Taking water into exams could boost grades

Nick Collins:

A study of university students found that those who brought drinks, especially water, with them as they sat their exams performed up to 10 per cent better than those who did not.
Psychologists said it was unclear why drinking water would improve your performance but said that being better hydrated could have a helpful impact on the brain, and knowing you had a bottle with you might make you feel more reassured.
The researchers studied hundreds of university students in their first and second years of degree courses and at pre-degree “foundation” level and observed what drinks, if any, they brought into exam halls with them.
Their study, presented at the British Psychological Society annual conference in London on Wednesday, found that those who brought drinks in with them averaged five per cent better in exams.

Yes, University of Phoenix is Disruptive; No, That Doesn’t Make It the End-All

Michael Horn:

Many of my friends in the education world are fond of talking about how the University of Phoenix is not in fact a disruptive innovation.
They don’t just stop this statement with the University of Phoenix of course. I’m using the University of Phoenix as shorthand. What they mean are many of the distinctly online universities that have emerged over the last couple of decades–everyone from Kaplan University to DeVry to Bridgepoint.
They are wrong. These online universities are disruptive innovations relative to traditional universities. They are now on their own sustaining innovation track, which every disruptive innovation moves to as it grows, expands, improves, and marches up market. It’s also true that not all of them will succeed in these endeavors.
The fact that I’m saying they are disruptive innovations in the face of many saying they aren’t strikes me as ironic, given that I often find my job is to correct people who want to declare nearly everything disruptive and misapply the term. I also readily admit that online learning isn’t inherently disruptive; when it’s used in a hybrid format to complement or extend traditional brick-and-mortar learning, chances are it’s being used as a sustaining innovation. No technology is inherently a disruptive innovation, as all technologies can be applied to sustain or disrupt the industry’s incumbents.

University agriculture school grows in new areas

Alex Friedrich:

When many people picture the typical agriculture student at the University of Minnesota, chances are they’d think of a rural farm boy.
For a long time they would have been on target. Many students probably arrived as a freshman to learn agronomy, soil or animal science and planned to return to the family farm or go to work for a big agricultural company.
That’s no longer true. Professors are seeing a different kind of agricultural student on the Twin Cities campus.
“It’s a woman who grew up in suburban Twin Cities, and is a transfer student from some place in MnSCU,” said Jay Bell, associate dean the U of M’s College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences.

Teaching students about plagiarism reduces plagiarism.

Daniel Willingham:

Most colleges have strict polices about student plagiarism, often including stringent penalties for those who violate the rules. (At the University of Virginia, where I teach, the penalty is expulsion.) Yet infractions occur. Why?
My own intuition has been that plagiarism is often due to oversight or panic. A student will fall behind and, with a deadline looming, get sloppy in the writing of a paper: a few sentences or even a paragraph makes its way into the student paper without attribution. In the rush to finish the student forgets about it, or decides it doesn’t matter.
Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob had a different idea.

To Pay Off Loans, Grads Put Off Marriage, Children

Sue Shellenbarger:

Between the ages of 18 and 22, Jodi Romine took out $74,000 in student loans to help finance her business-management degree at Kent State University in Ohio. What seemed like a good investment will delay her career, her marriage and decision to have children.
Ms. Romine’s $900-a-month loan payments eat up 60% of the paycheck she earns as a bank teller in Beaufort, S.C., the best job she could get after graduating in 2008. Her fiancé Dean Hawkins, 31, spends 40% of his paycheck on student loans. They each work more than 60 hours a week. He teaches as well as coaches high-school baseball and football teams, studies in a full-time master’s degree program, and moonlights weekends as a server at a restaurant. Ms. Romine, now 26, also works a second job, as a waitress. She is making all her loan payments on time.
They can’t buy a house, visit their families in Ohio as often as they would like or spend money on dates. Plans to marry or have children are on hold, says Ms. Romine. “I’m just looking for some way to manage my finances.”

Disrupting Smartboards: Penveu smart ‘whiteboard’ pen on test in US schools

Laura Locke:

An innovative electronic pen which could replace whiteboards is to be tested in schools in the US.
Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest with 770,000 students, will soon try out the gadget, named Penveu.
The handheld wireless device “electronically” works on any surface such as a bare wall, computer monitor or pulldown screen.
Penveu’s makers say it is far cheaper than existing whiteboard systems.
The device, which writes, points, and highlights on any flat surface, costs $499 (£312) for educational use – far less than existing interactive whiteboards which can cost more than £2,000.

A Conversation on Education with Horace Dediu



I’ve followed Horace’s excellent online writing (“precision, poetry”) for the past few years and had the opportunity to meet him at Friday’s asymconf.
I’ve been impressed by the depth and breadth of his writing and analytical presentations. That naturally led me to ask about his education (he moved 30+ times growing up), work and more recent experience with Finland’s system ( more here) as a parent. I also asked where he mastered such a broad command of the English language. Listen for the answer.
I hope you find this podcast (28mb mp3) as illuminating as I did.
Links: asymco.com, asymconf.com, quora and twitter.com/asymco.
Update (4.26.2012): A transcript is available here.

Superintendents: Lightning Challenge for School Reformer

David Wessel:

Paul Vallas made his mark in education-reform circles as school superintendent in the big cities of Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans, post-Katrina. Now the superstar superintendent is trying to turn around the schools in much smaller Bridgeport, Conn.–in 150 days or so.
This is more than a curiosity: America’s economic future depends on fixing its public schools. And, as Mr. Vallas observes, “There are a lot of Bridgeports”–small, de-industrialized, cash-short cities with failing schools.
If he succeeds here–within “existing financial constraints,” as he puts it, and with strong unions–Bridgeport can inspire others. “There are models for school improvement that don’t cost $1 million a school,” Mr. Vallas argues, a not-so-subtle swipe at the cost of experiments elsewhere.
The saga of schools in Bridgeport (pop. 144,229), a poor city amid the wealth of Fairfield County, is too long for this space. The short version: For nearly a decade, the state has flunked the 20,250-student, 37-school system. Only 10% of tenth graders meet state math and reading standards. At the best-performing of the city’s three high schools, the dropout rate is 23%; at the worst, 45%.
For years, members of the elected school board were at odds both with each other and with the city. The city hasn’t increased school funding for four years.In July, with quiet backing from the mayor, governor and wealthy education-reform enthusiasts, the school board took the extraordinary step of voting itself out of existence and asked the state to take over. A new state-appointed board fired the superintendent and, in December, signed Mr. Vallas to a one-year contract, raising money from private donors whose identities weren’t disclosed to pay his $229,000 salary and settle with his predecessor. But in February, the state Supreme Court declared the takeover illegal, and ordered a special election for a new school board. The date has yet to be set.

Bridgeport’s 2010-2011 budget spent $215,843,895 for “more than” 21,000 students = about $10,278/student. Madison spent $14,858.40/student during the 2011-2012 budget cycle.

LAUSD Looks To Raise The Bar For Graduating Seniors

CBS:

Officials with the Los Angeles Unified School District were considering a plan on Wednesday that would require all students to take advanced courses and earn at least a “C” in order to graduate.
The proposal is part of the district’s effort to make every LAUSD graduate meet the minimum standards for admission to University of California and Cal State University Systems.
The change would require students graduating in 2016 to pass a third year of math and two years of foreign language courses. With these changes, the district would no longer require the currently mandated health and applied technology courses.

Which College Majors Pay Best?

Phil Izzo:

We know that a college diploma boosts earnings, but a student’s choice of major also plays a big part.
The gap wages rates between electrical-engineering and general-education majors is nearly as large as the difference between college graduates and high school graduates, according to a wide-ranging study by Joseph G. Altonji, Erica Blom and Costas Meghir of Yale University.
The economists examine the large differences in labor-market outcomes across college majors in several ways. In one section of their paper, they look at data on wages by college major obtained through the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey. They find that among other things, math skills are correlated to higher earnings. “Wages tend to be high for engineers and low for elementary education majors, suggesting that perhaps much of the wage differences between majors are due to differences in mathematical ability and high school course work,” the authors write.

Badger Rock charter school plan hits hurdle

Matthew DeFour:

Madison School District officials are warning that the group financing a building for the city’s newest charter school is short of its fundraising goal, and families are wondering if their children will be in another temporary location in the fall.
The organization building an environmental campus that will include Badger Rock Middle School is “100 percent confident” it will be able to secure $1.1 million in loans and raise about $340,000 over the next two months.
Also, the construction manager for the project said Tuesday the building will be completed by July 31, in time for the school’s second year of operation.
“Although administration doesn’t share their confidence, we fully agree that there is sufficient time to finish this project if there is an increased sense of urgency on the job site in the very near future,” Superintendent Dan Nerad wrote in a memo to the Madison School Board last week.
Nerad briefed the board on the matter Monday night.

Florida school board election may be barometer for school choice

Ron Matus:

Florida has long given folks nationwide good reason to pay attention to school choice happenings at the state level. Now comes a compelling story at the local level.
Glen Gilzean, 31, is seeking a school board seat to help lead the 101,000-student Pinellas County school district. He’s a former staffer with the state education department; an education entrepreneur whose business helps low income kids; an energetic guy with a solid grasp of education issues. He also happens to openly support school choice options like vouchers and tax credit scholarships.
That support prompted headlines after Florida Gov. Rick Scott appointed Gilzean to the District 7 seat in January. And it was mentioned again when Gilzean announced last week that he’s running to hold on to the seat. It should be kept in perspective.

Madison School Board reviews Proposed $373,000,000 Budget

The Madison Metropolitan School District Board reviewed the almost $373 million budget proposed by Superintendent Dan Nerad Monday night.
If the superintendent’s budget is approved, Madison property taxes could increase more than four percent, about a $100 tax increase on the average home in Madison.
The estimate does not include a proposed $12.4 million put aside to help the achievement gap in Madison schools.
The budget already poses an estimated $12.4 million deficit.

Related: Singapore vs. Madison/US Schools: Do We (Americans) Put Money into Our Children?

2012-13 California budget is a looming fiasco

U-T San Diego:

It’s become a pattern in California. An exhausted Legislature finally completes work on a tardy state budget. Soon afterward, it becomes obvious the budget is a farce stitched together with funny numbers and delusional assumptions.
With the 2012-13 budget, however, the process has accelerated. Even before Gov. Jerry Brown issues his May revised budget, decisions made by lawmakers, the courts and federal bureaucrats – combined with bad news on the revenue front – make it close to impossible to expect a spending plan with a shred of credibility or accounting substance.
The most basic problem is that the governor plans to introduce a budget premised on the idea that voters in November will approve a midyear increase in income taxes on the wealthy and sales taxes, with “trigger cuts” hammering public schools if they are rejected. This screwball brinkmanship bodes terribly for schools if it fails and sets a horrible precedent if it succeeds. Only in Sacramento could a budget strategy that evokes a legendary National Lampoon cover – “buy this magazine or we’ll kill the dog” – be seen as inspired.

Madison School District’s Debt

Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad 188K PDF:

The important component of this information, is to realize that MMSD prior to re- financing for lower interest rates, had debt service for the unfunded pension liability all along with an interest rate of 7.8%. It wasn’t transparent as it was simply paid on an annual basis, but to recognize lower interest rates, we chose to issue bonds that will save the district over $13 million in interest costs.
There are a few ways to look at what the appropriate level of debt is for a school district, and we have attempted to put information together relative to each differing way. The ways are:

Milledgeville Police Handcuff 6-Year-Old Girl for Misbehaving at School

Judy Le & Pansy Hall:

Milledgeville’s acting police chief, Dray Swicord, said Tuesday that he stands by an officer’s decision to handcuff an elementary school student for safety Friday after she allegedly threw a tantrum.
Swicord said the arresting officer is not under investigation for his actions.
According to the police report, kindergartner Salecia Johnson is accused of tearing items off the walls and throwing furniture.

In defense of public-records requesters

Laurie Rogers:

“There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.” ~Mark Twain
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” ~Malcolm X
It’s true; the media have the power to destroy. But their real job is to uphold truth, accountability and transparency; to inform the people; and to investigate and shine a light on wrongdoing.
Today’s media are struggling to remain afloat. Challenged by blogs and Web sites, and accused of shallowness and bias, traditional media are scrambling to remain relevant and to retain readership. Many have cut space and reporting staff and now depend heavily on wire reports. Basic principles of journalism have been ground into dust under the need to satisfy advertisers and allies. It’s become convenient for media to use “stories” already written by government agencies (including school districts) and corporations. In return, the agencies ask for favorable coverage, which they get.

Why Don’t We Make Learning A Computer Language A Requirement In High School?

Brad Feld:

I spent this weekend at LindzonPalooza. Once a year Howard Lindzon gets together a bunch of his friends at the intersection of financing, tech, media, and entrepreneurship, we descend on The Del in Coronada, and have an awesome 48 hours together. Many interesting and stimulating things were said, but one I remember was from Peter Pham over dinner. It was a simple line, “why do we teach languages in junior high and high school but not a computer language?” that had profound meaning to me.
When I was in high school, I had to take two years of a foreign language. I had three choices – French, Spanish, or German. I didn’t really want to learn any of them so I opted for French. I hated it – rote memorization and endless tedious classes where I didn’t really understand anything. Fortunately I liked my teacher for the first two years and I did fine academically (I got an A) and ended up taking a third year of French.

ULGM Seeking Teachers to Teach ACT Prep Classes – $50/hr

Laura DeRoche-Perez:

The Urban League of Greater Madison would like to inform you of our new ACT College Readiness Academies, which have recently been established through a generous grant we received earlier this year from Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation. As such, ULGM is currently seeking certified teachers to teach ACT prep classes. Please forward this paid opportunity to your staff. Classes run in the evenings or on Saturdays, making it possible for teachers who are currently working full-time to lend their expertise to our ACT Readiness Academies. Teachers should contact Stephen Perez at 608-729-1209 or sperez@ulgm.org if interested. Please forward this message to other educators.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter

Madison Teachers Inc 92K PDF Newsletter:

EMOCRACY IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT. That is one message that should be evident with all that has happened in the last year. A functioning democracy requires an informed and engaged citizenry. Such is as true with union democracy as it is in a political democracy. MTI is a union of 4,700 members in five bargaining units, each with Bylaws enabling democratic governance to ensure the union reflects the will of its members. Each MTI unit elects its leadership – every member has a vote, and is free to seek office. Also, Collective Bargaining Agreements are subject to member ratification, with every member having a vote. Similarly, the MTI Budget is enacted only after approval by the MTI Finance Committee and by approval by the MTI Joint Fiscal Group, which is comprised of representatives proportionate to the membership of each of the five bargaining units. But,just like the right of suffrage cannot ensure voter participation, neither can union Bylaws ensure member participation in the union. Only you can. YOU ARE THE UNION.
In the coming months, your union will be engaging in a number of initiatives to further engage individuals in discussion about your union, what we have achieved together, what is at risk, and where we can go from the terrible situation created by Governor Walker’s Act 10. Beginning with a Member Engagement Survey which is being sent to the personal e-mail addresses of all MTI members who have shared their email address with the Union from all five bargaining units. Members are encouraged to take ten minutes to complete the on-line survey and share their thoughts. If you have not already provided your personal e-mail address to MTI, please do so now by contacting kantzlerr@madisonteachers.org. Those for whom MTI does not have a personal email address may access the survey on MTI’s webpage www.madisonteachers.org or by calling MTI Headquarters (257-0491).

WEA Trust looks to adapt: Nonprofit insurer sees revenue decline almost $70 million

channel3000.com:

The nonprofit insurer that covered about two-thirds of Wisconsin school districts last year has seen its revenue decline almost $70 million after the state gave districts more freedom to switch insurers.
But WEA Trust said it’s still in good shape. Spokesman Steve Lyons said the insurer is expanding its customers from just school districts to municipalities and individual state employees.
The insurer’s business took a hit after Gov. Scott Walker eliminated certain collective bargaining rights for most public employees.
Walker’s office touts data showing that 52 school districts that switched carriers saved a total of $30 million.

The Liberal Arts & Careers

Scott Jaschik:

For Wake Forest University students in the “Options in the World of Work” course on Wednesday, the topic was location. Heidi Robinson, the instructor, walked students through exercises in which they discussed how to evaluate job opportunities in different localities. The students were divided into small groups, each with an iPad with material designed to compare a specific job here (in a relatively small, affordable city) and a larger city such as Boston or Los Angeles. Salaries are provided for the jobs, and students are given websites to find out how much they would spend on groceries in a week, the cost of an apartment, and so forth.
Before they do the analysis, Robinson leads the class in a discussion of a range of issues to consider when deciding where to pursue jobs — the possibility for advancement (or moving to different companies in the same city), the quality of these jobs, opportunities for a social life. Then she listens in on the small groups, firing questions at the students. When someone boasts of finding an affordable apartment in Los Angeles, Robinson asks if she can see photos of the apartment and figure out whether the neighborhood is one she would want to live in. When a student jokes about being able to afford living in Boston if she could just skip buying any groceries, Robinson gently reminds the group that groceries aren’t optional for post-college life. As she moves around the room engaging with students, it’s clear she knows each student’s major, internship history and home town.

The Business Side of World University Rankings

Kris Olds:

Over the last two years I’ve made the point numerous times here that world university rankings have become normalized on an annual cycle, and function as data acquisition mechanisms to drill deep into universities but in a way that encourages (seduces?) universities to provide the data for free. In reality, the data is provided at a cost given that the staff time allocated to produce the data needs to be paid for, and allocating staff time this way generates opportunity costs.
See below for the latest indicator of the business side of world university rankings. Interestingly today’s press release from Thomson Reuters (reprinted in full) makes no mention of world university rankings, nor Times Higher Education, the media outlet owned by TSL Education, which was itself acquired by Charterhouse Capital Partners in 2007. Recall that it was that Times Higher Education began working with Thomson Reuters in 2010.

Professor starts e-text company to compete with textbook publishers

Kathleen Gallagher:

M. Ryan Haley, a University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh economics professor, has started a company that he hopes will disrupt the academic textbook publishing industry and help college students save a lot of money.
CoreTxt Plus Inc. is distributing a free digital statistics textbook to UW-Oshkosh students that’s prepared the same way as at big publishing houses.
“We bypassed the middleman, which is the people making all the money off our students,” Haley said. “They’re putting new editions out every few years now and it’s absurd. Statistics hasn’t changed in 150 years.”
Haley estimates the e-text has saved UW-Oshkosh students $100,000 to $150,000 in textbook costs during the four semesters the school has been using it.

It takes a village? No, when it comes to schooling, it takes parents

John Coons:

Editor’s note: As momentum builds across the United States for expanded school choice, it is important to understand the movement’s legal and philosophical foundations. For more than 40 years, John E. Coons, redefinED co-host and professor of law, emeritus, University of California at Berkeley, has argued that parents – and not government – have the primary legal and moral responsibility and authority to educate their children. Coons is a powerful thinker whose reflections are best consumed slowly and with respect. Enjoy this special post.
It takes a village to raise a child–or so they say, and perhaps it’s true. Humans are interdependent, and every particular village -whatever that word means – has influence, for good or ill.
But the phrase is murky and subject to many interpretations. It can be read as the quirky proposition that the village is what logicians call a “sufficient condition” of some outcome; alone, by itself, it determines the bundle of effects that will be the person called Andrew or Susie.

What’s In a Title?

sp-eye:

Is this Title Envy Part 2?
At the Human Resources Committee this week, Part II of the Employee Handbook (i.e., replacement for bargaining union contract) will be discussed. Part I was general information for all district employees. Part II is for the teachers….er…better make that “Professional Educators”.
Beneath the surface the (former) teacher’s union (SPEA) has long desired to be treated as “professionals”…and so now, to underscore that, they now will be known as “Professional Educators”.
Will this mean that there will now be “Parent-Professional Educator conferences”?
Now you leave an apple on the desk for “Professional Educator”?
Does Van Halen need to re-release the single from their “1984” CD as “Hot For Professional Educator”?

Value-Added Versus Observations, Part One: Reliability

Matthew Di Carlo:

Although most new teacher evaluations are still in various phases of pre-implementation, it’s safe to say that classroom observations and/or value-added (VA) scores will be the most heavily-weighted components toward teachers’ final scores, depending on whether teachers are in tested grades and subjects. One gets the general sense that many – perhaps most – teachers strongly prefer the former (observations, especially peer observations) over the latter (VA).
One of the most common arguments against VA is that the scores are error-prone and unstable over time – i.e., that they are unreliable. And it’s true that the scores fluctuate between years (also see here), with much of this instability due to measurement error, rather than “real” performance changes. On a related note, different model specifications and different tests can yield very different results for the same teacher/class.
These findings are very important, and often too casually dismissed by VA supporters, but the issue of reliability is, to varying degrees, endemic to all performance measurement. Actually, many of the standard reliability-based criticisms of value-added could also be leveled against observations. Since we cannot observe “true” teacher performance, it’s tough to say which is “better” or “worse,” despite the certainty with which both “sides” often present their respective cases. And, the fact that both entail some level of measurement error doesn’t by itself speak to whether they should be part of evaluations.*

Save Rhode Island: Do the Math

Mike Magee:

This is a story of hope, but you will have to read all the way to the end to know why.
This past October, all of Rhode Island’s 11th grade public school students sat down to take the NECAP test. As recently reported in the Providence Journal, one of the questions went like this:
Courtney walks three laps around a ¼-mile track. How many feet does she walk? (1 mile = 5,280 feet.)
A 440 feet. B 1,320 feet. C 3,960 feet. D 7,040 feet.
Being able to multiply and divide four-digit numbers would have helped but as long as students understood the problem and the concept of fractions, a rough estimate (what is ¾ of 5280?) would have given them the answer: C.
Sixty-nine percent of them chose the wrong answer.

Working Conditions Are Terrible for Teachers in [Nearby City]

Mike Antonucci:

But in researching the history of this battle over the surveys, I came across something much more illuminating and – let’s face it – entertaining.
When the governor first began making his claims of improved schools last fall, WEAC reacted in the traditional manner – by drawing up talking points. One memo, dated November 29, is still posted on the web site of the West Allis-West Milwaukee Education Association. It’s not unusual, until you get to the sample statement/press release that locals were supposed to use as a model. I repost it here in its entirety – warts and all:

Can Restorative Justice Stop the Schoolhouse-to-Jailhouse Pipeline?

Jeremy Adam Smith, via a kind reader’s email:

Instead of being kicked out for fighting, stealing, talking back, or other disruptive behavior, public school students in San Francisco are being asked to listen to each other, write letters of apology, work out solutions with the help of parents and educators, or engage in community service. All these practices fall under the umbrella of “restorative justice”–asking wrongdoers to make amends before resorting to punishment.
The program launched in 2009 when the San Francisco Board of Education passed a resolution for schools to find alternatives to suspension and expulsion. In the previous seven years, suspensions in San Francisco spiked by 152 percent, to a total of 4,341–mostly among African Americans, who despite being one-tenth of the district made up half of suspensions and more than half of expulsions.
This disparity fed larger social inequalities: Two decades of national studies have found that expelled or suspended students are vastly more likely to drop out of school or end up in jail than those who face other kinds of consequences for their actions.

The next Chicago teachers contract Create the flexibility to succeed

Chicago Tribune:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s school team is locked in a tense negotiation with the Chicago Teachers Union over a new teachers contract.
The threat of a teachers strike looms; CTU President Karen Lewis says that an informal poll of members at 150 schools shows “overwhelming” support for a strike. Lewis told reporters that she has “never seen anything like the hostile climate that exists right now.”
Strike talk in April. Before negotiations have even officially hit an impasse. Not a good sign.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: A Modest Proposal

Sheila Bair:

Are you concerned about growing income inequality in America? Are you resentful of all that wealth concentrated in the 1 percent? I’ve got the perfect solution, a modest proposal that involves just a small adjustment in the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy. Best of all, it will mean that none of us have to work for a living anymore.
For several years now, the Fed has been making money available to the financial sector at near-zero interest rates. Big banks and hedge funds, among others, have taken this cheap money and invested it in securities with high yields. This type of profit-making, called the “carry trade,” has been enormously profitable for them.
So why not let everyone participate?

and
Buffett Rule is a Political Gimmick That Won’t Work, and
Corruption Is Why You Can’t Do Your Taxes in Five Minutes

Arguing About Language

Gary Gutting:

Today I’m going to hopefully beg a question which will incentivize the reader to share their views. Yes, I’m writing about English grammar and usage.
Debates about linguistic norms typically set traditionalists against revisionists. The two sides are particularly entrenched because each is rooted in a fundamental truth: the traditionalists are right that the rules are the rules (for instance, pronouns do need to agree in number with their referents), and the revisionists are right that language does change over time (nouns can come to be used as verbs).

Making Education Brain Science

Jenny Anderson:

LAST month, two kindergarten classes at the Blue School were hard at work doing what many kindergartners do: drawing. One group pursued a variation on the self-portrait. “That’s me thinking about my brain,” one 5-year-old-girl said of her picture. Down the hall, children with oil pastels in hand were illustrating their emotions, mapping where they started and where they ended. For one girl, sadness ended at home with a yummy drink and her teddy bear.
Grappling so directly with thoughts and emotions may seem odd for such young brains, but it is part of the DNA of the Blue School, a downtown Manhattan private school that began six years ago as a play group. From the beginning, the founders wanted to incorporate scientific research about childhood development into the classroom. Having rapidly grown to more than 200 students in preschool through third grade, the school has become a kind of national laboratory for integrating cognitive neuroscience and cutting-edge educational theory into curriculum, professional development and school design.

WKCE & Madison Students

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Finally, the troubling differences in levels of student learning that give rise to our achievement gap present an enormous challenge for our teachers. We as a District have long been committed to inclusive and heterogeneous elementary school classrooms. Consequently, given the gap, our teachers frequently lead classrooms with a number of high-achieving students and a number of struggling students. Imagine how much dedication and ingenuity it must take for our classroom teachers to provide a learning environment where all their students can thrive. It would be helpful to hear from teachers about how they think they can be most effective in teaching all students in classes with such a wide span of developed capabilities, given our resource limitations.
Even test results as generally uninformative as the WKCE make clear the extent of our achievement gap in Madison. From the perspective of the WKCE and based on statewide averages, our white students on the whole seem to be doing just fine while our African-American students on the whole are struggling. This shouldn’t come as news to anyone, but it does underscore what’s at stake when over the next several weeks the School Board starts to decide what components of the superintendent’s achievement gap plan we’re actually willing to raise taxes to support.

Related: 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use

Singapore vs. Madison/US Schools: Do We (Americans) Put Money into Our Children?



I read with interest Nathan Comps’ article on the forthcoming 2012-2013 Madison School District budget. Board Vice President Marj Passman lamented:

“If Singapore can put a classroom of students on its money, and we can’t even put our money into children, what kind of country are we?” asks Passman, Madison school board vice president. “It’s going to be a horrible budget this year.”

Yet, according to the World Bank, Singapore spends 63% less per student than we do in America on primary education and 47% less on secondary education. The US spent $10,441/student in 2007-2008 while Madison spent $13,997.27/student during that budget cycle. Madison’s 2011-2012 budget spends $14,858.40/student.
The Economist on per student spending:

Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question: what do the successful lot have in common? Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich countries.
In Finland all new teachers must have a master’s degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%.

Rather than simply throwing more money (Madison taxpayers have long supported above average K-12 spending) at the current processes, perhaps it is time to rethink curriculum and just maybe, give Singapore Math a try in the Madison schools.
Related:


Via the Global Report Card. The average Madison student performs better than 23% of Singapore students in Math and 35% in reading.

Log-on Learning

Michael Jonas:

As online education continues to grow, says Bill Tucker, the managing director of Education Sector, a Washing­ton, DC, think tank, we need to strike a balance that encourages innovation while also holding schools and companies accountable for results. “I want the sector to have the space to grow,” says Tucker, who specializes in education technology and virtual school issues. “At the same time, it would be foolish or naïve just to think, ‘OK, let everybody do what they want and it will just naturally get better.'”
When it comes to full-time virtual schools, the state is now trying to figure out how to strike that balance. Mitchell Chester, the state’s education commissioner, says he thinks there is “a small percentage of the population for whom this mode of learning would be beneficial.” But he says he is “very uncomfortable” with the provision of the 2010 reform law that allows districts to decide on their own to open virtual schools that enroll students statewide. The Green­field-based school is “a statewide school with no role for the state,” he says.

The Long-Term Effects of Student-Loan Debt

Frank Donoghue:

First, let’s break down the staggering $1-trillion in student debt that has become so familiar a number to all of us in the last year or so. First, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as quoted in Sheryl Nance-Nash’s recent article in Forbes, “Unlike other consumer credit products, student debt keeps growing at a steady clip. Students borrowed $117-billion in just federal loans last year. And students continue to borrow private student loans, which lack the income-based repayment and deferment options of federal student loans.” The average total loan debt for undergraduates is $26,000, with the debt for those choosing to attend law school, medical school, or business school obviously much greater.
This enormous amount of debt has consequences for all of us since–although few economists discuss it at length–it represents a tremendous drain on the economy and is slowing our recovery from the recession that began in 2008. College graduates and postgraduates, instead of buying cars, buying houses, getting married, having children–in other words, becoming full-fledged consumers are, as Nance-Nash puts it, “running back home.” That hurts us all.

Who is advising MPS teachers?

Howard Karsh:

The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association recently asked its members to voluntarily contribute a week’s salary to help improve class sizes in Milwaukee Public Schools. The teachers overwhelmingly voted no.
They had a right to do that. They are angry about the new laws enacted by Gov. Scott Walker that will affect them at the end of their current contract. They are angry about the attack on collective bargaining.
But it was teachers who said that, had they been asked to the table instead of attacked, they would have done the right thing. Could the recent vote make that claim now look like something less?
Many of the strongest proponents of the recall effort against Walker are MPS teachers. They were in Madison last spring during the protests and were well-represented at rallies and foremost in collecting recall signatures.
They have a right to be proud of their efforts. And it has been their voices that have been loud and clear about the harm they believe is being caused by the Walker administration to the very kids they teach – the kids who need more teachers and more resources.

Academic Decathlon team at Waukesha West: As dedicated as any athletes

Alan Borsuk:

It’s 8:45 on a weeknight and five students are gathered in a dimly lighted corridor of Waukesha West High School. They’re dedicated. They’re energized. They’re getting ready to compete for a national championship. They’re part of what may well be the most dominating high school team in Wisconsin.
They’re reading out loud parts of essays they have written about the impact of British colonialism in Africa and Asia between 1800 and 1900. They’re critiquing each other. You spent much time lately interpreting Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, “Heart of Darkness?” These kids have.
They’ve been doing activities like this almost every night after school since last fall. Last week, school was out for spring break, but they and their teammates were at school from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day.
This is the Waukesha West Academic Decathlon team. State champions 11 years in a row – can any sports team claim a run like that? They’re getting ready to go to Albuquerque, N.M., at the end of this month for another shot at the national championship. The school won once, in 2002, and has finished in the top five repeatedly.

Struggle Over Longer School Day Poised To Continue As Study Finds 10-Hour Teacher Workdays

Progress Illinois:

Chicago Public School teachers work almost double their required daily instruction hours, according to a new study released Monday, and the findings worry some teacher advocates as the district gets ready to extend the school day.
On average, public school teachers work 58 hours per week, according to the report, “Beyond the Classroom: An analysis of a Chicago Public School Teacher’s Actual Workday.”
The study– put together by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Labor Education Program — analyzed surveys from nearly 1,000 CPS teaches and found on a typical school day teachers work more than 10 hours.
Teachers can also rack up more than five additional hours during weekday evenings and on the weekend, according to the report.

WE DON’T WANT TO KNOW YOU

Three times a year, The Boston Globe (in the Athens of America) has a 14-16-page Special Supplement celebrating local “scholar-athletes” with pictures and brief write-ups. These are high school students who have taken part in soccer, tennis, golf, football, swimming, baseball, basketball, softball, wrestling, and what-have-you, and done well by various measures. Their coaches, too, get their pictures in the paper and sometimes a paragraph of praise. In addition to these supplements, hardly a day goes by during the school year when some high school athletes, team, coach or event doesn’t get “covered” by The Boston Globe. A local philanthropic group has recently raised several million dollars to promote sports in our public high schools.
As we all know, sports involve students, parents, boosters and the like, and they build teamwork, discipline, character, equality (of a sort), ambition, competition, and attendance. Parents do not need to be dragged to games the way they do to school meetings or Parents’ Night to talk to teachers. In many cases, they pay fees to allow their youngsters to participate in sports, and some even raise money as boosters for trips to games, tournaments, etc. Community involvement is fairly easy to get in sports, and there are very few edupundits who find work advising schools and communities on how to get parents and other community members involved when it comes to school sports. I know of no new initiatives or workshops to teach parents how to get involved in their children’s sports programs. Athletes also enjoy rallies, cheerleaders, and coverage in their high school newspaper as well.
Recently a young student basketball player in Massachusetts, 6’10” and very good at his sport, “reclassified” himself (changed from a Junior to a Senior?), so that he could choose among the many colleges whose coaches want him to come play at their institutions. His picture not only appeared several times in his local school newspaper, but also showed up several times with stories in The Boston Globe (the Sports Section is one of only four main sections in the paper each day). Apparently we want to know who our good high school athletes are, and what they are achieving, and what they look like, etc.
There is another group in our high schools, which might be called not “scholar-athletes,” but perhaps “scholar scholars,” as their achievements are in the academic work for which, some believe, we build our schools with our taxes in the first place. But we tell those “scholar scholars” that we really don’t want to know them. Their work does not appear in The Boston Globe. Their pictures and stories do not appear in the three-a-year Special Supplements or in the daily paper (there is no “academics” section in the paper of course), or even in their local high school newspaper.
Whenever the subject of students who do exemplary academic work in our schools comes up, our cliché response tends to be that “they can take care of themselves.” But if we don’t seem to feel that good high school athletes should have to get along in anonymity, why do we think that anonymity for our best high school students will serve them (and us) well enough, in our education system, and in the country, which is in a serious fight to stay up with other countries who take their best students and their academic achievement very seriously indeed.
Sometimes when I mention that it might serve us well if we gave some recognition to our best high school “scholar scholars” people say that I must be “against sports.” I am not. I am just critical of the huge imbalance between our attention to athletes and what we give to scholars at the high school level. 100 to zero doesn’t make the best balance we can achieve in recognizing them, in my view.
Of course, I am biased, because for 25 years I have been publishing exemplary history research papers by high school students (so far 1,022 papers from 46 states and 38 other countries) in a unique quarterly journal, and none of them ever gets mentioned for their history scholarship in The Boston Globe. Folks tell me this practice is not limited to the Athens of America, of course.
If we are worried about the performance of our student athletes, then the relentless coverage of their efforts might seem justified. I know we are worried about the academic achievements of our public high schools, yet when scholar scholars in the high schools get published in The Concord Review (and then go on to Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton (as about 35% of our authors do), or get to be Rhodes Scholars (as several have), they don’t get mentioned in The Boston Globe. Actually one author, Jessica Leight from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, did get her picture in the paper when she got her Rhodes Scholarship, after being named Junior Eight Phi Beta Kappa and graduating summa cum laude at Yale, but no mention was made of her Emerson Prize-winning paper on Anne Hutchinson, which was published in that unique international journal when she was still in a local public high school.
So let’s do continue to praise our local high school athletes and their coaches. But isn’t it time at long last now to think about the message such publicity sends to our diligent and successful scholar scholars and their coaches (I mean their teachers–who are also ignored) about what we value as a society? Why has it been so important all these years to send them, when they are doing not only what we ask them to do in school, but well above and beyond what we have expected, the message that, sorry, but “We Don’t Want to Know About You”?
The Concord Review

Monkey See, Monkey Do. Monkey Read?

Erin Loury, via a kind Richard Askey email:

Monkeys banging on typewriters might never reproduce the works of Shakespeare, but they may be closer to reading Hamlet than we thought. Scientists have trained baboons to distinguish English words from similar-looking nonsense words by recognizing common arrangements of letters. The findings indicate that visual word recognition, the most basic step of reading, can be learned without any knowledge of spoken language.
The study builds on the idea that when humans read, our brains first have to recognize individual letters, as well as their order. “We’re actually reading words much like we identify any kind of visual object, like we identify chairs and tables,” says study author Jonathan Grainger, a cognitive psychologist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, and Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France. Our brains construct words from an assembly of letters like they recognize tables as a surface connected to four legs, Grainger says.
Much of the current reading research has stressed that readers first need to have familiarity with spoken language, so they can connect sounds (or hand signs for the hearing-impaired) with the letters they see. Grainger and his colleagues wanted to test whether it’s possible to learn the letter patterns of words without any idea of what they mean or how they sound–that is, whether a monkey could do it.

Las Rights for Higher Ed Graduation Rates

Libby Nelson:

WASHINGTON — A long-held wish of many community colleges is on the verge of becoming reality: the Education Department has announced its plans to change how student success is measured in higher education, taking into account students who transfer, part-time students and students who are not attending college for the first time.
The department outlined its plans Wednesday to carry out the recommendations of the Committee on Measures of Student Success, a federal panel that called for changing how data on completion rates and other measures at community colleges is reported in the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System, or IPEDS.

Kids & Cars

Ed Wallace:

A question asked in numerous stories a week ago was put best in a headline at the Atlantic: “Why Don’t Young Americans Buy Cars?” A year or so ago, of course, the question was why young people don’t read a newspaper; and before that it was something else young people don’t do that we seem to expect them to. While it’s been a great while since I sat inside dealerships to see exactly what the demographical makeup of their buyers was in any given month, it was fairly obvious decades ago that the makeup of car buyers was changing dramatically.
The Atlantic story gave out a few important facts, including that only half of kids 19 or younger now hold a driver’s license, down from “nearly two-thirds in 1998.” Following that statistic the magazine covered CNW Marketing Research’s study, which showed that young adults “between the ages of 21 and 34 buy just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America.” And that was down by 11 percentage points from 1985.
The Automotive News, in a similar story, pointed out that in 1983 fully 94 percent of persons in their 20s held a driver’s license as compared to just 84 percent today.y

Ireland to take schools from Church control

Jamie Smyth:

Dublin plans to remove hundreds of schools from the control of the Roman Catholic Church to reflect Ireland’s increasingly diverse population, in the biggest shake-up of its education system in almost a century.
Ruairi Quinn, Ireland’s minister for education, said on Tuesday that there was a need to transfer the patronage of hundreds of Roman Catholic schools to provide more choice for people of other faiths and reflect changes that had taken place in Irish society.
The proposals come amid a bitter debate about the role of the Church in Irish society, prompted by revelations of clerical child sex abuse and subsequent cover-ups by the Church authorities. But they also follow a sharp rise in the number of foreign-born residents – which now account for 17 per cent of the Irish population, up from 6 per cent in 1991 – as well as a growing secularisation of society.

Rhode Island’s fiscal reforms offer hope

Gillian Tett:

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column lamenting the dismal state of America’s local public sector pensions system. For with some $3,000bn (or more) of unfunded liabilities, the maths looks truly alarming – particularly given the gridlock besetting so much of the American political machine.
But what my column did not address, for reasons of space, was what might fix these woes. So, in the spirit of spring (and Easter) cheer, it is worth noting one small example where a local American government is now attempting some fiscal rebirth – not least because it holds some intriguing lessons for investors, both in America and Europe.
The location in question is Rhode Island, the iconic north eastern US state. Three years ago, this epitomised everything wrong with American state finances: the public pension fund was underfunded by more than 50 per cent, and it looked as if the state would soon be using a third of all its annual tax revenue to meet claims. Big spending cuts loomed, and the unions and politicians were at loggerheads.

Uncompromising Photos Expose Juvenile Detention in America

Pete Brook:

On any given night in the U.S., there are approximately 60,500 youth confined in juvenile correctional facilities or other residential programs. Photographer Richard Ross has spent the past five years criss-crossing the country photographing the architecture, cells, classrooms and inhabitants of these detention sites.
The resulting photo-survey, Juvenile-In-Justice, documents 350 facilities in over 30 states. It’s more than a peek into unseen worlds — it is a call to action and care.
“I grew up in a world where you solve problems, you don’t destroy a population,” says Ross. “To me it is an affront when I see the way some of these kids are dealt with.”

Longevity Annual Increases: Even Without Contracts, Unions in State Get Raises

Danny Hakim:

Public employees are working without contracts in cities and counties across New York State, as labor negotiations stall because local governments say they cannot afford to raise wages.
But many union members are still taking home larger paychecks, thanks to a state law that allows workers to continue receiving longevity-based salary increases after their contracts expire.
The pattern is seen throughout the state. All labor contracts in Albany, New Rochelle and Yonkers have expired. So have seven of nine contracts in Syracuse, six of eight in Buffalo and most of the contracts in New York City.

Has constructivism increased special-education enrollment in public schools?

Nakonia (Niki) Hayes:

As a teacher and administrator for 28 years, I rebelled against the disastrous fad of constructivism that began in the 1980’s. While its drumbeaters declared it was a higher form of intellectualism, it didn’t seem all that “intelligent” to me. Frankly, I thought it would help create failures among all groups of students–regular, special, and gifted.
For those who don’t know what “constructivism” is, it is an educational theory that, in practice, looks like this in America’s classrooms:

Wake Forest examines value of college education

Tom Breen:

For Bill Zandi, the son of Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi, enrolling as a student at a prestigious private institution like Wake Forest University was less surprising than the student’s choice of major: philosophy.
“Originally I was going to follow in my dad’s footsteps, but I’ve always been more interested in philosophical ideals,” the younger Zandi said.
With the cost of higher education soaring, from Ivy League schools to community colleges, an increasingly loud chorus of voices is questioning whether the results justify the cost, and whether the traditional liberal arts education, with its ideal of shaping well-rounded lives, is outmoded in the contemporary world of high-tech work.

Proposed Madison school budget would hike taxes 4.1%; flat last year, 9% 2 years ago

Matthew DeFour:

Madison School District property taxes would increase 4.1 percent, or about $10 million, under superintendent Dan Nerad’s proposed 2012-13 budget.
The increase would be a change from last year’s $245 million school property levy, which was a slight decrease from the previous year.
The district estimates a $255 million levy would increase property taxes by $108 on an average Madison home. However, updated property assessments for the city won’t be available until the end of next week, city assessor Mark Hanson said.
The $379.3 million proposed budget would increase total spending by $6.3 million, or 1.7 percent, from this past year’s budget.
The district is increasing property taxes partly to keep up with state-imposed revenue limits and qualify for additional state aid, Nerad said.

Notes and links on the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 budgets.

The Core of Good Teaching

Steve Peha:

The recent draft release of a Common Core exemplar lesson on The Gettysburg Address caused quite a kerfuffle.
Proponents of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) approach view the lesson as a strong example of good teaching. It’s tightly scripted and focused on a particular view of “close reading” through instructions like the following:
“Refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset…. This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students as they seek to comprehend Lincoln’s address.”

L.A. schools chief pushes to change system’s culture

Teresa Watanabe and Howard Blume:

It’s 7:30 a.m. and the chief of the Los Angeles Unified School District briskly launches a powwow on the sensitive topic of how to place the strongest math teachers with the weakest students.
Supt. John Deasy leads two dozen administrators through statistics showing the schools where the district’s most effective algebra instructors teach. They brainstorm incentives to get principals and teachers to buy into the plan, aimed at raising abysmal scores on state math tests. Some may believe it a waste to put their best with the worst, one administrator cautions, but Deasy’s response is quick and characteristically blunt:
“You really shouldn’t teach in LAUSD if you believe that,” he says.

Online Privacy: Kids Know More Than You Think

Tina Barseghian:

Much of the anxiety around tweens and social media lies in the fear that they don’t care about or understand privacy settings. Parents worry that kids will either willingly or unintentionally expose themselves to dangerous anonymous predators, or that they don’t fully understand that the information they share about themselves can be used against them.
But tweens are much more savvy about their privacy settings than adults give them credit for, even when it comes to subtleties of “frenemies” dynamics, according to a small, qualitative study by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education that’s forthcoming in the journal Learning, Media, & Technology.
“Tweens value privacy, seek privacy from both strangers and known others online, and use a variety of strategies to protect their privacy online,” wrote researchers Katie Davis and Carrie James, who conducted in-depth interviews with 42 middle-school students for the study. “Tweens’ online privacy concerns are considerably broader than the ‘stranger danger’ messages they report hearing from teachers.”

Even in retirement, teachers bring warmth to their former Oakland school

Katy Murphy:

Bella Vista School teachers gathered on this last morning before spring break for a treat — breakfast prepared by three retired teachers. The delicious repast included home fries, grits, donuts, and cheesy scrambled eggs. Tired staff, looking forward to the coming break almost as much as their students, took time to gather, enjoy the food, and spend some time together before the last day.
Carolyn Matson, Louise Broome, and Karen Chin have always been generous when it comes to sharing their cooking gifts with the staff at Bella Vista; ask any member of the staff from the past four decades and she will remember a potluck (or several) featuring one of Mrs. Broome’s tasty cooked treats, and for the past several years the social committee has been helmed by the dedicated, enthusiastic Mrs. Matson and Ms. Chin.

Innovation Spotlight: Baldwin County Public Schools, Alabama

David DeSchryver:

Change is difficult in public education. There are many reasons for this but the way we finance our schools is one of the larger obstacles. Our school districts are not set up to fund innovation. They distribute funds based on staff positions, personnel benefits, and selected programs. These expenses repeat annually and, over time, become entrenched costs. Anything new or different is usually just layered onto the base. Simply adding new programs to existing services may be feasible in good economic times, but it is not an option when funding is scarce.

Political, legal fights over school vouchers’ fate

Kimberly Hefling:

Students like Delano Coffy are at the heart of brewing political fights and court battles over whether public dollars should go to school vouchers to help make private schools more affordable.
He was failing in his neighborhood public elementary school in Indianapolis until his mother enrolled him in a Roman Catholic school. Heather Coffy has scraped by for years to pay the tuition for Delano, now 16 and in a Catholic high school, and his two younger siblings, who attend the same Catholic elementary as their brother did. She’s getting help today from a voucher program, passed last year at the urging of GOP Gov. Mitch Daniels, that allows her to use state money for her children’s education.
“I can’t even tell you how easy I can breathe now knowing that for at least for this year my kids can stay at the school,” said the single mother, who filed a petition in court in support of the law. The state Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to the law, which provides vouchers worth on average more than $4,000 a year to low- and middle-income families. A family of four making about $60,000 a year qualifies.

Latin American schools: disconnected

Andres Oppenheimer:

Two new studies confirm what we have long suspected: Latin American companies cannot effectively compete in the world economy because their countries’ educational systems are totally disconnected from reality.
The Global Information Technology Report 2012, a 442-page report by the World Economic Forum and the INSEAD business school, places most Latin American countries far behind the world’s most technologically connected countries in its ranking of “network readiness.”
The index takes into account various measurements, including internet use and people’s ability to use it productively, from international organizations and a survey of more than 15,000 executives worldwide.
According to the report, Latin America “continues to suffer from an important lag” in adopting information and communications technologies to improve countries’ competitiveness in a hyper-connected world.

UK Free schools ‘harm education of children nearby’

Richard Garner:

The Government’s flagship free schools are seriously damaging the education of children in neighbouring schools, according to research published today.
Analysis of those free schools already approved by the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, reveals that many have been set up in areas where existing schools already have surplus places.
Their arrival has caused a loss of pupils for existing comprehensives – threatening their viability, says the report. In one school – an academy highly rated by Ofsted, the education standards watchdog – the headteacher estimated he will lose £1m a year as a result of a new free school being set up.
So far, 24 free schools have been opened by the Government – run by parents, teachers and faith groups. A further 70 will open in the next 12 months.

There’s No One Correct Way To Rate Schools

Matthew DiCarlo:

Education Week reports on the growth of websites that attempt to provide parents with help in choosing schools, including rating schools according to testing results. The most prominent of these sites is GreatSchools.org. Its test-based school ratings could not be more simplistic – they are essentially just percentile rankings of schools’ proficiency rates as compared to all other schools in their states (the site also provides warnings about the data, along with a bunch of non-testing information).
This is the kind of indicator that I have criticized when reviewing states’ school/district “grading systems.” And it is indeed a poor measure, albeit one that is widely available and easy to understand. But it’s worth quickly discussing the fact that such criticism is conditional on how the ratings are employed – there is a difference between the use of testing data to rate schools for parents versus for high-stakes accountability purposes.

Demystifying math could ease anxiety

Erin Allday:

Human beings have all kinds of irrational fears and anxieties about everyday objects and situations: spiders and snakes, heights and enclosed spaces, airplanes and needles. Math.
That last one, in fact, may be very common, just going by the number of adults who freely admit to hating math or being bad at it. That supposed dislike of math, scientists say, may be disguising a real phobia that probably begins at an early age.
Stanford researchers studying math anxiety in second- and third-grade students found that kids who were stressed about math had brain activity patterns similar to people with other phobias. When the children were faced with a simple addition problem, the parts of their brain that feel stress lit up – and the parts that are good at doing math deactivated.
Interestingly, the children with math anxiety weren’t actually bad at math – they got about the same number of answers right as their anxiety-free peers – but it took them more time to solve the problems.

A Perfect Example of a Bad Boss: A Middle School Principal

Bob Sutton:

Last year, I wrote a post about how Justin Snider, who teaches education at Columbia, asserted that “the best principals are PRESENT, constantly interacting with teachers, students, and parents.” I was especially interested in his comment about an intriguing if rough measure of how well a principal is doing the presence thing:

“[A] great back-of-the-envelope measure of whether a principal is generally doing a good job is how many students’ names he or she knows. In my experience, there’s a strong correlation between principals who know almost all students by name and those who are respected (and seen as effective) by students, parents and teachers.”

I thought of Jason’s assertions about the power of presence after getting this depressing email from a middle school teacher about her horrible principal. This boss defines lack of presence. I have reprinted most of the story below in this teacher’s words, as I found it most compelling. But note the key point: “She never comes out of her office, and never spends time in the building, seeing how it functions. I can literally go weeks without catching sight of her.” Scary, huh?

Advocates of the Plain Writing Act prod federal agencies to keep it simple

Lisa Rein:

Federal agencies must report their progress this week in complying with the Plain Writing Act, a new decree that government officials communicate more conversationally with the public.
Speaking plainly, they ain’t there yet.
Which leaves, in the eyes of some, a basic and critical flaw in how the country runs. “Government is all about telling people what to do,” said Annetta Cheek, a retired federal worker from Falls Church and longtime evangelist for plain writing. “If you don’t write clearly, they’re not going to do it.”
But advocates such as Cheek estimate that federal officials have translated just 10 percent of their forms, letters, directives and other documents into “clear Government communication that the public can understand and use,” as the law requires.
Official communications must now employ the active voice, avoid double negatives and use personal pronouns. “Addressees” must now become, simply, “you.” Clunky coinages like “incentivizing” (first known usage 1970) are a no-no. The Code of Federal Regulations no longer goes by the abbreviation CFR.

Hiring Nerad’s replacement requires willing candidates

Chris Rickert:

The ink on Madison School superintendent Dan Nerad’s resignation letter is barely dry and already the hand-wringing over finding his replacement has begun.
The applicant market is tight, the job is tough, other places offer more attractive terms, warn the school administrators professional association and executive search firms, who arguably have something of a vested interest in tight markets that drive up school administrators’ salaries and require executive search firms to navigate.
Not that the locals are doing much of a sell job. I’d be pretty freaked out about applying for a position with the kinds of very high, yet mostly nonspecific, expectations voiced by the education and community bigwigs quoted in this paper on Sunday. (What exactly is a “bridge builder that can create a bold vision,” as Michael Johnson, head of the county Boys & Girls Club, put it?)
Hiring Madison’s superintendent in these days of shrinking state aid, uncertain labor rules and an embarrassing racial achievement gap is not to be taken lightly.

Much more, here.

Student Loan Debt, With Little to Show for It

Alison Damast:

Kevin Wanek was one semester away from graduation at Western State College of Colorado in 2010 when he found himself in a bind. He no longer wanted to be an accountant, the field he had studied, but owed more than $50,000 in student loan payments to Wells Fargo (WFC)and other private lenders. Reluctant to take on further debt and close to reaching his borrowing limit, he decided to drop out. Says Wanek: “I started adding up what I owed, and it really hit me.”
Since he was a college dropout, his career options were limited, but he found an entry-level job at iTriage, a Denver-based mobile health-care application company. In the past two years, he has become a self-taught computer programmer and received a promotion. He now wants to go back to school and finish his degree online, this time with a focus on technology and computer science. But with nearly all his disposable income going toward his $600 monthly student loan payments, Wanek, 24, worries he’ll never be able to save enough money to complete his bachelor’s degree.

School intake ‘segregated by class’

The Press Association:

UK schools are segregated along class lines, leaving the poorest children struggling to achieve against poverty and deprivation, a teachers leader has warned.
Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) said stratified schools are “toxic” for deprived youngsters as it means they fail to learn important qualities such as aspiration and effort from their richer classmates.
It is the coalition Government’s “dirty little secret” that their education cuts and reforms are making the lives of the poorest children tougher, she suggested. And she raised concerns that schools are held up as the scapegoat for educational failure, accusing ministers and Ofsted of “seeking to wash their hands, like Pontius Pilate” of the problem.
In her speech to ATL’s annual conference in Manchester, Dr Bousted said: “We have, in the UK, schools whose intakes are stratified along class lines. We have schools for the elite; schools for the middle class and schools for the working class.

New Lures for ‘Quants’: Wharton Rebrands Itself

Melissa Korn:

Knowledge is power.
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School hopes that knowledge is also a powerful branding message as it rolls out a new marketing campaign later this month.
The Philadelphia business school’s new advertising tagline, “Knowledge for…” will be completed with a variety of words–“action,” “global impact” and “life.”
“There was a certain inconsistency” in the school’s previous branding efforts, says Thomas Robertson, Wharton’s dean and a marketing professor. The school’s 20 research centers “weren’t immediately identifiable as Wharton.”

HB 1776, The Pennsylvania Property Tax Independence Act

Pennsylvania Property Taxpayers Cyber Coalition:

n November 15, 2011, David Baldinger, Administrator of the Pennsylvania Taxpayers Cyber Coalition, gave a presentation on the school property tax problem and the Property Tax Independence Act solution to a group of concerned taxpayers. This meeting, sponsored by the Citizens For Constitutional Government, was held at the Quakertown Public Library in Bucks County, PA.
The event was attended by about fifty concerned taxpayers and was reported here in the Perkasie News-Herald.

Developing The International Encyclopedia of Geography

aag.org:

The Association of American Geographers (AAG) will undertake one of the most ambitious and potentially far-reaching publication projects in the recent history of the fields of geography and GIScience. This will be a 15-volume work, to be published both in hard copy and online, tentatively entitled The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology.
This four-year project will engage geographers, GIScientists, and geographic societies around the globe, and its editors and contributors will reflect the international and interdisciplinary nature of our activities. The sheer scale of this undertaking, in terms of its length, depth, and international scope, has not, to my knowledge, been attempted before.

What Apple’s Supply Chain Says about US Manufacturing & Middle-Skill Training

Josh Stevenson:

In January, The New York Times released a front-page report on the iEconomy, Apple’s vast and rapidly growing empire built on the production of tech devices almost exclusively overseas. The fascinating story created a wave of attention when it was published, and it’s back in the news after NPR’s “This American Life” retracted its story about working conditions at Foxconn, one of Apple’s key suppliers of iPhones and iPads.
The end of the “This American Life” episode includes a discussion (audio | transcript) between host Ira Glass and Charles Duhigg, the NYT reporter who wrote the iEconomy piece, on Apple’s supply chain and the reason the tech giant doesn’t produce its insanely popular devices in the U.S. Perhaps you thought the main reason was labor costs; Apple would have to pay American workers much more than the estimated $17 a day (or less) many Chinese workers at Foxconn make. That’s part of it, but “an enormously small part,” Duhigg told Glass.
Duhigg explained that, in terms of labor costs, producing the iPhone domestically would cost Apple an additional $10 (on the low end) to $65 (on the high end) more per phone. “Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward,” he wrote in the NYT piece.

Is education reform on life support and can it be resuscitated?

CT state Sen. Toni Boucher:

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy maintains that education reform is the “civil rights issue of our time.”
Yet, the Education Committee chairs recently passed a watered down version of the governor’s original bill. The committee bill was heavily influenced and, many feel, was crafted by special interests behind closed doors.
There are provisions that all sides agree on such as the ability to hire teachers from other states by removing barriers; increased early childhood education slots for priority districts; and increasing grants for charter schools and non-Sheff magnet schools, but much more is left to be negotiated.
Areas still outstanding include:

Selling You on Facebook

Julia Angwin & Jeremy Singer-Vine:

Many popular Facebook apps are obtaining sensitive information about users–and users’ friends–so don’t be surprised if details about your religious, political and even sexual preferences start popping up in unexpected places.
Not so long ago, there was a familiar product called software. It was sold in stores, in shrink-wrapped boxes. When you bought it, all that you gave away was your credit card number or a stack of bills.
Now there are “apps”–stylish, discrete chunks of software that live online or in your smartphone. To “buy” an app, all you have to do is click a button. Sometimes they cost a few dollars, but many apps are free, at least in monetary terms. You often pay in another way. Apps are gateways, and when you buy an app, there is a strong chance that you are supplying its developers with one of the most coveted commodities in today’s economy: personal data.

A Future Full of Badges

Kevin Carey:

In the grand University of California system, the Berkeley and UCLA campuses have long claimed an outsized share of the public imagination. It’s easy to forget that the state system has more than two great institutions of higher education. In the heart of the Central Valley, UC-Davis has grown in a hundred years from being the “university farm” to becoming one of the world’s most important research universities. Now it’s part of a process that may fundamentally redefine the credentials that validate higher learning.
Throughout the 20th century, scientists at UC-Davis, a land-grant institution, helped significantly increase crop yields while leading research on plant genetics, water conservation, and pest control. When the present century began, Davis leaders knew the times called for not just production but conservation and renewal. So they created a new, interdisciplinary major in sustainable agriculture and food systems. Many different departments were involved in crafting curricula that range across life sciences, economics, and humanities, along with experiential learning in the field.
The university also conducted a detailed survey of practitioners, scholars, and students to identify the knowledge, skills, and experiences that undergraduates most needed to learn. The survey produced answers like “systems thinking,” “strategic management,” and “interpersonal communication.” They sound like buzzwords–and they can be­–but if taken seriously are nothing of the kind. Simultaneously understanding the intricacies of hydrology and plant DNA, the economics of federal agricultural subsidization, and the politics of community development is a high order of systems thinking. The first students enrolled in the program this past fall.

Liberal Arts Colleges Economic Future

Kevin Kiley:

A year ago, the notion that Smith College — with a $1 billion endowment, high student demand, and frequently cited educational quality — was raising existential questions, particularly about its economic model, seemed a fairly radical notion.
But an idea that seemed striking in the past — that elite liberal arts colleges might have to make significant changes in the next few years if they are to remain relevant (or present) in the current educational market — is now the hottest topic in the sector.
A conference this week here at Lafayette College entitled “The Future of the Liberal Arts College in America and Its Leadership Role in Education Around the World,” drew more than 200 college administrators, including about 50 college presidents, out of an invite list of U.S. News and World Report’s list of top national liberal arts colleges. Judging by the turnout, the discussion, and the fact that several other conferences addressing these questions are scheduled over the next few months, it’s clear that the questions are on everybody’s mind.

To Fix America’s Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It

Philip Howard:

Successful schools don’t have a formula, other than that teachers and principals are free to follow their instincts.
America’s schools are being crushed under decades of legislative and union mandates. They can never succeed until we cast off the bureaucracy and unleash individual inspiration and willpower.
Schools are human institutions. Their effectiveness depends upon engaging the interest and focus of each student. A good teacher, studies show, can dramatically improve the learning of students. What do great teachers have in common? Nothing, according to studies — nothing, that is, except a commitment to teaching and a knack for keeping the students engaged (see especially The Moral Life of Schools). Good teachers don’t emerge spontaneously, and training and mentoring are indispensable. But ultimately, effective teaching seems to hinge on, more than any other factor, the personality of the teacher. Skilled teachers have a power to engage their students — with spontaneity, authority, and wit.

Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club.

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher

Nathan Myers:

I found this essay in the Fall ’91 issue of Whole Earth Review. It finally clarified for me why American school is such a spirit-crushing experience, and suggested what to do about it.
Before reading, please set your irony detector to the on position. If you find yourself inclined to dismiss the below as paranoid, you should know that the design behind the current American school system is very well-documented historically, in published writings of dizzying cynicism by such well-known figures as Horace Mann and Andrew Carnegie.

Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:
The first lesson I teach is: “Stay in the class where you belong.” I don’t know who decides that my kids belong there but that’s not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.

It’s tough raising an autistic child. But for expatriate families in Hong Kong, the options for special needs education are even more limited

Oliver Chou:

Global public health crisis and a fast-growing epidemic: these were the stark terms used by experts at an international summit held here last weekend to describe the cost of autism. The descriptions are backed up by grim figures. In South Korea, as many as one in 38 children are diagnosed as having autism spectrum disorders.
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reports prevalence at about one in 88 youngsters in the country. Hong Kong doesn’t have an official estimate, but groups say the number ranges from 70,000 to 200,000, depending on the screening criteria.

Iowa Senate passed education reform; hurdles ahead

Jason Clayworth:

The Iowa Senate passed its version of education reform Monday, a significant step in what is becoming a legislative melee to find agreement between the governor and both parties in the final weeks before lawmakers go home.
Unlike Republican versions, the Senate’s doesn’t address such issues as high school student testing that would mandate end-of-course exams be factored into graduation requirements.
There are also key differences on how teachers would be evaluated, how online schools would be limited in scope and if third graders who fail to accomplish key literacy goals would be able to advance.

Hong Kong Arts college lacks students

Linda Yeung:

A US-based arts college, which sparked controversy when it won the right to use a heritage site ahead of local groups, remains short of its recruitment target, 18 months after it opened.
The Hong Kong campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design, housed in the former North Kowloon Magistracy building in Sham Shui Po, cited an initial target of 300 students and an eventual enrolment of 1,500 in bidding for the site.

California Department of Education Funds Four-Year Research Evaluation of Mathematics Online Tutoring System

SRI International:

SRI International, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), and the University of Maine have received a $3.5 million award from the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education to evaluate the effectiveness of an online tutoring system for mathematics homework. The research team will study seventh-grade mathematics students and teachers in more than 50 schools throughout Maine using WPI’s ASSISTments system.
ASSISTments aims to transform homework by giving students instant feedback and tutoring adapted to their individual needs. It also provides teachers with customized reports each morning on their students’ nightly progress. Teachers in the study will receive training in how to use these reports to adapt their lesson plans to better suit students’ needs.

Phonics test: NUT says it will make failures of five-year-olds

Angela Harrison:

A teachers’ union is calling for a boycott of a new phonics reading test, saying it risks making failures of five-year-olds.
The government in England wants all children to be taught to read using phonics, where they learn the sounds of letters and groups of letters.
And it says the new “phonics check” for five and six-year-olds will help identify children who need extra help.
But the National Union of Teachers says it will not tell teachers anything new.
And the union fears the results could be used in league tables.

Using TED Conversations in the classroom

TED Blog:

All semester, TED Fellow Nina Tandon has been using TED Conversations as part of her class in bioelectricity at Cooper Union. Yesterday in the TED offices, she hosted a Live TED Conversation to answer questions about using TED Conversations in her class. Here are some highlights:
Sarah Meyer: So your students asked questions of the TED community as they studied? Did any of their conversations get particularly good responses? Did you or your students learn anything from any of the comments?
Nina Tandon: We’ve been just blown away from the response — our TEDinClass Conversations, for example, have been trending in the top five for 9 weeks straight, and each conversation is being viewed in up to 60 countries. And in total, the conversations are reaching about half a million Facebook users via shares. The students are also learning a ton content-wise through responding to comments. And then there’s the more-difficult-to-measure but equally important lessons in poise and maturity that comes from leading. It’s been amazing.
Emily McManus: What did you worry about most when starting this experiment, and how did you control for it?

College Merger Plan Stirs Cost Worries

Associated Press:

Critics, including a U.S. senator, are convinced that a main motivation behind a plan to merge Rutgers University’s Camden campus into Rowan University is an effort to improve the Glassboro school’s financial position.
But Rowan officials say they don’t yet know how the money would work out. And it’s the same with the bond-rating agency that’s often cited in the debate.
“So many things could change, it’s hard to play the what-if game,” said a vice president and senior credit officer at Moody’s Investors Service, Edie Behr, who has studied the merger plans. “Who’s going to be responsible for the payment of which bonds? Whether bonds will be refinanced are restructured, whether the state will help to offset the costs in some way.”
Gov. Chris Christie is pushing for an agreement for the merger to be in place by July 1 as part of a bigger reconfiguration of the state’s higher-education system.
In addition to combining the two southern New Jersey campuses into an institution that would be treated as the state’s second comprehensive public research university, the University of Medicine and Dentistry would be broken up, with some of its schools being taken over by Rutgers and the remainder being renamed the New Jersey Health Sciences University.

Gray Area: A transracial adoption teaches our writer that issues of race in the U.S. are anything but black and white.

Debra Monroe:

In the mid-1990s I set out to adopt a baby. I made phone calls to adoption agencies, and staff members asked warily if I’d consider a transracial adoption. I said yes. At one agency, the receptionist snapped: “Do you understand what transracial means?” Her tone startled me. “I think so,” I said, parsing syllables, “adoption across races.” Impatient, she said, “You’ll get a black baby!”
I lived in a small town without internet access and had done my research–on adoption laws, policy, advice–at a library twenty miles away. I’d found references to a 1972 position paper issued by the National Association of Black Social Workers that objected to transracial adoption as “cultural genocide,” an understandable position, given the state of race relations in 1972. The few agencies that had been doing black-white adoptions stopped because of the position paper. I didn’t find references to a time when agencies started doing transracial adoptions again because the Metzenbaum Act–passed in 1994 to address the fact that children of color were overrepresented in the child welfare system–had been amended, making “race-matching” as the sole determinant for the placement of a child unambiguously illegal.
Some staff members welcomed the change but weren’t sure if adoptive parents would. Other staff members objected to the change–take the receptionist who’d thought I must not know what transracial meant based on my answer. In the end, I used an agency whose staff members were able to discuss race without anger or recoil.

How They Really Get In

Scott Jaschik, via a kind reader’s email:

Most elite colleges and universities describe their admissions policies as “holistic,” suggesting that they look at the totality of an applicant — grades, test scores, essays, recommendations, activities and so forth.
But a new survey of admissions officials at the 75 most competitive colleges and universities (defined as those with the lowest admit rates) finds that there are distinct patterns, typically not known by applicants, that differentiate some holistic colleges from others. Most colleges focus entirely on academic qualifications first, and then consider other factors. But a minority of institutions focuses first on issues of “fit” between a college’s needs and an applicant’s needs.
This approach — most common among liberal arts colleges and some of the most competitive private universities — results in a focus on non-academic qualities of applicants, and tends to favor those who are members of minority groups underrepresented on campus and those who can afford to pay all costs of attending.

Further discussion, here.

History Books

I majored in English literature at Harvard, and had such wonderful professors as B.J. Whiting for Chaucer, Alfred Harbage for Shakespeare, Douglas Bush for Milton, Walter Jackson Bate for Samuel Johnson, and Herschel Baker for Tudor/Stuart Drama. In my one year at Cambridge after graduation, I had the benefit of lectures by Clive Staples Lewis, F.R. Leavis, Joan Bennett, and R.T.H. Redpath.
But in high school and in college I didn’t read any history books and I didn’t think twice about it. Many years later, when I was asked to teach United States History at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I panicked. I read Samuel Eliot Morison’s Oxford History of the American People to get started and I have been reading history books ever since (thirty years), but I never knew enough history to be as good a history teacher as my students deserved.
Since 1987, (I left teaching in 1988) I have been the editor of The Concord Review, the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students, and we have now published 1,022 history research papers by high school students from 46 states and 38 other countries. This has only increased my understanding that high school students should be not only encouraged to read complete history books (as I never was in school) but assigned them as well. It is now my view that unless students in our high schools get used to reading at least one complete history book each year, they will not be as well prepared for the books on college nonfiction reading lists as they should be.
In addition, as adherents to the ideas of E.D. Hirsch know well, understanding what one reads depends on the prior knowledge of the reader, and by reading history books our high schools students will learn more history and be more competent to read difficult nonfiction material, including more history books, in college.
When I discuss these thoughts, even with my good friends in the education world, I find a strange sort of automatic reversion to the default. When I want to talk about reading nonfiction books, suddenly the conversation is about novels. Any discussion of reading nonfiction in the high schools always, in my experience, defaults to talk of literature. It seems virtually impossible to anyone discussing reading to relax the clutches of the English Departments long enough even to consider that a history book might make good reading material for our students, too. Try it sometime and see what I mean.
I realize that most Social Studies and History Departments have simply given up on having students read a history book, even in those few cases where they may have tried in the past. They are almost universally content, it seems, to leave the assignment of books (and too much of the writing as well) entirely in the hands of their English Department colleagues.
One outcome of this, in my view, is that even when the Common Core people talk about the need for more nonfiction, it is more than they can manage to dare to suggest a list of complete history books for kids to read. So we find them suggesting little nonfiction excerpts and short speeches to assign, along with menus, brochures, and bus schedules for the middle schoolers. Embarrassing.
Nevertheless, if asked, what history books would I suggest? Everyone is afraid to mention possible history books if they are not about current events, or civics, or some underserved population, for fear of a backlash against the whole idea of history books.
But I will offer these: Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough for Freshmen, Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer for Sophomores, Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson for Juniors, and The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough for Seniors in high school.
Obviously there are thousands of other good history books, and students should be free to read any of these as they work on their Extended History Essays or the very new Capstone Essays the College Board is beginning to start thinking about. And of course I do realize that some history took place before 1620 and even in countries other than our own, but these books are good ones, and if students read them they will actually learn some history, but perhaps more important, they will learn that reading a real live nonfiction history book is not beyond their reach. I dearly wish I had learned that when I was in high school.
www.tcr.org

Santa Monica College to delay 2-tiered fee hike

Associated Press:

The Board of Trustees at Santa Monica College voted Friday to postpone a two-tiered fee increase that led to angry campus protests where students were pepper-sprayed.
The board decided at an emergency meeting to delay a plan to deal with budget cuts by offering high-demand core courses at about four times the regular price.
The 6-0 vote followed the recommendation of college President Chui Tsang, who circulated a memo before the meeting urging that the plan be put on hold at least for summer classes to allow more time for community input.
His request to the board also reflected the college funding woes that prompted the fee plan.

How to Abuse Standardized Tests

Daniel Willingham:

The insidious thing about tests is that they seem so straightforward. I write a bunch of questions. My students try to answer them. And so I find out who knows more and who knows less.
But if you have even a minimal knowledge of the field of psychometrics, you know that things are not so simple.
And if you lack that minimal knowledge, Howard Wainer would like a word with you.
Wainer is a psychometrician who spent many years at the Educational Testing Service and now works at the National Board of Medical Examiners. He describes himself as the kind of guy who shouts back at the television when he sees something to do with standardized testing that he regards as foolish. These one-way shouting matches occur with some regularity, and Wainer decided to record his thoughts more formally.

Madison Teachers, Inc 4.1.2012 Newsletter

PDF Solidarity Newsletter:

Among the excellent benefits available to MTI members is the additional worker’s compensation benefit provided by MTI’s various Collective Bargaining Agreements.
Wisconsin Statutes provide a worker’s compensation benefit for absence caused by a work-related injury or illness, but such commences on the 4th day of absence and has a maximum weekly financial benefit.
MTI’s Contracts provide one’s full wage, beginning on day one of an absence caused by a work-related injury or illness, with no financial maximum. Also, under MTI’s Contract provision, one’s earned sick leave is not consumed by such an absence.
Although MTI is working to preserve this benefit, it is at risk due to Governor Walker’s Act 10.

Stop Smiling. Your Parents Sold You Out.

Kevin Carey:

American college students now owe more than $1 trillion on their student loans, more than total borrowing on credit cards or auto loans. Given how much people in our society like to drive cars and put their shopping bills on plastic, this is an astonishing sum. Borrowing for higher education used to be rare. Now students routinely leave college with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and, in the current job market, shaky prospects for paying it back.
The average amount of student debt carried in the United States by graduating seniors? $25,000. But many owe more than twice that, and forget about it if you plan to get a professional degree.
This represents an inter-generational betrayal with far-reaching consequences for the shape of civic life. Basically, our parents have sold us out.

Wisconsin, four other states offered chance at $133 million for young learners

Erin Richards:

After narrowly missing the cutoff last year to receive a share of $500 million to support early childhood education, Wisconsin has been offered another opportunity to apply for federal funding for its youngest learners, U.S. Education Department officials announced Monday.
The pool of grant money — $133 million — is smaller this time, but Wisconsin’s chances of winning are better than before because it would be competing against only four other states.
Department officials said the second round of the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge will be open to Wisconsin, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico and Oregon — all states that barely missed the minimum score needed to receive funding in the first round.
Wisconsin’s score sheet from the first round shows it received 234 points out of a possible 300, but department officials said Monday that score had been revised to 224. They said the scores were revised for five states because of “inconsistencies” the department noticed in its review of applicant and reviewer feedback. The revised scores did not affect the overall outcome of the first round of the competition.

Okla. State Board of Education places 6 schools on low-performing list, tables action on 7th

Ken Miller:

The Oklahoma Board of Education approved six public schools Monday that must work with the state Department of Education to improve student performance.
The board chose the six as “priority schools,” though delayed action on a seventh school that department officials wanted on the list.
The department initially identified 75 schools as the lowest-performing in Oklahoma in terms of student achievement, then cut the list to seven. The criteria included being in the bottom 5 percent in reading and math scores, having graduation rates below 60 percent and receiving federal School Improvement Grants.
The board agreed with the department to list Keyes Elementary, Farris Public Schools, Okay High School, McLain High School in Tulsa, and Shidler Elementary School and Roosevelt Middle School in Oklahoma City.

Join conversation about schools

Wisconsin State Journal:

Sometimes public education can be like the weather: Everybody wants to talk about it, but nobody ever does anything about it.
The school-focused Planning for Greatness initiative in Madison aims for talking, yes; but especially, the project aims for doing things to improve and revitalize our public education system.
The effort launched back in November, followed by a series of large-group discussions involving educators and community leaders. Now, Planning for Greatness is entering a key “next phase” moment, as those initial discussions have produced a series of eight key topics.
One smaller “study group” session has already been held — on the topic of early childhood learning opportunities — and the other seven study group sessions designed to dig into the priority topics start Monday.
All the topics make sense, and are critical to any desire to rethink how we do public education, and how our community is involved in that process. Planning for Greatness is first on a deep fact-finding mission — which is what the upcoming study groups are all about — and ultimately will make recommendations and proposals for improving our schools and the school/community interaction.

College Waitlists Offer Little Hope

Rachel Louise Ensign & Melissa Korn:

So Harvard has put you–or someone you know–on its waitlist. Great news! Or maybe not.
A spot on a waitlist from an elite school doesn’t necessarily mean a candidate is closer to the finish line. Some may be waitlisted, for example, because though their grades weren’t quite good enough or they didn’t take enough advanced placement classes, they still piqued the interest of admissions officers. Others are offered spots purely out of courtesy, such as family members of alumni or children of donors who failed to make the academic cut.
Schools often pad their waitlists to protect their “yield,” or the proportion of accepted students who choose to attend. They can admit fewer students on the first pass, to maintain their aura of exclusivity, then move on to the waitlist if accepted students turn them down.

UW Dept of Educational Policy Studies Brownbag on MMSD Achievement Gap

Laura De-Roche Perez, via a kind email:

On Monday May 7, 2012 from 12-130 pm, the Department of Educational Policy Studies at UW-Madison will host a brownbag on the topic “What is the Madison Metropolitan School District achievement gap — and what can be done about it?” It will feature EPS faculty and affiliates Harry Brighouse, Adam Gamoran, Nancy Kendall, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Linn Posey.
The brownbag will take place in the Wisconsin Idea Room at the Education Building, 1000 Bascom Mall.

Much more on Adam Gamoran, including a video interview, here.

Why getting into Harvard is no longer an honor

Jay Matthews:

You may have seen that Harvard just set a record for low undergraduate admission rate. Only 5.9 percent of applicants for the class of 2016 were accepted. I was going to do one of my many rants on why we should wake up and see that being admitted to the Ivies and certain other schools is no more a sign of depth and brilliance than winning the Mega Millions lottery. I was going to point out that Harvard could admit a full class of its rejects that would be just as good as the students it accepted. But I already wrote a book about that, “Harvard Schmarvard.” And yesterday I got an e-mail that says it better than I ever did.
So I offer this as a theme for this week’s discussion. The writer declined to be identified other than as “Concerned Student.” I usually don’t print anonymous contributions, but I am making an exception in this case since he speaks well for his college age group. Tell us what you think.
By “Concerned Student”