Sue Shellenbarger:

Those early childhood memories, which are so quick to fade, are important in influencing decisions in later life. WSJ’s Sue Shellenbarger reports on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.

What you can remember from age 3 may help improve aspects of your life far into adulthood.

Children who have the ability to recall and make sense of memories from daily life—the first day of preschool, the time the cat died—can use them to better develop a sense of identity, form relationships and make sound choices in adolescence and adulthood, new research shows.

While the lives of many youngsters today are heavily documented in photos and video on social media and stored in families’ digital archives, studies suggest photos and videos have little impact. Parents play a bigger role in helping determine not just how many early memories children can recall, but how children interpret and learn from the events of their earliest experiences.

“Our personal memories define who we are. They bond us together,” says Robyn Fivush, a psychology professor at Emory University in Atlanta and an author of dozens of studies on the topic. Children whose parents encourage reminiscing and storytelling about daily events show better coping and problem-solving skills by their preteens, and fewer symptoms of depression, research shows.

Douglas Belkin & Caroline Porter:

More companies are entering partnerships with colleges to help design curricula, as state universities seek new revenue and industry tries to close a yawning skills gap. Doug Belkin reports on Lunch Break. Photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick for The Wall Street Journal.

The University of Maryland has had to tighten its belt, cutting seven varsity sports teams and forcing faculty and staff to take furlough days. But in a corner of the campus, construction workers are building a dormitory specifically designed for a new academic program.

Many of the students who live there will be enrolled in a cybersecurity concentration funded in part by Northrop Grumman Corp. NOC -0.35% The defense contractor is helping to design the curriculum, providing the computers and paying part of the cost of the new dorm.

Such partnerships are springing up from the dust of the recession, as state universities seek new revenue and companies try to close a yawning skills gap in fast-changing industries.

Kingsley R. Browne:

Implicit in the materials for this conference is the assumption that any gap that exists between men and women in the workplace (at least if the gap seems to disfavor women) should be eliminated. The question is asked, “how can this gap be explained and rectified?,” implying that “rectification” should follow irrespective of how the gap is explained.

There are many statistical disparities between the sexes in our world, but only some become the subject of widespread concern. Ones that are perceived as favoring men are labeled “gaps,” while those that favor women are simply facts. Outside the workplace, men are arguably disadvantaged in a variety of arenas, whether in terms of health and longevity, crime and violence, domestic relations, or education. In the workplace, men are far more likely than women to be killed and to work long hours. None of these disparities is generally viewed as a “gap” deserving of intervention, however. Men earn a disproportionate number of Ph.Ds in some fields, while women earn a disproportionate number in others. Only the former set of disparities, however, is typically viewed as a “gap.”

Neil Munshi:

The Illinois legislature has passed a plan to overhaul two of the funds in the Chicago pension system, by far the most underfunded of any large US city.

The move is an important first step toward shoring up the combined $27bn unfunded liability the city and its school district have racked up after years of the government failing to pay its share. The massive liability has caused the city to suffer multiple credit rating downgrades in recent years.

The bill now moves to the desk of Governor Pat Quinn, who has not indicated whether he will sign it into law.

The reform addresses the pension funds for municipal employees and labourers, which are 37.6 per cent and 56.3 per cent funded, respectively. The bill would increase the funding levels to 90 per cent by 2055 through benefit cuts and increases in employee contributions.

Erin Richards & Kevin Crowe:

Reading and math proficiency for students attending private, mostly religious schools in Milwaukee with the help of taxpayer-funded vouchers ticked up in 2013 from 2012, according to the latest state standardized test score results.

On average, students in Milwaukee’s private-school voucher program still performed lower than students in the city’s traditional public school system.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released fall test score data for the taxpayer-funded private voucher schools on Tuesday, one day after allowing media to review the fall 2013 state test score results for public schools.

In all, reading and math achievement on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination for both the public and private voucher schools, especially in Milwaukee, continued to be low. That’s due in part to the state raising the bar for what’s considered a proficient score on the state test.

The WKCE will be replaced next year by a new, computer-based assessment in reading and math that is aligned to national standards and will allow for better comparisons of achievement between states.

Another issue that has cropped up is an increasing number of voucher-school families opting their children out of taking the state exams altogether — a legal option, but one seemingly at odds with the statewide push toward more transparency for schools.

Gov. Scott Walker signed two bills into law Tuesday that will bring more accountability to the private schools receiving taxpayer money.

Meanwhile, the latest state test results showed:

About 16% of Milwaukee voucher students who took the state test met or exceeded the bar for proficiency in math, and about 12% did the same in reading.

Much more on the oft criticized WKCE, here.

Sophia Grene:

Financial education falls into the motherhood and apple-pie category – almost everyone is in favour of it. So the news that a number of asset managers have taken part in an initiative by Redstart to provide financial education to English schoolchildren appears positive.

The move has raised concerns, however, chiefly the potential conflicts of interest. Should the vendors of financial products also be allowed to provide education about them?

The founders of Redstart hail from Redington, the investment consultancy. The company has little to gain from getting its name in front of schoolchildren. Redington does not deal with the retail market, so has neither products to push nor brands to promote.

But asset managers, who have proved happy to become involved, are likely to count on schoolchildren being their future customers.

“If financial institutions want to fund financial education, that is all well and good, as long as they have no part in designing it or delivering it,” says Mick McAteer, founder and director of The Financial Inclusion Centre, a think-tank. “If they are serious about doing it for public policy reasons, not just as a Trojan horse marketing stunt, let them fund financial education charities.”

Princeton Press (PDF):

The mathematics of ancient Iraq, attested from the last three millennia BCE, was written on clay tablets in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages using the cuneiform script, often with numbers in the sexagesimal place value system (§1.2). There have been many styles of interpretation since the discovery and decipherment of that mathematics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries CE (§1.1), but this book advocates a combination of close attention to textual and linguistic detail, as well as material and archaeological evidence, to situate ancient mathematics within the socio-intellectual worlds of the individuals and communities who produced and consumed it (§1.3)

Iraq—Sumer—Babylonia—Mesopotamia: under any or all of these names almost every general textbook on the history of mathematics assigns the origins of ‘pure’ mathematics to the distant past of the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Here, over five thousand years ago, the fi rst systematic accounting techniques were developed, using clay counters to represent fixed quantities of traded and stored goods in the world’s earliest cities (§2.2). Here too, in the early second millennium bce, the world’s first positional system of numerical notation—the famous sexagesimal place value system—was widely used (§4.2). The earliest widespread evidence for ‘pure’ mathematics comes from the same place and time, including a very accurate approximation to the square root of 2, an early form of abstract algebra, and the knowledge, if not proof, of ‘Pythagoras’ theorem’ defining the relationship between the sides of a right-angled triangle (§4.3). The best-known mathematical artefact from this time, the cuneiform tablet
Plimpton 322, has been widely discussed and admired, and claims have been made for its function that range from number theory to trigonometry to astronomy. Most of the evidence for mathematical astronomy, however, comes from the later fi rst millennium bce (§8.2), from which it is clear that Babylonian astronomical observations, calculational models, and the sexagesimal place value system all had a deep impact on the later development of Old World astronomy, in particular through the person and works of Ptolemy. It is hardly surprising, then, that ever since its discovery a century ago the mathematics of ancient Iraq has claimed an important role in
the history of early mathematics.

Cultural progressives often talk about something called “hegemonic masculinity.” By this progressives and feminists mean the standards we use to determine what an ideal man is in a particular culture. Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson, in The Gendered Society Reader, describe American hegemonic masculinity this way:

In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports . . . Any male who fails to qualify in any one of these ways is likely to view himself–during moments at least–as unworthy, incomplete and inferior.

With this definition, progressives and feminists are on what seems to be a campaign to “dismantle” any sense of “American” masculinity. Additionally, part of the mission is to redefine all of America’s problems in terms of what males, especially white males, have done to ruin society. As many have argued before, the first step in solving social ills is to pathologize boyhood and numb it into oblivion.

Esquire Magazine recently ran a story titled “The Drugging Of The American Boy” which highlights the seemingly settled disposition that developing masculinity is something to be diagnosed as ADHD and, therefore, a problem to be solved. The article cites this data:

Thomas Lin:

Freeman Dyson — the world-renowned mathematical physicist who helped found quantum electrodynamics with the bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and others, devised numerous mathematical techniques, led the team that designed a low-power nuclear reactor that produces medical isotopes for research hospitals, dreamed of exploring the solar system in spaceships propelled by nuclear bombs, wrote technical and popular science books, penned dozens of reviews for The New York Review of Books, and turned 90 in December — is pondering a new math problem.

“There’s a class of problem that Freeman just lights up on,” said the physicist and computational biologist William Press, a longtime colleague and friend. “It has to be unsolved and well-posed and have something in it that admits to his particular kind of genius.” That genius, he said, represents a kind of “ingenuity and a spark” that most physicists lack: “The ability to see further in the mathematical world of concepts and instantly grasp a path to the distant horizon that’s the solution.”

Priyamvada Gopal:

The once highly-regarded British public university is not quite dead but it is in terminal care. After half a century of global success on public funding that amounted to less than 1.5% of Britain’s GDP, in the space of two years we’ve seen the partial withdrawal of the state from the sector, and it is expected that this is a precursor to full withdrawal followed by extensive privatisation.

With the overnight tripling of tuition fees in 2010 (in the face of widespread protests) and with further rises in the offing, the student has been reframed as a consumer buying private goods in the form of a degree. Combine this with a mortgage and you have a large number of citizens who are unlikely to be debt-free at any point in their life.

Formerly known as a university, the service provider of higher education is now to sink or swim in response to the pressures of competition, as degree-awarding corporations rather than sites of inquiry and learning. Ironically, however, it turns out that the new fees regime which David Willetts, the Universities Minister, keeps bizarrely insisting is fairer than the previous one, is actually costing the exchequer more, through the rising costs of subsidising student loans.

Eva Dou:

In a concession to student protesters, Taiwan Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng said Sunday a review of a contentious services trade pact with China will be delayed until an oversight mechanism for cross-strait agreements is enacted.

The announcement is the largest gesture of conciliation from Mr. Wang since students stormed the legislature three weeks ago and barricaded themselves inside to protest the services trade agreement, which was signed last year.

The protesters have said negotiations between Taipei and Beijing weren’t transparent and demanded that the government set up a legally binding mechanism to oversee all cross-Strait deals, including the services trade pact, to ensure proper oversight and public input.

Pressure is mounting on the government to resolve an impasse over the trade pact that has moved thousands of students to camp inside and outside the legislature since March 18. More than 100,000 protesters gathered outside Taiwan’s Presidential Office Building in downtown Taipei last Sunday.

Alan Borsuk:

“It’s all about teacher quality,” Eric Hanushek said.

“What improves student achievement is improved instruction,” said Michael Casserly.

What’s needed, said Paul Hill, is “a mechanism to drive (the search for improvement) beyond the comfort zone of the school providers.”

If you were looking for one answer for improving American education outcomes, you didn’t find it in Milwaukee last week. But if you were looking for food for thought, the week brought rich offerings.

An unusual number of the nation’s — and in some cases, the world’s — leading thinkers and voices on education were involved in two separate events, one public, one invitation-only.

The public event, at Marquette University Law School, focused on what Milwaukee can learn from urban school systems where there are signs of improvement. (I was involved in organizing the session and moderated part of it.)

The private event was hosted by the low-profile but influential Kern Family Foundation, based in Waukesha County with more than a half billion dollars in assets and a strong interest in education.

Kern brought together 15 to 20 researchers and advocates at a downtown Milwaukee hotel to work on strategies for increasing U.S. success in international educational competitiveness. I sat in on several presentations (and will say more on what I learned later).

Ashley Jochim:

Lyndon B. Johnson once quipped, “Good politics is good government.” Johnson realized that whether a given public policy achieves its intended objectives is rarely a matter solely of technical design. Rather, success depends both on the quality of the plan and whether it is implemented fully enough to stand the chance of having an impact—a process that may take years.

It has been more than a decade since my colleagues at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, Paul Hill and Christine Campbell, wrote It Takes a City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform along with James Harvey. But its lessons about urban school reform are as relevant now as they were then. In analyzing systemic education reform in six cities, the authors posed a question of enormous consequence: How can city leaders construct reform strategies that promise to be powerful enough and last long enough to make a difference?

Fixing urban schools, they argued, requires more than lofty goals or incomplete strategies. The reform plans in the studied cities too often relied on “zones of wishful thinking”—assuming that teachers, principals, and district administrators would do what was right, rather than creating a plan that provided the incentives, freedom, and capacity for them to do so. Combining the best elements of each, the authors put forth three new reform models, including one option that would provide community oversight of a system of autonomous schools, much like the portfolio strategy does today.

Anne Tergesen:

As more couples delay having children, their parents have to wait longer for their first grandchild. Anne Tergesen joins Lunch Break with a look at the broader societal impact of couples having children later. Photo: Videoblocks.

It’s a natural part of growing older. People start to long for grandchildren—and many start to pressure their adult child, in overt or subtle ways, to produce those grandchildren.

For the current generation of would-be grandparents and their children, those desires are getting more urgent—and the pressure is getting a lot more intense.

It comes down to simple arithmetic. More individuals are waiting until their 30s and beyond to have their first child. Perhaps they want to get their finances or career in order first, find the right partner or take on other big projects like an advanced degree or world travel.

Whatever the reason, the result is that their parents have to wait longer for their first grandchild—perhaps to age 70 instead of age 60. They have to worry about whether they will be healthy enough to help out and enjoy the time they have with their grandchildren. Or if they’ll be alive at all.

Madison School District (PDF):

Understand the status of the MMSD evaluator certification process
Understand who will be evaluated and when

Understand the evaluation workflow

Understand professional development calendar to support implementation

When will staff be evaluated?

MMSD will “reset” the evaluation schedule, balancing one-third of evaluations, for each building, across the next 3 years

All new teachers to MMSD must be evaluated in their first year of employment

Referenced edu-jargon translation:

The Danielson Framework: Duck Duck Go | Google | Bing.

The Teachscape Evaluator: Duck Duck Go | Google | Bing.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation:

In this policy report, the Annie E. Casey Foundation explores the intersection of kids, race and opportunity. The report features the new Race for Results index, which compares how children are progressing on key milestones across racial and ethnic groups at the national and state level. The index is based on 12 indicators that measure a child’s success in each stage of life, from birth to adulthood, in the areas of early childhood; education and early work; family supports; and neighborhood context. The report also makes four policy recommendations to help ensure that all children and their families achieve their full potential.

Nicholas Simmons:

I’m a seventh-grade math teacher at Success Academy Harlem West, a public charter school. On April 30 and May 2, 3, the 272 students at my school, along with some 480,000 other New York City public school children, will sit for the state math exam. Last year, 89% of my seventh-graders and 83% of our sixth-graders passed the test, more than half scoring at the highest level.

But only 29% of all sixth-grade public-school students in the city passed the New York State Mathematics Test last year. Among sixth-grade black and Latino kids, only 15% and 17% passed, respectively. Among my sixth-graders, 97% are African-American or Latino, and three out of four of them are from low-income families.

Many teachers and parents—as well as New York City’s school chancellor and the mayor, have said there is too much emphasis on testing. But at Success Academy, we believe internal assessments and the results from state exams are essential feedback for how well we as teachers have done our job in the classroom. Students and teachers embrace academic rigor and take pride in having some of the top math scores in the city, in many cases outperforming the city’s gifted and talented programs.

Bill Korach, via Will Fitzhugh:

Delaney Moran, a senior at Lenox Memorial High School in Lenox, MA, has written an evocative account about the legendary Savoy Ballroom in Harlem for The Concord Review. “Stompin’ at the Savoy” the hit song written by Edgar Sampson and recorded separately by Benny Goodman and Chick Webb recalls the great days of the Savoy Ballroom in the 1930’s and 40’s. Since 1987, The Concord Review has been publishing the best high school papers in America. Each quarter, Will Fitzhugh, TCR publisher and his reviewers select the best papers for publication. The papers, from 6000-20,000 words represent the gold standard in high school writing. Fitzhugh and many others in education believe that reading and writing are the best way to learn and think. Writing was once an obvious and basic educational tool, but today as schools are dumbing down their students serious writing has all but vanished from the classroom. Happily, TCR continues to find and publish excellent work.

Delaney Moran’s paper opens with this account:

The entrance to the Savoy was at street level. You went down one flight to check your coat, then you walked back up two flights to the ballroom which was on the second floor. as I was climbing the steps that led to the ballroom, I could hear this swinging music coming down the stairwell, and it started seeping right into my body. I got to the top step, went through the double doors, and stopped for a moment with my back to the bandstand, taking it all in. When I turned around and faced the room…well, I just stood there with my mouth open. The whole floor was full of people—and they were dancing! The band was pounding. The guys up there were wailing! The music was rompin’ and stompin’. everyone was movin’ and groovin’.1
These were the remarks of Frankie Manning, a black dancer from Harlem, upon entering the Savoy Ballroom for the first time. This scene depicts a typical night at the Savoy Ballroom in 1930s Harlem. The Savoy was the most popular nightclub in the city and home to the best jazz and the best dancers New York had to offer.2 Remarkably, it was completely integrated from its inception in 1926, despite segregation in almost every other section of the country, including New York City.

Eleanor J Bader:

While we may tend to romanticize universities as bastions of free thought and intellectual rigor, Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira’s new book, The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, demonstrates their subjection to the same ideological underpinnings as the general body politic.

The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, Edited by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira University of Minnesota Press, 400 pages, $29.95.

For the past 10 years, I’ve taught English at a large, public community college in Brooklyn, New York. Most of my students are the first in their families to attend a university – and while some are disaffected, the majority are engaged and eager, hopeful that the promise of a higher education will open doors and provide them with a stable future. They’re also largely immigrants, and it is not uncommon for 28 students from 20 countries to find themselves sitting side-by-side in a classroom, arguing and debating about the meaning of a particular text.

Daisy Christodoulou, via Will Fitzhugh:

In 2007, I trained as a teacher and started teaching English in a secondary school in Southeast London that enrolls stu- dents between the ages of 11 and 18. One of the first things that struck me when I was teaching was that my pupils seemed to know so little. Even the bright and hard-working pupils seemed to me to have big gaps in their knowledge.

Before I became a teacher, I’d read newspaper articles about pupils lacking knowledge, but I had always assumed these reports had been exaggerated by the media. I wondered if my experiences were unusual, but the experiences of colleagues at other schools seemed similar to mine. Pupils who didn’t know where milk came from, who didn’t know the name of the British prime minister, who could barely name any foreign countries, and who had no idea of when important world-changing technologies had been invented.

I started researching the issue, and I found that my experiences weren’t atypical. I also found that many American teachers had the same experiences. For example, there’s a study showing that two-thirds of Americans can’t name the three branches of the United States government.1 In the United Kingdom, there’s a study showing that a third of pupils think the House of Lords is elected.

Hamilton Nolan:

America’s student debt burden has been on the rise for years, along with America’s class of incredibly well-educated retail workers. A new report reveals who’s driving the train to debt hell: grad students. Don’t do it!

Do you really need to go to grad school? For the vast majority of those of you considering going to grad school, the answer is “probably not.” So consider this a bit of data to encourage you to skip it. Take a year off. Travel the world. Hitchhike. Join the Peace Corps. Be a bartender. Huddle in a remote cabin and write your novel. Learn the trombone. All of these are good, affordable activities to pursue as you consider the findings of today’s New America Foundation report, which shows that the increase in the debt load of graduate students in the past decade makes the student debt load for undergrads look paltry by comparison. From the Wall Street Journal:

Jason Read:

“Whenever you have a ‘southern’ or a ‘northern’ or an ‘eastern’ or a ‘western’ before an institution’s name, you know it will be wildly underfunded.” –Richard Russo

On March nineteenth the Chancellor of the University of Maine System, as well as the President, and select members of the Board of Trustees gathered in front of a crowd of students, faculty and staff in the Hannaford Lecture Hall, a spacious and new lecture hall (more often rented out than used for classes) to unveil the University of Southern Maine’s new vision as a “Metropolitan University.” Two days later, on the twenty-first, twelve members of the faculty from such programs as economics, theater, and sociology met with the provost of the University to be “retrenched.” Both of these events followed the proposal to eliminate four programs (American and New England Studies, Geosciences, Recreation and Leisure Studies, and Arts and Humanities at the Lewiston Auburn Campus) the week before. It was a strange and tumultuous week, and one that I fear offers a frightening glimpse of a future of higher public education in the US.

All of these events, the rebranding and the cuts, were in a response to a system wide budget shortfall of $35 million, of which USM is slated to absorb $14 million in cuts. Claims of poverty on the part of public universities need to be contextualized against the massive decrease in state allocations, on the one hand, and the increasing connection between the university and financial services, on the other (on this point in general see Edward Kazarian’s post) in which bond ratings matter more than educational mission. With respect to the former the University of Maine system has followed the national trend of divestment in higher education. In 1999 appropriations accounted for 63 percent of the university’s budget while tuition and fees made up 37 percent, by 2014 this was reversed to 62 percent from tuition and 38 from allocation. During this period Maine went through the largest tax cut in its history, cutting taxes on inheritance and otherwise making it easier for the wealthiest to keep their money. A tuition freeze instituted in 2012 followed closely on the heels of this cut. (The latter is a perfect example of faux-populism, taking measures to supposedly cut college costs while failing to address the real cause of those costs.) During this same period USM added several new buildings, such as the lecture hall noted above. As enrollment dropped by six percent from 2008-2012 the combination of reduced appropriations, fixed tuition, and decreased enrollment led to a perfect storm of budget problems.

Eddie Small:

Kevin Floerke has been down this route before.

A student at Santa Rosa Junior College in Northern California, Floerke, 26 years old, already graduated in 2010 from UCLA, where he majored in archaeology.

This time, however, he’s not after a degree. He’s just trying to master a set of techniques and technologies that will help him verify the details he finds while doing fieldwork.

“I’m really there to learn the program itself and be able to use it in a professional setting,” he said.

Floerke, who leads tours for the National Geographic Society, is part of a group of students known as “skill builders” who are using conventional colleges in an unconventional way: not to get degrees but simply to learn specific kinds of expertise, without spending time or money on courses they don’t think they need.

It’s a trend being driven by the rising price of higher education and a growing emphasis on paying for training in only the most marketable skills.

Al Shanker via Will Fitzhugh:

Usually when I write this column, I’m trying to convince thousands of people about something. This time, I’m trying to reach one or two people. I don’t even know who they are, but they’ll have to be people receptive to spending some money on a good cause. Here’s the story.

Over the past several years, I’ve looked forward to seeing a quarterly history journal called The Concord Review come across my desk. The articles are a pleasure to read; they’re fresh, lively, well-researched and sometimes elegant. Their range is impressive. Among the essays I’ve found most interesting were ones on the Pullman Strike of 1894; on Lillie A. James, an African-American woman who pioneered education for African-Americans in Pensacola; and George W.G. Ferris, the inventor of the Ferris Wheel, which he meant to be the American answer to the Eiffel Tower. If you just picked it up and started reading, you’d never know the most extraordinary thing about The Concord Review—that all the essays are the work of high school students.

Editor Will Fitzhugh quit teaching and founded the journal five [27] years ago. He was impressed by the essays some of his own students produced, and he became convinced that there must be lots of other terrific history essays out there. Why not recognize, and encourage excellence by publishing some of them? The results have been wonderful. The essays come from both public and private school students, and they exemplify the level kids can achieve when they are interested in what they are doing and encouraged to pursue it.

The Review has won plenty of friends and admirers among people who are concerned about raising the standards of achievement in American education: Diane Ravitch, noted historian and assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education; Chester Finn, a former assistant secretary of education; Harold Howe, a former U.S. Commissioner of Education; James Freedman, president of Dartmouth College; and Theodore Sizer, founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, have all written in its support. I wrote an earlier column myself.

People in the front lines have been enthusiastic, too. Teachers from all over the world have sent student essays and money for subscriptions. And a commercial publisher has chosen four essays that appeared in the Review for a series on writing dedicated to secondary school students. One of Fitzhugh’s favorite testimonials is from an official of a foundation that didn’t offer the Review an financial support. Apparently, the man picked up a copy to glance at one essay and ended up reading the entire 150-page issue [now typically 270 pages].

But praise doesn’t pay the bills. The Review now [1992] has subscribers in 44 states and 15 foreign countries but nowhere near the number needed to make it self-supporting. This is no surprise. Fitzhugh, who has financed the journal largely with his own money, has never had the funds to promote it properly. And, as he points out, even Sports Illustrated, a magazine with mass-market appeal, and a yearly swim suit issue, took 10 years to break even. Unfortunately, he’s now at the point where he will have to close down operations in March—unless he can find the corporate or foundation support that has so far eluded him.

What’s the problem? Fitzhugh says some people have suggested that excellence of the kind that he is trying to encourage is elitist. In other words, the standards The Concord Review sets is too high for most kids. I don’t think that’s true. Jaime Escalante has shown us that expecting more of kids means you get more. This is as much the case with history as it is with math. If we encouraged students to raise their sights, many of them could measure up to the standards set by the Review; many more would enjoy reading essays written by other students and discussing them in class. And working with the journal would inspire everyone to do better—just the way watching a good runner inspires kids to go out and do as well as they can. Even if they have no hope of beating his record, they can try to break their own.

Or maybe the problem is that The Concord Review is ahead of its time. It’s a new idea so it doesn’t fit into the categories and priorities that foundations have identified. Fitzhugh says that when a foundation turns him down, that’s often what they tell him.

Something like this happened when he applied to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This federally funded agency is interested in history and it’s interested in raising standards. It also funds summer seminars for teachers. But NEH can’t consider Fitzhugh for a grant because he isn’t a teacher; they don’t fund student projects; and they don’t fund publications. In other words, The Concord Review falls through the cracks. And that, more or less, is the story with every foundation or agency that Fitzhugh has applied to.

Will Fitzhugh needs $150,000 a year [$250,000 needed 22 years later] and some time to build on the solid base he has already laid. There must be one or two people or a business or a foundation out there that can bend its guidelines so that this extraordinary publication won’t disappear.

© 1992 by Albert Shanker

Wu Nan:

Allegations that kindergartens gave prescription drugs to pupils without parents’ consent have led to calls for the laws governing them to be tightened.

It is alleged the drugs were administered to ensure high attendance rates and fees.

Lan Liqiang, a medical legal consultant advising some parents whose children were given the medicines, said the rules covering the operation of nursery schools were vague, out of date and in need of an overhaul.

“How could kindergartens as children’s guardians trade their health for money? The government should establish strict rules to prevent such incidents from happening again,” Lan said.

Parents are threatening legal action and some fear more kindergartens around the country may have fed pupils the anti-flu drug moroxydine hydrochloride without permission.

Some 10 nursery schools in Xian , Shaanxi , Jilin city in Jilin province, and Yichang in Hubei are so far thought to have given children the medicine.

Another kindergarten in Gansu province is said to have given pupils another antiviral treatment to ward off hand, foot and mouth disease.

The Ministry of Education and the National Health and Family Planning Commission have ordered nationwide inspections at all kindergartens and primary and middle schools to check the scale of the problem.

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

At the March 18 meeting of the MTI Faculty Representative Council, nominations were finalized for MTI Officers, as well as for the MTI Bargaining Committee relative to vacancies caused by terms ending in May, 2014. Nominated for President-Elect was current President Peg Coyne (Black Hawk). She will again serve as MTI President for the 2015-16 school year. Peg previously served as President during the 2011-12 school year. She is also a member of the Bargaining Committee. In addition, others nominated were Art Camosy (incumbent -Memorial) for Vice-President; Liz Donnelly Wingert (incumbent -Elvehjem) for Secretary; and Greg Vallee (incumbent – Thoreau) for Treasurer. Mike Lipp (West), who was elected last spring, will serve as President for the 2014-15 school year.

Nominated for the MTI Bargaining Committee were: High School Representative – Art Camosy (incumbent-Memorial); Middle School Representative – Nichole Von Haden (incumbent-Sherman); Elementary School Representative – Laurie Solchenberger (incumbent – Lincoln); At-Large Representative – Steve Pike (incumbent-West); Educational Services Representative-Middle School – Gabe Chavez (incumbent-Jefferson). The Bargaining Committee, from which the Bargaining Team is selected and which is the body responsible for MTI’s Teacher Contract negotiations, consists of 15 members, of which five are elected each year. MTI’s general election will be held April 28-30.

Kelsey Snell:

Millions of taxpayers struggling with student loan debt are being pitched what may seem like a dream come true this tax season: lower monthly payments and a chance to see a chunk of their debt disappear.

But there’s a catch: the potential for a huge tax bill down the road.

The new push from the Departments of Treasury and Education uses tax time to promote the opportunity for a borrower to have their entire debt repaid after 20 or 25 years. The agencies are partnering with TurboTax, the tax software used by more than 18 million Americans, to advertise the deal.

It’s part of an administration-wide effort to make college affordable, but consumer advocates worry that the tax-time pairing fails to fully disclose that the debt forgiveness counts as income and will likely lead to a bill from the Internal Revenue Service. Some even liken it to the too-good-to-be-true mortgages that played a role in the collapse of the housing market.

W. Michael Cox & Richard Alm

Education looms as both cause and cure for the decline of the middle class and the widening gap between rich and poor.

In today’s knowledge-based economy, poorly performing public schools leave many U.S. workers ill-equipped for jobs that pay middle-class wages.

So it follows that improving education is the only way to raise up the poor, reduce inequality and restore the American middle class.

We all want better schools — right-wingers, left-wingers, even business and labor are on board. Most proposals for improving education come down to the same thing — spend more of the taxpayers’ money.

But that’s what we’ve been doing for two or more generations, and it hasn’t worked. Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, calculates that inflation-adjusted spending per pupil more than doubled from $5,500 a year in 1970 to more than $12,500 in 2010.

…..

So why do some states have better public schools — if it’s not a matter of money? Statistical regressions using the adjusted spending and demographic data find that test scores improve significantly as parents get more education and earn higher incomes.

The intuitive story goes like this: Better educated and richer parents tend to appreciate the value of schooling. They insist on better schools for their children and stress education in the home. School districts that spend more tend to be those where the cost-of-living is higher, where income is higher and where adults are better educated.

It’s not the spending that improves scores, it’s the parents’ high expectations and emphasis on education.

Money can buy a lot in public schools — smaller classes, better teachers, modern facilities, computers and other technologies. So why hasn’t spending paid off in better educational outcomes? The biggest impediment is a government-run school system resistant to innovation, indifferent to student needs and mired in mediocrity.

Wisconsin ranks 12th in dollars spent and 24th in achievement among the 50 US states.

State Education Trends by Andrew Coulson:

ong-term trends in academic performance and spending are valuable tools for evaluating past education policies and informing current ones. But such data have been scarce at the state level, where the most important education policy decisions are made. State spending data exist reaching back to the 1960s, but the figures have been scattered across many different publications. State-level academic performance data are either nonexistent prior to 1990 or, as in the case of the SAT, are unrepresentative of statewide student populations. Using a time-series regression approach described in a separate publication, this paper adjusts state SAT score averages for factors such as participation rate and student demographics, which are known to affect outcomes, then validates the results against recent state-level National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores. This produces continuous, state-representative estimated SAT score trends reaching back to 1972. The present paper charts these trends against both inflation-adjusted per pupil spending and the raw, unadjusted SAT results, providing an unprecedented perspective on American education inputs and outcomes over the past 40 years.

Locally, Madison spends double the national average per student.

Center for Research on Education Outcomes (PDF):

Across the country, charter schools occupy a growing position in the public education landscape. Heated debate has accompanied their existence since their start in Minnesota two decades ago. Similar debate has occurred in California, particularly in Los Angeles, with charter advocates extolling such benefits of the sector as expanding parental choice and introducing market-based competition to education. Little of that debate, however, is grounded in hard evidence about their impact on student outcomes. This report contributes to the discussion by providing evidence for charter students’ performance in Los Angeles for four years of schooling, beginning with the 2008-2009 school year and concluding in 2011-2012.

With the cooperation of the California Department of Education (CDE), CREDO obtained the historical sets of student-level administrative records. The support of CDE staff was critical to CREDO’s understanding of the character and quality of the data we received. However, it bears mention that the entirety of interactions with CDE dealt with technical issues related to the data. CREDO has developed the findings and conclusions independently.

This report provides an in-depth examination of the results for charter schools physically located within the Los Angeles Unified School District boundary. It is the first separate analysis by CREDO of the performance of Los Angeles’ charter schools. However, charter schools in Los Angeles were included in the CREDO report on all California charter schools, which can be found on our website.1 This report has two main benefits. First, it provides a rigorous and independent view of the performance of the city’s charter schools. Second, the study design is consistent with CREDO’s reports on charter school performance in other locations, making the results amenable to being benchmarked against those nationally and in other states and cities.

The analysis presented here takes two forms. We first present the findings about the effects of charter schools on student academic performance. These results are expressed in terms of the academic progress that a typical charter school student in Los Angeles would realize from a year of enrollment in a charter school. The second set of findings is presented at the school level. Because schools are the instruments on which the legislation and public policy operate, it is important to understand the range of performance for the schools. These findings look at the performance of students by school and present school average results.

Compared to the educational gains that charter students might have had in a traditional public school (TPS), the analysis shows that in a year’s time, on average, students in Los Angeles charter schools make larger learning gains in reading and mathematics. Results for Hispanic charter students, especially Hispanic students in poverty, are particularly notable. At the school level, we compare the average performance over two growth periods to the average results for the school’s control group. The results in Los Angeles are among the strongest observed in any of the previous CREDO studies. Larger shares of schools outperform their local market in reading and math than was reported in the national study that was released in 2013.2

Meanwhile, a majority of Madison School Board members rejected the Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school a few years ago. The traditional – Frederick Taylor -, non diverse governance model remains well entrenched here.

Karl Zinsmeister:

Many have been puzzled by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s skepticism toward charter schools, his calls for ending space-sharing and charging them rent, and his $210 million cut of a construction fund important to the schools. Education reformers are also anxious about the failure of President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to defend charter schools in the face of these prominent reversals of New York City policy. Is this just about teacher-union politics, or are there perhaps legitimate performance reasons for tapping the brakes on charter schools in public education today?

The first thing to remember about charter schools is how recent an invention they are. Born in the 1990s, it wasn’t until 2006 that total enrollment reached a million children—out of 55 million pupils in the country. More than half of the charters in New York City are less than five years old.

With huge waiting lists for every available seat, though, charters are now beginning to mushroom. Well before Mr. de Blasio faces re-election in 2017, charters will educate 10% of New York City’s public-school students, and they already enroll a quarter of all pupils in some of the city’s poorest districts. Nationwide, charter schools will enroll five million by the end of this decade.

Shirley Wang:

Some employers increasingly are viewing autism as an asset and not a deficiency in the workplace.

Germany-based software company SAP AG SAP.XE +1.43% has been actively seeking people with autism for jobs, not because of charitable outreach but because it believes features of autism may make some individuals better at certain jobs than those without autism.

It’s a worthy initiative, according to disability experts, since 85% of adults with autism are estimated to be unemployed.

Piloted in Germany, India and Ireland, the program is also launching in four North American offices, according to an announcement Thursday.

SAP aims to have up to 1% of its workforce—about 650 people—be employees with autism by 2020, according to Jose Velasco, head of the autism initiative at SAP in the U.S.

People with autism spectrum disorder—characterized by social deficits and repetitive behavior—tend to pay great attention to detail, which may make them well suited as software testers or debuggers, according to Mr. Velasco, who has two children with the condition.

Josh Freedman:

Last week, the University of California got downgraded. Not in the U.S. News or other college rankings, where six of its campuses rank in the top 15 public colleges in the United States; nor in College Prowler’s list of schools with the most attractive men on campus (where flagship UC-Berkeley clocks in at a measly number 1185). Rather, the UC system has been downgraded in the credit markets: ratings agency Moody’s lowered the UC system’s general revenue bonds from Aa1 to Aa2.

People like to talk about student debt – read, for example, my five part series on the topic. (Ok, I know you’re busy. How about at least one part of it? Do it for me.) But university debt, although rarely discussed, is arguably more important. Schools across the country are borrowing more money, and the increasing reliance on debt-financing at universities is adding logs covered in lighter fluid to an already flammable higher education system. The University of California system, for example, has $14.5 billion in outstanding debt, more than double its level in 2005. The total volume of debt across colleges of all kinds has increased so much that interest payments per student have increased 86% since a decade ago despite low interest rates.

Jason Delisle:

A New America analysis of recently available Department of Education data reveals that much of America’s student debt problem may be a result of expensive graduate and professional degrees—not unaffordable undergraduate educations. In fact, around 40 percent of recent federal loan disbursements are for graduate student debt, suggesting that a large chunk of the ubiquitous “$1 trillion in outstanding federal student debt” number is, in fact, graduate debt.
 
 New America’s report, The Graduate Student Debt Review, suggests that debt for graduate students in a range of master’s and professional degree programs accounts for some of the most dramatic increases in student borrowing between 2004 and 2012. Moreover, this trend is not limited to what many already know are high-cost credentials, like those in medicine and law. According to the data, in 2004, the median level of indebtedness for a borrower who earned a Master of Arts degree was $38,000. In 2012, that figured jumped to $59,000, after adjusting for inflation. Debt levels for other master’s degrees, such as a Master of Science or a Master of Education, show similar trends. For borrowers at the 75th percentile of indebtedness, the increases are even larger in absolute terms. For most master’s degrees, debt at the 75th percentile jumps from about $54,000 for degree recipients in 2004 to $85,000 in 2012, after adjusting for inflation.

Harvard University Press Blog:

For decades, large corporations have been contracting whatever work they can to foreign suppliers—think manufacturing, call centers, etc. Meanwhile, the vitality of the domestic service sector, comprised of all those unable-to-be-outsourced jobs, has become an economic refrain. Yet large employers have also been rapidly shedding those service sector jobs, offering contracts to smaller firms that desperately squeeze costs, resulting in declining wages, eroding benefits, unhealthy workplaces, and greater inequality. In The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It, David Weil details the pressures of subcontracting, franchising, and supply chains, revealing the distressing state of the “secure” service sector. His book begins with the following series of “Vignettes from the Modern Workplace.”

—–

The-fissured-workplaceA maid works at the San Francisco Marriott on Fisherman’s Wharf. The hotel property is owned by Host Hotels and Resorts Inc., a lodging real estate company. The maid, however, is evaluated and supervised daily and her hours and payroll managed by Crestline Hotels and Resorts Inc., a national third-party hotel management company. Yet she follows daily procedures (and risks losing her job for failure to accomplish them) regarding cleaning, room set-up, overall pace, and quality standards established by Marriott, whose name the property bears.

A cable installer in Dayton, Ohio, works as an independent contractor (in essence a self-employed business provider), paid on a job-by-job basis by Cascom Inc., a cable installation company. Cascom’s primary client is the international media giant Time Warner, which owns cable systems across the United States. The cable installer is paid solely on the basis of the job completed and is entitled to no protections normally afforded employees. Yet all installation contracts are supplied solely by Cascom, which also sets the price for jobs and collects payment for them. The installer must wear a shirt with the Cascom logo and can be removed as a contractor at will for not meeting minimum quotas or quality standards, or at the will of the company.

Jefrrey Brown:

The financial security of a strong university endowment would seem to matter most when hard times come along—when revenues slow and core functions are in danger of being compromised. At such times, an endowment can help guard against shortsighted cost cutting that harms both near-term quality and long-run vitality. But it turns out that many universities do nothing of the sort.

During the recent recession, most endowments took a beating, with the average endowment losing a quarter of its value. That decline followed years of heady growth that led endowments to grow at a far faster clip than university spending did. As a result, the losses suffered in the market meltdown represented a much larger loss relative to universities’ annual operating budgets than did any previous market correction.

Claudia Dreifus:

The biochemist Ricardo E. Dolmetsch has pioneered a major shift in autism research, largely putting aside behavioral questions to focus on cell biology and biochemistry.

Dr. Dolmetsch, 45, has done most of his work at Stanford. Since our interviews — a condensed and edited version of which follows — he has taken a leave to join Novartis, where his mission is to organize an international team to develop autism therapies.

“Pharmaceutical companies have financial and organizational resources permitting you to do things you might not be able to do as an academic,” he said. “I really want to find a drug.”

Q. Did you start out your professional life studying the biochemistry of autism?

Timothy Burke:

What I’ll ask about is this: what stirs many tenured faculty in humanities departments at wealthy private colleges and universities to so often pick and fret and prod at almost any perturbation of their worlds of practice–their departments, their disciplines, their publications, their colleges and universities? Why do so many humanistic scholars rise to almost any bait, whether it is a big awful dangling worm on a barbed hook or some bit of accidental fluff blown by the wind into their pond?

The crisis in the humanities, we’re often assured, doesn’t exist. Enrollments are steady, the business model’s sound, the intellectual wares are good.

The assurance is, in many ways, completely correct. The trends are not so dire and many of the criticisms are old and ritualized. Parents have been making fun of the choice to major in philosophy for five decades. Or longer, if you’ve read your Aristophanes.

And yet humanists are in fact anxious. Judging from a number of experiences I’ve had in the last year at Swarthmore and elsewhere, there’s more and more tense feelings coming from more directions and more individuals in reaction to a wider and wider range of stimuli.

Andrew Davis:

Current government policy concerning reading favours synthetic phonics (SP), where children learn to recognise letters with their associated sounds – and how to blend those sounds to “read” the “words”.

The revised national curriculum, coming into force from September 2014, requires reception and year 1 students to be taught SP. Students aren’t meant to get help from clues such as context, meaning or illustration. It’s difficult to gauge how rigidly this will be enforced, but the situation certainly suggests there’ll be a significant increase in pressure on schools and teachers to conform.

The existing universal imposition of a phonics check on all five and six year-olds reinforces SP. Students are tested on isolated pieces of text – half of them are pseudo-words, such as “vap”, and all of them can be blended from conventional letter sounds.

Much of the current documentation around SP gives the impression that phonemes are sounds from which spoken words can be constructed. For example, the “cat” sound can be made up from |k|, |æ| and |t|. But the term “phoneme” doesn’t mean “sound”; it actually refers to sets of sounds in speech that distinguish one word from another. For instance, /æ/ and /a:/ are separate phonemes in English. /æ/ can be heard in the middle of “hat”, while /a:/ is heard in the middle of “hart”. The change in the middle sound gives us a different word.

Susan Bromley:

On average, less than one-third of students in third through eighth grades in the “>(Brandon) district are proficient in mathematics, according to the Michigan Educational Assessment Program.

MEAP scores released last month showed 28 percent of third grade students are proficient in math, compared with 40.2 percent statewide and 51 percent in the county. The gap grows larger by fourth grade. While the district showed 30 percent proficient in math at this grade, it was still behind the state at 45.3 percent, and far behind the county at 57 percent proficient.

Scores for science (tested in fifth and eighth grades) and social studies (tested in sixth and ninth grades) are even more dismal.

Less than 50 percent of district students tested proficient in writing in both fourth and seventh grades. The district’s strongest MEAP scores came in reading, ranging from 62 percent proficient in third grade, 55 percent proficient in seventh grade, to 77 percent proficient in eighth grade.

In every subject tested, at every grade level, district students underperformed compared to the county average, by as much as up to 27 percentage points. The district was also under the state averages at math for every grade level tested. The district did outperform the state average in reading for every grade tested besides seventh, and also did better than the state average in seventh grade writing, eighth grade science, and ninth grade social studies.

The district plans to be better prepared for whatever that test is with the board approval of $175,000 worth of new math materials for kindergarten through eighth grades. The materials, to be purchased at the end of this year, are the first new mathematics curriculum to be purchased at the elementary level in 12 years. Kindergarten through fifth grades will be using “Bridges” math curriculum, and sixth through eighth grades will use “Connected Math Project” to support the common core curriculum. Teacher representatives from all grade levels examined materials from several companies and selected Bridges and CMP as the best after sampling them in the classrooms and consulting with Geri Devine, a math consultant from Oakland Schools and district parent.

The materials are not traditional type textbooks, McMahon said, but for 6-8, bound books that each contain a unit of study, notebook like in size and shape. At the elementary level, the new materials are consumables, exercises and activities that a certain amount will have to be replaced yearly at a cost of roughly $20,000-$25,000.

“With the new materials, we should see an increase in scores,” McMahon said. “The publishers will give mathematics professional development and the district is also planning more professional development in the area of math, with instruction by expert users of the materials and those who have a proven track record for improving mathematical competency.”

Much more on Connected Math, here.

Bruce Deitrick Price:

People use these snarky expressions when they want to suggest that something is so totally obvious that ten out of ten people will see it instantly.

In a sane world, a good example would be Whole Word (or Look-say, as it was called when introduced in 1931). This is the famously bad reading method where kids have to memorize words as graphic designs, as shapes, as outlines.

Decade after decade, Whole Word produced dreadful results. It’s the main reason we have 50 million functional illiterates. The presence of this obvious hoax in elementary schools would seem to be prima facie proof of a vast conspiracy. Duh.

So how can this hoax survive if it’s so bad? The answer is that most people, once they become fluent readers, lose empathy for the difficulties that children face. As a result, the schools can get away with murder.

We need an easy way for adults to experience what it’s like to learn reading with Whole Word. Then they’ll care! Here’s a simple experiment that will drop you into an all-too-typical first grade:

Jennifer Richler:

A few days ago, an old friend sent me a panicked email. She had just finished reading Ron Suskind’s beautiful essay in the New York Times Magazine about raising a son with autism: “Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney.” Suskind describes how, at almost 3 years of age, his son Owen “disappeared.” The child was once “engaged, chatty, full of typical speech,” but then he stopped talking, lost eye contact, even struggled to use a sippy cup.

Owen was eventually diagnosed with a regressive form of autism, which Suskind says affects about a third of children with the disorder. “Unlike the kids born with it,” he continues, “this group seems typical until somewhere between 18 and 36 months—then they vanish.”

That was the line that alarmed my friend, whose son is nearing his third birthday. “What is this ‘regressive autism?’ ” she asked me, the resident autism expert in her peer group. (I conducted research on autism and regression in autism before becoming a freelance writer.) “I thought we were out of the woods!”

William Kremer:

Today, there’s often a perception that Asian children are given a hard time by their parents. But a few hundred years ago northern Europe took a particularly harsh line, sending children away to live and work in someone else’s home. Not surprisingly, the children didn’t always like it.

Around the year 1500, an assistant to the Venetian ambassador to England was struck by the strange attitude to parenting that he had encountered on his travels.

He wrote to his masters in Venice that the English kept their children at home “till the age of seven or nine at the utmost” but then “put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years”. The unfortunate children were sent away regardless of their class, “for everyone, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own”.

It was for the children’s own good, he was told – but he suspected the English preferred having other people’s children in the household because they could feed them less and work them harder.

The Onion:

After carefully scrutinizing the application of high school senior Erica Allson, admissions officers at Wesleyan University confirmed Monday that the 18-year-old was the ideal candidate to subsidize the tuition and fees of three lower-income students. “Erica is truly a perfect fit for us: Not only does she show sufficient academic potential, but her parents are two highly successful professionals capable of paying the school’s annual $47,000 in tuition plus $13,000 in room and board in their entirety,” assistant admissions director Stacey Wright said, adding that she was left in awe after reading Allson’s near flawless income disclosure form. “With the money she’ll bring to campus, we can easily admit several less-well-off students, which will help us project our desired image as a highly progressive and inclusive institution, plus we’ll still have some extra left over to add HDTVs to the dining hall and install a rock-climbing wall in the freshman dorms. It’s all about striking the right balance with our student body.” At press time, administrators confirmed that they had also just admitted a social activist whose contributions to the community would offset the reputations of three football recruits.

Matthew Ladner:

So how do private school students do in Science compared to public school students. I wasn’t sure, so I went to the NAEP data explorer to find out.

Private school students outscore public school students, but private school students tend to be more affluent than public school students, and there can be differences in special need and language profiles. Fortunately the NAEP data explorer allows you to take such factors into account. To maximize the comparison, we will only look at the NAEP science scores of children eligible for a Free or Reduced priced lunch under federal guidelines, and who have neither a special education nor an English Language Learner designation. This is about as close to apples to apples comparison you can hope for in NAEP data.

So NAEP changed the framework of their Science exam in 2009, making the 2009 and later exams incomparable to those given before 2009. The comparison of general education poor children between public and private schools is sporadically available in both NAEP science frameworks. You can’t compare old NAEP science to new NAEP science, but you can compare public and private school scores within each year. So let’s start with 4th grade:

……

So for those of you scoring at home, in 8 possible comparisons, private school general education poor children outscored six times. It was close (within the margin of sampling error) a few times but every time the result was lopsided it was lopsided in favor of the private school children. Quite frankly science scores should be higher in both public and private schools for low=income kids, but the available evidence does show an overall private school advantage. Unless you happen to be Stephanie Simon working through a sizable case of confirmation bias, in which case this is what you saw:

Nick Anderson:

Britt Freitag, an admissions officer at George Washington University, confessed she was “slightly nervous” about a candidate for the Class of 2018. His grades were solid, but not stellar. The student had taken some tough courses, but not as many as Freitag would have liked. Test scores, she said, were “definitely on the low side.”

On the other hand, Freitag told two other officers one recent morning, the student compared favorably to his high school classmates, wrote a good essay, showed impressive determination in activities outside class — and had a family connection to GW.

“I could go either way,” Freitag said.

“Either way what?” asked her colleague, Jim Rogers.

Deny or admit, she said, stumped. Her voice fell to a murmur. “You think maybe he’s a wait-list?”

This is the kind of conversation high school seniors across America wish they could hear but never will. For the past few weeks, teams of gatekeepers at colleges have dissected the academic and personal lives of these students in a matter of minutes to reach decisions that will chart their future.

…..

At that point, some tentative decisions might be reversed to boost the financial-aid budget. That could help a few borderline students from affluent families.

TED:

Sugata Mitra thinks big. At last year’s TED, he unveiled his dream to transform primary education. Instead of a teacher, a chalkboard and a generic curriculum, the recipient of the 2013 TED Prize asked us to imagine an environment that empowered children to learn on their own, with the guidance of virtual mentors. Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the CloudIt involved nothing more than a few computers, an Internet connection and a bunch of curious minds. He called this utopian world School in the Cloud, a Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE), or simply put, a place where children could tap into their innate sense of wonder by connecting with information online.

A year later, Mitra returned to the TED stage to give an update. He has opened five learning labs — three in India and two in the UK — with two more slated to open in May. Mitra is also the subject of a School in the Cloud documentary being filmed by British director Jerry Rothwell, the winner of the Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award. The trailer was released during TED2014, giving viewers a taster of all the work that went into building the School in the Cloud and a candid look at Sugata Mitra himself. Because let’s face it: some people thought his head was in the clouds when he conceived of this idea … But now, kids around the world are learning in this exciting new way.

At the same time, Mitra — a professor at Newcastle University — has also pioneered a digital tool, a virtual School in the Cloud Community Platform with the help of core technology and innovation partner Microsoft and their Skype Social Good team. The web platform, launched this week, ensures that anyone, anywhere around the world can experiment with self-organized learning. Made by Many, the product design team, spent six months co-creating the platform with Mitra’s team, Microsoft and children themselves, to ensure that the experience translates across cultural and economic barriers. Essentially, it is a giant global experiment in self-organized learning, inviting everyone to help design the future of learning.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown:

Note to American tweens: Don’t be a Good Samaritan on the state’s watch. A sixth grader at a Virginia Beach public school was suspended this week for having a razor blade. She took the blade from another student who was cutting himself with it. Bad move, apparently.

The Bayside Middle School student, Adrionna Harris, said she took a razor blade away from another student because he was using it to cut himself. She threw the blade away and told school officials. Then she was suspended for 10 days, with a recommendation for expulsion, according to Virginia Beach news station WAVY.

Note that Harris didn’t even have the razor blade in her possession when she went to school administrators. The only evidence this razor blade existed is Harris’ own admission of it, when she told school officials what had happened and that she had already thrown it away.

Michael Teitelbaum:

Everyone knows that the United States has long suffered from widespread shortages in its science and engineering workforce, and that if continued these shortages will cause it to fall behind its major economic competitors. Everyone knows that these workforce shortages are due mainly to the myriad weaknesses of American K-12 education in science and mathematics, which international comparisons of student performance rank as average at best.

Such claims are now well established as conventional wisdom. There is almost no debate in the mainstream. They echo from corporate CEO to corporate CEO, from lobbyist to lobbyist, from editorial writer to editorial writer. But what if what everyone knows is wrong? What if this conventional wisdom is just the same claims ricocheting in an echo chamber?

The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce. How can the conventional wisdom be so different from the empirical evidence? There are of course many complexities involved that cannot be addressed here. The key points, though, are these:

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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter via a kind Linda Doeseckle email (PDF):

Does it matter to you when school begins in the fall? How about when and how long winter or spring break is? And, how about when the school year ends? Have you thought about how many days you work for your annual salary, or how many hours make up your school day? In members’ responses to many years of MTI bargaining surveys, all of these factors are “very important” to those in MTI’s various bargaining units.

It was MTI’s case in 1966 which gave teacher unions an equal voice in establishing all of the above. Ruling for MTI, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the school calendar is a mandatory subject of bargaining, meaning that a school district in Wisconsin must negotiate with the union to determine each of the factors described above. However, Governor Walker’s Act 10 reversed the Supreme Court’s ruling, because Act 10 removed workers’ rights to collectively bargain. And now to make it worse, there is a legislative proposal to enable school boards to unilaterally increase the number of hours in a school day.

Walker’s Act 10 enables a school board without a good conscience to abuse staff, especially teachers, because teachers are paid an annual salary not on an hourly basis. MTI’s victory before Judge Colas found Act 10, in great part, to be unconstitutional, which in turn enabled MTI to negotiate Collective Bargaining Agreements for MTI’s five bargaining units for 2014-15. Walker’s appeal of Judge Colas’ decision to the Supreme Court is pending decision. District management meantime, has refused to bargain over the calendar for the 2015-16 school year. This negativity not only impacts teachers’ planning for the 2015-16 school year, but is also causing families not to be able to plan ahead. Many families often plan vacations, weddings and other family and religious events years in advance.

Deanna Wright:

Last April, and to a remarkable amount of fanfare, Jennifer Cheatham became the superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District. From the very start, the community has opened its arms to welcome her. When I interviewed her for Madison Magazine TV last month, I was aware that the community, especially parents of color, continues to be hopeful, if not expectant, that she’ll be a superintendent who follows through on her promises to ensure that all students learn—no excuses. Here’s an excerpt of our talk.

Deana Wright: One component of the district’s new strategic framework is parental and community involvement. Research, of course, has shown that when parents get involved in their kids’ education, not only do test scores go up, but disciplinary problems go down. The report does indicate that the plan to develop family engagement strategies for each school is a little behind schedule. What is the next step?

Jennifer Cheatham: Each of our schools develop their school improvement plans, and one of the requirements for those improvement plans is to have a strategy for better engaging families. What we learned quickly is that our schools are struggling with that. They just don’t know enough about what great parent engagement looks like. So, we had to take a close look at, really, what defined parent and family engagement, first of all. I think we intentionally had to slow this work down, because we realized that it was more complicated than we originally thought and we’re trying to re-define family engagement so it isn’t about expecting families to come to us, to come to the traditional events that we hold in our schools, but to really think about family engagement differently.

DW: Does that mean going to them?

Related:

Jennifer Cheatham.

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results

Madison’s 2013-2014 budget, about $392,000,000 or $15k/student

A brief look at recent Madison Superintendents.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

This will be my final report to the community as the president & CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison. Today, former Madison Police Chief Noble Wray will take over as the interim leader of this great organization and I will spend the remainder of this month supporting his transition, ironing out my new path, drinking these wonderful green smoothies and enjoying more frequent trips to the gym and bike rides around town.

We have accomplished a great deal since I joined the organization on March 29, 2010. We increased the size, diversity and strength of our staff to meet increased community needs, invested more in their professional growth and development of our team members than ever before, and improved their compensation to be more consistent with the market rate for their positions. We also provided full-time employment to five team members who completed our job training programs.

Highlights of our other accomplishments:
Increased our industry-specific, skill-based training academies from one to five, adding Customer Service & Sales, IT, Food Service and Construction Trades Academies. We continue to operate the highly regarded Health Administration Training Program (HATP) and are exploring adding academies in facilities maintenance, coding and lab tech as well.
Added the Featured Employer Program, adding 40 new employer partners in just the last 18 months who are dedicated to hiring talent through the Urban League. Since January 2010, graduates of Urban League training programs have earned more than $17.2 million in salaries and wages, and yielded more than $3.5 million in paid taxes. We’ve also grown from serving 183 adults in 2009 to 1,731 in 2013 through our four-tiered workforce development strategy.

Launched the Urban League Scholars Academy, which is presently offering an extended day high school preparatory program to 127 sixth and seventh graders attending three Madison middle schools who have academic enrichment needs.

Tutored more than 2,500 children annually in 17 middle and high schools across four Madison area school districts, utilizing more than 900 skilled volunteers; prepared more than 300 students for success on the ACT college entrance exam; and launched a partnership with the Madison Metropolitan School District to identify young men and women who’ve dropped out of school and help them complete high school, prepare for the workforce, secure jobs and continue their post-secondary education.

Created the annual Workplace Diversity & Leadership Summit, Wisconsin’s largest training ground in workplace diversity for employers and career professionals, and the Urban League Jazz Cabaret, a new annual fundraiser. To learn more about the upcoming Summit on May 9th which we are co-hosting this year with the Madison Region Economic Partnership, click here.
Completed a comprehensive analysis of the needs and aspirations of residents of three important South Madison neighborhoods and hosted several community events that have brought together hundreds of residents to celebrate and work together, and build a strong South Madison community.

Established the Urban League of Greater Madison Young Professionals Chapter which will bring together an unprecedented number of diverse young professionals at its first ever Emerge Gala on March 29, 2014. To learn more and purchase tickets, click here.

Built one of the strongest and most diverse teams and Board of Directors among nonprofits in Greater Madison, and cultivated talented leaders who are doing great things within the Urban League and other organizations they have gone on to work for and lead.

Among our greatest achievements also was our effort to establish the Madison Preparatory Academy charter schools for young men and women. Though our vision was not realized, in pushing for the school we spearheaded an unprecedented and necessary conversation about the state of education for African American and low income children that has moved a community and a school district to become more engaged and accountable than ever.

It has been an honor and a pleasure to stand on the shoulders of the Urban League leaders and team members who’ve come before me, and serve this great organization and the Greater Madison region. Thank you for all the encouragement and support you’ve shown me and our team, and thank you for all that you do for our community as well. The Urban League is poised to accomplish great things for the community for years to come.

…and don’t forget to provide your sponsorship and buy your tickets to the YP’s Emerge Gala and Economic Development, Leadership & Diversity Summit. The League can’t succeed without your financial contribution, continued active engagement, and support.

To the Future. Onward.

Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison

Much more on Kaleem Caire and the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

Interview with MMSD School Board candidate Wayne Strong Safe schools and high academic achievement:

High academic achievement, for Strong, means that all of our MMSD students are achieving to the fullest extent of their abilities.

“Whether you are a TAG [Talented and Gifted] or a special-needs student or whether you are a middleof- the-road student, the teachers [should be] challenging our students to do the best that they can do and to be the best that they can be,” Strong says.

“We’ve got to make sure we are doing that for all of our students.”

Strong wants to improve graduation rates and he feels that the disparity in the way that kids are disciplined affects that quite a bit.

“Right now, our African American students are only graduating at a rate of 53 percent. That’s still not good,” Strong says.

Michael Flores: I’ll build bridge from community to School Board, more.

Madison school board candidates Wayne Strong and Michael Flores propose achievement gap solutions.

Credit Kaleem Caire for big impact

It’s easy to talk about Madison’s awful record of graduating barely half of its black high school students in four years, among other glaring racial disparities.

Kaleem Caire actually did something about it. And that’s what matters most. Caire’s impact on Madison during his four years as leader of the Urban League of Greater Madison has been profound.

Unfortunately, unanswered questions about his surprising departure and “less than ideal” use of the nonprofit’s credit cards won’t help the cause. It will give supporters of the status quo more leverage to argue against bold change.

The Madison School Board in late 2011 rejected the Urban League’s promising charter school proposal, siding with the teachers union over the Urban League and its many supporters. The proposal for a Madison Preparatory Academy was aimed at low-achieving minority students. It would have offered higher expectations for students, a longer school day and year, more pressure on parents to get involved, more minority teachers, uniforms, same-sex classes and internships with local employers

Libbey Meister: Flores would be wonderful School Board member.

Ed Hughes: I look forward to helping Madison schools thrive (Mr. Hughes is running uncontested for the 3rd time).

On Politics: Mary Burke would cut statewide vouchers, private school tuition deduction

Investors Business Daily:

Buried deep in a section of President Obama’s budget, released this week, is an eye-opening fact: This year, 70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high.

In effect, the government has become primarily a massive money-transfer machine, taking $2.6 trillion from some and handing it back out to others. These government transfers now account for 15% of GDP, another all-time high. In 1991, direct payments accounted for less than half the budget and 10% of GDP.
What’s more, the cost of these direct payments is exploding. Even after adjusting for inflation, they’ve shot up 29% under Obama.
ObamaCare, Medicare…

Where do these checks go? The biggest chunk, 38.6%, goes to pay health bills, either through Medicare, Medicaid or ObamaCare. A third goes out in the form of Social Security checks. Only 21% goes toward poverty programs — or “income security” as it’s labeled in the budget — and a mere 5% ends up in the hands of veterans.

Walter Russell Mead:

With enrollments down and tuition peaking, many colleges are looking everywhere for way to enhance their revenue streams. A new piece in the New York Times describes the rise of “bridge programs,” which are essentially third-party companies hired by colleges to recruit foreign students to study in American schools and prepare them for a foreign educational system.

The purpose of these programs is twofold: There is an abundance of talented foreign students eager to study in the U.S., but most have only heard of the big-name schools, but there aren’t a lot of spots open. Enter bridge programs, which steer foreign students toward lesser-known schools and offer them crash courses in the peculiarities of the American learning environment.

The second purpose of these programs—boosting applications and enrollment—is of more interest to the universities:

Erin Richards:

It was once the premier creative arts school in the Milwaukee area, drawing students from as far away as Elkhorn and Cedarburg.

Now, the staffers at Roosevelt Middle School talk about the size and number of fights they endure.

Former teacher Caryl Davis remembers a Thursday afternoon in 2012, when a fight started among students. The disruption spread, and Davis saw a group of eighth-grade boys rush around a corner.

She put her arms out to slow them down, and one boy twisted her arm painfully behind her back, Davis told police. The incident resulted in a torn rotator cuff, she said, and the trauma ultimately prompted her to resign.

Few who attended Roosevelt in its prime would recognize the place it has become. The school, at 800 W. Walnut St., has 627 students in sixth through eighth grades. Last month, Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Gregory Thornton called for an emergency reorganization next year, eliminating the sixth-grade class entirely so staff could get a handle on the seventh and eighth grades for a year.

Rob Lazebnik:

March Madness is upon us, by which I mean the tradition of taking your high school junior on a manic tour of college campuses. I’ve done it twice now, so I feel that I have some perspective on how to survive it.

As the parent, you have much to offer on this exciting and emotional journey—paying for it and doing the driving. But this limited influence does give you leeway to help design the trip, and here is where you can begin your subtle campaign of influencing where your kid goes to college. Keep your designs sub rosa, because the minute you say, “I’d love to see you at UMass Amherst,” she’ll set her heart on Sarah Lawrence. That one little sentence can cost you $40,000.

You’re only going to have a week or so on the tour, so you’ll have to pick your schools carefully. Most likely your kid will have already assembled a wish list of colleges to see. Don’t feel hurt if those places are far away from you—that is only because she wants to be really far away from you.

First off, pick schools that are only one nonstop flight away. A kid who has to take multiple planes to get home will soon be saying, “Brandon’s family is close, so I’m going to spend Thanksgiving there instead and go crossbow hunting with him and his friends.”

As you plot out a Google GOOG -0.19% map of the schools you want to visit, use the opportunity to avoid colleges you feel aren’t a good “fit”—that is college counselor-ese for, “She doesn’t have a shot in hell of getting in.”

Reihan Salam:

America’s elite higher education institutions are the envy of the world. Foreign students flock to the oldest and wealthiest U.S. research universities to take advantage of resources that are unparalleled, thanks to the deep pockets of many centuries’ worth of captains of industry.
 
 Yet when we consider the post-secondary institutions that educate the typical American high school grad, we see a very different picture. While the share of Americans who enroll in higher education has grown substantially in recent decades, graduation rates have been stagnant.
 
 Community colleges promise an affordable education to millions of students, but they often fail to offer the courses students need to complete a degree in a reasonable amount of time. Public colleges and universities churn out graduates who are forced to take jobs that don’t actually require a four-year post-secondary education. Most private non-profits do the same, and they’re also notorious for charging obscene tuition that their graduates can scarcely afford. And private for-profits, which have grown enormously by taking on some of the hardest-to-accommodate students, stand accused of loading up their students with debt without offering them marketable skills.

By Jon Marcus and Holly K. Hacker:

America’s colleges and universities are quietly shifting the burden of their big tuition increases onto low-income students, while many higher-income families are seeing their college costs rise more slowly, or even fall, an analysis of federal data shows.
 
 It’s a trend financial-aid experts and some university administrators worry will further widen the gap between the nation’s rich and poor as college degrees—especially four-year ones—drift beyond the economic reach of growing numbers of students.
 
 “We’re just exacerbating the income inequalities and educational achievement gaps,” said Deborah Santiago, co-founder and vice president of Excelencia in Education, a nonprofit group that advocates for Latino and other students.

Molly Beck:

Even though expanding eight schools is only part of the plan, “if there’s any one (school) that looks particularly challenging to explain,” Hughes said, “we know that will be what the opponents of the referendum will latch onto. … We are going to have to be able to work through that and decide whether each of these is separately defensible.”

Hughes added that attendance area boundary changes are tough, but the board might find out that could be a solution for one or two of the schools.

Board vice president Arlene Silveira and board member T.J. Mertz also said that the controversial idea needed to be thoroughly vetted.

“We have to have the discussion about boundaries — we have to show that we looked at it, and what that showed,” said Silveira, who also added that internal transfers at popular schools like Van Hise Elementary and Hamilton Middle School needed to also be examined as a way to relieve crowding.

Board member Mary Burke said making the proposed investment in the eight schools could ultimately save the district the cost of having to build schools, especially if the district sees enrollment gains in the future as schools improve.

Related: Might low income student distribution be addressed? and Effective school maintenance spending?

Melissa Korn:

College admissions officers trumpet graduates’ success in finding well-paying jobs. But the schools often have a hard time getting solid proof.

Boiling down employment outcomes to a single metric isn’t easy, many college officials say, since hurdles stand in the way of gathering meaningful figures and conveying them. Others say they are leery of tying the nuances of educational success to dollar figures.

But with student-loan debt outstanding hitting a record $1.1 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the issue of quantifying graduate success has become increasingly important as colleges come under pressure to prove the education they provide is worth the investment.

Bonnie Mann Falk was dismayed at the lack of information on student outcomes that she and her daughter, Mollie, got from admissions officers during the college hunt this past fall. Mollie, a 17-year-old high-school senior from Long Island in New York, plans to study retail management and sought assurance she could find a job in that industry.

Arsalan Bashir:

Almost everybody knows there is a problem with the education system, but very few can put a finger down on what that problem is. Parents, teachers, students, and even school administrators blame a fractured system for its shortcomings — but this quickly dissolves into a circular argument centered around funding and improved results.

US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, drew out a contrast between the mindset of parents in South Korea and the United States. In a few minuted of non-sugar-coated honesty, Arne pointed out a perspective that is ignored in most attempts to fix the education system — teachers and culture.

This instantly aligned with my analysis of the caveats with the system, and why even a meteoric startup culture was struggling to help. While most of the EdTech pioneers aimed to make teachers redundant, countries like South Korea and Finland focused on first choosing the best teachers, and then empowering them to drive their students to academic success.

South Korea stringently requires teachers to come from the top 5% of college programs and Finland takes this quest for qualified educators to a higher level by insisting on all teachers being Masters degree holders.

Related: When A Stands for Average.

Emily Jane Fox:

Anthony-James Green has spent nearly a decade, and amassed quite a fortune, figuring out how to ace the SAT.

But his finely honed — and expensive — methodology could be in flux now that the College Board plans sweeping changes for the college entrance exam.

Among the changes: Test takers will no longer need to commit scores of obscure vocabulary words to memory, and math sections will focus much more on real-world problem solving. College Board president David Coleman said the changes, beginning in the spring of 2016, aim to level the playing field for those who can’t afford pricey tutors and classes.

So what about Green, who’s built a business around that uneven playing field?

Over the past nine years, he’s cultivated a strategy in which he observes each client one on one and zeroes in on the student’s biggest weakness.

“Before you ever teach students anything, you need to know the enemy — what is it that they don’t get and what’s stopping them from getting their perfect score,” he said.

Corey Robin:

Jargon has been the bane of academic life since there’s been academic life. Just read Immanuel Kant. Or Thomas Hobbes, who complained that the academic writing of his day was “nothing else … but insignificant trains of strange and barbarous words.” But if scholarly journals still feature specialists writing for specialists, more academics are writing for the public than ever before. When they’re not, it has less to do with the perversity of their preferences than the precariousness of their profession.

Seth Jovaag:

Melissa Droessler tries not to flinch when she tells people her dream of opening a charter school in Madison.

“Even the word ‘charter’ in Madison can be emotionally charged,” she says.

But Droessler, director of Isthmus Montessori Academy, is steadfast in her belief that a century-old pedagogy created in the slums of Rome could help tackle Madison schools’ thorniest problems.

Last month, the academy submitted a proposal to open Madison’s first public Montessori school in September 2015. As Madison’s fourth charter school, it would be tuition-free and open to anyone. It would also employ unionized Madison teachers, potentially avoiding a hurdle that tripped up proponents of the Madison Preparatory Academy charter school in 2011.

Perhaps most significant, Droessler and others believe the Montessori approach could raise low-income and minority student achievement.

“The achievement gap will probably be the biggest part of our pitch,” she says “We feel it’s time for this in Madison. There’s no other motive.”

Organizers want to submit a grant application to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction by April 15 that could net $150,000 for planning costs next year. The Madison school board is expected to vote whether to green-light the application at its March 31 meeting, though any binding decision to establish the school is at least 10 months away, according to district policy governing the creation of charter schools.

Board member James Howard has toured the academy at 255 N. Sherman Ave. on the city’s near-northeast side. He says he’s interested in the proposal but needs to know more before forming an opinion. Ditto for board president Ed Hughes.

Related: Previous stillborn Madison charter initiatives include: The Studio School and the Madison Preparatory Academy IB school.

Rebecca Onion:

Published in 1941, this “Trading Game: France—Colonies” aimed to teach French children the basics of colonial management.

Players drew cards corresponding to colony names, then had to deploy cards representing assets like boats, engineers, colonists, schools, and equipment, in order to win cards representing the exports of the various colonies. “Images on the game,” Getty Research Institute curator Isotta Poggi writes in her blog post on the document, “provide a vivid picture of the vast variety of resources, including animals, plants, and minerals, that the colonies provided to France.” Cartoons on the cards depict coal (mined by a figure clearly intended to be a “native”), rubber, wood, and even wild animals.

Along the way, players needed to avoid pitfalls like sickness, “laziness,” and intemperance (illustrated by a cartoon of a red-cheeked white man in khakis and a white hat, served by a “native” in “traditional” dress). Once the cards representing a colony’s major exports had been won, the colony was considered “exploitée,” and was out of the game.

As the map at the center of the board shows, at the time France’s empire held colonies in Africa, South America, and Asia. The postwar movements for decolonization and independence changed this picture completely. By 1962, when the eight-year-long Algerian War finally led to Algerian independence, many of the colonies marked in red on this map were no longer under French control.

Madison School District (PDF):

This is the third in a four-part series of updates regarding development of the 2014-15 MMSD budget. As you may recall, the January update focused on the revenue side of the budget. In February, the update provided an introduction to the staff allocation process. The update this month will feature the non-personnel side of the budget for the schools. It will also include information about the MMSD budget adoption process and schedule.

1) School Non-personnel Budgets:
Our proposition is that school non-personnel budgets are under-funded and that funds should be shifted from central office accounts to the schools to correct this condition. Our zero-based budget goal is to shift at least $500,000 to the schools for non-personnel budgets (an 11% increase), with a stretch goal of shifting $1,000,000 to the schools (a 22% increase). In 2013-14, the schools received $4.5 million of local funds for non-personnel accounts. Our goal is to increase this amount to $5,000,000 or $5,500,000. This reallocation will provide additional resources for schools which can be used for a variety of activities aligned with SIP priorities, such as basic classroom supplies and materials, supplemental instructional materials, staff development, additional teacher planning time, and additional SBLT planning time.

It should not be surprising that school non-personnel budgets have been squeezed in recent years. Whenever personnel costs grow faster than school revenues, which is the case in almost all Wisconsin school districts, the non-personnel side of the budget is inevitably reduced. For example, MMSD used a two percent (2%) across-the-board decrease in all supply accounts (including central office) to help balance this years’ budget.

We are making school non-personnel budgets a priority in budget development because it will give principals slightly more local decision-making authority. In addition, there are related signs of budgetary stress in the schools which we should acknowledge, even if we can’t solve them all in one step. At the secondary level, for example, under-funded school non-personnel budgets lead to departmental requests for higher course fees. At the elementary level, it leads to ever-lengthier school supply lists for parents to fulfill. At the community level, it leads to PTO’s and Boosters being asked to supplement school budgets for routine operational needs. These are conditions we wish to remediate over the next several budget cycles.

George Parker & Helen Warrell:

Under the intense gaze of Lenin and Malcolm X, Michael Gove is setting out his plan to break the grip of a bourgeois elite that has taken hold of Britain, seizing key positions in public life, including those at the heart of government – his government.

“It’s ridiculous,” splutters Gove, Britain’s education secretary, as he reflects on the immaculately connected and expensively educated inner circle of David Cameron, his friend and the country’s Conservative prime minister. Four of this exclusive group went to just one private school: Eton College, Cameron’s alma mater. “It doesn’t make me feel personally uncomfortable, because I like each of the individuals concerned,” he says. “But it’s ridiculous. I don’t know where you can find a similar situation in any other developed economy.”

Gove then draws parallels between Cameron’s team and the cabinet assembled by the supposedly nepotistic Tory prime minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil. “At the beginning of the 20th century, the Conservative cabinet was called Hotel Cecil. The phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’ came about. It’s preposterous.”

But this is Britain in the 21st century. And Gove is burning with indignation that money can still buy the education that opens doors to the top jobs in Britain today, while the state school system allows talent to go to waste. “I don’t blame any of the individuals concerned, that would be equally silly,” he says, referring to Cameron and his team. “But it’s a function of the fact that, as we pointed out a couple of years ago, more boys from Eton went to Oxford and Cambridge than boys eligible for free school meals.”

Lucy Ward:

Access to the data of more than a million teenagers and students and thousands of their parents is being sold to advertisers such as mobile phone and energy drinks companies by Ucas, the university applications body.

The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service received more than £12m last year in return for targeted advertising and sales of the emails and addresses of subscribers as young as 16.

The service, which controls admissions to UK universities and attracts 700,000 new applicants each year, sells the access via its commercial arm, Ucas Media.

Vodafone, O2, Microsoft and the private university accommodation provider Pure Student Living are among those who have marketed through Ucas, which offers access to over a million student email addresses and a market worth a claimed £15bn a year.

The Red Bull energy drink firm promoted three new drink flavours by sending sample cans to 17,500 selected students deemed to be trend-setting “early adopters” in order to create a “social media buzz”.

Applicants can opt out of receiving direct marketing, but only at the cost of missing out on education and careers mailings as well.

Owen Phillips:

News stories covering the rising price of a higher education are disconcerting for anyone planning to attend college—but for low-income students, these stories are particularly discouraging. That’s because these students are the most likely to see rising tuition as a barrier to attending college. And although billions of dollars in federal programs exist to help low-income students afford college, many never receive assistance because they do not complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Submitting the FAFSA is the first step in receiving a financial aid package. Once they have that, students can begin to calculate their true costs of college, and perhaps it won’t be as expensive as news stories had led them to believe. The map below uses data released earlier this year by the Department of Education (DOE) to show the share of high school seniors in each state that completed the FAFSA*. The data show that on average, less than 55 percent of seniors complete the FAFSA in each state. That’s an especially alarming statistic given that studies demonstrate a 25 to 30 percent increase in the likelihood of low and middle-income students enrolling in college if they simply complete the FAFSA. – See more at: http://www.edcentral.org/filling-fafsas/#sthash.AzhpOihh.dpuf

Powerpoint Slides (900K PDF):

Partner: University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education Term of Agreement: April 1, 2014 – June 30, 2015 (phase one)

Purpose: To craft a comprehensive induction strategy in Madison schools resulting in a workforce which can significantly impact student achievement and narrow opportunity gaps. (phase one)

Target Audience: New educators, instructional coaches, and new principals (phase one)

Much more on the UW-Madison School of Education, here.

There are alternatives to Powerpoint style “slideware”:

Jeff Bezos likes to read. That’s a dog-bites-man revelation if ever there was one, considering that Bezos is the cerebral founder and chief executive of a $100 billion empire built on books. More revealing is that the Amazon CEO’s fondness for the written word drives one of his primary, and peculiar, tools for managing his company: Meetings of his “S-team” of senior executives begin with participants quietly absorbing the written word. Specifically, before any discussion begins, members of the team — including Bezos — consume six-page printed memos in total silence for as long as 30 minutes. (Yes, the e-ink purveyor prefers paper. Ironic, no?) They scribble notes in the margins while the authors of the memos wait for Bezos and his minions to finish reading.

Amazon (AMZN) executives call these documents “narratives,” and even Bezos realizes that for the uninitiated — and fans of the PowerPoint presentation — the process is a bit odd. “For new employees, it’s a strange initial experience,” he tells Fortune. “They’re just not accustomed to sitting silently in a room and doing study hall with a bunch of executives.” Bezos says the act of communal reading guarantees the group’s undivided attention. Writing a memo is an even more important skill to master. “Full sentences are harder to write,” he says. “They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”

Philip Nel:

As I am writing this article, I should be writing something else: an email to an editor, an email to an author, a letter of recommendation, notes for tomorrow’s classes, comments on students’ papers, comments on manuscripts, an abstract for an upcoming conference, notes for one of the books I’m working on. I cannot remember the last time I ended a day having crossed everything off my to-do list.

Why do academics work so much?

1) Part of it is habit. When we’re just starting out, we learn to say “yes” to everything. Join this panel? Yes. Send article in to special issue? Yes. Write a book review? Yes. Join committee in professional organization? Yes. Indeed, we learn to look for things to say yes to. This is how you build your C.V. Go to conferences, publish, get involved. If you don’t do it, you won’t get that elusive tenure-track job. Then, should you become one of the few who get the job, you’ll need to maintain a level of production in order to get tenure. Should you get tenure, you’ll want one day to get promoted. If that happens, and you reach full professor, well, best to keep publishing … just in case. What if your university falls on hard times? Or you need to move? Tenure is good, but portable tenure is better. So you just get on that treadmill and never get off.

Noam Chomsky:

On hiring faculty off the tenure track

That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Walmart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line.

The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities.

The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.

Robert Hiltonsmith, Tamara Draut:

As student debt continues to climb, it’s important to understand how our once debt-free system of public universities and colleges has been transformed into a system in which most students borrow, and at increasingly higher amounts. In less than a generation, our nation’s higher education system has become a debt-for-diploma system—more than seven out of 10 college seniors now borrow to pay for college and graduate with an average debt of $29,400.1 Up until about two decades ago, state funding ensured college tuition remained within reach for most middle-class families, and financial aid provided extra support to ensure lower-income students could afford the costs of college.

As Demos chronicled in its first report in the The Great Cost Shift series, this compact began to unravel as states disinvested in higher education during economic downturns but were unable, or unwilling, to restore funding levels during times of economic expansion. Today, as a result, public colleges and universities rely on tuition to fund an ever-increasing share of their operating expenses. And students and their families rely more and more on debt to meet those rising tuition costs. Nationally, revenue from tuition paid for 44 percent of all operating expenses of public colleges and universities in 2012, the highest share ever. A quarter century ago, the share was just 20 percent.2 This shift—from a collective funding of higher education to one borne increasingly by individuals—has come at the very same time that low- and middle-income households experienced stagnant or declining household income.

Marian Wang:

At the center of the admissions and financial-aid process is a massive information imbalance: Schools make their decisions with detailed data about each applicant that goes well beyond test scores and transcripts. Many universities have access to comprehensive financial profiles, sometimes down to the type of cars a family drives. Some analyze patterns and interpret even the most subtle indicators from students, such as the order in which schools are listed on the federal financial-aid application, or even how long a student stays on the phone with an admissions officer.

Students are not so lucky. Schools offer comparatively little information about exactly who they’re awarding aid to and for what. College-bound teens and their parents often resort to college forums, sharing their personal “stats” — their financial and academic profiles — with strangers online to get advice on which colleges are likely to be generous with aid. Once they get their financial-aid awards, some even go back to these forums to compare their aid packages in an attempt to reverse engineer colleges’ criteria.

Most colleges offer “vague and superficial” disclosures about how they allocate their financial-aid dollars, said Mark Kantrowitz, a financial-aid expert with Edvisors, which publishes websites about paying for college. “They don’t give details about the actual formulas they use.”

Take Newman University, a Catholic liberal-arts college based in Kansas.

Steve Strieker, via a kind Michael Walsh email:

My first teaching contract 19 years ago at a Midwest Catholic high school grossed $15,000. My retirement benefits consisted of a whopping $500 401K. Cutting into my take-home pay was a $1500 annual premium for an inadequate health insurance plan with a high deductible and 80-20 coverage on remaining family medical bills.

Money aside, I was a good Christian soldier. I taught a full load with 3 or more preps, moderated the school newspaper, ran the service program, coached baseball, drove the school bus to athletic events, and volunteered for all kinds of school activities.

Considering money, I was a naive Christian soldier. I did not think finances mattered all that much. After growing up on the lower rim of the middle class, the $15 grand I grossed in my first year of teaching felt like a million dollars. When the family budget tightened as college loans came due and the family grew, I practiced my own personal “no excuses” policy and doubled down on work by milking cows in the evening and on weekends, painting houses in the summer, and working a variety of odd jobs. While many Americans were “moving on up” during the 1990’s, my wife (also an educator) and I shuffled funds around trying to survive on less-than-professional pay.

In these conditions, my teaching suffered. My professional goal of getting my masters degree by age 30 came and went. I recycled the same lesson every year. Innovation was limited to what I could concoct late at night or each morning before school. I was a resourceful teacher, but not a developing educator.

In the midst of this mess, one of my kids became seriously ill. She did a few tours in the hospital before some highly skilled and professionally-priced specialists got a handle on her condition. The medical bills mounted. Things became desperate.

So I made a desperate move. I sold my soul and left teaching for a year. I searched for funds in other fields. In the midst of this despair came some soul-saving, professional advice from my brother teaching in Wisconsin. He coaxed my wife (also an educator) and I to move to his neck of the woods, where we could earn professional pay and benefits by teaching in Wisconsin’s public school system.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Alexandra Topping:

More than 160 academics have written to the Guardian to protest at being used as an extension of the UK border police, after universities have come under more pressure to check the immigration details of students.

The academics, from universities including Oxford, Warwick, Durham and Sheffield, accuse the Home Office immigration agency of “undermining the autonomy and academic freedom of UK universities and trust between academics and their students”.

Unrest has been growing for months as universities have come under more pressure to prove that their students are legitimate, according to the signatories, who say matters took a “pernicious new turn” in summer 2012 when London Metropolitan University briefly lost its trusted sponsor status – a requirement for all institutions wishing to recruit overseas students.

“Since then, universities have been preoccupied with managing accountability demanded by UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI – formerly the UK Border Agency), and in effect have become its proxy,” says the letter. “Academics at a number of universities in the UK and beyond have now become concerned at this state of affairs, and at the methods used to establish bona fide student status.”

Arun Gupta::

Public school teachers in Portland, Ore., and their students are doing a victory lap. Nearly a year after unveiling a contract proposal that would have put the squeeze on the 2,900-member Portland Association of Teachers (PAT), the Portland School Board on March 3 approved a contract that acceded to virtually every demand from the teachers’ union.

The board was acting as a stalking horse for corporate attacks on unions and public education nationwide. It initially wanted to saddle teachers with higher health care costs, fewer retirement benefits, more students and a greater workload in a city where 40 percent of teachers already work more than 50 hours a week (PDF). The board also demanded expansive management rights (PDF) and allegedly wished to link teacher evaluation more closely to standardized testing. The PAT opposed the board, arguing that low-income and minority students would pay the heaviest price as their classes grew larger, more time was devoted to testing and resources for curriculum preparation and teacher development got slashed.

Only after 98 percent of the PAT voted to strike starting Feb. 20 — and students vowed to join the picket line — did the board blink. Alexia Garcia, an organizer with the Portland Student Union who graduated last year, says students held walkouts and rallies at many of the city’s high schools in support of teachers’ demands because “teachers’ working conditions are our learning conditions.”

The deal is a big victory for the teachers’ union in a state where business interests, led by the Portland Business Alliance, call the shots on education policy. The school board had brought out the big guns, authorizing payments of up to $360,000 to a consultant for contract negotiations and $800,000 to a law firm, despite already having a full-time lawyer on its payroll. But, emulating Chicago teachers who prevailed in an eight-day strike in 2012, the PAT went beyond contract numbers, winning community support by focusing on student needs and rallying to stop school closures in underserved communities.

Most significant, the teachers helped expose the role of education reform in gentrifying the city, making it nearly impossible for every neighborhood to have a strong school. This is a process playing out nationwide, from Los Angeles to Atlanta, Milwaukee to Washington, D.C. But it is particularly striking in Portland, so noted for quirkiness and tolerance it has spawned a hit television show, “Portlandia,” During a public forum on the contract negotiations, one teacher observed that the show was a reflection of how “we march to our own beat in Portland.” This has held true for the teachers’ approach to education.

Karin Fischer & Jack Stripling:

t happened so slowly that no one really noticed at first. That’s the way erosion works. It is a gradual decay.

But somewhere along the line, over the past three decades or so, the deterioration of support for public higher education became hard to miss. Appropriations tanked. Tuition soared. College leaders embraced gloomy rhetoric about broken partnerships with the very people who had built these institutions from the ground up.

Now we have come to a precipice. College students and their families, who just a decade ago paid for about one-third of the cost of their education, are on track to pay for most of it. In nearly half of the states, they already do.

Behind these changes is a fundamental shift. Public colleges, once viewed as worthy of collective investment for the greater good, are increasingly treated as vehicles delivering a personal benefit to students, who ought to foot the bill themselves.

Pedro M. Silva:

A few months ago, during a class, one of our teachers proposed as discussion: given a specific situation, with several participants, and an outcome, we would rank the level of culpability of each one.

Right now, the situation itself isn’t very important. The point is: after that class, I could not stop thinking about it. I didn’t knew why, but unconsciously I knew something was not right: it was like my subconscious already knew the answer, but refused to tell me, forcing me to get there on my own.

Society today is leaning more towards an acceptance mindset, in which we try to decipher others’ actions by putting ourselves in their shoes and seeing through their eyes. And sometimes, when others do something wrong or bad, even to us, we are able to do something wonderful called forgiving, because we are able to understand that their actions were perhaps caused by circumstances out of their control. And so we don’t blame them.

Sean Coughlan:

Up to 60 Shanghai maths teachers are to be brought to England to raise standards, in an exchange arranged by the Department for Education.

They will provide masterclasses in 30 “maths hubs”, which are planned as a network of centres of excellence.

The Chinese city’s maths pupils have the highest international test results.

The announcement comes as a campaign is launched to raise adult maths skills, with warnings that poor numeracy is costing the UK economy £20bn per year.

The National Numeracy Challenge aims to improve numeracy levels for a million people.

It is providing an online self-assessment test – with help for those lacking in confidence in maths.

Financial cost
Mike Ellicock, chief executive of National Numeracy, says 78% of working-age adults have maths skills below the equivalent of a GCSE grade C – and that half only have the maths skills of a child leaving primary school.

Related Connected Math and disastrous reading results in Madison.

Alex Tabarrok:

All of this is almost entirely at variance with three facts, all of which are well known among education researchers.

First, test prep has only a modest effect on test scores, on the order of 20-40 points combined for a commercial test preparation service. More expensive services such as a private tutor are towards the high of this range, cheaper sources such as a high-school course towards the lower. Buchmann et al., for example, estimate that private tutors increase scores by 37 points while a high school course increases scores by 26 points.

The average SAT score among those with a family income of $20,000-$40,000 is 1402 while the average score among those with an income $100,000 higher, $120,000-$140,000, is 1581 for a 179 point difference. Even if every rich family had a private tutor and none of the poor families had any test prep whatsoever, test prep would explain only 20% of the difference 37/179. If rich families rely on tutors and poor families rely on high school courses, the difference in test prep would explain only 6% (11/179) of the difference in score.

The second surprising fact about test prep is that it doesn’t vary nearly as much by income as people imagine. In fact, some studies find no effect of income on test prep use while others find a positive but modest effect. The latter study finding (what I call) a modest effect finds that in their sample a 2-standard deviation increase in income above the mean increases the probability of using a private test prep course less than whether “Parent encouraged student to prep for SAT (yes or no).”

Andrew Smith Lewis:

Since their inception, there has been a flurry of debate around the legitimacy and efficacy of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Widely recognized as game-changing in education, they offer radical reach and democratize access to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen. However, the rise of anything new and exciting is typically accompanied by criticism. In the case of MOOCs, it has been heavy. Skeptics point to uncertainty in scalability, assessment, engagement — the list goes on.

The main argument being made against MOOCs attacks the perceived lack of success as measured by their low completion rates (Mass MOOC Dropouts). The interpretation of this metric varies greatly.

Critics are obsessed with the infamous five percent rate, pointing out that “If 95 percent of students who enrolled in a residential college course dropped out or failed, that course would rightly be considered a disaster.”

Some take it further (the MOOC Racket), claiming that MOOCs are a platform for evangelizing academic rock stars to the detriment of students and teachers, and arguing that educators can’t teach tens of thousands of people at once — “that MOOCs only deliver information, but that’s not education.”

John Glover:

The amount of debt globally has soared more than 40 percent to $100 trillion since the first signs of the financial crisis as governments borrowed to pull their economies out of recession and companies took advantage of record low interest rates, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

The $30 trillion increase from $70 trillion between mid-2007 and mid-2013 compares with a $3.86 trillion decline in the value of equities to $53.8 trillion in the same period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The jump in debt as measured by the Basel, Switzerland-based BIS in its quarterly review is almost twice the U.S.’s gross domestic product.

Borrowing has soared as central banks suppress benchmark interest rates to spur growth after the U.S. subprime mortgage market collapsed and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bankruptcy sent the world into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Yields on all types of bonds, from governments to corporates and mortgages, average about 2 percent, down from more than 4.8 percent in 2007, according to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Broad Market Index.

“Given the significant expansion in government spending in recent years, governments (including central, state and local governments) have been the largest debt issuers,” according to Branimir Gruic, an analyst, and Andreas Schrimpf, an economist at the BIS. The organization is owned by 60 central banks and hosts the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a group of regulators and central bankers that sets global capital standards.

Knight Arts:

A few years ago, Knight Foundation set out to bring art and culture into people’s everyday lives by presenting surprise opera and classical ballet performances at markets, parks and airports. More than 1,000 of these Random Acts of Culture® took place in eight communities across the United States. The reaction each time was amazing to watch, as people grabbed their cellphones for pics and videos, some moved to tears, reminded of the emotional connection they have to the arts.
 
 Now, as we think of new ways to bring the arts to more people, Knight Foundation has turned to libraries. As libraries continue to reinvent themselves in the digital age, they have become spaces that are more about creation than collection.They are amongst the most democratic community spaces we have, used by people from every walk of life, in every age group. Spread throughout neighborhoods, we thought they were an organic way to bring the arts to all communities. All that and more makes them the perfect stage for what we’re calling Library Acts of Culture.

The Economist:

AUTISM is a strange condition. Sometimes its symptoms of “social blindness” (an inability to read or comprehend the emotions of others) occur alone. This is dubbed high-functioning autism, or Asperger’s syndrome. Though their fellow men and women may regard them as a bit odd, high-functioning autists are often successful (sometimes very successful) members of society. On other occasions, though, autism manifests as part of a range of cognitive problems. Then, the condition is debilitating. What is common to those on all parts of the so-called autistic spectrum is that they are more often men than women—so much more often that one school of thought suggests autism is an extreme manifestation of what it means, mentally, to be male. Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls are. For high-functioning autism, the ratio is seven to one.

Moreover, what is true of autism is true, to a lesser extent, of a lot of other neurological and cognitive disorders. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is diagnosed around three times more often in boys than in girls. “Intellectual disability”, a catch-all term for congenital low IQ, is 30-50% more common in boys, as is epilepsy. In fact, these disorders frequently show up in combination. For instance, children diagnosed with an autistic-spectrum disorder often also receive a diagnosis of ADHD.

Matthew Di Carlo:

A few months ago, the U.S. Department of Education (USED) released the latest data from schools that received grants via the School Improvement (SIG) program. These data — consisting solely of changes in proficiency rates — were widely reported as an indication of “disappointing” or “mixed” results. Some even went as far as proclaiming the program a complete failure.

Once again, I have to point out that this breaks almost every rule of testing data interpretation and policy analysis. I’m not going to repeat the arguments about why changes in cross-sectional proficiency rates are not policy evidence (see our posts here, here and here, or examples from the research literature here, here and here). Suffice it to say that the changes themselves are not even particularly good indicators of whether students’ test-based performance in these schools actually improved, to say nothing of whether it was the SIG grants that were responsible for the changes. There’s more to policy analysis than subtraction.

So, in some respects, I would like to come to the defense of Secretary Arne Duncan and USED right now – not because I’m a big fan of the SIG program (I’m ambivalent at best), but rather because I believe in strong, patient policy evaluation, and these proficiency rate changes are virtually meaningless. Unfortunately, however, USED was the first to portray, albeit very cautiously, rate changes as evidence of SIG’s impact. In doing so, they provided a very effective example of why relying on bad evidence is a bad idea even if it supports your desired conclusions.

Los Angeles Times Editorial:

Amid allegations of overbilling, environmental hazards and spiraling costs at the Belmont Learning Center in downtown L.A. in the late 1990s, the state Legislature created a separate investigative office within the Los Angeles Unified School District. The new inspector general was authorized to issue subpoenas, and charged with examining operations in the district with a piercing and unimpeded eye. But the position was authorized for only 15 years, until the end of 2014.

The first inspector general reported on serious shortfalls in accountability and oversight at Belmont. Four employees left the school district after he made his findings known, and five were placed on extended administrative leave. Subsequent audits and investigations that went beyond Belmont uncovered costly waste in the purchase of textbooks, misuse of federal money intended to feed students and the misappropriation of $200,000 that led to the criminal conviction of a charter operator.
The relationship between the inspector general and L.A. Unified leaders has at times been understandably tense; later legislation unfortunately weakened the investigator’s authority. Still, it’s to L.A. Unified’s credit that the district is backing legislation to extend the office for an additional 10 years. The need is ongoing: The current inspector general is now examining the district’s troubling decision to purchase hundreds of thousands of iPads without first resolving major concerns.

Ruthie:

A potential law in Minnesota will allow former and current military members and their spouses, the opportunity to obtain temporary teacher licenses in the state while they pursue permanent certification in the state. This proposal is considered the latest in a nationwide trend to allow degreed professionals easier paths to the classroom.

“This bill is not meant to usurp licensing boards,” explained Representative Will Morgan, “We’re simply trying to help military families who have been moved not by choice.”

Similar to new legislation in Kansas allowing private-sector professionals to teach through industry certification or career expertise benchmarks, the legislation in Minnesota aims to curtail lengthy and cumbersome hoops for potentially excellent educators.

AAE’s state chapter in Colorado, the Professional Association of Colorado Educators (PACE) surveyed its members on the issue of teacher licensure in their state, asking: Would you support a policy creating a clearer pathway into the teaching profession by granting an initial license, renewable based on performance evaluation ratings, to teacher candidates that are able to pass a background check and have three things: a bachelor’s degree, a principal willing to hire them, and a passing score on a content area exam? An overwhelming 72% of members supported this new path, further indicating a national shift in teacher licensure legislation.

bury pensions:

The July 1, 2013 actuarial reports for the New Jersey pension plans are coming out and if you are of a mind to explain to your teacher friends why they will soon be seeing Detroit-type ‘adjustments’ to their pensions just point them to page 8 of the Milliman report for the Teachers Plan – TPAF – (Buck does the valuations for the other 6 plans in the system) titled ‘Risk Measures.’ Search the Buck reports and you won’t even find the word ‘risk’ mentioned but Milliman beginning with their July 1, 2009 report thought it a good idea to mention that…..
THE PLAN BARELY HAS 50% OF THE ASSETS NECESSARY TO ANNUITIZE ONLY (YES ONLY) THE RETIREES WITH THE OTHER 475,000 PARTICIPANTS HAVING LESS THAN NOTHING.

The Risk Measures exhibit on page 8 for the last five years compares the value of the liabilities* for retiree benefits to the market value of assets less the Annuity Savings Fund (accumulated member contributions). That percentage as of July 1, 2013: 50.2%.

Now compare that to July 1, 2000 (when Milliman didn’t feel the need to insert a Risk Measures exhibit). $1,159,146,402 in retiree payouts valued at $12,040,604,827 and easily covered by the $35,839,120,536 in assets even when reduced by the $5,034,537,874 in the Annuity Savings Fund. That percentage came to 255.84% and even considering the dodgy assumptions for valuing liabilities (then and now) there would have been plenty of money to annuitize retirees.

edushyster.com:

Reader: I have a confession to make. My path has not been a righteous one. In fact the last time I attended a church service was in the 5th grade, when, as a *plus one* with my best friend’s family, I would pass a confused, incense-choked hour thinking longingly of the donuts that waited downstairs. But that all changed recently when I accompanied wonder blogger Mercedes Schneider to her southern Louisiana church. Her pastor gave a sermon about David and Goliath, so powerful, so perfect for our *2 big 2 fail* times that I have been thinking about it ever since.

Meet Goliath, Inc, Inc, Inc
In Malcolm Gladwell’s provocative study of David and Goliath (note: all references to the Gladwellian oeuvre must be preceded by *provocative*), he alleges that it was double vision that ultimately felled the giant Philistine. Our #edreform equivalent of Goliath—let’s call him *G*—suffers from a different disorder: double hearing. You see, our G lives in an echo chamber such that everything he utters is repeated back to him. He and his G-unit think in the same tanks and watch their Roth’s gently swell in the same banks. In fact, rare is the day in which they encounter a single other individual who does not share their belief that it is a matter of common sense, not to mention fierce urgency, that [INSERT BELOVED REFORMY POLICY HERE] should be implemented posthaste. In fact, in fact, only yesterday G read a brand new study affirming exactly that—well, maybe not a study exactly, more like a collection of handsomely bound talking points. But still…

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

The District has informed principals of their staffing allocations for the 2014-15 school year. Surplus notices, where the District determines such are necessary, are expected to be delivered to staff by March 19 (the Contract enables one to be declared surplus through July 1). As part of the negotiations over the 2013-14 MTI Teacher Contract, the parties agreed to significant changes to the teacher surplus reassignment and vacancy posting language. The changes were driven by the District’s desire to engage in earlier hiring.

Under the new language, teachers declared surplus will first be placed in available vacancies prior to the posting of said positions, with the goal of assigning all surplus teachers by May 1. Any positions which remain vacant as of May 1 will then be posted for voluntary internal transfer (while some vacant teaching positions in high-demand areas will be posted during the months of March and April, the majority of vacancy postings will occur on May 2). Application for voluntary internal transfer will be enabled for vacancies known by June 14. Positions becoming vacant after June 14 through the first four (4) weeks of school are not subject to posting and voluntary internal transfers are not enabled.

The benefits of the above revisions are that: 1) surplus teachers should receive earlier notice of their upcoming year teaching assignment, and; 2) by moving the “no post” date from August 1 to June 15, the District is able to offer new hires specific teaching positions approximately six weeks earlier than in the past, which the District asserts will improve their candidate pool. The potential downside to the changes is that current teaching staff will have fewer vacancies to choose from, and a shorter window of time to apply for vacancies. All MTI Faculty Representatives have received a fact sheet with information on surplus and transfer changes. Members may also call MTI Headquarters with any questions.

School allocation decisions made before the District’s budget is finalized was a controversial practice some years ago. Obviously, it continues.

Peter Wood:

The new changes, like others that have been instituted since the mid 1990s, are driven by politics. David Coleman, head of the College Board, is also the chief architect of the Common Core K-12 State Standards, which are now mired in controversy across the country. Coleman’s initiative in revising the SAT should be seen first of all as a rescue mission. As the Common Core flounders, he is throwing it an SAT life preserver. I’ll explain, but first let’s get the essentials of how the SAT is about to change.

The essay is now optional, ending a decade-long experiment in awarding points for sloppy writing graded by mindless formulae.

The parts of the test that explored the range and richness of a student’s vocabulary have been etiolated. The test now will look for evidence that students are familiar with academic buzzwords and jargon. The College Board calls this “Relevant Words in Context.” Test-takers won’t have to “memorize obscure words” but instead “will be asked to interpret the meaning of words based on the context of the passage in which they appear.”

Lynn Arditi:

The classic children’s book by Dr. Seuss is the 6-year-old’s top choice for bedtime reading, his mother, Brittany Morales said.

So when Jamier came home from kindergarten in East Providence recently with a bookmark that read “Meet the cat in the hat” at the Warwick Mall Saturday, she knew they had to go.

The National Education Association of Rhode Island’s 17th annual Read Across America Day drew some 2,000 children based upon the 3,000 or so donated children’s books volunteers gave away, said Marie Glass, president of the NEARI’s Education Support Professionals’ caucus.

The national Read Across America Day is officially Sunday, which was Dr. Seuss’s birthday. (He was born Theodor Seuss Geisel in Springfield, Mass., on March 2, 1904, and died in 1991.)

Mike Antonucci:

Last week we examined how teacher unions stand in relation to the rest of the labor movement. As the number of union members overall continued its decades-long decline, teacher unions were able to add members for many years, and so became the predominant sector of organized labor.

But how have the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers fared in relation to the teaching workforce? Was teacher union growth a function of organizational effort, or simply the expansion of the teaching population? Thanks to data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and unionstats.com, we have an answer.

BLS began tracking union data in 1983. That year there were more than 2.6 million people employed as primary, secondary and special education teachers in both public and private schools. More than 1.5 million of them were union members, for a unionization rate of 57.5 percent.

Deborah Fallows:

In January, I visited the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, a public residential high school in Greenville. Artistically talented students from around the state spend two or three of their high school years in dedicated pursuit of their art—dance, drama, music, visual arts, or creative writing—along with their academic curriculum. I wrote about it here.

I asked Scott Gould, a creative writing teacher at the school, if he would ask his students to write me a short essay about their school. This was a wide-open request; I wanted to hear whatever perspective the students wanted to offer about their experience at the school. Among the essays the students submitted, here are three of my favorites, unedited and untouched. I’d like to share them with you.