| School Information System |
 | Sponsorships |
|
|
IN 2012, after 244 years in print, Encyclopedia Britannica became online-only. Now a group of German fans of Wikipedia, an online, user-generated encyclopedia, are raising money for a move in the opposite direction. A print version of the English Wikipedia--1,000 bulky volumes and 1,193,014 pages--will be on show at a gathering of Wikipedians later this year. A world tour will probably follow: a global victory lap for the internet's most impressive crowd-sourced creation.The books will be instantly out of date; several times a second an article is amended online. But that is not the point. Wikipedia, which was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, has a right to show off. With articles on subjects as diverse as Spaghetti code ("a pejorative term for source code") and SpaghettiOs ("an American brand of canned spaghetti"), it has 1,600 times as many articles as the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is the world's fifth most popular website, with editions in 287 languages. (The English one is the biggest, with 4.4m articles.) On any given day 15% of all internet users visit it, amounting to 495m readers a month.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, militants of the extremist group Boko Haram walked onto the campus of a boarding school in northeastern Nigeria, locked up students sleeping in their dormitories, and torched the buildings. They spared the girls, reportedly sending them off with one message: go home, forget school, and get married instead.The attack left at least 59 people dead, most of them teenage boys and young men, with scores more injured.
Such acts of violence against students and schools are increasingly a tactic of modern warfare, says a new report released today by an organization committed to combating the trend, the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack. The study updates and expands earlier reports on the topic published by UNESCO in 2010 and 2007.
There's not enough comparison data yet to point definitely to a heightened incidence of education-targeted attacks. But the authors argue that the problem is "far more widespread than previously reported."
"Schools, students, and staff are not just caught in the crossfire, but are all too often the targets of attacks," Diya Nijhowne, the Global Coalition's director, said in a statement. "They are soft, easy targets, and governments and armed groups need to protect them from being used as a tactic of war."
Schools and students are targeted for reasons that range from politics and ideology to ethnicity and religion. The unifying trend is a pattern of deliberate attacks, which the report identifies in 30 countries. "Often, sectarian violence is fought out in the schoolyard," the authors say.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Many have tried to link vouchers and school choice to racism, but it can't be done without a tortured reading of the law and civil rights history. So it was a surprise to see two civil rights attorneys at an elite American university doing exactly that last week. The attorneys, Elizabeth Haddix and Mark Dorosin of the University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights, penned "The Ugly Truth About Vouchers," where they argue vouchers are a tool of modern racism.The authors begin linking school choice to racism by claiming private schools "are permitted to discriminate against students on the basis of race," which is simply not true. Surely, they know better. As determined by the U.S. Supreme Court in Runyon v. McCrary (1976), no private school in the U.S. is permitted to discriminate based on race, color or national origin.
Next, Haddix and Doroson argue there are "historical links between racism and private schools" and, thus, the attempt to attach vouchers and school choice to the civil rights movement is "a twisted irony."
Indeed, as they point out, many private schools across the nation grew in enrollment during the era of desegregation, as white students fled public schools that were enrolling black students. But to draw the link between racism and private schools is to miss the more important historical precursor: American public schools were themselves rooted in racism. African-Americans waited 235 years after the founding of the first public high school to get their first public high school. It would be another 84 years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board (1954) and nearly 20 more years before real integration efforts were made.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Chinese pupils are once again at the top of international education rankings. Recent further in-depth analysis of results from the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, have now shown that it's not just pupils from Shanghai and Beijing coming top of the class. Children from rural areas and disadvantaged environments of China also outperformed peers in other countries.UK education secretary Liz Truss is leading a visit to China with a group of teachers to observe why. But she should be mindful of copying a system that is being questioned by some Chinese researchers for the stress it puts on children.
Chinese pupils spend more time in school than British children. School days are longer and holidays are shorter. On average, under the current system, the length of the secondary school year is 245 days. Chinese pupils get around four weeks off in winter, and seven weeks in summer, including weekends and all kinds of traditional festivals. That's a total of 175 days off, 37 days fewer than UK pupils.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The obesity rate among young US children has fallen by 43% since 2003-2004, the first broad decline in years, a new national study has found.Obesity among US children ages two to five dropped to 8.4% in 2011-2012 from 13.9%, the survey found.
Scientists have not identified an exact cause but say a decrease in sugary beverage consumption may contribute.
Childhood obesity has been shown to increase risk of obesity, cancer, heart disease and stroke later in life.
The study was conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama) on Tuesday.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Tom Ginsburg & Thomas J. Miles:
There is a long scholarly debate on the tradeoff between research and teaching in various fields, but relatively little study of the phenomenon in law. This analysis examines the relationship between the two core academic activities at one particular school, the University of Chicago Law School, which is considered one of the most productive in legal academia. We use standard measures of scholarly productivity and teaching performance. For research, we measure the total number of publications for each professor for each year, while for teaching, we look at the average teaching rating. Net of other factors, we find that, under some specifications, research and teaching are positively correlated. In particular, we find that students' perceptions of teaching quality rises, but at a decreasing rate, with the total amount of scholarship. We also find that certain personal characteristics correlate with productivity. The recent debate on the mission of American law schools has hinged on the assumption that a tradeoff exists between teaching and research, and this article's analysis, although limited in various ways, casts some doubt on that assumption.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
One advantage to redrawing the lines is that it could delay the financial hit of having to build a new school. Some school officials are already talking referendum. Plus, with space available in the district, is there really any good reason any student should be forced to attend class in what was formerly a closet, as some at Sandburg Elementary do?More troubling is the effect crowding could have on low-income students who, statistically at least, struggle academically and might benefit from better learning environments.
According to data collected by the Department of Public Instruction, 48.9 percent of Madison elementary students were considered "economically disadvantaged" last school year. For the five schools over capacity now, that percentage was 48.4.
But two of those schools are more affluent and are expected to see their enrollments drop below 100 percent capacity by 2018-19. Most of the seven schools expected to be over capacity in 2018-19 serve less affluent areas of Madison, and collectively, the seven had a student population that was 57.8 percent economically disadvantaged last year.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is addressing educators in Washington today on the issue of student data -- everything from attendance and health records to test scores and disciplinary data.There's a big fight going on in many states over whether that data should be stored online and managed by third parties like inBloom, a nonprofit funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Inbloom declined Here & Now's request for an interview, but we are joined by two people with very different views on this: Mary Fox-Alter, superintendent of schools in Pleasantville, N.Y., and Aimee Rogstad Guidera, executive director of the Data Quality Campaign.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Parents who want Mississippi lawmakers to approve special education vouchers are adding their voices in support.House and Senate lawmakers held a hearing Tuesday to showcase the proposals. Natalie Gunnels of Tupelo told lawmakers that public school administrators can't or won't take care of students like her son Patrick, who has trouble walking, is sensitive to noises, and has trouble reading and writing.
"It's obvious to me and my husband that the public school system is not equipped to educate the Patricks of our state," Gunnels said.
The plan would give debit cards with more than $6,000 on them to parents who withdraw their special education students from public schools. The money could be spent on private school tuition or private tutoring services.
Mandy Rogers, a disability advocate, said that the state has been promising improvements but not delivering since the federal law was passed.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
This week, National Education Association (NEA) president Dennis Van Roekel released an open letter to his members criticizing the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and demanding a series of "course corrections," without which NEA will no longer back the initiative.Van Roekel joins Randi Weingarten, the president of the smaller and more urban American Federation of Teachers, in turning his back on the new standards, which were voluntarily adopted and designed to establish a more credible and consistent definition of proficiency across academic subjects.
It's worth keeping a few things in mind.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
February is Black History Month and we're thinking about the critical need for more diverse educators in our state. Delaware's public school population is 45 percent African-American and Latino and 52 percent white. Teachers of color in our state have comprised 13 percent of the teacher workforce statewide for two decades.This disparity goes far beyond optics and affects how students see themselves, what they believe is possible, and what they understand about the world outside their school buildings.
Students benefit from the insights and experiences of teachers who reflect all communities in Delaware to shape the curriculum and day-to-day experiences offered in our schools. Their pre-K though grade 12 experience must prepare them to thrive in a diverse world, and to believe amazing and unstoppable things about their potential within it. This concerns all of us.
Our students of color, particularly those growing up in low-income communities, lag behind their more affluent peers in early literacy, graduation rates, and college matriculation and completion. According to the Delaware Department of Education, African-American teens make up 44 percent of all dropouts, even though they make up 33 percent of the high school student population. African-American and Latino dropout rates outpace the state average by 20 percent.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Transforming education for the 21st century has become a top national priority.With seemingly countless emerging ideas and advocates, teachers are often overlooked as valuable allies. In order to promote positive and practical change in our system, we must listen to the devoted teachers on the front lines.
For too long, individual teachers' voices have fallen on deaf ears in favor of the self-preserving agenda of the teachers unions. Focused primarily on maintaining a system of forced dues and political power, the union's outdated model isn't serving a profession eager to embrace the future.
Do hard-working educators stand in solidarity with union leaders to protect the status quo? Hardly. To establish a credible teacher voice, we must recognize that teachers are not in lock-step agreement with unions as their leaders suggest.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley:
LAST WEEK, Kenneth Griffin, the founder and CEO of the investment firm Citadel, announced a gift of $150 million to Harvard University to subsidize financial aid. It's not only Harvard that's back in the money. A survey earlier this month showed that giving to colleges and universities was back at pre-recession levels, with a record $33.8 billion in charitable contributions during the 2013 fiscal year, almost a 10 percent increase over 2012. Most of this increase was, according to the survey by the Council for Aid to Education, "due to the rebounding in the stock market."This is great news for higher education but bad news for higher education reformers who have been hoping that the financial crunch might cause colleges to rethink their operating assumptions. It is no small irony that faculty tend to be anti-capitalist while the financial stability of their institutions depends heavily on the stock market. Alas, no matter how much college faculty bad-mouth the 1 percent, the wealthy seem to have a soft spot for the ivory tower.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It's a process invoked by school districts across New Jersey only a few times each year, a request for a waiver from state regulations that gets into the minutia of school operations.Laura Waters has moreA district might want to hire a registered nurse instead of a certified school nurse as required by the rules, for example. Last year, a district wanted to put a school psychologist in as a guidance.
Yet Newark's School Superintendent Cami Anderson has upped the ante in the little-used waiver process by requesting that the Christie administration let her lay off potentially hundreds of teachers over the next three years based on performance first, and seniority second.
The waiver request, filed on Friday, maintains that there is leeway in the state statute that requires dismissals be based on seniority alone, a policy known as "last in, first out," and that the state's education commissioner has the discretion to allow what Anderson termed a "performance-based" system to be used when making dismissals.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Chad Sommer and Jennifer Berkshire:
By Chad Sommer and Jennifer Berkshire
Last weekend, former Newark Star columnist Bob Braunpublished a bombshell column, arguing thatthe state-appointed superintendent of Newark, NJ schools, Teach For America (TFA) alum Cami Anderson, wants to waive seniority rules to fire upwards of 700 tenured Newark teachers and replace a percentage of them with TFA recruits. Executive Director of Teach For America New Jersey, Fatimah Burnam Watkins, quickly dismissedBraun's assertions as *conspiracy theories*, while claiming TFA has a small footprint in Newark. But the heated back-and-forth misses the larger issue: TFA plays an increasingly essential role in staffing the charters that are rapidly expanding, replacing public schools from Newark to Philadelphia to Chicago to Los Angeles. In fact, newly released documents indicate that many charter operators won't even consider opening new schools without TFA to provide a supply of *teacher talent.*TFA a requirement
Emails sent by the Broad Foundation, a leading advocate of market-based education reform and charter expansion, and acquired through a freedom of information request, reveal that many charter management organizations consider TFA presence in a region a necessary prerequisite for opening new schools.
According to the documents, charter management organizations including Rocketship, KIPP, Noble, LEARN and Uncommon Schools all indicated that a supply of TFA teachers was a general pre-condition for expanding into a new region. The emails, which detail the Broad Foundation's failed efforts to lure high-performing charter operators to Detroit, were released as part of a trove of thousands of documents requested as part of an investigation into Michigan's embattled Education Achievement Authority.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
With nearly 40 percent their students already opting out of the ISAT, teachers at Saucedo Scholastic Academy--a high-achieving magnet school--took the bold step on Tuesday of voting to refuse to administer it.In only one other instance--at a high school in Seattle last year--have teachers in one school made a unified group decision not to give a mandated test. National opponents of standardized testing applauded the decision and said it will send a signal across the country.
ISAT testing is conducted for eight hours over two weeks, starting on March 3. Testing opponents have already launched a drive to urge families in CPS to "opt out" of the ISAT, which is being administered for the last time this year.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Pisa stands for Programme for International Student Assessment. But judging from the reaction to the OECD rankings of educational attainment, it may as well mean Parental Index of Social Anxiety.The latest analysis of the global league table showed that the 15-year-old children of Chinese janitors and street-sweepers were better at maths than the offspring of many other countries' professionals and managers. The news added fuel to this week's visit to Shanghai by a UK education minister, bent on finding the secret of local children's success and replicating it at home.
But British concerns were reflected around the world, with telling local variants. Spain's El Confidencial highlighted that Madrid's teenagers were outperforming Catalonia's. Corriere della Sera wondered why, against the grain of other countries, the children of Italian managers beat those of professionals, who have higher educational attainment. (If you will inherit the family law firm or accounting practice, you get lazy, suggested one OECD researcher).
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Harvard University PennantsA waning number of high school graduates from the Midwest is sparking a college hunt for freshman applicants, with the decline being felt as far away as Harvard and Emory universities.
The drop is the leading edge of a demographic change that is likely to ease competition for slots at selective schools and is already prompting concern among Midwestern colleges.
"You can't create 18-year-olds in a lab," said Brian Prescott, director of policy research at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education in Boulder, Colorado. "Enrollment managers are facing an awful lot of pressure that they can't do much about."
Nationally, the high school Class of 2012 ushered in a first wave of declines in the number of graduates, according to a report by the commission. The trend will worsen after 2025, when admissions officers face the impact of a drop in births that began with the 2007 recession. Over the next two decades, the biggest drain in graduates will be in the Midwest and Northeast. The demographic shifts are compounded by economic factors as the cost of higher education continues to rise.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A leading California lawmaker plans to introduce state legislation on Thursday that would shore up privacy and security protections for the personal information of students in elementary through high school, a move that could alter business practices across the nearly $8 billion education technology software industry.Related: Google admits data mining student emails in its free education apps.The bill would prohibit education-related websites, online services and mobile apps for kindergartners through 12th graders from compiling, using or sharing the personal information of those students in California for any reason other than what the school intended or for product maintenance.
The bill would also prohibit the operators of those services from using or disclosing the information of students in the state for commercial purposes like marketing. It would oblige the firms to encrypt students' data in transit and at rest, and it would require them to delete a student's record when it is no longer needed for the purpose the school intended.
"We don't want to limit the legitimate use of students' data by schools or teachers," Senator Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat who is the sponsor of the bill and the president pro tempore of the California Senate, said in a phone interview. "We just think the public policy of California should be that the information you gather from students should be used for their educational benefit and for nothing else."
Lawmakers like Mr. Steinberg are part of a growing cohort of children's advocates who say they believe that regulation has failed to keep pace with the rapid adoption of education software and services by schools across the country.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"Hello. Where did you go to high school?" When so many of you nominated this question as your natural conversation starter, as I mentioned here last week, it was tempting to dismiss it as an example of how Americans never quite get over high school. Was this just about Fast Times at Ridgemont High, or 90210, or The O.C., or forever remembering all the other schools in your league? Or maybe you all are 18 years old. But you wrote with such enthusiasm, thoroughness, and conviction, that it looked like something else was going on. So, I decided to look again.Your nominations of this particular question came in from all corners of the country--all mid-sized cities--like Louisville, New Orleans, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Charlotte. They came from all ages of you, from the millennials to those who wrote that a half century ago, this question was also asked in Chicago and San Francisco, when those cities were arguably more "mid-size" than they are today. You also said this was the question of Oahu (where we know the young Barack Obama of modest means attended the elite private school, Punahou) and from Melbourne, Australia.
From your descriptions, it became clear that "Where did you go to high school?" is another way of asking "Where do you live?" But you aren't seeking a simple answer of name or geography with either of those questions. You are using those questions to seek valuable information about the socio-economic-cultural-historical background of a person. It helps you orient that person in the context of the world as you live it and interpret it.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
These kids should learn write from wrong.Earlier this month, The Post exposed a scheme at Manhattan's Murry Bergtraum HS for Business Careers in which failing students could get full credit without attending class, but instead watch video lessons and take tests online. One social-studies teacher had a roster of 475 students in all grades and subjects.
Red-faced administrators encouraged a student letter-writing campaign to attack The Post and defend its "blended learning" program. Eighteen kids e-mailed to argue that their alma mater got a bad rap.
Almost every letter was filled with spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.
A junior wrote: "What do you get of giving false accusations im one of the students that has blended learning I had a course of English and I passed and and it helped a lot you're a reported your support to get truth information other than starting rumors . . ."
Another wrote: "To deeply criticize a program that has helped many students especially seniors to graduate I should not see no complaints."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
SHANNON LUBIANO never dreamed she could send her children to the Duke School, an independent elementary school in Durham, N.C., where the tuition is $15,000 for prekindergarten, rising to nearly $18,000 for eighth grade.But then a friend told her about the school's indexed tuition plan -- essentially a pay-what-you-can model for a private education -- and that made all the difference for her.
"When I tell other people about it, they are shocked," said Ms. Lubiano, whose husband, a chef, owns a restaurant in town. "They had looked at the Duke School in the past and got run off by the cost."
Duke is part of a small group of independent schools, mostly in the Southeast and West, that have adopted indexed tuition as both a financial aid strategy and a way to attract people who would not otherwise apply to private school.
"We got to indexed tuition as a philosophical journey," said Dave Michelman, head of school at Duke. "We're committed to socioeconomic diversity. If you're committed to that it seems a little off-putting to say if you come here we'll give you charity. That's what financial aid sounds like."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Erica L. Green, Liz Bowie and Jean Marbella:
-- Newly named to head Baltimore's public schools, Gregory E. Thornton has unfinished business in the district he is leaving behind after 31/2 tumultuous years.Wearing a red T-shirt, he arrived Friday at a school where, to peals of laughter, the 59-year-old would join kids in a "jump rope-a-thon." But, as so frequently happened during his tenure, there were political hoops to jump through first.
"How are we doing?" Thornton asked a state senator he spied in the welcoming crowd.
It was not so much a pleasantry as a pulse check: How are we doing, he meant, in thwarting two bills that would close public schools and sell empty facilities to private schools that accept vouchers?
In a brief exchange, the senator mentioned a potentially worrisome legislator, and Thornton said he'd already talked to her the previous night. And then, it was time to "make some noise" as he exhorted the school crowd who had gathered to jump rope in honor of a phys ed teacher who started the tradition 35 years ago.
It was just another day navigating the complicated terrain of Milwaukee Public Schools.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
On Dec. 15, shortly after Army football's 12th consecutive loss to the U.S. Naval Academy, the superintendent of West Point, Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen , announced that he was considering institutional changes to build a winning program. "When America puts its sons and daughters in harm's way, they do not expect us to just 'do our best' . . . but to win," he wrote. "Nothing short of victory is acceptable. . . . Our core values are Duty, Honor, Country. Winning makes them real."Soon after, Army Athletic Director Boo Corrigan argued that West Point ought to take "an educated risk" by relaxing admission requirements in favor of superior football recruits. The superintendent has said that he does not intend to relax standards, but Corrigan's views are backed by powerful alumni, including retired Brig. Gen. Pete Dawkins, a Heisman Trophy winner who has participated in three study groups assessing Army football. "I think it's crucial that West Point stand out as a place of winners," Dawkins recently said. Thus his view that it's "entirely fair to accept some risks" in the admission of football recruits.
As a West Point graduate and faculty member, I find many of these arguments troubling. Academy leaders and alumni have often asserted that performance on the gridiron has a direct impact on our ability to win our nation's wars and that we therefore have a moral imperative to win in football. But the facts do not support that assertion.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
With total student loan debt over one trillion dollars, millions of students and families can never hope to repay what they owe, especially since there are no individual solutions to the problem. Student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, and student loan lenders can and do garnish debtors' wages and social security checks. The powers of lenders to collect are unprecedented in the history of creditor/debtor relations.Yet, belief in upward mobility through education is still a profoundly American ideal. In the midst of the latest recession, politicians and elites have argued not for the redistribution of wealth but for making college "more affordable" in the belief that increasing access to education makes more fundamental social changes unnecessary. Forgotten, too, in the emphasis on college financing is that education is not just a path to a job. It's a site of human desire, aspiration, and hope for the future.
As a former teacher and a student debtor, I've been thinking a lot about the future of higher education. And as an education activist, I've been coming to terms with what it means to fight for public education while mourning the death of the university. Before explaining what I mean by "the death of the university," I will provide some details about my own political history and how it has shaped my current thinking.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Board member T.J. Mertz said that sometime in the next six or seven months the board will begin a process of seriously looking at facilities issues, including whether to embark upon the contentious fix of changing any of the district's school boundaries, among other solutions.Related: We have seen this movie before. 10 Reasons to Combine Lapham & Marquette."In multiple areas we're either at or will be very, very soon at or over capacity, and we continue to have schools that are fairly well under capacity," Mertz said. "There's going to have to be something done ... and I'm of the get-started-with-this-sooner-rather-than-later school."
Madison has long supported a wide variation in school demographics. The chart above, created from 2013-2014 Madison School District middle school demographic data, illustrates the present reality, with the largest middle school - near west side Hamilton - also featuring the smallest percentage low income population.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When Nicholas Kristof, the soft-hearted liberal on the New York Times op-ed page, decided that political scientists had given up on writing for a broader public, a digital avalanche of blog posts, letters to the editor, and tweets, followed. The APSA, Corey Robin, Claire Potter, and basically the entire editorial collective of Jacobin took the man to task for, basically, channeling the laziest version of Tom Friedman. Why, Kristof seemed to be asking, casually leafing through the past few issues of the New Yorker, can't more people write like Jill Lepore? This is a fine question, but - as Robin points out - it isn't the right question at all, and it probably isn't an honest question, either.Now, just as Kristof's more recent and weak apologia has been begrudgingly accepted, here comes Joshua Rothman, writing in the New Yorker itself, and asking, with an eye on the recent contretemps, "Why is Academic Writing so Academic?" Where Kristoff seemed detached, Rothman is engaged, and genuinely interested in trying to understand why the professoriate writes for itself. Our gnomish academic audiences matter more, he sums, because they determine tenure and promotion. "Academic writing and research," he concludes, "may be knotty and strange, remote and insular, technical and specialized, forbidding and clannish--but that's because academia has become that way, too. Today's academic work, excellent though it may be, is the product of a shrinking system. It's a tightly-packed, super-competitive jungle in there."
Yes, there is is truth to this. A tight labor market means increased specialization and less risk-taking, leading one to assume that writing a dense essay that is sure to be published in a top journal is a safer bet (for promotion and hiring) than trying to publish in N+1. (Though there are plenty, despite the assumption, who do both). And when we read each other's work for venues that are chiefly academic, we tend to wonder more about the disciplinary stakes and less about the quality of the prose. Generally, that is.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Thus the college president spends his time running back and forth between Mammon and God, known in the academic vocabulary as Business and Learning. He pleads with the business man to make a little more allowance for the eccentricities of the scholar; explaining the absurd notion which men of learning have that they owe loyalty to truth and public welfare. He points out that if the college comes to be known as a mere tool of special privilege it loses all its dignity and authority; it is absolutely necessary that it should maintain a pretense of disinterestedness, it should appear to the public as a shrine of wisdom and piety. He points out that Professor So-and-So has managed to secure great prestige throughout the state, and if he is unceremoniously fired it will make a terrific scandal, and perhaps cause other faculty members to resign, and other famous scientists to stay away from the institution.The president says this at a dinner-party in the home of his grand duke; and next morning he hurries off to argue with the recalcitrant professor. He points out the humiliating need of funds-just now when the professor's own salary is so entirely inadequate. He begs the professor to realize the president's own position, the crudity of business men who hold the purse-strings, and have no understanding of academic dignity. He pleads for just a little discretion, just a little time-just a little anything that will moderate the clash between greed and service, the incompatibility of hate and love.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Lance Williams, Erica Perez & Jennifer Gollan:
The University of California's $11.2 billion endowment has produced the worst investment returns of any of the richest colleges in the country over the past decade, an analysis by The Center for Investigative Reporting shows.From the 2004 through 2013 fiscal years, the investment payout for the UC endowment ranked last among the 10 U.S. universities with the largest endowment funds. The university earned an average of 7.3 percent on the combined endowment of the system and individual campuses, while the other nine colleges - which include the public University of Michigan and University of Texas - averaged 10 percent.
In 2013, the UC endowment's return improved dramatically. But better performance over the previous nine years would have meant tens of millions of dollars a year to spend during a decade when the state's premier public university system saw massive cuts in state funding.
Thousands of employees in the 10-campus system lost their jobs and students felt the pain acutely, as their education costs more than doubled.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department's American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term "paradigm shift," and I described how this phrase had been used and abused, much to Kuhn's dismay, by postmodern insurrectionists and nonsensical self-help gurus. People seemed to like the essay, but they were also uneasy about it. "I don't think you'll be able to publish this in an academic journal," someone said. He thought it was more like something you'd read in a magazine.Was that a compliment, a dismissal, or both? It's hard to say. Academic writing is a fraught and mysterious thing. If you're an academic in a writerly discipline, such as history, English, philosophy, or political science, the most important part of your work--practically and spiritually--is writing. Many academics think of themselves, correctly, as writers. And yet a successful piece of academic prose is rarely judged so by "ordinary" standards. Ordinary writing--the kind you read for fun--seeks to delight (and, sometimes, to delight and instruct). Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. It's supposed to be dry but also clever; faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its deepest ambiguity has to do with audience. Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds. But, because it's intended for a very small audience of hyper-knowledgable, mutually acquainted specialists, it's actually among the most personal writing there is. If journalists sound friendly, that's because they're writing for strangers. With academics, it's the reverse.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Imagine meeting someone who says she works at a university. Some years ago, it would have been fairly safe to assume that she was a professor, and a member of the middle class with enviable job security. Not anymore. Two reports make clear that the nature of the college work force has changed substantially, possibly to the detriment of educational quality."The Just-In-Time Professor," released last month by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, describes a growing population of more than one million adjunct and other nontenure-track instructors. "In 1970, adjuncts made up 20 percent of all higher education faculty," the report says. "Today, they represent half."
As a rule, adjuncts have few or no benefits. They are generally paid per course, and paid poorly. (The Coalition on the Academic Workforce estimates that the median pay for a standard three-credit course is $2,700.) Because adjuncts often teach several classes in order to cobble together a living, they have little time for the research necessary to advance their careers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:
The following links provide a lot of additional details on the legislation that would replace the Common Core State Standards within 12 months with model academic standards created in Wisconsin. Please stay informed and contact your legislators with your thoughts.
Assembly Substitute Amendment 1 to Assembly Bill 617 (ASA1/AB617)
.
Video message from Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Tony Evers.
Related:
Governor Scott Walker staff drafted bill aimed at Common Core State Standards.
A Critique of the Wisconsin DPI and Proposed School Choice Changes.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
College endowments totaled $448.6 billion in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2013, an increase of 11.7 percent compared with a year earlier, according to recently released data.As we know, this wealth is concentrated among a privileged few. Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities all have almost $2 million in endowment funds for every student.
We've heard the argument that what these institutions do with their privately raised money is their business and that they provide a lot of financial aid opportunities for less affluent students. But these endowments are of dubious value and can be attacked on two grounds. First, they promote inefficiency through misallocation of resources. Second, they are anti-meritocratic.
Regarding inefficiency, Adam Smith got it right more than 200 years ago in "The Wealth of Nations." College endowments, he said, "have necessarily diminished more or less the necessity of application in the teachers." At the University of Oxford, he complained, "public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretense of teaching."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Diallo Shabazz was a student at the University of Wisconsin in 2000 when he stopped by the admissions office."One of the admissions counselors walked up to me, and said, 'Diallo, did you see yourself in the admissions booklet? Actually, you're on the cover this year,' " Shabazz says.
The photo was a shot of students at a football game -- but Shabazz had never been to a football game.
"So I flipped back, and that's when I saw my head cut off and kind of pasted onto the front cover of the admissions booklet," he says.
This Photoshopped image went viral and became a classic example of how colleges miss the mark on diversity. Wisconsin stressed that it was just one person's bad choice, but Shabazz sees it as part of a bigger problem.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
IF THE world's education systems have a common focus, it is to turn out school-leavers who are proficient in mathematics. Governments are impressed by evidence from the World Bank and others that better maths results raises GDP and incomes. That, together with the soul-searching provoked by the cross-country PISA comparisons of 15-year-olds' mathematical attainment produced by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, is prompting educators in many places to look afresh at what maths to teach, and how to teach it.Those countries languishing in the league tables fret about how to catch up without turning students off the subject with boring drill. Top performers, most of them Asian (see chart), fear that their focus on technical proficiency does not translate into an enthusiasm for maths after leaving school. And everyone worries about how to prepare pupils for a jobs market that will reward creative thinking ever more highly.
Maths education has been a battlefield before: the American "math wars" of the 1980s pitted traditionalists, who emphasised fluency in pen-and-paper calculations, against reformers led by the country's biggest teaching lobby, who put real-world problem-solving, often with the help of calculators, at the centre of the curriculum. A backlash followed as parents and academics worried that the "new math" left pupils ill-prepared for university courses in mathematics and the sciences. But as many countries have since found, training pupils to ace exams is not the same as equipping them to use their hard-won knowledge in work and life.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A few months ago, my son, who is in second grade, went on a field trip. As the class assembled in the parking lot, a new child joined in. He had metal leg braces and difficulty walking. Nobody quite knew how to talk to him and so he was left by himself at the edge of the crowd. But my son seemed drawn to him. As the little boy in braces began to struggle up the steps of the bus, my son went over to help and then sat beside him. Throughout the bus ride, they talked together. According to the teachers, that new little boy soon seemed like the happiest child in the group. One of the most sociable children in the class had made friends with him, and that goes a long way towards building self-esteem when you feel isolated and anxious.I'm very proud of what my son did. He showed compassion. He was still a new pupil himself, and he had suffered bullying related to a disability of his own. The way he was treated at his previous school was so horrible that he might easily have decided to pay it back rather than forward. But kids can be amazingly smart about how to treat one another. After all, it wasn't the children who bullied him at his old school. It was the adults.
Our son's movement problem emerged slowly - so slowly that we didn't notice at first. When he was five, he moved more like a three-year-old. He was happy and chatty, but he had difficulty writing, drawing, cutting, pasting, and sitting straight and still in a chair. Milk tended to spill an awful lot in his vicinity. His kindergarten teacher at his elementary school noted these difficulties, but the school decided he was in the normal range and didn't require any extra support.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A few years ago, "Carmen", a 17-year-old Latino girl in Boston, split up with her boyfriend. She wanted to tell her friends how upset she felt and duly put a post on her Facebook page. But there was a problem. Carmen's mother (like, I daresay, many FT readers) monitored her daughter's Facebook page - and Carmen did not want to tell her about the break-up. So, to signal her loss to her friends, she posted a message with the Monty Python song "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life".Her mother thought this meant Carmen was happy: her friends, however, understood that Carmen was using private teen code, since they often communicated with songs. They started a conversation with text messages - away from her mother's eyes. Carmen had thus maintained her "privacy", even on a public space.
Just a trivial example of teenage behaviour? Danah Boyd, a digital anthropologist who now works at Microsoft Research, does not think so. She has spent the past decade analysing how teenagers use social media by watching the subtle cultural signals, rituals and group dynamics that a more traditional anthropologist might track in an Amazonian village or "tribal" Papua New Guinea. And after conducting extensive research in 18 states across the US, she argues in a new book, It's Complicated, that some of the received wisdom about social media is wrong. Teenagers are not being corrupted by Facebook and Twitter, as (adult) pundits often fear. Instead, they are developing adaptive skills for this new digital age. As a result, the kids are (mostly) "all right", she insists, even if their behaviour occasionally baffles adults.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
All over the state, public executives are exercising new authority. Instead of raising teachers' salaries, the Mequon-Thiensville School District, near Milwaukee, froze them for two years, saving $560,000. It saved an additional $400,000 a year by increasing employee contributions for health care, said its superintendent, Demond Means. And it is starting a merit pay system for teachers, a move that has been opposed by some teachers and embraced by others.Much more on Act 10, here.Ted Neitzke, school superintendent in West Bend, a city of 31,000 people north of Milwaukee, said that before Act 10 his budget-squeezed district had to cut course offerings and increase class sizes. Now, the district has raised the retirement age for teachers and revamped its health plan, saving $250,000 a year. "We couldn't negotiate or maneuver around that when there was bargaining," Mr. Neitzke said. "We've been able to shift money out of the health plan back into the classroom. We've increased programming."
James R. Scott, a Walker appointee who is chairman of the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, which administers the law regarding public-employee unions, said that "as a result of Act 10, the advantages that labor held have been diminished." He added: "It's fair to say that employers have the upper hand now."
In Oshkosh, Mark Rohloff, the city manager, says the law has saved his city $1.2 million a year, largely because employees are now paying more of their pension and health contributions. But he said state aid cuts of $2 million a year left his city with an $800,000 shortfall.
Among the city's 560 city workers, union membership has fallen to 225, down from 450. The police and the firefighters, who were exempted from Act 10's restrictions on collective bargaining, make up most of the remaining union members. Mr. Rohloff said his city's police and firefighters have averaged annual raises of 2.5 percent, while the other workers had no across-the-board raises from 2010 to 2012, and received a 1 percent increase in 2013.
"Some of the employees who are not represented feel they're second-class citizens compared to other employees," Mr. Rohloff said.
Demoralization is the flip side of Act 10. In Oneida County in northern Wisconsin, the county supervisors jettisoned language requiring "just cause" when firing employees. Now, said Julie Allen, a computer programmer and head of the main local for Oneida County's civil servants, morale is "pretty bad" and workers are afraid to speak out about anything, even safety issues or a revised pay scale. "We don't have just cause," she said. "We don't have seniority protections. So people are pretty scared."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Students in Shanghai have the highest results in international Pisa tests. But what is the state of education for China's rural poor, far away from the showcase cities? Andreas Schleicher, who runs the Pisa tests, went to find out.About 1,900 miles south west of Shanghai is Qiao Tou Lian He elementary school.
It's an hour's drive from the town of Tengchong, which might seem a small distance in comparison, but most of the school's children have never made it to Tengchong.
Providing an education for children in such sparsely-populated rural areas is one of China's major challenges.
While the economic and social development of these rural regions has been remarkable, China's coastal cities are racing ahead at an even faster pace.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The children of cleaners in Asian cities such as Shanghai and Singapore are better at maths than the offspring of doctors and lawyers in the US and UK, according to an analysis of the global Pisa test rankings published on Tuesday.The international league table, first released by the OECD in December, had shown 15-year-olds in Shanghai to be top in maths, while the UK languished in 26th place and the US in 36th.
But fresh scrutiny has revealed that the state-educated children of British professionals are on average a whole school year behind the children of "elementary" workers in Shanghai in maths ability, and around three months behind the same group in Singapore. The gap is even wider between US professionals and Asian cleaners or caterers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A little over a week ago I ran two panels at a conference called Beyond Academia organized by a group of UC Berkeley PhD students and post-docs.This was a great conference particularly because this is the right time, and the Bay Area is the right place, for people with strong quantitative skills looking for other opportunities outside of academia. The startup-up culture, the high-density of exciting technical work, and the density of a highly educated populous offer a lot of options for people looking.
The desire to "jump ship" is further compounded by the terribly poor pay for post-docs and grad students. Most of our pay is set nationally by the NIH and is not adjusted for cost-of-living differences, which means that NIH-funded post-docs in San Francisco (with a median rent of $1363/mo) get paid the same as post-docs in Iowa City (with a median rent of $734/mo).
After however many years of education for a PhD my UCSF take-home pay after federal and state taxes, etc. is about $2800/mo. I'm a father; if I wanted to use UCSF daycare and live in UCSF post-doc housing I would be paying $1998/mo for daycare and at least $1099/mo for a studio. Imagine if I was a single parent? This would make my net take-home pay negative $297/mo.
Ivory Towers indeed.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When he was 4 years old, he took apart his mother's dining room table and gliding ottoman.Last year, he built a computer, pretty much from scratch.
But it's what the 16-year-old Louisburg High School junior made about two months ago that has him most excited these days. Not because it was so challenging, but because it's already changing the life of a family friend's 9-year-old son who was born without fingers on one hand.
Using a 3-D printer at the Johnson County Library, Wilde made a prosthetic hand that opens and closes and can even hold a pencil.
Just ask young Matthew how he feels about Wilde.
"He's awesome," the boy said, thrusting his mechanical hand high above his head.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Spend a little time Googling and you can quickly come up with names of famous people who switched careers in mid-stream. Julia Child, for example, worked in intelligence for the U.S. government before transitioning to cookbook author and television chef. Harrison Ford was a carpenter before he made it big in acting. And Peter Mansbridge worked as a baggage handler (and sometime flight announcer) at the Churchill, Manitoba, airport before starting a successful career in broadcast journalism.But switching disciplines mid-stream in academia? It is a risky move that requires self-confidence and the ability to both see and seize opportunities. One would think an academic career switch is fairly rare, and yet it wasn't hard to find several Canadians who've done it and thrived.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him--under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself--to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.Also on the deck, and also in the thrall of the night's pleasures, was one Louis Helmburg III, an education major and ace benchwarmer for the Thundering Herd baseball team. His response to the proposed launch was the obvious one: he reportedly whipped out his cellphone to record it on video, which would turn out to be yet another of the night's seemingly excellent but ultimately misguided ideas. When the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes's rectum, Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck. Fortunately for him, and adding to the Chaplinesque aspect of the night's miseries, the deck was no more than four feet off the ground, but such was the urgency of his escape that he managed to get himself wedged between the structure and an air-conditioning unit, sustaining injuries that would require medical attention, cut short his baseball season, and--in the fullness of time--pit him against the mighty forces of the Alpha Tau Omega national organization, which had been waiting for him.
It takes a certain kind of personal-injury lawyer to look at the facts of this glittering night and wrest from them a plausible plaintiff and defendant, unless it were possible for Travis Hughes to be sued by his own anus. But the fraternity lawsuit is a lucrative mini-segment of the personal-injury business, and if ever there was a deck that ought to have had a railing, it was the one that served as a nighttime think tank and party-idea testing ground for the brain trust of the Theta Omicron Chapter of Alpha Tau Omega and its honored guests--including these two knuckleheads, who didn't even belong to the fraternity. Moreover, the building codes of Huntington, West Virginia, are unambiguous on the necessity of railings on elevated decks. Whether Helmburg stumbled in reaction to an exploding party guest or to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is immaterial; there should have been a railing to catch him.
And so it was that Louis Helmburg III joined forces with Timothy P. Rosinsky, Esq., a slip-and-fall lawyer from Huntington who had experience also with dog-bite, DUI, car-repossession, and drug cases. The events of that night, laid out in Helmburg's complaint, suggested a relatively straightforward lawsuit. But the suit would turn out to have its own repeated failures to launch and unintended collateral damage, and it would include an ever-widening and desperate search for potential defendants willing to foot the modest bill for Helmburg's documented injuries. Sending a lawyer without special expertise in wrangling with fraternities to sue one of them is like sending a Boy Scout to sort out the unpleasantness in Afghanistan. Who knows? The kid could get lucky. But it never hurts--preparedness and all that--to send him off with a body bag.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Christine Xue wants to be an architect. Her mother, who runs a financial services business in their home region of Chengdu, southwest China, does not share this ambition for her daughter. She would rather her only child opted for something altogether more secure - accountancy, perhaps, or maybe banking. So the 17-year-old is resigned to studying physics at university in order to appease her parents. Secretly, however, she harbours hopes that one person may be able to bring her parents round to architecture: her guardian, Ophelia Colley.The well-groomed Ms Colley, 33, helps her young charge navigate the mysteries of the British education system, translates school reports for her parents and is on hand to support Ms Xue through the loneliness of living far away from home while studying at Queen Margaret's School in the desolate Yorkshire countryside. The girls' boarding school, on the grounds of a former Georgian estate, is beautifully elegant but on an icy-cold, rain-soaked day like today, it looks rather sombre and grey.
Ms Colley, originally from Hong Kong, sees her role as an advocate for her mainland Chinese and Hong Kong teenagers, not just liaising with the school but also the parents. It is her duty, she says, to educate the parents in western ways, telling them they need to adopt a new perspective. For parents rooted in Chinese culture and traditions, it can be difficult to understand their child's outlook infused with western experiences.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
AMERICANS are deeply divided as to whether widening inequality is a problem, let alone what the government should do about it. Some are appalled that Bill Gates has so much money; others say good luck to him. But nearly everyone agrees that declining social mobility is a bad thing. Barack Obama's state-of-the-union speech on January 28th dwelt on how America's "ladders of opportunity" were failing (see article). Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, two leading Republicans, recently gave speeches decrying social immobility and demanding more effort to ensure poor people who work hard can better their lot.Just as the two sides have found something to agree on, however, a new study suggests the conventional wisdom may be wrong. Despite huge increases in inequality, America may be no less mobile a society than it was 40 years ago.
The study, by a clutch of economists at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, is far bigger than any previous effort to measure social mobility. The economists crunch numbers from over 40m tax returns of people born between 1971 and 1993 (with all identifying information removed). They focus on mobility between generations and use several ways to measure it, including the correlation of parents' and children's income, and the odds that a child born into the bottom fifth of the income distribution will climb all the way up to the top fifth.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Following the general wisdom that says, "Leave well enough alone," let's not mess with the basic structure that supports the Wisconsin Technical College System (WCTS).Gov. Walker and the Republican legislature have opened the subject by proposing a property tax cut of more than $400 million through the mechanism of reducing the property tax raised annually for the technical colleges.
Note, though, that this return of a projected windfall budget surplus through that channel is a one-time deal. It is not a permanent change to the tax structure that supports the 16 the colleges.
Nor should it be.
Funding two of our major educational institutions, K-12 and the University of Wisconsin, has been stressful to say the least over the last decade. It will be a major issue in the campaign for governor this year.
The funding crunch stems from the fall-off in state tax revenues during the Great Recession and the grudging recovery. Further, Medicaid has chewed up much of the meager growth in the state's sales and income taxes. That under-managed program is crowding out many other priorities, even though the feds pay 60% of the tab.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As I've already described, I'm worried about the oncoming MOOC revolution and its effect on math research. To say it plainly, I think there will be major cuts in professional math jobs starting very soon, and I've even started to discourage young people from their plans to become math professors.I'd like to start up a conversation - with the public, but starting in the mathematical community - about mathematics research funding and why it's important.
I'd like to argue for math research as a public good which deserves to be publicly funded. But although I'm sure that we need to make that case, the more I think about it the less sure I am how to make that case. I'd like your help.
So remember, we're making the case that continuing math research is a good idea for our society, and we should put up some money towards it, even though we have competing needs to fund other stuff too.
So it's not enough to talk about how arithmetic helps people balance their checkbooks, say, since arithmetic is already widely known and not a topic of research.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Only 14 states' tax revenue had recovered from the Great Recession by the first quarter of 2013, after adjusting for inflation. Total state tax collections were still 1.6 percent below their peak in the third quarter of 2008. The difference shows how far states still have to go to regain lost tax revenue.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Last week's vote by workers at Volkswagen's Chattanooga, Tenn. plant against joining the United Auto Workers union -- despite VW's tacit encouragement -- points up the challenges faced by U.S. organized labor. Even though unions retain much public support, the share of American workers who actually belong to one has been falling for decades and is at its lowest level since the Great Depression.Related: "Anonymous" On The Battle Of Chattanooga.In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in June 2013, about half (51%) of Americans said they had favorable opinions of labor unions, versus 42% who said they had unfavorable opinions about them. That was the highest favorability rating since 2007, though still below the 63% who said they were favorably disposed toward unions in 2001. In a separate 2012 survey, 64% of Americans agreed that unions were necessary to protect working people (though 57% also agreed that unions had "too much power").
As of last year, however, only 11.3% of wage and salary workers belonged to unions, down from 20.1% in 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (At their peak in 1954, 34.8% of all U.S. wage and salary workers belonged to unions, according to the Congressional Research Service.) While the unionization rate among public-sector workers has held fairly steady over that 30-year span (just over a third of government workers are unionized), it's plummeted in the private sector -- from 16.8% in 1983 to 6.7% three decades later. The reasons for that decline are many and heatedly debated -- from the impact of globalization on U.S. manufacturing to intense hostility from businesses to unions' relative lack of success in organizing service- and information-industry workers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
This is a hard post for me to write. For one thing, I have an article coming out in the next Academe that covers some of this ground. For another thing, as my friend Phil Hill knows all too well, I have a #Slatepitch in for an essay on the evils of the flipped classroom. I think they're going to take it (eventually - assuming the one and only Rebecca Schuman doesn't do it first), so I don't want to give away the whole store here.But this paragraph is just way too much for me to bear:
The MOOC, in our view, is the ideal way to flip the classroom, replacing both the lecture and the textbook. Whether they build their own content or draw on an existing MOOC, professors can off-load content to on-line formats and spend face-to-face time interacting with students. Students will actively debate history -for instance-rather than transcribing the professor's lecture. Universities will not be destroyed, only lectures, and in their demise better conversations will happen.To make matters worse, I've met one of the co-authors of those words. Louis Hyman teaches at Cornell, his books on the history of debt are excellent and if I had all the time in the world I'd be taking his upcoming MOOC on the history of capitalism just for the sheer enjoyment of it. I'll bet you anything that he's a terrific lecturer, but if you think I'd let him or anybody else replace my own content on any subject you've got another thing coming.Why not? I need to back up a little in order to explain that.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
If race is a construct, gender is a construct, and teaching is a performative act, where and how do I exist in the classroom as a real black woman?"I am expected to woo students even as I try to fend them off; I am supposed to control them even as I am supposed to manipulate them into loving me. Still I am aware of the paradox of my power over these students. I am aware of my role, my place in an institution that is larger than myself, whose power I wield even as I am powerless, whose shield of respectability shelters me even as I am disrespected." - Patricia Williams. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Mad Law ProfessorThis is part three in a series by Dr. Matthew. See Part 1 and Part 2 at her blog.On the first day of class one semester a male student called me Mrs. Matthews. It was the very beginning of the school year, and I'd been on sabbatical the previous winter, which meant I had eight full months to work on two big projects--an anthology about race and tenure in the humanities and my book about the history of the novel and its intersections with 19th-century medical and conduct discourse. It also meant I had had no interactions with students, even in passing. I live in Brooklyn but teach in New Jersey, so when I'm away from school I'm really away from school. The only student I had interacted with was the graduate student helping me with background research for the introduction to the race and tenure anthology. This is probably why, when I heard "Mrs. Matthews," I replied without thinking, "Everything about that is wrong."I'm funny about people misspelling my last name. I think if it were, say, "Pryzbylewski" I wouldn't get upset about it. That's a hard name to spell, but "Matthew" is easy. Yet people add an "s" on the end all the time--telemarketers, doctors, Verizon, restaurant hostesses, and students. In the classroom, I can tell myself that I get persnickety about it because I'm teaching my students to pay attention to details, but I suspect I'm just funny about my name. And, when I'm at school, I'm funny about my title. Outside of work I rarely use it. In fact, when people ask me what I do for a living I just tell them I teach instead of saying I'm a university professor. But at school I assume that, like my male colleagues, students will refer to me as Dr. or Professor instead of Miss or Mrs. Depending on my mood or the time of the semester, I am either good-natured or sarcastic about this mistake. Early in the term I might say, "I may be large and contain multitudes but I am also singular, so please note there is no "s" at the end of my name," or I try to keep it simple by saying "that's Matthew two t's no s." When students (and when the mistake is made it's almost always a male student making the mistake) call me Miss or Mrs., I'm neither good-natured nor sarcastic. That's a mistake of a different kind. I try not to be too aggressive scary-feminist about the whole thing, but I'm quick to point out the error. Neither of these are high on my list of the problems of a tenured academic, but a recent comment on a student evaluation reminds of how being read as "black" by students has shaped my teaching, for better or ill.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Gabriel Sahlgren and Julian Le Grand:
Put a child of a cleaner from Shanghai or Singapore up against a scion of the western elite in a standardised test and guess who will come out top? According to the latest research, the western kids will trail their Asian counterparts by the equivalent of a whole school year.This prompted another bout of anxiety of a kind that has become increasingly common since 2001, when the global Pisa survey of educational attainment was first published. Parents once drew comfort from steady improvements in school-leaving grades in places such as the UK. Confronted with evidence of how their children's accomplishments compared to those of students in faraway places, many westerners have taken fright.
Next week Elizabeth Truss, a British education minister, will lead a fact-finding mission to Shanghai to try to find out what the schools there are doing right. Yet in their rush to copy the winning formula of high-performing countries in east Asia, politicians risk drawing the wrong conclusions. Schools in Shanghai are very different from those in Ms Truss's constituency in southwest Norfolk. But not all of those differences play a role in Shanghai's superior performance. Some are irrelevant. Some may even be harmful. And some will be idiosyncratic features of the school she happens to visit, rather than representative of the system. It is easy to point out how a good school differs from a bad one, and conclude that you have found the secret to high achievement - but it is also lazy, unscientific and wrong.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Caltech has a serious problem with undergraduates cheating on academic work, which Caltech administrators appear to be ignoring. A few years ago, one alumnus considered the problem so bad that he urged other alumni to stop donating. I attended Tech (that's what we called it) for a year and a half in the 1970s. I didn't think cheating was a problem then. Now it is.A recent article in the Times Higher Education Supplement by Phil Baty praised Caltech's "honor system", which includes trusting students not to cheat on exams. A Caltech professor of biology named Markus Meister told Baty that "cheats simply cannot prosper in an environment that includes such small-group teaching and close collaboration with colleagues because they would rapidly be exposed." That strikes me as naive. How convenient for Meister that there is no need to test his theory -- it must be true ("cheats simply cannot prosper").
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Thirty-four pages of research, branded with a staid title and rife with complicated graphs, might not seem like a scintillating read, but there's no doubt that a report released on Wednesday will punch higher education's hot buttons in a big way.The report, "Labor Intensive or Labor Expensive: Changing Staffing and Compensation Patterns in Higher Education," says that new administrative positions--particularly in student services--drove a 28-percent expansion of the higher-ed work force from 2000 to 2012. The report was released by the Delta Cost Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan social-science organization whose researchers analyze college finances.
What's more, the report says, the number of full-time faculty and staff members per professional or managerial administrator has declined 40 percent, to around 2.5 to 1.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A little over a week ago I ran two panels at a conference called Beyond Academia organized by a group of UC Berkeley PhD students and post-docs.This was a great conference particularly because this is the right time, and the Bay Area is the right place, for people with strong quantitative skills looking for other opportunities outside of academia. The startup-up culture, the high-density of exciting technical work, and the density of a highly educated populous offer a lot of options for people looking.
The desire to "jump ship" is further compounded by the terribly poor pay for post-docs and grad students. Most of our pay is set nationally by the NIH and is not adjusted for cost-of-living differences, which means that NIH-funded post-docs in San Francisco (with a median rent of $1363/mo) get paid the same as post-docs in Iowa City (with a median rent of $734/mo).
After however many years of education for a PhD my UCSF take-home pay after federal and state taxes, etc. is about $2800/mo. I'm a father; if I wanted to use UCSF daycare and live in UCSF post-doc housing I would be paying $1998/mo for daycare and at least $1099/mo for a studio. Imagine if I was a single parent? This would make my net take-home pay negative $297/mo.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
$5,785 may not do much for you at Duke where tuition exceeds $50,000 a year. But, it can put a serious dent in the tuition at Durham Tech Community College (approx. $13,000). With some state aid, institutional aid, and some luck a student might be able to get some of that workforce training everyone from the President of the United States and all the captains of the private sector claim we need.Pell grants help poor students overcome the consequences of choosing to be born to parents without means.
For almost the entire history of higher education in this country, college was for the sons (and much later the daughters) of wealthy families. The GI Bill created a national model for distributing aid to students without the benefit of inter-generational wealth to go to college.
But, the GI Bill was not evenly or fairly distributed. Despite the disproportionate number of black men and women who served in the military two decades after it was integrated, black folks had a hard time getting the aid they'd been promised.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison Teachers, Inc. (PDF), via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email:
The streets of Portland resemble those of Madison in 2011, only in Portland it is the Board of Education's failure to bargain in good faith which is causing the labor dispute.
"Fighting for the Schools Portland Students Deserve" is a predominant sign. This refers to the School Board's failure to implement an Arbitrator's Award which would provide additional planning time and reduce class size to provide more time for teachers to work with students and their individual learning styles; individual differences.The District has nearly $30 million it could access to address the issues presented by the Portland Association of Teachers, but the Board refuses. Instead the Board of Education threatens to take away the early retirement (TERP) benefit, even though it saves the District significant money. Among other issues are just cause and due process standards, videotaping instruction for evaluative purposes and the District improperly using "letters of expectation" to bully teachers.
The Union plans to strike if Contract issues are not resolved by February 20.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The old iron key turns on the third attempt and 50-year-old Wu Yuemeng pushes the door open with her knee. She motions her daughter into a seldom-used upstairs bedroom that is dominated by a dusty, century-old wooden loom and a metal-banded chest.Wu reaches into the chest and takes out treasures, as her daughter - the cheerful 19-year-old Xia - looks on. She pulls out hand-woven shoes, finely embroidered silk ribbons and fabrics dyed with intriguing patterns - all of which are ethnic Dong costumes and accessories. Finally, she reveals the prize: a glittering ceremonial headpiece with swaying golden leaves (see magazine cover) that has been passed down by generations of mothers to their daughters.
Layer by layer, lace by lace, Wu drapes her daughter in the garments she began making while pregnant with Xia, before she knew her baby would be a girl, let alone what kind of girl she would grow up to be. After Xia was born, Wu continued to weave and embroider ribbons and shirts whenever she was not in the fields planting rice.
Dong women embroider with just a single needle and without a fixed pattern, using their stitches to express their feelings for their children. The Dong people of impoverished Guizhou province have no written language, but their textile craftsmanship is unmatched in its refinement, and is a clear communication of love.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
New York City is worth watching these days as Mayor Bill de Blasio begins his new "progressive" government. His first priority seems to be a political and economic assault on charter schools.The number of charters in New York City grew by over 900% under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and they now teach some 70,000 kids out of 1.1 million. Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes has twice found that the city's charter students do better in reading and math than their counterparts at district schools.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Stephen Eide on why forcing New York City charter schools to pay rent will impact educational outcomes. Photo credit: Associated Press.
Mr. de Blasio plans to redress this inequity by handicapping charters. His Department of Education has already zeroed out $210 million in funding from its 2015-2019 capital budget for charter construction. The new mayor has also announced a moratorium on co-locations, a policy that allows charters to share facilities with district schools and provides for a more efficient use of space. Twenty-five co-locations approved last year under Mr. Bloomberg may be in jeopardy.
Mr. de Blasio explains that kids in district schools may feel like they're getting an inferior education if a charter moves in next door and renovates. Charters are public schools that also raise private money, and state law requires the city to match the private funds on district schools that charters spend on upgrades to prevent a disparity. So by killing co-location Mr. de Blasio can also spend less on district schools.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee:
The advances we've seen in the past few years--cars that drive themselves, useful humanoid robots, speech recognition and synthesis systems, 3D printers, Jeopardy!-champion computers--are not the crowning achievements of the computer era. They're the warm-up acts. As we move deeper into the second machine age we'll see more and more such wonders, and they'll become more and more impressive.How can we be so sure? Because the exponential, digital, and recombinant powers of the second machine age have made it possible for humanity to create two of the most important one-time events in our history: the emergence of real, useful artificial intelligence (AI) and the connection of most of the people on the planet via a common digital network.
Either of these advances alone would fundamentally change our growth prospects. When combined, they're more important than anything since the Industrial Revolution, which forever transformed how physical work was done.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Computer science is mostly white or Asian and male. We have lots of data to support that. What I didn't realize was how sub-groups within Asian-American differ markedly in their educational attainment. A new report from NYU and ETS disaggregates the data, and below is the startling graphic that Rick Adrion pointed me to.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia accused American schools of failing to properly educate citizens in their civic duties, railed against the state favoring non-religion over religion and even took a swipe at Chicago style pizza.Scalia spoke Friday night at the Union League Club of Chicago's 126th annual George Washington's Birthday celebration.
Calling the founder of our country "my favorite president," and "a man of conscience and steadfast determination," Scalia then launched into an analysis of how the founding fathers and leading teachers of the period viewed education and how far he believes educators, like courts have strayed from their original intentions.
He lamented that most students in elite law school classes he speaks at have never read the Federalist Papers. "It is truly appalling that they should have reached graduate school without having been exposed to that important element of their national patrimony, the work that best explains the reasons and objectives of the constitution."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
All 870 students at Hillview Middle School in Menlo Park, Calif. will soon have school-issued iPads that they can use both at school and at home. The school has slowly rolled out the program over the past three years, trying to work out the kinks before issuing the expensive devices to every student. Before students can take the devices home, they'll have to take a course to get their "digital driver license," which includes digital citizenship and learning their way around the device.Eighth grade students at Hillview have had their iPads since the beginning of the school year. Read more on how teachers are using the devices in class so far and their hopes for the future. Here, they weigh in on how the devices change what happens in class, how they think about learning and how they organize their school work.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I am a current high school senior who intends to go into the software industry. I'm trying to decide between enrolling in college to pursue a BS in Computer Science or entering directly into the workforce.My conundrum is this: I intend to seek a front-end engineering job, and am already very competent in front-end technologies. I have a fair number of items on my resume, mostly from personal projects and internships. I anticipate being able to acquire a moderately well-paying ($60,000 to $80,000+) development job after leaving high school. However, I'm also worried that not pursuing a degree will exclude me from certain well-paying jobs, especially later in my career.
I'm also quite worried about the debt load that a degree would require. I anticipate having to take out between $50,000 and $100,000 in loans to finance a degree.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Is standardized testing anti-student? Many educators and commentators believe so, vehemently. No more "drill and kill," some detractors demand. Kids are not robots goes another refrain. Others argue that standardized testing is a soul-sapping exercise in rote learning that devalues critical thinking and favors students of higher-income parents who can afford test-prep classes or private tutors.On the contrary: Testing is good for the intellectual health of students. It is also an excellent way for teachers to better understand the particular academic challenges their students face.
First, standardized tests are a critical thinker's dream. Multiple-choice questions often ask students to evaluate evidence and make inferences. Consider a sample multiple-choice question for the New York State English Language Arts test, which is administered in the public schools. It asks students to identify the tone of a paragraph excerpted from Andrew Carnegie's "The Gospel of Wealth" (1889).
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
By the time this post appears, the first peer-graded assignment in Cathy Davidson's Coursera MOOC, "History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education," will have come and gone, and students will be well into the second. Unlike programming projects, algebra exercises, and multiple-choice questions that can all be reliably graded by a computer, Coursera offloads the task of evaluating essays to students. After the deadline for an assignment has passed, students have a week to evaluate five of their classmates' essays using a rubric developed by the teaching staff. A student who fails to evaluate his or her classmates does not get a grade for the assignment, and in our course will not be able to achieve the statement of accomplishment "with distinction." Whether students see that as a chore, duty, or opportunity, the necessary assessment is eventually done--for better or for worse.Peer grading can be a controversial proposition. When students' scholarships and internships are riding on their grades, it isn't surprising that they hesitate to allow their classmates--who know as much as they do about the course material--to have any effect on their final assessment. Instructors scoff at the idea that students can be left to evaluate one another, certain that they will collude so that everyone will receive an A without doing any of the work. In its worst incarnation, peer grading can be a scheme for lazy professors to offload on students the boring work of assessment.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
There is a long standing belief in business that people performance follows the Bell Curve (also called the Normal Distribution). This belief has been embedded in many business practices: performance appraisals, compensation models, and even how we get graded in school. (Remember "grading by the curve?")Research shows that this statistical model, while easy to understand, does not accurately reflect the way people perform. As a result, HR departments and business leaders inadvertently create agonizing problems with employee performance and happiness.
Witness Microsoft's recent decision to disband its performance management process - after decades of use the company realized it was encouraging many of its top people to leave. I recently talked with the HR leader of a well known public company and she told me her engineer-CEO insists on implementing a forced ranking system. I explained the statistical models to her and it really helped him think differently.
Does human performance follow the bell curve? Research says no.
Let's look at the characteristics of the Bell Curve, and I think you'll quickly understand why the model doesn't fit.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In 2009, Money Magazine published a survey titled "The 50 Best Jobs in America." Their reporters analyzed job data and conducted an online survey of thirty-five thousand people, taking into account such factors as salaries, flexibility, benefit to society, satisfaction, stress, job security, and growth prospects. The proverbial college professor sat high on the list at No. 3, with a median salary of $70,400 for nine months' work, top pay of $115,000, and a ten-year growth prospect of 23 percent. College teaching earned "A" grades for flexibility, benefit to society, and satisfaction, and a "B" for job stress, with 59 percent of surveyed professors reporting low stress.While acknowledging that "competition for tenure-track positions at four-year institutions is intense," Money claimed that graduate students with only a master's degree could find a part-time teaching job: "You'll find lots of available positions at community colleges and professional programs, where you can enter the professoriate as an adjunct faculty member or non-tenure-track instructor without a doctorate degree."
Similarly, the 2000 "American Faculty Poll" conducted by the academic pension giant Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF) seemed to corroborate the high job satisfaction rate for professors. "The poll found that 90 percent of the faculty members surveyed were satisfied with their career choices and would probably make the same decisions again," reported Courtney Leatherman, in her Chronicle of Higher Education story about the survey.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Thanks to technology, people can create more wealth now than ever before, and in twenty years they'll be able to create more wealth than they can today. Even though this leads to more total wealth, it skews it toward fewer people. This disparity has probably been growing since the beginning of technology, in the broadest sense of the word.Technology makes wealth inequality worse by giving people leverage and compounding differences in ability and amount of work. It also often replaces human jobs with machines. A long time ago, differences in ability and work ethic had a linear effect on wealth; now it's exponential. [1] Technology leads to increasing wealth inequality for lots of other reasons, too--for example, it makes it much easier to reach large audiences all at once, and a great product can be sold immediately worldwide instead of in just one area.
Without intervention, technology will probably lead to an untenable disparity--so we probably need some amount of intervention. Technology also increases the total wealth in a way that mostly benefits everyone, but at some point the disparity just feels so unfair it doesn't matter.
Wealth inequality today in the United States is extreme and growing, and we talk about it a lot when someone throws a brick through the window of a Google bus. Lots of smart people have already written about this, but here are two images to quickly show what the skew looks like:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Public trust in the government, already quite low, has edged even lower in a survey conducted just before the Oct. 16 agreement to end the government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling.Explore public attitudes towards the federal government over time and compare the data with other key national indicators, such as consumer sentiment, the unemployment rate and changes within the elected leadership.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Last week we highlighted a study showing that university administrative positions rose 28 percent in the last decade, but a new study from the NECIR suggests that the problem is even worse.Over the last 25 years the number of administrative employees at U.S. colleges and universities more than doubled, according to a joint study by the New England Center of Investigative Reporting and the American Institutes for Research. The ratio of nonacademic positions to faculty positions doubled at both public and private institutions. Overall, the industry has added an average of 87 administrative positions per day, a rate has scarcely slowed since the economic downturn, despite tuition increases. Even more surprising, academic institutions have added more administrative employees despite part-time faculty taking on more teaching duties than full-time professors.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I decided that it would be a bit easier to digest to do the chart by individual subjects and use points rather than percentages of a standard deviation and combined tests as an axis. Also revenue per pupil was easier to find than expenditures. So what you see up there is a first crack at 4th grade reading between 1998 and 2013. No shock- money is still not the answer (yes I am looking right at you New York and Wyoming).
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The millennials -- born after 1980 -- are the best-educated generation in history. By early adulthood, a third have college degrees, and those degrees help them earn more than ever before. So scholars at the Pew Research Center were puzzled when they found that the median, inflation-adjusted income of 25- to 32-year-olds had changed very little since 1965.The reason, they discovered, is that even though a college degree is worth more, a high school degree alone is worth a lot less. Its value, in terms of wages, has declined enough to cancel out almost all the gains by all the millennials who have earned four-year degrees.
From 1965 to 2013, according to a new Pew report called "The Rising Cost of Not Going to College," the typical high school graduate's earnings fell more than 10 percent, after inflation.
"That is one of the great economic stories of our era, which you could define as income inequality," said Paul Taylor, an author of the report. "The leading suspects are the digital economy and the globalization of labor markets. Both of them place a higher premium on the knowledge-based part of the work force and have the effect of drying up the opportunities for good middle-class jobs, particularly for those that don't have an education."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Daifailluh al-Bugami was just a year old when his parents noticed that his lips turned blue as he slept at night. It was his weight, doctors said, putting pressure on his delicate airways.Now Daifailluh is 3, and at 61 pounds he is nearly double the typical weight of a child his age. So the Bugamis are planning the once unthinkable: To have their toddler undergo bariatric surgery to permanently remove part of his stomach in hopes of reducing his appetite and staving off a lifetime of health problems.
That such a young child would be considered for weight-loss surgery--something U.S. surgeons generally won't do--underscores the growing health crisis here and elsewhere in the Middle East. Widespread access to unhealthy foods, coupled with sedentary behavior brought on by wealth and the absence of a dieting and exercise culture, have caused obesity levels in Saudi Arabia and many other Gulf states to approach or even exceed those in Western countries.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Martius Bautista's goal heading into the Madison All-City Spelling Bee, was a simple one."Just try my best," said Martius, a fourth-grader at Edgewood Campus School.
His best turned out to be even better than the best.
In capturing the trophy at the Mitby Theatre of Madison Area Technical College, Martius had to outduel two-time All-City champion and reigning Badger State champion Aisha Khan, an eighth-grader at Spring Harbor Middle School.
Those two emerged as the finalists after Marissa Stewart, a seventh-grader at Black Hawk Middle School bowed out in the 24th round.
Aisha and Martius each got their first seven words in the finals correct before Aisha was confronted with "bolivar," the currency of Venezuela.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A giant runaway snowball crashed into a Reed dorm on Saturday evening, ripping a wall off its studs and narrowly missing a window. No one was injured in the collision.College officials say the ball was some 40 inches in diameter and weighed from 800 to 900 pounds. "It was a big snowball," says maintenance manager Steve Yeadon.
The episode started Saturday during a storm that dumped as much as 12 inches of snow on Portland. A couple of students decided to make a large snowball in the quadrangle formed by the Grove dorms, according to an incident report from the Community Safety Office. They rolled it back and forth across the Grove Quad in what must have at first seemed a Sisyphean undertaking. But as time went on, the frozen sphere picked up more and more snow, gained mass, and grew increasingly ponderous. Soon a rumor sprang up that the Doyle Owl was entombed in its icy heart. By 8 p.m., a crowd had gathered in the Quad and was chanting "Roll it! Roll it!"
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I hear from many experienced teachers who feel the emphasis on student test results has hurt their profession. But to young people coming into the profession, the situation does not look so dark. Education leaders influenced by European and Asian methods are raising standards for those who can enroll in teacher training, while making the training deeper, with more participation by skilled veterans.Many more teachers are required now to earn degrees in their subjects. The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation has set new standards for teacher training programs in which entrants should have a collective college grade-point average of at least 3.0 and college admission test scores above the national average by 2017.
The higher targets might already be having an effect. An article in the quarterly journal Education Next by Dan Goldhaber, a former Alexandria School Board member, and Joe Walch, both of the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington, says new teachers have significantly higher SAT scores than in previous years. Average SAT performance of first-year teachers in 2008-2009 was at the 50th percentile, compared with the 45th percentile in 1993-1994 and 42nd percentile in 2000-2001.
In the past, teacher candidates had lower SAT scores than college classmates choosing other jobs, but in 2008-2009, "graduates entering the teaching profession . . . had average SAT scores that slightly exceeded average scores of their peers entering other occupations," the researchers said.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Center for American Progress (CAP) recently released a short report on whether teachers were leaving the profession due to reforms implemented during the Obama Administration, as some commentators predicted.The authors use data from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), a wonderful national survey of U.S. teachers, and they report that 70 percent of first-year teachers in 2007-08 were still teaching in 2011-12. They claim that this high retention of beginning teachers, along with the fact that most teachers in 2011-12 had five or more years of experience, show that "the teacher retention concerns were unfounded."
This report raises a couple of important points about the debate over teacher retention during this time of sweeping reform.
First, however, I must point out that, due to an analytical error, the 70 percent retention figure is incorrect. The authors wanted to see how many first year teachers from 2007-08 were still in the profession in 2011-12. What they did was identify fifth-year teachers (in 2011-12), and then looked at these teachers' responses to another question asking their first year of teaching. 70 percent said it was 2007-08 (five years earlier), and so the CAP report concludes that 30 percent of first year teachers in 2007-08 had left the profession.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Of the millions of American high school students who receive their diplomas this month, 70 percent will move on to college. Unfortunately, by the time they reach their mid-twenties, fewer than half of those students will earn a four-year college degree. Recent studies tell us that even among those under 25 who have earned a college degree, as many as half may be unemployed or, more typically, underemployed. For those young people with no college degree, or worse yet no high school diploma, the situation is even more dire.Via the website. Much more here, here and here.In February 2011 the Pathways to Prosperity Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) released a report challenging our excessive focus on the four-year college pathway, arguing that we need to create additional pathways that combine rigorous academics with strong technical education to equip the majority of young people with the skills and credentials to succeed in our increasingly challenging labor market. Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century hit a nerve with employers, educators, and state officials struggling with high unemployment rates, perceived skills mismatches, and the devastating effect of the financial crisis on young people.
The enormous interest generated by the Pathways report has led to the launch of the Pathways to Prosperity Network, a collaboration between the Pathways to Prosperity Project at HGSE, Jobs for the Future (JFF), and six states focused on ensuring that many more young people complete high school, attain a postsecondary credential with currency in the labor market, and launch into a career while leaving open the prospect of further education. To accomplish this goal, participating states will deeply engage with employers and educators to build career pathways systems for high school-aged students. Each state will be led by a coalition of key public and private sector leaders committed to mobilizing and sustaining political and financial support for the agenda and addressing legislative or regulatory barriers that inhibit progress. The work will initially focus on one or two key regional labor markets within each state, but the long-term goal is to create a statewide system of career pathways that can serve a majority of students.
Related: wisconsin2.org
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
High school, where kids socialize, show off their clothes, use their phones--and, oh yeah, go to class.Laurence Steinberg is a psychology professor at Temple University and author of the forthcoming Age of Opportunity: Revelations from the New Science of Adolescence.Every once in a while, education policy squeezes its way onto President Obama's public agenda, as it did in during last month's State of the Union address. Lately, two issues have grabbed his (and just about everyone else's) attention: early-childhood education and access to college. But while these scholastic bookends are important, there is an awful lot of room for improvement between them. American high schools, in particular, are a disaster.
In international assessments, our elementary school students generally score toward the top of the distribution, and our middle school students usually place somewhat above the average. But our high school students score well below the international average, and they fare especially badly in math and science compared with our country's chief economic rivals.
What's holding back our teenagers?
One clue comes from a little-known 2003 study based on OECD data that compares the world's 15-year-olds on two measures of student engagement: participation and "belongingness." The measure of participation was based on how often students attended school, arrived on time, and showed up for class. The measure of belongingness was based on how much students felt they fit in to the student body, were liked by their schoolmates, and felt that they had friends in school. We might think of the first measure as an index of academic engagement and the second as a measure of social engagement.
On the measure of academic engagement, the U.S. scored only at the international average, and far lower than our chief economic rivals: China, Korea, Japan, and Germany. In these countries, students show up for school and attend their classes more reliably than almost anywhere else in the world. But on the measure of social engagement, the United States topped China, Korea, and Japan.
In America, high school is for socializing. It's a convenient gathering place, where the really important activities are interrupted by all those annoying classes. For all but the very best American students--the ones in AP classes bound for the nation's most selective colleges and universities--high school is tedious and unchallenging. Studies that have tracked American adolescents' moods over the course of the day find that levels of boredom are highest during their time in school.
It's not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents--it's every single thing we have tried.
One might be tempted to write these findings off as mere confirmation of the well-known fact that adolescents find everything boring. In fact, a huge proportion of the world's high school students say that school is boring. But American high schools are even more boring than schools in nearly every other country, according to OECD surveys. And surveys of exchange students who have studied in America, as well as surveys of American adolescents who have studied abroad, confirm this. More than half of American high school students who have studied in another country agree that our schools are easier. Objectively, they are probably correct: American high school students spend far less time on schoolwork than their counterparts in the rest of the world.
Trends in achievement within the U.S. reveal just how bad our high schools are relative to our schools for younger students. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, administered by the U.S. Department of Education, routinely tests three age groups: 9-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds. Over the past 40 years, reading scores rose by 6 percent among 9-year-olds and 3 percent among 13-year-olds. Math scores rose by 11 percent among 9-year-olds and 7 percent among 13-year-olds.
By contrast, high school students haven't made any progress at all. Reading and math scores have remained flat among 17-year-olds, as have their scores on subject area tests in science, writing, geography, and history. And by absolute, rather than relative, standards, American high school students' achievement is scandalous.
In other words, over the past 40 years, despite endless debates about curricula, testing, teacher training, teachers' salaries, and performance standards, and despite billions of dollars invested in school reform, there has been no improvement--none--in the academic proficiency of American high school students.
It's not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents--it's every single thing we have tried. The list of unsuccessful experiments is long and dispiriting. Charter high schools don't perform any better than standard public high schools, at least with respect to student achievement. Students whose teachers "teach for America" don't achieve any more than those whose teachers came out of conventional teacher certification programs. Once one accounts for differences in the family backgrounds of students who attend public and private high schools, there is no advantage to going to private school, either. Vouchers make no difference in student outcomes. No wonder school administrators and teachers from Atlanta to Chicago to my hometown of Philadelphia have been caught fudging data on student performance. It's the only education strategy that consistently gets results.
The especially poor showing of high schools in America is perplexing. It has nothing to do with high schools having a more ethnically diverse population than elementary schools. In fact, elementary schools are more ethnically diverse than high schools, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Nor do high schools have more poor students. Elementary schools in America are more than twice as likely to be classified as "high-poverty" than secondary schools. Salaries are about the same for secondary and elementary school teachers. They have comparable years of education and similar years of experience. Student-teacher ratios are the same in our elementary and high schools. So are the amounts of time that students spend in the classroom. We don't shortchange high schools financially either; American school districts actually spend a little more per capita on high school students than elementary school students.
Our high school classrooms are not understaffed, underfunded, or underutilized, by international standards. According to a 2013 OECD report, only Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland spend more per student. Contrary to widespread belief, American high school teachers' salaries are comparable to those in most European and Asian countries, as are American class sizes and student-teacher ratios. And American high school students actually spend as many or more hours in the classroom each year than their counterparts in other developed countries.
This underachievement is costly: One-fifth of four-year college entrants and one-half of those entering community college need remedial education, at a cost of $3 billion each year.
The president's call for expanding access to higher education by making college more affordable, while laudable on the face of it, is not going to solve our problem. The president and his education advisers have misdiagnosed things. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of college entry in the industrialized world. Yet it is tied for last in the rate of college completion. More than one-third of U.S. students who enter a full-time, two-year college program drop out just after one year, as do about one fifth of students who enter a four-year college. In other words, getting our adolescents to go to college isn't the issue. It's getting them to graduate.
If this is what we hope to accomplish, we need to rethink high school in America. It is true that providing high-quality preschool to all children is an important component of comprehensive education reform. But we can't just do this, cross our fingers, and hope for the best. Early intervention is an investment, not an inoculation.
In recent years experts in early-child development have called for programs designed to strengthen children's "non-cognitive" skills, pointing to research that demonstrates that later scholastic success hinges not only on conventional academic abilities but on capacities like self-control. Research on the determinants of success in adolescence and beyond has come to a similar conclusion: If we want our teenagers to thrive, we need to help them develop the non-cognitive traits it takes to complete a college degree--traits like determination, self-control, and grit. This means classes that really challenge students to work hard--something that fewer than one in six high school students report experiencing, according to Diploma to Nowhere, a 2008 report published by Strong American Schools. Unfortunately, our high schools demand so little of students that these essential capacities aren't nurtured. As a consequence, many high school graduates, even those who have acquired the necessary academic skills to pursue college coursework, lack the wherewithal to persevere in college. Making college more affordable will not fix this problem, though we should do that too.
The good news is that advances in neuroscience are revealing adolescence to be a second period of heightened brain plasticity, not unlike the first few years of life. Even better, brain regions that are important for the development of essential non-cognitive skills are among the most malleable. And one of the most important contributors to their maturation is pushing individuals beyond their intellectual comfort zones.
It's time for us to stop squandering this opportunity. Our kids will never rise to the challenge if the challenge doesn't come.
----------------------------------
"Teach with Examples"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
For several months running, the Bill and Eva Show has been the talk of New York City politics. He is the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, an unapologetic old-school liberal Democrat, scourge of the rich and of public charter schools. She is Eva Moskowitz, fellow Democrat and educational-reform champion who runs the city's largest charter network.How did Ms. Moskowitz, a hero to thousands of New Yorkers of modest means whose children have been able to get a better education than their local public schools offered, end up becoming public enemy No. 1?
She is the city's most prominent, and vocal, advocate for charter schools, and therefore a threat to the powerful teachers union that had been counting the days until the de Blasio administration took over last month from the charter-friendly Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Assailed by Mayor de Blasio and union leaders, Ms. Moskowitz is fighting back with typically sharp elbows.
"A progressive Democrat should be embracing charters, not rejecting them," she says. "It's just wacky."
As she reminds every audience, the 6,700 students at her 22 Success Academy Charter Schools are overwhelmingly from poor, minority families and scored in the top 1% in math and top 7% in English on the most recent state test. Four in five charters in the city outperformed comparable schools.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When it introduced a new privacy policy designed to improve its ability to target users with ads based on data mining of their online activities, Google said the policy didn't apply to students using Google Apps for Education. But recent court filings by Google's lawyers in a California class action lawsuit against Gmail data mining tell a different story: Google now admits that it does data mine student emails for ad-targeting purposes outside of school, even when ad serving in school is turned off, and its controversial consumer privacy policy does apply to Google Apps for Education.At SafeGov.org our work has long focused on the risks of allowing targeted online advertising into schools. This issue has come to the fore as companies like Google and Microsoft have launched a worldwide race to introduce their web application suites into as many schools as possible. In this article we review the background of this debate and then present important new evidence regarding the practices of one of the leading players, Google.
The suites in question are known as Google Apps for Education and Office 365 Education, respectively, and they include basic apps such as email, word processing, spreadsheets, live document sharing, simple web forms and messaging. Their key selling point is that they offer students something almost as good as a traditional office suite in the convenient format of a browser window, and - best of all for cash-strapped schools - they do so at no cost.
Of course as the economist said there is no such thing as a free lunch, and we must look carefully at the business motives behind these firms' generosity. Here an important difference between the two leaders emerges. Both Google and Microsoft generate substantial revenues by selling online office suites to government and enterprises for annual subscription fees. If the firms offer essentially the same suites to schools for free, it is surely in part because they hope that when students move into the workplace they will demand the same online tools they learned to use in school. This is a business model that is honest about its intentions and serves the interests of both students and the firms. However, there is an additional component in the Google business model that involves advertising, and this is where the trouble begins.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The University of Maine at Presque Isle is moving beyond grades by basing all of its academic programs on "proficiencies" that students must master to earn a degree.University officials announced the planned move to proficiency-based curriculums on Thursday. While many details have yet to be hashed out, the broad shift by the public institution is sure to raise eyebrows.
"We are transforming the entire university," said Linda Schott, Presque Isle's president. "In the next four years, for sure, all of our programs will be proficiency-based."That means students will progress through in-person, online and hybrid degree programs by demonstrating that they are proficient in required concepts, which faculty members will work to develop. Schott said the university will start by converting general education requirements, and then move to majors.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Say you wake up at 8 am. You shower, eat breakfast, brush your teeth... and get to work at 9. You spend your day working, leave the office at 5, and get home at about 5:30. You unwind a for a few minutes, and then start making dinner. By the time you're done cooking, eating and cleaning, it's 7 o'clock. You want to make sure that you get in your daily exercise, but you need to digest first, so after watching TV for a half hour, you start your workout. An hour later, it's 8:30. And after showering, it's 8:45. You now have about 3 hours before you go to sleep and start your day over again.There are two points I want to make.
Your career is very important. Aside from routine daily activities, the majority of your day will be work. That big 8 hour chunk. 9-to-5. And since this will be true for, say, 50 years, I don't think that it'd be too much of a stretch to say that the majority of your life will be work. For this reason, I think that it'd be wise to give this decision the time and thought that it deserves.
When you ask people, "What do you want to do with your life?", I don't think that they give you an honest answer. I don't think they're trying to deceive you, but I think that they're answering a different question. The question that they hear is, "Given that I'll be busy from 9-5 every weekday for 50 years, what else would I like to fit in to my life?".
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The champions of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, and other digitally mediated mass-produced education often speak of the "necessity" of transitioning to this model because of all of the increasingly onerous expense of traditional higher ed and unmet demand for education.Clay Shirky believes the need is dire: "The reason to bet on the spread of large-scale low-cost education isn't the increased supply of new technologies. It's the massive demand for education, which our existing institutions are increasingly unable to handle. That demand will go somewhere." (It's worth noting that Shirky said close to the opposite of this in 2012, before the limitations of MOOCs became so readily apparent).
I don't mean to pick on Shirky specifically--I've done that already. His post is just the freshest example of an attitude that's widely shared by important people like Bill Gates, Coursera founder Daphne Koller, and Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, not to mention the venture capitalist community that fuels this industry with their investment dollars.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Marc Andreesen believes that software is eating the world. It's a very visceral image, and in one sense it's absolutely true. Software is spreading into every industry, changing how established players must play and even what the rules of the game are. But while many in Silicon Valley and Educational Technology think that software will "eat" teachers, replacing many of them, at trinket we believe software's role is to create openness, making teachers better and more connected. Far from there being less teachers in the future, we think openness will enable and encourage more people than ever to teach.Godawful Teachers?
In the midst of a longer Twitter conversation I was having with him and others (which I will likely blog about separately), Andreesen made an interesting comment:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Common Core standards call for fifth graders to understand metaphors. So here's a story from my life last week that I fear may end up being a metaphor for the Common Core campaign.I had a flat tire. AAA came promptly, put on that weird little spare in my trunk, and didn't charge me anything. It turned out there was a nail in the tread.
The tire was repaired and put back on my car. In a pleasant surprise, I didn't have to pay for the repair because the tire was under warranty.
I was quite pleased to have this fixed for free. But then I thought how I really had paid, both with my AAA dues and with the money the tire cost me. Furthermore, I realized things had been returned only to where they started -- I had the same tire on the car and nothing was actually any different than before I ran over the nail.
Are you paying attention, fifth graders? Here's the metaphor: The tire episode was a fair amount of hassle, it's over now, I dealt with it, but nothing was really better in the end.
Is this where we're headed with the Common Core? A lot of work for the same results?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A few months ago I took a short holiday with my two daughters on Dartmoor. True to (British) form, it drizzled - constantly. So I braced myself for battles about how much television the girls could watch, or how many games they could play on my phone. But then fate - or a brilliant piece of innovation - intervened. The hotel where we were staying, Bovey Castle, featured a "Lego room service" menu, next to the normal food menu, which allowed guests to borrow Lego sets. My daughters dialled for some kits.Three days later, the room was full of models, including a highly complex "Lone Ranger silver mine", that featured crankshafts, pulleys and fiddly little buckets. My daughters brimmed with pride. Best of all, they barely watched any Disney Channel or minded the rain.
Is there a bigger moral here? I would love to think so. Last weekend The Lego Movie opened in North America and parts of Europe, to rapturous reviews and packed cinemas, earning some $69m in the first weekend alone. Having seen the movie, however, I was not entirely dazzled. It is striking to see that much Lego on a screen - the film features no fewer than 3,863,484 Lego bricks. It is also heartening to see an eight-decade-old Danish company reinvent itself, after earlier bouts of decline, by finding new focus buying intellectual property (hence the appearance of Batman Lego, Star Wars Lego and so on). But compared with some of the other brilliantly witty kids' films, the dialogue seems clunky. So does the predictably feel-good message (that kids need to be resilient, ambitious and let their creative spirits fly).
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Here I attempt to write the abstract for my thesis, 'A Partially-automated Approach to the Assessment of Mathematics in Higher Education', "using only the ten hundred words people use the most often".Katie Steckles pointed out via the latest Carnival of Mathematics that quantum computer scientist Scott Aaronson posted an explanation of his research using only the 1000 most common words in English, inspired by the xkcd comic 'Up-Goer Five', which did the same for a labelled diagram of the Saturn V rocket (the 'Up-Goer Five'). Scott's post links to The Up-Goer Five text editor, a fabulous innovation that allows typing in a box and highlights when a word isn't on the same list of words used in the xkcd diagram. I used this to write a version of my thesis abstract. Beyond what the text editor wanted, I also voluntarily adjusted some terms that are on the list, but presumably not in the way I mean them. Particularly, 'deep learning' and 'open-ended questions' didn't get highlighted. I've gone for a fairly close, word-by-word translation, though clearly some parts could be rewritten completely to be clearer.
My thesis abstract (the version I handed in) is in a previous blog post, if you want to view it for comparison. Here's my Up-Goer Five version.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
UNIVERSITIES have not changed much since students first gathered in Oxford and Bologna in the 11th century. Teaching has been constrained by technology. Until recently a student needed to be in a lecture hall to hear the professor or around a table to debate with fellow students. Innovation is eliminating those constraints, however, and bringing sweeping change to higher education.Online learning takes many forms. Wikipedia, a user-generated online encyclopedia, contains wonderfully detailed explanations. YouTube offers instruction on how to boil an egg as well as lectures on cosmology. Within many universities the online is displacing the offline. Professors publish course materials and videos of their lectures on the web. Students interact with each other and submit assignments by e-mail. Even those living on university campuses may nonetheless learn largely online, skipping lectures and reporting only for the final exam.
In America, bowing to the inevitable, universities have joined various startups in the rush to provide stand-alone instruction online, through Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. Though much experimentation lies ahead, economics can shed light on how the market for higher education may change.
Two big forces underpin a university's costs. The first is the need for physical proximity. Adding students is expensive--they require more buildings and instructors--and so a university's marginal cost of production is high. That means that even in a competitive market, where price converges towards marginal cost, modern education is dear.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Michelle Rhee and Susan Combs:
We're professionals from different backgrounds: one a Democrat and education reformer, the other a Republican comptroller of public accounts for Texas. We may not agree on everything, but we are coming together around two common beliefs.We both believe that nothing is more important to America's economic future than a world-class public education system. We also believe that limited education dollars should be invested in proven programs that benefit kids, not in unnecessary administration, overhead or red tape.
Today we're spending more than $600 billion a year in public schools across the country, and few of us are happy with the results. Over the last five decades, in fact, U.S. education spending has skyrocketed by 350%, yet achievement levels have remained stagnant.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Like many academics, I love books. Like many book-loving parents, I'm keen to share that love with my young children. Two years ago, I chanced upon two different professors in children's books, in quick succession. Wouldn't it be a fun project, I thought, to see how academics, and universities, appear in children's illustrated books? This would function both as an excuse to buy more books (we do live in a golden age of second hand books, cheaply delivered to your front door) and to explain to my kids - now five and a half, and twins of three - what Mummy Actually Does.It turns out it's hard to search just for children's books, and picture books, in library catalogues, but I combed through various electronic library resources, as well as Amazon, eBay, LibraryThing, and Abe, to dig up source material. I began to obsessively search the bookshelves of kids books in friend's houses, and doctors and dentist and hospital waiting rooms, whilst also keeping on the look out on our regular visits to our local library: often academics appear in books without being named in the title, so dont turn up easily via electronic searches. Parking my finds on a devoted Tumblr which was shared on social media, friends, family members, and total strangers tweeted, facebooked, and emailed me to suggest additions. People sidled up to me after invited guest lectures to whisper "I have a good professor for you..." Two years on, I've no doubt still not found all of the possible candidates, but new finds in my source material are becoming less frequent. 101 books (or individual books from a series*) and 108 academics, and a few specific mentions of university architecture and systems later, its time to look at what results from a survey of the representation of academics and academia in children's picture books.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
At Amherst College, where I've taught for more 20 years (oy, gevalt!), a couple of years ago a tenure case was brought down in part because of the word "solid." I've put it in quote marks in part because tenure cases are multiheaded monsters: Their rise or fall as a result of countless factors. In this particular one, one of the factors--and, ultimately, a stumbling block--was this much-contested word.An outside reviewer had used it to describe a candidate's publications record. It became a subject of debate among the Committee of Six and the department supporting the candidate.
Here I need to offer a quick crash course through the college's hierarchical structure, or at least a portion of it. The Committee of Six, a judicial body of elected faculty whose job it is to legislate on a large number of issues, is in charge of reviewing tenure cases once the candidate's department has offered its recommendations. For these cases, the C6 looks at, among other things, every student evaluation, every letter from peers, and every outside review with utmost dedication. In other words, it is a painful, meticulous process of what I call logocrasy: a Kafkaesque labyrinth of language. The president then endorses or rejects the C6 tenure recommendation.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
On the witness stand here Tuesday, Beatriz Vergara bit her lip and looked toward her mother and sister in the gallery as Eileen Goldsmith, a lawyer for California's biggest teachers unions, began cross-examining the 15-year-old.Ms. Vergara is one of nine student plaintiffs in a lawsuit bearing her name that challenges California's strong employment protections for teachers. She testified earlier that three of her middle-school instructors had failed to teach or discipline students properly. "I think a teacher's supposed to motivate you, encourage you, keep you going to school," the 10th-grader said. "If you have a bad teacher, you're not going to want to go to school."
How well certain teachers educated Ms. Vergara and her fellow plaintiffs is at the heart of the closely watched case. Research has pointed to teacher quality as the biggest in-school determinant of student performance, and in recent years many states have moved to simplify dismissal procedures for ineffective teachers and encourage districts to consider teacher performance in layoff decisions rather than conducting reductions in force based only on seniority.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Please sign this petition urging the GOP led Ed Cmte to drop the Special Needs Vouchers. http://t.co/mP3Y320o9H
— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) February 14, 2014For more than a decade, Singapore, along with South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Finland, has been at or near the top of international leagues tables that measure children's ability in reading, maths and science. This has led to a considerable sense of achievement in Finland and East Asia and endless hand-wringing and head-scratching in the West.What then do Singaporean teachers do in classrooms that is so special, bearing in mind that there are substantial differences in classroom practices between - as well as within - the top-performing countries? What are the particular strengths of Singapore's instructional regime that helps it perform so well? What are its limits and constraints?
Is it the right model for countries seeking to prepare students properly for the complex demands of 21st century knowledge economies and institutional environments more generally? Is Singapore's teaching system transferable to other countries? Or is its success so dependent on very specific institutional and cultural factors unique to Singapore that it is folly to imagine that it might be reproduced elsewhere?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
If one were to reduce the story of the California Institute of Technology to numbers, it would be difficult to know where to start.It is 123 years old, boasts 57 recipients of the US National Medal of Science and 32 Nobel laureates among its faculty and alumni (including five on the current staff).
It is the world's number one university - and has been for the past three years of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings - and has just 300 professorial staff.
In short, it is tiny, and it is exceptionally good at what it does.
Ares Rosakis, chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, describes Caltech as "a unique species among universities...a very interesting phenomenon". "Very interesting" may be something of an understatement.
Caltech's neat and unassuming campus sits in a quiet residential neighbourhood in Pasadena, in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
University presidents are in unique and powerful positions, overseeing institutions that are supposed to protect and foster free critical inquiry, and serve as safe-zones for the pursuit of intellectual investigation, open debate, and dissent. That's why it's particularly disturbing to witness the transformation of Janet Napolitano from DHS director to university system president.In September 2013, former director of the Department of Homeland Security Napolitano became the president of one of the nation's largest public university systems, the University of California. In her role as president of the UC system, Napolitano oversees almost 19,000 faculty members and over 200,000 students, as well as a staff of nearly 200,000.
Soon after she started the job, Napolitano embarked on a "listening and learning" tour of all the UC campuses. She was reportedly met with protest by immigrant and undocumented students, who did not forget that their university president once steered the biggest deportation ship in the history of the United States. (The Obama administration will soon have deported two million people, most of whom were kicked out of the country during Napolitano's reign at DHS, the parent organization of ICE.)
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Put 50 randomly selected U.S. professors in a room. Within 10 minutes they will be complaining about the growing number of administrators in their universities. Professors aren't right about everything, yet they have a point in this case.An examination of federal data on the explosion in college costs reveals how far colleges have gotten away from their original mission of providing "higher" education.
The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2010-11, nonprofit colleges and universities spent $449 billion. Less than 29 percent of that -- $129 billion -- went for instruction, and part of that amount went for expenses other than professors' salaries. Yes, the $449 billion includes money spent on auxiliary enterprises (food and housing operations, for example), hospitals and "independent operations" (whatever they are). Suppose we subtract the $85 billion that pays for all of that from the total. That leaves $364 billion. The $129 billion for instruction of students is still only 35 percent of that.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Colleges' attempts to curb employee costs by hiring part-time faculty members and using grad students are being offset by administrative hires and rising benefit costs, according to a new study by the Delta Cost Project at the American Institutes for Research.The study uses federal data to examine hiring trends going back to 1990. Over all, it found, colleges have hired at a faster pace from 2000 to now than they did in the 1990s, but that tempo didn't do enough to keep up with an influx of millennials and other students who flocked to colleges amid the recession.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
While it's certainly foolish to rush into committing to college, it's just as foolish to dismiss it without thought. That's why when I turned 18 I decided to take a 'gap year'. I did this because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, and it seemed like common sense to gather more information before making any irrevocable, life-altering choices.Lots of my friends were having graduation parties, which is where the topic came up the most (and was the least avoidable). This is what you talk about at that age. You talk about it with parents, friends, friends' parents, teachers, guidance counselors, admissions officers; almost anyone you happen to be making polite small talk with. I even wound up defending my decision to my doctor during a check-up.
Eventually, I started to doubt. Was I taking a huge risk by not going, or even by waiting a year to consider my options?
Now that I have more perspective on the situation, it seems absurd that this sort of pressure is heaped upon so many high school graduates every year. It comes forcefully and from all directions. But the urgency is the most confusing part: what real penalty can I expect for waiting a year? Will the job market cease to be there? Is it a race, where the job goes to whoever gets there first? If that's true, what does that mean for the people who graduate a year after me? And whatever the downsides, how do they compare to rushing into a major life decision (and lots of personal debt) with little idea of what you want out of it?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
While there is heated debate over how best to fix America's higher education system, everyone agrees on the need for meaningful reform. It's difficult to argue against reform in the face of college attainment rates that are stalled at just under 40 percent and the growing number of graduates left wondering whether they will ever find careers that allow them to pay off their mounting debts.Any policy debate should start with a clear picture of how the dollars are being spent and whether that money is achieving the desired outcomes. Unfortunately, a lack of accurate data makes it impossible to answer many of the most basic questions for students, families and policy makers who are investing significant time and money in higher education.
During the recent State of the Union address, President Obama talked about shaking up the system of higher education to give parents more information, and colleges more incentives to offer better value. Though he provided little detail, this most certainly referred to the broad vision for higher education reform he outlined over the summer centered around a new a rating system for colleges and universities that would eventually be used to influence spending decisions on federal student financial aid.
However, the President's proposal rests on a data system that is imperfect, at best. As former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said of the President's plan, "we need to start with a rich and credible data system before we leap into some sort of artificial ranking system that, frankly, would have all kinds of unintended consequences."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, via a kind reader:
Today, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty sent a letter to Superintendent Evers of the Department of Public Instruction, raising serious concerns about whether the DPI is misapplying the open enrollment laws in a way that discriminates against students with disabilities in violation of state law as well as Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 ("ADA") and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.Explained CJ Szafir, WILL Education Policy Director, "Every school year, hundreds of students with disabilities are denied the right to open enroll by their school district. When parents appeal the decision, records and interviews with parents have shown that the DPI is not protecting the rights of those students but is instead approving the rejections without conducting the analysis that it is legally required. The whole process leaves parents frustrated, and trapped in a school district that does not serve the needs of their child."
The purpose of Wisconsin's open enrollment program is to allow parents to choose a school district for their child other than the school district where they reside. But, students with disabilities have their applications for open enrollment rejected at a much higher rate than those without a disability. A major cause of this disparity is the resident school district claiming that they would incur an "undue financial burden" if the child leaves the school district.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When I was first getting into education research (about 2005) I was surprised to find how many people--teachers and others--assumed that there was scientific evidence supporting learning styles. In 2009 I made a 7 minute video arguing that this evidence is lacking. (You can see the video here). In 2010, with Cedar Riener, I wrote an article for Change magazine on the topic.Mostly because of the video I get a lot of emails about learning styles, so I thought it might be useful to post Frequently Asked Questions, along with my answers.
How can you not believe that that people learn differently? Isn't it obvious?
People do learn differently, but I think it is very important to say exactly how they learn differently, and focus our attention on those differences that really matter. If learning styles were obviously right it would be easy to observe evidence for them in experiments. Yet there is no supporting evidence. There are differences among kids that both seem obvious to us and for which evidence is easily obtained in experiments, e.g., that people differ in their interests, that students vary in how much they think of schoolwork as part of their identity ("I'm the kind of kid who works hard in school") and that kids differ in what they already know at the start of a lesson. All three of these have sizable, easily observed effects on learning. I think that often when people believe that they observe obvious evidence for learning styles, they are mistaking it for ability.
That sounds like an unimportant difference in semantics. What does it matter?
The idea that people differ in ability is not controversial--everyone agrees with that. Some people are good at dealing with space, some people have a good ear for music, etc. So the idea of "style" really ought to mean something different. If it just means ability, there's not much point in adding the new term. (Some of the other style distinctions could be matters of ability too: some people might be good at keeping track of details, whereas others are good at grasping the big picture. I don't know if they've been studied that way.)
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As a teacher I encounter all of the typical kinds of students. There's one kind of student I routinely encounter, usually in a freshman calculus course, that really boils my blood: the failing student who "has always been good at math."Oh it's so annoying! And it's even worse to hear because the stuff we teach in calculus isn't really math either. The irony is so thick in the air when a student says it I'm surprised I don't cough. Invariably, they never actually understood the "math" they were always so good at.
Of course, the problem is deeper than a handful of students who accidentally say ironically stupid things. The problem is that American high school students are taught something named "math" for four years which is not even close to math.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Kenosha teachers union says dues automatically will be deducted from teacher paychecks starting later this month -- a move that critics call a blatant violation of a 2011 law limiting collective bargaining.But a leading Kenosha Unified School District administrator said Tuesday that's not true -- the district will only deduct dues of employees who wish to be union members and have signed a voluntary wage deduction form.
The contradictory messages are the latest of several confusing developments in the state's third largest school district. They stem from a collective bargaining agreement the School Board signed with the teachers union in November, despite the collective bargaining limits for public workers known as Act 10. The legality of that contract is being challenged in a lawsuit by a former and current Kenosha teacher and two conservative groups.
"We are an enigma," Kristi Lacroix, a former Kenosha teacher involved in the lawsuit, said of the district.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Barry Topol, John Olson, and Ed Roeber (PDF):
Education experts agree that the next generation of assessments (such as those being developed by the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) in response to the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS)) need to do a better job of measuring deeper learning to determine if students are acquiring those skills critical to success in the 21st century.Existing assessments tend to emphasize "bubble in" multiple choice type questions because they are easier, more timely and cheaper to score. However, multiple choice questions do not provide as good a measure of critical thinking skills as performance type questions, in which students are asked to read a passage or passages and present an argument based on synthesizing the information they have read. The answers to these performance type questions tend to be scored by humans, which is a time intensive and expensive process.
While some discussion about finding ways to increase the amount of
money spent on state assessment systems overall has begun, at least for the near future, states only appear to be able to spend roughly what they spend today for new summative assessments. Therefore, the question is, can the next generation of assessments be designed to better measure student critical thinking skills while costing roughly the same amount as states spend today (about $25 per student)?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Madison Metropolitan School District has an image problem with teachers of color, says a consultant who recommends using the district's mission of creating an environment where all students thrive to recruit a more diverse workforce.
The number of minority teachers in the district, while growing, is not keeping pace with the growing proportion of minority students, consultant Monica Rosen told Madison School Board members Monday.
"You'll never catch up at the rate you're going. I think there needs to be something more aggressive," said Rosen, a partner in the national firm Cross & Joftus.The gap between the number of students of color and the number of teachers of color has been brought into sharp focus as the school district works to close a persistent academic achievement gap between students of color and their white classmates.
A leader in the African-American community in November filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, charging that the district was discriminating against people of color in its hiring.
And nearly all the school district personnel interviewed as part of Cross & Joftus' review mentioned their own concerns about the lack of diversity among school district staff, Rosen reported.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
My son has been doing martial arts for a couple of years now. He likes it for the most part--he just graduated to a level where he gets to learn how to fight with sticks, which is, he thinks, pretty great. So I was a little surprised when, chatting with him about it the other day, he informed me with some deliberation that he figured he would quit at some point. "I'll get bored," he said. "I'll definitely quit eventually."There's no need to borrow trouble, so I didn't push him on it. But I know that, after all the work he's put into it, if he comes to me some day and says he wants to quit, I will look him in the eye and say something along the lines of, "Okay. If that's what you want, we'll quit."
Probably a lot of folks think that's not the best tack to take--even as I type I can see the silent, judgy pursing of lips. I've talked about this here before in terms of adults quitting the workforce, but the stigma against quitting can be even more iron-bound with kids. American parents (or at least middle-class American parents) frown on giving up willy-nilly just because you're bored. How will you ever overcome hardship if you just give up when the going gets hard? we ask. As Delia Lloyd says in a recent piece at Brain, Child, "There's a real value in old-fashioned perseverance. And with all the talk of 'life skills' these days, I don't think it's a bad idea for children to start learning the value of commitment early on, even when they find something onerous."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Are you middle class? A decade ago, that question was of greatest interest to sociologists - or snobs. Now it is political dynamite.Last month the Pew Research Center released a survey which showed that the proportion of Americans who consider themselves "middle class" has been shrinking sharply, as median incomes have stalled. Back in 2008, or just as the financial crisis hit, the ratio apparently stood at 53 per cent. Now it is just 44 per cent.
And that is not because Americans are rising in self-confidence: just 15 per cent define themselves as upper class, down from 21 per cent in 2008. The real problem is that two-thirds of Americans think (quite correctly) that the gap between rich and poor is widening - and that they themselves are sinking: 40 per cent of people now define themselves as lower class, compared with 25 per cent previously.
This is startling. It helps to explain why the phrase "middle class" is now creating such political anxiety. When Barack Obama presented his recent State of the Union address, for example, he billed it as "a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class, and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class". And it is not just an American problem. In the UK, David Cameron keeps tossing the "m" word around, following in the wake of Ed Miliband, who recently insisted: "I know our country cannot succeed and become collectively better off without a strong and vibrant middle class . . . [we must] rebuild our middle class."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):
Rights granted to an employee by the Union's Contract are among the most important conditions of one's employment. Those represented by MTI, in each of MTI's five bargaining units, have numerous protections based on SENIORITY. Whether it is protection from involuntary transfer, being declared "surplus" or above staff requirements, or layoff, SENIORITY is the factor that limits and controls management's action. Because of SENIORITY rights guaranteed by the Union's Contract, the employer cannot pick the junior employee simply because he/she is paid less.Making such judgments based on one's SENIORITY may seem like common sense and basic human decency, but it is MTI's Contract that assures it. Governor Walker's Act 10 destroys these protections. MTI is working to preserve them.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Bruce Dahmen, the steady-handed principal of Madison Memorial High School, began every school day in the commons area, coffee cup in hand, greeting students. He'd stick around long enough to gently quiz the latecomers."What's going on in your life?" he'd ask them. "Is there anything we can do to help you?"
Dahmen, who died Tuesday at age 61, treated every student as worthy of attention and respect, colleagues and friends said. It was a trait that endeared him to an age group not always enthralled with authority figures.
"Mr. Dahmen had this quote, 'Make good decisions,' and as high-schoolers, you wouldn't believe in a million years we'd actually listen to an administrator," said senior Jeremy Gartland, 17. "But we did, because we knew he wasn't scolding us. He genuinely cared for us."
Dahmen understood Memorial like few others -- he started his career there as a student teacher in 1974 and never left. He served as a father figure to many students, and it was in that role that he and his wife, Peggi, an administrative assistant at Memorial, found themselves in Knoxville, Tenn., on Tuesday.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In an abbreviated day of testimony in the trial Vergara v. CA, a suit that is challenging teacher dismissal laws in California, Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu heard from two witnesses who described their personal disappointments with California's public education system and the laws regulating teacher employment.Testifying on behalf of the plaintiffs, Kareem Weaver, an award winning teacher and principal from the Oakland Unified School District, talked about his belief that minority students can ill afford exposure to grossly ineffective teachers.
An African-American who grew up in the Bay Area and was raised by a drug addicted father, Weaver broke down in tears, recounting the challenges he sees minority students facing.
"Low-income students of color are the most vulnerable population," he said, before putting his face in his hands.
He told the court how many minority students grow up on a "razor-thin margin of error," where educational experience can make a huge difference.
"It either props them up or blows them down," he said, adding that the slightest external factor can "determine how you will engage with learning for the rest of your life." And having a high quality teacher, he said, can be pivotal.
Weaver's testimony was so impassioned, plaintiffs' attorney Marcellus McRae, who was questioning him, also became emotional. At one point, McRae stepped into an alcove just off the court room to regain his composure.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In 2011, I published The Fall of the Faculty pointing to the problem of accelerating administrative bloat at America's colleges and universities. The book's reception exceeded my expectations with professors throughout the United States (as well as Canada and Europe) writing to me with stories of mismanagement, administrative incompetence, bureaucratic waste and fraud and the sheer arrogance and stupidity of their administrators. Many letter writers declared that I must have done my research on their campuses since everything I described had happened there. Others declared that my examples were not extreme enough and offered stories from their own schools that often topped mine.Everywhere, it seems, legions of administrators are engaged in strategic planning, endlessly rewriting the school mission statement, and "rebranding" their campus. All these activities waste enormous amounts of time, require hiring thousands of new deanlets and, more often than not, involve the services of expensive consultants. This rebranding business is so foolish that it is difficult even to caricature. With the help of consultants, the University of Chicago School of Medicine rebranded itself "Chicago Medicine," while my own university's medical school rebranded itself "Hopkins Medicine." I hope these new brands came with consultants' warranties. I have a feeling that the next group of administrators will want to introduce their own brands after, that is, rewriting their schools' mission statement.
- See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2014/02/can_we_halt_administrative_blo.html#sthash.qYCULQq6.dpuf
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Nathan Altmann, who earned a scholarship recognizing his perseverance, plans to become a high school teacher in hopes of inspiring other students.The Sun Prairie High School senior was one of 10 Wisconsin students to receive a 2014 Horatio Alger State Scholarship, which recognizes students who exhibit commitment to continuing their education and serving their communities in the face of adversity. Another area winner is Mary Caroline Tilton of Beaver Dam, who attends Pius XI High School in Milwaukee.
Nathan plans to use the scholarship toward his effort to obtain a degree in music education from UW-Eau Claire and become a high school band teacher.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Seems sometimes like every week is a bad week for higher education. Last week was no different: First came news of the University of Akron threatening to shutter 55 degree programs--you know, frivolous ones, like elementary education--broken on the heels of comments by the school's vice provost, Rex Ramsier, that if his institution stopped using underpaid adjunct labor, it would have to raise tuition 40 percent.Meanwhile, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting reveals that Ramsier, his six-figure salary, and the adjuncts he loves to impugn are business as usual. According to the report, since 1987, the number of administrators and other nonteaching employees at colleges nationwide more than doubled, "vastly outpacing" growth of not just faculty, but students. So, another week, another set of woes about which I can cry foul, and then get a bunch of condescending responses about supply and demand, as if I have never heard of such a thing.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The good news first: There are no more kids living at Seattle's shantytown, the Nickelsville encampment in the Central Area."We got the last ones out, finally," says the woman who set up the camp on South Jackson Street, Sharon Lee of the Low Income Housing Institute.
When she opened the temporary camp, Lee figured it would draw mostly single adults -- "hardy people" who are used to camping outside. But she was bowled over when up to 15 kids, some as young as 3, were living there at one time in the fall.
The homeless newspaper Real Change dubbed it "Nickelsville Elementary." I wrote in December about how kids living in unheated shacks was apparently now accepted in Seattle because a school bus stopped there each day, as if it were just another cul-de-sac.
Plenty of people offered to help with clothing or supplies, which was much appreciated. But it wasn't what these kids needed most: a heated place to sleep.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The city council hosted national experts on pre-kindergarten education this morning, getting an earful about the benefits of universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds. The council's Education and Governance committee, headed up by council president Tim Burgess, is looking at options to pay for a voluntary universal pre-K program for Seattle kids; it's unclear whether funding that program would require a ballot measure or if it could be paid for through the city's general fund.Burgess predicts paying for preschool for all (or at least many--the program will be voluntary) of the city's 12,000-plus three- and four-year-olds, only about two-thirds of whom are currently in preschool, will require a ballot initiative (Seattle's preferred way of paying for critical needs like parks, libraries, early-childhood education, and now, possibly, preschool).
"It is a significant amount of money," Burgess says, although he adds that he doesn't know exactly how much. "One question is, could we start in year one or year two with just general fund money?"
Dr. Hiro Yoshikawa, from NYU, pointed to a study of universally available preschool in Tulsa, OK that showed that the city saved $3 for every dollar it spent on preschool--a program NPR's show Planet Money highlighted in its show "Why Preschool Can Save the World" last year.
"When you look at that facts in every city in the U.S. and then you look at the powerful combination of the neuroscientific and the economic evidence that brain architecture is built in the first years of life... if you don't build the foundational skills in the first years of entry, you lose the ability of children to obtain basic skills," Yoshikawa said.
Among the researchers' conclusions:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Although scores on Gallup's Economic Confidence Index improved in most U.S. states in 2013, the index remained negative in all 50. Only the District of Columbia had a positive index. Indexes were least negative in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and California. They were most negative in West Virginia, followed by Alaska.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Ten days ago my husband went to a reunion at Eton College for the leavers of 1974. About 150 men crowded into the 15th-century chapel to belt out a quick "Praise my Soul the King of Heaven" before settling down to eat, drink and reminisce about schoolboy pranks while quietly trying to work out who had done best in the 40 years since then.Afterwards he made two observations. The first was how good they all looked. These men, blessed by breeding, education and money, still look at 57 and 58 easily recognisable as their teenage selves.
The second was how relatively undistinguished their careers had turned out to be. Apart from one senior politician and one former newspaper editor, they were a middling group of lawyers, property investors and fund managers, rich by national standards, but disappointing if you consider their start in life. They arrived at that school at 13, clever and mostly from wealthy families, to spend five years wearing tailcoats and becoming members of one of the world's most elite networks. Yet there they were, in their prime, and it had amounted to not very much at all.
His observation turns on its head the usual complaint about Eton - that it is an exclusive club of men who run the country. It is true there is currently a trinity of Etonians in power, as prime minister, mayor of London and Archbishop of Canterbury. But they are the exceptions to a more surprising rule that Eton is a club of men born to do great things but who increasingly fail to do anything much at all.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Michael Bastedo & Ozan Jaquette:
The increasing concentration of wealthy students at highly selective colleges is widely perceived, but few analyses examine the underlying dynamics of higher education stratification over time. To examine these dynamics, the authors build an analysis data set of four cohorts from 1972 to 2004. They find that low-income students have made substantial gains in their academic course achievements since the 1970s. Nonetheless, wealthier students have made even stronger gains in achievement over the same period, in both courses and test scores, ensuring a competitive advantage in the market for selective college admissions. Thus, even if low-income students were "perfectly matched" to institutions consistent with their academic achievements, the stratification order would remain largely unchanged. The authors consider organizational and policy interventions that may reverse these trends
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
via a kind reader. "People are really bad at math" (the last 4 minutes discuss Wisconsin's weak cut scores).
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Yet, for the moment, the market price is "free." That leads to a bit of conundrum -- big expensive ongoing fixed costs to produce something that we give away? How will we "monetize" it? What will the economic model be, and how will moocs change the higher education market?The grumpy response to moocs: When Gutenberg invented moveable type, universities reacted in horror. "They'll just read the textbook. Nobody will come to lectures anymore!" It didn't happen. Why should we worry now?
As Alex pointed out, there is a good analogy between textbook publishing and mooc creation -- high fixed, low marginal cost (now zero for textbooks too). It leads to superstars with established brand names taking over the market, and Alex speculated that publishers will know how to recover costs.
A lot of mooc is, in fact, a modern textbook -- because the twitter generation does not read. Forcing my campus students to watch the lecture videos and answer some simple quiz questions, covering the basic expository material, before coming to class -- all checked and graded electronically -- worked wonders to produce well prepared students and a brilliant level of discussion. Several students commented that the video lectures were better than the real thing, because they could stop and rewind as necessary. The "flipped classroom" model works.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It's time for a large number of Americans to hear what might seem like a harsh message: A degree from a four-year university might not be for you. Popular culture would cast this frank assessment as elitist. But that's a toxic myth that needs to vanish because the stakes are too high. A new study by Young Invincibles, a think tank geared toward issues facing young Americans, estimates that high youth unemployment costs the government about $25 billion in lost tax revenue. All the while, there are three million jobs that employers can't fill because too many workers lack the requisite skills.Policymakers and university administrators have admirably worked to expand access to college over the past several decades. In terms of enrollment rates, their efforts have been successful -- matriculation increased by thirty seven percent between 2000 and 2010. So, the good news is that we're getting young adults on campus. But we are profoundly failing them as a country after that; America's graduation rate sits at an abysmal 53 percent, including community colleges. This disparity betrays a critical disconnect, one not discussed often enough -- that a large swath of those lured to college should never have attended.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
You love math and want to learn more. But you're in ninth grade and you've already taken nearly all the math classes your school offers. They were all pretty easy for you and you're ready for a greater challenge. What now? You'll probably go to the local community college or university and take the next class in the core college curriculum. Chances are, you've just stepped in the calculus trap.For an avid student with great skill in mathematics, rushing through the standard curriculum is not the best answer. That student who breezed unchallenged through algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, will breeze through calculus, too. This is not to say that high school students should not learn calculus - they should. But more importantly, the gifted, interested student should be exposed to mathematics outside the core curriculum, because the standard curriculum is not designed for the top students. This is even, if not especially, true for the core calculus curriculum found at most high schools, community colleges, and universities.
Developing a broader understanding of mathematics and problem solving forms a foundation upon which knowledge of advanced mathematical and scientific concepts can be built. Curricular classes do not prepare students for the leap from the usual 'one step and done' problems to multi-step, multi-discipline problems they will face later on. That transition is smoothed by exposing students to complex problems in simpler areas of study, such as basic number theory or geometry, rather than giving them their first taste of complicated arguments when they're learning a more advanced subject like group theory or the calculus of complex variables. The primary difference is that the curricular education is designed to give students many tools to apply to straightforward specific problems. Rather than learning more and more tools, avid students are better off learning how to take tools they have and apply them to complex problems. Then later, when they learn the more advanced tools of curricular education, applying them to even more complicated problems will come more easily.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I'm a research bio-psychologist with a PhD, so I've done lots of school. I'm a pretty good problem-solver, in my work and in the rest of my life, but that has little to do with the schooling I've had. I studied algebra, trig, calculus and various other maths in school, but I can't recall ever facing a problem - even in my scientific research - that required those skills. What maths I've used was highly specialised and, as with most scientists, I learnt it on the job.The real problems I've faced in life include physical ones (such as how to operate a newfangled machine at work or unblock the toilet at home), social ones (how to get that perfect woman to be interested in me), moral ones (whether to give a passing grade to a student, for effort, though he failed all the tests), and emotional ones (coping with grief when my first wife died or keeping my head when I fell through the ice while pond skating). Most problems in life cannot be solved with formulae or memorised answers of the type learnt in school. They require the judgement, wisdom and creative ability that come from life experiences. For children, those experiences are embedded in play.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A child who grows up in Nevada has less chance for adult success than a child growing up anywhere else in the United States.Let that sink in for a moment. Of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the average (actually median) child whose family has chosen to live in Nevada has less chance of future success than the child of a family living anywhere else in the country -- less chance than a child in Mississippi or Alabama or inner city Washington, D.C.
Of 51 places in the country to raise a child, Nevada comes in at 51st. This is the conclusion of "Quality Counts," a national study conducted by Education Week and released recently. Just after the Sun printed its piece on the report, headlined "Report says Nevada schools again worst in nation for giving children a chance for success" (Jan. 9), I began receiving questions from disturbed educators, policymakers, parents, journalists and others about the study. How bad must the quality of education in Nevada really be? What should CCSD do to improve these horrible results? What could the College of Education do to address the poor chances of success for Nevada's children? Most cogently: What does the report really tell us and what needs to be done?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The school accountability bill still boils down to what Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, said last fall:"If you get a check, you get a checkup," the chairman of the Senate Education Committee succinctly stated.
It's taken awhile, but consensus on this point has emerged at the state Capitol.
Gov. Scott Walker has expressed similar sentiments for a long time. So did Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, last week during a meeting with the State Journal editorial board.
So let's get it done.
Sen. Paul Farrow, R-Pewaukee, appears to have the simplest idea that's easiest to pass. He plans to introduce a bill this week to ensure all traditional public, charter and private voucher schools are reporting student information to the state, including results of a new state test in spring 2015.
Farrow is willing to add consequences for low-performing schools through subsequent legislation next session. That would be in time for state report cards in 2015, which seems reasonable.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I once had this girlfriend who was an artist. We used to go to galleries and see shows together. Sometimes when she looked at a piece she would say, "Oh, that's something I did in art school." After a while it dawned on me that a lot of what she dismissed as student exercises--gambits she figured she'd outgrown--were things I liked. I started to think that she had inadvertently taught me, if not a definition of good art, then at least a kind of rule of thumb for identifying it in the field: if you make art in ways that other artists would have considered disposable exercises--Wittgensteinian ladders to be tossed aside once ascended--then you are getting somewhere with your art.Later, I came to realize that I shouldn't have been surprised how much "real" art has in common with art school exercises. As the art historian Howard Singerman pointed out in his invaluable and deeply humane book, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999), the purpose of the contemporary art school is not so much to teach students how to make art as to show them how to be artists. Singerman, who went to art school himself before changing direction and opting for the life of a scholar, recalls that "in one assignment we were asked to invent an artist of another type than we imagined ourselves to be--since we were to know ourselves as types--and then to produce an oeuvre, to make slides and do the talk, to model a speech or slouch." Fernando Pessoa meets Lee Strasberg: that assignment stands in for all others insofar as each of them requires the student to take a certain distance from her presumably naïve pre-art-school self and any unexamined sense of an artist's life. "Whatever has called a student to enter the department," Singerman points out, be it a "love of past art, an excitement about the process of creation, a desire for personal growth, the ability to draw," the instruction the student receives is intended to demonstrate that none of these are sufficient or possibly even necessary to being an artist. "Among the tasks of the university program in art is to separate its artists and the art world in which they will operate from 'amateurs' or 'Sunday painters,' as well as from a definition of the artist grounded in manual skill, tortured genius, or recreational pleasure."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
My wife and I teach our children at home. My wife does 99 percent of it. I teach the kids music as best I can. We've had good success with it. Our older son is now college age. He's not attending college. He doesn't want to become anything that requires credentials that are the result of attending college -- you know: doctor, lawyer, engineer. He wants to be a musician of some stripe. You can go to college to be a music teacher in a public school, or play in a symphony orchestra, but other than that, a diploma is superfluous. You just have to know how to play. He's like a monk right now. He doesn't do anything except work on music and shovel the driveway. No college would be as intensive.The little one is just ten. He doesn't know what he wants to do with his life. I'm still trying to decide what to do with mine, so I don't judge. He's recently become enamored of the idea of opening up his own restaurant. He says he wants to call it "The Meat Shelter." Catchy, that; but there's something about it that makes me wonder if he might abandon that line of thinking before he starts shaving. Little boys are interested in all sorts of things.
He already plays the drums. He plays the drums like an adult. He plays the drums for money. He and his brother call themselves Unorganized Hancock. They are very likely the most famous persons currently residing in the town we live in, but no one here knows that. You can watch the boys playing Crooked Teeth at the New Musical Express website if you like. They've sold copies, on two continents, of music they composed and recorded themselves, which makes them INTERNATIONAL RECORDING ARTISTS. Snicker.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
John Karr isn't a priest. He's a teacher.Most teachers are dedicated, hard-working people who wouldn't dream of hurting a child. The same is true of priests.
If the suspect in the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey were a priest, there would be a fresh outcry about a decades-long cover-up in the Catholic Church. Commentators from Left and Right would rightly unite in decrying the crisis and the entrenched complacency that led to it. Catholic pundits would take a special relish in pointing out that they agree: The Church had better get its act together.
Any institution that has allowed children to be harmed by predators deserves to be taken to task for it. No institution should get a pass. And no profession should get a pass. Not preachers, not priests -- not even teachers.
Especially not teachers. And yet ...
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Pretty soon, going to community college in Tennessee may become absolutely free. Republican Gov. Bill Haslam unveiled the proposal in his annual State of the State address this week.Haslam is trying to lift Tennessee's ranking as one of the least-educated states. Less than a third of residents have even a two-year degree. But a community college free-for-all has been tried elsewhere, though not sustained, and there's always a nagging question.
"So I know you're wondering," Haslam said. "How do we pay for this?"
Haslam told state lawmakers he'll tap into a mound of excess cash generated by the state's lottery. Roughly $300 million would go into an endowment. The returns would pay to send high school seniors without other scholarships to community college.
"Net cost to the state, zero. Net impact on our future? Priceless," he said to a round of applause. It's an effective one-liner that's been praised by education leaders and students.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The following file has 3 sheets with detailed data by race and gender. The first sheet is from 2006 to 2013 for selected states. The second sheet is the race and gender information for every state for 2013. The third sheet is the race and gender information for every state for 2012.DetailedStateInfoAP-CS-A-2006-2013-with-PercentBlackAndHIspanicByState.xlsx
This data was compiled from the data from the College Board at https://apcourseaudit.epiconline.org/ledger/ and http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/ap/data/archived.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Last month at MIT, mathematician Grigori Perelman delivered a series of lectures with the innocuous title "Ricci Flow and Geometrization of Three-Manifolds." In the unassuming social universe of mathematics, the equally apt title "I Claim To Be the Winner of a Million-Dollar Prize" would have been considered a bit much. Perelman claims to have proved Thurston's geometrization conjecture, a daring assertion about three-dimensional spaces that implies, among other things, the truth of the century-old Poincaré conjecture. And it's the Poincaré conjecture that, courtesy of the Clay Foundation, carries a million-dollar bounty. If Perelman is correct--and many in the field would bet his way--he's made a major and unexpected breakthrough, brilliantly using the tools of one field to attack a problem in another.There's only one problem with this story. Perelman is almost 40 years old.
In most people's minds, a 40-year-old man is as likely to be a productive mathematician as he is to be a major league center fielder or an interesting rock musician. Mathematical progress is supposed to occur not through decades of experience and toil but all at once, in a numinous blaze, to a born genius. Think of the young John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, discovering the Nash equilibrium in a smoky bar where his less precocious classmates think they're just picking up coeds, or the aged mathematician in Proof who "revolutionized the field twice before he was twenty-two."
It's not hard to see where the stereotype comes from; the history of mathematics is strewn with brilliant young corpses. Evariste Galois, Gotthold Eisenstein, and Niels Abel--mathematicians of such rare importance that their names, like Kafka's, have become adjectives--were all dead by 30. Galois laid down the foundations of modern algebra as a teenager, with enough spare time left over to become a well-known political radical, serve a nine-month jail sentence, and launch an affair with the prison medic's daughter; in connection with this last, he was killed in a duel at the age of 21. The British number theorist G.H. Hardy, in A Mathematician's Apology, one of the most widely read books about the nature and practice of mathematics, famously wrote: "No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It's common knowledge that the United States is miles behind other developed countries in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education, and that our economy suffers from, as Bill Gates has put it, "a severe shortfall of scientists and engineers with expertise to develop the next generation of breakthroughs." And we also know that the humanities are in a downward slide, in part because they've been eclipsed by the dire need to focus on STEM. In the towers of higher education and the annals of our culture, we debate which discipline needs our hand-wringing the most.If a recent feature in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' magazine, Spectrum, is to be believed, there's no debate to be had: "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth" advances a convincing case that the U.S. is graduating more than enough scientists and mathematicians to satisfy the demands of its workforce. If this is true, it undermines the arms-race rhetoric pouring out of universities--and, more importantly, out of the federal government--about STEM education. In a speech this April, President Barack Obama said our future depends on "lifting up these subjects for the respect that they deserve," and his proposed 2014 budget pledged another $3.1 billion to STEM schooling. If the sciences are not "in crisis," but are in fact doing just fine, it begs the question: Why are we spending so much to revive them?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In the United States, our media are not allowed to report on or discuss exemplary student academic achievement at the high school level. For example, in the "Athens of America," The Boston Globe has more than 150 full pages each year on the accomplishments of high school athletes, but only one page a year on academics--a full page with the photographs of valedictorians at the public high schools in the city, giving their name, their school, their country of origin (often 40% foreign-born) and the college they will be going to.
The reasons for this media blackout on good academic work by students at the secondary level are not clear, apart from tradition, but while high school athletes who "sign with" a particular college are celebrated in the local paper, and even on televised national high school games, the names of Intel Science Talent Search winners, of authors published in The Concord Review, and of other accomplished high school scholars may not appear in the paper or on television.
Publicity offers encouragement for the sorts of efforts we would like our HS students to make. We naturally publicize high school athletic achievements and this helps to motivate athletes to engage in sports. By contrast, when it comes to good academic work, we don't mention it, so perhaps we want less of it?
One senior high school history teacher has written that "We actually hide academic excellence from the public eye because that will single out some students and make others 'feel bad.'"
Does revealing excellence by high school athletes make some other athletes or scholar-athletes or high school scholars feel bad? How can we tolerate that? I know there are some Progressive secondary schools which have eliminated academic prizes and honors, to spare the feelings of the students who don't get them, but I don't see that they have stopped keeping score in school games, no matter how the losers in those contests may feel.
SAMPLE MEDIA COVERAGE OF HS ATHLETES
Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Signing Day Central--By Michael Carvell
11:02 am Wednesday, February 5th, 2014
"Welcome to the AJC's Signing day Day Central. This is the place to be to catch up with all the recruiting information with UGA, Georgia Tech and recruits from the state of Georgia. We will update the news as it happens, and interact on the message board below.
University of Georgia's TOP TARGETS FOR WEDNESDAY...AND RESULTS
Lorenzo Carter, DE, 6-5, 240, Norcross: UGA reeled in the big fish, landing the state's No.1 overall prospect for the first time since 2011 (Josh Harvey-Clemons). Isaiah McKenzie, WR, 5-8, 175, Ft. Lauderdale (Fla.) American Heritage: This was one of two big surprises for UGA to kick off signing day. McKenzie got a last-minute offer from UGA and picked the Bulldogs because of his best buddy and high school teammate, 5-star Sony Michel (signed with UGA). Hunter Atkinson, TE, 6-6, 250, West Hall: The Cincinnati commit got a last-minute call from Mark Richt and flipped to UGA. I'm not going to say we saw it coming, but ... Atkinson had grayshirt offers from Alabama, Auburn and UCF. Tavon Ross, S, 6-1, 200, Bleckley County: The Missouri commit took an official visit to UGA but decided to stick with Missouri. He's signed. Andrew Williams, DE, 6-4, 247, ECLA: He signed with Auburn over Clemson and Auburn. He joked with Auburn's Gus Malzahn when he called with the news, saying "I'm sorry to inform you..... That I will be attending your school," according to 247sports.com's Kipp Adams. Tyre McCants, WR-DB, 5-11, 200, Niceville, Fla.: Turned down late interest from UGA to sign with USF."
This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, of course, in the coverage of high school athletes that goes on during the year. I hope readers will email me any comparable examples of the celebration of exemplary high school academic work that they can find in the media in their community, or in the nation generally.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Assembly lawmakers want to change report cards for public, charter and private voucher schools and force poorly performing public schools to close or convert to charter schools.They also want to create a politically appointed council to advise the Department of Public Instruction on the best formula for determining report card scores.
The nine-member council would be led by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. The governor, Senate president and Assembly speaker would each appoint two members and the Assembly and Senate minority leaders would each appoint one member, none of whom would be legislators.
But Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said Friday there isn't support for such sweeping reforms of the accountability system this session, though there may be support for a narrower bill being developed by Sen. Paul Farrow, R-Pewaukee.
Farrow said he plans to introduce a bill next week that would ensure all public, charter and private voucher schools are reporting student information to the state, including results of a new state test in spring 2015.
Farrow said he wants to seek input from interested groups about possible changes to the accountability system, including consequences for low-performing schools, that could be enacted next session in time for the report card in fall 2015.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"Our Schools! Our Solutions!"In eye-catching orange and white, banners and buttons proclaiming that slogan have been showing up in the last several weeks, generally in the hands or on the clothes of members and allies of the Milwaukee teachers union.
It is their four-word proclamation of opposition to plans floated (but so far, not going forward) in Milwaukee and Madison that would make it likely that some low-performing schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system would be turned over to non-MPS charter school operators.
I find the slogan intriguing on several levels.
Level One: It is part of the energetic work leaders of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association and the Wisconsin Education Association Council, which has been involved in the campaign, are doing to try to remain relevant. Act 10, the 2011 legislation spurred by Gov. Scott Walker, stripped public employee unions of almost all their power over money and benefits, work conditions and school policies.
What's left? That's a challenging question for union leaders. Membership has fallen, political influence has fallen. Leaders of many school districts statewide are working with what remains of unions in more cooperative ways than I expected three years ago, but it is clear who has the upper hand.
In Milwaukee, the MTEA has reduced its staff and spending, but remains visible, active, and, in some cases, influential. The majority of the School Board is generally inclined toward the union.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"There is no place in the movement for the white liberal. He is our affliction."--James BaldwinFive years ago, while fervently supporting the candidacy of the man who would become America's first black president, I came to the realization that I didn't actually know any black people. Most of the people I did know (i.e., other white people) didn't know many black people either. One, maybe two, was the norm. I asked one white guy I knew if he had any black friends, and he replied, "You mean ones that aren't on television?"
I wanted to know why integration--actual, genuine integration--had failed so spectacularly. The result of that curiosity, published a little more than a year ago, was Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America, which traced the history of the color line back through all the places I have lived and chronicled the various efforts to erase it: school busing, affirmative action, fair housing, etc. Recently, I celebrated my one-year anniversary as an official participant in the National Conversation About Race--writing bits for Slate, speaking at colleges, and sitting on panels moderated by Soledad O'Brien (which is how you really know you've made it).
As good as liberal policies on race sound in speeches, many of them don't hold up in the real world.
When I started the book, after eight miserable years of George W. Bush and the euphoria of the Yes We Can crusade, I'd been driven pretty far left on the political spectrum. Taking on the issue of race, you'd think I'd have kept heading in that direction. But the more I read and researched, the more I went out and talked to people, I found that a funny thing was happening: I was becoming more conservative.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"I'm an academic," says Slekar, a Pittsburgh-area native whose mother and grandmother were elementary school teachers and who was a classroom teacher himself before earning a Ph.D. in curriculum from University of Maryland.Local Education school academics have long had interactions with the Madison School District. Former Superintendent Art Rainwater works in the UW-Madison School of Education."I understand scholarship, I understand evidence, I understand the role of higher education in society," he says. "When initiatives come through, if we have solid evidence that something is not a good idea, it's really my job to come out and say that."
Michael Apple, an internationally recognized education theorist and professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison agrees. In the face of conservative state legislators' push to privatize public education, "it is part of my civic responsibility to say what is happening," says Apple.
"In a society that sees corporations as having all the rights of people, by and large education is a private good, not a public good," he says. "I need to defend the very idea of public schools."
Both Apple and Julie Underwood, dean of the School of Education at UW-Madison, share Slekar's concern over the systematic privatization of education and recognize a role for scholars in the public debate about it.
...
A wide-ranging, animated, sometimes loud conversation with Slekar includes familiar controversies hotly debated around the country and in the Wisconsin Capitol, like high-stakes testing, vouchers and Common Core standards. The evidence, Slekar says flatly, shows that none of it will work to improve student learning.
The reform initiatives are instead part of a corporate takeover of public education masquerading as reform that will harm low-income and minority students before spreading to the suburbs, says Slekar, in what he calls the civil rights issue of our time.
A 30-year attack has worked to erode the legitimacy of the public education system. And teachers are taking much of the blame for the stark findings of the data now pulled from classrooms, he says.
"We're absolutely horrible at educating poor minority kids," says Slekar. "We absolutely know that."
But neither the so-called reformers, nor many more casual observers, want to talk about the real reason for the disparities in achievement, Slekar says, which is poverty.
"That's not an excuse, it's a diagnosis," he says, quoting John Kuhn, a firebrand Texas superintendent and activist who, at a 2011 rally, suggested that instead of performance-based salaries for teachers, the nation institute merit pay for members of Congress.
Further, this 122 page pdf (3.9mb) includes contracts (not sure if it is complete) between the UW-Madison School of Education and the Madison School District between 2004 and 2008. Has this relationship improved achievement?
Related: Deja Vu? Education Experts to Review the Madison School District and When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
[The Prentice Hall Common Core literature textbook for the tenth grade:]
....Teachers may (or may not) ask interested students (two, four, or half a dozen?) to read a segment of the book (presumably a brief one only describing the monster) that will lead to two silly compare-and contrast-assignments, one involving "similar novels they have read." (Have they read any? They haven't read Frankenstein yet.) What about the students who are not "advanced readers"? What is being done to help them become better readers? And why should even the advanced readers read only a few pages out of this classic? What should students be doing if not reading Frankenstein?
According to the notes in the margins of the Teacher's Edition, they should begin by offering to the class "classic examples of urban myths, tales of alien abductions, or ghost stories. (Examples include stories of alligators in the sewers, a man abducted for his kidneys, and aliens landing in Roswell, New Mexico)." (The word "classic" is being used very loosely.) To reinforce the findings of this "brainstorming activity," students should also "write a paragraph based on one of these modern urban myths." The class will also discuss Mary Shelley's introduction in various ways. Helping out, Elizabeth McCracken offers several more "scholar's insights," including one informing us of another ghost story about a man who buried his murder victim at the base of a tree "only to find that the next year's apples all had a clot of blood at the center of them." On the following page, we learn that Elizabeth McCracken did read the book, which she found better than the movie because, she tells us, in the book the monster can actually talk. Teachers are prompted to ask students why they think the film version would choose to keep the monster silent. Since the class will not be diverted enough with all this talk of movies, the Teacher's Edition also recommends that talented and gifted students "illustrate one aspect of Shelley's imaginings that is especially Gothic in its mood" and "display their Gothic art to the rest of the class."
Do the editors realize that all this extraneous discussion of monsters and ghosts only serves to preserve the silly Halloween caricature of Frankenstein? Apparently this caricature is what they want. On page 766, students are encouraged to "write a brief autobiography of a monster." The editors point out that monster stories are usually told from the perspective of "the humans confronting the monster." The editors of The British Tradition want to turn the tables and have students ask themselves "what monsters think about their treatment." Now there's a great exercise in multiculturalism! Those poor, misunderstood monsters. Thus, students are being asked to write a monster story. What good could come from this? Without reading the novel Frankenstein itself (which does in fact tell much of the story from the monster's perspective), students have no way of knowing how human this Gothic tale really is. After a mere three and a half pages of Mary Shelley's introduction, the book offers a series of questions under various headings: Critical Reading, Literary Analysis, and so forth. Some of these questions are steeped in two-bit literary criticism. Others require students to delve into the moral realms of science and creation. One is a question asking students to interpret a modern cartoon about Frankenstein--funny, but out of place in this literature book. Notwithstanding whether the questions are good or bad, the enterprise is as false as the worst Hollywood versions of Frankenstein. The questions offer the façade of learning without genuine learning having taken place. That is for a very simple reason. My wife, the former English teacher who recognizes pretense when she sees it, took one look at these pages and put it very simply:
"They (the editors) are requiring students to have opinions on something they know nothing about."
Moore, Terrence (2013-11-29).
The Story-Killers: A Common-Sense Case Against the Common Core (pp. 176-177). Kindle Edition.
-------------------------
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
This disturbing article about a rich neighborhood of Baton Rouge, La., that wants to secede so it won't have to share school funding with poorer neighborhoods reminds me of one of my great frustrations with the K-12 education policy debate--the terminology of "public schools."The way the word is used a school is "public" if it is owned by a government entity and thus part of the public sector. But a public school is by no means a school that's open to the public in the sense that anyone can go there. Here in the District of Columbia anyone who wants to wander into a public park is free to do so (that's what makes it public) but to send your kid to a good "public" elementary school in Ward 3 you have to live there. And thanks to exclusionary zoning, in practice if you want to live in Ward 3 you have to be rich. It wouldn't be legal to respond to the very high price of land in the area by building homes on small lots, or building tall buildings full of small affordable apartments.
Since D.C. doesn't have Louisiana's political culture, Ward 3 generally doesn't have a problem with its tax dollars subsidizing the schools in Wards 5, 7, and 8, but if you proposed randomly assigning students to schools to produce integrated instructional environments, you'd have an epic battle on your hands.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Since the passage of Proposition 209, California's public colleges and universities have embraced real diversity on campus through race-neutral alternatives, such as accepting the top percentage of students at all high schools, using socioeconomic consideration in admissions, adding mentorship and outreach to underperforming schools, dropping legacy preferences and expanding need-based scholarships.Although the share of underrepresented minorities in the UC system dropped from 20% before the ban to 18.6% in 1997, by 2008 it had rebounded to 25%, with an 18% rise in graduation rates among minorities. The numbers at the elite UC Berkeley and UCLA campuses have not fully recovered to pre-Proposition 209 numbers, but they have made considerable progress. Moreover, both were listed in U.S. News & World Report's Economic Diversity Among the Top 25 Ranked Schools for the 2011-12 year, with the highest percentage of undergraduates receiving Pell grants.
This is precisely the kind of diversity improvement the court said in Fisher would preclude the reintroduction of race preferences.
My involvement with the issue of affirmative action began as a 19-year-old student when I sued the University of Michigan for using different admissions standards based on an applicant's race. The Supreme Court eventually ruled in my favor in its 2003 Gratz vs. Bollinger decision, but it allowed more nuanced forms of racial policies to continue in a companion case. This split decision moved me to follow California's example and spearhead a constitutional amendment similar to Proposition 209 in Michigan, which voters approved 58% to 42% in 2006. Since California's bold step toward equal treatment, seven states have followed its lead.
The proposed changes for California are profound. Disguised as calls for equalizing opportunities and increasing diversity for better learning, these changes are a clear assault on equal protection in California. We are all individuals, with unique dreams, goals and experiences. Racial preferences empower government officials to divide us into categories, giving special treatment to some while discriminating against others, all on the basis of skin color or ethnicity. This is not how a civil society should treat its citizens.
There is no doubt that affirmative action policies began with the best of intentions: for people to be treated without regard to race. But they have turned into policies that instead encourage administrators and politicians to treat people differently based on skin color, creating new injustices with new victims. Treating people differently to make up for inequalities or create diversity only reinforces inequality and deepens racial division.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison Metropolitan School District 2013-2014 Budget Update 2 (PDF):
The allocation formulas and processes which determine school based staffing are proving to be one of the most important aspects of our zero-based budget process. During the past two months, we have documented current practice and created a 'design team' to review and propose ways to modify staff allocation practices. These efforts are helping to build a more unified ownership of the staff allocation process and better alignment between budget processes and instructional priorities.The staff allocation process, indeed the budget development process as a whole, can be one of those invisible but rigid structures which make it hard for schools to align resources to best impact student learning. Consider the table below, which reports MMSD's actual 2013-14 allocation of teaching staff at the elementary level:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
IT'S no secret that tenured professors cause problems in universities. Some choose to rest on their laurels, allowing their productivity to dwindle. Others develop tunnel vision about research, inflicting misery on students who suffer through their classes.Despite these costs, tenure may be a necessary evil: It offers job security and intellectual freedom in exchange for lower pay than other occupations that require advanced degrees.
Instead of abolishing tenure, what if we restructured it? The heart of the problem is that we've combined two separate skill sets into a single job. We ask researchers to teach, and teachers to do research, even though these two capabilities have surprisingly little to do with each other. In a comprehensive analysis of data on more than half a million professors, the education experts John Hattie and Herbert Marsh found that "the relationship between teaching and research is zero." In all fields and all kinds of colleges, there was little connection between research productivity and teaching ratings by students and peers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Karthik Muralidharan & Venkatesh Sundararaman (PDF):
We find that private school teachers have lower levels of formal education and training than public-school teachers, and are paid much lower salaries. On the other hand, private schools have a longer school day, a longer school year, smaller class sizes, lower teacher absence, higher teaching activity, and better school hygiene. After two and four years of the program, we find no difference between the test scores of lottery winners and losers on math and Telugu (native language). However, private schools spend significantly less instructional time on these subjects, and use the extra time to teach more English, Science, Social Studies, and Hindi. Averaged across all subjects, lottery winners score 0.13 σhigher, and students who attend private schools score 0.23 σhigher. We find no evidence of spillovers on public-school students who do not apply for the voucher, or on students who start out in private schools to begin with, suggesting that the program had no adverse effects on these groups. Finally, the mean cost per student in the private schools in our sample is less than a third of the cost in public schools.Our results suggest that private schools in this setting deliver (slightly) better test score gains than their public counterparts, and do so at substantially lower costs per student.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Throughout the developed world, record levels of youth unemployment are spreading feelings of hopelessness across an entire generation. Yet what is striking is that policy makers hardly seem to care.It is only part of the answer to observe that not everyone is suffering equally: for much of wealthy northern Europe, for instance, it hardly registers. And although it is true that in some of the badly affected countries the figures have been pretty high for several decades now, the crisis has made them much worse. The real problem is not economic; it is political. An epoch of some two centuries is ending, and the young are the main losers.
The rise of modern states coincided with a valorisation of youth. Napoleon marked the change. After him, age came to be associated with the ancien regime, youth with the hope of something better. Scarcely out of university, the great Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz, wrote his "Ode to Youth" in 1820, perhaps the best-known expression of this attitude. Founded a decade later, Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy generated endless spin-offs - there was a Young Germany and a Young Poland, not to mention Young Ottomans and later Young Turks. A radical umbrella group, Young Europe, briefly brought many of them together, turning the name of the continent into the emblem of a fairer, more peaceful and more brotherly age ahead. The contrast is striking with what Europe has now come to stand for - a vision dreamt up by old men, now out of touch and increasingly out of mind.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
French researchers are testing a drug they hope will flip a chemical switch in the brains of children with autism.If the switch isn't flipped at birth, the brain remains overexcited and becomes vulnerable to injury - and that's what a group of French researchers think happens in the brains of babies who go on to develop autism, according to a paper published today in the journal Science.
They hope that a drug they are testing in European children will make a crucial difference, allowing brain networks to develop more typically, said lead researcher Yehezkel Ben-Ari of the French Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, in Marseille, France.
Autism is a spectrum of social and communication differences and repetitive behaviors; symptoms range from social awkwardness to behavior problems and an inability to speak. The seeds of autism are believed to be laid during early pregnancy, from a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
The new paper showed that in rats and mice with a rodent form of autism the brain chemical GABA didn't make its normal switch from stimulating electrical activity in the brain to tamping it down. When their pregnant mothers were given the drug, bumetanide, a generic diuretic long used to treat high blood pressure, the switch happened - and the rodents didn't show autistic behaviors.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
ONCE upon a time, it was common for scientists to receive letters from researchers working in other institutions, asking for reprints of papers they had published. It was the usual practice in those days for journal publishers to furnish authors with a couple of dozen such reprints, precisely for this purpose--but, if these had run out, a quick visit to the photocopier kept the wheels of scientific discourse turning, and though it was technically a violation of copyright, no one much minded.Then, the world wide web was invented--initially, as it happens, with the intention of making it easier for scientists to share their results--and everything changed. Now, any scientist worth his grant has a website, and that site will often let the casual visitor download copies of its owner's work. And, though it has taken a while, some publishers have decided they do mind about this--indeed one, Elsevier, based in the Netherlands, has been fighting back. It is using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), an American law that lets copyright holders demand the removal of anything posted online without their permission, to require individual scientists to eliminate from their websites papers published in its journals. In doing so it has stirred a hornets' nest.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A word rarely uttered on college tours sits atop the website of St. Olaf, a small liberal-arts college south of Minneapolis with an annual estimated cost of $51,860.Next to clickable categories about arts and athletics appears the unlikely word "outcomes.''
And if you click on the word, a headline materializes promising "The Return on Investing in a St. Olaf Education.''
A few more clicks and you can learn what becomes of graduates after four years on its sylvan campus along the Cannon River. For example: Where will a St. Olaf education lead? Then there is "What Happens After Graduation: Recent Alumni Data,'' along with retention and graduation rates, and "evidence of learning."
This new level of candor sounds like an answer to growing concerns of parents, politicians, and foundations concerned about the value for money of a higher education--and of students worried about finding jobs and repaying college loans.
And it's part of a new wave in higher education.
Concerns that the rising costs are leaving too many behind are increasingly accompanied by fears that today's college graduates lack sufficient workforce skills--or that they aren't learning enough.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A new report from ACT reveals an untapped pool of students who have an interest in STEM areas (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) but are not planning to pursue a STEM career as they prepare for the future. The data point to a gap between interests and intentions that, if addressed, could help put more students on the path to STEM careers."The good news is that student interest in STEM is high overall," said Jon Erickson, ACT president of education and career solutions. "The bad news is that a sizable number of students may not be connecting the dots between their innate interests and a potential STEM-related career."
The ACT national and state report series, The Condition of STEM 2013, examines the expressed and measured interests of high school graduates in the class of 2013 who took the ACT® college readiness exam. Expressed interest is when students say they intend to pursue a particular major or occupation. Measured interest, in contrast, is derived from students' responses to the ACT Interest Inventory, a battery of questions that measures preferences for different types of work tasks.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Chrissy Guzman chucked the old bottle of paint across the classroom, aiming for the large trash bin that the custodian had wheeled in earlier that summer day.As she and fellow parent volunteer Lori Yuan cleared out the PTA meeting room, the two mothers vented their frustration over the looming takeover of the district-owned campus by an outside charter operator. They lamented losing their neighborhood school, Desert Trails Elementary School, to a controversial education law they'd fought so hard against: the so-called parent trigger.
Guzman tossed another bottle toward the garbage -- only this time the lid flew off midair, splattering paint all over.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
American Council of Trustees and Alumni
The residential liberal arts college is a distinctively American tradition, and for generations its distinguishing feature has been the broad, yet rigorous intellectual experience in the arts and sciences that it required of all students. Studies have demonstrated the success of individuals in a wide variety of roles whose college education was in the liberal arts rather than a narrower technical field. As early as 1956, Bell Laboratories began scientifically tracking the career progress of staff with different academic preparation. Over a 20-year period with the company, liberal arts majors progressed more rapidly and in greater percentage than other staff. Bell's report, released in 1981, concluded:[T]here is no reason for liberal arts majors to lack confidence in approaching business careers. The humanities and social science majors in particular continue to make a strong showing in managerial skills and have experienced considerable business success. We hope and expect this to continue.And a recent study commissioned by the Association of American Colleges and Universities also supports the marketplace competitiveness of liberal arts majors.2The economic reality of the 21st century is that the skills, knowledge, and intellectual agility that come from a solid liberal arts education are more valuable than ever. The Bureau of Labor Statistics now reports that the average person born between 1957 and 1964 held an average of 11.3 different jobs between the ages of 18 and 46 alone. In a recent survey, 93% of employers asserted that mastery of a range of skills that are traditionally associated with the liberal arts was more important than the college major.3
Yet students have been migrating from arts, humanities and social sciences to fields that seem to promise easier paths to employment, like communications and business. And some governors and schools are taking a narrow and rigidly vocational view of higher education--one that steers students toward high-demand majors and preprofessional programs at the expense of a wider liberal arts background.4
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
What's the best way to teach good financial habits to disadvantaged high-schoolers?Well, what about holding a game night at which teens and their parents scramble to pay hypothetical bills with make-believe dollars?
Or maybe the students could stay on a college campus for two weeks where they would compete for financial security in a simulated economy.
These were two of 73 ideas submitted to a Fidelity Investments competition that challenged nonprofits, think tanks and individuals to come up with an effective means of teaching low-income teenagers the financial skills they need in today's economy. Fidelity says the winning idea will be tested in a pilot program that will receive as much as $100,000 in funding plus support from Fidelity volunteers.
It's no secret that many Americans are woefully ignorant of such financial basics as living within a budget and planning for retirement. For young Americans who face a challenging job market and are starting out with more debt than the previous two generations, it's a handicap that is particularly acute.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The enthusiasm was sincere. But the ad hoc appearance as a humanities lecturer also supported his strong commitment to cross-disciplinary work and his defence of the virtues of a broad liberal arts education."Just as we wouldn't want a student in engineering to graduate never having read a Shakespeare play . . . .we also don't want a student graduating in history or English literature who doesn't know something about technology," he says, in his office in a corner of Stanford's Main Quad.
The book-lined room is itself a small shrine to the university's scope: his scientific medals sit near a wig given to him by US Supreme Court justice (and alumna) Sandra Day O'Connor; a low-cost infant-warmer developed by the university's social entrepreneurs; and a pair of sneakers decorated with pictures of Stanford.
From outside, though, the fight to maintain Stanford's breadth may look like an uphill battle, led by the wrong person. Many students see Stanford as a springboard into Silicon Valley and Prof Hennessy, himself a founder of two technology companies, is an example of precisely the sort of success to which they aspire.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Meredith Simons, via a kind Caroline Zellmer message:
Collegiate Academies is seen by many as the crown jewel of the New Orleans charter school system, which is itself believed to be a national model for urban education. The charter operator's flagship school, Sci Academy, boasts the best test scores of any open-enrollment high school in the city's Recovery School District. In 2010, Oprah cut the school a $1 million check.But this past November, a chain of events started that calls into question whether Collegiate Academies--and other New Orleans charters with similar models--will be able to maintain their success long-term.
First, students at Joseph S. Clark Preparatory High School, another New Orleans school, staged a sit-in after a beloved teacher was abruptly fired. The protest shut down junior classes for a day and got the following school day canceled while administrators decided how to respond. Leaders at Clark's charter operator, Firstline Schools, met with angry students and parents, agreed to give students a voice in hiring decisions, and reassigned the school's principal to the network office.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
John Graham, Pat Barnes & Peter Hayes:
Over the past few years, many entities, including The Arizona Republic, along with business and education leaders, have called for significant reforms to our K-12 education system. Central to any reform effort is the development of a quality accountability infrastructure.Prominently featured in Gov. Jan Brewer's fiscal 2015 budget are resources dedicated to the ongoing development and implementation of the Arizona Education Learning and Accountability System, or AELAS, and the development of a new assessment to measure student progress under Arizona's College and Career Ready Standards. Appropriations such as these will establish the cornerstone for even greater reforms.
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal deserves much credit for highlighting the need for a strong student/school data system. He has spent countless hours educating policy makers on why better data is at the heart of education reform.
Without solid measures to understand how well our districts, public and charter schools, and even individual teachers are progressing, how can we justify spending hundreds of millions of additional taxpayer dollars on the myriad of programs and funding formulas that make up the K-12 structure?
The governor has requested a modest one-time state appropriation of $16.5 million, which complements prior appropriations and other funds available to the Arizona Department of Education, to complete Huppenthal's vital work.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Last week Dave Grissmer and I published an op-ed on universal pre-k. We didn't take it as controversial that government support for pre-K access is a good idea. As Gail Collins noted, when President Obama mentioned early education in his State of the Union address, it was one of the few times John Boehner clapped. Even better, there are good data indicating that, on average, state programs help kids get ready to learn math and to read in Kindergarten (e.g., Gormley et al, 2005; Magnuson et al, 2007).Dave and I pointed out that the means do show gains, but state programs vary in their effectiveness. It's not the case that any old preschool is worth doing, and that's why everyone always says that preschool must be "high quality." But exactly how to ensure high quality is not so obvious.
One suggestion we made was made was to capitalize on what is already known. The Department of Education has funded preK research for decades. Dave and I merely claimed that it had yielded useful information. Let me give an example here of the sort of thing we had in mind.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Student members of the Wisconsin Public Interest Research Group (WISPIRG) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are urging universities to provide low-cost "open" alternatives to textbooks, citing the high cost of current options.A survey, conducted by student PIRG groups throughout the country during the fall of 2013, showed that 65 percent of college students have decided not to buy a college textbook because of its high price. Nearly half of students said that textbook costs influenced how many courses, or which courses, they took.
According to the report, the average college student spends $1,200 per year on textbooks and supplies, and textbook prices have increased by 82 percent over the past decade.
The rate of increase in the amount students spend on books and supplies has slowed some in the last several years, the study said, crediting in part the increased availability of rentals, used books and e-books.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
How can we calibrate the damage done to education reform in New Jersey these past few weeks?Quick recap: First, Gov. Chris Christie's political leverage takes a big hit as he runs heads first into the Bridgegate imbroglio. On Saturday national papers were plastered with the Nixonian allegation that "His Fleeceness" knew about the Fort Lee lane closures while they were happening.
Christie-haters, including those who yearn for a return to the glory days of charter-free school districts and profligate school-funding formulas, buzz with glee.
Next, there's Newark, New Jersey's hotbed for educational equity, which recently lost ardent school reformer Cory Booker to the logjam that is Washington, D.C. On Tuesday night at First Avenue School, state-appointed Superintendent Cami Anderson walked off the stage while 500 enraged residents and school employees jeered at her "One Newark" plan, which involves expanding school choice and charter schools, and consolidating traditional schools with declining enrollment.
Meanwhile, Newark mayoral-frontrunner Ras Baraka has found a handy wedge issue to differentiate himself from more moderate candidates. Baraka, who doubles as principal of Newark Central High School and South Ward Councilman (he's on leave from his administrative duties while he campaigns), is blazingly antireform and has compared efforts to upgrade Newark's bleak school system to "the U.S. involvement in Vietnam."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
On Wednesday morning at 10 am, a bill titled the "Higher Education, Lower Debt Act" will receive a hearing before the Wisconsin Legislature's Senate Committee on Universities and Technical Colleges.I have spent the last decade studying the impacts of higher education financing on current, prospective, and former students throughout Wisconsin and nationwide. In the most relevant effort, the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study, my team and I tracked a cohort of 3,000 Pell Grant recipients through the state's public 2-year and 4-year colleges. We carefully surveyed and interviewed them repeatedly to understand how college costs affected decision-making, stress and health and, of course, their education. When some left school without degrees, we continued to talk with them, learning about how debt has affected their post-college lives. We witnessed the challenges that rising debt brings to them and their families, and are deeply empathetic to the crisis that confronts them now.
In addition, I have also been very involved with policy debates at both the state and national level about what to do to make the situation better, improving our economy and collective health and well-being. Last spring, I testified to the United States Senate on the challenge of college affordability. These discussions are fraught with disagreements about right and wrong, and are further confused by the relative lack of empirical data indicating both the effects of debt and delineating the effective pathways forward. People on both the Left and Right are struggling to find good ideas that are also politically feasible. Over the last 18 months, I worked through these challenges with my friend Andrew Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute, not because he and I agree on everything (I'm on the far Left most of the time, and he's more towards the Right), but because we share a commitment to doing something effective for students, rather than something that is merely (or solely) ideological. In a forthcoming book from Harvard Education Press, due out next year, we describe a range of approaches to achieving greater college affordability through innovations in college financing. We recently hosted an event in Wisconsin, which can be viewed on Wisconsin Eye.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
This is an analysis of the 1970 US-wide, spontaneous student strike by council communist group Root and Branch. As the current situation in California ripens the strategic lessons that Root and Branch attempted to outline could be useful.The student upheaval of May, 1970 marks a decisive change in the development of American social forces. It is essential to understand what happened, so that when the movement opens up again, tens of thousands of people will know how to push it still further.
The May movement was no mere protest against the invasion of Cambodia. The Cambodian action was the pre-text for action because it embodies everything that the students have learned to hate: the making of life-and-death decisions by a handful of men at the top; deceit; imperialism; racism; violence. The students' instinctive reaction was to seize the only locus of power available to them, their universities, and to fight -- with force if necessary -- against the police, National Guard, and other instruments of state violence which tried to break them.
In the midst of the strike, a U.S. Congressman said that there must be a conspiracy behind the student actions, for how else could hundreds of thousands of students conduct the same kinds of struggle around the same basic demands on hundreds of different campuse
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Jaqueta Cherry did not have a glittering GPA or a résumé loaded with internships and varsity letters. She dropped out of high school at age 17. But last fall, right after she received a general equivalency diploma, for-profit colleges and universities besieged her with offers of admission. Admissions officers told her that she could start right away. They said she could get a degree that would help her land a professional job working in computers. Hoping to escape from a future of dead-end jobs, she enrolled in a two-year associate's program at Everest University Online.But a year later, she has failed or dropped out of six courses at two different schools. She has never earned a single credit hour. Despite attending Everest University Online and then later the Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online, she still cannot find a "salary job." But now she has thousands of dollars in outstanding federal student loans. And she's not the only one.
Jaqueta embarked on her college career after seeing Everest's advertisements on television and on the Internet. This was not an accident, though, because the schools had discovered her first.
Like many others, Jaqueta had an important asset: She was eligible for a federal student loan. It is impossible to talk about for-profit education without mentioning how the availability of federal loans affects the process.
The lack of wealth among many students in their classrooms means that a higher share can qualify for need-based student aid. More than 60 percent of students at for-profits receive need-based Pell Grants. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, says that 96 percent took out student loans -- twice as often as was the case with students in traditional four-year public institutions and more than seven times the rate of students at community colleges
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Republican controlled State Senate Education Committee was forced to retract SB 286, a bill that would give away public assets to corporate run charter schools, because there was not enough votes for the bill in its current form. Objections came for both public school and voucher school supports. The bill would use high-stakes, standardized test scores, create an A-F grading system and then turn over the public school building and assets of 'F' rated schools to private or charter voucher school management. It even goes so far as to mandate that some percentage of schools be labeled as failing each year. It is a terrible idea with disastrous consequences for public education.While the bill also would have required Voucher schools to have some accountability criteria, the standards are different and the consequences for failure nowhere near as punitive. If a voucher school fails using the same or similar criteria to the public school, they just can't accept any new voucher students. They will continue to receive tax-dollars and their assets will not be seized by the state. The corporate reform interests who would benefit from this treatment object to any accountability or consequences for voucher schools, which is a significant reason why Olsen was forced to retract the bill after it had originally been scheduled for a vote on January 30. Governor Walker and his special interest cronies have waded into the discussion, demanding revisions that favor their interests. This bill is not likely to go away quietly.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT, while fading from the popular press, is perhaps only now being thoroughly metabolized in the fussier corners of academic thought. This seems fitting when we consider Hegel's philosophy of history, which helps legitimate the university's function as a sacred space for slow and deliberate contemplation and academic freedom. Hegel would have it that phenomena such as Occupy are only fully understood when they have worked through their formative contradictions, dissipated their energies, and reached their conclusion. The owl of Minerva flies at night, in other words, but Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience tolls not the witching hour of the Occupy movement so much as the doldrums of mid-afternoon.We are still far from the historical perspective required to properly absorb the world-historical commotion that was, and still is, the Occupy movement. W.J.T. Mitchell admits as much: he starts with the disclaimer that these essays, which were originally published together in Critical Inquiry in mid-2012, attempt to explain a movement "still in process and whose outcome is unclear." Subsequent events have justified this caution. While in the summer of 2012 it made sense for Mitchell to claim that "everyone agrees that Occupy Wall Street changed the conversation in the mass media from deficit reduction to economic inequality and joblessness," this view already requires revision in the wake of October's Tea Party tantrum over Obamacare and ensuing shutdown of the federal government, which cost American taxpayers billions of dollars.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I went to college long before the era of laptops, so I learned to take notes the old-fashioned way: ink on paper. But that does not mean my note-taking system was simple. Indeed it was an intricate hieroglyphic language, in which asterisks and underscoring and check marks and exclamation points all had precise meaning, if only to me.It's a lost art. Many college students have some kind of electronic note-taking device nowadays, and most will swear by them. And really, only a Luddite would cling to pen and notebook in the 21st century. Typing is faster than longhand, producing more legible and more thorough notes for study later on.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Over the last few years K-12 schools and districts across the country have been investing heavily in iPads for classroom use.EdTechTeacher has been leading iPad professional development at many of these schools and we've seen firsthand how they approach iPad integration.
While we've witnessed many effective approaches to incorporating iPads successfully in the classroom, we're struck by the common mistakes many schools are making with iPads, mistakes that are in some cases crippling the success of these initiatives. We're sharing these common challenges with you, so your school doesn't have to make them.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The federal program that brings foreign au pairs to the U.S. will come under review this year, as the State Department weighs better monitoring and other protections for the mostly young females who provide child care to American families.Nearly 14,000 foreigners--typically young women from Europe, Latin America and Asia--came to the U.S. in 2012 to work as au pairs, traveling on visas designed to promote educational and cultural exchange. Au pairs are supposed to provide 45 hours of child-care-related work each week for a stipend and an educational allowance, as well as room and board and meals.
But there have been a spate of complaints from au pairs who say they quit after being overworked or otherwise mistreated. One au pair from Thailand said she had to carry heavy furniture and provide her own meals. An au pair from Brazil returned home last summer after she worked far longer hours than she expected. In 2011, a German woman sued the father of her Oregon host family and an au pair agency in state court over alleged sexual advances that he made toward her, according to court records. Both cases were settled on undisclosed terms without the father admitting or denying wrongdoing.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A senior chemistry student at UW-Madison has been selected as one of 14 Americans to win a Churchill scholarship, one of the most prestigious scholarships in higher education.Green Bay native Joshua Shutter will be heading to the University of Cambridge in England to pursue a master of philosophy in chemistry degree, according to a news release from the university.
With the Churchill scholarship awarded to a UW-Madison student, the university is one of only four American universities to have Churchill, Rhodes and Marshall scholars in the same year. The other three are Harvard, Princeton and Georgia Tech.
"The potential to perform research alongside esteemed faculty was one of the primary reasons why I chose to attend UW-Madison," Shutter said in the news release.
"Overall, the ability to perform research early on in my undergraduate career both motivated me and opened a variety of opportunities, from NASA to the Churchill scholarship, that would have seemed unimaginable to me four years ago."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Here's what looks like a policy dilemma. To attain the economic growth that it desperately needs, the United States must improve its schools and train a workforce capable of competing in the global economy. Economists Eric Hanushek, Dean Jamison, Eliot Jamison, and Ludger Woessmann estimate that improving student achievement by half of one standard deviation--roughly the current difference between the United States and Finland--would increase U.S. GDP growth by about a full percentage point annually. Yet states and the federal government face severe budgetary constraints these days; how are policymakers supposed to improve student achievement while reducing school funding?In reality, that task is far from impossible. The story of American education over the last three decades is one not of insufficient funds but of inefficient schools. Billions of new dollars have gone into the system, to little effect. Luckily, Americans are starting to recognize that we can improve schooling without paying an additional dime. In fact, by unleashing the power of educational choice, we might even save money while getting better results and helping the economy's long-term prospects.
Over the last four decades, public education spending has increased rapidly in the United States. According to the Department of Education, public schools spent, on average, $12,922 per pupil in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available. Adjusting for inflation, that's more than double the $6,402 per student that public schools spent in 1975.
Despite that doubling of funds, just about every measure of educational outcomes has remained stagnant since 1975, though some have finally begun to inch upward over the last few years. Student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)--the only consistently observed measure of student math and reading achievement over the period--have remained relatively flat since the mid-1970s. High school graduation rates haven't budged much over the last 40 years, either.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Sean Corcoran, Thomas Romer & Howard Rosenthal (PDF):
The operation and financing of primary and secondary public schools in the US is highly decentralized. Most of the budget of each of the 13,000+ school districts comes from a combination of local and state revenues. State constitutions and statutes determine the degree of local district autonomy and scope of taxing power.As part of an ongoing project on the political economy of education finance, this paper reports on some developments in school spending in one state during a time when some of the state's constitutional rules governing local school district taxing powers changed. In part, the paper provides a replication of tests of a model of bureaucratic agenda-setting in the financing of elementary and secondary public education. In that agenda-setting model, a budget-maximizing agenda setter makes a proposal for a locally funded operating levy that must be approved by a referendum. In the basic model, the referendum is modeled as an ultimatum game where the agenda setter makes a take-it-or leave-it proposal to some pivotal voter. If a majority of the electorate rejects the proposal, the levy is an exogenously specified reversion level. The optimal, budget-maximizing proposal makes the pivotal voter indifferent between the proposal and the
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In the current wave of online ill-will between contingent and tenure-track faculty (which of course most faculty in either group will never see, know about or care about), one of the common sentiments that produces some modest degree of agreement is, "Blame the administrators".The common refrain, echoing the arguments of Benjamin Ginsberg's Fall of the Faculty, goes something like this:
1) Faculty used to be firmly in control of most of the business of academic institutions.
2) Administrators took that control away from them.
3) Then administrators made more administrators and fewer faculty, and made most of the faculty contingent employees. Why? Because they're bad, because they could, because they hate truth and justice, because they're neoliberal capitalists.
4) And so here we are. We should retake governance, fire most of the administrators, and rehire most faculty as tenure-track faculty.
This at least is Ginsberg's take. Every once in a while in Fall, he pauses to consider what the faculty role in the history of administrative growth might be, every once in a while he considers the role of federal and state regulations, every once in a while he thinks about larger trends in employment and the economy. But for the most part, he views faculty as having little or no role in the growth of administration and the rise of contingent labor, he almost never asks whether students played a part, treats academia as a self-contained institution that explains itself, and largely sees administrators, particularly the "deanlets" that he views with special contempt, as the deliberate and programmatic agents of the marginalization of the faculty.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
There are two public/private worlds in Oakland existing in parallel to one another. Mostly white, fairly affluent people live in one, where they are focused on issues of expression and personal privacy--especially in cyberspace. The privacy battlefield of this group is theoretical. While there is much generalized surveillance it is not yet directed at this demographic in any copious way, and much of the focus is preventative to avoid a reality suggested by everyone's favorite rhetorical device, George Orwell's 1984. Oakland's other world is populated by mostly Black, Asian and Latino people in the city's poor and of color neighborhoods. Privacy in that world has an entirely different set of parameters and connotations.What is it like to have your every move in public surveilled? Many speakers on DAC, which appeared as the last item on the public safety agenda, mused on the idea with various projections. But the OPD report-back portion of the night's meeting that filled up the first half of the night already gave some clue, though it passed almost without comment by city official or public citizen. Ceasefire was mentioned again and again by police captains reporting back on successes. Success in the case of Ceasefire is reached through questionable policing tactics meant to assure affluent voters that the police are taking their crime-fears seriously, while addressing the race-based economic inequalities that make liberals uncomfortable.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
This week, the remains of fifty-five bodies were found in unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Florida School for Boys, in the panhandle town of Marianna. The reformatory school, which was operated by the state of Florida, and which closed in 2011, was notorious for its mistreatment of its students. In 1968, Florida's governor at the time, Claude Kirk, said of the school, "Somebody should have blown the whistle a long time ago." There have long been allegations of beatings, torture, and sexual abuse there; it now appears that some students were killed. The total number of bodies buried at the school has not been determined, but the forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle, the leader of the exhumation effort, which has been under way since September 2013, has said that it may exceed a hundred.Some of the children died natural deaths, but the sheer number of bodies suggests that there may have been many killings, a possibility buttressed by eyewitness accounts. Yet Florida's prosecutors have yet to file a single criminal charge, or even open a criminal investigation. To pass over crimes of this magnitude without investigation seems the very definition of injustice.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison Teachers, Inc. eNewsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF)::
In a recent post on her blog, Diane Ravitch shared concerns about alternative routes to certification; in particular Teach for America (TFA). Her post centered on a parent's letter to Senator Tom Harkin after her daughter had a bad experience with TFA. Ravitch posted two responses: Harkin's actual response to the parent; and a mock response crafted by Professor Julian Vasquez Heilig, University of Texas. Harkin serves as the Chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and as Chair of the Education Appropriations Subcommittee. While Harkin "read" his constituent's letter, it is apparent he did not incorporate Close reading strategies; his mind was made up. Harkin has supported funding for TFA and even tried to weaken the definition of "highly qualified", so as to include teachers in training (thus enabling TFA teachers to be assigned to schools). Dr. Heilig points out several of the issues with TFA, primarily the turnover rate of the teachers in this program, which our federal government funds. He also notes that while these "teachers" don't meet the standards of highly qualified, they are the teachers being disproportionately assigned to schools serving poor and minority children. Heilig also exposes the fact that TFA has access to and direct influence over the legislative process, as they provide cost-free education staffers for legislators on the Education and Workforce Committee. TFA lobbyists working inside the Capitol? No wonder Teach for America has been able to extend its reach so efficiently into so many districts around the country.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Private and charter schools appear to have significant but modest effects on test scores but much larger effects on educational attainment and even on long-run earnings. A new working paper from Booker, Sass, Gill and Zimmer and associated brief from Mathematica Policy Research finds that charter schools raise high school graduation, college enrollment and college persistence rates by ~7 to 13%. Moreover, the income of former charter school students when measured at 23-25 years old is 12.7% higher than similar students. Similar in this context is measured by students who were in charter schools in grade 8 but who then switched to a traditional high school-in many ways this is a conservative comparison group since any non-random switchers would presumably switch to a better school (other controls are also included).The effect of charters on graduation rates is consistent with a larger literature finding that Catholic schools increase graduation rates (e.g. here's and here). I am also not surprised that charters increase earnings but the earnings gain is surprisingly large; especially so when we consider that the gain appears just as large among charter and non-charter students both of whom attended college (i.e. the gain is not just through the college attendance effect).
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Children aged four will be expected to sit tests within weeks of starting primary school under controversial plans to be announced by the Government.The Times has been told that "baseline" tests to measure each child's level of development are to be moved from the age of seven to the beginning of the reception year. Ministers have decided that they will go ahead after consulting on proposals over the summer and autumn.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Parenthood as we know it -- predicated on the unconditional exaltation of our children -- is no more than 70 years old, and it has gone through radical readjustments over the past two generations. As children went from helping on the farm to being the focus of relentless cosseting, they shifted "from being our employees to our bosses," Jennifer Senior observes in her trenchant and engrossing first book, "All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood." Senior, a contributing editor at New York magazine, examines what it means to be a parent, through interviews with a handful of families who are neither typical nor extraordinary. These are snapshots, not longitudinal documentaries, but in the way of good snapshots, they tell more than one might notice at first glance, and they allow for cautious universalizing. She supplements these vignettes with extremely impressive research, weaving in insights from philosophy, psychology and an occasionally overwhelming mélange of social science reports.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Nearly everyone agrees that recent college graduates are having an inordinately tough time finding work almost five years after the end of the Great Recession. Young people aged 18 to 34 have struggled with double-digit unemployment and account for half of the 10.9 million unemployed Americans, according to government figures.Now a new study shows there is widespread disagreement between business leaders and young adults and their families over the root causes of this problem, beyond the obvious problem of a sluggish recovery.
Nearly three-quarters of hiring managers complain that millennials -- even those with college degrees -- aren't prepared for the job market and lack an adequate "work ethic," according to a survey from Bentley University, a private business school in Waltham, Mass.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
An article on the Education Bureau's website claiming "Cantonese is not an official language" has been removed after criticism.The article was posted on the website's Language Learning Support section on January 24.
It aimed to promote the importance of bilingualism and trilingualism as the city "develops alongside the rapidly growing China" and "the daily usage of Mandarin [in Hong Kong] becomes common".
It said: "Although the Basic Law stipulates that Chinese and English are the two official languages in Hong Kong, nearly 97 per cent of the local population learn Cantonese (a Chinese dialect that is not an official language) as their commonly used daily language."
The article was removed yesterday. The webpage is now "being updated".
Education sector lawmaker Ip Kin-yuen said the bureau had "done wrong" because it was not its business to define what language was official. But he commended it for quickly removing the article and apologising.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Some even suggest it may be psychologically damaging.
Positive discipline, which is becoming a grassroots fashion in America, aims to teach children self-control and empathy. Rather than screaming at them to pick up the toys they have strewn on the floor, parents or teachers ask them to suggest their own way of tackling the problem. Adults are encouraged to think harder about the causes of bad behaviour. Families meet regularly to discuss all of the above.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In Michael Gove and Andrew Adonis's wildest dreams, the academies and free schools their policies ushered into being would be filled with bright students in spotless classrooms, being encouraged to apply to top universities.When the failures of the Al-Madinah and Discovery free schools dominated the headlines last year, that vision seemed the stuff of a madman's hallucination. But not in Stratford, where in the shadow of the deconstruction of the 2012 Olympic venue the free school project finally had a gold medal winner in the London Academy of Excellence.
On Monday Gove will give his stamp of approval by delivering a speech on education reform at the LAE's unprepossessing home, a 1980s former council office block near Stratford tube station. But the reform Gove is most likely to trumpet is that of LAE itself. A sixth form college funded under the free school programme that opened two years ago, LAE had kept a low profile, thanks in the main to its unfashionable location in Newham. But it made headlines in January with the announcement that six of its first cohort of students had been offered places at Oxford and Cambridge.
Robert Wilne, LAE's energetic headmaster, says the school should be judged not on its success at Oxbridge entry but on the route its students took to get there.
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
Interest in using the internet to slash the price of higher education is being driven in part by hope for new methods of teaching, but also by frustration with the existing system. The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn't video lectures or online tests. It's the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.In the first half of the 20th century, higher education was a luxury and a rarity in the U.S. Only 5% or so of adults, overwhelmingly drawn from well-off families, had attended college. That changed with the end of WWII. Waves of discharged soldiers subsidized by the GI Bill, joined by the children of the expanding middle class, wanted or needed a college degree. From 1945 to 1975, the number of undergraduates increased five-fold, and graduate students nine-fold. PhDs graduating one year got jobs teaching the ever-larger cohort of freshman arriving the next.
This growth was enthusiastically subsidized. Between 1960 and 1975, states more than doubled their rate of appropriations for higher education, from four dollars per thousand in state revenue to ten. Post-secondary education extended its previous mission--liberal arts education for elites--to include both more basic research from faculty and more job-specific training for students. Federal research grants quadrupled; at the same time, a Bachelor's degree became an entry-level certificate for an increasing number of jobs.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Whatever appeared to be coming together a week ago seemed to be reduced to splinters in the last few days when it came to pursuit of ideas for low performing schools in Milwaukee.I think it's contagious and my brain has splintered into thoughts about the fairly tumultuous recent developments. So instead of a single column, I offer fragments.
Fragment 1: Last week was a good one for fans of the status quo. Plans for Republicans in the Legislature to push through new and fairly dramatic steps came to a halt when the lead author said he couldn't get enough votes.
Milwaukee School Board members went through much rhetoric on what to do in meetings two weeks in a row -- and sent the whole issue back to committee. Maybe doing nothing is better than doing the things being suggested. In any case, "doing nothing" is ahead at the moment.
Fragment 2: It's all about counting to 17. There's a big roster of education ideas up for action in the Legislature -- school accountability, including public and voucher schools; charter school expansion statewide; dealing with the future of the Common Core initiative.
But if 17 of the 18 Republican state senators don't agree to get behind any of these, nothing will result, at least this year. So far, no one has counted to 17 on any of these fronts. What could change that? Maybe concerted involvement by Gov. Scott Walker. Maybe not. The Senate Republicans are not easy to unite.
Fragment 3: The hostility was strong in the large audiences at the two recent meetings of Milwaukee School Board members focused on low performing schools.
Much of it was aimed at anything to do with charter schools. At one point, mention by Superintendent Gregory Thornton of Teach for America, City Year and especially Schools That Can Milwaukee drew audible rumbling from the crowd.
These organizations are controversial to some folks, but I think they each are bringing positive, good energy and commitment to helping kids in Milwaukee. It's one thing to disagree on approaches. It's another to add so much anger to the environment.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A former interim dean of UNC-Chapel Hill's College of Arts and Sciences has sent a letter to Chancellor Carol Folt and Provost Jim Dean, challenging their claims that the university was not admitting athletes unable to read at a high-school level.Madeline Levine, a highly honored professor emeritus, said that as a dean, she was made aware of instances in which the university has admitted athletes with substantial academic challenges, including one she suspected was "functionally illiterate" during her tenure.
Levine also accused the university of resisting efforts to get to the bottom of a long-running academic fraud scandal that is drawing sustained national attention since it made The New York Times' front page on New Year's Day. She said Dean took the wrong tack two weeks ago in publicly lambasting whistle-blower Mary Willingham, a former learning specialist in the athletes' tutoring program. Willingham said her research found that more than half of 183 athletes specially tested for learning deficiencies over an eight-year period could not read at a high-school level.
"Mary Willingham was courageous in speaking out about her experience as a reading specialist and academic counselor for such students," Levine wrote. "It is appalling that the highest officials at UNC - before it became clear that attacking a whistle-blower is not a smart PR move - mounted a concerted public attack on the accuracy of Ms. Willingham's statistical analysis and, by implication, against her personally, while steadfastly refusing to engage with the core issue that concerns her: the exploitation of student-athletes and the concomitant abuse of the academic values by which a great university should live."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Madison School District (PDF):
More rigorous and frequent reviews of progress (3.02, 4.04, 24)Nuestro Mundo generally operates within the traditional District structures. Two proposed charter schools that largely wished to operate in a more independent manner - to varying degrees -, The Studio School and the Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School were rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board.Modify student achievement goals and include more robust measures of student performance (4.01, 4.02, 4.03, Appendix 1)
Clarify the admissions process, which is expressly aligned to the process used for other DLI programs (7.04)
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
After a month, I drop out of Mumbai University. There is no particular reason, more of an aimless slide. Having told my parents that I'd try India before deciding about going abroad, I now accept an offer from Claremont McKenna--an American College comprised of words I mispronounce, the 'Mck' coming out as the 'muck' of muck and slime, rather than the 'mec' of McDonalds. The fee transfer is a family event. The four of us walk to the bank, each clutching assigned documents. Fifty thousand dollars--a sum so new, so gigantic, that the clerk who processes the transaction and I both roll our eyes. Once it's paid, Claremont begins sending me emails: housing form, dining form, health form, orientation package. I reply vaguely, and then go about preparations in a daze, as if buying clothes and packing suitcases for someone else.Then there is the matter of goodbyes. I am expected to throw a farewell party, and I do. The formality done, I provide my friends with a false (early) departure date so as to have a few weeks to myself. Not that anyone is harassing me. Lying and laying low just seem like the thing to do. The situation with my family is more difficult (though of course I myself don't realize this just yet.) My older sister Shirya is giving up on me. I didn't write to her from boarding school. It's unlikely that I will from the States. My mother, who blindly loves me, finds this period especially hard. We spend a lot of time together: at the passport office, at the American consulate, in line outside the American consulate, at shopping malls, at foreign exchange bureaus and, of course, in the car--but our interaction is dead. She might as well be a chauffeur. My father claims to "know what was going on in [my] head," because he is my father. Whether he really does, (I hope he doesn't) or is given to psychoanalyzing, or has just taken it upon himself to keep things together, I don't know. But he, more than the others, excuses my crankiness and lets me be.
As the date of departure approaches, I go further adrift, smoking openly in the building lobby, skipping meals without explanation, and even walking out on my grandparents when they arrive for a farewell visit. I listen to music until my head aches.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison School District (205K PDF):
The BOARD is committed to providing a strong instructional program that results in student growth for all students, including advanced learners. The BOARD recognizes that many advanced learners have unique academic and social-emotional needs that may require additional supports or interventions beyond the strong core instruction that is provided within a general education classroom if they are to achieve growth in their identified domain(s). The BOARD further recognizes the need to create systems for identifying, monitoring and serving advanced learners that are culturally responsive and sensitive to the needs and experiences of students with the potential for high performance but who are underperforming and students from underrepresented groups. The BOARD is committed to engaging the parents and guardians of advanced learners through outreach to, communication with and the inclusion of parents and guardians in education decisions that affect their students. In order to actualize these commitments for all students, all schools must, through professional collaboration and with the input from parents and guardians, appropriately identify and serve all advanced learners, including students from underrepresented groups, students who evidence high potential but are underperforming and twice exceptional learners, using the identification, monitoring and intervention systems set forth in the BOARD-approved Talented and Gifted Plan.Much more on the talented & gifted program, here and a parental complaint.A. Differentiated Instruction - A best practice for all instructional staff across all grade levels and subjects that involves modifying the classroom curriculum, instructional model and/or expected evidence of learning to meet unique student needs within the classroom.
B. Advanced Learner - A student who demonstrates high performance capability or the potential for high performance in one or more of the following domains and requires enrichment and/or intervention beyond differentiated core instruction. The domains are general intellectual, creativity, specific academic, leadership and visual and performing arts.
C. Interventions - Research-based instructional practices and programs used systematically to provide support to students who exceed academic or behavioral benchmarks or who evidence high potential but have not yet demonstrated high performance. Interventions, which are provided in addition to or in replacement of differentiated, grade-level core instruction, are used to systematically provide an enhanced opportunity to learn, scaffold learning for students whose mastery of skills or content are below what is expected and/or provide a faster pace of learning.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Rose Yang, a senior at UW-Madison, is starting to consider plans for graduate school. After she earns her bachelor's in social welfare, she wants to complete a master's and become a social worker."I want to help students very similar to myself, who didn't have opportunities--or didn't feel like they had the chance to go to college," Yang said, reflecting on her experience growing up in a low-income household in Madison. "I want to be that person who helps advocate for students like me at one point to get to college."
While the Madison Metropolitan School District's 2011-12 graduation rate was 74.6 percent overall, the figure hides disparites. For white students the graduation rate was 86.7 percent, but it was lower for all other races: 80.8 percent among Asians, 63.2 among Hispanics, and 53.1 among blacks. The rate for economically disadvantaged students was 55.4 percent.
Disparity in Madison received fresh attention in October when the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families released the "Race to Equity" report. The document outlined disparity between blacks and whites in Dane County, focusing on differing outcomes in education, employment and arrest rates as well as other areas.
"I think that was a real litmus test that people in our communities were surprised by those numbers," said Madeline Hafner, executive of the Minority Student Achievement Network, a Madison-based national coalition of school districts aiming to reduce their levels educational disparity.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Wisconsin's public school open enrollment application period will start in February for the 2014-15 school year, according to a release.Much more on open enrollment, here.The program allows parents an opportunity to send their children to any public school district in the state, officials said. The enrollment period runs from Feb. 3 to April 30.
Children in the state are usually assigned to public school districts based on the location of their parents' home, according to the release. The open enrollment application period is the only tuition-free opportunity for most parents to apply for their children to attend a public school in a school district other than the one they live in.
The program is an inter-district choice program that started in the 1998-99 school year, according to the release. Wisconsin is among 12 states with inter-district open enrollment.
"Wisconsin is among a number of states nationwide that offer public school open enrollment across school districts. The state's long-running program supports parental involvement and shared responsibility for educating children," State Superintendent Tony Evers said in the release.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
If there's an unofficial national day for America's sports passion, it is Super Bowl Sunday, and one of the largest U.S. television audiences of 2014 is expected to watch the Seattle Seahawks face the Denver Broncos.But ahead of this weekend's spectacle in New Jersey, there is some sobering news about the country's most-popular team sports: Fewer children are playing them.
Combined participation in the four most-popular U.S. team sports--basketball, soccer, baseball and football--fell among boys and girls aged 6 through 17 by roughly 4% from 2008 to 2012, according to an examination of data from youth leagues, school-sports groups and industry associations.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In 2008, Salman Khan, then a young hedge-fund analyst with a master's in computer science from M.I.T., started the Khan Academy, offering free online courses mainly in the STEM subjects -- science, technology, engineering and mathematics.Today the free electronic schoolhouse reaches more than 10 million users around the world, with more than 5,000 courses, and the approach has been widely admired and copied. I spoke with Mr. Khan, 37, for more than two hours, in person and by telephone. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversations.
Q. How did the Kahn Academy begin?
A. In 2004, my 12-year-old cousin Nadia visited with my wife and me in Boston. She's from New Orleans, where I grew up.
It turned out Nadia was having trouble in math. She was getting tracked into a slower math class. I don't think she or her parents realized the repercussions if she'd stayed on the slower track. I said, "I want to work with you, if you are willing." When Nadia went home, we began tutoring by telephone.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
On a recent afternoon, the Rev. Alex Gee, pastor of Fountain of Life Covenant Church on Madison's south side, facilitated a candid conversation with local African-American leaders on the realities facing blacks in Madison. The gathering was sparked by Gee's powerful personal essay, "Justified Anger," which ran in The Capital Times in December and generated enormous response. In it, Gee laid bare his frustrations with Madison -- a city that prides itself on fair-mindedness -- for its collective indifference toward the struggles of the African-American community here. A group of Cap Times staffers observed the meeting but did not participate. What follows is an edited transcript of the discussion.ON EDUCATION
Statistics on black student achievement in Wisconsin are grim: According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the achievement gap between whites and blacks in Wisconsin is the widest in the nation. Eighth-grade reading scores for black students here are the worst in the nation; black students' fourth-grade reading scores were the second-worst. At the same time, there are few minority teachers in Madison schools.Rev. Lilada Gee: When I walk up to the schools and I see these huge banners -- "School of Excellence" -- I'm thinking, "OK. So if you can hide behind those laurels that you're a school of excellence, where is your challenge to face the fact that that is not true for all of your children? When you have that big banner outside of your school and you've got the thumbs up, do you even look at the issues that there are these racial inequities that are going on, that there are droves of these black students that are not succeeding?"
I think that is kind of a metaphor of Madison. So much looks good on the outside, and they get so caught up at what looks good on the outside, that they don't have to go in deeper.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Thanks to technology, people can create more wealth now than ever before, and in twenty years they'll be able to create more wealth than they can today. Even though this leads to more total wealth, it skews it toward fewer people. This disparity has probably been growing since the beginning of technology, in the broadest sense of the word.Technology makes wealth inequality worse by giving people leverage and compounding differences in ability and amount of work. It also often replaces human jobs with machines. A long time ago, differences in ability and work ethic had a linear effect on wealth; now it's exponential. [1] Technology leads to increasing wealth inequality for lots of other reasons, too--for example, it makes it much easier to reach large audiences all at once, and a great product can be sold immediately worldwide instead of in just one area.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Glennon Doyle Melton via a kind reader:
A few weeks ago, I went into Chase's class for tutoring.I'd emailed Chase's teacher one evening and said, "Chase keeps telling me that this stuff you're sending home is math - but I'm not sure I believe him. Help, please." She emailed right back and said, "No problem! I can tutor Chase after school anytime." And I said, "No, not him. Me. He gets it. Help me." And that's how I ended up standing at a chalkboard in an empty fifth grade classroom staring at rows of shapes that Chase's teacher kept referring to as "numbers."
I stood a little shakily at the chalkboard while Chase's teacher sat behind me, perched on her desk, using a soothing voice to try to help me understand the "new way we teach long division." Luckily for me, I didn't have to unlearn much because I never really understood the "old way we taught long division." It took me a solid hour to complete one problem, but l could tell that Chase's teacher liked me anyway. She used to work with NASA, so obviously we have a whole lot in common.
Afterwards, we sat for a few minutes and talked about teaching children and what a sacred trust and responsibility it is. We agreed that subjects like math and reading are the least important things that are learned in a classroom. We talked about shaping little hearts to become contributors to a larger community - and we discussed our mutual dream that those communities might be made up of individuals who are Kind and Brave above all.
And then she told me this.
Every Friday afternoon Chase's teacher asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they'd like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student whom they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Odell Chalmers, a senior at Bradley Tech High School, dreams of starting a nonprofit that would grow vegetables inside blighted homes in Milwaukee.The homes would have a purpose, he reasons, and neighbors could learn how to build and maintain aquaponics units, or self-contained ecosystems where plants grow in water fertilized by fish waste.
Chalmers' vision may be idealistic, but it's rooted in a passion spurred by exposure to aquaponics and hydroponics -- cultivating plants in water -- in school.
Milwaukee Public Schools received a $98,000 grant Wednesday from AT&T and the National Education Association Foundation to encourage more of that thinking, with the grant funds used to expand the district's aquaponics offerings to 18, up from a dozen.
More teachers in the region and nationwide are trying to tap their students into the farm-to-table food movement and urban agriculture, creating partnerships with local farms, agriculture experts or college horticulture teachers to get students involved in aquaponics or hydroponics.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Paul Hill, via a kind Deb Britt email:
The recent news out of Columbus--that 17 of the 75 local charter schools had closed in the past year--is bad in so many ways. It throws up a big obstacle for reformers in that city, in Cleveland, and elsewhere who need to use chartering as a policy to create good options for all families. It buttresses opponents' arguments that charter operators don't know what they are doing. And it gives the press a field day reporting on how much public money was wasted.But that's not nearly the worst. The closure of these schools puts hundreds of children back at the tender mercies of a public school district that has failed students and defrauded the public about school performance and spending.
These children might be better off out of the failed charter schools than in them. But they are caught in a no-man's land. No charter school or authorizer is responsible to provide something better for these kids. Charter schools and authorizers have the luxury of defining whom they will be responsible for; kids who don't get into charter schools or are pushed out of them for some reason are no longer the school's--or the sector's--responsibility.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
