LA Teachers Face New Evaluations

Erica Phillips & Stephanie Banchero:

In the past three years, at least 30 states have begun to use student achievement to evaluate teachers, spurred in part by President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top education initiative as well as by some Republican governors. California isn’t one of them.
That could change after a ruling by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. At a hearing Tuesday, Judge James Chalfant said the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the nation’s largest, violated California’s Stull Act, a 41-year-old law that requires teacher evaluations to take into consideration the performance of students.
The current evaluation system in Los Angeles focuses on teaching methods, such as how a teacher demonstrates knowledge or guides instruction, according to the district.
In his ruling, Judge Chalfant contrasted the high rate of positive teacher evaluations in the district–97.6 in the 2009-10 school year–with low student proficiency in English and math.

Lecture 2: Asymptotic Notation, Recurrences, Substitution, Master Method

MIT Open Courseware:

“My name is Erik Demaine. You should call me Erik. Welcome back to 6.046. This is Lecture 2. And today we are going to essentially fill in some of the more mathematical underpinnings of Lecture 1. So, Lecture 1, we just sort of barely got our feet wet with some analysis of algorithms, insertion sort and mergesort. And we needed a couple of tools. We had this big idea of asymptotics and forgetting about constants, just looking at the lead term. And so, today, we’re going to develop asymptotic notation so that we know that mathematically. And we also ended up with a recurrence with mergesort, the running time of mergesort, so we need to see how to solve recurrences. And we will do those two things today. Question? Yes, I will speak louder. Thanks. Good…”

School district budget forums showcase half-truths, contempt for the public

Laurie Rogers:

“As long as he keeps the bad people rich and the good people scared, no one’ll touch him. … What chance does Gotham have when good people do nothing?”
– The Rachel Dawes character in “Batman Begins”
How much does it cost to educate a child? Has anyone in education EVER answered this question? I’ve asked around, and nobody provides a number, but they’re all certain they need more money.
Districts keep saying K-12 education has suffered massive cuts. This stunning deceit is winning hearts and minds – largely because media lapdogs refuse to investigate. Repeat after me: There is no money shortage in K-12 public education. There are very few bottom-line cuts. Money has been shifted – away from classrooms and toward adults. Various groups complain about each other, but they’re all to blame.

Vanishing Languages

Russ Rymer:

One morning in early fall Andrei Mongush and his parents began preparations for supper, selecting a black-faced, fat-tailed sheep from their flock and rolling it onto its back on a tarp outside their livestock paddock. The Mongush family’s home is on the Siberian taiga, at the edge of the endless steppes, just over the horizon from Kyzyl, the capital of the Republic of Tuva, in the Russian Federation. They live near the geographic center of Asia, but linguistically and personally, the family inhabits a borderland, the frontier between progress and tradition. Tuvans are historically nomadic herders, moving their aal–an encampment of yurts–and their sheep and cows and reindeer from pasture to pasture as the seasons progress. The elder Mongushes, who have returned to their rural aal after working in the city, speak both Tuvan and Russian. Andrei and his wife also speak English, which they are teaching themselves with pieces of paper labeled in English pasted onto seemingly every object in their modern kitchen in Kyzyl. They work as musicians in the Tuvan National Orchestra, an ensemble that uses traditional Tuvan instruments and melodies in symphonic arrangements. Andrei is a master of the most characteristic Tuvan music form: throat singing, or khöömei.

Teacher Turnover in New Berlin a Cautionary Tale

Mike Ford:

State aid, curriculum, technology, school boards. All are important factors in K-12 education; none educate a single child.
That task is of course in the hands of teachers. It follows that teachers are the most important employees in schools, and arguably the most important employees in the public sector. After all, hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites send their kids to spend the bulk of their childhoods learning from these employees. It only makes sense for the public to treat teachers with respect. But, as Alan Borsuk argues convincingly in the Journal Sentinel Sunday, this is not always the case.
I have written numerous times about the increasing financial burdens placed on teachers in the Milwaukee Public Schools and across the state. In general, districts offset some or all of last year’s 5.5% per-pupil reduction in revenue limits by increasing employee contributions to health and pension benefits. This means that teachers across the state received a cut to their take-home pay totally unrelated to their performance. It is easy to see why teachers felt they were being disrespected.

The Brewing Crisis in Science

Henry Miller:

The Golden Goose Award makes use of a formal fallacy, a pattern of reasoning that is illogical and wrong, called “asserting the consequent.” It takes the form of: “If A, then B. B, therefore, A.” An example would be: “If Warren Buffett owned the British Crown Jewels, he would be rich. Buffett is rich; therefore, he owns the Crown Jewels.” The rationale for the award seems to be, “Some criticism of federally-funded research projects has been uninformed and ill-advised. People continue to criticize federally funded projects; therefore, their views are uninformed and ill-advised.”
It’s astonishing that some of the projects awarded passed any kind of peer-review for merit. The first two awards went to the National Science Foundation. The first NSF grant, for $84,000, was intended to discover why people fall in love. The second, for $500,000 (part of which was from two other federal agencies), was to determine which stimuli cause rats, monkeys, and humans to bite and clench their jaws.

Young Americans get the shaft

Matt Miller:

There’s plenty that divides the parties in this pivotal election — from taxes to drones, from public workers to private equity. But there’s one uber-policy that brings Democrats and Republicans together that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
That policy involves you, younger Americans. You’re in big trouble. You don’t even know it. You’re busy trying to get a degree, land a job, start a family, save for a home. You don’t follow the news. But trust me — you’ve been taken for a ride by your elders.
The question isn’t whether such talk will stir up generational war. That’s already being waged — and you’re losing. The question is whether you’ll wake up and engage in a little generational self-defense. Let me see if I can motivate you.
How are you being swindled today? Let me count just some of the ways:
As many as 100 million Americans live in households today that are earning less than their parents did at a similar age. And this is happening well before we feel the full impact of global economic integration with rising economies like India and China.

Spoiled Rotten: Why Do Kids Rule the Roost?

Elizabeth Kolbert:

In 2004, Carolina Izquierdo, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, spent several months with the Matsigenka, a tribe of about twelve thousand people who live in the Peruvian Amazon. The Matsigenka hunt for monkeys and parrots, grow yucca and bananas, and build houses that they roof with the leaves of a particular kind of palm tree, known as a kapashi. At one point, Izquierdo decided to accompany a local family on a leaf-gathering expedition down the Urubamba River.
A member of another family, Yanira, asked if she could come along. Izquierdo and the others spent five days on the river. Although Yanira had no clear role in the group, she quickly found ways to make herself useful. Twice a day, she swept the sand off the sleeping mats, and she helped stack the kapashi leaves for transport back to the village. In the evening, she fished for crustaceans, which she cleaned, boiled, and served to the others. Calm and self-possessed, Yanira “asked for nothing,” Izquierdo later recalled. The girl’s behavior made a strong impression on the anthropologist because at the time of the trip Yanira was just six years old.

Valuable lessons in world awareness

Julie McGuire:

My son is in Primary Five and doesn’t seem to take any interest in world affairs. I try to encourage him to read the newspaper and watch the news on television with me, but he’d rather play video games or watch television. Any ideas?
Computers and other electronic entertainment media have a very strong pull on children and can easily distract them from other interests. Research tells us that the pros and cons of spending a lot of time with them are complex and vary by the individual. In the short term, at least, you could limit your son’s time in front of a screen so that he has the opportunity to take an interest in other things.

Small differences in birth timing tied to test scores

Genevra Pittman:

Researchers have known that babies born premature are at risk for slowed brain development, but a new study suggests that even among those considered “normal term” – between 37 and 41 weeks – a couple of extra weeks in the womb might make a difference.
Kids born on the shorter end of that range scored lower on math and reading tests as eight-year-olds than those born later – but the differences were small and “shouldn’t be alarming,” one researcher who wasn’t part of the study team said.
“Certainly the vast majority of 37-weekers and 41-weekers would end up developing typically,” said Dr. Kimberly Noble, the lead author on the new study from Columbia University Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York.
Still, she said, until more research is done, “We would urge caution to both parents and physicians when considering early elective delivery.”

NJ teacher tenure changes born of compromise

Geoff Mulvihill:

Lawmakers and education advocates came to a remarkable compromise in forging an overhaul of tenure laws to make it easier for public schools to oust ineffective educators. But building a consensus meant dropping a change that most other states have already made: Making teachers’ effectiveness a factor in determining which lose their jobs in case of layoffs.
GOP Gov. Chris Christie, who opposes using seniority to determine layoffs, is still deciding whether he’s willing to accept the compromise.
If he vetoes the bill, he’ll undo a deal among a unanimous Legislature and groups who don’t often agree on the details of improving schools.
If he signs it, he’ll have to sacrifice — for now, at least — something that’s been a core principle in his beliefs about school reform and leave New Jersey as one of only 11 states with a last-in, first-out policy for educators in the face of layoffs.

Something Doesn’t Add Up: How marketers can take advantage of consumers’ innumeracy

The Economist:

WHEN retailers want to entice customers to buy a particular product, they typically offer it at a discount. According to a new study to be published in the Journal of Marketing, they are missing a trick.
A team of researchers, led by Akshay Rao of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, looked at consumers’ attitudes to discounting. Shoppers, they found, much prefer getting something extra free to getting something cheaper. The main reason is that most people are useless at fractions.
Consumers often struggle to realise, for example, that a 50% increase in quantity is the same as a 33% discount in price. They overwhelmingly assume the former is better value. In an experiment, the researchers sold 73% more hand lotion when it was offered in a bonus pack than when it carried an equivalent discount (even after all other effects, such as a desire to stockpile, were controlled for).

Related: Math Forum.

NY city’s controversial ban on cellphones in schools has persuaded kids to leave their devices at a stranger’s home

textually:

New York city’s controversial ban on cellphones in schools has persuaded some kids to leave their devices at home — a stranger’s home! The New York Post reports.

Dozens of students at the former Bushwick HS campus have been paying $1 per day to store their phones at an alumnus’ apartment — just down the street from the Brooklyn campus.
Academy of Urban Planning graduate Giovanni Monserrate — known affectionately as either “Gio” or “The Mayor” — has padded his income as a Broadway usher by serving as a cellphone-storage site for between 30 and 100 teens daily over the last seven years.

Small School of thought

Harry Eyres:

My first school was not just a small school but a very small school indeed. I think there were usually around 27 pupils, taught by two remarkable women: a charismatic, creative dynamo called Miss Allen and quiet, wise Miss Bagehot, who apart from keeping us reasonably calm (and providing voluminous bloomers for little girls who had accidents), I guess performed the same role for her gifted, volcanic colleague and friend.
I was always a little bit afraid of Miss Allen because of this explosive tendency but the brightness with which the school shone, the sense of possibilities it gave us, came from her. I went to Little House school aged five, much older than most children arriving at their first schools today, and with considerable reluctance. I had no great wish to go to school at all; I was very happy at home, with the big garden to explore, the vegetable patch where Mr Appleby in his seventies still hoed and dug potatoes and carrots for me to take down to the kitchen, with its wonderful smells of baking and roasting, the marmalade cat Diddles and then the black cat Dusk to play with – not to mention my mother and father and sister.

(1985) Al Shanker on Education Reform, Working Together

Jean Latz Griffin:

“It is idiotic to have an internal war when we are threatened with extinction from the outside,“ said Shanker. “We have to work together to improve public schools or the American taxpayers, in their wisdom, will simply go elsewhere.“
Shanker said public educators must do a better job of heeding the warning signs than automakers did.
“American car manufacturers went to Japan 10 years ago and saw what was happening, but they came back and did nothing,“ said Shanker. “They said that labor and management would have to make too many sacrifices to compete with the Japanese-style factories and predicted that no one would buy those little cars the funny names anyway.“
“We can`t make the same mistake,“ Shanker said. “Labor and management have to make significant changes, significant sacrifices to keep public education alive. Tinkering will no longer help.“
Shanker, head of the nation`s second largest teachers union for 10 years and its chapter in New York City for 20 years, has reversed several traditional labor stands since a number of national reports criticizing education spawned an education reform movement.

Common Core State Standards and Exxon Mobil

Exxon Mobil:

ExxonMobil supports the efforts of local educators in 45 states who, along with community and business leaders, have come together to develop voluntary, rigorous Common Core State Standards in math and English. For the US to remain competitive globally, we must ensure all children, no matter where they live, are provided the best education possible and are prepared to go to work or college when they finish high school.
The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy. The Common Core State Standards are anchored by requirements for college and career success, providing a more accurate and rigorous description of academic readiness.

Exxon Mobil is running Olympic event television advertisements promoting the “Common Core“. Steve Coll’s latest book is worth reading: ExxonMobil: A ‘Private Empire’ On The World Stage.

The Pleasant Valley School Story: A Story of Education and Community in Rural New Jersey

Kathy Cecala:

It’s easy to forget that our crowded state of New Jersey, clogged with suburban sprawl and crisscrossed with busy highways, was once largely rural. Tales of farmers’ children ambling across fields and dirt roads to one-room schoolhouses often seem like bucolic fables when compared with our current era of internet scandals, bullying problems and school budget strife.
But Larry Kidder’s recently published book, “The Pleasant Valley School Story,” not only assures us such schools existed in New Jersey, he describes in affectionate and accurate detail the lives of the Hopewell Township school’s students and teachers, as well as the story of the surrounding agricultural community in the 19th and 20th centuries.
It is a truly American story of concerned citizens and hardworking farmers, committed teachers and local pride, with the little school at Pleasant Valley as its centerpiece. Kidder tells the tale with ease; though packed with careful research, photos and statistics, this local history is immensely and almost compellingly readable.
The story is universal, the gradual evolution of a small school through the years, from slate and chalk to mass-produced textbooks; and a school’s vital role in uniting a sometimes far-flung community.

Delaware school board member offers praise for soon-to-be Jersey City superintendent

Terrence McDonald:

“I’m not going to tell you that she’s going to come up there and everybody’s going to like her,” he said “But I’ve never seen her make a spiteful decision about a teacher or an educator.”
A group of local officials, teachers and parents have objected to Lyles’ appointment, arguing that they see acting state Education Commissioner Chris Cerf’s influence in the selection. Both Cerf and Lyles are graduates of the controversial Broad Superintendents Academy.
Young said he is “no friend of corporate educational reform,” calling the academy’s founder, billionaire Eli Broad, “meddlesome.” But he added that Lyles only cares for reforms that improve education for children in her district.
“If she didn’t like something Christopher Cerf tried to do, I think she would tell him and I think she would resist him,” he said.

Summer programmes can add a lot of fun to the long holidays, but only if they fit the child

Angela Baura:

With the long summer holidays upon us, many parents will be hoping to keep themselves sane and their children entertained by signing them up for summer classes. But with a plethora of programmes to choose from, selecting one that will entertain and educate your child can be a daunting task.
“One of the most important considerations when selecting a summer programme for your child is their interest,” advises Dr Caleb Knight, an educational and child psychologist at the Child and Family Centre in Central. “It is not productive to push a child into a programme of activity in which they show little motivation.”

Google, Redeem Thyself

Tracy Mitrano:

In response to my last blog, two commenters asked whether the intent was serious. The answer is yes. Why wouldn’t it be? Jumping off their comment as a foil (because I admittedly do not know their reply), allow me to delve a little deeper into an analysis.
Are many people still in the throes of anti-Microsoft views, now long in the tooth of Internet time? Are many still swimming in the miasma of Google glory? Or do they know something about the negotiations that higher education has had with both of these companies over the last many years that I don’t know?
Everyone knows that Google, for obvious business reasons and playing on its company’s consumer sex appeal, took well advantage of “free” to garner the major market share of outsourced mail services in higher education. What many do not know is how painfully difficult negotiating with Google can be for those services. Just getting some one on the phone is an achievement, but don’t expect a lawyer. Google is an engineering company, apparently with a powerful preference for project management where the law used to tread. A glorious revolution, you might say, but think about it from the perspective of the bargainer: for better or worse, at least a contract spells out actionable terms. We are a contracting separate party, not a distant cousin of the company to be project managed.

Children Learn a New Way to Play at Summer Camp That Teaches Tech

Rachael King:

Eight-year-old Daniel Katari isn’t just playing computers games this summer–he’s making them too.
Daniel, who will enter third grade in the fall, built five computer games within a week last month. He did this at iD Tech Camp, which specializes in teaching kids ages 7 to 18 everything from 3D modeling and animation to Web design and programming in C++. Daniel spent a week at the camp at Saint Mary’s College of California in Moraga.
“The best part is playing the games and seeing how they’re all put together,” says Daniel, who named one of his new creations Brick Braker II. Next summer, he says, he would like to enroll in a session for game design for the iPhone and iPad, which his 12-year-old brother, Michael, just completed.

Schools for Soldiers

Michael David Cohen:

By the first anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, Northerners had discovered how ill-prepared they were for a crisis. The peacetime Army had been tiny. Volunteers rallied to defend the Union, but what they brought in enthusiasm they lacked in experience. Many were too young to have fought in the Mexican War and, since most military academies were located in the South, few Northern youths had formal training in combat. To win the war, the Army had to create citizen-soldiers from scratch.
On July 2, 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed a bill designed to change that: the Morrill Land-Grant College Act, which offered federal financing to colleges that taught military tactics. When the next war began, its supporters believed, alumni of those colleges would be ready for battle. The law also required funded colleges to teach agriculture and engineering, thus preparing young men to serve their nation in both war and peace.
Since the United States’ founding, education had remained a local and state concern. Now, in the midst of the Civil War, the federal government began to play a major educational role. Indeed, while its requirements were responses to the country’s security and economic needs, the act proved to be one of the most transformative pieces of legislation in American history, seeding the ground for scores of high-quality public colleges and universities around the country.

New Mexico’s Sunshine Portal: School District Budgets & Salaries

sunshineportalnm.com:

The Sunshine Portal is the official transparency and accountability portal for New Mexico state government. This is your window into government spending, budgets, revenues, employees, contracts and more. Come back often to see new reports, enhanced features, and fresh data!

Albuquerque plans to spend about $1,200,000,000 for approximately 90,000 students during their 2013 budget cycle [PDF], or $13,333/student. Madison plans to spend about 13% more or $15,132 per student during the 2012-2013 budget.
The sunshine portal is a great idea, that should be available in every state.

Teachers blast Israeli Education Ministry for replacing them with ‘babysitters’

Talila Nesher:

The Education Ministry has issued a public tender for outside organizations to hire teachers who would give many pupils an extended school day. The issue of outsourcing the hiring of teachers has been a source of controversy as many contract teachers do not get the same employment conditions as regular teachers.
Nir Michaeli, who heads the education department at the Seminar Hakibbutzim Teacher’s College in Tel Aviv, said: “The main thing that I am bothered by is the quality of service that will be provided to the public.” He said that instead of a long school day, the students will get a babysitting service that will be administered at the lowest possible cost.
The terms of the public tender explicitly state that the staff of these outsourced extended school day programs will not be considered government employees. Responsibility for hiring and firing and payment of the staff of the program lies with the outside organization, not with ministry.

UCLA and Start-Up Teach New Skills as Retirement Becomes Elusive

Andrew Morse:

A Silicon Valley entrepreneur and the University of California are combining ready-made software, rented Web services and Apple Inc.’s AAPL +2.39% iPad tablet computer in a high-tech effort to bring career training to baby boomers looking to upgrade their skills.
Empowered Careers last week began enrolling students in 10 certificate programs to be taught by instructors at the UCLA Extension, the continuing-education arm of the University of California, Los Angeles. The programs target areas–such as patient advocacy, health-care management and new media marketing–that are expected to generate job growth.
The effort is part of a recent rush of colleges, start-ups and nonprofits tapping a mix of Web services and software to open online educational ventures. Coursera in April raised $16 million to start Web-based classes for four top schools, including Princeton and Stanford Universities. A month later, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they had committed a combined $60 million to create edX, a platform for teaching courses online. EdX courses are expected to start in the fall.

QS University Rankings, Including Geography

QS World University Rankings:

The world is changing, and higher education is no exception. The numbers of students participating in higher education is escalating globally, those doing so outside their own country is on the rise dramatically. In many countries funding is being slashed and tuition fees introduced or raised, international students have become a critical commodity for some universities and there is little compromise in the attempt to attract them.
Google (1998), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006) amongst others, have changed the face of communication and marketing and few universities hold back from using such tools to blast prospective international students with compelling messages. Never before has this crucial life decision involved so many options or such an unfathomable volume of information.
That is who we are for. The students. And more specifically, prospective international students.

QS top universities for geography, 2012, via the Guardian.

Delaware Schools to Be Barred from Students’ Social Media Lives

Sam Favate:

Delaware is on the verge of prohibiting schools from monitoring students’ social media activity without their consent.
The state Senate unanimously voted to ban public and private schools from requiring students to allow access to their social media lives, the Los Angeles Times reported. The bill, which also passed the Delaware House, only needs the governor’s signature to become law.
Some colleges and universities have required students to download social media monitoring software on their personal electronic devices or accounts as a condition of their scholarships or participation in athletics.
A recent revision in the University of North Carolina handbook on this matter is said to be typical, according to MSNBC.

When Push Comes To Pull In The Parent Trigger Debate

Matthew DiCarlo:

The so-called “parent trigger,” the policy by which a majority of a school’s parents can decide to convert it to a charter school, seems to be getting a lot of attention lately.
Advocates describe the trigger as “parent empowerment,” a means by which parents of students stuck in “failing schools” can take direct action to improve the lives of their kids. Opponents, on the other hand, see it as antithetical to the principle of schools as a public good – parents don’t own schools, the public does. And important decisions such as charter conversion, which will have a lasting impact on the community as a whole (including parents of future students), should not be made by a subgroup of voters.
These are both potentially appealing arguments. In many cases, however, attitudes toward the parent trigger seem more than a little dependent upon attitudes toward charter schools in general. If you strongly support charters, you’ll tend to be pro-trigger, since there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain. If you oppose charter schools, on the other hand, the opposite is likely to be the case. There’s a degree to which it’s not the trigger itself but rather what’s being triggered – opening more charter schools – that’s driving the debate.
If, for example, the parent trigger originally arose as a mechanism for decreasing class size or eliminating the role of high-stakes testing within a school (or, ironically, converting charters back to regular public schools), I suspect that many (but certainly not all) of its current opponents would be more supportive, or at least silent, while a substantial proportion of advocates would likely protest.*

A Review of the Sun Prairie School Board

sp-eye:

Perhaps it’s time to reflect on that change and project the effect the new face of the school board could have on the Sun Prairie Area School District. One noticeable change we’ve observed is that rubber stamps seemed to have been traded in or discarded. We now have a clear majority of board members that care (or demand) to see and review hard data before making decisions. That is a huge change, people.

Rainbow school remodel



Cory Doctorow:

Palatre & Leclère did this spectacular remodel on the Ecole Maternelle Pajol in Paris’s 18th arrondissement. As Tuija Seipell writes on The Cool Hunter: “The building has kept its 1940s brick-wall feel, yet it radiates exuberance and has an up-to-date energy. Most likely its current users feel it was built just for them.”

New Hampshire Legislature passes ‘school choice’ over Lynch veto

Ted Sieffer:

After months of debate, the “school choice” bill is now law.
The Legislature on Wednesday voted to override the governor’s veto of Senate Bill 372, which allows businesses to receive tax credits for donations to scholarship funds to help low- and middle-income students attend private and religious schools.
The Senate voted 16-7 on Wednesday to override the veto of SB 372 – the exact margin needed to overrule the governor.
The House voted 236-108, also surpassing the two-thirds margin necessary for an override.
Republican leaders in both chambers have considered the “School Choice Scholarship Act” one of their highest priorities this session.
Democrats, including Gov. John Lynch, are roundly opposed to the bill, which they say would undermine public schools and downshift costs to local districts and property tax payers.

Confessions of a Driving Instructor

Mac Demere:

“Did you forget your glasses?” I asked the driver as politely as possible, hoping to hide my frustration under a joke. (The other choice was to throw my helmet, which is frowned upon but not unprecedented.) “I left them at home,” she said, her right foot planted firmly on the accelerator, and traffic cones flying everywhere. “I can’t see a thing!” I prayed, poorly, and said under my breath the motto of right-seat driving instructors everywhere: “Today’s a beautiful day to die.”
I’ve taught just about every kind of driving instruction, from a superspeedway-stockcar school to basic high school driver’s ed. I also used to work for one of the major tire companies and have ridden with more than 10,000 people (including the woman who couldn’t see a thing) while doing product presentations. Most of those were exercises in which we wanted the cars to spin out. These days I work weekends at an advanced teen driving school. “I’ve lived a long, good life,” I tell myself. Here are some stories from the right-hand seat.

An Alumnus, Madison’s Interim Superintendent: Jane Belmore

A few links on Madison’s interim Superintendent, Jane Belmore. Belmore was Madison’s Assistant Superintendent for Elementary Schools before moving to the School of Education at nearby Edgewood College.

Madison School District links.
Blekko
Clusty
Bing
Google

And, of course, there are quite a few schoolinfosystem.org links, including this post on the District’s reading problems.
Reading, which is clearly the District’s job number one, continues to be a challenge, according to this 2009 Reading Recovery study: 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use.
Finally, a bit of history on Madison Superintendent hires over the years.
Dan Simmons article mentioned the School District’s spokeswoman: Rachel Strauch-Nelson. Interestingly, Ms. Strauch-Nelson formerly worked for Madison’s previous Mayor, Dave Cieslewicz and prior to that for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Chief Information Officer Andrew Statz also worked for the previous Mayor.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Small Town & Suburban Poverty

Judith Davidoff:

But Walsh, a lifelong Wisconsin resident whose parents were public school teachers, says she first ran up against the public/private divide when visiting a community in northwestern Wisconsin during the spring of 2008.
She says that a group of loggers, most of whom were self-employed, believed that while schoolteachers may work hard during the year, they have cushy positions. Among the perks: great benefits, health care, summers off and an annual salary of about $50,000 a year. “Nobody in this town makes anywhere near $50,000,” says Walsh, paraphrasing comments she heard. “At the lumber mill, they’re making $20,000 and losing their fingers!”
Walsh says when she probes further, asking why people see a public employee/private employee divide and not a rich/poor divide, she gets stares of disbelief.
It seems to come down to what is tangible and what can be controlled. Private-sector workers, many of whom are struggling, perceive that a large portion of their taxes are going to pay for the salaries of public workers. A cut to public-employee wages and benefits would, at least in theory, mean lower taxes.

The Economist:

One woman, Diane Windemuller (slide 7), “a former HR executive, lost her job in April 2011 and was very reluctant to look for anything less than a comparable position and salary…”. Meanwhile, “the Windemuller family is accessing public safety net services: the family has received rent assistance and goes to food pantries twice a week to shift money they otherwise would spend on food to other important bills.” It was, I believe, Ms Windemuller, who experienced her first visit to the local food bank as such a humiliation that she felt it necessary to park where no one she knew would see her car, and to try to sneak in unobserved, disguised by sunglasses and a hat. Yet, for a time, her family’s straitened financial circumstances were in part a direct consequence of her refusal to seek jobs she considered in some way beneath her prior executive post, and she took a temporary administrative position only after her unemployment benefits had run out, and her husband (whom she had criticised for not working harder to find a job more in line with his last one) started threatening to leave her.

Former Madison Mayor Critiques Online Education….

Dave Cieslewicz:

But getting back to open courses offered online, here’s the problem. It looks a lot like what happened to journalism. As someone has written, “this is what happens when you let English majors run businesses.” They gave away the same content they were selling in their papers on the Internet for free. And all that free access to information has resulted in fewer newspapers, fewer professional journalists and, I would say, a poorer public exchange of ideas.
Could the same thing happen in academia? Maybe. The question is this: Why would any cash-strapped family pay north of $40,000 for an education in a bricks and mortar university when world-class knowledge is just a click away for free?
Well, the answer might be that there’s no substitute for being on campus — no substitute for seeing the professor and asking him questions, no substitute for mixing it up with your classmates from around the country and world, no substitute for getting shit-faced and walking home alone along Lake Mendota at midnight on a breezy, balmy early May night and lying on the grass outside Adams Hall, staring up at the stars shining through the old oaks and wondering where your life might take you, not to say anyone I know has done the latter.

Madison should be leading the online learning revolution.
I agree that online learning is not the be all/end all. BUT, it can augment and replace some aspects of traditional education. Again, Madison, with the UW, Edgewood College and MATC should be leading the revolution.
Links: Udacity, MIT Open Courseware, UW online plans and a field guide to online education startups.

Asians and Affirmative Action

Scott Jaschik:

A brief filed Tuesday with the U.S. Supreme Court seeks to shake up the legal and political calculus of a case that could determine the constitutionality of programs in which colleges consider the race or ethnicity of applicants. In the brief, four Asian-American organizations call on the justices to bar all race-conscious admissions decisions, arguing that race-neutral policies are the only way for Asian-American applicants to get a fair shake.
Much of the discussion of the case has focused on policies that help black and Latino applicants. And the suit that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court was filed on behalf of a white woman, Abigail Fisher, who was rejected by the University of Texas at Austin.
But the new brief, along with one recently filed on behalf of Fisher, say that the policy at Texas and similar policies elsewhere hurt Asian-American applicants, not just white applicants. This view runs counter to the opinion of many Asian-American groups that have consistently backed affirmative action programs such as those in place at Texas.

Commentary & Feedback on Draft I of the Next Generation Science Standards

Paul Gross , Lawrence S. Lerner , John Lynch , Martha Schwartz , Richard Schwartz , W. Stephen Wilson:

Last month, Achieve unveiled and solicited comments on the first draft of the Next Generation Science Standards, the product of months of work by a team of writers on behalf of twenty-six states. This review by Fordham provides commentary, feedback, and constructive advice that we hope the NGSS authors will consider as they revise the standards before the release of a second draft later this year.

Teaching Poor Kids: Is the Obstacle the Poverty or the Pedagogy?

Laura Waters:

One dispute over tying teacher evaluations to data on student growth has been the charge that teachers who are effective with wealthy students would see their value-added scores plummet with poor students. Those opposed to data-infused evaluations argue that even great teachers can’t maintain the same degree of effectiveness with needy kids. It’s the poverty, not the pedagogy.
However, there’s a new working paper out from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Educational Research, “Portability of Teaching Effectiveness Across School Settings,” that comes to a different conclusion. From the abstract:

“Join the losing team”: A commencement address that made me cry

Cynthia Starks:

I can’t remember ever crying at a commencement speech – not one I attended and heard live and certainly not one I read after it was given.
But that changed this week when I read the commencement address given on May 22 at the University of Pennsylvania by Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a New York City organization devoted to breaking “the cycle of generational poverty for the thousands of children and families it serves.”
Canada’s speech is powerful in its honesty about the shape of the world today; it brought me to tears because of a personal story he tells; yet it remains hopeful because of the redemptive possibility with which it ends.
Canada begins his speech by telling the class of 2012 their graduation “is a great moment for you, and it could be a great moment for our country.”
He explains, “You are graduating at a time when our country is desperate for highly educated women and men who will fight to see through the veils of pure self-interest and half-truths to search for what is truly moral and just.”

California Bill to expedite firing teachers is rejected

Teresa Watanabe:

Los Angeles schools chief John Deasy blasted state lawmakers Thursday for not passing a bill to speed up the teacher-dismissal process, which he and others pushed following the sex-abuse scandal at Miramonte Elementary School.
The bill fell one vote short of clearing an Assembly education committee when six of the seven Democratic members either opposed it or abstained. Committee Chairwoman Julia Brownley (D-Oak Park) supported the bill, as did four Republican colleagues.
The measure would have allowed school boards to immediately suspend without pay a teacher or administrator notified of dismissal for “serious and egregious unprofessional conduct” involving sex abuse, drugs or violence toward children.

Madison’s Collective Bargaining to “Handbook” Transition: Status Quo, or ? Intrade?

Matthew DeFour:

Madison will be looking to its own collective bargaining agreement as well as handbooks adopted by other districts and input from employees, Nadler said. Unlike previous collective bargaining discussions, however, School Board meetings on the subject will be held in open session.
Madison Teachers Inc. Executive Director John Matthews, who in 45 years has had a hand in expanding the collective bargaining agreement from four to 157 pages, has been emphasizing since Act 10 passed that everything in the agreement has been jointly agreed upon by the School Board and union.
“Instead of collective bargaining it’s going to be meet and confer,” Matthews said. “We have really 50 years of developing things together that make the school system work.”
Don Severson, president of a conservative watchdog group and MTI critic, sees the handbook as an opportunity for the district to break away from MTI’s influence over school operations. He wants a middle school to be able to hire a math teacher from outside the district with math certification, for example, rather than be forced to hire a district teacher who meets minimum requirements but lacks such certification.
“They need to keep in mind that the only thing the union has any involvement or responsibility for is negotiating salary,” Severson said.

Related: Current 182 page Madison Teachers, Inc. Collective Bargaining Agreement (PDF) and Concessions before negotiations (“Voluntary Impasse Resolution Procedure“)
I suspect that 90% of the existing collective bargaining agreement will end up in the District’s “Handbook“. Perhaps someone might setup a prediction @ Intrade on this matter.
Conversely, some Districts will think differently and create a far different and more appealing world for some teachers.
New Wisconsin School District Handbooks take effect.

The Manifest Destiny of Artificial Intelligence

Brian Hayes:

Artificial intelligence began with an ambitious research agenda: To endow machines with some of the traits we value most highly in ourselves–the faculty of reason, skill in solving problems, creativity, the capacity to learn from experience. Early results were promising. Computers were programmed to play checkers and chess, to prove theorems in geometry, to solve analogy puzzles from IQ tests, to recognize letters of the alphabet. Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers, declared in 1961: “We are on the threshold of an era that will be strongly influenced, and quite possibly dominated, by intelligent problem-solving machines.”
Fifty years later, problem-solving machines are a familiar presence in daily life. Computer programs suggest the best route through cross-town traffic, recommend movies you might like to see, recognize faces in photographs, transcribe your voicemail messages and translate documents from one language to another. As for checkers and chess, computers are not merely good players; they are unbeatable. Even on the television quiz show Jeopardy, the best human contestants were trounced by a computer.

Educators say Michigan Merit Exams, ACT tests reveal ‘shameful’ achievement gaps

Dave Murray:

State educators are celebrating scores on standardized tests offered to high school students, but call achievement gaps between some student groups “shameful.”
Those concerns are echoed by an education advocacy group’s analysis of last week’s Michigan Merit Exam and ACT scores that show black and low-income students are falling even further behind the state’s white students.
While white student achievement has risen slightly over five years, scores for black and Hispanic students and students in poverty “remain grim,” according to the Education Trust-Midwest.

Skills-Based Math, Just in Time Learning, and Bad Habits of Mind

Barry Garelick:

In the never-ending dialogue about math education that has come to be known as the “math wars”, proponents of reform-based math tend to characterize math as it was taught in the 60’s (and prior) as “skills-based”. The term connotes a teaching of math that focused almost exclusively on procedures and facts in isolation to the conceptual underpinning that holds math together. The “skills-based” appellation also suggests that those students who may have mastered their math courses in K-12 were missing the conceptual basis of mathematics and were taught the subject as a means to do computation, rather than explore the wonders of mathematics for its own sake.
Without delving too far into the math wars, I and others have written that while traditional math may sometimes have been taught poorly, it also was taught properly. In fact, a view of the textbooks in use at that time reveal that they provided both procedures and concept. Missing perhaps were more challenging problems, but also missing from the reformers’ arguments is the fact that not only are procedures and concepts taught in tandem but that computational fluency leads to conceptual understanding. (See http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~siegler/r-jhnsn-etal-01.pdf )

Education is Undergoing a Startling Revolution — Let’s Support it!

Rob Nail:

Education is undergoing an incredible and exciting transformation, but I can’t help but wonder if the “experts” can’t see the forest for the trees. We are continuing to see roiling debates from the likes of Vivek Wadhwa and Peter Thiel over whether kids should go to college or not, administrations battling technologists over whether they need to flip the classroom, and politicians forcing us to pick sides as if there were only two options – all the while missing the extraordinary revolution taking place around us.
The education industry seems to be tracking similarly to every early stage tech industry or product with big potential – innovators are coming up with new products (check out Khan Academy, Udacity, or EdX), early adopters and investors (like Learn Capital, Apollo Group, Kapor Capital, and Education Growth Partners) enthusiastically take the initial risk, only some survive (rightfully so), and the good ones go mainstream or even viral.

A.J. Duffy in exile

Jim Newton:

A.J. Duffy is, at least for the moment, a man without a country.
He led United Teachers Los Angeles, the union that represents teachers in the nation’s second-largest school district, for six bruising years, tussling with the mayor and several superintendents and racking up critics. Then he went on to found a charter school, infuriating his old allies in labor who reflexively, and stupidly, reject charters as a threat to their existence. And then the school that Duffy helped create, Apple Academy, announced that it didn’t have room in its budget for a chief executive officer.
So Duffy’s back to teaching. He says he loves it, relishes the classroom, is especially gratified to be helping special education students. He was one himself many years ago, before he shook off drug addiction and developmental problems and launched his career in education and labor. But as Duffy talks about how happy he is, it’s fairly clear that he’s not. He was a high-roller for six years, and he isn’t anymore. He misses it. A lot.

A student’s point of view: Kids don’t want to learn

CNN, via a kind reader’s email:

“It’s a pretty basic educational problem we have: Students’ willingness to learn is not there,” says 17-year-old Joseph A. Ryan, Jr.
Ryan posted his video in response to CNN iReport’s assignment question “What’s wrong with America’s school system?” He says the problem is not about technology or books, but about student motivation.
“I go to school where most kids don’t even want to learn….They don’t care, and teachers get in trouble for it,” says Ryan. “They have to see the value in education.”

More at college confidential.

Latest Wisconsin Open Records Case

Wisconsin Supreme Court 120K PDF, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:

This case is not about a direct denial of public access to records, but the issue in the present case directly implicates the accessibility of government records. The greater the fee imposed on a requester of a public record, the less likely the requester will be willing and able to successfully make a record request. Thus, the imposition of fees limits and may even serve to deny access to government records. In interpreting the Public Records Law, we must be cognizant that the legislature’s preference is for “complete public access” and that the imposition of costs, as a practical matter, inhibits access.

A number of open records requests have been published here, including 1996-2006 Police calls and a school district land purchase that lacked competitive offers.
Related: The Sunlight Foundation.

Oregon Board of Education OKs teacher evaluations

Steven DuBois:

The state Board of Education has approved guidelines for how Oregon teachers and administrators will be evaluated.
Starting in 2013, multiple measures will be used to evaluate how well individual teachers are doing in three broad areas: professional practice, professional responsibility and student learning and growth. The evaluations will not be made public and standardized test scores will not be the sole measure of student progress.
The Oregon Legislature approved a bill last year to create statewide teaching standards, and Friday’s action satisfied that requirement. Moreover, states seeking waivers from the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law must have teacher evaluation systems that factor in student progress. State education officials hope to obtain a waiver in the next week or two.

Testing, No Child Left Behind, and Why Politicians Ignore Research

Dr. Richard Phelps, via a kind email:

It is common for education researchers to contend the topic they are studying or the policies they are promoting have never been researched before, says Dr. Richard Phelps in a new article for Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars. This is common even among well-known and influential researchers, he says. And its prevalence contributed to the much-hated and unwieldy No Child Left Behind Act.
Phelps joins the School Reform News podcast to discuss this curious and repeated assertion and its effect on education policy. He is the founder of the Nonpartisan Education Review and author of several books and the article prompting this discussion, titled “Academe’s Memory Hole.”

Students should ditch the university and learn gardening

The Telegraph:

Gardening guru Titchmarsh, 63, also said he wants horticulture to be taught in all secondary schools as a “useful life skill”.
Titchmarsh, who left school at 15 to become an apprentice council gardener, hopes soaring university tuition fees will see teenagers turn to careers in gardening.
He told Amateur Gardening magazine: “We’ve been in this ridiculous system where we’re sending everyone to university.
“It’s a mad way of proceeding.
“We need practical skills to keep the country going and the fact that they’ve been undervalued, underrated and under catered for is a great mistake in terms of our civilisation. We need to value these skills again.

Two-thirds of Wisconsin school districts will receive less state aid for 2012-’13

Erin Richards:

Almost two-thirds of Wisconsin’s 424 school districts will receive less general state aid in the 2012-’13 school year than they did last year, while some suburban Milwaukee school districts will get a sizable aid boost, according to preliminary state estimates released Friday by the Department of Public Instruction.
In all, the state will provide $4.29 billion in general aid to schools in the second year of Gov. Scott Walker’s biennial budget, a small increase over what the state budget set for aid last year – $4.26 billion, according to the DPI.
That’s far below what schools received in general aid before Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature dramatically cut funding for schools and limited districts’ ability to make up those funds by raising local taxes – changes that were passed as part of the biennial 2011-’13 state budget.
“It’s a bigger balance from last year, but if you compare this to what school districts had two and three years ago, it’s a reduction,” said Patrick Gasper, spokesman for the DPI.

Madison fared quite a bit better in this year’s redistributed state tax dollar program.

Mathematics and Art

Mike Loukides:

Nikki Graziano’s intriguing integration of mathematical curves into her photography sparked a Radar discussion about the relationship between mathematics and the real world. Does her work give insight into the nature of mathematics? Or into the nature of the world? And if so, what kind of insight?
Mathematically, matching one curve to another isn’t a big deal. Given N points, it’s trivial to write an N+1 degree equation that passes through all of them. There are many more subtle ways of solving the same problem, with more aesthetically pleasing results: you can use sine functions, wavelets, square waves, whatever you want. Take out a ruler, measure some points, plug them into Mathematica, and in seconds you can generate as many curves as you like. So finding an equation that matches the curve of an artfully trimmed hedge is easy. The question is whether that curve tells us anything, or whether it’s just another stupid math trick.

Socialist Sweden spends more on education than us? Nope.

Richard Rider:

Teacher Sharon Collins’ letter selflessly calls for higher taxes for education, citing socialist Sweden as her shining light.
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/jun/21/letters-sd-schools-teachers-labor-pact/?print&page=all
She didn’t do her homework.
She thinks Sweden values education more than America because they have a 25 percent sales tax (actually a VAT tax). But that high tax tells us nothing.
For a meaningful comparison, look at education spending per student. Of the 32 OECD counties (the economically advanced countries of the world) providing data, in 2008 Sweden ranks 6th in primary school per student spending, the U.S. 5th. Sweden ranks 9th in secondary school spending, the U.S. ranks 4th.
Sweden spent $9,080 per primary school student. The U.S. spent $9,940. Sweden spent $9,940 per secondary school student — the U.S. spent $12,007.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/888932463593