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

The terms and conditions of the 2015-16 MTI/MMSD Collective Bargaining Agreement relative to Parent-Teacher Conferences provides the following:

“All teachers are required to attend up to two (2) evenings for parent teacher conferences per contract year as directed by the teacher’s building administrator. Teachers participating in evening parent‐teacher conferences will be provided a compensatory day off as designated on the School Calendar in Section V‐L. In recognition of 4K, non‐ SAGE 2nd grade, non‐SAGE 3rd grade, 4th grade and 5th grade teachers having more parent‐teacher conferences due to increased class size, such teachers shall be released from the early release SIP‐aligned activities Monday during the months of November and March. At the elementary level conferences will be held in lieu of the report cards for the reporting periods in which they are held.”

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

Getting Organized! MTI now has over seventy-five (75) Member Organizers including teachers, educational assistants, clerical-technical employees, substitute teachers, and retired MTI members who are committed to helping the next generation maintain their Union. Member Organizers are volunteers who serve as point persons in their building/work location to help build awareness of and support for the recertification election of MTI’s five bargaining units.

Get-out-the-vote! In political elections, voter turnout is critical. Act 10 requires 51% “YES” votes to prevail, not just a simple majority like most elections. Thus, in Union recertification elections, the number voting is even more critical than in any other election. The experiences of other Wisconsin public sector Unions show that when employees vote, they overwhelmingly vote Union YES! Where recertification elections have been lost, it is frequently because less than 51% of the eligible voters cast a ballot. Unlike political elections, in recertification elections a non-vote counts as a “NO vote.”

In MTI’s recertification election, ballots can be cast 24 hours per day, seven days per week, via phone, computer, or iPad. Voting begins at Noon, November 4, and continues through Noon, November 24. The process is quick and efficient and should take no more than a couple minutes. That said, others have reported difficulties where votes were not counted, when they failed to accurately complete each step in the balloting process. It is for that reason that MTI is providing all MTI-represented employees with detailed voting instructions on posters, flyers and palm cards.

Megan McArdle:

College is expensive, and getting more so every year. Since most families don’t have tens of thousands of dollars lying around, the government has responded with ever-more-generous student loan programs.

First there were the loans themselves, with interest subsidized while you’re in school. Then, when that proved inadequate, we instituted income-based repayment, allowing students to cap their payments at a percentage of their discretionary income (stretching out the loan, and getting forgiveness on any balance remaining after 25 years). Then, since that wasn’t quite enough, we made the terms more generous. Now the Obama administration has announced that it’s making 5 million more people eligible for the program.

Michael Rothfeld:

Educators in this Oklahoma City suburb jumped into action when state leaders in 2010 adopted the Common Core academic standards that were sweeping states across the country.

The Edmond school district has a big military population that moves frequently, so officials liked the idea of using the same standards as other states. They also saw Oklahoma’s old standards as inferior. They spent about $500,000 preparing teachers and students, collaborating with educators in other states and buying materials and computers for a new Common Core test, finishing a year in advance.

Nicole Dungca:

If you find yourself chuckling at the seemingly random speed limits of 17 miles per hour around Hampshire College, you can thank David Kelly.

When the longtime math professor retired this summer after more than 44 years, he said he didn’t want a retirement party or ceremony.

Madison Government School District “Final” 2015-2016 Budget (5.2MB PDF):

Page 39: 2013-2014 Total Spending: $408,806,234.75

2014-2015: $411,671,817.67

2015-2016: $454,414,941.93 or $16,724.26 per student (27,171 students)

The United States spends $12,401 per student nationally, about 34% less than Madison.

Much more on open enrollment, here.

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

Over the past few weeks, discussions have been occurring throughout the District about MTI’s upcoming MTI Recertification Elections. One of the most frequently asked questions by newer staff, those who are not aware of MTI’s many accomplishments on behalf of District employees, is “what is at risk if we lose our Union?” To answer, one only needs to look around Wisconsin to see what has happened to employees of other public employers where employees no longer have a collective voice in the workplace.

Act 10 enabled public sector employers to unilaterally establish what employees pay toward health insurance. In many school districts, employers increased the employee’s take-home share to 12% of the premium. Such decreases an employee’s pay up to $220 per month. MTI worked with the District last year to keep to ZERO the health insurance contribution for MTI- represented employees. And, the Union will be working with the District again this year, via the Joint MTI/MMSD Wellness Committee, to collaboratively identify potential sources for health insurance savings rather than implementing a premium co-pay. MTI-represented employees are among the very few public employees in Wisconsin who are not obligated to pay 10-12% toward health insurance premiums. What MTI achieved puts an additional $50 to $171 of take- home pay in each MTI member’s pocket each month, depending on whether they carry single or family health insurance.

For long-time teachers, educational assistants, clerical-technical staff and security assistants approaching retirement, MTI’s Contracts and the new Employee Handbook provide retiring employees with 100% of the value of their accumulated sick leave for the payment of post-retirement insurances. Many school districts have capped or reduced such benefits, given the unilateral authority granted them by Act 10, forcing longtime employees to work longer in order to afford post-retirement insurance premiums.

Austin Dannhaus:

To date, the education sector has seen an over-focus on process and technological change that has led to evolutionary incremental, and sustaining improvements to teaching and learning. It seems we don’t exactly know what to do with all these new tools. In a 2008 op-ed, Clay Christensen and Michael Horn wrote:

“…That schools have gotten so little back from their investment [in technology] comes as no surprise. Schools have done what virtually every organization does when implementing an innovation. An organization’s natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing operating model to sustain what it already does. This is perfectly predictable, perfectly logical — and perfectly wrong.”

Milwaukee Public Schools (PDF):

MPS seeks proposals to identify qualified providers of T4U services for the remainder of the 15/16 school year and the 16/17, 17/18 and 18/19 school years. Providers hire and pay tutors and invoice MPS for services rendered.
The target population for T4U services are those K5 – 12th grade students, at under-performing schools as identified by DPI or the District, identified as failing, or most at risk of failing to meet challenging Common Core State Standards (CCSS) or Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards (WMELS). Of particular need are services for English Language Learners and Students with Special Learning Needs that are aligned to state and national standards.

Jonathan Adler:

The ideological imbalance that pervades academia fosters groupthink and undermines critical thinking. The dominance of left-leaning perspectives in academic institutions compromises their commitment to open inquiry and effective education.

Among other things, liberals and conservatives alike can fall prey to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. One benefit of ideological and viewpoint diversity is that it can provide a check on such tendencies. Writes Brooks:

William M. Arkin and Alexa :

The 100 schools named in the VICE News rankings produce the greatest number of students who are employed by the Intelligence Community (IC), have the closest relationships with the national security state, and profit the most from American war-waging.

Andrea Fuller:

For the first time, government data back up what some parents have long suspected: Students who choose elite liberal arts colleges don’t earn as much money early in their careers as those who attend highly selective research universities.

The disparity, determined by a Wall Street Journal analysis of the data, means that some liberal arts colleges may face tough questions about the potential payoff of their expensive tuition. That may be especially true for students needing financial aid, the group covered by the government’s figures.

The Education Department in September released salary numbers as part of its College Scorecard, an online tool that compares colleges on cost, student debt and graduation rates. For the first time, the government also paired information on federal student aid recipients with income tax records to compute median earnings figures for each school.

CBS Tampa

Superintendent Melba Luciano told the parents the school district needs to break down the day by minutes to see where recess can be added.

Amanda Lipham told WKMG her young son came home crying from school because he wasn’t allowed to play outside.

“I could see in his eyes that he lost that enthusiasm for school. He needed that time to socialize, that time to make friends,” she said. “I asked him if he made any friends and he said, ‘No, I don’t have time. I don’t have time to talk to them.’”

Mises Institute:

However, governmental bodies in the US and elsewhere also employ a wide array of mandates and tax-based benefits and incentives to carry out social policy. This distinguishes the US in particular from most European countries that rely more on cash benefits or non-cash benefits administered directly by governments.

But governments are not limited to direct benefits. Governments may also employ “tax breaks for social purposes” (TBSPs) including tax credits for child care, and tax breaks for health-care related spending.

Furthermore, in the United States — more so than in other countries — governments create tax incentives and mandates that lead to high levels of “private social expenditure.” The OECD defines these private expenditures as expenditures that are designed to redistribute wealth, but are not administered directly by government agencies:

grumpy teacher:

In other words, the dream that Common Core would be the single educational vision of the entire country– that dream is dead. Dead dead deadity dead.

But Rothfeld’s piece lays out a not-always-recognized (at least, not by people who don’t actually work in education) culprit for the demise. He lists the usual suspects– politics, testing, federal overreach. But the article is most interested in another malefactor– finances.

Eduardo Porter:

“There is no way you can blame socioeconomic status for the performance of the United States,” said Andreas Schleicher, the O.E.C.D.’s top educational expert, who runs the organization’s PISA tests. “When you look at all dimensions of social background, the United States does not suffer a particular disadvantage.”

Mr. Schleicher criticized the analysis of the PISA data by Professor Carnoy and his colleagues for using a single indicator: books at home. And he pointed me to a statistic that underscores how the role of socioeconomic status can be overplayed.

Indeed. Madison spends far more than most yet has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Chris Taylor:

Friends, a proposal: Let’s stop using the phrase “school-to-prison pipeline.” It’s misleading.

When going to school looks not a little like being in a prison, we’re no longer talking about a subject’s itinerary through discrete times and spaces—the narrative geography wherein a student, routed through a school that can only fail her, finds herself pushed into juvenile or adult criminal justice systems. The rigidity of disciplinarity in the post-public public school system intimates the tendential identity of the prison-function and the school-function. When a teacher calls an administrator who calls a cop who then brutalizes a student for failing to move from her seat when ordered, neither students nor observers need schooling in Althusser or Foucault to see the school operating as a prison.

All the same, school and prison’s tendency toward an identity of function can be hard to see. First, it is only emergent, a tendency, a possible future that nonetheless enacts itself in the present and points us toward what is in the process of becoming. To read this process of becoming is not the same as declaring an accomplished identity. Indeed, to say today “the school is a prison” is also to compute with the fact that it also is not a prison, not really, not yet. In describing a tendential identity, then, one always risks a kind of overdramatization, the inflation of an instance into a sign of things to come.

Sean Coughlan:

Charter schools – publicly funded independent schools – have continued to expand across the US, with supporters seeing them as a way of re-energising standards in state education.

And the educational technology sector has been pushing to bring some hi-tech start-up innovation to teaching and learning.

So it’s easy to see how the next step for a 21st Century education seemed to be a virtual classroom, combining the autonomy of charter schools with the flexibility of learning online.

Except a major report, based on research in 17 US states with online charter schools, has found “significantly weaker academic performance” in maths and reading in these virtual schools compared with the conventional school system.

Philip Guo:

Four years ago I went through the programming interview prep process (which I wrote about in Programming Interview Tips) to get a software engineering job at Google. Since on-campus hiring season is in full swing right now, a bunch of students are asking me about how to prepare for interviews. Here’s a thought:

University CS departments should offer a programming interview prep elective course.

Why? (Listicle warning)

Victor Davis Hanson:

The urban ideal tends to be just the opposite. Looking to cement his lead among urban unmarried women during his 2012 reelection campaign, Barack Obama ran an interactive Web ad, “The Life of Julia.” Its dependency narrative defined the life of an everywoman character as one of cradle-to-grave government reliance — a desirable thing. Julia is proudly and perennially a ward of the state. She can get through school only thanks to Head Start and federally backed student loans. Only the Small Business Administration and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act enable her to find work. In her retirement years, only Social Security and Medicare allow her comfort and the time to volunteer for a communal urban garden, apparently a hobby rather than a critical food source.

Caitlin Emma:

The difference between the schools was in their readiness to make use of the sudden infusion of money. In Miami, school district officials had prepared for the grants. They had the support of teachers, unions and parents. In Chicago, where teachers fought the program and officials changed almost yearly, schools churned through millions of dollars but didn’t budge the needle.

Now, the Department of Education is preparing for another multi-million grant competition. But interviews by POLITICO with nearly two dozen analysts, teachers, administrators and policymakers, who have studied the performance of SIG schools, raise questions about whether any of the changes ordered by the Department of Education or Congress will actually yield better results for the money spent.

History is useful: Kansas City exploded K-12 spending as well…

Locally, Madison spends more than most yet has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

The American Interest:

One possibility is a system of national exams, sponsored by employers, that would allow students from less prestigious schools to demonstrate that they had learned as much as or more than Ivy grads. As it stands, the top companies companies tend to recruit only at the top schools, so it is difficult for students from West Texas University or California State Chico to demonstrate their qualifications. Hundreds of companies use university prestige as an imperfect proxy for intellectual ability.

Needless to say, this system is deeply unfair. Whether or not someone impressed an admissions committee at age 17 (and admission committees are imbued with the usual higher education pieties and prejudices) is hardly the best way to measure what he or she has learned by age 22. People mature in different ways and at different paces, and use their time in college differently as well. Since it can be hard to perform poorly at grade inflation mills like Harvard, especially in the soft subjects, almost everybody who gets in graduates—no matter how little they learn.

Malcolm Harris:

If you visit collegedebt.com, that’s exactly what you find. It’s a stark display, black on white, with an ominous ticker counting up. “Current student loan debt in the United States.” Right now it’s at $1.339 trillion, but by the time you read this, the sum will be larger. The site is owned and operated by self-styled maverick billionaire Mark Cuban, who uses it to drive home a point he makes whenever the media will listen: American higher education is overpriced, and the bubble is going to pop.

Higher education has been pegged as the next bubble since the 2008 housing crisis, and the evidence is compelling. Increases to university tuition and fees outpaced both pre-crisis housing prices and climbing healthcare costs. The growth over the last 35 years certainly looks unsustainable when you plot it on a graph, and America remembers what happens when an asset bubble collapses. But it’s been seven years since the housing crisis, and while new home prices dipped, tuition and fees haven’t really. College costs have sustained more public scrutiny—the cure for bubbles—than real estate ever did before the crash, and still no pop. The average undergraduate now takes out $30,000 in loans. Universities keep expanding, building new facilities and introducing all sorts of auxiliary services. Despite omens to the contrary, the higher education industry is going strong. Analysts are waiting for the bubble to pop; this is the story of why it won’t.

Julian Francis Park

Today at the “Student Forum” discussing the glowing technofuture of the 21st century curriculum at Mills College there was something fundamental mentioned twice, but only in passing – a driving assumption behind the proposed curricular “revisions.” As the reader may know, these “revisions” include proposals to close the American Studies and Book Arts programs and eliminating the Dance major. It is worth trying to consider the total implications of the proposed changes, but that is not what I will do here (nor does any of us have the capacity to do that alone). What I will do is address the driving assumption and my understanding of some immediately relevant context surrounding that assumption.

The assumption is this: the college needs more students. There were two reasons for this articulated today by the administrators conducting the forum, one of which is radically misleading, the other of which is insane in the exact same way that capitalism is insane and this is because it is precisely the insanity of capitalism we are dealing with.

University of Cambridge:

Autistic traits are not the same as having a diagnosis of autism; instead, these are characteristics of personality and behaviour that are found throughout the general population and are linked to what is seen in the clinical condition of autism. Everyone has some autistic traits – such as difficulty in taking another person’s point of view, difficulty in switching attention flexibly, and excellent attention to detail – and there is a wide range in the population. 15 years ago a team of scientists at the University of Cambridge developed a way of measuring these, using a questionnaire called the Autism Spectrum Quotient, or AQ. This comprises 50 questions, each one representing one autistic trait.

Whink:

The Cornell Note Taking Technique is one of the most popular and effective methods for taking down notes for all kinds of subjects. It’s especially useful for studying and taking notes right from a textbook.

We’ve covered the skeleton basics of the Cornell Note Taking Method in our previous post but this time, we’d like to point out techniques on how to use this particular note taking strategy in reading and studying your textbook materials.

Sol Stern:

Over nearly three decades fighting to improve the nation’s largest public school district, I have discovered a dispiriting but undeniable fact: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I started writing about public education because of what I saw, up close and personal, at PS 87 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the elementary school my two sons attended from 1987 to 1997. It was at this elite school, favored by the neighborhood’s middle-class parents, that I first glimpsed the harm done to children — particularly, poor children — by a retrograde teachers’ contract and the dominance of progressive-education ideas in the classroom.

Despite two decades of often turbulent efforts at reform and a doubling of spending under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, these two fundamental problems still plague Gotham’s schools today.

Richard Freeland & John Davis:

Massachusetts is facing an education decision of vital importance to our fellow business and higher-education leaders. This month, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will determine whether to raise standards for our schoolchildren to help them keep pace with the rapidly changing economy, or continue with a measurement system developed 20 years ago. The choice should be obvious.

In 1993, our state adopted an ambitious set of standards for our K-12 system as part of a comprehensive education reform effort. To measure those standards, the state instituted the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS. At that time, the benchmarks were considered rigorous — they set a higher bar than what our schools were used to. But what was considered challenging 20 years ago is not good enough in today’s highly competitive and increasingly globalized business environment.

Heads in sand locally, where disastrous reading results reign.

Robert Klemko:

Elliot Uzelac took over this moribund football program at a struggling school in a worse-off town with clear goals. The boys would pass their classes. They would commit their weekday afternoons to practice. And they would make the playoffs. He even wrote that word—playoffs—on a chalkboard during his first team meeting, underlining it three times for emphasis. Never mind the fact this team had won four games in eight years.
Incredulous, a few players pulled out their smartphones and Googled this crazy man with white hair and a gruff voice. Before them stood a football lifer who had once coached under Bo Schembechler and Bill Belichick, a 74-year-old who had once been the head coach of Division I college programs.

High expectations should drive everything in the K-12 world, rather than spending more and delivering disastrous reading results.

Charlie Wells:

In a forthcoming study in the Journal of Marketing Research, Ms. Sussman found that even though people were theoretically earning 1% interest from their savings, they were willing to borrow money at much higher rates to keep their savings at a certain level.
 
 “I’m not at all saying people shouldn’t save,” says Ms. Sussman. “But even people with an appropriate liquidity cushion want to keep more money in their savings accounts because it makes them feel responsible, even though it might lead them to do these behaviors that are potentially economically costly.”

Glenn Reynolds:

As former Labor secretary Robert Reich recently noted, Ivy League schools are government-subsidized playgrounds for the rich: “Imagine a system of college education supported by high and growing government spending on elite private universities that mainly educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class, and low and declining government spending on public universities that educate large numbers of children from the working class and the poor.

“You can stop imagining,” Reich wrote. “That’s the American system right now. … Private university endowments are now around $550 billion, centered in a handful of prestigious institutions. Harvard’s endowment is over $32 billion, followed by Yale at $20.8 billion, Stanford at $18.6 billion, and Princeton at $18.2 billion. Each of these endowments increased last year by more than $1 billion, and these universities are actively seeking additional support. Last year, Harvard launched a capital campaign for another $6.5 billion. Because of the charitable tax deduction, the amount of government subsidy to these institutions in the form of tax deductions is about one out of every $3 contributed.”

Jason Pontin:

But Silicon Valley’s explanation of why there are no disruptive innovations is parochial and reductive: the markets—in particular, the incentives that venture capital provides entrepreneurs—are to blame. According to Founders Fund’s manifesto, “What Happened to the Future?,” written by Bruce Gibney, a partner at the firm: “In the late 1990s, venture portfolios began to reflect a different sort of future … Venture investing shifted away from funding transformational companies and toward companies that solved incremental problems or even fake problems … VC has ceased to be the funder of the future, and instead become a funder of features, widgets, irrelevances.” Computers and communications technologies advanced because they were well and properly funded, Gibney argues. But what seemed futuristic at the time of Apollo 11 “remains futuristic, in part because these technologies never received the sustained funding lavished on the electronics industries.”

Michael McGough:

A recent poll of college students’ attitudes toward free speech (in general and on campus) is a mixed bag.

The survey by McLaughlin & Associates for the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale shows that 87% of respondents agreed with this statement: “There is educational value in listening to and understanding views and opinions that I may disagree with and are different from my own.”

That’s good news that runs counter to the narrative that campuses have been seized by a speech-stultifying political correctness.

On the other hand, 21% students — and 30% of self-described liberals — agreed with the statement that the 1st Amendment was an “outdated amendment that can no longer be applied in today’s society and should be changed.”

Also remarkable was the fact that 35% of respondents agreed that “hate speech is NOT protected under the 1st Amendment.”

Matt Bruening:

Conor P. Williams has a piece at 74 million that purports to be a simulation of what critics of Teach for America must be like. Apparently, in Wiliams’ view, they are coffee shop elite hipsters. As far as this genre of writing goes, Williams’ piece is not particularly funny, insightful, or well-executed. It comes off, like some of his other pieces, as Williams wanting to demonstrate that he and people like him are personally cool and heroic while those on the other side are actually the lame losers. It is a brand of ego-stroking akin to the guy who likes to play up the time he did a humanitarian spring break in Africa, not (only) because he wants to advocate humanitarian spring breaks to Africa, but also because he wants people to think he’s righteous for what he did.

I thought about doing a similar piece where I simulated what Teach for America enlistees are like. I knew people who signed up to TFA around the time that they did so, and so I have some ample material to work with. But instead of creating some fictionalized parody of the arch TFA participant, I’ll just tell you what I think directly. This account is based on people I’ve known and some speculation beyond that.

Corey Robin:

A couple of months ago, at the beginning of the semester, I posted on Facebook a plea to my fellow faculty that they not post complaints there about their students. I said that I considered such public commentary a kind of betrayal, even when the students weren’t named.

Yesterday, Gothamist reported that an undercover cop had been spying for months, if not years, on a group of Muslim students at Brooklyn College, leading to the arrest of two women last spring for allegedly planning to build a bomb.

Set aside the problem of entrapment with these schemes. Set aside Mayor de Blasio’s promise to stop this kind of surveillance of Muslims in New York. Let’s focus instead on the leadership of CUNY that either knowingly allows this kind of spying on our students to continue or does little to nothing to stop it.

Breann Schossow:

Over a five-year period, the number of public school leaders in metro Milwaukee has not only gotten smaller — it’s also less educated, less experienced and mostly white, according to a new report.

The report, “Guiding Principals,” from the Milwaukee-based Public Policy Forum, is the second in a three-part series looking at teachers and school leaders in the Milwaukee area. The report focused on school leaders and their characteristics. The first report, released earlier this year, looked at the teacher workforce. That workforce also got smaller, was less experienced, and was mostly white.

Frank J. Swetz:

Archaeological digs in the Mideast have uncovered thousands of small clay objects, dating from as far back as 7500 BCE. These objects, referred to as “tokens,” have specific shapes and markings indicating a designated, but until recently unknown, purpose. This mystery was solved by the art historian Denise Schmandt-Besserat who began researching these items in 1969. The extraordinary results of her research were published in a number of articles and books, including How Writing Came About (University of Texas Press, 1996).

Her conclusion? The tokens were counters. Their use evolved over thousands of years from simply shaped tokens (see Figure 1) to more complex tokens bearing markings (see Figure 2). Each counter shape represented a specific quantity of a specific commodity. For example, a cone stood for a small measure of grain and a sphere for a large measure of grain. Using different shapes of counters to count different commodities is evidence of concrete counting, meaning that each category of items was counted with special numerations or number words specific to that category. There is a hint of concrete counting in our own society in our preference for phrases such as “a pair of shoes” or “a couple of days” over “two shoes” or “two days.” However, we almost always use abstract counting with our abstract numbers “two,” “three,” “four,” … that can be used to count any item. After 3300 BCE, the tokens were sometimes stored in clay envelopes with their imprints made on the envelope’s surface to make visible the number and shapes of tokens enclosed (see Figure 3). According to Schmandt-Besserat, the transformation of three-dimensional tokens to two-dimensional signs to communicate information was the beginning of writing. Eventually, the tokens were replaced by signs made by their impressions onto solid balls of clay, or tablets (see Figures 4 and 5). The impressed signs evolved to become cuneiform writing.

University of Rochester:

Using photos and text from Instagram, a team of researchers from the University of Rochester has shown that this data can not only expose patterns of underage drinking more cheaply and faster than conventional surveys, but also find new patterns, such as what alcohol brands or types are favored by different demographic groups. The researchers say they hope exposing these patterns could help develop effective intervention.

Instagram is very popular among teenagers and it offers large amounts of information about this target population in the form of photos and text. As Jiebo Luo, professor of computer science at the University of Rochester, and his colleagues describe in a new paper, underage drinkers “are willing to share their alcohol consumption experience” in social media. Studying the social media behavior of this group allows the researchers to observe it passively in an “undisturbed state.”

They are presenting their work this week at the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data in Santa Clara, California.

Rishawn Biddle:

Yesterday’s analysis of exclusion data from the reading portion of this year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that far too many states were excluding numbers of children in special education ghettos and English Language Learner programs far above what is allowed under federal law. But none of those revelations are a stark as what Dropout Nation learned from analyzing the reading exclusion data from the federal exam’s Trial Urban District Assessment of big-city school systems.

Aviva Stahl:

This past April, four years after Mel’s public act of faith, two Queens residents, Noelle Velentzas and Asia Siddiqui, were arrested and charged with allegedly planning to build a bomb. The US Justice Department issued a release stating that the women were linked to members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State, and revealed that a Detective from the NYPD’s Intelligence Bureau was heavily involved in bringing the women to justice.

Among the ISO members, some of whom ran in the same social circles as Velentzas and Siddiqui, the arrests set off a chain of frantic text messages, phone calls, and Facebook posts: “Mel” wasn’t “Mel.” She was an undercover cop.

Lauren Kirchner:

We reported yesterday on a study of Uber’s dynamic pricing scheme that investigated Uber’s surge pricing patterns in Manhattan and San Francisco and showed riders how they could potentially avoid higher prices. The study’s authors finally shed some light on Uber’s “black box,” the algorithm that automatically sets prices but that is inaccessible to both drivers and riders.

That’s just one of a nearly endless number of algorithms we use every day. The formulas influence far more than your Google search results or Facebook newsfeed. Sophisticated algorithms are now being used to make decisions in everything from criminal justice to education.

But when big data uses bad data, discrimination can result. Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Edith Ramirez recently called for “algorithmic transparency,” since algorithms can contain “embedded assumptions that lead to adverse impacts that reinforce inequality.”

Here are a few good stories that have contributed to our understanding of this relatively new field.

Richard Vedder:

Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee recently, I was asked by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) if, with respect to higher education, I would favor eliminating the U.S. Department of Education.

She was aghast when I said “yes.”

Before I go into the damage our national educational ministry has done to higher education, it is worth reviewing its creation in 1979.

The Democrats then controlled all of the federal government, with large congressional majorities. The party had promised to create the Department in its 1976 platform. President Jimmy Carter advocated it, as did the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Educational Association (NEA).

Yet the bill barely passed. The House committee considering it advanced it to the floor on a 20-19 vote—with seven Democrats voting no. The liberal press such as the New York Times and the Washington Post opposed it editorially.

In particular, the criticism leveled by the Times in its May 22, 1979 editorial “Centralizing Education Is No Reform” was sharp and prescient:

Donald Graham:

For the first time since I left the newspaper business, I feel I have some news. And it’s news that might shake up a stagnant Washington policy debate.

For-profit colleges have become a standard target of the progressive left (and not them alone). Their charges include: The students are recruited aggressively; the prices are too high; most of the students drop out and many incur high levels of debt and then default; for those who stick it out and graduate, the degrees aren’t worth much.

These charges have been so widely publicized and so often repeated that they have entered the realm of accepted truth. In some quarters, to defend any for-profit education company is to defend the indefensible. Hear me: There are huge differences among for-profit colleges, as among other colleges. Some for-profit colleges have behaved disgracefully to their students; I do not defend them.

Steven Greenhouse:

In fact, the labor market is a lot softer than a 5.1 percent jobless rate would indicate. For one thing, the percentage of Americans who are working has fallen considerably since the recession began. This disappearance of several million workers — as labor force dropouts they are not factored into the jobless rate — has meant continued labor market weakness, which goes far to explain why wage increases remain so elusive. End of story, many economists say.

But work force experts assert that economists ignore many other factors that help explain America’s stubborn wage stagnation. Outsourcing, offshoring and imports exert a steady downward tug on wages. Labor unions have lost considerable muscle. Many employers have embraced pay-for-performance policies that often mean nice bonuses for the few instead of across-the-board raises for the many.

Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, noted, for instance, that many retailers give managers bonuses based on whether they keep their labor budgets below a designated ceiling. “They’re punished to the extent they go over those budgets,” Professor Cappelli said. “If you’re a local manager and you’re thinking, ‘Should we bump up wages,’ it could really hit your bonus. Companies have done this in order to increase the incentive to hang tough on budgets, and it works.”

Matt McGue & Irving I. Gottesman:

Arguably, no psychological variable has received more attention from behavioral geneticists than what has been called “general cognitive ability” (as well as “general intelligence” or “g”), and for good reason. GCA has a rich correlational network, implying that it may play an important role in multiple domains of functioning. GCA is highly correlated with various indicators of educational attainment, yet its predictive utility is not limited to academic achievement. It is also correlated with work performance, navigating the complexities of everyday life, the absence of various social pathologies (such as criminal convictions), and even health and mortality. Although the causal basis for these associations is not always known, it is nonetheless the case that research on GCA has the potential to provide insights into the origins of a wide range of important social outcomes. In this essay, our discussion of why GCA is considered a fundamentally important dimension of behavior on which humans differ is followed by a look at behavioral genetics research on CGA. We summarize behavioral genetics research that has sought to identify and quantify the total contributions of genetic and environmental factors to individual differences in GCA as well as molecular genetic research that has sought to identify genetic variants that underlie inherited effects.

The Caucus Blog:

As the social justice caucus within the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, we were surprised to see that you are coming to Philadelphia to speak alongside leaders of Teach for America (TFA). The Caucus of Working Educators (WE) is committed to racial justice in our schools and society, and we stand in solidarity with the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

We see Teach for America as working in opposition to the goals of publicly funded education for all students in Philadelphia and to the goal of increasing the number of teachers of color and teachers who are committed to building relationships with communities over the long term, which we see as an integral component of culturally responsive teaching. We view the hiring of cadres of racial, cultural, and geographical outsiders with very little teaching preparation as part of a larger neoliberal effort to privatize education and replace unionized teachers (many of whom are teachers of color) with young, inexperienced teachers (most of whom are white and do not intend to stay in the teaching profession and commit to the long-term improvement of their teaching practice).

This practice of displacing African American teachers, in particular, is already underway. While Philadelphia’s teaching force increased by 13 percent from 2001-2011, the percentage of Black teachers dropped by 19 percent. This has contributed to Philadelphia having the greatest disparity between the race and ethnicity of the student body and those who teach them. Only 31 percent of Philadelphia teachers are of color compared to 86 percent of the student body they are teaching. This is unacceptable.

Arthur Brooks:

ONE of the great intellectual and moral epiphanies of our time is the realization that human diversity is a blessing. It has become conventional wisdom that being around those unlike ourselves makes us better people — and more productive to boot.

Scholarly studies have piled up showing that race and gender diversity in the workplace can increase creative thinking and improve performance. Meanwhile, excessive homogeneity can lead to stagnation and poor problem-solving.

Steven Horwitz:

“The motives of fear and greed are what the market brings to prominence,” argues G.A. Cohen in Why Not Socialism? “One’s opposite-number marketeers are predominantly seen as possible sources of enrichment, and as threats to one’s success.”

Cohen further notes that these are “horrible ways of seeing other people” that are the “result of centuries of capitalist civilization.”

If only we had a different economic system where people viewed each other as brothers and sisters in a common effort rather than competitors trying to grab the largest share of the economic pie.

Megan McArdle:

Why don’t more people get college degrees? In a new working paper, Sang Yoon Lee, Yongseok Shin and Donghoon Lee write: “In the early 1980s, American men with at least four years of college education earned about 40 percent more on average than those whose education ended with high school. By 2005, this college wage premium rose to above 90 percent. During the same time period, the fraction of men with a four-year college degree in the working-age population all but remained constant.”

This is a bit of a mystery. College tuition has gone up, to be sure, but financing that tuition is easier than it used to be, what with the panoply of repayment options for government-sponsored student loans. Moreover, more people start college than did in 1985; it’s just that they don’t finish. So you can’t explain this by saying that people are avoiding college because of the size of the potential tuition bills.

Alan Borsuk:

Until Thursday evening, I never dreamed I would write a “profiles in courage” piece about Wendell Harris. I apologize, Wendell. You earned it, and here it is.

Of course, an example of political courage can also be seen as an example of betrayal and broken promises. Harris will get those reactions, too. I assume he burned just about every political bridge he had when he voted for the proposal to put a Carmen high school program in the Pulaski High School building on Milwaukee’s south side.

Electrifying is a word I believe I have never used to describe a Milwaukee School Board meeting until now.

But the stakes Thursday night were high, the outcome uncertain, and the tension in the room palpable enough to lead Milwaukee Public Schools officials to bring in extra security. The proposal became an intense battle between supporters of conventional public schools and supporters of independent charter schools.

Deciding the issue meant making a statement about what kind of change is going to fly or not fly in MPS.

Carmen has two high-expectations charter schools in Milwaukee, operating under authorization of the School Board but employing its own teachers and its own education plans. Pulaski is a venerable, large high school with declining enrollment and low achievement. Its new principal, Lolita Patrick, supports the Carmen-Pulaski plan as a path to change.

If they won, advocates of the “partnership” plan would undertake the ambitious, but very difficult pursuit of a vision of these two schools creating excellence together in the same building.

More, here.

Meanwhile, Madison continues its one size fits all government schools model, most recently rejecting the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school, despite long term disastrous reading results.

Declan Harvey:

If you’re white, male and poor enough to qualify for a free meal at school then you face the toughest challenge when starting out in life.

That’s what the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has said in “the most comprehensive review ever carried out on progress towards greater equality in Britain”.

The suggestion is because white male poor pupils do worse at school their chances of getting good jobs is reduced.

The EHRC, an organisation set up to get rid of discrimination, defines anyone who qualifies for a free school meal as poor.

Marc Joffe:

According to recent research, expanding state Medicaid spending is “crowding out” spending on other major state programs, most notably education and transportation infrastructure. This growth in state Medicaid spending, however, does not seem to be increasing state debt burdens.

As the chart below shows, in 2000, state spending on Medicaid amounted to 19.1 percent of the total of state budgets. Education made up 22.3 percent, while transportation constituted 8.9 percent of state spending. Fourteen years later, in 2014, total state spending on Medicaid had increased to 25.8 percent of state budgets, while education fell to 19.5 percent and transportation spending declined to 7.7 percent of state budgets.

Chris Stewart:

“Over the last 40 years, our nation’s elementary and secondary education system has seen a 300 percent increase in federal funding. However, despite record taxpayer-funded investments in public education, academic achievement has not seen a commensurate improvement, and the state of the American education system is sobering,” Ryan stated on his House of Representatives web site. “Stagnant student achievement levels and exploding deficits have demonstrated that massive amounts of taxpayer funding and top-down bureaucratic interventions are not the way to provide America’s students with a high-quality education. It is imperative, then, that we allocate our financial resources effectively and efficiently to improve education in this country and ensure the continued success of future generations of Americans

Seth Schoen & Amy Williams:

Over the last year, law enforcement officials around the world have been pressing hard on the notion that without a magical “backdoor” to access the content of any and all encrypted communications by ordinary people, they’ll be totally incapable of fulfilling their duties to investigate crime and protect the public. EFF and many others have pushed back—including launching a petition with our friends to SaveCrypto, which this week reached 100,000 signatures, forcing a response from President Obama.

This is in addition to multiple findings that the government’s “going dark” concern has proven completely unfounded in the past, along with former national security officers disavowing the concern all together. And given law enforcement’s continuing attacks on the public’s use of encryption, we think it’s time for a quick look at the long tradition of encryption use by some ordinary, and some not so ordinary, Americans.

Madison Government Schools Administration (PDF):

Key Findings:

1. In total, 36% of MMSD high school students participated in interscholastic athletics, with participation rates varying by school, grade and demographic group.

2. 61% percent of interscholastic high school student athletes were white.

3. Soccer, cross country, track, and football had the greatest number of participants across the district.

4. Overall, higher percentages of interscholastic high school student athletes received no Ds (71%) or Fs (86%) than non-participants (58% and 66%).

5. All four potential eligibility models explored result in significant disparities in interscholastic athletics eligibility across student groups.

The Economist:

The Economist’s first-ever college rankings are based on a simple, if debatable, premise: the economic value of a university is equal to the gap between how much money its graduates earn, and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere. Thanks to the scorecard, the first number is easily accessible. The second, however, can only be estimated. To calculate this figure, we ran the scorecard’s earnings data through a multiple regression analysis, a common method of measuring the relationships between variables.

Khulia Pringle:

Every morning I woke up and got my kids dressed ready for school. They knew I was serious as a heart attack when it comes to education. I realize this isn’t what the world believes happens when they think of me. As a black mother living in an urban area I’m supposed to be disengaged. I’m supposed to be uncaring or out of touch. That’s the official story about me and others like me. I hear it from so many sources. We’re supposed to be struggling so much that we can’t be trusted to do at home what middle-class America wants us to do.

Message received. Duly noted.

For the record, that nonsense doesn’t fit me. I find it insulting and it sounds like a cheap way to ignore the problems my kids encounter in public schools. Not problems with the kids, but problems with the adults.

Molly Beck:

The number and type of crimes committed at high schools, at their events and on school buses would be printed on the state’s school report cards under a bill being circulated this week.

Any public high school, public charter high school or private voucher high school would be required to track reports of criminal activity beginning in the 2017-18 school year and submit the data to the state Department of Public Instruction annually under the bill authored by Rep. John Jagler, R-Watertown.

Jagler said the idea of the bill was triggered by a large fight in September at Milwaukee’s Barack Obama School of Career and Technical Education. He said he subsequently learned from police department employees that Milwaukee police are often called to the school, but Jagler could not find related data from the state Department of Justice or DPI.

“I was kind of surprised that the information wasn’t there, or wasn’t easily available — and I was kind of surprised the data wasn’t being tracked,” he said. “To me, I don’t know how anybody can think this information shouldn’t be available to parents.”

Round and round we go.

Obtaining police call data required a rather involved effort several years ago. SIS August 4, 2008:

The absence of local safety data spurred several SIS contributors to obtain and publish the police call data displayed below. Attorney and parent Chan Stroman provided pro bono public records assistance. Chan’s work on this matter extended to the Wisconsin Attorney General’s office. A few important notes on this data:

13% of the records could not be geocoded and therefore are not included in the summary information. The downloadable 1996-2006 police call data .zip file is comprehensive, however.

Clicking on the numbers below takes the reader to a detail page. This page includes all matching police calls and a downloadable .csv file of same. The csv file can be opened in Excel, Numbers and many data management tools.

This summary is rather brief, I hope others download the data and have a look.

Gangs & School Violence forum.

Terrence Jeffrey:

In the Detroit public school district, 96 percent of eighth graders are not proficient in mathematics and 93 percent are not proficient in reading.

That is according to the results of the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress tests published by the Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics.

Only 4 percent of Detroit public school eighth graders are proficient or better in math and only 7 percent in reading. This is despite the fact that in the 2011-2012 school year—the latest for which the Department of Education has reported the financial data—the Detroit public schools had “total expenditures” of $18,361 per student and “current expenditures” of $13,330 per student.

According to data published by the Detroit Public Schools, the school district’s operating expenses in the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2014 amounted to approximately $14,743 per student.

Madison spends more than $15,000 per student, yet has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

psmag:

After a century of insisting that the secure, benefits-laden job was the frictionless meritocratic means of rewarding society’s truly valuable work and workers, today we find that half the remaining jobs are in danger of being automated out of existence. Of the 10 fastest-growing job categories, eight require less than a college degree. Over 40 percent of college graduates are working in low-wage jobs, and it isn’t in order to launch their start-up from the garage after the swing shift at Starbucks: The rate of small-business ownership among the under-30 crowd is at the lowest in a generation.

In short, the same tide that swept millions of Americans out to precarity over the 20th century is lapping at suburban doorsteps in the 21st; like that other inconvenient truth, this one can no longer be outsourced to somebody else’s kids. How few “real jobs” have to remain before we can admit that most of the world’s work has always been done under other titles, by different rules—and so take this opportunity to re-consider how we organize and reward it?

Indeed, if there is anything to be celebrated in the current jobless recovery, it is this opportunity at last to assess the job as a social contrivance, not a timeless feature of the physical universe. A dose of historical perspective helps: the job, it turns out, has only recently been considered fit for polite company, let alone transformed into one of the chief desiderata of public life. In contrast to its more venerable cousins “work” and “labor,” “job” is the red-headed stepchild in the family of human action: Prior to the 20th century, in English the term connoted fragmented, poorly executed work—odd jobs, piece-work, chance employment.

By the 17th century’s financial revolution, it also carried the moral taint of chicanery: a “jobber” dealt in wholesale securities on the nascent London Stock Exchange, the classic middleman—implicitly unscrupulous and parasitic—who connected brokers beyond the view of the public. The job knew its place: Samuel Johnson defined it in 1755 as “a low mean lucrative busy affair; petty piddling work.” And yet today the job is mourned in elegiac tones, as it flounders off into obsolescence like the exhausted polar bear swimming after a retreating ice floe.

Victoria Clayton:

“Persistence is one of the great characteristics of a pitbull, and I guess owners take after their dogs,” says Annetta Cheek, the co-founder of the D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Plain Language. Cheek, an anthropologist by training who left academia in the early 1980s to work for the Federal Aviation Commission, is responsible for something few people realize exists: the 2010 Plain Writing Act. In fact, Cheek was among the first government employees to champion the use of clear, concise language. Once she retired in 2007 from the FAA and gained the freedom to lobby, she leveraged her hatred for gobbledygook to create an actual law. Take a look at recent information put out by many government agencies such as the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—if it lacks needlessly complex sentences or bizarre bureaucratic jargon, it’s largely because of Cheek and her colleagues.

Emmanuel Felton:

High-school students who enjoy obscure vocabulary and puzzle-like math problems might want to sign up for the SAT now, before the 89-year-old college-admissions test is revamped this March to better reflect what students are learning in high-school classrooms in the age of the Common Core.

While other standardized tests have also been criticized for rewarding the students who’ve mastered the idiosyncrasies of the test over those who have the best command of the underlying substance, the SAT—with its arcane analogy questions and somewhat counterintuitive scoring practices—often received special scorn.

Gautum Naik::

Children given antibiotics gain weight more quickly than those who don’t take the medicines, and their weight gain can be cumulative and progressive, new research shows.

The study, which tracked nearly 164,000 children in Pennsylvania, concluded that healthy youngsters at age 15 who had been prescribed antibiotics seven or more times in their childhood weighed about 3 pounds more than those who didn’t take these medicines.

“Antibiotics at any age contribute to weight gain,” said Brian S. Schwartz, a physician and epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and lead author of the study. The research was published Wednesday in the International Journal of Obesity.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis:

Nationally, nearly half of 25-year-olds lived with their parents in 2012-2013, up from just over a quarter in 1999. A recent article in The Regional Economist examined statistics and reviewed some of the literature on millennials moving back home.1

Economist Maria Canon and Regional Economist Charles Gascon noted that many factors have been suggested for why young adults return to or continue living at home, including significant student debt, weak job prospects and an uncertain housing market. The table below breaks down the percentage of 25-year-olds who were living at home for the period 2012-2013 in each state in the Federal Reserve’s Eighth District as well as in the country as a whole.2

James Suroweicki:

Today, the for-profit-education bubble is deflating. Regulators have been cracking down on the industry’s misdeeds—most notably, lying about job-placement rates. In May, Corinthian Colleges, once the second-largest for-profit chain in the country, went bankrupt. Enrollment at the University of Phoenix has fallen by more than half since 2010; a few weeks ago, the Department of Defense said that it wouldn’t fund troops who enrolled there. Other institutions have experienced similar declines.

The fundamental problem is that these schools made promises they couldn’t keep. For-profit colleges are far more expensive than community colleges, their closest peers, but, according to a 2013 study by three Harvard professors, their graduates have lower earnings and are actually more likely to end up unemployed. To make matters worse, these students are usually in a lot of debt. Ninety-six per cent of them take out loans, and they owe an average of more than forty thousand dollars. According to a study by the economists Adam Looney and Constantine Yannelis, students at for-profit schools are roughly three times as likely to default as students at traditional colleges. And the ones who don’t default often use deferments to stay afloat: according to the Department of Education, seventy-one per cent of the alumni of American National University hadn’t repaid a dime, even after being out of school for five years.

Kathy Boccella:

Amy Clipston had a request that was a new one for her daughter’s first-grade teacher.

Many parents had marched in to demand that their children, even those who couldn’t tie their shoes yet, get more homework. Clipston was the first to request the opposite – that her daughter opt out of homework altogether.

“I felt my child was doing quite fine in school,” said Clipston, a chemist with three children, noting that her daughter’s schoolday in the highly competitive Lower Merion School District was 61/2 hours, with a 20-minute recess. “I felt 10 to 20 minutes of homework a night was not accomplishing anything.”

VIJITH ASSAR:

Depending on whom you ask, the use of the active voice over the passive is arguably the most fundamental writer’s maxim, thought to lend weight, truth, and power to declarative statements. This absolutist view is flawed, however, because language is an art of nuance. From time to time, writers may well find illustrative value in the lightest of phrases, sentences so weightless and feathery that they scarcely even seem to exist at all. These can convey details well beyond the crude thrust of the hulking active voice, and when used strictly as ornamentation, they needn’t actually convey anything at all.

As a thought experiment, let’s examine in extremely close detail a set of iterative changes that can be made to a single simple grammatical structure, turning it from a statement taken at face value into one loaded with unrealized implication. This makes for rich writing which rewards – or even demands – close scrutiny.

Jill Mislinski:

Chris Stewart:

e results of a new Education Post poll illustrate varying perspectives on secondary education in America across racial and socio-economic lines. The 2015 Parent Poll surveyed a cross-section of over 1,000 parents and guardians of K-12 public school students on topics related to education ranging from the use of common core in schools, thoughts on improving failing schools, to the importance of college.

The poll found that parents, generally, had an optimistic outlook on education for students in poverty, with nearly 70 percent of parents believing that parents and teachers can overcome the challenges faced by needy children. This view was shared among parents at a 2-to 1 ratio and is consistent with the view of many Black parents who place high value on parental involvement and feel family units and parents are responsible for their children’s level of success in school.

Sarah Grant:

An experiment conducted by John Beck, Ph.D., at Hult International Business School found that a business strategy video game proved just as effective in teaching students as a professor.

Beck recruited 41 undergraduate students to take an an MBA-level course in that business strategy. Half of the group was taught by a professor. The other half spent the same amount of time playing a video game called One Day that Beck designed and developed with his consultancy, North Star Leadership Group.

Olivia Lowenburg:

The school is not a charter school, according to its website, but is “a private, non-profit school” that will partner with the Ravenswood Family Health Center, a nearby health clinic, to provide free healthcare services for students and their families.

When The Primary School opens in August 2016, it will offer parent-and-child classes for babies and toddlers and full-day pre-K classes for 3- and 4-year-olds. The school plans to add a grade level each year, slowly growing into a birth through 12th grade free, private school

bloomberg:

Jordana Gilman, a 24-year-old Ivy League graduate, is studying to be a doctor at SUNY Upstate Medical University. She has worked part-time jobs since she was 15 years old, balancing babysitter, restaurant hostess, and camp counselor gigs with heavy course loads to save money and carve out a little bit of financial independence. Yet as an adult living away from home, she gets an occasional check from her parents to cover the cost of groceries, movie tickets, and meals out.

“I feel embarrassed that I can’t support myself,” Gilman says, adding that she’s “immensely grateful” for the help. Her investment in medical school left her strapped for cash and time, she says, and it would be nearly impossible to make ends meet without her parents supplementing her income.

By Elise Gould and Tanyell Cooke:

recent decades most Americans have endured stagnant hourly pay, despite significant economy-wide income growth (Bivens and Mishel 2015). In essence, only a fraction of overall economic growth is trickling down to typical households. There is no silver bullet for ensuring ordinary Americans share in the country’s prosperity; instead, it will take a range of policies. Some should give workers more leverage in the labor market, and some should expand social insurance and public investments to boost incomes. An obvious example of the latter is helping American families cope with the high cost of child care.

Kate Davidson:

When it comes to saving for retirement, there’s a huge gap between what Americans say they want and what they’re doing to make it happen.

A new survey from BlackRock on attitudes about money and financial goals found Americans are holding nearly twice as much cash as they think they ought to in order to reach their retirement goals. Fewer than a quarter of them regularly set aside money into long-term savings or investment plans—yet 74% said they feel financially secure and “prepared to pursue their dreams.”

Baby boomers, who are retiring in droves, face a staggering shortfall. People ages 55 to 64 who responded to the online survey said they expected to have about $45,000 in annual income in retirement. But the amount they had saved would only provide an estimated $9,129—a potential $36,371 gap.

Mark W. Lipsey, Dale C. Farran & Kerry G. Hofer:

The third question we addressed involved the sustainability of effects on achievement and behavior beyond kindergarten entry. Children in both groups were followed and reassessed in the spring every year with over 90% of the initial sample located tested on each wave. By the end of kindergarten, the control children had caught up to the TN‐VPK [preschool] children and there were no longer significant differences between them on any achievement measures. The same result was obtained at the end of first grade using both composite achievement measures.

In second grade, however, the groups began to diverge with the TN‐VPK children scoring lower than the control children on most of the measures. The differences were significant on both achievement composite measures and on the math subtests.

On immigrant children:
whether or not ESL children experienced TN‐VPK, by the end of third grade, their achievement was greater than either of the native English speaking groups of children.

More here and here.

Lynnell Mickelsen:

Education Minnesota is the largest contributor to Democratic candidates and causes. It sets the tone and parameters of our education debates, which, among elected Democrats, are now predictably rigid and scripted — and this concerns a program that consumes 42 percent of the state’s operating budget, affects hundreds of thousands of children and has shamefully racialized results.

There are so many taboo topics, so many things that cannot be said for fear of setting off our funders, so many conspiracy theories, so much dismissal of data. Instead of leading on education issues, our elected Democrats, from school board members to legislators, act a lot like — God, this is painful — Republicans trying to placate their fundie base.

Our side on the education divide ducks, dodges and mostly dissembles. We block change and innovation. We defend the traditional system no matter what. And low-income children of color pay the biggest price.

How do you change a fundamentalist culture? You mostly can’t — it’s hard-wired to resist change. But for starters, we could at least admit it’s nutty.

Leslie Brody:

Ask Caleb Brooks, a 9-year-old in Newark, about his old school, and he points to a scar under his left eyebrow. He says he had to get stitches after an eighth-grader shoved his head into a table.

Caleb went to Bragaw Avenue School, a traditional public school that was one of the worst-performing in a troubled city system. Enrollment was low and more than a quarter of its students were chronically absent.

Meanwhile, Madison’s one size fits all model continues, despite its long term disastrous reading results.

Michael Stratford:

The nation’s colleges and universities collectively spend an estimated $27 billion each year trying to comply with federal requirements.

Or so says the latest Vanderbilt University report aimed at highlighting the burden of federal regulation on institutions of higher education.
The report, which is being published today, comes several months after the university courted controversy over how its president represented the findings of an initial review of regulatory burden on its own campus. Vanderbilt’s assertion, repeated by congressional lawmakers — that it spent some $11,000 per student on compliance costs — was widely panned as misleading. Many of the costs the university counted were affiliated with its role in medical education and treatment, with far fewer costs associated with regulations from the U.S. Department of Education.
The new study expands on the original, and looks at how an additional dozen colleges and universities of varying sizes and missions dealt with federal regulations on their campus. Included, for example, were Belmont University, Rasmussen College, De Anza Community College and the University of California at Berkeley.

Melanie Trottman:

The decline, which follows a longer-term slide in union membership rates in many countries, reflects a variety of factors. Legislation allowed some financially troubled companies to opt out of their bargaining agreements. The recession also made it more difficult to renew existing pacts. Meanwhile, some governments made it harder to negotiate national and sector-wide agreements reached by union federations and employer groups, favoring company-level pacts instead.

The study makes the case that wage inequality is rising, so public policies are needed to shore up collective bargaining and make it more inclusive. It says that bargaining coverage varies widely across a broader group of 75 countries, ranging from one or two percent of employees in Malaysia and Ethiopia to nearly 100% in Belgium and France.

Wall Street Journal:

Williams College (Tuition and fees: $63,290) has undertaken an “Uncomfortable Learning” Speaker Series in order to provide intellectual diversity on a campus where (like most campuses) left-leaning sentiment prevails. What a good idea! How is it working out? The conservative writer Suzanne Venker was invited to speak in this series. But when word got out that an alternative point of view might be coming to Williams, angry students demanded her invitation be rescinded. It was. Explaining their decision, her hosts noted that the prospect of her visit was “stirring a lot of angry reactions among students on campus.” So Suzanne Venker joins a long and distinguished list of people—including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, George Will, and Charles Murray—first invited then disinvited to speak on campus. It’s been clear for some time that such interdictions are not bizarre exceptions. On the contrary, they are perfect reflections of an ingrained hostility to free speech—and, beyond that, to free thought—in academia.

To put some numbers behind that perception, The William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale recently commissioned a survey from McLaughlin & Associates about attitudes towards free speech on campus. Some 800 students at a variety of colleges across the country were surveyed. The results, though not surprising, are nevertheless alarming. By a margin of 51 percent to 36 percent, students favor their school having speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty. Sixty-three percent favor requiring professors to employ “trigger warnings” to alert students to material that might be discomfiting. One-third of the students polled could not identify the First Amendment as the part of the Constitution that dealt with free speech. Thirty-five percent said that the First Amendment does not protect “hate speech,” while 30 percent of self-identified liberal students say the First Amendment is outdated. With the assault on free speech and the First Amendment proceeding apace in institutions once dedicated to robust intellectual debate, it is no wonder that there are more and more calls to criminalize speech that dissents from the party line on any number of issues, from climate change to race relations, to feminism and sex.

Todd Berry:

Next year at this time an event many politicians assure us is far in the future is expected to occur: One of the two funds comprising Social Security ― Disability Insurance (DI) ― will be depleted.

This is no surprise, although the issue has gone largely unnoticed by national political leaders and mass media.

The Economist:

Spurned by the elite
That leaves 4.5m young Americans eligible to serve, of whom only around 390,000 are minded to, provided they do not get snapped up by a college or private firm instead—as tends to happen to the best of them. Indeed, a favourite mantra of army recruiters, that they are competing with Microsoft and Google, is not really true. With the annual exception of a few hundred sons and daughters of retired officers, America’s elite has long since turned its nose up at military service. Well under 10% of army recruits have a college degree; nearly half belong to an ethnic minority.

The pool of potential recruits is too small to meet America’s, albeit shrunken, military needs; especially, as now, when the unemployment rate dips below 6%. This leaves the army, the least-favoured of the four services, having either to drop its standards or entice those not minded to serve with generous perks. After it failed to meet its recruiting target in 2005, a time of high employment and bad news from Baghdad, it employed both strategies zealously. To sustain what was, by historical standards, only a modest surge in Iraq, around 2% of army recruits were accepted despite having failed to meet academic and other criteria; “We accepted a risk on quality,” grimaces General Snow, an Iraq veteran. Meanwhile the cost of the army’s signing-on bonu

Online Course Report:

There are now thousands of MOOCs available worldwide from several hundred colleges, universities and other institutions of higher learning. For your convenience, we’ve compiled a list of 50 of the most popular MOOCs, based on enrollment figures for all sessions of a course. The ranking is based on filtering enrollment data for 185 free MOOCs on various elearning platforms.

Audrey Waters:

This is – I think (I hope) – the last keynote I will deliver this year. It’s the 11th that I’ve done. I try to prepare a new talk each time I present, in no small part because it keeps me interested and engaged, pushing my thinking and writing forward, learning. And we’re told frequently as of late that as the robots come to take our jobs, they will take first the work that can be most easily automated. So to paraphrase the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, any keynote speaker that can be replaced by a machine should be.
That this is my last keynote of the year does not mean that I’m on vacation until 2016. If you’re familiar with my website Hack Education, you know that I spend the final month or so of each year reviewing everything that’s happened in the previous 12 months, writing an in-depth analysis of the predominant trends in education technology. I try in my work to balance this recent history with a deeper, longer view: what do we know about education technology today based on education technology this year, this decade, this century – what might that tell us about the shape of things to come.

Veronica Dagher

Attention, parents of high-school sophomores: There are financial steps you may want to take before year-end to help your child get more financial aid for the freshman year of college.

A recent executive order signed by President Barack Obama will change the rules for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid beginning with aid for the 2017-18 school year. Families will complete the form based on their “prior prior year” income instead of prior-year income as they do now.

That means that current high-school sophomores who graduate in 2018 will use 2016, not 2017, as the base year in reporting family and student income on their first Fafsa form. The government form is used in determining the amount of grants, loans and other forms of financial aid.

Gail Heriot:

Remember when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor predicted in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) that universities would no longer need race-preferential admissions policies in 25 years? By the end of this year, that period will be half over. Yet the level of preferential treatment given to minority students has, if anything, increased.

Meanwhile, numerous studies—as I explain in a recent report for the Heritage Foundation—show that the supposed beneficiaries of affirmative action are less likely to go on to high-prestige careers than otherwise-identical students who attend schools where their entering academic credentials put them in the middle of the class or higher. In other words, encouraging black students to attend schools where their entering credentials place them near the bottom of the class has resulted in fewer black physicians, engineers, scientists, lawyers and professors than would otherwise be the case.

Beth Hawkins:

In 2013, the education programs at Minnesota State University-Moorhead boasted a 100 percent employment rate for its graduates. A big, round number indeed — and only an incremental uptick from 2012 and 2011, when rates were 99 percent and 98 percent, respectively.

That’s a higher rate than the one posted by Harvard Law. It’s higher than the number of Ph.D.s from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that go straight into the workforce and the number of newly minted Carlson School MBAs with job offers.

Enviable or unbelievable? The fact that it’s impossible to say makes the claim a good starting point for a discussion of exactly how hard it is to evaluate outcomes of Minnesota’s teacher-training programs, and to probe whether they are recruiting and training the right teachers.

Alberto Manguel:

Plato, in the “Timaeus,” says that when one of the wisest men of Greece, the statesman Solon, visited Egypt, he was told by an old priest that the Greeks were like mere children because they possessed no truly ancient traditions or notions “gray with time.” In Egypt, the priest continued proudly, “there is nothing great or beautiful or remarkable that is done here, or in your country, or in any other land that has not been long since put into writing and preserved in our temples.”

Such colossal ambition coalesced under the Ptolemaic dynasty. In the third century B.C., more than half a century after Plato wrote his dialogues, the kings ordered that every book in the known world be collected and placed in the great library they had founded in Alexandria. Hardly anything is known of it except its fame: neither its site (it was perhaps a section of the House of the Muses) nor how it was used, nor even how it came to its end. Yet, as one of history’s most distinguished ghosts, the Library of Alexandria became the archetype of all libraries.

Peter Cunningham:

America’s teachers unions probably will not put reform leaders like Newark’s Chris Cerf, Philadelphia’s William Hite, D.C’s Kaya Henderson, or Denver’s Tom Boasberg at the top of their Christmas card mailing list. But they should, because no one is working harder to improve and preserve traditional, unionized, district-run schools.

Yes, these and other reform superintendents support creating new, high-quality schools, including public charters, and giving all parents the power to choose the right schools for their children. But they and their leadership teams are most deeply committed to investing in and strengthening the existing district-run schools. No one wants these schools to work for kids more than these district leaders.

Stephen Nichols:

In more than 20 years of personal experience with coding, interacting with kids trying to learn code and observing users learning GameSalad, I’ve noticed that the vast majority of folks hit a wall early in the process. Academies like Code Academy boast 24 million+ users, but have few success stories, likely for the same reason. Most people fall off the wagon because they don’t understand the mind of the computer and, as such, find translating their intent into programming language hopelessly difficult.

Put succinctly, coding is writing text files in foreign languages containing instructions suitable for an absolute idiot to follow. Unlike human readers, computers cannot infer meaning from ambiguous text. So, to code, one must become very good at deconstructing problems into their most basic steps and spelling them out for the idiot box.

Apps of any appreciable complexity are constructed with a tremendous number of text files. As an example, just our GameSalad Creator app consists of 6,972,123 lines of code spread over 41,702 files. That’s equivalent to a book with 116,202 pages.

Alan Borsuk:

It’s a vastly different picture now. Many of the limitations are gone; an estimated 26,900 students who live in the city of Milwaukee are using vouchers to attend 117 private schools, the vast majority of them religious. Public spending for the current school year will exceed $190 million.

And that’s just Milwaukee. Vouchers became available in Racine four years ago, with a capped enrollment under 250. The cap is gone now and voucher enrollment is about 2,200, according to state estimates. That’s about 10% of the Racine public school enrollment.

Then there’s the statewide program. Now in its third year, the caps initially placed on it have been weakened and will fade in coming years. This fall, outside of Milwaukee and Racine, about 3,000 students are using vouchers to attend 79 private schools (out of a total of more than 650 private schools).

In total, that’s about 32,000 vouchers students, between 3% and 4% of Wisconsin public school enrollment. This year, kindergarten through eighth grade students generally bring $7,214 each to their private schools; high school students bring $7,860.

Bender said he sees a lot of parallels between the statewide program now and the Milwaukee program in its early years. And the long-term Milwaukee story has been one of changing rules to expand the program and who can take part.

Madison spends more than $15,000 per student, annually, yet has long produced disastrous reading results.

Thu-Huong Ha::

Does the Turkish word küçük (pronounced coo-chook) mean “big” or “small”? If you guessed the latter without knowing the language, you’re right—and there may be a cognitive explanation for your instinct.

In a study published in Cognition earlier this year, researchers tested people’s ability to guess at the meanings of words based on their sounds.

Kaitlyn Bankieris, a cognitive scientist from the University of Rochester, and Julia Simner, a psychologist and leader in the field of synesthesia, showed participants 400 adjectives from 10 languages they didn’t speak: Albanian, Dutch, Gujarati, Indonesian, Korean, Mandarin, Romanian, Tamil, Turkish, and Yoruba. The words were broken up into categories by meaning: big/small, bright/dark, up/down, or loud/quiet. Participants heard the words spoken aloud and guessed their meanings.

Molly Beck:

In April, 76 percent of the referendums to exceed revenue limits passed. That compares to a typical rate of about 50 percent in years prior. This represents a changing perception of the state’s support of public schools, said Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.

“This reflects a shift in public opinion due, I think, to tighter state-imposed restraint on aids and revenue limits in recent years,” Berry said. “There is one instance above all when locals will vote to tax themselves: a fear that they might lose their community’s or neighborhood’s school.”

One bill — yet to be introduced but available in draft form — would require school boards to ask voters to approve referendums only during the traditional spring or fall elections, and prohibit school boards from going back to voters for two years after a referendum is rejected.

Currently, school boards can hold special elections for referendums and can go back to voters during the next scheduled election if a question fails.

Another bill bans school boards from exceeding their state-imposed revenue limits in order to pay for energy-efficiency projects — an exception to levy limits that lawmakers created in 2009.

Compare Madison’s property tax growth and income stagnation. Despite spending more than $15,000 per student annually – double the national average, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Fall, 2015 Madison prperty tax growth rhetoric and posturing.

Education News, via a kind reader::

Catching up to our global peers will require changing education policy and culture

Intel’s recent announcement that it will cease sponsoring and underwriting the prestigious Science Talent Search (which it took over from Westinghouse in 1998) is another nail in the coffin of “gifted education” in the United States.

Unlike many European and Asian countries, which are awash in academic competitions, Olympiads, and other status-laden contests that bright students (and their schools and teachers) vie to win, American K‒12 education has relatively few that anyone notices, save for the National Spelling Bee that Scripps has valiantly stuck with since 1941. But spelling bees are for middle schoolers. The big deal for high schoolers, at least those with a bent toward STEM subjects, has long been the Science Talent Search, which President George H. W. Bush called the “Super Bowl of science.”
Intel’s turnabout surprised that firm’s former CEO, Craig Barrett, and disheartened many who care about both STEM education and gifted education. It’s another sign of America’s inattention to high-ability learners, especially those from disadvantaged circumstances. That neglect is what triggered our new book, Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students. All sorts of data—from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, from research studies including the 2011 Fordham Institute report, “Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students” by Robert Theaker and his colleagues, and elsewhere—have shown that high achievers made lesser gains in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era than did low achievers. Policy efforts that raised the floor and eased the achievement gap did so at the expense of strong students, who were already nudging the ceiling. Under NCLB, schools and teachers had scant incentive to work hard with kids who were already “proficient.” And so they didn’t, especially in places full of poor and minority kids, so many of whom needed extra help to become proficient.

Jeffrey Frderick:

None of us like to be wrong. I’ve tested this with many audiences, asking them “how does it feel when you’re wrong?” “Embarrassing”, “humiliating” or simply “bad” are among the most common answers. Stop now and try and think of your own list of words to describe the feeling of being wrong.

These common and universally negative answers are great from a teaching perspective, because they are answers to the wrong question. “Bad” isn’t how you feel when you’re wrong; it’s how it feels when you discover you were wrong! Being wrong feels exactly like being right. This question and this insight come from Kathryn Schulz’s TED Talk, On being wrong. Schulz talks about the “internal sense of rightness” we feel, and the problems that result. I think there’s a puzzle here: we’ve all had the experience of being certain while also being wrong. If the results are “embarrassing”, why do we continue to trust our internal feeling of certainty?

My answer comes from Thinking Fast & Slow. That sense of certainty comes from our System 1, the fast, intuitive, pattern recognition part of our brain. We operate most of our lives listening to System 1. It is what allows us to brush our teeth, cross a street, navigate our way through a dinner party. It is the first filter for everything we see and hear. It is how we make sense of the world. We trust our sense of certainty because System 1 is the origin of most of our impulses and actions. If we couldn’t trust System 1, if we had to double check everything with the slow expensive analytical System 2, we would be paralyzed. So we need our System 1 and we need the sense of certainty it provides. We also need to be aware it can lead us astray.

Wall Street Journal:

A teacher’s first year in the classroom is never easy; creating lesson plans from scratch and learning the ropes requires long hours. It’s doubly hard when you start teaching at age 59, as Dora Currea did.

Ms. Currea recently finished her first year of teaching at High Point High School in Beltsville, Md., a school serving about 2,400 mostly low-income students. She was hired at High Point after participating in Teach for America, a nonprofit that trains people from diverse backgrounds to become teachers. In return, TFA participants make a two-year commitment to teach in high-need schools.

George Cain:

The writing of textbooks and making them freely available on the web is an idea whose time has arrived. Most college mathematics textbooks attempt to be all things to all people and, as a result, are much too big and expensive. This perhaps made some sense when these books were rather expensive to produce and distribute–but this time has passed.

Diana Cembreros Castaño:

The objective of this research is to present a web application that predicts L2 text readability. The software is intended to assist ESL teachers in selecting texts written at a level of difficulty that corresponds with the target students’ lexical competence. The ranges are obtained by statistical approach using distribution probability and an optimized version of the word frequency class algorithm, with the aid of WordNet and a lemmatised list for the British National Corpus. Additionally, the program is intended to facilitate the method of selection of specialised texts for teachers of ESP using proportionality and lists of specialised vocabulary.

This web application is a free and open source software system that enables ESL/ESP teachers to carry out a comprehensive speed analysis without requiring knowledge of either computational linguistics or word frequency distributions and the underlying logarithmic proportionality.

Jackie Spinner:

That wasn’t the case two years ago when Sarah Karp, a veteran education reporter, first disclosed details of a questionable $20.5 million no-bid contract to train school administrators. Karp’s initial reporting on the contract, which ran on the website of the newsmagazine Catalyst Chicago, didn’t make much of a splash. But it caught the attention of the school district’s inspector general, who reached out to Karp to learn more. It also drew notice from federal prosecutors, whose investigation into the case became public earlier this year—the US Attorney even made reference to Karp’s 2013 article when he announced the indictment this month. A few days later, the former schools chief, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, pleaded guilty to fraud.

Kimberly Beltran:

, according to a new analysis of scores from this year’s Common Core-aligned assessments.

In a brief report that underscores large achievement gaps between student subgroups on the state’s new standardized tests, the non-profit Education Trust-West study revealed that on lists of the top 10 highest performing schools in English language arts and mathematics, charters equaled or outnumbered traditional public schools even though charters account for only about nine percent of the total number of schools statewide.

Seven charters were among the top 10 schools based on eighth-grade student math scores while charters matched traditional schools at five for both third grade and 11th grade English language arts performance.

“It is crucial that California celebrates and learns from the schools that are yielding the strongest results for those students with the greatest needs,” Myrna Castrejon, acting CEO of the California Charter Schools Association, said in a statement. “Clearly charters are fulfilling their mission of helping historically under-served students get the education they deserve.”