schoolinfosystem.org
[I asked her about some of her experiences with math and history. Will Fitzhugh] Jessica Li (Class of 2015) High School Junior, Summit, New Jersey 24 May 2014 [6,592-word Sophomore paper on Kang Youwei… Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize 2014] My interest and involvement in mathematics was inspired by my family and my own exploration. My […]
David Liu: Recently, we celebrated Knewton’s sixth birthday. It seems that each year brings more progress and change than all the previous years combined, and this past year was no different. We’re using our latest round of funding ($51 million) to continue to extend our technological leadership and support rapid growth globally, including a new […]
Wisconsin State Journal The president of the Madison teachers union just lamented an “embarrassingly low” wage increase for his members of 0.25 percent. But that doesn’t include automatic pay raises most teachers will receive for their years of experience. A large majority of Madison school teachers (in past years it has ranged from two-thirds to […]
Stephanie Simon: Moms and dads from across the political spectrum have mobilized into an unexpected political force in recent months to fight the data mining of their children. In a frenzy of activity, they’ve catapulted student privacy — an issue that was barely on anyone’s radar last spring — to prominence in statehouses from New […]
Lisa Beyer: Chalk up another demerit for the antivaccine movement: So far, 2014 is shaping up as the worst year for confirmed cases of the measles since it was declared eliminated as an endemic disease in 2000 in the U.S. Most of the news and media coverage of the outbreak has focused on the fact […]
George Joseph: Between 2007 and 2009, 350 Filipino teachers arrived in Louisiana, excited for the opportunity to teach math and science in public schools throughout the state. They’d been recruited through a company called Universal Placement International Inc., which professes on its website to “successfully place teachers in different schools thru out [sic] the United […]
Dan Rockmore: Fifty years ago, at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall at Dartmouth College, the world of computing changed forever. Professor John Kemeny, then the chairman of the mathematics department at Dartmouth and later its president, and Mike Busch, a Dartmouth sophomore, typed “RUN” on a pair of […]
Jessica Arp: – A local family is fighting with officials at Edgewood High School over allegedly failing to stop racial harassment. The family is asking for tuition money back, while school officials said they handled things appropriately. Blake Broadnax spent two and a half years as a student at Edgewood High School, played on the […]
Imani Perry In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education opinion, the Supreme Court declared that state laws requiring segregation in public schools were unconstitutional. But change didn’t come easily, nor are schools all that integrated today. Sixty years after Brown, let’s examine some myths about the landmark court decision. 1. Brown v. Board of […]
Malcolm Harris: On May 7, the federal government conducted its regularly scheduled auction of new Treasury bills, a monthly ritual in which investors compete to lend the state money. This, however, was no ordinary auction. Last year, after much debate, Congress tied federal student loan interest rates to the 10-year Treasury note’s each year’s pre-June […]
Bob Samuels: In my last post, I discussed how UC was fulfilling its obligation to accept every eligible Californian student by admitting them to Merced instead of Berkeley and UCLA. I also pointed out that some campuses are cashing in on the new policy that allows schools to keep all of the tuition dollars they […]
Julianne Hing: Editor’s note: Our series “Life Cycles of Inequity” explores the ways in which inequity impacts the lives of black men. Each month, we focus on a life stage or event in which that impact has been shown to be particularly profound. This article is part of a package focused on implicit bias in […]
Jake Seliger: I’m not that old, and I’ve already seen a lot of proposals for solving “poverty” come and go. Many—think Head Start—are tied up in education. The current debate around education tends to run in two directions: one group wants to improve parenting, or ameliorate poverty, or something along those lines, having seen innumerable […]
Deborah Fallows: One warm and misty May morning in Columbus, Mississippi, the lobby of the classroom building at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS) (more) was full of teen-agers milling about, waiting for morning classes to begin. In one corner of the glassy space was a grandfather clock, probably about 8 feet tall, […]
Stephen Moore: Looking for the biggest bargain in higher education? I think I found it in this rural Missouri town, 40 miles south of Springfield, nestled in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. The school is College of the Ozarks, and it operates on an education model that could overturn the perverse method of financing […]
Quictrung Bui: In honor of college graduation season, we made a graph. It answers a few questions we had: What is the mix of bachelor’s degrees awarded today, and how has the mix changed over the past several decades? A few notes: The persistence of business. Business majors, which include accounting, marketing, operations and real […]
Alan Schwarz: ATLANTA — More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outside established pediatric guidelines, according to data presented on Friday by an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report, which found that toddlers covered by Medicaid are particularly prone […]
Daniel Henninger: It’s been a long time coming, but America’s colleges and universities have finally descended into lunacy. Last month, Brandeis University banned Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali as its commencement speaker, purporting that “Ms. Hirsi Ali’s record of anti-Islam statements” violates Brandeis’s “core values.” This week higher education’s ritualistic burning of college-commencement heretics spread […]
Aleszu Bajak: Are your lectures droning on? Change it up every 10 minutes with more active teaching techniques and more students will succeed, researchers say. A new study finds that undergraduate students in classes with traditional stand-and-deliver lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use more stimulating, so-called active […]
Bonnie Rochman: Mention you’ve got a picky eater to a fellow parent, and the choruses of “me too!” come quick. Some fed-up parents—embarrassed, at their wits’ end or worried about their children’s nutrition—are hiring picky-eater coaches to expand their kids’ palates. Leslie Springer was tired of acting like a short-order cook for her twin girls […]
Douglas Belkin: A word to high-school seniors rejected by their first choice: A degree from that shiny, elite college on the hill may not matter nearly as much as you think. A new Gallup survey of 30,000 college graduates of all ages in all 50 states has found that highly selective schools don’t produce better […]
Diane Rado: Under a dramatic new approach to rating public schools, Illinois students of different backgrounds no longer will be held to the same standards — with Latinos and blacks, low-income children and other groups having lower targets than whites for passing state exams, the Tribune has found. In reading, for example, 85 percent of […]
Gayle Worland: Monday through Friday, Maya Reinfeldt is an eighth-grader at Savanna Oaks Middle School in Fitchburg. But on Saturdays, while her classmates are at soccer practice or gymnastics lessons, the 13-year-old is back at a desk studying literature in her mother’s native Russian. Maya is one of more than 50 students enrolled at the […]
Alan Gottlieb & Kate Schimel: When the Saturday morning meeting about proposed changes to George Washington High School’s International Baccalaureate program got off to a raucous, even unruly start in the school library, a mixed group of IB and non-IB students decided to take matters into their own hands. As angry parents who had expected […]
Michael Roth: It happens every semester. A student triumphantly points out that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is undermining himself when he claims “the man who reflects is a depraved animal,” or that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for self-reliance is in effect a call for reliance on Emerson himself. Trying not to sound too weary, I ask the […]
Anya Kamnetz: There’s plenty of anxiety in the U.S. over getting into a top college. But a new Gallup poll suggests that, later in life, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as we think. In fact, when you ask college graduates whether they’re “engaged” with their work or “thriving” in all aspects of their lives, […]
Melanie Pinola: We’re lucky to have access to so many excellent free online courses for just about anything you want to study, including computer science. Here’s a curriculum list that strings various free computing courses into the equivalent of a college bachelor’s degree. aGupieWare, an independent app developer, surveyed the curricular requirements for computer science […]
Will Fitzhugh: Abstract The superior academic achievement of Asian Americans is a well-documented phenomenon that lacks a widely accepted explanation. Asian Americans’ advantage in this respect has been attributed to three groups of factors: (i) socio-demographic characteristics, (ii) cognitive ability, and (iii) academic effort as measured by characteristics such as attentiveness and work ethic. We […]
Stephanie Banchero:
Stephanie Simon: The Obama administration plans to use tens of millions in federal financial aid as leverage to reward teacher training programs that produce teachers who routinely raise student test scores — and to drive the rest out of business. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will announce the revival of a push to regulate hundreds of […]
Lauren Weber: It seems like a perfect solution: employers need qualified employees. Apprenticeships offer an opportunity for workers to get the exact skills they need. So why are apprenticeships in decline? Lauren Weber is here with the story. Photo: Getty Images. Ask CEOs and corporate recruiters whether they’re finding the workers they need, and they’ll […]
Brandon Harris: As with most things that are prominently featured on television, the recently concluded NCAA tournament is made of money. A lot of it. $10.8 billion dollars to be exact. Money changes hands in innumerable ways – Turner Broadcasting and CBS pay the NCAA that enormous sum over fourteen years, with the organization parcelling […]
Kelli’s Woodhouse: An open letter to University of Michigan’s Board of Regents from about a dozen of the school’s faculty criticizes the school’s administrative pay and bonus system. “The University is in desperate and urgent need of fiscal reform,” the letter, dated April 20, states. Reform, it continues, should include: “arresting the steep increases in […]
Brian Tsai: Mental health problems are common chronic conditions in children. Medication is often prescribed to treat the symptoms of these conditions. Few population-based studies have examined the use of prescription medication to treat mental health problems among younger as well as older school-aged children. A new NCHS report describes the sociodemographic characteristics of children […]
Will Fitzhugh The Concord Review 4 May 2014 Back in the day, when Union contracts specified the number of widgets each worker was expected to produce during a shift, that number was called “the rate.” Anyone who produced more than that number was called a “rate-buster,” and was subjected to pressure, sanctions, and the like, […]
Scott Jaschik: A survey of more than 6,000 faculty members, across a range of disciplines, has found that when prospective graduate students reach out for guidance, white males are the most likely to get attention. The survey also found that public university faculty members are much more likely than their private counterparts to respond equally […]
Jenni Dye: But when I attended UW for law school, my total debt quickly topped $100,000, with interest rates locked in at 6.8 percent and 8.8 percent due to changes in federal law. Consolidation couldn’t reduce the interest rate, as federal law required my loan remain at the average of my existing interest rates. But, […]
The Madison School District (3MB PDF): Five Priority Areas (just like the “Big 10”) but who is counting! – page 6: – Common Core – Behavior Education Plan – Recruitment and hiring – New educator induction – Educator Effectiveness – Student, parent and staff surveys – Technology plan 2014-2015 “budget package” 3MB PDF features some […]
—No, the humanities should step up and proudly proclaim: “We are the purveyors of beauty more lethal than you may possibly be able to bear and knowledge more profound than you can yet fathom. We are your vehicle into the past and into the minds of other human beings. Within our precincts are works of […]
Brian T. Hill: FFor the time being, I’m going to talk about material realities shared by comp/rhet and its others, rather than their differences. There are all kinds of things I could say about the disciplinary and labor crises in our field, but for now I will focus on an interrelated set of areas with […]
George Anders: Meet Alaric Blair, a 47-year-old elementary school teacher from Calumet City, Ill. He is strict, pleasant and ambitious. Right now, he’s taking advanced classes at Chicago’s Dominican University, hoping to recast himself as a school principal. It’s costing him $10,000 — and he has no desire to get tangled up in the current […]
Jay Matthews: Walter Fields’s 15-year-old daughter is a sophomore at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J. She scored advanced proficient on state math tests in middle school and received an A in algebra in eighth grade. For reasons that mystify Fields and his wife, their daughter was not recommended for the ninth-grade geometry course that […]
Kevin Carey: igher education has a long and fraught relationship with the labor market. From colonial colleges training clergymen to the Morrill Act, normal schools, and the great 20th-century expansion of mass higher education, colleges have always been in the business of training people for careers. The oldest university in the Western world, in Bologna, […]
Michelle Singletary: A year ago, I was where many parents are right now. My daughter Olivia was faced with the decision of where to attend college. I’ll admit I was pretty adamant leading up to the choice that many families have to make by May 1, which is the deadline for accepted students to declare […]
James Hoff: Whether or not Krugman’s scholarship and teaching ability warrant such a superior salary is certainly worthy of debate, but the real issue for most commentators is not how much CUNY will pay Krugman, but how little they are asking him to do. CUNY is essentially offering him what used to be called a […]
Atif Mian & Amir Sufi: What are the determinants of inequality? The first step in answering this question is defining exactly what we mean by inequality. A working paper by Chetty, Hendren, Kline, and Saez takes an interesting approach: it measures inequality based on the likelihood that a child born into a poor family will […]
Alan Borsuk: Patricia Deklotz, superintendent of the Kettle Moraine School District, said her district, west of Milwaukee, is generally high performing. But, Deklotz asked, if they talk a lot about getting students ready for the global economy, are they really doing it? PISA is a way to find out. “It raises the bar from comparing […]
James Gallagher: Mathematicians were shown “ugly” and “beautiful” equations while in a brain scanner at University College London. The same emotional brain centres used to appreciate art were being activated by “beautiful” maths. The researchers suggest there may be a neurobiological basis to beauty. The likes of Euler’s identity or the Pythagorean identity are rarely […]
Michael Erard: Imagine a test that could tell you how good you can ultimately get in any foreign language, from Hindi to Welsh, from Igbo to Spanish, before you’ve even learned how to say “hello” or “please pass the butter.” Tres alléchant, no? Most adults would have to put in 10 years or more of […]
Bethany Gross: As the charter movement grew, so did concern that charter schools would become boutique schools for affluent families. By 2010, that concern had been dispelled—half of the 1.8 million students in charter schools came from low-income families. But it was increasingly clear that many charter schools were exclusive in another way: they were […]
Danah Boyd: If you’re like most middle-class parents, you’ve probably gotten annoyed with your daughter for constantly checking her Instagram feed or with your son for his two-thumbed texting at the dinner table. But before you rage against technology and start unfavorably comparing your children’s lives to your less-wired childhood, ask yourself this: Do you […]
The Wall Street Journal The California Public Employees’ Retirement System has a well-deserved rap as a taxpayer drain. So to rehabilitate its image, the pension fund has produced a “study” purporting that public-worker pensions are California’s biggest jobs generator. As if Californians needed more reason to doubt the pension behemoth’s math. According to the 14-page […]
Elizabeth Phillips I’D like to tell you what was wrong with the tests my students took last week, but I can’t. Pearson’s $32 million contract with New York State to design the exams prohibits the state from making the tests public and imposes a gag order on educators who administer them. So teachers watched hundreds […]
Richard Adams: Unions reacted angrily on Thursday after official figures showed a sharp rise in the number of unqualified teachers employed by state-funded schools in England. The growth follows education secretary Michael Gove’s 2012 decision to give academies and free schools the freedom to hire staff without standard qualifications such as a postgraduate certificate in education. The […]
Marni Bromberg & Christi Theokas (PDF): Nationally, there are 61,250 students of color and 60,300 students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds who perform among the top 25 percent of all students in reading and math at the beginning of high school. Many high-achieving students of color and students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, however, leave high school with lower […]
Charles Kenny: It is college acceptance season, and letters with financial aid offers attached are dropping on doormats nationwide. Many students and an even greater number of parents are facing the sticker shock associated with tertiary education. As college prices rise—the average annual cost hit $18,497 in 2010-11, according to the National Center for Education […]
Sue Shellenbarger: Those early childhood memories, which are so quick to fade, are important in influencing decisions in later life. WSJ’s Sue Shellenbarger reports on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images. What you can remember from age 3 may help improve aspects of your life far into adulthood. Children who have the ability to recall and […]
Douglas Belkin & Caroline Porter: More companies are entering partnerships with colleges to help design curricula, as state universities seek new revenue and industry tries to close a yawning skills gap. Doug Belkin reports on Lunch Break. Photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick for The Wall Street Journal. The University of Maryland has had to tighten its belt, […]
Cultural progressives often talk about something called “hegemonic masculinity.” By this progressives and feminists mean the standards we use to determine what an ideal man is in a particular culture. Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson, in The Gendered Society Reader, describe American hegemonic masculinity this way: In an important sense there is only one complete […]
Priyamvada Gopal: The once highly-regarded British public university is not quite dead but it is in terminal care. After half a century of global success on public funding that amounted to less than 1.5% of Britain’s GDP, in the space of two years we’ve seen the partial withdrawal of the state from the sector, and […]
Eva Dou: In a concession to student protesters, Taiwan Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng said Sunday a review of a contentious services trade pact with China will be delayed until an oversight mechanism for cross-strait agreements is enacted. The announcement is the largest gesture of conciliation from Mr. Wang since students stormed the legislature three weeks […]
Anne Tergesen: As more couples delay having children, their parents have to wait longer for their first grandchild. Anne Tergesen joins Lunch Break with a look at the broader societal impact of couples having children later. Photo: Videoblocks. It’s a natural part of growing older. People start to long for grandchildren—and many start to pressure […]
Ron Lieber: The era of the financial aid appeal has arrived in full, and April is the month when much of the action happens. For decades, in-the-know families have gone back to college financial aid officers to ask for a bit more grant money after the first offer arrived. But word has spread, and the […]
Reihan Salam: Rather than shift the tax burden from households with children to relatively high-earning households without children, Felix Salmon of Reuters proposes increasing federal education funding. This strikes me as ill-conceived for a number of reasons. If anything, I would suggest that we move in the opposite direction. Though federal spending represents a relatively […]
Theodore J. Joyce, Sean Crockett, David A. Jaeger, Onur Altindag, Stephen D. O’Connell: We test whether students in a hybrid format of introductory microeconomics, which met once per week, performed as well as students in a traditional lecture format of the same class, which met twice per week. We randomized 725 students at a large, […]
Hamilton Nolan: America’s student debt burden has been on the rise for years, along with America’s class of incredibly well-educated retail workers. A new report reveals who’s driving the train to debt hell: grad students. Don’t do it! Do you really need to go to grad school? For the vast majority of those of you […]
Wu Nan: Allegations that kindergartens gave prescription drugs to pupils without parents’ consent have led to calls for the laws governing them to be tightened. It is alleged the drugs were administered to ensure high attendance rates and fees. Lan Liqiang, a medical legal consultant advising some parents whose children were given the medicines, said […]
Harry: The authors lived for a year in a “party” dorm in a large midwestern flagship public university (not mine) and kept up with the women in the dorm till after they had graduated college. The thesis of the book is that the university essentially facilitates (seemingly knowingly, and in some aspects strategically) a party […]
W. Michael Cox & Richard Alm Education looms as both cause and cure for the decline of the middle class and the widening gap between rich and poor. In today’s knowledge-based economy, poorly performing public schools leave many U.S. workers ill-equipped for jobs that pay middle-class wages. So it follows that improving education is the […]
Jay Busbee: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of our nation’s finest universities, ranking 30th in the latest U.S. News and World Report list of top schools and eighth on Forbes’ list of top public colleges. And the bit of drivel above apparently earned an A-minus, according to ESPN. Why? Simple. That […]
Shirley Wang: Some employers increasingly are viewing autism as an asset and not a deficiency in the workplace. Germany-based software company SAP AG SAP.XE +1.43% has been actively seeking people with autism for jobs, not because of charitable outreach but because it believes features of autism may make some individuals better at certain jobs than […]
Matthew Ladner: So how do private school students do in Science compared to public school students. I wasn’t sure, so I went to the NAEP data explorer to find out. Private school students outscore public school students, but private school students tend to be more affluent than public school students, and there can be differences […]
Nick Anderson: Britt Freitag, an admissions officer at George Washington University, confessed she was “slightly nervous” about a candidate for the Class of 2018. His grades were solid, but not stellar. The student had taken some tough courses, but not as many as Freitag would have liked. Test scores, she said, were “definitely on the […]
The Economist: THERE can scarcely be two words in Kenya that cause more resentment than “school fees”. It is now more than ten years since charges for state primary schools in east Africa’s biggest economy were abolished by law. Yet it is an open secret that education is not truly free. In fact, fees are […]
Kaleem Caire, via a kind email: This will be my final report to the community as the president & CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison. Today, former Madison Police Chief Noble Wray will take over as the interim leader of this great organization and I will spend the remainder of this month supporting […]
Matthew Bruenig: Last week, the College Board announced that the writing portion of the SAT college admissions test would be made optional. The move returns the test to its pre-2005 form with its 1,600-point scale based upon math and reading questions. The speculated reasons for the change include the fact that the SAT has been losing […]
Interview with MMSD School Board candidate Wayne Strong Safe schools and high academic achievement: High academic achievement, for Strong, means that all of our MMSD students are achieving to the fullest extent of their abilities. “Whether you are a TAG [Talented and Gifted] or a special-needs student or whether you are a middleof- the-road student, […]
Investors Business Daily: Buried deep in a section of President Obama’s budget, released this week, is an eye-opening fact: This year, 70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high. In effect, the government has become primarily a massive money-transfer machine, taking […]
Maura Pennington: Salaries for employees in the Philadelphia school district are staggering. The district has 10 superintendents who make a combined $1.64 million annually. Superintendent William Hite tops the list at $270,000, and his deputy makes $210,000. Eight assistant superintendents each make $145,000. For the sake of comparison, Gov. Tom Corbett makes $175,000 annually. And while the district’s […]
KJ Dell’Antonio: When your children arrive home from school this evening, what will be your first point of conflict? How’s this for an educated guess? Homework. Do they have any? How much? When are they going to do it? Can they get it done before practice/rehearsal/dinner? After? When is it due? When did they start it? […]
Naveen Jain: Our education system is not broken, it has just become obsolete When I think of all the tremendous, seemingly impossible feats made possible by entrepreneurs, I am amazed that more has not been done to reinvent our education system. I want all entrepreneurs to take notice that this is a multi-hundred billion dollar opportunity […]
Powerpoint Slides (900K PDF): Partner: University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education Term of Agreement: April 1, 2014 – June 30, 2015 (phase one) Purpose: To craft a comprehensive induction strategy in Madison schools resulting in a workforce which can significantly impact student achievement and narrow opportunity gaps. (phase one) Target Audience: New educators, instructional coaches, […]
Robert Hiltonsmith, Tamara Draut: As student debt continues to climb, it’s important to understand how our once debt-free system of public universities and colleges has been transformed into a system in which most students borrow, and at increasingly higher amounts. In less than a generation, our nation’s higher education system has become a debt-for-diploma system—more […]
Randolf Arguelles: The College Board’s March 5 announcement that the SAT college-admissions exam will undergo a significant overhaul in 2016 has generated no shortage of commentary, some of it praising the changes as a “democratization” of the test. The College Board says it is expanding its outreach to low-income students and shifting from testing abstract-reasoning […]
Alex Tabarrok: All of this is almost entirely at variance with three facts, all of which are well known among education researchers. First, test prep has only a modest effect on test scores, on the order of 20-40 points combined for a commercial test preparation service. More expensive services such as a private tutor are […]
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF): The District has informed principals of their staffing allocations for the 2014-15 school year. Surplus notices, where the District determines such are necessary, are expected to be delivered to staff by March 19 (the Contract enables one to be declared surplus through July […]
Nat Hentoff: Former Chief Judge of New York State Judith S. Kaye always makes necessary sense, as she did when she recently wrote this in the opinion pages of The New York Times: “As universal pre-K and the Common Core standards dominate the headlines, we cannot overlook a third subject that deserves top billing: keeping […]
Austin Walters: This is a long story, but I feel sheds light on education in general and why academia and educational institutions function so poorly that they drive the brightest into the dark. More than once I have told by an academic advisor that I am going to fail 2nd grade was my first brush […]
I have a special interest in Civics education. My high school civics/government teacher drilled the Constitution, Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers into our small brains. This Vietnam Vet worked very hard to make sure that we understood how the US political system worked, or not. While reading the ongoing pervasive spying news, including […]
Pearson via Will Fitzhugh: Today Pearson announced a collaboration with Microsoft Corp. that brings together the world’s leading learning company and the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions to create new applications and advance a digital education model that prepares students to thrive in an increasingly personalized learning environment. The first collaboration between the […]
Compare: Three reporters assigned to the Urban League’s governance transition: 1. Steven Elbow: Madison Urban League chair: Kaleem Caire’s credit card use an ‘internal’ issue. 2. Dee Hall: Urban League head: Kaleem Caire’s ‘integrity intact’. 3. Dean Mosiman: Kaleem Caire’s departure followed concerns about credit card use, overwork. 2005 a reporter follows a story with […]
Fraser Nelson: Nothing tempts fate more than adding the word “flagship” to a government project. When Britain’s first profit-seeking state school opened in Suffolk 18 months ago, it perhaps had a little too much going in its favour. The blessing of the local MP, the skills minister Matthew Hancock. The backing of Sweden’s most successful […]
Carole Cadwalladr: It’s hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione? With the […]
Jim Zellmer: Good afternoon, Leigh Let’s begin with your education. Leigh Turner: Like increasing numbers of people in today’s modern world, I grew up in several countries, in Nigeria, in Britain, then again in Lesotho, in southern Africa, and then again in Britain. I went to several different, as we would say in English, schools […]
Madison School District 500K PDF Slideware: Phase Out: WKCE, Explore, and Plan Phase In: PALS 2, Smarter Balanced, Aspire, Work Keys Required State Assessments PALS (4K-2) WKCE Science & Social Studies (3-8) ACCESS for English Language Learners Aspire (9, 10) ACT + Writing (11) Work Keys (12) Related: Madison Schools’ MAP results
Richard Van Noorden: The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than […]
Pat Schneider Tim Slekar, the dean of education at Edgewood College and outspoken critic of corporate-driven education “reform,” couldn’t read another word about Wisconsin GOP legislators’ plan to rewrite the state’s educational standards without saying something about it. “Someone has to say it: Any bill that would allow politicians the ability to directly and/or indirectly […]
New York City is worth watching these days as Mayor Bill de Blasio begins his new “progressive” government. His first priority seems to be a political and economic assault on charter schools.
The number of charters in New York City grew by over 900% under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and they now teach some 70,000 kids out of 1.1 million. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes has twice found that the city’s charter students do better in reading and math than their counterparts at district schools.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Stephen Eide on why forcing New York City charter schools to pay rent will impact educational outcomes. Photo credit: Associated Press.
Mr. de Blasio plans to redress this inequity by handicapping charters. His Department of Education has already zeroed out $210 million in funding from its 2015-2019 capital budget for charter construction. The new mayor has also announced a moratorium on co-locations, a policy that allows charters to share facilities with district schools and provides for a more efficient use of space. Twenty-five co-locations approved last year under Mr. Bloomberg may be in jeopardy.
Mr. de Blasio explains that kids in district schools may feel like they’re getting an inferior education if a charter moves in next door and renovates. Charters are public schools that also raise private money, and state law requires the city to match the private funds on district schools that charters spend on upgrades to prevent a disparity. So by killing co-location Mr. de Blasio can also spend less on district schools.
Is standardized testing anti-student? Many educators and commentators believe so, vehemently. No more “drill and kill,” some detractors demand. Kids are not robots goes another refrain. Others argue that standardized testing is a soul-sapping exercise in rote learning that devalues critical thinking and favors students of higher-income parents who can afford test-prep classes or private tutors.
On the contrary: Testing is good for the intellectual health of students. It is also an excellent way for teachers to better understand the particular academic challenges their students face.
First, standardized tests are a critical thinker’s dream. Multiple-choice questions often ask students to evaluate evidence and make inferences. Consider a sample multiple-choice question for the New York State English Language Arts test, which is administered in the public schools. It asks students to identify the tone of a paragraph excerpted from Andrew Carnegie’s “The Gospel of Wealth” (1889).
There is a long standing belief in business that people performance follows the Bell Curve (also called the Normal Distribution). This belief has been embedded in many business practices: performance appraisals, compensation models, and even how we get graded in school. (Remember “grading by the curve?”)
Research shows that this statistical model, while easy to understand, does not accurately reflect the way people perform. As a result, HR departments and business leaders inadvertently create agonizing problems with employee performance and happiness.
Witness Microsoft’s recent decision to disband its performance management process – after decades of use the company realized it was encouraging many of its top people to leave. I recently talked with the HR leader of a well known public company and she told me her engineer-CEO insists on implementing a forced ranking system. I explained the statistical models to her and it really helped him think differently.
Does human performance follow the bell curve? Research says no.
Let’s look at the characteristics of the Bell Curve, and I think you’ll quickly understand why the model doesn’t fit.