| School Information System |
 | Sponsorships |
|
|
National Council on Teacher Quality (PDF):
1. The state should require teacher candidates to pass a test of academic proficiency that assesses reading, writing and mathematics skills as a criterion for admission to teacher preparation programs.via a kind Wisconsin Reading Coalition email:2. All preparation programs in a state should use a common admissions test to facilitate program comparison, and the test should allow comparison of applicants to the general college-going population. The selection of applicants should be limited to the top half of that population.
Wisconsin requires that approved undergraduate teacher preparation programs only accept teacher can- didates who have passed a basic skills test, the Praxis I. Although the state sets the minimum score for this test, it is normed just to the prospective teacher population. The state also allows teacher preparation programs to exempt candidates who demonstrate equivalent performance on a college entrance exam.
Wisconsin also requires a 2.5 GPA for admission to an undergraduate program.
To promote diversity, Wisconsin allows programs to admit up to 10 percent of the total number of students admitted who have not passed the basic skills test.RECOMMENDATION
Require all teacher candidates to pass a test of academic proficiency that assesses reading, writing and mathematics skills as a criterion for admission to teacher preparation programs.Even though the state's policy that permits programs to admit up to 10 percent of students who have not passed the basic skills test is part of a laudable goal to promote diversity, allowing this exemption is risky because of the low bar set by the Praxis I (see next recommendation).
Require preparation programs to use a common test normed to the general college-bound population.
Wisconsin should require an assessment that demonstrates that candidates are academically com- petitive with all peers, regardless of their intended profession. Requiring a common test normed to the general college population would allow for the selection of applicants in the top half of their class, as well as facilitate program comparison.
Consider requiring candidates to pass subject-matter tests as a condition of admission into teacher programs.
In addition to ensuring that programs require a measure of academic performance for admission, Wisconsin might also want to consider requiring content testing prior to program admission as opposed to at the point of program completion. Program candidates are likely to have completed coursework that covers related test content in the prerequisite classes required for program admis- sion. Thus, it would be sensible to have candidates take content tests while this knowledge is fresh rather than wait two years to fulfill the requirement, and candidates lacking sufficient expertise would be able to remedy deficits prior to entering formal preparation.
For admission to teacher preparation programs, Rhode Island and Delaware require a test of academic proficiency normed to the general college- bound population rather than a test that is normed just to prospective teachers. Delaware also requires teacher candidates to have a 3.0 GPA or be in the top 50th percentile for general education coursework completed. Rhode Island also requires an average cohort GPA of 3.0, and beginning in 2016, the cohort mean score on nationally-normed tests such as the ACT, SAT or GRE must be in the top 50th percentile. In 2020, the requirement for the mean test score will increase from the top half to the top third.
After receiving a grade of D in 2009 and 2001, Wisconsin has risen to a D+ on the 2013 State Teacher Policy Yearbook released by the National Council on Teacher Quality.In the area of producing effective teachers of reading, Wisconsin received a bump up for requiring a rigorous test on the science of reading. The Foundations of Reading exam will be required beginning January 31, 2014.
Ironically, Wisconsin also scored low for not requiring teacher preparation programs to prepare candidates in the science of reading instruction. We hope that will change through the revision of the content guidelines related to elementary licensure during a comprehensive review process that is underway at DPI this winter and spring.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Achievement tests play an important role in modern societies. They are used to evaluate schools, to assign students to tracks within schools, and to identify weaknesses in student knowledge. The GED is an achievement test used to grant the status of high school graduate to anyone who passes it. GED recipients currently account for 12 percent of all high school credentials issued each year in the United States. But do achievement tests predict success in life?The Myth of Achievement Tests shows that achievement tests like the GED fail to measure important life skills. James J. Heckman, John Eric Humphries, Tim Kautz, and a group of scholars offer an in-depth exploration of how the GED came to be used throughout the United States and why our reliance on it is dangerous. Drawing on decades of research, the authors show that, while GED recipients score as well on achievement tests as high school graduates who do not enroll in college, high school graduates vastly outperform GED recipients in terms of their earnings, employment opportunities, educational attainment, and health. The authors show that the differences in success between GED recipients and high school graduates are driven by character skills. Achievement tests like the GED do not adequately capture character skills like conscientiousness, perseverance, sociability, and curiosity. These skills are important in predicting a variety of life outcomes. They can be measured, and they can be taught.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
This is not Jersey's best week. Revelations from Bridgegate, along with the peculiar backroom statecraft that spawned the scandal over the Hudson, seem to splatter daily across the front page. Jon Stewart and Jimmy Fallon get a second Christmas while Chris Christie appears pale and oddly flat.As I'm writing this, the Bergen Record breaks the story that the Governor's brother Todd bought and sold properties near the PATH station in Harrison which, coincidentally, had been just been awarded renovation funding to the tasty tune of $256 million.
And here's another fresh Jersey lowlight: in Newark Tuesday night, state-appointed Superintendent Cami Anderson was booed off the stage during a rancorous meeting where 500 people, including the president of the American Federation of Teachers, reacted with disdain to her "One Newark" plan that would restructure the city's school system. This plan includes universal enrollment procedures for both charters and traditional schools, expansion of charter schools, and closings of poorly-utilized school buildings.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:
I spent the beginning of last week in Detroit, a city that spawned one of the nation's early charter laws, now home to one of the most unregulated charter sectors I have seen. I believe that Detroit families are better off as a result of choice. There are some very strong schools that wouldn't exist otherwise, and the school district, whose performance has been dismal for decades, is trying to find a way to compete with charters. But while Detroit charter schools slightly outperform district-run schools (according to CREDOs study), that is saying very little. Most of these schools are doing nothing to change the life trajectory of Detroit's children.Of course, given that I've studied charter schools for nearly 20 years, I know that there are many low-performing ones. But it was disturbing to hear firsthand about parents' unfulfilled struggles to get their kids a good education and civic leaders' futile efforts to get control of quality.
There are dozens of Detroit charter schools that should probably be closed immediately. Competition for students is so vicious that schools are reportedly bribing parents with iPads and cash to drive up enrollment. Yet despite all of this competition, charter school quality is stagnant, and more charters are being approved every year by university and community college sponsors who operate outside the city and with little or no accountability for their actions. I heard from parents who do feel empowered, but are having a horrible time navigating their choices and figuring out how to enroll in schools. I heard about schools that closed midyear, leaving families to fend for themselves. I heard about schools that didn't offer any counseling or special education services to students who come from severely distressed neighborhoods.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Hundreds of Milwaukee families have discovered in recent years that having a school voucher doesn't mean much if your private school of choice doesn't have the classroom space to accommodate additional children.In Bad Faith screen grab topSuch is the case for the city's St. Marcus Lutheran School. The high-performing private school has a long waiting list for any available seats that open up, and it's not difficult to understand why. By virtually all measures, St. Marcus Lutheran is outperforming Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) - its government-run counterpart - by a wide margin. The most telling statistic is probably the schools' graduation rates: St. Marcus succeeds in getting a diploma into the hands of 96 percent of its students, compared to MPS' dismal 65 percent graduation rate.
If families who qualify for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program could flee their neighborhood government school, many of them obviously would. More than 25,000 students already have fled the district, which has caused MPS' enrollment to crater. The attendance drop, in turn, has led to a surplus of school buildings the downsized district no longer needs.
But MPS leaders don't want alternative schools using the empty buildings.
MPS officials believe that St. Marcus Lutheran and other high-quality voucher and charter schools pose an existential threat to the district, which is why they've devised a very clever plan to block the schools' size and future growth by denying them access to the city's vacant and unused school buildings
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Hildegard Solzbacher was a charismatic speaker, a true believer in the child-centered Montessori way of teaching. She founded Milwaukee Montessori School and New World Montessori, and trained others in the Montessori method, in which children learn at their own rate.Despite her inspiring lectures, there was a point where students became frustrated with her.
"What do you do about discipline?" they would ask. "How do you handle a misbehaving child?"
"She would say, 'Well, that really never happened to me,'" said Priscilla Bovee, head of New World Montessori in River Hills.
Her students could see why that was the case
"She had a beautiful way with people," Bovee said. "And children, of course, are just smaller people."
Solzbacher, who introduced the Montessori way to Milwaukee and trained teachers worldwide, died Jan. 25 of natural causes at Community Memorial Hospital in Menomonee Falls. She was 83.
Solzbacher grew up in Bad Honnef, a small town in Germany, the youngest of 13 children.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
That old wintertime guessing game played out again earlier this week during a bitter cold snap.Will schools be closed? Should they be closed? Why do they close? And finally, how could they close/open school?!
Madison was one of the few districts open on Monday, and if some of the commentary this sparked among parents is to be believed, sending my kids to school that day bordered on child abuse.
District attendance figures show that enough parents kept their kids home on Monday to bring the district's absence rate to about 30 percent. Five percent or a little more is about average.
For those children who showed up, the day's exposure to the cold was probably similar to what my kids experienced: an approximately 10-second walk to a partially warmed-up minivan and another 45-second walk from the minivan to the school doors.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Whenever something is declared the subject of "the year of," you know said subject is ripe for a big fat backlash. So, when The New York Times declared 2012 "the year of the MOOC," it thus came to pass that massive open online courses should next become the subject of massive, open, often online criticism, as critics gathered to air both their disappointment that said courses had not in fact proven the savior of a broken education system -- and almost transparent delight and glee at same.That's not to say that the MOOC bubble couldn't stand to lose some of its air. Maybe it's no bad thing that some of that shiny techno-utopian language got buffed from the courses' gilded surfaces. The reality is that those responsible for MOOCs are still figuring out how to make them work, and they're experimenting and adjusting as they go.
Anant Agarwal: Why massive open online courses (still) matterAnant Agarwal: Why massive open online courses (still) matterCase in point: Anant Agarwal, who spoke at TED Global in Edinburgh in June 2013. Agarwal is president of edX, the non-profit "online learning destination" founded by Harvard and MIT. We caught up with him on the phone to find out what he makes of the anti-MOOC rhetoric -- and why he thinks a "blended learning" model of education that includes online and offline resources might just prove the real key to a vibrant education system of the future. An edited version of our conversation follows.
So let's start with the question on everyone's lips: what do you make of the backlash against MOOCs?
Initially there was a lot of talk about MOOCs being the solution to all of the world's problems. And clearly they're important; they can increase access to students who don't have access to good quality education. But even when we started edX, we talked about MOOCs and the blended model on campus and of campus education as being a key part of the whole equation. So for us it comes as no surprise that a pure MOOC model, a completely online model, will not work so well on campus. There, a blended model can be even better than a purely online model. The backlash you're seeing was more a backlash to the statement that MOOCs can cure the world of all educational ills. The answer is no. MOOCs have a very important place in increasing access to a large community of students. At the same time, if you take MOOC technology and blend it with in-person class help, we can achieve the blended model, which is even better and can improve campus education.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I'm following a Coursera course entitled "Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World" and just received a rather odd email. All students from Syria, Sudan, Iran and Cuba will no longer be able to access Coursera. As some of you may know, Coursera is an online website that offers free courses from many of the world's top universities.Here's the email, which can also be viewed on the Course's main page.
Dear All, I write this email under protest and with a considerable degree of anger and sadness. Few things illustrate the bone-headedness, short-sightedness, and sheer chauvinism of the political structure of the United States better than the extent to which its ideologues are willing to go to score cheap domestic political points with narrow interests in the pursuit of a sanctions regime that has clearly run its course.
You might remember the Apple ad from a few years back, in which the company proudly announced that their machines were now so powerful that they fell under export restrictions: "For the first time in history a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the US government ..."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Hannah Fry via a kind Caroline Zellmer email:
Eleven students at Corona del Mar High School were expelled Tuesday in connection with a cheating scandal that has rocked the high-performing Orange County campus.School officials allege that the students hacked into the district's computer system to change grades and access exams.
Newport-Mesa Unified School District trustees reached the decision early Wednesday after lengthy closed-door discussions.
In a statement, board President Karen Yelsey said the decision to expel the students -- the most severe penalty being considered -- follows the recommendations made by the school principal and district administration.
"The Board of Education has weighed each of the cases presented this evening on an individual basis and in careful detail," she said. "We've focused on the cases for hours in closed session. As a Board of Education, we are unanimous in our resolve to ensure the academic integrity of CDM and the district, as well as in delivering justice for the cases before us."
The votes of the board varied. Six decisions for expulsion were unanimous; others were split 4-3 and 6-1.
Last month, the district confirmed that students attached a keylogger -- a small device that can be placed in the back of a computer to monitor keystrokes -- to several teachers' computers to swipe logins and passwords, allegedly with the help of a private tutor.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"I can tell you that in general we do have guidelines that we expect employees to follow regarding appropriate conduct on social media, when they are representing or associated with the district. In any case when those guidelines are not followed, we follow up and take appropriate action."The spokeswoman did not return two follow-up emails from Wisconsin Reporter asking what "appropriate action" would be in a case like this.
As Right Wisconsin points out, the district's Standards of Conduct for Internet and school email usage prohibit staff from using "any form of obscene, harassing, racist, sexist or abusive language or behavior on-line."
Violations of the procedures or rules result in "appropriate disciplinary action up to and including discharge," the conduct policy states. The policy, however, refers to usage of the district's integrated technology network, and there is no evidence to suggest the comments were made on the district's system.
Hosking appears to have commented on a photo Walker posted of his two sons and two nieces, who were with the governor at his State of the State address last week.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The national debate about teacher tenure is the focus of a trial set to begin Monday in a fifth-floor Los Angeles courtroom, pitting a Silicon Valley mogul with a star-studded legal team against some of the most powerful labor unions in the country.The central question: Should it be easier to fire teachers?
David F. Welch, a 53-year-old founder of an optical telecommunications manufacturing firm, is challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections afforded public school teachers under California law.
He says that those policies allow the state's worst educators to continue teaching and that those ineffective teachers are concentrated in high-poverty, minority schools, amounting to a civil rights violation.
His challenge is aimed at a core mission of the labor unions that represent 400,000 educators in the state: to protect jobs. It also sets up what could be a lengthy, expensive -- and perhaps nationwide -- fight over employment practices for teachers, which date back more than a century.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
One of the things people do when economies slowdown: Go back to school. The hope is, they'll pick up training for new skills along with their law degree or doctorate.But PhD's don't come cheap, and in fact, consultant Karen Kelsky says getting a doctorate can cost you more than its worth.
She runs a business that is in part about finding jobs for students with doctorates, and she's an anthropology professor herself.
Kelsky says when it comes to fields like engineering or medicine, funding remains strong and pay in the workforce is high. But for "soft sciences," like political science or anthropology, schools are investing less and less to support advanced degrees:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Teddy Nykiel, via a kind reader's email:
About a dozen children are spread out at tables in the Simpson Street Free Press newsroom. They chat while poring over reference books and old issues of National Geographic to research stories. They jot down notes on large yellow pads.Nancy GarduAo, a bright teenager whose immigrant parents have an elementary school education, is reading a book. She says she dreams of attending UCLA or Duke after she graduates from high school. She has already applied for more than 20 college scholarships and received a few of them. GarduÃo, 17, has been working at Simpson Street since she was 8 years old and says she struggled in school -- especially with writing -- before that.
"It really stinks when you're stuck on a math problem and your friends can just go to their parents and ask for help, whereas I would have to wake up early and ride my bike to school to go talk to my teacher or something," GarduÃo says.
Simpson Street became the place where GarduÃo could work on her writing, get help with homework and learn how to search for scholarships.
"I know my parents can't afford it, which is why I didn't even think I was going to go to college," GarduÃo says. "But after getting some of those scholarships, it's looking more realistic now."
Simpson Street Free Press has been teaching kids to write and report for more than 20 years. The award-winning program started in a room at the Broadway-Simpson Street neighborhood center before moving across the street in 1996 to South Towne Mall. Over the years it has added more newsrooms and diversified its programming. Later this month it will launch Falk Free Press, its fourth newspaper, along with its first bilingual edition, La Prenza Libre de Simpson Street.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison Teachers, Inc. eNewsletter via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):
UST CAUSE does not mean "just because". It establishes standards and procedures which must be met before an employee can be disciplined or discharged. Fortunately, for members of MTI's bargaining units, all have protection under the JUST CAUSE STANDARDS. They were negotiated by MTI to protect union members.There are seven just cause tests, and an employer must meet all seven in order to sustain the discipline or discharge of an employee. They are: notice; reasonableness of the rule; a thorough and fair investigation; proof; equal treatment; and whether the penalty reasonably meets the alleged offense by the employee.
MTI's various Contracts enable a review and binding decision by a neutral arbitrator, as to whether the District's action is justified. The burden of proof is on the District in such cases.
These steps are steps every employer should have to follow.Unfortunately, every employer is not obligated to do so. However, MMSD must follow them, because of the rights provided to MTI members by MTI's Contracts. Governor Walker's Act 10 destroys these protections. MTI has preserved them.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Teacher Andrew Harris is expected to be back in a Middleton classroom this week after an expensive, but failed, effort by the Middleton-Cross Plains School District to uphold a unanimous 2010 school board vote to fire him for repeatedly viewing pornography on his work computer.The parties being blamed in this unhappy homecoming -- other than Harris himself -- are many.
Some say the board should have stopped spending money on appeals once an arbitrator ordered Harris' reinstatement. Others blame Harris' union for going to bat for a guy who, well, repeatedly viewed porn on his work computer. Then there are the arbitrator and the courts that took Harris' side.
But really, the chief culprits in the Harris affair might be the school district's residents, who have now learned a valuable lesson: Unions are good things, but like any other good thing, too much of it can make you sick.
Harris' main defense was that he was treated unfairly in comparison with colleagues who were disciplined -- but not fired -- for engaging in some of the same sorts of conduct.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Starting in 2015'16, every school that receives taxpayer money would receive an A-F rating based on their performance in the following areas:Matthew DeFour & Molly Beck:Achievement on state tests.
Achievement growth on state tests, based on a statistical analysis called value-added that estimates the impact schools and teachers have on student progress.
The progress in closing achievement gaps between white students and subgroups of students who are poor, of minority races or who have disabilities.
Graduation and attendance rate status and improvement.
The current school report card system went into effect two years ago and took the place of the widely disliked sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Gov. Scott Walker once pushed for using A through F grades, but a task force on school accountability had opted for a five-tiered system placing schools in categories from "significantly exceeds expectations" to "fails to meet expectations."
The 2012-'13 report cards placed 58 schools statewide into the "fails" category. That included 49 in MPS -- one is closed, so now there's 48 -- two independent charter schools authorized by the City of Milwaukee, four public schools in Racine and three public schools in Green Bay.
Wisconsin's lowest-performing public schools would be forced to close or reopen as charter schools and the state's 2-year-old accountability report card would be revamped under a bill unveiled Monday.The proposal also would require testing for taxpayer-subsidized students at private voucher schools while barring the lowest-performing schools from enrolling new voucher students. Participating private schools also could test all students for accountability purposes.
"We're going to start holding anybody who gets public money accountable for getting results. That is the bottom line," said Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, which plans to vote on the amended bill Thursday.
The bill makes several changes to the state's K-12 school accountability system -- including assigning schools letter grades -- which itself recently replaced a decade-old system under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Gov. Scott Walker has asked State Superintendent Tony Evers to begin hearings on revoking the teaching license of a Middleton teacher reinstated to his job earlier this month after being fired in 2010 for looking at pornographic images at school."After hearing from concerned parents, I am asking you to act efficiently in your investigation into the actions of Mr. Harris and to initiate revocation proceedings," Walker wrote in a letter dated Jan. 28. "The arbitration process afforded to Mr. Harris failed the school district and the students. It has taken both a financial and emotional toll on the district. Cases, such as this one, are a good example of why our reforms are necessary."
Walker also wrote cases like the one in Middleton "prompted me to sign 2011 Act 84 giving the State Superintendent clear authority to take action."
The law allows the Department of Public Instruction to revoke a license for immoral conduct, defined under state law to include looking at pornography at school.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Lant Pritchett is enjoying justified praise for his new The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain't Learning. His central thesis: schooling has exploded in the Third World, but literacy and numeracy remain wretched."I have never let my schooling interfere with my education" - apparently from Mark Twain.The average Haitian and Bangladeshi today have more schooling than the average Frenchman or Italian in 1960:
On international literacy and numeracy tests, however, the average student in the developing world still scores far below the average student in the developed world. Gaps of one standard deviation plus are typical:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
630K PDF Contract between Superintendent Cheatham and the Madison School District.
The lack of Superintendent oversight was an issue during the Rainwater era. Superintendent Cheatham's contract includes this:
14.01 At least once each year, the BOARD of Education will provide the ADMINISTRATOR with an evaluationRelated: A Look At Compensation Packages for Wisconsin School District Superintendents.a. The annual evaluation shall occur in closed session.
b. Prior to the BOARD conducting the SUPERINTENDENT'S evaluation, the SUPERINTENDENT shall provide the BOARD a self-appraisal. The BOARD shall take this self-appraisal into account in conducting its evaluation
c. All forms used and report formats requested as part of the evaluation process shall be collaboratively developed and mutually agreed upon by the ADMINISTRATOR and the BOARD.
d. While individual opinions may be expressed in the evaluation process, the final written record of performance evaluations shall include only narrative statements or opinions endorsed by a majority of the BOARD. The written evaluation shall be considered confidential to the extent permitted by law
Yet, reading, an issue for years in the Madison School District, remains a disastrous problem.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Like children headed home with their report cards, the nations of the globe recently received grades on the educational achievement of their students via the test known as the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. Reactions ranged from celebration to resignation to recrimination, depending upon the results.Tyler Cowen has more:In the United States, France and Great Britain, educators and political leaders bemoaned another disappointing showing despite their enviable wealth. They looked to East Asia and Eastern Europe and sought to understand how poorer countries in these regions could achieve so much more with fewer resources.
In Germany, educators took a measure of satisfaction that they had arrested an alarming decline, though they were far from declaring victory. In Poland, where leaders congratulated themselves for a breakout performance, the impressive results reinforced a controversial set of reforms.
The unleashing of the latest PISA scores occasioned a familiar debate over the merits of reducing the quality of schooling to a data point. Even the man who coordinates PISA, Andreas Schleicher, cautions that the numbers can be taken too far.
"Any assessment is a partial reflection of what matters," he told The WorldPost. "Math, science and literacy are the foundation for most of the other things, but they're not everything."
The data was provided to The WorldPost by Pablo Zoido, an analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the group behind PISA. It shows that students' wealth does not necessarily make them more competitive on an international scale. In the United States, for example, the poorest kids scored around a 433 out of 700 on the math portion of PISA, while the wealthiest ones netted about a 547. The lower score comes in just below the OECD average for the bottom decile (436), but the higher score also comes in below the OECD average for the top decile (554)."At the top of the distribution, our performance is surprisingly bad given our top decile is among the wealthiest in the world," said Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California's School of Education who reviewed the data.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
School district administrators often live in the crossfire, sandwiched between students and teachers, parents and school boards, taxpayers and state mandates. Even though salaries typically exceed $100,000, it's a job not many want.Related: Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham's contract.Those who take the job and keep it are in high demand, able to command an array of benefits and other enticements. A Gannett Wisconsin Media Investigative Team review of nearly 100 school administrator contracts around the state revealed perks including five-figure annuities, promised payouts of $60,000 or more at retirement, car allowances of at least $500 per month and bonuses of $10,000 or more for meeting performance goals, staying with the district or simply moving into the district.
"There's a diminishing pool of people wanting superintendent jobs -- mostly because of the nature of the job and the things that go with it, particularly politically -- so district boards are often really focused today more on incentives to retain superintendents," said Jon Bales, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham is a strong supporter of technology in the classroom. That's why she is putting a $27.7 million computer plan in front of the School Board tonight.Pat SchneiderBut Cheatham also knows what really drives education, from kindergarten to high school.
"It's the quality of teachers that matters the most," she told the State Journal editorial board during a recent meeting.
Putting a tablet computer into the hands of every Madison student "will absolutely help teachers with instruction," Cheatham said.
In our multi-device, always-wired world, understanding and using the latest technology is a must for today's students and can cater to their individual needs and interests.
Ultimately, the issue is not how many devices are in a classroom but, rather, how those devices are used. The technology needs to offer more than whiz-bang special effects. It needs to open new paths to learning.
The high-dollar technology plan has attracted critics who question the cost and worry about additional "screen time," especially for the youngest students.
The Madison Metropolitan School District's multi-million dollar Tech Plan is spending a lot of money on devices not proven to benefit student learning, according to an assistant professor of education at Madison's Edgewood College.In addition, the district isn't giving teachers, parents or students opportunities to provide meaningful feedback on the plan, said Donna Vukelich-Selva in written remarks to the Madison school board shared Monday with The Cap Times.
The School Board is scheduled to vote Monday, Jan. 27, on what is now a revised, estimated $27.7 million, five-year plan that would greatly increase the use of computers in classroom instruction. The school district pared the proposal slightly, following a community update session last week, to include fewer devices for the youngest students. The plan now would provide one computer tablet in the classroom for about every two kindergartners and 1st-graders, and a one-to-one computer ratio for students in grades 2-12.
But Vukelich-Selva said concerns that the district is moving too fast on the Tech Plan, expressed by parents and teachers at the community update Jan. 22 at Memorial High School, were dismissed.
"It is clear that many significant stakeholders in the district were not taken into account," she wrote.
The Madison school board first considered a draft of the plan on Jan. 13.
On hearing criticism that the proposal has advanced too quickly, Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said last week that the district has been "thorough and methodical in the development of the draft plan."
Vukelich-Selva also said there was inadequate assessment of the impact of one-to-one computing on learning for younger students through fifth grade. She pointed to an apparent focus on technology itself rather than curricular goals.
"The huge numbers of 'devices' we are being told we need in our classrooms will help support a vastly expanded platform for more standardized testing," she said.
Research shows that most large-scale evaluations of one-to-one computing initiatives have found mixed or no results, and underscore the importance of teacher mastery of using the devices, Vukelich-Selva wrote, referring specifically to an article in "Educational Leadership" from February, 2011, that is critical of one-to-one programs.
Much more on the Madison School District's Technology Plan, here.
One would hope that prior multi-million dollar technology implementations such as Infinite Campus, would be fully implemented first.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Ripping up the playground rulebook is having incredible effects on children at an Auckland school.Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don't cause bedlam, the principal says.
The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.
Principal Bruce McLachlan rid the school of playtime rules as part of a successful university experiment.
"We want kids to be safe and to look after them, but we end up wrapping them in cotton wool when in fact they should be able to fall over."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
With college-admission deadlines quickly approaching, my debt to the College Board keeps growing. Two SAT tests, five subject tests and six Advanced Placement (AP) tests later, I am ready to report my scores through the College Board website to the 10 colleges to which I am applying. On top of the total $102 I paid to take the SAT, $114 for the subject tests, and $534 for the AP tests, the College Board now demands $11.25 for each electronic submission of the test scores to the schools on my list.It seems odd that the College Board--a nonprofit whose CEO, David Coleman, was pulling in $750,000 as of 2012--cannot send a few numbers over the Internet for just a dollar or two, or maybe even free. Instead, I am shoveling out another $100-plus just for electronic submissions, another contribution to the swelling pockets of the College Board (annual revenue in 2011-2012: more than $750 million).
With almost complete control over the business of pre-college standardized testing, the College Board squeezes every penny it can from high-school students--or their parents. The company charges at every turn while attempting to "connect students to college success," loading on additional fees for every missed deadline and "rush" delivery of electronically sent scores, scores that apparently otherwise take weeks to navigate the labyrinth that is the World Wide Web.
The College Board should behave more like the nonprofit it claims to be. Lowering the cost of the SAT would encourage more students whose parents make modest incomes to retake the test and compete against students from higher income households who often take the test upward of four times, aiming for higher scores. (I took the test twice.)
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The FT Global MBA ranking and the English football Premier League have one thing in common. Pundits may argue about who will head the table, but most years there is little doubt about the top five.So it is for 2014: Harvard Business School fended off competitors and kept the crown it regained last year. This is the fifth time Harvard has topped the rankings since they began in 1999. Stanford Graduate School of Business remained second, while London Business School leapfrogged the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania, pushing the latter into fourth place. Columbia Business School and Insead are joint fifth.
The FT ranking is based on two surveys of the business schools and their alumni who graduated in 2010. MBA programmes are assessed according to the career progression of their alumni, the school's idea generation and the diversity of students and faculty.
Harvard leads the field for idea generation, coming first for research and second for its doctoral programme. The school's alumni also boast the second-highest average salary three years after graduation (behind Stanford) and above-average salary increase. Harvard is also among the top schools for career progression and its MBA was the most highly commended by graduates from other schools.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Sometimes I see a video or a blog post and think to myself..."yeah!" This is one of those times. This is a short speech from Tennessee student Ethan Young. He talks about education and issues such as common core and evaluations. Go ahead and watch the whole thing (only 5 minutes long).Let me just point out a few of his points:
In regards to Common Core, Ethan says that "rigorous" standards are just a buzz word.
Common Core standards represent a mistrust of teachers.Ethan claims that part of the problem with the administrative side of education (evaluation, standards, testing) is that we (the people) try to apply the same management model to education that we use for nuclear reactors.
Great quote: "Why don't we just manufacture robots instead of students? They last longer and always do what they're told."
Another great quote regarding the measurement of teaching: "If everything I learned in high school was a measurable objective, I haven't learned anything."
What is the point of education? It is to free minds and to inspire. We do not teach to train for careers, those will come naturally.
All great points. When I think about the educational process, there are two other important pieces that present interesting ideas.
Lockhart's Lament (pdf). This is an excellent essay from Paul Lockhart where he looks at the state of mathematics education. He creates an excellent analogy between the way we learn art and math. It's a great essay.
Sir Ken Robinson's Changing Education Paradigms (youtube). In this video, Robinson gives a great historical perspective as a reason for some of the way education works today.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Nine California public school students are suing the state over its laws on teacher tenure, seniority and other protections that the plaintiffs say keep bad educators in classrooms.The case that goes to trial Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court is the latest battle in a growing nationwide challenge to union-backed protections for teachers in an effort to hold them more accountable for their work. The nonjury trial is expected to wrap up in March.
"The system is dysfunctional and arbitrary due to these outdated laws that handcuff school administrators," said Theodore J. Boutrous, the lead attorney on the case sponsored by an educational reform group.
States across the nation have weakened teaching job protections, including generations-old tenure, to give administrators more flexibility to fire bad teachers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The U.S. Census Bureau today released the first-ever report examining the prevalence of non-degree certifications and licenses among American adults and their importance to the employment market. The report found that alternative credentials provide a path to higher earnings, underscoring that traditional educational attainment is just one way for workers to attain the skills needed in today's global economy.
A skilled workforce is an essential part of a modern, innovative economy. However, many U.S. employers today are struggling to find workers with the skills to fill some of the 3.9 million open jobs. That is why, for the first time, the Commerce Department is focusing on skills training as part of its Open for Business Agenda.The report, Measuring Alternative Educational Credentials, found that in fall 2012, 50 million U.S. adults, or one in four, had obtained a professional certification, license or educational certificate apart from a postsecondary degree awarded by colleges and universities. The report shows that, in general, these alternative credentials provide a path to higher earnings. Among full-time workers, the median monthly earnings for someone with a professional certification or license only was $4,167, compared with $3,433 for one with an educational certificate only; $3,920 for those with both types of credentials; and $3,110 for people without any alternative credential.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Undeterred by the high-profile problems experienced by other large school systems attempting to put digital devices in the hands of their students, the Houston Independent School District began distributing more than 18,000 laptop computers to high school students and staff members this month.Related: The Madison School District's latest technology plan.It's the first phase of a multi-year plan that, unlike troubled initiatives elsewhere, will be defined by "realistic expectations" and a cautious implementation plan, said Lenny Schad, the chief technology officer for the 210,000-student district.
"We are going to have bumps in the road," Schad said in a telephone interview. "But I feel very confident that when those bumps occur, we will be able to react, address the problems, and move on."
The Houston initiative, known as PowerUp, aims to distribute roughly 65,000 laptops--enough for every high school student and high school teacher in the district--by the 2015-16 school year. Eventually, the initiative is expected to cost about $18 million annually; this year, the Houston ISD is dishing out $6 million, all of it existing funds that were reallocated from other sources. The 2013-14 school year is being devoted to a step-by-step pilot program, and Schad--who previously oversaw implementation of a successful "bring your own device" initiative in Texas' 66,000-student Katy Independent School District--said the district is entering the 1-to-1 computing fray with eyes wide open.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A SEEMINGLY un-American fact about America today is that for some groups, much more than others, upward mobility and the American dream are alive and well. It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.Indian-Americans earn almost double the national figure (roughly $90,000 per year in median household income versus $50,000). Iranian-, Lebanese- and Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years, Mormons have become leaders of corporate America, holding top positions in many of America's most recognizable companies. These facts don't make some groups "better" than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.
Jewish success is the most historically fraught and the most broad-based. Although Jews make up only about 2 percent of the United States' adult population, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a third of American Nobel laureates.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Tuesday's State of the Union address will apparently focus on issues of wealth inequality in the United States. The impact of poverty is extremely important for issues such as housing, nutrition, health and safety. Additionally, education researchers like me have been hollering from the rooftops, hoping policymakers and others will understand that poverty is the biggest impediment to children's academic success. So this focus is long overdue and certainly welcome. Yet I worry that the president will slip from an accurate diagnosis to unproven and ineffectual treatments.The diagnosis is straightforward. I expect that the president will have no trouble describing enormous and increasing wealth gaps. We learned from Oxfam last week that "the world's 85 richest people own the same amount as the bottom half of the entire global population," which is over 7 billion people.
In the United States, the picture is just as shocking. In a 2013 UNICEF report on child poverty in 35 developed countries, the United States came in 34th, second to last--between Bulgaria and Romania, two much poorer countries overall. Twenty-three percent (23%) of children in the US live in poverty.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
What is "authentic assessment"?Almost 25 years ago, I wrote a widely-read and discussed paper that was entitled: "A True Test: Toward More Authentic and Equitable Assessment" that was in the Phi Delta Kappan. Download it here: Wiggins.atruetest.kappan89 I believe the phrase was my coining, made when I worked with Ted Sizer at the Coalition of Essential Schools, as a way of describing "true" tests as opposed to merely academic and unrealistic school tests. I first used the phrase in print in an article for Educational Leadership entitled "Teaching to the (Authentic) Test" in the April 1989 issue. (My colleague from the Advisory Board of the Coalition of Essential Schools, Fred Newmann, was the first to use the phrase in a book, a pamphlet for NASSP in 1988 entitled Beyond standardized testing: Assessing authentic academic achievement in secondary schools. His work in the Chicago public schools provides significant findings about the power of working this way - Authentic-Instruction-Assessment-BlueBook.)
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Today, Caire's tone has moderated. Somewhat.Related: notes and links on Mary Erpanbach, Jennifer Cheatham and Madison's long term disastrous reading scores."Teachers are not to blame for the problems kids bring into the classroom," he says. "But teachers have to teach the kids in front of them. And Madison teachers are not prepared to do that. Now we have two choices: Make excuses why these kids can't make it and just know that they won't. Or move beyond and see a brighter future for kids."
Many parents back him up. And many parents of students of color say that their experience with Madison's public schools--both as students here, themselves, and now as parents--is simply much different and much worse than what they see white students and parents experiencing.
"I just always felt like I was on as a parent, like every time I walked through the door of that school I would have to go to bat for my son," says Sabrina Madison, mother of a West High graduate who is now a freshman at UW-Milwaukee. "Do you know how many times I was asked if I wanted to apply for this [assistance] program or that program? I would always say, 'No, we're good.' And at the same time, there is not the same ACT prep or things like that for my child. I was never asked 'Is your son prepared for college?' I never had that conversation with his guidance counselor."
Hedi Rudd, whose two daughters graduated from East and son from West, says it has been her experience that the schools are informally segregated by assistance programs and that students of color are more likely to be treated with disrespect by school personnel. "Walk into the cafeteria and you'll see the kids [of color] getting free food and the white students eating in the hall. I walked into the school office one day," she recalls. "I look young and the secretary thought I was a student. She yelled, 'What are you doing here?' I just looked at her and said, 'Do you talk to your students like that?'"
Dawn Crim, the mother of a daughter in elementary school and a son in middle school, says lowered expectations for students of color regardless of family income is an ongoing problem. "When we moved to Madison in 1996, we heard that MMSD was a great school district ... and for the most part it has been good for our kids and family: strong teachers, good administrators, a supportive learning environment, and we've been able to be very involved."
But?
"Regarding lower expectations for kids of color, not just disadvantaged kids, we, too, have experienced the lower expectations for our kids; overall there is a feeling and a sense of lower expectations," Crim says. "And that should not come into play. All of our kids should be respected, pushed, have high expectations and should get the best education this district says it gives."
In the meantime, the school district has been running programs in partnership with the Urban League of Greater Madison, UW-Madison, United Way of Dane County, the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County, and other organizations--all designed to lift scholastic achievement, close the gap, and get more kids graduated and on to college.
The Advancement Via Individual Determination program known as AVID (or AVID/TOPS, when coordinated with the Teens Of Promise program) is run by the district and the Boys and Girls Club here, and is a standout in a slew of public/private efforts to change the fate of students of color in Madison.
.....
At the end of the last school year, a total of four hundred forty-two students did not graduate on time from high school in Madison. One hundred nine were white, eighty-six were Hispanic, thirty-three were Asian and one hundred ninety-one were African American. If the graduation rate for African American students had been comparable to the eighty-eight percent graduation rate of white students, one hundred forty more African American students would have graduated from Madison high schools.
But they did not. While it's true that the district actively searches out students who did not graduate on time, and works with them so that as many as possible do ultimately graduate, the black-and-white dividing line of fifty-five/eighty-eight remains for now the achievement gap's stark, frightening, final face. What can be said is that many more Madisonians are paying attention to it, and many people in a position to make a difference are doing their level best to do something about it.
......
"One of the reasons we haven't been as successful as we could be is because we've lacked focus and jumped from initiative to initiative," she (Cheatham) says of the Madison schools.
Background articles:
Notes and links on the rejected Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.
Notes and Links on the Madison K-12 Climate and Superintendent Hires Since 1992.
My Life and Times With the Madison Public Schools
Latest Madison Schools' 2013-2014 $391,834,829 Budget.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Fourth grade teacher Carissa Franz starts her lessons by outlining the Common Core standards she and her students will focus on. Franz is in her second year at Ray W. Huegel Elementary School, and uses the standards to drive her teaching this year.She and teachers throughout Madison are integrating the new Common Core State Standards, adopted by State Superintendent Tony Evers in 2010, into their curriculums with the help of new Common Core-aligned materials and district-supported teacher teams
The changeover to Common Core is a deliberate process. Franz meets monthly with the superintendent as part of a teacher advisory board that shares the "voice of the teachers" with the district, she said.
Every week, she meets with a group of teachers representing each grade level in her school to discuss how to align the standards and the math materials used district-wide with the needs of Huegel's classrooms.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Class size: 49 students.Much more on the Milwaukee Public Schools, here.Number of principals in six years: five.
Percentage of student turnover in a school year: 55%.
To the people who teach in them, those are some of the characteristics of "failing" public schools in Milwaukee, 48 in all.
To the superintendent who oversees them, the latest potential solution is to turn some into charter schools.
The teachers' response, at least for one day this past week, was to blast that idea and provide a vivid picture of the problems in their chronically underperforming schools, problems that never seem to get addressed by a revolving door of district reforms.
Once again, they said at a board committee meeting Thursday, the options on the table -- and there are three in all -- fail to address their biggest roadblocks to improvement. Almost every one of their students is poor. On average, one in four has a special need, usually an emotional or behavioral disorder. Many have unstable families and grow up in lives infused with violence.
Meanwhile, teachers said, their best resources to combat these issues have been cut. There are fewer art and music classes, despite district efforts lately to restore such specials. Class sizes can soar to between 40 and 50 students, inhibiting any kind of one-on-one attention. There is no additional staff to man in-school suspension rooms, so disruptive pupils affect the learning time -- and likely, the ultimate reading and math test scores -- of other students.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Commitment. What does that mean? What does it call for?We're about to get some very interesting and important lessons in "commitment" in terms of schools in Milwaukee -- which is to say I'm quite interested in what will happen at two meetings scheduled for this coming Thursday, in part because of what happened at a meeting last Thursday.
I choose the term "commitment" for specific reasons:
For one, at Thursday night's meeting of a Milwaukee School Board committee, Superintendent Gregory Thornton put forth a plan for dealing with 25 or so of the lowest performing schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system. One of the few details that was given was that this group of schools now would be known as "commitment schools."
Here's a second reason: It was clear at the meeting that a primary commitment of a full-house audience of about 300 -- as well as of what appeared to be a majority of the School Board -- was to solving MPS' problems within the traditional public school system and fighting those who are pushing for more charter schools that would have leaders and teachers who are not MPS employees.
The commitment to actual improvement seemed to vary among people in the crowd.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Seattle Public Schools has re-defined the word "curriculum" no fewer than six times in the past four years. It seems to change with each new Chief Academic Officer, Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning, or Executive Director of Curriculum. It also changes anytime the District needs to weasel or make other people (the Board or members of the public) appear ignorant.Here is the most recent definition provided. It comes with the FAQ on Common Core:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Several Hungarian student, undergraduate and teacher associations and groups joined Saturday to rally against the government's centralizing education policy.Some 700-800 people demonstrated on the birthday of Rozsa Hoffmann, state secretary for education.
The demonstrators at the "For a Free Education" spoke against the government's policies saying the centralized system that was set up last year to handle all school-related matters from personnel to procurement has failed.
"There's no paper in my school since early December," Andras Meleg, a high school student, said in his speech at the demonstration in Budapest, in front of the ministry responsible for education.
The government moved schools that were previously under local government management to the central government's care early last year. It introduced obligatory religion or ethics lessons at schools and a five-time-a-week physical education class countrywide, even in schools where the resources aren't adequate. The government also nationalized the schoolbook-market and increased teachers' working hours.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
What's are today's young adults really like? For those who've spent too much time gazing into the dark recesses of Thought Catalog or obsessing over "Girls," the Department of Education has a new report that offers up some enlightening answers.In the spring of 2002, the government's researchers began tracking a group of roughly 15,000 high school sophomores--most of whom would be roughly age 27 today--with the intention of following them through early adulthood. Like myself, many of those students graduated college in 2008, just in time to grab a front-row seat for the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the economic gore fest that ensued. In 2012, the government's researchers handed their subjects an enormous survey about their lives in the real world. Here, I've pulled together the most interesting findings.
(One important note: I've shorthanded this group as "today's 27-year-olds." But again, not all of the study participants are precisely that age.)
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Elaine Weiss and Dr. Thomas W. Payzant:
Every three years, American policymakers eagerly anticipate the release of scores for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). While any single test, no matter how strong, can explain only a limited amount about our education system, PISA provides some unique insights, testing students' ability to apply knowledge and skills both in and out of school. It is taken only by 15-year-olds, making it a decent proxy for the "college-and-career readiness" that is the focus of current debates.The 2013 headline is basically that the United States falls right in the middle of the pack, as it has for several decades. The U.S. Department of Education and its allies used those rankings to argue that U.S. schools are "stagnating" and to advance specific reforms it says will fix them. However, average scores may obscure and confuse more than they inform. Indeed, scores from individual states that have their own PISA rankings offer more policy-relevant insight than overall U.S. rankings. This makes sense -- U.S. education looks more like a diverse patchwork than a unified system. Public investments in schools, and in students and their families, vary greatly across states, as do other policies that may boost or depress scores. Luckily, this year, three states received individual PISA rankings -- as if they were independent countries. This can help us connect the dots between those disparities and scores.
Massachusetts is the good news story. If it were its own country, it would rank sixth in reading of 65 countries and economies included, behind only Singapore, Japan, Korea, and the Chinese regions of Shanghai and Hong Kong. Its students rank just above Finland and Canada, some of the world's best readers. Though its math scores are slightly lower, Massachusetts keeps company with Belgium and Germany and is only slightly behind Finland and Canada, ranking 16 of 65. In science, Massachusetts ranks 11th, ahead of Canada and Germany. Connecticut, the second of three states with its own scores, falls just below Massachusetts, ranking 9th in reading, 18th in math, and 17th in science.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Robin Mwai and Deidre Green
Simpson Street Free Press
The achievement gap is very prevalent in my school on a day-to-day basis. From the lack of minority students taking honors classes, to the over abundance of minority students occupying the hallways during valuable class time, the continuously nagging minority achievement gap prevails.
Upon entering LaFollette High School, there are visible traces of the achievement gap all throughout the halls. It seems as if there is always a presence of a minority student in the hallway no matter what the time of day. At any time during the school day there are at least 10 to 15 students, many of whom are minorities, wandering the halls aimlessly. These students residing in the halls are either a result of getting kicked out of class due to behavior issues, or for some, the case may be that they simply never cared to go to class at all. This familiar scene causes some staff to assume that all minority students that are seen in the halls during class time are not invested in their education. These assumptions are then translated back to the classroom where teachers then lower their expectations for these students and students who appear to be like them.
While there are some students of color who would rather spend their school time in the halls instead of in the classroom, others wish for the opportunity to be seen as focused students. Sadly many bright and capable minority students are being overlooked because teachers see them as simply another unmotivated student to be pushed through the system. Being a high achieving minority student in the Madison school District continues to be somewhat of a rarity--even in 2014. Three out of the four classes I am taking this semester at La Follette High School, which uses the four-block schedule, are honors or advanced courses. Of the 20 to 25 students in those honors classes, I am one of a total of two minority students enrolled.
Even though a large percentage of the student body is made up of minority students, very few of theses students are taking honors or advanced classes. These honors courses provide students with necessary skills that help prepare them for college. These skills include: critical thinking, exposure to a wider variety of concepts, and an opportunity to challenge their own mental capacities in ways that non-honors courses don't allow. This means that the majority of the schools' population is not benefiting from these opportunities. Instead, they are settling for lower-level courses that are not pushing them to the best of their abilities.
It is unfortunate that so many of our community's young people are missing out on being academically challenged in ways that could ultimately change their lives. This all too familiar issue is a complex community problem with no simple solutions. However it is one that should be addressed with the appropriate sense of urgency.
Robin Mwai is a Sophomore at LaFollette High School and serves as a staff writer for Dane County's Teen Newspaper Simpson Street Free Press. Deidre Green is a LaFollette High School Graduate and is now a UW-Madison Senior. She is also a graduate of Simpson Street Free Press and now serves as Managing Editor.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Reader Mike Himmelstein has rightly pointed out that our analysis of the new IPEDS data would benefit from using visualization tools instead of just tables. This comment led me to a multi-day investigation of which data visualization tool would best integrate into a WordPress blog while maintaining interactive data exploration. I tried MicroStrategy (great tool but cannot share without login), IBM Many Eyes (good public tool but limited in formatting), and several variations of Google Charts (not as rich in features as MicroStrategy, but close, and supports public sharing). In the end I've ended up using the Visualizer plugin to display Google Charts. All data below is for degree-granting institutions.Let's first look at the state-by-state data in a Geochart. This data tracks online ed in public higher ed institutions as of Fall 2012. I'm showing the data broken out by undergraduate and graduate students. The color scale is based on the percentage of students taking at least one online course, but if you hover over a state you can also see the percentage of students taking all of their courses online.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Madison School District (1MB PDF):
Every school will be a thriving school that prepares every student to graduate from high school college, career, and community ready.Much more on the District's Technology Plan, including prior initiatives such as "Infinite Campus", here.Highlights of the Tech Plan
Devices available to all students when needed to personalize learning and increase digital literacy
Resources for staff that will strengthen high-quality instruction
Flexible learning spaces for discovery, collaboration, and creation
Upgraded infrastructure for fast, reliable systems
Improved data systems to help tailor learning based on students' needs
Professional learning to engage staff in ongoing learning around instructional technology
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Middleton High School has a new policy in place for students during finals week after district officials made changes amidst cheating allegations.Parents had the chance to attend a listening session Wednesday night at Middleton High School to learn more about recent academic integrity issues.
Last month, 250 students had to retake an Advanced Placement math test because a few allegedly cheated on tests using their cellphones.
District officials said it's been a wake-up call, and they now have a new policy in place. On test days, students have to put their cellphones in a basket and will get them back when everyone has turned in their tests.
District officials said most teachers already have policies like this, but now the rule is official.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter, via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):
Sections IV-I and IV-J of the MTI Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement set forth the procedures which principals are contractually required to use when management notifies a teacher that he/she is being considered for non-renewal of contract. By Contract, the District is obligated to advise a teacher before May 1, if they are considering non-renewal. Under Wisconsin State Statutes, such a notice must be delivered to the teacher on or before May 15. Such notice could also be on one's evaluation that must occur by April 15 per your Collective Bargaining Agreement.MTI staff should be present at any and all meetings
between the teacher and any administrator in this regard, given that the meeting may indeed affect the teacher's continued employment status. The teacher has the legal right to MTI representation and does not have to begin or continue a meeting without representation. See the reverse side of your MTI membership card.For probationary teachers, a request for a hearing before the Board of Education must be submitted within five (5) days of the teacher's receipt of the notice that the Board of Education is considering non-renewal of the teacher's contract. For non-probationary staff, a request for arbitration must be made within fifteen (15) days of a non-renewal notice. It is extremely important for any teacher receiving such a notice to immediately contact MTI.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Stephanie Simon, with help from Caitlin Emma and Libby Nelson
CEOs DEBATE THE ROLE OF PROFIT IN EDUCATION: Top executives from Microsoft, Pearson, Discovery Education, Intel and other firms will gather in Davos, Switzerland today for a roundtable on education during the World Economic Forum. Joined by academics from Harvard and Stanford, the group will mull the risks and benefits of making a profit motive more central to education; swap tips on connecting corporations, schools and governments; and consider how to ensure that ed tech products rise or fall based on their impact in the classroom, not just their marketing budgets.-- The discussion will focus on the concept of "shared value," which posits that companies can address social problems -- and, not incidentally, boost profits -- by intervening in K-12 and higher education. For example, Intel has sent anthropologists into schools to observe students using technology, in hopes of developing new products that drive up both sales and academic achievement. A report outlines other case studies: http://politico.pro/1aPtXpF
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The WorldPost has gotten the first look at the math scores of students at every socioeconomic decile from the 65 countries that participate in the Programme for International Student Assessment. What they reveal about the correlation between wealth and a student's academic performance is surprising.The data was provided to The WorldPost by Pablo Zoido, an analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the group behind PISA. It shows that students' wealth does not necessarily make them more competitive on an international scale. In the United States, for example, the poorest kids scored around a 433 out of 700 on the math portion of PISA, while the wealthiest ones netted about a 547. The lower score comes in just below the OECD average for the bottom decile (436), but the higher score also comes in below the OECD average for the top decile (554).
"At the top of the distribution, our performance is surprisingly bad given our top decile is among the wealthiest in the world," said Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California's School of Education who reviewed the data.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Carl Benedikt Frey & Michael A. Osborne:
We examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation. To assess this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier. Based on these estimates, we examine expected impacts of future computerisation on US labour market outcomes, with the primary objective of analysing the number of jobs at risk and the relationship between an occupation's probability of computerisation, wages and educational attainment. According to our estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk. We further provide evidence that wages and educational attainment exhibit a strong negative relationship with an occupation's probability of computerisation.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I don't usually like to sound like a doomsayer but today I'm going to make an exception. I'm going to describe an effect that I believe will be present, even if it's not as strong as I am suggesting it might be. There are three points to my post today.1) Math research is a byproduct of calculus teaching
I've said it before, calculus (and pre-calculus, and linear algebra) might be a thorn in many math teachers' side, and boring to teach over and over again, but it's the bread and butter of math departments. I've heard statistics that 85% of students who take any class in math at a given college take only calculus.
Math research is essentially funded through these teaching jobs. This is less true for the super elite institutions which might have their own army of calculus adjuncts and have separate sources of funding both from NSF-like entities and private entities, but if you take the group of people I just saw at JMM you have a bunch of people who essentially depend on their take-home salary to do research, and their take-home salary depends on lots of students at their school taking service courses.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I am (or at least think I am) an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy. When I say something on those subjects, I expect that my opinion holds more weight than that of most other people.I never thought those were particularly controversial statements. As it turns out, they're plenty controversial. Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious "appeals to authority," sure signs of dreadful "elitism," and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a "real" democracy.
But democracy, as I wrote in an essay about C.S. Lewis and the Snowden affair, denotes a system of government, not an actual state of equality. It means that we enjoy equal rights versus the government, and in relation to each other. Having equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge. It assuredly does not mean that "everyone's opinion about anything is as good as anyone else's." And yet, this is now enshrined as the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in fact, Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world is getting worse. The belief that the world can't solve extreme poverty and disease isn't just mistaken. It is harmful. That's why in this year's letter we take apart some of the myths that slow down the work. The next time you hear these myths, we hope you will do the same.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
How are scholars ranked for promotion, tenure and honors? How can we improve the quantitative tools available for decision makers when making such decisions? Can we predict the academic impact of scholars and papers at early stages using quantitative tools?Current academic decisions (hiring, tenure, prizes) are mostly very subjective. In the era of "Big Data," a solid quantitative set of measurements should be used to support this decision process.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
But the writer's view of Madisonians as a bunch of liberals whose actions belie their highfalutin ideals rings true when it comes to at least one Madison institution: the schools.Despite decades of embarrassing gaps in achievement between white and minority and poor and rich students, the Madison School District has:
Moved slowly to ramp up the AVID/TOPS (Advancement Via Individual Determination/Teens of Promise) program, which has been shown to boost academic achievement among the district's students of color, who make up more than half the student body. It served 7 percent of middle and high school students in 2012-13, up from 0.2 percent when AVID was introduced in 2007-08 (TOPS was added a year later).
Done nothing to change regressive union rules that make teachers' career advancement and promotion almost entirely a matter of their seniority and degree attainment -- as opposed to, say, their ability to engage and educate students of color and poor students.
Turned down a bid by the Urban League of Greater Madison to create a charter school that would have focused on serving poor and minority students.
Declined to broach the idea of year-round school despite research showing that students from poor families suffer most from the "summer slide."
Declined to seek changes to a school board elections system that has already basically ensured a win for the one white candidate on the ballot this April. The black candidate and the Latino candidate will have to fight it out for the other districtwide seat.
None of this is news. What is new, however, is the attention Madison's long-standing race-based disparities in the schools and other areas are getting from the politically liberal people who run this town.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The board is being asked to approve the Tech Plan before it sets out the district's annual budget later in the year, which Cheatham said will allow district administration "to move confidently toward implementation planning.""We're confident we can fund major priorities of our district, as outlined in our strategic plan, through our zero-based budgeting process while also funding the Tech Plan, which undergirds those priorities," she said. "We don't believe we will be having to make major trade-offs."
The zero-based budget process - new for MMSD - starts from scratch, allowing evaluation of all spending. "We will need to make tough decisions about work we will no longer fund that is not tightly aligned with those priorities," Cheatham said.
What those might be, Cheatham said she can't yet say.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Nearly 140 teachers and administrators in Philadelphia public schools have been implicated in one of the nation's largest cheating scandals, according to district officials, who also said Wednesday that they will spend the next few weeks disciplining or firing dozens of employees.The Pennsylvania attorney general's office also is conducting a criminal investigation into the allegations, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Three principals were fired late last week as part of the probe, which grew out of a 2009 state analysis of questionable erasure patterns on test booklets on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment math and reading exams. The district, which wouldn't discuss the specific allegations, said those involved "violated basic testing integrity, ethical and moral standards."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Skepticism over the value of a college degree, especially one in the liberal arts, is common these days. Rising college prices, increasing levels of student debt, and a still weak job market all heighten doubts. Return on investment has become a popular research question, and a higher-education association released on Wednesday a report arguing that a liberal-arts major is a worthwhile choice.In recent years, new data have helped paint a detailed picture of what college graduates earn. Analyses have focused on what they make by major, or by degree program at particular colleges.
On Wednesday the Association of American Colleges and Universities--a champion of liberal education--stepped into the fray with a report, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, that examines the payoff of a liberal-arts degree over the course of a career.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Republicans eager to attract black and Latino voters believe they have hit on an ideal magnet: school choice.Led by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, with high-profile contributions from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the GOP is pushing an election-year initiative to talk up school choice at every turn.
Calling for more charter schools, vouchers and tax credits to help parents pay private school tuition fits with the party's mantra that the government works best when it gets out of the way and lets the free market flourish. But top strategists say it's more than that: Talking about helping poor minority children softens the GOP's image and lets candidates offer a positive vision instead of forever going on the attack. And unlike immigration reform, school choice is politically safe; there's no chance of blowback from the tea party.
Plus, the photo ops are great. As the conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks put it in a strategic planning document: "Focus on kids and the future = excellent media opportunity."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"Do what you love" is the mantra for today's worker. Why should we assert our class interests if, according to DWYL elites like Steve Jobs, there's no such thing as work?"Do what you love. Love what you do."
The commands are framed and perched in a living room that can only be described as "well-curated." A picture of this room appeared first on a popular design blog, but has been pinned, tumbl'd, and liked thousands of times by now.
Lovingly lit and photographed, this room is styled to inspire Sehnsucht, roughly translatable from German as a pleasurable yearning for some utopian thing or place. Despite the fact that it introduces exhortations to labor into a space of leisure, the "do what you love" living room -- where artful tchotchkes abound and work is not drudgery but love -- is precisely the place all those pinners and likers long to be. The diptych arrangement suggests a secular version of a medieval house altar.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It is late December 2007. I am attending my first MLA Conference in Chicago, with the hopes of finding a job. I have a number of promising interviews lined up, and I am filled with hope. 2007 has been a good year for me (completed and defended the dissertation, had my first child, successfully teaching various classes in a relatively well-paying adjunct position), and the number of interviews I have received is the icing on the cake for me. My husband and daughter have accompanied me, in part for moral support, in part because I am still breastfeeding. My department, even though I am an adjunct, is funding a part of my trip. The rest goes on credit cards, on the seemingly reasonable gamble that I will get a job that will allow me to eventually pay off this trip. An investment, a necessity of the nature of the profession.We stay at a non-conference hotel, using a new site that gives you a reduced rate, but requiring that you pay in advance. We receive word from the site that our stay may be "disrupted" for vague reasons, and it is too late for us to rebook anywhere else, so we keep our plans as they are. Turns out, the "disruption" consists of striking hotel workers who picket the front of the hotel. It is easy to walk quickly past the strikers, head down against the Chicago winter cold and wind. More disruptive is my daughter who is confused by the time change and cold weather, causing me to stay up all night before my day with two job interviews.
While the MLA interviews were not successful, I was offered a tenure-track job that academic job cycle. We packed up and moved across the country, on our own dime, with the hopes of starting my academic career, proving stability for my growing family (I was pregnant again) and the career I had been dreaming of for year. I literally never gave those striking hotel workers another thought.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As I go around the country talking to different groups about my book on how to make public higher education free, I continue to encounter student debt horror stories, but there is perhaps no story more horrible than the recent Congressional Budget Office report on how the federal government raked in over $50 billion last year in profits from student loans. It turns out that after the feds took over the destructive private loan industry, the result was not to give students the best deal possible, but to cash in on the fact that the government can borrow money at virtually no interest and lend it to students at a much higher rate (of course the government profits go up much higher when students default or are penalized for late payments). In fact, the average student loan defaulter pays a penalty of over 100% of the principal, and the federal government is very good at collecting these debts.Although I do not think it was the intention of the Obama administration to turn indebted students into cash cows, a systemic analysis tells us that the federal government is profiting from the state reduction of funding for public higher education, which in turn has helped to cause the increase in student tuition at public institutions, which increases student debt, and at the same time, increases in the number of students going to high-cost, low-performing for-profit colleges.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
36MB mp3 audio. Also available here.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In the last month of 2013 we were treated to two celebrations of the enduring public character of UC Berkeley. Not surprisingly Frederick Wiseman's documentary 'At Berkeley', with its portrayal of Cal's senior managers battling against the twin forces of a dis-investing state and a student movement resisting tuition hikes, got all the attention. Yet of arguably greater significance was an article by UC Berkeley's Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, George Breslauer, that outlined the new common sense and guiding philosophy of Berkeley's senior management at that time and perhaps still now.
Wiseman and Breslauer are fiercely critical of a political culture that has enabled the state to disinvest from higher education. According to Breslauer, even after the passage of Proposition 30 state funds now account for just 14% of Berkeley's total budget, down from 30% in 1999 and 70% in 1971. Although, if one includes 'restricted' monies from federal and local government about 40% of Berkeley's revenue comes from public sources, the withdrawal of state funding has indeed been calamitous. Despite this Breslauer's polemic is that Berkeley is now more of a public university than it used to be in the fabled Master Plan era.Breslauer's contention is that UC Berkeley serves California more effectively now: our student population is more representative of its population, while our graduates contribute more to public service and the state's economic growth than ever before. He lacks historical data to substantiate any of these claims. It is not even clear what metrics could be used to establish that Cal graduates, or the research conducted at Berkeley, contribute more to the state's economy and public service than Stanford.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
There is a troubling pattern of racialized rhetoric to education activism. The latest to come to my attention is from Grant Wiggins, president of Authentic Education. He begins the short post with a definition of apartheid and ends it by making a parallel to teachers having separate eating and bathroom facilities from students.I'm not kidding:
Huh! Where is there apartheid like this now?Wiggins clearly says that he being a little provocative. He underestimates himself. In eliding the racialized history of class distinctions he is being majorly provocative in all of the worst ways. He isn't alone.In schools everywhere. Separate eating places and toilets for teachers and for students.
I have talked about how class analysis of contemporary higher education labor issues baldly ignores the racist roots of its activism. Too often the rhetoric coming from real, substantive, meaningful education activists lazily deploys racist imagery and history to evoke emotional responses. Poorly paid teachers and adjuncts are slaves, education is a new civil rights movement (as if Brown v Board wasn't both about education and the "old" civil rights movement), and teacher bathrooms are apartheid.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Cooper Union, as it has existed for the last century and a half, is dead."As we work together to find new ways to get The Cooper Union onto stable financial ground," the board chair wrote in a statement released after yesterday's unprecedented vote to impose tuition, "we will also work together to develop a contemporary mission for the institution."
Got that? The old mission has been retired, but the college still exists, so a new mission must be found.
"Despite the changes, our admissions will continue to be based strictly on merit," the statement said. And that will certainly be true, in a narrow sense, for now. But applications have already begun to fall -- early admissions requests dropped by a third this year. The imposition of tuition will degrade the applicant pool, and it will change it. The students who apply, and the accepted students who choose to attend, will become both richer and less talented.
How did this happen? There's a lot we don't know. Despite the statement's promises of inclusiveness and transparency there was no specific discussion of the board's process in the statement -- not even a vote count, much less a list of who voted which way. The Cooper Union board of trustees are not, in this sense, accountable to the Cooper Union community. One wonders how the process would have differed if individual trustees had known from the start that they would be voting and defending their votes in public.
The one trustee who did vote in public was Alumni Trustee Kevin Slavin. He published an essay laying out his intentions on Thursday, and a Facebook post discussing the meeting and the vote last night.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
What is a map? Examples of maps are common, interspersed in driving directions, visualizations, and political boundary disputes. Let's look deeper and think about the fundamental elements of maps from the eye of the creator.Maps are fundamentally composed of data. Data is in the abstract, composed of billions of points or just a few polygons, or a photo-like recording of colors and temperature. It is important that data is not specific to a certain usage.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Nobody does guilt like a Madison liberal! The president of the Madison School Board tells me that I really didn't make that. All along, I have been swimming in the water of white privilege.Much more on the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, here.I wish Ed Hughes had told me about white privilege when, growing up on the farm, I was mucking out the old barn with a shovel. I knew I was swimming in something but I didn't think it was white privilege.
Ed is an honorable public servant, mindful of the dismayingly poor unemployment, incarceration, and graduation rates among people of color here in the Emerald City.
"We white folks pretty much get to set the rules in Madison," Hughes apologizes. He meant "liberal white folks." They've been running Madison for 40 years, since Paul Soglin first became mayor. It's 50 years since LBJ's Great Society. Something besides the Obamacare website ain't workin'.
Allow this Madison minority -- I'm a conservative -- to propose a fix: If a crusading young black educator named Kaleem Caire returns to the Madison School Board with a plan for a school focused on tackling minority underachievement, give it a chance! Ed, you voted with the majority to kill Madison Prep.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
University of Florida. Nice to see the public information.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A 12th-grader wrote a college admissions essay about wanting to pursue a career in oceanography. Let's call her Isabella. A few months ago, we edited it in my classroom during lunch. The writing was good, but plenty of 17-year-olds fantasize about swimming with whales. Her essay was distinctive for another reason: Her career goals were not the highlight of the essay. They were just a means of framing her statement of purpose, something surprisingly few personal statements actually get around to making.The essay's core concerned the rhetoric that educators had used to motivate her and her peers--other minority students from low-income communities. She'd been encouraged to think of college foremost as a path to socioeconomic mobility. Since elementary school, teachers had rhapsodized about the opportunities that four years of higher education could unlock. Administrators had rattled off statistics about the gulf in earnings between college graduates and those with only high-school diplomas. She'd been told to think about her family, their hopes for her, what they hadn't had and what she could have if she remained diligent. She'd been promised that good grades and a ticket to a good college would lead to a good job, one that would guarantee her financial independence and enable her to give back to those hard-working people who had placed their faith in her.
Thankfully, Isabella decried this characterization as shortsighted and simplistic. My guess is that only students like her ever have to hear it.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
>@jimzellmer She sees "lack of focus" as problem. District "has spread itself too thin." Throws so many strategies at problem. @MollyBeckWSJ
— Scott Milfred (@ScottMilfred) January 16, 2014@jimzellmer On teaching and learning, district will now "execute on a few things & do them really well." @MollyBeckWSJ
— Scott Milfred (@ScottMilfred) January 16, 2014I'm glad to see the apparent focus on doing a few things well. This is the only way forward given the District's disastrous reading results. That said, I was disappointed when the new Superintendent largely continued the "same service" budget approach during the 2013-2014 financial discussions.
The District's 2x per student spending (above the national average) has supported numerous initiatives, likely preventing a focus on those that are truly meaningful for our students. For example, Kerry Motoviloff noted that Madison Schools Administration has "introduced more than 18 programs and initiatives for elementary teachers since 2009". Steven Sinofsky's latest is also worth reading in this context.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When a Michigan middle-school teacher was denied $10,000 in severance pay last month, the local teachers union filed a grievance against the school board on his behalf. Given the union's mission to defend the rights of educators, this would appear to be routine. Not so fast: The teacher is a convicted sex offender.Neal Erickson was sentenced in July to a 15- to 30-year jail term after acknowledging that he had sexual relations with a male student beginning when the boy was 14 years old. The school board denied him severance once he was charged. But the local chapter of the National Education Association thinks this criminal deserves his severance, which says a lot about the mindset of teachers unions, which are also trying to weaken a bipartisan bill in Washington that would help keep sexual predators out of schools.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A proposal to allow special-needs students to attend private schools at taxpayer expense is being revived, the latest effort by Republicans in the Legislature to give parents more options outside traditional public schools.The proposal is a revamped version of a measure that failed in Gov. Scott Walker's 2013-'15 budget.
That measure would have allowed 5% of students with disabilities to attend schools outside their home districts with the help of a taxpayer-funded voucher. As part of a broader compromise, the portion on students with disabilities was dropped in favor of a limited expansion of private school vouchers statewide.
The revived Wisconsin Special Needs Scholarship bill is scheduled to be introduced Tuesday by State Sens. Leah Vukmir (R-Wauwatosa) and Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), and Reps. John Jagler (R-Watertown) and Dean Knudson (R-Hudson).
The primary concern of those who oppose special-needs vouchers is that private schools are not obligated to follow federal disability laws. They point to examples in other states where -- in their eyes -- underqualified operators have declared themselves experts, opened schools and started tapping taxpayer money.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
About 14 years ago, school board candidate Michael Flores climbed into a green Plymouth Neon that was left idling outside a Middleton hotel with the keys still in the ignition.The car's owner -- whom Flores didn't know -- was inside the hotel delivering pizza when Flores drove away. Flores, who said that he was intoxicated at the time, was arrested after police found him and the car about 20 miles away in east Madison, according to court records.
Flores, who was 22 at the time, pleaded guilty in 2000 to taking and driving a vehicle without the driver's consent and was accepted to the Dane County District Attorney's deferred prosecution program for first-time offenders. After about nine months of counseling and paying back the pizza deliveryman's lost wages as part of the program, the felony charge against Flores was dismissed in 2001.
"It was a blessing in disguise," said Flores. "It really showed me how fragile freedom can be. You make a mistake and it can be the end of your life as you know it. It was very scary. I have to kind of breathe sometimes ... I still feel that. It's good to remember because it keeps you from making the same mistake."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
INNOVATION, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swept aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were.For those, including this newspaper, who believe that technological progress has made the world a better place, such churn is a natural part of rising prosperity. Although innovation kills some jobs, it creates new and better ones, as a more productive society becomes richer and its wealthier inhabitants demand more goods and services. A hundred years ago one in three American workers was employed on a farm. Today less than 2% of them produce far more food. The millions freed from the land were not consigned to joblessness, but found better-paid work as the economy grew more sophisticated. Today the pool of secretaries has shrunk, but there are ever more computer programmers and web designers.
Remember Ironbridge
Optimism remains the right starting-point, but for workers the dislocating effects of technology may make themselves evident faster than its benefits (see article). Even if new jobs and wonderful products emerge, in the short term income gaps will widen, causing huge social dislocation and perhaps even changing politics. Technology's impact will feel like a tornado, hitting the rich world first, but eventually sweeping through poorer countries too. No government is prepared for it.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Under a new rating system for Florida's state universities, schools must meet the state's definition of an excellent school to earn state funding.The benchmarks set by the Florida State University System's Board of Governors will influence who gets into the school (Pell Grant students are favored) and what subjects students study (STEM degrees encouraged).
The new system is "designed to reward university excellence and improvement and maximize the return on investment for Florida students," the Board of Governors said on Thursday.
Similar to the federal plan outlined by President Obama last August, the Florida model is intended to provide students with "a first-class education at an affordable cost, providing the best-possible opportunities for graduates to obtain and create good jobs and contribute to a successful Florida workforce," the Board of Governors said.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In a December Cap Times cover story titled "Justified Anger," the Rev. Alex Gee of Fountain of Life Covenant Church shared a first-person account of the racial discrimination he has experienced and sees all around him in Madison, and challenged our community to become concerned and involved. The story resonated with readers -- it was one of the Cap Times' best-read stories of 2013 and sparked lively discussions on social media and letters to the editor.Both the Rev. Gee and the Cap Times are moving ahead to keep the conversation going about Madison's racial discrimination problem -- and to work on solutions.
The Cap Times opinion section is running a series of columns by community members responding to the Rev. Gee and sharing their views on the way forward. This week, there are four.
Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor in UW-Madison's department of curriculum and instruction, writes that "nice" Madison is in denial about its racism. Ladson-Billings recounts how when she toured Madison schools nearly two decades ago, she predicted there would be no African-Americans in advanced math classes, and many in the "basic" science class. When she turned out to be correct, her white colleagues on the tour thought she was clairvoyant. Another striking anecdote she relays is how a diversity expert who conducted training here was rebuffed and attacked when he dared suggest Madisonians had issues with race -- the only time he'd experienced such a reaction despite delivering a similar message in numerous communities.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
One year ago today I took up my new assignment as your Purdue colleague. I did so with the deepest respect for Purdue's great history and traditions, but also in the knowledge that we have entered a period of momentous change for all of higher education, with predictions in many quarters of upheaval or even widespread failure of long-standing institutions. Fortunately, one of Purdue's strongest traditions is that of constant innovation, of continuous improvement, of steadily striving to build "one brick higher."In August, after months of consultation with faculty and other campus leadership, we announced a series of actions aimed at propelling our university further forward in both its teaching and discovery missions, and to addressing head-on many of the challenges now confronting all of higher education. Before I or anyone could devise a catchy label for the ten selected initiatives, an informal colloquialism stuck, and they have become known as the Big Moves. As a slogan, it may be pedestrian, but the ambition it embodies is not: Successful implementation would stamp Purdue as a global leader in areas that we believe fit our historic land-grant mission, and matter most to the society of today.
The Morrill Act, which Abraham Lincoln signed in 1862, committed the nation to construct new colleges with two principal goals: to throw open the doors of higher education to a much wider swath of the population, and to promote technological progress in "agriculture and the mechanical arts." At its sesquicentennial, the act's purposes are at least as relevant as at its inception. One study after another informs the nation that economic success requires thousands more engineers, scientists, and technologically adept citizens.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that formal education is what kids need to become productive, happy adults. Many parents do have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula, or more rigorous tests. But what if the real problem is school itself?The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.
Children are required to be in school, where their freedom is greatly restricted, far more than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we've been compelling them to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there's strong evidence that this is causing psychological damage to many of them. And as scientists have investigated how children naturally learn, they've realized that kids do so most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Every tennis game starts with love.Nowhere is that more evident than at FDR High School when tennis coach Bob Mayerhofer gathers his varsity players together to teach some of Hyde Park's autistic children about their favorite sport.
"Before I retired from teaching," said Mayerhofer, "I had been involved with Special Olympics and I wanted to find some way to keep helping young people with special needs."
His wishes were granted when he learned about a program known as ACEing Autism, which was started in Boston in 2008 by tennis professional Richard Spurling and his wife, Shafali Spurling Jeste, a child neurologist. The program, which is offered free to children with autism spectrum disorders, currently spans six states, including Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, California and New York.
Hyde Park's program was brought to fruition by Mayerhofer along with Lynn Forcella, the mother of an autistic child and other parents of autistic children, with support from Aviva Kafka, Assistant Superintendent for Special Education in Hyde Park. The program is one of only four active in the state. The others are located in Dobbs Ferry and Ithaca, and at Riverside Park in New York City.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Andrew J. Coulson & Jason Bedrick:
Should private schools be primarily accountable to parents or to government bureaucrats?Much more on the "Common Core", here.That's the central question the Thomas B. Fordham Institute seeks to answer in the report it released Tuesday. The institute proposes that state governments should require private schools to administer state tests to all students participating in school-choice programs, and that the results should be publicized. Any private school the state deemed "persistently underperforming" would be expelled from the choice program.
"
The Fordham Institute's recommendation for regulating subsidized private schools is dangerous."This policy is well-intentioned, but a bad idea. It isn't supported by the evidence and would be detrimental to the hundreds of thousands of students participating in school-choice programs nationwide.
First, the evidence: It is telling that the Fordham Institute cites only one study that suggests its policy "may boost student achievement." Problematically, one of the authors of that study has already publicly cautioned against drawing this conclusion, noting that his finding is "enticing and suggestive but hardly conclusive."
But even if the support of that one study were not in question, it would still only be one study. And a single study, no matter how carefully executed, is not a scientific basis for policy.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The U.S. Education Department plans to provide guidance counselors and state agencies with more information about students who are filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as the FAFSA, Obama administration officials said Wednesday at the department's so-called "Datapalooza" event.The goal is to boost the rate at which students, especially those from low-income backgrounds, complete the FAFSA.
The department will "responsibly" share data with high school guidance counselors on which of their students have begun the FAFSA so they can work with those students on actually completing the forms, according to a department fact sheet. Department officials will also share that information with state student aid agencies "early" this year, the White House announced separately on Thursday.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
For the last 15 years, I have been involved in the study and reform of academic reward systems. Academic reward systems are fascinating to study because they reflect assumptions, values, goals, and aspirations held by institutions and fields.I have studied academic reward system change in such areas as redefining scholarship, post-tenure review, stopping the tenure clock, and efforts to include ways to appraise new and diverse approaches to scholarly dissemination in the tenure process. My work has caused me to reflect on the current state of dominant academic reward systems, the assumptions that guide them, and the specific things I would like to see colleges and universities NOT do anymore, and start changing.
Universities pay a major price by not acknowledging bias and expanding their definitions of scholarship.
As a preamble to what I want us not to do anymore, I set forth the following principles. Most colleges and universities are charged with the goal of advancing knowledge within and through a diverse, inclusive community. By inclusive, I mean inclusive of both diverse individuals and diverse contributions to knowledge. Second, academic reward systems are about the valuing of professional lives and contributions. They are symbolic and concrete artifacts of what an institution values and aspires to become. Third, academic reward systems should ensure that faculty making excellent contributions to scholarship, teaching, and service should be retained and advanced. Yet, what excellence looks like in 2013 may differ from what it looked like in 1960 and 50 years from now.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
'Nonviolence . . . the most potent weapon' is the theme of this year's the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. student essay contest. The winning essays are published in this section. The contest, in its 31st year, is sponsored by the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association and the Journal Sentinel.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, is to promise that every school in England and Wales will have a teacher dedicated to maintaining order.He will say these specialist discipline teachers will be required to add simulated exercises to their training to ensure all who qualify are "classroom ready".
Hunt is known to believe that discipline is the single biggest issue that motivates most voters about education, and in an article designed to court readers of the Sun, he promises to outflank the education secretary, Michael Gove, by being tough on classroom behaviour.
"For any great teacher, at the heart of it is behaviour management and concentration in the classroom," he writes, adding "standards in our schools and kids getting jobs depend on it".
Successive education secretaries have promised to act on discipline with policies ranging from quicker expulsions of disruptive children to improved pupil referral units.
It is not clear how much substance lies behind Hunt's promise, made in a speech in which he sets out his plans for teachers to be subject to relicensing.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Rick Hess, via a kind reader's email:
Education beats across the country have been speckled with nightmarish headlines about education technology failures in schools: big iPad acquisitions gone awry, melted chargers, broken screens, and students accessing social media on their school-granted devices. It seems like we haven't had a lot to cheer about when it comes to digital learning. But who is really to blame here?Related: Madison Superintendent Cheatham's proposed $31,000,000 five year technology plan.Of course, safety, security, and smooth execution of device roll-outs are important, but implementation glitches are to be expected when a school introduces any new system -- both as devices need improving and as students, teachers, and administrators acclimate to using new technology.
Vilifying education technology is the wrong lesson. Technology is not the problem. As I point out in my new book, Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age, what's more important is how schools plan to use it.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
At the grocery store yesterday, I passed a man and his daughter in the snack aisle. She was maybe ten or eleven, a little overweight, and begging for cookies. He was tall and muscular, a blue-collar type, clearly exasperated with her. "You have no conception of how hard your mother and I work to earn money, do you?" he said. There was desperation in his voice.This brief encounter has been in my mind ever since. It reminds me of something I read over at the Seeds of Wisdom forum. Jim Anthony shared a story about how he is teaching his six-year-old the value of money. Anthony doesn't like the idea of just giving his son money -- he thought it created an "entitlement mentality" -- but he doesn't like the idea of tying the allowance to chores, either.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley:
As students spend the next few weeks completing their college applications, a question is hanging in the air: Is college worth it? It's not only students who are wondering. It's also employers who are starting to question what a college degree tells them about potential hires. Maybe a top name will suggest a student who performed well on the SATs, but the truth is that employers often have no idea what they're getting.As Carol Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, recently toldInsideHigherEd, "Our employer studies show that employers basically find the transcript useless in evaluating job candidates." The people doing the hiring these days have no idea if students can write a coherent paragraph. And the courses listed on their transcripts do not really tell employers what skills they have actually mastered. According to the Department of Education, in 2012 there were more than 1,500 academic programs students could choose for a major. That number increased by more than 350in the decade before. What employer keeps track of what those programs entail?
This problem is not exactly new and the solution has been clear to many for years. As Charles Murray wrote in his 2008 book, Real Education, "The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know and are able to do, not where they learned it or how long it took them to learn it."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In his first address to Congress President Obama argued that the U.S. needs to put far more people through college so that our economy will remain competitive with those of other nations. He set forth a goal of again having "the highest proportion of college graduates in the world."Failure to raise our educational attainment level, on the other hand, "is a prescription for economic decline."
The President's thinking is shared by many others. Economic success, both individually and at the national level, tends to correlate with education. People (and countries) with little education are mostly poor, while people (and countries) with very advanced education are mostly wealthy. Therefore, it's tempting to jump to the conclusion that partaking of more education will boost an individual's income and that a country can increase prosperity by "investing" more in education.
Resist that temptation, which is based on fallacious reasoning. True, education correlates with prosperity and economic growth, but one of the crucial lessons of logic is that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. We must apply it here.
People who have high intelligence and ambition often earn college and advanced degrees. Sometimes that formal education is important in their later success, but many say that their education had very little to do with it. Conversely, some extremely successful people dropped out of college or never attended at all. And as those ridiculous Occupy Wall Street protests taught us, huge numbers of college graduates are unemployed or employed only in jobs that don't call for anything more than basic trainability.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I'm certainly not the first Ph.D. candidate who, with the end of graduate school in sight, has wondered: If I had to do it all over again, would I still pursue a doctoral degree?The answer? Yes. But what's been on my mind lately is why that's my unequivocal response. After all, I haven't had a full-time job in over five years, and I've racked up some student debt (albeit less than many of my peers) in the process. That's something I wouldn't have been disposed to do in the first place if it weren't for my family background.
You might say advanced degrees run in my family. My mother has a Ph.D. in biology and is happily employed as a toxicologist in the private sector. Her father was a doctor; his brothers were another doctor and a lawyer. In fact, that side of my family is thick with Ph.D.'s, M.D.'s and J.D.'s. And while my dad was the first member of his family to go to college, he went on to earn an M.B.A. and worked in finance for years before ultimately turning in a more artistic direction. As a result, my parents take terminal degrees for granted--they're just a step on the way to having a career you enjoy.
After working for a few years post-college, when I felt like I could go no higher on the career ladder without an advanced degree, I entered a master's program. At the time, I thought an M.A. would be enough to get me where I wanted to go--into the upper echelons of a labor union or economic-policy think tank. But two semesters into a master's program in economics, I realized I had so much more to learn! I couldn't possibly tackle it all in a master's program. I entered a Ph.D. program, aware of the intellectual difficulty, but not fully registering what it meant to pursue a doctorate and how privileged I was to be able to do so.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
My oldest child, Emma, just returned to campus after a long holiday break to finish up her last semester of college.But even before she has put the final period on her senior thesis, friends and family have been bombarding me with one question: What is she going to do after graduation?
The job market is, after all, awfully tough. Just this month the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a study showing that "recent graduates are increasingly working in low-wage jobs or working part-time," if they're lucky enough to find work at all.
The bright spot, according to the Fed analysis, students who majored in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics--areas in which recent graduates "have tended to do relatively well, even in today's challenging labor market." But Emma is a student of the much-maligned humanities--an American Studies major with a focus on the politics and culture of food at a small liberal arts school.
For quite a while, I tripped all over myself to describe how her field of study is so trendy right now that I'm not the least bit worried she will find a decent job. "Emma's concentration and interests could lead her in any number of directions," I would tell people. "Writing for a food blog. Working at a nonprofit that improves health and nutrition for the urban poor. Managing social media for a food-related startup."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
At Best Education Degrees our mission is simple. We want to help you find the best school to help you further your career in education.Compare the states here.Whether you are a teacher or administrator or educational consultant, your goal is to get the best education you can get, given your current circumstances. Many times educators are already in the workforce and looking to learn new skills and specializations. But working full time comes with added challenges. Thankfully today's world offers many excellent options including part-time and online degree programs.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Wisconsin has 243 charter schools.Every one of them is a public school.
So don't buy the "privatization" scare tactics surrounding legislation to expand chartering options across the state. Charter schools aren't privatizing public education. They're invigorating public education by trying new approaches to learning.
Charter schools cost the public less per student than traditional public schools. They often serve higher concentrations of minority and low-income students. And they are accountable for better results.
Local school boards have authorized the vast majority of charter schools in Wisconsin. Only UW-Milwaukee, UW-Parkside in Racine, Milwaukee Area Technical College and the city of Milwaukee are able to establish charter schools without local school board support.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
These post-recession years have not been gentle on young college grads, and by now, you've heard plenty of stories about students matriculating from campus to life as a barista. But how many B.A.'s are really out there toiling in dead-end jobs? A new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York offers us an answer this week, which I think can be summed up as: Fewer than you probably think, but definitely more than we're used to.Using Census data, the bank's researchers found that, through 2012, roughly 44 percent of working, young college graduates were "underemployed," meaning they were in a job that did not require their degree. While the number sounds pretty daunting, it's not actually without precedent. It's about the same rate as in 1994.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
If you're thinking about going to graduate school, read this (Google docs non open version or .xlsx version) before you apply. It's an open spreadsheet where graduates have posted about their debt levels, why they acquired so much debt, and how they're planning to pay it off.via Karen KelskyNote that a lot of these people had funding. Before they go to grad school, people are warned that you shouldn't go unless you're fully funded (tuition paid, some sort of research or teaching stipend). And that's absolutely correct. If a Ph.D. program admits you without funding, it's telling you that it doesn't care whether you come; the program is willing to take your money, but not willing to invest in you. That means you won't have access to the opportunities and support required to have a viable career in academia.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Today is one of the worst days of the school year. They call it 'Future Thinking' day, I call it a complete nightmare. The whole school is off timetable and kids are directed to a series of 'workshops' or talks that aim to get kids to start thinking about life beyond school. It's a great idea in principle, but unsurprisingly disastrous in practice. It goes a bit like this:
Period 1: Take tutor group to a talk from the Head in the assembly hall. Listen to him talk about the importance of getting a C. Die a little inside.Period 2: Take tutor group to a 'team work' workshop, where they will carry out the types of trust exercises you might encounter on an episode of The Apprentice. Chaos ensues almost immediately and the facilitator (a poor unsuspecting woman from the real world) appears to regret ever agreeing to the gig.
Period 3: Off we go again! This time to a CV writing workshop run by the Head of PSE. Sit at the back and try not to get annoyed as name-calling, rudeness and idleness go unpunished.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Today, marks the first day in class for Georgia Tech's new online Master's degree in Computer Science program, which Georgia Tech, Udacity, and AT&T have jointly developed. This is a very big day for us. Udacity's mission is to democratize higher education. With this program, we are making a top-notch computer science education available to a much broader group of students. And we are doing this at a price point of less than 20% of an on-campus education. I believe this is a watershed moment for students around the world.We are very pleased with the application numbers for this new program. A total of 2,360 students applied within the 3-week application period. This is about 75% more than normally apply for the on-campus degree over the duration of an entire year. Of this pool, 375 have been accepted and start today and several others have deferred admission.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity eNewsletter via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):
School district employees received some encouraging news prior to winter break. Wisconsin school employees chose "UNION" by large margins. Between November 29 and December 19, 2013 the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) conducted recertification elections for over 500 local unions representing over 56,000 classroom teachers, clerical/technical workers, educational assistants, bus drivers, custodial workers and other school district employees. Over 98% of those voting, voted Union YES!Of the 39,872 total votes cast, 39,107 voted to recertify their union, with only 765 (less than 2%) voting against recertification. Annual union recertification elections are mandated by Governor Walker's Act 10. In his ruling in MTI's lawsuit, Judge Colas found requiring such elections to be unconstitutional. That decision was reversed by the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Abrahamson and Justice Walsh Bradley expressing strong dissent, in a 26 page opinion. Not surprisingly, Dane County school districts had a particularly strong showing; Monona Grove teachers had nearly 90% of all eligible voters cast ballots and, of those, nearly 96% voted Union YES. But it wasn't only the Dane County districts that voted Union. Even those school districts in largely conservative counties voted affirmatively. Waukesha teachers voted 648-14 to maintain their Union as their certified bargaining agent; Wauwatosa teachers 367-7; and West Allis Educational Assistants voted 47-1. The largest school districts in the state also enthusiastically voted Union YES. Appleton Substitute teachers voted 159-2; La Crosse Secretaries voted 40-0; Milwaukee teachers voted 3,728-35 and Milwaukee Ed Assistants voted 875-10.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Eat your heart out, Harvard. You're not as good as Northern Kentucky University.It may seem like an embarrassing admission to make in a magazine that produces the world's most influential international university rankings, but I mistrust academic league tables: I can never convince myself that there are suitable criteria for comparisons of value. I cannot bear to read the listings because rich, old and prestigious institutions exert routine, predictable preponderance. Of course, Harvard University is insuperable for wealth, recruiting power, research funding, social cachet, networking opportunities, quality of plant and for the size of the library. But if we shift focus and ask how much difference an undergraduate education at Harvard (or Yale or Princeton or Stanford or Oxford or Cambridge or any of their elite lookalikes) makes to most of their students' lives, we have to acknowledge that it probably doesn't amount to very much.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Is a college degree worth what it costs? More and more Americans are questioning the conventional wisdom that it is, as the price tag climbs while the educational value (at least for many students) falls.That isn't either a "right" or a "left" critique. Honest observers from all over the political landscape realize that to a great extent, colleges and universities are run more for the benefit of their faculty, than for the benefit of their students.
Two well-known liberal writers, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus made that point in their 2011 book Higher Education? "The schools almost function for (the professors), for their aspirations and interests. Students come and go every four years, administrators will move on, but the tenured stay on in Bloomington, College Park, and Chapel Hill, accumulating power, controlling resources, reshaping the university according to their needs," they write.
The libertarian Peter Thiel, a Stanford graduate, thinks that the pursuit of the college degree is a waste of time for bright and energetic young people. He has established Thiel Fellowships for people like that, enabling them to bypass college and start their productive careers years sooner.
But just because much of our higher education system is now a poor value for students who really want to study, we shouldn't think that worthwhile schools have disappeared. In fact, just a few years ago, a new, very small university was created -- the University of Minnesota Rochester (UMR) - that does just what a college is supposed to do.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Andrew J. Coulson and Jason Bedrick:
Should private schools be primarily accountable to parents or to government bureaucrats?That's the central question the Thomas B. Fordham Institute seeks to answer in the report it released Tuesday. The institute proposes that state governments should require private schools to administer state tests to all students participating in school-choice programs, and that the results should be publicized. Any private school the state deemed "persistently underperforming" would be expelled from the choice program.
"The Fordham Institute's recommendation for regulating subsidized private schools is dangerous."
This policy is well-intentioned, but a bad idea. It isn't supported by the evidence and would be detrimental to the hundreds of thousands of students participating in school-choice programs nationwide.First, the evidence: It is telling that the Fordham Institute cites only one study that suggests its policy "may boost student achievement." Problematically, one of the authors of that study has already publicly cautioned against drawing this conclusion, noting that his finding is "enticing and suggestive but hardly conclusive."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Universities Minister David Willetts yesterday confirmed there was no "direct connection" between the plans to expand student places and the Government's intention to sell off student debts.Appearing before the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Select Committee, Mr Willetts said the sell-off would act as "cash flow assistance", and chimed with the Coalition's plan to reduce the net debt. He noted that "if you can hold down Public Sector Net Debt, it makes it easier to have policies such as more students".
Funding the cost of expansion through the sell-off of loans, such as the 'new style' income-contingent student loans, has been likened in some quarters to a 'Ponzi' scheme. Both policies were mentioned in the Chancellor's Autumn Statement, which seemed to offset the costs of expansion of student places with the money generated by selling of parts of the post-1997 student loan book.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Given that traditional revenue streams in higher education are declining across the country, and the cost of getting an education is increasing, it is critical for students, along with their families, to make informed decisions about their academic careers. The UT System has developed this website and complementary online tool that provide valuable data about employment earnings for the first five years after graduation, as well as average student loan debt, for graduates by degree major.Even as the cost of earning a degree is rising, having a college degree has become a minimum requirement for even entry-level jobs in many fields. To finance an education, students and their families must find the right balance of available grant and scholarship aid and family financial contributions, with student loans making up the difference. Based on The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's 2011 estimate, 37 million borrowers owed $870 billion in student loan debt. And, while debt itself is not inherently bad, uninformed borrowing decisions can lead to burdensome debt loads.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
There's not much evidence showing that children learn any more effectively by way of computer screen than by way of pencil, paper, chalkboard and textbook.Related: Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham proposes $31 million, five-year technology plan.Although at the very least, the Madison School District's $31 million plan to put a tablet or netbook in the hands of every student will familiarize them with the kinds of technology necessary to function in modern-day America.
What I can't figure out is why a community as fond of wealth redistribution as Madison would want to spread some of the school district's wealth to the already wealthy.
The district has said that it's open to the possibility of students bringing their own computer devices to school. But for now, it's planning to lease new tablets or netbooks for every child regardless of his or her family's ability to lease or buy their own.
With few exceptions, this is contrary to the way the district and the community treat other student necessities -- which tablets or netbooks might soon become.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison school board member James Howard is not convinced a proposed Student Conduct and Discipline Plan will end a pattern of suspending and expelling disproportionately high numbers of African-American students."It's not clear to me that it will," Howard says. "I could never vote for a code that does not address those disparities and disproportionalities."
Howard, currently the school board's sole African-American member, is leading the board committee overseeing the revamp of the discipline plan.
The plan includes a chart that matches up examples of student misconduct with appropriate responses from teachers and school administrators. If a student's misbehavior escalates, the responses escalate as well. The stated goal of the plan is to give kids the "space to make mistakes, learn from them and receive support to make changes in their behavior."
But Howard says research shows that adopting positive behavior support models, while reducing the total number of suspensions and expulsions, does little to erase racial disparities. And while the proposed plan spells out step-by-step responses to misconduct, Howard says he is not yet convinced that component will address the inconsistencies in enforcing discipline between schools and even within schools.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In his press conference introducing Carmen Fariña as New York City's next schools chancellor, Mayor Bill de Blasio suggested that he had picked her over several other candidates because she was on the same page with him in opposing Bloomberg-era education reforms. Most of the city's education reporters took the new mayor's spin and ran with it, even though Fariña had served loyally as Michael Bloomberg's second-highest-ranking education official. Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez predicted that Fariña would now bring "revolutionary" changes to the department of education that she left in 2006. A headline in The Hechinger Report claimed that Fariña wanted DRAMATIC--EVEN JOYFUL--DEPARTURE FROM BLOOMBERG ERA. But that depends on what Bloomberg era you're talking about: during the years that she served in the administration, Fariña was fully on board with its education policies.In fact, considering Fariña's pivotal role during the first Bloomberg term in shaping the Department of Education's radical initiatives, portraying her as a dissident from within seems absurd. Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in June 2002, but he knew little about what actually went on in the city's classrooms. He appointed Joel Klein, a corporate lawyer with no background in instructional issues, as his first schools chancellor. Bloomberg and Klein deferred virtually all decision-making on classroom instruction and curriculum to a cadre of veteran progressive educators led by Diana Lam, Klein's first deputy chancellor for teaching and learning. Lam and Fariña convinced Klein to introduce the constructivist "balanced-literacy" reading and writing program, developed by Lucy Calkins of Columbia Teachers College, along with a fuzzy constructivist-math program called Everyday Math, into just about every elementary school classroom in the city. (Klein would eventually realize that adopting balanced literacy was a serious mistake.)
In an early 2003 speech presenting his administration's new education reforms, Mayor Bloomberg declared that the "experience of other urban school districts shows that a standardized approach to reading, writing, and math is the best way to raise student performance across the board in all subjects," and therefore that "the chancellor's office will dictate the curriculum." And so it did. Lam soon became embroiled in a nepotism scandal and had to resign. Fariña then took over as deputy chancellor for instruction. She became the DOE's enforcer, making sure that all teachers in the elementary schools toed the line and implemented Calkins's constructivist methods for teaching reading and writing. Teachers received a list of "nonnegotiable" guidelines for arranging their classrooms, including such minute details as the requirement that there must be a rug on the floor for students to sit on in the early grades and that nothing but student work be posted on the walls.
Balanced literacy has no track record of raising the academic performance of poor minority children. No independent research study has ever evaluated its methodology. Nevertheless, it was popular in education schools because it promulgated two of progressive education's key commandments: that teachers must abandon deadening "drill and kill" methods and that students are capable of "constructing their own knowledge." Progressives such as Calkins evoked ideal classrooms, where young children naturally find their way to literacy without enduring boring, scripted phonics drills forced on them by automaton teachers. Instead, in a balanced-literacy classroom, students work in small groups and follow what Calkins calls the "workshop model" of cooperative learning. The program takes for granted that children can learn to read and write naturally, with minimal guidance. Calkins rejects E.D. Hirsch's finding (based on an overwhelming consensus in cognitive-science research) that the key to improving children's reading comprehension is grounding them in broad knowledge, which she and other progressives dismiss as "mere facts." Calkins also believes that her model classrooms promote "social justice" for all. In an interview I conducted with her at the time the DOE selected her program, she told me that "It's a great move to social justice to bring [balanced literacy] to every school in the city."
That's what Fariña tried to accomplish in the early years of the Bloomberg administration--including the social-justice part. She was instrumental in creating the most centralized, top-down instructional system in the recent history of American public education. Agents of the deputy chancellor (euphemistically called "coaches") fanned out to almost all city elementary schools to make sure that every teacher was marching in lockstep with the department of education's new pedagogical approach. Under the rubric of "professional development," DOE central headquarters launched an aggressive campaign to force teachers to teach literacy and math only one way--the progressive way. Each of the city's 80,000 teachers got a six-hour CD-ROM laying out the philosophy behind the new standardized curriculum and pedagogy. The CD portrayed the world of progressive education writ large, with all its romantic assumptions about how children learn. In addition to inculcating Calkins's balanced literacy, the DOE's training manual celebrated the theories of an obscure Australian education guru--Brian Cambourne of Wollongong University in New South Wales, a leader of the whole-language movement (a cousin of balanced literacy) then dominating Australian public schools. Cambourne's ideas gave city teachers not only more balanced literacy (or whole language) theory, but also a warrant for social-justice teaching.
Cambourne claims that as a young teacher, he discovered that many of his poorly performing students were actually quite bright. To his surprise, almost all demonstrated extraordinary competence in performing challenging tasks. The son of the local bookie, for example, "couldn't learn basic math," according to Cambourne, "but could calculate the probability the Queen of Spades was in the deck faster than I could." Cambourne decided that children learn better in natural settings, with a minimum of adult help--a staple of progressive-education thought. Thus the role of the educator should be to create classroom environments that stimulate children but also closely resemble the way adults work and learn. Children should no longer sit in rows facing the teacher; instead, the room should be arranged with work areas where children can construct their own knowledge, much as in Calkins's workshop model of balanced literacy.
Such constructivist assumptions about how to teach literacy were enforced with draconian discipline in city schools for several years. Progressives like Calkins, Cambourne, and Fariña don't insist that more learning occurs when children work in groups and in "natural" settings because they've followed any evidence. To the contrary, as much as it tells us anything on this issue, science makes clear that, particularly for disadvantaged children, direct, explicit instruction works best. But under Fariña, reeducation sessions for teachers were meant to overcome dissenting opinion and drive home the progressive party line. To quote the directives to teachers included on the CD: "Your students must not be sitting in rows. You must not stand at the head of the class. You must not do 'chalk and talk' at the blackboard. You must have a 'workshop' in every single reading period. Your students must be 'active learners,' and they must work in groups."
As I reported at the time, some brave teachers objected. At Junior High School 44 in Manhattan, a teacher tried to point out to his supervisor, quite reasonably, that some teachers feel more comfortable with and get better results through direct instruction and other traditional methods. The school's literacy coach, sent by the DOE, then responded: "This is the way it is. Everyone will do it this way, or you can change schools."
Calkins was grateful for Carmen Fariña's efforts in advancing her instructional agenda, her career, and her organization's bottom line. (Calkins's Readers and Writers Program at Teachers College received over $10 million in no-bid contracts from the city.) Calkins expressed her appreciation in a forward she penned for Fariña's book, A School Leader's Guide to Excellence, coauthored with Laura Koch, Fariña's closest associate and collaborator at the DOE. "When Carmen and Laura took the helm of New York City's school system, teachers, staff developers, and principals across the entire city let out a collective cheer of enthusiasm," Calkins writes. She conjures a glorious history: "Within a week [of Fariña's promotion to deputy chancellor for instruction] our education system began to change. Educators at every level could feel possibility in the air; the excitement was palpable." And because of Fariña's magic, "sound practices in the teaching of reading and writing became the talk of the town--the subject of study groups and hallway conversations in every school . . . The entire city began working together afresh to meet the challenge of improving education for all children."
In reality, though, the balanced-literacy advocates failed in this task. The city's eighth-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests barely budged over 12 years, despite a doubling of education spending--from $12 billion to $24 billion. There was no narrowing of the racial achievement gap. (In sounding his tale of two cities theme, Mayor de Blasio makes no accounting for the failure of progressive education programs to reduce the academic achievement gap between poor and middle-class children.)
Recognizing balanced literacy's meager results, Chancellor Klein reverted to a system of more autonomous schools, giving principals far more discretion over instructional matters. Klein apparently came to believe that he had been misled by Fariña and Calkins. The chancellor then became a supporter of Hirsch's Core Knowledge curriculum, with its focus on direct instruction and the teaching of broad content knowledge. He set up a three-year pilot program, matching ten elementary schools using the Hirsch early-grade literacy curriculum against a demographically similar cohort of ten schools that used balanced literacy. The children in the Core Knowledge schools significantly outperformed those in the schools using the Calkins approach.
Still opposing the direct teaching of factual knowledge, Fariña recently shrugged off the pilot study, saying that not enough schools were involved. But if Fariña is serious about that criticism, she now has an opportunity to run a much larger evaluation of Core Knowledge. As a result of the city's adoption of the Common Core State Standards and of aligned curricula emphasizing the "rich content knowledge" that the standards require, 71 elementary school principals have chosen to use Hirsch's Core Knowledge literacy program in their schools.
Let Fariña visit and study those schools over the next year. If she really is committed to changing the tale of two cities, as she and the new mayor claim to be, one way to start would be to cast aside ideology and judge whether those Core Knowledge classrooms, drenched in "mere facts," are actually the key to narrowing the devastating knowledge gap between middle-class kids and poor children, who begin school with little knowledge of the world and with a stunted vocabulary. She might also find that there is at least as much "joy" in classrooms in which children get taught explicitly about the world around them as there is in classrooms in which children "construct" their own knowledge.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Pity the American parent! Already beleaguered by depleted 401(k)s and gutted real-estate values, Ponzi schemes and toxic paper, burst bubbles and bear markets, he is now being asked to contend with a new specter: that college, the perennial hope for the next generation, may not be worth the price of the sheepskin on which it prints its degrees.As long as there have been colleges, there's been an individualist, anti-college strain in American culture--an affinity for the bootstrap. But it is hard to think of a time when skepticism of the value of higher education has been more prominent than it is right now. Over the past several months, the same sharp and distressing arguments have been popping up in the Times, cable news, the blogosphere, even The Chronicle of Higher Education. The cost of college, as these arguments typically go, has grown far too high, the return far too uncertain, the education far too lax. The specter, it seems, has materialized.
It's no surprise, given how the Great Recession has corroded public faith in other once-unassailable American institutions, that college should come in for a drubbing. But inevitability is just another word for opportunity, and the two most vocal critics are easy to identify and strikingly similar in entrepreneurial self-image. In the past year or so, James Altucher, a New York-based venture capitalist and finance writer, has emerged through frequent media appearances as something of a poster boy, and his column "8 Alternatives to College" something of an essential text, for the anti-college crusade. The father of two young girls, Altucher has a very personal perspective on college: He doesn't think he should pay for it. "What am I going to do?" he asked last March on Tech Ticker, a popular investment show on Yahoo. "When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?" To Altucher, higher education is nothing less than an institutionalized scam--college graduates hire only college graduates, creating a closed system that permits schools to charge exorbitant prices and forces students to take on crippling debt. "The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That's why they keep raising tuition."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In 1978 Willis J. Stetson, known as Lee, became the dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania. The new job was quite a challenge. Penn at the time was in a weak position. In an era when big-city crime rates were still rising, its location in West Philadelphia was a handicap. Its promotional efforts took pains to point out that despite its name, the University of Pennsylvania was a private university and a member of the Ivy League, like Yale and Harvard, not of a state system, like the University of Texas. But within the Ivy League, Penn had acquired the role of backup or safety school for many applicants. "I would estimate that in the 1970s maybe forty percent of the students considered Penn their first choice," Stetson told me recently. For the rest, Penn was the place that had said yes when their first choice had said no.Stetson's job, and that of the Penn administration in general, was to make the school so much more attractive that students with a range of options would happily choose to enroll. Through the next decade the campaign to make Penn more desirable was a success. As urban life became safer and more alluring, Penn's location, like Columbia's, became an asset rather than a problem. Stetson and his staff traveled widely to introduce the school to potential applicants. When Stetson first visited the Harvard School, a private school for boys in California's San Fernando Valley, he found that few students had even heard of Penn. The school is now coed and known as Harvard-Westlake, and of the 261 seniors who graduated last June, more than a quarter applied to Penn. The Lawrenceville School, in New Jersey, and Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, have in recent years sent more students to Penn than to any other college. Colleges may complain bitterly about rankings of their relative quality, especially the "America's Best Colleges" list that U.S. News & World Report publishes every fall, but a college is quick to cite its ranking as a sign of improvement when its position rises. When U.S. News published its first list of best colleges, in 1983, Penn was not even ranked among national universities. Last year it was tied with Stanford for No. 6--ahead of Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, and Brown in the Ivy League, and of Duke and the University of Chicago.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It is no surprise, given the stakes, that education reform is now one of the major battles in American politics. Particularly at the municipal and state levels--from Washington, D.C. to Boston to Chicago--it has created upheaval not only in schools, but also in elections, as Democrats and unions have parted ways and new pressure groups have emerged to funnel cash toward candidates who espouse the reform movement's vision.All of this leaves Diane Ravitch, a historian and assistant secretary of education under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, troubled. In her new book Reign of Error, she mounts a well-documented and generally compelling case against the agenda of the "corporate school reform movement" of the last twenty-five years. She takes on its advocacy of testing and accountability as a means of raising the quality of low-performing schools; its promotion of for-profit, nonprofit, and cyber charter schools; its urge to replace professional educators with inexperienced college graduates and swap school board members, superintendents, and principals for corporate executives.
These are familiar complaints. Ravitch's particular contribution is to unpack the philosophical assumptions guiding the reform movement. Reformers' goals--higher test scores for all students and a reduced gap in achievement between affluent and poor, white and nonwhite--seem admirable. But Ravitch argues that their achievement comes at the cost of replacing both the ideal and the experience of education as a public good--provided by publicly financed, publicly controlled institutions that aspire to educate future citizens for their public responsibilities and adult lives--with an understanding of education as a private commodity chosen by parents. This commodity, like others, would be produced by rival corporations motivated by profit. Corporations would seek to educate not for the responsibilities of citizenship but for success in competitive markets. The philosophical and ideological commitment to the corporate over the public, Ravitch contends, threatens real damage not only to the education of mostly low-income children, but, more broadly, to our republic and the social compact and civil society on which it rests.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A contentious proposal to expand independent charter schools in Wisconsin worries public-school advocates because it would further reduce aid to traditional districts and open the door for more private companies to run public schools.But advocates of the bill, in a vigorous debate in Madison on Thursday, argued that's largely the point -- that it would offer more public-school options to families, as well as bring Wisconsin's charter-school law in line with other states.
There are hints that such a change is too controversial to pass the Senate, primarily because of the financial effect it could have on school districts statewide. But that didn't stop a robust, seven-hour debate about Assembly Bill 549 in the Assembly's Committee on Urban Education -- much of which revolved around differing ideologies about how to provide quality options for all in public education.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
THEODORE "TEDDY" ROOSEVELT, soldier, president and outdoorsman, once summed up his vision for America as a "doctrine of the strenuous life". Hunting lay at the heart of that doctrine: the virile business of learning to shoot straight, to track beasts through brutal heat or cold and to master "buck fever"--a nervous excitement felt in the face of prey that must be suppressed by effort of will. Years before he declined to blast a bear tethered to a tree by his hosts on a 1902 hunt, spawning admiring newspaper cartoons and the worldwide teddy-bear industry, Roosevelt crafted and promoted a "credo of fair chase".In addition to encouraging sportsmanship, his vision of the American hunt was democratic. Though he crossed oceans to shoot lions and scaled mountains to hunt bears, Roosevelt deplored Europe's elitism, with its royal forests and aristocratic estates wherein lisping sons of privilege chased their father's deer for sport. Closer to home Roosevelt and his allies were dismayed by the near-extinction of the buffalo and other species, driven by such forces as gun technology and competition for land.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Wisconsin can improve many of its educational policies to make its public school system more student-centered. Specifically, the state can do more to prioritize teacher effectiveness in decision-making and empowering parents with information and quality choices.Laura Waters takes a look at New Jersey's report card.Despite educator evaluations that include student academic growth as a significant factor, Wisconsin continues to prioritize seniority, rather than effectiveness, in its personnel decisions. Wisconsin empowers parents with choices through public charter schools and a model opportunity scholarship program that prioritizes low-income students stuck in low-performing schools. However, the state lacks a strong charter accountability framework that holds authorizers accountable for school performance. Wisconsin also does not empower parents with accessible information regarding school and classroom performance, nor does it guarantee that no student will be placed with an ineffective teacher for two consecutive years.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"When a teacher tells me they want to opt out of using technology because of their lack of comfort, it means students are not getting access to tools that have become an essential part of life, certainly of work life," Cheatham told school board members Monday. "I don't think that's fair. I don't think that's okay. We need to demand that all students have access to technology they will be expected to use when they go on to college and career."It may well be time to simply let teachers buy their own equipment via a stipend.Cheatham's remarks came at the end of a meeting where school board members heard an outline of her district technology plan, which calls for a one-to-one ratio of devices to students and teachers by the 2018-2019 school year.
"It's scary. We're asking people to think differently about the profession," Cheatham said, recalling resistance to the daily use of email by some teachers when that technology emerged. "But an adult's comfort level shouldn't be something that stops us from doing the right thing for kids."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Heather Mac Donald may be the Ida Tarbell of our age: a writer who combines a meticulous eye for facts, intellectual brilliance, a sure sense of the historical moment, and deep moral seriousness. Tarbell is famous for her History of the Standard Oil Company, serialized in McClure's Magazine between 1902 and 1904, and is celebrated today by the Left for her having struck a blow against Big Business. She even merited her own postage stamp in 2002, along with three other women journalists.It may be a while before Mac Donald wins such philatelic immortality. Like Tarbell, she is a deft expositor of the excesses of large enterprises that have grown unaccountable and corrupt. But Mac Donald's preferred topics are big city government and, increasingly, academia. The Left has a hard time coming to grips with the prospect that the latter day equivalent of Standard Oil may be the University of California.
Witness the splenetic rage of Rebecca Schuman writing on Slate. The occasion was the republication in The Wall Street Journal of an essay that Mac Donald first published in City Journal: "The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity." Mac Donald offered a fer instance of why students across the country are forsaking majors in the humanities and minimizing the number of courses they take in the traditional humanistic departments. Her essay explains what happened at UCLA in 2011, when the English Department deep-sixed its requirements in "the cornerstones of English literature" in favor of some theory-besotted junk. Schuman's rebuttal takes the form of a series of snotty rhetorical questions meant to imply that Mac Donald is a cultural ignoramus.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), a government agency in charge of the country's internet industry, has announced plans to progressively introduce software programming classes into public schools, giving students an opportunity to write code in a classroom setting. The news was first reported on Good Morning Singapore in mandarin yesterday.Related: Madison considers more hardware for schools.Given the rapidly changing nature of the technology industry, the agency hopes to roll out these classes quickly in the next few months with the ultimate aim of keeping the Singapore economy at the top.
"Infocomm technology is getting to be more pervasive, and we all recognize that it's going to be a strategic catalyst for [Singapore's] competitive advantage," said James Kang, assistant chief executive of the government chief information office at IDA.
To be sure, topics like programming and 3D printing are already available in some schools as extra-curricular activities with IDA's help, so it's unclear for now how these classes differ from previous initiatives, and how the IDA works with the education ministry to introduce the field. Tech in Asia has contacted the agency for more details.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The humanities are often represented as an irrelevant, moribund, and merely preservationist field, passing on old knowledge of old things without producing anything new. That's why it keeps having to be "defended" by people saying, "no! old shit matters too!" (It does--witness one chapter from Washington Irving's 1819-20 Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. getting rebooted yet again, this time as a goofy paranormal procedural--but this already accepts a basic misrepresentation of humanities scholarship.)Yet it's precisely the production of new knowledge in the humanities that powerfully influences the everyday lives of Americans, and which leads to pearl-clutching by those who insist on the humanities' irrelevance. David Brooks, for example, is very sad that the humanities have failed to be stagnant. He claims that humanities enrollments have substantially declined (factually untrue) since the rise of critical theory and its concurrent attention to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability in the 1980s. But the humanities didn't just turn to these categories for kicks (still less because it was "fashionable," as culture-wars critics like Alan Sokal have claimed); turning to them was the result of research. Through research, scholars found out that these categories were complicated, powerful, and important for understanding culture. Brooks seems to suppose that doing research that has a broad impact makes your field irrelevant. This is deranged.*
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
was spending time at my undergraduate school's library putting the final touches on my Masters thesis, and I stopped in to the student union for lunch. While in line, I ran into a professor emeritus that I had taken classes from as an undergraduate. He asked what I was up to, as well as asking why I was on campus a year or so after graduating. I told him about my thesis, and that I was graduating in two weeks, and he told me to submit my CV to the department chair.Two weeks later?
Masters degree in one hand and a very lucrative adjunct position in the other! This same department also went out of its way (when I was leaving!) to help me with my Ph.D. application materials.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In the past few weeks some interesting and contentious threads of discussion have been unwinding on "Academic Twitter", in particular one that's focused on the current conditions of the academic job market in the United States. It seems the debate was kicked off by a post from Rebecca Schuman at Pan Kisses Kafka blog, who criticized a UC Riverside department for the practice of sending out interview requests only five days before the interviews would take place at the annual MLA conference. This provoked a response from Claire Potter in her blog Tenured Radical, in which she insisted that there had to be reasonable explanations for the process. Potter also critiqued the tone of Schuman's post, describing it as a "hissy fit". Multiple follow-up posts ensued.After the exchange between Schuman and Potter, the flames were further fanned by Karen Kelsky's response at The Professor Is In, wherein she made a comparison between the denial of privilege by the tenured and the denial of racism by white people. The comparison is inappropriate, but Kelsky's analysis of the advantages of the tenured hit home, and it set off another intense discussion about the responsibilities of tenured faculty in a context where non-tenured peers/colleagues are working in exploitative conditions.
I think there have been a couple of things happening in this debate. One of them is the underlying issue itself - the job market and hiring practices and, at root, the culture of academe and its professionalization process. This is tied closely to the nature of the academic workforce, which in the United States now comprises over two-thirds temporary and/or contingent faculty positions (hence "New Faculty Majority"); tenure is becoming exceptional. But also emerging from this heated exchange about academic working conditions is the question of how we talk with each other, and the issue of the "policing" of people's participation in the name of civility or professionalism as illustrated in Potter's response to Schuman.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Angela K. Dills, Rey Hernández-Julián, Nathan Hale:
Listed tuition--essentially the sticker price--for US colleges has increased significantly, even after adjusting for inflation. For all institutions of higher education, that increase averages 71 percent since 1990 and 36 percent since 2000.1 Tuition has increased faster in public, four-year institutions, where the increase has averaged 126 percent since 1990 and 62 percent since 2000, but listed tuition has increased in all categories--public and private, for-profit and not-for-profit, two-year and four-year. Private schools' prices started in 1990 at much higher absolute levels, so although their increases since then have generally been lower in terms of percentage, they were often higher in terms of dollar amount.In the 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama stated that "taxpayers cannot continue to subsidize the soaring cost of higher education. Colleges must do their part to keep costs down, and it's our job to make sure they do." In the same speech, the president argued that policies such as tax credits, grants, and subsidized loans have been important policy tools to "make college more affordable." In 2007 President George W. Bush signed into law a bill that increased the maximum Pell Grant award--in order, he said, to "help millions of low-income Americans earn a college degree." 2 Both presidents failed to mention that the policies they supported could themselves have been responsible for some of the increase in tuition. Considering two effects of the subsidies--direct price reduction and higher sticker prices--at the same time is important for understanding the intended and unintended consequences of higher education subsidies.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
If you're reading this alongside the latest bargaining updates from UNB management, you could be forgiven for wondering if you'd strayed into a parallel universe. UNB management continues to assure the world that they are committed to a negotiated agreement. "Faculty are the lifeblood of any university", we are told. "We are committed to continuing to negotiate to achieve a new collective agreement," another email to students insists. Yet there has been little progress on key issues. UNB's administration seems keen on continuing, but not on concluding, the contract negotiations that began ten months ago.AUNBT has a simple response to these protestations: send a bargaining team to the table with an actual mandate to bargain.
Negotiating requires that the people in UNB management who make the decisions stop hiding in their offices and board rooms and roll up their sleeves. Merely sending a team to sit in a row at a long table day after day does not amount to negotiating. Denying that team a real bargaining mandate is not negotiating. Refusing even to discuss issues is not negotiating.
No-one strikes recreationally. Certainly not in New Brunswick in January. AUNBT is the only NB faculty union that has never gone on strike. But over 90% of our full-time members have become so frustrated with spending priorities at UNB that they are willing to take that step now. We are not willing to continue to circle the drain. AUNBT members came to UNB to contribute to a nationally competitive comprehensive university. Yet we are discovering that our work is not valued and that the current senior administration refuses to take concrete action to maintain our reputation and standing.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
All students in the Madison School District would have their own tablets or notebook computers by the 2018-19 school year under a five-year, $31 million plan proposed by Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham.Prior to spending any additional taxpayer funds on new initiatives, I suggest that the District consider (and address) the status of past expensive initiatives, including:If approved, the plan would increase the district's current
$1.5 million annual technology budget to $4.2 million in the 2014-15 school year to start upgrading the district's network infrastructure, upgrade or equip classrooms and libraries with new technology or computers, and provide notebook computers to all district teachers and administrators. Elementary teachers also would get tablet computers under the plan.
Costs to upgrade are projected to increase each of the five years of the plan for a total of $31 million spent in that time. Afterward, the annual budget for technology would be about $7 million per year going forward.
.....
Madison School Board members, who formally received the plan at their meeting Monday, were mostly optimistic about the plan. Board member T.J. Mertz questioned whether the program needed to be as extensive as it's proposed given what he said were other unmet needs in the district and given research that he called "universally disappointing" surrounding such initiatives.
Mertz said in an interview after Monday's board meeting that he agrees with the majority of the investments in technology under the plan, "but then there's a third or a quarter where I think it's going overboard."
As an example, Mertz said he questions whether every kindergarten student needs their own tablet computer.
Infinite Campus: is it fully implemented? If not, why? Why continue to spend money on it?
"Standards based report cards".
And of course, job number one, the District's long term disastrous reading scores.
Madison already spends double the national average per student ($15k). Thinning out initiatives and refocusing current spending on reading would seem to be far more pressing than more hardware.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Cooper Union Board of Trustees today managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It was a depressing and yet entirely predictable vote, which resulted in a depressing and yet entirely predictable statement.You might remember the tragedy of Cooper Union -- the way in which a unique and irreplaceable institution was destroyed by the inflated egos of overpaid technocrats. Well, after many months of outcry and outrage, a glimpse of hope appeared in December: a detailed and hopeful 54-page Working Group Report was submitted to the board, explaining how the institution could still, amazingly continue without charging tuition. Today, the board voted on whether to adopt the report.
As Kevin Slavin explains, the stakes could hardly be higher:
If the vote goes one way, a new, lean, careful Cooper Union will tiptoe forward, tuition-free. It will require equal parts deep sacrifice, wild ambition, and straightforward pragmatism. And it will uphold a 150+ year tradition of free undergraduate education.If it goes the other way, all of that will disappear. Not just the free tuition, but everything that was built on it. In its place we'll find a tragic fraud. A joke. A zombie.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
What do you say to someone who has given more than $30 million to helps schools and educators in Milwaukee?My parents taught me to say thank you. Seems like a good practice.
But it's not that simple when that someone is the Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the mega-billions heirs of Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart. Their generous, but ideological-oriented support leaves many people saying thank you and many others wishing the Waltons would go away.
The role of a dozen or so foundations with the assets to have nationwide impact in promoting change in education frequently brings out strong opinions.
The dividing line, not surprisingly, is often over ideas such as school choice, private school vouchers, independent charter schools, and the roles of entrepreneurs and teachers unions. Several of the big foundations, including Walton, strongly support what many call "reform" ideas.
You would think Milwaukee would be a primary venue for the philanthropic titans. We have the oldest and one of the largest urban voucher programs and an energetic charter school sector. But for whatever reasons, we haven't seen that much of the "billionaire boys club," as Diane Ravitch, an adamant and leading critic, has called it.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the giant among giants, put quite a bit of money into launching small high schools in Milwaukee a dozen years ago or so, leaving behind a few good schools but not too much overall. Otherwise, we've been kind of low on the Gates priority list, at least compared to some other places.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It's no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation's most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn't look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon. For starters, there's more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As an Asian male student at MIT, I fit society's image of a young programmer. Thus, throughout college, nobody ever said to me:"Well, you only got into MIT because you're an Asian boy."
(while struggling with a problem set) "Well, not everyone is cut out for Computer Science; have you considered majoring in bio?"
(after being assigned to a class project team) "How about you just design the graphics while we handle the backend? It'll be easier for everyone that way."
"Are you sure you know how to do this?"Although I started off as a complete novice (like everyone once was), I never faced any micro-inequities to impede my intellectual growth. Throughout college and grad school, I gradually learned more and more via classes, research, and internships, incrementally taking on harder and harder projects, and getting better and better at programming while falling deeper and deeper in love with it. Instead of doing my ten years of deliberate practice from ages 8 to 18, I did mine from ages 18 to 28. And nobody ever got in the way of my learning - not even inadvertently - because I looked like the sort of person who would be good at such things.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In a post-Christmas blog post my indefatigable American Enterprise Institute colleague Jim Pethokoukis points to a study that shows that no economy in the world rewards smart, skilled workers more than the United States. the study, by economists Eric Hanushek, Guido Schwerdt, Simon Wiederhold and Ludger Woessmann, and published by the National Bureau for Economic Research, quantifies the return on numeracy skills for the U.S. at 28 percent, significantly ahead of Ireland, Germany, Spain and the U.K., which range between 21 percent and 23 percent. Korea, Canada, Poland and Japan hover below 20 percent.Pethokoukis argues that the higher returns come in "economies with more open, private-sector-based labor markets." He goes on to ask, "Wouldn't this seem to argue that higher U.S. inequality -- based on pre-tax, pre-transfer market incomes -- reflects 21st century market forces rewarding ability rather than some sort of breakdown in social norms."
Sign Up for the Michael Barone newsletter!
To this (seemingly rhetorical) question I would answer "yes," and would go on to say that it tends to confirm the thesis of my 2004 book Hard America, Soft America. In it, I contrasted Hard America -- the parts of American society in which there is competition and accountability, and Soft America, the parts of American society in which there isn't. K-12 education, in my view, is part of Soft America; the competitive market economy is part of Hard America.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
After passing some of the most aggressive tax cuts in the nation, Kansas lawmakers are watching the state's top court for a ruling that could force education spending to skyrocket.The Kansas Supreme Court will determine whether the state must comply with a lower-court ruling requiring the GOP-led legislature and Republican Gov. Sam Brownback to increase annual funding for K-12 education by an estimated $450 million, or 14% above the previous year's level. The timing of the ruling is unclear, but it could come to dominate the state legislative session that opens Monday.
The court battle, which came after school districts challenged how much money the state sends to towns and cities for K-12 education, is one of several across the U.S. that have pulled judges into the fights over how much states should spend on public education.
In Kansas, lawmakers started to push back against the courts last year. The Senate passed a bill to amend the state constitution so that such decisions on education spending would be up to the legislature. To go into effect, the proposed amendment would have to win approval in the House by a two-thirds majority and pass in a statewide vote.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"The test of any particular voting scheme is the quality of the candidates who are elected under it," Hughes told me. "We currently have seven good board members. After the spring election we'll continue to have seven good board members. I don't see a problem."And here I thought that in a democracy the best test of a voting "scheme" was how well it represented the desires of the democracy's citizens.
Silly me.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The western world watches China's rise as a formidable world-power with a mixture of awe and apprehension. Sci-fi films depict a futuristic world where Baidu.com is the new Google and Mcdonalds has been replaced by Grandma Wang's Dumpling Emporium. And yet again Shanghai is number one on the Programme for International Student Assessment's (Pisa) 2012 ranking list of international education, and the US is once again at a low rank, this time 36th place. The US is desperate, and naturally the Chinese educational system seems like an answer. But let me tell you - this is not the case. I know; for two years I attended a local Shanghainese high school and this is the truth: they are terrible.The biggest problem with Chinese education? It's medieval. Shanghainese education is just like the stories my grandmother tells about high school in the 1940's. Footage of military parades in Fascist Italy share an unnerving resemblance to the morning assemblies from my school in Shanghai. Chinese education would be a poison for America, not a remedy.
The problem is that there are too many Chinese students. Shanghainese classrooms have about 40 students and in the countryside classes have over 60. The most efficient way to organize all these children is by testing, categorizing and grading them - Chinese education is essentially elitist. Students that excel in school are rewarded with prizes and encouragement, but struggling students are abandoned. I once served as a translator for the principal of my school when seven Swedish principals came to visit Shanghai. The Swedes asked what the school did for students with "special needs" and the principal answered:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
This concept, which I began to track in early 2012, built across multiple fronts in 2013. The bubble idea holds that colleges are overpriced, that student demand is questionable, and both could drop together. I have tested this concept throughout 2013 through social media and in-person presentation, using multiple trends and analyzes, and even developed an alternative model (peak higher education). My verdict now is... the bubble might be happening.A series of major trends supported the bubble concept in 2013:
College and university tuition and fees continued to rise, despite several tuition freeze experiments. This is consistent with a rising bubble, among other interpretations.
Student debt rose throughout 2013, inspiring widespread anxiety. This is also consistent with a bubble (as well as other models: consumer behavior in a captive market, and also consumers reacting to media panic, etc.)
A number of institutions took drastic steps to stave off financial crisis, including merging with other campuses, ending academic programs, and laying off faculty (I dubbed the latter two "sacrificing the queen"). These events could be advance signs of a bubble about to pop.
The number of students taking classes went down across many sectors (see "Enrollment decline" above). If this continues, then that's a sign of a bubble popping.
Some graduate programs suffered badly in 2013, most notably law schools, who saw declining revenues, applicants, graduates, and jobs.
Outside of campuses, political pressures remained steady. Some of this occurred in partisan terms, as Republicans extended their criticism of public K-12 to all of higher education, sometimes with an anti-union dimension.
Indeed, I find bubble arguments most often made by conservatives. However, 2013 also saw Democrats joining in for a full-court bipartisan press on higher education, from a presidential charge to build a new institutional assessment system to high-profile governors and mayors calling for reduced higher education fees.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The GED test, for decades the brand name for the high school equivalency exam, is about to undergo some changes.On Thursday, an upgraded GED exam and two new competing equivalency tests offered in several states will usher in a new era in adult education testing.
The GED (General Educational Development) exam was created in 1942 to help World War II veterans who dropped out of high school use college benefits offered under the GI Bill. This will be its first face-lift in more than a decade.
The revamped test is intended to be more rigorous and better aligned with the skills needed for college and today's workplaces. The new test will only be offered on a computer, and it will cost more. What consumers pay for the test varies widely and depends on state assistance and other factors.
Even before its launch, officials in many states have balked at the cost increase and at doing away with paper-and-pencil testing. At least nine states -- New York, New Hampshire, Missouri, Iowa, Montana, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine and West Virginia -- severed ties with the GED test and adopted one of the two new tests that are entering the market. Three others -- Wyoming, New Jersey and Nevada -- will offer all three. Tennessee will offer the GED test and one other, and other states are expected to decide what to do in the coming months.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Name a factoid about a college -- best party school, most military-friendly, et cetera -- and a magazine or website somewhere is probably ranking it.The implication of those measures is usually some publicity.
But a new ratings system proposed by President Barack Obama would put more than a college's reputation at stake.
The nation's colleges would be pitted against one another on measures such as graduation rates, student debt and cost of attendance under the president's proposed system, aimed at putting a rating to the value colleges provide for their tuition dollars.
Obama said the plan is intended to hold down the cost of college and steer federal loans and grants toward those schools that rate the best. The schools that come out on top could eventually be rewarded with a bigger piece of the federal funding pie.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As a young faculty member at Harvard, I got asked such questions a lot. Why did you choose this career? How do you do it? And I can't blame them for asking, because I am scared by those myths too. I have chosen very deliberately to do specific things to preserve my happiness, lots of small practical things that I discovered by trial and error.So when asked by graduate students and other junior faculty, I happily told them the things that worked for me, mostly in one-on-one meetings over coffee, and a few times publicly on panels. Of course, I said all these things without any proof that they lead to success, but with every proof that they led me to enjoy the life I was living.
Most people I talked to seemed surprised. Several of my close friends challenged me to write this down, saying that that I owed it to them. They told me that such things were not done and were not standard. That may be true. But what is definitely true, is that we rarely talk about what we actually do behind the scenes to cope with life. Revealing that is the scariest thing of all.
I've enjoyed my seven years as junior faculty tremendously, quietly playing the game the only way I knew how to. But recently I've seen several of my very talented friends become miserable in this job, and many more talented friends opt out. I feel that one of the culprits is our reluctance to openly acknowledge how we find balance. Or openly confront how we create a system that admires and rewards extreme imbalance. I've decided that I do not want to participate in encouraging such a world. In fact, I have to openly oppose it.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In an era of rising income inequality, understanding the extent of economic mobility from one generation to the next in America has never been more important. Only if there is considerable opportunity for children from disadvantaged backgrounds to move beyond their parents' place in the income distribution, may economic inequality be viewed as tolerable. This report introduces two new and flexible measures to examine upward relative mobility--the extent to which children can rise above their parents' position when compared to their peers. The report also explores various factors that might account for racial differences in upward economic mobility rates.Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and measuring family income averaged over several years, the report discusses the following key findings:
The vast majority of individuals, 71 percent, whose parents were in the bottom half of the income distribution actually improved their rankings relative to their parents. However, the amount of their movement was not large.
As a result, only 38 percent of individuals who started in the bottom half of the income distribution moved to the top half of the distribution as adults
- Only about 45 percent of those who started in the bottom half moved
up the income distribution by more than 20 percentiles relative to their
parents' ranking.- Many of those who did manage to exceed their parents' income started near the very bottom, where exceeding one's parents is not a very steep hurdle.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When people talk about how to diversify the tech field, a common solution is, "Start earlier." Rather than focus on getting women and minorities hired at tech startups or encouraging them to major in computer science in college, there should be a push to turn them on to the discipline when they're still teenagers--or even younger."It's already too late," Paul Graham, founder of the tech entrepreneur boot camp Y Combinator, said last month in a controversial interview. "What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that."
Right now, the "start early" strategy doesn't seem to be working: The students doing advanced computer science work in high school remain overwhelmingly white and male. According to data from the College Board compiled by Georgia Tech's Barbara Ericson, only a small percentage of the high-schoolers taking the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam are women. Black and Latino students make up an even lower percentage of the test-takers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Well-off students at private schools have long subsidized poorer classmates. But as states grapple with the rising cost of higher education, middle-income students at public colleges in a dozen states now pay a growing share of their tuition to aid those lower on the economic ladder.The student subsidies, which are distributed based on need, don't show up on most tuition bills. But in eight years they have climbed 174% in real dollars at a dozen flagship state universities surveyed by The Wall Street Journal.
During the 2012-13 academic year, students at these schools transferred $512,401,435 to less well-off classmates, up from $186,960,962, in inflation-adjusted figures, in the 2005-06 school year.
Enlarge ImageMaria Giannopoulos, a 20-year-old junior at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, relies on the tuition help. Darren Hauck for The Wall Street Journal
At private schools without large endowments, more than half of the tuition may be set aside for financial-aid scholarships. At public schools, set-asides range between 5% and 40% according to the Journal's survey.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In 1973, my high school, Acton-Boxborough Regional, in Acton, Massachusetts, moved to a sprawling brick building at the foot of a hill. Inspired by architectural trends of the preceding decade, the classrooms in one of its wings didn't have doors. The rooms opened up directly onto the hallway, and tidbits about the French Revolution, say, or Benjamin Franklin's breakfast, would drift from one classroom to another. Distracting at best and frustrating at worst, wide-open classrooms went, for the most part, the way of other ill-considered architectural fads of the time, like concrete domes. (Following an eighty-million-dollar renovation and expansion, in 2005, none of the new wings at A.B.R.H.S. have open classrooms.) Yet the workplace counterpart of the open classroom, the open office, flourishes: some seventy per cent of all offices now have an open floor plan.Madison's Thoreau Elementary School was originally built with "open classrooms".The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve. In June, 1997, a large oil and gas company in western Canada asked a group of psychologists at the University of Calgary to monitor workers as they transitioned from a traditional office arrangement to an open one. The psychologists assessed the employees' satisfaction with their surroundings, as well as their stress level, job performance, and interpersonal relationships before the transition, four weeks after the transition, and, finally, six months afterward. The employees suffered according to every measure: the new space was disruptive, stressful, and cumbersome, and, instead of feeling closer, coworkers felt distant, dissatisfied, and resentful. Productivity fell.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Tomorrow I will step into a classroom to begin the last semester of a 24-year teaching career. Don't get me wrong. I am not retiring. I am not "burned out." The truth is rather more banal. Ohio State University will not be renewing my three-year contract when it expires in the spring. The problem is tenure: with another three-year contract, tenure becomes an option. In an era of tight budgets, there is neither money nor place for a 61-year-old white male professor who has never really fit in nor tried very hard to. (Leave aside my heterodox politics and hard-to-credit publication record.) My feelings are like glue that will not set. The pieces fall apart in my hands.This essay is not a contribution to the I-Quit-Academe genre. (A more accurate title in my case would be Academe Quits Me.) Although I have become uncomfortably aware that I am out of step with the purposeful march of the 21st-century university (or maybe I just never adjusted to Ohio State), gladly would I have learned and gladly continued to teach for as long as my students would have had me. The decision, though, was not my students' to make. And I'm not at all sure that a majority would have voted to keep me around, even if they had been polled. My salary may not be large (a rounding error above the median income for white families in the U.S.), but the university can offer part-time work to three desperate adjuncts for what it pays me. A lifetime of learning has never been cost-effective, and in today's university--at least on the side of campus where the humanities are badly housed--no other criterion is thinkable.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Ann Cook loved the library.She spent hours upon hours during her 70 years there, reading about faraway lands, visions of the future and dramas about life and love.
As a gift to the institution that gave her so much joy, the former school teacher left $2.5 million to the Council Bluffs Public Library.
"I'm not surprised," said Mildred Smock, head librarian from 1957 until her retirement in 1992.
"She was a great reader," said Smock, who first met Cook when the library patron was a young girl. "She was in the library checking out books about once a week, very frequently. This was a long time ago, but in my recollection she read mostly fiction for pleasure."
Cook supported the library financially throughout her life, thanks in part to money inherited from her parents, who also passed on their love of books and learning to their daughter. As an adult, Cook would stop by after school let out. She taught from 1964 to 1997 at Norris and the now-closed Bancroft Junior Highs in the Omaha Public Schools system. After retirement she spent even more time at the library, volunteering with the Friends of the Library organization.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
My son Ben's language arts teacher emailed one morning this winter to tell me she is leaving Ben's school. I feel sick, but I don't blame her. Three of Ben's middle school teachers have left in the past year. North Carolina's intentional assault on public education is working. It is pushing our best teachers out.Ten years ago my family moved to Chapel Hill. A relatively low cost of living and bipartisan commitment to public education made North Carolina immensely attractive. There is plenty of historic precedent for devaluing public education in the South, and for many years North Carolina was not much different from its neighbors. In 1997 the state ranked 42nd in teacher pay. The year before, Gov. Jim Hunt had run on a platform to invest in public education. After he was elected, he worked with Republican House Speaker Harold Brubaker to focus on excellence in teaching and raised teacher salaries up to the national average in just four years. That bipartisan investment paid off. In the 1990s our public student test scores rose more than any other state's. North Carolina became known as "the education state." As recently as 2008, North Carolina paid teachers better than half the nation.
Things can change quickly, especially if you're not looking. Now, the brand that attracted us--"the education state"--sounds like a grim joke. After six years of no real raises, we have fallen to 46th in teacher pay. North Carolina teachers earn nearly $10,000 less than the national average. And if you look at trends over the past decade, we rank dead last: After adjusting for inflation, North Carolina lowered teacher salaries nearly 16 percent from 2002 to 2012, while other states had a median decline of 1 percent. A first-year teacher in North Carolina makes $30,800. Our school district lost a candidate to a district in Kentucky because its starting salary was close to $40,000. It takes North Carolina teachers more than 15 years to earn $40,000; in Virginia it may take only four. Gap store managers on average make about $56,000.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Maryland's public colleges are six months into complying with one of the nation's most ambitious college completion bills. The state-mandated push puts Maryland in a class with Tennessee, Indiana and Georgia."It represents a defining moment for public higher education in the state of Maryland," said Charlene M. Dukes, president of Prince George's Community College. "It sets a whole new tone."
A few educators said they were uneasy about the state's Legislature getting so deep in the weeds with legislation that touches on everything from dual enrollment to remediation and completion plans for each student. (See below for more details about the measure.)
Making the many required changes has been a heavy lift at times. But several college leaders said the comprehensive nature of the legislation was a virtue.
That's because Maryland's completion law, which was enacted in July, deals simultaneously with K-12, community colleges and four-year institutions. Experts say attempted completion fixes, such as improving remedial course success rates, can benefit from reaching across the various stages of public education."If we really want to deal with developmental education," said Bernie Sadusky, executive director of the Maryland Association of Community Colleges, "we have to go to the source of the problem. That is K-12."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has announced that she'll call for the end of using "value added" measures as a component in teacher-evaluation systems.Much more on "value added assessment", here.Politico first reported that the AFT is beginning a campaign to discredit the measures, beginning with the catchy (if not totally original) slogan "VAM is a sham." We don't yet know exactly what this campaign will encompass, but it will apparently include an appeal to the U.S. Department of Education, generally a proponent of VAM.
Value-added methods use statistical algorithms to figure out how much each teacher contributes to his or her students' learning, holding constant factors like student demographics.
In all, though, Weingarten's announcement is less major policy news than it is something of a retreat to a former position.
When I first interviewed Weingarten about the use of test scores in evaluation systems, in 2008, she said that educators have "a moral, statistical, and educational reason not to use these things for teacher evaluation."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A Los Angeles library plans to take its role as a place of learning a step farther and will start offering residents the opportunity to get an accredited high school diploma.The Los Angeles Public Library announced Thursday that it is teaming up with a private online learning company to debut the program for high school dropouts, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.
It's the latest step in the transformation of public libraries in the digital age as they move to establish themselves beyond just being a repository of books to a full educational institution, said the library's director, John Szabo.
Since taking over the helm in 2012, Szabo has pledged to reconnect the library system to the community and has introduced a number of new initiatives to that end, including offering 850 online courses for continuing education and running a program that helps immigrants complete the requirements for U.S. citizenship.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When newspaper editors are in the mood to run a good old-fashioned screed about the collapsing value of college, they inevitably turn to Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist who runs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. Vedder likes to argue that the financial return on a B.A. is falling, graduates are chronically underemployed, and that our profligate universities are in for a reckoning once everyone wises up and stops throwing their money away. (For what it's worth, I tend to disagree).Today Vedder and one of his students, Christopher Denhart, have upped the ante a bit for The Wall Street Journal, where they've published an op-ed titled, "How the College Bubble Will Pop." The reckoning, they say, is already upon us, as total college enrollment has fallen 1.5 percent since 2012.
"What's causing the decline?" they ask. "While changing demographics--specifically, a birth dearth in the mid-1990s--accounts for some of the shift, robust foreign enrollment offsets that lack. The answer is simple: The benefits of a degree are declining while costs rise."
It's an alluring theory. But their evidence falls apart under even the lightest inspection.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison School District (PDF):
This budget forecast and those that will follow are intended to keep the board informed as the budget development process unfolds. The forecasts also provide an opportunity for board discussion and input into important budget development issues.The word cloud is interesting, particularly in light of the District's job number one, addressing its long term disastrous reading results.MMSD's Strategic Framework establishes the direction of the school district. The framework is supported by the annual budget, which is simply the resource strategy behind the Strategic Framework. The budget process begins with a thorough review of district priorities, current spending patterns, and outcomes. The zero- based budget process requires a critical examination of all budget practices and how those practices influence resource deployment.
Based upon our budget work thus far, we believe there are opportunities to make the staffing process more responsive to individual school needs, to shift non- personnel resources from central office budgets to school budgets, and to improve budget accuracy by clarifying and simplifying account structures. We're excited to explore these and other opportunities throughout the 2014-15 budget process.Zero-based Approach to Budget Development:
A zero-based approach is being used to develop the expenditure budget. Unlike an 'historical cost' budget or a 'cost to continue' budget, the zero-based process is intended to go beyond marginal refinements of existing budgets and existing structures.For example, MMSD has used essentially the same staffing allocation process for over ten years under the 'cost to continue' approach, with only minor modifications along the way. While the existing allocation process is uniform and consistent, it can be improved by making it more responsive to the challenges presented by individual schools. The senior leadership team, with input from the principals, is assessing the staffing allocation process this month before any allocation decisions are put into motion in February.
The existing staff allocation process consists of a series of departmental layers, with separate staffing allocations for regular education, special education, Title 1, OMGE, pupil services, PBS, etc. We are hopeful that a more integrated and responsive staffing allocation process, beginning this year and refined continuously in subsequent years, will produce a more tailored fit for each school. The zero-based approach is designed to uncover such opportunities.The zero-based process also includes in-depth reviews of each central office department. We are particularly interested in identifying inter-departmental overlaps, gaps, and even redundancies. We are optimistic that this effort will produce new efficiencies and help push resources from the district office into the schools.
Strategic Priorities Drive the Budget:
The resource decisions contained in the annual budget are subject to continuous review, either directly through the zero-based budget process, or indirectly through the SIP process, district surveys, targeted studies (such as the Principal Pipeline study [PDF] and High School Reform study), and several active advisory committees. These are the sources which inform the budget development process.The Strategic Framework identifies five key priorities which are aimed at providing schools with the tools, processes and resources they need to serve children and their families better than ever before. The five priorities are: (1) Coherent Instruction, (2) Personalized Pathways, (3) Family and Community Engagement, (4) A Thriving Workforce, and (5) Accountability at All Levels.
Each of the priorities in the Strategic Framework includes a set of high-leverage actions that have cost implications. A preview of some of the major actions with cost implications, organized by Priority Area, will be developed and refined throughout the budget development process. A preview of the major actions will be presented to the Operations Work Group along with this Budget Forecast.
Related: numerous links on the District's 2013-2014 budget, here. Madison spends about twice the national average per student ($15k).
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The credential -- the degree or certificate -- has long been the quintessential value proposition of higher education. Americans have embraced degrees with a fervor generally reserved for bologna or hot dogs. Everyone should have them! Many and often! And their perceived value elsewhere in the world -- in Asia in particular -- is if anything even higher.From the evaluator's standpoint, credentials provide signals that allow one to make quick assumptions about a candidate's potential contribution to an organization and their ability to flourish on the job. To a prospective student (or parent), the value lies in assuming these signals will be accepted in employment markets and other times of social evaluation. These signals have long been known to be imperfect, but they were often the only game in town. Thus, a degree from a top university has been seen to contain crucial information about a person's skills, networks, and work habits.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Two factors have so far shielded the American university from the sort of criticism that it so freely levels against almost every other institution in American life. (1) For decades a college education has been considered the key to an ascendant middle-class existence. (2) Until recently a college degree was not tantamount to lifelong debt. In other words, American society put up with a lot of arcane things from academia, given that it offered something -- a BA or BS degree -- that almost everyone agreed was a ticket to personal security and an educated populace.Not now. Colleges have gone rogue and become virtual outlaw institutions. Graduates owe an aggregate of $1 trillion in student debt, borrowed at interest rates far above home-mortgage rates -- all on the principle that universities could charge as much as they liked, given that students could borrow as much as they needed in federally guaranteed loans.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Record-low temperatures caused by the Polar Vortex have forced schools across the country to close this week. Weather-related school cancellations tend to raise anxieties about whether we're a nation of wimps. During President Obama's first winter in Washington, he complained when his daughters' school closed for bad weather: "We're going to have to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this town." In response to this latest round of school closings, a Virginia mom sighed, "Hasn't anyone heard of gloves, scarf and a hat when it's cold?? Just bundle up--people do it all over the world. We are such wimps to cancel school."A story about a teacher assigned to a one-room schoolhouse in South Dakota in the 1880s will confirm suspicions that America has gone soft when it comes to dealing with the cold. The story is from These Happy Golden Years, the second-to-last book in Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved "Little House" series about growing up on the American frontier. It describes the protagonist, a 15-year-old teacher named Laura, traveling a half a mile in the snow to get to school:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Richard Vedder & Christopher Denhart:
The American political class has long held that higher education is vital to individual and national success. The Obama administration has dubbed college "the ticket to the middle class," and political leaders from Education Secretary Arne Duncan to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have hailed higher education as the best way to improve economic opportunity. Parents and high-school guidance counselors tend to agree.Yet despite such exhortations, total college enrollment has fallen by 1.5% since 2012. What's causing the decline? While changing demographics--specifically, a birth dearth in the mid-1990s--accounts for some of the shift, robust foreign enrollment offsets that lack. The answer is simple: The benefits of a degree are declining while costs rise.
A key measure of the benefits of a degree is the college graduate's earning potential--and on this score, their advantage over high-school graduates is deteriorating. Since 2006, the gap between what the median college graduate earned compared with the median high-school graduate has narrowed by $1,387 for men over 25 working full time, a 5% fall. Women in the same category have fared worse, losing 7% of their income advantage ($1,496).
A college degree's declining value is even more pronounced for younger Americans. According to data collected by the College Board, for those in the 25-34 age range the differential between college graduate and high school graduate earnings fell 11% for men, to $18,303 from $20,623. The decline for women was an extraordinary 19.7%, to $14,868 from $18,525.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Okay, maybe he's no shrinking violet, but it's worth taking note that almost exactly two years ago today Christie signed A-4394/S-3148, a law that gives school districts the right to bypass school budget votes if they move school board member elections to November.After years of dissent from the New Jersey Education Association and the NJ School Boards Association, the bill, mostly sponsored by Democrats in the Statehouse, passed quietly, forever changing the dynamics of school board politics and fiscal strategy. Final vote tallies were 34-3 in the Senate and 62-11 in the Assembly.
Wait: you mean school board elections used to be in April?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In October 2013, I posted an essay, "PISA's China Problem," that called on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to fully disclose its arrangement with China regarding Shanghai's participation in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The latest PISA scores were to be released in December, offering an excellent opportunity for the OECD to dispel the mystery surrounding Shanghai's 2009 involvement with PISA. I noted that Shanghai, the wealthiest, most educated province in China, was the only mainland province officially participating in PISA 2009 and PISA 2012. Other data from rural areas of China had been talked about by PISA officials over the years, but never released to the public domain. I called on PISA to release those data.When the latest PISA scores came out in December, nothing had changed. I followed up with a second essay. I again urged full transparency. I also challenged PISA's portrayal of Shanghai as a "high equity" school system. An extensive literature--including excellent journalism and both qualitative and quantitative scholarship--documents the cruel effects of the hukou system on migrants in Shanghai. Hukou is an internal registration system in China that limits rural migrants' access to urban public services, in particular, to schools. These migrants are Chinese citizens, mind you, not immigrants from other countries. They have simply moved from rural areas to China's big cities, or, because the hukou is inherited, they were born in one of China's big cities but because of their family's rural hukou, have become second generation migrants in the eyes of the state.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Last week, I wrote that collectively, faculty need to deal with the terrible market for professorships by producing fewer potential professors: admitting a lot fewer students to graduate school. Graduate school doesn't exploit students the way that, say, a third-tier law school program does -- the students are paid, not paying vast sums for degrees they can't use. But by wildly overproducing graduate students, academia is doing something just as bad, in a different way: encouraging overoptimistic (OK, maybe arrogant) kids to spend their formative years in the labor market pursuing jobs they aren't so likely to get, then hiring the excess students as essentially casual labor at low wages.There are two criticisms I've received that seem worth responding to. The first is that I myself work in a profession that looks a lot like a tournament: a lucky few at the top, and a lot of hopefuls who don't make it. That's absolutely true. But I don't encourage young people to seek jobs in the profession; I tell them the math is terrible and getting worse, and they should do something else. The economics of the industry are very bad, unless you are lucky enough to work for a place like Bloomberg News, which doesn't depend on advertising. I certainly don't get paid to train them for journalism jobs that they probably won't get.
That said, most people don't spend five or six or eight years just preparing to be eligible to get a job in journalism, and an additional four years or so cycling through post-docs before it becomes clear that that journalism job isn't going to happen. Nor, when they are six years into their first permanent job, do they have a committee that meets to decide whether to fire them and put them back on the job market, quite possibly with very poor prospects. They don't have to move to towns in the middle of nowhere or give up relationships because their partners will never be able to find work in the Ozarks. Female journalists do not have to put off starting a family until they're pushing 40 because it would be insane to reproduce before the tenure committee approves them. The opportunity costs of trying to become a journalist are quite a bit lower than the opportunity costs of trying to become an academic.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
AMERICAN students are enrolling in college in record numbers, but they're also dropping out in droves. Barely half of those who start four-year colleges, and only a third of community college students, graduate. That's one of the worst records among developed nations, and it's a substantial drain on the economy. The American Institutes for Research estimates the cost of those dropouts, measured in lost earnings and taxes, at $4.5 billion.Incalculable are the lost opportunities for social mobility and the stillborn professional careers.
There's a remedy at hand, though, and it's pretty straightforward. Nationwide, universities need to give undergraduates the care and attention akin to what's lavished on students at elite institutions.
If that help is forthcoming, graduation rates more than double, according to several evaluations of an innovative program at the City University of New York's community colleges.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A Youth Misery Index that measures young Americans' woes has skyrocketed under President Barack Obama and hit an all-time high.The index, released Wednesday, was calculated by adding youth unemployment and average college loan debt figures with each person's share of the national debt. While it has steadily grown over the decades, under Obama the figure has shot up dramatically, from 83.5 in 2009 to 98.6 in 2013.
The index has increased by 18.1 percent since Obama took office, the highest increase under any president, making Obama the worst president for youth economic opportunity, according to the nonprofit that released the figure.
"Young people are suffering under this economy," said Ashley Pratte, program officer for Young America's Foundation, which developed the index and calculates it annually using federal statistics. "They're still living in their parent's basements, unable to find full-time jobs that pay them what they need in order to pay back their debt."
Youth unemployment in 2013 was 16.3 percent, and student loan debt came in at a record-breaking average of $29,400 last year, the foundation points out; what's more, each person's share of the roughly $17 trillion dollar national debt stands at its highest level ever: $52,948.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity eNewsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email:
MTI represents nearly 3,000 teachers in the Madison Metropolitan School District. Of that number, over 96% are members of their Union. That number has been rising since Governor Walker, as he described it, "dropped the bomb" on public employees and collective bargaining almost three years ago.However, there are currently several hundred MMSD employees in the teacher bargaining unit who are not members of MTI. They choose to be "fair share" contributors - that is, they pay a maintenance fee to the Union for all of the rights and benefits MTI has negotiated for them and provides to them, even though they are not members of their Union. These individuals have no voice in what issues MTI pursues; how MTI is governed; and can't vote on MTI contracts, or in the election of MTI officers.
Faculty Representatives in each school and work location receive, on a monthly basis, updated lists of members and fair share contributors. What can you do? Share this article with fair share teachers at your work location, and have a discussion about the many rights and benefits MTI has negotiated on their behalf over the last 45 years, e.g., a never-ending salary schedule, health, dental and life insurance, due process, retirement, TERP, leaves of absence, paid sick leave, paid holidays and FMLA integration, to name a few.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Greg Noll, a senior at Columbia University, balances his engineering major with a federally subsidized "work-study" job at the university's fitness center, where he fills spray bottles, wipes sweat off the machines, and picks up towels for twenty hours a week. The $9-an-hour wage he's paid is underwritten by the federal work-study program, which was launched in 1964 to support low-income students who would not otherwise be able to afford college.While Noll and his counterparts at Columbia and other pricey, top-tier private colleges and universities no doubt benefit from the program--Noll says he uses the money to buy books and food and to go out with his friends on the weekends--they are not necessarily the intended recipients of aid from the $1.2 billion federal program. Noll's family, for instance, makes $140,000 a year, which he says, rightly, puts them squarely in the upper-middle class. In fact, researchers at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, have found that only 43 percent of students who receive work study meet the federal definition of financial need as determined by whether they also receive Pell Grants. Work study "disproportionately benefits the students who need it the least," says Rory O'Sullivan, research and policy director at the youth advocacy organization Young Invincibles.
A major source of the problem stems from the fact that the work-study program uses a fifty-year-old formula to determine how federal funds are allocated. Unlike other federal financial aid programs that distribute money according to how many students at a university actually need aid, money for the work-study program is based instead on how much a university received the previous year, and how much it charges for tuition.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Higher education may seem like a different world, but universities in many ways have been working from the same playbook.
Savvier college-bound consumers know that the so-called "sticker price" of tuition and fees at a given college or university isn't what many - or even most - students pay.Take American University, where 74 percent of full-time freshmen got a grant or scholarship - essentially, a discount off the list price - for the 2011-2012 school year. Or Drexel University, where that figure was 98 percent.
At nearly 200 schools, 100 percent of full-time freshmen got a scholarship, as DePaul University's Jon Boeckenstedt points out.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"TO read a novel is a difficult and complex art," Virginia Woolf wrote in a 1925 essay, "How to Read a Book." Today, with our powers of concentration atrophied by the staccato communication of the Internet and attention easily diverted to addictive entertainment on our phones and tablets, book-length reading is harder still.It's not just more difficult to find the time and focus that a book demands. Longstanding allies of the reader, professionals who have traditionally provided guidance for those picking up a book, are disappearing fast. The broad, inclusive conversation around interesting titles that such experts helped facilitate is likewise dissipating. Reading, always a solitary affair, is increasingly a lonely one.
A range of related factors have brought this to a head. Start with the publishing companies: Overall book sales have been anemic in recent years, declining 6 percent in the first half of 2013 alone. But the profits of publishers have remained largely intact; in the same period only one of what were then still the "big six" trade houses reported a decline on its bottom line. This is partly because of the higher margins on e-books. But it has also been achieved by publishers cutting costs, especially for mid-list titles.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Name a factoid about a college -- best party school, most military-friendly, et cetera -- and a magazine or website somewhere is probably ranking it.The implication of those measures is usually some publicity.
But a new ratings system proposed by President Barack Obama would put more than a college's reputation at stake.
The nation's colleges would be pitted against one another on measures such as graduation rates, student debt and cost of attendance under the president's proposed system, aimed at putting a rating to the value colleges provide for their tuition dollars.
Obama said the plan is intended to hold down the cost of college and steer federal loans and grants toward those schools that rate the best. The schools that come out on top could eventually be rewarded with a bigger piece of the federal funding pie.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As Mark Twain famously wrote, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." His point? Strong writing is lean writing.When you want to make your writing more powerful, cut out words you don't need--such as the 10 included in this post:
1. Just: The word "just" is a filler word that weakens your writing. Removing it rarely affects meaning, but rather, the deletion tightens a sentence.
2. Really: Using the word "really" is an example of writing the way you talk. It's a verbal emphasis that doesn't translate perfectly into text. In conversation, people use the word frequently, but in written content it's unnecessary. Think about the difference between saying a rock is "hard" and "really hard," for example. What does the word add? Better to cut it out to make your message stronger.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Stephanie Simon & Maggie Severns:
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor vowed Wednesday to protect and promote school choice programs and attacked Democratic politicians, including New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, for seeking to block the growth of charter schools and voucher programs.Long an advocate of school choice, Cantor used a speech at the Brookings Institution to vow that Republicans would defend what he called an "education revolution" that has shifted power away from traditional public schools and put it in the hands of parents. Many states now allow parents to get tax-funded vouchers to send their children to private or parochial schools or chose from an array of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
If there was going to be major action to reduce the $1 trillion in student debt--or at least the rate at which it's increasing--it probably should have happened by now.
The conventional wisdom going into the election was that President Obama and the Democrats would have to galvanize the youth vote if they wanted a repeat of 2008. With nearly 20 percent of families, and 40 percent of young families, owing a slice of the education debt, the issue affects a large and growing constituency. And because existing student loan policy is so anti-student and pro-bank, Democrats could have proposed a number of commonsense, deficit-neutral reforms, even reforms that would have saved the government money. The stars were aligned for a major push.Remarkably, it didn't happen. Instead we saw dithering, half-measures, and compromises meant to reassure voters that politicians were aware of their suffering and that something was going to be done. The moves that were implemented did not address the core problem: the amount of money debtors will have to pay. For example, President Obama claimed credit for delaying a doubling of interest rates on federal loans from 3.4 to 6.8 percent, while, at the same time, ending interest grace periods for graduate and undergraduate students. The first measure is temporary and is expected to cost the government $6 billion; the second is permanent and will cost debtors an estimated $20 billion in the next decade alone. Despite his campaign rhetoric, President Obama has overseen an unparalleled growth of student debt, with around a third of the outstanding total accruing under his watch.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Mary C. Tillotson, via a kind reader:
California's laws surrounding teacher tenure, dismissal, and layoffs violate the state's constitution -- specifically, students' right to an equal opportunity to access quality education -- say nine students suing the state. The trial is set to begin Jan. 27.If they win, the effects could ripple across the country.
"I think any time that you see a genuine reform in California, you empower reformers everywhere in the country who realize if you can actually fix something like that in California, you can fix it anywhere," said Ed Ring, executive director of the California Public Policy Center.
Plaintiffs argue that minority and poor students are most in need of effective teachers and least likely, in California, to be taught by them.
"Research has shown that inside the school building, nothing matters more than the quality of the teachers," said Sandi Jacobs, vice president for National Council on Teacher Quality. "An effective teacher and a highly effective teacher make a really significant difference in the trajectory of their students, and the same is true in the negative capacity for an ineffective teacher."
Other factors, like parents' level of education, are also correlated with student performance, but as far as factors schools can control, teacher quality matters more than any other variable, she said.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Having asked their national affiliates for permission, the Wisconsin Education Association Council and AFT-Wisconsin finalized the founding documents of a new merged state teachers' union, to be called Wisconsin Together.The representative bodies of both unions will vote on a new constitution and by-laws in April. If approved, the merger will go into effect on September 1.
AFT-Wisconsin has posted the full text of the documents on its web site, but here are a few of the highlights:
While Wisconsin Together will come into being in September 2014, it will have a two-year transition period during which the current WEAC president and the AFT-Wisconsin president will act as co-presidents.
One of the major differences between NEA affiliates and AFT affiliates is that the former practice term limits for executive officers while the latter do not. The new representative body of Wisconsin Together will decide the issue after September 2016.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Thomas Snyder & Sally Dillow (PDF):
The data in this volume were obtained from many different sources--including students and teachers, state education agencies, local elementary and secondary schools, and colleges and universities--using surveys and compilations of administrative records. Users should be cautious when comparing data from different sources. Differences in aspects such as procedures, timing, question phrasing, and interviewer training can affect the comparability of results across data sources.Most of the tables present data from surveys conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) or conducted by other agencies and organizations with support from NCES. Some tables also include other data published by federal and state agencies, private research organizations, or professional organizations. Brief descriptions of the surveys and other data sources used in this volume can be found in Appendix A: Guide to Sources. For each NCES and non-NCES data source, the Guide to Sources also provides information on where to obtain further details about that source.
Data are obtained primarily from two types of surveys: universe surveys and sample surveys. In universe surveys, information is collected from every member of the population. For example, in a survey regarding certain expenditures of public elementary and secondary schools, data would be obtained from each school district in the United States. When data from an entire population are available, estimates of the total population or a subpopulation are made by simply summing the units in the population or subpopulation. As a result, there is no sampling error, and observed differences are reported as true.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Lourdes del Castillo de Rumié, 77 years old and practically vibrating (because there is so much left to do!), thinks she may have found the secret to joyous old age: PowerPoint.Yes, that PowerPoint: legendary time drain of consultants, bureaucrats and generals -- the software that never fails to make simple things more complicated. But Mrs. del Castillo de Rumié has found that what makes it tedious for the young makes it marvelous for the ripened. After all, when you are old, though you lack for years ahead, you have all the hours in the world.
Mrs. del Castillo de Rumié wants to tell any older person she can to take the path she did a year and a half -- and 175 or so PowerPoint presentations -- ago, after many fulfilling decades baking wedding cakes and teaching informal art history classes to adults from her home in this lush Caribbean city. "You're going to find so much happiness before you die," she said.
She traces her late blossoming as a PowerPoint evangelist to bank visits in which the teller would ask for her email address. It was humiliating to confess she didn't have one.
That bitter feeling is where the encounter with technology so often ends for the well-aged. It might have for Mrs. del Castillo de Rumié, too, had it not been for a friend whom she considered truly old.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
An updated list of sites that offer free public domain books in electronic and audio format.Every year new publications enter public domain. That means their intellectual property rights have expired or are not applicable any longer.
The content of these works becomes available for public use. Anyone is free to use it - but also to reuse it, for instance publish a new edition. Therefore you may find in major ebookstores (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBook Store, or Google Play Books) public domain books that are not free.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
People of all political persuasions have identified significant problems plaguing the American system of higher education. President Obama outlined some reform ideas during a back-to-school tour of New York and Pennsylvania colleges. But Ohio University economist Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, believes the president's proposals fall short in some important ways. During a visit to the Triangle, Vedder discussed higher education challenges with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)Kokai: We have heard quite a bit about this issue of what's wrong with higher ed, especially [when] the president made a big deal out of this. ... First of all, you think that some of his ideas made some sense.
Vedder: Yeah, the president said one or two very sensible things. He said we need more transparency in higher education. That is to say people should have better information about the decisions they make. I don't see how one could reasonably disagree with that. Indeed the federal government does have some data available that it could make available, such as earnings data on graduates. There's a decent argument that can be made that that should be provided. So that part of his remarks didn't bother me at all.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison School Board filings are in: Michael Flores and Wayne Strong in race for Seat 6. Board president Ed Hughes runs unopposed for 7.
— Molly Beck (@MollyBeckWSJ) January 7, 2014acing reduced membership, revenue and political power in the wake of 2011 legislation, Wisconsin's two major state teachers unions appear poised to merge into a new organization called Wisconsin Together.The merger would combine the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state's largest teachers union, and AFT-Wisconsin, a smaller union that includes technical college, higher education and state employees, according to new draft documents.
At the same time, a national educators group that promotes itself as an alternative to unions -- and has the backing of some conservative-leaning organizations -- is picking up new members in Wisconsin.
The developments underscore the changing landscape for Wisconsin teachers unions since the passage of Act 10, which limits collective bargaining and makes it more difficult for unions to collect dues.
After Act 10, WEAC has lost about a third of its approximately 98,000 members and AFT-Wisconsin is down to about 6,500 members from its peak of approximately 16,000, leaders of both organizations have reported.
According to their most recent federal tax filings, WEAC collected about $19.5 million in dues in 2011, and AFT-Wisconsin collected about $2 million. Both have downsized staff and expenses.
The initial governance documents of Wisconsin Together, which include a transition document, constitution and bylaws, have been posted on AFT-Wisconsin's website for members of both organizations to peruse. A final vote on whether to merge will be taken at a special joint assembly in Green Bay on April 26.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
David DesRoches, via a kind reader:
Darien's issues have highlighted a special education flaw that exists across the state and nation. The question over what is appropriate has drawn a deep divide among residents. Parents from several states and Connecticut towns have contacted The Times, saying that Darien's problems happen everywhere, and in most cases, the problems are worse.Sue Gamm, the Chicago attorney hired by the Board of Education to investigate how deep the special education problems went, told The Darien Times that her work in town was the most difficult job in her 40-plus year career. Gamm formerly was a top administrator for Chicago Public Schools and a division director for the U.S. Office of Civil Rights. She has performed similar duties in more than 50 school districts across the United States.
John Verre, the man charged with overhauling Darien's special education program, has also noted the difficult challenge Darien presents.
"Darien is a particularly challenging combination of problems," Verre told The Times shortly after he was hired in October. "It compares to the most challenging situation I've ever found."
A number of people have resigned from their top-earning positions, including the schools' superintendent, Steve Falcone, along with Matt Byrnes, a former assistant superintendent, Dick Huot, the finance director, and Antoinette Fornshell, the literacy coordinator. Most recently, one of the people who has been consistently named as having contributed to the illegal special education program, Liz Wesolowski, announced to fellow staff members she was leaving Darien for a position with Shelton Public Schools.
Fornshell and Wesolowski played key roles in the implementation of the district's SRBI program, which Gamm criticized for its lack of data and poor implementation due to staff being poorly trained. There was also no manual for SRBI, which is an intervention program designed to give children extra help if they fall behind in their class work. It's intended to prevent children from needing more expensive special education services, but critics say it is more often used to delay providing special ed to children with legally-defined disabilities.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
For the past 31 years, since I stumbled across amazing things happening at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, my main topic as an education writer has been schools whose low-income students have been raised to unexpected heights of academic achievement. There are many schools in the Washington area that have done that. What about those that haven't?By my count, in about 20 predominantly low-income high schools in the District and Prince George's County, the passing rates on Advanced Placement exams have been stuck below 10 percent. Yet other high schools full of impoverished kids in those same two school districts have done better on the challenging college-level tests.
Why are some succeeding and others not?
The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has released a remarkable study answering these questions from a national perspective. It found six districts among contenders for its annual Broad Prize for Urban Education where black students in AP "were improving passing rates quickly enough to gain on their white peers while increasing or keeping participation levels steady." They were: Cobb County and Fulton County in Georgia, the Garland Independent district in Texas, Jefferson County in Kentucky, Orange County in Florida and the San Diego Unified district in California. The researchers identified four reasons for their success:
1. Searching for more academic talent: In many cases, this meant enlarging gifted programs for younger students far beyond the designations based on high IQ scores that most districts use. In Fulton County, the settlement of a court-ordered desegregation plan in the early 2000s included a big expansion. The district went from two to 58 elementary schools with gifted-education teachers, and from 300 to almost 2,000 elementary school students getting gifted services.
2. Giving more high school students access to challenging courses: A surprising finding, at least to me, was that the move to smaller high schools in some urban districts reduced the variety of course offerings, including AP. I know of some small charter high schools that have plenty of AP courses, but I can see how smaller schools in big districts might be shortchanged. The researchers said: "San Diego has opened several small schools and is now moving back to large ones in part because of the lack of opportunities for specialized courses." The districts doing well with AP tend to give PSAT tests to all students to identify the many who are overlooked for AP but whose test scores show they are ready. The researchers said that approach is based on this fact: "A College Board study showed only a 0.28 correlation between AP exam passage and grade point average, while the correlation with PSAT scores was 0.5 to 0.7."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Wrights Law, via a kind reader:
Wrightslaw Special Education Law and Advocacy Training Conference, a Wrightslaw training program featuring Pete Wright, Esq., is being sponsored and organized by ParSEC Wisconsin, LLC., with Co-sponsors Integrated Development Services (IDS), Walbridge School, The Law Center for Children & Families and Wisconsin Family Ties. This is the first Wrightslaw conference in the state of Wisconsin!
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Today we look at the first signs of collapse in the business model of America's universities. The For More Information section has a wealth of information about the crisis in education (and links to posts about the crisis in journalism).Structural Change
More education as a solution for America
The universities act like vampires, bleeding their students
The law of supply and demand strikes back
Articles about the collapse of universities
For More Information
More education as a solution for AmericaDecades of falling real wages has sparked a frantic scramble by youth (and increasing numbers of older people) for undergraduate and advanced degrees. In July 2009 I wrote that this made sense for an individual -- but could not work for a nation, and would not end well.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
We'd all like to absolve our children of their bad behavior by blaming it on some pernicious influence or other. As Howard Gardner and Katie Davis document in "The App Generation," there is plenty to forgive. They examine data showing that children have become less empathetic and more socially isolated, less imaginative and more hesitant to take risks.Yet the authors make a common mistake. Like many others, they assume that because kids spend so much time with their gadgets, these are crucially important to children's psychology and can explain all of their behavior. At times our phones (and not just our kids') may indeed seem to reflect our quirks and our weaknesses, but if they do, the most natural explanation is that our weaknesses have shaped the technology's development, not the other way around.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Montgomery County schools officials plan to survey students taking high school final exams in math next week about how they think about and prepare for the biggest test of the semester, as school leaders explore the causes of steep failure rates on the countywide tests.The officials say they still have no clear answers for why a majority of 30,000 high school students in the high-performing district failed their finals in key math courses last year. The low grades came to public attention as data about the tests circulated in the spring, underscoring a problem that had gone on for years.
A work group studying the issue will make recommendations by March, said Erick J. Lang, associate superintendent for curriculum and instructional programs. A report was expected in November, but the issue has not been easy to unravel, he said.
Some parents and educators have suggested that the problem might be that students have been advanced too quickly in math courses or that they lack academic support. Many blame grading policies that leave students assuming that the test will not affect their course grades.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As public schools nationwide embrace instruction via iPads, laptops and other technologies, many are realizing they lack the necessary broadband speed to perform even simple functions. This is crimping classroom instruction as more teachers pull lesson plans off the Internet and use bandwidth-hungry programming such as video streaming and Skype.An estimated 72% of public schools have connections that are too slow to take full advantage of digital learning, according to EducationSuperHighway, a nonprofit that tests school broadband speeds and works to upgrade Internet access. The average school has about the same speed as the average American home, while serving 200 times as many users, according to the Obama administration. Expanding high-speed Internet in schools involves upgrading wiring, expanding Wi-Fi capabilities or simply spending more money to purchase faster service.
Adding to the worries: 45 states and the District of Columbia adopted the new Common Core math and reading standards and most will take the new online assessments in the 2014-15 school year. The test results will be used to evaluate teachers, make student promotion and graduation decisions and rate schools.
"Just as people are getting excited about the power of what the Internet offers to students and teachers, they are running into the buzz saw of infrastructure," said Evan Marwell, CEO of EducationSuperHighway.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As a former member of the Common Core Validation Committee and the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, I am one of the few mothers to have heard the full sales pitch for this latest educational reform, which has been adopted by 45 states.I know the Common Core buzz words, from "deeper learning" and "critical thinking" to "fewer, clearer, and higher standards." It all sounds impressive, but I'm worried that the students who study under these standards won't receive anywhere near the quality of education that children in the U.S. did even a few years ago.
President Obama correctly noted in September 2012 that "leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today--especially in science, technology, engineering and math." He has placed a priority on increasing the number of students and teachers who are proficient in these vital STEM fields. And the president's National Math and Science Initiative is strongly supported by people like Suzanne McCarron, president of the Exxon Mobil XOM -0.24% Foundation, who has said she wants to "inspire our nation's youth to pursue STEM careers by capturing their interest at an early age."
Yet the basic mission of Common Core, as Jason Zimba, its leading mathematics standards writer, explained at a videotaped board meeting in March 2010, is to provide students with enough mathematics to make them ready for a nonselective college--"not for STEM," as he put it. During that meeting, he didn't tell us why Common Core aimed so low in mathematics. But in a September 2013 article published in the Hechinger Report, an education news website affiliated with Columbia University's Teachers College, Mr. Zimba admitted: "If you want to take calculus your freshman year in college, you will need to take more mathematics than is in the Common Core."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Public schools in this Appalachian town pocked with shuttered factories and vacant storefronts got an average of $8,362 to spend on each student's education in 2013, the least they had gotten in five years.Locally, Madison plans to spend about $15k/student during the 2013-2014 school year.Several hours away, at the public K-8 school in the wealthy Jefferson County suburb of Anchorage, revenue rose slightly to $19,927 per student, more than twice as much as Barbourville's.
Everything looks better in Anchorage: teachers' salaries and experience levels, class sizes, textbooks, computer access, test scores and the future in general. After eighth grade, Anchorage students can go to a number of fine private academies. Or, if their parents desire, they can bypass Louisville's sometimes troubled urban classrooms for public high school in affluent Oldham County, 10 miles down the road.
"The model we have here is really working," said Anchorage school superintendent Kelley Ransdell.
In Barbourville, the locals are proud of their independent "city school," as they call it, a small campus enrolling about 700 mostly poor children from preschool to 12th grade. But they don't fool themselves about where it ranks.
There's no money for pay raises and little for arts programs unless parents raise it themselves. There are a handful of desktop computers, outdated in the iPad era. There's no state aid for textbooks, so the books on hand are few, old and worn. When new books became essential last year to teach modern "division math" at the elementary school, officials lifted $19,276 from the building repair fund.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
So much about education, from the classroom to the textbook has changed, largely due to educators setting a clear vision for the future. What initially began as a lecture-based style of teaching in the days of Greek philosophers has moved past teaching solely from the question and answer format. Engagement and creativity have found their way into the classroom, pushing students to think critically rather than just absorb knowledge. And in a world of iPads and Google Glass, educators too have had to find new ways to teach and adapt over the years, but the box can be pushed further if we allow it. We know the goal of all educators is to enhance the learning process, but can that goal be furthered by looking at new ways to approach classroom learning? The tried-and-true principles that have created the fundamentals of what a classroom education means are vital, but can also drive us into new ways to examine the educational process, rethink the concept of learning and forge new pathways for higher education success.So how do we get to that next step of educational innovation? We as educators must build upon the current framework that drives our teaching and create a new space for innovation to take place. Consider today's higher education framework, which revolves around the goal of engaging students in critical thinking, inquiry and thoughtful discussion. The method itself opens the door to creativity, illuminates ideas and stimulates conversation that may have never been considered. But are we satisfied with stopping there, or are we ready to take the next step in engaging students in the classroom, from where they live, where they work and in perspective to how they learn?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The district provided a comprehensive extended learning summer school program, K-Ready through 12th grade, at ten sites and served 5,097 students. At each of the K-8 sites, there was direction by a principal, professional Leopold, Chavez, Black Hawk and Toki, and oral language development was offered at Blackhawk and Toki. The 4th grade promotion classes were held at each elementary school, and 8th grade promotion classes were held at the two middle school sites.Jennifer Cheatham:Students in grades K-2 who received a 1 or 2 on their report card in literacy, and students in grades 3-5 who received a 1 or 2 in math or literacy, were invited to attend SLA. The 6-7 grade students who received a GPA of 2.0 or lower, or a 1 or 2 on WKCE, were invited to attend SLA. As in 2012, students with report cards indicating behavioral concerns were invited to attend summer school. Additionally, the summer school criterion for grades 5K-7th included consideration for students receiving a 3 or 4 asterisk grade on their report card (an asterisk grade indicates the student receives modified curriculum). In total, the academic program served 2,910 students, ranging from those entering five-year-old kindergarten through 8th grade.
High school courses were offered for credit recovery, first-time credit, and electives including English/language arts, math, science, social studies, health, physical education, keyboarding, computer literacy, art, study skills, algebra prep, ACT/SAT prep, and work experience. The high school program served a total of 1,536 students, with 74 students having completed their graduation requirements at the end of the summer.
All academic summer school teachers received approximately 20 hours of professional development prior to the start of the six-week program. Kindergarten-Ready teachers as well as primary literacy and math teachers also had access to job embedded professional development. In 2013, there were 476 certified staff employed in SLA.
Key Enhancements for Summer School 2014A) Provide teachers with a pay increase without increasing overall cost of summer school.
Teacher salary increase of 3% ($53,887).B) Smaller Learning Environments: Create smaller learning environments, with fewer students per summer school site compared to previous years, to achieve the following: increase student access to high quality learning, increase the number of students who can walk to school, and reduce number of people in the building when temperatures are high. ($50,482)
C) Innovations: Pilot at Wright Middle School and Lindbergh Elementary School where students receive instruction in a familiar environment, from a familiar teacher. These school sites were selected based on identification as intense focus schools along with having high poverty rates when compared to the rest of the district. Pilot character building curriculum at Sandburg Elementary School. ($37,529)
D) Student Engagement: Increase student engagement with high quality curriculum and instruction along with incentives such as Friday pep rallies and afternoon MSCR fieldtrips. ($25,000)
E) High School Professional Development: First-time-offered, to increase quality of instruction and student engagement in learning. ($12,083)F) Student Selection: Utilize an enhanced student selection process that better aligns with school's multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) so that student services intervention teams (SSIT) have time to problem solve, and recommend students for SLA. Recommendations are based on student grades and standardized assessment scores, such as a MAP score below the 25th percentile at grades 3-5, or a score of minimal on the WKCE in language arts, math, science, and social studies at grades 3-5. (no cost)
Estimated total cost: $185,709.00Summer School Program Reductions
The following changes would allow enhancements to summer school and implementation of innovative pilots:A) Professional development (PD): reduce PD days for teachers grades K-8 by one day. This change will save money and provide teachers with an extra day off of work before the start of summer school (save $49,344.60).
B) Materials reduction: the purchase of Mondo materials in 2013 allows for the reduction of general literacy curricular materials in 2014 (save $5,000).
C) Madison Virtual Campus (MVC): MVC is not a reimbursable summer school program as students are not in classroom seats. This program could be offered separate from summer school in the future (save $18,000).
D) Librarians: reduce 3 positions, assigning librarians to support two sites. Students will continue to have access to the expertise of the librarian and can utilize library resources including electronic equipment (save $12,903.84).
E) Reading Interventionists: reduce 8 positions, as summer school is a student intervention, it allows students additional learning time in literacy and math. With new Mondo materials and student data profiles, students can be grouped for the most effective instruction when appropriate (save $48,492).
F) PBS Coach: reduce 8 positions, combining the coach and interventionist positions to create one position (coach/interventionist) that supports teachers in setting up classes and school wide systems, along with providing individual student interventions. With smaller learning sites, there would be less need for two separate positions (save $24,408).
G) Literacy and Math Coach Positions: reduce from 16 to 5 positions, combining the role and purpose of the literacy and math coach. Each position supports two schools for both math and literacy. Teachers can meet weekly with literacy/math coach to plan and collaborate around curriculum and student needs (save $27,601.60).
Estimated Total Savings: $185,750.04
Strategic Framework:
The role of the Summer Learning Academy (SLA) is critical to preparing students for college career and community readiness. Research tells us that over 50% of the achievement gap between lower and higher income students is directly related to unequal learning opportunities over the summer (Alexander et al., 2007). Research based practices and interventions are utilized in SLA to increase opportunities for learning and to raise student achievement across the District (Odden & Archibald, 2008). The SLA is a valuable time for students to receive additional support in learning core concepts in literacy and math to move them toward MMSD benchmarks (Augustine et.al., 2013). SLA aligns with the following Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Strategic Framework goals:A) Every student is on-track to graduate as measured by student growth and achievement at key milestones. Milestones of reading by grade 3, proficiency in reading and math in grade 5, high school readiness in grade 8, college readiness in grade 11, and high school graduation and completion rate.
B) Every student has access to challenging and well-rounded education as measured by programmatic access and participation data. Access to fine arts and world languages, extra-curricular and co-curricular activities, and advanced coursework.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The United Federation of Teachers will make a push to raise taxes in New York City to fund universal pre-K "one of the main pieces in our legislative package this year," the union's president, Michael Mulgrew, told Capital. Republicans in the State Senate and Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo have so far declined to embrace the idea, citing an openness to the program but a reluctance to raise taxes. "There might be different ideas about this, but right now, this is the idea we are supporting," said Mulgrew, adding that "an additional revenue source" is needed. "It should not come out of any revenue source that we currently have. The state budget is tight enough as it is; we are still not past the economic damage of this recession."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It was ayy very tuff decision but had to do wat was best for me #OnWisconsin#letsgetit#hann pic.twitter.com/FvkPsHD3Ld
— craig evans (@craigevans18) January 4, 2014When Yadir Sanchez arrived in this San Joaquin Valley agricultural town at age 5, she joined a well-traveled path to academic failure that children of other Mexican farmworkers had been on for years.Mark AraxStudents like Sanchez - poor, Hispanic and barely bilingual - routinely fell through the cracks in the Sanger Unified School District, which had one of the worst records in the state. Lacking basic math and English skills, students were pushed into trades or allowed to drop out.
Sanchez appeared to be no different, speaking only Spanish in kindergarten and struggling with English until fifth grade.
But something remarkable happened that lifted the fortunes of Sanchez and so many like her. The district reinvented itself, making huge strides by shaking up the way teachers worked with students, parents and each other.
In 2012, the district graduated 94 percent of its Hispanic students, 20 percentage points higher than the state average and similar districts. Its Hispanic dropout rate was just 3 percent, compared to 18 percent statewide.
Sanger's success is still the exception across California. While Latinos are poised to become the state's largest ethnic group in 2014, they continue to score lower on standardized tests, graduate at lower rates and drop out more often than other students.
Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed legislation that will funnel more money to help poorer schools, but Sanger's success serves as a model for how a district made vast gains despite budget cuts.
Take Sanger Unified, for one. Six years ago, the achievement gap between whites in Sanger and whites in Fresno stood at 57 points on the API test. Today, the gap has widened to 78 points. Whites in Sanger score 892 points on the API compared to 814 points for whites in Fresno. The gap between Latinos, by far the majority population in both districts, is even wider. Latinos in Sanger score 811 on the API compared to 708 for Latinos in Fresno. The most stunning gap -- a gulf really -- can be seen in the black community. Blacks in Sanger score 821 while blacks in Fresno score 665. That's a 156-point difference in two districts whose headquarters sit a few miles apart.Sanger will spend $80,795,175 for 11,000 students during the 2013-2014 school year (PDF Budget document), or $7,345 per student. That is about half the amount Madison spends per student (!) and similar to the national average.
Sanger's "Academic Performance Index". Demographic comparison: Sanger | Madison.
Sanger high school offers 14 AP courses.
Madison's substantial per student spending continues, despite long term disastrous reading results.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles wrecked its English major. Such a development may seem insignificant, compared with, say, the federal takeover of health care. It is not. What happened at UCLA is part of a momentous shift that bears on our relationship to the past--and to civilization itself.
Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton--the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the "Empire," UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to "alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Late last semester, as students were packing up their backpacks one final time before winter break, Middleton High School principal Denise Herrmann and assistant principal Lisa Jondle were co-authoring a note home to parents informing them of a widespread cheating scandal involving nearly 250 calculus students at the school. In the letter, they explain the scope of the incidents, including the taking, sharing and selling of cell phone photos of exam questions.The administrators close their letter by saying, "We feel fortunate to have a wonderful student body (at Middleton High) whose academic record on multiple assessments is top-notch. We are hopeful that through our collaborative efforts we can determine the root cause of talented students choosing to participate in dishonest academic practices. In January, we will host a series of focus groups including staff, students and parents to problem-solve short- and long-term solutions."
Ms. Herrmann and Ms. Jondle, I think I can save you lots of time on focus groups. I'm the parent of a high school student, albeit in Madison, and I have a pretty good inkling on the "root cause" of why "talented students" would choose to cheat.
It's because these students are reminded every day that every test matters. These kids all have access to on-line forums like College Confidentialthat tell them, in no uncertain terms, that if they want to get into a top-ranked college or university, they better take the most rigorous high school curriculum available to them, which means calculus, perhaps even AP calc. But to get to calculus at all in high school, a year of math has to be skipped somewhere. The standard high school sequence has pre-calc as the 12th grade norm -- so the jockeying for top dog status starts in elementary school.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In the field of higher education, reality is outrunning parody. A recent feature on the satire website the Onion proclaimed, "30-Year-Old Has Earned $11 More Than He Would Have Without College Education." Allowing for tuition, interest on student loans, and four years of foregone income while in school, the fictional student "Patrick Moorhouse" wasn't much better off. His years of stress and study, the article japed, "have been more or less a financial wash."Related: UW Law School 2013 Graduation Speech by Judge Barbara Crabb."Patrick" shouldn't feel too bad. Many college graduates would be happy to be $11 ahead instead of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, behind. The credit-driven higher education bubble of the past several decades has left legions of students deep in debt without improving their job prospects. To make college a good value again, today's parents and students need to be skeptical, frugal and demanding. There is no single solution to what ails higher education in the U.S., but changes are beginning to emerge, from outsourcing to online education, and they could transform the system.
Though the GI Bill converted college from a privilege of the rich to a middle-class expectation, the higher education bubble really began in the 1970s, as colleges that had expanded to serve the baby boom saw the tide of students threatening to ebb. Congress came to the rescue with federally funded student aid, like Pell Grants and, in vastly greater dollar amounts, student loans.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
What really matters when it comes to the quality of education? It's not whether a school is public, private or charter, said a speaker at a panel discussion I moderated."It's about what happens with that personal relationship between that young person and that teacher when the door closes."
The speaker said he had seen success at schools where he taught early in his career because of great leadership, and he aimed to be that kind of leader when he became a principal.
The best part of his job, he said, "was introducing myself and saying I was the proudest principal in America."
His school didn't have as much money as some schools, and it served students with a lot of needs. But, he said, "we did more with less because you had people who cared, and we were going to make it happen one way or the other."
Oh, Ronn Johnson. What you said at that session 10 months ago was all true. As principal of Young Leaders Academy, an independent charter school in the YMCA branch at W. North and N. Teutonia avenues, you had accomplishments that deserved praise.
The school had a distinctive program, a lot of energy, solid structure and a record of decent, although not great, student achievement since it opened in 2002.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Knowledge may be priceless, but a higher education is clearly not. University administrators keep hiking tuition, the wages of graduates keep falling, and a whole generation of Americans is struggling under the crushing burden of debt as they postpone their dreams for a tomorrow that may never come.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A group of Senate Democrats announced Thursday a new push to provide student loan borrowers with more protections and hold colleges more accountable for loan defaults.In a call with reporters, Senators Richard Durbin of Illlinois, Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts highlighted a package of new and existing proposals aimed at reducing the burden of student debt. Durbin acknowledged that the senators had had "limited success" in getting Republican support for the measures, but said they will be a centerpiece of the Democratic agenda in the Senate in 2014.
One of the more controversial new proposals, to be introduced by Reed, would require colleges with high student loan default rates to pay a penalty to the government that is proportional to the defaulted debt.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
At the Branstens' modern white dining table, the family holds hands for their nightly ritual.Arielle, 8 years old, says she's thankful for her late grandfather, Horace, and how funny he was. "I'm missing him," she says. Her third-grade pal, over for dinner, chimes in, "I'm grateful for the sausages." Leela, who works for an education nonprofit, and her attorney husband Peter, burst into smiles. The San Francisco couple couldn't have scripted this better. Appreciation for things big and small--that's why they do this.
Giving thanks is no longer just holiday fare. A field of research on gratitude in kids is emerging, and early findings indicate parents' instincts to elevate the topic are spot-on. Concrete benefits come to kids who literally count their blessings.
Gratitude works like a muscle. Take time to recognize good fortune, and feelings of appreciation can increase. Even more, those who are less grateful gain the most from a concerted effort. "Gratitude treatments are most effective in those least grateful," says Eastern Washington University psychology professor Philip Watkins.
Among a group of 122 elementary school kids taught a weeklong curriculum on concepts around giving, gratitude grew, according to a study due to be published in 2014 in School Psychology Review. The heightened thankfulness translated into action: 44% of the kids in the curriculum opted to write thank-you notes when given the choice following a PTA presentation. In the control group, 25% wrote notes.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
DO ACADEMIC economists focus too much on America? Yes: a sample of 76,000 papers published between 1985 and 2005 shows that econo-nerds are infatuated with the "land of the free".There were more papers focused on the United States than on Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa combined (see chart). And for the world's top-five economics journals--where publication of a paper can push a young researcher towards a full professorship--the imbalance is yet more marked. Even accounting for the fact that lots of economic research (and often the best) comes from American universities, the bias persists.
The world's poorest countries are effectively ignored by the profession. From 1985 to 2005 Burundi was the subject of just four papers. The American Economic Review, the holy grail for many academics, published one paper on India, by some measures the world's third-largest economy, every two years.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In August of 2009, Nicholas George boarded a flight from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. He was on his way back to university at Pomona College.While he was going through airport security, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent discovered Arabic language flashcards in his carry-on luggage.
He was pulled aside, detained and interrogated for five hours - two of which were allegedly spent in handcuffs.
"Do you know who did 9/11?" one of the TSA agents allegedly asked.
"Osama bin Laden," George responded.
"Do you know what language he spoke?"
"Arabic"
"Do you see why these cards are suspicious?"Nicholas George was released when it became clear that neither he nor his flashcards posed a threat to US national security. George went on to try to sue the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for violating his first and fifth amendment rights. Last week -more than four years after the incident - the case was dismissed.
In other words, it is legal and legitimate to detain and interrogate a traveller on the grounds of suspicion from Arabic language flashcards alone.
As an Arab-American who came of age post-9/11, I am frustratingly resigned to the well-documented fact that airports are often hostile places for Arab and Muslim-Americans. Watching my white father effortlessly glide through airport security while my brown mother is frequently "randomly selected" to be stopped, searched and asked to show the contents of her bag is evidence of this in and of itself. However, detaining a traveller for Arabic language flashcards brings this flagrant racism and criminalization of all things Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim (as the three are often conflated) to a whole new level.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A week ago I published my list of top ten stories--highs and lows--in higher education in 2013. I was generously rewarded when Powerline picked it as #2 in its list of top ten top lists. But there are still some minutes left in the season of top ten lists, which ought to extend to January 6, the traditional date of Epiphany. Then we have the (lower case) epiphany that it is time to get on with things.My new list is mainly about people who did something original, creative, noteworthy, or surprising in 2013 whose accomplishments deserve a little more attention. I set out to list only positive accomplishments, but unfortunately a few infamies sneaked in. What follows are the top ten best surprises: the gifts you didn't know you wanted until you unwrapped the package. First up:
1. Thug Notes. This YouTube site debuted in June, with Sparky Sweets, Ph.D. explicating Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Since then, Dr. Sweets has offered his taut plot summaries and explications de texte for Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, The Sun Also Rises, The Inferno, Heart of Darkness, Moby Dick, and many more canonical works of literature. The intro to each piece is a pastiche of Masterpiece Theater, the camera scanning across a shelf of beautifully bound volumes accompanied by Bach's Brandenburg Concerto 3, then cutting to a book-lined study in which Dr. Sweets sits in a comfortable chair, in gold-chained muscle shirt and do-rag, announcing this week's selection. "What's happening, yo? This week on Thug Notes we get regal with Hamlet by William Shakespeare."
This could have been a one-off parody, hitting the two birds of pretentious British TV and mass-marketed cheat sheets with one gangsta, but Dr. Sweets has developed the idea further. His wordplay (Hamlet serves up "Elizabethan hater-ade") is smart and his rapid-fire analyses delivered in character as a street-smart thug really are smart.
The series has conferred minor celebrity on Dr. Sweets. He takes what he does seriously, telling one interviewer that he created Thug Notes because "literature is enshrouded by a veil of unnecessarily pedantic terminology and intellectual one-upmanship," and that his calling is to bring it to "people on the opposite side of the social stratum." Dr. Sweets holds that "the gift of literature is universal."
2. Leaked! Harvard's Grading Rubric. A+++ to Nathaniel Stein, who published this satire of Harvard's grade inflation in The New York Times. Presented as a memorandum from the Dean of Harvard College, Leaked! purports to explain the criteria that qualify a term paper for an A+, including the stipulation that the "The paper contains few, if any, death threats." Grades of A++ or A+++ are designated "A+ with garlands."
3. Farewell. College presidents come and go and typically there is there is no reason to celebrate one's leaving. The next is likely to be as bad or worse. But occasionally one comes and stays. And stays. And stays. In June Gordon Gee announced his retirement as president of Ohio State University. Gee became president of West Virginia University in 1981 at age 37, and then served in succession as president of the University of Colorado, Ohio State University, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, and then back to Ohio State again. He distinguished himself mainly by his soaring remuneration, becoming by 2003 the highest paid university president in the U.S. (and no doubt the world) with compensation of over $1.3 million.
It would difficult to understate Gee's other accomplishments, though he did manage an uncommonly graceless departure by sneering at Roman Catholics and the University of Notre Dame ("those Damn Catholics") and mocking other colleges. The remarks didn't sit well with the Ohio State board of trustees. But let's let Dr. Gee settle into his well-upholstered retirement. Few men have profited more from higher education than he.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Even the most ardent academic must concede that there's something darkly funny about devoting years of one's life to a thesis question so abstruse that no one else had ever cared enough to ask it--and then answering it at such great length that few will ever care to read it.Enter lolmythesis.com, a Tumblr started by a Harvard senior procrastinating on her own undergraduate thesis. The blog encourages fellow undergrad and graduate students to distill all their hard-won knowledge into a single sentence--a sort of self-mocking tl;dr of their years-long labor of love/hate. The concept is reminiscent of #overlyhonestmethods, the brilliant hashtag game that swept science-Twitter earlier this year. If lolmythesis is a little less piercingly witty than its forebear, it's also more accessible to non-academics. And it's been flooded with submissions: Three weeks after it launched, the blog stands at 54 pages' worth of academic one-liners.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
You know all those seemingly great sales during the holidays? It turns out, they are often a "carefully engineered illusion." A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal defines what it calls "retail theater," noting that often the discounts being offered to bargain-conscious consumers are carefully planned out by retailers from the start:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
- No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, section 1111(2)(F)Those of us who fail to heed the lessons of history are destined to repeat it. So let us take this moment, as we enter the New Year, to remember the hubris that caused reformers, policy elites, members of Congress, and the George W. Bush Administration to set the goal of attaining "universal proficiency" in reading and math by 2014.
The next time someone says that we must ensure that all students are college and career ready...remember "universal proficiency by 2014."
The next time someone says that we must place a highly effective teacher in every classroom...remember "universal proficiency by 2014."
The next time someone says that we must eradicate childhood poverty...remember "universal proficiency by 2014."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Terrence lives at The Optimist Youth Homes & Family Services center in Highland Park. He's trying to scratch a record for the first time.Josh Winkler, an Atlanta DJ better known as Klever, says Terrence was impressive for his first attempt at DJing.
"He's doing good. I think the most important thing right now is being on beat, the rhythm part," he said. "And confidence really, man. Because at first all the guys were kind of looking, and scared. But now, look at 'em, they're all wanting to do it, so overcoming all that stuff means more to me than trying to learn a scratch."
Klever was one of about a dozen prominent DJs and music producers stationed at five tables set up around the gym, offering lessons in scratching, beat making, and other basic tricks of the trade.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
One year ago, many were pointing to the growth of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, as the most important trend in higher education. Many saw the rapid expansion of MOOCs as a higher education revolution that would help address two long-vexing problems: access for underserved students and cost.Substantive change takes more than a year, but will likely happen faster than Oda expects.In theory, students saddled by rising debt and unable to tap into the best schools would be able to take free classes from rock star professors at elite schools via Udacity, edX, Coursera and other MOOC platforms.
But if 2012 was the "Year of the MOOC," as The New York Times famously called it, 2013 might be dubbed the year that online education fell back to earth. Faculty at several institutions rebelled against the rapid expansion of online learning -- and the nation's largest MOOC providers are responding.
Earlier this year, San Jose State University partnered with Udacity to offer several types of for-credit MOOC classes at low cost. The partnership was announced in January with lots of enthusiastic publicity, including a plug from California Gov. Jerry Brown, who said MOOC experiments are central to democratizing education.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Is your teenage son camped out in the basement surrounded by pizza boxes and Red Bull, playing video games 24/7 ? Does your daughter lie around 'reading' tabloid magazines or watching the Kardashians on her laptop until it's time to eat when she graciously comes in to pick at the food you've spent the day making? Is your fridge completely empty because the TV-watching boy has eaten everything before noon and is now complaining of hunger?Was your holiday gift-opening tranquility sabotaged by your girl who became enraged that her BFF (who she texted nonstop while opening every painstakingly wrapped item) got the iPad while she's going to have to make do with an iPhone 5S FOR GOD'S SAKE?
Take solace mums and dads: Gigi Levangie Grazer has written just the book for you.Seven Deadlies: A Cautionary Talea is a book of short stories set in the Los Angeles Mark Frost Academy, where kids and parents embody every tabloid, reality show or gossip column attribute you know. It's a view of humanity (if that could possibly be the right word) seen through the eyes of narrator, Perry Gonzales, a 14-year-old Hispanic scholarship student. Perry gets right inside the mansions of her academic peers thanks to her tutoring skills. Like most of the regulars of these homes, she's a paid Latina. But the joke is, she has something all of these kids seem to lack: brains.
Here she is on the moms at Mark Frost Academy:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It's no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation's most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn't look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon. For starters, there's more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.
It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. At first it was shocking, but it no longer surprises any college instructor that the nice and eager young people enrolled in your classes have no ability to grasp most of the material being taught. Teaching American literature, as I have been doing, has become harder and harder in recent years, since the students read little literature before coming to college and often lack the most basic historical information about the period in which the novel or the poem was written, including what important ideas and issues occupied thinking people at the time.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
To the Editor:
Re "Even Gifted Students Can't Keep Up" ("Numbers Crunch" series, editorial, Dec. 15): Educators know that when the curriculum is set at an optimal difficulty level, students learn to persist, attend carefully and gain self-confidence. For mathematically gifted students, the curriculum must move more quickly and in greater depth so that they can become disciplined, resilient students.
When the mathematically gifted sons and daughters of affluent, well-educated parents are not challenged, their parents spend considerable amounts of time and money finding tutors, summer programs and online courses. As a psychologist who has worked for more than 20 years with the families of gifted students, I have seen how much time and money is required for this effort.
For mathematically gifted students from poorer families, there is neither the time nor the money to seek educational opportunities outside the public schools. A weak public school system without flexibility or adequate challenge can seriously limit the educational experiences and lifetime employment opportunities of these students. A weak public school system ultimately limits quality education to those few whose parents can pay for it privately.
JULIA B. OSBORN
Brooklyn, Dec. 19, 2013
Related: "They're all rich, white kids and they'll do just fine -- NOT!"
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Presidents at 42 private colleges scaled the $1 million annual mark in total pay and benefits in 2011--a slight bump from the year before, according to a survey based on the latest federal tax information from the 500 private schools with the largest endowments.Total median compensation was $410,523, or 3.2 percent more.
A high salary can be a sign of prestige for presidents, but it also opens them to criticism. The Obama administration and consumers are pressuring schools to rein in tuition costs, increase graduation rates and strengthen the value of a diploma.
The Chronicle of Higher Education's report released Sunday used federal tax information from 2011, the most recent available.
The top earner in the survey was Robert J. Zimmer, the president of the University of Chicago. His base pay was $918,000, but his total compensation was $3.4 million. About 40 percent of his total earnings stem from deferred compensation--a retention tool commonly used to keep college presidents on the job longer, according to the Chronicle.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Several weeks ago, I approached my friend Jenny (not her real name) for information on how to get hooked up with a teaching position at one of the local community colleges. Jenny currently works at five different schools -- three community colleges, one private university, and one online university. My guess was that if anyone could point me in the right direction, it would be her.I always figured I'd end up in academia. While in graduate school, I taught a semester of undergraduate creative writing, but then after a few years in elementary-school classrooms, I gave up on the idea of teaching. Still, I keep it in my back pocket as a go-to if I absolutely have to do it again.
I approached Jenny not because things have gotten dire, but that the scramble from one freelance writing job to another is beginning to take its toll. I figure why not take it easy for a while, supplement my income with a consistent, guaranteed paycheck and balance out the uncertainty of the freelance life. And, yes, after years of living hand-to-mouth, I have lofty dreams of tweed, sabbaticals, retirement plans, and picking up the check while drinking beer with graduate students.
But, halfway through our conversation, after we've covered whom to contact, what to do with my résumé, and which schools not to bother with, Jenny knocks my professorial fantasy on its ass.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Imagine that North America was somehow flipped, so that East was West and West was East. The continent's West Coast, as we know it, would face the Atlantic and Europe. That would have greatly affected the history of this country.Before the Industrial Revolution, bulk goods such as grain and lumber moved by water or they did not move. People and news also traveled fastest by boat.
The East Coast is rich in harbors large and small. Its many rivers are navigable, some for hundreds of miles inland.
The Pacific Coast of the U.S. is practically a blank wall, with high mountains that often hug the coastline. It has only three good natural harbors along its entire length--Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay, and San Diego Bay. Only one river that flows into the Pacific, the Columbia, has deep water for more than a few miles inland. Its mouth, however, is blocked by a sand bar that has brought many a ship to grief.
Settling along the West Coast would have been difficult, developing a viable economy there equally so. But because of the East Coast's water communications, commerce thrived in the British colonies and the settlements served as bases for exploring and occupying the interior. A further advantage: The wide alluvial plains east of the Appalachians made farming easy.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When I graduated high school, I had a cumulative grade point average of 2.1, hadn't taken any advanced placement classes or the SATs, and didn't apply to any colleges. Five years later, I graduated from the nation's best public university: UC Berkeley. Here's the story of what happened.I grew up in Laguna Hills and Malibu with an older sister and loving parents. My father was a drywall contractor and my mother stayed home to take care of us while working part time as a nanny/ housekeeper. While growing up in El Salvador, my mom ended her schooling before graduating middle school. Similarly, my father dropped out of high school in San Diego to work and support his parents. They worked incredibly hard to support my sister and I.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
On Thursday, recently departed Huskies coach Steve Sarkisian told ESPNLosAngeles.com he was informed last week that Lupoi was being investigated for potential violations of NCAA rules after he allegedly paid for tutoring and online classes for a recruit. Sarkisian said the investigation likely will prevent Lupoi from getting a job on USC's staff."I learned of the allegations this past Friday and I was obviously surprised by them," Sarkisian said. "I think this potential allegation could affect not only Tosh's future at USC but moving forward anywhere."
The Times reported on Wednesday that Washington and USC were looking into the allegations against Lupoi, who is in his second year as the Huskies' defensive line coach. He was hired in 2012 by Sarkisian, who was Washington's head coach at the time of the potential violations. Sarkisian left the Huskies for the head-coaching job at USC earlier this month.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Did not much happen? Consider the waves of flat data on how kids are doing.It may take a while to sort out this year. But that won't stop me from offering a few awards for, um, distinguished something or other.
Most jaw-dropping moment of the year: Adding into the state budget a statewide private school voucher program. Literally in the middle of the night, with no public hearings or advance word, this emerged from a backroom deal by key Republicans and voucher lobbyists. It is limited to a small number of students now. But if Gov. Scott Walker wins re-election in November and Republicans keep control of the Assembly and Senate, there is a strong possibility vouchers will become available widely in Wisconsin.
Education person of the year: Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Gregory Thornton. In his fourth year, Thornton and his powerful behind-the-scenes chief of staff, Naomi Gubernick, are at the center of so much. Thornton is both tough and a nice guy, each an asset in his work. He is good at spreading optimism. He's got plans and goals that sound good and, in many ways, are. And he's politically adept. But he is a perplexing figure who seems eager not to be challenged by subordinates or pesky people like reporters. A "gotcha" style of management by bosses seems to be pretty common in MPS, undermining morale.
The Same Old Same Old Award: Waves of test data and a second round of the new statewide school report cards told us that the Have kids are doing OK in Wisconsin and the Have Not kids are not. As for the Haves, they're not doing so well that we shouldn't be talking about how to give their schools a fresh burst of energy, and that seems to be happening in some places. As for the Have Nots, so little has changed, despite so much effort. There are a few bright spots on the scene, and we need to do more to grow them. Overall, we've got to find paths that are better than the ones we've been on.
The Gone-At-Last Award (Hopefully To Stay): Dr. Brenda Noach Choice School. This was one of a handful of voucher schools that was a model of what's wrong with oversight of Milwaukee's nationally important program to pay for children in private schools. The school was "an abomination," as one strongly pro-voucher leader told me recently. But for years, it fended off attempts to cut off its funding. Finally, this year, after receiving $7,299,749 in public money over a dozen years, the Brenda Noach school ran out of options -- it couldn't find anyone to accredit it. But that doesn't mean the school leaders aren't shopping for accreditation to re-open for next year.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"In the words of teachers themselves, they don't feel qualified," Gandara said.About 40 percent of American teachers have ELL students in their classrooms, but only a third of these teachers have training for them. However, this training usually amounts to just four hours over five years, said Granada on Saturday, laying the ground for a panel of ELL experts and teachers discussing why intensive efforts have failed to close the gaps of ELL students.
"This is really difficult to do," said Gandara, quoting a bilingual teacher who still struggles to keep ELL students on track despite speaking Spanish, the native language of three-fourths of America's ELL students.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
On May 5, musician Patti Smith was asked what advice she had for young people trying to make it in New York City. The long-time New Yorker's take? Get out. "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling," she said. "New York City has been taken away from you."Smith was not the only New Yorker to reject the city that had nurtured artists for decades. In October, musician David Byrne argued that "the cultural part of the city - the mind - has been usurped by the top 1 percent". Under Michael Bloomberg, New York's first billionaire mayor, homelessness and rent both soared, making one of the world's centres of creative and intellectual life unliveable for all but the richest.
At play, notes Byrne, was more than a rise in the cost of living. It was a shift in the perceived value of creativity, backed by an assumption that it must derive from and be tied to wealth. "A culture of arrogance, hubris and winner-take-all was established," he recalls. "It wasn't cool to be poor or struggling. The bully was celebrated and cheered."
New York - and San Francisco, London, Paris and other cities where cost of living has skyrocketed - are no longer places where you go to be someone. They are places you live when you are born having arrived. They are, as journalist Simon Kuper puts it, "the vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself".
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
