Free Nokia Lumia Cell Phones for College Students

Ryan Lytle:

The sight of cell phones during a lecture has typically been a source of frustration for many college professors attempting to teach students who may have more interest in their mobile devices than the lesson plans. But one university is hoping a new effort to leverage smartphones will better engage students inside and outside of the classroom.
Seton Hall University in New Jersey has launched its new initiative during summer orientation by providing smartphones and pre-paid cell phone plans to its incoming freshman class. Equipped with an app for freshmen to connect with other incoming students and academic advisers, university officials hope this mobile device, a Nokia Lumia 900, will keep students engaged with the school, even when they’re not on campus.
“We need to be able to reach [students] and connect to them,” says Michael Taylor, an associate professor and the school’s academic director of the Center for Mobile Research and Innovation. “We want to [provide] a device that’s always on, always connected, and tends to always be with the student no matter where they are.”

Tyrany of Low Expectations: Will lowered test scores bring about broader change in Madison schools?

Chris Rickert via several kind readers:

Wisconsin has a “long way to go in all our racial/ethnic groups,” said Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at UW-Madison.
My hope is that, given Wisconsin’s overwhelmingly white population, proficiency problems among white students will spur more people to push for policies inside and outside of school that help children — all children — learn.
“I hate to look at it that way, but I think you’re absolutely right,” said Kaleem Caire, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison. “The low performance of white students in our state may just lead to the type and level of change that’s necessary in public education for black and other students of color to succeed as well.”
Indeed, Gamoran said Massachusetts’ implementation of an evaluation system similar to the one Wisconsin is adopting now has been correlated with gains in reading and math proficiency and a narrowing of the racial achievement gap in math. But he emphasized that student achievement is more than just the schools’ responsibility.
Madison has known for a while that its schools are not meeting the needs of too many students of color.

The issue of low expectations and reduced academic standards is not a new one. A few worthwhile, related links:

Obama turns to ‘master teachers’ to improve US math scores

Stacy Teicher Khadaroo:

To ratchet up math and science achievement in American schools, President Obama announced Wednesday a plan to create a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Master Teacher Corps.
The $1 billion plan is dependent on Congress approving the president’s budget plan. While the investment would be significant, improving science and math teaching has been a longstanding challenge, and the plan is not a silver bullet, education experts say.
Initially, 50 master teachers would mentor fellow teachers in 50 sites around the country. Over four years, the corps would expand to 10,000 teachers who earn up to $20,000 on top of their base annual salary in exchange for their expertise and leadership.

High School Dropout Potential Could Be Determined In Middle School

Frontline:

Johns Hopkins researcher Dr. Robert Balfanz has uncovered a series of indicators that he says can predict how likely a student is to drop out of high school: attendance, behavior and course performance, which he describes as the “ABCs.”
In high-poverty schools, if a sixth grade child attends less than 80 percent of the time, receives an unsatisfactory behavior grade in a core course, or fails math or English, there is a 75 percent chance that they will later drop out of high school — absent effective intervention.
Middle schools are generally designed to give younger kids a more intensive level of support. If intervention doesn’t occur until high school, Balfanz says it becomes much harder to “turn kids around and put them back on track.”

Report: U.S. spent (wasted?) $14.8 billion paying teachers for master’s degrees

Ron Matus:

School districts spent nearly $15 billion in the 2007-08 school year to pay teachers extra for earning master’s degrees, up 72 percent from four years prior, concludes a report released this week by a left-leaning think tank.
The Center for American Progress suggests money for the so-called “master’s bump” was not well spent because research shows there is little difference in effectiveness between teachers who have master’s degrees and those who don’t.
“This increase, which outstripped inflation many times over during the same time period, is music to the ears of those institutions of higher education that cater to teachers and their academic pursuits,” the report says. “But for the nation’s primary and secondary schools, this increase strikes a discordant note and underscores the need to uncouple teacher compensation from the earning of advanced degrees.”

How can you know if it’s *really* “research-based?”

Daniel Willingham:

My new book, When Can You Trust the Experts: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education is now available. (There’s a link for a free download of Chapter 1 on this page.) EDIT (7:17 pm 7/18) I just saw that it’s listed as “Recommended,” with a micro-review on the Scientific American website.
I wrote the book out of frustration with a particular problem: the word “research” has become meaningless in education. Every product is claimed to be research-based. But we all know that can’t be the case. How are teachers and administrators supposed to know which claims are valid?
It’s notable that this problem exists in many other fields. However good your training, research doesn’t stand still. So how does a pediatrician who has been in practice 10 years know that what she learned in medical school as the optimal treatment for, say, croup, is still the best treatment?

Pay hikes at WWU exactly the problem

Richard Davis:

In a single collective bargaining agreement, Western Washington University has undermined state efforts to control costs, spotlighted the tuition bubble, and spurred interest in a new delivery model. Western’s mischief has not gone unnoticed.
Pointing to high unemployment and “the worst economic times in 80 years,” Gov. Chris Gregoire wrote WWU president Bruce Shepard to express “grave concerns” about the school’s decision to increase faculty pay by more than 14 percent over the next three years. Department chairs and faculty receiving promotions get additional boosts.
The agreement is not subject to review by the state budget office or Legislature.

Are Millennials the Screwed Generation?

Joel Kotkin:

Today’s youth, both here and abroad, have been screwed by their parents’ fiscal profligacy and economic mismanagement. Neil Howe, a leading generational theorist, cites the “greed, shortsightedness, and blind partisanship” of the boomers, of whom he is one, for having “brought the global economy to its knees.”
How has this generation been screwed? Let’s count the ways, starting with the economy. No generation has suffered more from the Great Recession than the young. Median net worth of people under 35, according to the U.S. Census, fell 37 percent between 2005 and 2010; those over 65 took only a 13 percent hit.
The wealth gap today between younger and older Americans now stands as the widest on record. The median net worth of households headed by someone 65 or older is $170,494, 42 percent higher than in 1984, while the median net worth for younger-age households is $3,662, down 68 percent from a quarter century ago, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Arizona Education tax hike goes back on the ballot

Mary Jo Pitzl:

A measure to direct a 1-cent sales tax increase to education and construction programs is eligible for the November ballot, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled Wednesday morning.
Judge Robert Oberbillig made his ruling from the bench, taking less than an hour to hear arguments and make a decision.
He overturned Secretary of State Ken Bennett’s decision earlier this month to reject the petitions submitted by the Quality Education and Jobs campaign. Bennett decided the paper copy of the proposed ballot measure filed with his office did not match exactly the one circulated to voters.

Women overtake men in IQ tests for the first time in 100 years (but is it all down to multitasking?)

Emily Andrews:

It is a finding certain to be hotly disputed – at least among half the population. According to the latest research, women are brighter than men.
For the first time in IQ testing, psychologists have found that female scores have risen above those of men.
Smarter: Women now have a higher IQ than men according to the latest tests
Since IQ testing began a century ago, women have been as much as five points behind, leading psychologists to suggest embedded genetic differences.
But that gap has been narrowing in recent years and this year women have moved ahead, according to James Flynn, a world-renowned authority on IQ tests.

Wisconsin’s future “Smarter Balanced” Standardized Tests Of Tomorrow Behind Schedule, According To Insider Survey

Joy Resmovitz:

When asked about the problems associated with standardized testing — cheating, overtesting, blunt measures of student achievement — U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan often points to a duo of “next-generation assessments” funded by federal money.
But a new survey, which consulting group Whiteboard Advisors plans to publish this week, suggests that “education insiders” aren’t so sure that the one of the new tests will resolve all of the issues with standardized testing. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed reported that they believe the Smarter, Balanced Assessment Coalition, one of the two state-based consortia developing the tests, is on the wrong track.
“Smarter Balanced seems to have started with a misdiagnosis of the testing program to begin with, and then gone from there,” one respondent wrote.

Wisconsin selected “Smarter Balanced“.

The Revolution: Top Ten Disruptors of Education

Jack Hidary:

New online learning models are bursting from startups and top universities, bridging the educational divide.
We are in the midst of a revolution that will bring high-quality education to hundreds of millions of people who have never had access to this level of learning before.
These tools will reach those in developing cities and countries but also foment a revolution in the U.S. classroom as they change our perception of what learning can be.
Here are the leading new platfoms disupting the education world:
1. Udacity
Sebastian Thurn and his colleagues hit on wild success with their Stanford computer science courses when they opened them up to the online public.The team has left Stanford to start Udacity with venture backing and a new slate of courses. They have hit 150,000+ students in each course, signaling the demand for great online education. Thurn admits that there is no firm business model as yet, but will use the next year to experiment with different approaches.
CNN highlights Udacity’s new model.

School leaders refuse to say why district is adopting unproven products

Laurie Rogers:

“The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”
– Patrick Henry
Several top leaders of Spokane Public Schools appear to believe they don’t have to publicly justify their decision-making, or even respond to questions about it.
On June 11, I asked 11 Spokane school district leaders (six administrators and five board directors) for their rationale for adopting unproven Common Core curricula on top of the failed curricular materials the district already has. The administrators, from the Department of Teaching and Learning, collectively get more than half a million taxpayer dollars per year in base salary. Five didn’t respond, one didn’t answer the questions, and four of the board directors said the board president would answer for them.
Therefore, from 11 district leaders, I received one answer (and in my opinion, it isn’t a very good one).
My questions aren’t difficult. I didn’t ask how the universe began, why God allows evil to exist, or how to build a rocket. I didn’t ask how to climb mountains, survive a nuclear attack, or create world peace. Here’s the gist of what I asked:

UK Governors urged to scrutinise teachers’ performance

Judith Burns:

School governors in England are being urged to keep a close eye on individual teachers’ performance records.
In a response to a report by MPs the government said confidentiality should not override the need for governors to scrutinise teaching standards.
The response says governors have too often been denied access to performance data on grounds of confidentiality.
Graham Stuart, chairman of the Commons Education Select Committee said he welcomed the move.
“Otherwise you risk having the head as sole arbiter of performance within the school,” said Mr Stuart.

School uniforms put focus on learning, not looks

Jamie Jones:

It is now common wisdom that our schools are not educating children sufficiently to compete in a world economy. There are many causes and just as many proposed remedies to address this increasingly serious problem. More funding, charter schools, separating boys and girls, testing students and grading teachers according to skills acquired by their students are among the many ideas. Most of these ideas share the disadvantage of requiring money, which is not readily available in today’s economy or of instituting major changes in the educational system.
One small and inexpensive change could help student achievement: school uniforms.

The changing complexity of congressional speech

Lee Drutman:

ongress now speaks at almost a full grade level lower than it did just seven years ago, with the most conservative members of Congress speaking on average at the lowest grade level, according to a new Sunlight Foundation analysis of the Congressional Record using Capitol Words.
Of course, what some might interpret as a dumbing down of Congress, others will see as more effective communications. And lawmakers of both parties still speak above the heads of the average American, who reads at between an 8th and 9th grade level.
Today’s Congress speaks at about a 10.6 grade level, down from 11.5 in 2005. By comparison, the U.S. Constitution is written at a 17.8 grade level, the Federalist Papers at a 17.1 grade level, and the Declaration of Independence at a 15.1 grade level. The Gettysburg Address comes in at an 11.2 grade level and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is at a 9.4 grade level. Most major newspapers are written at between an 11th and 14th grade level. (You can find more comparisons here)

Nothing Can Replace a Good Teacher

Jay Matthews

Those who hope 21st-century technological wonders will save our schools should read a recent lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. It tells the story of Melvin Marshall, a seventh-grader at Barber Focus School in Highland Park.
During the just-completed school year, the lawsuit says, “Melvin was enrolled in a class called ‘Virtual Learning English Language Arts,’ in which he answered questions on the computer. While he worked on the computer, his teacher graded papers or did other work on her own computer. His teacher did not lecture or use the blackboard for instruction. Melvin did not receive direct instruction from his teacher and was frustrated that, although the computer program would indicate whether he answered a question correctly, it never explained why a particular answer was correct.”

How computers can hurt schools

Jay Matthews:

In January he began using in his homeroom an online course called Read 180, “America’s Top Reading Intervention Program” according to its owner, Scholastic. The lawsuit said “occasionally, his teacher assisted students around the room, but she generally sat at her desk and kept track of how students did on the computer exercises. In this program, Melvin did not receive any explicit instruction from an adult.”
When asked about his school, the lawsuit said, the child wrote: “My name is Melvin Marshall I go to Barber foucs school. I wish it was a batter [illegible] in the clean bathroom. Batter teachers and batter Lunch.” When his reading proficiency was evaluated in May, he tested four grades below his age level. Other students had similar experiences, the lawsuit said.
The Scholastic.com Web site says hundreds of studies verify the effectiveness of Read 180. But Scholastic spokeswoman Kyle Good said it, like other programs, won’t work “unless teachers are actively involved.” Highland Park school officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Wisconsin’s Achievement Stagnation: 1992 – 2011



Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson and Ludger Woessmann, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:

“Yet when compared to gains made by students in other countries, progress within the United States is middling, not stellar (see Figure 1). While 24 countries trail the U.S. rate of improvement, another 24 countries appear to be improving at a faster rate. Nor is U.S. progress sufficiently rapid to allow it to catch up with the leaders of the industrialized world.”
“Meanwhile, students in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Indiana were among those making the fewest average gains between 1992 and 2011. Once again, the larger political climate may have affected the progress on the ground. Unlike in the South, the reform movement has made little headway within midwestern states, at least until very recently. Many of the midwestern states had proud education histories symbolized by internationally acclaimed land-grant universities, which have become the pride of East Lansing, Michigan; Madison, Wisconsin; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Lafayette, Indiana. Satisfaction with past accomplishments may have dampened interest in the school reform agenda sweeping through southern, border, and some western states.”
Underlying study: “Achievement Growth: International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance

Related:

  • Student scores slip with new proficiency benchmarks by Erin Richards

    The results: Only 35.8% of Wisconsin’s WKCE test-takers in third through eighth and 10th grade in fall 2011 scored proficient or better in reading, and just 48.1% scored proficient or better in math.
    Compare that with March, when the state released 2011 WKCE results that showed 78% and 82% of students scored proficient or better in math and reading.
    Under the new benchmarks, just 41.9% of white students scored proficient or advanced in reading, and 55.2% met that mark in math on the latest state test. Previously, more than 87% of white students were considered proficient or better in reading, and 84.3% were considered to have scored proficient or better in math in 2011.
    As for the state’s black students – many of whom attend Milwaukee Public Schools – 13.4% are considered proficient or advanced in reading, down from 58.7% using the old grading scale.
    Rep. Steve Kestell, a Republican from Elkhart Lake who chairs the Assembly’s Education Committee, called the revised picture of student performance a “necessary and long-delayed wake-up call for Wisconsin.”
    “We’ve been trying to tell folks for some time that we’ve been looking at things through rose-colored glasses in Wisconsin,” he added. “It was a hard thing to communicate, and it was largely ignored. This is a new awakening.”
    State Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said: “We’ve known for years that our proficiency-cut scores are way below where they should be, and really, this shows that we have got to do a better job.”
    Under the past decade of No Child Left Behind, Wisconsin had been criticized for having a more lenient bar for proficiency than other states.

  • Less than half of state’s students measure proficient under new national standards by Matthew DeFour:

    Still, the new results should be a “smack in the face” for Wisconsin, said Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at UW-Madison.
    “It’s going to be a wake-up call,” Gamoran said. “It’s a more honest reckoning of where Wisconsin students stand relative to other students across the nation and relative to the goals we want for all of our students.”
    The old results were based on whether students were meeting Wisconsin’s definition of being at grade-level, whereas the new results reflect more rigorous standards of what it means to be prepared for college or a career used for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s report card.
    About 3,000 4th and 8th graders in Wisconsin take the NAEP every other year. In 2011, 32 percent of Wisconsin 4th graders scored proficient on NAEP’s reading test and 39 percent scored proficient on the math test.
    The data released Tuesday marks the first time DPI has converted results of the state test, which more than 430,000 students in grades 3-8 and 10 take in the fall, to the NAEP benchmarks.
    DPI won’t release recalculated results for individual schools and districts until the fall, when it also plans to release individual school report cards with ratings on a scale of 0 to 100.
    Kim Henderson, president of the Wisconsin Parent Teacher Association, said parents pay closer attention to state test scores than NAEP scores, so the results could “bring up a lot of good questioning.”

  • State sets new, tougher standards for student tests by the Associated Press:

    To get the waiver, Wisconsin had to develop its own accountability system in addition to teacher and principal evaluations, among other things.
    The scores will be included on new school report cards to be released in the fall. How well individual students in grades 3-8 and 10 do on reading and math tests they take in November will be released next spring.
    The new school report cards were developed in conjunction with Gov. Scott Walker, legislative leaders and others over the past year. They will include a numerical rating for individual schools from 0-100 based on student achievement, growth, graduation rates and closing of achievement gaps between different groups of students. The scores will generate an overall total that will place each school into one of five categories ranging from “Fails to Meet Expectations” to “Significantly Exceeds Expectations.”
    “This new system will empower parents, allowing them to make education related decisions based on reliable and uniform data,” Walker said in a statement.
    Sample report cards, without actual school data, are posted online to solicit feedback through Aug. 12.

  • Numerous notes and links on the oft-criticized WKCE, here.
  • wisconsin2.org



Down in Lower Education

In 1893, when the Committee of Ten published its recommendations for high school education, Upper Education and Lower Education academics were still talking to each other. Harvard president Charles William Eliot was the chairman, and the committee, Diane Ravitch reported in Left Back (Simon & Schuster, 2000), included four other college presidents, three high school principals, and a college professor. In 1918, when the NEA Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education issued its report, the chairman was, as Diane Ravitch wrote, “Clarence Kingsley, a former social worker, former teacher of mathematics at Brooklyn Manual Training High School, and–at the time of the report–supervisor of high schools in Massachusetts.” (Ravitch, pp. 42,123)
The main objectives for high school students in the NEA report were: “1. Health, 2. Command of fundamental processes, 3. Worthy home membership, 4. Vocation, 5. Citizenship, 6. Worthy use of leisure, and 7. Ethical character.” These “became famous among educators as ‘the Seven Cardinal Principles,’ the seven objectives based on the needs of life.” (Ravitch, p. 124)
With this new set of objectives in view, and with the transformation of the Normal Schools
into psychobabbling Graduate Schools of Education hostile to academic content, perhaps it is not surprising that college professors and other academics were increasingly estranged from the goings on in Lower Education. What professor of history or physics or Romance languages or nanotechnology could find common ground with those at the Lower Level who were dedicated to teaching secondary students the “worthy use of leisure”?
Nevertheless, as the number of high schools grew, along with the number of colleges, one Upper Education group formed a growing interest in what people were doing in sports at the Lower Level. This would be college coaches, who saw in the strong interest in athletics at the high school level a vital breeding ground for the athletes they would need to recruit for their college programs. As a consequence, college coaches began to keep track of the progress of especially promising high school athletes in a variety of sports, and in their Lower Education Level coaches. In fact, friendly relations were often formed between high school coaches and college coaches, so that news about really good athletes could get to the Upper Level in time to enable recruiting to begin (now at about the 10th grade).
Coaches in colleges recognized that success in their jobs depended in part on their ability to locate good candidates and persuade them to come to their place of work to be athletes after high school. Lower Education coaches understood that their work and their opinions were valued by those in the Upper Education reaches of their sports.
Meanwhile, among teachers of academic subjects in Lower Education, a very different situation could be found. Teachers who identified and prepared promising students of history or physics or literature realized that their counterparts in Upper Education did not want to know them or to hear about their students. Upper Education professors left recruitment of great candidates in their disciplines completely up to the Upper Education Admissions Committees.
By contrast, Upper Education coaches have decided not to depend on the Admissions people to find the best athletes for them. In fact, they typically bring the Admissions Committees lists of the athletes who they would like to have admitted to meet the needs of their teams. Upper Education professors rarely, if ever, come to the Admissions Committees with names of scholars from the high schools they wanted admitted to strengthen their academic departments.
Of course there are many differences in the reward systems for Upper Level coaches and for Upper Level professors. If the coaches do not get good athletes they will not be able to win games, matches, or other athletic competitions and before long their jobs will be in jeopardy. On the other hand, most Upper Education professors believe they lose nothing by simply ignoring their Lower Education colleagues, their students, and their curricula. Their jobs depend on their research and publications, for the most part, and they are content to let the Admissions Committees select their students for them. When the students arrive in their courses, they often complain that these recruits are ignorant and unable to do serious Upper Education academic work, but that never seems to increase their interest in meeting Lower Education teachers or finding out what academic work is being done at that Lower level.
One result of this situation is that Lower Education teachers and scholars are aware that Upper Education academics don’t much care about what they do, while Lower Education coaches and athletes (often the same people) are quite sure that Upper Education coaches are very interested in what they are doing, to the extent, in some cases of forming good relationships between them. It is understood that Upper Education coaches may even wish to visit promising high school athletes in their homes in an effort to recruit them for their programs. It is beyond imagination that an Upper Education professor would do anything like that.
In their battles against anti-intellectualism, Lower Education people can expect little or no interest or assistance from their Upper colleagues, and the professors in Upper Education will no doubt continue to bemoan the level of preparation of their students, especially in reading and writing, without wondering, it seems, if that is the result in part of anything they have failed to do.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
17 July 2012

College Education Boot Camp 2012: Madison & Milwaukee

Galin Education, via a kind reader’s email:

The College Application Boot Camp is a two-day intensive workshop to help rising seniors complete a bulk of the college application before school starts.
In these two days, students will:
Gain an understanding of the college admissions process and how admissions officers evaluate applications.
Receive advice on which teachers should write the recommendations and how to ask for their help.
Get feedback on which schools to apply to and the chances of admission.
Work one-on-one and in small groups to complete the Common Application datasheets.
Complete an activity chart that highlights high school awards, extracurricular activities, and leadership positions.
Brainstorm, write, and edit a personal statement essay that can be used with a variety of applications.
Learn interviewing techniques for admissions and alumni interviews.

Teacher Evaluation in Tennessee

Tennessee Department of Education:

In July 2011, Tennessee became one of the first states in the country to implement a comprehensive, student outcomes-based, statewide educator evaluation system. This implementation was a key tenet of Tennessee’s First to the Top Act, adopted by the General Assembly with bipartisan support during 2010’s extraordinary session under the backdrop of the federal Race to the Top competition. This landmark legislation established the parameters of a new teacher and principal evaluation system and committed to implementation during the 2011-12 school year. The act required 50 percent of the evaluation to be comprised of student achievement data–35 percent based on student growth as represented by the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) or a comparable measure and the other 15 percent based on additional measures of student achievement adopted by the State Board of Education and chosen through mutual agreement by the educator and evaluator. The remaining 50 percent of the evaluation is determined through qualitative measures such as teacher observations, personal conferences and review of prior evaluations and work.
An important component of the First to the Top Act was the creation of the Teacher Evaluation Advisory Committee (TEAC), a group of teachers, principals, superintendents, legislators, business leaders, and other community members, which met 21 times over the course of the following year to review and discuss various issues related to policy and implementation. The committee reviewed field tests of four different observation rubrics, which were conducted in the 2010-11 school year in approximately 125 schools across the state. The TEAC supported use of the TEAM (Tennessee Educator Acceleration Model) rubric as the state model and also voted on a number of key components of implementation, including the number and structure of observations for the year. By law, those recommendations were made to the State Board of Education, which was charged with adopting the final guidelines and criteria for the annual evaluation of all teachers and principals. The board ultimately unanimously adopted the TEAC endorsed TEAM model and, in addition, approved three alternative models – 1) Project Coach in Hamilton County; 2) TEM (Teacher Effectiveness Measure) in Memphis City; and 3) TIGER (Teacher Instructional Growth for Effectiveness and Results) in 12, mostly municipal, school systems statewide. The board also approved a menu of achievement measures that could be used as part of the 15 percent measure.
In the summer of 2011, the Tennessee Department of Education contracted with the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET) to provide a four-day training for all evaluators across the state. NIET trained more than 5,000 evaluators intensively in the state model (districts using alternative instruments delivered their own training). Evaluators were required to pass an inter-rater reliability exam, in which they viewed video recordings of teachers delivering lessons and rated them to ensure they understood the distinction between differing levels of performance.

Teacher residency program debuts in Twin Cities

Tom Weber:

The start of the upcoming school year will mark the debut of a new type of teacher preparation program for the Twin Cities.
The Twin Cities Teacher Collaborative STEM Urban Teacher Residency program is starting small, but organizers wonder if it might be the next big thing. The program, known as TC2 is planning to train 60 teachers over the next four years.
Eight teaching candidates are entering a full-year residency at five different middle and high schools in St. Paul and Minneapolis this fall. Residencies are common for future doctors and lawyers, but teaching residencies have only been around for 11 years in other states.
The residents met as a group last week and will spend the weeks before the start of class preparing for the year. They’ve already met their mentor teachers; the eight will be placed at Humboldt Senior High, Highland Park Senior High and Highland Park Junior High in St. Paul, as well as at South and Southwest High Schools in Minneapolis.

Can a charter school proposal get a fair shake in Fairfax County, VA?

Kristin Amundson:

Want to know how a school system can kill an innovative program without leaving any fingerprints? All you need to do is watch how Fairfax County Public Schools is handling the charter school application of the Fairfax Leadership Academy.
Teacher Eric Welch is leading an effort to create the county’s first charter school. He and other educators believe that this effort is critical to closing the achievement gap between white and minority students. Their goal is to create a school that will serve high-risk, low-income students — the kids who often fall through the cracks. The school is actually focusing on many of the programs that FCPS used to provide to at-risk populations, such as an extended school day and year, which can be critical for students who need more time to master challenging content. Those programs were among the casualties of recent Fairfax budget cuts.

Examining Principal Turnover

Ed Fuller:

“No one knows who I am,” exclaimed a senior in a high-poverty, predominantly minority and low-performing high school in the Austin area. She explained, “I have been at this school four years and had four principals and six algebra I teachers.”
Elsewhere in Texas, the first school to be closed by the state for low performance was Johnston High School, which was led by 13 principals in the 11 years preceding closure. The school also had a teacher turnover rate greater than 25 percent for almost all of the years and greater than 30 percent for 7 of the years.
While the above examples are rather extreme cases, they do underscore two interconnected issues – teacher and principal turnover – that often plague low-performing schools and, in the case of principal turnover, afflict a wide range of schools regardless of performance or school demographics.

The world at work: Jobs, pay, and skills for 3.5 billion people

Richard Dobbs, Anu Madgavkar, Dominic Barton, Eric Labaye, James Manyika, Charles Roxburgh, Susan Lund, Siddarth Madhav:

Over the past three decades, as developing economies industrialized and began to compete in world markets, a global labor market started taking shape. As more than one billion people entered the labor force, a massive movement from “farm to factory” sharply accelerated growth of productivity and per capita GDP in China and other traditionally rural nations, helping to bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. To raise productivity, developed economies invested in labor-saving technologies and tapped global sources of low-cost labor.
Today, the strains on this market are becoming increasingly apparent. In advanced economies, demand for high-skill labor is now growing faster than supply, while demand for low-skill labor remains weak. Labor’s overall share of income, or the share of national income that goes to worker compensation, has fallen, and income inequality is growing as lower-skill workers–including 75 million young people–experience unemployment, underemployment, and stagnating wages.

Private schools leader vs. me

Jay Matthews:

After I accused American private schools of hiding vital data, a practice that makes it hard for me to compare them to other schools, National Association of Independent Schools President Patrick F. Bassett agreed to a chat. His organization represents many well-known private schools:
Mathews: You have said you don’t like my way of comparing schools. Okay, what way of comparing schools would you prefer?
Bassett: When parents ask us, “What’s the best school,” we say, “The school that best meets your child’s needs.” The first step in finding that perfect school is to evaluate what your child needs. An environment that’s more nurturing? Or more competitive? Does she thrive in a larger community or one that is smaller? Is he looking for specific classes or programs? Does the philosophy of the school mesh with your family’s values? Look at the websites and other materials from the schools. Would the approach and program at a school work for your child?

Esther Cepeda: Our non-elite students remain unchallenged

Esther Cepeda:

If you live in an affluent community with a high-performing school district and are familiar with the pressure-cooker environment of endless test-prepping, extracurricular overload and early resume-building that students endure in their quest to get into elite colleges, you probably laughed at a recent report saying many students believe their schools are not sufficiently challenging them.
If, like me, you live in a community struggling with high rates of poverty, or one where state budget cuts have reduced the schools to shadows of their former selves, you know full well that the report — “Do Schools Challenge Our Students?” — produced by the Center for American Progress has a painful ring of truth to it.
The findings represent the everyday experiences of students stuck in less-than-high-performing schools, where enrichment opportunities such as field trips or in-school presentations are few, where gym, music and art classes are often a distant memory, and where boredom is a constant complaint.

How America Pays for College 2012

Sallie Mae and Ipsos:

Sallie Mae’s “How America Pays for College 2012” (PDF, 1.3MB) study, conducted by Ipsos, finds that:
83% of college students and parents strongly agreed that higher education is an investment in the future, college is needed now more than ever (70%), and the path to earning more money (69%).
Drawing from savings, income and loans, students paid 30% of the total bill, up from 24% four years ago, while parents covered 37% of the bill, down from 45% four years ago.
The percentage of families who eliminated college choices because of cost rose to the highest level (69%) in the five years since the study began. Virtually all families exercised cost-savings measures, including living at home (51%), adding a roommate (55%), and reducing spending by parents (50%) and students (66%).
In 2012, families continued the shift toward lower-cost community college, with 29 percent enrolled, compared to 23 percent two years ago. In fact, overall, families paid 5 percent less for college compared to one year ago.
35% percent of students borrowed education loans to pay for college: 25% borrowing federal loans only, 9% using a mix of federal and private loans, and 1% tapping private loans only.

More Outgoing Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad Reflections

Matthew DeFour

Q: Given a chance to oversee the Madison Prep debate again, would you have done anything differently?
A: My approach was I was attempting to make that work as an instrumentality of the district, and costs were prohibiting that. In terms of it being a non-instrumentality proposal, there were two big problems there. One was the fact that contractually it wasn’t permissible. The other area was the need for accountability to the public body and the governing board.
Q: So what would you have done differently?
A: I’ve looked into myself quite a bit on that and I don’t know what that is.
Q: So you think you were decisive enough?
A: Let other people judge that. But if I didn’t have an interest in looking at a program like Badger Rock Middle School and other innovative program designs, we wouldn’t have spent the time we did on Madison Prep. We put considerable effort into trying to find alternative ways to work that out and the reality of it is that it didn’t work out.

Much more on the Madison Superintendent position, here.
Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.

Why Math Teachers Feel Poorly Prepared

Anna Kuchment:

When William Schmidt, an expert on math education at Michigan State University, moved his family from East Lansing to Charlottesville, Virginia for a year’s research leave, his work took a personal turn. He noticed that the public school his daughters would be attending outside Charlottesville was academically behind the one they had attended in Michigan. Back home, his 2nd grade daughter would be learning multiplication tables up through the number 5, yet in Charlottesville, multiplication was not even part of his local school’s second grade curriculum.
His daughter’s experience, he explains in a new book excerpted below, is not unique. ” The [American] system of schooling represents a game of chance that few are even aware is being played,” he writes in “Inequality for All: The Challenge of Unequal Opportunity in American Schools,” co- written with Curtis C. McKnight. The inequalities pose a risk to every child, they write, regardless of socioeconomic background or race. They stem from differences in state education standards, in school funding, in curricula that districts choose to adopt and in the content that individual classroom teachers choose to teach. In this excerpt, Schmidt and McKnight focus on variations in how math teachers are trained and how that, in turn, affects student achievement.
The following is excerpted from Inequality for All: The Challenge of Unequal Opportunity in American Schools, by William H. Schmidt and Curtis C. McKnight. (Teachers College Press, 2012).

Related: Math Forum.

As Membership Plummets, NEA Retools Mission

Stephen Sawchuk:

Faced with arguably the biggest crisis of its 155-year history–the loss of at least 100,000 full-time members–the nation’s largest union plans to respond by organizing thousands of new members and transforming itself into an even more politically potent force.
Whether the National Education Association can accomplish those goals while simultaneously advocating improvements to the teaching profession–a role publicly supported by its leaders, but contested among rank and file–remains an open question.
Nothing less than the entire organization’s future appears to hinge on the answer.

SP-EYE Turns 5: A Look at Governence & Spending in the Sun Prairie Schools

spe-eye:

1. District Administrator Tim Culver’s salary is higher than that of Governor Doyle. The combined salaries of the top 4 administrators in the district exceeds one-half MILLION dollars.
check it out:
http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/lbstat/newasr.html

2. While the rest of the world , including state employees, pays some or all of their health care costs, we, the taxpayers, covered 100% of school district employees’ health benefits up until this year. Now they still pay only 2-4% of health care costs. State employes typically pay 6-8% or more.
3. During the past school year (2006-07) taxpayers paid for over $7000 worth of pizza, subs and other food for administrators and staff, typically charged to “[Department] Supplies”
4. Instead of appointing an individual who narrowly missed election in both 2006 and 2007 to a school board vacancy, the School Board appointed an individual who has lived in Sun Prairie for less than 3 years, and whose career experience is in school administration. Think we got a vote for taxpayers here?
5. It’s budget time again! The annual public meeting is in October. Did you know that when the rest of us have a co-worker who loses a family member or celebrates some big event, we all chip in and buy flowers. The School District, however, has a policy that allows it to purchase flowers for its employees on these occasions on the taxpayers’ dime.

NM unions complain about teacher evaluation plan

Associated Press:

Three New Mexico teachers unions are complaining the state Public Education Department has failed to consult parents and teachers as it crafts a new teacher evaluation system.
The state chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, the Albuquerque Teachers Federation and the Albuquerque Education Assistants Association sent a letter Friday to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
The letter claims the state didn’t include any teachers nominated by the American Teachers Federation on its evaluation task force.
The letter also says parents and school board members weren’t included and that the task force violated the Open Meetings Act by meeting without public notice.

Madison School Board President James Howard says parent engagement is key to black students’ success

Pat Schneider:

T: The assumption in the discussion of parent engagement and academic achievement is that it is African-American parents who are not engaged.
JH: I think that’s the reality of it. The question is: why aren’t they engaged? The latest survey we had showed that roughly 40 percent of African-American high school students were not engaged. Why? What happens to the kids? We seem to lose them over time, and we lose the parents.
CT: That’s a pernicious thing for black youth, isn’t it? Why do you think it’s happening?
JH: I think one of the things is that we need to create a culture in our schools that these kids can feel they are more a part of. For example, we don’t present “American” history — there’s a lot of African-American history that never makes it to the books. So, if we as a country, as a community, would depict the true picture and make them part of it, I think kids would remain engaged longer.

Related: An interview the Henry Tyson, Superintendent of Milwaukee’s St. Marcus school.

Research is mixed over year-round versus traditional schools

Beth Harpaz:

By the time summer’s over, many families can’t wait for school to start. Working parents have struggled to find camps or babysitting, kids are bored and teachers fret over “summer slide” — the academic losses that research shows hits kids from poor families hardest.
Year-round schooling might seem like the antidote, and in some parts of the country, schools with just a few weeks off are not uncommon. In Raleigh, N.C., and other parts of Wake County, for instance, July 9 was the first day of school for 26,000 students on a year-round calendar.
But year-round schools, which once seemed like a panacea for everything from low test scores to overcrowding, have proven to be a mixed bag. And some places that once embraced them — including Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and parts of California — have returned to traditional calendars.

Concerns linger on new Pa. teacher evaluations

Kathy Matheson:

Pennsylvania teachers must demonstrate a combination of classroom skills and student achievement if they want to make the grade on planned new statewide evaluations, the first overhaul of the assessments in more than 40 years.
Legislation enacted last month spells out specific criteria on which educators will be measured, and a possible new protocol for classroom observation has been getting trial runs in dozens of districts. But concerns linger about the still-unwritten final regulations.
What about those who teach grades or subjects not covered by standardized tests? What about those who work in high-poverty schools, where students can face challenges such as language barriers, lack of resources and little parent involvement?

Education’s pendelum: Thinkers or test takers?

The Los Angeles Times:

The people of a large and mighty nation wonder why their schools can’t do more to imitate those of another large, powerful nation across the Pacific Ocean. But this time it’s not the United States seeking to emulate the schools of an Asian country — it’s China seeking to emulate ours, at least to some extent.
China is pushing for more emphasis on building creative skills and less on high-stress, high-stakes testing, according to a recent article in the New York Times. Under the existing system, a single entrance exam determines whether students attend college, and which one. Talk about teaching to the test: The last year of high school is often given over to cramming for the exam. In at least one classroom, students were placed on intravenous drips of amino acids in preparation for the test, in the belief that it would help their memories and provide an energy boost; in another sad case, a girl was not told about her father’s death for two months to avoid disrupting her studies.

24.46% of Michigan Teacher Payroll Dollars Fund Retirement (2011), growing to 35% in Subsequent Years

Lori Higgins, via a kind Brian S. Hall email

School districts crushed by surging retirement costs could save as much as $250 million this school year under a contentious bill that would make retirement benefits more expensive for public school employees but give districts millions they could use to decrease class size, restore cut programs or squirrel away more money for emergencies.
On Wednesday, the state Senate is expected to take up the bill — backed by Gov. Rick Snyder — that would require current and retired school employees to dig deeper into their pockets to keep their benefits. Some employees would get reduced benefits.
Supporters say the bill, already approved by the House by a 57-47 vote largely along party lines, would help address a $45-billion unfunded liability in the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System. Some Republicans believe it doesn’t go far enough — they want to end the pension system altogether for new employees, an extremely costly option the Snyder administration wants to study more.
The bill is hotly opposed by groups representing current and retired school employees.

Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman in a 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

How to Overcome Failure

Ken Bain:

Many people think of intelligence as static: you are born with lots of brains, very few, or somewhere in between, and that quantum of intelligence largely determines how well you do in school and in life.
The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has never liked this view. “I hardly ever use the word intelligence,” says Mr. Tyson, who directs the Hayden Planetarium in New York. “I think of people as either wanting to learn, ambivalent about learning or rejecting learning.” He speaks from experience: As a young man, he was booted from one doctoral program but managed to get into another and complete his Ph.D.
Over the past 25 years, social scientists have produced some key insights into how successful people overcome their unsuccessful moments–and they have found that attitudes toward learning play a large role from a young age.

Some things I’ve learnt about writing

John Graham-Cumming:

The big theme of my working life (so far) has been programming, and yesterday I published a short list of things I’ve learnt about programming. The second (smaller) theme has been writing. Since 1996, when my first piece of writing was published in The Guardian, I’ve written quite a number of articles for newspapers and magazines (including a recent 3,000 word special on Alan Turing for New Scientist) and a book.
Almost everything I’ve written is non-fiction (except my parody startup CEO Brad Bradstone), so my thoughts are about that sort of writing. I have nothing useful to say about writing fiction.
Here are a few things I’ve learnt about writing. I hope you’ll find them useful, as I think writing is a vital skill for almost everyone because good writing is simply good communicating and good communicating matters enormously in any job.

“I was free to ask the unanswered questions probing my mind, and determine my own answers and conclusions accordingly. That feeling of liberation and freedom in the writing process proved crucial to the success of my paper.”

Ayana Gray:

The Concord Review: A Process
“I really hope it’s worth it, Ayana.” I can still hear my dad, exasperated, as I sat hunched over the family computer typing frantically at two a.m. one Sunday morning. I’d been writing for hours, determined to finish this paper, and now even he’d grown weary watching me work. I couldn’t explain to him that, for me, writing this paper to be submitted for possible entry into The Concord Review was worth it for more than one reason. I couldn’t explain, to him nor anyone else, that while this paper was the chance for me to delve more thoroughly into a research project than I ever had before, it was also a chance for me to prove to myself that I could do it, that at seventeen years old, I could write a twenty-page paper.
Interest in the main topic of my research paper, female infanticide, began as a sophomore in the previous school year. It was my first opportunity in my academic career to write about anything I wanted. There were no boundaries, no specifics, and few requirements; I was free to ask the unanswered questions probing my mind, and determine my own answers and conclusions accordingly. That feeling of liberation and freedom in the writing process proved crucial to the success of my paper.
It is significantly easier to break a research paper writing project into stages. Alongside my peers, I believe the most common difficulty we all faced was finding the academic support to affirm and corroborate the claims and statements we made. Thus, I learned to break the process into two simpler stages: reading and then writing. Never mind trying to write and read alternately; know your topic absolutely. Read as much as possible–highlighting and marking frequently–and note important facts. When beginning to write, write your own opinions, and then use the facts you’ve accumulated to further affirm what you have to say. Not only is this process less tedious and consuming than sifting back and forth from your research to your paper, it allows room for your own “voice” as you write.
Finally, the power of drafting and continuous editing can never be overstated. By the end of writing, my entire paper had probably been edited six times, and each sub-section of the paper innumerably. It is crucial to edit your work not only grammatically, but conceptually throughout its entire production.
At the close of my junior year, one faithful Monday morning, I submitted my paper for possible submission to The Concord Review with more than a feeling of gratification. In writing and researching over the course of two months, not only had I phenomenally expanded my knowledge on a global issue I felt justified my concern, I’d expanded my skill as a writer. I learned, most essentially, that what you write about must be what most impassions you. There will, inevitably, be periods of doubt as you write, and certainly times when you’d like nothing more than to rid yourself of all things relevant to your topic and even start anew. But if you choose to research something you truly care about, hopefully you feel the same way I did, as if it’s your duty to write about it so that others may read and learn and desire to change something.

SEX-SELECTIVE ABORTION, FEMALE INFANTICIDE, AND THEIR LASTING EFFECTS IN CHINA AND INDIA

With a consistency comparable only to the world’s abil- ity to change daily, humanity undergoes evolution. Politically, economically, and particularly socially, changes throughout the contemporar y world are unavoidable and, at best, only understood in part. Yet amidst many changes that threaten the global com- munity’s future, demographic changes have caused increasing concern of late. As author Thomas Homer-Dixon notes in his The Upside of Down: “to understand the destiny of our global society… it is good to start with global demographics.”1 Populations, most notably in impoverished areas of the world, are expected to grow astronomically in subsequent decades, resulting in an unprec- edented youth bulge2 in many developing countries. China and India–presently two of the world’s most densely populated coun- tries–are especially affected by this rapid population increase. Yet despite impending threats of mass starvation and economic
downfall resulting from widespread poverty and overpopulation, sex-selective abortion and female infanticide are undoubtedly most threatening to populations in China and India.

Open Education for a Global Economy

David Bornstein:

If you or your kids have taken an online lesson at the Khan Academy (3,200 video lessons, 168 million views), been enlightened by a TED Talk (1,300 talks, 800 million views), watched a videotaped academic lecture (Academic Earth, Open Courseware Consortium, Open Culture), enrolled in a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course, now being offered by companies like Udacity and a growing list of universities, including M.I.T., Harvard and Stanford), or simply learned to play guitar, paint a landscape or make a soufflé via YouTube — then you know that the distribution channels of education have changed — and that the future of learning is free and open.
This is good news for everyone, but it is particularly good for the vast number of people around the world whose job prospects are constrained by their skill levels and who lack the resources to upgrade them through conventional training. It’s a problem that a company based in Ireland called ALISON — Advanced Learning Interactive Systems Online — is helping to address with a creative model.

North Korea: suffer the little children

Aidan Foster-Carter:

The task of building up Kim Jong-un as a credible leader continues, and Pyongyang’s peculiar political culture adds its own burdens. On the one hand, thrusting a callow twenty-something into the top slot merely because of who his father was compels a relentless emphasis on continuity.
Now and for evermore, Kim Jong-un must be lauded as the political heir and inheritor of his father Kim Jong-il and grandfather Kim Jong-un.
On the other hand, continuity alone is not enough. Given the DPRK’s problems, ‘same old same old’ on its own would not be a palatable message. Not that anyone is asking the people their view, but even a system as top-down as North Korea cannot wholly neglect the popular mood. So the leaden stress on continuity must also be leavened by hints of change, offering hope for the future.

Common Core Challenges for California

Alice Mercer:

I spent my last week of June at the ISTE Conference (International Society for Technology in Education) in San Diego, CA. Given that the new Common Core standards feature the use of technology by student prominently, I expected the standards to be front and center at the conference. Since I’ve been blogging about Common Core lately, I looked forward to hearing more. The conference program promised a number of sessions on the subject. Many of these were put on by vendors, who were no doubt seeking to make money off the fear of administrators, but the exhibitor floor was where they went all out. It reminded me of a quip I heard from one edublogger about the exhibit floor at these conferences pushing products to cure your NCLB blues; now, everything seems to be Common Core “aligned”. Folks were excitedly discussing the new upcoming computer-based adaptive assessments which are due to roll-out in 2014. That brought another question to add to the five I’d previously raised: where on earth is my state planning to find the money for them? This led to some rather surreal conversational moments as I asked this question to folks who were excited about the new assessment, and their answers would often be a perplexed look, and the statement, “Well they have to implement this!” and I would say, “Really, why? We’re not in Race to the Top so we aren’t getting dollars dependent on this.” At this point folks looked really perplexed.

Change is coming for good schools, too

Alan Borsuk:

Here are eight thoughts on why parents of students in top-flight schools (and parents in just about any school) should be paying attention to what is unfolding:
Rising standards for defining proficiency. Wisconsin is about to raise the bar for what it takes for a student to be labeled “proficient” or “advanced.” The idea is that the new standards will be more realistic measures of whether a student is on track for college and a career. But a lot of parents used to their kids being among the, say, 89% or so of students doing well at high-testing school will now find their kids aren’t in that category and the schoolwide figure is suddenly, say, 45%. Will parents and school leaders take this as a call for everyone to aim higher? I hope so, but brace yourself.
New school report cards. By next year, a new system for describing how each school in the state is doing will be launched. It will offer a lot more data and new types of ratings. Particularly for conscientious parents who take advantage of it, it will offer new perspectives on how to pick a school and what a child’s school is doing well – or not well.
Achievement gaps at high-performing schools. Almost all top schools, including many suburban schools, have such gaps if they have more than a handful of poor children and minority children among their students, or if special education students aren’t meeting state goals. The gaps, in terms of percentage of proficient students, are often just as wide in those schools as in Milwaukee. The decade-old No Child Left Behind system put these gaps in the spotlight without being very effective in bringing improvement. The new Wisconsin system will focus on this even more. Top schools are likely to be under even more scrutiny on these fronts.

Upper Education Myopia

Not long ago, an associate professor of Creative Writing (the most popular subject in which is now not Ozymandias or Dover Beach or Westminster Bridge, but “ME”)…at an Upper Education institution west of the Mississippi wrote an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, bemoaning the incompetence and/or indifference of her Upper peers in evaluating, correcting or coaching the academic writing of their students:
“…And since there’s little room in most graduate curricula to focus on writing, many future faculty members simply never learn. The truth is, everyone thinks whoever went before him or her was responsible for the job of teaching writing: College instructors believe students learned the mechanics in high school; graduate advisers assume their students learned as undergraduates what they needed to know about style and argumentation.
By the time people become professors, they have no one to turn to for help with their writing. Some hope or pray that editors will save them; sometimes that happens. But most acquisitions editors don’t have the time or energy to do line-editing, and they assume that the copy editors will clean up the prose…And so, bad prose gets published and bad models proliferate….
…What, then, to make of the political scientist who didn’t think he had the expertise to comment on his students’ writing? I believe he’s shirking an important aspect of his job…If professors don’t tell students that the writing matters, who will? If professors don’t know what good writing looks like, who does?”
I followed up this welcome interest in academic writing at the Upper Education level by sending her information about The Concord Review, which, for 25 years has been working to encourage, distribute and, with the National Writing Board, to assess, serious academic expository writing by high school students around the world (Lower Education Level).
The replies I got from the Upper Education personage were:
“I got a whole bunch of messages that I don’t think were meant for me. You might check your computer for viruses.”
When I sent more information, she replied that she had seen material about these efforts when she was in Admissions at an Upper Education place in the Southeast but:
“What made a big impression on me is that there was (as I recall) a submissions fee. At Duke, I saw a lot of ‘honors’ that came with a price tag. That troubles me.”
So, of course, she never inquired further. (And yes, Duke takes an admissions fee…)
Now, so as not to charge all Upper Education people with having the same dim or poor vision about writing at the Lower Education Level, here is a letter I got from a physicist at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study…
INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY
Einstein Drive, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
22 June 2000
Mr. Will Fitzhugh, President
National Writing Board
The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776
Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,
I recently came across The Concord Review, and I would like to express my appreciation for your leadership role and your continuous dedication to this endeavor. Not only am I impressed with the high quality of the history articles that appear in the Review, but I am also impressed with the very idea of a publication which provides a forum for the academic work of high school students in history.
As a physicist, I am accustomed to the many initiatives, such as math competitions and physics olympiads, instituted to recognize and promote interest and talent in the sciences among high school students. However, I have always felt that there was no equivalent mechanism to encourage and nurture students in the humanities, and to recognize their accomplishments. The Concord Review strikes me as a simple yet brilliant idea to help fill that gap, and as a very effective way to promote high standards and excellence in the humanities.
Sincerely,
Chiara R. Nappi
Theoretical Physicist
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
12 July 2012

Outgoing Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad Reflects on His Tenure

channel3000.com:

Dan Nerad, the departing Madison Metropolitan School District superintendent, talked with WISC-TV on Thursday about his four years leading the district, plus the greatest challenges going forward.
He cited the four-year-old kindergarten program, which he implemented, and tackling difficult budgets as his achievements. Nerad said on some issues, such as over the heightened debate over the district’s minority achievement gap, there were shortcomings.
Nerad is scheduled to leave July 27 for the top job at the school district in Birmingham, Mich., a smaller and more affluent suburb of Detroit.
THEO KEITH, WISC-TV: Is there an issue or issues where you had your greatest success or shortcoming?

The Glorious End of Higher Education’s Monopoly on Credibility

Michael Ellsberg:

In the past, the only way to get professional credibility was with a college degree. Now young people are using many different tools to gain a foothold in the business world.
The times they are a changin’, and in this essay, I’d like to suggest they are changing in a way that has massive implications for education: sources of credibility–once the domain of expensive degrees-are becoming democratized, decentralized, and diversified.
In the past, there was pretty much one way to gain credibility: get some letters after your name, from as fancy an institution as possible.
Now, in 2012, I’ve seen dozens of young people who don’t even have college degrees use the following tools as sources of credibility in the business world:

ACLU alleges Michigan school district violated students’ ‘right to learn to read’

Lyndsey Layton:

In the first case of its kind, the American Civil Liberties Union is charging that the state of Michigan and a Detroit area school district have failed to adequately educate children, violating their “right to learn to read” under an obscure state law.
The ACLU class-action lawsuit, to be filed Thursday, says hundreds of students in the Highland Park School District are functionally illiterate.
“None of those adults charged with the care of these children . . . have done their jobs,” said Kary L. Moss, executive director of the ACLU of Michigan. “The Highland Park School District is among the lowest-performing districts in the nation, graduating class after class of children who are not literate. Our lawsuit . . . says that if education is to mean anything, it means that children have a right to learn to read.”

What’s Wrong with Accreditation–A Textbook Case

Andrew Gillen:

The world of higher education is abuzz with the news that a for-profit university, Ashford University, whose Iowa campus holds accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, has been denied accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) for its online headquarters. Denial of accreditation for schools that already have it is pretty unusual and gives us a rare glimpse into accreditation and a detailed example of what’s wrong with the existing system.
An Evidence-Based Decision?
According to the Chronicle, “Ralph A. Wolff [president of WASC]… said the extensive process was meant to provide an evidence-based reason for the association’s decision on Ashford.”
That certainly sounds reassuring. And WASC is leading the way on transparency, publicly releasing documents relating to the decision (though the posted versions of the documents are non-searchable, a significant barrier to actually making use of the documents).
One might expect to see some evidence about how Ashford University students are learning less than comparable students at other WASC-accredited universities. If so you’d be disappointed. Turns out student learning is not an important consideration when it comes to accreditation. Here are the allegedly unmet standards cited in denying Ashford accreditation for its large online program:

Madison West High team soars to 2nd in International Rocketry Challenge

Matthew DeFour:

Madison West High School’s rocketry team finished second behind the French team in the International Rocketry Challenge in London on Friday.
The four-student team won the national Team America Rocketry Challenge competition in May to qualify for the international competition. It’s the second time a West team has represented the United States in the five-year history of the event, which took place this year at the Farnborough International Air Show.

Congratulations!

Madison’s Superintendent Search Service Contenders

Proact Services: [1MB PDF Presentation]

Gary Solomon, Chief Executive Officer
Gary Solomon was elevated to CEO of PROACT Search in 2009. Previously, Mr. Solomon had founded Synesi Associates and worked in Education for the past twenty years, starting as a high school teacher and administrator in the Chicago suburbs. Gary transitioned from the public to the private sector taking on a position as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for The Princeton Review, and was responsible for rebuilding the sales organization into a senior consultative team focused on creating custom solutions in the areas of assessment, professional development and academic intervention. During his six years with The Princeton Review, where annual revenue goals were exceeded by and average 150%, Solomon was fortunate to do significant business in many of the top 50 urban districts in the country, and work with some of the best and brightest reformers in the K12 space. 

A graduate of the University of Illinois, Solomon holds a Masters in Education Arts from Northeastern University.

Thomas Vranas
, President
Thomas brings an extensive background in educational management in the private sector, as well as numerous start-ups across various industries. He recently served as Vice President at one of the largest publicly traded test preparation companies where he was directly responsible for their sales teams as well as online learning division. Previously Thomas built an urban tutoring program in Chicago to service over 8,000 students with recognition for a quality program from the local and national government. Thomas has also started-up a Wireless Internet company, a Sales and Marketing company as well as a boutique Venture Capital firm. Thomas has been published by the Northwestern Press for his work in political economics and is and active volunteer at many organizations including Habitat for Humanity, Northwestern University and Steppenwolf Theatre. He’s been a guest lecturer at Northwestern University, where he earned his B.A. in Economics and Slavic Languages.

Phil Hansen
, Chief Operations Officer
Phil Hansen is a seasoned educator with an impeccable record rooted in Accountability. For fifteen years Phil taught history, before moving on to five years as assistant principal for the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), and then Director of Special Education in the southern suburbs of Chicago. In 1991 Phil took on the role of Principal at Clissold Elementary, a Chicago Public school. In 1995 he became the CPS Director of School Intervention, before moving on in 1997 to take on the position of Chief Accountability Officer, where he served until 2002. At this time Phil was offered a position working as an assistant to the Illinois State Superintendent where he was the liaison between CPS and the Illinois State Board of Education specifically focused on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) implementation throughout the state.
Upon his retirement Phil joined The Princeton Review and managed a turnaround project in Philadelphia, transitioning four middle schools to new small high schools. He also separately did consulting work for the School District of Philadelphia, the St Louis Schools Office of Accountability, and the Recovery School District of New Orleans. In the Recovery School District he served as the Interim Chief Academic Officer during the transition of leadership. Upon joining Synesi Associates, as Vice President of Policy and Development he has worked with the State Board of Louisiana and the East Baton Rouge Parish School District. His primary work has been in completing school and district quality reviews followed up by long term support as an external partner. Through Synesi he also continues to work in New Orleans, assisting with the High School Redesign efforts
As an active member of his community, Phil has also served as President and Secretary of the Beverly Area Planning Association, and has received rewards for service from both the local community as well as the greater city of Chicago. Most recently Phil was honored as an outstanding City of Chicago Employee and Outstanding Educator from the National Conference for Community and Justice.

Stephen Kupfer
, Regional President
Steve Kupfer serves as Northeast Regional President for PROACT Search and is responsible for executing talent management and support strategies in K-12 education institutions and organizations. He was previously a Senior Consultant in the education practice at Public Consulting Group where he worked alongside district leadership to implement web-based special education and response to intervention (RtI) case management modules in some of the largest school districts in the country, including Miami Dade County Public Schools, The School District of Philadelphia, and the Louisiana Recovery School District.
Steve brings practical, district-level experience in organizational development to challenges in K-12 human capital management and support. In his most recent role, he leveraged local leadership to build operational and financial capacity through Medicaid reimbursement programs, mitigating budget shortfalls and sustaining critical student services. Steve has also developed and implemented comprehensive strategies to engage and communicate with key internal and external stakeholders across districts, and has front line experience with the urgency and complexity of the problems school leaders face today.
Steve is a proud product of the K-12 public school system. He went on to receive a B.A. in political economy from Skidmore College, where he played baseball and was a member of various chamber music groups. He continued on to receive an M.B.A. from Clark University.
Kristin Osborn, Director of Operations
Krissi Osborn runs all Operations and Recruitment for PROACT Search. In her role with the company, she has additionally established an award winning internship program exclusively with Northwestern University. Krissi is an active member in her Chicago community, volunteering as an ESL Tutor in Albany Park, as well as on the executive board for a community outreach group. Krissi graduated from Northwestern with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and History from the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Ray and Associates: [2.6MB PDF Presentation]

Gary L. Ray, President
Christine Kingery, Vice-President
William Newman, National Executive Director
Ryan Ray, Corporate Director
Heidi Cordes, Corporate Associate
HeidiAnn Long, Executive Search Assistant
Carrie Gray, Executive Search Assistant

Notes, links, audio and video from the 2008 Madison Superintendent Search: Steve Gallon, James McIntyre and Dan Nerad.
Notes and links on Madison Superintendent hires since 1992.
TJ Mertz comments.

Do Schools Challenge Our Students?

Ulrich Boser, Lindsay Rosenthal:

You might think that the nation’s teenagers are drowning in schoolwork. Images of sullen students buried in textbooks often grace the covers of popular parenting magazines, while well-heeled suburban teenagers often complain they have to work the hours of a corporate lawyer in order to finish their school projects and homework assignments. But when we recently examined a federal survey of students in elementary and high schools around the country, we found the opposite: Many students are not being challenged in school.
Consider, for instance, that 37 percent of fourth-graders say that their math work is too easy. More than a third of high-school seniors report that they hardly ever write about what they read in class. In a competitive global economy where the mastery of science is increasingly crucial, 72 percent of eighth-grade science students say they aren’t being taught engineering and technology, according to our analysis of a federal database.
These findings come at a key time. Researchers increasingly believe that student surveys can provide important insights into a teacher’s effectiveness. When the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released findings from their Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project in 2011, they found that student feedback was a far better predictor of a teacher’s performance than more traditional indicators of success such as whether a teacher had a master’s degree or not. The mounting evidence on the importance of student surveys has also been shaping policy at the state and local level, and a variety of groups dedicated to the improvement of teaching–such as the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that works to advance policies and practices to ensure effective teaching in every classroom–have been incorporating student surveys into their teacher evaluation and certification process.

‘No Loans’ Revisited

Scott Jaschik:

“No loans” policies were the hit of 2007 and 2008, as many of the nation’s most elite (and wealthy) colleges and universities announced that borrowing would be eliminated from the aid packages of students with family incomes below certain levels.
But this particular movement in higher education took off just before the economic downturn hit in the fall of 2008, sharply reducing these institutions’ endowments and forcing many of them into budget-cutting mode. Now, a few years later, institutions are taking steps that reflect very different financial outlooks than those before the downturn. In May, Wesleyan University ended its policy of need-blind admissions, a policy seen by many as (when combined with meeting admitted applicants’ full need) the gold standard of private college admissions. This policy is supposed to mean that applicants can rest assured of their ability to attend if admitted — and that lack of resources shouldn’t stand in the way.

Thoroughly Counterintuitive Approach to Leading

Bob Sutton:

You and I have been e-mailing about leadership traits, and at one point you suggested, “Good leaders know when to be boring, vague, emotionally detached, and authoritarian.” Under what circumstances might such traits be desirable? Start with boring.
There are two situations in which it’s a good idea to be boring. One is when you’re working on something but, so far, all you’ve got is bad news. Under those circumstances, any outside attention is bad.
Don Petersen was the CEO of Ford after the Iacocca era, and he was responsible for turning the company around. He told me a story about being invited to speak at the National Press Club. He didn’t want to do it. At the time, Ford had no good cars at all. But he and his PR chief decided he would go and give a speech about the most boring subject they could think of. At the time, that was safety. He practiced speaking in the most boring way possible, using the passive voice and long sentences. He put up charts that were hard to read, and then turned his back to the audience to talk about the charts. After that, the press lost interest in him for a while, so he could concentrate on doing the work.

The trouble with Khan Academy

Robert Talbert:

At some point around the beginning of February 2012, David Coffey — a co-worker of mine in the math department at Grand Valley State University and my faculty mentor during my first year — mentioned something to me in our weekly mentoring meetings. We were talking about screencasting and the flipped classroom concept, and the conversation got around to Khan Academy. Being a screencaster and flipped classroom person myself, we’d talked about making screencasts more pedagogically sound many times in the past.
That particular day, Dave mentioned this idea about projecting a Khan Academy video onto the screen in a classroom and having three of us sit in front of it, offering snarky critiques — but with a serious mathematical and pedagogical focus — in the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I told him to sign me up to help, but I got too busy to stay in the loop with it.

The Future of Education…..

Pete Wailes:

Shortly after the invention of the quantum computer chip, and the laying of fibre optic broadband to almost every house in the UK, it had been clear that the days of teaching as a profession were numbered.
Teaching had been relegated to a minority profession in a matter of years. It had been simply a question of scale. A teacher, working for 45 years, could teach maybe 1,500 children. Some lessons would be better than others, some children would get more attention and do better than others, they’d occasionally need time off and so on. Simply put, human teachers were inconsistent, and not always great.
So when the new educational bodies started recording the best lectures for every subject from around in the world, annotating them in 3D, and enhancing them with CG, what could the schools do to fight back?

Final recipients of National Merit, Achievement scholarships Unveiled

Wisconsin State Journal:

There were 54 scholarship recipients in Wisconsin. Local recipients included: Alyssa A. Hantzsch, Baraboo, Baraboo High School; Katarina L. Klafka and Mikko S.R. Utevsky, Madison, East High School; Tristan H. Abbott, Shoshana L. Rudin and Joanna Q. Weng, Madison, West High School; Clare M. Everts and Katherine D. Stein, Madison, Edgewood High School; Winifred B. Hoerr, Madison, St. Ambrose Academy; Eva R. Fourakis and Andrew Gilchrist-Scott, Middleton, Middleton High School; Pratyusha Kalluri, Verona, Madison Memorial High School; and Max W. Molina, Whitewater, Whitewater High School.

Comparing Per-Pupil Support in Different Types of Milwaukee Schools: An Update

Mike Ford:

A ways back I compared public support for the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) to students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). Though not the perfect (and unattainable) “apples-to-apples” comparison, I came up with something reasonably logical. What follows is an updated comparison that includes independent charter schools in Milwaukee, as well as MPS and the MPCP.

First, MPS. According to the district’s 2013 proposed budget the final adopted total district budget in 2012 (excluding carryover funds) was $1,188,160,523. Within that number:

  • $17,952,177 goes to non-public schools.
  • $20,868,734 (excluding carryover funds) goes to the extension fund. The extension fund is for public recreation and facilities that serve the broader community.
  • $7,060,441 comes from private grants.

Subtracting the non-public schools allocation, the extension fund, and private grants from the MPS budget brings the relevant 2012 MPS budget number to $1,142,279,171. Dividing that number by the number of MPS pupils, 86,089, (MPS grand total excluding students leaving MPS via the chapter 220 program) puts the 2012 comparative per-pupil public support of MPS at $13,269.

The $376,200,000 2012-2013 Madison School District budget spends $15,132 for each of its 24,861 students. Madison’s per student spending is about 45% higher than the Austin, TX school district.

Wisconsin and National School Spending Growth Perspectives

Laura Waters:

Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, has an editorial in the Wall St. Journal this week assailing the “explosive growth” in America’s public school work force. Since 1970, he charges, student enrollment has “flat-lined,” yet the number of teachers and instructional aides has doubled, from 3.3 million to 6.4 million, with concurrent increases in costs.
Coulson writes, “America’s public schools have warehoused three million people in jobs that do little to improve student achievement–people who would be working productively in the private sector if that extra $210 billion were not taxed out of the economy each year.”
But there’s a panacea readily available: create state voucher systems to send all our kids to private schools. (Also, elect Mitt Romney because President Obama’s education agenda is an “expensive and tragic failure.”)
Whoa, Nellie!
While it’s no doubt a challenge to squish a radical paradigm shift within the confines of the WSJ’s 600-word limit, that’s no excuse for specious logic or casual disregard for facts. Worse, this sort of inflammatory rhetoric gives education reform a bad name.
For example, let’s look at Mr. Coulson’s claim that American public schools hire too many teachers and aides (i.e., have too low a teacher/student ratio), and that private schools are cheaper and produce higher-achieving students.
He writes, “If we returned to the student-staff ratio of 1970, American tax payers would save about $210 billion in personnel costs.”







Madison School Board member Ed Hughes:

There is no mystery about the size of the overall pie. The last budget under Governor Doyle appropriated $5,025,190,300 for elementary and secondary school aids for 2009-10 and $5,271,555,900 for 2010-11. Under Governor Walker’s budget, this total was cut to $4,845,083,000 for 2011-12 and $4,913,986,100 for 2012-13. So Governor Walker slashed general state aid to schools by about $538 million over the biennium. This is hardly cause for celebration.
How next year’s $4.9 billion in general state aid is split up among the state’s 424 school districts is determined by the school funding formula. I describe how the formula works here. This year, to just about everyone’s surprise, the formula has turned out to be Madison’s friend.
Last year, application of the school funding formula resulted in MMSD qualifying for about $15 million in general state aid. This amount was increased to about $43 million by virtue of the hold-harmless provision of the law that capped each school district’s reduction in state aid at 10% of the previous year’s total.
How could it be that the same formula that calculated that MMSD was entitled to $15 million in state aid in 2011-12 would determine that the district was in line for $53 million for 2012-13?


Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding

Nicholas Ostler on the History and Diversity of Language

The Browser:

It’s widely presumed that the English language will become entrenched as the world’s lingua franca and that minority languages will continue to die out. But you don’t really buy into this theory and have argued that new technology might allow minority languages to thrive. I wonder if you could expand on this?
I try to look at things from a historical perspective rather than just what’s happening in this decade or century. I look at the progress of languages over centuries and millennia – my book Empires of the Word starts in 3000 BC and ends in modern times. Each of us only lives two or three generations, so it’s quite difficult for us to get that perspective without really striving for it. When it comes to languages, we tend to be familiar only with the one that we use on a daily basis. When we are also conscious that in the last century or two that language has spread out all over the world, it gives us a very foreshortened perspective. What I’m trying to do is to correct that.

The Most Important Writing Lesson I Ever Learned

Steven Pressfield:

My first real job was in advertising. I worked as a copywriter for an agency called Benton & Bowles in New York City. An artist or entrepreneur’s first job inevitably bends the twig. It shapes who you’ll become. If your freshman outing is in journalism, your brain gets tattooed (in a good way) with who-what-where-when-why, fact-check-everything, never-bury-the-lead. If you start out as a photographer’s assistant, you learn other stuff. If you plunge into business on your own, the education is about self-discipline, self-motivation, self-validation.
Advertising teaches its own lessons. For starters, everyone hates advertising. Advertising lies. Advertising misleads. It’s evil, phony, it’s trying to sell us crap we don’t need. I can’t argue with any of that, except to observe that for a rookie wordsmith, such obstacles can be a supreme positive. Why? Because you have to sweat blood to overcome them-and in that grueling process, you learn your craft.
Here it is. Here’s the #1 lesson you learn working in advertising (and this has stuck with me, to my advantage, my whole working life):

Ball boys demonstrate power of training

Lucy Kellaway:

As Ivo Karlovic whacked a tennis ball at 135 miles per hour towards Andrew Murray on Wimbledon’s Centre Court last week, I found myself staring at something behind his back that wasn’t moving at all. Two kids of about 15 were standing in symmetrical formation, stock still. When a stray ball came their way, they scooped it up, threw it with speed and perfect accuracy into the player’s hand and then returned to being statues once more.
As someone who has spent a decade trying and failing to get teenagers to pick up stray dirty socks from the floor and throw them in the general direction of the laundry basket, I found this performance even more remarkable than the one being given by the grown-up men with the tennis racquets.

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) solution for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch

Assistiveware:

We are thrilled to announce the release of Proloquo2Go 2.0! Version 2.0 introduces two new, research-based vocabularies: Basic Communication and Core Words. An analysis of commonly used sentences has shown that the Core Words vocabulary reduces the number of steps to build a sentence by more than 30%, when compared to previous versions of Proloquo2Go.
The completely redesigned editing interface of Proloquo2Go 2.0 offers many other new, cool features including:

Teach Your Children about STEM

Matthew DeFour:

Parents can play a key role in swelling the ranks of students pursuing careers in science, math, engineering and technology (STEM) fields, according to a new UW study published in Psychological Science.
Increasing interest in STEM fields is crucial to developing a strong 21st century U.S. workforce, but interest in science and math begins to wane in high school when students choose not to take advanced courses in those subjects, according to the study.
While most efforts to change that have focused on things schools can do to increase student interest in STEM classes, researchers at UW demonstrated the influence parents can have.

Education Predications

magashark.com

Since lower and middle class consumers will earn less money they will have less credit — and their demand won’t be the main driver of the economy. The rich people however will be more able than ever to get loans from the banks which are looking for lending opportunities. They will pick up the slack from the poor and middle class because they have more savings in the banks.
We can already see this because the average savings is zero but we know the lower and middle class are highly in debt (at least until they default, in which case that money disappears from the system and the foreclosed properties drop in value). Basically there will be a growing disparity between the rich and the poor, unless we are able to reform the educational system and align it more with the jobs that will be needed in 4 years. And that’s a tough thing to do.

Has Higher Education Become an Engine of Inequality?

The Chronicle:

Inequality is growing in the United States, and social mobility is slowing. A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 62 percent of Americans raised in the top one-fifth of the income scale stay in the top two-fifths; 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths.
Education, long praised as the great equalizer, no longer seems to be performing as advertised. A study by Stanford University shows that the gap in standardized-test scores between low-income and high-income students has widened about 40 percent since the 1960s–now double that between black and white students. A study from the University of Michigan found that the disparity in college-completion rates between rich and poor students has grown by about 50 percent since the 1980s.
What role has higher education played in society’s stratification? Are colleges and universities contributing to economic inequality and the decline of social mobility?

Departing Madison schools Superintendent Dan Nerad looks back and forward

Nayantara Mukherji

The last day for Madison schools superintendent Dan Nerad will be July 27. Nerad, who led the Madison Metropolitan School District for four years, will be replaced by newly appointed interim superintendent Jane Belmore. In March, Nerad submitted his resignation to the school board and was subsequently offered the job of schools superintendent in Birmingham, Michigan. He will start there in August.
Isthmus recently sat down with Nerad to discuss his tenure in Madison and his new post.
Isthmus: What were some of the factors that went into your decision to ask the school board to terminate your contract by August 1?
Nerad: We had been in a discussion for several months about my leaving the district, so that is not a brand new thing. But, I have an opportunity to continue this work in another school district in Michigan, and that’s really what drove the more immediate consideration about leaving at this point in time.

“We’re All Above Average”

Joe Klein:

The conversation turned to education. “The fundamental assumption is that we’re all ‘above average’ and that everybody should go to college, but that’s unfair to the kids who are not cut out for college,” Morgan said. “A lot of kids go to college and drop out immediately. My high school class started with 600 and is going to end with 400-there should be other paths, like vocational education, for the ones not suited for college,” she said and later admitted that she’d read my piece about Career and Technical Education in Arizona a few months ago. What a brilliant, discerning girl!
Morgan was one of the three who were taking online courses. She was taking American History from the University of Miami. “It’s more work than all my other AP courses combined,” she said. “I wish I could take all my classes online.” The other girls disagreed about that. Kelly Silnes had a great AP History teacher, “but when I have a bad teacher, it makes me feel dumber.” Abigail Stone loved the social life of her school. Martha Scott* was taking college-level courses in government and economics. She said she had a weekly phone call with her online professors and participated in a chat room with her fellow online students. (This seemed to me a very promising educational development, a way to challenge top high school students and expand the curricula available in smaller high schools.)
I asked the girls about their less-extraordinary schoolmates. “I look at some of them,” Morgan said, “And I think that five years from now, they’ll be the sort of adults you see around town-their glory days were in high school. They won an athletic championship or were a cheerleader, or whatever. I can’t understand that. I’m desperate to get out, see the world.”

Average.

The consequences of rising demand for an expensive London education

The Economist:

A CURIOUS WRINKLE in the strange case of Bo Xilai, the fallen Chinese politician, and Neil Heywood, his erstwhile British friend, is that Mr Heywood, who was allegedly murdered by Mr Bo’s wife, is said to have helped their son, Bo Guagua, to get into Harrow, one of London’s leading schools. This is not unusual. Woody Webster, of Bright Young Things, a consultancy that helps get children into London schools, cites “Chinese aristocrats” as a big growth area.
Quality is one reason rich foreigners want to send their children to school in London. According to the OECD, Britain’s private schools are the best in the world, and London’s schools are better than those elsewhere in Britain. Security is another reason for rich people from troubled countries, who are often more determined than the locals to get their children into the right establishments. “I’ve met children whose parents watch them on Skype while they’re working,” says Mr Webster.

Macmillan Knows Publishing Is Doomed, So It’s Funding the Future

Erin Griffith:

Even if the dominant players in a staid, legacy industry see the writing on the wall — that the Internet will eventually kill them — it’s not easy for them to do much about it.
Some publishers are merely waiting for Amazon to put them out of business. (See “We’re in Amazon’s sights and they’re going to kill us.”) Others have taken to suing startups which threaten their business model. (See: Publishers accuse textbook replacement service Boundless of copyright infringement.)
Macmillan Publishing has taken an entirely different route altogether. It’s one that, until now, has remained relatively under the radar. The company hired Troy Williams, former CEO of early e-book company Questia Media, which sold to Cengage. Macmillan gave him a chunk of money and incredibly unusual mandate:

Substantial change is underway in education. Yet, most of the players continue to emphasize our Frederick Taylor, agrarian model.

In Defense of Cursive

Judith Thurman:

As of Independence Day, 2012, forty-five of the fifty United States have adopted the Common Core curriculum in their public elementary schools. Those states are now in the process of phasing out the teaching of cursive writing, which, apparently, does not accord with the mission statement of the curriculum’s framers: to impart skills that are “robust and relevant” to the modern world.
I grew up in the nineteen-fifties, when the art of penmanship was taught to every schoolchild in America, and prized as a sign of cultivation. I loved ruling the blank pages of my copybook, then filling the spaces between the lines with shapely letters–“M” and “W” were my favorite capitals; “j” and “y” my favorite minuscules. If I had not learned to write cursive, I probably never would have learned to read it, and my archival work as a biographer–deciphering the handwritten letters of men and women born in the nineteenth century, or the early decades of the twentieth–would have been extremely arduous, if not impossible. A knowledge of cursive may not be “relevant” to the modern world, but it is essential to a visceral sense of the past, and an ability to examine the literature, correspondence, and history contained in original documents.

Blue Is for Boys, Red Hearts for Girls

Cassie Murdoch:

The idea of putting boys and girls in separate classrooms certainly is not new–private schools have been dividing the genders for eons. But lately, more and more public schools are opting for single-sex education. The ACLU is fighting against the trend, and already some programs have been dropped. But there are still plenty of educators advocating that separate-but-equal is better for everyone.
The AP has an interesting report on this growing conflict, which really ramped up in 2006 when the Department of Education relaxed restrictions on single-sex classrooms. In 2002, there were only about a dozen public schools that had separate classrooms, and now it’s estimated that there are roughly 500 schools that have at least some same-sex classrooms. The interest in teaching the sexes separately grew largely out of research that showed that boys, especially minority boys, didn’t do as well on tests as girls and graduated at lower rates. But the idea is that same-sex ed is supposed to benefit both boys and girls equally.

School Is ‘Too Easy,’ Say American Students

NPR
Many students in American classrooms don’t feel challenged enough. That’s according to new analysis of federal data (pdf) conducted by the Washington think tank American Progress.
The organization, which promotes “progressive ideas and action,” came to that conclusion when it analyzed surveys given to students by the Department of Education for its National Assessment of Educational Progress.
In its press release, American progress says its analysis found that the popular images of students overburdened with work and keeping “the hours of a corporate lawyer in order to finish their school projects and homework assignments” are quite simply off base.
“Many students are not being challenged in school,” the organization says. USA Today dug through the report and finds:
— “37% of fourth-graders say their math work is ‘often’ or ‘always’ too easy;
— “57% of eighth-graders say their history work is ‘often’ or ‘always’ too easy;
— “39% of 12th-graders say they rarely write about what they read in class.”
USA Today spoke Florida State University English education professor Shelbie Witte who said students are likely bored by an education system that puts too much emphasis on standardized testing and “when they’re bored, they think the classes are easy.”
Another interesting find from the report is that lower-income students reported that they comprehended their teachers less than their more affluent classmates.
American Progress points out that student surveys have been shown to be accurate predictors of a teacher’s performance. It’s the reason they decided to look at this set of data.

America Has Too Many Teachers

Andrew Coulson:

Public-school employees have doubled in 40 years while student enrollment has increased by only 8.5%–and academic results have stagnated.
Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled–to 6.4 million from 3.3 million–and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers’ aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs.
Or would they? Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has shown that better-educated students contribute substantially to economic growth. If U.S. students could catch up to the mathematics performance of their Canadian counterparts, he has found, it would add roughly $70 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next 80 years. So if the additional three million public-school employees we’ve hired have helped students learn, the nation may be better off economically.
To find out if that’s true, we can look at the “long-term trends” of 17-year-olds on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress. These tests, first administered four decades ago, show stagnation in reading and math and a decline in science. Scores for black and Hispanic students have improved somewhat, but the scores of white students (still the majority) are flat overall, and large demographic gaps persist. Graduation rates have also stagnated or fallen. So a doubling in staff size and more than a doubling in cost have done little to improve academic outcomes.

A School Fix Without a Fight; Cleveland Mayor Works With Governor and Teachers to Link Pay to Test Scores

Stephanie Banchero:

he Republican governor of Ohio, the Democratic mayor of Cleveland and the local teachers union have united to overhaul how teachers are hired, fired and paid, a rare example of cooperation in education that some critics warn could still face challenges in the implementation.
The overhaul, signed into law by Gov. John Kasich this month, will allow the district to link teachers’ pay, in part, to student test scores, and to lay off teachers based on performance instead of seniority. It will also let the district fire teachers after two years of poor performance, based in part on test scores.
The district will become the only one in Ohio to share local tax dollars with charter schools–public schools run by outside entities that are now funded by state and federal money–and will have more say in who gets to operate those schools.

Literary classics rebooted as children’s tales

Cheryl Truman:

Lisa Samson is not yet up in the literary firmament with the likes of J.K. Rowling. But the Kentuckybased children’s author, who writes as L.L. Samson, is in the midst of writing a wonderfully arch yet educational series, The Enchanted Attic. It’s based on what might happen if some of literature’s greatest characters wandered into modern times.
In the process, she is sending a message to young readers and their parents that the classics get that designation for a reason. When you pause to consider the characters and themes at their most basic, you learn quite a lot.
In the latest book in series, Saving Moby Dick, Ahab trades his whalebone leg for a comfortable prosthetic and garners a few lessons in internet etiquette. Young readers learn new words, the definitions of which are delivered gently and with humour.

5 Recent Mathematical Breakthroughs That Could Be Taught in Elementary School (but aren’t)

The Suburban Lion:

In a previous blog post, I made the claim that much of the math curriculum is ordered based on historical precedent rather than conceptual dependencies. Some parts of the math curriculum we have in place is based on the order of discovery (not always, but mostly) and while other parts are taught out of pure habit: This is how I was taught, so this is how I’m going to teach. I don’t think this needs to be the case. In fact, I think that this is actually a detriment to students. If we want to produce a generation of mathematicians and scientists who are going to solve the difficult problems of today, then we need to address some of the recent advances in those fields to prepare them. Students should not have to “wait until college” to hear about “Topology” or “Quantum Mechanics”. We need to start developing the vocabulary for these subjects much earlier in the curriculum so that students are not intimidated by them in later years.

In Their Own Words: ‘Study Drugs’

Alan Schwartz:

A 16-year-old, determined to succeed on her own merits, who finally bends under the pressure. Students with legitimate prescriptions who are hounded for their pills. Young men and women whose use of stimulants spirals out of control.
After inviting students to submit personal stories of the abuse of prescription drugs for academic advantage, The Times received almost 200 submissions. While a majority focused on the prevalence of these drugs on college campuses, many wrote about their increasing appearance in high schools, the focus of our article on Sunday. We have highlighted about 30 of the submissions below, almost all written by current high school students or recent graduates.
In often vivid detail — snorting their own pills, stealing pills from friends — the students described an issue that they found upsetting, valuable, dangerous and, above all else, real. Most of them claimed that it was a problem rooted not in drugs per se, but with the pressure that compelled some youngsters to use them.

You can’t teach creative writing. Can you?

Rick Gekoski:

Because my editor here at guardian.co.uk/books is unaccountably unwilling to allow italics in my submissions, I suspect you will be unable to understand the following: “You can’t teach creative writing.”
The reason for the sentence’s ambiguity is that, unitalicised and out of context, it is unclear how the stresses work. It might mean any of the following:
You can’t teach creative writing, but I can.
(As if said to oneself): I can’t teach creative writing.
You can teach other sorts of writing, but not creative writing.
You can teach other sorts of creative stuff, but not writing.
I could go on …

The Dalcroze method turns music inside-out

Vanessa Yung:

Playing a lively tune on the keyboard, Chu Sui-ming tells a group of youngsters to follow her instructions. She asks them to imagine that they are rain. They can run in whatever direction they like, but they must follow the pace of the melody.
This will change from fast to slow or from loud to soft to indicate heavy rain or drizzle. The barefooted children dash about in a squash court in the Mui Wo Municipal Services Building, running faster as the music speeds up and stomping when Chu strikes harder on the keys.
Then she cries, “Freeze!” The music stops and the children strike a pose to mimic an icicle in whatever shape they picture it. When the music starts again, it’s to depict the sun that comes out and melts the icicles. So the children slowly fold their bodies, descending to the floor as human puddles.

Carmen’s proposed northwest-side Milwaukee school looks to fill need

Jim McLaughlin, via a kind reader’s email:

Patricia Hoben, a former Washington, D.C., science adviser, experimented with a different kind of school model when she founded Carmen High School of Science and Technology on Milwaukee’s densely Latino south side.
The school has heightened grading policies, gives quarterly assessments on ACT standards, mandates college application boot camp over the summer, holds a January term to salvage credits or enrich high achievers, and requires four years of math, laboratory science, history and English.
Her five-year test yielded one of the best public schools in the city that don’t require an entrance exam.
Like any good scientist, Hoben is hoping to replicate her results in a new school, this time on the mostly African-American northwest side.
Leaders of the south side’s successful Carmen High School submitted a proposal to the Milwaukee School Board last month to open a new grades six to 12 charter school on the northwest side in fall 2013. The proposal for Carmen Northwest Secondary School, as it will temporarily be referred to, earned a rare perfect rating from the charter review panel, which called the proposal “exemplary” for its longer school year and mandatory summer school programs – features that mimic the south-side campus.

A new era for Wisconsin school boards

LuAnn Bird:

What can we expect from our school boards in this new era without collective bargaining? Can our elected school officials, unconstrained by union contracts, spend time creating the conditions for our professional teaching staff to succeed in reaching high levels of learning districtwide? Or will they continue to let operational issues – buses, buildings, personnel, etc. – dominate board agendas?
New Berlin provides an example for how school leaders plan to use their new power to create changes in their district. Is it necessary to lose almost one-third of your teachers in the process? Maybe in a failing school district where total transformation is needed, but New Berlin’s students perform well on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exams with around 90% scoring proficient or advanced in both reading and math.
Since some New Berlin students score at lower levels, improvements are still needed, but the district’s teachers deserve respect. New Berlin is one of the higher ranking school districts in the state.
In a recent Journal Sentinel article, some New Berlin teachers were quoted as saying they were leaving because they did not feel respected. School boards need not let that happen in their system. There is a better way.

Filling the Skills Gap

Joe Nocera:

A man named Gerald Chertavian came by my office not long ago, and, by the time he left, I was filled with renewed appreciation for the potential of community colleges to help stem the decline of the middle class. There are few more urgent tasks.
Chertavian is not the president of a community college or even a teacher at one. Rather, he runs a program, Year Up, which he founded, that makes it possible for poor high school graduates to land good jobs. It does so, in part, by imparting important soft skills that the upper-middle-class take for granted, like how to interact with colleagues in an office setting.

More U.S. Business Programs Add Specialized Degrees, but Whom Does It Benefit?

Melissa Korn:

U.S. business schools are trying to master a new corner of the market: specialized master’s degrees.
The courses in topics such as management, accounting and analytics, generally lasting one year and aimed mainly at college graduates with little or no work experience, have a decadeslong history at many European and other international schools.
But the programs have gained particular traction in the U.S. recently, more than doubling student enrollment to 52,014 in the 2010-2011 academic year, compared with the 2006-2007 year, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. (Demand is still higher outside the U.S., where member schools enrolled 84,134 in the 2010-2011 year.)
The benefit for schools is obvious–more tuition revenue and a critical mass of students to entice recruiters when interest in traditional M.B.A. programs is declining. But the long-term value for students remains unclear, as graduates’ salaries and job titles often look very similar to those assigned to new hires coming straight from undergraduate schools.

Commantary

The Economist:

AT the Macmillan Dictionary Blog, Stan Carey has a nice post on commas. For the life of me I’ve never understood why some people think that their personal comma preference is linguistic law. There are those who think the “Oxford comma” is the last barricade protecting civilisation from the barbarians, and those who are equally convinced of the opposite. I, for one, have always been with Vampire Weekend on the subject, though I omit the Oxford comma as per The Economist’s style (a work habit that has become a personal one).
Marty Peretz, a former editor and owner of the New Republic, insists that commas must always come in pairs. He once made his staff count the commas in an entire issue of the magazine, telling them that the number had better come out even. (The incident, which is not fiction, was made famous in the film “Shattered Glass”.) Where Mr Peretz got this ridiculous view is beyond me, I confess. (Need I point out the fully grammatical, single comma in that last sentence?)

College Students and Their Smartphones

Sam Laird:

College students aren’t just concerned with getting good grades and finding the best parties. More than ever, they’re using their smartphones to navigate life on campus.
On the bus, waiting in line, in bed, on the treadmill and even while driving, college students can’t seem to put their phones down. Fifty-two percent say they often check their phones before getting out of bed in the morning, according to one study. Nearly half do so while in bed at night before they fall asleep.
Thirty-five percent say they sometimes use their phones while driving but stopped at a red light, and nearly 20% say they sometimes use them while the wheels are even moving. But it’s not all addiction and danger. Forty-five percent of college students say smartphones frequently help with school assignments, and 46% say they’re often helpful for work-related tasks.

More Dallas/Fort Worth school districts are offering online courses

Shirley Jinkins:

When Arlington teacher R.J. Williams speaks during her online multimedia classes, high school students all over Texas log on to listen.
Williams is among a growing number of educators who are teaching in the Texas Virtual School Network, a clearinghouse established by the Legislature in 2007. The network offers a statewide catalog of supplemental online courses to students in charter and public schools.
“This year is the only time I’ve had two students from Arlington,” Williams said of her summer online schedule. “They’re usually from Austin and all over the place. I’ve had a few from rural areas.”

New voucher program for dyslexic students deserves a look

Allison Hertog:

Mississippi recently became the first state in the nation to adopt a public and private school choice program in which state and federal monies are provided directly to schools which parents choose. Aimed at students with dyslexia, it’s also the second special needs school choice program in the country designed for children with a single type of disability. (Ohio’s Autism Scholarship Program enacted in 2003 was the first.)
What makes this new program interesting is that it may be a starting point for other state legislatures where special needs voucher bills have failed due to concerns about parent accountability – Wisconsin comes to mind – or where special needs voucher laws have come under increased scrutiny due to reports of private school abuse of public money – Florida comes to mind.
Mississippi’s program morphed from a dyslexia screening and treatment bill (supported by a governor who struggled with the learning disorder) into a school choice measure during the proverbial sausage-making legislative process. It’s not as carefully or as broadly designed as it could have been. It also appears there’s currently only one school in the state which is specialized enough to meet the exceedingly specific criteria to participate. But nonetheless, it succeeds in incentivizing the growth of more highly-accountable school options for parents.

Restaurant owners to review school meals

Katherine Sellgren:

Two founders of a restaurant chain have been asked to carry out a review of school food in England.
Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent run the London-based Leon chain, which markets itself as offering healthy fast food.
Education Secretary Michael Gove has invited them to look at nutrition in schools and see how it can be improved.
But TV chef Jamie Oliver, who has long campaigned for better school meals, hit out at the announcement, saying it was “not the time for more costly reports”.

Liberal studies leave no room for thinking

Alex Lo::

Our public education system may be beyond reform. Every attempt at reform either ends up accentuating the very features we were trying to change or making life worse for teachers and students. Take, for example, the new liberal studies curriculum, a signature programme of the government’s dismal, decade-old education reform.
A new study by University of Hong Kong academics has found that liberal studies, introduced in September and compulsory for all pupils in forms four to six, has achieved the opposite of the government’s original intention.
Most teachers, the study found, admitted they just spoon-fed students with liberal studies materials taken directly from textbooks, a practice they were explicitly told to avoid. Predictably, many of the 70,000 students who sat the first liberal studies exam in May simply repeated answers they had learned from textbooks. Nearly 90 per cent of 300 teachers said their main source of teaching materials came from textbooks. Only a small number of teachers believed pupils should be encouraged to explore new ideas through critical thinking. And while more than 200 teachers said bringing different perspectives to students was vital in liberal studies, only 50 of them said they would do so.

The Medication Generation

Katherine Sharpe:

When I was a college freshman in the late 1990s, antidepressants were everywhere. Prozac was appearing on magazine covers, and I’d just seen my first commercial for Paxil on TV. Halfway through the semester, I was laid out by a prolonged anxiety attack and found myself in the school’s campus health center, tearfully telling a newly minted psychiatry resident about my feelings of panic and despair. Given the spirit of the times, it wasn’t a complete surprise when she sent me away a few minutes later with a prescription and a generous supply of small cardboard boxes full of beautiful blue pills, free samples dropped off on campus by a company rep.
Photo Illustration by Stephen Webster
When young people who grew up on antidepressants become adults, should they stay on their medications or try to stop?
The school psychiatrist didn’t suggest talk therapy. She simply asked that I return for a “med check” every few weeks to make sure that the pills were working.

Your E-Book Is Reading You

Alexandra Alter:

It takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy on the Kobo e-reader–about 57 pages an hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series: “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.” And on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first “Hunger Games” book is to download the next one.
In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them.

Gender Selection

Elaine Yau:

Miss Chan, who has a daughter, did not want to leave anything to chance when she decided to have another child a year ago. For a foolproof way to conceive a boy, she turned to a local consultancy which arranges for couples to undergo gender-specific artificial insemination in Thailand and US. After spending HK$180,000 and 10 days in Bangkok, the 26-year-old’s wish came true six months ago.
“I had a test after returning from Thailand, and it confirmed that I’m carrying a boy. All the money and procedures are worth it as my mother-in-law wants a grandson very much,”she says.
Chan’s treatment consisted of in-vitro fertilisation and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) – also known as embryo screening – which tests embryos for genetic diseases and gender.
Gender selection is illegal in Hong Kong, so couples must travel to have the treatment in the US, Thailand, South Africa and the Middle East, the handful of countries where the process is legal.

Apps & Autism

Rory Cellan-Jones:

New technology can be inspiring, exciting or sometimes infuriating – but I can’t ever remember it being really moving. Until, that is, I met Ruby Dunn, whose life is being changed by a piece of software.
Ruby, who was born 14 weeks premature in 2006, has autism and has never spoken. She does, however, attend her local school – Sandford Primary in Somerset – and is well integrated into every aspect of school life. But it is an app which she uses on an iPod and an iPad which is making a big difference.
Ruby uses the app, Proloquo2Go, to communicate with her teachers, her family and other children. She taps on symbols, constructs a sentence and out it comes, spoken in a child’s voice. So in the playground, she taps “head, shoulders” to choose a game. At lunchtime she chooses “lasagne” and “carrots” adds “please” and “Tina” and hands it to the dinner lady. And in the classroom she reads a story and then taps out answers to questions about it via the iPad version of the app.

Australian student mocked after appealing 99.95 per cent exam score

Jonathan Pearlman:

Sarah Hui Xin Wong, who attended an elite private girls’ school in Sydney, said she had a wrist problem, suffered discrimination and her mark should have been 100. Her result, a university entrance score, meant she beat 99.95 per cent of other students – but she believed she would have received the top mark if treated fairly.
Miss Wong was ridiculed for the appeal, as was her mother, who was inevitably labelled a “Tiger Mom” after it emerged she had lodged the initial complaint to the board of studies.
“What’s the 0.05 mark going to do?” said a comment on the news.com.au.” The mother needs to back down.”
Another said: “It’s probably a publicity stunt by her parents to get others to acknowledge her talent.”

British Columbia School Board Fired for Failing to Balance Budget

CBC News:

Cowichan Valley School Board’s nine trustees have been fired by British Columbia’s education minister after failing to submit a balanced budget for the upcoming school year.
The School Act requires boards to pass balanced budgets, but in May School District 79 approved a budget with a $3.7-million shortfall, saying it had a duty to provide a quality education.
Board members were given until June 30 to comply but failed to do so and on Sunday, Minister of Education George Abbott followed through on his threat to relieve them of their posts.
Former Chair Eden Haythornthwaite said they were simply trying to protect students.