Search Results for: Act 10
Vermont Report: Shaping the Soul of a School
I found Principal Brian Williams in the lunchroom of the Sustainability Academy, a pre-K – 5 magnet school in the Old North End of Burlington, Vermont. He was easy to spot, the biggest guy in the room, sitting on a very small chair, talking with an 8-year-old tousled-haired boy who was having trouble with his writing. It was noontime, and Principal Williams asked me if I would like some of today’s lunch: “Beef stew. I made it myself.”
I was about to chuckle a “Sure, sure” when I stopped and thought that actually, maybe he had made the stew himself. It seemed like such a place where the principal might also be the cook.
Just 5 years ago, the Sustainability Academy (SA) was known as the Lawrence Barnes Elementary School, one of two failing schools (the other was H.O. Wheeler) in the needy, sketchy part of Burlington, where about 95% of the kids were on free or reduced lunch (the nation’s most reliable proxy for poverty), test scores were very low and enrollment was declining. The school’s neighborhood is home to a mix of the down-and-out, the frontier-pushers, and is also the first stop for many of Burlington’s constant influx of refugees and immigrants.The Burlington, VT school district will spend $59,615,950 to education about 3,600 students during the 2013-2014 school year, or $16,559.98 per student. Madison will spend about $15k/student this year, about twice the national average.
Why We Can’t Get Anything Done in an Open-Plan Office
Yesterday I got back from a vacation on which I broke my noise-cancelling headphones, snapping off one of the ear cups when I crammed them into my suitcase. I had originally bought the headphones for trips, for blocking out the roars of jet engines (which, apparently, are deadly), snoring neighbors, and the klaxon wails of babies reacting (in a way I myself would sometimes like to) to the traumatizing experience of modern air travel. But as I was reminded upon my return, what I really use the headphones for, what I need them for, is getting anything done at work.
Like many people, I work in an open-plan office. There are rows of long shared desks, as on a bond trading floor. That means that at any one time, I am within earshot of approximately three dozen phone conversations–it would be more if one of my neighbors wasn’t a laser printer. In addition, from where I sit, there are six TV screens within my line of sight, which are usually tuned (soundlessly, thank God) to 24-hour news channels. There’s a Kurt Vonnegut short story set in a dystopian future in which everyone is supposed to be exactly equal, mentally and physically, so smart people have to wear little devices in their ears that blast horrible noises every 20 seconds to disrupt their thinking. That is how my office sometimes feels. And so yesterday I found myself groping repeatedly for the spot on my desk where the noise-canceling headphones used to sit–and breaking into a cold sweat when I couldn’t find them.Madison’s Thoreau Elementary School originally featured an open plan design. No longer.
‘There’s an insidious prejudice against older teachers’
he Guardian newspaper in England published a post in its Secret Teacher blog, written by teachers who write anonymously, with this headline: “There’s an insidious prejudice against older teachers.’ The piece refers to a program in England called “Teach First,” which, it turns out, is a founding partner with Wendy Kopp’s Teach For America in a growing network of dozens of organizations in countries around the world that try to change the teacher corps. It’s called Teach For All, which I wrote about in this post:
Teach for All is a network of like-minded school reform organizations in countries around the world that, as the website says, “all recruit outstanding university graduates and young leaders of a variety of disciplines and career interests to commit two years to teach in high-need areas, providing a critical source of additional teachers who ensure their students have the educational opportunities they deserve, despite socioeconomic factors.”
Teach First, whose patron is Prince Charles, is having the same effect on many veteran teachers in England as Teach For America is having in the United States, at least according to this Secret Teacher blog post. Here’s part of it:
Until not so long ago I was a happy classroom teacher, with happy pupils in a happy school. A teacher who had been officially and consistently recognised as teaching successfully over a long period of time, by many different professionals – leaders and colleagues, visiting headteachers and Ofsted inspectors. Now, despite years of successful practice, I am feeling vulnerable and hunted….
Overscheduled Children: How Big a Problem?
Now that the school year is under way, my wife and I are busy managing our children’s after-school schedules, mixing sports practices, music lessons, homework and play dates. It can be a complicated balancing act for our elementary-age daughters, as some days end up overstuffed, some logistically impossible, some wide open. Still, compared to when we were children, the opportunities they get to sample on a weekly basis is mind-blowing.
There’s only one problem: To absorb the conventional wisdom in parenting circles these days, what we’re doing to our children is cruel, overbearing and destructive to their long-term well-being. For years now, a consensus has been emerging that a subset of hard-driving, Ivy-longing parents is burdening their children with too many soccer tournaments, violin lessons and cooking classes. A small library of books has been published with names like “The Over-Scheduled Child,” “The Pressured Child,” “Pressured Parents, Stressed-Out Kids” and so on.
Too Many Kids Are Coming to College Unprepared
What explains the high, and rising, cost of college in the U.S.?
JON ERICKSON: Among the obvious factors affecting the rising costs of a college education in the U.S. are declining state funding coupled with increased services. However, there are other factors that may not be so apparent.
Among these factors are the staggering costs of remedial education. Our data show that far too many high-school graduates arrive on college campuses ill-prepared to succeed in standard first-year courses. According to some studies as many as 40% of college students must take at least one remedial course. Conservative estimates just within Texas put the cost at nearly $250 million.
Since remedial courses don’t count toward degree attainment, this also places a significant strain on students, delaying graduation, costing them more money in tuition and fees, and deferring the salary they will earn after they obtain their degree. Improving the college readiness of our high school graduates could help reduce college costs for many students.
Is Music the Key to Success?
Joanne Lipman CONDOLEEZZA RICE trained to be a concert pianist. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a professional clarinet and saxophone player. The hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kovner is a pianist who took classes at Juilliard. Multiple studies link music study to academic achievement. But what is it about serious music training […]
Madison School District’s Outbound Open Enrollment Increases to -1206 (-836 net out)
MMSD financial results for 2012-13 were favorable in comparison to budget expectations. The General Fund Balance, which was budgeted to decrease by ($5.5) million to support several one-time expenditures, actually decreased by just ($1.6) million. This puts the District’s balance sheet in a stronger opening position for 2013-14. The primary reason for the favorable result was an unbudgeted revenue influx of $3.2 million from Medicaid reimbursements.
However, the Food Service Fund struggled in 2012-13, recording a net loss of $386,000 on total revenues of $10.5 million. Labor cost overages were the primary cause of the net loss. The Business Office is working closely with the Food Service department on budgetary expectations for 2013-14. Overall participation in the program decreased slightly last year.
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Open enrollment results show 370 students enrolling in to MMSD from elsewhere and 1,206 MMSD residents enrolling outside of the district. The net out is -836. (Enrollment background data & District statistics)
(Last year, MMSD had 379 students enrolling in and 1,118 enrolling out, for a net out of -739.)Much more on open enrollment here.
Suburban Districts vs. Madison, 1995-2012.
Madison School District: Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Surveys (June, 2009).
Why I Stopped Writing Recommendation Letters for Teach for America
For the past nine years, I’ve been an instructor, a Ph.D. student, adjunct professor, and post-doctoral fellow in humanities departments at several different universities. During this time, many students have asked me to write recommendations for Teach for America. My students generally have little to no experience or training as teachers, but they are lured by TFA’s promises that they can help close the education gap for children in low-income communities. For humanities majors, TFA is a clear path to a job that both pays a living wage and provides a stepping stone to leadership positions in a cause of national importance.
I understand why my students find so much hope in TFA. I empathize with them. In fact, I’m a former Teach for America corps member myself. But unless they are education majors–and most of them aren’t–I no longer write Teach for America letters of recommendation for my students. I urge my higher-ed colleagues to do the same.
There is a movement rising in every city of this country that seeks true education reform–not the kind funded by billionaires, corporations, and hedge funds, and organized around their values. This movement consists of public school parents and students, veteran teachers, and ex-TFA corps members. It also consists of a national network of college students, such as those in Students United for Public Education, who talk about the damage TFA is inflicting on communities and public schools. These groups and others also acknowledge the relationship between the corporatization of higher education and the vast impact of corporate reform on our youngest and most needy children. It is these children who are harmed by the never-ending cycle of under-trained, uncertified, first- and second-year teachers that now populates disadvantaged schools, and by the data-obsessed approach to education that is enabled by these inexperienced teachers.
What College Will Be Like in 2023: Imagine a university without textbooks and classes without calendars. But still costing a lot of money.
Ten years from now college might not look too different from the outside–the manicured quads, the football games, the parties–but the learning experience students receive will probably be fundamentally different from the one they get today.
Textbooks. Lecture halls. September-to-spring calendars. Over the next decade, technology may sweep away some of the most basic aspects of a university education and usher in a flood of innovations and changes. Look for online classes that let students learn at their own pace, drawing on materials from schools across the country–not just a single professor and a hefty textbook.
All those changes probably won’t make a university education cheaper–alas–but they will likely upend our perceptions about how we value it. Traditionally, schools have been judged by how many prospective students they turn away, not by how many competent graduates they churn out.
“Those are status rankings, driven by exclusivity and preservation of an old model,” says Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University. But as new technologies seep into the classroom, it will be easier to measure what students actually learn. That will “make universities more accountable for what they produce,” Dr. Crow says.
Integrating Programming with Core Curriculum
There has been a steady and growing call for more students to learn computer programming. In an app-centric world, many see the immediate possible benefits of a more highly skilled workforce that can create the computer-based tools we all depend on. And tech companies love the idea. Adobe’s Worldwide Education Programs Lead Tacy Trowbridge said coding is “an important and increasingly relevant form of creative expression” that has been instrumental in the growth of their business model to the cloud.
As they try to answer that call, some educators are looking beyond stand-alone lessons or separate programming classes and integrating coding into their core curriculum.
Beaver Country Day School (BCDS), a private school for students in grades 6-12 located just outside Boston, launched a school-wide coding initiative this academic year to help prepare their students for a new world of work and to, they hope, encourage more students to study computer science in college.
However, rather than just offering required stand-alone computer science courses, said Math Teacher and Department Head Rob MacDonald, they are integrating it into the core curriculum.
“I’ve actually been teaching a very successful coding elective for several years now,” he said, “but I was thrilled when I got the okay to integrate coding into our core math courses.”
MacDonald said he had been interested to hear about “interesting work around coding that was being done in schools, makerspaces, and extra-curricular programs, but very few places seemed willing to take the leap and make coding universal.”
How Intense Study May Harm Our Workouts
Gretchen Reynolds via a kind John Dickert email::
Tire your brain and your body may follow, a remarkable new study of mental fatigue finds. Strenuous mental exertion may lessen endurance and lead to shortened workouts, even if, in strict physiological terms, your body still has plenty of energy reserves.
Scientists have long been intrigued by the idea that physical exertion affects our ability to think, with most studies finding that short bouts of exercise typically improve cognition. Prolonged and exhausting physical exercise, on the other hand, may leave practitioners too worn out to think clearly, at least for a short period of time.
But the inverse possibility — that too much thinking might impair physical performance — has received far less attention. So scientists from the University of Kent in England and the French Institute of Health and Medical Research, known as INSERM, joined forces to investigate the matter. For a study published online in May in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, they decided to tire volunteers’ brains with a mentally demanding computer word game and see how well their bodies would perform afterward.
Colleges Try Cutting Tuition–and Aid Packages
After years of hefty tuition increases, a few colleges are cutting prices and trying to wean families from discounts.
More than a half-dozen schools have slashed their sticker prices starting this fall or next as part of simplifying the college-financing process, which has become a patchwork of aid deals and discounts for families. Administrators say the price cuts could actually make schools money by attracting more new students and helping retain cost-conscious ones.
Published tuition rates have soared in the last decade, but only a small percentage of families actually pays full freight. Between grants to needy students and merit scholarships to entice other desirable candidates, schools these days are giving back nearly 50% of gross tuition revenue in the form of aid and awards, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
Such discounting has become so widespread that many small, private colleges say they are stuck in a vicious cycle: They won’t meet enrollment goals if they charge full price, even to affluent families, but they can’t afford to continue cutting everyone a deal.
The Graduate Glut
South Korea is perhaps the most over-educated country in the world.
More people are enrolled in its universities and colleges than are in the target age group for tertiary education. This is probably due to older people and foreigners.
Although the proportion of students who are foreign is low – just 1.6 per cent in 2011 according to the OECD – their numbers are increasing fast. In the past decade they’ve grown more than a thousandfold. In particular Korea attracts a lot of Chinese students.
Although it’s the most extreme example, it’s not the only country to see people pour into higher education over the past decade. Plenty of other developed nations are seeing education levels soar. A recent paper found that half of American and European workers’ education level is mismatched with their current job – the majority of whom are over-educated, and under-employed.
Skill up or lose out
For the first time, the Survey of Adult Skills allows us to directly measure the skills people currently have, not just the qualifications they once obtained. The results show that what people know and what they do with what they know has a major impact on their life chances. On average across countries, the median wage of workers who score at Level 4 or 5 in the literacy test – meaning that they can make complex inferences and evaluate subtle arguments in written texts – is more than 60% higher than the hourly wage of workers who score at or below Level 1 – those who can, at best, read relatively short texts and understand basic vocabulary. Those with poor literacy skills are also more than twice as likely to be unemployed. In short, poor skills severely limit people’s access to better-paying and more-rewarding jobs.
It works the same way for nations: The distribution of skills has significant implications for how the benefits of economic growth are shared within societies. Put simply, where large shares of adults have poor skills, it becomes difficult to introduce productivity-enhancing technologies and new ways of working. And that can stall improvements in living standards.
Proficiency in basic skills affects more than earnings and employment. In all countries, adults with lower literacy proficiency are far more likely than those with better literacy skills to report poor health, to perceive themselves as objects rather than actors in political processes, and to have less trust in others. In other words, we can’t develop fair and inclusive policies and engage with all citizens if a lack of proficiency in basic skills prevents people from fully participating in society.
Australian Universities Learning From Asia’s Tiger Moms
At the request of strict Asian parents, the days of college as an opportunity to work hard and play hard are fast being replaced by a new regime of alcohol-free dorms and gender-segregated floors. The University of New South Wales in Sydney offers nightly bed checks for younger students to ensure they are in their rooms by 10 p.m.–and alone.
“My mom’s happy about the fact that our apartments are under 24/7 campus security coverage,” said Mike Lin, a 22-year-old commerce student from Fuzhou, in southern China, who is studying at the university. “I do think domestic students tend to party a bit much at university-they seem to enjoy the university life better than us.”
Alarmed by a sharp decline in foreign students, Australian universities are upending the traditional college model to meet the standards of strict Asian parents. Residential dorms now offer prayer rooms and private en-suites. Newly built studio apartments gleam with hotel-style bathrooms and kitchenettes, the latest in IT technology and soundproof rooms for study groups, as well as 24-hour security and a telephone hotline for parents.
8 states where student debt is out of control
Rising levels of student debt have raised alarm bells in the minds of economists and recent college graduates alike. With a bachelor’s degree virtually indispensable in today’s workplace — and a master’s necessary in many fields, as well — many people, be they fresh out of high school or not, have found themselves needing to a seek a higher education in order to pay the bills.
The problem is that these days, college is far from cheap. Tuition for a four-year college can cost easily more than $10,000 per year, ranging all the way up to $50,000 or even more for top-of-the-line institutions. With many inbound college students finding themselves strapped for cash, their only option — aside from obtaining federal aid — is to seek loans to cover the difference between the costs of college and living and any income they might obtain in the meantime. This can amount to a crippling debt load by the time students graduate.
However, student debt rates are not the same across the nation: In fact, there is a surprising amount of variance, according to numbers collected by College In Sight. The average graduate of a four-year institution (or higher) with student debt has less than $20,000 of debt in Utah or Arizona. Let’s take a look at eight states at the other end of the spectrum, those with the highest amounts of student debt in the country.
The Bizarre, Misguided Campaign to Get Rid of Single-Sex Classrooms
Wealthy families have always had the option of sending their children to all-male or all-female schools, but parents of modest means have rarely had that choice. That changed in 2001, when four female senators sponsored legislation that sanctioned single-sex classes and academies in public schools. Today, there are more than 500 public schools that offer single-sex classes and 116 public all-girl or all-boy academies. Many are in struggling urban neighborhoods and many have proven to be hugely successful.
The Irma Lerma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership School in Dallas opened in 2004 and enrolls 473 girls in grades six through 12. More than 70 percent of the students are from economically disadvantaged homes and more than 90 percent are minorities. Its success has been dazzling. In less than a decade, the school has won multiple academic achievement awards and, according to U.S. News & World Report, is one of the top public schools in Texas.
In 2011, Dallas opened a comparable public school for young men: the Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy. Before opening its doors, the principal, Nakia Douglas, spent a year visiting schools throughout the United States–including many boys’ schools–to determine best practices for educating young men. More than half the teachers at BOMLA are male and there is massive focus on areas where many boys need extra help: organizational skills, time management, self-control, perseverance, and above all, academic achievement. Wearing ties and blazers, the students are instructed in the art of becoming young gentlemen. The principal’s research taught him that boys will go to astonishing lengths to defend their team. So (inspired in part by his reading of Harry Potter), he divided the academy into four houses–Expedition, Justice, Decree, and Alliance–which compete against one another for points earned through good grades, community service, reading books, and athletics. Douglas and his colleagues have created a school where young men can’t help but flourish. There is now a long waiting list for entry into this academy.
How the Market Can Rein in Tuition Costs
With the costs of higher education rising and almost a third of the outstanding $1.2 trillion in student debt in default, it’s time for imaginative solutions. One of the more promising ideas comes from Oregon, where the state senate this summer passed a bipartisan bill to test a new system called “Pay It Forward, Pay It Back.”
Students attending public universities in the state would pay no tuition at all. Instead, they would commit to repaying 3% of their income for the next 20 years into a fund that would support the next generation of students.
The idea is attracting attention. Stephen Sweeney, president of the New Jersey state senate, has proposed a similar concept for his state, and U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.) says he will soon introduce a bill proposing the same “pay it forward” concept for federal student loans.
Income-based loan repayments are a promising idea, but lawmakers should proceed with caution. On the positive side, borrowers don’t generally default on loans because they’re irresponsible. They simply have times in their life, perhaps after losing a job, when they can’t afford to pay. Income-based repayments sidestep the problem: When you earn less, you pay less. When you earn more, you pay more. And by design, these loans are always affordable.
Pay Raises for Teachers With Master’s Under Fire: “Paying teachers on the basis of master’s degrees is equivalent to paying them based on hair color”
The nation spends an estimated $15 billion annually on salary bumps for teachers who earn master’s degrees, even though research shows the diplomas don’t necessarily lead to higher student achievement.
And as states and districts begin tying teachers’ pay and job security to student test scores, some are altering–or scrapping–the time-honored wage boost.
Lawmakers in North Carolina, led by Republican legislators, voted in July to get rid of the automatic pay increase for master’s degrees. Tennessee adopted a policy this summer that mandates districts adopt salary scales that put less emphasis on advanced degrees and more on factors such as teacher performance. And Newark, N.J., recently decided to pay teachers for master’s degrees only if they are linked to the district’s new math and reading standards.
The moves come a few years after Florida, Indiana and Louisiana adopted policies that require districts to put more weight on teacher performance and less on diplomas.
Voevodsky’s Mathematical Revolution
On last Thursday at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, Vladimir Voevodsky gave perhaps the most revolutionary scientific talk I’ve ever heard. I doubt if it generated much buzz among the young scientists in advance, though, because it had the inscrutable title “Univalent Foundations of Mathematics,” and the abstract contained sentences like this one: “Set-theoretic approach to foundations of mathematics work well until one starts to think about categories since categories cannot be properly considered as sets with structures due to the required invariance of categorical constructions with respect to equivalences rather than isomorphisms of categories.”
Eyes glazed over yet?
Bridging the Gap Between High School and College, at a Price
MY older son is about a month into his freshman year at college, and like most of his classmates, is adjusting to new roommates, classes and doing his own laundry.
But not all his friends are engrossed in campus life. One is doing volunteer work in South America. Another is preparing to go to Israel.
They’re taking gap years, a break between high school and college that traditionally begins in the fall. There are no national statistics on the number of students taking gap years, but there’s no question the idea — and the number of companies offering gap year programs — is growing in popularity.
USA Gap Year Fairs began in 2006 with seven fairs at high schools. About 10 companies and several hundred people showed up, said Robin Pendoley, chief executive of Thinking Beyond Borders, a nonprofit group that arranges gap year programs. His company also helps organize the fairs.
In six years, that number grew to 30 fairs in 28 cities with about 40 organizations and 2,500 students attending. This January and February (when the events are typically held), 35 fairs attracted 50 organizations and about 4,000 students.
How Taxpayers Are Helping to Finance Harvard’s Capital Campaign
Public funds for higher education are hard to find. States have slashed billions from university budgets while the federal government is struggling to keep the Pell Grant program afloat. So it came as a shock when government officials on Saturday announced plans to give $2-billion in taxpayer funds over the next five years to a single private university that mostly educates rich people and already has an endowment bigger than the gross domestic product of Bolivia.
Well, actually, government officials didn’t do the announcing. Harvard University did it for them, by launching a $6.5-billion capital campaign, the largest ever.
Harvard, which has an endowment of more than $30-billion, is a “nonprofit” organization, according to a close, technical reading of the law. That means donations to the campaign are tax-deductible. If we conservatively estimate a 28-percent marginal federal income-tax rate for donors (the top rate is 39.6 percent), and a similar effective rate for corporate donations, that’s $1.8-billion in forgone revenue. State income-tax rates vary from zero to more than 10 percent; assuming 5 percent, on average, yields $325-million more, or $2.1-billion total.
School first, sports second
The Berkeley Faculty Association deplores the disruption of the university’s academic mission by the occupation of Kroeber Plaza by Fox Sports TV earlier this month. The Fox Sports booths, television screens and other advertising paraphernalia were set up on a Friday, even as students and faculty were trying to attend classes and access the library and art studios. Faculty were not consulted about the event beforehand — which was especially problematic when departments in Kroeber Hall, including the anthropology library and art practice workshops, were forced to close on Saturday due to increased traffic — a result of poor planning and lack of adequate security. Academics were not merely interrupted but trumped by Cal Athletics and its corporate partners.
This past weekend’s event comes in the wake of several years of deepening faculty concern about the place of athletics at UC Berkeley. First, the construction of a $321 million, debt-financed stadium and a pattern of misinformation from Intercollegiate Athletics about revenues from tax-deductible seat sales. Then, news of the additional $124 million debt incurred to build the Simpson Student-Athlete High Performance Center, a facility available to less than 1 percent of the student body. Now, the plan to construct a new Aquatics Center, again not for the general use of the campus community, but for the exclusive use of Intercollegiate Athletics. These issues merely add to ongoing concern about the huge sums from the Chancellor’s Discretionary Fund that have been used to cover yearly operating deficits of Intercollegiate Athletics — nearly $100 million in the past decade — and recent news that UC Berkeley still ranks last in the Pac-12 Conference in graduation success rates of students playing men’s basketball (“up” from 20 percent in 2009 to the current 33 percent and next-to-last in football).
We are not anti-athletics. We understand that intercollegiate competition contributes to institutional pride and plays an important role in maintaining the loyalty of students and alumni. We believe in the educational place of an athletics program that fosters student fitness, physical well-being and camaraderie. But despite scandal after scandal under different chancellors, the proper management of IA has eluded the best efforts of campus administration. The continuing conflicts between IA and the primary mission of the university — excellence in education, research and public service — makes us wonder whether the time has come to separate Cal Athletics — financially, administratively and geographically — from UC Berkeley’s academic endeavors and locales.
Drawing conclusions: Politics of art class appear to come with different consequences
A controversial art lesson in the Madison Metropolitan School District draws similarities from a 2012 incident in which a Louisiana middle school teacher was fired after displaying his student’s anti-President Obama drawings.
Kati Walsh, an elementary art teacher in Madison, published anti-Gov. Scott Walker political cartoons drawn by her kindergarten, first- and second-grade students. One drawing depicts Walker in jail, and another in which he appears to be in jail and engulfed in flames. Walsh said the orange in that drawing actually represented a prison jumpsuit.
Robert Duncan, a former Slidell, La., middle school social studies teacher at St. Tammany Parish School District, was fired after an internal investigation found he acted incompetently in displaying several student drawings depicting harm to Obama. The incident was first brought to light after a parent leaked photos of the drawings to WDSU, a local TV news outlet.After learning to read well, critical thinking would certainly be a useful topic for all students.
Colorado State University Bets on a Stadium to Fill Its Coffers
Colorado State University has seen the future of higher education, and it has goal posts and end zones.
Faced with declining state funding, CSU is raising money to build a $246 million, 40,000-seat football stadium on its Fort Collins campus. University President Tony Frank says the new facility will help build a winning football team while advancing one of the school’s highest priorities: attracting more out-of-state students paying higher tuition.
Skeptics, including some alumni and faculty, see the project as a boondoggle–especially for a team that plays in a relatively low-profile athletic conference and doesn’t sell out its current 32,500-seat stadium off campus. The debate has sparked dueling websites, animated letters to the editor and arguments about the role of sports at a university.
This Year’s SAT Scores Are Out, and They’re Grim
isconsin State Superintendent of Instruction Tony Evers used the platform of his annual State of Education speech Thursday to respond to skeptics of Common Core standards, whose ranks Republican Gov. Scott Walker joined just a few days earlier.
“We cannot go back to a time when our standards were a mile wide and an inch deep, leaving too many kids ill prepared for the demands of college and a career. We cannot pull the rug out from under thousands of kids, parents and educators who have spent the past three years working to reach these new, higher expectations that we have set for them. To do so would have deep and far reaching consequences for our kids, and for our state,” Evers said in remarks at the State Capitol that also touched on accountability for voucher schools. “We must put our kids above our politics. And we owe it to them to stay the course.”
Evers signed on to national Common Core curriculum standards for reading and math in 2010, making Wisconsin one of the first states to adopt them. School districts across the state, including Madison Metropolitan School District, are in the process of implementing them. Madison schools Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham has called Common Core standards “pretty wonderful,” and says they are about critical thinking and applying skills to practical tasks.
Walker had been pretty low-key about Common Core until a few days ago, when he issued a statement calling for separate, more rigorous state standards. Republican leaders of both houses of the state Legislature quickly announced special committees to weigh the Common Core standards, and public hearings on not-yet-adopted science and social studies standards will be held, according to one report.Related: Wisconsin’s oft-criticized WKCE assessment and wisconsin2.org
A Report Card on Education Reform
I sat down last week in Washington with Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, and Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana governor and current Purdue University president, after they had met with several dozen chief executives of big companies to talk about education. Their meeting was at the office of the Business Roundtable, the corporate lobbying group, and joining us for the conversation was John Engler, the former Michigan governor who runs the Business Roundtable.
Neilson Barnard/Getty Images, for The New York Time Education Secretary Arne Duncan
Mr. Duncan is a Democrat, of course, and Mr. Daniels and Mr. Engler are Republicans. But they all sympathize with many of the efforts of the so-called education reform movement. I asked them whether the country’s education system was really in crisis and what mistakes school reformers had made. A lightly edited version of the first part of our conversation follows; the second part will appear on Economix on Thursday.
Leonhardt: You always hear we’re in crisis. But what is the bad news, and what is the good news, and are we making any progress?
Duncan: I do think we have a crisis. I do feel tremendous urgency. If you look at any international comparison – which in a global economy is much more important than 30 or 40 years ago – on no indicator are we anywhere near where we want to be. Whether it’s test scores or college graduation rates, whatever it is, we’re not close. So we’ve got a long way to go. That’s the challenge.
Why I am hopeful is we have seen some real progress. Some things are going the right way. The question is how do we accelerate that progress. College graduations rates are up some. High school graduation rates are up to 30-year highs, which is a big step in the right direction.
The African-American/Latino community is driving much of that improvement, which is very, very important. There is a huge reduction in the number of kids going to dropout factories. We are seeing real progress. The question is how do we get better faster.
Daniels: I am glad that the secretary didn’t pull any punches. I don’t know any other way to read it. In Indiana, we just had, by far, the best results we’ve ever seen in our state. Everything was up. The high-school graduation rate is up 10 percent in just four years. Test scores, advanced-placement scores too. But we’re just nowhere near where we need to be. And the competition is not standing still. So we need many more years of progress at the current rate, and it still maybe too slow. I’m afraid this is a half-empty analysis, but I think it’s an honest one.
Engler: The president of Purdue and the president of the Business Roundtable – we are the consumer groups here at the table. All the products of K-12 system are either going to go to the university or they are going to the work force. The military is not here, but they’re not very different.Related: Madison’s long time disastrous reading scores and wisconsin2.org
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The American Dream, RIP?
COULD America survive the end of the American Dream? The idea is unthinkable, say political leaders of right and left. Yet it is predicted in “Average is Over“, a bracing new book by Tyler Cowen, an economist. Mr Cowen is no stranger to controversy. In 2011 he galvanised Washington with “The Great Stagnation”, in which he argued that America has used up the low-hanging fruit of free land, abundant labour and new technologies. His new book suggests that the disruptive effects of automation and ever-cheaper computer power have only just begun to be felt.
It describes a future largely stripped of middling jobs and broad prosperity. An elite 10-15% of Americans will have the brains and self-discipline to master tomorrow’s technology and extract profit from it, he speculates. They will enjoy great wealth and stimulating lives. Others will endure stagnant or even falling wages, as employers measure their output with “oppressive precision”. Some will thrive as service-providers to the rich. A few will claw their way into the elite (cheap online education will be a great leveller), bolstering the idea of a “hyper-meritocracy” at work: this “will make it easier to ignore those left behind”.
College Board ‘Concerned’ About Low SAT Scores
Claudio Sanchez (NPR) The College Board, sponsor of the SAT, says that roughly six out of 10 college-bound high school students who took the test were so lacking in their reading, writing and math skills, they were unprepared for college level work. The College Board is calling for big changes to better prepare students for […]
The Post-Lecture Classroom: How Will Students Fare
If college professors spent less time lecturing, would their students do better?
A three-year study examining student performance in a “flipped classroom” — a class in which students watch short lecture videos at home and work on activities during class time — has found statistically significant gains in student performance in “flipped” settings and significant student preference for “flipped” methods.
The study, provided exclusively toThe Atlantic, is one of the first to examine a “flipped” classroom in the current state of its technology. Russell Mumper, a Vice Dean at the University of North Carolina’s Eshelman School of Pharmacy, conducted the study, and two separate articles based on its findings are now in press in the journals Academic Medicine and The American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education. The education technology company Echo360, whose technology was used in the classes examined, funded the study with a $10,000 grant.
How American HomeSchoolers Measure Up
Once upon a time, all children were homeschooled. But around 150 years ago states started making public school mandatory and homeschooling eventually became illegal. It wasn’t until the 90’s that all states made it legal again. Today, with more than 2 million homeschoolers making up 4% of the school-aged population, it’s the fastest growing form of education in the country.
HOMESCHOOL HISTORY
1840: 55% of children attended primary school while the rest were educated in the home or by tutors.
1852: The “Common School” model became popular and Massachusetts became the first state to pass compulsory attendance law. Once compulsory attendance laws became effective, America eventually relied entirely on public and private schools for educating children. Homeschooling then became something only practiced by extremely rural families, and within Amish communities.
1870: All states had free primary schools.
1900: 34 states had compulsory attendance laws.
1910: 72% of children attended primary school.
1960: Educational reformers started questioning public schooling’s methods and results.
1977: “Growing Without Schooling” magazine was published, marking a shift from trying to reform public education to abandoning it.
1980: Homeschooling was illegal in 30 states.
1983: Changes in tax law forced many Christian Schools to close which led to soaring homeschooling rates.
1993: Homeschooling become legal in all 50 states and saw annual growth rates of 15-20%.
Waiting for Recovery: New York Schools and the Aftermath of the Great Recession
Rajashri Chakrabarti and Max Livingston
A key institution that was significantly affected by the Great Recession is the school system, which plays a crucial role in building human capital and shaping the country’s economic future. To prevent major cuts to education, the federal government allocated $100 billion to schools as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), commonly known as the stimulus package. However, the stimulus has wound down while many sectors of the economy are still struggling, leaving state and local governments with budget squeezes. In this post, we present some key findings on how school finances in New York State fared during this period, drawing on our recent study and a series of interactive graphics. As the stimulus ended, school district funding fell dramatically and districts across the state enacted significant cuts across the board, affecting not only noninstructional spending but also instructional spending–the category most closely related to student learning.
Poverty Can Trump a Winning Hand of Genes
Alison Gopnik Changes in our environment can actually transform the relation between our traits and the outside world. We all notice that some people are smarter than others. You might naturally wonder how much these differences in intelligence depend on genes or upbringing. But that question, it turns out, is impossible to answer. That’s because […]
My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
Memorization, not rationalization. That is the advice of my 13-year-old daughter, Esmee, as I struggle to make sense of a paragraph of notes for an upcoming Earth Science test on minerals. “Minerals have crystal systems which are defined by the # of axis and the length of the axis that intersect the crystal faces.” That’s how the notes start, and they only get murkier after that. When I ask Esmee what this actually means, she gives me her homework credo.
Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. My wife and I have noticed since she started there in February of last year that she has a lot of homework. We moved from Pacific Palisades, California, where Esmee also had a great deal of homework at Paul Revere Charter Middle School in Brentwood. I have found, at both schools, that whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or administrators, their response is that they are required by the state to cover a certain amount of material. There are standardized tests, and everyone–students, teachers, schools–is being evaluated on those tests. I’m not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed. During the school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep.
Our era needs new words to describe new conditions
It occurs to me that our new era requires new words to describe new conditions, so herewith follows a quick useful lexicon for 2013.
The first modern condition that springs to mind is one described by the word: smupidity (n.) smart + stupidity
Smupidity defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we’ve never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we’ve never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of smupidity. Example: “Yes, I know I was able to obtain a list of all Oscar winners from 1952 in three tenths of a second, yet it makes me feel smupid that I didn’t waste two hours visiting the local library to obtain that list.” In our newly smupid world, the average IQ is now 103 but it feels like it’s 97.
One possible explanation for smupidity is that people are generally far more aware than they ever were of all the information they don’t know. The weight of this fact overshadows huge advances made in knowledge-accumulation and pattern-recognition skills honed by online searching.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: How Detroit went broke: The answers may surprise you – and don’t blame Coleman Young
Nathan Bomey and John Gallagher:
Detroit is broke, but it didn’t have to be. An in-depth Free Press analysis of the city’s financial history back to the 1950s shows that its elected officials and others charged with managing its finances repeatedly failed — or refused — to make the tough economic and political decisions that might have saved the city from financial ruin.
Instead, amid a huge exodus of residents, plummeting tax revenues and skyrocketing home abandonment, Detroit’s leaders engaged in a billion-dollar borrowing binge, created new taxes and failed to cut expenses when they needed to. Simultaneously, they gifted workers and retirees with generous bonuses. And under pressure from unions and, sometimes, arbitrators, they failed to cut health care benefits — saddling the city with staggering costs that today threaten the safety and quality of life of people who live here.
The numbers, most from records deeply buried in the public library, lay waste to misconceptions about the roots of Detroit’s economic crisis. For critics who want to blame Mayor Coleman Young for starting this mess, think again. The mayor’s sometimes fiery rhetoric may have contributed to metro Detroit’s racial divide, but he was an astute money manager who recognized, early on, the challenges the city faced and began slashing staff and spending to address them.
And Wall Street types who applauded Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s financial acumen following his 2005 deal to restructure city pension debt should consider this: The numbers prove that his plan devastated the city’s finances and was a key factor that drove Detroit to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in July.
Great Education War being waged on multiple fronts
I have such conflicted feelings about the war.
No, not Syria. Also not Iraq, Afghanistan or even Grenada (we won that one, remember?)
The Great Education War rages all around us. If anything, it seems to be getting more intense, and cooperation and goodwill seem to be in shorter supply.
The war has many fronts:
- Standardized testing, how much should there be, what uses should the results be put to.
- Private school voucher programs (the battle royal, especially in places such as Wisconsin).
- Charter schools (actually, a hotter fight in many places than around here).
- Teachers’ collective bargaining powers. Also teachers’ pay and pensions. Also funding and tax issues overall
- Anything that some people see as “privatization.”
War, of course, is too strong a term, if you take it literally. There is no physical fighting (thank goodness). But there are passions and intensity, and the stakes are high and the advocacy is often conducted with bare-knuckled rhetoric and uncompromising strategy. It sort of has the feeling of war.
The Boy Genius of Ulan Bator
Days before I was to meet Battushig Myanganbayar at his home in Mongolia, he sent me an e-mail with a modest request: Would I bring him a pair of tiny XBee wireless antennas? Electronic parts are scarce in Mongolia (he used components from old elevators for some of his projects), and packages ordered online take weeks to show up.
When I arrived, antennas in hand, at his apartment in the middle-class neighborhood of Khan Uul, in Ulan Bator, Battushig, 16, led me down a steep incline into the building’s underground garage to show me what they were for. Many children in the city play in their apartment buildings’ driveways, but this one seemed oriented in a particularly dangerous way. Battushig worried about his 10-year-old sister and her friends being hit by an exiting car. Standing in the concrete space, its aqua walls nicked, he pointed overhead to a white box containing a sensor from which he had run wires to a siren with a flashing red light outside in the building’s driveway. His Garage Siren gave his sister and the other children time to get out of the way when a car was coming.
Battushig, playing the role of the car, moved into the sensor’s path to show me how it worked, but it was clear he was not entirely satisfied with his design. “The use of the long wires is very inconvenient for my users,” he said, almost apologetically, clasping his hands together in emphasis. He realized that contractors would be reluctant to install the siren in other buildings if they had to deal with cumbersome wiring, so he was developing a wireless version. Thus, the antennas.
Commentary on Using Empty Milwaukee Public Schools’ Buildings
As I regularly pass by the former Malcolm X Academy that has been vacant for years, the words of a legendary African-American educator comes to mind:
“No schoolhouse has been opened for us that has not been filled.”
Booker T. Washington said that in 1896 during an address to urge white Americans to respect the desire by most African-American parents to seek the best possible education for their children.
Fast-forward to 2013 in Milwaukee, and the issue of vacant school buildings gives a pecular spin to Washington’s words. Back then, he could never have imagined the combination of bureaucracy and politics that has some educators scrambling to find spaces to fill with African-American students.
The campaign by a local private school funded by taxpayers to buy the former Malcolm X Academy at 2760 N. 1st St. has caused some in town to question why Milwaukee Public Schools hasn’t done more to turn closed school buildings into functioning houses of learning.
In particular, some conservatives question why MPS hasn’t been willing to sell valuable resources to school choice entities that are essentially their main competition for low-income minority students.
Actually, that stance seems valid from a business standpoint; why help out the folks trying to put you out of business?The City of Milwaukee: Put Children First!
St. Marcus is at capacity.
Hundreds of children are on waiting lists.
Over the past decade, St. Marcus Lutheran School in Milwaukee’s Harambee neighborhood has proven that high-quality urban education is possible. The K3-8th grade school has demonstrated a successful model for education that helps children and families from urban neighborhoods break the cycle of poverty and move on to achieve academic success at the post-secondary level and beyond.
By expanding to a second campus at Malcolm X, St. Marcus can serve 900 more students.WILL Responds to MPS on Unused Schools Issues
On Tuesday, Milwaukee Public Schools responded to WILL’s report, “MPS and the City Ignore State Law on Unused Property.” Here is WILL’s reply:
1. MPS’ response is significant for what it does not say. WILL’s report states that, right now, there are at least 20 unused school buildings that are not on the market – and practically all of these buildings have attracted interest from charter and choice schools. As far as its records reveal, MPS refuses to adopt basic business practices, such as keeping an updated portfolio of what is happening with its facilities. How is the public to know where things stand when it is not clear that MPS keeps tabs on them?
2. MPS thinks everything is okay because it has sold four buildings since 2011 and leases to MPS schools. MPS’ response is similar to a football team (we trust it would be the Bears) celebrating that they scored two touchdowns in a game – only to end up losing 55-14. Our report acknowledged that MPS had disposed of a few buildings, but when there are at least 20 empty buildings – and substantial demand for them – claiming credit for selling a few is a bit like a chronic absentee celebrating the fact that he usually comes in on Tuesdays. Children and taxpayers deserve better.Conservative group says MPS, city not selling enough empty buildings
A conservative legal group says that Milwaukee Public Schools is stalling on selling its empty school buildings to competing school operators that seek school facility space, and that the City of Milwaukee isn’t acting on a new law that gives it more authority to sell the district’s buildings.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which supports many Republican causes, says its new report shows that MPS is preventing charter schools and private schools in the voucher program from purchasing empty and unused school buildings.
But MPS fired back yesterday, saying the legal group’s information omits facts and containts false claims.
For example, MPS Spokesman Tony Tagliavia said that this year, five previously unused MPS buildings are back in service as schools.
He said MPS has also sold buildings to high-performing charter schools. Charter operators it has sold to such as Milwaukee College Prep and the Hmong American Peace Academy are operating schools that are under the MPS umbrella, however, so the district gets to count those students as part of its enrollment.My entire career of close to 50 years has been focused on growing a business in and close to the city of Milwaukee. This is where I have my roots. I have followed education closely over these years.
The Aug. 17 Journal Sentinel had an interesting article about conflicting opinions on what the most viable use is for the former Malcolm X School, which closed over six years ago.
The Milwaukee School Board has proposed to have the city convert the site into a community center for the arts, recreation, low-income housing and retail stores. The cost to city taxpaying residences and businesses has not been calculated. Rising tax burdens have been a major factor in the flight to the suburbs and decline of major cities across our country.
St. Marcus Lutheran School is prepared to purchase Malcolm X for an appraised fair market value. St. Marcus is part of Schools That Can Milwaukee, which also includes Milwaukee College Prep and Bruce-Guadalupe Community School. Other participating high performing schools are Atonement Lutheran School, Notre Dame Middle School and Carmen High School of Science and Technology. Support comes from private donations after state allowances for voucher/choice students.
Their students go on to graduate from high school at a rate of over 90%, compared to approximately 60% at Milwaukee Public Schools. The acquisition of Malcolm X would give an additional 800 students the opportunity to attend a high performing school and reduce waiting lists at St. Marcus.
Generation Monoglot
AS THE new term starts across England, schools are chewing over this summer’s results in the 16-plus exams. One trend is clear–the coalition’s emphasis on pupils achieving five core academic subjects, including a language, in its new EBACC (English Baccalaureate) qualification has raised the number of candidates taking language exams.
This marks a reversal of a long period in which English schools turned out a rising number of monoglots (see chart). The past two decades have witnessed a sharp decline in the numbers of teenagers poring over French verbs, let alone the oddities of German, which as Mark Twain, a 19th-century American writer, observed, renders a girl neuter but a turnip feminine.
In 1993 over 315,000 pupils sat the 16-plus exam in French, compared with just over 177,000 this year. German had 108,000 entrants in 1993; there are fewer than 63,000 now. Only Spanish fared better, with 91,000 GCSE entrants this year, rising from 32,000 in 1993. Largely to blame for the slump was a decision by the Labour government in 2002 to end the compulsory status of a language in secondary schools. That accelerated a longer period of modern-languages decline, as pupils switched to subjects perceived to be easier or more practical. Now the coalition is claiming that the rise in this year’s exam entries at 16 marks the first step to correcting the resulting monolingualism. Yet progress has been modest–the number of GCSE French entrants, for example, merely returned to 2010 levels, around half the numbers of the 1990s.
The Crushing Racism of Low Expectations
One of the lesser-broadcast features of the most recent jobs report is that unemployment for African-Americans actually ticked higher, to 13 percent, even as the rest of the country held even at 7.3 percent.
Unemployment for Hispanics was 9.3 percent and for Asians 5.1 percent. Also worrisome, the number of African-American adults who held jobs actually declined last month, and fewer than 61 percent of blacks are working–the lowest participation rate since 1982.
While New York’s Mayor Bloomberg sees racism in the campaign of Bill deBlasio and Jay Z finds racism in the Trayvon Martin decision, I perceive racism in these jobs figures. Blacks are increasingly left behind, at least in part because their leaders do not demand better schools. The greatest source of “disparate impact” in this country, to borrow a phrase currently popular with the Justice Department, is that most black kids can’t read or write. Upward mobility for the African-American community, tenuous at best, is squashed the minute they enter kindergarten.
Too harsh? Not by half. Consider the results from the recent Common Core testing in New York, one of the first to measure how students meet the new nation-wide standards. Statewide, 31 percent of public school students in grades 3 through 8 were considered proficient in English; only 16 percent of blacks met that test, compared to 50 percent of Asians and 40 percent of whites – results which the state’s education department says reveals “the persistence of the achievement gap.”Related: English 10 & Connected Math.
Philadelphia Schools Reopen Amid Financial, Academic Distress
Stephanie Banchero & Kris Maher:
As Philadelphia students returned to school this week facing larger class sizes and slimmed-down arts programs, a fight raged over how to keep the district from sinking further into financial and academic distress.
One of the nation’s most troubled school districts, Philadelphia is buckling under financial pressure and has been unable to squeeze concessions from the teachers union. Teachers started the school year Monday without a contract after failing to reach agreement by Aug. 31, and state leaders are threatening to hold up additional funding unless teachers agree to pay cuts and other changes, such as performance-based pay and a longer school day.
Wanda Cantres, whose 7-year-old son reported to Henry C. Lea Elementary School for the first time after his school was closed, said she is worried about ballooning class sizes and the financial uncertainty.
“They can build prisons and put up high rises, but they can’t get school right,” she said. “There are going to be a lot of children that slip through the cracks.”
The Wrong Kind of Education Reform
The case for market-driven reforms in education rests on two key premises: The public school system is in crisis, and the solution is to let the market pick winners and losers. Market strategies–high-stakes teacher accountability, merit pay, shuttering “failing” schools–are believed to be essential if public schools are ever going to get better. And these maxims underlie the commitment to charter schools and vouchers. Freed from the dead hand of bureaucracy and the debilitating effects of school board politics, the argument runs, schools are free to innovate.
If you follow education debates, you’ve heard that again and again. Here’s what’s new: A spate of new books undercuts both propositions, simply decimating the argument for privatizing education.
Since The Death and Life of the Great American School System, her 2010 best-seller, Diane Ravitch has been the most prominent critic of the market-minded reformers. Americans love apostates, and the fact that, as assistant secretary of education in the first Bush administration, Ravitch acknowledged that she had “fallen for the latest panaceas and miracle cures and drunk deeply of the elixir that promised a quick fix,” has given her considerable credibility. Now she pops up everywhere, keynoting national conventions, urging on teachers at an Occupy the Department of Education rally, being profiled flatteringly in The New Yorker, deluging her supporters with emails, and sparring with ex-D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, the darling of the privatizers, about how to “fix” education.
Why America’s Public Universities – And Not Just Their Students – Have a Debt Problem
Charlie Eaton and Jacob Habinek:
With growing student debt in the headlines, Washington DC policymakers have focused on the interest rates students pay on the loans they take out to cover college costs. But student loan interest payments are a symptom more than the underlying cause of rising student debt. Colleges have steadily hiked tuition, to heights that now make attendance unaffordable for many students from families of modest means.
Tuition increases have been especially sharp at public research universities that once provided an affordable world-class education. The increases have been going on for a long time, but they have accelerated recently. Average tuition and fees at public research universities increased 56% between 2002 and 2010 from $5,011 to $7,824 a year. As the cost of going to college has escalated, so has student indebtedness. According to data from the Institute for College Access and Success, student debt at graduation from public four-year colleges increased by 32% between 2004 and 2010, when it hit an average of $21,605 per student.
Why are tuition and fees at public universities rising so sharply? Universities face higher costs to pay for all of their activities, while the public funding they receive has plummeted. Tuition hikes help make up the difference. Yet there is another factor at work, especially recently – because public universities are going into debt. Working with major Wall Street players like J.P. Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America, they issue bonds and make substantial interest payments to investors, many of whom also trade in university debt. Like their students, in short, public universities have developed a debt problem – indeed, the rising burden on the students is partly driven by the indebtedness universities have taken on.
Justice Department bids to trap poor, black children in ineffective schools
NINE OF 10 Louisiana children who receive vouchers to attend private schools are black. All are poor and, if not for the state assistance, would be consigned to low-performing or failing schools with little chance of learning the skills they will need to succeed as adults. So it’s bewildering, if not downright perverse, for the Obama administration to use the banner of civil rights to bring a misguided suit that would block these disadvantaged students from getting the better educational opportunities they are due.
The Justice Department has petitioned a U.S. District Court to bar Louisiana from awarding vouchers for the 2014-15 school year to students in public school systems that are under federal desegregation orders, unless the vouchers are first approved by a federal judge. The government argues that allowing students to leave their public schools for vouchered private schools threatens to disrupt the desegregation of school systems. A hearing is tentatively set for Sept. 19.
Claude Steele to speak on stereotype threat at Beloit College
Renowned social psychologist Claude Steele will visit Beloit College to give a lecture on Monday, Sept. 9. Free and open to the public, the lecture titled “Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do” takes place at 7:30 p.m. in Eaton Chapel. Steele, the I. James Quillen Dean for the School of […]
Race too, after all, along with Gender
Since Michaela Cross’s experience was part of a study abroad program conducted annually by the University of Chicago, and I was part of the program – for three years as a graduate student assistant (for the Fall quarters of 2007-2009), and one year as faculty in the program (Fall of 2010) – I think I could most usefully contribute by highlighting a few facts about the program itself. In the process I would think aloud about some of the issues that have come up in the reception of Cross’s experience in India, especially in the responses of Rajyashree Sen and Ameya Naik. I choose Sen’s and Naik’s responses partly because they have been the most recent, but also because between them they represent the spectrum of possible positions that one could usefully take about this issue. Needless to add, there have been other responses, such as the one posted by another fellow University of Chicago student on the trip, an article titled ‘In Defence of Rose Chasm (Michaela Cross) and countless other comments, criticisms, and responses that have flooded the Internet world.
However, between Sen and Naik, the basic ends of the spectrum are quite clear. Sen contends that it is not only a white woman’s problem but an issue for all women and that some self-regulation and discipline would have gone a long way to avert the unsavory experiences if not completely eliminate their possibility. Naik, at the other end of the spectrum, points out that the expectation of preparedness or caution urged by Sen belies the possibility of questioning the pervasive culture of sexual violence, in which any cautionary attempt to be safe, is to pay merely lip service to acknowledging the crime of sexual violence, instead of combating more difficult questions about such a culture.
Why do people view teaching as a ‘B-list’ job?
It happens a lot: I’ll introduce myself to a group of people I don’t know well, explaining that I’m a high school English teacher. And someone will invariably respond, “But you’re smart, what do you really want to do?” As backhanded compliments go, that one really rankles. What I find most irksome isn’t even the implication that my colleagues and I are typically mundane or that my work of the last decade has been a waste of my time. The most frustrating thing about hearing that I’m “too smart” for teaching is the counter-productive mentality about my profession that such a comment underscores.
In the early half of the 20th century, a bright woman’s best career option was to be a teacher. Now, thankfully, most every path is open to women, the only downside of which is the inevitable matriculation of top female graduates away from the field of teaching due to a plethora of other choices. This trend is compounded by the fact that teaching is now seen as a B-list job: Most top graduates of my college went into law, medicine, business, or academia. Those who did go into teaching, myself included, constantly encountered the assumption that this would be a short-term gig, the ubiquitous two-year foray (through Teach for America or the like) that would ultimately pad graduate school applications. For many, it was. Teaching wasn’t, and – 10 years later – still isn’t, seen as a “prestigious” career, even by liberal university graduates who would all agree that strong public education is an inviolable social good.
The New Era of Toy Robotics
IN OLDEN TIMES, the most an ambitious young tinkerer could hope for in a toy was to be able to stick one funny-shaped piece onto another. Kids built airplanes with Tinkertoys and spaceships with Erector Sets. In large part, the joy was in the building.
But recreational tinkering has since taken a quantum leap forward. Once motors and computer processors got less expensive and the smartphone became ubiquitous, suddenly, toys could be programmed–not just remote-controlled, but given orders, even missions. Sure, it’s fun to scare your sister by hiding a toy spider in her dresser, but that’s nothing compared to outfitting a jerry-built arachnid with LED eyes and a motion-activated vibrating motor. Today, mini robots can be made to zigzag down the hall, patrol a home, greeting siblings with a friendly hello or a barrage of plastic missiles.
The unintended consequences of laws addressing sex between teachers and students
There is a painfully uncomfortable episode of “Louie” in which the comedian Louis C.K. muses that maybe child molesters wouldn’t kill their victims if the penalty weren’t so severe. Everyone I know who watches the show vividly recalls that scene from 2010 because it conjures such a witches’ cauldron of taboo, disgust and moral outrage, all wrapped around a disturbing kernel of truth. I have similar ambivalence about the case involving former Montana high school teacher Stacey Dean Rambold. Louie concluded his riff with a comment to the effect of “I don’t know what to do with that information.” That may be the case for many of us, but with our legal and moral codes failing us, our society needs to have an uncensored dialogue about the reality of sex in schools.
As protesters decry the leniency of Rambold’s sentence — he will spend 30 days in prison after pleading guilty to raping 14-year-old Cherice Morales, who committed suicide at age 16 — I find myself troubled for the opposite reason. I don’t believe that all sexual conduct between underage students and teachers should necessarily be classified as rape, and I believe that absent extenuating circumstances, consensual sexual activity between teachers and students should not be criminalized. While I am not defending Judge G. Todd Baugh’s comments about Morales being “as much in control of the situation” — for which he has appropriately apologized — tarring and feathering him for attempting to articulate the context that informed his sentence will not advance this much-needed dialogue.
From Mr Average … to superman
The needle is 21 gauge, 1.5in. A hogsticker. Forty of them arrived in a package from Greece. Ever received a package from overseas? You get that puff of air when you rip it open – air that’s travelled thousands of miles. Foreign, like stepping into a stranger’s house. The syringe wrapper has instructions in Italian, French, Greek and Arabic – not a word of English. But it’s a needle. Operation is self-explanatory. I had put them out on my work desk a few days ago – an unignorable fact. An invitation. A threat.
Buck up, laddie. Fortune favours the brave.
What’s inside looks like oily urine. 1cc of Equipoise – a veterinary drug normally injected into beef cattle – and 2cc of Testosterone Cypionate: 10 times the testosterone a man my size produces naturally in a week.
It was going into my backside; plenty of meat there. But the sciatic nerve radiates from my hips; plus, if I hit a vein I could go into cardiac collapse. I tucked a bag of frozen corn beneath my underwear to numb the injection site. The hash marks on the syringe were smudged away by my sweaty hands. That couldn’t be a sign of quality medical equipment, could it?
The Rising Costs of a ‘Free’ Public Education
The kids are back in school. And you’ve probably shelled out for pencil cases, notebooks, a new backpack–and AP French.
“Free public education” clauses are written into state constitutions nationwide. Yet at many public schools around the country it has become anything but. Schools are charging parents for programs and items that have traditionally come standard–including fees for course supplies, school-run extracurricular activities, transportation and even basic registration fees.
School districts have seen their budgets slashed over the past few years as states cut back funding amid the economic downturn. And this year is no exception, even as the economy continues to slowly improve. Thanks to the federal budget sequester earlier this year, schools nationwide have had to adjust to additional budget cuts of 5%, says Dan Domenech, executive director of the AASA, the School Superintendents Association, a nonprofit public-education advocacy group based in Alexandria, Va.
Parents aren’t happy about having to cover some of the tab. And some are even fighting back.
Nashville Forecast: Cloudy with a Chance of Charter Schools
Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:
In the last few years, those at the helm of the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) have become increasingly hostile to the city’s fast-growing charter school sector. Last year, the school board refused (despite a directive from the state to approve) a charter application from Great Hearts Academy, a respected Arizona charter management organization. This is despite the fact that only about 40% of the district’s students in grades 3-8 are meeting proficiency standards. In the past few weeks, the relationship between the MNPS directors and charter schools has deteriorated to the point that some describe as nuclear war. Schools Director Jesse Register has engaged lawyers to argue that the decade-old charter school law is unconstitutional.
Last week, a Nashville paper called for MNPS to adopt a portfolio strategy, meaning that the district should stop trying to be a monopoly operator of schools. Becoming a portfolio district would not mean that Nashville would put all its schools out to bid to charter schools. It would mean that the district would stop treating the students in Nashville charter schools as somebody else’s responsibility and start seeing its job as ensuring that all children in the city are well served by the public schools, no matter who runs them. If a particular neighborhood was not being well served and a renowned district principal wanted to open a new school there, great. If a high-performing charter school was in a position to open a new school there, great. Portfolio districts don’t have a preference for charters or district-run schools; they prefer whatever arrangement gets good results for kids.
Automated Teaching Machine: A Graphic Introduction to the End of Human Teachers
“The machine lasts indefinitely. It gets no wrinkles, no arthritis, no hardening of the arteries . . . Two machines replace 114 men that take no coffee breaks, no sick leaves, no vacations with pay,” proclaims the watch-twirling, hard-hearted CEO Wallace V. Whipple in a particularly prescient 1964 episode of The Twilight Zone. Despite the emotional pleas of the workers and their union, Whipple robo-sources 250,000 factory jobs to the “X109B14 modified, transistorized, totally automated machine.” The machine – a cardboard prop filled with vacuum tubes, twirling doo-dads and feverishly blinking diodes may be hilariously outdated, laughable even. But less laughable, though, is that this cautionary tale has come to pass: Today, 50 years later, American workers need not only compete with foreign labor, but with automatons. It’s no longer science fiction, but common-sense corporate practice.
Mr. Whipple was not a warning, but rather, a muse.
Nowhere has Mr. Whipple inspired more watch-twirling CEOs of late than in the Global Education Reform Movement, which seeks to privatize public education. Last year, Adam Bessie profiled this movement – lead by billionaires, industrialists and the Wall Street elite – in a three-part comic series with graphic journalist Dan Archer “The Disaster Capitalism Curriculum: The High Price ofEducation Reform” (See also episode II, and episode III).
Inside News Corp’s $540 Million Bet on American Classrooms
This piece is part of Mashable Spotlight, which presents in-depth looks at the people, concepts and issues shaping our digital world.
In the middle of Brooklyn’s high-end Dumbo neighborhood, 20 inner-city children sit around two wooden tables at what appears to be a small summer camp. Tablet computers are scattered across the tables, punctuated by plates of corn chips and bowls of salsa. The kids are restless on this sweltering July afternoon, fidgeting in their chairs and asking the handful of twenty-somethings if they can play Temple Run or maybe just head home for the day.
These kids aren’t technically campers, and these Millennials aren’t counselors. Instead, the children are product testers (paid weekly in $100 Amazon gift cards) for News Corp., the Rupert Murdoch-founded media conglomerate that began Fox News. The “counselors” are News Corp. employees, tasked with recording these children’s every reaction to the educational games into which News Corp. has poured at least $180 million, according to Bloomberg, on top of the $360 million it spent to acquire the technology.
Stephen Hsu on Cognitive Genomics
Luke Muehlhauser: I’d like to start by familiarizing our readers with some of the basic facts relevant to the genetic architecture of cognitive ability, which I’ve drawn from the first half of apresentation you gave in February 2013:
The human genome consists of about 3 billion base pairs, but humans are very similar to each other, so we only differ from each other on about 3 million of these base pairs.
Because there’s so much repetition, we could easily store the entire genome of every human on earth (~3mb per genome, compressed).
Rather than scanning an entire genome, we can just scan the roughly 10 million locations where humans are likely to differ (these are called SNPs).
Scanning someone’s SNPs costs about $200; scanning their entire genome costs $1000 or more.
But, genotyping costs are falling so quickly that SNPs may be irrelevant soon, as it’ll be simpler and cheaper to just sequence entire genomes.
To begin to understand the genetic architecture of cognitive ability, we can compare it to the genetic architecture of height, since the genetic architectures of height and cognitive ability are qualitatively the same.
For example, (1) height and cognitive ability are relatively stable and reliable traits (in adulthood), meaning that if you measure a person’s height or cognitive ability at multiple times you’ll get roughly the same result each time, (2) height and cognitive ability arevalid traits, in that they “measure something real” that is predictive of various life outcome measures like income, (3) both height and cognitive ability are highly heritable, and (4) both height and cognitive ability are highly polygenic, meaning that many different genes contribute to height and cognitive ability.
All cognitive observables — e.g. vocabulary, digit recall (short term memory), ability to solve math puzzles, spatial rotation ability, cognitive reaction time — appear to be positively correlated. Because of this, we can (lossily) compress the data for how a person scores on different cognitive tests to a single number, which we call IQ, and this single number is predictive of their scores on all cognitive tests, and also life outcome measures like income, educational attainment, job performance, and mortality.
This contradicts some folk wisdom. E.g. parents often believe that “Johnny’s good at math, so he’s probably not going to be good with words.” But in fact, the data show that math skill is quite predictive of verbal skill, because (roughly) all cognitive abilities are positively correlated.
By convention, IQ is normally distributed in the population with a mean at 100 and a standard deviation of 15.
College Football’s Grid of Shame
It’s easy to judge a college-football program from afar. To properly praise and ridicule, one needs hard data.
As the season begins Thursday, The Wall Street Journal presents its third annual grid of shame. Because college football is as much about scandal as it is about sport, we have rated all 125 major-college teams on two axes: how good they’re projected to be on the field and how shameful their activities have been off of it.
The ratings are systematic. To rank the teams’ 2013 prospects, we calculated a composite of four 1-through-125 rankings: Athlon, Lindy’s, the Orlando Sentinel and football guru Phil Steele. The shame component is based on five categories: each team’s four-year Academic Progress Rate (APR) figure, the metric the NCAA uses to assess academic performance; recent history of major violations and probation; percentage of athletic-department revenues subsidized by student fees; number of player arrests in the off-season, and a purely subjective, overall “ick” factor. (Sorry, Penn State.)
The results show how loudly you should crow at your next tailgate–or whether you should consider using your diploma as a coaster.
This year, the geeks are taking over. Academic stalwarts Stanford and Northwestern rank among the winners. So does Notre Dame–although the Manti Te’o fake-girlfriend fiasco sent the Fighting Irish plummeting toward the “embarrassing” axis.
What is algebra?
We hear a lot about the importance that all children master algebra before they graduate from high school. But what exactly is algebra, and is it really as important as everyone claims? And why do so many people find it hard to learn?
Answering these questions turns out to be a lot easier than, well, answering a typical school algebra question, yet surprisingly, few people can give good answers.
First of all, algebra is not “arithmetic with letters.” At the most fundamental level, arithmetic and algebra are two different forms of thinking about numerical issues. (I should stress that in this article I’m focusing on school arithmetic and school algebra. Professional mathematicians use both terms to mean something far more general.)
Let’s start with arithmetic. This is essentially the use of the four numerical operations addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to calculate numerical values of various things. It is the oldest part of mathematics, having its origins in Sumeria (primarily today’s Iraq) around 10,000 years ago. Sumerian society reached a stage of sophistication that led to the introduction of money as a means to measure an individual’s wealth and mediate the exchange of goods and services. The monetary tokens eventually gave way to abstract markings on clay tablets, which we recognize today as the first numerals (symbols for numbers). Over time, those symbols acquired an abstract meaning of their own: numbers. In other words, numbers first arose as money, and arithmetic as a means to use money in trade.
San Francisco, Oakland schools cut off tutoring companies
More than 100 companies providing federally funded tutoring services in San Francisco and Oakland public schools have been cut off from the beginning of the school year after the schools terminated the program.
On August 6 the U.S. Department of Education granted a one-year waiver allowing eight California school districts, including San Francisco and Oakland, to opt out of the No Child Behind Act. SFUSD and OUSD received $700,000 and $3.42 million respectively in supplemental education services (SES) funds for the upcoming school year. Under No Child Left Behind, schools were required to use that money to offer programs such as afterschool tutoring for struggling students. With the waiver, both districts have decided not to offer the SES program and plan to use the money in other ways to help low-income students.
Last year, there were 121 state approved SES providers for Oakland schools alone. The district expects the number of contracted SES providers to drop drastically.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: States and localities owe far, far more than their citizens know.
Maria Pappas, the treasurer of Cook County, Illinois, got tired of being asked why local taxes kept rising. Betting that the answer involved the debt that state and local governments were accumulating, she began a quest to figure out how much county residents owed. It wasn’t easy. In some jurisdictions, officials said that they didn’t know; in others, they stonewalled. Pappas’s first report, issued in 2010, estimated the total state and local debt at $56 billion for the county’s 5.6 million residents. Two years later, after further investigation, the figure had risen to a frightening $140 billion, shocking residents and officials alike. “Nobody knew the numbers because local governments don’t like to show how badly they are doing,” Pappas observed.
Since Pappas began her project to tally Cook County’s hidden debt, she has found lots of company. Across America, elected officials, taxpayer groups, and other researchers have launched a forensic accounting of state and municipal debt, and their fact-finding mission is rewriting the country’s balance sheet. Just a few years ago, most experts estimated that state and local governments owed about $2.5 trillion, mostly in the form of municipal bonds and other debt securities. But late last year, the States Project, a joint venture of Harvard’s Institute of Politics and the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government, projected that if you also count promises made to retired government workers and money borrowed without taxpayer approval, the figure might be higher than $7 trillion.
Daytona State, school districts reach agreements on dual enrollment
As opening days for fall classes draw near, agreements in support of dual enrollment have been reached between Daytona State College and Volusia and Flagler school districts.
The college’s District Board of Trustees on Aug. 13 approved agreements to cover the majority of the schools’ costs for services associated with dual enrollment in 2013-14.
The Volusia and Flagler school boards will vote on the agreements in upcoming weeks.
Dual enrollment provides college-credit classes on Daytona State campuses, giving college-bound students a head start on their higher education, at no cost to them.Related:Obtaining credit for non Madison School District Courses has been an ongoing challeng. Perhaps this issue has faded away as past practices die? Madison’snon-diverse or homogeneous governance model inflictsnumerous cost, fromone size fits all curricula to growth in the ‘burbs accompanied byever increasing property taxes on top of stagnant or declining income.
Help the United Way of Dane County Boost School Attendance
Wisconsin State Journal editorial About a third of kindergartners in Madison schools miss 10 or more days of classes. And a fifth are “chronically absent,” meaning they miss 18 or more days, which is at least 10 percent of the school year. Attendance improves by fifth grade and into middle school, then falls when students […]
James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley: Why Shouldn’t Princeton Pay Taxes?
James Piereson & Naomi Schaefer Riley:
For the latest evidence of the town-gown divide, look no further than New Jersey, where earlier this summer residents of Princeton banded together to sue the prestigious school in their backyard. The residents argued that Princeton University, which boasts the largest endowment per student in the country, should no longer be entitled to its tax-exempt status because the school makes money–from its scientific patents, ticketed concerts, on-campus eateries and more. The Ivy League school is operating like a business, the plaintiffs say, so the tax code should treat it like one.
The conflict isn’t going away. In June, a state tax court judge said the case had merit and refused the school’s request to dismiss the case. Princeton officials don’t seem worried: Reacting to the judge’s decision, a school vice president said that he expected any adjustments to its tax bill to be “quite modest.”
Perhaps, but the townies still have a point. According to the lawsuit, the university took in over $115 million from patents in 2011, of which $35 million was given to various faculty members. The lawyer for the plaintiffs told the Times of Trenton that “People in Princeton pay at least one-third more in taxes because the university has been exempt all of these years.” If all of the school’s property were taxed, the bill would come to roughly $28 million a year, instead of the roughly $10 million the university is now contributing voluntarily to town coffers.
Howard Zinn and the Art of Anti-Americanism
Upon the death of the Marxist-inspired historian Howard Zinn in 2010, eulogies rang out from coast to coast calling him a heroic champion of the unsung masses. In Indiana, then-Gov. Mitch Daniels refused to join the chorus and instead sent emails to his staff wondering if the historian’s “execrable” books were being force-fed to Hoosier students. The recent revelation of these emails provoked an angry backlash.
High-school teachers within Zinn’s vast network of admirers blogged their disapproval of the governor’s heresy, and leading professional organizations of historians denounced the supposed threat to academic freedom. At Purdue University, where Mr. Daniels now serves as president, 90 faculty members hailed Zinn as a strong scholarly voice for the powerless and cast the former governor as an enemy of free thought.
An activist historian relentlessly critical of alleged American imperialism, Zinn managed during his lifetime to build an impressive empire devoted to the spread of his ideas. Even after his death, a sprawling network of advocacy and educational groups has grown, giving his Marxist and self-described “utopian” vision a wider audience than ever before.
Zinn’s most influential work, A People’s History of the United States, was published in 1980 with an initial print run of 4,000 copies. His story line appealed to young and old alike, with the unshaded good-guy, bad-guy narrative capturing youthful imaginations, and his spirited takedown of “the Man” reminding middle-aged hippies of happier days. Hollywood’s love for Zinn and a movie tribute to his work has made him even more mainstream. As his acolytes have climbed the rungs of power, still seeking revolution, A People’s History has increased in popularity. To date, it has sold 2.2 million volumes, with more than half of those sales in the past decade.
In Zinn’s telling, America is synonymous with brute domination that goes back to Christopher Columbus. “The American system,” he writes in A People’s History, is “the most ingenious system of control in world history.” The founding fathers were self-serving elitists defined by “guns and greed.”
For Americans stuck in impoverished communities and failing schools, Zinn’s devotion to history as a “political act” can seem appealing. He names villains (capitalists), condemns their misdeeds, and calls for action to redistribute wealth so that, eventually, all of the following material goods will be “free–to everyone: food, housing, health care, education, transportation.” The study of history, Zinn taught, demands this sort of social justice.
Schools with social-justice instruction that draw explicitly on Zinn are becoming more common. From the Social Justice Academy outside of San Francisco to the four campuses of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, in Washington, D.C., social-justice academies relate their mission mainly in terms of ideological activism. At UCLA’s Social Justice Academy, a program for high-school juniors, the goal is that students will “develop skills to take action that disrupts social justice injustices.”
While social-justice instruction may sound to some like it might be suited to conflict resolution, in practice it can end up creating more discord than it resolves. Several years ago, the Ann Arbor, Michigan, public schools faced complaints from the parents of minority students that the American history curriculum was alienating their children. At a meeting of the district’s social-studies department chairs, the superintendent thought that he had discovered the cure for the divisions plaguing the school system. Holding up a copy of A People’s History, he asked, “How many of you have heard of Howard Zinn?” The chairwoman of the social studies department at the district’s largest school responded, “Oh, we’re already using that.”
Zinn’s arguments tend to divide, not unite, embitter rather than heal. The patron saint of Occupy Wall Street, Zinn left behind a legacy of prepackaged answers for every problem–a methodology that progressive historian Michael Kazin characterized as “better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s website than to a work of scholarship.”
Yet despite the lack of hard evidence in three-plus decades that using A People’s History produces positive classroom results, a number of well-coordinated groups recently have been set up to train teachers in the art of Zinn. Founded five years ago out of a partnership between Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, the Zinn Education Project offers more than 100 lesson plans and teachers’ guides to Zinn’s books, among a variety of other materials, including “Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practice Guide to K-12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development.” Already, the project claims to have enlisted 20,000 teachers in its efforts.
Before Zinn launched his own teaching career, he became a member of the Communist Party in 1949 (according to FBI reports released three years ago), and worked in various front groups in New York City. Having started his academic career at Spelman College, Zinn spent the bulk of it at Boston University, where on the last day before his retirement in 1988 he led his students into the street to participate in a campus protest.
Today, Boston University hosts the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series, and New York University (Zinn’s undergraduate alma mater) proudly houses his academic papers. In 2004 Zinn was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Havana, an occasion he took to excoriate the lack of academic freedom in America. As recently as 2007, A People’s History was even required reading at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy for a class on “Leaders in America.”
Thanks in part to an endorsement from the character played by Matt Damon in 1997’s “Good Will Hunting,” Zinn’s magnum opus has also turned into a multimedia juggernaut. Actor Ben Affleck (like Mr. Damon, a family friend of Zinn’s), and musicians Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Eddie Vedder and John Legend all have publicly praised Zinn. A History Channel documentary produced by Mr. Damon, “The People Speak,” featured Hollywood A-listers Morgan Freeman, Viggo Mortensen, Kerry Washington and others reading from Zinn’s books. There are “People’s Histories” on topics including the American Revolution, Civil War, Vietnam and even science. Zinn die-hards can purchase a graphic novel, A People’s History of American Empire, while kids can pick up a two-volume set, A Young People’s History of the United States (wall chart sold separately).
In 2005, as a guest on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” Zinn delivered his standard wholesale condemnation of America. Surprised by the unrelenting attack, host Jon Stewart gave the historian an opportunity to soften his criticism. “We have made some improvements,” the comedian asked, “in our barbarity over three hundred years, I would say, no?” Zinn denied there was any improvement.
As classes resume again this fall, it is difficult not to think that despite the late historian’s popularity, our students deserve better than the divisive pessimism of Howard Zinn.
Mr. Bobb, director of the Hillsdale College Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship, in Washington, D.C., is author of Humility: An Unlikely Biography of America’s Greatest Virtue, forthcoming from Thomas Nelson.
A version of this article appeared August 12, 2013, on page A17 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: “Howard Zinn and the Art of Anti-Americanism.”
Librarian suggests turning the page on longtime reading club winner
Tyler Weaver calls himself “the king of the reading club” at Hudson Falls Public Library. But now it seems Hudson Falls Public Library Director Marie Gandron wants to end his reign and have him dethroned.
The 9-year-old boy, who will be starting fifth grade next month, won the six-week-long “Dig into Reading” event by completing 63 books from June 24 to Aug. 3, averaging more than 10 a week.
He has consistently been the top reader since kindergarten, devouring a total of 373 books over the five contests, according to his mother, Katie.
“It feels great,” said Tyler, an intermediate scholar student at Hudson Falls School. “I think that was actually a record-breaking streak.”
Master’s Degree Is New Frontier of Study Online
Next January, the Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a master’s degree in computer science through massive open online courses for a fraction of the on-campus cost, a first for an elite institution. If it even approaches its goal of drawing thousands of students, it could signal a change to the landscape of higher education.
From their start two years ago, when a free artificial intelligence course from Stanford enrolled 170,000 students, free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have drawn millions and yielded results like the perfect scores of Battushig, a 15-year-old Mongolian boy, in a tough electronics course offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But the courses have not yet produced profound change, partly because they offer no credit and do not lead to a degree. The disruption may be approaching, though, as Georgia Tech, which has one of the country’s top computer science programs, plans to offer a MOOC-based online master’s degree in computer science for $6,600 — far less than the $45,000 on-campus price.
Zvi Galil, the dean of the university’s College of Computing, expects that in the coming years, the program could attract up to 10,000 students annually, many from outside the United States and some who would not complete the full master’s degree. “Online, there’s no visa problem,” he said.
Facebook use ‘makes people feel worse about themselves’
BBC:
Using Facebook can reduce young adults’ sense of well-being and satisfaction with life, a study has found.
Checking Facebook made people feel worse about both issues, and the more they browsed, the worse they felt, the University of Michigan research said.
The study, which tracked participants for two weeks, adds to a growing body of research saying Facebook can have negative psychological consequences.
Facebook has more than a billion members and half log in daily.
“On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it,” said the researchers.
Internet psychologist Graham Jones, a member of the British Psychological Society who was not involved with the study, said: “It confirms what some other studies have found – there is a growing depth of research that suggests Facebook has negative consequences.”
But he added there was plenty of research showing Facebook had positive effects on its users.
Criticism and rebuttal: The main arguments regarding core curriculum
Here are arguments made by critics of the core curriculum, and responses from the Branstad administration:
TRANSPARENCY
TRANSPARENCY
CRITICISM: Although critics object to government telling them what their kids must learn, they also complain that the common core was developed by two private membership organizations through a process that was not subject to any freedom of information acts or other sunshine laws that government agencies must follow.
RESPONSE: “The common core standards were developed by a coalition of states led by governors and state school chiefs through their membership in the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Forty-eight states took part, drawing on the expertise of content specialists, teachers, school administrators and parents. The process was open for public comment, and more than 10,000 comments were received. The standards were created for voluntary adoption in states through their own unique processes. In Iowa, the standards were discussed and adopted by the State Board of Education at public meetings in 2010.”
Evaluation of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program Participation, Compliance and Test Scores in 2011-12
This is the sixth in a series of reports evaluating the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) Program, as required by the Florida Statutes, s. 1002.395(9)(j). This report provides information on private school compliance with program rules regarding required testing, describes the attributes of eligible students who participate in the program, and presents data on student test score levels and gains in the program (as well as school-level gain scores), the performance of participating students prior to their entry into the program, and the performance of participating students once they leave the program to return to the public sector.
During the 2011-12 academic year, David Figlio, the Project Director, collected test score data from private schools participating in the FTC Program in real time. This is the sixth year for which program participants’ test score data were collected, and the fifth year in which this data collection occurred in real time.
Compliance with program testing requirements, 2011-12:
- Compliance with program testing requirements in 2011-12 was at its highest level to date, and private school reporting errors continue to be at very low levels. Private schools provided usable test scores for a record 96.4 percent of program participants in grades 3-10. Another 2.5 percent of participants were ineligible for testing or were not enrolled in the school at the time of testing; this is largely driven by the fact that some students arrived in schools after fall testing (for schools that test in the fall, principally those that administer the Iowa Test of Basic Skills) and some students who began the year in a school left the school prior to the more typical spring testing. The 0.9 percent rate of reported illness/absence remains at a very low level. Test administration compliance errors by participating schools have held steady for the last several years, with reporting problems involving only 0.3 percent of participants in 2011-12.
- A large majority, though lower than prior years (57.5 percent), of test-takers took the Stanford Achievement Test. Other popular tests were the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (22.5 percent) and the TerraNova (12.1 percent). Substantially larger numbers of schools administered Terra Nova in 2011-12 than in prior years.
Why can’t we talk about IQ?
“IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore,” theGuardian’s Ana Marie Cox wrote back in May. It was a breathtakingly ignorant statement. Psychologist Jelte Wicherts noted in response that a search for “IQ test” in Google’s academic database yielded more than 10,000 hits — just for the year 2013.
But Cox’s assertion is all too common. There is a large discrepancy between what educated laypeople believe about cognitive science and what experts actually know. Journalists are steeped in the lay wisdom, so they are repeatedly surprised when someone forthrightly discusses the real science of mental ability.
If that science happens to deal with group differences in average IQ, the journalists’ surprise turns into shock and disdain. Experts who speak publicly about IQ differences end up portrayed as weird contrarians at best, and peddlers of racist pseudoscience at worst.
I’m speaking from experience. My Harvard Ph.D. dissertation contains some scientifically unremarkable statements about ethnic differences in average IQ, including the IQ difference between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites. For four years, the dissertation did what almost every other dissertation does — collected dust in the university library. But when it was unearthed in the midst of the immigration debate, I experienced the vilification firsthand.
Chinese students coming to US middle schools? It’s starting to happen.
Peggy Wang has lived in China her entire life. A successful, English-speaking executive, she frequently travels abroad for work, but never imagined that her most recent itinerary would include dropping off her 15-year-old daughter at a prestigious boarding school outside Washington.
While there is a long history of Chinese students pursuing advanced degrees abroad, especially in the United States, Ms. Wang’s daughter, Susan Li, is part of a rapidly growing trend in which Chinese students are choosing to seek their education overseas as early as middle school or high school.
In the 2010-11 school year alone, nearly 24,000 high school-age Chinese were studying in the US, more than 15 percent of the total number of Chinese students in the US overall, up from virtually none five years ago. US middle schools hosted 6,725 Chinese middle schoolers in 2011, up from just 65 in 2006, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
This phenomenon, known as students “growing younger” in Chinese, is seen as resulting from two key interrelated factors: the rigidity of the Chinese education system, and a desire to avoid the gaokao, the country’s rigorous college-entrance exam, for which six-day-a-week preparation begins in 9th grade.
Not surprisingly, officials at schools with a significant number of Chinese students say the students have heightened the sense of competition and achievement. But they also say the students have helped others see a more nuanced and human view of China. For many of the Chinese students themselves, it is most likely the beginning of lives lived abroad, given that the core of their education will have come in English – and without the gaokao.
Bursting the Neuro-Utopian Bubble
During my graduate studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia, I spent countless hours in the Burke Library of Union Theological Seminary, where I had a spectacular, cater-corner view of the construction and unveiling of the Northwest Corner Building, Columbia’s new interdisciplinary science building. Although the 14-story steel and aluminum tower was designed to complement the brick and limestone gothic tower of Union, its dominating presence on the corner of Broadway and 120th serves as a heavy-handed reminder of where we are heading. Walking from Union toward Columbia’s main campus through its doors, I often felt, passing through the overwhelmingly aseptic marble lobby, as if the building was meant to cleanse northwesterly intruders who have not been intimidated by the facade.
The ninth floor of this building houses a laboratory of Rafael Yuste, lead author of an ambitious brief that appeared in the prominent neuroscience journal Neuron in 2012. The paper proposed the need for the “Brain Activity Map Project, aimed at reconstructing the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits.” This April, the Obama administration endorsed the project, setting aside $100 million for it in 2014 alone, and renaming it the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative, or the Brain Initiative for short.
M. Night Shyamalan Takes on Education Reform
M. Night Shyamalanhas spent most of his career as a filmmaker coming up with supernatural plotlines and creepy characters, but these days, he says, he’s got a different sort of fantasy character in mind: Clark Kent, the nerdy, bookish counterpart to the glamorous, highflying Superman.
Best known for producing films such as “The Sixth Sense” and “The Village,” Mr. Shyamalan is about to come out with a book called “I Got Schooled” on the unlikely subject of education reform. He’s the first to admit what a departure it is from his day job. “When you say ‘ed reform’ my eyes glaze over,” Mr. Shyamalan says, laughing. “I was going to have some provocative title like ‘Sex, Scandals and Drugs,’ and then at the bottom say: ‘No, really this is about ed reform.”
…….
Until recently, he says, moviemaking was his real passion. “I’m not a do-gooder,” he says. Still, after the commercial success of his early movies, he wanted to get involved in philanthropy. At first, he gave scholarships to inner-city children in Philadelphia, but he found the results disheartening. When he met the students he had supported over dinner, he could see that the system left them socially and academically unprepared for college. “They’d been taught they were powerless,” he says.
He wanted to do more. He decided to approach education like he did his films: thematically. “I think in terms of plot structure,” he says. He wondered if the problems in U.S. public schools could be traced to the country’s racial divisions. Because so many underperforming students are minorities, he says, “there’s an apathy. We don’t think of it as ‘us.’ ”
One reason that countries such as Finland and Singapore have such high international test scores, Mr. Shyamalan thinks, is that they are more racially homogenous. As he sees it, their citizens care more about overall school performance–unlike in the U.S., where uneven school quality affects some groups more than others. So Mr. Shyamalan took it upon himself to figure out where the education gap between races was coming from and what could be done about it.
An idea came to him over dinner with his wife and another couple who were both physicians. One of them, then the chief resident at a Pennsylvania hospital, said that the first thing he told his residents was to give their patients several pieces of advice that would drastically increase their health spans, from sleeping eight hours a day to living in a low-stress environment. The doctor emphasized that the key thing was doing all these things at the same time–not a la carte.
“That was the click,” says Mr. Shyamalan. It struck him that the reason the educational research was so inconsistent was that few school districts were trying to use the best, most proven reform ideas at once. He ultimately concluded that five reforms, done together, stand a good chance of dramatically improving American education. The agenda described in his book is: Eliminate the worst teachers, pivot the principal’s job from operations to improving teaching and school culture, give teachers and principals feedback, build smaller schools, and keep children in class for more hours.
Over the course of his research, Mr. Shyamalan found data debunking many long-held educational theories. For example, he found no evidence that teachers who had gone through masters programs improved students’ performance; nor did he find any confirmation that class size really mattered. What he did discover is plenty of evidence that, in the absence of all-star teachers, schools were most effective when they put in place strict, repetitive classroom regimens.Ah, content knowledge!
WEAC: An advocate for students as well as teachers WEAC has worked with Republicans and Democrats for the benefit of children.
By Morris Andrews former Executive Secretary Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) 1972-1992
Lost in the two-month maelstrom at the state Capitol is the role of teachers and their union, WEAC, as the chief advocates for school quality in Wisconsin. Scott Walker and the Fitzgeraids paint WEAC as a destroyer. They say eradicate WEAC, an organization they know almost nothing about except that it opposes their antisteacher agenda. Should they succeed in killing the voice of organized teachers, the real loser wilt be our public schools.
Teachers have fought hard to make schools better over the past four decades. And it was Republican and Democratic votes in support of WEAC issues that resulted in the passage of pro-education bills. Such bipartisanship is but one casualty of today’s polarized politics.
Beginning in the 1970s WEAC became a political force, mainly by deciding to start backing legislative candidates. To receive WE/C’s endorsement, a candidate had to support a list of education-related issues. Many Republicans did support these school improvement issues. And WEAC members consequently worked to help them win election or reelection. One Republican who received a WEAC endorsement was Tommy Thompson when he was in the Assembly.
Today it seems unbelievable that the 1977 collective bargaining bill now reviled by the governor passed with Republican support. At the time, there were 11 Republicans in the Senate; five of them supported the bill. When the law’s three-year trial period was about to expire, a group of Senate Republicans voted to extend it–despite a veto by Republican Governor Lee Dreyfus. Notably, Mike Ellis (then in the Assembly) was among a group of Republicans who jumped party lines on procedural votes that saved it.
Our members then also reflected views across the spectrum. They identified themselves this way: Independents, 37%; Democrats, 35%; and Republicans, 27%. This spectrum was reflected at the annual WEAC convention, held a few days before the 1976 presidential election, when Gerald Ford and Walter Mondale both spoke to the huge assembly. Today, these numbers have changed as the Republicans shift further and further to the extremes.
Did WEAC work to improve teacher pay and benefits? Yes, of course. But we were also committed to changing the wide variation in school quality from district to district.
At the top of WEAC’s school improvement list was getting a set of minimum educational standards that applied to every school district. In 1974, with Republican support, we succeeded. Today these standards are taken for granted. Among the many changes were requirements that every district must:
establish a remedial reading program for underachieving Ke3 student
offer music art, health, and physical education.
have a kindergarten for five-year olds.
ensure that school facilities are safe. (Many aging buildings were crumbling)
provide emergency nursing services.
require teachers in Wisconsin to go through continuing education and to have their licenses renewed once every five years. (Prior to enactment of minimum standards. districts were empbying unlicensed teachers for whom they secured an emergency license that they would hold year after year).
On this foundation of programs Wisconsin students rose to the top of the national ACT scores for decades.
The state Department of Public instruction (DPI), headed by State Superintendent Barbara Thompson, was charged with implementing the minimum standards. She accepted most of WEAC’s recommendations. WEAC backed Thompson, a Republican with strong GOP support for her reelection in 1977.
We sought common ground with Republicans. When Democratic Governer Pat Lucey proposed strict cost controls on school budgets in 1975, it was Republicans and Democrats in the Senate 110 coalesced with WEAC and school boards against Democrats on the Joint Finance Committee to ease the restrictions. Years later, when Republican Governor lee Dreyfus vetoed a measure to raise the cost control ceiling, the WEAC-supported override succeeded with the votes of 23 Assembly Republicans and eight Senate Republicans against the Republican governor.
As late as 1984, Wisconsin had no uniform high school graduation requirements. WEAC supported Gov. Tony Earl’s efforts requiring graduates to have a specified number of credits in English, maths science, social studies, physical education, health, and computer science.
To curb underage drinking, WEAC Joined with a coalition of organizations on a bill that gave teachers and administrators legal protection to remove students suspected of drinking from school premises and events. All Assembly Democrats and all but three Republicans voted for the bill. In the Senate all Republicans voted for it and all but two Democrats voted for it.
WEAC allied with Republicans and Democrats to repeal a longestanding provision that gave city councils in 41 of our largest cities veto power over their school boards’ budgets.
The fate of students with special needs also concerned WEAC in 1973, four years before Congress passed the federal special education law, WEAC successfully lobbied the Wisconsin Legislature for a state special education law that required every district to have a special education program. The chief sponsor was James Devitt, a Republican state senator.
In 1976, the Legislature approved WEAC-backed bills to require tests of newborns for signs of mental retardation, and require children under age five to undergo a test for visual impairment. During this time WEAC successfully supported a bill that required teachers to report suspected child abuse, which has helped protect children across the state from life-altering harm.
In the 1970s, sex discrimination in school athletics was a major issue. In most school districts many sports were for boys only. This changed after WEAC joined with women’s groups to ensure that girls who wanted to play in sports have the same opportunity as boys. There were less than half as many WIAA-sponsored statewide tournaments for girls as there were for boys 14 for boys, six for girls. WEAC filed sex discrimination lawsuits against both the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletics Association (WIAA) and the DPI that helped correct this inequality. WEAC also convinced the Legislature to budget the additional state funding needed to add programs for girls.
Working with the Great Lakes lnter-Tribal Council, which represents Native Americans on ten reservations, WEAC successfully lobbied for a bill that provided state aid to districts that employed home/school coordinators for Native American students. And for passage of a law allowing Native Americans without certification to teach native culture and endangered native languages.
Citizens who wanted to add new or replace old school buildings asked WEAC to help them pass local bond referendums. Monroe was one district where WEAC’s help resulted in passage of a school bond for a much needed elementary school. The measure had failed in four previous elections. With WEAC help it won by a huge margin on the fifth attempt.
Property taxes are a major source of school funding. VVEAC recognized that tax increases place a burden on low income homeowners, especially retirees on fixed incomes. To help these people, we backed an expanded homestead tax-relief program. Another action in support of low income citizens was creation of the Citizens Utility Board (CUB). CUB fights for affordable electricity and telephone service on behalf of Wisconsin customers before regulatory agencies, the Legislature, and the courts. Two organizations that fought hardest for CUB were WEAC and the United Auto Workers. All Wisconsin utilities opposed it.
The key to these achievements in the 1970s and ’80s was the cooperative spirit between WEAC and politicians of both parties. People from different sides of the aisle respected and listened to one another. We socialized outside of the Capitol. We grew to like each other, even if we disagreed on political issues.
Today there is no middle ground. Compromise is deemed “caving in.” Winning is not enough for the extremists. The “enemy must be completely destroyed. But if teacher unions are silenced, who will replace them as effective advocates for students?
Free dual enrollment is a big deal for many Roanoke students; Madison continues one size fits all approach
It’s now even easier and cheaper for local high school students to get a college education.
At a joint meeting between City Council, The Roanoke City School Board and Virginia Western the community college talked about it’s newest program.
Back in March, Virginia Western announced it’s waiving tuition for students taking dual enrollment classes.
Those are classes students can take in high school and earn college credit, but many students weren’t.
They can now.Related: Obtaining credit for non Madison School District Courses has been an ongoing challenge. Perhaps this issue has faded away as past practices die? Madison’s non-diverse or homogeneous governance model inflicts numerous costs, from one size fits all curricula to growth in the ‘burbs accompanied by ever increasing property taxes on top of stagnant or declining income.
The Obama Setback for Minority Education Steady gains for black and Hispanic students under No Child Left Behind have come to a virtual standstill.
Should federally mandated school accountability and testing requirements be abandoned? With Congress actively considering a major revision of No Child Left Behind, that question has moved to the top of the national education agenda. The Obama administration, teachers unions and some Republicans are joining forces to gut core provisions of the education law that was one of the Bush administration’s crowning achievements.
No Child Left Behind, which began in 2002, focused on the low performance of African-American and Hispanic students. It required that all students, no matter their race or ethnicity, reach proficiency by 2014. Since minority students had the longest road to travel, schools placed special emphasis on their instruction, and measured the quality of their instruction by ascertaining their performance on standardized tests.
Each school was required to report annual test-score results for every student in grades three through eight. (High-school students took only one test in four years.) Although all schools were tested, No Child requirements bore most heavily upon schools that received federal compensatory education dollars, which typically had substantial percentages of minority students.
Dread of August: The Kids’ Teacher Assignments As parents worry their kids will get stuck with a dud, more schools are trying to limit their input.
August brings high anxiety for many parents awaiting big news for fall: Who will be their child’s teacher? Will it be someone creative and inspiring? Or will they get stuck with a burnout, a bore or a scary drill-sergeant type?
Now, that angst is being further intensified by a combination of factors, including a less experienced teacher pool, faster gossip grapevines and schools’ increased strategies to limit parents’ involvement in the teacher-placement process.
In fact, school officials are sending a strong message to parents: Don’t ask. A growing number of principals hold parents at bay by sending questionnaires in the spring that ask for general information about a child, but prohibit requesting a specific teacher. More principals are skipping parent input altogether, setting firm policies that teacher assignments are up to the school.
The psychological phenomenon that skews college admissions and hiring
If you go to a college with tougher grading standards than average, you’re less likely to get into graduate school, new research shows–and there’s a similar problem within the job market. Correspondence bias, a psychological phenomenon that makes us judge people based on their behavior (like GPA) while ignoring context (like the difficulty of the school attended), could be keeping you from getting the jobs you want.
A recent study by researchers at the University of California Berkeley provides evidence that the bias affects hiring and admissions practices. Until now, corresponding author Samuel A. Swift told Quartz, it’s only been observed in the lab. “It’s a psychological idea that’s been around for quite awhile,” Swift said, “and we had relatively little testing whether the phenomenon has an effect in the real world. We always have to wonder if lab studies reflect on reality, and whether people will make the same mistakes they make in the lab in real-world situations.”
To put correspondence bias to the test, Swift and his fellow researchers used actual admissions staff from US colleges in their experiment. When presented with students for admission, the counselors were more likely to select those with higher GPAs–even when they were also told how each student compared to his or her school’s average. Even if a school’s average GPA was questionably high, indicating grade inflation and poor standards, students who managed a 4.0 there were more successful applicants than those who pulled slightly lower GPAs at much tougher colleges.
A Free Market for Teaching Talent – The $4 Million Teacher South Korea’s students rank among the best in the world, and its top teachers can make a fortune. Can the U.S. learn from this academic superpower?
Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher–a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country’s private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills–and he is in high demand.
Kim Ki-Hoon, who teaches in a private after-school academy, earns most of his money from students who watch his lectures online. ‘The harder I work, the more I make,’ he says. ‘I like that.’
Mr. Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and the Internet has turned them into commodities, available for purchase online at the rate of $4 an hour. He spends most of his week responding to students’ online requests for help, developing lesson plans and writing accompanying textbooks and workbooks (some 200 to date).
“The harder I work, the more I make,” he says matter of factly. “I like that.”
I traveled to South Korea to see what a free market for teaching talent looks like–one stop in a global tour to discover what the U.S. can learn from the world’s other education superpowers. Thanks in part to such tutoring services, South Korea has dramatically improved its education system over the past several decades and now routinely outperforms the U.S. Sixty years ago, most South Koreans were illiterate; today, South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the world in reading, behind Shanghai. The country now has a 93% high-school graduation rate, compared with 77% in the U.S.
….
No country has all the answers. But in an information-driven global economy, a few truths are becoming universal: Children need to know how to think critically in math, reading and science; they must be driven; and they must learn how to adapt, since they will be doing it all their lives. These demands require that schools change, too–or the free market may do it for them.The Madison School Board President recently wrote: “The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”
Related: www.wisconsin2.org.
Ms. Ripley is an Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, “The Smartest Kids in the World–and How They Got That Way,” to be published Aug. 13 by Simon & Schuster.
No, You’re Probably Not Smarter Than a 1912-Era 8th Grader
In the early years of the 20th century, the students in Bullitt County, Kentucky, were asked to clear a test that many full-fledged adults would likely be hard-pressed to pass today. The Bullitt County Geneaological Society has a copy of this exam, reproduced below–a mix of math and science and reading and writing and questions on oddly specific factoids-preserved in their museum in the county courthouse.
But just think for a moment: Did you know where Montenegro was when you were 12? Do you know now? (Hint: it’s just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. You know where the Adriatic Sea is, right?)
Or what about this question, which the examiners of Bullitt County deemed necessary knowledge: “Through what waters would a vessel pass in going from England through the Suez Canal to Manila?” The Bullitt geneaological society has an answer sheet if you want to try the test, but really, this question is just a doozie:
National Civics, History Tests to Disappear
The National Assessment of Educational Progress exams in civics, U.S. history, and geography have been indefinitely postponed for fourth and twelfth graders. The Obama administration says this is due to a $6.8 million sequestration budget cut. The three exams will be replaced by a single, new test: Technology and Engineering Literacy.
“Without these tests, advocates for a richer civic education will not have any kind of test to use as leverage to get more civic education in the classrooms,” said John Hale, associate director at the Center for Civic Education.
NAEP is a set of national tests of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders that track achievement on various subjects over time. Researchers collect data for state to state comparisons in mathematics, reading, science, and writing. The other subjects only provide national statistics and are administered to fewer students. The tests provide basic information about students but do not automatically trigger consequences for teachers, students, and schools.
Students have historically performed extremely poorly on these three tests. In 2010, the last administration of the history test, students performed worse on it than on any other NAEP test. That year, less than half of eighth-graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights, and only 1 in 10 could pick a definition of the system of checks and balance on the civics exam.
Science vs. Humanities
Since most civic education is taught to first-semester high school seniors, Hale said, not testing in twelfth grade creates a major gap of information.
“Is it possible to have a responsible citizenry if we don’t teach them civics, history, and the humanities?” said Gary Nash, a professor of history education (sic) at the University of California Los Angeles. Postponing the exams, typically administered every four years, does not mean classroom education in the humanities will be cut. But the cuts indirectly say we can do without civics and U.S. history, Nash said.
Trading the humanities tests for technology tests is necessary to measure “the competitiveness of U.S. students in a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-focused world,” said David Driscoll, chair of the NAEP Governing Board, in a statement. “The [Technology and Engineering Literacy] assessment, along with the existing NAEP science and mathematics assessments, will help the nation know if we are making progress in the areas of STEM education.”
Nash agrees the U.S. needs more engineers and scientists: “But what are they without humanities under their belt?” he said.
Excellence in one area flows into others
A summer report from the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences explained the need for these subjects this way: “The humanities and social sciences provide an intellectual framework and context for understanding and thriving in a changing world. When we study these subjects, we learn not only what but how and why.”
Nash pointed out that Franklin High School in the Los Angeles Unified School district is 94 percent Latino, and many families are immigrants. Without changing anything in science and math, the school began to emphasize humanities. The scores in science and math improved, testing almost on par with students in Beverly Hills. “It’s about increasing their passion for learning,” he says. Furthermore, giving students a context for learning helps them learn more.
Masters of Our Government
Students must be prepared “to think for themselves as independent citizens,” said Hale. “Civics and Government (& History) is (are) as generative as math; we are not born as great democratic citizens. We aren’t born knowing why everyone should have the right to political speech, even if it is intolerant speech.”
Consider the current events of the last few weeks, he said: the Supreme Court rulings on marriage and the Voting Rights Act, the National Security Administration’s data collection, and Congress debating immigration and student loan rates.
“Our leaders make decisions every day based on interpretations on the proper role of government; we have no way of knowing if these [decisions] are good or bad,” Hale continued. “We are supposed to be masters of our government, not servants of it.”
Cutting the civics tests indicates the government’s priorities, and priorities affect curriculum, Nash noted. He suggested danger for a country that must govern itself if children do not learn how.—————————–
“Teach by Example”
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The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
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Mitch Daniels’s Gift to Academic Freedom His skepticism about the merits of a sacrosanct liberal history textbook has sparked an overdue debate.
Most Americans would agree that academic freedom is a sacred right of the academy and crucial to the American experiment in democracy. But what is it really?
That’s the question raised by the Associated Press’s July 16 release of emails between Mitch Daniels, when he was the governor of Indiana, and his staff concerning Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” The emails were written in 2010 and Mr. Daniels, whose second term as governor ended this January, is now president of Purdue University in Indiana.
Published in 1980, Zinn’s “A People’s History” (the author died in 2010 at age 87) has been a staple of Advanced Placement courses at the high-school level and omnipresent in college syllabi for decades. Praised by some for focusing on American history from the ground up, the book has been condemned by others as emblematic of the biased, left-leaning, tendentious and inaccurate drivel that too often passes as definitive in American higher education.
Mr. Daniels falls squarely among the critics. Zinn’s history, the then-governor wrote in February 2010, “is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page.” Then Mr. Daniels asked: “Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before any more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?”
Efforts to Recruit Poor Students Lag at Some Elite Colleges
With affirmative action under attack and economic mobility feared to be stagnating, top colleges profess a growing commitment to recruiting poor students. But a comparison of low-income enrollment shows wide disparities among the most competitive private colleges. A student at Vassar, for example, is three times as likely to receive a need-based Pell Grant as one at Washington University in St. Louis.
“It’s a question of how serious you are about it,” said Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar. She said of colleges with multibillion-dollar endowments and numerous tax exemptions that recruit few poor students, “Shame on you.”
At Vassar, Amherst College and Emory University, 22 percent of undergraduates in 2010-11 received federal Pell Grants, which go mostly to students whose families earn less than $30,000 a year. The same year, the most recent in the federal Department of Education database, only 7 percent of undergraduates at Washington University were Pell recipients, and 8 percent at Washington and Lee University were, according to research by The New York Times.
Researchers at Georgetown University have found that at the most competitive colleges, only 14 percent of students come from the lower 50 percent of families by income. That figure has not increased over more than two decades, an indication that a generation of pledges to diversify has not amounted to much. Top colleges differ markedly in how aggressively they hunt for qualified teenagers from poorer families, how they assess applicants who need aid, and how they distribute the available aid dollars.
Some institutions argue that they do not have the resources to be as generous as the top colleges, and for most colleges, with meager endowments, that is no doubt true. But among the elites, nearly all of them with large endowments, there is little correlation between a university’s wealth and the number of students who receive Pell Grants, which did not exceed $5,550 per student last year.
Related:Travis Reginal and Justin Porter were friends back in Jackson, Miss. They attended William B. Murrah High School, which is 97 percent African-American and 67 percent low income. Murrah is no Ivy feeder. Low-income students rarely apply to the nation’s best colleges. But Mr. Reginal just completed a first year at Yale, Mr. Porter at Harvard. Below, they write about their respective journeys.
Reflections on the Road to Yale: A First-Generation Student Striving to Inspire Black Youth by Travis Reginal:For low-income African-American youth, the issue is rooted in low expectations. There appear to be two extremes: just getting by or being the rare gifted student. Most don’t know what success looks like. Being at Yale has raised my awareness of the soft bigotry of elementary and high school teachers and administrators who expect no progress in their students. At Yale, the quality of your work must increase over the course of the term or your grade will decrease. It propelled me to work harder.
Reflections on the Road to Harvard: A Classic High Achiever, Minus the Money for a College Consultant by Justin Porter
I do not believe that increasing financial aid packages and creating glossy brochures alone will reverse this trend. The true forces that are keeping us away from elite colleges are cultural: the fear of entering an alien environment, the guilt of leaving loved ones alone to deal with increasing economic pressure, the impulse to work to support oneself and one’s family. I found myself distracted even while doing problem sets, questioning my role at this weird place. I began to think, “Who am I, anyway, to think I belong at Harvard, the alma mater of the Bushes, the Kennedys and the Romneys? Maybe I should have stayed in Mississippi where I belonged.”
Louisiana reinvents high school with private sector help
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s latest plans to reinvent public education with the aid of the business community will accelerate this fall with the launch of a novel program that lets high school students take classes from the private sector on the public dime.
State Superintendent John White said Monday that nearly 3,000 students have enrolled in an array of private-sector classes that the state has agreed to pay for, from math and literature to Japanese and German to hair styling, welding and nail manicuring. The classes, which carry regular high school credits, are taught by an eclectic mix of nonprofits, unions, trade associations and for-profit companies, as well as local colleges.
White said he had only budgeted $2 million for the program but would find another $1 million to cover demand, perhaps by leaving some open jobs in the state education department unfilled. And he plans to expand the program substantially next year. White said he is particularly interested in adding more vocational classes, though an analysis of enrollments that the state provided to POLITICO shows one of the most popular offerings is ACT Prep.
Zero Tolerance Policies Put Students In The Hands Of Bad Cops
Over the past several years, there’s been a rise in the number of law enforcement officers taking up residence in public schools. This rise corresponds with the proliferation of zero-tolerance policies. Combined, these two factors have resulted in criminalization of acts that were once nothing more than violations of school policies, something usually handled by school administrators. As infractions have morphed into criminal acts, the severity of law enforcement “liaison” responses has also escalated.
Here’s a recent example of the severity of the response greatly outweighing the actual infraction.
The incident started when a Delaware State Police trooper, who was on assignment as a school resource officer in the Cape Henlopen School District, questioned the third-grader and a fifth-grader while investigating the theft of $1.
According to court papers, the questioning was so intense, complete with threats of the children being sent to a juvenile facility for lying, that the 8-year-old — who was not a suspect — burst into tears. His parents pulled him out of school because of the January 2008 incident and filed a lawsuit in January 2010 charging the officer violated the child’s rights.
The theft of a dollar shouldn’t have warranted much more than a visit to the principal’s office, if that. But, because of these policies, the school automatically turned it over to a state trooper, who then interrogated two children, presumably attempting to get the 8-year-old to testify against the fifth-grader. Unfortunately, incidents like these are far from rare.
Is Your College Going Broke? The Most And Least Financially Fit Schools In America
Matt Schifrin, via a kind reader email
In late June, nearly two months after most incoming freshmen had sent in their deposit checks securing places at hundreds of colleges across America, Long Island University’s Post campus, nestled in the wealthy New York City suburb of Brookville, N.Y., was testing a new approach in its efforts to fill up the 250 or so empty seats it had in its class of 2017.
The week of June 24 was “Express Decision Week” at LIU. High school seniors were invited to walk into Post’s Mullarkey Hall any time from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., transcript, SAT scores and personal statement in hand, and LIU’s admissions officers promised to make an acceptance decision on the spot. All application fees would be waived, and registration for fall classes would be immediate. An identical event was being held simultaneously at LIU’s Brooklyn campus.
Post’s aggressive marketing ploy is eerily reminiscent of the on-the-spot low-docmortgage approvals that occurred during the heady days leading up to the housing crisis. But the product here is bit less tangible than a loan that secures a house. These admissions officers are selling the promise of a better life through post-secondary-school learning.
LIU isn’t alone. Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, N.Y. and Centenary College in Hackettstown, N.J. offer similar same-day, on-the-spot admissions events. According to Jackie Nealon, Long Island University’s vice president of enrollment, LIU takes it a step further in the spring and sends admissions officers into Long Island high schools to admit students on location-the academic version of a house call.
If LIU sounds a bit desperate, it is. From a financial standpoint LIU is suffering from a host of ills common to hundreds of colleges today. According to the most recent financial data LIU has supplied to the Department of Education, its Post campus has been running at an operating deficit for three years. Its core expenses, or those essential for education activities, have been greater than its core revenues. Like many other schools, Post is a tuition junkie, with nearly 90% of its core annual revenues derived from tuition and fees.
This year Post raised its tuition and fees by 3.5% to $34,005, yet it offers steep tuition discounts to nearly every incoming freshman. In fact, a quick click over to its website shows the deals available. If your kid is an A student with an SAT score of about 1300 out of 1600, expect at least a $20,000 rebate per year.
This seeming paradox of raising prices while simultaneously offering deep discounts is a way of life among middling and lower-quality colleges in the market for higher education. It’s a symptom of a deeply troubled system where the cachet of elite institutions like Harvard and Yale has led thousands of nonelite schools to employ a strategy where higher prices and deeper discounts are more effective than cutting prices and tightening discounts. According to the National Association of College & University Business Officers, the so-called tuition discount rate has risen for the sixth straight year and is now averaging 45%. In some ways colleges operate like prestige-seeking liquor brands. In other ways they are more like Macy’s offering regular sales days, only quietly.Behind Forbes College Financial Grades
To do that we created the FORBES College Financial Grades, which measure the fiscal soundness of more than 900 four-year, private, not-for-profit schools with more than 500 students (public schools are excluded). For the purposes of our analysis we used the two most recent fiscal years available from the Department of Education-2011 and 2010. The grades measure financial fitness as determined by nine components broken into three categories.
-Balance Sheet Health (40%): As determined by looking at endowment assets per full-time equivalent (15%), expendable assets (assets that can be sold in a pinch) to debt, otherwise known as a college’s viability ratio (10%) and a similar measure known as the primary reserve ratio (15%). Primary reserve measures how long a college could survive if it had to sell assets to cover its expenses. Schools like Pomona and Swarthmore are so asset-rich, for example, that they could cover expenses for ten years without collecting a penny in tuition. Other well-known schools like Carnegie Mellon and Syracuse have primary ratios of about 1.0, meaning they could last about a year.
-Operational Soundness (35%): A blend of return on assets (10%), core operating margins (10%) and perhaps most important, tuition and fees as a percentage of core revenues (15%). Tuition dependency is the most serious risk facing middling colleges today.
-Admissions Yield (10%): The percentage of accepted students who choose to enroll tells not only how much demand there is from a specific school’s target customers but also gives an indication of the effectiveness of its admissions staff.
-Freshmen Receiving Institutional Grants (7.5%): The most desperate schools use “merit aid” as a tool to lure more than 90% of incoming freshmen.
-Instructional Expenses per Full-Time ?Student (7.5%): Struggling schools tend to skimp in this area.
False memory planted in mouse’s brain
Scientists have implanted a false memory in the brains of mice in an experiment that they hope will shed light on the well-documented phenomenon whereby people “remember” events or experiences that have never happened.
False memories are a major problem with witness statements in courts of law. Defendants have often been convicted of offences based on eyewitness testimony, only to have their convictions later overturned when DNA or some other corroborating evidence is brought to bear.
In order to study how these false memories might form in the human brain, Susumu Tonegawa, a neuroscientist at the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics, and his team encoded memories in the brains of mice by manipulating individual neurons. He described the results of the study in the latest edition of the journal Science.
Memories of experiences we have had are made from several elements including records of objects, space and time. These records, called engrams, are encoded in physical and chemical changes in brain cells and the connections between them. According to Tonegawa, both false and genuine memories seem to rely on the same brain mechanisms.
In their work, Tonegawa’s team used a technique known asoptogenetics, which allows the fine control of individual brain cells. They engineered brain cells in the mouse hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be involved in forming memories, to express the gene for a protein called channelrhodopsin. When cells that contain channelrhodopsin are exposed to blue light, they become activated. The researchers also modified the hippocampus cells so that the channelrhodopsin protein would be produced in whichever brain cells the mouse was using to encode its memory engrams.
The Dichotomy of Madison School Board Governance: “Same Service” vs. “having the courage and determination to stay focused on this work and do it well is in itself a revolutionary shift for our district”.
The dichotomy that is Madison School Board Governance was on display this past week.
1. Board Member TJ Mertz, in light of the District’s plan to continue growing spending and property taxes for current programs, suggests that “fiscal indulgences“:Tax expenditures are not tax cuts. Tax expenditures are socialism and corporate welfare. Tax expenditures are increases on anyone who does not receive the benefit or can’t hire a lobbyist…to manipulate the code to their favor.
be applied to certain school volunteers.
This proposal represents a continuation of the Districts’ decades long “same service” approach to governance, with declining academic results that spawned the rejected Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.
2. Madison’s new Superintendent, Jennifer Cheatham introduced her “Strategic Framework” at Wednesday’s Downtown Rotary Club meeting.
The Superintendent’s letter (jpg version) (within the “framework” document) to the Madison Community included this statement (word cloud):Rather than present our educators with an ever-changing array of strategies, we will focus on what we know works and implement these strategies extremely well. While some of the work may seem familiar, having the courage and determination to stay focused on this work and do it well is in itself a revolutionary shift for our district. This is what it takes to narrow and eliminate gaps in student achievement.
The Madison School Board’s letter (jpg version) to the community includes this statement:
Public education is under sustained attack, both in our state and across the nation. Initiatives like voucher expansion are premised on the notion that public schools are not up to the challenge of effectively educating diverse groups of students in urban settings.
We are out to prove that wrong. With Superintendent Cheatham, we agree that here in Madison all the ingredients are in place. Now it is up to us to show that we can serve as a model of a thriving urban school district, one that seeks out strong community partnerships and values genuine collaboration with teachers and staff in service of student success.
Our Strategic Framework lays out a roadmap for our work. While some of the goals will seem familiar, what’s new is a clear and streamlined focus and a tangible and energizing sense of shared commitment to our common goals.
The bedrock of the plan is the recognition that learning takes place in the classroom in the interactions between teachers and students. The efforts of all of us – from school board members to everyone in the organization – should be directed toward enhancing the quality and effectiveness of those interactions.
There is much work ahead of us, and the results we are expecting will not arrive overnight. But with focus, shared effort and tenacity, we can transform each of our schools into thriving schools. As we do so, Madison will be the school district of choice in Dane County.Madison School Board word cloud:
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, signed a budget bill Friday that eliminates teacher tenure and–in a rare move–gets rid of the automatic pay increase teachers receive for earning a master’s degree.
The legislation targets a compensation mechanism that is common in the U.S., where teachers receive automatic pay increases for years of service and advanced degrees. Some research has suggested those advanced degrees don’t lead to improved teaching.
Although a few other states have talked about doing away with the automatic pay increase for advanced degrees, experts say North Carolina is believed to be the first state to do so.
The budget bill–which drew hundreds of teachers to the Capitol in protest earlier this week–also eliminates tenure for elementary and high-school teachers and freezes teacher salaries for the fifth time in six years.
It comes as states and districts across the country are revamping teacher evaluations, salaries and job security, and linking them more closely to student performance. These changes have been propelled, in part, by the Obama administration and GOP governors.The challenge for Madison is moving away from long time governance structures and practices, including a heavy (157 page pdf & revised summary of changes) teacher union contract. Chris Rickert’s recent column on Madison’s healthcare practices provides a glimpse at the teacher – student expenditure tension as well.
Then Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 Madison Rotary speech offers important background on Madison’s dichotomy:“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
“Budget Cuts: We Won’t Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That’s Okay”.
Grades are in: June’s final exams in math show more failure in Montgomery County Schools
Donna St. George, via a kind reader’s email:For another semester, Montgomery County high school students flunked their final exams in math courses in startlingly high numbers, according to new figures that show failure rates of 71 percent for Geometry and 68 percent for Algebra 1.
The numbers add to a phenomenon that goes back more than five years and came to widespread public attention this spring, setting off a wave of concern among parents as well as elected officials in the high-performing school system.
Latest math-exam figures show high failure rates persist in the high-performing school system.
The new figures, for exams given in June, show that failure rates worsened in Algebra 1 and Geometry; improved in Precalculus and Bridge to Algebra 2; and stayed fairly even in Algebra 2, Honors Precalculus, Honors Algebra 2 and Honors Geometry.
Overall, 45 percent of high school students in eight math courses failed their June finals — about 14,000 students out of roughly 31,000 enrolled.
Exactly what explains steep failure rates for exam-takers has been an issue of debate in recent months.
In a memo to the school board, School Superintendent Joshua P. Starr released a preliminary figure on test-skipping: As many as 500 students were no-shows for the Algebra 1 exam in June, accounting for one-sixth of the 2,912 students who failed the test.
Starr said student motivation was one of a half-dozen issues under study as a newly created math work group seeks to understand the failure problem and suggest ways to turn it around. Other possible causes cited include alignment between the curriculum and the exam, school system practices and policies, and the “cognitive demands” of the exam.Related: Math Forum audio & video along with a number of connected matharticles.
2004 (!) Madison West High School math teacher letter to Isthmus on dumbing down the curriculum.
America’s best educated kids don’t go to school
Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute, compared home schoolers and public school students on the results of three standardized tests — the California Achievement Test, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Stanford Achievement Test — for the 2007-2008 academic year. With public school students at the 50th percentile, home schoolers were at the 89th percentile in reading, the 86th percentile in science, the 84th percentile in language, math, and social studies.
Socio-economic factors may have a lot to do with why home schoolers do so much better. Virtually all have a mother and a father who are living together. Nearly two thirds of fathers and 62 percent of mothers have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
The explosive growth in home schooling has been fueled by dissatisfaction with public schools.
We spend more per pupil than any other country, but among industrialized nations, American students rank near the bottom in science and math. Only 13 percent of high school seniors knew what high school seniors should know about American history, says the National Assessment of Education Progress. Half of 18 to 24 year olds in a National Geographic Society survey couldn’t locate New York state on a map.
The United States is only major country where young people will not know more than their parents, the education expert for the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development told the BBC last year.
About 2 million children are home schooled. Since 1999, the number being home schooled has increased 7 percent a year. Enrollment in public schools fell 5 percent between 2005 and 2010.
The first students to leave public schools tend to be the better ones, because their parents care more about education, said University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds. “When they leave, the overall quality of the remaining students, and thus the schools, will drop.”
When enrollment declines, funding is cut. Because teacher unions are so powerful, first on the chopping block are music, art and athletic programs. (In Buffalo, N.Y., where teachers get free cosmetic surgery, music programs may be eliminated in half the schools.) These cuts make public schools less attractive, accelerating departures.
High Confidence Not Translating Into High Math Scores for American & European Students
Nima Sanandaji, via a kind reader:
Swedish fourth graders are leading the world in mathematics, followed closely by those in other developed European nations, at least if we look at students’ reported self-confidence in the subject. Fully 77% of Swedish students at fourth grade express a high level of confidence about their learning, compared to merely 5% who express a low level. In Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Norway seven out of ten students have high confidence about their mathematics knowledge. One in ten or fewer have low confidence. Self-confidence is somewhat less common amongst US fourth graders, where 67% believe that they perform highly in mathematics and 10% express the opposite view. Unfortunately, this confidence – in America and elsewhere – is not backed up by high achievement.
As shown by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, the average US student with high confidence only scored 551 on the test. This is just half a standard deviation from the average score of 500. The phenomenon where many students believe that they are doing well in mathematics – while they are in fact lagging behind other nations – is even more evident in several European nations. In Sweden the average score of the self-identified high achievers is only 514. The sureness of Swedish students seems to rise from a progressive school system. As more focus is put on promoting self-expression and raising self-esteem than on actual knowledge gathering and hard work, students with only slightly higher international scores identify themselves as being high achievers.Related: www.wisconsin2.org
First public school seized by parents set to open
A grand experiment in letting parents seize control of their neighborhood schools is unfolding in an impoverished Mojave Desert town — and lawmakers as far away as Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan are watching, and pondering the implications for troubled schools in their own states.
Desert Trails Preparatory Academy in Adelanto, Calif., will open for the academic year on Monday as the first school in the nation to have been remade under a law that gives parents the power to take over a low-performing public school and fire the principal, dismiss teachers or bring in private management.
The law, known as “parent trigger“, passed in California in 2010 and has since been adopted by six other states — Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas — though parents have not yet taken over schools in any of them.
Parent Revolution, a nonprofit dedicated to organizing trigger campaigns, anticipates a surge of interest in other state legislatures as Desert Trails and three other California schools transformed by parent activism reopen over the next month. Parent empowerment has strong bipartisan support in many states — a sign of the diminished clout of teachers unions, which oppose trigger laws but have not been able to stop their traditional allies in the Democratic Party from endorsing the concept.
Four Ideas to Fix Higher Education
Still, the average cost of in-state tuition, room and board ($12,110 a year last year) at a four-year public university, after scholarships and tax breaks, has risen 40% faster than economywide inflation over the past decade, the College Board estimates. Private schools are more expensive (average net cost $23,840), but their inflation-adjusted net price has climbed more slowly, at 9%.
White House insiders say the president is frustrated that increases in federal aid have coincided with–some say, fueled–rising costs in higher education and steep cuts in state funding. “Over the four years of the Obama administration, federal support for higher ed rose by $20 billion and states cut by $10 billion,” says David Bergeron, who recently retired after 30 years at the U.S. Education Department.
Increasingly one hears parallels in Washington being drawn between higher education and health care. Both are heavily financed by the federal government. Both are essential and inefficient. Both are characterized by century-old institutions and habits that may block technology from improving productivity.
Teacher training program uses rigorous preparation to produce great instructors
Ben Velderman The Match Education organization has developed a reputation over the past 12 years for operating several high-quality charter schools throughout the Boston area. Now the organization is garnering national attention for its approach to training future teachers. It all began in 2008, when Match officials opened a two-year teacher training program for graduate […]
Madison Superintendent Cheatham’s Rotary Club Talk (audio & slides): “What will be different this time?”
15mb mp3 audio.
Superintendent Cheatham’s slides follow (4MB PDF version). I hope that the prominence of Madison’s disastrous reading scores – slide 1 – indicates that this is job one for our $15,000ish/student organization.
A few of the Superintendent’s words merit a bit of analysis:
1. “What will be different this time?” That rhetoric is appropriate for our Madison schools. I compiled a number of notes and links on this subject, here.
2. “Ready to partner with local businesses and other organizations”. Great idea. The substance of this would certainly be a change after the Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school debacle (Urban League) and, some years ago, the rejection of Promega’s kind offer to partner on Madison Middle Schools 2000.
3. Mentions “all Madison schools are diverse”. I don’t buy that. The range of student climate across all schools is significant, from Van Hise and Franklin to LakeView, Mendota and Sandburg. Madison school data by income summary. I have long been astonished that this wide variation continues. Note that Madison’s reading problems are not limited to African-American students.
4. Mentioned Long Beach and Boston as urban districts that have narrowed the achievement gap. Both districts offer a variety of school governance models, which is quite different than Madison’s long-time “one size fits all approach”.
5. Dave Baskerville (www.wisconsin2.org) asked a question about benchmarking Madison students vs. the world, rather than Green Bay and Milwaukee. Superintendent Cheatham responded positively to that inquiry. Interestingly, the Long Beach schools prominently display their status as a “top 5 school system worldwide”.
6. “Some teachers and principals have not been reviewed for as long as 7 years”. This points to the crux of hard decision making. Presumably, we are at this point because such reviews make no difference given rolling administrator contracts and a strong union umbrella (or floor depending on your point of view). Thus, my last point (below) about getting on with the hard decisions which focus the organization on job number one: reading.
Pat Schneider and Matthew DeFour summarize the Superintendent’s press release and appearance.
Finally, I found it a bit curious that the Superintendent is supporting spending (and related property tax growth) for current programs in light of the larger strategy discussed today along with the recent “expert review”. The review stated that the “Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap”
This would be a great time to eliminate some programs such as the partially implemented Infinite Campus system.
Superintendent Cheatham’s plan indicates that choices will be made so that staff and resources can focus on where they are most needed. I wholeheartedly agree. There is no point in waiting and wasting more time and money. Delay will only increase the cost of her “strategy tax“.
Teaching to See
“This [film] is about patient and dedicated teaching, about learning to look and visualize in order to design, about the importance of drawing. It is one designer’s personal experience of issues that face all designers, expressed with sympathy and encouragement, and illustrated with examples of Inge [Druckrey]’s own work and that of grateful generations of her students. There are simple phrases that give insights into complex matters, for example that letterforms are ‘memories of motion.’ Above all, it is characteristic of Inge that in this examination of basic principles the word ‘beautiful’ is used several times.”
Matthew Carter
Type Designer, 2010 MacArthur Fellow
Despite Education Advances, a Host of Afghan School Woes
There is not an ounce of fat on the wiry frame of Abdul Wahid, and no wonder.
After he finishes his morning work shift, he walks 10 miles down mountain trails in northern Afghanistan to the first road, where he catches a bus for the last couple of miles to the teacher training institute in Salang. He walks back up the mountain another 10 miles to get home, arriving well after dark, just in time to rest up for his day job.
In his determination to formally qualify as a teacher, Mr. Wahid, 33, exemplifies many of the gains for Afghan education in recent years. “It’s worth it, because this is my future,” he said.
But he also personifies how far the efforts here have yet to go. Mr. Wahid’s day job is being the principal of the high school in his village, Unamak. Though he has only a high school diploma, he is the best educated teacher that his 800 students have.
It is widely accepted that demand among Afghans for better schooling — and the actual opportunity to attend, particularly for girls — is at its highest point in decades. For Western officials seeking to show a positive legacy from a dozen years of war and heavy investment in Afghanistan, improvements in education have provided welcome news.
But for those who are working to make it happen — local Afghan officials, aid workers, teachers and students — there are concerns that much of the promise of improvement is going unfulfilled, and major problems are going unsolved.
Madison’s Planned $pending & Property Tax Increase: Does it Include $75/Student “Unrestricted” State Budget Increase (Outside of Revenue Caps)?
Wisconsin Association of School Boards, via a kind reader’s email:
The 2013-15 state budget act provides for state categorical aid payments to each district of $75 per pupil in the first year and $150 per pupil in 2014-15 (reflecting $75 from the first year + an additional $75) and each year thereafter. (“Categorical aid” in this case simply means that it is received outside the revenue cap (as distinguished from general aid, which is under the revenue cap).
This per-pupil aid may be spent irrespective of the district’s revenue limit and can be used for any purpose. (Unlike most other categorical aid, it is not tied to any specific student population or program.) This aid will be received by all districts and is likely to be welcomed by high per-pupil property wealth districts that receive little general aid.
In addition, the 2013-15 state budget act provides for a $75 per-pupil increase in the revenue limit in each year. These increases add on top of one another (so $75 gets added to the base in the first year and another $75 on top gets added of that in the second year–for a total of $130 million in new revenue limit authority statewide). Note: The budget act makes no provision for a revenue limit adjustment in 2015-16 or thereafter.
Together, it is argued that the revenue limit adjustment and the per-pupil categorical aid will provide districts with an additional $150 per pupil in each year of the biennium. (While this $150 figure doesn’t equate to the inflationary adjustment contemplated by the WASB resolutions, it compares quite favorably with the $0 per-pupil “budget freeze” proposed in the budget as originally introduced.) Half of this increase ($75 per pupil) comes from an increase in revenue limits, while the remainder ($75 in the first year, and that $75 plus an additional $75 in the second year) comes from the new categorical aid that will benefit all school districts.
(Technically, the increase in spendable resources for most districts is actually $100 per pupil in the first year because the $50 per-pupil payment received by districts that levied to the max in 2012-13 was one-time money and goes away. For the 27 or so districts that didn’t qualify for the state matching money, the increase in additional resources over 2012-13 resources actually IS $150 per pupil. See Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo on this subject.)
Significantly, the per-pupil categorical aid that is provided to every district is permanent and will continue in 2014-15 and each school year thereafter. It is funded through a sum sufficient GPR appropriation, making it the first sum sufficient appropriation for public school districts since the state abandoned the statutory commitment to two-thirds funding in the 2003-05 state budget bill. Because this is a sum sufficient appropriation, the payments to individual school districts won’t be affected (e.g., pro-rated) by changes in statewide membership. The per-pupil amount is, in effect, guaranteed.) And unlike the $50 per-pupil categorical aid that was provided in 2012-13 to 397 school districts, there is no requirement that a district levy a certain amount in order to qualify for this categorical aid.
The calculation is also straightforward–each district aid is determined by using its three-year rolling average membership to calculate the number of pupils in each district times $75 per pupil. Thus, the $75 per student categorical aid payment in the coming year will be calculated on a current-year basis (using the current year membership count plus the two previous years). As a result, the DPI will have to wait until each district has completed its third Friday in September count in order to complete the calculation. School boards and school administrators who have to hold their annual meeting and get the levy approved by district electors by Oct. 31 should be able to calculate their district’s allotment.
Finally, the $75 per-pupil payment won’t be made by the state until the fourth Monday in March, so it isn’t likely to solve districts’ biggest cash flow issues, but will provide a needed boost.Much more on the Madison School District’s planned spending & property tax increases via the 2013-2014 budget, here.
Related: Analysis: Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap.
Fighting the Wrong Enemy
On top of it all, the most challenging piece for me was how underprepared I actually was. I graduated from high school in the top 10% of my class. But as a freshman at DePauw, I realized I was living the educational inequity that exists in our country.
I’ll never forget Intro to Philosophy. Some of my classmates would spend 45 minutes studying for a test and get A’s, while I would spend hours at the library studying every night, and still wound up with a C+ in that class. I started to lose confidence. Self-doubt began to haunt me.
But with the support and deep belief of my parents and my mentor, Joe Disque, I overcame it. In fact, I conquered it. I came out the other side with a newfound sense of social responsibility.
And that led me to Teach For America. In 1998 I joined the corps in Phoenix where I taught for 3 years. Getting to know my kids and their families inspired me to make this my life’s work.
Later–I saw alumni friends create a new normal in founding and leading schools where I grew up. These schools expected that 100% of their mostly first generation college students would go to and expected to get through college within 6 years. This inspired me, and I have never turned back.
What Is It With US Students and Programming Contests?
I saw this recently on SlashDot – No US College In Top 10 For ACM International Programming Contest 2013 Now the ACM International Programming Contest is sort of a big deal. In the first fifteen or so years US teams won first place every year. Since 1997 though a US team has not taken first place. In Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competitions there is no US winner in any of the 15 or so categories this year. In fact US results in programming and software development competitions have been pretty poor (one might say embarrassing) for a while. One has to ask why?
I don’t think it is because they US doesn’t have students who can compete. I think we do. I think many of the best and brightest choose not to compete. Why? Well I don’t think they see enough value in the competitions to take time from other things that they value more. If you are a top student in a top US university you probably already think your value is obvious. And realistically it is. Top companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.) are recruiting on your campus. You are already doing enough to get their attention. On the other hand if you are in a university in a small eastern European or Asian country that no one has heard of outside the area an an international contest victory may be just the edge you need to get noticed.
