Wisconsin Reading Coalition:

Reading proficiency in 50 low-income, high-minority Milwaukee schools is less than 8%. See this 12/5/14 PolitiFact article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
​
Earn a graduate degree from a program that has been accredited by the International Dyslexia Association as meeting the IDA Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading. Coursework incorporates Orton-Gillingham multisensory reading and LETRS. Online and face-to-face cohorts through The Science of Reading Partnership (Mount St. Joseph University and Mayerson Academy) begin in May and August. For more information, see http://www.msj.edu/academics/graduate-programs/master-of-arts-teacher-advancement-programs/reading-science/

NOTE: Graduates may seek an equivalent license in Wisconsin by applying to Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction via the out-of-state pathway. DPI will conduct a comparability review. For more information on this possibility, we suggest you contact Tammy Huth (Tammy.Huth@dpi.wi.us) or Julie Hagen (608-266-6794) at DPI.

Interesting news from New South Wales: Education Minister orders universities to teach phonics or face losing accreditation.

Milwaukee Succeeds is moving forward in an effort to replicate the Minnesota Reading Corps in Milwaukee next year. Milwaukee leaders visited Minneapolis recently to see this Americorps reading intervention program in action. See a report at http://focus.mnsun.com/2014/12/08/wisconsin-educators-visit-highland-elementary-to-learn-about-reading-corps-program/

A Wilson Reading System Introductory Workshop will be held March 18-20 at CESA #1 in Pewaukee. For information, go to http://www.cesa1.k12.wi.us/programs/wilsonreading/

Stay tuned in early 2015, as the future of the Common Core State Standards and Badger Assessment will be hot topics in the legislature. If either or both are replaced, the quality of the replacement will be critical to our students and teachers.

David Brooks:

ver the past decades, the case for enhancing union power has grown both stronger and weaker. On the one hand, as wages have stagnated while profits have soared, it does seem that there is something out of whack in the balance of power between labor and capital. Workers need some new way to collectively bargain for more money.

On the other hand, unions, and especially public-sector unions, have done a lot over the past decades to rigidify workplaces, especially government. Teachers’ unions have become the single biggest impediment to school reform. Police unions have become an impediment to police reform.

If you look at all the proposals that have been discussed since the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York, you find that somewhere or other around the country, police unions have opposed all of them:

Michael Dannenberg (PDF):

Teacher Preparation explains more of the variance in K-12 achievement than all other teacher characteristics.

Unfortunately, teacher education programs do not have especially high entry standards.

Worse, traditional teacher education programs appear to have relatively low performance standards.

Related: When A stands for average.

Philip S. Cicero:

This book is for anyone who believes that reducing class size, doing more homework, being taught by experienced teachers, using technology, receiving remediation, repeating a grade and increasing school time will improve student achievement. The reason this book is for you is because these long practiced academic interventions just don’t work. Not only do they not work but they are overly priced, costly and put an unnecessary financial burden on school districts and taxpayers. So why do we continue to use them? We use them because we believe they work. However, that’s not the reality. Recent research demonstrates that those respective interventions have little, if any, impact on improving student achievement. This book reviews the research debunking the myths, estimates the various wasteful costs of these ineffective myths and offers practical and alternative means to improving student achievement.

Ashley Jochim, Michael DeArmond, Betheny Gross, Robin Lake:

• Parents are taking advantage of choice, but they want more good options.

Parents’ optimism about whether schools are improving varies widely.

Parents with less education, minority parents, and parents of children with special needs are more likely to report challenges navigating choice.

Some parents are forced to make difficult trade-offs between academics, safety, and location.

Some cities have done much more to support parent choice. Denver, New Orleans, and Washington, DC, have made the most progress on transportation, fair enrollment, and information systems. However, all cities have work to do to ensure choice works for all families.

The authors recommend that civic leaders:

Expand the supply of high-quality schools.

Recognize that different families have different needs.

Guarantee free and safe passage to schools.

Invest much more heavily in information systems
This report is the second in CRPE’s Making School Choice Work series.

Douglas Belkin:

The Obama administration spelled out an ambitious college-rating plan on Friday that introduces new metrics to judge the nation’s roughly 5,000 colleges and universities at a time when student debt is hamstringing the U.S. economy and the efficiency of the higher-education sector is in question.

Under the draft framework, schools may be judged on graduation and retention rates; the ability of their graduates to pay back their student loans; and the schools’ accessibility to low-income and first-generation students.

The Department of Education will seek comments to weigh the pros and cons of each metric before finalizing the system before the start of the next academic year.

“The public should know how students fare at institutions receiving federal student aid, and this performance should be considered when we assess our investments and set priorities,” said Department of Education Under Secretary Ted Mitchell. “We also need to create incentives for schools to accelerate progress toward the most important goals, like graduating low-income students and holding down costs.”

W. Lee Hansen:

In July, I wrote about the pressure that University of Wisconsin officials have been exerting on the faculty for greater “equity” on campus.

My “Madness in Madison” essay pointed out that university administrators are so caught up in egalitarian groupthink that they want to reduce or eliminate differences in students’ choice of majors and in the distribution of grades.

That essay elicited a defensive reaction from the university. Chief Diversity Officer Patrick Sims stated in a July 22, 2014 press release that UW’s diversity plan does not entail “a quota system for apportioning grades by race.”

Bringing up quotas, however, is a distraction from the plan’s impact—a red herring.

UW-Madison’s new diversity plan, “A Framework for Diversity and Inclusive Excellence,” calls for the elimination of the grade gap, but in a veiled way that never uses the word “quota.” Unfortunately, the result will hardly be any different than if it did.

Annamarie Andriotis:

Here’s another source of stress for families with children racing to finish college applications: The moves you make between now and year-end could mean the difference between collecting or losing thousands of dollars in financial aid.

Timing is crucial because the amount of need-based aid a student qualifies for depends largely on parental income in the calendar year before applying for assistance. If parents sell stocks this month to lock in a large gain, for example, their high school senior could receive less aid next fall.

Good fortune also can backfire if, for example, that same high school senior receives large cash gifts from other relatives at the holidays. The formula for federal financial aid requires students to contribute a much greater share of their income than parents do.

The Madison School District (PDF):

What Have We Learned?

Nationally and internationally, large body of research on Reading Recovery with mixed evidence

Locally, although some RR students in some schools have success during and after the program, results over time show no consistent positive effects at a systems level

What do these findings mean for interventions overall and for Reading Recovery?

Next Steps
In General for Interventions:

Review current interventions on a cycle that is commensurate with core curriculum review

Central office will provide guidance and support to schools as they select interventions based on student needs

Tighten up system of documentation for all interventions (Oasys)

Continue to identify effective research based interventions that may meet the needs of more students

Continue with our expanded and enhanced professional development model as it is a comprehensive training model that supports coherent instruction

Specific to Reading Recovery:

Based on capacity to implement with fidelity, history of student success, and alignment with School Improvement

Plan, principals have discretion to offer Reading Recovery within their multi-tiered system of supports

Fits with district belief of flexibility within clear parameters

Keeps schools at the center of decision-making because they know their students and staff best

Title 1 schools are no longer required to have Reading Recovery as an intervention

Title 1 schools will not lose any funding if they choose not to implement Reading Recovery

2014 Madison Schools’ Reading Recovery Evaluation (PDF).

Notes and links on Reading Recovery.

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.

Tensile Tracy:

The Santa Clarita Valley school systems in California lost $250,000 in cafeteria sales last year when students rejected healthier fare designed to meet new federal nutrition standards. Now the districts are trying to win back diners by hiring a chef trained at Le Cordon Bleu, the prestigious culinary school.

To make the lower-fat, reduced-sodium fare more appealing, new hire Brittany Young is employing restaurant-style techniques. She moved popcorn chicken out of a steamy wax bag and into an open boat serving platter. She told kitchen staff to wipe down serving bowls so chow mein noodles don’t hang over the side. “Think about how [you’d] like to see the food,” Ms. Young told them.

Emre Peker:

Political divisions here are extending into the classroom as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inspired by the country’s Ottoman past, vows to reshape a secular education system.

Turkey’s National Education Council this month recommended the country’s most sweeping curriculum changes in decades, including Islamic religion classes for first-graders who are Muslim, Ottoman-language lessons for some students and a rewrite of textbooks on modern Turkey’s secularist founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The Education Ministry—headed by a member of Mr. Erdogan’s party—has the power to now put those recommendations into effect.

Opposition lawmakers said the shift stems from a broader pivot away from the West to the Middle East, as Mr. Erdogan seeks to turn the country into a regional power.

Boundary 2:

eaching is, according to the subtitle of education journalist Dana Goldstein’s new book, “America’s Most Embattled Profession.” “No other profession,” she argues, ”operates under this level of political scrutiny, not even those, like policing or social work, that are also tasked with public welfare and are paid for with public funds.”

That political scrutiny is not new. Goldstein’s book The Teacher Wars chronicles the history of teaching at (what has become) the K–12 level, from the early nineteenth century and “common schools” — that is, before before compulsory education and public school as we know it today — through the latest Obama Administration education policies. It’s an incredibly well-researched book that moves from the feminization of the teaching profession to the recent push for more data-driven teacher evaluation, observing how all along the way, teachers have been deemed ineffectual in some way or another — failing to fulfill whatever (political) goals the public education system has demanded be met, be those goals be economic, civic, or academic.

Amanda Marcotte:

Many in academia have long known about how the practice of student evaluations of professors is inherently biased against female professors. Students, after all, are just as likely as the public in general to have the same ugly, if unconscious, biases about women in authority. Just as polling data continues to show that a majority of Americans think being a man automatically makes you better in the boss department, many professors worry that students just automatically rate male professors as smarter, more authoritative, and more awesome overall just because they are men. Now, a new study out North Carolina State University shows that there is good reason for that concern.

One of the problems with simply assuming that sexism drives the tendency of students to giving higher ratings to men than women is that students are evaluating professors as a whole, making it hard to separate the impact of gender from other factors, like teaching style and coursework. But North Carolina researcher Lillian MacNell, along with co-authors Dr. Adam Driscoll and Dr. Andrea Hunt, found a way to blind students to the actual gender of instructors by focusing on online course studies. The researchers took two online course instructors, one male and one female, and gave them two classes to teach. Each professor presented as his or her own gender to one class and the opposite to the other.

Bryan Bender:

Waltham-based Raytheon Co. is planning to invest at least $50 million over the next seven years to establish a campus in Kuwait for the University of Massachusetts Lowell, officials said.

The defense contractor called the arrangement a unique way to meet its contractual commitments to invest in Kuwait, one of its foreign customers, in return for the Arab nation’s purchase of its high-tech weaponry. The university hailed the new campus as a major step in raising UMass Lowell’s international profile.

The pact, two years in the making, will offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering, business, education, and science on the campus of the Gulf University for Science and Technology, set up in Kuwait in 2002. Ultimately, an estimated 1,200 students will be enrolled for up to two dozen degrees through the UMass Lowell-Raytheon partnership.

Classes would be available beginning in January. A new engineering college will also be built on the Kuwait City campus, but the details of the construction have not been disclosed.

Dave Umhoefer:

So we did our own look at reading scores at all Milwaukee schools fitting the 80/80 description, including high schools and separate elementary and middle schools that include smaller groupings of grades. Our main data source: the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

Why are officials focusing on these schools at all?

High-poverty schools tend to have lower achievement than low-poverty schools. Milwaukee’s highest-poverty schools serve racial minorities. Milwaukee’s black students post some of the lowest achievement scores nationally among black students nationwide in certain grades and subjects.

To the numbers

Under Tyson’s approach, the K-8 schools, we found 57 that met the criteria.

Their average schoolwide reading proficiency score: 7.9 percent.

In the broader pool of schools, which tallied 95 schools, the average was 7.3 percent.

So the 8 percent claim is on target.

Of course, this is the reading average based on the collective reading proficiency at each school. It doesn’t mean every school came in at the overall school average of 7.3 percent.

Five schools, for example, had not a single pupil score proficient in reading on the state tests, which are administered to students in third through eighth grades, and once in high school, in 10th grade. The state assigned those schools a 0 percent score.

On the other end of the scale, the best reading proficiency score at an 80/80 school was 21 percent at Hartford Avenue University School in MPS. Second (20 percent) was Franklin School, also in MPS. St. Marcus Lutheran was third (19 percent).

Madison, too, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Luisa Kroll, via a kind Erich Zellmer email:

A vision for the future of education sits within a converted church in the heart of a working-class neighborhood in northern Houston, abutted by auto parts stores and a heat treatment plant. At YES Prep North Central, homogeneity reigns: Of the 953 middle and high schoolers at the 11-year-old charter school, 96% are Hispanic, and a similarly large majority live at or below the poverty line. The kids are dressed the same–blue or khaki pants with school-issued polo shirts. But most important, their outcomes are uniform, too: 100% of graduates get into a four-year college, as the university pennants lining the hallways suggest.

Gliding into the school, 44-year-old Carrie Walton Penner sticks out from the students–older, blonder and, in jeans and a black wrap jacket, more polished than the young collegiate uniforms she weaves through. She’s also the granddaughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, the daughter of current company chairman Rob Walton, an heir to the largest family fortune, to the tune of $165 billion, in the entire world. And as the family’s point person on education issues, she’s arguably the most powerful force in the charter school movement. “How long is the longest-serving teacher?” she asks the school director, amid a flurry of questions. “Is there step-up pay and pay for performance?”

Kevin Hilliker:

In all of sports, few leaders are more accomplished than Bill Aris, a high school cross-country coach in suburban Syracuse, N.Y.

It isn’t just that his teams have won nine national titles in nine years, including sweeping the boys’ and girls’ competitions last weekend at the Nike Cross Nationals. It’s that Aris coaches at a public school, Fayetteville-Manlius High, meaning that he can’t recruit outside its modest-sized district.

Also, his teams usually lack superstars. No runner of his ever finished first at nationals. Last weekend, his fastest girl finished 11th—but her teammates finished 12th, 13th, 14th and 20th, giving their squad the team title.

“There’s something special going on at that program, for it to win year after year,” says Bob Larsen, a former UCLA cross-country coach who now coaches professional stars such as Meb Keflezighi.

Winnie Hu:

As Kareem left school on an overcast afternoon, he looked up and down the street before heading home to the Van Dyke I Houses. Last spring, he recalled, he was jumped a block away by a couple of boys from another project. They threw him to the ground and stomped on him, though he did nothing to provoke them, he said.

“I want to leave Brownsville because a lot of violence goes on,” said Kareem, 12, soft-spoken in a navy sweatshirt and gray cargo pants, a backpack over his shoulder. “I feel that I could have a better life.”

For Kareem, Mott Hall Bridges Academy is more than just a place to learn algebra and history. A public middle school, it is seen by many families as a safe zone in a crime-plagued neighborhood, and a gateway out of generational poverty for those born with few advantages in life. Nearly all 191 students in grades six through eight are black or Hispanic; more than 85 percent are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

Alan Borsuk:

everal years ago, I was writing about how the most significant debates in approaches to improving education didn’t pit Republicans against Democrats. They pitted Democrats against Democrats.

Now, the dynamic to watch is between Republicans and Republicans. Both in Washington and Madison, they have so much power now — and they have some pretty big differences within their ranks.

Early in the Obama administration, the Democratic battles could be summed as education “reformers” vs. the education establishment, including teachers unions. For Republicans, I’d call it the smaller government people vs. the demand-quality-and-results people.

For Democrats, the differences included whether to push creation of charter schools, whether to evaluate teachers in ways that include student progress measured by test scores and, in general, what to think of a rising number of schools with high demands on students when it comes to both academics and behavior.

For Republicans, the differences include whether there should be a nationwide requirement that students take standardized tests in language and math, whether the goals for what students should learn should be a matter of broad agreement or left to each state or school district (the Common Core issue) and, in general, the ways federal or state power should be used to deal with low performing schools. In Wisconsin, but not really in Washington, you can add the question of the future of private school choice.

For context, start 13 years ago, when President George W. Bush and Congress, with sweeping bipartisan support, approved the No Child Left Behind education law. The law was scheduled to be revised by Congress in 2007. And it set the goal that by the end of 2014, all children in America would be on grade level in reading and math.

It is now the end of 2014. Not only are millions of children not on grade level — it was a ridiculous goal in the first place — but Congress has never agreed on how to fix No Child Left Behind. Seven years late and no action! Also ridiculous, right?

Jason Song:

Weinstein’s idea isn’t original. Some campuses, including Bates College in Maine and Wesleyan University in Connecticut, have instituted similar programs, but widespread implementation is rare, Weinstein said. In the last five years, 22 private, nonprofit colleges have begun offering three-year degrees, according to the National Assn. of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Gov. Jerry Brown supports the idea of offering more three-year track degrees, and a University of California special panel — the Commission on the Future — suggested that fast-track degrees were worth exploring in 2010, but the UC system has never tried to implement or experiment with a three-year model.

“Colleges and universities are a little like the healthcare industry,” Weinstein said. “They’re not very transparent and tend to be risk averse. Changing them isn’t going to be a grassroots movement among the universities; it’s going to take a visionary to implement it from the top down.”

Maggie:

I am so sick and tired of hearing that “xyz” person doesn’t have teaching experience, or is a “non-educator” and therefore can’t possibly have a worthwhile view on the education of our kids.

We are not applying for teaching jobs. We are not writing curriculum (standards are not curriculum). We do however, pay for education and that comes with the responsibility to ensure our money is spent effectively.

Every single person in this country helps to pay for education. Every single person has the right to question if their money is being spent properly, when the results they see are not ideal.

Related: A focus on adult employment.

Jon Ronson:

In a classroom in Bronzeville, on Chicago’s South Side, eight students are locked in intense debate about Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. They’re tearing Kohlberg apart, with justification, as far as I can tell, but keeping up with fast-paced Socratic dialogue about complicated philosophy is not my strong suit. I’m visiting this college, Shimer, because something quite calamitous has just happened to it.

The communications officer, Isabella Winkler, gives me a tour. Which lasts about three minutes. Shimer is tiny. The entire college is squeezed onto two slightly disheveled floors rented from a more successful neighboring college – the Illinois Institute of Technology. There are no sports teams at Shimer, no sororities. This place will never get ranked America’s No1 party school (which is currently the University of Pennsylvania, according to Playboy). No: the list Shimer currently tops is a miserable one. The reason why I’m here is because it has just been ranked the No1 worst college in America.

So what’s it like, this worst college? What criteria put it there? The compiler, Ben Miller, a former senior policy advisor in the Department of Education, explained in the Washington Monthly that they were looking for colleges that ‘charge students large amounts of money to receive an education so terrible that most drop out before graduation.’ Actually, Shimer topped a list that was adjusted for race and income. So a truer description is that it’s the worst college in America that doesn’t have many students of color or low-income students.

Laura Waters

There’s a relatively new meme running through the edu-blogosphere that claims that the Common Core and its attendant standardized tests are built on the false premise that all kids should prepare for college and careers. For example, on Monday New Jersey blogger Marie Cornfield claimed that the “big, fat myth of standardized testing “was foisted upon the public with the sole goal of scamming money from school districts. She writes, “It’s not about developing a generation of super students or magically lifting every single child out of poverty. It’s all about money, and the money is the hostage.“

The result of this scam, says Cornfield, is that now “students are graduating college with Cadillac degrees only to find work in the Edsel factory. The CCSS and PARCC will not solve that problem, but they will make a boatload of money for the testing industry. And while college debt is at record highs, that debt, unlike corporate debt, isn’t erased in bankruptcy.” The aspirations underlying the Common Core — that students should graduate high school ready for college and careers — are both quixotic and cynical because “a large sector of the American work force is highly over educated and working in jobs that don’t require the education they earned, because those jobs do not exist.” (Emphasis her own.)

National Council on teacher quality:

State governments are arguably the most powerful authority over the teaching profession. Since 2007, NCTQ has tracked and analyzed teacher policies across all 50 states and the District of Columbia in our State Teacher Policy Yearbook. The Yearbook presents the most detailed analysis available of each state’s performance against, and progress toward, a set of specific, research-based teacher policy goals aimed at helping states build a comprehensive policy framework in support of teacher effectiveness.

Marcus Wohlsen:

Google has spent the past decade-and-a-half perfecting the science of recognizing patterns in the chaos of information on the web. Now it’s applying that expertise to searching for clues to the genetic causes of autism in the vast sea of data contained in the human genome.

On Tuesday, autism advocacy group Autism Speaks said it was partnering with Google to sequence the genomes of 10,000 people on the autism spectrum along with their family members. Google will host and index the data for qualified researchers to sift as they hunt for variations in DNA that could hint at autism’s genetic origins.

“We believe that the clues to understanding autism lie in that genome,” Rob Ring, Autism Speaks’ chief science officer, told WIRED. “We’d like to leverage the same kind of technology and approach to searching the internet every day to search into the genome for these missing answers.”

Danny Garrett:

The focus of the meeting was improving education in the United States. Participants had the opportunity to attend break-out sessions and learn more about the challenges and opportunities facing education in the U.S. A variety of viewpoints were expressed; some presenters/attenders favor the Common Core standards and approach, while other presenters/participants strongly oppose this approach. I found the conference to be very informative. I left the meetings maintaining a strong resolve that states control education within their borders, and that educational standards, resources and funding must increase if we are serious about improving education.

I also believe that charter schools and other alternative approaches to education merit consideration in certain circumstances. In addition, we need to promote and emphasize career, technical and vocational educational programs; every student is not going to attend college and our current system is generally not adequately preparing students who make up this category.

I spoke with several constituents, state legislators and University of Alabama System personnel about the decision by UAB’s administration to terminate its football program. If UAB is going to continue to emphasize and grow undergraduate programs and attract more resident students, I believe that athletic programs – especially football – are important to achieving this strategy. I wrote a letter to UAB President Dr. Ray Watts, urging him to work with the city of Birmingham, corporations and individuals in the metropolitan area to identify ways to financially support and continue the football program. I plan to continue to explore and better understand the issues surrounding Dr. Watts’ decision and recommendation.

Renee Schoof:

The estimated 60,000 young people who are held in juvenile justice centers must have the same opportunities for education as students in the nation’s regular public schools, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Monday as they announced new guidelines aimed at improving what a White House task force found was a low level of educational achievement in the detention facilities.

A report from the My Brother’s Keeper Task force in May found that only 6.6 percent of those in juvenile correctional facilities earned a GED or a high school diploma. The task force also found that only 47 percent of incarcerated youth earned any high school credits. The report called for facilities to provide academic and job-related instruction tailored to students needs’ and comparable in quality to what they’d get in public schools.

Molly Beck

Mary Burke, the incumbent Madison School Board member who unsuccessfully challenged Gov. Scott Walker last month, confirmed Friday she will seek re-election in April. But Arlene Silveira, the longest serving board member and in her second stint as president, will not seek another term.

And Anna Moffit, who has served on the district’s special education advisory council, announced Saturday she’ll seek the seat currently held by Silveira. Silveira confirmed in a text message to the State Journal on Sunday that she will not run again.

Only Burke’s and Silveira’s seats are up in 2015. School board members are elected as at-large members.
Silveira was first elected in 2006 when Art Rainwater was superintendent and has since helped hire two superintendents as well as an interim leader.
She oversaw some of the most dramatic events in the district’s recent history, including in 2011 when Walker successfully sought to limit collective bargaining for public school teachers — a move that the Madison teachers union fought in court until this year when the state Supreme Court upheld the law.

The same year, the board faced another polarizing debate after the Urban League of Greater Madison’s then-executive director Kaleem Caire proposed a charter school aimed at reducing the persistently low achievement levels of the district’s black students. The board ended up voting against the proposal after months of tense discussion.

Notes and links on Mary Burke, Arlene Silveira and Anna Moffit.

Sarah Yatsko:

For over a decade, my job was to craft alternatives to incarceration for juvenile offenders. In the early 1990s, soon after I began this work, the juvenile crime rate soared and, along with it, a “tough on crime” increase in punishment for both the most severe and the most minor offenses. I remember visiting two clients who were cellmates: one was there for exchanging gunfire with a rival gang, and the other for a snowball fight on the school playground. Juvenile courts had always taken seriously children who wielded guns, and appropriately so. My caseload now included children who wielded snowballs, snatched Halloween candy, or got into shoving matches.

This same wide net of harsh punishment was cast in school discipline leading up to and in the wake of rare but widely reported school shootings—especially the horrifying Columbine High School incident. As with “tough on crime” laws, the new “zero tolerance” policies didn’t change how schools treated students who assaulted teachers or brought guns to school: they continued to get expelled and referred to law enforcement just as they always had. However, there was a sharp increase in the number of students caught in the highly discretionary zero tolerance zone, an unintended result of trying to prevent another Columbine. Unfortunately, these new policies have failed to show any corresponding increase in school safety.

Ashley Jochim, Michael DeArmond, Betheny Gross, Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:

• Parents are taking advantage of choice, but they want more good options.

Parents’ optimism about whether schools are improving varies widely.

Parents with less education, minority parents, and parents of children with special needs are more likely to report challenges navigating choice.

Some parents are forced to make difficult trade-offs between academics, safety, and location.

Some cities have done much more to support parent choice. Denver, New Orleans, and Washington, DC, have made the most progress on transportation, fair enrollment, and information systems. However, all cities have work to do to ensure choice works for all families. The authors recommend that civic leaders:

Expand the supply of high-quality schools.

Recognize that different families have different needs.

Guarantee free and safe passage to schools.

Invest much more heavily in information systems

Angus Johnston:

This has been an extraordinary autumn for student organizing in the United States. From protests against police brutality and sexual assault to anti-tuition demonstrations and a new wave of campus occupations, students have been standing up and speaking out to a degree not seen since the heyday of Occupy.

The protests of the last three months haven’t just been big, they’ve been inventive and extraordinarily diverse, too. An undergrad at Columbia created a senior project carrying a mattress around campus to shame the administration for its failure to respond to her rape, and students across the country stepped up to help her carry the weight. The killings of Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, and so many others have sparked sit-ins and die-ins, walkouts and speakouts. Administrators from New York to California have been forced to negotiate with and grant concessions to occupiers.

And perhaps most extraordinary has been the role of high school and middle school students. In dozens of incidents in dozens of states, such students have stood up and fought back against rape, violence, curricular meddling, and even infantilizing hall passes. They’ve been organizing and taking action, and they’ve been winning.

Education Should be Free:

The cowardly California Democrats, fearing the retribution of the students and people of California, have announced a new plan to avoid fee hikes. But their plan proposes cutting scholarship programs for middle-class Californian students and raising tuition for out-of-state students by over $4,000. Let’s be clear about the strategy they’re employing: instead of imposing cuts on all students, the Democrats intend to attack certain constituencies, middle-class and out-of-state students, the classic imperial maneuver of “divide and conquer.” They want to divide us, leave us to fight over the scraps left by the state.

ReClaim UC:

On Tuesday, state Democratic Party lawmakers presented their 2015 plan for higher education. The most publicized aspects of the plan are, first, that it would marginally increase state contributions to the UC and, second, that it would freeze undergraduate in-state tuition. An in-state tuition freeze would be be much better than Napolitano’s original proposal for 5% annual tuition hikes.

But there’s more to the Democrats’ plan: it would also eliminate a recently-established middle class scholarship program, would tie CSU student support to timely completion of degree, and would raise UC out-of-state and international students’ tuition by 17 percent, or approximately $4,000 dollars. These proposed out-of-state fee hikes would be more than three times those initially proposed by Napolitano, and would generate for the UC an estimated $82 million dollars of revenue next year.

There are a number of reasons to oppose this plan, particularly its reliance on a $4,000 dollar tuition hike for out-of-state and international students. First, from the perspective of those students directly affected, the hike would involve a financial shock, almost certain to be managed by many through the taking on of even more debt. Those opposed to skyrocketing student debt levels and to the privatization of the university thus have reason to oppose the Democrats’ plan to increase out-of-state and international students’ debt levels, and to keep UC reliant on tuition revenue rather than on public funds.

Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:

We found that parents in these ‘high-choice’ cities are aggressively taking advantage of school choice when it is available. In seven of the eight cities, half or more of parents are choosing a public school other than their assigned neighborhood school. Clearly, when parents get the opportunity to choose, they take advantage of it.

But we also found that parents have vastly different experiences when choosing a school for their child. And while some cities are improving parents’ ability to choose with confidence, we saw that each has work ahead to ensure that every parent can find the right school for their child.

As with nearly all public schools surveys, parents from all types of schools across all high-choice cities reported very high satisfaction with their current school. But when we pressed and asked whether parents had other good options, stark differences emerged. At the high end, 60 percent of Denver’s parents agreed they have other good public school options, but only 40 percent of Philadelphia’s parents felt this way.

Three cities—Denver, New Orleans, and D.C.—that have invested a lot on developing high-quality schools, closing low performers, and developing transportation, information, and common enrollment systems to help parents navigate their choices, saw some good results. More than half of all parents in these cities reported that their cities’ schools are getting better, compared to less than a third of parents in Baltimore, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. Parents were the least likely to report transportation as a barrier in New Orleans, the only city where most non-neighborhood-based public schools provide transportation. Eighty percent of parents in D.C., and 79 percent of parents in New Orleans reported prioritizing academics over safety and school location. In other cities, where not all families are able to enroll in safe and accessible schools, smaller proportions of parents reported choosing based on academics. Parents in these cities are likely making difficult trade-offs between academics, safety, and location.

Newsletter (PDF) via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email:

“Love their Union” came through loud and clear as MTI-represented District employees in all five (5) MTI bargaining units voted overwhelmingly to recertify MTI as their Union. The teacher unit voted 2,624 to recertify (88% of the eligible voters), while the educational assistant unit (EA-MTI) voted 549 (77%); the clerical/technical unit (SEE-MTI) voted 180 (77%); the substitute teacher unit (USO-MTI) voted 359 (73.5%); and the security assistant unit (SSA-MTI) voted 22 (81.5%). In all, 85.35% of the eligible MTI voters voted in the recertification election. MTI has not been challenged since it became the bargaining agent for teachers in 1964. Since its creation, MTI has grown from 900 to 4,700 members, and has gained the reputation as one of the most successful public sector Unions in the country. It is Governor Walker’s Act 10 that forced the vote this year. MTI had to pay fees of $3,550 to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission to conduct the election. Additional costs were experienced for educational and promotional materials related to the election which, under Act 10, must be conducted annually.

The large turnout is a testament to MTI members’ appreciation and support of their Union, and to the hard work of the over 200 MTI Member Organizers who reached out to engage their colleagues in conversations about their Union. MTI members clearly understand that students & staff will be better served if we continue to “Stand Together.” Thanks to all who made their voice heard by voting.

Paul Fanlund

A nationwide exit poll on Election Day revealed that 70 percent viewed the economy as “not so good” or “poor.” Only 22 percent thought life for the next generation would be better than for this one.

Second, because those with the most education are doing better (and Madison is jammed with academic elites) we are not seen as suffering as they do, and that is noticed and resented.

Third, they see school teachers and other public employees with a level of retirement and health insurance benefits they no longer enjoy or ever did. (Among public workers, only cops and firefighters seem to get a pass for being comparatively well-compensated.)

Fourth, they are constantly told that government programs are distorted to help those who do not help themselves. Given the concentrations of minorities in the two largest cities, the racial subtext is always there. Many in outlying Wisconsin see themselves as distinctively hard-working and self-reliant and getting no government help. They do not perceive their own public education, Medicare, Social Security, highway infrastructure and so forth as the sorts of “handouts” they think flow to others.

This thesis is supported by the election results for governor, where Walker won in rural areas, small towns and suburbs, and Democrat Mary Burke mostly dominated in the dependable urban centers of Madison and Milwaukee.

Ryan Knutson & Theo Francis:

The American middle class has absorbed a steep increase in the cost of health care and other necessities as incomes have stagnated over the past half decade, a squeeze that has forced families to cut back spending on everything from clothing to restaurants.

Health-care spending by middle-income Americans rose 24% between 2007 and 2013, driven by an even larger rise in the cost of buying health insurance, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of detailed consumer-spending data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That hit has been accompanied by increases in spending on other necessities, including food eaten at home, rent and education, as well as the soaring cost of staying connected digitally via cellphones and home Internet service.

With income growth sluggish, discretionary spending on things like clothing and movies, live shows and amusement parks has given way.

Bill Lueders:

School choice proponents, many from out of state, funneled $64,000 directly into candidates’ coffers in 2014, through AFC and another group. (The AFC-affiliated funder, Wisconsin Federation for Children Political Fund, filed its last report Nov. 26, a month late, risking a penalty of up to $500. Its Washington, D.C.-based administrator did not respond to an emailed question about the late filing.)

In addition, AFC made independent expenditures of $866,000 to boost or oppose candidates. This adds to the nearly $10 million in state electoral spending by school choice proponents between 2003 and 2012, as tallied by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

AFC’s spending in the Nov. 4 elections included $148,000 to help narrowly defeat Democrat Rep. Mandy Wright, a former teacher and school choice critic. It spent $123,000 to help Republican Todd Novak score a razor-thin win over Democrat Dick Cates. And it poured $240,000 into GOP choice proponent Howard Marklein’s successful bid for an open Senate seat.

Jensen is proud of these victories, which he says give it “a school choice majority in both houses.” He attributes this success to public support for school choice.

Yet, in its electioneering, AFC commonly doesn’t even mention school choice. It attacked Wright for allegedly using sick leave to attend a protest, which she insists is not true. It went after Cates for his vote on the local school board concerning the Pledge of Allegiance. And it ripped Democratic Rep. Gordon Hintz for threatening a female colleague and being cited in a massage parlor sting operation, both in 2011.

Related; WEAC: 1,570,000 for four (state) Senators.

Stephanie Armour:

Americans increasingly have to dig into their own pockets to pay for medical care, a shift that is helping to curb the growth in health spending by employers and the government.

The trend is being accelerated by the Affordable Care Act because many private plans sold by the law’s health exchanges come with hefty out-of-pocket costs, which prompt some people to delay or put off seeking care.

For the exchanges’ 2015 policies, which went on sale last month, “bronze- level” plans have an average deductible of $5,181 for individuals, up from $5,081 in 2014, according to a November report from HealthPocket, which publishes health insurance market analyses. Bronze plans generally cover 60% of consumers’ medical expenses.

While surveys show steeper out-of-pocket costs lead some people to defer even routine medical care, economists say the trend brings an important upside: It is helping fuel a period of historically low growth in health-care spending, which eases the federal deficit.

The federal government said Wednesday that 2013 was the fifth consecutive year in which health spending grew at less than 4%. The 3.6% rate is the lowest since the government began tracking such spending in the 1960s. While economists initially credited the recession for the soft spending growth, the trend continued even as the economy improved.