How Children What?



Alec:

John Holt and Paul Tough are a half-century apart. Both were interested in children and how they learned. One wrote a book called How Children Learn, the other a book called How Children Succeed. Their juxtaposition has a lot to tell us about how we think about and treat our young people.

In 1967, John Holt published How Children Learn. In 2013, Paul Tough published How Children Succeed.

Holt was following up on the publication of his 1964 book, How Children Fail. Beginning in 1952, Holt taught elementary and middle school—first in Colorado, then Boston. For eleven years, Holt kept a journal of his experiences. This journal grew into his first books, How Children Fail and How Children Learn. The first explored how children, “used their minds badly.” The second explored what it looked like for children to “act as bold, effective learners.” Both were grounded in Holt’s own, concrete stories and experiences. The fundamental thesis of both is that learners’ motivation is essential and that because this cannot be forced, we must trust learners, working with them and their interests if they are to grow into empowered adults. Semiotically, Holt now parses as hippie, especially given his position as father of the United States homeschooling movement.

Tough is a journalist who has covered education, child development, and poverty for the past decade. Tough has never taught. After writing about Geoffery Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone in Whatever It Takes, he felt dissatisfied with his understanding of why only some children go on from such programs to succeed. Tough sought out researchers, economists, neuroscientists, psychologists, doctors, and the occasional teacher or administrator to find his answer. The fundamental thesis of How Children Succeed is that kids will be more successful in school and more secure in life if we focus on developing their ‘non-cognitive skills,’ like the ability to persevere or maintain healthy emotional hygiene. Semiotically, Tough parses as a pragmatic journalist uncovering heroic possibilities for education reform.




Typical high school student survey



Grant Wiggins:

Let’s have our first look at constructed response, in closing this post. Students were asked on the last question: if you could ask your teachers to make one change to make classes more interesting, what would you say? Here is what the “A” students said (I have selected these answers randomly by just selecting the middle 20+):

Try something creative when teaching something new

To not talk the entire time and give us more hands on things to do /work on.

Provide more opportunities for the students to learn for themselves, without just providing them with everything.

Only talk as much as you need to and leave most of the investigative discussions to the class

Nothing

I would say to make sure everything is clear for the students

Get a better grading scale and do more variety of things because in biology we do the same thing every unit and then just have a test randomly

Have students teach for once to see if they know what they’re doing.
Don’t make tests or assignments just about memorization, because then no one will actually understand it.

Well, some teachers are great and teach me very well. It’s the few teachers that really need to step it up. Also they have to realize that we can’t prioritize their work first if every teacher wants their work prioritized.
The teachers should slow down their teaching a little bit when asked to because by not slowing down, it’s not helping students learn to their best ability.

To relate assignments more to the students and make them less busywork and more in terms of variety. They should provide variety in class every week to keep things interesting

Make projects more fun to do by giving us more options and more visuals in class because some people learn better that way.

To help those even if they have advanced thinking, and teachers should put more energy in paying attention to children, and fix the situation where those who are good kids get yelled at more often than those who fool around on a daily basis.

Make sure the students fully understand what’s being taught before moving on to something new. Try to get to know students and talk to them before class or something to make everyone feel comfortable around you. So you’re not the “mean” teacher.
Slow down and teach the subject more instead of assuming we know and understand the material.

Just be more understanding and try to put themselves in the students shoes.




The Problem with Outcome-Oriented Evaluations



David Cohen:

Imagine I observe two poker players playing two tournaments each. During their first tournaments, Player A makes $1200 and Player B loses $800. During her second tournament, Player A pockets another $1000. Player B, on the other hand, loses $1100 more during her second tournament. Would it be a good decision for me to sit down at a table and model my play after Player A?

For many people the answer to this question – no – is counterintuitive. I watched Player A and Player B play two tournaments each and their results were very different – haven’t I seen enough to conclude that Player A is the better poker player? Yet poker involves a considerable amount of luck and there are numerous possible short- and longer-term outcomes for skilled and unskilled players. As Nate Silver writes in The Signal and the Noise, I could monitor each player’s winnings…




Educating the educators University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Willingham, PhD, is dedicated to helping schools and families determine which new educational tools and strategies are scientifically supported and worth adopting



Amy Novotny:

There are myriad books and professional development materials devoted to the study of learning styles. The problem, says University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, PhD, is that most of them don’t rely on good science.

“If you talk to teachers frequently, they’re surprised there isn’t a firm research base for different learning styles,” says Willingham, author of the books “When Can You Trust the Experts?” and “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

That lack of good information is among the reasons Willingham has devoted his work to researching the application of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to K–12 education — and popularizing the information for the general public. In addition to providing commentary about science and education on the education blog RealClearEducation.com, he is working to help schools and families determine which educational approaches — from games and software to training programs and workbooks — are scientifically supported and worth adopting.

Willingham spoke with the Monitor about the importance of offering students a challenging curriculum and providing motivation and praise to help struggling students.
What are some of the other unfounded beliefs teachers have about what works in the classroom?
One example is so-called neuromyths, or beliefs that some educators may have about the brain. For example, the characterization of left-brain versus right-brain thinking is not well-supported and really never has been.
The truth is that most teachers in my experience really have a lot of common sense. There are ideas that are peddled to them that are wrong, but most teachers are pretty skeptical of them. They’re in the classroom every day, so they have a sense of what works and what doesn’t work with kids.




The One Percent at State U



Andrew Irwin & Marjorie Wood:

State universities have come under increasing criticism for excessive executive pay, soaring student debt, and low-wage faculty labor. In the public debate, these issues are often treated separately. Our study examines what happened to student debt and faculty labor at the 25 public universities with the highest executive pay (hereafter “the top 25”) from fall 2005 to summer 2012 (FY 2006 – FY 2012). Our findings suggest these issues are closely related and should be addressed together in the future.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, executive pay at “the top 25” (see Appendix 2) has risen dramatically to far exceed pre-crisis levels. From fall 2005 to fall 2011, low-wage faculty labor and student debt at these institutions rose faster than national averages. In short, a top-heavy, “1% recovery” occurred at major state universities across the country, largely at the expense of faculty and students.

Key Findings:




How Education Drives Inequality Among the 99%



Brenda Cronin:

Recent hand-wringing about income inequality has focused on the gap between the top 1% and everyone else. A new paper argues that the more telling inequities exist among the 99%, primarily driven by education.

“The single-minded focus on the top 1% can be counterproductive given that the changes to the other 99% have been more economically significant,” says David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and author of the study.
His paper, “Skills, Education and the Rise of Earnings Inequality Among the ‘Other 99 Percent’,” comes as something of riposte to French economist Thomas Piketty, whose bestselling “Capital in the 21st Century” has ignited sales and conversation around the world with its historical look at the fortunes of the top 1%.




How Do We Teach Digital Literacy to Digital Natives?



CJ Kettler:

Is it possible for our students to be both digital natives and digitally unaware?

Young people today are instant messengers, gamers, photo sharers and supreme multitaskers. But while they use the technology tools available to them 24/7, they are struggling to sort fact from fiction, think critically, decipher cultural inferences, detect commercial intent and analyze social implications. All of which makes them extremely vulnerable to the overwhelming amount of information they have access to through the digital tools they use—and love!—so much.

In fact, teachers surveyed in a recent Pew Study say they worry about “students’ overdependence on search engines; the difficulty many students have judging the quality of online information; and the general level of literacy of today’s students.” In total, 83% of teachers surveyed agreed that the amount of information available to students online is overwhelming, and 60% agreed that today’s digital technologies make it harder for students to track down and use credible sources.




US Spent $595,000,000,000 on K-12 Education in 2012, down .08% from 2012



Caroline Porter:

Funding for U.S. public elementary and secondary schools decreased by $4.9 billion in fiscal year 2012, the first recorded drop since the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting the data in 1977, according to a report released by the bureau Thursday. Total funding of nearly $595 billion was down 0.8% from the previous year.

An approximate 19% downturn in federal dollars from the previous year—to about $60 billion in 2012 from about $74 billion in 2011—explains the shortfall for schools, according the Census Bureau. Revenue from state and local sources went slightly higher—about $270 billion and almost $265 billion respectively—in the same time frame.

Fiscal year 2012 represents roughly the same time period as the 2011-2012 school year.

The decrease in school funding reflects changes in revenue patterns during and after the recession, according to Mike Griffith, a school finance consultant for the Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan research group.

“What we saw was the phase out of the additional federal dollars in stimulus funding,” said Mr. Griffith. “Those dollars had helped prop up state budgets during the recession. We saw state budgets recuperate in 2011-2012 at same time as federal money was disappearing…but states hadn’t recovered enough to make up for the federal dollars lost, so overall funding dropped.”

The largest slice of 2012 spending was for instructional salaries, which totaled about $207 billion, or nearly 35% of total spending.

“Expenses grow every year,” said Mr. Griffith, referring in part to teacher salaries and benefits. “The decrease in revenue is a problem for school districts because they will have to make cuts.”




Scathing report could shut UK Muslim school for promoting Salafi beliefs



Richard Adams:

Ofsted inspectors have harshly criticised an independent Muslim school for promoting Salafi fundamentalist beliefs and rated the school as inadequate, in a possible prelude to it being closed or taken over by the Department for Education.

In their unpublished draft report, the inspectors said the school – the Olive Tree primary school in Luton – fails to prepare its pupils “for life in modern Britain, as opposed to life in a Muslim state”, and that its library contains books that are “abhorrent to British society” in their depiction of punishments under sharia law.

“Some books in the children’s library contain fundamentalist Islamic beliefs (Salafi) or are set firmly within a Saudi Arabian socio-religious context. Some of the views promoted by these books, for example about stoning women, have no place in British society,” the report argues.




Why do people persist in believing things that just aren’t true



Maria Konnikova:

Last month, Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, published the results of a study that he and a team of pediatricians and political scientists had been working on for three years. They had followed a group of almost two thousand parents, all of whom had at least one child under the age of seventeen, to test a simple relationship: Could various pro-vaccination campaigns change parental attitudes toward vaccines? Each household received one of four messages: a leaflet from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stating that there had been no evidence linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (M.M.R.) vaccine and autism; a leaflet from the Vaccine Information Statement on the dangers of the diseases that the M.M.R. vaccine prevents; photographs of children who had suffered from the diseases; and a dramatic story from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about an infant who almost died of measles. A control group did not receive any information at all. The goal was to test whether facts, science, emotions, or stories could make people change their minds.

The result was dramatic: a whole lot of nothing. None of the interventions worked. The first leaflet—focussed on a lack of evidence connecting vaccines and autism—seemed to reduce misperceptions about the link, but it did nothing to affect intentions to vaccinate. It even decreased intent among parents who held the most negative attitudes toward vaccines, a phenomenon known as the backfire effect. The other two interventions fared even worse: the images of sick children increased the belief that vaccines cause autism, while the dramatic narrative somehow managed to increase beliefs about the dangers of vaccines. “It’s depressing,” Nyhan said. “We were definitely depressed,” he repeated, after a pause.




Empty classrooms expose flaws in UK private colleges boom



Shiv Malik, Andrew McGettigan and John Domokos:

A private college in north London is offering government-funded places to people who “blatantly” don’t have the skills, recruiting candidates off the street and from countries in eastern Europe – and in at least one case lecturing to a class with no students.

So serious are the problems that the London School of Science and Technology (LSST) in Wembley has been called the “cashpoint college” or “the ATM” by students who believe they can obtain loans and grants of up to £11,000 a year and then not show up to learn.

The higher education institution has taken £6.5m in public money in the last three years, and has tripled in size since ministers relaxed controls over student loans in 2012. Even if these full-time students take out the loans and do no work, LSST benefits from the increased numbers paying £6,000 a year in tuition fees.

The chaotic organisation of LSST demonstrates serious flaws in the planned expansion of privately run higher education colleges that was unveiled by David Willetts, the higher education minister, in 2011. Little-known private colleges were allowed to recruit unlimited amounts of students so they could compete with established universities.




Taxing a Professor’s Privilege



Megan McArdle:

I’ve been reading Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” You’ll have to wait on my thoughts on the book until they’re a bit more fully formed. As I’ve been reading, though, I keep returning to a question I heard at an economics conference a couple of months back: If we did implement a wealth tax, should it tax tenure?

Professorial tenure is, after all, a valuable asset. As long as you show up and teach your classes, and you don’t make passes at your students or steal from the department’s petty cash drawer, you can draw a paycheck for the rest of your working life. And since the abolition of mandatory retirement ages, that working life can be as long as you like.

Ah, you will say, there are risks: Your school could go out of business, or you might get ill and be unable to work, or inflation could eat away at the value of that paycheck. Just so. All assets are risky. That doesn’t make them worthless; it just means that the price has to take the potential downsides into account.

Why single out professors? you ask. Isn’t this just more academic-bashing? You’re quite right: We shouldn’t single out professors. Everyone with civil-service protections or similar employment guarantees should probably have that asset taxed.




How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation: A Conversation with Sydney Brenner



Elizabeth Dzeng:

I recently had the privilege of speaking with Professor Sydney Brenner, a professor of Genetic medicine at the University of Cambridge and Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine in 2002. My original intention was to ask him about Professor Frederick Sanger, the two-time Nobel Prize winner famous for his discovery of the structure of proteins and his development of DNA sequencing methods, who passed away in November. I wanted to do the classic tribute by exploring his scientific contributions and getting a first hand account of what it was like to work with him at Cambridge’s Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Laboratory for Molecular Biology (LMB) and at King’s College where they were both fellows. What transpired instead was a fascinating account of the LMB’s quest to unlock the genetic code and a critical commentary on why our current scientific research environment makes this kind of breakthrough unlikely today.

It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of Professor Brenner and his colleagues’ contributions to biology. Brenner won the Nobel Prize for establishing Caenorhabditis elegans, a type of roundworm, as the model organism for cellular and developmental biological research, which led to discoveries in organ development and programmed cell death. He made his breakthroughs at the LMB, where beginning in the 1950s, an extraordinary number of successive innovations elucidated our understanding of the genetic code. This code is the process by which cells in our body translate information stored in our DNA into proteins, vital molecules important to the structure and functioning of cells. It was here that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double-helical structure of DNA. Brenner was one of the first scientists to see this ground-breaking model, driving from Oxford, where he was working at the time in the Department of Chemistry, to Cambridge to witness this breakthrough. This young group of scientists, considered renegades at the time, made a series of successive revolutionary discoveries that ultimately led to the creation of a new field called molecular biology.

To begin our interview, I asked Professor Brenner to speak about Professor Sanger and what led him to his Nobel Prize winning discoveries.




Madison School District proposes using screening test to predict teachers’ impact on student success



Molly Beck:

The Madison School Board is considering spending $273,000 on a screening program its creators say can better predict whether prospective teachers will improve student achievement.

The proposed three-year contract with Chicago-based TeacherMatch would provide the district with a system to track and recruit applicants, ask teacher candidates a timed series of questions and assign each applicant a professional development profile to show principals or human resources staff what kind of help applicants may need once hired based on their answers, said Ron Huberman, executive chairman of TeacherMatch.

One board member is concerned that the program puts too much emphasis on the impact candidates may have on student test scores and that the public won’t be able to scrutinize how the screening program judges prospective teachers. And the leader of the local teachers union says computer-based screening tools don’t work as well as personal interviews.




K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Jersey pension system beyond saving at any reasonable cost



Steve Malanga:

For three years now PSI has been warning (see here and here ) that New Jersey had neglected its government employee pension system for so long that the state’s 2010 and 2011 reforms were inadequate to save the system. At some point we said (numerous times) the state would have to admit it could not possibly keep to the refunding schedule it had set for itself.

Yesterday Gov. Christie declared as much when he announced he would help erase the state’s current budget deficit by paring back its pension contributions. But even the payments that Christie announced he couldn’t afford to make amount to about half of what it would cost the state every year to adequately fund its pension system. The numbers, quite frankly, are staggering.

Christie said he would make a nearly $700 million pension payment this year, instead of the $1.6 billion the state originally committed to, and he’s planning to cut next year’s payment to $681 million, from a projected $2.25 billion. The lower figures are what the state estimates it costs to pay for pension benefits that state workers are earning this year; the additional costs are to pay back what Christie describes as the sins of past neglect.




Here Is What I Would Tell the Rutgers Graduating Class of 2014…



PJ O’Rourke

I hear Condoleezza Rice stood you up. You may think it was because about 50 students—.09 percent of your student body—held a “sit-in” at the university president’s office to protest the selection of Secretary Rice as commencement speaker. You may think it was because a few of your faculty—stale flakes from the crust of the turkey pot pie that was the New Left—threatened a “teach-in” to protest the selection of Secretary Rice.

“Sit-in”? “Teach-in”? What century is this?

I think Secretary Rice forgot she had a yoga session scheduled for today.

It’s shame she was busy. You might have heard something useful from a person who grew up poor in Jim Crow Alabama. Who lost a friend and playmate in 1963 when white supremacists bombed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Who became an accomplished concert pianist before she tuned her ear to the more dissonant chords of international relations.

Secretary Rice was Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Denver and received a B.A. cum laude in political science—back before the worst grade a student had ever heard of was a B-.




6 Disturbing Things I Learned Writing Your Textbooks



J.F. Sargent, T.K. Pennywhistle:

Academic textbooks are wildly overpriced. We can pretty much all agree on that. If you’ve ever spent rent money on the required reading materials for your class on the socioeconomic impact of ALF, you know the pain of which I speak. But what most of you probably never imagined is how misinformed, lazy, and opportunist many textbook companies are. I’ve written textbooks for two years. I’ve covered every subject, and I’m here to tell you that …

#6. The Writers Are Unqualified and Probably Have No Interest in the Topic

Ahh, academia — the land of rigorous research standards and carefully thought-out conclusions. Surely this is where our knowledge comes from, handed down on high from those who have spent countless hours with their noses buried in books instead of coke and the genitals of strippers, and who have thus achieved the highest academic accolades. Right?




What HBO Can Teach Colleges About ‘Trigger Warnings’



Conor Friedersdorf:

Collegians all over the country are calling for “trigger warnings,” or “explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them,” the N.Y. Times reports. The wisest activists favor narrowly drawn alerts intended to spare veterans and sexual assault victims from post-traumatic stress. Others want students warned about any content that might stoke anxiety or trauma. Critics of the “trigger warning” movement include academics who worry that requiring alerts in the classroom would chill speech and erode academic freedom. Others argue that the alerts are condescending, showy, or useless.

Strange as it may seem, reflecting on The Sopranos can help us here. The HBO series was as graphically violent as you’d expect of a mob drama: arms and legs are broken to extort protection money; gamblers who can’t cover debts are brutally pummeled; a couple seasons in, I’d seen aggravated assaults, extreme domestic abuse, and more murderous gunshots to heads, chests, and guts than I can recall. Hence my surprise that Season 3, episode four was preceded by a warning I’d never seen. HBO uses standard Pay TV Content Descriptors. I’d been tipped off countless times about “adult content” and “graphic violence.” What I hadn’t known till just prior to that episode is that there’s a special designation for rape:




The Class of 2014 Just Made History in the Worst Imaginable Way



Zak Cheney-Rice:

The news: Congratulations, class of 2014!

Not for graduating — though that’s nice, too — but for earning one of the more dubious distinctions in recent memory: You’ve officially been named “the most indebted class ever.”

According to the Wall Street Journal and data compiled by analyst Mark Kantrowitz, the average loan-holding 2014 college graduate will have to pay back $33,000. That’s up from around $31,000 in 2013 and under $10,000 in 1993:




Digital education could make Americans more competitive, close achievement gap



Sarah Garland:

To technology advocates, these are visions of how technology could transform U.S. classrooms. With a desktop or portable computer, a tablet or even a smartphone available to every student and every teacher, the idea is that school will be better tailored to students’ needs and also better able to prepare them for the sorts of high-skilled, technology-centric jobs that will dominate in the future. It could even help close the achievement gap for disadvantaged students.

“If a teacher has class of 30 students and they don’t have technology, the very best teachers are bouncing from student to student,” said Karen Cator, president of Digital Promise, a nonprofit working with individual school systems that are going high tech. “When students have technology they can be helping themselves in some sense, and the teacher can come in when they’re most needed.”




Fresh Thinking On Public Education: 100 SF School Principals Heading To Deloitte University For Leadership Boost



Tom Foremski

Deloitte, the giant audit and consulting group, is planning to send as many as 100 principals of San Francisco public schools to its Deloitte University in early June, for a three-day leadership program in a bid to help struggling public schools create a generation of highly motivated and college-bound students.

I spoke with Teresa Briggs, vice chair of Deloitte and head of its Western Region, about the venture and what it hopes to achieve. Here are some notes from our conversation:

– Deloitte wanted to help public schools create a college-bound culture as part of its philanthropic activities in giving back to communities. There are studies that show student performance is influenced and connected to the leadership abilities of school principals. Deloitte knew that its leadership courses were very effective for business leaders, why not offer the same to public school principals.




The Teacher Evaluation Test



Mike Antonucci

A lot of arguments in public education revolve around how to marry the measurable and the unmeasurable. Teachers have seniority provisions in their contracts – a measurable factor – because they don’t trust administrators to use unmeasurable and subjective means to evaluate them.

On the other hand, teachers also distrust a host of measurable factors that might be used to evaluate them, most notably student test scores.

They have a point. No one wants to be judged on the performance of others. Still, they’re not teaching in a vacuum. If quality teaching doesn’t result in quality learning, what good is it?

The problem for teachers’ unions is to enunciate a viable means to evaluate teaching that doesn’t sound like a dodge. Ted Nesi, a political reporter for WPRI in Providence, Rhode Island, interviewed the three candidates for president of the Providence Teachers Union and asked them the same simple question: “ Should teacher evaluations be tied to student performance? If no, how would you like to measure a teacher’s success? ”

All three had serious reservations – to varying degrees – about judging teachers on student performance. But it was the second question that elicited the most illuminating answers.




Many teachers face a retirement savings penalty when leaving the profession



Andy Rotherham & Chad Aldeman:

Americans are struggling to save for retirement at a time of still-high unemployment rates, rising college costs and stagnant wages. For many workers, individual circumstances lead to inadequate savings. But for public school teachers, poorly structured retirement policies hinder their future security.

At more than 3 million, teachers are the largest class of U.S. workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Unfortunately, policymakers are undermining the future retirement security of this large and important group of workers. In our recent paper, “Friends Without Benefits: How States Systematically Shortchange Teachers’ Retirement and Threaten Their Retirement Security,” we used pension-plan assumptions for all 50 states and the District of Columbia to estimate that, in the median state, more than half of all teachers won’t qualify for even a minimal pension. Fewer than one in five teachers will work a full career and reach the pension plan’s “normal retirement age.” Most will leave their public service with little retirement savings.

This story doesn’t fit with the popular perception of teacher pensions as more generous than private-sector retirement benefits. That’s because the real story of teacher pensions today involves a small number of relatively big winners and a much larger group of losers.




A Math App That Offers an Unusual Human Touch



Kenneth Chang:

Tabtor is an expensive iPad math-teaching app for kindergartners through sixth graders. Although free to download and try for two weeks, thereafter it costs $50 a month per child.

At first glance, Tabtor — the name is “tablet tutor” mashed together — does not look particularly different from the hundreds of other math offerings in Apple’s app store and the gazillion math-drill software programs on personal computers.

For each problem, there is space on the touch screen to scribble calculations with a finger or a stylus before punching in the answer on an on-screen keypad. A green check mark and a pleasing clanging sword sound greet a correct answer; a wrong one gets a red “X” and a less pleasing clang. There is a second chance to get the problem right.

So what does the $50 a month buy? Unlike any other math teaching app I’ve encountered, it comes with a human being.




Review of the First Three Johns Hopkins Coursera Data Science Courses



Jeff Heaton:

I am currently working towards the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization at Coursera. I am now complete with the first three courses. I posted my initial, and very positive, impressions when I was about half-way through the first four-week block. My impressions are still very favorable at completion. Now that the course is complete, I can post my complete thoughts for the first three courses.

There are a total of nine courses, and a capstone. After completing all 10 requirements you earn the “specialization”. After you complete a course you are given an “online certificate”. You can link this to your Linked In page, or other social media. You can see my first three certificates here.




Big bucks: Up to $80m for technology upgrades and free computers for kids in Santa Fe



Rob Nikolewski:

As a result, the Santa Fe school board recently passed a $55 million Digital Learning Plan that promises to integrate technology for students and teachers, upgrade computer infrastructure and eventually give personal computers to each of the 14,000 students in the district.

Just two years ago, Santa Fe voters approved a bond to provide $12.7 million per year for six years to fund construction and technological enhancements. That comes to $76.2 million. Included in that amount was $2.4 million to buy Apple computers and technology for students in the summer of 2012.

Carl Gruenler, the SFPS chief business officer, told New Mexico Watchdog the majority of the $76.2 million is going to building maintenance, and “approximately 25-33 percent has been spent for technology infrastructure and equipment since 2012.?

So what happened to the $2.4 million for Apple computers?




Report: Achievement gaps smaller among Florida charter school students



Travis Pillow:

Achievement gaps are smaller for Florida’s charter school students than for their peers in traditional public schools, according to the state Department of Education’s latest state-mandated report comparing their student achievement.

Like previous years’ reports, the latest results show charter schools outperforming their district-run counterparts on a range of measures, scoring higher and making larger gains in most of the department’s comparisons. Of the 177 comparisons in the report, more than 150 gave charter schools an edge.
But the report shows school districts gaining ground in some areas. For example, unlike in previous years, traditional public schools matched the learning gains charter schools achieved in math for the student population as a whole.




Why can’t we solve poverty, or solve it through schools?



Jake Seliger:

I’m not that old, and I’ve already seen a lot of proposals for solving “poverty” come and go. Many—think Head Start—are tied up in education. The current debate around education tends to run in two directions: one group wants to improve parenting, or ameliorate poverty, or something along those lines, having seen innumerable correlative studies demonstrating that rich kids on average do better than poor kids at school. The other group—the one I belong to—tends to think that we could do a lot for schools, and especially big urban schools, through some combination of charters, vouchers, and/or weakening the power of teachers’s unions. For more on why the latter group thinks as we do, see the many links in this post.

This has a lot to do with education because, as I noted in the first paragraph, people who are relatively okay with the educational status quo tend to want to address things outside of school first. Diane Ravitch is a great leader for this group. I’ve read two of Ravitch’s books on education—Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform and The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education—and to read her work is to respect her knowledge and erudition. She moved from a strong educational reformer who favored charter schools to someone who… I don’t know how to characterize her current position other than to say she doesn’t favor charters or vouchers. She does observe the many ways particular charter schools haven’t done very well, but in my view they haven’t been worse than the urban schools they competed with, and some have done much better.

Overall, Ravitch wants to reduce poverty, but as noted above I’m skeptical of social or government forces to do so. In Reign of Error, her most recent book—I’m not all the way through it—she says that public schools are better than they’re commonly depicted. She’s somewhat right: relatively wealthy suburban schools are okay. But that pretty much leaves urban schools (L.A., Chicago, New York, Newark) to languish, and those are the areas and schools that are most promising for vouchers.

The final thing I’ll note is that a lot of people favor “more” money for schools. Overall, inflation-adjusted funding has roughly doubled on a per-pupil basis, per the New Yorker article, and overall funding is quite high—including in screwed up districts like Washington D.C.’s. The Great Stagnation also discusses this dynamic. So while “more” money for school districts may or may not be a good thing, it’s apparent that more money does not automatically lead to better results.




A Mississippi School Striving for Excellence



Deborah Fallows:

One warm and misty May morning in Columbus, Mississippi, the lobby of the classroom building at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS) (more) was full of teen-agers milling about, waiting for morning classes to begin.

In one corner of the glassy space was a grandfather clock, probably about 8 feet tall, constructed by one of the students out of brightly colored plastic pieces. (Right.) On the hour, a little white ball would roll down a chute, tripping levers to ring a small chime. Upstairs in one of the science rooms was a 3-D printer, a rough-and-ready contraption that, with a little more luck, is approaching the final stages of actually printing something. Another of the students, a senior, had made it himself. I recognized several other students whom I had seen performing in an after-school stage production, one dressed as Eco-Man in blue and green tights, cape, and mask.

MSMS is a public boarding school in Columbus, occupying a few of the more modest buildings on the grounds of the elegant Mississippi University for Women, is called “The W”. The men who have enrolled at The W since it became co-ed, say they always have a time explaining themselves to those not in the know.




Student Debt Grows Faster at Universities with Highest Paid Administrators



Tamar Lewin:

At the 25 public universities with the highest-paid presidents, both student debt and the use of part-time adjunct faculty grew far faster than at the average state university from 2005 to 2012, according to a new study by the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning Washington research group.

The study, “The One Percent at State U: How University Presidents Profit from Rising Student Debt and Low-Wage Faculty Labor,” examined the relationship between executive pay, student debt and low-wage faculty labor at the 25 top-paying public universities.

The co-authors, Andrew Erwin and Marjorie Wood, found that administrative expenditures at the highest-paying universities outpaced spending on scholarships by more than two to one. And while adjunct faculty members became more numerous at the 25 universities, the share of permanent faculty declined drastically.




New Jersey Per Student $pending up 5% in the past year, Average is $18,891!



Laura Waters:

“New Jersey schools spent an average of $18,891 to educate each student last year, an increase of $866, or almost 5 percent, from 2012,” says the Star Ledger, according to the State’s annual “Taxpayer’s Guide to Education Spending.” On average, costs are up 5% from last year. The highest cost per pupil district is Avalon School District at $43,775 per student and the lowest spending district is Rockaway Borough at $12,587 per student. Also see coverage from The Record, The Press of Atlantic City, and NJ Spotlight.




Children of parents in technical jobs at higher risk for autism



Deborah Mann Lakr:

Children of fathers who are in technical occupations are more likely to have an autism spectrum disorder, according to researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

The findings will be presented Friday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Atlanta.

During participation in the LoneStar LEND program, first author Aisha S. Dickerson, Ph.D., a researcher at UTHealth’s Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences, used the United States government’s Standard Occupational Classification system. Parents were divided into those who had more non-people-oriented jobs (technical) or more people-oriented jobs (non-technical).

Fathers who worked in engineering were two times as likely to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Those who worked in finance were four times more likely and those who worked in health care occupations were six times more likely to have a child on the autism spectrum.




On Education Reform: Spending & Structure



Paul Campos:

The law school reform movement gets a boost from an unexpected source:

It is no mystery what has prompted the current calls for a two-year law degree. It is, quite simply, the constantly increasing cost of legal education . . . If I may advert to my own experience at Harvard, once again: In the year I graduated, tuition at Harvard was $1,000. To describe developments since then, in the words of a recent article:

Over the past 60 years, tuition at Harvard Law School has increased ten-fold in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars. In the early 1950s, a year’s tuition at the school cost approximately $5,100 in 2011 dollars. Over the next two decades this figure more than doubled, so that by 1971 tuition was $11,664 in 2011 dollars. Tuition grew at a (relatively) modest pace over the course of the 1970s, so that by 1981 it was $14,476 in 2011 dollars. Then it climbed rapidly again, rising to $25,698 in 1991, $34,484 in 2001, and nearly $50,000 in 2011, again all in constant dollars.




What’s Your Major? 4 Decades Of College Degrees, In 1 Graph



Quictrung Bui:

In honor of college graduation season, we made a graph. It answers a few questions we had: What is the mix of bachelor’s degrees awarded today, and how has the mix changed over the past several decades?

A few notes:

The persistence of business. Business majors, which include accounting, marketing, operations and real estate, grew even more popular over the past several decades. One in 5 college grads now gets a degree in the field.

The decline of the education major. The education degree saw a dramatic decline, falling from 21 percent of all graduates in 1970 to just 6 percent in 2011. Does this mean there’s a huge shortage of teachers? Not necessarily — it just means that far fewer students who go on to be teachers actually graduate with an education degree. According to the Department of Education, as recently as 1999 roughly two-thirds of new teachers graduated with an undergraduate degree in education. By 2009, that figure fell to just half.




Student Perspectives on Race and Education in Tuscaloosa



Amanda Zamora:

“Skin color doesn’t define your intelligence.”

“I am not what society thinks.”

“Looking forward, not to the past.”

These are just a few of the six-word essays written by high school students in Tuscaloosa, Ala., when asked to describe their perspectives on race and education in America today.

The essays are all the more poignant when paired with photographs by the same students documenting everyday life at two schools on very different sides of the resegregation equation. Sixty years after the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling outlawed official segregation, nearly one in three black students in Tuscaloosa now attends a school more reminiscent of the Jim Crow South.

When my colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones set out to report the story of the dismantling of court orders, closed-room deals and school district decisions that paved the way for resegregation in Tuscaloosa, she knew some of the most important voices would be from students living the consequences of those decisions. So we hatched a plan to enlist them in telling their own stories. As the engagement editor at ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative newsroom, my job is to help build an audience for our work and get the community to participate in our journalism. We wanted the students’ stories to be a vital part of this story from the start.




Intervention with low achieving students: who gets to graduate?



Paul Tough:

For as long as she could remember, Vanessa Brewer had her mind set on going to college. The image of herself as a college student appealed to her — independent, intelligent, a young woman full of potential — but it was more than that; it was a chance to rewrite the ending to a family story that went off track 18 years earlier, when Vanessa’s mother, then a high-achieving high-school senior in a small town in Arkansas, became pregnant with Vanessa.

Vanessa’s mom did better than most teenage mothers. She married her high-school boyfriend, and when Vanessa was 9, they moved to Mesquite, a working-class suburb of Dallas, where she worked for a mortgage company. Vanessa’s parents divorced when she was 12, and money was always tight, but they raised her and her younger brother to believe they could accomplish anything. Like her mother, Vanessa shone in school, and as she grew up, her parents and her grandparents would often tell her that she would be the one to reach the prize that had slipped away from her mother: a four-year college degree.

There were plenty of decent colleges in and around Dallas that Vanessa could have chosen, but she made up her mind back in middle school that she wanted to attend the University of Texas at Austin, the most prestigious public university in the state. By the time she was in high school, she had it all planned out: She would make her way through the nursing program at U.T., then get a master’s in anesthesiology, then move back to Dallas, get a good job at a hospital, then help out her parents and start her own family. In her head, she saw it like a checklist, and in March 2013, when she received her acceptance letter from U.T., it felt as if she were checking off the first item.

Five months later, Vanessa’s parents dropped her off at her dorm in Austin. She was nervous, a little intimidated by the size of the place, but she was also confident that she was finally where she was meant to be. People had warned her that U.T. was hard. “But I thought: Oh, I got this far,” Vanessa told me. “I’m smart. I’ll be fine.”




Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds, Raising Worries



Alan Schwarz:

ATLANTA — More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outside established pediatric guidelines, according to data presented on Friday by an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report, which found that toddlers covered by Medicaid are particularly prone to be put on medication such as Ritalin and Adderall, is among the first efforts to gauge the diagnosis of A.D.H.D. in children below age 4. Doctors at the Georgia Mental Health Forum at the Carter Center in Atlanta, where the data was presented, as well as several outside experts strongly criticized the use of medication in so many children that young.




Reflections on the Future of the Legal Academy: Increased Faculty Workload & Less Pay



The Honorable Antonin Scalia: Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States:

What I want to discuss with you briefly—and I promise to be brief—is whether (to be blunt about it) you have essentially wasted one of your three years here, and could have done the job in two.

It is a current proposal for reform that law students should be permitted to sit for the bar exam and otherwise be eligible to practice law after only two years of study. To be sure, this is not a new idea. In New York, for example, between 1882 and 1911, college graduates needed to complete only two years of law school to sit for the New York bar; only non-graduates had to do the extra year.1 But then, in 1911, the New York Court of Appeals changed the rule to three years—which remains the rule today in almost all jurisdictions. But, now and again, it has been a source of controversy. In the 1970s prominent educators from President Derek C. Bok of Harvard University to President Edward H. Levi of the University of Chicago said publicly that switching to two years was at least worth a try.2 Then in 1999 Judge Richard Posner embraced the idea.3 As did the President of the United States just last year, saying that third-year students would be “better off clerking or practicing in a firm.”4 Finally, joining the chorus—and this was a surprise, at least to me—was the American Bar Association’s Task Force on the Future of Legal Education, which suggested in January of this year that “bar admitting authorities could create paths to licensure with fewer hours than the [current] Standards require by devices such as: (1) accepting applicants who . . . have fewer hours of law-school training than the Standards require; or (2) accepting applicants with two-years of law school credits plus a year of carefully-structured skills-based experience, inside a law school or elsewhere.”5

I vigorously dissent. It seems to me that the law-school-in-two-years proposal rests on the premise that law school is—or ought to be—a trade school. It is not that. It is a school preparing men and women not for a trade but for a profession—- the profession of law. One can practice various aspects of law without knowing much about the whole field. I expect that someone could be taught to be an expert real- estate conveyancer in six weeks, or a tax advisor in six months. And maybe we should train such people—but we should not call them lawyers. Just as someone might become expert in hand surgery without knowing much about the rest of the human body, so also one can become expert in various segments of the law without knowing much about the rest. We should call the former a hand surgeon rather than a doctor; and the latter a real-estate conveyancer, or H&R Block—but not a lawyer. Those of you who have walked the streets of Paris may have noticed (as I have) signs here and there—“Jurisconsult,” for example—advertising the services of people who give legal advice but are not avocats (lawyers). I am not even sure whether one must pass an exam or have any special training to work in such a capacity.




Are affirmative action preferences “worse” than other sorts of admissions preferences?



David Bernstein:

My article on the Schuette case was written before the Supreme Court decided the case, but it will still be useful to those interested in the constitutional and policy debate over affirmative action preferences. Careful readers will note that some of my criticisms of the Sixth Circuit decision also apply to Justice Sotomayor’s dissent. Here’s the abstract:

The question presented to the Supreme Court in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is, “Whether a state violates the Equal Protection Clause by amending its constitution to prohibit race- and sex-based discrimination or preferential treatment in public-university admissions decisions.” Given that the Supreme Court barely tolerates affirmative action preferences, it is exceedingly unlikely to endorse a lower court ruling that overturns a state ban on them.Nevertheless, it is worth examining the reasoning of the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Schuette, because it exemplifies many interesting nuances regarding the debate over the constitutionality of affirmative action preferences, nuances that were mostly ignored in the dissenting opinions. Judge Cole’s opinion demonstrates (1) that despite decades of jurisprudence permitting state university affirmative action preferences only if used for “diversity” purposes, its legal advocates, including federal judges, still act under the assumption that the purpose of preferences is to benefit students who are members of underrepresented minority groups; (2) some affirmative action advocates cling to an obsolete model of American politics that posits that African Americans and members of other minority groups lack any substantial political power; (3) some affirmative action advocates tend to discuss the issue as if the only groups affected are African Americans and whites, neglecting both that Asian Americans tend to be harmed by university admissions’ preferences, and that African Americans are a shrinking minority of those eligible for preferences, with Hispanics a significantly larger and faster-growing demographic group; and (4) affirmative action advocates tend to be dismissive of the claim that race is different and more problematic than other criteria that university officials may consider in admissions, for moral, historical, and practical reasons. While not unassailable, these reasons seem to provide a significant non-arbitrary rationale for state voters to ban official reliance on race and ethnicity.




Congratulations to Class of 2014, the Most Indebted Ever



Phil Izzo:

As college graduates in the Class of 2014 prepare to shift their tassels and accept their diplomas, they leave school with one discouraging distinction: they’re the most indebted class ever.

The average Class of 2014 graduate with student-loan debt has to pay back some $33,000, according to an analysis of government data by Mark Kantrowitz, publisher at student-marketing company Edvisors. Even after adjusting for inflation that’s nearly double the amount borrowers had to pay back 20 years ago.




UCLA prof says stats prove school’s admissions illegally favor blacks



Maxim Lott:

Public universities in California are barred from using race as a factor in admitting students, but a UCLA professor who once served on its admissions oversight team says he has proof they do it anyway.

While the first round of admissions consideration is handled fairly, African-American students are nearly three times as likely to make it out of the “maybe” pile than equally-qualified white students, and more than twice as likely as Asians, according to Tim Groseclose, a political science professor at the school and author of a new book titled, “Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA.”

“UCLA is using racial preferences in admissions,” Groseclose, who made his case using data from 2006-2009, told FoxNews.com.

After a first look results in most applications being either accepted or rejected, a handful of senior university staff sift through those marked for further consideration, according to Groseclose. That’s where the alleged bias happens. He found black applicants were accepted at a 43 percent rate in the second round, while whites were accepted at a 15 percent rate and Asians at an 18 percent rate.




Common App: Admissions Collusion?



Scott Jaschik:

Colleges may soon have a new reason — an antitrust lawsuit — to think twice about their relationship with the Common Application.

CollegeNET, which provides a variety of admissions-related services to college, some in direct competition with the Common Application, sued Common App last week in federal court, charging antitrust violations. And while the suit is only against Common App, it states that some of the 500 colleges that are members have been “co-conspirators” in some of the alleged violations.

When CollegeNET issued a news release last week about having sued Common Application, some admissions leaders were scratching their heads about how a service to process applications could violate antitrust law. The press release provided few details.

Related: Financial Aid Leveraging.




Confessions of a Grade Inflator Between the grubbing and the blubbering, grading fairly is just not worth the fight.



Rebecca Schumann:

n the classroom, I can be formidable: I’ve been known to drill-sergeant lethargic students out of their chairs and demand burpees; I am a master of the I’m Not Mad, I’m Just Disappointed scowl. And yet, when it comes to assigning an end-of-semester letter value to their results, I am a grade-A milquetoast. It’s grading time once again, and I’m a softie as usual: Of my current 33 students, 20 are getting either A’s or A-minuses.

It’s not that I just “give” students good grades. Each course I teach has a meticulous assessment breakdown, taking into account participation, homework, quizzes, and essays—and for the latter, I grade with a rubric, which both minimizes griping and allows me to be slightly fair. But even with all of these “hard-ass” measures, the ugly truth is that to get below a B+ in my class, you have to be a total screw-up. I’m still strict with my scale—it’s just that said scale now goes from “great” to “awesome.” It’s pathetic, I know. But when you see what professors today are up against, maybe you’ll understand.

If I graded truly fairly—as in, a C means actual average work—the “customers” would do their level best to ruin my life. Granted, there exist professors whose will to power out-powers grade-gripers. There are stalwarts who remain impervious to students’ tenacious complaints, which can be so single-minded that one wonders what would happen if they had applied one-fifteenth of that focus to their coursework. I admire and cherish those professors, but I am not one of them. You know why? Because otherwise, at the end of every semester, my life would become a 24-hour brigade of this:




2+2=What? Parents rail against Common Core math



Michael Rubinkam:

What could be so horrible? Grade-school math.

As schools around the U.S. implement national Common Core learning standards, parents trying to help their kids with math homework say that adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing has become as complicated as calculus.

They’re stumped by unfamiliar terms like “rectangular array” and “area model.” They wrestle with division that requires the use of squares, slashes and dots. They rage over impenetrable word problems.

Related: Math Forum audio & video.




Inside UK’s Park View academy: Religion row school ‘is victim of its success’



Richard Adams:

asan Sajad is a year-11 student at Park View academy in Birmingham. He should be thinking about sitting his GCSEs shortly, but his school’s emergence at the centre of a political furore about alleged Islamist takeovers has given him something else to worry about: his future.

“There’s a chance we may be sidelined due to what’s come up in the news. People may say, oh they are from Park View, they’ve been part of the whole Trojan horse scandal, so let’s not give them a place in a sixth form or university later on. That could be a possibility,” Sajad said.

A few months ago that would not have been a concern for Sajad or his classmates. Park View was warmly praised by Ofsted’s head, Sir Michael Wilshaw, and its inspectors for achieving academic results well above the national average, all the more remarkable given its location in Alum Rock, a deprived mini-suburb of Birmingham and its high proportion – 70% – of pupils eligible for free school meals.

But that changed in February with the emergence of the now-infamous Trojan horse document alleging a citywide Islamist plot to hijack state schools in the area, catapulting it into the media glare. Claims of outside meddling, indoctrination and bullying of non-Muslim staff have engulfed it and other schools in Birmingham, and different parts of the country including Bradford and Manchester.




For Sale: Student Profiles



Stephanie Simon:

Each year, more than 2 million middle school and high school students fill out comprehensive surveys for the National Research Center for College & University Admissions detailing their academic records, their athletic skills, their religious leanings, their aspirations.
In short, it’s “their hopes and dreams,” said Ryan Munce, the group’s vice president. He compiles profiles on each child.

Playbook: Brock launches Koch unit
Poll: Clinton sweeps GOP in Ohio
Report: Sterling calls Obama ‘flippant’
For sale: Student ‘hopes and dreams’
Are student files private? It depends.
Fannie, Freddie reform to get harder
Then he sells them.

The recent flurry of interest in updating federal privacy law focuses on preventing children’s personal information from being sold without parental consent. Left unnoticed: The huge and lucrative market of peddling profiles with student consent — even when that consent may not be entirely informed.




U.S. Students from Educated Families Lag in International Tests



Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson and Ludger Woessmann:

“The big picture of U.S. performance on the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is straightforward and stark: It is a picture of educational stagnation…. Fifteen-year olds in the U.S. today are average in science and reading literacy, and below average in mathematics, compared to their counterparts in [other industrialized] countries.”

U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan spoke these grim words on the bleak December day in late 2013 when the international tests in math, science, and literacy were released. No less disconcerting was the secretary’s warning that the nation’s educational problems are not limited to certain groups or specific places. The “educational challenge in America is not just about poor kids in poor neighborhoods,” he said. “It’s about many kids in many neighborhoods. The [test] results underscore that educational shortcomings in the United States are not just the problems of other people’s children.”

In making his comments, Secretary Duncan challenged those who cling to an old belief that the nation’s educational challenges are confined to its inner cities. Most affluent Americans remain optimistic about the schools in their local community. In 2011, Education Next asked a representative sample to evaluate both the nation’s schools and those in their own community. The affluent were especially dubious about the nation’s schools—only 15 percent conceded them an A or a B. Yet 54 percent gave their local schools one of the two top ratings.

Public opinion is split on how well the nation’s schools educate students of different abilities. In 2013 Education Next asked the public whether local schools did a good job of teaching talented students. Seventy-three percent said the local schools did “somewhat” or “extremely” well at the task, as compared to only 45 percent who thought that was true of their capacity to teach the less-talented.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org.




How Teacher Quality Became a top Tier Issue



The Joyce Foundation:

A decade ago, Joyce decided to fund research and advocacy on the importance of placing a highly effective teacher in each classroom, the best ways to identify and reward excellent teachers, and ways to support those who need additional help improving their work.

Coinciding with our ten-year focus on teacher quality, Bellwether has released Genuine Progress, Great Challenges, a report that documents how the teacher quality movement took hold and propelled policy changes in dozens of states. Along with the report, the interactive narrative above tells the story of progress to date and priorities ahead.

In the next ten years to implement and improve upon the policies we know work best for students and teachers. Children need this. Parents demand this. Teachers deserve this.




Google Apps for Schools – Eric Schmidt Has an Interest. Is It a Conflict?



Steve Lohr:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York last month appointed a three-person commission to offer thoughts on the use of technology in schools.

The group, the governor’s office said in a statement, will be “charged with advising the state on how to best invest” the $2 billion the governor plans to raise in a “Smart Schools” bond issue in the fall.

Eric E. Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, is one of the three, but his appointment raised some eyebrows. Mr. Schmidt’s company has a commercial interest in seeing more Chromebook computers, which run Google’s Chrome web software, and the company’s productivity applications, Google Apps, being used in schools.

And Mr. Schmidt’s appointment struck Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit advocacy group with a history of pursuing Google, mostly on privacy issues, as a conflict of interest. Last month, it sent a letter of protest to Mr. Cuomo’s office, and got no reply.




Higher Education Spending & Tuition Growth Climate: Jobless in Two Days



Colleen Flaherty:

Like so many institutions, Quinnipiac University has struggled at times to maintain its financial footing since the recession. And like their counterparts elsewhere, Quinnipiac professors have borne the brunt of that struggle, seeing a salary freeze and stalled hiring along the way. But faculty members say that no one saw last week’s rapid-fire round of full-time faculty cuts coming, and they’re still “reeling” from the news.

Beyond the unusually quick timeline for the cuts – deans and department chairs were given just two days to decide whom to lay off – the matter has raised concerns about shared governance. Faculty members say they have no idea whether such cuts are really necessary, given their lack of involvement in the decision and the fact that Quinnipiac simultaneously announced it will hire additional faculty members next year in other “growth” programs.

“There’s shock, disbelief, confusion – we’re really just still reeling from this,” said a faculty member who did not want to be named, citing concerns about job security. “I don’t know how to express to you, in terms of information, how little we got [about the cuts].”




Madison school board’s Ed Hughes: Don’t extend Teacher Union contract without rethinking hiring process



Pat Schneider:

It’s not a good idea for the Madison School District to extend its labor contract with teachers through the 2015-2016 school year without renegotiating it, says school board member Ed Hughes.

Hughes wants Madison School District administrators — especially school principals — to have the ability to offer jobs to the best teacher candidates before they are snapped up by other districts.

One way to accomplish that would be to drop a labor contract provision giving Madison teachers the opportunity to transfer into open positions before external candidates can be offered those jobs, Hughes says.

“To take the collective bargaining agreement in its current form and just change the date without any discussion, to my mind, is creating a potential impediment to our important efforts to attract a highly qualified and diverse workforce,” Hughes said Tuesday.

Hughes said that a labor contract that includes a “last hired, first fired” provision also hampers efforts to hire teachers with experience in racially and ethnically diverse classrooms.

“Why would someone with 15 years experience in Janesville come to Madison and be the first one on the chopping block if there are layoffs?” he asked. “I’m not proposing a specific solution, but we need to address these issues in a collaborative way so we’re not handcuffing ourselves from bringing in the best teachers.”

Related: Act 10, Madison Teachers, Inc and Ed Hughes.

Emphasizing adult employment: Newark School Reform and retired Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman.

Mr Hughes wrote one of the more forthright quotes on local school matters in 2005:

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

Tea leaves: Mr. Hughes was just replaced as President of the Madison School Board. Interestingly, he ran unopposed in three (!) elections. The candor is appreciated, but were there similar comments during the past few years?




Lectures Aren’t Just Boring, They’re Ineffective, Too, Study Finds



Aleszu Bajak:

Are your lectures droning on? Change it up every 10 minutes with more active teaching techniques and more students will succeed, researchers say. A new study finds that undergraduate students in classes with traditional stand-and-deliver lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use more stimulating, so-called active learning methods.

“Universities were founded in Western Europe in 1050 and lecturing has been the predominant form of teaching ever since,” says biologist Scott Freeman of the University of Washington, Seattle. But many scholars have challenged the “sage on a stage” approach to teaching science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses, arguing that engaging students with questions or group activities is more effective.

To weigh the evidence, Freeman and a group of colleagues analyzed 225 studies of undergraduate STEM teaching methods. The meta-analysis, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that teaching approaches that turned students into active participants rather than passive listeners reduced failure rates and boosted scores on exams by almost one-half a standard deviation. “The change in the failure rates is whopping,” Freeman says. And the exam improvement—about 6%—could, for example, “bump [a student’s] grades from a B– to a B.”

“This is a really important article—the impression I get is that it’s almost unethical to be lecturing if you have this data,” says Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard University who has campaigned against stale lecturing techniques for 27 years and was not involved in the work. “It’s good to see such a cohesive picture emerge from their meta-analysis—an abundance of proof that lecturing is outmoded, outdated, and inefficient.”

Although there is no single definition of active learning approaches, they include asking students to answer questions by using handheld clickers, calling on individuals or groups randomly, or having students clarify concepts to each other and reach a consensus on an issue.




K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Just Released: Young Student Loan Borrowers Remained on the Sidelines of the Housing Market in 2013



Meta Brown, Sydnee Caldwell, and Sarah Sutherland:

Last year, our blog presented results from the FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel (CCP) indicating that, at a time of unprecedented growth in student debt, student borrowers were collectively retreating from housing and auto markets. In this post, we compare our 2012 findings to the news for 2013.

Between 2012 and 2013, U.S. auto and housing markets recovered substantially. The CoreLogic national house price index rose by 11 percent from December 2012 to December 2013. According to the Los Angeles Times, “It was the [auto] industry’s best year since 2007.” Last summer, this blog post discussed the sources of the ongoing auto recovery. Here we pose two questions: What part have young borrowers, with and without student debt, played in the recent housing and auto market recoveries? And, have the housing and auto purchases of young student borrowers at last accelerated past those of nonstudent borrowers, to once again reflect their skill and earnings advantages?

The share of twenty-five-year-olds with student debt continued to increase in 2013, as the group’s average student loan balance reached $20,926. For those twenty-five-year-olds with student loans, student debt now comprises 69 percent of the debt side of their balance sheets. Given the increased popularity of student loans, some have questioned how taking on extensive debt early in life has affected young workers’ post-schooling economic activity.

Continuing to grow K-12 spending on top of property taxes is not a good long term strategy.




Schooled: Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education.



Dale Russakoff:

Late one night in December, 2009, a black Chevy Tahoe in a caravan of cops and residents moved slowly through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Newark. In the back sat the Democratic mayor, Cory Booker, and the Republican governor-elect of New Jersey, Chris Christie. They had become friendly almost a decade earlier, during Christie’s years as United States Attorney in Newark, and Booker had invited him to join one of his periodic patrols of the city’s busiest drug corridors.

The ostensible purpose of the tour was to show Christie one of Booker’s methods of combatting crime. But Booker had another agenda that night. Christie, during his campaign, had made an issue of urban schools. “We’re paying caviar prices for failure,” he’d said, referring to the billion-dollar annual budget of the Newark public schools, three-quarters of which came from the state. “We have to grab this system by the roots and yank it out and start over. It’s outrageous.”




U.S. children read, but not well or often: report



Andrew Seaman:

Although American children still spend part of their days reading, they are spending less time doing it for pleasure than decades ago, with significant gaps in proficiency, according to a report released on Monday.

The San Francisco-based nonprofit Common Sense Media, which focuses on the effects of media and technology on children, published the report, which brings together information from several national studies and databases.

“It raises an alarm,” said Vicky Rideout, the lead author of the report. “We’re witnessing a really large drop in reading among teenagers and the pace of that drop is getting faster and faster.”

The report found that the percentage of nine-year-old children reading for pleasure once or more per week had dropped from 81 percent in 1984 to 76 percent in 2013, based on government studies. There were even larger decreases among older children.




High School Seniors in U.S. Fail to Show Reading, Math Progress



Janet Lorin:

U.S. high school seniors, whose school years have encompassed the sweeping education initiatives of two presidents, failed to demonstrate improvement in math or reading on a national exam.

Only 38 percent of those tested in 2013 scored as proficient readers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” released today by the Education Department. Three-quarters failed to show math proficiency. The scores were little changed from 2009, when the test was last given.

“Stagnation is unacceptable,” David Driscoll, chairman of the board that administers the test, said in a statement. “Achievement at this very critical point in a student’s life must be improved to ensure success after high school.”

The seniors were in the first grade when President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law. The program called for schools to demonstrate yearly progress and to show that all students are proficient on state standardized tests by 2014. Most states have received waivers under President Barack Obama, whose Race to the Top program has pledged $4.35 billion in state grants in four years to boost education standards.

The Nation’s Report Card shows what students know in various subject areas and compares achievement data among states and demographic groups. Tests are also given in science, history and other subjects. Just 12 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in American history, according to a 2011 report.

Related: wisconsin2.org.




K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Food Stamp Growth, including Wisconsin



Atif Mian & Amir Sufi:

Why exactly has there been such a sharp rise in food stamp usage? Is it general economic weakness? Failed economic policies? What do the data say?

The USDA provides state-level information on food stamp usage, so we can see exactly where food stamp program enrollment increased the most. Here is the growth in food stamp usage from 2006 to 2009, with darker red states those that had the largest increase:




Lessons From the World’s Best Public School



Grant Birmingham:

Jinjing Liu, a 15-year-old ninth-grader at Meilong Intermediate in central Shanghai—and part of the best education system in the world’s most populous country—is ticking off her normal class schedule: “Physics, chemistry, math, Chinese, English, Chinese literature, geography…the usual stuff,” she says in impeccable English.

That’s not Jinjing’s school day schedule; that’s her workload each and every Sunday. The Lord may have rested on the seventh day, but Jinjing studies, from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. She relates this over lunch on a Saturday afternoon, “the only day,” she acknowledges, that she has “any free time to relax.” And lest you think she is some whiz-bang academic geek on the fast track to Tsinghua, China’s M.I.T., think again. Ask who else in her high school has that Sunday routine and she says, “Pretty much everyone.”

Over the past several years, the Shanghai public school system has drawn global envy—and stirred controversy—by acing an international test given every few years by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that seeks to measure the quality of school systems globally. In 2009 (the first time the city participated in the test) and again in 2012, Shanghai finished first out of 66 locations surveyed in the so-called PISA exams (Program for International Student Assessment) in the three key disciplines: reading, science and mathematics. At the same time, the test showed the United States dropping lower in the global standings in all three disciplines, most precipitously in math.




Charter, public schools and the chasm between



Javier Hernandez:

When Neil J. McNeill Jr., principal of the Middle School for Art and Philosophy in Brooklyn, learned that fewer than 4 percent of his students had passed state exams in math last year, he was frustrated.
It so happened that he shared a building with one of the top-performing schools in the Brownsville neighborhood, Kings Collegiate Charter School, where 37 percent of the students had passed, well above the New York City middle-school average of 27 percent.

Mr. McNeill had long been curious about the charter school’s strategies: It, too, served large numbers of low-income black students, many from the same neighborhoods. But the two schools operated in their own bubbles, with separate public-address systems and different textbooks. And as a matter of practice, they did not talk about academics.




Illinois: Different standards for different students



Diane Rado:

Under a dramatic new approach to rating public schools, Illinois students of different backgrounds no longer will be held to the same standards — with Latinos and blacks, low-income children and other groups having lower targets than whites for passing state exams, the Tribune has found.

In reading, for example, 85 percent of white third- through eighth-grade students statewide will be expected to pass state tests by 2019, compared with about 73 percent for Latinos and 70 percent for black students, an analysis of state and federal records shows.

The concept is part of a fundamental and, according to critics, troubling shift in how public schools and students will be judged after the federal government recently allowed Illinois to abandon unpopular requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

A key NCLB measure long considered unreachable — that 100 percent of students must pass state exams — will be eliminated.

But the complex new approach of different standards for different groups is troubling to civil rights activists, who are not convinced that school districts will be held accountable for failing to educate minority students, and to some local educators, who say the lowered expectations will send a negative message to students.

“You’re potentially sending a message that it’s OK for some kids to not do as well,” said Timothy Truesdale, assistant superintendent in Cicero’s Morton High School District 201, where almost all students are Latino and low-income, and test scores have been dismal for years.

Via: Kaleem Caire.




Cincinnati’s achievement gap initiatives



Kim McGuire:

When educators nationwide want to look at proven ways to turn around a struggling urban school system, this is the city they visit.

Over a decade, Cincinnati Public Schools’ graduation rate has jumped from 50 to 80 percent. And in the past five years, the reading and math proficiency of its elementary students has climbed in many schools.

Those gains have been fueled by big improvements in the performance of black students, who make up more than half of the district’s 30,000 students. In 2006, 2007 and 2010, black students’ graduation rates surpassed those of whites.

Via Molly Beck.

Cincinnati spent $602,605,253 during 2013 [PDF] for 33,000 students or $18,261/student.

Madison plans to spend $402,265,253 for 25,107 full time and 2,079 pre-k students (about 14,800/student) during the 2014-2015 school year [detailed budget package 2.5mb pdf]




Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding



Matt Richtel:

The event was part of a national educational movement in computer coding instruction that is growing at Internet speeds. Since December, 20,000 teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade have introduced coding lessons, according to Code.org, a group backed by the tech industry that offers free curriculums. In addition, some 30 school districts, including New York City and Chicago, have agreed to add coding classes in the fall, mainly in high schools but in lower grades, too. And policy makers in nine states have begun awarding the same credits for computer science classes that they do for basic math and science courses, rather than treating them as electives.

There are after-school events, too, like the one in Mill Valley, where 70 parents and 90 children, from kindergartners to fifth graders, huddled over computers solving animated puzzles to learn the basics of computer logic.




College Grads Have Diplomas — and Lots of Optimism



Kathleen Madigan:

College graduates are wearing caps and gowns–and rose-colored glasses.

A new survey of college grads shows a high level of optimism about job prospects. What the Class of 2014 may not realize is that their predecessors were also upbeat about their job prospects, only to have their expectations dashed on the rocks of a weak recovery.

The Accenture 2014 College Graduate Employment Survey, released Wednesday, shows 69% of this year’s class think they will have a job within six months of graduating. Another 11% have already accepted a job.




Proposed changes to storied IB program roil Denver high school



Alan Gottlieb & Kate Schimel:

When the Saturday morning meeting about proposed changes to George Washington High School’s International Baccalaureate program got off to a raucous, even unruly start in the school library, a mixed group of IB and non-IB students decided to take matters into their own hands.

As angry parents who had expected an open forum but found themselves in a less interactive session tried to shout down Denver Public Schools administrators, a group of about 20 students calmly retreated to a computer lab and spent 90 minutes devising their own list of recommendations.
The student gathering was impassioned but calm and when two students started talking at once, one of their peers chimed in with “C’mon, guys, let’s not be like the parents.”

For their part, parents said they had legitimate reasons to be angry. They cited a letter penned last week by GW Principal Micheal Johnson that promised the meeting would “address any questions or concerns that may arise about our future direction.” Instead, DPS officials made it clear from the outset that they were not going to answer questions but rather would hold “breakout sessions” on “becoming a destination high school,” “improving communications and school culture,” and ensuring academic excellence for all students.”

Parents said they felt impending changes to one of DPS’ most academically successful programs were sprung on them with little notice and no opportunity for them to provide input. “This was all done sub rosa,” said Leslie Lilly, whose son is an IB program 10th-grader.

Related: Denver spends $1,581,688,230 for 84,000 students or $18,830 per student (Page 89 of the 469 page 2013-2014 budget document [PDF]. Interestingly, prominence is given to “general fund” spending on page 25, not total spending) Madison seems to have done this in its most recent budget documents as well. I fail to understand how ignoring total spending vis a vis “general fund” makes sense. The mission of public school districts is to educate their students. End of statement.

Madison spends about $15,000/student – see the 2014-2015 budget documents, here.




Young Minds in Critical Condition



Michael Roth:

It happens every semester. A student triumphantly points out that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is undermining himself when he claims “the man who reflects is a depraved animal,” or that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for self-reliance is in effect a call for reliance on Emerson himself. Trying not to sound too weary, I ask the student to imagine that the authors had already considered these issues.

Instead of trying to find mistakes in the texts, I suggest we take the point of view that our authors created these apparent “contradictions” in order to get readers like us to ponder more interesting questions. How do we think about inequality and learning, for example, or how can we stand on our own feet while being open to inspiration from the world around us? Yes, there’s a certain satisfaction in being critical of our authors, but isn’t it more interesting to put ourselves in a frame of mind to find inspiration in them?

Our best college students are very good at being critical. In fact being smart, for many, means being critical. Having strong critical skills shows that you will not be easily fooled. It is a sign of sophistication, especially when coupled with an acknowledgment of one’s own “privilege.”




Our Generous Uncle Sam: Lenient College Debt Rules Encourage Students To Keep Borrowing And Hunt For “Public Service” Jobs



George Leaf:

Our Generous Uncle Sam: Lenient College Debt Rules Encourage Students To Keep Borrowing And Hunt For “Public Service” Jobs

People keep talking about the high burden of college debt, which now surpasses credit card debt. And the federal government is doing something to help.

Unfortunately, what it is doing makes the problem worse.

Student loan debt has risen more than any other category, according to a February report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That’s surprising because college enrollments (and also enrollments in many graduate and professional schools) have been declining.

So why is that student debt mountain still growing?

Instead of paying their debts down, many graduates are either keeping their loan balances steady or even allowing them to increase. About 17 percent of student borrowers are currently delinquent, but many more who aren’t officially delinquent have avoided that only by taking advantage of Uncle Sam’s generosity with taxpayer money.

One of the “generous” features of federal loans permits students to defer their payments. They can simply claim that they impose “economic hardship” or they can return to school. Just by enrolling half-time, the student can qualify for more loans and can use the money not just to pay for tuition, but to help cover living expenses.




Princeton president: Graduating college with $100k debt? ‘Something’s gone wrong in your financial planning’



Nicole Mulvaney:

PLAINSBORO — If you’re an undergraduate leaving a four-year institution owing $100,000 or more in debt, “something’s gone wrong in your financial planning,” according to Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber.

“It’s highly atypical of what you see coming out of colleges,” said Eisgruber, speaking before about 150 business officials today at a Princeton Regional Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

After serving as Princeton’s provost for nine years, Eisgruber was named the university’s 20th president in July after Shirley Tilghman stepped down. In his remarks today, Eisgruber stressed the necessity of obtaining an undergraduate degree to compete in the current job market, debunking claims in news media, he said, that four-year degrees are no longer worth the increasing costs.

“If you talk to labor economists who study higher education about those kinds of topics, they are baffled by that kind of coverage in the press, because the case economically for the value of higher education is extraordinary,” Eisgruber said. “The premium from a college education today is higher than it has been at any point in our history.”

To justify this, Eisgruber referenced economists’ figures for the value of an undergraduate degree: between 7.5 percent and 15.2 percent annually in return on investment, he said.

“Think about that: How many investments can you make where the anticipated return is about 10 percent compounding?” Eisgruber asked.




The College Bottleneck in the American Opportunity Structure



Richard V. Reeves and Quentin Karpilow:

Note: Part of a two-week series devoted to exploring what we can learn about social mobility from Joseph Fishkin’s new book, Bottlenecks.

Bottlenecks control the flow of future opportunities, according to Fishkin, and they can take the form of developmental opportunities, instrumental goods (like money), or a qualifications. In the U.S. today, one qualification acts a quintessential bottleneck: the college degree.

Qualification bottlenecks

Simply put, qualification bottlenecks are:

“Educational credentials, test scores, and other requirements that one must fulfill in order to pursue some path or range of paths to valued ends.” (Fishkin, Bottlenecks, p. 156)

While developmental bottlenecks are concerned with skills-building opportunities, qualification bottlenecks relate to the requirements for pursuing a particular life path.

Of course, in many cases, developmental and qualification bottlenecks are interrelated. Scoring well on the SAT is often a pre-requisite for going to an elite college, making it a qualification bottleneck. Elite colleges, however, offer educational and skills-building opportunities that are often hard to find in other post-secondary institutions.




Competency and Affordability



Paul Fain:

The $10,000 bachelor’s degree remains elusive. But Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America has unveiled self-paced, competency-based degrees that students should be able to complete for that price, or less.

The private university’s regional accreditor, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, last week gave a green light to online bachelor’s degrees in health care management and communications from College for America, which is a nonprofit subsidiary of the university.

The college first began enrolling students last year. Until this week its sole option was an associate degree in general studies.

Tuition and fees at College for America are $1,250 per six-month term. The college uses a subscription-style model in which students can complete assessments at their own speed. The associate degree is designed for students to complete in an average of two years — at a cost of $5,000.
The new bachelor’s degrees will be stacked on top of associate degrees, college officials said. That means students must first complete the associate degree — or transfer in with one from elsewhere — with the bachelor’s being the second half of the curriculum.




10 Hour Jet Cards | College Tours



Magellan Jets:

We know that this is a very hectic time of the year for clients with children deciding on which college to attend, and everyone knows that the best way to learn about a college is to visit the campus!

That is why for a limited time we are offering 10 Hour Jet Cards starting at $43,500 to help you and your child see their prospective campus before making their decision! Let us take care of the headaches so you can concentrate on what is important…Your child’s future!




How to Fill the Skills Gap: Bring Back Apprenticeships



Robert Maxim:

Manufacturing is growing in the United States, but many companies claim that they face a “skills gap.” These companies have unfilled vacancies, but say that unemployed workers and recent high school graduates do not have the technical knowledge needed to fill them. Apprenticeships have historically taught students the necessary skills for a career in manufacturing. However, there has been a sharp decline in apprenticeships across the United States, some 40 percent over the past decade, and cash-strapped state budgets have forced schools to cut technical education in favor of four-year college preparatory curricula.




Harvard to adopt student honesty pledge



Sean Coughlin:

Harvard University is going to introduce an “honour code” in which students will promise not to cheat.

It will be the first time the prestigious US university has asked students to make a public commitment not to plagiarise or cheat in their coursework and exams.

In 2012 the university faced its biggest-ever cheating scandal.

The proposals will mean students at Harvard from 2015 agreeing to an “affirmation of integrity”.

“Honour codes” – or “honor codes” in the American spelling – are used by a number of US universities as a way of discouraging students from cheating in exams or submitting material that has been copied from the internet.




Poll: Prestigious Colleges Won’t Make You Happier In Life Or Work



Anya Kamnetz:

There’s plenty of anxiety in the U.S. over getting into a top college. But a new Gallup poll suggests that, later in life, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as we think. In fact, when you ask college graduates whether they’re “engaged” with their work or “thriving” in all aspects of their lives, their responses don’t vary one bit whether they went to a prestigious college or not.

The surprising findings come in a survey of 29,650 college graduates of all ages by Gallup pollsters working with researchers at Purdue University. The poll asked graduates a range of questions designed to measure how well they are doing in life across factors such as income and “engagement” in their jobs and careers.

The survey set a high bar. It found that 39 percent of college grads overall say they’re “engaged” at work (which is 10 points higher than the population at large). And, while almost 5 in 6 self-report doing great in at least one sphere — whether sense of purpose, financial security, physical health, close relationships or community pride — only 11 percent are “thriving” in all five areas of well-being.

And here’s the kicker.




Get a College-Level Computer Science Education with These Free Courses



Melanie Pinola:

We’re lucky to have access to so many excellent free online courses for just about anything you want to study, including computer science. Here’s a curriculum list that strings various free computing courses into the equivalent of a college bachelor’s degree.

aGupieWare, an independent app developer, surveyed the curricular requirements for computer science programs at several of the US’s top universities. It then developed a similar program using 15 free online courses from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, and other sources. Like formal college programs, the courses are broken into introductory classes, core classes, and electives.

While this won’t get you an actual college degree, you can save tens of thousands of dollars rolling your own education. (And you might also be able to get formal college credit through exams.)




Scaling a University



Anthony Finkelstein:

Regular readers will probably appreciate that I occasionally write to exorcise my managerial angst. This may not make for enthralling reading, but needs must. So, I have been giving thought to the problem of universities and scale.

The problem here is that many of the mechanisms, both formal and informal, by which universities conventionally operate, do not scale. They are built upon institutions that are physically, more or less, in one place. These institutions are constituted of a small number of departments, perhaps loosely clustered in coherent faculties, where the departments are small enough for all the members of staff to know each other and for the Head to be able to both run the department and be a peer to the senior staff. The departments are the primary locus of student engagement and hold the main responsibilties in respect of day-to-day management. The universities are dependent upon broad participation in collective governance and on a shared understanding of a common operating model. They depend too on a straightforward and transparent allocation of financial responsibilities and schemes of delegation.

There are very few universities for which these operational conditions hold. Put simply most research intensive institutions outgrew the established mechanisms and associated organisational models perhaps ten or more years ago. Much of the recent story of university management has been a process of catch-up in which we have sought to transition from a scheme of working that could no longer be sustained to an approach that respects the realities of increased scale. This is the genesis of ‘faculties’ with executive responsibilities, coordinating ‘schools’, ‘research institutes’, ‘clusters’, ‘hubs’, ‘programmes’ and all the varied organisational forms that have emerged.




The radically sensible idea that’s lowering America’s massive monthly student debt payments



Matt Phillips:

As we all know, US student debt is soaring. With a relentless rise, student debt has become the second-highest form of consumer debt in the US in recent years. In the fourth quarter, the amount of student debt outstanding hit $1.1 trillion. (This chart doesn’t show mortgage debt, which is about a dozen times as big.) But at the same time , there’s a crucial transformation going on. That’s why this chart, below, is important. It shows more people have been availing of a couple of different federal programs that lower the monthly repayments on student loans. The income-based repayment program (IBR) was instituted by the US Department of Education in 2009. It caps monthly loan payments at 15% of the borrower’s discretionary income and forgives loans after 25 years. A separate repayment plan, known as pay-as-you-earn (PAYE), was introduced in December 2012. It is aimed at helping young Americans who graduated into the miserable economy of the Great Recession. (It is only available to those who took out their first loan after Oct. 1, 2007.) It caps monthly payments at 10% of discretionary income and forgives loans after 20 years.

People seem to think these programs are a good deal, as usage of them is growing fast. In a report, analysts from Moody’s noted that the balance of all federal direct loans in repayment—which includes loans that are in forbearance and deferment—under these two programs was about 20% as of the end of March. That’s up from 14% in June 2013.




Online Learning: A Bachelor’s Level Computer Science Program Curriculum



agupieware:

A few months back we took an in-depth look at MIT’s free online Introduction to Computer Science course, and laid out a self-study time table to complete the class within four months, along with a companion post providing learning benchmarks to chart your progress. In the present article, I’ll step back and take a much more broad look at com-sci course offerings available for free on the internet, in order to answer a deceptively straightforward question: is it possible to complete the equivalent of a college bachelor’s degree in computer science through college and university courses that are freely available online? And if so, how does one do so?

The former question is more difficult to answer than it may at first appear. There are, of course, tons of resources relating to computer science and engineering, computer programming, software engineering, etc. that can easily be found online with a few simple searches. However, despite this fact, it is very unlikely that you would find a free, basic computer science curriculum offered in one complete package from any given academic source. The reason for this is fairly obvious. Why pay $50,000 a year to go to Harvard, for example, if you could take all the exact same courses online for free?




In Pursuit of Knowledge, and Profit How universities aid and abet patent trolls



Daniel Engber:

A few weeks ago, administrators at Penn State University did something they believed had never been attempted in American academia: The school put about 70 engineering patents up for auction and tried to sell them to the highest bidder. They weren’t so successful—not many patents sold—but the project has disturbing implications. What if all this intellectual property, based on research done at a public institution, were to end up in the hands of someone less interested in innovation than in hauling companies to court? What if Penn State auctioned its inventions to a greedy patent troll?

It wouldn’t be the first time that an institute of higher learning had partnered up with patent trolls, or mimicked their behavior. Universities and patent trolls have some major traits in common: Both make money off of legal rights; both let other businesses implement ideas and then pinch a portion of the revenue; both purport to bring that money back to those innovators who most deserve it. Looked at from a distance, and with squinted eyes, a school might seem to be a patent troll itself—and that resemblance is growing stronger.




‘What could be more interesting than how the mind works?’



Colleen Walsh:

Steven Pinker follows Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Martha Minow, and E.O. Wilson in the Experience series, interviews with Harvard faculty members covering the reasons they became teachers and scholars, and the personal journeys, missteps included, behind their professional success. Interviews with Melissa Franklin, Stephen Greenblatt, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Helen Vendler, and Walter Willett will appear in coming weeks.

The brain is Steven Pinker’s playground. A cognitive scientist and experimental psychologist, Pinker is fascinated by language, behavior, and the development of human nature. His work has ranged from a detailed analysis of how the mind works to a best-seller about the decline in violence from biblical times to today.

Raised in Montreal, Pinker was drawn early to the mysteries of thought that would drive his career, and shaped in part by coming of age in the ’60s and early ’70s, when “society was up for grabs,” it seemed, and nature vs. nurture debates were becoming more complex and more heated.

His earliest work involved research in both visual imagery and language, but eventually he devoted himself to the study of language development, particularly in children. His groundbreaking 1994 book “The Language Instinct” put him firmly in the sphere of evolutionary psychology, the study of human impulses as genetically programmed and language as an instinct “wired into our brains by evolution.” Pinker, 59, has spent most of his career in Cambridge, and much of that time at Harvard — first for his graduate studies, later as an assistant professor. He is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology.

Q: Can you tell me about your early life? Where did you grow up and what did your parents do?




Wales (UK) set to abandon school banding system for new colour-coded ratings



Gareth Evans:

Wales’ controversial school ‘banding’ system is to be replaced with a new colour-coded support mechanism designed to raise pupil performance, we can reveal.

Officials in the Welsh Department for Education are preparing to launch the “national school improvement and categorisation system” as a means of ensuring schools get the right support and intervention to improve.

Unlike banding, it will extend to primaries as well as secondaries and see schools in Wales categorised annually into one of four groups.

A judgement on standards – based on available data – will be made, and schools at the lowest end of the scale (category Four) will languish in the “red zone”.




“Check Your Privilege” is Actually Just a Lousy Argument



Brian Mayer:

Like you, I’ve read Tal Fortgang’s piece, “Why I’ll Never Apologize for my White Male Privilege.” And like you, I’ve enjoyed watching him get skewered by blog after blog in the never ending one-upmanship that is the who-had-it-worse awards. As the internet froths at the mouth, I hereby declare that, like you, I think he made a big mistake! He should have elaborated on his first sentence and stopped there.

The point he should have made, but skipped over instead, was that the “check your privilege” riposte is not relevant to almost any discussion in which it is invoked. It is a rhetorical flourish used to discredit the proposition based on the identity of the speaker, and not the merit of the proposition itself. There’s a word for this logical fallacy: ad hominem. When employed, it can pack a powerful punch, but in reality it is lazy, lousy, and liberally lobbed in lieu of any legitimate point.

Although I’ve rarely heard the literal words “check your privilege,” I have been exposed to many, many forms of this non-argument. You might recognize these examples from your own experience:




From The Bard to Russell Brand: To Study or Not To Study



Alex Quigley:

Today the newspapers were awash with stories to make our great British population wince with embarrassment and raise a fist in fury. Our hallowed tradition of literature is apparently under threat of being sullied by the dumbing down of a new A level qualifications. It is sure to send our nation spiralling into inexorable decline. Shakespeare and Austen paired with Dizzy Rascal and Russell Brand. Oh, the horror, the horror!

The Department for Education were outraged at this “rubbish“. The Daily Mail put aside their immigration-nation narrative to one side for at least a few hours to demonise their bête noire – drug fuelled raconteur Russell Brand. Bejewelled with breast-laden hyperlinks, “Brand-speak” was suitably denounced. Of course, if we can gloss over the celebrity fuelled sex-spiked Daily Mail stories for one moment, we can buys ourselves with many linked condemnations of our state education system.




“I want…N.C.A.A. machinery dismantled. I want faculties to take back their universities from athletic depts.”



Joe Nocera:

Mary Willingham remembers the exact moment when she realized she had to go public. It was at the memorial service in the fall of 2012 for Bill Friday, the former president of the University of North Carolina. During his long career, Friday had championed the amateur ideal — the notion that college athletes needed also to be students, and that academics mattered as much as wins.

Willingham went to the university in Chapel Hill in 2003 as an academic adviser to the school’s athletes, primarily its football and basketball players. She was a reading specialist, a refugee from corporate America who had become a teacher in midlife. “Mary is one of those people who believed in the mythology, that you can do both athletics and academics,” says Richard Southall, who runs the College Sport Research Institute at the University of South Carolina.

But right from the start, she realized that there was a problem: Many of the athletes were coming into college unequipped to do college-level work. Around 2008, she recalls, after the N.C.A.A. changed its eligibility requirements — depending on their G.P.A.’s, athletes could now get in with lower S.A.T. scores — the situation became dramatically worse.




America’s Leaky Pipeline for Teachers of Color



Farah Ahmad and Ulrich Boser:

If you spend time in almost any major school district in America today, you will notice that the students often do not look much like the teachers. In fact, in some areas, the students don’t look anything like their teachers. There is a significant demographic gap in the largely white teaching profession and an increasingly diverse student population.

To prepare American students for lives of high achievement, America’s schools need a teaching corps that is not only highly effective but also racially and ethnically diverse. Progress has been made in recent decades in attracting people of color to the teaching profession. But major barriers—including a scarcity of high-quality, teacher-training programs targeted at teachers of color; the educational debt students of color must shoulder; and the general lack of esteem in our society for teaching—stand in the way of producing an optimal pool of teachers. Without vigorous policy innovations and public investment, the demographic gap will only widen to the detriment of children’s education.




Learning to Automatically Solve Algebra Word Problems



Nate Kushman, Yoav Artzi, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Regina Barzilay:

We present an approach for automatically learning to solve algebra word problems. Our algorithm reasons across sentence boundaries to construct and solve a sys- tem of linear equations, while simultane- ously recovering an alignment of the vari- ables and numbers in these equations to the problem text. The learning algorithm uses varied supervision, including either full equations or just the final answers. We evaluate performance on a newly gathered corpus of algebra word problems, demon- strating that the system can correctly an- swer almost 70% of the questions in the dataset. This is, to our knowledge, the first learning result for this task.




Why students using laptops learn less in class even when they really are taking notes



Fred Barbash:

Are you one of those old-school types who insists that kids learn better when they leave the laptops at home and take lecture notes in longhand?

If so, you’re right. There’s new evidence to prove it, and it’s unsettling because so many students aren’t really taught longhand anymore.

According to a new study based on a series of lab-based experiments comparing how much students learned after listening to the same lectures, there’s no contest. Handwriters learn better, hands down.

The ones who took their notes in longhand demonstrated in tests that they got more out of the lectures than the typists.

It’s not for the reasons most people think either. It’s not because of “multi-tasking” or the distraction available to students using laptops, especially with WiFi. That’s a problem by itself. But for this study, in a lab setting, no extraneous activity was allowed.




College tips: Advice from a professor



Matthew Might:

Beware the first semester
When I ask my students about their biggest college regret, it is almost universally, “my first semester.”

Graduates often lament that they spent their entire college career trying to recover from the damage inflicted to their GPA in the first semester.

The change in class structure and freedom catches students off guard.

Professors don’t coddle like high school teachers.

Most won’t even force students to attend class.

For students in dorms, parents can’t act like a check on bad habits.

Students without a strong sense of discipline find themselves sleeping through 8 AM classes, failing to study for exams and unable to complete assignments.

Most of these students sober up and gain discipline when they see their grades for the first semester, and live with a sense of regret thereafter.

Those that don’t drop out at the end of freshman year.




Student Debt and a Broken Financial System



Atif Mian & Amir Sufi:

When the Class of 2009 entered college in 2005, they had good reason to be optimistic. The economy appeared to be healthy, and a college degree commanded higher wages. College, of course, is expensive. And almost 2 out of 3 students entering college took on some debt. They took on that debt believing that it would be easy to pay back given the strong market for those with a college degree.

But then the biggest recession in 80 years hit the United States, leading to a much worse job market for college graduates. Here is the unemployment rate as of October for college graduates who just graduated, by year from 2007 to 2011.

The Class of 2009 had an unemployment rate of 18% — twice as bad as the Class of 2007 had when they graduated. The employment to population ratio also shows how bad the market was:




Guess Who Cares For Young Adults When They Move Back Home



Heather Krause:

When my kids first left home, one of the things I enjoyed most was that I didn’t have to make any more school lunches. But today, in my home just as in millions of others, my 21- and 24-year-old kids are back, and I’m making lunches again. This is a big change from what I had expected my life to look like when my kids became young adults. Like many women of my generation, I invested a lot of time in parenting my children, with the unspoken assumption that they would enjoy the same independence and economic prosperity that I did as an adult. I expected that when they were in their 20s, I would be dining out, dropping off laundry at the dry cleaners and spending quiet weekends with my husband.

A record number of young adult children are living at home with their parents. In the U.S., 21.6 million young adults were living at home in 2012, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data. That’s 36 percent of all 18- to 31-year-olds, representing the highest rate since 1969, the first year that comparable data was available. This recently increasing trend began at the onset of the most recent recession in 2007. So I wondered: is this affecting how parents are spending their time, the way it has affected me? And are women affected differently than men?

It turns out it’s not just me. According to an analysis of data from the American Time Use Survey,1 which asks a nationally representative sample of people to record how they spend their time every day, parents with 18- to 31-old children living at home are spending at least eight hours per week caring for them. That’s causing real shifts in the time they spend relaxing. (Their sex lives are also being affected.) And women are spending significantly more time taking care of these young adult children than men are.

It’s not news that women do more work around the house than men, or that women have less leisure time than men. What’s new is that the period of care is getting longer, even if it’s mitigated by the increased responsibility and independence of these adult children.




How to Talk to Your Children About Mass Surveillance



Cory Doctorow:

There’s a popular forum on the Reddit online service called ‘‘Explain Like I’m Five,’’ in which redditors pose difficult and esoteric questions whose settled answers are beyond their comprehension, and ask their fellows to simplify these answers to the point where a five year old could follow them.

Parenting is a long-running game of ‘‘Explain Like I’m Five’’ (actually, it starts with ‘‘Explain like I’m a pre-verbal infant,’’ and I imagine it ends somewhere around ‘‘Explain like I’m a post-adolescent young adult’’). My daughter, Poesy, is six, and she’s turned me into a skilled player of ‘‘Explain Like I’m _______,’’ starting when she was about two and a half and found out about death and was consumed with existential terror. For about a year – a very long, very difficult year – I found myself explaining death and the circle of life, over and over again, to my kid. It’s the only time I’ve ever regretted being an atheist. I’m pretty sure that if I’d floated the idea of harps and robes and eternal paradise in a cloudy heavenscape, I could have avoided a lot of grief. But it was worth it, if only for the weird misunderstandings that my attempts engendered, like when we visited a friend’s farm and Poesy explained that the celery in the garden was made of dead people.

Since then, we’ve tackled a variety of substantial topics, from globalism, to climate change, to racism, to the Holocaust, to evolution, to the Enlightenment, to monarchism, to cosmology and quantum uncertainty. We talk about Ukrainian politics and we talk about global aviation logistics. We talk about Chinese labor migration and we talk about proportional systems of governance.




Enrollment in Student-Debt Forgiveness Programs Soars in 2014



Josh Mitchell:

Two federal programs that offer to wipe away huge accumulations of student debt have grown at a rapid clip this year, putting them among the government’s fastest-growing forms of financial assistance.

The Journal reported last week that enrollment in the plans—which allow students to rack up big debts and then forgive the unpaid balance after a set period—surged nearly 40% in the second half of 2013.

The growth of the programs hasn’t slowed. The number of borrowers in the income-based repayment programs climbed 24% between January through March to 1.63 million, the Education Department said. The amount of debt absorbed grew by 22% to $88 billion—now nearly a 10th of all outstanding federal student debt.

At that rate, the government took on more than $5.3 billion per month in potential student-debt liability in the first three months of the year.

Interest in the programs began to surge in the middle of last year as the Obama administration promoted the programs through emails to borrowers and on the Internet. In the nine months through March, enrollment is up a staggering 72%.

The programs’ popularity comes as top law schools have taken to advertising their own plans that offer to cover a graduate’s federal loan repayments until outstanding debt is forgiven—opening the way for free or greatly subsidized degrees at taxpayer expense.




Do Our Kids Get Off Too Easy?



Alfie Kohn:

THE conventional wisdom these days is that kids come by everything too easily — stickers, praise, A’s, trophies. It’s outrageous, we’re told, that all kids on the field may get a thanks-for-playing token, in contrast to the good old days, when recognition was reserved for the conquering heroes.

Children are said to be indulged and overcelebrated, spared from having to confront the full impact of their inadequacy. There are ringing declarations about the benefits of frustration and the need for grit.

These themes are sounded with numbing regularity, yet those who sound them often adopt a self-congratulatory tone, as if it took extraordinary gumption to say pretty much what everyone else is saying. Indeed, this fundamentally conservative stance on children and parenting has become common even for people who are liberal on other issues.




Writing Instructor, Skeptical of Automated Grading, Pits Machine vs. Machine



Steve Kolowich:

Les Perelman, a former director of undergraduate writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sits in his wife’s office and reads aloud from his latest essay.

“Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent,” he reads. “Humankind will always subjugate privateness.”

Not exactly E.B. White. Then again, Mr. Perelman wrote the essay in less than one second, using the Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator, or Babel, a new piece of weaponry in his continuing war on automated essay-grading software.

The Babel generator, which Mr. Perelman built with a team of students from MIT and Harvard University, can generate essays from scratch using as many as three keywords.

For this essay, Mr. Perelman has entered only one keyword: “privacy.” With the click of a button, the program produced a string of bloated sentences that, though grammatically correct and structurally sound, have no coherent meaning. Not to humans, anyway. But Mr. Perelman is not trying to impress humans. He is trying to fool machines.




“White Privilege” as the Neutron Bomb of Moral Warfare



John Robb::

The growing popularity of “check your privilege” and “white privilege” at Universities and in political debates is interesting.

Why is it interesting? It’s not a force for progress or positive change, it’s a form of moral warfare. That means it’s not a constructive remark that improves the debate, rather, it’s an attack that does damage the target. However, it doesn’t damage the target directly. Instead, the damage is done by weakening or breaking the moral bonds that allow the target to function in a social context.

In other words, the attack disconnects the target from the moral support of others. You can see that disconnection at work in how groups within the target group “white privilege” are fleeing from it, rather than rejecting the concept outright. For example, I’ve seen “white male privilege” as a form of attack now. I’ve also seen “white straight male privilege” being used. This divisibility of the attack makes it the neutron bomb of moral warfare. The kind of attack that’s meant to surgically remove a specific target group from the debate without doing damage to your own group.




The limits of the digital humanities



Adam Kirsch:

he humanities are in crisis again, or still. But there is one big exception: digital humanities, which is a growth industry. In 2009, the nascent field was the talk of the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention: “among all the contending subfields,” a reporter wrote about that year’s gathering, “the digital humanities seem like the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” Even earlier, the National Endowment for the Humanities created its Office of Digital Humanities to help fund projects. And digital humanities continues to go from strength to strength, thanks in part to the Mellon Foundation, which has seeded programs at a number of universities with large grants—most recently, $1 million to the University of Rochester to create a graduate fellowship.




In the lottery of life it’s best to start first



John McDermott:

‘Firstborn children really do excel, reveals groundbreaking study’ TheGuardian.com, April 26.

What’s ‘groundbreaking’? Firstborns have been outperforming their siblings since Cain and Abel.

I’m not sure killing your brother ever counted as attainment, even in Genesis.

There are countless examples of high-achieving firstborns – Barack Obama, Sheryl Sandberg, Angela Merkel and 75 per cent of Harvard undergraduates.

You’ve taken the last claim from Michael Sandel.

The philosopher, yes.

In his Harvard class on justice, Sandel asks students whether they think their success is down to effort or luck. Most say effort. Then he asks them to put up their hands if they are the firstborn in their family.




UK Grammar schools announce plan to give priority to disadvantaged pupils



Richard Adams:

Grammar schools in England are looking to break the middle-class stranglehold on selective state education by offering to rewrite their admissions codes to discriminate in favour of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.

More than half of England’s 164 existing grammar schools – the survivors of England’s comprehensive school reforms in the 1960s and 1970s – say they plan to revise their admissions criteria to give priority to qualifying children who are eligible for free school meals (FSM) or the pupil premium.

The move follows a chorus of complaints that grammar schools favour the better off due to their reliance on entrance examinations such as the eleven-plus to select pupils. The Sutton Trust has published research showing that just 2.7% of grammar schools’ places went to pupils eligible for FSM, compared with around 20% in state schools nationally.




How many college applications is too many?



Liz Weston:

On the surface, it seems to be a simple question: How many college applications should you submit?

The answer may be more than parents may think, and the reason is that the admissions process has become less predictable, college consultants said.

“I have one student this year who was waitlisted at the University of Chicago and accepted at Yale, Harvard and Columbia,” said Shirley Bloomquist, a college counselor in Great Falls, Virginia with 30 years of experience.

Another student with similar credentials was accepted to the University of Chicago but rejected by Yale. “It’s much more variable than it used to be,” Bloomquist said.

There’s a chicken vs. egg quality to all this uncertainty. The national college acceptance rate has steadily declined in the past 10 years, but that’s in large part due to the growth in applications each student submits, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s latest “State of College Admission” report.