Search Results for: English 10
Less than half of Wisconsin public school students proficient or advanced in math and language arts
Doug Erickson: On the latest round of statewide tests, fewer than half of Wisconsin public school students in grades three through eight scored proficient or better in English language arts or math. The results, released Tuesday by the state Department of Public Instruction, showed 42.5 percent of students scored in those top two categories in […]
Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong?
Joseph R. Teller My students can’t write a clear sentence to save their lives, and I’ve had it. In 10 years of teaching writing, I have experimented with different assignments, activities, readings, approaches to commenting on student work — you name it — all to help students write coherent prose that someone would actually want […]
Too many students unprepared for college
Alan Borsuk: About a dozen years ago, Willie Jude, a longtime Milwaukee Public Schools administrator who was principal of Custer High School at the time, told me that many Custer grads who went on to higher education (and there weren’t that many) realized quickly they were way behind many other students when it came to […]
Source Code for IoT Botnet ‘Mirai’ Released
Brian Krez’s: The source code that powers the “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released, virtually guaranteeing that the Internet will soon be flooded with attacks from many new botnets powered by insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders […]
Safety First: The New Parenting (Remarkable)
Simon Keper: ‘A 10-year-old in western Europe is probably the safest demographic since man first walked upright, but try telling that to your brain’ I’d like to have a soldier stationed outside the classroom door,” my son’s teacher told the parents’ meeting. “And I’d like him to be young and handsome.” My children’s primary school […]
Oxford Tops List of World’s Best Universities
Beckie Strum The University of Oxford, the oldest in the English-speaking world, took the top spot in the latest World University Rankings, released annually by Times Higher Education. The English university dating to 1096 dethroned the California Institute of Technology, a small, private school in Pasadena that had ranked No. 1 for five consecutive years, […]
Good News Liberal-Arts Majors: Your Peers Probably Won’t Outearn You Forever
George Anders: Six years ago, Andy Anderegg’s decision to major in English looked like an economic sacrifice. When she left academia in 2010, with a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Kansas, the first job she landed was a Groupon Inc. writing gig paying all of $33,000 a year. Now, however, Ms. […]
A NYC Teacher Gets Up Close and Personal
Vivett Dukes: Let me get personal and tell you a little bit about me: in particular, what sparked my passion for educational equity and commitment to giving disenfranchised children a shot at success. When I took 11th grade English with Mr. Frank McHugh at Elmont Memorial Senior High and we read D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and […]
N.J. triples weight of PARCC results in teacher evaluations11
Adam Clark: TRENTON — The results of controversial standardized tests that many New Jersey students have yet to pass will carry three times as much weight in some teacher’s evaluations this school year, the state announced Wednesday. Teachers in grades 4-7 whose students participate in the PARCC math tests or in grades 4-8 whose students […]
Why not bring back grammar schools?
Chris Cook: Few intra-governmental memos have sparked more anger than one called Circular 10/65, a memorandum sent 51 years ago by Anthony Crosland, then the education secretary, to local authorities. The document instructed local officials to commence converting grammar schools into comprehensives. Only a few English counties, such as Kent and Lincolnshire, retained many. Today, […]
Miranda Warning Equivalents Abroad
Federation of American Scientists: This report contains short summaries describing warnings similar to the Miranda warning that are required in 108 jurisdictions around the globe. The summaries are divided into sections based on broad geographic categories: Americas and the Caribbean, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, South […]
The Horrifying Reality of the Academic Job Market
Hamilton Nolan: I got my PhD in Classics, which maintains a bit of an old school appeal to pedigree (and white males). Our PhDs are being churned out at an alarming rate (not as bad as English, though), and there are few tenure track jobs. If you look at the Classics wiki, which goes back […]
“Why I’m Sticking to the Union – and Others Should Too”
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email: (By Andrew McCuaig, English teacher, LaFollette High School) Joining a union is an act of faith: a belief that people coming together with similar daily work lives can have an impact on those people who may have goals that don’t take into account […]
Don’t expect less of low-income minority students and their families
Esther Cepeda We’ve heard for years that when it comes to African-Americans, Hispanics and low-income minority communities in general, expectations for academic achievement are low. Indeed, the Center for American Progress found in 2014 that 10th-grade teachers thought African-American students were 47 percent, and Hispanic students were 42 percent, less likely to graduate college than […]
The Rare District That Recognizes Gifted Latino Students
Claudio Sanchez: back in school, bored to death, with limited academic options. Because you’re learning English, everybody assumes you’re not ready for more challenging work. What they don’t realize is that you’re gifted. Researchers say this happens to lots of gifted children who arrive at school speaking little or no English. These students go unnoticed, […]
Student Loans With Future Work Collateral
Scott Cowley: Purdue, in West Lafayette, Ind., has 30,000 undergraduate students. Indiana residents pay annual tuition fees of $10,000, while students from other states pay nearly $30,000. Its average graduate emerges owing $28,000. The income-sharing program will offer terms based on students’ majors and the projected salaries in those fields. A comparison tool on Purdue’s […]
Literature’s Emotional Lessons
Andrew Simmons: I’d drawn a little tombstone on the board. I was in the middle of leading a class of 10th-grade English students through Piggy’s death scene in Lord of the Flies: the rock, the shattered conch, Piggy’s long fall, the red stuff flowing out, the twitching legs. The corners of her eyes bubbling, a […]
Shenzhen Says It Plans to Spend Billions to Attract Talent
Kang Shu: Shenzhen’s government has doubled this year’s budget for programs related to attracting talented people to the city to 4.4 billion yuan this year in a bid to attract more academics and professionals to help nurture innovation. The city government, which announced the plans through media outlets on March 21, made especially rich offers […]
How Google Stole the Work of Millions of Authors
Roxana Robinson Last week publishers, copyright experts and other supporters filed amicus briefs petitioning the Supreme Court to hear the copyright-infringement case against Google brought by the Authors Guild. The court’s decision will determine how and whether the rights and livelihood of writers are protected in the future. If you type, “Shall I compare thee […]
We should reject efforts to repeal College & Career Ready Standards
Jennifer Brown: I wish I could say that this honor was for jovial purposes. It wasn’t. I appeared before the committee not to discuss the amazing job our teachers are doing in classrooms across the state, but instead to defend Alabama’s College and Career Ready Standards from the latest legislative attempt to reverse what the […]
Lexical Distance Among the Languages of Europe
Teresa Elms: This chart shows the lexical distance — that is, the degree of overall vocabulary divergence — among the major languages of Europe. The size of each circle represents the number of speakers for that language. Circles of the same color belong to the same language group. All the groups except for Finno-Ugric (in […]
Several London post-92s see falls in battle for students
John Morgan: The government’s removal of student number controls has led some English universities to increase their student intake by more than 20 per cent in a year, while others have recorded drops of up to 10 per cent, with larger institutions in London seeing a particular decline. Analysis by Times Higher Education of figures […]
Can 15-year-old Wikipedia remain the planet’s font of all knowledge?
Andrew Lih: This month, Wikipedia officially celebrates 15 years as the internet’s free encyclopedia, cataloguing humankind’s achievements in real time and, more importantly, rescuing desperate students facing assignment deadlines. In that time, it has hastened the end of Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia and supplanted Britannica as the dominant reference work in English. While the digital landscape […]
Learning to Read at Age 41
Elaine Sohn: It was June, 2006. The place was the Adult Learning Center at the Aguilar branch of the NYPL on 110th Street near Lexington, where more than a hundred students and twenty-five volunteers met regularly to study together. Around a table, small groups of students met with one or two volunteers for four hours […]
Wisconsin’s K-12 Math And Reading Performance: NAEP 37% at or Above Proficient
Annysa Johnson: They do not include individual district- and school-level data for public schools or the scores for private schools participating in the state-funded voucher programs. Among the highlights: The composite score for juniors who took the ACT was 20 on a scale of 36. That’s below the 22.2 reported in August 2015. Again, DPI […]
Sixteen years in academia made me an a-hole
Rani Neutill: Gradually, I started to resent academia, partly because I couldn’t get a permanent job and partly because of the elitism and snobbery that came with the profession—an elitism that seemed inextricable from the environment and the people in it. I would grit my teeth at academic parties, listening to conversations where it was […]
The Counterfeit High School Diploma
New York Times: Teachers unions and other critics of federally required standardized tests have behaved in recent years as though killing the testing mandate would magically remedy everything that ails education in the United States. In reality, getting rid of the testing requirement in the early grades would make it impossible for the country to […]
NAEP DISHONOR ROLL 2015: CITIES EDITION
Rishawn Biddle: Yesterday’s analysis of exclusion data from the reading portion of this year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that far too many states were excluding numbers of children in special education ghettos and English Language Learner programs far above what is allowed under federal law. But none of those revelations are a stark […]
The Future of Work: The Rise and Fall of the Job
psmag: After a century of insisting that the secure, benefits-laden job was the frictionless meritocratic means of rewarding society’s truly valuable work and workers, today we find that half the remaining jobs are in danger of being automated out of existence. Of the 10 fastest-growing job categories, eight require less than a college degree. Over […]
A Randomized Control Trial of a Statewide Voluntary Prekindergarten Program on Children’s Skills and Behaviors through Third Grade
Mark W. Lipsey, Dale C. Farran & Kerry G. Hofer: The third question we addressed involved the sustainability of effects on achievement and behavior beyond kindergarten entry. Children in both groups were followed and reassessed in the spring every year with over 90% of the initial sample located tested on each wave. By the end […]
“Half of the top-performing schools serving low-income students in California are charters, Status Quo In Madison
Kimberly Beltran: , according to a new analysis of scores from this year’s Common Core-aligned assessments. In a brief report that underscores large achievement gaps between student subgroups on the state’s new standardized tests, the non-profit Education Trust-West study revealed that on lists of the top 10 highest performing schools in English language arts and […]
The College Board Lowers Standards
Will Fitzhugh: The College Board and Atlantic Magazine, recently joined their forces to lower standards for academic expository writing in the English-speaking world. Although their efforts did not match in scope and daring those of groups like InBloom, Amplify, and others, they persuaded 3,000 secondary students to meet their contest guidelines. They asked for papers […]
Commentary On Wisconsin’s K-12 test Regime…
Molly Beck: According to the Department of Administration, bids were sought for a Web-based exam testing third- through eighth-graders in English and fourth-, eighth- and 10th-graders in math and science. A separate bidding process was set up for a new exam to test students in social studies. Daniel Wilson of the DOA said the process […]
Success Academy Posted Its Latest Test Scores. The Results Are Astounding.
Jim Epstein: New York released its annual test scores this week, and Success Academy, the city’s rapidly expanding charter school network, posted remarkable results. Again. Success Academy schools did well in English—68 percent of students were proficient, compared with 30 percent in the city over all—but in math, the scores were astonishing. Ninety-three percent of […]
A century after his death, work of wordsmith James Murray is remembered
Hannah Somerville: ACADEMICS, family members and fans gathered in Oxford yesterday to celebrate 100 years since the death of James Murray, chief editor of the first Oxford English Dictionary. Wreaths were laid at the lexicographer’s grave in Wolvercote Cemetery, Banbury Road, at 11am, led by his great-grandson Oswyn Murray. One special offering was provided by […]
Law seeks answers on Wisconsin high school grads who need remedial classes
What can or should be done? Jagler is a Republican member of the state Assembly from Watertown. He said he got interested in this when he heard about students who graduated from high school in good standing, enrolled at a UW campus, took placement tests and were assigned to remedial courses. He said one parent […]
Common Core Flop/Flip & Flip/Flop
Wheeler Report (PDF): For this reason, many of us were initially encouraged when you indicated that you would defund Wisconsin’s participation in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) via your proposed 2015-2017 biennial budget. We hoped for substantive movement, at long last, on an issue that affects most children, parents, and teachers in Wisconsin. However, […]
Public School Educators Get Second Reminder of Ban on Tutoring
Luo Ruiyao: (Beijing) – The government has again told teachers they are prohibited from tutoring students after class for extra cash, but experts say the latest reminder will have little effect if educators are not paid more. On July 6, the Ministry of Education reiterated that primary and middle schools and their teachers cannot host […]
Why Johnny and Joanie Can’t Write, Revisited
Gerald Graff COMPLAINTS THAT American high school and college graduates can’t write have been pervasive for so long that they almost go without saying. Last year, when the Society for Human Resource Management asked managers about the skills of recent college graduates, 49 percent of them rated those graduates deficient in “the knowledge and basic […]
Common Core Is Leaving My Students Behind
Brian Zorn: The mission of American education is “No Child Left Behind.” For me as a special-education teacher in New York state, that means making my students feel worthwhile and giving them the confidence they need to succeed—academically and socially. Yet New York’s statewide English language arts (ELA) and mathematics exams unduly humiliate children in […]
America’s most controversial educator
Robert Pondsco: If you don’t live in New York City or within the education policy universe, Eva Moskowitz might not be on your radar screen. She should be. With a recent front page piece in The New York Times about the extraordinary results posted by her network of 32 Success Academy charter schools and how […]
Social Studies [and history] Education in Crisis
Gorman Lee, via Will Fitzhugh: The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s decision to indefinitely suspend the History and Social Science MCAS in 2009 has placed social studies education in a high risk of marginalization in K-12 public school districts across the Commonwealth. The problem has only exacerbated with increased emphases of English language […]
Finland’s reforms won’t scrap subjects altogether
Pasi Sahlberg: Finland’s plans to replace the teaching of classic school subjects such as history or English with broader, cross-cutting “topics” as part of a major education reform have been getting global attention, thanks to an article in The Independent, one of the UK’s trusted newspapers. Stay calm: despite the reforms, Finnish schools will continue […]
Finally, Some Unbiased Educational Statistics on Newark Public Schools
Laura Waters: Comparison in student outcomes between traditional and charter schools: “A substantial and persistent achievement gap exists in pass rates among students in Newark traditional public schools and charter schools. For example, while 71 percent of charter school students in Newark passed 3rd grade language arts tests in 2013–14 — higher than the state […]
State Of Parenting
Parent Toolkit: While it may be true that divorce rates are still high and Americans are delaying marriage, the idea that American families are worse off and continuing to decline is up for debate. The findings of this new NBC News State of Parenting Poll which was sponsored by Pearson, paint a different story. The […]
Tsinghua, Peking Universities Rise in Reputation Rankings
Xu Heqian & Wang Yucheng Two top mainland universities climbed in the latest rankings of colleges around the world that is produced by a leading education publication in Britain. Tsinghua University was ranked No. 26 in the 2015 Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings published on March 12 – an improvement of 10 spots for […]
Study praises Wisconsin for raising the bar on state exams; RIP WKCE Low Standards?
Erin Richards Eight years ago, a study found Wisconsin had one of the lowest bars in the country for rating students proficient in reading and math on the state standardized test. That means children here looked more academically accomplished than they probably really were — something the state aimed to remedy by raising the scores […]
Addressing racial disparity in schools
Christian Schneider: When the Madison Metropolitan School District School Board met in October of last year, members listened to teachers tell stories of being hit, bitten and kicked by students. The teachers were objecting to a new school district plan that sought to both allay the wide racial disparity in student suspensions and keep children […]
The “Wild West” of Academic Publishing
Craig Lambert: Last summer, Harvard University Press (HUP) asked a book designer to create a T-shirt for its softball squad’s intramural season. The front of the shirt bore the expression r > g, signifying that the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of growth in income (g)—the central thesis of […]
DPI Standard of the Week: Using phonics as building blocks for reading
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: The Department of Public Instruction chooses an English Language Arts standard each week and posts resources and ideas for practicing in the classroom and at home. The standard for the week of January 5 is phonics. Follow this link to the site http://dpi.wi.gov/my-wi-standards/ela/1-6-15 As is usually the case […]
Racial Isolation in Public Schools
NY Times: This is not an easy problem to solve. But the state cannot just throw up its hands. It has a moral obligation to ensure that as many children as possible escape failing schools for ones that give them a fighting chance. And history has shown that districts can dramatically improve educational opportunities for […]
Who was behind the Common Core math standards, and will they survive?
Sarah Garland: Every Saturday morning at 10 a.m., Jason Zimba begins a math tutoring session for his two young daughters with the same ritual. His youngest, Claire, 4, draws on a worksheet while his oldest, Abigail, 7, pulls math problems written on strips of paper out of an old Kleenex box, decorated like a piggy […]
Mind the Generation Gap….
Jonathan Margolis: Do you send emails in literate, properly spelt English, broken down into crisp, relevant paragraphs, signed at the end, even with the mandatory extra space inserted after each full stop? If you do, you are almost certainly old. How old? From a not hugely scientific study of everyone I happen to know, I’d […]
Pearson chief promises a big push into China’s education sector
Wang Zhuoqiong: Pearson Plc’s pavilion at a book fair in Beijing. The global education service company said that its business revenue in China reached $300 million last year from $10 million in 2007 when it entered the Chinese market. Global giant to take mixed, blended learning approach for success Pearson Plc, the global education service […]
Who Killed Wikipedia?
Virginia Postrel: Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website in the world. It’s the quickest way to get the lowdown on the Battle of Nashville, find out exactly how old Ruth Bader Ginsburg is, or discover who invented Hot Pockets. You can find more authoritative specialized resources online—from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to IMDb— […]
What do you know? A simple way to revolutionise teacher quality1 2
Tom Bennett: I want to talk about a topic so volatile and delicate it could be a kitten made of nitroglycerin: subject knowledge. And, for once, I don’t mean looking at what children know, because that’s a discussion that can currently be enjoyed on channels 1-100 on your Sky box (other cable providers are, of […]
NPR & School Discipline
Ross T:
Teaching to the Authentic Assessment
Barry Garelick, via a kind email: Back in September, when I was doing my sub-assignment for the high school, I attended a math department meeting the day before school began. Sally from the District office presided, and among the many things she told us at that session was that this year the students in the […]
Lone Geniuses Are Overrated
Jeffrey Goldberg: Somewhat to my surprise, Walter Isaacson’s new book, The Innovators, a group portrait of the men and women who invented computers and the Internet, is riveting, propulsive and at times deeply moving. My surprise is not rooted in doubts about Isaacson’s skills; he is considered to be the leading biographer of the digital […]
Managing Dyslexia Forum 25 October 2014
Lake Superior Tutoring Center (PDF) Guest Speaker: Shantell Barrett Shantell Barrett has a B.A. in English from BYU specializing in language processing deficits and behavioral issues. She is a former teacher and a parent of a child with dyslexia. She is also the Dyslexia Specialist and Director of Training for Reading Horizons. To learn more […]
Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn
Howard Hotson: During the past eight years, university tuition fees were introduced into most west German federal states. Yet in a few months, every single state will have abolished them. These facts raise a series of topical questions that cast current English higher education policy in a fresh and revealing light. Why did Germany introduce […]
“They are intellectually underpowered and full of themselves, because they’ve been told their whole life how wonderful they are”
Michael Schulson: In the spring of 2008, William Deresiewicz taught his last class at Yale. In the summer of 2008, he published an essay explaining how an Ivy League education had messed up his life, and the lives of his students. Elite schools, Deresiewicz argued, give their students an inflated sense of self-worth. They reward […]
Reading and Curricular Suggestions & Links as the school year begins
Wisconsin Reading Coalition via a kind email: With the beginning of a new school year, here is some timely information and inspiration. You can make a difference: At WRC, we are often focused on top-down systemic change that can improve reading outcomes for students across our state. However, bottom-up, individual efforts are equally important. A […]
American Horror, Ivy League Edition
Alexander Nazaryan In 1911, the fictional Dink Stover arrived at Yale, “leisurely divested himself of his trim overcoat” and coolly strolled into campus life. “He had come to conquer,” writes Owen Johnson in the 1912 novel called Stover at Yale, “and zest was in his step.” Stover’s zest has little to do with intellectual inquest, […]
An Interview with Will Fitzhugh: Peer Scholars Helping and Mentoring Budding Scholars
Professor Michael F. Shaughnessy 1) Will, you have been editing The Concord Review for ages. When did you begin, and what are you trying to accomplish? Since 1987, when I got started, the goals have been to: (1) find and celebrate exemplary history research papers by secondary students from the English-speaking world, and (2) to […]
Best state in America: Massachusetts, for its educational success
Reid Wilson: That’s according to the Education Week Research Center, a nonpartisan group that measured indicators such as preschool and kindergarten enrollment, high school graduation rates, and higher education attainment. The yearly study also considered family income and parental employment, which are linked to educational achievement. In almost every category, the Bay State beats the […]
Year after Rocketship’s scrutinized Milwaukee launch, signs point to progress; Status Quo in Madison
Erin Richards: What were the highlights of Rocketship’s first year here? Strong growth. Rocketship set a goal of having 65% of its Milwaukee students meet the national average for reading and math growth over the course of the year. In fact, 72% of the school’s students, almost all of whom are low-income and Hispanic or […]
Self-Delusion Spreads from Professional to Graduate Education; Consternation Curiously Absent
Bernie Burk: I want to be clear at the outset: I love literature. I was an English major, and I’ve never regretted it for a moment. I seriously considered pursuing a Ph.D. in English. I could not have a deeper faith in the liberal arts as a path to the betterment of all mankind. So […]
Poor progress of UK disadvantaged pupils a waste of talent, says Alan Milburn
Richard Adams: England’s education system is wasting young talent “on an industrial scale” because of poor progress made by the brightest disadvantaged children once they leave primary school, Alan Milburn, chair of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, said after publication of a report detailing the educational differences that emerge by the age of […]
Self-Delusion Spreads from Professional to Graduate Education; Consternation Curiously Absent
Bernie Burk: I want to be clear at the outset: I love literature. I was an English major, and I’ve never regretted it for a moment. I seriously considered pursuing a Ph.D. in English. I could not have a deeper faith in the liberal arts as a path to the betterment of all mankind. So […]
2014 Teacher Prep Review Findings
National Council on Teacher Quality: Our Approach There’s widespread public interest in strengthening teacher preparation — but there’s a significant data gap on what’s working. We aim to fill this gap, providing information that aspiring teachers and school leaders need to become strategic consumers and that institutions and states need in order to rapidly improve […]
South Korea’s Millionaire Tutors: The vast sums spent on preparing children for tests are causing unease
Simon Mundy: Kim Ki-hoon has risen to stardom of a sort that exists in few places outside South Korea. As the country’s highest-earning celebrity English teacher, he estimates he made about $4m last year from his online language lessons – and then there is the income from his educational publishing company, which turned over about […]
We Need to Talk About the Test: A problem with the common core
Elizabeth Phillips I’D like to tell you what was wrong with the tests my students took last week, but I can’t. Pearson’s $32 million contract with New York State to design the exams prohibits the state from making the tests public and imposes a gag order on educators who administer them. So teachers watched hundreds […]
Illustration by Stanley Mouse Field Trippin’ One high school teacher’s account of a trip he didn’t mean to take
John Moss: We were barely past MacArthur when I felt it beginning to take hold. It was a big Friday for me, taking 40 students on a walking field trip to our local bookstore, then a tour of the Community Center and, if there was enough time, a little sit-under-a-tree-and-read time for the students in […]
Academia Under the Influence
Eleanor J Bader: While we may tend to romanticize universities as bastions of free thought and intellectual rigor, Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira’s new book, The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, demonstrates their subjection to the same ideological underpinnings as the general body politic. The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, Edited […]
I’ll Have a Dose of Confirmation Bias, Heavy on the Bias
Matthew Ladner: So how do private school students do in Science compared to public school students. I wasn’t sure, so I went to the NAEP data explorer to find out. Private school students outscore public school students, but private school students tend to be more affluent than public school students, and there can be differences […]
Chinese parents scramble to send children to top British schools
Helen Warrell: Packed into a grey minibus, 22 Chinese parents are trundling down a bumpy driveway towards Cobham Hall, a girls boarding school set in 70 hectares of Kent countryside. The red-brick Tudor mansion, with its octagonal wing turrets, looks like something out of an Enid Blyton novel. But there is nothing fanciful about the […]
Why India’s landmark education law is shutting down schools
Alays Francis In an unauthorised colony of labourers in Delhi, a class of six-year-olds is reciting English, a language their parents hope will get them jobs in call centres and offices. But later this month the classes will stop. Ramditi JRN Deepalaya is among hundreds of small private schools – which have multiplied in India […]
Please Excuse my Grammar
Austin Walters: This is a long story, but I feel sheds light on education in general and why academia and educational institutions function so poorly that they drive the brightest into the dark. More than once I have told by an academic advisor that I am going to fail 2nd grade was my first brush […]
Educators launch defense of Common Core at Senate hearing
Erin Richards: More than more than 100 superintendents and school board members packed a Senate chamber Thursday in opposition to a bill that could derail the transition to new educational standards in Wisconsin. At issue are the Common Core State Standards, a set of expectations for English and math instruction that most states have adopted […]
UK Free schools will stumble – the test is how well they recover
Fraser Nelson: Nothing tempts fate more than adding the word “flagship” to a government project. When Britain’s first profit-seeking state school opened in Suffolk 18 months ago, it perhaps had a little too much going in its favour. The blessing of the local MP, the skills minister Matthew Hancock. The backing of Sweden’s most successful […]
A Conversation with Leigh Turner
Jim Zellmer: Good afternoon, Leigh Let’s begin with your education. Leigh Turner: Like increasing numbers of people in today’s modern world, I grew up in several countries, in Nigeria, in Britain, then again in Lesotho, in southern Africa, and then again in Britain. I went to several different, as we would say in English, schools […]
Madison Schools’ Student Assessment Plan Proposed Changes
Madison School District 500K PDF Slideware: Phase Out: WKCE, Explore, and Plan Phase In: PALS 2, Smarter Balanced, Aspire, Work Keys Required State Assessments PALS (4K-2) WKCE Science & Social Studies (3-8) ACCESS for English Language Learners Aspire (9, 10) ACT + Writing (11) Work Keys (12) Related: Madison Schools’ MAP results
The Pleasures Of ‘Teaching To the Test’
Is standardized testing anti-student? Many educators and commentators believe so, vehemently. No more “drill and kill,” some detractors demand. Kids are not robots goes another refrain. Others argue that standardized testing is a soul-sapping exercise in rote learning that devalues critical thinking and favors students of higher-income parents who can afford test-prep classes or private tutors.
On the contrary: Testing is good for the intellectual health of students. It is also an excellent way for teachers to better understand the particular academic challenges their students face.
First, standardized tests are a critical thinker’s dream. Multiple-choice questions often ask students to evaluate evidence and make inferences. Consider a sample multiple-choice question for the New York State English Language Arts test, which is administered in the public schools. It asks students to identify the tone of a paragraph excerpted from Andrew Carnegie’s “The Gospel of Wealth” (1889).
Eva Moskowitz: Teachers Union Enemy No. 1
For several months running, the Bill and Eva Show has been the talk of New York City politics. He is the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, an unapologetic old-school liberal Democrat, scourge of the rich and of public charter schools. She is Eva Moskowitz, fellow Democrat and educational-reform champion who runs the city’s largest charter network.
How did Ms. Moskowitz, a hero to thousands of New Yorkers of modest means whose children have been able to get a better education than their local public schools offered, end up becoming public enemy No. 1?
She is the city’s most prominent, and vocal, advocate for charter schools, and therefore a threat to the powerful teachers union that had been counting the days until the de Blasio administration took over last month from the charter-friendly Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Assailed by Mayor de Blasio and union leaders, Ms. Moskowitz is fighting back with typically sharp elbows.
“A progressive Democrat should be embracing charters, not rejecting them,” she says. “It’s just wacky.”
As she reminds every audience, the 6,700 students at her 22 Success Academy Charter Schools are overwhelmingly from poor, minority families and scored in the top 1% in math and top 7% in English on the most recent state test. Four in five charters in the city outperformed comparable schools.
An Approach That Uses Computers a Bit to Ask Questions on Numbers and Stuff in Big School
Here I attempt to write the abstract for my thesis, ‘A Partially-automated Approach to the Assessment of Mathematics in Higher Education’, “using only the ten hundred words people use the most often”.
Katie Steckles pointed out via the latest Carnival of Mathematics that quantum computer scientist Scott Aaronson posted an explanation of his research using only the 1000 most common words in English, inspired by the xkcd comic ‘Up-Goer Five’, which did the same for a labelled diagram of the Saturn V rocket (the ‘Up-Goer Five’). Scott’s post links to The Up-Goer Five text editor, a fabulous innovation that allows typing in a box and highlights when a word isn’t on the same list of words used in the xkcd diagram. I used this to write a version of my thesis abstract. Beyond what the text editor wanted, I also voluntarily adjusted some terms that are on the list, but presumably not in the way I mean them. Particularly, ‘deep learning’ and ‘open-ended questions’ didn’t get highlighted. I’ve gone for a fairly close, word-by-word translation, though clearly some parts could be rewritten completely to be clearer.
My thesis abstract (the version I handed in) is in a previous blog post, if you want to view it for comparison. Here’s my Up-Goer Five version.
Big names dominate FT MBA ranking top spots
The FT Global MBA ranking and the English football Premier League have one thing in common. Pundits may argue about who will head the table, but most years there is little doubt about the top five.
So it is for 2014: Harvard Business School fended off competitors and kept the crown it regained last year. This is the fifth time Harvard has topped the rankings since they began in 1999. Stanford Graduate School of Business remained second, while London Business School leapfrogged the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania, pushing the latter into fourth place. Columbia Business School and Insead are joint fifth.
The FT ranking is based on two surveys of the business schools and their alumni who graduated in 2010. MBA programmes are assessed according to the career progression of their alumni, the school’s idea generation and the diversity of students and faculty.
Harvard leads the field for idea generation, coming first for research and second for its doctoral programme. The school’s alumni also boast the second-highest average salary three years after graduation (behind Stanford) and above-average salary increase. Harvard is also among the top schools for career progression and its MBA was the most highly commended by graduates from other schools.
2013 Madison Summer School Report
The district provided a comprehensive extended learning summer school program, K-Ready through 12th grade, at ten sites and served 5,097 students. At each of the K-8 sites, there was direction by a principal, professional Leopold, Chavez, Black Hawk and Toki, and oral language development was offered at Blackhawk and Toki. The 4th grade promotion classes were held at each elementary school, and 8th grade promotion classes were held at the two middle school sites.
Students in grades K-2 who received a 1 or 2 on their report card in literacy, and students in grades 3-5 who received a 1 or 2 in math or literacy, were invited to attend SLA. The 6-7 grade students who received a GPA of 2.0 or lower, or a 1 or 2 on WKCE, were invited to attend SLA. As in 2012, students with report cards indicating behavioral concerns were invited to attend summer school. Additionally, the summer school criterion for grades 5K-7th included consideration for students receiving a 3 or 4 asterisk grade on their report card (an asterisk grade indicates the student receives modified curriculum). In total, the academic program served 2,910 students, ranging from those entering five-year-old kindergarten through 8th grade.
High school courses were offered for credit recovery, first-time credit, and electives including English/language arts, math, science, social studies, health, physical education, keyboarding, computer literacy, art, study skills, algebra prep, ACT/SAT prep, and work experience. The high school program served a total of 1,536 students, with 74 students having completed their graduation requirements at the end of the summer.
All academic summer school teachers received approximately 20 hours of professional development prior to the start of the six-week program. Kindergarten-Ready teachers as well as primary literacy and math teachers also had access to job embedded professional development. In 2013, there were 476 certified staff employed in SLA.Jennifer Cheatham:
Key Enhancements for Summer School 2014
A) Provide teachers with a pay increase without increasing overall cost of summer school.
Teacher salary increase of 3% ($53,887).
B) Smaller Learning Environments: Create smaller learning environments, with fewer students per summer school site compared to previous years, to achieve the following: increase student access to high quality learning, increase the number of students who can walk to school, and reduce number of people in the building when temperatures are high. ($50,482)
C) Innovations: Pilot at Wright Middle School and Lindbergh Elementary School where students receive instruction in a familiar environment, from a familiar teacher. These school sites were selected based on identification as intense focus schools along with having high poverty rates when compared to the rest of the district. Pilot character building curriculum at Sandburg Elementary School. ($37,529)
D) Student Engagement: Increase student engagement with high quality curriculum and instruction along with incentives such as Friday pep rallies and afternoon MSCR fieldtrips. ($25,000)
E) High School Professional Development: First-time-offered, to increase quality of instruction and student engagement in learning. ($12,083)
F) Student Selection: Utilize an enhanced student selection process that better aligns with school’s multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) so that student services intervention teams (SSIT) have time to problem solve, and recommend students for SLA. Recommendations are based on student grades and standardized assessment scores, such as a MAP score below the 25th percentile at grades 3-5, or a score of minimal on the WKCE in language arts, math, science, and social studies at grades 3-5. (no cost)
Estimated total cost: $185,709.00
Summer School Program Reductions
The following changes would allow enhancements to summer school and implementation of innovative pilots:
A) Professional development (PD): reduce PD days for teachers grades K-8 by one day. This change will save money and provide teachers with an extra day off of work before the start of summer school (save $49,344.60).
B) Materials reduction: the purchase of Mondo materials in 2013 allows for the reduction of general literacy curricular materials in 2014 (save $5,000).
C) Madison Virtual Campus (MVC): MVC is not a reimbursable summer school program as students are not in classroom seats. This program could be offered separate from summer school in the future (save $18,000).
D) Librarians: reduce 3 positions, assigning librarians to support two sites. Students will continue to have access to the expertise of the librarian and can utilize library resources including electronic equipment (save $12,903.84).
E) Reading Interventionists: reduce 8 positions, as summer school is a student intervention, it allows students additional learning time in literacy and math. With new Mondo materials and student data profiles, students can be grouped for the most effective instruction when appropriate (save $48,492).
F) PBS Coach: reduce 8 positions, combining the coach and interventionist positions to create one position (coach/interventionist) that supports teachers in setting up classes and school wide systems, along with providing individual student interventions. With smaller learning sites, there would be less need for two separate positions (save $24,408).
G) Literacy and Math Coach Positions: reduce from 16 to 5 positions, combining the role and purpose of the literacy and math coach. Each position supports two schools for both math and literacy. Teachers can meet weekly with literacy/math coach to plan and collaborate around curriculum and student needs (save $27,601.60).
Estimated Total Savings: $185,750.04
Strategic Framework:
The role of the Summer Learning Academy (SLA) is critical to preparing students for college career and community readiness. Research tells us that over 50% of the achievement gap between lower and higher income students is directly related to unequal learning opportunities over the summer (Alexander et al., 2007). Research based practices and interventions are utilized in SLA to increase opportunities for learning and to raise student achievement across the District (Odden & Archibald, 2008). The SLA is a valuable time for students to receive additional support in learning core concepts in literacy and math to move them toward MMSD benchmarks (Augustine et.al., 2013). SLA aligns with the following Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Strategic Framework goals:
A) Every student is on-track to graduate as measured by student growth and achievement at key milestones. Milestones of reading by grade 3, proficiency in reading and math in grade 5, high school readiness in grade 8, college readiness in grade 11, and high school graduation and completion rate.
B) Every student has access to challenging and well-rounded education as measured by programmatic access and participation data. Access to fine arts and world languages, extra-curricular and co-curricular activities, and advanced coursework.
The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity When Shakespeare lost out to ‘rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class’ at UCLA, something vital was harmed.
In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles wrecked its English major. Such a development may seem insignificant, compared with, say, the federal takeover of health care. It is not. What happened at UCLA is part of a momentous shift that bears on our relationship to the past–and to civilization itself.
Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton–the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.
In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”
5 Things Faculty Can Actually Do About the Academy, Part 3: The Humanities Resembles a Pyramid Scheme, and We Should Be Bothered By That
Earlier this fall semester, Dr. Anne-Marie Womack (Tulane), a colleague from my graduate institution, and I had a piece about the academic job market in English published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the piece, we make the argument that departments should strive to make the first round of job applications free of cost for candidates. The idea for this piece arose when we were on a flight together to campus visits and we got into a discussion about how much money we had spent on Interfolio during the job search “season”. Both of us had applied to more than 100 jobs, and for myself the Interfolio cost alone was north of $600. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Interfolio, it is a dossier service that allows a candidate to put his or her materials together, including confidential letters of recommendation, and send them as one package to the hiring committee responsible for the job search. The minimum cost for sending a dossier through Interfolio is $6, and in the case of print materials, the price increases as the page count goes up. For most jobs I applied to, the committee required at minimum a CV, three confidential letters of recommendation, a teaching philosophy, a writing sample, and a job letter in the first round of application.
Due to the volume of this type of application, the cost for a single Interfolio dossier could go as high as $20. Given such a high cost to applicants, most often graduate students, adjuncts, and postdoctoral fellows, and the fact that many jobs in English had as many as 500 applicants in the first round, we argued that departments and schools should work to make the process free to applicants by requiring only an electronic submission of a CV and job letter in the first round.
We further argued that this system would also provide feedback and reassurance to applicants advanced to the next round of the search by contacting them for materials like the writing sample and confidential letters of recommendation. Requesting more materials from a short list, we claimed, “would also alert us of our success and would mark a significant personal accomplishment in what can be a very anonymous process.”
Is College Necessary? Ask Recent Graduates
Lately the question “Is College Necessary?” has been under debate. One factor sparking the debate is the record 85 percent of recent college grads living with their parents. While economists and academics argue about the benefits of a college education and the loan debt incurred by many students, what are recent college grads thinking, especially those who can’t find jobs or if they do, cannot support themselves?
In this guest post, Cristina Schreil, a 2011 graduate of New York University who majored in English Literature and Journalism, investigated how her generation feels about the expectations they had and what they feel now–diplomas in hand. Like many of her peers, she admits, “in no way am I supporting myself 100 percent, but I am still pursuing the goal of working in journalism full time. I think it’s going to be a long journey.” Here is what Cristina learned about her peer’s attitudes and struggles:
Report urges Michigan to replace MEAP with Smarter Balanced test
A new report urges state lawmakers to proceed with plans to introduce the Smarter Balanced exam as a replacement for the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, saying it remains the only viable option for the 2014-15 school year.
Michigan education officials released the 23-page report Monday outlining options for a new state assessment tool to be used as early as next year to test K-12 students under Common Core state standards. State schools administered the MEAP for what is supposed to be the last time this fall.
The report, requested by lawmakers in late October after they removed a funding block for implementation of Common Core, examines 12 test options in the marketplace.
The report provides summaries on the cost of each test, scoring and reporting methods, test security transparency and overall design.
Of the 12 options, only Smarter Balanced and two other tests were aligned to Common Core, a more rigorous set of standards adopted by the State Board of Education in 2010 for math and English. The other exams aligned to the standards are Measured Progress and PARCC.
Madison School Board Policy on Policies
The Madison School District (PDF):
BOARD POLICIES and PROCEDURES represent the BOARD’s vision for the DISTRICT and set the general direction for the DISTRICT. It is an essential function of the BOARD to establish BOARD POLICIES and the BOARD PROCEDURES necessary to eaffect those POLICIES and PROCEDURES. In order to carry out this function in an effective, efficient, consistent and transparent manner, the BOARD believes it is imperative to have a well-defined procedure for creating, maintaining and modifying such POLICIES and PROCEDURES as needed.
…
Beginning in the 2014-2015 school year, except for POLICIES and PROCEDURES that are reviewed on an annual basis, see IV.H, below, the SUPERINTENDENT or his/her designee shall review all BOARD POLICIES and PROCEDURES shall be reviewed pursuant to the following three-year review cycle:
Year 1: Chapter 4000 (Pupils), Chapter 5000 (Auxiliary Services), Chapter 6000 (Operations)
Year 2: Chapter 2000 (Administration), Chapter 3000 (Instruction), Chapter 7000 (Community Relations), Chapter 10000 (Charter Schools)
Year 3: Chapter 1000 (Board of Education), Chapter 8000 (Personnel), Chapter 9000 (Ethics)
Following said review, the SUPERINTENDENT shall present his/her recommendations at a WORK GROUP meeting for review and approval by the BOARD. The review cycle does not preclude the BOARD from taking action on any POLICY determined to be in need of revision.
During the course of the three-year review cycle, all
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POLICIES and PROCEDURES shall be translated into Spanish and additional languages, as possible. Translated POLICIES and PROCEDURES shall be subject to the same revisions as their English-language counterparts.
Wisconsin Reading Coalition: 2013 Reading Report Card
Wisconsin Reading Coalition (PDF), via a kind email:
he National Center for Education Statistics has released the 2013 scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the “Nation’s Report Card.” While the press has rightly focused on Wisconsin’s scores for black students (lowest in the country) and the black-white gap (largest in the country), the data indicates many other areas of concern. Here are some major takeaways from the critical 4th grade reading performance:
- Wisconsin’s average score (221) in 2013 is identical to 2011, and is statistically unchanged from our first NAEP score (224) in 1992.While we have remained stagnant, many other jurisdictions have seen statistically significant increases.
- Wisconsin ranked 31st out of 52 jurisdictions that participated in NAEP this year. In 1994, we ranked 3rd.
- Since 2007, the number of jurisdictions scoring significantly lower than Wisconsin has shrunk from 21 to 11. The number scoring significantly higher has grown from 8 to 15. Wisconsin sits in the lower half of the “middle” group of 26 jurisdictions.
- Only 8% of Wisconsin students scored at the advanced level, while 32% were below basic, the lowest level.
- Compared to their peer groups nationwide, Wisconsin’s white, black, Hispanic, Asian, low income, and disabled students all scored below their respective national averages.
- Wisconsin had the lowest scores for black students in the nation.
- Wisconsin had the largest gap between white and black students in the nation.
How will Wisconsin respond?
Social and economic disadvantages affect achievement for many students, but other states do better at mitigating those realities. Wisconsin must look within the education system itself for improvement opportunities, starting with teacher preparation. Beginning in 2014, the Foundations of Reading exam will require prospective teachers to understand the science of reading that is woven through the Common Core State Standards and that is necessary for successful intervention with struggling readers. As DPI revises the regulations governing educator licensure and preparation program approval, it will be important to align them with the only comprehensive guidelines available, the Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading (Moats, Carreker, Davis, Meisel, Spear-Swerling, Wilson, 2010), and to encourage independent, objective program reviews for campuses. Equally important, our state and districts need to provide practicing teachers with that same knowledge of language structure and reading acquisition, and to track the impact of professional development on student performance outcomes. Programs like LETRS from Sopris Learning and the online coursework and coaching offerings from the Science of Reading Partnership deserve attention. Only then can we hope to see student outcomes begin to reflect the efforts of our dedicated educators.
The pie charts below show the breakdown of proficiency levels of Wisconsin students as a whole and broken into sub-groups. The line graphs show the trend over time in Wisconsin scores compared to Massachusetts, Florida, and Washington, D.C., where the science of reading has found a greater acceptance in education, as well as the changes in national ranking for Massachusetts, Florida, and Wisconsin.
Related: Madison’s disastrous reading results and Wisconsin adopts the MTEL-90 (Massachusetts) elementary teacher English content knowledge requirements.
Just Say No to College
Paul Gu is the winner of a Thiel Fellowship-a two-year $100,000 grant designed to encourage teenagers to skip college and pursue scientific or entrepreneurial projects in the real world. He is also the founder of Upstart, a human capital contract firm that allows investors to fund an individual’s education in exchange for a share of their future earnings. Gu spoke with reasonintern Michael Bruschini in August about his experience with the Thiel fellowship, his start-up, and the future of higher education.
Q: You came here from China at six without any knowledge of English. How did you climb the ladder to attend Yale and become a Thiel Fellow?
A: I developed a streak for independent thinking early on and generally preferred to try beating the system instead of doing what I was told. I loved my time at Yale, but after two years, it was obvious to me that I was more of a self-learner and was getting impatient to get in the “real world.” So when I saw the Thiel opportunity come along, it was a no-brainer for me.
Florida’s long-term NAEP gains easily outpace the nation
Florida made small gains over the last NAEP cycle, but how does its growth compare over the long haul? Pretty good.
If you go all the way back to the beginning of NAEP time (which can vary from 1990 to 2003 depending on the grade, subject and sub-group), Florida’s gains since then best the national gains in 38 of 40 categories. If NAEP gains were heavyweight boxing, Florida’s career record would be 38-2 with 11 KO’s (beating the average by 10 or more points).
Florida’s average gain per category is 21.5 points (about two grade levels worth of advancement). Its average spread over the national gain is 7.1 points (nearly a grade level).
One caveat: In the two areas where Florida was beat by the national average (4th grade math by English Language Learners (ELL) and 8th grade math by low-income Hispanics) the results may be biased because so few states had enough ELL and Hispanic students to compare.
University exam brings South Korea to standstill
Time was put on hold in South Koreaon Thursday as financial markets and public offices opened late to ensure calm when more than 650,000 students sat the annual university entrance exam. Success in the test is critical to millions of young students’ career and marriage prospects.
Trading at the Korea Stock Exchange and the country’s foreign exchange market began at 10am, an hour later than usual, to keep roads clear while aircraft will be grounded in the afternoon during the English listening test. About 65 commercial flights have been rescheduled to avoid take-off or landing for 30 minutes from 1.05pm.
Classes at primary and secondary schools started an hour later than usual while civil servants and most employees in the private sector were also asked to go to work an hour later than usual to ease traffic congestion to ensure that students arrive at their exam sites on time.
The university entrance exam is one of the most critical annual events for young people in the country – where seven out of every 10 high school students go on to higher education – as a diploma from top schools is widely regarded as a ticket to success in Asia’s fourth-largest economy. An almost cult-like devotion to learning has been among the driving forces behind the country’s rapid economic development over the past half century, creating one of the world’s most highly educated workforces.
Boston Charter School Demand and Effectiveness
Sarah R. Cohodes, Elizabeth M. Setren, Christopher R. Walters, Joshua D. Angrist & Parag A. Pathak:
Boston charter schools have had many reasons to tout their performance in 2013. Research reports and MCAS scores have shown exceptional progress by charter students. But while we were buoyed by these findings, the Boston Foundation and NewSchools Venture Fund sought to better understand in more detail not only how well charters are working, but for whom.
The answer–or at least the beginnings of it–is described in this report by a team of researchers from MIT’s School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII). This is the third in a series of studies examining charter and Boston Public Schools (BPS) student performance. The first, released in 2009, was groundbreaking in its use of individual student data, its research design–which incorporated an observational study–and a lottery analysis. The second report, released in May 2013, examined Boston’s charter high schools and found gains in their students’ MCAS, Advanced Placement and SAT scores compared to their peers in the Boston Public Schools.
This report updates the 2009 study and uses a similar methodology. It examines the performance of all students enrolled in Boston’s charter schools as well as that of important subgroups of high-needs students, including those whose first language isn’t English or who have special needs. Importantly, this report also examines demand and enrollment patterns and finds a changing student population that includes more of these subgroups.
Like earlier studies, this report finds that attending a charter school in Boston dramatically improves students’ MCAS performance and proficiency rates. The largest gains appear to be for students of color and particularly large gains were found for English Language Learners.
At the same time, it is important to note that the analysis showed that charter school students are less likely to have special needs or to be designated as English Language Learners. While that gap has narrowed since the passage of education reform in 2010, the charters’ success with high-needs students should provide an even greater impetus to connect those student populations with charter schools.
In addition, the research team found that charter schools continue to be a popular option for Boston families. As the number of available seats grows, so too does the number of applicants. Nonetheless, the report finds that the odds of receiving a charter offer are roughly comparable to a student receiving his or her first choice through the BPS school-assignment process.
Readers of this report will draw many different conclusions, but the takeaway for us is clear: charters work for their students. It’s not only evident that we need more of these schools, but we must also redouble our efforts to ensure that students who have the most to gain are afforded greater access to them.
On the non-payment of adjuncts at CUNY
An email landed in my inbox this morning about widespread non-payment of adjuncts in the CUNY system. I’ll reprint it below the fold. IANAL, but those who are might want to comment on this in light of NY’s “Wage Theft” law.
Here, though, read how Anthony Galluzo, one of those affected, describes his situation:I’m supposed to be paid–finally–tomorrow, although classes started the last week of August. The explanation? Well, I was hired late–the week before said classes began–and there is a state mandated pay schedule. Fantastic. A system apparently designed with long term employees in mind, hence the glacial in-processing, even though it now runs on casualized permatemps hired at the last minute. This scenario was compounded by the fact that the secretary in the English department only submitted materials for one of my courses. I am teaching three. A fluke that happens all too often, as I’ve since learned from other adjuncts. Of the several adjuncts I talk to, I don’t know one who was paid on time.
If you’ve been affected by non-payment, late payment, or partial payment, contact Debbie Bell dbell@pscmail.org. To offer support of any kind, contact Jonathan Buschbaum. Below the fold, more details:
The Decline of Wikipedia
The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.
Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia–and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation–has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-ranking quality scores.
