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Time and again, research has shown that first-born children are better at a lot of things than their younger siblings. First-borns do better on IQ tests and are more likely to become president of the United States than their kid brothers or sisters. And, at the other end of the spectrum, first-borns are less likely to do drugs andget pregnant as teenagers.So it probably won't surprise anyone that first-borns do better in school than their younger siblings, a finding documented in a recent study I wrote with Juan Pantano, an assistant professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Sarah R. Cohodes, Elizabeth M. Setren, Christopher R. Walters, Joshua D. Angrist & Parag A. Pathak:
Boston charter schools have had many reasons to tout their performance in 2013. Research reports and MCAS scores have shown exceptional progress by charter students. But while we were buoyed by these findings, the Boston Foundation and NewSchools Venture Fund sought to better understand in more detail not only how well charters are working, but for whom.The answer--or at least the beginnings of it--is described in this report by a team of researchers from MIT's School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII). This is the third in a series of studies examining charter and Boston Public Schools (BPS) student performance. The first, released in 2009, was groundbreaking in its use of individual student data, its research design--which incorporated an observational study--and a lottery analysis. The second report, released in May 2013, examined Boston's charter high schools and found gains in their students' MCAS, Advanced Placement and SAT scores compared to their peers in the Boston Public Schools.
This report updates the 2009 study and uses a similar methodology. It examines the performance of all students enrolled in Boston's charter schools as well as that of important subgroups of high-needs students, including those whose first language isn't English or who have special needs. Importantly, this report also examines demand and enrollment patterns and finds a changing student population that includes more of these subgroups.
Like earlier studies, this report finds that attending a charter school in Boston dramatically improves students' MCAS performance and proficiency rates. The largest gains appear to be for students of color and particularly large gains were found for English Language Learners.
At the same time, it is important to note that the analysis showed that charter school students are less likely to have special needs or to be designated as English Language Learners. While that gap has narrowed since the passage of education reform in 2010, the charters' success with high-needs students should provide an even greater impetus to connect those student populations with charter schools.
In addition, the research team found that charter schools continue to be a popular option for Boston families. As the number of available seats grows, so too does the number of applicants. Nonetheless, the report finds that the odds of receiving a charter offer are roughly comparable to a student receiving his or her first choice through the BPS school-assignment process.Readers of this report will draw many different conclusions, but the takeaway for us is clear: charters work for their students. It's not only evident that we need more of these schools, but we must also redouble our efforts to ensure that students who have the most to gain are afforded greater access to them.
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High school graduates may be better served by taking a year off after graduation for an intense immersion experience in a country of their choosing instead of diving straight into college.Too often students rush from high school to college and don't seriously contemplate taking some time to grow in other directions. My response to students who would thrive in such an experience but feel compelled to race off to college with their peers is questioning what they would really lose if they started college a year later. In fact, students that go abroad for year often end up acquiring a second language and culture, and more importantly, calling a new place home.
American Field Service (AFS), perhaps the most well-respected and distinguished study abroad program, has been an integral part of bridging youth from the Milwaukee area with youth from all over the globe. It was born as a result of WWI and WWII. The idea spawned from a group of volunteer ambulance drivers that were tired of the carnage and atrocity of war. They thought that the only way to avoid future conflict was to get youth from all over the world to live in and experience other countries. Over sixty years later AFS continues advancing its mission with the help of a strong cadre of volunteers and dedicated teachers.
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Education analyst and professor Diane Ravitch is a harsh critic of many recent trends in education, from high-stakes testing to privately run charter schools.Ravitch supported many of those efforts when she was assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush.
But she later concluded they didn't work. And she has been especially critical of both the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind Act, championed by President George W. Bush, and President Obama's 2009 Race to the Top grant program.
Ravitch offered some of her insights in a speech Oct. 15, 2013, at the University of Rhode Island.
Part of her argument is that champions of such so-called reforms are overstating the problem. She said a decades-look back at standardized test scores shows more student improvement than the nation's public schools get credit for.
"Test scores had gone up steadily for 40 years until No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top," she said.
We wondered whether scores had increased so steadily and whether, as her statement implies, they leveled off or dropped after the two federal programs took hold.
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An email landed in my inbox this morning about widespread non-payment of adjuncts in the CUNY system. I'll reprint it below the fold. IANAL, but those who are might want to comment on this in light of NY's "Wage Theft" law.Here, though, read how Anthony Galluzo, one of those affected, describes his situation:
I'm supposed to be paid--finally--tomorrow, although classes started the last week of August. The explanation? Well, I was hired late--the week before said classes began--and there is a state mandated pay schedule. Fantastic. A system apparently designed with long term employees in mind, hence the glacial in-processing, even though it now runs on casualized permatemps hired at the last minute. This scenario was compounded by the fact that the secretary in the English department only submitted materials for one of my courses. I am teaching three. A fluke that happens all too often, as I've since learned from other adjuncts. Of the several adjuncts I talk to, I don't know one who was paid on time.If you've been affected by non-payment, late payment, or partial payment, contact Debbie Bell dbell@pscmail.org. To offer support of any kind, contact Jonathan Buschbaum. Below the fold, more details:
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rederick Wiseman's films often document the insipid, noxious operations of bureaucracies. This is certainly the case with High School, released in the auspicious year 1968. If At Berkeley can be read as a sequel to that earlier film, what becomes clear is that it is not only the character of educational institutions that has changed over the past fifty years--like the Fordist factory in the era of globalization, the factory-like public school has faded as well (although many schools have at the same time become increasingly prison-like)--but also the character of the director, who has become, notes one reviewer, "something of an institution himself."Another way of putting this comes from Wiseman's reflections on the documentary form itself. The following comes from a Q&A panel after a screening at the New York Film Festival (above), but it's an argument Wiseman repeats in nearly every discussion of the film:
People don't want to believe that other people can act the way they sometimes do. Both good and bad--not necessarily just because it shows people doing difficult, uncomfortable or occasionally sadistic or cruel, but it's equally true that some people don't want to admit that other people can do nice, kind, helpful things. And in part that's related to the idea that documentary film should always be an expose, should reveal something bad about government or people's behavior. . . . I think it's equally important when people are doing a good job and care and are kind and sensitive to other people, that's an equally good subject for a documentary.
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In 2013, women generally don't go to college for their "MRS" degrees -- meaning, going to college to find a young man with a good education and high earning potential -- instead, they often focus on education and career before getting married.A 2011 Pew Research survey found that the median age of first marriage was around 27 for women and 29 for men -- years after college graduation.
That doesn't mean college students have stopped finding their fiancés in the undergraduate dating pool.
A Facebook Data Sciences study released last week found that about 28% of married graduates attended the same college as their spouse. About 15% of individuals on Facebook attended the same high school as their spouse.
Though the results are limited by the population on Facebook and how diligently users update their relationship statuses, people clearly are still meeting their future partners in college.
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When Dane Country Circuit Court Judge Juan Colas held officials in Gov. Scott Walker's administration in contempt this week, he was pushing back against a level of unchecked lawlessness by this administration that is "practically seditious," says attorney Lester Pines.Colas had already ruled a year ago that parts of Act 10 -- the law that ended most collective bargaining rights for most public employees -- were unconstitutional. This included Act 10's requirement that unions hold annual recertification elections. But commissioners at the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission decided to ignore that decision. They went ahead and prepared for recertification elections for more than 400 school district and worker unions in November.
"The commissioners knew full well" they were flouting the court, Colas said, despite their cute argument that the word "unconstitutional" applied only to the specific plaintiffs in the case -- teachers in Madison and city workers in Milwaukee.
As John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., put it, Colas' decision "is one of the most important decisions not only in public-sector labor history, but also in democracy."
The principle here is simple. If a law is unconstitutional on its face, it's unconstitutional in every case. That has always been understood in Wisconsin courts. And, Judge Colas pointed out, the Walker officials understood it, too.
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The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you'll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to "compile the sum of all human knowledge" are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project's flagship, the English-language Wikipedia--and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation--has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project's own. Among the significant problems that aren't getting resolved is the site's skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project's own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don't earn even Wikipedia's own middle-ranking quality scores.
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Michigan teachers are discovering that their union is determined to make it as hard as possible for them to take advantage of the state's new right-to-work law, which prohibits workers from being forced to pay dues to a union.Nine teachers sued the Michigan Education Association in the last week alleging unfair labor practices.
Eight teachers sued the MEA on Monday. They are being represented by the conservative Mackinac Center Legal Foundation. Their complaint alleges the union is violating the intent of the right-to-work law by only giving them a very brief period -- the month of August -- to drop their membership.
One of the eight, Coopersville teacher Miriam Chanski, told MEA in a May letter she was leaving the union. MEA denied her request because it was sent in too early.
She claims the union did not tell her this at the time. She only learned of the August opt-out window in September. That was when MEA informed her she would now have to pay another year's dues.
"It surprised me that there would be more to the process -- I had not heard anything else," she told the local ABC affiliate.
It got worse for her when MEA said that if she didn't continue to pay, they would report her to a collection agency, which would negatively affect her credit rating.
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The SAMR model (substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition) explores the impact of integrating technology on both teaching and learning. It attempts to outline a progression that educators follow in their journey towards redefining teaching and learning with technology. I've used this model as a guide to identify where a particular lesson or activity falls on the spectrum of technology integration, but it does not reflect the teacher's evolution.In professional development, it's common to hear teachers groan, "I'm so behind. There's so much to learn. I won't ever catch up." That's right. We won't ever catch up. We will never be in front of the rapid advances transforming technology...and that's okay. We don't need to be ahead of the Edtech curve. We just need a willingness to continue learning and taking risks! It also helps to have a powerful PLN (personal learning network) supporting you.
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It's also noteworthy how you tiptoe here around the elephant in the room in the preceding paragraph: to what extent today's teachers are doing an adequate job. Indeed, much of your polemic is to criticize those who say that "blame must fall on the shoulders of teachers and principals." Well, why shouldn't it? That's where achievement and change do or do not happen. Instead, you blame the forces of privatization and corporatism and poverty. Indeed, even, in the first paragraph above you lament merely a lack of "standards" and "curriculum" - a de-personalized critique. So, which is it? Are schools doing as well as they can with the teachers they have, or not? Are kids getting the education they deserve or not?I think there is plenty of evidence about the inadequacies of much current teaching that you and I find to be credible and not insidiously motivated. How else, in fact, would you say that schools aren't "fine" as they are? Reform is strongly needed in many schools (and not just the dysfunctional urban schools). To say that these problems are somehow not due to teaching and mostly due to forces outside of school walls belies the fact that schools with both non-poor students and adequate resources are also under-performing, and outlier schools serving poor children have had important successes.
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Americans love equality of opportunity. The idea that, if you work hard and play by the rules, you can end up better than you, is pretty deeply embedded in the national psyche. It's what the American dream's all about.And it doesn't apply if you're black. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at NYU, has been studying trends and causes of social mobility, and finds that white children born into the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution are twice as likely to move up to the top 80 percent as black kids. Even worse, 78 percent of black kids born into the top three fifths of the income distribution fall below it as adults. Social mobility goes *backwards*. By comparison, only 43 percent of white kids fall back that much.
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Pakistan's daily disasters and constant crises mean that long-term issues, education prominent among them, get little attention from our harried leadership. When education is addressed, the focus is almost entirely on increasing access, enrolment and literacy, and if we're lucky, on girls' schooling. Getting children to go to school, and to stay there, is obviously critical. Fortunately, we appear to be on a positive trajectory in terms of this goal, especially in Punjab.But that goal overlooks the glaring education emergency within our schools. The fact is that our schools are failing miserably in educating the children who make it to them. Each day is an opportunity lost for each uniform-clad, schoolbag-burdened child who heads to school in the morning. These children attend school, but are not getting an education. Their inquisitive spirit is crushed, their thinking ability never developed. They are never taught that there are, at least, two sides to every story, and every history. They never learn to question and to analyse, much less to imagine and to create.
Let me be clear here -- I am not talking about the schools which cater to our elite, but about those that reach our masses. In these schools, textbooks following the official curriculum, with their poor quality, and questionable and biased content, reign supreme. The teachers literally teach one page of the textbook per lecture, asking students to memorise the content, with barely any explanation and no additional material taught.
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The statewide voucher program, in its first year, is at capacity, with about 500 students receiving vouchers statewide, according to the department. Of those, 79 percent did not attend a Wisconsin public school last year.The program's enrollment limit will rise to 1,000 next year. The statewide program exists in districts outside of Milwaukee and Racine, which have had programs for years.
Seventy-three percent of students now attending private schools using a voucher were already enrolled in a private school last year, according to the department. Twenty-one percent of students were from public schools. About 3 percent did not attend any school and 2 percent were home schooled.
Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said he would probably support adding a preference given to applicants from public schools given those numbers.
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Sarah Kendzior, Al-Jazeera English's firebrand of social and economic justice, suggested this week that there should be a Norton Anthology of Academics Declaring They Quit, among whose august contributions she would place Zachary Ernst's "Why I Jumped Off the Ivory Tower." Ernst's Oct. 20 essay is a deeply honest account of his acrimonious departure from what many would consider a dream job: a tenured position as a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri.Ernst's contribution is indeed part of a raucous subgenre of "I Quit Lit" in (or rather, out of) academe, which includes Kendzior's own acidic "The Closing of American Academia," Alexandra Lord's surprisingly controversial "Location, Location, Location," and my own satirical public breakdown. All of us faced, and continue to face, the impressively verbose wrath of a discipline scorned, which itself is the completing gesture of initiation into the I Quit Oeuvre.
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Ariel Starra, Melissa E. Libertus & Elizabeth M. Brannon:
The uniquely human mathematical mind sets us apart from all other animals. How does this powerful capacity emerge over development? It is uncontroversial that education and environment shape mathematical ability, yet an untested assumption is that number sense in infants is a conceptual precursor that seeds human mathematical development. Our results provide the first support for this hypothesis. We found that preverbal number sense in 6-month-old infants predicted standardized math scores in the same children 3 years later. This discovery shows that number sense in infancy is a building block for later mathematical ability and invites educational interventions to improve number sense even before children learn to count.
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At 9.30am promptly, AC Grayling begins a two-hour Introduction to Philosophy lecture for year one students in an airy conservatory at the back of his new private college. For anyone whose attention is straying, there are views on to a yard with plane trees, a white stucco mews house and the blackened brick of the smart Bloomsbury townhouse where the New College of the Humanities is based. None of the 19 students is gazing out of the window, however. They are focused on the lecture, which centres on René Descartes, but considers along the way the nature of knowledge and how we obtain it."You all know, because you were reading a biography of him last night in the bath no doubt, that Descartes was born in 1596 and died in 1650, a period of great advance in science and philosophy," Grayling begins in a melodious voice. The students make dutiful notes on A4 pads, or straight on to their laptops. The lecture is fascinating; 45 minutes pass happily, and I have to force myself to stop paying attention so I can look at the students: 15 male, four female, all white, dress code quite preppy, not much piercing.
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Most people do not believe me when I tell them that I can be shy at first.When I was younger, the actual tone of my voice would change just because I was nervous (in person or over the phone). A majority of the time, if I don't know someone that well, I prefer keeping my sunglasses on, ear buds in and conversation to myself. Unless we are friends or I want to get to know you, the chance that I'll start a conversation is pretty low.
Over the years, my introversion has improved - and to me - it doesn't seem noticeable.
If it wasn't for a conversation I had with my Dad years ago, I don't think I'd be the person I am today.
He taught me how to take a risk.
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"It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence." Douglas Hofstadter is in a grocery store in Bloomington, Indiana, picking out salad ingredients. "If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say--maybe they wouldn't go this far--but they might say this is some of the only good work that's ever been done."Hofstadter says this with an easy deliberateness, and he says it that way because for him, it is an uncontroversial conviction that the most-exciting projects in modern artificial intelligence, the stuff the public maybe sees as stepping stones on the way to science fiction--like Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-playing supercomputer, or Siri, Apple's iPhone assistant--in fact have very little to do with intelligence. For the past 30 years, most of them spent in an old house just northwest of the Indiana University campus, he and his graduate students have been picking up the slack: trying to figure out how our thinking works, by writing computer programs that think.
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In today's world, brimful as it is with opinion and falsehoods masquerading as facts, you'd think the one place you can depend on for verifiable facts is science.You'd be wrong. Many billions of dollars' worth of wrong.
A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology.
The idea was to make sure that research on which Amgen was spending millions of development dollars still held up. They figured that a few of the studies would fail the test -- that the original results couldn't be reproduced because the findings were especially novel or described fresh therapeutic approaches.
But what they found was startling: Of the 53 landmark papers, only six could be proved valid.
"Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research," observed C. Glenn Begley, then Amgen's head of global cancer research, "this was a shocking result."
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If you want a look at a high-profile field dealing with a lot of humbling snags, peer into #ASHG2013, the Twitter hashtag for last week's meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, held in Boston. You will see successes, to be sure: Geneticists are sequencing and analyzing genomes ever faster and more precisely. In the last year alone, the field has quintupled the rate at which it identifies genes for rare diseases. These advances are leading to treatments and cures for obscure illnesses that doctors could do nothing about only a few years ago, as well as genetic tests that allow prospective parents to bear healthy children instead of suffering miscarriage after miscarriage.But many of the tweets--or any frank geneticist--will also tell you stories of struggle and confusion: The current list of cancer-risk genes, the detection of which leads some people to have "real organs removed," likely contains many false positives, even as standard diagnostic sequencing techniques are missing many disease-causing mutations. There's a real possibility that the "majority of cancer predisposition genes in databases are wrong." And a sharp team of geneticists just last week cleanly dismantled a hyped study from last year that claimed to find a genetic signature of autism clear enough to diagnose the risk of it in unborn children.
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This report is based on the results of a large-scale, nationally representative survey, the second in Common Sense Media's series on children's media use; the first was conducted in 2011 (Zero to Eight: Children's Media Use in America). By replicating the methods used two years ago, we document how children's media environments and behaviors have changed. We survey parents of children ages 0 to 8 in the U.S., and cover media ranging from books/reading and music to mobile interactive media like smartphones and tablets.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter via a kind Jeanie (Bettner) Kamholtz email (PDF):
Collective bargaining was restored for all city, county and school district employees by a Court ruling last week through application of an earlier (9/14/12) Court decision achieved by MTI. Circuit Court Judge Juan Colas found that Governor Walker's appointees to the WERC, James Scott and Rodney Pasch, were in contempt of court "for implementing" those parts of Act 10 which he (Colas) previously declared unconstitutional, which made them "a law which does not exist", as Colas put it.The Judge told Scott & Pasch to comply with his finding of unconstitutionality or be punished for their contempt. They agreed to comply.
Judge Colas made his ruling on unconstitutionality on September 14, 2012. MTI was represented by its legal counsel, Lester Pines.
In the contempt claim, in addition to MTI, Pines represented the Kenosha Education Association and WEAC. The latter was also represented by Milwaukee attorney Tim Hawks, who also represented AFSCME Council 40, AFT Wisconsin, AFT nurses and SEIU Healthcare, in last week's case. Also appearing was Nick Padway, who partnered with Pines in representing Milwaukee Public Employees Union Local 61 in the original case.
Judge Colas specifically ordered the WERC to cease proceeding with union recertification elections, which in his earlier ruling were found to be unconstitutional. Act 10 mandated all public sector unions to hold annual elections to determine whether union members wished to continue with representation by the union. Act 10 prescribed that to win a union had to achieve 50% plus one of all eligible voters, not 50% plus one of those voting like all other elections. The elections were to occur November 1.
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Readers know that I am a strong supporter of Standards generally and the Common Core specifically. To me it is simply a no-brainer: there is no such thing as Georgia Algebra or Montana Writing. In a mobile society, and based on economies of scale, common national standards make a lot of sense.But no friends of Standards can be happy with how this effort has evolved logistically, on the ground, in terms of guidance to and resources for districts; or satisfied with the incentives - actually, disincentives - provided for undertaking such challenging work. Worse, we are in the unenviable position of fighting over a set of standards that now belongs to no official entity, so there is no way to amend the Standards, properly defend them from critics, or (especially) push back on how they are implemented by states.
And indeed, the chief culprits here are the states, in my view, employing tactics that run counter to everything we know about organizational change.
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Richard Ingersoll taught high-school social studies and algebra in both public and private schools for nearly six years before leaving the profession and getting a Ph.D. in sociology. Now a professor in the University of Pennsylvania's education school, he's spent his career in higher ed searching for answers to one of teaching's most significant problems: teacher turnover.Teaching, Ingersoll says, "was originally built as this temporary line of work for women before they got their real job--which was raising families, or temporary for men until they moved out of the classroom and became administrators. That was sort of the historical set-up."
Ingersoll extrapolated and then later confirmed that anywhere between 40 and 50 percent of teachers will leave the classroom within their first five years (that includes the nine and a half percent that leave before the end of their first year.) Certainly, all professions have turnover, and some shuffling out the door is good for bringing in young blood and fresh faces. But, turnover in teaching is about four percent higher than other professions.
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@hen I asked district officials why they aren't interested in throwing some of that money the way of programs like these, the answer I got can be boiled down to what Chicago Cubs fans like me are all too well accustomed to hearing: Wait until next year."Going forward, the district will work to further align our resources with the district's framework and support schools to the fullest," said district spokeswoman Rachel Strauch-Nelson in a statement. "Until we do that, we don't want to ask taxpayers for additional investments."
School Board president Ed Hughes said that the district's state aid next year would decrease by about 50 cents on each extra dollar it were to spend out of the property tax cut windfall this year.
"So if we don't increase our spending now and instead are able to lower our tax levy, this makes it more likely that we'll also be able to keep the tax levy at a manageable level for next year as well," he said.
School board member T.J. Mertz described this year's budget as "transitional" and said, "at this point, the current administrative team believes we need to concentrate on doing better with what we have while figuring out what we are not doing but should be, or aren't doing enough of (and what we are doing and isn't working)."
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We live in a school district with many things. But one thing we mot definitely lack is any administrators with cojones. As Metallica would sing, "Sad, but true." The district office is populated by eunuchs. We thought that Joe Palooka might bring a pair with him to Buildings & Grounds, but apparently the rule is that one's cojones must be tuned over in order to obtain your district ID. Lord knows that Tim Culver grows evermore like Tootles, constantly in search of his lost marbles. Phil Frei is a fiscal wizard, but don't ask him to hold anyone accountable for paying their bills. Sad but true. One would think that collecting money due would be the prime directive for a Business Manager....wouldn't one?Now we understand that money due to the district--and UNPAID--- for camps and such exceeds $40,000 just for the past school year alone. And the usual suspects are all whining and moaning about how to collect it. Or even whether to bother collecting it at all. Just tack maintenance costs onto the tax levy. After all...it's all for the kids, right?
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Yet, in perpetuating these stories, which are often little more than emotional linkbait, journalists are complicit in a gross oversimplification of a complicated phenomenon. In short, we're getting the facts wrong.The common narrative goes like this: Mean kids, usually the most popular and powerful, single out and relentlessly bully a socially weaker classmate in a systemic and calculated way, which then drives the victim into a darkness where he or she sees no alternative other than committing suicide.
And yet experts - those who study suicide, teen behavior and the dynamics of cyber interactions of teens - all say that the facts are rarely that simple. And by repeating this inaccurate story over and over, journalists are harming the public's ability to understand the dynamics of both bullying and suicide.
People commit suicide because of mental illness. It is a treatable problem and preventable outcome. Bullying is defined as an ongoing pattern of intimidation by a child or teenager over others who have less power.
Yet when journalists (and law enforcement, talking heads and politicians) imply that teenage suicides are directly caused by bullying, we reinforce a false narrative that has no scientific support. In doing so, we miss opportunities to educate the public about the things we could be doing to reduce both bullying and suicide.
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Following up on my analysis/thoughts on the Peters/Dale Estey race in District IV, I had promised a thread on this issue of so-called School Board "dysfunction."As I have pointed out, in the Board evaluation, not a SINGLE member of the Board called the Board dysfunctional. One Board member said if they didn't trust each other more, they would become "the poster child for a dysfunctional Board." That's far from saying that they are. (One senior staff member did call them dysfunctional.)
Now if you read the whole evaluation, you can see there are issues. No denying that. BUT, what the Times and Dale Estey and all these people leave out are all the pages of comments - by both the Board and senior management - about the good things said about the Board as people and as Board members.
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Sarah Kendzior, Al-Jazeera English's firebrand of social and economic justice, suggested this week that there should be a Norton Anthology of Academics Declaring They Quit, among whose august contributions she would place Zachary Ernst's "Why I Jumped Off the Ivory Tower." Ernst's Oct. 20 essay is a deeply honest account of his acrimonious departure from what many would consider a dream job: a tenured position as a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri.Ernst's contribution is indeed part of a raucous subgenre of "I Quit Lit" in (or rather, out of) academe, which includes Kendzior's own acidic "The Closing of American Academia," Alexandra Lord's surprisingly controversial "Location, Location, Location," and my own satirical public breakdown. All of us faced, and continue to face, the impressively verbose wrath of a discipline scorned, which itself is the completing gesture of initiation into the I Quit Oeuvre.
AdvertisementErnst's "Why I Jumped" is thus not unusual in and of itself: Academe is a profession full of erudite free-thinkers who feel disillusioned by a toxic labor system in which criticism is not tolerated--so those who leave often relish the newfound ability to say anything they want (talking about "a friend" here). In its insularity and single-mindedness, academe is also very similar to a fundamentalist religion (or, dare I say, cult), and thus those who abdicate often feel compelled to confess.
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Atlas doesn't shrug. But he teeters, loses his grip, stutters and staggers.His task one afternoon is to clear a debris field. After many agonizing moments, in a set of abrupt and jerky movements, he crouches and with painstaking precision manages to grasp a two-by-four board and then drop it to his right. At the rate he is moving, completing the chore might take days.
Atlas in this case is an imposing, six-foot-tall humanoid robot that evokes the bipedal "Star Wars" robot C-3PO. It stands in a cluttered robotics laboratory here at Worcester Polytechnic Institute where a team of students, engineers and software hackers are training the 330-pound bundle of sensors, computers, metal struts, joints and cables.
Seven teams are working with Atlas robots, manufactured by Boston Dynamics, a small military-funded research firm based in Waltham, Mass. Like the others, the Worcester team is preparing for a December contest held by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The contest is meant to accelerate work in the field of robotics by prototyping machines that can work effectively and autonomously in extreme emergencies, like the failure of a nuclear power plant.
The vision evokes decades of sci-fi movies like "I, Robot" in which self-directed walking machines glide through the world with grace and precision. At the moment the gap between that dream and reality is daunting.
The immensity of the challenge is underscored by the fact that, here in the lab, Atlas remains tethered -- "on belay," in the mountain climbing sense. Like a toddler learning to walk, it wears a safety harness, and whenever it moves, its human operators, equipped with safety glasses, position themselves behind a transparent plastic enclosure.
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Nothing I have read in The Washington Post lately has been more lucid and bracing than Patrick Welsh's assault on catch-phrase school reforms in the Sept. 29 edition of the Outlook section. It was vintage Welsh -- detailed, angry, literate. It's what you expect from one of our best education writers and high school teachers. He added a dash of melancholy for fans like me as we learned he had just retired after 43 years at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria.My only complaint about the piece is that it did not celebrate Welsh or his school enough. It would be out of character for him to mention his own accomplishments. He did say how superb several of his colleagues on T.C. Williams's faculty have been, but someone reading his piece too fast might think that dumb programs such as Effective Schools, SPONGE and Standard-Based Education had turned T.C. Williams into a bad school. The truth is that they failed to diminish a great school.
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Take that, Finland.Related: www.wisconsin2.org.Wisconsin eighth graders are doing better in math and are on a par in science with eighth graders in the Scandinavian country often spotlighted in recent years as having the highest performing students in the world, according to an analysis released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress last week.
In fact, the study concluded Wisconsin eighth graders rate in the upper bracket when compared to all American states and 47 other education systems around the world. The groundbreaking study is the first I've seen that specifically compares Wisconsin kids to kids around the world in a way that many education statisticians would regard as reasonably solid (although some would disagree).
The results are pretty encouraging, not only for Wisconsin but for most states, especially in the region that stretches from the Midwest through New England. In math, eight of the top 10 states were in that region, including four of the six New England states.
Does that mean we can stop beating ourselves up about how the U.S. is so far down the ladder compared with other countries when it comes to educational accomplishment? Well, not exactly, but perhaps a lot of people get a bit carried away with dumping on where we stand -- just as others might get carried away with self-congratulation over the new results.
"It's better news than we're used to," David Driscoll, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which runs the NAEP program, told the New York Times. "But it's still not anything to allow us to rest on our laurels.
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The 21st-century romance between America's universities and China continues to blossom, with New York University opening a Shanghai campus last month and Duke to follow next year. Nearly 100 U.S. campuses host "Confucius Institutes" funded by the Chinese government, and President Obama has set a goal for next year of seeing 100,000 American students studying in the Middle Kingdom. Meanwhile, Peking University last week purged economics professor Xia Yeliang, an outspoken liberal, with hardly a peep of protest from American academics."During more than 30 years, no single faculty member has been driven out like this," Mr. Xia says the day after his sacking from the university, known as China's best, where he has taught economics since 2000. He'll be out at the end of the semester. The professor's case is a window into the Chinese academic world that America's elite institutions are so eager to join--a world governed not by respect for free inquiry but by the political imperatives of a one-party state. Call it higher education with Chinese characteristics.
"All universities are under the party's leadership," Mr. Xia says by telephone from his Beijing home. "In Peking University, the No. 1 leader is not the president. It's the party secretary of Peking University."
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Researchers have been warning for more than a decade that the United States was losing ground to its economic competitors abroad and would eventually fall behind them unless it provided more of its citizens with the high-level math, science and literacy skills necessary for the new economy.Naysayers dismissed this as alarmist. But recent data showing American students and adults lagging behind their peers abroad in terms of important skills suggest that the long-predicted peril has arrived.
A particularly alarming report on working-age adults was published earlier this month by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a coalition of mainly developed nations. The research focused on people ages 16 to 65 in 24 countries. It dealt with three crucial areas: literacy -- the ability to understand and respond to written material; numeracy -- the ability to use numerical and mathematical concepts; and problem solving -- the ability to interpret and analyze information using computers.
Americans were comparatively weak-to-poor in all three areas. In literacy, for example, about 12 percent of American adults scored at the highest levels, a smaller proportion than in Finland and Japan (about 22 percent). In addition, one in six Americans scored near the bottom in literacy, compared with 1 in 20 adults who scored at that level in Japan.
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Whenever I visit China, I am struck by the sharply divergent predictions of its future one hears. Lately, a number of global investors have been "shorting" China, betting that someday soon its powerful economic engine will sputter, as the real estate boom here turns to a bust. Frankly, if I were shorting China today, it would not be because of the real estate bubble, but because of the pollution bubble that is increasingly enveloping some of its biggest cities. Optimists take another view: that, buckle in, China is just getting started, and that what we're now about to see is the payoff from China's 30 years of investment in infrastructure and education. I'm not a gambler, so I'll just watch this from the sidelines. But if you're looking for evidence as to why the optimistic bet isn't totally crazy, you might want to visit a Shanghai elementary school.I've traveled here with Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, and the leaders of the Teach for All programs modeled on Teach for America that are operating in 32 countries. We're visiting some of the highest- and lowest-performing schools in China to try to uncover The Secret -- how is it that Shanghai's public secondary schools topped the world charts in the 2009 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) exams that measure the ability of 15-year-olds in 65 countries to apply what they've learned in math, science and reading.
After visiting Shanghai's Qiangwei Primary School, with 754 students -- grades one through five -- and 59 teachers, I think I found The Secret:
There is no secret.
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Regulation is the bugaboo of today's politics. We have too much of it in most areas, we have too little of it in others, but mostly, we just have the wrong kind, a mountain of paper rules, inefficient processes, and little ability to adjust the rules or the processes when we discover the inevitable unintended results.Consider, for a moment, regulation in a broader context. Your car's electronics regulate the fuel-air mix in the engine to find an optimal balance of fuel efficiency and minimal emissions. An airplane's autopilot regulates the countless factors required to keep that plane aloft and heading in the right direction. Credit card companies monitor and regulate charges to detect fraud and keep you under your credit limit. Doctors regulate the dosage of the medicine they give us, sometimes loosely, sometimes with exquisite care, as with the chemotherapy required to kill cancer cells while keeping normal cells alive, or with the anesthesia that keeps us unconscious during surgery while keeping vital processes going. ISPs and corporate mail systems regulate the mail that reaches us, filtering out spam and malware to the best of their ability. Search engines regulate the results and advertisements they serve up to us, doing their best to give us more of what we want to see.
What do all these forms of regulation have in common?
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When he was hired in March, 2011, as Beloit Memorial High School head football coach, Jon Dupuis knew he was accepting a major undertaking."I'm passionate about it," Dupuis said at the time. "I'm home grown. I really believe in these kids and this community. I want to make going to Beloit games something you do on Friday nights again."
After three seasons and just two victories to go with 25 losses, Dupuis wasn't ready to throw in the towel.
The high school's administration, however, did it for him. Dupuis said Monday he learned he was being let go.
"I went in and asked for a three-year commitment and was told they wanted to move in a different direction," Dupuis said. "I think my staff and I deserved (the three additional years) because of the progress we were making. I was told they want a powerhouse and I told them you're not going to turn this into a powerhouse in three years. I don't know how you could do that.
"When I originally interviewed for this job I wanted five years to turn it around and they gave me three. I don't know much more of what we could have done
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ne of the general features of information technology is that through coordination it makes better use of distributed resources, such as workers, automobiles or energy. An excellent case in point is being tested in Stockholm, Sweden. SMSlivräddare (in Swedish) has a large list of people who are trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). When an emergency call is received indicating a possible heart attack, SMSlivräddare finds the mobile phone user(s) closest to the potential victim and alerts them with a text message. The message also contains a map to the victim's location.Survival rates for heart attack outside a hospital in Sweden are low, only about 5-10% but every minute shaved off the time it takes to begin CPR increases the survival rate by 10%. When notified, SMS responders arrive faster than ambulances about 50% of the time so the potential for saving lives is quite large (final data on the research project are not yet in).
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What do America's college students want? They want to be oppressed. More precisely, a surprising number of students at America's finest colleges and universities wish to appear as victims -- to themselves, as well as to others -- without the discomfort of actually experiencing victimization. Here is where global warming comes in. The secret appeal of campus climate activism lies in its ability to turn otherwise happy, healthy, and prosperous young people into an oppressed class, at least in their own imaginings. Climate activists say to the world, "I'll save you." Yet deep down they're thinking, "Oppress me."In his important new book, The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings, French intellectual gadfly Pascal Bruckner does the most thorough job yet of explaining the climate movement as a secular religion, an odd combination of deformed Christianity and reconstructed Marxism. (You can find Bruckner's excellent article based on the book here.) Bruckner describes a historical process wherein "the long list of emblematic victims -- Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples -- was replaced, little by little, with the Planet." The planet, says Bruckner, "has become the new proletariat that must be saved from exploitation."
But why? Bruckner finds it odd that a "mood of catastrophe" should prevail in the West, the most well-off part of the world. The reason, I think, is that the only way to turn the prosperous into victims is to threaten the very existence of a world they otherwise command.
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Researchers have been warning for more than a decade that the United States was losing ground to its economic competitors abroad and would eventually fall behind them unless it provided more of its citizens with the high-level math, science and literacy skills necessary for the new economy.Naysayers dismissed this as alarmist. But recent data showing American students and adults lagging behind their peers abroad in terms of important skills suggest that the long-predicted peril has arrived.
A particularly alarming report on working-age adults was published earlier this month by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a coalition of mainly developed nations. The research focused on people ages 16 to 65 in 24 countries. It dealt with three crucial areas: literacy -- the ability to understand and respond to written material; numeracy -- the ability to use numerical and mathematical concepts; and problem solving -- the ability to interpret and analyze information using computers.
Americans were comparatively weak-to-poor in all three areas. In literacy, for example, about 12 percent of American adults scored at the highest levels, a smaller proportion than in Finland and Japan (about 22 percent). In addition, one in six Americans scored near the bottom in literacy, compared with 1 in 20 adults who scored at that level in Japan.
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Three years ago today, I sat in the office of Massachusetts neuropathologist Ann McKee, who studies the brains of deceased former football players to discover the effects of repetitive brain trauma. She showed me slides of cross-sections of brains of former NFL players with evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). This was five days after Rutgers player Eric LeGrand was paralyzed after a big hit in a college game, and four days after frightening blows by pro players James Harrison, Brandon Meriweather and Dunta Robinson. "I wonder,'' McKee said that day. "Can we make it more of an Indy 500 and less of a demolition derby?"The race is on to see if football can change--and so far, after three years, the effort is there on all levels. With the emphasis on the head trauma issue evident all over football and society, The MMQB will spend this week publishing a series of stories taking the temperature of people across America--high school coaches and players, parents of players, medical experts and current and former pro players--about the game.
What you'll read on our site this week:
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My primary hero of the full existence of the Constitution is George Mason, a Virginia delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Why him? He refused to sign the Constitution because it didn't have a "declaration of rights" -- the individual liberties of American citizens.Because of George Mason, who was followed by other non-signers, James Madison introduced the Bill of Rights. These first 10 amendments to the Constitution, when ratified by enough states in 1791, guaranteed to We The People specific limits on government power.
In this self-governing republic, the Fourth Amendment in these guarantees clearly states:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
In last week's column, I focused on two shocking cases, unknown to most Americans because the media in its various forms ignored them. These cases dealt with public school students who had been "locked down" in mass searches by police and drug-sniffing dogs. The searches were conducted without court warrants or any indication that the students being searched for drugs or drug paraphernalia had any connection at all to these suspicions.
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In recent years, a number of international surveys have raised alarms that the United States is falling behind other countries in terms of educational achievement. Now there is another one, and its findings represent a serious threat to the country's future prosperity. In basic literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills, the new study shows, younger Americans are at or near the bottom of the standings among advanced countries.The survey was carried out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a Paris-based forum and research group, which counts thirty-three high- and middle-income countries among its members. Some of its findings have been well covered elsewhere, particularly by the Times' editorial board and its economics columnist Eduardo Porter.
But the data comparing young adults aged sixteen to twenty-four in different countries--the folks who will be manning the global economy for the next thirty or forty years--deserves a closer look. The figures come from three charts in the report's statistical annex, which we have adapted here. Taken together, they vividly illustrate some of the challenges facing an economic hegemon that has for decades been plagued by wage stagnation and rising inequality, and which, as President Obama has pointed out, desperately needs to raise its game.
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Douglas Belkin & Caroline Porter:
After decades of rampant growth, the rate of tuition increases at U.S. colleges and universities has slowed for the second academic year in a row, but government aid has fallen, continuing a cycle of rising costs and debt for American students.Published tuition and fees rose 2.9% for in-state students at four-year public schools, the smallest one-year increase since 1975-76. At private schools, tuition and fees rose 3.8%, a bit lower than in recent years, according to a report from the College Board, a New York nonprofit that tracks university costs.
"The news in terms of college price increases is that it does seem the spiral is moderating, not turning around, not ending, but moderating," said Sandy Baum an economist at the College Board.
After adjusting for aid, students attending public four-year institutions this academic year are paying an average of $12,620, up $220 from last year, for tuition, room and board. Private-school costs rose $700, to $23,290.
The continued rising costs come as student debt has topped $1 trillion and the default rate on student loans has risen for six straight years. One in 10 students now defaults within two years of starting repayment, according to Department of Education figures released earlier this month.
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The English education system is being dismembered. Gradually but purposefully first New Labour and now the coalition government have been unpicking and disarticulating the national system of state schooling. With free schools and academies of various kinds, faith schools, studio schools and university technical colleges, the school system is beginning to resemble the patchwork of uneven and unequal provision that existed prior to the 1870 Education Act.At the same time, we are moving back to an incoherent and haphazard jigsaw of providers - charities, foundations, social enterprises and faith and community groups - monitored at arm's length by the central state. Furthermore, private providers are waiting in the wings for the opportunity to profit from running schools.
Local democratic oversight has been almost totally displaced. Our relationship to schools is being modelled on that of the privatised utilities - we are individual customers, who can switch provider if we are unhappy, in theory, and complain to the national watchdog if we feel badly served - but with no direct, local participation or involvement, no say in our children's education.
These changes have been pursued in the name of choice, diversity and autonomy. Some parents now have new schools to choose from for their children, but some do not. This simply depends on where you live. You may have a local academy or you may not. If you do, it might be a sponsored academy (Bexley, south-east London), a chain academy (Ark, ULT, AET), a converter academy, or a school subject to forced academisation. There are 174 free schools and you may live near one of these, but many are faith schools or have specialisms that may not suit your child. The free schools were supposed to be targeted at areas of social disadvantage but recent research by Rob Higham at the Institute of Education indicates their distribution does not reflect this aim. There is a distribution map of free schools on the DfE website.Some of these free schools already have problems - unqualified teachers, poor management - as Nick Clegg will point out in his speech on Thursday. Academies seem to display the same diversity of outcomes as the schools they replaced. If you live in a rural area you're unlikely to have much, if any, choice of school.
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The No Child Left Behind Act required student testing and reporting of data in return for continuing receipt of federal education dollars. The law however left granular details to the states, most of whom happily went about abusing them.This chart is from a new study about the inclusion of special needs children in state testing regimes. As you can see from the third column, states held a glorious 35.4% of schools accountable for the academic performance of special needs children during the 2009-10 school year. This ranged from a glorious 100% in Connecticut and Utah to a sickening 7% in Arizona.
I have heard through the grapevine that addressing this national scandal has been a major point of emphasis in Arne Duncan's waiver process. As someone who views this process skeptically overall and suspects that it is creating a mess that will be difficult to unwind, let me say bully for Duncan on this score.
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Cao Qing is home-schooling her 13-year-old son because, among other things, "he doesn't like homework".In the land of the midnight homework project, the average teenager's distaste for homework would not normally give Tiger Mum pause. Most Chinese children learn early to sacrifice playtime and sleeptime on the altar of schoolwork: kids who do not excel in primary school fail to get into the middle school that gets them into the high school that guarantees the right university entrance scores. School is a serious business in China, right from the beginning.
So who cares if the offspring hate homework? Is that not part of the human condition - not just in China, but around the world?
Ms Cao is one of an increasing number of Chinese parents who no longer think suffering is a necessary condition of academic success.
"The school gives too much homework," she says, as an autumn breeze blows through the open patio door of the walk-up duplex flat she rents in a Shanghai suburb to use as a home-schooling base for her son, Zhou Yi. "Besides, he's a boy, and boys like to play, they don't like to sit still for a long time," she says, adding: "They can't just get all their knowledge from textbooks." Our chat is obviously distracting the boy in question, who pops up from his studies at the nearby kitchen table and goes off to fondle the family's newborn kitten and fetch his beetle collection for us to admire.
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In October 2002, about nine months after Bloomberg took office, he and schools Chancellor Joel Klein unveiled "Children First: A New Agenda for Public Education." Children First sought to increase the four-year high school graduation rates--which hovered around 50 percent--and preparedness for college. Because children from advantaged households already graduated at high rates, the only way to increase the number of graduates was to improve results for children who were at risk of never graduating. The only way to do that was to improve schools--high schools so students would be encouraged to take necessary courses and persevere to graduation, and elementary and middle schools so that students would enter high school ready to succeed. Children First also worked to rescue high school-age students who had already dropped out or fallen drastically behind. It did this by creating career and technical education schools that linked students to jobs, and "multiple pathways to graduation" that offered flexible schedules and concentrated learning opportunities so students could graduate.Here's an assessment of the results.
Graduation rates are up. When Bloomberg became mayor, less than half the students in New York City's high schools graduated in four years. Today, nearly two-thirds graduate on time. Every year, 18,000 more young people graduate high school than would have been expected in 2002. The percentage of graduates who enter college without needing to take remedial courses has doubled since 2001.
From 2005 to 2012, the graduation rate for Asian students rose from 66.3 percent to 82.1 percent, for black students from 40.1 percent to 59.8 percent; for Hispanic students from 37.4 percent to 57.5 percent; and for white students from 64.0 percent to 78.1 percent.
The percentage of city students dropping out after entering high school fell from 22 percent in 2005 to 11.4 percent in 2012. The percentage receiving an Advanced Regents Diploma increased from 12.5 percent in 2005 to 16.6 percent in 2012.
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Florida's Duval County School District is losing students to charter schools, and the district's entrepreneurial superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, is fighting back.
But his efforts to regain lost market share raise an important question: Should districts place maximizing student enrollment over ensuring all children have access to the learning options that best meet their needs?Most school boards and district superintendents want to maximize district enrollment, but this is not the best way to ensure student success. K-12 students today are incredibly diverse. School districts have never been able to meet the needs of all students, which is why parents are demanding more school choice options and flocking to charter schools, private schools, virtual schools, and homeschooling.
The Duval school district is the sixth largest in Florida and 22nd largest in the nation. Its enrollment has dropped from 126,873 in 2003-04 to 119,188 today, while enrollment of charter schools within the district has increased from 609 to 7,795 over the same period. Duval's private schools now enroll more than 24,000 students.
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On the same day that state officials left Kansas City Public Schools unaccredited for now, Mayor Sly James and Superintendent Steve Green asked state lawmakers to support their efforts to improve education in the city.Much more on the Kansas City schools, here.At a public hearing before 18 members of the 22-member Missouri House Interim Committee on Education, the conversation ranged from a push for early childhood education to support for the mayor's city-wide reading initiative. The potential transfer of students from unaccredited Kansas City schools to surrounding suburban districts also was discussed.
The committee, which is traveling the state hearing from educators and residents, said its plan is to put together a report on what people across Missouri say is needed to improve education and present it to other legislators.
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Nearly 92 percent of teachers were rated highly effective or effective in the first year of a new evaluation system, the state Education Department said Tuesday.The highly controversial testing of teachers produced few poor grades, the state said. Just 1 percent was deemed ineffective, and 4 percent were characterized as developing.
The results are for 126,829 teachers outside New York City; 91.5 percent were deemed effective or highly effective.
The results come after the state released new student assessment scores as part of the Common Core program last summer that showed just 31 percent of New York students in elementary and middle schools were proficient in math and reading.
"The results are striking," state Education Commissioner John King said in a statement. "The more accurate student proficiency rates on the new Common Core assessments did not negatively affect teacher ratings. It's clear that teachers are rising to the challenge of teaching the Common Core."
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Local teacher union officials say they are hopeful after Monday's ruling by a Madison judge finding state labor commissioners in contempt of court for continuing to enforce collective bargaining restrictions he deemed unconstitutional last year.Meanwhile, some area school districts are saying it's too soon to tell if the ruling will produce new calls for negotiations.
"We are back to the point that unions and the people they represent have equal standing," said John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., one of two plaintiffs that brought a lawsuit challenging Act 10, resulting in Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colas' 2012 decision.
The Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission had argued that decision applied just to the plaintiff unions. Colas said Monday the ruling applied statewide and the commission was purposefully ignoring it.
In Madison, teachers and the district just extended a contract through June 2015.
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Madison received an increase of $11,800,000 in redistributed state tax dollars last year...Public schools will receive $4.26 billion in general state aid this school year, up $87.5 million or 2.1 percent from last year, the Department of Public Instruction announced Wednesday.
The aid figures are a revision from those released Oct. 15. Gov. Scott Walker signed a bill Sunday to increase aid by $100 million over two years. The bill did not include an increase in state-imposed limits on school district revenues, so school boards are expected to use the additional aid to lower property taxes.
The aid figures were marginally different than estimates released by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau last week as part of the discussion of the property tax relief bill. The Madison School District, for example, will receive $12,680 less than reported last week, a change of 0.02 percent.
Over all, Madison will get $52.2 million in state aid, a 10.7 percent decrease.
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Madison Teachers, Inc (PDF), via a kind Jeanie (Bettner) Kamholtz email:
Several joint committees were created in the recent negotiations over MTI's 2014-15 Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement. The joint committees will study and potentially recommend modification of Contract terms. Each committee will report its recommendations, if any, to Superintendent Cheatham and to the MTI Board of Directors.The Committee on Teacher Assignments will discuss potential modification of Contract Section IV-F, Teacher Assignments, Surplus, Vacancies and Transfers. MTI's appointees are: Andy Mayhall (Thoreau), Nancy Roth (West), Karlton Porter (Cherokee) and Doug Keillor.
The Committee on Teacher Evaluation will study and make recommendations pertaining to the District's implementation of the State-mandated teacher evaluation system, "Educator Effectiveness". Any revisions will be incorporated into Section IV-H of the Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement and will become effective July 1, 2014. MTI's appointees are: MTI President Peggy Coyne (Black Hawk), Andrew McCuaig (La Follette), Kerry Motoviloff (Doyle) and Sara Bringman.
The Committee on Professional Collaboration Time will discuss implementation of the MTI/MMSD Memorandum of Understanding on High School & Middle School Professional Collaboration Time. MTI's appointees are: Art Camosy (Memorial), Karen Vieth (Sennett), Aisha Robertson (West), and Nichole Von Haden (Sherman).
The Committee on Elementary Planning Time will discuss potential modification of Section V-I-1-d, Early Monday Release and Section V-P, Planning Time. MTI's appointees are: Nancy Curtin (Crestwood), Greg Vallee (Thoreau), Holly Hansen (Falk) and Doug Keillor.
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Tap or click to view the pdf version.
Speaker: Pharen Bowman, Harvard College Admissions and Financial Aid Officer Tuesday, November 5
6:30 - 8:00 p.m.
Urban League of Greater Madison (2222 S. Park Street Madison, WI)
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Motoko Rich (NYT)Nearly two decades ago, a landmark study found that by age 3, the children of wealthier professionals have heard words millions more times than those of less educated parents, giving them a distinct advantage in school and suggesting the need for increased investment in prekindergarten programs.
Now a follow-up study has found a language gap as early as 18 months, heightening the policy debate.
The new research by Anne Fernald, a psychologist at Stanford University, which was published in Developmental Science this year, showed that at 18 months children from wealthier homes could identify pictures of simple words they knew -- "dog" or "ball" -- much faster than children from low-income families. By age 2, the study found, affluent children had learned 30 percent more words in the intervening months than the children from low-income homes.
The new findings, although based on a small sample, reinforced the earlier research showing that because professional parents speak so much more to their children, the children hear 30 million more words by age 3 than children from low-income households, early literacy experts, preschool directors and pediatricians said. In the new study, the children of affluent households came from communities where the median income per capita was $69,000; the low-income children came from communities with a median income per capita of $23,900.
Since oral language and vocabulary are so connected to reading comprehension, the most disadvantaged children face increased challenges once they enter school and start learning to read.
"That gap just gets bigger and bigger," said Kris Perry, executive director of the First Five Years Fund, an advocate of early education for low-income children. "That gap is very real and very hard to undo."
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If someone would have asked me this question a few years ago I honestly would not have had a good answer. I always thought a positive school culture was one where strict rules were created and consistently enforced to keep students focused on learning. In my mind, the more I could control the environment that my students were a part of the better the results. There was not much flexibility in terms of the structure of the day and what students were "allowed" to do. The end result was either compliance or outright defiance. Those who were compliant were celebrated while those who were defiant were disciplined accordingly.
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George Washington University -- which got in trouble last year for misreporting admissions data to bolster its college ranking -- is making yet another confession.The university has been misrepresenting its admissions and financial-aid policy for years, touting a "need-blind" admissions policy while in fact giving preference to wealthier students in the final stages of the admissions process, according to the student newspaper, the GW Hatchet, which first reported on the practice. Meanwhile, hundreds of academically comparable but needier students were put on the waitlist for admission because they lacked the financial resources.
Many colleges and universities like to tout "need-blind" admissions processes, or the practice of judging their applicants' academic qualifications strictly on their merits and making decisions without factoring in applicants' wealth. In recent years, some colleges that have traditionally been need-blind have weighed whether to become more need-aware.
Until a few days ago, the undergraduate admissions page for George Washington University stated, "Requests for financial aid do not affect admissions decisions." That language was removed over the weekend. (Here's the archived version.)
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The Fed's capabilities to engineer changes in economic growth and inflation are asymmetric. It has been historically documented that central bank tools are well suited to fight excess demand and rampant inflation; the Fed showed great resolve in containing the fast price increases in the aftermath of World Wars I and II and the Korean War. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, rampant inflation was again brought under control by a determined and persistent Federal Reserve.However, when an economy is excessively over-indebted and disinflationary factors force central banks to cut overnight interest rates to as close to zero as possible, central bank policy is powerless to further move inflation or growth metrics. The periods between 1927 and 1939 in the U.S. (and elsewhere), and from 1989 to the present in Japan, are clear examples of the impotence of central bank policy actions during periods of over-indebtedness.
Four considerations suggest the Fed will continue to be unsuccessful in engineering increasing growth and higher inflation with their continuation of the current program of Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAP)
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The pressure of the year's first exam-and-essay crunch is driving some students at Canadian universities to look for help in study drugs. A dealer might charge $20 for a single pill of the prescription Adderall, but students under stress are willing to pay.A few weeks ago, before midterm season, that same pill might have cost $5. Students who have used a range of medications commonly prescribed to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, say they can help casual users focus for hours, study stacks of material or write papers through the night without fatigue.
Nearly 4 per cent of students who have no medical need for the drugs take them to cope with academic demands, despite risks to their health, according to a major national study released this year. Many buy them from friends or classmates with legitimate prescriptions. Schools are aware of the problem - and the ethical questions - but have few tools to combat it.
The Globe and Mail asked student journalists across the country to probe the use of study drugs on their campus. In more than 20 interviews, students said they turned to the drugs, often before exams, because they had too many non-academic commitments or felt anxious to get good marks to be accepted to graduate school. Others confessed that they had procrastinated. Nearly every one said the drugs gave them a clear boost. The Globe contacted the students to verify the interviews. All of them declined to be identified on the record, out of concern about harming their academic or job prospects.
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Teach for America is best known for sending bright young college graduates to teach for two years in poor communities.But it's much more than a service organization. It's a political powerhouse.
With a $100 million endowment and annual revenues approaching $300 million, TFA is flush with cash and ambition. Its clout on Capitol Hill was demonstrated last week when a bipartisan group of lawmakers made time during the frenzied budget negotiations to secure the nonprofit its top legislative priority -- the renewal of a controversial provision defining teachers still in training, including TFA recruits, as "highly qualified" to take charge of classrooms.
It was a huge victory that flattened a coalition of big-name opponents, including the NAACP, the National PTA and the National Education Association. But it barely hints at TFA's growing leverage.
TFA has already produced an astounding number of alumni who have transformed the education landscape in states from Tennessee to Texas by opening public schools to competition from private entrepreneurs; rating teachers in part on their ability to raise student test scores; and pressing to eliminate tenure and seniority-based job protections. Convinced that quicker, bolder change is needed, TFA executives are mining their network of 32,000 alumni to identify promising leaders and help them advance.
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We like to think of human rights in affirmative terms, so we speak most often of our rights to move toward what we want: our rights to vote, assemble freely, speak freely, and choose our own paths to happiness. My contention here, however, is that the most basic right--the right that makes all other rights possible--is the right to quit.Quitting often has negative connotations in our minds. We grow up hearing things like, "Quitters never win, winners never quit." We're supposed to stick things out, no matter how tough the going. I rather like this variation, which I heard somewhere: "Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots."
If we move our minds out of the quagmire of competition (indeed, we can't win tennis matches by quitting) and think of life's broader goals--the goals of surviving, avoiding injury, finding happiness, and living in accordance with our personal values among people whom we respect and who respect us--then we see that freedom to quit is essential to all of these goals. I am talking here about the freedom to walk away from people and situations that are harmful to our wellbeing.
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America has a problem, a big one, the middle class has been wiped out. It is economic genocide and the target is most of America. The statistics just continue to pour in on how poorly America is doing. Even as the great manufactured crisis is over in D.C., the political agenda once again has nothing to do with helping America's middle class. Why jobs are not job #1 by this government we do not know. To drive home just how bad it is below we show some damning maps.The Southern Education Foundation has a new report showing the percentage of low income students in public schools from 2011. In 2010 and 2011 there was a new record set, the majority of kids in public schools in the West are poor. Below is their map showing in the South and West, the majority of students are low income. In other words, America is now raising a nation of poverty stricken kids.
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Bill Keller, via a kind Peter Gascoyne email:
WHOEVER coined that caustic aphorism should have been in a Harlem classroom last week where Bill Jackson was demonstrating an exception to the rule. Jackson, a 31-year classroom veteran, was teaching the mathematics of ratios to a group of inner-city seventh graders while 15 young teachers watched attentively. Starting with a recipe for steak sauce -- three parts ketchup to two parts Worcestershire sauce -- Jackson patiently coaxed his kids toward little math epiphanies, never dictating answers, leaving long silences for the children to fill. "Denzel, do you agree with Katelyn's solution?" the teacher asked. And: "Can you explain to your friend why you think Kevin is right?" He rarely called on the first hand up, because that would let the other students off the hook. Sometimes the student summoned to the whiteboard was the kid who had gotten the wrong answer: the class pitched in to help her correct it, then gave her a round of applause.Related: Teacher prep ratings.After an hour the kids filed out and the teachers circled their desks for a debriefing. Despite his status as a master teacher, Jackson seemed as eager to hone his own craft as that of his colleagues. What worked? What missed the mark? Should we break this into two lessons? Did the kids get it? And what does that mean?
"Does 'get it' mean getting an answer?" Jackson asked. "Or does it mean really understanding what's going on?"
At that point Deborah Kenny, the founder of the Harlem Village Academies charter schools, leaned over to me: "That right there, that is why we're starting a graduate school."
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AMERICANS WHO WONDER what the heck is happening to their public colleges can find answers in the British case. While American educational and political leaders deny the negative outcomes of the actions they barely admit to be taking, the United Kingdom's Tory government has offered explicit rationales for the most fundamental restructuring of a university system in modern history. The stakes are very high. Both countries have been downgrading their mass higher education systems by shrinking enrollments, reducing funding for educational quality, increasing inequality between premier and lower-tier universities, or all three at once.Oddly, policymakers are doing this in the full knowledge that mass access to high-quality public universities remains the cornerstone of high-income economies and complex societies. The public has a right to know what politicians and business leaders are really doing to their higher education systems, why they are doing it, and how to respond.
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Stan Druckenmiller makes an unlikely class warrior. He's a member of the 1%--make that the 0.001%--one of the most successful money managers of all time, and 60 years old to boot. But lately he has been touring college campuses promoting a message of income redistribution you don't hear out of Washington. It's how federal entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are letting Mr. Druckenmiller's generation rip off all those doting Barack Obama voters in Generation X, Y and Z."I have been shocked at the reception. I had planned to only visit Bowdoin, " his alma mater in Maine, he says. But he has since been invited to multiple campuses, and even the kids at Stanford and Berkeley have welcomed his theme of generational theft. Harlem Children's Zone President Geoffrey Canada and former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh have joined him at stops along the tour.
Mr. Druckenmiller describes the reaction of students: "The biggest question I got was, 'How do we start a movement?' And my answer was 'I'm a 60-year-old washed-up money manager. I don't know how to start a movement. That's your job. But we did it in Vietnam without Twitter and without Facebook and without any social media. That's your job.' But the enthusiasm--they get it."
Even at Berkeley, he says, "they got it. There is tremendous energy in the room and of course they understand it. I'd say it's a combination of appalled but motivated. That's the response I've been getting, and it's been overwhelming."
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Picture a world where human relationships are challenging, narcissism and self-centeredness are on the rise, and there is disagreement on the best way for people to live harmoniously together.It sounds like 21st-century America. But the society that Michael Puett, a tall, 48-year-old bespectacled professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, is describing to more than 700 rapt undergraduates is China, 2,500 years ago.
Puett's course Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory has become the third most popular course at the university. The only classes with higher enrollment are Intro to Economics and Intro to Computer Science. The second time Puett offered it, in 2007, so many students crowded into the assigned room that they were sitting on the stairs and stage and spilling out into the hallway. Harvard moved the class to Sanders Theater, the biggest venue on campus.
Why are so many undergraduates spending a semester poring over abstruse Chinese philosophy by scholars who lived thousands of years ago? For one thing, the class fulfills one of Harvard's more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. It's clear, though, that students are also lured in by Puett's bold promise: "This course will change your life."
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There have always been some pretty smart--make that incredibly smart--teenagers around.Take, for example, the French mathematician Evariste Galois (1811-1832; at left), who invented the field of abstract algebra known as group theory while still in his teens. This branch of mathematics lies at the heart of modern quantum mechanics, among other things.
Galois may have been brilliant, but he was no nerd: He died in a duel over a love affair at the tender age of 21! So, teen geniuses are nothing new. However, it does seem like there are more of them around today than ever before.
Some of them are inventors; some, like Galois, solve difficult mathematical problems; some are brilliant artists, performers, or entrepreneurs; and some have encyclopedic knowledge, speak multiple languages, or can correctly spell any word.
They are all smart. Very smart. Smart way beyond their years. So, how do we measure intelligence? The most popular measure for intelligence is the Stanford-Binet IQ test offered through Mensa International, an organization for high-IQ people. An average IQ score is 85-114; 144 or above is considered genius-level. Yet, some people have intelligence and gifts that defy or go beyond a test score.
At first glance, it's pretty hard to recognize the smartest teenagers. Just like fruit and other gifts of nature, we can't (and shouldn't) judge that proverbial book by its cover. You'll recognize the diversity among these 50 smart teenagers and find very little in common among them in terms of physical characteristics, locations, background, etc.
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The University of Oxford is today releasing a set of sample interview questions from tutors who conduct Oxford interviews, in an attempt to explain the reasoning behind even the most strange-sounding questions.The questions have been released to mark the deadline day for students to apply to study at Oxford University next year. Students applying for biological sciences might be asked whether it is easier for an organism to live on sea or land, history applicants might be asked which historical figure they would like to interview and why, while aspiring philosophers might be asked to distinguish between 'lie', 'deceive' and 'mislead'.
'When considering an application to Oxford, we look very carefully at GCSE results, aptitude test scores, personal statement, teacher's reference and interview performance, and we know that for many students the interview is the most daunting part of the process,' says Mike Nicholson, Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Oxford University. 'Academic interviews will be an entirely new experience for most students, so we want to show students what they are really like so they aren't put off by what they might have heard.
'Interviews are designed to give candidates a chance to show their real ability and potential, which means candidates will be pushed to use their knowledge and apply their thinking to new problems in ways that will both challenge them and allow them to shine. Interviews are an academic conversation in a subject area between tutors and candidate, similar to the undergraduate tutorials which current Oxford students attend every week. Like tutorials, interviews are designed to get students to think, not recite specific facts or answers.'
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Since the suburban boom of the post-World War II era, parents of means have moved from cities to affluent areas with better schools. Despite what facile style section pieces tell you, this has long been a trend. But a new analysis of census data featured in the Wall Street Journal shows that wealthy people with kids are now twice as likely to segregate themselves from the poor than they were in the 1970s. Conversely, poor families now cluster together as well.According to an analysis of census data by Kendra Bischoff of Cornell University and Sean Reardon at Stanford University, the proportion of families living in affluent areas doubled from 1970 to 2009--it went from 7 to 15 percent. At the same time, the percentage of families living in poor areas also more than doubled--it went from 8-18 percent.
So what's going on here? Why are more affluent Americans with children clustering together now than they did in the '70s? Presumably wealthy people have always wanted their kids to live in areas that had good public schools and low crime rates--what's changed?
I asked my former colleague Tim Noah, contributing writer for MSNBC and the author of The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, why he thinks more wealthy families are now living in affluent communities than they did 40 years ago. He wrote in an email:
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With the faint whiff of eugenics about it, the act of choosing the sex of your baby may be anathema to many people.But increasing numbers of Hong Kong and mainland parents are getting around laws which ban the procedure at home by hiring the services of middlemen to smooth the way - at a price.
These facilitator businesses partner with clinics and hospitals in places like Thailand and the United States, where an IVF procedure can cost anything from HK$250,000 to HK$2.3 million.
"We have people who want a boy and a girl at the first go," says 32-year-old Tina Fong Wai-lan, who runs Eden Hospitality with her husband Alfred Siu Wing-fung. Set up in 2008, it has arranged for more than 300 couples to go overseas on IVF and sex selection packages. "If it's the first time they're having children, the [Chinese] government won't penalise them," she said. Others look to even out the sex balance in their families.
Business has spiked with their client base tripling to 300 in the past year - about 70 per cent from the mainland and the rest from Hong Kong. The increase could be partly due to an advertising strategy which offers marriage packages alongside baby sex selection services.
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Universal pre-kindergarten schooling, every progressive's fondest dream, is back in the news. Bill de Blasio, the overwhelming favorite in the New York mayoral race and the likely future head of the nation's largest school system, is pushing universal pre-K as his No. 1 policy proposal. President Obama offered a national version of this idea in his February State of the Union address and has since pushed hard in other settings. Two problems: Such programs would have negligible educational value, and they would be massively expensive.Mr. de Blasio wants to raise taxes on the city's rich to collect $530 million annually mostly to fund full-day pre-K. The money would go for 68,000 lower-income New York City children, most of whom already attend publicly funded pre-K either full- (20,000) or part-time (38,000) at a current annual cost of about $190 million. Mr. de Blasio's proposal means nearly tripling the annual cost for roughly the same group of children.
"Universal" is a misnomer. since Mr. de Blasio's program would serve only lower-income kids out of a total New York population of about 120,000 four-year-olds. Perhaps, by saying "universal," Mr. de Blasio intends to rally public support with something seemingly equally available to all. Mr. Obama takes a similar tack, offering the combination of a lofty "universal pre-K" vision with a more limited and targeted program in practice. Yet his program would also cost tens of billions of dollars.
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Madison School Board President Ed Hughes:
As I hope someone might have noticed, I have not been posting much lately. Part of the reason is that I have another outlet. I have been writing a column in the school district's bi-weekly family newsletter.My latest column focused on a recent School Board retreat where we learned more about the Common Core State Standards. Even though the family newsletter is a district publication, I should point out that the views I express in the column (as well as in this blog) are my own and do not necessarily represent the views, positions or policies of the Madison Metropolitan School District. But however unofficial my words may be, here is what I wrote:
On Saturday, September 28, the Madison School Board held the first of our quarterly board retreats. We get together on a Saturday for an extended discussion of a few topics of particular interest. Our focus this time was on the much-misunderstood Common Core academic standards for literacy and math.
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Madison School Board President Ed Hughes:
Mary Burke's past activities are coming under increased scrutiny now that she is an active candidate for governor. Mary has generously supported different educational initiatives for many years. Her primary focus has been the AVID/TOPS partnership between the Madison School District and the Boys and Girls Club. But her pledge of support for the Madison Prep charter school proposal has drawn the most attention. Since I was more involved in the Madison Prep saga than most, I thought it might be helpful if I provided a summary of what I know about Mary's involvement.Burke's candidacy will bring additional statewide attention (and rhetoric) to the Madison schools, particularly its challenges. It will be interesting to see what, if anything Mary Burke says about her time on the local school board.In December, 2010, the Urban League of Greater Madison presented an initial proposal to the Madison School Board to establish a charter school called Madison Prep. The Urban League described the school as "a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men, particularly young men of color." The school was intended to inculcate a culture of hard-work and achievement among its students through a host of practices, including single-sex classrooms, an International Baccalaureate curriculum, longer school days and school years, intensive mentoring, and obligatory parental involvement.
Madison Prep was controversial from the start and the initial proposal was adjusted in response to various concerns. By the fall of 2011, Madison Prep was planned to be an instrumentality charter school, like our existing charter schools Nuestro Mundo and Badger Rock. As an instrumentality, all teachers and staff would have been union members.
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Perhaps no urban legend has played as long and loudly as the notion that "empty nesters" are abandoning their dull lives in the suburbs for the excitement of inner city living. This meme has been most recently celebrated in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.Both stories, citing research by the real estate brokerage Redfin, maintained that over the last decade a net 1 million boomers (born born between 1945 and 1964) have moved into the city core from the surrounding area. "Aging boomers," the Post gushed, now "opt for the city life." It's enough to warm the cockles of a downtown real-estate speculator's heart, and perhaps nudge some subsidies from city officials anxious to secure their downtown dreams.
But there's a problem here: a look at Census data shows the story is based on flawed analysis, something that the Journal subsequently acknowledged. Indeed, our number-crunching shows that rather than flocking into cities, there were roughly a million fewer boomers in 2010 within a five-mile radius of the centers of the nation's 51 largest metro areas compared to a decade earlier.
If boomers change residences, they tend to move further from the core, and particularly to less dense places outside metropolitan areas. Looking at the 51 metropolitan areas with more than a million residents, areas within five miles of the center lost 17% of their boomers over the past decade, while the balance of the metropolitan areas, predominately suburbs, only lost 2%. In contrast places outside the 51 metro areas actually gained boomers.
Only one city, Miami, recorded a net gain in the boomer population within five miles of the center, roughly 1%. Much ballyhooed back to city markets including Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco suffered double-digit percentage losses within the five-mile zone.
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Here are the notes from the brief 10-minute talk I gave yesterday at the University of Mary Washington at a "conference before the conference" (Namely: OpenVA). I was part of an afternoon-long event called "Minding the Future," that brought together a number of educators and technologists. (Namely: Kin Lane, Gardner Campbell, David Wiley, Alan Levine, and myself). We each spoke for 10 minutes about our thoughts on the future of higher education, then took 20 minutes of questions. And at the end of the evening, we sat on a panel, taking questions from Jeff McClurken and the audience. Video and slides are also embedded below.
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Marshfield School District has been in the news lately, This time they have shown us the consequences of ACT10.First this story from the Administrators where they praised ACT10:
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Tom Larson is one of the legislators responsible for reviewing the set of academic standards for public schools in Wisconsin, yet the rural Colfax assemblyman admitted last week that he was still trying to catch up with the arguments swirling around the "Common Core."Related: the oft criticized WKCE.In 2010, state schools Superintendent Tony Evers voluntarily agreed to adopt the Common Core State Standards, which cover math and English and promote literacy in history/social studies, science and technical subjects for students from kindergarten through high school. According to the Common Core website, the standards also define a vision of what it means to be a literate person in the 21st century.
On paper, that all sounds good, but, in the real world, the Common Core standards have sparked a firestorm of controversy in the Badger State and elsewhere.
Speaking Monday before a group of local education officials in Eau Claire, Larson said he had been selected as one of nine representatives to sit on the Assembly Select Committee on Common Core Standards.
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Sarah Theule Lubienski didn't set out to compare public schools and private schools. A professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she was studying math instructional techniques when she discovered something surprising: Private schools--long assumed to be educationally superior--were underperforming public schools.She called her husband, Christopher A. Lubienski, also a professor at the university. "I said, 'This is a really weird thing,' and I checked it and double checked it," she remembers. The couple decided to take on a project that would ultimately disprove decades of assumptions about private and public education.
Studying the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, they have found that, when controlling for demographic factors, public schools are doing a better job academically than private schools. It seems that private school students have higher scores because they come from more affluent backgrounds, not because the schools they attend are better educational institutions. They write about these conclusions--and explain how they came to them--in their book, The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools. Here's an interview with the Lubienskis about their work, edited and condensed for clarity and length.
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For more than 200 years from its beginnings in the 1770s, the Dead Letter Office was where Americans' letters and parcels were sent if they were unclaimed or undeliverable. Some items were redirected: the DLO had a "blind reading" department trained to decipher illegible or vague addresses ("To my Son he lives out West he drives a red ox the rale rode goes By Thar").The office would incinerate the others or auction their contents, which included, according to one sale list, anything from wedding rings to "False Bosoms" and quack medicines, such as "the cure-all Tennessee Swamp Shrub". It was estimated that 6bn pieces of mail were posted in the US in 1898, of which 6.3m ended up at the DLO in Washington, DC. "What romance was to be had in an undelivered or undeliverable letter!" Simon Garfield writes in To The Letter. "And what mystery and sadness too."
Well, the romance and mystery have certainly gone. The US Postal Service has renamed the DLO the Mail Recovery Center, consolidated four locations into one in Atlanta, Georgia, and is pushing through a "Lean Six Sigma" process improvement project to make it more efficient. Asked if they write letters, most people would echo the DLO's famous fictional former clerk Bartleby in the Herman Melville story: "I would prefer not to."
Plainly, instant electronic means of communication - email, of course, but increasingly social media such as Twitter and Facebook - have pushed pen, paper and postboxes to the edge of most private correspondents' consciousness. It may be nice to think that investors' enthusiasm for this month's public offering of shares in Britain's Royal Mail, the world's oldest postal service, is based on a revival of letter writing, "the humane art, which owes its origins to the love of friends", in Virginia's Woolf's words. In fact, Royal Mail's daily postbag is at its lowest for 20 years, and it predicts the volume of letters - most of which are for business and marketing - will fall at up to 6 per cent a year. The Royal Mail's future lies in delivery of items ordered on the internet. Even Postman Pat, the children's cartoon character, has had to amend his theme tune to reflect the fact he now brings more "parcels through your door" than letters.
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And if there's a happy future in the whole MPS buildings issue, it's unlikely to lie in vacant buildings. It lies in doing something different with current schools that chronically get poor results. What if those buildings housed something much better? Keep watch to see if there is fresh action on that front, including offering some to charter schools.The specific factors around the Malcolm X matter are one reason for the big fight now. But the bigger reason, in my view, is the continuing failure by, oh, close to everybody to get past those sharp divisions among us and to take actions that best serve the largest number of kids by creating the largest number of quality schools.
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A cynic would be forgiven for wondering whether the press conference Minneapolis mayoral candidate Mark Andrew held Monday afternoon, flanked by five members of the school board, was at least partly an exercise in damage control.Minneapolis plans to spend $524,944,868 (PDF budget book) during the 2013-2014 school year for 34,148 students or 15,364 per student, about the same as Madison.At the session, held in the library at Windom Dual Immersion School in southwest Minneapolis, Andrew announced a three-pronged education agenda. At its center: a promise to convene a collaborative headed by education advocates with divergent philosophies, Mike Ciresi and Louise Sundin.
"The conversation about improving educational outcomes for kids of color has gotten extremely polarized and increasingly heated in the past several years," Andrew explained in the plan. "The reformers vs. unions dichotomy is unproductive, and doesn't serve the best interests of our children or find Minneapolis solutions to the problems in Minneapolis' schools."
Yet, property taxes are substantially lower in Minneapolis where a home currently on the market for $279,900 has a 2013 property tax bill of $3,433. A $230,000 Madison home pays $5,408.38 while a comparable Middleton home pays $4,648.18 in property taxes. Madison plans to increase property taxes 4.5% this year, after a 9% increase two years ago, despite a substantial increase in redistributed state tax dollar receipts. Yet, such history is often ignored during local tax & spending discussions. Madison Superintendent Cheatham offers a single data point response to local tax & spending policy, failing to mention the substantial increase in state tax receipts the year before:
When we started our budget process, we received the largest possible cut in state aid, over $8 million," Cheatham said. "I'm pleased that this funding will make up a portion of that cut and help us accomplish what has been one of our goals all along: to reduce the impact of a large cut in state aid on our taxpayers."A bit more background.
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High-cost cities tend to have higher median incomes, which leads to the simple heuristic that, sure, it's costlier to live in San Francisco than in Akron, but the people who pay bills there make enough money that they can afford it.In reality, yes, the median household income in metropolitan San Francisco is higher than it is in Akron (by about $30,000). But that smaller income will buy you much, much more in Ohio. To be more specific, if you make the median income in Akron - a good proxy for a spot in the local middle class - 86 percent of the homes on the market there this month are likely within your budget.
If you're middle-class in San Francisco, on the other hand, that figure is just 14 percent. Your money will buy you no more than 1,000 square feet on average. That property likely isn't located where you'd like to live. And the options available to you on the market are even fewer than they were just a year ago, according to data crunched by Trulia. To frame this another way, the median income in metro San Francisco is about 60 percent higher than it is in Akron. But the median for-sale housing price per square foot today is about 700 percenthigher.
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Funding the state's public universities based on performance will be examined by an Iowa Board of Regents task force on Friday.The task force will study how state dollars are awarded to Iowa's universities, and determine what metrics should be used to measure performance. The regents board governs the state's universities.
Across the country, some state legislators have sought to hold public universities accountable for better performance. In Tennessee, 100 percent of higher education funding is based on a variety of performance measures, including graduation rates.
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Because the "asymmetry thesis" just won't leave me alone, I decided it would be sort of interesting to see what the relationship was between a "science comprehension" scale I've been developing and political outlooks.The "science comprehension" measure is a composite of 11 items from the National Science Foundation's "Science Indicators" battery, the standard measure of "science literacy" used in public opinion studies (including comparative ones), plus 10 items from an extended version of the Cognitive Reflection Test, which is normally considered the best measure of the disposition to engage in conscious, effortful information processing ("System 2") as opposed to intuitive, heuristic processing ("System 1").
The items scale well together (α= 0.81) and can be understood to measure a disposition that combines substantive science knowledge with a disposition to use critical reasoning skills of the sort necessary to make valid inferences from observation. We used a version of a scale like this--one combining the NSF science literacy battery with numeracy--in our study of how science comprehension magnifies cultural polarization over climate change and nuclear power.
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745.That's the number of students in the Madison Metropolitan School District identified as homeless seven weeks into the 2013-14 school year. The count is on a pace to continue record-setting numbers of homeless children over the past decade, say school officials.
The number of homeless children and youth in the school district has climbed more than 2-1/2 times since the 2004-2005 school year, from 485 to 1,263 in the 2012-2013 school year, according to district statistics.
"We're learning more and more that the trauma created by having to go through homelessness stays with them the rest of their lives," Amy Noble, a social worker with the school district, told participants at Homelessness in Dane County, a summit hosted Tuesday by Leadership Greater Madison.
The number of students in families who are homeless rises over the course of the school year as families lose housing and students' circumstances are recognized by school personnel. The count, under federal law, includes children whose families are doubled up for economic reasons, a common circumstance for low-income families not included in most other calculations of the homeless population.
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Students taking China's hypercompetitive college entrance exam, according to a popular saying, resemble an army of 10,000 rushing across a narrow log. So what happens to those who fall off?Each year, more than 9 million Chinese students endure the gaokao, as the exam is known. A grueling two or three days' experience -- it varies by region -- the test covers Chinese, mathematics, a foreign language, chemistry, physics, geography, and history, among other subjects. The test results, which range from the 200s to the 600s (scores of over 700 sometimes make headlines), comprise almost the entirety of a student's college application portfolio. While some of the multiple-choice questions would be familiar to U.S. teenagers sweating over Advanced Placement exams, gaokao essay prompts are sometimes so bizarre that even Chinese state media challenged its mostly adult readers to answer some of the more notorious essay prompts, such as this one: "It flies upward, and a voice asks if it is tired. It says, 'No.'"
Because Chinese parents often expect their children to become family breadwinners, the pressure to perform is intense. Faced with the gaokao's high stakes and frustrating unpredictability, tens of thousands of test takers choose to sit through the ordeal again, when their scores fall short of their -- or their parents' -- expectations. Having already graduated from high school, some of these re-takers hunker down at home for a year to study. Others attend cram schools like Maotanchang High School, which lies tucked away in a small town in the mountains of central China's Anhui province and specializes in the dark art of military-style test prep. With an annual enrollment of more than 10,000 students, the school, known as Maozhong, has earned the dubious honor of being called "China's Largest Gaokao Factory" in Chinese state media.
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We are proud to announce Wolfram Problem Generator, a website where students decide which topic they want to practice and we provide the questions and solutions. This is an exciting new way to help students with their classes: previously, students provided their own practice questions and Wolfram|Alpha helped them find answers with Step-by-step solutions. Students can now ask Wolfram|Alpha for help with practice and homework questions and can do practice problems with Wolfram Problem Generator.Currently, there are six main topics that Wolfram Problem Generator covers: arithmetic, number theory, algebra, calculus, linear algebra, and statistics. The topics range from early elementary school all the way through college calculus. Moreover, for elementary and secondary education material, we are closely following the Common Core Standards initiative to provide a comprehensive list of topics.
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The education secretary, Michael Gove, has urged politicians to stop "lying to children" about their life chances and allowing inflated exam grades that he compared to Soviet tractor production propaganda."For years, ministers in previous governments looked at the way more and more people were getting GCSEs and they congratulated themselves, like Soviet economics ministers on the growth in statistics," Gove a US summit on education reform on Thursday night.
Slipping into a mock Russian accent and syntax, Gove said: "Look in Russia, thousands more get GCSEs. Surely now we are education powerhouse?"
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A few years ago John Donoghue, professor of neuroscience at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, met Cathy Hutchinson, a young woman who was suffering from locked-in syndrome following a stroke. Until recently, this would have condemned her to a life of helplessness and hopelessness: locked-in syndrome means that somebody cannot move their limbs, even if their brains are functioning normally (as Jean-Dominique Bauby described so movingly in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).But Hutchinson had a dream: she longed to drink a cup of coffee on her own, in one vestige of normality. And Donoghue was convinced he could help. Over the past few years, he has run a project called Braingate that combines the latest advances in computing science, engineering and mathematics with neuroscience, to map the connections inside the brain - and replicate them on a computer.
More specifically, this project uses the impulses that our brains send whenever the body makes a movement - or even just thinks about a movement - to activate a robot, via a computer.
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So my daughter's computer class has progressed now from typing Word documents to Excel spreadsheets. What the hell does a 6th grader need with Excel? Is she realistically going to balance her piggy bank with a complicated spread sheet formula? Or is that meant to inspire her to enter the Future Excel Drones of America(c) club?When I was in 6th grade I was learning HyperCard. We were animating stick figures and making choose your own adventure decks. You know, the kind of things that are appropriate for a 6th grader. In the process the groundwork was laid for my programming career.
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The education research of recent years has pointed overwhelmingly to the importance of teachers. Perhaps more than anything else - quality of principal, size of school, size of class - the strength or weakness of classroom teachers influences how much students learn and even how they fare later in life.The great unknown is how to improve teacher quality, be it by attracting more good teachers, weeding out more bad teachers or helping teachers become better at their craft.
A new study released on Thursday, offers powerful if still tentative evidence that teacher-evaluation programs can play an important role. The study is especially notable because past research about evaluation programs suggested they had little effect. The new paper, however, studies an evaluation program - called Impact, in the District of Columbia school system - that is far larger, with bigger rewards and stiffer penalties, than most programs.
Impact, which began under Michelle Rhee while she was chancellor, has been a hotly debated program, and the new study is sure to attract attention from both supporters and critics of teacher evaluation. New York state's plan to begin evaluating teachers has also been the subject of intense praise and criticism, as have such programs elsewhere.
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A research group that named Hunter College High School the saddest tweeting spot in Manhattan now says it was mistaken in its finding. The group's acknowledgment of the error came to light after many questions were raised about an initial post on the study.In August, the group, New England Complex Systems Institute, released a study assessing the moods of New Yorkers based on their Twitter posts. The lead researcher on the study, Prof. Yaneer Bar-Yam, told media outlets that Hunter High School, an elite public school on the Upper East Side, had the highest percentage of "negative sentiment" posts of any place in Manhattan.
This was determined, he said, by a computer program that sorted geo-tagged posts into negative or positive sentiment designations, based upon their language and emoticons.
Hunter High School was the source of an unusually high percentage of negative Twitter messages, even higher than hospital locations and spots with particularly frustrating rush-hour traffic, said Professor Bar-Yam, who offered possible reasons that included the high school's lack of windows, high workload and the fact that the posts were collected just as the students had returned from spring break and were facing final exams.
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It's unusual for a man like the influential Deasy to enjoy being sued. But these are unusual times. As Deasy had hoped, Superior Court Judge James Chalfant tentatively ruled that Los Angeles Unified School District's leaders had ignored a key state law, the 1971 Stull Act, which requires LAUSD to grade not just its students but its teachers.Hailed 31 years ago as a key reform, the Stull Act requires all school districts to evaluate their educators annually. Teachers were to be assessed on many criteria, including how well pupils progressed under their tutelage.That never happened.
Assessing teachers by how well their students learned was all but ignored statewide. LAUSD, which educates one in every nine children in California, never bothered.
Deasy's courtroom loss inDoe v. Deasy "did exactly what has been my position," Deasy says. Chalfant ordered school districts to take student progress into account in grading their teachers.
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He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice," Mississippi's William Faulkner said of man upon receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, "but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things."New Englanders can rightfully claim to have been America's 19th-century literary hub, but no other regional landscape dominated 20th-century literature like the South and its genius for storytelling. Famously, Faulkner's imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, Chickasaw for "split land," provided the setting for his most inspired novels.
American high school students should read Southern writers like Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, author of the 1962 National Book Award-winning "The Moviegoer." Percy crafted stories about "the dislocation of man in the modern age," while contributing to a "community of discourse" around fiction writing. His Greenville, Miss., was a wellspring of outstanding writers.
Greenville's patriarch, William Alexander Percy, was a lawyer, planter and poet from a suicide-plagued family. He authored the best-selling 1941 memoir "Lanterns on the Levee." His second cousin, Walker Percy, and Walker's lifelong best friend, Shelby Foote, were both young when they lost their fathers. Will Percy's book-filled house became a sanctuary for writers, journalists and musicians, as the man himself mentored a region.
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Facebook Inc.'s move Wednesday to let teenagers share items more widely reflects growing competition among social networks for the attention of teens--and the advertisers that want to reach them.Facebook said it would let users between the ages of 13 and 17 make posts "public" so that they can be seen by anyone on the network. Previously, teenagers' posts could be seen only by their friends and "friends of friends."
With the shift, Facebook will operate more like such rivals as Twitter Inc. that let teens share publicly. Twitter, unlike Facebook, also lets users post anonymously or with pseudonyms.
Analysts said Facebook risks losing the next generation of young users if it doesn't keep pace with competitors. But some privacy advocates are more concerned about public posts on Facebook than on other sites because of its vast reach. It has 1.2 billion users world-wide, roughly five times as many as Twitter. Facebook also allows users to post a wider range of media and to comment more broadly than Twitter does.
"This is about monetizing kids and teens," said James Steyer, founder and chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit devoted to online privacy.
Aaron Everson, president of Shoutlet, a Madison, Wis., company that helps brands manage social-media campaigns, said Facebook wants to "compete against other networks that might have a younger demographic, and potentially help them reel in more advertisers." Marketers will have to be creative in grabbing the Web-savvy teen's attention without alienating parents, he added.
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A regular bedtime schedule is unquestionably helpful for parents, but a new study has found it that it may be even more beneficial for their children.British researchers interviewed mothers when their children were ages 3, 5 and 7, asking how often their children had a regular bedtime: always, usually, sometimes or never. The mothers and the children's teachers also completed questionnaires about behavioral difficulties.
Almost 20 percent of 3-year-olds had no regular bedtime, compared with 9.1 percent of 5-year-olds and 8.2 percent of 7-year-olds. After controlling for many social, economic and parental behavioral factors, the scientists found that children with a regular bedtime, whether early or late, had fewer behavioral problems. And the longer irregular bedtimes persisted, the more severe the difficulties were.
The study, published Monday in Pediatrics, also found that children who had irregular bedtimes at ages 3 and 5 had significant improvements in behavior scores if their bedtime was regular by age 7.
Still, the lead author, Yvonne Kelly, a professor of lifecourse epidemiology at University College London, warned against exaggerating the importance of the findings.
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The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) has recently released the first round of results from its new principal evaluation system. Like the system used for teachers, the principal ratings are based on a combination of test and non-test measures. And the two systems use the same final rating categories (highly effective, effective, minimally effective and ineffective).It was perhaps inevitable that there would be comparisons of their results. In short, principal ratings were substantially lower, on average. Roughly half of them received one of the two lowest ratings (minimally effective or ineffective), compared with around 10 percent of teachers.
Some wondered whether this discrepancy by itself means that DC teachers perform better than principals. Of course not. It is difficult to compare the performance of teachers versus that of principals, but it's unsupportable to imply that we can get a sense of this by comparing the final rating distributions from two evaluation systems.
These are different, completely untested systems measuring different jobs. Moreover, the principal evaluations (appropriately) employdifferent measures than those used for teachers, and they are combined in a different way. For instance, principals can only be rated effective if they meet their proficiency targets in either math or reading and "make gains" in the other. (Side note: Cross-sectional proficiency gains are a terrible measure that, in my view, should not be used in these systems.)
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Education in England is no better than mediocre, and billions of pounds have been wasted on pointless university courses and Sure Start schemes for young children, Michael Gove's special adviser has said in an outspoken private thesis written a few weeks before he is due to step down from his post.Dominic Cummings, the most influential adviser to the education secretary in the past five years, also argues in a revealing 250-page paper that "real talent" is rare among the nation's teachers - and, eye-catchingly, says educationists need to better understand the impact of genetics on children. The adviser, known for making fierce demands of civil servants, writes that the endgame for the Department for Education should be to reduce its role to acting as accountants and inspectors, employing hundreds and not thousands of civil servants - and creating an environment in which private and state education would be indistinguishable.
The Cummings manifesto claims that "the education of the majority even in rich countries is between awful and mediocre", and that the quality of maths education, in particular, is poor.
"In England, few are well trained in the basics of extended writing or mathematical and scientific modelling and problem-solving," he writes.
One of the best-known and most controversial of many special advisers working in government, Cummings is due to leave Gove at the end of the year. He worked in the department for two years, having previously advised Gove before the election, although his appointment within the department was initially blocked by David Cameron's then director of communications, Andy Coulson, who regarded Cummings as untrustworthy.
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What is wrong with the way most of us are introduced to math?
The way mathematics is taught is akin to an art class in which students are only taught how to paint a fence and are never shown the paintings of the great masters. When, later on in life, the subject of mathematics comes up, most people wave their hands and say, "Oh no, I don't want to hear about this, I was so bad at math." What they are really saying is, "I was bad at painting the fence."So what is it really like to be a mathematician?
You don't discover something beautiful every day. Most of the time, you work on something for weeks or months, only to realize that it doesn't work. But you never give up, you go back and try to analyze the data that you have, and try to see the analogies and connections to try to come up with a new hypothesis. Then you try to test that.What is the ultimate goal of all these efforts?
Another analogy is solving a jigsaw puzzle. Imagine that somebody gives you a puzzle, but they don't give you the box, just the pieces. You take those different pieces and try to put them together to create something of value, something beautiful and powerful. You can think of mathematics as the grand project of building this enormous jigsaw puzzle, with different groups of people working on different parts. Then, every once in a while, somebody finds a bridge between two parts, a way to assemble pieces together so that big chunks of the puzzle connect.
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A simple link. That's all it took to unleash a hailstorm of angry emails, messages, tweets, and comments. Why? I dared wonder if libraries will continue to exist in the future.I mean, it's not that crazy a notion, right? (If you're a librarian, you're not allowed to answer that.)
Last Monday, I linked to this piece by Art Brodsky for Wired from my blog. In it, he argues that beyond the recent hoopla around e-book pricing, the real problem with e-books is what they're doing to libraries. That is, killing them.
As Brodsky notes:
Imagine walking into a library or bookstore and needing three or four pairs of different glasses to read different books manufactured to specific viewing equipment. Or buying a book and then having to arbitrarily destroy it after say, two weeks. That's just nuts. But it's the current situation we're in with ebooks.
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"Life is better now than at almost any time in history", Angus Deaton writes in The Great Escape. The Princeton economist's account of health and wealth is a fundamentally positive story. Lives are longer, healthier, richer and more satisfying than ever before. To take one statistic from this compendium of progress: in every country in the world, infant and child mortality is lower than it was in 1950. On average, humankind is having a pretty good run.
Our incomplete flight from deprivation and early death is, however, more than a story of averages. Deaton's lucid book celebrates the riches brought by growth while judiciously explaining why some people are always "left behind". He draws a distinction between the inequalities that are opened up by advances in knowledge and those caused by flawed political systems. For it is humanity's lot that, ultimately, "inequality is the handmaiden of progress".
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About a week ago I began deleting all photos and videos of my children from the Internet. This is proving to be no easy task. Like many parents, I've excitedly shared virtually every step, misstep and milestone that myself and my children have muddled our way through.To be honest, aside from making sure my Facebook privacy permissions were set, I hadn't given a whole lot of thought about sharing photos of the kids online. I've run this blog (in various formats) for about a decade, and sharing stuff on it was just what I did. What I've always done. It's sort of the point of it. And when in the last few years I've started blogging less and posting on Facebook more, I carried that same sense of "my life is an open book" with me to the social network.
My view on sharing photos of the kids has always been that the advantages of having an easy, centralized way of sharing photos with an extended family that are thousands of kilometres away outweighed the largely fictional threat of creepy people having access to them.
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Michael Hancock and Kevin Johnson, Angel Taveras and Julian Castro:
Lagging far behind their international peers. Shamefully low reading and math competency. A staggering achievement gap. We've heard the alarming statistics about the trajectory of American students. After 10 years, No Child Left Behind has failed to put American children back on a competitive academic track.
But we are beginning to see real results in America's cities, the epicenters of innovation, including the four we lead: Denver; Providence, R.I.; San Antonio; and Sacramento, Calif.Long before we entered the political arena, each of us lived in the city we now lead. We attended public schools and sat at those desks -- and through that connection, we know that public education can work.
One lesson is that education doesn't need to be a partisan battleground. Far from Washington, smart education policy is uniting even the most strident opponents.
Take the Common Core curriculuma which was first promoted by the National Governors Association and has now been adopted by 45 states. Common Core improves on NCLB by putting more influence into the hands of those on the ground, breathing new life into an old Tip O'Neill axiom: Not only is all politics local, but effective education policy is even more local.
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I'm participating in the #WWEOpen13 MOOC about open online teaching. For the first unit, we were asked to post our "teaching philosophy." These kinds of questions typically tie me in knots. They seem inherently circular and unsolvable: to say how I should teach, I need to know what students need to learn, which isn't something I can just declare. For whatever reason, this time I was able to tap out ten statements. I don't know that I'd call them a philosophy, but they ring true as commitments I feel comfortable with.Good teaching is good learning... for both the student and the instructor. Learning means new connections and themes and lessons that weren't there at the beginning.
I believe in a balance between what the instructor and the students contribute. Teaching shouldn't be a monologue, but it also shouldn't be purely a peer conversation: students want the guidance and validation and knowledge that the instructor can orchestrate.
Every student should feel they are part of the experience and encouraged to contribute their unique perspectives. In particular, students should not be unfairly disadvantaged by factors such as gender, race, national origin, language, or disability.
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Oregon high school students are broadly dissatisfied with their public education experience, saying school isn't challenging enough, too many teachers are careless or incompetent and too many students are falling through the cracks.Those are among the findings of a survey of 200 Oregon high school students representative of the geographic, grade-level and racial/ethnic make-up of the state's high school population. The small sample means the survey has a margin of error of about 7 percentage points.
The survey, done by survey firm DHM Research and non-profit education advocacy group The Chalkboard Project, was designed to inject the student voice into the adult-dominated conversation about education reform in Oregon.
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A new study from the RSPB suggests that large numbers of children in Britain are missing out on the natural world.The three-year projectfound that only 21% of children aged 8-12 were "connected to nature".
Girls were much more likely than boys to be exposed to the great outdoors, while children in Wales had the lowest score across the UK.
The RSPB says that a perception among some adults that nature is dangerous or dirty could be holding children back.There has been an increasing amount of research in recent years underlining the lack of contact and experience with nature among modern children.
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In the weeks leading up to the publication of our cover story about Sergio Juárez Correa and the students of José Urbina López Primary School, it became clear that WIRED could help. We decided to sponsor the school and Juárez Correa, providing them with supplies and equipment they need, like a projector, printer, and laser pointer.But there also are powerful ways you can get involved with the burgeoning student-centered style of learning and teaching. Whether you want to bring this approach into an existing school, start a program of your own, donate to a program, or find a teacher who has asked for specific help, we've got suggestions. Here are four ways to take action:
1. Last year, the TED prize gave $1 million to Sugata Mitra, one of the movement's leading thinkers. If you are interested in supporting Mitra and his School in the Cloud project emailTEDPrize@TED.com or make contributions payable to:
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What were you most surprised by?The open bar. Just kidding! When I asked the people I talked to about how they got involved in the education reform movement nearly all could point to a transformative event in which they'd confronted some frustrating aspect of the education bureaucracy. I was struck by how similar their stories were to the ones that teachers tell me--and fascinated by how it is that we could have arrived at such different analyses of both the problem and the solution. For example, one of the reasons I'm so passionate about teachers having some kind--any kind--of job protections is because I've seen how often they have to get up in the grill of their principal or other administrators to advocate for their students. But that's a topic for another day. You want to know if I spotted any celebs...
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The Baltimore City school board has requested that the district follow through on a plan to assess the effectiveness of teachers who are alternatively certified through programs like Teach for America that for years have funneled teachers into the city's struggling schools.The city school board approved last week the $880,000 contract to hire and train 125 to 150 Teach For America teachers for the 2013-2014 school year.
The board also approved a $735,000 contract to hire the same amount of teachers from the Baltimore City Teaching Residency, a program similar to Teach for America that has more rigorous certification requirements.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):
Record keeping by an employee is important. Don't wait for trouble to start before you begin to compile your own personnel records. Having good records is also very important, should you become involved in a grievance over your Contract rights or benefits, or in a matter involving discipline or dismissal. To enable the Union to provide the best possible protection and representation, every employee should maintain his/her own "personnel" records.One's file should contain such documents as: college transcripts, evaluations, accumulated sick leave and days used, direct deposit (wage) records, records of student disciplinary referrals, Wisconsin Retirement System (DETF) records, personal leave, documentation of honors and awards, notes on student accidents and confrontations with parents or administrators, copies of all correspondence with supervisor(s) and administrators, and for teachers - individual teacher contracts for each year, licenses, and teaching assignments by year with subjects taught.
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The ancient university that has been seated at Oxford at least since Norman times has little in common with the modern one at Loughborough in the English Midlands that is descended from a council-run technical college. Yet one thing that is the same in both places is the £9,000-a-year fee. Britain's universities are barred from charging more than that, and only a quarter of them opt to charge less.Andrew Hamilton, Oxford's vice-chancellor, detects that something is amiss. Noting the oddity of "a market in which every item, virtually regardless of content and quality, is the same price", he argues that universities should have the freedom to charge more.
Yet America's experience of allowing universities to set their fees is a cautionary tale. In real terms, tuition at US universities costs on average five times more than it did 30 years ago. Annual fees can run to $45,000 (roughly £28,000). Two-thirds of students who graduated in 2011 had gone into debt, borrowing an average of $26,000.
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The results of this experiment probably won't surprise you. What surprised me was the fact that we didn't already have data like this in hand.The researchers (Sadler et al., 2013) tested 181 7th and 8th grade science teachers for their knowledge of physical science in fall, mid-year, and years end. They also tested their students (about 9,500) with the exact same instrument.
Each was a twenty-item multiple choice test. For 12 of the items, the wrong answers tapped a common misconception that previous research showed middle-schoolers often hold. For example, one common misconception is that burning produces no invisible gases. This question tapped that idea:
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There are six new sets of bleachers at Kletzsch Park, and a 12-year-old is responsible. It's a project that's helping him make history.Standing next to the bleachers he helped build, James Hightower III recited the Scout Oath "On my honor I will do my best, to do my duty to God and my country, and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight."
His father, James Hightower II, tells TODAY'S TMJ4's Jesse Ritka how much being in The Boy Scouts means to the Hightower family, "We believe in scouting. Where else can a young man, at the age of 10 or 11 start a oath by saying 'on my honor'? It starts with saying 'on my honor' and those are very powerful words and words to live by."
They're words that the Glen Hills 7th grader takes seriously. James joined The Boy Scouts when he was eight years old and now he is the youngest African-American Eagle Scout in the country. An accomplishment the now twelve-year-old is proud of, "It's awesome, it's... I've impressed myself."
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Bill Korach, via Will Fitzhugh:
A new video war game "Call of Duty" integrates women as the objects of violence while time spent on homework declines to about two hours per week. This is not a formula designed to produce an educated literate society that will be competitive in the global economy. On the other hand, spending 8 ½ hours per day on media including games of shocking violence is a formula that will continue to coarsen our culture and even produce real violence. Recall that the Columbine killers were avid video game players.
The Kaiser Foundation reported in January 2010, that:
"Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in media use among young people. Five years ago, we reported that young people spent an average of nearly 61/2 hours (6:21) a day with media--and managed to pack more than 81/2 hours (8:33) worth of media content into that time by multitasking. At that point it seemed that young people's lives were filled to the bursting point with media. Today, however, those levels of use have been shattered. Over the past five years, young people have increased the amount of time they spend consuming media by an hour and seventeen minutes daily, from 6:21 to 7:38--almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day, except that young people use media seven days a week instead of five. [53 hours a week]"
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"My goal," says the candidate, "is a healthier America. That is why I am setting an ambitious target of sending 1 million more Americans to the hospital in the next five years. To make sure they get there, I am announcing a new, low-interest loan program to help them pay for their treatment. This will ensure that hospital costs stay within reach of the typical American family."If you heard a speech like that, you probably would start scratching your head. Sure, people with acute medical conditions need hospital care. But most people don't have to lie for weeks in a hospital bed to get healthy. And lavishing more money on hospital care will simply drive the price up -- just as giving everyone a $2,000 vehicle subsidy would jack up prices for cars and trucks.
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Teachers are significantly more likely than people in other professions to be diagnosed with progressive speech and language disorders, according to a new Mayo Clinic study.Speech and language disorders, or SLDs, affect patients' ability to communicate through speaking or writing, rendering them unable to come up with words, produce sentences with correct grammar or articulate properly. It is different from Alzheimer's dementia, which primarily involves loss of memory. SLDs become progressively more severe over time, with death occurring on average between seven and 10 years after onset.
The study, whose results were published this month in the American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias, came about after Mayo Clinic doctors noticed that a high percentage of their SLD patients were educators.
Using Alzheimer's patients as a control group, the study found that the odds of being a teacher with SLD were 3.4 times higher than being a teacher with Alzheimer's dementia. For other occupations, there was no statistical difference between the SLD group and the Alzheimer's group. The study controlled for the percentage of teachers in the general population as counted in the U.S. Census.
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I found Principal Brian Williams in the lunchroom of the Sustainability Academy, a pre-K - 5 magnet school in the Old North End of Burlington, Vermont. He was easy to spot, the biggest guy in the room, sitting on a very small chair, talking with an 8-year-old tousled-haired boy who was having trouble with his writing. It was noontime, and Principal Williams asked me if I would like some of today's lunch: "Beef stew. I made it myself."The Burlington, VT school district will spend $59,615,950 to education about 3,600 students during the 2013-2014 school year, or $16,559.98 per student. Madison will spend about $15k/student this year, about twice the national average.I was about to chuckle a "Sure, sure" when I stopped and thought that actually, maybe he had made the stew himself. It seemed like such a place where the principal might also be the cook.
Just 5 years ago, the Sustainability Academy (SA) was known as the Lawrence Barnes Elementary School, one of two failing schools (the other was H.O. Wheeler) in the needy, sketchy part of Burlington, where about 95% of the kids were on free or reduced lunch (the nation's most reliable proxy for poverty), test scores were very low and enrollment was declining. The school's neighborhood is home to a mix of the down-and-out, the frontier-pushers, and is also the first stop for many of Burlington's constant influx of refugees and immigrants.
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I had a depressing experience a few nights ago. (Don't worry, I'll end on a more optimistic note.) Someone sent me an email, asking for a copy of a story about him that ran in the Milwaukee Journal in 1986. He said I wrote it. This was totally news to me, but it turned out the guy was right. Glad to help.My life was better organized in those days. I kept scrapbooks. In the course of trying to help this person, I found one with stories I wrote in 1986. I paged through it and came upon a story from September of that year about the gap in success between black students and white students in Milwaukee. The story was based on observations in classrooms, data and interviews.
The depressing part: With some cosmetic changes, that story could appear right here, right now. No one would think it was out of date. Twenty-seven years ago! In the big picture, so little has changed.
Here are some of the central points from the 1986 article:
"Many black children are not getting support from their homes that would help them do well in school."
"Economic poverty is connected to academic poverty."
"While some teachers are excellent, others can hardly control a classroom."
"The dominant classroom characteristic of many students is indifference, not misbehavior."
"Extremely high pupil turnover within schools impairs the progress of children."
The story described a middle-grade class where students were engaged and doing good work under one teacher. Her period ended and the next teacher took over the same class -- and disorder reigned.
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Yesterday I got back from a vacation on which I broke my noise-cancelling headphones, snapping off one of the ear cups when I crammed them into my suitcase. I had originally bought the headphones for trips, for blocking out the roars of jet engines (which, apparently, are deadly), snoring neighbors, and the klaxon wails of babies reacting (in a way I myself would sometimes like to) to the traumatizing experience of modern air travel. But as I was reminded upon my return, what I really use the headphones for, what I need them for, is getting anything done at work.Madison's Thoreau Elementary School originally featured an open plan design. No longer.Like many people, I work in an open-plan office. There are rows of long shared desks, as on a bond trading floor. That means that at any one time, I am within earshot of approximately three dozen phone conversations--it would be more if one of my neighbors wasn't a laser printer. In addition, from where I sit, there are six TV screens within my line of sight, which are usually tuned (soundlessly, thank God) to 24-hour news channels. There's a Kurt Vonnegut short story set in a dystopian future in which everyone is supposed to be exactly equal, mentally and physically, so smart people have to wear little devices in their ears that blast horrible noises every 20 seconds to disrupt their thinking. That is how my office sometimes feels. And so yesterday I found myself groping repeatedly for the spot on my desk where the noise-canceling headphones used to sit--and breaking into a cold sweat when I couldn't find them.
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Barry Garelick, via a kind email:
An important part of the job of teaching math in K-12 is to stretch students--to teach them creative and personal engagement with the material. At some point this must involve expecting students to come up with previously unfamiliar steps on their own for new problems that do not lend themselves to known algorithms, prescribed methods, and predictable approaches. An effective way of doing this is to extend routine problems that students know how to solve into nonroutine problems.Over the past two decades, however, disagreements between advocates of traditional or conventional math teaching and the math reform movement have resulted in a fragmented approach to teaching math. A key area of disagreement centers on the distinction between "exercises" and "problems". Math reformers generally believe that conventional math teaching consists mainly of routine problems that are nonthinking, repetitive, tedious and do not lead to students learning to solve nonroutine problems.
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he Guardian newspaper in England published a post in its Secret Teacher blog, written by teachers who write anonymously, with this headline: "There's an insidious prejudice against older teachers.' The piece refers to a program in England called "Teach First," which, it turns out, is a founding partner with Wendy Kopp's Teach For America in a growing network of dozens of organizations in countries around the world that try to change the teacher corps. It's called Teach For All, which I wrote about in this post:Teach for All is a network of like-minded school reform organizations in countries around the world that, as the website says, "all recruit outstanding university graduates and young leaders of a variety of disciplines and career interests to commit two years to teach in high-need areas, providing a critical source of additional teachers who ensure their students have the educational opportunities they deserve, despite socioeconomic factors."
Teach First, whose patron is Prince Charles, is having the same effect on many veteran teachers in England as Teach For America is having in the United States, at least according to this Secret Teacher blog post. Here's part of it:
Until not so long ago I was a happy classroom teacher, with happy pupils in a happy school. A teacher who had been officially and consistently recognised as teaching successfully over a long period of time, by many different professionals - leaders and colleagues, visiting headteachers and Ofsted inspectors. Now, despite years of successful practice, I am feeling vulnerable and hunted....
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"There is precedent for a government shutdown," Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, remarked last week. "There's no precedent for default."How wrong he is.
The U.S. government defaulted after the Revolutionary War, and it defaulted at intervals thereafter. Moreover, on the authority of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the government means to keep right on shirking, dodging or trimming, if not legally defaulting.
Default means to not pay as promised, and politics may interrupt the timely service of the government's debts. The consequences of such a disruption could -- as everyone knows by now -- set Wall Street on its ear. But after the various branches of government resume talking and investors have collected themselves, the Treasury will have no trouble finding the necessary billions with which to pay its bills. The Federal Reserve can materialize the scrip on a computer screen.
Things were very different when America owed the kind of dollars that couldn't just be whistled into existence. By 1790, the new republic was in arrears on $11,710,000 in foreign debt. These were obligations payable in gold and silver. Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, duly paid them. In doing so, he cured a default.
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More important than whether UW-Madison might take a chance on Madison Prep, though, is whether such a school chartered by UW-Madison would work. Caire said "higher education institutions tend to be more careful about who gets a charter and tend to charter some high-quality schools."Much more on the Madison Preparatory Academy, an IB charter school proposal rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board.There appears to be some evidence of this. Ten of 11 UW-Milwaukee-authorized charters have an average state report card score some 14 points higher than the Milwaukee Public Schools generally, with one charter school not rated.
The MPS and charter schools have comparable rates of poverty, although MPS schools have higher proportions of disabled students and English language learners. A special state test for disabled students and other accommodations can help mitigate the negative effect on a school's overall performance but not necessarily completely, according to James Wollack, an associate professor and expert in testing and evaluation at UW-Madison.
Madison's non-diverse K-12 governance model spends about double the national average per student yet has sustained disastrous reading results for some time. The "same service" governance model has long run its course.
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You've got to learn a foreign language. At least one! This is not 1953. America's relative position in the world will continue to decline, and Americans must know about and engage the rest of the world. If I can do just one thing, I would shake up the American education system and make Americans learn more about the world. We have the largest debt in the world. The days when we can get away with not caring about the world are coming to an end.
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"You have this enormous pool of people that's being missed because of the way the entire industry goes after the same kinds of people, asking, did you go to Stanford, did you work at this company?" said Erik Juhl, head of talent at Vungle Inc.
They can drive cars, win Jeopardy and find your soon-to-be favorite song. Machines are also learning to decipher the most human qualities about you -- and help businesses predict your potential to be their next star employee.A handful of technology companies from Knack.it Corp. to Evolv Inc. are doing just that, developing video games and online questionnaires that measure personality attributes in a job applicant. Based on patterns of how a company's best performers responded in these assessments, the software estimates a candidate's suitability to be everything from a warehouse worker to an investment bank analyst.
Welcome to hiring in the age of big data, an ambition marrying automation with analysis in the race to better allocate talent. Having people work at what they do best would make them more productive, bolstering the economy's capacity to expand, according to Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
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Now that the school year is under way, my wife and I are busy managing our children's after-school schedules, mixing sports practices, music lessons, homework and play dates. It can be a complicated balancing act for our elementary-age daughters, as some days end up overstuffed, some logistically impossible, some wide open. Still, compared to when we were children, the opportunities they get to sample on a weekly basis is mind-blowing.There's only one problem: To absorb the conventional wisdom in parenting circles these days, what we're doing to our children is cruel, overbearing and destructive to their long-term well-being. For years now, a consensus has been emerging that a subset of hard-driving, Ivy-longing parents is burdening their children with too many soccer tournaments, violin lessons and cooking classes. A small library of books has been published with names like "The Over-Scheduled Child," "The Pressured Child," "Pressured Parents, Stressed-Out Kids" and so on.
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At a far west Madison school, the News 3 Topnotch Teacher for October 2013 is imparting on students the power that words can have on others.Toki Middle School "Report Card" (PDF).In early October, Dana Munoz' sixth-grade class at Toki Middle School was working on its class contract, an agreement about how the students are going to interact with each other for the school year.
"Those usually include things they believe about themselves or they believe about the world and that they really want to happen," Munoz said. "It sets the tone or the foundation for the rest of the year. I refer to it all the time."
Munoz, who's been working at Toki for five years, teaches language arts and likes to emphasize to her students that words, whether written or spoken, can be quite powerful in good or bad ways.
"The words we say, the impact we have on others can make or break someone's day," Munoz says. "Not only is it important to read and write, how we relate to one another can change the world."
Munoz chose to use her words to change the world through teaching. The University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate admits it's not always easy.
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Height-for-age among children is lower in India than in Sub-Saharan Africa. This presents a puzzle since India is richer than the average African country and fares better on most other development indicators including infant mortality. Using data from African and Indian Demographic and Health Surveys, we document three facts. First, among firstborns, Indians are actually taller than Africans; the Indian height disadvantage appears with the second child and increases with birth order. Second, investments in successive pregnancies and higher birth order children decline faster in India than Africa. Third, the India-Africa birth order gradient in child height appears to vary with sibling gender. These three facts suggest that parental preferences regarding higher birth order children, driven in part by cultural norms of eldest son preference, underlie much of India's child stunting.
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In the past decade, college tuition has risen three times as fast as the consumer-price index and twice as fast as medical care.To answer those questions, The Wall Street Journal invited three economists with distinctly different orientations within higher education to discuss the issue.
Rudy Fichtenbaum teaches at Wright State University, Fairborn, Ohio, and is president of the American Association of University Professors, which promotes academic freedom and shared governance on college campuses. Katharine Lyall was president of the University of Wisconsin System from 1992 to 2004. Richard Vedder is director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Washington, D.C., which researches cost and efficiency in higher education.
This conversation was conducted by email between Aug. 28 and Sept. 3. Here are edited excerpts.
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What explains the high, and rising, cost of college in the U.S.?JON ERICKSON: Among the obvious factors affecting the rising costs of a college education in the U.S. are declining state funding coupled with increased services. However, there are other factors that may not be so apparent.
Among these factors are the staggering costs of remedial education. Our data show that far too many high-school graduates arrive on college campuses ill-prepared to succeed in standard first-year courses. According to some studies as many as 40% of college students must take at least one remedial course. Conservative estimates just within Texas put the cost at nearly $250 million.
Since remedial courses don't count toward degree attainment, this also places a significant strain on students, delaying graduation, costing them more money in tuition and fees, and deferring the salary they will earn after they obtain their degree. Improving the college readiness of our high school graduates could help reduce college costs for many students.
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Joanne Lipman
CONDOLEEZZA RICE trained to be a concert pianist. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a professional clarinet and saxophone player. The hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kovner is a pianist who took classes at Juilliard. Multiple studies link music study to academic achievement. But what is it about serious music training that seems to correlate with outsize success in other fields? The connection isn't a coincidence. I know because I asked. I put the question to top-flight professionals in industries from tech to finance to media, all of whom had serious (if often little-known) past lives as musicians. Almost all made a connection between their music training and their professional achievements.
The phenomenon extends beyond the math-music association. Strikingly, many high achievers told me music opened up the pathways to creative thinking. And their experiences suggest that music training sharpens other qualities: Collaboration. The ability to listen. A way of thinking that weaves together disparate ideas. The power to focus on the present and the future simultaneously. Will your school music program turn your kid into a Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft (guitar)? Or a Woody Allen (clarinet)? Probably not. These are singular achievers. But the way these and other visionaries I spoke to process music is intriguing. As is the way many of them apply music's lessons of focus and discipline into new ways of thinking and communicating -- even problem solving.
Look carefully and you'll find musicians at the top of almost any industry. Woody Allen performs weekly with a jazz band. The television broadcaster Paula Zahn (cello) and the NBC chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd (French horn) attended college on music scholarships; NBC's Andrea Mitchell trained to become a professional violinist. Both Microsoft's Mr. Allen and the venture capitalist Roger McNamee have rock bands. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, played saxophone in high school. Steven Spielberg is a clarinetist and son of a pianist. The former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn has played cello at Carnegie Hall.
"It's not a coincidence," says Mr. Greenspan, who gave up jazz clarinet but still dabbles at the baby grand in his living room. "I can tell you as a statistician, the probability that that is mere chance is extremely small." The cautious former Fed chief adds, "That's all that you can judge about the facts. The crucial question is: why does that connection exist?" Paul Allen offers an answer. He says music "reinforces your confidence in the ability to create." Mr. Allen began playing the violin at age 7 and switched to the guitar as a teenager. Even in the early days of Microsoft, he would pick up his guitar at the end of marathon days of programming. The music was the emotional analog to his day job, with each channeling a different type of creative impulse. In both, he says, "something is pushing you to look beyond what currently exists and express yourself in a new way."
Mr. Todd says there is a connection between years of practice and competition and what he calls the "drive for perfection." The veteran advertising executive Steve Hayden credits his background as a cellist for his most famous work, the Apple "1984" commercial depicting rebellion against a dictator. "I was thinking of Stravinsky when I came up with that idea," he says. He adds that his cello performance background helps him work collaboratively: "Ensemble playing trains you, quite literally, to play well with others, to know when to solo and when to follow."
For many of the high achievers I spoke with, music functions as a "hidden language," as Mr. Wolfensohn calls it, one that enhances the ability to connect disparate or even contradictory ideas. When he ran the World Bank, Mr. Wolfensohn traveled to more than 100 countries, often taking in local performances (and occasionally joining in on a borrowed cello), which helped him understand "the culture of people, as distinct from their balance sheet."
It's in that context that the much-discussed connection between math and music resonates most. Both are at heart modes of expression. Bruce Kovner, the founder of the hedge fund Caxton Associates and chairman of the board of Juilliard, says he sees similarities between his piano playing and investing strategy; as he says, both "relate to pattern recognition, and some people extend these paradigms across different senses."
Mr. Kovner and the concert pianist Robert Taub both describe a sort of synesthesia -- they perceive patterns in a three-dimensional way. Mr. Taub, who gained fame for his Beethoven recordings and has since founded a music software company, MuseAmi, says that when he performs, he can "visualize all of the notes and their interrelationships," a skill that translates intellectually into making "multiple connections in multiple spheres."
For others I spoke to, their passion for music is more notable than their talent. Woody Allen told me bluntly, "I'm not an accomplished musician. I get total traction from the fact that I'm in movies."
Mr. Allen sees music as a diversion, unconnected to his day job. He likens himself to "a weekend tennis player who comes in once a week to play. I don't have a particularly good ear at all or a particularly good sense of timing. In comedy, I've got a good instinct for rhythm. In music, I don't, really."
Still, he practices the clarinet at least half an hour every day, because wind players will lose their embouchure (mouth position) if they don't: "If you want to play at all you have to practice. I have to practice every single day to be as bad as I am." He performs regularly, even touring internationally with his New Orleans jazz band. "I never thought I would be playing in concert halls of the world to 5,000, 6,000 people," he says. "I will say, quite unexpectedly, it enriched my life tremendously."
Music provides balance, explains Mr. Wolfensohn, who began cello lessons as an adult. "You aren't trying to win any races or be the leader of this or the leader of that. You're enjoying it because of the satisfaction and joy you get out of music, which is totally unrelated to your professional status."
For Roger McNamee, whose Elevation Partners is perhaps best known for its early investment in Facebook, "music and technology have converged," he says. He became expert on Facebook by using it to promote his band, Moonalice, and now is focusing on video by live-streaming its concerts. He says musicians and top professionals share "the almost desperate need to dive deep." This capacity to obsess seems to unite top performers in music and other fields.
Ms. Zahn remembers spending up to four hours a day "holed up in cramped practice rooms trying to master a phrase" on her cello. Mr. Todd, now 41, recounted in detail the solo audition at age 17 when he got the second-highest mark rather than the highest mark -- though he still was principal horn in Florida's All-State Orchestra.
"I've always believed the reason I've gotten ahead is by outworking other people," he says. It's a skill learned by "playing that solo one more time, working on that one little section one more time," and it translates into "working on something over and over again, or double-checking or triple-checking." He adds, "There's nothing like music to teach you that eventually if you work hard enough, it does get better. You see the results."
That's an observation worth remembering at a time when music as a serious pursuit -- and music education -- is in decline in this country.
Consider the qualities these high achievers say music has sharpened: collaboration, creativity, discipline and the capacity to reconcile conflicting ideas. All are qualities notably absent from public life. Music may not make you a genius, or rich, or even a better person. But it helps train you to think differently, to process different points of view -- and most important, to take pleasure in listening.
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MMSD financial results for 2012-13 were favorable in comparison to budget expectations. The General Fund Balance, which was budgeted to decrease by ($5.5) million to support several one-time expenditures, actually decreased by just ($1.6) million. This puts the District's balance sheet in a stronger opening position for 2013-14. The primary reason for the favorable result was an unbudgeted revenue influx of $3.2 million from Medicaid reimbursements.Much more on open enrollment here.However, the Food Service Fund struggled in 2012-13, recording a net loss of $386,000 on total revenues of $10.5 million. Labor cost overages were the primary cause of the net loss. The Business Office is working closely with the Food Service department on budgetary expectations for 2013-14. Overall participation in the program decreased slightly last year.
....
Open enrollment results show 370 students enrolling in to MMSD from elsewhere and 1,206 MMSD residents enrolling outside of the district. The net out is -836. (Enrollment background data & District statistics)
(Last year, MMSD had 379 students enrolling in and 1,118 enrolling out, for a net out of -739.)
Suburban Districts vs. Madison, 1995-2012.
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Christine Campbell & Betheny Gross, via a kind Deb Britt email:
When people lament that innovation is not possible in "regular" districts--ones that are overseen by elected school boards and working with active teachers unions--we at CRPE often point to Denver Public Schools. We're not alone in noticing Denver--cities around the country have heard about its energy, new ideas, and solid implementation. Last year alone, more than a dozen city teams visited Denver to try to bring some of its ideas back to their own communities.But this enthusiasm is not universal. In a recent Denver Post article about the challenges facing Superintendent Tom Boasberg in the upcoming school board race, one interviewee remarked that his "national notoriety is pinned more to the change that DPS has been willing to initiate and less on the results that it has produced."
Actually, Denver has produced results. During Boasberg's tenure, graduation rates rose and dropout rates fell. According to a 2012 study by a local foundation, over four years, 68 percent of new charter schools and 61 percent of new innovation schools exceeded the district median in student growth. Independent researchers found that the district's teacher compensation reform was associated with improved student achievement. And the district's new enrollment system, which allows families to apply for any of the city's public schools with a single application, matched 83 percent of students to one of their top three choices and, as hoped, showed that families across the city demand high-performing schools.
Concerns remain, of course--but the city is working to address them. When the foundation report revealed that only 32 percent of the city's turnaround schools performed above the district average, the district sought to open new schools rather than rely on turnarounds. Researchers found that the high-quality schools that families prefer aren't evenly distributed across the city; local civic leaders are keeping a close eye on the progress of the district's landmark effort to improve schools in the historically underserved Far Northeast section of the city.
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Here's a TV schedule from 1963. If you wanted to watch Hootenanny you needed to be in front of the television on Saturday night between 7:30 and 8:30 pm. Have something else to do that night? Too bad. No pause or rewind either.
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"Our mission is a world-class education for anyone anywhere, and when people think of world class, they think of places like Phillips Academy..."One night last August, Bill Scott sent a new batch of math problems to Khan Academy from his home computer in Andover. By then, the chair of Phillips Academy's math department was beginning to get the hang of things, turning out 30 problems for the website in a matter of hours rather than days. He turned off his computer and headed to bed, with the latest problem set--graphs, functions and their derivatives--still on his mind.
In the morning, Scott logged on to the Khan Academy website--and could see that Sal Khan himself had uploaded the problem set to the live site at 9:20 a.m. (that's 6:20 a.m. for Khan in Silicon Valley). Scott checked back three hours later to find that Khan already had created four new videos to accompany Scott's lesson. "That guy is incredible," Scott marveled. "He's got a lean and mean operation." So, too, does PA's math department, whose members have been mining, finding and organizing their favorite BC calculus problems to help beef up Khan Academy's highest-level math offerings as part of an unprecedented partnership with the online learning site. "This is the first time we've partnered with a high school to substantively drive a lot of our core content," said Khan.
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Some critics of my book "Reign of Error" say that "reformers" are not privatizers. Who, me, they say, in all innocence?I invite them to read this post by veteran reporter Bobby Tanzilo in Milwaukee. Here is a city with a thriving voucher program, a thriving charter sector, and a shrinking public school system (that contains disproportionate numbers of students with disabilities and English learners who are unwanted by the other two sectors).
All of this competition among the three sectors was to produce dramatic improvement, but it didn't. Milwaukee has had school choice for 23 years. Today, it is one of the lowest performing urban districts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
But the business leaders of Milwaukee, Tanzilo writes, want more choice. They want more privatization. They want the entire city school district turned into a "Recovery School District," to emulate those in New Orleans and Memphis.
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What explains the high, and rising, cost of college in the U.S.?KARL ULRICH: Higher education does not have to be costly. Utah Valley University, a fast-growing school with an enrollment of more than 30,000, educates students for about $8,000 per year. That's one third less than the average cost of educating a high-school student in the U.S.
Most of the noise about the cost of higher education surrounds the flagship state universities and the elite private institutions. Those schools are very costly. For instance, Haverford College, where my son is a student, spends $68,000 per year for each of its students. (Note that the average student pays less than $30,000 at Haverford because of financial aid.)
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For the past nine years, I've been an instructor, a Ph.D. student, adjunct professor, and post-doctoral fellow in humanities departments at several different universities. During this time, many students have asked me to write recommendations for Teach for America. My students generally have little to no experience or training as teachers, but they are lured by TFA's promises that they can help close the education gap for children in low-income communities. For humanities majors, TFA is a clear path to a job that both pays a living wage and provides a stepping stone to leadership positions in a cause of national importance.I understand why my students find so much hope in TFA. I empathize with them. In fact, I'm a former Teach for America corps member myself. But unless they are education majors--and most of them aren't--I no longer write Teach for America letters of recommendation for my students. I urge my higher-ed colleagues to do the same.
There is a movement rising in every city of this country that seeks true education reform--not the kind funded by billionaires, corporations, and hedge funds, and organized around their values. This movement consists of public school parents and students, veteran teachers, and ex-TFA corps members. It also consists of a national network of college students, such as those in Students United for Public Education, who talk about the damage TFA is inflicting on communities and public schools. These groups and others also acknowledge the relationship between the corporatization of higher education and the vast impact of corporate reform on our youngest and most needy children. It is these children who are harmed by the never-ending cycle of under-trained, uncertified, first- and second-year teachers that now populates disadvantaged schools, and by the data-obsessed approach to education that is enabled by these inexperienced teachers.
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We felt like our family was totally violated by the sheriff's department and the school district," says Doug and Catherine Snodgrass of Temecula, California. Last December their 17-year-old autistic high school son was arrested after twice buying marijuana for an undercover Riverside county police officer.The undercover operation, titled "Operation Glass House," spanned a few months and included undercover officers in three area high schools: Chaparral, Temecula Valley, and Rancho Vista Continuation. The officers posed as regular high school students and would ask other students for drugs. Twenty-two students were arrested - the majority of them are reported to be special needs students like the Snodgrass' son.
Their son, who wished to remain unnamed, is noticeably handicapped and has been diagnosed with autism as well as bipolar disorder, Tourettes, and several anxiety disorders.
"Everyday is a challenge for him," says his father.
Their son's list of disabilities have many in the community wondering why he was targeted in this undercover drug operation.
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Ten years from now college might not look too different from the outside--the manicured quads, the football games, the parties--but the learning experience students receive will probably be fundamentally different from the one they get today.Textbooks. Lecture halls. September-to-spring calendars. Over the next decade, technology may sweep away some of the most basic aspects of a university education and usher in a flood of innovations and changes. Look for online classes that let students learn at their own pace, drawing on materials from schools across the country--not just a single professor and a hefty textbook.
All those changes probably won't make a university education cheaper--alas--but they will likely upend our perceptions about how we value it. Traditionally, schools have been judged by how many prospective students they turn away, not by how many competent graduates they churn out.
"Those are status rankings, driven by exclusivity and preservation of an old model," says Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University. But as new technologies seep into the classroom, it will be easier to measure what students actually learn. That will "make universities more accountable for what they produce," Dr. Crow says.
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Do you know who Diane Ravitch is? If not, you should. No other educator has been acclaimed in so many places as the woman who can lead American education into the future. Her new book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools, had a first printing of 75,000 copies and quickly made the New York Times non-fiction best seller list.Recently, the leading magazine for left-liberal intellectuals, The New York Review of Books, featured a cover story about Ravitch by Andrew Delbanco. He compares the approaches of the educator most despised by the Left, Michelle Rhee, with Ravitch. He calls Ravitch "our leading historian of primary and secondary education." Having established that, he goes on to note Ravitch's condemnation of Rhee, which he says "borders on contempt." Delbanco also dislikes Rhee. He does not agree with what he calls her "determination to remake public institutions on the model of private corporations." Rhee is pro-corporate, a woman who wants "to introduce private competition (in police, military, and postal services, for example) where government was once the only provider." In other words, Rhee stands with the enemies of the Left who want school choice for poor children, vouchers, charter schools, and competition, rather than more pay for teachers, smaller classes, and working with and through the teachers' unions.
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Jennifer Cheatham, Madison School District superintendent, said what type of devices and how much funding the plan will need has not been determined.I disagree somewhat with the Superintendent's sentiment. The iPad per se is not terribly important at this point. Rather, reading continues to be job one along with math and science."We believe that in order to be college-, career- and community-ready they need to know how to use the technology available to them," Cheatham said.
At Sandburg, the iPads are used in lesson plans daily and stay with the students through the end of elementary school. By the end of the year, about 70 percent of the instruction and learning involve an iPad, according to Coblentz. Currently, students are not allowed to take them home.
The students start using the iPads in second grade with access to seven educational apps and no access to the Internet or the camera. Week by week the students learn how to use the iPad in additional subjects.
Coblentz and Wilfrid said the limited functionality is intentional. They want the younger students to learn how to correctly use the camera and Internet, and have students realize it is a privilege to use the devices and to demonstrate they are ready for other features.
The third grader using an iPad today will be interacting with information in a very different way in tech school or college. Accomplished reading, math, science and critical thinking skills are far more important.
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It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation. If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else, or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so. If you want to succeed at whist, either be a good whist-player, or play with marked cards. You may want a book about jumping; you may want a book about whist; you may want a book about cheating at whist. But you cannot want a book about Success. Especially you cannot want a book about Success such as those which you can now find scattered by the hundred about the book-market. You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners. If these writers, for instance, said anything about success in jumping it would be something like this: "The jumper must have a clear aim before him. He must desire definitely to jump higher than the other men who are in for the same competition. He must let no feeble feelings of mercy (sneaked from the sickening Little Englanders and Pro-Boers) prevent him from trying to do his best. He must remember that a competition in jumping is distinctly competitive, and that, as Darwin has gloriously demonstrated, THE WEAKEST GO TO THE WALL." That is the kind of thing the book would say, and very useful it would be, no doubt, if read out in a low and tense voice to a young man just about to take the high jump. Or suppose that in the course of his intellectual rambles the philosopher of Success dropped upon our other case, that of playing cards, his bracing advice would run-"In playing cards it is very necessary to avoid the mistake (commonly made by maudlin humanitarians and Free Traders) of permitting your opponent to win the game. You must have grit and snap and go in to win. The days of idealism and superstition are over. We live in a time of science and hard common sense, and it has now been definitely proved that in any game where two are playing IF ONE DOES NOT WIN THE OTHER WILL." It is all very stirring, of course; but I confess that if I were playing cards I would rather have some decent little book which told me the rules of the game. Beyond the rules of the game it is all a question either of talent or dishonesty; and I will undertake to provide either one or the other-which, it is not for me to say.
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Here is a truth about children with autism: they grow up to become adults with autism. Advocates estimate that over the next decade some 500,000 such individuals will come of age in the United States.No one can say for sure what adulthood will hold for them. To start, where will everyone live and work? A 2008 Easter Seals study found that 79 percent of young adults with autism spectrum disorders continue to reside with their parents. A solid majority of them have never looked for a job.
And yet the life expectancy of people with autism is more or less average. Here is another truth, then, about children with autism: they can't stay at home forever.
This realization -- as obvious as it is worrying -- has recently stirred the beginnings of a response from researchers, architects and, not least, parents. In 2009, a pair of academics, Kim Steele and Sherry Ahrentzen, collaborated on "Advancing Full Spectrum Housing," a comprehensive design guideline for housing adults with autism. (An expanded book on the topic is scheduled to come out next year.)
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Workers in Spain and Italy are the least skilled among 24 developed countries surveyed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a deficit that is likely to impede the ability of those two countries to boost their competitiveness as part of efforts to overcome the euro-zone fiscal crisis.Related: wisconsin2.org.In a report that covered a wide range of countries, the OECD also concluded that in both the U.S. and the U.K., younger people are significantly less-skilled relative to their peers than older people, while Japan and Finland boast the most-skilled workers.
Most assessments of the quality of human capital available to national economies have focused on time spent in education. The OECD's study is the most extensive effort to date to measure the skills acquired during education.
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There has been a steady and growing call for more students to learn computer programming. In an app-centric world, many see the immediate possible benefits of a more highly skilled workforce that can create the computer-based tools we all depend on. And tech companies love the idea. Adobe's Worldwide Education Programs Lead Tacy Trowbridge said coding is "an important and increasingly relevant form of creative expression" that has been instrumental in the growth of their business model to the cloud.As they try to answer that call, some educators are looking beyond stand-alone lessons or separate programming classes and integrating coding into their core curriculum.
Beaver Country Day School (BCDS), a private school for students in grades 6-12 located just outside Boston, launched a school-wide coding initiative this academic year to help prepare their students for a new world of work and to, they hope, encourage more students to study computer science in college.
However, rather than just offering required stand-alone computer science courses, said Math Teacher and Department Head Rob MacDonald, they are integrating it into the core curriculum.
"I've actually been teaching a very successful coding elective for several years now," he said, "but I was thrilled when I got the okay to integrate coding into our core math courses."
MacDonald said he had been interested to hear about "interesting work around coding that was being done in schools, makerspaces, and extra-curricular programs, but very few places seemed willing to take the leap and make coding universal."
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Gretchen Reynolds via a kind John Dickert email::
Tire your brain and your body may follow, a remarkable new study of mental fatigue finds. Strenuous mental exertion may lessen endurance and lead to shortened workouts, even if, in strict physiological terms, your body still has plenty of energy reserves.
Scientists have long been intrigued by the idea that physical exertion affects our ability to think, with most studies finding that short bouts of exercise typically improve cognition. Prolonged and exhausting physical exercise, on the other hand, may leave practitioners too worn out to think clearly, at least for a short period of time.But the inverse possibility -- that too much thinking might impair physical performance -- has received far less attention. So scientists from the University of Kent in England and the French Institute of Health and Medical Research, known as INSERM, joined forces to investigate the matter. For a study published online in May in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, they decided to tire volunteers' brains with a mentally demanding computer word game and see how well their bodies would perform afterward.
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After years of hefty tuition increases, a few colleges are cutting prices and trying to wean families from discounts.More than a half-dozen schools have slashed their sticker prices starting this fall or next as part of simplifying the college-financing process, which has become a patchwork of aid deals and discounts for families. Administrators say the price cuts could actually make schools money by attracting more new students and helping retain cost-conscious ones.
Published tuition rates have soared in the last decade, but only a small percentage of families actually pays full freight. Between grants to needy students and merit scholarships to entice other desirable candidates, schools these days are giving back nearly 50% of gross tuition revenue in the form of aid and awards, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
Such discounting has become so widespread that many small, private colleges say they are stuck in a vicious cycle: They won't meet enrollment goals if they charge full price, even to affluent families, but they can't afford to continue cutting everyone a deal.
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South Korea is perhaps the most over-educated country in the world.More people are enrolled in its universities and colleges than are in the target age group for tertiary education. This is probably due to older people and foreigners.
Although the proportion of students who are foreign is low - just 1.6 per cent in 2011 according to the OECD - their numbers are increasing fast. In the past decade they've grown more than a thousandfold. In particular Korea attracts a lot of Chinese students.
Although it's the most extreme example, it's not the only country to see people pour into higher education over the past decade. Plenty of other developed nations are seeing education levels soar. A recent paper found that half of American and European workers' education level is mismatched with their current job - the majority of whom are over-educated, and under-employed.
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Scott Rohlfing left Verona's football game at Madison La Follette feeling like his brain was going to bulge out of his eye sockets.Related: League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis.The senior offensive lineman and team captain doesn't remember much about the Sept. 12 game, but knows he took a pretty good hit to the helmet in the second quarter. He continued to play, but well into the second half, the pain was too much.
"I just could not stand it," Rohlfing said. "The lights were getting extremely bothering. At some point probably midway through the fourth quarter, I ended up just pulling the plug on it and talked to the trainer.
"I sat on the sideline with cotton balls in my ears and basically with my eyes closed and my head down, watching as much as I could just because the sound and lights were pretty intense."
Rohlfing was diagnosed with a concussion. His doctor ordered him to avoid electronics and school work. And state law forbid him from practicing or playing until he received written clearance from a health care provider.
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For the first time, the Survey of Adult Skills allows us to directly measure the skills people currently have, not just the qualifications they once obtained. The results show that what people know and what they do with what they know has a major impact on their life chances. On average across countries, the median wage of workers who score at Level 4 or 5 in the literacy test - meaning that they can make complex inferences and evaluate subtle arguments in written texts - is more than 60% higher than the hourly wage of workers who score at or below Level 1 - those who can, at best, read relatively short texts and understand basic vocabulary. Those with poor literacy skills are also more than twice as likely to be unemployed. In short, poor skills severely limit people's access to better-paying and more-rewarding jobs.It works the same way for nations: The distribution of skills has significant implications for how the benefits of economic growth are shared within societies. Put simply, where large shares of adults have poor skills, it becomes difficult to introduce productivity-enhancing technologies and new ways of working. And that can stall improvements in living standards.
Proficiency in basic skills affects more than earnings and employment. In all countries, adults with lower literacy proficiency are far more likely than those with better literacy skills to report poor health, to perceive themselves as objects rather than actors in political processes, and to have less trust in others. In other words, we can't develop fair and inclusive policies and engage with all citizens if a lack of proficiency in basic skills prevents people from fully participating in society.
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Over the past four decades, the obesity rate among children and adolescents ages 6 to 19 has more than tripled.This has increased the risk of young people developing health problems such as cardiovascular disease, depression, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, breathing problems, sleep disorders, and high cholesterol. More than 31 million U.S. children participate in the National School Lunch Program each school day, and many students consume up to half of their daily calories at school. As a result, schools have the potential to help reverse the national childhood obesity epidemic.In January 2011, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, proposed updated nutrition standards for school meals to align them with the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and current information on children's nutrient requirements. USDA's standards call for schools to offer more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and to serve only fat-free and low-fat milk. In addition, the standards place limits on calorie and sodium levels, and eliminate foods with trans fatty acids, or trans fats. Schools were required to implement the new standards for lunches in school year, or SY, 2012-13 and for breakfasts in SY 2013-14.
As school food authorities,* or SFAs, work to implement the new meal standards, they may face challenges,including limitations in existing kitchen equipment and infrastructure, and in the training and skills of food service staff. In January 2012, the Kids' Safe and Healthful Foods Project--a joint initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation--began conducting the first national study to assess the needs of SFAs. The Kitchen Infrastructure and Training for Schools study examined challenges SFAs encountered in implementing the new meal requirements under the National School Lunch Program, and collected data on their reported needs for new equipment, infrastructure changes, and staff training.
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Pernille Ripp needed a change.The West Middleton Elementary School teacher was unhappy with her teaching methods, felt she wasn't doing her students justice and had no idea how she was going to fix it.
Then, one summer night in 2010, Ripp and her husband, Brandon, were driving down a road in Lodi listening to author Neil Gaiman speak about his One Book, One Twitter project in which people read the same book and discuss it on Twitter using the same hashtag.
"I looked at my husband and said that would be so cool to do with kids," Ripp said. "And he was like, 'Yeah, you should do that.'"
And so she created the Global Read Aloud Program that now has 132,000 students globally and revitalized her love for teaching.
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On Sunday the teachers' union from Oaxaca, one of Mexico's poorest states, decided that all 70,000 of the state's teachers should go back to class -- some seven weeks after the rest of the country resumed school.The strikers headed home after spending five months protesting in Mexico City, trying and failing to stop sweeping education reforms, including new evaluation rules for hiring, promoting and dismissing teachers.
For a time they camped out in front of the National Palace in the Zócalo, the capital's -- and the country's -- main public square. After they were dislodged by the police on Sept. 13, they resettled on Revolution Square, a couple of blocks away.
Throughout the summer they demonstrated in Mexico City's main avenues. They blocked access to the airport and to Congress. They marched to the president's official residence.
At first they were asking Congress not to pass the proposed laws. When Congress passed the laws, they asked it to repeal them. When Congress didn't repeal the laws, they decided to go back to work.
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When Gov. Rick Snyder was a student at Lakeview High School in Battle Creek, he started taking college courses at Kellogg Community College.Related: Credit for non-Madison School District Courses.He had 23 credits by the time he was a senior. But the credits didn't count toward his high school graduation, he said after speaking Oct. 4 at an event at Saginaw Valley State University promoting science, math, engineering and technology instruction as key to preparing public-school students for the careers of the future.
Now, Snyder is a proponent of dual-enrollment for high school students as a means to save money on their college educations. He would like the college credits to also count toward a high-school diploma.
"It's a great opportunity. Students could complete a year of college before they graduate high school," he said.
That would save them 25 percent on a degree at a four-year university or 50 percent toward an associate's degree at a community college, Snyder said.
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A lot of the currently hot controversy over the Common Core State Standards for kindergarten through 12th grade has to do with the role of standardized testing. Being a contrary kind of person, that leads me to offer this highly unstandardized test, including a few comments on some of the questions:One: Do you have any idea what we're talking about?
This really interests me. Just about every school in Wisconsin is deep into some pretty important changes in the goals for what kids should learn and how they should be taught when it comes to reading, language arts and math. This is part of a nationwide effort called the Common Core State Standards, launched several years ago by the National Governors Association and the organization of education chiefs of each state, with backing from major business leaders. Forty-five states are taking part. But opposition to the standards has been rising. An eight-hour public hearing Thursday before a legislative committee in Madison was called largely so foes of the standards could air their views. Three more hearings around the state (none in the Milwaukee area) are scheduled this month.
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Professor Susan Gibbs Goetz, left, videotapes St. Catherine University student and aspiring teacher Jasmine Zeppa, right, during a science lesson at Crossroads Elementary in St. Paul, Minn. A growing number of states are judging aspiring teachers based on their performance in the classroom. (AP)Most candidates for a teaching license in the United States have to pass written exams testing their knowledge of teaching theory and specific subject areas, such as English or biology.
Now, a growing number of states and teacher preparation programs are focusing more on how an aspiring teacher performs in the classroom. The goal is to ensure that teachers are able to translate book learning into effective instruction.
"This is what a beginning practitioner must know and be able to do," said Sharon Robinson, head of theAmerican Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. "This is somebody who can be entrusted with the responsibilities of beginning practice."
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An estimated 20 million Americans live in mobile homes, according to new Census figures. How did this become the cheap housing of choice for so many people?"From the state where 20% of our homes are mobile 'cause that's how we roll, I'm Brooke Mosteller, Miss South Carolina."
Not the usual jaunty PR message you expect to hear at Miss America. And Mosteller caused a minor storm for presenting what some South Carolina natives felt was a negative slight on the state.A few days after her comments, US Census figures confirmed that her state did indeed have the highest proportion of mobile homes - also known as trailers or manufactured housing - though the figure is closer to 18% than 20%.
Mobile homes have a huge image problem in the US, where in many minds they are shorthand for poverty. But how accurate is this perception?
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Chinese companies are increasingly designing sophisticated components for Apple's iPhones and iPads instead of just supplying low-cost labour for assembling the high-tech devices.The shift is an indication of how Chinese companies' rising technological capabilities are threatening the Taiwanese, Japanese and South Korean companies that now dominate the global electronics supply chain.
The number of Chinese companies supplying Apple with components such as batteries has more than doubled from eight in 2011 to 16 this year, according to Apple's published lists of suppliers and research from the brokerage CLSA.
"There are very, very serious companies emerging in China" that are beginning to see the pay-off of many years of rapid growth in their spending on research, said Nicolas Baratte, regional head of technology research for CLSA.
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At the request of strict Asian parents, the days of college as an opportunity to work hard and play hard are fast being replaced by a new regime of alcohol-free dorms and gender-segregated floors. The University of New South Wales in Sydney offers nightly bed checks for younger students to ensure they are in their rooms by 10 p.m.--and alone."My mom's happy about the fact that our apartments are under 24/7 campus security coverage," said Mike Lin, a 22-year-old commerce student from Fuzhou, in southern China, who is studying at the university. "I do think domestic students tend to party a bit much at university-they seem to enjoy the university life better than us."
Alarmed by a sharp decline in foreign students, Australian universities are upending the traditional college model to meet the standards of strict Asian parents. Residential dorms now offer prayer rooms and private en-suites. Newly built studio apartments gleam with hotel-style bathrooms and kitchenettes, the latest in IT technology and soundproof rooms for study groups, as well as 24-hour security and a telephone hotline for parents.
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Darling's proposed amendment to Senate Bill 76 would allow the University of Wisconsin System two- and four-year campuses, as well as technical colleges and regional state entities known as Cooperative Educational Services Agencies, to approve charter schools to operate independent of school districts. It would also allow independent charter schools performing 10% higher in achievement than their local districts for two years in a row to automatically add new campuses. And it would allow charter schools that do not employ district staff to opt out of the state's new educator evaluation system.The legislation has the support of the chairman of the Senate Education Committee, Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), as well as business groups and charter school advocates, who believe independent charter schools should have more opportunities to expand and replicate.
The state Department of Public Instruction, the associations that represent school boards and superintendents in Wisconsin, and the state's largest teachers union are all against the proposal.
"This bill takes money out of the budgets of schools in western Wisconsin," Sen. Kathleen Vinehout (D-Alma) said.
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Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:
Today, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty - along with Education Action Group - have launched a website that will make it easier for teachers in Wisconsin to exercise their rights. A new website, TeacherFreedom.org, helps teachers opt out of their public unions.After filling out a short questionnaire on the website, an opt- out letter is automatically created. The teacher then must mail the signed letter to his or her union officer. "TeacherFreedom.org serves as a tool to enable teachers to leave their union if they so choose," explains Rick Esenberg, WILL President and General Counsel.
"Under Act 10, teachers can resign from their labor union and choose to stop paying union dues, saving money in the process. For the first time, teachers are free agents and not bound to the rigid union employment rules," he continued.
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BEIJING -- For years, Yang Jie's friends warned her to save up for her daughter's education. Not for tuition or textbooks, but for the bribes needed to get into this city's better public schools.A strong-willed, self-made businesswoman, Yang largely ignored their advice. "Success in life," she told her daughter, "is achieved through hard work."
But now, with her daughter entering the anxiety-filled application process for middle school, Yang is questioning that principle. She has watched her friends shower teachers and school administrators with favors, presents and money. One friend bought a new elevator for a top school. His child was admitted soon after.
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Kelly Ruppel grew up on a dairy farm outside Racine, headed to the west coast for college and worked in Washington D.C. before moving back to the Midwest and becoming a private consultant to the embattled Chicago Public Schools system.Fascinating. Are these new positions, or are the entrants replacing others? 10/2013 Madison School District organization chart (PDF).When she received a job offer from new Madison Schools Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, whom she met when Cheatham was a top administrator at Chicago Public Schools, she and her husband packed their bags.
Today Ruppel is Cheatham's chief of staff, one of five top administrators hired by Cheatham with ties to Chicago since taking the reins of the Madison School District in April.
In addition to Ruppel, a former principal at Civic Consulting Alliance, they include:
Alex Fralin, assistant superintendent for secondary schools and former Deputy Chief of Schools for CPS
Rodney Thomas, special assistant to the superintendent and former director of Professional Development and Design for the Chicago Board of Education
Nancy Hanks, deputy assistant superintendent for Elementary Schools and a former Chicago public elementary school principal
Jessica Hankey, director of strategic partnerships and innovation, formerly manager of school partnerships at The Field Museum in Chicago.
Related: "The thing about Madison that's kind of exciting is there's plenty of work to do and plenty of resources with which to do it," Mitchell said. "It's kind of a sweet spot for Jen. Whether she stays will depend on how committed the district is to continuing the work she does."
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Under the new contracts clerical and technical employees will be able to work 40-hour work weeks compared to the current 38.75, and based on the recommendation of principals, employees who serve on school-based leadership teams will be paid $20 per hour.Pat Schneider:Additionally, six joint committees will be created to give employees a say in workplace issues and address topics such as planning time, professional collaboration and the design of parent-teacher conferences.
Kerry Motoviloff, a district instructional resource teacher and MTI member, spoke at the beginning of the meeting thanking School Board members for their collective bargaining and work in creating the committees that are "getting the right people at the right table to do the right work."
Cheatham described the negotiations with the union as "both respectful and enormously productive," adding that based on conversations with district employees the contract negotiations "accomplished the goal they set out to accomplish."
"Madison is in the minority. Very few teachers are still under contract," said Christina Brey, spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Education Association Council. Fewer than 10 of 424 school districts in the state have labor contracts with teachers for the current school year, she said Wednesday.Andrea Anderson:And while Brey said WEAC's significance is not undermined by the slashed number of teacher contracts, at least one state legislator believes the state teacher's union is much less effective as a resource than it once was.
Many school districts in the state extended teacher contracts through the 2011-2012 school year after Act 10, Gov. Scott Walker's law gutting collective bargaining powers of most public employees, was implemented in 2011. The Madison Metropolitan School District extended its teacher contract for two years -- through the 2013-2014 school year -- after Dane County Judge Juan Colas struck down key provisions of Act 10 in September 2012.
The contract ratified by the members Monday will be in effect until June 30, 2015.
On Thursday, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty emailed a letter to Cheatham and the School Board warning that a contract extension could be in violation of Act 10.Pat Schneider:Richard Esenberg, WILL president, said he sent the letter because "we think there are people who believe, in Wisconsin, that there is somehow a window of opportunity to pass collective bargaining agreements in violation of Act 10, and we don't think that."
If the Supreme Court rules Act 10 is constitutional all contracts signed will be in violation of the law, according to Esenberg.
Esenberg said he has not read the contract and does not know if the district and union contracts have violated collective bargaining agreements. But, he said, "I suspect this agreement does."
The contract does not "take back" any benefits, Matthews says. However, it calls for a comprehensive analysis of benefits that could include a provision to require employees to pay some or more toward health insurance premiums if they do not get health care check-ups or participate in a wellness program.Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:Ed Hughes, president of the Madison School Board, said that entering into labor contracts while the legal issues surrounding Act 10 play out in the courts was "the responsible thing to do. It provides some stability to do the important work we need to do in terms of getting better results for our students."
Hughes pointed out that the contract establishes a half-dozen joint committees of union and school district representatives that will take up issues including teacher evaluations, planning time and assignments. The contract calls for mediation on several of the issues if the joint committees cannot reach agreement.
"Hopefully this will be a precursor of the way we will work together in years to come, whatever the legal framework is," Hughes said.
Matthews, too, was positive about the potential of the joint committees.
WILL President and General Counsel Rick Esenberg warns, "The Madison School Board is entering a legally-gray area. Judge Colas' decision has no effect on anyone outside of the parties involved. The Madison School Board and Superintendent Cheatham - in addition to the many teachers in the district - were not parties to the lawsuit. As we have continued to say, circuit court cases have no precedential value, and Judge Colas never ordered anyone to do anything."The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty's letter to Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (PDF).He continued, "If the Madison School District were to collectively bargain in a way that violates Act 10, it could be exposed to litigation by taxpayers or teachers who do not wish to be bound to an illegal contract or to be forced to contribute to an organization that they do not support." The risk is not theoretical. Last spring, WILL filed a lawsuit against the Milwaukee Area Technical College alleging such a violation.
The essential question, how does Madison's non-diverse K-12 governance model perform academically? Presumably, student achievement is job one for our $15k/student district.
Worth a re-read: Then Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman's 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:
"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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Rising levels of student debt have raised alarm bells in the minds of economists and recent college graduates alike. With a bachelor's degree virtually indispensable in today's workplace -- and a master's necessary in many fields, as well -- many people, be they fresh out of high school or not, have found themselves needing to a seek a higher education in order to pay the bills.The problem is that these days, college is far from cheap. Tuition for a four-year college can cost easily more than $10,000 per year, ranging all the way up to $50,000 or even more for top-of-the-line institutions. With many inbound college students finding themselves strapped for cash, their only option -- aside from obtaining federal aid -- is to seek loans to cover the difference between the costs of college and living and any income they might obtain in the meantime. This can amount to a crippling debt load by the time students graduate.
However, student debt rates are not the same across the nation: In fact, there is a surprising amount of variance, according to numbers collected by College In Sight. The average graduate of a four-year institution (or higher) with student debt has less than $20,000 of debt in Utah or Arizona. Let's take a look at eight states at the other end of the spectrum, those with the highest amounts of student debt in the country.
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Ever since the administration filed suit to freeze Louisiana's school voucher program, high-ranking Republicans have pummeled President Barack Obama for trapping poor kids in failing public schools.Notes and links on Simon's Politico article here. Fascinating.The entire House leadership sent a letter of protest. Majority Leader Eric Cantor blistered the president for denying poor kids "a way into a brighter future." And Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal accused him of "ripping low-income minority students out of good schools" that could "help them achieve their dreams."
But behind the outrage is an inconvenient truth: Taxpayers across the U.S. will soon be spending $1 billion a year to help families pay private school tuition -- and there's little evidence that the investment yields academic gains.
In Milwaukee, just 13 percent of voucher students scored proficient in math and 11 percent made the bar in reading this spring. That's worse on both counts than students in the city's public schools. In Cleveland, voucher students in most grades performed worse than their peers in public schools in math, though they did better in reading.
In New Orleans, voucher students who struggle academically haven't advanced to grade-level work any faster over the past two years than students in public schools, many of which are rated D or F, state data show.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email:
n a very strong turnout - the most in many years - members of MTI's five (5) bargaining units met last Wednesday and ratified Collective Bargaining Agreements covering the 2014-15 school year. While MTI President Peg Coyne chaired the meeting, the Presidents of each MTI bargaining unit made comments from the podium and conducted the vote by their respective bargaining units. They are: Erin Proctor (EA-MTI), Kristopher Schiltz (SEE-MTI), David Mandehr (USO-MTI) and Jeff Kriese (SSA-MTI).For the current school year, MTI is fortunate to be one of four unions of school district employees which is able to continue to assure members of the rights, wages and benefits which they have available through MTI's Collective Bargaining Agreements. Prior to Governor Walker's Act 10, which he verbalized as designed to destroy negotiated contracts for public employees, all 423 school districts had Contracts with their employees' unions. Those guarantees in MTI members' employment are now assured through June, 2015.
MTI's legal challenge of Act 10 continues to provide the right of all public employee unions (except State employees) to bargain. That right is because Judge Juan Colas found that Act 10, in large part, violated the Constitutional rights of employees and their unions. Unfortunately, most Wisconsin school boards refuse to honor Colas' ruling. While the Governor has appealed Colas' decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has yet to schedule oral arguments in the case. In a related case, the Commissioners of the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission are charged with contempt of court for not abiding by Colas' Order.
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Joanne Barkan, via a kind email:
Big philanthropy was born in the United States in the early twentieth century. The Russell Sage Foundation received its charter in 1907, the Carnegie Corporation in 1911, and the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913. These were strange new creatures--quite unlike traditional charities. They had vastly greater assets and were structured legally and financially to last forever. In addition, each was governed by a self-perpetuating board of private trustees; they were affiliated with no religious denomination; and they adopted grand, open-ended missions along the lines of "improve the human condition." They were launched, in essence, as immense tax-exempt private corporations dealing in good works. But they would do good according to their own lights, and they would intervene in public life with no accountability to the public required.From the start, the mega-foundations provoked hostility across the political spectrum. To their many detractors, they looked like centers of plutocratic power that threatened democratic governance. Setting up do-good corporations, critics said, was merely a ploy to secure the wealth and clean up the reputations of business moguls who amassed fortunes during the Gilded Age. Consider the reaction to John D. Rockefeller's initial request for a charter from the U.S. Senate (he eventually received one from New York State):
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Jennifer Cheatham doesn't have the countenance of someone who has stepped into a maelstrom. Madison schools superintendent since April, Cheatham, 41, has already visited every school in the district and rolled out a "Strategic Framework" to tackle some of the district's thorniest issues, including the achievement gap. So far she's generated considerable excitement around her plans and raised hopes, even among skeptics.Kaleem Caire has even put off plans to file a federal civil rights complaint against the district for the school board's rejection of a charter school geared toward low-income minority students. The CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, which spearheaded the proposal, says he's now content to play a "facilitative, supportive role" and get behind Cheatham's plan to "bring order and structure" to the district.
"Personally, I've been hanging back, letting her get her space," says Caire. "The superintendent should be the leader of education. All of us should be supporting and holding that person accountable.
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I've lived here since the mid-1980s and self-awareness is a very rare quality among the tech companies and techno-elite. They don't see much and they fantasize about doing great things on a grand scale but achieve nothing locally. Hypocrisy runs rampant.For example, Twitter execs a couple of years ago were making public comments about how they were changing the world and how Twitter was empowering individuals and communities and how the Arab Spring was a great example. Yet at the same time they were willing to hold San Francisco hostage, threatening to move hundreds of jobs unless they received special tax relief on payroll taxes and on profits from an IPO. The city government gave in and Twitter got what it wanted and it agreed to move into the mid-Market/Tenderloin area, one of the poorest neighborhoods, that the city has been trying to gentrify for decades.
But there's not much gentrification going on, since Twitter keeps hundreds of staff inside, with free gourmet meals, plus a slew of free services, dry cleaning, even cleaning staff apartments. It is competing with local businesses rather than helping support them -- it's the opposite of gentrification.
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Train drivers employed by Rio Tinto Group to haul iron ore across Australia's outback make about the same money as surgeons in the U.S. It's little wonder the mining company will replace them with robot locomotives.The 400-plus workers in the remote Pilbara region who earn about A$240,000 ($224,000) a year probably are the highest-paid train drivers in the world, according to U.K.-based transport historian Christian Wolmar. Australia's decade-long mining boom has sucked up skilled workers, raising wages for engineers to drivers at Rio, the second-largest exporter of the mineral, and its closest competitors, Vale SA (VALE) and BHP Billiton Ltd.
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A personal-genomics company in California has been awarded a broad U.S. patent for a technique that could be used in a fertility clinic to create babies with selected traits, as the frontiers of genetic enhancement continue to advance.The patented process from 23andMe, whose main business is collecting DNA from customers and analyzing it to provide information about health and ancestry, could be employed to match the genetic profile of a would-be parent to that of donor sperm or eggs. In theory, this could lead to the advent of "designer babies," a controversial idea where genes would be selected to boost the chances of a child having certain physical attributes, such as a particular eye or hair color.
The technique potentially could also be used to create healthier babies, by screening out donors with genes that are predisposed to disease, either on their own, or in combination with the recipient's genes.
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Wealthy families have always had the option of sending their children to all-male or all-female schools, but parents of modest means have rarely had that choice. That changed in 2001, when four female senators sponsored legislation that sanctioned single-sex classes and academies in public schools. Today, there are more than 500 public schools that offer single-sex classes and 116 public all-girl or all-boy academies. Many are in struggling urban neighborhoods and many have proven to be hugely successful.The Irma Lerma Rangel Young Women's Leadership School in Dallas opened in 2004 and enrolls 473 girls in grades six through 12. More than 70 percent of the students are from economically disadvantaged homes and more than 90 percent are minorities. Its success has been dazzling. In less than a decade, the school has won multiple academic achievement awards and, according to U.S. News & World Report, is one of the top public schools in Texas.
In 2011, Dallas opened a comparable public school for young men: the Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy. Before opening its doors, the principal, Nakia Douglas, spent a year visiting schools throughout the United States--including many boys' schools--to determine best practices for educating young men. More than half the teachers at BOMLA are male and there is massive focus on areas where many boys need extra help: organizational skills, time management, self-control, perseverance, and above all, academic achievement. Wearing ties and blazers, the students are instructed in the art of becoming young gentlemen. The principal's research taught him that boys will go to astonishing lengths to defend their team. So (inspired in part by his reading of Harry Potter), he divided the academy into four houses--Expedition, Justice, Decree, and Alliance--which compete against one another for points earned through good grades, community service, reading books, and athletics. Douglas and his colleagues have created a school where young men can't help but flourish. There is now a long waiting list for entry into this academy.
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REDS ARE RUINING CHILDREN OF RUSSIA" raged a New York Times headline in June 1919. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had seized control of Russia's provisional government two years previously, to the consternation of the US, and now stories were circulating about the changes wrought by the Soviet power, including a new education policy.The newspaper revealed the instigator of this "system of calculated moral depravity" as Anatoly Lunacharsky, first head of the Soviet People's Commissariat for Enlightenment, a department known as Narkompros (after the second world war, it became the more prosaic Ministry of Education).
According to the article, in the new "Red" Russia, religious instruction "is strictly forbidden", "lessons are supplanted by dancing and flirtations", and, lest you should think that sounded fun, the journalist warned, "It is a deliberate part of the Bolshevist plan to corrupt and deprave the children ... and to train them as future propagandists of Lenin's materialistic and criminal doctrine."
The reality is more complex, as illuminated in a book to be published next month by London's Redstone Press. Inside the Rainbow is a fascinating collection of Soviet literature for children, featuring stories, picture book illustrations and rhymes published between 1920 and 1935 - an exhilarating and dangerous time. The early days of Bolshevik rule, before Lenin's death in 1924, while often chaotic, hungry and cruel, were also marked by great optimism and idealism. A new society was to be built from scratch. How to mould and inspire human beings fit for this wonderful new world was a challenge for artists and educators alike. Avant-garde writers, artists, cinematographers and musicians, many of them commissar Lunacharsky's friends, were eager to be part of the great experiment.
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With the costs of higher education rising and almost a third of the outstanding $1.2 trillion in student debt in default, it's time for imaginative solutions. One of the more promising ideas comes from Oregon, where the state senate this summer passed a bipartisan bill to test a new system called "Pay It Forward, Pay It Back."Students attending public universities in the state would pay no tuition at all. Instead, they would commit to repaying 3% of their income for the next 20 years into a fund that would support the next generation of students.
The idea is attracting attention. Stephen Sweeney, president of the New Jersey state senate, has proposed a similar concept for his state, and U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.) says he will soon introduce a bill proposing the same "pay it forward" concept for federal student loans.
Income-based loan repayments are a promising idea, but lawmakers should proceed with caution. On the positive side, borrowers don't generally default on loans because they're irresponsible. They simply have times in their life, perhaps after losing a job, when they can't afford to pay. Income-based repayments sidestep the problem: When you earn less, you pay less. When you earn more, you pay more. And by design, these loans are always affordable.
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Madison Museum of Contemporary Arts, via a kind reader:
The series kicks off Thursday, October 10 with American Promise. Filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson turned the camera on themselves and began documenting their five-year-old son, Idris, and his best friend, Seun, as they started kindergarten at the prestigious Dalton School. Their cameras followed both families for another twelve years as the paths of the two boys diverged--one continued private school while the other pursued a different route through the public education system.American Promise is an epic and ground-breaking documentary charged with the hope that every child can reach his or her full potential and contribute to a better future for our country. It calls into question commonly held assumptions about educational access and what factors influence academic performance. Stephenson and Brewster deliver a rare, intimate, and emotional portrait of black middle-class family life, humanizing the unique journey of African-American boys as they face the real-life hurdles society poses for young men of color, inside and outside the classroom. (Description from the Sundance Film Festival)
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Similarly, when I asked Madison School Board member T.J. Mertz -- a critic of nontraditional public education models -- about the bill, he framed it as a question of "local control."Related: A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School. I am somewhat surprised that the Madison Prep rejection has not been challenged via legal venues."The big issue in this bill is the loss of local control," he said. "It allows for the authorizing of charters without any role for elected boards and mandates the approval of replicant charters, regardless of the needs of the community."
It's a funny notion, this "local control."
Used by tea partiers to object to the new "common core" standards and by liberals to object to charter and voucher schools, the principle of "local control" tends to be so dependent on circumstance as to be not much of a principle at all.
True local control would dictate that if a state university is to refrain from authorizing charter schools, it should refrain from authorizing many of their affiliated centers and institutes because they use public money but lack direct public oversight, too.
True local control would mean electing Madison School Board members by geographic districts, not by randomly assigned at-large "seats."
The state's most recent school report cards show the Milwaukee school district scoring 14 points lower than 10 of the 11 charters authorized as of last year by UW-Milwaukee (one wasn't rated). This despite very similar student poverty levels -- 82.3 percent for Milwaukee and 75.96 percent for the charters.
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The nation spends an estimated $15 billion annually on salary bumps for teachers who earn master's degrees, even though research shows the diplomas don't necessarily lead to higher student achievement.And as states and districts begin tying teachers' pay and job security to student test scores, some are altering--or scrapping--the time-honored wage boost.
Lawmakers in North Carolina, led by Republican legislators, voted in July to get rid of the automatic pay increase for master's degrees. Tennessee adopted a policy this summer that mandates districts adopt salary scales that put less emphasis on advanced degrees and more on factors such as teacher performance. And Newark, N.J., recently decided to pay teachers for master's degrees only if they are linked to the district's new math and reading standards.
The moves come a few years after Florida, Indiana and Louisiana adopted policies that require districts to put more weight on teacher performance and less on diplomas.
"Paying teachers on the basis of master's degrees is equivalent to paying them based on hair color," said Thomas J. Kane, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director for the Center for Education Policy Research.
Mr. Kane said decades of research has shown that teachers holding master's degrees are no more effective at raising student achievement than those with only bachelor's, except in math. Researchers have also shown that teachers with advanced degrees in science benefit students.
Mr. Kane and other critics suggest that schools alter pay plans to reward teachers on other accomplishments, such as advancing student achievement.
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If you want to enliven a parent-teachers evening in Washington, DC, raise the subject of Michelle Rhee, the city's former schools chancellor. Most education officials toil in obscurity. Rhee is a national celebrity. Some see her as an unflinching champion of US education reform and a bold opponent of the powerful teachers' unions. Others revile her as a mouthpiece of billionaire philanthropists and advocate of school privatisation. People tend to have strong views about Rhee.In 2008, when Rhee was in the midst of overhauling Washington's classrooms, she was pictured on the cover of Time magazine holding a new broom - "How to Fix America's Schools", it said. Anyone who failed to grasp the symbolism was disabused two years later by Waiting for "Superman", an award-winning documentary by Davis Guggenheim that depicted the rise of the US charter school movement - union-free, publicly-funded schools that select students by lottery. Many are also privately-funded. Rhee, who promoted the spread of charter schools in DC, was one of the movie's stars. In one scene she offers to fire a public school principal on camera. She goes ahead and sacks the unfortunate woman. No shrinking violet is Rhee.
I await her arrival in some trepidation. We are meeting at DC Coast, a well-heeled modern American restaurant in downtown Washington that was one of Rhee's haunts before she moved to Sacramento, where her husband, Kevin Johnson, the former basketball star, is mayor. She also has a home in Nashville where her two children live with her former husband, Kevin Huffman, who is education commissioner of Tennessee - the same role Rhee played in DC. She spends much of her life flying between the two cities.
I have taken a table upstairs away from the clamour of the main dining area. Rhee, who is 43, turns up precisely on time. Dressed in a smart blue and cream business suit, she shakes my hand briskly and sits down. I apologise for plonking my smartphone under her nose and mutter something banal about how the iPhone's audio now rivals the best tape recorders. "Samsung seems to be holding its own as well," she replies.
Rhee, who was raised in Toledo, Ohio, by first generation Korean parents, is fluent in the language and clearly proud of her heritage. As a child she was sent to Korea for a year, where she says she learnt the virtue of hard work. "They were tough with the children but it didn't affect their self-esteem," she says. "Coming from America I was used to being told everything I did was great. Korea was a shock to my system." Lately, Korean-Americans have flourished in the US almost as much as South Korea has on the world stage. I suggest that Rhee must be the most famous Korean-American around. "Oh, I don't think so," she says looking a little flustered. "There's, um, comedian Margaret Cho," she says. "Then there's that guy who heads Dartmouth College, what's his name?" Jim Yong Kim, now president of the World Bank? "Yes, that's the one."
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Ofcom, the UK's media regulator, has published a fascinating research report on UK children's use of media and digital devices (PDF here). It's long and covers a wide range of topics, from TV consumption and awareness of advertising to use of games consoles (which is falling), but there are a couple of data sets around mobile devices that I want to pull out.First, ownership and access. Over 70% of 15 year olds have a smartphone, and over half of 13 year olds (the notional cut-off for social networks).
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Write a short piece (one to a few paragraphs) on one or two significant bits from your k12 (or equivalent for those outside of the US) education. What made it good or bad? Was the focus right? How does it compare with your perception of today? How does it compare with other countries?... anything you want. Sign it anonymous if you like, but give the country where it took place and the half decade when you graduated (early 70s, late 80s, ...)
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On last Thursday at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, Vladimir Voevodsky gave perhaps the most revolutionary scientific talk I've ever heard. I doubt if it generated much buzz among the young scientists in advance, though, because it had the inscrutable title "Univalent Foundations of Mathematics," and the abstract contained sentences like this one: "Set-theoretic approach to foundations of mathematics work well until one starts to think about categories since categories cannot be properly considered as sets with structures due to the required invariance of categorical constructions with respect to equivalences rather than isomorphisms of categories."Eyes glazed over yet?
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Alastair Creelman & Linda Reneland-Forsman:
Statistics are often used to reveal significant differences between online and campus-based education. The existence of online courses with low completion rates is often used to justify the inherent inferiority of online education compared to traditional classroom teaching. Our study revealed that this type of conclusion has little substance. We have performed three closely linked analyses of empirical data from Linnaeus University aimed at reaching a better understanding of completion rates. Differences in completion rates revealed themselves to be more substantial between faculties than between distribution forms. The key-factor lies in design. Courses with the highest completion rates had three things in common; active discussion forums, complementing media and collaborative activities. We believe that the time has come to move away from theoretical models of learning where web-based learning/distance learning/e-learning are seen as simply emphasizing the separation of teacher and students. Low completion rates should instead be addressed as a lack of insight and respect for the consequences of online pedagogical practice and its prerequisites.
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WHEN Cynthia Stevenson, the superintendent of Jefferson County, Colo., public schools, heard about a data repository called inBloom, she thought it sounded like a technological fix for one of her bigger headaches. Over the years, the Jeffco school system, as it is known, which lies west of Denver, had invested in a couple of dozen student data systems, many of which were incompatible.In fact, there were so many information systems -- for things like contact information, grades and disciplinary data, test scores and curriculum planning for the district's 86,000 students -- that teachers had taken to scribbling the various passwords on sticky notes and posting them, insecurely, around classrooms and teachers' rooms.
There must be a more effective way, Dr. Stevenson felt.
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MY older son is about a month into his freshman year at college, and like most of his classmates, is adjusting to new roommates, classes and doing his own laundry.But not all his friends are engrossed in campus life. One is doing volunteer work in South America. Another is preparing to go to Israel.
They're taking gap years, a break between high school and college that traditionally begins in the fall. There are no national statistics on the number of students taking gap years, but there's no question the idea -- and the number of companies offering gap year programs -- is growing in popularity.
USA Gap Year Fairs began in 2006 with seven fairs at high schools. About 10 companies and several hundred people showed up, said Robin Pendoley, chief executive of Thinking Beyond Borders, a nonprofit group that arranges gap year programs. His company also helps organize the fairs.
In six years, that number grew to 30 fairs in 28 cities with about 40 organizations and 2,500 students attending. This January and February (when the events are typically held), 35 fairs attracted 50 organizations and about 4,000 students.
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This year's Mexico independence celebration came with an extremely high cost, and we're not talking about the fireworks budget. In preparation to "liberate" Mexico City's central plaza, the Zócalo, the government deployed 3,600 riot police, a water tank and two Black Hawk helicopters to evict a teacher's encampment. Ironically the government violently evicted the monthlong legal protest encampment to scream "El Grito de Dolores" - a scream traditionally emitted by the president to commemorate the start of the Mexican War of Independence.The teachers, who are part of the CNTE, the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers, largely hail from the southern state of Oaxaca, whose population is largely indigenous and rural with alarmingly high rates of poverty. The CNTE occupied the Zócalo to voice its opposition to the new education reform and urge the government to negotiate with them. The teachers have criticized the reform - stating that it chips away at their labor rights, fails to recognize the diverse needs of students in rural indigenous communities and tries to impose a one-size-fits-all evaluation model. And, yes, these are the same teachers who seven years ago sparked a large uprising in opposition to Oaxacan Gov. Ulises Ruiz in which a popular assembly camped out in the main plaza of Oaxaca and installed protest barricades throughout the city for more than 7 months.
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Here's a great story you may have missed: at the University of Toronto, students have created their own exchanges where they can pay students who are enrolled in a class which is full to drop out, thus opening space for themselves. In other words, a secondary market in class spaces has spontaneously emerged (as markets do).Most people's reaction to this is either shock/horror (costs to students, more inequality, yadda yada), or mild amusement. But I think it raises some interesting questions: other than administrative convenience, why do we have a single price for all classes in a faculty, anyway?
From time immemorial, until sometime in the nineteenth century, professors actually charged their own tuition with no interference from "the university". They charged whatever the market would bear, which often wasn't very much. But it kept a market discipline on the profession. Professors who couldn't help students pass their exams didn't just get bad teaching reviews - they got less money.
(Just once, when someone talks about how neo-liberalism is eroding the eternal values of the medieval concept of the university, I want them to include guaranteed professorial pay as one of the modern vices that needs to be rejected in favour of its medieval antecedents. Just once. Please.)
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Public funds for higher education are hard to find. States have slashed billions from university budgets while the federal government is struggling to keep the Pell Grant program afloat. So it came as a shock when government officials on Saturday announced plans to give $2-billion in taxpayer funds over the next five years to a single private university that mostly educates rich people and already has an endowment bigger than the gross domestic product of Bolivia.Well, actually, government officials didn't do the announcing. Harvard University did it for them, by launching a $6.5-billion capital campaign, the largest ever.
Harvard, which has an endowment of more than $30-billion, is a "nonprofit" organization, according to a close, technical reading of the law. That means donations to the campaign are tax-deductible. If we conservatively estimate a 28-percent marginal federal income-tax rate for donors (the top rate is 39.6 percent), and a similar effective rate for corporate donations, that's $1.8-billion in forgone revenue. State income-tax rates vary from zero to more than 10 percent; assuming 5 percent, on average, yields $325-million more, or $2.1-billion total.
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The Berkeley Faculty Association deplores the disruption of the university's academic mission by the occupation of Kroeber Plaza by Fox Sports TV earlier this month. The Fox Sports booths, television screens and other advertising paraphernalia were set up on a Friday, even as students and faculty were trying to attend classes and access the library and art studios. Faculty were not consulted about the event beforehand -- which was especially problematic when departments in Kroeber Hall, including the anthropology library and art practice workshops, were forced to close on Saturday due to increased traffic -- a result of poor planning and lack of adequate security. Academics were not merely interrupted but trumped by Cal Athletics and its corporate partners.This past weekend's event comes in the wake of several years of deepening faculty concern about the place of athletics at UC Berkeley. First, the construction of a $321 million, debt-financed stadium and a pattern of misinformation from Intercollegiate Athletics about revenues from tax-deductible seat sales. Then, news of the additional $124 million debt incurred to build the Simpson Student-Athlete High Performance Center, a facility available to less than 1 percent of the student body. Now, the plan to construct a new Aquatics Center, again not for the general use of the campus community, but for the exclusive use of Intercollegiate Athletics. These issues merely add to ongoing concern about the huge sums from the Chancellor's Discretionary Fund that have been used to cover yearly operating deficits of Intercollegiate Athletics -- nearly $100 million in the past decade -- and recent news that UC Berkeley still ranks last in the Pac-12 Conference in graduation success rates of students playing men's basketball ("up" from 20 percent in 2009 to the current 33 percent and next-to-last in football).
We are not anti-athletics. We understand that intercollegiate competition contributes to institutional pride and plays an important role in maintaining the loyalty of students and alumni. We believe in the educational place of an athletics program that fosters student fitness, physical well-being and camaraderie. But despite scandal after scandal under different chancellors, the proper management of IA has eluded the best efforts of campus administration. The continuing conflicts between IA and the primary mission of the university -- excellence in education, research and public service -- makes us wonder whether the time has come to separate Cal Athletics -- financially, administratively and geographically -- from UC Berkeley's academic endeavors and locales.
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Robyn Magalit Rodriguez has put together an impressive list of essays that should be read by women of color in higher education and, perhaps more importantly, anyone who wants to actively support meaningful diversity. Her list covers a range of important issues, and you can see it here, but I've pulled out essays that deal with a specific problem that can be debilitating to faculty of color--how students react to them in the classroom. As the essays here evince, and I've noted in my conversations with women of color from around the country, faculty of color are judged more harshly than their white counterparts in college and university classrooms. They consistently receive lower evaluations from students, particularly at Predominately White Institutions. In addition to being demoralizing, especially for those who become academics because they want to teach, the institutional implications of such attitudes can have material consequences. Put simply, poor teaching evaluations can damage a candidate's chances for tenure. They can become part of a narrative to prove that a candidate is not a good "fit" when the real problem might be that the candidate is simply different than those evaluating her personnel file.
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As Long Beach City College officials see it, a state plan allowing two-year schools to charge more for high-demand classes would help move students more quickly toward transfer and graduation.Students at the campus, however, argue that such a move would be unfair, and they have launched a statewide petition drive and video campaign to block the legislation.
"Long Beach City College has one of the largest populations of poor students in the state," said Andrea Donado, the student trustee in the Long Beach Community College District. "This bill will create two classes of students, those who can pay and finish and those who can't. It's not the mission of a community college to be like a private college."
Legislation that has passed both the state Senate and Assembly would create a pilot project allowing colleges to charge all students non-resident tuition -- as much as $200 per unit -- for high-demand classes during summer and winter terms. Those classes include transfer-level English, algebra and history, which typically have long waiting lists.
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There's a contradiction in Dane County that is becoming hard to ignore. While the community is known for its high standard of living, educated workforce and progressive values, multiple studies have found African Americans here have one of the highest arrest and incarceration rates in the country, do poorly in school relative to whites, and live far more often in poverty.Trying to get to the bottom of these seemingly incompatible truths inspired a report by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families that measures the "extent and pattern" of racial disparities in Dane County.
"The desire to understand the seeming paradox between reputation and reality was an important motive behind the creation of the Race to Equity Project," the authors wrote in their introduction. "Could a place as prosperous, resourceful and progressive as Dane County also be home to some of the most profound, pervasive and persistent racial disparities in the country?"
Project director Erica Nelson acknowledges that Race to Equity: A Baseline Report on the State of Racial Disparities in Dane County, to be released formally Wednesday at the annual YWCA Racial Justice Summit, did not produce the answer to the "paradox."
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For more than a decade, a lifelike statue of a security guard nicknamed Alphonse has whimsically stood watch over York Prep, a private school on New York's Upper West Side.But in today's grimmer age, he and his equally fake dog have become the fourth line of defense for students--provided a would-be shooter peers in and thinks they are real.
In the aftermath of last December's Sandy Hook school massacre in Newtown, Conn., private schools across New York City are re-evaluating and revamping their security systems.
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My job, as a tenured associate professor of biology, wouldn't be possible without a sizable crew of adjunct instructors in my department.Here is some context about the role of adjuncts in my particular department: At the moment, the ratio of undergraduate majors to tenure-line faculty is about 100:1. This isn't unprecedented, but is on the higher end of laboratory science departments in public universities. Because we have so few tenure-line faculty, and so many lectures and labs to teach, we hire a slew of adjuncts every semester.
It's not like the adjuncts are there to make life easier for tenure-line faculty. They're here to keep the department from falling apart and to teach classes that otherwise we would be unable to teach. One thing that keeps us tenure-line faculty busy is advising. All of our majors required to be advised every semester in half-hour appointments, one-on-one with tenure-line faculty, in order to be able to register for the subsequent semester. In addition to our base teaching assignment of four lecture courses per semester and the standard research and service expectations, we're worked mighty heavily.
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Intelligence tests were first devised in the early twentieth century as a way to identify children who needed extra help in school. It was only later that the growing eugenics movement began to promote use of the tests to weed out the less intelligent and eliminate them from society, sparking a debate over the appropriateness of the study of intelligence that carries on to this day. But it was not the research that was problematic: it was the intended use of the results.As the News Feature on page 26 details, this history is never far from the minds of scientists who work in the most fraught areas of behavioural genetics. Although the ability to investigate the genetic factors that underlie the heritability of traits such as intelligence, violent behaviour, race and sexual orientation is new, arguments and attitudes about the significance of these traits are not. Scientists have a responsibility to do what they can to prevent abuses of their work, including the way it is communicated. Here are some pointers.
First: be patient. Do not speculate about the possibility of finding certain results, or about the implications of those results, before your data have even been analysed. The BGI Cognitive Genomics group in Shenzhen, China, is studying thousands of people to find genes that underlie intelligence, but group members sparked a furore by predicting that studies such as theirs could one day let parents select embryos with genetic predispositions to high intelligence. Many other geneticists are sceptical that the project will even find genes linked to this trait.
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Kyle Thompson likes playing football, playing video games, and hanging out with his friends. He's also been under house arrest since last March and barred from school for six months. Why? His teacher wanted to see a note he had written, and she tried to take it from him. He thought she was teasing him about it and was playfully trying to get the note back. When he realized this wasn't play, he immediately let her have the note. That misunderstanding got Kyle thrown in jail, and placed under house arrest.Kyle is part of a national trend where children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse or neglect, and would benefit from additional educational and counseling services. Instead, they are isolated, punished and pushed out. "Zero-tolerance" policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules, while cops in school lead students being criminalized for behavior that should be handled inside the school. Students of color are especially vulnerable to push-out trends and the discriminatory application of discipline.
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There's a pretty good chance Scott Walker doesn't know much about Common Core, the new set of education standards for kindergarten through high school being adopted by states and school districts across the country.It's not surprising, then, that when his spokesman was asked Tuesday to explain what his boss meant when he said the standards might be too weak, this newspaper got no response. It's likely that Walker doesn't know what he meant.
He's not alone -- a poll recently found that two-thirds of Americans hadn't even heard of Common Core -- and that's unfortunate because it leaves the door open for those at the extreme ends of the political spectrum to step into the vacuum.
In May, state tea party groups sent a letter to Walker and the Legislature accusing the Common Core of being all sorts of bad things, including an "educational fraud" and something of a federal takeover of education.
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"A great story beautifully told."Ken Carbone, Designer, Chief Creative Director, Carbone Smolan Agency
"This [film] is about patient and dedicated teaching, about learning to look and visualize in order to design, about the importance of drawing. It is one designer's personal experience of issues that face all designers, expressed with sympathy and encouragement, and illustrated with examples of Inge [Druckrey]'s own work and that of grateful generations of her students. There are simple phrases that give insights into complex matters, for example that letterforms are 'memories of motion.' Above all, it is characteristic of Inge that in this examination of basic principles the word "beautiful" is used several times."
Matthew Carter, type designer, MacArthur Fellow
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Wisconsin Council on Children and Families:
Profound and persistent racial disparities in health, education, child welfare, criminal justice, employment, and income are common across the United States and in Wisconsin. These racial disparities compromise the life chances of many children and families and thwart our common interest that every child grows up healthy, safe and successful.Related: Madison's long time disastrous reading scores and the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school (by a majority of the Madison School Board).The Wisconsin Council on Children and Families (WCCF) aspires to make a greater contribution to narrowing and ultimately eliminating racial disparities in Wisconsin. We are beginning with a multi-year "Project to Reduce Racial Disparities in Dane County" and hope subsequently to move into a broader effort to reduce racial disparities across Wisconsin.
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Madison School District teachers and staff will be covered under a collective bargaining agreement through the 2014-15, pending approval by the Madison School Board.Related: Proposed City of Madison budget raises property taxes by 1.5%, while the Madison School District's 2013-2014 budget increases taxes by 4.5%, after a 9% increase two years ago (and a substantial jump in redistributed state tax dollars last year).Madison Teachers Inc. members gathered Wednesday evening at Madison Marriott West in Middleton to ratify a one-year contract extension with the district. MTI's five bargaining units, which include teachers, education assistants, clerical and security staff, and other district employees, all ratified the deal.
The Madison School Board will vote on the agreement Monday.
John Matthews, executive director of the union, said that pending school board approval, MTI would be the only teachers' union in Wisconsin with a contract through the 2014-15 school year.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):
Some principals appear to be confused about scheduling of parent-teacher conferences. The following is the AGREEMENT between MTI and the District as regards scheduling of parent-teacher conferences, and whether or not teachers are obligated to report to school on Friday, November 15."Section V-M of the MTI / MMSD Collective Bargaining Agreement will be implemented by evening conferences being scheduled on two evenings after the regular school day (November 12 and 14 for 2013). No school will be scheduled for Friday of the week of evening conferences. Teachers can hold conferences for parents wishing conferences, but who could not make one of the two evenings, or teachers can agree to conference with the parent(s) at another mutually agreeable time/date. Teachers who complete all conferences during the two evenings or agree to hold conferences at times other than on Friday for those parents who could not make the evening conferences, need not report to school on Friday. Teachers will not be required to be present during the parent-teacher conference day once their parent teacher conferences are complete, or are scheduled to be completed."
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Let's face it. When push comes to shove, we all die utterly alone.And apparently, more of us are living that way too, according to recent updates on the declining marriage rate in the US and its negative impact on American family finances.
In an analysis of the US Census Bureau's recently released median household income data, Ben Casselman at WSJ's Real Time Economics examined the entrails of the US Census Bureau's recently-released median household income data and found that the income levels of a "typical" US family correlate with both the state of the US economy and changes in family structure. He writes:
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As a professor who favors pop quizzes, Cedrick May is used to grimaces from students caught unprepared. But a couple of years ago, in his class on early American literature at the University of Texas at Arlington, he said he noticed "horrible, pained looks" from the whole class when they saw the questions.He soon learned that the students did not know he had changed the reading assignment because they did not check their e-mail regularly, if at all. To the students, e-mail was as antiquated as the spellings "chuse" and "musick" in the works by Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards that they read on their electronic books.
"Some of them didn't even seem to know they had a college e-mail account," Dr. May said. Nor were these wide-eyed freshmen. "This is considered a junior-level class, so they'd been around," he said.
That is when he added to his course syllabuses: "Students must check e-mail daily." Dr. May said the university now recommends similar wording.a
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The on-ramp to adulthood is delayed and harder to reach for young people today, a reality that is changing the country's society and economy, according to a new report.More demanding job requirements, coupled with the pressures of the recession, have delayed the transition to adulthood for young people in the past decade and earned them the title of "the new lost generation," according to the report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, published Monday.
James Roy dropped out of college and now works at a coffee shop in a Chicago suburb. The 26-year-old calls his outlook 'kind of grim.'
James Roy, 26, has spent the past six years paying off $14,000 in student loans for two years of college by skating from job to job. Now working as a supervisor for a coffee shop in the Chicago suburb of St. Charles, Ill., Mr. Roy describes his outlook as "kind of grim."
"It seems to me that if you went to college and took on student debt, there used to be greater assurance that you could pay it off with a good job," said the Colorado native, who majored in English before dropping out. "But now, for people living in this economy and in our age group, it's a rough deal."
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Dallas Independent School District Superintendent Mike Miles will keep his job, but he was reprimanded by the Board of Trustees on Monday night.
An external investigation determined that Miles violated policy and his contract, and on Monday night, the school board was split on what his punishment should be.They voted 5-3 against a proposal to fire the superintendent after concluding that his transgressions fell short of that penalty, but later decided to give Miles a letter of reprimand in a 7-0 vote, with board member Carla Ranger abstaining.
Following a lengthy closed-door meeting, Miles' contract was amended to prohibit disparaging comments about the school board, bullying, abusive behavior, and the release of confidential information.
In addition, he was placed on a "90-day growth plan," although it was not immediately clear what that means.
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Applications to the University of Pennsylvania's business school have declined 12% in the past four years, with the M.B.A. program receiving just 6,036 submissions for the class that started this fall. That was fewer than Stanford Graduate School of Business, with a class half Wharton's size.Wharton says the decline, combined with a stronger applicant pool and a higher percentage of accepted applicants who enroll, proves that the school is doing a better job targeting candidates.
But business-school experts and b-school applicants say Wharton has lost its luster as students' interests shift from finance to technology and entrepreneurship.
"We're hearing [applicants say] Stanford, Harvard or nothing. It used to be Stanford, Harvard or Wharton," says Jeremy Shinewald, the founder of mbaMission, an admissions advisory firm.
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A controversial art lesson in the Madison Metropolitan School District draws similarities from a 2012 incident in which a Louisiana middle school teacher was fired after displaying his student's anti-President Obama drawings.After learning to read well, critical thinking would certainly be a useful topic for all students.Kati Walsh, an elementary art teacher in Madison, published anti-Gov. Scott Walker political cartoons drawn by her kindergarten, first- and second-grade students. One drawing depicts Walker in jail, and another in which he appears to be in jail and engulfed in flames. Walsh said the orange in that drawing actually represented a prison jumpsuit.
Robert Duncan, a former Slidell, La., middle school social studies teacher at St. Tammany Parish School District, was fired after an internal investigation found he acted incompetently in displaying several student drawings depicting harm to Obama. The incident was first brought to light after a parent leaked photos of the drawings to WDSU, a local TV news outlet.
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When you ask parents of any background what they want, you will overwhelmingly get this response:"I want to raise great kids."
Curiously, that is not what most parents actually want. What they actually want is to raise great kids...who become great adults.
Think about it--how many great kids have you seen go totally crazy the second they leave home for college or adult life? It happens all the time. Why? Because their parents gave little thought to the people those great kids would become once they left the house.
It's so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day challenges of raising children that we often lose sight of the big picture of who those children are becoming.
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A generation after he was squarely pummeled as elitist, antiquated and narrow-minded, the education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr. is being dragged back into the ring at the age of 85 -- this time for a chance at redemption.Invitations to speak have come from Spain, Britain and China. He has won a prestigious education award. Curriculums developed by the Core Knowledge Foundation, which Mr. Hirsch created to disseminate his ideas, have recently been adopted by hundreds of schools in 25 states and recommended by the New York City Department of Education for teachers to use in their classrooms.
Not since 1987, when he first published "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know," whose list of 5,000 essential concepts left even Ph.D.'s a little dumbstruck, has Mr. Hirsch been so in demand.
"This is a redemptive moment for E. D. Hirsch, after a quarter-century of neglect by people both conservative and liberal," said Sol Stern, an education writer and senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.
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Marcus Winters, via a kind Deb Britt email:
This study uses NYC data to analyze the factors driving the gap in special education enrollment between charter and traditional public schools. Among the findings:Students with disabilities are less likely to apply to charter schools in kindergarten than are regular enrollment students. This is the primary driver of the gap in special education enrollments.
The gap grows as students progress through elementary grades, largely because charter schools are less likely than district schools to place students in special education--and less likely to keep them there.
The gap also grows as students transfer between charter and district schools. Between kindergarten and third grade, greater proportions of regular education students enter charter schools, compared to students with special needs.
There is great mobility among special education students, whether they attend a charter or traditional public school. Close to a third of students in special education leave their school by the fourth year of attendance, whether they are enrolled in charters or traditional public schools.
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RICK KARR: According to the law, Cynthia Cruz is an undocumented immigrant, a Mexican citizen living in the United States. According to Cynthia Cruz, New Jersey is home ... because it's where her parents brought her when she wasn't even two years old ... and Mexico is very far away.CYNTHIA CRUZ: I don't remember anything about it. I don't remember how it looks. I don't remember, like, where I lived, where I was born. I don't remember anything. All I know is the American culture.
RICK KARR: Cruz says American culture taught her that the key to success is education. So after high school, she went to a local community college, and then last fall to Rutgers, New Jersey's flagship public university. Her goal was a degree in public policy, but after only one semester on campus, she had to drop out because she ran out of money. As an undocumented immigrant, she couldn't get financial aid from the state, and she had to pay higher tuition than other New Jersey residents. If you're a resident of the state of New Jersey, the tuition and fees for one year as a full-time undergraduate at Rutgers is just over thirteen thousand dollars. If you're not a resident, it's going to cost you twice as much -- nearly twenty eight thousand dollars.
And that's the amount that students who are undocumented immigrants have to pay, even if they've lived the vast majority of their lives as residents of the state of the New Jersey. They support a bill in the state legislature that would allow them to pay the in-state rate. The idea is called tuition equity.
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There is broad acknowledgment that local schools are performing better since Hurricane Katrina washed away New Orleans' failing public education system and state authorities took control of many campuses here.Related: Madison's long term, disastrous reading results.Graduation rates went to 78% last year from 52% before Katrina--surpassing Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Oakland, Calif., cities also struggling to boost achievement among lower-income students. The share of New Orleans students proficient in math, reading, science and social studies increased to 58% in 2012 from 35% before the 2005 storm, state data shows.
School officials now want to ramp up improvements, saying the city's education marketplace still needs work. The enrollment system is complicated. There are far fewer available seats at good schools than at poor ones, leaving many families to choose between bad and worse. And few students can get into top-rated schools because of limited seats and strict admissions policies.
Boosters, including Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, say New Orleans points to the future of public education. Giving parents a choice of schools, they say, fosters competition that weeds out badly run campuses. Academically, New Orleans is improving faster than any school district in Louisiana.
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That's what Bill Gates said on Sept. 21 (see video below) about the billions of dollars his foundation has plowed into education reform during a nearly hour-long interview he gave at Harvard University. He repeated the "we don't know if it will work" refrain about his reform efforts a few days later during a panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative.Related: Small Learning Communities.Hmmm. Teachers around the country are saddled every single year with teacher evaluation systems that his foundation has funded, based on no record of success and highly questionable "research." And now Gates says he won't know if the reforms he is funding will work for another decade. But teachers can lose their jobs now because of reforms he is funding.
In the past he sounded pretty sure of what he was doing. In this 2011 oped in The Washington Post, he wrote:
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On the other hand, universal pre-K eases economic stress on parents and improves human resources. It helps counter economic forces that are both driving up the relative cost of child-rearing and increasing economic inequality.Sustained below-replacement fertility will increase the share of elderly in the population, threaten national and ethnic identity, and weaken the links between present and future generations that are forged by family commitments. The taxes paid by the working-age population benefit all elderly fellow citizens, including those who have contributed relatively little to their care. In tomorrow's global economy, the quality of future workers will matter even more than the quantity.
Entirely self-interested individuals have no reason to worry about what happens after they die. But a nation, like a family, hopes and plans to live on.
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