Attracta Mooney:

The US public pension system has developed a $3.4tn funding hole that will pile pressure on cities and states to cut spending or raise taxes to avoid Detroit-style bankruptcies.

According to academic research shared exclusively with FTfm, the collective funding shortfall of US public pension funds is three times larger than official figures showed, and is getting bigger.

Devin Nunes, a US Republican congressman, said: “It has been clear for years that many cities and states are critically underfunding their pension programmes and hiding the fiscal holes with accounting tricks.”

Mr Nunes, who put forward a bill to the House of Representatives last month to overhaul how public pension plans report their figures, added: “When these pension funds go insolvent, they will create problems so disastrous that the fund officials assume the federal government will have to bail them out.”

Large pension shortfalls have already played a role in driving several US cities, including Detroit in Michigan and San Bernardino in California, to file for bankruptcy. The fear is other cities will soon become insolvent due to the size of their pension deficits.

Melissa Korn:

For more than 150 years, the “final clubs” at Harvard University have sat atop a rigid social hierarchy, the original all-male clubs at the country’s oldest college. Now, they are in a spat with school administrators, who want to address sexual assault on campus by forcing the clubs to welcome women members.

Undergraduate leaders of the clubs, whose members have included Roosevelts and Kennedys, were told at a meeting with Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana late last month that they had until April 15 to decide whether to go coed, or face unknown consequences, according to multiple students who attended the meeting. The request included the newer all-female clubs as well, they said.

Undergraduate and alumni representatives from all-male and all-female clubs met with Mr. Khurana again for nearly three hours Wednesday night, pressing him for details of potential sanctions against members of groups that don’t go coed, according to two attendees. One of those attendees said his responses were “noncommittal”; the other called them “nonspecific.”

Jillian Berman

Public higher education is often thought of as a way to help level the playing field between Americans of all stripes, but there’s evidence that flagship public colleges aren’t the engines of mobility we think.

These schools are often thought a way to provide students from a variety of backgrounds with a high-quality education at an affordable cost. But a new study adds to the growing body of evidence that these schools increasingly serve wealthier students.

Between 1972 and 2007, the share of applicants to the University of Wisconsin-Madison from the bottom fifth of the income distribution stayed roughly the same at less than 5%, according to a study published last week in the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. During the same period, the share of applicants from the second-lowest income quintile declined from at least 20% or more to just 11.5% in 2007. But the share of applicants from the top two highest income levels grew from 42.6% to 64.1%.

The university does make efforts to reach more low-income applicants, including through outreach, scholarship programs and transfer agreements with two-year colleges, whose classes typically include a large share of low-income students, according to Meredith McGlone, a University of Wisconsin-Madison spokeswoman. In addition, the school upped its need-based grant aid from $6.6 million during the 2007-2008 academic year to $31.3 million this past academic year, she said.

Alex Csiszar:

Referees are overworked. The problem of bias is intractable. The referee system has broken down and become an obstacle to scientific progress. Traditional refereeing is an antiquated form that might have been good for science in the past but it’s high time to put it out of its misery.

What is this familiar litany? It is a list of grievances aired by scientists a century ago.If complaining about the faults of referee systems is nothing new, such systems are not as old as historical accounts often claim. Investigators of nature communicated their findings without scientific referees for centuries. Deciding whom and what to trust usually depended on personal knowledge among close-knit groups of researchers. (Many might argue it still does.)

Neal Gabler:

Since 2013, the federal reserve board has conducted a survey to “monitor the financial and economic status of American consumers.” Most of the data in the latest survey, frankly, are less than earth-shattering: 49 percent of part-time workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage; 29 percent of Americans expect to earn a higher income in the coming year; 43 percent of homeowners who have owned their home for at least a year believe its value has increased. But the answer to one question was astonishing. The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who knew?

Jonnelle Marte:

embers of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and their supporters attend a rally outside the Capitol in Washington on April 14. The demonstrators protested a plan by the Central States Pension Fund to reduce payments to retirees. (Drew Angerer/Bloomberg)
More than a quarter of a million active and retired truckers and their families could soon see their pension benefits severely cut — even though their pension fund is still years away from running out of money.

Within the next few weeks, the Treasury Department is expected to announce a crucial decision on whether it will approve reductions to one of the country’s largest multi-employer pension plans.

David West:

Recent decades have seen a protracted attack and painstaking demolition of the traditional or ‘old’ university and an associated purging of academics. The rise of managers and ‘managerial’ doctrines were supposed to make universities more efficient and productive, more lean and transparent, and above all, more modern. In practice, managerial reforms have given rise to a range of pathologies and side effects. Bullying is widespread, many staff are unhappy. But the spread of managerialism is also threatening the university’s role as a centre of committed teaching scholarship and critical research. Examination of the actual effects – rather than stated aims – of the managerial experiment is long overdue.

Tim Harford:

This statistical capitulation was a dismaying read for anyone still wedded to the idea — apparently a quaint one — that gathering statistical information might help us understand and improve our world. But the Guardian’s cynicism can hardly be a surprise. It is a natural response to the rise of “statistical bullshit” — the casual slinging around of numbers not because they are true, or false, but to sell a message.

Politicians weren’t always so ready to use numbers as part of the sales pitch. Recall Ronald Reagan’s famous suggestion to voters on the eve of his landslide defeat of President Carter: “Ask yourself, ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’” Reagan didn’t add any statistical garnish. He knew that voters would reach their own conclusions.

The British election campaign of spring last year, by contrast, was characterised by a relentless statistical crossfire. The shadow chancellor of the day, Ed Balls, declared that a couple with children (he didn’t say which couple) had lost £1,800 thanks to the government’s increase in value added tax. David Cameron, the prime minister, countered that 94 per cent of working households were better off thanks to recent tax changes, while the then deputy prime minister Nick Clegg was proud to say that 27 million people were £825 better off in terms of the income tax they paid.

Could any of this be true? Yes — all three claims were. But Ed Balls had reached his figure by summing up extra VAT payments over several years, a strange method. If you offer to hire someone for £100,000, and then later admit you meant £25,000 a year for a four-year contract, you haven’t really lied — but neither have you really told the truth. And Balls had looked only at one tax. Why not also consider income tax, which the government had cut? Clegg boasted about income-tax cuts but ignored the larger rise in VAT. And Cameron asked to be evaluated only on his pre-election giveaway budget rather than the tax rises he had introduced earlier in the parliament — the equivalent of punching someone on the nose, then giving them a bunch of flowers and pointing out that, in floral terms, they were ahead on the deal.

Each claim was narrowly true but broadly misleading. Not only did the clashing numbers confuse but none of them helped answer the crucial question of whether Cameron and Clegg had made good decisions in office.

Related: Math Forum and Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Lawrence Summers:

It has seemed to me that a vast double standard regarding what constitutes prejudice exists on American college campuses. There is hypersensitivity regarding prejudice against most minority groups but what might be called hyper-insensitivity with respect to anti-Semitism.

At Bowdoin College, holding parties with sombreros and tequila is deemed to be an act of prejudice against Mexicans. At Emory, the chalking of an endorsement of the likely Republican presidential candidate on a sidewalk is deemed to require a review of security tapes. The existence of a college named after a widely admired former US president has under the duress of a student occupation been condemned at Princeton. At Yale, Halloween costumes are the subject of administrative edict. The dean of Harvard Law School has acknowledged that hers is a racist institution, while the freshman dean at Harvard College has used dinner placemats to propagandise the student body on aspects of diversity. Professors acquiesce as students insist that they not be exposed to views on issues like abortion that make them uncomfortable.

As I have discussed in the past, this is in my view inconsistent with basic American values of free speech and open debate. It fails to recognise that a proper liberal education should cause moments of acute discomfort as cherished beliefs are challenged.

Elaine Moore:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a medieval romance composed by an unknown poet, a mishmash of religious allegory and folklore that has survived through a single copy to become a keystone of English literature.

It is also, according to academics at the University of Cambridge, the source of one of the earliest known examples of a rape joke, which is why this tale of Arthurian Britain, unintelligible to those not conversant in Middle English, has been dragged into a very modern debate about the phenomenon known as “triggering”.

At Cambridge, students who attend lectures on the poem are now issued with a warning — accompanied with a small exclamation mark — that what they are about to read contains potentially sensitive or upsetting material.

“Trigger warnings” have long been a mainstay of feminist websites, used to alert readers to graphic descriptions of abuse or violence, the sort of things that might stir up traumatic memories for those who had suffered similarly. They’ve also made an impression on US campuses. But even though there is no obligation for lecturers to apply the warnings, their introduction at one of Britain’s oldest universities is proving to be a source of contention.

Advocates of content warnings see them as a simple means for students to make informed decisions. Critics, meanwhile, see the debate as emblematic of millennial over-sensitivity and censoriousness, in line with their neurotic preoccupation with “safe spaces” and “micro-aggressions”. Academics have been caught in the middle: sympathetic to students who have had difficult personal experiences, but uneasy at the idea of warnings being imposed.

Charles Cooke:

In her harrowing 1892 treatise on the horrors of lynching in the post-bellum American South, the journalist, suffragist, and civil-rights champion Ida B. Wells established for her readers the value of bearing arms. “Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year,” Wells recorded, “the only case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed themselves.” She went on to proffer some advice: “The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense. The lesson this teaches, and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

Conservatives are fond of employing foreign examples of the cruelty and terror that governments may inflict on a people that has been systematically deprived of its weaponry. Among them are the Third Reich’s exclusion of Jews from the ranks of the armed, Joseph Stalin’s anti-gun edicts of 1929, and the prohibitive firearms rules that the Communist party introduced into China between 1933 and 1949. To varying degrees, these do help to make the case. And yet, ugly as all of these developments were, there is in fact no need for our augurs of oppression to roam so far afield for their illustrations of tyranny. Instead, they might look to their own history.

“Do you really think that it could happen here?” remains a favorite refrain of the modern gun-control movement. Alas, the answer should be a resounding “Yes.” For most of America’s story, an entire class of people was, as a matter of course, enslaved, beaten, lynched, subjected to the most egregious miscarriages of justice, and excluded either explicitly or practically from the body politic. We prefer today to reserve the word “tyranny” for its original target, King George III, or to apply it to foreign despots. But what other characterization can be reasonably applied to the governments that, ignoring the words of the Declaration of Independence, enacted and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act? How else can we see the men who crushed Reconstruction? How might we view the recalcitrant American South in the early 20th century? “It” did “happen here.” And “it” was achieved — in part, at least — because its victims were denied the very right to self-protection that during the Revolution had been recognized as the unalienable prerogative of “all men.”

When, in 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney buttoned his Dred Scott v. Sandford opinion with the panicked warning that if free blacks were permitted to become American citizens they might begin “to keep and carry arms wherever they went,” he was signaling his support for a disgraceful status quo within which suppression of the right to bear arms was depressingly quotidian. Indeed, until the late 1970s, the history of American gun control was largely inextricable from the history of American racism. Long before Louisiana was a glint in Thomas Jefferson’s eye, the French “Black Codes” mandated that any black person found with a “potential weapon” be not only deprived of that weapon but also beaten for his audacity. British colonies, both slaveholding and free, tended to restrict gun ownership to whites, with even the settlements at Massachusetts and Plymouth prohibiting Indians from purchasing or owning firearms. Throughout the South, blacks were denied weapons. The intention of these rules was clear: to remove the means by which undesirables might rebel or resist, and to ensure that the majority maintained its prerogatives. In 1834, alarmed by Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia, Tennessee amended its state constitution to make this purpose unambiguous, clarifying that the “right to keep and to bear arms” applied not to “the freemen of this State” — as the 1794 version of the document had allowed — but to “the free white men of this State.”

In much of America, this principle would hold for another century, emancipation notwithstanding. As Adam Winkler of UCLA’s law school has noted, a movement comprising the Ku Klux Klan and those Democrats who sought to thwart the gains of the Civil War “began with gun control at the very top of its agenda.” In theory, by mandating that “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” the 14th Amendment would bring an end to Dixie’s confiscatory schemes; in reality, its passage provoked white supremacists in the states of the former Confederacy to achieve their aims in a more subtle manner. Nowhere in Tennessee’s illustrative “Army and Navy” law (1879) was race so much as hinted at. Instead, the measure limited residents of that state to a few expensive firearms, thereby outlawing the small derringers and low-caliber revolvers that impoverished blacks could afford. Like the poll taxes and literacy tests that went along with them, such laws achieved their aims without telegraphing their intent.

Catey Hill:

Many Americans don’t have to worry about giving Uncle Sam part of their hard-earned cash for their income taxes this year.

An estimated 45.3% of American households — roughly 77.5 million — will pay no federal individual income tax, according to data for the 2015 tax year from the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington-based research group. (Note that this does not necessarily mean they won’t owe their states income tax.)

Blake Neff:

A professional education consultant and teacher trainer argued at the White Privilege Conference (WPC) in Philadelphia that great teachers must also be liberal activists, and described in detail her goal for destroying the “white supremacist” nature of modern education.

Heather Hackman operates Hackman Consulting Group and was formerly a professor of multicultural education at Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University, where she taught future teachers. On Friday, Hackman was given a platform at WPC to deliver a workshop with the lengthy title “No Freedom Unless We Call Out the Wizard Behind The Curtain: Critically Addressing the Corrosive Effects of Whiteness in Teacher Education and Professional Development.” The long title masked a simple thesis on Hackman’s part: Modern education is hopelessly tainted by white supremacy and the “white imperial gaze,” and the solution is to train prospective teachers in college to be activists as well as pedagogues.

In fact, Hackman argued teachers shouldn’t even bother teaching if they aren’t committed to promoting social justice in school.

“Education is not about the mere reproduction of knowledge,” Hackman said. “Education is the practice of freedom. And as a result, we have to have [teaching] students becomes activists as well as teachers.”

Creating educators who are proper activists, Hackman continued, means training them to not only to encourage diversity but also to engage with the systemic oppression she says is pervasive in the entire educational system. In Hackman’s telling, virtually everything associated with being a good student in modern education is actually just a tool of racist white supremacy.

Janis Mackey Frayer:

Bereaved parents are demanding more compensation from China’s government, blaming the now-defunct one-child policy for robbing them of the chance to have more kids.

“I don’t have any hope anymore,” said Zhou Ru Xian, whose 24-year-old daughter died in 2013.

Image: Protest in Beijing, China
Parents seeking compensation after China axed its one-child policy attended a rally outside the Ministry of Health in Beijing on Tuesday.

Rudi Keller:

The Columbia campus is trying to cover $22 million of an expected $32.5 million shortfall because of declining enrollment and new commitments such as the new Division of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity, spokesman Christian Basi said. The cuts do not take into account possible state budget reductions or increases.

Of the 50 positions in operations to be cut, 21.75 currently are vacant and will not be filled, and many others are in auxiliary departments such as campus catering or facilities, Basi said. Many are held by students, he said.

Yuan-ling Liang:

On April 17, Jonathan Bergmann, inventor of the “flipped classroom,” attended an educational conference in Taiwan held by UDN, sharing the spirit of the unconventional teaching method and his opinions on Taiwan’s education system. During the conference, Bergmann pointed out that teachers in Taiwan might be replaced by YouTube videos if they don’t change their teaching methods.

Teachers should promote problem-solving abilities
Bergmann is a high school chemistry teacher in the US and has more than 20 years of teaching experience. In 2007, he filmed his lectures in class for absent students, but was accused of encouraging them to not come to school. This urged him to contemplate on the real function and value of teachers.

Mareesa Nicosia:

Advocates and parents with the education reform group StudentsFirstNY are demanding that New York City release records of the roughly 1,100 public school teachers who are on its payroll indefinitely but don’t have a job to do.

The teachers are part of what’s known as the Absent Teacher Reserve, which costs taxpayers an estimated $100 million per year. Teachers end up in the reserve if their jobs have been eliminated due to a school closure or downsizing, or they may be placed there during misconduct hearings.
Regardless of the reason, teachers in the ATR receive full salaries and benefits while they wait to be assigned to a classroom or for disciplinary proceedings to proceed, sometimes languishing for months or years at a time.

T Rees Shapiro:

High schools in the Southwest dominate the 2016 U.S. News and World Report rankings of the country’s best high schools, taking six of the top 10 spots in the rankings released Tuesday.

Texas and Arizona high schools earned the top four rankings, and the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology a Fairfax County, Va. magnet school, was in the fifth spot nationally.

The news magazine collected data on more than 21,500 schools for the report, which for the first time included graduation rates as a factor in the rankings.

Wisconsin high schools.

Middleton appears to be the highest ranked Madison area high school (#656 nationally).

Jeff Guo:

The latest research from Autor and his colleagues shows that early-life adversity causes boys to struggle much more than girls. It’s not yet clear why girls are so tough, but they seem much better suited to the challenges of modern childhood. The gender differences are minimal in households with resources — but among poorer families, boys systematically fall short of their sisters and female peers. This pattern implies that if income inequality continues to worsen, the gender inequalities will worsen, too.

Now, in a new paper released Monday, the economists have found additional evidence that bad schools exacerbate the differences in academic achievement between boys and girls. The phenomenon is illustrated in a stunning chart, seen below.

The economists plotted the average test scores of boys and girls at various middle schools in Florida. The schools are ranked by quality, based on how good they are at improving kids’ test scores. At the far left are the worst schools. At the far right are the best schools.

:

Last spring, 9-year-old Derrick Fields sat in his social studies classroom at Sherman Elementary School, learning about the creation of the telegraph. The machine was invented so that “someone can connect to someone who is far away,” he said.

This was pretty normal stuff for a fourth grade history lesson, except for one thing: The entire lesson — from the textbooks to the teacher’s instructions to the students’ short essays — was in Spanish.

In fact, half of Derrick’s time is spent learning in Spanish and the other half in English in what’s known as a dual language immersion program.
Teaching academic subjects in Spanish, or any foreign language, has been widely understood to be illegal in California since 1998. [Proposition 227](https://ballotpedia.org/CaliforniaProposition227,theEnglishinPublicSchoolsInitiative_(1998))
appeared on the June ballot that year, offering voters a chance to weigh in on whether or not students should be taught primarily in English in public schools. While opponents saw the measure as racist, it was loudly championed by Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley millionaire with political aspirations, as the best way to integrate the state’s booming immigrant population.

Eric Hoover:

Alexander W. Astin has something to say — a lot to say, really — about smartness. He knows some people won’t want to hear it, especially if they happen to teach college students for a living.

Mr. Astin, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, believes that too many faculty members “have come to value merely being smart more than developing smartness.” That line comes from his new book, Are You Smart Enough? How Colleges’ Obsession With Smartness Shortchanges Students.

In the short yet provocative text, Mr. Astin peers into the faculty lounge as well as the admissions office. There he finds more concern with “acquiring” smart students, as defined by conventional metrics, than with helping students improve after they enroll.

“When the entire system of higher education gives favored status to the smartest students, even average students are denied equal opportunities,” he writes. “If colleges were instead to be judged on what they added to each student’s talents and capacities, then applicants at every level of academic preparation might be equally valued.”

Abilash Gopal:

Overparenting is widely recognized as a problematic approach to raising kids. For nearly a decade, studies have shown how the rise of the “helicopter parent” has been worsening children’s anxiety and school performance in the K-12 years. Now we’re witnessing what happens when the overparented child grows up, and it’s a trainwreck that is painful to watch, but impossible to ignore.

As an inpatient adolescent psychiatrist, I see the most severe cases. Oftentimes, the overly-involved parents have been impeding the development of autonomy in their child for years. The child comes to the hospital anxious and depressed but doesn’t have the tools to make a change. So the parents become even more involved, and the child becomes more dependent and emotionally stunted. It’s a vicious cycle laced with the best intentions.

I try to help these adolescents become more well-adjusted adults by teaching them how to develop an authentic identity that is separate from their parents. I encourage them not to slip into the victim role and blame their parents and the world, because that is both counterproductive and psychologically harmful. If they can be open to taking responsibility for their choices and are willing to develop insight into their strengths and limitations, they will be on the path to self-empowerment and confidence.

Eric Banks:

I can’t remember the last time I used an electric typewriter. It most likely would have been in the course of typing out an address on an envelope—but then again, I can’t readily call to mind the last time I did that with anything other than that old-fashioned technology, the ballpoint pen, which itself is not really all that old school. The mass commercial distribution of the ballpoint pen in the United States dates only to about 1945, which means its triumphal appearance in the writing market occurred just under twenty years before that of the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter, IBM’s radically rethought typewriting device. Released in 1964, the MT/ST was the first machine of its kind, equipped with a magnetic-tape memory component that allowed you to edit text before it was actually printed on the page. Corporations were considered the primary beneficiaries of the new technology, a wrinkle on the electric typewriter that arrived with considerable media enthusiasm. The makers of the MT/ST saw the contemporary office groaning under the weight of metastasizing paperwork and envisioned making money off companies hoping to streamline the costs of secretarial labor and increase productivity. Writers were something of an afterthought: Whatever effect IBM’s product would have on authors—high or low, commercial or experimental—was collateral.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

Creative products, by definition, are the antithesis of expertise. This is because creativity must be original, meaningful, and surprising. Original in the sense that the creator is rewarded for transcending expertise, and going beyond the standard repertoire. Meaningful in the sense that the creator must satisfy some utility function, or provide a new interpretation. This constantly raises the bar of what is considered useful, and puts immense pressure on creators to find new meanings. Finally, creative products must be surprising in that the original and meaningful creative product must be surprising not only to oneself, but to everyone. This is exactly how the United States Patent Office evaluates new applications. Original and meaningful ideas that could have been created by any expert in the field are considered “obvious” and are therefore unpatentable. Creative products– such as the discoveries of Galileo and Leeuwenhoek– are surprising to everyone, novices and experts alike.

Roberto Ferdman:

A team of researchers, led by Sarah Hill, who teaches psychology at Texas Christian University, believe they have uncovered evidence of one such lingering effect. Specifically, Hill and her colleagues found that people who grow up poor seem to have a significantly harder time regulating their food intake, even when they aren’t hungry.

Danny Boyle:

A-level students have been told to wear their target grades on ID cards around their necks, leading to pupils complaining of suffering from “unnecessary pressure”.

Sixth-formers at a Bedfordshire school have been given lanyards bearing their predicted exam marks, along with their names and photographs.

But pupils have described the scheme as “alienating” and “stressful”, with some teachers who do not approve of the move reportedly referring to the badges as “the noose”.

Some students at Sharnbrook Upper School, near Bedford, were so upset by the request that they began crossing out their target grades, which are based on their GCSE results.

udayj:

We are developing an app to let you search and find tutors, institutes, online courses, videos, articles, books, etc. for anything you want to learn – from physics & deep learning to dance & guitar.
While similar services exist, they restrict users in what they can search for (only offline tutors or just online courses or just academic subjects) and are mostly listing based services where they charge tutors to list their names. We want to keep it free for the users, including people who list as a teacher, and earn through advertising, affiliate marketing.

We already have a working product at www.tutorack.com – however, it still needs a lot of data.

Laura Waters:

Today at The 74 Bill Bennett suggests that the opt-out movement in New York is driven solely by teacher union leaders and allies who have spent millions of dollars on robocalls, emails, forums, and other tactics. Their motivation to increase test refusals this year is engineered to undermine “tough, high-quality standardized exams” that “will hold their members accountable and make the possibility of grade inflation more difficult.” It’s “a move by teachers unions and far-left policy leaders to completely abolish any serious accountability within student assessments.”

Certainly, the union campaign to eliminate links between student outcomes on benchmarked tests and teacher evaluations is a major driver in New York. But it’s not the only one, nor the only reason why this year’s opt-out rates appear as high as last year’s, at least in white suburbs. (Best estimates, still preliminary, are that students are opting out in Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties at about the same rate as last year while other regions — school districts around Rochester and Albany, for example — are showing lower rates. Minority and lower-class students throughout the state are mostly opting in.)

Elahe Izadi:

Teachers and students scribbled the lessons — multiplication tables, pilgrim history, how to be clean — nearly 100 years ago. And they haven’t been touched since.

This week, contractors removing old chalkboards at Emerson High School in Oklahoma City made a startling discovery: Underneath them rested another set of chalkboards, untouched since 1917.

“The penmanship blows me away, because you don’t see a lot of that anymore,” Emerson High School Principal Sherry Kishore told the Oklahoman. “Some of the handwriting in some of these rooms is beautiful.”

Rachel Pells

Students have reacted to claims from university professors that they struggle to read books from cover to cover by admitting it is true – but insisting it’s because universities don’t give them enough time to finish them.

University academics caused a furore this week by claiming many students found the thought of reading books all the way to the end “daunting”, due to shorter attention spans and an inability to focus on complex philosophies.

Jenny Pickerill, a professor in environmental geography at the University of Sheffield, told Times Higher Education magazine: “Students struggle with set texts, saying the language or concepts are too hard”.

Sharif El-Mekki:

Recently, Philadelphia Superintendent William R. Hite announced that North Philadelphia school E.W. Rhodes Elementary would be among four schools undergoing a district-run turnaround plan—requiring staff to reapply for their jobs, with only half able to remain.

In opposition, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, stood with other union leaders and politicians in defense of this persistently failing school. After an hour-long tour of the school Weingarten had this to say:

,

Martin Wolf:

In this way, better accounting might lead to better policy and improved management of assets and liabilities. This is not only important for the UK. It could make a big difference to the eurozone where the accounting is quite poor.

Eric Hand:

Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia, has struggled with the logistics of evaluating a rising number of grant proposals that has propelled funding rates to historic lows. Annual or semiannual grant deadlines lead to enormous spikes in submissions, which in turn cause headaches for the program managers who have to organize merit review panels. Now, one piece of the agency has found a potentially powerful new tool to flatten the spikes and cut the number of proposals: It can simply eliminate deadlines.

This week, at an NSF geosciences advisory committee meeting, Assistant Director for Geosciences Roger Wakimoto revealed the preliminary results from a pilot program that got rid of grant proposal deadlines in favor of an anytime submission. The numbers were staggering. Across four grant programs, proposals dropped by 59% after deadlines were eliminated. “We’ve found something that many programs around the foundation can use,” Wakimoto told the advisory committee on 13 April.

Jeffrey Sparshott:

anything good come of cheating?

A 2011 analysis by The Wall Street Journal showed a bulge in New York City students’ test scores right over the passing mark. The evidence strongly suggested teachers were manipulating grades on statewide Regents Exams and helped spur changes to testing procedures.

Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford University, updated the numbers from the initial analysis after the state took steps to eliminate grade inflation. The findings: Teachers who manipulated scores appear to have been motivated by altruism, score manipulation was eliminated by 2012, and the graduation gap between black and white students is about 5% larger in its absence.

Neerav Kingsland:

Not that America needs anything greater than a picture of a flag with *both* an eagle and some unnamed founding document superimposed across it.

But in case you’re hungry for more goodness, one of the great parts of my job is I get to travel the country and see innovative work, much of which doesn’t get a lot of national press.

So here’s some highlights, most of which are early stage, none of which are proven, but all of which give me a lot of hope.

Innovation Schools in Indianapolis

Indianapolis has built broad community support for a model that gives great educators autonomy, allow for new school entrepreneurship, and, perhaps most importantly, provides non-profit governance – all within a district construct that is still accountable to a publicly elected school board.

I once wrote a parable about this re: blacksmiths. What’s happening in Indianapolis is even better. This could be a breakthrough in both school site governance (a non-charter path for sustained entrepreneurship and autonomy) and system level governance (how a district reinvents itself as a public steward of great schools).

Tim Whewell:

The case of a young couple in Norway whose five children were taken away by the state has fuelled mounting concern within the country and abroad over its child protection practices. Protesters around the world – and leading Norwegian professionals – say social workers are often too quick to separate children from their families, with too little justification, particularly when parents are immigrants.

Ruth and Marius’s life was torn apart without warning one Monday afternoon last November when two black cars approached the farm where they live in a remote Norwegian valley.

Their two little boys, aged five and two, and their three-month-old baby son, were in their big, bright, modern living room overlooking the steel-grey fjord.
Ruth was waiting as usual for the school bus that would bring back their two daughters, aged eight and 10.

Norway view
But that Monday, it never came. Instead, Ruth saw the two unknown cars. One continued along the main road; the other turned up the farm track – and a woman from the local child protection service knocked at the door.

She told Ruth to come to the police station for interrogation.

“We know best” is hardly perfect.

Alan Borsuk:

So many schools have come and gone from the Milwaukee scene. For many, their departure was more of a public service than their opening.

The Urban Day School story is different. The school is a significant and honorable part of Milwaukee history. For many, including me, feelings about its impending departure include a strong element of sadness.

About 10 days ago, school leaders announced Urban Day would close at the end of this school year. By the end of last week, it was not resolved what was really going to happen at the building at W. Vliet and N. 24th streets, the school’s principal facility, after June. At least one school organization and possibly more are considering taking over in a way that could be seen as carrying on the mission of Urban Day.

Jana Kasperkevic

Los Angeles city council will hear a proposal on Tuesday to exempt union members from a $15 an hour minimum wage that the unions themselves have spent years fighting for.

The proposal for the exemption was first introduced last year, after the Los Angeles city council passed a bill that would see the city’s minimum wage increase to $15 by 2020. After drawing criticism last year, the proposed amendment was put on hold but is now up for consideration once again.

Union leaders argue the amendment would give businesses and unions the freedom to negotiate better agreements, which might include lower wages but could make up the difference in other benefits such as healthcare. They argue that such exemptions might make businesses more open to unionization.

Annysa Johnson:

The city’s decision to move forward with the state-mandated sale of vacant or surplus Milwaukee Public School buildings to competing operators will hinder the district’s own reform efforts and its ability to serve returning students when private voucher and charter schools go belly-up, an MPS spokesman said Saturday.

The common council on Friday — acting under a threat of a lawsuit by school choice proponents — set the stage for the sale of as many as seven buildings, under a procedure dictated by a new state law.

“We are disappointed and concerned that this latest development may limit our ability to continue to grow programs with a track record of success that families in our community are seeking,” MPS spokesman Tony Tagliavia said in an email to the Journal Sentinel.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative public interest law firm that had threatened to sue the city if it did not comply with the statute, issued a statement lauding the vote.

John Keilman:

Rain had fallen steadily for hours, the kind of shower that turns grass fields to mush and forces young athletes to take the day off. But there they were, a squad of 9- and 10-year-old Oak Park soccer players practicing their skills on a damp but playable surface made of plastic and rubber.

“I got here and was super excited because any other field, there would be standing water,” said Todd Hover, the team’s coach.

Rain-or-shine playability is a big reason why thousands of schools and park districts around the country have turned to artificial turf, but increasingly, some parents worry that the convenience has come with a trade-off.

Sonya Ellen Man:

Skipping college is almost middle-class mainstream at this point. For example, not graduating is an oddly inverted rite of passage in the world of tech startups. Of course, working-class people have been going straight from high school to full-time jobs forever. For as long as there have been universities, educated middle-class or wealthy parents — who are disproportionately white and otherwise privileged — have looked down their noses at the less-rich “unwashed masses”.

However, lacking a bachelor’s degree doesn’t incur the same amount of disapproval as being a high-school dropout. Dropping out of high school is like getting an MFA — it guarantees you’ll end up at McDonald’s (if you can believe the snide, faux-pitying comments). Unlike skipping college, dropping out of high school is reserved for losers and astonishing child geniuses who get admitted to Stanford at twelve. If you can believe the widespread perception.

Marti Leimbac:

I don’t know what it would be like to grow up in a derelict building in a dangerous neighbourhood, to have drug addicts for parents, to fear for my safety Nonetheless, this whole notion of “privilege” vexes me.

We talk about it as though we can all recognise what it is. I am not always so sure. I can tell one narrative of my life and it seems to describe someone who grew up without privilege, and I can tell another narrative and it seems almost as though my life was one of ease and privilege from the time I was born.

Greg Hurst:

Men who studied at any of 23 of the lowest-performing British universities went on to earn less than those who did not enter further education, research has revealed.

The findings will fuel debate about the cost to the taxpayer of universities with the worst employment records, because a large proportion of graduates do not repay their student loans.

The study, the first to match tax data with student loan records, also highlighted the big differences in earnings of graduates depending on their choice of degree.

Raul Carrillo:

As the presidential primaries rumble on, the candidates — especially Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton — have debated college affordability and Wall Street greed. Unfortunately, no one is confronting the links between the two.

More than 40 million Americans have student debt, totaling at least $1.2 trillion. On average, borrowers out of school owe $36,000, with a monthly payment of $680. Roughly 11 percent of borrowers are in default. Overall, indebtedness discourages people from starting degrees, families and businesses, dragging everyone down.

Or almost everyone. One person’s debt is another person’s asset. What some owe, others own. And student debtors don’t just cut checks to lenders. Our money flows to third parties — including investors.

One rarely discussed feature of the “student loan industrial complex” is the $200 billion market for student loan asset-backed securities (SLABS). This is a circular business, involving lenders like Sallie Mae and big banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America. Like mortgages, student loans get pooled and repackaged into new financial products (securities). The lenders then sell the securities to investors. Investors receive the reward of monthly loan payments, plus interest. They can hold the securities themselves, trade them or bet on them. In turn, lenders receive quick cash, including fees and commissions, and push the risk of the underlying loans onto investors. This shift allows lenders to make more, and larger, loans.

Melia Robinson:

Whether you come from the California coastline or the snowy forests of Maine, reading a book set in your home state can make you feel a warm nostalgia for that beloved place.

After scouring the internet and surveying our colleagues on their picks, we rounded up the most famous book set in every state in America.

Did we get your state right? Let us know in the comments if you have another pick.

Xeni Jardin:

Looks like the geniuses who run UC Davis never Googled the words “Streisand Effect.”

After a police officer pepper-sprayed UC Davis students in a widely reported 2011 incident, the California university contracted with SEO consultants for $175,000 (or maybe more) to scrub unfavorable online items about the incident and boost online reputations of both the university and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi.

The Sacramento Bee reported on the SEO scandal, and based their story on documents newly released in response to requests filed last month under the California Public Records Act.

In January 2013, UC Davis contracted a Maryland firm, Nevins & Associates, for a six-month contract that paid $15,000 a month. Nevins was the first of many “reputation management firms” paid off by the university administrators. And that payment was just the start.

Doyin Oyeniyi:

Tests can already induce anxiety in students, especially one they need to pass in order to graduate. That’s when testing administration errors are the least welcome, but last week during the administration of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, answers on 14,220 of the tests across the state were lost due to a computer glitch.

The affected students—who’d been inactive for 30 minutes, who’d momentarily lost internet connection, or who’d logged out to take a break—tried to submit online tests, they would instead receive an error message, only to log back in to find that their answers were missing. Additionally, some visually impaired students, who had also been prepared to take their braille STAAR tests last week, never got a chance to take the tests because their tests never arrived.

The Texas Education Agency is investigating both of these mishaps. For districts where students lost the answers, TEA announced that individual districts could determine for themselves whether students needed to retake the exam. The agency also ensured “that there are no adverse consequences for students who do not resume testing and for districts that elect not to have students resume testing.” TEA emailed an apology to families of visually impaired students who never received their tests:

Anita Chabria:

Students pepper-sprayed by campus police at the University of California at Davis have reacted in anger at the “vastly inappropriate” and “insulting” decision by their university to contract firms to systematically scrub mentions of the story on the internet.

The university is being accused of censorship after quietly seeking to hide web references to a widely reported incident in which police sprayed student activists from the then-nascent Occupy movement four years ago.

The photograph and video went viral across the world, prompting a major backlash against the California university and its chancellor Linda PB Katehi, who was accused of using heavy-handed tactics against peaceful activists Students are once again calling for Katehi’s resignation.

Alexa Tsoulis-Reay:

For a long time, it was thought that people with autism spectrum disorder lacked emotion, that even the higher-functioning among them navigated the world like logical robots oblivious to “real” feelings. More recently, research has shown their social issues are more likely to stem from difficulty expressing emotion or reading the emotions of others.

Though he wasn’t diagnosed with autism until he was 40, John Elder Robison felt isolated and disconnected throughout his entire youth and early adulthood. But in 2008, at 50, he took part in what became a three-year research project looking at brain function in individuals with autism spectrum disorders and exploring the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to help them.

Robby Soave:

A Maryland high school student who obeyed the parameters of the assignment he was given is now facing widespread outrage because it wasn’t politically correct—even though the point of the assignment was to write something inflammatory.

Here’s a modest proposal: in order to protect students’ rights and encourage their imaginations, let’s murder all teachers and administrators. Of course, no one actually advocates such a policy (not even me—keep it civil, commenters). It’s an idea inspired by satirist Jonathan Swift’s famous 18th century essay, “A Modest Proposal,” in which he jokingly suggested that poor Irish folk should sell their children to be eaten.

Google:

Chebet Mutai from Nairobi, Kenya had little digital knowledge when she attended a “Women, Technology & Entrepreneurship” event run by Google in 2012. But the stories she heard and skills she learned there inspired her to quit her job at a bank and pursue her dream of opening a fashion business. She used her savings to buy two sewing machines and rent workshop space, and she set up a business making leather bags and accessories. Today, her company Wazawazi (a combination of two Swahili words meaning “open mindedness”) employs 12 people at a fair wage, exports to countries around the world, and continues to grow.

Motoko Rich:

Opening a new front in the assault on teacher tenure, a group of parents backed by wealthy philanthropists served notice to defendants on Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging Minnesota’s job protections for teachers, as well as the state’s rules governing which teachers are laid off as a result of budget cuts.

Similar to cases in California and New York, the plaintiffs, who are filing the lawsuit in district court in Ramsey County in St. Paul, argue that the state’s tenure and layoff laws disproportionately harm poor, minority children because, they say, the most ineffective teachers are more likely to be assigned to public schools with high concentrations of those children.

In the lawsuit, parents of children in public schools across Minnesota argue that the state’s tenure laws, which grant teachers job protections after three years on the job, deprive students of “their fundamental right to a thorough and efficient education” under the state’s Constitution. The suit also argues that state laws that protect the most veteran teachers in the event of layoffs can result in better teachers losing their jobs simply because they have fewer years in the classroom.

Yasha Berchenko-Kogan:

A lot of math grad school is reading books and papers and trying to understand what’s going on. The difficulty is that reading math is not like reading a mystery thriller, and it’s not even like reading a history book or a New York Times article.

The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don’t really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you’re only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.

PBS Newshour:

Do you live in a bubble?

There exists a new upper class that’s completely disconnected from the average white American and American culture at large, argues Charles Murray, a libertarian political scientist and author.

Take this 25-question quiz, based on a similar one published in Murray’s 2012 book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010,” to find out just how thick your bubble is.

orztheory.net

Our new volume of RSO on “The University under Pressure” is now out in hard copy (electronic version here). Which prompted this post about the five areas where I think organizational sociology can really help us understand the current transformation of higher education.

Historically, the sociology of education, including higher education, has focused on stratification and social mobility. There’s lots of quantitative work on how social background (mostly class and race) affect whether students get to college, what happens once they’re there, and whether they finish. This is counterbalanced with qualitative work, often focused on cultural capital, that looks at how college mostly reproduces existing advantages.

In the last ten years, though, a growing body of work has emerged that looks at U.S. higher education through an organizational lens. There have always been specific examples of such research—e.g. Brint and Karabel’s The Diverted Dream (1990), on community colleges. But we can now point to scholarship from Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton, Mike Bastedo, Amy Binder and Kate Wood, Joe Hermanowicz, Ozan Jaquette, Matt Kraatz, Lauren Rivera, Sheila Slaughter and her collaborators, Mike Sauder and Wendy Espeland, Mitchell Stevens, Gaye Tuchman, Melissa Wooten, not to mention myself or orgtheory’s own Fabio Rojas, that draw on organizational sociology to understand higher education—and this is hardly an exhaustive list.

And much more is in the pipeline. At Berkeley, Charlie Eaton and others are studying the financialization of higher education. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s widely awaited book on the for-profit sector will be out in a few months.

Levi Gahman:

The story of the Zapatistas is one of dignity, outrage, and grit. It is an enduring saga of over 500 years of resistance to the attempted conquest of the land and lives of indigenous peasants. It is nothing less than a revolutionary and poetic account of hope, insurgency and liberation—a movement characterized as much by adversity and anguish, as it is by laughter and dancing.

More precisely, the ongoing chronicles of the Zapatista insurrection provide a dramatic account of how indigenous people have defied the imposition of state violence, oppressive gender roles and capitalist plunder. And for people of the Ch’ol, Tseltal, Tsotsil, Tojolabal, Mam and Zoque communities in Chiapas, Mexico who make the decision to become Zapatista, it is a story reborn, revitalized and re-learned each new day, with each new step.

Ali Meyer

Inflation-adjusted federal tax revenues hit a record $1.48 trillion for the first half of fiscal year 2016, but the federal government still ran a $461 billion deficit during that time, according to the latest monthly Treasury Department statement.

Treasury receipts include tax revenue from individual income taxes, corporate income taxes, social insurance and retirement taxes, unemployment insurance taxes, excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, customs duties, and other miscellaneous items.

In the first half of fiscal 2016, which included the months of October, November, December, January, February, and March, the amount of taxes collected by the federal government outpaced the first half of all previous fiscal years, even after adjusting for inflation. The 2016 fiscal year begins on Oct. 1, 2015, and runs through Sept. 30, 2016.

The federal government collected $1,476,218,000,000 in the first half of fiscal year 2016. Most of the $1.48 trillion came from individual income taxes, which comprised almost half of that total, totaling $675 billion.

Related: US Debt Clock.

Claudio Sanchez:

back in school, bored to death, with limited academic options. Because you’re learning English, everybody assumes you’re not ready for more challenging work. What they don’t realize is that you’re gifted.

Researchers say this happens to lots of gifted children who arrive at school speaking little or no English. These students go unnoticed, until someone taps into their remarkable talent and potential. Vanessa Minero Leon was lucky. She was one of those students who got noticed.

Related: “THEY’RE ALL RICH, WHITE KIDS AND THEY’LL DO JUST FINE” — NOT!.

Talk Vietnam:

“Users can raise detailed questions in English on GotIt! via their smartphones,” Dr. Tran Viet Hung, the brain behind the application, explained. “Once the question has been loaded onto the network, the system will automatically connect the user with an available study expert in the field related to the question in just under ten seconds using our algorithm. The most suitable expert will ‘claim’ the user and spend around ten minutes talking with them to guide them through the problem.”

Matt Barnum:

promise of Brooklyn Prospect Charter, which is using the model of school choice to break down neighborhood barriers and foster a more diverse student body.

But such an approach faces skeptics on both sides. On the one hand critics of charter schools say that far from advancing integration, they are a source of segregation. On the other hand, some advocates of school choice say that the model should stay focused on empowering parents and advancing student achievement — not integrating schools. Research on the issue is mixed, but past studies suggest that charter schools may exacerbate previously existing segregation within a district.

The new question in Brooklyn and beyond is whether integrated charter schools can successfully combine the benefits of parent choice with effective, high quality programs that would appeal to families of all backgrounds? If so, then they might manage something that has eluded much of the charter and traditional public school sector for decades — integration.

Deliberately diverse

University of Wisconsin posters site.

#UWPosters Program (PDF)

Jillian Berman:

If every borrower identified by the Department decides to have his or her debt forgiven, the government will end up discharging more than $7.7 billion in debt, according to the Department.

“Americans with disabilities have a right to student loan relief,” Ted Mitchell, the undersecretary of education, said in a statement. “And we need to make it easier, not harder, for them to receive the benefits they are due.”

About 179,000 of the borrowers identified by the Department are in default on their student loans, and of that group more than 100,000 are at risk of having their tax refunds or Social Security checks garnished to pay off the debt. Often borrowers losing out on these benefits aren’t even aware that they’re eligible for a disability discharge, said Persis Yu, the director of the Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project at the National Consumer Law Center.

Related: US debt clock.

David Shimer

For more than seven months, the 17 members of the Yale Corporation, including Salovey, who chairs each of the body’s meetings, have been deliberating whether to rename Calhoun and eliminate the title of master. They have not yet announced a decision. The Corporation has also been debating what to name the two new residential colleges. This decision has not been reached either.

In November, student activists demanded that Salovey address these issues within days. But for such unusual and significant items, who makes the actual decision: the president or the Corporation as a whole?

To the surprise of former University leaders dating back 60 years, the answer now seems to be the Corporation.

Interviews with Corporation members, former University President Richard Levin and various current and former administrators reveal that past presidents did not see the Corporation as a body that could or should make these types of decisions. Rather, they viewed the Corporation as a feedback mechanism that always accepted presidential recommendations — including on nonroutine issues like these three.

Michael Meranze & Christopher Newfield:

Regent Behling should be saying, “quality, quality, quality,” to keep himself and other Wisconsin leaders from steadily slashing the infrastructure that would allow the state to regain its lost leadership status. Instead, he and the board majority went with the capacity to override tenure. Some large portion of Wisconsin leadership has spent years obsessing about UW tenure as a main roadblock to economic greatness. No evidence has ever been presented for this–no calculation of how expensive sociology professors are impeding the growth of contract manufacturing. It’s a political goal and a cultural belief–in much of U.S. business culture, the power to fire people makes everything fixable. “Flexibility” started out in the 1970s as a desperation move as US industry lost its postwar lead over Germany, Japan, and other rebuilt industrial powers. In the 1980s, management theorists like Tom Peters and Rosabeth Moss Kanter showed that mass layoffs destroyed company value rather than created it, but short-term executive rewards ran against them, and mass layoffs became a routine practice and sure-fire way of doping the stock price. “Flexibility” has nothing to do with improving education. It’s imposition has already damaged education, and its practice will continue to.

Charles Schwartz:

Previous studies are extended to show a 24-year history of runaway growth in Management personnel throughout the University of California. The newest data also let us detail the location of those supervisory positions on each campus and within each budget category.

In Section I, “The Data”, we first look at the summary data that shows a 308% growth in Management personnel while total employment grew by only 62%. Then, more detailed data show that broad classification of Management positions broken down into major sub-categories – Executives, Senior Professionals, and “Middle Management” – as well as separated into the Health Sciences and the General Campus sectors of the University. Finally, we can look at individual campuses and locate the employment statistics according to the Functional categories – Instruction, Research, Student Services, Institutional Support, etc. – that provide the budget for those positions. This lets us see where responsibility for the apparent excess of Management may be laid: 19% at the Faculty in the academic Departments, 14% at the Deans of the Schools and Colleges, and 67% at the upper Administrators on the campuses.

In Section II, “Past Questions and Answers”, we note previous attempts to get the systemwide administrators of the University to pay attention to this data and to explain why this apparent bloat is not a huge waste of resources – estimated as costing around $1 Billion per year. Their latest ploy is to redefine the issue in question as growth of “administration” rather than growth of “management”; and then they can gather data to show that there is no bloat at all.

In Section III, “New Opportunities for Investigation”, we suggest how this new data may be used constructively.

Paul Hill:

More and more cities are trying community schools, which wrap health, dental, therapeutic, and family support services around existing schools to try to mitigate the effects of poverty and thereby improve students’ learning and life prospects. This idea is not new; its modern incarnation started in Cincinnati in the early 2000s and has now spread to New York City and Philadelphia.

BetterExplained:

Calculus based on the ADEPT method:

Explore high-level themes (analogies, diagrams) before the low-level details
See learning as a journey, not an all-or-nothing destination.

Acknowledge our limited motivation. What Aha! moments can we have in minutes, not weeks?

Rachel Cohen:

In 2013, citing a $1.4 billion deficit, Philadelphia’s state-run school commission voted to close 23 schools—nearly 10 percent of the city’s stock. The decision came after a three-hour meeting at district headquarters, where 500 community members protested outside and 19 were arrested for trying to block district officials from casting their votes. Amid the fiscal pressure from state budget cuts, declining student enrollment, charter-school growth, and federal incentives to shut down low-performing schools, the district assured the public that closures would help put the city back on track toward financial stability.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Angus Deaton:

The finding that income predicts mortality has a long history. Nineteenth-century studies include Villermé1 on Paris, France, in 1817, Engels2 on Manchester, England, in 1850, and Virchow3 on Upper Silesia in 1847 through 1848. Modern analyses include the Whitehall study of British civil servants, whose status was measured by income,4 as well as similar findings for other European countries.5 Indeed, the mortality gradient by income is found wherever and whenever it is sought. Virchow’s statement3,6 that “medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine at a larger scale” has lost none of its resonance. By contrast, the medical mainstream, looking back to Koch rather than Virchow, emphasizes biology, genetic factors, specific diseases, individual behavior, health care, and health insurance.

Annysa Johnson:

amirez, whose family foundation has committed up to $70 million to develop St. Augustine Preparatory Academy over the next decade, unveiled the final plans for the school at a reception Tuesday at Discovery World.

Marquette, MSOE and Wheaton Franciscan, Ramirez said, would help develop health-care and engineering programs designed to give St. Augustine students a leg up in those industries.

Paul:

gotten the notes/tutorials for my Algebra (Math 1314), Calculus I (Math 2413), Calculus II (Math 2414), Calculus III (Math 3435) and Differential Equations (Math 3301) class online. I’ve also got a couple of Review/Extras available as well. Among the reviews/extras that I’ve got are an Algebra/Trig review for my Calculus Students, a Complex Number primer, a set of Common Math Errors, and some tips on How to Study Math.

I’ve made most of the pages on this site available for download as well. These downloadable versions are in pdf format. Each subject on this site is available as a complete download and in the case of very large documents I’ve also split them up into smaller portions that mostly correspond to each of the individual topics. Near the top of each page you will see one or two download buttons depending on whether the subject is available as only as a complete document or is also available in pieces. You can see a complete listing of all the available downloads by selecting the Downloads option in the menu.

Dale Kurschner

Two actions and one inaction by the Minnesota Legislature in 2013 led to the “last straw” for many wealthier Minnesotans.

That year, Gov. Mark Dayton and the DFL House and Senate majorities enacted a tax bill increasing by 25% the taxes to be paid by the state’s highest wage earners—and lowered the threshold of “highest” to individuals making $154,950 or more annually or households making $258,260 or more annually.

The new top rate of 9.85% ranks as the third-highest such tax in the nation. It also hit many of the state’s 22,000 Subchapter S corporations, as their profits are passed through to their owners’ tax returns. In comparison, Florida has no income tax (nor do South Dakota, Texas, Nevada and three other states). Florida also has no tax on pension or Social Security benefits.

The second action was the enactment of a gift tax, one of only two such state gift taxes in the country. The tax was on the transfer of property by one individual to another while receiving nothing or less than full value in return. It was 10% on such gifts in excess of a lifetime total of $1 million made by Minnesota residents—and non-residents who owned property in Minnesota. There was such an uproar the Legislature repealed the gift tax a year later.

The inaction in 2013 pertains to the estate tax. That year, Congress approved an exemption amount of $5 million, indexed to inflation (so in 2016 it is $5.45 million per individual or $10.9 million for a married couple) on federal estate taxes. If the estate is below this level when the individual dies, heirs pay zero estate tax. If it’s over this amount, the estate can be taxed up to 40%.

Minnesota is one of 14 states that still have an estate tax (which dates from a time when the federal estate tax allowed a dollar-for-dollar credit for state estate taxes; this ended in 2001, and the majority of states repealed their estate taxes). Unlike the federal estate tax, Minnesota’s kicks in at more than $1 million in estate value (this will rise to $2 million by 2018) and is taxable at between 9% and 16%—on top of what’s paid in federal estate taxes.

These actions and inaction followed years of intensified auditing by the Department of Revenue of those who claim their domicile is in another state but still have a home here and visit often.

Madison Teachers, Inc. (PDF), via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):

The Department of Public Instruction receives 36,000 teacher license applications each year (initial and renewal applications). To help make this process more efficient, DPI created the Educator Licensing Online (ELO) System in December, 2013. DPI no longer accepts paper applications for license renewal; one must complete and submit the renewal application through this online system.
Don’t wait until the last minute to prepare for a license renewal. If your license is set to expire on June 30 of this year, start collecting the required documentation early. You will need to provide information about the certifications currently held (they can all be renewed), and where and when you completed your certification (you can provide multiple IHEs). If you were licensed in 2004 or after, you must have your PDP reviewed and approved. Once that is accomplished, the District will provide that information directly to DPI.
If you are renewing your license through the completion of 6 university credits, have electronic (scanned) verification available, so it can be uploaded during the application process. All applicants will need to complete a Conduct and Competency Questionnaire and will need to scan and upload an Employment Verification form (#1613) signed by MMSD Human Resources. Using the new system the first time can be confusing and frustrating. Having all the information and/or materials you need, will help to make the application process go more smoothly.
A one-time, one-year license extension is possible. Failure to renew one’s license can be considered a severance of one’s teaching contract, and will be considered a resignation by the District.
Contact MTI for assistance or questions about your license renewal. For more information visit DPI’s ELO website: http://tepdl.dpi.wi.gov/licensing/elo.

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi:

There is a discrepancy between what the industry requires or expects from academia, and what schools and universities provide. There are some things that universities are not prepared or willing to teach students simply because it does not fall within their mission, and whether or not that is Right and Good is a topic for another day. The industry, on the other hand, makes the mistake of expecting universities to churn out “programmers”, ready to join the big machine and crank out code. But programming is but one aspect of all the many things that relate to “Computer Science”.

Eric Fischl:

The current status quo of the art world is dysfunctional and unsustainable. Aspiring artists are indoctrinated into the belief that path for advancement lies through the minefield of dogma higher education has been reduced to.

The reality of the situation is that the assumptions and biases of the elitist academic approach probably did more to create and sustain the crisis of relevance the arts are undergoing than any other factor.

Jonathan Cole:

According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ recently completed Lincoln Project report, between 2008 and 2013 states reduced financial support to top public research universities by close to 30 percent. At the same time, these states increased support of prisons by more than 130 percent. New York City’s budget office reported in 2013 that incarcerating a person in a state prison cost the city roughly $168,000 a year. California apparently does it on the cheap: It costs roughly $64,000 annually for each prisoner—a bit more than the cost of a year at an Ivy League university (average tuition is $50,000) and far more than at the University of California, Berkeley, ($13,000) or at CUNY ($8,000).

University of Adelaide

Jacob O’Neal:

Did you know that your car will take in 20,000 cubic feet of air to burn 20 gallons of fuel? That’s the equivalent of a 2,500 sq. ft. house! If your only experience with a car engine’s inner workings is “How much is that going to cost to fix?” this graphic is for you. Car engines are astoundingly awesome mechanical wonders. It’s time you learned more about the magic under the hood!

Adam Stites:

“We feel like this is our sport. It’s being attacked, and we got to stop it at the grass roots,” Arians said at the “Arizona Cardinals High School Football Coaches Clinic” on Friday, according to Ed Cole of NBC Sports 1060 in Phoenix. “It’s the best game that’s ever been f——€” invented, and we got to make sure that moms get the message; because that’s who’s afraid of our game right now. It’s not dads, it’s moms.”

The message isn’t much different than one he delivered at league meetings in March when Arians told Sports Illustrated’s Peter King that parents are “fools” if they won’t let their kids play football. But on Friday, he narrowed the scope from “parents” to “moms.”

Many of the NFL’s most prominent names, including Troy Aikman, Terry Bradshaw, Adrian Peterson, Kurt Warner and Brett Favre, have all said that they wouldn’t let their sons play football. LeBron James echoed the sentiment and even President Barack Obama told The New Yorker that if he had a son, he wouldn’t let him play pro football.

Kate Grossman:

High School on Chicago’s struggling West Side is a proud school with a bad reputation and too few students. It likely has just one more shot at survival.

Austin has hollowed out in recent years, as have dozens of similar schools across Chicago’s poor and mostly Latino and black neighborhoods. With 391 students, including just 57 freshmen across three academies in a building meant for nearly 1,700, Austin is one of 35 Chicago public high schools that are well under half full. Ten schools aren’t even a quarter full.

These schools face a set of woes that make a turnaround all but impossible. A citywide school-choice system leaves these mostly open-enrollment schools with some of Chicago’s most challenging and low-achieving students. Deeply strained budgets fueled by declining enrollment hurt staffing levels, teacher retention, and programming. Mix in a stubborn reputation for violence at many schools—unwarranted in the case of Austin and some others—and these schools are in a death spiral.

“I want to live in the Hamilton/Van Hise attendance area.” I’ve heard that statement many times over the years. I wondered how that desire might be reflected in real estate activity.

Tap for a larger view. xlsx version.

Happily, it’s easy to keep up with the market using the Bunbury, First Weber, Restaino or Shorewest apps. For the middle schools, I’ll use the First Weber app iOS Android. Next week, I plan to take a look at elementary schools using the Restaino app. I also hope to dive into property tax variation.

Tap the search link on your iPhone, iPad or Android with the First Weber app installed. You can then interact with the data and properties.

Black Hawk Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Cherokee Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Hamilton Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Jefferson Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

O’Keeffe Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Sennett Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Sherman Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Toki Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Whitehorse Middle School Attendance Area Search. Stats.

Madison’s median household income is $53,933 ($31,659 per capita).

Finally, Madison, via a 2015 referendum, is expanding Hamilton, its least diverse middle school.

** As always, much of the property information beneath these statistics is entered by humans. There may be an occasional mistake… 🙂

neeravkingsland:

table below to compare New Orleans African-American students and economically disadvantages students against the same subgroups in other places across all subjects in grades 3-8, with the hope that looking across grades and varied proficiency differentials might illuminate trends.

It should be noted that New Orleans students used paper and pencil versions, so in later grades especially this might result in inflated NOLA results. But as the chart details, New Orleans did well in 3rd and 4th grade as well (where other states saw less scoring differentials based on test type).

Green cells indicate where New Orleans students outperformed their peers; red cells indicate where they underperformed their peers.The numbers in the cell are +/- differential rates for how other geographies scored compared to NOLA proficiency.

Meanwhile, Madison largely continues with more if the same.

Laurie Everett:

Ahaan Rungta and his family moved from Calcutta, India, to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2001, the same year MIT announced OpenCourseWare (OCW), a bold plan to publish all of MIT’s course materials online and to share them with the world for free. Little did his parents realize at the time that their two-year-old son — already an avid reader — would eventually acquire his entire elementary and secondary education from OpenCourseWare and MITx, and would be admitted to the MIT class of 2019 at the age of 15.

“When I was five years old my mom told me ‘there’s this thing called OCW,’” says Rungta, who was homeschooled. “I just couldn’t believe how much material was available. From that moment on I spent the next few years taking OCW courses.”
When most kids are entering kindergarten, Rungta was studying physics and chemistry through OpenCourseWare. For Rungta’s mother, the biggest challenge to homeschooling her son was staying ahead of him, finding courses and materials to feed his insatiable mind.

Susan Dynarski, via a kind reader:

Public schools are increasingly filled with black and Hispanic students, but the children identified as “gifted” in those schools are overwhelmingly white and Asian.

The numbers are startling. Black third graders are half as likely as whites to be included in programs for the gifted, and the deficit is nearly as large for Hispanics, according to work by two Vanderbilt researchers, Jason Grissom and Christopher Redding.

New evidence indicates that schools have contributed to these disparities by underestimating the potential of black and Hispanic children. But that can change: When one large school district in Florida altered how it screened children, the number of black and Hispanic children identified as gifted doubled.

Jill Barshay, via a kind reader:

Tracking, the practice of putting a small group of higher achieving students into separate advanced or honors classes, isn’t popular with progressive educators. Previous research has pointed out that it exacerbates inequality in our schools because higher income and white or Asian kids are more likely to get tracked into the elite classrooms. Students who aren’t chosen can become demoralized, or the curriculum in the average class can get too watered down. Great teachers and extra resources get steered to these honors programs, leaving the kids who need the most help with less. Researchers have sometimes found that lower-achieving kids are worse off in schools that track.

Jamaal Abdul-Alim:

Specifically, the study found that charter high school attendance is associated with an increase of about $2,300 in maximum annual earnings for students between ages 23 and 25—or roughly 12 percent higher earnings than comparable students who attended a charter middle school but then switched to a regular public school for high school.

It also found that charter higher school students are six percentage points more likely to persist in college for two years, even after controlling for postsecondary enrollment. That’s significant, the study states, because most students who drop out of college do so during their freshman year, which means making it to the second year makes it more likely that students will earn a college degree and reap the economic benefits that go along with being a college graduate.

The study, which was published this week in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, is titled “Charter High Schools’ Effects on Long-Term Attainment and Earnings.”

Alan Borsuk:

She wrote in the book that she was convinced “that a large part of the answer to poor schooling in this country is to understand what strong preparation for teachers looks like and can do, and to undertake policy changes needed to ensure that all teachers can have access to such preparation.”

She told me that maybe a quarter of education schools in the U.S. had programs of that quality. Many are OK, but not at that level. And some should not be in the business. She said there should be minimum requirements for the quality of teacher education programs.

But, she added, “If there’s been a lot of teacher bashing, there’s been even more teacher education bashing.” Don’t count her in on that. Do count her in on standing up for teachers, for good teacher training and for supporting teachers so they have the most positive impact.

Related: National Council on Teacher Quality and a focus on adult employment.

Janet Mertz

The primary point on which we seem to disagree is how best to obtain such highly qualified middle school math teachers. It is my strong belief that the MMSD will never succeed in fully staffing all of our middle schools with excellent math teachers, especially in a timely manner, if the primary mechanism for doing so is to provide additional, voluntary math ed opportunities to the District’s K-8 generalists who are currently teaching mathematics in our middle schools. The District currently has a small number of math-certified middle school teachers. It undoubtedly has some additional K-8 generalists who already are or could readily become terrific middle school math teachers with a couple of hundred hours of additional math ed training. However, I sincerely doubt we could ever train dozens of additional K-8 generalists to the level of content knowledge necessary to be outstanding middle school math teachers so that ALL of our middle school students could be taught mathematics by such teachers.

Part of our disagreement centers around differing views regarding the math content knowledge one needs to be a highly-qualified middle school math teacher. As a scientist married to a mathematician, I don’t believe that taking a couple of math ed courses on how to teach the content of middle school mathematics provides sufficient knowledge of mathematics to be a truly effective teacher of the subject. Our middle school foreign language teachers didn’t simply take a couple of ed courses in how to teach their subject at the middle school level; rather, most of them also MAJORED or, at least, minored in the subject in college. Why aren’t we requiring the same breathe and depth of content knowledge for our middle school mathematics teachers? Do you really believe mastery of the middle school mathematics curriculum and how to teach it is sufficient content knowledge for teachers teaching math? What happens when students ask questions that aren’t answered in the teachers’ manual? What happens when students desire to know how the material they are studying relates to higher-level mathematics and other subjects such as science and engineering?

Free Range Kids:

principal of an elementary school in Magnolia, TX, has forbidden parents from picking up their kids to walk them home. No matter how close the children live to the school, they are required to take the bus or be picked up by car, Fox 26 in Houston is reporting.

If not, the local authorities are ready to enforce the rule with arrests for trespassing.

The ostensible reason for this step at Bear Branch Elementary is “safety.” It always is, right? What I couldn’t glean from the story is whether kids are allowed to leave the school, by foot, without a parent at all, which would eliminate the trespassing issue. In any event, that doesn’t seem to be the standard M.O. A video of the line of cars at pick-up time looked like a funeral cortege, solemnly inching forward.

Cherise M. Newsome:

Elie Bracy III wrapped up two business calls before strolling into Wilson High School recently. Someone’s always calling the school division superintendent: an administrator, a School Board member, a city official.

He slid the smartphone into his suit pants pocket as he approached the door, even though it kept buzzing. He had a lunchtime appointment with the school’s culinary classes.

Bracy hovered over a group of students searing chicken and creating a creamy mushroom sauce, and another mixing dough for cookies. Teacher Kathy Pitt nudged him to try his hand at baking.

Martha Woodall:

didn’t know the school was slated for essentially a destabilizing turnaround, you would never have known that by walking through the school,” Weingarten said after an hour-long tour of E.W. Rhodes Elementary School. “In fact, you would have said: ‘Wait a minute. This is a place where parents want to send their kids, where educators want to work, where the kids are engaged.’ ”

Rhodes, at 2900 W. Clearfield St., is one of four elementary schools Superintendent William R. Hite has targeted for district-run academic makeovers. Under the approach he outlined last month, staff will be required to reapply for their jobs; no more than half could remain.

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and others have criticized the approach, saying drastic staff turnover is disruptive for students and the school community.

Scott Cowley:

Purdue, in West Lafayette, Ind., has 30,000 undergraduate students. Indiana residents pay annual tuition fees of $10,000, while students from other states pay nearly $30,000. Its average graduate emerges owing $28,000.
The income-sharing program will offer terms based on students’ majors and the projected salaries in those fields. A comparison tool on Purdue’s website lets students estimate how their own offers might look.

A senior studying mechanical engineering, one of Purdue’s most popular majors, could get $15,000 in return for a commitment to pay 4.23 percent of his or her income for a bit less than eight years. Purdue estimates that the engineer would have a starting salary of about $56,000, and will be making monthly payments of $200. In that hypothetical situation, the student would eventually repay a total of $20,647.

But an English major can anticipate a starting salary of $34,000, by Purdue’s calculation. For that student, the school would offer a different package, which might require a higher percentage of income over a longer period.

Advocates of income-sharing agreements, sometimes called human capital contracts, see them as a way to spread risk and prevent students from being locked into dangerously high debt payments. “Affordability is built in,” said Robert M. Whelan Jr., the chief executive of 13th Avenue Funding, a nonprofit company that ran a small pilot test of the income-sharing model with 11 students in California in 2012 and 2013. “Student debt is a crisis, and this is an opportunity to approach it in a different way.”

Robin Hanson:

In his upcoming book, The Case Against Education, my colleague Bryan Caplan argues that school today, especially at the upper levels, functions mostly to help students signal intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity to modern workplace practices. He says we’d be better off if kids did this via early jobs, but sees us as having fallen into an unfortunate equilibrium wherein individuals who try that seem non-conformist. I agree with Bryan that, compared with the theory that older students mostly go to school to learn useful skills, signaling better explains the low usefulness of school subjects, low transfer to other tasks, low retention of what is taught, low interest in learning relative to credentials, big last-year-of-school gains, and student preferences for cancelled classes.

My main problem with Caplan’s story so far (he still has time to change his book) is the fact that centuries ago most young people did signal their abilities via jobs, and the school signaling system has slowly displaced that job signaling system. Pressures to conform to existing practices can’t explain this displacement of a previous practice by a new practice. So why did signaling via school did win out over signaling via early jobs?

Colin Mulligan:

The main problem with a pass/fail system is its inability to distinguish one student from another. How would a graduate school differentiate the thousands of applicants if they all had the same grades? Well, perhaps these institutions should adapt more progressive acceptance policies as well. One education initiative created by the Harvard School of Education recommends that universities focus less on grades and more on students’ “concern for others and the common good.” Graduate institutions could still demarcate students by entrance exam scores, extracurricular activities, and social involvement without such heavy reliance on course grades.

Karen Banes:

Your child’s anxiety is not your fault, but it’s possible that some of the parenting practices you’re most proud of are actually making things worse.

Caring too much. When your child comes home from school with tales of mean girls, aggressive boys and insensitive teachers, you feel for her, and often you let it show, but maybe you shouldn’t. Our kids feed off our emotions and get more distressed when we’re distressed. When my daughter communicates her worries to me, only to have me start worrying too, it definitely makes things worse. She needs me to be strong, but instead I inadvertently send the message that anxiety is the ‘right’ reaction to her problems. Difficult though it is, we need to keep our own anxiety in check while sympathizing with theirs. We have to be the emotional rock: the person who understands, supports and (if asked) advises, without ever showing that their problems make us feel anxious too.

Jeffrey J. Selingo

It’s that time of year again, when high-school seniors receive their college acceptances and sift through financial-aid offers to pick the place where they are going to spend the next four years in college. It’s also the time when seemingly everyone involved in the college search process — from the media to school counselors — are obsessed with the admissions decisions Harvard and dozens of other selective colleges and universities have made.

Last week, Ben Casselman writing at fivethirtyeight.com and Frank Bruni in the New York Times, exposed the absurdity of our obsession with Harvard, Stanford, and the other colleges that reject most of their applicants. As Casselman rightly pointed out, just 4 percent of undergraduates in the U.S. attend institutions that accept 25 percent or less of their applicants, “and hardly any — well under 1 percent — attend schools like Harvard and Yale that accept less than 10 percent.”

BBC

A Swiss secondary school has caused uproar by allowing two Muslim boys not to shake hands with women teachers – a common greeting in Swiss schools.

The boys had told the school in the small, northern town of Therwil it was against their faith to touch a woman outside their family.

Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga said shaking hands was part of Swiss culture and daily life.

A local teachers’ union said the exemption discriminated against women.

The case has propelled Therwil, a town of 10,000 people in the Basel-Country canton, to the centre of a national debate about Swiss identity. A similar case has been reported elsewhere in the region.

Christian Amsler, head of the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education, suggested that the school may have tried to get an “unpleasant problem out of the way” but had simply made a mistake.

Amy Hockert:

At the heart of our communities are people who go above and beyond to lift others up. Like on the courts at Phelps Parks Recreation Center in south Minneapolis, where a group of third grade boys are learning valuable lessons about basketball and life.

The ‘Phelps Falcons’

Shawn Williams first noticed the group of kids a few months ago as a teaching assistant at Best Academy in Minneapolis. He took time to see their potential, and then took them under his wing.

Dave Baskerville (7 April 2016)

Mr. Ed Hughes, Member, MMSD Board 4/7/16

Ed, I finally got around to reading your “Eight Lessons Learned” article in the 3/9/16 edition of CT. Interesting/thanks. As you know from our previous discussions, we have similar thinking on some of the MMSD challenges, not on others. For the sake of further dialogue and to continue your tutorial style (‘learned’, ‘not learned’) without my trying to be either facetious or presumptious., let me comment as follows:

LESSON ONE. “It’s Complicated”. Certainly agree, but not an excuse for catching up with the rest of the First World. Did you learn that? Challenges which you rightly say are ’multiyear and multipronged’ become far more complicated when there is not a clearcut, long term direction for a company or system. It seems that every responsible board of private/public or NGO institutions has that responsibility to the CEO (read Superintendant).

You talk of improvement (kaizen), but “better” for the status quo alone is not enough when we have been falling behind for several generations. What you apparently did not learn is that with our global rankings and radical changes in technology and the future world of work, serious transformation of our system is needed?

LESSON TWO. “No Silver Bullet”. There can be 1~3 long term goals, but agree, 426 WI school districts need to figure out in their own ways how to get there. (And where things are measured, they are more often done. Dare you provide, as 300 HSs around the country and 14 in WI have done, the PISA tests for all of our MSN 15 years olds. $15,000 per HS, and indeed, does that ever prod Supt’s, and citizens to set their goals long term and higher! And execute!)

LESSON THREE. “Schools Are Systems”. Agree with Gawande that “a system-wide approach with new skills, data-based, and the ability to implement at scale” is needed. Look at Mayo Clinic where my wife and I spend too much of our time! As you say, a significant cultural shift is required. But what you did not learn is what he said later: “Transformation must be led at the top”. That means clearly articulating for the CEO, staff and public the long term destination point for rigorous achievement and the quantitative means to measure. You did not learn that it does not mean getting involved in the vast HOW of ‘defining the efforts of everyone’, innovation, implementation and details. A good CEO and her team will handle all of that.

LESSON FOUR. “Progress Requires Broad Buy-in”. True. Yet, are you not as a Board getting way into the nitty gritty issues, while at the same time not having a clear long term goal with a Scorecard that not only educators can comprehend but all of us citizens? You did not learn that much of strategy and most all of tactics is not a Board’s prerogative to dwell in/muck around in. But the responsibility to articulate a few goals and a scorecard to vigorously monitor for the broader public is a critical constituency responsibility for the MMSD and the broader buy-in.

LESSON FIVE. “Buy-in can’t be bought”. Agree, many business values are not relevant in education.. But to me , what was not learned from the Zukerberg:Newark disaster was rather that you cannot transform a poorly performing system by simply pouring many more resources and monies into it and enabling/enhancing the status quo. (Believe now in San Francisco, Zuckerberg has learned that as well.)

LESSON SIX. “No substitute for Leadership”. Certainly. That’s why I give you folks a rough time! But your reference to a balance of ‘the best system’ and’ teacher /staff commitment’ is valid. Very much mutually needed for global achievement. And you certainly should be discussing those with Jen, as she sees fit.. But it’s not primarily your Board responsibilities. Again to repeat, by mucking around too much in those Supt. Management, and tactical areas and completely missing the long term, measurable goals/ direction, you have not learned the most critical Board role as I outlined in Lesson One above. In addition where management meets political or union road blocks to substantial progress towards those goals, boards must often step in.

And I would add in most institutions, charisma does not transfer. Milt McPike was a great leader that I’m sure considerably improved the achievement levels at East HS. But is not the Purgolders back to mediocre? If the MMSD Board would have had a transformed system with very clear long term goals for East with a PISA Scorecard that involved the public, I’m betting Milt’s accomplishments would be being built on. If we lose Jen in the next few years, I fear likewise. (Or better, you really challenge her with some 20 year global targets, get out of the way, and maybe she’ll stay with us that long.)

LESSON SEVEN. “Improvement Takes Time”. Of course. But you have simply not learned a sense of urgency. Finland, South Korea, Japan, Shanghai-China, etc….are not going to just watch and wait for 20 years our MMSD kids to catch up. They are all forthrightly after further improvement. Those countries unlike you MMSD Board Members really believe/expect their kids can be trained with the best in the world. Very high expectations! You look at where investment in the world is made…where in the USA millions of jobs lack needed skilled people….why over 65% of the UW-MSN doctoral/ post doc students in almost all of the critical science, engineering and math courses are non-Americans. You have not learned, ED, that a long term direction AND urgency must go together!

LESSON EIGHT. “Incremental progress is good progress”. Agree, lurching about in goals/system approach is not good. A “sustainable school…and coherent approach guided by a system-wide vision…” is good. But as said above, you’ve not learned that your ‘incremental progress’ is not enough! The MMSD approach essentially does not recognize the global job market our kids will walk into. Does not recognize that 20 years hence 65% of the careers now do not exist. ( So only major achievement/competency in the basics {MATH, Science, Reading} will provide some assurance of good work/salaries/further trainability during their lifetime.) That with todays transformation of technology, STEM and blue collar jobs as well as universties will definitely require those kinds of skills for social mobility and self-sufficiency.

That’s it for now. See you at the Club, give me a call if you wish to discuss further,
And either way, best regards,

Dave Baskerville (608-259-1233) www.stretchtargets.org.

Much more on Ed Hughes, here.

Unfortunately, Madison’s monolithic, $17K+ per student system has long resisted improvement. We, as a community have tolerated disastrous reading results for decades, rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school and astonishingly, are paying to expand our least diverse schools (Hamilton middle and Van Hise elementary) via a 2015 referendum….

Further reading, from 2005! When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before.

2006! “THEY’RE ALL RICH, WHITE KIDS AND THEY’LL DO JUST FINE” — NOT!

Two of the most popular — and most insidious — myths about academically gifted kids is that “they’re all rich, white kids” and that, no matter what they experience in school, “they’ll do just fine.” Even in our own district, however, the hard data do not support those assertions.
When the District analyzed dropout data for the five-year period between 1995 and 1999, they identified four student profiles. Of interest for the present purpose is the group identified as high achieving. Here are the data from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Report from May, 2000:

Group 1: High Achiever, Short Tenure, Behaved
This group comprises 27% of all dropouts during this five-year period.
Characteristics of this group:

Finally, a few of these topics arose during a recent school board member/candidate (all three ran unopposed this spring) forum. MP3 audio.

Change is hard and our children are paying a price, as Mr. Baskerville notes.

Joaquin Sapien:

The Innocence Project released a report Tuesday alleging that prosecutors across the country are almost never punished when they withhold evidence or commit other forms of misconduct that land innocent people in prison.

The Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal group that represents people seeking exonerations, examined records in Arizona, California, Texas, New York and Pennsylvania, and interviewed a wide assortment of defense lawyers, prosecutors and legal experts.

In each state, researchers examined court rulings from 2004 through 2008 in which judges found that prosecutors had committed violations such as mischaracterizing evidence or suborning perjury. All told, the researchers discovered 660 findings of prosecutorial error or misconduct. In the overwhelming majority of cases, 527, judges upheld the convictions, finding that the prosecutorial lapse did not impact the fairness of the defendant’s original trial. In 133 cases, convictions were thrown out.

Only one prosecutor was disciplined by any oversight authorities, the report asserts.

The report was issued on the anniversary of a controversial Supreme Court ruling for those trying to achieve justice in the wake of wrongful convictions. In a 5–4 decision in the case known as Connick v. Thompson, the court tossed out a $14-million dollar award by a Louisiana jury to John Thompson, a New Orleans man who served 18 years in prison for a murder and robbery he did not commit.

The majority ruled that while the trial prosecutors had withheld critical evidence of Thompson’s likely innocence – blood samples from the crime scene – the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office could not be found civilly liable for what the justices essentially determined was the mistake of a handful of employees. The decision hinged on a critical finding: that the District Attorney’s office, and the legal profession in general, provides sufficient training and oversight for all prosecutors.

Jesse Saffron:

Two years ago I attended a student debate at North Carolina Central University, one of the state’s five public historically black colleges and universities. It was fascinating, especially given the self-examination raised by its topic, “HBCUs: Can They Survive?”

The moderator asked several incisive questions: Would the closure of HBCUs materially impair black students’ access to higher education? Would closing some HBCUs make the remaining ones stronger? Would the civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s support an enduring HBCU presence today?

As I reported at the time, the students eloquently argued both “pro” and “con” positions and deeply engaged with the relevant facts and issues. If only more of today’s political and higher education leaders did the same.

Many of America’s 106 HBCUs—which are concentrated mostly in the South—are in crisis. Years of falling enrollment, declining academic standards and graduation rates, shrinking endowments, and poor management have called into question such institutions’ staying power.

Various reforms have been attempted, but those have often been Band-Aids for problems that demand long-term solutions and fresh thinking. The downward trajectory has continued as HBCU supporters and policymakers have treated the sector as a protected class in higher education—one in which outside criticism is labeled reactionary or, worse, a vestige of racism.

Objectively, however, HBCUs in many respects fail the students they purport to uplift: low-income students, first-generation college students, and students with substandard academic preparation.