A funny thing happens at McSwain Elementary School on Friday afternoons when a teacher comes over the intercom to say it’s time for “CAB,” which stands for Celebrating Appropriate Behavior and is extended recess time.
For most students, the announcement is a happy one, a reward at the end of the week. But for Christy Davis’ group of gifted third-graders it either elicits no response or assurance that what they are working on — creative enrichment projects — is way more fun than CAB.
“CAB? We haven’t done CAB in forever,” said Kayla Bullard, as she worked on a visual story involving Lego characters where she created her own text, background and props.
A fellow classmate chimed in, “Yeah, this is way funner.”
Schools That Turn Students into Outcasts Are Unamerican
Former Chief Judge of New York State Judith S. Kaye always makes necessary sense, as she did when she recently wrote this in the opinion pages of The New York Times:
“As universal pre-K and the Common Core standards dominate the headlines, we cannot overlook a third subject that deserves top billing: keeping children in school and out of courts” (Letters, The New York Times, Feb. 22).
Kaye was writing in response to an op-ed that had run in the Times last month. In it, Robert K. Ross and Kenneth H. Zimmerman, the respective heads of the California Endowment and the United States programs for the Open Society Foundations, wrote: “Large numbers of students are kicked out, typically for nonviolent offenses, and suspensions have become the go-to response for even minor misbehavior, like carrying a plastic water gun to elementary school …
“The Civil Rights Project at UCLA found that the number of secondary school students suspended or expelled increased by some 40 percent between 1972-73 and 2009-10 … A study of nearly one million Texas students found that those suspended or expelled for violations at the discretion of school officials were almost three times as likely to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year” (“Real Discipline in School,” Robert K. Ross and Kenneth H. Zimmerman, The New York Times, Feb. 17).
Mathematicians are chronically lost and confused (and that’s how it’s supposed to be)
A large part of my audience over at Math ∩ Programming are industry software engineers who are discovering two things about mathematics: it’s really hard and it opens the door to a world of new ideas. In that way it’s a lot like learning to read. Once you’re mildly fluent you can read books, use the ideas to solve problems, and maybe even write an original piece of your own.
Many people who are in this position, trying to learn mathematics on their own, have roughly two approaches. The first is to learn only the things that you need for the applications you’re interested in. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s akin to learning just enough vocabulary to fill out your tax forms. It’s often too specialized to give you a good understanding of how to apply the key ideas elsewhere. A common example is learning very specific linear algebra facts in order to understand a particular machine learning algorithm. It’s a commendable effort and undoubtedly useful, but in my experience this route makes you start from scratch in every new application.
Student Loans Are Ruining Your Life. Now They’re Ruining the Economy, Too
American students are well over $1 trillion in debt, and it’s starting to hurt everyone, economists say
Chris Rong did everything right. A 23-year-old dentistry student in New York, Chris excelled at one of the country’s top high schools, breezed through college, and is now studying dentistry at one of the best dental schools in the nation.
Travelers: It’s About Damn Time Airlines Toughened Up Baggage PoliciesBeef: It’s What’s No Longer Affordable for DinnerHere’s An Updated Tally Of All The People Who Have Ever Died From A Marijuana Overdose Huffington PostThese Disturbing Fast Food Truths Will Make You Reconsider Your Lunch Huffington PostShakira: I Had To Get My Boyfriend’s Permission to Work with Rihanna People
But it may be a long time before he sees any rewards. He’s moved back home with his parents in Bayside, Queens—an hour-and-a-half commute each way to class at the New York University’s College of Dentistry—and by the time he graduates in 2016, he’ll face $400,000 in student loans. “If the money weren’t a problem I would live on my own,” says Rong. “My debt is hanging over my mind. I’m taking that all on myself.”
Why India’s landmark education law is shutting down schools
In an unauthorised colony of labourers in Delhi, a class of six-year-olds is reciting English, a language their parents hope will get them jobs in call centres and offices.
But later this month the classes will stop.
Ramditi JRN Deepalaya is among hundreds of small private schools – which have multiplied in India selling education at 100 rupees ($1.6; 96 pence) a month – that are being forced to sound the final bell because they do not comply with a law which makes education a fundamental right for children.
Teacher Gitanjali Krishnan said the school in Panchsheel Enclave would have to triple student fees to meet the demands of the law.
“Our parents are the poorest of the poor, labourers and migrant workers, they won’t be able to afford it,” she said.
When the Right To Education (RTE) law was introduced in 2009 it was hailed as a major step to bridging the cavernous gap between the education of rich and poor in India.
The Ideologue vs. the Children
What a small and politically vicious man New York’s new mayor is. Bill de Blasio doesn’t like charter schools. They are too successful to be tolerated. Last week he announced he will drop the ax on three planned Success Academy schools. (You know Success Academy: It was chronicled in the film “Waiting for Superman.” It’s one of the charter schools the disadvantaged kids are desperate to get into.) Mr. de Blasio has also cut and redirected the entire allotment for charter facility funding from the city’s capital budget. An official associated with a small, independent charter school in the South Bronx told me the decision will siphon money from his school’s operations. He summed up his feelings with two words: “It’s dispiriting.”
Some 70,000 of the city’s one million students, most black or Hispanic, attend charter schools, mostly in poorer neighborhoods. Charter schools are privately run but largely publicly financed. Their teachers are not unionized. Their students usually outscore their counterparts at conventional public schools on state tests. Success Academy does particularly well. Last year 82% of its students passed citywide math exams. Citywide the figure was 30%.
These are schools that work. They are something to be proud of and encourage.
Mr. de Blasio’s move has caused considerable personal anxiety and widespread public anger. The Daily News on Thursday called the nearly 200 Success Academy students who now have no place to go the mayor’s “educational orphans.” A reporter spoke to distraught families. “I wanted the best for my daughter,” said Rakim Smith, 40, a cable technician from Harlem whose daughter Dymond is a sixth-grader at Success Academy Harlem Central Middle School. “Now they’re trying to take it away.” “I don’t know where else I can send my son so that he can have the same level education,” said Fatoumata Kebe of the Bronx, whose 11-year-old son, Ousmane, goes to Harlem Central.
SAT college-entrance exam’s essay portion to become optional in 2016
As part of a major overhaul of the SAT college entrance exam, test-takers starting in 2016 will no longer be required to write an essay, the College Board announced Wednesday.
However, an essay-writing test still will be offered, and many colleges may demand that applicants take it and submit the score.
With that change, the main SAT will be condensed to two sections from the current three, and the top possible score will be 1,600, as it was for many decades.
The current 2,400-point maximum was introduced with the start of the required essay seven years ago. The new optional essay test will be graded separately on a scale that is still under consideration, said officials of the College Board, which owns the widely used exam.
Those shifts, officials said, are part of a wider effort to better align the exam with what students learn in high school and will need in college — and away from the advantages they may gain from expensive private tutoring.
For example, the revised sections in reading will drop their most obscure vocabulary words and instead “focus on words students will use over and over again,” said College Board President David Coleman. The math problems will be less theoretical and more linked to real-life questions.
“While we build on the best of the past, we commit today that the redesigned SAT will be more focused and useful, more clear and open than ever before,” Coleman said at a meeting in Austin, Texas, that was broadcast on the Internet.
Sarah Vine praises ‘miracle’ of state education in Daily Mail column
She and husband Michael Gove became first Tory education secretary family to send offspring to state secondary school
You shouldn’t judge people by their clothes, or where they live, but by who they really are’ … Sarah Vine
Sarah Vine – the journalist and wife of education secretary Michael Gove – has written a rousing celebration of state education in England, calling it “a miracle” while describing private schools as polarising and built on principles of snobbery.
Vine told readers of her Daily Mail column that her decision to send her daughter to a state secondary school was motivated by a desire for her child to receive a broad education: “that you shouldn’t judge people by their clothes, or where they live, but by who they really are”.
“That, in my view, is the miracle of our state education system. Like the NHS, it welcomes all-comers,” Vine wrote. “The state doesn’t care where its pupils come from; all that matters is where they’re heading.”
Vine and Gove’s decision to send their daughter Beatrice to Grey Coat Hospital comprehensive school, a popular girls’ academy in Westminster, made headlines this week because it marked the first time a Conservative education secretary had chosen the state over the private sector for their child’s seconday schooling.
“I believe that at state school Beatrice will receive a far more comprehensive education – in every sense of the phrase – than at any private establishment,” Vine concluded.
An Open Letter to Students on the Danger of Seeing School as a Trial to Survive
In an innocuous office complex, three blocks south of Northwestern University, and a short walk from Lake Michigan, you can find the Yellowbrick psychiatric treatment center. Though Yellowbrick treats the expected spectrum of mental disorders, from anxiety to schizophrenia, its mission is unique: it’s the country’s only psychiatric center dedicated exclusively to emerging adults — young people in the ever-expanding gap between adolescence and the stability of family, a mortgage, and a settled career.
Unfortunately for you, my dear student reader, business at Yellowbrick is booming.
In a recent New York Times Magazine article, journalist Robin Marantz Henig provides a haunting portrait of a typical Yellowbrick patient: he’s a young man “who had done well at a top Ivy League college until the last class of the last semester of his last year, when he finished his final paper and could not bring himself to turn it in.” This brief moment of existential despair spiraled out of control.
“The demands of imminent independence can worsen mental-health problems or create new ones for people who have managed up to that point to perform all the expected roles,” explains Henig. “[They] get lost when schooling ends and expected roles disappear.”
In other words, when you go through life thinking “if I can make it through this, things will be better later,” you eventually forget what “better” means.
Please Excuse my Grammar
This is a long story, but I feel sheds light on education in general and why academia and educational institutions function so poorly that they drive the brightest into the dark.
More than once I have told by an academic advisor that I am going to fail
2nd grade was my first brush with failure, I started young and I failed English. I remember my parents telling me that I could not pass 2nd grade without learning to read. Yet, I showed them, I passed with a D! For some reason, being the independent 6 year old I felt smug knowing I had outsmarted them and by the middle of 4th grade I was in deep trouble. At this point I had to be enrolled in an after school tutoring program, since I still did not really know how to read. This was expensive for my parents and I regret it now (realizing how childish I was when… I was a child), but at the time I thought little of it.
I remember myself sitting in a chair and speaking the first time with the overweight, scraggily haired tutor across the table. She was explaining to me how this tutoring program worked and looking back it was perfect. The tutor laid out the process of how in this tutoring program for each thing we accomplish we receive a coin, we then can use our coins to purchase items. Simple things such as candy, to things such as tents, or radios, etc. The most expensive items were probably $50 – $100, but to me this was amazing! I worked very hard, saved all of my coins, and by my last day in the program I bought out all of the items they had available that day.
For me, what was important is achieving something. In this case I wanted to do what I perceived as the hardest thing to do, to buy out all of the “prizes” for doing a good job. Thankfully, (as a happy coincidence) I learned to read.
This was just the first of many challenges I faced, largely due to the fact I chose not to learn to read until late 4th – early 5th grade.
I Opted My Kids Out of Standardized Tests
Deciding to opt my two daughters out of Colorado standardized testing seemed like a no-brainer. We aren’t permanent Colorado residents—we’re just here for one academic year while I’m a visiting professor at the University of Denver. My daughters, ages 13 and 14, are strong students. My husband and I see no educational benefit to the tests. My younger daughter experienced some serious test anxiety a couple of years back when taking Pennsylvania’s standardized tests.
And honestly, given three things—that, according to what a school administrator told me, Colorado law allows parents to refuse the testing on behalf of their children; that the testing enrollment forms include an option to “refuse testing”; and that we currently live in Boulder, one of the most liberal, individualistic towns in America—we truly didn’t think this would be a big deal.
Boy, were we wrong.
Civics & the Ed Schools; Ripe for Vast Improvement
I have a special interest in Civics education. My high school civics/government teacher drilled the Constitution, Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers into our small brains. This Vietnam Vet worked very hard to make sure that we understood how the US political system worked, or not.
While reading the ongoing pervasive spying news, including the battle between the CIA and its Senate “oversight” committee, I read with interest the recent University of Wisconsin-Madison “Associated Students of Madison” spring, 2014 election results. One piece of data somewhat surprised me: the UW-Madison School of Education lacked any declared candidates.
Conversely, Julie Underwood, Dean of the UW-Madison School of Education has been quite active in the political scene, while dealing with criticism of ed school standards and practices.
Do schools of education provide civics training, or do they assume that students learn about our government and their role as citizens in high school? A friend well steeped in the education world and with children recently remarked that “you can no longer count on the public schools to teach our kids the things they need to know”. I’ve been pondering this statement in light of the recent ASM election.
Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham recently jumped into the state academic standards rhetorical battle with a statement that included:
“Politicizing the creation of learning standards, while simultaneously abandoning the broadly-supported Common Core State Standards, will not serve the students of Wisconsin well. Rather, such moves will only serve to cause confusion and uncertainty,” Cheatham said.
Students would be better served if legislators focused on a fairly-funded public school system “that maintains a relentless focus on implementing consistent, rigorous standards,” Cheatham said.
Yet, education is inherently political, encompassing substantial spending with, to be charitable, challenging results.
Education spending, policies and curricular choices have long been “politicized”. The Wisconsin DPI’s decade plus implementation of the criticized WKCE reveals the challenge of improving standards for our students. How many million$ have been wasted?
It appears that Ms. Underwood and Ms. Cheatham’s landscape is ripe for vast improvement.
Effective School Maintenance Spending?
Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham is proposing a $39,500,000 November, 2014 maintenance referendum (page 38 of 39), according to her “Strategic Framework Progress” update [1MB PDF]. Questions remain on where the money went from the $26,200,000 2005 maintenance referendum. The District has, according to page 3, launched a “zero based budget”. I am hopeful that the District will address past spending initiatives and provide a complete, easy to understand look at its finances.
Finally, bricks and mortar have their place, but nothing is more important than addressing Madison’s disastrous reading results.
Diane Ravitch Madison Presentation Set for May 1
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):
Plan now to attend celebrated Professor Diane Ravitch’s presentation at the Monona Terrace on May 1. The program, commencing at 7:00 p.m., is part of The Progressive Magazine’s PUBLIC SCHOOL SHAKEDOWN (www.publicschoolshakedown.org) campaign which is designed to illustrate the negative impact on public school education, because of the financial drain caused by private/parochial charter and voucher schools. While admission is free, a suggested $5 donation is requested to support the project.
The Progressive is pulling together education experts including Ravitch (education historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education), activists, bloggers, and concerned citizens from across the country.
PUBLIC SCHOOL SHAKEDOWN is dedicated to EXPOSING the behind-the-scenes effort to privatize public schools, and CONNECTING pro-public school activists nationwide.
“Public School Shakedown will be a fantastic addition to the debate”, says Ravitch. “The Progressive is performing a great public service by helping spread the word about the galloping privatization of our public schools.”
“Free public education, doors open to all, no lotteries, is a cornerstone of our democracy. If we allow large chunks of it to be handed over to private operators, religious schools, for-profit enterprises, and hucksters, we put our democracy at risk”, Ravitch adds.
Wisconsin Senate Education Committee Common Core Hearing Video Archive
Wisconsin Eye, via a kind reader:
On March 6, 2014, the Senate Committee on Education held a public hearing on Senate Bill 598, relating to utilizing an alternative process for educator effectiveness; and Senate Bill 619, relating to creating a model academic standards board.
Much more on the Common Core, here.
Colleges Need to Act Like Startups — Or Risk Becoming Obsolete
Evan Salinger & Andrew Phelps:
The Golden Age of universities may be dead. And while much of the commentary around the online disruption of education ranges from cost-benefit analyses to assessing ideology of what drives MOOCs (massively open online courses), the real question becomes — what is the point of the university in this landscape?
It’s clear that universities will have to figure out the balance between commercial relevance and basic research, as well as how to prove their value beyond being vehicles for delivering content. But lost in the shuffle of commentary here is something arguably more important than and yet containing all of these factors: culture.
Online courses can be part of, and have, their own culture, but university culture cannot be replicated in an online environment (at least not easily). Once this cultural difference is acknowledged, we can revisit the cost-benefit analysis: Is cheaper tuition worth it if it pays for education that isn’t optimized for innovation? Will university culture further stratify the socioeconomic difference MOOCs may level? And so on…
While innovation is a buzzword that’s bandied about a bit too loosely, we think this is the lens we need to use in judging the relevance of universities. It’s the only thing that prevents us from programming students as robots, a workforce whose jobs can be automated away. In fact, universities that excel at preparing students for such a creative economy prioritize the same three things that drive successful startup cultures: density, shared resources, and community
Who Needs Harvard?
Today almost everyone seems to assume that the critical moment in young people’s lives is finding out which colleges have accepted them. Winning admission to an elite school is imagined to be a golden passport to success; for bright students, failing to do so is seen as a major life setback. As a result, the fixation on getting into a super-selective college or university has never been greater. Parents’ expectations that their children will attend top schools have “risen substantially” in the past decade, says Jim Conroy, the head of college counseling at New Trier High School, in Winnetka, Illinois. He adds, “Parents regularly tell me, ‘I want whatever is highest-ranked.'” Shirley Levin, of Rockville, Maryland, who has worked as a college-admissions consultant for twenty-three years, concurs: “Never have stress levels for high school students been so high about where they get in, or about the idea that if you don’t get into a glamour college, your life is somehow ruined.”
Admissions mania focuses most intensely on what might be called the Gotta-Get-Ins, the colleges with maximum allure. The twenty-five Gotta-Get-Ins of the moment, according to admissions officers, are the Ivies (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale), plus Amherst, Berkeley, Caltech, Chicago, Duke, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Northwestern, Pomona, Smith, Stanford, Swarthmore, Vassar, Washington University in St. Louis, Wellesley, and Williams. Some students and their parents have always been obsessed with getting into the best colleges, of course. But as a result of rising population, rising affluence, and rising awareness of the value of education, millions of families are now in a state of nervous collapse regarding college admissions. Moreover, although the total number of college applicants keeps increasing, the number of freshman slots at the elite colleges has changed little. Thus competition for elite-college admission has grown ever more cutthroat. Each year more and more bright, qualified high school seniors don’t receive the coveted thick envelope from a Gotta-Get-In.
But what if the basis for all this stress and disappointment—the idea that getting into an elite college makes a big difference in life—is wrong? What if it turns out that going to the “highest ranked” school hardly matters at all?
What You Learn in Your 40s
IF all goes according to plan, I’ll turn 44 soon after this column appears. So far in my adult life, I’ve never managed to grasp a decade’s main point until long after it was over. It turns out that I wasn’t supposed to spend my 20s frantically looking for a husband; I should have been building my career and enjoying my last gasp of freedom. I then spent my 30s ruminating on grievances accumulated in my 20s.
This time around, I’d like to save time by figuring out the decade while I’m still in it. Entering middle age in Paris — the world’s epicenter of existentialism — isn’t terribly helpful. With their signature blend of subtlety and pessimism, the French carve up midlife into the “crisis of the 40s,” the “crisis of the 50s” and the “noonday demon” (described by one French writer as “when a man in his 50s falls in love with the babysitter”).
The modern 40s are so busy it’s hard to assess them. Researchers describe the new “rush hour of life,” when career and child-rearing peaks collide. Today’s 40ish professionals are the DITT generation: double income, toddler twins.
Home College: an Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again)
“Maybe you should home-college,” I joked to a highly educated Ph.D. friend—doctorate in medieval history, two master’s, several years of adjunct teaching experience in three fields. She was worried about how she would pay for her own offspring’s eventual college education on her tiny salary, if she did not soon land a full-time job, preferably on the tenure track.
As the words hung in the air, the idea’s utility seemed obvious. Thousands of qualified, trained, energetic, and underemployed Ph.D.s are struggling to find stable teaching jobs. Tens of thousands of parents are struggling to pay for a good college education for their children. Home-schooling at the secondary-school level has proved itself an adequate substitute for public or private high school. Could a private home-college arrangement work as a kind of Airbnb or Uber for higher education?
I don’t think I am overstating the qualifications of many of my fellow academics in the humanities to say that any one of them could provide, singlehandedly, a first-rate first-year college education in the liberal arts. The colleague whom I kidded about home-colleging is qualified to teach expository writing, multiple languages (introductory Latin, French, and Italian), medieval history, European history, art history, and a variety of literature courses. Another colleague could teach American history, introduction to political theory, introduction to philosophy, African-American literature, and expository writing. Another could teach Surrealism, intro to cognitive science, film, neuroscience, linguistics, and Spanish. I know others who could teach calculus, the history of science, European history, classical literature, film, and art history.
More from Walter Russell Mead.
The Global Achievement Gap
Most Americans, whether employers or parents or people who do business internationally, recognize that our students’ achievement is mismatched with our economy. The growing sectors of our economy are highly skill-intensive, and only the shrinking sectors require unskilled laborers. Yet, as evinced by scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the share of our population that is capable of performing highly skilled jobs is no greater than it was forty years ago. Our students’ achievement is mediocre compared to the achievement of the people worldwide with whom they will have to compete for jobs in the future.
For instance, American fifteen-year-olds scored below the average in mathematics in 2009 among students in member nations of theOrganisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). They merely scored at the average in reading. Moreover, in the future, US students will not compete only with OECD students. They will compete with millions of people from countries like India and China where the number of well-educated young adults is growing very rapidly.
The recognition that American students must improve is not enough, however. The United States needs to find the methods and the resources to make the improvements. In this essay, I examine some of the methods that hold the greatest promise and argue that they are affordable with the resources we already have.
Citizen Oversight, Public Records & the Spokane Public Schools
For this sincere effort on my part to be careful, thorough and accurate, I have repeatedly been implied to be, or accused of being, a hater, a whacko, a nut job, an antagonist, a loud critic, a conspiracy theorist, a gadfly, abusive, a person who “needles” public officials, and perhaps “less than fully hinged.” In a Spokane paper, my efforts recently were placed under the heading “Friends and Enemies.”
It isn’t as if I enjoy reading records from Spokane Public Schools. They do not tend to improve my day or my mood. There is typically very little in records from the leadership that I can praise. They often contain grammatical errors, and their focus on money is near absolute. The needs of the children, particularly academic needs, are reflected almost nowhere. Reading the records through the years, it seems that many in leadership have viewed teachers, parents, children and voters as pawns in a chess game of “Get More For the Leadership” and “Do Whatever It Takes to Avoid Seeing and/or Telling the Stark Truth.”
Many people have asked me to share the records. Below is an email string between Associate Superintendent Mark Anderson and what he calls the “levy leadership team.” I’m providing this string without comment. No accusation or assumption about the records, or about those within the records, is being made or implied. The records speak for themselves.
I just think you might like to see them. And, you have a right to.
Following is a reproduction of the text of an email string I received from Spokane Public Schools; formatting issues prevent it from being an exact duplicate.
Legislature should look into the PDC’s investigation of Spokane Public Schools
On September 28, 2011, I filed a complaint with the Public Disclosure Commission (PDC) regarding election activities by Spokane Public Schools. These activities entailed a bond and levy election in 2009 and a school board election in 2011.
The complaint stemmed from public records I obtained from Spokane Public Schools in January and July 2011. In those records, I saw a clear pattern of school district officials using public resources to promote bond and levy ballot propositions, as well as evidence of certain employees using public resources to assist in the campaign of a school board candidate. There appeared to me to be multiple violations of RCW 42.17.130, a law that governed disclosure, campaign finances, lobbying and records. (The law was recodifed as RCW 42.17A.555 in January 2012.)
In the afternoon of Election Day 2011 (Nov. 8), the PDC announced it would investigate; the case was numbered 12-145. After two and a half years of investigation, PDC officials Phil Stutzman and Tony Perkins presented their findings on 12-145 to Commissioners at their Feb. 27 hearing in Olympia.
If you read through the PDC report, you might feel a cold chill down your back. There must be an immediate and thorough legislative investigation of the Public Disclosure Commission. The PDC has essentially sanctioned repeated violations of election law with respect to school district elections.If you think I’m exaggerating, please read this article. Then, I invite you to read the PDC report.
All Cities Are Not Created Unequal
There are many ways of looking at inequality statistically; one useful way to measure it across places is by using the “95/20 ratio.” This figure represents the income at which a household earns more than 95 percent of all other households, divided by the income at which a household earns more than only 20 percent of all other households. In other words, it represents the distance between a household that just cracks the top 5 percent by income, and one that just falls into the bottom 20 percent. Over the past 35 years, members of the former group have generally experienced rising incomes, while those in the latter group have seen their incomes stagnate.
The latest U.S. Census Bureau data confirm that, overall, big cities remain more unequal places by income than the rest of the country. Across the 50 largest U.S. cities in 2012, the 95/20 ratio was 10.8, compared to 9.1 for the country as a whole. The higher level of inequality in big cities reflects that, compared to national averages, big-city rich households are somewhat richer ($196,000 versus $192,000), and big-city poor households are somewhat poorer ($18,100 versus $21,000).
5-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus
The familiar, hierarchical sequence of math instruction starts with counting, followed by addition and subtraction, then multiplication and division. The computational set expands to include bigger and bigger numbers, and at some point, fractions enter the picture, too. Then in early adolescence, students are introduced to patterns of numbers and letters, in the entirely new subject of algebra. A minority of students then wend their way through geometry, trigonometry and, finally, calculus, which is considered the pinnacle of high-school-level math.
But this progression actually “has nothing to do with how people think, how children grow and learn, or how mathematics is built,” says pioneering math educator and curriculum designer Maria Droujkova. She echoes a number of voices from around the world that want to revolutionize the way math is taught, bringing it more in line with these principles.
The current sequence is merely an entrenched historical accident that strips much of the fun out of what she describes as the “playful universe” of mathematics, with its more than 60 top-level disciplines, and its manifestations in everything from weaving to building, nature, music and art. Worse, the standard curriculum starts with arithmetic, which Droujkova says is much harder for young children than playful activities based on supposedly more advanced fields of mathematics.
Educators launch defense of Common Core at Senate hearing
More than more than 100 superintendents and school board members packed a Senate chamber Thursday in opposition to a bill that could derail the transition to new educational standards in Wisconsin.
At issue are the Common Core State Standards, a set of expectations for English and math instruction that most states have adopted and have been implementing for three years.
The debate came as lawmakers hustled to push through — or push aside — a host of measures, with the end of the legislative session in sight. Committees on Thursday approved bills to rewrite election rules and provide more oversight of the deaths of suspects in police custody, while a Senate leader declared a bill to limit so-called living wage rules is dead in his house.
But the hot issue of the day was Common Core.
Many Republican lawmakers fear the standards didn’t get enough input and review when they were written and adopted in 2010. They’re proposing a state standards board that could repeal Common Core and write its own standards.
Superintendents at the Senate Education Committee hearing acknowledged the Common Core standards were not perfect and that they could use more time and resources to implement them. But they argued a new committee would just politicize the process while failing to improve outcomes for students.
“(Common Core) is the basis we need to be able to make local adjustments,” said Jennifer Cheatham, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Student Academic Work Should Be The Focus Of College Prep
It is settled wisdom among Funderpundits and those to whom they give their grants that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality, but I have regularly pointed out that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work.
Now, however, a small number of other dissenting voices have begun to speak. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in Academically Adrift have suggested that (p. 131) “Studying is crucial for strong academic performance…” and “Scholarship on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of shifting attention from faculty teaching to student learning…”
This may seem unacceptably heterodox to those in government and the private sector who have committed billions of dollars to focusing on the selection, training, supervision, and control of K-12 teachers, while giving no thought to whether K-12 students are actually doing the academic work which they are assigned.
In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Doomed to Fail:
“Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education.”
More recently, and less on the fringe of this new concern, Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System:
“One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students’ academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers’ influence.”
There are necessarily problems in turning attention toward the work of students in judging the effectiveness of schools. First, all the present attention is on teachers, and it is not easy to turn that around. Second, teachers are employees and can be fired, while students can not. It could not be comfortable for the Funderpundits and their beneficiaries to realize that they may have been overlooking the most important variable in student academic achievement all this time.
In February, when the Associated Press reported that Natalie Monroe, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania, had called her students, on a blog, “disengaged, lazy whiners,” and “noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS,” the response of the school system was not to look more closely at the academic efforts of the students, but to suspend the teacher. As one of her students explained, “As far as motivated high school students, she’s completely correct. High school kids don’t want to do anything…(but) It’s a teacher’s job…to give students the motivation to learn.” (sic)
It would seem that no matter who points out that “You can lead a student to learning, but you can’t make him drink,” our systems of schools and Funderpundits stick with their wisdom that teachers alone are responsible for student academic achievement.
While that is wrong, it is also stupid. Alfred North Whitehead (or someone else) once wrote:
“For education, a man’s books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his.”
As in the old story about the drunk searching under the lamppost for his keys, those who control funds for education believe that as long as all their money goes to paying attention to what teachers are doing, who they are, how they are trained, and so on, they can’t see the point of looking in the darkness at those who have the complete and ultimate control over how much academic achievement there will be—namely the students.
Apart from scores on math and reading tests after all, student academic work is ignored by all those interested in paying to change the schools. What students do in literature, Latin, chemistry, math, and Asian history classes is of no interest to them. Liberal education is not only on the back burner for those focused on basic skills and job readiness as they define them, but that burner is also turned off at present.
This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students. And students, who see little or no pressure to be other than “disengaged lazy whiners” will continue to pay the price for their lack of education, both in college and at work, and we will continue to draw behind in comparison with those countries who realize that student academic achievement has always been, and will always be, mainly dependent on diligent student academic work.
Commentary on Madison’s Achievement Gap: “More than Poverty”
Yet some of those strategies have been used by the school district for years, and the results have not been good, Hughes acknowledged. “The results have been disappointing not just because African-American kids are achieving at lower rates than white kids, but because our African-American kids are doing worse than African-American kids in Beloit, than African-American kids in Racine. We ought to be able to do better than that.”
Madison has long spent more per student than most Wisconsin school districts. Unfortunately, the District’s disastrous reading results continue.
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Related: The rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.
Global Leader Pearson Creates Leading Curriculum, Apps for Digital Learning Environments
Today Pearson announced a collaboration with Microsoft Corp. that brings together the world’s leading learning company and the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions to create new applications and advance a digital education model that prepares students to thrive in an increasingly personalized learning environment. The first collaboration between the two global companies will combine Pearson’s Common Core System of Courses with the groundbreaking capabilities of the Windows 8 touchscreen environment. The Common Core System of Courses is the first curriculum built for a digital personalized learning environment that is 100 percent aligned to the new standards for college and career readiness.
“Pearson has accelerated the development of personalized digital learning environments to improve educational outcomes as well as increase student engagement,” said Larry Singer, Managing Director for Pearson’s North American School group. “Through this collaboration with Microsoft, the global leader in infrastructure and productivity tools for schools, we are creating a powerful force for helping schools leverage this educational model to accelerate student achievement and, ultimately, ensure that U.S. students are more competitive on the global stage.”
“Personalized learning for every student is a worthy and aspirational goal. By combining the power of touch, type, digital inking, multitasking and split-screen capabilities that Windows 8 with Office 365 provides with these new Pearson applications, we’re one step closer to enabling an interactive and personalized learning environment,” said Margo Day, vice president, U.S. Education, Microsoft Corp. “We’re in the middle of an exciting transformation in education, with technology fueling the movement and allowing schools to achieve this goal of personalized learning for each student.”
In addition, iLit, Pearson’s core reading program aimed at closing the adolescent literacy gap, will be optimized for the Windows 8 platform. Designed based on the proven instructional model found in the Ramp Up Literacy program, which demonstrated students gaining two years of growth in a single year, iLit offers students personalized learning support based on their own instructional needs, engaging interactivities, and built-in reward systems that motivate students and track their progress.
Milissa Crum, a teacher at Highland Middle School in Anderson, Ind., is illustrative of the ways teachers around the country are discovering iLit as a powerful tool for personalizing learning and closing the literacy gap for their students. She said, “The iLit program and curriculum provides real time data that can guide my interaction and teaching with my students everyday. The feedback from the program enables my sixth grade students to become hands on in their own learning and growing and become involved in the conversation in how to make changes in the learning and growing to increase their own performance. Making programs like this more accessible with the release of them on mobile devices would only make this already amazing program invaluable in today’s pedagogy and curriculum.”
A Windows 8 app will also be developed for Pearson’s hundreds of core and supplemental eText titles, allowing students and teachers to access the full functionality of the company’s eBook solutions on Windows 8 devices. In addition, Pearson’s innovative TestNav 8 assessment app, incorporated into Next-Generation Assessments around the United States, will support Internet Explorer 11.
The Common Core System of Courses, iLit, eText titles, and TestNav 8 are a sampling of a variety of instructional resources, assessments, professional development, virtual learning, and school improvement services delivered to millions of students around the globe.
The Pearson solutions on the Windows platform will be available for use by schools in the 2014-2015 school year.
About the Common Core System of Courses
Written from the ground-up to support the new, more rigorous learning goals, the Common Core System of Courses is a new, all-digital curriculum that’s designed for use as a system of courses. Underlying the development of the Common Core System of Courses is the belief that the teacher is the key to the quality of education provided to students. This curriculum is designed as a workshop model that engages students and teachers in a variety of activities. It provides opportunities for students to develop their ways of thinking about complex text and complex problems individually, in pairs or small groups, and then shared in a whole-class discussion. This ensures that students are developing the skills requisite for success in the digital age: deeper cognitive and meta-cognitive academic skills as well as their personal skills: communication, collaboration, problem-solving, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.
About iLit
A tablet-based reading intervention for grades 4-10, iLit provides teachers with everything they need for their students to gain two years of reading growth in a single year. In an iLit classroom, each day begins with the students reading a self-selected title from the thoughtfully curated high-interest leveled library, which culls Pearson’s vast collection of Penguin, DK, Adapted Classics and other texts. The daily instruction allows for gradual release of control through explicit guided reading, modeling the fluency and meta-cognition of a successful reader while teaching important skills and strategies to fill reading deficiency gaps. By taking advantage of Pearson’s award-winning proprietary technology learning solutions, iLit provides students real-time feedback and coaching on informal summary writing and formal essays. Scaffolded hints and personalized feedback allow the students to write and re-write independently, practicing skills in a safe engaging environment before submitting for grading. It is the only reading intervention program with technology-based writing coaching.
About Pearson eText
Pearson’s eText platform is the company’s electronic book technology (eBook), designed to meet the varied requirements of learners in the classroom. Beyond providing perfect fidelity to the printed textbook, the Pearson eText platform offers easy-to-use interactive and intuitive features such as navigation controls, enhanced searchability, personal highlighting, bookmarks and note-taking.
About TestNav
Pearson’s comprehensive approach to assessment includes an innovative online delivery solution, TestNav delivers millions of secure, high-stakes assessments in K-12 schools every year. TestNav allows schools to administer tests online and on demand, securely and dependably. Today’s students are completely at home in a digital environment, where a keyboard, mouse, navigation buttons, toolbars, and point-and-click skills are familiar tools. TestNav uses these tools in a student friendly interface that employs interactive tools and innovative items, enhancing the test-taking experience for all computer literacy levels.
About Pearson
Pearson is the world’s leading learning company, providing educational materials and services and business information through the Financial Times Group. Pearson serves learners of all ages around the globe, employing 41,000 people in more than 70 countries. For more information about Pearson, visit http://www.pearson.com.
Pearson Media Contact: Stacy Skelly, stacy (dot) skelly (at) pearson (dot) com, or (800) 745-8489.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Public Purse Media Spending Oversight, or note…. Bread & Circuses
Compare: Three reporters assigned to the Urban League’s governance transition:
1. Steven Elbow: Madison Urban League chair: Kaleem Caire’s credit card use an ‘internal’ issue.
2. Dee Hall: Urban League head: Kaleem Caire’s ‘integrity intact’.
3. Dean Mosiman: Kaleem Caire’s departure followed concerns about credit card use, overwork.
2005 a reporter follows a story with a Madison School Board member: Susan Troller: School Board member may seek audit of 2005 referendum dollars: “For more than a year, Madison School Board member Lucy Mathiak has been asking Madison school district officials for a precise, up-to-date summary of how $26.2 million in 2005 maintenance referendum dollars were spent over the last five years.”.
I’ve not seen any followup on the maintenance referendum spending, not to mention the tens of millions spent on Madison’s reading programs. Those programs have, to be charitable, been ineffective.
Much more on Kaleem Caire, here. Perhaps an Ash Wednesday reflection on John 8 might be in order.
Bread & circuses, indeed.
Harvard’s Exit Strategy
A RECENT Free exchange column looked at how online education might affect higher education. Elite institutions should be fine, we wrote, because they product they offer is completely different from the standardised, distance education that MOOCs offer. Unless, that is, they begin offering their own course material online at low prices, in the process breaking their business model. What is that model? Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby has one answer:
Elite institutions face very different circumstances, Ms Hoxby reckons. They operate like venture-capital firms, offering subsidised, labour-intensive education to highly qualified students. They aim to cultivate a sense of belonging and gratitude in students in order to recoup their investment decades later in the form of donations from successful alumni.
Ironically, these universities may have threatened their own business model by embracing MOOCs. Online courses break the personal link between students and university and, if offered cheaply to outsiders, may make regular graduates feel more like chumps than the chosen few. For top schools, the best bet may simply be to preserve their exclusivity.
The past 24 hours have provided an excellent illustration of both sides of that model. First, NPR’s Planet Money reports:
Higher Education: Well Endowed
WE RECENTLY examined university business models and the value of them of their endowments. Endowments, which stretch into the billions of dollars for elite institutions, deserve a bit more scrutiny. These cash piles have grown at a fair clip over the last two decades thanks to savvier investments by those that manage these funds. Payouts are an increasingly critical component of university revenue, too. Endowment income supports a wide range of activities from hiring, to facility upgrades and even need-based scholarships. They are generally viewed, not least by donors, as a university’s rainy day fund. Scholars at the University of Illinois and Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, wondered how endowments have been helping universities to cope with recent economic difficulties. Do they smooth the income universities receive during financial shocks as expected, and are they treated just as another form of income for the university?
When the team looked at how endowments had responded to negative financial shocks during the technology bubble of 2001-2, and the financial crisis in 2008-9, the picture was different than they expected: endowments do not behave as rainy day funds at all. In a forthcoming paper for the American Economic Review (earlier version here), the authors propose that what they see in spending is more consistent with a hypothesis the team terms “endowment hoarding”. When times are bad, leadership is quick to cut the payouts from the endowment to reduce the size of any decline in the overall size of the fund—even though this tends to be contrary to what such funds are expected to do. When times are good payouts do increase, although there is often a slight lag between a bullish turn and increased flow from the tap.
Are the robots about to rise? Google’s new director of engineering thinks so…
It’s hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione?
With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living for ever? He just has to stay alive “long enough” to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he’s 66 and he believes that “some of the baby-boomers will make it through”). Or with the fact that he’s predicted that in 15 years’ time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. They already do that. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do. Only better.
But then everyone’s allowed their theories. It’s just that Kurzweil’s theories have a habit of coming true. And, while he’s been a successful technologist and entrepreneur and invented devices that have changed our world – the first flatbed scanner, the first computer program that could recognise a typeface, the first text-to-speech synthesizer and dozens more – and has been an important and influential advocate of artificial intelligence and what it will mean, he has also always been a lone voice in, if not quite a wilderness, then in something other than the mainstream
I Was Born For This: Breaking My Silence on Black Colleges
I have a few writing rules.
I do not write when I am angry and I do not write about HBCUs.
The former may go without saying the but the latter really flummoxes people. I am a graduate of an HBCU. I’m a third generation HBCU graduate. I study higher education. I study race and inequality. And I do not talk about HBCUs.
There became a point when the scope of my readership meant that what I write is often read through me. Intellectually, I go for the truth as close as I can approximate it and ethically, rigorously argue it. I fear that those two things may be in conflict. And I care too much to let that happen. So, I do not talk about HBCUs.
Except today I am talking at an HBCU. It is my HBCU. I am delivering the annual Mason-Sekora lecture. I am an oddball choice. I don’t really “do” anything of note. I’m not much accomplished if we’re still measuring that by having a job (I ain’t got no job, Craig). But, here I am. And I am happy to be here. There’s something about a moment in your life when you come full circle, only with new eyes and a greater capacity for appreciation.
Twelve Fixed, Eternal Commandments for Academic Job Candidates
In my too many years on the academic job market which culminated miraculously in my current position, I received a great deal of advice about how to navigate job application and interview protocols. I thought I would pass along some of this received wisdom in the form of these twelve fixed, eternal commandments that reflect a universal consensus about the proper guidelines for would-be scholars. Here they are:
1. Make sure to use last names and formal titles when addressing your interviewers. You don’t want to seem disrespectful.
1. Use first names. You want to seem like a colleague, not a grad student.
2. Make sure to thoroughly research the department to which you are applying before an interview. Learn the research interests of your interviewers and highlight in detail how your own work will complement the existing strengths of the program.
2. It will creep out the search committee if they learn you are googling them. You’ll seem like a stalker.
3. Highlight your scholarly breadth and interdisciplinary interests. Hiring committees want to know you are flexible and able to teach a variety of courses outside of your area of specialization.
Saving a Library Remnant
You see, I was asked last week by our university Librarian to review books that she wants to withdraw from the collection.
I teach at a small university with about 2800 students, most of whom are in the health sciences and business, with only a few in the humanities and social sciences. The reason the Librarian gave for the purge was that the books selected for elimination had not been checked out in thirty or more years, and that they needed to move them to make room. But it does not seem that that is the case that they will buy as many books to replace them – that the stacks are being culled to make room for electronic resources, or other non-textual uses.Still, I agree that some books reluctantly need to go. If a book goes thirty, forty or even fifty years without being checked out, it may need to relinquish its place to something more relevant. A number of volumes were actually collections of primary source documents, most of which have now merged onto online formats, making them far easier for students to access. In these cases, the convenience of document collections compiled in the 1960s are really just like our internet accessibility now. One could easily imagine the editors of such physical books now just putting the docs and links on a website, and getting far more student use out of it. Same with multiple editions of works, often textbooks, which do not really need to be in a small university library.
Student Loans Entice Borrowers More for Cash Than a Degree
Some Americans caught in the weak job market are lining up for federal student aid, not for education that boosts their employment prospects but for the chance to take out low-cost loans, sometimes with little intention of getting a degree.
Take Ray Selent, a 30-year-old former retail clerk in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was unemployed in 2012 when he enrolled as a part-time student at Broward County’s community college. That allowed him to borrow thousands of dollars to pay rent to his mother, cover his cellphone bill and catch the occasional movie.
“The only way I feel I can survive financially is by going back to school and putting myself in more student debt,” says Mr. Selent, who has since added $8,000 in student debt from living expenses. Returning to school also gave Mr. Selent a reprieve on the $400 a month he owed from previous student debt because the federal government doesn’t require payments while borrowers are in school.
On Academic Labor
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 Wal-Mart, 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.
This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more. That’s the way you keep societies efficient and healthy from the point of view of the corporations. And as universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.
Commentary on the K-12 Education Model’s Structure
Ryan Krohn stopped as we walked down a middle school hallway to point out what was in a classroom we were passing: rows of traditional student desks, neatly lined up.
That’s what we’re getting away from, he said. Those desks — and the kind of approach to teaching and learning that comes with them. We’re all in our places with (sometimes not so) bright, shiny faces and, if this is third hour, we’ll sit and listen to the teacher instruct us in math or social studies or whatever the schedule calls for during those 50 minutes.
Krohn, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the Waukesha School District, had just left an entirely different atmosphere about 100 feet away: Flight Academy, where 60 sixth- and seventh-graders this year have much different furniture and, more importantly, an approach to their school work and school days you would probably find hard to recognize.
I figure that at least once a year I ought to check up on how the revolution is going. So I get in touch with Jim Rickabaugh, who heads what is called the Institute at CESA 1, a state agency that assists school districts throughout southeastern Wisconsin.
A Conversation with Leigh Turner
Jim Zellmer: Good afternoon, Leigh Let’s begin with your education.
Leigh Turner: Like increasing numbers of people in today’s modern world, I grew up in several countries, in Nigeria, in Britain, then again in Lesotho, in southern Africa, and then again in Britain.
I went to several different, as we would say in English, schools and then to university. I was at a school in Swaziland called Waterford Kamhlaba School, a boarding school, for a year and a half, a very fascinating and interesting time.
Then, I was in a school in Manchester called Manchester Grammar School for most of my secondary education, as we would say in Britain. Then, from there, I went to the University of Cambridge and did a three-year bachelor’s degree in Geography. That was it. After that, I was 21. I went off and started work.
Jim: Do you have a perspective on how that movement, let’s say, improved or hindered your education as you grew up? What’s your take on that?
Leigh: It all depends on your degree of family stability and the degree to which you are fortunate in having good schools, good teachers, and good classmates. It’s very difficult to be deterministic about what makes a good education.
I was extremely fortunate in having a peripatetic childhood and going to primary school in Lesotho with a bunch of kids of all different nationalities, African children, European children, American children, different people.
Then, going to a school in Waterford Kamhlaba School in Swaziland which was very much a place which was set up in the years of apartheid in South Africa as a place where children from all different ethnic backgrounds could go to a high-quality school together and learn the British educational exams.
That gave me a great deal of insight into different people, the size of the world, and the fact that one country is not it. It’s very easy to forget that if you’ve not had the good fortune to travel widely. It’s easy to think that you’re in your city, and that’s the world, or you’re in your country, and that’s the world.
When you travel around the world as a child, you see that there are many countries, there are many different ways of living, there are many different outlooks on life. That’s a very important part of anyone’s education.
I then was very fortunate in having five or six years of continuous education in one school, in Manchester. I do think that for many young people, stability of education is a positive.
I grew up moving around the world. With my kids, we made a real effort to try to arrange our postings in such a way that the children could stay in a limited number of schools, for as long as possible.
In fact, I even arranged postings so that we could stay in Berlin in eight years in a row so the children could stay in the same school. That seems to have served them very well.
Jim: What languages did you pick up along the way? What about your kids? Obviously, when I look at your postings and your tweets, you’ve taken the time to learn the local language. What are your thoughts on that?
Leigh: I was lucky enough to study German and French when I was at school in Manchester, at high school, as you would say in America. I found the grammar extremely difficult.
I have a famous story about trying to learn my German grammar as I moved up towards a certain public exam. At each stage, I got 0 out of 30 for my grammar, 3 times in a row.
After the final occasion where I got 0 out of 30, with a public exam looming, my teacher said to me, “Leigh, if you make just a few less mistakes, you might be able to get a mark in this part of the exam.”
Even though that happened, I was able to pass those exams and indeed score reasonably well in those exams because I spent time doing what we would call an “exchange,” which is where a child, usually between 11 and 16, is sent off from their own family to stay with a family in a foreign country, to live with that family for three weeks, to speak only the language of that country for three weeks, and to socialize, maybe to go to school with the child that they’re staying with.
There’s always an exchange child at the other end, who, ideally, is somebody of similar age to you. Then, that child comes back to your country, and the reverse situation takes place.
I did this when I was 12. I went to Paris, at age 12, and stayed with a family who lived within eyesight of the Arc de Triomphe. I remember well waking up on my first morning and trying to think of something that I could say in French.
My mind was blank. Eventually, I managed to say, “Le soleil brille.” The sun is shining. From that start, after three weeks of staying with a family, I came back speaking simple, fluent French, after three weeks.
Similarly, German, I did a German exchange. I went out there with only the most simple grasp of German. I found after three weeks of German exchange, I was speaking much better. Indeed, I did repeated German exchanges.
By the time I took my final public school exams, when I was 17, I was actually reasonably fluent in French and German. Those were my first two languages. They were learned partly by school study and partly by these home stays in the countries concerned.
Subsequently, when I joined the Foreign Office, I was posted to Russia. I needed to speak Russian for that job. On that occasion, we had a different approach.
The British Foreign Service is very keen on teaching its officers foreign languages. We think that’s an important part of the training and an important part of doing the job.
I was sent on a nine-month, full-time Russian course, which was pretty mind-bending. I should say, in the Foreign Office, when you join, they give you a test to measure your aptitude to learn foreign languages.
True to my history of my German experience from doing my [inaudible 07:51] , my initial public school exams, I scored very badly on this language aptitude test and was told I should go off maybe and learn Afrikaans and some easy languages.
In fact, for a series of reasons, I was going to Moscow. I spent nine months learning Russian full-time, including a seven-week stay in Moscow, in 1992.
By the time I finished the course, I was able to pass the relevant exam. In my subsequent three-year posting in Moscow, I was able to use Russian a great deal. By that time, I spoke it really quite fluently and could read Russian as well.
[crosstalk]
Leigh: Go on.
Jim: This is something that our friends have discussed over the years, the ability of children to learn and pick up those languages much faster than when you were posted in Moscow.
The amount of time you discussed was obviously extensive. (Presumably) the depth of your language understanding and learning, I assume, was much deeper with Russian.
What was your experience as you were older? Today, learning Turkish , how long does it take? If you took about three weeks when you’re 12 years old in Paris, to have some level of fluency, how long did it take you to have that similar level when you arrived in Istanbul?
Leigh: When I knew I was coming to Turkey, I was, at that stage, still living and working in Ukraine. I was Ambassador, in Kiev, from 2008 to 2012. In Kiev, I made a big effort to learn Ukrainian. Both Ukrainian and Russian are widely spoken.
I had a couple of weeks of immersion there. I didn’t pick it up as quickly as I did French when I was 12. That’s for sure. I did pick up a reasonable level of Ukrainian.
Then, when I heard I was coming to Istanbul, I immediately got out a self-study, computer-based Turkish course and spent five or six months really working hard on that. I actually kept a record of the 127 hours I spent by myself with the computer language course learning Turkish.
By the time I arrived in Turkey, August 2012, I was able, thanks to this course, to speak a little bit of straightforward Turkish. I then had five weeks [inaudible 10:35] staying with someone here in Turkey, going to lessons four hours every day of the week, except weekends.
By the end of that, I could speak very simple Turkish, but by no means as well as I could speak French after three weeks staying with a family in France in 1970-71.
Jim: Well, we’re all getting older there. As you think of all these experiences you’ve had, both as a parent, professionally, and then obviously traveling, what do you think it means to be educated today and tomorrow? What does that mean in the age of Google, smart phones, and digital electronic [inaudible 11:21] ?
Leigh: I am no great educational expert, but I think that there are, in education, two things which you have to balance, one is what I might call learning by route or drilling, where you accumulate facts that you know and clearly there has been a move away from this.
This is the traditional way of learning things, people reciting their timetables and so on in schools in Victorian England [inaudible 11:58] images, and as life has gone on, people have focused more on having the ability to find things out, which clearly is the way to go these days.
You need to be able to know where to acquire information, know how to assimilate and organize information, know how to manage the almost infinite amount of information that is rightly available there on your smart phone in your pocket.
I think there are those two elements to education, one is knowing stuff and the other thing is knowing how to find out and organize stuff.
I think you have to have a certain amount of both in order to have a successful education. If we look at some countries in Far East which have a traditional route learning, they have really effective educational systems.
On the other hand, if you look at some countries like UK or the US, where there is more of a tradition of learning how to find things out, they don’t score so highly at least the far East countries, for example, mathematical ability, but on the other hand, they are very good at creative industries.
Clearly, it might be unique to have a judicious balance of both. You simply cannot learn a language without learning vocabulary and without learning a bit of grammar. It’s never going to work. At the same time, if you don’t know how to use a dictionary and don’t know how to use the Internet, you’re going to make learning a language much more difficult for yourself.
Jim: Again, [inaudible 13:38] all this, what should young people know today? Obviously, you’ve tried [inaudible 13:42] to your children. (Talking) about parents, what should young people know today?
Leigh: I’m a big fan of that balance I was talking about just now. The hardest thing for me as a parent is the balance between giving your children the space they need to develop their own views on who they are as individuals and being able to make informed decisions about how to live their lives.
If parents don’t give their children that and they miss to take the important opportunities, that’s on the one side, giving them freedom, allowing them to develop as individuals, on the other hand, providing them with the framework within which they can establish that identity.
I think the framework part is important too. If you don’t have any rules in the house about when you go to bed, when you get up, when you eat your meals together, how you should behave in the family home, then the child is going to find it hard to adjust to a world which is based on certain norms of behavior in any society.
It’s balancing those two between your [inaudible 15:09] approach to do anything you want to do, finding themselves, and the kind of [inaudible 15:17] the new millennium of people really need to have the skill they need to get a job and the discipline they need to be able to hold down the job in an area where we have increasing global competition between countries.
If your kid from a rich country isn’t able to compete with the hungry, dynamic, well-trained kids from countries, which have not been so blessed by history as your country, then they’re going to find it hard to compete in the global markets.
Jim: Speaking of that, you’re a keen observer of the world as it is. It’s remarkable I have to say, I have very much enjoyed your tweets and writing.
Taking those observations, how might you compare and contrast the education system, let’s say the software, the raw materials that the different countries you’ve been in provide their kids from UK to France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and now Turkey?
Leigh: Well, you risk getting very political when you [inaudible 16:40] one education system is different from or better than another. I would just say that what really is [inaudible 16:49] is that I think being to high school in Britain, France, or Germany, they run very different.
Similarly, having been a diplomat in Britain, having seen the systems that operate in France and in Germany, it is striking how utterly different the training given to diplomats from France, Germany, Britain is.
For example, in Germany, you have to have studied quite often law, ideally international law, then you join the foreign ministry and you have a two-year training course with a group of people who joined at the same time as you.
Before you even sit down, there’s day’s full work.
In France, you have to go to a “grande école”, which will get you into the upper reaches of civil service. Often, you have to go to another specialized school to give you a chance to get into the grande école in the first place. They are that highly [inaudible 17:47] exams are that difficult.
In Britain, you get into the Foreign Service by taking the public exam, which is pretty difficult and which involves written exams and assessment centers. Then, on your first day, usually you sit down and start work. No training at all.
Why am I saying this? Because nobody would say that French, or British, or German diplomats were better than each other. I know many great brilliant diplomats from France, Germany, and Britain. They have had completely different training, yet they are all excellent diplomats.
I think the point of what I’m saying is that very different educational systems can be successful. It’s all really about having a good basic structure, a good concept of what kind of education you are trying to deliver. Then, having assiduous, well-trained teachers who know what they’re talking about, and having of course children who would be supported by parents to help them to learn.
Jim: It’s struck me because I have dealt with some very talented software developers in the old Soviet Bloc. Is it the long emphasis on science, technology and math [inaudible 19:24] in that space?
Did you have any observations on their system, the Russian system, the Ukrainian? Did you interact with the education systems in those places at all?
Leigh: I must say that I have many Russian friends and colleagues, many Ukrainian friends and colleagues. I have often been struck by the excellence of their educational systems, their knowledge. Many people from Russia and Ukraine, who go off to the UK to study there, are very high achievers.
Although, I would say that on the whole their system are more based on root learning, repetition and, what some in the West might think, a rather old-fashioned educational system. But mind you, they work very well.
I remember the first time when I was learning Russian, coming face to face with a gentleman who introduced himself as a soviet, a naval interpreter in the Soviet Navy who turned up in the UK for some reason. This was in 1991.
He spoke English not only with complete fluency, but with a beautiful English accent, and he’d never been outside the Soviet Union. I had to take my hat off to that level of educational attainment in the elite systems of the former Soviet Union.
Similarly, here in Turkey there are many excellent quality educational establishments. You can always look at a system and think of a better way to organize it and to improve it, but I think we should always be very careful to assuming that we have the answer that some other people don’t.
Jim: I completely agree with that. [laughs] It’s interesting because, as a student pointed out earlier regarding the learn-by-rote [inaudible 21:26] versus the (discovery method), it is striking to observe how successful that approach was in some of those countries.
As you traveled, do you have a sense that some of these countries there is a more egalitarian state or do you see (a wide range of experiences & quality)?
Leigh: I do think that there is a role for central government in any country in maintaining educational standards.
On the one hand, I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s and I’d find intellectually stimulating the idea that we should let the best schools to slug it out, work out who has the best system and let the marketplace decide. But I’m not sure that we’ve got time for that, when it comes to education.
I think some role for central government in setting standards, and deciding curricula, and helping educational systems to provide the education that business and society need in that country is essential. They say fair is great, but we haven’t got time to leave that to operate through the educational systems. We can’t afford to have kids who are failed by educational systems.
Jim: I have a last question. Let’s take the time machine, Dr. Who, back, to when you were 18 or coming out of Manchester. What would you study today if you were 18…? The same thing? What would you do?
Leigh: I tend to think that I’ve been an exceptional fortunate individual in my life.
I’ve had a rich and privileged range of experiences. From hitchhiking around the United States for seven weeks when I was 21, starting in White Plains, New York and making it as far as North Carolina, and San Francisco, and British Columbia or Canada, and all the way back to White Plains, one of the great experiences of my life, to visiting the Island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic with my job, to having all kinds of terrific friends and relationships.
Having visited many countries and seen many different ways of doing things, I would in no way claim that my life is perfect, but it’s been terrific so far. I certainly wouldn’t want to change a thing.
Having said all that, my advice to anybody who is just beginning their university education would be to really take the education seriously. You’ve only got one chance to accumulate the best possible set of skills at the university. If you don’t do it now, you are going to find it very difficult to do it later.
As I said earlier on, you need to balance that inquisitive and applied approach to learning with, at the same time, having some fun and getting out in the air and exploring things, meeting people, trying some things that maybe your parents wouldn’t be all that crazy about, and exploring life a little bit.
It’s the balance between those two, the yin and yang of educational development if you like, that I think young people need to explore.
Jim: That’s wonderful. Is there anything else you want to add? We really appreciate your time today.
Leigh: Not really, except that I would encourage all of your readers or listeners to check out my Twitter account which is @LeighTurnerFCO, and also my work blog which has my thoughts about life in Turkey, and finally my personal writing blog where you have the journalism that I’ve done over the years, four years as a journalist working in Berlin when I was there, and also some of my fiction writing, which I’m very proud of.
Jim: Yes. I will include links to that, definitely.
Twitter @leighturnerFCO
Official blog: http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/leighturner/
Personal writing blog (short stories, novels, journalism): rleighturner.com
Madison Schools’ Student Assessment Plan Proposed Changes
Madison School District 500K PDF Slideware:
Phase Out: WKCE, Explore, and Plan
Phase In: PALS 2, Smarter Balanced, Aspire, Work Keys
Required State Assessments
PALS (4K-2)
WKCE Science & Social Studies (3-8) ACCESS for English Language Learners Aspire (9, 10)
ACT + Writing (11)
Work Keys (12)
Related: Madison Schools’ MAP results
Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.
Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.
Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply*; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper).
Ten map meditations on economic mobility
Andy Smarick, via a kind reader:
The map shows, by small geographic areas, the likelihood that a child born into the lowest-income quintile ended up (as an adult) in the highest-income quintile.
This isn’t the necessarily the best indicator of economic mobility, but it is still edifying. (The fantastic interactive map from the Times allows you to look at mobility from a number of other angles, as well).
A whole lot of staring at this map and some additional research has produced ten thoughts—most of them gloomy.
The miniscule chance of a rags-to-riches rise in some locations takes my breath away. In Memphis, the chance of this “lowest-to-highest” movement is only 2.6 percent. Atlanta, at 4 percent, is barely better.
The stickiness of poverty in some locations is heartrending. In most of the red areas in the Mississippi Delta, a child born into a family at the tenth percentile of earnings has a 75 percent chance of having an adulthood in one of the bottom two economic quintiles.This is a catastrophic distortion of the American Dream.
The belt of red in the Southeast is absolutely shameful. An entire swath of our nation is constricting the opportunities of low-income kids. The “Rust Belt,” once the nation’s manufacturing hub, consisting of cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, is almost as sad.
Kill the bill that would let politicians muck around with Common Core standards, says education dean
Tim Slekar, the dean of education at Edgewood College and outspoken critic of corporate-driven education “reform,” couldn’t read another word about Wisconsin GOP legislators’ plan to rewrite the state’s educational standards without saying something about it.
“Someone has to say it: Any bill that would allow politicians the ability to directly and/or indirectly write learning standards must be killed!” Slekar posted Friday on the At the Chalk Face blog.
Slekar was writing about a bill sponsored by Sen. Leah Vukmir, R-Wauwatosa, that would create a politically appointed board to write state-specific educational standards to replace the national Common Core standards that are drawing criticism from conservatives and progressives alike. The proposal has been swept up in political maneuvering and made headlines again when gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke said it would politicize education.
Too late, Slekar said in an interview. Politicians are talking about educational standards instead of the people most impacted by them.
“Politicians have proven themselves over the last 30 years to be wholly unqualified to make even remotely positive decisions about public education policy. In fact I propose a bill that would place an indefinite moratorium on politicians’ ability to even breathe too closely around public schools,” he wrote.
“Are we clear about what I just said? Kill the Bill! Got it? K-I-L-L the Bill!”
Fascinating.
Related: NCTQ Sues University of Wisconsin education schools over course syllabi and When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Lake Wobegon has nothing on the UW-Madison School of Education. All of the children in Garrison Keillor’s fictional Minnesota town are “above average.” Well, in the School of Education they’re all A students.
The 1,400 or so kids in the teacher-training department soared to a dizzying 3.91 grade point average on a four-point scale in the spring 2009 semester.
This was par for the course, so to speak. The eight departments in Education (see below) had an aggregate 3.69 grade point average, next to Pharmacy the highest among the UW’s schools. Scrolling through the Registrar’s online grade records is a discombobulating experience, if you hold to an old-school belief that average kids get C’s and only the really high performers score A’s.
Much like a modern-day middle school honors assembly, everybody’s a winner at the UW School of Education. In its Department of Curriculum and Instruction (that’s the teacher-training program), 96% of the undergraduates who received letter grades collected A’s and a handful of A/B’s. No fluke, another survey taken 12 years ago found almost exactly the same percentage.
And, MTEL arrives in Wisconsin via the Legislature and Governor, not the ed schools.
Finally, Madison’s long term disastrous reading scores.
New faith-based school aimed at niche market
You might say the Buffalo Chesterton Academy is going old school.
Local public school districts and the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo are moving to shut down schools throughout Erie County, because the area has fewer and fewer children.
But the demographic trends haven’t discouraged a small group of Catholics from planning a new faith-based high school in Cheektowaga that will emphasize classic subjects such as philosophy, Latin and literature and rely on the Socratic method to teach the humanities.
“We’re a boutique school. We’re going to do some things that no one else does. We’re going to teach four years of philosophy in high school,” said Deacon Michael P. McKeating, chairman of the board of trustees of Buffalo Chesterton Academy. “This is not for everybody. It’s for a niche market – both for students and faculty. They will look at this and say, ‘That’s what I’ve been waiting for.’ ”
The co-educational school is independent of the Diocese of Buffalo, although it will lease classroom space from St. Josaphat Catholic Church on William Street in Cheektowaga and each school day will start with a Mass inside the church.
Use It or Lose It – Class Covering Pay
Madison Teachers, Inc Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email:
Section III-R of MTI’s Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement ensures that teachers are compensated for covering another teacher’s class, when a substitute is unavailable. Nearly all members of MTI’s teacher collective bargaining unit are entitled to class coverage pay whether one volunteers or are assigned by a building administrator. This is also true whether one loses planning or not. The only exceptions are the following positions: learning coordinator, instructional resource teacher, PBS coaches, literacy coaches or dean of students, team teachers when the co-teacher is absent (unless coverage results in lost planning time). Follow up with the building administrator or administrative clerk to verify that this additional time is recorded for compensation purposes. Class coverage pay is $22 per hour. Contact MTI for additional details.
Tennessee State University Plans to Require Electronic Student ID’s
Tennessee State University (TSU) is implementing a new policy to keep students and staff safe. The changes come after a rash of vandalism and a shooting this school year on campus.
It’s already difficult for students to get around campus without identification.
“I use it going to the cafeteria, going in and out of my dorm and driving on campus,” freshman Xavier Johnson explained about the importance of his identification.
A new policy has students and staff lining the halls at the campus police department. Each one is required to get a new photo identification. Starting on March 1st it must be prominently displayed while on campus.
The current policy requires everyone to be able to present identification only when asked.
“It kind of reminds me of high school,” Johnson said. “I guess it’s okay. It’s a public University.”
Both the technology and design has changed on the new badges. A built in chip can now restrict access to certain areas and track who is entering different buildings.
“That gives us another arm to aide our students in identifying potential problems on the campus,” Dr. Curtis Johnson, Associate Vice President for Administration said.
US toddler obesity rate plummets
The obesity rate among young US children has fallen by 43% since 2003-2004, the first broad decline in years, a new national study has found.
Obesity among US children ages two to five dropped to 8.4% in 2011-2012 from 13.9%, the survey found.
Scientists have not identified an exact cause but say a decrease in sugary beverage consumption may contribute.
Childhood obesity has been shown to increase risk of obesity, cancer, heart disease and stroke later in life.
UK Primary school teachers work almost 60 hours a week, finds official survey
Primary state school teachers in England are working almost 60 hours a week, according to a survey by the Department for Education – a sharp increase on the previous survey.
The snapshot of their workload is a grim portrait of a profession plagued by long hours and “unnecessary and bureaucratic tasks”, according to the survey. Many of the 1,000 respondents cited preparations for Ofsted visits as well as form-filling and other paperwork as causing a burden outside the classroom.
The last similar exercise conducted by the DfE in 2010 found that full-time primary school teachers worked just over 50 hours a week – a figure that was little changed over the previous decade.
The latest survey found that teachers worked 59 hours and 20 minutes on average, while their secondary school counterparts worked almost 56 hours.
Martin Freedman, director of economic strategy at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said teachers were now fitting in the equivalent of an extra full day a week by working during evenings and weekends.
For Millennials, a bachelor’s degree continues to pay off, but a master’s earns even more
Millennials are the nation’s most educated generation in history in terms of finishing college. But despite the stereotype that today’s recent college graduates are largely underemployed, the data show that this generation of college grads earns more than ones that came before it.
In 2009 (the latest year available) the median monthly earnings of young adults with a bachelor’s degree and no further education was $3,836, a 13% increase from 1984 ($3,399), according to the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).
The economic payoffs for obtaining a bachelor’s degree vary widely by major field of study. It is certainly possible that earnings have declined since the early 1980s for specific major fields of study. But given what young adults choose to study, the typical or median young adult with a bachelor’s degree earns more than they used to.
What’s next for Wikipedia?
IN 2012, after 244 years in print, Encyclopedia Britannica became online-only. Now a group of German fans of Wikipedia, an online, user-generated encyclopedia, are raising money for a move in the opposite direction. A print version of the English Wikipedia–1,000 bulky volumes and 1,193,014 pages–will be on show at a gathering of Wikipedians later this year. A world tour will probably follow: a global victory lap for the internet’s most impressive crowd-sourced creation.
The books will be instantly out of date; several times a second an article is amended online. But that is not the point. Wikipedia, which was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, has a right to show off. With articles on subjects as diverse as Spaghetti code (“a pejorative term for source code”) and SpaghettiOs (“an American brand of canned spaghetti”), it has 1,600 times as many articles as the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is the world’s fifth most popular website, with editions in 287 languages. (The English one is the biggest, with 4.4m articles.) On any given day 15% of all internet users visit it, amounting to 495m readers a month.
The worst thing about China’s education system
Chinese pupils are once again at the top of international education rankings. Recent further in-depth analysis of results from the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, have now shown that it’s not just pupils from Shanghai and Beijing coming top of the class. Children from rural areas and disadvantaged environments of China also outperformed peers in other countries.
UK education secretary Liz Truss is leading a visit to China with a group of teachers to observe why. But she should be mindful of copying a system that is being questioned by some Chinese researchers for the stress it puts on children.
Chinese pupils spend more time in school than British children. School days are longer and holidays are shorter. On average, under the current system, the length of the secondary school year is 245 days. Chinese pupils get around four weeks off in winter, and seven weeks in summer, including weekends and all kinds of traditional festivals. That’s a total of 175 days off, 37 days fewer than UK pupils.
New Jama study: US toddler obesity rate plummets
The obesity rate among young US children has fallen by 43% since 2003-2004, the first broad decline in years, a new national study has found.
Obesity among US children ages two to five dropped to 8.4% in 2011-2012 from 13.9%, the survey found.
Scientists have not identified an exact cause but say a decrease in sugary beverage consumption may contribute.
Childhood obesity has been shown to increase risk of obesity, cancer, heart disease and stroke later in life.
The study was conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama) on Tuesday.
The Teaching/Research Tradeoff in Law: Data from the Right Tail
Tom Ginsburg & Thomas J. Miles:
There is a long scholarly debate on the tradeoff between research and teaching in various fields, but relatively little study of the phenomenon in law. This analysis examines the relationship between the two core academic activities at one particular school, the University of Chicago Law School, which is considered one of the most productive in legal academia. We use standard measures of scholarly productivity and teaching performance. For research, we measure the total number of publications for each professor for each year, while for teaching, we look at the average teaching rating. Net of other factors, we find that, under some specifications, research and teaching are positively correlated. In particular, we find that students’ perceptions of teaching quality rises, but at a decreasing rate, with the total amount of scholarship. We also find that certain personal characteristics correlate with productivity. The recent debate on the mission of American law schools has hinged on the assumption that a tradeoff exists between teaching and research, and this article’s analysis, although limited in various ways, casts some doubt on that assumption.
Madison Schools’ attendance area changes hard — but probably worth it
One advantage to redrawing the lines is that it could delay the financial hit of having to build a new school. Some school officials are already talking referendum. Plus, with space available in the district, is there really any good reason any student should be forced to attend class in what was formerly a closet, as some at Sandburg Elementary do?
More troubling is the effect crowding could have on low-income students who, statistically at least, struggle academically and might benefit from better learning environments.
According to data collected by the Department of Public Instruction, 48.9 percent of Madison elementary students were considered “economically disadvantaged” last school year. For the five schools over capacity now, that percentage was 48.4.
But two of those schools are more affluent and are expected to see their enrollments drop below 100 percent capacity by 2018-19. Most of the seven schools expected to be over capacity in 2018-19 serve less affluent areas of Madison, and collectively, the seven had a student population that was 57.8 percent economically disadvantaged last year.
Sharing Student Data In The Cloud: Should We Be Worried?
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is addressing educators in Washington today on the issue of student data — everything from attendance and health records to test scores and disciplinary data.
There’s a big fight going on in many states over whether that data should be stored online and managed by third parties like inBloom, a nonprofit funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Inbloom declined Here & Now’s request for an interview, but we are joined by two people with very different views on this: Mary Fox-Alter, superintendent of schools in Pleasantville, N.Y., and Aimee Rogstad Guidera, executive director of the Data Quality Campaign.
Parents push for Miss. special education vouchers
Parents who want Mississippi lawmakers to approve special education vouchers are adding their voices in support.
House and Senate lawmakers held a hearing Tuesday to showcase the proposals. Natalie Gunnels of Tupelo told lawmakers that public school administrators can’t or won’t take care of students like her son Patrick, who has trouble walking, is sensitive to noises, and has trouble reading and writing.
“It’s obvious to me and my husband that the public school system is not equipped to educate the Patricks of our state,” Gunnels said.
The plan would give debit cards with more than $6,000 on them to parents who withdraw their special education students from public schools. The money could be spent on private school tuition or private tutoring services.
Mandy Rogers, a disability advocate, said that the state has been promising improvements but not delivering since the federal law was passed.
Union Leaders Put Common Core in the Cold
This week, National Education Association (NEA) president Dennis Van Roekel released an open letter to his members criticizing the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and demanding a series of “course corrections,” without which NEA will no longer back the initiative.
Van Roekel joins Randi Weingarten, the president of the smaller and more urban American Federation of Teachers, in turning his back on the new standards, which were voluntarily adopted and designed to establish a more credible and consistent definition of proficiency across academic subjects.
It’s worth keeping a few things in mind.
Time to close Del. education diversity gap
February is Black History Month and we’re thinking about the critical need for more diverse educators in our state. Delaware’s public school population is 45 percent African-American and Latino and 52 percent white. Teachers of color in our state have comprised 13 percent of the teacher workforce statewide for two decades.
This disparity goes far beyond optics and affects how students see themselves, what they believe is possible, and what they understand about the world outside their school buildings.
Students benefit from the insights and experiences of teachers who reflect all communities in Delaware to shape the curriculum and day-to-day experiences offered in our schools. Their pre-K though grade 12 experience must prepare them to thrive in a diverse world, and to believe amazing and unstoppable things about their potential within it. This concerns all of us.
Our students of color, particularly those growing up in low-income communities, lag behind their more affluent peers in early literacy, graduation rates, and college matriculation and completion. According to the Delaware Department of Education, African-American teens make up 44 percent of all dropouts, even though they make up 33 percent of the high school student population. African-American and Latino dropout rates outpace the state average by 20 percent.
AAE Op-Ed: Shattering the Teachers Union Stereotype
Transforming education for the 21st century has become a top national priority.
With seemingly countless emerging ideas and advocates, teachers are often overlooked as valuable allies. In order to promote positive and practical change in our system, we must listen to the devoted teachers on the front lines.
For too long, individual teachers’ voices have fallen on deaf ears in favor of the self-preserving agenda of the teachers unions. Focused primarily on maintaining a system of forced dues and political power, the union’s outdated model isn’t serving a profession eager to embrace the future.
Do hard-working educators stand in solidarity with union leaders to protect the status quo? Hardly. To establish a credible teacher voice, we must recognize that teachers are not in lock-step agreement with unions as their leaders suggest.
Popping the higher education bubble
James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley:
LAST WEEK, Kenneth Griffin, the founder and CEO of the investment firm Citadel, announced a gift of $150 million to Harvard University to subsidize financial aid. It’s not only Harvard that’s back in the money. A survey earlier this month showed that giving to colleges and universities was back at pre-recession levels, with a record $33.8 billion in charitable contributions during the 2013 fiscal year, almost a 10 percent increase over 2012. Most of this increase was, according to the survey by the Council for Aid to Education, “due to the rebounding in the stock market.”
This is great news for higher education but bad news for higher education reformers who have been hoping that the financial crunch might cause colleges to rethink their operating assumptions. It is no small irony that faculty tend to be anti-capitalist while the financial stability of their institutions depends heavily on the stock market. Alas, no matter how much college faculty bad-mouth the 1 percent, the wealthy seem to have a soft spot for the ivory tower.
Newark’s Unusual Route to Performance based Layoffs
It’s a process invoked by school districts across New Jersey only a few times each year, a request for a waiver from state regulations that gets into the minutia of school operations.
A district might want to hire a registered nurse instead of a certified school nurse as required by the rules, for example. Last year, a district wanted to put a school psychologist in as a guidance.
Yet Newark’s School Superintendent Cami Anderson has upped the ante in the little-used waiver process by requesting that the Christie administration let her lay off potentially hundreds of teachers over the next three years based on performance first, and seniority second.
The waiver request, filed on Friday, maintains that there is leeway in the state statute that requires dismissals be based on seniority alone, a policy known as “last in, first out,” and that the state’s education commissioner has the discretion to allow what Anderson termed a “performance-based” system to be used when making dismissals.
Broad Foundation emails indicate charter operators reluctant to expand without TFA presence
Chad Sommer and Jennifer Berkshire:
By Chad Sommer and Jennifer Berkshire
Last weekend, former Newark Star columnist Bob Braunpublished a bombshell column, arguing thatthe state-appointed superintendent of Newark, NJ schools, Teach For America (TFA) alum Cami Anderson, wants to waive seniority rules to fire upwards of 700 tenured Newark teachers and replace a percentage of them with TFA recruits. Executive Director of Teach For America New Jersey, Fatimah Burnam Watkins, quickly dismissedBraun’s assertions as *conspiracy theories*, while claiming TFA has a small footprint in Newark. But the heated back-and-forth misses the larger issue: TFA plays an increasingly essential role in staffing the charters that are rapidly expanding, replacing public schools from Newark to Philadelphia to Chicago to Los Angeles. In fact, newly released documents indicate that many charter operators won’t even consider opening new schools without TFA to provide a supply of *teacher talent.*
TFA a requirement
Emails sent by the Broad Foundation, a leading advocate of market-based education reform and charter expansion, and acquired through a freedom of information request, reveal that many charter management organizations consider TFA presence in a region a necessary prerequisite for opening new schools.
According to the documents, charter management organizations including Rocketship, KIPP, Noble, LEARN and Uncommon Schools all indicated that a supply of TFA teachers was a general pre-condition for expanding into a new region. The emails, which detail the Broad Foundation’s failed efforts to lure high-performing charter operators to Detroit, were released as part of a trove of thousands of documents requested as part of an investigation into Michigan’s embattled Education Achievement Authority.
Teachers at Saucedo say “No” to state tests
With nearly 40 percent their students already opting out of the ISAT, teachers at Saucedo Scholastic Academy–a high-achieving magnet school–took the bold step on Tuesday of voting to refuse to administer it.
In only one other instance–at a high school in Seattle last year–have teachers in one school made a unified group decision not to give a mandated test. National opponents of standardized testing applauded the decision and said it will send a signal across the country.
ISAT testing is conducted for eight hours over two weeks, starting on March 3. Testing opponents have already launched a drive to urge families in CPS to “opt out” of the ISAT, which is being administered for the last time this year.
Skills are more than the sum of school data
Pisa stands for Programme for International Student Assessment. But judging from the reaction to the OECD rankings of educational attainment, it may as well mean Parental Index of Social Anxiety.
The latest analysis of the global league table showed that the 15-year-old children of Chinese janitors and street-sweepers were better at maths than the offspring of many other countries’ professionals and managers. The news added fuel to this week’s visit to Shanghai by a UK education minister, bent on finding the secret of local children’s success and replicating it at home.
But British concerns were reflected around the world, with telling local variants. Spain’s El Confidencial highlighted that Madrid’s teenagers were outperforming Catalonia’s. Corriere della Sera wondered why, against the grain of other countries, the children of Italian managers beat those of professionals, who have higher educational attainment. (If you will inherit the family law firm or accounting practice, you get lazy, suggested one OECD researcher).
Dwindling Midwest High School Grads Spur College Hunt
Harvard University Pennants
A waning number of high school graduates from the Midwest is sparking a college hunt for freshman applicants, with the decline being felt as far away as Harvard and Emory universities.
The drop is the leading edge of a demographic change that is likely to ease competition for slots at selective schools and is already prompting concern among Midwestern colleges.
“You can’t create 18-year-olds in a lab,” said Brian Prescott, director of policy research at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education in Boulder, Colorado. “Enrollment managers are facing an awful lot of pressure that they can’t do much about.”
Nationally, the high school Class of 2012 ushered in a first wave of declines in the number of graduates, according to a report by the commission. The trend will worsen after 2025, when admissions officers face the impact of a drop in births that began with the 2007 recession. Over the next two decades, the biggest drain in graduates will be in the Midwest and Northeast. The demographic shifts are compounded by economic factors as the cost of higher education continues to rise.
Legislation Seeks to Ban Data Mining Students via School Software
A leading California lawmaker plans to introduce state legislation on Thursday that would shore up privacy and security protections for the personal information of students in elementary through high school, a move that could alter business practices across the nearly $8 billion education technology software industry.
The bill would prohibit education-related websites, online services and mobile apps for kindergartners through 12th graders from compiling, using or sharing the personal information of those students in California for any reason other than what the school intended or for product maintenance.
The bill would also prohibit the operators of those services from using or disclosing the information of students in the state for commercial purposes like marketing. It would oblige the firms to encrypt students’ data in transit and at rest, and it would require them to delete a student’s record when it is no longer needed for the purpose the school intended.
“We don’t want to limit the legitimate use of students’ data by schools or teachers,” Senator Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat who is the sponsor of the bill and the president pro tempore of the California Senate, said in a phone interview. “We just think the public policy of California should be that the information you gather from students should be used for their educational benefit and for nothing else.”
Lawmakers like Mr. Steinberg are part of a growing cohort of children’s advocates who say they believe that regulation has failed to keep pace with the rapid adoption of education software and services by schools across the country.
Related: Google admits data mining student emails in its free education apps.
Why We Never Get Over High School
“Hello. Where did you go to high school?” When so many of you nominated this question as your natural conversation starter, as I mentioned here last week, it was tempting to dismiss it as an example of how Americans never quite get over high school. Was this just about Fast Times at Ridgemont High, or 90210, or The O.C., or forever remembering all the other schools in your league? Or maybe you all are 18 years old. But you wrote with such enthusiasm, thoroughness, and conviction, that it looked like something else was going on. So, I decided to look again.
Your nominations of this particular question came in from all corners of the country–all mid-sized cities–like Louisville, New Orleans, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Charlotte. They came from all ages of you, from the millennials to those who wrote that a half century ago, this question was also asked in Chicago and San Francisco, when those cities were arguably more “mid-size” than they are today. You also said this was the question of Oahu (where we know the young Barack Obama of modest means attended the elite private school, Punahou) and from Melbourne, Australia.
From your descriptions, it became clear that “Where did you go to high school?” is another way of asking “Where do you live?” But you aren’t seeking a simple answer of name or geography with either of those questions. You are using those questions to seek valuable information about the socio-economic-cultural-historical background of a person. It helps you orient that person in the context of the world as you live it and interpret it.
Teens defend ‘fail factory’ school in error-filled letters
These kids should learn write from wrong.
Earlier this month, The Post exposed a scheme at Manhattan’s Murry Bergtraum HS for Business Careers in which failing students could get full credit without attending class, but instead watch video lessons and take tests online. One social-studies teacher had a roster of 475 students in all grades and subjects.
Red-faced administrators encouraged a student letter-writing campaign to attack The Post and defend its “blended learning” program. Eighteen kids e-mailed to argue that their alma mater got a bad rap.
Almost every letter was filled with spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.
A junior wrote: “What do you get of giving false accusations im one of the students that has blended learning I had a course of English and I passed and and it helped a lot you’re a reported your support to get truth information other than starting rumors . . .”
Another wrote: “To deeply criticize a program that has helped many students especially seniors to graduate I should not see no complaints.”
At Private Schools, Another Way to Say ‘Financial Aid’
SHANNON LUBIANO never dreamed she could send her children to the Duke School, an independent elementary school in Durham, N.C., where the tuition is $15,000 for prekindergarten, rising to nearly $18,000 for eighth grade.
But then a friend told her about the school’s indexed tuition plan — essentially a pay-what-you-can model for a private education — and that made all the difference for her.
“When I tell other people about it, they are shocked,” said Ms. Lubiano, whose husband, a chef, owns a restaurant in town. “They had looked at the Duke School in the past and got run off by the cost.”
Duke is part of a small group of independent schools, mostly in the Southeast and West, that have adopted indexed tuition as both a financial aid strategy and a way to attract people who would not otherwise apply to private school.
“We got to indexed tuition as a philosophical journey,” said Dave Michelman, head of school at Duke. “We’re committed to socioeconomic diversity. If you’re committed to that it seems a little off-putting to say if you come here we’ll give you charity. That’s what financial aid sounds like.”
New Baltimore schools chief navigated complex terrain in Milwaukee
Erica L. Green, Liz Bowie and Jean Marbella:
— Newly named to head Baltimore’s public schools, Gregory E. Thornton has unfinished business in the district he is leaving behind after 31/2 tumultuous years.
Wearing a red T-shirt, he arrived Friday at a school where, to peals of laughter, the 59-year-old would join kids in a “jump rope-a-thon.” But, as so frequently happened during his tenure, there were political hoops to jump through first.
“How are we doing?” Thornton asked a state senator he spied in the welcoming crowd.
It was not so much a pleasantry as a pulse check: How are we doing, he meant, in thwarting two bills that would close public schools and sell empty facilities to private schools that accept vouchers?
In a brief exchange, the senator mentioned a potentially worrisome legislator, and Thornton said he’d already talked to her the previous night. And then, it was time to “make some noise” as he exhorted the school crowd who had gathered to jump rope in honor of a phys ed teacher who started the tradition 35 years ago.
It was just another day navigating the complicated terrain of Milwaukee Public Schools.
West Point is placing too much emphasis on football
On Dec. 15, shortly after Army football’s 12th consecutive loss to the U.S. Naval Academy, the superintendent of West Point, Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen , announced that he was considering institutional changes to build a winning program. “When America puts its sons and daughters in harm’s way, they do not expect us to just ‘do our best’ . . . but to win,” he wrote. “Nothing short of victory is acceptable. . . . Our core values are Duty, Honor, Country. Winning makes them real.”
Soon after, Army Athletic Director Boo Corrigan argued that West Point ought to take “an educated risk” by relaxing admission requirements in favor of superior football recruits. The superintendent has said that he does not intend to relax standards, but Corrigan’s views are backed by powerful alumni, including retired Brig. Gen. Pete Dawkins, a Heisman Trophy winner who has participated in three study groups assessing Army football. “I think it’s crucial that West Point stand out as a place of winners,” Dawkins recently said. Thus his view that it’s “entirely fair to accept some risks” in the admission of football recruits.
As a West Point graduate and faculty member, I find many of these arguments troubling. Academy leaders and alumni have often asserted that performance on the gridiron has a direct impact on our ability to win our nation’s wars and that we therefore have a moral imperative to win in football. But the facts do not support that assertion.
What Comes After the Public University?
With total student loan debt over one trillion dollars, millions of students and families can never hope to repay what they owe, especially since there are no individual solutions to the problem. Student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, and student loan lenders can and do garnish debtors’ wages and social security checks. The powers of lenders to collect are unprecedented in the history of creditor/debtor relations.
Yet, belief in upward mobility through education is still a profoundly American ideal. In the midst of the latest recession, politicians and elites have argued not for the redistribution of wealth but for making college “more affordable” in the belief that increasing access to education makes more fundamental social changes unnecessary. Forgotten, too, in the emphasis on college financing is that education is not just a path to a job. It’s a site of human desire, aspiration, and hope for the future.
As a former teacher and a student debtor, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of higher education. And as an education activist, I’ve been coming to terms with what it means to fight for public education while mourning the death of the university. Before explaining what I mean by “the death of the university,” I will provide some details about my own political history and how it has shaped my current thinking.
Madison Schools Considers School Boundaries, Might Low Income Distribution be Addressed?
Board member T.J. Mertz said that sometime in the next six or seven months the board will begin a process of seriously looking at facilities issues, including whether to embark upon the contentious fix of changing any of the district’s school boundaries, among other solutions.
“In multiple areas we’re either at or will be very, very soon at or over capacity, and we continue to have schools that are fairly well under capacity,” Mertz said. “There’s going to have to be something done … and I’m of the get-started-with-this-sooner-rather-than-later school.”
Related: We have seen this movie before. 10 Reasons to Combine Lapham & Marquette.
The Myth of Public Schools
Tap for a larger version
Madison has long supported a wide variation in school demographics. The chart above, created from 2013-2014 Madison School District middle school demographic data, illustrates the present reality, with the largest middle school – near west side Hamilton – also featuring the smallest percentage low income population.
The Academic Writing Thing
When Nicholas Kristof, the soft-hearted liberal on the New York Times op-ed page, decided that political scientists had given up on writing for a broader public, a digital avalanche of blog posts, letters to the editor, and tweets, followed. The APSA, Corey Robin, Claire Potter, and basically the entire editorial collective of Jacobin took the man to task for, basically, channeling the laziest version of Tom Friedman. Why, Kristof seemed to be asking, casually leafing through the past few issues of the New Yorker, can’t more people write like Jill Lepore? This is a fine question, but – as Robin points out – it isn’t the right question at all, and it probably isn’t an honest question, either.
Now, just as Kristof’s more recent and weak apologia has been begrudgingly accepted, here comes Joshua Rothman, writing in the New Yorker itself, and asking, with an eye on the recent contretemps, “Why is Academic Writing so Academic?” Where Kristoff seemed detached, Rothman is engaged, and genuinely interested in trying to understand why the professoriate writes for itself. Our gnomish academic audiences matter more, he sums, because they determine tenure and promotion. “Academic writing and research,” he concludes, “may be knotty and strange, remote and insular, technical and specialized, forbidding and clannish–but that’s because academia has become that way, too. Today’s academic work, excellent though it may be, is the product of a shrinking system. It’s a tightly-packed, super-competitive jungle in there.”
Yes, there is is truth to this. A tight labor market means increased specialization and less risk-taking, leading one to assume that writing a dense essay that is sure to be published in a top journal is a safer bet (for promotion and hiring) than trying to publish in N+1. (Though there are plenty, despite the assumption, who do both). And when we read each other’s work for venues that are chiefly academic, we tend to wonder more about the disciplinary stakes and less about the quality of the prose. Generally, that is.
Upton Sinclair on college presidents
Thus the college president spends his time running back and forth between Mammon and God, known in the academic vocabulary as Business and Learning. He pleads with the business man to make a little more allowance for the eccentricities of the scholar; explaining the absurd notion which men of learning have that they owe loyalty to truth and public welfare. He points out that if the college comes to be known as a mere tool of special privilege it loses all its dignity and authority; it is absolutely necessary that it should maintain a pretense of disinterestedness, it should appear to the public as a shrine of wisdom and piety. He points out that Professor So-and-So has managed to secure great prestige throughout the state, and if he is unceremoniously fired it will make a terrific scandal, and perhaps cause other faculty members to resign, and other famous scientists to stay away from the institution.
The president says this at a dinner-party in the home of his grand duke; and next morning he hurries off to argue with the recalcitrant professor. He points out the humiliating need of funds-just now when the professor’s own salary is so entirely inadequate. He begs the professor to realize the president’s own position, the crudity of business men who hold the purse-strings, and have no understanding of academic dignity. He pleads for just a little discretion, just a little time-just a little anything that will moderate the clash between greed and service, the incompatibility of hate and love.
UC endowment has worst investment returns among largest US college funds
Lance Williams, Erica Perez & Jennifer Gollan:
The University of California’s $11.2 billion endowment has produced the worst investment returns of any of the richest colleges in the country over the past decade, an analysis by The Center for Investigative Reporting shows.
From the 2004 through 2013 fiscal years, the investment payout for the UC endowment ranked last among the 10 U.S. universities with the largest endowment funds. The university earned an average of 7.3 percent on the combined endowment of the system and individual campuses, while the other nine colleges – which include the public University of Michigan and University of Texas – averaged 10 percent.
In 2013, the UC endowment’s return improved dramatically. But better performance over the previous nine years would have meant tens of millions of dollars a year to spend during a decade when the state’s premier public university system saw massive cuts in state funding.
Thousands of employees in the 10-campus system lost their jobs and students felt the pain acutely, as their education costs more than doubled.
Why is Academic Writing so Academic?
A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm shift,” and I described how this phrase had been used and abused, much to Kuhn’s dismay, by postmodern insurrectionists and nonsensical self-help gurus. People seemed to like the essay, but they were also uneasy about it. “I don’t think you’ll be able to publish this in an academic journal,” someone said. He thought it was more like something you’d read in a magazine.
Was that a compliment, a dismissal, or both? It’s hard to say. Academic writing is a fraught and mysterious thing. If you’re an academic in a writerly discipline, such as history, English, philosophy, or political science, the most important part of your work–practically and spiritually–is writing. Many academics think of themselves, correctly, as writers. And yet a successful piece of academic prose is rarely judged so by “ordinary” standards. Ordinary writing–the kind you read for fun–seeks to delight (and, sometimes, to delight and instruct). Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. It’s supposed to be dry but also clever; faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its deepest ambiguity has to do with audience. Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds. But, because it’s intended for a very small audience of hyper-knowledgable, mutually acquainted specialists, it’s actually among the most personal writing there is. If journalists sound friendly, that’s because they’re writing for strangers. With academics, it’s the reverse.
The New College Campus
Imagine meeting someone who says she works at a university. Some years ago, it would have been fairly safe to assume that she was a professor, and a member of the middle class with enviable job security. Not anymore. Two reports make clear that the nature of the college work force has changed substantially, possibly to the detriment of educational quality.
“The Just-In-Time Professor,” released last month by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, describes a growing population of more than one million adjunct and other nontenure-track instructors. “In 1970, adjuncts made up 20 percent of all higher education faculty,” the report says. “Today, they represent half.”
As a rule, adjuncts have few or no benefits. They are generally paid per course, and paid poorly. (The Coalition on the Academic Workforce estimates that the median pay for a standard three-credit course is $2,700.) Because adjuncts often teach several classes in order to cobble together a living, they have little time for the research necessary to advance their careers.
Proposed Wisconsin Academic Standards Bills (Replacing the “Common Core”)
The Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:
The following links provide a lot of additional details on the legislation that would replace the Common Core State Standards within 12 months with model academic standards created in Wisconsin. Please stay informed and contact your legislators with your thoughts.
2013 Senate Bill 619.
Assembly Substitute Amendment 1 to Assembly Bill 617 (ASA1/AB617)
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Video message from Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Tony Evers.
Related:
Governor Scott Walker staff drafted bill aimed at Common Core State Standards.
A Critique of the Wisconsin DPI and Proposed School Choice Changes.
Cut off Harvard to Save America
College endowments totaled $448.6 billion in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2013, an increase of 11.7 percent compared with a year earlier, according to recently released data.
As we know, this wealth is concentrated among a privileged few. Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities all have almost $2 million in endowment funds for every student.
We’ve heard the argument that what these institutions do with their privately raised money is their business and that they provide a lot of financial aid opportunities for less affluent students. But these endowments are of dubious value and can be attacked on two grounds. First, they promote inefficiency through misallocation of resources. Second, they are anti-meritocratic.
Regarding inefficiency, Adam Smith got it right more than 200 years ago in “The Wealth of Nations.” College endowments, he said, “have necessarily diminished more or less the necessity of application in the teachers.” At the University of Oxford, he complained, “public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretense of teaching.”
A Campus More Colorful Than Reality: Beware That College Brochure
Diallo Shabazz was a student at the University of Wisconsin in 2000 when he stopped by the admissions office.
“One of the admissions counselors walked up to me, and said, ‘Diallo, did you see yourself in the admissions booklet? Actually, you’re on the cover this year,’ ” Shabazz says.
The photo was a shot of students at a football game — but Shabazz had never been to a football game.
“So I flipped back, and that’s when I saw my head cut off and kind of pasted onto the front cover of the admissions booklet,” he says.
This Photoshopped image went viral and became a classic example of how colleges miss the mark on diversity. Wisconsin stressed that it was just one person’s bad choice, but Shabazz sees it as part of a bigger problem.
Teaching mathematics: Time for a ceasefire
IF THE world’s education systems have a common focus, it is to turn out school-leavers who are proficient in mathematics. Governments are impressed by evidence from the World Bank and others that better maths results raises GDP and incomes. That, together with the soul-searching provoked by the cross-country PISA comparisons of 15-year-olds’ mathematical attainment produced by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, is prompting educators in many places to look afresh at what maths to teach, and how to teach it.
Those countries languishing in the league tables fret about how to catch up without turning students off the subject with boring drill. Top performers, most of them Asian (see chart), fear that their focus on technical proficiency does not translate into an enthusiasm for maths after leaving school. And everyone worries about how to prepare pupils for a jobs market that will reward creative thinking ever more highly.
Maths education has been a battlefield before: the American “math wars” of the 1980s pitted traditionalists, who emphasised fluency in pen-and-paper calculations, against reformers led by the country’s biggest teaching lobby, who put real-world problem-solving, often with the help of calculators, at the centre of the curriculum. A backlash followed as parents and academics worried that the “new math” left pupils ill-prepared for university courses in mathematics and the sciences. But as many countries have since found, training pupils to ace exams is not the same as equipping them to use their hard-won knowledge in work and life.
An inconvenient child My six-year-old son was removed from school as a danger to others. His crime? A disability you could find in any classroom
A few months ago, my son, who is in second grade, went on a field trip. As the class assembled in the parking lot, a new child joined in. He had metal leg braces and difficulty walking. Nobody quite knew how to talk to him and so he was left by himself at the edge of the crowd. But my son seemed drawn to him. As the little boy in braces began to struggle up the steps of the bus, my son went over to help and then sat beside him. Throughout the bus ride, they talked together. According to the teachers, that new little boy soon seemed like the happiest child in the group. One of the most sociable children in the class had made friends with him, and that goes a long way towards building self-esteem when you feel isolated and anxious.
I’m very proud of what my son did. He showed compassion. He was still a new pupil himself, and he had suffered bullying related to a disability of his own. The way he was treated at his previous school was so horrible that he might easily have decided to pay it back rather than forward. But kids can be amazingly smart about how to treat one another. After all, it wasn’t the children who bullied him at his old school. It was the adults.
Our son’s movement problem emerged slowly – so slowly that we didn’t notice at first. When he was five, he moved more like a three-year-old. He was happy and chatty, but he had difficulty writing, drawing, cutting, pasting, and sitting straight and still in a chair. Milk tended to spill an awful lot in his vicinity. His kindergarten teacher at his elementary school noted these difficulties, but the school decided he was in the normal range and didn’t require any extra support.
How to tweet like a teenager
A few years ago, “Carmen”, a 17-year-old Latino girl in Boston, split up with her boyfriend. She wanted to tell her friends how upset she felt and duly put a post on her Facebook page. But there was a problem. Carmen’s mother (like, I daresay, many FT readers) monitored her daughter’s Facebook page – and Carmen did not want to tell her about the break-up. So, to signal her loss to her friends, she posted a message with the Monty Python song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”.
Her mother thought this meant Carmen was happy: her friends, however, understood that Carmen was using private teen code, since they often communicated with songs. They started a conversation with text messages – away from her mother’s eyes. Carmen had thus maintained her “privacy”, even on a public space.
Just a trivial example of teenage behaviour? Danah Boyd, a digital anthropologist who now works at Microsoft Research, does not think so. She has spent the past decade analysing how teenagers use social media by watching the subtle cultural signals, rituals and group dynamics that a more traditional anthropologist might track in an Amazonian village or “tribal” Papua New Guinea. And after conducting extensive research in 18 states across the US, she argues in a new book, It’s Complicated, that some of the received wisdom about social media is wrong. Teenagers are not being corrupted by Facebook and Twitter, as (adult) pundits often fear. Instead, they are developing adaptive skills for this new digital age. As a result, the kids are (mostly) “all right”, she insists, even if their behaviour occasionally baffles adults.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Wisconsin’s Legacy for Unions
All over the state, public executives are exercising new authority. Instead of raising teachers’ salaries, the Mequon-Thiensville School District, near Milwaukee, froze them for two years, saving $560,000. It saved an additional $400,000 a year by increasing employee contributions for health care, said its superintendent, Demond Means. And it is starting a merit pay system for teachers, a move that has been opposed by some teachers and embraced by others.
Ted Neitzke, school superintendent in West Bend, a city of 31,000 people north of Milwaukee, said that before Act 10 his budget-squeezed district had to cut course offerings and increase class sizes. Now, the district has raised the retirement age for teachers and revamped its health plan, saving $250,000 a year. “We couldn’t negotiate or maneuver around that when there was bargaining,” Mr. Neitzke said. “We’ve been able to shift money out of the health plan back into the classroom. We’ve increased programming.”
James R. Scott, a Walker appointee who is chairman of the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, which administers the law regarding public-employee unions, said that “as a result of Act 10, the advantages that labor held have been diminished.” He added: “It’s fair to say that employers have the upper hand now.”
In Oshkosh, Mark Rohloff, the city manager, says the law has saved his city $1.2 million a year, largely because employees are now paying more of their pension and health contributions. But he said state aid cuts of $2 million a year left his city with an $800,000 shortfall.
Among the city’s 560 city workers, union membership has fallen to 225, down from 450. The police and the firefighters, who were exempted from Act 10’s restrictions on collective bargaining, make up most of the remaining union members. Mr. Rohloff said his city’s police and firefighters have averaged annual raises of 2.5 percent, while the other workers had no across-the-board raises from 2010 to 2012, and received a 1 percent increase in 2013.
“Some of the employees who are not represented feel they’re second-class citizens compared to other employees,” Mr. Rohloff said.
Demoralization is the flip side of Act 10. In Oneida County in northern Wisconsin, the county supervisors jettisoned language requiring “just cause” when firing employees. Now, said Julie Allen, a computer programmer and head of the main local for Oneida County’s civil servants, morale is “pretty bad” and workers are afraid to speak out about anything, even safety issues or a revised pay scale. “We don’t have just cause,” she said. “We don’t have seniority protections. So people are pretty scared.”
Much more on Act 10, here.
Rural China’s tough lessons in resilience
Students in Shanghai have the highest results in international Pisa tests. But what is the state of education for China’s rural poor, far away from the showcase cities? Andreas Schleicher, who runs the Pisa tests, went to find out.
About 1,900 miles south west of Shanghai is Qiao Tou Lian He elementary school.
It’s an hour’s drive from the town of Tengchong, which might seem a small distance in comparison, but most of the school’s children have never made it to Tengchong.
Providing an education for children in such sparsely-populated rural areas is one of China’s major challenges.
While the economic and social development of these rural regions has been remarkable, China’s coastal cities are racing ahead at an even faster pace.
Children of UK professionals fall behind Asians in maths
The children of cleaners in Asian cities such as Shanghai and Singapore are better at maths than the offspring of doctors and lawyers in the US and UK, according to an analysis of the global Pisa test rankings published on Tuesday.
The international league table, first released by the OECD in December, had shown 15-year-olds in Shanghai to be top in maths, while the UK languished in 26th place and the US in 36th.
But fresh scrutiny has revealed that the state-educated children of British professionals are on average a whole school year behind the children of “elementary” workers in Shanghai in maths ability, and around three months behind the same group in Singapore. The gap is even wider between US professionals and Asian cleaners or caterers.
Why I Chose Academia
A little over a week ago I ran two panels at a conference called Beyond Academia organized by a group of UC Berkeley PhD students and post-docs.
This was a great conference particularly because this is the right time, and the Bay Area is the right place, for people with strong quantitative skills looking for other opportunities outside of academia. The startup-up culture, the high-density of exciting technical work, and the density of a highly educated populous offer a lot of options for people looking.
The desire to “jump ship” is further compounded by the terribly poor pay for post-docs and grad students. Most of our pay is set nationally by the NIH and is not adjusted for cost-of-living differences, which means that NIH-funded post-docs in San Francisco (with a median rent of $1363/mo) get paid the same as post-docs in Iowa City (with a median rent of $734/mo).
After however many years of education for a PhD my UCSF take-home pay after federal and state taxes, etc. is about $2800/mo. I’m a father; if I wanted to use UCSF daycare and live in UCSF post-doc housing I would be paying $1998/mo for daycare and at least $1099/mo for a studio. Imagine if I was a single parent? This would make my net take-home pay negative $297/mo.
Ivory Towers indeed.
Kansas teen uses 3-D printer to make hand for boy
When he was 4 years old, he took apart his mother’s dining room table and gliding ottoman.
Last year, he built a computer, pretty much from scratch.
But it’s what the 16-year-old Louisburg High School junior made about two months ago that has him most excited these days. Not because it was so challenging, but because it’s already changing the life of a family friend’s 9-year-old son who was born without fingers on one hand.
Using a 3-D printer at the Johnson County Library, Wilde made a prosthetic hand that opens and closes and can even hold a pencil.
Just ask young Matthew how he feels about Wilde.
“He’s awesome,” the boy said, thrusting his mechanical hand high above his head.
Meet 5 academics who have switched disciplines mid-career
Spend a little time Googling and you can quickly come up with names of famous people who switched careers in mid-stream. Julia Child, for example, worked in intelligence for the U.S. government before transitioning to cookbook author and television chef. Harrison Ford was a carpenter before he made it big in acting. And Peter Mansbridge worked as a baggage handler (and sometime flight announcer) at the Churchill, Manitoba, airport before starting a successful career in broadcast journalism.
But switching disciplines mid-stream in academia? It is a risky move that requires self-confidence and the ability to both see and seize opportunities. One would think an academic career switch is fairly rare, and yet it wasn’t hard to find several Canadians who’ve done it and thrived.
The Dark Power of Fraternities
One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him–under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself–to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.
Also on the deck, and also in the thrall of the night’s pleasures, was one Louis Helmburg III, an education major and ace benchwarmer for the Thundering Herd baseball team. His response to the proposed launch was the obvious one: he reportedly whipped out his cellphone to record it on video, which would turn out to be yet another of the night’s seemingly excellent but ultimately misguided ideas. When the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes’s rectum, Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck. Fortunately for him, and adding to the Chaplinesque aspect of the night’s miseries, the deck was no more than four feet off the ground, but such was the urgency of his escape that he managed to get himself wedged between the structure and an air-conditioning unit, sustaining injuries that would require medical attention, cut short his baseball season, and–in the fullness of time–pit him against the mighty forces of the Alpha Tau Omega national organization, which had been waiting for him.
It takes a certain kind of personal-injury lawyer to look at the facts of this glittering night and wrest from them a plausible plaintiff and defendant, unless it were possible for Travis Hughes to be sued by his own anus. But the fraternity lawsuit is a lucrative mini-segment of the personal-injury business, and if ever there was a deck that ought to have had a railing, it was the one that served as a nighttime think tank and party-idea testing ground for the brain trust of the Theta Omicron Chapter of Alpha Tau Omega and its honored guests–including these two knuckleheads, who didn’t even belong to the fraternity. Moreover, the building codes of Huntington, West Virginia, are unambiguous on the necessity of railings on elevated decks. Whether Helmburg stumbled in reaction to an exploding party guest or to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is immaterial; there should have been a railing to catch him.
And so it was that Louis Helmburg III joined forces with Timothy P. Rosinsky, Esq., a slip-and-fall lawyer from Huntington who had experience also with dog-bite, DUI, car-repossession, and drug cases. The events of that night, laid out in Helmburg’s complaint, suggested a relatively straightforward lawsuit. But the suit would turn out to have its own repeated failures to launch and unintended collateral damage, and it would include an ever-widening and desperate search for potential defendants willing to foot the modest bill for Helmburg’s documented injuries. Sending a lawyer without special expertise in wrangling with fraternities to sue one of them is like sending a Boy Scout to sort out the unpleasantness in Afghanistan. Who knows? The kid could get lucky. But it never hurts–preparedness and all that–to send him off with a body bag.
Homework and homesickness
Christine Xue wants to be an architect. Her mother, who runs a financial services business in their home region of Chengdu, southwest China, does not share this ambition for her daughter. She would rather her only child opted for something altogether more secure – accountancy, perhaps, or maybe banking. So the 17-year-old is resigned to studying physics at university in order to appease her parents. Secretly, however, she harbours hopes that one person may be able to bring her parents round to architecture: her guardian, Ophelia Colley.
The well-groomed Ms Colley, 33, helps her young charge navigate the mysteries of the British education system, translates school reports for her parents and is on hand to support Ms Xue through the loneliness of living far away from home while studying at Queen Margaret’s School in the desolate Yorkshire countryside. The girls’ boarding school, on the grounds of a former Georgian estate, is beautifully elegant but on an icy-cold, rain-soaked day like today, it looks rather sombre and grey.
Ms Colley, originally from Hong Kong, sees her role as an advocate for her mainland Chinese and Hong Kong teenagers, not just liaising with the school but also the parents. It is her duty, she says, to educate the parents in western ways, telling them they need to adopt a new perspective. For parents rooted in Chinese culture and traditions, it can be difficult to understand their child’s outlook infused with western experiences.
Class in America: Mobility, measured
AMERICANS are deeply divided as to whether widening inequality is a problem, let alone what the government should do about it. Some are appalled that Bill Gates has so much money; others say good luck to him. But nearly everyone agrees that declining social mobility is a bad thing. Barack Obama’s state-of-the-union speech on January 28th dwelt on how America’s “ladders of opportunity” were failing (see article). Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, two leading Republicans, recently gave speeches decrying social immobility and demanding more effort to ensure poor people who work hard can better their lot.
Just as the two sides have found something to agree on, however, a new study suggests the conventional wisdom may be wrong. Despite huge increases in inequality, America may be no less mobile a society than it was 40 years ago.
The study, by a clutch of economists at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, is far bigger than any previous effort to measure social mobility. The economists crunch numbers from over 40m tax returns of people born between 1971 and 1993 (with all identifying information removed). They focus on mobility between generations and use several ways to measure it, including the correlation of parents’ and children’s income, and the odds that a child born into the bottom fifth of the income distribution will climb all the way up to the top fifth.
Leave tech college tax base alone
Following the general wisdom that says, “Leave well enough alone,” let’s not mess with the basic structure that supports the Wisconsin Technical College System (WCTS).
Gov. Walker and the Republican legislature have opened the subject by proposing a property tax cut of more than $400 million through the mechanism of reducing the property tax raised annually for the technical colleges.
Note, though, that this return of a projected windfall budget surplus through that channel is a one-time deal. It is not a permanent change to the tax structure that supports the 16 the colleges.
Nor should it be.
Funding two of our major educational institutions, K-12 and the University of Wisconsin, has been stressful to say the least over the last decade. It will be a major issue in the campaign for governor this year.
The funding crunch stems from the fall-off in state tax revenues during the Great Recession and the grudging recovery. Further, Medicaid has chewed up much of the meager growth in the state’s sales and income taxes. That under-managed program is crowding out many other priorities, even though the feds pay 60% of the tab.
Why is math research important?
As I’ve already described, I’m worried about the oncoming MOOC revolution and its effect on math research. To say it plainly, I think there will be major cuts in professional math jobs starting very soon, and I’ve even started to discourage young people from their plans to become math professors.
I’d like to start up a conversation – with the public, but starting in the mathematical community – about mathematics research funding and why it’s important.
I’d like to argue for math research as a public good which deserves to be publicly funded. But although I’m sure that we need to make that case, the more I think about it the less sure I am how to make that case. I’d like your help.
So remember, we’re making the case that continuing math research is a good idea for our society, and we should put up some money towards it, even though we have competing needs to fund other stuff too.
So it’s not enough to talk about how arithmetic helps people balance their checkbooks, say, since arithmetic is already widely known and not a topic of research.
Fiscal 50: Change in Tax Revenue from Each State’s Peak State Trends and Analysis
Only 14 states’ tax revenue had recovered from the Great Recession by the first quarter of 2013, after adjusting for inflation. Total state tax collections were still 1.6 percent below their peak in the third quarter of 2008. The difference shows how far states still have to go to regain lost tax revenue.
American unions membership declines as public support fluctuates
Last week’s vote by workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tenn. plant against joining the United Auto Workers union — despite VW’s tacit encouragement — points up the challenges faced by U.S. organized labor. Even though unions retain much public support, the share of American workers who actually belong to one has been falling for decades and is at its lowest level since the Great Depression.
In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in June 2013, about half (51%) of Americans said they had favorable opinions of labor unions, versus 42% who said they had unfavorable opinions about them. That was the highest favorability rating since 2007, though still below the 63% who said they were favorably disposed toward unions in 2001. In a separate 2012 survey, 64% of Americans agreed that unions were necessary to protect working people (though 57% also agreed that unions had “too much power”).
As of last year, however, only 11.3% of wage and salary workers belonged to unions, down from 20.1% in 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (At their peak in 1954, 34.8% of all U.S. wage and salary workers belonged to unions, according to the Congressional Research Service.) While the unionization rate among public-sector workers has held fairly steady over that 30-year span (just over a third of government workers are unionized), it’s plummeted in the private sector — from 16.8% in 1983 to 6.7% three decades later. The reasons for that decline are many and heatedly debated — from the impact of globalization on U.S. manufacturing to intense hostility from businesses to unions’ relative lack of success in organizing service- and information-industry workers.
Related: “Anonymous” On The Battle Of Chattanooga.
The flipped classroom as MOOC waste product.
This is a hard post for me to write. For one thing, I have an article coming out in the next Academe that covers some of this ground. For another thing, as my friend Phil Hill knows all too well, I have a #Slatepitch in for an essay on the evils of the flipped classroom. I think they’re going to take it (eventually – assuming the one and only Rebecca Schuman doesn’t do it first), so I don’t want to give away the whole store here.
But this paragraph is just way too much for me to bear:The MOOC, in our view, is the ideal way to flip the classroom, replacing both the lecture and the textbook. Whether they build their own content or draw on an existing MOOC, professors can off-load content to on-line formats and spend face-to-face time interacting with students. Students will actively debate history -for instance-rather than transcribing the professor’s lecture. Universities will not be destroyed, only lectures, and in their demise better conversations will happen
.To make matters worse, I’ve met one of the co-authors of those words. Louis Hyman teaches at Cornell, his books on the history of debt are excellent and if I had all the time in the world I’d be taking his upcoming MOOC on the history of capitalism just for the sheer enjoyment of it. I’ll bet you anything that he’s a terrific lecturer, but if you think I’d let him or anybody else replace my own content on any subject you’ve got another thing coming.
Why not? I need to back up a little in order to explain that.
Teaching While Black
If race is a construct, gender is a construct, and teaching is a performative act, where and how do I exist in the classroom as a real black woman?
“I am expected to woo students even as I try to fend them off; I am supposed to control them even as I am supposed to manipulate them into loving me. Still I am aware of the paradox of my power over these students. I am aware of my role, my place in an institution that is larger than myself, whose power I wield even as I am powerless, whose shield of respectability shelters me even as I am disrespected.” – Patricia Williams. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Mad Law Professor
This is part three in a series by Dr. Matthew. See Part 1 and Part 2 at her blog.On the first day of class one semester a male student called me Mrs. Matthews. It was the very beginning of the school year, and I’d been on sabbatical the previous winter, which meant I had eight full months to work on two big projects–an anthology about race and tenure in the humanities and my book about the history of the novel and its intersections with 19th-century medical and conduct discourse. It also meant I had had no interactions with students, even in passing. I live in Brooklyn but teach in New Jersey, so when I’m away from school I’m really away from school. The only student I had interacted with was the graduate student helping me with background research for the introduction to the race and tenure anthology. This is probably why, when I heard “Mrs. Matthews,” I replied without thinking, “Everything about that is wrong.”
I’m funny about people misspelling my last name. I think if it were, say, “Pryzbylewski” I wouldn’t get upset about it. That’s a hard name to spell, but “Matthew” is easy. Yet people add an “s” on the end all the time–telemarketers, doctors, Verizon, restaurant hostesses, and students. In the classroom, I can tell myself that I get persnickety about it because I’m teaching my students to pay attention to details, but I suspect I’m just funny about my name. And, when I’m at school, I’m funny about my title. Outside of work I rarely use it. In fact, when people ask me what I do for a living I just tell them I teach instead of saying I’m a university professor. But at school I assume that, like my male colleagues, students will refer to me as Dr. or Professor instead of Miss or Mrs. Depending on my mood or the time of the semester, I am either good-natured or sarcastic about this mistake. Early in the term I might say, “I may be large and contain multitudes but I am also singular, so please note there is no “s” at the end of my name,” or I try to keep it simple by saying “that’s Matthew two t’s no s.” When students (and when the mistake is made it’s almost always a male student making the mistake) call me Miss or Mrs., I’m neither good-natured nor sarcastic. That’s a mistake of a different kind. I try not to be too aggressive scary-feminist about the whole thing, but I’m quick to point out the error. Neither of these are high on my list of the problems of a tenured academic, but a recent comment on a student evaluation reminds of how being read as “black” by students has shaped my teaching, for better or ill.
Let schools compete and students will be winners
Gabriel Sahlgren and Julian Le Grand:
Put a child of a cleaner from Shanghai or Singapore up against a scion of the western elite in a standardised test and guess who will come out top? According to the latest research, the western kids will trail their Asian counterparts by the equivalent of a whole school year.
This prompted another bout of anxiety of a kind that has become increasingly common since 2001, when the global Pisa survey of educational attainment was first published. Parents once drew comfort from steady improvements in school-leaving grades in places such as the UK. Confronted with evidence of how their children’s accomplishments compared to those of students in faraway places, many westerners have taken fright.
Next week Elizabeth Truss, a British education minister, will lead a fact-finding mission to Shanghai to try to find out what the schools there are doing right. Yet in their rush to copy the winning formula of high-performing countries in east Asia, politicians risk drawing the wrong conclusions. Schools in Shanghai are very different from those in Ms Truss’s constituency in southwest Norfolk. But not all of those differences play a role in Shanghai’s superior performance. Some are irrelevant. Some may even be harmful. And some will be idiosyncratic features of the school she happens to visit, rather than representative of the system. It is easy to point out how a good school differs from a bad one, and conclude that you have found the secret to high achievement – but it is also lazy, unscientific and wrong.
Cheating at CalTech
Caltech has a serious problem with undergraduates cheating on academic work, which Caltech administrators appear to be ignoring. A few years ago, one alumnus considered the problem so bad that he urged other alumni to stop donating. I attended Tech (that’s what we called it) for a year and a half in the 1970s. I didn’t think cheating was a problem then. Now it is.
A recent article in the Times Higher Education Supplement by Phil Baty praised Caltech’s “honor system”, which includes trusting students not to cheat on exams. A Caltech professor of biology named Markus Meister told Baty that “cheats simply cannot prosper in an environment that includes such small-group teaching and close collaboration with colleagues because they would rapidly be exposed.” That strikes me as naive. How convenient for Meister that there is no need to test his theory — it must be true (“cheats simply cannot prosper”).