A measles outbreak in Minnesota offers a case study of how the disease is transmitted in the United States today: An unvaccinated person travels abroad, brings measles back and infects vulnerable people — including children who are unprotected because their parents chose not to vaccinate them.
That’s the conclusion of a report published online June 9 in Pediatrics that details the 2011 outbreak that sickened 19 children and two adults in the state.
It began when an unvaccinated 2-year-old was taken to Kenya, where he contracted the measles virus. After returning to the United States, the child developed a fever, cough and vomiting. However, before measles was diagnosed, he passed the virus on to three children in a drop-in child care center and another household member. Contacts then multiplied, with more than 3,000 people eventually exposed.
To improve our schools, we need to make it harder to become a teacher.
So far this month in education news, a California court has decimated rigid job protections for teachers, and Oklahoma’s governor has abolished the most rigorous learning standards that state has ever had. Back and forth we go in America’s exhausting tug-of-war over schools—local versus federal control, union versus management, us versus them.
But something else is happening, too. Something that hasn’t made many headlines but has the potential to finally revolutionize education in ways these nasty feuds never will.
In a handful of statehouses and universities across the country, a few farsighted Americans are finally pursuing what the world’s smartest countries have found to be the most efficient education reform ever tried. They are making it harder to become a teacher. Ever so slowly, these legislators and educators are beginning to treat the preparation of teachers the way we treat the training of surgeons and pilots—rendering it dramatically more selective, practical, and rigorous. All of which could transform not only the quality of teaching in America but the way the rest of us think about school and learning.
Wisconsin took one very small step toward teacher content knowledge, MTEL a few years ago.
Related: the National Council on a Teacher Quality has been reviewing schools of education.
Common Core, in 9-Year-Old Eyes
He could have written about the green toy truck he kept hidden in his room, a reminder of Haiti, a place he did not yet fully understand.
He might have mentioned the second-place trophy he had won for reciting a psalm in French at church — “le bonheur et la grâce m’accompagneront tous les jours de ma vie…” — his one and only award.
He could have noted his dream of becoming an engineer or an architect, to one day have a house with a pool and a laboratory where he would turn wild ideas about winged cars and jet packs into reality.
But on a windy April afternoon, as the first real sun of spring fell on Public School 397 in Brooklyn, and empty supermarket bags floated through the sky, Chrispin Alcindor’s mind was elsewhere.
much more on the Common Core, here.
Will California’s Ruling Against Teacher Tenure Change Schools?
On Tuesday, a California superior-court judge ruled that the state’s teacher tenure system discriminates against kids from low-income families. Based on testimony that one to three percent of California teachers are likely “grossly ineffective”—thousands of people, who mostly teach at low-income schools—he reasoned that current tenure policies “impose a disproportionate burden on poor and minority students.” The ruling, in Vergara v. California, has the potential to overturn five state laws governing how long it takes for a teacher to earn tenure; the legal maneuvers necessary to remove a tenured teacher; and which teachers are laid off first in the event of budget cuts or school closings.
Tenure has existed in K-12 public education since 1909, when “good-government” reformers borrowed the concept from Germany. The idea spread quickly from New Jersey to New York to Chicago and then across the country. During the Progressive Era, both teachers unions and school-accountability hawks embraced the policy, which prevented teaching jobs from being given out as favors by political bosses. If it was legally difficult to fire a good teacher, she couldn’t be replaced by the alderman’s unqualified sister-in-law.
Don’t Go To College
Go to college if you’re fortunate enough to have the opportunity. I did, I learned a lot (both academically and socially), and I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world. Not everyone needs college, but you should go if you can.
My philosophy about being a C student and not needing to do 80% of the work should also be taken lightly. That strategy works well if you want to follow a path like mine after college: working for small companies that care less about your GPA, or that you can convince to hire you by other means (showing impressive personal projects, advanced skills, etc.). But my GPA was so bad that no big tech company — not Microsoft, not Apple, not Amazon, and definitely not Google — would even consider hiring me. (I tried.)
New York’s Single Test for High School Defined My Life
When I was eleven years old, didn’t speak English well, and worked in a sweatshop, I was accepted into one of New York City’s elite specialized high schools. Now, some want to alter the admissions system that helped change my life.
When I was eleven years old, I took the entrance exam for Hunter College High School, one of New York City’s elite schools and among the best in the country. It changed my life.
I came from a non-English-speaking immigrant family that had moved to New York from Hong Kong only six years earlier. My parents worked in a garment factory in Chinatown, where I helped them every day after school. My family knew absolutely nothing about navigating the New York City public school system, but I was lucky that my Brooklyn elementary school principal identified my academic potential, understood my family’s inexperience, and pointed me to the entry test. I remember stumbling out of the examination room, dazed by questions I had never imagined, many of which I could barely understand. But I was accepted, and the test became the defining event of my life.
It’s Urgent To Put The Liberal Arts Back At The Center Of Education
Here’s the thing. In the understanding of both the great Ancient philosophers and, taking after them, of the thinkers who gave us the Enlightenment and the intellectual scaffolding for our prosperous liberal-democratic society, including the Founding Fathers, democracy did not simply happen. Democracy depended on a robust citizenship, and this citizenship, in turn, was a struggle of all the men (and, now, women) of the polity; it conferred rights as well as responsibilities. In particular, two of the most fundamental requirements of citizenship were virtue and a liberal education.
The expression “liberal education” is quite important. Today, when we think “liberal education”, we think “Would you like fries with that?” But as the common root with the word liberty suggests, liberal education is an education that helps make us free. Only by first understanding not only the empirical scaffolding of our Universe–a.k.a. science–but also its conceptual scaffolding, a.k.a. the ideas, concepts and history which shape the world we live in, can we ever hope to be free, that is to say to be able to make informed, conscious decisions.
Similarly, the great men (and, sorry, they were mostly men) who bequeathed us this wonderful order understood that a regime of majority rule cannot long withstand the test of time without having a citizenship that takes seriously the notion of virtue. The virtues, to Aristotle and others, are not so much about being a goody-two-shoes, but rather about the lifelong effort to reach self-mastery through confronting our passions (today, perhaps, we would say: our addictions) and properly ordering our will towards that which is good. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll see how growth in virtue is itself a form of liberal education.
Without an awareness of these things, a bunch of very smart people who built our world and know the instruction manual have been warning us, we consign ourselves to doom.
An Educator’s Lament: Part III — Stakes of Our Educational Demise
“You have to be confused before you can reach a new level of understanding anything.” — D. Herschbach (Harvard University chemist and Nobel laureate)
In the summer of 2007, I attended “Boot Camp for Profs” in Leadville, Colorado. For an entire week, a maverick team of educators from multiple disciplines — geology, chemistry, education, biology, and psychology among others — bombarded 30 college and university professors with the theory and practice of learning. Mind you, I didn’t say teaching. Beholden to no educational model except “what works,” this no-nonsense, eclectic group had for years refused offers to sell out to the latest educational fad. They weren’t into either dogma or money. Their mantra was classroom effectiveness, pure and simple. “Boot camp” was a fitting term; the experience was overwhelming, eye-opening, occasionally exhilarating or terrifying, and immensely practical.
Via Susan Poling.
Commentary on Madison’s special Education and “inclusive” practices; District enrollment remains flat while the suburbs continue to grow
That was one issue that brought together family activists who formed Madison Partners for Inclusive Education [duckduckgo search] in 2003, Pugh said.
“A parent in an elementary school on the west side could be seeing high-quality inclusive expert teaching with a team that ‘got it,’ and someone on the east side could be experiencing exactly the opposite,” Pugh said. Families and the school district are still striving to provide the best learning experience to all students with disabilities.
The key is to establish a culture throughout the district where participation in the classroom by students with disabilities is expected and valued. In addition, all teachers need to be trained to work collaboratively with special education teachers to make that happen, she said.
“It comes down to leadership,” said Pugh, who added that she is heartened by Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham’s remarks about raising expectations for all students. “That’s where we start.”
The district had an outside consultant review its special education programs earlier this year.
“In the next several weeks, we’ll use this information, our own data and expertise in the district to develop an improvement plan, including what our immediate steps will be,” spokesperson Rachel Strauch-Nelson said.
There has been no small amount of tension over Madison’s tactics in this matter from the one size fits all English 10 to various “high school redesign” schemes.
Yet, Madison’s student population remains stagnant while nearby districts have grown substantially.
Outbound open enrollment along with a Talented and Gifted complaint are topics worth watching.
This French tech school has no teachers, no books, no tuition — and it could change everything
École 42 might be one of the most ambitious experiments in engineering education.
It has no teachers. No books. No MOOCs. No dorms, gyms, labs, or student centers. No tuition.
And yet it plans to turn out highly qualified, motivated software engineers, each of whom has gone through an intensive two- to three-year program designed to teach them everything they need to know to become outstanding programmers.
The school, housed in a former government building used to educate teachers (ironically enough), was started by Xavier Niel. The founder and majority owner of French ISP Free, Niel is a billionaire many times over. He’s not well known in the U.S., but here he is revered as one of the country’s great entrepreneurial successes in tech.
He is also irrepressibly upbeat, smiling and laughing almost nonstop for the hour that he led a tour through École 42 earlier this week. (Who wouldn’t be, with that much wealth? Yet I have met much more dour billionaires before.)
Change to our agrarian era $15k+/student public school organizations looms.
Math for seven-year-olds: graph coloring, chromatic numbers, and Eulerian paths and circuits
As a guest today in my daughter’s second-grade classroom, full of math-enthusiastic seven-and-eight-year-old girls, I led a mathematical investigation of graph coloring, chromatic numbers, map coloring and Eulerian paths and circuits. I brought in a pile of sample graphs I had prepared, and all the girls made up their own graphs and maps to challenge each other. By the end each child had compiled a mathematical “coloring book” containing the results of their explorations. Let me tell you a little about what we did.
We began with vertex coloring, where one colors the vertices of a graph in such a way that adjacent vertices get different colors. We started with some easy examples, and then moved on to more complicated graphs, which they attacked.
Wisconsin Gubernatorial candidate Act 10 Commentary
Mary Burke, who has already been endorsed by more than a dozen of the state’s largest private- and public-sector unions, said she supports making wages, hours, benefits and working conditions mandatory subjects of bargaining for public employees.
She called the annual elections, the prohibition on requiring union dues of all employees, and a ban on automatic dues collections “nothing more than heavy-handed attempts to punish labor unions” and said she would work to repeal those provisions.
She said she would have used the collective bargaining process to achieve the pension and health insurance contributions that helped balance the state budget. But she does not want to reset the law to before Act 10, when state employees could pay no more than 20 percent of health insurance premiums and could bargain with employers to cover their full pension contribution.
Burke also agreed the way contract disputes were settled for decades needed to change, but disagreed with eliminating interest arbitration. She said the factors used in the process should allow for “effective, efficient and accountable government workforce and institutions,” though she didn’t offer a specific plan for reinstating it.
The Walker campaign responded that Burke’s position on Act 10 “mirrors her willingness to concede to unions as a Madison School Board member, and is yet another example of how she would take Wisconsin backward.”
Unions weigh in
Rick Badger, executive director of AFSCME Council 40, which represents many Dane County-area municipal employees, said some of his members are unhappy Burke won’t promise to repeal the law entirely. But they like that she expressed interest in listening to different points of view, whereas Walker never responded to requests to meet after he was elected.“She’s made it clear she’ll sit down with us,” Badger said. “After what employees went through over the past three years, it’s great to hear someone say, ‘Your concerns still matter.’ ”
Much more on Wisconsin Act 10, here.
Technology in classrooms: The latest innovations promise big improvements in teaching
WHO killed Edgar Allan Poe? The mysterious death of the 19th-century author features in a new online school curriculum from Amplify, the education arm of News Corp. Pupils follow clues that require close reading of Poe’s stories (the assassin’s identity varies, to prevent cribbing), and take machine-graded comprehension and vocabulary tests along the way. Another section teaches mathematics by setting quests, such as an Alaskan dog-sled race for which pupils must plan, budget and manage provisions.
Two decades of fitting classrooms with computers and whiteboards have gobbled rich countries’ school budgets and done little for attainment. But the latest technology promises to improve teaching methods, rather than merely shifting them from blackboard to screen, and to give all children the personalised education once only available to the rich. Game-style lessons let pupils progress at their own pace, getting instant feedback at every step. Even homework is more fun: when Pearson (a part-owner of The Economist) supplied tablet-based courses to schools in Alabama, they were such a hit that Wi-Fi was installed on school buses so it could be done en route.
In trying to root out religious conservatism from a few schools, the British government has ended up angering Muslims at large
MANY parents who picked up their children from Park View Academy on June 9th took home something else too: an official report excoriating the school. Ofsted, England’s schools inspector, had downgraded the largely Muslim institution to “inadequate”, saying it had failed to protect children from extremism. But parents outside the gates were less alarmed at this than cross about the report and the disruption it was causing. “If he messes up his GCSEs, I’ll hold David Cameron personally responsible,” said an angry father, pointing at his son.
A few months ago Birmingham City Council received a letter purporting to advise Muslim militants how to take over a state school. The letter might be a hoax, but it struck some as painfully accurate. Stories appeared of staff pushed out by hard-line governors (elected amateurs who appoint head teachers and set schools’ strategic direction). As the row grew, the government ordered snap inspections of 21 schools. Some of their findings are damning. But British Muslims—many of whom are Pakistani—have damned the government.
The Fall of Teacher Unions
Yet the share of Americans who see teachers unions as a negative influence on public schools shot up to 43 percent last year, up from 31 percent in 2009, according to national polling conducted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and the journal Education Next. By contrast, 32 percent see unions as a positive force, up from 28 percent in 2009, the poll found.
Labor’s fading clout was evident earlier this month in the California primary, when unions representing teachers and other public-sector workers spent nearly $5 million to boost state Superintendent Tom Torlakson to a second term — but failed to bring in enough votes for him to win outright.
Instead, Torlakson will have to fight for his seat in a runoff against a fellow Democrat, former charter school executive Marshall Tuck, who has bucked the teachers unions on many issues — and who has been endorsed by every major newspaper in California. In backing Tuck, most of the editorial boards specifically cited the urgent need to curb union influence.Another sign of the shifting sands: the ruling this week in Vergara v. California striking down laws governing the hiring and firing of teachers. In a withering opinion, Judge Rolf M. Treu essentially blamed the unions for depriving minority children, in particular, of a quality education by shielding incompetent teachers from dismissal.
The unions argue that the laws in question simply guarantee teachers due process. They plan to appeal. But the judge’s rhetoric clearly hit a nerve. Education Secretary Arne Duncan hailed the ruling. So did Rep. George Miller, a leading Democratic voice on education policy in Congress. He called the union policies “indefensible.” A New York Times editorial went further, referring to the laws the unions had defended as “shameful,” “anachronistic” and straight-up “stupidity.”
Exorbitant Cost of Pseudo-Educating America: The Next Two-Trillion Dollar Bubble
At $1.2 trillion student debt, we may only be 60 percent along the way, but rest assured that it won’t take but 3 to 5 years before this spectacular bubble bursts… and it will do so on the economic backs of the poor, and the ghostly – ghastly might be more apropos – remnants of a fast disappearing middle class.
Two weeks ago, while doing a final screening of old papers kept for no-apparent good reason, I came across a few notes from a graduate business course which I taught over three decades ago. An underlined hyphenated-word stood in front of me teasing both my memory and reason for its use: Porno-Economics. Then, I quickly recalled that my reason for its use had absolutely nothing to do with the economics of porn; and how I explained to my class – mostly graduate engineers with families trying to attain an MBA attending evening classes to improve their chance for career advancement – with my intended meaning appearing in parenthesis in the notes: “worthless economic activity for no other reason than to stimulate and fulfill greed.” It would be more than a decade later that the true father of Porno-Economics, and Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, would show up (December 1996) with his celebrated cute-ism of Irrational Exuberance… as prelude to the infamous Dot-com bubble burst (1999-2001).
James Dyson in drive to fill engineering vacuum in UK schools
Emma Yates surveys students manipulating 3D printers and wrestling with fibreglass moulds in the bustling design and technology studio of the school where she is headteacher. “I was amazed when I first came here and looked around,” she says.
Yates took over at Hayesfield girls’ school in Bath in January. It was already one of the best state secondaries in the country at teaching design and technology, thanks in part to a £75,000 grant from the James Dyson Foundation.
Putting Teacher Tenure In Context
One piece of evidence against this comes from the study Goldstein cites, which found that the teachers who were dismissed were: 1) more likely to have frequent absences, 2) received worse evaulations in the past, 3) have lower value added scores, and 4) have less qualifications. While this policy only applied to newer teachers and thus can’t deal with things like experience or expensive teachers, it is evidence that administrators do consider teacher effectiveness.
The allegation that expensive or experienced teachers would be fired is an interesting one. Why, after all, would an administrator want to fire experienced teachers when experience is a quality that contributes to outcomes? And if teachers are paid in a way that is commensurate with their effectiveness, then why would more expensive and therefore more effective teachers be fired? The problem, as Ravitch surely knows, is that older teachers are overpaid relative to younger teachers. As Michael Petrilli has shown in a piece called “The Case For Paying Most Teachers The Same”, the teacher pay scale is far more back-loaded than in other professional jobs. You can see this clearly in Petrilli’s figure below that compares average teacher pay by age to doctors and lawyers. If there is a risk that administrators will find older teachers too expensive relative to younger teachers, it’s because of this payscale problem. Effectively preventing schools from firing people is a pretty poor way to respond to the problem of overpaid older teachers and underpaid younger teachers.
High-School Students Smoking Less, but Texting While Driving More
Parents may no longer need to worry quite as much about their teens smoking and drinking, but texting and emailing while driving is rampant, according to a new government study of U.S. high-school students.
Some 41.4% of students said they had texted or emailed at least once while driving in the previous 30 days when asked last year, according to the broad-based study that tracks teenage behavior.
South Dakota topped the list with 61.3% of teens admitting they texted or emailed while driving. Massachusetts had the lowest rate, at 32.3%. This was the first time the question was asked in the National Risk Behavior Survey of more than 13,000 high schoolers, conducted every two years by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The 1 Thing That Will Improve Math Learning
How can we do a better job of teaching kids math? A different curriculum? New pedagogical strategies? Personalized instruction through technology? All these worthy ideas have their adherents, but another method — reducing math anxiety — may both improve performance and help kids enjoy math more. Sian Beilock and I recently reviewed the research literature on math anxiety with an eye towards remediation. Here are some of the highlights.
Math anxiety means, unsurprisingly, that one feels tension and apprehension in situations involving math. What is surprising is the frequency of the problem, and the young age at which it can start. Fully half of first and second graders feel moderate to severe math anxiety. And many children do not outgrow it; about 25 percent of students attending a four-year college suffer from math anxiety. Among community college students, the figure is 80 percent.
Here’s Why the Student Loan Market Is Completely Insane
President Obama made news this week by expanding a student loan program to broaden the eligibility of borrowers and proposing to limit monthly payments to 10 percent of a student borrower’s income. On the margin, such moves might help. But the administration’s efforts don’t address a more fundamental problem: These loans aren’t calibrated for risk. In other words, students from Harvard and less-prestigious regional colleges are thrown in the same bucket, despite quite different risk profiles.
Under Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) rules governing the insurance of banks, lenders can’t differentiate among schools in assessing credit risk as they do with home buyers and car owners. As a result, “the government has made it difficult for banks to price to default rates,” says Mike Cagney, founder of Social Finance, a socially based student lending operation known informally as SoFi. “By accepting FDIC insurance, banks lose pricing flexibility and can’t charge interest rates commensurate with the quality of schools—and default rates vary widely by schools.”
SoFi has funded more than $650 million in loans to 7,000 borrowers since its founding in 2011. Says Cagney: “The definition of a predatory lender is someone who pushes loans on an individual who can’t afford to pay them back. Under that definition, many of the educational loans made today could be considered predatory.”
Information technology and higher education
Expanding the Reach and Lifelong Impact of Teachers
For years I have been reporting on and learning from ASCD, previously the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Its characteristic challenge to teachers in “The Myth of Student Engagement” (inservice.ascd.org, April. 15) begins:
“Each day that you enter your classroom, are you educating students? Or are you teaching at them?
“Do your lessons only improve their academic knowledge? Or do they foster their personal growth?”
And then: “You could shift your perspective to stop teaching at students and begin learning about them.”
In a few places around the nation, it’s not only ASCD asking and doing something about these questions. Before examining where this is happening, I cannot resist starting with a single teacher who is answering those questions by herself — without the exceptionally knowledgeable and creative ASCD staff.
On College Debt & lack of K-12 Math Teaching
And the contract terms on private college loans are rigid to the point of cruelty. Borrowers have almost no say and little ability to renegotiate the terms if financial trouble occurs – an inevitability. Many private lenders don’t allow students to pay down the principal of a loan, which means endless payments just to cover the high interest, without ever chipping away at the real amount. Payment options like forbearance are temporary and restricted; prepayment or consolidation are largely forbidden. The most dangerous part for such a significant debt is that there is no escape, no way to ease the burden.
Private or publicly guaranteed student loans are a sideshow. Our K-12 schools should be teaching basic math, skills that students can use to understand the implications of their choices.
With Focus on Competencies, Colleges Rethink Business Models
Kirk Carapezza and Mallory Noe-Payne:
This classroom in Nashville looks more like your traditional conference room. All of the students are over 21 and some of them have been sent here by their employers. From behind a one-way window, Doctor Charla Long stares in, observing their work.
“They have to come up in 45 minutes a consensus on these policy issues. And so you start to see how do they work with one another. Are they mean to each other?” Long explained.
Long is dean of the College of Professional Studies at Lipscomb, a small private university. She’s an outspoken advocate for giving working adults college credit for what they know how to do.
The Latest Student-Loan Charade
You can tell an election is coming, because President Obama is promising more student-loan relief to young people who are growing less enthralled with his economic record. The latest exercise unveiled Monday is also supposed to make these young people forget the loan burden that earlier free lunches supposedly provided. The taxpayer losses will come on some other President’s watch.
Specifically, Mr. Obama announced an expansion of the burgeoning disaster known as his Pay As You Earn program. This gift from taxpayers caps monthly student-loan payments at 10% of a borrower’s discretionary income, regardless of how much the borrower owes. Even better, the borrowers have their debts entirely forgiven after 20 years—or merely 10 years if they work in government or nonprofits. Those who work outside the profit-making economy don’t even have to report the forgiven loans as income.
On Wisconsin’s Teacher Tenure Practices
During a reduction in force (RIF), Wisconsin requires that layoffs are conducted in order of inverse seniority. To ensure effective teachers are retained, the state should require districts to base dismissals during a RIF on performance and explicitly prohibit seniority from being a factor in these decisions except as a tie-breaker for similarly rated teachers.
Explaining Asian Americans’ academic advantage over whites
We find that the Asian-American educational advantage over whites is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian–white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to (i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and (ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.
Via Laura Waters.
Sports Should Be Child’s Play
The heightened pressure on child athletes to be, essentially, adult athletes has fostered an epidemic of hyperspecialization that is both dangerous and counterproductive.
One New York City soccer club proudly advertises its development pipeline for kids under age 6, known as U6. The coach-picked stars, “poised for elite level soccer,” graduate to the U7 “pre-travel” program. Parents, visions of scholarships dancing in their heads, enable this by paying for private coaching and year-round travel.
“Of 275,000 teachers statewide, 2.2 teachers are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance per year–0.0008 percent”
We think it’s simple: reward and retain passionate, motivating, effective teachers and hold those accountable who are failing our children. By striking down the following laws, Vergara v. California will create an opportunity for lawmakers, teachers, administrators and community leaders to design a system that’s good for teachers and students. Because when it comes to educating our kids, there should only be winners.
Permanent Employment Statute: The permanent employment law forces administrators to either grant or deny permanent employment to teachers after an evaluation period of less than 16 months—before new teachers even complete their beginner teacher induction programs and before administrators are able to assess whether a teacher will be effective long-term.
Dismissal Statutes: The process for dismissing a single ineffective teacher involves a borderline infinite number of steps, requires years of documentation, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and still, rarely ever works. Out of 275,000 teachers statewide, 2.2 teachers are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance per year on average, which amounts to 0.0008 percent.
“Last-In, First-Out” (“LIFO”) Layoff Statute: The “LIFO” law forces school districts to base layoffs on seniority alone, with no consideration of teachers’ performance in the classroom.
Autism costs ‘£32bn per year’ in UK
The economic cost of supporting someone with autism over a lifetime is much higher than previously thought, research suggests.
It amounts to £1.5m in the UK and $2.4m in the US for individuals with the highest needs, say UK and US experts.
Autism cost the UK more than heart disease, stroke and cancer combined, said an autism charity.
But only £6.60 per person is spent on autism research compared with £295 on cancer, according to Autistica.
The research looked at the costs to society of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in both the UK and US.
Madison Mayor Paul Soglin on Special Education spending (2007).
The Value of Autism
My name is Lisa Domican and I am the mother of 2 healthy, energetic, engaging and good-looking teenagers; who are both very autistic.
I co-created the Grace App along with my daughter Grace and a very clever young Games developer called Steve Troughton-Smith.
Grace App is a picture communications system for smart phones that has enabled 30,000 non-verbal people with autism or other communication disabilities to ask for what they want.
Unlike the multitude of picture speaking apps that followed, Grace app was created to be owned and controlled by the person who needs it. The goal is to give the user, the person with the disability, total control over what they want to communicate, and the means to do it independently.
Are lectures a good way to learn?
Imagine a future where university enrolment paperwork is accompanied by the statement:
Warning: lectures may stunt your academic performance and increase risk of failure.
Researchers from the United States have just published an exhaustive review and their findings support that warning. They read every available research study comparing traditional lectures with active learning in science, engineering and mathematics. Traditional lecture-based courses are correlated with significantly poorer performance in terms of failure rates and marks.
Getting started in data science: My thoughts
There’s no denying that ‘data scientist’ is a hot job title to have right now, and for good reason. It’s a tremendously fun and challenging field to be in, and despite all of the often undeserved hoopla that surrounds it, data scientists are doing some pretty amazing things. So it’s no surprise that many people are clamoring to find out how to become data scientists. As I run a blog that attempts to teach some basic data science using sports analytics, I often get email asking how one gets started in data science and/or how quickly one can learn the prerequisites for being a data scientist. Instead of replying to these all the time, I thought I’d write my thoughts up here.
In short, there are lots of great, free resources out there for the motivated autodidact. I’ll list some of them here. The more nuanced take, though, is that I’m highly skeptical that many or even most people can ‘become’ a data scientist through MOOCs and tutorials. And certainly not quickly enough to be qualified to get a job as a data scientist before the data scientist salary market comes crashing back down to earth.
Judge Rules Union Priorities Violate Kids Civil Rights
A court ruling on Tuesday striking down job protections for teachers in California deals a sharp blow to unions — and will likely fuel political movements across the nation to eliminate teacher tenure.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu found five California laws governing the hiring and firing of teachers unconstitutional. But it was his language, more than the ruling itself, that will shake the political debate.
Treu found that the statutes permit too many grossly incompetent teachers to remain in classrooms across the state — and found that those teachers shortchange their students by putting them months or years behind their peers in math and reading.
He ruled that such a system violates the state constitution’s guarantee that all children receive “basic equality of educational opportunity.” In a blunt, unsparing 16-page opinion, Treu compared his ruling to the seminal federal desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, decided 60 years ago last month. “The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience,” Treu wrote.
How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution
The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support.
But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money — tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute national standards.
So they turned to the richest man in the world.
On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.
1 in 10 Students Enrolled Exclusively in Online Courses
A little more than 12 percent of all American post-secondary students were enrolled exclusively in online courses or online degree programs in 2012, according to the latest figures released by the National Center for Education Statistics, with another 13 percent taking at least some courses online.
On the whole, more than one-quarter — 25.8 percent — of post-secondary students took at least some courses online in fall 2012 (the latest period for which data are available).
Among undergraduates, 2.6 million (14.2 percent) took just some courses online, with 2 million (11 percent) taking their courses exclusively online.
The percentage of students taking courses exclusively online spiked among post-baccalaureate students, with 22 percent (639,343) enrolled exclusively online. Another 7.8 percent (227,467) took just some courses online.
According to the new report, “Enrollment in Distance Education Courses, by State: Fall 2012,” public two-year colleges had the highest percentage of students taking just some courses online (17.3 percent, or 1.2 million students), followed by public four-year institutions, at 15.1 percent (1.2 million). About 16 percent, or 2.4 million, of all students enrolled at public institutions took just some courses online, with 8.3 percent (1.25 million) taking all of their courses online.
A speech for high school graduates
Last weekend I gave a speech at this year’s graduation event for the Stanford Online High School (OHS) that one of my children has been attending. Here’s the transcript:
Thank you for inviting me to be part of this celebration today—and congratulations to this year’s OHS graduates.You know, as it happens, I myself never officially graduated from high school, and this is actually the first high school graduation I’ve ever been to.
It’s been fun over the past three years—from a suitable parental distance of course—to see my daughter’s experiences at OHS. One day I’m sure everyone will know about online high schools—but you’ll be able to say, “Yes, I was there when that way of doing such-and-such a thing was first invented—at OHS.”
Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media Tuition is up 1,200 percent in 30 years. Here’s why you’re unemployed, crushed by debt — and no one is helping
The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation of college grads with debt. Today, thanks to those enormous tuition prices, young Americans routinely start adult life with a burden unknown to any previous cohort and whose ruinous effects we can only guess at.
On the assumption that anyone in that generation still has a taste for irony, I offer the following quotation on the subject, drawn from one of the earliest news stories about the problem of soaring tuition. The newspaper was the Washington Post; the speaker was an assistant dean at a college that had just announced a tuition hike of 19 percent; and the question before him was how much farther tuition increases could go. “Maybe all of a sudden this bubble is going to burst,” he was quoted as saying. “How much will the public take?”
Productivity And The Education Delusion
There is a constant tension about education in labor economics these days. On one hand, education is strongly correlated with income and employability. Workers with college degrees, or even just some university-level courses, are significantly more likely to have a job and to be paid better, as well. This is borne out by today’s U.S. jobs report, which showed a decrease of unemployment for college graduates, but an increase of unemployment for high school graduates.
The tension comes when you look at the government’s projections for job growth over the next decade. The jobs with the highest expected growth are also among the jobs that are least likely to provide a living wage, occupations like personal care aides (median salary: $19,910 per year), retail sales people ($21,110 per year), home health aides ($20,820 per year), food preparation workers ($18,260 per year), and the list goes on. In fact, of the top 20 occupations with greatest expected job growth, only two of the categories are above the current median wage of the country.
This is the largest problem facing society this century.
There has been much discussion over the past few weeks about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty focuses on the increasing divergence of the income and wealth distributions between the top percentile and everyone else. Left mostly unanalyzed in the book, however, is how people at the top of the labor market are able to leverage their abilities so much more than those in the middle or base of the market due to a combination of technology and finance.
Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
n the first day of what would be a depressing and alienating two-year trudge under the fluorescent lights of a rural high school, a soft-spoken bald man stood in front of my English class and looked at the ceiling as if trying to remember what he was going to say.
“So. In the past few years, you’ve all learned that an essay should be five paragraphs. The first paragraph states your argument and includes a topic sentence. You develop your argument over the next three paragraphs, and finish with a conclusion paragraph that starts with the words ‘in conclusion’ or something.”
Silent assent from thirty smallish heads.
“Forget it.”
Small gasps. Heresy!
“They probably taught you never to start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but.’ Forget it. Don’t use adverbs? Forget it. Forget,” he pointed at us, “all of it.”
My class drove multiple teachers to tears, and substitutes swore blood oaths on our principal’s desk sealing their promise never to teach again until we were all dead and buried under crossroads, but this man never even had to raise his voice. He’s among the pivotal figures that made me want to write, and not give up for all the years I was terrible at it.1 He understood writing, and just as important, he understood his students.
Information Processing: Rare mutations and severe intellectual disability
The paper below describes rare de novo mutations which cause severe intellectual disability. See also Structural genomic variants (CNVs) affect cognition.
By the principle of continuity, I suspect that rare variants of smaller negative effect on cognitive ability also exist. These alleles, although harder to detect, would account for part of the observed population variation in the normal range. As discussed in an earlier post (Common variants vs mutational load), these are likely responsible for additional heritability not included in the h2 ~ 0.5 due to common variants estimated from GCTA.
The Future Of College Financial Aid, According To The Man Who Influences Billions Of It
With college costs continuing to rise and the US economy still sputtering, financial aid for college is more important than ever to families trying to foot the bill. The big question then is what is the future of college financial aid? For that answer I turned to the man at the top, Justin Draeger, the President of the National Association of Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA). The nation’s college aid professionals make up NASFAA’s membership, allowing Draeger to keep his finger on the pulse of what is going on with billions in college aid. Ahead of NASFAA’s annual conference later this month in Nashville, Mr. Draeger took time for the Q&A below.
1. Admissions Deans offer admission to more students than they have room for because they know that not all of those students will enroll. For the same reason, financial aid officers award millions more in aid than is actually budgeted. How do admissions and financial aid professionals collaborate to fill a college’s seats without breaking the financial aid bank?
Generally, the planned collaboration between admission and financial aid offices occurs through an institution’s enrollment management plan and/or policies. This is typically derived from intricate statistical analyses that calculate the probability of students choosing to attend, the students’ expected financial need, and the institutional financial aid dollars available at the school.
UW Badgers rank second in country for athletic spending
The University of Wisconsin-Madison athletic department spent the second-highest amount of money on its athletic program among public universities in 2013, trailing only the University of Texas, according to new figures compiled by USA Today.
UW generated $149.14 million in revenue through athletics and spent $146.7 million, USA Today said. Texas collected $165.7 million and spent $146.8 million.
Wisconsin’s expenditures jumped more than $44 million in 2013 primarily due to higher buildings and grounds costs. However, UW’s contributions, which count as revenue, increased almost as much, by about $39 million.
UW ranked first among Big Ten schools. Michigan was fourth overall with $131 million in expenditures and $143 million in revenue and Ohio State was fifth overall with $116 million in expenses and $139.7 million in revenue.
Fixing The PhD
Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can’t appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new report from the Modern Language Association. (The M.L.A. is the professional association for teachers of literature and language.) The report is about Ph.D. programs, which have been in decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you’re unlikely to find a tenure-track job. Motivated by “concern about the future of humanistic study,” the M.L.A. asked a committee of eight scholars to go on a listening tour, talking to professors, administrators, students, and “employers outside the academy” about how the system might be fixed. Professors are always complaining about “committee work”; judging by the report this one produced, this was the least fun committee imaginable.
The core of the problem is, of course, the job market. The M.L.A. report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph.D.s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything, that’s wildly optimistic: the M.L.A. got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list (around six hundred) with the number of new graduates (about a thousand). But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting—not to mention the older professors who didn’t receive tenure, and who now find themselves competing with their former students. (The report name-checks these groups, but, strangely, makes no effort to incorporate them into its overall estimate.) In all likelihood, the number of jobs per candidate is much smaller than the report suggests. That’s why the mood is so dire—why even professors are starting to ask, in the committee’s words, “Why maintain doctoral study in the modern languages and literatures—or the rest of the humanities—at all?”
The Case for Banning Laptops in the Classroom
A colleague of mine in the department of computer science at Dartmouth recently sent an e-mail to all of us on the faculty. The subject line read: “Ban computers in the classroom?” The note that followed was one sentence long: “I finally saw the light today and propose we ban the use of laptops in class.”
While the sentiment in my colleague’s e-mail was familiar, the source was surprising: it came from someone teaching a programming class, where computers are absolutely integral to learning and teaching. Surprise turned to something approaching shock when, in successive e-mails, I saw that his opinion was shared by many others in the department.
My friend’s epiphany came after he looked up from his lectern and saw, yet again, an audience of laptop covers, the flip sides of which were engaged in online shopping or social-media obligations rather than in the working out of programming examples. In a “Network”-inspired Peter Finch moment, he quickly changed the screen of his lecture presentation to a Reddit feed and watched some soccer highlights. That got everyone’s attention.
Kenosha School Board settles lawsuit over Act 10 dispute
Kenosha schools and the teachers union were at odds over the issue of automatic dues deduction for non-union members. Supporters of the contract argued the agreement and terms within it, such as the provision for automatic dues deduction, were legal because of the Colás decision.
Kenosha Unified spokeswoman Tanya Ruder explained the School Board negotiated with the unions and signed the agreement on Nov. 12 only after receiving notice from the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission in October that the unions were still the certified collective bargaining representative of the teachers.
Legal rulings after that agreement resulted in WERC then informing Kenosha that the unions were not, in fact, certified collective bargaining representatives at the time, Ruder said.
That meant the union didn’t actually represent the employees in November when the collective bargaining agreements were reached, Ruder said.
Much more on Act 10 here.
Locally, Madison continues to automatically deduct union dues from teacher paychecks.
Mining Student Results & Metadata: “massive increase in the demand for proficiency-based adaptive learning”
Recently, we celebrated Knewton’s sixth birthday. It seems that each year brings more progress and change than all the previous years combined, and this past year was no different.
We’re using our latest round of funding ($51 million) to continue to extend our technological leadership and support rapid growth globally, including a new office across the pond in London. Our partnerships with leading education companies brought Knewton-powered products to over 4 million students in 250,000 classrooms in 120 countries around the globe. We expect to have over 7 million students using products powered by the Knewton platform by the end of this year.
I joined Knewton back in 2010. The company was still getting off the ground, but the vision was the same as it is today — to provide personalized learning for everyone on the planet. Every individual deserves the opportunity to maximize their learning potential. It’s inspiring to see how far we’ve come, and to go to work every day knowing that we’re helping to make education more effective and accessible for students worldwide.
In the past year, we’ve seen a massive increase in the demand for proficiency-based adaptive learning, both in the U.S. and internationally. While it was always Knewton’s vision to create an adaptive learning platform to benefit every student in the world, it wasn’t always straightforward for education companies and others to understand this mission. Now, these organizations are using our platform to push the envelope to create products that will have a meaningful impact on student outcomes. Knewton enables our partners to focus on innovating new content and user experiences — while leveraging Knewton’s infrastructure and network effects to provide powerful personalization for students and actionable metrics for instructors.
Polarizing Plutocracy: Our Broken Higher Education System
The American political system is broken, and one unmistakable sign of it is our inability to bring down soaring levels of student debt or to regulate predatory for-profit colleges. The best solution the Obama administration has been able to propose in this area is a college ratings system that would evaluate colleges on the basis of factors like graduation rates and graduates’ earnings and debt loads.
Frankly, the idea that a ratings system will fix what ails American higher education is a little nuts. It views education as if it were a market like any other, and treats colleges like consumer products. “It’s like rating a blender,” burbled Education Department official Jamienne Studley last week to the New York Times. But while blenders can be tested in a lab, employment statistics can be all too easy to game, as anyone who’s followed recent reporting about bogus law school employment rates can attest.
By taking an approach to regulation that emphasizes “transparency” of information, the Obama administration also places the burden of evaluating schools on students and their families. Less affluent students, who often are poorly advised during the college application process in general, won’t fare particularly well under this system. A more aggressive approach is needed to protect them from the predatory for-profits. For many in this group, far more generous financial aid is needed to make going to college an economically rational decision in the first place.
Who Profits from the Master’s Degree Pay Bump for Teachers?
The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research. In a study published in 2011, Paul Peterson and I confirmed this finding by comparing the student achievement of the same teachers before and after they earned master’s degrees, and found no impact.[1]
This finding may be non-controversial among researchers, but it has largely been ignored by policymakers. Ninety-six percent of the 112 major U.S. school districts included in the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) Teacher Contract Database pay teachers with MA degrees more than those with BA degrees, with an average difference of $3,205 in the first year of teaching, $4,176 in the fifth year, and $8,411 at the top of the salary schedule. The size of this pay bump varies widely, topping out at over $30,000 in three districts in Maryland.[2]
It is not surprising that teachers respond to these incentives by earning MA degrees. In 2011-12, nearly half of U.S. teachers held such a degree. However, it comes at a price. As higher education costs continue to rise, teachers are going deeper into debt in order to earn these degrees. The proportion of education MA students with graduate debt increased from 49 to 60 percent between 2004 and 2012, and median graduate debt levels increased (in constant dollars) from $27,455 to $35,350. Factoring in undergraduate debt pushes the 2012 figure to $50,879.
Teachers also generally receive annual years of service increases.
University slated for $20 million cut to administrative spending; Minnesota President Kaler’s budget for next year axes more than 100 top leadership positions.
The University of Minnesota’s administrative spending is slated for $20 million in cuts next year.
President Eric Kaler proposed the cuts at a Board of Regents meeting earlier this month as part of a larger plan to reduce administrative spending by $90 million over six years, following widespread criticism of the institution’s pay to top executives.
The plan cuts 115 full-time administrative positions, mostly through methods like retirement, voluntary layoffs and by leaving some positions vacant when employees’ contracts expire, said Associate Vice President for Budget and Finance Julie Tonneson.
Administrative employees will feel the weight of $20 million in administrative cuts as part of the institution’s $90 million savings goal, and University managers say those cuts will eliminate positions and create more work for current employees.
Jobs cuts include two associate program director positions in the College of Biological Sciences and 12 spots in the College of Education and Human Development.
A review of Coursera & other Education Apps
MASSIVE Open Online Courses — or MOOCs — are a snowballing revolution in education.
Thousands of courses from some of the world’s finest institutions are available free online, covering everything from astrophysics to the arts. For each course, students, sometimes numbering in the thousands, take part from home — where they view video lectures, take tests and submit essays through a Web interface. It’s a digital classroom with no actual “room,” and where you can study more or less when you like.
Nowadays of course, your smartphone means you can also study when you’re on the move.
Coursera’s free iOS and Android app is perhaps the very best way to take part in a MOOC through a phone or tablet — maybe during your commute to work or your lunch break. The app gives you limited access to Coursera’s list of available courses as well as any you have already signed up for.
The Key to Better US News College Rankings
What would it take for a well-regarded institution — such as the University of Rochester, and a few dozen more like it — to be among U.S. News & World Report’s top 20 national universities? Hundreds of millions of dollars and a prayer, according a new peer-reviewed paper co-written by a former Rochester provost and his staff.
The study, published by the journal Research in Higher Education, argues that small movements in the rankings are simply “noise” and that any kind of sustained upward movement is both immensely expensive and nearly impossible.
Ralph Kuncl, a former Rochester provost who is now president of University of Redlands, in California, co-wrote the paper, which was a decade in the making. He started thinking about changes in the rankings when he was vice provost at Johns Hopkins University.
He said “the trustees would go bananas” when Johns Hopkins dropped in the rankings. The administration would then have to explain what had happened.
Parents fight student data mining (do they use google & Facebook?)
Moms and dads from across the political spectrum have mobilized into an unexpected political force in recent months to fight the data mining of their children. In a frenzy of activity, they’ve catapulted student privacy — an issue that was barely on anyone’s radar last spring — to prominence in statehouses from New York to Florida to Wyoming.
A months-long review by POLITICO of student privacy issues, including dozens of interviews, found the parent privacy lobby gaining momentum — and catching big-data advocates off guard. Initially dismissed as a fringe campaign, the privacy movement has attracted powerful allies on both the left and right. The American Civil Liberties Union is pushing for more student privacy protection. So is the American Legislative Exchange Council, the organization of conservative legislators.
Facing low enrollment, Minnesota Law School gets a $2.2 million boost
As its enrollment continues to drop, the University of Minnesota’s Law School is set to receive more money to fight financial woes.
President Eric Kaler’s proposed budget for next year includes a $2.2 million allocation to help the Law School cover a loss in tuition revenue, an issue plaguing law schools nationwide.
The University’s Law School has had relatively consistent enrollment over the past few years, but Dean David Wippman said the applications to the school and the number of first-year students are sharply declining.
In fall 2014, he said, about 180 students will enroll, compared to about 220 first-year students in 2013.
“That’s a pretty significant drop,” Wippman said.
Nationally, the number of applicants to American Bar Association-approved schools has dropped by more than 10 percent in each of the past three years, while first-year enrollment has dropped by more than 7 percent each year.
Mathematicians Urge Colleagues To Refuse To Work For The NSA
In January, the math community had its big event of the year — the Joint Mathematics Meeting — where 3,000 mathematicians and math students gathered to talk about new advances in the field and jostle for jobs. The National Security Agency is said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the country and so it always has a sizeable presence at the event to recruit new candidates. This year, it was even easier for the agency as the four-day conference took place at the Baltimore Convention Center, just 22 minutes away from NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. Thomas Hales, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who describes himself as a “mathematician who’s upset about what’s going on,” is dismayed at the idea of the brightest minds in his field going to work for the agency. In reaction to the Snowden revelations — which started exactly a year ago – about NSA’s mass surveillance and compromising of encryption standards, Hales gave a grant to the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation to fly a representative to Baltimore to try to convince mathematicians young and old not to go help the agency with data-mining and encryption-breaking.
Big Data, Common Core, and National Testing
May 2014 A Pioneer Institute White Paper by Emmett McGroarty, Joy Pullmann, and Jane Robbins New technology allows advocates for education as workforce development to accomplish what has long been out of their reach: the collection of data on every child, beginning with preschool or even earlier, and using that data to track the child throughout his/her academic career and his/her progression through the workforce. This paper explores the many initiatives that the federal government has worked with private entities to design and encourage states to participate in, in order to increase the collection and sharing of student data, while relaxing privacy protections. The authors offer recommendations to protect student privacy, including urging parents to ask what kinds of information are being collected on digital-learning platforms and whether the software will record data about their children’s behaviors and attitudes rather than just academic knowledge. If parents object to such data-collection, they should opt out. The authors also urge state lawmakers to pass student privacy laws, and they recommend that Congress correct the 2013 relaxation of FERPA.
A Decade of Degrees Universities are constantly changing and Northwestern is no exception. Its history—old and new—is written in the creation, destruction, and changing popularity of its majors.
Had your great-great-great-grandfather, or thereabouts, bought a $100 “perpetual scholarship” when the University first opened its doors on November 5, 1855, he would have had five departments and two degrees to pick from. Today, not only do you have the ability to attend NU and not be a Methodist man, but you also have 94 different majors to pick from, according to CAESAR.
The path from the University of 1855 to today is filled with antiquated majors and abandoned programs. For instance, in the years following World War I, the University introduced “Military Science” and “Physical Education and Hygiene” to broaden its course offerings, though both programs have since been abandoned. Those programs didn’t get very long in the spotlight: To be prepared for wartime jobs during World War II, more Northwestern students studied math, physics and chemistry.
The period after the war saw a huge change in Northwestern’s curriculum. New majors in “Naval Science” and “Home Economics” were created, presumably on the basis of the idea that sailing and sewing were vital anti-Soviet trades. In light of the struggle against communism, classes in “Western Civilization” to teach “democratic values” grew in popularity. This was accompanied by a renewed emphasis on the sciences to keep Moscow from beating us to the moon. The ’70s brought new technology and new fields of study: In 1971, the Department of Computer Science was created, closely followed in 1972, by the African-American Studies department.
The Declining Fortunes of the Young since 2000
Beaudry, Paul, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand:
We document that successive cohorts of college and post-college degree graduates experienced an increase in the probability of obtaining cognitive jobs both at the start of their careers and with time in the labor market in the 1990s. However, this pattern reversed for cohorts entering after 2000; profiles of the proportion of a cohort in cognitive occupations since school completion fall and become flatter with successive cohorts. Since cohort-wage profiles display a similar pattern, these findings appear to fit with a strong increase in demand for cognitive tasks in the 1990s followed by a decline in the 2000s.
Tyler Cowen includes a few more links.
Two educators, two very different visions, one question
Take two education activists with very different theories — and give them a chance to work together on a goal they both care about. That’s the thinking in the video above, the kick-off of Microsoft’s new Work Wonders project, which pairs up unlikely collaborators to spark new ideas. Watch as TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra joins forces with TEDx speaker Adam Braun to tackle a bold mission: Use technology to rethink education in severely underserved communities.
They’re a bit of an odd couple. Mitra, who created the School in the Cloud to enable kids to explore questions that matter to them on their own, believes that traditional schools are becoming more and more obsolete; meanwhile Braun, who founded Pencils of Promise to rally communities in the developing world to build schools, believes that traditional classrooms are the answer to opening up opportunity.
Above, watch the first in a series of mini-docs following this collaboration as it unfolded over the past three months. This episode shows Mitra and Braun meeting for the first time and thinking about how the other’s talents could help strengthen their own vision.
Microsoft, a longtime TED partner, will be revealing more episodes over the next month, so you can join the pair as they explore how to adapt Mitra’s Self-Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) tools for use in three Pencils of Promise schools in Ghana, with the help of Office 365 products and services, and how to build a SOLE starter kit to roll out across Pencils of Promise’s global network. This kit, designed with the needs of underserved communities in mind, could even get distribution far beyond that.
How my school rejected an app made for students
In Sep 16, 2013, I pushed the first commit to PortoApp’s GitHub repo. Back then, I wanted to make an experiment on managing sessions on iOS. I shamelessly got chpwn’s news:yc’s authentication model, copied his entire login controller by hand and I logged in at my school’s server.
Then, I implemented a news parser for the school’s website. Then, I made a grades viewer/simulator. Then, I displayed the school’s memos decently (and to do so I had to write a whole ASP.NET view state parser in C). The last pre-release commit was in 23 Apr 2014.
Roughly one month later (today), after finishing a four-hour test, my school called me for a meeting. I met with the Educational Councillor (a somewhat psychologist for student issues), the Educational Vice-Director, the Educational Technology Director and the IT Department Director of the school. They told me I was infringing copyright over their website’s content and had the “challenge to think about how what I did was ethically wrong”. It was a big sermon on how I’d be sued if it was the real world, and how they were being so friendly by talking to me, and so on. They never said it, but they naturally meant that there would be legal consequences for me if I did not remove connecting to their website as a feature in my app. In other words, I should turn it into a generic “grade calculator”.
Olin College Commencement Speech
Good afternoon. Today is a very special day for those of you graduating and your parents but it is also a special day for the world.
Here at Olin you have had a unique kind of educational experience – one that I wish more graduating seniors had had from our colleges and universities across the globe and certainly one that I personally wish I had had.
Yes, I went to Brown University – also a great school – but I was trained to be just a technical geek – worshiping technical problems that could be solved with mathematics, physics and computation.
Problems were like clocks; we viewed them as mechanisms that we could take apart, analyze, and solve through aggregating partial solutions. All problems were seen as technical in nature, isolated from the contexts that made them messier to work on.
But you are different – you have learned that many significant problems are, at their root, socio-technical. And that the problem, as stated, is almost never the real problem. You have learned how to unpack the problem as it is integrally associated with the context in which it is embedded.
You see the problem from many angles – the social, the cultural and the institutional as well as just the technical.
In design parlance you have learned to unpack and extend the brief – a talent you will find critical for all things as you venture forth from here today.
I did not have the luxury of your education but experiences quickly taught me the importance of looking beyond the problem as stated – to follow the problem out into its situated context and let it take you to its roots.
How Much Does It Cost to Recruit a Star College Athlete?
My colleague Brad Wolverton has a terrific story this week that takes you inside the big-time college-sports recruitment process through the eyes of Marvin Clark, a promising high-school basketball player who dreams of playing in the NBA.
Mr. Clark was heavily recruited by half a dozen colleges, whose coaches flew to Kansas to see him play, brought him and his mother to their campuses for VIP tours, and gave him hours of personal attention on top of the hundreds of text messages they sent him. Mr. Clark’s story got us thinking: What does it cost for a college to recruit a single athlete?
We looked at four of the universities that pursued Mr. Clark most vigorously: Indiana University at Bloomington, and Iowa State, Kansas State, and Michigan State Universities.
Dumping Everyday Math? The Future of Seattle Elementary Math Education Will Be Decided on Wednesday
But I would suggest an even more important vote will occur on Wednesday, one that will decide the future of tens or hundreds of thousands of Seattle students over the next decade: the Seattle School Board’s vote on the future elementary math curriculum.
As I have noted in previous blogs, Seattle Public Schools is now using a grossly inferior math curriculum, Everyday Math. Most school districts in the area (and around the country) have dropped it because it fails to provide basic competency in elementary-level mathematics, crippling students’ ability to learn algebra and higher mathematics later in their career. Everyday Math is a prime example of “fuzzy math,” with students spending much their their time inventing their own algorithms, writing long essays, using calculators, and doing group projects. Everyday Math is a wonderful example of the tendency to jump on the latest fad, which may sound good, but fails in the classroom.
So you would think the district would be doubly sure not to make a serious mistake again.
Last month, a committee established by the district provided their recommendation of a possible new curriculum. Their rankings were:
1. EnVision Math
2. Go Math!
3. Math in Focus (MIF), which is a U.S. version of Singapore Math.As I explained in my last blog of the subject, their evaluation was a great disappointment. Math in Focus, based on the extraordinarily successful Singapore Math approach, was downgraded because it advanced student’s too rapidly (compared to the latest fad, the Common Core standards). Go Math! is glossy and weak. EnVision, their top choice, is glossy and full of excessive reading and writing, making it a poor choice for students who do not have strong English skills. But better than Everyday Math for sure.
Much more on Everyday Math, here.
Related: Math Forum audio/video.
Locally, Madison has also used Everyday Math.
Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison
WHEN the Center for Investigative Reporting recently visited the Santa Cruz County Juvenile Hall — widely considered one of the best juvenile detention centers in the country — they found remarkably prison-like conditions, ranging from the bare, concrete walls to the use of solitary confinement as a method of disciplining youth. There are currently no federal or state laws that regulate the use of solitary confinement for juvenile offenders, despite overwhelming evidence of its harmful effects. But the abuses don’t stop there. A 2012 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a division of the Department of Justice, determined that youth held in adult prison facilities suffered less instances of sexual violence than their peers in juvenile facilities. And in some facilities, the rate of juvenile recidivism is over 80 percent, meaning that the bulk of these young people will eventually add to the burgeoning prison population.
There seems to be a consensus that the prison system as a whole isn’t working, and this is particularly true when it comes to juvenile detention. The United States incarcerates more young people under the age of 18 than any other industrialized country in the world. (By comparison, South Africa, our closest competitor, incarcerates its youth at one-fifth the rate of the United States.) Most juveniles who are sent to these facilities are from racial minorities. Many of them suffer abuses in prison that are heinous for adults and potentially ruinous for youth — solitary confinement, rape, repeated physical abuse, deprivation of sunlight, insufficient food and affection. Perhaps worst of all, children leave these facilities with additional traumas under their belts and no promise that their outside lives will improve.
And yet, despite protestations from all political parties that our society values children, despite the proliferation of New York Times bestsellers on how to raise children, despite growing scientific evidence that the confinement of adolescents may profoundly stunt their brain development, despite the fact that juvenile crime is steadily declining, change has not followed. Why?
Roll Call: The importance of teacher attendance
National Council on Teacher Quality:
This report breaks down teacher attendance for 40 districts in the nation’s largest cities in the 2012-2013 school year. We identify districts with the greatest percentage of teachers with excellent attendance as well as those with the biggest percentages of chronically absent teachers. In addition to identifying districts that are leaders and laggards in school attendance, the report takes a look at the impact of school poverty levels on teacher attendance and whether or not policies to curb absences made a difference.
Dads on patrol provide positive example in classrooms
Usually when we think about the parent heading to a PTO meeting, our minds go to moms, but a program in Sun Prarie schools is trying to change that.
They’re called WatchDOGS, DOGS standing for “Dads Of Great Students.”
Every morning at Horizon Elementary School, Principal Rainey Briggs introduces the men who came in for the day to look after the halls and participate in classrooms to the entire student body.
Briggs said the program has grown to be so popular that they had to add days when dads come in.
“It gives us another set of eyes in the building. It gives us another person in the classroom who really wants to be that positive role model for kids from a male’s perspective,” Briggs said.
Why School Boards Shouldn’t Have a Say in Charter School Authorization
It starts here:
Last week Assemblyman Troy Singleton (D-Camden) released a bill that updates New Jersey’s 20-year-old charter school law. The draft of the bill invests local school boards with the power to control 30 percent of an aspiring charter’s application score…
What’s wrong with delegating charter approval to democratically-elected school board members? After all, local districts pay tuition and transportation for charter school students. Shouldn’t community representatives have power to deter perceived threats to traditional district dominance?
Computer Science and Math
I came across an interesting discussion regarding the role math in computer science education on SIGCSE’s (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education consisting of CS professors) mailing list. Brad Zanden, a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Tennessee, started the conversation with:
I understand that discussing the role of math in CS is one of those religious war type issues… After 30 years in the field, I still fail to see how calculus and continuous math correlate with one’s ability to succeed in many areas of computer science… I have seen many outstanding programmers who struggled with calculus and never really got it. I also constantly see how what I consider to be excessive continuous math requirements in our program (calculus 1, 2, and 3, plus linear algebra) stops students from entering computer science…
Little brother, if I had to go to college again
My brother recently moved away from home to begin his first semester of college. I thought about my first semester of college and how much I changed during those four years. As I put myself in his shoes I thought to myself – what would I do differently if I had to go through college one more time? What would I do the same?
So a few weeks ago I sat down and wrote an email for him. I didn’t write it in an attempt to push him towards a different path. I wrote it because I think I would want him to do the same if he’d finished college before me. Here you go.
Start a business
Take something you’re good at, working out, and turn it into a business on the side. Be a physical trainer for people during your free time. Thanks to your classes, your days will be predictable and scheduling sessions will be easy. If there’s one thing [name redacted] and I both regret looking back, it’s not taking advantage of the freedom and free time you have in college.
The Death Of Expertise
I am (or at least think I am) an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy. When I say something on those subjects, I expect that my opinion holds more weight than that of most other people.
I never thought those were particularly controversial statements. As it turns out, they’re plenty controversial. Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy.
Madison Teachers, Inc. Contract Ratification Meeting – Tuesday, June 3!
This meeting is scheduled to consider ratification of Contract terms for 2015-16 for all five MTI bargaining units. This is a membership meeting. 2013-14 membership cards are required for admission.
Those who need assistance with membership issues, and those who are not members at this time and wish to join to enable participation in the meeting can be assisted by reporting to the “MTI Membership Table”.
This meeting will be conducted under MTI Bylaws and Roberts Rules of Order.
Notice of the meeting will also be on MTI’s webpage (www.madisonteachers.org), MTI Facebook, and by email to all who have provided MTI with their home email address.
Related:
St. Paul schools to put iPads in hands of all students
The St. Paul School District plans to become the largest in the state to put iPads in the hands of all students.
The decision, to take effect in the 2015-16 school year, was announced Friday by Superintendent Valeria Silva and represents a reversal of the stance taken by the district in 2012.
That year, the district sought and won voter approval of a $9-million-per-year technology initiative dubbed “Personalized Learning Through Technology.” Its proponents insisted that the initiative was not about supplying devices to students. They emphasized instead the creation of a “teaching and learning platform,” or Facebook-like Web page, through which teachers and students could interact — with the goal of giving students the power to learn anytime, anywhere.
But the district and Dell, its partner in the project, have failed to develop a customized platform that could serve students and teachers “directly enough or quickly enough,” Silva said. That work has been halted — with Dell agreeing to refund the $665,000 it has been paid in the form of future technology upgrades.
Universities can’t fulfil the myth, but they can’t become a vocational school either
Is it time to rethink higher education? I’m someone who went through the system and I’m now, to a greater or lesser extent, contributing to its maintenance, so it seems strange that I should advocate its dismantling. Yet I’m beginning to think that I ought to.
Unlike most rants of this nature, I have no complaints about the modern standard of education. The myth of falling standards has been with us since the Roman republic decided that they wanted the south of France as their personal back garden. If they really were falling for that long, we would all be living in caves wondering how our fore bearers were able to create this thing called fire.
Indeed, I think that students today learn a hell of a lot more than I did in my day. Although I may mourn the fact that Lagrangian mechanics is now a footnote on the way to a physics degree, that is not a sign of falling standards, but rather tells us that it is more important to learn other things to obtain a relevant education.
No, my complaint is that universities do not fill the role that there were supposed to play, and they are very inefficient at fulfilling the role that they actually play.
MIT and Harvard release de-identified learning data from open online courses
“We are excited to be able to present the data behind the reports we released in January. This step opens the door to more sophisticated analyses that build on what we have already done,” says co-lead researcher Isaac Chuang, a professor in MIT’s electrical engineering and computer science and physics departments. “MITx and HarvardX are committed to upholding learner privacy as well as advancing learning research. These data are a public good.”
Harvard’s Andrew Ho, Chuang’s co-lead, adds that the release of the data fulfills an intention — namely, to share best practices to improve teaching and learning both on campus and online — that was made with the launch of edX by Harvard and MIT in May 2012.
Ho and Chuang anticipate that the data will offer insight to other educational researchers. Moreover, the methods used to protect learner privacy comply with FERPA (Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act) regulations, which govern the release of such data. The practice should inform the release of future datasets from edX and offer lessons more broadly.
OLPC Memo 5: Education and Psychology
What goals do we want our schools to achieve? Most parents agree that their children should learn about History, Language, Science and Math, and get some instruction in Health, Sports, and Art. Most parents also want their children taught to behave in what they regard to be civilized ways. And surely, most parents would also agree that schools should help children learn good ways to think. However, while schools have good ways to teach facts about subjects, many pupils still fail to build adequate skills for applying that knowledge. [[1]]
But if “good thinking” is one of our principal goals, then why don’t schools try to explicitly teach about how human Learning and Reasoning work? Instead we tacitly assume that if we simply provide enough knowledge, then each child’s brain will ‘self-organize’ appropriate ways to apply those facts. Then would it make sense for us to include a subject called “Human Psychology” as part of the grade-school curriculum? I don’t think that we can do this yet, because, few present-day teachers would agree about which “Theories of Thinking” to teach.
So instead, we’ll propose a different approach: to provide our children with ideas they could use to invent their own theories about themselves! The rest of this essay will suggest some benefits that could come from this, and some practical ways to accomplish it—by engaging children in various kinds of constructive, computer-related projects.
Business School, Disrupted
The question: Should Harvard Business School enter the business of online education, and, if so, how?
Universities across the country are wrestling with the same question — call it the educator’s quandary — of whether to plunge into the rapidly growing realm of online teaching, at the risk of devaluing the on-campus education for which students pay tens of thousands of dollars, or to stand pat at the risk of being left behind.
5 facts about today’s college graduates
1 Only about 56% of students earn degrees within six years. The National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit verification and research organization, tracked 2.4 million first-time college students who enrolled in fall 2007 with the intent of pursuing a degree or certificate. The completion rate was highest (72.9%) among students who started at four-year, private, nonprofit schools, and lowest (39.9%) among those who started at two-year public institutions.
2 Business is still the most common major. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about a fifth (20.5%) of the 1.79 million bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2011-12 were in business. Business has been the single most common major since 1980-81; before that, education led the way. The least common bachelor’s degrees, according to the NCES, were in library science (95 conferred in 2011-12), military technologies and applied sciences (86) and precision production (37).
Who or What Broke My Kids?
I am Desperate
I am on a desperate search to find out who or what broke my students. In fact I am so desperate that I stopped class today to ask them who broke them. Was it their parents, a former teacher, society, our education system or me that took away their inquisitive nature and made math only about getting a right answer? I have known this was a problem for a while but today was the last straw.
A Probability Lesson Gone Wrong
It started out innocently enough working on the seventh grade Common Core standard 7.SP.C.5 about understanding that all probabilities occur between zero and one and differentiating between likely and unlikely events which I thought would be simple enough. After the introduction and class discussion we began partner work on this activity from the Georgia Common Core Resource Document (see page 9). The basic premise of the activity is that students must sort cards including probability statements, terms such as unlikely and probable, pictorial representations, and fraction, decimal, and percent probabilities and place them on a number line based on their theoretical probability. I thought it would be an interactive way to gauge student understanding. Instead it turned into a ten minute nightmare where I was asked no less than 52 times if their answers were “right”. I took it well until I was asked for the 53rd time and then I lost it. We stopped class right there and proceeded to have a ten minute discussion on who broke them.
Brentwood parents of special education students unite to call for school district reform
Parents of special education students who recently protested in front of Brentwood Union School District headquarters are calling for districtwide reform, including greater inclusion for special needs children on campuses and an end to alleged retaliation against proactive parents by district officials.
Parents for Special Education Reform claim that their children are being treated unfairly and even excluded from grade-level field trips. Group members said parents who advocate on behalf of their children by filing complaints against the district with the state or taking legal action are being targeted.
An independent agency needs to help guide the district with its special education program, according to the group. Recently, 13 Brentwood families filed complaints with the federal Office for Civil Rights in San Francisco, and a six-month investigation into the retaliation and discrimination claims is underway.
New Orleans Public Schools go 100% Charter
The second-graders paraded to the Dumpster in the rear parking lot, where they chucked boxes of old work sheets, notebooks and other detritus into the trash, emptying their school for good.
Benjamin Banneker Elementary closed Wednesday as New Orleans’ Recovery School District permanently shuttered its last five traditional public schools this week.
With the start of the next school year, the Recovery School District will be the first in the country made up completely of public charter schools, a milestone for New Orleans and a grand experiment in urban education for the nation.
Locally, Madison continues with its agrarian era school structure, unchallenged.
Is Harvard really better than Yale? This startup may have the answer
When American high school students—and foreign students keen on studying in the US—survey their choice of universities, they can consult one of any number of rankings and listings. Or they can trudge through the websites of dozens on colleges to make up their own minds. Either way, it’s a bit of a chore.
The website Onlyboth.com seeks to may make that process easier with a program that crawls through the thicket of available data and pulls out useful insights and comparisons. The startup’s co-founders, Raul Valdez-Perez, formerly a research faculty member at Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department, and his colleague Andre Lessa, collected data from several sources, chiefly the federal government, to create a database of each US university’s special characteristics. Type in a college name, and the website shows how it compares to its neighbors and peers, as well across lists.
I will send my children private if I can’t get them into a (UK) grammar
As grammar schools come under scrutiny yet again – this time for creating an “unequal society” – one alumna of the state-school system argues that the answer is really to create more of them
The latest row to embroil the Education Secretary, Michael Gove – whether he did or didn’t want Of Mice and Men taken off the GCSE syllabus – took me juddering back to my schooldays.
That slender volume was a standard text at my comprehensive. I’d always had the suspicion that, being a novella, it was chosen because it was easier to read than, say, a weighty Dickens tome. And far easier to teach, too, when it was common for staff to spend up to two-thirds of a 50-minute lesson performing crowd control.
Efforts to Curb College Costs Face Resistance Schools, Lawmaker Balk at Rules on Career Training, New Rating System
Obama administration initiatives intended to help restrain soaring college costs are facing resistance from schools and from a bipartisan bloc of lawmakers looking to protect institutions in their districts.
Groups representing colleges and universities this week formally opposed the administration’s plan to more tightly oversee programs that officials say leave students in steep debt but with weak job prospects. The new rules cover for-profit schools along with career-training programs—those that lead to certificates, but not degrees, in a given field, such as mechanics or cosmetology—at public schools and nonprofits. A bipartisan group in Congress is seeking ways to kill the plan, which the administration wants to have in place by November.
At the same time, the administration is planning to delay the rollout of its signature higher-education initiative: a college-rating system that would score institutions based on their affordability and quality. Education Department officials, hoping to have that proposal in place by late 2015, said they need more time to draft the rules after criticism from school officials unnerved by the prospect of federal officials’ making value judgments on a school’s worth.
Stop subsidizing student loans. That one move will solve many problems.
From Invisible to Visible: Being Able To “See” the Crisis in Learning
Engagement and Understanding: The First Step in Assessment and Action
The group of mothers sitting in the sun in a village in north India was happy to chat. We talked about children and about their school. “Are they going to school?” I asked. “Of course,” said the mothers proudly. Some went further to say, “we even send them for private coaching after school.” “How are they doing with their education?” The common word for education in Hindi is the same as reading-writing. The chatter stopped. One mother looked at me sternly and said, “How do we know? We are illiterate. Anyway, that is the business of the school and of the teachers.”
For decades it has been assumed that schooling leads to learning. This is the assumption that has been widely held by parents and practitioners, policymakers and public. It is also assumed that “more is better”—more years of schooling are better than less. It is only recently that the world is beginning to realize that schooling does not necessarily lead to learning. For many in India and in other countries, at ground level and at higher levels, this is a new learning. Accustomed to years of measuring inputs and expenditures, the switch to measuring outcomes—especially learning outcomes—is new and still unfamiliar. We are just beginning to figure out how to think about learning beyond, and in addition to, schooling.
MOOCs’ disruption is only beginning
Clayton M. Christensen and Michelle R. Weise:
JOURNALISTS, AS 2013 ended, were busy declaring the death of MOOCs, more formally known as massive open online courses. Silicon Valley startup Udacity, one of the first to offer the free Web-based college classes, had just announced its pivot to vocational training — a sure sign to some that this much-hyped revolution in higher education had failed. The collective sigh of relief from more traditional colleges and universities was audible.
The news, however, must have also had the companies that had enthusiastically jumped on the MOOC train feeling a bit like Mark Twain. When newspapers confused Twain for his ailing cousin, the writer famously quipped, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Undoubtedly pronouncements over MOOCs’ demise are likewise premature. And their potential to disrupt — on price, technology, even pedagogy — in a long-stagnant industry is only just beginning to be seen.
How important is disruption in higher education? Tuition costs have been ballooning faster than general inflation and even faster than health care. And what do we get in return? Nearly half of all bachelor’s-degree holders do not find employment or are underemployed upon graduation. At the same time, employers have not been satisfied with degree candidates. Two recent Gallup polls showed that although 96 percent of chief academic officers believe they’re doing a good job of preparing students for employment, only 11 percent of business leaders agree that graduates have the requisite skills for success in the workforce. And this is all occurring while higher education leaders were convinced that they were innovating all along.
Is College Worth It? It Depends on Whether You Graduate
In The New York Times on Tuesday morning, David Leonhardt took on the “Is college worth it?” question. His answer? An unequivocal yes. The college wage premium — how much more college grads earn than everyone else — is the widest it’s ever been, Leonhardt wrote. Graduates are much more likely to find jobs than nongraduates. And despite mounting fears about student debt levels, the average student’s loan burden pales in comparison to the long-term benefits of a bachelor’s degree.
“For all the struggles that many young college graduates face,” Leonhardt wrote, “a four-year degree has probably never been more valuable.”
That’s probably true. Sure, some people end up with unmanageable debt loads, and not everyone who earns a bachelor’s degree easily gets a job, let alone a good one (all points that Leonhardt acknowledges). But on average, college graduates are much better off than nongraduates.
Finns beat U.S. with low-tech take on school
At the start of morning assembly in the state-of-the-art Viikki School here, students’ smartphones disappear. In math class, the teacher shuts off the Smartboard and begins drafting perfect circles on a chalkboard. The students — some of the highest-achieving in the world — cut up graphing paper while solving equations using their clunky plastic calculators.
Finnish students and teachers didn’t need laptops and iPads to get to the top of international education rankings, said Krista Kiuru, minister of education and science at the Finnish Parliament. And officials say they aren’t interested in using them to stay there.
Teacher content knowledge surely trumps tech gizmos and endless grant driven schemes.
You’re probably using the wrong dictionary
The way I thought you used a dictionary was that you looked up words you’ve never heard of, or whose sense you’re unsure of. You would never look up an ordinary word — like example, or sport, or magic — because all you’ll learn is what it means, and that you already know.
Indeed, if you look up those particular words in the dictionary that comes with your computer — on my Mac, it’s the New Oxford American Dictionary, 3rd Edition — you’ll be rewarded with… well, there won’t be any reward. The entries are pedestrian:
example /igˈzampəl/, n. a thing characteristic of its kind or illustrating a general rule.
How a college with 340 students lost $220 million in five years
The Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, with its sleek, glass-walled buildings around a peaceful grass oval, has earned glowing international attention for the successful ways it has pioneered the teaching of undergraduate engineering.
Built from scratch with hundreds of millions of dollars from a private foundation and a commitment to charging no tuition, 12-year-old Olin has attracted standout faculty, even though it does not give tenure. Top companies recruit its high-achieving students, who graduate at enviable rates into jobs with above-average starting salaries.
Behind the accolades, however, Olin has been bleeding red ink.
Colleges Are Buying Stuff They Can’t Afford and Making Students Pay For It
With tuition costs more than doubling over the past generation, and student debt now exceeding $1 trillion, everyone knows the cost of college is too damn high. About 40 million people nationwide are weighed down by education debts that often reach into the tens of thousands. But those numbers are just a sliver of the bleak shadow that Wall Street casts over higher education.
A new study on debt across the higher education system reveals that the massive debts borne by both students and their institutions has climbed to about $45 billion per year. So the debt-related payments to the financial sector—including Wall Street investors, institutional lenders and the mammoth federal student loan system—drive about one tenth of all spending on higher education nationwide. These debt-servicing costs are tied to tuition lending as well as financial debts accrued by schools themselves, which finance investments of all kinds, from professors’ salaries to libraries to indulgences like sports teams and administrators’ bonuses.
According to researchers with University of California–Berkeley’s Debt & Society Project, a project of the Center for Culture, Organizations, and Politics with research support from the American Federation of Teachers, the a key factor in the rising cost of college is driven by expenditures largely unrelated to either the quality of the education, teaching or maintaining campus facilities. Rather, college is getting unimaginably expensive for both institutions and students because it costs so much to finance the business of education, thanks to Wall Street lenders. While there are many controversial budget items in higher education—critics lament bloated administrations and the cost of sports teams and flashy amenities—the report focuses on debt itself, and the massive volume of borrowing, as a major overlooked burden on institutions.
The 3 Questions To Ask In Any Classroom
It’s a frequent complaint in education journalism: Reporters should spend less time at school board meetings and get into a classroom to find out what’s really going on.
For reporters, though, that’s a challenge and a risk, because lots of good journalists don’t know what to look for in a busy classroom. How do you know if what you’re seeing is “good” or not? After all, reporters aren’t professional educators. And they’re often under deadline.
Sometimes, this can even backfire — when a quick visit to add “color” to a story leads to shortcuts or hasty conclusions. What if a reporter shows up without knowing, for instance, that a fire drill that morning completely distracted the students and got them all excited? Or that 12th-graders in the period right after lunch are way more boisterous and engaged than the sleep-deprived zombies that stumble into 8 a.m. homeroom?
A College Degree is No Guarantee
The Great Recession has been hard on all recent college graduates, but it has been even harder on black recent graduates.
This report reviews evidence on the labor-market experience of black recent college graduates during and after the Great Recession.
Key findings include:
In 2013 (the most recent full year of data available), 12.4 percent of black college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 were unemployed. For all college graduates in the same age range, the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent.
Between 2007 (immediately before the Great Recession) and 2013, the unemployment rate for black recent college graduates nearly tripled (up 7.8 percentage points from 4.6 percent in 2007).
In 2013, more than half (55.9 percent) of employed black recent college graduates were “underemployed” –defined as working in an occupation that typically does not require a four-year college degree. Even before the Great Recession, almost half of black recent graduates were underemployed (45.0 percent in 2007).
Black recent college graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors have fared somewhat better, but still suffer from high unemployment and underemployment rates. For example, for the years 2010 to 2012, among black recent graduates with degrees in engineering, the average unemployment rate was 10 percent and the underemployment rate was 32 percent.
In part, these outcomes reflect the disproportionate negative effect of economic downturns on young workers and, in part, they reflect ongoing racial discrimination in the labor market. A college degree blunts both these effects relative to young black workers without a degree, but college is not a guarantee against either set of forces.
Teaching Economic Concepts with a Bag of Chocolate: A Classroom Experiment for Elementary School Students
This paper describes a classroom experiment suitable for elementary school students in which participants are actively engaged in making trading decisions. Students are provided an endowment of gum and are asked to make trading decisions to acquire chocolate. As the op- portunity cost of acquiring a piece of chocolate rises, fewer students are willing to make trades. This interactive classroom exercise illustrates three fundamental economic concepts: the law of demand, opportunity costs, and gains from trade. Assessement test results reveal that two days after this classroom exercise, fifth grade students register significant improvements in their understanding of three fundamental economic concepts.
The Ripple Effects of Rising Student Debt
What are the roads not taken because students must take out loans for college? A collection of studies shows that the burden of student debt may well cause people to make different decisions than they would otherwise — affecting not just individual lives but also the entire economy.
For one thing, it appears that people with student loans are less likely to start businesses of their own. A new study has found that areas with higher relative growth in student debt show lower growth in the formation of small businesses (in this case, firms with one to four employees).
The correlation makes sense. People normally have only a certain amount of “debt capacity,” said Brent W. Ambrose, a professor of risk management at Pennsylvania State University and a co-author of a preliminary paper on the research along with Larry Cordell and Shuwei Ma of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
Analysis of Over 2,000 Computer Science Professors at Top Universities
As part of a class assignment in my human-computer interaction seminar, students used crowdsourcing to collect information about the computer science professors from 5 universities each. This information comprised the names, institution, degrees obtained, and when they joined the university, for professors in the traditional role that involves both research and teaching. The data excludes lecturers, professors of practice, clinical, adjunct, affiliate, or research professors; only because we were constrained by time and resources. My Ph.D. student Alexandra Papoutsaki worked with a handful of students in the course to correct, normalize, and merge the data, and has posted it along with some descriptive information.
The posted data includes 51 top universities in the United States and is already useful for students planning to apply to graduate schools, but there are some interesting insights that we can still draw from a more aggregate analysis. This analysis is meant to supplement the data and Alexandra’s report, and looks more at:
From The Ivy League To State Schools, Demand For Computer Science Is Booming
For years, people in the tech industry have worked to persuade more young people in the United States to become interested in studying computer science. It now looks like they’ve finally gotten the message.
Demand for computer science classes and programs is booming at universities across the U.S., according to data presented this past week at the NCWIT summit for Women in IT by Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and Stanford Computer Science professor Eric Roberts.
At Lazowska’s own school, the number of incoming freshman who plan to major in computer science is soaring — the graph below, published earlier this week by Geekwire, speaks for itself:
Fat-Cat University Administrators at the Top 25
Confronted with punishing state budget cuts, the public colleges and universities that educate more than 70 percent of this country’s students have raised tuition, shrunk course offerings and hired miserably paid, part-time instructors who now form what amounts to a new underclass in the academic hierarchy. At the same time, some of those colleges and universities are spending much too freely on their top administrators.
A report from the Institute for Policy Studies, a research group, says that the presidents at the 25 public universities that pay their presidents the most have seen their compensation soar since 2008. The average pay for presidents at all public research universities is hardly shabby, increasing by 14 percent, to $544,554, between 2009 and 2012. But average compensation for the presidents at the 25 highest-paying universities increased by a third, to $974,006.
Related: Financial Aid Leveraging.
UK Book Rhetoric
THE John Steinbeck novella Of Mice and Men, and other American classics including Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible and the Harper Lee novel To Kill a Mockingbird, have been dropped from new English literature GCSEs after Michael Gove, the education secretary, insisted teenagers had to study works by British writers.
Three-quarters of the books on the governmentdirected GCSEs, which will be unveiled this week, are by British authors and most are pre-20th century.
“Of Mice and Men, which Michael Gove really dislikes, will not be included. It was studied by 90% of teenagers taking English literature GCSE in the past,” said OCR, one of Britain’s biggest exam boards. “Michael Gove said that was a really disappointing statistic.”
On the other hand.
25.62% of Madison’s $402,464,374 2014/2015 budget to be spent on benefits; District’s Day of Teacher Union Collective Bargaining; WPS déjà vu
Act 10 duckduckgo google wikipedia
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email::
School Board Decisions on Employee Health Insurance Contributions Could Further Reduce Wages
Under MTI’s various Collective Bargaining Agreements, the District currently pays 100% of the health insurance premiums for both single and family coverage, but retains the ability to require employees to contribute up to 10% of the monthly premium for both single and family coverage.
District management has recommended to the Board of Education that they adopt a Budget which would allow for up to a 5% increase in health insurance premiums to be paid by the District. If the Board agrees, this would require employees to pay any increase above 5%, and insurance carriers of District plans currently propose premium increases greater than 5%. The Board is currently discussing whether to require the employee to pay the increase. If the Board does, that would further decrease employees’ take-home pay. Even a 2% employee premium contribution would cost employees over $120 per year for the least expensive single coverage, and over $300 per year for the least expensive family coverage, i.e. any increase would compound the loss of purchasing power described above.
2014-2015 budget documents, to date.
Several articles on the legal controversy regarding Wisconsin “collective bargaining”:
WILL to Madison School Board: Comply With Act 10 or Face Lawsuit.
Mary Burke (running for Governor) votes for labor talks with Madison teachers.
Madison School Board nearing extension of union contracts.
Madison School Board flouts the law in favor of teachers union.
Liberals look to one last chance to overturn Scott Walker’s reforms, in a judicial election.
The Madison School District’s substantial benefit spending is not a new topic.
