Ryan Devereaux, Spencer Woodman:

An internal handbook obtained by The Intercept provides a rare view into the extensive asset seizure operations of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, an office that trains its agents to meticulously appraise the value of property before taking it.

HSI’s 71-page “Asset Forfeiture Handbook,” dated June 30, 2010, underscores the role seizures play in “helping to fund future law enforcement actions” and covering costs “that HSI would otherwise be unable to fund.” It thus offers an unprecedented window into ICE’s wide-ranging asset forfeiture operations and the premium the agency places on seizing valuable property. Forfeiture proceeds can bolster ICE’s partnerships with local police departments, which are now the subject of heightened debate given the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration agenda.

Matt Welch:

So the “Unsafe Space” campus speaking tour sponsored by Spiked (and hosted at least once so far in an emergency backup way by Reason) continues to generate interesting collisions between libertarian commentators and the angry campus progressives who seek to shout them down. One recent incident, while not coming close to a Berkeley-style riot, or a “Cocks Not Glocks” dildo-waving protest of gun-right speaker Katie Pavlich, or even the latest Charles Murray kerfuffle, nonetheless caught my attention because it involved old pal Kmele Foster, and my favorite piece of writing by Martin Luther King.

Foster (see video below) had just sat through a series of emotional audience harangues defending identity politics and speech-sensitivity as necessary pushbacks against a racist power structure, when he attempted to make a case familiar to Reason readers—that free-speech protections are crucial precisely for minority populations’ struggles against the majority:

Will Flanders and Natalie Goodnow:

Much has been made in recent years about the rate of suspensions and expulsions across the country and the role that student race ostensibly plays in them. A 2016 U.S. Department of Education study showed that African American students were 3.8 times more likely than white students to be suspended. But other scholars claim that racial disparities in suspensions are emblematic of other problems, such as poverty (Eden, 2017; Kersten 2017). In an unprecedented, controversial manner, the Obama Administration took action to ensure that race was not a factor in school suspension decisions. Through the Supportive School Discipline Initiative and a “Dear Colleague memo,” the U.S. Justice Department and Education Department under the Obama Administration threatened public school districts with legal penalties in order to change their disciplinary policies. The letter told schools that unlawful discrimination can occur if it has a disproportionate effect on minority students and the school cannot justify the difference. None of these actions went through the traditional rulemaking, regulatory process – or were implemented into law though Congress. School districts changed disciplinary policies to comply. Since 2011-2012, according to the Manhattan Institute, over 50 of the largest school districts and 27 states changed their laws or policies relating to school discipline. These changes resulted in fewer suspensions and, as highlighted by Wisconsin talk radio show host Dan O’Donnell, made the classroom less safe. As a result, the disciplinary policy changes were unpopular; a 2015 EdNext poll found that a majority of the public – and nearly 60% of teachers – disapproved of the Obama Administration’s actions. Wisconsin was not immune to the national trend. This paper seeks to build on previous studies by providing the most comprehensive analysis, to date, of how the Obama Administration’s disciplinary policy changes have impacted Wisconsin public schools. We provide the historical context for changes in suspension policy before conducting extensive analyses of data on suspensions in Wisconsin since the 2007-08 school year. Some of our findings include:

Jill Tucker:

Now, he’s Mr. Wilson the music teacher. Instead of playing Puccini’s “La Bohème” at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, the 58-year-old maestro is working up to 14 hours a day coaxing “Jingle Bells” out of beginners and pouring much of his life savings into bringing music back to a school where 95 percent of students live in poverty. If he can take kids who can’t play a note and teach them a song, Wilson believes, they will not just feel successful, but see new possibilities everywhere in their lives.

It is his fourth year of teaching at DeJean, of testing that belief. And, though he doesn’t know it yet, it also will be his last.

So he stands on the platform, this unconventional man with disheveled hair and bloodshot eyes, a black apron on his waist to hold pens, bathroom passes and good-behavior raffle tickets, and waits for his students to quiet down. Only when the chatter finally abates by an almost imperceptible decibel does he begin to count: One and two and three and …

The students play. The notes aren’t perfect. A trumpet is flat, and a trombone is off by an octave. But the song is unmistakable: The itsy bitsy spider is climbing up the water spout.

When the music stops. Wilson jumps off the stage, then leaps again, spinning in a circle, his glasses bouncing. His five band classes, mostly students who picked up an instrument for the first time five weeks earlier, have played a song together.

biztimes:

According to a story posted on BizTimes.com, GPS Education Partners has partnered with local manufacturers to provide high school juniors and seniors with work-based education programs, in which students take courses on-site at the businesses, called “education centers,” and apply those lessons on the manufacturing floor. The non-profit is based in Brookfield, Wis., and launched in 2000.

The organization has grown from just 5 students at Waukesha, Wis.-based Generac Power Systems Inc. in its initial year to now having served 500 students, in partnership with 100 businesses.

Now, as worker shortages persist and a growing number of schools look to bolster their career and technical education offerings, GPS is expanding its reach with a new service model.

The organization is beginning to provide consulting services to schools as they launch their own apprenticeship education programs — a hybrid of the traditional GPS education center model.

Mike Antonucci:

he Clark County Education Association, representing 10,000 teachers who work for the Las Vegas schools, filed a lawsuit earlier this month against its parent affiliate, the Nevada State Education Association, alleging a breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract.
Soon after, NSEA and the National Education Association filed a countersuit also charging of breach of contract, as well as unjust enrichment and fraud.
The dueling lawsuits are just the latest in a long series of conflicts between NSEA and its locals, particularly Clark County, whose membership comprises almost half of NSEA’s total. I questioned the outlook for the Nevada union’s survival last March, and now a crisis appears imminent.
The Clark County lawsuit details the timeline of its deteriorating relationship with NSEA and lays out what the local union wants.

Patrick Kiger::

A patient fills in a questionnaire and sleep diary before undergoing a polysomnography at a sleep center in Switzerland. What are some biasess scientists need to be aware of when conducting studies? AMELIE-BENOIST /BSIP/Getty Images

Arrhythmia, an irregular rhythm of the heart, is common during and soon after a heart attack and can lead to early death. That’s why when anti-arrhythmia drugs became available in the early 1980s, they seemed like a major life-saving breakthrough [source: Freedman].

The problem, though, was that although small-scale trials showed that the drugs stopped arrhythmia, the drugs didn’t actually save lives. Instead, as larger-scale studies showed, patients who received such treatments were one-third less likely to survive. Researchers had focused on stopping arrhythmia as a measure of effectiveness rather than on the problem that they were trying to solve, which was preventing deaths [sources: Freedman, Hampton].

Colleen Flaherty:

Arif A. Mamun, PhD, Erik W. Carter, PhD, Thomas M. Fraker, PhD, …

To better understand how early work experience shapes subsequent employment outcomes for young people (ages 18 to 20) with disabilities, we analyzed longitudinal data from the Youth Transition Demonstration (YTD) evaluation to test whether the employment experiences of 1,053 youth during the initial year after entry affected their employment during the third year after entry. To derive causal estimates, we used a dynamic-panel estimation model to account for time-invariant unobserved individual characteristics that may be correlated with youth’s self-selection into both early and later employment. We also controlled for other socioeconomic and health factors that may affect later employment. We found that early work experience increases the probability of being employed 2 years later by 17 percentage points. This estimate is an important advancement over the correlational approaches that characterize the current literature and provides stronger evidence that early work experience is a key determinant of subsequent labor market success.

Victor Tan Chen:

Over the last several decades, the proportion of Americans who get married has greatly diminished—a development known as well to those who lament marriage’s decline as those who take issue with it as an institution. But a development that’s much newer is that the demographic now leading the shift away from tradition is Americans without college degrees—who just a few decades ago were much more likely to be married by the age of 30 than college graduates were.

Today, though, just over half of women in their early 40s with a high-school degree or less education are married, compared to three-quarters of women with a bachelor’s degree; in the 1970s, there was barely a difference. The marriage gap for men has changed less over the years, but there the trend lines have flipped too: Twenty-five percent of men with high-school degrees or less education have never married, compared to 23 percent of men with bachelor’s degrees and 14 percent of those with advanced degrees. Meanwhile, divorce rates have continued to rise among the less educated, while staying more or less steady for college graduates in recent decades.

The divide in the timing of childbirth is even starker. Fewer than one in 10 mothers with a bachelor’s degree are unmarried at the time of their child’s birth, compared to six out of 10 mothers with a high-school degree. The share of such births has risen dramatically in recent decades among less educated mothers, even as it has barely budged for those who finished college. (There are noticeable differences between races, but among those with less education, out-of-wedlock births have become much more common among white and nonwhite people alike.)

Tim Harford:

But given the huge investment this involved, they were often disappointed with the savings. Until about 1910, plenty of entrepreneurs looked at the new electrical drive system and opted for good old-fashioned steam.
 
 Why? Because to take advantage of electricity, factory owners had to think in a very different way. They could, of course, use an electric motor in the same way as they used steam engines. It would slot right into their old systems.
 
 But electric motors could do much more. Electricity allowed power to be delivered exactly where and when it was needed.
 
 Small steam engines were hopelessly inefficient but small electric motors worked just fine. So a factory could contain several smaller motors, each driving a small drive shaft.
 
 As the technology developed, every workbench could have its own machine tool with its own little electric motor.
 
 Power wasn’t transmitted through a single, massive spinning drive shaft but through wires.
 
 A factory powered by steam needed to be sturdy enough to carry huge steel drive shafts. One powered by electricity could be light and airy.
 
 Steam-powered factories had to be arranged on the logic of the driveshaft. Electricity meant you could organise factories on the logic of a production line.
 
 More efficient
 
 Old factories were dark and dense, packed around the shafts. New factories could spread out, with wings and windows allowing natural light and air.
 
 In the old factories, the steam engine set the pace. In the new factories, workers could do so.

Doyin Oyeniyi:

Since the New York Times‘ report, there have been other articles exploring how wealth affects the admissions process more than affirmative action. Even in Fisher’s suit against UT Austin, she was unable to support her claims of being racially discriminated against in the admissions process. In fact, in a ProPublica report, Nikole Hannah-Jones notes that though there were students with lower test scores and grades than Fisher admitted into UT, most of them—42 applicants—were white. Only five were black or Latino. The majority of UT Austin’s admissions is made up of students who graduated in the top 7 percent (it was originally the top 10 percent and most recently the top 8 percent) of Texas high schools. The remaining students are admitted using a holistic process, which does include race, but only as “a factor of a factor of a factor,” rather than as an extra point or to fulfill any racial quota. Still, Fisher believed that race should not have been any sort of factor in UT’s admissions process.

What opponents of affirmative action tend to miss is why affirmative action exists in the first place. As Richard Reddick, an associate professor in Educational Administration, explained after the Fisher v. UT Austin decision, affirmative action is in place to account for inequalities in access to resources and education that still exist to this day:

John McGinnis:

oogle and our elite universities appear to inhabit the same ideological bubble and intone the same diversity mantras. And that is not surprising, because almost everyone at Google is a product of the modern university and those at its HR department the likely product of its more PC inflected half—the humanities or soft social sciences. And Google must live within the world of mainstream media and government regulation, and these two sectors are also dominated by elite university graduates of the last quarter century.

But nevertheless the institutions and their employees operate under different constraints. Google is the elite university without tenure and the elite university is Google without market discipline. You might think that tenure is the more important obstacle to enforcing an orthodoxy like modern diversity policy. After all, a professor at an elite university would not be fired for making the largely accurate factual claims about the average differences in temperament between women and men that the Googler did in the memo that got him sacked. Nor would she be let go for arguing that it would be better to judge people as individuals and hire on merit alo

Alan Borsuk:

Every school on the south side is in fear of what Augustine Prep will mean, a leader of a different school told me recently. Some are at least expressing good wishes. Some are not, especially privately.

The biggest thing to watch over the next several years will be enrollment at a lot of the schools on the south side. Augustine, which is a private, Christian school where 100% of students will receive public voucher money, will debut with about 660 students in early elementary grades, sixth grade and ninth grade, said Ramirez and the school’s superintendent, Alfonso Carmona.

The plan is that it will fill out, grade by grade, to become a K-12, with 1,700 students. The intention is to build a second building immediately to the east and for enrollment to grow to 3,000 by a few years from now. If that comes to pass, Augustine most likely would be the largest school operation in Milwaukee, outside of MPS.

The population on Milwaukee’s south side and the population of Hispanics, the dominant portion of the Augustine enrollment, are growing. But it’s hard to envision so many kids going to Augustine without other schools losing enrollment.

St. Augustine Preparatory Academy.

Dave Gershgorn:

“As a human you have senses, you have your eyes, you have your ears, and sometimes you have the sense of touch. You are feeling the road,” Nvidia self-driving car head Danny Shapiro told Business Insider. “So those are your inputs and then those senses feed into your brain and your brain makes a decision on how to control your feet and your hands in terms of braking and pressing the gas and steering. So on an autonomous car you have to replace those senses.”
 
 Both pursuits have their challenges. John Deere doesn’t need to contend with hundreds of other vehicles on its path, but a collision with other equipment or a misadjusted piece of equipment could mean disaster for an entire season. Cars and trucks carry precious cargo—humans—but benefit from signs, lines, and established infrastructure to help guide cars on the correct paths.
 
 A vexing problem that inhibits John Deere and self-driving carmakers from an easy path to autonomy is dust and other weather conditions. Not only does weather change how the vehicle should act in its environment, but it also reduces the accuracy of the sensors, Leibfried said. He says the solution might come in redundancy—more sensors that could be used as backup, or to infer information not directly able to be seen.
 

Amber Walker:

In a 5-2 decision on Monday, the Madison School Board voted to postpone the charter approval of Isthmus Montessori Academy.

The board wanted more clarity around the school’s proposed attendance area, financial and academic accountability standards at their three-year mark, and language in the proposal that asks for waivers that apply to early release and lesson planning time promised to all Madison Metropolitan School District teachers via the employee handbook.

IMA has until Aug. 21 to finish negotiations with the district to iron out the details. The board is expected to take up the vote again at its next regular meeting on Aug. 28.

If the board approves the charter, IMA, which is currently a private school, would cease operation and reopen as Isthmus Montessori Academy Charter School in the fall of 2018 serving students in 4K through ninth grade.

IMACS would be a free public charter school, operating under the authority of the Madison School Board.

Some history on (aborted) independent charter schools in Madison, including:

the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School and

the Studio School.

2009: “An emphasis on adult employment“.

Unfortunately, Madison continues to support a non diverse K-12 Governance model, this despite spending far more per student than most districts and tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

Related: an Independent (!) Charter School RFP for Madison or Milwaukee.

Steve Rayson:

It is difficult to overstate the importance of headlines. A good headline can entice and engage your audience to click, to read, and to share your content. In many cases headlines are the thing that is shared rather than the article. So you knew that. But do you know what makes an engaging headline?
 
 To help answer this question we analyzed 100 million article headlines. We have set out below our findings from the research including the:
 
 Headline phrases that drive most engagement on Facebook
 
 Worst performing headline phrases on Facebook
 
 Most effective phrases that start or end headlines
 
 Optimum number of words and characters to use in a headline
 
 Most impactful numbers to use in headlines
 
 Most engaging Twitter headline phrases
 
 Differences between B2C and B2B headlines
 
 While there is no magic formula for creating a viral or popular headline, there are many lessons we can learn to improve our content engagement. We shared our findings with a number of content experts to reflect on the implications of the research for writers. We have included their expert thoughts and advice at the end of this post. We have also included a section on how you can analyze headlines yourself using BuzzSumo.

Katherine Gregg

Gov. Gina Raimondo’s veto of a bill to extend expired municipal and teacher contracts indefinitely has sparked an override campaign by teachers unions, ending whatever temporary peace she may have forged with them.

“I think that the classified ad is out: ‘Real Democrat wanted for governor of Rhode Island,”’ Robert Walsh, executive director of the National Education Association Rhode Island, said Thursday.

Alleging that Raimondo told him face-to-face, in a private meeting, that she intended to veto the contract-extension bill because her “donors don’t like it,” Walsh said his union feels obligated to actively recruit a candidate to run against Raimondo in a 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Walsh named several up-and-coming Democrats, suggesting they may have awakened on Thursday morning to the realization they don’t have to wait until 2022 for their next big political move.

“I think there are 10,000 scenarios out there where people of ambition are now looking at timing and saying this may be their time, and I don’t think that was the case three months ago,” he said.

Raimondo’s spokesman David Ortiz responded: “This isn’t a partisan issue.”

“The governor deeply respects the important role that organized labor plays in our shared efforts to grow the economy and provide opportunity for every Rhode Islander and she firmly supports collective bargaining,” he said.

But “the governor is most urgently concerned with protecting Rhode Island’s taxpayers. Mayors, town managers and school leaders from every corner of Rhode Island — most of them Democrats — urged the governor to veto this legislation.”

Karl Herchenroeder::

Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) argued Wednesday that America should push receptive young people toward careers in manufacturing, an industry severely rattled by the Great Recession that represents about 9 percent of the workforce.

“We have to stop telling every young person that they’re going to go to college,” Cicilline said during a discussion at the Brookings Institution that touched on the industry’s decline in jobs and surging production.

President Trump’s appeal to the manufacturing sector during his presidential campaign was a deciding factor in the 2016 election, particularly in the Midwest, where discouraged workers continue to struggle in finding secure employment.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing unemployment was reported at 4.6 percent in January 2007, it climbed to 10.9 percent in January 2009 and hit a 10-year high at 13 percent in January 2010.

Bureau records also show that there were 17.5 million employed in manufacturing in 1987, but today there are only 12.4 million. Prior to the recession, in 2007, the industry counted 14 million workers. Though many experts are skeptical that those millions of jobs are ever coming back, due to automation and globalization, it’s anticipated that over the next decade the U.S. will be in need of 3.5 million manufacturing jobs, partly because of the Baby Boomer generation leaving the workforce. According to the National Association of Manufacturers, about 2 million of those jobs will go unfilled because of a skills gap.

James Wollack
and Michael Fish:

Major Findings

• CORE-Plus students performed significantly less well on math placement test and ACT-M than did traditional students
• Change in performance was observed immediately after switch
• Score trends throughout CORE-Plus years actually decreased slightly

  Inconsistent with a teacher learning-curve hypothesis

• CORE-AP students fared much better, but not as well as the traditional-AP students

  Both sample sizes were low

2012: “An increasing number of freshmen in the UW System need remedial math when they start college, according to UW officials.”

2014: “

The UW’s freshman math remediation rate of 21% is below the national average of 25% to 35%, according to Cross.

UW Regent Jose Vasquez bristled at the UW System taking on “a problem that is really our cohort’s problem,” referring to K-12. “The problem was not created by the university and I’m not convinced we can solve it within the university.”

He advocated earlier intervention in high school.

”

Related: Math Forum audio/video.

Discovery Math

Connected Math

Singapore Math

Core Plus

and: Foundations of Reading Results (Wisconsin Education Schools), or MTEL arrives.

Kelsey Gee:

Even William Shakespeare could have benefited from an M.B.A.—or so the nation’s oldest business school would like young poets to think.

University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business is set to launch a new program today for undergraduates studying liberal arts, science and nursing at the Ivy League institution and looking to gain early admission to its prestigious graduate business school.

Investment banker Ken Moelis and his wife, Julie Taffet Moelis, gave a $10 million gift to their alma mater to create the program, which is open to Penn seniors aiming to work for up to four years after graduation before returning to campus to study management.

Katie Avis-Riordan:

As we get older, it’s easy for our brains to get rusty. That’s why we want to know how to keep them healthy and functioning at their best capacity.

So, in honour of World Thinking Day, we asked SharpBrains – an independent market research firm tracking applied brain science – to share some top tips for keeping our minds sharp and active.

1. Get clued up

Learn about your brain and how it functions. Just having a basic understanding will enable you to fully appreciate the ever-developing nature of the brain and its billions of neurons and synapses.

Some interesting facts include, the human brain is the largest brain of all vertebrates, relative to body size, Live Science states, and makes up about 2% of body weight. “The cerebrum makes up 85% of the brain’s weight. It contains about 86 billion nerve cells (neurons) — the ‘grey matter’. It contains billions of nerve fibers (axons and dendrites) — the ‘white matter’. These neurons are connected by trillions of connections, or synapses.”

George Dvorsky:

Calculators are awesome, but they’re not always handy. More to the point, no one wants to be seen reaching for the calculator on their mobile phone when it’s time to figure out a 15 percent gratuity. Here are ten tips to help you crunch numbers in your head.

Mental math isn’t as difficult as it might sound, and you may be surprised at how easy it is to make seemingly impossible calculations using nothing but your beautiful brain. You just need to remember a few simple rules.

Add and Subtract From Left to Right

Remember how you were taught in school to add and subtract numbers from right to left (don’t forget to carry the one!)? That’s all fine and well when doing math with pencil and paper, but when performing mental math it’s better to do it moving from left to right. Switching the order so that you start with the largest values makes it a bit more intuitive and easier to figure out. So when adding 58 to 26, start with the first column and calculate 50+20=70, then 8+6=14, which added together is 84. Easy, peasy.

Kathleen McKiernan:

In 2011, 153 city teachers were paid $100,000 or more, representing nearly 4 percent of the 4,264 teachers on the payroll, according to Sullivan.

Six-figure earners jumped to 1,419 last year, representing 32 percent of the 4,367 teachers on the books — with city payroll data showing 265 more topped $100,000 due to arbitration settlements, stipends and extended learning time pay.

The rise in teacher salaries comes as the city and the Boston Teachers Union continue to negotiate a new deal that expired last summer. The proposed $1.06 billion school budget for next year includes $20 million extra to cover union negotiations.

The district also carries a costly — up to $15 million a year — “excess pool” of tenured teachers with no classroom to report to. An extra $4,500 per teacher was paid out to 600 educators last year to extend the school day at some locations.

“I think the city and the union have to be mindful of the fact that the budget for the school department has to be affordable to the city,” Sullivan said. “It is a public policy consideration to find ways not to have excessive growth. We’re paying so much more than 10 years ago for the school department and that is not attributable to more teachers.”

Donald J. Boudreaux

In an article published recently in the Atlantic, “The Curse of Econ 101,” University of Connecticut law professor James Kwak argues against what he assumes to be the content, thrust, and effect of the basic principles course, Economics 101.

He thinks it’s too simplistic. And he’s sure that in its simplicity, it masks the complexities that must be accounted for when passing judgment on economic reality and especially on government policies.

According to Kwak, over the past few decades Econ 101 has devolved into “economism,” which he describes as “the belief that basic economics lessons can explain all social phenomena—that people, companies, and markets behave according to the abstract, two-dimensional illustrations of an Economics 101 textbook.” The two-dimensional illustrations to which Kwak refers are supply-and-demand graphs.

Wang Lianzhang:

After spending more than 10 years away from his hometown of Luokan, in the southwestern province of Yunnan, a 42-year-old man was forced by local authorities to undergo a vasectomy upon returning for the lunar new year holiday. He was taken away by family planning officials on Feb. 8, and the operation was concluded the next day.

The fecund fugitive, surnamed Hu, was reprimanded for having four children: Already the father of two sons and one daughter, he divorced his first wife, married another woman, and had a fourth child. Zhenxiong County authorities determined that Hu had violated the two-child policy and would undergo a vasectomy as punishment.

Stephen Chen:

Drug resistant bacteria can be found easily in China’s poultry production chain – from hatcheries to supermarkets – according to recent research by scientists from China, the US and Europe, underscoring the need for Beijing to control the use of antibiotics.

Superbugs are bacteria that are resistant to antibiotic drugs. A British government report last year estimated that antibiotic resistance would kill 10 million people yearly around the globe by 2050, more than cancer.

But the new study suggests a grimmer picture.

Gabriel Weinberg:

At DuckDuckGo, our vision is to raise the standard of trust online, and in service of that vision, our mission is to be the world’s most trusted search engine.

We are proud to say that at the end of last year, we surpassed a cumulative count of 10 billion anonymous searches served, with over 4 billion in 2016! We are growing faster than ever with our first 14M day on Jan 10, 2017.

People are actively seeking out ways to reduce their digital footprint online. For example, a Pew Research study reported “40% think that their search engine provider shouldn’t retain information about their activity.”

Moglen’s Snowden and the future is worth reading.

Carl Straumsheim

The Georgia Institute of Technology will this fall offer an online master’s degree program in analytics for less than $10,000, a new investment in the institute’s model for low-cost, online graduate education.

The interdisciplinary program, called OMS Analytics, follows the blueprint the institute created with its online master’s degree program in computer science, known as OMSCS, which launched in 2014 and has grown to about 4,000 students. Last year, Georgia Tech announced plans to expand the model into new fields.

Since offering the program online greatly increases the number of students Georgia Tech can enroll, the institute will charge students a fraction of the cost of the residential program to study the same curriculum online. The 36-credit-hour program, split into 10 courses and a semester-long analytics capstone project, will cost in- and out-of-state students “less than $10,000,” the institute said. Georgia residents and out-of-state students pay about $36,000 and $49,000, respectively, for the yearlong residential program.

“Analytics is now a subject that touches practically every field and every problem that we face,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at Georgia Tech. “

Deborah Jones Merritt:

Poor employment outcomes have plagued law school graduates for several years. Legal scholars have debated whether these outcomes stem from macroeconomic cycles or from fundamental changes in the market for legal services. This Article examines that question empirically, using a database of employment outcomes for more than 1,200 lawyers who received their JDs in 2010. The analysis offers strong evidence of structural shifts in the legal market. Job outcomes have improved only marginally for the Class of 2010, those outcomes contrast sharply with results for earlier classes, and law firm jobs have dropped markedly. In addition to discussing these results, the Article examines correlations between job outcomes and gender, law school prestige, and geography. In a concluding section, it offers four predictions about the future of the legal market and the economics of legal education.

Cory Koedel and Morgan Polikoff, via a kind Dan Dempsey email:

Textbooks are one of the most widely used educational inputs, but remarkably little is known about their effects on student learning. This report uses data collected from elementary schools in California to estimate the impacts of mathematics textbook choices on student achievement. We study four of the most popular books in the state from 2008-2013 and find that one—Houghton Mifflin California Math—consistently outperforms the other three. The superior performance of California Math persists up to four years after adoption and shows up in grades 3, 4, and 5.

The textbook impacts we identify are educationally meaningful and come at an extremely low cost. With regard to cost, textbooks are relatively inexpensive and tend to be similarly priced. The implication is that the marginal cost of choosing a more effective textbook over a less effective alternative is essentially zero. In terms of achievement impacts, our findings suggest non-trivial gains in student achievement are attainable simply by choosing more effective curriculum materials. The effect sizes we document are on par with what one could expect from a hypothetical policy that substantially increases the quality of the teaching workforce. But whereas there is much uncertainty about whether commensurate increases in teacher quality are attainable, and how they might be attained—at least in the near term—choosing a more effective textbook is a seemingly straightforward policy option for raising student achievement.

A critical factor limiting the capacity of school administrators to choose more effective textbooks is that there is virtually no evidence on how different textbooks affect student achievement. The fundamental problem limiting the development of an evidence base is that very few states track school and district textbook adoptions. This point bears repeating: most states do not know which curriculum materials are being used in which schools and districts. Without these data, it is not possible to perform evaluations of textbook efficacy. Thus, in most states, decisionmakers who wish to incorporate into their adoption decisions evidence on how textbooks affect student achievement are simply out of luck.

…..

Our work makes several important contributions. First, we have assembled a dataset of textbook adoptions in California, the largest U.S. state with the greatest number of schools. We have received funding to continue collecting these data moving forward. We will continue to analyze the data and go on to study other subjects and other grades. We also plan to make the data available to interested researchers so that others can pursue new lines of inquiry. There are many questions in this area of great import that do not have to do with impacts on student achievement—
for instance, is there equitable access to current curriculum materials? How do charter and traditional public schools differ in their adoption patterns? We hope these newly available data can spawn a new wave of data-driven research on textbook adoptions and their effects. The current research literature is sorely lacking in quantitative analyses of textbooks in schools.

Second, our work again demonstrates a method (previously demonstrated by Bhatt, Koedel, and Lehmannxiv) that can be applied in other states, grades, and subjects. We believe at this point that the method is suf ciently well developed that it can be widely applied. By doing this—studying textbook effects across multiple settings—we can begin to develop a better understanding of what is working, where, and for whom. In addition to California, we have collected data on textbook adoptions in Texas, Illinois, New York, and Florida. Whether the data we have are suf ciently complete to allow this kind of investigation in each setting is unclear, but we will try.

PDF Report link.

Related: Math Forum audio/video

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Madison’s 2009 (!) Math Task Force

21% OF UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SYSTEM FRESHMAN REQUIRE REMEDIAL MATH

DEJA VU: REPORT OF THE 1965 MADISON SCHOOL DISTRICT MATH 9 TEXTBOOK COMMITTEE.

Alexandra Frean:

Uber’s decision this week to start releasing its traffic data from dozens of cities worldwide is a reminder that information can be as important to digital companies in shaping markets and creating value as the software and hardware used to access their services.
 
 Uber says that sharing average travel times gleaned from millions of trips will produce a public benefit. We can safely assume it is also acting for its own benefit. Not only is Uber probably hoping to buy loyalty from the city authorities with which it frequently clashes, it may also be seeking to gain a foothold in a key area of its business model presently outside its control: urban planning and traffic management.

Robert Kuehn:

Under ABA Accreditation Standard 301, law schools have two educational objectives: prepare their students “for admission to the bar and for effective, ethical, and responsible participation as members of the legal profession.” There has been much concern lately over declining bar passage rates, focusing attention on whether some schools are admitting students who may not be capable of passing the bar exam and whether a school’s program of legal education adequately prepares its graduates for the exam.

In focusing on the bar exam, it’s important not to lose sight of legal education’s primary duty of ensuring that law school prepares students for entry into the legal profession and a successful career. If studies of practicing lawyers and recent law graduates matter, it is clear that law schools are failing, even worse than in preparation for bar admission, to adequately prepare their students for legal practice.

A 2012 study by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) analyzed the job activities of newly-licensed lawyers to determine which knowledge domains and professional skills and abilities are most significant to their job. Acquisition of professional skills and abilities were deemed significantly more important to newly-licensed lawyers than legal knowledge — 25 skills and abilities were deemed more important than the highest rated knowledge domain. The percentages of lawyers using these 25 skills in their work (all rated between 89% to 100%) also were all greater than the percentage using the highest rated knowledge domain (86%). Yet these skills and abilities generally are not developed in traditional doctrinal law classes but in the experiential and first-year legal writing courses that, under the ABA standards, need only account for ten percent of a student’s legal education.

Georg Dyson:

In 1916, social theorist Thorstein Veblen called for the post-war institution of “academic houses of refuge… where teachers and students of all nationalities, including Americans with the rest, may pursue their chosen work.” In 1923, Oswald Veblen contacted Simon Flexner, who suggested “you might speak with my brother, Mr. Abraham Flexner,” thus bringing in Louis Bamberger and Carrie Fuld, whose fortunes had been launched selling distressed merchandise out of a Newark storefront in 1892. In this public lecture, George Dyson, Director’s Visitor (2002–03), explores how as a flood of distressed intellectuals began fleeing Europe, the Veblens, the Flexners, and the Bambergers opened a department store for the freedom of ideas.

Jane Foster:

As a scientist, I often find myself chatting with friends and neighbors about the latest advances in neuroscience. In the past few years I have found more and more people asking about microbiota—the microorganisms that typically inhabit a bodily organ. In the last 10 years, I’ve been one of many neuroscientists advancing new ideas about how microbiota in the gut affects brain function. The media has taken notice as well. Recent stories on the gut-brain axis—among the most exciting new frontiers in neuroscience—include “Some of My Best Friends Are Germs” in the New York Times Magazine and “Gut Microbes Contribute to Mysterious Malnutrition” in National Geographic. In 2012, the editors of Science thought the research important enough to devote a special issue to the topic.

Why is the issue so fascinating? For one thing, it’s heightened consciousness of how diet and nutrition impact our health. For another, it’s sheer numbers. Our brains contain billions of neurons, but we less often talk about the fact that trillions of “good” bacteria are alive and well in our intestinal tracts. Remarkably, these naturally occurring, ever-present commensal bacteria may be instrumental in how our brain develops, how we behave, react to stress, and respond to treatment for depression and anxiety.

Colleen Flaherty

Faculty members in English at Ohio State University say 18 non-tenure-track lecturer jobs have been saved, at least for this year. The university maintains that their jobs were never at risk. Faculty members said earlier this week that Ohio State had been struggling to come up with approximately $500,000 to fulfill the 18 contracts for first-year writing instructors, which extend through summer. They organized against midyear cuts on social media and in a stock letter to Bruce McPheron, provost. Some traced the funding issue to the university’s conversion from quarters to semesters, but were unsure why it became an urgent problem now, several years after the change and well into the academic year.

Faculty members said they were told Monday that their contracts would be honored, but the university said it was always its intention to fulfill them and attributed concerns to miscommunication. Benjamin Johnson, university spokesman, said via email that Ohio State “values the role that our lecturers and other associated faculty play in supporting and furthering our overall educational mission” and that the College of Arts and Sciences “will be working with the Department of English to address these budget challenges. We acknowledge the concerns expressed regarding the associated [faculty] and regret any confusion.”

Van Nguyen

Update 7:02 p.m.: Among the tablers on the West Mall, the Young Conservatives of Texas held a bake sale — but instead of selling cookies for charity, they used baked goods to express their opinions on affirmative action.

The anti-affirmative action bake sale, which took place on Thursday from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m., led to protest from close to 300 students for several hours. Prices for baked goods were sold based on the race and gender of the purchaser, and lower prices were allocated to black and hispanic students, while Native American students were offered the sale items for free. Asian students were asked to pay the highest prices, followed by white students.

Lisa Miller

Since 2001, about $15 billion has been spent by taxpayers and philanthropists trying to boost academic achievement in American public schools. These efforts have largely failed — especially in high school. For the average 17-year-old, reading and math scores have not budged since 1971. On standardized tests, white 17-year-olds still outscore black 17-year-olds by 20 points or more — a stubborn gap, unchanged for 30 years.

Laurene Powell Jobs is undaunted by these facts. To her, the cause of the failure is clear: High schools fail to serve American kids because they were designed a hundred years ago for an industrial society that has ceased to exist. “You can pull all the disaggregated data that you want and get depressed about it,” she told me in June, as we sat drinking wine in the lobby of a downtown Chicago hotel — but what high school needs is a “completely changed design in 25,000 places.” Powell Jobs, who is the widow of Steve Jobs and worth about $18 billion, proposes the overhaul of all high schools neutrally, as though she’s suggesting something ordinary, like a cleanup of the garage. “That’s what we need to do.”

“We should have the best education system in the world!” she continues. “We should! We shouldn’t just have the best military. We shouldn’t just have the best economy. We should have the best education system. Of course we should! Every single person would agree to that!” It is perhaps not surprising that Powell Jobs holds a version of her husband’s disregard for Establishment institutions. But whereas the myth of Jobs portrays him as an enfant terrible, his widow is his opposite: low-key, disciplined, self-contained. At about six feet tall, she looks like a Valkyrie and comports herself like a queen. It’s her insistent optimism, even in the face of dire realities, such as the failure of a generation of school reformers to achieve any substantive gains, that betrays her defiance.

Last month, Powell Jobs announced the details of a $100 million investment in American high school through a contest she helped design called XQ: The Super School Project. She is not naïve to how venture philanthropists can be perceived by the people in the trenches, as unwelcome intruders or self-regarding colonizers. But she has lived in Silicon Valley for half her life, and in her world, “people actually get excited about solving problems. I feel very strongly that the problems we get to solve are really hard, otherwise they would have been solved. Now it’s our turn. We’re going to bring in people from all different disciplines who think about things a little different. Sometimes, they take it to the extreme, so — if we were to do this, which is not plausible, but if we were to colonize Mars, what would be our first step? And so you backwards map. After a couple of decades of living there, you think, Well, this shouldn’t be insurmountable. It’s a lot harder to have an early detection of all cancers than it is to give an excellent education to every kid in our country

Gretchen Livingston:

About one-in-ten mothers with a Master’s degree or more are staying at home in order to care for their family, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data. Among mothers with professional degrees, such as medical degrees, law degrees or nursing degrees, 11% are relatively affluent and are out of the workforce in order to care for their families. This is true for 9% of Master’s degree holders and 6% of mothers with a Ph.D.

These so-called “opt-out moms” (roughly 10% of all highly educated mothers) make up just 1% of the nation’s 35 million mothers ages 18 to 69 who are living with their children younger than 18. For our purposes, “opt-out moms” are mothers who have at least a Master’s degree, an annual family income of $75,000 or more; a working husband; and who state that they are out of the workforce in order to care for their family.

Checkpolice.org

We reviewed the police union contracts of 81 of America’s 100 largest cities* and police bill of rights in all 14 states with such legislation to identify the ways in which these policies make it more difficult to hold police accountable

Tamara Hiler and Lanae Erickson Hatalsky:

Public colleges and universities play an essential role in unlocking the doors of higher education for many Americans. Today, more than 6.8 million students attend four-year public institutions, making up nearly two-thirds of the entire bachelor’s degree-seeking population in the United States.1 Close to two-thirds of all students attending these schools take out student loans in order to finance their education, with the average loan-holding student finding themselves more than $20,000 in debt four years later.2 And American taxpayers spend more than $10 billion dollars a year on federal Pell grants to help more than 2.7 million low- and moderate-income students attending these institutions afford a postsecondary education.3

This investment is one most Americans are willing to make—in part because of the irrefutable economic benefits gained in our modern economy by those who earn a college degree.4 But our analysis of the Department of Education’s College Scorecard data reveals that not all four-year public schools are giving students, or taxpayers, a good return on their investment. In fact, at many of these institutions, first-time, full-time students are not graduating, a large number are unable to earn wages higher than the typical high school graduate, and many cannot pay back the loans they’ve taken out.

While rising costs continue to drive the conversation around higher education in our country, this report and our previous analysis of four-year private, non-profit colleges raise much more fundamental questions beyond sticker price. With outcomes like these, it is clear that simply addressing the rising cost of college isn’t sufficient to ensure students are being equipped with the degrees and skills they need to succeed.

Among our key findings:

Tamara Hiler & Lanae Erickson Hatalsky

Public colleges and universities play an essential role in unlocking the doors of higher education for many Americans. Today, more than 6.8 million students attend four-year public institutions, making up nearly two-thirds of the entire bachelor’s degree-seeking population in the United States.1 Close to two-thirds of all students attending these schools take out student loans in order to finance their education, with the average loan-holding student finding themselves more than $20,000 in debt four years later.2 And American taxpayers spend more than $10 billion dollars a year on federal Pell grants to help more than 2.7 million low- and moderate-income students attending these institutions afford a postsecondary education.3

This investment is one most Americans are willing to make—in part because of the irrefutable economic benefits gained in our modern economy by those who earn a college degree.4 But our analysis of the Department of Education’s College Scorecard data reveals that not all four-year public schools are giving students, or taxpayers, a good return on their investment. In fact, at many of these institutions, first-time, full-time students are not graduating, a large number are unable to earn wages higher than the typical high school graduate, and many cannot pay back the loans they’ve taken out.

Kim Liao:

Last year, I got rejected 43 times by literary magazines, residencies, and fellowships—my best record since I started shooting for getting 100 rejections per year. It’s harder than it sounds, but also more gratifying.

In late 2011, a writer friend was sharing her experiences of having months of uninterrupted writing time at her residencies at the Millay Colony, Ragdale, and Yaddo. I was staggered by her impressive rates of acceptance. You probably have one of those friends, too—you know the one I’m talking about, that friend who is a beautiful writer, but who also seems to win everything? I could barely believe that she had the balls to apply to—let alone, get accepted to—several residencies, a prestigious fellowship, and publications in journals I had actually heard of.

Sekar Krisnauli

Morocco will receive millions of dollars in funding from the United States government through programs aimed to address challenges that prevent girls in the country from quality education, according to a Monday White House press release.

The Millenium Challenge Corporation, an independent U.S. Government foreign-aid agency, is expected to give nearly $100 million dollars to invest in a new model for secondary education in Morocco, the announcement stated. The U.S. Agency for International Development will also invest $40,000 to build five girls’ dormitories, known as “Dar Talibas”, by the next school year.

“I am so proud that the U.S. is working with the Moroccan Government to make…transformative new investments to educate and empower girls across Morocco,” stated United States First Lady Michelle Obama in the release.

The announcement was made as Obama visited Marrakesh Tuesday where she was joined by actresses Merryl Streep and Freida Pinto in a panel moderated by CNN’s Correspondent Isha Sesay to promote quality education for girls worldwide through the Let Girls Learn initiative.

PLOS Computational Biology:

A big difference between inexperienced users of statistics and expert statisticians appears as soon as they contemplate the uses of some data. While it is obvious that experiments generate data to answer scientific questions, inexperienced users of statistics tend to take for granted the link between data and scientific issues and, as a result, may jump directly to a technique based on data structure rather than scientific goal. For example, if the data were in a table, as for microarray gene expression data, they might look for a method by asking, “Which test should I use?” while a more experienced person would, instead, start with the underlying question, such as, “Where are the differentiated genes?” and, from there, would consider multiple ways the data might provide answers. Perhaps a formal statistical test would be useful, but other approaches might be applied as alternatives, such as heat maps or clustering techniques. Similarly, in neuroimaging, understanding brain activity under various experimental conditions is the main goal; illustrating this with nice images is secondary. This shift in perspective from statistical technique to scientific question may change the way one approaches data collection and analysis. After learning about the questions, statistical experts discuss with their scientific collaborators the ways that data might answer these questions and, thus, what kinds of studies might be most useful. Together, they try to identify potential sources of variability and what hidden realities could break the hypothesized links between data and scientific inferences; only then do they develop analytic goals and strategies. This is a major reason why collaborating with statisticians can be helpful, and also why the collaborative process works best when initiated early in an investigation. See Rule 3.

Matthew Watkins & Neena Satija:

But a surprising shift has occurred at A&M over the last decade. Despite its reluctance to formally consider the race of its applicants, the university has worked hard to convince black and Hispanic students to apply and enroll. Since 2003, when the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the legality of affirmative action in college admissions, A&M has continued not using it, yet the share of black and Hispanic students has more than doubled at its College Station campus — from 10.8 percent to 23.1 percent.

Geek and Nerd:

our lives without smartphones and laptops. They help us in solving various problems from getting up on time (alarm clocks) to checking grammar mistakes in our academic papers and business reports. We also use them as calculating tools to make our life less complicated. Besides, downloading the right app can make you forget about complicated math problems. If you need some help with difficult calculations or simply like playing math games and solving logical problems, these applications are exactly what you need.

Conor Friedersdorf:

The student activists had occupied a small room outside Katehi’s office, planning to stay until their chancellor resigned or was removed from her post. By the time they left 36 days later, a petition that now bears roughly 100 signatures of UC Davis students and staff were demanding that they prematurely end their occupation, criticizing their tactics, and alleging a number of grave transgressions: The signatories accused the student activists of sexism, racism, bullying, abuse, and harassment, complaining that many who used the administration building “no longer feel safe.” The student activists say that those charges are unfair.

The conflict illustrates a pattern that campus observers are likely see more and more in coming years: Insofar as progressives succeed in remaking campuses into places unusually sensitive to psychological harms, where transgressing against “safe spaces” is both easy to do and verboten, confrontational activism will no longer be viable.

Too many people feel upset by it.

KurzweilAI:

Binghamton University researchers have developed a biometric identification method called Cognitive Event-RElated Biometric REcognition (CEREBRE) for identifying an individual’s unique “brainprint.” They recorded the brain activity of 50 subjects wearing an electroencephalograph (EEG) headset while looking at selected images from a set of 500 images.

The researchers found that participants’ brains reacted uniquely to each image — enough so that a computer system that analyzed the different reactions was able to identify each volunteer’s “brainprint” with 100 percent accuracy.

In their original brainprint study in 2015, published in Neurocomputing (see ‘Brainprints’ could replace passwords), the research team was able to identify one person out of a group of 32 by that person’s responses, with 97 percent accuracy. That study only used words. Switching to images made a huge difference.

Elahe Izadi:

Teachers and students scribbled the lessons — multiplication tables, pilgrim history, how to be clean — nearly 100 years ago. And they haven’t been touched since.

This week, contractors removing old chalkboards at Emerson High School in Oklahoma City made a startling discovery: Underneath them rested another set of chalkboards, untouched since 1917.

“The penmanship blows me away, because you don’t see a lot of that anymore,” Emerson High School Principal Sherry Kishore told the Oklahoman. “Some of the handwriting in some of these rooms is beautiful.”

“I want to live in the Hamilton/Van Hise attendance area.” I’ve heard that statement many times over the years. I wondered how that desire might be reflected in real estate activity.

Tap for a larger view. xlsx version.

Happily, it’s easy to keep up with the market using the Bunbury, First Weber, Restaino or Shorewest apps. For the middle schools, I’ll use the First Weber app iOS Android. Next week, I plan to take a look at elementary schools using the Restaino app. I also hope to dive into property tax variation.

Tap the search link on your iPhone, iPad or Android with the First Weber app installed. You can then interact with the data and properties.

Black Hawk Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Cherokee Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Hamilton Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Jefferson Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

O’Keeffe Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Sennett Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Sherman Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Toki Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Whitehorse Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Madison’s median household income is $53,933 ($31,659 per capita).

Finally, Madison, via a 2015 referendum, is expanding Hamilton, its least diverse middle school.

** As always, much of the property information beneath these statistics is entered by humans. There may be an occasional mistake… 🙂

Kang Shu:

Shenzhen’s government has doubled this year’s budget for programs related to attracting talented people to the city to 4.4 billion yuan this year in a bid to attract more academics and professionals to help nurture innovation.

The city government, which announced the plans through media outlets on March 21, made especially rich offers to top talents. It defined those as world-class scientists and researchers who have led nationally or internationally acclaimed research projects.

Shenzhen gave those luminaries three options should they come to the city. The first was a one-off cash payment of 6 million yuan. The second was a 10-year lease on a 200 square meter apartment, which could be kept if the person stayed for the entire period. That offer also included local household registration privileges, which entitle the holder to health care, education and other public services. The final option was 10 million yuan in cash and benefits, payable after 10 years.

Olivia Goldhill:

In 2005, John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, published a paper, “Why most published research findings are false,” mathematically showing that a huge number of published papers must be incorrect. He also looked at a number of well-regarded medical research findings, and found that, of 34 that had been retested, 41% had been contradicted or found to be significantly exaggerated.

Since then, researchers in several scientific areas have consistently struggled to reproduce major results of prominent studies. By some estimates, at least 51%—and as much as 89%—of published papers are based on studies and experiments showing results that cannot be reproduced.

Researchers have recreated prominent studies from several scientific fields and come up with wildly different results. And psychology has become something of a poster child for the “reproducibility crisis” since Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, coordinated a Reproducibility Initiative project to repeat 100 psychological experiments, and could only successfully replicate 40%.

hayom:

Tamar Barbi from Hod Hasharon is only in the 10th grade, but she has already chalked up an impressive achievement: developing a new geometric theorem.

Barbi, who is studying mathematics on the highest matriculation track offered in Israel, discovered while doing her geometry homework that the theorem she was using to solve one of the problems on her homework didn’t actually exist.

“I checked with my teacher, Sean Gabriel-Morris, I asked relatives abroad who are involved with mathematics, and I consulted my parents, and [then] I realized that the theorem really didn’t appear anywhere, even though it’s very logical and basic.”

PDF slides from a recent Madison School District Quarterly Board retreat. Readers may wish to understand “MAP” or “Measure of Academic Progress” [duck duck go SIS 2012 Madison and Waunakee results]

Using MAP for Strategic Framework Milestones and SIP Metrics

Feedback from various stakeholders has led us to examine the use of MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) to measure Strategic Framework Goal #1: Every student is on track to graduate as measured by student growth and achievement at key milestones. In particular, we have received three specific questions regarding our use of MAP data for Strategic Framework Milestones and SIP Metrics for 2016-17:

1. What is the best way to measure growth on MAP?

2. How should the district and schools set MAP goals for growth?

3. How should the district and schools set MAP goals for proficiency?

4. Should we track progress based on Proficient-Advanced or Basic-Proficient-Advanced?

In this document, we summarize the key issues for each of these questions and provide our recommendations.
1. What is the best way to measure growth on MAP?

Currently, MMSD uses the percent of students meeting or exceeding fall to spring growth targets on the MAP assessment as both a Strategic Framework Milestone and School Improvement Plan (SIP) metric. In addition, this metric receives significant attention in our public reporting on MAP in other venues and teachers have been trained over the past several years to use it to measure progress at the classroom and student level. We have included growth as a complement to MAP proficiency; it allows us to look not just at how students are performing, but also improvement during the year.

For MAP growth, our initial growth trajectory involved a 10 percentage point improvement each year for the district. This goal has extended to SIPs for the past three years, as schools near district averages have received the goal recommendation of 10% improvement; that recommendation changed to 5% starting in 2015-16. The graph to the right illustrates our original trajectory of 10 percentage points a year, our recommended goals for each year (the previous year’s actual result plus an improvement of 10%), and our actual results from each year.

This graph shows us that the original plan of 10% improvement in growth per year would have placed us around 80% in the current school year. Although we believe in setting ambitious goals, the idea that we would continue to improve 10 percentage points every year likely was not realistic, and now that we are around 60% of students meeting growth targets, we may want to consider a lower target than 10 percentage points each year, as even 5 percentage points is relatively large.

Almost all schools set goals for MAP growth that aligned with a district recommendation: 5%, 10%, or 15%. In addition, we see that very few schools actually achieved growth improvements of 5% or more, with changes in growth generally clustering around 0%.

Recommendation: Schools/groups within 10 percentage points of the MAP growth threshold would receive a recommendation for 2% improvement and schools/groups more than 10 percentage points from the threshold would receive a recommendation for 5% improvement.

## On the other hand, one might view this discussion positively, compared to the use of “facts and figures” ten years ago, in the Math Forum.

2015-16 Analysis: Equitable Distribution of Staffing.

Overview:

Call to Action: Together as a community, we can commit to ensuring all of our students are successful. We must work in partnership, creating an organized effort to lift up our students of color, especially our African American students.

Technology plan One Pager:

The MMSD Information and Technology plan undergirds all three of the goals and five priority areas in the Strategic Framework. The plan includes deliberate preparation, implementation, and monitoring phases to ensure each project’s success. We are learning from emerging best practices, building on successes, spreading out costs and addressing key challenges that arise. Technology is a powerful tool for enhancing teaching and learning and meeting students’ needs in creative, innovative and flexible ways. We are committed to providing more equitable access to technology for all students.

The first cohort (G1) began device implementation this school year after a full year of planning and targeted professional learning. Staff and students from other schools are in need of devices to access core digital resources, intervention programs, linguistic resources, and just-in-time learning. To continue progress towards equitable access and device implementation as stated in the original Tech Plan, we would like to phase in the next cohort of schools (G2) in January 2017 by instating the following actions:

Technology plan budget.

Behavior Education Plan – Draft:

The Behavior Education Plan (BEP), MMSD’s policy for addressing behavior and discipline, was approved by the Board of Education in the spring of 2014 with initial implementation in the fall of 2014. The BEP moves us toward the use proactive approaches that focus on building student and staff skills and competencies, which, in turn, lead to greater productivity and success. Moreover, the BEP is also designed to reflect a commitment to student equity as we hold all students to high expectations while providing different supports to meet those expectations. Ultimately, the BEP seeks to decrease the use of exclusionary practices through the use of progressive, restorative discipline while also impacting the significant disproportionality experienced, in particular, by our African American students, male students, and / or students with disabilities.

Given the complexity of implementing the many layers of the BEP, ongoing implementation of the BEP continues to require differentiated and stable supports for our schools including allocation of resources targeted to the needs of students. BEP focus areas for 2016-2017 include implementation of Positive Behavior Support (PBS) universal school-wide systems, PBS classroom systems and practices, behavior response, and tier 2 and 3 interventions.

Priority Actions for Board Consideration (Draft – February 2016):

Pathways Professional Development – In order to support the planning and implementation of personalized pathways in year one, the District will provide professional development to support the first health services pathway.

$400,000 Grant Total (Grant Funding for Professional Development – pending)

$200,000 -(Direct Grant to support local Professional Development)

$200,000 – (In-Kind Grant for Professional Development)

Major Capital Maintenance- The capital maintenance budget is currently funded at $4.5 million, well below the $8.0 million target level recommended in the latest (2012) facility study.

$500,000 – Provides incremental progress towards annual funding goal of $8,000,000 to maintain our schools. (Funding from Local) – Questions have been raised about past maintenance and referendum spending (editor)

Priority spreadsheet that requires new funding.

Measuring Strategic Framework Goal #3:

Goal 3 of MMSD’s Strategic Framework is that “Every student, family and employee experiences a customer service oriented school system as measured by school climate survey data.” The district’s Climate Survey, first administered in the spring of 2015, provides the data we need to measure progress on this goal. In this document, we introduce our recommendations for using climate survey data to set goals and track progress at the district (Strategic Framework via the Annual Report) and school (SIP) level.

Our recommendations are designed to answer five questions:

1. How should we account for different surveyed groups?
2. What metric(s) should we use?
3. Which dimensions should we include?
4. How should schools set goals?
5. Should schools goal set on focus groups?

Personalized Pathways- Draft

Introduction
Personalized Pathways- Draft 2016-2017
The development of Personalized Pathways is a major strategic priority action for 2016-17. The goal next year is to prepare for and establish the right conditions for a successful launch of Personalized Pathways in the fall of 2017 that will improve the level of engagement for our students, the number of students on track for graduation and our graduation rates. In alignment with state legislation, the continued development and expansion of Academic and Career Plans (ACP) undergirds the development of Personalized Pathways by ensuring that every student graduates with a clear post-secondary plan that has been developed throughout their secondary school experience. The key actions for 2016-17 are outlined below and are essential to improving the readiness levels of our schools and central office staff.

Personnel
Next year, the expansion of ACP to 7th and 10th grade will require a small increase of 1.9 FTE at middle school and 1.5 FTE at high school (total 3.4 FTE) to support these new work streams.

With the continued expansion of ACP to grades 6 through 12 over three years, staffing will need to increase across our middle schools to 3.8 FTE where it will level off for full implementation. ACP expansion at high schools will also need to expand over the next three years to support the number of students needing experiential learning related to college and career exploration, as well as Pathways coordination, leveling off at 6.8 FTE. The funding strategy may include repurposing existing roles or grant opportunities.

Indeed, spending more than $500,000,000 annually for 27K students provides “plenty of resources”.

“The thing about Madison that’s kind of exciting is there’s plenty of work to do and plenty of resources with which to do it,” Mitchell said. “It’s kind of a sweet spot for Jen. Whether she stays will depend on how committed the district is to continuing the work she does. plenty of resources”, Derek Mitchell, 2013.

Benjamin Lindy:

This Note uses the 1999 sunset and 2003 reauthorization of New Mexico’s public employee collective bargaining law to estimate the causal effect of teacher collective bargaining on student achievement. This Note finds that mandatory teacher bargaining laws increase the performance of high-achieving students while simultaneously lowering the performance of poorly achieving students. After establishing this core empirical result, the Note explores its implications for current trends in American education policy and for normative arguments about the role of teachers’ unions in public schools.

More here.

Act 10.

Philip Greenspun, via a kind reader:

Based on what people said at the forum, the core driver of mediocrity seems to be the dual function of the American school. A home-schooled child studies for three hours per day. A Russian child studies for about four hours, from just after breakfast until just before lunch (with 10-minute breaks, but no recess). Children are parked at an American school for 6-7 hours per day and thus necessarily much of the time is spent on stuff other than learning. This leads to the school becoming a place for “social/emotional development” during 2-3 hours per day. The “social/emotional” aspects were the foremost concerns of the parents at the forum. One mother described how the first 20 minutes out of a 25-minute parent/teacher conference were spent discussing a child’s social life during recess. This was not a complaint, just a response to the question of how such conferences were going. When asked what was on their mind, nearly every other parent led with “social/emotional.” It makes sense if you step back from the situation and ask “What is urgent for a parent?” Of course we would all like our children to be well-educated at age 25 (or 30?) when they are done with the master’s degree that is now our entry-level credential. But the immediate (and therefore urgent) goal is to see one’s child smiling. If a child comes home in tears because of something that happened at recess it would be a rare parent who would say “let’s talk about how what you learned writing this history essay is going to affect your performance in college.”

As this was a new principal and the forum was a place for open discussion, I asked if anyone had read The Smartest Kids in the World, which was a New York Times bestseller and recommended heavily by Amazon, The Economist, and various newspapers. Everyone in the room was either employed by a school or interested enough to take time to show up at this forum, but nobody had read the book. So I mentioned that the Russian system (not much better results than ours, but absurdly cheap to run by comparison) and the Finnish system had schools and teachers concentrate on the single mission of academics. Day care, sports, and social/emotional were handled by people other than teachers in venues other than school. Then I asked if there were state regulations that would prevent the town from setting up a Russian-style system in which teachers taught until lunch and then a separate set of employees took over for the lunch+afternoon social/emotional/daycare shift. That way parents could concentrate on academics when talking with teachers. The principal responded that “children aren’t built that way” (i.e., the American way of alternating academic and daycare activities for 6-7 hours is the only possible way to run a school).

Mediocre math standards are not a new issue.

Parent-Teacher Conferences: Contract Language

Alexandra Harney:

Three decades ago, Chinese cities began turning rural land into industrial parks to attract foreign investors. Today, a new kind of project is blooming in China’s countryside: the vocational education park.

Cities around China are carving out tracts of land for school parks – dubbed “education factories” – designed to train hundreds of thousands of students.

Fuelling their drive are generous government subsidies and targets to increase the number of skilled workers, part of Beijing’s push to redirect China’s economy away from its investment-led past toward a more innovative, high-tech future.

But the expansion comes even as many existing vocational schools are struggling to live up to their promise.

“You can build as much as you want, but unless you get good teachers, good curriculum and a system that assesses and rewards high performing schools with more resources, it’s just going to be a waste of money,” says Scott Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program at Stanford University and the author of many papers on vocational education in China.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman:

The European Court of Justice, Europe’s highest court, has just ruled that the Safe Harbor, an arrangement between the European Union and the United States allowing for the transfer of personal data, is legally invalid. Few non-specialists have heard of the Safe Harbor. Even so, this ruling is going to send shock waves through both Europe and the United States. Here’s how it happened (we talk about the implications in a separate post).
 
 The Safe Harbor is the cornerstone of transatlantic e-commerce
 
 Over the last 15 years, major U.S. e-commerce firms, such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, have developed big markets in Europe. They all rely on an arrangement called “Safe Harbor” to export personal data from Europe to the United States. The Safe Harbor was negotiated between Europe and the United States after a previous transatlantic dispute in which Europe threatened to stop transatlantic data flows. Europe has comprehensive legislation guaranteeing the privacy of E.U. citizens and preventing businesses from using their personal information in various potentially harmful ways. The United States does not have comprehensive privacy legislation (although it does protect the data of U.S. citizens against government intrusions, and provides some protections, e.g. for health data).

Glenn Greenwald:

There is no shortage of American pundits who love to denounce “PC” speech codes which restrict and punish the expression of certain ideas on college campuses. What these self-styled campus-free-speech crusaders typically – and quite tellingly – fail to mention is that the most potent such campaigns are often devoted to outlawing or otherwise punishing criticisms of Israel. The firing by the University of Illinois of Professor Stephen Salatia for his “uncivil” denunciations of the Israeli war on Gaza – a termination that was privately condoned by Illinois’ Democratic Senator Dick Durbin – is merely illustrative of this long–growing trend.

One of the most dangerous threats to campus free speech has been emerging at the highest levels of the University of California system, the sprawling collection of 10 campuses which includes UCLA and UC Berkeley. The University’s governing Board of Regents, with the support of University President Janet Napolitano and egged on by the State’s legislature, has been attempting to adopt new speech codes that – in the name of combating “anti-Semitism” – would formally ban various forms of Israel criticism and anti-Israel activism.

ACTA:

According to the study, nearly 10% of college graduates think Judith Sheindlin — commonly known as Judge Judy — is on the Supreme Court; one-third of college graduates can’t identify the Bill of Rights as a name given to a group of Constitutional amendments; and 32% believe that Representative John Boehner is the current president of the U.S. Senate. Shockingly, 46% of college grads don’t know the election cycle — six years for senators, two years for representatives. Turning to the general population, the report finds that over half (54%) of those surveyed cannot identify the Bill of Rights accurately, and over 1 in 10 (11%) of those ages 25–34 believe that the Constitution must be reauthorized every four years.

The survey coincides with the upcoming commemoration of Constitution Day, September 17. Nearly a decade ago, Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) spearheaded the designation of the day, mandating that all publicly funded educational institutions provide educational programming to improve knowledge of the Constitution. Just this year, higher education leaders called on Congress to eliminate the Constitution Day educational requirement as undue interference in a university’s autonomy.

Doug Erickson:

Candidates still got scored this year, but on a newly developed set of core competencies that district officials say better match the skills that matter most for teaching in Madison. One of the new competencies is “data proficiency,” described as the ability to “use data beyond standardized assessments to diagnose student learning needs and differentiate instruction in the classroom.”

In a break from the past, only those candidates with clear deficiencies, such as not having the right professional certification, were dropped right away, said Hargrove-Krieghoff, hired in August of last year.

“We did not look solely at a number and say, ‘You’re in or you’re out,’” she said. “We looked at a variety of information, because we want to move away from this idea of a cut score and more toward looking at the competencies and understanding each candidate’s strengths.”

Hundreds more than usual advanced to a phone interview, and the interview length was expanded from five or 10 minutes to a half-hour or more, she said.

The process took more time — retired district administrators came back to help. But at least in the first year under the new rules, the district wanted to collect as much information as possible on as many candidates as possible. It can now go back and study whether an applicant’s initial score ended up being a good predictor of being hired, Hargrove-Krieghoff said.

The district also revised its interview questions to reduce the potential for unconscious cultural bias, Hargrove-Krieghoff said. This meant replacing opinion-based questions with scenario-based ones that ask, for instance, how applicants would handle certain classroom situations.

“It’s much more about the craft of teaching and about the skills the person will bring to the job, not whether the person looks or sounds like you do,” Hargrove-Krieghoff said.

Related (2009): an attempt to change teacher credentialism.

Rachel Feltman:

One portion of the study presented 100 subjects — all of whom had been asked to rate their knowledge of personal finances — with 15 specific finance terms. They were then asked to rate their understanding of each term, not knowing that three of them (pre-rated stocks, fixed-rate deduction, annualized credit) were totally made up.

“The more people believed they knew about finances in general, the more likely they were to overclaim knowledge of the fictitious financial terms,” lead study author Stav Atir of Cornell said in a statement. “The same pattern emerged for other domains, including biology, literature, philosophy and geography.”

Mike Antonucci:

changed nothing, and Scott Walker is running for President of the United States.

In June 2012, it didn’t require a crystal ball to write , “Now that the recalls are over, we’re likely to see a WEAC in a few years that’s no better than half what it was at its peak.”

That day is here. WEAC’s 2015 membership numbers show an organization with fewer than 50,000 total members, and fewer than 40,000 who are currently employed in Wisconsin’s public school system. The downward spiral is so pronounced the union cut dues by $60 , but it does not seem to have reversed its fortunes.

Despite the rosy picture NEA attempted to paint earlier this month , the union still faces enormous membership problems, with only a handful of state affiliates slowly returning to health. I will have the full story in today’s communiqué.

Related: $1.57m for four senators.

John Reitmeyer:

Gov. Chris Christie has taken an aggressive approach to dealing with public workers and their unions since taking office in early 2010. He’s encouraged voters to reject school budgets in communities where teachers weren’t accepting pay freezes, pushed to change civil-service rules, and signed legislation that forced employees to pay more toward to their pensions and health benefits.

Now that Christie has joined the 2016 GOP presidential primary field, his administration is taking another tough stance. It recently told thousands of union members whose contracts expired June 30 that they won’t be receiving annual incremental pay increases while there’s no new deal in place.

In the past, the unions say workers have generally received their annual increases if their performance merited the bump — even without a contract in place.

Christie’s freeze affects state office workers, college professors, corrections officers, and other groups of public workers who haven’t yet reached the top of their pay scales.

Public-worker unions have been responding to the Christie administration’s new position on pay increments — something many view as a pressure tactic — by filing administrative grievances and at least one union, Policemen’s Benevolent Association Local 105, has filed suit in Superior Court.

Lance Lopez, the president of PBA Local 105, said the Christie administration’s freeze affects 3,700 members of his union. The prior agreement with the state said that the rules established under a contract that expired on June 30 would be extended for a year if no new agreement was reached, he said. And the union would have had to have been informed in writing by February 1, 2015 of any change, which didn’t occur, he added.

Sarah Zhang:

Recently, we did an experiment: We took an outdated issue of a respected popular science magazine, Scientific American, and researched exactly what happened to the highly-touted breakthroughs of the era that would supposedly change everything. What we discovered is just how terrible we are at predicting the long arc of scientific discovery.

The daily churn of science news tends toward optimism. You know what I’m talking about: New cure! New breakthrough smashing Moore’s law! New revolutionary technology! I write about science, and I am always uncomfortable trying to predict how a new piece of research will change the future.

That’s because science can be wrong. It can go down dead ends. And even when it doesn’t, almost everything is more complicated and takes longer than we initially think. But just how wrong and how long?

Alan Borsuk:

Amid the many education issues now in flux, the future of charter schools seems to attract a high degree of heat and, frequently, misunderstanding. So I thought it might be good to offer a Charter Schools 101 primer.

Q.Just what is a charter school?

A. Launched in Minnesota about 25 years ago, the idea was to offer kids independent, publicly funded schools with creative, different programs. The movement grew rapidly. More than 2.5 million students nationwide were in charter schools in 2013-’14.

Q.Why are they called “charter” schools?

A. Let’s say you and I have an idea for a school. We go to a government body (usually a school board, but, around here, a few other bodies, such as Milwaukee city government), and say, hey, give us permission to open this school, give us money and we’ll give you something different with good results. (At least, that’s the ideal.) Down the road — usually after five years — you can either give us a green light to continue or you can cut off our money, based on our record. If the government body says OK, then we formalize an agreement that is called our charter.

Generally, I’m describing what we’ll call an independent charter. There are quite a few charters created within school districts as alternatives to their traditional programs. Most of the charter schools in Wisconsin fit this description.

A significant difference between school district charters and independent charters is whether the teachers are employees of the district or whether they are hired (and potentially fired) by the individual school. Almost all of the controversy around charter schools involves independent schools.

New Jersey Supreme Court (PDF):

Because of the importance of maintaining the soundness of the pension funds, the loss of public trust due to the broken promises made through Chapter 78’s enactment is staggering. The Court recognizes that the present level of the pension systems’ funding is of increasing concern. But this is a constitutional controversy that has been brought to the Judiciary’s doorstep, and the Court’s obligation is to enforce the State Constitution’s limitations on legislative power. The State Constitution simply does not permit Chapter 78’s payment provisions to have any more binding effect than that of a contract that is subject to appropriation. To be clear, the Court emphasizes that it is not declaring Chapter 78 unconstitutional. Chapter 78 remains in effect, as interpreted, unless the Legislature chooses to modify it. There is therefore no need to address severability or the mutuality of obligations and the Court leaves those considerations for the political branches. The Court also emphasizes that its analysis does not conflate the issue of the State’s obligation to pay pension benefits with the issue whether Chapter 78 legally binds the State annually to make the scheduled payments into the pension systems. The Court’s holding is, simply, that Chapter 78 cannot constitutionally create a legally binding, enforceable obligation on the State to annually appropriate funds as Chapter 78 purports to require. (pp. 53-61)
10. That the State must get its financial house in order is plain. The need is compelling in respect of the State’s ability to honor its compensation commitment to retired employees. But the Court cannot resolve that need in place of the political branches. They will have to deal with one another to forge a solution to the tenuous financial status of New Jersey’s pension funding in a way that comports with the strictures of our Constitution. The Debt Limitation Clause and the Appropriations Clause envisioned no role for the Judiciary in the annual budget-making process and prevent it from having to perform the unseemly role of deciding in that process whether a failure to fully fund a statutory program, including one labeled a contract, was reasonable and necessary. A Contracts Clause analysis would require annual incursions by the Judiciary into second-guessing spending priorities and perhaps even revenue-raising considerations in recurring years. Under the Debt Limitation Clause and the Appropriations Clause, the responsibility for the budget process remains squarely with the Legislature and Executive, the branches accountable to the voters through the electoral process. This is not an occasion for the Judiciary to act on the other branches’ behalf. (pp. 61-68)

Via Laura Waters.

NJEA statement.

Asit Kiswas & Juliette Kirchherr:

MANY of the world’s most talented thinkers may be university professors, but sadly most of them are not shaping today’s public debates or influencing policies.

Indeed, scholars often frown upon publishing in the popular media. “Running an opinion editorial to share my views with the public? Sounds like activism to me,” a professor recently noted at a conference, hosted by the University of Oxford.

The absence of professors from shaping public debates and policies seems to have exacerbated in recent years, particularly in social sciences.

In the 1930s and 1940s, 20 per cent of articles in the prestigious The American Political Science Review focused on policy recommendations. At the last count, the share was down to a meagre 0.3 per cent.

David Blaska:

Like the Sun Prairie groundhog, the Madison school district’s teachers contract has come back to bite the taxpayer. The Madison Metropolitan School District is looking at a $20.8 million budget deficit next school year.

Good Madison liberals worried about the state balancing its budget can now look closer to home.

To balance the budget, the district will most certainly have to raise taxes again; last year’s increase was a hefty 5.4%. It will probably cut programs. It may even lay off teachers. To ease the blow, will it ask those teachers to contribute to their excellent health coverage like 99% of the rest of the world?

This is the school district that thumbed its nose at Wisconsin law, the school district that eschewed using the flexibility given it by Wisconsin Act 10, the 2011 collective bargaining reform. Madison is the only district that collects union boss John Matthews’ dues for him, the only district that requires fair share payments, the only district that does not require its employees to contribute toward their very excellent health care insurance. A district that gave teachers longevity raises of 2% and 3% on top of free health insurance.

Much more, here.

Ruth Robarts, writing in 2005:

However, the administration’s “same service” budget requires a revenue increase of more than 4%. The Gap for next year is $8.6M.

Next will come a chorus of threats to slash programs and staff to “close the gap”. District staff will come on stage bearing long lists of positions and programs cut in previous years to close the gap. The mood will be ominous when the curtain comes down on Act 1.
On March 7, Act 2 opens with the administration revealing— with great reluctance— the annual “Cut List”. On the Cut List will be programs that motivate our kids to excel at school, such as fine arts, extracurricular sports, environmental field trips, and classes for students with special talent. Also on the list will be staff positions that assist kids with special problems, such as choosing classes and colleges, overcoming difficult home circumstances, learning job skills, or having special educational needs. School custodians may again appear on the Cut List, but not central administrators. “We have no choice” is the theme of Act 2.

Molly Beck

District spending would increase by 4.8 percent during the 2015-16 school year, largely based on staff pay and a projected health insurance rate increase of 9 percent, according to the district’s projections, and is expected to exceed district revenues by $10.1 million.

Spending grows annually, yet, reading results have long been disastrous.

Related: Madison’s Superintendent “reverts to the mean.”

Jonelle Marte:

Millennials are looking beyond beach vacations and nights out when it comes to finding the best way to use their cash.

More of them are putting money away for retirement, according to a new analysis released Thursday by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. About 40,000 workers in their 20s and early 30s signed up for their employer’s 401(k) plan for the first time during the first half of this year, the report found. That is up 55 percent from the same time last year and more than the 37 percent increase seen for all age groups.

“If you look at the millennials, they’re actually by nature better savers,” says Kevin Crain, managing director and senior relationship executive for Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The bank analyzed data from its 401(k) business, which has $128.9 billion in assets and includes 2.5 million participants.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

Dyslexia 101: Wisconsin Institute for Dyslexia/Learning Disabilities is repeating Dyslexia 101 this Saturday, October 11, from 9-12, at the WILDD center in Madison. $10 [Brochure – PDF]

Free webinar: Dr. Margie Gillis presents Every Child Reading: Linking Knowledge and Practice to Support School Systems
Tuesday, October 28, 1-2 PM CT
Sponsored by Learning Ally
Margie is president of Literacy How, Inc., and a research affiliate of Haskins Laboratories and Fairfield University. She is a frequent presenter at the International Dyslexia Association annual conference and has a wealth of information. We encourage you to tune in to learn about:
supporting school leadership
using data transparently for accountability
coordinating a multi-tier system of support
providing embedded professional development based on best practice
engaging parents and families

Click on the webinar title to register

Thomas Donlan:

Maybe they’re doing something right: American colleges and universities are highly regarded by an important subset of their students. One-fifth of students from other countries who study abroad are studying here in the U.S.

A recent Brookings Institution report found more than 800,000 foreign students in the U.S. in 2012, a record, and five times as many as were here in 2001. About 25% are from China, 15% from India, 10% from South Korea, and 5% from Saudi Arabia.

Some were sent here by their governments, others by their parents or their employers. Some come by their own unaided effort, making large financial sacrifices. No matter where the money comes from, foreign students mostly pay full freight to their institutions. From 2001 through 2012, they paid an estimated $56.5 billion in tuition and fees. Their living expenses added another $39.1 billion to U.S. gross domestic product.

The University of Southern California had the greatest number of foreign undergraduates, followed closely by Columbia University, the University of Illinois, New York University, and Purdue University.

Tamar Jacoby:

Dakota Blazier had made a big decision. Friendly and fresh-faced, from a small town north of Indianapolis, he’d made up his mind: He wasn’t going to college.

“I discovered a long time ago,” he explained, “I’m not book smart. I don’t like sitting still, and I learn better when the problem is practical.” But he didn’t feel this limited his options—to the contrary. And he was executing a plan as purposeful as that of any of his high-school peers.

It started in his junior year with release time from high school to take a course in basic construction skills at a craft training center run by the Associated Builders and Contractors. The next step was an internship with a local contractor, Gaylor Electric.

This summer, he’s at Gaylor full time, earning $10 an hour plus credits he can apply at the ABC training center, where he intends to return this fall for a four-year apprenticeship. Mr. Blazier, 18, beamed as he explained his plan. This was no fallback, no desperate Hail Mary pass. It was a thoughtful choice—and he was as proud and excited as if he were heading off to the Ivy League.

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

Last fall, MTI asked the District to bargain Contracts for multiple years. They refused, and a Contract was negotiated for the 2014-15 school year.

After hundreds of MTI members, sporting their MTI red shirts, attended two school board meetings in late May, the Board had a change of heart – and also a change in leadership with Arlene Silveira replacing Ed Hughes. Several MTI members addressed the Board at its meetings on May 26 and 29. The Board agreed to bargain. After five days of bargaining, terms were reached for Contracts for MTI’s five bargaining units, AFSCME’s two bargaining units, and that of the Building Trades Council.

In the new Contracts, MTI was successful in retaining members’ employment security and economic security provided by Contract salary schedules and fringe benefits.

MTI’s Contracts for 2014-15 and 2015-16 are the only contracts with Wisconsin school districts, for those years. A synopsis of the new Contracts is available on MTI’s webpage www.madisonteachers.org.
MTI members ratified the Contracts last Tuesday evening

Madison Teachers, Inc. Synopsis (PDF):

HANDBOOK: Among the topics addressed in our 2013 negotiations was how the Act 10 mandated “Employee Handbook” would be developed. In last year’s negotiations MTI gained agreement with the District, that while most school boards acted unilaterally to develop the Handbook, MTI has 5 appointees to the Committee which will develop the Handbook. That agreement also provides that MTI’s 2014- 15 Collective Bargaining Agreements serve as the foundation for the Handbook. That has now been amended to provide that the 2015-16 Contracts will serve as the foundation for the Handbook. Some school boards have rolled back employee rights to the 1950’s or 1960’s, when unilaterally creating the Handbook for their school districts. For example, teachers in some districts cannot wear sandals, open-toed

shoes and women must wear skirts or dresses at least to the knee. The Janesville School Board just eliminated wages for any credits or
degrees beyond the BA.

Sumatha Reddy

Children still in kindergarten or even younger form cliques and intentionally exclude others, say psychologists and educators who are increasingly noticing the behavior and taking steps to curb it.

Special programs are popping up in elementary schools to teach empathy as a means of stemming relational aggression, a psychological term to describe using the threat of removing friendship as a tactical weapon. Children also are being guided in ways to stand up for themselves, and to help others, in instances of social exclusion. Though both boys and girls exhibit relational aggression, it is thought to be more common among girls because they are generally more socially developed and verbal than boys.

“I think it’s remarkable that we’re seeing this at younger and younger ages,” said Laura Barbour, a counselor at Stafford Primary School in West Linn, Ore., who has worked in elementary schools for 24 years. “Kids forget about scuffles on the playground but they don’t forget about unkind words or being left out.”

Insider Higher Ed:

Navient, the loan-servicing company formerly known as Sallie Mae, disclosed to investors Friday that it expects to pay an additional $103 million to settle two federal investigations, on top of the $70 million it already set aside last year for that purpose. The company is facing investigations from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Department of Justice, and other federal and state agencies over how it managed and processed the payments of student loan borrowers, including active-duty servicemembers.

The spin-off of Sallie Mae’s loan-servicing business into its own independent company, Navient, was officially completed at the end of April. Navient now inherits all liability stemming from the federal and state investigations of Sallie Mae’s loan-servicing business, the company said. The FDIC has cited Sallie Mae for unfair or deceptive acts involving the way it made disclosures to borrowers and assessed certain late fees.

Navient said Friday that, based on its discussions with the FDIC, the company believes it will be required to refund $30 million worth of certain late fees to borrowers of Sallie Mae loans dating back to November 2005. In addition, in an effort to “treat all customers in a similar manner,” Naveint said it also expected to “voluntarily” reimburse $42 million in late fees for borrowers whose loans were not owned by Sallie Mae but were serviced by them.