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With the nationalizing of the American healthcare system well underway, nationalizing public education pre-K through 12 is the next big thing on the progressive agenda. Wait for it.Related: Up for re-election Madison School Board President Ed Hughes: "The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking."; "For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools....". Remarkable.It will be called ObamaCore Education, for short.
The original 2008 Obama campaign Blueprint for Change document included a "Plan to Give Every American Child a World Class Education" and linked to a 15-page, single-spaced document entitled "Barack Obama's Plan For Lifetime Success Through Education." It offered a litany of proposals as part of a broad, federal intervention into America's public education system.
A case can be made that the regime would have been better off, in the long run, nationalizing public education before healthcare, because the fundamental transformation of education would have been easier.
How so? you ask.
The reasons for the relative ease -- compared to ObamaCare -- of installing ObamaCore Education were cited in the American Thinker back in June 2009.
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An advertisement that appeared briefly on the classifieds website Craigslist claimed to be posted by an incoming Harvard University student offering to pay $40,000 a year to have someone pretend to be the student for four years.Whoever posted the ad wrote that they had already been accepted to start in the fall of 2014 at Harvard, which sent acceptance notices to 992 early action applicants for the class of 2018 a few days ago.
The ad poster said that they would, of course, also pay for tuition, books, housing, transportation and other living expenses. And, a $10,000 bonus would be given if the student imposter graduated successfully.
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More than 5.3 million American public school students would struggle to understand this sentence.These students need to be taught the English language in addition to the usual material in math, science, and social studies. This presents a monumental challenge for educators nationwide, according to Patricia Gandara, a UCLA education professor whom President Barack Obama appointed to the Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. She is also co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Speaking at the Education Writers Association's National Seminar, held in May at Stanford University, Gandara referenced a nationwide survey given to teachers already trained for the growing number of English-language learners, commonly called ELLs.
"In the words of teachers themselves, they don't feel qualified," Gandara said.
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Chad Aldeman: First, can you say why you are interested in pension reform, and what made this bill important?Daniel Biss: I'm interested in pension reform because the first two years of my service in the Illinois General Assembly were years that followed a very significant tax increase and yet saw extremely deep cuts in discretionary spending to areas of public service that I cared deeply about, the reasons that I entered public service in the first place.
The size of our pension payments was so large that if we tried to address our budget problems without looking at pensions, we would be signing ourselves up for deep and never-ending impacts on the rest of state government. I just couldn't get to a place where that seemed acceptable. I sought out changes to the pension system that ultimately strengthened and preserved it for those who rely on it the most.
This bill makes significant changes to the pension system in a way that seeks to do three very important things. The first is to achieve significant budgetary savings. After this legislation, our state payments over the next 30 years will be $160 billion dollars lower. Number two, this bill achieves those savings in a way that is consistent with my policy priorities, namely sheltering those with the smallest pensions and those who are most reliant on their pensions, as well as those who have served the longest. Number three, for the first time in history, Illinois will be making its actuarially required payments in keeping with national actuarial standards. Not only do we get on an actuarial payment schedule, we put in place protections to ensure that we stay on that schedule going forward.
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How much do you know about the Common Core Standards? Choose all that apply. The Common Core is:a) a new set of nationwide standards that will encourage deep thinking instead of rote memorization
b) a new round of edu-crap, like No Child Left Behind
c) replacing state standards in 45 states including California
d) causing surprisingly large numbers of students to freak out and start weeping uncontrollably during initial tests all across the East Coast
e) causing Arne Duncan to infuriate opponents by dismissing them as "white suburban moms"
f) going to push fiction out of English classrooms
g) going to have no effect on the teaching of fiction
h) going to change everything
i) going to change nothing
j) going to make testing companies billions of dollars
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In the early 1990s, a team of researchers decided to follow about 40 volunteer families -- some poor, some middle class, some rich -- during the first three years of their new children's lives. Every month, the researchers recorded an hour of sound from the families' homes. Later in the lab, the team listened back and painstakingly tallied up the total number of words spoken in each household.
What they found came to be known as the "word gap."
It turned out, by the age of 3, children born into low-income families heard roughly 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers.
Research since then has revealed that the "word gap" factors into a compounding achievement gap between the poor and the better-off in school and life. The "word gap" remains as wide today, and new research from Stanford University found an intellectual processing gap appearing as early as 18 months.
That study led to some increased calls for universal preschool, but some say that's not early enough.
"I recognized that we need to really start in the cradle," says Angel Taveras, mayor of Providence, R.I.
He says two-thirds of kindergarteners in the city show up on their first day already behind national literacy benchmarks.
Next month, with funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Taveras' city will launch "Providence Talks," a new effort to take on the "word gap." Providence will distribute small recording devices -- essentially word pedometers -- that tuck into the vest of a child's clothing. These will automatically record and calculate the number of words spoken and the number of times a parent and child quickly ask and answer each other's questions.
"We are very hopeful that we can be the laboratory here in Providence, and as we have success we can share it with the rest of the country," Taveras says.
The idea was inspired in part by a research program called 30 Million Words in Chicago.
Aneisha Newell says that program taught her to talk to her young daughter in new ways. She says she never realized bath time -- with colors and shapes of bubbles and toys to describe -- could be a teachable moment. She ended up breaking the program's record for the most words spoken.
And then there was the moment her daughter -- not yet 3 years old -- used the word 'ridiculous' correctly. Newell was amazed.
"It was just something that made me feel good as a parent," she says.
Progress like Newell's stems from a special kind of parent-child interaction, says Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, who started the 30 Million Words program.
"We can't just have people saying 30 million times 'stop it!' It's got to be much more," she says.
The parent should "tune in" to what the child is looking at, talk about it and ask questions that can create a sort of "serve and return" between parent and child.
Suskind says that research shows overhearing a cell phone conversation or sitting in front of a television program doesn't cut it when it comes to building a child's brain.
She and others hope to expand their style of training to day care centers and beyond. She says she hopes to eventually have it be routine for parents to learn about this at their newborn's first hearing screening. She wants them to understand that their talk matters well before their baby starts talking back.
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Entangled, impossible to separate, that is what content and pedagogy have been and are in U.S. schooling. But not to reformers.For decades, in science, math, and history policymakers, researchers, teacher educators, practitioners, and parents have argued over what kind of content should be taught in classrooms, playing down the inevitable presence of pedagogy or how the subject should be taught. Amnesiac reformers, pumped full of certitude, have pushed forward with "new science," "new math" and "new history" curricula many times over the past century believing that the content in of itself-particularly delivered by academic experts-will magically direct teachers how to put innovative units and lessons into practice in their classrooms.
Well-intentioned but uninformed, these reformers have ignored how knotted and twisted together they are. Knowing content is one strand and how to teach it is the other. Entwined forever.
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Did you hear about last Monday's "National Day of Action to Reclaim the Promise of Public Education?" Maybe not. Despite a media blitz from the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, despite allocations of $1.2 million of teachers' union dues, despite organized protests in 90 cities across the country, this event had little impact.For New Jersey, the more meaningful signal was sent by the AFT's decision to hold its "Day of Action" in Newark. (Pennsylvanians headed over to Gov. Corbett's Philly office on Broad Street.)
Newark, after all, is the heart of N.J. education reform territory and boasts the state's most progressive teacher contract (signed last year with great acclaim), an extensive and successful cadre of charter schools that educates one in four public school students, and a superintendent whose latest initiative embraces parental empowerment through a universal enrollment plan. Some of that progress is at stake as Newark residents get ready to pick a replacement for Senator Cory Booker.
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Integration seems one of the great political issues of our era. That is, people express great concern about factional favoritism based on race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, age, etc., and push for laws and policies to prevent it, or to encourage mixing and ties across factional boundaries. I've tended to assume that such policies have been sufficient, and perhaps even excessive.But a student, Randall McElroy, wrote a paper for my grad law & econ class, that got me thinking. He wrote about how the Hopi indians dealt with mass immigration in part by defining newcomers as a new clan, and then forbidding within-clan marriage. Such "exogamy" has apparently been a common strategy in history: force mixing and friendly ties between factions by requiring all marriages to be between factions.
I was reminded of Cleisthenes redesigning the political system of ancient Athens to break up the power of region-based alliances that had caused endemic political conflict. He created ten equal tribes, where a third of each tribe was taken from a different type of region, plain, coast, or hills, and made these tribes the main unit of political organization.
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American Airlines completed its transition to "paperless cockpits" this year, after giving pilots iPads in place of the 3,000-plus pages of documents and manuals they used to carry.At professional services group PwC, meanwhile, staff must walk to a printer and enter a passcode to produce their hard copy - an extra step that was designed to cut the waste created by uncollected printouts.
If the paperless workplace is finally arriving, as these examples suggest, it is worth asking whether there is a difference between reading on screens and on paper - and whether all screens are created equal.
Anne Mangen, an associate professor at the University of Stavanger in Norway who specialises in reading, says the answer depends on the complexity of the content and the type of screen.
For skimming a short message, the medium may not matter, adds Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in the US.
But a screen is not necessarily best suited to "deep" reading, where the aim is to pick up more insight and come up with novel thoughts. In this situation, she says: "Paper seems to offer some advantages."
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What will our economy, workplaces, and society look like when we can copy our brains and build virtual workers to do our jobs? An economist looks at the next great era, a world dominated by robots.What might a world full of robots as smart as humans look like? Experts in robotics and artificial intelligence have given a lot of thought to when and if such robots might appear. Most say it will happen eventually, and some say it will happen soon.
Knowing when advanced robots will appear doesn't tell us how they will change the world. For that, we need experts in social science, like economists.
Here, I outline a scenario of what a new robot-based society might look like. Some people say I shouldn't do this, because it's impossible, while others just say it is unscientific. Even so, I'm doing it anyway, because it seems useful and it's fun.
Keep in mind, however, that I'm not arguing that this scenario is good; I'm just applying basic economics to make best guesses about what things would actually be like. While most of you have probably seen movies depicting worlds with smart robots, as an economist I intend to show you we can do a lot better by using careful economic analysis. We can actually say quite a lot about this new world.
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In 2009 when the federal government announced the requirements for states to compete for billions of dollars of school reform grants, Wisconsin's name came up -- but not in the context state leaders wanted.Wisconsin adopts a small part of MTELEducation Secretary Arne Duncan called a Wisconsin law on the books at the time "simply ridiculous" because it prohibited using student test scores as a factor in evaluating teacher performance. Wisconsin never won a grant through the $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition.
Nearly five years later, the state is on the brink of rolling out an evaluation system for educators in all K-12 public school districts, but the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction still hasn't determined how to tie student outcomes into those ratings.
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The U.S. government has arguably run far afoul of international and national law by torturing terrorism suspects and collecting private citizens' phone records.Much more on Middleton, here (including 16% lower property taxes).We're just coming out of a recession caused largely by heretofore respectable banking, real estate and other moneyed interests who played fast and loose with the rules.
And recent years have seen many a hero athlete nabbed for taking performance-enhancing drugs.
So I find it hard to heap too much abuse on Middleton High School students accused of widespread cheating. They wouldn't be wrong to point to the front page of almost any day's newspaper and reprise a line from that old war-on-drugs public service announcement: "I learned it by watching you!"
Still, while we grown-ups have set some pretty bad examples, it would be a shame if Middleton's grown-ups perpetuate that recent tradition by declining to dig too deeply into the cheating allegations.
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Michael Roston and Erik Piepenburg:
Let it not be said that Shakespeare means nothing to young people."The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," may have first been performed 500 years ago. But when The New York Times asked high school and college students to use Instagram to record short videos of lines from William Shakespeare's tale of royal intrigue and revenge, nearly 500 students seized the opportunity. Scholars differ on whether or not Hamlet was the most vengeful teenager in Danish royal history. But the young people who made these many short videos demonstrated the many ways they were able to connect the world they dwell in with Prince Hamlet's tragedy.
From basements and bedrooms to classrooms and cloistered locations, hundreds of students hit the "record" button on a smartphone and delivered up novel interpretations of Shakespeare's words. We feature some of our favorite short Hamlet videos below, along with explanations from several students about what inspired their performances.
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Lasting improvements in public education have been hard-won and tempered by a discovery that change in the K-12 system will never be swift, but rather incremental.Reflecting on the two decades I've written about education in Washington state, I notice a sea change. Remember when students misbehaving in school were suspended or, depending on the transgression, kicked out permanently? The Washington state Legislature is among a number of states curbing the practice of school suspensions and expulsions.
Not long ago, struggling students were relegated to low-level academic tracks. The best teachers were given the gift of high-performing "deserving" kids.
Expectations of rigor were placed on the shoulders of students in gifted programs. Now, Washington state and other states require students to take an advanced course.
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Geoffrey Collier, via a kind Erich Zellmer email:
The parlous state of American higher education has been widely noted, but the view from the trenches is far more troubling than can be characterized by measured prose. With most students on winter break and colleges largely shut down, the lull presents an opportunity for damage assessment.The flood of books detailing the problems includes the representative titles "Bad Students, Not Bad Schools" and "The Five Year Party." To list only the principal faults: Students arrive woefully academically unprepared; students study little, party much and lack any semblance of internalized discipline; pride in work is supplanted by expediency; and the whole enterprise is treated as a system to be gamed in which plagiarism and cheating abound.
The problems stem from two attitudes. Social preoccupations trump the academic part of residential education, which occupies precious little of students' time or emotions. Second, students' view of education is strictly instrumental and credentialist. They regard the entire enterprise as a series of hoops they must jump through to obtain their 120 credits, which they blindly view as an automatic licensure for adulthood and a good job, an increasingly problematic belief.
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We arrived at The Grove School in Redlands, California, just before their winter break, at about noon and right in time for lunch.The Grove School is a public charter school with about 200 students in grades 7 through 12. It follows the Montessori system, and it adjoins a private Montessori elementary school. The complex has citrus groves on one side and pastures, livestock enclosures, farm buildings, and vegetable gardens on the other. The effect is of a rural-area school that happens to be on the edge of a city.
The middle school on the campus is called The Farm, and students there grow some of the produce for the school lunches, including the one we ate. High schoolers do rotations in the kitchen in preparing, cooking, and cleaning up the meal. On the day we visited the menu was called "Hawaiian," and included chicken, rice, pasta (with some carrots, maybe from the farm) and a chunk of pineapple. It was much better than the school lunches I remember.
Grove is a fairly new school in Redlands, graduating its first class in 2002. When my husband, Jim, grew up in the town, every student from every corner of the town went to its one high school, Redlands High. As the area grew, the RHS enrollment became unmanageably large. When Jim graduated in the late 1960s, he had 800+ classmates; a generation later, the town's population had doubled, from around 35,000 to nearly 70,000, and the school was swollen too. Now two more 4-year public high schools have opened: Redlands East Valley in 1997, with an enrollment of about 2300 in grades 9 - 12, and Citrus Valley High School, which graduated its first class in 2012. Redlands High itself now has about 2300 students in grades 9 - 12.
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QUIT. I had to.Hopefully, you've never picked up the telephone and felt the hair stand up on the back of your neck as you realized who was on the phone and what they were talking about, felt your heart empty out and felt dread and despair flooding in. I have, twice. The first time, it was my ex-husband. The second time, it was the United Way of Los Angeles. I phoned into a conference call that wasn't what I expected, and it ended my relationships with the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, Teachers for a New Unionism and Educators for Excellence, and put some others in the doghouse. The call confirmed some of the most discouraging talk I'd heard or read, and some of my most disappointing experiences. After what I heard, I couldn't stay any longer.
photo (1)We've had a hard time with education reform in Los Angeles, and with a broken relationship between LAUSD and UTLA; what happened this fall just made it all worse. Early in the school year, LAUSD began implementing a plan to provide iPads to every student in the district, and distributed the devices at 47 schools. Students at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights quickly figured out how to overcome security filters that blocked social media sites, and the rollout had issues at two other schools. The iPads were quickly recalled and the bumbling start of the iPad program made national headlines in late September and early October. The school board soon erupted in a fit of 20-20 hindsight that was not improved by subsequent emergency meetings. All of this is chronicled in the press, but I mention it to set the stage for a little feint that John Deasy pulled on October 24, 2013, right after the iPad scandal and right before he was going to be called in for his own job evaluation. It was the last straw. Although I had publicly stuck up for him after a UTLA poll of 16,000 educators rendered a 91% "no confidence" vote, I lost all faith in him with the iPad situation, and had to face some very hard realities about reform groups in LA.
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Bullying isn't only a problem that occurs in schools or online among young people. It can happen anywhere to anyone, and a Rutgers-Camden nursing scholar is shedding some light on how it is becoming increasingly common in academia."What worries me is the impact that bullying is having on the ability to recruit and retain quality educators," says Janice Beitz, a professor at the Rutgers School of Nursing-Camden. "It has become a disturbing trend."
Beitz is a co-author of "Social Bullying in Nursing Academia," an article published in the September/October 2013 edition of Nurse Educator that draws upon interviews conducted with 16 nursing professors who were the victims of social bullying in an academic nursing workplace. Beitz says that the participants described in detail instances in which they were slandered, isolated, physically threatened, lied to, or given unrealistic workloads, among various other bullying tactics.
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For 45-year-old Li Jinsheng, who's visually impaired, it has been a long struggle to obtain permission to sit an exam that would put him on the road to fulfilling his dream of a career in law.Now he has finally won an eleventh hour nod to sit next year's National College Entrance Examination in China. He now hopes his battle will start a national discussion on the subject of the rights of China's disabled to an education.
Li recalled that at one point an examination authority official from Zhumadian city, Henan province, refused his application to sit the entrance exam because the test papers were not available in Braille.
"We're not letting you register because we're trying to be responsible for you," the official reportedly had told Li, according to Xinhua.
Sadly, this was not Li's first brush with the often frustrating bureaucracy of China's many provinces. Around 2002, Li struggled for 15 months to get permission for a self-study examination in traditional Chinese medicine. Li's stance on education for the disabled even earned him an audience with Deng Pufang, the paraplegic son of the late Deng Xiaoping, who complimented Li's bravery.
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This summer Michael Olagunju and his friend Zain Abbas decided that if they were to get the jobs they so desired - as an investment banker and an actuary, respectively - they needed to do something to lift them above the torrent of featureless email applications by their graduate peers. So they dusted off their best suits and each made a placard advertising themselves and stood outside Canary Wharf, the east London hub of finance."I knew there had to be a better way to get noticed," says 22-year-old Mr Olagunju, who qualified with a first-class degree in maths from Aberdeen university. "I just needed to get my toe in the door."
Competition for graduate- level jobs is fierce. According to figures released by the Office for National Statistics last month, almost half the UK's new graduates are working in non-graduate jobs. Forty-seven per cent of those who had finished their degree in the past five years were working in roles such as sales assistants and care workers. Recent analysis by the Financial Times showed that people who graduated this year are earning 12 per cent less than their counterparts before the financial crash.
Typically, positions at investment banks or fund managers are highly contested. These industries receive 135 applications per job, according to the Association of Graduate Recruiters.
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After years of cuts in state subsidies and growing resistance to rising tuition, U.S. colleges and universities are starting to unwind decades of administrative bloat and back-office waste that helped push up costs and tuition.The State University of New York system shaved $48 million in the past two years by cutting unused software licenses and consolidating senior administrators.
Expense Report
How a few colleges went about improving efficiency to cut costs
University of California, Berkeley, restructured its management chain and cut 280 management positions. Savings: about $20 million a year.
University of Kansas centralized some of its 800 computer servers to keep fewer rooms chilled to 64 degrees. Energy savings: about $1 million a year
The SUNY system consolidated elevator-service contracts. Maintenance savings: $500,000 a year.
The University of California, Berkeley, cut $70 million since 2011 by centralizing purchasing and laying off a layer of middle managers, among other things.
And the University of Kansas revamped its back-office operations to save about $5 million in 2013. One example of the fresh efficiency: A new way of deploying maintenance workers shaved an hour of drive time from their shifts each day.
Jeffrey Vitter, the provost and executive vice chancellor at the University of Kansas, said for years schools put off the hard choices on reining in costs. "There clearly is a sense of urgency now and that frankly is a big part that allows us to move forward," he said. Since reordering its back offices last year, the school, which educates 30,000 students, uses 11 million fewer pieces of paper a year.
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Last week, voters in 408 Wisconsin districts participated in union certification elections to determine their future representation. According to the results, 19 teachers unions decertified. All told, workers rejected over 70 of 408 school district unions during annual recertification elections.The largest school districts included New Berlin, Menomonee Falls, Pewaukee, Berlin, and Waterford. Additionally, substitute teachers with the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association also decertified with 128 of 320 members voting for the union.
While the majority of unions will continue to negotiate contracts for education employees, there are large districts throughout the state that are unwilling to pay high dues for outdated representation and partisan politics. Here at AAE, we believe this historic vote ushers in a new era of accountability for the state's unions. Teachers deserve to hold unions accountable to their members.
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The New Jersey School Boards Association has created a task force on student achievement to help local boards identify strategies to improve student performance and close the economic achievement gap.Members of 11 school boards from urban, rural and suburban districts are joined by education and community leaders to review relevant research and address issues ranging from curriculum to access to technology. The task force will present best practices and make recommendations that local boards can use to improve student performance.
"Overall New Jersey's students performing well on nationwide measures of academic progress, but when one digs deeper, a troubling statistic becomes apparent: a persistent economic achievement gap," the association's executive director Lawrence Feinsod said. "Poverty is no friend to academic achievement. Neither should it be an excuse for allowing children not to succeed."
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As international forces leave Afghanistan, much of the aid allocated to improving women's education is disappearing.Improving women's education is considered one of the stand-out successes in Afghanistan since the invasion of international forces in 2001.
But as foreign troops prepare to leave, that legacy is looking less certain.
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Every month, money flies from my checking account to the education savings accounts of my children, because I don't want them to become hobos. This is one way I allay my fear the world will eat them up. It's a mark of a good parent to worry over where--and whether--his child will go to college, isn't it?I need to confess a profoundly un-American heresy: I question what my children will get for the money. I don't question the value of education (though we make it a panacea for deeper ills of the soul); I doubt the capacity of most educational institutions to impart much beyond what one could obtain with, as the protagonist in Good Will Hunting notes, "a dollar-fifty in late charges at the public library."
I know there are teachers who can help a student get far more out of Dracula, say, than he might acquire on his own. They can cultivate in him a healthy awareness of the various psycho-sexual literary analytical clubs with which the text has been bludgeoned for decades, for example, or even help him challenge dominant beliefs about what Dracula, and monster literature more broadly, means to us culturally. There are teachers like that; I've seen them in action, and they are a heartening, humbling species to behold.
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On Nov. 20, just two weeks before their final exam for the semester, students enrolled in a night class in political science at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga received a rude surprise. They were told by a dean that their professor, Stefan Veldhuis, who had been teaching at the public community college in San Bernardino County for nearly a decade, had been abruptly fired the day before.The students don't know why they lost their instructor because Chaffey has refused to comment on the matter. Veldhuis told a reporter for the online trade paper Inside Higher Ed that a Chaffey administrator simply phoned him and told him he was no longer a "good fit." He speculates that the firing might be related to his informing the college that another Chaffey employee was having sex in a classroom, and that the employee might have retaliated by falsely accusing Veldhuis of something.
In any event, Veldhuis was a popular instructor at Chaffey, with a 4.8 (out of 5) rating on RateMyProfessor, and many of his students have rallied to his defense, setting up a support page for him on Facebook. The online magazine Slate took up the cry, declaring that "terminating professors midsemester with no reason and no due process is abhorrent."
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Explore the median household incomes in neighborhoods across the United States, based on the latest U.S. Census Bureau data.
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The holiday seasons of 2012 and 2013 in the education world have been dominated by the release of new international test-score data, and the accompanying hand-wringing about the performance of the U.S., with advocates of every stripe finding a high-performing country with existing policies that match what they always thought the U.S. ought to do. Here at the Chalkboard we often take on the dangers of analyses that draw causal conclusions from correlational data, particularly when the analyst is free to keep mining the data until the desired pattern is revealed. There are certainly many real examples that illustrate this important point, but today I'd like to illustrate it with a frivolous example about the Yuletide, based on real data and analyses.With one week to go before Christmas, most Americans are too busy going to holiday parties and shopping for last-minute gifts to worry about college ratings, teacher evaluation systems, and the other education policy issues of the day. Could the festive holiday spirit get in the way of putting students first? Or is it possible that a little holiday magic might increase student achievement?
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This Christmas I had a wonderfully simple experience of why asymmetric rates of learning matter so much, and a simple way to explain it to friends and colleagues.I have a young son. This is his first Christmas where he's really aware of the whole Christmas thing: that there is a Santa Claus, there is a tree, people are being extra nice to one another. He's loving it.
Naturally, part of the ritual is a trip to visit Santa Claus and so the other day, he embarked on his first visit with the big guy. Here's a short version of the transcript:
Santa: "Hello Alec, would you like to talk to Santa?"
Alec: (with somewhat shy smile...) "Yes."
Santa: "So Alec, do you like choo-choo trains?"
Alec: (smile, eyes wide) "Yes."
Santa: "Do you like Thomas the choo-choo train?"
Alec: (practically giggling, eyes super wide) "Yes!"
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An Oakland public school created to serve African American males will shut down in January, just 18 months after it opened.Related: The proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School - rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board.The 100 Black Men of the Bay Area Community School, a public charter school, struggled financially and suffered administrative turnover as well as loss of enrollment during its three semesters of operation. Its last day will be Jan. 24.
The school, located at the former Thurgood Marshall Elementary campus in the city's southeast hills, had 120 students at the start of this school year and 75 this week.
Short of funds"Our problem is a lack of money, not a mismanagement of funds," said Dr. Mark Alexander, a member of the school's board of directors. "This is the responsible thing to do."
Alexander believes the closure will be a hiatus to give the school time to reorganize, determine what went wrong and reopen in the next year or two.
"It's a setback for us," he said. "We've come too far to let this dream go."
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In the last week, we've paid great attention to Nelson Mandela's call for forgiveness and reconciliation between South Africa's former white rulers and its exploited black majority. But we've paid less attention to the condition that Mandela insisted must underlie reconciliation--truth. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Mandela established, and that Bishop Desmond Tutu chaired, was designed to contribute to cleansing wounds of the country's racist history by exposing it to a disinfecting bright light. As for those Afrikaners who committed even the worst acts of violence against blacks, they could be forgiven and move on only if they acknowledged the full details of their crimes.In the current issue of the School Administrator, I write that we do a much worse job of facing up to our racial history in the United States, leading us to make less progress than necessary in remedying racial inequality. We have many celebrations of the civil rights movement and its heroes, but we do very little to explain to young people why that movement was so necessary. Earlier this week, the New York Times described how the Alabama Historical Association has placed many commemorative markers around Montgomery to commemorate civil rights heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, but declined--because of "the potential for controversy"--to call attention to the city's slave markets and their role in the spread of slavery before the Civil War. Throughout our nation, this fear of confronting the past makes it more difficult to address and remedy the ongoing existence of urban ghettos, the persistence of the black-white achievement gap, and the continued under-representation of African Americans in higher education and better-paying jobs.
One of the worst examples of our historical blindness is the widespread belief that our continued residential racial segregation, North and South, is "de facto," not the result of explicit government policy but instead the consequence of private prejudice, economic inequality, and personal choice to self-segregate. But in truth, our major metropolitan areas were segregated by government action. The federal government purposefully placed public housing in high-poverty, racially isolated neighborhoods (pdf) to concentrate the black population, and with explicit racial intent, created a whites-only mortgage guarantee program to shift the white population from urban neighborhoods to exclusively white suburbs (pdf). The Internal Revenue Service granted tax-exemptions for charitable activity to organizations established for the purpose of enforcing neighborhood racial homogeneity. State-licensed realtors in virtually every state, and with the open support of state regulators, supported this federal policy by refusing to permit African Americans to buy or rent homes in predominantly white neighborhoods. Federal and state regulators sanctioned the refusal of the banking, thrift, and insurance industries to make loans to homeowners in other-race communities. Prosecutors and police sanctioned, often encouraged, thousands of acts of violence against African Americans who attempted to move to neighborhoods that had not been designated for their race.
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Molly Beck, via several kind readers:
Cheating on math exams at Middleton High School began years ago and focused on students sharing photographs of test questions with their peers, two letters sent to the school allege.The letters, one purportedly from a parent and one said to be from a student, both unsigned, name no students or teachers' classes but describe a system in which many students participated in cheating, which included the selling of test questions, first-period students sharing test questions and students calling in sick on test days and later obtaining test information.
The letters, obtained by the State Journal under the state's Open Records Law, were sent to the school this month. Officials this month made about 250 students retake a calculus exam because of suspected cheating
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LYNCHBURG, Va. -- BY the beginning of the 2015 school year, college students will have yet another tool for evaluating their higher-education options -- only this one won't come from U.S. News and World Report or Playboy, but the Department of Education. And rather than ranking academic quality or opportunities to party, this list will rate schools on "value."
At a time when the cost of college is soaring and millions of Americans are being shut out of higher education, a government-approved list of colleges that offer students more bang for their buck might sound like a good idea. But it's not.The ratings, proposed by President Obama in August, would evaluate schools based on criteria including tuition levels, graduation rates, how many students receive Pell grants and how much money recent graduates earn.
The problem is, the program won't just shape the choices students make; it will create potentially perverse incentives for the schools themselves.
Ratings based on graduate earnings will encourage schools to minimize preparation for lower-paying but socially valuable professions like social work, ministry and preschool education. Ratings based on graduation rates will encourage them to admit fewer students who might be less prepared for college, who graduate in lower numbers.
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Madison West High School Principal Ed Holmes (PDF), via a kind reader's email.
A number of controversial curricular initiatives occurred during Holmes' reign, including the implementation of "one size fits all" English 10, a parent TAG complaint, small learning communities and various "high school redesign" plans.
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Have you ever seen the movie "Idiocracy"? It is a movie about an "average American" that wakes up 500 years in the future only to discover that he is the most intelligent person by far in the "dumbed down" society that is surrounding him. Unfortunately, that film is a very accurate metaphor for what has happened to American society today. We have become so "dumbed down" that we don't even realize what has happened to us. But once in a while something comes along that reminds us of how far we have fallen. In Kentucky, an eighth grade exam from 1912 was recently donated to the Bullitt County History Museum. When I read this exam over, I was shocked at how difficult it was. Could most eighth grade students pass such an exam today? Of course not. In fact, I don't even think that I could pass it. Sadly, this is even more evidence of "the deliberate dumbing down of America" that former Department of Education official Charlotte Iserbyt is constantly warning us about. The American people are not nearly as mentally sharp as they once were, and with each passing generation it gets even worse.Related: Madison Literary Club Talk: Examinations for Teachers Past and Present.
Just check out some of the questions from the eighth grade exam that was discovered. Do you think that you could correctly answer these?...
-Through which waters would a vessel pass in going from England through the Suez Canal to Manila?
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Unfortunately, the place where our first creative ideas go to die is the place that should be most open to them--school. Studies show that teachers overwhelmingly discriminate against creative students, favoring their satisfier classmates who more readily follow directions and do what they're told.Even if children are lucky enough to have a teacher receptive to their ideas, standardized testing and other programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top (a program whose very designation is opposed to nonlinear creative thinking) make sure children's minds are not on the "wrong" path, even though adults' accomplishments are linked far more strongly to their creativity than their IQ. It's ironic that even as children are taught the accomplishments of the world's most innovative minds, their own creativity is being squelched.
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From parents funding elementary art classes out of their own pockets, to a school district with more than 100 art and music teachers, to urban charter schools specializing in the arts, Michigan's arts education landscape is as varied as its geography.Over the next week, online and in print, MLive will take a look at how schools across the state teach the arts, focusing on how districts have cut, maintained or brought back classes through hard budget choices and generous fundraising.
The state's educational guidelines call for students from kindergarten through high school to learn about dance, visual art, music and theater, and the Michigan Merit Curriculum requires students to complete one course in "visual, performing or applied arts" in order to graduate and receive a high school diploma.
That graduation requirement, coupled with budget pressures facing districts across the state, has often put elementary and middle school arts programs on the chopping block.
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Schools in the city of Sanger, California, struggle with many of the educational challenges you'd anticipate in a rural, farming community, populated largely by migrant workers with low incomes and little English. Yet in the past decade, Sanger schools have beaten the odds, improving educational outcomes for their students in many significant ways.You can find the details in this AP story by Gosia Wozniacka, at the San Diego Union-Tribune web site: Farm town develops education success formula. The story echoes much of what David Kirp said about improving schools in his book Improbable Scholars, (reviewed here). While his book focuses on Union City, New Jersey, he does refer to Sanger as an example of similar conditions producing similar improvements.
The most important take-away from these stories is that school improvement does not require dramatic overhauls in curriculum or governance. Rather, it's mainly a matter of stability and trust, the key conditions that allow people to build a shared understanding of the challenges they face and how to best serve their students, developing home-grown solutions that everyone commits to supporting.
Here's a sample of the article, which I hope you'll read in its entirety:
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The Principals of the five elementary schools and Scarsdale Assistant Superintendent Lynne Shain took center stage at the Board of Education meeting on Monday night December 9 to present a review of the elementary school program in the district. This presentation is one of a series of special reports that have been presented at Board of Education meetings in preparation for school budget discussions for 2014-15. The Principals reviewed the curriculum, program elements and staffing to give an overview of activities at the five schools, explain what's now being done and the associated costs.Much more on Scarsdale, here.It was an impressive review of many of the elements of the elementary program and it can be viewed on the Scarsdale Schools website on the Video on Demand page here or read the highlights of the presentations below.
Shain explained that the highly professional staff, small class sizes, student support, emphasis on basic skills plus interdisciplinary programs and critical and creative problem solving all contribute to a successful K-8 program that allows students to excel in high school and beyond. In response to new federal and state requirements to teach the core curriculum the district has made modest modifications to the curriculum where needed.
Scarsdale plans to spend $143,899,713 during the 2013-2014 school year for 4,700 students or $30,616 (!) per student. This is about double Madison's $15K/student, which is itself, double the United States average. Scarsdale demographics & Madison.
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An educational and enrichment workshop was recently conducted by the Galileo Enrichment Learning Program where the multi-awarded mathematician and Singapore Math advocate Dr. Queena Lee-Chua together with her son Scott, shared with the participants the fundamentals of Singapore Math and demonstrated how this fun learning approach is used to solve word problems.Much more on Singapore Math, here.Multi-awarded mathematician and Singapore Math advocate Dr. Queena Lee-Chua shared with the participants the fundamentals of Singapore Math and demonstrates how this fun-learning approach is used to solve word problems.
The workshop, held at Nuvali Evoliving AVR, Sta. Rosa City, Laguna, was organized by Galileo Sta. Rosa, attended by parents and their kids, as well as by teachers from different pre-schools and elementary schools in and outside Manila. It was indeed an enlightening and engaging time for everyone as the mother and son tandem proved to the audience that complex mathematical problems can be solved with simple math logic.
Related: Math Forum Audio/Video.
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For the majority of young adults diagnosed with autism, finding a skilled job -- especially one in the entertainment biz -- is a pipe dream. But thanks to Exceptional Minds digital arts vocational school, it doesn't have to be.With the school's help, four autistic students in their early 20s were hired to work on post-production visual effects for "American Hustle." Arielle Guthrie, Lloyd Hackl, Patrick Brady and Eli Katz, who are in the program's third and final year, provided rotoscoping services -- the laborious process of outlining elements in key frames for digital manipulation -- from EM's Sherman Oaks, Calif., studio.
One of the program's instructors, Josh Dagg, closely supervised the project, which the students worked on for five weeks on top of their full course loads. Dagg said most people with Autism Spectrum Disorders -- when they feel mentally engaged -- can focus with laser precision on a task for hours on end. Students in the program represent a wide range of individuals afflicted with a varying severity of symptoms. The students who worked on "American Hustle" had milder forms of autism.
"I want them to look forward to a career of personal and professional success rather than a lifetime of people telling them that 'because you hit this particular number in this genetic lottery, you are now a glorified houseplant,' " Dagg said. "That's a very real fear for a lot of people (with autism)."
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The high school student's 'Ido in Autismland' is part memoir and part protest, a compelling message to educators on how to teach people such as him.I t-h-i-n-k ...
Ido Kedar sits at the dining room table of his West Hills home. He fidgets in his chair, slouched over an iPad, typing. He hunts down each letter. Seconds pass between the connections.
... A-u-t-i-s-m-l-a-n-d ...
AdvertisementHe coined the word, his twist on Alice's Wonderland.
"C'mon," says his mother, Tracy. "Sit up and just finish it, Ido. Let's go."
He touches a few more keys, and then, with a slight robotic twang, the iPad reads the words he cannot speak.
I think Autismland is a surreal place.
For most of his life, Ido has listened to educators and experts explain what's wrong with him. Now he wants to tell them that they had it all wrong.
Last year, at the age of 16, he published "Ido in Autismland." The book -- part memoir, part protest -- has made him a celebrity in the autism world, a young activist eager to defy popular assumptions about a disorder that is often associated with mental deficiency.
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Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:
DPI held public hearings on the Common Core State Standard today, December 19, in Milwaukee, LaCrosse, and Ashland. The public may submit written testimony on the CCSS to DPI until January 3, 2014. Testimony may be send via email to CCSSTestimony @dpi.wi.gov or mailed to DPI at P.O. Box 7841, Madison, WI 53707-7841.This is separate from the legislative hearings on the CCSS which were held in October. The following information has been provided by DPI to update us on developments since the legislative hearings.
NEW Developments since October Hearing Opportunity
On December 11, the Assembly special committee on CCSS released the following report and on December 12, voted on eight recommendations crafted after hearing public testimony at the four hearings in October. Read more about the outcome of that vote from the committee chair press release here or view the Wisconsin Eye video of this vote and discussion here (120 min).
On December 11, the Senate special committee released their report and recommendations. It is unclear whether the Senate committee will also vote on their recommendations.
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This study used data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS:88) to examine the effects of dual enrollment programs for high school students on college degree attainment. The study also reported whether the impacts of dual enrollment programs were different for first generation college students versus students whose parents had attended at least some college. In addition, a supplemental analysis reports on the impact of different amounts of dual enrollment course-taking and college degree attainment.Via Noel RadomskiDual enrollment programs offer college-level learning experiences for high school students. The programs offer college courses and/or the opportunity to earn college credits for students while still in high school.
The intervention group in the study was comprised of NELS participants who attended a postsecondary school and who participated in a dual enrollment program while in high school (n = 880). The study author used propensity score matching methods to create a comparison group of NELS participants who also attended a postsecondary school but who did not participate in a dual enrollment program in high school (n = 7,920).
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Counterfeit diapers are damaging both the reputation and bottom line of Japanese manufacturers in China, with companies in Tokyo calling on local authorities to act.The booming Chinese market is proving a lucrative one for Japanese firms such as Daio Paper, which makes the hugely popular Goo.n line of disposable diapers. And because they are superior to Chinese products, that has elevated them to the status of a luxury product.
That popularity, however, has made them a target for the fakers.
The quality of the copies - the diaper looks like the genuine article and the packaging is indistinguishable - means that the counterfeiters can charge almost the same price as the real thing, between 155 and 185 yuan (HK$234). That figure is double the price in Japan, underlining the importance of the Chinese market to Japanese firms.
It is only when the diapers are put to the test that the differences become clear. The copies are made of a rougher material and absorb less liquid.
This has caused big problems for companies such as Daio Paper, as angry parents complain about the quality of diapers that they believed were genuine products.
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Kelly Yang, via a kind John Dickert email:
This month, for the third time in a row, the Asians kicked American butt -- academically, that is. On reading, science and math, students in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore earned the top scores on the international PISA test. U.S. students scored below or near the worldwide average, prompting suggestions that American education as a whole is failing. As a Hong Kong educator, I'm confident that the last thing the United States needs to copy is Chinese education.Here in this city of 2 million parents , there are 2 million school principals, all ordering after-school academic courses like appetizers in a restaurant. Parents are the headmasters because our schools no longer control the education process. A 2011 survey estimated that 72 percent of Hong Kong high school students receive tutoring outside of school, often until late in the evening. So when our schools get out, the school day is just beginning for most kids.
Long before the term "tiger mom" was coined, Chinese parents had a history of obsessing over academics. The other day, I overheard two parents talking about their sons. One mom turned to the other and shrieked, "I found him in his room, just sitting there. Not doing anything!" The other gasped and shook her head in disbelief.
Their sons are 6 years old.
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Erin Richards, via a kind Wisconsin Reading Coalition email:
Milwaukee Public Schools students' average reading and math scores on a national exam ticked up slightly in fourth and eighth grade between 2009 and 2013, according to a new report released Wednesday.Related: Madison's long term, disastrous reading results.But -- and there always seems to be a "but" -- only the score change in eighth-grade math was statistically significant over those years.
And compared with the performance of 20 other urban districts in 2013, MPS ranked in the bottom four for math and the bottom six for reading.
Still, MPS officials were optimistic about the latest results of the Trial Urban District Assessment, praising the district's average scale-score increases in reading and math in fourth and eighth grades over the past two years -- even though federal statisticians said those changes did not fall outside the margin of testing error.
"Would we like to see statistically significant change? Sure," said Melanie Stewart, MPS director of assessment. "But in all four areas, we are trending in the positive direction."
Results from the urban district assessment come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a government-sponsored exam administered about every two years that's considered the best gauge of how students are doing in reading and math.
National and state results on the 2013 assessment were released last month.
....
Fuller said MPS and community leaders need to think about reaching out to other urban districts showing improvement."We can't keep acting like there's nobody out there teaching poor, young black and brown students how to read," Fuller said.
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The New York Times editorial board contains people who studied history, economics, law, history (again), journalism, journalism (again), history (again, this time for the "science" expert), journalism, English literature, French literature, English literature (again), comparative literature, law, psychology, international relations, German, modern history, and law. Yesterday, the group signed an editorial entitled "Missing from Science Class; Too Few Girls and Minorities Study Tech Subjects." The group of history and literature majors confidently wrote about the benefits of a tech education, how to motivate women and people with particular skin colors, and the sagacity of President Obama's proposal on preschools (my previous post on the subject; note that Obama has previous extolled the virtues of STEM education for people other than himself (example)).Why would folks who apparently preferred other subjects suggest that women and particular minority groups be encouraged to study tech subjects that they themselves did not like and ended up not needing?
Separately, here is a much more substantive approach to the challenge of getting more women interested in computer science: "Feminism and Programming Languages" by Arielle Schlesinger. Excerpts:
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Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email
requently Asked Questions about Making Specific Learning Disability (SLD) Eligibility Decisions has been updated to reflect full implementation of all components of the SLD eligibility rule. The document is posted at http://sped.dpi.wi.gov/files/sped/pdf/sld-faq.pdf.SLD in Plain Language, including a one page summary of the eligibility criteria for SLD is posted at http://sped.dpi.wi.gov/files/sped/pdf/sld-plain-language.pdf.
Wisconsin's Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) Rule: A Technical Guide for Determining the Eligibility of Students with Specific Learning Disabilities update is posted at http://sped.dpi.wi.gov/files/sped/pdf/sld-guide.pdf.
DPI recommends that you replace any earlier versions of the guide or the FAQs with their updates. Look forward to an updated overview of SLD PowerPoint presentation, and other updates in the coming days and weeks.
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Faculty and graduate students at Johns Hopkins University, an elite private research institution that costs undergrads $61,000 per year, are up in arms about a new strategic plan that proposes sweeping changes (and cuts) to its Ph.D. programs. Some 275 graduate students, concerned about the viability of their departments, have petitioned the university to reconsider, arguing to Inside Higher Ed that such downsizing could be emulated around the country if it takes effect. But these grad students should be more concerned about their viability after the Ph.D.--which is grim. Johns Hopkins knows this, and is taking drastic but needed measures. I'm all for it, and I'd be delighted, not dismayed, if other universities emulated this strategy.Here's the plan, which faculty and students have demanded the administration reconsider: Over the course of the next five years, Hopkins would like to cut its graduate enrollment by 25 percent, and use those savings to raise the remaining grad-student stipends (what "nonemployees" get instead of a salary) to $30,000 per year.
This reduction would result in fewer graduate seminars. More importantly, though, instead of roughly one-half the instruction in the university being done by graduate students, only one-fourth would be, and this will put senior faculty in more contact with the undergraduate hoi polloi than they have been in decades. (The fact that Hopkins plans to fire no tenured faculty--merely to force them into contact with undergrads--is why these reductions seem much more reasonable than the ones at, say, Minnesota State University-Moorhead.) Meanwhile, the grad students that do remain will be paid well: that $30,000 is straight-up baller cash in the grad-school world--current stipends at JHU are around $20,000, and I received around $16,000 at UC-Irvine.
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In 2007, when I was 22, I took a position as an aerospace engineer working on the design of NASA's next-generation spacecraft. It was my dream job. I had just received a degree in mechanical engineering, and the only career ambition I could articulate was to work on something space-related. On my first days of work, I was awestruck by the drawings of Apollo-like spacecraft structures, by the conversations about how the heat shield would deflect when the craft landed in water and how much g-force astronauts could withstand. I couldn't believe I wasn't just watching a documentary on the space industry--I was inside it.I was extremely motivated during my first year of work. I got in earlier and stayed later than most, and I tried to learn everything I could from my more experienced colleagues. The work wasn't easy. Our team was trying to re-engineer, with modern technology, something that was designed in the '60s. As a design engineer, I had to integrate the efforts of several different groups that often didn't talk to each other or even get along very well. My deadlines haunted me like a thousand nightmares. Over the course of the next few years, though, I received awards and exceptional performance reviews, and I gained the respect of my colleagues, some of whom had been in the business for about as long as I had been alive.
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KUOW obtained a copy of the two-year agreement between the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and The Seattle Times, signed last month, which authorizes eight Times journalists to work with, but not publish, confidential student and staff information, including names and Social Security numbers.
"Wow," said Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Jose Banda. "I wasn't aware of [this agreement], and I don't think any of my staff was aware that this was being considered and approved.""This is really disconcerting for us, because we've been assuring families that we are really mindful about following [data privacy] rules," Banda said.
The contract outlines measures the Times must take to secure confidential data it receives, including allowing OSPI to inspect Times facilities and requiring any confidential information to be returned or destroyed when the contract expires.
One sour note - KUOW did not explain the "grant-funded" Education Lab project at Seattle Times is thru the Gates Foundation.
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Molly Beck, via a kind reader's email:
Middleton High School officials are investigating claims of cheating, including allegations of students sharing and selling photographs of test questions.Nearly 250 seniors at Middleton High School were told to retake a calculus test this week after the school learned last week of suspected cheating among its test takers, a spokesman said.
The scope of the investigation widened after the school received four letters from parents and students indicating such cheating had occurred before and in other subjects.
In a letter to parents Thursday, principal Denise Herrmann and associate principal Lisa Jondle said during the course of their investigation into alleged sharing of photos of calculus test questions, they received letters from students and parents "which provided additional information to the scope and severity of cheating on tests in courses across the curriculum," prompting the school to notify all parents of the allegations.
Herrmann and Jondle asked parents for their support "in talking with your students about the ramifications of engaging in some of the dishonest assessment practices reported to us."
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The Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission released the results of this year's 408 union recertification elections. If you are a union person, you were encouraged that "about 90 percent of the groups said yes to recertifying." If you are a union opponent, you were encouraged that "workers rejected over 70 of 408 school district unions."I don't read much into the results either way. Some unions chose not to recertify, and since the law puts the apathetic on the "no" side, we have no sense of the depth of opposition. Since doing nothing was the same as voting no, there was no reason to vote no unless you felt very strongly about it.
The locals that achieved support from a majority of members can feel proud of their accomplishment in such an environment, but even the largest victories still leave them with 25 percent or more of their rank-and-file who don't want them or can't be bothered making a phone call to record their support.
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Jonathan Raymond saw his charge as superintendent of Sacramento City Unified as transforming the district. This week, after 4½ years leading the 42,000-student district, he departs with a credible list of accomplishments at least partly attributable to his leadership.Some of those - progress in implementing Common Core standards, greatly expanded summer programs, new college and career programs tied to businesses and the community, home-school visits and new parent-teacher partnerships - will survive. So too probably will the new focus on social and emotional aspects of learning, which, Raymond said, "is really catching on like the beginning of a wild blaze."
Other changes, though - protections he provided a half-dozen once low-performing Priority Schools and a waiver from the No Child Left Behind law tied in part to adoption of a new teacher evaluation system - will remain under attack from the teachers union with whom Raymond repeatedly clashed.
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The Wisconsin State Journal offers a page to compare property taxes on a $200,000 home, here.
Related:
Madison's 2013-2014 budget and commentary on Madison and Surrounding School Districts; Middleton's lower Property Taxes.
Much more, here.
Madison spends about $15K per student, roughly double the national K-12 average, yet has long generated disastrous reading results.
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Candidates who lose a race for public office face a choice. They can give up on campaigning and step back to the sidelines of the American experiment. Or they can wade back into the competition -- better prepared and more determined to prevail.Much more on the 2014 Madison School Board election, here.Gaylord Nelson lost his first race for the state Legislature.
So did Scott Walker.
Robert M. La Follette lost and lost before he won the governorship.
Bill Proxmire lost statewide race after statewide race before he was elected to the U.S. Senate.
Paul Soglin lost his first race for mayor of Madison.
And Madison firefighter and paramedic Michael Flores lost his first race for the Madison School Board in 2012.
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My students squint desperately at my handwritten comments on their papers. They turn the paper sideways as if a fresh angle might lend clarity. They shrug or giggle and fold the paper up, resigned to the grade and regrettably impervious to the constructive criticism I carefully crafted the previous night."I can't read this, Simmons," a student sometimes announces. I hustle over to translate and feel the warmth of real shame creeping along my neck when it takes me more than a few seconds to figure out what I've written. I can read my own writing, but even I am sometimes momentarily baffled by what I behold.
I have terrible handwriting. Being left-handed and not particularly committed to tidiness in any capacity, my scribbling, whether cursive, print, or some ugly amalgam, never evolved significantly from my elementary-school days. If anything, it is now worse.
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Chancellor Rebecca Blank arrived at the University of Wisconsin this fall in a time of strained relations between the university and state Legislature.
With goals of increased funding, faculty retention and continuing the Wisconsin Idea, Blank said she came into her position with low expectations for state funding.Nonetheless, Blank said she would advocate to keep current funding levels and also work to establish good communication and relationships with the Legislature.
Blank also advocated for a balance between affordable higher education and new revenue streams. To do so, she emphasized improving private donor funding.
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Nearly 30 percent of the students at Madison's Marquette Elementary School were classified last year as "talented and gifted," or TAG, according to the school district.Much more on "talented & gifted" programs, here, including a recent parent group complaint.That may not be Lake Wobegon territory -- where "all the children are above average" -- but it's still pretty hard to believe.
Such alleged widespread student giftedness isn't just the case at one district school.
Yes, there are wide variations among Madison elementary and middle schools in percentage of TAG students, but figures from the district suggest that on average districtwide, there are about twice as many TAG students as one would expect given national averages and expert opinion.
The National Association for Gifted Children estimates that about 6 percent of American school children are gifted.
The federal government's National Center for Education Statistics put the gifted and talented number at 6.7 percent as of 2006, the most recent year for which data are available.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):
When a union member files a grievance it means that the member and his/her union believes that their employer has failed to live up to its end of a provision which the employer agreed to include in the Collective Bargaining Agreement. They are called "agreements" for a reason: the union and the employer pledged that what they agreed upon in negotiations is what both will live by, that it is best for the employees and the employer. A Collective Bargaining Agreement is a legally binding Contract.Filing a grievance sets in motion a process for resolving the employee's complaint, often a complaint which could have been resolved easily and informally through discussion. Once a grievance is filed, the union and the employer meet in a process set forth in the Collective Bargaining Agreement to discuss the reasons on which the grievance is based. When the issue cannot be resolved through discussions, the union may take the complaint to a neutral third party (an arbitrator) who will decide whether management has violated the Contract. Wisconsin law assures that union- represented employees cannot be retaliated against because of filing a grievance.
The Collective Bargaining Agreement is the Constitution of the workplace, and only unionized employees, like members of MTI, are protected by a Collective Bargaining Agreement.
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University of Wisconsin-Madison NewsPoverty may have direct implications for important, early steps in the development of the brain, saddling children of low-income families with slower rates of growth in two key brain structures, according to researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
By age 4, children in families living with incomes under 200 percent of the federal poverty line have less gray matter -- brain tissue critical for processing of information and execution of actions -- than kids growing up in families with higher incomes.
"This is an important link between poverty and biology. We're watching how poverty gets under the skin," says Barbara Wolfe, professor of economics, population health sciences and public affairs and one of the authors of the study, published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
The differences among children of the poor became apparent through analysis of hundreds of brain scans from children beginning soon after birth and repeated every few months until 4 years of age. Children in poor families lagged behind in the development of the parietal and frontal regions of the brain -- deficits that help explain behavioral, learning and attention problems more common among disadvantaged children.
The parietal lobe works as the network hub of the brain, connecting disparate parts to make use of stored or incoming information. The frontal lobe, according to UW-Madison psychology professor Seth Pollak, is one of the last parts of the brain to develop.
"It's the executive. It's the part of the brain we use to control our attention and regulate our behavior," Pollak says. "Those are difficulties children have when transitioning to kindergarten, when educational disparities begin: Are you able to pay attention? Can you avoid a tantrum and stay in your seat? Can you make yourself work on a project?"
The maturation gap of children in poor families is more startling for the lack of difference at birth among the children studied.
"One of the things that is important here is that the infants' brains look very similar at birth," says Pollak, whose work is funded by the National Institutes of Health. "You start seeing the separation in brain growth between the children living in poverty and the more affluent children increase over time, which really implicates the postnatal environment."
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To sum up, I have been teaching for 10 years now in mainstream and BESD. Last year has been awful. Wanted to quit; couldn't cope; cried all the time at home; worked ridiculous hours to keep up; didn't sleep. Also, I've put on nearly 3 stone through poor diet, eating on the run and comfort eating and look about 50 (I'm 31). I went to the doctors because I was ill a lot and, once I'd explained symptoms, he medicated me for work-related anxiety.Months passed and there was no change really so I went back. Now I take mild antidepressants too on top of anxiety meds. Generally it's helped and I can cope better but I definitely had to get out of my current school as it is going to the dogs. So short-staffed it is silly; no PPA; always on duty; no time to get anything done. 13 hour days most days.
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Three years ago today, parliament voted by a narrow margin to triple tuition fees and cut the educational maintenance allowance. Outside, thousands of students, lecturers and others gathered in the freezing cold to protest against everything the vote represented - the closing off of further and higher education to all but the rich and those prepared to take on thousands of pounds worth of debt for a job that might never come. Riot police charged horses into crowds, lashed out with batons to devastating effect and kettled hundreds for hours on Westminster Bridge. Dozens were later charged with serious public order offences, although juries thankfully didn't buy it, acquitting 18 of the 19 who pleaded not guilty.Three years later, we find the right to protest yet more eroded. Following successful student actions in support of cleaning staff, "occupational-style protests" have recently been the subject of an injunction at the University of London, turning a civil matter criminal, and recent "Cops Off Campus" demos have seen a return of aggressive police tactics in the form of physical violence, kettling and mass police presence. The only thing the police seemed to have "learned" from last time was the short-term impact of mass arrests - as the 286 anti-fascist protesters arrested recently in Tower Hamlets will know. Protesters are loaded into police vans or specially commissioned buses, taken to police stations all over London and sometimes even outside the city, held for hours, released on police bail with ludicrous conditions (not to enter the city of Westminster, or to attend any protests, or to congregate in groups of four), then the charges are dropped many months down the line.
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The Montessori method of teaching relies heavily on natural materials. One of the first things people notice about our classrooms, for example, is the abundance of activities involving wood. And so it made sense that as we duplicated the Montessori experience in digital form, the materials presented looked the same way. On an iPhone or iPad, the experience we offered children was largely rooted in the real world.
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The introduction of iOS7--a new operating system that removes ties to the physical world in many ways--has changed everything. It's more transparent, noticeably lighter, and seemingly faster.
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We desire the same traits in a digital Montessori education. And that's led to a rethinking of the aesthetic that is so thoroughly dependent on woodgrain--and all its shadows and textures that are now relics of Apple's previous operating system. The new version forced us to seriously consider how our apps would look and feel, and how children would engage with them. As we've changed to reflect this, the question becomes, will children still interact with the digital material as they do the physical one when it isn't grounded in their real-world experience?
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The average teacher salary in Wisconsin is $55,171, down 2.1 percent since 2000 when adjusted for inflation, according to a new report from a national education group.View the report, here.The Wisconsin salary, which does not include benefits, is comparable to the U.S. average of $56,383. Teacher salaries nationally have fallen by 1.5 percent since 2000, adjusted for inflation.
By comparison, Minnesota teacher salaries have risen by 3.3 percent since 2000 to $56,268.
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Erin Richards and Jason Stein:
Wisconsin could see a dramatic rise in the number of charter schools operating outside of districts and without teachers unions, under a new Assembly bill brought by Republicans that would take independent charters statewide.The proposed legislation would eliminate district-staffed charters and empower a new slate of authorizers to approve independent charters: all four-year and two-year University of Wisconsin System institutions, as well as all the state's regional educational service agencies and technical college district boards.
The measure comes as Republican lawmakers intensify their efforts to pass a charter-school bill in the remaining months of the session.
Independent charters are controversial because they are public schools run like private businesses; they don't employ unionized staff and don't have to answer to school boards. They exist through a contract, or charter, with an approved nondistrict entity.
Advocates see the schools as important to reform efforts because they're not bogged down by school system bureaucracy and have more flexibility in curriculum and staffing.
Opponents criticize the schools for not having to follow the same rules as traditional districts, and for being the darlings of business interests. The schools also, in effect, reduce funding for traditional public schools the charter pupil otherwise might have attended.
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I had just finished my presentation about the mass incarceration of African-American men to a Downtown Rotary luncheon when a woman from the audience approached me."Wonderful presentation, Dr. Gee!" she told me, adding she was intrigued by my data and insights about Wisconsin's mass incarceration phenomenon.
She added, "If you don't mind, I must tell you that I am so glad that you are not some angry black man!"
This well-intentioned white Rotarian had just heard how Wisconsin has an epidemic and leads the nation in the incarceration of African-American males between 20 and 24 years old.
Giving these kinds of presentations typically takes a toll on me because of the bleakness of the subject matter, the pain in my soul unearthed by the topic and the typically blank stares by people who wonder why we are still talking about racial disparities in 2013.
"I am an angry black man," I responded. "Why would you think I wasn't angry over what is happening in and to my community? Is it because I put on my best face and 'safe' black voice for you today?"
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Home School Legal Defense Association:
With the introduction of Senate Bill 248 on December 3, 2013, by Senator Capri Cafaro, Ohio has suddenly become a frontline in the battle over homeschooling freedom.SB 248 is breathtakingly onerous in its scope. It requires all parents who homeschool to undergo a social services investigation which would ultimately determine if homeschooling would be permitted. Social workers would have to interview parents and children separately, conduct background checks and determine whether homeschooling is recommended or not. If it is not recommended, parents would have to submit to an "intervention" before further consideration of their request to homeschool.
SB 248 was offered by sponsors as a way to respond to the death of 14-year-old Teddy Foltz-Tedesco in January 2013. News reports indicate that Teddy had been abused for years by his mother's boyfriend, Zaryl Bush. After teachers reported abuse to authorities, Teddy's mother withdrew him from public school, allegedly to homeschool him. Reports tell a sad story of a broken home where neighbors, friends, family, police, teachers and others knew Teddy was suffering ongoing abuse. Finally, Bush beat Teddy so severely that he later died of his injuries. Both Bush and Teddy's mother are now in prison. A news report can be found online.
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From: The Dean of Harvard CollegeTo: The Faculty
In light of the controversy regarding so-called grade inflation, please take a moment to review the grading guidelines rubric, reproduced below:
¶ The A+ grade is used only in very rare instances for the recognition of truly exceptional achievement.
For example: A term paper receiving the A+ is virtually indistinguishable from the work of a professional, both in its choice of paper stock and its font. The student's command of the topic is expert, or at the very least intermediate, or beginner. Nearly every single word in the paper is spelled correctly; those that are not can be reasoned out phonetically within minutes. Content from Wikipedia is integrated with precision. The paper contains few, if any, death threats.
A few things can disqualify an otherwise worthy paper from this exceptional honor: 1) Plagiarism, unless committed with extraordinary reluctance. 2) The paper has been doused in blood or another liquid, unless dousing was requested by the instructor. 3) The paper was submitted late (with reasonable leeway -- but certainly by no more than one or two years).
An overall course grade of A+ is reserved for those students who have not only demonstrated outstanding achievement in coursework but have also asked very nicely.
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Shannon Gibney is a professor of English and African diaspora studies at Minneapolis Community and Technical College (MCTC). When that's your job, there are a lot of opportunities to talk about racism, imperialism, capitalism, and history. There are also a lot of opportunities to anger students who would rather not learn about racism, imperialism, capitalism, and history. I presume MCTC knows that; they have an African diaspora studies program. Back in January 2009, white students made charges of discrimination after Gibney suggested to them that fashioning a noose in the newsroom of the campus newspaper--as an editor had done the previous fall--might alienate students of color. More recently, when Gibney led a discussion on structural racism in her mass communication class, three white students filed a discrimination complaint because it made them feel uncomfortable. This time, MCTC reprimanded Gibney under their anti-discrimination policy.Elevating discomfort to discrimination mocks the intent of the policy, but that's not the whole of it. By sanctioning Gibney for making students uncomfortable, MCTC is pushing a disturbing higher-education trend. When colleges and universities become a market, there is no incentive to teach what customers would rather not know. When colleges are in the business of making customers comfortable, we are all poorer for it.
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"The United States is one of few advanced nations where schools serving better-off children usually have more educational resources than those serving poor students," writes Eduardo Porter for the New York Times. This is because a large percentage of funding for public education comes not from the federal government, but from the property taxes collected in each school district. Rich kids, then, get more lavish educations.This means differences in how much we spend per student both across and within states. New York, for example, spends about $19,000 per student. In Tennessee they spend $8,200 and in Utah $5,321. Money within New York, is also unequally distributed: $25,505 was spent per student in the richest neighborhoods, compared to $12,861 in the poorest.
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What's the evidence? What have researchers found when they compare single-sex education with coeducation?Let's begin with two recent studies in which students were RANDOMLY assigned either to single-gender or coed classrooms, with no opt-out. We are aware of no other studies in which students were randomly assigned either to single-gender or coed classrooms, with no parental opt-out allowed. Any such study would be illegal in the United States; in the United States, federal statute 34 CFR 106.34 requires that any assignment to a single-gender classroom or school must be completely voluntary.
In the first study, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania traveled to Seoul South Korea, because in Seoul, students are RANDOMLY assigned either to single-gender or to coed high schools. The assignment is truly random, and compulsory. Students cannot "opt out" of either the single-gender format or the coed format. This policy of random assignment was instituted in 1974 specifically to prevent clustering of students from particular backgrounds at particular schools. In recent decades, many Korean school districts have loosened the policy and they now allow parents to express preferences or to "opt out" of particular schools. But not in Seoul. In Seoul, it's still a true random assignment with no opt-out.
The scholars from Penn recognized that the random nature of the assignment creates the opportunity to compare single-gender schools with coed schools, without the usual confounding variables which would accompany any attempt at a similar comparison among North American schools. All the schools in the study are publicly-funded; none of them charges any fees or tuition. The researchers found no differences between the single-gender and the coed schools in terms of teacher quality or in teacher training. Class sizes in the boys' schools were no different than in the typical coed school, and class sizes were actually slightly larger in girls' schools than in the typical coed school. There were no differences in socioeconomic background or prior academic achievement between students attending single-gender schools and those attending coed schools.
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Jason Grotto, Alex Richards andHeather Gillers:
More than a decade ago, demographic projections signaled an important reversal for Chicago Public Schools: Enrollment was about to shrink dramatically.
Yet CPS leaders appointed by former Mayor Richard M. Daley issued billions of dollars in bonds to repair, expand or replace the vast majority of the district's schools regardless of future needs and without voter input, a Tribune investigation found.In total, CPS officials have borrowed more than $10 billion in general obligation bonds since 1996 to fund school construction projects, debt that has contributed to the system's current financial crisis. Officials poured $1.5 billion of that money into schools that today are less than 60 percent full.
Along the way, CPS invested $100 million in schools it closed this year, in part, because they were underused. About half of that spending came after demographic projections predicted districtwide enrollment drops.
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Richard Murphy and Felix Weinhardt:
Conventional wisdom suggests that it is always best to place children with higher-performing peers.Our research, which looks at their later outcomes, indicates that this is
not necessarily true.Imagine two pupils of the same high ability: one is top of their class but the other is in the middle because their school attracts many high-ability children.
We find that the pupil who was top of the class becomes more confident and performs better in secondary school than the pupil who had the same test score in primary school but a lower rank.
These rankings are inferred by the pupils themselves as it is not standard practice for teachers to discuss rankings. We find that being highly ranked during primary school has a positive effect on later test scores that is equivalent to being taught by a highly effective teacher for one year. And being ranked in the top quarter of your primary school peers as opposed to the bottom quarter improves later test scores by twice as much as being taught by a highly effective teacher for one year.
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Ashley Jochim, Patrick J. Murphy , via a kind Deb Britt email:
The push to raise standards and increase student outcomes has placed state education agencies (SEAs) at the center of efforts to improve the performance of the nation's lowest-performing schools, but few are well positioned to deliver on that imperative. Federal and state initiatives like Race to the Top, School Improvement Grants, and Common Core State Standards pose challenges that most agencies are not prepared to meet.Seeking to understand what SEAs are doing to meet new and existing obligations, researchers conducted interviews with state chiefs and analyzed agency initiatives and budgets in 10 states with varied approaches to school and district improvement. They found no evidence that those with the most money had better data systems or more comprehensive accountability systems. And few SEAs engage in the type of budget analysis that would enable them to assess whether their investments align with their priorities or are paying off.
While the lack of legal authority to intervene in failing schools sometimes limited the ability of states to act on their school improvement strategies, the researchers found that states that had such authority rarely used it.
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In 1891, when Mr. James Naismith (he got his MD in 1898) put two peach baskets with the bottoms out at about 10 feet up at each end of the gymnasium in Springfield, Massachusetts, how many high school students do you think could make the three-point shot? Zero.
Today, when people see the exemplary history research papers published in The Concord Review, the most common reaction is: "These were written by High School Students?!" The reason for this disbelief is that most adults (even Edupudits, etc.) today no more expect high school student to write 11,000-word research papers than people in 1891 expected them to be able to make a three-point shot or dunk the basketball.
Theodore Sizer, late Dean of the Harvard School of Education and Headmaster of Phillips Academy, Andover, wrote, in 1988, that:
Americans shamefully underestimate their adolescents. With often misdirected generosity, we offer them all sorts of opportunities and, at least for middle-class and affluent youths, the time and resources to take advantage of them. We ask little in return. We expect little, and the young people sense this, and relax. The genially superficial is tolerated, save in areas where the high school students themselves have some control, in inter-scholastic athletics, sometimes in their part-time work, almost always in their socializing. At least if and when they reflect about it, adolescents have cause to resent us old folks. We do not signal clear standards for many important areas of their lives, and we deny them the respect of high expectations. In a word, we are careless about them, and, not surprisingly, many are thus careless about themselves. "Me take on such a difficult and responsible task?" they query, "I'm just a kid!" All sorts of young Americans are capable of solid, imaginative scholarship, and they exhibit it for us when we give them both the opportunity and a clear measure of the standard expected. Presented with this opportunity, young folk respond. The Concord Review is such an opportunity, a place for fine scholarship to be exhibited, to be exposed to that most exquisite of scholarly tests, wide publication. The Concord Review is, for the History-inclined high school student, what the best of secondary school theatre and music performances, athletics, and (in some respects) science fairs are, for their aficionados. It is a testing ground, and one of elegant style, taste and standards. The Review does not undersell students. It respects them. And in such respect is the fuel for excellence."
Since 1987, The Concord Review has published more than a thousand 6,000-word, 8,000-word, 11,000-word, 15,000-word, and longer history papers by secondary students from 46 states and 38 other countries, and, as we only take about 5% of the ones we get, evidently several more thousands of high school students have written serious history papers and submitted them. But I was recently asked, "How many high school students do you think could actually write papers like that?"--Suggesting that it must be a very small number indeed! As small perhaps as the number of high school students who could make that three-pointer in 1891?
Some examples: Colin Rhys Hill, of Atlanta, Georgia, decided to write a 15,000-word history research paper on the Soviet-Afghan War; Sarah Willeman of Byfield, Massachusetts, decided she wanted to write a 21,000-word paper on the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah in 1857; Nathaniel Bernstein, of San Francisco, chose to write an 11,000-word paper on the unintended consequences of Direct Legislation reforms in the early 1900s in California; and Jonathan Lu, of Hong Kong, wrote a 13,000-word paper on the Needham Question (why did Chinese technology stall after 1500?)...(send to fitzhugh@tcr.org for pdfs of these papers).
"Where there's a Way, there's a Will," I sometimes think. If peach baskets exist, some day somewhere a high school student or two will try to shoot a ball through one. Obviously by now the number of such students who can make a three-point shot is very large. We even have nationally-televised high school basketball games in which they can demonstrate such an achievement. If an international journal for the academic history research papers of secondary students exists, perhaps some students will actually write and submit them?
Most people may tell a high school students that they are not capable of doing the reading and the writing for a long serious history research paper. Most of their teachers do not want to spend the time coaching for and reading them. But my advice to any prospective high school author is (pay no attention to the people who tell you that you are only capable of writing a five-paragraph essay), and:
Prepare yourself over hours, weeks, months, and years of practice.
Make sure your feet are behind the three-point line.
Take the shot.
---------------------------
"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
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We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.Which brings me to the point of this release. We are looking for new, inventive ways to navigate, find and display these 'unseen illustrations'. The images were plucked from the pages as part of the 'Mechanical Curator', a creation of the British Library Labs project. Each image is individually addressible, online, and Flickr provies an API to access it and the image's associated description.
We may know which book, volume and page an image was drawn from, but we know nothing about a given image. Consider the image below. The title of the work may suggest the thematic subject matter of any illustrations in the book, but it doesn't suggest how colourful and arresting these images are.
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This essay on the current experience at the University of Michigan published on Inside Higher Ed, made the rounds last week. Titled "Corporate Values", it includes several quotes that speak directly to my ten year experience at my current institution. To wit:America's public research universities face a challenging economic environment characterized by rising operating costs and dwindling state resources. In response, institutions across the country have looked toward the corporate sector for cost-cutting models. The hope is that implementing these "real-world" strategies will centralize redundant tasks (allowing some to be eliminated), stimulate greater efficiency, and ensure long-term fiscal solvency.As I've argued in the past, the experience in Britain serves as both a model and a warning to my colleagues in the United States. Decisions are taken purely on a revenue-stream criterion. If eliminating one undergraduate program will allow resources to be shifted to another, thus resulting in a marginally enhanced revenue stream on a per-student basis, then such a move has appeal. Those of us providing the "content" are treated as interchangeable parts, have superficial input in decision making (which is typically window dressing as one of many "stakeholders" in the institution, designed to assuage concerns of consultation). Management decisions are conducted with no transparency, and handed down as edicts. There's no entertainment of feedback, let alone constructive criticism. Again this resonates:
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Earlier this fall semester, Dr. Anne-Marie Womack (Tulane), a colleague from my graduate institution, and I had a piece about the academic job market in English published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the piece, we make the argument that departments should strive to make the first round of job applications free of cost for candidates. The idea for this piece arose when we were on a flight together to campus visits and we got into a discussion about how much money we had spent on Interfolio during the job search "season". Both of us had applied to more than 100 jobs, and for myself the Interfolio cost alone was north of $600. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Interfolio, it is a dossier service that allows a candidate to put his or her materials together, including confidential letters of recommendation, and send them as one package to the hiring committee responsible for the job search. The minimum cost for sending a dossier through Interfolio is $6, and in the case of print materials, the price increases as the page count goes up. For most jobs I applied to, the committee required at minimum a CV, three confidential letters of recommendation, a teaching philosophy, a writing sample, and a job letter in the first round of application.Due to the volume of this type of application, the cost for a single Interfolio dossier could go as high as $20. Given such a high cost to applicants, most often graduate students, adjuncts, and postdoctoral fellows, and the fact that many jobs in English had as many as 500 applicants in the first round, we argued that departments and schools should work to make the process free to applicants by requiring only an electronic submission of a CV and job letter in the first round.
We further argued that this system would also provide feedback and reassurance to applicants advanced to the next round of the search by contacting them for materials like the writing sample and confidential letters of recommendation. Requesting more materials from a short list, we claimed, "would also alert us of our success and would mark a significant personal accomplishment in what can be a very anonymous process."
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On 4 December, the University of London was granted an injunction from the High Court that prohibits 'persons unknown (including students of the University of London) from 'entering or remaining upon the campus and buildings of University of London for the purpose of occupational protest action' for the next six months. Many such injunctions have been granted to universities across the country over the past four years, with increasing frequency and ever wider restrictions on student protest. In this case, the University of London argued that the occupation of Senate House threatened the liberty and freedom of senior university personnel, and presented a risk of damage to property, despite assurances from the occupiers that staff were free to come and go from the building and no such damage would occur. The eventual eviction of the occupiers was rough and violent. On 5 December, 35 students were arrested and several of them detained overnight. Some were assaulted by the police.'The action is restorative,' the occupiers' official statement said, 'displacing the undemocratic and unaccountable management with a democratic space for the free pursuit of knowledge, critical enquiry and dissent.' Their specific demands related to the democratic deficit in university governance, the privatisation of service provision and the student loan book, and the working conditions of academic, cleaning and maintenance staff.
The use of injunctions to quash protest is an indicator of how deeply privatisation has taken root in British universities. Injunctions are a private law remedy. They are being granted to prohibit protest as if universities, as legal persons, were like any other private property owner; as if students were like any people at large, violating the property rights of the university. The claimant in this case alerts the court to the Code of Student Discipline, implying that students who take part in sit-ins and occupations are in breach of their contract with the university. The right to express dissent, the rights of freedom of association and expression, and entirely legitimate concerns about university governance, are excised from the ostensibly private realms of property and contract.
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The first thing you notice about Camden, New Jersey, is that pretty much everyone you talk to has just gotten his or her ass kicked.Detroit's Debt Crisis: Everything Must Go
Instead of shaking hands, people here are always lifting hats, sleeves, pant legs and shirttails to show you wounds or scars, then pointing in the direction of where the bad thing just happened.
"I been shot six times," says Raymond, a self-described gangster I meet standing on a downtown corner. He pulls up his pant leg. "The last time I got shot was three years ago, twice in the femur." He gives an intellectual nod. "The femur, you know, that's the largest bone in the leg."
"First they hit me in the head," says Dwayne "The Wiz" Charbonneau, a junkie who had been robbed the night before. He lifts his wool cap to expose a still-oozing red strawberry and pulls his sweatpants down at the waist, drawing a few passing glances. "After that, they ripped my pockets out. You can see right here. . . ."
Even the cops have their stories: "You can see right here, that's where he bit me," says one police officer, lifting his pant leg. "And I'm thinking to myself, 'I'm going to have to shoot this dog.'"
"I've seen people shot and gotten blood on me," says Thomas Bayard Townsend III, a friendly convicted murderer with a tear tattoo under his eye. "If you turn around here, and your curiosity gets the best of you, it can cost you your life."
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At 10 P.M. on a Sunday night in May, Lauren and John,* a young couple in the Washington, D.C., area, started an emergency 14-hour drive to the state where Lauren grew up in a strict fundamentalist household. Earlier that day, Lauren's younger sister, Jennifer, who had recently graduated from homeschooling high school, had called her in tears: "I need you to get me out of this place." The day, Jennifer said, had started with another fight with her parents, after she declined to sing hymns in church. Her slight speech impediment made her self-conscious about singing in public, but to her parents, her refusal to sing or recite scripture was more evidence that she wasn't saved. It didn't help that she was a vegan animal-rights enthusiast.After the family returned home from church, Jennifer's parents discovered that she had recently been posting about animal rights on Facebook, which they had forbidden. They took away Jennifer's graduation presents and computer, she told Lauren. More disturbing, they said that if she didn't eat meat for dinner she'd wake up to find one of the pets she babied gone.
To most people, it would have sounded like overreaction to innocuous forms of teenage rebellion. But Lauren, who'd cut ties with her family the previous year, knew it was more. The sisters grew up, with two brothers, in a family that was almost completely isolated, they say, held captive by their mother's extreme anxiety and explosive anger. "I was basically raised by someone with a mental disorder and told you have to obey her or God's going to send you to hell," Lauren says. "Her anxiety disorder meant that she had to control every little thing, and homeschooling and her religious beliefs gave her the justification for it."
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The short version (see slide 4) is this: there are currently two solitudes in the MOOC conversation, and it's not a cMOOC/xMOOC divide. One solitude - the mainstream media discourse - is essentially a unicorn, in the sense that its promises are fantasies of salvation and solutionism that have very little to do with the actual practice of higher education. The other - the practitioners' discourse(s), broadly represented by the various interests around the table at #mri13 - is a Tower of Babel. Still, this solitude, loosely and cacophonously affiliated as it is, nonetheless leans towards discussing MOOCs in terms of learning. And in the wake of twenty-odd months of hype in which the dominant public narratives about higher ed have been all glorious revolution or ghastly spectre, I think it's time to seize this (likely momentary) lull in unicorn sales and try to talk about MOOCs as learning. We need to make ourselves familiar with what the post-hype landscape of higher ed looks like, and address the issues and opportunities it's left us with. In learning terms. On as many public platforms as we can. In stereo.In other words, challenge the empty narratives that your administrators or your faculty have been sold. Find ways to talk about why what you're doing matters. Change the narrative from unicorns back to what education is about: learning. End story.
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NY Times Editorial, via a kind reader:
"Federal, state and local governments and school districts have put little effort into identifying and developing students of all racial and economic backgrounds, both in terms of intelligence and the sheer grit needed to succeed. There are an estimated three million gifted children in K-12in the United States, about 6 percent of the student population. Some schools have a challenging curriculum for them, but most do not."Related: parents file talented & gifted complaint with the Madison School District......
In a post-smokestack age, there is only one way for the United States to avoid a declining standard of living, and that is through innovation. Advancements in science and engineering have extended life, employed millions and accounted for more than half of American economic growth since World War II, but they are slowing. The nation has to enlarge its pool of the best and brightest science and math students and encourage them to pursue careers that will keep the country competitive.
But that isn't happening. Not only do average American students perform poorly compared with those in other countries, but so do the best students, languishing in the middle of the pack as measured by the two leading tests used in international comparisons.
On the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment test, the most recent, 34 of 65 countries and school systems had a higher percentage of 15-year-olds scoring at the advanced levels in mathematics than the United States did. The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland all had at least twice the proportion of mathematically advanced students as the United States, and many Asian countries had far more than that.
Other tests have shown that America's younger students fare better in global comparisons than its older students do, which suggests a disturbing failure of educators to nurture good students as they progress to higher grades. Over all, the United States is largely holding still while foreign competitors are improving rapidly.
Federal, state and local governments and school districts have put little effort into identifying and developing students of all racial and economic backgrounds, both in terms of intelligence and the sheer grit needed to succeed. There are an estimated three million gifted children in K-12 in the United States, about 6 percent of the student population. Some schools have a challenging curriculum for them, but most do not.
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At Cooper Union, it was outrage over a new tuition policy. At City College, it was anger over the closing of a community center. At both Manhattan colleges, student protest shut down buildings, garnered headlines and largely defined campus life over the past year. Now those two very different institutions are considering policies that could restrict how, when and where students can express dissent, while raising the penalties for those who disobey.Representatives of Cooper Union's student government were surprised when, a few weeks ago, administrators showed them a draft of a new code of conduct. In addition to addressing matters like fire safety and drug use, the document would forbid "deliberate or knowing disruption of the free flow of pedestrian traffic on Cooper Union premises" and "behavior that disturbs the peace, academic study or sleep of others on or off campus." A section on bullying and intimidation mentions communication, in any medium, that "disrupts or interferes with the orderly operation of the Cooper Union."
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Pristine was born in Japan and she was only 3 years old when we moved to Dubai in 2007. She only spoke Japanese then but as our stay in the UAE became longer and longer (7 years in a few weeks!) and with Pristine attending British curriculum international school, she has lost her grip not just on the language but also being away from Japan too long, been detached from the Japanese culture and tradition aspect.When we went for vacation to Japan this summer, we enrolled Pristine in the local Japanese public school - something we've always wanted to do for years now. She has spent more of her years here than in Japan and we didn't want her to forget half of what she is.
More specifically, we want her to experience both worlds.
Taiken nyuugaku: a special program for Japanese kids who lived overseas. They come home for the summer, and experience life in a Japanese school. We knew lots of children who did it. We thought it was a great way to reconnect with her roots, not mention hone her Japanese language skills and most importantly, to be with Japanese children her age, in Japan.
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Barely a week has gone by this year without some MOOC-related news. Much like last year, massive open online courses have dominated ed-tech conversations.Madison's latest budget spends about $15K per student.But if 2012 was, as The New York Times decreed, the year of the MOOC, 2013 might be described as the year of the anti-MOOC as we slid down that Gartner Hype Cycle from the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" and into the "Trough of Disillusionment." For what it's worth, Gartner pegged MOOCs at the peak back in July, while the Horizon Report says they're still on the horizon. Nevertheless the head of edX appeared on the Colbert Report this year, and the word "MOOC" entered the Oxford Online Dictionary - so whether you think those are indications of peak or trough or both or neither, it seems the idea of free online university education has hit the mainstream.
MOOCs: An Abbreviated History
To recap: in 2008, Dave Cormier coins the term "MOOC" to describe George Siemens' and Stephen Downes' course "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge." In the Fall of 2011, Stanford offers open enrollment in online versions of three engineering classes: Artificial Intelligence (taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig), Machine Learning (taught by Andrew Ng), and Databases (taught by Jennifer Widom). In December 2011, MIT unveil MITx. In January 2012, Thrun announces he's leaving Stanford to launch Udacity. In April 2012, Ng, along with Stanford colleague Daphne Koller, launch Coursera. In May 2012, Harvard and MIT team up for edX. In December 2012, 12 British universities partner to launch their MOOC platform, FutureLearn. And in 2013...
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I read with interest all of the comments about the Glenda Ritz/Indiana State Department of Education controversy, both pro and con. I am of the opinion that the office, regardless of who is elected or appointed, or Democrat or Republican, will have little if any effect on the kind of education our children will continue to receive.I grew up in rural South Texas and went to two-room schools through middle school and to a 100-student high school. The 21 graduates in my high school class all could read by second grade and none ended up in prison or with a felony conviction. I think that held true for most of the students in that era. We had no stadium, no swimming pool, no state and federal education standards, no teachers union, minimal school funding, and yet we all learned to read and write and do basic math, and how to get a job and get to work.
Today, our public schools are about everything but teaching the basics, and yet that is what makes the most difference in our students' future. Vast amounts of public tax dollars are spent on impressive buildings and facilities, indoctrinating instead of teaching, teaching a vast array of non-essential subjects, political correctness, huge sports complexes, and on and on. Yet many of our students do not gain the basic skills of reading and writing and financial literacy.
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It is not easy to make Tom Phillipson happy when it comes to the way a child who needs special education is being served in Milwaukee.He's a charming, warm guy in many ways. But get him involved in a child's needs and he's demanding and persistent. I doubt "puppy dog" is the phrase that comes to mind first for people on the receiving end of his attention.
It is time to sing praises of Phillipson and to provide some perspective on changes in how special education is handled in Milwaukee and beyond. In some ways, the last few years have been a time of significant improvements, but there is much more distance to go.
The improvements can be summed up with two points:
There are more ambitious goals for children with special-education needs than there used to be.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act, 12 years old now, has a lot of failings. But one good thing it did was set out that schools were expected to see every segment of their student population achieve, and that included kids in special-ed. It was a bold statement that led to much more focus on the academic needs of the children, not just on taking care of them in school.
And, with a lot of pushing, compliance with special-education laws has gotten better. Milwaukee Public Schools is a good example of that. The impact of a lawsuit brought against MPS in 2001 is one of the reasons.
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After years of being backed into a corner, on Monday public-school teachers stood up in defiance against what they see as their chief bully--budget-slashing school reforms that have made school more stressful and less fulfilling for both them and their students.Under the banner of a National Day of Action to Reclaim the Promise of Public Education, educators, students and community groups coordinated demonstrations, rallies and other public gatherings in dozens of cities. In the long run, the day of action kicked off a broader campaign by a coalition of unions and community groups to chart an alternative path to education reform.
According to a policy statement by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the leading union behind the campaign, and its partner groups, the goal is to foster "a community-union movement for educational equity and excellence." While that agenda may sound neutral to the uninitiated, it speaks to growing resentment toward the prevailing reform rhetoric pushed by the White House and many politicians: corporate-oriented "standards" and "management," leading to a test-heavy curriculum focused on math and reading at the expense of all else. First imposed under the No Child Left Behind law of the Bush administration, this hardline approach rests on the belief that a lack of academic rigor and "ineffective" educators are impeding U.S. students' performance. The prescription has been an avalanche of high-stakes testing, public-school funding cuts and free-market privatization measures such as charter schools, often funded by corporate-oriented philanthropists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
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Kissairis Munoz via a kind Wisconsin Reading Coalition email:
What's it like to have dyslexia? These eight videos chosen by our community will give you a peek into the experience of dyslexia--from brain function to celebrities' take on it, and more. Click on the colorful brain image below to start the slideshow, and add your favorite videos in the comments.
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Michael Porter 150K PDF via Whitney Tilson.
Related: Madison's long term disastrous reading results and wisconsin2.org.
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When pressed on what the main issues confronting educators in the 21st century are, Deborah Howes is unequivocal in her response. "The biggest challenge in looking ahead is letting go of familiar habits preventing you from reaching other audiences that expect and need to learn in different ways."via Noel Radomski.Ms Howes, the Director of Digital Learning at New York's iconic Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), is well placed to reflect on the future of education, particularly as it increasingly evolves - and involves - online.
MoMA's digital education offerings include seven fee-based courses (offered via their website) and, more recently, a free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) offered via Coursera.
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To the best of our knowledge via the Wisconsin Reading Coalition:
Jim Fleming: Maryanne Wolf knows as much as anybody on the planet about what the human brain is actually doing when it reads. She runs The Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University and enjoyed significant popular success for her last book, "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain." But as Anne Strainchamps found out, Wolf is equally passionate about the dyslexic brain.Maryanne Wolf: I like to say that the dyslexia brain is proof and daily evidence that the brain was never wired to read. Now there are all these children in the world, all these individuals are walking around with brains that are so often, I can't say that for every single person, but so often these are brains that are wired to see spatial patterns, to see the big picture, to go outside of the box, to think holistically. Often they're artists, they're architects and yeah, that same advantage or set of advantages which made them before literacy, our generals, out builders, a lot of our great figures, that made a disadvantage at the same time for some of the wiring that goes into left hemisphere language processes.
Now the real, if, if you wanna know my real task in life, it's to re-conceptualize or to help re-conceptualize dyslexia from being thought of as a deficit or something wrong with the brain, to realizing this is an extraordinary and beautiful brain that we have failed as an educational system to know how to teach easily when it comes to reading. But that is the failure, not the child, but of us to understand.
And one of the joys for me in brain imaging is that we're able to look and see how many of our individuals with Dyslexia have such interesting right hemispheric processes, and when you look at how t hey read are using the right hemisphere inefficiently for a left hemisphere-like task.
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After more than 50 years leading the fight to legitimize attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Keith Conners could be celebrating.Severely hyperactive and impulsive children, once shunned as bad seeds, are now recognized as having a real neurological problem. Doctors and parents have largely accepted drugs like Adderall and Concerta to temper the traits of classic A.D.H.D., helping youngsters succeed in school and beyond.
But Dr. Conners did not feel triumphant this fall as he addressed a group of fellow A.D.H.D. specialists in Washington. He noted that recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the diagnosis had been made in 15 percent of high school-age children, and that the number of children on medication for the disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990. He questioned the rising rates of diagnosis and called them "a national disaster of dangerous proportions."
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For many students, the brain isn't a hot topic of conversation. This is especially true for younger students who are still trying to understand the world around them, and are still far from developing physiological self-awareness of the very thing that gives them that self-awareness.But helping students develop "brain literacy" doesn't have to be a matter of dry science pumped full of confusing jargon. Understanding the brain can be empowering for students as they recognize their ability to strengthen it each time they use it. As a teacher, you can emphasize how using the executive functions, both in the classroom and outside of school, increases their strength for academic success. Practice makes perfect!
To reduce anxiety about new "stuff" in the classroom -- whether related to Common Core State Standards, struggles with reading, or something else entirely -- you can find opportunities to emphasize students' ability to literally build the brains they want. Remind them that, when they turn in a story, demonstrate a science principle in a skit, or even raise their hand to respond to a question, they grow more dendrites and add new layers of myelin to their axons. To them this may sound gross, but it's actually good news. By activating these brain networks, they continuously use their executive functions as they apply new learning. Like a muscle, the brain responds to interaction and activity.
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Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (4.6MB PDF).
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I noticed recently that books with the phrase "The Last Man Who Knew Everything" all share in common that their subjects lived during the period close to the Scientific Revolution, roughly between 1550 to 1700. (The examples I own are about Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit priest born in 1602; Thomas Young, who studied topics such as optics and philology and was born in 1773; and Philadelphia area professor Joseph Leidy, who was born in 1823.)It's as if the Scientific Revolution -- and the knowledge it spawned -- killed the ability to Know Everything. Before then, it was not only possible to be a generalist or polymath (someone with a wide range of expertise) -- but the weaving together of different disciplines was actually rather unexceptional. The Ancients discussed topics such as ethics, biology, and metaphysics alongside each other. The Babylonian Talmud discusses everything from astronomy and biology to morality and law, weaving them together into a single compendium.
So what changed? Scientific knowledge exploded in size, mainly due to the application of the scientific method to our surroundings. As that knowledge base and its domain experts grew exponentially, we began classifying and ordering all that we understood -- from the classification taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus to manuals for categorizing mental disease. We made sense of our world by dividing information into manageable portions and distinct areas of proficiency.
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GWEN IFILL: Here's an idea for improving the learning environment in a low-performing urban school: Stand the traditional classroom model on its head. That's the experiment under way in a suburban Detroit school.Jeffrey Brown has the story as part of our American Graduate project, a public media initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
MAN: So, you see how they are in the same family.
JEFFREY BROWN: What if you took the traditional school day and flipped it on its head, not literally, of course, but having lessons offered at night at home and homework done by day in the classroom?
That's the experiment under way at Clintondale High School just outside Detroit, an area still reeling from the economic and social ills of the nearby city. The school serves many low-income families and faces tight budgets and declining enrollment.
MAN: So what's the number part that I'm going to need for all three?
RELATED INFORMATION
Creating the flipped 'lecture' for at-home use
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Philadelphia's Mastery Charter Schools is hoping to run a school in Camden. This week, Camden Public Schools announced that is now accepting applications from charter operators. But despite Mastery's track-record, not everyone is excited by this idea.The Philadelphia Inquirer reported this week that New Jersey's Education Law Center (ELC), the primary advocate for New Jersey's 31 poor Abbott districts, believes that the Camden Board of Education should not approve any more charter schools and instead focus on facilities repairs.
It's not so hard to divine the politics of ELC's anti-charter school stance. After all, the non-profit has made its bones lobbying for equitable school funding in the traditional public school sector and is closely allied with anti-choice groups that look askance at progressive instructional models. ELC was also one of the very few opponents to the Urban Hope Act, a 2011 bipartisan piece of legislation that allows non-profits to build up to four new schools in Camden, Trenton, and Newark, subject to approval by the local school board.
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TUDA results for New York City will be exceptionally important this year. While Mayor Bloomberg has highlighted selected indicators of improvement during his tenure, the Trial Urban District Assessment results will be a final, objective assessment of student progress during the Bloomberg years. They will also allow us to measure New York City against other major urban districts, including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Houston, Atlanta, and a large-U.S. cities average.What TUDA results have showed so far -- and 2011 was the last time they were updated -- is that New York City's 4th- and 8th-graders have improved in 4th grade math and reading and 8th grade math, but not as much as their peers in other major cities. On 8th-grade reading between 2003 and 2011, the city showed an especially disturbing trend of no improvement. New York used to lead among urban districts. But city scores have moved towards the middle of the pack of major urban school systems over the past decade. - See more at: http://www.edwize.org/trial-urban-districts-assessment-what-the-results-could-show#sthash.zCd2n4Op.dpuf
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Academic departments and programs already have been reviewing their course offerings in relation to the new curriculum, looking at possible changes in courses that already exist, new courses, and courses that will no longer be needed. That planning ramps up in Spring 2014 with more formal assessments conducted with the A&S Dean's Office. Simultaneously, Provost Halleran will join President Taylor Reveley in a full review of the proposed curriculum, including projected costs.William & Mary.There will be some development and transition costs, Halleran said, as faculty design and implement the new courses, and some modest increased permanent costs in expanding the engaged learning model that characterizes a W&M education. Now that faculty have approved the new curriculum, the A&S Dean's Office will conduct a formal assessment of temporary costs, associated costs such as increased faculty support and new, direct costs.
"From what I've seen so far, those costs appear to be reasonable and appropriate," said Halleran, adding the College will support the new curriculum through a combination of resources, including reallocation of existing funds, budget priorities through W&M's annual strategic planning process and private donations.
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Lead researcher Sara Goldrick-Rab also said the most recent study -- released Monday, of the 2012-13 school year -- provides better evidence that the advancements probably come as a result of the program (i.e., they aren't just a coincidence or a result of other causes).Much more on the achievement gap, here.This is good news for a district that has seen the percentage of low-income students reach 50 percent and now enrolls more students of color than whites.
But it's not as if these demographic changes were sudden, and the district's failure to reach low-income, minority students is longstanding.
The achievement gap is clear in state testing data online that goes back to 1996, but it almost certainly existed for many years before that.
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Last month, I asked whether parents and grandparents were worried about threats to annual testing caused by the national switch to the Common Core standards.U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had warned that California would be shortchanging students and their families if it held to its plan not to report school test averages next year. Almost everyone who responded to me said Duncan was wrong.
I proposed in that column a year's respite from reporting state test results, while teachers adjusted to the new Common Core lessons and tests. "Schools can give the new tests but use the results only for improving teaching methods, not for assessing students and teachers," I wrote.
Virginia parent Wendy Hoskins was among many who think that was a good idea. In fact, she said she would be happy if her kids didn't take the tests at all.
"Standardized tests do not give a true sense of a child's abilities," she said. "If it's so great, why don't private schools jump on the bandwagon?"
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Responses from nearly 100 school superintendents across Wisconsin with their feelings about the Common Core academic standards have been released by a legislative committee.View the complete report, here (24mb PDF).The special panel created by Republicans to study the standards released results of the four-question survey on Tuesday. The committee is expected to release its recommendations related to the Common Core curriculum on Wednesday and vote on it Thursday.
The survey was sent to all 426 public school districts in Wisconsin and 94 superintendents responded. Their comments can be seen online.
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Rick Perlstein has a great piece on how faculty respond to grad student unions.He quotes at length from a letter that a professor of political science at the University of Chicago sent to graduate students in his department who are trying to organize a union there.
What always amuses me about these sorts of statements from faculty is how carefully crafted and personal they are -- you can tell a lot of time and thought went into this one -- and yet somehow they still manage to attain all the individuality of a Walmart circular. No union contract was ever as standardized or as cookie-cutter as one of these missives. The very homogenization and uniformity that faculty fear a union will foist upon their campus is already present in their own aversion.
Anyway, here's what the good professor has to say:
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What defines the west? American and European politicians like to talk about values and institutions. But for billions of people around the world, the crucial point is simpler and easier to grasp. The west is the part of the world where even ordinary people live comfortably. That is the dream that makes illegal immigrants risk their lives, trying to get into Europe or the US.Yet, even though the lure of the west remains intense, the western world itself is losing faith in its future. Last week Barack Obama gave one of the bleakest speeches of his presidency. In unsparing terms, the US president chronicled the increasing inequality and declining social mobility that, he says, "pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the world".
A Pew Research Center opinion survey, conducted in 39 countries this spring, asked: "Will children in your country be better off than their parents?" Only 33 per cent of Americans believed their children would live better, while 62 per cent said they would live worse. Europeans were even gloomier. Just 28 per cent of Germans, 17 per cent of Brits, 14 per cent of Italians and 9 per cent of French thought their children would be better off than previous generations. This western pessimism contrasts strongly with optimism in the developing world: 82 per cent of Chinese, 59 per cent of Indians and 65 per cent of Nigerians believe in a more prosperous future.
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The term "autodidact" is usually reserved for those who, like Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, and so on, did not have the advantages of spending much time in school or the help of schoolteachers with their education.
I would like to suggest that every student is an autodidact, because only the student can decide what information to accept and retain. Re-education camps in the Communist world, from Korea to Vietnam to China, no doubt made claims that they could "teach" people things whether they want to learn them or not, but I would argue that the threat of force and social isolation used in such camps are not the teaching methods we are searching for in our schools.
And further, I would claim that even in re-education camps, students often indeed reserve private places in their minds about which their instructors know very little.
My main point is that the individual is the sovereign ruler of their own attention and the sole arbiter of what information they choose to admit and retain. Our system of instruction and examination has no doubt persuaded many sovereign learners over the years to accept enough of the knowledge we offer to let most of them pass whatever exams we have presented, but the cliché is that after the test, nearly all of that information is gone.
Teachers have known all this from the beginning, and so have developed and employed all their arts to first attract, and then retain, the attention of their students, and they have labored tirelessly to persuade their students that they should decide to attend to and make use of the knowledge they are offering.
One of the best arguments for having teachers be very well-grounded in the subjects they are teaching is that the likelihood increases that they will really love their subject, and it is easier for teachers to convince students of the value of what they are teaching if they clearly believe in its value themselves.
It should not be forgotten, however, that the mind is a mercurial and fickle instrument, and the attention of students is vulnerable to all the distractions of life, in the classroom and out of it. I am distressed that so many who write about education seem to overlook the role of students almost entirely, concentrating on the public policy issues of the Education Enterprise and forgetting that without the attention and interest of students, all of their efforts are futile.
It seems strange to me that so little research is ever done into the actual academic work of students, for instance whether they ever read a complete nonfiction book, and whether they every write a serious academic paper on a subject other than themselves.
For many reformers, it seems the only student work they are interested in is student scores on objective tests. Sadly, objective tests discover almost nothing about the students' interest in their experiences of the complexity of the chemistry, history, literature, Chinese, and other subjects they have been offered.
There was a time when college entrance decisions were based on essays students would write on academic subjects, and those could reveal not only student fluency and knowledge, but something of their attachment to and appreciation for academic matter.
But now, we seem to have decided that neither we nor they have time for extended essays on history and the like (except for the International Baccalaureate, and The Concord Review), and the attractions of technology have led examiners to prefer tests that can be graded very quickly, by computer wherever possible. So, when the examiners show no interest in serious academic work, it should not surprise us that students may see less value in it as well.
The Lower Education teachers are still out there, loving their subjects, and offering them up for students to judge, and to decide how much of them they will accept into their memories and their thoughts, but meanwhile the EduPundits and the leaders of the Education Enterprise [Global Education Reform Movement = GERM, as Pasi Sahlberg calls it], with lots of funding to encourage them, sail on, ignoring the control students have, and always have had, over their own attention and their own learning.
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Most of us have heard the term the "school-to-prison" pipeline, but perhaps you aren't completely clear on what it is or how it works. A new video by the Advancement Project that uses throwback clips of classic television shows, "The Cosby Show" and "Saved By the Bell," is meant to illustrate exactly what drives the mass incarceration of Black and Latino youth. The video highlights the fact that kids today are more poorly behaved than in the past, but that punishment for even minor disciplinary infractions in school casts them criminals. When Zach Morris was disciplined for using a phone in class, we didn't see Mr. Belding calling the cops."It has been this way for a long time but in the 1980s, there was a shift in the discourse around young people and there was this new term used to describe them, 'superpredator.' Young people had been dubbed superpredators right in the middle of the crack cocaine epidemic and the height of the war on drugs," Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, told EBONY.com. "The intersection of these things, were the leading cause to a crackdown on young people's [behavior]."
"Schools then started to adopt 'zero tolerance policies' along with drug sniffing dogs and metal detectors. Then came the 1990s, with the Drug Free School Zones Act which requires expulsion for carrying a gun on school grounds. Zero tolerance policies are the kind of discipline that requires a particular kind of exclusion and it is a practice of harsh discipline."
It wasn't always like this. Before and during part of the 1980s, kids engaged in many of the same behaviors that are the grounds for suspension and expulsion now. Talking on a cell phone, having a food fight in the cafeteria, lateness, dress code violations,disrupting class----minor infractions that used to result in a trip to the principal's office and maybe a few days of detention. Now, these types of behaviors can result in criminal penalties, fines, and young people getting caught up in the criminal justice system with ramifications that can last a lifetime.
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Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are the latest effort to harness information technology for higher education. While they are still in a nascent stage of development, many in academe are enthusiastic about their potential to be an inexpensive way of delivering an education to vast audiences.Yet one aspect of the MOOC movement has not been fully analyzed: who controls the knowledge. MOOCs are largely an American-led effort, and the majority of the courses available so far come from universities in the United States or other Western countries. Universities and educators in less-developed regions of the world are climbing onto the MOOC bandwagon, but it is likely that they will be using the technology, pedagogical ideas, and probably significant parts of the content developed elsewhere. In this way, the online courses threaten to exacerbate the worldwide influence of Western academe, bolstering its higher-education hegemony.
For the most part, MOOC content is based on the American academic experience and pedagogical ideas. By and large, the readings required by most MOOC courses are American or from other Western countries. Many of the courses are in English, and even when lectures and materials are translated into other languages, the content largely reflects the original course. The vast majority of instructors are American. It is likely that more diversity will develop, but the basic content will remain the same.
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James Murphy, via Carrie Zellmer:
On several occasions in the past year, David Coleman, the president of the College Board, which administers the SAT, has suggested that changes need to be made to the vocabulary tested on the exam. In a talk he gave at the Brookings Institution a year ago, Coleman remarked, "I think when you think about vocabulary on exams, you know, how SAT words are famous as the words you will never use again? You know, you study them in high school and you're like, gosh, I've never seen this before, and I probably never shall." Coleman co-opted an old criticism of the SAT, that it forced students to learn difficult vocabulary that is useless for much of anything other than scoring well on the exam. He went on, "Why wouldn't it be the opposite? Why wouldn't you have a body of language on the SAT that's the words you most need to know and be ready to use again and again? Words like transform, deliberate, hypothesis, right?"Jim Montoya, the College Board's Vice President of Higher Education, in an interview on NPR, reiterated Coleman's criticism of "SAT words." Asked why the SAT is "always [testing] the word 'unscrupulous'," Montoya replied, "Yes, you're right. It's one of those words people identify as an SAT word. All I can say is that as we move forward, one of the things we want to make absolutely certain of is that the vocabulary that students are expected to know will be vocabulary that they will be able to use as college students, and which will be valuable to them."
Coleman's comments on vocabulary provoked little response at the time, although one commentator accused him of "sending a message that devalues language." The notion that some words are not worth knowing is bound to raise the hackles not only of people who love the wealth and power of all kinds of words, including fancy ones, but also of people who know just how much importance educational experts attribute to what they call "lexical richness," or a large and diverse vocabulary. Coleman just so happens to be both of those kinds of people, and he understands that the question is less what vocabulary students should learn vocabulary than how they should learn it.
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If they are to make progress, children should start learning early. But Mandarin is very different from European languages and harder for an English speaker to learn than French or German. Also, in the race to learn other languages, the Chinese are way ahead in learning English. Although the English-language component of the Chinese university entrance exam has been reduced, there are 50,000 English-language teaching companies in the country. Internationally-minded companies regard English as important. Lenovo, the Chinese computer company, has made it its official language.Throughout Europe, English is now essential for anyone wanting to reach a senior corporate position. It is a given, a background skill like knowing how to create a PowerPoint presentation or find your way to the office.
That will be the case in China too. Foreign Mandarin speakers may establish better contacts and win business. But if China follows the European pattern, its future young executives will listen as their anglophone counterparts struggle a while in their school-learnt Mandarin and they will then switch to English because it wastes less time.
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During a recent teachers strike in this Zapotec Indian town in the poor southern state of Oaxaca, parents who brought in replacement instructors discovered that the children hadn't been taught the words to Mexico's national anthem. Instead, they had been trained to sing a popular leftist song which acts as an unofficial anthem to a local chapter of the teachers union."We don't know the words to the Mexican anthem," said Leticia Diego, a student, apologizing to a visitor one recent morning. About a dozen seventh-graders then shyly sang the leftist anthem, "The People United Will Never Be Defeated."
The union here is the National Coordinator of Educational Workers, or CNTE, a radical and powerful wing of the country's national teachers union. Analysts say it has long maintained an iron grip over some of Mexico's poorest states--one that goes beyond what children are taught, and extends to lengthy strikes, disruptive protests and violent clashes. Now, as Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto begins to implement an overhaul of Mexico's troubled public school system, the CNTE has stepped up its efforts to fight the government.
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Most of us watching the looming budget showdown do so with a sense of dread. The last one left congressional approval at 9%, the president's popularity at a new low, and consumer confidence at levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis. The trouble, of course, is finding common ground on a 10-year budget framework or even on a six-week punt. Hopefully, they will find common ground.If we are committed to evidence, though, there's one area where we ought to be able to agree: early-childhood education. Investments in pre-kindergarten education have among the highest payoffs of any government policy, and whatever budget agreement emerges should restore the country's long-standing commitment to early education.
The budget-sequester cuts agreed to in 2011, under the guise of saving money, have knocked as many as 70,000 kids out of such programs. How myopic. It doesn't save money beyond the narrowest definition of the immediate term. Incarceration, special education, teen pregnancy, low earnings--avoiding these outcomes will actually save money, and early education helps achieve that.
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Release of the numbers last month, amplified by an attention-getting analysis authored by retired UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor John Cummins and graduate student Kirsten Hextrum, has sent shock waves around the campus. The department of athletics and its friends are playing full-court damage control.John Cummins and Kirsten Hextrum (PDF):Sandy Barbour, Berkeley's director of athletics, acknowledged the problem and promises to turn things around. Early indicators of academic progress in the past year are encouraging, she says, "But, we need to do better."
A year ago she fired football coach Jeff Tedford, in part, say her friends, because he failed to do enough to help his players succeed academically. In the sports world, the explanation was simpler: Tedford's three losing seasons. Barbour told me it was some of both: "downward trends" both on the field and in the classroom.
But in the eyes of some Berkeley professors and administrators - and for many beyond the campus - the attention given the new numbers about athletes' graduation rates seems to raise the specter of older and more fundamental issues.
This white paper is based on a larger project being conducted with the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library. The purpose of the research is to explore the history of the management of Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley from the 1960s to the present. The project began in 2009 and will include, when completed, approximately 70 oral history interviews of individuals who played key roles in the management of intercollegiate athletics over that period of time - Chancellors, Athletic Directors, senior administrators, Faculty Athletic Representatives, other key faculty members, directors of the Recreational Sports Program, alumni/donors, administrators in the Athletic Study Center and others. The interviews are conducted by John Cummins, Associate Chancellor - Chief of Staff, Emeritus who worked under Chancellors Heyman, Tien, Berdahl and Birgeneau from 1984 - 2008. Intercollegiate Athletics reported to him from 2004 - 2006. A publication of the results is underway and will be co- authored by Cummins and Kirsten Hextrum, a PhD student in the Graduate School of Education, a member and two-time national champion of Cal Women's Crew from 2003 - 2007, and a tutor/adviser in the Athletic Study Center since 2009. This paper addresses administrative and management issues that typically concern those responsible for the conduct of a Division I-A intercollegiate athletics program. It assumes that such a program will continue for many years to come and that it provides important benefits for the Cal community. Its focus is principally with the market driven, multi-billion dollar phenomenon of the big-time sports of Men's football and basketball, their development over time and their intersection with the academic world. The Olympic or non-revenue sports at UC Berkeley more closely resemble the amateur intercollegiate ideal with high graduation rates and successful programs. Even these sports programs, however, are gradually being pulled into the more highly commercialized model.In the spring of 1999, a Professor in Ethnic Studies provided passing grades to two football players who did little or no work for his course. The NCAA cited Cal for academic fraud and a lack of institutional control, and placed the department on probation for five years. These kinds of incidents exact an emotional toll on the AD and the senior administration. They are a major embarrassment for the campus and remain so. In the NCAA's own accounting of schools by major violations in its history, Cal, along with a few other schools including UCLA, with 7, ranks just behind Oklahoma (8) and Arizona State and Southern Methodist University (9). Stanford has none. Future work by these authors will investigate the nature of these violations, the culture that led to them and suggest efforts to mitigate further infractions. This paper primarily addresses the academic issues.
.....
Kasser did complete the Haas Pavilion during his watch despite the conflicts and difficulties associated with it, unquestionably a major accomplishment. He made great strides in addressing the inequities between the Men's and Women's programs. He upgraded the coaching in some of the Olympic Sports and his appointment of Ben Braun as the Men's Basketball coach, who brought an inclusive, team oriented approach to management boosted the morale of the department. Kasser valued the Rec Sports program as part of the merged department and was an excellent public ambassador for Cal.
.....
The graduation rate for UC Berkeley's revenue generating teams are the lowest in the department. Men's basketball went four years with none of their scholarship student athletes graduating. This brought down their average to a 58% graduation rate over this eight year period. Football also has sub-par graduation rates. Over the past eight years, football graduation rates have ranged from a high of 72% to a low of 31%. Football has the lowest average team graduation rate with only 50% of their scholarship athletes graduating. The numbers are even more grim when broken down by race. In particular, the black scholarship football players, many of whom are special admits, have gone from a high of 80% to a low of 18%. The NCAA also tracks graduation rates by compiling four-year averages to even-out any anomalies. In this data set, the black graduation rates range from a high of 63% to a low of 30%. Three of the seven four-year averages mark the black graduation rate in the 30s.
.....
With a new Chancellor, a new football coach, a new stadium and high performance center, a larger and more monied conference, the present surely marks a transitional period for intercollegiate athletics at UC Berkeley. These changes all signal Cal's continued escalation as a Big-Time sports program, and the difficult dilemmas campus administrators face. To fund an intercollegiate program of this magnitude they cannot alienate a substantial donor base. The recent blowback after the elimination, and subsequent reinstatement of five varsity sports, makes the possibility of cutting sports again as a cost saving measure extremely remote for years to come. Further, the athletic deficit places enormous pressures to win. This increases the temptation to gain an extra edge on the competition whether through newer facilities, higher-paid coaches, or longer practices. All this must be achieved on the backs of student athletes who are enrolled in a full-time course load at one of the most prestigious academic universities in the world. Rather than resolving the dilemma of how to maintain a nearly $70 million per year athletic enterprise while still providing a world-class education for the participants, campus administrators continue to muddle through.
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Is school backward? In the latest education trend, "flipped learning," students watch video lectures at home, and then do what is often traditionally thought of as homework--problem solving, writing, or hands-on activities--in the classroom, with personal assistance from their teachers. Who's excited about this? Tech companies, app developers, and some teachers have eagerly embraced "the flip." But other educators are skeptical. Is more screen time what our kids need? In this episode, I talk to Jonathan Bergmann, a teacher and educational technology advocate, and Frank Noschese, a science teacher and blogger who is skeptical of flipping.
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The start of the week was expected to include football teams preparing for UIL semifinals and celebrating TAPPS state titles. Instead, on the day when the Cowboys play the Chicago Bears on Monday Night Football, high school teams are joining the party.A dozen teams from North Texas will be playing Monday, starting with the 1 p.m. showdown of DeSoto (13-0) and Euless Trinity (11-2) at Waco ISD Stadium. Both schools are releasing students early so they can head south for the Class 5A Division I Region I final.
Playing on Monday won't be a big adjustment, DeSoto coach Claude Mathis said.
"But playing in the cold weather? That's something different," he said. "But we've played some in the cold, too."
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Chairman Issa, Ranking Member Cummings, thank you for the opportunity to testify today regarding the limitations of government intervention.Despite Washington's recent focus on the disastrous Affordable Care Act website rollout, policymakers are missing what the rollout glitches symbolize: the fundamental flaws that imbue government intervention.
The work of public choice economists such as Nobel laureate James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Mancur Olson, and William Niskanen has shown that, despite good intentions and lavish use of taxpayer resources, government solutions are not only unlikely to solve most of our problems--they often make problems worse.
Public Choice Economics: Politics without Romance
Congress spends a great deal of time discussing the need to address market failures such as monopolies and pollution.
However, even when such a problem does exist, the policies implemented to address it are often ineffective or undesirable.1 That's because, as public choice economists have pointed out, while there may be market failures, there are also government failures. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, popularized in his famous essay "Public Choice: Politics without Romance," James Buchanan explains why looking to government for solutions often results in more harm than good.2
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We are on a mission to put a MakerBot Desktop 3D Printer in every school in the United States of America.MakerBot and America Makes are teaming up to get thousands of 3D printing bundles into schools all across our nation.
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LaGuardia Community College is a GED machine. At this urban school, near the Long Island Expressway in the New York City borough of Queens, the prep courses for the state's high school equivalency exam aren't just textbook reviews--they are professional-development classes. There is a course for would-be health workers, another for business students, and yet another for anyone interested in technology and engineering.LaGuardia's free classes, funded by state, city, and foundation grants, have a months-long waiting list. Students willing to pay for courses (at about $3.50 per hour of instruction) can usually get a spot in the next scheduled class, although those fill up, too. Most students are black or Latino.
Gail Mellow, LaGuardia's president, says postsecondary educators who don't reach out to high school dropouts are ignoring many of the young people who most need their help. In big cities such as New York, almost 40 percent of students who enter high school don't finish. "To really educate the American populace," she says, "we cannot forget people who did not graduate from high school."
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The foam board models of dream homes created by seventh-grade students at Glacial Drumlin School in Cottage Grove sported extra features like swimming pools, an airplane and the "world's biggest hot tub."While they were busy conceptualizing their fantasy homes, the students were using math as they learned how to create something to scale.
Trenton Herber, 12, and Henry Huston, 13, decided to make a house in the shape of a pyramid, which was spray-painted gold and taken apart in three pieces to reveal the interior, which included a basketball court.
"It was pretty hard because all the angles had to be like perfect or it would just fall apart," Trenton said.
Peyton Blang, Anissa Dimmig and Ali Dorn, all 12 years old, had a Cape Cod-style home in mind when they used Popsicle sticks to create siding for their home. The group ended up making adjustments when they realized their blueprints didn't account for the thickness of the foam board.
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Recent Wesleyan University graduate Zach Wallace confided to reporters Thursday that he has no clue how his parents are supposed to earn enough money to settle his $40,000 in student loan debt. "My God, they'll be lucky if they're able to pay this off while they're still in their 70s," said the 23-year-old film studies major and unpaid intern, noting the minimum monthly payments his father and mother will need to make just to keep their heads above water. "The student loan system takes advantage of a lot of parents who simply don't realize what they're getting into. Then four years later it's like, 'Welcome to the real world, Mom and Dad!'" Citing the present trend of tuition hikes and stagnant wages, Wallace added that his parents might well be forced into bankruptcy by the time he has completed a decent Ph.D. program.
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He went on to found the Kentucky Youth Symphony in Louisville, and later was hired by Boston University to start the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, which performed for President John F. Kennedy at the White House. At age 50, Rabin was lured to Madison to help shape and lead WYSO.A great example of what one person can accomplish. I am thankful for the many arts opportunities available to our students. Much more on Marvin Rabin, here.Rabin received countless service awards, including the 2000 Wisconsin Governor's Award in Support of the Arts. Both WYSO and the American String Teachers Association named awards for outstanding arts leaders in his honor.
"Marvin Rabin was the most passionate advocate for youth orchestras that the world has ever known," said Bridget Fraser, executive director for WYSO, which plans to memorialize Rabin at its Winterfest concerts in March.
"He really believed in making music accessible, and not an elitist thing," his son Ralph told the State Journal in a 2011 profile. "As a teacher, he makes students feel the importance of who they are and what they can become."
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It's designed to be an impressive show of force: Thousands of unionized teachers plan to rally Monday in cities from New York to San Francisco to "reclaim the promise of public education."Behind the scenes, however, teachers unions are facing tumultuous times. Long among the wealthiest and most powerful interest groups in American politics, the unions are grappling with financial, legal and public-relations challenges as they fight to retain their clout and build alliances with a public increasingly skeptical of big labor.
"I do think it's a moment of truth," said Lance Alldrin, a veteran high-school teacher in Corning, Calif., who has split from his longtime union after serving for a decade as the local president.
The National Education Association has lost 230,000 members, or 7 percent, since 2009, and it's projecting another decline this year, which will likely drop it below 3 million members. Among the culprits: teacher layoffs, the rise of non-unionized charter schools and new laws in states such as Wisconsin and Michigan freeing teachers to opt out of the union.
The American Federation of Teachers has been able to grow slightly and now represents 1.5 million workers -- but because many new members are retirees or part-timers who pay lower dues, union revenue actually fell last year, by nearly $6 million, federal records show.
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Sallie Mae and other large student-loan servicers -- the companies that act as a go-between for borrowers and lenders -- will soon be getting some regular oversight from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency announced this week.ProPublica and others have long documented student borrowers' troubles with the companies that handle the day-to-day collection of student-loan payments and communicate with borrowers.
"Student loan servicers can have a profound impact on borrowers and their families," CFPB Director Richard Cordray said Monday in a call with reporters. "Given how quickly this market has grown and the recent uptick in delinquency rates, it is important for us to ensure that borrowers receive appropriate attention from their servicers."
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WISTAX: On December property tax bill, statewide school levies up 0.8%, counties up 1.2%, technical colleges up 1.3%
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJMattD4) December 9, 2013But statistics showing African-American students in the district were eight times more likely to get an out-of-school suspension than white students last year raises questions about whether the discipline code works against efforts to close the achievement gap.Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum.Among big school districts reconsidering such measures is Broward County in Florida, where a zero-tolerance policy led to arrests for such infractions as possessing marijuana or spraying graffiti, the New York Times reports. That district, which had more than 1,000 arrests in the 2011 school year, entered into an agreement last month with community organizations to overhaul its policies to de-emphasize punishment. School districts in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Denver are undertaking similar reviews of get-tough policies.
"Everybody knows that suspensions don't always achieve a change in behavior," says Tim Ritchie, dean of students at Madison Memorial High School. "When we send some kids out of school (on suspension) they don't have anywhere appropriate to go -- their homes can be very chaotic environments."
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Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
t would be terrific if three or more people run for Passman's open seat, triggering a Feb. 18 primary, followed by the general election April 1. That would allow more debate -- and community engagement -- on the future of our schools.Much more on the 2014 Madison School Board election, here.The School Board seat held by president Ed Hughes also is up for election this spring. We admire Hughes for his public service. He's capable and level-headed.
But incumbents shouldn't get a free pass. We hope someone -- or more than one challenger -- will step forward to give voters a choice.
When it comes to School Board elections, the more candidates, the better. Our community deserves the best leaders possible.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email:
The District is currently experiencing a shortage of substitute teachers, which has led to a high number of unfilled assignments when a teacher or SEA is absent. As a result, many principals are asking teachers and other professional staff to cover for the absent teacher. When this occurs, members of MTI's "Teacher" Bargaining Unit are likely to qualify to receive "class coverage compensation." Class coverage pay is $22 for each hour of covering another teacher's students. The Contract mandates that in the event a teacher's absence cannot be covered by a substitute, volunteers must first be solicited to cover the classes. If no volunteers come forward, the building administrator can assign other certified staff.Compensation for class coverage is provided by Section III-R of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and is paid under the following conditions:
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Reminders of Best PracticeRelated: Parent talented & gifted complaint, MAP Assessment results, English 10, credit for non-Madison school district courses and outbound open enrollment.Current Practice
Data from MMSD
Review input from Focus Groups
Examine Implications for Policy
Examine Implications for Practice
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But this year, thanks to Ohio's Third Grade Reading Guarantee and State Board of Education, the magic number is 28 points. Score more than 27 and it is presumed that the child is wholly prepared to advance forward without required intervention while a score of 27 or less forces the child, the school, and the parents to engage in interventions that may not be appropriately aligned to any particular reading deficiency nor specifically aligned to the exact struggles the child is dealing with.It is this type of one-size-fits-all educational approach that has widespread opposition from a diverse group of education advocates on the left and the far right:
"When it comes to learning, one size does not fit all." - School Choice Ohio
"In this environment, and especially in this age of sophisticated data, we shouldn't put too much stock in an instrument as crude as a "one size fits all" standardized test." - NEA President Dennis Van Roekel
"I think one of the problems that we have had in public education is thinking that one size fits all, and we just know that doesn't work for all children." - Ohio Superintendent Richard Ross
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Like a school principal handing out a clutch of C grades, Andreas Schleicher unveiled the results from the latest round of the Program for International Student Assessment tests last week.For Britain, the United States and most of Western Europe, the results ranged from "average" to "poor." British students, for example, scored exactly average in mathematics and slightly above average in reading and science. French students were slightly below average in science and slightly above in reading and mathematics. The United States were below average in mathematics and science but slightly above in reading.
For Asian countries, the news was much more encouraging, with students from Shanghai topping the chart by a considerable margin, but with students from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea all closely bunched at the high end.
Mr. Schleicher, the head of education at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the tests every three years to about half a million 15-year-olds in 65 countries around the world, also noted significant improvement in Vietnam. He described it as a poor country whose students outperformed peers from many wealthier nations -- and did even better once differences in income were taken into account.
"On a level playing field, the British look even worse," he said at a press conference here.
Western countries, Mr. Schleicher warned, should not to comfort themselves with the myth that Asian high performance is the result of education systems that favor memorization over creativity.
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Clever launched about a year and a half ago to provide a standardized API for K-12 schools that allows them to unlock and share data with outside developers. It's managed to get 10,000 schools signed up to use its tools since then. Now, according to our sources, the company has raised $10 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital.The funding comes as Clever is finding ways to make schools more connected and accessible for developers. Most schools today use a variety of legacy Student Information Systems (SIS) as a way to store student data. But many of those systems tend to be outdated or custom-built, meaning that the information held within -- which includes class lists, attendance, and grades -- can't be shared or accessed by outside developers.
For developers, that means integrating with individual schools on a one-to-one basis, and that just doesn't scale. Clever, by contrast, provides a single, universal API that will allow developers and education companies to access all the data that has been locked up in legacy silos and use it in their apps.
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It is unusual for school students to be worrying about the "collective". But, then, yours seems to be an unusual school. When I was here the last time, you were pondering the "continuum". I find it truly remarkable. To grapple with issues and concepts that are deeply philosophical and at the same time of immense practical value - and doing so at a young age - is an ingredient that goes into the making of great civilizations. In a world that seems to revel in everything that is crass and commercial, and in a country that appears like a continent of cacophony and shallowness, this is not expected of you. You and your teachers must be congratulated for swimming against the tide.Collective is something that falls between a collection and the composite. There is ample space between these two categories, and where exactly does a collective fall in this space depends on what kind of collective we are talking about. But let us first talk a bit about the endpoints of this space.A collection can be gathering together of arbitrary and distinct elements as in a mathematical set. A set comprising of a frog, a princess, a pencil and a magic wand will qualify as a collection. A collection can also be of identical but distinct elements. A collection of four identical horses pulling Raja Dasharath's chariot - or ten identical horses pulling King Solomon's chariot - is also a collection, although you could also call it a team of horses. You may notice that we are already shifting from the concept of an arbitrary collection, although you would still not say that the chariot is being pulled by a collective of horses.
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For some juniors and seniors at Union High School, their choice of electives will soon be seemingly endless.The R-XI school board unanimously approved a program that will allow these students to take Massive Open Online Courses, or "MOOCs" for a half a credit next semester.
The class will be pass/fail and will not count toward the student's overall grade point average.
MOOCs are offered by universities worldwide, including some of the most highly accredited U.S. institutions such as Harvard, Yale or MIT.
They cover just about any subject imaginable, from The Beatles to the Big Bang Theory, or foreign languages to physics.
Dr. Justin Tarte, director of curriculum and support services, said about 40 students are already in the required application process to take these courses next semester.
Students must go through an interview process with their guidance counselor and other officials to justify why they want to take MOOCs. Once approved for the program, students will be responsible for finding enough of them to fill an 18-week semester.
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The test results aren't good. Get different tests.That may sound like a kill-the-messenger response to why American kids keep getting unsatisfying results on standardized tests. Tests don't give wrong answers -- kids do.
But that's one way of looking at the huge changes afoot for testing, including in Wisconsin. At the same time, criticism of testing is gaining momentum and may have an effect I would not have expected even recently. There is a chance we could see, in Wisconsin and nationwide, a much better, more insightful world of standardized tests soon. And there is a chance we're heading toward a colossal testing mess.
"I think the country is at a moment of truth on testing, a really important one," Marc Tucker, CEO and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and a major figure in national efforts to raise education standards, said last week. Tucker spoke in response to release of a high-profile round of international tests that showed no progress for American kids in reading and math and a growing number of nations doing better than the United States.
The building heat around testing has several big themes.
For one, it is the partner issue with the controversies over the Common Core standards that are being implemented in 90% of states, including Wisconsin, and which are drawing increasing criticism. Standards are goals for what children should learn. Broad-scale tests are the way to find out how they're doing and compare kids in, say, your school or state with kids in another school or state. But that is valid only if the tests are worthy of the task -- which is where a lot of debate lies.
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"It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence." Douglas Hofstadter is in a grocery store in Bloomington, Indiana, picking out salad ingredients. "If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say--maybe they wouldn't go this far--but they might say this is some of the only good work that's ever been done."Hofstadter says this with an easy deliberateness, and he says it that way because for him, it is an uncontroversial conviction that the most-exciting projects in modern artificial intelligence, the stuff the public maybe sees as stepping stones on the way to science fiction--like Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-playing supercomputer, or Siri, Apple's iPhone assistant--in fact have very little to do with intelligence. For the past 30 years, most of them spent in an old house just northwest of the Indiana University campus, he and his graduate students have been picking up the slack: trying to figure out how our thinking works, by writing computer programs that think.
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Two big evaluations of education in the Sunshine State came out this week--and readers can be excused for feeling a bit confused, because they tell rather different stories about the state of Florida's schools.Eleven newspapers around the state went front-page this week with stories highlighting the release of teacher evaluation data. The vast majority of Florida teachers--98 percent--were rated "effective" or "highly effective."
Meanwhile, two papers--the Lakeland Ledger (which ran wire copy) and The Palm Beach Post (subscription-only) gave A1 placement to stories about Florida's results on the Program for International Student Assessment, which tests students in more than 60 countries. (Florida was one of three US states to pay for state-specific results.) The numbers weren't sparkling: Florida kids fared roughly in line with the US and international averages in reading, and similar to the lackluster US average but well below the international standard in science. In math, the state's results were worst of all: well below the US average and "similar to Croatia," as the Post story put it, with 30 percent of students scoring as "low achievers."
The demographic challenges in Florida's schools are real, but still there's an obvious question here: How can the state's teachers be doing such a great job while students can't compete with international peers and struggle to keep up with already-middling US scores?
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When asked if politics and the resistance from the tea party had eroded the chances of Common Core moving forward in Wisconsin, Evers said the politics surrounding the issue have created a lot of misinformation."It's important for everyone, including those on these committees, to realize that this is about our students being college and career ready," Evers said. "These standards have been embraced by districts across the state for the past three years. I think it is the right thing to do for the kids to keep the standards in place. That's the bottom line."
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The average debt that borrowers of student loans had at graduation continued to rise last year, climbing to $29,400 for the class of 2012, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS).This year's figure is up by almost 10 percent compared with the group's estimate last year of $26,600 and increased an average of 6 percent each year from 2008 to 2012, the report says. TICAS derives its estimates from data the federal government collects every four years as well as information that colleges report on a voluntary basis to an annual survey by Peterson's college guide.
As in previous years, the report shows a wide variation in average student debt loads across different states and institutions. Delaware and New Hampshire lead the list of the highest-debt states, with average debt levels of $33,649 and $32,698, respectively. Meanwhile, New Mexico's average student debt of $17,994 gives the state the distinction of the lowest-debt state. California was the second-lowest-debt state with $20,269.
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Lately the question "Is College Necessary?" has been under debate. One factor sparking the debate is the record 85 percent of recent college grads living with their parents. While economists and academics argue about the benefits of a college education and the loan debt incurred by many students, what are recent college grads thinking, especially those who can't find jobs or if they do, cannot support themselves?In this guest post, Cristina Schreil, a 2011 graduate of New York University who majored in English Literature and Journalism, investigated how her generation feels about the expectations they had and what they feel now--diplomas in hand. Like many of her peers, she admits, "in no way am I supporting myself 100 percent, but I am still pursuing the goal of working in journalism full time. I think it's going to be a long journey." Here is what Cristina learned about her peer's attitudes and struggles:
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Learning how to wave bye-bye is an important milestone for an infant that usually occurs between the age of 10 months and a year. A study in Pediatrics International found premature infants mastered the bye-bye gesture significantly later than full-term babies and used different hand and wrist motions.Babies are born with an innate ability to imitate that develops throughout infancy. Research has shown this ability is controlled by circuitry in the brain that regulates the development of the visual and fine motor skills required to imitate others. The timing of bye-bye imitations and the type of hand motions used may be an important indicator of a premature infant's developmental state, the researchers said.
The study in Japan compared bye-bye waving in 597 full-term and 95 premature infants, using their corrected age, or their age if they had been born full term. (Corrected age estimates a premature baby's developmental age by subtracting the number of weeks the infant was premature from his chronological age.)
Mothers reported the age at which their babies started to wave bye-bye. The infants' hand motions were analyzed from video recordings made at well-baby checkups, where researchers said goodbye to each infant orally and with hand motions.
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Students in 2012 were more likely than their counterparts in 2003 to have attended at least one year of pre-primary education.While more 15-old students reported to have enrolled in pre-primary education during the period, many of the students who reported that they had not attended pre-primary school are disadvantaged - the students who could benefit most from pre-primary education.
If offered a choice of schools for their child, parents are more likely to consider such criteria as "a safe school environment" and "a school's good reputation" more important than "high academic achievement of students in the school".
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Missouri's most pressing public policy problem is what to do about school districts in urban areas that fail to make the grade. When the Missouri Legislature returns in January, resolving both the issue of what to do with unaccredited school districts, and how to make sure students in those districts have an opportunity to attend quality schools, should be the top priority.Unfortunately, as is too common in Missouri, the two primary sides of the debate -- the education establishment and reformers who want some form of school choice -- are once again at odds.
Make no mistake: This fight is personal, particularly for education commissioner Chris Nicastro and suspended Ferguson-Florissant schools superintendent Art McCoy, who are battling for their jobs for daring to support elements of the reform movement.
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"It is with great sadness we share the news that WYSO's founder, Dr. Marvin Rabin has passed away." WYSO Facebook page
The Open World of Marv Rabin
Marc Newhouse (2/18/13)
Want to see a guy go from his mid-nineties to about age fifty in thirty seconds or less?
Marvin Rabin does it, unbelievably, just by talking about music, his lifelong passion and profession.
Interesting what you know and don't know about adults when you're a kid. Rabin was the founder of the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra; he was imported--OK, lured--to the UW from Boston. So I figured he was from a musical family, a long line of cultured, genteel, well-heeled patrician people.
Wrong, his father was a store keeper, and didn't play an instrument. But his father, a Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine, did realize--vaudeville kept a lot of musicians fed and shod. Remember, the talking picture hadn't been invented, and that meant every movie house had a pit orchestra. So his father put a violin in young Marvin's hands, which changed his life and a lot of other lives.
Mine, for example. When Rabin believed in you...
But wait...
Rabin believed in EVERY kid, which is to say that he was always looking for that special talent, or spark, or curiosity that made a kid unique. Nor was he just a music teacher, a conductor, an educator; he came to music relatively late, having gotten a Bachelor's degree in history and political science. He wanted kids to grow up and develop and keep developing through their lives, and if that meant music--great.
The complete blog post includes an interview with Dr. Rabin.
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It sounds like the opening line of a joke, "A father walked up to his kid's school and gets arrested..." but watch the video of Jim Howe trying to pick up his kids from South Cumberland Elementary School in Cumberland County, Tennessee, and you'll sooner cry than laugh. That's because Howe's alleged crime waswalking into the school building and asking to take his children now that classes were over. Howe was supposed to wait, you see. All walking parents are supposed to cool their heels until a long line of drivers have picked up their kids, and only then retrieve their own children. That's because school authorities are convinced that making parents drive up to school for pick-up is somehow safer than allowing choice in the matter."Previously, parents were coming out to pick up children, they were just getting out of cars and coming to school," Donald Andrews, the director of Cumberland County Schools told the Huffington Post. "In this day in age, the PTO [parent teacher organization] was concerned that it was a safety issue, someone could come up and grab [any] kid."
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The recently released study of IMPACT, the teacher evaluation system in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), has garnered a great deal of attention over the past couple of months (see our post here).Much of the commentary from the system's opponents was predictably (and unfairly) dismissive, but I'd like to quickly discuss the reaction from supporters. Some took the opportunity to make grand proclamations about how "IMPACT is working," and there was a lot of back and forth about the need to ensure that various states' evaluations are as "rigorous" as IMPACT (as well as skepticism as to whether this is the case).
The claim that this study shows that "IMPACT is working" is somewhat misleading, and the idea that states should now rush to replicate IMPACT is misguided. It also misses the important points about the study and what we can learn from its results.
First, to reiterate from our first post about the study, the analysis focuses solely on the teachers who are near the minimally effective (ME) and highly effective (HE) cutoff points. It is not an "overall" assessment of the system, as there is no way to know how teachers who are not close to these thresholds (i.e., the vast majority of teachers) are responding to the system. And improvement among all teachers is an extremely important outcome (as is how the system might affect the teacher labor supply).
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A Utah lawmaker says compulsory education in Utah wrongly places too much emphasis on attendance and not on outcomes, and he now plans to introduce three bills in the upcoming legislative session to shift the focus."We have no accountability -- no meaningful accountability measures -- on parents and students when it comes to the educational outcome," said Sen. Aaron Osmond, R- South Jordan on Tuesday.
The state senator's plan, first outlined in a post on the Utah Policy website, would require parents to attend parent-teacher conferences and agree to support children in completion of homework assignments, while exempting children being educated at home or in private schools from state requirements like classroom time and testing.
Osmond said to this point, too much has been expected and required of teachers.
"For us to turn all of that responsibility over to the teachers is not right," Osmond said.
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American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the bankruptcy court ruling that Detroit is eligible for bankruptcy protection is morally and legally troubling, and her union will be part of an appeal.U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes's Tuesday ruling dealt a major blow to unions, which had argued that pension cuts are protected by a provision in Michigan's constitution. During his 90-minute presentation outlining his ruling, Judge Rhodes said the power of the federal court superseded that state provision.
"Pension rights are contract rights under the Michigan constitution" and contracts are at risk for cuts under federal bankruptcy law, Judge Rhodes said. The state is one of only seven with constitutional provisions protecting government-worker pensions, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
Ms. Weingarten sees it differently. "Pension benefits are deferred wages" that people expected to get and need, she told reporters Wednesday morning at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in downtown Washington, D.C.
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Is talking about race at Minneapolis Community and Technical College grounds for punishment if white students are offended? That's what some supporters of a professor recently under investigation for talking about race there are asking. One supporter went so far as to create a parody logo of the college with its initials and the text: "Making it a Crime to Talk about Color."Minneapolis media and activists have been following the story of Shannon Gibney, a full-time adjunct professor of English. She says a student complaint about a recent lecture on structural racism triggered a meeting with administrators about her conduct and that the meeting was followed by a written letter of reprimand. She also says she was directed to the college's chief diversity officer for sensitivity training.
But the college denies her account, saying it never reprimanded her for talking about structural racism -- what it calls an important topic for students and faculty.
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The results from a global exam that evaluates students' reading, science and math skills are in and, once again, Chinese students appear to be reigning supreme while American students continued to underperform.But before you shake your head ruefully and scoff at the decline of Western-style education, take a look at how the data is organized.
The OECD's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams are held every three years. Coming first and third respectively in the 2012 exams are the Chinese cities of Shanghai and Hong Kong.
However, China is uniquely not listed as a country in the rankings -- unlike the U.S., Russia, Germany, Australia and other nations judged on the basis of their country-wide performances. Instead, China only shares Shanghai's score with PISA. (Hong Kong, a Special Autonomous Region of China, sends its own data.)
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Here, in a nutshell, is the human toll of the student-loan mess: it is forcing many recent grads to defer marriage and having children; it is hobbling many prospective entrepreneurs that our economy badly needs and may well delay the retirement of new grads by 11 or 12 years.
The total student-loan debt hit $1 trillion dollars two years ago, eclipsing total durable goods debt, and credit card debt. It is now one-fifth higher, at about $1.2 trillion. Student loan debt tripled between 2004 and 2012, with more than 40% of 25-year-olds now carrying student loan debt, averaging $24,000 per debtor. And remember, it is nearly impossible to discharge student-loan debt in bankruptcy.By "debacle," I mean this sad process: the ramping up of federal government guarantees for banks lending money to more and more students over the last 15 years (culminating in the complete nationalization of Sallie Mae in 2008), which led to an explosion in college tuition and consequently an explosion in total loan debt.
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The agreement for Scholars Academy was one of about 10 being developed as part of a process to make sure that all programs provided by outside organizations are in alignment with the school district's strategic plan for closing the achievement gap, says Jessica Hankey, director of strategic partnerships and innovation for the district.Are current school district programs held to the same standard?As part of a policy for community partnerships adopted by the district in February, the district is looking critically at how programs that partners offer are benefiting students, Hankey says.
There are more of those programs than you might imagine. Hankey says a "diverse portfolio" of up to 150 programs is offered to school district students by outside organizations. Some, like 100 Black Men of Madison's Backpacks for Success, involve minimal participation by the district. Others, like some MSCR programs, are not focused primarily on academics.
The agreements now being developed in collaboration with the partnership organizations are focusing on programs with "high intensity" alignment with the district's mission. They cover such things as goals, collaboration with school principals, program staff structure, sharing of data and metrics to measure outcomes, Hankey says.
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PISA 2012 is the programme's 5th survey. It assessed the competencies of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science (with a focus on mathematics) in 65 countries and economies.Laura Waters:Around 510 000 students between the ages of 15 years 3 months and 16 years 2 months participated in the assessment, representing about 28 million 15-year-olds globally.
The students took a paper-based test that lasted 2 hours. The tests were a mixture of open-ended and multiple-choice questions that were organised in groups based on a passage setting out a real-life situation. A total of about 390 minutes of test items were covered. Students took different combinations of different tests. They and their school principals also answered questionnaires to provide information about the students' backgrounds, schools and learning experiences and about the broader school system and learning environment.
Among the 34 OECD countries, the United States performed below average in mathematics in 2012 and is ranked 26th...Performance in reading and science are both close to the OECD average. The United States ranks 17 in reading, (range of ranks: 14 to 20) and 21 in science (range of ranks: 17 to 25). There has been no significant change in these performances over time.Dana Goldstein::Mathematics scores for the top-performer, Shanghai-China, indicate a performance that is the equivalent of over two years of formal schooling ahead of those observed in Massachusetts, itself a strong-performing U.S. state.
While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance. For example, the Slovak Republic, which spends around USD 53 000 per student, performs at the same level as the United States, which spends over USD 115 000 per student.
Just over one in four U.S. students do not reach the PISA baseline Level 2 of mathematics proficiency - a higher-than-OECD average proportion and one that hasn't changed since 2003. At the opposite end of the proficiency scale, the U.S. has a below-average share of top performers.
Students in the United States have particular weaknesses in performing mathematics tasks with higher cognitive demands, such as taking real-world situations, translating them into mathematical terms, and interpreting mathematical aspects in real-world problems. An alignment study between the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and PISA suggests that a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains also in PISA.
While these results always make news, this year there is an added tempest in the teapot of the education policy world: The OECD and the Obama administration worked in advance with a selected group of advocacy organizations to launch a media campaign called PISA Day. Which organizations? The College Board, ACT, America Achieves, and the Business Roundtable--all key architects of the Common Core, the new national curriculum standards whose increased rigor and standardized tests have led to a much-publicized protest movement among some parents, teachers, and kids. Groups that support the Core have an interest in calling attention to low American test scores, which today they will use to argue that the Core is the solution not only to our academic woes, but also to reviving the American economy. Happy PISA Day!Julia Ryan:But the truth is that the lessons of PISA for our school reform movement are not as simple as they are often made out to be. PISA results aren't just about K-12 test scores and curricula--they are also about academic ability tracking, income inequality, health care, child care, and how schools are organized as workplaces for adults.
Not much has changed since 2000, when the U.S. scored along the OECD average in every subject: This year, the U.S. scores below average in math and ranks 17th among the 34 OECD countries. It scores close to the OECD average in science and reading and ranks 21st in science and 17th in reading.Stephanie Banchero:Here are some other takeaways from the report:
America Is Struggling at Math
The U.S. scored below the PISA math mean and ranks 26th out of the 34 OECD countries. The U.S. math score is not statistically different than the following countries: Norway, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Russian Federation, Slovak Republic, Lithuania, Sweden, and Hungary.Do American Schools Need to Change? Depends What You Compare Them To
On average, 13 percent of students scored at the highest or second highest level on the PISA test, making them "top performers." Fifty-five percent of students in Shanghai-China were considered top performers, while only nine percent of American students were.
For the last few years, many U.S. educators and policy makers have looked to Finland, noting its high test scores and laser-like focus on attracting and retaining the best teachers. Although Finland still posts high scores, they have slid in the past few years.Related: www.wisconsin2.orgPoland, on the other hand, has seen sharp improvement. The only European country to have avoided the recession, Poland undertook a host of education overhauls in 1999, including delaying by one year the system that places students into academic or vocational tracks, and crafting better systems to identify struggling students and get them help.
"Poland launched a massive set of reforms and, while we cannot say for sure they caused the improvement, they certainly are...a sort of plausible explanation," said Andreas Schleicher, deputy director for education and skills at the OECD.
In Massachusetts, educators and policy makers credit the good showing, in part, to a 1993 effort that boosted spending and ushered in rigorous standards and achievement tests that students have to pass to graduate.
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After years of disfavor, vocational education is being transformed for young people seeking jobs that require more than high school but less than college.Instead of going through Congress and making the initiative bipartisan, President Obama acted alone in mid-November, promising $100 million in grants to specialized high schools -- such as New York City's Pathways in Technology Early College High School -- that prepare students for technical careers. The president's on the right track, but why make it partisan? Schools like P-TECH are an idea whose time has come -- one that can be adopted by both parties and by business as well as government.
Vocational education fell from favor decades ago because it was seen as an inferior track for less able students. More Americans attend college today than ever before: this year, 42% of young people 18 to 24 years old. Even among high school students in the bottom quarter of their class, 90% expect to go to college. And there's no question that, for many Americans, college is a ticket to the middle class.
But there's also mounting evidence that the college-for-all model isn't working. Nearly half of those who start a four-year degree don't finish on time; more than two-thirds of those who start community college fail to get a two-year degree on schedule. Even students who graduate emerge saddled with debt and often without the skills they need to make a decent living.
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PEER review, many boffins argue, channelling Churchill, is the worst way to ensure quality of research, except all the others. The system, which relies on papers being vetted by anonymous experts prior to publication, has underpinned scientific literature for decades. It is far from perfect: studies have shown that referees, who are not paid for their services, often make a poor fist of spotting serious mistakes. It is also open to abuse, with reviewers susceptible to derailing rivals or pinching their ideas. But it is as good as it gets.Or is it? Marcus Munafò, of Bristol University, believes it could be improved--by injecting a dose of subjectivity. The claim, which he and his colleagues present in a (peer-reviewed) paper just published in Nature, is odd. Science, after all, purports to be about seeking objective truth (or at least avoiding objective falsity). But it is done by scientists, who are human beings. And like other human endeavours, Dr Munafò says, it is prone to bubbles. When the academic herd stampedes to the right answer, that is fine and dandy. Less so if it rushes towards the wrong one.
To arrive at their counterintuitive conclusion the researchers compared computer models of reviewer behaviour. Each began with a scientist who had reached an initial opinion as to which of two opposing hypotheses is more likely to be true. The more controversial the issue, the lower the confidence. He then sends the manuscript supporting one of the hypotheses to a reviewer, who also has a prior opinion about its veracity, and who recommends either rejecting or accepting the submission. (In this simple model journal editors are assumed to follow reviewers' advice unquestioningly, which is not always the case in practice.) Subsequently, the reviewer himself writes and submits his own paper advocating one of the hypotheses to the journal, and the process repeats itself.
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Polls show that smaller class sizes are incredibly popular with parents and teachers. But with the Great Recession forcing school budget cuts, class size is once again a matter of debate, with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, megaphilanthropist Bill Gates, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg all suggesting that larger class sizes could be a good idea.What do we really know about how class size affects student learning? Is there an ideal class size? In this episode, I talk to Larry Ferlazzo, a public school teacher and blogger, and Matthew Chingos, a class-size researcher at the Brookings Institution.
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Matthew Clarida & Nicholas Fandos:
The median grade at Harvard College is an A-, and the most frequently awarded mark is an A, Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris said on Tuesday afternoon, supporting suspicions that the College employs a softer grading standard than many of its peer institutions.Harris delivered the information in response to a question from government professor Harvey C. Mansfield '53 at the monthly meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
"A little bird has told me that the most frequently given grade at Harvard College right now is an A-," Mansfield said during the meeting's question period. "If this is true or nearly true, it represents a failure on the part of this faculty and its leadership to maintain our academic standards."
Harris then stood and looked towards FAS Dean Michael D. Smith in hesitation.
"I can answer the question, if you want me to." Harris said. "The median grade in Harvard College is indeed an A-. The most frequently awarded grade in Harvard College is actually a straight A."
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A recent New York Times editorial took a moment out to lecture mayor-elect of New York City Bill de Blasio on how he should treat teachers and their unions. We hope he doesn't listen.The editorial began by endorsing a pay raise for New York City teachers, but insisted that "any sort of raise will require concessions in exchange," including loosening "work rules that stifle innovation and favor senior teachers over younger ones who may in fact be more talented." This general philosophy was spelled out on a number of different fronts.
For example, the editorial continued: "Seniority trumps everything and is treated as a proxy for excellence. Under current rules, a school that has an enrollment shortfall or budget problem and has to cut one of its five math teachers cuts the least senior teacher, period. In progressive systems, like the one in Washington, D.C., which has made big gains on federal assessment tests, decisions about which teachers to cut are based on a combination of factors, including how they stack up on evaluations and whether they possess special skills. The goal is to keep the most talented teachers."
There are a number of problems here. First, The New York Times editorial board is simply accepting - no questions asked - that in the richest country in the world it makes sense for schools to cut teachers because of a "budget problem." The U.S is engaged in an insane, entirely irrational campaign of underfunding its public schools on a massive basis, thereby robbing the country of the benefit of a future well-educated citizenry. How The New York Times expects any teacher to succeed in nurturing critically thinking students, when they are surrounded by policy makers who lack any semblance of logic and who give corporations generous tax breaks rather than adequately fund schools, is at least, questionable.
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Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke launched a new, more detailed website Tuesday with one notable omission: her only experience in elective office, as a Madison School Board member.Madison schools' academic challenges and above average spending & taxes will likely receive greater scrutiny during the upcoming gubernatorial election.But after the State Journal inquired about it, the campaign said it would update the site to include her role on the board.
A campaign spokesman called the omission an "oversight." However, the website in several places downplays Burke's ties to the city where she lives.
The website focuses on Burke's experience as a top executive at Waterloo-based Trek Bicycle, which her father founded, and her time as Commerce secretary in the Gov. Jim Doyle administration.
Burke, the only Democrat so far who announced plans to run against Gov. Scott Walker next fall, launched burkeforwisconsin.com in October with a video announcement and ways for supporters to provide an email and donate to the campaign.
That said, a healthy debate on Madison's long time, agrarian era governance model vs the more dynamic school choices available in most urban areas would be welcome.
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KellyNoel Waldorf
The Chronicle
In my four years at Duke, I have tried to write this article many times. But I was afraid. I was afraid to reveal an integral part of myself. I'm poor.Why is it not OK for me to talk about such an important part of my identity on Duke's campus? Why is the word "poor" associated with words like lazy, unmotivated and uneducated? I am none of those things.
When was the first time I felt uncomfortable at Duke because of money? My second day of o-week. My FAC group wanted to meet at Mad Hatter's Bakery; I went with them and said that I had already eaten on campus because I didn't have cash to spend. Since then, I have continued to notice the presence of overt and subtle class issues and classism on campus. I couldn't find a place for my "poor identity." While writing my resume, I put McDonald's under work experience. A friend leaned over and said, "Do you think it's a good idea to put that on your resume?" In their eyes, it was better to list no work experience than to list this "lowly" position. I did not understand these mentalities and perceptions of my peers. Yet no one was talking about this discrepancy, this apparent class stratification that I was seeing all around me.
People associate many things with their identity: I'm a woman, I'm queer, I'm a poet. One of the most defining aspects of my identity is being poor. The amount of money (or lack thereof) in my bank account defines almost every decision I make, in a way that being a woman or being queer never has and never will. Not that these are not important as well, just that in my personal experience, they have been less defining. Money influenced the way I grew up and my family dynamics. It continues to influence the schools I choose to go to, the food I eat, the items I buy and the things I say and do.
I live in a reality where:
Sometimes I lie that I am busy when actually I just don't have the money to eat out.
I don't get to see my dad anymore because he moved several states away to try and find a better job to make ends meet.
I avoid going to Student Health because Duke insurance won't do much if there is actually anything wrong with me.
Coming out as queer took a weekend and a few phone calls, but coming out as poor is still a daily challenge.
Getting my wisdom teeth removed at $400 per tooth is more of a funny joke than a possible reality.
I have been nearly 100 percent economically independent from my family since I left for college.
Textbook costs are impossible. Praise Perkins Library where all the books are free.
My mother has called me crying, telling me she doesn't have the gas money to pick me up for Thanksgiving.
My humorously cynical, self-deprecating jokes about being homeless after graduation are mostly funny but also kind of a little bit true.
I am scared that the more I increase my "social mobility," the further I will separate myself from my family.
Finances are always in the back (if not the forefront) of my mind, and I am always counting and re-counting to determine how I can manage my budget to pay for bills and living expenses.
This article is not meant to be a complaint about my life. This is not a sob story. There are good and bad things in my life, and we all face challenges. But it should be OK for me to talk about this aspect of my identity. Why has our culture made me so afraid or ashamed or embarrassed that I felt like I couldn't tell my best friends "Hey, I just can't afford to go out tonight"? I have always been afraid to discuss this with people, because they always seem to react with judgment or pity, and I want absolutely nothing to do with either of those. Sharing these realities could open a door to support, encouragement or simply openness.
Because I also live in a reality where:
I am proud of a job well done.
I feel a great sense of accomplishment when I get each paycheck.
I feel a bond of solidarity with those who are well acquainted with the food group "ramen."
I would never trade my happy family memories for a stable bank account.
I would never trade my perspective or work ethic or appreciation of life for money.
Most times it certainly would be nice to have more financial stability, but I love the person I have become for the background I have had.
It is time to start acknowledging class at Duke. Duke is great because of its amazing financial aid packages. My ability to go here is truly incredible. Duke is not great because so many of the students fundamentally do not understand the necessity for a discussion of class identity and classism. Duke needs to look past its blind spot and start discussing class stratification on campus to create a more welcoming environment for poor students.
If you have ever felt like this important piece of your identity was not welcome at Duke, know that you are not the only one. I want you to know that "poor" is not a dirty word. It is OK to talk about your experiences and your identity in relation to socioeconomic status. It is OK to tell the truth and be yourself. Stop worrying whether it will make other people feel uncomfortable. People can learn a lot about themselves from the things that make them uncomfortable. I want to say to you that no matter what socioeconomic status you come from, your experiences are worthy.
And because no one in four years has said it yet to me: It's okay to be poor and go to Duke.
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Wondering how much more your college's sports program spends per athlete than your institution does in academic funds per student? What your university spends on coaching salaries per player? What your campus pays to subsidize its sports program out of institutional funds?Then the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics has the database for you.
The commission, which next year will mark 25 years since issuing its first report on college sports reform, is today releasing a database designed to provide campus officials, policy makers, reporters and others with better -- and more accessible -- statistical information about how colleges in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I finance their sports programs. It does so by marrying data from several existing sources in a unique way.
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I tell all my kids they should start their own businesses someday. I think it's an amazing way to make a living, an amazing mindset to have, and it's a school like no other that you keep learning from all the time.Besides marrying my wife and having my kids, starting my business is the best thing I've done.
And then a little while ago, I realized that there's nothing stopping them from starting a business now, while they're young.
Yesterday my 14-year-old daughter Maia became the first to officially launch her business: a vegan cupcake venture!
I encouraged her to start one a few months ago, and in that time she's experimented with a handful of recipes, doing taste tests with her siblings (who have absolutely loved the process of course). She's found recipes that worked.
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Seven in 10 college seniors (71%) who graduated last year had student loan debt, with an average of $29,400 per borrower. From 2008 to 2012, debt at graduation (federal and private loans combined) increased an average of six percent each year.Details, including state- and college-level data, can be found in the full report and by clicking on the map and other links on this page.
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Imagine a diorama in an American Museum of Occupations showing the evolution of the professor. The exhibit starts in the early 1800s with an austere, black-suited man in a minister's collar, perhaps looking over the shoulder of a student at a rustic desk, with a Greek text open in front of him. In the next scene, from around 1900, he morphs into a pince-nez-wearing gentleman in starched collar and cravat, at a podium delivering a lecture. The professor of 1950 adopts the rumpled bearing of a tweed jacket, pointing with his pipe to a poem or a physics equation on a chalkboard. In the next frame, circa 1990, she wears jeans and is sitting in front of a computer screen.How would the diorama represent the professor of 2020?
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Amy (not her real name) sat in my office and wiped her streaming tears on her sleeve, refusing the scratchy tissues I'd offered. "I'm thinking about just applying for a Ph.D. program after I graduate because I have no idea what I want to do." Amy had mild depression growing up, and it worsened during freshman year of college when she moved from her parents' house to her dorm. It became increasingly difficult to balance school, socializing, laundry, and a part-time job. She finally had to dump the part-time job, was still unable to do laundry, and often stayed up until 2 a.m. trying to complete homework because she didn't know how to manage her time without her parents keeping track of her schedule.I suggested finding a job after graduation, even if it's only temporary. She cried harder at this idea. "So, becoming an adult is just really scary for you?" I asked. "Yes," she sniffled. Amy is 30 years old.
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Two-thirds of Atlanta's school board will be filled with new representatives following a runoff election Tuesday that ousted the board's chairman.Reuben McDaniel, an investment banker who led the school board during the last two years, lost re-election to attorney Cynthia Briscoe Brown, who collected 66 percent of the vote.
Brown, an attorney, criticized McDaniel's leadership of the school system following the nation's largest cheating scandal, scrutiny from the school system's accrediting body and an investigation of racism allegations at North Atlanta High School.
McDaniel was the only incumbent facing a runoff challenge. Three other runoff races decided Tuesday involved political newcomers for seats in which incumbents didn't seek re-election.
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The City of Madison Clerk has posted a helpful candidate guide (PDF), here.
Two Madison School Board seats will be on the spring, 2014 ballot: Seat 6 and Seat 7. It is never too early to run for school board, particularly in light of the District's long term, disastrous reading results.
The 2014 Spring Primary will be held on February 18, 2014 if necessary. The spring election is scheduled for April 1, 2014.
Much more on Ed Hughes and Marj Passman. Incumbent Ed Hughes has not had a competitive race in his previous two elections.
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How To Sharpen Pencils, An Instructional Film on Proper Sharpening Technique with Expert Sharpener David Rees
by EDW Lynch on November 29, 2013Expert pencil sharpener David Rees provides exacting instructions for proper pencil sharpening in the short film "How To Sharpen Pencils" by Kenneth Price. You can order a newly sharpened #2 pencil on Rees' Artisan Pencil Sharpening website (sold out until 2014), and read his book on pencil sharpening, How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening. We previously posted about Rees' artisan pencil sharpening business back in 2012.
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In 2000, economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about the internal wage structure of a Chicago drug gang. This piece would later serve as a basis for a chapter in Levitt's (and Dubner's) best seller Freakonomics. [1] The title of the chapter, "Why drug dealers still live with their moms", was based on the finding that the income distribution within gangs was extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities, let's say at McDonald's. They calculated 3.30 dollars as the hourly rate, that is, well below a living wage (that's why they still live with their moms). [2]If you take into account the risk of being shot by rival gangs, ending up in jail or being beaten up by your own hierarchy, you might wonder why anybody would work for such a low wage and at such dreadful working conditions instead of seeking employment at Mc Donalds. Yet, gangs have no real difficulty in recruiting new members. The reason for this is that the prospect of future wealth, rather than current income and working conditions, is the main driver for people to stay in the business: low-level drug sellers forgo current income for (uncertain) future wealth. Rank-and file members are ready to face this risk to try to make it to the top, where life is good and money is flowing. It is very unlikely that they will make it (their mortality rate is insanely high, by the way) but they're ready to "get rich or die trying".
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The search for a few good men and women, a few good readers, writers and artists are in focus this week.Escambia County School District officials will soon be forming a new task force to help close the achievement gap among the district's students.
During a special workshop earlier this month, Escambia County Schools Superintendent Malcolm Thomas said he would be working with the school board's new chairwoman Linda Moultrie to organize a committee of community members dedicated to "solution-finding" in the coming months.
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A Florida mother's child visitation court battle has become the Home School Legal Defense Association's latest cause.The mom, Therese Cano, had been home-schooling her children and, according to the HSLDA, a court psychologist had found the kids were doing well academically. But a guardian ad litem for the children told the court she believed they would benefit from the socialization aspects of public schooling.
The judge then ordered the children into public schools, overruling a court order permitting the home schooling. The HSLDA quotes the judge as saying, "When are they going to socialize? Is homeschool going to continue through college and/or professional schooling? At which point are these children going to interact with other children, and isn't that in their best interest?"
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ome Florida private schools face an unexpected dilemma this school year: Find extra dollars to pay for state college courses their high school students want to take - or deny them the option.The problem stems from a new law requiring public school districts and individual private schools to cover tuition for students enrolled in the state's popular dual enrollment program.
Though it's unclear how many private school schools and students are affected, the change has left some schools curbing participation and others anxious about what they'll do if local colleges, prompted by the new law, end up hiking charges.
The change "caught everybody off guard,'' said Howard Burke of the Florida Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, and immediate past president of Florida Association of Academic Nonpublic Schools (FAANS). "This is a hardship for parents already paying taxes for public schools and paying for private school.''
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A new report urges state lawmakers to proceed with plans to introduce the Smarter Balanced exam as a replacement for the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, saying it remains the only viable option for the 2014-15 school year.Michigan education officials released the 23-page report Monday outlining options for a new state assessment tool to be used as early as next year to test K-12 students under Common Core state standards. State schools administered the MEAP for what is supposed to be the last time this fall.
The report, requested by lawmakers in late October after they removed a funding block for implementation of Common Core, examines 12 test options in the marketplace.
The report provides summaries on the cost of each test, scoring and reporting methods, test security transparency and overall design.
Of the 12 options, only Smarter Balanced and two other tests were aligned to Common Core, a more rigorous set of standards adopted by the State Board of Education in 2010 for math and English. The other exams aligned to the standards are Measured Progress and PARCC.
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Education: Parents pay a fortune to send their kids to big-name colleges, and they expect strong scholarship in return. More and more, what they're getting ranges from drivel to leftist indoctrination.Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald shocked a New York City audience at the 2013 Wriston Lecture this month with some examples of what leftist academics have done to the American college curriculum.
"Until 2011," she noted, "students majoring in English at UCLA had been required to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton -- the cornerstones of English literature.
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These "confiscation cabinets," assembled by veteran teacher and artist Guy Tarrant, are an unusual archive: toys taken from London schoolchildren in 150 different schools, over thirty years.Tarrant became interested in the toys as tokens of resistance to school routines and teacherly discipline. He enlisted other teachers to donate their own confiscated items to his project. In all, he made eight such cabinets, which are currently on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood in London.
Besides showcasing the creativity of some rebellious children--improvised pea shooters, World Cup finger puppets, and mix CDs feature in the collection--the grouping lets us see some differences between American and British toys.
A "Scooby doo" appears in the girls' cabinet, and seems to be some kind of a friendship bracelet. In the boys' cabinet, there's a Sikh kirpan, or ceremonial sword, reflecting the large Sikh immigrant population in the UK. (Recently, Sikh advocacy groups have fought the confiscation of such items as a restriction of religious freedom.) And there's a "39'er," which appears to be a "conker" (or horse chestnut) used in the traditional British kids' game.
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"Do you think this is the right color ribbon?" asked a petite brunette, her hair pulled back in a haphazard ponytail, her college sweatshirt engulfing her tiny frame. "And do you think these are the right length of sections I'm cutting? I don't want it to be all funky when we pin them on.""Mmm ... I'm not sure," said the guy next to her, sucking on a lollipop, his football-player physique totally evident in his tight band T-shirt.
"Looks good to me," his roommate said without even glancing over at the ribbon or the girl.
Meet the college anti-war movement.
I just got back from a two-week campus speaking tour during which I had the privilege of hanging out in a women's center at a Catholic college, eating bad Mexican food with Mennonite feminists, and chatting with aspiring writers and activists at a college in which half the students are the first in their families to experience higher education. I heard the stories of transgender youth in Kansas City, jocks with food addictions in Jacksonville, and student organizers who are too overwhelmed to address all the world's problems in Connecticut.
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Congress and the administration have recently been talking a lot about access to and affordability of higher education. The administration has proposed an ambitious overhaul of our entire higher-education system, including the development of a college scorecard to ensure that students and their families have all of the information they need to make an informed decision about their postsecondary education.The college scorecard will be hugely useful for families only if the data used to create it are readily available and accurate. Innovative technology companies have already developed this technology and have been collecting and analyzing student and institution data and can be an effective partner to policymakers in creating a scorecard and other higher-education policies that will help families with one of the biggest financial decisions they will make.
The Higher Education Act, the federal law that governs all higher education, was first enacted in 1965 to pave the way for millions of students to access higher education. Once a vehicle of access to higher education, the law is now more than 1,000 pages long and has most recently been a barrier to innovation. The Higher Education Act includes pages and pages of regulations added during the 2008 reauthorization that have never been enforced. If Congress continues down this path, the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, due next year, will likely create hundreds of pages of more regulations that are never enforced and programs that are never funded.
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What will people think of 16-month-old wonder child Jonathon Rader, able to play various musical instruments, if he decides not to pursue a career as a musician?The answer seems to be "a failure," when hearing the story from Kim Ung-yong, a 48-year-old record holder for the world's highest intelligence quotient, in an interview with The Korea Herald.
"I was famous for having a 210 IQ and being able to solve intricate math equations at the age of four," Kim said, adding, "Apparently, the media belittled the fact that I chose to work in a business planning department at Chungbuk Development Corporation."
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Laurel Sturt was a 46-year-old fashion designer in New York City whose career trajectory took an unlikely shift one day on the subway. A self-proclaimed social activist, Sturt noticed an ad for a Teaching Fellows program. Then and there, she decided to quit her job in fashion design and shift her focus to her real passion: helping others. She enrolled in the two-year program and was assigned to teach at an elementary school in a high-poverty neighborhood near the South Bronx.
A decade later, Sturt has written about the experience in her provocative memoir Davonte's Inferno: Ten Years in the New York Public School Gulag. I spoke with her about how her time in the classroom affected her views on education today.You got into teaching at the age of 46, which is later than most. What spurred you to make the big life change?
I had always been a social activist and felt there was a responsibility for the "haves" to help the "have-nots." I used to fulfill that obligation by tutoring inner-city kids, but my actual career was in fashion design and illustration. I remember thinking: When someone's on their deathbed, are they really going to think about the dress I designed for them? Not to put down fashion design, but it's just not enough. I decided to flip the equation and instead of doing social activism part-time, make it a full time job.
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"Snow" is this year's pick for the Great World Texts program facilitated by UW-Madison's Center for the Humanities, a 9-year-old literacy initiative that provides Wisconsin teachers like Gibson with sets of novels chosen for their cultural and literary value, teaching guides and professional development, and provides students with a chance to respond to such work with projects of their choice that cover a theme of the book.The culmination of that effort unfolds Monday, when about 500 students from 15 Wisconsin schools will meet at the Great World Texts conference at UW-Madison. The students will have a chance to meet and hear from the author they have been studying all semester, and to present and discuss their work together. Nine students have been chosen to have lunch with Pamuk.
The book was chosen for its global perspective, said program coordinator Heather DuBois Bourenane, but also because it is a text that is frequently asked about on Advanced Placement exams but not frequently taught in schools.
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The National Education Association filed its 2012-2013 LM-2 financial disclosure to the U.S. Department of Labor, and once again, the nation's largest teachers' union spent big to preserve its influence over education policymaking. The NEA spent $131 million on lobbying and contributions to like-minded groups in 2012-2013, a four percent increase over its $125 million spend in the previous year. These numbers don't include the $51 million the union spent in 2012-2013 on so-called representational activities, which are often just as much geared toward political activity; that number, by the way, is little changed from spending levels in 2010-2011 and 2011-2012.wpid-threethoughslogoAn analysis of the NEA's spending shows that while it attempts to use some strategy in order to leverage its contributions to like-minded groups, it remains as scatter-shot as it has been in previous years. Over the past year, the NEA has attempted to get social justice groups it funds to echo its messaging and work more-closely with it in order to advance its agenda. This included meetings between the union's executive director, John Stocks, with the top executives of past and current recipients. All this effort, however, has not ensured that NEA recipients are any more loyal to the union's mission than at any other time.
For example, the NEA handed $30,000 to the Leadership Council for Civil and Human Rights, one of the leading civil rights-based players in the school reform movement, and dropped $75,000 into the National Council of La Raza's political action fund even though the outfit is also a major reform player. Another recipient of NEA largesse is Al Sharpton's National Action Network. It picked up $100,000 from the union in 2012-21013 in spite of the civil rights leaders longtime support of expanding the very charter schools the NEA opposes, $75,000 more than in the previous fiscal year.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):
MTI's Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement provides that all members of MTI's teacher bargaining unit will be provided with a daily duty-free lunch period of at least 30 continuous minutes. The 30 minutes cannot be abridged by one being directed to walk with students to the lunchroom.More recently, once again, some teachers have been requested to open their classroom so students can have "a place to go". Directing a teacher to sacrifice any portion of their 30 minute duty-free lunch period violates the Contract. If a teacher volunteers to do so, they are to be compensated at $9.10 per hour, with such computed in one-half hour lots.
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In light of Alan Borsuk's positive article, I thought it timely understand the mountain to be climbed by our traditional $15k/student public school district. The charts above are a brief update of the always useful "Where have all the Students Gone" articles.
Further, early tenure cheerleading is not a new subject. Those interested might dive into the Capital Times & Wisconsin State Journal Superintendent (recently easily searched, now rather difficult) archive:
That being said, Superintendent Cheatham's comments are worth following:
Cheatham's ideas for change don't involve redoing structure. "I'd rather stick with an imperfect structure," she said, and stay focused on the heart of her vision: building up the quality and effectiveness of teaching.Perhaps the State Journal's new K-12 reporter might dive into what is actually happening in the schools.Improving teaching is the approach that will have the biggest impact on the gaps, she said.
"The heart of the endeavor is good teaching for all kids," Cheatham said in an interview. Madison, she said, has not defined what good teaching is and it needs to focus on that. It's not just compliance with directives, she said.
Related: Madison's long term disastrous reading results and "When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed...and not before".
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The 2.8 percent decrease between 2010 and 2012 at University of Wisconsin System campuses comes after a 6.8 percent increase between 2008 and 2010, according to System data reported to the federal Education Department provided to the State Journal by the UW System in response to a request for enrollment data for the System's teacher-training programs. Related: When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?.The numbers do not include students seeking teaching licenses with majors not classified by the UW System as education majors.
It's unclear why the number of students enrolled in teacher-education programs has dropped, but Cheryl Hanley-Maxwell, associate dean of the UW-Madison School of Education, said some graduates there are now reporting feeling ill prepared for what they call the political atmosphere surrounding teaching.
"Until our most recent surveys, we've never had a complaint that 'you didn't prepare us for the political atmosphere'" of teaching, said Hanley-Maxwell about surveys the school sends to graduates who have been teaching for about three years.
She said about 60 percent of the school's graduates respond to the after-graduation surveys that question how well the school prepared them for the teaching profession.
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David Blacker studied at the University of Texas and holds degrees in philosophy and education from the University of Illinois. He is currently Professor of philosophy of education and Director of Legal Studies at the University of Delaware (USA). His books include Dying to Teach: The Educator's Search for Immortality (Columbia University Teachers College), Democratic Education Stretched Thin: How Complexity Challenges a Liberal Ideal (SUNY), a US-state specific book series on law, ethics and education for education students. His most recent book is The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame (Zero Books, forthcoming this December). His is now working on a project concerning Spinoza and the idea of permaculture. Before becoming corrupted by the comforts of academia, he worked at the (sadly) now-defunct Guardian newspaper ("an Independent Radical Newsweekly") in New York City.What has led to both the increase in credentialization in higher education and the elimination of much of the funding of higher ed at the same time? And why is the political economy of education so little discussed directly?
These questions admit several layers of response, concentric causal circles converging on the contemporary trends. Let me take the funding question first. In the United States, the immediate cause of the funding crisis in higher education, particularly public higher education, is the decades-'long withdrawal of the historic commitment to these institutions by state and local governments. In this sense, U.S. higher education has been a leading edge of austerity avant la lettre, well before opposition to "austerity" became a rallying cry of dissent. A generation or two ago, our leading public universities received most of their operating funds from the public coffers. Now at the marquee universities, the level of such funding has dwindled to the single digits. For example, the University of Virginia--long a symbol of American public education because of its Jeffersonian origins--now receives around 6% of its budget via public funds. A mere 6%! At this point it is fair to ask, in what sense are our "public universities" actually public anymore?
A second layer of answer to the funding question has to do with shifting policy justifications for state support of education that reflect general movements in ideology. While one must be careful to guard against a narrative of decline that implies some kind of golden age of public spiritedness, there was a certain degree of liberal idealism present in the nineteenth-century founding of American public universities qua "land grant" institutions charged with contributing to the public good. There has at times been a strong sense that there is a collective interest in maintaining a strong network of such institutions, a palpable sense that everyone benefits from them. Now, however, a relatively narrow and crabbed economism holds sway that fails to honor the "public good" nature of these institutions and instead regards them mainly as private benefits exclusive to the individuals involved in them. At a collective level they are at best "good for business" and economic development; in particular their educational side is seen as a pipeline for a shrinking elite corporate workforce. These expensive institutions are regarded as justified insofar as they add value to "human capital" for employers and also as in effect off-site research and development centers for corporations, particularly those in the high tech sectors. So at the aggregate level, education is viewed as a literal "investment."
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I often worry about today's young growing up in a country where everybody is liable to be under secret government surveillance, with nearly all of these Americans never having violated any law. How much expectation of individual constitutional liberty can these young citizens have?But now I am somewhat heartened by the results of a recent (reliable) poll by Quinnipiac University described in a Nov. 18 lead editorial in the New York Post:
"In 2008 and 2012, millennials -- voters between ages 18 and 30 -- came out in a big way for Barack Obama."
But now, "something's changed. The poll has young voters disapproving of the president by a 54 percent to 36 percent margin ... Only 43 percent of the under-30s say the president is honest and trustworthy. By contrast, a majority -- 51 percent -- say he's not."
Moreover, "60 percent of young voters disapprove of the way the president's handling the economy. Fifty-six percent disapprove of Obama's handling of health care. Fifty-three percent disapprove of his handling of foreign policy" ("Young voters turn against President Obama," New York Post, Nov. 18).
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If you've been paying attention to the MOOC debate over the last year or so, you may have seen that for all intents and purposes the debate is pretty much over. MOOCs are dead. Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, recently acknowledged that his company makes a "lousy product." Soon after, Daphne Koller admitted that her company Coursera could in no way compete with the traditional, brick-and-mortar university which teaches through face-to-face interaction: "The best place to acquire [much deeper cognitive skills] is by coming and getting an education at the best universities."But UC Online has always been, well, a ways behind everybody else. From the beginning, the project was unable to raise the private capital needed to get off the ground. The head of the project, former UC Berkeley Law School Dean Chris Edley, infamously claimed that he "should be shot" if he wasn't able to raise that money himself -- he was only able to put together the paltry sum of $748,000 -- but in the end he had to crawl back to the administration begging for an interest-free, $6.9 million loan.
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I recently got into an argument with a professor online over the value of education and why people may still be politically sympathetic to "the cause," but simply will not ever cancel classes. This is the single most common reason given for why faculty and graduate students would not abide the strike.First of all, I would like to say that I thought we kind of already made the choice to join the union to protect our individual liberties, so we should probably stand up for our fellow colleagues. Because when we are injured we would want our colleagues to stand up and defend us... right?
Here is my most important point: generalizing "education as more important than" creates a very slippery dichotomy that erases the labor people of color have put into building the university and making it run every day, including today. At the strike in my University, it was not surprising that most of the rally and the picket chants were in Spanish. In fact, if you participated and did not know Spanish, chances were that you understood about 20% of what was conveyed. The reason for this is very simple: most AFSCME workers are people of color, predominately Latino service workers. This reality is very specific to the University of California, and it is a reality that the University management exploits every day with unlivable wages, unaffordable health care, and blatant discrimination and intimidation. No, your education is not more important than the struggles of these workers; in fact, it does not even come close. Your education is not more important than the actual daily struggle of having to put food on the table, or having to tell your children why you don't have enough money to pay the rent. In fact, your education is not more important than any other struggle. It is simply not OK to argue that missing one day (or one week, or whatever that length of duration of a strike is) is comparable to the misery and pain of not earning a decent wage. It is also not OK to delegitimize a strike as unimportant or not a "real strike," because there was not a hunger strike involved. Let's set this straight - management has already proven that it does not care about its workers and its students, why in your right mind would you think they would care about your health? A hunger strike is a very risky form of protest, and I would not recommend it to anybody. It is largely contingent on whether you can get public awareness and sympathy to your struggles, and in a world where political struggles easily become marginalized and delegitimized (key word of the day), populism is a tough shot to guarantee your demands will be met without serious health repercussions.
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I. I am waiting for a letter to arrive in the mail. It will be short, no more than one page, and will be covered in black ink, with the occasional flourish of institutional logo. The signature at the bottom will belong to a high-ranking officer at my Midwestern college of 12,000 students, and the words that preface it will briefly explain the method and, more importantly, the verdict, of an almost three-week long investigation, in which students, faculty, and staff were questioned by the school's legal staff as to if, in fact, I had committed acts constituting an official case of racial harassment.What happened to me in 2008 did not happen because I am a young, Black female faculty member at school that has over 50 percent students of color; what happened to me occurred because I turned the world backwards on an angry White male student. We were in a regular weekly meeting of the newspaper staff, and the students were discussing the fact of the new edition, how well it had turned out, and the editor-in-chief said that although he was proud of the paper's developments, he was not pleased with the fact that so few students regularly picked up the publication. Theories were thrown around as to why this was--the aesthetics were all wrong, the design didn't pop, the stories could be flashier. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a noose hanging from the ceiling. When I looked again, it was gone.
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If there's a gene for hubris, the 23andMe crew has certainly got it. Last Friday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered the genetic-testing company immediately to stop selling its flagship product, its $99 "Personal Genome Service" kit. In response, the company cooed that its "relationship with the FDA is extremely important to us" and continued hawking its wares as if nothing had happened. Although the agency is right to sound a warning about 23andMe, it's doing so for the wrong reasons.Since late 2007, 23andMe has been known for offering cut-rate genetic testing. Spit in a vial, send it in, and the company will look at thousands of regions in your DNA that are known to vary from human to human--and which are responsible for some of our traits. For example a site in your genome named rs4481887 can come in three varieties. If you happen to have what is known as the GG variant, there is a good probability that you are unable to smell asparagus in your urine; those blessed with the GA or AG varieties are much more likely to be repulsed by their own pee after having a few spears at Spargelfest.
At first, 23andMe seemed to angle its kit as a fun way to learn a little genetics using yourself as a test subject. ("Our goal is to connect you to the 23 paired volumes of your own genetic blueprint... bringing you personal insight into ancestry, genealogy, and inherited traits," read the company's website.) The FDA had little problem with the company telling you why you had dry ear wax (rs17822931) or whether you're likely to sneeze when you look at a bright light (rs10427255).
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Is your child "gifted"? What does that even mean? Some schools use old-fashioned IQ tests to identify gifted students. Others use teacher recommendations. A few schools are ending gifted programs altogether and are trying to implement gifted-level instruction for all kids. Which of these methods is fair? What should schools do to make sure that gifted tracks aren't an option only for socio-economically advantaged children? In this episode, I talk to Sandy Darity, a researcher on giftedness at Duke, and Jeff Danielian, a Rhode Island teacher and giftedness advocate.
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If you're planning to attend either Minnesota State University Moorhead or the University of the District of Columbia, best get in your Romeo and Juliet now--and while you're at it, you should probably learn the formulas for velocity and momentum, and study up on the Spanish-American War. Because soon, these regional public universities may have no departments of English, physics, or history--nor a host of other programs often associated with "college," including political science (MSUM), philosophy (MSUM), computer science (MSUM), and even economics (UDC).What is confounding about these universities' plans to possibly obliterate nearly half of their departments is why both institutions, faced with budget crises, went straight for the academic jugular. And not just by cutting highfalutin artsy disciplines, but with an eye toward fields of study that are actually valued in today's cruel and fickle market. Nobody seems to notice that the structure of today's higher-ed "business" model is backwards: It's far easier to cut academics than it is to cut anything else, so that's what universities are doing. The irony that the very raison d'être of a university--education!--is also its most disposable aspect seems lost on everyone (perhaps because nobody studies English, philosophy, or French anymore, so nobody recognizes irony or knows what a raison d'être is).
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In a rousing attempt to capture the spirit of the former prime minister, Boris Johnson delivered the keynote speech at the annual Margaret Thatcher lecture last night. In it, he sought to justify his belief that inequality could be desirable "for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses" by claiming that inequality is inevitable. Why? Because of differences in our IQ.Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85 ... Over 16% anyone? Put up your hands.
Muted laughter followed. He then turned his attention to the 2% of the population who have an IQ above 130. We check those numbers.
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Upon entering the massive Forever 21 store here at the Oak Park Mall, Goldia Kiteck and three of her close friends scattered like spilled marbles.The high-school seniors were on separate missions and pursued them through corridors filled with clingy leggings, racks of chunky necklaces and tank tops with kittens across the front.
"It has all my favorite things, in one place," Ms. Kiteck said of the store, where she spent $51 on a skirt, a pair of earrings and a black sweatshirt with the words "Super Awesome" emblazoned in gold print across the chest.
Fast-fashion chains such as Forever 21 and H&M HM-B.SK -0.11% are eating the lunch of traditional teen retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle Outfitters AEO +1.06% and Aéropostale. The sector's onetime leader, Abercrombie, posted a loss of $11.5 million in the nine months ended Nov. 2, as sales fell nearly 7%.
To learn more about where teens are shopping and why, The Wall Street Journal went on an extended tour of the mall with two groups of committed shoppers, and it is clear why fast fashion is winning.
Teens' tastes can be fickle, but on the Journal trips, buying decisions were almost invariably driven by two considerations: developing an individual style, and doing so for less.
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Howard Schneider, via a kind Rick Kiley email:
As a high school junior, Hope Johnson thought she had things figured out. She'd been hit with wanderlust during an academic trip to Brazil, set her sights on London's Richmond University and hoped to pursue a career in diplomacy.
It was just the kind of white-collar job that would take her far from the confines of this Southern city and please her dad, an elevator repairman who wanted his daughter to graduate from a four-year college.That was before the 16-year-old was offered a life-defining choice by Siemens, the German industrial conglomerate: Drop everything, enroll in a competitive European-style apprenticeship, and get a free technical education and a job in return.
Johnson opted for the job. The allure of traditional college life was strong, she said, "but you gotta pay the bills."
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Madison Teachers, Inc., via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):
Teachers in Madison recently received an email inviting them to join AAE, and for a very inexpensive fee. For only $15 per month, they say, one can be eligible to apply for a scholarship, receive a publication, and information on professional development. Plus, they claim none of their income will be spent on political action, and a member receives protection via liability insurance. The facts are, that none of what AAE offers is needed.According to the Massachusetts Teachers Association, "The American Association of Educators, is a group backed by some of the deepest pockets in the anti-public education movement (think Koch brothers). The AAE is partnering with the National Right to Work Committee to encourage educators to give up their (Union) membership and join an organization that has affiliates covering just six states. Right-wing foundations provide nearly all of the money to (operate) the AAE Foundation."
- MTI negotiates a Collective Bargaining Agreement, and enforces the Collective Bargaining Agreement via grievance and arbitration.
- MTI represents teachers who are challenged by the District.
- The District is responsible by Statute to provide liability insurance and MTI members receive additional liability coverage provided through membership as a result of MTI's
affiliation with WEAC & NEA.- AAE is anti-union. They even tried to stop the Kenosha
School Board from ratifying the new recently agreed-upon Contracts.AAE was able to write to each Madison teacher because they obtained teachers' email addresses via an open records request from the District.
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- Phil Hands