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Tang Wanyuan, the father of a sixth grader in Beijing, said he has not paid much attention to the Communist Party's decision to ban the practice of putting the elite pupils in special classes. Like most young parents, he has little faith in such initiatives.The resolution of the Central Committee's third plenum earlier this month said that educational authorities should no longer designate elite classes or elite schools for pupils who outperform their peers, or come from privileged families. The move was part of an effort to address inequality in the access to quality teaching.
"These schools are almost certain to continue operating the way they have, only under a different name such as 'model schools' or 'schools with special characteristics'," Tang said.
"If anything, parents want transparency over enrolments at elite schools. That way we'll know what chance, if any, we stand of having our children admitted. Parents want policies that don't cause more stress for us."
Tang is more concerned about where his son will attend middle school, where standards of teaching differ tremendously.
These schools are almost certain to continue operating the way they have, only under a different name.
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Students in a lecture class can give the impression of lethargy: Maybe a student sleeps in the back of the classroom, maybe others fidget and doodle. The students who are paying attention may be too focused on their notebooks to flash a look of understanding and inspiration.Perhaps because of this negative initial impression, lectures are under attack these days. The Common Core standards place far greater value on small-group discussion and student-led work than on any teacher-led instruction. The term "lecture" is entirely out of fashion, as is the unqualified word "lesson." On recent planning templates released by New York's Department of Education, only the term "mini-lesson" is used. The term gets its diminutive status because of the fact that only 10 to 15 minutes on the hour are allotted for teacher-disseminated information, while the rest of the class period is focused on student-centered practice in groups or project based learning. But the mini lesson is not even accepted as the most progressive way of teaching. Champions of the "flipped classroom" relegate lectures to YouTube channels. In a recent interview here at The Atlantic, futurist David Thornburg declared that lectures created a depressing experience for him in school.
The tendency to see lecture-based instruction as alienating and stifling to student creativity is not altogether new. In Paulo Friere's 1970 Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the lecturing teacher was cast as an arrogant imperialist. Alison King coined the flip expression "sage on the stage" in a 1997 article and, although more than half of King's article consists of ideas for working small group approaches into otherwise lecture-centric courses, demonstrating that she was in no way looking to eliminate the lecture entirely, everyone from Common Core advocates to edtech disrupters has co-opted "sage on the stage" as license to heckle the "out-of-touch expert." Nevertheless, there is immense value in lecture, and it must not be written off as boring and ineffective teaching.
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"You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have." It's a line familiar to many African Americans, but when the political fixer Olivia Pope delivered it last month in an episode of ABC's Scandal, black Twitter and Facebook came to life anyway.I couldn't help thinking that it was resonant for academics, too. It's not necessarily the case that "blackademics" have to put in twice as many hours of literal toil as others seeking promotion, tenure, and a successful academic career. But too often, we have to work twice as hard to convince powerful committee members that our scholarly work has value. This is especially true when our work touches on subjects that are controversial, challenge or--worse yet--almost completely foreign to those whose approval we need.
After almost 20 years in the highly racialized terrain of the academy, I know that support and consent are no small things. At most four-year institutions, fewer than 10 percent of professors are people of color, so when it comes to promotion and tenure, those professors aren't often in positions of authority. The problem this creates is clear: If we aren't able to convince the faculty powerbrokers we do have that the subjects we want to pursue, familiar or not, are worthy of support, we may not get as far down the road as we want to go.
"You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have." It's a line familiar to many African Americans, but when the political fixer Olivia Pope delivered it last month in an episode of ABC's Scandal, black Twitter and Facebook came to life anyway.I couldn't help thinking that it was resonant for academics, too. It's not necessarily the case that "blackademics" have to put in twice as many hours of literal toil as others seeking promotion, tenure, and a successful academic career. But too often, we have to work twice as hard to convince powerful committee members that our scholarly work has value. This is especially true when our work touches on subjects that are controversial, challenge or--worse yet--almost completely foreign to those whose approval we need.
After almost 20 years in the highly racialized terrain of the academy, I know that support and consent are no small things. At most four-year institutions, fewer than 10 percent of professors are people of color, so when it comes to promotion and tenure, those professors aren't often in positions of authority. The problem this creates is clear: If we aren't able to convince the faculty powerbrokers we do have that the subjects we want to pursue, familiar or not, are worthy of support, we may not get as far down the road as we want to go.
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Universities do not have effective systems to help staff who have been subjected to online bullying and sexual harassment.This is the opinion of Sara Perry, lecturer in cultural heritage management at the University of York, who surveyed professionals about their experiences of being harassed online after she was herself targeted by colleagues in the higher education sector.
"In one case, I was sent a message about my appearance, which included...photographs [of a sexual nature] detailing the things that they would like to do to me if we were not in a professional context," she told Times Higher Education.
"Subsequent to that I moved institutions and had the same thing happen - first with a person in the university and then with someone from a different university. Some of them were academics, others were...supporting my work."
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Most of the buildings in Machakos, the former capital of Kenya, are made of concrete, with neat fences, informal gardens, indoor plumbing, and electricity, however erratic. By contrast, the local schoolhouse of Bridge International Academies is beyond basic: walls of corrugated tin, a plywood frame. There's no electrical wiring in sight. A pair of latrines adjoin an open courtyard that doubles as a lunch and recreation area. A few young children loll on the patchy grass, engaged in unhurried conversation.Yet this school is by no means a failure -- in fact, it recently passed a 700-point inspection and is running exactly as planned. This is just one of 212 Bridge Academies that have opened in Kenya during the past four years. Bridge's "schools in a box" spring up seemingly overnight: In January of 2013, the company launched 51 schools at once, while in September it opened another 78. Bridge now educates roughly 50,000 students in Kenya every day, and its global aspirations may transform the entire project of education for poor youth around the world.
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Ever since December 2001, when the results of the first PISA survey were made public, the Finnish educational system has received a lot of international attention. Foreign delegations are flocking to Finland, in the hope of discovering Finland's secrets. Finland is also trying to take advantage of its PISA success by exporting its knowledge in education [1]; this strategy is supported by talks given in international events by representatives of the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture [2].The explanation widely accepted is that the Finnish educational system is better. For example, the following aspects have been pointed out:
Schools routinely provide tutoring for weak students.
Each school has a social worker ("koulukuraattori").
Substitute teachers are often provided when the teacher is ill.
Teachers are seldom on strike.
The methods used for teaching mother tongue are solid. Finnish first graders learn to read first by learning letters, then syllables, then words, then sentences. For example, throughout grade 1 (and most of grade 2), words are often printed with syllables separated by hyphens [3]. Adventurous approaches (such as starting with words or sentences as wholes) are not used.
Schools have more autonomy than in many countries. For example, schools can dismiss teachers if they are not satisfied with their work.
The profession of teacher is better recognized than in many countries.
Transition from low to high grades of the Finnish curriculum is smoother than in many countries.
Finnish students have a free canteen at their disposal.
Explanations not related to the educational system have also been proposed, including:
The Finnish society is homogeneous. The number of foreigners is lower than in most OECD countries (3.6% at the end of 2012 [4]), which makes the teachers' job easier.
Finnish spelling is regular, thus easing Finnish students' task.
Foreign TV programs are subtitled, instead of dubbed as in many OECD countries, thus easing acquisition of foreign languages.
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A few nights ago, after cleaning up from the play date I had organized for my 2½-year-old, changing his diaper, and refilling his water, I was about to start cooking him dinner before giving him a bath when the subject of Thanksgiving came up. He didn't know what it was, so I tried to explain it to him. But somewhere between It's a special day when we all think about how grateful we are for what we haveand So, basically, it's all about giving thanks, my son took off to terrorize our dog, and I was left stirring pasta that, five minutes later, I had to remind my son to thank me for.Lincoln on Thanksgiving.My husband and I are incredibly lucky to be able to give our son what he needs and often what he wants, and we are raising him in a wonderful town in which many families do the same. Yet he's growing up in a bubble, and that terrifies me. If he never truly struggles for things--important things--and he doesn't spend much time with people who do, will he ever realize he's got it so good? And will he ever want to do anything to make the world better? I know--rich/white/entitled people problems. This is the upper-middle-class parent's existential enigma: How can we lovingly provide for our kids without turning them into spoiled brats? How can I teach my child to be thankful?
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Brian Kisida, Jay Greene & Daniel Bowen:
FOR many education advocates, the arts are a panacea: They supposedly increase test scores, generate social responsibility and turn around failing schools. Most of the supporting evidence, though, does little more than establish correlations between exposure to the arts and certain outcomes. Research that demonstrates a causal relationship has been virtually nonexistent.A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.
Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions.
Crystal Bridges, which opened in November 2011, was founded by Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. It is impressive, with 50,000 square feet of gallery space and an endowment of more than $800 million.
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School lunch has never been the stuff of foodie dreams. I'm still haunted by the memory of my elementary school cafeteria's "brain pizza" - a lumpy oval thing topped with fleshy white strips of barely melted mozzarella that clumped together like neurons.And it looks like America's school cafeterias are still turning out the culinary abominations, judging by the images on , a fascinating online project showcasing school lunch photos submitted by students across the country.
The project is the brainchild of Farah Sheikh, who manages education campaigns for , a nonprofit group that helps organize young people to take action around social change. She got the idea, she said, while researching student dropout rates. Nutrition, she noticed, "has a pretty big impact on student concentration and student performance in school," she tells The Salt.
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Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, one of the most high-profile private sector attempts to "disrupt" higher education discovered inequality this week. Thrun has spent the last three years dangling the shiny bauble of his elite academic pedigree and messianic vision of the future of higher education before investors and politicos. He promised nothing short of radically transforming higher education for the future by delivering taped classroom lessons of elite professors through massive open online courses.So what went wrong?After low performance rates, low student satisfaction and faculty revolt, Thrun announced this week that he has given up on MOOCs as a vision for higher education disruption. The "godfather of free online education" says that the racially, economically diverse students at SJSU,"were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives...[for them] this medium is not a good fit." It seems disruption is hard when poor people insist on existing.
Thrun has the right to fail. That's just business. But he shouldn't have the right to fail students like those at San Jose State and the public universities that serve them for the sake of doing business.
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I've been saying for years that we need to have a national debate about whether we want to have a public higher education system in this country, and that our failure to have that debate is killing public higher ed. I believe that to be true. With taxpayer support for many public colleges sliding toward single-digit percentages, with out-of-state tuition at some public universities approaching Harvard's, with in-state applicants losing seats to make room for those out-of-state revenue streams in students' clothing, we're abandoning the idea of public higher education without giving that idea the respect of saying so.And yet something curious is happening as a result. Slowly, haltingly, but with growing confidence, voices are beginning to rise in support of the concept of a higher education that is not merely public, but actually free. Economist Jeffrey Sachs claimed in a 2011 book that we could eliminate tuition at public colleges and universities nationwide for an investment of little as $15 billion a year, and since then the idea has been popping up more and more frequently in public discussion.
It's not a new idea, of course. As a delegate to the US Student Association's congresses in the early 1990s I remember ritually endorsing an end to tuition in resolutions every summer. But in those days the idea felt more than a little pro forma. Of course college should be free, we'd say, and then we'd go back to fighting tuition hikes and lobbying against Pell Grant cuts.
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Public education should be free. If it isn't free, it isn't public education.This should not be a controversial assertion. This should be common sense. But Americans have forgotten what the "public" in "public education" actually means (or used to mean). The problem is that the word no longer has anything to refer to: This country's public universities have been radically transformed. The change has happened so slowly and so gradually -- bit by bit, cut by cut over half a century -- that it can be seen really only in retrospect. But with just a small amount of historical perspective, the change is dramatic: public universities that once charged themselves to open their doors to all who could benefit by attending -- that were, by definition, the public property of the entire state -- have become something entirely different.
What we still call public universities would be more accurately described as state-controlled private universities -- corporate entities that think and behave like businesses. Whereas there once was a public mission to educate the republic's citizens, there is now the goal of satisfying the educational needs of the market, aided by PR departments that brand degrees as commodities and build consumer interest, always with an eye to the bottom line. And while public universities once sought to advance the industry of the state as a whole, with an eye to the common good, shortfalls in public funding have led to universities' treating their research capacity as a source of primary fundraising, developing new technologies and products for the private sector, explicitly to raise the money they need to operate. Conflicts of interest are now commonplace.
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I'm ten the night my house explodes. The sound isn't a sound, just a vibration so strong it rattles my chest. I come-to face down on the floor, impossibly unharmed, and pull myself on my elbows across the carpet and into the hallway. A section of the house--the part where my parents' bedroom is supposed to be--is missing. I run. In the street, the pavement is warped from the treads of tanks that have plowed through the neighborhood. I spot a trench, jump down, and follow its rutted path toward the city center.Deep underground in the public shelter I bypass the cluster of my classmates who are vying for their turn on the stationary bicycle that lights this airless cement box--surrogate playtime, a welcome distraction from boredom and fear. They let me cut the line, and I pedal fast until the lights glow full-strength and my joints stiffen with shock. It's only when I stop that I notice the blood trickling from my ears and down my neck in thin red escape routes. Other people's mothers ask me if I'm okay. I don't like to talk about it.
People in the city are disappearing. People have been forced to walk east; people have become hemic vapor amidst the midnight explosions. We are fortunate they've blown up the TV tower, that we cannot turn on the news and see the images the rest of Europe is now viewing and ignoring: pictures of our neighbors, bald and emaciated in camps that the Serbian government is claiming, in the same broadcast, do not exist.
In the morning I run to my best friend Davor's house. When I get there I double back, thinking I've missed it, the landscape rendered unrecognizable by shellings. I don't find it, but eventually I find Davor. I ask him what happened to his family and he says nothing for the rest of the day.Everyone left uniforms up into various shades of olive. Even we've been issued the smallest soldier-like attire obtainable--camouflage t-shirts and caps smuggled in from Hungary in vans with curtained windows. Davor and I line up with the rest of the town in front of the police barracks, where the sergeant is issuing weapons to people much stronger than us. I tuck my hair under my hat and hope the dirt on my face covers any traces of girlhood.
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Given the evidence compiled by Mishel et al, it would be difficult to maintain that technology has been the main culprit in the upward redistribution of income that we have seen.It is not difficult to identify other potential culprits - trade would certainly rank high on the list. A trade policy that quite deliberately puts factory workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while protecting doctors and other highly paid professionals, would be expected to redistribute income from the former to the latter.
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Middle schools and high schools often offer an array of classes and programs in order to serve students with a variety of educational needs. They include talented and gifted, special education, honors and advanced placements, career and technical education and basic courses. ProPublica is investigating whether these courses have also become a means of segregating students by race.Related: English 10.Help us investigate this issue by filling out the form below. We promise any personally identifying information will remain confidential. If you'd rather, you can also reach out to reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones directly at Nikole.Hannah-Jones@propublica.org
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Facing stagnant enrollment and increasingly price-conscious consumers, already cash-strapped universities will continue to see their revenues fail to keep up with inflation, the bond-rating agency Moody's Investment Service says.The proportion of public universities with expected revenue declines has doubled over last year.
Nearly 30 percent of public and one out of five private universities will suffer declines in revenue--more than the proportion that experienced this last year, and a sign that the problem is getting worse and not better, according to Moody's, which annually reviews the financial condition of higher-education institutions whose bonds it rates.
Nearly half of universities expect to see declines in their enrollments.
Second-tier public universities and small private universities that are having trouble persuading families and students that they're worth the price of their tuition are in the most danger, Moody's says--and will have to take dramatic steps to win back business.
"At this pace, tuition-dependent colleges and universities will be challenged to make necessary investments in personnel, programs, and facilities to remain competitive over the longer term," says Karen Kedem, a Moody's senior analyst, who authored the report.
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Gov. Andrew Cuomo is offering schools millions of dollars for academic initiatives that are overwhelmingly supported by education experts, and for the second time, districts aren't interested in the money.The vast majority of eligible school districts didn't apply for Cuomo's $75 million competitive grants this year, which would fund the creation of full-day pre-kindergarten, extend the school day or year, create "community schools," where at-risk students can get health care, counseling and other services, and reward high-performing teachers in high-need districts.
Experts offered a variety of explanations for why participation in Cuomo's programs is so low, after a first round of grants also drew a relative few applications. Mainly, schools don't want to build programs they'll have to dismantle when grants expire, leaders said.
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The Common Core National Education Standards are, they say, very interested in having all our students taught the techniques of deeper reading, deeper writing, deeper listening, deeper analysis, and deeper thinking.
What they seen to have almost no interest in, is knowledge--for example knowledge of history, especially military history. As far as I can tell at the moment, their view of the history our high school students need to know includes: The Letter From Birmingham Jail, The Gettysburg Address, and Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.
While these are all, of course, worthy objects for deeper reading and the like, they do not, to my mind, fully encompass the knowledge of the Magna Carta, the Constitution of the United States, the Battle of the Bulge and of Iwo Jima and of Okinawa, or the Women's Christian Temperance Movement, or the U.S. transcontinental railroad, or the Panama Canal, or woman suffrage or the Great Depression, or a number of other interesting historical circumstances our students perhaps should know about.
Nor does it seem to call for much knowledge about William Penn, or Increase Mather, or George Washington, or Alexander Hamilton, or Robert E. Lee, or Ulysses S. Grant, or Thomas Edison, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Dwight David Eisenhower, or several hundreds of other historical figures who might be not only interesting, but also important for students to be familiar with.
In short, from what I have seen, the Common Core Vision of necessary historical knowledge includes what any high school Junior ought to be able to read in one afternoon (i.e. three short "historical documents").
Ignorance of history has, it may be said, been almost an American tradition, and many Americans have discovered in their travels, and to their embarrassment, that people in other countries may know more about our history than they do.
We have, many times in the past, even invaded countries our soldiers knew next to nothing about, and sometimes that has been a disadvantage for us. But if the Common Core doesn't care if our students know any United States history, they are certainly not going to mind if our students don't know the history of any other country either.
But even in schools were history is still taught, and where the Common Core has not yet sunk its roots, one area of history is perhaps neglected more than any other. Was it Trotsky who said: "You may not be interested in War, but War is interested in you."?
And Publius Flavius Vegetius argued that: "If you want peace, prepare for war." In many of our school history departments, military history is regarded as "militaristic," and the thought, apparently, is that if we tell our students nothing about war, then war will simply go away.
History doesn't seem to support that notion, and if war does come to us again, it might be useful for students in places other than our Military Academies to know something about military history. In addition, military history tells absorbing stories of some of the most inspiring efforts ever made in the history of mankind.
We talk a fair amount these days about our Wounded Warriors and about what we owe to our veterans, past and present, but for some odd reason, that seldom translates into the responsibility to teach military history, at least to some minimal extent, to the students in our public high schools.
It is quite clear to me that ignorance of history does not make history go away, and ignorance of the lessons of history does not make us better prepared to understand the issues of our time. And certainly, in spite of whatever dreams and wishes are out there, ignorance of war has not ever made, and quite probably will not make, war go away.
We want to honor our veterans, but we do not do so by erasing knowledge of our wars, past and present, from our high school history curriculum, whatever the pundits who are bringing us the Common Core may think about, and plan for, the teaching of history.
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"Teach by Example"
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The Concord Review [1987]
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TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
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Teacher merit pay. It's one of those perennially popular policy ideas that, historically, hasn't worked very well.A few years ago, New York City offered teachers in select schools $3,000 if the entire school's test scores went up. But scores at the merit pay schools did not improve any faster than scores at control schools. (In some of the merit-pay schools, scores actually went down.) In Nashville, teachers who volunteered for a merit pay experiment were eligible for $5,000 to $15,000 in bonuses if kids learned more. Students of those teachers performed no better on tests than students in a control group. And in Chicago, teachers were paid more if they mentored their colleagues and produced learning gains for kids. Again, students of the merit-pay teachers performed no better than other kids.
That's why the results of a new study, the Talent Transfer Initiative, financed by the federal government, are so important. Surprisingly, this experiment found merit pay can work.
In 10 cities, including Los Angeles, Miami, and Houston, researchers at Mathematica identified open positions in high-poverty schools with low test scores, where kids performed at just around the 30th percentile in both reading and math. To fill some of those positions, they selected from a special group of transfer teachers, all of whom had top 20 percent track records of improving student achievement at lower poverty schools within the districts, and had applied to earn $20,000 to switch jobs. The rest of the open positions were filled through the usual processes, in which principals select candidates from a regular applicant pool.
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Kean University's president will ask the institution's board next month to reject two-thirds of the professors up for tenure this year, further antagonizing a faculty that has been at odds with the administration for years.Kean's faculty union said...
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With not a small amount of disdain, my youngest son -- the one who's addicted to his Xbox video game console -- said to his parents the other day: "That's all you two ever do: work and read."A lot of good it's done us. How we managed to raise two boys who detest reading is beyond me.
Reading to them at bedtime every night, going to story time at our library and encouraging them to read everything from newspapers to magazines, comic books, read-along "books," audio books, e-books -- none of it has made much of a difference.
Some of our biggest professional disappointments also have revolved around not being able to inspire some of our students to love reading, too. But as with our own kids, love ultimately has nothing to do with it. Reading is too important to be left to taste or affinity.
My husband and I both determined long ago that for kids and students who don't love books, the only solution is to treat reading like fruits, vegetables and time off from electronics: a non-negotiable requirement since they don't think there are any books they'd enjoy.
This is anathema to today's literacy experts who insist on making reading "easy," "fun," "personally meaningful" or "culturally relevant" instead of treating it as what it is: A challenging skill that must be approached with the same rigor and discipline that an algebra or chemistry teacher approaches abstract and symbolic reasoning.
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State Board of Education members vetoed a proposed charter school in the Dallas area Friday after complaints were raised that its operator has a history of catering to white students from more affluent families.Board members voted, 9-6, to deny a state charter to Great Hearts Academies. The group had hoped to establish at least four campuses in the Dallas area, beginning with Irving.
The board approved a Great Hearts charter school in San Antonio last year, but that campus won't open until next fall.
Great Hearts was one of four independent charter schools that Education Commissioner Michael Williams authorized in September, subject to the board's approval.
The three other schools, in Austin, El Paso and San Antonio, won board approval Friday.
Board member Mavis Knight, D-Dallas, noted that the 15 Great Hearts charter schools in Phoenix -- where the charter operator is based -- have a much higher percentage of white students than the regular public schools in the Phoenix area. While 42 percent of the public school students are Hispanic, only 13 percent of the enrollment at the Great Hearts schools is Hispanic.
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The federal government made enough money on student loans over the last year that, if it wanted, it could provide maximum-level Pell Grants of $5,645 to 7.3 million college students.The $41.3 billion profit for the 2013 fiscal year is down $3.6 billion from the previous year but it's a higher profit level than all but two companies in the world: Exxon Mobil cleared $44.9 billion in 2012, and Apple cleared $41.7 billion.
"It's actually neither accurate nor fair to characterize the student loan program as making a profit," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said during a July conference call with reporters after the Free Press and other news media reported on profits from student loans. The department did not return calls or e-mails seeking comment this week.
The numbers track the entire fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. They come as concern continues to mount about the level of indebtedness by college students and graduates. Estimates show more than $1.2 trillion in student loan debt across the nation, more than the nation owes on credit cards.
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AT a middle school near Boston not long ago, teachers and administrators noticed that children would frequently return from a classmate's weekend bar mitzvah with commemorative T-shirts, swag that advertised a party to which many fellow students hadn't been invited.So administrators moved to ban the clothing.
They explained, in a letter to parents, that "while the students wearing the labeled clothing are all chatting excitedly," the students without it "tend to walk by, trying not to take notice." What an ordeal.
Many parents favored the ban, a prophylactic against disappointment.
Some did not, noting that life would soon enough deal the kids much worse blows along these lines. And one observer, in a Facebook thread, said this, according to a local TV station's report: "Perhaps they should dress the children in Bubble Wrap and tie mattresses to their backs so they don't get hurt."
I assume that's facetious.
But these days, you never know.
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Optimists have scoured the dictionary for superlatives to describe the future of internet education. But the cult of the Mooc - massive online open courses - took a blow last week when one of its leading Silicon Valley pioneers, Sebastian Thrun, described it as a "lousy product".Students taking Mr Thrun's online courses at Udacity performed far worse - and dropped out in far higher numbers - than those with a human instructor. Mr Thrun, who invented the self-driving car, is at least temporarily dropping out of the business. Luddites everywhere will be feeling vindicated.
Yet the need to reinvent US education is more pressing than ever. If America's college dropout rates are not persuasive enough - nearly half of US students fail to complete their four-year degree within six years - the fate of those who make it ought to be. Graduate earnings have fallen 5 per cent since 2000. The college premium is still there but only because the earnings of those with a high-school diploma have dropped by far more. Meanwhile, the costs of getting a degree continue to rise, which means the trade-off of taking on ever larger debt to boost future earnings keeps getting weaker.
This is where online education comes in. Moocs can drive down costs to almost zero. Yet they will be hard-pressed to fix the cost problem if more than 90 per cent of their enrollees lose interest, which was the outcome of Udacity's much-hyped experiment. This is twice the attrition of mainstream students.
Yet it makes only marginal difference whether a student gets his or her education from a computer or a real live human if the content is irrelevant to the jobs market. As the economist Tyler Cowen argues in his seminal book, Average is Over, there is a larger crisis in what US students are being taught. Content, rather than medium, is the problem.
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Residents of an Apple Valley neighborhood aren't happy with the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan School District's plans to build a new early childhood and adult education center, citing worries about traffic and declining property values if the project proceeds.They also believe the district hasn't been completely clear about its plans and is rushing to build the facility, despite 14 meetings between December 2012 and the Nov. 12 school board meeting at which updates on the center were shared.
"As a neighborhood, we felt like we were blindsided," said Steve Budnik, who lives on 144th St. W.
"I think it's a lack of partnership with the neighborhood, it really is," said Steve Robbins, who lives off 144th St. W. on Drumlin Court.
The district is already clearing the land for the proposed building, a two-story, 54,000-square-foot school that will house early childhood and adult education programs, currently held in leased spaces. Construction will begin in late winter, with completion planned in December 2014.
Residents' reactions at the meeting were surprising, said Rob Duchscher, school board member.
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Has the conversation in the Wake County school system switched from student assignment to student achievement?Wake County Schools spends $1,378,298,829 for 153,152 students, or $9,000 per student. Madison spends 67% more per student at around $15,000 each.As noted in today's article, Wake has seen a spike in the number of high-poverty schools in the past few four years, helping to produce some pretty low proficiency rates under the new state exams. But members of the board's Democratic majority say they need to focus on core instruction and not student assignment to address the situation.
"What we intend to do over the next year or so is to focus on core instruction, raising achievement and improving student outcomes," said school board Chairman Keith Sutton. "The new exams give us a good starting point."
Sutton said a balanced approach is needed now.
"We can't rely solely on assignment to balance student achievement," Sutton said. "We can't rely solely on magnet programs to balance student achievement. You can't rely only on an infusion of additional money. There's not a single bullet."
Sutton said they need more time to consider how they'll implement the changes made to the assignment policy this year.
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College-level courses distributed free online have much more to do before they achieve their proponents' hopes of eliminating economic, geographic, racial and gender barriers to higher education, according to a University of Pennsylvania study published Wednesday.The university surveyed nearly 35,000 students from more than 200 countries and territories who participated in the 32 massive open online courses, or MOOCs, it distributes through Coursera, the largest provider of the free courses. Researchers found that most of the students were already well educated, and most were young men looking for new skills to advance their careers.
More than 80% of the U.S.-based students, for example, already had a college degree, compared with about 30% of the general U.S. population. Across the board, Penn's MOOC students already far exceeded average educational standards in their countries, the study said.
The economic elite are often first adopters of new technologies, particularly on the Internet. The study found that the "educational disparity is particularly stark" in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, where almost 80% of the MOOC students came from the wealthiest 6% of the population.
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Older Americans can be a burden on the economy -- but for cash-strapped families, they're a lifeline.Roughly one in four adults 25 years old and over got $100 or more from parents in 2011, according to Judith Seltzer, a sociology professor at UCLA who analyzed Census data and the June 2012 Survey of Consumers. The average gift was $6,500. Better-educated parents were more likely to give: Nearly 37% of adults with college-educated parents received assistance.
Grandparents also provide child care. About 28% of grandparents provided at least 50 hours of care per year for grandchildren they didn't live with, and nearly one-third of grandmothers who live with a grandchild have primary responsibility for them. More affluent grandparents, meanwhile, tend to help adult children with mortgage costs, house down-payments and education, greasing the wheels of economic mobility for their grandchildren, research shows.
The upshot: Older people are quietly serving as an emergency-support system for adult children struggling with a weak economy and high joblessness -- and indeed, with years of slow wage growth and declining economic mobility.
Marjorie Price, of Boise, Idaho, is among those helping out. The 80-year-old widow and mother of five, known as "the Jelly Lady" locally, wanted to shutter her business of selling jams and jellies at farmers' markets a few years ago. Instead, she's continuing to produce 5,000 jars a year to earn extra income and help her daughter Ann, who has two twenty-something daughters of her own.
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A federal program that pumped a record $5 billion into failing schools is showing mixed results, with students at more than one-third of the targeted schools doing the same or worse after the schools received the funding, according to government data released Thursday.The Obama administration has handed out $5.1 billion to states to improve academic performance at about 1,500 schools since 2009, the largest federal investment ever targeted at failing schools.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement that the numbers point toward success.
"The progress, while incremental, indicates that local leaders and educators are leading the way to raising standards and achievement and driving innovation over the next few years," Duncan said. "To build on this success in our disadvantaged communities, we must expand the most effective practices to accelerate progress for students and prepare them for success in college and careers."
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Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein:
Earlier this year, we published an analysis of international test score data in which we showed that these data hide many complex issues, and that glib conclusions regarding the meaning and policy implications of international test data should be avoided. We showed that it is more appropriate to compare student performance across countries by comparing students with similar social class backgrounds, and we showed that comparative information is more useful if it includes test data trends over time as well as levels in the current year. We also presented apparent anomalies in test data (for example, periods in which performance on one international test goes up but performance on another international test, purporting to measure the same subject, goes down, or carelessness in sampling methodology) that should caution analysts from relying too heavily on test score data.Related: www.wisconsin2.orgUpon the release of our report, we were attacked by several promoters of the conventional idea that international test data show that American schools are in collapse and are threatening our economic security. Prominent among these was Marc Tucker, president of one of the leading education-scold organizations, the National Center on Education and the Economy. Tucker attacked our report without having bothered to read it, and was subsequently forced to issue an apology for misrepresenting our findings ("We misstated the conclusions presented by Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein in the report described in this newsletter. We believe we have stated those conclusions accurately here, and apologize to the authors for the error.").
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The Madison School District (PDF):
BOARD POLICIES and PROCEDURES represent the BOARD's vision for the DISTRICT and set the general direction for the DISTRICT. It is an essential function of the BOARD to establish BOARD POLICIES and the BOARD PROCEDURES necessary to eaffect those POLICIES and PROCEDURES. In order to carry out this function in an effective, efficient, consistent and transparent manner, the BOARD believes it is imperative to have a well-defined procedure for creating, maintaining and modifying such POLICIES and PROCEDURES as needed.
...
Beginning in the 2014-2015 school year, except for POLICIES and PROCEDURES that are reviewed on an annual basis, see IV.H, below, the SUPERINTENDENT or his/her designee shall review all BOARD POLICIES and PROCEDURES shall be reviewed pursuant to the following three-year review cycle:Year 1: Chapter 4000 (Pupils), Chapter 5000 (Auxiliary Services), Chapter 6000 (Operations)
Year 2: Chapter 2000 (Administration), Chapter 3000 (Instruction), Chapter 7000 (Community Relations), Chapter 10000 (Charter Schools)
Year 3: Chapter 1000 (Board of Education), Chapter 8000 (Personnel), Chapter 9000 (Ethics)
Following said review, the SUPERINTENDENT shall present his/her recommendations at a WORK GROUP meeting for review and approval by the BOARD. The review cycle does not preclude the BOARD from taking action on any POLICY determined to be in need of revision.
During the course of the three-year review cycle, all
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Formatted: NormalPOLICIES and PROCEDURES shall be translated into Spanish and additional languages, as possible. Translated POLICIES and PROCEDURES shall be subject to the same revisions as their English-language counterparts.
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Jim Carlton & Caroline Porter:
The fate of City College of San Francisco, one of the nation's largest community colleges, rests largely on the surgically repaired shoulder of a state-appointed trustee named Robert Agrella.The 70-year-old former community-college president is in a race against time to slim down the bureaucratic behemoth with 80,000 students and 1,900 faculty before it implodes.
"In community colleges in general, we tried to be all things to all people," he said. "We cannot afford to do that any longer."
In July, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, said it plans to revoke the school's accreditation at the end of the school year, giving the college a year to prove that it can turn around or be shut down.
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Last week the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released results of 2013 state tests. While many other standardized tests get no respect, the NAEP assessments, also called "The Nation's Report Card," are highly regarded by educators, offering an accurate profile of state progress in reading, math, and science for public school students, including those enrolled in charter schools. You can't cheat on NAEP tests. They're weighted properly for socio-economics, disabilities, and English Language Learners. The country's harshest test critics, including doyenne Diane Ravitch, refers to NAEP as the "gold standard" of standardized testing.Via Laura Waters.New Jersey's scores were flat, one statistically insignificant point lower than last year's NAEP results. Forty-nine percent of 8th graders were proficient in math and 47 percent were proficient in reading. Our achievement gaps, historically larger than most states, were static, about 20 points between white and Hispanic children and 25 points between white and black children.
Diane Ravitch herself commented in the Huffington Post, "New Jersey...actually lost ground."
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"Pay to play" is a widely reviled practice in government, but that's effectively what the District's legal argument would establish through its challenge of an open records case in state court.For more than 10 months, Parents United for Public Education and our lawyers at the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia have been fighting to make public the Boston Consulting Group's list of 60 schools recommended for closure and the criteria it used for developing the list. In 2012, BCG contracted with the William Penn Foundation to provide "contract deliverables," one of which was identifying 60 public schools for closure. William Penn Foundation solicited donations for this contract, including some from real estate developers and those promoting charter expansion. The "BCG list" was referred to by former Chief Recovery Officer Thomas Knudsen in public statements. But District officials refused to release the list, saying that it was an internal document and therefore protected from public review.
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At first, artist Mica Angela Hendricks didn't want her four-year-old daughter near her new sketchbook. She is serious about her art, and she knew little Myla would want to scribble all over the pages. Then, her daughter said the words that changed everything.
"If you can't share, we'll have to take it away."She had used her own mother's words against her, and now Mica had no choice but to indulge Myla. She let her daughter finish one of her sketches, and pretty soon, they had a whole collection of collaborations.
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A woman who was part of a group I spoke to one evening last week in Fox Point said she volunteered to tutor high school students in Milwaukee who were struggling with reading. It went badly. The teens were far below grade level. They were not interested in school, not interested in reading, not interested -- period.Contrast that with what I saw one morning recently at Engleburg School, a Milwaukee Public Schools elementary at 5100 N. 91st St. A classroom has been set aside for the SPARK Early Literacy Program of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee, a project aimed at getting more kids on track as readers early on.
About 45 first- and second-graders at Engleburg are participating this fall. Two or three times a week, each spends a half-hour in the SPARK room, working one-on-one with tutors, many of them trained college students working under the federally funded Americorps program.
Little kid and big kid, almost shoulder to shoulder, with the big kid following a very specific program for what to do minute by minute. And behind that, collaboration between classroom teachers and SPARK staff to build up results. And behind that, mountains of research that shows that kids who do not get a good start on reading by third grade are much more likely to have poor long-term outcomes, both in school and beyond.
But -- and this is important -- the in-school work is just one of three parts of SPARK. The students are also involved in after-school reading sessions several times a week. And SPARK works with the families of the students, including making home visits, to coach parents and involve them in helping their kids become good readers. That includes providing books they can own and read together at home.
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Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has now pushed through a new evaluation system that will assign A-through-F grades to each public school, based largely on students' standardized test scores. The state Board of Education just approved criteria (see below) for the new scheme, which was part of the governor's 2013 school reform efforts. What Virginians don't know, because McDonnell hasn't mentioned it, is that the system he used as a model for his plans is in tatters.The system was pioneered in Florida when Jeb Bush was governor from 1999 to 2007 as part of Bush's push for corporate-influenced, standardized test-based reform, and it was used as a model in some 15 other states. The scheme involves more than simply assigning grades to schools; high stakes are involved, as schools can be closed if they get too many successive low grades.
When McDonnell was trying to sell the grading system to the Virginia legislature earlier this year, he sought help from Bush; the former governor praised McDonnell's plans in a teleconference, saying that the scheme had helped improve schools in Florida. In reality, the Florida system has been so plagued with problems that the Florida Association of District School Superintendents on Thursday urged state officials to revamp the system and released a proposal to eliminate the letter grades. The association's Web site says:
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A reference to nuclear warheads may seem out of place at a meeting of Newark educators, but not when you consider what's at stake.Via Laura Waters
The Newark Public School district and the city's charter schools are considering a plan that would blow up the status quo in what they say is an effort to provide equity to the city's schoolchildren.School officials are creating what some say is a first-in-the-nation voluntary effort to offer universal enrollment for students citywide to all of Newark's 71 public schools and 21 public charter schools.
Under the plan, there would be one application, one timeline and one central clearing space for information about all city schools. Essentially, it would eliminate the need for parents to go from school to school filling out applications and participating in separate lotteries in the hopes of getting a spot in a particular school.
Related: a majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.
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In "The New Abolitionism: Why Education Emancipation is the Moral Imperative of Our Time" (TOS, Winter 2012-13), I argued that America's government school system is immoral and antithetical to a free society, and that it must be abolished--not reformed. The present essay calls for the complete separation of school and state, indicates what a fully free market in education would look like, and explains why such a market would provide high-quality education for all children.
The Need for Separation of School and StateWhat is the proper relationship of school and state? In a free society, who is responsible for educating children? Toward answering these questions, consider James Madison's reasoning regarding the proper relationship of government and religion--reasoning that readily applies to the issue of education. In 1784, in response to Patrick Henry's call for a compulsory tax to support Christian (particularly Episcopalian) ministers, Madison penned his famous "Memorial and Remonstrance," a stirring defense of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. The heart of his argument can be reduced to three principles: first, individuals have an inalienable right to practice their religion as they see fit; second, religion must not be directed by the state; and third, religion is corrupted by government interference or control. Few Americans today would disagree with Madison's reasoning.
One virtue of Madison's response to Henry's bill is that its principles and logic extend beyond church-and-state relations. In fact, the principles and logic of his argument apply seamlessly to the relationship of education and state. If we substitute the word "education" for "religion" throughout Madison's text, we find a perfect parallel: first, parents have an inalienable right to educate their children according to their values; second, education must not be directed by the state; and third, education is corrupted by government interference or control. The parallel is stark, and the logic applies equally in both cases.
Just as Americans have a right to engage in whatever non-rights-violating religious practices they choose, so Americans have a right to engage in whatever educational practices they choose. And just as Americans would not grant government the authority to run their Sunday schools, so they should not grant government the authority to run their schools Monday through Friday.
Parents (and guardians) have a right to direct the education of their children.1 Parents' children are their children--not their neighbors' children or the community's children or the state's children. Consequently, parents have a right to educate their children in accordance with the parents' judgment and values. (Of course, if parents neglect or abuse their children, they can and should be prosecuted, and legitimate laws are on the books to this effect.) Further, parents, guardians, and citizens in general have a moral right to use their wealth as they judge best. Accordingly, they have a moral right and should have a legal right to patronize or not patronize a given school, to fund or not fund a given educational institution--and no one has a moral right or properly a legal right to force them to patronize or fund one of which they disapprove. These are relatively straightforward applications of the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness--the rights on which America was founded.
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Wisconsin Reading Coalition (PDF), via a kind email:
he National Center for Education Statistics has released the 2013 scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the "Nation's Report Card." While the press has rightly focused on Wisconsin's scores for black students (lowest in the country) and the black-white gap (largest in the country), the data indicates many other areas of concern. Here are some major takeaways from the critical 4th grade reading performance:How will Wisconsin respond?
- Wisconsin's average score (221) in 2013 is identical to 2011, and is statistically unchanged from our first NAEP score (224) in 1992.While we have remained stagnant, many other jurisdictions have seen statistically significant increases.
- Wisconsin ranked 31st out of 52 jurisdictions that participated in NAEP this year. In 1994, we ranked 3rd.
- Since 2007, the number of jurisdictions scoring significantly lower than Wisconsin has shrunk from 21 to 11. The number scoring significantly higher has grown from 8 to 15. Wisconsin sits in the lower half of the "middle" group of 26 jurisdictions.
- Only 8% of Wisconsin students scored at the advanced level, while 32% were below basic, the lowest level.
- Compared to their peer groups nationwide, Wisconsin's white, black, Hispanic, Asian, low income, and disabled students all scored below their respective national averages.
- Wisconsin had the lowest scores for black students in the nation.
- Wisconsin had the largest gap between white and black students in the nation.
Social and economic disadvantages affect achievement for many students, but other states do better at mitigating those realities. Wisconsin must look within the education system itself for improvement opportunities, starting with teacher preparation. Beginning in 2014, the Foundations of Reading exam will require prospective teachers to understand the science of reading that is woven through the Common Core State Standards and that is necessary for successful intervention with struggling readers. As DPI revises the regulations governing educator licensure and preparation program approval, it will be important to align them with the only comprehensive guidelines available, the Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading (Moats, Carreker, Davis, Meisel, Spear-Swerling, Wilson, 2010), and to encourage independent, objective program reviews for campuses. Equally important, our state and districts need to provide practicing teachers with that same knowledge of language structure and reading acquisition, and to track the impact of professional development on student performance outcomes. Programs like LETRS from Sopris Learning and the online coursework and coaching offerings from the Science of Reading Partnership deserve attention. Only then can we hope to see student outcomes begin to reflect the efforts of our dedicated educators.The pie charts below show the breakdown of proficiency levels of Wisconsin students as a whole and broken into sub-groups. The line graphs show the trend over time in Wisconsin scores compared to Massachusetts, Florida, and Washington, D.C., where the science of reading has found a greater acceptance in education, as well as the changes in national ranking for Massachusetts, Florida, and Wisconsin.
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"Management's Discussion and Analysis" (PDF):
Page 30: As provided in applicable negotiated contracts, certified District employees meeting a minimum age and length of service requirement may participate in the District's group health and insurance program upon retirement. The District bears the cost of the employee's participation up to the maximum amount it pays for active employees. For the year ended June 30, 2013, there were 1,138 participants and expenditures on a pay-as- you-go basis were $4,288,615. The District's sick leave liability at June 30, 2013 was $77,017,949, which represents $47,848,809 for currently active employees and $29,169,140 for retirees.As provided in applicable negotiated contracts, certified District employees meeting a minimum age and length of service requirement are eligible to receive early retirement benefits of 19% of the employee's salary for three years. For the year ended June 30, 2013, there were 352 participants and expenditures on a pay-as-you-go basis were $3,547,011 After applying a discount rate of 3%, the present value of the District's early retirement liability at June 30, 2013 was $7,054,700.
The District contributes 100% of the current year premium for teachers and non- administrative employees electing coverage and all other nonadministrative employees covered under one of three health plans. Administrators contribute 10% to the plans. The net OPEB obligation at June 30, 2013 was $8,471,005.
Page 36:
The Food Service Fund had an excess of actual expenditures over budget for the year ended June 30, 2013 of $455,570. The Capital Projects Fund had an excess of actual expenditures over budget for the year ended June 30, 2013 of $4,019,807 due to QZAB and Energy Efficiency financing and related capital expenditures. Special Revenue funds were in excess of budget by $374,390.
Page 44:
Administrator's Retirement Plan
The District has an administrators' retirement plan which covers eligible administrators with over 10 years of experience with the District. The plan requires contributions by administrators electing to participate in the plan. The District is required to make a defined contribution ranging from $30,000 to $36,000 annually to the plan upon the administrators' retirement for administrators with at least 15 years of service. The District contributed $181,446 to the plan for the year ended June 30, 2013.
"Using a Zero Based Budget Process" (PDF)
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IN THE film "Bad Teacher", Cameron Diaz's character says she entered the profession "for all the right reasons: shorter hours, summers off, no accountability". No one is threatening to take away the first two agreeable perks, but several states are eyeing the third.Much more on teacher content knowledge requirements, here.
In the past, teachers were judged solely on their level of education and the number of years they had spent in the classroom--neither of which tells you whether their pupils are learning anything. But this is changing. A new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a research group, finds that most states now demand that student achievement should be a significant factor in teacher evaluations (see chart). Only Alabama, California, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Texas and Vermont have no formal policy.
The expansion of teacher evaluation is broadly good news. Work published in 2011, from Columbia and Harvard, showed that pupils assigned to better teachers are more likely to go to college and earn decent salaries, and less likely to be teenage mothers. If teachers in grades 4 to 8 are ranked according to their ability to add value (ie, teach) and those in the bottom 5% are replaced with ones of average quality, a class's cumulative lifetime income is raised by $250,000. Bill Gates once said that if every child had mathematics teachers as good as those in the top quartile, the achievement gap between America and Asia would vanish in two years. (His lecture has been watched 1.5m times online.)
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There's no way to structure this coherently. They are random observations that might help explain the mental processes. But often, I think that we look at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why. We know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but it's rare to have a poor person actually explain it on their own behalf. So this is me doing that, sort of.
Rest is a luxury for the rich. I get up at 6AM, go to school (I have a full courseload, but I only have to go to two in-person classes) then work, then I get the kids, then I pick up my husband, then I have half an hour to change and go to Job 2. I get home from that at around 1230AM, then I have the rest of my classes and work to tend to. I'm in bed by 3. This isn't every day, I have two days off a week from each of my obligations. I use that time to clean the house and soothe Mr. Martini and see the kids for longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork. Those nights I'm in bed by midnight, but if I go to bed too early I won't be able to stay up the other nights because I'll fuck my pattern up, and I drive an hour home from Job 2 so I can't afford to be sleepy. I never get a day off from work unless I am fairly sick. It doesn't leave you much room to think about what you are doing, only to attend to the next thing and the next. Planning isn't in the mix.When I got pregnant the first time, I was living in a weekly motel. I had a minifridge with no freezer and a microwave. I was on WIC. I ate peanut butter from the jar and frozen burritos because they were 12/$2. Had I had a stove, I couldn't have made beef burritos that cheaply. And I needed the meat, I was pregnant. I might not have had any prenatal care, but I am intelligent enough to eat protein and iron whilst knocked up.
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#1: Good teaching needs to be seen as including those students who are already grade-level proficientThis would seem to make sense for all students.- Lesson plans (coherent instruction) - Curricular alignment
- Accountability#2 Needs-Based Learning
• What a student is learning should be based on his or her current level of mastery
• This may or may not correspond with age-level norms
Related: Some states begin to add teacher content knowledge requirements to the licensing process.
Much more on Madison's Talented & Gifted program along with a recent parent complaint.
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Yet the technical prerequisites are already well underway. Machine translation of signs, text, and speech brings down language barriers and facilitates ever more cross-cultural meetings of like minds. Immersive headsets, input devices, and telepresence robots further collapse space and time, allowing us to instantly be alongside others on the other side of the globe. Mobile technology makes us ever more mobile, increasingly permitting not just easier movement around a home base but permanent international relocation.Status quo governance of our agrarian era $15k/student public education structures are unlikely to survive the era of pervasive networks and cheap computing.Technology is thus enabling arbitrary numbers of people from around the world to assemble in remote locations, without interrupting their ability to work or communicate with existing networks. In this sense, the future of technology is not really location-based apps; it is about making location completely unimportant.
When physical goods themselves can't be digitized, our interface to them will be....
This is why location is becoming so much less important: technology is enabling us to access everything we need from our mobile phone, to find our true communities in the cloud, and to easily travel to assemble these communities in person. Taken together, we are rapidly approaching a future characterized by a totally new phenomenon, the reverse diaspora: one that starts out internationally distributed, finds each other online, and ends up physically concentrated.
What might these reverse diasporas be like? As a people whose primary bond is through the internet, many of their properties would not fit our pre-existing mental models. Unlike rugged individualists, these emigrants would be moving within or between nation states to become part of a community, not to strike out on their own. Unlike would-be revolutionaries, those migrating in this fashion would be doing so out of humility in their ability to change existing political systems. And unlike so-called secessionists, the specific site of physical concentration would be a matter of convenience, not passion; the geography incidental and not worth fighting over.
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For a city its size, Madison has a thriving arts community. And all artists start out as students in the schools. But it doesn't take an Einstein (or a Yo-Yo Ma) to note that a student in the Allied Drive neighborhood doesn't have the same exposure to the arts as a Shorewood kid.Now, amid a growing consensus that the arts are a critical element of educational success, Madison has become a demonstration city for boosting access to arts education for all students.
In July, the Washington, D.C.-based Kennedy Center designated Madison as the 12th Any Given Child city, following in the footsteps of Austin, Baltimore, Portland (Ore.) and Sacramento. As the first step in a two- to three-year process, the Kennedy Center has already partnered with the Madison Metropolitan School District, the city of Madison and the Overture Center to convene a new Community Arts Team, charged with improving "access and equity" to arts education for all K-8 students in the Madison schools.
"There are certain communities around the United States that realize the arts are as important as the other areas," said Kennedy Center vice president Darrell Ayers at a July press conference in Madison that announced the initiative. "We can ensure that every child in the school system, not just those who can afford it, can have the arts in their classroom."
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The Madison School District (PDF).
Related: 2009 Outbound Open Enrollment Parent Survey.
Madison's attempts to limit outbound open enrollment. Much more on open enrollment, here.
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The Middleton Education Association made one request to open negotiations with district officials in September and another request in October.Related: Madison Schools' Budget Updates: Board Questions, Spending Through 3.31.2013, Staffing Plan Changes, Middleton-Cross Plains School Board to appeal ruling on teacher fired for viewing porn at work and Commentary on Madison and Surrounding School Districts; Middleton's lower Property Taxes."We believe the recent Circuit Court ruling or the ruling Judge Colas made last year still allows us to bargain a complete or full master contract for the 2014-2015 school year. We also believe they are able to provide more of an increase," Chris Bauman, MEA president, said.
The Board of Education voted unanimously to delay any talks.
"We've requested to delay negotiations on a base salary partly because of our budget unknowns, enrollment, a variety of other things in terms of our total budget expenditures that are required for 2014-2015," MCPASD Superintendent Don Johnson said.
While the board decided to delay talks, some teachers at Middleton High School have begun circulating a petition in hopes of getting their message across.
Recently, the board approved an overall wage increase of $1,078 per year for teachers.
However, a number of teachers say the increase is not enough, considering their personal contributions to retirement and health care. In some people's opinion, the increase penalizes teachers who have been around for years.
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Two Democratic U.S. senators are giving a boost to the growing interest from members of both parties in Congress to make it easier for alternative models of higher education -- such as competency-based education -- to gain access to federal funding.Sens. Christopher Murphy of Connecticut and Brian Schatz of Hawaii said Thursday that they planned to introduce legislation next month that would create a competitive pilot program to fund innovations in higher education that would bring down costs and reduce the time needed to complete a degree.
"We're at the very early stages of the competency-based learning ecosystem," Murphy told reporters Thursday. "But the federal government should be a bigger partner in helping to develop these new innovative ecosystems around shorter-timeframe degree programs."
He said the fund would be aimed at innovations in online courses, competency-based degrees, dual-enrollment programs and accelerated degrees.
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Nearly half of the nation's colleges and universities are no longer generating enough tuition revenue to keep pace with inflation, highlighting the acceleration of a downward spiral that began as the recession ended, according to a new survey by Moody's Investors Service.The survey of nearly 300 schools reflects a cycle of disinvestment and falling enrollment that places a growing number at risk. While schools for two decades were seeing rising enrollments and routine increases of 5% to 8% in net tuition, many now are facing grimmer prospects: a shrinking pool of high-school graduates, depressed family incomes and precarious job prospects after college.
The softening demand for four-year degrees is prompting schools to rein in tuition increases while increasing scholarships. Those moves are cutting into net tuition revenue--the amount of money a university collects from tuition, minus school aid.
For 44% of public and 42% of private universities included in the survey, net tuition revenue is projected to grow less than the nation's roughly 2% inflation rate this fiscal year, which for most schools ends in June. Net tuition revenue will fall for 28% of public and 19% of private schools.
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Becoming a teacher in Michigan just became a lot more difficult.Related NCTQ study on teacher preparation and When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?.Only one in four aspiring teachers passed a beefed-up version of Michigan's teacher certification test - an exam that teachers must pass to be hired to lead a classroom - when the new test was administered for the first time last month.
The initial pass rate for the old version of the test was 82 percent; In October, with more difficult questions and higher scores needed to pass, the pass rate was 26 percent.
That means that three out of four students who completed what is typically a four- or five-year college program will have to retake the test or find another career.
The toughened certification tests are an effort to assure that only the most highly-qualified teachers are leading Michigan classrooms.
"Just like we'd want the best and most effective doctor," said State Superintendent Mike Flanagan said in a news release about the new, low pass rates. "The same applies to teaching Michigan's students."
Bridge Magazine raised concerns about the ease of teacher certification tests in October. At the time, aspiring Michigan teachers had a similar pass rate on certification tests as cosmetologists.
That story was part of a series examining the crucial role of teacher preparation in increasing learning in Michigan classrooms, where test scores show students are falling behind students in other states.
UW-Madison School of Education Dean Julie Underwood continues her "status quo" advocacy via this latest op-ed.
Madison Literary Club Talk: Examinations for Teachers Past and Present
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For years, California has attempted to reform its teacher preparation programs to better prepare new teachers for the classroom. Alternative routes have popped up to offer aspiring teachers, in many cases, a less expensive and faster route to teaching. The state's extensive performance exams for teacher candidates have served as a model for the rest of the nation.Related NCTQ study on teacher preparation and When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?.Now, a teacher preparation program in California is pledging career-long support to its graduates. On Thursday, the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education launched a free helpline for its 25,000 alumni that will connect struggling graduates with a "rapid response team" of nine full-time faculty members. That team will diagnose problems, build individual plans for alumni, and offer solutions that range from site visits, to coaching, to professional development resources.
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Maybe online course aren't going to remake the face of higher education after all.After a fast start, reality seems to be closing in on the world of the massive, open, online courses that were supposed to replace traditional lectures and recitations and make free, or at least very cheap, higher education available to everyone. San Jose State University has slowed down a move to deliver introductory undergraduate courses through MOOC provider Udacity.
Udacity itself, one of several MOOC providers that have sprung up in the last couple of years, is refocusing its activities on corporate training. Sebastian Thrun, Stanford computer scienctist and founder of Udacity, told Fast Company, "We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don't educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product. It was a painful moment."
No surprise. I'm not surprised. I've been a skeptical enthusiast for online education since MIT started its Open Courseware initiative a few years back, and over the last year or so, I have enrolled in several offerings, mostly from Coursera, like Udacity, a for-profit provider of open courses. My experience has been a very mixed bag, but one that has taught me a lot about where the approach does and doesn't work. A couple of general observations. First, the technology has a long way to go and on one seems to have figured out a completely effective way to deliver lectures on video. I've seen a number of approaches, from video recording regular blackboard lectures, to slide-based presentations in which the instructor only occasionally appears, to a course that used cartoony "virtual students" to asked questions in computer synthesized voices. None worked completely, though the last was the most annoying. Online lectures today remind me of the earliest days of television, when shows were "radio with pictures." No one has quite cracked the medium yet.
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Last week legislation was introduced in the Senate and House to create federally funded universal pre-k for 4-year-olds. The details of the legislation are largely consistent with the White House proposal, called Preschool for All, that was announced in the president's state of the union address in February.The rhetoric around the introduction of the legislation includes the by now entirely predictable and thoroughly misleading appeal to the overwhelming research evidence supporting such an investment. For example, Senator Harkin, the lead author of the Senate version of the legislation, declared that "Decades of research tell us that ... early learning is the best investment we can make to prepare our children for a lifetime of success."
By way of background, I'm a developmental psychologist by training and spent the majority of my career designing and evaluating programs intended to enhance the cognitive development of young children. For instance, I directed a national Head Start Quality Research Center; created a program, Dialogic Reading (which is a widely used and effective intervention for enhancing the language development and book knowledge of young children from low-income families); and authored an assessment tool, the Get Ready to Read Screen, that has become a staple of early intervention program evaluation. My point is that I care about early childhood education and believe it is important - as witnessed by how I spent my professional life for 30 years.
My career since 2001 has largely been about advancing evidence-based education, which is the endeavor of collecting and using the best possible evidence to support policy and practice in education. Since the president's state of the union address, I've been writing that the evidence is decidedly mixed on the impact of the type of preschool investments the president has called for and that we now see in the legislation introduced in Congress. It may seem in the pieces I've written that I'm wearing only my evidence-based education hat. But in fact if you're an advocate of strengthening early childhood programs, as I am, you also need to pay careful attention to the evidence - all of it. Poor children deserve effective programs, not just programs that are well-intentioned.
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Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse.Analysis of past societies shows that these destabilizing historical trends develop slowly, last many decades, and are slow to subside. The Roman Empire, Imperial China and medieval and early-modern England and France suffered such cycles, to cite a few examples. In the U.S., the last long period of instability began in the 1850s and lasted through the Gilded Age and the "violent 1910s."
We now see the same forces in the contemporary U.S. Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades.
The roots of the current American predicament go back to the 1970s, when wages of workers stopped keeping pace with their productivity. The two curves diverged: Productivity continued to rise, as wages stagnated. The "great divergence" between the fortunes of the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent is much discussed, yet its implications for long-term political disorder are underappreciated. Battles such as the recent government shutdown are only one manifestation of what is likely to be a decade-long period.
How does growing economic inequality lead to political instability? Partly this correlation reflects a direct, causal connection. High inequality is corrosive of social cooperation and willingness to compromise, and waning cooperation means more discord and political infighting. Perhaps more important, economic inequality is also a symptom of deeper social changes, which have gone largely unnoticed.
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When Brandeis University president Jehuda Reinharz stepped down three years ago, he moved back into his old faculty office.
But unlike most history professors, Reinharz does not teach any classes, supervise graduate students, or attend departmental meetings. He did not bother posing for the department photo. The chairwoman for Near Eastern and Judaic Studies said she did not even know whether he was officially a member of her department.Yet Reinharz remains one of the highest paid people on campus.
He received more than $600,000 in salary and benefits in 2011, second only to the new Brandeis president, according to the school's most recent public tax returns. And that's on top of the $800,000 Reinharz earned in his new job as president of the Mandel Foundation, a longtime Brandeis benefactor.
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From Cicero to John Keats, Virginia Woolf to Jack Kerouac --how would these masters of the letter have taken to the inbox and junk folder? Would they have withheld their jewels of prose behind passwords and defunct operating systems? Would they have been cloud-savvy enough to pass on their attachments and YouTube links to future generations?These aren't frivolous questions. We have grown used to the fact that we no longer write letters as we used to, but I'm not sure we have fully contemplated what this means to future generations. We love email, as we should--for its brilliant speed, its global reach, its free transmission of vast amounts of information. Its terrors (the cc'ed indiscretions, the "always-on" culture, the Big Brother scenarios) have not lessened its use. But how much have we really sacrificed on this altar of swiftness and efficiency?
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Naps aren't for everyone, though. I've heard lots of people say naps don't make them feel better, so I wanted to explore how naps affect your brain and whether they really are good for you or not.
How sleep affects usBetter sleeping is known to provide lots of health benefits. These can include better heart function, hormonal maintenance and cell repair as well as boosting memory and improving cognitive function. Basically, sleeping gives your body a chance to deal with everything that happened during the day, repair itself, and reset for tomorrow.
Sleep deprivation, therefore, actually harms us in several ways. One of the most obvious harms is that we have trouble focusing when we're sleep deprived. Buffer cofounder Leo Widrich wrote about this before:
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The state Board of Regents fleshed out proposals to reduce and reform testing in New York schools at their regular meetings Monday and Tuesday, including a plan to shorten math and English exams.The state plans to cut down the amount of time students spend taking math exams by 20 minutes in all grades and will also cut the number of questions to relieve concerns about students not being able to finish.
In grades five through eight, the state will reduce questions on English exams, but maintain the maximum testing time, giving students more time for each question.
The state is moving forward seeking a federal waiver to relieve eighth graders in advanced Algebra from taking both the eighth-grade and the high school-level assessments. While about 57,000 students would be affected by that change, the state is expanding the waiver request to include another 2,000 students, including seventh graders who are also taking the algebra course as well as eighth graders who are taking high-school geometry.
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Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:
Portfolio cities are not all created equal. Some, like New Orleans, have been able to advance quickly. Others are slowed down by the public reactions to school closures or school board turnover or other political or technical realities. District leaders like the idea of accountability for schools, but avoid creating clear performance criteria. They like the idea of new schools, but don't want to close low performers. They like the idea of partnering with a few charter schools, but they don't want to upset the unions by partnering with more. They like the idea of school-level decisionmaking, but don't want to shrink their central offices.Civic leaders and philanthropists who want to support portfolio efforts need to be skeptical of people who adopt the word "portfolio" without really being serious about carrying out the reform. It's also easy for even the most well-intentioned portfolio leaders to get caught up in day-to-day policymaking and implementation and lose sight of whether their efforts are panning out in meaningful changes for students.
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Police tried to spy on Cambridge students, secret footage shows Officer is filmed attempting to persuade activist in his 20s to become informant targeting 'student-union type stuff'Police sought to launch a secret operation to spy on the political activities of students at Cambridge University, a covertly recorded film reveals.
An officer monitoring political campaigners attempted to persuade an activist in his 20s to become an informant and feed him information about students and other protesters in return for money.
But instead the activist wore a hidden camera to record a meeting with the officer and expose the surveillance of undergraduates and others at the 800-year-old institution.
The officer, who is part of a covert unit, is filmed saying the police need informants like him to collect information about student protests as it is "impossible" to infiltrate their own officers into the university.
The Guardian is not disclosing the name of the Cambridgeshire officer and will call him Peter Smith. He asks the man who he is trying to recruit to target "student-union type stuff" and says that would be of interest because "the things they discuss can have an impact on community issues".
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When Federal District Court Judge William H. Pauley III ruled in June that Fox Searchlight Pictures should have paid two interns who worked on its award-winning film "Black Swan," he did not leave a lot of room for interpretation. Pauley concluded that unpaid internship programs were in clear and near-universal violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Interns whose labor benefits their employer are workers and are thereby entitled to minimum wage. The judge was not creating new law; he was simply enforcing what has been on the books. The ruling has already convinced some employers to decide how to handle their unpaid help, and interns to organize efforts to recover their stolen pay.Hollywood is not the only industry paying attention; university administrators are worried as well. The common practice of granting class credit for completed internships has contributed to the dramatic increase of unpaid internships. According to a survey-based study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), a record 63 percent of 2013 graduates had completed an internship. A similar study by the college recruiting consultancy Intern Bridge found that just under half of interns received school credit. Credits are what universities are selling. Since outsourcing the actual teaching to employers saves money -- it is cheaper to certify than instruct -- American universities have jumped on the intern bandwagon.
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Scientists are calling for a wider public debate on a new development in genetics that could allow the simple and accurate manipulation of the human genome, as revealed yesterday by The Independent.The technique, known as CRISPR, could revolutionise human gene therapy and genetic engineering because it allows scientists for the first time to make the finest changes to the DNA of the chromosomes with relative ease.
One Nobel scientist, Craig Mello of the University of Massachusetts, said that the "jaw dropping" technique has the potential to transform the study and manipulation of genes and "lowers the barrier" to genetic engineering of human IVF embryos - something he would oppose.
Professor George Church of Harvard University, who was the first scientist to get the process working in human cells and mouse embryos, said that it was important to air the social and ethical implications of the technique to the wider public.
"Talking about the future is better than letting it sneak up on us. We need to do more of this or we will be left with very limited vocabulary in the space between positive and negative hype," Professor Church said.
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In the 11 months since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., another school attack or safety scare seems to unfold almost weekly.Three students -- two 17-year-olds and a 16-year-old -- were shot and wounded Wednesday near a Pittsburgh high school as they walked to their car after classes. A 20-year-old man armed with an AK-47-style rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition entered an elementary school in Decatur, Ga., on Aug. 20 and fired a few rounds but surrendered before anyone was injured. A 45-year-old teacher was shot to death, allegedly by a 12-year-old student, at Nevada's Sparks Middle School on Oct. 21. The next day, a Massachusetts high school math teacher was stabbed to death with a box cutter, allegedly by a 14-year-old student.
It'd be easy to conclude that school has never been a more dangerous place, but for the USA's 55 million K-12 students and 3.7 million teachers, statistics tell another story: Despite two decades of high-profile shootings, school increasingly has become a safer place.
The trend is playing out against a backdrop of jitters over school security that have accumulated since Newtown. Schools in some states are urged to issue concealed handgun permits to teachers and buy them bulletproof whiteboards and desk calendars. An Ohio company sells a $100 Kevlar insert it says will make any backpack bulletproof. Educators attend training sessions in which they're advised to charge armed attackers.
"I think (the concern) has to do with the psychological impact of some of these incidents," says David Esquith, director of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Safe and Healthy Students, which oversees school security. "(The shootings) are so upsetting and traumatic, it reinforces a perception that schools are experiencing a spike in violence and victimization, when in fact they're not."
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):
Last Monday's Supreme Court hearing, scheduled for 90 minutes, went almost four hours, given numerous comments and questions from the Justices - all seven participating to some degree. The resultant responses caused tension, such as Attorney General Van Hollen's response to Justice Ann Walsh Bradley's comment, "aren't the parties' arguments like ships passing in the night?" Van Hollen retorted that the two ships, "... are on a collision course" and "the State has a bigger ship and we shall win!"As The Progressive editor Ruth Conniff wrote of the exchange, "That pretty much sums up the Walker Administration's attitude toward the teachers, janitors, clerks, and municipal employees it seeks to disempower through Act 10. The state is bigger and stronger, Walker, Van Hollen, and their allies argue, and will not be deterred by public outcry, mass protests, or even the courts."
MTI legal counsel Lester Pines, when presenting the Union's argument resurrected the ship analogy, telling Van Hollen that, "The Titanic was a big ship too, compared to the relatively small iceberg that caused it to sink." Pines added that the administration's Act 10, like the Titanic, has hit an iceberg, and that the iceberg in this case is the Wisconsin Constitution.
In his argument, Pines told the Court that the fundamental argument came down to Constitutional rights. Pines' claim led to Van Hollen claiming, "There is no constitutional right to collective bargaining."
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In 1962, a group of people at the Gorizia Mental Hospital in northern Italy began dismantling the fence that surrounded the institution. Footage from a documentary by the Italian film-maker Sergio Zavoli shows what appears to be patients and staff cutting and pulling down sections of the high metal fence - a fence built with the clear purpose to both demarcate a specific area of a building and to keep people from getting over it. Significantly, we see the fence that defined the boundary of the hospital being dismantled from inside the compound, and the faces of those pulling each segment of it to the ground express relief, even joy. In Italian, the voiceover of the film describes the action:In November 1962, the psychiatric team directed by Dr Franco Basaglia opened up the first ward of the hospital and inaugurated a therapeutic community. Hospital life will be regulated by ward assemblies and by general assemblies. The patients are regaining a human and social role, as they get to take care of themselves and their existence through an ongoing communication with the people treating them. Once the prison-like nature of the institution has been abolished, the nature of its ideology can be studied.
Dr Franco Basaglia had been made director of the Gorizia Mental Hospital the previous year. He initiated the demolition of the containment structure devised to keep the patients inside the hospital which had, according to the new director, operated more like a prison camp than a place intended for treatment and care. The fence was not just there for the sake of the patients; it existed to protect society from the insane and insanity. Now the fence was coming down.
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When Ferran Adrià, the Spanish maestro who is undisputedly the most influential chef of the last two decades, gave up cooking at his restaurant El Bulli, he announced that he was going to be starting a number of projects. One of them is intended to be a foundation dedicated to the study of himself. Another was a collaboration on the subject of food and science with Harvard. I think quite a few people, on first hearing about that, scratched their heads and wondered what a joint venture between the two might be like. On the one hand, seawater sorbet and ampoules of reduced prawn head bouillon (two Adrià signature dishes). On the other, Helen Vendler. Outcome not obvious.What we outsiders didn't know is that all undergraduates at Harvard are required to take at least one class in science. As a result, the university offers some courses designed to be appealing to the kinds of student who wouldn't be studying science unless they had to. Once that's known, it makes a lot of sense to involve Adrià, who is rock-star famous in the world of food, in a course designed to appeal to the clever and curious and artily-minded young. So here it is: SPU27, an acronym standing for Science of the Physical Universe 27. Spelled out in English, the name of the course is Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science. The person who thinks it's funny that SPU sounds like 'spew'? Harvard isn't cross with you. Just ... disappointed.
Once upon a time, to take a course like SPU27, you had to be young enough and lucky enough in all the relevant ways to get to Harvard. Today, all you need is to be lucky enough to have access to a computer with an internet connection. SPU27 is part of a remarkable experiment in open access university education called EdX, a collaboration between Harvard and MIT, which gives away entire courses, online, for free. The type of course is known as a MOOC, for Massive Open Online Course, and is a big growth area in the field of education, with a truly extraordinary amount of material now available, almost entirely from American universities.＊ One of the leaders in the field is Stanford, creator of the first MOOCs.
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The U.S. Justice Department says Louisiana's private school voucher program must be monitored to make sure it doesn't make public school segregation worse. To that end, it wants the state to submit extensive student and school demographics each year.Moreover, federal lawyers say that after 25 years of working together, Louisiana has largely stopped cooperating with the federal government on efforts to ensure racial equality in schools. They made the case in a memo filed Friday with Judge Ivan Lemelle in federal District Court in New Orleans.
The lawyers wrote that "the United States' requests for information in this case are not an attack on the voucher program." However, the demand is likely to raise Gov. Bobby Jindal's hackles once more in this high-profile court case that has drawn support from prominent national Republicans, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, both of whom visited New Orleans voucher schools this month.
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In mid-October, Milwaukee Public Schools announced that enrollment for this year was up from a year ago, "reversing a decline that lasted nearly a decade."Which is true, except it comes with a big asterisk. When it comes to the roster of schools most people think of when they think of MPS, the enrollment decline continues, and that trend is of great importance when you try to envision where we're going with the whole education enterprise in Milwaukee.
Now that all the official enrollment counts have been posted for schools where Milwaukee children receive publicly funded education, this is the central fact:
The percentage of children in schools outside the mainstream MPS system has, for the first time, crossed 40%. In other words, two out of every five Milwaukee children whose education is paid for by tax dollars are not being taught by MPS teachers. The percentage has been going up one to two points a year, and that happened again this year.
In short, the main body of MPS continues to lose kids, which ultimately means money, employees and vitality, and the array of other streams of local schools continues to gain strength, which ultimately means -- well, actually, I don't know what that ultimately means, which is one reason why keeping an eye on the trends is important.
How is the MPS statement about increased enrollment accurate? Simple: With Superintendent Gregory Thornton as a key advocate, MPS is increasingly embracing the change in Milwaukee's remarkably complex school landscape. Which is to say, there was a sharp increase in students in charter schools run by organizations independent of the MPS structure, not staffed by MPS principals and teachers, but authorized to operate by the Milwaukee School Board.
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"Do we want more for our kids, or do we want less?" Duncan said. "Do we want higher standards or not?"That's the debate that Duncan dearly wants to have.
It's not, however, the debate he's getting.
To the immense frustration of Common Core supporters, an eclectic array of critics have raised sustained and impassioned objections about the new standards. From New York to Florida to Michigan to Louisiana, their voices are so loud and their critiques so varied that they have muddied the narrative around Common Core. It's no longer a focused national debate about high standards; it's hundreds of local debates, about everything from student privacy rights to cursive handwriting to computerized testing to the value of Shakespeare.
Over the summer, Duncan complained that opponents were "fringe groups" who make "outlandish claims" about "really wacky stuff" such as "mind control, robots, and biometric brain mapping." There is undoubtedly some of that.
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A couple of weeks ago, Leo, a freshman at East High School, carried a plate of spaghetti through the school lunch line. But the food service worker said he couldn't keep the food on his tray.The money in Leo's lunch account had run out, and his "temporary meal status" had expired.
Leo left the line, but something compelled him to go back up. He asked what they were going to do with his lunch, and the woman said she had to throw it away.
"Can I just have it then?" he asked. But policy is policy. Leo's lunch went to the landfill.
Leo's brother Julian gave him some bread.
This story would upset me if I heard it about any kid. But Leo's my son, so I really couldn't shake the image. Mother mammals want their kids to be fed. I called the 9th grade office, and I called the Food & Nutrition office, and gave them both a piece of my mind.
They said they should have given Leo something to eat. Like more than half of the kids in the Madison school district, our kids are eligible for free and reduced lunch.
It happened again Tuesday. This time, he tried to get a hamburger, but his "status" only entitled him to a sandwich, milk and fruit. Leo waited five minutes for the sandwich. Then he gave up.
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On its face, sending money to religious schools ought to be unconstitutional under the First Amendment's prohibition against promoting religion. The designers of vouchers cleverly got around that by sending "vouchers" to families who meet certain financial guidelines and who, in turn, pay for tuition at a private school.Related: Sweden's voucher system.So now Jewish taxpayers are helping fund Christian schools, nonbelievers are contributing to devout fundamentalists, and scientists are helping pay for evolution deniers.
Worse, though, is that the proliferation of vouchers is eating at the very fabric of the American public education system -- a system in which children of all beliefs, creeds and colors learn about each other, share experiences and explore conflicting ideas so that they can intelligently engage in the complexities of American democracy.
That's what is so dangerous about vouchers. Using taxpayer dollars, they promote putting people who look alike and think alike with each other. That may be your view of the world, but don't ask others to pay for it.
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"Of all the places I remember from my childhood," David Thornburg writes, "school was the most depressing." The now award-winning educational futurist and creator of the "educational holodeck," Thornburg's early experience in the classroom prompted him to help others rethink traditional classroom design. In his latest book, From the Campfire to the Holodeck: Creating Engaging and Powerful 21st Century Learning Environments, Thornburg outlines four learning models: the traditional "campfire," or lecture-based design; the "watering hole," or social learning; the "cave," a place to quietly reflect; and "life"--where ideas are tested.I spoke with Thornburg about his project-based approach to learning, why traditional models of teaching fail, and how to incorporate technology into education to teach students how to think creatively. Here's a transcript of our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity.
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The first six months of 2013 brought us a small measure of good news about student loans: the delinquency rate, while still far too high for comfort, was falling.Sadly, that's no longer the case. As shown on the graph below, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports that 11.8% of outstanding loan balances were 90 days or more past due by the end of September, a new post-recession high.
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One of the most important lessons good parents teach toddlers is that not getting one's way is no excuse for behaving badly.It appears that much of Indiana's educational and political leadership never got that valuable piece of developmental training.
On Wednesday, a meeting of the Indiana Board of Education descended into -- well, chaos would be too kind a term. Some hybrid of blood feud and epic temper tantrum would be closer to the mark.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz closed and then walked out of the meeting after a board member made a motion Ritz said was inappropriate and illegal. The board members, all of whom were appointed by Republican governors, accused Ritz of thwarting reform and unfairly using her position as chair to stifle discussion. Ritz accused Gov. Mike Pence, a Republican, of attempting to deny the will of the voters and take over education. Pence responded with a statement and an op-ed piece that made it seem as if Ritz's conduct were something he needed to scrape off the bottom of his shoe.
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Who is troubled by this week's Sebastian Thrun hagiography ('Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course') in Fast Company, as well as this announcement ('Launching our Data Science & Big Data Track built with Leading Industry Partners') via the Udacity blog (both posted on 14 November 2013)? A lot of committed open education thinkers and practitioners, so it seems, and not merely because of the hype machine Thrun so evidently cultivates (I'll leave aside the possible negative reaction to Thrun getting photographed in Lycra tights through a filter borrowed from a 1970s Swedish cinematographer, or the journalist's attempt to throw in a clichéd Matrix reference):
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Taking the No. 6 train downtown Friday morning, Kelman Ramirez looks like any New York office drone. He's got the red paisley tie, the black lace-up shoes, the worn building pass lodged in his wallet. When he arrives at the Capital Group in Rockefeller Center, he gives his receptionist the usual polite hello. Ho-hum. But here's the twist: Mr. Ramirez is only 17 years old.He attends Cristo Rey New York, a small Catholic school in East Harlem where students pay their tuition by working as corporate serfs. Dressed in jackets, ties and little black suits, the students, some as young as 14, fan across the city to the cubicles and board rooms of companies such as McKinsey, Deloitte and Morgan Stanley, where they shred documents, file trade confirmations and reconcile expense reports. Their earnings, billed at roughly $19 an hour, fund nearly half the school's budget.
At Cristo Rey, it's all business--the place is even decorated to look like an office. The Rev. Joseph Parkes, the school's president ("Like the CEO!" he says) gave me a tour last week. It's the cleanest, sparest school you've ever seen. There are beige walls, framed art prints and slate-blue carpets. The classrooms look like corporate training rooms, with smartboards and long gray tables. There are no bells, says Father Parkes, because there are "no bells in the corporate environment."
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Maryland's scores on a national reading test may have been inflated because the state's schools excluded a higher percentage of special-education students than any other state, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education.The National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the test, estimates that Maryland's scores were 7 points higher for fourth-grade reading and 5 points higher for eighth-grade reading because of the exclusion.
Maryland has always earned high scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and its steady increases in test scores over the years has helped earn it the ranking of No. 1 in the nation by Education Week, an often-quoted measure.
"When exclusion rates are higher, average scores tend to be higher than if more children were tested," said Larry Feinberg, assistant director for reporting and analysis for the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent body that sets policy for NAEP.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeannie Bettner Kamholtz:
In February 2011, Governor Walker, as he described it, "dropped the bomb" on Wisconsin's public employees, the birthplace of public employee bargaining, by proposing a law (Act 10) which would eliminate the right of collective bargaining in school districts, cities, counties, and most of the public sector. Collective Bargaining Agreements provide employment security and economic security, as well as wage increases, fringe benefits, and as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Holmes said many years ago, an effective voice for employees in the workplace. Unions had achieved these rights and benefits in a half-century of bargaining. Ostensibly proposed to address an alleged budget shortfall, the Governor's proposed Act 10 not only called for reductions in economic benefits for public employees (e.g. limits on employer contributions toward pensions and health care), but prohibited public employers from bargaining with nearly all public employees over any issue, other than limited wage increases, under which no employee could recover losses due to the increase in the Consumer Price Index. For example, under Act 10, teacher unions can no longer bargain over issues of school safety, class size, planning and preparation time, and health insurance; educational assistants can no longer bargain over salary progression, insurance coverage or training; clerical/technical workers can no longer bargain over work hours, vacation benefits or time off to care for sick children; and state workers can no longer bargain over whistle-blower protections. The intent of the Governor was to silence public employees on issues of primary importance to them and those they serve, and to eliminate their political activity. His stated extreme, no compromise, "divide and conquer" approach was to gain full power over employees. That resulted in MTI members walking out for four days to engage in political action. Soon thereafter thousands followed MTI members, resulting in the largest protest movement in State history.MTI legally challenged Walker's law and in September, 2012, MTI, represented by Lester Pines, and his partners Tamara Packard and Susan Crawford, prevailed in an action before Dane County Circuit Court Judge Juan Colas, wherein Colas found that most of Act 10 is unconstitutional. In ruling on MTI's petition, Colas agreed that Act 10 is unconstitutional as it violates MTI members' freedom of association and equal protection, both of which are guaranteed by the Wisconsin Constitution. This enabled MTI to bargain Contracts for its five (5) bargaining units for 2014-15. MTI's are among the few public sector contracts in Wisconsin for 2014-15.
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When Beth Tillack learned that her son had made his middle school's honor roll, she immediately took away his computer privileges and called the school to demand a retraction.The shocking reaction to something most parents celebrate by defacing their car's bumper was prompted by a D that Douglas got in civics.
"The bottom line is there is nothing honorable about making a D," the Pasco County, Florida mom told a local news station. "I was not happy, because how can I get my child to study for a test when he thinks he's done enough."
Dade City's Pasco Middle School places students on its honor roll based on their Grade Point Average.
In addition to the D, Douglas also got three A's and a C, giving him a GPA of 3.16 -- more than enough to be counted among the school's best and brightest.
But thanks to his mom, the Pasco County schools superintendent has announced that the honor roll policy will be changed to allow only students with all A's or A's and B's to be considered for inclusion.
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Elementary school students in Finland could be adding coding and programming to their nightly homework routine in the near future.Potentially following in the footsteps of neighboring country Estonia, Alexander Stubb -- the Finnish Minister of European Affairs and Foreign Trade -- told Mashable that teaching basic programming skills to young kids in the classroom is on the country's radar.
"It would be a great idea to have coding as a voluntary or otherwise subject in school," Stubb says. "Kids today are growing up as natives to technology, and the sooner they get going, the better. It starts with games and familiarizing themselves with gadgets, and coding is a big part of that."
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Students can sometimes be the very best advocates for the teaching profession. Here's a few shout-outs to MPS teachers from none other than their appreciative students.Dear Mrs. Grant,
Thank you for everything! You have supported me through a lot. All the time you have helped me I am so grateful for. You are one of my memorable and favorite teachers!
From, Alyana CastrejonMRS. OGUNBOWALE
You are my favorite teacher I ever met even though I get in trouble.my favorite teacher
Ms. Cynthia Wilder is my favorite. She's a peaceful woman. She is very nice. She is always helping me with my work. When i feel like I want to give up on something she'll say to never give up, always keep trying. You'll never get to where you want to be if you give up.Dear Ms. Carney,
Thank you for making this the best year yet. You are one of my favorite teachers and I truly appreciate everything you do every day. When I first came into seventh grade I didn't understand anything but you made it easy for me, so thank you for that. I wish all the best of luck next year when you get your new students.
-Alondra Corro
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About one in five Harvard seniors applies to Teach for America. However, only a "minuscule" percentage of the class actually studies education, according to Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean James Ryan.What accounts for this difference? Why are so many of America's brightest students apparently interested in teaching but not availing themselves of the training their school has to offer?
Part of what's to blame is a long-standing institutional snobbery toward teaching. As Walter Isaacson put it at this year's Washington Ideas Forum, there's a perception that "it's beneath the dignity of an Ivy League school to train teachers."
Teach for America has helped change that perception. "I think TFA has done a lot in terms of elevating the profession of teaching and elevating the importance of public education and education generally," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in conversation with Isaacson, CEO of The Aspen Institute, and Ryan.
But Harvard and other schools like it haven't made it a priority to encourage students to pursue teaching--and so students are looking for opportunities elsewhere. As Ryan put it, "There's a tremendous demand for teacher training--and the main outlet is TFA."
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Across schools, however, better pupils are assigned to slightly better teachers on average. The common practice of "tracking" pupils (filtering good ones into more advanced courses) could be to blame, the authors reckon, though they abstain from drawing firm conclusions. Whatever the cause, getting more effective teachers to instruct better-performing pupils naturally exacerbates the gap in achievement. Making the best teachers work with the worst pupils could go a long way toward minimising the yawning differences in attainment within a school system, the authors contend.Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates and Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood.At the very least, that change would be lucrative for the pupils who benefit from it, according to the researchers' second paper. They compare their measure of teacher quality against pupils' fortunes as adults, after again controlling for pupils' previous test scores and demography. (Pupils from the earliest years of their sample are now in their late 20s.) Unsurprisingly, exposure to better teachers is associated with an increased probability of attending university and, among pupils who go on to university, with attendance at better ones, as well as with higher earnings. Somewhat more unexpectedly, good teachers also seem to reduce odds of teenage pregnancy and raise participation in retirement-savings plans. Effects seem to be stronger for girls than for boys, and English teachers have a longer-lasting influence on their pupils' futures than maths teachers.
The authors reckon that swapping a teacher at the bottom of the value-added spectrum with one of average quality raises the collective lifetime income of each class they teach by $1.4m. That rise would apply across all the teacher's classes and over the whole of his or her career.
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saac Asimov, the astonishingly prolific science fiction writer, died in 1992, but he foresaw much about American politics today. One of his most profound works is the neglected short story "Franchise," written in 1955, in the days when computers were bulky, room-sized machines powered by vacuum tubes and operated by a high priesthood of punch card-wielding technicians. For a work of fiction, it is stunningly prescient.In Asimov's tale, set in November 2008, democratic elections have become nearly obsolete. A mysterious supercomputer said to be "half a mile long and three stories high," named Multivac, absorbs most of the current information about economic and political conditions and estimates which candidate is going to win. The machine, however, can't quite do the job on its own, as there are some ineffable social influences it cannot measure and evaluate. So Multivac picks out one "representative" person from the electorate to ask about the country's mood (sample query: "What do you think of the price of eggs?"). The answers, when combined with the initial computer diagnosis, suffice to settle the election. No one actually needs to vote.
Asimov was on to something: American political campaigns have indeed become extraordinarily sophisticated data-mining operations driven by smart computers, harvesting and sifting through vast virtual warehouses of demographic information and consumer preferences to manipulate and shape the electorate. They may not do the voting for us, but this new generation of intelligent machines can do just about everything else. And when it comes to humans actually casting their ballots, well, we hardly are surprised by the results: Computer-powered data jocks such as Nate Silver can predict the outcomes of most races and often the margins of victory as well. We're not too far off from the world of Asimov's protagonist, an Indiana department-store clerk dragooned into being America's lone "voter." "From the way your brain and heart and hormones and sweat glands work, Multivac can judge exactly how intensely you feel about the matter," the machine operators tell him. "It will understand your feelings better than you yourself."
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As a pundit, Diane Ravitch is nothing if not prolific. That aptly describes her constant stream of blog posts, tweets, speeches to teacher unions and anti-reform crowds, and promotional book tour stops and media interviews. It also describes her flow of incompatible viewpoints.Take her view on NAEP test scores, for example. In a New York Times op-ed from 2005, Ravitch called NAEP "the gold standard," and in a 2006 WSJ piece with Chester Finn, she said "NAEP's role as honest auditor makes state officials squirm." Just three years ago, she touted NAEP as "more trustworthy than state exams." She used NAEP score comparisons as the foundation for her argument against charter schools and No Child Left Behind in the 2010 WSJ op-ed she penned explaining her change of heart.
And in her most recent book, which critics have argued "trades fact for fiction," she bases her critique of Michelle Rhee's record as DCPS Chancellor on the foundation that NAEP scores illustrate Rhee "did not turn it into the highest-performing urban district in the United States."
Yet last week, when 2013 NAEP scores were released, she found the "statistical horse race utterly stupid." She completely dismissed commending the historic gains made in DC and Tennessee as "nonsense" and "hype," asking, were "students in the states with the biggest gains getting better education or more test prep?" This despite the fact that she wrote in her just-published book "there is no way to prepare for NAEP."
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Most of the buildings in Machakos, the former capital of Kenya, are made of concrete, with neat fences, informal gardens, indoor plumbing, and electricity, however erratic. By contrast, the local schoolhouse of Bridge International Academies is beyond basic: walls of corrugated tin, a plywood frame. There's no electrical wiring in sight. A pair of latrines adjoin an open courtyard that doubles as a lunch and recreation area. A few young children loll on the patchy grass, engaged in unhurried conversation.Yet this school is by no means a failure -- in fact, it recently passed a 700-point inspection and is running exactly as planned. This is just one of 212 Bridge Academies that have opened in Kenya during the past four years. Bridge's "schools in a box" spring up seemingly overnight: In January of 2013, the company launched 51 schools at once, while in September it opened another 78. Bridge now educates roughly 50,000 students in Kenya every day, and its global aspirations may transform the entire project of education for poor youth around the world.
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Time zones away from the quads of Cambridge, Mass., and Palo Alto, Calif., there's a curious educational evolution happening.Though the modern massive open online course movement (MOOCs) originated in North America, two-thirds of their users live abroad--in places like Rwanda, China, and Brazil.
Foreign users are adapting the courses produced at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to fit their local communities and cultures. And in the process, they're creating an entirely new education model. Instead of toiling at MOOCs alone with the dim light of a laptop, communities around the world are combining screen time with face time. In these small-group, informal, blended-learning environments, students work with the support of peers and mentors and compete online on a level playing field with the new elite of the world. "It gave me a taste of what is first world education," said Alejandra B., a 21-year-old studying business at a Catholic university in La Paz, Bolivia, and a MOOC participant in such a setting, told me.
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Artists and art students from around Greater Los Angeles remembered art teacher Joseph Gatto, who was found shot to death in his Silver Lake home, as a great educator and promoter of the arts.Artist Robert Vargas, who did the mural in downtown L.A. on the corner of 6thand Spring streets, said Gatto "was a pillar in my foundation as a young artist."
Vargas was a student at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and graduated in 1993. The most important class he remembered with Gatto was figure drawing in which half of the class would draw and the other half critique.
"His teaching style was very honest; it was very direct. I think his honesty and his intentions were always sincere," Vargas sad. "He challenged and inspired us to pull from within ourselves and not be afraid of that path of discovery, wherever that may lead us."
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SOME people hope that the internet will revolutionise higher education, making it cheaper and more accessible to the masses. Others fear the prospect. Some academics worry that they will be sacked and replaced by videos of their more photogenic colleagues. Others argue that MOOCs (massive open online courses) are nowhere near as good as a class taught face-to-face.Earlier this year academics at Amherst, a liberal-arts college, decided not to offer MOOCs. Professors in the philosophy department at San José State University wrote a letter of complaint because they were encouraged to use a popular online Harvard course, "JusticeX", as part of their own curriculum. Even at Harvard, which has invested $30m in MOOCs, much of the faculty is prickly. In May 58 professors wrote to the dean of arts and sciences to demand greater oversight of MOOCs.
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A few years ago, I met with my former high school social studies teacher to catch up over drinks. "Miss F" was one of my favorite teachers and we hadn't seen each other in about 12 years. As we reminisced about our field trips, my other classmates, and my hilariously unfortunate fashion choices, she revealed to me that she and many of my former high school teachers refer to that time as "the golden era". I was shocked. How could it be that the school district had become worse since I graduated?
My high school, which is located in a working class Latino suburb bordering Chicago, was overpopulated, underfunded, and in my opinion, incredibly stifling. Needless to say, I resented going there. I felt we were disenfranchised and were not given the same opportunities that affluent schools provided their students.I should have realized how lucky I really was when I was in college, however. Unlike many of my classmates, I cranked out papers with little difficulty because I knew how to synthesize information and formulate an argument. Writing a thesis statement was a freaking breeze. But at the time I had no idea that these skills were a luxury.
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Think that art school dooms graduates to a life of unemployment? The numbers paint a very different picture."Artists can have good careers, earning a middle-class income," says Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. "And, just as important and maybe more, artists tend to be happy with their choices and lives."
Not Exactly Starving
A 2011 report from the center found that the unemployment rate in the first two years for those graduating with bachelor of fine arts degree is 7.8%, dropping to 4.5% for those out of school longer. The median income is $42,000.
"Artists' income is comparable to other liberal-arts majors," he says. "They do a little better than psychology majors, since counseling and social work is a very low-wage occupation."
For artists who go on to graduate degrees, the most common of which is the master's of fine arts, the unemployment rate for recent graduates drops to just under 5%, and their median yearly income increases to roughly $50,000.
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Technology that derives personality traits from Twitter updates is being tested to help target promotions and personalize customer service.Trying to derive a person's wants and needs--conscious or otherwise--from online browsing and buying habits has become crucial to companies of all kinds.
Now IBM is taking the idea a step further. It is testing technology that guesses at people's core psychological traits by analyzing what they post on Twitter, with the goal of offering personalized customer service or better-targeted promotional messages."We need to go below behavioral analysis like Amazon does," saysMichelle Zhou, leader of the User Systems and Experience Research Group at IBM's Almaden Research Center in California, which developed the software. "We want to use social media to derive information about an individual--what is the overall affect of this person? How resilient is this person emotionally? People with different personalities want something different."
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Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala., was founded in 1830. It has graduated governors and admirals. Martin Luther King Jr. praised it for its early efforts at integration in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail."None of that august history protected it from plummeting enrollment last year. So, to induce prospective students to consider its $170,000 sticker price for a four-year education, Spring Hill began offering $1,000 scholarships for taking a campus tour.
"We're at a time when enrollment is the No. 1 driver," said Bob Stewart, the school's vice president for admissions and financial aid. "We needed to have some game changers to bring in new students."
Spring Hill was caught in the same tailspin that many U.S. private colleges are facing as they endure plummeting enrollment among price-conscious students.
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A record number of international students studied at American colleges and universities last year, including in Wisconsin, driven largely by an influx of young scholars from China, according to U.S. data released Monday.
University of Wisconsin-Madison enrolled 5,291 international students last year -- 12.5% of its total 42,463 enrollment.That's up from 4,840 in 2011-'12 and 4,647 the previous academic year.
International students boost the diversity among student populations and contribute significantly to the bottom line for public universities because they pay higher out-of-state tuition.
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ACLU:
Beyond Zero Tolerance focuses on two forms of exclusion from school that many Pennsylvania public school districts rely upon heavily: out-of-school suspensions (OSS) and removal from school by police, a category that includes arrests and summary offenses.In this first-time analysis of statewide school discipline data for Pennsylvania, we found that Black and Latino students and students with disabilities have been disproportionately removed from school.
For both forms of exclusion from school, we report our findings and suggest evidence-based best practices.
DOWNLOAD: Beyond Zero Tolerance (Full Report)
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As part of our Direct-to-Profile Certifications pilot program with premier online education companies, including Coursera, EdX, lynda.com, Pearson, Skillsoft, Udacity and Udemy, LinkedIn is making it easy for members to update their profiles.I am not a fan of their data mining. Alternative and far lower cost credential methods are inevitable and will change the present high cost systems.How does it work? After the completion of a course with a participating provider, you will receive an email with a link that will present you with an automatically populated certification field, complete with the details of the course you just completed. When you click "Save," it will seamlessly add the certification or completed course work to your LinkedIn Profile.
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At the beginning of each school year, I let my students' parents know how I feel about educating their children. I tell them that I am happy to make my classroom a second home for students and that I am truly passionate about their success. However, after 15 years in the classroom, I have come to the realization that teachers cannot do it alone.It is imperative that we increase family/parent involvement in the educational goals of our students. Teachers across our state are working with their schools to increase the amount of year-round community engagement, including adding community service in the curriculum, building partners in education, volunteering, developing education programs for our parents, incorporating after school programs with parent participation, and/or schools partaking in community events.
But we need your help in this journey. I want parents to see their child's school as a cornerstone of our community, ensuring the empowerment of young minds.
So the question is, "Are you ready to get involved?" Here are five simple ways to start off building a culture of community in your child's school.
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Paul Hill, via a kind Deb Britt email:
Last week, three cities pursuing portfolio strategies held elections. In Denver, voters kept a pro-reform majority on the school board. In Boston, a strong pro-reform mayoral candidate lost, but to a man who serves on a charter school board and favors continued charter expansion. In New York, the mayoralty was won by a candidate who adopted anti-reform rhetoric but in truth kept his options open.In each of these three cities, education reforms are working; schools are markedly improving. Yet as a proxy for reform support, the vote tallies were mixed. Why is that?
Smart education leaders know that families are the indispensible constituency. If parents don't think their schools are getting better, they won't buy in to ongoing reforms. Reformers reason that if parents know their children are learning more and are in safer, more supportive schools, they will support the reforms they believe are working.
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In its first year operating free of a state-imposed enrollment cap, Racine's private school voucher program saw enrollment more than double to 1,245 students, according to fall enrollment figures released by the state Department of Public Instruction.Growth in the Milwaukee private-school voucher program continued its steady climb, increasing by about 3.6% from last year to 25,820 students, up from 24,941 last September.
Including the 512 students using a voucher to attend a private school in a new statewide program, the traditional third Friday of September head count reveals a total of 27,577 students using public dollars to attend 148 private, mostly religious schools in the state in the 2013-'14 school year.
Participating private school leaders and voucher-school champions celebrate the growth, saying they're meeting a parent need and offering more children an opportunity to pursue a quality education.
"I think the community has responded very positively," said Frank E. Trecroci, the founder and administrator of Mount Pleasant Renaissance School in Racine, which more than tripled its number of voucher students to 280 this fall, up from 89 voucher students in September 2012.
But many public-school advocates see the growth of voucher programs as a threat, and those concerns are now coming from a chorus of voices outside Milwaukee.
"I struggle with the wisdom of moving in this direction," Patricia Deklotz, the superintendent of the Kettle Moraine School District in Waukesha County, said Thursday. "We're building a dual system of funding here."
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Parents of in-district kids formed a group called Lakewood Unite, an advocacy group with a mission "to make the public aware of the many issues in the Lakewood Public School District" and "to address the inequities in the Lakewood School District Special Education Program." They started video-taping school board meetings and also secured a meeting with Ed. Comm. Chris Cerf.Three years ago voters ousted some long-time school board members who were under the thumb of both the local Rabbinate and the lawyer who pretty much ran the district. (For years he not only collected attorney fees but also collected salary and benefits under the unusual title of "Out-of-District Special Education Supervisor. This title was in deference to the lawyer's able representation of Jewish families who had children with special needs and wanted their kids to attend, at district expense, a private special needs school,The School for Children with Hidden Intelligence, which operates under a pretense of secularity but is actually a Jewish school. Tuition tops $100,000 per student per year. (Some backgroundhere.)
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A job after graduation. It's what all parents want for their kids.So, what's the smartest way to invest tuition dollars to make that happen?
The question is more complicated, and more pressing, than ever. The economy is still shaky, and many graduating students are unable to find jobs that pay well, if they can find jobs at all.
The result is that parents guiding their children through the college-application process--and college itself--have to be something like venture capitalists. They have to think through the potential returns from different paths, and pick the one that has the best chance of paying off.
For many parents and students, the most-lucrative path seems obvious: be practical. The public and private sectors are urging kids to abandon the liberal arts, and study fields where the job market is hot right now.
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Laurie Rogers, via a kind email:
If they were forced to add the truth to what they already say about you, Laurie, it would look like this: [The truth:] 'Wow, that Laurie Rogers. She volunteers her time to advocate for proper math, help small children, and uncover the truth about how public schools spend our money. [What they say:] What a bitch.'"-- A friend and colleagueIf the Spokane print media ever want to get rid of me and my reporting on Spokane Public Schools (SPS), all they have to do is publish a thorough, accurate and balanced article about me and my efforts to inform Spokane parents. I'm sure I would die of the shock. I'm not worried it will happen any time soon.
Their worst betrayal is of the children. I do not understand adults who can look away from children in need, who can persistently deny or ignore a child's grim reality - even as they take steps to help their own children. Sadly, Spokane is filled with adults just like that.
After nearly seven years of advocacy, I wasn't surprised at The Spokesman-Review's "coverage" of a lawsuit I filed against SPS over public records. The SR article was published Oct. 9, 2013, on the front page, above the fold. In the first sentence, it claims I have a "history of needling officials." The article contains several errors, including the date and the wording of my records request. The reporter and editors made no effort to contact me before publishing the article, and the opportunity to post comments online was shut down after just one day.
I've been a reporter and an editor. This article would never have been published "as is" at the newspapers I worked for. The article would have been fact-checked and corrected. Diligent efforts would have been made to contact the subject of the article, and those efforts would have been noted in the article. Any factual errors would have been corrected on subsequent days.
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Nicholas KristofAs readers know, one of my hobby horses is the need for early childhood education as the most cost-effective way to break the cycles of poverty in America. But the issue never gets much traction, and one reason is the perception that it's politically hopeless: Republicans would never go for such a program. My Sunday column tries to push back at the assumption that it's hopeless and notes that one of the leaders in providing pre-K in America is-not Massachusetts, not New York, not some other blue state, but reliably red Oklahoma. It's all the more surprising because Oklahoma spends less per pupil on education than almost any other state, and pays its teachers near the bottom. This is not a state that believes in lavish spending on schooling. Yet, quite remarkably, it provides universal high-quality pre-K, with a ratio of no more than 10 students per staff member, and all teachers have a college degree.
My own take is that even earlier interventions may get even more bang for the buck than pre-K for 4-year-olds, and sure enough Oklahoma also invests in those, including home visitation programs to coach parents on reading to toddlers and talking more to them. It also has some programs for kids 0 to 3 if they're from disadvantaged families. These are no silver bullet to defeat poverty-there isn't one-but there seems a recognition in Oklahoma that they work in improving school performance and life outcomes and reduce the risk that poverty will be transmitted from generation to generation. So if Oklahoma can do it, why not the rest of the country?
Bipartisan legislation is expected to be introduced this coming week in Congress to establish national support for pre-K programs, and polling shows the idea has broad support. It'll be an uphill struggle, but I'm hoping that Congress will, like Oklahoma, see that this isn't a social welfare program exactly, but an investment in our children and our future. Read the column and help spread the word about the need for this legislation!
The column: "Oklahoma! Where the Kids Learn Early"
"The aim is to break the cycle of poverty, which is about so much more than a lack of money."
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Many Americans have come to doubt the proposition that college delivers a path to prosperity.In a poll conducted last month by the College Board and National Journal, 46 percent of respondents -- including more than half of 18- to 29-year-olds -- said a college degree was not needed to be successful. Only 40 percent of Americans think college is a good investment, according to a 2011 poll by the Pew Research Center.
On a pure dollars-and-cents basis, the doubters are wrong. Despite a weak job market for recent graduates, workers with a bachelor's degree still earn almost twice as much as high school graduates. College might be more expensive than ever, but a degree is worth about $365,000 over a lifetime, after defraying all the direct and indirect costs of going to school. This is a higher payoff than in any other advanced nation, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Still, the growing skepticism about the value of a degree has fed into a deeper unease among some economists about the ironclad trust that policy makers, alongside many academics, have vested in higher education as the weapon of choice to battle widening income disparities and improve the prospects of the middle class in the United States.
It has given new vigor to a critique, mostly by thinkers on the left of the political spectrum, that challenges the idea that educational disparities are a main driver of economic inequality.
"It is absolutely clear that educational wage differentials have not driven wage inequality over the last 15 years," said Lawrence Mishel, who heads the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning center for economic policy analysis. "Wage inequality has grown a lot over the last 15 years and the educational wage premium has changed little."
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Innovation for Kids and LearningSeveral areas where we are seeing exciting progress with innovation of the book experience is with learning books and books for kids.
Textbooks are slowly being reinvented for the digital media age by adding new interactive media to supplement text-based content. This is providing more rich and immersive learning experiences by combining two great things: multimedia and reading. The learning experience is much more powerful when the mind is engaged with more than just static text and images. Being able to read about history, then seeing and engaging with that history through interactive multimedia enhances the learning process. Nearly every learning category where text is used will be enhanced in the digital age to include a blend of text and interactive media.
Children's books are another area where we are seeing experimentation and innovation. There are increasing amounts of new book experiences for kids that include images, animations, sound effects, games and puzzles. These books are helping children engage in reading, learning and many other kinds of important aspects of development.
An interesting example I came across recently is a project called Bridging Book from engageLab. This is a solution that pairs a physical book with a companion digital experience. The book can be synchronized with an iPad, using the iPad to show additional digital content to go along with the page the child is on within the physical book. Exciting examples like this get the imagination going, dreaming up ways to blend physical reading experiences with digital ones.
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The financially troubled school district here is seeking buyers for more than two dozen school buildings that it shuttered last summer in one of the country's biggest school closing programs.And while one prospective developer, Municipal Acquisitions, a firm based in Washington, has offered $100 million for the entire portfolio, both Drexel and Temple Universities are considering the purchase of individual schools near their campuses.
The school district published details on its website of 27 buildings, totaling about 3.7 million square feet, and the land they sit on, in the hope that the properties could be adapted and reused by buyers, who could provide the district with desperately needed cash. The public school system laid off 3,800 workers to close a $304 million budget deficit at the start of the current school year.
The properties range from the former University City High School and its associated buildings covering 611,000 square feet on a prime West Philadelphia site near Drexel University, to the building that housed Germantown High School, a 278,000-square-foot site in a low-income area of Philadelphia's northern suburbs.
District officials said the portfolio's overall value was being appraised. For eight properties that are subject to expedited sales because there has been a "demonstrated interest," the appraised value should be known by Dec. 17; valuation for the remaining sites will come later.
Twenty-four schools, representing about 12 percent of the district's total, were closed at the end of the 2012-13 academic year because dwindling student populations had left them significantly underused, and they were draining scarce resources.
Municipal Acquisitions said its offer reflected real estate prices in the area.
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Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke shared some of her views on school vouchers in a lengthy interview she did over the weekend with blogger Heather DuBois Bourenane, a prominent critic of Gov. Scott Walker.Some of Burke's remarks, based on a transcript:
Q. "What do you really think you can you do to move past this sort of toxic and divisive rhetoric without seeming like you're not willing to take a stand on the issues that really matter the most to preserving Wisconsin values and to standing up for Wisconsin workers and students and educators?"
"I talk about jobs a lot because I do believe that there are a lot of people who are unemployed and really struggling to get by and we do have to emphasize what's going to get jobs growing here in Wisconsin. But also I think that the direction that we're headed in terms of education is really frightening to me. The statewide voucher expansion we're talking about, I actively fought against and I think that I am very worried about what will happen in the next four years with regards to taking the caps off and funding them through a continued siphoning of funds that should be going to public education."
Q."If you don't support a full repeal of the voucher system, how exactly do you plan to improve their performance and accountability without draining more taxpayer funds from the public school budget?"
"Sure. Well, first, in the interview I gave regarding the voucher, statewide voucher expansion, the emphasis I definitely placed is in not taking off the caps or letting the voucher expand. Then in terms of rolling back that statewide voucher expansion, you know, as governor I would have to work with the Legislature and certainly would do that, but it would be obviously only in conjunction with the Legislature that could happen.
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It's a nightly dilemma in many households: A student hits a wall doing homework, and parents are too tired, too busy--or too mystified--to help.Ordering up a tutor is becoming as easy for kids as grabbing a late-night snack. Amid rapid growth in companies offering online, on-demand tutoring, students can use a credit card to connect, sometimes in less than a minute, with a live tutor. Such 24/7, no-appointment-needed services can be especially helpful to students with tight budgets or tight time frames or those in remote areas.
"All of a sudden, the world opens up to them," says Michael Horn, executive director of education for the Clayton Christensen Institute, a San Mateo, Calif., education and health-care think tank.
That said, the quality of on-demand scholastic support can be uneven, and the catch-as-catch-can approach to enlisting a tutor may not be best for struggling students who need sustained help. Sessions can bog down on technical glitches, and language barriers can cause problems on sites that rely on tutors from abroad.
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"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs," proclaimed a sticker I once purchased in a suburban shopping centre. It fitted in perfectly with my collection of risqué buttons and key chains. As a teenager I had discovered accessorising was the easiest way to at least give the appearance of defying authority.Fast forward through university, and my entry into the financial industry - where I worked before becoming a journalist - presented a wholly different set of norms to which to conform. Money, rather predictably, was at the centre of many. But a less obvious one had to do with Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software. It seemed to be the right tool for every job, every time, according to almost everyone.
And heck, why not use it for everything? Excel is a powerful computational engine that anyone who is reasonably numerate can bend to their will to perform tasks.
Flimsy rival spreadsheets, from the likes of Google or Apple, cannot compete - too much is missing from them. Discovering that baseline Excel functionality is not there or that favourite keyboard shortcuts do not work, is - to borrow a lyric from Alanis Morissette - like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.
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Ever since inequality began rising in the U.S., in the nineteen-seventies, people have debated its causes. Some argue that rising inequality is mainly the result of specific policy choices--cuts to education, say, or tax breaks for the wealthy; others argue that it's an expression of larger, structural forces. For the last few years, Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and a widely read blogger, has been one of the most important voices on the latter side. In 2011, in an influential book called "The Great Stagnation," Cowen argued that the American economy had exhausted the "low-hanging fruit"--cheap land, new technology, and high marginal returns on education--that had powered its earlier growth; the real story wasn't inequality per se, but rather a general and inevitable economic slowdown from which only a few sectors of the economy were exempt. It was not a comforting story."Average Is Over," Cowen's new book, is a sequel to, and elaboration upon, "The Great Stagnation." In many ways, it's even less comforting. It's not just, Cowen writes, that the old economy, built on factory work and mid-level office jobs, has stagnated. It's that the nature of work itself is changing, largely because of the increasing power of intelligent machines. Smart software, Cowen argues, is transforming almost everything about work, and ushering in an era of "hyper-meritocracy." It makes workers redundant, by doing their work for them. It makes work more unforgiving, by tracking our mistakes. And it creates an entirely new class of workers: people who know how to manage and interpret computer systems, and whose work, instead of competing with the software, augments and extends it. Over the next several decades, Cowen predicts, wages for that new class of workers will grow rapidly, while the rest will be left behind. Inequality will be here to stay, and that will affect not only how we work, but where and how we live.
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The developers of a new performance-based teacher-licensing test have a clear message for states that want to use it: Set the passing bar high, but not too high.Striking that balance will be among the key decisions states must now make about the edTPA, which had its official launch at a press conference today in Washington. Where states set the cutoff score will determine which candidates will be granted or denied a teaching license; as such, it's the major "stake" attached to the performance-based test.
In development since 2009, the edTPA includes a 15-minute videotape of each candidate's teaching skill. Seven states—Hawaii, Washington, Minnesota, New York, Tennessee, Georgia, and Wisconsin—have formally committed to using the edTPA for certification, or to gauge the quality of teacher-preparation programs; four other states are considering adopting it. (Twenty-two other states and jurisdictions have individual programs that have piloted the test.)
A technical report issued today by the Stanford Center on Assessment, Learning, and Equity, or SCALE, recommended that states not set a passing bar higher than 42 out of 75 total points—a cutoff point that would allow only 58 percent of candidates to pass on their first try. The figure is based on field-test data collected over the past year.
States that chose a different cutoff point would have a different yield: A passing score of 37 would boost passing rates up to 78 percent of candidates.
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Although Wisconsin currently requires the fewest number of math and science credits in the Midwest for high school students to graduate, recently proposed legislation would increase the number of necessary credits in those subjects.The bill, which received a public hearing Thursday, would require students to take three credits of math and science, as opposed to the current state-required two credits of each.
"As we work to raise the bar this year, we are challenging students to think critically and solve complex problems. We believe that's what it takes to ensure students are college, career and community ready," Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said in an email to The Badger Herald. "Additional math and science classes align with that vision. Many of our students already take additional math and science in high school, and we're supportive of making that a requirement."
The bill would require more credits at the state level, but many districts in Wisconsin already have higher numbers of mandatory credits, Peter Goff, UW professor in the department of educational leadership and policy analysis, said.
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Adjuncts want, most immediately, more pay - a livable wage. They want space on campus in which to work. They want benefits, of health insurance especially, and a budget for essential work-related expenses (such as computers and support for their maintenance and repair). They want job security: renewable contracts guaranteeing long-term or consistently longer-term employment; advance notice for teaching appointments. They wish, most broadly, for equality: a role in faculty governance; a stake in the curricular or operational decisions of the department; the respect and support of their tenured peers.The US Campus Equity Week has just finished highlighting the working conditions of the off-track teachers who keep America's higher education systems running. There are tropes here that don't translate easily into the Australian context--working for Walmart wages, qualifying for food stamps, missing out on healthcare--but Rebecca Schuman's drive to show search committees how bad things are is pretty frank. And it's just as obvious here as there that the idea of graduate student teaching as a rite of passage towards a tenured career has become a redundant fantasy.Noel Jackson, "A brief dispatch from Boston's Adjunct Action Symposium", this week
I think we've been slow to recognise this in universities because we've focused inwards and backwards, in the naive belief that things could be made better now just because they were different before. But the reality is that universities didn't just lose their way momentarily; they are changing in step with the broader workforce, where middle class contingency is expanding beyond the traditional freelancing professions. As the 2010 Intuit Report intuited, it's time to "imagine a world where contingent work is as common as traditional employment."
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Paul Gu is the winner of a Thiel Fellowship-a two-year $100,000 grant designed to encourage teenagers to skip college and pursue scientific or entrepreneurial projects in the real world. He is also the founder of Upstart, a human capital contract firm that allows investors to fund an individual's education in exchange for a share of their future earnings. Gu spoke with reasonintern Michael Bruschini in August about his experience with the Thiel fellowship, his start-up, and the future of higher education.
Q: You came here from China at six without any knowledge of English. How did you climb the ladder to attend Yale and become a Thiel Fellow?A: I developed a streak for independent thinking early on and generally preferred to try beating the system instead of doing what I was told. I loved my time at Yale, but after two years, it was obvious to me that I was more of a self-learner and was getting impatient to get in the "real world." So when I saw the Thiel opportunity come along, it was a no-brainer for me.
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I was fascinated when I started to read about the work of Betty Hart and Todd Risley and the early language differences between children growing up in different socioeconomic circumstances. But it took me a while to realize that we care about words primarily because of what words indicate about knowledge. This is important because it means that we must focus on teaching children about a wide range of interesting "stuff" - not just vocabulary for vocabulary's sake. So, if words are the tip of the iceberg, what lies underneath? This metaphor inspired me to create the short animation below. Check it out!
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Eastport, Maine, which Deb and Jim Fallows have been profiling recently in their American Futures posts - and which Jim is writing an article about for the January issue of the magazine (subscribe here!) - is a tiny town of 1300 people in Washington county, which wraps around Maine's farthest "down East" stretches.Washington County calls itself the "Sunrise County" because it's the easternmost county in the U.S, where the sun first rises on the 48 contiguous states. But it doesn't boast about being the poorest county in Maine, which it is. Many of the small seaside communities dotting the county's eastern border survive on small-scale fishing operations, while much of the rest of the county's economy depends on wild blueberries. This is hardscrabble-life territory. That's why towns like Eastport are working so strenuously to innovate and find paths to a more prosperous future.
It's also why a college education leading to a solid career is perhaps even more prized here than in much of the rest of the U.S - why families celebrate when their kids get admitted to their chosen college.
There's nothing unusual about celebrating your kid's admission to a preferred college with a party. But for many families in Maine, that party has a name - a "lottery party," as in "our kid just won the lottery." I'm told this is what lots of folks in Maine call such a celebration that follows admission to the Maine Maritime Academy(MMA), graduation from which, they believe, virtually guarantees lifetime earnings equal to a big lottery win.
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Homelessness is defined as not having a regular permanent residence. This doesn't necessarily mean living in the streets or in their vehicles - though many do. A large portion of homeless split their times between hotels, homeless shelters or crowding in with friends and families. For many students, when they go to school each morning, they may have no idea where they will be sleeping that night.The Department of Education released its latest report on homeless students last month and the numbers are startling. More than 1.2 million K-12 students for the 2011-12 school year were homeless. This staggering number is considered underreported, since many kids take great measures to hide their homelessness due to embarrassment, and parents do their best to stay under the radar for fear of losing their children.
Most states saw a year to year increase in the number of homeless students. The nearly 75 percent increase nationwide since the recession began is a sign that whatever improvements are happening in the economy, it has not reached the poorest families.
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Students with traditional surnames such as Darcy and Percy have dominated the roll-calls at Oxford and Cambridge Universities since the Norman Conquest, a new study has revealed, sparking concerns over social mobility.Despite the upheavals of the last 800 years, there have been Darcys, Mandevilles, Percys and Montgomerys at the two elite institutions for 27 generations.
Researchers found the same names which were associated with great wealth and privilege under William the Conqueror are still found at the top echelons of society today.
Family names which signalled poverty 150 years ago, such as Boorman, Defoe, Goodhill and Ledwell, also tend to remain low on the social scale, the team from the London School of Economic (LSE) concluded.
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Andrew Ross, Michael Cheque, and Luke Herrine:
Top-level lawmakers are finally turning their attention to the student debt crisis. On August 22, President Obama announced a plan to "fundamentally rethink how higher education is paid for in this country." A few weeks before, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon declared that he would introduce a bill that would spread Oregon's "Pay It Forward" loan repayment proposal across the nation. No doubt, there is a widespread hunger for a new way forward in education funding, and it has only sharpened in the wake of the sorry spectacle, earlier in the year, of legislators squabbling over how much to raise interest rates on federal loans. But the well-intentioned proposals floated by Obama and Merkley fall far short of a sustainable, effective solution to the problem.Before dealing with these plans, let's be clear: making college affordable would hardly put a dent in the federal budget. If we subtracted all of the tax exemptions, outlays, and programs that currently subsidize public education, only $12.4 billion in additional annual funding would be needed to cover the current tuition at all two and four-year public colleges and universities. In other words, the cost of a genuinely "public option" that would turn education into a binding democratic right turns out to be not much more than a rounding error in the federal budget--less than one percent of yearly spending. That's all it would take for the federal government to join the long list of other countries that fully fund higher education. By way of comparison, U.S. taxpayers are currently subsidizing too-big-to-fail banks to the tune of $83 billion a year. If we just turned off that faucet we could provide public education completely tuition-free with $70 billion to spare.
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Florida made small gains over the last NAEP cycle, but how does its growth compare over the long haul? Pretty good.If you go all the way back to the beginning of NAEP time (which can vary from 1990 to 2003 depending on the grade, subject and sub-group), Florida's gains since then best the national gains in 38 of 40 categories. If NAEP gains were heavyweight boxing, Florida's career record would be 38-2 with 11 KO's (beating the average by 10 or more points).
Florida's average gain per category is 21.5 points (about two grade levels worth of advancement). Its average spread over the national gain is 7.1 points (nearly a grade level).
One caveat: In the two areas where Florida was beat by the national average (4th grade math by English Language Learners (ELL) and 8th grade math by low-income Hispanics) the results may be biased because so few states had enough ELL and Hispanic students to compare.
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In the post-Prop 209 era, nearly 60 percent of African-American students accepted at Cal are choosing to attend other colleges -- often, because they feel unwelcome.In 1997, the year after California voters approved Proposition 209, which prohibited the consideration of race or ethnicity in the operation of state institutions, black students made up 8 percent of UC Berkeley's freshmen enrollment -- roughly the same percentage of African Americans living in the state. The following year, the percentage of black freshmen at Cal plummeted by more than half, and has hovered at or below 4 percent ever since. It averaged 3.6 percent in the five-year period between 2006 and 2010.
"On the campus website, more often than not, you'll often find a black face representing some program or other," said American Studies senior Salih Muhammad of Oakland. Muhammad is the former chair of Berkeley's Black Student Union and currently chair of the statewide UC African-American Coalition. "But when it comes to walking around the campus, those black faces are few and far between. Or, you'll see the 'I Support Berkeley' banners on campus, with all these black faces on them, but there are more black faces on the banners than there are in many of the classes."
In fact, some students in Cal's science and technology departments -- where black students are least represented -- said they can go an entire day without seeing another African American.
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Madison School Board President Ed Hughes
Pending Senate Bill 76 is another volley in the war Wisconsin Republican legislators have unleashed on local control. The bill would further undermine the authority of locally-elected school boards to determine the number of charter schools that operate within their school districts.Do we apply the same governance standards to traditional school districts that spend at least double the virtual schools?Senators Darling and Olson introduced an amendment to the bill on October 31. The amendment provision making it easier for a school district to convert all of its schools to charter schools has already drawn attention. What seems to have escaped notice so far is that Senators Olson and Darling may have mixed up their holidays - their Halloween amendment provides yet another Christmas present for their well-heeled friends at K12 Inc. and the for-profit virtual charter school industry.
The poor performance of virtual charter schools in Wisconsin has resulted in few if any negative consequences for their operators. But this past year, a slight dose of accountability has slipped into the mix with the advent of school district report cards issued by DPI. Senators Olson and Darling's amendment nips that positive trend in the bud by stripping virtual charter schools out of the home school district for report card purposes. It is hard to see this as anything other than a sell-out to K12 and their virtual charter chums.
There are currently 28 virtual charter schools operating in Wisconsin. Many of them - like Middleton-Cross Plains 21st century eSchool - are wholly operated by and genuinely integrated into the home school district. In other cases, however, the home school district serves as the equivalent of a mailing address for a virtual charter school that is operated by an out-of-state, for-profit vendor.
Much more on Ed Hughes, here.
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So I get why Burke was the only board member to vote against a tax-raising, 2013-2014 school district budget.Still, just once I'd like to see a candidate throw caution to the wind and mount a data-based defense of good, if politically unwise, choices. If voters don't buy it, well then they deserve what they get.
Burke explained her latest no vote on the budget last week by saying the district needs to consider whether salary increases for district residents are keeping up with school district tax increases.
To back up that concern, Burke provided me with a May 1 news release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that in Dane County, residents saw a 3.9 percent drop in average weekly wages between the third quarter of 2011 and the third quarter of 2012.
I did a little more digging and found that wages also dropped by 0.1 percent between the second quarter of 2011 and the second quarter of 2012, and by 0.3 percent between the first quarters of 2012 and 2013.
Nevertheless, a broader view of the most recent available data suggests her concern is largely unfounded.
The BLS reported that wages were up 7.7 percent and 5.9 percent respectively, in the first and fourth quarters of last year - essentially wiping out, and then some, the wage decreases.
Plus, over the most recent 10 years for which data are available, personal income and per-capita income in Dane County rose, on an average annual basis, by 4.29 percent and 2.92 percent, respectively, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
By contrast, next year's school district budget raises taxes on the average homeowner by 2.5 percent, and over the past 10 years, the average annual school district tax increase has been 1.75 percent.
If anything, district tax increases aren't keeping up with district residents' ability to pay them.
Despite the old tax-and-spend myth frequently pinned on liberal Dane County, the school district isn't unique, either, at least when it comes to Madison and county government.
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The technology now exists to let you read every email your child sends and receives. But should you?If you could see every email, every chat, every internet search your teenager does on his laptop late at night would you want to? Because if you want to, you can.
I know this because one day at lunch in a restaurant I ran into a friend, whom I'll call Mrs Orwell, and she told me that she had started monitoring her daughter's computer by installing spyware. Before I go any further I should say that Mrs Orwell is in no way the drab or crazy person you might imagine from this particular vignette. Instead she is quite glamorous and sensible and fun; she is busy with her own life, and does not seem unduly or excessively involved with her children. Which is why when she told me that she was secretly monitoring her daughter's every move on the internet, I was intrigued. If anyone else had told me the same thing, I would have thought, well, she's nuts or dangerously bored.
The reason Mrs Orwell turned to spyware is that her 15-year-old has a very serious, brooding boyfriend. She had come across some evidence (in the real world: a diary entry left open on a desk) that the boyfriend was dangerously or theatrically self-destructive, and so she was worried about her daughter.
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Mike Rowe, widely-known from the hit TV show "Dirty Jobs" and a series of Ford commercials, appeared on The Glenn Beck Program Wednesday to discuss his efforts with the mikeroweWORKS Foundation in challenging "the absurd belief that a four-year degree is the only path to success.""We're lending money we don't have, to kids who will never be able to pay it back, for jobs that no longer exist," he explained, echoing what he told TheBlaze TV's Andrew Wilkow earlier this month. "That's crazy, right? That's what we've been doing for the last forty years."
Rowe's motivation for the work largely began with what he described as "the worst advice in the history of the world" - a poster he saw in high school challenging students to "work smart, not hard." The picture of the person working "smart" was holding a diploma, and the person working "hard" looked miserable performing some form of manual labor.
"Today, skilled trades are in demand. In fact, there are 3 million jobs out there that companies are having a hard time filling. So we thought that skilled trades could do with a PR campaign," he said with a smile. "So we took the same idea, went ahead and vandalized it. Work smart AND hard.'"
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Student critiques of adult cluelessness have long been as much a part of high school as Friday night football and backpacks. My best friend in high school, Dan Cummings, was suspended for publishing an underground newspaper eviscerating how our school was run.Maddy King, a junior at Fairfax County's James Madison High School in Vienna, was similarly moved to vent recently, but being a teacher's daughter and a staffer for the official school newspaper, she opted for a long, thoughtful letter to Principal Mark Merrell. When posted on the newspaper Web site, the letter created a sensation. She exposed issues that often infuriate students and yet are blithely overlooked by policymakers trying to upgrade the U.S. secondary school system.
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A slight plurality of LA Unified teachers said they would favor continuing the iPad program, according to a new UTLA survey that produced mixed results in a district contemplating the next phase of a billion dollar digital device program.The union poll was conducted over a week in late October, with 255 teachers from the 47 district schools that received iPads in Phase 1 of the program responding. Not all the teachers responded to all the questions, but taken together, the ambiguous results may undermine the value of the survey as a credible resource for policy.
Even the number who favored continuing the program, 62, was barely more than those who would stop it, 57, with another 54 saying they were unsure what to do. The district is planning to give iPads to all 650,000 students by the end of 2015.
The survey was conducted at the request of Monica Ratliff, the LA Unified board member who serves as chair of the Common Core Technology Project committee. She has been in favor of district students' receiving digital devices beyond Phase 1 but not necessarily iPads. At the board's meeting two days ago, she proposed holding off further distribution until officials could evaluate the instructional effectiveness of all digital devices used in the district.
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Without trying to pin it on one magic solution -- what are some of the potential solutions that are being discussed?Related: the rejected Madison Preparatory IB charter school.There's plenty of research that says you get the most bang for your buck in investing in the early childhood grades. That probably still holds true. But at the same time, if you invested in high quality preschool and then let chips fall where they may, many of those positive effects will eventually deteriorate.
My sense is that the efforts to identify high-performing schools, high-quality schools regardless of what sector they're in -- public, charter or private -- identifying the characteristics of high-performing schools regardless of sector, and trying to replicate them.
The other thing we've known for a long time is the single biggest within-school factor or influence on student achievement, in this order, are the quality of the teacher and the quality of the principal. Investing in ways of identifying effective teachers and helping them get better is almost always a good investment. It's hard work, but it's a good investment.
The other thing in terms of causes worth mentioning: there's plenty of research that shows we have inequitable distributions of teacher quality. The higher the poverty rate, the more likely students are to be taught by a younger, less effective teacher. We can look at ways of trying to incentivize the most effective teachers to teach in the neediest schools. There are some positive signs here, but it's nothing that's going to be fixed over night.
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A few years ago when I walked the hallways of a high school with my five-year-old niece Evie, she remarked, without prompting: "There's the principal's office: you only go there if you are in trouble." As an educator and an aunt, I wondered how the office of an educational professional had come to be symbolized in such a decisive way in the mind of a child, particularly a child who had yet to enter formal schooling. As I scanned popular representations of the school principal, I found that Evie's impression was hardly unusual. Across popular and professional cultures, the figure of the school principal is commonly reduced to a small, often disagreeable functionary of bad news, the wet blanket of progressive teacher practice, the prison guard of students' freedom. As I asked friends and colleagues about their impressions of school principals, few actually knew what principals did, and many people confused the role of school building principal with school district superintendent. Most remarkably, those very people who did not understand what a principal did were often the first to argue for the abolition of the role.In American public schools, the principal is the most complex and contradictory figure in the pantheon of educational leadership. The principal is both the administrative director of state educational policy and a building manager, both an advocate for school change and the protector of bureaucratic stability. Authorized to be employer, supervisor, professional figurehead, and inspirational leader, the principal's core training and identity is as a classroom teacher. A single person, in a single professional role, acts on a daily basis as the connecting link between a large bureaucratic system and the individual daily experiences of a large number of children and adults. Most contradictory of all, the principal has always been responsible for student learning, even as the position has become increasingly disconnected from the classroom.
The history of the principal offers even more contradictions. Contemporary principals work in the midst of unique modern challenges of ever-changing fiscal supports, school law and policy, community values, and youth culture. At the same time, the job of the contemporary principal shares many of the characteristics of their predecessors two centuries ago. While social and economic contexts have changed, the main role of the principal has remained essentially the same over time: to implement state educational policy to the school and to maneuver, buffer, and maintain the stability of the school culture at the local level.
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School choice plays a growing role in the quest to educate all students in the Charlotte region, speakers told more than 100 people gathered Saturday for a forum on the future of public education.In the past, public education was synonymous with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Superintendent Heath Morrison was one of the speakers at the session organized by Staying Ahead Carolina, a social networking group. But he was joined by Eddie Goodall of the N.C. Public Charter Schools Association and state Rep. Rob Bryan, R-Mecklenburg, co-sponsor of the state's Opportunity Scholarship Act, which will provide income-based vouchers to pay private school tuition starting in 2014.
All of them, along with Bill Anderson of the nonprofit advocacy group MeckEd, agreed that families want high-quality choices for their children. But they voiced different views on the benefits and drawbacks of North Carolina's options.
"Parents like choice. That shows up on every survey, across the state and across the country," Morrison said. "We have to make sure that there's quality as well as quantity."
"Parents like choice. That shows up on every survey, across the state and across the country," Morrison said. "We have to make sure that there's quality as well as quantity."
Staying Ahead Carolina, a nonpartisan group that has previously focused on noneducation issues such as arts and health, convened the forum at UNC Charlotte Center City to talk about choices, challenges and changes in public education.
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States should take student demographics into consideration when constructing school performance measures, move away from A-F grading of schools and be more innovative in measuring school accountability under No Child Left Behind waivers issued by the Education Department, a new paper presented in the journal Educational Researcher says.The paper, written by researchers at the University of Southern California and North Carolina State University, is the latest input the Education Department has received as it moves forward with plans to renew waivers for some states through the 2015-16 school year.
A renewal of the law is stalled in Congress, but 42 states, the District of Columbia and eight school districts in California have waivers absolving them of some of the key requirements of NCLB.
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But voting down a bill with a relatively minor tax increase, one that was less than the maximum allowed by the district, makes it look like she might offer an austerity budget if she sat in the governor's chair. That's why Burke made sure to toss a little red meat to the deep blue crowd.Yet, the same service tax, spending and curricular approach continues in Madison, despite long term disastrous reading results."My concern is that very little of it (the property tax increase) went into increasing pay for teachers," she said.
Ta-da! She voted against the budget because it wasn't paying teachers enough! There's another campaign slogan: "Mary Burke: She fights to pay teachers more!"
Rhetoric and vote parsing does nothing for the thousands of young people who cannot read.
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Time was put on hold in South Koreaon Thursday as financial markets and public offices opened late to ensure calm when more than 650,000 students sat the annual university entrance exam. Success in the test is critical to millions of young students' career and marriage prospects.Trading at the Korea Stock Exchange and the country's foreign exchange market began at 10am, an hour later than usual, to keep roads clear while aircraft will be grounded in the afternoon during the English listening test. About 65 commercial flights have been rescheduled to avoid take-off or landing for 30 minutes from 1.05pm.
Classes at primary and secondary schools started an hour later than usual while civil servants and most employees in the private sector were also asked to go to work an hour later than usual to ease traffic congestion to ensure that students arrive at their exam sites on time.
The university entrance exam is one of the most critical annual events for young people in the country - where seven out of every 10 high school students go on to higher education - as a diploma from top schools is widely regarded as a ticket to success in Asia's fourth-largest economy. An almost cult-like devotion to learning has been among the driving forces behind the country's rapid economic development over the past half century, creating one of the world's most highly educated workforces.
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Less than a decade ago, Ravitch promoted many of the same policies she now rails against. As assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, and then as head of the federal testing program, she led the charge for state and national academic standards and supported ideas of "choice" and merit pay. "I believed in those things because in theory they made a lot of sense," Ravitch says when I ask about her dramatic about-face. "It sounds right that if you pay teachers a bonus they'll get higher scores. It just doesn't work."Ravitch went public with her change of heart in her 2010 book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. In her new book, she uses data to rebut arguments for market-based solutions to education problems.
"When you look at the data, the test scores have never been higher in the last 40 years," says Ravitch. "Dropouts have never been lower than they are today."
Real gaps
"The achievement gap is real," Ravitch told me when I brought up Madison's racial and economic disparities.
She points to research showing the only time the black-white achievement gap has narrowed was in the late 1970s and early 1980s because of concerted efforts to desegregate schools, reduce class size, increase access to early childhood education and target federal resources to schools with low-income students.
But today's leaders have abandoned solutions that work, says Ravitch, who comes down as hard on President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan as she does on conservatives. "Our policymakers have given up on reducing class size," she adds, saying she visits classes with up to 40 students. "Are there expanding opportunities for African American families? Our society has thrown up its hands, and we're resegregating
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As AI and globalization chew up good jobs for the non-elites, there is a bright spot on the career horizon. The market for household staff is booming.According to the WSJ, "A good housekeeper earns $60,000 to $90,000 a year. A lady's maid can make $75,000 a year. A butler may start at $80,000 a year and can earn as much as $200,000."
And, there are openings, "Demand for the well-staffed home is on the rise, according to agencies and house managers alike. Clients are calling for live-in couples, live-out housekeepers, flight attendants for private jets, stewards for the yachts and chefs for the summer house. In San Francisco, Town and Country Resources, a staffing agency for domestic help, has seen demand for estate managers and trained housekeepers grow so fast the agency is going to offer its own training programs in subjects like laundry, ironing and spring cleaning starting in 2014. Claudia Kahn, founder of The Help Company, a staffing agency based in Los Angeles, says she used to get one call a month for a butler but has gotten three in the past week alone."
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What are we doing wrong? Why aren't things getting better?No, I don't have some powerful secret answer. But I know the urgency behind the questions became all the clearer last week, whether you're talking about Milwaukee or Wisconsin as a whole. Whatever it is that would work, we haven't done it yet or, at best, we haven't done it well enough.
There are so many people trying to change education outcomes for the better. I respect so many of them and think some are having praiseworthy impact in specific arenas. But the overall pursuit? Look at the record.
There are two reasons for my fresh agitation:
First are new results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP is the best, most nailed-down gauge of how students are doing nationwide. About every two years, NAEP releases results from reading and math tests of samples of fourth and eighth graders in every state. New results came out Thursday.
Nationwide, there were some bright spots, but overall, not much was new or better.
For Wisconsin, the results were disheartening. The average score of a fourth grader in reading was lower than in 1992. We pride ourselves on being a high performing state, but the Wisconsin score and the national score were the same. Sounds pretty middle-of-the-pack to me.
There has been long-term improvement in math scores in Wisconsin. But almost all of it occurred years ago -- scores have been flat for the last half-dozen years.
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In response to findings that a disproportionate number of black students enrolled in the Sun Prairie School District are placed into special education programs, the district has agreed to revamp its student screening process and bolster teacher training.The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights announced Friday that the Sun Prairie district had volunteered to make the changes in response to a "compliance review," which was designed to determine whether the district discriminates against black students when referring them to special education meant for students with a disability.
The federal office found that in the 2012-13 school year, black students made up 10 percent of the district's student enrollment but 24.2 percent of the students enrolled in special education.
Screenings for students who might be struggling vary from school to school within the 7,372-student district, and some students referred to special education did not receive follow-up, the investigation found.
The review was still in progress when the district offered to make changes, including:
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Should writers work for free? What if those writers are academics?That is a real question up for debate in several media outlets this past week. But I'd like to ask why we work for free and why we don't shame organizations that expect us to.
The Internet has created a bottomless void that requires content. In a classic case of how expansion breeds stratified access, an increase in platforms that require writing has resulted in fewer outlets that pay writers to write. In the New York Times recently, Tim Kreider argued that he cannot afford to write for free. He encourages other writers to reject the freemium culture for the benefit of all who make a living by penning the word. In a column for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sarah Kendzior says that journalists may find it beneficial to write for free occasionally, but that academics should never do the same, even though "[p]ublishers like to evoke academics' professional status to justify not paying them."
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Unsurprising, particularly when one encounters young people unable to comprehend cell phone costs, student loan terms or simply make change.The economic returns to education are well documented. It is also well-known that college graduates with certain majors will earn more than others and find it easier to land a job. But surprisingly, the courses students take in high school also make a difference, when the courses are mathematics. Even among workers with the same level of education, those with more math have higher wages on average and are less likely to be unemployed. These findings suggest that even students ending their formal education after high school can increase their future earnings by investing in more math courses while in high school.High school graduates earn more money in general than high school dropouts. This well-known fact is a powerful incentive to finish high school. But is it just the diploma that counts, or do the particular courses students take while in high school matter for their future job prospects? Students can opt for a variety of courses, from vocational tracks to advanced placement classes for college credit, during their final four years of required education.
Most high school graduates choose a curriculum that is far more rigorous than the minimum requirements. This is most evident in mathematics courses. For example, in 2009, 75 percent of high school graduates completed math coursework at the level of Algebra II or above. Most of these students could have stopped at Algebra I and satisfied the minimum high school requirements. Only six states required Algebra II for graduation as of 2006. About 11 required Algebra I, six required geometry, and the remaining 27 required only that students complete a minimum of three years of mathematics at any level.
The fact that so many students take a rigorous math curriculum is not surprising given that a minimum of Algebra II is necessary for adequate college preparation. But an analysis of detailed high school transcript data and employment outcomes suggests that a more rigorous high school math curriculum benefits even those who do not go to college. While math may be difficult for many, our findings indicate that the payoffs for all students may be substantial.
Related: Math Forum audio / video and Connected Math.
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"I have never encountered politics as mean, nasty and personal as in ed reform," said Ben Austin, who runs an advocacy group called Parent Revolution. He's hardly a naïf: He led a communications team for the 2000 Democratic National Convention and spent five years in the Clinton White House. Yet Austin says he finds the bare-knuckle brawling of education politics both bewildering and depressing."The toxicity level is bizarrely high," he said. "It would be funny if [the instigators] were bloggers sitting around in their underwear in tin-foil hats, but these are thought leaders in the field."
Austin himself took a direct hit several months ago when Ravitch skewered him on her widely read blog, describing him as "loathsome" and writing of Parent Revolution: "There is a special place in hell reserved for everyone who administers and funds this revolting organization ..."
Ravitch later apologized in a long public letter that spent 87 words repenting and nearly 1,700 running through all the reasons she considers Austin and his team to be heartless and destructive for organizing parents at a struggling Los Angeles school to oust the principal.
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Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala., was founded in 1830. It has graduated governors and admirals. Martin Luther King Jr. praised it for its early efforts at integration in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail."None of that august history protected it from plummeting enrollment last year. So, to induce prospective students to consider its $170,000 sticker price for a four-year education, Spring Hill began offering $1,000 scholarships for taking a campus tour.
"We're at a time when enrollment is the No. 1 driver," said Bob Stewart, the school's vice president for admissions and financial aid. "We needed to have some game changers to bring in new students."
Spring Hill was caught in the same tailspin that many U.S. private colleges are facing as they endure plummeting enrollment among price-conscious students.
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Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:
The results of the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released today. For Wisconsin, the news on reading is much the same as it was two years ago at the last NAEP administration. 33.6% of our 4th graders reached the proficient level. Massachusetts again scored at the top, with 50.4% of its 4th graders proficient.Wisconsin students who are Asian, black, and white, as well as students who are not eligible for a free and reduced lunch, all posted scores that are significantly lower than the national averages for those groups of students. We had no 4th grade sub-groups that scored significantly above the national average for their group.
Wisconsin's black 8th graders had the lowest scores in the nation, falling below Mississippi and Alabama. Wisconsin's black 4th graders had the second lowest scores in the nation, and at both 4th and 8th grade, Wisconsin had the largest gap between white and black students.
As we examine the data more fully, we will have more specifics.
Fourth- and eighth-graders across the country made modest advances in national math and reading exams this year, according to data released Thursday, but proficiency rates remained stubbornly below 50% on every test.State posts widest achievement gap in 'the nation's report card' by Lydia Mulvany:Amid the sluggish progress nationwide, a few areas notched drastic improvements on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, with Tennessee and Washington, D.C., --as well as schools on military bases--the only ones achieving statistically significant gains on all tests.
Washington gained a cumulative 23 points since 2011, while Tennessee posted a 22-point jump--both compared with a 4-point national gain. The exams are scored on a 0-500 scale.
Officials in Tennessee and Washington attributed the gains to tougher classroom math and reading standards, improved teacher development and overhauling teacher evaluations.
Steven Dykstra, a founding member of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, a grassroots group devoted to reforming reading instruction, said the state needs to start imitating reforms in other states by training teachers more effectively. In the past, Wisconsin students ranked as high as third in the nation in reading.Meanwhile, St. Norbert College Education Professor Steve Correia emphasized how well (!) Reading Recovery is working while discussing Wisconsin's NAEP results on WPR. [5.6mb mp3 audio]"This isn't a surprise. The last time we did well in reading was when everyone sucked at reading," Dykstra said. "When some states started doing better, they very quickly left us behind."
"Left behind" is precisely what the data shows is happening to Wisconsin's black students:
Eighth graders, reading: 9% were judged proficient; 55% rated below basic, the most of any state.
Fourth graders, reading: 11% were proficient; 65% scored below basic, again the most of any state.
Eighth graders, math: 8% were proficient; 62% rated below basic, better than only three states.
Fourth graders, math: 25% were proficient; 30% scored below basic, again with only three states performing worse.
Henry Krankendonk, a retired Milwaukee Public Schools math curriculum planner and NAEP board member, said Wisconsin's failure to narrow the disparity -- which has existed for decades -- is a challenge for Milwaukee in particular, because it has the highest concentration of minority students. Krankendonk said the problem has long been weak standards for what students should know, and he was hopeful that the recent adoption of new standards more in line with NAEP, called Common Core State Standards, would help.
Related: Madison's long term disastrous reading results.
Much more on NAEP over time, here.
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What happens to education when students, from preschool to high school, are subjected to disciplinary policies that more closely resemble policing than teaching? Around the country, advocates are collecting data illustrating the devastating effects of what they call the "school-to-prison pipeline," where student behavior is criminalized, children are treated like prisoners and, all too often, actually end up behind bars. "The school-to-prison pipeline refers to interlocking sets of relationships at the institutional/structural and the individual levels," explains Miriame Kaba, founding director at Project NIA, an advocacy group in Chicago fighting youth incarceration. "All of these forces work together to push youth of color, especially, out of schools and into unemployment and the criminal legal system."This fall, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) issued a report focusing on how the criminalization of school discipline is profoundly harming children's educational opportunities in New York City. "Once a child is subjected to suspensions or arrests in school, they are less likely to graduate and more likely to end up involved in the criminal justice system," says Donna Lieberman, the NYCLU's executive director. "That means they're on a path to prison, not graduation." The report demonstrates that the city's black and low-income students, as well as students with disabilities, are disproportionately affected by suspensions, expulsions and arrests - which have skyrocketed under Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration. The data also shows a correlation between neighborhoods whose students experience high rates of suspension and those with high rates of stop-and-frisk, the controversial policing tool ruled unconstitutional earlier this year.
The number of students suspended from New York City schools each year has more than doubled under Bloomberg, from roughly 29,000 in 2001 to almost 70,000 in 2011. Half of those suspended were black, despite black students comprising less than a third of the student population. Black students with disabilities have the highest rates of suspension, almost three times higher than their white disabled peers. White students with disabilities are also suspended at higher rates than their non-disabled peers. "It's a lot about race," says Lieberman. "Black students are far more likely than [non-disabled] white students and white students with special needs to be suspended from school."
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IN THE film "Bad Teacher", Cameron Diaz's character says she entered the profession "for all the right reasons: shorter hours, summers off, no accountability". No one is threatening to take away the first two agreeable perks, but several states are eyeing the third.Much more on teacher content knowledge requirements, here.In the past, teachers were judged solely on their level of education and the number of years they had spent in the classroom--neither of which tells you whether their pupils are learning anything. But this is changing. A new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a research group, finds that most states now demand that student achievement should be a significant factor in teacher evaluations (see chart). Only Alabama, California, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Texas and Vermont have no formal policy.
The expansion of teacher evaluation is broadly good news. Work published in 2011, from Columbia and Harvard, showed that pupils assigned to better teachers are more likely to go to college and earn decent salaries, and less likely to be teenage mothers. If teachers in grades 4 to 8 are ranked according to their ability to add value (ie, teach) and those in the bottom 5% are replaced with ones of average quality, a class's cumulative lifetime income is raised by $250,000. Bill Gates once said that if every child had mathematics teachers as good as those in the top quartile, the achievement gap between America and Asia would vanish in two years. (His lecture has been watched 1.5m times online.)
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Total revenue for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the largest union in the state, dropped from $26 million in 2011 to $20 million in 2012. WEAC, which represents 80,000 teachers across the state, has for years been a great force for the Democratic Party, providing millions of dollars on attack ads against Republicans on top of legions of volunteers.Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators.The next largest public sector union, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has also taken a financial hit. AFSCME Council 40, which represents county and municipal workers outside of Milwaukee County, reported its gross revenue dropping from $6.7 million in 2011 to $4.5 million in 2012. Reports for some of the other large AFSCME Councils, including Council 24, which represents state employees, are not yet available online.
Revenue for the American Federation of Teachers, which in Wisconsin largely represents academic staff at the state's universities as well as a number of white-collar state employees, dropped from just under $4 million in 2011 to $2.6 million in 2012.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 150 -- which represents many public sector healthcare professionals -- saw its revenue drop from $937,000 to $783,000. Fortunately for that union, many of its members, including nurses at Meriter Hospital, are in the private sector, and are thus unaffected by Act 10.
The decrease in union money could spell serious trouble for Democrats as they try to recapture the governorship and gain seats in the state Legislature next year. Third-party ads in favor of Democrats are largely funded by labor, whether from individual unions or union-funded groups such as the Greater Wisconsin Committee or We Are Wisconsin.
With the largest unions bleeding dues, it will be hard for Democratic forces to compete with corporate-funded players on the right, such as Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, which has already dumped $1 million into an ad buy celebrating Walker's record as governor.
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But poor parenting is not alone on the hook. Our culture is on the hook too. We put too little value on a strong work ethic for our kids. Our kids are not hungry to succeed, particularly the boys. The boys in our culture seem to love, even respect, their stereotype of dumb and dumber. They are not interested in investing effort for the future; postponing gratification. Our many welfare programs are at least partly responsible for this attitude, by giving handouts and asking less of our citizens, making us weaker and less proud of beating our foreign competition.Our culture loves excellence in sports far more than academic achievement. Too many students (and parents) think sports are the very purpose of high schools; academics suffer as a result. Because sports, particularly football is so expensive, academic areas get too little funding. One school found that cheerleading instruction cost four times more than math instruction.
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Despite all this, Gov. Scott Walker and lawmakers seem paralyzed in the face of potential bipartisan agreement.Walker has said as far back as August that he's open to changing the voucher program to give preference to public school students. The Republican chairmen of the Senate and Assembly education committees have made similar noises. Yet none responded to messages from me saying essentially: Well, OK, so are you introducing legislation to do that?
Similarly, Gillian Drummond, spokeswoman for Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chris Larson, said "I have not heard of anything" on possible Democratic legislation on the issue in the Senate.
Speaking on background, a staffer for Rep. Sondy Pope, who has been outspoken in her criticism of underwriting private school tuition with vouchers, said "our caucus as a whole is looking" to do something even more stringent than in Racine, but was less than optimistic about Republicans going along.
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New York Sen. Charles Schumer today called on the Justice Department to develop a program that would allow for voluntary tracking of children with autism or other developmental disorders.This is a very bad idea.... The data will flow as we continue to learn.Devices could be worn as wristwatches, anklets, or clipped onto belt loops or onto shoelaces, Schumer said in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.
Schumer's request comes one month after 14-year-old Avonte Oquendo (left) disappeared from his Queens, New York school. The teen, who suffers from autism and does not speak, was seen on surveillance cameras leaving his school on Oct. 4. New York authorities have mounted an extensive campaign to find him, but he remains missing. Those with information about Avonte should call 1-800-577-TIPS, while anyone who spots him should call 911 immediately.
"The sights and sounds of NYC and other busy places can be over-stimulating and distracting for children and teens with Autism, often leading to wandering as a way to escape. Voluntary tracking devices will help our teachers and parents in the event that the child runs away and, God forbid, goes missing," Schumer said in a statement. "DOJ already funds these devices for individuals with Alzheimer's and they should do the same for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Funding this program will help put school systems and parents of children and teens with Autism at ease knowing where their children are."
In related news, AT&T announced today that it will sell the Amber Alert GPS, a 3G device that kids can carry in their pockets or backpacks and features two-way calling and among other features.
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Voters emphatically rejected a $950 million tax increase and the school funding revamp that came with it, handing Amendment 66 a resounding defeat Tuesday night.The measure fell behind by a large margin as the early returns were counted, with nearly two-thirds of voters giving it a thumbs-down, and the outcome was clear just a little more than an hour after the polls closed.
"Colorado families spoke loud and clear," said Kelly Maher, executive director of Compass Colorado, which opposed Amendment 66. "We need substantive outcome-driven reforms to the educational system before we ask families and small businesses to foot a major tax bill."
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The answer to the question of whether America is still a land of opportunity varies widely depending on where you live - and the Milwaukee area is one of the places where the answer is not so good, a prominent economist told an audience of several hundred at the Marquette University Alumni Memorial Union on Tuesday.The answer to what Milwaukee might do to improve the opportunities of success for children from lower income homes emphasizes better education, Raj Chetty of Harvard University said.
Chetty spoke at a session that combined the Marquette University Department of Economics' Marburg Memorial Lecture with the Marquette Law School's "On the Issues with Mike Gousha." Chetty spoke for about 45 minutes, followed by a conversation in which Gousha, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial page editor David Haynes, and audience members asked questions.
Chetty, now 34, is one of the youngest people to be named a tenured professor at Harvard and has won numerous awards, including a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. He spent his high schools years in the Milwaukee area and was the 1997 valedictorian at University School of Milwaukee.
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Sarah Blaskey and Phil Gasper:
MADISON, WIS., has a reputation as one of the most liberal cities in the country. It is also possibly the most racially unequal.Related: The failed battle over the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school and our disastrous reading scores.In early October, Race to Equity--a Madison-based initiative started by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families--released a report detailing racial disparities in Madison, and more broadly in Dane County, Wis. The findings are staggering.
The Race to Equity researchers expected the numbers compiled for racial disparities in Dane County to be similar or slightly better than the national averages. After all, Madison has long prided itself on having quality public education, good jobs, access to health care and human services programs, a relatively high standard of living and, in general, a progressive outlook on social, economic and political questions.
But while living standards for the white population in Dane County are higher than the national average, for the Black population, the opposite is true. On every indicator, with only two exceptions out of 40 measures, statistics collected in Dane County demonstrated equal or higher racial disparities between whites and Blacks than the national averages.
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Property taxes in the Madison School District will increase by about $67 for the average homeowner as part of the final $392 million 2013-14 budget approved by the school board on Monday.Much more on the 2013-2014 budget, here.The board voted 6-1 to approve this year's amended budget and also to set the levy at $257.7 million, a 3.38 percent increase over last year.
That increase is about 1 percentage point less than originally projected in July, before Gov. Scott Walker unveiled his two-year $100 million property tax relief bill that sent an additional $2.5 million in state aid to Madison schools.
Total property taxes will increase by $66.74 on average. That's $39.24 less of an increase than originally expected earlier this year, according to district budget documents. A property tax bill for the average $231,000 Madison home is now estimated to be $2,739.66 for school purposes.
School board member Mary Burke, a candidate for governor, cast the lone votes against the final amended budget and against the levy, citing the desire to see a better balance between the needs of the district and the needs of taxpayers.
"Next year, as we look at this, we really need to look at how many people are struggling to make ends meet," Burke said about the levy increase, noting the district and board should consider whether salary increases among district families are not keeping pace with property tax increases.
The City of Madison's portion of local property tax will grow 2.2%.
Middleton's property taxes are 16% less than Madison's on a comparable home.
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The principal of Cedar Grove-Belgium High School left his job just six weeks after the start of this school year -- and shortly after board members discussed not renewing his contract -- but will be paid his full year's salary of $91,290.Larry Theiss resigned as principal effective at the end of his contract -- June 30, 2014 -- but has not actually worked since mid-October. Theiss informed the school board in a letter dated Oct. 15 that he was taking an immediate leave of absence from the job so he could take classes toward a superintendent's license, Superintendent Steve Shaw said.
School Board President Chad Hoopman said Wednesday that Theiss' departure was "a forced resignation."
Earlier in October, the board discussed not renewing Theiss' contract for the 2014-'15, so Shaw sat down with the principal to alert him to the possible change, Hoopman said.
After meeting with Shaw, Theiss resigned.
There was no provision in Theiss' contract that required payout of the full year's salary, according to Shaw. However, the school board decided to accept the resignation and pay Theiss through his absence to create "an opportunity for both sides to move forward," Shaw said.
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Thanks to hefty student loan debts, many millennials will have to wait until 73 to retire, a recent study found. That's 12 years later than the current average retirement age, 61.Joseph Egoian, a financial analyst for personal finance website NerdWallet and the author of the study, explains that 73 was the age by which a college graduate with a median amount of student debt and a median starting salary would finally build a big enough retirement portfolio to replace 80% of his peak salary annually. (Also factored in are Social Security benefits beginning at 67, at $11,070 a year.) Read the full report here.
Here's the problem, according to NerdWallet: The median debt for a student when she graduates is $23,300, and the median starting salary for a recent grad (who has a job) is $45,327. Assuming a student makes the average annual loan payment of $2,858 for the first 10 years of her career, that drastically cuts into the amount of retirement saving she can manage. And figuring that missed-out contributions could have been earning a compounded rate of return until retirement, the lost savings due to student debt payments is $115,096 by age 73, according to the report. The report assumes every loan payment would have gone to retirement savings, and that the graduate would save at the historical 30-year national post-tax savings rate of 6.1% after the debt is paid off, Egoian said.
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Exposure to poverty in early childhood negatively affects brain development, but good-quality caregiving may help offset this effect, new research suggests. A longitudinal imaging study shows that young children exposed to poverty have smaller white and cortical gray matter as well as hippocampal and amygdala volumes, as measured during school age and early adolescence.
"These findings extend the substantial body of behavioral data demonstrating the deleterious effects of poverty on child developmental outcomes into the neurodevelopmental domain and are consistent with prior results," the investigators, with lead author Joan Luby, MD, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, write.
However, the investigators also found that the effects of poverty on hippocampal volume were influenced by caregiving and stressful life events.
The study was published online October 28 in JAMA Pediatrics.
Powerful Risk Factor
Poverty is one of the most powerful risk factors for poor developmental outcomes; a large body of research shows that children exposed to poverty have poorer cognitive outcomes and school performance and are at greater risk for antisocial behaviors and mental disorders. However, the researchers note, there are few neurobiological data in humans to inform the mechanism of these relationships.
"This represents a critical gap in the literature and an urgent national and global public health problem based on statistics that more than 1 in 5 children are now living below the poverty line in the United States alone," the authors write.
To examine the effects of poverty on childhood brain development and to understand what factors might mediate its negative impact, the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine total white and cortical gray matter as well as hippocampal and amygdala volumes in 145 children aged 6 to 12 years who had been followed since preschool.
The researchers looked at caregiver support/hostility, measured observationally during the preschool period, and stressful life events, measured prospectively. The children underwent annual behavioral assessments for 3 to 6 years prior to MRI scanning and were annually assessed for 5 to 10 years following brain imaging. Household poverty was measured using the federal income-to-needs ratio.
"Toxic" Effect
The researchers found that poverty was associated with lower hippocampal volumes, but they also found that caregiving behaviors and stressful life events could fully mediate this negative effect.
"The finding that the effects of poverty on hippocampal development are mediated through caregiving and stressful life events further underscores the importance of high-quality early childhood caregiving, a task that can be achieved through parenting education and support, as well as through preschool programs that provide high-quality supplementary caregiving and safe haven to vulnerable young children," the investigators write.
In an accompanying editorial, Charles A. Nelson, PhD, Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, in Massachusetts, notes that the findings show that early experience "weaves its way into the neural and biological infrastructure of the child in such a way as to impact development trajectories and outcomes."
"Exposure to early life adversity should be considered no less toxic than exposure to lead, alcohol or cocaine, and, as such it merits similar attention from health authorities," Dr. Nelson writes.
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This post will be a bit of a departure from what you guys are used to seeing from me, but it's super-important to me personally, and I wanted to share it with you.
I've watched in admiration as my brother Andrew Freedman has worked in politics the last few years. My brother is a campaign director of Colorado Commits to Kids, which is an amendment in Colorado that fixes Colorado's educational system. If you are at all interested in fixing public schools, not just in Colorado specifically, but throughout the country, I think it will be worth your time to read this post.
The public education has some truly massive underlying problems. Hopefully most of you by now have seen Waiting for Superman. This clip below really got to me:
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More than a third of children in Sweden's cities complain that their parents spend too much time staring at phones and tablet computers, leading doctors in the country to warn that children may be suffering emotional and cognitive damage.According to a survey by YouGov, 33% of parents in Sweden's major towns and cities have received complaints from their children about their excessive phone use.
The survey also found that more than one in five parents in Stockholm and its suburbs admit to having lost sight of their children while out after being distracted by their phones.
"Of course it will affect their emotional development," said Dr Roland Sennerstam, one of several paediatricians in the country to warn of the phenomenon. "I sometimes see children tapping their parents on the back to get attention, but the parents give them no time."
Sweden now boasts the second highest smartphone usage in western Europe after Norway. According to data from Google, 63% of adults own an iPhone, Android phone or Windows phone.
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It isn't often that the Koch brothers' political advocacy group gets involved in a local school board race.
But this fall, Americans for Prosperity is spending big in the wealthy suburbs south of Denver to influence voters in the Douglas County School District, which has gone further than any district in the nation to reshape public education into a competitive, free-market enterprise.The conservatives who control the board have neutered the teachers union, prodded neighborhood elementary schools to compete with one another for market share, directed tax money to pay for religious education and imposed a novel pay scale that values teachers by their subjects, so a young man teaching algebra to eighth graders can make $20,000 a year more than a colleague teaching world history down the hall.
Conservatives across the U.S. see Douglas County as a model for transforming public schools everywhere. But with four of seven seats on the board up for grabs in Tuesday's election, reformers find themselves fending off a spirited challenge from a coalition of angry parents and well-funded teachers unions. The race has been nasty and pricey, too; spending from all parties is likely to hit at least $800,000.
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A new Freakonomics trend is forming. Kids are mastering technology before they learn to speak. It is difficult to even attempt to predict what kind of implications this will have on this new "Generation Tech." Malcom Gladwell suggested that one of the biggest factors in Bill Gates' success was his immense exposure to programming by the time he was in a position to act profit from this experience. How about an army of kids who have 10,000 hours of interaction with mobile phones and tablets before they turn 5 years old? I am not sure if this is a positive or negative development. As kids we played video games endlessly, and before us kids stared at the TV endlessly, and before them kids played in the yard endlessly... And all of these were frowned upon at the time. Perhaps Generation tech just needs some guidance in the right direction.
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The first year of New Jersey's new tenure law has so far resulted in a much quicker process for deciding discipline charges against teachers, while established case law has still largely determined the outcomes.
At least that's the interpretation of an attorney who has summarized and analyzed the approximately 40 tenure cases brought before state arbitrators so far under the Teacher Effectiveness and Accountability for the Children of New Jersey Act (TEACHNJ).Carl Tanksley of the law firm of Parker McCay presented a summary of the first 23 of those tenure decisions at last month's New Jersey School Boards Association convention in Atlantic City.
He said that from his perspective as an attorney representing school boards, the process has pretty much worked as intended. Tanksley's firm represents about 80 districts, mostly in southern and central New Jersey.
"I think there are a couple of bugs to work through, but overall it's an improvement over the old process," he said yesterday.
Tanksley noted that the tenure decisions have come in all shapes and sizes, as the 25 state-certified arbitrators selected under the law each using their own style and wording in making decisions. But he said his review found that the arbitrators have largely followed legal precedents.
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Quick! Name the Ohio school-choice program that has provided students the opportunity to attend a school not operated by their resident school district for the longest period of time. Charter schools? Nope, strike 1. The Cleveland voucher program? Try again, strike 2. Unless you guessed open enrollment, that's strike 3. Before heading back to the dugout, read on to learn more about this established school-choice program.Much more on Open Enrollment here.Open enrollment, first approved by the legislature in 1989, allows school districts (if they choose) to admit students whose home district is not their own. Perhaps against conventional wisdom, it has become a popular policy for districts. We even analyzed the trend in an April 2013 Gadfly.
According to Ohio Department of Education records, over 80 percent of school districts in the state have opted to participate in some form of open enrollment. There are 432 districts that have opened their doors to students from any other district in the state, and another sixty-two districts have allowed students from adjacent districts to attend their schools.
This year's budget bill (HB 59) created a task force to study open enrollment. The task force is to "review and make recommendations regarding the process by which students may enroll in other school districts under open enrollment and the funding mechanisms associated with open enrollment deductions and credits." The task force's findings are to be presented to the Governor and legislature by the end of the year.
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Clayton Christensen & Michael Horn, via a kind Rick Kiley email:
WHEN the first commercially successful steamship traveled the Hudson River in 1807, it didn't appear to be much of a competitive threat to transoceanic sailing ships. It was more expensive, less reliable and couldn't travel very far. Sailors dismissed the idea that steam technology could ever measure up -- the vast reach of the Atlantic Ocean surely demanded sails. And so steam power gained its foothold as a "disruptive innovation" in inland waterways, where the ability to move against the wind, or when there was no wind at all, was important.In 1819, the technology vastly improved, the S.S. Savannah made the first Atlantic crossing powered by steam and sail (in truth, only 80 of the 633-hour voyage was by steam). Sailing ship companies didn't completely ignore the advancement. They built hybrid ships, adding steam engines to their sailing vessels, but never entered the pure steamship market. Ultimately, they paid the price for this decision. By the early 1900s, with steam able to power a ship across the ocean on its own, and do so faster than the wind, customers migrated to steamships. Every single transoceanic sailing-ship company went out of business.
Traditional colleges are currently on their hybrid voyage across the ocean.
Like steam, online education is a disruptive innovation -- one that introduces more convenient and affordable products or services that over time transform sectors. Yet many bricks-and-mortar colleges are making the same mistake as the once-dominant tall ships: they offer online courses but are not changing the existing model. They are not saving students time and money, the essential steps to disruption. And though their approach makes sense in the short term, it leaves them vulnerable as students gravitate toward less expensive colleges.
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Who Will Get NEA's Great Public Schools Grants? Last July, the National Education Association offered the delegates to its representative assembly a choice. They could either approve a budget with a dues level of $179, or a budget with a dues level of $182. The latter choice would set up a $6 million Great Public Schools fund, which would disburse grant money to state and local affiliates for projects "enhancing the quality of public education."NEA was deliberately vague about what kinds of projects these might be, but made clear that it was in response to "those with little or no practical classroom experience" who were "crafting policies and implementing practices that we know won't work for our students." The $6 million annually would allow the union to "fund our own ideas."
The delegates approved the dues increase and the creation of the fund, although it was a close vote by the standards of NEA elections. It gave the union's 12-member Executive Committee the power to write the grant guidelines, subject to the approval of the board of directors. I mentioned at the time that, as a practical matter, it gave the Executive Committee the power to dispense the money any way it wished.
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Lant Pritchett, Rukmini Banerji & Charles Kenny:
For the last ten years, the major focus of the global education community has been on getting children into school. And that effort has been a success: most of the world's children live in countries on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary completion by 2015.But behind that progress is a problem--one that grows with each additional child that walks through the classroom door. Some children in those classes are learning nothing. Many more are learning a small fraction of the syllabus. They complete primary school unable to read a paragraph, or do simple addition, or tell the time. They are hopelessly ill-equipped for secondary education or almost any formal employment. The crisis of learning is both deep and widespread. It is a crisis for children, too many of whom leave school believing they are failures. And it is a crisis for their communities and countries, because economic analysis suggests it is what workers know--not their time in school--that makes them more productive and their economies more prosperous.
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Schools across the Madison Metropolitan School District submitted reports this week on how they can do a better job.Those "school improvement reports" will be made public in the next couple weeks, and what's inside them may help the United Way of Dane County target an effort started earlier this year.
WISC-TV first told you about the "Here!" campaign by the United Way on the first day of school. The effort is a push to reduce the number of absences, specifically in kindergarten.
"Up to 25 percent of our Latino kids are regularly absent and about 35 percent of our African American kids are regularly absent and that's unacceptable" said Sal Carranza, co-chair of the Here! Advisory Council for the United Way of Dane County.
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My speech teacher came to see me. She was both angry and distraught. In her hand was her 6-year-old's math test. On the top of it was written, "Topic 2, 45%". On the bottom, were the words, "Copyright @ Pearson Education." After I got over my horror that a first-grader would take a multiple-choice test with a percent-based grade, I started to look at the questions.The test provides insight into why New York State parents are up in arms about testing and the Common Core. With mom's permission, I posted the test here. Take a look at question No. 1, which shows students five pennies, under which it says "part I know," and then a full coffee cup labeled with a "6″ and, under it, the word, "Whole." Students are asked to find "the missing part" from a list of four numbers. My assistant principal for mathematics was not sure what the question was asking. How could pennies be a part of a cup?
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Via Harrison Jacobs, here's a recent study showing the trend in income segregation in American neighborhoods. Forty years ago, 65 percent of us lived in middle-income neighborhoods. Today, that number is only 42 percent. The rest of us live either in rich neighborhoods or in poor neighborhoods.This is yet another sign of the collapse of the American middle class, and it's a bad omen for the American political system. We increasingly lack a shared culture or shared experiences, and that makes democracy a tough act to pull off. The well-off have less and less interaction with the poor outside of the market economy, and less and less empathy for how they live their lives. For too many of us, the "general welfare" these days is just an academic abstraction, not a lived experience.
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The Harvard Club of Wisconsin cordially invites you to a public conversation about higher education, college admissions, equity, and access. [PDF Flyer]
Tuesday, November 5, 2013 6:30 - 8:00 p.m.
Urban League of Greater Madison
2222 S. Park Street [Map]
Madison, WI
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The typical community-college student works at least part time while attending classes and often doesn't complete a degree even after three years, according to the U.S. Education Department.Derrick Johnson is on a different track. The 19-year-old first-year student from a low-income neighborhood of Indianapolis received a scholarship for spending six hours in class each day and another six hours a day studying with classmates. He has pledged not to work during the week. His scholarship, besides tuition and fees, also helps cover expenses, such as some food and transportation costs. Best of all, he expects to earn an associate's degree by May, within one year.
Mr. Johnson sleeps on a couch at his dad's house and rises at 5 a.m. He then rides two buses for about an hour to get to school each day by 7 a.m., and usually leaves campus by 7 p.m. His weekdays consist of little more than attending class, studying and commuting. Other students have more breathing room because they can drive to school, avoiding a lengthy trip on public transportation.
"It takes up a lot of time," Mr. Johnson said. "But I can get stuff done in a year and the cost is less" than a traditional two-year associate's degree.
Mr. Johnson is part of an experimental program at Ivy Tech Community College, a public community college in Indiana. The Associate Accelerated Program, known by the nickname ASAP, aims to chart a new path to a degree as two-year schools across the nation wrestle with poor graduation and retention rates and a growing need to upgrade the skills of people entering the workforce.
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Learn about fractions, here.
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Harold Sirkin, via a kind Erich Zellmer email:
The United States continues to invest massive amounts of talent and treasure on two goals: preventing students from dropping out of high school and increasing the percentage of high school graduates who go on to college.We do everything possible to encourage college attendance. During the most recent year for which data are available (the 2011-2012 academic year), the federal Pell Grant program, intended to help low- and moderate-income students finance college, cost taxpayers about $33.6 billion, about half the U.S. Department of Education budget.
Yet, many Pell Grant recipients never graduate. They flounder, drop out, become statistics. As a result of this and other factors, in September the teenage unemployment rate was 21.4%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said.
How can we prevent such waste?
The College Board, in a recent report funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, offers a variety of useful ideas, such as providing larger grants to students who demonstrate a commitment to their studies by taking heavier course loads.
That's one approach. But let me suggest another, which Germany has pioneered.
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Three recent anecdotes that I think point to something important:First: A friend told me her fifth-grade daughter, a high-performing student in a high-performing school, picked up an art project from a counter. It fell to the floor. She let out a four-letter expletive that begins with "s." This prompted a phone call from the school to the parent to discuss the daughter's conduct.
Second: Someone else told me about a teacher she knew who worked for years in challenging schools. She was dedicated, but she got worn down, so she retired, somewhat earlier than she might otherwise have. The clinching factor in her decision? She couldn't take the students' language any longer.
Third: I visited a small private high school on a recent Monday. The students are required to wear uniforms -- polo shirts with the school logo and khakis, that sort of thing. But the previous week had been "spirit week" and students were allowed to wear other stuff. The principal said she was relieved to have them wearing uniforms again because it reduced the number of behavior problems she had to deal with.
What do these anecdotes suggest? This is just the view of one increasingly old person, but if I'm in a school where learning is particularly serious and energetic, I'm probably in a school that is a pretty buttoned-down place.
The culture of a school is critical to its success. It generally involves things that don't show up easily in data -- how healthy and constructive the environment is, how well everyone knows how to treat each other and so on. Furthermore, classroom management is a huge challenge -- oh, today's kids and all that. The thing new teachers usually find the hardest to master is getting kids to focus on their work. I've been in classrooms where the pursuit of order took huge chunks of time away from the pursuit of education.
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They hired private tutors for their son after educators told them that he would never be literate. They pushed back when administrators at their son's middle school wanted to place him in a more restrictive classroom, isolating him from students without disabilities. And they fought when Montgomery public-school officials wanted to label their son "emotionally disturbed" after an administrator didn't allow him to go to the restroom and he had an accident.The Powells' 15-year-old son is now thriving in high school despite his learning disability, but it wouldn't have happened, they say, without a series of painstaking clashes with the school system that have just about consumed their lives and family income.
"His entire future was at stake," said Drew Powell, who asked that his son's name not be used in order to protect him. "His educational, academic and personal future and his whole self-esteem. Sadly, our experience and experiences similar to these have been shared by many other parents over the years."
The Powells are not alone. Complaints of difficult relations between special education parents and the school system have prompted some elected officials to call for an external review of the special education department in Montgomery, a proposal that a Board of Education committee is expected to consider in coming months.
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The funny thing about the whole loud, bitter debate over school vouchers in Wisconsin is that it's hard to argue with the goals of the most honorable advocates from both sides.Honorable pro-voucher folks see the issue as one of choice: What does it matter if voucher schools don't do any better than public schools? Everyone knows that different children need different educational experiences, and if choice is intimately connected with freedom, and public education is a right, then parents should be able to choose which schools their children go to -- on the government's dime.
Honorable anti-voucher folks, on the other hand, see a strong and enduring network of public schools as kind of a great democratic leveler of playing fields: Here are institutions where children -- regardless of means and family background -- can go to get a good education, experience cultures and histories different from their own, and be molded into capable participants in a democratic society and lovers of the commonweal.
All of these values -- choice and freedom, democracy and community -- are distinctly American.
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THE first clinical trial aimed at boosting social skills in people with autism using magnetic brain stimulation has been completed - and the results are encouraging."As a first clinical trial, this is an excellent start," says Lindsay Oberman of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, who was not part of the study.
People diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder often find social interactions difficult. Previous studies have shown that a region of the brain called the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) is underactive in people with autism. "It's also the part of the brain linked with understanding others' thoughts, beliefs and intentions," says Peter Enticott of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Enticott and his colleagues wondered whether boosting the activity of the dmPFC using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), which involves delivering brief but strong magnetic pulses through the scalp, could help individuals with autism deal with social situations. So the team carried out a randomised, double-blind clinical trial - the first of its kind - involving 28 adults diagnosed with either high-functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome.
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When it comes to working together to support the survival and enjoyment of history for students in our schools, why are history teachers, as a group, as good as paralyzed?
Whatever the reason, in the national debates over nonfiction reading (history books, anyone?) and nonfiction writing for students in the schools, the voice of history teachers, at least in the wider conversation, has not been clearly heard.
Perhaps it could be because, as David Steiner, former Commissioner of Education in New York State, put it: "History is so politically toxic that no one wants to touch it."
Have the bad feelings and fears raised over the ill-fated National History Standards which emerged from UCLA so long ago persisted and contributed to our paralysis in these national discussions?
Are we (I used to be one) too sensitive to the feelings of other members of the social studies universe? Are we too afraid that someone will say we have given insufficient space and emphasis to the sociology of the mound people of Ohio or the history and geography of the Hmong people or the psychology of the Apache and the Comanche? Or do we feel guilty, even though it is not completely our fault, that all of the Presidents of the United States have been, (so far), men?
I am concerned when the National Assessment of Educational Progress finds that 86% of our high school seniors scored Basic or Below on U.S. History, and I am appalled by stories of students, who, when asked to choose our Allies in World War II on a multiple-choice test, select Germany (both here and in the United Kingdom, I am told). After all, Germany is an ally now, they were probably an ally in World War II, right? So Presentism reaps its harvest of historical ignorance.
Of course there is always competition for time to give to subjects in schools. Various groups push their concerns all the time. Business people often argue that students should learn about the stock market at least, if not credit default swaps and the like. Other groups want other things taught. I understand that there is new energy behind the revival of home economics courses for our high school future homemakers.
But what my main efforts have been directed towards since 1987 is prevention of the need for remedial nonfiction reading and writing courses in college. My national research has found that most U.S. public high schools do not ask students to write a serious research paper, and I am convinced that, if a study were ever done, it would show that we send the vast majority of our high school graduates off without ever having assigned them a complete history book to read. Students not proficient in nonfiction reading and writing are at risk of not understanding what their professors are talking about, and are, in my view, more likely to drop out of college.
For all I know, book reports are as dead in the English departments as they are in History departments. In any case, most college professors express strong disappointment in the degree to which entering students are capable of reading the nonfiction books they are assigned and of writing the term papers that are assigned.
A study done by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 90% of professors judge their students to be "not very well prepared" in reading, doing research, and writing.
I cannot fathom why we put off instruction in nonfiction books and term papers until college in so many cases. We start young people at a very early age in Pop Warner football and in Little League baseball, but when it comes to nonfiction reading and writing we seem content to wait until they are 18 or so.
For whatever reason, some students have not let our paralysis prevent them either from studying history or from writing serious history papers, and I have proof that they can do good work in history, if asked to do so. When I started The Concord Review in 1987, I hoped that students might send me 4,000-word research papers in history. By now, I have published, in 98 issues, 1,077 history research papers averaging 6,000 words, on a huge variety of topics, by high school students from 46 states and 38 other countries.
Some have been inspired by their history teachers, other by their history-buff parents, but a good number have been encouraged by seeing the exemplary work of their peers in print. Here are parts of two comments from authors--Kaitlin Marie Bergan: "When I first came across The Concord Review, I was extremely impressed by the quality of writing and the breadth of historical topics covered by the essays in it. While most of the writing I have completed for my high school history classes has been formulaic and limited to specified topics, The Concord Review motivated me to undertake independent research in the development of the American Economy. The chance to delve further into a historical topic was an incredible experience for me and the honor of being published is by far the greatest I have ever received. This coming autumn, I will be starting at Oxford University, where I will be concentrating in Modern History." And Emma Curran Donnelly Hulse: "As I began to research the Ladies' Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task. At first, I did check out every relevant book from the library, running up some impressive fines in the process, but I learned to skim bibliographies and academic databases to find more interesting texts. I read about women's history, agrarian activism and Irish nationalism, considering the ideas of feminist and radical historians alongside contemporary accounts...Writing about the Ladies' Land League, I finally understood and appreciated the beautiful complexity of history...In short, I would like to thank you not only for publishing my essay, but for motivating me to develop a deeper understanding of history. I hope that The Concord Review will continue to fascinate, challenge and inspire young historians for years to come."
Lots of high school [and middle school] students are sitting out there, waiting to be inspired by their history teachers [and their peers] to read history books and to prepare their best history research papers, and lots of history teachers are out there, wishing there were a stronger and more optimistic set of arguments coming from a history presence in the national conversation about higher standards for nonfiction reading and writing in our schools.
-----------------------------
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog
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On Stanford University's sprawling campus, where a long palm-lined drive leads to manicured quads, humanities professors produce highly regarded scholarship on Renaissance French literature and the philosophy of language.They have generous compensation, stunning surroundings and access to the latest technology and techniques of scholarship. The only thing they lack is students: Some 45 percent of the faculty members in Stanford's main undergraduate division are clustered in the humanities -- but only 15 percent of the students.
With Stanford's reputation in technology, it is no wonder that computer science is the university's most popular major, and that there are no longer any humanities programs among the top five. But with the recession having helped turn college, in the popular view, into largely a tool for job preparation, administrators are concerned.
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The United States' reputation as "the land of opportunity" is a cruel bit of false advertising.Americans are less likely to experience relative economic mobility than our peers in countries like Canada, Denmark, and Sweden. Children born to poor and working-class parents are considerably less likely to reach the highest rungs of the economic ladder than their richer classmates.
But why? One of the most promising new groups working to answer this question is Opportunity Nation, a group committed to working across partisan and ideological lines "to expand economic opportunity and close the opportunity gap in America." Their newly released Opportunity Index includes 16 indicators, from high-school graduation to income inequality. But not one indicator relates to the family.In fact, the opportunity story begins with our families--in particularly, with our parents. As the Nobel-prize-winning economist James Heckman recentlynoted, "the family into which a child is born plays a powerful role in determining lifetime opportunities." My own research using individual-level data from the Add Health dataset for the Home Economics Project, a new joint initiative between the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, indicates that adolescents raised in intact, married homes are significantly more likely to succeed educationally and financially. The benefits are greatest for less privileged homes--that is, where their mother did not have a college degree.
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A Beloit teacher is gaining in popularity online for turning classroom lessons into song lyrics and music videos.
John Honish creates parodies of popular songs and uses them as lessons in his classroom. He said he wanted his students to retain the material, so he started rapping.Honish said he likes to put the most important information in the chorus, since it will get repeated.
"Oh, Mr. Honish, you're so crazy to the kids that can recite every word from every video I've put out there," said Honish.
He remixed Kanye West's "Power" to teach students about World War II and Hitler.
For the last three years, Honish, a geography teacher, has been dropping rhymes and giving students a valuable lesson with each line.
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In the last few years, 16 states have begun funding public colleges based at least partially on student outcomes like degree production and completion rates. That number soon will grow, according to Complete College America, bringing the total to 25 states."It's sweeping across the country," said Stan Jones, president of the nonprofit group, which is hosting its fourth annual meeting here this week.
Supporters of performance-based funding now include President Obama, who wants to link his planned college ratings system to federal financial aid.
Complete College America, which receives significant funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is a prominent and effective proponent of linking state funding to student outcomes. Attendees at this week's meeting include representatives from 33 states and the District of Columbia, all of which have signed on to elements of the group's take on the national college completion "agenda.
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The Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC) just issued a report on special interest group spending for the Christie/Buono contest and the heavyweight is NJEA. Here's ELEC Director Jeff Brindle in a press statement:Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators.
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Seeking to counter a recent trial judge's ruling in a public labor lawsuit, a Milwaukee teacher and four others from Wisconsin are suing to force the union elections called for under Gov. Scott Walker's signature legislation.
With teachers from La Crosse, Waukesha, Brookfield and Racine, Nicholas Johnson of Milwaukee Public Schools filed the lawsuit in Waukesha County Circuit Court with legal help from union opponents at the National Right to Work Foundation and the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.The lawsuit seeks to force the state Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission to hold recertification elections to determine whether the unions in their districts can officially represent school employees. The rules for the recertification elections make them difficult for unions to win, and many labor groups faced with them have chosen not even to hold them.
Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colás last year found Act 10 was unconstitutional for teachers and local government workers, saying it violated their guarantee of equal protection under the law and infringed on their freedom-of-association rights.
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I called Hanks to ask her about her decision to leave Chicago. She responded by e-mail. "A great opportunity presented itself that I thought I could really grow and learn from. You know I am still pretty young, too. I don't have kids, so it's easier for me to move around now versus one day when I am more settled."I had a great experience leading Melody and I'm proud of the work that we did," she went on. "That work prepared me to take on this role."
A spokesperson for CPS told me in an e-mail: "We never like to see talented leaders like Nancy Hanks leave the district. We wish her success in her new role and hope she returns to CPS at some point." He added that the district's "extensive professional development, training, and recruiting programs . . . help ensure that we always have a pipeline of qualified leaders ready to replace principals who may move, retire, or leave the district for new opportunities."
The Madison superintendent who recruited Hanks, Jennifer Cheatham, had herself recently left CPS. Cheatham, 41, who was chief instruction officer here, was named superintendent in Madison in February.
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The Board of Education must adopt a tax levy by November 6, 2013. We recommend a total tax levy for all Funds of $257,727,292. This is a 3.38% increase over the prior year, and a 1.09% decrease over the levy estimate included in the August 2013 preliminary budget. The Board's 'unused' levy authority, which can be preserved and carried forward, is $8.9 million.The current 2013-2014 budget spends $391,834,829 for 27,186 pk-12 students or $14,413/student. Note that per student spending is not linear for pre-k plus full time students.We also recommend that the Board adopt a Fall Budget for 2013-14 which will replace the preliminary budget approved in August. The Fall Budget has been updated to reflect the latest information regarding funding, grants, and actual staffing levels. A review of all budget line items was included in the update process, with adjustments made wherever necessary to improve the accuracy of the budget.
The materials included in this packet provide multiple layers of detail concerning the budget and tax levy, from the concise 'DP! recommended budget format' to more detailed views of the budget and levy.
Related: Madison's Planned $pending & Property Tax Increase: Does it Include $75/Student "Unrestricted" State Budget Increase (Outside of Revenue Caps)?, 45% (!) Increase in Madison Schools' Fund 80 Property Taxes from the 2011-2012 to 2012-2013 School Year; No Mention of Total Spending, Madison Schools' 2013-2014 Budget Charts, Documents, Links, Background & Missing Numbers and Madison's disastrous reading results.
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Watch the video and access more information --http://www.lighting.philips.com/main/application_areas/school/schoolvision/index.wpd
I'd think that similar appropriate lighting would boost output in an office while making employees feel better at the end of the day.
Feel free to contact me if you'd like to pursue this type of lighting in your school or business.
I work with lighting designers and installers who understand these lighting principles behind SchoolVision.
The pioneering SchoolVision solution [by Phillips Lighting] was put to the test as part of an independent study by the local government in Hamburg and the Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf. A total of 166 pupils and 18 teachers took part in the year-long scientific experiment, which recorded significant improvements in student performance.
A lesson in behaviour
After the existing lighting in each classroom was replaced with the SchoolVision system, attention span, concentration and the behaviour of pupils all improved significantly. Under the dynamic daylight conditions not only did their performance improve, they also read faster and made fewer mistakes.
The proof is in the figures
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We've heard the myths before. Parents can't receive public support for their children to attend a faith-based school because that would violate constitutional restrictions. Faith-based schools are selective and homogenous. Faith-based schools shred the social fabric and civic unity. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the myths persist. And, in doing so, they continue to hamper efforts to bring faith-based schools fully into the panoply of choices from which all parent should be able to choose - and which compose public education in the 21st Century.In its first report to the nation, "Religious Schools in America: A Proud History and Perilous Future," the Commission on Faith-based Schools lists 10 of these myths - along with the facts that dispel them. The commission is a product of the American Center for School Choice, which co-hosts this blog. Its aim: To cast a brighter spotlight on the value and plight of faith-based schools, which are declining in urban areas where they have long been part of the solution in educating low-income children. The commission is holding a leadership summit in New York City on Nov. 19, where the report will be released. We'll bring you more information in future posts. In the meantime, we thought the 10 myths worth sharing on their own.
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National Council on Teacher Quality:
This report provides a detailed and up-to-date lay of the land on teacher evaluation policies across the 50 states and DCPS. It also offers a more in-depth look at the states with the most ambitious teacher evaluation systems, including their efforts to connect teacher evaluation to other policy areas. In addition, it includes some advice and lessons learned from states' early experiences on the road to improving teacher evaluation systems.
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he number of students that have left Madison schools for other districts through the state's public school open enrollment program has grown every year since 2005.Much more on outbound open enrollment here.But which schools are those students leaving? Our graphic below uses Madison Metropolitan School District data to show the number of leavers -- the term used for students who live in the Madison district but go to school in another -- by which school's attendance area they live in. (Note that the open enrollment program doesn't apply to students who leave for private schools or to be home-schooled.)
By percentage of enrollment, the schools with the most leavers were Glendale Elementary (83, 17.5 percent), Leopold Elementary (67, 10.2 percent), Toki Middle (48, 9.4 percent) and La Follette High (121, 8.2 percent). Memorial High has the highest number of leavers at 134, but its higher enrollment put it only eighth when ranked by percentage (7.3 percent).
Of the 1,041 leavers for the 2012-13 school year, 494 were from elementary schools, 188 were in the middle school grades 6 through 8 and 359 were at the high school level.
The Monona Grove School District was the most popular destination for the leavers, followed closely by Verona and McFarland. Students left Madison for 25 districts, but data for how many attended each was not fully available because the district can't report small numbers due to privacy concerns.
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These are those educators.2013 Early Career Award Winner: Lauren Boyd
Lauren Boyd has been a second-grade teacher at Milwaukee College Preparatory School-38th Street Campus for two years (as of 3/13). She earned her certification for teaching through the Urban Education Fellows' licensure program at Mount Mary University, where she also completed her master's in education.According to Principal Maggie Olson, Lauren was chosen by Ms. Olson to attend lead teacher meetings at Schools That Can Milwaukee. Ms. Boyd is very engaged with her learners, and her students show strong growth on MAP testing in math and reading. Lauren also demonstrates other positive instructional traits: "...superior classroom management skills...strong classroom culture...open to feedback and seeking support...builds wonderful relationships with (her students') families."
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Editor's Note: Recently, six well-known AIR thought leaders including George Bohrnstedt, Beatrice Birman, David Osher, Jennifer O'Day, Terry Salinger, and Jane Hannaway posted blogs on the AIR website about A Nation at Risk. Gary Phillips, AIR Vice President and AIR Institute Fellow, joins these thinkers with his blog, "Why Local Educators Haven't Heeded the Warnings in A Nation at Risk," which we've reposted below.For the last 30 years national education leaders have believed that our underachieving educational system has put our nation at risk. One persistent problem with that belief is that the international data examined by national policy makers to support the claim don't match the state data reported to the local press and parents. International assessments generally show that the United States is, at best, in the middle of the pack among other industrialized nations while state data generally show that students are proficient and performing above average. No wonder the crisis experienced by policy makers doesn't seem so urgent to local governors, boards of education, and parents. And no wonder local educators haven't acted on what national policy makers consider crises.
A graph helps illustrate the problem. The beige bars represent the state performance in 2007 based on the data reported by states to the federal government under the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, also known as No Child Left Behind. Look at Tennessee, for example. In 2007, the state reported that 90 percent of its 4th graders were proficient in mathematics based on challenging performance standards established by the state.
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he University admitted publicly for the first time Friday that it puts hundreds of undergraduate applicants on its waitlist each year because they cannot pay GW's tuition.Administrators now say the admissions process has always factored in financial need. But that contradicts messaging from the admissions and financial aid offices that, as recently as Saturday, have regularly attested that the University remained need-blind.
Students who meet GW's admissions standards, but are not among the top applicants, can shift from "admitted" to "waitlisted" if they need more financial support from GW. These decisions affect up to 10 percent of GW's roughly 22,000 applicants each year, said Laurie Koehler, the newly hired associate provost for enrollment management.
Admissions representatives do not consider financial need during the first round of reading applications. But before applicants are notified, the University examines its financial aid budget and decides which students it can actually afford to admit.
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Eighteen years ago, they were crib mates in a Romanian orphanage.Today, Elena Heimark and Rachel Murphy are roommates at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Taking their first steps into adulthood side-by-side as college freshmen is as natural to them as taking their first steps together as toddlers, even though they didn't see each other for years in between while they were busy growing up.
They were 2 years old when their parents traveled halfway around the world to adopt them and bring them home to Wisconsin -- Elena to West Bend and Rachel to South Milwaukee.
There's a picture of the girls sitting on the steps of the orphanage the day they left. Each is wearing brand new sneakers and adorable outfits their parents picked out for them when they were still imagining what it would be like to be their parents.
Once in Wisconsin, their moms arranged occasional play dates to keep the girls connected. There's a picture of them giggling and spinning together in a tire swing. Elena, who is one month and two days older, is a whole head taller than Rachel. You can see their bond. But nothing foretells just how much alike they will be as 18-year-olds.
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Earlier this year I visited a school in turmoil. It began with two students: a sixth-grade girl who I'll call Emily, and her 14-year-old boyfriend, who I'll call Justin. Justin begged Emily to send him some photos. "Nothing raunchy," he said. Their parents would never know, he promised.Emily did as he asked in the privacy of her bedroom. She pulled down her shirt to reveal the curve of her breast. (Like many other 12-year-old girls nowadays, she could easily pass for 15.)
Justin promised Emily that nobody else would ever see the photos, and it seems he meant to keep that promise. But Justin left his phone unattended at a party, and another boy, we'll call him Brett, picked up Justin's phone, scrolled through the photos, and saw the ones Emily had sent. Brett forwarded the photos of Emily from Justin's phone to his phone, and then posted the photos on Instagram, using an account with a fictitious name.
Within their suburban community, the photos went viral. Other girls began calling her "Emily the slut." Boys came up to Emily and asked her to put on a show for them. She was uninvited from a ski weekend with friends when the parents of one of the other girls said they didn't want their daughter to be around Emily's bad influence.
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Florida, in short, will need to find a way to educate far more than one million additional students each year by 2030. Note that Florida's charter school law passed in 1996. The time between 1996 and now is the same at the amount of time between now and 2030. Charter schools educated 203,000 students in 2012-13.The Step Up for Students and McKay programs educate another 86,000. It will take a very substantial improvement in Florida choice programs simply to get them to absorb a substantial minority of the increase in student population on the way. Otherwise, Florida districts will either find themselves overwhelmed with expensive construction projects, or can start using their facilities in early and late shifts, or both.
A giant new investment in school facilities will prove incredibly difficult because of the other meta-trend in Florida's demographics: aging. The expansion of Florida's youth population, while substantial, pales in comparison to that of the elderly population. Florida's population aged 65 and older projects to more than double between 2010 and 2030, from approximately 3.4 million to almost 7.8 million (see Figure 3).
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For years, colleges have sought out applicants who have high test scores or who can throw a football. But increasingly the targets are far more precise, in part because of technology and in part because recruiters are under the gun to meet enrollment goals.Now, it's easier for recruiters to use millions of high school students' personal information to target them for certain traits, including family income or ethnicity, or even to predict which students will apply, enroll and stay in college.
These tactics, which are beginning to resemble the data-driven efforts used by political campaigns, have already prompted internal discussions at the College Board. Advisers to the College Board -- which has data on seven million students it sells to about 1,100 institutions each year - met early this summer and talked about doing more to police how colleges can use the board's student data, but a committee decided not to change the current policies.
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