School Information System

RSS

Search Results for: English 10

“If you believe in charter schools, then it’s time to start asking why Wisconsin doesn’t have more.”

Libby Sobic: So what’s a charter school and what kind of options do parents have access to? Charter schools are public schools with significantly less red tape than their traditional public school peers. Wisconsin has several types with the most common type of charter school is a school authorized by the school district. “Instrumentality” charter […]

A Side Effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic? Reading Got a Lot Harder

Emma Pettit: Margaret Chapman wanted to know how her students were faring after her institution, Elon University, shifted to remote learning. When the dust settled, she sent a survey to the students in her course on women, gender, and sexuality studies. The feedback was united: Ditch the textbook. We can’t focus on it. That didn’t […]

The Era of Coddling is over

David Brooks: Over the past decades, a tide of “safetyism” has crept over American society. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt put it in their book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” this is the mentality that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. The goal is to eliminate any stress or hardship a child […]

Campaigners call on broadcasters and streamers to seize the moment to switch on subtitles for kids’ programming

Vanessa Thorpe: An urgent call is to go out to children’s television broadcasters this weekend, backed by major names in British entertainment, politics and technology. Writer and performer Stephen Fry, best-selling author Cressida Cowell and businesswoman Martha Lane Foxare joined by former children’s television presenter Floella Benjamin as signatories to a letter, carried in today’s Observer, that […]

Commentary on Virtual Learning & The Madison School District

Logan Wroge: In an email Friday, district spokesman Tim LeMonds said the district is now aiming to roll out virtual learning the first week of April, but it “takes time and thoughtful planning to prepare an all inclusive virtual learning program.”  “The complexities being addressed include there being a large number of our families who […]

On the Technical Advancements and Instrumentalization of Rumor

CD/DC:/ The quality of information matters immensely in situations like this. I want to briefly direct your attention to an opinion piece on the Scientific American written by Dr. Bill Hanage and Dr. Marc Lipsitch, both great epidemiologists at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. […]

Commentary on Taxpayer Supported School Accountability

Aaron Churchill: This post examines the academic data of schools assigned an overall grade of F under the state’s accountability system. The numbers are small: Just 8 percent, or 275 schools (204 district and 71 charter) received such a rating in 2018–19.[1] But their results suggest a continuing need for a red flag—an alarm bell—that […]

Hidden Segregation Within Schools Is Tracked in New Study

Sarah Sparks: Eliminating racial segregation can be a little like playing whack-a-mole: Instead of going away, too often it just finds a new outlet. A massive new study of North Carolina classrooms over nearly 20 years finds that as racial segregation between schools went down, the racial isolation within the classrooms inside those schools went […]

Civics: Journalism Schools, relevance vs. cost

Frederic Filloux: Should students pay $30,000 or even up to $100,000 to attend a journalism school in the United States? Is it realistic considering the starting salaries in the profession? Is teaching journalism schools actually needed? An interesting discussion was prompted last week by Rafat Ali, about the cost of tuition in journalism schools in […]

Commentary on Wisconsin’s Disastrous Reading Climate

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, Via a kind email: New Wisconsin Group Issues a Call to Action for Reading Excellence On February 12th, a new group called WI-CARE – Wisconsin Call to Action for Reading Excellence – issued a Call to Action for DPI, detailing five areas of concern. You can watch their press conference on Wisconsin Eye and read commentary […]

“We definitely see science-based reading instruction as urgent in our – Madison – schools” (!)

Scott Girard: The 2018-19 state Forward Exam, given to students in grades 3 through 8, showed 35% of students scored proficient or advanced on the English Language Arts portion. For black students, it was 10.1% and for Hispanic students, 16%. Those scores come amid a nationwide, and more recently statewide, push for using the Science of Reading to educate […]

China’s Funding of U.S. Researchers Raises Red Flags

Aruna Viswanatha and Kate O’Keeffe: When officials at the Texas A&M University System sought to determine how much Chinese government funding its faculty members were receiving, they were astounded at the results—more than 100 were involved with a Chinese talent-recruitment program, even though only five had disclosed their participation. A plant pathologist at the Texas […]

Wisconsin ACT Test Scores Have Declined Since 2014

Rich Kremer: The share of Wisconsin high school students deemed to be college-ready has declined since the 2014-2015 school year according to a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum. While the state leads most others that test 100 percent of high school students, the data also shows significant gaps in college-readiness based on race […]

Analysis of ACT results finds fewer than half of Wisconsin high school juniors college-ready

Annysa Johnson: Fewer than half of high school juniors in Wisconsin are considered college-ready in core subjects, based on the latest round of ACT test results, according to a new analysis released Friday by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum. And the percentage of students who met that benchmark has declined in every subject but one since the state began […]

Mission vs organization: leadership of the taxpayer supported ($500m+ annually) Madison School District

David Blaska: Only 8.9% of Madison’s African American high school students are proficient in English, according to 2019 ACT scores. One of every five African American students never graduate. In math, 65% of black students test below basic proficiency, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Not to worry, the district now prohibits teachers […]

The Triple Jeopardy of a Chinese Math Prodigy

Kit Chellel and Jeremy Hodges Before he was denounced as a thief and cast out of the hedge fund industry, before he was a Goldman Sachs banker or a math prodigy, Ke Xu was a little boy in Hubei province, China, who loved puzzles. His parents, junior government clerks, didn’t have much money, so Xu […]

Unmerited: Inequality and the New Elite

Nicholas Lemann: About 25 years ago, I spent a memorable afternoon in London with Michael Young, the author of the strange 1958 dystopian novel in the form of a dissertation called The Rise of the Meritocracy, which introduced that term into the English language. In the United States, for years, people have liked to insist […]

Critical Thinking is Nothing Without Knowledge

DJ Buck: Among high school students, I’ve seen puzzled looks in response to the mention of Adolf Hitler, segregation, Thomas Jefferson, the Cold War, Aristotle and the Bill of Rights—among other things. This shocking lack of knowledge has a noxious effect on student thought. Take a question I gave during a video assignment: to which […]

Dear teachers, most of the popular lessons you found online aren’t worth using

Amber Northern & Michael Petrilli: As we were putting the final touches on our new report, The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar: Is What’s Online Any Good?, Amazon unveiled a “new storefront” called Amazon Ignite. The site will allow educators to earn money by publishing—online, of course—their original educational resources (lesson plans, worksheets, games, and more). The e-commerce […]

Commentary on a Madison style (non independent) charter school: Badger Rock

Scott Girard: A team of reviewers for the school’s charter found it “fails to meet expectations” in seven criteria, “meets expectations” in 29 and “exceeds expectations” in two. The fails to meet expectations criteria include being below the enrollment required by the current contract, 120. This year the school has 97 students enrolled. In the […]

Apostrophe society shuts down because ‘ignorance and laziness have won’

Tim Baker: Retired journalist John Richards, 96, started the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001 to make sure the “much-abused” punctuation mark was being used correctly. But Mr Richards has now announced: “With regret I have to announce that, after some 18 years, I have decided to close the Apostrophe Protection Society. “There are two reasons […]

Can Storied Williams College Be Saved From Itself?

Michael Poliakoff: For $73,000 per year, top students with SAT scores well north of 1,500 count themselves lucky to be accepted by Williams College. There, however, despite the chilly Massachusetts climate, they are in danger of melting with their fellow snowflakes.  Last year, the school canceled a play for alleged racial insensitivity, notwithstanding its African American authorship, […]

Beware Warren’s ‘Madisonian’ Plan for Public Education

CJ Szafir and Cori Petersen Of the Wisconsin school districts with an achievement gap, Madison’s is one of the worst. According to 2018-19 Forward Exam scores, only 34.9% of Madison students are proficient in English, well below the statewide average of 40.9%. But in Madison only 10% of African-American students are proficient in English, compared […]

Elizabeth Warren Pledges To Crack Down On School Choice, Despite Sending Her Own Son To Elite Private School

Peter Hasson: “I do not blame Alex one bit for attending a private school in 5th grade. Good for him,” said Reason Foundation director of school choice Corey DeAngelis, who first flagged Alexander’s private schooling Monday. “This is about Warren exercising school choice for her own kids while fighting hard to prevent other families from […]

Politifact joins the Wisconsin Reading mulligan party

Wisconsin’s new Governor, Democrat Tony Evers, recently acknowledged his support for thousands of elementary reading teacher content knowledge exam mulligans. Now comes Politifact: As proof, Thiesfeldt’s staff pointed to the most recent Wisconsin Student Assessment System results. The annual tests include the Forward Exam for grades three to eight and ACT-related tests for grades nine […]

ANother Lost Decade: Madison’s Reading Crisis Continues

Simpson Street Free Press: On the wall at Simpson Street is a feature editorial from the Wisconsin State Journal. The headline reads “Support State Reading Initiatives” and announces the launch of a bipartisan effort co-chaired by Tony Evers and Scott Walker. The editorial is dated September 12, 2012. Local News and Numbers Recent reports by […]

Providence teachers push back against harsh report on schools

Madeleine List: Providence teachers describe a climate of negativity, an air of uncertainty and a culture of blame hovering over their district since the release of a report by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy this summer on the state of the schools. But for them, the anxiety caused by the scathing report, the […]

Commentary on Education Schools and Teacher Supply/Demand

: More than 2,500 teachers in Wisconsin worked in schools using emergency licenses during the 2017-18 school year, according to DPI data. In the Madison Metropolitan School District, 109 teachers were on emergency licenses during the 2016-17 school year after 67 the preceding school year. Teachers who work with some of the state’s most vulnerable […]

My Schooling In The Soviet Union Surpasses U.S. Public Schools Today

Katy Sedgwick: In America, however, that very system has been weakened from within. Here’s an overview of what’s different between my childhood Soviet education and my kids’ U.S. public schools. Mathematics Math was the dissident’s favorite in the Soviet Union. It was believed that the subject is so logical and abstract, the party could never […]

How Ferguson, Mo., now could help reform public education funding

Aaron Garth Smith: Historically, the Ferguson-Florissant School District has underperformed. In fact, in the school-year before Dr. Joseph Davis took over as superintendent in 2015, a paltry 16 students took Advancement Placement exams, which help prepare students for college. Although the district has shown signs of improvement, many of its 10,000 students – 83 percent […]

Departing Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham WORT FM Interview

mp3 audio – Machine Transcript follows [Better transcript, via a kind reader PDF]: I’m Carousel Baird and we have a fabulous and exciting show lined up today. Such a fabulous guy sitting right across from me right here in the studio. Is Madison metropolitan school district current superintendent? She still here in charge of all […]

Trump’s Citizenship Question Isn’t Controversial. Obama Deleting It Should’ve Been.

Ian Miles Cheongon: Obama’s own efforts to not ask the question was limited to the 2010 Census. From 2009 to 2016, the former president’s Census Bureau had no problem asking anyone if they were Americans on all eight of his annual ACSs (American Community Survey), which targeted smaller demographics key to the success of the […]

Saving China’s Dialects? There’s an App for That

Qian Zhecheng: These days, Xu Li doesn’t worry whenever her elderly father takes off on one of his frequent solo trips to Europe. Although the native of provincial capital Hefei speaks little English and has Chinese so heavily infused by his city’s local patois that other Chinese cannot always understand him, Xu trusts that, in […]

METRO Critics cry ‘grade inflation’ at NYC schools as students pass without meeting standards

Susan Edelman: At the Science School for Exploration and Discovery, MS 224 in the Bronx, an impressive 94 percent of students in grades 6-8 passed their math classes in the 2017-18 school year. But how much math they actually mastered is questionable. Only 2 percent of those same Mott Haven students — nearly all Hispanic […]

Righting the wrong of not writing: High schoolers finally tackle major research papers

Many IB papers have been published in The Concord Review, a quarterly collection of [history] research by high school students. AP papers have appeared in the Young Researcher and the Whitman Journal of Psychology. The Review publishes only 5 percent of submissions, but AP Research pieces will be in the running. Jay Matthews, via Will […]

Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined

George Packer: No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984. The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc—doublethink, memory hole, unperson, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Thought Police, Room 101, Big Brother—they’ve all entered […]

Do Charter Schools Replicate?

Wall Street Journal: The paper’s authors, three professors of economics or education policy, explain what happened after Massachusetts raised its charter cap in 2010. The state set rules encouraging successful charter schools—deemed “proven providers”—to seed new campuses. Most follow a “no excuses” framework, with high expectations and a low tolerance for misbehavior. After the cap […]

Academe’s Extinction Event

Andrew Kay: All around them, the humanities burned. The number of jobs in English advertised on the annual MLA job list has declined by 55 percent since 2008; adjuncts now account for all but a quarter of college instructors generally. Whole departments are being extirpated by administrators with utilitarian visions; from 2013 to 2016, colleges […]

3 California NAACP chapters break with state and national leaders, calling for charter moratorium to be overturned

Esmeralda Fabián Romero: NAACP branches in three California cities that have some of the state’s largest populations of black students are calling to end the charter school moratorium adopted by their national board in 2016. The San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino branches have submitted separate resolutions to NAACP’s state board saying they oppose the […]

Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

Tobias Smith: As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children’s way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to […]

The Other LA College Cheating Scandal — The One You Might Have Missed

Josie Huang: UCLA is at the center of a cheating scandal that federal authorities say involved former and current students impersonating dozens of Chinese nationals who needed good scores on English tests to get into college in the U.S. The six defendants, five with ties to UCLA, allegedly used fake passports, doctored with their own […]

Why we should be honest about failure

Janan Ganesh: On a long-haul flight, Can You Ever Forgive Me? becomes the first film I have ever watched twice in immediate succession. Released last month in Britain, it recounts the (true) story of Lee Israel, a once-admired, now-marginal writer who resorts to literary forgery to make the rent on her fetid New York hovel. […]

In China, some parents seek an edge with genetic testing for tots

Michael Standaert: In Shenzhen, even kindergartners have homework. You can see it in the workbook-laden backpacks weighing them down as they waddle through the school gates at 8 a.m. and back out again at 5 p.m. Many are not headed home yet. There are dance classes, piano lessons, English tutors, kung-fu sessions to get to. […]

Public Education’s Dirty Secret

Mary Hudson: Aside from the history teacher from Texas, other Washington Irving educators stood out as extraordinary, and this in an unimaginably bad learning environment. One was a cheerful Lebanese math teacher who had been felled as a child by polio. He called himself “the million dollar man” because of his handicapped parking permit, quite […]

Public Education’s Dirty Secret

Mary Hudson: Bad teaching is a common explanation given for the disastrously inadequate public education received by America’s most vulnerable populations. This is a myth. Aside from a few lemons who were notable for their rarity, the majority of teachers I worked with for nine years in New York City’s public school system were dedicated, […]

Why you should re-read Paradise Lost

BBC: Milton’s Paradise Lost is rarely read today. But this epic poem, 350 years old this month, remains a work of unparalleled imaginative genius that shapes English literature even now. In more than 10,000 lines of blank verse, it tells the story of the war for heaven and of man’s expulsion from Eden. Its dozen […]

Political Philosophy Isn’t Just for College Students, It’s Making My Students Stronger Readers

Zachary Wright: Alongside the whiteboard in the front of my 12th-grade English classroom in Philadelphia, there are sentence strips listing the names of the authors we have read thus far this school year. The names read like a syllabus to “Political Philosophy 101”: Hobbes. Locke. Rousseau. Plato. Marx. Hume. Machiavelli. Sun Tzu. These authors and […]

Wisconsin has a serious case of the blahs when it comes to education

Alan Borsuk: To set the context briefly: Comparing three years ago to last year, the percentage of students statewide who are rated as proficient or advanced in language arts, math and science has gone down. Just above 40% of Wisconsin kids are proficient or better in each subject, which means close to 60% are not. […]

5-Year-Old’s CV Boasting ‘Rich and Varied Experience’ Invites Scorn in China

Eli Meixler: A resume for a kindergartener who possesses “rich and varied experience” and “an independent personality” prompted ridicule on Chinese social media this week, but also called attention to the high-stakes pressure children in China can face from a young age. The document kicked off a storm after an entertainment blogger posted it Tuesday […]

“Students who are flourishing are not the ones typically transferring schools.”

Erin Richards: Test scores tell another story. Less than 5 percent of students are proficient in English and math on the state exam. The vast majority score “below basic,” the lowest category, in both subjects. Despite devoted teachers, a spirit of achievement, extra money and five years of attention from Milwaukee’s best minds in business […]

“Less discussed in Wisconsin is the tremendous impact that economic status has on student achievement”

Will Flanders: Less discussed in Wisconsin is the tremendous impact that economic status has on student achievement. A school with a population of 100% students who are economically disadvantaged would be expected to have proficiency rates more than 40% lower than a school with wealthier students. Indeed, this economics achievement gap is far larger in […]

Wisconsin DPI: “We set a high bar for achievement,” & abort Foundations of Reading Teacher Content Knowledge Requirement}

Molly Beck and Erin Richards: “We set a high bar for achievement,” DPI spokesman Tom McCarthy said. “To reach more than half (proficiency), we would need to raise the achievement of our lowest district and subgroup performers through policies like those recommended in our budget, targeted at the large, urban districts.” The new scores reveal […]

Ten Things They Didn’t Tell You at Freshman Orientation

David Gelernter: Welcome to Yale. Please disregard what you’ve been told so far, and follow these instructions. 1. Understand that you’re here to learn how to be good citizens of the United States. Many of you come from Japan or Ghana or France, and we’re glad to have you. But Yale can’t teach you to […]

Seeing the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship Between Madison School District (WI) Graduation Rates and Student Achievement

Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques [PDF]: Dear Simpson Street Free Press: Thank you for leading the way in looking more closely at recent reports of an increase in MMSD minority student graduation rates and related issues: http://simpsonstreetfreepress.org/special-report/local-education/rising-grad-rates http://simpsonstreetfreepress.org/special-report/local-education/act-college-readiness-gap Inspired by your excellent work, we decided to dig deeper. We call the result of our efforts […]

Pro-Democracy Party Slams Communist Party ‘Brainwashing’ in Hong Kong Textbooks

Radio Free Asia: A pro-democracy party in Hong Kong has hit out at newly published school textbooks backed by the Chinese government as “biased,” and aimed at “brainwashing” students. The books and teaching materials published by Educational Publishing, which is wholly controlled by Beijing’s Central Liaison Office in the city, contain a biased account of […]

The Humanities Are in Crisis Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong.

Benjamin Schmidt: People have been proclaiming the imminent extinction of the humanities for decades. A best-selling volume in 1964 warned that a science-focused world left no room for humane pursuits, even as Baby Boomers began to flood the English and history departments of new universities. Allan Bloom warned about academics putting liberal ideology before scholarship […]

Strengthening Reading Instruction through Better Preparation of Elementary and Special Education Teachers (Wisconsin DPI, lead by Tony Evers, loophole in place)

Elizabeth Ross: This study examines all 50 states’ and the District of Columbia’s requirements regarding the science of reading for elementary and special education teacher candidates. Chan Stroman: “Report finds only 11 states have adequate safeguards in place for both elementary and special education teachers.” Make that “10 states”; with Wisconsin PI 34, the loophole […]

At Democratic forum Matt Flynn says Scott Walker will eat Tony Evers for lunch

Matthew De Four: It wasn’t until the end of Wednesday night’s Democratic gubernatorial forum at the Madison Public Library that someone took a swing at the candidate who has led in all of the polls. Former party chairman Matt Flynn in his closing statement called State Superintendent Tony Evers “Republican lite” and criticized him for […]

Are Rising Madison School District Grad Rates Something to Celebrate?

Anna Welch: The Madison District has seen graduation rates improve. But, it remains unclear if those students are prepared for college and career. Students who are not adequately prepared before they graduate often pay the price in college. In 2016, Act 28 took effect requiring the UW Board of Regents to submit an annual report […]

20 years ago…. Mutually Destructive Tendencies in K-12 and College Education

Chester E. Finn, Jr. President, Fordham Foundation Academic Questions, Spring 1998e: What’s going on in the college curriculum cannot be laid entirely at the doorstep of the K-12 system. Indeed, as Allan Bloom figured out a decade or more ago, it has as much to do with our educational culture, indeed with our culture per […]

Passe presomptif

Peter Thonemann: The first date in English History, according to 1066 and All That, is 55 BC, the year of Julius Caesar’s memorable landing at Thanet. “The Ancient Britons”, Sellar and Yeatman remind us, “were by no means savages before the Conquest, and had already made great strides in civilisation, e.g. they buried each other […]

Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem

Eric Bennett: Can the average humanities professor be blamed if she rises in the morning, checks the headlines, shivers, looks in the mirror, and beholds a countenance of righteous and powerless innocence? Whatever has happened politically to the United States, it’s happened in stark opposition to the values so many philosophers and English professors, historians […]

How Liberty University Built a Billion-Dollar Empire Online

Alec MacGillis: The real driver of growth at Liberty, it turns out, is not the students who attend classes in Lynchburg but the far greater number of students who are paying for credentials and classes that are delivered remotely, as many as 95,000 in a given year. By 2015, Liberty had quietly become the second-largest […]

Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem

Eric Bennett: Can the average humanities professor be blamed if she rises in the morning, checks the headlines, shivers, looks in the mirror, and beholds a countenance of righteous and powerless innocence? Whatever has happened politically to the United States, it’s happened in stark opposition to the values so many philosophers and English professors, historians […]

California again ranks low in academic testing (Wisconsin/Madison….)

Dan Walters: There was a bit of good news for California in the federal government’s latest round of academic test results: it’s one of seven states that registered four-point gains in reading comprehension among eighth-graders. But that positive morsel in the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing of fourth- and eighth-graders released this […]

Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges

Kyle Spencer: “My parents don’t want to just throw money around now,” Ms. Shahverdian said as she walked across Pasadena’s 53-acre campus, heading toward her English class. “I’m getting a great education at a fraction of the cost.” Community colleges have long catered to low-income students who dream of becoming the first in their families […]

Teaching excellence should be celebrated

Alicia Duran: My 10 years as a high school English teacher at Volcano Vista in Albuquerque were awesome. I love the art of teaching, the science of teaching and the joys of teaching. My students’ learning came first, which is at the heart of why I love our profession – making an impact on kids’ […]

Private school with global ambition to open in D.C. and China in 2019

Nick Anderson: An education company backed by U.S. and Chinese investors is launching a global private school for students ages 3 to 18, with the first two campuses scheduled to open next year in Washington and the Chinese coastal city of Shenzhen. Whittle School & Studios will offer foreign-language immersion — Chinese in the United […]

Educators speak out on behavior. Why no consequences? And where are the parents?

Alan Borsuk: Don’t think this is a piece only about schools in Milwaukee, either public or private. I got responses from suburban schools where the same issues are seen, and from across the state. People working in affluent areas said behavior has gotten worse in their schools, as well. ​​​​​​English language arts begins. You pull […]

Seeking the Lost Art of Growing Old with Intention

Bill Donahue: the U.S. and landed in western Maine. They planned to grow pota­toes. Instead they were taken in for a summer by a kind family, the Adamses, whose ramshackle farm was a mess, a melange of dogs and cows and chickens and broken tractor equipment. To Bernd, the place was paradise, as he writes […]

New York’s Dwight School Plans New Campus—in Dubai

Leslie Brody: As the private Dwight School in Manhattan gears up to open a new campus, it is recruiting dozens of American teachers with perks such as free housing and tuition for their children. The rub is that the new site is almost 7,000 miles away in Dubai, a city on the Persian Gulf where […]

Jack Ma Foundation launches new rural education program

Gu Liping : The Jack Ma Foundation on Monday announced a new plan to invest at least 300 million yuan (45 million U.S. dollars) to encourage graduates of normal schools to teach in rural areas in the next 10 years. The first 10 million yuan will be invested in selecting 100 fresh graduates from normal […]

Wisconsin Accountability System Under the “Every Student Succeeds Act”

American Institutes for Research (AIR): Wisconsin annually differentiates across all public schools based on scores for the individual federally-required accountability measures (not annual summative ratings for all schools/all students based on all indicators). Schools for comprehensive support and improvement, targeted support and improvement, and additional targeted support and improvement are identified using the following composite […]

The Great College Loan Swindle

Matt Taibbi: On a wind-swept, frigid night in February 2009, a 37-year-old schoolteacher named Scott Nailor parked his rusted ’92 Toyota Tercel in the parking lot of a Fireside Inn in Auburn, Maine. He picked this spot to have a final reckoning with himself. He was going to end his life. Beaten down after more […]

What’s Really Keeping Pakistan’s Children Out of School?

Nadia Naviwala: On a visit to a village school in the mountains near Abbottabad in northwestern Pakistan, I asked a group of third graders to spell “Pakistan.” They stared at me, silent and bewildered. The school had 20 students; only two have survived till the fifth grade. The two fifth graders were somewhat literate. One […]

Paul Miller Loved Teaching Math So Much That He Did It For Nearly 80 Years

Claudio Sanchez: Most teachers these days last no more than five to 10 years in the classroom, but Paul Miller taught math for nearly 80. At one point, he was considered the “oldest active accredited teacher” in the U.S. His career started in his hometown of Baltimore. It was 1934, the Dust Bowl was wreaking […]

The Art of Teaching Math and Science

Kyoto Hamada: “There’s nothing that has no relationship to science,” Comer said after the class. “It’s very important to me that students know how the world around them functions.” But learning science is like learning another language, she said, and only 10 percent of Baychester’s students read English at or above grade level. Complicating matters, […]

An update on Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Amber Walker For math, the numbers were 46 percent for proficiency and 65 percent for growth. Over the past four years, students’ reading proficiency increased 10 percentage points in reading and 8 percentage points in math. The largest achievement gap in elementary school reading exists between African-American and white students, with 18 percent of black […]

Teachers With Student Debt: These Are Their Stories

Elissa Nadworny: Teachers have one of the lowest-paid professional jobs in the U.S. You need a bachelor’s degree, which can be costly — an equation that often means a lot of student loans. We’ve reported on the factors that make this particular job even more vulnerable to a ton of debt, including chronically low teacher […]

Reimagining the Humanities: Proposals for a New Century

David Bell: IN 1922, Austrian art historian Josef Stryzgowski lectured in Boston on “The Crisis in the Humanities as Exemplified in the History of Art.” In 1964, British historian J.H. Plumb published a volume of essays entitled The Crisis in the Humanities. Between 1980 and 2000 a “crisis in the humanities” was discussed more than […]

Is There Anything Common Core Gets Right?

Sandra Stotsky, via Will Fitzhugh: Most books on public education in any country do not favor workforce preparation for all students in place of optional high school curricula or student-selected post-secondary goals. Nor have parents in the USA lauded Common Core’s effects on their children’s learning or the K-8 curriculum. Indeed, few observers see anything […]

Do Geography and Altitude Shape the Sounds of a Language

Joseph Stromberg: You likely don’t give a ton of thought to the sounds and patterns that make up the language you speak everyday. But the human voice is capable making of a tremendous variety of noises, and no language includes all of them. About 20 percent of the world’s languages, for example, make use of […]

“Mr. Hayes’s solution is to improve education”

Joseph Tago: Mr. Hayes’s solution is to improve education, specifically with a national apprenticeship program that would guide local public-private partnerships to train and prepare the workforce better. He knows the problem firsthand: “I’ve got thousands of job openings.” Do you really? “Thousands,” he replies. “A lot of this is because we’ve got growth in […]

Germany sees benefits in educating international students for free

David Matthews: In 2016, German universities enjoyed another big rise in the international student population, according to the latest data. Germany recorded close to a 7 percent increase in international students coming to the country. This follows a jump of nearly 8 percent the previous year. Numbers have risen about 30 percent since 2012. In […]

A Quarter Century of Changes in the Elementary and Secondary Teaching Force: From 1987 to 2012

NCES: This report looks at changes in several key characteristics of the teaching force between the 1987-88 and 2011-12 school years, including the number of teachers, the level of teaching experience, and the racial/ethnic diversity of the teaching force. The report focuses on how these demographic changes varied across different types of teachers and schools. […]

Long Beach Unified accused of misspending money for neediest students

Howard Blume: Add Long Beach Unified to the list of California school districts accused of improperly spending money intended to help students with some of the greatest needs. The system, with about 78,000 students, is the seventh to be targeted by Public Advocates. The watchdog law firm has filed a complaint on behalf of Children’s […]

New Johns Hopkins School of Education website grades K-12 reading, math programs

The Hub: By using the categories of evidence—strong, moderate, and promising—outlined in the law, Evidence for ESSA makes it easier for school leaders to determine which programs are in compliance. Programs without evidence of effectiveness are not ranked on the website, and the CRRE plans to incorporate new educational studies and new programs into the […]

There were hopes that the flood of Chinese students into America would bring the countries closer. But a week at the University of Iowa suggested to Brook Larmer that the opposite may have happened

Brook Larmer: As the plane descended over Iowa, Fan Yijia could see a quilt of green and yellow cornfields extending to the horizon. It had taken more than 24 hours – and one missed flight – for the first-year University of Iowa student to travel from Jiaxing in eastern China to the American Midwest. To […]

“A Typical Well-Funded But Underperforming School District”

Because of its location near the nation’s capital, its charming historic Old Town, and its median family income of $109,228 (the highest of any city in Virginia), outsiders might think that Alexandria boasts a first-rate public-school system. It doesn’t. The quality of the public schools within the city varies greatly, and system as a whole […]

D.C. Charter Teachers Seek to Unionize

Rachel Cohen: This morning, teachers at Paul Public Charter School, one of the oldest charters in Washington, D.C., publicly announced their intent to unionize—a first for charter schoolteachers in the nation’s capital. As in other cities where charter teachers have formed unions, the Paul educators are forming their own local—the District of Columbia Alliance of […]

Relaxing Wisconsin’s Weak K-12 Teacher Licensing Requirements; MTEL?

Molly Beck: A group of school officials, including state Superintendent Tony Evers, is asking lawmakers to address potential staffing shortages in Wisconsin schools by making the way teachers get licensed less complicated. The Leadership Group on School Staffing Challenges, created by Evers and Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators executive director Jon Bales, released last […]

Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Tony Evers Responds to Madison Teachers’ Questions

Tony Evers (PDF): 1. Why are you running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction? I’ve been an educator all my adult life. I grew up in small town Plymouth, WI. Worked at a canning factory in high school, put myself through college, and married my kindergarten sweetheart, Kathy-also a teacher. I taught and became a […]

Why a top university runs a London state school on Soviet lines

The Economist: FOR a glimpse of the Soviet Union’s influence on English education, head to a sixth-form college in Lambeth, a 20-minute stroll from Parliament. There, in a former 1930s bath-house sunk low amid housing estates, sits King’s College London Mathematics School (KCLMS). Inside, pupils can spend their free time solving mathematical problems on whiteboards […]

A Candidate Forum On Wisconsin’s K – 12 Spending And Achievement Plans

Molly Beck: Overall on school funding, Evers said that the state is not spending enough on schools and that more funding should be sent to schools with higher numbers of students in foster care, students living in poverty and students who don’t speak English as a first language. Humphries said academic achievement — particularly elementary […]

Milwaukee’s Voucher Verdict What 26 years of vouchers can teach the private-school choice movement—if only it would listen

Erin Richards: Together, Travis Academy and Holy Redeemer have received close to $100 million in taxpayer funding over the years. The sum is less than what taxpayers would have paid for those pupils in public schools, because each tuition voucher costs less than the total expense per pupil in Milwaukee Public Schools. But vouchers weren’t […]

A Syrian Child Transforms

Catrin Einhorn & Jodi Kantor: As soon as Bayan Mohammad, a 10-year-old Syrian refugee, arrived here last winter, she began her transformation. In her first hour of ice-skating, she managed to glide on her own. She made fast friends with girls different from any she had ever known. New to competitive sports, she propelled herself […]

Compare Omaha K-12 Governance & Spending With Madison: Expand Least Diverse Schools Or?

Mareesia Nicosia: They’ve waited every morning since, Gunter told The 74 in a recent interview, until the doors open and staff welcomes them warmly inside, trading handshakes and high-fives as music courses through the halls. Not long ago, though, there was little enthusiasm from students, their families — and staff, for that matter. The pre-K–5 […]

Wisconsin Student Performance on the Forward Exam

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: It has become common knowledge that Wisconsin students do not perform well in 4th grade reading, and that efforts to improve performance over the past two decades have been largely ineffective. On the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), the only means we have to compare Wisconsin apples-to-apples […]

Four Nations Are Winning the Global War for Talent

Adam Creighton The world’s highly skilled immigrants are increasingly living in just four nations: the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, according to new World Bank research highlighting the challenges of brain drain for non-English-speaking and developing countries. Falling transport costs combined with growing competition for talented workers have seen the ranks of highly skilled immigrant […]

$500,000 to fulfill the 18 contracts for first-year writing instructors

Colleen Flaherty Faculty members in English at Ohio State University say 18 non-tenure-track lecturer jobs have been saved, at least for this year. The university maintains that their jobs were never at risk. Faculty members said earlier this week that Ohio State had been struggling to come up with approximately $500,000 to fulfill the 18 […]