Wheeler Report (PDF):

For this reason, many of us were initially encouraged when you indicated that you would defund Wisconsin’s participation in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) via your proposed 2015-2017 biennial budget. We hoped for substantive movement, at long last, on an issue that affects most children, parents, and teachers in Wisconsin. However, as we read the actual budget language, we became troubled. Despite the defunding of SBAC, nothing in the budget language prohibits the selection or implementation of another Common Core-aligned assessment. Nor does it propose any fiscal plan for the creation or adoption of non- Common Core standards.
As it turns out, we were right to be skeptical.

On April 23rd, the Wisconsin Department of Administration (DoA) issued a Request for Bids (RFB) to replace the SBAC assessments that your proposed budget would ostensibly defund. The RFB was so vague as to which academic standards bidders should use to construct the new assessments that it took two rounds of questions to pin down a definitive answer. On June 5th the truth was irrefutably revealed: For mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA), the State of Wisconsin is telling bidders to write assessments based on the Common Core. Even then, there was clearly an effort to make it difficult to get to the truth. The links provided to the math and ELA standards did not directly contain the standards. Bidders and interested citizens, such as us, had to chase a rabbit trail of links and pages finally to arrive at PDF documents that contained the standards—clearly labeled as Common Core.

March, 2014

More than 100 superintendents and school board members packed a Senate chamber Thursday in opposition to a bill that could derail the transition to new educational standards in Wisconsin.

At issue are the Common Core State Standards, a set of expectations for English and math instruction that most states have adopted and have been implementing for three years.

The debate came as lawmakers hustled to push through — or push aside — a host of measures, with the end of the legislative session in sight. Committees on Thursday approved bills to rewrite election rules and provide more oversight of the deaths of suspects in police custody, while a Senate leader declared a bill to limit so-called living wage rules is dead in his house.

But the hot issue of the day was Common Core.

Many Republican lawmakers fear the standards didn’t get enough input and review when they were written and adopted in 2010. They’re proposing a state standards board that could repeal Common Core and write its own standards.

Superintendents at the Senate Education Committee hearing acknowledged the Common Core standards were not perfect and that they could use more time and resources to implement them. But they argued a new committee would just politicize the process while failing to improve outcomes for students.

“(Common Core) is the basis we need to be able to make local adjustments,” said Jennifer Cheatham, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District.

John Wagner:

Democratic presidential hopeful Martin O’Malley on Wednesday put forward an ambitious five-year goal of allowing students to graduate debt-free from public colleges and universities across the country.

The proposition is deeply personal for O’Malley: Aides say he and his wife have already incurred $339,200 in loans to put the two eldest of their four children through universities. And college affordability was a leading priority for O’Malley during his tenure as Maryland’s governor.

The issue is one being talked about a lot these days by Democrats, including the party’s other White House candidates, as more and more students enter the workforce with hefty debt loads.

Andrew DelBanco:

Death may be the great equalizer, but Americans have long believed that during this life “the spread of education would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.” These words come from Horace Mann, whose goal was to establish primary schooling for all children—no small ambition when he announced it in 1848. Others had already raised their sights higher. As early as 1791, exulting in the egalitarian mood of the new republic, one writer declared it “a scandal to civilized society that part only of the citizens should be sent to colleges and universities.”1

How that part has grown is a stirring story. It begins in the colonial period with church-funded scholarships for the sons of poor families. It continued after the Revolution with the founding of public universities such as those of North Carolina and Virginia. In the midst of the Civil War, it was advanced by the Morrill Act, by which Congress set aside federal land for establishing “land-grant” colleges, many of which became institutions of great distinction. By the later nineteenth century, when most colleges still admitted only white men, the cause was advanced again by the creation of new colleges for women and African-Americans.

KSTP:

The results of a new survey released Monday by U.S. Bank stated that many college-age young adults say they have no idea how to keep a budget.

What’s more, they look to their parents for financial education and advice.

The study’s key findings show college students don’t fully understand credit and credit scores. They have a good perspective on saving, the study found, but they need help understanding investments and retirement savings.

According to the survey results, parents are most often mentioned as students’ financial role models.

“They really felt unprepared to talk about the future or to save for the future, had no knowledge of retirement savings whatsoever and many didn’t know that their parents would have to pay back their loan if they didn’t pay their student loan back,” Christine Hobrough, U.S. Bank region market manager in the Twin Cities, said.

Related: Connected Math and the now 10 year old math forum.

Laura Waters:

The U.S. Congress is seemingly close to reauthorizing ESEA, now called the “Every Child Achieves Act.” But the current proposal is overly deferential towards Tea Party-ish members who resent the teeth of federal oversight not only in same-sex marriage but also in education policy. And, in its current people-pleasing mode, this draft of ESEA panders to teacher union loyalists whose determination to undermine any federal role in education policy was on full-frontal display at the recent NEA annual meeting. Delegates there approved three new business items that sacrifice the ability of states to accurately measure student achievement in order to protect teachers’ jobs.

But let’s not be too negative. There’s plenty to like about the Every Child Achieves Act, primarily its retention of annual state testing and disaggregation of data. However, as the Washington Post Editorial Board opines today, its passage “would mark a defeat for the nation’s neediest students”:

Conor Friedersdorf:

I could mention my first introduction to Godel’s theorem about the essential incompleteness of mathematics; or my first encounter with the Banach-Tarski theorem in topology showing that a sphere the size of a pea can be decomposed into a finite number of pieces and put back together to get a sphere the size of a basketball; or Russell’s paradox about the set of all sets that do not belong to themselves; or any number of counterintuitive results in probability theory. All of these mathematical ideas excited me in high school and college, but I will concentrate instead on the thrill I felt in elementary school when I saw that the power of simple arithmetic was sufficient to vanquish a bully, my fifth grade teacher. It still evokes the same emotions in me that it did decades ago.

I was about ten years old and enthralled with baseball. I loved playing the game and aspired to be a major league shortstop. (My father played in college and professionally in the minor leagues.) I also became obsessed with baseball statistics and noted that a relief pitcher for the then Milwaukee Braves had an earned run average (ERA) of 135. (The arithmetic details are less important than the psychology of the story, but as I dimly recall, the pitcher had allowed the opposing team to score 5 runs and had got only one batter out. Getting one batter out is equivalent to pitching 1/3 of an inning, 1/27 of a complete 9-inning game––and allowing 5 runs in 1/27 of an inning translates into an ERA of 5/(1/27) or 135.)

Mark Dice, via a kind reader:

Media analyst Mark Dice asks beachgoers in San Diego, California some basic questions about America’s 4th of July Independence Day celebration and their answers are quite disturbing.

James Oliphant:

“We do not need timid tweaks to the old system. We need a holistic overhaul,” Rubio said in a policy speech in Chicago. “We need to change how we provide degrees, how those degrees are accessed, how much that access costs, how those costs are paid, and even how those payments are determined.”

The speech was part of a move by the U.S. senator from Florida to raise his visibility on the campaign trail after focusing on Senate business recently. Rubio is one of 14 declared candidates vying to represent the Republican Party in the November 2016 election.

It also gave Rubio the chance to expound on what has become his candidacy’s central theme: preparing America for a future shaped by globalization, automation, and rapid technological change.

Rubio’s remarks were “very much an effort to win the support of middle class, moderate Americans who play a key role in general elections,” said Jesse Rhodes, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Jonathan Katz

American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs for them. When something, or someone, is a glut on the market, the price drops. In the case of Ph.D. scientists, the reduction in price takes the form of many years spent in “holding pattern” postdoctoral jobs. Permanent jobs don’t pay much less than they used to, but instead of obtaining a real job two years after the Ph.D. (as was typical 25 years ago) most young scientists spend five, ten, or more years as postdocs. They have no prospect of permanent employment and often must obtain a new postdoctoral position and move every two years. For many more details consult the Young Scientists’ Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.

As examples, consider two of the leading candidates for a recent Assistant Professorship in my department. One was 37, ten years out of graduate school (he didn’t get the job). The leading candidate, whom everyone thinks is brilliant, was 35, seven years out of graduate school. Only then was he offered his first permanent job (that’s not tenure, just the possibility of it six years later, and a step off the treadmill of looking for a new job every two years). The latest example is a 39 year old candidate for another Assistant Professorship; he has published 35 papers. In contrast, a doctor typically enters private practice at 29, a lawyer at 25 and makes partner at 31, and a computer scientist with a Ph.D. has a very good job at 27 (computer science and engineering are the few fields in which industrial demand makes it sensible to get a Ph.D.). Anyone with the intelligence, ambition and willingness to work hard to succeed in science can also succeed in any of these other professions.

Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at $27,000 annually in the biological sciences and about $35,000 in the physical sciences (graduate student stipends are less than half these figures). Can you support a family on that income? It suffices for a young couple in a small apartment, though I know of one physicist whose wife left him because she was tired of repeatedly moving with little prospect of settling down. When you are in your thirties you will need more: a house in a good school district and all the other necessities of ordinary middle class life. Science is a profession, not a religious vocation, and does not justify an oath of poverty or celibacy.

Larry Cuban:

School reformers seek to fix problems. Many of these “solutions” appear and disappear again and again–as the previous post argued. Yet some past reforms do stick. How come?

In investigating school reforms that have taken place over the last century and a half, I have divided them into incremental and fundamental changes (see here and here). Incremental reforms are those that aim to improve the existing structures of schooling; the premise behind incremental reforms is that the basic structures are sound but need improving to remove defects. The car is old but if it gets fixed it will run well; it has been dependable transportation. It needs tires, brakes, a new battery, and a water pump-incremental changes. Fundamental reforms are those that aim to transform, to alter permanently, those very same structures; the premise behind fundamental reforms is that basic structures are flawed at their core and need a complete overhaul, not renovations. The old jalopy is beyond repair. We need to get a completely new car or consider different forms of transportation-fundamental changes.

If new courses, new staff, summer schools, higher standards for teachers, and increased salaries are clear examples of enhancements to the structures of public schooling, then the introduction of the age-graded school (which gradually eliminated the one-room school) and Progressive educators’ broadening the school’s role to intervene in the lives of children and their families (e.g., to provide medical and social services) are examples of fundamental reforms that stuck.

Patricia Cohen & Ron Lieber:

Experts are struggling to figure out exactly why. “We don’t know to what extent they’re not working because they can’t find a job, or aren’t interested, or are doing other stuff — like going to summer school, traveling, volunteering, doing service learning,” said Martha Ross, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a research organization based in Washington.

What is clear is that those who need a job the most are often the least likely to get one. To a large extent, the higher a household’s income, the more likely a teenager is to get a job. Suburbanites have a better shot than city dwellers, and white teenagers face far better odds than blacks, in part because of disappearing federal support for summer jobs.

Upshot:

Five years since the end of the Great Recession, the economy has finally regained the nine million jobs it lost. But not all industries recovered equally.

John McDermott

Presumably this is how they found out that half of households are net beneficiaries.

But here’s the mistake. The ONS also tries to estimate the value to households of so-called “in-kind” benefits, such as state education and the National Health Service. Once these benefits are included then, yes, 52 per cent of households take in more than they pay in tax.

That is still not ideal.

That’s your opinion but these numbers do not reveal a conspiracy; at every election we vote indirectly on how to distribute money. One might add that there are a lot of “benefits” to living in Britain that are not included here, such as a decent legal system, Match of the Day, and a sceptical approach to revolutions.

Not to mention a sceptical approach to inequality.

Perhaps, but the UK tax and benefit system does keep income inequality in check. Before any taxes and benefits — including benefits “in-kind” — are considered, the highest earning fifth of households makes an average of £80,800 per year, 15 times more than the bottom fifth, which earns £5,500. Once you take into account the deductions and additions, that gap narrows to four times: £60,000 versus £15,500. And contrary to what many people believe, standard measures of income inequality in the UK have not changed much in two decades.

William Tierney & Gerard Postiglione:

The international race to have a “world-class university” in Hong Kong has been in full swing for more than a decade. Whether you use the QS ranking, Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities, or the UK’s Times Higher Education World University Rankings, the vast majority of the top 100 are in the US and Europe, with the former having the lion’s share of the top 25. Not surprisingly, other countries are trying to ape what they think of as the “American model”.

Many observers think fiscal and organisational structures enable universities to be world class. Some of the best universities – Harvard, Stanford, the University of Southern California – are private and do not rely on government largesse. Even so-called state universities in the US get little funding from government any more. The implication for other countries is that their universities should be more entrepreneurial. Universities in many countries have begun to sing the praises of entrepreneurialism as never before.

Others look at private philanthropy in endowing positions for academic staff and erecting buildings on America’s campuses. Of consequence, many aspiring universities have begun to create or expand their development offices. The University of Hong Kong’s medical school accepted its renaming as the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine. Many libraries at China’s universities are named after Run Run Shaw.

Central governments also have a role. Federal spending on the research infrastructure of America’s best universities contributes to their excellence. The result is that other governments, including Saudi Arabia and China, now invest heavily in building facilities and providing the funds to hire academic staff so that some of their universities might be considered world class in research.

US universities are not consistently atop the world rankings because of their funding streams or organisational models, but rather their ability to drive excellence in teaching and research. The role of academic freedom cannot be underestimated, as it allows professors to speak their minds, search for truth and not worry that they will face sanctions in their work. Eliminate that and US universities drop in the world rankings.

Simon:

It’s old news for those of us who have already drank the entrepreneurial Kool-Aid. We already know being an entrepreneur is fantastic gig. But what if you’re still working a 9 to 5 job and feeling stuck in life because you’re struggling to make ends meet or you’re feeling unhappy with where your life is heading? I think many of us in our 20s, 30s, and perhaps in our 40s have felt this way as one point.

The world has changed in the past 40 years. Whilst we were born into a world dominated by corporations and a knowledge based job market, it no longer is good enough to be a university graduate and hope that a job exists for you out there. If you’re a recent graduate, you’ll be acutely aware of the mess we call the job market.

But it’s not just the job market. The whole way we look at work-life balance is a problem. We — as a society — are living lives where our priorities are misplaced, pursuing goals in ways which are unfulfilling at the same time.

Taylor Pearson attempts to reconcile these issues in his book. The solution, he argues, is that we must become entrepreneurial.

Japan Subculture:

The Japanese government is moving forward with plans to scrap humanities programs from public universities by withholding funds from “non-performing” universities and research centers engaged in activities that subversively undermine the profit-generating imperatives of a burgeoning, neoliberal fascist state. Shusuke Murai of the Japan Times cites various government sources on this latest scheme to transform public institutions from centers of intellectual activity into taxpayer funded vocational training centers for corporate employers.

You don’t need advanced studies to decipher the latest Imperial proclamation being issued from Nagatacho. In fact, it’s better to discourage genuine literacy altogether in order to prevent some uppity serf from reading into the implications of the Abe government’s latest assault on the democratic institutions that don’t advance the cause of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party or its feudal “reforms”. This time, America’s shadow puppet PM is warning national universities that they won’t receive crucial subsidies unless they scrap their unproductive, money-wasting humanities programs entirely. If you want “to build a system to produce human resources that match the needs of society by grasping accurately changes in industrial structure and employment needs, you’re not going to accomplish any of the above with the current system that favors “theoretical” mumbo-jumbo above more “practical” concerns of industry. Roughly translated: Less thinking in the brains and more elbow grease! And off the record, of course: Chew on that, you bespectacled, pointy-headed sociology major! Here’s a “three-pronged economic growth strategy” for your indolent, non-productive life – one for each orifice.

Pricenomics:

In the opening pages of American Psycho, a novel set in the finance boom in 1980s New York, a fictional investment banker raves, “I mean am I alone in thinking we’re not making enough money?”

From context, it’s clear that the character is indignant that his — seemingly enormous — paycheck isn’t higher. But, in a sense, financiers don’t “make” money. They just move it around. The sector makes most of its revenue through providing a service, not to their individual customers but to the economy. As Nell Irwin explained in The New York Times: “[Finance] exists to channel capital effectively from savers to investment. […] Most of modern finance doesn’t exist as an end in itself, but to make the rest of the economy more efficient.”

Once upon a time, the finance sector was vilified in Western culture, for exactly this reason. (Also because, since Catholic doctrine banned money lending for interest, in Europe for centuries it was the nearly exclusive profession of Jews). Slowly, capitalism emerged, people realized the benefits of an efficient economy, and finance was lionized.

“While there have been dissenting views, today it is accepted that finance is not simply a by-product of the development process, but an engine propelling growth,” economists Stephen G. Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi wrote in a 2012 study. “This, in turn, was one of the key elements supporting arguments for financial deregulation. If finance is good for growth, shouldn’t we be working to eliminate barriers to further financial development?”

Greg Nichols:

Luke Matheny keeps getting pulled away. We are on a rented soundstage on the outskirts of Los Angeles’s Koreatown, sitting in director’s chairs in front of a television monitor. A woman standing nearby flips through script pages on a clipboard, and a few crew members mill around with practiced nonchalance. On the monitor is a live feed of four middle schoolers sitting at desks on the other side of a big prop wall. From this set, which looks like a museum piece — presidential portraits, American flag, the words monroe doctrine scrawled on a dusty blackboard — someone is hollering for Matheny, the 38-year-old director of Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street. “To be continued,” Matheny calls over his shoulder as his expansive snarl of dark hair disappears around the corner. I catch a brief glimpse of his pants on the monitor as he strides past the camera.

Gortimer, which debuted last year on Amazon to critical acclaim, is about a 13-year-old boy whose suburban street provides the backdrop for fantastical adventures with his two best friends. Matheny won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film and hasn’t done children’s television before, but he says he fell in love with the show when he first read the pilot. “It felt like The Wonder Years, but with a supernatural element,” he tells me. Today, he’s shooting an episode in which Gortimer discovers a charmed blazer that makes others see and treat him as an adult. While Gortimer characteristically weighs the implications of his newfound power and hesitates to use it for his own gain, his mischievous best friend Ranger goes on a spree of lottery-ticket buying and R-rated-movie watching.

David Hookstead:

University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point officials have advised faculty that the term “America is a melting pot” is a racial microaggression.

The common phrase was among a list of examples of so-called racial microaggressions used “as a discussion item for some new faculty and staff training over the past few years,” a campus official told The College Fix in an email.

Other phrases on the list included: “You are a credit to your race,” “where are you from,” “there is only one race, the human race,” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” and “everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough.”

The list is very similar to a list of microaggressions distributed by University of California system administrators in voluntary faculty trainings held over the last school year. That list suggested similar phrases to the ones distributed by the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

In the case of Wisconsin, the document is broken down into three columns: theme, microaggression and message. It lists “everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” racial microaggressions because those phrases supposedly send the message that “people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race. People of color are lazy and/or incompetent and need to work harder.”

Pat Schneider:

The late long-time principal of Madison East High School touched the lives of many students, some of whom say his influence on them was transformational.

So it’s not surprising that the East High class of 1995, looking to do something big to mark its 20th reunion, got to thinking about a scholarship honoring McPike.

Unexpected, perhaps, is how the idea caught fire, through word of mouth and social media.

Organizer Craig Karlen said that interest in mounting a campaign for the scholarship quickly spread from members of his class, to East High alumni more broadly and into the community.

That has allowed the effort to tap the skills of volunteers in media, fundraising and other fields to get the campaign rolling, he said.

Chris Rickert:

In other words, it’s wrong for a school board member to vote specifically on policy affecting his finances, but OK to vote on a budget including that very same policy.

There are probably people in other parts of Wisconsin who would object to a local school board that gives itself big, immediate raises and to a school board member who votes on a budget that continues to excuse him from doing something the majority of workers already do — help pay for their health insurance.

But this is Madison, and as long as the board keeps its politics liberal and its teachers union happy, it’s doing a pretty good job.

Related: School Board member Ed Hughes (2005):

This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Chris Rickert:

District officials were able to close about a third of the budget deficit by negotiating rate freezes with the three insurers it contracts with for employee health coverage — which is great, but isn’t going to put any more of those 79 positions back in the classroom.

The district, like local taxing bodies throughout Dane County, is wont to blame all its money woes on four years of tight-fisted and damaging Republican control of state spending.

It’s a fair point, although my experience over 15 years of covering local government is that cities, counties and school districts are quite capable of experiencing budget woes no matter who happens to be in charge at the Capital.

And who’s responsible for budget woes probably matters less than who suffers their effects.

Much more on Madison’s 2015-2016 budget and its long term disastrous reading results, here. Note that Madison has long spent more than double the national average per student.

Gerald Graff

COMPLAINTS THAT American high school and college graduates can’t write have been pervasive for so long that they almost go without saying. Last year, when the Society for Human Resource Management asked managers about the skills of recent college graduates, 49 percent of them rated those graduates deficient in “the knowledge and basic skill of writing in English” (Goodbaum). A few years earlier, in 2006, a survey sponsored by the Conference Board posed the same questions to human resource professionals, and 81 percent of them judged high school graduates deficient in written communications, 47 percent of them said the same of two-year college graduates, and 28 percent of four-year college graduates.

A 2012 survey of employers by the Chronicle of Higher Education concluded, “When it comes to the skills most needed by employers, job candidates are lacking most in written and oral communication skills.” More bad news comes from the standardized test universe—for instance, the SAT exam, which added a writing component in 2006. Since then, the national average has dropped every year except 2008 and 2013, when it was flat. (The 2012 SAT reading result marked the lowest figure since 1972.) In the 2013 administration of the ACT exam, only 64 percent of the 1.8 million test takers achieved a “college-ready” score in English.

On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress exam in writing (the “Nation’s Report Card”), only 24 percent of twelfth-graders reached “Proficient.” The findings of these surveys and tests are often framed as a national crisis. Bad writing means lower productivity in the workplace, and it also spells deteriorating discourse in the civic sphere. Since the quality of our writing reflects the quality of our thinking, slovenly writing breeds weak citizens—people who are slow to see through propaganda and nonsense, unable to detect contradictions, and poor at grasping the implications of consequential policy choices…

(2015-05-22). The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism
(Kindle Locations 1027-1044). Templeton Press. Kindle Edition.

Warren Adler:

There is nothing wrong with providing young students with more access to non-fiction and its many manifestations that include all the documentation of historical facts, biography, science, government, analysis, travel, real life adventure and anything else in this category. Any scrap of informational reading is absolutely essential to a well-rounded education and deserves a prominent place in the education of young minds, but not at the expense of fiction.

Works of the imagination, of which fellow authors and I are proud dispensers, is not only essential material for a well-rounded curriculum, it is crucial. In fact, it should be expanded. Imagination, in my view, often trumps information and hard scholarship.

Via Will Fitzugh.

Christian Schneider:

In describing how one becomes eloquent, Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed, “the best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.” Given the state of education at universities in 2015, Emerson is as prescient as he is erudite.

Universities have long fought the perception that they are intellectual castles, where common sense is kept outside their high walls. But recently, the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point filled its moat with alligators.

Last fall, on its official website, the university issued a document titled “Examples of Racial Microaggressions,” which sought to spur discussion about acceptable language on campus. The list was part of a diversity seminar for new faculty and staff, but only recently became the talk of the Internet. The suggested language restrictions are the latest in a long line of university efforts to discourage discussion of race, gender, age or socioeconomic status, as any of those topics may cause a “hostile learning environment.”

But even well-meaning students could run afoul of these guidelines without knowing it. According to the document, statements such as “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” and “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough” perpetuate the “myth of meritocracy,” which assumes “people of color are lazy and/or incompetent and need to work harder.”

Also on the list of racially insensitive utterances are statements such as, “I’m not a racist. I have several black friends,” “When I look at you, I don’t see color,” and “America is a melting pot.”

You read that correctly — denying you are racist is now racist.

Molly Beck:

The motion also adds a proposal allowing teachers or school administrators who have licenses from other states and have taught or worked for at least one year in that state to receive Wisconsin licenses. Administrators must have been offered a job in Wisconsin before they can apply for a license, the proposal says.

Officials with the state Department of Public Instruction, which blasted the licensing proposals when they were introduced this spring, said they were pleased to see the two most controversial provisions removed from the budget. DPI spokesman John Johnson said better pay and benefits, not lower licensing standards, will attract teachers to rural schools.

But Johnson also said the agency did not support the changes to licensing for technical education and out-of-state teachers — measures he said would mean lawmakers were lowering teaching standards for the third legislative session in a row.

When a stands for average.

Zheping Huang:

While many of his peers get their sense of achievement from online video games, Li Shengyao, a 21-year-old sophomore at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, gets it from playing the stock market. He describes himself as a short-term trader who “can’t stop my fingers from making orders.”

Li spends at least three hours every night dissecting day-trading activity and company disclosures to prepare for the next morning. “When everyone else is losing like a dog,” he said. “I’m still making money.”

One thing Li is not: an outlier. In China, it’s surprisingly common for college students to be active traders on the nation’s volatile stock markets, often with their parents’ money and consent, and sometimes at the expense of their studies.

Pat Schneider:

“I will consider contributions to health care, depending on what we see in terms of costs and the budget,” Burke said. “But we need to look at compensation in its entirety to make sure we remain competitive while we are accountable to the taxpayers.”

The school district is in the process of preparing to hire a consultant to conduct a study of employee compensation, she said.

Representatives of Madison Teachers Inc. say the fully paid health care premiums are a benefit bought with concessions on salary increases over the years.

That’s exactly why it’s so important to look at the district’s compensation as a whole, Burke said.

“We want to make sure the school district is a place that can attract quality people. That’s why the survey will not only compare us to other school districts, but also to other professions,” she said.

The Madison Metropolitan School District’s three major health insurance providers — Group Health Cooperative, Dean Health Plan and Unity Health Insurance — each agreed to hold the line on premiums next year. That helped the school district hold the line on a major expense — more than $61 million annually — in a budget round that saw operating expenses up nearly 11 percent as state aid dropped.

Madison’s 2015-2016 budget and its long term disastrous reading results, here. Note that Madison has long spent more than double the national average per student.

Conor Fiedersdorf:

When William Deresiewicz published “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” his critique struck such a chord that he turned it into a book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.

On Tuesday, New York Times columnist David Brooks––who teaches high achieving kids at Yale––read a passage from that book to an Aspen Ideas Festival audience. It was filled with people whose kids or grandkids attend elite colleges or universities.

The passage:

What do you owe your parents?

Erika Sanzi:

Parents prefer relationships to data. Most of us enjoy people more than numbers and like parent teacher conferences better than bar graphs. We take comfort in knowing that our kids are being educated in a safe space and worry very little about the high school profile or SAT participation rate in our town.

It’s human nature to listen to our hearts instead of our heads and it’s normal to be driven by connections we feel to teachers and coaches and school leaders to whom we entrust our children every day.

Hard truths however are better learned early than too late. Parents in my little state of Rhode Island deserve to know how their kids match up educationally against kids from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and even Maryland. Is the education they’re receiving as good as it feels like it is or are there systemic and measurable deficiencies that parents need to acknowledge?

And will those deficiencies impact the future that they have already envisioned and perhaps even planned for their children?

For example, many parents do not realize that their child’s high school profile has a significant impact on how college admissions officers view their application. And unfortunately for top tier students especially, their applications are looked at less favorably because of what other kids in their class are or are not doing.

Related: where have all the students gone?

Dana Liebelsoh:

When the video above was filmed, the girl on the bed was 17 years old. For the purposes of this story, I’ll call her Jamie. There was a time when she liked acting in goofy comedy skits at her Detroit church or crawling into bed with her grandmother to watch TV. She loved to sing—her favorite artist was Chris Brown—but she was too shy to perform in front of other people.

Jamie, whose mother was addicted to crack cocaine, was adopted when she was 3. At high school, she fell in with a wayward crowd and started drinking and smoking weed. Since she didn’t always get along with her adoptive mom, she lived with a close family friend from her church whom she referred to as her sister. One fall day in 2011, they got into a bad fight over their living arrangements. The friend told police that Jamie threw a brick at her, hitting her in the chest, and then banged the brick so hard on the front door that she broke the glass mail chute. Jamie denies the assault—and the police report notes that the brick may not have hit her friend—but she admitted to officers that she was “mad” and “trying to get back in the house.” The Wayne County court gave her two concurrent six-month sentences, for assault and destruction of a building.

Leonard Cassuto:

Arthur Levine, the head of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, has been a vituperative critic of teacher education programs for years. His recent announcement that he’s partnering with MIT to start a new teacher education graduate degree program has brought new attention to these teacher training programs – and to teacher training generally.

Levine’s indictment of education school teaching has legs. The teaching of teachers is in a serious disarray. Requirements and standards for the master’s degree in education, the recognized certification credential for US public school teaching, vary wildly from university to university. And the effects of such variations ripple through the entire K-12 education system.

There is no doubt that education schools have faced some special difficulties. The number of master’s degrees in education awarded in the US has more than doubled since 1990. This increase has brought more attention to the problems with these degrees.

But these concerns should also draw our attention to a larger problem with the teaching in graduate schools in general.

Campbell Brown:

Former CNN host Campbell Brown went from a career in journalism to a second life as an education-reform advocate. Now she is looking to combine the two.

Next month, Ms. Brown will be launching a non-profit, education-focused news site called The Seventy Four, which she says refers to the 74 million school-age children in classrooms across the U.S.

“There are a lot of entrenched interests that are standing in the way of some the best possibilities for innovation” in education, she said in an interview at the offices of her nascent site in Lower Manhattan. “We want to challenge and scrutinize the powers that be.”

But the creation of the site is likely to stir controversy. Since turning to advocacy in the years after she left CNN in 2010, Ms. Brown became a lightning rod for criticism from the teachers’ union and its supporters who have seen her efforts – most notably a push to reform tenure rules in New York – as part of a thinly-veiled campaign aimed at union busting.

Ms. Brown has denied wanting to destroy the union, and says she just wants to reform a system she says fails to adequately serve children. She says the site will be non-partisan but won’t shy away from advocacy.

Daniel Wagner:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is investigating whether some collection agencies are involved in lawsuits against student loan borrowers even when the companies can’t prove their legal right to collect on the loans, according to agency documents and people familiar with the investigation. The CFPB is weighing “whether Bureau action is warranted” against the collectors, documents say.

If investigators can prove wrongdoing, thousands of low-income borrowers could be spared years of wage garnishment that would place them at greater risk for financial hardship, including bankruptcy.
The lawsuits mirror illegal practices by mortgage companies seeking to foreclose after the 2008 financial crisis. Banks have paid billions to settle charges related to “robo-signing” — the practice of swearing falsely that a person has direct knowledge about a loan and the chain of companies that owned it. The people claiming to have that knowledge turned out to be signing hundreds of affidavits a day, often without reviewing the underlying loan files.

Lenora Hanson & Elsa Noterman:

National attention has turned to Wisconsin yet again due to a Republican-led charge to eliminate longstanding and historically progressive state protections for employees. Last week, the Joint Finance Committee (JFC), a subcommittee of the Legislature, approved an omnibus motion that not only cuts the university budget by $250 million but also removes tenure protections for faculty from state statutes. The tenure item has led many around the country to conclude that Wisconsin is a conservative testing ground for ALEC-styled initiatives, while media representation would seem to suggest that there has been an active, political response to it. For instance, headlines last week read, “Wisconsin faculty incensed by motion to eliminate tenure,” “Faculty members protest tenure, shared governance changes,” and “Outraged UW-Madison faculty call for full court press on tenure.” (The titles of the first two pieces, written by Colleen Flaherty for Inside Higher Ed, have recently been changed to remove any mention of faculty response. They are now entitled “Trying to Kill Tenure” and “Losing Hope in Wisconsin.”)

But these titles are misleading, as we will outline here, for numerous reasons – and importantly for strategic reasons. Early on in February when the Biennial Budget first announced the potential magnitude of the cuts, there was widespread agreement among university administration and many faculty and students that protest and political action would only worsen the situation. Despite the ongoing attacks on the university system by the state legislature – and the seeming complicity of the UW System President, Ray Cross – many faculty and students continue to trust the Board of Regents (BOR), UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank, and Cross to diplomatically defend student and faculty interests against the conservative agenda set by the Legislature. By and large, faculty, students and others decided that political action would only ensure the passage of the $300 million cuts proposed in the 2015-17 Budget. Despite the fact that sixteen of the eighteen members of the Board of Regents are Governor Walker appointees, there was a hopeful assumption on the part of faculty that the Board would push back against the recent Joint Finance Committee’s motion – especially item #39 which alters the tenure system by moving tenure protections from state statutes to the Board of Regents.

Meagan Batdorff, Albert Cheng, Larry Maloney, Jay F. May & Patrick J. Wolf:

Public education funding relies on revenues from a variety of sources, from local taxpayers to federal programs targeting students with specific needs. The vast sum of funding collected—in excess of $600 billion annually— often masks which entities fund the education of our nation’s youth. Questions of funding adequacy and equity across school sectors, school districts and individual schools are prominent in discussions of how to improve educational outcomes, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. A year ago, our research team published the third in a series of national studies that uncovered a general lack of equity in the funding of the public charter school sector compared to the traditional public school (TPS) sector (Batdorff et al. 2014; Batdorff et al. 2010; Thomas B. Fordham Institute 2005). We found major discrepancies in the funding of all public schools, including traditional and charter. Nationally in academic year 2010-11, charter schools received a total of $3,814 less in per-pupil revenues from all sources than did TPS—a funding gap of 28.4% that has grown larger over time (Batdorff et al. 2014).
The funding of K-12 education comes from local, state and federal public sources, but TPS and public charter schools also generate funding from private and philanthropic sources (see Table 2 below). In the majority of cases, TPS received slightly more revenue ($571 per pupil) from non-public sources than did public charter schools ($552 per pupil). Based on our 2014 national study, non-public revenue in general does not allow the public charter school sector to close the revenue gap with traditional public schools. In fact, it makes the gap larger (Batdorff et al. 2014).

Meg Anderson:

Over half of CPS teachers surveyed for a small-scale study by an education policy group said they do not regularly use strategies learned in professional development provided by the district.

In addition, nine out of 10 said have rarely or never used the district’s online professional development tool, Learning Hub.

The study of 220 teachers by the group Educators 4 Excellence reinforced long-standing complaints by many teachers that the district’s ongoing training for them is ineffective. The report highlighted ineffective practices and offered recommendations for improvement.

E4E listed four main problems with PD: inconsistent quality across the district; a disconnect between PD and the district’s teacher evaluation system, which is supposed to point teachers toward areas where they can improve; a lack of communication about what PD is provided; and few avenues for teachers to give feedback on PD they have received.

“I definitely see that in a district of 22,000 teachers, it’s hard to feel a personal connection,” says Laura Ferdinandt, CPS Manager of Teacher Leadership and Professional Development, after hearing the results. “We’ve got the foundations built. It’s just a matter of communicating.”

Karen Herzog:

Last week, two conservative educators — both University of Wisconsin-Madison professors — echoed much of what many of their liberal-leaning colleagues have been saying for weeks, albeit with a twist.

Changing tenure rules would put their viewpoints at risk, too, Donald Downs and John Sharpless wrote in a Politico piece.

“As far as college campuses go, we’re a rare, endangered species: two long-tenured professors who lean right and libertarian,” the political science professor and history professor, respectively, wrote. “But we’re increasingly worried that in trying to take up another conservative crusade, our governor, Scott Walker, is going to silence the very voices he claims to support.”

Without strong tenure protections, they wrote, “professors like us who fight for free speech and liberty — values Walker himself espouses — could be even more at risk of being targeted on college campuses for our beliefs.”

Sharpless was a Republican candidate for Congress in a tight race with Democrat Tammy Baldwin in 2000; Downs served on his campaign strategy and finance committees. Both were leaders of the free speech/academic freedom movement at UW-Madison in the 1990s, when conservative and liberal professors with tenure protection stood together against speech codes that were perceived as censorship.

The second assumption in the national debate is that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — a certain presidential candidate in 2016 — is the behind-the-scenes architect of the provisions in the GOP plan put forward by the Legislature’s budget-writing Joint Finance Committee on May 29.

It’s unclear what role the governor played, if any, in the layoff language that faculty are most upset about. Walker has been noticeably silent on the matter.

Andrew Hacker:

Pronouncements like the following have become common currency: “The United States is falling behind in a global ‘race for talent’ that will determine the country’s future prosperity, power, and security.” In Falling Behind?, Michael Teitelbaum argues that alarms like this one, which he quotes, are not only overblown but are often sounded by people who do not disclose their motives. Teitelbaum vehemently denies that we are lagging in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, now commonly abbreviated as STEM. Still, he writes that there are facts to be faced:

In less than 15 years, China has moved from 14th place to second place in published research articles.

General Electric has now located the majority of its R&D personnel outside the United States.

Only four of the top ten companies receiving United States patents last year were United States companies.

The United States ranks 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering.

The Madison School District continues to grow its K-12 monoculture, despite long term disastrous reading results.

Sarah Ahmed:

Complaining, censorious, and over-sensitive, university students are destroying their own institutions. Wait, seriously? People think that?

An earlier version of this essay was posted at the blog feministkilljoyWhat do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error mes

Bet McMurtrie:

Hundreds of colleges in the United States live on the financial margins. Typically small and private, they struggle to pay bills, recruit students, and raise money. Yet few of them fail.

As Sweet Briar College’s projected demise and unexpected revival illustrate, small colleges are a resilient bunch. There are about 1,600 private, nonprofit four-year colleges in the United States, but only a handful close each year. In 2012, the most recent year for which data are available from the National Center for Education Statistics, just two of those institutions shut down.

College leaders and their advisers say that a number of factors keep troubled institutions in business. For one, even broaching the idea of a college’s demise is emotionally fraught. To students, professors, administrators, alumni, and trustees the meaning of their time on a campus depends, in many ways, on the college’s continued existence. Students and alumni may have had life-altering experiences or developed important networks, while professors may have found a community of like-minded people with whom they could picture spending their careers.

Jennifer Tisdale:

To lower barriers to use of its collections, the Ransom Center has adopted an open access policy, removing the requirement for permission and use fees for a significant portion of its online collections believed to be in the public domain.

In conjunction with the release of the policy, the Ransom Center launches Project REVEAL (Read and View English and American Literature), a year-long initiative to digitize and make available 25 of its manuscript collections of some of the best-known names from American and British literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the authors represented in Project REVEAL are Joseph Conrad, Hart Crane, Thomas Hardy, Vachel Lindsay, Jack London, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sara Teasdale.

The Project REVEAL initiative generated more than 22,000 high-resolution images, available for use by anyone for any purpose without restriction or fees. The Ransom Center does, however, ask for attribution alongside the use of its images.

Tim Parks:
blockquote>There are moments when quite separate fragments of information or opinion come together and something hitherto only vaguely intuited becomes clear. Opening a new book called Forgetting by the Dutch writer Douwe Draaisma, I am told almost at once that our immediate visual memories “can hold on to stimuli for no more than a fraction of a second.” This fact—our inevitable forgetting, or simply barely registering most of the visual input we receive—is acknowledged with some regret since we are generally encouraged, Draaisma reflects, “to imagine memory as the ability to preserve something, preferably everything, wholly intact.”

The same day, I ran across a quotation from Vladimir Nabokov on the Internet: “Curiously enough,” the author of Lolita tells us, “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” Intrigued by this paradox, I checked out the essay it came from. “When we read a book for the first time,” Nabokov complains, “the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.” Only on a third or fourth reading, he claims, do we start behaving toward a book as we would toward a painting, holding it all in the mind at once.

Hair Ziyad:

I first applied in 1997 with an application filled out in chalk on the sidewalk of East 128th Street in East Cleveland. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote in my personal essay, but it involved a game with squares and a basketball.

I was a shoo-in. A legacy admission, I thought. Turns out most of my family hadn’t really attended. Well, some uncles, aunts, and cousins had. My parents had, back in the day, but times had changed. It wasn’t the same school anymore. Different courses were being taught.

I watched my older siblings winning pickup games at the basketball court down the street where all the boys in the neighborhood went to play with their shirts off and teenage girls stood court-side and marveled. I marveled. My siblings were pretty good, and eventually I learned to play from watching them.

I had a nice jumper. I could compete with the other boys my age, and I did, but when I played with them my heart would slam relentlessly against my ribs and my throat would try its best to strangle itself. Something would go terribly wrong with my hands. The shots stopped dropping so often I’d pass the ball away whenever I had the chance. This is your world. Take the ball from me. Take from me. Take me. It’s crazy how pressure can thieve your talents. When I was alone, it was nothing but net.

Alan Borsuk:

But others differ on what research shows. Without attracting much attention, SAGE is undergoing a remodeling that is likely to de-emphasize class-size reduction in favor of other efforts that supporters think will have more impact.

Unlike some other major education changes, the new SAGE didn’t emerge from behind closed doors in the middle of the night. The legislature’s Joint Legislative Council, which works on developing legislation, created a bipartisan study committee of legislators and educators that met over several months.

State Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), who chaired the group, recalled a talk he heard at a national convention of legislators by Andreas Schleicher, an influential figure in studying the success of students around the world. Schleicher cited high-quality teachers and rigorous curriculum as bigger factors in student success than small class sizes.

During the Legislative Council sessions, Sarah Archibald, an aide to Olsen at the time, presented research that said that, while small class sizes help kids, high-quality teaching and high-quality one-on-one tutoring produce more significant results. (Archibald is now an education consultant in Madison.)

“People love small class sizes,” Archibald told me. “I get it.” But class-size reduction “is more expensive and less effective than other strategies.”

“I’d rather have an effective teacher with a large class than an ineffective teacher with a small class,” she said.

Madison has tolerated disastrous reading results for decades, despite any number of programs, inclding SAGE.

The Economist:

IT IS not often that a criminal trial involves a prosecutor pushing for rehabilitation and appropriate counselling”, and a defence lawyer urging the judge to jail his client. But that is what happened at a hearing on June 2nd for Amos Yee, a 16-year-old Singaporean blogger found guilty of circulating an obscene image and insulting Christians.

The rub, in this case, is that the prosecutor was arguing for Mr Yee to be sent to a Reformative Training Centre, a heavily structured programme for young offenders involving military-style training as well as counselling, which can last up to 30 months. Mr Yee’s lawyer was pushing for a short jail term.

As it turns out, both sides will need to wait. At a hearing on June 23rd Mr Yee—who uploaded a cartoon which depicted Singapore’s founding prime minister, the late Lee Kuan Yew, and the late British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in a compromising position, and who mocked Christians on his YouTube channel—was remanded for another two weeks. The court is awaiting a psychiatric report after the head psychiatrist for Singapore’s prison system said that Mr Yee may be autistic.

Both Human Rights Watch and the UN Human Rights Office for South-East Asia have called for Mr Yee’s release. The UN body said Mr Yee’s punishment seemed “disproportionate and inappropriate”. Since being found guilty on May 12th, Mr Yee has remained defiant. He has described Singapore’s obscenity laws as “unnecessary [and] inane” and its laws and police as “dumb”. He has derided the Christian God as “fictitious, mass-murdering, sexist, racist [and] sadomasochistic” and has declared: “I have not ‘learnt my lesson’, nor do I see any ‘lesson’ that needs to be learnt.”

Jeff Kaufman:

Have you been accepted to a top college, one that promises to meet 100% of demonstrated financial need? (see list)? If you’re planning on anything near the $60k/year sticker price you are dramatically overpaying. What if I told you that you could attend one of these top schools for free?

They all figure your financial aid the same way. First they collect information about your income and assets using the FAFSA form, then they give you aid (effectively a discount) to make up the gap between what they charge and what they think you can afford. This is absolutely wonderful price discrimination: every industry would love to look deeply into your finances to figure out exactly what you’d be able to pay and charge you that, but only with colleges do we let them.

As a high school senior, you probably don’t have much in terms of income or assets. So why doesn’t the college see you can only pay very little, and give you financial aid for most of the cost of college? Parents. The FAFSA doesn’t just ask about your finances, it also asks about theirs too.

But what if there were a simple way to exclude your parents’ finances from consideration by the college? Where you’d be granted aid based only on your own income and assets? What’s the catch?

Timothy Ready:

The Promise abruptly reversed the district’s long-running enrollment slide, as the previous blog in this series showed. School enrollment has increased by nearly 25 percent and the city’s population once again has begun to grow. College-going rates have increased significantly, as Brad Hershbein will show later this week. However, there has been no major influx of professional families. In fact, the percentage of students receiving free and reduced lunch increased from 57 percent to 71 percent.

Kalamazoo kids remain poor
More than one-third of children in the district are below the federal poverty line, and 14 percent are in deep poverty—at or below 50 percent of the poverty line. Four in ten live in neighborhoods of highly concentrated poverty (40% poor or more). Income inequality in the Kalamazoo area is above the 80th percentile for US cities—a correlate of low social mobility, according to Raj Chetty, and a predictor of a wide range of social problems in the US and internationally. A recent comparative analysis of social mobility found that Kalamazoo County has lower social mobility for poor children than more than four-fifths of all U.S. counties. While this analysis was based on data that predate the launch of the Promise, there is little evidence —yet — that the Promise has influenced rates of social mobility.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level”. We adopted this goal in response to recommendations from a citizen study group that believed that minority students who are not competent as readers by the end of the third grade fall behind in all academic areas after third grade.

“All students” meant all students. We promised to stop thinking in terms of average student achievement in reading. Instead, we would separately analyze the reading ability of students by subgroups. The subgroups included white, African American, Hispanic, Southeast Asian, and other Asian students.

2004: Madison schools distort reading data.

Madison’s reading curriculum undoubtedly works well in many settings. For whatever reasons, many chil dren at the five targeted schools had fallen seriously behind. It is not an indictment of the district to acknowledge that these children might have benefited from additional resources and intervention strategies.

In her column, Belmore also emphasized the 80 percent of the children who are doing well, but she provided additional statistics indicating that test scores are improving at the five target schools. Thus she argued that the best thing is to stick with the current program rather than use the Reading First money.

Belmore has provided a lesson in the selective use of statistics. It’s true that third grade reading scores improved at the schools between 1998 and 2004. However, at Hawthorne, scores have been flat (not improving) since 2000; at Glendale, flat since 2001; at Midvale/ Lincoln, flat since 2002; and at Orchard Ridge they have improved since 2002 – bringing them back to slightly higher than where they were in 2001.

In short, these schools are not making steady upward progress, at least as measured by this test.

2013: Madison’s long term disastrous reading results

In investigating the options for data to report for these programs for 2011-12 and for prior years, Research & Program Evaluation staff have not been able to find a consistent way that students were identified as participants in these literacy interventions in prior years.

As such, there are serious data concerns that make the exact measures too difficult to secure at this time. Staff are working now with Curriculum & Assessment leads to find solutions. However, it is possible that this plan will need to be modified based on uncertain data availability prior to 2011-12.

Proposals to again increase property taxes and school board members’ compensation are in the news (additional school board campaign rhetoric – a bit of history).

Madison spends roughly double the national average per student.

Unfortunately, Madison resists substantive change at every opportunity.

Compare Madison staffing.

The Economist:

Students who post profiles on SeekingArrangement.com know what they want, so “it’s almost like a business partnership”, says Angela Bermudo, a spokesman for the company. The site hosts some 900,000 profiles of sugar babies enrolled in American universities, up from 458,000 two years ago. Their ranks swelled during the recession and are still growing fast, says Brandon Wade, the site’s founder. A year ago nearly 1,200 students with an e-mail account belonging to an American university posted a profile on the site every day; the daily average has risen to about 2,000. The site has even stopped advertising online. Its ads used to pop up with search results for terms such as “student loan”.

Caroline Bermudez:

Education is a public good, funded by taxpayer money. But to some, weighing in on education policy is the exclusive purview of those with classroom experience.

We venture down a slippery slope when we act as gatekeepers on issues with import on all our lives. Do you have to be a doctor to care about health-care policy? A police officer when public safety crises erupt?

A wide swath of Americans are affected by what transpires in schools: taxpayers whose dollars support public education, anyone who has ever attended public schools, parents of public school students and employers looking to hire qualified job applicants.

Ah, we know best…

Andrew Delbanco:

Death may be the great equalizer, but Americans have long believed that during this life “the spread of education would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.” These words come from Horace Mann, whose goal was to establish primary schooling for all children—no small ambition when he announced it in 1848. Others had already raised their sights higher. As early as 1791, exulting in the egalitarian mood of the new republic, one writer declared it “a scandal to civilized society that part only of the citizens should be sent to colleges and universities.”1

How that part has grown is a stirring story. It begins in the colonial period with church-funded scholarships for the sons of poor families. It continued after the Revolution with the founding of public universities such as those of North Carolina and Virginia. In the midst of the Civil War, it was advanced by the Morrill Act, by which Congress set aside federal land for establishing “land-grant” colleges, many of which became institutions of great distinction. By the later nineteenth century, when most colleges still admitted only white men, the cause was advanced again by the creation of new colleges for women and African-Americans.

WPR:

Speaking on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “The Kathleen Dunn Show,” Brookfield Republican Rep. Dale Kooyenga downplayed those complaints, drawing a comparison to his experience serving in the U.S. Army.

“You know, before I got into politics, I was in Baghdad, and I was there in 2008 when things were not going well. And you want to talk about a crisis, a crisis is a child in a school in Baghdad in 2008. I mean, that’s to me a crisis. When I look at the Wisconsin education environment, our results are going up,” said Kooyenga.

Kooyenga said that Democrats have been saying for years that Republican changes to Wisconsin schools would gut education and lead the state to lag the rest of the country.

“And the numbers just dont say that. I think you need to look at not only money going into the schools, but you need to look at the outputs. And in every single output in education, we are in a better spot today in 2015 than we were in 2011,” said Kooyenga.

Much more, here.

David Crouch:

In a quiet classroom adorned with the joyful creations of small children, Ville Sallinen is learning what makes Finland’s schools the envy of the world.

Sallinen, 22, is teaching a handful of eight-year-olds how to read. He is nearing the end of a short placement in the school during his five-year master’s degree in primary school teaching.

Viikki teacher training school in eastern Helsinki describes itself as a laboratory for student teachers. Here, Sallinen can try out the theories he has learned at the university to which the school is affiliated. It’s the equivalent of university teaching hospitals for medical students.

The school’s principal, Kimmo Koskinen, says: “This is one of the ways we show how much we respect teaching. It is as important as training doctors.”

Laura Waters:

This article in South Jersey Magazine is two years old, but it could have been written today. Here, journalist Jayne Jacova Feld profiles a young woman named Rebecca Basenfelder, who graduated from Shawnee High School, part of Lenape Public School district in a suburb of Burlington County, and proudly headed off to Burlington County College. There she discovered herself woefully unprepared for college-level work.

Shawnee High is, according to the N.J. Department of Education’s School Performance Report, a fine school in a middle-class town. (The median household income in Medford, where Shawnee is located, is $83,059 and the median income for a family is $97,135.) The school is strikingly homogeneous: almost all white, with only 6.3% of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. Test scores look great, with just about every student achieving proficiency or advanced proficiency on N.J.’s non-Common Core-aligned assessment called the High School Proficiency Assessment. The school meets every NCLB target.

Yet here’s Rebecca Basenfelder, one of Shawnee’s proud graduates who, upon arrival at Burlington County College, flunked both the English and math portions of Accuplacer (the college placement test) and spent her entire first year “taking non-credit bearing remedial classes, relearning math she vaguely remembered from middle school and brushing up on her rusty writing skills.” It wasn’t until her second year that she qualified to take college-level coursework.

Mitch Henck:

Gee, Kaleem Caire and other black community leaders fought for Madison Prep. It was a proposed charter school aimed at serving young males, mostly black and Hispanic, to be taught predominantly by teachers of color for more effective role modeling.

Berg and several white conservatives in Madison, along with moderate John Roach, supported Madison Prep. It was voted down by white progressives, 5-2.

In 1983, white progressives voted for the Midvale/Lincoln and Randall/Franklin pairing plan 4-3. Berg joined conservative Nancy Harper and board president Salter in opposing the busing plan.

Gee says poor performance and bad behavior can be related to children of color feeling lost in an unfamiliar environment. That can lead to children “working” the teachers or pushing the envelope more than what would happen if teachers of color and similar culture could relate to parents and command more respect in class.

As reported in this paper last Sunday, Gee spoke to Madison School Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham and other school officials about his ideas to close the achievement gap. “They didn’t run out of the room,” Gee said.

It’s not clear if Madison’s education establishment will budge on Gee’s ideas, which include recruiting more parent leaders and working with employers to train young entrepreneurs.

Caroline Porter

About 30 fifth-graders let out a collective “ooh!” as a monkey munched on dinner in front of them. The students asked questions of an expert, took notes and waved goodbye to the monkey. Then they returned to their seats at Plaza Vista School about 40 miles south of Los Angeles.

Their virtual field trip to an animal sanctuary in the U.K. was over.

In the wake of recession-era budget cuts and increased pressure on school performance, field trips at some schools consist of a webcam, projection screen and Internet connection instead of permission slips, brown-bag lunches and school buses. The techniques can be used to cut down the cost, time and expense of some real-world trips while expanding the number of possible field-trip-like experiences.

Brian Zorn:

The mission of American education is “No Child Left Behind.” For me as a special-education teacher in New York state, that means making my students feel worthwhile and giving them the confidence they need to succeed—academically and socially. Yet New York’s statewide English language arts (ELA) and mathematics exams unduly humiliate children in special education and frustrate the teachers who want them to succeed.

The tests, administered to third- through eighth-graders over six days each spring, evaluate students on uniform Common Core State Standards that have been adopted by most states and emphasize critical thinking. As this newspaper reported in 2013, the first year the tests were administered, many children in New York state “ran out of time, collapsed in tears or froze up.”

Madison School District Administration Slideware (PDF).

Much more on the $413,703,424+ 2015-2016 Madison School District budget, here.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email:

Longtime MTI activist Peg Coyne (Black Hawk), who was elected a year ago to her third term as MTI President, has decided to retire at the conclusion of the school year. Coyne also served as Union President for the 2011-12 and 2013-14 school years, was on the Union’s Bargaining Committee for 12 years (2003-2015), and on the Union’s Board of Directors for five years (2010-2015). She has taught in the District for 42 years.

As a result of her leadership during the Act 10 protests, she spoke several times around the United States, including before the Chicago Teachers Union, at an international labor conference in Minneapolis, and at a social issues conference in Osaka, Japan.

Andy Waity (Crestwood), MTI’s President-elect, will assume the Union’s Presidency at the conclusion of the school year. Given Coyne’s retirement, Waity will serve for two years. Nominations for the remainder of Waity’s At-Large position on the MTI Board will be received at the September 15 meeting of the MTI Faculty Representative Council, or can be made by contacting MTI Executive Director John Matthews (matthewsj@madisonteachers.org 608-257-0491). The election will be held at the October Council meeting. The term expires September, 2016.

Ben Egel:

“High school teachers are supposed to love Shakespeare, and I don’t, so I said I didn’t,” Dusbiber said. “I think the reliance on Shakespeare is something I find odd.”

After 25 years teaching in Sacramento, including the last 13 at Luther Burbank High School, she said she has replaced the Bard’s plays in her classroom with works by nonwhite authors. Dusbiber, who is white, said many of her students come from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds than her own.

In the 2013-14 academic year, 96 percent of Burbank students were nonwhites and 81 percent qualified for free or reduced-price lunches based on household income, according to state data.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email:

Governor Walker’s proposed Budget and the gamesmanship being played in the legislature has been compared to the game “whack-a-mole”. Representative Melissa Sargent, a champion for public education, teachers and progressive causes, said of the Budget proposals, “Just when you think we’ve averted one crisis, another initiative is introduced to threaten the progressive traditions of our state.” Sargent added, “The Budget process provides a look inside the corporate-driven policy agenda of the Republican party. Their goal is comprehensive privatization.”

That concept came through loud and clear last week, when the Republican majority on the Joint Finance Committee introduced a proposal which would enable even more funds to be diverted from money-starved public schools to private schools, by expanding the number of parents who can use a State-issued voucher to pay the cost of sending their child to a private school. The funds would come from that child’s area public school system. An investigation by One Wisconsin Now illustrates that a pro-voucher front group donated $122,000 to the campaigns of the Republicans on the Joint Finance Committee.

Senate Democratic Leader Jennifer Shilling said education must be the top Budget priority, that “the needs of children and schools must be addressed before tax breaks for the wealthy and giveaways to special interests (voucher supporters).” Shilling continued, “To fully restore the cuts our schools have seen over the past four years, we need to invest an additional $200 per student above what Walker has proposed.” While the Republican majority brags that they are adding $208 million in school aids, it amounts to only 1⁄2 of 1% over the two-year Budget, and more than 50% of that will not go to schools, but to reducing property taxes.

The Walker Budget would also enable State takeover of the Milwaukee Public Schools, and perhaps the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Budget proposal would enable a “commissioner to convert these schools to charter or voucher schools.” The “commissioner” would have the authority to fire all teachers and administrators in a school district taken over, given the provisions of the proposed law.

A recent amendment would enable anyone with any BA degree to teach English, social studies, math or science, and enable anyone – even without a degree – to teach business, art, music, agriculture or special education.

The Budget will be acted upon this month. It is time to let your objections be heard regarding the school funding crisis being created by the proposed Budget. Contact majority party members of the Joint Finance Committee:

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results, despite spending more than $15,000 per student, double the national average.

Michael Grunwald:

Most parents will do just about anything for their children, especially when it comes to education. Predictably, at a time when college costs are exploding and students are staggering under more than $1 trillion in debt, one opportunistic lender is making huge profits on loans to their doting moms and dads.

Less predictably, that lender is the United States government.

The fast-growing federal program known as Parent PLUS now serves 3.2 million borrowers, who have racked up $65 billion in debt helping their kids go to school. The loans have much in common with the regular student loans that have created a national debt crisis and a 2016 campaign issue, but PLUS has much higher interest rates and fees, and far fewer opportunities for loan forgiveness or reductions.

In fact, the PLUS program, which includes similar loans to graduate students, is the most profitable of the 120 or so federal lending programs. That sounds like a good thing, until you remember the government’s profit comes from its own citizens, often citizens of modest means.

Parent PLUS was created in 1980 to provide small loans to help reasonably well-off families finance the American Dream of an undergraduate education. But in an era of skyrocketing education costs, it has grown to look a lot like publicly funded predatory lending, providing almost any borrowers with almost unlimited cash to attend any school with almost no regard to their ability to repay. Thirteen percent of undergraduates now rely on Parent PLUS, and many of their parents are falling into debt traps.

Alan Borsuk:

Grit. Resilience. The strength to persist in worthy pursuits past points of frustration.

Going back several years, there’s been a wave of interest in the role these kinds of character traits have in building success in school and, for that matter, in life. Some research suggests building up character assets such as these is as important as building up academic skills.

Leaders of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the closest thing there is to a national testing program, announced recently that they are aiming to include in tests, starting in 2017, questions aimed at shedding light on how strong character traits are. It’s a significant recognition of how important these “soft skills” are.

The Wisconsin Character Education Partnership held a conference at Alverno College last week. I attended a luncheon at which the South Milwaukee School District, Catholic Memorial High School in Waukesha and Columbus Elementary School in Columbus were among those honored for their character education programs.

This is all very good. I applaud high-quality character programs, schools that make them a part of their own character, and the growing interest in character education. These are things that should be taught at home — and they often are. But they often aren’t. And even if they are, a school is an important place for promoting and enforcing these aspects of being both good and successful.

Laura Waters:

Leslie Kan, who blogs about teacher pensions for Bellwether, writes that “New Jersey teacher are furious” because “Governor Christie has shortchanged the pension fund” and they’re expressing their anger by wearing black tee-shirts that show the number of pension payments they’ve made into the system. Kan is on their side: evil Christie promised to make certain pension payments through the 2011 pension reform legislation but he’s “break[ing] his own promise.”

Even worse, she writes, teachers don’t understand that they’re loss is greater than the missed pension payments. They don’t know, she says (and maybe it’s just me who detects a note of condescension here), that they “will actually end up paying out more towards the system in contributions plus interest than what they will get back in benefits. And, “while Governor Christie has shortchanged the pension fund, the system itself is shortchanging the majority of New Jersey teachers. Unfortunately, because of the lack of transparency and byzantine nature of pension systems, many teachers may not realize this.”

Richard Adams:

Some schools and teachers ignore the magnitude of bad behaviour taking place in their classrooms, flattering official statistics and fooling Ofsted inspectors, according to the government’s newly appointed expert on pupil behaviour.

“When Ofsted come calling, loads and loads of schools hoover up the naughtiest kids before inspections,” said Tom Bennett, named by education secretary Nicky Morgan as head of a task force to improve teacher training on classroom behaviour in England.

“From my own experience I’ve known schools that have had very patchy behaviour but they’ve had good ratings simply because the inspectors have only seen certain lessons or certain situations, which are often quite artificial.”

According to Bennett, who also spent six years running nightclubs in Soho, the official paper trail a school is supposed to leave will simply not exist, “because if a school is very bad at recording bad behaviour then it will look pristine. Whereas the opposite might be true”.

Richard Adams:

Some schools and teachers ignore the magnitude of bad behaviour taking place in their classrooms, flattering official statistics and fooling Ofsted inspectors, according to the government’s newly appointed expert on pupil behaviour.

“When Ofsted come calling, loads and loads of schools hoover up the naughtiest kids before inspections,” said Tom Bennett, named by education secretary Nicky Morgan as head of a task force to improve teacher training on classroom behaviour in England.

“From my own experience I’ve known schools that have had very patchy behaviour but they’ve had good ratings simply because the inspectors have only seen certain lessons or certain situations, which are often quite artificial.”

According to Bennett, who also spent six years running nightclubs in Soho, the official paper trail a school is supposed to leave will simply not exist, “because if a school is very bad at recording bad behaviour then it will look pristine. Whereas the opposite might be true”.

Stephen Burt:

This pedestrian term is actually the key to my historical period.

A disputatious panel at last year’s professional conference revealed the surprising state of the field (it’s as bad as you think).

My historical period, properly understood, includes yours.

What looked like a moment of failure, confusion, or ugliness in this well-known work is better seen as directions for reading the whole.

A problem you thought you could solve defines your field; you can’t imagine the field without the problem.

The only people able to understand this work properly cannot communicate that understanding to you.

Those two apparently incompatible versions of a thing are better regarded as parts of the same, larger thing.

Sean Patrick Carney:

Last month’s bold decision by an entire MFA class to drop out in protest over mistreatment by school administrators dramatically highlights systemic problems in art education from coast to coast.

Seven graduate students at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design left the school on May 15 over the school administration’s changes to their promised funding, faculty and curriculum. The decision, by students Julie Beaufils, Sid Duenas, George Egerton­Warburton, Edie Fake, Lauren Davis Fisher, Lee Relvas, and Ellen Schafer, came as a shock, to say the least.

Over the last several years, USC’s MFA program has been viewed as a model of what a graduate experience in studio art should look like: generous scholarship packages, teaching assistantships with cash awards, close ties to Los Angeles cultural institutions like MOCA, and a who’s-who list of visiting artists and faculty (see Entire 2016 MFA Class Drops Out of USC’s Roski School of Art and Design).

Ten current and former USC faculty members recently issued a statement of support of the students, also calling out the disconnected administration.

Nancy Kendall:

Walker has said that the proposed tenure changes will provide “more autonomy” for the UW system’s Board of Regents (the governing body that oversees the UW system) and for chancellors to manage the cuts. It would do so by allowing tenured faculty to be laid off at the discretion of the chancellors and Board of Regents.

As a faculty member at UW-Madison, I am heartbroken that my state government has seemingly decided to undermine, instead of prioritizing, the K-16 education system.

As a researcher whose work examines the politics of education in the U.S. and around the world, I am deeply concerned by the threat this legislative shift poses to the ability of public university faculty to conduct research about politically inconvenient facts and teach in politically disfavored fields: the core purposes of faculty tenure and shared governance in public universities.

Ian McEwan:

McEwan did not shy away from addressing the current temper on campus, choosing to focus on the creeping group-think in faculty lounges and discussion sections instead of the all too easy targets of Russian crackdowns on free speech or the “industrial scale” state-sponsored censorship in China. McEwan directly confronted the problem of a country rooted in the tradition of free expression under the First Amendment meekly submitting to what he called “bi-polar thinking” — the eagerness of some to “not side with Charlie Hebdo because it might seem as if we’re endorsing George Bush’s War on Terror.”

McEwan criticized the cowardly behavior of six writers who withdrew from the PEN American Center’s annual gala over their discomfort with the organization’s support for Charlie Hebdo. He argued that the time to “remember your Voltaire” is precisely when confronted with scathing speech that “might not be to your taste” and said he was disappointed that “so many authors could not stand with courageous fellow writers and artists at a time of tragedy.”

Michael Goldstein:

lighting the world on fire.

Some outliers exist. There’s a low tail, of course, and a battle over whether regulators can shut ’em down fast enough.

There’s a high tail, too—KIPP, Uncommon, AF, YES, Success, High Tech High, Collegiate, etc. Reformy non-profits and ed-tech ventures sometimes supply these exemplars with services, and are sometimes spun out of them.

A lot of the leaders from these top-performing schools show up the day before each New Schools Venture Fund Annual Summit for a smaller get-together. Education reform opponents might liken these meetings to a scene from The Godfather in which crime families gather to discuss how to more effectively commit crimes. My memories of these edu-meetings are less “consiglieres whispering advice to nattily attired bosses” and more “nerdy do-gooders meeting in hallways, excitedly trading tips about English curriculum while trying to keep up with emails from teachers back home (the real work).”

But I recall one gathering with a bit of mafioso feel. Katrina had recently wiped out New Orleans public schools. The big national reformers like TNTP, TFA, and NLNS were already planning big NOLA expansions. Now the smaller organizations, along with each charter “family,” was implored:

Sarah Zhang:

Recently, we did an experiment: We took an outdated issue of a respected popular science magazine, Scientific American, and researched exactly what happened to the highly-touted breakthroughs of the era that would supposedly change everything. What we discovered is just how terrible we are at predicting the long arc of scientific discovery.

The daily churn of science news tends toward optimism. You know what I’m talking about: New cure! New breakthrough smashing Moore’s law! New revolutionary technology! I write about science, and I am always uncomfortable trying to predict how a new piece of research will change the future.

That’s because science can be wrong. It can go down dead ends. And even when it doesn’t, almost everything is more complicated and takes longer than we initially think. But just how wrong and how long?

Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein & Philippe Mongeon

The consolidation of the scientific publishing industry has been the topic of much debate within and outside the scientific community, especially in relation to major publishers’ high profit margins. However, the share of scientific output published in the journals of these major publishers, as well as its evolution over time and across various disciplines, has not yet been analyzed. This paper provides such analysis, based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973-2013. It shows that in both natural and medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis increased their share of the published output, especially since the advent of the digital era (mid-1990s). Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. Disciplines of the social sciences have the highest level of concentration (70% of papers from the top five publishers), while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% from top five publishers). NMS disciplines are in between, mainly because of the strength of their scientific societies, such as the ACS in chemistry or APS in physics. The paper also examines the migration of journals between small and big publishing houses and explores the effect of publisher change on citation impact. It concludes with a discussion on the economics of scholarly publishing.

Jon Marcus:

There’s a saying in famously egalitarian Norway that Curt Rice, the American-born incoming president of the country’s third-biggest university, likes to rattle off: “We’re all sitting in the same boat.”

What it means, said Rice, is that, “To single out anyone, we’re against that. That just does not sit well in the Norwegian soul.”

So all Norwegians have the same tuition-free access to college, no matter what their backgrounds. Every student gets the same allowance for living expenses.
The Atlantic

This story also appeared in The Atlantic

But something surprising is happening in Norway, which explains a similar phenomenon in the United States that has been thwarting efforts to increase the number of Americans pursuing higher education.

Koritha Mitchell:

I’m a tenured professor at Ohio State University. I have taught at the college level for more than 15 years — more than five as graduate student instructor, seven as a tenure-track professor, and three with tenure.

I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me

I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all.

When I read about professors being afraid of their own students and changing what they teach in response to that fear, I’m struck by two things. First, I understand why they’re afraid. After my decade and a half in the classroom, I can confidently add to the chorus suggesting that universities increasingly treat students like consumers. As administrators seem more concerned with enrollment dollars than students’ learning, instructors receive a clear message: “The customer is always right.”

The Economist:

FOR an hour or two on a foggy morning last December, some students at the University of Iowa (UI) mistook one of their professors, Serhat Tanyolacar, for a fan of the Ku Klux Klan. MrTanyolacar had placed a canvas effigy based on Klan robes, screen-printed with news cuttings about racial violence, on the Pentacrest, the university’s historic heart. The effigy had a camera in its hood to record public reactions.

The reaction among some black students was to fear for their safety, and that is not surprising. What is more of a puzzle—for anyone outside American academia, at least—is that students and UI bosses continued denouncing Mr Tanyolacar for threatening campus safety even after the misunderstanding was cleared up. In vain did the Turkish-born academic explain that he is a “social-political artist”, using Klan imagery to provoke debate about racism. Under pressure from angry students, university chiefs issued two separate apologies. The first expressed regret that students had been exposed to a “deeply offensive” artwork, adding that there is no room for “divisive” speech at UI. The second apologised for taking too long to remove a display which had “terrorised” black students and locals, thereby failing to ensure that all students, faculty, staff and visitors felt “respected and safe”. An unhappy Mr Tanyolacar feels abandoned by the university. He left Iowa earlier this month, when his visiting fellowship came to an end, and has suspended his teaching career.

Kelly Baker

I don’t have tenure nor a tenure-track job. I was a graduate student, an adjunct, and then a full-time lecturer. My employment in academia was only ever in those positions we call contingent: the contractual, non-tenure track jobs that are either part-time or full-time. Almost two years ago, I quit my lecturer gig to become a freelance writer. I’m off the path that graduate school groomed me for, the tenure-track job. I used to believe that somehow my story was the exception, that most other religious studies PhDs moved onto tenure-track jobs while I fell off the beaten path. Now I realize that I’m not alone and that the opposite is true: contingency is now the exploitative norm in higher education rather than the exception.

In 2011, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) estimated that 70% of academic laborers were non-tenure track (NTT) faculty while the Coalition of the Academic Workforce (CAW) places the estimate closer to 75%.v Tenure, once a definitive component of employment in higher education, is on the decline while contingent positions have increased dramatically over the last forty years. PrecariCorps, a non-profit foundation aiding adjuncts, estimates that since 1975 part-time NTT faculty increased 286% and full-time NTT faculty increased 259%. Full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty increased by a mere 23% over the same time period. In 2003, twelve years ago, the AAUP noted ominously that at most institutions, “the number of tenure-track positions now available is insufficient to meet institutional teaching and research needs.” The majority of faculty lack the protections of tenure, and they are often an exploited majority.

Caroline Porter:

After a recent high-tech makeover at Reynoldsburg City Schools in this working-class suburb of Columbus, many staples of traditional education are gone.

There are no desks permanently lined up in rows and, in one building, no bells signaling the end of class. College isn’t some far-off place: Students can take classes from a community college on school premises. Most students don’t even have to take gym in high school.

At the heart of the overhaul that is aimed at all grades is a personalized learning model combining computer-based and in-person instruction that the district says has held down costs, sustained above-average test scores and put students in greater control of their learning.

Cassidy McDonald:

Madison public school students will no longer be allowed to wear clothing with Native American athletic team names, logos or mascots that depict “negative stereotypes” while at school, after the Madison School Board voted to enact the rule in a unanimous vote last month.

The policy, which goes into effect this fall, might be the first of its kind for a school district, according to students who drafted the proposal.

The new policy also mandates that Madison schools ask visiting teams to leave Native American mascots and logos at home when they play a Madison school. If the other school does not comply, the game may be canceled.

And it would ban other clothing with “negative stereotypes” of race, gender, religion and other characteristics.

Gabriel Saiz, a junior at West High School and a member of the Ponca Tribe, worked with student government and other Native American students to draft the new policy and propose it to the board. He said the proposal wasn’t based on anything he’d seen before.

Lauren Klein:

When it comes to the digital humanities, my most strongly-held belief is that the field, in its most powerful instantiation, can perform a double function: facilitating new digital approaches to scholarly research, and just as powerfully, calling attention to what knowledge, even with these new approaches, still remains out of reach. I will illustrate this double function through the example of the TOME project, a digital tool that I’ve been developing with my colleague at Georgia Tech, Jacob Eisenstein, and a team of several graduate and undergraduate students. Our tool employs topic modeling, a technique that derives from the field of machine learning, to support the interactive thematic exploration of digitized archival collections. (And more on that soon).

But since our test archive consists of a set of abolitionist newspapers, including many held at the AAS, I thought I’d use this particular occasion to work through some of the things that our tool, and the process of its development, have taught us about nineteenth century knowledge production, before considering how digital tools, more generally, do—and do not—help to bring that process of knowledge production to light.

Jeffrey Sachs:

The good people of Dusseldorf, Germany, and specifically the IKB Bank, which specializes in loans to small and medium-size businesses, has kindly endowed Harvard University’s engineering school with a gift of $400m. Harvard President Faust announced the endowment on June 3, the most generous in the University’s history. Strangely, though, the Harvard Engineering School was renamed after hedge-fund manager John A. Paulson, not IKB, and thereby hangs a tale.

You see, the gift by Dusseldorf was not made in its own name. In fact, the money en route to Harvard was taken from IKB through an infamous swindle. Back in early 2007, before the 2008 financial crash, hedge fund manager John Paulson approached Goldman Sachs with the idea of ripping off unknowing investors to the tune of $1 billion. In essence, Paulson would assemble a $1 billion portfolio of toxic assets (known as Abacus) that Goldman Sachs would market to its unsuspecting clients. Paulson would bet against the portfolio, so that the investors’ $1 billion loss would be Paulson’s gain. Goldman would pocket some fees for its service in this treachery against its own clients.

Tom:

When I used to teach Beowulf to undergraduates, I often compared the first parts of the poem to a classic American Western: Grendel and his mother were the outlaws who had harassed and taken over the town, scary liminal figures (OE mearcstapa: boundary-walkers) whose very existence proclaimed that there was something rotten in Denmark. Beowulf himself was also an outsider, like the gun-toting loner who cleans up the Western town, one who can’t really ever fit in. Like the gunfighter riding off into the sunset, he is too much the outsider to be integrated into the community; Beowulf has become too much like the monsters he fights.

I hesitate, in some ways, to begin a “Post-Academic” blog, and to even make the attempt to forge a “post-academic” identity for myself, in part because such an identity positions itself so clearly as just the sort of liminal figure embodied by Beowulf—or Grendel. Which kind of figure I am, after all, may only be a matter of perception or perspective. But Beowulf and Grendel both are symptoms of the rottenness at the heart of Heorot; they are, in a sense, generated by the very structure of the story they find themselves caught up in. I feel a kind of kinship with them both.

And thus perhaps I must speak, or write, precisely because I find myself peculiarly positioned on the borders of academia. Like Beowulf, or Grendel, perhaps I may see more clearly to the heart of matters than do those who live them more from the inside.

John Gardner:

We have to face the fact that most men and women out there in the world of work are more stale than they know, more bored than they would care to admit. Boredom is the secret ailment of large-scale organizations. Someone said to me the other day “How can I be so bored when I’m so busy?” And I said “Let me count the ways.” Logan Pearsall Smith said that boredom can rise to the level of a mystical experience, and if that’s true I know some very busy middle level executives who are among the great mystics of all time.

We can’t write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well — people even younger than yourselves –are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits. A famous French writer said “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.” I could without any trouble name a half of a dozen national figures resident in Washington, D.C., whom you would recognize, and could tell you roughly the year their clock stopped. I won’t do it because I still have to deal with them periodically.

I’ve watched a lot of mid-career people, and Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching. I’ve concluded that most people enjoy learning and growing. And many are dearly troubled by the self-assessments of mid-career.

Terrance Ross:

Examinations, tests, assessments—whatever the nomenclature, it’s hard to imagine schooling without them. Testing is the most popular method of quantifying individuals’ knowledge, often with the intention of objectively measuring aptitude and ability.

Test-taking is a dreaded experience that the country’s kids and young adults share with their counterparts across the globe. The ritual at its core doesn’t vary much: Students sit at a table or a computer desk (or sometimes, as shown below, on the floor), pencil and/or mouse in hand, the clock ticking away mercilessly. America for its part is home to what The Atlantic has described as an “alphabet soup” of standardized tests, including: the NAEP, SBAC, PARCC, ACT, and, of course, SAT. Testing has become increasingly notorious in the U.S., to the point that tens of thousands of parents across the country have opted their kids out of standardized tests.

In America, perhaps all the testing helps explain why “all-nighters” and Adderall abuse are the norm on many college campuses. But there is an unhealthy obsession with acing the test abroad, too. Fraudulent college applications are reportedly rampant among students in China—the birthplace of the standardized test—aspiring to attend school in the U.S. And hundreds of people in India were recently arrested in connection with a massive cheating scandal. (Many of those arrested were believed to be family members of the 10th-grade test-takers.) Meanwhile, as NPR has reported, “the relentless focus on education and exams is often to blame” for suicide among teens in South Korea, the leading cause of death for that demographic.

Emily Badger:

Americans are pulling apart. We’re pulling apart from each other in general. And, in particular, we’re pulling apart from people who differ from us.

The evidence on this idea is varied, broad and often weird.

We are, as Robert Putnam famously put it, less likely to join community bowling leagues.

We’re more likely, as I mentioned yesterday after a police confrontation with a group of black teens at a private swimming pool, to swim in seclusion, in gated community clubs and backyard pools that have taken the place of public pools.

We’re more likely to spend time isolated in our cars, making what was historically a communal experience — the commute to work — a private one. In 1960, 63 percent of American commuters got to work in a private car.

Now, 85 percent of us do. And three-quarters of us are riding in that car alone.

Daniel Menninger:

The memory hole, a creation of George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” was a mechanism for separating a society’s disapproved ideas from its dominant ideas. The unfavored ideas disappeared, Orwell wrote, “on a current of warm air” into furnaces.

Alan Borsuk:

Amid the many education issues now in flux, the future of charter schools seems to attract a high degree of heat and, frequently, misunderstanding. So I thought it might be good to offer a Charter Schools 101 primer.

Q.Just what is a charter school?

A. Launched in Minnesota about 25 years ago, the idea was to offer kids independent, publicly funded schools with creative, different programs. The movement grew rapidly. More than 2.5 million students nationwide were in charter schools in 2013-’14.

Q.Why are they called “charter” schools?

A. Let’s say you and I have an idea for a school. We go to a government body (usually a school board, but, around here, a few other bodies, such as Milwaukee city government), and say, hey, give us permission to open this school, give us money and we’ll give you something different with good results. (At least, that’s the ideal.) Down the road — usually after five years — you can either give us a green light to continue or you can cut off our money, based on our record. If the government body says OK, then we formalize an agreement that is called our charter.

Generally, I’m describing what we’ll call an independent charter. There are quite a few charters created within school districts as alternatives to their traditional programs. Most of the charter schools in Wisconsin fit this description.

A significant difference between school district charters and independent charters is whether the teachers are employees of the district or whether they are hired (and potentially fired) by the individual school. Almost all of the controversy around charter schools involves independent schools.

Jim Stingl:

Finally someone put a name to my carefree childhood of the 1960s. I was a free-range kid. We all were back then.

From the time we were old enough to attend school, we roamed our neighborhood and rode our bikes and played games — all outside the view of our parents who loved us but didn’t hover over us in constant fear.

By the time my wife and I were raising our own kids in the 1980s and ’90s, we were feeling a growing vague sense of peril that called us to keep our kids closer and in organized sports leagues.

Today, an unattended child is likely to result in a call to the police. In a recent high-profile case, a Maryland couple who allowed their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter to walk home alone from the park were investigated by Child Protective Services.

Last week, the agency issued a directive saying they need not be involved in cases like this unless the kids have been harmed or face a substantial risk of harm.

That’s good news to journalist Lenore Skenazy, founder of the free-range kids movement that was born several years ago when she wrote a column about letting her 9-year-old son ride the subway alone in New York, where she lives.

“Two days later I found myself decried as ‘America’s worst mom’ on the ‘Today’ show, MSNBC, Fox News and NPR,” she wrote in a column earlier this year. Skenazy has written a book, “Free-Range Kids,” and hosts a reality show, “World’s Worst Mom.”

On Friday I called Skenazy, and found her busy defending herself from charges that she made up a nightmare scenario faced by free-range parents in Florida. Her viewpoint on kids has made her a lightning rod.

Beth Greenfield:

“The size of the study speaks to the definitiveness of the findings,” says co-author Michael Rosanoff, director of public health research for Autism Speaks, the organization that funded the study. “We can now say confidently that advanced paternal and maternal age is a risk factor for autism.” Such findings are not new, he tells Yahoo Parenting, but this is by far the most sweeping of its kind.

It also turned up some new correlations: In addition to finding that autism rates were 66 percent higher among children born to dads over the age of 50 than those in their 20s (and 28 percent higher for dads in their 40s), researchers found rates were 18 percent higher with teen moms than those with moms in their 20s.

Janet Lorin:

Chris Winiarz, a 31-year-old money manager with a Northwestern MBA, jumped at a student-loan deal of a lifetime.
A startup called SoFi offered to refinance his $45,000 in federal debt, slashing his interest rate to 2.69 percent from 6.55 percent. Winiarz will pay off his obligation three years early, saving about $9,500 and helping pay for an engagement ring for his girlfriend. The company even threw in a free bottle of artisan olive oil.

“I really should have done this a lot sooner,” said Winiarz, who helps oversee the University of California’s endowment and pension investments.

In a growing refinancing boom, a new generation of private lenders — backed by hedge-fund billionaires and Silicon Valley royalty — is targeting successful graduates with professional degrees and student loans. For the borrowers, “it’s an uncashed lottery ticket,” said Brendan Coughlin, head of education finance for Citizens Financial Group Inc.

Hunter Rawlings:

Pick up any paper or magazine, and you’re likely to see a front-page article on college: It costs too much, spawns too much debt, is or isn’t worth it.

I entered academia 52 years ago as a student of Latin and Greek expecting to enter a placid sector of American life, and now find my chosen profession at the center of a media maelstrom. With college replacing high school as the required ticket for a career, what used to be a quiet corner is now a favorite target of policymakers and pundits. Unfortunately, most commentary on the value of college is naive, or worse, misleading.

Here’s what I mean. First, most everyone now evaluates college in purely economic terms, thus reducing it to a commodity like a car or a house. How much does the average English major at college X earn 18 months after graduation? What is the average debt of college Y’s alumni? How much does it cost to attend college Z, and is it worth it? How much more does the “average” college grad earn over a lifetime than someone with only a high school degree? (The current number appears to be about $1 million.) There is now a cottage industry built around such data.

BBC:

Even the pit ponies were blasted to oblivion in the Peckfield explosion and 90 children, mostly from one village, were left fatherless. When it went wrong down a pit, it went wrong big time and every member of every family involved in the industry was acutely aware of it.
Who in their right mind would take a 10-year-old boy down a working coal mine?

Strange then that on this particular Sunday the old man should have taken it into his head to take me down the pit with him that day. I don’t know how he wangled it. It would never be allowed in today’s litigious and safety-conscious times. It was the maddest thing he’d ever done.
Who in their right mind would take a 10-year-old boy down a working coal mine? I knew it was dangerous because I overheard things.

Uncle Goldie, dad’s brother, often called round to our house and the two of them invariably got talking about the pit. “Ah see Leetning lost three on t’ thutty-niners t’ other week, Poke. Bloody belt’ll kill some’dy sooin, tha knows.”

Josh Mitchell:

Federal officials acknowledged the potentially high cost of the policy. In the case of Corinthian alone, the Education Department said 350,000 Americans who owe roughly $3.5 billion in loans could be eligible for forgiveness. In all, Americans owe more than $1.2 trillion in outstanding student debt.

Federal officials declined to disclose the potential total amount of loans that could be eligible for forgiveness.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a conference call with reporters that the administration is “determined to crack down on colleges that leave students with huge debt, worthless degrees and few job prospects.”

Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell said the agency realized the move could invite applications from across higher education, whether from community college students or law-school graduates. The agency said it would hire a “special master” to figure out many of the details, including what standards the department should use to determine whether a school had violated state law. The department also would likely hire additional personnel to handle the applications.

Anya Kamenetz:

Oregon has the nation’s second-worst graduation rate, at 69%. One school is intervening at an even younger age: preschool.

Chiara Piccinotti:

A better user interface than what, you might ask…
The answer: Better than numbers and symbols and equations.

It’s quite an insight really — symbolic systems as a “user interface” — and it’s absolutely true.

I’ve been noodling on this one for quite some time now. I have always been “good at math” — good enough that I was always a step ahead of my teachers in high school when we were learning calculus or geometry, and I later majored in math in undergrad. However, I’ve always sucked at arithmetic. Give me a bill and it will take me several minutes and a pencil to calculate and add up the tip.

If you ask me why, I’ll tell you that my brain has a bad user interface when it comes to math.

I just don’t think about it the right way. I can add double digits intuitively, and then I have rely on a small set of memorized facts to get me the rest of the way… simple multiplication tables, adding zeros to multiply by ten… Armed with this limited tool box, I try to break down complicated problems into smaller ones and then recombine them. But the process is inefficient and requires a lot of working memory. I keep forgetting where I was and having to start over.

Shannon Mattern:

Melvil Dewey was a one-man Silicon Valley born a century before Steve Jobs. He was the quintessential Industrial Age entrepreneur, but unlike the Carnegies and Rockefellers, with their industries of heavy materiality and heavy labor, Dewey sold ideas. His ambition revealed itself early: in 1876, shortly after graduating from Amherst College, he copyrighted his library classification scheme. That same year, he helped found the American Library Association, served as founding editor of Library Journal, and launched the American Metric Bureau, which campaigned for adoption of the metric system. He was 24 years old. He had already established the Library Bureau, a company that sold (and helped standardize) library supplies, furniture, media display and storage devices, and equipment for managing the circulation of collection materials. Its catalog (which would later include another Dewey invention, the hanging vertical file) represented the library as a “machine” of uplift and enlightenment that enabled proto-Taylorist approaches to public education and the provision of social services. As chief librarian at Columbia College, Dewey established the first library school — called, notably, the School of Library Economy — whose first class was 85% female; then he brought the school to Albany, where he directed the New York State Library. In his spare time, he founded the Lake Placid Club and helped win the bid for the 1932 Winter Olympics.

Adam Kotsko:

Campus culture has been much-discussed in recent weeks, as a growing consensus has emerged that today’s college students, though well-meaning, are often prone to overreaction and oversimplification of complex political and moral issues. The result is hurt feelings in the campus community and, all too often, shattered careers for professors.

Let’s grant that this diagnosis is partially correct. It does seem to be the case that campus political activism is often characterized by lack of nuance and by massive impatience. Student groups sometimes seem to choose “targets of opportunity” without any clear overarching strategy. Online activist culture has arguably contributed to this situation by substituting clever memes and carefully orchestrated outrage for actual political analysis. The result is an approach to political advocacy that does little to foster a community based on dialogue and mutual understanding.

The thing about this diagnosis is that, aside from the online aspect, pundits from time immemorial have said similar things about college students. This is because college students are adolescents who have often been thrown into a very intense and confusing social situation without much in the way of preparation. Simplistic moralizing and group identities based more on common enemies than shared substance are part of the natural growing pains. I went through a phase much like that described by the David Brookses of the world, and now I’m not like that anymore. Surely many of us can say the same, if we’re honest.

The hope, obviously, is that the end result of a college education would be, in part, a more sophisticated grasp of political realities, institutional structures, moral ambiguities, etc., etc. For me, the question is not whether college students are acting like college students, but whether our institutions of higher learning are helping them toward that laudable goal of political maturity.

Yevgeny Feyman, via a kind reader:

Last year, as part of a contract deal with the teachers’ union, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he and the city’s unions had agreed to cut $3.4 billion in worker health-care costs over four years. Even with these “savings,” though, Gotham’s health-insurance spending is projected to grow 6 percent annually through 2018—totaling a whopping $6.2 billion that year. According to the Citizens Budget Commission, more than 90 percent of city employees are enrolled in plans that require no premium contributions from workers. Most other city governments require employees to pay something toward their health-care costs. In the private sector, such contributions are standard.

The massive cost of paying full freight for nearly half a million employees’ health care is one reason why the city budget will run a $1.4 billion deficit in 2018, according to de Blasio administration projections. Even without the looming Cadillac Tax, the city’s budgetary status quo is unsustainable. Making these expensive benefits even more costly is a recipe for fiscal disaster.

The ACA imposes a 40 percent excise tax on the value of health insurance costing $10,200 or more for individual plans and $27,500 or more for family plans. And because the tax is indexed to the general rate of inflation rather than to faster-growing health-care inflation, it will hit more plans each year. Researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health estimate that the tax will affect 75 percent of employer-provided plans within a decade of its implementation. It likely won’t take that long for the tax to hit New York’s typical HMO coverage plans for city workers. In 2013, one plan offered to workers cost $6,600 annually for individual coverage. Assuming that these premiums grow at the same rate as overall costs for the city’s health insurance, such a plan would cost over $9,000 annually by 2018. In just a few years, these plans would cross the Cadillac Tax threshold. Who will bear the burden? With no required contributions from city employees, local taxpayers will be on the hook.