Scott Carlson:

Thirty-four pages of research, branded with a staid title and rife with complicated graphs, might not seem like a scintillating read, but there’s no doubt that a report released on Wednesday will punch higher education’s hot buttons in a big way.
The report, “Labor Intensive or Labor Expensive: Changing Staffing and Compensation Patterns in Higher Education,” says that new administrative positions–particularly in student services–drove a 28-percent expansion of the higher-ed work force from 2000 to 2012. The report was released by the Delta Cost Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan social-science organization whose researchers analyze college finances.
What’s more, the report says, the number of full-time faculty and staff members per professional or managerial administrator has declined 40 percent, to around 2.5 to 1.

Bradley Voytek:

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.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

$5,785 may not do much for you at Duke where tuition exceeds $50,000 a year. But, it can put a serious dent in the tuition at Durham Tech Community College (approx. $13,000). With some state aid, institutional aid, and some luck a student might be able to get some of that workforce training everyone from the President of the United States and all the captains of the private sector claim we need.
Pell grants help poor students overcome the consequences of choosing to be born to parents without means.
For almost the entire history of higher education in this country, college was for the sons (and much later the daughters) of wealthy families. The GI Bill created a national model for distributing aid to students without the benefit of inter-generational wealth to go to college.
But, the GI Bill was not evenly or fairly distributed. Despite the disproportionate number of black men and women who served in the military two decades after it was integrated, black folks had a hard time getting the aid they’d been promised.

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

The streets of Portland resemble those of Madison in 2011, only in Portland it is the Board of Education’s failure to bargain in good faith which is causing the labor dispute.

“Fighting for the Schools Portland Students Deserve” is a predominant sign. This refers to the School Board’s failure to implement an Arbitrator’s Award which would provide additional planning time and reduce class size to provide more time for teachers to work with students and their individual learning styles; individual differences.
The District has nearly $30 million it could access to address the issues presented by the Portland Association of Teachers, but the Board refuses. Instead the Board of Education threatens to take away the early retirement (TERP) benefit, even though it saves the District significant money. Among other issues are just cause and due process standards, videotaping instruction for evaluative purposes and the District improperly using “letters of expectation” to bully teachers.
The Union plans to strike if Contract issues are not resolved by February 20.

Justin Jin:

The old iron key turns on the third attempt and 50-year-old Wu Yuemeng pushes the door open with her knee. She motions her daughter into a seldom-used upstairs bedroom that is dominated by a dusty, century-old wooden loom and a metal-banded chest.
Wu reaches into the chest and takes out treasures, as her daughter – the cheerful 19-year-old Xia – looks on. She pulls out hand-woven shoes, finely embroidered silk ribbons and fabrics dyed with intriguing patterns – all of which are ethnic Dong costumes and accessories. Finally, she reveals the prize: a glittering ceremonial headpiece with swaying golden leaves (see magazine cover) that has been passed down by generations of mothers to their daughters.
Layer by layer, lace by lace, Wu drapes her daughter in the garments she began making while pregnant with Xia, before she knew her baby would be a girl, let alone what kind of girl she would grow up to be. After Xia was born, Wu continued to weave and embroider ribbons and shirts whenever she was not in the fields planting rice.
Dong women embroider with just a single needle and without a fixed pattern, using their stitches to express their feelings for their children. The Dong people of impoverished Guizhou province have no written language, but their textile craftsmanship is unmatched in its refinement, and is a clear communication of love.

The Wall Street Journal:

New York City is worth watching these days as Mayor Bill de Blasio begins his new “progressive” government. His first priority seems to be a political and economic assault on charter schools.
The number of charters in New York City grew by over 900% under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and they now teach some 70,000 kids out of 1.1 million. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes has twice found that the city’s charter students do better in reading and math than their counterparts at district schools.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Stephen Eide on why forcing New York City charter schools to pay rent will impact educational outcomes. Photo credit: Associated Press.
Mr. de Blasio plans to redress this inequity by handicapping charters. His Department of Education has already zeroed out $210 million in funding from its 2015-2019 capital budget for charter construction. The new mayor has also announced a moratorium on co-locations, a policy that allows charters to share facilities with district schools and provides for a more efficient use of space. Twenty-five co-locations approved last year under Mr. Bloomberg may be in jeopardy.
Mr. de Blasio explains that kids in district schools may feel like they’re getting an inferior education if a charter moves in next door and renovates. Charters are public schools that also raise private money, and state law requires the city to match the private funds on district schools that charters spend on upgrades to prevent a disparity. So by killing co-location Mr. de Blasio can also spend less on district schools.

Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee:

The advances we’ve seen in the past few years–cars that drive themselves, useful humanoid robots, speech recognition and synthesis systems, 3D printers, Jeopardy!-champion computers–are not the crowning achievements of the computer era. They’re the warm-up acts. As we move deeper into the second machine age we’ll see more and more such wonders, and they’ll become more and more impressive.
How can we be so sure? Because the exponential, digital, and recombinant powers of the second machine age have made it possible for humanity to create two of the most important one-time events in our history: the emergence of real, useful artificial intelligence (AI) and the connection of most of the people on the planet via a common digital network.
Either of these advances alone would fundamentally change our growth prospects. When combined, they’re more important than anything since the Industrial Revolution, which forever transformed how physical work was done.

Computing Education Blog:

Computer science is mostly white or Asian and male. We have lots of data to support that. What I didn’t realize was how sub-groups within Asian-American differ markedly in their educational attainment. A new report from NYU and ETS disaggregates the data, and below is the startling graphic that Rick Adrion pointed me to.

Art Golab:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia accused American schools of failing to properly educate citizens in their civic duties, railed against the state favoring non-religion over religion and even took a swipe at Chicago style pizza.
Scalia spoke Friday night at the Union League Club of Chicago’s 126th annual George Washington’s Birthday celebration.
Calling the founder of our country “my favorite president,” and “a man of conscience and steadfast determination,” Scalia then launched into an analysis of how the founding fathers and leading teachers of the period viewed education and how far he believes educators, like courts have strayed from their original intentions.
He lamented that most students in elite law school classes he speaks at have never read the Federalist Papers. “It is truly appalling that they should have reached graduate school without having been exposed to that important element of their national patrimony, the work that best explains the reasons and objectives of the constitution.”

Katrina Schwartz:

All 870 students at Hillview Middle School in Menlo Park, Calif. will soon have school-issued iPads that they can use both at school and at home. The school has slowly rolled out the program over the past three years, trying to work out the kinks before issuing the expensive devices to every student. Before students can take the devices home, they’ll have to take a course to get their “digital driver license,” which includes digital citizenship and learning their way around the device.
Eighth grade students at Hillview have had their iPads since the beginning of the school year. Read more on how teachers are using the devices in class so far and their hopes for the future. Here, they weigh in on how the devices change what happens in class, how they think about learning and how they organize their school work.

ruswick:

I am a current high school senior who intends to go into the software industry. I’m trying to decide between enrolling in college to pursue a BS in Computer Science or entering directly into the workforce.
My conundrum is this: I intend to seek a front-end engineering job, and am already very competent in front-end technologies. I have a fair number of items on my resume, mostly from personal projects and internships. I anticipate being able to acquire a moderately well-paying ($60,000 to $80,000+) development job after leaving high school. However, I’m also worried that not pursuing a degree will exclude me from certain well-paying jobs, especially later in my career.
I’m also quite worried about the debt load that a degree would require. I anticipate having to take out between $50,000 and $100,000 in loans to finance a degree.

James Samuelson:

Is standardized testing anti-student? Many educators and commentators believe so, vehemently. No more “drill and kill,” some detractors demand. Kids are not robots goes another refrain. Others argue that standardized testing is a soul-sapping exercise in rote learning that devalues critical thinking and favors students of higher-income parents who can afford test-prep classes or private tutors.
On the contrary: Testing is good for the intellectual health of students. It is also an excellent way for teachers to better understand the particular academic challenges their students face.
First, standardized tests are a critical thinker’s dream. Multiple-choice questions often ask students to evaluate evidence and make inferences. Consider a sample multiple-choice question for the New York State English Language Arts test, which is administered in the public schools. It asks students to identify the tone of a paragraph excerpted from Andrew Carnegie’s “The Gospel of Wealth” (1889).

Barry Peddycord III:

By the time this post appears, the first peer-graded assignment in Cathy Davidson’s Coursera MOOC, “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education,” will have come and gone, and students will be well into the second. Unlike programming projects, algebra exercises, and multiple-choice questions that can all be reliably graded by a computer, Coursera offloads the task of evaluating essays to students. After the deadline for an assignment has passed, students have a week to evaluate five of their classmates’ essays using a rubric developed by the teaching staff. A student who fails to evaluate his or her classmates does not get a grade for the assignment, and in our course will not be able to achieve the statement of accomplishment “with distinction.” Whether students see that as a chore, duty, or opportunity, the necessary assessment is eventually done–for better or for worse.
Peer grading can be a controversial proposition. When students’ scholarships and internships are riding on their grades, it isn’t surprising that they hesitate to allow their classmates–who know as much as they do about the course material–to have any effect on their final assessment. Instructors scoff at the idea that students can be left to evaluate one another, certain that they will collude so that everyone will receive an A without doing any of the work. In its worst incarnation, peer grading can be a scheme for lazy professors to offload on students the boring work of assessment.

Josh Bersin

There is a long standing belief in business that people performance follows the Bell Curve (also called the Normal Distribution). This belief has been embedded in many business practices: performance appraisals, compensation models, and even how we get graded in school. (Remember “grading by the curve?”)
Research shows that this statistical model, while easy to understand, does not accurately reflect the way people perform. As a result, HR departments and business leaders inadvertently create agonizing problems with employee performance and happiness.
Witness Microsoft’s recent decision to disband its performance management process – after decades of use the company realized it was encouraging many of its top people to leave. I recently talked with the HR leader of a well known public company and she told me her engineer-CEO insists on implementing a forced ranking system. I explained the statistical models to her and it really helped him think differently.
Does human performance follow the bell curve? Research says no.
Let’s look at the characteristics of the Bell Curve, and I think you’ll quickly understand why the model doesn’t fit.

Keith Hoeller:

In 2009, Money Magazine published a survey titled “The 50 Best Jobs in America.” Their reporters analyzed job data and conducted an online survey of thirty-five thousand people, taking into account such factors as salaries, flexibility, benefit to society, satisfaction, stress, job security, and growth prospects. The proverbial college professor sat high on the list at No. 3, with a median salary of $70,400 for nine months’ work, top pay of $115,000, and a ten-year growth prospect of 23 percent. College teaching earned “A” grades for flexibility, benefit to society, and satisfaction, and a “B” for job stress, with 59 percent of surveyed professors reporting low stress.
While acknowledging that “competition for tenure-track positions at four-year institutions is intense,” Money claimed that graduate students with only a master’s degree could find a part-time teaching job: “You’ll find lots of available positions at community colleges and professional programs, where you can enter the professoriate as an adjunct faculty member or non-tenure-track instructor without a doctorate degree.”
Similarly, the 2000 “American Faculty Poll” conducted by the academic pension giant Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF) seemed to corroborate the high job satisfaction rate for professors. “The poll found that 90 percent of the faculty members surveyed were satisfied with their career choices and would probably make the same decisions again,” reported Courtney Leatherman, in her Chronicle of Higher Education story about the survey.

Sam Altman:

Thanks to technology, people can create more wealth now than ever before, and in twenty years they’ll be able to create more wealth than they can today. Even though this leads to more total wealth, it skews it toward fewer people. This disparity has probably been growing since the beginning of technology, in the broadest sense of the word.
Technology makes wealth inequality worse by giving people leverage and compounding differences in ability and amount of work. It also often replaces human jobs with machines. A long time ago, differences in ability and work ethic had a linear effect on wealth; now it’s exponential. [1] Technology leads to increasing wealth inequality for lots of other reasons, too–for example, it makes it much easier to reach large audiences all at once, and a great product can be sold immediately worldwide instead of in just one area.
Without intervention, technology will probably lead to an untenable disparity–so we probably need some amount of intervention. Technology also increases the total wealth in a way that mostly benefits everyone, but at some point the disparity just feels so unfair it doesn’t matter.
Wealth inequality today in the United States is extreme and growing, and we talk about it a lot when someone throws a brick through the window of a Google bus. Lots of smart people have already written about this, but here are two images to quickly show what the skew looks like:

Pew Research:

Public trust in the government, already quite low, has edged even lower in a survey conducted just before the Oct. 16 agreement to end the government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling.
Explore public attitudes towards the federal government over time and compare the data with other key national indicators, such as consumer sentiment, the unemployment rate and changes within the elected leadership.

Walter Russell Mead:

Last week we highlighted a study showing that university administrative positions rose 28 percent in the last decade, but a new study from the NECIR suggests that the problem is even worse.
Over the last 25 years the number of administrative employees at U.S. colleges and universities more than doubled, according to a joint study by the New England Center of Investigative Reporting and the American Institutes for Research. The ratio of nonacademic positions to faculty positions doubled at both public and private institutions. Overall, the industry has added an average of 87 administrative positions per day, a rate has scarcely slowed since the economic downturn, despite tuition increases. Even more surprising, academic institutions have added more administrative employees despite part-time faculty taking on more teaching duties than full-time professors.

Matthew Ladner:

I decided that it would be a bit easier to digest to do the chart by individual subjects and use points rather than percentages of a standard deviation and combined tests as an axis. Also revenue per pupil was easier to find than expenditures. So what you see up there is a first crack at 4th grade reading between 1998 and 2013. No shock- money is still not the answer (yes I am looking right at you New York and Wyoming).

Note Wisconsin’s spending growth combined with much lower than average academic performance.

Shaila Dewan:

The millennials — born after 1980 — are the best-educated generation in history. By early adulthood, a third have college degrees, and those degrees help them earn more than ever before. So scholars at the Pew Research Center were puzzled when they found that the median, inflation-adjusted income of 25- to 32-year-olds had changed very little since 1965.
The reason, they discovered, is that even though a college degree is worth more, a high school degree alone is worth a lot less. Its value, in terms of wages, has declined enough to cancel out almost all the gains by all the millennials who have earned four-year degrees.
From 1965 to 2013, according to a new Pew report called “The Rising Cost of Not Going to College,” the typical high school graduate’s earnings fell more than 10 percent, after inflation.
“That is one of the great economic stories of our era, which you could define as income inequality,” said Paul Taylor, an author of the report. “The leading suspects are the digital economy and the globalization of labor markets. Both of them place a higher premium on the knowledge-based part of the work force and have the effect of drying up the opportunities for good middle-class jobs, particularly for those that don’t have an education.”

Shirley Wang:

Daifailluh al-Bugami was just a year old when his parents noticed that his lips turned blue as he slept at night. It was his weight, doctors said, putting pressure on his delicate airways.
Now Daifailluh is 3, and at 61 pounds he is nearly double the typical weight of a child his age. So the Bugamis are planning the once unthinkable: To have their toddler undergo bariatric surgery to permanently remove part of his stomach in hopes of reducing his appetite and staving off a lifetime of health problems.
That such a young child would be considered for weight-loss surgery–something U.S. surgeons generally won’t do–underscores the growing health crisis here and elsewhere in the Middle East. Widespread access to unhealthy foods, coupled with sedentary behavior brought on by wealth and the absence of a dieting and exercise culture, have caused obesity levels in Saudi Arabia and many other Gulf states to approach or even exceed those in Western countries.

Dennis Punzel:

Martius Bautista’s goal heading into the Madison All-City Spelling Bee, was a simple one.
“Just try my best,” said Martius, a fourth-grader at Edgewood Campus School.
His best turned out to be even better than the best.
In capturing the trophy at the Mitby Theatre of Madison Area Technical College, Martius had to outduel two-time All-City champion and reigning Badger State champion Aisha Khan, an eighth-grader at Spring Harbor Middle School.
Those two emerged as the finalists after Marissa Stewart, a seventh-grader at Black Hawk Middle School bowed out in the 24th round.
Aisha and Martius each got their first seven words in the finals correct before Aisha was confronted with “bolivar,” the currency of Venezuela.

Chris Lydgate:

A giant runaway snowball crashed into a Reed dorm on Saturday evening, ripping a wall off its studs and narrowly missing a window. No one was injured in the collision.
College officials say the ball was some 40 inches in diameter and weighed from 800 to 900 pounds. “It was a big snowball,” says maintenance manager Steve Yeadon.
The episode started Saturday during a storm that dumped as much as 12 inches of snow on Portland. A couple of students decided to make a large snowball in the quadrangle formed by the Grove dorms, according to an incident report from the Community Safety Office. They rolled it back and forth across the Grove Quad in what must have at first seemed a Sisyphean undertaking. But as time went on, the frozen sphere picked up more and more snow, gained mass, and grew increasingly ponderous. Soon a rumor sprang up that the Doyle Owl was entombed in its icy heart. By 8 p.m., a crowd had gathered in the Quad and was chanting “Roll it! Roll it!”

Jay Matthews:

I hear from many experienced teachers who feel the emphasis on student test results has hurt their profession. But to young people coming into the profession, the situation does not look so dark. Education leaders influenced by European and Asian methods are raising standards for those who can enroll in teacher training, while making the training deeper, with more participation by skilled veterans.
Many more teachers are required now to earn degrees in their subjects. The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation has set new standards for teacher training programs in which entrants should have a collective college grade-point average of at least 3.0 and college admission test scores above the national average by 2017.
The higher targets might already be having an effect. An article in the quarterly journal Education Next by Dan Goldhaber, a former Alexandria School Board member, and Joe Walch, both of the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington, says new teachers have significantly higher SAT scores than in previous years. Average SAT performance of first-year teachers in 2008-2009 was at the 50th percentile, compared with the 45th percentile in 1993-1994 and 42nd percentile in 2000-2001.
In the past, teacher candidates had lower SAT scores than college classmates choosing other jobs, but in 2008-2009, “graduates entering the teaching profession . . . had average SAT scores that slightly exceeded average scores of their peers entering other occupations,” the researchers said.

Matthew Di Carlo:

The Center for American Progress (CAP) recently released a short report on whether teachers were leaving the profession due to reforms implemented during the Obama Administration, as some commentators predicted.
The authors use data from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), a wonderful national survey of U.S. teachers, and they report that 70 percent of first-year teachers in 2007-08 were still teaching in 2011-12. They claim that this high retention of beginning teachers, along with the fact that most teachers in 2011-12 had five or more years of experience, show that “the teacher retention concerns were unfounded.”
This report raises a couple of important points about the debate over teacher retention during this time of sweeping reform.
First, however, I must point out that, due to an analytical error, the 70 percent retention figure is incorrect. The authors wanted to see how many first year teachers from 2007-08 were still in the profession in 2011-12. What they did was identify fifth-year teachers (in 2011-12), and then looked at these teachers’ responses to another question asking their first year of teaching. 70 percent said it was 2007-08 (five years earlier), and so the CAP report concludes that 30 percent of first year teachers in 2007-08 had left the profession.

Robert Schwartz (1.7MB PDF):

Of the millions of American high school students who receive their diplomas this month, 70 percent will move on to college. Unfortunately, by the time they reach their mid-twenties, fewer than half of those students will earn a four-year college degree. Recent studies tell us that even among those under 25 who have earned a college degree, as many as half may be unemployed or, more typically, underemployed. For those young people with no college degree, or worse yet no high school diploma, the situation is even more dire.
In February 2011 the Pathways to Prosperity Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) released a report challenging our excessive focus on the four-year college pathway, arguing that we need to create additional pathways that combine rigorous academics with strong technical education to equip the majority of young people with the skills and credentials to succeed in our increasingly challenging labor market. Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century hit a nerve with employers, educators, and state officials struggling with high unemployment rates, perceived skills mismatches, and the devastating effect of the financial crisis on young people.
The enormous interest generated by the Pathways report has led to the launch of the Pathways to Prosperity Network, a collaboration between the Pathways to Prosperity Project at HGSE, Jobs for the Future (JFF), and six states focused on ensuring that many more young people complete high school, attain a postsecondary credential with currency in the labor market, and launch into a career while leaving open the prospect of further education. To accomplish this goal, participating states will deeply engage with employers and educators to build career pathways systems for high school-aged students. Each state will be led by a coalition of key public and private sector leaders committed to mobilizing and sustaining political and financial support for the agenda and addressing legislative or regulatory barriers that inhibit progress. The work will initially focus on one or two key regional labor markets within each state, but the long-term goal is to create a statewide system of career pathways that can serve a majority of students.

Via the website. Much more here, here and here.
Related: wisconsin2.org

Laurence Steinberg:

High school, where kids socialize, show off their clothes, use their phones–and, oh yeah, go to class.
Every once in a while, education policy squeezes its way onto President Obama’s public agenda, as it did in during last month’s State of the Union address. Lately, two issues have grabbed his (and just about everyone else’s) attention: early-childhood education and access to college. But while these scholastic bookends are important, there is an awful lot of room for improvement between them. American high schools, in particular, are a disaster.
In international assessments, our elementary school students generally score toward the top of the distribution, and our middle school students usually place somewhat above the average. But our high school students score well below the international average, and they fare especially badly in math and science compared with our country’s chief economic rivals.
What’s holding back our teenagers?
One clue comes from a little-known 2003 study based on OECD data that compares the world’s 15-year-olds on two measures of student engagement: participation and “belongingness.” The measure of participation was based on how often students attended school, arrived on time, and showed up for class. The measure of belongingness was based on how much students felt they fit in to the student body, were liked by their schoolmates, and felt that they had friends in school. We might think of the first measure as an index of academic engagement and the second as a measure of social engagement.
On the measure of academic engagement, the U.S. scored only at the international average, and far lower than our chief economic rivals: China, Korea, Japan, and Germany. In these countries, students show up for school and attend their classes more reliably than almost anywhere else in the world. But on the measure of social engagement, the United States topped China, Korea, and Japan.
In America, high school is for socializing. It’s a convenient gathering place, where the really important activities are interrupted by all those annoying classes. For all but the very best American students–the ones in AP classes bound for the nation’s most selective colleges and universities–high school is tedious and unchallenging. Studies that have tracked American adolescents’ moods over the course of the day find that levels of boredom are highest during their time in school.
It’s not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents–it’s every single thing we have tried.
One might be tempted to write these findings off as mere confirmation of the well-known fact that adolescents find everything boring. In fact, a huge proportion of the world’s high school students say that school is boring. But American high schools are even more boring than schools in nearly every other country, according to OECD surveys. And surveys of exchange students who have studied in America, as well as surveys of American adolescents who have studied abroad, confirm this. More than half of American high school students who have studied in another country agree that our schools are easier. Objectively, they are probably correct: American high school students spend far less time on schoolwork than their counterparts in the rest of the world.
Trends in achievement within the U.S. reveal just how bad our high schools are relative to our schools for younger students. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, administered by the U.S. Department of Education, routinely tests three age groups: 9-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds. Over the past 40 years, reading scores rose by 6 percent among 9-year-olds and 3 percent among 13-year-olds. Math scores rose by 11 percent among 9-year-olds and 7 percent among 13-year-olds.
By contrast, high school students haven’t made any progress at all. Reading and math scores have remained flat among 17-year-olds, as have their scores on subject area tests in science, writing, geography, and history. And by absolute, rather than relative, standards, American high school students’ achievement is scandalous.
In other words, over the past 40 years, despite endless debates about curricula, testing, teacher training, teachers’ salaries, and performance standards, and despite billions of dollars invested in school reform, there has been no improvement–none–in the academic proficiency of American high school students.
It’s not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents–it’s every single thing we have tried. The list of unsuccessful experiments is long and dispiriting. Charter high schools don’t perform any better than standard public high schools, at least with respect to student achievement. Students whose teachers “teach for America” don’t achieve any more than those whose teachers came out of conventional teacher certification programs. Once one accounts for differences in the family backgrounds of students who attend public and private high schools, there is no advantage to going to private school, either. Vouchers make no difference in student outcomes. No wonder school administrators and teachers from Atlanta to Chicago to my hometown of Philadelphia have been caught fudging data on student performance. It’s the only education strategy that consistently gets results.
The especially poor showing of high schools in America is perplexing. It has nothing to do with high schools having a more ethnically diverse population than elementary schools. In fact, elementary schools are more ethnically diverse than high schools, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Nor do high schools have more poor students. Elementary schools in America are more than twice as likely to be classified as “high-poverty” than secondary schools. Salaries are about the same for secondary and elementary school teachers. They have comparable years of education and similar years of experience. Student-teacher ratios are the same in our elementary and high schools. So are the amounts of time that students spend in the classroom. We don’t shortchange high schools financially either; American school districts actually spend a little more per capita on high school students than elementary school students.
Our high school classrooms are not understaffed, underfunded, or underutilized, by international standards. According to a 2013 OECD report, only Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland spend more per student. Contrary to widespread belief, American high school teachers’ salaries are comparable to those in most European and Asian countries, as are American class sizes and student-teacher ratios. And American high school students actually spend as many or more hours in the classroom each year than their counterparts in other developed countries.
This underachievement is costly: One-fifth of four-year college entrants and one-half of those entering community college need remedial education, at a cost of $3 billion each year.
The president’s call for expanding access to higher education by making college more affordable, while laudable on the face of it, is not going to solve our problem. The president and his education advisers have misdiagnosed things. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of college entry in the industrialized world. Yet it is tied for last in the rate of college completion. More than one-third of U.S. students who enter a full-time, two-year college program drop out just after one year, as do about one fifth of students who enter a four-year college. In other words, getting our adolescents to go to college isn’t the issue. It’s getting them to graduate.
If this is what we hope to accomplish, we need to rethink high school in America. It is true that providing high-quality preschool to all children is an important component of comprehensive education reform. But we can’t just do this, cross our fingers, and hope for the best. Early intervention is an investment, not an inoculation.
In recent years experts in early-child development have called for programs designed to strengthen children’s “non-cognitive” skills, pointing to research that demonstrates that later scholastic success hinges not only on conventional academic abilities but on capacities like self-control. Research on the determinants of success in adolescence and beyond has come to a similar conclusion: If we want our teenagers to thrive, we need to help them develop the non-cognitive traits it takes to complete a college degree–traits like determination, self-control, and grit. This means classes that really challenge students to work hard–something that fewer than one in six high school students report experiencing, according to Diploma to Nowhere, a 2008 report published by Strong American Schools. Unfortunately, our high schools demand so little of students that these essential capacities aren’t nurtured. As a consequence, many high school graduates, even those who have acquired the necessary academic skills to pursue college coursework, lack the wherewithal to persevere in college. Making college more affordable will not fix this problem, though we should do that too.
The good news is that advances in neuroscience are revealing adolescence to be a second period of heightened brain plasticity, not unlike the first few years of life. Even better, brain regions that are important for the development of essential non-cognitive skills are among the most malleable. And one of the most important contributors to their maturation is pushing individuals beyond their intellectual comfort zones.
It’s time for us to stop squandering this opportunity. Our kids will never rise to the challenge if the challenge doesn’t come.

Laurence Steinberg is a psychology professor at Temple University and author of the forthcoming Age of Opportunity: Revelations from the New Science of Adolescence.
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Matthew Kaminski:

For several months running, the Bill and Eva Show has been the talk of New York City politics. He is the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, an unapologetic old-school liberal Democrat, scourge of the rich and of public charter schools. She is Eva Moskowitz, fellow Democrat and educational-reform champion who runs the city’s largest charter network.
How did Ms. Moskowitz, a hero to thousands of New Yorkers of modest means whose children have been able to get a better education than their local public schools offered, end up becoming public enemy No. 1?
She is the city’s most prominent, and vocal, advocate for charter schools, and therefore a threat to the powerful teachers union that had been counting the days until the de Blasio administration took over last month from the charter-friendly Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Assailed by Mayor de Blasio and union leaders, Ms. Moskowitz is fighting back with typically sharp elbows.
“A progressive Democrat should be embracing charters, not rejecting them,” she says. “It’s just wacky.”
As she reminds every audience, the 6,700 students at her 22 Success Academy Charter Schools are overwhelmingly from poor, minority families and scored in the top 1% in math and top 7% in English on the most recent state test. Four in five charters in the city outperformed comparable schools.

Jeff Gould:

When it introduced a new privacy policy designed to improve its ability to target users with ads based on data mining of their online activities, Google said the policy didn’t apply to students using Google Apps for Education. But recent court filings by Google’s lawyers in a California class action lawsuit against Gmail data mining tell a different story: Google now admits that it does data mine student emails for ad-targeting purposes outside of school, even when ad serving in school is turned off, and its controversial consumer privacy policy does apply to Google Apps for Education.
At SafeGov.org our work has long focused on the risks of allowing targeted online advertising into schools. This issue has come to the fore as companies like Google and Microsoft have launched a worldwide race to introduce their web application suites into as many schools as possible. In this article we review the background of this debate and then present important new evidence regarding the practices of one of the leading players, Google.
The suites in question are known as Google Apps for Education and Office 365 Education, respectively, and they include basic apps such as email, word processing, spreadsheets, live document sharing, simple web forms and messaging. Their key selling point is that they offer students something almost as good as a traditional office suite in the convenient format of a browser window, and – best of all for cash-strapped schools – they do so at no cost.
Of course as the economist said there is no such thing as a free lunch, and we must look carefully at the business motives behind these firms’ generosity. Here an important difference between the two leaders emerges. Both Google and Microsoft generate substantial revenues by selling online office suites to government and enterprises for annual subscription fees. If the firms offer essentially the same suites to schools for free, it is surely in part because they hope that when students move into the workplace they will demand the same online tools they learned to use in school. This is a business model that is honest about its intentions and serves the interests of both students and the firms. However, there is an additional component in the Google business model that involves advertising, and this is where the trouble begins.

Paul Fain:

The University of Maine at Presque Isle is moving beyond grades by basing all of its academic programs on “proficiencies” that students must master to earn a degree.
University officials announced the planned move to proficiency-based curriculums on Thursday. While many details have yet to be hashed out, the broad shift by the public institution is sure to raise eyebrows.
“We are transforming the entire university,” said Linda Schott, Presque Isle’s president. “In the next four years, for sure, all of our programs will be proficiency-based.”
That means students will progress through in-person, online and hybrid degree programs by demonstrating that they are proficient in required concepts, which faculty members will work to develop. Schott said the university will start by converting general education requirements, and then move to majors.

College Inside Review:

Say you wake up at 8 am. You shower, eat breakfast, brush your teeth… and get to work at 9. You spend your day working, leave the office at 5, and get home at about 5:30. You unwind a for a few minutes, and then start making dinner. By the time you’re done cooking, eating and cleaning, it’s 7 o’clock. You want to make sure that you get in your daily exercise, but you need to digest first, so after watching TV for a half hour, you start your workout. An hour later, it’s 8:30. And after showering, it’s 8:45. You now have about 3 hours before you go to sleep and start your day over again.
There are two points I want to make.
Your career is very important. Aside from routine daily activities, the majority of your day will be work. That big 8 hour chunk. 9-to-5. And since this will be true for, say, 50 years, I don’t think that it’d be too much of a stretch to say that the majority of your life will be work. For this reason, I think that it’d be wise to give this decision the time and thought that it deserves.
When you ask people, “What do you want to do with your life?”, I don’t think that they give you an honest answer. I don’t think they’re trying to deceive you, but I think that they’re answering a different question. The question that they hear is, “Given that I’ll be busy from 9-5 every weekday for 50 years, what else would I like to fit in to my life?”.

John Warner:

The champions of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, and other digitally mediated mass-produced education often speak of the “necessity” of transitioning to this model because of all of the increasingly onerous expense of traditional higher ed and unmet demand for education.
Clay Shirky believes the need is dire: “The reason to bet on the spread of large-scale low-cost education isn’t the increased supply of new technologies. It’s the massive demand for education, which our existing institutions are increasingly unable to handle. That demand will go somewhere.” (It’s worth noting that Shirky said close to the opposite of this in 2012, before the limitations of MOOCs became so readily apparent).
I don’t mean to pick on Shirky specifically–I’ve done that already. His post is just the freshest example of an attitude that’s widely shared by important people like Bill Gates, Coursera founder Daphne Koller, and Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, not to mention the venture capitalist community that fuels this industry with their investment dollars.

Elliott Hauser:

Marc Andreesen believes that software is eating the world. It’s a very visceral image, and in one sense it’s absolutely true. Software is spreading into every industry, changing how established players must play and even what the rules of the game are. But while many in Silicon Valley and Educational Technology think that software will “eat” teachers, replacing many of them, at trinket we believe software’s role is to create openness, making teachers better and more connected. Far from there being less teachers in the future, we think openness will enable and encourage more people than ever to teach.
Godawful Teachers?
In the midst of a longer Twitter conversation I was having with him and others (which I will likely blog about separately), Andreesen made an interesting comment:

Alan Borsuk:

The Common Core standards call for fifth graders to understand metaphors. So here’s a story from my life last week that I fear may end up being a metaphor for the Common Core campaign.
I had a flat tire. AAA came promptly, put on that weird little spare in my trunk, and didn’t charge me anything. It turned out there was a nail in the tread.
The tire was repaired and put back on my car. In a pleasant surprise, I didn’t have to pay for the repair because the tire was under warranty.
I was quite pleased to have this fixed for free. But then I thought how I really had paid, both with my AAA dues and with the money the tire cost me. Furthermore, I realized things had been returned only to where they started — I had the same tire on the car and nothing was actually any different than before I ran over the nail.
Are you paying attention, fifth graders? Here’s the metaphor: The tire episode was a fair amount of hassle, it’s over now, I dealt with it, but nothing was really better in the end.
Is this where we’re headed with the Common Core? A lot of work for the same results?

Gillian Tett:

A few months ago I took a short holiday with my two daughters on Dartmoor. True to (British) form, it drizzled – constantly. So I braced myself for battles about how much television the girls could watch, or how many games they could play on my phone. But then fate – or a brilliant piece of innovation – intervened. The hotel where we were staying, Bovey Castle, featured a “Lego room service” menu, next to the normal food menu, which allowed guests to borrow Lego sets. My daughters dialled for some kits.
Three days later, the room was full of models, including a highly complex “Lone Ranger silver mine”, that featured crankshafts, pulleys and fiddly little buckets. My daughters brimmed with pride. Best of all, they barely watched any Disney Channel or minded the rain.
Is there a bigger moral here? I would love to think so. Last weekend The Lego Movie opened in North America and parts of Europe, to rapturous reviews and packed cinemas, earning some $69m in the first weekend alone. Having seen the movie, however, I was not entirely dazzled. It is striking to see that much Lego on a screen – the film features no fewer than 3,863,484 Lego bricks. It is also heartening to see an eight-decade-old Danish company reinvent itself, after earlier bouts of decline, by finding new focus buying intellectual property (hence the appearance of Batman Lego, Star Wars Lego and so on). But compared with some of the other brilliantly witty kids’ films, the dialogue seems clunky. So does the predictably feel-good message (that kids need to be resilient, ambitious and let their creative spirits fly).

Peter Rowlett:

Here I attempt to write the abstract for my thesis, ‘A Partially-automated Approach to the Assessment of Mathematics in Higher Education’, “using only the ten hundred words people use the most often”.
Katie Steckles pointed out via the latest Carnival of Mathematics that quantum computer scientist Scott Aaronson posted an explanation of his research using only the 1000 most common words in English, inspired by the xkcd comic ‘Up-Goer Five’, which did the same for a labelled diagram of the Saturn V rocket (the ‘Up-Goer Five’). Scott’s post links to The Up-Goer Five text editor, a fabulous innovation that allows typing in a box and highlights when a word isn’t on the same list of words used in the xkcd diagram. I used this to write a version of my thesis abstract. Beyond what the text editor wanted, I also voluntarily adjusted some terms that are on the list, but presumably not in the way I mean them. Particularly, ‘deep learning’ and ‘open-ended questions’ didn’t get highlighted. I’ve gone for a fairly close, word-by-word translation, though clearly some parts could be rewritten completely to be clearer.
My thesis abstract (the version I handed in) is in a previous blog post, if you want to view it for comparison. Here’s my Up-Goer Five version.

The Economist:

UNIVERSITIES have not changed much since students first gathered in Oxford and Bologna in the 11th century. Teaching has been constrained by technology. Until recently a student needed to be in a lecture hall to hear the professor or around a table to debate with fellow students. Innovation is eliminating those constraints, however, and bringing sweeping change to higher education.
Online learning takes many forms. Wikipedia, a user-generated online encyclopedia, contains wonderfully detailed explanations. YouTube offers instruction on how to boil an egg as well as lectures on cosmology. Within many universities the online is displacing the offline. Professors publish course materials and videos of their lectures on the web. Students interact with each other and submit assignments by e-mail. Even those living on university campuses may nonetheless learn largely online, skipping lectures and reporting only for the final exam.
In America, bowing to the inevitable, universities have joined various startups in the rush to provide stand-alone instruction online, through Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. Though much experimentation lies ahead, economics can shed light on how the market for higher education may change.
Two big forces underpin a university’s costs. The first is the need for physical proximity. Adding students is expensive–they require more buildings and instructors–and so a university’s marginal cost of production is high. That means that even in a competitive market, where price converges towards marginal cost, modern education is dear.

Michelle Rhee and Susan Combs:

We’re professionals from different backgrounds: one a Democrat and education reformer, the other a Republican comptroller of public accounts for Texas. We may not agree on everything, but we are coming together around two common beliefs.
We both believe that nothing is more important to America’s economic future than a world-class public education system. We also believe that limited education dollars should be invested in proven programs that benefit kids, not in unnecessary administration, overhead or red tape.
Today we’re spending more than $600 billion a year in public schools across the country, and few of us are happy with the results. Over the last five decades, in fact, U.S. education spending has skyrocketed by 350%, yet achievement levels have remained stagnant.

Melissa:

Like many academics, I love books. Like many book-loving parents, I’m keen to share that love with my young children. Two years ago, I chanced upon two different professors in children’s books, in quick succession. Wouldn’t it be a fun project, I thought, to see how academics, and universities, appear in children’s illustrated books? This would function both as an excuse to buy more books (we do live in a golden age of second hand books, cheaply delivered to your front door) and to explain to my kids – now five and a half, and twins of three – what Mummy Actually Does.
It turns out it’s hard to search just for children’s books, and picture books, in library catalogues, but I combed through various electronic library resources, as well as Amazon, eBay, LibraryThing, and Abe, to dig up source material. I began to obsessively search the bookshelves of kids books in friend’s houses, and doctors and dentist and hospital waiting rooms, whilst also keeping on the look out on our regular visits to our local library: often academics appear in books without being named in the title, so dont turn up easily via electronic searches. Parking my finds on a devoted Tumblr which was shared on social media, friends, family members, and total strangers tweeted, facebooked, and emailed me to suggest additions. People sidled up to me after invited guest lectures to whisper “I have a good professor for you…” Two years on, I’ve no doubt still not found all of the possible candidates, but new finds in my source material are becoming less frequent. 101 books (or individual books from a series*) and 108 academics, and a few specific mentions of university architecture and systems later, its time to look at what results from a survey of the representation of academics and academia in children’s picture books.

Ilan Stevens:

At Amherst College, where I’ve taught for more 20 years (oy, gevalt!), a couple of years ago a tenure case was brought down in part because of the word “solid.” I’ve put it in quote marks in part because tenure cases are multiheaded monsters: Their rise or fall as a result of countless factors. In this particular one, one of the factors–and, ultimately, a stumbling block–was this much-contested word.
An outside reviewer had used it to describe a candidate’s publications record. It became a subject of debate among the Committee of Six and the department supporting the candidate.
Here I need to offer a quick crash course through the college’s hierarchical structure, or at least a portion of it. The Committee of Six, a judicial body of elected faculty whose job it is to legislate on a large number of issues, is in charge of reviewing tenure cases once the candidate’s department has offered its recommendations. For these cases, the C6 looks at, among other things, every student evaluation, every letter from peers, and every outside review with utmost dedication. In other words, it is a painful, meticulous process of what I call logocrasy: a Kafkaesque labyrinth of language. The president then endorses or rejects the C6 tenure recommendation.

Erica Philips:

On the witness stand here Tuesday, Beatriz Vergara bit her lip and looked toward her mother and sister in the gallery as Eileen Goldsmith, a lawyer for California’s biggest teachers unions, began cross-examining the 15-year-old.
Ms. Vergara is one of nine student plaintiffs in a lawsuit bearing her name that challenges California’s strong employment protections for teachers. She testified earlier that three of her middle-school instructors had failed to teach or discipline students properly. “I think a teacher’s supposed to motivate you, encourage you, keep you going to school,” the 10th-grader said. “If you have a bad teacher, you’re not going to want to go to school.”
How well certain teachers educated Ms. Vergara and her fellow plaintiffs is at the heart of the closely watched case. Research has pointed to teacher quality as the biggest in-school determinant of student performance, and in recent years many states have moved to simplify dismissal procedures for ineffective teachers and encourage districts to consider teacher performance in layoff decisions rather than conducting reductions in force based only on seniority.

Please sign this petition urging the GOP led Ed Cmte to drop the Special Needs Vouchers. http://t.co/mP3Y320o9H

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) February 14, 2014

David Hogan:

For more than a decade, Singapore, along with South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Finland, has been at or near the top of international leagues tables that measure children’s ability in reading, maths and science. This has led to a considerable sense of achievement in Finland and East Asia and endless hand-wringing and head-scratching in the West.
What then do Singaporean teachers do in classrooms that is so special, bearing in mind that there are substantial differences in classroom practices between – as well as within – the top-performing countries? What are the particular strengths of Singapore’s instructional regime that helps it perform so well? What are its limits and constraints?
Is it the right model for countries seeking to prepare students properly for the complex demands of 21st century knowledge economies and institutional environments more generally? Is Singapore’s teaching system transferable to other countries? Or is its success so dependent on very specific institutional and cultural factors unique to Singapore that it is folly to imagine that it might be reproduced elsewhere?

Phil Baty:

If one were to reduce the story of the California Institute of Technology to numbers, it would be difficult to know where to start.
It is 123 years old, boasts 57 recipients of the US National Medal of Science and 32 Nobel laureates among its faculty and alumni (including five on the current staff).
It is the world’s number one university – and has been for the past three years of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings – and has just 300 professorial staff.
In short, it is tiny, and it is exceptionally good at what it does.
Ares Rosakis, chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, describes Caltech as “a unique species among universities…a very interesting phenomenon”. “Very interesting” may be something of an understatement.
Caltech’s neat and unassuming campus sits in a quiet residential neighbourhood in Pasadena, in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Privacy SOS:

University presidents are in unique and powerful positions, overseeing institutions that are supposed to protect and foster free critical inquiry, and serve as safe-zones for the pursuit of intellectual investigation, open debate, and dissent. That’s why it’s particularly disturbing to witness the transformation of Janet Napolitano from DHS director to university system president.
In September 2013, former director of the Department of Homeland Security Napolitano became the president of one of the nation’s largest public university systems, the University of California. In her role as president of the UC system, Napolitano oversees almost 19,000 faculty members and over 200,000 students, as well as a staff of nearly 200,000.
Soon after she started the job, Napolitano embarked on a “listening and learning” tour of all the UC campuses. She was reportedly met with protest by immigrant and undocumented students, who did not forget that their university president once steered the biggest deportation ship in the history of the United States. (The Obama administration will soon have deported two million people, most of whom were kicked out of the country during Napolitano’s reign at DHS, the parent organization of ICE.)

Richard Vedder:

Put 50 randomly selected U.S. professors in a room. Within 10 minutes they will be complaining about the growing number of administrators in their universities. Professors aren’t right about everything, yet they have a point in this case.
An examination of federal data on the explosion in college costs reveals how far colleges have gotten away from their original mission of providing “higher” education.
The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2010-11, nonprofit colleges and universities spent $449 billion. Less than 29 percent of that — $129 billion — went for instruction, and part of that amount went for expenses other than professors’ salaries. Yes, the $449 billion includes money spent on auxiliary enterprises (food and housing operations, for example), hospitals and “independent operations” (whatever they are). Suppose we subtract the $85 billion that pays for all of that from the total. That leaves $364 billion. The $129 billion for instruction of students is still only 35 percent of that.

Ry Rivard:

Colleges’ attempts to curb employee costs by hiring part-time faculty members and using grad students are being offset by administrative hires and rising benefit costs, according to a new study by the Delta Cost Project at the American Institutes for Research.
The study uses federal data to examine hiring trends going back to 1990. Over all, it found, colleges have hired at a faster pace from 2000 to now than they did in the 1990s, but that tempo didn’t do enough to keep up with an influx of millennials and other students who flocked to colleges amid the recession.

Grace Bowyer:

While it’s certainly foolish to rush into committing to college, it’s just as foolish to dismiss it without thought. That’s why when I turned 18 I decided to take a ‘gap year’. I did this because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and it seemed like common sense to gather more information before making any irrevocable, life-altering choices.
Lots of my friends were having graduation parties, which is where the topic came up the most (and was the least avoidable). This is what you talk about at that age. You talk about it with parents, friends, friends’ parents, teachers, guidance counselors, admissions officers; almost anyone you happen to be making polite small talk with. I even wound up defending my decision to my doctor during a check-up.
Eventually, I started to doubt. Was I taking a huge risk by not going, or even by waiting a year to consider my options?
Now that I have more perspective on the situation, it seems absurd that this sort of pressure is heaped upon so many high school graduates every year. It comes forcefully and from all directions. But the urgency is the most confusing part: what real penalty can I expect for waiting a year? Will the job market cease to be there? Is it a race, where the job goes to whoever gets there first? If that’s true, what does that mean for the people who graduate a year after me? And whatever the downsides, how do they compare to rushing into a major life decision (and lots of personal debt) with little idea of what you want out of it?

Ron Wyden and Marco Rubio:

While there is heated debate over how best to fix America’s higher education system, everyone agrees on the need for meaningful reform. It’s difficult to argue against reform in the face of college attainment rates that are stalled at just under 40 percent and the growing number of graduates left wondering whether they will ever find careers that allow them to pay off their mounting debts.
Any policy debate should start with a clear picture of how the dollars are being spent and whether that money is achieving the desired outcomes. Unfortunately, a lack of accurate data makes it impossible to answer many of the most basic questions for students, families and policy makers who are investing significant time and money in higher education.
During the recent State of the Union address, President Obama talked about shaking up the system of higher education to give parents more information, and colleges more incentives to offer better value. Though he provided little detail, this most certainly referred to the broad vision for higher education reform he outlined over the summer centered around a new a rating system for colleges and universities that would eventually be used to influence spending decisions on federal student financial aid.
However, the President’s proposal rests on a data system that is imperfect, at best. As former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said of the President’s plan, “we need to start with a rich and credible data system before we leap into some sort of artificial ranking system that, frankly, would have all kinds of unintended consequences.”

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, via a kind reader:

Today, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty sent a letter to Superintendent Evers of the Department of Public Instruction, raising serious concerns about whether the DPI is misapplying the open enrollment laws in a way that discriminates against students with disabilities in violation of state law as well as Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (“ADA”) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
Explained CJ Szafir, WILL Education Policy Director, “Every school year, hundreds of students with disabilities are denied the right to open enroll by their school district. When parents appeal the decision, records and interviews with parents have shown that the DPI is not protecting the rights of those students but is instead approving the rejections without conducting the analysis that it is legally required. The whole process leaves parents frustrated, and trapped in a school district that does not serve the needs of their child.”
The purpose of Wisconsin’s open enrollment program is to allow parents to choose a school district for their child other than the school district where they reside. But, students with disabilities have their applications for open enrollment rejected at a much higher rate than those without a disability. A major cause of this disparity is the resident school district claiming that they would incur an “undue financial burden” if the child leaves the school district.

Daniel Willingham:

When I was first getting into education research (about 2005) I was surprised to find how many people–teachers and others–assumed that there was scientific evidence supporting learning styles. In 2009 I made a 7 minute video arguing that this evidence is lacking. (You can see the video here). In 2010, with Cedar Riener, I wrote an article for Change magazine on the topic.
Mostly because of the video I get a lot of emails about learning styles, so I thought it might be useful to post Frequently Asked Questions, along with my answers.
How can you not believe that that people learn differently? Isn’t it obvious?
People do learn differently, but I think it is very important to say exactly how they learn differently, and focus our attention on those differences that really matter. If learning styles were obviously right it would be easy to observe evidence for them in experiments. Yet there is no supporting evidence. There are differences among kids that both seem obvious to us and for which evidence is easily obtained in experiments, e.g., that people differ in their interests, that students vary in how much they think of schoolwork as part of their identity (“I’m the kind of kid who works hard in school”) and that kids differ in what they already know at the start of a lesson. All three of these have sizable, easily observed effects on learning. I think that often when people believe that they observe obvious evidence for learning styles, they are mistaking it for ability.
That sounds like an unimportant difference in semantics. What does it matter?
The idea that people differ in ability is not controversial–everyone agrees with that. Some people are good at dealing with space, some people have a good ear for music, etc. So the idea of “style” really ought to mean something different. If it just means ability, there’s not much point in adding the new term. (Some of the other style distinctions could be matters of ability too: some people might be good at keeping track of details, whereas others are good at grasping the big picture. I don’t know if they’ve been studied that way.)

Jeremy Kun:

As a teacher I encounter all of the typical kinds of students. There’s one kind of student I routinely encounter, usually in a freshman calculus course, that really boils my blood: the failing student who “has always been good at math.”
Oh it’s so annoying! And it’s even worse to hear because the stuff we teach in calculus isn’t really math either. The irony is so thick in the air when a student says it I’m surprised I don’t cough. Invariably, they never actually understood the “math” they were always so good at.
Of course, the problem is deeper than a handful of students who accidentally say ironically stupid things. The problem is that American high school students are taught something named “math” for four years which is not even close to math.

Erin Richards:

The Kenosha teachers union says dues automatically will be deducted from teacher paychecks starting later this month — a move that critics call a blatant violation of a 2011 law limiting collective bargaining.
But a leading Kenosha Unified School District administrator said Tuesday that’s not true — the district will only deduct dues of employees who wish to be union members and have signed a voluntary wage deduction form.
The contradictory messages are the latest of several confusing developments in the state’s third largest school district. They stem from a collective bargaining agreement the School Board signed with the teachers union in November, despite the collective bargaining limits for public workers known as Act 10. The legality of that contract is being challenged in a lawsuit by a former and current Kenosha teacher and two conservative groups.
“We are an enigma,” Kristi Lacroix, a former Kenosha teacher involved in the lawsuit, said of the district.

Barry Topol, John Olson, and Ed Roeber (PDF):

Education experts agree that the next generation of assessments (such as those being developed by the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) in response to the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS)) need to do a better job of measuring deeper learning to determine if students are acquiring those skills critical to success in the 21st century.
Existing assessments tend to emphasize “bubble in” multiple choice type questions because they are easier, more timely and cheaper to score. However, multiple choice questions do not provide as good a measure of critical thinking skills as performance type questions, in which students are asked to read a passage or passages and present an argument based on synthesizing the information they have read. The answers to these performance type questions tend to be scored by humans, which is a time intensive and expensive process.
While some discussion about finding ways to increase the amount of
money spent on state assessment systems overall has begun, at least for the near future, states only appear to be able to spend roughly what they spend today for new summative assessments. Therefore, the question is, can the next generation of assessments be designed to better measure student critical thinking skills while costing roughly the same amount as states spend today (about $25 per student)?

Pat Schneider:

The Madison Metropolitan School District has an image problem with teachers of color, says a consultant who recommends using the district’s mission of creating an environment where all students thrive to recruit a more diverse workforce.
The number of minority teachers in the district, while growing, is not keeping pace with the growing proportion of minority students, consultant Monica Rosen told Madison School Board members Monday.
“You’ll never catch up at the rate you’re going. I think there needs to be something more aggressive,” said Rosen, a partner in the national firm Cross & Joftus.
The gap between the number of students of color and the number of teachers of color has been brought into sharp focus as the school district works to close a persistent academic achievement gap between students of color and their white classmates.
A leader in the African-American community in November filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, charging that the district was discriminating against people of color in its hiring.
And nearly all the school district personnel interviewed as part of Cross & Joftus’ review mentioned their own concerns about the lack of diversity among school district staff, Rosen reported.

Noah Berlatsky:

My son has been doing martial arts for a couple of years now. He likes it for the most part–he just graduated to a level where he gets to learn how to fight with sticks, which is, he thinks, pretty great. So I was a little surprised when, chatting with him about it the other day, he informed me with some deliberation that he figured he would quit at some point. “I’ll get bored,” he said. “I’ll definitely quit eventually.”
There’s no need to borrow trouble, so I didn’t push him on it. But I know that, after all the work he’s put into it, if he comes to me some day and says he wants to quit, I will look him in the eye and say something along the lines of, “Okay. If that’s what you want, we’ll quit.”
Probably a lot of folks think that’s not the best tack to take–even as I type I can see the silent, judgy pursing of lips. I’ve talked about this here before in terms of adults quitting the workforce, but the stigma against quitting can be even more iron-bound with kids. American parents (or at least middle-class American parents) frown on giving up willy-nilly just because you’re bored. How will you ever overcome hardship if you just give up when the going gets hard? we ask. As Delia Lloyd says in a recent piece at Brain, Child, “There’s a real value in old-fashioned perseverance. And with all the talk of ‘life skills’ these days, I don’t think it’s a bad idea for children to start learning the value of commitment early on, even when they find something onerous.”

Gillian Tett:

Are you middle class? A decade ago, that question was of greatest interest to sociologists – or snobs. Now it is political dynamite.
Last month the Pew Research Center released a survey which showed that the proportion of Americans who consider themselves “middle class” has been shrinking sharply, as median incomes have stalled. Back in 2008, or just as the financial crisis hit, the ratio apparently stood at 53 per cent. Now it is just 44 per cent.
And that is not because Americans are rising in self-confidence: just 15 per cent define themselves as upper class, down from 21 per cent in 2008. The real problem is that two-thirds of Americans think (quite correctly) that the gap between rich and poor is widening – and that they themselves are sinking: 40 per cent of people now define themselves as lower class, compared with 25 per cent previously.
This is startling. It helps to explain why the phrase “middle class” is now creating such political anxiety. When Barack Obama presented his recent State of the Union address, for example, he billed it as “a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class, and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class”. And it is not just an American problem. In the UK, David Cameron keeps tossing the “m” word around, following in the wake of Ed Miliband, who recently insisted: “I know our country cannot succeed and become collectively better off without a strong and vibrant middle class . . . [we must] rebuild our middle class.”

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

Rights granted to an employee by the Union’s Contract are among the most important conditions of one’s employment. Those represented by MTI, in each of MTI’s five bargaining units, have numerous protections based on SENIORITY. Whether it is protection from involuntary transfer, being declared “surplus” or above staff requirements, or layoff, SENIORITY is the factor that limits and controls management’s action. Because of SENIORITY rights guaranteed by the Union’s Contract, the employer cannot pick the junior employee simply because he/she is paid less.
Making such judgments based on one’s SENIORITY may seem like common sense and basic human decency, but it is MTI’s Contract that assures it. Governor Walker’s Act 10 destroys these protections. MTI is working to preserve them.

Doug Erickson:

Bruce Dahmen, the steady-handed principal of Madison Memorial High School, began every school day in the commons area, coffee cup in hand, greeting students. He’d stick around long enough to gently quiz the latecomers.
“What’s going on in your life?” he’d ask them. “Is there anything we can do to help you?”
Dahmen, who died Tuesday at age 61, treated every student as worthy of attention and respect, colleagues and friends said. It was a trait that endeared him to an age group not always enthralled with authority figures.
“Mr. Dahmen had this quote, ‘Make good decisions,’ and as high-schoolers, you wouldn’t believe in a million years we’d actually listen to an administrator,” said senior Jeremy Gartland, 17. “But we did, because we knew he wasn’t scolding us. He genuinely cared for us.”
Dahmen understood Memorial like few others — he started his career there as a student teacher in 1974 and never left. He served as a father figure to many students, and it was in that role that he and his wife, Peggi, an administrative assistant at Memorial, found themselves in Knoxville, Tenn., on Tuesday.

Vanessa Romo:

In an abbreviated day of testimony in the trial Vergara v. CA, a suit that is challenging teacher dismissal laws in California, Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu heard from two witnesses who described their personal disappointments with California’s public education system and the laws regulating teacher employment.
Testifying on behalf of the plaintiffs, Kareem Weaver, an award winning teacher and principal from the Oakland Unified School District, talked about his belief that minority students can ill afford exposure to grossly ineffective teachers.
An African-American who grew up in the Bay Area and was raised by a drug addicted father, Weaver broke down in tears, recounting the challenges he sees minority students facing.
“Low-income students of color are the most vulnerable population,” he said, before putting his face in his hands.
He told the court how many minority students grow up on a “razor-thin margin of error,” where educational experience can make a huge difference.
“It either props them up or blows them down,” he said, adding that the slightest external factor can “determine how you will engage with learning for the rest of your life.” And having a high quality teacher, he said, can be pivotal.
Weaver’s testimony was so impassioned, plaintiffs’ attorney Marcellus McRae, who was questioning him, also became emotional. At one point, McRae stepped into an alcove just off the court room to regain his composure.

Benjamin Ginsberg:

In 2011, I published The Fall of the Faculty pointing to the problem of accelerating administrative bloat at America’s colleges and universities. The book’s reception exceeded my expectations with professors throughout the United States (as well as Canada and Europe) writing to me with stories of mismanagement, administrative incompetence, bureaucratic waste and fraud and the sheer arrogance and stupidity of their administrators. Many letter writers declared that I must have done my research on their campuses since everything I described had happened there. Others declared that my examples were not extreme enough and offered stories from their own schools that often topped mine.
Everywhere, it seems, legions of administrators are engaged in strategic planning, endlessly rewriting the school mission statement, and “rebranding” their campus. All these activities waste enormous amounts of time, require hiring thousands of new deanlets and, more often than not, involve the services of expensive consultants. This rebranding business is so foolish that it is difficult even to caricature. With the help of consultants, the University of Chicago School of Medicine rebranded itself “Chicago Medicine,” while my own university’s medical school rebranded itself “Hopkins Medicine.” I hope these new brands came with consultants’ warranties. I have a feeling that the next group of administrators will want to introduce their own brands after, that is, rewriting their schools’ mission statement.
– See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2014/02/can_we_halt_administrative_blo.html#sthash.qYCULQq6.dpuf

Pamela Cotant:

Nathan Altmann, who earned a scholarship recognizing his perseverance, plans to become a high school teacher in hopes of inspiring other students.
The Sun Prairie High School senior was one of 10 Wisconsin students to receive a 2014 Horatio Alger State Scholarship, which recognizes students who exhibit commitment to continuing their education and serving their communities in the face of adversity. Another area winner is Mary Caroline Tilton of Beaver Dam, who attends Pius XI High School in Milwaukee.
Nathan plans to use the scholarship toward his effort to obtain a degree in music education from UW-Eau Claire and become a high school band teacher.

Rebecca Schuman:

Seems sometimes like every week is a bad week for higher education. Last week was no different: First came news of the University of Akron threatening to shutter 55 degree programs–you know, frivolous ones, like elementary education–broken on the heels of comments by the school’s vice provost, Rex Ramsier, that if his institution stopped using underpaid adjunct labor, it would have to raise tuition 40 percent.
Meanwhile, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting reveals that Ramsier, his six-figure salary, and the adjuncts he loves to impugn are business as usual. According to the report, since 1987, the number of administrators and other nonteaching employees at colleges nationwide more than doubled, “vastly outpacing” growth of not just faculty, but students. So, another week, another set of woes about which I can cry foul, and then get a bunch of condescending responses about supply and demand, as if I have never heard of such a thing.

Danny Westneat:

The good news first: There are no more kids living at Seattle’s shantytown, the Nickelsville encampment in the Central Area.
“We got the last ones out, finally,” says the woman who set up the camp on South Jackson Street, Sharon Lee of the Low Income Housing Institute.
When she opened the temporary camp, Lee figured it would draw mostly single adults — “hardy people” who are used to camping outside. But she was bowled over when up to 15 kids, some as young as 3, were living there at one time in the fall.
The homeless newspaper Real Change dubbed it “Nickelsville Elementary.” I wrote in December about how kids living in unheated shacks was apparently now accepted in Seattle because a school bus stopped there each day, as if it were just another cul-de-sac.
Plenty of people offered to help with clothing or supplies, which was much appreciated. But it wasn’t what these kids needed most: a heated place to sleep.

Erica Barnett:

The city council hosted national experts on pre-kindergarten education this morning, getting an earful about the benefits of universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds. The council’s Education and Governance committee, headed up by council president Tim Burgess, is looking at options to pay for a voluntary universal pre-K program for Seattle kids; it’s unclear whether funding that program would require a ballot measure or if it could be paid for through the city’s general fund.
Burgess predicts paying for preschool for all (or at least many–the program will be voluntary) of the city’s 12,000-plus three- and four-year-olds, only about two-thirds of whom are currently in preschool, will require a ballot initiative (Seattle’s preferred way of paying for critical needs like parks, libraries, early-childhood education, and now, possibly, preschool).
“It is a significant amount of money,” Burgess says, although he adds that he doesn’t know exactly how much. “One question is, could we start in year one or year two with just general fund money?”
Dr. Hiro Yoshikawa, from NYU, pointed to a study of universally available preschool in Tulsa, OK that showed that the city saved $3 for every dollar it spent on preschool–a program NPR’s show Planet Money highlighted in its show “Why Preschool Can Save the World” last year.
“When you look at that facts in every city in the U.S. and then you look at the powerful combination of the neuroscientific and the economic evidence that brain architecture is built in the first years of life… if you don’t build the foundational skills in the first years of entry, you lose the ability of children to obtain basic skills,” Yoshikawa said.
Among the researchers’ conclusions:

Gallup:

Although scores on Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index improved in most U.S. states in 2013, the index remained negative in all 50. Only the District of Columbia had a positive index. Indexes were least negative in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and California. They were most negative in West Virginia, followed by Alaska.

Lucy Kellaway:

Ten days ago my husband went to a reunion at Eton College for the leavers of 1974. About 150 men crowded into the 15th-century chapel to belt out a quick “Praise my Soul the King of Heaven” before settling down to eat, drink and reminisce about schoolboy pranks while quietly trying to work out who had done best in the 40 years since then.
Afterwards he made two observations. The first was how good they all looked. These men, blessed by breeding, education and money, still look at 57 and 58 easily recognisable as their teenage selves.
The second was how relatively undistinguished their careers had turned out to be. Apart from one senior politician and one former newspaper editor, they were a middling group of lawyers, property investors and fund managers, rich by national standards, but disappointing if you consider their start in life. They arrived at that school at 13, clever and mostly from wealthy families, to spend five years wearing tailcoats and becoming members of one of the world’s most elite networks. Yet there they were, in their prime, and it had amounted to not very much at all.
His observation turns on its head the usual complaint about Eton – that it is an exclusive club of men who run the country. It is true there is currently a trinity of Etonians in power, as prime minister, mayor of London and Archbishop of Canterbury. But they are the exceptions to a more surprising rule that Eton is a club of men born to do great things but who increasingly fail to do anything much at all.

Michael Bastedo & Ozan Jaquette:

The increasing concentration of wealthy students at highly selective colleges is widely perceived, but few analyses examine the underlying dynamics of higher education stratification over time. To examine these dynamics, the authors build an analysis data set of four cohorts from 1972 to 2004. They find that low-income students have made substantial gains in their academic course achievements since the 1970s. Nonetheless, wealthier students have made even stronger gains in achievement over the same period, in both courses and test scores, ensuring a competitive advantage in the market for selective college admissions. Thus, even if low-income students were “perfectly matched” to institutions consistent with their academic achievements, the stratification order would remain largely unchanged. The authors consider organizational and policy interventions that may reverse these trends

via a kind reader. “People are really bad at math” (the last 4 minutes discuss Wisconsin’s weak cut scores).
Related: A Critique of the Wisconsin DPI (creator of the oft-criticized WKCE) and Proposed School Choice Changes.

John Cochrane:

Yet, for the moment, the market price is “free.” That leads to a bit of conundrum — big expensive ongoing fixed costs to produce something that we give away? How will we “monetize” it? What will the economic model be, and how will moocs change the higher education market?
The grumpy response to moocs: When Gutenberg invented moveable type, universities reacted in horror. “They’ll just read the textbook. Nobody will come to lectures anymore!” It didn’t happen. Why should we worry now?
As Alex pointed out, there is a good analogy between textbook publishing and mooc creation — high fixed, low marginal cost (now zero for textbooks too). It leads to superstars with established brand names taking over the market, and Alex speculated that publishers will know how to recover costs.
A lot of mooc is, in fact, a modern textbook — because the twitter generation does not read. Forcing my campus students to watch the lecture videos and answer some simple quiz questions, covering the basic expository material, before coming to class — all checked and graded electronically — worked wonders to produce well prepared students and a brilliant level of discussion. Several students commented that the video lectures were better than the real thing, because they could stop and rewind as necessary. The “flipped classroom” model works.

David Will:

It’s time for a large number of Americans to hear what might seem like a harsh message: A degree from a four-year university might not be for you. Popular culture would cast this frank assessment as elitist. But that’s a toxic myth that needs to vanish because the stakes are too high. A new study by Young Invincibles, a think tank geared toward issues facing young Americans, estimates that high youth unemployment costs the government about $25 billion in lost tax revenue. All the while, there are three million jobs that employers can’t fill because too many workers lack the requisite skills.
Policymakers and university administrators have admirably worked to expand access to college over the past several decades. In terms of enrollment rates, their efforts have been successful — matriculation increased by thirty seven percent between 2000 and 2010. So, the good news is that we’re getting young adults on campus. But we are profoundly failing them as a country after that; America’s graduation rate sits at an abysmal 53 percent, including community colleges. This disparity betrays a critical disconnect, one not discussed often enough — that a large swath of those lured to college should never have attended.

Richard Rusczyk:

You love math and want to learn more. But you’re in ninth grade and you’ve already taken nearly all the math classes your school offers. They were all pretty easy for you and you’re ready for a greater challenge. What now? You’ll probably go to the local community college or university and take the next class in the core college curriculum. Chances are, you’ve just stepped in the calculus trap.
For an avid student with great skill in mathematics, rushing through the standard curriculum is not the best answer. That student who breezed unchallenged through algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, will breeze through calculus, too. This is not to say that high school students should not learn calculus – they should. But more importantly, the gifted, interested student should be exposed to mathematics outside the core curriculum, because the standard curriculum is not designed for the top students. This is even, if not especially, true for the core calculus curriculum found at most high schools, community colleges, and universities.
Developing a broader understanding of mathematics and problem solving forms a foundation upon which knowledge of advanced mathematical and scientific concepts can be built. Curricular classes do not prepare students for the leap from the usual ‘one step and done’ problems to multi-step, multi-discipline problems they will face later on. That transition is smoothed by exposing students to complex problems in simpler areas of study, such as basic number theory or geometry, rather than giving them their first taste of complicated arguments when they’re learning a more advanced subject like group theory or the calculus of complex variables. The primary difference is that the curricular education is designed to give students many tools to apply to straightforward specific problems. Rather than learning more and more tools, avid students are better off learning how to take tools they have and apply them to complex problems. Then later, when they learn the more advanced tools of curricular education, applying them to even more complicated problems will come more easily.

Peter Gray:

I’m a research bio-psychologist with a PhD, so I’ve done lots of school. I’m a pretty good problem-solver, in my work and in the rest of my life, but that has little to do with the schooling I’ve had. I studied algebra, trig, calculus and various other maths in school, but I can’t recall ever facing a problem – even in my scientific research – that required those skills. What maths I’ve used was highly specialised and, as with most scientists, I learnt it on the job.
The real problems I’ve faced in life include physical ones (such as how to operate a newfangled machine at work or unblock the toilet at home), social ones (how to get that perfect woman to be interested in me), moral ones (whether to give a passing grade to a student, for effort, though he failed all the tests), and emotional ones (coping with grief when my first wife died or keeping my head when I fell through the ice while pond skating). Most problems in life cannot be solved with formulae or memorised answers of the type learnt in school. They require the judgement, wisdom and creative ability that come from life experiences. For children, those experiences are embedded in play.

Kim Metcalf:

A child who grows up in Nevada has less chance for adult success than a child growing up anywhere else in the United States.
Let that sink in for a moment. Of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the average (actually median) child whose family has chosen to live in Nevada has less chance of future success than the child of a family living anywhere else in the country — less chance than a child in Mississippi or Alabama or inner city Washington, D.C.
Of 51 places in the country to raise a child, Nevada comes in at 51st. This is the conclusion of “Quality Counts,” a national study conducted by Education Week and released recently. Just after the Sun printed its piece on the report, headlined “Report says Nevada schools again worst in nation for giving children a chance for success” (Jan. 9), I began receiving questions from disturbed educators, policymakers, parents, journalists and others about the study. How bad must the quality of education in Nevada really be? What should CCSD do to improve these horrible results? What could the College of Education do to address the poor chances of success for Nevada’s children? Most cogently: What does the report really tell us and what needs to be done?

Wisconsin State Journal:

The school accountability bill still boils down to what Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, said last fall:
“If you get a check, you get a checkup,” the chairman of the Senate Education Committee succinctly stated.
It’s taken awhile, but consensus on this point has emerged at the state Capitol.
Gov. Scott Walker has expressed similar sentiments for a long time. So did Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, last week during a meeting with the State Journal editorial board.
So let’s get it done.
Sen. Paul Farrow, R-Pewaukee, appears to have the simplest idea that’s easiest to pass. He plans to introduce a bill this week to ensure all traditional public, charter and private voucher schools are reporting student information to the state, including results of a new state test in spring 2015.
Farrow is willing to add consequences for low-performing schools through subsequent legislation next session. That would be in time for state report cards in 2015, which seems reasonable.

Barry Schwabsky:

I once had this girlfriend who was an artist. We used to go to galleries and see shows together. Sometimes when she looked at a piece she would say, “Oh, that’s something I did in art school.” After a while it dawned on me that a lot of what she dismissed as student exercises–gambits she figured she’d outgrown–were things I liked. I started to think that she had inadvertently taught me, if not a definition of good art, then at least a kind of rule of thumb for identifying it in the field: if you make art in ways that other artists would have considered disposable exercises–Wittgensteinian ladders to be tossed aside once ascended–then you are getting somewhere with your art.
Later, I came to realize that I shouldn’t have been surprised how much “real” art has in common with art school exercises. As the art historian Howard Singerman pointed out in his invaluable and deeply humane book, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999), the purpose of the contemporary art school is not so much to teach students how to make art as to show them how to be artists. Singerman, who went to art school himself before changing direction and opting for the life of a scholar, recalls that “in one assignment we were asked to invent an artist of another type than we imagined ourselves to be–since we were to know ourselves as types–and then to produce an oeuvre, to make slides and do the talk, to model a speech or slouch.” Fernando Pessoa meets Lee Strasberg: that assignment stands in for all others insofar as each of them requires the student to take a certain distance from her presumably naïve pre-art-school self and any unexamined sense of an artist’s life. “Whatever has called a student to enter the department,” Singerman points out, be it a “love of past art, an excitement about the process of creation, a desire for personal growth, the ability to draw,” the instruction the student receives is intended to demonstrate that none of these are sufficient or possibly even necessary to being an artist. “Among the tasks of the university program in art is to separate its artists and the art world in which they will operate from ‘amateurs’ or ‘Sunday painters,’ as well as from a definition of the artist grounded in manual skill, tortured genius, or recreational pleasure.”

Sippican Cottage:

My wife and I teach our children at home. My wife does 99 percent of it. I teach the kids music as best I can. We’ve had good success with it. Our older son is now college age. He’s not attending college. He doesn’t want to become anything that requires credentials that are the result of attending college — you know: doctor, lawyer, engineer. He wants to be a musician of some stripe. You can go to college to be a music teacher in a public school, or play in a symphony orchestra, but other than that, a diploma is superfluous. You just have to know how to play. He’s like a monk right now. He doesn’t do anything except work on music and shovel the driveway. No college would be as intensive.
The little one is just ten. He doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. I’m still trying to decide what to do with mine, so I don’t judge. He’s recently become enamored of the idea of opening up his own restaurant. He says he wants to call it “The Meat Shelter.” Catchy, that; but there’s something about it that makes me wonder if he might abandon that line of thinking before he starts shaving. Little boys are interested in all sorts of things.
He already plays the drums. He plays the drums like an adult. He plays the drums for money. He and his brother call themselves Unorganized Hancock. They are very likely the most famous persons currently residing in the town we live in, but no one here knows that. You can watch the boys playing Crooked Teeth at the New Musical Express website if you like. They’ve sold copies, on two continents, of music they composed and recorded themselves, which makes them INTERNATIONAL RECORDING ARTISTS. Snicker.

Tom Hoopes:

John Karr isn’t a priest. He’s a teacher.
Most teachers are dedicated, hard-working people who wouldn’t dream of hurting a child. The same is true of priests.
If the suspect in the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey were a priest, there would be a fresh outcry about a decades-long cover-up in the Catholic Church. Commentators from Left and Right would rightly unite in decrying the crisis and the entrenched complacency that led to it. Catholic pundits would take a special relish in pointing out that they agree: The Church had better get its act together.
Any institution that has allowed children to be harmed by predators deserves to be taken to task for it. No institution should get a pass. And no profession should get a pass. Not preachers, not priests — not even teachers.
Especially not teachers. And yet …

Blake Farmer:

Pretty soon, going to community college in Tennessee may become absolutely free. Republican Gov. Bill Haslam unveiled the proposal in his annual State of the State address this week.
Haslam is trying to lift Tennessee’s ranking as one of the least-educated states. Less than a third of residents have even a two-year degree. But a community college free-for-all has been tried elsewhere, though not sustained, and there’s always a nagging question.
“So I know you’re wondering,” Haslam said. “How do we pay for this?”
Haslam told state lawmakers he’ll tap into a mound of excess cash generated by the state’s lottery. Roughly $300 million would go into an endowment. The returns would pay to send high school seniors without other scholarships to community college.
“Net cost to the state, zero. Net impact on our future? Priceless,” he said to a round of applause. It’s an effective one-liner that’s been praised by education leaders and students.

ericson:

The following file has 3 sheets with detailed data by race and gender. The first sheet is from 2006 to 2013 for selected states. The second sheet is the race and gender information for every state for 2013. The third sheet is the race and gender information for every state for 2012.
DetailedStateInfoAP-CS-A-2006-2013-with-PercentBlackAndHIspanicByState.xlsx
This data was compiled from the data from the College Board at https://apcourseaudit.epiconline.org/ledger/ and http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/ap/data/archived.

Jordan Ellenberg:

Last month at MIT, mathematician Grigori Perelman delivered a series of lectures with the innocuous title “Ricci Flow and Geometrization of Three-Manifolds.” In the unassuming social universe of mathematics, the equally apt title “I Claim To Be the Winner of a Million-Dollar Prize” would have been considered a bit much. Perelman claims to have proved Thurston’s geometrization conjecture, a daring assertion about three-dimensional spaces that implies, among other things, the truth of the century-old Poincaré conjecture. And it’s the Poincaré conjecture that, courtesy of the Clay Foundation, carries a million-dollar bounty. If Perelman is correct–and many in the field would bet his way–he’s made a major and unexpected breakthrough, brilliantly using the tools of one field to attack a problem in another.
There’s only one problem with this story. Perelman is almost 40 years old.
In most people’s minds, a 40-year-old man is as likely to be a productive mathematician as he is to be a major league center fielder or an interesting rock musician. Mathematical progress is supposed to occur not through decades of experience and toil but all at once, in a numinous blaze, to a born genius. Think of the young John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, discovering the Nash equilibrium in a smoky bar where his less precocious classmates think they’re just picking up coeds, or the aged mathematician in Proof who “revolutionized the field twice before he was twenty-two.”
It’s not hard to see where the stereotype comes from; the history of mathematics is strewn with brilliant young corpses. Evariste Galois, Gotthold Eisenstein, and Niels Abel–mathematicians of such rare importance that their names, like Kafka’s, have become adjectives–were all dead by 30. Galois laid down the foundations of modern algebra as a teenager, with enough spare time left over to become a well-known political radical, serve a nine-month jail sentence, and launch an affair with the prison medic’s daughter; in connection with this last, he was killed in a duel at the age of 21. The British number theorist G.H. Hardy, in A Mathematician’s Apology, one of the most widely read books about the nature and practice of mathematics, famously wrote: “No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game.”

Nora Caplan-Bricker:

It’s common knowledge that the United States is miles behind other developed countries in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education, and that our economy suffers from, as Bill Gates has put it, “a severe shortfall of scientists and engineers with expertise to develop the next generation of breakthroughs.” And we also know that the humanities are in a downward slide, in part because they’ve been eclipsed by the dire need to focus on STEM. In the towers of higher education and the annals of our culture, we debate which discipline needs our hand-wringing the most.
If a recent feature in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ magazine, Spectrum, is to be believed, there’s no debate to be had: “The STEM Crisis Is a Myth” advances a convincing case that the U.S. is graduating more than enough scientists and mathematicians to satisfy the demands of its workforce. If this is true, it undermines the arms-race rhetoric pouring out of universities–and, more importantly, out of the federal government–about STEM education. In a speech this April, President Barack Obama said our future depends on “lifting up these subjects for the respect that they deserve,” and his proposed 2014 budget pledged another $3.1 billion to STEM schooling. If the sciences are not “in crisis,” but are in fact doing just fine, it begs the question: Why are we spending so much to revive them?

In the United States, our media are not allowed to report on or discuss exemplary student academic achievement at the high school level. For example, in the “Athens of America,” The Boston Globe has more than 150 full pages each year on the accomplishments of high school athletes, but only one page a year on academics–a full page with the photographs of valedictorians at the public high schools in the city, giving their name, their school, their country of origin (often 40% foreign-born) and the college they will be going to.
The reasons for this media blackout on good academic work by students at the secondary level are not clear, apart from tradition, but while high school athletes who “sign with” a particular college are celebrated in the local paper, and even on televised national high school games, the names of Intel Science Talent Search winners, of authors published in The Concord Review, and of other accomplished high school scholars may not appear in the paper or on television.
Publicity offers encouragement for the sorts of efforts we would like our HS students to make. We naturally publicize high school athletic achievements and this helps to motivate athletes to engage in sports. By contrast, when it comes to good academic work, we don’t mention it, so perhaps we want less of it?
One senior high school history teacher has written that “We actually hide academic excellence from the public eye because that will single out some students and make others ‘feel bad.'”
Does revealing excellence by high school athletes make some other athletes or scholar-athletes or high school scholars feel bad? How can we tolerate that? I know there are some Progressive secondary schools which have eliminated academic prizes and honors, to spare the feelings of the students who don’t get them, but I don’t see that they have stopped keeping score in school games, no matter how the losers in those contests may feel.
SAMPLE MEDIA COVERAGE OF HS ATHLETES
Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Signing Day Central–By Michael Carvell
11:02 am Wednesday, February 5th, 2014
“Welcome to the AJC’s Signing day Day Central. This is the place to be to catch up with all the recruiting information with UGA, Georgia Tech and recruits from the state of Georgia. We will update the news as it happens, and interact on the message board below.
University of Georgia’s TOP TARGETS FOR WEDNESDAY…AND RESULTS
Lorenzo Carter, DE, 6-5, 240, Norcross: UGA reeled in the big fish, landing the state’s No.1 overall prospect for the first time since 2011 (Josh Harvey-Clemons). Isaiah McKenzie, WR, 5-8, 175, Ft. Lauderdale (Fla.) American Heritage: This was one of two big surprises for UGA to kick off signing day. McKenzie got a last-minute offer from UGA and picked the Bulldogs because of his best buddy and high school teammate, 5-star Sony Michel (signed with UGA). Hunter Atkinson, TE, 6-6, 250, West Hall: The Cincinnati commit got a last-minute call from Mark Richt and flipped to UGA. I’m not going to say we saw it coming, but … Atkinson had grayshirt offers from Alabama, Auburn and UCF. Tavon Ross, S, 6-1, 200, Bleckley County: The Missouri commit took an official visit to UGA but decided to stick with Missouri. He’s signed. Andrew Williams, DE, 6-4, 247, ECLA: He signed with Auburn over Clemson and Auburn. He joked with Auburn’s Gus Malzahn when he called with the news, saying “I’m sorry to inform you….. That I will be attending your school,” according to 247sports.com’s Kipp Adams. Tyre McCants, WR-DB, 5-11, 200, Niceville, Fla.: Turned down late interest from UGA to sign with USF.”
This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, of course, in the coverage of high school athletes that goes on during the year. I hope readers will email me any comparable examples of the celebration of exemplary high school academic work that they can find in the media in their community, or in the nation generally.

Matthew DeFour:

Assembly lawmakers want to change report cards for public, charter and private voucher schools and force poorly performing public schools to close or convert to charter schools.
They also want to create a politically appointed council to advise the Department of Public Instruction on the best formula for determining report card scores.
The nine-member council would be led by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. The governor, Senate president and Assembly speaker would each appoint two members and the Assembly and Senate minority leaders would each appoint one member, none of whom would be legislators.
But Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said Friday there isn’t support for such sweeping reforms of the accountability system this session, though there may be support for a narrower bill being developed by Sen. Paul Farrow, R-Pewaukee.
Farrow said he plans to introduce a bill next week that would ensure all public, charter and private voucher schools are reporting student information to the state, including results of a new state test in spring 2015.
Farrow said he wants to seek input from interested groups about possible changes to the accountability system, including consequences for low-performing schools, that could be enacted next session in time for the report card in fall 2015.

Alan Borsuk:

“Our Schools! Our Solutions!”
In eye-catching orange and white, banners and buttons proclaiming that slogan have been showing up in the last several weeks, generally in the hands or on the clothes of members and allies of the Milwaukee teachers union.
It is their four-word proclamation of opposition to plans floated (but so far, not going forward) in Milwaukee and Madison that would make it likely that some low-performing schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system would be turned over to non-MPS charter school operators.
I find the slogan intriguing on several levels.
Level One: It is part of the energetic work leaders of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association and the Wisconsin Education Association Council, which has been involved in the campaign, are doing to try to remain relevant. Act 10, the 2011 legislation spurred by Gov. Scott Walker, stripped public employee unions of almost all their power over money and benefits, work conditions and school policies.
What’s left? That’s a challenging question for union leaders. Membership has fallen, political influence has fallen. Leaders of many school districts statewide are working with what remains of unions in more cooperative ways than I expected three years ago, but it is clear who has the upper hand.
In Milwaukee, the MTEA has reduced its staff and spending, but remains visible, active, and, in some cases, influential. The majority of the School Board is generally inclined toward the union.

Tanner Colby

“There is no place in the movement for the white liberal. He is our affliction.”–James Baldwin
Five years ago, while fervently supporting the candidacy of the man who would become America’s first black president, I came to the realization that I didn’t actually know any black people. Most of the people I did know (i.e., other white people) didn’t know many black people either. One, maybe two, was the norm. I asked one white guy I knew if he had any black friends, and he replied, “You mean ones that aren’t on television?”
I wanted to know why integration–actual, genuine integration–had failed so spectacularly. The result of that curiosity, published a little more than a year ago, was Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America, which traced the history of the color line back through all the places I have lived and chronicled the various efforts to erase it: school busing, affirmative action, fair housing, etc. Recently, I celebrated my one-year anniversary as an official participant in the National Conversation About Race–writing bits for Slate, speaking at colleges, and sitting on panels moderated by Soledad O’Brien (which is how you really know you’ve made it).
As good as liberal policies on race sound in speeches, many of them don’t hold up in the real world.
When I started the book, after eight miserable years of George W. Bush and the euphoria of the Yes We Can crusade, I’d been driven pretty far left on the political spectrum. Taking on the issue of race, you’d think I’d have kept heading in that direction. But the more I read and researched, the more I went out and talked to people, I found that a funny thing was happening: I was becoming more conservative.

Pat Schneider:

“I’m an academic,” says Slekar, a Pittsburgh-area native whose mother and grandmother were elementary school teachers and who was a classroom teacher himself before earning a Ph.D. in curriculum from University of Maryland.
“I understand scholarship, I understand evidence, I understand the role of higher education in society,” he says. “When initiatives come through, if we have solid evidence that something is not a good idea, it’s really my job to come out and say that.”
Michael Apple, an internationally recognized education theorist and professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison agrees. In the face of conservative state legislators’ push to privatize public education, “it is part of my civic responsibility to say what is happening,” says Apple.
“In a society that sees corporations as having all the rights of people, by and large education is a private good, not a public good,” he says. “I need to defend the very idea of public schools.”
Both Apple and Julie Underwood, dean of the School of Education at UW-Madison, share Slekar’s concern over the systematic privatization of education and recognize a role for scholars in the public debate about it.
…
A wide-ranging, animated, sometimes loud conversation with Slekar includes familiar controversies hotly debated around the country and in the Wisconsin Capitol, like high-stakes testing, vouchers and Common Core standards. The evidence, Slekar says flatly, shows that none of it will work to improve student learning.
The reform initiatives are instead part of a corporate takeover of public education masquerading as reform that will harm low-income and minority students before spreading to the suburbs, says Slekar, in what he calls the civil rights issue of our time.
A 30-year attack has worked to erode the legitimacy of the public education system. And teachers are taking much of the blame for the stark findings of the data now pulled from classrooms, he says.
“We’re absolutely horrible at educating poor minority kids,” says Slekar. “We absolutely know that.”
But neither the so-called reformers, nor many more casual observers, want to talk about the real reason for the disparities in achievement, Slekar says, which is poverty.
“That’s not an excuse, it’s a diagnosis,” he says, quoting John Kuhn, a firebrand Texas superintendent and activist who, at a 2011 rally, suggested that instead of performance-based salaries for teachers, the nation institute merit pay for members of Congress.

Local Education school academics have long had interactions with the Madison School District. Former Superintendent Art Rainwater works in the UW-Madison School of Education.

Further, this 122 page pdf (3.9mb) includes contracts (not sure if it is complete) between the UW-Madison School of Education and the Madison School District between 2004 and 2008. Has this relationship improved achievement?
Related: Deja Vu? Education Experts to Review the Madison School District and When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

[The Prentice Hall Common Core literature textbook for the tenth grade:]
….Teachers may (or may not) ask interested students (two, four, or half a dozen?) to read a segment of the book (presumably a brief one only describing the monster) that will lead to two silly compare-and contrast-assignments, one involving “similar novels they have read.” (Have they read any? They haven’t read Frankenstein yet.) What about the students who are not “advanced readers”? What is being done to help them become better readers? And why should even the advanced readers read only a few pages out of this classic? What should students be doing if not reading Frankenstein?
According to the notes in the margins of the Teacher’s Edition, they should begin by offering to the class “classic examples of urban myths, tales of alien abductions, or ghost stories. (Examples include stories of alligators in the sewers, a man abducted for his kidneys, and aliens landing in Roswell, New Mexico).” (The word “classic” is being used very loosely.) To reinforce the findings of this “brainstorming activity,” students should also “write a paragraph based on one of these modern urban myths.” The class will also discuss Mary Shelley’s introduction in various ways. Helping out, Elizabeth McCracken offers several more “scholar’s insights,” including one informing us of another ghost story about a man who buried his murder victim at the base of a tree “only to find that the next year’s apples all had a clot of blood at the center of them.” On the following page, we learn that Elizabeth McCracken did read the book, which she found better than the movie because, she tells us, in the book the monster can actually talk. Teachers are prompted to ask students why they think the film version would choose to keep the monster silent. Since the class will not be diverted enough with all this talk of movies, the Teacher’s Edition also recommends that talented and gifted students “illustrate one aspect of Shelley’s imaginings that is especially Gothic in its mood” and “display their Gothic art to the rest of the class.”
Do the editors realize that all this extraneous discussion of monsters and ghosts only serves to preserve the silly Halloween caricature of Frankenstein? Apparently this caricature is what they want. On page 766, students are encouraged to “write a brief autobiography of a monster.” The editors point out that monster stories are usually told from the perspective of “the humans confronting the monster.” The editors of The British Tradition want to turn the tables and have students ask themselves “what monsters think about their treatment.” Now there’s a great exercise in multiculturalism! Those poor, misunderstood monsters. Thus, students are being asked to write a monster story. What good could come from this? Without reading the novel Frankenstein itself (which does in fact tell much of the story from the monster’s perspective), students have no way of knowing how human this Gothic tale really is. After a mere three and a half pages of Mary Shelley’s introduction, the book offers a series of questions under various headings: Critical Reading, Literary Analysis, and so forth. Some of these questions are steeped in two-bit literary criticism. Others require students to delve into the moral realms of science and creation. One is a question asking students to interpret a modern cartoon about Frankenstein–funny, but out of place in this literature book. Notwithstanding whether the questions are good or bad, the enterprise is as false as the worst Hollywood versions of Frankenstein. The questions offer the façade of learning without genuine learning having taken place. That is for a very simple reason. My wife, the former English teacher who recognizes pretense when she sees it, took one look at these pages and put it very simply:
“They (the editors) are requiring students to have opinions on something they know nothing about.”
Moore, Terrence (2013-11-29).
The Story-Killers: A Common-Sense Case Against the Common Core (pp. 176-177). Kindle Edition.
————————-
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Matthew Yglesias:

This disturbing article about a rich neighborhood of Baton Rouge, La., that wants to secede so it won’t have to share school funding with poorer neighborhoods reminds me of one of my great frustrations with the K-12 education policy debate–the terminology of “public schools.”
The way the word is used a school is “public” if it is owned by a government entity and thus part of the public sector. But a public school is by no means a school that’s open to the public in the sense that anyone can go there. Here in the District of Columbia anyone who wants to wander into a public park is free to do so (that’s what makes it public) but to send your kid to a good “public” elementary school in Ward 3 you have to live there. And thanks to exclusionary zoning, in practice if you want to live in Ward 3 you have to be rich. It wouldn’t be legal to respond to the very high price of land in the area by building homes on small lots, or building tall buildings full of small affordable apartments.
Since D.C. doesn’t have Louisiana’s political culture, Ward 3 generally doesn’t have a problem with its tax dollars subsidizing the schools in Wards 5, 7, and 8, but if you proposed randomly assigning students to schools to produce integrated instructional environments, you’d have an epic battle on your hands.

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.

Jennifer Gratz:

Since the passage of Proposition 209, California’s public colleges and universities have embraced real diversity on campus through race-neutral alternatives, such as accepting the top percentage of students at all high schools, using socioeconomic consideration in admissions, adding mentorship and outreach to underperforming schools, dropping legacy preferences and expanding need-based scholarships.
Although the share of underrepresented minorities in the UC system dropped from 20% before the ban to 18.6% in 1997, by 2008 it had rebounded to 25%, with an 18% rise in graduation rates among minorities. The numbers at the elite UC Berkeley and UCLA campuses have not fully recovered to pre-Proposition 209 numbers, but they have made considerable progress. Moreover, both were listed in U.S. News & World Report’s Economic Diversity Among the Top 25 Ranked Schools for the 2011-12 year, with the highest percentage of undergraduates receiving Pell grants.
This is precisely the kind of diversity improvement the court said in Fisher would preclude the reintroduction of race preferences.
My involvement with the issue of affirmative action began as a 19-year-old student when I sued the University of Michigan for using different admissions standards based on an applicant’s race. The Supreme Court eventually ruled in my favor in its 2003 Gratz vs. Bollinger decision, but it allowed more nuanced forms of racial policies to continue in a companion case. This split decision moved me to follow California’s example and spearhead a constitutional amendment similar to Proposition 209 in Michigan, which voters approved 58% to 42% in 2006. Since California’s bold step toward equal treatment, seven states have followed its lead.
The proposed changes for California are profound. Disguised as calls for equalizing opportunities and increasing diversity for better learning, these changes are a clear assault on equal protection in California. We are all individuals, with unique dreams, goals and experiences. Racial preferences empower government officials to divide us into categories, giving special treatment to some while discriminating against others, all on the basis of skin color or ethnicity. This is not how a civil society should treat its citizens.
There is no doubt that affirmative action policies began with the best of intentions: for people to be treated without regard to race. But they have turned into policies that instead encourage administrators and politicians to treat people differently based on skin color, creating new injustices with new victims. Treating people differently to make up for inequalities or create diversity only reinforces inequality and deepens racial division.

Madison Metropolitan School District 2013-2014 Budget Update 2 (PDF):

The allocation formulas and processes which determine school based staffing are proving to be one of the most important aspects of our zero-based budget process. During the past two months, we have documented current practice and created a ‘design team’ to review and propose ways to modify staff allocation practices. These efforts are helping to build a more unified ownership of the staff allocation process and better alignment between budget processes and instructional priorities.
The staff allocation process, indeed the budget development process as a whole, can be one of those invisible but rigid structures which make it hard for schools to align resources to best impact student learning. Consider the table below, which reports MMSD’s actual 2013-14 allocation of teaching staff at the elementary level:

Adam Grant

IT’S no secret that tenured professors cause problems in universities. Some choose to rest on their laurels, allowing their productivity to dwindle. Others develop tunnel vision about research, inflicting misery on students who suffer through their classes.
Despite these costs, tenure may be a necessary evil: It offers job security and intellectual freedom in exchange for lower pay than other occupations that require advanced degrees.
Instead of abolishing tenure, what if we restructured it? The heart of the problem is that we’ve combined two separate skill sets into a single job. We ask researchers to teach, and teachers to do research, even though these two capabilities have surprisingly little to do with each other. In a comprehensive analysis of data on more than half a million professors, the education experts John Hattie and Herbert Marsh found that “the relationship between teaching and research is zero.” In all fields and all kinds of colleges, there was little connection between research productivity and teaching ratings by students and peers.

Karthik Muralidharan & Venkatesh Sundararaman (PDF):

We find that private school teachers have lower levels of formal education and training than public-school teachers, and are paid much lower salaries. On the other hand, private schools have a longer school day, a longer school year, smaller class sizes, lower teacher absence, higher teaching activity, and better school hygiene. After two and four years of the program, we find no difference between the test scores of lottery winners and losers on math and Telugu (native language). However, private schools spend significantly less instructional time on these subjects, and use the extra time to teach more English, Science, Social Studies, and Hindi. Averaged across all subjects, lottery winners score 0.13 σhigher, and students who attend private schools score 0.23 σhigher. We find no evidence of spillovers on public-school students who do not apply for the voucher, or on students who start out in private schools to begin with, suggesting that the program had no adverse effects on these groups. Finally, the mean cost per student in the private schools in our sample is less than a third of the cost in public schools.
Our results suggest that private schools in this setting deliver (slightly) better test score gains than their public counterparts, and do so at substantially lower costs per student.

Mark Mazower:

Throughout the developed world, record levels of youth unemployment are spreading feelings of hopelessness across an entire generation. Yet what is striking is that policy makers hardly seem to care.
It is only part of the answer to observe that not everyone is suffering equally: for much of wealthy northern Europe, for instance, it hardly registers. And although it is true that in some of the badly affected countries the figures have been pretty high for several decades now, the crisis has made them much worse. The real problem is not economic; it is political. An epoch of some two centuries is ending, and the young are the main losers.
The rise of modern states coincided with a valorisation of youth. Napoleon marked the change. After him, age came to be associated with the ancien regime, youth with the hope of something better. Scarcely out of university, the great Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz, wrote his “Ode to Youth” in 1820, perhaps the best-known expression of this attitude. Founded a decade later, Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy generated endless spin-offs – there was a Young Germany and a Young Poland, not to mention Young Ottomans and later Young Turks. A radical umbrella group, Young Europe, briefly brought many of them together, turning the name of the continent into the emblem of a fairer, more peaceful and more brotherly age ahead. The contrast is striking with what Europe has now come to stand for – a vision dreamt up by old men, now out of touch and increasingly out of mind.

Karen Weintraub:

French researchers are testing a drug they hope will flip a chemical switch in the brains of children with autism.
If the switch isn’t flipped at birth, the brain remains overexcited and becomes vulnerable to injury – and that’s what a group of French researchers think happens in the brains of babies who go on to develop autism, according to a paper published today in the journal Science.
They hope that a drug they are testing in European children will make a crucial difference, allowing brain networks to develop more typically, said lead researcher Yehezkel Ben-Ari of the French Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, in Marseille, France.
Autism is a spectrum of social and communication differences and repetitive behaviors; symptoms range from social awkwardness to behavior problems and an inability to speak. The seeds of autism are believed to be laid during early pregnancy, from a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
The new paper showed that in rats and mice with a rodent form of autism the brain chemical GABA didn’t make its normal switch from stimulating electrical activity in the brain to tamping it down. When their pregnant mothers were given the drug, bumetanide, a generic diuretic long used to treat high blood pressure, the switch happened – and the rodents didn’t show autistic behaviors.

The Economist:

ONCE upon a time, it was common for scientists to receive letters from researchers working in other institutions, asking for reprints of papers they had published. It was the usual practice in those days for journal publishers to furnish authors with a couple of dozen such reprints, precisely for this purpose–but, if these had run out, a quick visit to the photocopier kept the wheels of scientific discourse turning, and though it was technically a violation of copyright, no one much minded.
Then, the world wide web was invented–initially, as it happens, with the intention of making it easier for scientists to share their results–and everything changed. Now, any scientist worth his grant has a website, and that site will often let the casual visitor download copies of its owner’s work. And, though it has taken a while, some publishers have decided they do mind about this–indeed one, Elsevier, based in the Netherlands, has been fighting back. It is using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), an American law that lets copyright holders demand the removal of anything posted online without their permission, to require individual scientists to eliminate from their websites papers published in its journals. In doing so it has stirred a hornets’ nest.

Liz Willien:

A word rarely uttered on college tours sits atop the website of St. Olaf, a small liberal-arts college south of Minneapolis with an annual estimated cost of $51,860.
Next to clickable categories about arts and athletics appears the unlikely word “outcomes.”
And if you click on the word, a headline materializes promising “The Return on Investing in a St. Olaf Education.”
A few more clicks and you can learn what becomes of graduates after four years on its sylvan campus along the Cannon River. For example: Where will a St. Olaf education lead? Then there is “What Happens After Graduation: Recent Alumni Data,” along with retention and graduation rates, and “evidence of learning.”
This new level of candor sounds like an answer to growing concerns of parents, politicians, and foundations concerned about the value for money of a higher education–and of students worried about finding jobs and repaying college loans.
And it’s part of a new wave in higher education.
Concerns that the rising costs are leaving too many behind are increasingly accompanied by fears that today’s college graduates lack sufficient workforce skills–or that they aren’t learning enough.

act.org

A new report from ACT reveals an untapped pool of students who have an interest in STEM areas (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) but are not planning to pursue a STEM career as they prepare for the future. The data point to a gap between interests and intentions that, if addressed, could help put more students on the path to STEM careers.
“The good news is that student interest in STEM is high overall,” said Jon Erickson, ACT president of education and career solutions. “The bad news is that a sizable number of students may not be connecting the dots between their innate interests and a potential STEM-related career.”
The ACT national and state report series, The Condition of STEM 2013, examines the expressed and measured interests of high school graduates in the class of 2013 who took the ACT® college readiness exam. Expressed interest is when students say they intend to pursue a particular major or occupation. Measured interest, in contrast, is derived from students’ responses to the ACT Interest Inventory, a battery of questions that measures preferences for different types of work tasks.

Natasha Lindstrom:

Chrissy Guzman chucked the old bottle of paint across the classroom, aiming for the large trash bin that the custodian had wheeled in earlier that summer day.
As she and fellow parent volunteer Lori Yuan cleared out the PTA meeting room, the two mothers vented their frustration over the looming takeover of the district-owned campus by an outside charter operator. They lamented losing their neighborhood school, Desert Trails Elementary School, to a controversial education law they’d fought so hard against: the so-called parent trigger.
Guzman tossed another bottle toward the garbage — only this time the lid flew off midair, splattering paint all over.

American Council of Trustees and Alumni

The residential liberal arts college is a distinctively American tradition, and for generations its distinguishing feature has been the broad, yet rigorous intellectual experience in the arts and sciences that it required of all students. Studies have demonstrated the success of individuals in a wide variety of roles whose college education was in the liberal arts rather than a narrower technical field. As early as 1956, Bell Laboratories began scientifically tracking the career progress of staff with different academic preparation. Over a 20-year period with the company, liberal arts majors progressed more rapidly and in greater percentage than other staff. Bell’s report, released in 1981, concluded:

[T]here is no reason for liberal arts majors to lack confidence in approaching business careers. The humanities and social science majors in particular continue to make a strong showing in managerial skills and have experienced considerable business success. We hope and expect this to continue.

And a recent study commissioned by the Association of American Colleges and Universities also supports the marketplace competitiveness of liberal arts majors.2
The economic reality of the 21st century is that the skills, knowledge, and intellectual agility that come from a solid liberal arts education are more valuable than ever. The Bureau of Labor Statistics now reports that the average person born between 1957 and 1964 held an average of 11.3 different jobs between the ages of 18 and 46 alone. In a recent survey, 93% of employers asserted that mastery of a range of skills that are traditionally associated with the liberal arts was more important than the college major.3
Yet students have been migrating from arts, humanities and social sciences to fields that seem to promise easier paths to employment, like communications and business. And some governors and schools are taking a narrow and rigidly vocational view of higher education–one that steers students toward high-demand majors and preprofessional programs at the expense of a wider liberal arts background.4