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Online education run amok? Private companies want to scoop up your child’s data.
Massive open online courses, first envisioned as a way to democratize higher education, have made their way into high schools, but Washington is powerless to stop the flood of personal data about teenage students from flowing to private companies, thanks to loopholes in federal privacy laws.
Universities and private companies this fall unveiled a slew of free, open-access online courses to high school students, marketing them as a way for kids to supplement their Advanced Placement coursework or earn a certificate of completion for a college-level class.
But when middle and high school students participate in classes with names like “Mars: The Next Frontier” or “The Road to Selective College Admissions,” they may be unwittingly transmitting into private hands a torrent of data about their academic strengths and weaknesses, their learning styles and thought processes — even the way they approach challenges. They may also be handing over birth dates, addresses and even drivers license information. Their IP addresses, attendance and participation in public forums are all logged as well by the providers of the courses, commonly called MOOCs.
Google’s education privacy practices are worth a look.
How to Tell If a ‘Fact’ About Millennials Isn’t Actually a Fact
It has become difficult to avoid research about so-called millennials, the unofficial generational nickname typically applied to people born in the 1980s and 1990s.
According to research (collected from this reporter’s in-box):
• They will soon be the majority of the U.S. workforce–a huge generation!
• Slightly more than one-third of them are skilled at 3D printing and 22% of them are skilled at driverless cars–new technology!
• 79% of them have bachelor’s degrees–so educated!
• 17% of millennials would “rather become a YouTube star than fall in love”–different priorities!
• And 55% more millennials are signing up for 401(k) plans–good savers!
An update on Kalamazoo’s promise program
Graduates of Kalamazoo Public Schools eligible for The Kalamazoo Promise are much more likely to enroll in college and more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree compared to their peers nationwide, the latest Promise data shows.
More than 90 percent of Promise-eligible students have enrolled in college since the program started with the Class of 2006, compared to two-thirds of recent U.S. high school graduates.
In terms of college completion, 41 percent of Promise-eligible students in the Class of 2006 have a bachelor’s degree compared to 37 percent of U.S. high school graduates age 25 to 29, based on U.S. Census reports.
That favorable comparison is “significant,” particularly since so many Promise-eligible students come from low-income families, said Bob Jorth, executive director of the scholarship program, which marks its ninth anniversary this month.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: LinkedIn data show the US is losing out on the immigrants it covets most
The United States is still the world’s most popular destination for highly skilled professionals. But it doesn’t seem to have quite the allure it used to.
In fact, professional migration to the US has declined substantially since 2001, according to a new study (pdf) that used a massive dataset culled from LinkedIn career histories.
LinkedIn data scientists Bogdan State and Mario Rodriguez found that while 27% of migrating professionals chose the US in 2000, just 12% did in 2012. The drop for professionals in science, engineering, technology, and math fields was even steeper, from 37% to 15%. The trend holds across degree types (with the data based on the highest degree earned):
The hidden price of more overseas students at British public schools
Just a decade or so ago, most public‑school-educated parents felt obliged to give their children the same start in life they themselves were given — selling off heirlooms to send their Jacks and Henriettas off to Eton, Stowe, Cheltenham Ladies or St Paul’s. These days the price is just too high, says Andrew Halls, head of King’s College School in Wimbledon, and he’s been honest enough to name the cause: the hordes of prospective parents from other countries, oligarchs and oil men, all jostling for places for their progeny. They push the price of an elite ‘British’ education up beyond the reach of any ordinary Brit.
He’s brave to raise the issue, but what he doesn’t mention is that there is a price to be paid for this by the independent schools themselves. With these new wealthy students — from China, Nigeria, Ukraine, Russia and the Gulf States — come new and often conflicting cultures. They inevitably bring very ‘traditional’ views to schools that have spent the past 20 years remaking themselves to fit the modern world.
According to the Independent Schools Council, there are 2,536 Russian pupils (with overseas parents) studying in this country — three times as many as there were in 2007. It is the trendy thing for moneyed Russian families to do. One 16-year-old Russian girl quoted in the Guardian last year put it well: ‘Nothing brings out the smugness in a middle-class Russian parent’s voice more than saying: “Oh, my children go to school in England.”’ This is good news for so-called UK Plc, but there are downsides too.
3 Ways to Lower Crazy High College Costs
After centuries of little change, the basic “sage on a stage” business model of higher education is beginning to undergo a radical transformation. Buffeted by high tuition costs and loan debt, students and their parents are seeking better value for money. Meanwhile technological change spearheaded by online education and such innovations as “massive open online courses” (MOOCs) is shaking up the economics of educational information and teaching. And new business models, introducing such approaches as competency based degrees and blends of online and campus-based learning, are reducing costs and offering more customized degrees.
Thanks to these developments, the cost of acquiring the skills needed to be successful in the future economy is likely to fall sharply. That will be good for the economy. It will also open up opportunities for skill-based economic advancement for the many Americans who today cannot afford college without incurring crushing debt.
For this transformation to achieve its full potential, however, three things are needed.
Big Ed Reform News in N.J.: Appellate Court Denies Education Law Center and Save Our Schools-NJ’s Argument that Successful Charter Schools Can’t Expand
The N. J. Charter School Association issued its own statement that relies more on the actual ruling than spin:
Today’s appellate division ruling validates our understanding of the breadth of the state DOE’s authority in regulating public charter school growth and the department’s intention to support public education choice for New Jersey families. This lawsuit was yet another attempt to stop the growth of innovation and preserve the status quo which continues to fail our state’s public school students. Defending this authority, and validating it through the judicial process, will allow charter schools to grow and serve families that are looking for great educational opportunities.
A proposal to rate teacher preparation programs
But Jeanne Williams, past president of the Wisconsin Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and chair of the educational studies department at Ripon College, said the state is already preparing to release educator preparation program report cards, in accordance with a state law passed in recent years to strengthen teacher training.
Those will report graduates’ pass rates on required licensure exams and provide data about where graduates get employed.
Williams did not agree with using test scores of students taught by the new teachers to review their programs that trained them.
She said several studies had shown that using student test data to evaluate teacher preparation programs is “not valid or reliable because of the numerous intervening variables that can affect student performance,” such as poverty, school climate and rates of teacher turnover in a school.
National Council on Teacher Quality reviews and ranks teacher preparation programs.
When A stands for average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education receive sky high grades. How smart is that?
I hope our leaders stand up against Walsh, teachers unions
I read with interest Erika Sanzi’s fine Nov. 25 Commentary piece (“Election bodes well for R.I. students”) on the election of two pro-student candidates as governor and lieutenant governor of Rhode Island. Neither Governor-elect Gina Raimondo nor Lieutenant Governor-elect Dan McKee seems to be beholden to the teachers unions.
I hope and pray that Ms. Sanzi is right. But I remember with dread the endorsement of Robert Walsh, executive director of the National Education Association Rhode Island, of candidate Raimondo in the last weeks before the election. Was there a quid pro quo? And what will be the payback demanded?
– See more at: http://www.providencejournal.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/20141126-tom-foley-i-hope-our-leaders-stand-up-against-walsh-teachers-unions.ece#sthash.YrD2FNyF.dpuf
Should the U.S. Make Standardized Tests Harder?
With opposition to the new Common Core State Standards and the assessments linked to them reaching a fever pitch, advocating for better tests seems like an unpopular proposition. But what if U.S. students took fewer tests that measured their ability to understand academic concepts far more deeply than current tests permit?
A growing chorus of scholars is calling for just that: fewer but harder tests that go beyond the standard multiple choice model, ones that ask students to answer open-ended questions, solve tougher problems, and interpret harder texts.
“We could get the benefits of higher-quality assessments and spend less than we’re spending today,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, a leading professor of education at Stanford University, during a recent presentation. “We’re just not spending it in ways that are very optimal for promoting deeper learning.”
If the quality of tests are a reflection of how much students are expected to know, the standardized assessments of the No Child Left Behind era have missed the mark on measuring students’ ability to process complex knowledge, some research suggests. A recent RAND Corporation study of 17 state standardized tests found that 2 percent of the math questions and 21 percent of the English Language Arts questions assessed students on higher-order skills. Several other studies have come to similar conclusions.
Why College Is Necessary But Gets You Nowhere
So even though college costs are rising, the financial return to a college degree compared to not having one is rising even faster.
But here’s the qualification, and it’s a big one.
A college degree no longer guarantees a good job. The main reason it pays better than the job of someone without a degree is the latter’s wages are dropping.
In fact, it’s likely that new college graduates will spend some years in jobs for which they’re overqualified.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 46 percent of recent college graduates are now working in jobs that don’t require college degrees. (The same is true for more than a third of college graduates overall.)
Learning with Big Data: The Future of Education
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger & Kenneth Cukier:
A decade ago, as a 22-year-old grad student, von Ahn helped create something called CAPTCHAs—squiggly text that people have to type into websites in order to sign up for things like free email. Doing so proves that they are humans and not spambots. An upgraded version (called reCAPTCHA) that von Ahn sold to Google had people type distorted text that wasn’t just invented for the purpose, but came from Google’s book-scanning project, which a computer couldn’t decipher. It was a beautiful way to serve two goals with a single piece of data: register for things online, and decrypt words at the same time. Since then, von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has looked for other “twofers”—ways to get people to supply bits of data that can serve two purposes. He devised it in a startup that he launched in 2012 called Duolingo. The site and smartphone app help people learn foreign languages—something he can empathize with, having learned English as a young child in Guatemala. But the instruction happens in a very clever way.
The company has people translate texts in small phrases at a time, or evaluate and fix other people’s translations. Instead of presenting invented phrases, as is typical for translation software, Duolingo presents real sentences from documents that need translation, for which the company gets paid. After enough students have independently translated or verified a particular phrase, the system accepts it—and compiles all the discrete sentences into a complete document. Among its customers are media companies such as CNN and BuzzFeed, which use it to translate their content in foreign markets. Like reCAPTCHA, Duolingo is a delightful “twin-win”: students get free foreign language instruction while producing something of economic value in return.
Americans Borrowing More Briskly for Cars, Homes Delinquencies Fall Broadly, Except in Student Lending
Americans increased their borrowing this summer, taking out more new mortgages for the first time in over a year while adding to their car, credit-card and education loans.
For the most part, consumers are taking on new loans carefully, yet late payments on one fast-growing category of debt—student loans—are worsening, new figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show.
“We pay too little attention to the actual content of lessons: what gets taught and how it is taught”
Above all, she aims straight for the most sacred cows to which even Tory ministers sometimes pay obeisance. Claims that you can teach “transferable skills”, that the 21st century changes everything and that “teacher-led instruction is passive” – all these are myths, she says. She is scathing about how Ofsted highlights and praises lessons where pupils do things “spontaneously”, such as spelling French words correctly, as though it were unnecessary to instruct them on such things. She dares to criticise John Dewey, a staple of teacher training courses, for his opaque writing style and to chide Charles Dickens for creating, through Hard Times’ Thomas Gradgrind and his daughter, the myth that teaching facts turns children into emotionally stunted adults. As a West Ham supporter who played for Warwick University’s women’s football team, she even critiques how we develop young footballers, arguing that children shouldn’t play 11-a-side matches on full-sized pitches until they’ve learned ball control.
Teaching civility: Two daring assignments
I remember the day I stopped humming the theme song to the television show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” It was midway through the semester at Towson University, and I had just met with a student who was furious that I had asked her to leave class because she had been e-mailing. She couldn’t believe I would do such a thing. I was angry that she flouted my no-texting/e-mailing classroom policy and, worse, that she lacked even a whiff of contrition.
I walked into my next class, a course that explored the declining health of civility and community in American culture. As usual, everyone’s eyes were buried in their cellphones. When class started, the tension was palpable. Ever since we had started exploring the toxic state of community, students had grown defensive. They hadn’t bought my argument that they needed to break out of their hyperconnected cocoons — “ramparts” may be more accurate — and live in ever-expanding communities where face-to-face relationships breed tolerance and the rewards of individual sacrifice.
I posed a question. “I just read a study which says that 81 percent of your generation doesn’t trust most people or large institutions,” I said. “So, how can we create community if we only trust our small circle of friends and families?”
“What’s wrong with finding our own small communities?” Ashley huffed.
A wave of “Yeahs!” sounded.
Self Selection of New Jersey Public Schools
intentionally skimming,” said Anderson, “but all of these things are leading to a higher concentration of the neediest kids in fewer [district] schools.”
Charter advocates winced and went on the defensive. Charter detractors grinned and high-fived. Both reactions miss the point.
Statisticians and social scientists argue about the presence and/or impact of this unintentional bias cited by Anderson, what Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the progressive Century Foundation, calls “the self-selection problem that skims the most motivated families into charter schools.” So let’s start by agreeing that many charter schools are subject to unintentional skimming (and note the irony that Anderson’s “One Newark” universal enrollment plan, the subject of much criticism, was created specifically to avoid that bias.)
But this narrow reading of Newark’s public school enrollment template ignores the big picture. New Jersey parents have a long proud tradition of self-selection of schools. It’s as New Jersey as cranberries. Charter school skimming in Newark is just New Jersey’s school segregation problem writ small, an in situ version of a statewide pattern.
There are 21 school districts in Essex County, including Newark, which educate 124,000 students in 247 public schools. The median household income is $55,000, about $16,000 below the state’s median $71,000. The county’s racial makeup is diverse, with equal numbers of white and black residents and a growing Hispanic population. However, as Paul Tractenberg pointed out in these pages last year, Essex is the most segregated county in the state. Twelve school districts are almost entirely white and wealthy. Four, including Newark, “are urban, desperately poor, and almost entirely populated by students of color.”
More districts are searching internationally to find candidates for difficult-to-fill math and science positions
When a national search attracted only a few new candidates, Casa Grande administrators hired a consulting agency to search for teachers overseas.
Avenida International Consultants gave administrators videos of candidates from the Philippines teaching in classrooms. Administrators then conducted interviews with the candidates via Skype to assess their skills and English-language abilities. Goodsell hired 11 math and science teachers, who relocated and started work this fall.
“We’re very pleased in regard to who we’ve been able to attract to our small district,” Goodsell says. “The teachers have done a great service for our kids and community.” All of the Filipino teachers have bachelor’s degrees, and many have master’s degrees and are working on doctorates in the subject they are teaching, he adds.
Math and science
U.S. schools have hired teachers from abroad for decades. But as baby boomers retire and school enrollment steadily increases, more districts are searching internationally to find candidates for difficult-to-fill math and science positions. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that districts will need to hire nearly half a million teachers by the end of the decade.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Falling Wages at Factories Squeeze the Middle Class
Nelson Schwartz & Patricia Cohen:
For nearly 20 years, Darrell Eberhardt worked in an Ohio factory putting together wheelchairs, earning $18.50 an hour, enough to gain a toehold in the middle class and feel respected at work.
He is still working with his hands, assembling seats for Chevrolet Cruze cars at the Camaco auto parts factory in Lorain, Ohio, but now he makes $10.50 an hour and is barely hanging on. “I’d like to earn more,” said Mr. Eberhardt, who is 49 and went back to school a few years ago to earn an associate’s degree. “But the chances of finding something like I used to have are slim to none.”
Related: Ongoing Madison Property Tax Increases: “delinquencies 30% higher than we expect”.
Pearson chief promises a big push into China’s education sector
Pearson Plc’s pavilion at a book fair in Beijing. The global education service company said that its business revenue in China reached $300 million last year from $10 million in 2007 when it entered the Chinese market.
Global giant to take mixed, blended learning approach for success
Pearson Plc, the global education service company, is planning a major push into China in response to the country’s swelling demand for English-language skills both from students and the business community.Pearson acquired one of the world’s leading providers of English language training Wall Street English in 2009, which has dozens of sites across the country. It also bought the Beijing-based Global Education and Technology Group for $294 million in 2011, which is considered the largest test preparation provider for the International English Language Testing System and a leading provider of educational courses and related services in China.
John Fallon, Pearson’s chief executive officer, who visited Beijing recently, said rising numbers of Chinese students are looking to study at English speaking universities, a lot of which are raising their English entry requirements.
Thinking too highly of higher ed
Perhaps the least controversial thing that President Obama ever said was that “in the coming decades, a high school diploma is not going to be enough. Folks need a college degree.” This vision is commonplace, but it implies a bleak future where everyone must work harder just to stay in place, and it’s just not true. Nothing forces us to funnel students into a tournament that bankrupts the losers and turns the winners into conformists. But that’s what will happen until we start questioning whether college is our only option.
Is higher education an investment? Everyone knows that college graduates earn more than those without degrees. Maybe that earning power comes from learning valuable skills, networking with smart people or obtaining a recognized credential. Well, maybe — it’s hard to say exactly, since “college” bundles so many different things into one arbitrary package. And if all the most ambitious kids in our society go to college just because it’s the conventional thing to do, then what happens on campus might not matter, anyway. The same kids would probably enjoy a wage premium even if they spent four years in the Peace Corps instead.
Studying for the Test by Taking It
PROTESTS are flaring up in pockets of the country against the proliferation of standardized tests. For many parents and teachers, school has become little more than a series of workout sessions for the assessment du jour.
And that is exactly backward, research shows. Tests should work for the student, not the other way around.
In an experiment published late last year, two University of Texas psychologists threw out the final exam for the 900 students in their intro psych course and replaced it with a series of short quizzes that students took on their laptops at the beginning of each class.
COMMENTARY: Every Camden kid deserves good education
I was born and raised in North Camden and still live here today. There are good people here who chose to stay and raise their families when they could have left for a better future. People here work hard and want what is best for their children so that they can have a better future than my generation has.
I attended elementary and middle school in the city but never made it out of seventh grade. I was held back twice and tagged as a troublemaker. As a result it felt like I was trapped in middle school. Since I had nowhere to go, I just dropped out. I did get my GED. Then I worked in factories. Now I work as a housekeeper at a local hotel.
Until this year, my children were going to a public elementary school because it was the closest. The school wasn’t working for them and my children were headed down a path similar to mine. They hated school. Classrooms were out of control and there were no consequences for bad behavior. They didn’t know how to do homework when they got home in the afternoon, and they didn’t want to go to school in the morning. They wanted to give up.
Then this past summer I learned about Mastery’s North Camden Elementary when I saw fliers and people representing the school were on my street talking with the neighbors. I decided to enroll them because I really wanted to try something different for my children. Today, my children can’t wait to get to school. They love their teachers. And I love that there is real structure there, unlike where they came from.
Harvard’s Asian Problem
The Supreme Court declined to draw a clear line on racial discrimination in university admissions in last year’s Fisher v. University of Texas decision. Now new lawsuits are moving to challenge how far colleges can go in using racial preferences.
A group called Students for Fair Admissions filed lawsuits Monday against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina in federal court. The suits argue that the schools use race…
Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers
This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. We recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards. The criteria for determining predatory publishers are here.
We hope that tenure and promotion committees can also decide for themselves how importantly or not to rate articles published in these journals in the context of their own institutional standards and/or geocultural locus. We emphasize that journal publishers and journals change in their business and editorial practices over time. This list is kept up-to-date to the best extent possible but may not reflect sudden, unreported, or unknown enhancements.
School design through the decades
In the decades after the Industrial Revolution, educational reformers led the effort to modernise schools and classroom spaces, and the ubiquitous one-room schoolhouse gradually gave way to bigger and more sophisticated designs. Scholars such as Lindsay Baker at the University of California, Berkeley have traced the subsequent history of these school designs, and have noted the surprising ebb and flow of attention to details such as indoor air quality and access to daylight.
This article explores some school designs from across these decades in the USA and Europe.
Related: Frederick Taylor.
Surprise: Humanities Degrees Provide Great Return On Investment
Humanities degrees have received a bad rap recently, even from President Obama. Many people, including top policy makers, routinely push policies to encourage more students to major in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Some governors have even suggested that state subsidies for public universities should be focused on STEM disciplines, with less money going to “less useful” degrees such as the humanities. Yet, in contravention to this perceived truth, the data show that humanities degrees are still worth a great deal.
As part of a recent project estimating the economic impact of my university, I had a reason to compute the predicted value of college degrees in a wide variety of fields. While it is certainly true that science, engineering, math and business degrees all produce graduates with high expected salaries, those humanities degrees still pay off rather handsomely.
Who Killed Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website in the world. It’s the quickest way to get the lowdown on the Battle of Nashville, find out exactly how old Ruth Bader Ginsburg is, or discover who invented Hot Pockets. You can find more authoritative specialized resources online—from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to IMDb— but nothing is as comprehensive. The English-language edition, the largest of Wikipedia’s 287 language editions, now includes more than 4.5 million entries, and 11 other editions have more than a million each.
Few of the tens of millions of readers who rely on Wikipedia give much thought to where its content comes from or why the site, which is crowdsourced and open (at least in theory) for anyone to edit, doesn’t degenerate into gibberish and graffiti. Like Google or running water, it is simply there. Yet its very existence is something of a miracle. Despite its ocean of content, this vital piece of informational infrastructure is the work of a surprisingly small community of volunteers. Only about 3,000 editors contribute more than 100 changes a month to the English-language Wikipedia, down from a high of more than 4,700 in early 2007. Without any central direction or outside recognition, these dedicated amateurs create, refine, and maintain millions of content pages.
Student Loan Debt per US State
This map shows average student loan debt and student loan default rates in the U.S. when your cursor hovers over a state. The table below shows a ranking of states by their average student loan debt. Explore, then see our conclusions below.
Harvard Deserves Steve Ballmer’s Millions
Now that he’s retired as chief executive officer of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer has time for popular billionaire pastimes. First, he bought a basketball team for $2 billion. Now he’s gotten into big-bucks philanthropy.
Ballmer and his wife, Connie, are giving $50 million in unrestricted funds to bolster the endowment of the University of Oregon, her alma mater. (She’s also on the university’s board of trustees.) They’re kicking in a seemingly comparable amount to significantly expand the computer science department at Harvard University, from which he received his undergraduate degree in 1977. The gift will allow Harvard to add a dozen computer science professors, bringing the department to 36 faculty, compared with 55 next door at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (The exact sum wasn’t disclosed, but when the Harvard Crimson estimated $60 million — 12 slots at an endowment of $5 million each — Ballmer called the numbers “pretty good.”)
Jeb Bush speaks up for Common Core
“In my view, the rigour of the Common Core state standards must be the new minimum in classrooms,” Mr Bush said. “For those states choosing a path other than Common Core, I say this: Aim even higher. Be bolder. Raise standards and ask more of our students and the system, because I know they have the potential to deliver it.”
Mr Bush said the US government must make education reform a priority and, if that happens, it could make Common Core a 2016 election cycle issue. Last month, Rand Paul, Kentucky’s Republican senator, said that a supporter “doesn’t have much chance of winning in a Republican primary.”
Mr Bush pointed to Black and Hispanic American fourth graders reading two and a half grade levels below their white peers on average. He also cited the global rankings that place American students 21st in reading and 31st in mathematics.
“But if we buy the excuses, if we let kids struggle, if we herd them into failing schools, how can we expect young people to grasp those first rungs of opportunity?” Mr Bush asked. “That is why the challenge of fixing our schools must be among the most urgent of national priorities.”
Typing takes over as handwriting ends
BBC:
Finnish students will no longer be taught handwriting at school, with typing lessons taking its place, it’s reported.
Learning joined-up writing, often in fountain pen in the UK, is almost a rite of passage for primary school students. But Finland is moving into the digital age by ditching the ink in favour of keyboards, the Savon Sanomat newspaper reports. From autumn 2016, students won’t have to learn cursive handwriting or calligraphy, but will instead be taught typing skills, the report says. “Fluent typing skills are an important national competence,” says Minna Harmanen from the National Board of Education. The switch will be a major cultural change, Ms Harmanen says, but typing is more relevant to everyday life.
Student Debt: A Calculator Focused on College Majors
Student debt seems on its way to becoming a significant political issue, for better or worse. When a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll asked people about a long list of domestic and foreign policy proposals, none received more support – 82 percent – than reducing the cost of student loans. When the 2016 campaign gets underway, candidates will most likely come forth with various plans to address the issue.
So it’s a good time for an interactive calculator that the Hamilton Project is releasing Thursday, meant to give more detailed information about loan burdens. The feature’s main contribution is the earnings data it gives on about 80 different majors, allowing people to look up typical debt burdens by major, over the first decade after college – which is when people tend to repay their loans.
Passing Rate Declines by 20% as State Uses New Certification Exams for Teachers
New York State saw a significant drop in the number of candidates who passed teacher certification tests last year as tougher exams were introduced, state officials said on Wednesday, portraying the results as a long-needed move to raise the level of teaching and the performance of teacher preparation schools.
In the 2013-14 school year, 11,843 teachers earned their certification in New York, a drop of about 20 percent from the previous two years.
Candidates without certification cannot teach in public schools, and education schools with high failure rates may eventually lose their accreditation.
Related: a Wisconsin MTEL “toe dip”.
5 ways community colleges are fixing higher education
By Emanuella Grinberg, Jamie Gumbrecht and Thom Patterson:
Enter community colleges. They provide technical programs for emerging careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics that are comparable to — if not better than — some of their four-year counterparts, at a fraction of the cost. Often, they’re the launchpad to baccalaureate programs for people without the time, money or academic skills to jump into a four-year program straight out of high school.
And as part of the American Association of Community Colleges’ 21st Century Initiative, they’re updating their missions and nimbly shifting to serve the economy of the future.
Here are some of the ways they’re facing problems that weigh down all of higher education — and succeeding.
Graduates of Elite Colleges See a Payoff
Sure, it’s nice to have a graduate degree from Yale, but a new study finds that attending an elite undergraduate institution counts for an awful lot when it comes to lifelong earnings.
A researcher at the Vanderbilt University Law School found that people with advanced degrees from elite schools and undergraduate diplomas from less-selective institutions earn less than people who attended elite schools for both their graduate and undergraduate degrees.
The results hold up across a broad swath of graduate programs, from law degrees to M.B.A.s. And those who attended less elite undergraduate institutions are unlikely to ever close the salary gap, according to the study.
Joni Hersch of Vanderbilt Law School said the survey results came as somewhat of a surprise, but suggests that it’s not really undergraduate education driving the pay disparity, but instead the social status of graduates of elite colleges.
The parents of students at elite colleges tend to be better-educated than the parents of those at less competitive schools, Hersch said; the children of educated parents tend to have more early networking opportunities and understand certain social cues.
“It’s the vacations you can talk about, the small talk you can make, what wine you order in restaurants” that could make the difference in a hiring manager’s decision, said Hersch, who earned her undergraduate degree at the University of South Florida.
Wisconsin Special Education Open Enrollment Lawsuit
Teens learn better when they’re awake
Last week the New Jersey Senate Education Committee approved a bill proposed by Sen. Dick Codey (D-Essex) that would authorize “a study on the issues, benefits, and options for instituting a later start time to the school day in middle school and high school.” Makes sense, right? After all, we know that the hormonal changes of puberty affect teenagers’ circadian rhythms which, in turn, dictate sleep schedules and alertness. If you’ve had teenagers (I’ve had four) you know that they’re late to bed and late to rise, a pattern that hardly squares with school start times of 7:30 or so. Sen. Codey’s bill logically proposes that middle and high schools students start school when they are awake enough to fully benefit from academic instruction. This shift is supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
You’d think that this would be an easy call for the State Legislature, but it’s complicated. With all the agonizing we do over the state of American education — our kids are underperforming! our kids are over-tested! it’s the race to nowhere! it’s their only chance! — we rarely focus on the fact that school schedules are shaped by an assortment of priorities that at times coexist harmoniously with the academic mission of schools and at times conflict with that mission. One of those conflicts is our tradition of designing school schedules to accommodate the needs of extracurricular activities. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Sen. Codey’s bill is that it forces us to examine that compromise.
Here Comes The Student Loan Forgiveness
President Obama is in the process of expanding a student loan forgiveness program through his executive power (the infamous pen). Whether constitutional or not, he appears to believe that he can add more students to the eligibility list for a program he created by regulation in November 2013. This “Pay-As-You-Earn” program is partly about lowering the monthly payments to make student loans more affordable for graduates, but mostly it is the foot in the door to student loan forgiveness.
Under the latest version of President Obama’s giveaway to former college students, people with student loans that meet certain income eligibility standards will only need to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income for a maximum of 20 years. Discretionary income is the amount you earn above the poverty line for your family size. If a borrower works for a government or in a job defined as public service, they only have to pay for 10 years. After that, the remaining balance is forgiven.
What do you know? A simple way to revolutionise teacher quality1 2
I want to talk about a topic so volatile and delicate it could be a kitten made of nitroglycerin: subject knowledge. And, for once, I don’t mean looking at what children know, because that’s a discussion that can currently be enjoyed on channels 1-100 on your Sky box (other cable providers are, of course, available). It’s a good debate, and an important one. But it isn’t this one.
This sermon is about teacher knowledge. What do you know about what you teach? It can be a sobering reflection, for me as much as anyone else. The personal is political, so here’s some history. I studied philosophy, because that’s where all the good-looking people earning big bucks started out [check this – Ed]. It was at the University of Glasgow, where you wisely begin with three subjects (English literature, philosophy and politics for me), narrowing one’s focus in year three, continuing to an optional master’s degree in year four. I received a joint honours MA in politics and philosophy. I learned a good deal about Thomas Hobbes and the social contract, type/token mistakes and the 100 best gags of Andrea Dworkin. You will note that, fascinating as these topics are, none of them particularly prepare you for a Year 7 lesson on the 5 Ks of Sikhism, the concept of authority and law in Judaism, or the Passion of Gethsemane.
Vape gathers linguistic steam to become Word of the Year 2014
This was the year of vaping, according to Oxford Dictionaries, which has chosen “vape” – the act of inhaling from an electronic cigarette – as its word of 2014 after use of the term more than doubled over the last year.
Vape – defined as to “inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device” – beat contenders including slacktivism, bae and indyref to be chosen as Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2014. The shortlist is compiled from scanning around 150m words of English in use each month, applying software to identify new and emerging usage. Dictionary editors and lexicographers, including staff from the Oxford English Dictionary, then pinpoint a final selection and an eventual winner, which is intended to be a word judged “to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance”.
Why Is American Teaching So Bad?
Aware of such research, Green circles back to the education schools, where a zealous coterie of scholars has been trying to identify and inculcate the “habits of mind” that define the disciplines. They tend to follow the work of Stanford University’s Lee Shulman, who coined the term “pedagogical content knowledge” to describe the intellectual apparatus that you need to teach a given subject. I am a full professor at a major research university, but I could not, without much preparation, teach high school chemistry. I could, of course, require my students to memorize the periodic table of elements. But I couldn’t teach the discipline, because I don’t understand its history or structure: how it developed over time, what it has discovered, what is left to know, and what counts as “knowledge” in the first place. These are hugely complicated questions, usually reserved for graduate study in the disciplines themselves. But unless you understand how a discipline actually works, you won’t be able to help anyone else understand it, either.
And that brings us to the saddest fact of all: most of our teachers don’t possess a deep working knowledge of any discipline, at least not in the way that good teaching demands. Perhaps the teachers of very small children do not need the same mastery of a discipline as their counterparts in middle and high schools. But surely they need a deep and theoretically sophisticated understanding of the ways that children learn. Even the teaching of so-called simple arithmetic turns out to be an immensely complicated endeavor, but most of our teachers do not treat it as such. Part of that failing has to do with the lack of constructive collaboration inside our schools, where teachers work almost entirely in isolation.
By contrast, many other advanced countries have institutionalized critical commentary by peers and also provide intellectual support to improve skills and learning as part of teachers’ professional practice. Japanese teachers even have a separate word for this process, jugyokenkyu, which is built into their weekly routines. All teachers have designated periods to observe each other’s classes, study curriculum, and otherwise hone their craft. But they also learn a great deal in their pre-service training, which is both more rigorous and more demanding concerning particular subject matter than anything American teacher-education students are likely to encounter.
Colleges and universities charge more, keep less, new report finds
Forced to keep discounting their prices as enrollment stagnates, U.S. universities and colleges expect their slowest growth in revenue in 10 years, the bond-rating company Moody’s reports.
The squeeze could threaten further cuts in services even as tuition continues to increase.
A quarter of colleges and universities are projecting declines in revenue, according to a closely watched annual Moody’s survey. Half of public and 40 percent of private institutions say they will take in only 2 percent more than the inflation rate, or worse.
“Smaller entering classes in much of the country over the next few years foreshadows continued revenue pressure.” Eva Bogaty, vice president and senior analyst, Moody’s
Moody’s analysts say regional public universities and small private colleges, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest where birth rates are flat and enrollment growth has stalled, are at the greatest risk. But the problems are dogging campuses everywhere.
College Applicants Sanitizing Social Media Profiles
Admissions officers at Morehouse College in Atlanta were shocked several years ago when a number of high school seniors submitted applications using email addresses containing provocative language.
Some of the addresses made sexual innuendos while others invoked gangster rap songs or drug use, said Darryl D. Isom, Morehouse’s director of admissions and recruitment.
But last year, he and his staff noticed a striking reversal: Nearly every applicant to Morehouse, an all-male historically black college, used his real name, or some variation, as his email address.
Chinese Students at U.S. Universities Jump 75% in Three Years
In 2013-2014, the number of Chinese students in the U.S. rose 8.1 percent from a year earlier, while those from India swelled by 17 percent, the IIE said. Foreigners are attractive to colleges because they bring diversity to campuses and many pay full freight. That’s a boon to schools, which doled out about $48 billion in grant aid in the form of discounts in 2013-2014, almost double the rate of a decade earlier when adjusted for inflation, according to the New York-based College Board.
“There’s room in American higher education for more foreign students,” said Allan Goodman, president of the institute.
Algorithms on Khan Academy, a collaboration with Dartmouth College professors
What is an algorithm? It’s a sequence of steps that you follow to solve a problem. In everyday life, you might have an algorithm for hanging up your laundry, efficiently going through a shopping list, or finding an empty parking space in a lot. In computer science, an algorithm is a sequence of instructions that a computer program follows. Algorithms form the basis of the most interesting and important programs we use, such as the algorithm that Google uses to calculate driving directions, or the algorithm that Facebook uses to automatically tag you in a photo.
Because algorithms are so important to computer science, they are a core part of a computer science curriculum. The AP CS A class teaches object-oriented programming with algorithms, every college CS student will have at least one algorithms class and encounter algorithms everywhere, and every software engineer interviewing for a job will review algorithms while they’re prepping for an interview.
On Common Core Reading
NPR:
All week we’ve been reporting on big changes in reading instruction brought on by the Common Core State Standards: a doubling-down on evidence-based reading, writing and speaking; increased use of nonfiction; and a big push to get kids reading more “complex texts.”
Whatever you think of these shifts, they’re meaningless ideas without a classroom and kids to make sense of them. That’s today’s story, as we round out our series on reading in the Core era.
It’s mid-morning at Watkins Elementary in Washington, D.C. From the fourth floor, Amy Wertheimer’s fifth-grade classroom looks out over a red-brick grid of rowhouses and, looming over it all, the U.S. Capitol. But every back is to the view as Ms. Wertheimer calls her kids to the reading rug.
Design education is “tragic”
News: Apple’s head designer Jonathan Ive says he struggles to hire young staff as schools are failing to teach them how to make products.
Speaking at London’s Design Museum last night, Ive attacked design schools for failing to teach students how to make physical products and relying too heavily on “cheap” computers.
“So many of the designers that we interview don’t know how to make stuff, because workshops in design schools are expensive and computers are cheaper,” said Ive.
“That’s just tragic, that you can spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one.”
Ive, who is Apple’s senior vice president of design, said that students were being taught to use computer programs to make renderings that could “make a dreadful design look really palatable”.
Commentary on open Enrollment & the Madison school District
Of course, public schools officials will never accept a rating system that includes a failing-grade option; some things are OK for students, but not for the people who educate them.
None of these initiatives is any older than 2011, when Republicans took over complete control of the state government, but parents have been voting against the Madison district — with their feet — since they were first allowed to in 1998.
The open enrollment program was included in the 1997 state budget bill and allows parents to enroll their children in any public school district that has the space.
In the years since, the Madison district has never seen more students coming in than going out. In the current school year, 1,203 children living within the district’s boundaries opted to go to other districts, according to a district report. Another 372 opted to come into Madison from other districts.
A 2009 survey of families who took advantage of the open enrollment program to leave Madison found that 61 percent of parents pointed to environmental problems with Madison schools as among the reasons they left. Overcrowded classrooms, bullying and poor communication were among the specific complaints.
Notes and links on Madison’s open enrollment history, here.
Watch Harvard Students Fail the Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote in 1964
This summer, we revisited a literacy test from the Jim Crow South. Given predominantly to African-Americans living in Louisiana in 1964, the test consisted of 30 ambiguous questions to be answered in 10 minutes. One wrong answer, and the test-taker was denied the right to vote. It was all part of the South’s attempt to impede free and fair elections, and ensure that African-Americans had no access to politics or mechanisms of power.
How hard was the test? You can take it yourself below (see an answer key here) and find out. Just recently, the same literacy test was also administered to Harvard students — students who can, if anything, ace a standardized test — and not one passed. The questions are tricky. But even worse, if push comes to shove, the questions and answers can be interpreted in different ways by officials grading the exam. Carl Miller, a resident tutor at Harvard and a fellow at the law school, told The Daily Mail: “Louisiana’s literacy test was designed to be failed. Just like all the other literacy tests issued in the South at the time, this test was not about testing literacy at all. It was a … devious measure that the State of Louisiana used to disenfranchise people that had the wrong skin tone or belonged to the wrong social class.” (Sometimes the test was also given to poor whites.) Above, you can watch scenes from the Harvard experiment and students’ reactions.
Community Colleges Make Four-Year Degrees Pay Off
With college costs soaring and the job market for new grads sputtering, one trend is worth watching: more and more states are authorizing community colleges to grant bachelor’s degrees. Already, more than 20 states — now including California, which enrolls one out of every four of the nation’s community college students — have authorized community colleges to grant these degrees.
Turf will be an issue as this trend continues, but there is a division of labor between community colleges and universities that makes sense. Community colleges can and should be encouraged to develop bachelor’s-degree programs in career and technical areas and to avoid the liberal arts degrees that are integral to the mission and education delivered by universities. In any case, turf isn’t the bottom line in this coming shift. The bottom line is the bottom line: Do the technical and career-oriented degrees in which community colleges specialize pay off in the labor market?
Student Debt Rises Again
Students in the class of 2013 who took out loans to attend public and private nonprofit colleges graduated with an average of debt of $28,400, a 2 percent increase from the previous year, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Institute for College Access and Success.
About 70 percent of graduates had student loans, the report says, but the amount they owed varied widely across different institutions and states.Six states — New Hampshire, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Minnesota, and Connecticut — had graduates with average student loan debt in excess of $30,000. At the other end of the spectrum, New Mexico and California, at $18,656 and $20,340, respectively, were the states with the lowest average student loan debt.
OntoMathPro Ontology Page
The OntoMathPro ontology has been developed by a research group from Kazan Federal University. The ontology is geared to be the hub for math knowledge in the Web of Data. We shared the sources with the Semantic Web community to engage our colleagues from elsewhere in its further development. We are going to create an ecosystem of datasets and mashups around the ontology.
Why Blended tops my thankful list
Each November our family has a tradition of listing things we’re grateful for on 100 colorful construction-paper leaves and taping them all over the windows by the kitchen table. The recent publication of Blended of course tops my list!
Admittedly that’s in part because of the relief of a finished project, but the more lasting joy is from knowing that Michael Horn and I helped preserve stories that I think need to be told about children and school and the profound effect of adults’ choices on children’s lives. The book begins with a story about Jack, a fifth grader at Santa Rita Elementary School who started the 2010-11 school year at the bottom of his math class. He struggled to keep up and considered himself one of those kids who would just never quite “get it.” In a typical school, he would have been tracked and placed in the bottom math group. That would have meant that he would not have taken algebra until high school, which would have limited his college options.
Why College is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People
Instead, I’m addressing this post to a specific type of person. But it’s a type that I’ve been encountering with greater frequency recently.
I’m talking about the kind of person who has various passions — theoretical or practical — and wants to study and/or gain skills in their area(s) of interest. For this type of person, college is often a very poor choice. At the very least, college can be a very circuitous path to those goals; there are paths that are way more direct.
It’s not that college doesn’t include some things that can further these goals. It might, but only incidentally. And along with a bunch of stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with these goals. College also includes things that are diametrically opposed to them.
Chinese Enrollment in U.S. Graduate Schools Dips as India Surges
Attentive observers won’t be surprised by the new international-enrollment numbers released on Wednesday by the Council of Graduate Schools. But there’s something momentous about the annual report’s key finding: For the first time since the council’s reports began, in 2004, first-time enrollment by Chinese students in graduate programs at American universities actually dropped this year.
The writing has been on the wall for more than a year. In April 2013, the council reported that Chinese applications to American graduate schools fell 5 percent after seven consecutive years of double-digit growth. The drop was so unexpected that the council’s president at the time, Debra W. Stewart, didn’t believe it at first. The possibility that the dip was an aberration was proved unlikely this year, when the council reported that applications from China fell again.
Q&A: Lamar Alexander On Education In The New Congress
What’s your first priority?
Our first priority is to fix No Child Left Behind. The Republican proposal to fix NCLB would give states the option — not mandate — to take federal dollars and let those dollars follow children to the schools they attend. We want to expand choice, but my view is that the federal government shouldn’t mandate it. … Republicans would [also] transfer back to states the responsibility for deciding whether schools are succeeding or failing. Tennessee, Texas or New York would decide what the academic standards would be, what the curriculum would be, what to do about failing schools and how to evaluate teachers.
Do you support the Common Core State Standards?
I support giving states the right to decide whether to [adopt] the Common Core or not.
What about higher education? There’s a lot of pressure to hold institutions more accountable for the $200 billion they get in federal aid and to bring the cost of college down.
The cost of higher education is more affordable than people think. At a community college, average tuition is $3,600. At a four-year public institution, it’s $8[,000] to $9,000. Many students can get a Pell Grant they don’t have to pay back, up to $5,000. We lend $100 billion every year in student loans at an interest rate of about 4 percent to people with no credit history. Tennessee is the first state to say two years of community college is free. I expect more states to do that.
I’m [also] working with [Colorado Democratic] Sen. Michael Bennet to take the 108-question student-aid application form, known as FAFSA, and reduce it to two questions: ‘What’s your family income?’ and ‘What’s your family size?’ … The complexity of the form is discouraging students from attending college. So the greatest barrier to more college graduates is this federal application form.
London schools: the central role of ethnicity
Urban areas are often associated with poor educational attainment. But London is different. Recent analysis suggests that the attainment and progress of pupils in London is the highest in the country. A leading education policy commentator argues that: “Perhaps the biggest question in education policy over the past few years is why the outcomes for London schools have been improving so much faster than in the rest of the country”. Some have argued that this is the result of policies and practices adopted by London schools. If so, identifying the key policies is a great prize, with the hope that they can be implemented more broadly. Another recent report emphasises more the importance of primary schools.
In this research I have set out the evidence that a big part, almost all in fact, of the answer lies in the ethnic composition of London’s pupils. More broadly, my interpretation of this leads to a focus on pupil aspiration, ambition and engagement. There is nothing inherently different in the educational performance of pupils from different ethnic backgrounds, but the children of relatively recent immigrants typically have greater hopes and expectations of education, and are, on average, more likely to be engaged with their school work. This is not by chance of course; a key part of the London effect is its attraction to migrants and those aspiring to a better life.
A Look at Ed Tech’s Biggest Money Magnets
Investment in higher-education technology is booming. Venture-capital funding for individual companies trying to break into the market has climbed well past the million-dollar mark, and the growth shows no sign of slowing.
According to Peter Yoon, a managing director at the Berkery Noyes investment bank who specializes in the education and training sector, ed-tech investment has increased steeply since 2006. More than $1-billion was invested in ed-tech companies in 2013, he said, and in the first quarter of this year more than $50-million was invested.
“It’s quite a brisk pace in terms of the amount of investment,” Mr. Yoon said. “Compared to previous years, it’s a tremendous increase.”
– See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/A-Look-at-Ed-Tech-s-Biggest/149943/?key=Tj1wdAZma3UWZS1hYj5KMzZdaHBlZUIpZSYdOSohblpUEA==#sthash.9Lr5A2L2.dpuf
Charter School in NYC Pays Teachers 125K. Gets Same Results as Most Other Charter Schools in NYC.
When the media gets a charter school story wrong, I usually suspect political bias.
Progressive media outlets often underplay the effectiveness of charter schools, while conservative outlets overstate their impact.
But sometimes everyone misses a major part of the story.
All of the following media outlets reported on Mathematica’s study of The Equity Project: Vox.com (leans left), the Wall Street Journal (leans right), National Public Radio (leans left), the National Review (leans right), Shanker Blog (leans left).
Most of these education writers are top notch.
But all of them, I think, missed the mark.
The Mathematica Study; The CREDO Study
The Equity Project is a charter school in New York City. It pays teachers $125,000.
Mathematica just completed a rigorous study and found that, over four years, The Equity Project delivered an additional 1.6 years of math gains and .4 years of ELA gains.
Minneapolis Schools Implement Explicit Racial Bias in Suspensions
The good: Minneapolis Public Schools want to decrease total suspensions for non-violent infractions of school rules.
The bad: The district has pledged to do this by implementing a special review system for cases where a black or Latino student is disciplined. Only minority students will enjoy this special privilege.
That seems purposefully unconstitutional—and is likely illegal, according to certain legal minds.
The new policy is the result of negotiations between MPS and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Minority students are disciplined at much higher rates than white students, and for two years the federal government has investigated whether that statistic was the result of institutional racism.
Related. Madison’s problematic discipline policy.
Discipline & school violence forum
Scientists have unlocked a state of child-like fast learning in the adult brain
When we’re young, our brains are able to form new neural connections extremely quickly – an ability known as “plasticity” that allows us to learn how to walk, talk and play all in the space of a few years. But, as we get older, this ability fades and, sadly, it takes us longer to learn new things.
Now scientists from Stanford University in the US have managed to unlock child-like plasticity in the adult brains of mice by interfering with a protein known as PirB (or LilrB2 in humans).
The breakthrough is pretty exciting as it could not only lead to new mind-enhancing drugs, but could also help us work out how to make the brain more malleable and better able to recover from damage.
Do Schools Really Need Principals?
Rafiq Kalam Id-Din is walking down a hallway at Brooklyn’s Professional Prep charter school when he sees a fourth-grader in the doorway of a so-called “djed room.” The room, named after an ancient Egyptian symbol for stability, is a quiet, safe space where students can recollect themselves if they’ve been disruptive or a teacher suspects they’re about to become so.
“Are you here by choice, or did you get sent here?” Kalam Id-Din asks. The student’s head is down, and he hedges a bit before acknowledging that a teacher saw him acting up and suggested he step out before the behavior escalated.
At Professional Prep, teachers can’t send their kids to the principal’s office. Because there isn’t one.
One of three “managing partners” at the school, Kalam Id-Din is about the closest thing Professional Prep has to a school leader. Yet his main job is to teach a group of 20 or so fourth-graders rather than deal with the day-to-day administrative issues—hiring, discipline, staff and parent meetings—a typical principal might handle. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.
The school’s entire approach to discipline, for instance, was designed by teachers and was rooted in the idea that every action is a deliberate choice by a student. Kalam Id-Din says the djed rooms are much more effective than a trip to the principal’s office, citing the school’s low suspension rate as evidence.
Schools & Taxpayers Receive Poor Broadband Value
Wisconsin schools and libraries rely on Internet service that’s often inadequate and overpriced, with the true cost obscured by millions of dollars in government subsidies, according to research by a University of Wisconsin-Extension professor that has pitted him against the state’s telecommunications industry.
Andy Lewis, a professor and community development specialist at UW-Extension, in Madison, says the issue is twofold: Schools and libraries aren’t getting the broadband service they need to keep pace with increasing demands of technology and learning, and taxpayers could be paying up to 10 times too much for the service through a telecommunications network called BadgerNet.
Broadband speeds are measured in megabits per second. Higher broadband levels can accommodate more Internet users at the same time, which is important to schools and libraries and data-intensive services such as video presentations.
“It’s hard to believe, but schools and libraries in Wisconsin — or should I say the taxpayers — are often paying about the same amount of money for a 5-megabit-per-second circuit that other school districts across the country are paying for 1,000 megabits per second,” Lewis said.
Fearful Parenting Is Contagious
On Immunity: An Inoculation
Eula Biss
Graywolf Press, $24 (cloth)After my daughter was born, whenever I heard about parents who refused vaccines, I’d feel a flare of hostility. Not because I couldn’t relate to them—as an easily spooked new mom, I could relate all too well. No mother is thrilled to see a needle jabbed into her child. It hardly helps to know that the needle contains a substance derived from a disease-causing agent. Even leaving aside the debunked autism claims, the visceral reality of vaccination runs counter to every parental instinct.
But I had decided to trust the experts and not think about it too much. My daughter’s blue immunization book was fully up to date. Hearing about parents who opted out reminded me of my unease. Their existence was also an implicit rebuke; thinking of them put me on the defensive. They would, I imagined, deem me a bad mother, negligent and misinformed. I all but wanted to shout, “I know you are but what am I” at my hypothetical anti-vaxxer adversaries.
In On Immunity, Eula Biss’s quietly impassioned new book, the author evinces no such hostility (and considerably more maturity). She does attribute one pitch-perfect line to her father, a doctor who serves as the wry voice of reason in the book. Biss is groping for words to explain the phenomenon of chicken pox parties as alternatives to vaccinations. “I say, ‘Some people want their children to get chicken pox because,’ and pause to think of the best reason to give a doctor. ‘They’re idiots,’ my father supplies.”
Charter Schools Get Better over Time
Patrick L. Baude, Marcus Casey, Eric A. Hanushek, Steven G. Rivkin:
Studies of the charter school sector typically focus on head-to-head comparisons of charter and traditional schools at a point in time, but the expansion of parental choice and relaxation of constraints on school operations is unlikely to raise school quality overnight. Rather, the success of the reform depends in large part on whether parental choices induce improvements in the charter sector. We study quality changes among Texas charter schools between 2001 and 2011. Our results suggest that the charter sector was initially characterized by schools whose quality was highly variable and, on average, less effective than traditional public schools. However, exits from the sector, improvement of existing charter schools, and positive selection of charter management organizations that open additional schools raised average charter school effectiveness over time relative to traditional public schools. Moreover, the evidence is consistent with the belief that a reduction in student turnover as the sector matures, expansion of the share of charters that adhere to a No Excuses philosophy, and increasingly positive student selection at the times of both entry and reenrollment all contribute to the improvement of the charter sector.
More, here, including Madison’s ceaseless monolithic K-12 governance model.
Searching for consensus and New Jersey’s charter school wars
For those of you who follow N.J.’s charter school wars within the circumscribed twitter universe, the last few days have been pretty hot. The backstory here is that Mark Weber (a popular anti-reform blogger known as Jersey Jazzman who studies with Bruce Baker at Rutgers) and Julia Sass Rubin (professor at Rutgers and founder of the anti-charter organization called Save Our Schools-NJ) published a report on charter school demographics, paid for by an anti-charter foundation, also based at Rutgers. The study aimed to prove that charter schools “cream off” cohorts of kids who are less impoverished, less disabled, and more fluent in English than those enrolled in traditional district schools.
The conclusions imbedded in the report have been disputed by charter school leaders. Carlos Perez, head of the N.J. Charter School Association, for example, dismissed the report as “anti-charter propaganda.” But the primary igniter of this week’s heat wave was not the report itself but Ms. Rubin’s remark, printed in the Star-Ledger, that charter schools draw a less poor and more informed group of parents because “poor families are less able to focus on the best place to educate their children.” Here’s her quote:
This backpack designed for poor kids does so much more than carry books
South Africans Thato Kgatlhanye and Rea Ngwane are co-founders of the business Rethaka. Their brand of Repurposed Schoolbags are made from recycled and reinforced plastic shopping bags. Many of the recipients come from poor families.
But it’s so much more than a bag. Because the kids often live in shacks and remote areas with no electricity, Repurposed Schoolbags are built with some other smart features. On the outside of the flap is a pocket for a solar panel, which charges on the long walk to and from school. That screws onto a Consol glass jar that the kids use as a lamp at home when doing homework in the evenings. The bag is also reflective because many of these kids wake up at the crack of dawn and walk in the dark to get to school on time.
The Fine Art of Tough Love
What does it take to achieve excellence? I’ve spent much of my career chronicling top executives as a business journalist. But I’ve spent much of the last year on a very different pursuit, coauthoring a book about education, focusing on a tough but ultimately revered public-school music teacher.
And here’s what I learned: When it comes to creating a culture of excellence, the CEO has an awful lot to learn from the schoolteacher.
The teacher at the heart of the book Strings Attached is on the face of it an unlikely corporate role model. My childhood music teacher Jerry Kupchynsky, who we called “Mr. K,” was strictly old school: A ferocious Ukrainian immigrant and World War II refugee, he was a tyrannical school orchestra conductor in suburban New Jersey. He would yell and stomp and scream when we screwed up, bellowing “Who eez DEAF in first violins?” His highest praise was “not bad.” He rehearsed us until our fingers were raw.
The Rise of Extreme Daycare
In the garden of Dee’s Tots Childcare, amid the sunflowers, cornstalks, and plastic cars, a three-year-old girl with beads in her braids and a two-year-old blond boy are shimmying. These are Deloris Hogan’s 6:45 p.m. pick-ups. Nearby, also dancing, are four kids who won’t be picked up until late at night, as well as two “overnight babies,” as Deloris calls them. Dee’s Tots stays open 24 hours a day, seven days a week; the children’s parents work unconventional hours, producing an unexpected cycle of drop-offs and reunions. One afternoon in August, the kids bounce on the center’s inflatable castles, rustle around at the sand tables, and eat a watermelon snack. Then it gets dark.
Well-paid professionals who work evenings may be able to afford one or two nannies, or they may have partners who stay at home. But parents like the ones who rely on Dee’s can’t afford such luxuries.
Wisconsin superintendent seeks an Increase in Redistributed State Tax Dollars to $12,800,000,000
Erin Richards & Kelly Meyerhoffer:
State Superintendent Tony Evers wants to boost funding for Wisconsin’s K-12 schools by $613 million in the next biennial budget, combined with increases to the amount of money schools can raise in local taxes, and a new way of funding the Milwaukee voucher program.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s 2015-’17 budget request released Monday kicks off the conversation about the future of public school funding, ahead of Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature putting together the biennial state budget in early 2015.
But the newly elected Legislature is even more conservative than the previous two Legislatures — neither of which warmed to Evers’ similar “Fair Funding for our Future” budget proposals in 2010 and 2012.
“This is our third kick at the cat to get Fair Funding passed,” said DPI spokesman John Johnson.
The proposal calls for a 2.5% increase in state aid in the first year of the budget, which Johnson said would put the state back on track from the education cuts in the last four years. The 2016-’17 school year would see an even larger increase, 4.9%, in state aid. In total, that accounts for a $453 million increase in general school aid, according to the DPI.
The plan also calls for a $160 million increase in separate aid for specific uses, known as categorical aid.
More significant for school districts is Evers’ aim to increase the revenue limit — or the amount districts can raise in state aid and local property taxes — by $200 per pupil in 2015-’16 and $204 per pupil in 2016-’17.
Current state law calls for no increase to the revenue limit in 2015-’16 and thereafter, according to the DPI.
The DPI wants to tie the revenue limit increase each year to the rate of inflation.
Props to Molly Beck for including total spending. Ideally, the article would incorporate performance information…
Wisconsin’s K-12 taxes & spending have increased substantially over the years. Outcomes
I taught my black kids that their elite upbringing would protect them from discrimination. I was wrong
I knew the day would come, but I didn’t know how it would happen, where I would be, or how I would respond. It is the moment that every black parent fears: the day their child is called a nigger.
My wife and I, both African Americans, constitute one of those Type A couples with Ivy League undergraduate and graduate degrees who, for many years, believed that if we worked hard and maintained great jobs, we could insulate our children from the blatant manifestations of bigotry that we experienced as children in the 1960s and ’70s.
We divided our lives between a house in a liberal New York suburb and an apartment on Park Avenue, sent our three kids to a diverse New York City private school, and outfitted them with the accoutrements of success: preppy clothes, perfect diction and that air of quiet graciousness. We convinced ourselves that the economic privilege we bestowed on them could buffer these adolescents against what so many black and Latino children face while living in mostly white settings: being profiled by neighbors, followed in stores and stopped by police simply because their race makes them suspect.
But it happened nevertheless in July, when I was 100 miles away.
Related: The Poverty & Education Forum.
Don’t fight school choice in Camden
Why does a Rutgers University professor from one of the most affluent towns in New Jersey want to take away great schools from Camden families?
Everywhere I turn, Julia Sass Rubin seems to be talking for Camden’s poor. Just last week she told one of the state’s largest newspapers: “People in abject poverty don’t have the bandwidth to even evaluate charter schools. It’s just not going to be high on their list.”Excuse me? That deeply offensive comment toward low-income families in Camden shows not only her complete disregard of our families, but a dangerous misunderstanding about what our families want.
Meanwhile, Madison continues with its monolithic, one size fits all K-12 governance model.
Minneapolis offers students a wide variety of choices.
Anti-charter backlash grows
Everywhere I turn, Julia Sass Rubin seems to be talking for Camden’s poor. Just last week she told one of the state’s largest newspapers: “People in abject poverty don’t have the bandwidth to even evaluate charter schools. It’s just not going to be high on their list.”
Excuse me? That deeply offensive comment toward low-income families in Camden shows not only her complete disregard of our families, but a dangerous misunderstanding about what our families want.
Absurd. Yet we have similar “we know best sentiments in Madison“. This despite long term disastrous reading results.
UNC students blame capitalism, white supremacy for academic scandal
UNC students blamed racism and heteropatriarchal capitalism for the recent UNC academic scandal during a rally Wednesday afternoon.
A report released last week found that special classes were created for student athletes in order for them to remain grade-eligible to participate in games.Students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill blamed racism and heteropatriarchal capitalism for the recent academic scandal that has plagued the university.
Gathering Wednesday afternoon, members of the Real Silent Sam coalition gathered to share their response to the recently released “Investigation of Irregular Classes in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,” which found that certain classes in the former African and Afro-American Department were created simply to keep athletes grade-eligible.
“I think that, intentional or not, words have a lot of power and the language and proceedings of this investigation have shown that we don’t value athletes and we don’t value black studies.”
How the “performance revolution” came to athletics—and beyond.
The arms race centers on an obsessive scrutiny of every aspect of training and performance. Trainers today emphasize sports-specific training over generalized conditioning: if you’re a baseball player, you work on rotational power; if you’re a sprinter, on straight-line explosive power. All sorts of tools have been developed to improve vision, reaction time, and the like. The Dynavision D2 machine is a large board filled with flashing lights, which ballplayers have to slap while reading letters and math equations that the board displays. Football players use Nike’s Vapor Strobe goggles, which periodically cloud for tenth-of-a-second intervals, in order to train their eyes to focus even in the middle of chaos.
Training is also increasingly personalized. Players are working not just with their own individual conditioning coaches but also with their own individual skills coaches. In non-team sports, such as tennis and golf, coaches were rare until the seventies. Today, tennis players such as Novak Djokovic have not just a single coach but an entire entourage. In team sports, meanwhile, there’s been a proliferation of gurus. George Whitfield has built a career as a “quarterback whisperer,” turning college quarterbacks into N.F.L.-ready prospects. Ron Wolforth, a pitching coach, is known for resurrecting pitchers’ careers—he recently transformed the Oakland A’s Scott Kazmir from a has-been into an All-Star by revamping his mechanics and motion.
Then there’s the increasing use of biometric sensors, equipped with heart-rate monitors, G.P.S., and gyroscopes, to measure not just performance (how fast a player is accelerating or cutting) but also fatigue levels. And since many studies show that getting more sleep leads to better performance, teams are now worrying about that, too. The N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks have equipped players with Readiband monitors to measure how much, and how well, they’re sleeping.
Why Parents Prefer Charters
Marlene Gonzalez and Hector Nieves:
What wasn’t said in the Oct. 29th NJ.com story, “N.J. charter schools see smaller percentages of poor and special needs students than districts,” was the implication that charter schools are the creation of better-off, better-educated parents who want to make sure their children are spared the miserable education of the state’s failing urban schools.
But the author of the study, Rutgers professor Julia Sass Rubin, seemed to blame poor parents for not getting more of their children into urban charter schools, saying, “People in abject poverty don’t have the band-width to even evaluate charter schools.”
Speaking on behalf of more than 1,000 families who made the choice to send their children to the LEAP Academy charter school in Camden, we have had the bandwidth to evaluate the education available to children in traditional public schools in cities such as Camden, Trenton and Newark. In spite of the thousands of dollars that poured into these districts, even when they have been under state oversight, the results have been atrocious and simply unacceptable.
Commentary on standardized Tests
An old lament. Here’s what bugs me. Many of us made this argument 25 years ago. The limited value of secret one-shot standardized tests as feedback has been known for decades. They may be acceptable as low-stake audits; they are wretched as feedback mechanisms and as high-stakes audits. Why don’t audits work when they are high-stakes tests (unlike, say NAEP or PISA)? Because then everyone tries to “game” them through test prep. This inevitability was discussed by George Madaus and others 40 years ago.
Openness is everything in a democracy. Without such openness, what difference does it make if the PARCC or SB questions offer better tests – if we still do not know what the specific question by questions results are? There can be no value or confidence in an assessment system in which all the key information remains a secret. Indeed, in some states you can be fired for looking at the test as a teacher!
PARCC or no PARCC, educators and educational associations should demand that any high-stakes test be released after it is given, supported by the kind of item analysis noted above. We don’t need merely better test questions; we need better feedback from all tests. Fairness as well as educational improvement demand it. And PS: the same is true for district tests.
K-12 Grants & Outcome Responsibilty
When foundation grants fail to achieve the objectives officials sought, philanthropists turn their backs, shrug, and walk away. They have no responsibility to districts, individual schools, teachers, students and parents for hopes raised and dashed. Donors are beyond the reach of being fired or voted out of office. Yet as anyone knows from personal experience, admitting error is crucial to insights into a problem and, ultimately invention of better ways to solve it.
For those who support philanthropic giving, this unaccountability is an exercise of personal liberty in taking actions for the public good and is in the best tradition of a democracy. Moreover, some have argued: “[S]uch virtual immunity represents foundations’ greatest strength: the freedom to take chances, to think big, to innovate, to be, in the words of the late Paul Ylvisaker of the Ford Foundation, ‘society’s passing gear.’ “ [i]
Being society’s “passing gear,” however, assumes that funders and their retinue of experts know best how to identify educational problems, sort out symptoms from fundamental causes, and adopt solutions that solve the problem. When donors bet foolishly or are simply wrong and projects and programs fail who are these funders answerable to for their errors in judgment? No one, as far as I can see.
related: “the grants made us do it “. “Small learning communities“.
Risky bonds prove costly for Chicago Public Schools
Jason Grotto and Heather Gillers,:
Fresh from the world of high-stakes trading, David Vitale arrived at Chicago Public Schools a decade ago with a plan to transform the way it borrowed money.
With the district thirsty for cheap cash, plain old municipal bonds weren’t good enough anymore, and banks were standing by with attractive new options.
So Vitale, then the chief administrative officer at CPS, and other officials pushed forward with an extraordinary gamble. From 2003 through 2007, the district issued $1 billion worth of auction-rate securities, nearly all of it paired with complex derivative contracts called interest-rate swaps, in a bid to lower borrowing costs.
The Places in America Where College Football Means the Most
It is hard to explain to someone who grew up in a big city in the Northeast just how big a deal college football is in the Southeast.
College sports, and particularly football, occupy a role at the center of daily life in the South — like in South Carolina, where one of us grew up — that is hard to imagine for many people who grew up in New York or Boston.
Last month we published The Upshot’s map of college football fandom, showing where people root for what college teams. That map offers great detail about what teams college football fans root for in a given location, but nothing about how concentrated college football fans are in that place.
Here, we are looking at another question: not which teams fans root for, but the proportion of the population in various places who are fans of any college football team. We asked Facebook to compile that information, and the results offer a portrait of America’s college-football obsession — or lack thereof. To be more specific:
Law Schools & Legal 1%
After every recession since the Second World War, the legal profession swiftly and robustly recovered. Not this time. The market for lawyers shrank following the post-2008 recession, and no one thinks that it’s coming all the way back. What’s happened in the legal world represents a twist on developments in the larger economy. In law, as in the nation, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. With lawyers, though, it’s the system of professional education that’s directly contributing to inequality.
In the legal world, the haves are doing better than fine. In 1985, average profits per partner in The American Lawyer’s list of leading law firms was $309,000 ($623,000 in current dollars); today, the profits per partner for roughly the same group is about $1.5 million. These numbers hide an even greater disparity. Those at the very top of the pyramid—firms such as Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan; Cravath, Swaine & Moore; and a handful of others—are thriving as never before, with annual profits per partner in the multimillions.
On Student Loan Debt
The cartoon below provides a tongue-in-cheek alternative payback method for unemployed or under-employed recent college graduates!
Currently the recent college graduate unemployment rate in the nation is running in the range of 8.5% compared to the overall national average under 6% (new employment data will be released tomorrow).
This statistic, when coupled with an average individual student loan debt burden of more than $29,000 and outstanding aggregate student loan debt nationally above $1 trillion, poses a problem.
In addition there are few parents of college-age students who haven’t heard the stories of college graduates unable to find full-time work in their chosen field instead taking part-time jobs or unpaid internships simply to build their resume.
Using photos with English language learners
“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
— UnknownThough the origin of this popular adage is unclear, one thing is clear: using photos with English-Language Learners (ELLs) can be enormously effective in helping them learn far more than a thousand words — and how to use them.
Usable images for lessons can be found online or teachers and students can take and use their own.
The activities presented below connect to multiple Common Core Standards including the following ELA Standards:
On B-School Test, Americans Fail to Measure Up; “Improve K-12 Math”
New waves of Indians and Chinese are taking America’s business-school entrance exam, and that’s causing a big problem for America’s prospective M.B.A.s.
Why? The foreign students are much better at the test.
Asia-Pacific students have shown a mastery of the quantitative portion of the four-part Graduate Management Admission Test. That has skewed mean test scores upward, and vexed U.S. students, whose results are looking increasingly poor in comparison. In response, admissions officers at U.S. schools are seeking new ways of measurement, to make U.S. students look better.
Domestic candidates are “banging their heads against the wall,” said Jeremy Shinewald, founder and president of mbaMission, a New York-based M.B.A. admissions-consulting company. While U.S. scores have remained consistent over the past several years, the falling percentiles are “causing a ton of student anxiety,” he said.
we continue to play in the “C” (D?) leagues.
Madison’s disastrous reading scores.
Math forum audio and video. Math task force.
Madison School Board Accountabilty Commentary.
New on Campus: The 3-Year Degree
To combat rising college costs and student debt, more schools are offering a time- and money-saving idea: a three-year bachelor’s degree.
Schools including Purdue University, the University of Iowa and the University of South Carolina are betting that students will want to finish college sooner by spending a year less on campus. Whether there will be many takers, however, remains unclear.
Many early experiments with accelerated degrees have fallen flat. While cost is a crucial consideration for most families, and the vast majority need to borrow money, many students are eager to enjoy every bit of traditional college life, including social activities, athletics and summers off. The accelerated programs require students to give up some of these perks.
“Parents are really interested in saving time and money, [but] the students are really interested in the four years of a college experience,” said Jenna Templeton, vice president of academic affairs at Chatham University in Pittsburgh.
“major issue of these schools is the high concentration of low-quality teachers who tested poorly when receiving their teacher licenses.”
The report suggests that these schools make a concerted effort to hire both veteran teachers and new teachers, with more incentives such as merit pay being offered to high performing teachers. The Legislature suggests allowing schools to use $5,000-$15,000 each year for this purpose.
“Those teachers that are the best prepared to teach these children should be able to get greater income and be rewarded for the wonderful job that they’re doing,” said Senator Sue Wilson Beffort.
However, not everyone agrees with the report. The Albuquerque Teachers Federation claim the report is merely pushing solutions based on half of the story.
“They don’t have an evaluation system that can truly identify effective teachers because they’re just relying on test scores I think it’s a wrong-headed reform scheme that has been disproven in many, many states,” said Ellen Bernstein, president of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation.
In order to create a successful school, low-income school leaders must use financial resources wisely to give the most support to the areas that need them, coordinate services, help teachers, keep track of student progress, and also maintain a good relationship that keeps parents and the community involved.
– See more at: http://www.educationnews.org/education-policy-and-politics/new-mexico-report-weak-teachers-not-just-poverty-hurt-learning/#sthash.ireU175S.dpuf
In California education debate, the tide is turning
The easy re-election win of state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson on Tuesday was a big disappointment to education reformers. They believed Marshall Tuck — a polished, well-funded Democrat with a strong record as an education executive in Los Angeles — was the perfect candidate to unseat Torlakson, a Bay Area Democrat who has acted more like an appendage of the state teachers unions than a nonpartisan officeholder devoted to improving schools.
But in the big picture, we think Tuck’s candidacy will be remembered as one of the turning points in a period in which the school reform debate at long last took center stage in California. The education establishment is like a supertanker that requires the application of vast energy to make it to change course. There are subtle but unmistakable signs this course change has begun.
UW Madison to assist liberal arts majors in job search
Call it the cranky parent appeasement program, designed to arm UW-Madison students majoring in art history or Polish or zoology with answers to a common question: How will you get a job in that?
John Karl Scholz, dean of the College of Letters and Science, is launching a large new program to improve career planning and job outcomes for students in his college, by far the largest at the university with more than 16,000 undergraduates in 39 departments.
The effort comes amid some questions nationally about the value of a college degree, especially in liberal arts majors that don’t lend themselves directly to a career path but cost the same — and result in the same debt loads — as more job-ready majors such as accounting or nursing.
Scholz pointed to evidence that majoring in what makes the heart sing does lead to jobs that make the wallet smile.
“Trying to spark their imagination about what they can do with different majors strikes me as really important,” said Scholz, in his second year as dean.
Harvard secretly photographed students to study attendance
Harvard University has revealed that it secretly photographed some 2,000 students in 10 lecture halls last spring as part of a study of classroom attendance, an admission that prompted criticism from faculty and students who said the research was an invasion of privacy.
The clandestine experiment, disclosed publicly for the first time at a faculty meeting Tuesday night, came to light about a year-and-a-half after revelations that administrators had secretly searched thousands of Harvard e-mail accounts. That led the university to implement new privacy policies on electronic communication this spring, but another round of controversy followed the latest disclosure.
“You should do studies only with the consent of the people being studied,” Harvard computer science professor Harry Lewis said in an interview Wednesday.
Lewis said he learned about the study from two nontenured colleagues and asked administrators about it during the packed faculty meeting.
Midterm Election Survey
54% of Insiders say the Republican win in the Senate will make post-secondary education a higher priority.
Exactly half of Insiders think Senate newcomers are unlikely to impact education policy or it’s too soon to tell. Echoing October’s report, Insiders said Lamar Alexander will “lead the charge.”
Education Insiders express slight optimism that both K12 and higher education policies will become higher priorities with Republican control of the Senate, though agreement between the President and Congress is unlikely. Insiders see attention gainful employment regulations as a possible area of focus.
Insiders repeatedly cite Senator Lamar Alexander, the presumptive chair of the HELP committee, as the key driving force behind both K12 and higher education legislation in the Senate. With the political winds in his favor, Alexander may have the support he needs to gain traction on key education policies. But Insiders do not see the newly elected senators as having a great impact on education policy.
Madison Superintendent’s Perspective
Our strategy is no longer a laundry list of ever-changing “initiatives,” but instead a set of inter-related, long-term work aimed at eliminating the gaps in opportunity that lead to disparities in achievement.
It is directly focused on the day-to-day work of great teaching and learning. Put differently, our strategy directly impacts the daily work of teachers in a way that other efforts that have focused on the classroom periphery have not.
To be successful, this strategy requires us to continually monitor our progress, respond to issues as they arise, and manage the natural stages and pace of change.
As a district, we conduct a deep review of progress once a quarter — that first review is scheduled for this month. This process provides a space for us — school based leadership teams, central office, and board — to examine both implementation and outcomes, process concerns and questions from our staff, families and community, and to make adjustments, even major shifts in direction, if necessary.
If we use this process the way it was designed, we’ll continually identify strengths and challenges, understand root causes, collaboratively problem solve and chart our course forward.
Related: Madison’s disastrous reading results.
Seeing Red: Stanford v. Harvard
STANFORD, Calif.—Stanford buzzes. Walk across any of the 8,000-plus acres of earthy-red tiles and dusty, rolling hills of the university’s grounds and you’ll find yourself dodging hundreds of bicycles, whose moving gears and wheels make the campus hum.
More than 13,000 bikes belonging to students and faculty traverse campus daily, according to the school’s website, and it’s no wonder why. Stanford University, a massive tract of land that occupies what was once Leland Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm, is its own city, so large it requires an individual zip code.
In a way, the constant motion of Stanford’s bikers is indicative of the university’s dynamism. Even the university’s motto, “Die Luft der Freiheit weht”—or, “The Winds of Freedom Blow”—nods at Stanford’s focus on the cutting-edge of research and education in the 21st century.
Thousands of bikes decorate the Stanford campus.
Fired school leaders get big payouts
A former Union City superintendent took home more than $600,000 last year, making her the top earner on a new online database tracking salary and benefit information for California public school employees.
Kari McVeigh, former superintendent of New Haven Unified School District in Union City, and two other superintendents from the Bay Area were among the highest-paid school employees in the state last year in large part because they were fired and received six-figure severance payouts, according to a Chronicle analysis of pay data recently made public by the state Controller’s Office.
The data shows that both small and large public school districts awarded administrators six-figure salaries, sometimes with lifetime health benefits, low- or no-interest home loans and golden parachutes, even as California emerged from a financial crisis that forced huge cuts to social service programs for the poor and elderly.
Too Many Kids Quit Science Because They Don’t Think They’re Smart
For most students, science, math, engineering, and technology (STEM) subjects are not intuitive or easy. Learning in general—and STEM in particular—requires repeated trial and error, and a student’s lack of confidence can sometimes stand in her own way. And although teachers and parents may think they are doing otherwise, these adults inadvertently help kids make up their minds early on that they’re not natural scientists or “math people,” which leads them to pursue other subjects instead.
So what’s the best way to help kids feel confident enough to stay the STEM course? To answer this question, I spoke with Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University in California. Over the past 20 years, Dweck has conducted dozens of studies about praise’s impact on students’ self-esteem and academic achievement. Here is a transcript of our conversation, which has been condensed and lightly edited.
Alexandra Ossola: What sparked your interest in this field?
The Changing Profile of Student Borrowers Biggest Increase in Borrowing Has Been Among More Affluent Students
Share of College Graduates From High-Income Families who Borrow Has DoubledIn 2012, a record share of the nation’s new college graduates (69%) had taken out student loans to finance their education, and the typical amount they had borrowed was more than twice that of college graduates 20 years ago. A new Pew Research Center analysis of recently released government data finds that the increase in the rate of borrowing over the past two decades has been much greater among graduates from more affluent families than among those from low-income families. Fully half of the 2012 graduates from high-income families borrowed money for college, double the share that borrowed in 1992-93.1
The rise in the rate of borrowing was also substantial among upper-middle-income graduates, with 62% of 2012 graduates from upper-middle-income households leaving college with debt, compared with 34% roughly 20 years ago.
Somewhat related: Wisconsin Governor Walker on the student loan crisis. Walker’s comments on the Doyle era mirror my limited experience.
The best thing parents can do for schools
I’m the parent of a public school student myself. So I know how much parents want to help.
American parents are more involved in the schools than ever before — much more so than in other countries.
I followed three American kids who studied as foreign exchange students in Finland, South Korea and Poland. You didn’t see parents at those schools. They weren’t coaching soccer or accompanying classes on field trips. I didn’t see those kinds of extracurricular activities. Instead, the parents were involved at home, working directly with their child’s education.
Research shows that it’s much more impactful to prioritize learning at home over community-building activities.
There’s this amazing study: The more time that parents spent on extracurriculars in a country’s schools, the worse the kids did in reading. It’s shocking.
Five-year high schools challenge the K-12 model
For years now, some school districts in Oregon have been allowing their high school seniors who are ready to graduate stay for another year, letting them take community college courses on the school district’s dime and bolstering their budgets with an extra year of state funding. Are these districts taking unfair advantage of the state’s school funding system? Maybe, but they are doing something that other districts should emulate for its purpose, creativity and results.
Critics contend that districts which offer extended high school programs have been helping themselves to a larger and unfair share of the state school fund, which provides funding for students until receipt of a diploma. (Restrictions kick in at ages 20 and 21.) Dallas High School enrolls 25 percent of last year’s senior class in its Extended Campus Program with Chemeketa Community College. Those students have earned the credits needed for a high school diploma. But, by postponing the award of their diplomas, the district can claim state funding averaging $6,500 for each of them – enough to pay for a full load of community college courses and provide support from the high school’s counselors as well.
Smaller districts like Lebanon and Redmond have copied the Dallas program. But, if any of Oregon’s large urban districts were to follow suit, they would spark a run on the K-12 bank. Suppose 25 percent of all high school seniors in Oregon were to opt into a program of this kind. The state would then have to come up with an extra $70 million a year or districts would have to redistribute that amount from their K-12 classrooms to support these additional students.
Rather than more years, the trend, imho, should be towards a shorter, more rigorous K-12 experience.
The Teachers Unions First Lost The Media; Have They Now Lost Everyone Else, Too?
Andrew J. Rotherham & Richard Whitmire:
This may mark one of the great missed opportunities in education. With a sympathetic president as a partner, national union leaders could have spent the last five years telling their members the truth: The nation’s classrooms are changing fast, now at 50 percent poor and minority students, and our schools are simply not good enough for too many students. So the entire education sector, including teachers, must change as well.
But they didn’t. Instead, union leaders spent the last five years telling their members that change was not necessary. You are blameless, they insisted in their fight against “reformers.” You’re being demonized. Poverty is to blame, not our schools.
Those demanding change, they insisted, are “corporate reformers” out to “privatize” your schools. What’s needed instead, they told their teachers, was a massive digging-in to block those very changes.
Lies, Damned Lies, and College Admissions
College-application season is shifting into high gear, and with it comes anxiety and abuses—on both sides of the admissions desk. Some wealthy parents will pay private counselors more than $40,000 for “tweaking” their kids’ essays, on the implicit promise that these consultants have connections inside admissions offices, where many once worked. For their part, admissions directors want more applications so that they can reject a higher percentage of qualified kids. By boosting their rejection rates, they improve their school’s position in most rankings. While the current admissions system works well for a small number of colleges and over-achieving kids, for everyone else, the process is broken. Colleges, government, and the media all share in the blame.
Recently, Inside Higher Education, with Gallup’s help, published its annual survey of college- admissions officers. The report was sobering: 93 percent of the college-admissions officers surveyed said they believed colleges lie about key data they report, such as average SAT scores of admitted students. Why? It makes their schools appear more selective, which attracts more applicants. Sixty-five percent of admissions officers said that their institution did not meet its enrollment goals last year.
