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More and more teenage girls are using intrauterine devices and other long-acting reversible contraceptives, or LARCs. That’s one reason the teen pregnancy rate has plunged. But those girls are using condoms less often than girls who take oral contraceptives, according to a new analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics.
Why it matters:
LARCs are more than 99 percent effective at preventing pregnancy, and their use has doubled between 2010 and 2015. But IUDs and hormonal implants — which work by preventing sperm from fertilizing an egg — don’t protect women from sexually transmitted diseases or infections.
Repeatedly during the meeting, Millner and other regents cited the need, in an era of tight budgets, for “flexibility” to close programs — and eliminate faculty jobs in the process. The votes here marked the near-end of two years of debate over a tenure policy that saw the university system’s tenured faculty go from having among the strongest protections in the nation (written into state law) to having a system that many professors fear will make it too easy to dismiss them and eliminate programs they believe should be preserved. When the idea of removing tenure from state statute first surfaced — at the behest of Governor Scott Walker, a Republican — he and others said that necessary protections for faculty members could all be preserved in system policy. But the system adopted Thursday differs in key ways from what was removed from state law — especially after a series of amendments were rejected.
Millner weighed in on an amendment proposed by Tony Evers, a fellow regent, that — if passed — would have addressed one of the biggest faculty concerns about the proposed policy regarding layoffs of tenured faculty: that it conflates financial and educational considerations in assessing programs for possible closure (and subsequent faculty job losses).
JimQ:
stumbled across an article in the Financial Times the other day revealing why Philadelphia’s infrastructure is crumbling, with absolutely zero possibility of reversing the downward spiral. I find it fascinating a foreign publication had to uncover the ugly truth, while the liberal rag Phila. Inquirer is completely silent on the issue. They just spout the mantra of how the Feds and PA need to give Philadelphia more money. It’s always for the children. The hundreds of billions poured into the public education system in this country over the last decade has been a complete waste of time, mainly because a huge portion of the money doesn’t go towards education, but bloated pensions and administration costs.
More mediocre teachers, more government control, more social engineering, more free breakfasts and lunches, more catchy slogans and more promises have achieved steady declines in SAT scores across the board. The next solution is to phase out SAT scores. Measuring failure isn’t allowed in our politically correct, trophy generation, safe spaces world. Reporting declines in scores on a test that has been an accurate predictor of college success for generations is a micro aggression against the intellectually stunted morons being matriculated through the government run public education system. The $14,000 to $20,000 per student per year spent by the taxpayers across this country just isn’t enough according to those of a liberal ilk. The children would be smart if we just upped the ante by another $2,000 per kid. They’d hire more below average education majors into the teacher’s union. That’s a can’t miss solution.
David Gelernter, via Will Fitzhugh:
Donald Trump is succeeding, we’re told, because he appeals to angry voters—but that’s obvious; tell me more. Why are they angry, and how does he appeal to them? In 2016, Americans want to vote for a person and not a white paper. If you care about America’s fate under Obama, naturally you are angry; voters should distrust a candidate who is not angry.
But there’s more to it than mere anger. Chris Christie was angry, and he’s gone. Trump has hit on important issues—immigration, the economy, appeasement unlimited—in ways that appeal to voters emotionally. There’s nothing wrong with that; I trust someone who feels what I feel more than a person who merely thinks what I think. But though Rubio and Cruz are plainly capable of connecting with voters emotionally, Trump is way ahead—for many reasons, but the most important is obvious and virtually ignored.
Political correctness. Trump hasn’t made it a campaign theme exactly, but he mentions it often with angry disgust. Reporters, pundits, and the other candidates treat it as a sideshow, a handy way for Trump (King Kong, Jr.) to smack down the pitiful airplanes that attack him as he bestrides his mighty tower, roaring. But the analysts have it exactly backward. Political correctness is the biggest issue facing America today. Even Trump has just barely faced up to it. The ironic name disguises the real nature of this force, which ought to be called invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism. The old-time American mainstream, working- and middle-class white males and their families, is mad as hell about political correctness and the havoc it has wreaked for 40 years—havoc made worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it. Republicans rarely even acknowledge its existence as the open wound it really is; a wound that will fester forever until someone has the nerve to heal it—or the patient succumbs. To watch young minorities protest their maltreatment on fancy campuses when your own working life has seen, from the very start, relentless discrimination in favor of minorities—such events can make people a little testy.
We are fighting Islamic terrorism, but the president won’t even say “Islamic terrorism.” It sounds like a joke—but it isn’t funny. It connects straight to other problems that terrify America’s nonelites, people who do not belong (or whose spouses or children don’t belong) to the races or groups that are revered and protected under p.c. law and theology.
Political correctness means that when the Marines discover that combat units are less effective if they include women, a hack overrules them. What’s more important, guys, combat effectiveness or leftist dogma? No contest! Nor is it hard to notice that putting women in combat is not exactly the kind of issue that most American women are losing sleep over. It matters only to a small, powerful clique of delusional ideologues. (The insinuation that our p.c. military is upholding the rights of women everywhere, that your average American woman values feminist dogma over the strongest-possible fighting force—as if women were just too ditzy to care about boring things like winning battles—is rage-making.)
The mainstream press largely ignored the Marines story. Mainstream reporters can’t see the crucial importance of political correctness because they are wholly immersed in it, can’t conceive of questioning it; it is the very stuff of their thinking, their heart’s blood. Most have been raised in this faith and have no other. Can you blame them if they take it for granted?
Why did the EPA try to issue a diktat designed to destroy the American coal industry in exchange for decreases in carbon emissions that were purely symbolic? Political correctness required this decree. It is not just a matter of infantile posing, like pretending to be offended by the name Washington Redskins. Bureaucrats have been ordered by those on high to put their p.c. principles into practice, and the character of American government is changing.
The IRS attacks conservative groups—and not one IRS worker has the integrity or guts to resign on principle, not one. Political correctness is a creed, and the creed holds that American conservatives are ignorant, stupid, and evil. This has been the creed for a generation, but people are angry now because we see, for the first time, political correctness powering an administration and a federal bureaucracy the way a big V-8 powers a sports car. The Department of Justice contributes its opinion that the IRS was guilty of no crime—and has made other politically slanted decisions too; and those decisions all express the credo of thought-police liberalism, as captured by the motto soon to be mounted (we hear) above the main door at the White House, the IRS, and the DOJ: We know what’s best; you shut up.
It’s a gigantic, terrifying problem—and no other candidate even mentions it! If Cruz and Rubio and Bush choose to be taken seriously by voters (versus analysts), they will follow Trump in attacking this deadly corrosion that weakens democracy from the inside, leaving a fragile shell that crumbles to powder in the first stiff breeze.
The State Department, naturally, is installing the same motto above its door—together with a flag emblazoned with a presidential phone and a presidential pen, the sacred instruments of invasive leftism. Christians are persecuted, enslaved, murdered in the Middle East, but the Obama regime is not interested. In a distant but related twist, Obama orders Christian organizations to dispense contraceptives whether they want to or not. This is political correctness in action—invasive leftism. Political correctness holds that Christians are a bygone force, reactionary, naïve, and irrelevant. If you don’t believe it, go to the universities that trained Obama, Columbia and Harvard, and listen. We live in the Biblical Republic, founded by devout Christians with a Creed (liberty, equality, democracy) supported directly—each separate principle—by ancient Hebrew verses. Christianity created this nation. But p.c. people don’t know history. Don’t even know that there is any. Stalin forced the old Bolsheviks to confess to crimes they never committed, then had them shot. Today, boring-vanilla Americans are forced to atone for crimes committed before they were born. Radically different levels of violence; same underlying class-warfare principle.
And we still haven’t come to the main point. Many white male job-seekers have faced aggressive state-enforced bigotry their whole lives. It doesn’t matter much to a Washington wiseguy, left or right, if firemen in New Haven (whites and Hispanics) pass a test for promotion that is peremptorily thrown in the trash after the fact because no blacks scored high enough. Who cares? It hardly matters if a white child and a black child of equal intelligence study equally hard, get equally good grades and recommendations—and the black kid gets into college X but the white kid doesn’t. Who would vote for a president based on that kind of trivia? This sort of corruption never bothers rich or well-educated families. There’s always room at the top. But such things do matter to many citizens of this country, who are in the bad habit of expecting honesty and fairness from the institutions that define our society, and who don’t have quite as many fancy, exciting opportunities as the elect families of the p.c. true believers. In analyzing Trump, Washington misses the point, is staggeringly wide of the point. Only Trump has the common sense to mention the elephant in the room. Naturally he is winning.
Why, by the way, was Trump alone honored by a proposal in the British Parliament that he be banned from the country? Something about Trump drives Europeans crazy. Not the things that drive me crazy: his slandering John McCain, mocking a disabled reporter, revealing no concept of American foreign policy, repeating that ugly lie about George W. Bush supposedly tricking us into war with Iraq. The British don’t care about such things one way or the other—they are used to American vulgarians. But a man who attacks political correctness is attacking the holy of holies, the whole basis of governance in Europe, where galloping p.c. is the established religion—and has been effective for half a century at keeping the masses quiet so their rulers can arrange everybody’s life properly. Europe never has been comfortable with democracy.
The day Obama was inaugurated, he might have done a noble thing. He might have delivered an inaugural address in which he said: This nation used to be guilty of race prejudice, but today I can tell you that there is no speck of race prejudice in any corner of the government or the laws of this country, and that is an amazing achievement of which every American ought to be deeply proud. An individual American here or there is racist; but that’s his right in a free country; if he commits no crime, let him think and say what he likes. But I know and you know, and the whole world knows, that the overwhelming majority of Americans has thoroughly, from the heart, renounced race prejudice forever. So let’s have three cheers for our uniquely noble nation—and let’s move on tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.
But he didn’t.
Worst of all its crimes is what invasive leftism has done to our schools. Trump’s un-privileged, un-classy supporters understand that their children are filled full of leftist bile every day at school and college. These parents don’t always have the time or energy to set their children straight. But they are not stupid. They know what is going on.
Cruz, Rubio, Bush, and Carson—even Kasich—could slam thought-police liberalism in every speech. They’d concede that Trump was right to bring the issue forward. Their own records are perfectly consistent with despising political correctness. It’s just that they lacked the wisdom or maybe the courage to acknowledge how deep this corruption reaches into America’s soul. It’s not too late for them to join him in exposing this cancer afflicting America’s spirit, the malign and ferocious arrogance of p.c.
David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
When I was six, I had a dream. I dreamed of being a ballet dancer, floating across the stage in my white tutu and tights. I would dazzle the world! Alas, I never made it. I was built like a brick, and had no sense of rhythm. I had plenty of determination, but so what? Not even 10,000 hours of practice would have made me fit to carry Karen Kain’s pointe shoes.
The notion of “grit” – a combination of hard work and
perseverance – has caught on everywhere. It has been widely embraced by educators, along with its companion, “character education.” Grit is based on the idea that intelligence isn’t everything, or even the main thing. Non-cognitive factors are just as important to school success. Teach them grit, the theory goes, and even mediocre students can become high achievers.
If only it were true. Alas, it’s not. The most significant predictor of how kids will do in school is how their parents did in school. Nothing the education system has tried so far has changed that. The latest confirmation comes from a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It assessed the data from test results in the U.K., where everyone takes a universal exam at the ageof 16. The researchers focused on the test scores of 2,321 twin pairs, who are part of a long-term study to determine the various influences of environment and heredity on behaviour and life outcomes. Their conclusion is both good news and bad news for those who think intelligence is highly overrated. They found that educational achievement does indeed depend on far more traits than just IQ. The bad news: Those traits are highly heritable, too.
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences
In the last twenty years, and especially since the onset of the Great Recession, states have dramatically reduced their contributions to public higher education.
While the cuts have affected every public higher education institution, the cuts at public research universities have been the most severe, averaging a 26 percent drop in investment since 2008.
The federal government has not covered this deficit, but has rather scaled back its support for the public research enterprise.
No one has yet devised a workable plan to reverse these trends
I wish I could say that this honor was for jovial purposes.
It wasn’t.
I appeared before the committee not to discuss the amazing job our teachers are doing in classrooms across the state, but instead to defend Alabama’s College and Career Ready Standards from the latest legislative attempt to reverse what the democratically-elected State Board of Education put in place in 2010.
This was not the first time that the basic expectations for what K-12 students in Alabama are supposed to learn in math and English each year were publicly debated before this committee. In fact, it was the sixth.
Poor Andrew Cuomo: he just can’t get it right. First he signed the Education Transformation Act of 2015 that, in part, ties teacher evaluations to student outcomes and was toasted by those who believe that we can do a better job of ensuring that effective teachers are in New York State classrooms.
Then teacher union leaders fomented a boycott of Common Core-aligned tests by rich suburban white folk, who happen to be a key part of the Governor’s constituency. So, in what his advisors must have believed was a necessary political pander, Cuomo reversed himself and ordered a Task Force to review the state’s standards and assessments program.
Just as President Obama steps back from student testing and governors coast to coast retreat from high-stakes accountability in schools, China’s leaders are pushing to enrich their national exams and nudge teachers away from rote instruction, aiming to nurture cognitively nimble and socially committed graduates.
No Child Left Behind—for all its blemishes and endless rules—did signal stiffer expectations for America’s schools, setting ambitious standards that they needed to meet in order to dodge sanctions. But the policy pendulum now swings back toward a lenient approach, enabling states to forge their own accountability tools, defining their own learning goals and tests.
New York eased expectations for students last month, as state officials revealed plans to simplify its math test, because pupil scores had fallen too low. Massachusetts, once setting the highest bar for pupil proficiency, has reversed its support for standards. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles school board has proclaimed that homework should not exceed 30 minutes of effort each night for high-school students.
What, then, is the missing piece? A major factor that has not received sufficient attention is the role of public policy. Throughout most of the country’s history, American government at all levels has pursued policies designed to preserve local control of businesses and to check the tendency of a few dominant cities to monopolize power over the rest of the country. These efforts moved to the federal level beginning in the late 19th century and reached a climax of enforcement in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet starting shortly thereafter, each of these policy levers were flipped, one after the other, in the opposite direction, usually in the guise of “deregulation.” Understanding this history, largely forgotten today, is essential to turning the problem of inequality around
Mr Thrun insists that nanodegrees are distinct from massive open online courses (MOOCs), the digital lecture series which are now offered by many higher educational institutions. Udacity analyses individual students’ learning data (using AI) in an attempt to increase their retention and completion rates. “We effectively reverse-engineer the human learning brain to find out what it means for a person to engage,” says Mr Thrun. “It’s my dream to make learning as addictive as a video game.”
Online lessons and automated tests are free, although students pay for feedback from real humans and to obtain a certificate on completion. Because the teachers are usually recent nanodegree graduates rather than traditional professors, Udacity can keep prices to just a couple of hundred dollars a month, which is about a tenth of the price of a university. Mr Thrun also claims that over 60% of Udacity students finish their courses, compared with around 10% for MOOCs.
Depending on their complexity, nanodegrees are designed to take just 4-12 months to complete. Shorter courses like these are appropriate for today’s high-paced workplace, says Mr Thrun. “The dream of lifetime employment has gone. In my field, whatever you’ve learned becomes obsolete within five years. If you only spend six months on your first degree, as opposed to the average six years for a bachelor’s degree today, you can afford to get more education when you need it again later on.”
The case heard by the state Supreme Court on Tuesday pits Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s administration against Evers and public education backers who object to the 2011 Act 21. That law gave the governor power to approve or reject the administrative rules state agencies create to implement statutes.
A court blocked the law from applying to Evers’ Department of Public Instruction in 2012, ruling that it unconstitutionally elevated the governor’s authority over the state superintendent’s. An appeals court agreed in February. Lawmakers continue to review rules as they did before the law was signed, but they have not had the power to reject them without passing a law to that effect.
As you might imagine, administrative rule-making doesn’t usually come with the high political drama that lawmaking does.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction brought us decades of low academic standards via the oft-criticized WKCE.
In 1996, the high court unanimously ruled the elected superintendent is in charge of education, finding the governor and lawmakers could not strip the office of those powers. Now, the court is being asked to overturn that decision.
Justice David Prosser was the speaker of the state Assembly during the legal battle two decades ago, and in that capacity he filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing the Legislature had greater powers over schools.
He lost that argument, but as a member of the court he will get to revisit it.
The case now before the Supreme Court is meant to determine whether the governor can have a say in the administrative rules written by the superintendent’s Department of Public Instruction. Lower courts ruled the governor could not.
Overturning the 1996 decision wasn’t at issue when the case was before the lower courts but was raised when it got to the state Supreme Court. Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel is arguing for reversing the decision, as is Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, a business lobbying group that filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case.
Evers argues the decision should not be reversed because courts are supposed to follow precedent and there are no new facts or conflicting rulings that should prompt the court to reverse course.
When Samuel Stouffer first wrote on political tolerance during the McCarthy era, he concluded that Americans were generally an intolerant bunch. Yet, finding that younger people were more tolerant than their parents, he also concluded that Americans would become more and more tolerant over time, due to generational replacement and increases in education. However, Stouffer did not predict the rise of the New Left, which I argue has reframed our collective notions about free expression, resulting in a significant decline in political tolerance among America’s youth. I develop this argument in a chapter I wrote for Stanley Rothman’s last book, The End of the Experiment, (Rothman, Nagai, Maranto, and Woessner, 2015) My findings are outlined below.
First, I make the case that young people are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation and that this marks a clear reversal of the trends observed by social scientists for the past 60 years. Political tolerance is generally defined as the willingness to extend civil liberties and basic democratic rights to members of unpopular groups. That is, in order to be tolerant, one must recognize the rights of one’s political enemies to fully participate in the democratic process. Typically, this is measured by asking people whether they will allow members of unpopular groups, or groups they dislike, to exercise political rights, such as giving a public talk, teaching college, or having their books on loan in public libraries.
Education News, via a kind reader::
Catching up to our global peers will require changing education policy and culture
Intel’s recent announcement that it will cease sponsoring and underwriting the prestigious Science Talent Search (which it took over from Westinghouse in 1998) is another nail in the coffin of “gifted education” in the United States.
Unlike many European and Asian countries, which are awash in academic competitions, Olympiads, and other status-laden contests that bright students (and their schools and teachers) vie to win, American K‒12 education has relatively few that anyone notices, save for the National Spelling Bee that Scripps has valiantly stuck with since 1941. But spelling bees are for middle schoolers. The big deal for high schoolers, at least those with a bent toward STEM subjects, has long been the Science Talent Search, which President George H. W. Bush called the “Super Bowl of science.”
Intel’s turnabout surprised that firm’s former CEO, Craig Barrett, and disheartened many who care about both STEM education and gifted education. It’s another sign of America’s inattention to high-ability learners, especially those from disadvantaged circumstances. That neglect is what triggered our new book, Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students. All sorts of data—from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, from research studies including the 2011 Fordham Institute report, “Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students” by Robert Theaker and his colleagues, and elsewhere—have shown that high achievers made lesser gains in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era than did low achievers. Policy efforts that raised the floor and eased the achievement gap did so at the expense of strong students, who were already nudging the ceiling. Under NCLB, schools and teachers had scant incentive to work hard with kids who were already “proficient.” And so they didn’t, especially in places full of poor and minority kids, so many of whom needed extra help to become proficient.
Go back, for a moment, nearly 30 years. In March 1987, Margaret Thatcher visited Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in Moscow. Sitting in the Kremlin, the two argued for hours. At one point, Mr. Gorbachev accused Mrs. Thatcher of leading the party of the “haves” and of fooling the people about who really controlled the levers of power. The Iron Lady had an answer: “I explained,” she wrote in her memoirs, “that what I was trying to do was create a society of ‘haves,’ not a class of them.”
In the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, those words carried conviction. There was plenty of argument, of course, about whether the means they chose were the best and about the fate of those who got left behind. But even critics reluctantly had to agree about which way history was heading: The society of “haves” in the West was growing; state socialism was imploding.
The conservative legal group Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty in a court filing this week asked the state Supreme Court to reverse an appeals court decision that upheld Evers’ rule-making authority related to education.
The brief was filed on behalf of the state’s largest business lobbying group Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, School Choice Wisconsin, former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen and former Democratic Assembly member Jason Fields.
Department of Public Instruction spokesman John Johnson said every rule DPI makes faces legislative review and approval no matter what happens in this case.
“There’s really no impact on the legislature’s ability to do education reforms,” he said. Johnson also noted that the Legislature could act to remove a state law that allows school districts to adopt their own academic standards.
The Wisconsin DPI spent many millions on the oft criticized WKCE…
Being superintendent was a pretty low profile matter for much of the last 166 years, but no more.
Here are three reasons why:
Vouchers: DPI oversees administration of the private school voucher program. Evers and his two predecessors were big advocates of the conventional public school system.
Voucher advocates generally regard all of them and the DPI as a whole as foes.
Common Core: In 2010, Evers signed up Wisconsin to be part of the Common Core effort to create consistent standards across the nation for what children should learn.
Didn’t seem like such a big deal then. Now, of course, it’s highly unpopular, especially among Republicans.
State tests: Evers signed Wisconsin up to be part of a multistate consortium developing tests aligned to the Common Core.
The resulting test had its first full run last spring. There were big problems with the launch and the Legislature killed that test. New tests are coming, but controversies over testing remain.
“I know our entire party is not happy with a public school system that can’t even get 37 percent of the students proficient in reading.”
According to DPI data, 36.6 percent of the state’s students were considered proficient in reading in the 2013-14 school year, the latest data set available.
DPI spokesman John Johnson said Evers was not available Monday for an interview. Johnson called the proposal “divisive.”
“It’s just unfortunate that there’s a single legislator that wants to re-politicize a battle around public education,” Johnson said. “It’s just a divisive distraction. It seems odd to put politics in front of kids.”
When asked if Johnson believes proposals made by Evers that have been unsuccessful, such as the funding formula change, might have a better shot at being implemented if the state schools chief were appointed, Johnson said no.
Much more on the Wisconsin DPI, home of the oft criticized WKCE.
The 2014 real median income number is 6.5 percent below its 2007, pre-crisis level. It is 7.2 percent below the number in 1999.
A middle-income American family, in other words, makes substantially less money in inflation-adjusted terms than it did 15 years ago. And there is no evidence that is reversing. Those families lost ground in 2014. And as we’ve reported previously, the data on wages in 2015 so far does not suggest there is a meaningful acceleration on the way.
A drop in the price of oil, though, has created a short-term drop in inflation numbers that may create a temporary bump in inflation-adjusted incomes for 2015 anyway.
The depressing data on middle-class wages is true across almost all groups based on race and age. (One exception is a 5.3 percent gain in median wages among Hispanics in 2014, though that is within the statistical margin of error and so may not be meaningful).
Madison’s property taxes continue to grow, far beyond incomes…
Chester Finn & Brandon Wright:
Why pay special attention to high-ability girls and boys? Won’t they do fine anyway? Shouldn’t we concentrate on kids with problems? Low achievers? Poor kids?
Good questions all, particularly when American education leaders (and their counterparts in most other advanced countries) are preoccupied with equalizing opportunity, closing gaps, and giving a boost to those most challenged—and when resources are chronically scarce. Yet such questions have two compelling answers.
The problem was that the money he was using was, essentially, the nation’s seed corn. Venezuelan crude oil is relatively expensive to extract and refine and required a high level of investment just to keep production level. As long as oil prices were booming, this policy wasn’t too costly because the increase offset production losses. But this suffered from the same acceleration problem that we discussed earlier: The more production fell, the more the country needed prices to rise to offset it. Between 1996 and 2001, Venezuela was producing more than 3 million barrels a day. It is now producing about 2.7 million barrels a day. In real terms, the price of a barrel of oil is barely higher than it was in August 2000, but Venezuela is producing something like 700,000 fewer barrels each day. Policies that looked great on the way up — more revenue and more social spending — became disastrous on the way down as the population was hit with the double whammy of lower production and lower prices.
This was predictable. Indeed, many people predicted it, including me, though I was just channeling smarter and better-informed people, not displaying any particular sagacity. But the Venezuelan government either didn’t listen to the predictions or didn’t believe them. Now falling oil prices are crushing government revenues at exactly the time the country most needs money to help the people who are suffering great misery as the oil cash drains out of their economy. In the beginning, printing money may have looked like the best of a lot of bad options. By the time it became clear that the country was not fudging its way out of a temporary hole, but making a bad situation worse, it was committed to a course that is extremely painful to reverse.
So it’s not surprising that his grandkids got him wondering about — and researching — a big question: How well is the U.S. educating its top performers?
His answer: not very. “High achievers are being neglected in all sort of ways by schools that had no incentive to push them farther up.”
His research became a book, with co-author Brandon Wright, out next month from Harvard Education Press. It’s titled Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students. It contains an analysis of the U.S. issue, plus case studies on gifted education from a dozen countries around the world.
Wisconsin’s Class of 2015 posted an average ACT composite score of 22.2, tying the state for second nationally among states where the majority of students take the national college entrance exam, according to results released Wednesday.
The results come from the 73% of Wisconsin students who graduated in 2015 and took the exam in high school. Another round of ACT scores will be released this fall, tied to the new mandate that requires all juniors to take the exam — which happened for the first time this spring.
Because that pool of test-takers will include students who may not have otherwise chosen or been academically prepared to take the ACT, Wisconsin’s average statewide composite score is expected to drop.
“By setting a new course and administering the ACT to all high school juniors, we’re helping way more students consider further education after high school,” State Superintendent Tony Evers said in a statement Wednesday.
Nationally, 49% of graduates, or 1.9 million students, took the ACT in 2015, posting a national average composite score of 21.
Compare districts and schools, here.
Depending on whom you ask, Reconstruction, which lasted from 1863 to 1877, began with Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation that declared “all persons held as slaves within [Confederate] States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free.” Others might say it began the moment the Confederacy, its industry, farms, and railroads ruined, surrendered to Union troops in 1865. Still, a more exacting group might date it at the passage of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which carved the South into five military districts in which a military commander had the final word for an entire decade. Despite these varied beginnings, all ignore the stories of the people central to this revolutionary moment: enslaved Black people.
As we grapple with the radical meaning of today’s Black Lives Matters movement, it is important to look at our history to understand how our ancestors mobilized to secure freedom after the Civil War. It is also important to understand power and the systems that sought to undermine the potential for Black autonomy and freedom in the United States.
While Reconstruction demonstrated the law’s limited ability to reverse the violence of 366 years of chattel slavery, Black people still organized civic associations, won elective office, and established towns—all motivated by an alternative vision of American democracy.
We are indebted to W.E.B. Du Bois’s book Black Reconstruction, the first revisionist account of the racist view that Black people were unequipped for freedom. We will read Du Bois in tandem with other sources past and present.
There are many paths to failure. But to understand how Illinois’ pension system became the worst in the nation, it’s instructive to look at what happened 10 years ago in the final, hectic days of the annual state legislative session in Springfield.
A dense, 78-page bill aimed in part at curbing pension abuses in downstate and suburban school systems landed in lawmakers’ laps two days before their scheduled May adjournment. One sponsor called it the first “meaningful” reform in 40 years, a reversal of “decades of neglect and bad decisions.” Another predicted that it could save the state up to $35 billion.
Laying down a new marker in the competition for school enrollment in Milwaukee, the School Board has approved a high-profile young educator’s proposal for a new charter school, after he promised to ramp up efforts to reverse the flow of students leaving the district for voucher schools and other options.
Maurice Thomas’ planned Milwaukee Excellence Charter School, set to open in 2016, promises an “unapologetically college preparatory” education for grades six to 12, complete with longer school days, an extended school year and strict disciplinary standards. By 2024, Thomas said, 100% of graduates will be at a four-year college.
Such “no excuses” schools have produced higher rates of graduation and better test scores than conventional schools in some parts of the country. Such a school could be especially impactful at the planned location on the city’s northwest side, a historically underserved area in education.
The school will likely be housed in the vacant Edison Middle School building at 5372 N. 37th St.
As a charter school authorized by Milwaukee Public Schools, Milwaukee Excellence will keep the public dollars that follow students into its classrooms in MPS coffers. As an independent school, though, it can be staffed by non-district, non-unionized employees and operate free of some regular rules governing public schools.
changed nothing, and Scott Walker is running for President of the United States.
In June 2012, it didn’t require a crystal ball to write , “Now that the recalls are over, we’re likely to see a WEAC in a few years that’s no better than half what it was at its peak.”
That day is here. WEAC’s 2015 membership numbers show an organization with fewer than 50,000 total members, and fewer than 40,000 who are currently employed in Wisconsin’s public school system. The downward spiral is so pronounced the union cut dues by $60 , but it does not seem to have reversed its fortunes.
Despite the rosy picture NEA attempted to paint earlier this month , the union still faces enormous membership problems, with only a handful of state affiliates slowly returning to health. I will have the full story in today’s communiqué.
Related: $1.57m for four senators.
Education issues have been some of the most controversial elements of the 2015-’17 state budget. The proposal calls for allowing much more public money to flow to private, mostly religious schools while keeping public school funding mostly flat. Public schools would see a modest increase in funding in the second year of the budget, but it’s under the rate of inflation.
Walker indicated in a radio address Thursday that the budget would lower property taxes and provide more money for K-12 education.
Some of the measures Evers is recommending Walker veto include:
■The Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program. That’s the Milwaukee “takeover” plan, which would allow Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele to appoint a person to oversee up to five failing Milwaukee public schools each year. The schools would answer to that individual, instead of the Milwaukee School Board, and would likely result in more independent, nonunion charter school management companies running the schools.
Advocates say it’s time for undertaking a dramatically different strategy to address performance at the underachieving schools. Critics argue for local control, saying the measure would take power away from the elected Milwaukee School Board to address and resolve issues.
“Every other district in the state enjoys that privilege — this proposal would rob the MPS community of that right,” Evers wrote, adding that authority to close or reorganize schools would be placed in the hands of a single individual who would not have to answer to the MPS community.
Rather ironic. The DPI presided over decades of mediocrity via the WKCE…
The Promise abruptly reversed the district’s long-running enrollment slide, as the previous blog in this series showed. School enrollment has increased by nearly 25 percent and the city’s population once again has begun to grow. College-going rates have increased significantly, as Brad Hershbein will show later this week. However, there has been no major influx of professional families. In fact, the percentage of students receiving free and reduced lunch increased from 57 percent to 71 percent.
Kalamazoo kids remain poor
More than one-third of children in the district are below the federal poverty line, and 14 percent are in deep poverty—at or below 50 percent of the poverty line. Four in ten live in neighborhoods of highly concentrated poverty (40% poor or more). Income inequality in the Kalamazoo area is above the 80th percentile for US cities—a correlate of low social mobility, according to Raj Chetty, and a predictor of a wide range of social problems in the US and internationally. A recent comparative analysis of social mobility found that Kalamazoo County has lower social mobility for poor children than more than four-fifths of all U.S. counties. While this analysis was based on data that predate the launch of the Promise, there is little evidence —yet — that the Promise has influenced rates of social mobility.
The answer is complicated.
Increasing school resegregation – the renewal of segregation – and the continuing inequality of black students is resulting in lower achievement and graduation rates, signalling a reversal of civil rights gains.
Achievement disparities, referred to widely as the black-white achievement gap or test-score gap, frequently position black students at the low end of the scale and white (and Asian) students at the top.
This situation often engenders simplistic individual and group explanations for the gap, which frequently frame the lives and educational experiences of black children in ways that involve a deficit of some sort.
However, there are enormous variations in these students’ social, economic, historic, political and educational opportunities.
When gaps in achievement are addressed without a deliberate investigation of racial inequities, students, parents, teachers and neighbourhoods tend to be blamed for the poor educational outcomes of black students.
I contend that inquiries into how black students perform in school must include investigation of the harsh disciplinary sanctions in public schools for black students, the disinvestment in black neighbourhoods and why the least prepared teachers are those most likely to serve black students.
On Thursday, April 16th more than 150,000 students, teachers, workers and citizens marched down Santiago’s main thoroughfare under the slogan “Less Corruption, More Democracy”. The protest had been called by the national roundtable of student federations, known as the CONFECH, as the first in a promised series of renewed mobilizations. The turnout was impressive and marked an upsurge in social agitation, reversing the trend of demobilization seen since the election of Michelle Bachelet in November of 2013. The strength of the march testifies to two significant developments in the relationship between society and politics. First is the denuding of the intimate relationship between the economic and political elite and second the ability of social forces to mobilize against a government that at least in rhetoric backs their demands.
A few years ago, the Internet was awash in groundbreaking data visualizations. There was Aaron Koblin’s deeply influential map of flight patterns around the U.S. Periscopic’s exhaustive, haunting portrait of gun violence in the United States. Jer Thorp and John Underkoffler’s Minority Report-like interface for exploring the galaxy.
Today, you’d be lucky to find a cheap knockoff in a world dominated by crappy promotional infographics churned out for viral attention. Nicholas Felton, the data viz guru who once designed Facebook’s Timeline, now builds apps. Jer Thorp is as interested in reverse-engineering algorithms and data art as he is in producing pure data visualization. Even the infographics on the portfolio-sharing site Behance are on the downswing. “Infographic posting generally rose steadily from 2007 to 2012, where it peaked, and has begun to decline since then,” Sarah Rapp, Head of Behance Community Data & Insights, Adobe, writes in an email.
“There should be some room for inflationary increases, and our schools have been really constrained for several biennia now. So zero is not a win. Certainly, it’s better than what it was but, frankly, nothing has changed over the last six months so maybe the budget should have been put in place as 0 percent to begin with and we could have worked from there. Now we’re working from a place of disadvantage.”
Some school districts have responded to state cuts by asking voters to approve referenda for funding. Last month, Madison voters approved a $41 million referendum that will pay for upgrades and expansions in 16 schools.
Evers said districts have a success rate of 60 to 70 percent when they go to referendum, but that kind of arrangement could lead to legal challenges.
Much more on Wisconsin’s K-12 tax & spending climate, here.
There are 18-wheelers with brake problems, hungry bears just stumbling out of hibernation, and lawnmowers that suddenly shift into reverse. And then there’s the unparalleled danger of Double Stuf Oreos. Thank goodness this teacher requires parents to sign off on cookie consumption—if they dare.
Failure is universal in a way that success is not. A failure confessed tends to make somebody endearing, while their successes, told aloud, may make us want to bite them. And still it is success we dwell on. Search your social media newsfeeds for admissions of failure, and you’ll find them; but the success story, the achievement post, rules.
My daughter loved the app. Her friends loved it. And, of course, you feel this is going to be the next Snapchat
I became interested in failure having got up close to a good few success stories myself. As a writer, I’ve profiled people who have got somewhere close to where they want to be: high in the album charts, at a Cup final or in a CEO’s chair, front and centre in a Hollywood film. Research and retell the histories of enough achievers, and their rise begins to look less talent-fuelled – not so much the result of hard, solitary toil – and more like a bet that has paid off. The flourishing musician, the medal-winning sportsperson, the profitable entrepreneur: all of them took a punt, once, and we come to consider their story because that punt came good.There’s another narrative we’ve become familiar with: failure as a past-tense business, something overcome. It’s a narrative that fuels a self-help industry, books titled Success Through Failure, How To Fail Most Successfully, How I Raised Myself From Failure, Fail Better, Fail Up and Failure: The Womb Of Success. But I wonder what there is to learn from the countless others we don’t hear about, those relative failures without whom there could be no corresponding successes. The people who simply fail.
What does failure feel like in the low, crummy moment of it? I speak to a couple of musicians, hopefuls who had high ambitions in rock or pop and for whatever reason had to shelve them. It is possible to get by as perfectly OK teachers, lawyers, chefs or journalists, but there are certain pursuits that seem to insist on binary dealings with success and failure, and the music industry is one.
From the very beginning, top Texas legislators and key officials at the University of Texas have offered only one response to revelations of wrongdoing brought forward by UT System Regent Wallace Hall of Dallas — absolute denial, backed up by a yee-haw hog-hunting bloodlust for Hall’s scalp. The more they do it, the deeper they dig.
In the last few days, the corrupt practices discovered by Hall — funny money at the law school, secret backdoor admissions for relatives of legislators, bogus accounting of endowment funds and more — have spurred a cascade of negative external consequences for UT.
Plaintiffs in the longstanding Abigail Fisher reverse discrimination litigation this week filed a new writ in the U.S. Supreme Court charging that the university’s system for achieving racial diversity “is a sham,” citing evidence first discovered by Hall and confirmed in subsequent investigations.The American Council of Trustees and Alumni in Washington yesterday issued a blistering condemnation of efforts we told you about here Monday by a state senator who wants to pass a law against university trustees asking too many questions. Citing the Enron debacle, the council warns that putting directors in blindfolds and handcuffs is exactly the wrong way to go in seeking institutional responsibility.
No shit.
See also: Senate Bill Aims to Improve UT Oversight by Blinding Regents
Just in case somebody thought there was anything “conservative” about Amarillo Republican state Senator Kel Seliger’s attempt to hog-tie university trustees and regents, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin, weighed in yesterday: Thomas K. Lindsay, director of the foundations’ Center for Higher Education, wrote an open letter to Seliger explaining to him the concept of fiduciary responsibility:
“‘Fiduciary'” derives from the Latin fiducia, for ‘trust,'” Lindsay told Seliger. “A trustee possesses the legal power and duty to act on behalf of others, both the school and the Texas citizenry, under conditions requiring both complete trust and complete openness.”It’s the same thing lawyers hired by a faked-up impeachment committee in the Legislature told the committee about the charges it wanted to bring against Hall for asking too many questions: Asking questions was the dude’s job, people. You’re supposed to ask questions, too, you know.
When Yale announced it last week that it would offer its first fully online degree, the backlash was almost immediate. Students and alumni of of the physician assistant program that Yale will offer online vocally opposed the move, urging the university to reverse the decision and stoking a letter-writing campaign. At a meeting in the wake of the announcement, they warned that offering an online degree would devalue the program, the profession, and the university.
On the student newspaper’s article about the move, the most popular comment read simply: “This seems like an unbelievably bad idea.”
But the idea received a much more positive response from another group: investors in 2U Inc., the online education company that is partnering with Yale to offer the degree. 2U’s stock is up 24% since the announcement, and its market capitalization is now just shy of $1 billion — a rapid rise for a company that had flown relatively under the radar since it went public last April. It is not yet profitable, but revenues have grow steadily , and it expects to turn a profit by 2017.
Magic has entered our world. In the pockets of many Americans today are thin black slabs that, somehow, understand and anticipate our desires. Linked to the digital cloud and satellites beyond, churning through personal data, these machines listen and assist, decoding our language, viewing and labeling reality with their cameras. This summer, as I walked to an appointment at the University of Toronto, stepping out of my downtown hotel into brisk hints of fall, my phone already had directions at hand. I asked where to find coffee on the way. It told me. What did the machine know? How did it learn? A gap broader than any we’ve known has opened between our use of technology and our understanding of it. How did the machine work? As I would discover, no one could say for certain. But as I walked with my coffee, I was on the way to meet the man most qualified to bridge the gap between what the machine knows and what you know.
Will Teachers’ Unions Exit Stage Left? We established last week that cognitive linguistic analysis would not be the salvation of teachers’ unions. Recent events dictate we revisit the possibility that teachers’ unions will revitalize themselves by moving to the left.
Yes, yes, I know many of you think there cannot possibly be any room remaining to them on that side, but it isn’t true. The officers and executive staff of NEA and AFT are committed liberals, but they are also very wealthy individuals overseeing a billion-dollar private enterprise. No matter what you hear coming out of their mouths, they won’t be leading the revolution, believe me.
But times are bad, and that is leading to upheaval in the ranks. Union activists further to the left than their superiors have been elected to lead large locals and one state affiliate. They believe they are approaching a critical mass to push the teacher union movement as a whole to the left.
Bob Peterson, president of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, is a long-time class warrior and recently had a manifesto reprinted in the pages of In These Times. It contains all the rhetoric you would expect, and a few targets you would not. Peterson decries teachers’ unions utilizing “a business model that is so dependent on staff providing services that it disempowers members and concentrates power in the hands of a small group of elected leaders and/or paid staff.”
Parents of students and members of teachers unions sued Walker over the law as it applied to rules put together by the Department of Public Instruction, which is headed by Evers. Walker is a Republican and Evers is aligned with Democrats, though his post is officially nonpartisan.
The state constitution says that “the supervision of public instruction shall be vested in a state superintendent and such other officers as the Legislature shall direct.” In a 1996 case that the appeals court repeatedly cited, the state Supreme Court held that lawmakers and the governor cannot give “equal or superior authority” over public education to any other official.
The Supreme Court’s ruling found that the state constitution prevented then-Gov. Tommy Thompson from transferring powers from the Department of Public Instruction to a new Department of Education overseen by the governor’s administration.
“In sum, the Legislature has the authority to give, to not give, or to take away (the school superintendent’s) supervisory powers, including rule-making power. What the Legislature may not do is give the (superintendent) a supervisory power relating to education and then fail to maintain the (superintendent’s) supremacy with respect to that power,” Appeals Judge Gary Sherman wrote for the court in Thursday’s decision.
Yet, we have no useful method to track academic progress despite the DPI’s decades long WKCE adventure.
Teaching is commonly associated with instruction, yet in evolution, immunology, and neuroscience, instructional theories are largely defunct.
We propose a co-immunity theory of teaching, where attempts by a teacher to alter student neuronal structure to accommodate cultural ideas and practices is sort of a reverse to the function of the immune system, which exists to preserve the physical self, while teaching episodes are designed to alter the mental self.
This is a theory of teaching that is based on the inter-subjective relationship between teacher and learner. This theory posits that teaching does not, as is commonly assumed, take place via instruction from teacher to students, but rather through a process of selection in the learner’s brain, stimulated by materials and activities utilized by the teacher. In this theory, the mechanism that drives the selection process in learners’ brains is co-regulated emotional signaling between teacher and learner. From this perspective, the power of formative assessment is that it intrinsically carries with it emotional aspects for both learner and teacher, in that it provides a feedback relationship between them both, and so, according to the Greenspan & Shanker theory of cognitive symbolic development, promotes cognitive development.
– See more at: http://beta.briefideas.org/ideas/b0b3c84a223e16c8f066b8770831a962#sthash.kKerYg1g.dpuf
Wisconsin’s 16 technical colleges could establish independent charter high schools staffed by college instructors, under a proposal being circulated by two Republican lawmakers that aims to better prepare students for the workforce.
Rep. Tom Weatherston (R-Racine) says charter high schools focused on occupational education or technology could attract students who would not otherwise be college-bound and help them attain the skills Wisconsin employers need.
His vision, outlined in a draft bill he and Sen. Van Wanggaard (R-Racine) are circulating for cosponsorship, is to allow students to attend a charter high school run by the tech college for four years, then continue in the college to earn an associate degree after just one more year.
“There are a lot of young people in my district lacking the knowledge that technical education is out there,” Weatherston said. “Especially with the current systems, they’re required to graduate high school before they can get into technical programs.”
Options already exist for Wisconsin high school students to take classes at technical colleges, though Weatherston counters that some districts don’t let students participate in them.
More broadly, the potential bill would be the latest proposal aimed at expanding public charter schools in Wisconsin that operate independently of traditional school districts — something public-school supporters have opposed.
Gov. Scott Walker’s 2015-’17 budget proposal calls for creating a different avenue to spawn more independent charter schools: a new state board that would authorize nonprofit entities to oversee such schools around the state.
He made the same proposal in his previous biennial budget.
A failed Republican-backed bill last session would have allowed all the University of Wisconsin System campuses, plus technical colleges and regional state education agencies to approve operators to open charter schools.
Generally, teachers unions and many district administrators are not on board with these ideas. That’s because independent charter schools are public schools run like small businesses, with nonunion employees that don’t answer to local school boards.
Critics say that the schools divert students, and by extension, state revenue, away from traditional public schools they would have otherwise attended.
Advocates say without so much government bureaucracy, independent charters can be more innovative than a typical public school.
While lots of districts operate their own charter schools staffed by district employees, independent charters exist only around the Milwaukee area currently.
Most answer to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee or the City of Milwaukee. State law also allows UW-Parkside to authorize charter schools.
One technical college, Milwaukee Area Technical College, can as well, but MATC has never exercised that authority.
One unusual aspect of the Weatherston-Wanggaard idea is that it would have the tech colleges run the charter high schools themselves, rather than overseeing a charter-school management company to run the potential high school.
The bill would allow instructors at the college to teach at the high school, ostensibly without a state teaching license typically required of K-12 educators.
Weatherston said tech-based charter high schools could offer programming relevant to careers such as dental hygienist or HVAC technician.
He said general education classes could have a technical career focus, such as math for bookkeeping.
“I think we should keep it broad-based and allow the market to drive what kind of curriculum they offer,” he said.
But some educators worry about autonomy.
“Communities deserve to have local control over their schools, and this proposal appears to allow high schools to be dropped into their towns without input,” Betsy Kippers, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, said in a statement Tuesday.
Options already exist for high school students to take occupational or technical education classes at local colleges.
The Legislature last session also approved a new program called Course Options that lets students at all grade levels take up to two classes at a time from approved educational institutions outside their home school, at no cost.
Approved institutions include the University of Wisconsin System institutions and state technical colleges.
Waukesha County Technical College started a special program two years ago that allows local high school seniors to apply to spend a portion of their day taking credit-bearing classes in areas such as welding, metal fabrication, and printing and publishing. Students admitted to the program don’t have to pay for the college classes. State Superintendent Tony Evers is scheduled to visit that program at WCTC Dual Enrollment Academy on Wednesday.
Some districts have even started their own specialty schools to meet that niche. LakeView Technology Academy is a specialty high school in the Kenosha Unified School District that allows students to earn up to the equivalent of one year of tech college credits and one semester of engineering credits upon graduation.
(8)
About Erin Richards
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Erin Richards covers K-12 education in urban and suburban Milwaukee, as well as state politics related to education issues.
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erichards@journalsentinel.com
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PolitiFact: Checking in on Scott Walker education promises
6:00 a.m. – New today from PolitiFact Wisconsin:
High school under fire for assignment on political ideology
Feb. 10, 2015 – A parent at Nathan Hale High says a teacher marked “conservative/Republican” the correct answer for the statement: “We should not help the poor, it’s a waste of money.”
Problems swirl around new state test tied to Common Core
Feb. 9, 2015 – As Gov. Scott Walker calls for scrapping a new state achievement test after just one year, the exam is coming in over budget and lacking key functionality. (4)
Rural schools get mixed bag of benefits in Walker’s budget
Feb. 8, 2015 – Leaders of financially struggling rural school districts say the governor’s proposed budget both gives relief and takes it away.
Costs to administer the new test have gone millions of dollars over budget. And administrators learned last week that a key technological feature of the new test — its ability to adapt to students’ individual ability levels by offering harder or easier questions as they take the exam — won’t be ready this spring.
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction officials are downplaying the concerns.
“(It’s) a good test. It’s reliable,” said State Superintendent Tony Evers, while acknowledging the exam has turned out to be pricier than anticipated.
District superintendents are more critical. The timeline the Legislature approved for switching to a new exam tied to the Common Core standards this academic year has districts bearing the brunt of political and technological hangups with the test.
“If we administer this for one year only, which is likely, why are we shifting?” said Patricia Greco, superintendent of the Menomonee Falls School District. “We’re putting staff and students through a lot of change for a shift to a test that probably won’t produce the results we expected.”
The chinks in the armor of the new exam are coming to light at the same time that Walker has shifted his position on Common Core — again. Walker has had a complicated relationship with the standards, ranging from tacit early approval to an explicit call for their repeal last summer.
Now he’s eased away from throwing out the standards to booting the examination tied to them.
Wisconsin’s WKCE has long been criticized for its lack of rigor. Yet, we continue.
Robert P. George and Yuval Levin, via Will Fitzhugh:
“If broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered.”
This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family. The full series will appear in our Spring 2015 issue to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 release of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (generally referred to as the Moynihan Report).
As a general rule, assistant secretaries in the Labor Department do not produce lasting historical documents. The so-called Moynihan Report, produced by Assistant Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the winter of 1965 and published under the title “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” is surely the only exception to that rule. But it is quite an exception.
The Moynihan Report gained notice and notoriety almost immediately. Its statistical analysis was cited, and its call to action was repeated, by President Lyndon Johnson within a few months of its publication—again, an uncommon fate for a Labor Department report. But its analysis was just as quickly resisted and disputed in the government and in the academy. Moynihan was accused of arguing that low-income black families were simply causing their own problems and of trying to undermine the civil rights movement. The social psychologist William Ryan actually coined the now-common phrase “blaming the victim” (which he used as a title for a 1971 book) specifically to describe the Moynihan Report.
Of course, Moynihan did no such thing. To the extent that he attributed blame at all, it was to the long and ugly legacy of slavery and to the persistence of racism in American life. Both, he argued, had worked to undermine the standing of black men, and thereby their roles in their own families, and to deform the structure of family life in the black community.
But Moynihan’s aim was in any case less to assign blame than to describe a peculiar problem. The problem first presented itself to Moynihan and his team in the form of a surprising divergence in the black community between unemployment rates and welfare application rates (which coincided with rates of single motherhood, since essentially only unmarried mothers could apply for the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program). Until the late 1950s, the two indexes had risen and fallen together. But starting in the late ’50s, welfare rolls increased even when unemployment was low and the economy was strong.
Moynihan came to understand that he was seeing something new and deeply troubling. Most impressive in retrospect is that he understood that this emerging pattern was troubling above all not for economic reasons, but for deeper and more significant reasons—reasons that are ultimately cultural. “The fundamental problem,” he wrote, “is that of family structure. The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.” Communities affected, he worried, faced “massive deterioration of the fabric of society and its institutions.” Such deterioration, should it prove in fact to be occurring, would constitute “the single most important social fact of the United States today.”
In the decades since Moynihan wrote those words, his work has been held up as an example of prophetic social science, and of constructive policy analysis. And his case has served as the foundation for efforts to focus attention and resources on strengthening family formation among the poor. But both the controversy surrounding the report and the continued attention devoted to it have acted to obscure somewhat the key achievement of Moynihan’s work and so, too, its foremost lesson for our own time.
The strength of the report was not in its analysis of the causes underlying the collapse of the family among lower-income African Americans. Moynihan was convinced that what he was witnessing was fundamentally a phenomenon of the black community, and so could be explained by the tragic history of African Americans, which rendered black families uniquely vulnerable to the kind of social and economic pressures many faced in poor urban environments.
There is of course no question that the savage inhumanity to which African Americans were subjected in our country for much of its history and the racism that has persisted far longer have had detrimental effects on the black community and on its families. But the particular pattern Moynihan began to observe in the 1960s has not in fact been limited to the black community. In the half century since he wrote, the pattern has shown itself in the lives of poor Americans of all races. The problems remain worst in the black community, and the history and realities of racism that Moynihan pointed to are surely important contributing factors, but the challenge of family disintegration plainly runs deeper and broader than that. Family breakdown appears to be a prevailing feature of modern American poverty. In this sense, Moynihan’s analysis of causes was not quite on target.
Focus on the Problem
The report is also notable for not proposing solutions to the disturbing set of problems it laid out, although the author did suggest policy prescriptions elsewhere. Indeed, Moynihan specifically committed the report to stick to diagnosis. “The object of this study has been to define a problem, rather than propose solutions to it,” he wrote. And the chief reason for doing so, he argued, was that “there are many persons, within and without the Government, who do not feel the problem exists, at least in any serious degree. These persons feel that, with the legal obstacles to assimilation out of the way, matters will take care of themselves in the normal course of events.”
And here we find the true core of Moynihan’s contribution. It was, simply put, to tell the truth, both about what emerging facts seemed to suggest about a troubling social trend and about the foreseeable implications of that trend for the lives of the people involved. The family appeared to be breaking down among lower-income black Americans, and to Moynihan broken families meant broken communities and broken lives. Both elements of that diagnosis were crucial, and both were hard pills to swallow.
The latter element in particular—the importance of the family to the health and flourishing of society—has been controversial in the half century that followed Moynihan’s report. Roughly halfway through that period, in 1992, Moynihan himself took up that controversy in a speech delivered at the University of Chicago (and later reprinted in the Public Interest). He was blunt. Despite President Johnson’s personal interest in his arguments, Moynihan said, the years that immediately followed his report—the era of the Great Society—brought an approach to social science and to public policy that made the problem he had diagnosed much more difficult to address effectively, and even to talk about honestly. Simply put, he said, the Great Society era “gave great influence in social policy to viewpoints that rejected the proposition that family structure might be a social issue.”
That was an understatement. The most striking, even shocking, feature of the sociological (and to some degree economic) literature in the several decades following Moynihan’s report is the sheer lack of interest in the question of what the breakdown of the family among the poor, which no one could deny was occurring, might mean in the lives of those involved. The few exceptions acted merely to prove the rule.
Those exceptions included the work of Moynihan himself during his academic career; most of the other people responsible for exceptional attention to this problem followed a path similar to his. “Think, for example, of the writing in the early editions of the Public Interest,” Moynihan noted in that 1992 lecture. “Almost without exception, the authors were political liberals who had stumbled upon things that weren’t entirely pleasing to them but which, as the song goes, could not be denied.” Many people, of course, did deny them. But ultimately, Moynihan suggested, facts were facts and their consequences could not help but follow.
Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976, Moynihan secured a seat on the Senate Finance Committee during his first term and served as its chairman
from 1993 to 1995.When he delivered the lecture, reflecting on his report some 27 years after its publication, Moynihan might have had some reason to suppose that his small band of truth tellers was finally getting heard. In retrospect, those early years of the 1990s seem like they might have been the apex of that band’s influence and stature in the public square. Moynihan was chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, with jurisdiction over welfare and entitlement policy, among much else. James Q. Wilson and James S. Coleman, both members of that original Public Interest circle, were, respectively, president of the American Political Science Association and president of the American Sociological Association. The Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1992 spoke about family breakdown and welfare in terms that even some Republicans had not always been comfortable with. And the academic wall of silence seemed to be cracking just a little, perhaps especially after William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) was released and sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur’s book Growing Up with a Single Parent (1994) powerfully documented the detrimental effects of family breakdown on children. It could well have appeared as though the tide was finally turning, and the vital importance of family structure would finally find its place in public policy and the public debate. Moynihan, in that moment, seemed almost optimistic.
But it was not to be. Family structure would remain off-limits, even as the underlying trends evolved to encompass more of the populace. Since the early 1990s, the fact that births out of wedlock are not fundamentally a matter of race has become far clearer. In 2010, 72 percent of African American births were to unwed mothers, but so were 53 percent of Hispanic births and 36 percent of white births—all far higher figures than those Moynihan saw in the black community in 1965, when he described a 25 percent rate as a social disaster. In our nation as a whole, 41 percent of children born in 2010 were born to unmarried mothers.
And the rate is growing faster among whites than among other groups: between 1992 (when Moynihan delivered his mildly hopeful lecture) and 2010, births to unwed black mothers rose modestly from 68 to 72 percentage points, but births to unwed white mothers saw a dramatic jump from 23 to 36 percent, an increase of more than 50 percent (see “Was Moynihan Right?” features, Spring 2015, Figure 2).
And what is more, the academy has not in fact grown much more hospitable to the notion that family structure is an essential social concern. Although some ground was surely gained in the 1980s and ’90s, much of it has been lost since, as taboos about studying and discussing the implications of family structure have again been hardening. Indeed, even many Republican politicians now shy away from arguments about the importance of marriage for fear of veering into the debate over same-sex marriage.
But as Moynihan noted half a century ago, one cannot deny either the data about family formation or the centrality of the family to the flourishing of society and its members. And today, far more than when Moynihan penned his report, the implications of these facts are grim and essential to understand.
Mapping the Consequences
It is customary to describe the consequences of social trends in economic terms, and that is surely one useful way to illustrate their costs. Some 40 percent of children raised by single mothers are living in poverty, according to the Census Bureau, while roughly 8 percent of children raised by married parents are poor (see “Was Moynihan Right?” features, Spring 2015, Figure 4).
Another way to think about the consequences of these trends is to look at the sociological and psychological effects. Children who grow up in single-parent families are significantly more likely to exhibit behavioral problems, to drop out of school, to experience mental-health problems, to attempt suicide, and to be out of the workforce as young adults. And as Brookings Institution scholar Ron Haskins has argued, this appears to be very much connected to the challenges that single parents face. “Married parents—in part simply because there are two of them—have an easier time being better parents,” Haskins argues. They can share the burdens and responsibilities of parenthood and can combine their efforts to set clear rules and reinforce them with consequences. Clearly, they have more time and energy.
If broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered.
None of this, of course, is to downplay the extraordinary and often heroic efforts of many single mothers to help their children avert negative consequences. On the contrary, findings like these help us see just how daunting the challenges faced by mothers raising children alone can be.
But describing the crisis of the family among low-income Americans in these economic and sociological terms may itself be a way of avoiding the deeper problem of which these are but symptoms. The family is the core character-forming institution of every human society. It is the source of the most basic order, structure, discipline, support, and loving guidance that every human being requires. It is essential to human flourishing, and its weakening puts at risk the very possibility of a society worthy of the name. It is hard to imagine how any of the social problems that take up the time and efforts of policymakers—problems of economic mobility, educational attainment, employment, inequality, and on and on—could be seriously mitigated without some significant reversal of the trends in family breakdown. These are ultimately human problems, problems of the soul, at least as much as they are economic and social problems. And the first step toward seriously taking them on must be a reinvigoration of our commitment to the family.
Exceptions to the traditional form of the family can of course be successful—guided by the traditional model. But if that norm itself is undone, if broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered. And this is precisely what is now happening across wide swaths of American society.
The Future of the Family
The facts about the collapse of the family among America’s poor are deeply discomfiting for the Left and the Right alike. They are uncomfortable for the Left because liberals don’t want to acknowledge what they show us about the importance of the family structure and about the need to reinforce it. And they are uncomfortable for the Right because conservatives don’t want to acknowledge what they show us about the destructive effects of persistent poverty, and about the difficulty of helping people rise out of it. These are facts that suggest both the importance of the family and the need for public action, and so they are perfectly suited to being ignored by everyone in our politics.
Moynihan could see that danger half a century ago, and his report was meant to warn of it. His concluding words, although shaped by his sense that race was at the core of the phenomena he had discerned, still ring through the decades. He wrote,
“The policy of the United States is to bring the Negro American to full and equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship. To this end, the programs of the Federal government bearing on this objective shall be designed to have the effect, directly or indirectly, of enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family.”
The promise of America, Moynihan understood, is unreachable in the absence of strong and stable families. That call should now be generalized into a case for making the strength of the family a key national priority. The lessons of the past half century, and especially of the Great Society’s mostly failed experiments in social policy, can help us think more clearly about the means by which this end could be pursued. But the end was well laid out by Moynihan’s prescient words. The end should be the reinforcement and recovery of the core institution of our society, and every society.
Putting that end at the center of our politics must begin by stating plainly that the future of the family will determine the future of the country. That may seem like a simple and straightforward fact. But as Daniel Patrick Moynihan showed half a century ago, responsible and constructive social science often consists of simply stating such facts, and making it difficult for people to deny or ignore them. His report offers a model of truth telling from which we all could stand to learn.
Robert George is professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University. Yuval Levin is the editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Of course, Evers had a less sweet-spot-like reason for saying that. He went on to call for Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans in the Legislature not to mess things up with “divisive mandates” and “constrained revenue.”
Evers said, “I am very fearful that the balance will shift under the guise of school reform.”
I asked Walker, in a brief conversation Friday, about what Evers said. The governor praised local control — and, a hot theme for him, he emphasized the power parents should have to pick schools.
He said he was resisting proposals from Assembly Republicans for more state involvement in dealing with low-performing schools and said he was more in line with Senate Republicans whose accountability proposals call for less state involvement.
We’ll have plenty of opportunity over the next several months — hurray for the state budget process — to talk about these specific matters.
Let’s keep the focus here on the broader concept of local control of schools. It’s been the professed philosophy of Wisconsin education forever.
Everyone is in favor of it, at least at the slogan level. But as a practice?
So many of the shots are called these days from Washington or Madison that I got to wondering a few months ago what really was left of local control. That led me to write a piece for Marquette Lawyer magazine.
One of the people I interviewed was Michael Kirst, a Stanford-based expert on education policy who is now president of the California State Board of Education.
Via a kind reader’s email.
Despite spending double the national average per student and delivering disastrous reading results – for years – Madison’s Superintendent pushes back on school accountability:
Dear Legislators:
Thank you for your efforts to work on school accountability. We all agree that real accountability, focused on getting the best outcomes for all children, is important. From our first review of the bill introduced today, it is clear there is a lot of work to be done before a school accountability bill can be passed.
There are several parts of this bill that need more thoughtful consideration to be the type of real accountability that our students and families deserve:
– using multiple tests that would not fairly compare public and private schools
– requiring charter conversion rather than creating a true path to improvement
– assigning letter grades that do not accurately communicate how a school is performing
– removing control from locally elected school boards.
We need an accountability bill that supports our efforts to produce the best results for all children rather than a flawed one that is rushed to pass in order to make a political point.
I would urge you to work with districts to develop a true accountability system that holds all schools to the same standards and supports them in getting the best results for children. We have not yet been given the opportunity to work with you but we would welcome it. I would be happy to answer any questions, give input or discuss with you more.
Thank you for your time and consideration. Sincerely,
Jennifer Cheatham, Ed.D.
Superintendent, Madison Metropolitan School District
A further example, try to find total spending in this 2015-2016 Madison Schools’ Budget slideware document (PDF).
Auto-pilot spending and governance practices continue:
General Fund expenditures will increase by approximately 4.8%, based on existing wage and salary commitments and an estimated health insurance rate increase of 9%, unless budget actions are taken to intervene
A Budget Gap of 2.8% (2% Revenue vs. 4.8% Expenditures) or $9-$10 million will occur unless budget actions are taken to intervene
Note the use of “General Fund”. The document neglects to mention total spending, or recent increases in redistributed state tax dollars to the Madison Schools.
A party insider recently mentioned that the “days of Dane County Democrats harvesting tax dollars from around the state and spending them here, are over”.
I further recall lunch a few years ago with a long time Madison elected official: “Always blame the State”.
Wolfram: Reverting to the mean.
The number of Wisconsinites who received a high school equivalency certification plummeted by 92 percent this year, in part due to more rigorous standards and an increase in testing fees.
Officials say the switch to a new General Education Development test this year was necessary to better prepare graduates for today’s workforce, and that there already are signs that the downward trend in graduates is beginning to reverse.
As the year came to a close, only 912 people have graduated from Wisconsin’s GED program, according to the state Department of Public Instruction. That’s a dramatic decline from 2013, when 11,378 people got their GEDs.
Madison’s Omega School, which has provided free one-on-one GED test preparation for 42 years, saw the number of graduates drop from about 139 two years ago to 15 in 2014, executive director Oscar Mireles said. In a typical year, the school has 100 graduates, half of whom are minorities.
“Students are getting frustrated,” Mireles said. “It just appears to be more daunting and they say, ‘Why should I even try.’ That’s probably the worst aspect of the change.”Wisconsin wasn’t alone. Many other states saw a similar drop this year in the number of people seeking high school equivalency degrees, according to GED Testing Service, which contracts with states to provide the course.
How do you spell illiterate?
A majority of students training at scores of New York colleges to become teachers flunked a literacy test they have to pass to be licensed, new figures show.
The state Board of Regents for the first time is requiring would-be teachers to pass the Academic Literacy Skills exam.
It measures whether a prospective teacher can understand and analyze reading material and also write competently. The results show many don’t belong anywhere near a classroom.
At Boricua College in The Bronx, 13 students took the literacy test. Not a single one passed.
At a half-dozen City University campuses, about half or more failed to make the grade.
Only 29 percent passed at York College in Queens, where there were 68 test takers.
Just one-third of the 21 test takers at Brooklyn’s Medgar Evers College passed.
The pass rate was only 41 percent at CUNY’s College of Technology in Brooklyn; 47 percent at Lehman College in The Bronx; 51 percent at City College; 54 percent at Brooklyn College and 55 percent at the College of Staten Island. CUNY vowed better results going forward.
Related: when a stands for average.
Admissions officers at Morehouse College in Atlanta were shocked several years ago when a number of high school seniors submitted applications using email addresses containing provocative language.
Some of the addresses made sexual innuendos while others invoked gangster rap songs or drug use, said Darryl D. Isom, Morehouse’s director of admissions and recruitment.
But last year, he and his staff noticed a striking reversal: Nearly every applicant to Morehouse, an all-male historically black college, used his real name, or some variation, as his email address.
Erin Richards & Kelly Meyerhoffer:
State Superintendent Tony Evers wants to boost funding for Wisconsin’s K-12 schools by $613 million in the next biennial budget, combined with increases to the amount of money schools can raise in local taxes, and a new way of funding the Milwaukee voucher program.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s 2015-’17 budget request released Monday kicks off the conversation about the future of public school funding, ahead of Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature putting together the biennial state budget in early 2015.
But the newly elected Legislature is even more conservative than the previous two Legislatures — neither of which warmed to Evers’ similar “Fair Funding for our Future” budget proposals in 2010 and 2012.
“This is our third kick at the cat to get Fair Funding passed,” said DPI spokesman John Johnson.
The proposal calls for a 2.5% increase in state aid in the first year of the budget, which Johnson said would put the state back on track from the education cuts in the last four years. The 2016-’17 school year would see an even larger increase, 4.9%, in state aid. In total, that accounts for a $453 million increase in general school aid, according to the DPI.
The plan also calls for a $160 million increase in separate aid for specific uses, known as categorical aid.
More significant for school districts is Evers’ aim to increase the revenue limit — or the amount districts can raise in state aid and local property taxes — by $200 per pupil in 2015-’16 and $204 per pupil in 2016-’17.
Current state law calls for no increase to the revenue limit in 2015-’16 and thereafter, according to the DPI.
The DPI wants to tie the revenue limit increase each year to the rate of inflation.
Props to Molly Beck for including total spending. Ideally, the article would incorporate performance information…
Wisconsin’s K-12 taxes & spending have increased substantially over the years. Outcomes
Imagine finding a bill for $200 in your mailbox because your daughter was late to a couple of sorority events. Imagine, too, that those who snitched were her new best friends. This is one of the unwelcome surprises of sorority membership.
Depending on the generosity of the vice president of standards, a fine can be reversed with proof of a qualifying reason, such as a funeral, doctor’s appointment or medical emergency, so long as a doctor’s note is forthcoming. A paper due or a test the next day? No excuse. (Fraternities, by the way, rarely impose even nominal fines to enforce punctuality.)
Now imagine attending mandatory weekend retreats, throwing yourself into charitable work, making gifts for your sisters and, at tradition-thick schools like the University of Alabama and University of Missouri, investing 30 to 40 hours pomping — threading tissue paper through chicken wire to create elaborate homecoming decorations or parade floats that outdo rivals’.
Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGEGo to Education Life »
During fall or winter rush, sororities court starry-eyed freshmen. They showcase their joyful conviviality with skits and serenades. They stress the benefits of joining, and brag about attracting the prettiest, smartest or most athletic. At many traditional sororities, however, not much energy is spent explaining what is expected, leaving many pledges unaware of the considerable time commitment and costs.Photo
Some sororities will fine members for being late to events. It can be reversed, with a doctor’s note.
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):
Getting Organized! MTI now has over two hundred (200) Member Organizers including teachers, educational assistants, clerical-technical employees, substitute teachers, security assistants, and retired MTI members who are committed to helping the next generation maintain their Union. Member Organizers are volunteers who have agreed to serve as point people in their building/work location to help build awareness and support for MTI’s recertification elections.
Get-out-the-vote! In political elections, voter turnout is critical. In Union recertification elections, it is even more critical. The experiences of other Wisconsin public sector Unions show that when employees vote, they overwhelmingly vote Union YES! Where recertification elections have lost, it is because less than 51% of the eligible voters cast a ballot. Unlike political elections, in recertification elections a non-vote counts as a “no vote”.
In MTI’s recertification election, ballots can be cast 24 hours per day, seven days per week, via phone or computer, beginning at Noon on November 5 and continuing through Noon on November 25. The process is quick and efficient and should take no more than a couple minutes. That said, others have reported difficulties where votes were not counted, when they failed to accurately complete each step in the balloting process. It is for that reason that MTI is providing all MTI-represented employees with detailed voting instructions on posters, flyers and palm cards.
The MTI Recertification Election palm cards provide MTI-represented staff the phone number, web address and voting instructions. On the reverse side of the palm card, voters are asked to complete their name, work location & bargaining unit and give the completed card totheirMTIFacultyRepresentativeorMemberOrganizer.
After doing so,one will receivean“IVoted”button. Someworklocations will hold raffles using the completed palm cards. By collecting completed palm cards, your Union organizing team will be able to try to assure that the 51% threshold is met, as mandated by Walker’s Act 10, during the 20-day election period. Additional information on MTI’s recertification elections is available at www.madisonteachers.org.
With metaphors like those, brain-game companies entice people to buy subscriptions to their online training programs, many of which promise to increase customers’ “neuroplasticity,” “fluid intelligence,” and working memory capacity. They even claim to help stave off the effects of aging.
Leading scientists have criticized those promises, though. The loudest objection came on Monday, when the Stanford Center for Longevity and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, in Berlin, released “A Consensus on the Brain-Training Industry From the Scientific Community,” a statement objecting “to the claim that brain games offer consumers a scientifically grounded avenue to reduce or reverse cognitive decline.”
Florida students no longer need chemistry, physics or Algebra II to graduate from high school. Texas just scrapped its Algebra II requirement. And the Washington state board of education last month reversed its own resolution calling for a foreign language mandate, over concerns that it appeared too elitist.
A standards rebellion — or in the eyes of the opponents, the dumbing down of America — is sweeping red states and blue, promoted by both Republicans and Democrats. President Barack Obama has called for a rigorous college-prep curriculum for all students. States, however, are responding with defiance: They’re letting teens study welding instead of Spanish, take greenhouse management in place of physics and learn car repair instead of muddling over imaginary numbers.
In 1987, when he was Ronald Reagan’s education secretary, the conservative culture warrior William J. Bennett wrote a famous essay denouncing federal aid for higher education because it allowed colleges “blithely to raise their tuitions,” at little benefit to students.
Nearly two decades later, it seems, he was broadly right. Indeed, he didn’t know the half of it.
It’s not just that many colleges and universities are bleeding taxpayers. The government’s overall strategy to subsidize higher education is failing at its core task: providing less privileged Americans with a real shot at a college degree. Alarmingly, it is burdening low-income students with risks they cannot bear and steering them into low-quality educations.
“Institutions of higher education in the United States extract a lot of money without delivering value but the government has no way of influencing that,” said Andreas Schleicher, the top education expert at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the research organization for the world’s major industrial powers. “It has very few levers of control over equity-related issues.”
If colleges want to reverse the declining number of teachers of color, create more STEM teachers, and calibrate teacher supply with district demand, then teacher preparation programs need to become less dependent on individuals’ tuition.
The current tuition-driven system is incentivizing teacher preparation programs to prioritize quantity over districts’ needs.
The country needs more effective STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) teachers as well as teachers of color. President Obama endorsed the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’s 2010 report that called for the recruitment and development of 100,000 new STEM teachers over the next decade. Despite being over half of all public school students, people of color only represent 15 percent of teachers (projected 5 percent by 2020). Since collegiate teacher prep programs educate 90 percent of all teachers, universities must lead the charge in cultivating these areas of need.
The fastest-growing campus in the University of Wisconsin System has set another record for fall enrollment, thanks in large part to an initiative that capitalizes on its proximity to Iowa and Illinois.
UW-Platteville is effectively drawing students from three states with strategic pricing and a smaller campus that appeals to those who don’t want to study engineering or another high-demand field at a big school.
Nestled in southwestern Wisconsin about 20 miles from the Iowa and Illinois borders, the school known for engineering has figured out how to increase both enrollment and revenue while state support for higher education is waning and declining birthrates that began 20 years ago are making the competition for high school graduates stiffer.
Meanwhile, UW-Madison this week reported flat preliminary fall enrollment numbers. Several other UW System campuses saw fall enrollments creep up, and UW-Milwaukee reported it has reversed a seven-year decline in freshmen enrollment with stepped-up recruiting efforts.
College costs have been rising for decades. Slowing — or even better, reversing — that trend would get more people into college and help reduce student debt. The Obama administration is working on an ambitious plan intended to rein in college costs, and it deserves credit for tackling this tough job.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to work, at least not in controlling tuition at public colleges, which enroll a vast majority of students. The plan might dampen prices at expensive private colleges, but some of them may close if they can’t survive on lower tuition.
The program is an attempt to rate colleges according to practical measures like dropout rates, earnings of graduates and affordability. The aim is to improve the quality of higher education while also bringing down costs.
Wisconsin Reading Coalition via a kind email:
With the beginning of a new school year, here is some timely information and inspiration.
You can make a difference: At WRC, we are often focused on top-down systemic change that can improve reading outcomes for students across our state. However, bottom-up, individual efforts are equally important. A letter from Colin Powell, Alma Powell, and Laysha Ward in the Washington Post reminds us that as individuals we can be part of the solution. “Imagine that you have an envelope beneath your chair, containing the name of a child in need and within your reach. He or she is heading back to school now but is at risk of not finishing. There are students like this in every community across the country, just waiting for someone to connect with them. This school year, we challenge you to find your Nico Rodriguez: Reach out directly to your local school, parent-teacher association or a relevant nonprofit with an offer to volunteer. . . Whatever path you choose, know that everybody can do something, starting today.” If you are in the Milwaukee area, please consider volunteering for one of the reading tutor pilots through Milwaukee Succeeds. We at WRC have a personal investment in programs at St. Catherine’s School at 51st and Center and Northwest Catholic School at 41st and Good Hope. With as little as an hour a week, you can participate in providing Orton-Gillingham-based intervention to struggling K5-2 students. Contact Audra Brennan at 414-336-7038, or abrennan@milwaukeesucceeds.org
Adult literacy issues: In his recent article, Time to knock out illiteracy, James Causey of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel highlighted the reading difficulties of boxing champion Floyd Mayweather, and suggested that Mayweather address his reading issues and become a “better role model for black boys across America, who have the worst reading scores of any group in the nation.” Rapper 50 Cent and disc jockey Charlamagne Tha God have publicly humiliated Mayweather by pointing out his reading difficulties. Causey states: “It’s hard to feel sorry for Mayweather because he loves playing the bad guy in the ring and he’s made enough money to afford the best tutors and educators in the world. Which begs the questions, why hasn’t he learned to read yet?” Mary McFadden, a Milwaukee adult basic education tutor, responded in an opinion comment: “I can think of a few reasons. Reading difficulties are not the result of a lack of intelligence or a lack of effort. Unfortunately, effective programs for adults with learning disabilities or learning challenges are available but not very prevalent. Also, seeking help means having to tell someone you have a problem, which is difficult for many people. . . . I believe that greater pressure should be applied to 50 Cent to become a role model by educating himself on learning disabilities, apologizing for his cruel behavior and encouraging people to celebrate each other’s strengths while showing empathy and compassion as we all struggle with our weaknesses.”
You can’t learn if you’re not there: Wisconsin Superintendent Tony Evers sent some important information to school principals concerning the importance of student attendance, particularly in the early years of school. Resources and strategies for improving attendance are included. “The evidence from Wisconsin is irrefutable: students with good attendance in Kindergarten through Grade 2 have higher rates of reading and math proficiency in later grades. Good attendance in the early years also predicts good attendance rates throughout a student’s K-12 education. Data reveal that repeated early absence has negative educational implications for children.”
Setting the bar on Smarter Balanced assessment: Anyone with opinions on appropriate and fair cut scores for the upcoming Smarter Balanced assessments may participate in the achievement level setting process. An online national panel requires just three hours over two days during a window from October 6 through 17. Don’t complain if you don’t participate. Click here to register.
A win for the good guys: The Federal Trade Commission recently announced a settlement of its action against Infant Learning, Inc. and its owner for false educational claims related to its “Your Baby Can Read” product. The final order in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California imposes monetary judgements exceeding $185 million, which will be suspended after the owner pays $300,000. The Federal Trade Commission works for consumers to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices and to provide information to help spot, stop, and avoid them. To file a complaint in English or Spanish, visit the FTC’s online Complaint Assistant or call 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357). The FTC enters complaints into Consumer Sentinel, a secure, online database available to more than 2,000 civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad. The FTC’s website provides free information on a variety of consumer topics. Like the FTC on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to press releases for the latest FTC news and resources.
Focus on dyslexia: Wisconsin FACETS offers a free telephone workshop on September 24 from 12-1 PM. The program, titled “Red Flags of a Struggling Reader,” will be presented by Cheryl Ward. Register online at www.wifacets.org, or contact Sandra McFarland at 877-374-0511 or smcfarland@wifacets.org. Also, the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD), has dyslexia basics, a free dyslexia toolkit, top 10 resources, and more on its website. A video on the dyslexic brain is also available.
It’s a big job: Lest we forget, effective reading intervention is not an easy or quick fix, particularly when begun at third grade or later. A recent New York Times article discusses the third-grade retention movement in multiple states, and the summer school programs that are seeking to avoid that outcome for students. It highlights the importance of teaching reading the right way from the start, and intervening early when problems surface. (Note: you may have to close numerous pop-up windows to read this article.)
Literate Nation Virtual Boot Camp: The Literate Nation organization will offer a free virtual boot camp on how to create literacy change in your community. This is a live webcast of a 1-1/2 day event in Denver, CO, that runs from Saturday, October 18 through Sunday, October 19. Participate individually or form your own group. Click here to register.
The classic novel Brave New World describes a future in which people have lost all of their liberty and in which they have become drugged robots obedient to a central authority. It also details how this control was first established. First, the rulers had to erase all history and all the people’s memory of a time before their bondage.
Today, the history of George Washington’s leadership has been erased in the new Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History test/curriculum, taking effect in the fall of 2014. The College Board, the organization that publishes the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) and AP tests, has also decided to completely blot out Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, among others. In this newly revised course, General Washington merits one fleeting mention in one sentence, in reference to his Farewell Address.
American history without George Washington? That is like the Beatles without Paul McCartney or the Super Bowl without Vince Lombardi. A former AP U.S. history teacher, Larry Krieger, provides insightful analysis of these sweeping changes here. The rebuttal of Trevor Parker, senior vice president for AP programs at the College Board, can be found here, and Mr. Krieger’s defense here. As an aside, it should be noted that the College Board’s new president, David Coleman, is also one of the major architects of Common Core.
The 98-page College Board AP U.S. History curriculum framework can be read here. Mr. Krieger’s analysis makes clear that this deletion was by design and not by accident. The new College Board U.S. history defines the USA as a racist, genocidal, imperialist nation. Their whole point is that America is bad so of course they leave America’s heroes out.
Some examples of this theme can be observed in the “Key Concepts” of the framework enumerated in each historical period as key guidelines for teachers:
Period 1: 1491-1607
Key Concept 1.1. Before the arrival of Europeans, native populations in North America developed a wide variety of social, political and economic structures based in part on interactions and each other. (Page 31)
Translation: American Indians lived in a natural state of peace in harmony with nature before the Europeans arrived. No mention of brutal inter-tribal wars and practices such as scalping.Period 2: 1607-1754
Key Concept 2.1 Differences in imperial goals, cultures and the North American environments that different empires confronted led Europeans to develop diverse patterns of colonization.
Section II, A: English colonies attracted both males and females who rarely intermarried with native people or Africans, leading to the development of a rigid racial hierarchy. (Page 35)
Translation: The colonizing of the New World was one large imperialist, racist scheme. No mention of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower seeking religious freedom here.
Key Concept 2.2 European colonization efforts in North America stimulated intercultural contact and intensified conflict between the various groups of colonizers and native peoples.
Section II, A: “Continuing contact with Europeans increased the flow of trade goods and diseases into and out of native communities. Teacher’s example: population collapse of Catawba Nation” (Page 38)
Translation: The imperial efforts at cultural conquest resulted in genocide of the Native Americans. Left unmentioned are the millions of people who fled European wars in the 1600s, such as the “Pennsylvania Dutch” settlers fleeing the 30 Years’ War in Germany. Not exactly an imperialist effort.
Section II, B: “The resulting independence movement was fueled by colonial elites, as well as some grassroots movements.” (Page 42)
Translation: This war was mainly driven by a lot of well-connected, self-interested rich guys. Apparently, the overthrow of a monarchy by citizen militiamen seems not to merit as overthrowing “elites.”Sample Test Questions:
Question 1: Some historians have argued that the American Revolution was not revolutionary in nature. (Page 114)
Sample Good Answers (Page115):
“Individuals who were wealthy, powerful and influential before the event continued to possess wealth, power and influence later. George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson could serve as examples.”
Translation: The poor continued to be oppressed by the rich. George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were rich bad guys.
“Other good responses might analyze the absence of revolutionary change for groups such as women, slaves, and Native Americans following the Revolution.” (Page 115)
Translation: The Revolution was actually bad. The Founding Fathers were racist and sexist.So what does this “brave new history” hold for our children?
After suffering the blizzards of Valley Forge, improbably enduring for five years against the world’s superpower at that time, Great Britain, and prevailing at Yorktown, the victorious General Washington rejected all power after the War of Independence, rebuked those who would have made him king, and simply retired to his farm in Virginia. How could the College Board convince our children that our country is founded upon and hell-bent on conquest after learning about the father of our country? The answer is they could not. So the College Board had to erase the story of George Washington’s inimitable life.
The College Board explicitly instructs teachers to teach the history of the United States from the first settlers through the Declaration of Independence and into the present as being one long continuous period of racist, imperialist conflict. Thomas Jefferson is omitted from the framework. Yet “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” captured the spirit and hearts of a people yearning for freedom. In the words of John Adams, “the Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.” You cannot teach young people that our nation is inherently racist and also conduct an in-depth review the historical impact of Thomas Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration of Independence, up to and including its influence on the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. So Thomas Jefferson had to be erased. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also was deleted.
After gaining our liberty, James Madison was one of the key people responsible for the creation of the world’s first limited government of the people, by the people and for the people. This explains leaving James Madison out of this “brave new history.” You can’t omit the founding of the American republic based on individual liberty and limited government with a Bill of Rights if you discuss James Madison’s work. So “the Father of the Constitution” had to be erased.
This is more than just an academic spat among history teachers. America today is the freest, most prosperous land the world has ever known. Everything everyone has in this country exists because of the original gift of liberty bequeathed to us by General George Washington and our Founding Fathers. Let’s also not forget that hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people around the globe owe their current freedom to the United States of America and, by extension, to our Founding Fathers.Benjamin Franklin was asked a question upon exiting Independence Hall after finishing the Constitution. “What kind of government have you given us, Dr. Franklin?” He replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” If your child never learns about Benjamin Franklin’s story or about how the Revolutionary War was won or about the Gettysburg Address or about the D-Day landing at Normandy (all erased in this “brave new history”), then he will never know that it is up to us to keep our Republic. It is for us the living never to forget our forefathers, who fought and sacrificed for us that we might live a life of liberty. It is for us to be dedicated here to the unfinished work they so nobly advanced.
Erasing the Founding Fathers from the premier U.S. history course for secondary students is unconscionable and intolerable. We must protect them from being erased. The list of people who make up the College Board’s Board of Trustees can be found in the Appendix below, listed alphabetically by state. Many of them are employed by public secondary school systems or state universities.
I suggest the following course of action:
If you are a parent of high school age students, boycott AP U.S. History with them together, and do not enroll.
Call-write your governor and state representatives and demand that they pass a resolution to drop the AP U.S. History course offering until the curriculum change is reversed.
Tell your state representatives that they should require each member of the Board of Trustees of the College Board who is a public employee (see list below) to renounce the new AP U.S. History course curriculum and vote to abolish it as a condition of his or her continued employment.
Consider the ACT as an alternative to the SAT for your college-bound teenager. The SAT has a dominant market position and has a powerful hold on the American mind as “the” vehicle to college. The security of this dominant position has bred arrogance in the College Board. I would not advocate that someone put his or her child’s future educational opportunities at risk; however, nowadays, universities readily accept both the ACT and SAT.Our national anthem ends with a question. The College Board has answered and will be directing the teachers of America to instruct your children and mine that the USA is the land of the imperialist and the home of the racist. Now, you might ask yourself: will that star-spangled banner yet wave over the land of the free, or will it hang limp over the Brave New World? As for me and my children, I can confirm that the spirit of ’76 will not be erased.
Appendix
College Board of Trustees:
Arizona: Karen Francis-Begay, Asst. Vice President, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
California: Nathan Brostrom, Executive Vice President, University of California, Oakland, CA
California: Karen Cooper, Director of Financial Aid, Stanford University
Connecticut: Caesar Storlazzi, Director of Financial Aid, Yale University
D.C.: Daniel J. Rodas, Isaacson Miller
Florida: Luis Martinez-Fernandez, Professor of History, University of Central Florida
Hawaii: Belinda W. Chung, Director of College Counseling, St. Andrew’s Priory School, Honolulu
Indiana: Pamela T. Horne, Associate Vice Provost, Purdue University, Lafayette, IN
Indiana: Mary Nucciarone, Director of Financial Aid, Notre Dame University
Illinois: Margareth Etienne, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois
Illinois: Von Mansfield, Superintendent, Homewood-Flossmor High School, Flossmor, Illinois
Minnesota: Pam Paulson, Senior Director, Perpich Center for Arts Education, Golden Valley, MN
New Mexico: Margie Huerta, Special Assistant to the President, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM
New York: Shun Fang Chang, Assistant Principal, Bronx High School of Science, Bronx, NY
North Carolina: Shirley Ort, Vice Chair, Associate Provost, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Oklahoma: Paul W. Sechrist, Oklahoma City Community College
Pennsylvania: Maghan Keita, Chair, Villanova University, Philadelphia
Pennsylvania: Daniel Porterfield, President, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA
Rhode Island: Jim Tilton, Director of Financial Aid, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
South Carolina: Scott Verzyl, Associate Vice President, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
Texas: Terry Grier, Superintendent, Houston Independent School District, Houston, TX
Texas: Michael Sorrell, President, Paul Quinn College, Dallas, TX
Texas: Paul G. Weaver, District Director of Counseling, Plano Independent School District, Plano, TX
Washington: Philip Ballinger, Associate Vice Provost, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington
Washington: Chio Flores, Assistant Dean of Students, Washington State University, Pullman, WA
via Will Fitzhugh.
Scott Heil, Liza Reisel & Paul Attewell:
How much of a difference does it make whether a student of a given academic ability enters a more or a less selective four-year college? Some studies claim that attending a more academically selective college markedly improves one’s graduation prospects. Others report the reverse: an advantage from attending an institution where one’s own skills exceed most other students. Using multi-level models and propensity score matching methods to reduce selection bias, we find that selectivity, measured by a college’s average SAT score, does not have an independent effect on graduation. Instead of a selectivity effect we find relatively small positive effects on graduation rates from attending a college with higher tuition costs. We also find no evidence that students who do not attend highly selective colleges suffer reduced chances of graduation as a result, all else being equal.
Mark Peters & Caroline Porter:
Wisconsin’s highest court upheld a law ending most collective-bargaining rights for government employees in the state, a blow for public-sector unions that have been stymied in their efforts to reverse the controversial measure championed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
The law, passed in 2011, rocked the state, leading to mass protests and recall elections, while making Mr. Walker a favorite of conservatives across the country. The measure put Wisconsin at the center of a national debate over the role of public-employee unions, particularly in the wake of a recession that battered government finances.
Much more on Act 10, here.
Background links: Mary Spicuzza, Jason Stein & Monica Davey.
Last week I wrote that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no reason to believe that American colleges are, on average, the best in the world. A number of people who responded, including several in letters to The Times, raised issues worth addressing more broadly.
Several of the questions concerned whether the American graduates in the study, known as Piaac, short for the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, are somehow different from those in other countries to whom they’re being compared.
Steve Hochstadt, professor of history at Illinois College, noted that a third of Americans have a bachelor’s degree, “compared with about 23 percent” in member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and asserted that this causes Americans, on average, to score lower on tests.
A chart with the article showed that Austrian graduates scored highest in a test of numeracy; Mr. Hochstadt noted that less than 15 percent of Austrians complete college, implying that those who do are likely to be higher achievers.
Today, it was reported that a girls’ state school in Bradford has been criticised by Ofsted for only employing female teachers. Feversham College, a Muslim school, has been told to hire positive male role models for its 664 girls, aged 11-18, who currently have an ‘all-female learning environment’.
Its head teacher has stated that the school – which used to be private – was established “in response to parental demand for single-sex education based on religious beliefs” and said the policy had been accepted when the it applied for voluntary-aided status in 2001.
That may be. But, as Chief Executive of the Girls’ Day School Trust (GDST) – a group of 26 independent schools and academies in England and Wales – I can’t help but agree with the Ofsted report. Simply, we can’t argue for diversity in the boardroom and then not allow it in the staffroom.
Girls’ schools have long been at the forefront of extending opportunities for young women. We expect, quite rightly, that no doors will be closed to the girls leaving us at the end of their school lives this month and going on to university, or the world of work.
A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning.
That’s one of the implications of new research on the neuroscience of creative writing. For the first time, neuroscientists have used fMRI scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers as they sat down — or, in this case, lay down — to turn out a piece of fiction.
The researchers, led by Martin Lotze of the University of Greifswald in Germany, observed a broad network of regions in the brain working together as people produced their stories. But there were notable differences between the two groups of subjects. The inner workings of the professionally trained writers in the bunch, the scientists argue, showed some similarities to people who are skilled at other complex actions, like music or sports.
Bagehot did not mean to write to the courteous IT consultant from Nashville, Tennessee, whose e-mail address he mistakenly saved to his phone. He was after another Michael Gove, the British education secretary, who hardly anyone would wish to be confused with just now.
This Mr Gove is one of the most disliked men in British politics—unfairly, in Bagehot’s view, and worryingly. For it is an indicator of how diminished is the radical centrism that David Cameron’s coalition government once promised and of which he is the last undaunted exponent.
The battering comes from all sides. The opposition Labour Party calls his effort to free schools from local-authority control a wrecking job. A senior Liberal Democrat, the coalition’s junior partner, calls Mr Gove an “ideologically obsessed zealot”—a phrase that denigrates him without quite dissociating the Lib Dems from reforms they helped pass. A petition calling for Mr Gove’s sacking has over 120,000 signatures, and more will be added. Hating Mr Gove unites not only the self-righteous teachers’ unions but also the legions of teaching assistants, caretakers, dinner ladies, lollipop men and parents—half of society, at least—who come under their influence. “It’s amazing how many people loathe him,” says a Tory high-up.
For Mr Gove and his small band of diehard supporters, the abuse is an unpleasant sort of vindication. It reflects how entrenched and widespread are the interests they are attacking: a complacent and self-serving education establishment, whose ill-deserved privileges Mr Gove has dedicated himself to removing. Besides liberating existing schools and allowing parents to launch new ones, he has accordingly pushed performance-based pay for teachers while shaking up exam boards, the curriculum and the schools inspectorate. In the process he has reversed a long demise in foreign language and science teaching, and brought many smaller changes besides. He has done so, moreover, while repeatedly demonstrating that he is not the high-handed elitist his critics describe. Mr Gove is a high-handed liberal, who sees good, state-provided education as a form of social justice. Having enjoyed a poor start in life—he was given up for adoption as the newborn baby of an unknown mother—he is messianic in his regard for education’s transformative power, especially among the poor.
OBESITY, according to a government-sponsored report, could make the current generation of Americans the first in history to live shorter lives than the previous one. A major change in food habits is needed to reverse the trend of widening waistlines (a development which we recently illustrated on our blog Graphic detail). Recognising that people’s dietary preferences develop at an early age, John List of the University of Chicago and Anya Savikhin Samek of the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined in a recent study whether children can be “nudged” (or incentivised) to eat more fruits and less sweets. Their results suggest that the answer is yes.
In a field experiment carried out in Chicago over several weeks, Mr List and Ms Savikhin Samek tested the impact of giving kids an incentive to choose food they normally would not. During after-school programmes dubbed “Kids’ Cafes” in 24 different locations across the city, children aged 6-18 were offered a free snack and could select either a cup with dried fruit (dried banana with acai or dried mango) or a cookie (such as snickerdoodle or chocolate chip). A group of the Kids’ Cafes was randomly selected to offer the children at their particular site an incentive to pick the cup; each time an individual chose the dried fruit over the cookie and ate it in the cafeteria, he or she would receive a small prize worth 50 cents or less (for example a wristband, pen or keychain).
Beaudry, Paul, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand:
We document that successive cohorts of college and post-college degree graduates experienced an increase in the probability of obtaining cognitive jobs both at the start of their careers and with time in the labor market in the 1990s. However, this pattern reversed for cohorts entering after 2000; profiles of the proportion of a cohort in cognitive occupations since school completion fall and become flatter with successive cohorts. Since cohort-wage profiles display a similar pattern, these findings appear to fit with a strong increase in demand for cognitive tasks in the 1990s followed by a decline in the 2000s.
Tyler Cowen includes a few more links.
The St. Paul School District plans to become the largest in the state to put iPads in the hands of all students.
The decision, to take effect in the 2015-16 school year, was announced Friday by Superintendent Valeria Silva and represents a reversal of the stance taken by the district in 2012.
That year, the district sought and won voter approval of a $9-million-per-year technology initiative dubbed “Personalized Learning Through Technology.” Its proponents insisted that the initiative was not about supplying devices to students. They emphasized instead the creation of a “teaching and learning platform,” or Facebook-like Web page, through which teachers and students could interact — with the goal of giving students the power to learn anytime, anywhere.
But the district and Dell, its partner in the project, have failed to develop a customized platform that could serve students and teachers “directly enough or quickly enough,” Silva said. That work has been halted — with Dell agreeing to refund the $665,000 it has been paid in the form of future technology upgrades.
A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm shift,” and I described how this phrase had been used and abused, much to Kuhn’s dismay, by postmodern insurrectionists and nonsensical self-help gurus. People seemed to like the essay, but they were also uneasy about it. “I don’t think you’ll be able to publish this in an academic journal,” someone said. He thought it was more like something you’d read in a magazine.
Was that a compliment, a dismissal, or both? It’s hard to say. Academic writing is a fraught and mysterious thing. If you’re an academic in a writerly discipline, such as history, English, philosophy, or political science, the most important part of your work—practically and spiritually—is writing. Many academics think of themselves, correctly, as writers. And yet a successful piece of academic prose is rarely judged so by “ordinary” standards. Ordinary writing—the kind you read for fun—seeks to delight (and, sometimes, to delight and instruct). Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. It’s supposed to be dry but also clever; faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its deepest ambiguity has to do with audience. Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds. But, because it’s intended for a very small audience of hyper-knowledgable, mutually acquainted specialists, it’s actually among the most personal writing there is. If journalists sound friendly, that’s because they’re writing for strangers. With academics, it’s the reverse.
Professors didn’t sit down and decide to make academic writing this way, any more than journalists sat down and decided to invent listicles. Academic writing is the way it is because it’s part of a system. Professors live inside that system and have made peace with it. But every now and then, someone from outside the system swoops in to blame professors for the writing style that they’ve inherited. This week, it was Nicholas Kristof, who set off a rancorous debate about academic writing with a column, in the Times, called “Professors, We Need You!” The academic world, Kristof argued, is in thrall to a “culture of exclusivity” that “glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience”; as a result, there are “fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.”
One warm and misty May morning in Columbus, Mississippi, the lobby of the classroom building at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS) (more) was full of teen-agers milling about, waiting for morning classes to begin.
In one corner of the glassy space was a grandfather clock, probably about 8 feet tall, constructed by one of the students out of brightly colored plastic pieces. (Right.) On the hour, a little white ball would roll down a chute, tripping levers to ring a small chime. Upstairs in one of the science rooms was a 3-D printer, a rough-and-ready contraption that, with a little more luck, is approaching the final stages of actually printing something. Another of the students, a senior, had made it himself. I recognized several other students whom I had seen performing in an after-school stage production, one dressed as Eco-Man in blue and green tights, cape, and mask.
MSMS is a public boarding school in Columbus, occupying a few of the more modest buildings on the grounds of the elegant Mississippi University for Women, is called “The W”. The men who have enrolled at The W since it became co-ed, say they always have a time explaining themselves to those not in the know.
America – so the song says – is the land of the free and home of the brave. It does not always feel that way. Last week the Food and Drug Administration said it would regulate e-cigarettes like normal tobacco. This is in spite of the fact there is no proof it leads people on to the real ones. Quite the reverse – the whole point is to help people kick the habit. Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles have gone further and banned e-cigarettes in public places. There is no evidence their vapour causes harm to users or bystanders. The sight of it alone is apparently offensive enough.
The US has always struggled between its impulse for freedom and a Calvinistic urge to meddle. The pendulum in early 21st-century America is swinging back to intrusion. Whether it is workplace safety, traffic, public health or social behaviour, there is a creeping impulse to micro-regulate.
Far from the freedom of the open road, today’s US offers a spider’s web of local and federal rules. Fancy bicycling without a helmet or unleashing your dog? Or perhaps opening a can of beer on the beach? There is an ordinance forbidding it. New York is trying to ban 16-ounce soda. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew would not feel out of place in Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago. Sugar is the new tobacco, we are told. How soon before we get to caffeine?
Caroline Beevers and her family moved to Stotfold, Bedfordshire, for the usual reasons: a pretty village, fast transport links to central London and the promise of good schools. The trouble was, they were not the only ones.
“It’s a nice village, the people are nice, there’s lots for the kids. The schools were a major factor in why we moved here,” said Beevers, whose four-year-old, Adam, starts school this September. “We thought we didn’t mind which of the schools he got into because they all seemed pretty good. To be honest it didn’t occur to me we wouldn’t get into any of the three village schools. You’d think we’d be covered really.”
While most of the 600,000 families applying for primary school reception places across England found out this week they had been accepted by their first, second or third preferences, it was not the case for an unlucky few, such as the Beevers family.
Instead of gaining a place at the local state primary school a short walk away, the authority, Central Bedfordshire council, allocated the family a place six miles away, with no direct public transport.
PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHING is a profession in transition.
Already the largest occupation in the United States, it is expanding faster than the nation’s student population. Teachers of color are entering the profession at twice the rate of white teachers, reversing an exodus after civil rights victories opened many other doors to African Americans. And women are again entering the profession in greater numbers after years of bypassing the field for other opportunities.1But what may be most significant—to students, schools, and the nation—is that teachers today are younger and markedly less experienced than a generation ago.2 Experts consider teachers with five or fewer years of experience to be still learning their craft.3 By the end of the last decade, more than a quarter of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers were in that category, compared to only about 17 percent in the late 1980s. Back then, the most common teacher in America was a 15-year veteran; two decades later, she was a first-year neophyte. 4 “The flow of new teachers,” says Richard Ingersoll, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education who studies teacher trends, “has become a flood.”
Although the recent recession pushed back the tide somewhat, and has likely raised the level of experience, the sheer number of novices in public school teaching has serious financial, structural, and educational consequences for public education—straining budgets, disrupting school cultures and, most significantly, depressing student achievement.
Yet there has been scant discussion of the phenomenon by education policymakers. “I don’t know why everybody isn’t talking about this,” says Gail McGee, manager of new teacher induction for the Houston Independent School District. “It overwhelms me. Everybody, everywhere, is single-mindedly focused on the achievement gap, and nobody is spending any time talking about what potentially could be one of the biggest underlies of why we have one.”6
More moms are staying home: The share of mothers who do not work outside the home has risen over the past decade, reversing a long-term decline in stay-at-home mothers. (In the U.S. today, 71% of all mothers work outside the home.) Two-thirds are “traditional” married stay-at-home mothers with working husbands, but a growing share is unmarried.
2 Americans say a parent at home is best: Despite the fact that most mothers in the U.S. work at least part time, 60% of Americans say children are better off when a parent stays home to focus on the family, while 35% say they are just as well off when both parents work outside the home.
“Whenever you have a ‘southern’ or a ‘northern’ or an ‘eastern’ or a ‘western’ before an institution’s name, you know it will be wildly underfunded.” –Richard Russo
On March nineteenth the Chancellor of the University of Maine System, as well as the President, and select members of the Board of Trustees gathered in front of a crowd of students, faculty and staff in the Hannaford Lecture Hall, a spacious and new lecture hall (more often rented out than used for classes) to unveil the University of Southern Maine’s new vision as a “Metropolitan University.” Two days later, on the twenty-first, twelve members of the faculty from such programs as economics, theater, and sociology met with the provost of the University to be “retrenched.” Both of these events followed the proposal to eliminate four programs (American and New England Studies, Geosciences, Recreation and Leisure Studies, and Arts and Humanities at the Lewiston Auburn Campus) the week before. It was a strange and tumultuous week, and one that I fear offers a frightening glimpse of a future of higher public education in the US.
All of these events, the rebranding and the cuts, were in a response to a system wide budget shortfall of $35 million, of which USM is slated to absorb $14 million in cuts. Claims of poverty on the part of public universities need to be contextualized against the massive decrease in state allocations, on the one hand, and the increasing connection between the university and financial services, on the other (on this point in general see Edward Kazarian’s post) in which bond ratings matter more than educational mission. With respect to the former the University of Maine system has followed the national trend of divestment in higher education. In 1999 appropriations accounted for 63 percent of the university’s budget while tuition and fees made up 37 percent, by 2014 this was reversed to 62 percent from tuition and 38 from allocation. During this period Maine went through the largest tax cut in its history, cutting taxes on inheritance and otherwise making it easier for the wealthiest to keep their money. A tuition freeze instituted in 2012 followed closely on the heels of this cut. (The latter is a perfect example of faux-populism, taking measures to supposedly cut college costs while failing to address the real cause of those costs.) During this same period USM added several new buildings, such as the lecture hall noted above. As enrollment dropped by six percent from 2008-2012 the combination of reduced appropriations, fixed tuition, and decreased enrollment led to a perfect storm of budget problems.
Many have been puzzled by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s skepticism toward charter schools, his calls for ending space-sharing and charging them rent, and his $210 million cut of a construction fund important to the schools. Education reformers are also anxious about the failure of President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to defend charter schools in the face of these prominent reversals of New York City policy. Is this just about teacher-union politics, or are there perhaps legitimate performance reasons for tapping the brakes on charter schools in public education today?
The first thing to remember about charter schools is how recent an invention they are. Born in the 1990s, it wasn’t until 2006 that total enrollment reached a million children—out of 55 million pupils in the country. More than half of the charters in New York City are less than five years old.
With huge waiting lists for every available seat, though, charters are now beginning to mushroom. Well before Mr. de Blasio faces re-election in 2017, charters will educate 10% of New York City’s public-school students, and they already enroll a quarter of all pupils in some of the city’s poorest districts. Nationwide, charter schools will enroll five million by the end of this decade.
Britt Freitag, an admissions officer at George Washington University, confessed she was “slightly nervous” about a candidate for the Class of 2018. His grades were solid, but not stellar. The student had taken some tough courses, but not as many as Freitag would have liked. Test scores, she said, were “definitely on the low side.”
On the other hand, Freitag told two other officers one recent morning, the student compared favorably to his high school classmates, wrote a good essay, showed impressive determination in activities outside class — and had a family connection to GW.
“I could go either way,” Freitag said.
“Either way what?” asked her colleague, Jim Rogers.
Deny or admit, she said, stumped. Her voice fell to a murmur. “You think maybe he’s a wait-list?”
This is the kind of conversation high school seniors across America wish they could hear but never will. For the past few weeks, teams of gatekeepers at colleges have dissected the academic and personal lives of these students in a matter of minutes to reach decisions that will chart their future.
…..
At that point, some tentative decisions might be reversed to boost the financial-aid budget. That could help a few borderline students from affluent families.
The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld
Penguin, $27.95The tiger couple is chasing its own tail, which is to say, they are stuck in circular reasoning. In their new book, The Triple Package, Amy Chua, author of the best-selling Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and Jed Rubenfeld tackle the question of why certain groups are overrepresented in the pantheon of success. They postulate the reason for their success is that these groups are endowed with “the triple package”: a superiority complex, a sense of insecurity, and impulse control. The skeptic asks, “How do we know that?” To which they respond: “They’re successful, aren’t they?”
But Chua and Rubenfeld proffer no facts to show that their exemplars of ethnic success—Jewish Nobel Prize winners, Mormon business magnates, Cuban exiles, Indian and Chinese super-achievers—actually possess this triple package. Or that possessing these traits is what explains their disproportionate success. For that matter, they do not demonstrate that possessing the triple package is connected, through the mystical cord of history, to Jewish sages, Confucian precepts, or Mormon dogma. Perhaps, as critics of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism have contended, success came first and only later was wrapped in the cloth of religion. In other words, like elites throughout history, Chua and Rubenfeld’s exemplars enshroud their success in whatever system of cultural tropes was available, whether in the Talmud, Confucianism, Mormonism, or the idolatry of White Supremacy. The common thread that runs through these myths of success is that they provide indispensable legitimacy for social class hierarchy.
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter via a kind Linda Doeseckle email (PDF):
Does it matter to you when school begins in the fall? How about when and how long winter or spring break is? And, how about when the school year ends? Have you thought about how many days you work for your annual salary, or how many hours make up your school day? In members’ responses to many years of MTI bargaining surveys, all of these factors are “very important” to those in MTI’s various bargaining units.
It was MTI’s case in 1966 which gave teacher unions an equal voice in establishing all of the above. Ruling for MTI, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the school calendar is a mandatory subject of bargaining, meaning that a school district in Wisconsin must negotiate with the union to determine each of the factors described above. However, Governor Walker’s Act 10 reversed the Supreme Court’s ruling, because Act 10 removed workers’ rights to collectively bargain. And now to make it worse, there is a legislative proposal to enable school boards to unilaterally increase the number of hours in a school day.
Walker’s Act 10 enables a school board without a good conscience to abuse staff, especially teachers, because teachers are paid an annual salary not on an hourly basis. MTI’s victory before Judge Colas found Act 10, in great part, to be unconstitutional, which in turn enabled MTI to negotiate Collective Bargaining Agreements for MTI’s five bargaining units for 2014-15. Walker’s appeal of Judge Colas’ decision to the Supreme Court is pending decision. District management meantime, has refused to bargain over the calendar for the 2015-16 school year. This negativity not only impacts teachers’ planning for the 2015-16 school year, but is also causing families not to be able to plan ahead. Many families often plan vacations, weddings and other family and religious events years in advance.
At the center of the admissions and financial-aid process is a massive information imbalance: Schools make their decisions with detailed data about each applicant that goes well beyond test scores and transcripts. Many universities have access to comprehensive financial profiles, sometimes down to the type of cars a family drives. Some analyze patterns and interpret even the most subtle indicators from students, such as the order in which schools are listed on the federal financial-aid application, or even how long a student stays on the phone with an admissions officer.
Students are not so lucky. Schools offer comparatively little information about exactly who they’re awarding aid to and for what. College-bound teens and their parents often resort to college forums, sharing their personal “stats” — their financial and academic profiles — with strangers online to get advice on which colleges are likely to be generous with aid. Once they get their financial-aid awards, some even go back to these forums to compare their aid packages in an attempt to reverse engineer colleges’ criteria.
Most colleges offer “vague and superficial” disclosures about how they allocate their financial-aid dollars, said Mark Kantrowitz, a financial-aid expert with Edvisors, which publishes websites about paying for college. “They don’t give details about the actual formulas they use.”
Take Newman University, a Catholic liberal-arts college based in Kansas.
Passive smoking causes lasting damage to children’s arteries, prematurely ageing their blood vessels by more than three years, say researchers.
The damage – thickening of blood vessel walls – increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes in later life, they say in the European Heart Journal.
In their study of more than 2,000 children aged three to 18, the harm occurred if both parents smoked.
Experts say there is no “safe” level of exposure to second-hand smoke.
“This study goes a step further and shows it [passive smoking] can cause potentially irreversible damage to children’s arteries increasing their risk of heart problems in later life”
The research, carried out in Finland and Australia, appears to reveal the physical effects of growing up in a smoke-filled home – although it is impossible to rule out other potentially contributory factors entirely.
Jim Zellmer: Good afternoon, Leigh Let’s begin with your education.
Leigh Turner: Like increasing numbers of people in today’s modern world, I grew up in several countries, in Nigeria, in Britain, then again in Lesotho, in southern Africa, and then again in Britain.
I went to several different, as we would say in English, schools and then to university. I was at a school in Swaziland called Waterford Kamhlaba School, a boarding school, for a year and a half, a very fascinating and interesting time.
Then, I was in a school in Manchester called Manchester Grammar School for most of my secondary education, as we would say in Britain. Then, from there, I went to the University of Cambridge and did a three-year bachelor’s degree in Geography. That was it. After that, I was 21. I went off and started work.
Jim: Do you have a perspective on how that movement, let’s say, improved or hindered your education as you grew up? What’s your take on that?
Leigh: It all depends on your degree of family stability and the degree to which you are fortunate in having good schools, good teachers, and good classmates. It’s very difficult to be deterministic about what makes a good education.
I was extremely fortunate in having a peripatetic childhood and going to primary school in Lesotho with a bunch of kids of all different nationalities, African children, European children, American children, different people.
Then, going to a school in Waterford Kamhlaba School in Swaziland which was very much a place which was set up in the years of apartheid in South Africa as a place where children from all different ethnic backgrounds could go to a high-quality school together and learn the British educational exams.
That gave me a great deal of insight into different people, the size of the world, and the fact that one country is not it. It’s very easy to forget that if you’ve not had the good fortune to travel widely. It’s easy to think that you’re in your city, and that’s the world, or you’re in your country, and that’s the world.
When you travel around the world as a child, you see that there are many countries, there are many different ways of living, there are many different outlooks on life. That’s a very important part of anyone’s education.
I then was very fortunate in having five or six years of continuous education in one school, in Manchester. I do think that for many young people, stability of education is a positive.
I grew up moving around the world. With my kids, we made a real effort to try to arrange our postings in such a way that the children could stay in a limited number of schools, for as long as possible.
In fact, I even arranged postings so that we could stay in Berlin in eight years in a row so the children could stay in the same school. That seems to have served them very well.
Jim: What languages did you pick up along the way? What about your kids? Obviously, when I look at your postings and your tweets, you’ve taken the time to learn the local language. What are your thoughts on that?
Leigh: I was lucky enough to study German and French when I was at school in Manchester, at high school, as you would say in America. I found the grammar extremely difficult.
I have a famous story about trying to learn my German grammar as I moved up towards a certain public exam. At each stage, I got 0 out of 30 for my grammar, 3 times in a row.
After the final occasion where I got 0 out of 30, with a public exam looming, my teacher said to me, “Leigh, if you make just a few less mistakes, you might be able to get a mark in this part of the exam.”
Even though that happened, I was able to pass those exams and indeed score reasonably well in those exams because I spent time doing what we would call an “exchange,” which is where a child, usually between 11 and 16, is sent off from their own family to stay with a family in a foreign country, to live with that family for three weeks, to speak only the language of that country for three weeks, and to socialize, maybe to go to school with the child that they’re staying with.
There’s always an exchange child at the other end, who, ideally, is somebody of similar age to you. Then, that child comes back to your country, and the reverse situation takes place.
I did this when I was 12. I went to Paris, at age 12, and stayed with a family who lived within eyesight of the Arc de Triomphe. I remember well waking up on my first morning and trying to think of something that I could say in French.
My mind was blank. Eventually, I managed to say, “Le soleil brille.” The sun is shining. From that start, after three weeks of staying with a family, I came back speaking simple, fluent French, after three weeks.
Similarly, German, I did a German exchange. I went out there with only the most simple grasp of German. I found after three weeks of German exchange, I was speaking much better. Indeed, I did repeated German exchanges.
By the time I took my final public school exams, when I was 17, I was actually reasonably fluent in French and German. Those were my first two languages. They were learned partly by school study and partly by these home stays in the countries concerned.
Subsequently, when I joined the Foreign Office, I was posted to Russia. I needed to speak Russian for that job. On that occasion, we had a different approach.
The British Foreign Service is very keen on teaching its officers foreign languages. We think that’s an important part of the training and an important part of doing the job.
I was sent on a nine-month, full-time Russian course, which was pretty mind-bending. I should say, in the Foreign Office, when you join, they give you a test to measure your aptitude to learn foreign languages.
True to my history of my German experience from doing my [inaudible 07:51] , my initial public school exams, I scored very badly on this language aptitude test and was told I should go off maybe and learn Afrikaans and some easy languages.
In fact, for a series of reasons, I was going to Moscow. I spent nine months learning Russian full-time, including a seven-week stay in Moscow, in 1992.
By the time I finished the course, I was able to pass the relevant exam. In my subsequent three-year posting in Moscow, I was able to use Russian a great deal. By that time, I spoke it really quite fluently and could read Russian as well.
[crosstalk]
Leigh: Go on.
Jim: This is something that our friends have discussed over the years, the ability of children to learn and pick up those languages much faster than when you were posted in Moscow.
The amount of time you discussed was obviously extensive. (Presumably) the depth of your language understanding and learning, I assume, was much deeper with Russian.
What was your experience as you were older? Today, learning Turkish , how long does it take? If you took about three weeks when you’re 12 years old in Paris, to have some level of fluency, how long did it take you to have that similar level when you arrived in Istanbul?
Leigh: When I knew I was coming to Turkey, I was, at that stage, still living and working in Ukraine. I was Ambassador, in Kiev, from 2008 to 2012. In Kiev, I made a big effort to learn Ukrainian. Both Ukrainian and Russian are widely spoken.
I had a couple of weeks of immersion there. I didn’t pick it up as quickly as I did French when I was 12. That’s for sure. I did pick up a reasonable level of Ukrainian.
Then, when I heard I was coming to Istanbul, I immediately got out a self-study, computer-based Turkish course and spent five or six months really working hard on that. I actually kept a record of the 127 hours I spent by myself with the computer language course learning Turkish.
By the time I arrived in Turkey, August 2012, I was able, thanks to this course, to speak a little bit of straightforward Turkish. I then had five weeks [inaudible 10:35] staying with someone here in Turkey, going to lessons four hours every day of the week, except weekends.
By the end of that, I could speak very simple Turkish, but by no means as well as I could speak French after three weeks staying with a family in France in 1970-71.
Jim: Well, we’re all getting older there. As you think of all these experiences you’ve had, both as a parent, professionally, and then obviously traveling, what do you think it means to be educated today and tomorrow? What does that mean in the age of Google, smart phones, and digital electronic [inaudible 11:21] ?
Leigh: I am no great educational expert, but I think that there are, in education, two things which you have to balance, one is what I might call learning by route or drilling, where you accumulate facts that you know and clearly there has been a move away from this.
This is the traditional way of learning things, people reciting their timetables and so on in schools in Victorian England [inaudible 11:58] images, and as life has gone on, people have focused more on having the ability to find things out, which clearly is the way to go these days.
You need to be able to know where to acquire information, know how to assimilate and organize information, know how to manage the almost infinite amount of information that is rightly available there on your smart phone in your pocket.
I think there are those two elements to education, one is knowing stuff and the other thing is knowing how to find out and organize stuff.
I think you have to have a certain amount of both in order to have a successful education. If we look at some countries in Far East which have a traditional route learning, they have really effective educational systems.
On the other hand, if you look at some countries like UK or the US, where there is more of a tradition of learning how to find things out, they don’t score so highly at least the far East countries, for example, mathematical ability, but on the other hand, they are very good at creative industries.
Clearly, it might be unique to have a judicious balance of both. You simply cannot learn a language without learning vocabulary and without learning a bit of grammar. It’s never going to work. At the same time, if you don’t know how to use a dictionary and don’t know how to use the Internet, you’re going to make learning a language much more difficult for yourself.
Jim: Again, [inaudible 13:38] all this, what should young people know today? Obviously, you’ve tried [inaudible 13:42] to your children. (Talking) about parents, what should young people know today?
Leigh: I’m a big fan of that balance I was talking about just now. The hardest thing for me as a parent is the balance between giving your children the space they need to develop their own views on who they are as individuals and being able to make informed decisions about how to live their lives.
If parents don’t give their children that and they miss to take the important opportunities, that’s on the one side, giving them freedom, allowing them to develop as individuals, on the other hand, providing them with the framework within which they can establish that identity.
I think the framework part is important too. If you don’t have any rules in the house about when you go to bed, when you get up, when you eat your meals together, how you should behave in the family home, then the child is going to find it hard to adjust to a world which is based on certain norms of behavior in any society.
It’s balancing those two between your [inaudible 15:09] approach to do anything you want to do, finding themselves, and the kind of [inaudible 15:17] the new millennium of people really need to have the skill they need to get a job and the discipline they need to be able to hold down the job in an area where we have increasing global competition between countries.
If your kid from a rich country isn’t able to compete with the hungry, dynamic, well-trained kids from countries, which have not been so blessed by history as your country, then they’re going to find it hard to compete in the global markets.
Jim: Speaking of that, you’re a keen observer of the world as it is. It’s remarkable I have to say, I have very much enjoyed your tweets and writing.
Taking those observations, how might you compare and contrast the education system, let’s say the software, the raw materials that the different countries you’ve been in provide their kids from UK to France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and now Turkey?
Leigh: Well, you risk getting very political when you [inaudible 16:40] one education system is different from or better than another. I would just say that what really is [inaudible 16:49] is that I think being to high school in Britain, France, or Germany, they run very different.
Similarly, having been a diplomat in Britain, having seen the systems that operate in France and in Germany, it is striking how utterly different the training given to diplomats from France, Germany, Britain is.
For example, in Germany, you have to have studied quite often law, ideally international law, then you join the foreign ministry and you have a two-year training course with a group of people who joined at the same time as you.
Before you even sit down, there’s day’s full work.
In France, you have to go to a “grande école”, which will get you into the upper reaches of civil service. Often, you have to go to another specialized school to give you a chance to get into the grande école in the first place. They are that highly [inaudible 17:47] exams are that difficult.
In Britain, you get into the Foreign Service by taking the public exam, which is pretty difficult and which involves written exams and assessment centers. Then, on your first day, usually you sit down and start work. No training at all.
Why am I saying this? Because nobody would say that French, or British, or German diplomats were better than each other. I know many great brilliant diplomats from France, Germany, and Britain. They have had completely different training, yet they are all excellent diplomats.
I think the point of what I’m saying is that very different educational systems can be successful. It’s all really about having a good basic structure, a good concept of what kind of education you are trying to deliver. Then, having assiduous, well-trained teachers who know what they’re talking about, and having of course children who would be supported by parents to help them to learn.
Jim: It’s struck me because I have dealt with some very talented software developers in the old Soviet Bloc. Is it the long emphasis on science, technology and math [inaudible 19:24] in that space?
Did you have any observations on their system, the Russian system, the Ukrainian? Did you interact with the education systems in those places at all?
Leigh: I must say that I have many Russian friends and colleagues, many Ukrainian friends and colleagues. I have often been struck by the excellence of their educational systems, their knowledge. Many people from Russia and Ukraine, who go off to the UK to study there, are very high achievers.
Although, I would say that on the whole their system are more based on root learning, repetition and, what some in the West might think, a rather old-fashioned educational system. But mind you, they work very well.
I remember the first time when I was learning Russian, coming face to face with a gentleman who introduced himself as a soviet, a naval interpreter in the Soviet Navy who turned up in the UK for some reason. This was in 1991.
He spoke English not only with complete fluency, but with a beautiful English accent, and he’d never been outside the Soviet Union. I had to take my hat off to that level of educational attainment in the elite systems of the former Soviet Union.
Similarly, here in Turkey there are many excellent quality educational establishments. You can always look at a system and think of a better way to organize it and to improve it, but I think we should always be very careful to assuming that we have the answer that some other people don’t.
Jim: I completely agree with that. [laughs] It’s interesting because, as a student pointed out earlier regarding the learn-by-rote [inaudible 21:26] versus the (discovery method), it is striking to observe how successful that approach was in some of those countries.
As you traveled, do you have a sense that some of these countries there is a more egalitarian state or do you see (a wide range of experiences & quality)?
Leigh: I do think that there is a role for central government in any country in maintaining educational standards.
On the one hand, I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s and I’d find intellectually stimulating the idea that we should let the best schools to slug it out, work out who has the best system and let the marketplace decide. But I’m not sure that we’ve got time for that, when it comes to education.
I think some role for central government in setting standards, and deciding curricula, and helping educational systems to provide the education that business and society need in that country is essential. They say fair is great, but we haven’t got time to leave that to operate through the educational systems. We can’t afford to have kids who are failed by educational systems.
Jim: I have a last question. Let’s take the time machine, Dr. Who, back, to when you were 18 or coming out of Manchester. What would you study today if you were 18…? The same thing? What would you do?
Leigh: I tend to think that I’ve been an exceptional fortunate individual in my life.
I’ve had a rich and privileged range of experiences. From hitchhiking around the United States for seven weeks when I was 21, starting in White Plains, New York and making it as far as North Carolina, and San Francisco, and British Columbia or Canada, and all the way back to White Plains, one of the great experiences of my life, to visiting the Island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic with my job, to having all kinds of terrific friends and relationships.
Having visited many countries and seen many different ways of doing things, I would in no way claim that my life is perfect, but it’s been terrific so far. I certainly wouldn’t want to change a thing.
Having said all that, my advice to anybody who is just beginning their university education would be to really take the education seriously. You’ve only got one chance to accumulate the best possible set of skills at the university. If you don’t do it now, you are going to find it very difficult to do it later.
As I said earlier on, you need to balance that inquisitive and applied approach to learning with, at the same time, having some fun and getting out in the air and exploring things, meeting people, trying some things that maybe your parents wouldn’t be all that crazy about, and exploring life a little bit.
It’s the balance between those two, the yin and yang of educational development if you like, that I think young people need to explore.
Jim: That’s wonderful. Is there anything else you want to add? We really appreciate your time today.
Leigh: Not really, except that I would encourage all of your readers or listeners to check out my Twitter account which is @LeighTurnerFCO, and also my work blog which has my thoughts about life in Turkey, and finally my personal writing blog where you have the journalism that I’ve done over the years, four years as a journalist working in Berlin when I was there, and also some of my fiction writing, which I’m very proud of.
Jim: Yes. I will include links to that, definitely.
Twitter @leighturnerFCO
Official blog: http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/leighturner/
Personal writing blog (short stories, novels, journalism): rleighturner.com
A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm shift,” and I described how this phrase had been used and abused, much to Kuhn’s dismay, by postmodern insurrectionists and nonsensical self-help gurus. People seemed to like the essay, but they were also uneasy about it. “I don’t think you’ll be able to publish this in an academic journal,” someone said. He thought it was more like something you’d read in a magazine.
Was that a compliment, a dismissal, or both? It’s hard to say. Academic writing is a fraught and mysterious thing. If you’re an academic in a writerly discipline, such as history, English, philosophy, or political science, the most important part of your work–practically and spiritually–is writing. Many academics think of themselves, correctly, as writers. And yet a successful piece of academic prose is rarely judged so by “ordinary” standards. Ordinary writing–the kind you read for fun–seeks to delight (and, sometimes, to delight and instruct). Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. It’s supposed to be dry but also clever; faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its deepest ambiguity has to do with audience. Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds. But, because it’s intended for a very small audience of hyper-knowledgable, mutually acquainted specialists, it’s actually among the most personal writing there is. If journalists sound friendly, that’s because they’re writing for strangers. With academics, it’s the reverse.
The Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:
The following links provide a lot of additional details on the legislation that would replace the Common Core State Standards within 12 months with model academic standards created in Wisconsin. Please stay informed and contact your legislators with your thoughts.
2013 Senate Bill 619.
Assembly Substitute Amendment 1 to Assembly Bill 617 (ASA1/AB617)
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Video message from Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Tony Evers.
Related:
Governor Scott Walker staff drafted bill aimed at Common Core State Standards.
A Critique of the Wisconsin DPI and Proposed School Choice Changes.
Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, via a kind reader:
Today, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty sent a letter to Superintendent Evers of the Department of Public Instruction, raising serious concerns about whether the DPI is misapplying the open enrollment laws in a way that discriminates against students with disabilities in violation of state law as well as Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (“ADA”) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
Explained CJ Szafir, WILL Education Policy Director, “Every school year, hundreds of students with disabilities are denied the right to open enroll by their school district. When parents appeal the decision, records and interviews with parents have shown that the DPI is not protecting the rights of those students but is instead approving the rejections without conducting the analysis that it is legally required. The whole process leaves parents frustrated, and trapped in a school district that does not serve the needs of their child.”
The purpose of Wisconsin’s open enrollment program is to allow parents to choose a school district for their child other than the school district where they reside. But, students with disabilities have their applications for open enrollment rejected at a much higher rate than those without a disability. A major cause of this disparity is the resident school district claiming that they would incur an “undue financial burden” if the child leaves the school district.
Michael Bastedo & Ozan Jaquette:
The increasing concentration of wealthy students at highly selective colleges is widely perceived, but few analyses examine the underlying dynamics of higher education stratification over time. To examine these dynamics, the authors build an analysis data set of four cohorts from 1972 to 2004. They find that low-income students have made substantial gains in their academic course achievements since the 1970s. Nonetheless, wealthier students have made even stronger gains in achievement over the same period, in both courses and test scores, ensuring a competitive advantage in the market for selective college admissions. Thus, even if low-income students were “perfectly matched” to institutions consistent with their academic achievements, the stratification order would remain largely unchanged. The authors consider organizational and policy interventions that may reverse these trends
Sean Corcoran, Thomas Romer & Howard Rosenthal (PDF):
The operation and financing of primary and secondary public schools in the US is highly decentralized. Most of the budget of each of the 13,000+ school districts comes from a combination of local and state revenues. State constitutions and statutes determine the degree of local district autonomy and scope of taxing power.
As part of an ongoing project on the political economy of education finance, this paper reports on some developments in school spending in one state during a time when some of the state’s constitutional rules governing local school district taxing powers changed. In part, the paper provides a replication of tests of a model of bureaucratic agenda-setting in the financing of elementary and secondary public education. In that agenda-setting model, a budget-maximizing agenda setter makes a proposal for a locally funded operating levy that must be approved by a referendum. In the basic model, the referendum is modeled as an ultimatum game where the agenda setter makes a take-it-or leave-it proposal to some pivotal voter. If a majority of the electorate rejects the proposal, the levy is an exogenously specified reversion level. The optimal, budget-maximizing proposal makes the pivotal voter indifferent between the proposal and the
Wisconsin’s public school open enrollment application period will start in February for the 2014-15 school year, according to a release.
The program allows parents an opportunity to send their children to any public school district in the state, officials said. The enrollment period runs from Feb. 3 to April 30.
Children in the state are usually assigned to public school districts based on the location of their parents’ home, according to the release. The open enrollment application period is the only tuition-free opportunity for most parents to apply for their children to attend a public school in a school district other than the one they live in.
The program is an inter-district choice program that started in the 1998-99 school year, according to the release. Wisconsin is among 12 states with inter-district open enrollment.
“Wisconsin is among a number of states nationwide that offer public school open enrollment across school districts. The state’s long-running program supports parental involvement and shared responsibility for educating children,” State Superintendent Tony Evers said in the release.
Much more on open enrollment, here.
Gov. Scott Walker has asked State Superintendent Tony Evers to begin hearings on revoking the teaching license of a Middleton teacher reinstated to his job earlier this month after being fired in 2010 for looking at pornographic images at school.
“After hearing from concerned parents, I am asking you to act efficiently in your investigation into the actions of Mr. Harris and to initiate revocation proceedings,” Walker wrote in a letter dated Jan. 28. “The arbitration process afforded to Mr. Harris failed the school district and the students. It has taken both a financial and emotional toll on the district. Cases, such as this one, are a good example of why our reforms are necessary.”
Walker also wrote cases like the one in Middleton “prompted me to sign 2011 Act 84 giving the State Superintendent clear authority to take action.”
The law allows the Department of Public Instruction to revoke a license for immoral conduct, defined under state law to include looking at pornography at school.
Fourth grade teacher Carissa Franz starts her lessons by outlining the Common Core standards she and her students will focus on. Franz is in her second year at Ray W. Huegel Elementary School, and uses the standards to drive her teaching this year.
She and teachers throughout Madison are integrating the new Common Core State Standards, adopted by State Superintendent Tony Evers in 2010, into their curriculums with the help of new Common Core-aligned materials and district-supported teacher teams
The changeover to Common Core is a deliberate process. Franz meets monthly with the superintendent as part of a teacher advisory board that shares the “voice of the teachers” with the district, she said.
Every week, she meets with a group of teachers representing each grade level in her school to discuss how to align the standards and the math materials used district-wide with the needs of Huegel’s classrooms.
Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter, via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):
Sections IV-I and IV-J of the MTI Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement set forth the procedures which principals are contractually required to use when management notifies a teacher that he/she is being considered for non-renewal of contract. By Contract, the District is obligated to advise a teacher before May 1, if they are considering non-renewal. Under Wisconsin State Statutes, such a notice must be delivered to the teacher on or before May 15. Such notice could also be on one’s evaluation that must occur by April 15 per your Collective Bargaining Agreement.
MTI staff should be present at any and all meetings
between the teacher and any administrator in this regard, given that the meeting may indeed affect the teacher’s continued employment status. The teacher has the legal right to MTI representation and does not have to begin or continue a meeting without representation. See the reverse side of your MTI membership card.
For probationary teachers, a request for a hearing before the Board of Education must be submitted within five (5) days of the teacher’s receipt of the notice that the Board of Education is considering non-renewal of the teacher’s contract. For non-probationary staff, a request for arbitration must be made within fifteen (15) days of a non-renewal notice. It is extremely important for any teacher receiving such a notice to immediately contact MTI.
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity eNewsletter via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):
School district employees received some encouraging news prior to winter break. Wisconsin school employees chose “UNION” by large margins. Between November 29 and December 19, 2013 the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) conducted recertification elections for over 500 local unions representing over 56,000 classroom teachers, clerical/technical workers, educational assistants, bus drivers, custodial workers and other school district employees. Over 98% of those voting, voted Union YES!
Of the 39,872 total votes cast, 39,107 voted to recertify their union, with only 765 (less than 2%) voting against recertification. Annual union recertification elections are mandated by Governor Walker’s Act 10. In his ruling in MTI’s lawsuit, Judge Colas found requiring such elections to be unconstitutional. That decision was reversed by the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Abrahamson and Justice Walsh Bradley expressing strong dissent, in a 26 page opinion. Not surprisingly, Dane County school districts had a particularly strong showing; Monona Grove teachers had nearly 90% of all eligible voters cast ballots and, of those, nearly 96% voted Union YES. But it wasn’t only the Dane County districts that voted Union. Even those school districts in largely conservative counties voted affirmatively. Waukesha teachers voted 648-14 to maintain their Union as their certified bargaining agent; Wauwatosa teachers 367-7; and West Allis Educational Assistants voted 47-1. The largest school districts in the state also enthusiastically voted Union YES. Appleton Substitute teachers voted 159-2; La Crosse Secretaries voted 40-0; Milwaukee teachers voted 3,728-35 and Milwaukee Ed Assistants voted 875-10.
Jason Grotto, Alex Richards andHeather Gillers:
More than a decade ago, demographic projections signaled an important reversal for Chicago Public Schools: Enrollment was about to shrink dramatically.
Yet CPS leaders appointed by former Mayor Richard M. Daley issued billions of dollars in bonds to repair, expand or replace the vast majority of the district’s schools regardless of future needs and without voter input, a Tribune investigation found.
In total, CPS officials have borrowed more than $10 billion in general obligation bonds since 1996 to fund school construction projects, debt that has contributed to the system’s current financial crisis. Officials poured $1.5 billion of that money into schools that today are less than 60 percent full.
Along the way, CPS invested $100 million in schools it closed this year, in part, because they were underused. About half of that spending came after demographic projections predicted districtwide enrollment drops.
Two big evaluations of education in the Sunshine State came out this week–and readers can be excused for feeling a bit confused, because they tell rather different stories about the state of Florida’s schools.
Eleven newspapers around the state went front-page this week with stories highlighting the release of teacher evaluation data. The vast majority of Florida teachers–98 percent–were rated “effective” or “highly effective.”
Meanwhile, two papers–the Lakeland Ledger (which ran wire copy) and The Palm Beach Post (subscription-only) gave A1 placement to stories about Florida’s results on the Program for International Student Assessment, which tests students in more than 60 countries. (Florida was one of three US states to pay for state-specific results.) The numbers weren’t sparkling: Florida kids fared roughly in line with the US and international averages in reading, and similar to the lackluster US average but well below the international standard in science. In math, the state’s results were worst of all: well below the US average and “similar to Croatia,” as the Post story put it, with 30 percent of students scoring as “low achievers.”
The demographic challenges in Florida’s schools are real, but still there’s an obvious question here: How can the state’s teachers be doing such a great job while students can’t compete with international peers and struggle to keep up with already-middling US scores?
When asked if politics and the resistance from the tea party had eroded the chances of Common Core moving forward in Wisconsin, Evers said the politics surrounding the issue have created a lot of misinformation.
“It’s important for everyone, including those on these committees, to realize that this is about our students being college and career ready,” Evers said. “These standards have been embraced by districts across the state for the past three years. I think it is the right thing to do for the kids to keep the standards in place. That’s the bottom line.”
Yet the technical prerequisites are already well underway. Machine translation of signs, text, and speech brings down language barriers and facilitates ever more cross-cultural meetings of like minds. Immersive headsets, input devices, and telepresence robots further collapse space and time, allowing us to instantly be alongside others on the other side of the globe. Mobile technology makes us ever more mobile, increasingly permitting not just easier movement around a home base but permanent international relocation.
Technology is thus enabling arbitrary numbers of people from around the world to assemble in remote locations, without interrupting their ability to work or communicate with existing networks. In this sense, the future of technology is not really location-based apps; it is about making location completely unimportant.
When physical goods themselves can’t be digitized, our interface to them will be.
…
This is why location is becoming so much less important: technology is enabling us to access everything we need from our mobile phone, to find our true communities in the cloud, and to easily travel to assemble these communities in person. Taken together, we are rapidly approaching a future characterized by a totally new phenomenon, the reverse diaspora: one that starts out internationally distributed, finds each other online, and ends up physically concentrated.
What might these reverse diasporas be like? As a people whose primary bond is through the internet, many of their properties would not fit our pre-existing mental models. Unlike rugged individualists, these emigrants would be moving within or between nation states to become part of a community, not to strike out on their own. Unlike would-be revolutionaries, those migrating in this fashion would be doing so out of humility in their ability to change existing political systems. And unlike so-called secessionists, the specific site of physical concentration would be a matter of convenience, not passion; the geography incidental and not worth fighting over.
Status quo governance of our agrarian era $15k/student public education structures are unlikely to survive the era of pervasive networks and cheap computing.
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.
schoolinfosystem.org