Douglas Belkin:

Nearly half of the nation’s colleges and universities are no longer generating enough tuition revenue to keep pace with inflation, highlighting the acceleration of a downward spiral that began as the recession ended, according to a new survey by Moody’s Investors Service.
The survey of nearly 300 schools reflects a cycle of disinvestment and falling enrollment that places a growing number at risk. While schools for two decades were seeing rising enrollments and routine increases of 5% to 8% in net tuition, many now are facing grimmer prospects: a shrinking pool of high-school graduates, depressed family incomes and precarious job prospects after college.
The softening demand for four-year degrees is prompting schools to rein in tuition increases while increasing scholarships. Those moves are cutting into net tuition revenue–the amount of money a university collects from tuition, minus school aid.
For 44% of public and 42% of private universities included in the survey, net tuition revenue is projected to grow less than the nation’s roughly 2% inflation rate this fiscal year, which for most schools ends in June. Net tuition revenue will fall for 28% of public and 19% of private schools.

Ron French:

Becoming a teacher in Michigan just became a lot more difficult.
Only one in four aspiring teachers passed a beefed-up version of Michigan’s teacher certification test – an exam that teachers must pass to be hired to lead a classroom – when the new test was administered for the first time last month.
The initial pass rate for the old version of the test was 82 percent; In October, with more difficult questions and higher scores needed to pass, the pass rate was 26 percent.
That means that three out of four students who completed what is typically a four- or five-year college program will have to retake the test or find another career.
The toughened certification tests are an effort to assure that only the most highly-qualified teachers are leading Michigan classrooms.
“Just like we’d want the best and most effective doctor,” said State Superintendent Mike Flanagan said in a news release about the new, low pass rates. “The same applies to teaching Michigan’s students.”
Bridge Magazine raised concerns about the ease of teacher certification tests in October. At the time, aspiring Michigan teachers had a similar pass rate on certification tests as cosmetologists.
That story was part of a series examining the crucial role of teacher preparation in increasing learning in Michigan classrooms, where test scores show students are falling behind students in other states.

Related NCTQ study on teacher preparation and When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?.
UW-Madison School of Education Dean Julie Underwood continues her “status quo” advocacy via this latest op-ed.
Madison Literary Club Talk: Examinations for Teachers Past and Present

Jackie Mader:

For years, California has attempted to reform its teacher preparation programs to better prepare new teachers for the classroom. Alternative routes have popped up to offer aspiring teachers, in many cases, a less expensive and faster route to teaching. The state’s extensive performance exams for teacher candidates have served as a model for the rest of the nation.
Now, a teacher preparation program in California is pledging career-long support to its graduates. On Thursday, the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education launched a free helpline for its 25,000 alumni that will connect struggling graduates with a “rapid response team” of nine full-time faculty members. That team will diagnose problems, build individual plans for alumni, and offer solutions that range from site visits, to coaching, to professional development resources.

Related NCTQ study on teacher preparation and When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?.

Steve Wildstrom:

Maybe online course aren’t going to remake the face of higher education after all.
After a fast start, reality seems to be closing in on the world of the massive, open, online courses that were supposed to replace traditional lectures and recitations and make free, or at least very cheap, higher education available to everyone. San Jose State University has slowed down a move to deliver introductory undergraduate courses through MOOC provider Udacity.
Udacity itself, one of several MOOC providers that have sprung up in the last couple of years, is refocusing its activities on corporate training. Sebastian Thrun, Stanford computer scienctist and founder of Udacity, told Fast Company, “We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don’t educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product. It was a painful moment.”
No surprise. I’m not surprised. I’ve been a skeptical enthusiast for online education since MIT started its Open Courseware initiative a few years back, and over the last year or so, I have enrolled in several offerings, mostly from Coursera, like Udacity, a for-profit provider of open courses. My experience has been a very mixed bag, but one that has taught me a lot about where the approach does and doesn’t work. A couple of general observations. First, the technology has a long way to go and on one seems to have figured out a completely effective way to deliver lectures on video. I’ve seen a number of approaches, from video recording regular blackboard lectures, to slide-based presentations in which the instructor only occasionally appears, to a course that used cartoony “virtual students” to asked questions in computer synthesized voices. None worked completely, though the last was the most annoying. Online lectures today remind me of the earliest days of television, when shows were “radio with pictures.” No one has quite cracked the medium yet.

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst

Last week legislation was introduced in the Senate and House to create federally funded universal pre-k for 4-year-olds. The details of the legislation are largely consistent with the White House proposal, called Preschool for All, that was announced in the president’s state of the union address in February.
The rhetoric around the introduction of the legislation includes the by now entirely predictable and thoroughly misleading appeal to the overwhelming research evidence supporting such an investment. For example, Senator Harkin, the lead author of the Senate version of the legislation, declared that “Decades of research tell us that … early learning is the best investment we can make to prepare our children for a lifetime of success.”
By way of background, I’m a developmental psychologist by training and spent the majority of my career designing and evaluating programs intended to enhance the cognitive development of young children. For instance, I directed a national Head Start Quality Research Center; created a program, Dialogic Reading (which is a widely used and effective intervention for enhancing the language development and book knowledge of young children from low-income families); and authored an assessment tool, the Get Ready to Read Screen, that has become a staple of early intervention program evaluation. My point is that I care about early childhood education and believe it is important – as witnessed by how I spent my professional life for 30 years.
My career since 2001 has largely been about advancing evidence-based education, which is the endeavor of collecting and using the best possible evidence to support policy and practice in education. Since the president’s state of the union address, I’ve been writing that the evidence is decidedly mixed on the impact of the type of preschool investments the president has called for and that we now see in the legislation introduced in Congress. It may seem in the pieces I’ve written that I’m wearing only my evidence-based education hat. But in fact if you’re an advocate of strengthening early childhood programs, as I am, you also need to pay careful attention to the evidence – all of it. Poor children deserve effective programs, not just programs that are well-intentioned.

Peter Turchin:

Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse.
Analysis of past societies shows that these destabilizing historical trends develop slowly, last many decades, and are slow to subside. The Roman Empire, Imperial China and medieval and early-modern England and France suffered such cycles, to cite a few examples. In the U.S., the last long period of instability began in the 1850s and lasted through the Gilded Age and the “violent 1910s.”
We now see the same forces in the contemporary U.S. Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades.
The roots of the current American predicament go back to the 1970s, when wages of workers stopped keeping pace with their productivity. The two curves diverged: Productivity continued to rise, as wages stagnated. The “great divergence” between the fortunes of the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent is much discussed, yet its implications for long-term political disorder are underappreciated. Battles such as the recent government shutdown are only one manifestation of what is likely to be a decade-long period.
How does growing economic inequality lead to political instability? Partly this correlation reflects a direct, causal connection. High inequality is corrosive of social cooperation and willingness to compromise, and waning cooperation means more discord and political infighting. Perhaps more important, economic inequality is also a symptom of deeper social changes, which have gone largely unnoticed.

Todd Wallack:

When Brandeis University president Jehuda Reinharz stepped down three years ago, he moved back into his old faculty office.
But unlike most history professors, Reinharz does not teach any classes, supervise graduate students, or attend departmental meetings. He did not bother posing for the department photo. The chairwoman for Near Eastern and Judaic Studies said she did not even know whether he was officially a member of her department.
Yet Reinharz remains one of the highest paid people on campus.
He received more than $600,000 in salary and benefits in 2011, second only to the new Brandeis president, according to the school’s most recent public tax returns. And that’s on top of the $800,000 Reinharz earned in his new job as president of the Mandel Foundation, a longtime Brandeis benefactor.

Simon Garfield:

From Cicero to John Keats, Virginia Woolf to Jack Kerouac –how would these masters of the letter have taken to the inbox and junk folder? Would they have withheld their jewels of prose behind passwords and defunct operating systems? Would they have been cloud-savvy enough to pass on their attachments and YouTube links to future generations?
These aren’t frivolous questions. We have grown used to the fact that we no longer write letters as we used to, but I’m not sure we have fully contemplated what this means to future generations. We love email, as we should–for its brilliant speed, its global reach, its free transmission of vast amounts of information. Its terrors (the cc’ed indiscretions, the “always-on” culture, the Big Brother scenarios) have not lessened its use. But how much have we really sacrificed on this altar of swiftness and efficiency?

Belle Beth Cooper:

Naps aren’t for everyone, though. I’ve heard lots of people say naps don’t make them feel better, so I wanted to explore how naps affect your brain and whether they really are good for you or not.
How sleep affects us
Better sleeping is known to provide lots of health benefits. These can include better heart function, hormonal maintenance and cell repair as well as boosting memory and improving cognitive function. Basically, sleeping gives your body a chance to deal with everything that happened during the day, repair itself, and reset for tomorrow.
Sleep deprivation, therefore, actually harms us in several ways. One of the most obvious harms is that we have trouble focusing when we’re sleep deprived. Buffer cofounder Leo Widrich wrote about this before:

Jessica Bakeman:

The state Board of Regents fleshed out proposals to reduce and reform testing in New York schools at their regular meetings Monday and Tuesday, including a plan to shorten math and English exams.
The state plans to cut down the amount of time students spend taking math exams by 20 minutes in all grades and will also cut the number of questions to relieve concerns about students not being able to finish.
In grades five through eight, the state will reduce questions on English exams, but maintain the maximum testing time, giving students more time for each question.
The state is moving forward seeking a federal waiver to relieve eighth graders in advanced Algebra from taking both the eighth-grade and the high school-level assessments. While about 57,000 students would be affected by that change, the state is expanding the waiver request to include another 2,000 students, including seventh graders who are also taking the algebra course as well as eighth graders who are taking high-school geometry.

Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Portfolio cities are not all created equal. Some, like New Orleans, have been able to advance quickly. Others are slowed down by the public reactions to school closures or school board turnover or other political or technical realities. District leaders like the idea of accountability for schools, but avoid creating clear performance criteria. They like the idea of new schools, but don’t want to close low performers. They like the idea of partnering with a few charter schools, but they don’t want to upset the unions by partnering with more. They like the idea of school-level decisionmaking, but don’t want to shrink their central offices.
Civic leaders and philanthropists who want to support portfolio efforts need to be skeptical of people who adopt the word “portfolio” without really being serious about carrying out the reform. It’s also easy for even the most well-intentioned portfolio leaders to get caught up in day-to-day policymaking and implementation and lose sight of whether their efforts are panning out in meaningful changes for students.

State-By-State Factsheets.

Rob Evans and Mustafa Khalili

Police tried to spy on Cambridge students, secret footage shows Officer is filmed attempting to persuade activist in his 20s to become informant targeting ‘student-union type stuff’
Police sought to launch a secret operation to spy on the political activities of students at Cambridge University, a covertly recorded film reveals.
An officer monitoring political campaigners attempted to persuade an activist in his 20s to become an informant and feed him information about students and other protesters in return for money.
But instead the activist wore a hidden camera to record a meeting with the officer and expose the surveillance of undergraduates and others at the 800-year-old institution.
The officer, who is part of a covert unit, is filmed saying the police need informants like him to collect information about student protests as it is “impossible” to infiltrate their own officers into the university.
The Guardian is not disclosing the name of the Cambridgeshire officer and will call him Peter Smith. He asks the man who he is trying to recruit to target “student-union type stuff” and says that would be of interest because “the things they discuss can have an impact on community issues”.

Malcolm Harris:

When Federal District Court Judge William H. Pauley III ruled in June that Fox Searchlight Pictures should have paid two interns who worked on its award-winning film “Black Swan,” he did not leave a lot of room for interpretation. Pauley concluded that unpaid internship programs were in clear and near-universal violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Interns whose labor benefits their employer are workers and are thereby entitled to minimum wage. The judge was not creating new law; he was simply enforcing what has been on the books. The ruling has already convinced some employers to decide how to handle their unpaid help, and interns to organize efforts to recover their stolen pay.
Hollywood is not the only industry paying attention; university administrators are worried as well. The common practice of granting class credit for completed internships has contributed to the dramatic increase of unpaid internships. According to a survey-based study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), a record 63 percent of 2013 graduates had completed an internship. A similar study by the college recruiting consultancy Intern Bridge found that just under half of interns received school credit. Credits are what universities are selling. Since outsourcing the actual teaching to employers saves money — it is cheaper to certify than instruct — American universities have jumped on the intern bandwagon.

Steve Connor:

Scientists are calling for a wider public debate on a new development in genetics that could allow the simple and accurate manipulation of the human genome, as revealed yesterday by The Independent.
The technique, known as CRISPR, could revolutionise human gene therapy and genetic engineering because it allows scientists for the first time to make the finest changes to the DNA of the chromosomes with relative ease.
One Nobel scientist, Craig Mello of the University of Massachusetts, said that the “jaw dropping” technique has the potential to transform the study and manipulation of genes and “lowers the barrier” to genetic engineering of human IVF embryos – something he would oppose.
Professor George Church of Harvard University, who was the first scientist to get the process working in human cells and mouse embryos, said that it was important to air the social and ethical implications of the technique to the wider public.
“Talking about the future is better than letting it sneak up on us. We need to do more of this or we will be left with very limited vocabulary in the space between positive and negative hype,” Professor Church said.

Greg Toppo:

In the 11 months since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., another school attack or safety scare seems to unfold almost weekly.
Three students — two 17-year-olds and a 16-year-old — were shot and wounded Wednesday near a Pittsburgh high school as they walked to their car after classes. A 20-year-old man armed with an AK-47-style rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition entered an elementary school in Decatur, Ga., on Aug. 20 and fired a few rounds but surrendered before anyone was injured. A 45-year-old teacher was shot to death, allegedly by a 12-year-old student, at Nevada’s Sparks Middle School on Oct. 21. The next day, a Massachusetts high school math teacher was stabbed to death with a box cutter, allegedly by a 14-year-old student.
It’d be easy to conclude that school has never been a more dangerous place, but for the USA’s 55 million K-12 students and 3.7 million teachers, statistics tell another story: Despite two decades of high-profile shootings, school increasingly has become a safer place.
The trend is playing out against a backdrop of jitters over school security that have accumulated since Newtown. Schools in some states are urged to issue concealed handgun permits to teachers and buy them bulletproof whiteboards and desk calendars. An Ohio company sells a $100 Kevlar insert it says will make any backpack bulletproof. Educators attend training sessions in which they’re advised to charge armed attackers.
“I think (the concern) has to do with the psychological impact of some of these incidents,” says David Esquith, director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Safe and Healthy Students, which oversees school security. “(The shootings) are so upsetting and traumatic, it reinforces a perception that schools are experiencing a spike in violence and victimization, when in fact they’re not.”

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

Last Monday’s Supreme Court hearing, scheduled for 90 minutes, went almost four hours, given numerous comments and questions from the Justices – all seven participating to some degree. The resultant responses caused tension, such as Attorney General Van Hollen’s response to Justice Ann Walsh Bradley’s comment, “aren’t the parties’ arguments like ships passing in the night?” Van Hollen retorted that the two ships, “… are on a collision course” and “the State has a bigger ship and we shall win!”
As The Progressive editor Ruth Conniff wrote of the exchange, “That pretty much sums up the Walker Administration’s attitude toward the teachers, janitors, clerks, and municipal employees it seeks to disempower through Act 10. The state is bigger and stronger, Walker, Van Hollen, and their allies argue, and will not be deterred by public outcry, mass protests, or even the courts.”
MTI legal counsel Lester Pines, when presenting the Union’s argument resurrected the ship analogy, telling Van Hollen that, “The Titanic was a big ship too, compared to the relatively small iceberg that caused it to sink.” Pines added that the administration’s Act 10, like the Titanic, has hit an iceberg, and that the iceberg in this case is the Wisconsin Constitution.
In his argument, Pines told the Court that the fundamental argument came down to Constitutional rights. Pines’ claim led to Van Hollen claiming, “There is no constitutional right to collective bargaining.”

Jakob Jakobsen:

In 1962, a group of people at the Gorizia Mental Hospital in northern Italy began dismantling the fence that surrounded the institution. Footage from a documentary by the Italian film-maker Sergio Zavoli shows what appears to be patients and staff cutting and pulling down sections of the high metal fence – a fence built with the clear purpose to both demarcate a specific area of a building and to keep people from getting over it. Significantly, we see the fence that defined the boundary of the hospital being dismantled from inside the compound, and the faces of those pulling each segment of it to the ground express relief, even joy. In Italian, the voiceover of the film describes the action:
In November 1962, the psychiatric team directed by Dr Franco Basaglia opened up the first ward of the hospital and inaugurated a therapeutic community. Hospital life will be regulated by ward assemblies and by general assemblies. The patients are regaining a human and social role, as they get to take care of themselves and their existence through an ongoing communication with the people treating them. Once the prison-like nature of the institution has been abolished, the nature of its ideology can be studied.
Dr Franco Basaglia had been made director of the Gorizia Mental Hospital the previous year. He initiated the demolition of the containment structure devised to keep the patients inside the hospital which had, according to the new director, operated more like a prison camp than a place intended for treatment and care. The fence was not just there for the sake of the patients; it existed to protect society from the insane and insanity. Now the fence was coming down.

John Lanchester:

When Ferran Adrià, the Spanish maestro who is undisputedly the most influential chef of the last two decades, gave up cooking at his restaurant El Bulli, he announced that he was going to be starting a number of projects. One of them is intended to be a foundation dedicated to the study of himself. Another was a collaboration on the subject of food and science with Harvard. I think quite a few people, on first hearing about that, scratched their heads and wondered what a joint venture between the two might be like. On the one hand, seawater sorbet and ampoules of reduced prawn head bouillon (two Adrià signature dishes). On the other, Helen Vendler. Outcome not obvious.
What we outsiders didn’t know is that all undergraduates at Harvard are required to take at least one class in science. As a result, the university offers some courses designed to be appealing to the kinds of student who wouldn’t be studying science unless they had to. Once that’s known, it makes a lot of sense to involve Adrià, who is rock-star famous in the world of food, in a course designed to appeal to the clever and curious and artily-minded young. So here it is: SPU27, an acronym standing for Science of the Physical Universe 27. Spelled out in English, the name of the course is Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science. The person who thinks it’s funny that SPU sounds like ‘spew’? Harvard isn’t cross with you. Just … disappointed.
Once upon a time, to take a course like SPU27, you had to be young enough and lucky enough in all the relevant ways to get to Harvard. Today, all you need is to be lucky enough to have access to a computer with an internet connection. SPU27 is part of a remarkable experiment in open access university education called EdX, a collaboration between Harvard and MIT, which gives away entire courses, online, for free. The type of course is known as a MOOC, for Massive Open Online Course, and is a big growth area in the field of education, with a truly extraordinary amount of material now available, almost entirely from American universities.​＊ One of the leaders in the field is Stanford, creator of the first MOOCs.

Danielle Dreilinger

The U.S. Justice Department says Louisiana’s private school voucher program must be monitored to make sure it doesn’t make public school segregation worse. To that end, it wants the state to submit extensive student and school demographics each year.
Moreover, federal lawyers say that after 25 years of working together, Louisiana has largely stopped cooperating with the federal government on efforts to ensure racial equality in schools. They made the case in a memo filed Friday with Judge Ivan Lemelle in federal District Court in New Orleans.
The lawyers wrote that “the United States’ requests for information in this case are not an attack on the voucher program.” However, the demand is likely to raise Gov. Bobby Jindal’s hackles once more in this high-profile court case that has drawn support from prominent national Republicans, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, both of whom visited New Orleans voucher schools this month.

Alan Borsuk:

In mid-October, Milwaukee Public Schools announced that enrollment for this year was up from a year ago, “reversing a decline that lasted nearly a decade.”
Which is true, except it comes with a big asterisk. When it comes to the roster of schools most people think of when they think of MPS, the enrollment decline continues, and that trend is of great importance when you try to envision where we’re going with the whole education enterprise in Milwaukee.
Now that all the official enrollment counts have been posted for schools where Milwaukee children receive publicly funded education, this is the central fact:
The percentage of children in schools outside the mainstream MPS system has, for the first time, crossed 40%. In other words, two out of every five Milwaukee children whose education is paid for by tax dollars are not being taught by MPS teachers. The percentage has been going up one to two points a year, and that happened again this year.
In short, the main body of MPS continues to lose kids, which ultimately means money, employees and vitality, and the array of other streams of local schools continues to gain strength, which ultimately means — well, actually, I don’t know what that ultimately means, which is one reason why keeping an eye on the trends is important.
How is the MPS statement about increased enrollment accurate? Simple: With Superintendent Gregory Thornton as a key advocate, MPS is increasingly embracing the change in Milwaukee’s remarkably complex school landscape. Which is to say, there was a sharp increase in students in charter schools run by organizations independent of the MPS structure, not staffed by MPS principals and teachers, but authorized to operate by the Milwaukee School Board.

Stephanie Simon:

“Do we want more for our kids, or do we want less?” Duncan said. “Do we want higher standards or not?”
That’s the debate that Duncan dearly wants to have.
It’s not, however, the debate he’s getting.
To the immense frustration of Common Core supporters, an eclectic array of critics have raised sustained and impassioned objections about the new standards. From New York to Florida to Michigan to Louisiana, their voices are so loud and their critiques so varied that they have muddied the narrative around Common Core. It’s no longer a focused national debate about high standards; it’s hundreds of local debates, about everything from student privacy rights to cursive handwriting to computerized testing to the value of Shakespeare.
Over the summer, Duncan complained that opponents were “fringe groups” who make “outlandish claims” about “really wacky stuff” such as “mind control, robots, and biometric brain mapping.” There is undoubtedly some of that.

Catherine Capellaro:

A couple of weeks ago, Leo, a freshman at East High School, carried a plate of spaghetti through the school lunch line. But the food service worker said he couldn’t keep the food on his tray.
The money in Leo’s lunch account had run out, and his “temporary meal status” had expired.
Leo left the line, but something compelled him to go back up. He asked what they were going to do with his lunch, and the woman said she had to throw it away.
“Can I just have it then?” he asked. But policy is policy. Leo’s lunch went to the landfill.
Leo’s brother Julian gave him some bread.
This story would upset me if I heard it about any kid. But Leo’s my son, so I really couldn’t shake the image. Mother mammals want their kids to be fed. I called the 9th grade office, and I called the Food & Nutrition office, and gave them both a piece of my mind.
They said they should have given Leo something to eat. Like more than half of the kids in the Madison school district, our kids are eligible for free and reduced lunch.
It happened again Tuesday. This time, he tried to get a hamburger, but his “status” only entitled him to a sandwich, milk and fruit. Leo waited five minutes for the sandwich. Then he gave up.

Dave Zweifel:

On its face, sending money to religious schools ought to be unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s prohibition against promoting religion. The designers of vouchers cleverly got around that by sending “vouchers” to families who meet certain financial guidelines and who, in turn, pay for tuition at a private school.
So now Jewish taxpayers are helping fund Christian schools, nonbelievers are contributing to devout fundamentalists, and scientists are helping pay for evolution deniers.
Worse, though, is that the proliferation of vouchers is eating at the very fabric of the American public education system — a system in which children of all beliefs, creeds and colors learn about each other, share experiences and explore conflicting ideas so that they can intelligently engage in the complexities of American democracy.
That’s what is so dangerous about vouchers. Using taxpayer dollars, they promote putting people who look alike and think alike with each other. That may be your view of the world, but don’t ask others to pay for it.

Related: Sweden’s voucher system.

Hope Reese:

“Of all the places I remember from my childhood,” David Thornburg writes, “school was the most depressing.” The now award-winning educational futurist and creator of the “educational holodeck,” Thornburg’s early experience in the classroom prompted him to help others rethink traditional classroom design. In his latest book, From the Campfire to the Holodeck: Creating Engaging and Powerful 21st Century Learning Environments, Thornburg outlines four learning models: the traditional “campfire,” or lecture-based design; the “watering hole,” or social learning; the “cave,” a place to quietly reflect; and “life”–where ideas are tested.
I spoke with Thornburg about his project-based approach to learning, why traditional models of teaching fail, and how to incorporate technology into education to teach students how to think creatively. Here’s a transcript of our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity.

Jordan Weissmann:

The first six months of 2013 brought us a small measure of good news about student loans: the delinquency rate, while still far too high for comfort, was falling.
Sadly, that’s no longer the case. As shown on the graph below, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports that 11.8% of outstanding loan balances were 90 days or more past due by the end of September, a new post-recession high.
< IMg src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/Delinquencies_Nov_2013.png">

John Krull:

One of the most important lessons good parents teach toddlers is that not getting one’s way is no excuse for behaving badly.
It appears that much of Indiana’s educational and political leadership never got that valuable piece of developmental training.
On Wednesday, a meeting of the Indiana Board of Education descended into — well, chaos would be too kind a term. Some hybrid of blood feud and epic temper tantrum would be closer to the mark.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz closed and then walked out of the meeting after a board member made a motion Ritz said was inappropriate and illegal. The board members, all of whom were appointed by Republican governors, accused Ritz of thwarting reform and unfairly using her position as chair to stifle discussion. Ritz accused Gov. Mike Pence, a Republican, of attempting to deny the will of the voters and take over education. Pence responded with a statement and an op-ed piece that made it seem as if Ritz’s conduct were something he needed to scrape off the bottom of his shoe.

Kris Olds:

Who is troubled by this week’s Sebastian Thrun hagiography (‘Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course‘) in Fast Company, as well as this announcement (‘Launching our Data Science & Big Data Track built with Leading Industry Partners‘) via the Udacity blog (both posted on 14 November 2013)? A lot of committed open education thinkers and practitioners, so it seems, and not merely because of the hype machine Thrun so evidently cultivates (I’ll leave aside the possible negative reaction to Thrun getting photographed in Lycra tights through a filter borrowed from a 1970s Swedish cinematographer, or the journalist’s attempt to throw in a clichéd Matrix reference):

Anne Kadet:

Taking the No. 6 train downtown Friday morning, Kelman Ramirez looks like any New York office drone. He’s got the red paisley tie, the black lace-up shoes, the worn building pass lodged in his wallet. When he arrives at the Capital Group in Rockefeller Center, he gives his receptionist the usual polite hello. Ho-hum. But here’s the twist: Mr. Ramirez is only 17 years old.
He attends Cristo Rey New York, a small Catholic school in East Harlem where students pay their tuition by working as corporate serfs. Dressed in jackets, ties and little black suits, the students, some as young as 14, fan across the city to the cubicles and board rooms of companies such as McKinsey, Deloitte and Morgan Stanley, where they shred documents, file trade confirmations and reconcile expense reports. Their earnings, billed at roughly $19 an hour, fund nearly half the school’s budget.
At Cristo Rey, it’s all business–the place is even decorated to look like an office. The Rev. Joseph Parkes, the school’s president (“Like the CEO!” he says) gave me a tour last week. It’s the cleanest, sparest school you’ve ever seen. There are beige walls, framed art prints and slate-blue carpets. The classrooms look like corporate training rooms, with smartboards and long gray tables. There are no bells, says Father Parkes, because there are “no bells in the corporate environment.”

Liz Bowie:

Maryland’s scores on a national reading test may have been inflated because the state’s schools excluded a higher percentage of special-education students than any other state, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education.
The National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the test, estimates that Maryland’s scores were 7 points higher for fourth-grade reading and 5 points higher for eighth-grade reading because of the exclusion.
Maryland has always earned high scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and its steady increases in test scores over the years has helped earn it the ranking of No. 1 in the nation by Education Week, an often-quoted measure.
“When exclusion rates are higher, average scores tend to be higher than if more children were tested,” said Larry Feinberg, assistant director for reporting and analysis for the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent body that sets policy for NAEP.

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

In February 2011, Governor Walker, as he described it, “dropped the bomb” on Wisconsin’s public employees, the birthplace of public employee bargaining, by proposing a law (Act 10) which would eliminate the right of collective bargaining in school districts, cities, counties, and most of the public sector. Collective Bargaining Agreements provide employment security and economic security, as well as wage increases, fringe benefits, and as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Holmes said many years ago, an effective voice for employees in the workplace. Unions had achieved these rights and benefits in a half-century of bargaining. Ostensibly proposed to address an alleged budget shortfall, the Governor’s proposed Act 10 not only called for reductions in economic benefits for public employees (e.g. limits on employer contributions toward pensions and health care), but prohibited public employers from bargaining with nearly all public employees over any issue, other than limited wage increases, under which no employee could recover losses due to the increase in the Consumer Price Index. For example, under Act 10, teacher unions can no longer bargain over issues of school safety, class size, planning and preparation time, and health insurance; educational assistants can no longer bargain over salary progression, insurance coverage or training; clerical/technical workers can no longer bargain over work hours, vacation benefits or time off to care for sick children; and state workers can no longer bargain over whistle-blower protections. The intent of the Governor was to silence public employees on issues of primary importance to them and those they serve, and to eliminate their political activity. His stated extreme, no compromise, “divide and conquer” approach was to gain full power over employees. That resulted in MTI members walking out for four days to engage in political action. Soon thereafter thousands followed MTI members, resulting in the largest protest movement in State history.
MTI legally challenged Walker’s law and in September, 2012, MTI, represented by Lester Pines, and his partners Tamara Packard and Susan Crawford, prevailed in an action before Dane County Circuit Court Judge Juan Colas, wherein Colas found that most of Act 10 is unconstitutional. In ruling on MTI’s petition, Colas agreed that Act 10 is unconstitutional as it violates MTI members’ freedom of association and equal protection, both of which are guaranteed by the Wisconsin Constitution. This enabled MTI to bargain Contracts for its five (5) bargaining units for 2014-15. MTI’s are among the few public sector contracts in Wisconsin for 2014-15.

Neetzan Zimmerman:

When Beth Tillack learned that her son had made his middle school’s honor roll, she immediately took away his computer privileges and called the school to demand a retraction.
The shocking reaction to something most parents celebrate by defacing their car’s bumper was prompted by a D that Douglas got in civics.
“The bottom line is there is nothing honorable about making a D,” the Pasco County, Florida mom told a local news station. “I was not happy, because how can I get my child to study for a test when he thinks he’s done enough.”
Dade City’s Pasco Middle School places students on its honor roll based on their Grade Point Average.
In addition to the D, Douglas also got three A’s and a C, giving him a GPA of 3.16 — more than enough to be counted among the school’s best and brightest.
But thanks to his mom, the Pasco County schools superintendent has announced that the honor roll policy will be changed to allow only students with all A’s or A’s and B’s to be considered for inclusion.

Samanth Murphy Kelly:

Elementary school students in Finland could be adding coding and programming to their nightly homework routine in the near future.
Potentially following in the footsteps of neighboring country Estonia, Alexander Stubb — the Finnish Minister of European Affairs and Foreign Trade — told Mashable that teaching basic programming skills to young kids in the classroom is on the country’s radar.
“It would be a great idea to have coding as a voluntary or otherwise subject in school,” Stubb says. “Kids today are growing up as natives to technology, and the sooner they get going, the better. It starts with games and familiarizing themselves with gadgets, and coding is a big part of that.”

Lori:

Students can sometimes be the very best advocates for the teaching profession. Here’s a few shout-outs to MPS teachers from none other than their appreciative students.
Dear Mrs. Grant,
Thank you for everything! You have supported me through a lot. All the time you have helped me I am so grateful for. You are one of my memorable and favorite teachers!
From, Alyana Castrejon
MRS. OGUNBOWALE
You are my favorite teacher I ever met even though I get in trouble.
my favorite teacher
Ms. Cynthia Wilder is my favorite. She’s a peaceful woman. She is very nice. She is always helping me with my work. When i feel like I want to give up on something she’ll say to never give up, always keep trying. You’ll never get to where you want to be if you give up.
Dear Ms. Carney,
Thank you for making this the best year yet. You are one of my favorite teachers and I truly appreciate everything you do every day. When I first came into seventh grade I didn’t understand anything but you made it easy for me, so thank you for that. I wish all the best of luck next year when you get your new students.
-Alondra Corro

Eleanor Barkhorn:

About one in five Harvard seniors applies to Teach for America. However, only a “minuscule” percentage of the class actually studies education, according to Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean James Ryan.
What accounts for this difference? Why are so many of America’s brightest students apparently interested in teaching but not availing themselves of the training their school has to offer?
Part of what’s to blame is a long-standing institutional snobbery toward teaching. As Walter Isaacson put it at this year’s Washington Ideas Forum, there’s a perception that “it’s beneath the dignity of an Ivy League school to train teachers.”
Teach for America has helped change that perception. “I think TFA has done a lot in terms of elevating the profession of teaching and elevating the importance of public education and education generally,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in conversation with Isaacson, CEO of The Aspen Institute, and Ryan.
But Harvard and other schools like it haven’t made it a priority to encourage students to pursue teaching–and so students are looking for opportunities elsewhere. As Ryan put it, “There’s a tremendous demand for teacher training–and the main outlet is TFA.”

The Economist:

Across schools, however, better pupils are assigned to slightly better teachers on average. The common practice of “tracking” pupils (filtering good ones into more advanced courses) could be to blame, the authors reckon, though they abstain from drawing firm conclusions. Whatever the cause, getting more effective teachers to instruct better-performing pupils naturally exacerbates the gap in achievement. Making the best teachers work with the worst pupils could go a long way toward minimising the yawning differences in attainment within a school system, the authors contend.
At the very least, that change would be lucrative for the pupils who benefit from it, according to the researchers’ second paper. They compare their measure of teacher quality against pupils’ fortunes as adults, after again controlling for pupils’ previous test scores and demography. (Pupils from the earliest years of their sample are now in their late 20s.) Unsurprisingly, exposure to better teachers is associated with an increased probability of attending university and, among pupils who go on to university, with attendance at better ones, as well as with higher earnings. Somewhat more unexpectedly, good teachers also seem to reduce odds of teenage pregnancy and raise participation in retirement-savings plans. Effects seem to be stronger for girls than for boys, and English teachers have a longer-lasting influence on their pupils’ futures than maths teachers.
The authors reckon that swapping a teacher at the bottom of the value-added spectrum with one of average quality raises the collective lifetime income of each class they teach by $1.4m. That rise would apply across all the teacher’s classes and over the whole of his or her career.

Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates and Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood.

Tyler Cowen:

saac Asimov, the astonishingly prolific science fiction writer, died in 1992, but he foresaw much about American politics today. One of his most profound works is the neglected short story “Franchise,” written in 1955, in the days when computers were bulky, room-sized machines powered by vacuum tubes and operated by a high priesthood of punch card-wielding technicians. For a work of fiction, it is stunningly prescient.
In Asimov’s tale, set in November 2008, democratic elections have become nearly obsolete. A mysterious supercomputer said to be “half a mile long and three stories high,” named Multivac, absorbs most of the current information about economic and political conditions and estimates which candidate is going to win. The machine, however, can’t quite do the job on its own, as there are some ineffable social influences it cannot measure and evaluate. So Multivac picks out one “representative” person from the electorate to ask about the country’s mood (sample query: “What do you think of the price of eggs?”). The answers, when combined with the initial computer diagnosis, suffice to settle the election. No one actually needs to vote.
Asimov was on to something: American political campaigns have indeed become extraordinarily sophisticated data-mining operations driven by smart computers, harvesting and sifting through vast virtual warehouses of demographic information and consumer preferences to manipulate and shape the electorate. They may not do the voting for us, but this new generation of intelligent machines can do just about everything else. And when it comes to humans actually casting their ballots, well, we hardly are surprised by the results: Computer-powered data jocks such as Nate Silver can predict the outcomes of most races and often the margins of victory as well. We’re not too far off from the world of Asimov’s protagonist, an Indiana department-store clerk dragooned into being America’s lone “voter.” “From the way your brain and heart and hormones and sweat glands work, Multivac can judge exactly how intensely you feel about the matter,” the machine operators tell him. “It will understand your feelings better than you yourself.”

Eric Lerum:

As a pundit, Diane Ravitch is nothing if not prolific. That aptly describes her constant stream of blog posts, tweets, speeches to teacher unions and anti-reform crowds, and promotional book tour stops and media interviews. It also describes her flow of incompatible viewpoints.
Take her view on NAEP test scores, for example. In a New York Times op-ed from 2005, Ravitch called NAEP “the gold standard,” and in a 2006 WSJ piece with Chester Finn, she said “NAEP’s role as honest auditor makes state officials squirm.” Just three years ago, she touted NAEP as “more trustworthy than state exams.” She used NAEP score comparisons as the foundation for her argument against charter schools and No Child Left Behind in the 2010 WSJ op-ed she penned explaining her change of heart.
And in her most recent book, which critics have argued “trades fact for fiction,” she bases her critique of Michelle Rhee’s record as DCPS Chancellor on the foundation that NAEP scores illustrate Rhee “did not turn it into the highest-performing urban district in the United States.”
Yet last week, when 2013 NAEP scores were released, she found the “statistical horse race utterly stupid.” She completely dismissed commending the historic gains made in DC and Tennessee as “nonsense” and “hype,” asking, were “students in the states with the biggest gains getting better education or more test prep?” This despite the fact that she wrote in her just-published book “there is no way to prepare for NAEP.”

Daho Olopade:

Most of the buildings in Machakos, the former capital of Kenya, are made of concrete, with neat fences, informal gardens, indoor plumbing, and electricity, however erratic. By contrast, the local schoolhouse of Bridge International Academies is beyond basic: walls of corrugated tin, a plywood frame. There’s no electrical wiring in sight. A pair of latrines adjoin an open courtyard that doubles as a lunch and recreation area. A few young children loll on the patchy grass, engaged in unhurried conversation.
Yet this school is by no means a failure — in fact, it recently passed a 700-point inspection and is running exactly as planned. This is just one of 212 Bridge Academies that have opened in Kenya during the past four years. Bridge’s “schools in a box” spring up seemingly overnight: In January of 2013, the company launched 51 schools at once, while in September it opened another 78. Bridge now educates roughly 50,000 students in Kenya every day, and its global aspirations may transform the entire project of education for poor youth around the world.

Anya Kamenetz:

Time zones away from the quads of Cambridge, Mass., and Palo Alto, Calif., there’s a curious educational evolution happening.
Though the modern massive open online course movement (MOOCs) originated in North America, two-thirds of their users live abroad–in places like Rwanda, China, and Brazil.
Foreign users are adapting the courses produced at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to fit their local communities and cultures. And in the process, they’re creating an entirely new education model. Instead of toiling at MOOCs alone with the dim light of a laptop, communities around the world are combining screen time with face time. In these small-group, informal, blended-learning environments, students work with the support of peers and mentors and compete online on a level playing field with the new elite of the world. “It gave me a taste of what is first world education,” said Alejandra B., a 21-year-old studying business at a Catholic university in La Paz, Bolivia, and a MOOC participant in such a setting, told me.

Ari Bloomekatz:

Artists and art students from around Greater Los Angeles remembered art teacher Joseph Gatto, who was found shot to death in his Silver Lake home, as a great educator and promoter of the arts.
Artist Robert Vargas, who did the mural in downtown L.A. on the corner of 6thand Spring streets, said Gatto “was a pillar in my foundation as a young artist.”
Vargas was a student at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and graduated in 1993. The most important class he remembered with Gatto was figure drawing in which half of the class would draw and the other half critique.
“His teaching style was very honest; it was very direct. I think his honesty and his intentions were always sincere,” Vargas sad. “He challenged and inspired us to pull from within ourselves and not be afraid of that path of discovery, wherever that may lead us.”

The Economist:

SOME people hope that the internet will revolutionise higher education, making it cheaper and more accessible to the masses. Others fear the prospect. Some academics worry that they will be sacked and replaced by videos of their more photogenic colleagues. Others argue that MOOCs (massive open online courses) are nowhere near as good as a class taught face-to-face.
Earlier this year academics at Amherst, a liberal-arts college, decided not to offer MOOCs. Professors in the philosophy department at San José State University wrote a letter of complaint because they were encouraged to use a popular online Harvard course, “JusticeX”, as part of their own curriculum. Even at Harvard, which has invested $30m in MOOCs, much of the faculty is prickly. In May 58 professors wrote to the dean of arts and sciences to demand greater oversight of MOOCs.

Erika Sanchez:

A few years ago, I met with my former high school social studies teacher to catch up over drinks. “Miss F” was one of my favorite teachers and we hadn’t seen each other in about 12 years. As we reminisced about our field trips, my other classmates, and my hilariously unfortunate fashion choices, she revealed to me that she and many of my former high school teachers refer to that time as “the golden era”. I was shocked. How could it be that the school district had become worse since I graduated?
My high school, which is located in a working class Latino suburb bordering Chicago, was overpopulated, underfunded, and in my opinion, incredibly stifling. Needless to say, I resented going there. I felt we were disenfranchised and were not given the same opportunities that affluent schools provided their students.
I should have realized how lucky I really was when I was in college, however. Unlike many of my classmates, I cranked out papers with little difficulty because I knew how to synthesize information and formulate an argument. Writing a thesis statement was a freaking breeze. But at the time I had no idea that these skills were a luxury.

Daniel Grant:

Think that art school dooms graduates to a life of unemployment? The numbers paint a very different picture.
“Artists can have good careers, earning a middle-class income,” says Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “And, just as important and maybe more, artists tend to be happy with their choices and lives.”
Not Exactly Starving
A 2011 report from the center found that the unemployment rate in the first two years for those graduating with bachelor of fine arts degree is 7.8%, dropping to 4.5% for those out of school longer. The median income is $42,000.
“Artists’ income is comparable to other liberal-arts majors,” he says. “They do a little better than psychology majors, since counseling and social work is a very low-wage occupation.”
For artists who go on to graduate degrees, the most common of which is the master’s of fine arts, the unemployment rate for recent graduates drops to just under 5%, and their median yearly income increases to roughly $50,000.

Tom Simonite:

Technology that derives personality traits from Twitter updates is being tested to help target promotions and personalize customer service.
Trying to derive a person’s wants and needs–conscious or otherwise–from online browsing and buying habits has become crucial to companies of all kinds.
Now IBM is taking the idea a step further. It is testing technology that guesses at people’s core psychological traits by analyzing what they post on Twitter, with the goal of offering personalized customer service or better-targeted promotional messages.
“We need to go below behavioral analysis like Amazon does,” saysMichelle Zhou, leader of the User Systems and Experience Research Group at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California, which developed the software. “We want to use social media to derive information about an individual–what is the overall affect of this person? How resilient is this person emotionally? People with different personalities want something different.”

Douglas Belkin:

Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala., was founded in 1830. It has graduated governors and admirals. Martin Luther King Jr. praised it for its early efforts at integration in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
None of that august history protected it from plummeting enrollment last year. So, to induce prospective students to consider its $170,000 sticker price for a four-year education, Spring Hill began offering $1,000 scholarships for taking a campus tour.
“We’re at a time when enrollment is the No. 1 driver,” said Bob Stewart, the school’s vice president for admissions and financial aid. “We needed to have some game changers to bring in new students.”
Spring Hill was caught in the same tailspin that many U.S. private colleges are facing as they endure plummeting enrollment among price-conscious students.

Karen Herzog:

A record number of international students studied at American colleges and universities last year, including in Wisconsin, driven largely by an influx of young scholars from China, according to U.S. data released Monday.
University of Wisconsin-Madison enrolled 5,291 international students last year — 12.5% of its total 42,463 enrollment.
That’s up from 4,840 in 2011-’12 and 4,647 the previous academic year.
International students boost the diversity among student populations and contribute significantly to the bottom line for public universities because they pay higher out-of-state tuition.

ACLU:

Beyond Zero Tolerance focuses on two forms of exclusion from school that many Pennsylvania public school districts rely upon heavily: out-of-school suspensions (OSS) and removal from school by police, a category that includes arrests and summary offenses.
In this first-time analysis of statewide school discipline data for Pennsylvania, we found that Black and Latino students and students with disabilities have been disproportionately removed from school.
For both forms of exclusion from school, we report our findings and suggest evidence-based best practices.
DOWNLOAD: Beyond Zero Tolerance (Full Report)

Alexis Baird:

As part of our Direct-to-Profile Certifications pilot program with premier online education companies, including Coursera, EdX, lynda.com, Pearson, Skillsoft, Udacity and Udemy, LinkedIn is making it easy for members to update their profiles.
How does it work? After the completion of a course with a participating provider, you will receive an email with a link that will present you with an automatically populated certification field, complete with the details of the course you just completed. When you click “Save,” it will seamlessly add the certification or completed course work to your LinkedIn Profile.

I am not a fan of their data mining. Alternative and far lower cost credential methods are inevitable and will change the present high cost systems.

Dorina Sackman:

At the beginning of each school year, I let my students’ parents know how I feel about educating their children. I tell them that I am happy to make my classroom a second home for students and that I am truly passionate about their success. However, after 15 years in the classroom, I have come to the realization that teachers cannot do it alone.
It is imperative that we increase family/parent involvement in the educational goals of our students. Teachers across our state are working with their schools to increase the amount of year-round community engagement, including adding community service in the curriculum, building partners in education, volunteering, developing education programs for our parents, incorporating after school programs with parent participation, and/or schools partaking in community events.
But we need your help in this journey. I want parents to see their child’s school as a cornerstone of our community, ensuring the empowerment of young minds.
So the question is, “Are you ready to get involved?” Here are five simple ways to start off building a culture of community in your child’s school.

Paul Hill, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Last week, three cities pursuing portfolio strategies held elections. In Denver, voters kept a pro-reform majority on the school board. In Boston, a strong pro-reform mayoral candidate lost, but to a man who serves on a charter school board and favors continued charter expansion. In New York, the mayoralty was won by a candidate who adopted anti-reform rhetoric but in truth kept his options open.
In each of these three cities, education reforms are working; schools are markedly improving. Yet as a proxy for reform support, the vote tallies were mixed. Why is that?
Smart education leaders know that families are the indispensible constituency. If parents don’t think their schools are getting better, they won’t buy in to ongoing reforms. Reformers reason that if parents know their children are learning more and are in safer, more supportive schools, they will support the reforms they believe are working.

Erin Richards:

In its first year operating free of a state-imposed enrollment cap, Racine’s private school voucher program saw enrollment more than double to 1,245 students, according to fall enrollment figures released by the state Department of Public Instruction.
Growth in the Milwaukee private-school voucher program continued its steady climb, increasing by about 3.6% from last year to 25,820 students, up from 24,941 last September.
Including the 512 students using a voucher to attend a private school in a new statewide program, the traditional third Friday of September head count reveals a total of 27,577 students using public dollars to attend 148 private, mostly religious schools in the state in the 2013-’14 school year.
Participating private school leaders and voucher-school champions celebrate the growth, saying they’re meeting a parent need and offering more children an opportunity to pursue a quality education.
“I think the community has responded very positively,” said Frank E. Trecroci, the founder and administrator of Mount Pleasant Renaissance School in Racine, which more than tripled its number of voucher students to 280 this fall, up from 89 voucher students in September 2012.
But many public-school advocates see the growth of voucher programs as a threat, and those concerns are now coming from a chorus of voices outside Milwaukee.
“I struggle with the wisdom of moving in this direction,” Patricia Deklotz, the superintendent of the Kettle Moraine School District in Waukesha County, said Thursday. “We’re building a dual system of funding here.”

Laura Waters:

Parents of in-district kids formed a group called Lakewood Unite, an advocacy group with a mission “to make the public aware of the many issues in the Lakewood Public School District” and “to address the inequities in the Lakewood School District Special Education Program.” They started video-taping school board meetings and also secured a meeting with Ed. Comm. Chris Cerf.
Three years ago voters ousted some long-time school board members who were under the thumb of both the local Rabbinate and the lawyer who pretty much ran the district. (For years he not only collected attorney fees but also collected salary and benefits under the unusual title of “Out-of-District Special Education Supervisor. This title was in deference to the lawyer’s able representation of Jewish families who had children with special needs and wanted their kids to attend, at district expense, a private special needs school,The School for Children with Hidden Intelligence, which operates under a pretense of secularity but is actually a Jewish school. Tuition tops $100,000 per student per year. (Some backgroundhere.)

Peter Cappelli:

A job after graduation. It’s what all parents want for their kids.
So, what’s the smartest way to invest tuition dollars to make that happen?
The question is more complicated, and more pressing, than ever. The economy is still shaky, and many graduating students are unable to find jobs that pay well, if they can find jobs at all.
The result is that parents guiding their children through the college-application process–and college itself–have to be something like venture capitalists. They have to think through the potential returns from different paths, and pick the one that has the best chance of paying off.
For many parents and students, the most-lucrative path seems obvious: be practical. The public and private sectors are urging kids to abandon the liberal arts, and study fields where the job market is hot right now.

Laurie Rogers, via a kind email:

If they were forced to add the truth to what they already say about you, Laurie, it would look like this: [The truth:] ‘Wow, that Laurie Rogers. She volunteers her time to advocate for proper math, help small children, and uncover the truth about how public schools spend our money. [What they say:] What a bitch.'”– A friend and colleague

If the Spokane print media ever want to get rid of me and my reporting on Spokane Public Schools (SPS), all they have to do is publish a thorough, accurate and balanced article about me and my efforts to inform Spokane parents. I’m sure I would die of the shock. I’m not worried it will happen any time soon.
Their worst betrayal is of the children. I do not understand adults who can look away from children in need, who can persistently deny or ignore a child’s grim reality – even as they take steps to help their own children. Sadly, Spokane is filled with adults just like that.
After nearly seven years of advocacy, I wasn’t surprised at The Spokesman-Review’s “coverage” of a lawsuit I filed against SPS over public records. The SR article was published Oct. 9, 2013, on the front page, above the fold. In the first sentence, it claims I have a “history of needling officials.” The article contains several errors, including the date and the wording of my records request. The reporter and editors made no effort to contact me before publishing the article, and the opportunity to post comments online was shut down after just one day.
I’ve been a reporter and an editor. This article would never have been published “as is” at the newspapers I worked for. The article would have been fact-checked and corrected. Diligent efforts would have been made to contact the subject of the article, and those efforts would have been noted in the article. Any factual errors would have been corrected on subsequent days.

Eduardo Porter:

Many Americans have come to doubt the proposition that college delivers a path to prosperity.
In a poll conducted last month by the College Board and National Journal, 46 percent of respondents — including more than half of 18- to 29-year-olds — said a college degree was not needed to be successful. Only 40 percent of Americans think college is a good investment, according to a 2011 poll by the Pew Research Center.
On a pure dollars-and-cents basis, the doubters are wrong. Despite a weak job market for recent graduates, workers with a bachelor’s degree still earn almost twice as much as high school graduates. College might be more expensive than ever, but a degree is worth about $365,000 over a lifetime, after defraying all the direct and indirect costs of going to school. This is a higher payoff than in any other advanced nation, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Still, the growing skepticism about the value of a degree has fed into a deeper unease among some economists about the ironclad trust that policy makers, alongside many academics, have vested in higher education as the weapon of choice to battle widening income disparities and improve the prospects of the middle class in the United States.
It has given new vigor to a critique, mostly by thinkers on the left of the political spectrum, that challenges the idea that educational disparities are a main driver of economic inequality.
“It is absolutely clear that educational wage differentials have not driven wage inequality over the last 15 years,” said Lawrence Mishel, who heads the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning center for economic policy analysis. “Wage inequality has grown a lot over the last 15 years and the educational wage premium has changed little.”

Ben Bajarin:

Innovation for Kids and Learning
Several areas where we are seeing exciting progress with innovation of the book experience is with learning books and books for kids.
Textbooks are slowly being reinvented for the digital media age by adding new interactive media to supplement text-based content. This is providing more rich and immersive learning experiences by combining two great things: multimedia and reading. The learning experience is much more powerful when the mind is engaged with more than just static text and images. Being able to read about history, then seeing and engaging with that history through interactive multimedia enhances the learning process. Nearly every learning category where text is used will be enhanced in the digital age to include a blend of text and interactive media.
Children’s books are another area where we are seeing experimentation and innovation. There are increasing amounts of new book experiences for kids that include images, animations, sound effects, games and puzzles. These books are helping children engage in reading, learning and many other kinds of important aspects of development.
An interesting example I came across recently is a project called Bridging Book from engageLab. This is a solution that pairs a physical book with a companion digital experience. The book can be synchronized with an iPad, using the iPad to show additional digital content to go along with the page the child is on within the physical book. Exciting examples like this get the imagination going, dreaming up ways to blend physical reading experiences with digital ones.

Jon Hurdle:

The financially troubled school district here is seeking buyers for more than two dozen school buildings that it shuttered last summer in one of the country’s biggest school closing programs.
And while one prospective developer, Municipal Acquisitions, a firm based in Washington, has offered $100 million for the entire portfolio, both Drexel and Temple Universities are considering the purchase of individual schools near their campuses.
The school district published details on its website of 27 buildings, totaling about 3.7 million square feet, and the land they sit on, in the hope that the properties could be adapted and reused by buyers, who could provide the district with desperately needed cash. The public school system laid off 3,800 workers to close a $304 million budget deficit at the start of the current school year.
The properties range from the former University City High School and its associated buildings covering 611,000 square feet on a prime West Philadelphia site near Drexel University, to the building that housed Germantown High School, a 278,000-square-foot site in a low-income area of Philadelphia’s northern suburbs.
District officials said the portfolio’s overall value was being appraised. For eight properties that are subject to expedited sales because there has been a “demonstrated interest,” the appraised value should be known by Dec. 17; valuation for the remaining sites will come later.
Twenty-four schools, representing about 12 percent of the district’s total, were closed at the end of the 2012-13 academic year because dwindling student populations had left them significantly underused, and they were draining scarce resources.
Municipal Acquisitions said its offer reflected real estate prices in the area.

Tom Kertscher:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke shared some of her views on school vouchers in a lengthy interview she did over the weekend with blogger Heather DuBois Bourenane, a prominent critic of Gov. Scott Walker.
Some of Burke’s remarks, based on a transcript:
Q. “What do you really think you can you do to move past this sort of toxic and divisive rhetoric without seeming like you’re not willing to take a stand on the issues that really matter the most to preserving Wisconsin values and to standing up for Wisconsin workers and students and educators?”
“I talk about jobs a lot because I do believe that there are a lot of people who are unemployed and really struggling to get by and we do have to emphasize what’s going to get jobs growing here in Wisconsin. But also I think that the direction that we’re headed in terms of education is really frightening to me. The statewide voucher expansion we’re talking about, I actively fought against and I think that I am very worried about what will happen in the next four years with regards to taking the caps off and funding them through a continued siphoning of funds that should be going to public education.”
Q.”If you don’t support a full repeal of the voucher system, how exactly do you plan to improve their performance and accountability without draining more taxpayer funds from the public school budget?”
“Sure. Well, first, in the interview I gave regarding the voucher, statewide voucher expansion, the emphasis I definitely placed is in not taking off the caps or letting the voucher expand. Then in terms of rolling back that statewide voucher expansion, you know, as governor I would have to work with the Legislature and certainly would do that, but it would be obviously only in conjunction with the Legislature that could happen.

Sue Shellenbarger:

It’s a nightly dilemma in many households: A student hits a wall doing homework, and parents are too tired, too busy–or too mystified–to help.
Ordering up a tutor is becoming as easy for kids as grabbing a late-night snack. Amid rapid growth in companies offering online, on-demand tutoring, students can use a credit card to connect, sometimes in less than a minute, with a live tutor. Such 24/7, no-appointment-needed services can be especially helpful to students with tight budgets or tight time frames or those in remote areas.
“All of a sudden, the world opens up to them,” says Michael Horn, executive director of education for the Clayton Christensen Institute, a San Mateo, Calif., education and health-care think tank.
That said, the quality of on-demand scholastic support can be uneven, and the catch-as-catch-can approach to enlisting a tutor may not be best for struggling students who need sustained help. Sessions can bog down on technical glitches, and language barriers can cause problems on sites that rely on tutors from abroad.

Lisa Pollack:

“Reality is a crutch for people who can’t handle drugs,” proclaimed a sticker I once purchased in a suburban shopping centre. It fitted in perfectly with my collection of risqué buttons and key chains. As a teenager I had discovered accessorising was the easiest way to at least give the appearance of defying authority.
Fast forward through university, and my entry into the financial industry – where I worked before becoming a journalist – presented a wholly different set of norms to which to conform. Money, rather predictably, was at the centre of many. But a less obvious one had to do with Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software. It seemed to be the right tool for every job, every time, according to almost everyone.
And heck, why not use it for everything? Excel is a powerful computational engine that anyone who is reasonably numerate can bend to their will to perform tasks.
Flimsy rival spreadsheets, from the likes of Google or Apple, cannot compete – too much is missing from them. Discovering that baseline Excel functionality is not there or that favourite keyboard shortcuts do not work, is – to borrow a lyric from Alanis Morissette – like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.

Joshua Rothman:

Ever since inequality began rising in the U.S., in the nineteen-seventies, people have debated its causes. Some argue that rising inequality is mainly the result of specific policy choices–cuts to education, say, or tax breaks for the wealthy; others argue that it’s an expression of larger, structural forces. For the last few years, Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and a widely read blogger, has been one of the most important voices on the latter side. In 2011, in an influential book called “The Great Stagnation,” Cowen argued that the American economy had exhausted the “low-hanging fruit”–cheap land, new technology, and high marginal returns on education–that had powered its earlier growth; the real story wasn’t inequality per se, but rather a general and inevitable economic slowdown from which only a few sectors of the economy were exempt. It was not a comforting story.
“Average Is Over,” Cowen’s new book, is a sequel to, and elaboration upon, “The Great Stagnation.” In many ways, it’s even less comforting. It’s not just, Cowen writes, that the old economy, built on factory work and mid-level office jobs, has stagnated. It’s that the nature of work itself is changing, largely because of the increasing power of intelligent machines. Smart software, Cowen argues, is transforming almost everything about work, and ushering in an era of “hyper-meritocracy.” It makes workers redundant, by doing their work for them. It makes work more unforgiving, by tracking our mistakes. And it creates an entirely new class of workers: people who know how to manage and interpret computer systems, and whose work, instead of competing with the software, augments and extends it. Over the next several decades, Cowen predicts, wages for that new class of workers will grow rapidly, while the rest will be left behind. Inequality will be here to stay, and that will affect not only how we work, but where and how we live.

Stephen Sawchuk:

The developers of a new performance-based teacher-licensing test have a clear message for states that want to use it: Set the passing bar high, but not too high.
Striking that balance will be among the key decisions states must now make about the edTPA, which had its official launch at a press conference today in Washington. Where states set the cutoff score will determine which candidates will be granted or denied a teaching license; as such, it’s the major “stake” attached to the performance-based test.
In development since 2009, the edTPA includes a 15-minute videotape of each candidate’s teaching skill. Seven states—Hawaii, Washington, Minnesota, New York, Tennessee, Georgia, and Wisconsin—have formally committed to using the edTPA for certification, or to gauge the quality of teacher-preparation programs; four other states are considering adopting it. (Twenty-two other states and jurisdictions have individual programs that have piloted the test.)
A technical report issued today by the Stanford Center on Assessment, Learning, and Equity, or SCALE, recommended that states not set a passing bar higher than 42 out of 75 total points—a cutoff point that would allow only 58 percent of candidates to pass on their first try. The figure is based on field-test data collected over the past year.
States that chose a different cutoff point would have a different yield: A passing score of 37 would boost passing rates up to 78 percent of candidates.

Christin Tang:

Although Wisconsin currently requires the fewest number of math and science credits in the Midwest for high school students to graduate, recently proposed legislation would increase the number of necessary credits in those subjects.
The bill, which received a public hearing Thursday, would require students to take three credits of math and science, as opposed to the current state-required two credits of each.
“As we work to raise the bar this year, we are challenging students to think critically and solve complex problems. We believe that’s what it takes to ensure students are college, career and community ready,” Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said in an email to The Badger Herald. “Additional math and science classes align with that vision. Many of our students already take additional math and science in high school, and we’re supportive of making that a requirement.”
The bill would require more credits at the state level, but many districts in Wisconsin already have higher numbers of mandatory credits, Peter Goff, UW professor in the department of educational leadership and policy analysis, said.

Music for Deck Chairs:

Adjuncts want, most immediately, more pay – a livable wage. They want space on campus in which to work. They want benefits, of health insurance especially, and a budget for essential work-related expenses (such as computers and support for their maintenance and repair). They want job security: renewable contracts guaranteeing long-term or consistently longer-term employment; advance notice for teaching appointments. They wish, most broadly, for equality: a role in faculty governance; a stake in the curricular or operational decisions of the department; the respect and support of their tenured peers.
Noel Jackson, “A brief dispatch from Boston’s Adjunct Action Symposium”, this week

The US Campus Equity Week has just finished highlighting the working conditions of the off-track teachers who keep America’s higher education systems running. There are tropes here that don’t translate easily into the Australian context–working for Walmart wages, qualifying for food stamps, missing out on healthcare–but Rebecca Schuman’s drive to show search committees how bad things are is pretty frank. And it’s just as obvious here as there that the idea of graduate student teaching as a rite of passage towards a tenured career has become a redundant fantasy.
I think we’ve been slow to recognise this in universities because we’ve focused inwards and backwards, in the naive belief that things could be made better now just because they were different before. But the reality is that universities didn’t just lose their way momentarily; they are changing in step with the broader workforce, where middle class contingency is expanding beyond the traditional freelancing professions. As the 2010 Intuit Report intuited, it’s time to “imagine a world where contingent work is as common as traditional employment.”

Mike Bruschini:

Paul Gu is the winner of a Thiel Fellowship-a two-year $100,000 grant designed to encourage teenagers to skip college and pursue scientific or entrepreneurial projects in the real world. He is also the founder of Upstart, a human capital contract firm that allows investors to fund an individual’s education in exchange for a share of their future earnings. Gu spoke with reasonintern Michael Bruschini in August about his experience with the Thiel fellowship, his start-up, and the future of higher education.
Q: You came here from China at six without any knowledge of English. How did you climb the ladder to attend Yale and become a Thiel Fellow?
A: I developed a streak for independent thinking early on and generally preferred to try beating the system instead of doing what I was told. I loved my time at Yale, but after two years, it was obvious to me that I was more of a self-learner and was getting impatient to get in the “real world.” So when I saw the Thiel opportunity come along, it was a no-brainer for me.

Esther Quintero:

I was fascinated when I started to read about the work of Betty Hart and Todd Risley and the early language differences between children growing up in different socioeconomic circumstances. But it took me a while to realize that we care about words primarily because of what words indicate about knowledge. This is important because it means that we must focus on teaching children about a wide range of interesting “stuff” – not just vocabulary for vocabulary’s sake. So, if words are the tip of the iceberg, what lies underneath? This metaphor inspired me to create the short animation below. Check it out!

John Tierney:

Eastport, Maine, which Deb and Jim Fallows have been profiling recently in their American Futures posts – and which Jim is writing an article about for the January issue of the magazine (subscribe here!) – is a tiny town of 1300 people in Washington county, which wraps around Maine’s farthest “down East” stretches.
Washington County calls itself the “Sunrise County” because it’s the easternmost county in the U.S, where the sun first rises on the 48 contiguous states. But it doesn’t boast about being the poorest county in Maine, which it is. Many of the small seaside communities dotting the county’s eastern border survive on small-scale fishing operations, while much of the rest of the county’s economy depends on wild blueberries. This is hardscrabble-life territory. That’s why towns like Eastport are working so strenuously to innovate and find paths to a more prosperous future.
It’s also why a college education leading to a solid career is perhaps even more prized here than in much of the rest of the U.S – why families celebrate when their kids get admitted to their chosen college.
There’s nothing unusual about celebrating your kid’s admission to a preferred college with a party. But for many families in Maine, that party has a name – a “lottery party,” as in “our kid just won the lottery.” I’m told this is what lots of folks in Maine call such a celebration that follows admission to the Maine Maritime Academy(MMA), graduation from which, they believe, virtually guarantees lifetime earnings equal to a big lottery win.

Crystal Shepeard:

Homelessness is defined as not having a regular permanent residence. This doesn’t necessarily mean living in the streets or in their vehicles – though many do. A large portion of homeless split their times between hotels, homeless shelters or crowding in with friends and families. For many students, when they go to school each morning, they may have no idea where they will be sleeping that night.
The Department of Education released its latest report on homeless students last month and the numbers are startling. More than 1.2 million K-12 students for the 2011-12 school year were homeless. This staggering number is considered underreported, since many kids take great measures to hide their homelessness due to embarrassment, and parents do their best to stay under the radar for fear of losing their children.
Most states saw a year to year increase in the number of homeless students. The nearly 75 percent increase nationwide since the recession began is a sign that whatever improvements are happening in the economy, it has not reached the poorest families.

Miranda Prynne:

Students with traditional surnames such as Darcy and Percy have dominated the roll-calls at Oxford and Cambridge Universities since the Norman Conquest, a new study has revealed, sparking concerns over social mobility.
Despite the upheavals of the last 800 years, there have been Darcys, Mandevilles, Percys and Montgomerys at the two elite institutions for 27 generations.
Researchers found the same names which were associated with great wealth and privilege under William the Conqueror are still found at the top echelons of society today.
Family names which signalled poverty 150 years ago, such as Boorman, Defoe, Goodhill and Ledwell, also tend to remain low on the social scale, the team from the London School of Economic (LSE) concluded.

Andrew Ross, Michael Cheque, and Luke Herrine:

Top-level lawmakers are finally turning their attention to the student debt crisis. On August 22, President Obama announced a plan to “fundamentally rethink how higher education is paid for in this country.” A few weeks before, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon declared that he would introduce a bill that would spread Oregon’s “Pay It Forward” loan repayment proposal across the nation. No doubt, there is a widespread hunger for a new way forward in education funding, and it has only sharpened in the wake of the sorry spectacle, earlier in the year, of legislators squabbling over how much to raise interest rates on federal loans. But the well-intentioned proposals floated by Obama and Merkley fall far short of a sustainable, effective solution to the problem.
Before dealing with these plans, let’s be clear: making college affordable would hardly put a dent in the federal budget. If we subtracted all of the tax exemptions, outlays, and programs that currently subsidize public education, only $12.4 billion in additional annual funding would be needed to cover the current tuition at all two and four-year public colleges and universities. In other words, the cost of a genuinely “public option” that would turn education into a binding democratic right turns out to be not much more than a rounding error in the federal budget–less than one percent of yearly spending. That’s all it would take for the federal government to join the long list of other countries that fully fund higher education. By way of comparison, U.S. taxpayers are currently subsidizing too-big-to-fail banks to the tune of $83 billion a year. If we just turned off that faucet we could provide public education completely tuition-free with $70 billion to spare.

Patrick Gibbons:

Florida made small gains over the last NAEP cycle, but how does its growth compare over the long haul? Pretty good.
If you go all the way back to the beginning of NAEP time (which can vary from 1990 to 2003 depending on the grade, subject and sub-group), Florida’s gains since then best the national gains in 38 of 40 categories. If NAEP gains were heavyweight boxing, Florida’s career record would be 38-2 with 11 KO’s (beating the average by 10 or more points).
Florida’s average gain per category is 21.5 points (about two grade levels worth of advancement). Its average spread over the national gain is 7.1 points (nearly a grade level).
One caveat: In the two areas where Florida was beat by the national average (4th grade math by English Language Learners (ELL) and 8th grade math by low-income Hispanics) the results may be biased because so few states had enough ELL and Hispanic students to compare.

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor:

In the post-Prop 209 era, nearly 60 percent of African-American students accepted at Cal are choosing to attend other colleges — often, because they feel unwelcome.
In 1997, the year after California voters approved Proposition 209, which prohibited the consideration of race or ethnicity in the operation of state institutions, black students made up 8 percent of UC Berkeley’s freshmen enrollment — roughly the same percentage of African Americans living in the state. The following year, the percentage of black freshmen at Cal plummeted by more than half, and has hovered at or below 4 percent ever since. It averaged 3.6 percent in the five-year period between 2006 and 2010.
“On the campus website, more often than not, you’ll often find a black face representing some program or other,” said American Studies senior Salih Muhammad of Oakland. Muhammad is the former chair of Berkeley’s Black Student Union and currently chair of the statewide UC African-American Coalition. “But when it comes to walking around the campus, those black faces are few and far between. Or, you’ll see the ‘I Support Berkeley’ banners on campus, with all these black faces on them, but there are more black faces on the banners than there are in many of the classes.”
In fact, some students in Cal’s science and technology departments — where black students are least represented — said they can go an entire day without seeing another African American.

Madison School Board President Ed Hughes

Pending Senate Bill 76 is another volley in the war Wisconsin Republican legislators have unleashed on local control. The bill would further undermine the authority of locally-elected school boards to determine the number of charter schools that operate within their school districts.
Senators Darling and Olson introduced an amendment to the bill on October 31. The amendment provision making it easier for a school district to convert all of its schools to charter schools has already drawn attention. What seems to have escaped notice so far is that Senators Olson and Darling may have mixed up their holidays – their Halloween amendment provides yet another Christmas present for their well-heeled friends at K12 Inc. and the for-profit virtual charter school industry.
The poor performance of virtual charter schools in Wisconsin has resulted in few if any negative consequences for their operators. But this past year, a slight dose of accountability has slipped into the mix with the advent of school district report cards issued by DPI. Senators Olson and Darling’s amendment nips that positive trend in the bud by stripping virtual charter schools out of the home school district for report card purposes. It is hard to see this as anything other than a sell-out to K12 and their virtual charter chums.
There are currently 28 virtual charter schools operating in Wisconsin. Many of them – like Middleton-Cross Plains 21st century eSchool – are wholly operated by and genuinely integrated into the home school district. In other cases, however, the home school district serves as the equivalent of a mailing address for a virtual charter school that is operated by an out-of-state, for-profit vendor.

Do we apply the same governance standards to traditional school districts that spend at least double the virtual schools?
Much more on Ed Hughes, here.

Chris Rickert

So I get why Burke was the only board member to vote against a tax-raising, 2013-2014 school district budget.
Still, just once I’d like to see a candidate throw caution to the wind and mount a data-based defense of good, if politically unwise, choices. If voters don’t buy it, well then they deserve what they get.
Burke explained her latest no vote on the budget last week by saying the district needs to consider whether salary increases for district residents are keeping up with school district tax increases.
To back up that concern, Burke provided me with a May 1 news release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that in Dane County, residents saw a 3.9 percent drop in average weekly wages between the third quarter of 2011 and the third quarter of 2012.
I did a little more digging and found that wages also dropped by 0.1 percent between the second quarter of 2011 and the second quarter of 2012, and by 0.3 percent between the first quarters of 2012 and 2013.
Nevertheless, a broader view of the most recent available data suggests her concern is largely unfounded.
The BLS reported that wages were up 7.7 percent and 5.9 percent respectively, in the first and fourth quarters of last year – essentially wiping out, and then some, the wage decreases.
Plus, over the most recent 10 years for which data are available, personal income and per-capita income in Dane County rose, on an average annual basis, by 4.29 percent and 2.92 percent, respectively, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
By contrast, next year’s school district budget raises taxes on the average homeowner by 2.5 percent, and over the past 10 years, the average annual school district tax increase has been 1.75 percent.
If anything, district tax increases aren’t keeping up with district residents’ ability to pay them.
Despite the old tax-and-spend myth frequently pinned on liberal Dane County, the school district isn’t unique, either, at least when it comes to Madison and county government.

Mr. Rickert neglects to mention the changing composition of Wisconsin K-12 tax revenue sources. Redistributed state tax dollars grew substantially during the past few decades. That growth has now largely stopped. Absent a serious look at our agrarian era school organizations and practices, property tax & spending growth are going up annually.

Katie Rophie:

The technology now exists to let you read every email your child sends and receives. But should you?
If you could see every email, every chat, every internet search your teenager does on his laptop late at night would you want to? Because if you want to, you can.
I know this because one day at lunch in a restaurant I ran into a friend, whom I’ll call Mrs Orwell, and she told me that she had started monitoring her daughter’s computer by installing spyware. Before I go any further I should say that Mrs Orwell is in no way the drab or crazy person you might imagine from this particular vignette. Instead she is quite glamorous and sensible and fun; she is busy with her own life, and does not seem unduly or excessively involved with her children. Which is why when she told me that she was secretly monitoring her daughter’s every move on the internet, I was intrigued. If anyone else had told me the same thing, I would have thought, well, she’s nuts or dangerously bored.
The reason Mrs Orwell turned to spyware is that her 15-year-old has a very serious, brooding boyfriend. She had come across some evidence (in the real world: a diary entry left open on a desk) that the boyfriend was dangerously or theatrically self-destructive, and so she was worried about her daughter.

Erica Ritz:

Mike Rowe, widely-known from the hit TV show “Dirty Jobs” and a series of Ford commercials, appeared on The Glenn Beck Program Wednesday to discuss his efforts with the mikeroweWORKS Foundation in challenging “the absurd belief that a four-year degree is the only path to success.”
“We’re lending money we don’t have, to kids who will never be able to pay it back, for jobs that no longer exist,” he explained, echoing what he told TheBlaze TV’s Andrew Wilkow earlier this month. “That’s crazy, right? That’s what we’ve been doing for the last forty years.”
Rowe’s motivation for the work largely began with what he described as “the worst advice in the history of the world” – a poster he saw in high school challenging students to “work smart, not hard.” The picture of the person working “smart” was holding a diploma, and the person working “hard” looked miserable performing some form of manual labor.
“Today, skilled trades are in demand. In fact, there are 3 million jobs out there that companies are having a hard time filling. So we thought that skilled trades could do with a PR campaign,” he said with a smile. “So we took the same idea, went ahead and vandalized it. Work smart AND hard.'”

Jay Matthews:

Student critiques of adult cluelessness have long been as much a part of high school as Friday night football and backpacks. My best friend in high school, Dan Cummings, was suspended for publishing an underground newspaper eviscerating how our school was run.
Maddy King, a junior at Fairfax County’s James Madison High School in Vienna, was similarly moved to vent recently, but being a teacher’s daughter and a staffer for the official school newspaper, she opted for a long, thoughtful letter to Principal Mark Merrell. When posted on the newspaper Web site, the letter created a sensation. She exposed issues that often infuriate students and yet are blithely overlooked by policymakers trying to upgrade the U.S. secondary school system.

Michael Janofsky:

A slight plurality of LA Unified teachers said they would favor continuing the iPad program, according to a new UTLA survey that produced mixed results in a district contemplating the next phase of a billion dollar digital device program.
The union poll was conducted over a week in late October, with 255 teachers from the 47 district schools that received iPads in Phase 1 of the program responding. Not all the teachers responded to all the questions, but taken together, the ambiguous results may undermine the value of the survey as a credible resource for policy.
Even the number who favored continuing the program, 62, was barely more than those who would stop it, 57, with another 54 saying they were unsure what to do. The district is planning to give iPads to all 650,000 students by the end of 2015.
The survey was conducted at the request of Monica Ratliff, the LA Unified board member who serves as chair of the Common Core Technology Project committee. She has been in favor of district students’ receiving digital devices beyond Phase 1 but not necessarily iPads. At the board’s meeting two days ago, she proposed holding off further distribution until officials could evaluate the instructional effectiveness of all digital devices used in the district.

Jesse Opoien:

Without trying to pin it on one magic solution — what are some of the potential solutions that are being discussed?
There’s plenty of research that says you get the most bang for your buck in investing in the early childhood grades. That probably still holds true. But at the same time, if you invested in high quality preschool and then let chips fall where they may, many of those positive effects will eventually deteriorate.
My sense is that the efforts to identify high-performing schools, high-quality schools regardless of what sector they’re in — public, charter or private — identifying the characteristics of high-performing schools regardless of sector, and trying to replicate them.
The other thing we’ve known for a long time is the single biggest within-school factor or influence on student achievement, in this order, are the quality of the teacher and the quality of the principal. Investing in ways of identifying effective teachers and helping them get better is almost always a good investment. It’s hard work, but it’s a good investment.
The other thing in terms of causes worth mentioning: there’s plenty of research that shows we have inequitable distributions of teacher quality. The higher the poverty rate, the more likely students are to be taught by a younger, less effective teacher. We can look at ways of trying to incentivize the most effective teachers to teach in the neediest schools. There are some positive signs here, but it’s nothing that’s going to be fixed over night.

Related: the rejected Madison Preparatory IB charter school.

Kate Rousmaniere:

A few years ago when I walked the hallways of a high school with my five-year-old niece Evie, she remarked, without prompting: “There’s the principal’s office: you only go there if you are in trouble.” As an educator and an aunt, I wondered how the office of an educational professional had come to be symbolized in such a decisive way in the mind of a child, particularly a child who had yet to enter formal schooling. As I scanned popular representations of the school principal, I found that Evie’s impression was hardly unusual. Across popular and professional cultures, the figure of the school principal is commonly reduced to a small, often disagreeable functionary of bad news, the wet blanket of progressive teacher practice, the prison guard of students’ freedom. As I asked friends and colleagues about their impressions of school principals, few actually knew what principals did, and many people confused the role of school building principal with school district superintendent. Most remarkably, those very people who did not understand what a principal did were often the first to argue for the abolition of the role.
In American public schools, the principal is the most complex and contradictory figure in the pantheon of educational leadership. The principal is both the administrative director of state educational policy and a building manager, both an advocate for school change and the protector of bureaucratic stability. Authorized to be employer, supervisor, professional figurehead, and inspirational leader, the principal’s core training and identity is as a classroom teacher. A single person, in a single professional role, acts on a daily basis as the connecting link between a large bureaucratic system and the individual daily experiences of a large number of children and adults. Most contradictory of all, the principal has always been responsible for student learning, even as the position has become increasingly disconnected from the classroom.
The history of the principal offers even more contradictions. Contemporary principals work in the midst of unique modern challenges of ever-changing fiscal supports, school law and policy, community values, and youth culture. At the same time, the job of the contemporary principal shares many of the characteristics of their predecessors two centuries ago. While social and economic contexts have changed, the main role of the principal has remained essentially the same over time: to implement state educational policy to the school and to maneuver, buffer, and maintain the stability of the school culture at the local level.

Ann Doss Helms:

School choice plays a growing role in the quest to educate all students in the Charlotte region, speakers told more than 100 people gathered Saturday for a forum on the future of public education.
In the past, public education was synonymous with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Superintendent Heath Morrison was one of the speakers at the session organized by Staying Ahead Carolina, a social networking group. But he was joined by Eddie Goodall of the N.C. Public Charter Schools Association and state Rep. Rob Bryan, R-Mecklenburg, co-sponsor of the state’s Opportunity Scholarship Act, which will provide income-based vouchers to pay private school tuition starting in 2014.
All of them, along with Bill Anderson of the nonprofit advocacy group MeckEd, agreed that families want high-quality choices for their children. But they voiced different views on the benefits and drawbacks of North Carolina’s options.
“Parents like choice. That shows up on every survey, across the state and across the country,” Morrison said. “We have to make sure that there’s quality as well as quantity.”
“Parents like choice. That shows up on every survey, across the state and across the country,” Morrison said. “We have to make sure that there’s quality as well as quantity.”
Staying Ahead Carolina, a nonpartisan group that has previously focused on noneducation issues such as arts and health, convened the forum at UNC Charlotte Center City to talk about choices, challenges and changes in public education.

Caitlin Emma:

States should take student demographics into consideration when constructing school performance measures, move away from A-F grading of schools and be more innovative in measuring school accountability under No Child Left Behind waivers issued by the Education Department, a new paper presented in the journal Educational Researcher says.
The paper, written by researchers at the University of Southern California and North Carolina State University, is the latest input the Education Department has received as it moves forward with plans to renew waivers for some states through the 2015-16 school year.
A renewal of the law is stalled in Congress, but 42 states, the District of Columbia and eight school districts in California have waivers absolving them of some of the key requirements of NCLB.

Alan Talaga:

But voting down a bill with a relatively minor tax increase, one that was less than the maximum allowed by the district, makes it look like she might offer an austerity budget if she sat in the governor’s chair. That’s why Burke made sure to toss a little red meat to the deep blue crowd.
“My concern is that very little of it (the property tax increase) went into increasing pay for teachers,” she said.
Ta-da! She voted against the budget because it wasn’t paying teachers enough! There’s another campaign slogan: “Mary Burke: She fights to pay teachers more!”

Yet, the same service tax, spending and curricular approach continues in Madison, despite long term disastrous reading results.
Rhetoric and vote parsing does nothing for the thousands of young people who cannot read.
Bread & circuses.

Song Jung-a:

Time was put on hold in South Koreaon Thursday as financial markets and public offices opened late to ensure calm when more than 650,000 students sat the annual university entrance exam. Success in the test is critical to millions of young students’ career and marriage prospects.
Trading at the Korea Stock Exchange and the country’s foreign exchange market began at 10am, an hour later than usual, to keep roads clear while aircraft will be grounded in the afternoon during the English listening test. About 65 commercial flights have been rescheduled to avoid take-off or landing for 30 minutes from 1.05pm.
Classes at primary and secondary schools started an hour later than usual while civil servants and most employees in the private sector were also asked to go to work an hour later than usual to ease traffic congestion to ensure that students arrive at their exam sites on time.
The university entrance exam is one of the most critical annual events for young people in the country – where seven out of every 10 high school students go on to higher education – as a diploma from top schools is widely regarded as a ticket to success in Asia’s fourth-largest economy. An almost cult-like devotion to learning has been among the driving forces behind the country’s rapid economic development over the past half century, creating one of the world’s most highly educated workforces.

Catherine Capellaro:

Less than a decade ago, Ravitch promoted many of the same policies she now rails against. As assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, and then as head of the federal testing program, she led the charge for state and national academic standards and supported ideas of “choice” and merit pay. “I believed in those things because in theory they made a lot of sense,” Ravitch says when I ask about her dramatic about-face. “It sounds right that if you pay teachers a bonus they’ll get higher scores. It just doesn’t work.”
Ravitch went public with her change of heart in her 2010 book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. In her new book, she uses data to rebut arguments for market-based solutions to education problems.
“When you look at the data, the test scores have never been higher in the last 40 years,” says Ravitch. “Dropouts have never been lower than they are today.”
Real gaps
“The achievement gap is real,” Ravitch told me when I brought up Madison’s racial and economic disparities.
She points to research showing the only time the black-white achievement gap has narrowed was in the late 1970s and early 1980s because of concerted efforts to desegregate schools, reduce class size, increase access to early childhood education and target federal resources to schools with low-income students.
But today’s leaders have abandoned solutions that work, says Ravitch, who comes down as hard on President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan as she does on conservatives. “Our policymakers have given up on reducing class size,” she adds, saying she visits classes with up to 40 students. “Are there expanding opportunities for African American families? Our society has thrown up its hands, and we’re resegregating

Angus:

As AI and globalization chew up good jobs for the non-elites, there is a bright spot on the career horizon. The market for household staff is booming.
According to the WSJ, “A good housekeeper earns $60,000 to $90,000 a year. A lady’s maid can make $75,000 a year. A butler may start at $80,000 a year and can earn as much as $200,000.”
And, there are openings, “Demand for the well-staffed home is on the rise, according to agencies and house managers alike. Clients are calling for live-in couples, live-out housekeepers, flight attendants for private jets, stewards for the yachts and chefs for the summer house. In San Francisco, Town and Country Resources, a staffing agency for domestic help, has seen demand for estate managers and trained housekeepers grow so fast the agency is going to offer its own training programs in subjects like laundry, ironing and spring cleaning starting in 2014. Claudia Kahn, founder of The Help Company, a staffing agency based in Los Angeles, says she used to get one call a month for a butler but has gotten three in the past week alone.”

Alan Borsuk:

What are we doing wrong? Why aren’t things getting better?
No, I don’t have some powerful secret answer. But I know the urgency behind the questions became all the clearer last week, whether you’re talking about Milwaukee or Wisconsin as a whole. Whatever it is that would work, we haven’t done it yet or, at best, we haven’t done it well enough.
There are so many people trying to change education outcomes for the better. I respect so many of them and think some are having praiseworthy impact in specific arenas. But the overall pursuit? Look at the record.
There are two reasons for my fresh agitation:
First are new results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP is the best, most nailed-down gauge of how students are doing nationwide. About every two years, NAEP releases results from reading and math tests of samples of fourth and eighth graders in every state. New results came out Thursday.
Nationwide, there were some bright spots, but overall, not much was new or better.
For Wisconsin, the results were disheartening. The average score of a fourth grader in reading was lower than in 1992. We pride ourselves on being a high performing state, but the Wisconsin score and the national score were the same. Sounds pretty middle-of-the-pack to me.
There has been long-term improvement in math scores in Wisconsin. But almost all of it occurred years ago — scores have been flat for the last half-dozen years.

Gayle Worland:

In response to findings that a disproportionate number of black students enrolled in the Sun Prairie School District are placed into special education programs, the district has agreed to revamp its student screening process and bolster teacher training.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced Friday that the Sun Prairie district had volunteered to make the changes in response to a “compliance review,” which was designed to determine whether the district discriminates against black students when referring them to special education meant for students with a disability.
The federal office found that in the 2012-13 school year, black students made up 10 percent of the district’s student enrollment but 24.2 percent of the students enrolled in special education.
Screenings for students who might be struggling vary from school to school within the 7,372-student district, and some students referred to special education did not receive follow-up, the investigation found.
The review was still in progress when the district offered to make changes, including:

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

Should writers work for free? What if those writers are academics?
That is a real question up for debate in several media outlets this past week. But I’d like to ask why we work for free and why we don’t shame organizations that expect us to.
The Internet has created a bottomless void that requires content. In a classic case of how expansion breeds stratified access, an increase in platforms that require writing has resulted in fewer outlets that pay writers to write. In the New York Times recently, Tim Kreider argued that he cannot afford to write for free. He encourages other writers to reject the freemium culture for the benefit of all who make a living by penning the word. In a column for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sarah Kendzior says that journalists may find it beneficial to write for free occasionally, but that academics should never do the same, even though “[p]ublishers like to evoke academics’ professional status to justify not paying them.”

Jon James:

The economic returns to education are well documented. It is also well-known that college graduates with certain majors will earn more than others and find it easier to land a job. But surprisingly, the courses students take in high school also make a difference, when the courses are mathematics. Even among workers with the same level of education, those with more math have higher wages on average and are less likely to be unemployed. These findings suggest that even students ending their formal education after high school can increase their future earnings by investing in more math courses while in high school.

High school graduates earn more money in general than high school dropouts. This well-known fact is a powerful incentive to finish high school. But is it just the diploma that counts, or do the particular courses students take while in high school matter for their future job prospects? Students can opt for a variety of courses, from vocational tracks to advanced placement classes for college credit, during their final four years of required education.
Most high school graduates choose a curriculum that is far more rigorous than the minimum requirements. This is most evident in mathematics courses. For example, in 2009, 75 percent of high school graduates completed math coursework at the level of Algebra II or above. Most of these students could have stopped at Algebra I and satisfied the minimum high school requirements. Only six states required Algebra II for graduation as of 2006. About 11 required Algebra I, six required geometry, and the remaining 27 required only that students complete a minimum of three years of mathematics at any level.
The fact that so many students take a rigorous math curriculum is not surprising given that a minimum of Algebra II is necessary for adequate college preparation. But an analysis of detailed high school transcript data and employment outcomes suggests that a more rigorous high school math curriculum benefits even those who do not go to college. While math may be difficult for many, our findings indicate that the payoffs for all students may be substantial.

Unsurprising, particularly when one encounters young people unable to comprehend cell phone costs, student loan terms or simply make change.
Related: Math Forum audio / video and Connected Math.

Stephanie Simon:

“I have never encountered politics as mean, nasty and personal as in ed reform,” said Ben Austin, who runs an advocacy group called Parent Revolution. He’s hardly a naïf: He led a communications team for the 2000 Democratic National Convention and spent five years in the Clinton White House. Yet Austin says he finds the bare-knuckle brawling of education politics both bewildering and depressing.
“The toxicity level is bizarrely high,” he said. “It would be funny if [the instigators] were bloggers sitting around in their underwear in tin-foil hats, but these are thought leaders in the field.”
Austin himself took a direct hit several months ago when Ravitch skewered him on her widely read blog, describing him as “loathsome” and writing of Parent Revolution: “There is a special place in hell reserved for everyone who administers and funds this revolting organization …”
Ravitch later apologized in a long public letter that spent 87 words repenting and nearly 1,700 running through all the reasons she considers Austin and his team to be heartless and destructive for organizing parents at a struggling Los Angeles school to oust the principal.

Douglas Belkin:

Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala., was founded in 1830. It has graduated governors and admirals. Martin Luther King Jr. praised it for its early efforts at integration in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
None of that august history protected it from plummeting enrollment last year. So, to induce prospective students to consider its $170,000 sticker price for a four-year education, Spring Hill began offering $1,000 scholarships for taking a campus tour.
“We’re at a time when enrollment is the No. 1 driver,” said Bob Stewart, the school’s vice president for admissions and financial aid. “We needed to have some game changers to bring in new students.”
Spring Hill was caught in the same tailspin that many U.S. private colleges are facing as they endure plummeting enrollment among price-conscious students.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

The results of the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released today. For Wisconsin, the news on reading is much the same as it was two years ago at the last NAEP administration. 33.6% of our 4th graders reached the proficient level. Massachusetts again scored at the top, with 50.4% of its 4th graders proficient.
Wisconsin students who are Asian, black, and white, as well as students who are not eligible for a free and reduced lunch, all posted scores that are significantly lower than the national averages for those groups of students. We had no 4th grade sub-groups that scored significantly above the national average for their group.
Wisconsin’s black 8th graders had the lowest scores in the nation, falling below Mississippi and Alabama. Wisconsin’s black 4th graders had the second lowest scores in the nation, and at both 4th and 8th grade, Wisconsin had the largest gap between white and black students.
As we examine the data more fully, we will have more specifics.

Stephanie Banchero:

Fourth- and eighth-graders across the country made modest advances in national math and reading exams this year, according to data released Thursday, but proficiency rates remained stubbornly below 50% on every test.
Amid the sluggish progress nationwide, a few areas notched drastic improvements on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, with Tennessee and Washington, D.C., –as well as schools on military bases–the only ones achieving statistically significant gains on all tests.
Washington gained a cumulative 23 points since 2011, while Tennessee posted a 22-point jump–both compared with a 4-point national gain. The exams are scored on a 0-500 scale.
Officials in Tennessee and Washington attributed the gains to tougher classroom math and reading standards, improved teacher development and overhauling teacher evaluations.

State posts widest achievement gap in ‘the nation’s report card’ by Lydia Mulvany:

Steven Dykstra, a founding member of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, a grassroots group devoted to reforming reading instruction, said the state needs to start imitating reforms in other states by training teachers more effectively. In the past, Wisconsin students ranked as high as third in the nation in reading.
“This isn’t a surprise. The last time we did well in reading was when everyone sucked at reading,” Dykstra said. “When some states started doing better, they very quickly left us behind.”
“Left behind” is precisely what the data shows is happening to Wisconsin’s black students:
Eighth graders, reading: 9% were judged proficient; 55% rated below basic, the most of any state.
Fourth graders, reading: 11% were proficient; 65% scored below basic, again the most of any state.
Eighth graders, math: 8% were proficient; 62% rated below basic, better than only three states.
Fourth graders, math: 25% were proficient; 30% scored below basic, again with only three states performing worse.
Henry Krankendonk, a retired Milwaukee Public Schools math curriculum planner and NAEP board member, said Wisconsin’s failure to narrow the disparity — which has existed for decades — is a challenge for Milwaukee in particular, because it has the highest concentration of minority students. Krankendonk said the problem has long been weak standards for what students should know, and he was hopeful that the recent adoption of new standards more in line with NAEP, called Common Core State Standards, would help.

Meanwhile, St. Norbert College Education Professor Steve Correia emphasized how well (!) Reading Recovery is working while discussing Wisconsin’s NAEP results on WPR. [5.6mb mp3 audio]
Related: Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.
Much more on NAEP over time, here.

Molly Knefel:

What happens to education when students, from preschool to high school, are subjected to disciplinary policies that more closely resemble policing than teaching? Around the country, advocates are collecting data illustrating the devastating effects of what they call the “school-to-prison pipeline,” where student behavior is criminalized, children are treated like prisoners and, all too often, actually end up behind bars. “The school-to-prison pipeline refers to interlocking sets of relationships at the institutional/structural and the individual levels,” explains Miriame Kaba, founding director at Project NIA, an advocacy group in Chicago fighting youth incarceration. “All of these forces work together to push youth of color, especially, out of schools and into unemployment and the criminal legal system.”
This fall, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) issued a report focusing on how the criminalization of school discipline is profoundly harming children’s educational opportunities in New York City. “Once a child is subjected to suspensions or arrests in school, they are less likely to graduate and more likely to end up involved in the criminal justice system,” says Donna Lieberman, the NYCLU’s executive director. “That means they’re on a path to prison, not graduation.” The report demonstrates that the city’s black and low-income students, as well as students with disabilities, are disproportionately affected by suspensions, expulsions and arrests – which have skyrocketed under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration. The data also shows a correlation between neighborhoods whose students experience high rates of suspension and those with high rates of stop-and-frisk, the controversial policing tool ruled unconstitutional earlier this year.
The number of students suspended from New York City schools each year has more than doubled under Bloomberg, from roughly 29,000 in 2001 to almost 70,000 in 2011. Half of those suspended were black, despite black students comprising less than a third of the student population. Black students with disabilities have the highest rates of suspension, almost three times higher than their white disabled peers. White students with disabilities are also suspended at higher rates than their non-disabled peers. “It’s a lot about race,” says Lieberman. “Black students are far more likely than [non-disabled] white students and white students with special needs to be suspended from school.”

The Economist:

IN THE film “Bad Teacher”, Cameron Diaz’s character says she entered the profession “for all the right reasons: shorter hours, summers off, no accountability”. No one is threatening to take away the first two agreeable perks, but several states are eyeing the third.
In the past, teachers were judged solely on their level of education and the number of years they had spent in the classroom–neither of which tells you whether their pupils are learning anything. But this is changing. A new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a research group, finds that most states now demand that student achievement should be a significant factor in teacher evaluations (see chart). Only Alabama, California, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Texas and Vermont have no formal policy.
The expansion of teacher evaluation is broadly good news. Work published in 2011, from Columbia and Harvard, showed that pupils assigned to better teachers are more likely to go to college and earn decent salaries, and less likely to be teenage mothers. If teachers in grades 4 to 8 are ranked according to their ability to add value (ie, teach) and those in the bottom 5% are replaced with ones of average quality, a class’s cumulative lifetime income is raised by $250,000. Bill Gates once said that if every child had mathematics teachers as good as those in the top quartile, the achievement gap between America and Asia would vanish in two years. (His lecture has been watched 1.5m times online.)

Much more on teacher content knowledge requirements, here.

Jack Craver:

Total revenue for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the largest union in the state, dropped from $26 million in 2011 to $20 million in 2012. WEAC, which represents 80,000 teachers across the state, has for years been a great force for the Democratic Party, providing millions of dollars on attack ads against Republicans on top of legions of volunteers.
The next largest public sector union, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has also taken a financial hit. AFSCME Council 40, which represents county and municipal workers outside of Milwaukee County, reported its gross revenue dropping from $6.7 million in 2011 to $4.5 million in 2012. Reports for some of the other large AFSCME Councils, including Council 24, which represents state employees, are not yet available online.
Revenue for the American Federation of Teachers, which in Wisconsin largely represents academic staff at the state’s universities as well as a number of white-collar state employees, dropped from just under $4 million in 2011 to $2.6 million in 2012.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 150 — which represents many public sector healthcare professionals — saw its revenue drop from $937,000 to $783,000. Fortunately for that union, many of its members, including nurses at Meriter Hospital, are in the private sector, and are thus unaffected by Act 10.
The decrease in union money could spell serious trouble for Democrats as they try to recapture the governorship and gain seats in the state Legislature next year. Third-party ads in favor of Democrats are largely funded by labor, whether from individual unions or union-funded groups such as the Greater Wisconsin Committee or We Are Wisconsin.
With the largest unions bleeding dues, it will be hard for Democratic forces to compete with corporate-funded players on the right, such as Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, which has already dumped $1 million into an ad buy celebrating Walker’s record as governor.

Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators.

Bill Bollom:

But poor parenting is not alone on the hook. Our culture is on the hook too. We put too little value on a strong work ethic for our kids. Our kids are not hungry to succeed, particularly the boys. The boys in our culture seem to love, even respect, their stereotype of dumb and dumber. They are not interested in investing effort for the future; postponing gratification. Our many welfare programs are at least partly responsible for this attitude, by giving handouts and asking less of our citizens, making us weaker and less proud of beating our foreign competition.
Our culture loves excellence in sports far more than academic achievement. Too many students (and parents) think sports are the very purpose of high schools; academics suffer as a result. Because sports, particularly football is so expensive, academic areas get too little funding. One school found that cheerleading instruction cost four times more than math instruction.

Chris Rickert:

Despite all this, Gov. Scott Walker and lawmakers seem paralyzed in the face of potential bipartisan agreement.
Walker has said as far back as August that he’s open to changing the voucher program to give preference to public school students. The Republican chairmen of the Senate and Assembly education committees have made similar noises. Yet none responded to messages from me saying essentially: Well, OK, so are you introducing legislation to do that?
Similarly, Gillian Drummond, spokeswoman for Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chris Larson, said “I have not heard of anything” on possible Democratic legislation on the issue in the Senate.
Speaking on background, a staffer for Rep. Sondy Pope, who has been outspoken in her criticism of underwriting private school tuition with vouchers, said “our caucus as a whole is looking” to do something even more stringent than in Racine, but was less than optimistic about Republicans going along.