Don at edteacher.org:

A solid digital workflow system addresses many of these questions. But before exploring the myriad systems out there, figure out what you already have in place, and what you really want the system to do.
Ask yourself the following questions before your start evaluating options – the answer will help narrow your choices:
Do I need a webpage for my class that has all resources, assignments, class info, my info, messaging, etc?
Do I simply need an organized way to exchange work back and forth with students?

Laura Waters:

New Jersey’s political races for U.S. Senate and Governor have dominated local media, despite the lack of meaningful competition for shoo-ins Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Governor Chris Christie.
The latest Quinnipiac poll shows that 52 percent of voters support Booker; U.S. Congressmen Frank Pallone and Rush Holt each garner less than 10 percent of the electorate, and laggard Sheila Oliver barely musters 3 percent.
In the gubernatorial race, Christie is running about 40 points ahead of N.J. Sen. Barbara Buono.
Lock or not, N.J.’s public education system is a big talking point for all candidates. In fact, the current electoral discussions get to the heart of a puzzle for this blue state’s Democratic leadership: in the realm of education reform, what does it mean to be a New Jersey Democrat?
If you ask Cory Booker, a “Democratic” agenda includes charter school expansion, data-driven teaching evaluations, top-down accountability, focus on poor urban school districts, and vouchers. But if you ask Barbara Buono for her prescription for improving public education, a “Democratic” agenda, antithetical to Booker’s, includes restrictions on charter school growth, protection for teachers from the vagaries of data, and local control.

William Damon, via a kind reader’s email:

William Damon was interviewed about his book, “Failing Liberty.” In the book, Prof. Damon argues that we are not properly preparing our young people to become responsible citizens. This interview was recorded at the Hoover Institution on the campus of Stanford University.

Lynn Neary:

Chances are you have had contact with Scholastic Publishing at some point in your life: You might have read their magazines in school, or bought a book at one of their book fairs, or perhaps you’ve read Harry Potter or The Hunger Games? From its humble beginning as publisher of a magazine for high schoolers, Scholastic has become a $2 billion business and one of the biggest children’s book publishers in the world.
Scholastic is a leader in the school book fair business — which is in keeping with the company’s origins. Nearly 100 years ago, the company started out by building its business in schools.
“If you think of Scholastic, it’s a relationship company with teachers and parent and kids,” says Dick Robinson, Scholastic’s chairman and CEO. “And it succeeded by going on from generation to generation.”

Linda:

The 6th Circuit ruled several weeks ago that the German homeschooling-and-evangelical-Christian family is not eligible for refugee status and should be deported. The Romeikes appealed for a rehearing en banc. The DOJ responded on the 26th of June. At this point, the parties are waiting to see if the 6th Circuit will grant the rehearing. If they do not, the Romeikes’ next step will be to appeal directly to SCOTUS.
Now I’ve had a peek at the two latest briefs. They aren’t long or complicated. Basically, the Petitioners said the 6th Circuit panel did not follow precedent for evaluating asylum claims, and further that the panel’s new rule is flawed and the decision erroneous.
The United States responded first with the obligatory standard of proof argument that every party not bearing heightened scrutiny uses in the hopes of winning without getting to the merits of the case. Then they basically said nuh-uh, they did too decide correctly.
The arguments are mainly legal, but the DOJ also disagrees on a crucial point of fact: whether the German government uses its compulsory attendance law in order to prevent Christians from homeschooling their children for religious reasons.
Appellate courts give deference to trial-level findings of fact. Since this was an administrative case, the trial level wasn’t in a federal district court, but rather before an administrative judge, who granted the Romeikes’ request for asylum. In order to rule in their favor, the judge must have made factual findings in favor of the Romeikes. Yet, the only reference to findings of fact is in a DOJ reference to the “Board.” How that relates to the administrative judge’s decision, I do not know.

Morgan Smith:

Some Texas high school students who failed state standardized exams this spring were given a reprieve under the comprehensive education bill that Gov. Rick Perry signed in early June.
Under current law, they would have had to take 15 state standardized exams to graduate. With the changes in House Bill 5 that begin in the coming school year, they will need to pass only 5. Shortly after Perry signed the bill, which cleared both chambers of the Legislature unanimously, the Texas Education Agency announced that current high school students would not have to retake exams they had failed in any of the six subjects that the new law removed from the state’s testing requirements. They are algebra II, chemistry, English III, geometry, physics and world history.
But as educators welcome the relief that the legislation brought from what were widely considered onerous state testing requirements, some school districts are now looking ahead at another part of the law, which will take effect in the 2014-15 school year and broadly expand the courses that will count toward a diploma.

Olga Khazan, via a kind reader’s email:

It’s hard not to get jealous when I talk to my extended family.
My cousin’s husband gets 36 vacation days per year, not including holidays. If he wants, he can leave his job for a brief hiatus and come back to a guaranteed position months later.
Tuition at his daughter’s university is free, though she took out a small loan for living expenses. Its interest rate is 1 percent.
My cousin is a recent immigrant, and while she was learning the language and training for jobs, the state gave her 700 euros a month to live on.
They had another kid six years ago, and though they both work, they’ll collect 100 euros a month from the government until the day she turns 17.
They of course live in Finland, home to saunas, quirky metal bands, and people who have for decades opted for equality and security over keeping more of their paychecks.
Inarguably one of the world’s most generous — and successful — welfare states, the country has a lower infant mortality rate, better school scores, and a far lower poverty rate than the United States, and it’s the second-happiest country on earth (the U.S. doesn’t break the top 10). According to the OECD, Finns on average give an 8.8 score to their overall life satisfaction. Americans are at 7.5.

Much more on Finland’s schools, here.

Neal McCluskey:

At this point, I think I’ve said all I need to about the doubling of interest rates on subsidized federal student loans. Basically, the doubling won’t have a big impact one way or another, but putting a little more payment burden on the students consuming higher education is probably a good thing. Why? Because cheap aid encourages students to demand stuff they otherwise wouldn’t, and enables colleges to raise their prices at excessive rates.
That said, since the nation will likely be talking about student aid for a while longer, now is probably a good time to reprint – and expand – the list of empirical studies that have, in one way or another, found that schools in large part capture aid money rather than becoming more affordable. The list probably isn’t exhaustive, and there are many limitations that make it impossible to prove that aid fuels inflation, but combined with the logic that you’ll willingly pay more if you have someone else’s money, these studies show that there is very good reason to conclude that aid is counterproductive:
John D. Singell, Jr., and Joe A. Stone, “For Whom the Pell Tolls: The Response of University Tuition to Federal Grants-in-Aid,” Economics of Education Review 26, no. 3 (2006): 285-95.

Matt McDonald, Laura Crawford, Tucker Warren, Russ Grote.

Erik McClure

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” ― Eric Hoffer
Yesterday, the University of Washington finally mailed me my diploma. A Bachelor of Science in Applied Computational Math and Science: Discrete Math and Algorithms. I learned a lot of things in college. I learned how to take tests and how to pinpoint exactly what useless crap a particular final needed me to memorize. I learned that math is an incredibly beautiful thing that has been butchered so badly I hated it all the way until my second year of college. I learned that creativity is useless and all problems have one specific right answer you can find in the back of a textbook somewhere, because that’s all I was ever graded on. I learned that getting into the CSE major is more about fighting an enormous, broken bureaucratic mess than actually being good at computer science. But most of all, I learned that our educational system is so obsessed with itself it can’t even recognize it’s own shortcomings.
The first accelerated program I was accepted into was the Gifted program in middle school. I went from getting As in everything to failing every single one of my core classes. Determined to prove myself, I managed to recover my grades to Bs and Cs by the end of 7th grade, and by the end of 8th grade I was back up to As and Bs. I didn’t do this by getting smarter, I did it by getting better at following directions. I got better at taking tests. I became adept at figuring out precisely what the teacher wanted me to do, and then doing only that, so I could maximize both my free time and my grades. By the time I reached high school, I would always meticulously go over the project requirements, systematically satisfying each bullet point in order to maximize my score. During tests, I not only skipped over difficult questions, I would actively seek out hints in the later questions to help me narrow down possible answers. My ability to squeeze out high grades had more to do with my aptitude at filling in the right bubbles on a piece of paper then actually understanding the material.

Lee Siegel

You’ve probably heard the baleful reports. The number of college students majoring in the humanities is plummeting, according to a big study released last month by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The news has provoked a flood of high-minded essays deploring the development as a symptom and portent of American decline.
But there is another way to look at this supposed revelation (the number of humanities majors has actually been falling since the 1970s).
The bright side is this: The destruction of the humanities by the humanities is, finally, coming to a halt. No more will literature, as part of an academic curriculum, extinguish the incandescence of literature. No longer will the reading of, say, “King Lear” or D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love” result in the flattening of these transfiguring encounters into just two more elements in an undergraduate career–the onerous stuff of multiple-choice quizzes, exam essays and homework assignments.
The disheartening fact is that for every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few–the British scholar Frank Kermode kindled Shakespeare into an eternal flame in my head–there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two hours in the periodontist’s chair. In their numbing hands, the term “humanities” became code for “and you don’t even have to show up to get an A.”

Matt Asay:

One of the mantras of the Big Data revolution is that causation no longer matters. It’s enough, the theory goes, to seek correlations in our copious data, deciphering “what” is happening and not bothering with “why.” But not only is this problematic for a business looking for optimal retail pricing strategies, it’s dramatically more so for those charged with crafting public policy.
For governments and other public institutions, it turns out that understanding causation matters a great deal.
Causation Loses Its Sex Appeal
The “forget-causation-seek-correlation” Big Data crowd has been around for years and its most sophisticated proponents are Kenneth Cukier (The Economist) and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Oxford University). In their excellent Big Data, the authors argue: “In a big-data world … we won’t have to be fixated on causality; instead we can discover patterns and correlations in the data that offer us novel and invaluable insights. Big data is about what, not why.”
The idea is that given enough data, algorithms can appreciate correlations between seemingly disparate data sets without bothering to understand those correlations. It is enough to see that a rise in the purchase of Pop-Tarts at Wal-Mart highly correlates with hurricane warnings. Wal-Mart needn’t understand why: it just needs to stock Pop-Tarts in a visible area of the store whenever hurricane warnings are issued.

No One of Any Import:

Blogging, Parenting, Political Correctness 9 June 2013 Comments: 11
I want to talk a little more about my decision to fundraise for the Tampa Bay HEAT.
My decision is based on something bigger than the gratitude I feel for this organization. I am fundraising for the HEAT’s dream of a full service school building because I see a tremendous need for it.
As I have encountered various homeschool groups in the last two years, I have noticed a pattern. Each group tends to have a particular focus: academics, informal fellowship, or sports. Of course, these goals overlap, but most groups give priority to one category over the others.
Without question, the hardest need to satisfy when homeschooling is participation in team sports. “Tebow” laws are great but not a complete answer to the question of how we provide team sports to the homeschooling community at large.

Jeffrey Davis:

In the literary world, forests have often been the symbol of menace.
Think of how many times someone has uttered “we’re not out of the woods yet.”
But a forest is a great place to begin one’s outdoors education and apply science, math, reading and writing.
And the Madison Metropolitan School District is playing a role.
Several retired MMSD teachers recently spoke of alerting newer teachers to take advantage of the opportunity to introduce children to the Madison School Forest, a 307-acre woods the district owns southwest of Verona in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area. It is also known as the Jackson School Forest after naturalist Joseph “Bud” Jackson.

The school forest is a gem.

Diane Kern and Lynne Derbyshire:

Next spring, thousands of Rhode Island high school students may be denied a diploma, not because of poor grades, but because of low scores on New England Common Assessment Program tests. The current state Board of Education’s plan to use the standardized test to help grant or deny high school diplomas will certainly fail, not educate, our bright and capable students.
It is not right or wise to use high-stakes testing to keep college and career-ready students from graduating high school. Research also does not support using NECAP, or other high-stakes tests for that matter, as a high-school graduation requirement.
There are many flaws in the current board policy and the state Department of Education’s five-year strategic plan, now ending its third year. We’ll raise two here.
The foremost issue is the Rhode Island public school funding formula, which currently denies students access to an equitable quality public education. As our neighbors in Massachusetts did 10 years ago, we should have frontloaded the resolution of this serious problem.

Andrew Gillen:

Colorado State University-Global Campus was in the news last fall as the first college to offer credit for a MOOC course. No one has yet taken up CSU-Global on its offer, though keep in mind it was a single course in computer science.
But offering credit for a MOOC is not the only uncommon practice at CSU-Global:
CSU-Global is a public university that is entirely online – no labs, football stadium, dorms, etc.
It doesn’t receive any state appropriations. After some state startup capital, CSU-Global operates without state funding and administrators say it is financially sustainable. (The average per-student state appropriation for a four-year public university is around $8,000.)
CSU-Global relies entirely on adjunct professors; no tenured faculty.
It has a very small administration–72 full-time employees for 8,500 students.
To enroll in CSU-Global, students already must have 12 credit hours from another university.

Maia Szalavitz:

A test for six antibodies in an expectant mom’s blood may predict with more than 99% certainty which children are at highest risk of developing autism.
In a study published in Translational Psychiatry, researchers report that 23% of all cases of autism may result from the presence of maternal antibodies that interfere with fetal brain development during pregnancy. The work builds on a 2008 study from the same scientists that first described the group of antibodies in mothers-to-be. The latest paper describes the specific antibodies and provides more detail on what they do.
“It’s very exciting,” says Alycia Halladay, Senior Director of Environmental and Clinical Sciences for Autism Speaks, who was not associated with the research.

Colorado Springs Gazette:

Politicians, including Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, want voters in November to approve a massive, historic and permanent billion-dollar-a-year tax increase that will raise income tax rates of middle-class wage earners from 4.63 percent to as high as 5.9 percent. It could be a hard sell, to say the least, but politicians tell us it’s all for the children. It’s an education tax, they insist.
The progressive tax, which would do away with Colorado’s fair and enviable flat tax, would cost almost $600 each year for a family living on $100,000. For someone earning $45,000, the cost would be $166.50.
Most decent human beings care about children and value education, so perhaps they’ll think a giant wallop to Colorado’s economy, along with a hit to household budgets, makes good sense. Anything for the children.
Just make sure the politicians prove it. Make sure this money will go for education before even considering a vote in favor of something that will tax Colorado incomes at a rate higher than is paid in more progressive states, such as Michigan, Massachusetts and Illinois. Understand that voting to take an additional $1 billion a year out of Colorado payrolls will be a gift to flourishing states, such as Texas and Wyoming, that charge no income tax and try to lure talent and employers away from Colorado on that basis.

Related: Madison’s planned spending and property tax increase for 2013-2014.

Andy Henion:

Students perform better in math when their instructors use hand gestures–a simple teaching tool that could pay off in higher-level classes like algebra.
The study published in Child Development [1] provides some of the strongest evidence yet that gesturing may have a unique effect on learning. Teachers in the United States tend to use gestures less than teachers in other countries.
Straight from the Source
Read the original study [1]
“Gesturing can be a very beneficial tool that is completely free and easily employed in classrooms,” says Kimberly Fenn, study co-author and assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “And I think it can have long-lasting effects.”
Fenn and her colleagues conducted an experiment with 184 second, third, and fourth-graders in Michigan elementary classrooms.
Half of the students were shown videos of an instructor teaching math problems using only speech. The others were shown videos of the instructor teaching the same problems using both speech and gestures.
The problem involved mathematical equivalence (i.e., 4+5+7=__+7), which is known to be critical to later algebraic learning. In the speech-only videos, the instructor simply explains the problem. In the other videos, the instructor uses two hand gestures while speaking, using different hands to refer to the two sides of the equation.

Leslie Jamison:

Near the end of The Faraway Nearby–a collage-style memoir that brings together history and myth, science and confession–Rebecca Solnit describes an arctic sled made of frozen meat and bones. It falls to pieces during a sudden heat wave when the dogs devour its newly thawed parts. What’s remarkable about the image isn’t just its macabre silhouette but the kind of restless thinking it generates. Solnit doesn’t deploy the sled as a metaphoric vehicle for any single message; she uses it to consider multiple truths at once: how suddenly a whole can dissolve into its parts, how our hungers compel us to destroy what we need, and how our most precious objects fall apart for reasons we can’t predict or forestall.
Throughout The Faraway Nearby, Solnit draws analogies between disparate objects and anecdotes in order to make newly available–thawed, edible–those connections she finds between them. She presents these connections as a series of consolations: “Pared back to its bare bones,” Solnit writes, “this book is a history of an emergency and the stories that kept me company then.” The “emergency” is her mother’s dementia, and its urgency reminds us that the associative structure of The Faraway Nearby is less about intellectual virtuosity and more about survival. Solnit finds echoes across registers in order to feel less alone.

I read with interest Madison School Board President Ed Hughes’ blog post on local spending, redistributed state tax dollars & property tax increases. Mr. Hughes mentioned Oconomowoc:

Superintendent Cheatham and new Assistant Superintendent for Business Services Mike Barry (recently arrived from the Oconomowoc school district to replace Erik Kass) promise a zero-based approach to budgeting for the 2014-15 school year, so the budgeting process promises to be more lively next year.

Mr. Hughes, writing on May 3, 2012: Budget Cuts: We Won’t Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That’s Okay..
Alan Borsuk recently followed up on the changes (fewer, but better paid teachers) in Oconomowoc.
Rocketship and Avenues are also worth looking into.

Sherri Ackerman:

After months of reports that some Florida public schools are limiting or denying students access to Florida Virtual School, the state’s chancellor of public schools is putting districts on notice.
“School districts may not limit student access to courses offered through the FLVS,” Pam Stewart wrote in a recent memo to superintendents. “Since the Florida Legislature passed legislation in 2013 that impacts the funding of school districts and FLVS will receive, it is important that you remember the statutory requirements.”
As redefinED has noted, the new funding formula has left fewer state dollars for both districts and FLVS and resulted in an unintended consequence: a dramatic drop in enrollment for Florida Virtual, the nation’s largest provider of online classes. Some districts immediately started steering students away from FLVS, while at least a few charter schools told students they would have to pay for FLVS courses.

Andrew Gillen:

This analysis examines default rates at American colleges and demonstrateshow using input-adjusted rates can indicate if schools are doing better–or worse–than expected in preparing their students for success, and how they could immediately improve an existing higher education accountability system.

Jay Greene:

On President Obama’s recent visit to Ireland, he offered a surprising explanation of the enduring tensions there: “If towns remain divided–if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs–if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.” Given his use of the word “we,” it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is also how the president views religious “schools and buildings” in the United States.
Like much of the Democratic Party leadership, Mr. Obama supports allowing families to use public funds to attend the school of their choice, including charter schools, but strongly opposes the inclusion of private religious schools among the options. Opponents of voucher programs that include religious schools often cite “separation of church and state” concerns.

Holly Capelo:

Hands over temples and eyes closed, as if trying to contain the shifting permutations of tactical possibilities, a chess champion calculates twenty moves forward in her game. In the shop windows of Istanbul, there are chess boards for sale to tourists. In the common rooms of state prisons across the United States, inmates play endless rounds over black and white boards. Right now, many of the 7.5 million registered online chess players from 160 countries are sparring with one another from their computers. Researchers in the Brain and Behavioral Sciences Department at UT Dallas ask chess players to quickly memorize and re-identify positions on a chess board, and compare this ability to the capacity for facial pattern recognition.
Each chess game holds the promise of resolution by one player’s aggressive victory, by the other’s blunder, by a draw, or by the clock. The game therefore forms a closed system, with an objective ranking system, onto which researchers can map other, less resolved, quandaries. For some decades, cognitive and social scientists have used chess as a proxy to investigate how the interpersonal aspects of a competitive experience may affect its outcome.

edushyster:

Reader: more and more white people agree that strict, “no excuses” style charter schools provide an ideal learning environment for poor minority kids. As proof of this surging enthusiasm I give you exhibit A: a glowing report about Harlem’s Democracy Prep charter school featured in the current issue of the New Yorker, one of America’s whitest magazines. (Full disclosure: I am white and also a New Yorker subscriber). Which brings us to today’s fiercely urgent question: why are white people so eager to advocate for the sort of schools to which they would never send their own children?
Through the Gauntlet
The New Yorker piece, by writer Ian Frazier, is subtitled ‘Up Life’s Ladder’–but ‘gauntlet’ might be a more accurate metaphor. Frazier is dazzled by the spectacle of the 44 members of Democracy Prep’s first graduating class, on stage at the Apollo Theater in their school-bus-yellow robes, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on hand to fete them. But more than three quarters of Democracy Prep’s students–23% each year–never made it onto the stage. If Frazier is aware of the school’s attrition rate, among the highest in New York City, he doesn’t mention it. Nor does Frazier have anything to say about the school’s strict “no excuses” disciplinary policy. Instead, he seems excited by the fact that students at the school are required to take Korean, the only foreign language offered. Best of all, Frazier likes the fact that 100% of the remaining graduates are headed to a four-year college.

Erin Richards:

t’s midmorning on a Saturday in June when Will Reichardt unlocks the front door of a south side office and grabs the day’s supplies: clipboard, school fliers in Spanish and English, some enrollment applications.
Just in case.
Then Reichardt drives his minivan to the local laundromats, where he circles dryers and washers and toddlers and parents, asking each family, in Spanish, to consider the opportunities at a new school opening in August called Rocketship.
A newcomer to Milwaukee, Rocketship Education is a nonprofit elementary charter-school network based in San Jose, Calif., that’s attracting national attention for its low-cost schools that blend traditional instruction with technological intervention.
Rocketship’s first national expansion site is Southside Community Prep, a new school at 3003 W. Cleveland Ave. which will operate under a special charter with the City of Milwaukee. If successful, Rocketship may open up to eight schools serving up to 4,000 children in Milwaukee.
The organization’s mission is to eliminate the achievement gap by rapidly replicating schools that perform better and cost less than local options. It intends to grow from 3,800 students in California to 25,000 students in six states by 2018.
In a decade, leaders estimate, they could be educating 200,000 students in 30 cities.
But in Milwaukee, Rocketship is an unknown, and the hurdles to recruiting students in a highly competitive school landscape have it scrambling to enroll at least 300 students by an Aug. 19 start date — now four weeks away.

Related: A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school last year.

Andrew Gillen:

Our new study, In Debt and In the Dark: It’s Time for Better Information on Student Loan Defaults, made two main points. First, we should improve the way we use default rates to hold colleges accountable by comparing expected to actual default rates rather than having a single cutoff that applies to all colleges (See a short synopsis).
The second point was that default rates are a great source of information for prospective students. One of the ways we illustrated this was by finding (to our dismay) the many colleges where default rates were greater than the graduation rates. We warned that these colleges should set of a “red flag” in the minds of students who will need to borrow to attend these colleges. Caution is warranted, as graduation rates are only tracked for first-time, full-time students based on when they begin college whereas default rates are tracked for borrowers based on when they start repaying their loans (and they ignore students’ Perkins and GradPLUS loans).
In the report, we looked at these red flag colleges from several angles in Table 1 on page 11 (e.g., the adjusted default rate takes into account the percent of students borrowing). Today, we introduce another angle: geography. The maps below show the locations of red flag colleges in four college towns – Boston, San Francisco, Houston, and Chicago.

Mike Antonucci:

Per-pupil spending in Indiana, and growth in same, trailed the national averages in 2010-11. But while spending in the booming Hamilton Southeastern Schools topped out at $7,374, the two highest spending school districts in the state both had rapidly shrinking K-12 enrollment.
The Indianapolis Public Schools lost 13.3 percent of its students between 2006 and 2011 and was in danger of being overtaken by Fort Wayne as the largest school district in Indiana. Nevertheless, Indianapolis spent $13,908 per pupil, over $4,500 more per pupil than the state average.

Madison has long spent more per student than most districts. The most recent 2012-2013 budget, via a kind Donna Williams and Matthew DeFour email is $392,789,303 or $14,496.74 per student (27,095 students, including pre-k).

Cringely:

Programmers in Bangalore will soon boast Georgia Tech degrees without even having a passport.
There are plenty of online courses available from prestigious universities like MIT and Harvard — most of them free. There are plenty of online degree programs, too — most of them not free and in fact not even discounted. So this Georgia Tech program, made possible by a $2 million grant from AT&T, is something else. It could be the future of technical education. It could be the beginning of the end for elite U.S university programs. Or it might well be both.
The online classes are all free, by the way, it’s just the degree that costs money.
This technical capability has been around for several years but no prestigious U.S. university has made the jump before now because it’s too scary. Georgia Tech is launching its program, I believe, to gain first-mover advantage in this new industry, which I suppose is education, maybe training, but more properly something more like brand sharing or status conferral.

Caroline Craig:

If you plan to help your kids with their homework in the future, better start boning up on your programming skills now. (And you thought new math was hard!)
The U.K. Department of Education this week made a radical departure from its current curriculum, announcing plans to begin teaching “rigorous computer science” to all children ages 5 to 14. After studying the current state of instruction, the department concluded that computing in British schools had been “dumbed down” and attempts to teach programming dropped. Children were instead merely being exposed to word processors and spreadsheets, “mostly Word, Excel, and, of course, all running on Windows.” They axed the curriculum, saying it was “so harmful, boring, and/or irrelevant it should simply be scrapped.”
As the British education minister commented:

The Buffalo News:

One of the most preposterous expenses that Western New York taxpayers are forced to bear is the cosmetic surgery rider included in some public union contracts, including that of Buffalo teachers, where the cost has become particularly onerous.
Facing elimination of nearly half the Buffalo School District’s band and orchestra programs, the School Board is targeting superficial anti-wrinkle procedures such as facial peels and microderm abrasions. The cost of such procedures to the district in the 2011-12 school year came to nearly $1.7 million, according to School Board member John B. Licata, who has sponsored a resolution to deny such claims from teachers and administrators.
We sympathize with Licata and the board, which unanimously approved his resolution in late June, but as Philip Rumore, president of the Buffalo Teachers Federation, noted, this is a contractual issue. For reasons that defy understanding, the school district at one time provided that benefit to some teachers and administrators.
As foolish as it was, the cosmetic surgery rider is in the contract. That makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the district simply to decide not to cover certain procedures.
But now, teachers and students are about to pay a steep price for it. Licata believes the savings from his proposal could help preserve the endangered music programs, whose pending termination has stirred anger in the community.

Matthew DiCarlo

In education today, data, particularly testing data, are everywhere. One of many potentially valuable uses of these data is helping teachers improve instruction – e.g., identifying students’ strengths and weaknesses, etc. Of course, this positive impact depends on the quality of the data and how it is presented to educators, among other factors. But there’s an even more basic requirement – teachers actually have to use it.
In an article published in the latest issue of the journal Education Finance and Policy, economist John Tyler takes a thorough look at teachers’ use of an online data system in a mid-sized urban district between 2008 and 2010. A few years prior, this district invested heavily in benchmark formative assessments (four per year) for students in grades 3-8, and an online “dashboard” system to go along with them. The assessments’ results are fed into the system in a timely manner. The basic idea is to give these teachers a continual stream of information, past and present, about their students’ performance.
Tyler uses weblogs from the district, as well as focus groups with teachers, to examine the extent and nature of teachers’ data usage (as well as a few other things, such as the relationship between usage and value-added). What he finds is not particularly heartening. In short, teachers didn’t really use the data.

Ruthie:

Our great nation is known for the constant pursuit of equality and for “offering every citizen “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In education, while there is an increasing focus on minority achievement, especially for African American and Hispanic students, few people are acknowledging the growing disparity in gender achievement in the United States.
According to New York Times bestselling author Michael Gurian, for every 100 girls suspended from elementary and secondary school, 250 boys are suspended. For every 100 girls diagnosed with a learning disability, 276 boys are so diagnosed. Also, for every 100 girls expelled from school, 355 boys are expelled.
Similarly, boys are expelled from preschool at five times the rate of girls, and boys are 60% more likely to be held back in kindergarten than girls. More girls than boys take college prep courses in high school and take the SAT. On average, girls get better grades than boys and graduate with high GPA’s. Considering these statistics it is not at all surprising that more girls receive college degrees.
In his book, Why Boys Fail, Richard Whitmire reports that the reading skills of the average 17-year-old boy have steadily declined over the last 20 years. According to estimates, if 5% more boys completed high school and matriculated to college, the nation would save $8 billion a year in welfare and criminal justice costs.

I received a kind email from Madison School Board President Ed Hughes earlier today regarding the proposed property tax increase associated with the 2013-2014 District budget.
Ed’s email:

Jim —
Your comparison to the tax rates in Middleton is a bit misleading. The Middleton-Cross Plains school district that has a mill rate that is among the lowest in Dane County. I am attaching a table (.xls file) that shows the mill rates for the Dane County school districts. As you will see, Madison’s mill rate is lower than the county average, though higher than Middleton’s. (Middleton has property value/student that is about 10% higher than Madison, which helps explain the difference.)
The table also includes the expenses/student figures relied upon by DPI for purposes of calculating general state aid for the 2012-13 school year. You may be surprised to see that Madison’s per-student expenditures as measured for these purposes is among the lowest in Dane County. Madison’s cost/student expenditures went up in the recently-completed school year, for reasons I explain here: http://tinyurl.com/obd2wty
Ed

My followup email:
Hi Ed:
Thanks so much for taking the time to write and sending this along – including your helpful post.
I appreciate and will post this information.
That said, and as you surely know, “mill rate” is just one part of the tax & spending equation:
1. District spending growth driven by new programs, compensation & step increases, infinite campus, student population changes, open enrollment out/in,
2. ongoing “same service” governance, including Fund 80,
3. property tax base changes (see the great recession),
4. exempt properties (an issue in Madison) and
5. growth in other property taxes such as city, county and tech schools.
Homeowners see their “total” property taxes increasing annually, despite declining to flat income. Middleton’s 16% positive delta is material and not simply related to the “mill rate”.
Further, I continue to be surprised that the budget documents fail to include total spending. How are you evaluating this on a piecemeal basis without the topline number? – a number that seems to change every time a new document is discussed.
Finally, I would not be quite as concerned with the ongoing budget spaghetti if Madison’s spending were more typical for many districts along with improved reading results. We seem to be continuing the “same service” approach of spending more than most and delivering sub-par academic results for many students. (Note the recent expert review of the Madison schools Analysis: Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap.)
That is the issue for our community.
Best wishes,
Jim
Related: Middleton-Cross Plains’ $91,025,771 2012-2013 approved budget (1.1mb PDF) for 6,577 students, or $13,840.01 per student, roughly 4.7% less than Madison’s 2012-2013 spending.

Allen St. John:

“We were having fun, and in a split second, he was dead.”
In 2011, 3291 American teenagers were killed in automobile accidents. Car crashes account for more than a third of teenage deaths, by far the largest cause-surpassing the number of teens killed separately by guns, drugs, cancer, homicide, and suicide. Drivers between 16 and 19 years old have a fatal-accident rate more than three times that of those between 30 and 69.
If this were a disease, we’d declare it an epidemic. If kids were being killed by a foreign government, we’d go to war. But since these deaths happen one at a time, nine or so Donovan Tessmers every day, no one seems to care enough to do anything. Not the government, not the insurance companies, not even the parents.
Upper-middle-class American parents spend almost $9000 annually on enrichment activities for their children. But $100-per-hour cello lessons won’t make most kids Yo-Yo Ma. The soccer career of the average boy or girl in a $1500-a-season travel league ends with high school. Most teenagers will drive for the rest of their lives.
Yet parents tend to cheap out when it comes to teaching driving to kids. The price of a typical driving course is $300. When Mercedes-Benz started its driving academy in 2009-at $1390, more than four times as expensive as the average American driving class-the company conducted focus groups with its upper-income customers, asking them how they would go about selecting a piano teacher for their kids. The answers were thoughtful, including soliciting referrals from other parents, conducting personal interviews, and observing actual lessons. By contrast, those same parents found driving schools through the Yellow Pages.

Helaine Olen:

The question of student loans is taking on an increasing urgency everywhere but Washington.
Rates on federally subsidized loans doubled to almost 7% on July 1,thanks to Congressional bickering and dithering. The latest attempt to roll back the rates failed to get out of the Senate earlier this week, when sponsoring Democrats failed to break a Republican filibuster against the bill.
There’s a clear double standard here. If you are a Congressman who needs to fly somewhere, you can rely on your fellow elected officials to bail you out with special legislation designed to exempt air traffic controllers from the impact of sequester within a day or so. If you are a student who needs to know student loan rates so you can actually apply for one before the start of the academic year later this summer … well, good luck to you. No majority in Congress has your back.
Senator Elizabeth Warren wants to set the rate at 0.75% for the next year, the same rate the Federal Reserve charges banks that borrow money from them on a short-term basis.Others – including many Republicans and President Barack Obama – would like to see a floating rate tied to the ten-year Treasury note.

Nicomollo:

Today I’m releasing Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Geometry. It’s a Compass and Straightedge tool/puzzle game written in JavaScript. I’ve always thought Geometric Construction felt like a puzzle, so to me this pairing was quite natural. Compass and Straight edge is a technique for constructing shapes out of circles, straight lines, and their intersection points. You can read the wikipedia here – but watch out, some of the gifs are spoilers for the game.

Khadeeja Safdar:

Math and science majors are popular until students realize what they’re getting themselves into, according to new research.
In a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers Ralph Stinebrickner of Berea College and Todd R. Stinebrickner of the University of Western Ontario say that college students are fleeing from math, physics, chemistry and the like after dipping into some classes.
The researchers surveyed 655 students entering Berea College, a private liberal arts college located in Kentucky, in the falls of 2000 and 2001. The students were asked about their beliefs pertaining to majors 12 times during each year they were in school, the first time prior to starting college. The questions covered a variety of topics, including their certainty of graduating with a particular major, their anticipated grade point average and the amount of work they expected to do each day.

Anastasia Dawson:

A new law aims to offer more online classes to Florida students than ever before, but making sure it works as intended will take lots of time and planning, school officials say.
Gov. Rick Scott signed the bill into law July 1, allowing more out-of-state digital learning companies to partner with developing Florida online classes and requiring the Department of Education to research the effects. Now, the state has to figure out how to hold online teachers and curricula accountable.
The goal is to improve education for all Florida students, said Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, one of the bill’s sponsors.
“One of the biggest variables in students’ lives is the quality of the teacher at the front of their classroom,” Brandes said. “If we can somehow standardize the quality of instruction they’re receiving, we can remove one of the variables from their educational success. I don’t think we’re going to get to that point where every student is learning the same thing, but we should be using technology to help our teachers facilitate that process.”

Trevor Smith:

Lupe Fiasco is known for his outspoken political attitude. The rapper has been known to rant about his views, and most recently wrote for Kanye West’s racially charged track “Black Skinhead”. Fiasco got a chance to speak to some recent graduates this weekend at the 2013 Mass Black Male Graduation And Transition To Manhood Ceremony, where he was able to speak about his issues with the American education system.
Lupe began his speech with a critique of the U.S. school system. “Congratulations, you have graduated from one of the most terrible, substandard school systems in the entire world. You have just spent the last…12 years receiving one of the worst educations on earth. You are at least four, five steps behind people in other countries that are younger than you,” he declared.

July, 2013 Madison Schools 2013-2014 Budget Presentation (PDF). Notes:

• No mention of total spending…. How might the Board exercise its oversight obligation without the entire picture?
• The substantial increase in redistributed state tax dollars (due to 4K) last year is not mentioned. Rather, a bit of rhetoric: “The 2013-14 budget development process has focused on actions which begin to align MMSD resources with the Strategic Framework Priorities and strategies to manage the tax levy in light of a significant loss of state aid.” In fact, according to page 6, the District expects to receive $46,392,012 in redistributed state tax dollars, which is a six (6%) increase over the funds received two years ago.
• The District’s fund equity (financial cushion, or reserves) has more than doubled in the past eight years, from $22,368,031 in 2005 to $46,943,263 in 2012.
  
• Outbound open enrollment continues to grow, up 14% to 1,041 leavers in 2013 (281 inbound from other Districts).
• There is no mention of the local tax or economic base:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The growth in Fund 80 (MSCR) property taxes and spending has been controversial over the years. Fund 80, up until recently was NOT subject to state imposed property tax growth limitations.
• Matthew DeFour briefly summarizes the partial budget information here. DeFour mentions (no source referenced or linked – in 2013?) that the total 2013-2014 budget will be $391,000,000. I don’t believe it:
  

  The January, 2012 budget document mentioned “District spending remains largely flat at $369,394,753” (2012-2013), yet the “baseline” for 2013-2014 mentions planned spending of $392,807,993 “a decrease of $70,235 or (0.02%) less than the 2012-13 Revised Budget” (around $15k/student). The District’s budget generally increases throughout the school year, growing 6.3% from January, 2012 to April, 2013. Follow the District’s budget changes for the past year, here.

Finally, the document includes this brief paragraph:

Work will begin on the 2014-15 early this fall. The process will be zero-based, and every line item and FTE will be carefully reviewed to ensure that resources are being used efficiently. The budget development process will also include a review of benefit programs and procurement practices, among other areas.

One hopes that programs will indeed be reviewed and efforts focused on the most urgent issues, particularly the District’s disastrous reading scores.
Ironically, the recent “expert review” found that Analysis: Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap. If this is the case (and I agree with their conclusion – making changes will be extraordinarily difficult), what are students, taxpayers and citizens getting for the annual tax & spending growth?
I took a quick look at property taxes in Middleton and Madison on a $230,000 home. A Middleton home paid $4,648.16 in 2012 while a Madison home paid 16% more, or $5,408.38.

Abby Andrietsch and Kole Knueppel, via several kind reader emails:

Charter. Choice. Public.
In recent weeks, these words became more politically charged than ever before. They are emblematic of the divisive debate surrounding school funding and policy changes included in the new state budget.
Now, the time for discussion and deliberation is over. The budget is law. It is time for Milwaukee’s education stakeholders to move forward and to do so together for the benefit of all our city’s children — no matter what type of school they attend. For the sake of our city’s prosperity and quality of life today and in the future, we must turn our collective efforts toward improving the quality of all schools.
Despite decades of effort, too many Milwaukee children still lack access to an effective, high-quality education. In fact, we have the largest racial achievement gap in the country. Without the opportunity to attend an excellent school, students will continue to fall behind, their challenges compounding into insurmountable roadblocks to success in academics and life.
In Milwaukee, there are great Milwaukee Public Schools, choice schools and charter schools. Still, each of these categories contains some of the worst schools in our community. Instead of bickering over how schools are organized, we need more collaboration and sharing of best practices across all three sectors. We need to work together to ensure that every type of school is capable of equipping students for the future.
Since 2010, Schools That Can Milwaukee has partnered with and supported high-quality and high-potential schools across all three sectors to close the Milwaukee achievement gap and ensure all students have the opportunity to learn and succeed. By focusing on kids and quality instead of the differences between school types, STCM is leading an unprecedented cross-sector collaboration of talented leaders from MPS, charter and choice schools serving predominantly low-income students.
Over the past three years, schools supported by STCM have outperformed their Milwaukee peers on the annual standardized Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, and many also have beaten state test score averages. During the 2013-’14 school year, STCM will work with 35 traditional MPS, charter and choice schools, supporting more than 150 school and teacher leaders reaching over 13,000 students. Not only are these leaders coming together with a vision of excellence for their own schools, but also a larger vision of quality for our community and our children.

Barry Garelick, via a kind email

The New York Times recently published a piece called “The Faulty Logic of the Math Wars” by W. Stephen Wilson (a math professor at Johns Hopkins University) and Alice Crary. While the article itself is worth reading, I found the reaction of the readers to be equally fascinating. They revealed the ideological divide that defines this “war”. I was reminded of Tom Wolfe’s famous description of the reaction of the New Yorker literati to his 1965 article in the New York Herald Tribune that criticized the culture of The New Yorker magazine: “They screamed like weenies over a wood fire.”

Kevin Kiley:

That seems to be the case with an Oregon proposal that has generated headlines such as “Plan would make tuition free at Oregon colleges,” “Oregon is doing free higher education the right way,” and “Oregon looking to eliminate tuition and loans for higher education students.”
Despite the headlines, the state didn’t suddenly abandon all plans to charge tuition. Last week the Oregon legislature took the first steps toward possibly implementing a plan that would allow public college and university students to forgo upfront tuition payments in exchange for paying a portion of their wages back to their alma mater for about 25 years following graduation. While it may mean no money down, it could still add up to large tuition bills.
But the program is a long way from actually being instituted. The bill approved by the legislature, if it is signed by the governor, would only direct the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission – a relatively new agency created amid broader governance changes in recent years — to create a pilot program for legislative consideration in 2015. If the governor signs the bill, the commission would work between now and the 2015 legislative session to figure out how to overcome significant logistical barriers to implementation and the pros and cons of implementing such a system.

Ki Mae Heussner:

The so-called quantified self movement is knocking on the nursery door. As adults rush to wrap their wrists with activity trackers and fill their smartphone screens with calorie counters, a number of new companies are trying to court them with gadgets for their most vulnerable appendages: their babies. But is all of that data really useful?
The most recent (and buzzworthy) product is a “smart diaper” from New York-based Pixie Scientific that uses camera technology and chemistry to detect when a baby might be suffering from a urinary tract infection, dehydration or other problems. The front of the diaper displays a square with colored boxes that change color when they interact with a protein, bacteria or other urine content that indicates a potential abnormality. To decode the colored patch, parents snap a picture of the diaper with a smartphone app that analyzes the color changes and returns a result.
“I was driving with my wife and daughter one day, when my wife asked if the baby had wet herself,” Yaroslav Faybishenko, Pixie’s founder, told the New York Times. “I realized she was sitting in data.”

Victor Fleischer:

The law school at Seton Hall University has put its untenured faculty on legal notice that their contracts may not be renewed for the 2014-15 academic year. The firings of these seven individuals are not certain, depending on the outcome of other steps the administration will try to bring the budget in balance.
The situation at Seton Hall is representative of many other non-elite law schools. Firing untenured faculty is a shortsighted approach to managing an academic budget. It encroaches on an important principle of academic freedom, namely that a tenure decision should be based on the merit of the case, not the budget of the department.
As a tax scholar who writes about issues that can hit rich people in the pocketbook, I am sometimes reminded why the institution of tenure, for all its flaws, is worth keeping around.

Paul Caron has more.

Ashley Lauren Samsa:

“Look at you. You’re so tan! Sometimes I wish I were a teacher so I could get summers off, too,” a friend says to me at an Independence Day barbecue. I decide not to mention that the only reason I have a tan is because I sit outside on my patio while writing – a second job I need during the summers in order to pay our ever-increasing bills.
My husband, also a teacher, has been on a pay freeze for three years, not even receiving the cost-of-living increase most jobs that require a bachelor’s degree offer. So, we both take on extra work during the summer on top of the planning and preparation we have for the upcoming school year.
My husband and I are not alone. About 62% of teachers have another job outside of teaching in order to make ends meet. Because of this stress, almost half of public school teachers leave the profession within the first five years of their career in order to take other jobs that pay a living wage, or at least pay closer to what their college-educated peers are earning.
It’s a popular trope in this day and age to bash teachers. The public’s hard-earned money goes to taxes that pay teacher salaries, and when teachers work only 10 months out of the year, why should they get paid more?

Christopher Schuetze:

Kosta Kuzmanovic’s wish is to be a radiologist in Australia. But the path is lined with hurdles for the 17-year-old Roma student from this dusty East European city, which still bears scars from wartime bombings in 1999.
As a member of one of Europe’s more disenfranchised minority groups, he may face financial, linguistic, bureaucratic and social barriers. If he does make it to an Australian university, it will be because of both his hard work and the Secondary Scholarship Program, run by the Roma Education Fund, a regional organization.
The program makes it possible for him to attend the Novi Sad Medical High School here, which offers counseling and financing for Roma students. “I have an opportunity, why wouldn’t I use it?” he said.
The Serbian government does not track how many Roma youth are in school. But the R.E.F. estimates that only one in three Roma students in Serbia even attempts to enroll in high school.

The Wall Street Journal:

Government researchers continue to show that federal student loans are hazardous to both students and taxpayers. But Senate liberals don’t seem to care, as long as the money keeps flowing to their constituents in the nonprofit academic world.
As the Senate prepares for Wednesday voting on student-loan subsidies, a coalition that includes congressional Republicans, President Obama and moderate Democrats favors reform that ties the rates on student loans to the 10-year Treasury rate. This protects taxpayers from having to guarantee low fixed rates to students while the government’s own borrowing costs rise. And it provides some marginal encouragement to students to consider whether their chosen course of study is worth the money.

Gabriella Hoffman:

A new study from McKinsey & Company reveals that 45 percent of four-year college graduates now work jobs that don’t require college degrees.
The study also revealed that one-third of college students believe their four-year education insufficiently prepared them for lives as adults.
If you read Campus Reform on a regular basis these findings should come as no surprise to you.
For the past several years, administrators and faculty at many institutions have abandoned the true purpose of college ­- equipping students with a true education. They have instead focused scarce resources on teaching the doctrines of tolerance, inclusion, and a host of other liberal false idols.
For example, students may now study for four years to receive degrees in subjects such as gender equality, labor studies, and medical marijuana growing.
Leftist faculty are using more traditional degrees as vessels for their leftist ideologies.

Sources:
Department of Numbers.
City of Madison Assessor Reports
Related:
August, 2006 (Deja-vu): Property Taxes Outstrip Income.
Budget Cuts: We Won’t Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That’s Okay.
Madison Schools’ 2013-2014 Budget Charts, Documents, Links, Background & Missing Numbers.
Madison’s long-term disastrous reading results.
The Hated Property Tax: Salience, Tax Rates, and Tax Revolts.
Levying the Land.
Revenue Potential and Implementation
Challenges (IMF PDF).
Tax Policy Reform and Economic Growth (OECD).
Stagnant School Governance; Tax & Spending Growth and the “NSA’s European Adventure”.










Analysis: Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap.
A Middleton home paid $4,648.16 in 2012 while a Madison home paid 16% more, or $5,408.38. Local efforts to significantly increase property taxes may grow the gap with Middleton..

Frank DeFord:

Our other team sports — baseball, basketball, ice hockey, not to mention soccer — all have strong foreign elements. Football is the all-American game, but, ironically, already middle-class all-American parents ­­– even fathers who played themselves — are showing a reluctance to allow their sons to play

The Economist:

BOTH relief and tears will greet the results of France’s school-leavingbaccalauréat exam on July 5th. With breathtaking efficiency, the entire country’s exam papers are corrected and marked within just two weeks. Founded in 1808 by Napoleon, the bac is an entry ticket to university as well as a yearly national ritual, which opens with a gruelling compulsory four-hour philosophy general paper that even scientists have to sit. This year the papers seem particularly revealing of how French youngsters are taught to view the world.
“What do we owe to the state?” was one essay option in the philosophy exam. In the economics and social science paper, pupils were asked to comment on a wealth-distribution table, showing that 10% of French households owned 48% of the country’s wealth, and then told to “demonstrate that social conflict can be a factor behind social cohesion”. We still have the mentality of the class struggle, says Nicolas Lecaussin, of the Institute of Fiscal and Economic Research (IREF), a think-tank, and author of a report on economics textbooks.

Chris Rickert:

It might seem strange that it’s an overwhelmingly white, middle-class school district about one-seventh the size of Madison’s that is considering a strategy that could narrow the kind of long-standing achievement gap Madison is becoming known for.
It’s not. Heavily influenced by its host city’s brand of establishment liberalism, the Madison School District isn’t known for tinkering much with the sacred cow that is traditional public education.
But should that change, school leaders might be wise to take a gander 11 miles south.
The Oregon School District has a task force to look into converting one of its three elementary schools, Netherwood Knoll, to a year-round calendar — something no other public school in Dane County has.
Spreading the standard 180-day school year out over 11 or 12 months is an intriguing idea given the well-documented “summer learning loss” phenomenon.
Even more to the point, summer learning loss is most apparent among low-income, often minority, students, and recent research has shown that year-round learning can be of most benefit to them.
New Madison superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said through a spokeswoman that year-round school isn’t on the district’s radar.

Related: Budget Cuts: We Won’t Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That’s Okay..

The Economist:

STUDENT loans are based on a simple idea: that a graduate’s future flow of earnings will more than cover the costs of doing a degree. But with unemployment rates in parts of the rich world at post-war highs, that may no longer hold true for many people. The consequences will be felt by everybody.
All over the world student indebtedness is causing problems–witness this month’s violent protests in Chile (see article). In Britain, according to a recent parliamentary report, rising university fees mean that student debt is likely to treble to £70 billion by 2015. But, partly because higher education there is so expensive, the scale of the problem is far greater in America. When the next official estimates of outstanding student debt there are published, it is expected to be close to $1 trillion, higher than credit-card borrowing (see article). Credit quality in other classes of consumer debt has been improving; delinquency rates on student loans are rising.
Many of the anti-Wall Street protesters push the idea of blanket debt forgiveness as a solution. But that is the wrong answer. Higher education is not a guarantee of employment, but it improves the odds immensely. Unemployment rates among university graduates stood at 4.4% on average across OECD countries in 2009. People who did not complete secondary school faced unemployment rates of 11.5%. Much of the debt that students are taking on is provided or guaranteed by the government. Imposing write-offs on all taxpayers to benefit those with the best job prospects is unfair; and ripping up contracts between borrowers and private lenders is usually a bad idea.

The Economist:

BARACK OBAMA was raised by his grandparents for part of his childhood. He remembers his grandmother as being “tough as nails”. Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court judge, was raised by his grandparents because his mother could not make ends meet. He called his grandfather “the greatest man I have ever known”. Grandparents have always reared children when need arose. Most have done it well. A few have done it badly–the late comedian Richard Pryor, who was raised by his grandmother in a brothel she owned, was constantly beaten.
What is new is that, as the nuclear family frays, grandparents are taking more and more of the strain. Of the 75m children in America, 5.5m live in households headed by grandparents, a number that has risen by almost a million since 2005, according to the Census bureau. Beware stereotypes. Child-rearing grandparents are disproportionately black, but in absolute terms most are white, live above the poverty line and own their own homes. When a parent loses a job or cannot pay the mortgage, many families move in with grandma. Sometimes, however, the parents have disappeared: an estimated 900,000 children are being raised solely by grandparents.

Sarah Lacy:

Software programming? Yeah it’s an okay way to make a living. But the real money is in teaching.
Or at least that’s the recent experience of Scott Allen, a programmer and teacher the tech-y online education platform Pluralsight.com. Allen has earned more than $1.8 million through fees and royalties from Pluralsight over the last five years. He says each monthly royalty check has increased in size over that period — the smallest increase being 10 percent month-over-month. That far outdid his expectations when he started making educational videos for Pluralsight. “It’s amazing,” he says.
I got pitched this story this morning with the subject line “Online ed’s first millionaire teacher.” I was drawn to it, because I could imagine the same story being pitched about blogging or online journalism several years ago. There are a lot of parallels between what those two industries are going through, and how each are grappling with the Web’s potential for disruption.

Heather Long:

When the world looks back at how the “designer babies” trend began, they will see an innocent start. A Philadelphia couple who had gone through the physical and emotional marathon of trying to have a child turned to intra-uterine insemination and ultimately IVF. Like any rational people, they wanted to do everything to increase their chances that IVF would work. In this case, they sent the embryos to an Oxford lab, which ran a kind of minimal DNA test to see which embryos would be most likely to take.
It’s hard to deny this Philadelphia couple the chance to be parents. David Levy and Marybeth Scheidts look very wholesome in their family photo holding their son Connor, born in May 2013. They clearly weren’t trying to select the embryo with their preferred hair or eye color or other physical or mental traits. In fact, they didn’t even have a full DNA analysis done, only a scan of the chromosomes, the structures that hold genes. This isn’t Brave New World-esque test tube babies. It’s a traditional family – with the best of modern medicine.

The Economist:

THE sort of people who go through business school, one might think, would have no problem with the idea of education being provided for a profit. But when Thunderbird, a struggling school based in Arizona, announced three months ago that it was planning a partnership with Laureate, an education company, there was uproar among its alumni and students. A petition calling for the deal to be halted has won almost 2,000 signatures. By “selling out”, Thunderbird’s management is diluting the school’s brand and cheapening its degrees, it says.
Thunderbird insists that the school itself, founded on a former air-force base after the second world war, will remain a non-profit. The partnership will be used to create foreign campuses, to expand the school’s online teaching and courses for executives, and to introduce undergraduate degrees. But a damning report on America’s for-profit higher-education firms, issued last year by a Senate committee, helps to explain the suspicions about the deal. It found that such institutions got $32 billion of student aid from the government in the 2009-10 academic year. They charge higher fees than state universities but spend less on teaching. Their drop-out rates are alarming: in 2008-09 the median student lasted just four months.

Eric Siu:

As a kid, waking up early used to be really tough. Especially for school. My mom would have to hound me at least 3 times each morning to get out of bed because I hated to wake up for something I didn’t really care for. When you grow a little older, things change. Especially as an entrepreneur. Your day becomes filled with different tasks to do and if you’re just starting out, you’re wearing multiple hats and jumping all over the place. And if you have a family, that’s another full time job for you. There’s just so many things happening that it’s hard to stay focused. So what’s the best way to really lock down on important tasks? Join The 5 a.m Club. Simply put, that means wake up at or around 5 a.m in the morning. Let’s look at some examples of people that rise early:

John Whitehead:

What do college girls and bottled water have to do with the emerging American police state? Quite a bit, it seems.
Public outcry has gone viral over an incident in which a college student was targeted and terrorized by Alcohol Beverage Control agents (ABC) after she purchased sparkling water at a grocery store. The girl and her friends were eventually jailed for daring to evade their accosters, who failed to identify themselves or approach the young women in a non-threatening manner.
What makes this particular incident significant (other than the fact that it took place in my hometown of Charlottesville, Va.) is the degree to which it embodies all that is wrong with law enforcement today, both as it relates to the citizenry and the ongoing undermining of our rule of law. To put it bluntly, due in large part to the militarization of the police and the equipping of a wide range of government agencies with weaponry, we are moving into a culture in which law enforcement officials have developed a sense of entitlement that is at odds with the spirit of our Constitution–in particular, the Fourth Amendment.
The incident took place late in the evening of April 11, 2013. Several University of Virginia college students, including 20-year-old Elizabeth Daly, were leaving the Harris Teeter grocery store parking lot after having purchased a variety of foodstuffs for an Alzheimer’s Association sorority charity benefit that evening, including sparkling water, ice cream and cookie dough, when they noticed a man staring at them as they walked to their car in the back of the parking lot.

Martin Bryant:

This year’s The Next Web Conference Europe is already more than two months in the past and we’re looking forward to our forthcoming events in São Paulo andNew York City. To fill the gap, let’s take a look at a really interesting talk from our Amsterdam event.
Juan Lopez-Valcarcel is Chief Digital Officer at education and publishing companyPearson. In his talk, he noted that education is a $4 trillion industry – that’s three times bigger than the mobile industry. The opportunities for investors, technology companies, educators and (most importantly) learners are vast.
Lopez-Valcarcel took us through seven trends in the education technology space, from robot-assisted learning to international ‘rockstar’ teachers and beyond. Take a break for whatever you’re doing, grab a coffee and watch…

Jon Marcus:

Universities and colleges may be competing to build such perks as climbing walls and fancy dormitories, but the “arms race” over residence halls, food services, and fitness centers is having little effect on college applicants’ choices, new research shows.
Conducted before and after the economic downturn by economists Kevin Rask of Colorado College and Amanda Griffith of Wake Forest University, the research saysstudents are more interested in price and prestige than in amenities.
Families that do and do not qualify for financial aid are equally concerned about cost and reputation, particularly as measured by the U.S. News and World Report rankings, Rask and Griffith found after surveying high-achieving students in various income categories who started college between 2005 and the academic year just ended.

Richard Adams:

The education secretary Michael Gove’s efforts to revolutionise learning in England’s schools will see five-year-olds studying fractions and writing computer programs in their first year of school, according to final versions of the new national curriculum published on Monday.
Among the changes are a requirement for 3-D printers to be used in design and technology lessons, after major revisions to the subject’s curriculum.
According to a Whitehall source: “Three-dimensional printers will become standard in our schools – a technology that is transforming manufacturing and the economy. Combined with the introduction of programming, it is a big step forward from Labour’s dumbed-down curriculum.”

K Jackson:

Some people see computers as little more than gaming consoles and shopping tools. Recently developed electronics, however, have revolutionized education for children with disabilities. If you know a child with disabilities who is struggling, you might want to explore some of these devices.
Technology for Kids With Autism
Children with autism often don’t develop typical communication skills. It takes years and years of therapy for some of these children to start using simple language. Just because a child cannot speak does not mean that he or she doesn’t have something to say.
That’s where revolutionary electronics come in. For years, counselors have used picture cards to communicate with non-verbal children. Now, they can use some of these apps that let autistic kids express practically any thought or feeling. They just load the app on a laptop of your choice so the kids can point and click their way to expression.

Chris Parr:

In days past, parents in Britain were often uninterested bystanders when it came to decisions about where their children would go to university. Now they are so important that student recruitment advertising is targeting them directly.
Online forum and social media network the Student Room has partnered with Mumsnet, the online forum for parents, to allow universities to aim advertising directly at parents and their children at the same time.
A marketing pitch by the Student Room sent to universities reads as follows: “Over the past year we’ve had the pleasure of talking to many of you about reaching the student market … but one thing we’ve been asked for time and again is ‘how can we reach the parents?’ So we’ve teamed up with … Mumsnet, to offer you a brilliant parent targeting solution.”
Jason Geall, managing director of the Student Room, said the traffic the site receives from parents has “grown substantially” over the past two years, with figures suggesting that there are more than 16,000 parents active on its forums – a 20 percent increase over the past 12 months. “In the parental market, we are seeing people coming on to the site for monitoring purposes: they are able to assess and understand what is being talked about before helping their children make informed decisions,” Geall said.

Nick Anderson:

Senior academic leaders at Howard University have charged that “fiscal mismanagement is doing irreparable harm” to the school in Northwest Washington and urged the dismissal of Howard’s chief financial officer, asserting that his actions have put its survival at risk.
Howard’s Council of Deans alleged that staff cuts at the university have been based on “inaccurate, misleading” data, lamented a decline in research expenditures and contended that a “burdensome” tuition increase has driven away students.
In a letter obtained by The Washington Post, the deans said Howard’s external auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, had cited “grave concern about the quality of fiscal decision-making” recently as it terminated its work for the university. Above all, the deans blamed the “fiscal direction” of Robert M. Tarola, an independent contractor who serves as the university’s senior vice president for administration, chief financial officer and treasurer.

The Independent:

Cooper Union in the USA was founded to offer ‘education equal to the best’ while staying ‘open and free to all’ – but this ideal is under threat from new management. This is the story of the students’ battle to keep their institution true to itself
Looking out over Manhatten, the occupiers at Cooper Union seem to have a pretty good setup. With the college president’s office now occupied for eight weeks, the protestors have made themselves into the school’s alternative administration.
Alumni have made key campaigners plaques for their desks, and the entrance to the space, formerly a reception area, now shows a proportion of the artwork and installations that the campaign has inspired. The message that education is a public good, and that it should be available to all regardless of finances, rings loud and true.
Cooper Union, founded in 1859 by Peter Cooper, was created to ensure that ‘education equal to the best’ was, and is, ‘open and free to all’. The university at present provides a full tuition scholarship to all its students, ensuring that at least in principle, the opportunity to study in the institution is not hindered by race, class or wealth. This ideal is core to both the campaign currently taking place, and also the beliefs of all those who I met during my time in New York.

Joel Levin:

Dig, dig, dig. Break and build. Such are the simple, hallmark mechanics behind one of the world’s most popular indie games, Minecraft, which has sold an estimated 20 million copies across different platforms and consoles since its alpha release in 2009.
That includes copies at more than 1,400 schools across six continents, shared Joel Levin, the “Minecraft Teacher” who many accredit for bringing the game into the classroom. Levin, who teaches computer science at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in New York City, is the co-creator of MinecraftEDU, the official version of the game specifically tailored for teachers and students. His popular blog serves as a nexus of the Minecraft educator community.
“I see myself more as a gardener,” Levin humbly stated in an interview at the recent 2013 Games for Change Festival.”
And the garden that he’s nurtured has blossomed into a collection of colorful worlds, projects and contraptions of every imaginable scope and scale. Perhaps the grandest is the World of Humanities, made up of ancient cities and landmarks filled with additional readings, missions and quests for students. Its creator, Eric Walker, a teacher at the American School in Kuwait, has poured 600–and counting–hours into the project.

Scott Lemieux:

I was just reminded by Kathy Geier on FB and Twitter that when she was a student at Hunter College in the early 1990s, she took a comparative literature course with Philip Roth. According to Kathy, Roth had no TAs, designed the course himself, graded all the papers (and there was a lot of writing), and was paid reasonably.

Dr. Douglas Fields:

The job of a scientist is to predict the future and get there first. We do this by looking for patterns in subtle clues; organizing the fragments thoughtfully to project their likely trajectory. It is this process that moves me to write this essay; in essence an epitaph from the future.
After giving a guest lecture at a departmental seminar in one of the nation’s leading medical schools a few weeks ago, I met with a group of eager graduate students and postdoctoral fellows over a lunch of sandwiches and chips as is customary for visiting speakers. I enjoy these sessions immensely as we go around the table and listen to each of the enthusiastic budding scientists share in turn their current research project with passion. This was an exceptionally bright and highly motivated group, but before any of us took a bite of lunch the meeting went off script. No one shared their research. Instead the group confessed fear. Uncertainty and bewilderment for the life choices they had made began to spill out.

I am more optimistic than Fields. continuing the practices of the past does not guarantee similar future results. there are certainly opportunities to re-think our spending priorities. Locally, we could and should eliminate programs such as the expensive and partially implemented Infinite Campus system, among others.

Jessica Siegel

Seventy-five 10th graders, who in other schools might ordinarily be texting, flirting, laughing, razzing each other, maybe even giving teachers a hard time, enter Laurie Friedman-Adler’s music classroom at Brooklyn College Academy (BCA) on Coney Island Avenue ready to play–and work. Members of the World Music Ensemble, they spend four days a week learning to play Indian tablas, Japanese taiko drums, African djembes, Native American flutes, Senagalese balaphones, Australian dijerydos, a banjo, a shofar, a harmonium and an Appalachian hammer dulcimer.
These are among the 150 instruments that Friedman-Adler, a professional clarinetist, has collected on travels around the world, and they are the tools for this remarkable orchestra and opportunity for musical development. Every year since 2003, Friedman-Adler and her students have spent a year working on a piece that she composes for a concert in June, melding together all these instruments.
While the World Music Ensemble would be remarkable if it existed in Great Neck, Scarsdale or Montclair, N.J., it is even more so here in New York City since, thanks to a variety of factors, arts and music programs are struggling in the schools, according to arts education advocates.
A combination of forces–budget cuts, the pressure on schools to focus on standardized tests, the elimination of dedicated funds for the arts, the replacement of large high schools with smaller schools with more limited budgets–have worked together to crowd the arts out of many schools. The trend makes a program like Friedman-Adler’s doubly amazing.

Patrick Marley:

With a recently leaked poll, the first contours of the 2014 race for governor are coming into view.
Democrats have contended for months that they see Gov. Scott Walker as vulnerable, but they have not offered a candidate to run against him. But last month a poll was conducted testing the viability of Mary Burke, a former state commerce secretary and former Trek Bicycle Corp. executive.
The poll was conducted around the same time an unknown person registered five Burke-themed Internet addresses, such as BurkeForWisconsin.com and BurkeForGovernor.com. None of the websites are active.
Burke, who was elected to the Madison School Board last year, has not responded to interview requests since the poll surfaced in June. Mike Tate, the chairman of the state Democratic Party, issued a statement at the time saying Democrats were conducting polls for “several potential strong challengers” to Walker.
Democrats are hungry for a victory after Walker became the first governor in the nation’s history to survive a recall election last year. Republicans are equally motivated to keep him in office after having to elect him twice for one term.
Democratic strategists said Burke is seriously considering a run but has not made a final decision. They noted others could run, but they hoped to have just one candidate to avoid a Democratic primary.
Democrats said they liked Burke’s background in business and economic development — as well as the personal funds she could bring to the race — while Republicans pointed to her ties to former Gov. Jim Doyle and other issues as matters they could exploit.

Loti Higgins:

With a record number of school districts sinking into a deficit, and two districts possibly on their way to being dissolved, state Superintendent Mike Flanagan is urging drastic action — such as converting Michigan’s nearly 550 districts, 56 intermediate districts and nearly 280 charter schools into countywide school districts.
If that can’t be done right away, he said, the state should give more power to intermediate school districts so operations such as transportation and food services can be consolidated.
Flanagan predicted that countywide districts or his hybrid option could save millions — money he said could be used to teach students. But little, if any, research supports his position, a fact that’s drawing concern from educators and others.
Don Wotruba, deputy director of the Michigan Association of School Boards, said his organization is open to discussing the idea. But, he said, a one-size-fits-all mandate isn’t the way to go.

Rory Linnane:

Kim Fitzer’s daughter, Trinity, was attending kindergarten at Northwest Catholic School in Milwaukee with a voucher from the state for the 2011-12 school year. But Trinity, then 6, had gastrointestinal problems and anxiety — conditions that Fitzer said the private school was ill-equipped to address.
Fitzer said the school repeatedly called her to pick up Trinity, saying she was “out of control.” After Trinity knocked papers to the floor and kicked a teacher who tried to restrain her, Fitzer was told the girl was no longer welcome at the school.
Northwest Catholic Principal Michelle Paris said in an email statement that “every decision was made in the very best interest of the child with mutual agreement of our school leadership and the parent.”
But Fitzer said it was not her decision, and she “didn’t have an option.”
Trinity transferred to a Milwaukee public school, where she has received special education services that address her anxiety as a disability.
Under the state’s parental choice program, Northwest Catholic received a $6,442 voucher for Trinity’s enrollment in the private school, but the public school got no extra money for taking her through the end of the school year. Critics of school choice, and a pending federal lawsuit, charge that students with disabilities, such as Trinity, are being underserved by publicly funded vouchers meant to give low-income students in Milwaukee and Racine the chance of a private education.

Much more on the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

The Economist:.

OECD PDF

Governments are paying increasing attention to international comparisons as they search for effective policies that enhance individuals’ social and economic prospects, provide incentives for greater efficiency in schooling, and help to mobilise resources to meet rising demands. As part of its response, the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills devotes a major effort to the development and analysis of the quantitative, internationally comparable indicators that it publishes annually in Education at a Glance. These indicators enable educational policy makers and practitioners alike to see their education systems in light of other countries’ performance and, together with the OECD country policy reviews, are designed to support and review the efforts that governments are making towards policy reform.
Education at a Glance addresses the needs of a range of users, from governments seeking to learn policy lessons to academics requiring data for further analysis to the general public wanting to monitor how its country’s schools are progressing in producing world-class students. The publication examines the quality of learning outcomes, the policy levers and contextual factors that shape these outcomes, and the broader private and social returns that accrue to investments in education.
Education at a Glance is the product of a long-standing, collaborative effort between OECD governments, the experts and institutions working within the framework of the OECD Indicators of Education Systems (INES) programme and the OECD Secretariat.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org

This American Life:

We spent five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot. 29. We went to get a sense of what it means to live in the midst of all this gun violence, how teens and adults navigate a world of funerals and Homecoming dances. We found so many incredible and surprising stories, this show is a two-parter; you can listen to Part Two here.

Our educators now stand ready to commit the same mistakes with the Common Core State Standards. Distressed teachers are saying that they are being compelled to engage in the same superficial, content-indifferent activities, given new labels like “text complexity” and “reading strategies.” In short, educators are preparing to apply the same skills-based notions about reading that have failed for several decades.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

A British schoolteacher, Daisy Christodoulou, has just published a short, pungent e-book called Seven Myths about Education. It’s a must-read for anyone in a position to influence our low-performing public school system. The book’s focus is on British education, but it deserves to be nominated as a “best book of 2013″ on American education, because there’s not a farthing’s worth of difference in how the British and American educational systems are being hindered by a slogan-monopoly of high-sounding ideas–brilliantly deconstructed in this book.
Ms. Christodoulou has unusual credentials. She’s an experienced classroom teacher. She currently directs a non-profit educational foundation in London, and she is a scholar of impressive powers who has mastered the relevant research literature in educational history and cognitive psychology. Her writing is clear and effective. Speaking as a teacher to teachers, she may be able to change their minds. As an expert scholar and writer, she also has a good chance of enlightening administrators, legislators, and concerned citizens.
Ms. Christodoulou believes that such enlightenment is the great practical need these days, because the chief barriers to effective school reform are not the usual accused: bad teacher unions, low teacher quality, burdensome government dictates. Many a charter school in the U.S. has been able to bypass those barriers without being able to produce better results than the regular public schools they were meant to replace. No wonder. Many of these failed charter schools were conceived under the very myths that Ms. Christodoulou exposes. It wasn’t the teacher unions after all! Ms. Christodoulou argues convincingly that what has chiefly held back school achievement and equity in the English-speaking world for the past half century is a set of seductive but mistaken ideas.
She’s right straight down the line. Take the issue of teacher quality. The author gives evidence from her own experience of the ways in which potentially effective teachers have been made ineffective because they are dutifully following the ideas instilled in them by their training institutes. These colleges of education have not only perpetuated wrong ideas about skills and knowledge, but in their scorn for “mere facts” have also deprived these potentially good teachers of the knowledge they need to be effective teachers of subject matter. Teachers who are only moderately talented teacher can be highly effective if they follow sound teaching principles and a sound curriculum within a school environment where knowledge builds cumulatively from year to year.
Here are Ms Christodoulou’s seven myths:
1 – Facts prevent understanding
2 – Teacher-led instruction is passive
3 – The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
4 – You can always just look it up
5 – We should teach transferable skills
6 – Projects and activities are the best way to learn
7 – Teaching knowledge is indoctrination
Each chapter follows the following straightforward and highly effective pattern. The “myth” is set forth through full, direct quotations from recognized authorities. There’s no slanting of the evidence or the rhetoric. Then, the author describes concretely from direct experience how the idea has actually worked out in practice. And finally, she presents a clear account of the relevant research in cognitive psychology which overwhelmingly debunks the myth. Ms. Christodoulou writes: “For every myth I have identified, I have found concrete and robust examples of how this myth has influenced classroom practice across England. Only then do I go on to show why it is a myth and why it is so damaging.”

This straightforward organization turns out to be highly absorbing and engaging. Ms. Christodoulou is a strong writer, and for all her scientific punctilio, a passionate one. She is learned in educational history, showing how “21st-century” ideas that invoke Google and the internet are actually re-bottled versions of the late 19th-century ideas which came to dominate British and American schools by the mid-20th century. What educators purvey as brave such as “critical-thinking skills” and “you can always look it up” are actually shopworn and discredited by cognitive science. That’s the characteristic turn of her chapters, done especially effectively in her conclusion when she discusses the high-sounding education-school theme of hegemony:

I discussed the way that many educational theorists used the concept of hegemony to explain the way that certain ideas and practices become accepted by people within an institution. Hegemony is a useful concept. I would argue that the myths I have discussed here are hegemonic within the education system. It is hard to have a discussion about education without sooner or later hitting one of these myths. As theorists of hegemony realise, the most powerful thing about hegemonic ideas is that they seem to be natural common sense. They are just a normal part of everyday life. This makes them exceptionally difficult to challenge, because it does not seem as if there is anything there to challenge. However, as the theorists of hegemony also realised, hegemonic ideas depend on certain unseen processes. One tactic is the suppression of all evidence that contradicts them. I trained as a teacher, taught for three years, attended numerous in-service training days, wrote several essays about education and followed educational policy closely without ever even encountering any of the evidence about knowledge I speak of here, let alone actually hearing anyone advocate it….For three years I struggled to improve my pupils’ education without ever knowing that I could be using hugely more effective methods. I would spend entire lessons quietly observing my pupils chatting away in groups about complete misconceptions and I would think that the problem in the lesson was that I had been too prescriptive. We need to reform the main teacher training and inspection agencies so that they stop promoting completely discredited ideas and give more space to theories with much greater scientific backing.

The book has great relevance to our current moment, when a majority of states have signed up to follow new “Common Core Standards,” comparable in scope to the recent experiment named “No Child Left Behind,” which is widely deemed a failure. If we wish to avoid another one, we will need to heed this book’s message. The failure of NCLB wasn’t in the law’s key provisions that adequate yearly progress in math and reading should occur among all groups, including low-performing ones. The result has been some improvement in math, especially in the early grades, but stasis in most reading scores. In addition, the emphasis on reading tests has caused a neglect of history, civics, science, and the arts.
Ms. Christodoulou’s book indirectly explains these tragic, unintended consequences of NCLB, especially the poor results in reading. It was primarily the way that educators responded to the accountability provisions of NCLB that induced the failure. American educators, dutifully following the seven myths, regard reading as a skill that could be employed without relevant knowledge; in preparation for the tests, they spent many wasted school days on ad hoc content and instruction in “strategies.” If educators had been less captivated by anti-knowledge myths, they could have met the requirements of NCLB, and made adequate yearly progress for all groups. The failure was not in the law but in the myths.

Our educators now stand ready to commit the same mistakes with the Common Core State Standards. Distressed teachers are saying that they are being compelled to engage in the same superficial, content-indifferent activities, given new labels like “text complexity” and “reading strategies.” In short, educators are preparing to apply the same skills-based notions about reading that have failed for several decades.
Of course! They are boxed in by what Ms. Christodoulou calls a “hegemonic” thought system. If our hardworking teachers and principals had known what to do for NCLB– if they had been uninfected by the seven myths–they would have long ago done what is necessary to raise the competencies of all students, and there would not have been a need for NCLB. If the Common Core standards fail as NCLB did, it will not be because the standards themselves are defective. It will be because our schools are completely dominated by the seven myths analyzed by Daisy Christodoulou. This splendid, disinfecting book needs to be distributed gratis to every teacher, administrator, and college of education professor in the U.S. It’s available at Amazon for $9.99 or for free if you have Amazon Prime.

Grant Wiggins:

I recall my son, Ian, as a 4-year-old, pondering which ‘work’ to do that day, on the way to school: food work? sewing work? Or Drawing? Well, why might you choose one or the other today? I asked. And he proceeded to do a cute think-aloud with little furrowed brow, about the pros and cons (based on recent choices and skill deficits).
Fast forward: grown-up Ian has lost 2 room-mates as he begins senior year in college this coming fall. Why did they leave? They were unable to handle the complete freedom to set their schedule and honor their obligations.
What is wanted in education is a curriculum and assessment system that builds in, by design, a gradual release of teacher responsibility across the long-term scope and sequence. Traditional curriculum design runs completely counter to this idea, of course: the work gets harder and harder but the student has practically no executive control over the intellectual agenda up until graduation.
Making matters worse, a number of people have wrongly interpreted the Gradual Release model to say that the last step is called “Independent Practice.” This is utterly misguided. Independent practice is still scaffolded, prompted, and simplified activity in which the student knows full well what single move we want them to use. There is no strategic thinking or executive control needed. The acid test of autonomy therefore, arrives when students confront a genuine challenge requiring thought, and no advice about strategy or technique is provided or hinted at.

Posted on Craigslist, St. Louis

The truth is usually a tough thing to accept, so I understand if this is flagged. It would be a cowardly thing to do, but I understand it. Some people just ignore unpleasant truths. However, if you think ignoring the problem, or trying to censor the truth, will help our black children improve, you’re dreaming. This is important, so I’m happy to repost – indefinitely if necessary. I find it interesting that NO ONE has had the intellect to refute anything in the essay. They can only attempt to censor it, as if doing so somehow makes it invalid. Weak minds, weak minds.
Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state.
The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like “chaotic” or “poor learning environment” or “lack of discipline” do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.
Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock.
One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary decorum. It was not unusual for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down and waiting for a lull in the din to make their point — something that occurs to even the dimmest white students — blacks just tried to yell over each other.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

An abundance of research shows that teacher quality is the single most important determinant of student learning. It’s also the conclusion of a report by the National Council on Teacher Quality — part of a project funded by major U.S. foundations.
Unfortunately, the same report found that colleges and their schools of education do a poor job of training teachers and preparing them for real-life challenges in the classroom.
“We don’t know how to prepare teachers,” says Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia University Teachers College. “We can’t decide whether it’s a craft or a profession.” Mr. Levine blames low admission standards, less-than-relevant academic work and an out-of-touch faculty in schools of education — some of whom haven’t set foot in a school for years.
Part of the problem is that the teaching profession does not attract, in general, the nation’s most talented students. Less than one in four of U.S. teachers graduated in the top third of their high school class, the report states, compared to 100 percent in Singapore and Finland.

Related: NCTQ 4-3-2-1 Star-Rating of University Teacher Preparation Programs in the USA: “the evaluations provide clear and convincing evidence, based on a four-star rating system, that a vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers…. Much more on the NCTQ teacher preparation report, here.

Bill Glauber:

ines helped spearhead the legal challenge against Act 10, which curtailed collective bargaining for most public sector workers. In a case involving Madison Teachers Inc. and Public Employees Local 61 in Milwaukee, a Dane County circuit judge struck down portions of the law.The case now goes to the state Supreme Court.
In another case involving Pines and Madison Teachers Inc., a Dane County judge struck down a portion of a law that gave Walker the power to veto rules written by the state schools superintendent. The case is now before the 4th District Court of Appeals in Madison.
Pines, representing the League of Women Voters, successfully argued in front of a Dane County judge that the state’s voter ID law violated the Wisconsin Constitution. The decision was overturned by the 4th District Court of Appeals, and the league has petitioned the Supreme Court to review the ruling. The voter ID measure remains on hold because of a ruling in a separate case.
“I believe that my law firm — because of the position we’re in and because of the work we’ve done — has disrupted the (Walker) agenda by using appropriate means and calling on the third equal branch of government (the court) to stop the majoritarian and authoritarian impulses of this Legislature,” he says.
The outcome of the cases is far from certain. But one thing is clear: Pines will keep up the fight.

Much more on Act 10, here.

The Madison School District’s recent rhetoric around annual property tax increases (after a significant increase in redistributed state tax dollars last year and a “return to normal” this year) is, to the ongoing observer, unsurprising. We appear to be in the Rainwater era “same service” approach to everything, from million$ spent on a partially implemented Infinite Campus to long-term disastrous reading scores.
Steve Coll’s 5 July 2013 New Yorker column nails it:

The most likely explanation is that President Obama never carefully discussed or specifically approved the E.U. bugging, and that no cabinet-level body ever reviewed, on the President’s behalf, the operation’s potential costs in the event of exposure. America’s post-September 11th national-security state has become so well financed, so divided into secret compartments, so technically capable, so self-perpetuating, and so captured by profit-seeking contractors bidding on the next big idea about big-data mining that intelligence leaders seem to have lost their facility to think independently. Who is deciding what spying projects matter most and why?

Much more on annual local property tax increases, here:

The Madison School Board should limit the school property tax hike to the rate of inflation next year, even if that means scaling back a proposed 1.5 percent across-the-board salary increase for school district employees, says member Mary Burke.
“I think in an environment where we’ve seen real wages in Dane County decrease, and a lot of people are on fixed incomes, we have to work as hard as possible to limit any increase to the inflation rate,” Burke said Tuesday in an interview.
…
But School Board discussions have focused around reducing the proposed salary hike, and cutting back on facility maintenance to pare down the $392 million proposed budget enough to bring the property tax increase to 4 or 5 percent, board President Ed Hughes told me.
The district under state law could increase its levy by as much as $18,385,847 or 9 percent. Keeping the increase to around the rate of inflation would mean an increase of less 2 percent.
…
Board member TJ Mertz can’t vote on salaries because his wife is a teacher’s aide with the school district, he told me, but he has long been outspoken in his belief in good pay for teachers to ensure the best academic achievement for students.
“As a citizen, I understand our staff needs to be compensated,” he said, adding that teachers have taken losses in take-home pay since they were required to begin making contributions to their pensions in 2011. “If the state won’t invest in our children, it has to come from the property tax,” he said.
Mertz said he would prefer a tax increase steeper than the 4 percent or 5 percent the board as a whole is focusing on. “I firmly believe the most important thing we can do is invest in our students; the question should not be what property tax levy can we afford,” he said.

I appreciate Schneider’s worthwhile questions, including a discussion of “program reviews”:

Several School Board members interviewed for this story stressed that the 2013-2014 budget will be a transitional one, before a broad re-evaluation of spending planned by Cheatham can be conducted.

Yet, it would be useful to ask if in fact programs will be reviewed and those found wanting eliminated. The previous Superintendent, Dan Nerad, discussed program reviews as well.
Madison Schools’ 2013-2014 Budget Charts, Documents, Links, Background & Missing Numbers.
The Madison School Board seat currently occupied by Mr. Hughes (Seat 7, and Seat 6 – presently Marj Passman) will be on the Spring, 2014 ballot (candidate information is available at the Madison City Clerk’s website).

Glynis Board:

“Any changes in education–such as the single-sex classes or the calendar–have to work with what’s in the community. We have to stop a single curriculum where we’re teaching everyone to be an engineer in college. We have to adjust our curriculum so that it meets the needs of every student. But those are decisions that the community and the individual schools should be making.”
Lee maintains that statewide efforts to improve education should be focused on how to keep quality teachers in the state. He says the quality of education we deliver, with diversified curriculums, using digital learning tools, and reaching every student, will follow suit.
“Education in West Virginia is at a real crisis point. We have to have reform that is educator-lead and educator-driven. Teachers are the expert in public education. They know the direction that we need in the classroom.”

weartv.com:

The Dixon School of the Arts, in Pensacola, is no longer a charter school. Dixon opened three years ago, but has received failing grades from the state. More failing grades were expected this year, and that would have forced its closure by the state. So, the board of directors announced today it will become a private school, and K through 6th grade enrollment will be limited.
As Amber Southard reports,the move means the school is no longer eligible for full funding from the state, and no longer subject to the same rules as public schools. “The students that attend the new private school will have to follow a code of conduct that will allow the teaching of church in the classroom.” Board members say becoming a private school will allow them to teach religion and try to get families more involved in the students education. Lutimothy May “We can use those values as core values to teach our children about their self worth and how to operate in a world that is diverse.”

Huffington Post

In an awesome attempt to help its students learn English, a school in Brazil named Red Balloon challenged a group of eight to 13-year-olds to play “grammar cops” for their favorite celebrities on Twitter. The kids picked out grammatically incorrect tweets from big-name stars like Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton and responded directly with their edits. The results were, unsurprisingly, hilarious and wonderful.
Check out a sampling, below, and watch the video above to learn more about the creative school project.

John Merrfield

For years, it was lost in the wreckage from the crash of the politically incorrect “tracking” of students. But now, the worthy concept of “ability grouping” is making a comeback. A June 9 New York Times article on its resurgence is good news, but in the current public school system the much-needed ability grouping by subject is especially costly, with a very a limited upside. If parents had more freedom to choose within a system that could easily diversify its instructional offerings in response to families’ interests and needs, the power and attractiveness of the concept would be much greater.
Unlike tracking, which assumes an across-the-board, one-dimensional level of student ability – i.e., students are uniformly brilliant, average, or slow – ability grouping by subject recognizes children have strengths and weaknesses. Strengths probably correlate with interest/talent, so in a system of genuine school choices, parents recognizing those interest/talents would tend to enroll their children in schools specializing in those particular areas. They’d be in classrooms with children who are similarly passionate and able to progress at similar, fast rates. And, likewise, for necessary subject matter in which they are not as adept, again, they’d be in a room and school building full of kids more similar to them. Stigma gone; no self-esteem threat.

Related: English 10.

Professor Baker:

Is grammar necessary? It’s an old question, and if a glance is taken, quite casually, at the textbooks on the market nowadays, there would be a unanimous verdict: Grammar is necessary.
Our textbooks are full of grammar, our readers are full of grammar. Thus, grammar is necessary. Case closed. Grammar is necessary.
Even the passive voice, it’s necessary, despite those who would try to live without it. I mean, try being born without the passive voice. Which phrase feels more comfortable to you?
1. I was born in (year). – Passive Voice
or
2. My mother gave birth to me in (year). – Active Voice

Patrick O’Donnell:

The Cleveland school district’s improvement plan for 13 schools this upcoming school year will bring major changes for some and smaller, but substantial, ones for others.
Teachers will receive special training at all 13 schools, some of which will get new principals and see significant staff changes. And a few of the schools will have outside agencies come in to give the schools new styles and approaches.
All together, the district is spending more than $2 million this upcoming year on staff training and outside help to try to improve these schools, which the district has labeled “Investment Schools.”
“We’re looking to have 13 different plans for 13 unique needs,” said Eric Gordon, the district’s chief executive officer.
More changes are in the works. After the district met with staff, parents and community leaders at each of the schools in May, schools will host additional meetings over the summer to refine the plans.

Cleveland spent $15,072 per student during the 2012-2013 budget year, similar to Madison’s spending.

Cory Doctorow:

A quote variously attributed to Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein has it that ”If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t really understand it.” Most of us have encountered this in our lives: you think you really know something and understand it, and then you try to teach it and realize that you never understood it in the first place.
Computers are the children of the human race’s mind, and as they become intimately involved in new aspects of our lives, we keep stumbling into semantic minefields, where commonly understood terms turn out to have no single, well-agreed-upon meaning across all parts of society. These conflicts all have a quiet drama, because on the definition of these ”commonly understood” terms turns questions of social control with profound implications for our human lives.
Take names. When Google rolled out its Facebook-a-like service Google Plus in 2011, it stirred up controversy by declaring that it would adopt Facebook’s ”real name” policy, meaning that its users would be expected to use their real, legal names in their online interactions. Google offered a lot of explanations for this policy – mostly revolving around reducing cruel behavior and spamming – and opponents of the idea offered their own arguments in response. Some pointed out that they were widely known by a name other than the one on their legal documents; others wanted the ability to socialize without making their real identities visible to violent stalkers; refugees from oppressive regimes raised the spectre of retaliation against their in-country relatives if they participated in visible online debates under their real names.

sp-eye:

The Department of Public Instruction (DPI)’s July 1 estimate of state aid for the 2013-14 school year shows Sun Prairie getting 10.98% MORE aid than last year.
The most current budget estimates projected we’d receive a 10% increase over last year.
The net effect is that the district is receiving $3.8M more than last year, and $382K more than projected.
Let the spending begin!

Sarah Yatsko, Elizabeth Cooley Nelson, Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has been monitoring, supporting, and analyzing the cross-sector collaborative work undertaken in 16 District-Charter Compact cities. CRPE tracks progress on agreements and reports on local political, legal, and financial barriers to collaboration, and also facilitates networking and problem-solving among participants. Using data and documents from interviews with district and charter leaders, this interim report details the first two years of Compact work and finds evidence that these cities have made mixed progress on a number of fronts, such as facilities sharing, equitable funding for charter schools, more high-performing schools, and improved access to high-quality special education. But challenges like leadership transitions, local anti-charter politics, and key leaders’ unwillingness to prioritize time and resources for implementation have thwarted efforts in some cities. The report includes key Compact agreements and measurements of progress for each city, plus a checklist for district and charter leaders considering a collaboration Compact.

Marco Evers:

Plenty of schools use iPads. But what if the entire education experience were offered via tablet computer? That is what several new schools in the Netherlands plan to do. There will be no blackboards or schedules. Is this the end of the classroom?
Think different. It was more than an advertising slogan. It was a manifesto, and with it, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs upended the computer industry, the music industry and the world of mobile phones. The digital visionary’s next plan was to bring radical change to schools and textbook publishers, but he died of cancer before he could do it.
Some of the ideas that may have occurred to Jobs are now on display in the Netherlands. Eleven “Steve Jobs schools” will open in August, with Amsterdam among the cities that will be hosting such a facility. Some 1,000 children aged four to 12 will attend the schools, without notebooks, books or backpacks. Each of them, however, will have his or her own iPad.
There will be no blackboards, chalk or classrooms, homeroom teachers, formal classes, lesson plans, seating charts, pens, teachers teaching from the front of the room, schedules, parent-teacher meetings, grades, recess bells, fixed school days and school vacations. If a child would rather play on his or her iPad instead of learning, it’ll be okay. And the children will choose what they wish to learn based on what they happen to be curious about.
Preparations are already underway in Breda, a town near Rotterdam where one of the schools is to be located. Gertjan Kleinpaste, the 53-year-old principal of the facility, is aware that his iPad school on Schorsmolenstraat could soon become a destination for envious — but also outraged — reformist educators from all over the world.
And there is still plenty of work to do on the pleasant, light-filled building, a former daycare center. The yard is littered with knee-deep piles of leaves. Walls urgently need a fresh coat of paint. Even the lease hasn’t been completely settled yet. But everything will be finished by Aug. 13, Kleinpaste says optimistically, although he looks as though the stress is getting to him.

Matthew DeFour:

“If the students are performing at or better than they were in the schools they came from, then that would be a compelling case to offer more choices like that to more families across the state,” Walker said. “If the majority are not performing better, you could make a pretty compelling argument not to.”
Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said work on an accountability bill is wrapping up and he hopes it will begin circulating for sponsors by the end of this month. He hopes hearings will be held in late summer and early fall with a bill sent to the governor by the end of the year.
“I hope that everyone comes away happy that this is the right thing to do,” Olsen said. “The voucher people want a bill like this because they’re only as good as their weakest school.”
Olsen said the bill will not only apply the report card system to schools participating in the voucher program, it will also make changes to the report card for public schools.
The report card released last fall didn’t measure high school student growth, because it was based on one test taken in 10th grade. The state budget the governor signed Sunday expands high school testing to grades nine and 11. The accountability bill will ensure future report cards include those tests, Olsen said.
Democrats have been skeptical that Republicans will follow through on holding private voucher schools accountable. Earlier this year Senate Minority Leader Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, compared talk of a bill to Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.
In February, Walker told the State Journal editorial board that he hoped to sign a voucher school accountability bill before the budget was approved. That didn’t happen, but Walker said there was push back from the Legislature.

Much more on vouchers, here.

James Otteson:

An article on the plight of adjunct professors in higher education, “Labor of Love or Cheap Labor? The Plight of Adjunct Professors,” was brought to my attention by its author, Celine James. Ms. James kindly asked me for my thoughts about her article. I thought Pileus readers might be interested in what I sent her. Here it is in full:

Dear Celine,
I have had a chance to read your article. I empathize with the plight of adjunct instructors that you describe. It is, or can be, a terribly difficult life. I am afraid, however, that I cannot endorse the solution you suggest, namely unionization.
Higher education is operated like a medieval guild, with special protections for the lucky few who make it in and special benefits to them that come at the expense of all those who were not lucky enough to get in. The problem is the rigidity in the labor market that this creates: once a person is in, he or she cannot be fired, regardless of performance, for life.That is a great deal for those who get in, and it explains why so many try so desperately hard to get in, but it is a model for maintaining an unjust, and slowly dying, status quo rather than responding to changing economic realities we actually face.
The solution would be not to extend the guild system to a slightly larger cohort, but, rather, to abandon it altogether. In other words, we should abolish the tenure system. In a world with thousands of institutions of higher education, along with now an almost unlimited upper bound of educational opportunities online, there can be no justification for the economically stifling and restricting system of guild benefits for a privileged elite.

Larry Cuban:

I published Part 1 about how my ideas about school reform have changed over the past half-century. Here is Part 2.
***************************************************************************
I used to think that structural reforms (e.g., creating non-graded schools; new district and school site governance structures; novel technologies; small high schools with block schedules, advisories, and student learning communities) would lead to better classroom instruction.And now I think that, at best, such structural reforms may be necessary first steps toward improving instruction but are (and have been) seldom sufficient to alter traditional teaching practices.
In teaching nearly 15 years, I had concluded that policies creating new structures (see above examples) would alter common teaching practices which, in turn, would get students to learn more, faster, and better.
I revised that conclusion, albeit in slow motion, as I looked around at how my fellow teachers taught and began to examine my own classroom practices. I reconsidered the supposed power of structures in changing teaching practices after I left the classroom and began years of researching how teachers have taught following the rainfall of progressive reforms on the nation’s classrooms in the early 20th century and similar showers of standards-based, accountability-driven reforms in the early 21st century.[i]

Richard Perez-Pena:

Going to college can seem like a choice between impossibly high payments while in school or a crushing debt load for years afterward, but one state is experimenting with a third way.
This week, the Oregon Legislature approved a plan that could allow students to attend state colleges without paying tuition or taking out traditional loans. Instead, they would commit a small percentage of their future incomes to repaying the state; those who earn very little would pay very little.
The proposal faces a series of procedural and practical hurdles and will not go into effect for at least a few years, but it could point to a new direction in the long-running debate over how to cope with the rising cost of higher education. While the approach has been used in Australia, national education groups say they do not know of any university in the United States trying it.

Mike McShane:

Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a speech to the Society of News Editors that Education Week called “The strongest defense yet of Common Core Standards.”
In it, he said that the Common Core – educational standards that are being adopted by most states – “has become a rallying cry for fringe groups,” that opposition has been “misguided” and “misinformed” and that legislation in state houses across the country aimed at stopping the standards is “based on false information.”
While it is true that some criticism of the Common Core has been over the top, it is also true that the Common Core does not have to be a malign conspiracy to be problematic.
Even if you believe that the standards are a “boon” for schools, as the Washington Post’s and USA Today’s editorial boards do, it is important to recognize that the Common Core’s ultimate success will hinge on its implementation. As such, several issues loom large.