New York Times:

Teachers unions and other critics of federally required standardized tests have behaved in recent years as though killing the testing mandate would magically remedy everything that ails education in the United States. In reality, getting rid of the testing requirement in the early grades would make it impossible for the country to know what if anything children were learning from year to year.

Congress understood this fundamental point, and kept the testing requirement, when it reauthorized the No Child Left Behind Act — now called the Every Student Succeeds Act — last month. But lawmakers ducked the most important problem: the fact that most states still have weak curriculums and graduation requirements that make high school diplomas useless and that leave graduates unprepared for college, the job market or even meeting entry requirements for the Army.

The costs associated with this problem are demonstrated in a recent report by Motoko Rich in The Times, which focused on Berea High School in Greenville, S.C., where the graduation rate has risen to 80 percent, from under 65 percent just four years ago. But college entrance exams given to 11th graders last year showed that only one in 10 students was ready for college-level reading and only about one in 14 was prepared for entry-level college math. On a separate job skills test, only about half of students demonstrated the math proficiency needed to succeed at most jobs.

With results like that, it’s no wonder some South Carolina business leaders are worried that the state is producing high school graduates who are not qualified to compete for higher-skilled jobs at companies like Boeing, Volvo and BMW.

This is a national problem. A recent study from Achieve, a nonpartisan organization that works with the states to raise academic standards, showed that only 18 states and the District of Columbia required all graduates in the class of 2014 to meet the minimum preparation requirements for college — four years of English and math through Algebra II, or its equivalent.

Related:Young Americans cannot do tricky sums without a calculator and Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Amy Dockser Marcus:

It was a big decision, and Kathy Giusti saved the conversations about it for quiet moments. A phone call catching up with her mother. A car ride with her children. A backyard party celebrating a high-school graduation.

Ms. Giusti wanted to discuss the complex, intimate and sometimes life-changing choice that many families will have to make in the coming years: whether to get your genes sequenced and then share the data.

Ms. Giusti, 56 years old, is a well-known cancer advocate and proponent of data sharing. She and her identical twin sister, Karen Andrews, founded the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation in 1998, two years after Ms. Giusti was diagnosed with the disease, a rare and incurable cancer of the plasma cells.

Alan Borsuk:

In hopes of revving up readership, I invited Miley Cyrus to join in presenting the annual Wisconsin education awards. But she was busy lowering standards of public decency in America, so you’ll have to put up with me. How boring — but this year wasn’t boring for Badger state education, so let’s get right to the 2015 honors.

The Everyone Gets an A Award. This goes to Wisconsin’s messed up standardized testing system for 2014-’15. Wondering how kids are doing in your community’s schools? So am I! So is everyone! Maybe they’re all doing great.

The launch of what was called the Badger Exam was awful. And the test was killed off before it really came to life. There were screw ups in several big ways. Now, at the end of 2015, no scores have been released publicly. (They’re coming soon, I’m told. Great. And we have a new state test coming in the spring. Also great.) This also kiboshed the state report cards for schools for the past year. From a public accountability standpoint, 2014-’15 might as well not have happened.

The Hail Mary Award. No, it doesn’t go to Aaron Rodgers for that pass against the Lions. It goes to the Milwaukee Archdiocese and its launch of an ambitious effort, called Seton Catholic Schools, aimed at raising the quality of more than two dozen parochial grade schools in the city. The initiative aims to centralize control of key matters, including hiring and training teachers and principals and raising overall professionalism and energy. This is a big deal and, given the thousands of children involved, I hope it pays off.

Annysa Johnson:

A Marquette University summer reading program for children developed by former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent and education reform advocate Howard Fuller would get a $1.25 million boost from the state under a bill making its way through the Legislature.

The Assembly bill, proposed by Rep. Joe Sanfelippo (R-New Berlin), would require the state Department of Public Instruction to award Marquette’s Institute for the Transformation of Learning, headed by Fuller, $375,000 next year and $750,000 in 2017. And that could increase in coming years, he said, if the program is as effective as Fuller and Marquette have claimed.

“We’re using this as a pilot program,” said Sanfelippo, who learned of the Marquette program when he sat down with Fuller to discuss education issues in 2014. “We would fund it for two years so we can take a good, hard look at the numbers. And if we continue to see the results Marquette is achieving, we would hope to expand it statewide for any district interested.”

Leonard Sax:

Kyle was absorbed in a videogame on his cellphone, so I asked his mom, “How long has Kyle had a stomach ache?” Mom said, “I’m thinking it’s been about two days.” Then Kyle replied, “Shut up, mom. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And he gave a snorty laugh, without looking up from his videogame. Kyle is 10 years old.

I have been a physician for 29 years. This sort of language and behavior from a 10-year-old was very rare in the 1980s and 1990s. It would have been unusual a decade ago. It is common today. America’s children are immersed in a culture of disrespect: for parents, teachers, and one another. They learn it from television, even on the Disney Channel, where parents are portrayed as clueless, out-of-touch or absent. They learn it from celebrities or the Internet. They learn it from social media. They teach it to one another. They wear T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like “I’m not shy. I just don’t like you.”

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

In order to understand why our children are making the decision to die, Silicon Valley parents need to be willing to examine what is perhaps our community’s most sacred cow: the false but tightly-held belief that students must attend a highly selective college to be worth anything in life, and that our worth as parents is also measured by that metric.

With this mindset as mantra, and with those colleges routinely denying 90-95% of applicants, we set our children on a grim racecourse to try to beat those nearly impossible odds. We’ve created a way of life in which kids have no time for play—which is an inalienable right for every child around the globe, according to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). Instead, we insist that every moment of our children’s lives be enriching, as if each activity, athletic endeavor, quiz, and piece of homework is a make or break moment for their future. As if every afternoon must be harnessed for usefulness.

National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) PDF:

Across America, there is much debate about charter schools. Some of that debate is about the existence of charter schools and whether there should be more or fewer of them. More of the debate is about the quality and oversight of charter schools.

This publication is part of that debate and speaks to the state laws and policies that greatly determine how many charter schools exist (accessibility), the exibility they have to operate (autonomy), and the standards of quality and oversight they must meet (accountability).

It is easy to nd zealous voices arguing for or against charter school policies based on theories or ideologies. Some believe charter schools should be heavily regulated, along the lines of school districts. Some believe that 6,700 charter schools serving more than 2.9 million children can somehow all be eliminated. Others argue for less regulation and faster growth, even in places where some charter schools or types of operators are failing.

The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) approaches this debate from a unique position— real-world experience—and that position is re ected in this publication. NACSA is a professional membership organization of the agencies that approve, monitor, renew, and sometimes close charter schools. NACSA staff has worked in virtually every state and major city with charter schools. Here is what we know from our experiences:

Perhaps someone will compare oversight practices with tradtional government schools.

Jason Joyce:

“Students in the alternative program have their classes on the third floor, separate from the elementary students,” said Rachel Strauch Nelson in an email. “I would note that we have already been considering other possible locations for these programs as our district works to strengthen our alternative program options.”

Strauch Nelson added that “interaction with the elementary students is very limited.”

At 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham sent an email to all district parents under the subject “Safe Schools.” The complete email reads:

Dear MMSD community,

As we read about disturbing events of violence across the country, we recognize that there can be cause for concern about day to day safety. I want to reassure you that safety is a top priority in our district.

At each of our schools, we have strong safety protocols in place, we continuously train our staff and review these procedures, and we work very closely with the Madison police to keep our school communities safe. We also continuously strive to have good communication between staff, parents and students and community members.

I say this, in part, because you may have heard about an incident in which a high school age student brought a firearm to a school today. Unlike other incidents we have seen around the country, the student made no threats and indicated that he did not intend any harm to anyone at school. Our district staff and police responded immediately, recovered the firearm and took the student into custody.

While this situation is very different than incidents we’ve heard about throughout the country, it is a good example of why we have strong safety protocols in place. Our staff followed those protocols very well to ensure the safety of our students and staff.

Whenever there are safety incidents in our schools, we work hard to communicate with you quickly and ensure that you have up to date information.

That is important because we also recognize that parents have the most important role in providing comfort and reassurance to their children when they express concern about events around the country. As parents, our role is to remain calm, explore with them what they know, and what they are worried about, and to provide reassurance and routine. This is also the role of our educators in schools. If your child is having difficulty or needs support, please seek support from your school’s student services staff or principal.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me or your school principal.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Cheatham

Superintendent

Related: Gangs and School Violence Forum, and

Police calls to Madison Hogh Schools Schools: 1996-2006

Jon Gabriel:

More money for schools with no new taxes: What’s not to like? A lot, apparently. Mr. Ducey’s plan disrupted the usual coalition of teachers unions and public school districts, leading some in the K-12 establishment—those administrators and union officials who have a way of soaking up dollars while doing little for students—to take the unfamiliar position of objecting to new education funding.

The superintendent of Mesa Public Schools, Arizona’s largest district, launched an email and robocall campaign to turn parents against the proposal. He insisted he was fighting for “the children,” but he was less upfront about disclosing that his lobbying effort was funded with school-district money that could have been put into the classroom instead.

On the other side of the aisle, several of Gov. Ducey’s fellow Republicans preferred to keep the state lands in reserve as a safety net for the future. The green-eyeshade crowd was suspicious of any new spending, even without added taxes. State Treasurer Jeff DeWit, the most prominent official to criticize the plan, lobbied GOP legislators against his own governor. A political newcomer, Mr. DeWit worried that the plan would shortchange the state land trust by several billion dollars—40 years from now. The trust is one of the few fiefdoms that Mr. DeWit controls, and he wanted to keep that money in his back pocket, collecting interest. His re-election campaign three Novembers from now might be tougher if his balance sheet shows a short-term dip.

The disruptive nature of Gov. Ducey’s proposal was unmistakable. With the legislature weighing whether to place his plan on the next ballot, the two sides in the lawsuit were forced to the mediation table after judges’ pleas for the parties to settle had failed. After tense meetings at the governor’s office between legislative and education leaders, a deal was struck that would give schools $3.5 billion over 10 years—$2 billion from the land trust and $625 million reallocated from the state’s general fund. The legislature quickly passed the bargain, and Gov. Ducey signed it on Oct. 30.

Alan Borsuk:

“For us, stability is key.”

Mark Flaten, principal of Green Bay West High School, said that to 10 members of the state Assembly when they visited last week at the school as part of the work of a legislative task force on urban education.

Flaten was talking about challenges faced at the school, where about a quarter of the students come or go during a school year or between school years, not counting incoming ninth-graders and graduating seniors.

Flaten could have been speaking for many educators across Wisconsin and beyond who every day face the challenges of trying to create educational stability in the lives of students whose circumstances aren’t so stable, sometimes in big ways.

In short, stability is a big plus when it comes to educational success, but change, both good and bad, is part of our times and the lives of large numbers of children. One central challenge for schools is to provide as much of the former as possible, given the high degree of the latter.

The notion that kids enroll in a school and stay there until they move up to the next level of schooling is not what it used to be. That’s the case across the board, but it is particularly true at schools serving a higher percentage of low-income students and students who are new to the United States.

If you think this is “a Milwaukee problem,” you’re right and wrong. It certainly is a big issue in Milwaukee, where thousands of students have unstable personal circumstances.

Nicholette Zeliadt:

The latest estimate of autism prevalence in the U.S., released last week, suggests the condition is even more common than previously thought. But the apparent rise in autism coincides with a decline in other developmental disorders, highlighting the complexity folded into this seemingly simple statistic.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 1 in 45 children have autism, up from 1 in 80 in 20131. The new figure is based on the annual door-to-door National Health Interview Survey, which asks parents whether a doctor has ever told them their child has autism, intellectual disability or another type of developmental delay.

Scott Jaschik:

The Wall Street Journal couldn’t have been much more excited about what Mitch Daniels said Wednesday about the protests at Yale University and the University of Missouri. “We’ve been wondering all week what happened to the grown-ups on American university campuses, and it appears we have a sighting. Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University, spoke up Wednesday about the children’s revolt at Yale and Missouri,” said the Journal in an editorial.

While many conservatives joined in praising Daniels, his comments angered many black students at Purdue and some critics elsewhere. A rally is planned at Purdue today.

Noah Rothman:

It has been said that college is where students go to learn how to learn. That is increasingly looking like an assumption based only in faith. The crisis of enforced intellectual homogeneity on America’s college campuses has been an acute one for several years. Despite the public’s growing concern for the integrity of American higher education, it is a crisis that seems only to get worse.

Colleges have courted a reputation not for shaping young minds and molding them in preparation for entering the workforce, but for mollycoddling a student body that seems forever engaged in one long, defensive, threat display. It is a true paradox that institutions with the mission of exposing students to new ideas, which will inevitably include some offensive or even dangerous ideas, are increasingly under fire for doing their job. Prospective campus speakers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Condoleezza Rice, are perfect examples of this phenomenon. These women of stature who fail to comport to the stereotype of victimization to which women and minorities are, in the progressive mind, supposed to conform were disinvited from their respective speaking engagements following a revolt of the coddled. It wasn’t enough for those students to retreat to the Orwellian-named “safe spaces” that shield oversize children from discomfort. No, these aspiring totalitarians had to ensure that no one else could be exposed to these speakers’ ideas or the example that they as role models set.

Sol Stern:

Over nearly three decades fighting to improve the nation’s largest public school district, I have discovered a dispiriting but undeniable fact: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I started writing about public education because of what I saw, up close and personal, at PS 87 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the elementary school my two sons attended from 1987 to 1997. It was at this elite school, favored by the neighborhood’s middle-class parents, that I first glimpsed the harm done to children — particularly, poor children — by a retrograde teachers’ contract and the dominance of progressive-education ideas in the classroom.

Despite two decades of often turbulent efforts at reform and a doubling of spending under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, these two fundamental problems still plague Gotham’s schools today.

Simon Mundy:

The system was introduced in 2010 to replace a state monopoly on history textbooks that was introduced by the authoritarian leader Park Chung-hee in 1974, two years after he revised the constitution to suspend democratic elections.

Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye, is the sitting president and some of her political opponents have claimed that her government’s drive to reclaim control of the textbooks is driven by her desire to improve the standing of her father. He kick-started South Korea’s dramatic economic development but has been criticised for overseeing severe human rights violations, as well as for serving in Japan’s military during its colonial occupation of Korea.

“The Park government is trying to turn history books into government-controlled ones that glorify Japan and dictatorship,” the opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy said in a statement after the announcement.

But leading figures in the ruling New Frontier party have said the return to a single government-authored history textbook is necessary to promote national unity and prevent the risk of schoolchildren developing sympathy for North Korea.

David Dahmer:

Two facts that we know to be true: One, children who can read, who love to learn, and who can work effectively with others will be best prepared to lead happy lives and raise happy and healthy families as adults. Two, many children of color in low-income families don’t start their learning in accredited childcare centers and quickly fall behind their peers. Most never catch up.

Kaleem Caire, founder and president of One City Early Learning Center on Madison’s south side, knows that his new endeavor will help create opportunities for struggling young people and their parents. One City Early Learning Centers believes in the old adage that it takes a village to raise a child.

“It’s huge to be able to say that in South Madison we have this organically grown thing created by a native Madisonian from Fisher Street who was born and raised in the area,” Caire told Madison365. “It gives some inspiration to what we are doing, but the focus is really trying to get these kids ready for school.

Related: Kaleem Caire and the rejected Madison Preparatory academy IB charter school.

David Kiro:

There’s still no evidence that the children benefited cognitively from preschool. They may be better socialized to school life — a skill, emphasized in preschool, that may well bring long-term benefits — but many of them haven’t mastered the three Rs. That’s terrible news, since being a proficient reader by third grade is widely regarded as the best predictor of high school graduation.

Pre-K critics will again pounce on the results. “Devastating for advocates of the expansion of state pre-K programs,” wrote Russ Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, commenting on the first-round evaluation. It’s an “I told you so” moment for Tennessee State Representative Bill Dunn, who slammed his state’s prekindergarten as “like paying $1,000 for a McDonald’s hamburger.”

When a nationwide evaluation of Head Start, the federal government’s preschool program, reported similarly disappointing outcomes three years ago, Mr. Whitehurst delivered a blistering critique. “The best available evidence raises serious doubts that a large public investment in the expansion of pre-K for 4-year-olds will have the long-term effects that advocates tout.” Pre-K was generally thought to be better than Head Start, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in Tennessee.

Have the claims made for early education been overblown? Not necessarily. Consider what’s happening in Boston. A randomized study showed that prekindergartners there gained between four and seven months’ progress in reading and math, and those gains persisted: 27 percent more of Boston’s preschool children scored “proficient” or better on the state’s rigorous third-grade exams.

Emma Jacobs

One morning Madeleine Kasson received an email from an undergraduate, sent at 5am. Please write my essay — it is due in today, it requested. She declined the solicitation, as she does with all such requests from students. This is a common misunderstanding of her work as a private tutor to undergraduates.

This new breed of tutors catering to undergraduates is growing (admittedly from a low base). Once the guilty secret of schoolchildren seeking to get into selective schools or gain top marks in exams, private tutors are now helping British undergraduates and even postgraduates at universities. As many teenagers and twenty-somethings start their new university terms, some will be seeking the help of tutors, like Ms Kasson. Some even assist graduates applying for jobs in banks and professional services firms.

Edd Stockwell, co-founder of Tutorfair, a non-profit organisation that also provides tutoring to children whose parents cannot afford the fees, has seen the number of requests for degree-level tutorials double in the past year. Luke Shelley, director of Tavistock Tutors, says its services for undergraduates have grown “rapidly” in the past six years.

In extreme cases this might involve intensive tutoring throughout the degree course.

Adam Caller, founder of Tutors International, describes one case where a father had forced his daughter to enrol on a business degree — rather than her original choice of English — with the aspiration that she could one day take over the family business. In order to school her in a subject that she had little interest in, a tutor taught her for five hours every working day for three years. The bill came to more than £400,000. She graduated with a 2:1.

Marianne Lombardo:

The Hibsty Map-when you’re given information that paints a rosier picture than what is the actual case – might be humorous if we’re talking about Match.com, but it isn’t when we’re talking about our children’s education.

The Obama administration has fought hard, against extensive criticism, to address the discrepancies between what states have been calling proficient and what students need to know and be able to do in order to enter college or a career successfully. This discrepancy is devastating for the 60 percent of students who are deemed not ready for college, frustrates the 30 percent of high school graduates who enter a job market where 40 percent of employers rate new entrants with a high school diploma as “deficient” in their workforce preparation, and even disastrous for our nation’s security as a whole: Nearly one-fourth of all high school graduates don’t get the minimum score needed to join any branch of the military.

Lucy Kellaway:

Last week online readers of the FT, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal were accosted by this question in a big white banner advertisement paid for by UBS. As I glanced at it two further questions occurred to me: a) what business is that of a bank? and b) what about mothers?

“For some of life’s questions you are not alone. Together we can find an answer” the advertisement went on.

So I clicked through, and it turns out that the bank has found an answer already. The trick to being a good father is to hand over your money to UBS. “We can . . . help you plan for the future, and provide the life you want for your loved ones.”

This raises a further question: whether chutzpah and disingenuity work as a marketing strategy. I pondered this for a bit, but then lost interest and returned to the FT website. There the question was again. Am I a good father?

And am I a good mother?

It might seem odd given that I’ve had 24 years in which to consider the matter, but until now I have avoided asking myself this question. That is partly because of the pointless guilt that comes with it, but it’s also because I have four children, who have needed very different things from me at different times. Some of those things, like fish fingers and early bedtimes, have been easy to provide. Others have been much harder. Sometimes things go to plan. More often they don’t.

Angela Hanscom:

I still recall the days of preschool for my oldest daughter. I remember wanting to desperately enrich her life in any way possible – to give her an edge before she even got to formal schooling. I put her in a preschool that was academic in nature – the focus on pre-reading, writing, and math skills. At home, I bought her special puzzles, set up organized play dates with children her age, read to her every night, signed her up for music lessons, put her in dance, and drove her to local museums. My friends and I even did “enrichment classes” with our kids to practice sorting, coloring, counting, numbers, letters, and yes….even to practice sitting! We thought this would help prepare them for kindergarten.

[Why so many kids can’t sit still in school today]

Like many other American parents, I had an obsession: academic success for my child. Only, I was going about it completely wrong. Yes, my daughter would later go on to test above average with her academic skills, but she was missing important life skills. Skills that should have been in place and nurtured during the preschool years. My wake-up call was when the preschool teacher came up to me and said, “Your daughter is doing well academically. In fact, I’d say she exceeds expectations in these areas. But she is having trouble with basic social skills like sharing and taking turns.” Not only that, but my daughter was also having trouble controlling her emotions, developed anxiety and sensory issues, and had trouble simply playing by herself!

John Higgins:

After nearly a year of deliberation, the state Supreme Court ruled 6-3 late Friday afternoon that charter schools are unconstitutional, creating chaos for hundreds of families whose children have already started classes.

The ruling — believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country — overturns the law voters narrowly approved in 2012 allowing publicly funded, but privately operated, schools.

Eight new charter schools are opening in Washington this fall, in addition to one that opened in Seattle last year.

It was not immediately known what would happen with the schools that are already running. The parties have 20 days to ask the court for reconsideration before the ruling becomes final.

Related: WEAC, $1.57 million for four senators.

Dr Hurd:

Schools have long since lost sight of what education actually is. Government schools are particularly guilty. Public schools are government schools. If we called them what they are — government schools — many of us might not be so prone to defend them.

By their very definition, the purpose of nationalized, federally subsidized government schools is to turn out “good little citizens” — as the government currently in power defines them.
Bear in mind that this is neither a Republican nor a Democrat issue. Each party stands ready to get its turn in the sun and utilize the coercive apparatus of the federal regulatory and funding structure in an attempt to assert their visions, priorities and will into the minds of young people. Social engineering (right wing or left wing) imposed on children, propped up by government coercion, subsidies and mandatory attendance laws … It’s truly the intellectual equivalent of child abuse.

Contrary to principles of education discovered and articulated by geniuses like Maria Montessori, most schools approach education collectively, not individually. We utilize the German model, based on the kind of thinking that gave rise to Hitler, nationalism and fascism; there’s nothing American about it. A distinctively American approach to education would be based on individualism, for-profit and competitive excellence, and parental choice in a totally free marketplace. Innovation and genuine diversity would be the dominant themes in a privatized education marketplace. We presently have none of those things.

Children are not taught to learn in their own ways at paces they can personally handle, while still adhering to objective standards of truth, fact and knowledge. Instead, we strive for normalcy, as defined by the rulers in charge. We seek out teachers who pursue master’s degrees in the nonspecific (and indefinable) field of “education,” while knowing little or nothing about the subjects they’re expected to teach. We require teachers to teach for the sake of nationalized tests, more in the pursuit of attaining scores that make the schools look collectively good rather than actually catering to the highly individualized, while still objective, process of learning and thinking.

Washington policy center :

New research finds that some justices on the state supreme court have received political contributions from a lead party in a key lawsuit now before the court.

Parties in the case, League of Women Voters, Washington Education Association, et al vs State of Washington, are asking the court to strike down Washington’s charter school law, passed by voters in 2012, and bar children from attending a charter public school.

Charter schools are community-based public schools that operate independently of central district management. They are tuition-free and open to all students. In Washington, charter schools are designed to help poor families and children underserved by traditional schools.

Charter schools are popular with low-income parents who see education as the path to a better future for their children. Demand far exceeds supply. While 10 charter schools are set to open, the Charter School Commission this year rejected applications from 12 community charter school groups, leaving 4,900 children to wait for a future round of approvals.

Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for four senators.

State Senator Jennifer Shilling:

It’s clear that we need to take a close look at how student funding cuts and increasing poverty rates are affecting classroom learning. Instead of taking more resources away from Wisconsin children, we must work together to invest in local schools, reduce student hunger and improve student achievement.

For too long, Republicans have prioritized tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of funding for our schools and communities. In recent months, Gov. Walker’s presidential ambitions have overshadowed the real challenges facing families and distracted from our ability to find solutions to this growing crisis.

It is high time we focus on the important issues affecting Wisconsin families and local schools. Together, we can work to end childhood hunger in Wisconsin and provide all hardworking students the opportunity to succeed.

Related: recent Wisconsin K-12 budget comments.

Jennifer Shilling notes and links.

Brentin Mock:

Referring to New Orleans as anything like a “laboratory” during the first weeks and months after Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters receded would have been a bad move. As displaced residents trickled back into the city, they were first and foremost seeking help with piecing their old lives back together: How were they going to pay for a new roof? Where could they find their displaced aunts and nephews? How would they soothe their traumatized children back to sleep during rainstorms? Any conversation about “experimentation” wasn’t going to fly with already rattled residents.

And yet, public hypothesizing about a “new” New Orleans began nearly immediately. James Reiss, an avatar of Uptown wealth and chairman of the Regional Transit Authority, helicoptered back into New Orleans after the floods to declare, “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically.”

The Economist:

Complicating the politics, school buses have their roots in a very different philosophy. More than just machines for moving children around, they have often been tools for social engineering. Busing took off in the 1930s, as progressive education officials sought to close one-room rural schoolhouses and move kids to “modern” township schools. Visitors to the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, can see a handsome school bus used in pre-war Indiana. Some rural parents feared the new schools would bring higher taxes and alien values, the museum notes: they were overruled. Even their uniform colour dates back to a meeting of experts in New York in 1939, who deemed bright yellow the most visible shade at dawn and dusk, setting a standard now known as “National School Bus Chrome”. The civil-rights era saw furious protests as courts ordered schoolkids bused across once-inviolable racial lines.

A series of desegregation plans explain why Fort Wayne has rather a large school bus fleet (it has 240 now, serving a district with 30,000 pupils). A first plan saw black pupils carried from the inner city to white suburban secondary schools. That “one-way busing” did not bring about a “kumbaya moment” of racial or educational equality, recalls Fort Wayne’s school superintendent, Wendy Robinson, who was raised in the city. A more ambitious desegregation plan, agreed to after a lawsuit in the 1980s, opened “magnet schools” in the inner city, offering such specialisms as science or a Montessori education. The aim was to create schools that both urban and suburban families wanted to attend, giving kids from all backgrounds a reason to jump on the bus.

Fort Wayne spent $281,352,667 (2015 budget pdf) or $9,378 per student for 30,000 students during the 2015 budget. Madison, the land of milk and honey, spent more than $15,000 per student during the same year.

Jonathan Knee:

Watching the $200 million iceberg (Mr. Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation was contingent on raising a matching amount) slowly melt into an ocean of recrimination over the course of 256 brisk pages can be a sometimes painful exercise. The union boss, Joe Del Grosso, demanded a ransom of $31 million to compensate for what he felt members should have received in previous years — before agreeing to discuss any labor reforms. The superintendent, Cami Anderson, demanded accountability from schools but set her own performance goals only after the academic year was largely over and relied on expensive consultants — whose total bill ultimately exceeded $20 million — without clear objectives long after she had promised to recruit a permanent leadership team.

The school reform movement’s focus on measurable results and “business-style management” is laudable. But it is downright chilling to watch the leadership team throw around buzz phrases from business best-sellers with minimal focus on the nuanced requirements of applying these principles to the education ecosystem generally or to the Newark public schools particularly. Too many of Newark’s children have suffered unspeakable trauma from their exposure to a combination of violent crime, family turmoil and deep poverty. With all the high-minded talk of revolution and “ripping off Band-Aids” and “changing the engine while flying the plane,” remarkably little thought went into the actual effect these policies might have on this population in desperate need of stability — much less how $200 million could be best spent in this context.

Robert Pondiscio:

Every sentence in Sir Ken Robinson’s Creative Schools begins with a capital letter. There is also a punctuation mark at the end of each, without exception. I have made a careful study of his nearly three-hundred-page manuscript, and can now report conclusively that its author employs—precisely and exclusively—the twenty-six letters of the standard English alphabet.

Normally, this would not be worth remarking upon. Most of us have come to expect standard English in books written for general readers. But most of us are not Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D. He is “one of the elite thinkers on creativity and education,” whose TED talk on how schools kill creativity in children is “the most watched in TED history.” Sir Ken intensely dislikes standardization in all its forms. So it is at least somewhat disappointing that he has chosen to eschew interpretive dance, semaphore flags, or other means to argue against standards and for creativity in education.

Caroline Bermudez:

A growing amount of scrutiny is paid to the roughly $4 billion private philanthropies give to public K-12 education annually.

Such attention is understandable—even if the amount is dwarfed by the $600 billion in local, state, and federal dollars taxpayers spend every year on public schools. We should be talking about the sway the very rich can have over national policy.

But if “follow the money” is now our mantra, we also need to ask what $600 billion has gotten us if our schools cannot properly educate black, brown, low-income and disabled children—if our system cannot figure out a way to spend that money fairly in a way that does not penalize children most at risk.

In a previous life, I was a journalist. For eight years, I reported for The Chronicle of Philanthropy on the charitable giving of the wealthy. Yes, I interviewed and wrote about the 1 percenters and in some cases, they were closer to the .000001 percenters.

Matthew Hennessey:

For Wade and her husband, and for city dwellers with concerns ranging from classroom environment to the Common Core, public school is out of the question. And for them, as for many urban middle-class families, paying hefty private school tuition is not a realistic option, either. “It wasn’t so much a decision of what we were going to do—it was what we weren’t going to do,” she says. In the end, the Wades opted to homeschool. “Homeschooling is in some ways the easiest option. We’re driving our children’s education. We’re giving up a lot to do it, but in the end we thought it would make us most satisfied.”

At first, the Wades knew no other homeschoolers, and, like many young parents in the city, they had no family nearby, so they prepared themselves to go it alone. Before too long, however, they found a growing network of urban homeschoolers. “In a city like this, you can find your tribe,” says Wade. “You can find your homeschoolers. And there are a lot of us.”

Not so long ago, homeschooling was considered a radical educational alternative—the province of a small number of devout Iowa evangelicals and countercultural Mendocino hippies. No more. Today, as many as 2 million—or 2.5 percent—of the nation’s 77 million school-age children are educated at home, and increasing numbers of them live in cities. More urban parents are turning their backs on the compulsory-education model and embracing the interactive, online educational future that policy entrepreneurs have predicted for years would revolutionize pedagogy and transform brick-and-mortar schooling. And their kids are not only keeping pace with their traditionally schooled peers; they are also, in many cases, doing better, getting into top-ranked colleges and graduating at higher rates. In cities across the country, homeschooling is becoming just one educational option among many.

Erik Gilbert

Last year the younger of my two sons went off to college. As we went through the search process, we looked at university and department websites, checked faculty research interests, looked for evidence of faculty involving students in their research, flinched at the prices, marveled at the climbing walls, and considered quality of the food on campus. Basically we did all the things a typical middle-class family would do in a college search, along with a few insider concerns like looking at faculty publications and grants and checking that the university libraries had at least one of my books. In retrospect one question that never crossed my mind was, “I wonder what this place’s assessment program is like?” I suspect I am not alone in this.

My lack of curiosity about assessment when making an important choice about my children’s education probably surprises no one, but it should. It’s unsurprising in that no one, higher-ed insider or not, ever seems to worry about this when choosing a college. No admissions officer ever touted his institution’s assessment results. No parent ever exclaimed, “Suzy just got into Prestigious College X. I hear they are just nailing their student learning outcomes!” But it’s still a little surprising in that I am a professor and an administrator who has been involved in assessment in various forms for a long time. I have been dutifully doing assessment in my classes almost since I started teaching a decade and half ago.

Jessica Lahey

I’ve known the mother sitting in front of me at this parent-teacher conference for years, and we have been through a lot together. I have taught three of her children, and I like to think we’ve even become friends during our time together. She’s a conscientious mother who obviously loves her children with all of her heart. I’ve always been honest with her about their strengths and weaknesses, and I think she trusts me to tell her the truth. But when she hits me with the concern that’s been bothering her for a while, all I can do is nod, and stall for time.

“Marianna’s grades are fine; I’m not worried about that, but she just doesn’t seem to love learning anymore.”

Tim Scott and Deborah Keisch:

Education systems in all societies are designed to serve as the primary institutions that reproduce dominant social and economic orders, customs and beliefs systems. In U.S. public education, this makes schooling a function of capitalism, white supremacy and their intrinsic restraints on democracy and social equality. Current efforts to reform primary and secondary public education are based within the violence of white supremacy aligned with the broader brutality of neoliberalism. Elite, Eurocentric education policymakers continue to espouse a language of equity while simultaneously maintaining private elite schools for their own children, spaces that look nothing like the ones they are designing for the masses. This results in a hyper intensification of the sorting of students based on their “value” as defined by a neoliberal worldview steeped in white supremacy. In this system, those identified to have the least amount of value are ultimately deemed disposable.

This article is composed of several components that seem on the surface distinct but are actually quite connected, and will illustrate the relationship between education reform policies and the lives of children and communities of color in the United States. Essential to this project are selected audio interviews with some of the most powerful U.S. critical education scholars and activists of our time. Alongside our own narrative, we share their voices and stories, collected by Education Radio[1] from July 2011 through June 2012. The two authors of this article were producers for Education Radio, which documented testimony and analysis of the impact of U.S. education reform policies on schools and communities. We have selected pieces of that audio from the Education Radio collection as a way to weave together a narrative of a public education system that is structured—both historically and contemporarily—within the violence of white supremacy. Our hope is that the voices we share will both enhance the story we are telling as well as connect readers more deeply to the issues we discuss.

Rose Hackman:

“Dad, can you please teach me how to swim?”

Goodson’s answer to his daughter broke his heart. It was no. “I told her I don’t know how to swim myself.”

This summer, the pleas have started again.

Goodson, who’s 37 and works in the restaurant industry, says he would do anything for his daughter. But growing up in Alabama, he was just simply never taught to swim. His story is part of a common narrative, not a singular occurrence.

In the US, swimming ability is starkly divided along racial lines. White Americans are twice as likely to know how to swim as black Americans.

The consequences of this can be deadly: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black children aged five to 14 are three times more likely to die from unintentional drowning than their white counterparts. In the US, approximately 10 people die from unintentional drowning every day.

copaa:

I am an African-American mother of two children in Virginia public schools. Both of them have a learning disability. My husband and I have very high expectations for our children. It has been a struggle to make sure their schools share our high expectations. One day my son Justin’s speech pathologist told me that she was not sure if my son had a “real” speech delay, or if my husband and I were speaking “Black English” to him at home, and that was the cause for my son’s speech delays. I guess she forgot that my husband, and proud father of his children, is White. At that moment, I knew it would take more, than just raising our children to believe that if they work hard, they can and will achieve great things. I would also have to convince their schools to look beyond my children’s race or disabilities and believe that they could be successful in school and in life.

Audrey Gillan:

‘I still have my life force’
Ivan Roitt, 87, is emeritus professor at Middlesex University’s Centre for Investigative and Diagnostic Oncology. He lives in Finchley, north London, with his wife, Margaret. They have three daughters and six grandchildren.

There was no conscious decision – I just went on working. When I finished as head of immunology at University College London, after 25 years, a colleague asked if I would like to go to Middlesex University. I thought, “Let’s do something useful”, so I set up the cancer research centre.

Ana Tintocalis:

Van Zandt admits he has high expectations for his children. He also has high expectations for San Francisco Unified, which is why he and many parents like him were outraged when they learned Algebra 1 will no longer be taught in middle school under Common Core, the state’s new academic standards.

Instead, all students will have to wait until their freshman year in high school to take the class.

Valentina says delaying Algebra 1 is going to hurt gifted students because some classes are “too easy” or “aren’t very challenging” for high-achieving students.

The shift to now require Algebra 1 in high school may seem like a subtle change, but it hits on a deep-rooted debate over when advanced math should be introduced, and to which students.

Some say Algebra 1 at a young age causes students to flounder.

Andy Hawf:

That is not to say we haven’t achieved great things. We have expanded and protected parents’ right to choose their children’s schools through a citywide unified enrollment system. We have created a city in which independent charter schools and charter management organizations are enthusiastically and successfully serving a population much more at risk than that of the traditional school district. And while people in cities like New York and Washington, D.C. argue over whether charter schools should “backfill,” our charter schools are already serving all students, accepting them year-round, and creating innovative programs for students with significant disabilities.

So, what does this mean? And what does it mean for the next 10 years?

Sylvia By Sylvia Pagan Westphal:

JENN MCNARY KNOWS ANGER. It has overcome her often, and with the ravaging might that only a mother knows when her child is dying. Except in her case, it’s not one son but two who face a death sentence.

At 34, McNary’s face still has the glow of youth, and it lights up when she talks about all four of her kids, although she knows she has given most of her life, her energy, and all of her fight to her two oldest. As McNary sits in the kitchen of her modest apartment in Pembroke, her eyes harden as she remembers the moment a few years back when she realized there was something worse than knowing both of her children would die — knowing there was something out there that could help them, but that only one of them could have.

Marguerite Roza & Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:

When the Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Lamar Alexander (R-TN), recently released a draft bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (otherwise known as the No Child Left Behind Act), reaction was swift. At issue is the $14 billion in Title I funds—designed to drive extra money to educate poor, disadvantaged children.

Senator Alexander’s proposal would let dollars follow a student to whatever school he attends and would grant districts greater flexibility in how they use their Title I dollars. Some groups worry about how to guarantee those dollars are well spent. Others are concerned that divvying up funds equally among poor students means that the poorest school systems may not get as much money as they do under the current funding scheme.

These concerns are not insignificant, but they ignore the elephant in the room. And if we tame this elephant, we have the chance to finally turn the tide for poor students.

Wheeler Report (PDF):

For this reason, many of us were initially encouraged when you indicated that you would defund Wisconsin’s participation in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) via your proposed 2015-2017 biennial budget. We hoped for substantive movement, at long last, on an issue that affects most children, parents, and teachers in Wisconsin. However, as we read the actual budget language, we became troubled. Despite the defunding of SBAC, nothing in the budget language prohibits the selection or implementation of another Common Core-aligned assessment. Nor does it propose any fiscal plan for the creation or adoption of non- Common Core standards.
As it turns out, we were right to be skeptical.

On April 23rd, the Wisconsin Department of Administration (DoA) issued a Request for Bids (RFB) to replace the SBAC assessments that your proposed budget would ostensibly defund. The RFB was so vague as to which academic standards bidders should use to construct the new assessments that it took two rounds of questions to pin down a definitive answer. On June 5th the truth was irrefutably revealed: For mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA), the State of Wisconsin is telling bidders to write assessments based on the Common Core. Even then, there was clearly an effort to make it difficult to get to the truth. The links provided to the math and ELA standards did not directly contain the standards. Bidders and interested citizens, such as us, had to chase a rabbit trail of links and pages finally to arrive at PDF documents that contained the standards—clearly labeled as Common Core.

March, 2014

More than 100 superintendents and school board members packed a Senate chamber Thursday in opposition to a bill that could derail the transition to new educational standards in Wisconsin.

At issue are the Common Core State Standards, a set of expectations for English and math instruction that most states have adopted and have been implementing for three years.

The debate came as lawmakers hustled to push through — or push aside — a host of measures, with the end of the legislative session in sight. Committees on Thursday approved bills to rewrite election rules and provide more oversight of the deaths of suspects in police custody, while a Senate leader declared a bill to limit so-called living wage rules is dead in his house.

But the hot issue of the day was Common Core.

Many Republican lawmakers fear the standards didn’t get enough input and review when they were written and adopted in 2010. They’re proposing a state standards board that could repeal Common Core and write its own standards.

Superintendents at the Senate Education Committee hearing acknowledged the Common Core standards were not perfect and that they could use more time and resources to implement them. But they argued a new committee would just politicize the process while failing to improve outcomes for students.

“(Common Core) is the basis we need to be able to make local adjustments,” said Jennifer Cheatham, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District.

John Wagner:

Democratic presidential hopeful Martin O’Malley on Wednesday put forward an ambitious five-year goal of allowing students to graduate debt-free from public colleges and universities across the country.

The proposition is deeply personal for O’Malley: Aides say he and his wife have already incurred $339,200 in loans to put the two eldest of their four children through universities. And college affordability was a leading priority for O’Malley during his tenure as Maryland’s governor.

The issue is one being talked about a lot these days by Democrats, including the party’s other White House candidates, as more and more students enter the workforce with hefty debt loads.

Larry Cuban:

School reformers seek to fix problems. Many of these “solutions” appear and disappear again and again–as the previous post argued. Yet some past reforms do stick. How come?

In investigating school reforms that have taken place over the last century and a half, I have divided them into incremental and fundamental changes (see here and here). Incremental reforms are those that aim to improve the existing structures of schooling; the premise behind incremental reforms is that the basic structures are sound but need improving to remove defects. The car is old but if it gets fixed it will run well; it has been dependable transportation. It needs tires, brakes, a new battery, and a water pump-incremental changes. Fundamental reforms are those that aim to transform, to alter permanently, those very same structures; the premise behind fundamental reforms is that basic structures are flawed at their core and need a complete overhaul, not renovations. The old jalopy is beyond repair. We need to get a completely new car or consider different forms of transportation-fundamental changes.

If new courses, new staff, summer schools, higher standards for teachers, and increased salaries are clear examples of enhancements to the structures of public schooling, then the introduction of the age-graded school (which gradually eliminated the one-room school) and Progressive educators’ broadening the school’s role to intervene in the lives of children and their families (e.g., to provide medical and social services) are examples of fundamental reforms that stuck.

Erika Sanzi:

Parents prefer relationships to data. Most of us enjoy people more than numbers and like parent teacher conferences better than bar graphs. We take comfort in knowing that our kids are being educated in a safe space and worry very little about the high school profile or SAT participation rate in our town.

It’s human nature to listen to our hearts instead of our heads and it’s normal to be driven by connections we feel to teachers and coaches and school leaders to whom we entrust our children every day.

Hard truths however are better learned early than too late. Parents in my little state of Rhode Island deserve to know how their kids match up educationally against kids from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and even Maryland. Is the education they’re receiving as good as it feels like it is or are there systemic and measurable deficiencies that parents need to acknowledge?

And will those deficiencies impact the future that they have already envisioned and perhaps even planned for their children?

For example, many parents do not realize that their child’s high school profile has a significant impact on how college admissions officers view their application. And unfortunately for top tier students especially, their applications are looked at less favorably because of what other kids in their class are or are not doing.

Related: where have all the students gone?

Campbell Brown:

Former CNN host Campbell Brown went from a career in journalism to a second life as an education-reform advocate. Now she is looking to combine the two.

Next month, Ms. Brown will be launching a non-profit, education-focused news site called The Seventy Four, which she says refers to the 74 million school-age children in classrooms across the U.S.

“There are a lot of entrenched interests that are standing in the way of some the best possibilities for innovation” in education, she said in an interview at the offices of her nascent site in Lower Manhattan. “We want to challenge and scrutinize the powers that be.”

But the creation of the site is likely to stir controversy. Since turning to advocacy in the years after she left CNN in 2010, Ms. Brown became a lightning rod for criticism from the teachers’ union and its supporters who have seen her efforts – most notably a push to reform tenure rules in New York – as part of a thinly-veiled campaign aimed at union busting.

Ms. Brown has denied wanting to destroy the union, and says she just wants to reform a system she says fails to adequately serve children. She says the site will be non-partisan but won’t shy away from advocacy.

Timothy Ready:

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.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level”. We adopted this goal in response to recommendations from a citizen study group that believed that minority students who are not competent as readers by the end of the third grade fall behind in all academic areas after third grade.

“All students” meant all students. We promised to stop thinking in terms of average student achievement in reading. Instead, we would separately analyze the reading ability of students by subgroups. The subgroups included white, African American, Hispanic, Southeast Asian, and other Asian students.

2004: Madison schools distort reading data.

Madison’s reading curriculum undoubtedly works well in many settings. For whatever reasons, many chil dren at the five targeted schools had fallen seriously behind. It is not an indictment of the district to acknowledge that these children might have benefited from additional resources and intervention strategies.

In her column, Belmore also emphasized the 80 percent of the children who are doing well, but she provided additional statistics indicating that test scores are improving at the five target schools. Thus she argued that the best thing is to stick with the current program rather than use the Reading First money.

Belmore has provided a lesson in the selective use of statistics. It’s true that third grade reading scores improved at the schools between 1998 and 2004. However, at Hawthorne, scores have been flat (not improving) since 2000; at Glendale, flat since 2001; at Midvale/ Lincoln, flat since 2002; and at Orchard Ridge they have improved since 2002 – bringing them back to slightly higher than where they were in 2001.

In short, these schools are not making steady upward progress, at least as measured by this test.

2013: Madison’s long term disastrous reading results

In investigating the options for data to report for these programs for 2011-12 and for prior years, Research & Program Evaluation staff have not been able to find a consistent way that students were identified as participants in these literacy interventions in prior years.

As such, there are serious data concerns that make the exact measures too difficult to secure at this time. Staff are working now with Curriculum & Assessment leads to find solutions. However, it is possible that this plan will need to be modified based on uncertain data availability prior to 2011-12.

Proposals to again increase property taxes and school board members’ compensation are in the news (additional school board campaign rhetoric – a bit of history).

Madison spends roughly double the national average per student.

Unfortunately, Madison resists substantive change at every opportunity.

Compare Madison staffing.

Michael Lewis:

To: Harvard Management Company

From: Harvard Admissions

It’s been several painful weeks since Steve Schwarzman revealed that we denied him admission to the Harvard Class of 1969. As we now all know, the private equity billionaire (net worth: $13 billion and climbing) appeared on the Bloomberg channel and said that the dean of admissions at Harvard wrote to him a few years ago and said, “I guess we got that one wrong.” He also announced his $150 million gift to Yale, to erect a monument to our idiocy.

We in admissions have finished your requested review of the circumstances that led to our catastrophic error. We conclude a) we must improve our attempts at self-abasement and b) Harvard’s admissions process must be overhauled. It has proved imperfectly designed to identify and smile upon those children most likely to become extremely rich.

Brian Zorn:

The mission of American education is “No Child Left Behind.” For me as a special-education teacher in New York state, that means making my students feel worthwhile and giving them the confidence they need to succeed—academically and socially. Yet New York’s statewide English language arts (ELA) and mathematics exams unduly humiliate children in special education and frustrate the teachers who want them to succeed.

The tests, administered to third- through eighth-graders over six days each spring, evaluate students on uniform Common Core State Standards that have been adopted by most states and emphasize critical thinking. As this newspaper reported in 2013, the first year the tests were administered, many children in New York state “ran out of time, collapsed in tears or froze up.”

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

Governor Walker’s proposed Budget and the gamesmanship being played in the legislature has been compared to the game “whack-a-mole”. Representative Melissa Sargent, a champion for public education, teachers and progressive causes, said of the Budget proposals, “Just when you think we’ve averted one crisis, another initiative is introduced to threaten the progressive traditions of our state.” Sargent added, “The Budget process provides a look inside the corporate-driven policy agenda of the Republican party. Their goal is comprehensive privatization.”

That concept came through loud and clear last week, when the Republican majority on the Joint Finance Committee introduced a proposal which would enable even more funds to be diverted from money-starved public schools to private schools, by expanding the number of parents who can use a State-issued voucher to pay the cost of sending their child to a private school. The funds would come from that child’s area public school system. An investigation by One Wisconsin Now illustrates that a pro-voucher front group donated $122,000 to the campaigns of the Republicans on the Joint Finance Committee.

Senate Democratic Leader Jennifer Shilling said education must be the top Budget priority, that “the needs of children and schools must be addressed before tax breaks for the wealthy and giveaways to special interests (voucher supporters).” Shilling continued, “To fully restore the cuts our schools have seen over the past four years, we need to invest an additional $200 per student above what Walker has proposed.” While the Republican majority brags that they are adding $208 million in school aids, it amounts to only 1⁄2 of 1% over the two-year Budget, and more than 50% of that will not go to schools, but to reducing property taxes.

The Walker Budget would also enable State takeover of the Milwaukee Public Schools, and perhaps the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Budget proposal would enable a “commissioner to convert these schools to charter or voucher schools.” The “commissioner” would have the authority to fire all teachers and administrators in a school district taken over, given the provisions of the proposed law.

A recent amendment would enable anyone with any BA degree to teach English, social studies, math or science, and enable anyone – even without a degree – to teach business, art, music, agriculture or special education.

The Budget will be acted upon this month. It is time to let your objections be heard regarding the school funding crisis being created by the proposed Budget. Contact majority party members of the Joint Finance Committee:

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results, despite spending more than $15,000 per student, double the national average.

Michael Grunwald:

Most parents will do just about anything for their children, especially when it comes to education. Predictably, at a time when college costs are exploding and students are staggering under more than $1 trillion in debt, one opportunistic lender is making huge profits on loans to their doting moms and dads.

Less predictably, that lender is the United States government.

The fast-growing federal program known as Parent PLUS now serves 3.2 million borrowers, who have racked up $65 billion in debt helping their kids go to school. The loans have much in common with the regular student loans that have created a national debt crisis and a 2016 campaign issue, but PLUS has much higher interest rates and fees, and far fewer opportunities for loan forgiveness or reductions.

In fact, the PLUS program, which includes similar loans to graduate students, is the most profitable of the 120 or so federal lending programs. That sounds like a good thing, until you remember the government’s profit comes from its own citizens, often citizens of modest means.

Parent PLUS was created in 1980 to provide small loans to help reasonably well-off families finance the American Dream of an undergraduate education. But in an era of skyrocketing education costs, it has grown to look a lot like publicly funded predatory lending, providing almost any borrowers with almost unlimited cash to attend any school with almost no regard to their ability to repay. Thirteen percent of undergraduates now rely on Parent PLUS, and many of their parents are falling into debt traps.

BBC:

Even the pit ponies were blasted to oblivion in the Peckfield explosion and 90 children, mostly from one village, were left fatherless. When it went wrong down a pit, it went wrong big time and every member of every family involved in the industry was acutely aware of it.
Who in their right mind would take a 10-year-old boy down a working coal mine?

Strange then that on this particular Sunday the old man should have taken it into his head to take me down the pit with him that day. I don’t know how he wangled it. It would never be allowed in today’s litigious and safety-conscious times. It was the maddest thing he’d ever done.
Who in their right mind would take a 10-year-old boy down a working coal mine? I knew it was dangerous because I overheard things.

Uncle Goldie, dad’s brother, often called round to our house and the two of them invariably got talking about the pit. “Ah see Leetning lost three on t’ thutty-niners t’ other week, Poke. Bloody belt’ll kill some’dy sooin, tha knows.”

Possible de-regulation of Wisconsin charter school authorizations has lead to a bit of rhetoric on the state of Madison’s schools, their ability to compete and whether the District’s long term, disastrous reading results are being addressed. We begin with Chris Rickert:

Madison school officials not eager to cede control of ‘progress’:

Still, Department of Public Instruction student achievement data suggest independent charter schools overseen by UW-Milwaukee since 1999 provide better educations than Milwaukee public schools.

And if the UW System gets the authority to create a new office for approving charter schools in Madison, it wouldn’t be the first time a local or state government function was usurped by unelected and allegedly unaccountable people at higher levels of government who are aiming to eliminate injustice. U.S. presidents sent federal authorities to the South during the civil rights era. Appointed state and federal judges have been asked to overturn local and state abortion-related ordinances and laws. Last year, a federal judge struck down Wisconsin’s voter-approved gay marriage ban.

The injustice in the Madison School District is, of course, its decades-long failure to close achievement gaps between white students and students of color and between middle class and poor students.

Cheatham told this newspaper that “we are making progress on behalf of all children.”

Apparently, the district feels it should be the only educational organization in Madison with the opportunity to make such progress.

That’s because control over education might be as high a priority for the district as improving education.

David Blaska:

It is a worthy debate, for there is little doubt that the full school board, its superintendent, its teachers union, the Democratic Party, Mayor Soglin, and probably the majority of Madisonians share Ed’s sentiments. For the festive rest of us, the white lab coats at the Blaska Policy Research Werkes have developed an alternative Top Ten, dedicated to the late Larry “Bud” Melman.

1) Attack the motives of your adversaries. “What’s tougher is buying into [the] interpretation that the Joint Finance Committee Republicans are the good guys here, struggling mightily to do what’s right for our kids,” Ed Hughes says. “My much different interpretation is that the Joint Finance proposal is simply another cynical attack on our neighborhood public schools and is motivated both by animus for Madison and by an unseemly obsession with privatizing public education, particularly in the urban areas of our state.”

Unseemly! Particularly in urban Milwaukee, where the public school district as a whole has received a failing grade from the Department of Public Instruction, and in Madison, with a yawning chasm between black and white student achievement.

2) Nobody asked our permission. Ed complains that nobody consulted MMSD about its “strategies for enhancing student achievement, promising practices, charter school philosophy, or anything else.” Um, sometimes results speak louder than pretty words on paper, Ed.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

So we have two contrasting interpretations of the proposal. As it happens, I am right and Rickert is wrong. To help Rickert see the error of his ways, here’s a Letterman-like list of the top ten reasons why the Joint Finance proposal to establish a so-called “Office of Educational Opportunity” within the office of the UW System President is a cynical ploy to stuff Madison with charter schools for the sake of having more charter schools rather than a noble effort to combat injustice:

Mr. Hughes, in 2005:

This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.

Finally, then Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman, in 2009:

Zimman’s talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin’s K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Kate Bachelor:

Getting into Harvard is tough enough: Every year come the stories about applicants who built toilets in developing countries, performed groundbreaking lunar research, or won national fencing competitions, whatever it takes to edge out the competition. So you can imagine that the 52-year-old Florida businessman and author Yukong Zhao is incensed that gaining admission may be even harder for his children—because of their race.

“It’s not a political issue,” he says. “It’s a civil-rights issue.”

Mr. Zhao helped organize 64 groups that last month asked the Education Department to investigate Harvard University for discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions. The allegation is that Harvard is holding Asian-Americans to higher standards to keep them from growing as a percentage of the student body. The complaint, filed also with the Justice Department, follows a lawsuit against the university last fall by the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions.

First, a few facts. Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and the share of college-age Asian-Americans climbed to 5.1% in 2011 from 3% in 1990. Yet according to independent research cited in the complaint, members of this 5% make up roughly 30% of National Merit semifinalists, a distinction earned by high-school students based on PSAT scores. Asian-American students seem to win a similar share of the Education Department’s Presidential Scholar awards, “one of the nation’s highest honors for high-school students,” as the website puts it. By any standard, Asian-Americans have made remarkable gains since 1950. They constituted 0.2% of the U.S. population then, due in part to the legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

REAP:

Rozelle also compared vocational training in China and Germany. He believes that German vocational training emphasizes building foundational knowledge and cultivating learning ability as the best way to prepare individuals for future technology and skills. “Chinese vocational training focuses excessively on training for a single occupation, training workers in only in skills that currently in demand but can be outdated in the blink of an eye.”

In December 2014, the Ministry of Education finally issued a document setting forth strict rules declaring that in addition to teaching technical skills, vocational schools also have to teach language, mathematics, English, computer skills, physical education, history, and other common fundamental courses. In vocational middle schools these basic classes should take up one third of total instruction time, and in vocational high schools these courses must make up no less than one quarter of total instruction.

After having worked with people on the ground in China for the last three decades, Rozelle does not begrudge praise for Chinese officials, especially basic-level cadres; “many of them are hard-working, intelligent, and eager to do good.” However, Rozelle is occasionally dismayed by the excessive misgivings of officials in some areas. In Qinghai province, while carrying out an experiment to test the effectiveness of computer-assisted learning software in helping Tibetan students to learn Mandarin. Although “the local governor liked it very much,” due to his American citizenship and the foreign background of those in the Rural Education Action Program team, his research was temporarily halted. “Let’s take a break for a semester, then see if we can start again.” In the next two days, Rozelle rushed to Shangluo, in Shaanxi province. There, he and the National Health and Family Planning Commission started a new experiment. This experiment prepares for the future transformation and training of rural cadres responsible for enforcing the One Child Policy, and enable them to become trainers in charge of educating village families–especially grandparents raising migrant children–in accurate information about child development and skills for raising babies.

Rozelle said, “I have heard too many grandparents in rural China ask me in surprise, ‘why should we talk to an infant? Why should we sing to them? Why should we give them toys to play with?’” He found that by the age of four, a significant IQ gap had already appeared between rural children–who in the first four months after birth lack sufficient stimuli–and urban children–whose parents interacted with them from a young age.

“We all say that we cannot let children lose before they get to the starting line. This starting line begins much earlier than we thought,” Rozelle said.

Gillian Tett:

This month, some Brooklyn-based friends have been touring New York’s top selective public high schools to assess whether their kids should take the ultra-competitive entry tests. It has left them grappling with unease — and some subtle guilt.

On the one hand, they explained, they were dazzled by the schools’ academic environment. Competition to get into these free institutions is so fierce that the schools are veritable intellectual hothouses — not least because many kids come from poorer, immigrant backgrounds and are exceptionally motivated to succeed.

But the experience also prompted my friends to wonder if academic success is the only thing that children need to succeed. “It’s the extracurricular stuff, the social things, I wonder about,” one mother said. More specifically, what worried her about these ultra-competitive high schools was that they seemed to provide fewer of the diversions that middle-class children might find in elite — private — schools, such as sport, trips to France, extra music lessons and so on. “I don’t know if that matters,” she murmured. “But it worries me.”

On one level, that quibble might seem ridiculous: after all, academic excellence and strong competitive skills are supposed to be the keys to success in modern-day America. (And I suspect that if my friend’s children do combat the odds to get into one of these schools, they will not turn it down.) But on another level, her comment is revealing; doubly so if you look at an intriguing new book, Pedigree; How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, by Lauren Rivera, a US sociologist.

Joe Quennan:

Once their children are all grown up and have moved away for good, parents are supposed to suffer from profound melancholy and sometimes even outright depression. This is the phenomenon widely known by the horrid term “empty nest syndrome.”

“It all went by too fast.” “We didn’t really enjoy those precious little moments as much as we should have.” “The future now looks so bleak.” These are the sorts of things that rueful empty nesters—nostalgic for the glorious, halcyon days when their children were young and innocent and still nesting—say to themselves. Or so runs the popular mythology.

Molly Beck:

“We are confident the proposal can fundamentally transform the educational opportunities that are available to students in Wisconsin’s two largest school districts,” he said.

Delaporte pointed to Department of Public Instruction data that shows less than 40 percent of Madison students have tested proficient in reading in recent years — slightly higher than the statewide average.
But Madison School District superintendent Jennifer Cheatham blasted the proposal, saying in a statement: “We are incredibly determined, and we are making progress on behalf of all children. But at every step of the way, the Legislature puts more barriers in our way and makes our jobs more difficult.”

Madison School Board member Ed Hughes called the proposal “breathtaking.”

“It looks like the UW President is required to appoint someone who could then authorize as many publicly funded but potentially for-profit charter schools in Madison as that unelected and unaccountable person wanted,” he said.

The proposal requires DPI to reduce a school district’s funding by the same amount that is paid per student to independent charter schools, currently about $8,000.

Cheatham also said independent charter schools have no consistent record of improving education and drain school districts’ funding.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending double the national average per student.

A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.

Erin Richards:

The proposal comes amid continuing discussion over the rigor and selectivity of university teacher education programs.

Jon Bales, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, said there are issues in Wisconsin around the recruitment of would-be teachers and the quality of their preparation. But he said the provision championed by Czaja is shortsighted and wouldn’t solve the problem.

“This is characteristic of bad and ineffective policy,” Bales said. “We think this puts all kids at risk.”

Christina Brey, spokeswoman for the state teachers union, said teaching requires more than subject-matter expertise. Licensure, she said, provides some assurance that the person has received training in how to teach children.

“Children all across the state deserve to have teachers who have proven they can do the job,” Brey said.

In a 4-page letter this week to Assembly and Senate lawmakers, the Wisconsin Association of Colleges for Teacher Education said the changes would compromise the quality of adolescent education.

The association urged lawmakers to amend the budget, saying that putting unprepared teachers into classrooms was not only unwise and unfair, but “threatens the very foundation of a strong, competitive workforce.”

The state budget proposal is not final. It must be passed by both houses of the Legislature and signed by Gov. Scott Walker. Walker had proposed easing teacher certification provisions in his original budget request.

The quality of Wisconsin teacher licensing schools has been in question recently.

When “A” stands for average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education receive sky high grades. How smart is that?

Jenny Turner:

ike contemplating Hamlet without the ghost: that’s what one historian calls anything about education in England that doesn’t mention the Endowed Schools Act of 1869. Before it, England had no such thing as a secondary-education system. If you were rich you might go to Eton or Rugby or Winchester or Harrow; if you were lucky you might live near a city merchant’s charitable foundation. But for most people there was nothing much at all. The 1869 act changed that by seizing the endowments that had been left, over the centuries, to the ancient grammar schools and distributing the money in what was, in some ways, a more sensible fashion: for example, by funding schools for girls. But the act also abolished provisions made for educating poor scholars completely free – this wasn’t the something-for-nothing society, this was Victorian England. And it helped split schools into three basic types, for working-class, middle-class and upper-class children – a divide, buried though governments have tried to make it, that continues to distort and disfigure the education system today.

There’s something else people need to know about the 1869 act. The heads of the endowed schools hated it, and set up a club, the Headmasters’ Conference, to defend themselves against it. It is now called the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, but it’s still the main body representing the elite education providers in Britain, the schools that, even now, can promise pupils a much better chance than average of gaining wealth, power, Ucas points, and membership of the mysterious old boys’ networks that continue to gird the globe. “More than half of the top medics, civil servants, lawyers, media figures and Conservative MPs” in Britain attended an HMC school, says David Turner, not to mention “pop stars – 22% of them, according to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission”. Worse, the very fact such privilege exists causes many people to feel that state schools, no matter how good they are, are never good enough. Academies, free schools and grammar schools, and church places, music places and places for whatever else: all spring from a sense of inadequacy that goes back decades.

Molly Beck:

The added funding comes from a $250 per student special funding stream for school districts in the second year of the budget, according to the legislation package proposed by Republican co-chairs of the Joint Finance Committee.

At the same time, the 1,000-student cap on the statewide voucher program would be lifted and students with disabilities would be eligible to apply for vouchers for the first time under a separate program. No more than 1 percent of a school district’s enrollment could receive vouchers, however.

The plan assures that private schools receiving school vouchers would receive about $7,200 for each K-8 student and about $7,800 for each high school student, the committee leaders said Tuesday. Walker’s proposed expansion would provide schools considerably less per student.

The voucher expansion would be paid for in a manner similar to the state’s open enrollment program for public schools — tax money would follow a student from the public district to the private voucher school. The plan could ultimately cost school districts about $48 million over the biennium, according to a Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo drafted last week for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester.

The package also proposes to adopt Walker’s budget language that prohibits the state superintendent from promoting the Common Core State Standards, and from adopting new academic standards created by the Common Core State Standards Initiative, though there are none in the works.

Erin Richards & Jason Stein:

Special-needs vouchers would allow parents of children with special needs to use taxpayer money to send their child to a private school. Standalone bills have been defeated twice in recent years, in large part because every established advocacy organization for those with disabilities have opposed the bills in public hearings.

Their chief concern: Private schools are not obligated to follow federal disability laws. They point to examples in other states where, in their view, under-qualified operators have declared themselves experts and started tapping taxpayer money to serve such students.

Critics also say the proposal would erode taxpayer funding for public schools.

Patrick Marley, Jason Stein & Erin Richards:

The GOP proposal would also phase out the Chapter 220 school integration program, put the Milwaukee County executive in charge of some low-performing Milwaukee Public Schools, create an alternative system for licensing teachers and require that high school students take the civics test given to those applying for U.S. citizenship.

Another provision would allow home-school students, virtual school students and private school students to participate in public schools’ athletic and extracurricular programs.

The plan would also reshape how the Racine Unified School Board is constituted, requiring it to have members representing different regions of the school district. Some of the students in that district are represented by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Sen. Van Wanggaard (R-Racine).

Republicans were able to come up with more money for public schools and voucher schools in part by making a $105.6 million payment to public schools in July 2017 — outside of the two-year spending plan they are developing. That means the payment wouldn’t be counted in the budget lawmakers are writing, even though taxpayers would ultimately bear those costs.

Jessie Opoien

The funds will restore a $127 million cut next year that was proposed in Walker’s budget, and will provide an additional $100 per pupil in state aid the following year.

“It was really a challenge, but it was everybody’s first priority, and we made it,” said Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills.

Darling and Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette, said Republicans also plan to move forward with a statewide expansion of the voucher program, capped at 1 percent of the students in each district.

The expansion would be modeled after the state’s open enrollment system, and would increase the amount of per-pupil aid for taxpayer-funded voucher schools to $7,200 per K-8 student and $7,800 per high school student.

That expansion will change the amount of funds that public schools receive, but Darling and Nygren declined to say by how much it could be.

“We don’t want the schools to suffer,” Darling said. “What we want to do is have the strongest education system we can for every child.”

Molly Hensley-Clancy:

Don’t tell Natalie Anderson that she is better off without Everest College.

Until Sunday, Anderson was a student in medical assisting at Everest College in Phoenix. That day, she saw a message on Facebook: “This campus has been permanently closed.”

Anderson is unemployed, supporting two children on disability payments, and living in a Budget Suites of America, the only place she could find that came fully furnished. She’s “barely surviving,” she said, but dreams of becoming a nurse: “I want to get my kids off of the system.”

When she saw that Everest had closed, stranding her partway through her nine-month certificate, Anderson said, “I cried. Seriously, I did, because this was my chance.” Her voice broke: “Now I’m going to cry again.”

The saga of America’s largest for-profit college shutdown began last June and ended last week, when Corinthian Colleges abruptly shuttered 28 of its Everest and Heald college campuses. Since the beginning, when Corinthian began to teeter on the verge of collapse, there has been a tug between those who say Corinthian’s students are better off with their campuses closed — eligible to have their students loans forgiven — and those who say students should be allowed to finish their educations.

Ilya Somin

By Ilya Somin April 21 at 8:13 PM

In a recent post on the notorious Maryland case where authorities have repeatedly detained two children in order to force the Meitiv family to stop them from walking home alone, I noted that the parents have the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent on their side. At Above the Law, experienced public interest lawyer Sam Wright agrees that the parents have the Constitution on their side, but cautions that bureaucrats and lower court judges routinely ignore such petty issues as constitutional rights when it comes to enforcing the their conceptions of “the best interests of the child”:

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, law professor Ilya Somin notes that the application of child welfare laws is subject to some (seemingly) robust constitutional constraints: there’s case law providing that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit and that it also, in the words of Justice O’Connor’s plurality opinion in Troxel v. Granville, creates a “presumption that fit parents act in the best interests of their children.”

But the reality facing most parents in court is that that “presumption” isn’t actually a thing. Take the experience documented in a well-publicized essay on Salon last year: the author left her four-year-old unattended in a car for a few minutes on a mild day, the police were called, she found herself charged with a crime…. [Her lawyer] warned her that “juvenile courts are notorious for erring on the side of protecting the child” and suggested that fighting the case might lead her to lose her child. Faced with that possibility she, of course, folded. Anyone would…

And that’s been my experience as an advocate too. When I worked for a legal aid organization, one of my tasks was to represent parents in child welfare proceedings. No one in those sad, sequestered courtrooms cited Supreme Court cases; everyone just argued over what was in the best interest of the child….

So parents, be cautious: yes, there’s Supreme Court precedent on your side, but if you find yourself in court then the system’s conception of the “best interests of the child” will likely overrule yours.

Wright also notes that vaguely worded child welfare statutes give bureaucrats wide discretion that they sometimes exert in ways that punish perfectly reasonable and safe parenting practices, a problem I wrote about in this 2012 post.

Wright’s note of caution is well-taken. When I wrote that the Maryland situation “should be a relatively case,” I meant that applicable precedent clearly supports the parents, and that they should ultimately prevail if the constitutional issue is raised and courts take Supreme Court precedent seriously. However, achieving such a victory against determined bureaucrats could require prolonged and costly litigation. Sometimes, seemingly novel constitutional issues won’t be taken seriously until a case reaches the appellate level, where judges are more used to addressing constitutional questions. Many parents understandably lack the time, resources, and emotional stamina for a lengthy legal battle. And even a small risk of defeat might be unacceptable if it could mean losing custody of your children or suffering continued official harassment. I don’t blame parents who decide that such a fight isn’t worth it. The purpose of my earlier post was to analyze the relevant constitutional issue, not give advice to parents facing a potentially difficult legal battle with child welfare bureaucrats.

At the same time, it is important to recognize that, in the cases Wright cites, the constitutional issue mostly wasn’t even raised, much less decided. Anxious parents generally give in without putting up a fight. If the issue were raised in a sufficiently egregious case, and effectively pursued by determined parents with strong legal representation, the chances of ultimate victory might well be good. And such a victory could create an important precedent that helps deter similar official misconduct in the future, especially if the government agency is forced to pay damages as well as cease its harassment of the parents.

Kevin:

I was having a really good day today; recovering from post-semester burnout, recharging the batteries–all in all, getting to my Happy Place. But then I read Mark Bauerlein’s Op-ed in today’s New York Times, and now I’m all irritated. “What’s the Point of a Professor?” Bauerlein asks; he then goes on to tell us, basically, “not much.” And who’s responsible for this lamentable state of affairs, you might wonder? Well–there’s students, for one. In today’s consumerist and career-over-true-education society, they just don’t engage with professors outside of the classroom transaction. “They have no urge to become disciples,” according to Bauerlein. Why don’t they want to become disciples? Well, colleagues, there’s where it becomes our fault, too:

Sadly, professors pressed for research time don’t want them, either. As a result, most undergraduates never know that stage of development when a learned mind enthralled them and they progressed toward a fuller identity through admiration of and struggle with a role model

Who even realizes they want to become an acolyte of a rock-star professor if they never get to the right “stage of development?” College seems to be reduced, in this view, to a several-year series of rote careerist transactions between infantilized students and disinterested professors. Gone are the halcyon days of yore when professors dispensed wisdom to adoring throngs of geek-groupies, never to return. O THE POOR CHILDREN.

Madison School District

Why is it important for all of our children in Madison to have equitable access to a comprehensive arts education and to thrive in an arts rich school? Through creating, presenting, responding, and connecting in multiple art forms, students can come to recognize and celebrate their own unique ways of seeing, doing, and communicating. With access to a comprehensive arts education, our students can explore and problem-solve through productivity and teamwork. Skill development through an art form teaches students to describe, analyze, and interpret visual, aural, and kinesthetic images. This strengthens skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening within text and language of that art form, and contributes to their comprehensive literacy skills.

The arts also impact our local economy by creating a sense of place, developing skilled creative workers for non-arts related careers, helping to revitalize neighborhoods and giving communities a competitive edge in attracting businesses and talent. We believe that arts rich schools are a foundational piece of our community fabric that cultivate the creative thinking, innovation, and attractive community that will fuel our economic future. Students trained in the arts as part of their K-12 education will have the opportunity to contribute to one of our city’s major economic engines. The local abundance of cultural offerings and the arts are cited frequently as attributes that support Madison being listed as a top place to live in the United States.

The Arts Rich Schools Blueprint will also build on a long history of arts education support between the Madison Metropolitan School District and the community.

The Madison School District administration tried, a number of years ago, to kill the popular strings program.

View a longer version of the Arts Rich School Blueprint (PDF).

Arts Rich School Continnum Rubric – 2015-16 (PDF).

Olivia:

Last week, a science teacher who had heard about the knowledge-led, mastery-focused curriculum at Michaela asked me, “do your kids hate Science yet?” On the same day, I attended a ‘knowledge versus skills’ science debate. The skills troops were gathered and I was offered an insight into the ideological battlefield. There was a real sense of dissatisfaction by how little their sevens’ loved Science. The troops seemed to agree that the reason why secondary school science does not inspire young minds is because there are not enough opportunities for discovery, creativity and awe-inspiring practicals.

I agreed that many science departments in secondary schools do not inspire young minds. However, this is because those departments do not have a high enough level of rigour in their curriculum at Key Stage Three. Even their lower ability pupils are not sufficiently challenged.
Quite frankly, science departments around the country patronise children. They do this by trying to get their children to be scientists and think like scientists. Ironically, by trying to treat the pupils like adult scientists, they end up patronising them by turning lessons into ‘playing grown-ups’. Even at Advanced Level, I did not think like a scientist. On starting out, even Aristotle did not think like a scientist. Instead, he was deeply influenced by his teacher, Plato. Aristotle’s work on geology, physics, metaphysics, psychology, biology and medicine were founded on the 20 years that he spent at Plato’s Academy, accumulating masses of knowledge and experience.

Amy Kazmin:

Yet in their zeal to build schools, and to encourage attendance with incentives such as free lunches, Indian policy makers have paid scant attention to what is taking place inside the new classrooms. There has been little serious national debate over how to teach fundamental skills effectively to millions of first-generation students.

“The government said let’s get children into school, we’ll worry about quality later, and we’ll worry about content of teaching later,” says Vimala Ramachandran, a professor at New Delhi’s National University of Educational Planning and Administration. “They separated the quantitative goals from what is happening inside the school.”

Ms Aiyar echoes that view: “The government focused entirely on getting schools to children and getting children into schools. It assumed the teaching-learning story would take care of itself.”

Some argue India’s low learning levels are the result of an “overambitious” national curriculum, which assumes all students will master reading in their first year of school, even if they come from “text-scarce” environments, with little or no prior exposure to written material. “By the end of grade 1, they are supposed to be done with reading,” says Ms Duflo. “It’s a complete fantasy.”

Madison, too, has long dealt with disastrous reading results.

.

Stephen Moore

The scenes of Baltimore set ablaze this week have many Americans thinking: What can be done to rescue families trapped in an inner-city culture of violence, despair and joblessness?

There are no easy answers, but down the road from Baltimore in Washington, D.C., an education program is giving children in poor neighborhoods a big lift up. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which George W. Bush signed into law in 2004, has so far funded private-school tuition for nearly 5,000 students, 95% of whom are African-American. They attend religious schools, music and arts schools, even elite college-prep schools. Last month at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, I met with about 20 parents and children who participate in the program. I also visited several of these families in their homes—which are located in some of the most beaten-down neighborhoods in the city, places that in many ways resemble the trouble spots in Baltimore.

Rick Reider:

4 reasons college costs & student debt are a major headwind to U.S. recovery

1 Contributing to unemployment and declining labor market participation

Due to the heavy financial burden college costs place on parents, many parents struggling to pay for their children’s education are left with less savings and more debt when they hit retirement age than they might otherwise have had. As a result, they’re forced to stay in the workforce longer, crowding out younger workers and making it harder for the younger generation to find jobs. In other words, the rising cost of college is one reason for the demographic-related headwinds facing the labor market today.

2 Stymieing savings

By some estimates, more than half of college students now borrow annually to cover the costs of education, and more than half of student loan borrowers still have outstanding debt balances into their 30s. This early-life debt means that the younger generation has less money to save–significant student debt lowers the average savings rate for young workers–and will likely have to work longer to cover future children’s college costs.

3 Suppressing home buying

Today, the first-time home buyer demographic is synonymous with student loan borrowers, posing a major headwind to recoveries in the lackluster housing market and in real estate-related employment. Thanks to high-interest student loan debt payments, along with disappointing employment opportunities and stagnant incomes, many young adults don’t have the savings required to make a down payment. Indeed, the proliferation of student loans in the early 2000s coincides with a decline in home ownership rates of 25 to 34 year olds, and the trend appears to be continuing. According to one recent report, rising student debt burdens reduced U.S. home sales by about 8% in 2014.

4 Worsening the class divide

16 News:

Dear Parents, it is very important that all students have a nutritious lunch. This is a public school setting and all children are required to have a fruit, a vegetable and a healthy snack from home, along with a milk. If they have potatoes, the child will also need bread to go along with it. Lunchables, chips, fruit snacks, and peanut butter are not considered to be a healthy snack. This is a very important part of our program and we need everyone’s participation.

Jeremy Adam Smith:

San Francisco faces a challenge: promoting educational options without undermining classroom diversity

Each January, parents across San Francisco rank their preferences for public schools. By June, most get their children into their first choices, and almost three-quarters get one of their choices.

A majority of families may be satisfied with the outcome, but the student assignment system is failing to meet its No. 1 goal, which the San Francisco Unified School District has struggled to achieve since the 1960s: classroom diversity.

Since 2010, the year before the current policy went into effect, the number of San Francisco’s 115 public schools dominated by one race has climbed significantly. Six in 10 have simple majorities of one racial group. In almost one-fourth, 60 percent or more of the students belong to one racial group, which administrators say makes them “racially isolated.” That described 28 schools in 2013–2014, up from 23 in 2010–2011, according to the district.

USA Today:

Two Sundays ago, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv of Montgomery County, Md., got a call from Child Protective Services. Police had taken their two children, ages 10 and 6, into custody three hours earlier and were holding them at the crisis center.

Had the children been abused? No. Were they lost? No. So what prompted this extraordinary intervention? A concerned pedestrian had seen the children walking alone and called 911. It was the second time in four months that the Meitivs’ children were reported to authorities as they walked home from parks about a mile away.

OPPOSING VIEW: Allow children to be children

The Meitivs are part of a movement known as “free-range parenting,” a reaction to over­involved and hovering “helicopter” parenting. Free-range parents believe that allowing their kids more independence will teach them self-sufficiency. The Meitivs have trained 10-year-old Rafi and 6-year-old Dvora to navigate basic routes home by themselves, much as previous generations of kids have done on foot or bike, and have taught them basic safety precautions.

Molly Beck:

A $300,000 grant paid over the next three years from the Madison Community Foundation will begin the process of developing “full-service” community schools in the Madison School District.

“Our goal is to raise student achievement for all and narrow and close achievement gaps but we cannot do it on our own,” superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said Thursday. “By better coordinating our efforts (and) creating a quilt of strong neighborhood centers with strong, full-service community schools, we’ll be able to make sure that the families that need coordinated services can actually get them.”

The community school model is used in school districts across the country in an effort to address more than just academic needs of children, according to the Urban Strategies Council, and is especially used in areas with high poverty with neighborhood residents and families that may have poor access to health care services or meals.

Kristin DeCarr:

A recent survey by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice found that students who participate in the privately-funded Baltimore school choice program, set up for students of low-income families, are on average graduating high school earlier than those students who are not part of the program and are attending college at higher rates than local and national averages.

Released this week, the survey, called “The Achievement Checkup,” looked at the progress of students who received private school scholarships through the Children’s Scholarship Fund Baltimore from kindergarten through the eighth grade.

Author Alex Schuh discovered that 18% of students who received the scholarship graduated high school within three years. National data finds this percentage to be 2.9% for students who do not have the scholarship offered to them. On a local level, 97% of scholarship students graduated high school. Meanwhile, the graduation rate at Baltimore County Public Schools is 34 to 64%.

Rachel Cohen:

Twice a week for 30 minutes, fifth graders at KIPP Washington Heights, a charter school in New York City, attend “character class.” Each lesson is divided into three parts, according to Ian Willey, the assistant principal who teaches it. First, students find out what specific skill they’ll be focusing on that day. “This morning we’re going to learn how to set a long-term goal,” Willey might tell them. Next, students are asked to practice the skill. In this case, students may imagine they have a long-term project to complete, and then work to construct a timeline with incremental deadlines. In the final part of the lesson, students would take time to collectively reflect. “What was hard about this exercise?” Willey might ask. “What went well? Did anyone feel nervous? What did you do when you felt nervous?” And because part of KIPP’s mission is to help build character, the students would then classify their new skill as one or more of KIPP’s seven targeted character goals. In this example, the students were learning “grit.”

Few ideas inspire more debate in education circles than grit, which means having dedication to and passion for long-term goals. Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, first popularized the concept in 2007; she believes that if we can teach children to be “grittier” in schools, we can help them achieve greater success. Paul Tough, a journalist who published a 2012 bestseller, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, also brought grit into the national spotlight. Many policymakers and school leaders have since jumped at the idea. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan praised Tough’s “fantastic book”—arguing that teaching skills like grit “can help children flourish and overcome significant challenges throughout their lifetimes.” Districts all over the country are exploring how they can incorporate grit into their curriculum. In 2013, Duckworth was awarded $625,000 by the MacArthur Foundation to continue researching ways to cultivate grit in schools.

Pauline Rose:

Calls for a data revolution are putting the spotlight on the importance of more and better data as a means to hold policymakers to account for post-2015 goals. In many ways, education has been at the forefront of approaches to measuring progress over the past 15 years. The influence of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report (GMR) and the efforts of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) in improving the availability of education data provide important lessons for tracking progress post-2015. This experience should play an important contribution to informing the practical next steps for the data revolution.

Building on this experience, a roundtable held at the Overseas Development Institute on 17 November brought together over 40 technical experts, who debated approaches to measuring progress towards post-2015 education targets, with a focus on learning and equity. The meeting coincided with the launch of consultation on post-2015 education indicators by the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to the EFA Steering Committee. As noted in the opening remarks on the data revolution by Neil Jackson, Chief Statistician at DFID, in many ways the education sector is leading the way in thinking about how to monitor post-2015 progress in concrete ways.

One of the problems that the GMR and UIS faced in tracking progress over the past 15 years was that indicators were not set at the time of deciding on education for all goals in 2000, hence the importance of the current consultation process. Another was that data have not been available a sufficiently disaggregated form to track progress on the most disadvantaged subgroups within each country, that is those most likely to be left behind. The GMR’s World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE), drawing on internationally-comparable household survey data, has been one step forward in presenting data in an accessible format to show that the poorest children living in rural areas, and often girls, are still far from completing primary school in many countries, and that many are also not learning the basics in reading and mathematics even if they have spent time in school.

Alexandra Gibbs:

In 2012, Latitude Research published a study about children’s interaction with robots, which demonstrated that 64 percent of those interviewed, said that robots felt like “natural, human-like companions.” Many app companies have capitalized on this concept, and made apps that educate young children about robots.

Danielle Hauser:

When I think of the demands on teachers today, I picture the cover of the classic children’s folktale “Caps for Sale,” in which a mustachioed cap salesman falls asleep under a tree, wearing his entire stock of wares on his head. This image, unsurprisingly conjured by an elementary and middle school teacher of five years, suggests the staggering expectations policy-makers and the public have of teachers in the 21st century.

Teachers are expected to possess strong content knowledge, pedagogical expertise in rooms of diverse learners, and a heroic grasp of classroom psychology. They must close gaps in content mastery, develop students’ interpersonal skills, and create project-based learning experiences that require critical thinking and analytical reasoning. Of course, they are assumed to have artistic skill in designing inviting classroom environments and jaw dropping bulletin boards, as well as technical proficiency in integrating new media to make lessons engaging for the modern kid. They are to do all this and much more with a calm, cool demeanor, on a meager paycheck, and with minimal recognition–as teachers, our “caps” runneth over.
I spent four years teaching at Success Academy Charter Network, which recently came under attack in the New York Times for the incredible demands made of their teachers and students. And yes, Success is upfront about their unwavering commitment to excellence and setting a high bar for all involved, but what I found to be most staggering was the profound support offered to teachers to meet the demands of the day.

Lcally, Madison continues to lack K-12 diversity. a majority of the School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

Diane Ravitch writing in Educational Excellence Network, 1989:

Futuristic novels with a bleak vision of the prospects for the free individual characteristically portray a society in which the dictatorship has eliminated or strictly controls knowledge of the past. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the regime successfully wages a “campaign against the Past” by banning the teaching of history, closing museums, and destroying historical monuments. In George Orwell’s 1984, the regime routinely alters records of the past; it rewrites newspapers and books to conform to political exigencies, and offending versions are destroyed, dropped “into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.”

If knowledge of the past does in fact allow us to understand the present and to exercise freedom of mind—as totalitarian societies, both real and fictional, acknowledge by dictating what may be studied or published—then we have cause for concern. The threat to our knowledge of the past arises, however, not from government censorship but from our own indifference and neglect. The erosion of historical understanding among Americans seems especially pronounced in the generation under thirty-five, those schooled during a period in which sharp declines were registered in test scores in virtually every subject of the school curriculum.

Based on the anecdotal complaints of college professors and high school teachers about their students’ lack of preparation, there was reason to suspect that the study of history had suffered as much erosion and dilution as other fields. To test whether students had a secure command of the “foundations of literacy,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) administered the first national assessment of history and literature in the spring of 1986.

One object of the test was to ascertain whether students had ready command of essential background knowledge about American history.

The results were not reassuring. Presumably there is certain background information about American history so fundamental that everyone who goes to school should have learned it by age seventeen (and nearly 80 percent of those who took the assessment were enrolled in the second semester of their high school American history course). In What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?, Chester Finn, Jr., and I pointed out that there had never been a test of this kind on a national basis and that there was no way to know whether students were learning more or less about history than in the past.

Nonetheless, we found it disturbing that two-thirds of the sample did not know that the Civil War occurred between 1850 and 1900; that nearly 40 percent did not know that the Brown decision held school segregation unconstitutional; that 40 percent did not know that the East Coast of the United States was explored and settled mainly by England and that the Southwest was explored and settled mainly by Spain, that 70 percent did not know that the purpose of Jim Crow laws was to enforce racial segregation, and that 30 percent could not find Great Britain on a map of Europe.

Since the test had never been given before, critics were quick to quarrel with our judgment that student performance was disappointing. Perhaps, they suggested, students thirty or fifty years ago might have done worse on a comparable test. Others complained that the test should also have been given to a representative sample of the adult population, because if adults don’t know such things, then high school students should not be expected to know them either.

Still others complained that we should not expect students to know or care about history because our society does not reward people who value learning, whether teachers or professors. And there were critics who insisted that the test relied too much on factual knowledge, which is insignificant compared to learning how to think. The most repeated criticism was that the results were of no importance because the study of history itself was of no importance, of no utility whatever in the world today. Again and again, the questions were posed, “What can you do with history? What kind of job will it get you?”

Polemics can be both endless and frustrating because there is almost always some truth in every assertion and counter-assertion. Everything the critics said was true to some extent. But it was also true that the assessment revealed that students were not learning some important things they should know about American history. Whether their counterparts in the past knew less, and whether adults today know less, is beside the point. Three wrongs don’t make a right.

Plainly, a significant number of students are not remembering the history that they have studied; they are not integrating it into their repertoire of background knowledge, either as fact or as concept. In reality, as every student of history ought to recognize, facts and concepts are inseparable. Some information is so basic, so essential that all students must know it in order to make sense of new learning. Nor can students be expected to think critically about issues unless they have the background knowledge to support their reasoning. Insisting that facts have a rightful place in the study of history does not mean that history must be learned by rote.

However one learns about the Civil War, however innovative or unorthodox the teacher’s methodology, the student should know that it took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century, not because of the singular importance of that isolated fact, but because that fact connects the events to a particular place in time, to a larger context, and to a chronological setting in which it is possible to make judgments about causes and consequences and relationships among events in the same era.

Was there once a golden age in the study of history? There may have been, but I know of no evidence for it. In 1943, The New York Times reported the results of a test given to seven thousand college freshmen in thirty-six institutions. It was an open-ended test, not a multiple-choice test. Only 45 percent could name four of the specific freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights; fewer than 25 percent could name two achievements of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, or Theodore Roosevelt; less than 15 percent could identify Samuel Gompers as a leader of organized labor or Susan B. Anthony as an advocate of women’s rights; and only 6 percent could name the thirteen original colonies.

Compared to the college freshmen of 1943, today’s high school juniors do well; after all, 50 percent of today’s sample identified Gompers and 69 percent identified Susan B. Anthony. But our test takers had some critical advantages: first, they took a multiple-choice test, which limits their options and jogs their memory with the right answer; second, Gompers and Anthony are included in their high school textbooks, but were not always included in the textbooks of forty years ago; third, the multiple-choice format virtually guarantees that a minimum of 25 percent will guess the right answer.

The search for comparability may be a blind alley. After all, the historical knowledge that seems most important will differ with each generation, because the salient issues are different for each generation. Today, we expect youngsters to learn about the history of civil rights and minorities, and we stress social history as well as political history. On the NAEP test, there were a number of questions about recent history, like Watergate and Sputnik. Such questions obviously could not have been asked forty years ago, and some of them may seem unimportant forty years from now.

The questions we may reasonably ask about history instruction in the schools are whether students are learning what schools are trying to teach them; whether the history that schools are teaching is significant, current, and presented in ways that encourage student engagement; whether enough time is provided to study issues and events in depth and in context; whether students learn to see today’s issues and events in relationship to the past; whether events are studied from a variety of perspectives; whether students understand that the history they study is not “the truth,” but a version of the past written by historians on the basis of analysis and evidence; and whether students realize that historians disagree about how to define the past.

I first became concerned about the condition of history in the schools while visiting about three dozen campuses across the country in 1984-1985, ranging from large public universities to small private liberal arts colleges. Repeatedly, I was astonished by questions from able students about the most elementary facts of American history. At one urban Minnesota campus, none of the thirty students in a course on ethnic relations had ever heard of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

How were they learning about ethnic relations? Their professor described the previous week’s role-playing lesson. The class had been visited by a swarthy man who described himself as an Iranian, made some provocative statements, and then launched into a tirade, chastising them for being prejudiced against him (in reality, he was an Italo-American from Long Island, and not an Iranian at all). This “lesson” hardly compensated for their ignorance about the history of immigration, of racial minorities, of slavery and segregation, or of legislative and judicial efforts to establish equality in American life.

As a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, I lectured at various campuses on the virtues of a liberal education and its importance to society today. After one such speech at a university in the Pacific Northwest, a professor of education insisted that high-school students should concentrate on vocational preparation and athletics, since they had the rest of their lives to learn subjects like history “on their own time.” Time and again, I heard people wonder why even prospective teachers should have a liberal education, particularly if they planned to teach below the high school level. The younger the children, according to the skeptics, the less their teacher needs to know; they seemed to think that knowing and nurturing were incompatible.

In my meetings and talks with students, who were usually the best in the education or the history program, I was surprised to find that most did not recognize allusions to eminent historical figures such as Jane Addams or W.E.B. DuBois. As I traveled, I questioned history professors about whether their students seemed as well prepared today as in the past. None thought they were. Even at such elite institutions as Columbia and Harvard, professors expressed concern about the absence of a common body of reference and allusion to the past; most said their students lacked a sense of historical context and a knowledge of the major issues that had influenced American history. As a professor at Berkeley put it to me, “They have no furniture in their minds. You can assume nothing in the way of prior knowledge. Skills, yes; but not knowledge.”

Those who teach at non-elite institutions perceived an even deeper level of historical illiteracy. Typical were comments by Thomas Kessner, a professor of history at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York: “My students are not stupid, but they have an abysmal background in American or any other kind of history.” This gloomy assessment was echoed by Naomi Miller, chair of the history department at Hunter College in New York. “My students have no historical knowledge on which to draw when they enter college,” she told me.

“They have no point of reference for understanding World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, or the Holocaust.” She expressed dismay at her students’ indifference to dates and chronology or causation. “They think that everything is subjective. They have plenty of attitudes and opinions, but they lack the knowledge to analyze a problem.” Professor Miller believes that “we are in danger of bringing up a generation without historical memory. This is a dangerous situation.”

In search of some explanation for these complaints, I visited social studies classes in New York City. In one high school, where most of the three thousand students are black, Hispanic, and/or recent immigrants, a teacher said to me, “Our students don’t see the relevance to their own lives of what a lot of dead people did a long time ago. American studies means more to them than American history.”

I observed a class in American studies, where the lesson for the day was state government, its leaders and their functions. When the teacher asked whether anyone knew what the state attorney general does, a girl answered tentatively, “Isn’t he the one that says on the cigarette box that you shouldn’t smoke because it gives you cancer?” The teacher responded, incorrectly, “Yes, but what else does he do?” The teacher went on, earnestly trying to explain what New York’s secretary of state does (“he keeps the state’s papers”) and to find some way to connect the work of these officials to the students’ daily lives. The youngsters were bored and apathetic. Watching their impassive faces, I thought that a discussion of the Crusades or the Salem witchcraft trials or Nat Turner’s rebellion would be infinitely more interesting, and relevant, to their adolescent minds.

In another American studies class the topic for the day was the Dred Scott decision. Ah, I thought, I will now see how historical issues are dealt with. The class began with ten minutes of confusing discussion about how students would feel if they were drafted and told they had to serve in Vietnam. The teacher seemed to think this was relevant to the students (since it was relevant to her own generation), although it was not clear that the students had any idea what the war in Vietnam was about. What she was trying to do, I finally realized, was to get the students to wonder who is a citizen and how citizenship is defined. It was a worthy aim, but the rest of the lesson shed little light on the meaning of the Dred Scott decision. The students were told he was a slave who had been brought into a free territory and then sued for his freedom; they were also given a brief definition of the Missouri Compromise. With this as background, the teacher divided them into groups, each of which was a miniature Supreme Court, where they would decide whether Dred Scott should be a slave or go free. Ten minutes later, no surprise, each little Supreme Court recommended that Dred Scott should be a free man, and the class ended. They did not learn why Chief Justice Roger B. Taney decided otherwise, nor did they learn the significance of the Dred Scott decision in the antislavery agitation, nor its importance as a precursor to the Civil War. Since the course was law studies, not American history, the students had no background knowledge about sectional antagonisms, about slavery, or about anything else that preceded or followed the Civil War.

When I expressed surprise about the complete absence of traditional, chronological history in the social studies curriculum, the chair of the social studies department said, “What we teach is determined by guidelines from the State Education Department. In the late 1960s the state decided to deemphasize chronological history and to focus instead on topical issues and social science concepts. We followed suit.” A teacher chimed in to explain, “We don’t teach history, because it doesn’t help our students pass the New York State Regents examination in social studies.” This teacher claimed to have compiled a list of concepts that regularly appear on the Regents examinations; his students prepare for the Regents by memorizing the definitions of such terms as “cultural diffusion” and “social mobility.”

What happened to the study of history? Many factors contributed to its dethroning; some relate to the overall American cultural situation, others to specific institutional forces within the schools and changes in the social studies field. Those who claim that American culture devalues history make a strong case. Despite the fervor of history buffs and historical societies, Americans have long been present- and future-oriented. I suspect that it has never been easy to persuade Americans of the importance of understanding the past. Trends in recent years have probably strengthened popular resistance to historical study. Even in the academy, rampant specialization among college faculties has made professors less willing to teach broad survey courses, less concerned about capturing the attention of non-majors or the general public by tackling large questions.

Within the schools, the study of history has encountered other kinds of problems. During the past generation, history was dislodged from its lofty perch as “queen” of the social studies by the proliferation of social sciences, electives, and other courses. Many in the social studies field say that history still dominates the social studies, since almost all students take the traditional one-year high school course in American history, and about half the students take a one-year course in world history. However, even though the high school American history course may be secure, researchers have found “a gradual and persistent decline in requirements, courses and enrollments” in history at the junior high school level, as well as a reduction of requirements and course offerings in world history in high schools. Indeed, the only history course that is well entrenched in the curriculum is the high school survey of American history.

To some teachers, social studies means the study of the social sciences, and many schools offer electives in sociology, political science, economics, psychology, and anthropology. Some see the field as primarily responsible for the study of current social problems. Others see it as a field whose overriding objective is to teach students the essentials of good behavior and good citizenship. Still others declare that the goal of the social studies is to teach critical thinking, or values, or respect for cultural diversity.

Because of the ill-defined nature of the social studies field, it is easily (and regularly) invaded by curricular fads, and it all too often serves as a dumping ground for special-interest programs. Whenever state legislatures or interest groups discover an unmet need, a new program is pushed into the social studies curriculum. Each state has its own pet programs, but under the copious umbrella of social studies can be found courses in such subjects as energy education, environmental education, gun-control education, water education, sex education, human rights education, future studies, consumer education, free-enterprise education and a host of other courses prompted by contemporary issues.

This indiscriminate confusion of short-term social goals would have dismayed those historians who first took an active interest in history in the schools. In 1893 a distinguished panel of historians, including the future President Woodrow Wilson, recommended an eight-year course of study in history, beginning in the fifth grade with biography and mythology and continuing in the following years with American history and government, Greek and Roman history, French history, and English history. Criticizing the traditional emphasis on rote learning, the Committee of Ten argued that history should teach judgment and thinking, and should be conjoined with such studies as literature, geography, art, and languages. The historians’ recommendations were aimed at all children, not just the college-bound: “We believe that the colleges can take care of themselves; our interest is in the schoolchildren who have no expectation of going to college, the larger number of whom will not enter even a high school.”

In 1899 the Committee of Seven, a group of historians created by the American Historical Association (AHA), recommended a four-year model high school curriculum: first year, ancient history; second year, medieval and modern European history; third year, English history; and fourth year, American history and government. It was expected that students would read biographies, mythology, legends, and hero tales in the elementary years, and that this reading would provide a foundation for their subsequent study of history. The Committee of Seven’s proposal set a national pattern for American high schools for years to come. Like the Committee of Ten, the Seven believed that history should be the core of general education for all students in a democracy.

This four-year model history curriculum came under increasing attack, however, from the newly emerging field of social studies, whose major purpose (according to a 1918 report known as The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education) was “social efficiency.” Characteristic of the progressive effort to make education socially useful, the new report, which for decades has been considered the most influential document in American education, rejected those studies that seemed not to contribute directly to the goal of training students to take their place in society.

Moreover, The Cardinal Principles broke sharply with the findings and recommendations of earlier committees. It endorsed differentiated curricula, based on students’ future vocational goals, such as agriculture, business, clerical, industrial, and household arts programs. Much of the history that had been taught had no immediate social utility and thus its advocates had difficulty claiming a place in the curriculum. In the decades that followed, as the curriculum incorporated more courses that seemed socially useful or were intended to teach social skills, the time available for history shrank. Many schools collapsed their courses in ancient history, European history, and English history into a single, and optional, one-year course called “world history” or “Western civilization.”

The new emphasis on short-term social utility also affected the curriculum in the early grades. The various reform reports of the early twentieth century had recommended that young children read exciting stories about remarkable people and events that changed the course of history. In most city and state curricula, children in the early grades studied distant civilizations and read their myths and legends in addition to learning the stories about heroes and the folktales of their own country. They also celebrated holidays and learned about their local community through field trips, an emphasis called “home geography.” But by the 1930s this curriculum began to be replaced by studies of family roles and community helpers. Instead of thrilling biographies and mythology, children read stories about children just like themselves.

The new curriculum for the early grades, called “expanding environments” or “expanding horizons,” was factual and immediate, ousting imaginative historical literature and play from the early grades. Increasingly, time in the early grades was devoted to this fixed pattern: kindergarten, myself; first grade, my family; second grade, my neighborhood; third grade, my city. There was no evidence that children preferred to read about postal workers over tall tales, stories of heroes, or ancient Egyptians. Nonetheless, the new curriculum gradually swept the country, pushing historical content out of the early grades.

Not until the late 1980s did the social studies curriculum in the primary grades attract sustained criticism. According to leading cognitive psychologists, the “expanding environments” approach has no grounding in developmental research. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that it dwells unnecessarily on what the child already knows or does not need to go to school to learn. In 1987, a content analysis of social studies textbooks for the early grades was conducted at the University of Georgia. One of the investigators, Professor A. Guy Larkins, concluded, “If asked to choose between teaching primary-grades social studies with available texts or eliminating social studies from the K-3 curriculum, I would choose the latter. Much of the content in current texts is redundant, superfluous, vacuous, and needlessly superficial.” Larkins also complained that children were reading about taking field trips instead of actually taking field trips, seeing pictures of a generic community rather than investigating their own.

Learning again and again about the roles of family members and community helpers in the primary years may well be extremely boring for children who are used to watching action-packed stories on television and seeing dramatic events on the evening news. The me-centered curriculum fails to give children a sense of other times and places, and fails to appeal to their lively imaginations. Children might enjoy the study of history if they began in the early grades to listen to and read lively historical literature, such as myths, legends, hero stories, and true stories about great men and women in their community, state, nation, and world. Not only in the early grades but throughout the kindergarten to twelfth grade sequence, students should read lively narrative accounts of extraordinary events and remarkable people. Present practice seems calculated to persuade young people that social studies is a train of self-evident, unrelated facts, told in a dull manner.

By mid-century most American public schools had adopted a nearly standardized social studies curriculum: Children in kindergarten and the first three grades studied self, home, family, neighborhood, and community; children in fourth grade studied state history; in fifth grade, American history; in sixth grade, world cultures; seventh grade, world geography; eighth grade, American history; ninth grade, civics or world cultures; tenth grade, world history; eleventh grade, American history; twelfth grade, American government. While there have been many variations from district to district, this has been the dominant social studies curriculum for the last fifty years. Most cities and states follow the model for the early grades, teach one year of American history in elementary school and again in junior high school, and require a single year of American history for high school graduation. Most, however, do not require the study of world history in the high school years.

Despite this format’s persistent emphasis on social relevance and student interest, surveys have repeatedly shown that students find social studies to be less interesting and less important than their other school subjects. Why is this field, whose intrinsic human interest is so compelling, so often perceived as boring? There are many possible answers, including the compendious, superficial, and dull textbooks students are assigned to read. But the curricular pattern itself must be in some measure at fault, as it forces repetition of courses on the one hand and too little time for study in depth on the other. Both problems are surefire formulas for dullness, and curriculum planners have been thus far unable to resolve either of them.

When the usual curricular model is followed, American history is taught three times: in the fifth grade, the eighth grade, and the eleventh grade. The question is whether to teach a complete survey course (from pre-Columbian times to the present) at each of the three grade settings. If the survey is taught three times, there is no time to go beyond the textbook, to explore significant questions, to examine original sources or to conduct mock trials or debates. Some districts have broken away from the “coverage” survey by instead teaching major topics and themes in American history, but this approach is clearly insufficient when youngsters fail to understand chronology, the sequence of events, or the causal connections among events.

Another alternative to the survey is to devote each of the three years of American history to a different time period. The usual pattern is that the elementary school course concentrates on exploration and settlement and daily life in the colonies; the junior high course emphasizes the nineteenth century; and the high school year carries the student from the Civil War to the present. The advantage of the latter program is that it allows for time to treat issues in depth, without neglecting chronology. The disadvantage is that it allows no time for mature students to examine the Revolutionary era, when the principles of American government were shaped, or to consider the constitutional conflicts that led to the Civil War. It is also problematic in light of population mobility from state to state, as well as the immigrant influx from other countries, which means that newcomers in the middle or later grades will miss out on important events in the life of the early Republic.

While there is no easy answer to this problem, the history curriculum adopted in California in 1987 attempts to meld the two approaches; each year concentrates on a different time period, but each course begins and ends with an intensive review of critical issues and events. In the world history program, the most pressing problem is time. In most districts where world history is taught, it is studied for only one year, not nearly enough time to encompass the history of the world. New York State adopted a two-year global studies sequence in 1987 (though not strong on history), and California adopted a mandatory three-year world history sequence in the same year. Most other states, however, do not require even one year of world history.

Furthermore, the social studies field is divided about whether world history should emphasize Western Europe or global studies. When the course focuses on Western Europe, it is unified by attention to the evolution of democratic political institutions and ideas, as well as to their betrayal by genocide, war, and racism. When the course is global studies (as, for example, in New York State), equal attention is given to Western Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and other regions. The “Western civilization” course has been criticized by some as “ethnocentric,” while the “global studies” approach has been criticized by others for superficiality, for incoherence, and for minimizing the importance of the West in world history. No matter which approach is taken, a single year is insufficient to study world history.

The difficulty of trying to compress the history of the world into an introductory course is exemplified by one widely-adopted text, in which World War II is reduced to a brief summary and the Holocaust to two sentences: “Many millions of civilians also lost their lives. Six million Jews alone were murdered at Hitler’s orders.”

Does it matter if Americans are ignorant of their past and of the world’s? Does it matter if they know little of the individuals, the events, the ideas, the forces, and the movements that shaped their nation and others? If the study of history is to gain public support and attention,
historians must directly answer the utilitarian challenge. They must be prepared to argue that the study of history is useful in its own terms. Those who study history learn how and why the world came to be what it is, why things change and why they stay the same.

Knowledge of history is both useful and necessary for our society because everyone has the right to choose our leaders and to participate in our civic and social life. All citizens, not just the few, are expected to understand major domestic and international issues. Without historical perspective, voters are more likely to be swayed by emotional appeals, by stirring commercials, or by little more than a candidate’s photogenic charisma.

Even between elections, a knowledge of history is vital today for the average citizen and vital for the health of our political system. Politicians and news organizations regularly poll the public to assess their view of domestic and international issues. When public sentiment is clear, the government and the media take heed. When the public is ill-informed or uninterested, policymakers are free to act without the consent of the governed. Americans today require historical background in order to understand complex social and political questions in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere.

Writers and editors in national newspapers and magazines assume the presence of a historically literate public by alluding without further explanation to historic events and individuals. Without a historically literate public, readily able to understand such references,
newspapers and television journalism will have no choice but to simplify their vocabulary, to reduce their coverage of serious topics, and serve as little more than headline and amusement services, devoid of significant context.

Those who have a professional commitment to the study of history have a particular responsibility to improve the way it is taught and learned in the schools. Organizations such as the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) have a direct responsibility for the quality of history instruction. The teacher-scholar collaboratives sponsored by these organizations are one valuable means to assist professionals in the schools. There are others. For example, professional associations should lobby to ensure that teachers of history have actually studied history in college; in several states, including New York and California, social studies teachers may be certified without ever having studied any history. Professional associations could assist curriculum planners in enriching the study of history at every grade level. The AHA and OAH could provide invaluable support to state curriculum offices that are pressured by powerful interest groups to rewrite or water down the history curriculum; some kind of review mechanism could fend off unreasonable demands.

In 1932, Henry Johnson of Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote a delightful review of the teaching of history throughout the ages, somewhat misleadingly entitled An Introduction to the History of the Social Sciences. Johnson quoted a sixteenth-century Spanish scholar, Juan Vives, to explain why it is valuable to study history: “Where there is history,” wrote Vives, “children have transferred to them the advantages of old men; where history is absent, old men are as children.” Without history, according to Vives, “no one would know anything about his father or ancestors; no one could know his own rights or those of another or how to maintain them; no one would know how his ancestors came to the country he inhabits.” Johnson cited the view of the seventeenth-century French oratorians that “history is a grand mirror in which we see ourselves…The secret of knowing and judging ourselves rightly is to see ourselves in others, and history can make us the contemporaries of all centuries in all countries.”

History will never be restored as a subject of value unless it is detached from vulgar utilitarianism; it should not be expected to infuse morals or patriotism. Properly taught, history teaches the pursuit of truth and understanding; it establishes a context of human life in a particular time and place, relating art, literature, philosophy, law, architecture, language, government, economics, and social life; it portrays the great achievements and terrible disasters of the human race; it awakens youngsters to the universality of the human experience as well as to the particularities that distinguish cultures and societies from one another; it encourages the development of intelligence, civility, and a sense of perspective. It endows its students with a broad knowledge of other times, other cultures, other places. It leaves its students with cultural resources on which they may draw for the rest of their lives. These are values and virtues that are gained through the study of history, values and virtues essential to the free individual exercising freedom of mind. Beyond these, history needs no further justification.

via Will Fitzhugh.

Paul Hill & Tricia Maas, via a kind Deb Britt email:

A debate about “backfill”—whether charter high schools should add students to replace those who drop out—has just begun (see here, here, and here). Some argue that successful charter school models should not have to deviate from their focus by admitting children who don’t enter at the beginning of 9th grade. Others believe that a school is inherently inequitable if it closes its doors to any subset of the local population. The current debate is raw and polarized between the extremes that schools should never have to backfill students, or that they be legally required to replace every student they lose.

As usual, the extremes are unrealistic. There is no way to completely relieve charters of any pressure to backfill, because lost enrollment means lost revenue. On the other side, it makes no sense to require schools to fill every vacancy, no matter when it occurs and no matter whether the newly admitted student has any chance to earn enough credits and skills to graduate.

Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim

Mike Kirst’s review of our book, A Democratic Constitution for Public Education, is insightful and constructive and raises important questions about how our proposal would work in practice.

He correctly points out that public school principals are not trained for the roles we propose — setting priorities, making hiring decisions and budget tradeoffs (e.g. between salaries and purchase of on-line instruction), making the school attractive to families and teachers, and leading continuous improvement. But, as we argue, principals and potential principals won’t ever have these capacities unless and until the job changes, so that people wanting to take full responsibility seek it, and people wanting to avoid full responsibility avoid it. The same is true with pre-service training: it won’t cover a more ambitious set of skills until the job requires them.

When the school job changes (as it did in England where school heads got hiring and budget authority, and in New York City under Joel Klein’s school autonomy policy) the principal pool changes. Some school leaders use capacities they always had but couldn’t use, others learn what they need, and others quit and are replaced by people attracted to the new, more demanding job. This isn’t instantaneous but natural turnover allows steady replacement of people who don’t want to or can’t adapt. The system we have proposed also relieves principals of a lot of burdens, e.g., the many central office demand to attend meetings and be “trained” (or arrange staff training) in whatever the central office is peddling. How to prepare/retrain/select school leaders requires careful analysis, and happily there are exemplars in the places above.

True, changes in principal capacity will require new forms of training and support. But, these needs are finite, and they will be met only if the job changes.

Paul Hill & Ashley Jochim

Andy characterized this arrangement as a continuation of the district and predicted that the transition would never be made, based on the leopard/spots metaphor. But under our plan, the district would be replaced by an entirely new entity, based on new law and established with a totally different set of powers than local school boards now have. It is hard to see how this is the old “district” unless the term is used equivocally (i.e., at one time to describe an organization that operates schools directly and at another time to refer to a geographic area).

Andy also thinks that the role we assign the CEC in overseeing the transition to the new system will preserve the old district. Again, we disagree.

Though the replacement of school boards with CECs would be complete and instantaneous, schools that operated under the old school board would still need to exist to serve the children enrolled in them. This would continue until the CEC either authorized replacements or recognized them as independent school providers eligible to operate under the new rules.

Educators who worked in those schools, or in the central office created by the now-defunct school board, would need to make a transition to the new system. Teachers and principals would transition from being district employees to employees of newly independent schools; their jobs would then depend on those schools’ continuation. Central office employees would have the opportunity to form or join new nonprofit assistance providers who could offer services to schools (which could decide what and whether to buy) or find new lines of work.

Laura Waters:

Almost everyone is finding something to like in the new U.S. Senate bill that would replace No Child Left Behind, titled the Every Child Achieves Act of 2015. (Here’s a summary.) Conservatives, Tea Partiers, and local control devotees coo at the diminution of federal oversight while liberals and progressives approve of the bill’s preservation of disaggregated data, which allows schools and states to spotlight the academic growth of children in poverty and those with disabilities.

There’s a chief dissenter, however, among the celebrants. Teacher union leaders, especially, those from the National Education Association (NJEA’s parent) despise the bill’s retention of annual standardized tests in third to eighth grade and once in high schools. NEA has fought stridently (AFT more softly) for “grade span testing” — once in elementary school, once in middle school, once in high school — and, judging by the draft bill, the country’s largest teacher labor union appears to have lost this battle.

Lyndsay Layton:

The nation’s major civil rights groups say that federally required testing — in place for a decade through existing law — is a tool to force fairness in public schools by aiming a spotlight at the stark differences in scores between poor, minority students and their more affluent counterparts.

And they are fighting legislative efforts to scale back testing as lawmakers on Capitol Hill rewrite the nation’s main federal education law, known as No Child Left Behind.

“Removing the requirement for annual testing would be a devastating step backward, for it is very hard to make sure our education system is serving every child well when we don’t have reliable, comparable achievement data on every child every year,” Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, said in recent testimony before the Senate education panel. Her group joined 20 civil rights organizations to lobby Congress to keep the requirement to test all children each year in math and ­reading.

Paul Niel:

Immediately, we are surrounded by children and other curious locals. Clare gets chatting to Shanthi, a school teacher and organiser of a helpline that assists girls forced into child labour, and within minutes we are invited for tea, where we are given first-hand insights into how the school system works in southern India. Shanthi tells us of the pride she has for her district, where almost all the children have attended at least elementary school and literacy levels are high. However, she confirms that lots of girls leave school between the ages of 10 and 12, to get married or to work to help their families.

Back on the road, our adventure takes another unexpected turn – beach roads have turned into windy mountain roads, palm trees into jungle. Cruising down a steep lane, our rickshaw loses its way on a dangerous hairpin turn and goes straight into a stone wall. With no seatbelts or airbags, Tom and I are sent flying, but it is the tuk tuk that comes off worse – the windshield, axis and entire front end are broken. We convince a mechanic in a nearby village to repair it, but it will take a few days.

Sagar, in Karnataka – the huge state in southwest India – is a sleepy town and it takes a while to find accommodation. We decide to visit a local school and are welcomed with open arms and big smiles. Classes are stopped as hundreds of schoolchildren listen to our presentation, the highlight of which is a short geography lesson about our five home nations – we can’t get enough of all those curious faces.

David Hill:

Silander said about 70 percent of Finnish high school teachers have already received training in the “phenomenon-based” approach, which began testing two years ago. So far student outcomes have improved and teacher response has been positive.

Marjo Kyllonen, Helsinki’s education manager, who leads the initiative said, “We really need a rethinking of education and a redesigning of our system, so it prepares our children for the future with the skills that are needed for today and tomorrow.”

The new approach aims to encourage different kinds of learning, shifting from facts to problem solving, individual work to collaboration. In other words, instead of skill-oriented instruction, this topical structure prioritizes the four Cs—communication, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration—skills that are central to working in teams, a reflection of the ‘hyperconnected’ world we live in today.

Interestingly, this approach is similar to a homeschooling method called Unit Studies, a throwback to the one-room schoolhouse with students of multiple ages working together but at different skills and levels of understanding. Of course, this method is convenient for homeschooling families with multiple children and minimal resources, but modern workplace teams also consist of people at various skills levels with limited budgets. Additionally, U.S. homeschoolers don’t always have access to the latest technologies beyond the Internet. Curiously, this parallels the Finnish school systems, which have relied on innovative teaching methodologies instead of educational technologies to consistently perform better than American students.

Alan Borsuk:

I asked Dan McKinley, as he reaches retirement, what he has learned in nearly a quarter-century of involvement in efforts to improve the education of high-needs children in Milwaukee. He gave me four answers, and we’ll get to those.

Then, a few days later, he sent me a fifth lesson — the most important one, he said.

“It really is all about love,” he said. “When you visit a school, if you can’t feel the love, you know there is something missing in the educational program. The school may be working hard, but outcomes of all that work are probably not that good.

“This is what the policy-makers miss: In the end, it is not about teacher data or management techniques. It is about a community of people dedicated to high ideals who work every day to bring out the best in the children they love.”

McKinley and the organization he headed all these years, PAVE, have been good at spotting the love and spotting the quality in schools.

For years, while the State of Wisconsin was allowing schools of hugely varying quality to receive public money through the private school voucher program or independent charter programs, and while voucher advocates took a pass on getting involved in quality, PAVE picked the places it supported financially with care and smart eyes.

Mediocre schools and especially those that were just horrible got almost nothing from PAVE, which was a conduit for millions of dollars in scholarship help, no-interest loans and other help to many of the most promising schools in the city.

Chris Rickert:

A reader with a much keener sense of irony than I emailed this week to point out that the site identified 3 1/2 years ago for the aborted Madison Preparatory Academy is slated to become home to a new police station by 2017.

That’s right. In a city with some of the highest rates of black incarceration in the country, a police station is taking the place of a school aimed at improving the prospects of poor, minority students.

The Madison Prep charter school was the brainchild of the Urban League of Greater Madison and its then-CEO, Kaleem Caire, and was to occupy the former Mount Olive Lutheran Church building at 4018 Mineral Point Road.

Madison Prep would have featured single-sex classrooms, longer school days, required parental involvement and other strategies not usually seen in a Madison public schools system that has struggled to educate black children.

In December 2011, it was voted down by a majority white, uniformly liberal school board over concerns about its cost, accountability to taxpayers, and use of nonunion employees. Madison’s overwhelmingly white teachers union opposed the school.

Now, Madison appears to be moving ahead with a plan to demolish the church and an adjoining house and replace them with a $9 million police station that will increase the number of stations from five to six and, police said, relieve pressure on officers serving the populous West Side.

Much more on the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school

New Jersey Mom:

I’m one of you – except that I didn’t opt my children out of PARCC testing. But otherwise, I am. I am white, a progressive Democrat, and pay a lot of property taxes. We moved to our town because the schools lead New Jersey and the nation’s list of best schools. I’ve got kids in the public schools, which makes me an oddity amongst my neighbors. But, despite the warts, I believe in public schools. And yes, I do value teachers. I believe them to be well meaning, seeking to do their best on behalf of my children.

But they are not infallible. And it is my role as a parent to monitor their work with my children. I don’t always believe that they know what’s best. And truth be told, I often wonder about their mastery over the content that they teach. Many of our family’s dinnertime conversations have centered on correcting the day’s mistakes. For instance, my child’s third grade math teacher taught that the “product of three sixes” was 18 (3 x 6) versus the actual product of three sixes, i.e., 6 x 6 x 6. A teachable moment at home that night with our eight year old: “No one – not even your teacher – is always right. Question everything.”

Kendall Powell:

By the time Sophie Thuault-Restituito reached her twelfth year as a postdoctoral fellow, she had finally had enough. She had completed her first postdoc in London, then moved to New York University (NYU) in 2004 to start a second. Eight years and two laboratories later, she was still there and still effectively a postdoc, precariously dependent on outside grants to secure and pay for her position. Her research on Alzheimer’s disease was not making it into high-profile journals, so she was unable to compete for academic positions in the United States or Europe. She loved science and had immense experience, but with two young children at home, she knew she needed something more secure. “My motivation was gone. I was done with doing research,” she says.

So in 2013, Thuault-Restituito moved into a job as a research-laboratory operations manager at NYU, where she coordinates building renovations and fosters collaboration between labs. She enjoys the fact that her staff position has set hours, as well as better pay and benefits. But at the time of the move, she mourned the loss of a research career and she regrets the years wasted pursuing one. “I stayed five years more than I should have,” she says.

Thuault-Restituito is the face of a postdoctoral system that is broken. These highly skilled scientists are a major engine driving scientific research, yet they are often poorly rewarded and have no way to progress in academia. The number of postdocs in science has ballooned: in the United States alone, it jumped by 150% between 2000 and 2012. But the number of tenured and other full-time faculty positions has plateaued and, in some places, it is even shrinking (see Nature 472, 276–279; 2011). Many postdocs move on to fulfilling careers elsewhere, but those who want to continue in research can find themselves thwarted. They end up trapped as ‘permadocs’: doing multiple postdoc terms, staying in these positions for many years and, in a small but significant proportion, never leaving them. Of the more than 40,000 US postdocs in 2013, almost 4,000 had been so for more than 6 years (see ‘The postdoc pile-up’).

Peter Spence:

Many parents are willing to invest thousands of pounds in school fees, hoping to offer their children the best start in life. Even for those who don’t opt to send their children to private school, a good education can come at a cost.

This map illustrates where house prices have been bumped up by good local schools.
Each dot represents a school in England. The larger the dot, the greater the relative cost of homes around the school compared to the rest of the region. This premium indicates where good school could be driving up nearby house prices.

The colour of each dot represents how well pupils perform in exams. The darker the shade, the better the grades. Use the “visible layers” toggle to switch between views of schools by GCSE and A-level performance.

The data, compiled by Savills in its report The Education Equation, show that for many the “most cost efficient option is to tap into high performing state schools, without school fees to worry about”.

Fareed Zakaria:

If Americans are united in any conviction these days, it is that we urgently need to shift the country’s education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills. Every month, it seems, we hear about our children’s bad test scores in math and science — and about new initiatives from companies, universities or foundations to expand STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math) and deemphasize the humanities. From President Obama on down, public officials have cautioned against pursuing degrees like art history, which are seen as expensive luxuries in today’s world. Republicans want to go several steps further and defund these kinds of majors. “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?” asked Florida’s Gov. Rick Scott. “I don’t think so.” America’s last bipartisan cause is this: A liberal education is irrelevant, and technical training is the new path forward. It is the only way, we are told, to ensure that Americans survive in an age defined by technology and shaped by global competition. The stakes could not be higher.

This dismissal of broad-based learning, however, comes from a fundamental misreading of the facts — and puts America on a dangerously narrow path for the future. The United States has led the world in economic dynamism, innovation and entrepreneurship thanks to exactly the kind of teaching we are now told to defenestrate. A broad general education helps foster critical thinking and creativity. Exposure to a variety of fields produces synergy and cross fertilization. Yes, science and technology are crucial components of this education, but so are English and philosophy. When unveiling a new edition of the iPad, Steve Jobs explained that “it’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — that it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.”

Max Ehrenfreund:

Finland’s classrooms are very different from America’s — far more permissive, with less of an emphasis on academics. There are no standardized tests until high school, and children get 15 minutes of recess in between lessons — more than an hour of recess a day. “Play is important,” one Finnish teacher told the Smithsonian magazine. “We value play.”

Yet Finnish kids always get good grades on comparisons of student achievement between countries. Their average scores on the Program for International Student Assessment, a test that’s given to 15-year-olds in 65 countries, are among the highest in the developed world. As a result, critics of education reform in the United States often cite the Finnish example. It’s a stark contrast to America’s reliance on using test scores in public school teacher evaluations, or the strict, “no-excuses” model of discipline in charter schools that many have touted as improving academic results.

Now, Finnish schools are embracing an even more radical approach to teaching. One major initiative is to encourage teaching by topic instead of by subject. According to The Independent, instead of teaching geography and foreign language classes separately, teachers will ask kids to name countries on a map in a foreign language. Instead of separate lessons on history and economics, they’ll talk about the European Union.

Drew Magory:

I never took an AP course in high school. I’m pretty sure it was because I never qualified for it (I went straight B-minuses throughout my high school career), but it was also because I went to school back when taking AP courses wasn’t the dire necessity that it is for today’s students. According to this article, taking just one AP course now doubles your odds of getting a college degree; according to this other article, “Approximately 85 percent of selective colleges and universities reported that they looked at whether or not a student had taken an AP course to make their admissions decision.”

In other words, if you haven’t taken an AP class, you are fucked. Or, at the very least, you will feel as if you are inadequate, dumb, and doomed to a life of washing cheese off of fajita platters at the local Don Pablo’s. Students and parents alike know all this by now: They also know that doing well in an AP course gets you college credit (and I like that you can learn so much in high school that expensive colleges will be like, “Yeah, you don’t have to learn as much here”). I wonder if there are advanced placement courses WITHIN the AP infrastructure, so that Harvard can only admit kids who have taken AP AP AP AP calculus. I have children in the public school system, and I’m already a bit intimidated by all this potential AP jockeying. It lords over everything.

Alan Borsuk:

Some of the best schools in Milwaukee are independent charters, Ziebarth said, and he’s right. Later Wednesday, I got a news release from a reputable research organization known as CREDO at Stanford University, which found that students in independent charter schools in Milwaukee were making more progress overall than students in Milwaukee Public Schools.

Why aren’t there more green lights to create such schools? Ziebarth asked. Good question.

Then, in the afternoon, I got a call encouraging me to take an interest in a statement signed by the leaders of more than 30 government and nongovernment bodies involved in Milwaukee’s complex education scene. A lot of them aren’t known for cooperating with one another, and this was an encouraging example of working together, initiated by the Milwaukee Succeeds campaign.

Many of the signers have bigger fish to fry with the Legislature and state budget now. But they set that aside to support a relatively modest request for $250,000 in each of the next two years to increase tutoring in reading for children in all types of schools. One of the most shocking statistics about Milwaukee as a whole is that close to six out of seven third-graders do not read proficiently.

Maggie Ginsberg interviews Brandi Grayson:

Can you give an example of what you’ve described as “intent versus impact?”

The Behavior Education Plan that the [Madison Metropolitan] school district came up with. The impact is effed up, in so many words, and that’s because the voices that are most affected weren’t considered. It’s like standing outside of a situation and then coming in and telling people what they ought to do and should be doing, according to your experience and perspective, which is totally disconnected from the people you’re talking to and talking at. In order to come up with solutions that are effective, they have to come from the people who are living in it. When I first heard about this Behavior Education Plan, I immediately knew that it was going to affect our kids negatively. But people sitting on that board thought it was an amazing idea; we’ll stop suspensions, we’ll stop expulsions, we’ll fix the school-to-prison pipeline, which is all bullcrap, because now what’s happening is the impact; the school is putting all these children with emotional and behavioral issues in the same classroom. And because of the lawsuit with all the parents suing for advanced placement classes and resources not being added, they’ve taken all the introduction classes away. They can’t afford it. So then our students who may need general science or pre-algebra no longer have that. So then they take all these students who aren’t prepared for these classes and throw them in algebra, throw them in biology and all together in the same class. And you know it’s very intentional because if you have a population of two percent Blacks at a school of two thousand and all the Black kids are in the same class, that is not something that happens by random. And then you have kids like my daughter, who is prepared for school and can do well in algebra, but she’s distracted because she’s placed in a class with all these kids with IEP issues who, based on the Behavior Education Plan, cannot be removed from the classroom. So what does that do? It adds to the gap.

Speaking of education, you’ve mentioned the critical need to educate young Black kids on their own history.

Our children don’t know what’s happening to them in school, when they are interacting in these systems. Whether it’s the system of education, the justice system, the human services system, the system within their own families—that’s programming them to think they’re inferior. We have to educate our kids so they know what they’re dealing with. In Western history, we’re only taught that our relevance and our being started with slavery, but we know as we look back that that’s a lie. That we are filled with greatness and magnificence and if our children can connect the link between who they are and where they’ve come, then they can discover where they’re going. But with that disconnection, they feel hopeless. They feel despair. They feel like this is all life has to offer them and it’s their fault and there’s no way out. We have to begin to reprogram that narrative at kindergarten on up. We have to teach our children the importance of reading and knowledge and educating yourself and not depending on the education of the system because it’s already biased, based on the very nature of our culture.

Related: Brandi Grayson.

Talented and gifted lawsuit

English 10

High School Redesign

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results. This is the core issue, one that has simmered for decades despite Madison spending double the national average per student.

Ironically, the April, 2015 Madison schools tax increase referendum includes a plan to expand two of the least economically diverse schools:

Van Hise Elementary / Hamilton Middle

Problem: With enrollment numbers on the rise, this combination elementary/middle school exceeded capacity in 2013 and 2014. Because the building is designed for a smaller student enrollment, simply adding classroom space is not a solution.

Proposed Solution: Relocating the library to the center of the building and dividing it into elementary and middle school spaces will free up seven classroom-sized spaces currently used for library activities. Est. Cost: $3,151,730 – View Plan Details.

Bullitt County History:

This copy of the Eighth Grade Exam for Bullitt County Schools in 1912 was donated to the museum. We thought you might like to see what the test looked like a hundred years ago. Obviously it tested some things that were more relevant at that time than now, and it should not be used to compare student knowledge then and now.

Note that there are several typesetting mistakes on the test including a mistake in the spelling list. The word “eneeavor” should be “endeavor.” This version of the exam was probably a master version given out to the schools (note that the spelling words wouldn’t be written on a test.) The museum has been told that the exam was handed out in a scroll form (that is why the paper is long.) The typos would have been corrected simply by contacting the teachers and telling them to mark their copies accordingly, much like would be done today. And there might not be quite as many typos as you think; “Serbia” for example was indeed spelled “Servia” back then.

Bullitt County Schools were mostly one-room schools in those days, scattered around the rural county. Students came together at the county courthouse once or twice a year to take this “Common Exam.” It was apparently a big deal. The local newspaper urged students to do well, even urging seventh graders that it was not too early to start preparing. Some scholarships were provided to those who passed to go on to high school, which was also a big deal back then. In those days, high school was sometimes another county away and a rare thing for many farm children to be able to otherwise attend.

Economist:

THE most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation’s most prominent liberal scholars has joined the chorus.

Robert Putnam is a former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of “Bowling Alone” (2000), an influential work that lamented the decline of social capital in America. In his new book, “Our Kids”, he describes the growing gulf between how the rich and the poor raise their children. Anyone who has read “Coming Apart” by Charles Murray will be familiar with the trend, but Mr Putnam adds striking detail and some excellent graphs (pictured). This is a thoughtful and persuasive book.

Among the educated elite the traditional family is thriving: fewer than 10% of births to female college graduates are outside marriage—a figure that is barely higher than it was in 1970. In 2007 among women with just a high-school education, by contrast, 65% of births were non-marital. Race makes a difference: only 2% of births to white college graduates are out-of-wedlock, compared with 80% among African-Americans with no more than a high-school education, but neither of these figures has changed much since the 1970s. However, the non-marital birth proportion among high-school-educated whites has quadrupled, to 50%, and the same figure for college-educated blacks has fallen by a third, to 25%. Thus the class divide is growing even as the racial gap is shrinking.

Meanwhile, the Madison School Board & District administration plan to expand Van Hise and Hamilton schools via the April, 2015 referendum.

Hamilton and Van Hise are among Madison’s least diverse schools…..

Susan Engel:

In the past few years, parents, teachers, and policy makers have furiously debated whether standardized tests should be used to promote or hold back children, fire teachers, and withhold funds from schools. The debate has focused for the most part on whether the tests are being used in unfair ways. But almost no one has publicly questioned a fundamental assumption — that the tests measure something meaningful or predict something significant beyond themselves.

I have reviewed more than 300 studies of K–12 academic tests. What I have discovered is startling. Most tests used to evaluate students, teachers, and school districts predict almost nothing except the likelihood of achieving similar scores on subsequent tests. I have found virtually no research demonstrating a relationship between those tests and measures of thinking or life outcomes.

Erin Richards

Eight years ago, a study found Wisconsin had one of the lowest bars in the country for rating students proficient in reading and math on the state standardized test.

That means children here looked more academically accomplished than they probably really were — something the state aimed to remedy by raising the scores needed for students to attain rankings of advanced, proficient or basic on the annual state test.

That effort has been applauded by a new study noting that Wisconsin aggressively tightened its state test proficiency standards by 2013, ranking it second in the nation behind New York for the rigor of its expectations.

This spring, Wisconsin is administering a new state test tied to the Common Core State Standards — 17 other states are administering the same test — which will have a common bar for proficiency. Wisconsin raised the bar on its old state test largely to prepare everyone for the switch to the tougher new test.

That’s partly what led Harvard University researchers Paul E. Peterson and Matthew Ackerman to suggest that the Common Core standards are responsible for states raising the bar for proficiency on their individual state tests between 2011 and 2013.

Wisconsin adopted the standards in 2010, and joined one of two consortia of other states committed to administering tougher, common tests tied to the new grade-level expectations in English and math.

The study found Wisconsin’s new bar for proficiency to be as strong or stronger than the bar used by a respected national standardized exam.

More: States Raise Proficiency Standards:

Which states changed the most? For the first time since this survey of state standards has been undertaken, no fewer than nine states receive a grade of “A,” indicating they have set a proficiency bar that is roughly comparable to that set by NAEP. Joining Massachusetts and Tennessee, the only two states given that top grade in 2011, are Kentucky, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Wisconsin. Five of these states (Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) have even set some standards that exceed those of NAEP. Six states (Kentucky, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah, Wisconsin, and Michigan) should be commended for improving by more than two letter grades between 2011 and 2013. All of these states have adopted CCSS. Meanwhile, only New Hampshire’s standards have dropped by a full letter grade.

CCSS may be driving these changes. One indication that this may be the case is that the six states that are not implementing CCSS for reading or math all continue to set low proficiency standards. Their grades: Virginia, C+; Nebraska, C; Indiana, C-; Texas, C-; Alaska, D+; and Oklahoma, D.

Let’s hope that this move to more rigor continues.

Background: Wisconsin’s low bar WKCE expedition.