Brigid Schulte:

It wasn’t that long ago that American parents were gripped with Tiger Mother anxiety. Did we overpraise our kids in the name of promoting self-esteem? Were we forfeiting an Ivy League future for them if we didn’t force them to practice endless hours of violin or rip up birthday cards that weren’t perfect? Were we, as Amy Chua said in her best-selling memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” raising children who were “soft” and “entitled?” ¶ Now, though, it’s the French who have it figured out. Just like Chua’s book, journalist Pamela Druckerman’s recently released “Bringing Up Bebe” — which lauds the “wisdom” of French parents, who love their children but don’t live for them the way American parents do — has hit the bestseller lists. Another new parenting-by-comparison book, “How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm,” extols the virtues of the Argentines, who keep Baby up late for special occasions, and the Japanese, who let their kids fight it out. ¶ Such frenzied fascination with foreign parenting raises a question: Are American parents really that bad?
The simple answer is no. Of course we love our children and want what’s best for them. Our problem is that we’re not sure what, exactly — in our driven, achievement-oriented country — is best. Perhaps instead of snapping up the latest foreign fad or obsessing over every international test score ranking, American parents would do well to look no further than a very American ideal: the pursuit of happiness.

Todd Finkelmeyer:

It took nearly five decades, but those producing the Dictionary of American Regional English finally reached Z.
The dictionary, known as DARE, is produced on the UW-Madison campus and includes a range of words, phrases, pronunciations and pieces of grammar that vary from one part of the United States to another.
Like a conventional dictionary, DARE is arranged alphabetically. But the multi-volume DARE goes on to not only give information about a word’s meaning but to indicate where people use it.
Americans, for example, have a collection of words for sandwiches served on a long bun that include meat, cheese, lettuce and tomato. The Dictionary of American Regional English can tell you — and often show you via maps based on fieldwork — where words such as hero, hoagie, grinder, sub, Cuban and the like are the local terms for this kind of sandwich.
The fifth volume of the dictionary, covering Sl through Z, now is available from Harvard University Press.

Penn Medicine:

Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have put sleeplessness on the map — literally. The research team, analyzing nationwide data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has produced the first state-by-state sleep maps for the United States, revealing that residents of Southern states suffer from the most sleep disturbances and daytime fatigue, while residents on the West Coast report the least amount of problems. The results are published online in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Neil Steinberg:

When my family moved out of Chicago, we left for only one reason: the schools. Our neighborhood school was substandard, we couldn’t afford to send the boys to private school and weren’t willing to take our chances with the musical chairs game of getting into a magnet school.
So off to Northbrook we fled. And nothing in nearly a dozen years of closely observing two students move through the school system, day by day, from crayoning smiley yellow suns to studying calculus, has made me question the wisdom of that decision. Now we’re seeing the next school generation — families with toddlers moving to our block, following the same path we did. To us, school trumps almost everything.
Not everyone believes that, of course. Most Chicago suburban tax referendums failed last year. From Prospect Heights to Mokena, residents heard the words “tax increase” and said forget it. Times are tight. Who needs good schools?
But look at the result. One of those districts rejecting a referendum last year was West Northfield School District 31. One subdivision — the district covers parts of Northbrook and Glenview — voted 12-to-1 against it. Still the district is trying again this year, but if the referendum doesn’t pass this time, the results will be dire.

Patrick May:

It’s midmorning and the faces of the students in Tim Wesmiller’s religious studies class are bathed in the baby-blue glow of their iPad screens.
Instead of sitting in rigid rows of desks staring at a blackboard, as they would in a typical classroom, kids huddle in groups to brainstorm and blog about Indian culture. Lessons flash from tablets to digitalized white board and back. The “lecture” is a blend of YouTube videos and interactive maps. There’s very little paper and no sign of chalk.
Faculty and students in this two-year iPad pilot project at Archbishop Mitty High School say this is the future of education.
“We still use paper and pencils sometimes,” says Jeremy Pedro, a soft-spoken junior. “But our homework is mostly digital. Paper homework is a thing of the past.”

I have been hearing from constituents who want to know more about how to provide input in addition to the community input sessions. There are at least two easy ways to provide input:

1) Use the on-line form that can be found at: https://www.madison.k12.wi.us/node/10069
2) As always, e-mails sent to board@madison.k12.wi.us will reach all members of the board, the superintendent, and some administrators.

Madison Teachers’, Inc. Solidarity via a kind Jeanne Bettner email:

MTI and the District have been in dispute regarding the interpretation of Section III-R of the Collective Bargaining Agreement regarding Class Covering Pay since 2007 when MTI filed a grievance on behalf of the staff at Sennett Middle School. The grievance was over class covering pay when a substitute teacher is unavailable and students were assigned to other staff.
Resolution was achieved through a grievance mediation process which MTI and the District entered into last school year in an attempt to deal with a backlog of grievances. The process, which was recommended by Mediator/Arbitrator Howard Bellman during negotiations three years ago, is part of a project begun by Northwestern University Law School.
The mediated agreement resulted in clarity to the language that ensures teachers and other teacher bargaining unit members are compensated for covering another teacher’s class while leaving some flexibility for unforeseen emergencies and rare occurrences.
Section III-R states that when the District is unable to assign a substitute teacher to cover for an absent teacher, the building principal must first solicit volunteers from those teachers available to cover the class in question. If no teacher volunteers, the principal may assign a teacher to cover another teacher’s class.
The District had maintained that to be compensated for this work the covering teacher had to lose prep or planning time. MTI disputed that interpretation. In addition, the District contended that classes could be split up and assigned to multiple classrooms without receiving class covering pay.
The following constitutes the resolution of this matter as to when class covering pay is owed to teachers:

Steve Strieker:

In his 2006 memoir Teacher Man, the late, great Frank McCourt tersely wrote, “Teaching is the downstairs maid of professions.”
Just six years later, McCourt’s proposition is already in need of a rewrite. In Walker’s Wisconsin, teaching has been relegated from professional status to political fodder. I fear what will be excreted when the free-market reformers are done masticating education.
Professional distrust reigns in the wake of Gov. Walker’s union-busting legislation created without consideration of professional educators’ input. Too many state and local business-focused politicians and their supporters have promoted unjust resentment for teachers, their unions, their compensation packages, their work conditions, and their professional standing.

George Lightbourn:

And they were right; the public really did not understand the state budget. When our pollster asked what was the largest expenditure in the state budget (school aids at 40% dwarfs everything else), 70% of the people guessed wrong.
And when we asked them how much was spent in Wisconsin’s K-12 schools, the average guess – $6,000 per student – was less than half of what it actually was.
However, while the public might not understand the specifics of the budget, they seem to get the big picture.
Looking at that big picture, we see that Wisconsin is feeling considerably better about the management of state finance today than a couple of years ago. Let’s look at what the polls said.
Leading up to the last election for governor, our pollster asked if the public thought the elected leaders in Madison were, “capable of solving the state budget deficit.” Only 23% said they did. 59% of those same citizens told our pollster that they saw the state budget as a big problem.
What a disconnect. It’s not often that you can actually measure public cynicism, but that is exactly what that poll did. It is ironic that he cause for the cynicism was the very political leaders who were counting on the public on being too dim to understand what was really going on in the budget?
Now, after Governor Walker and the Legislature have rather famously – some would say infamously – balanced the state budget, how is the public feeling? We asked about that last October when 41% of the public said that they actually thought the budget – a budget that included numerous cuts – would actually improve the future quality of life in Wisconsin. This level of approval is surprising given that most people – even Republicans – tend to get weak in the knees when it comes to spending cuts.

Locally, Madison will spend $14,858.40 / student during the 2011-2012 school year. The 2011-2012 budget is roughly $369,394,753 for 24,861 students.

Mike Nichols:

But for the often tumultuous waters of Chequamegon Bay, LaPointe Elementary would have long ago been shuttered and forgotten, its students shuttled off to other schools in other places.
LaPointe is one of the tiniest little grade schools in Wisconsin, perhaps because it is barely even in Wisconsin. It sits on Madeline Island, 2.5 miles by ferry – or even wind sled in years colder than this one – across Superior from Bayfield.
“For safety reasons, the school stays open,” said Carol Sowl, who describes herself as the K-5 school’s sole teacher, janitor and nurse. Crossing the bay can be a treacherous business in some of the colder months when the waters heave and the ice shifts, and makes for too risky a ride for six- and seven-year-olds. In addition, the Bayfield School District that LaPointe is part of receives a lot of tax revenue from the island residents and summer-home owners, many of whom want the school to remain open.

Keith Gerein:

A culture of “political extortion” practised by the Alberta government has been laid bare in a recent letter from northern Conservative MLA Hector Goudreau to a school board, opposition parties allege.
In the Feb. 9 letter obtained by The Journal, Goudreau warned the Holy Family Catholic School Division that criticism of the government could imperil the district’s chances of funding for a new school.
“In order for your community to have the opportunity to receive a new school, you and your school board will have to be very diplomatic from here on out,” the Dunvegan-Central Peace MLA tells district superintendent Betty Turpin.
“I advise you to be cautious as to how you approach future communications as your comments could be upsetting to some individuals. This could delay the decision on a new school.”

Diane Solis:

Inside the small classrooms of Lorenzo de Zavala Elementary School, first-grade students detail recipes, in Spanish, for “limonada,” lemonade. “Agua, hielo, limon.”
In another room, older students construct sentences, in English, with the word “malfunction” as they work through a Star Wars-inspired game. “My brain wasn’t working,” says one boy mischievously. “It had a malfunction.”
Not missing a beat, teacher Charles Stewart tells a Star Wars comrade, “Cesar, turn his brain back on.”
The giggles tumble out. But this is serious teaching and turning brains on is exactly the point. Teaching at this humble elementary school, just west of the Trinity River and a giant new bridge, is part of the most serious restructuring of bilingual education in decades.

Karen Veith:

When I attended the Board of Education meeting back in October 2011, I walked in without expectations. I was there to hear the public testimony on Madison Preparatory Academy and to figure out my own position in this controversy. I listened to everyone speak, but I came away from the meeting conflicted. I realized that my desire to do something to eliminate the achievement gap was as strong as ever, but that something seemed amiss. Rather than rely on what I had read in the media or heard at the podium, I decided to do my homework and read the Urban League’s proposal for this charter school. What I found in its pages confirmed my fears that this was not a solution for the students I serve.
My Thoughts on Madison Preparatory Academy 10/22/2011
Madison Preparatory Academy Still Waiting for Answers 11/07/2011
So, it was with hesitance that I received Superintendent Nerad’s words earlier this month. His summary was well received by those in attendance, but it was just that, a summary. A coworker handed me the 97 page plan and I’m fairly certain a sigh escaped with my “Thank you.” Once again, I was sent home with studying to do.

Howard Blume:

A new fourth-grade reading program recommends using blindfolds to help students learn about sensory details. But in light of the Miramonte Elementary case, district officials consider it prudent to eliminate the eye coverings.
Who knew that blindfolding students was part of the curriculum in the Los Angeles Unified School District?
It was, until last week, when a senior district official nixed a lesson in a new fourth-grade reading program.
The blindfolding of students attracted notice after the January arrest of Miramonte Elementary teacher Mark Berndt, who has pleaded not guilty to 23 counts of lewd conduct for allegedly photographing students blindfolded and being spoon-fed his semen.
In light of that case, blindfolding “may be perceived negatively,” wrote Deputy Supt. of Instruction Jaime Aquino, in a Feb. 23 memo to principals.

OECD:

Obesity rates are still high worldwide, according to a new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Australia ranks as the fifth worst country in the world for adult obesity, with a rate of 24.6 percent.
The OECD report says obesity is related to inequality, with higher rates among poorer people.
Compare adult obesity rates in OECD countries with this interactive map:

Alan Borsuk:

Five years and three dozen reports later, here’s the biggest thing I have learned when it comes to comparing how kids are doing in Milwaukee Public Schools and in the publicly funded voucher program for private schools:
We’ve got some schools that are getting very good results. But we’ve got a lot of problems, and that’s true across the board. You’ll find schools where weak outcomes are the dominant reality in MPS, in the voucher program and among the independent charter schools. Three major streams of schools in Milwaukee and not much reason to cheer for any of them, in and of themselves.
What’s there to cheer for? Specific high performing schools – voucher, charter and MPS. Specific school leaders, teachers, supporters and kids. Specific people who are pushing to improve the status quo. Specific people who are willing to work together, including across ideological lines, to build up what works and tear down what doesn’t.
What’s there to cheer for? People who are serious participants in the pursuit of quality and results, regardless of the overarching governing and financial structure of their schools.
Five years and three dozen reports later, we know a lot about comparing the streams of Milwaukee education – and, it seems to me, it’s time to move past that. It’s time to focus on success school by school and what can be done to increase it effectively.

Todd Finkelmeyer:

The last sentence of Wood’s blog states: “I should add that, though I am offering a defense of Santorum’s statements on higher education, I am not endorsing him or anyone else in the presidential race.”
Santorum — a candidate for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination — earned plenty of media play over the weekend after calling President Barack Obama a “snob” for wanting all students to seek educational opportunities after high school. Santorum made the remark during a Feb. 25 speech at a meeting of Americans for Prosperity in Michigan. He notes plenty of hard-working people make an honest living without ever being “taught by some liberal college professor that is trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why (Obama) wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.” (If you want more context, or to hear more of what Santorum said, here is a video of that talk.)
Earlier this year, during a speech at a church in Naples, Fla., Santorum previously noted (according to CBS News): “It’s no wonder President Obama wants every kid to go to college. The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure that there wasn’t one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities, right?”
To learn more about Santorum’s attacks on higher education, check out this piece by Scott Jaschik of Insidehighered.com.

Ruth Conniff:

It’s crunch time on school vouchers for disabled kids in Wisconsin.
Last summer, I wrote about how Republicans and school choice groups are targeting kids in special ed.
A particularly noxious piece of “school reform” legislation, drafted by ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council) and pushed by Republicans in statehouses around the country, would get unsophisticated parents to swap their kids’ federally protected right to a free, appropriate public education for school vouchers of highly dubious value to the kids.
How dubious? An expose in the Miami New Times tracked the fly-by-night academies housed in strip malls where special ed kids with vouchers wasted hours crammed into makeshift classrooms with bored, untrained, and sometimes abusive teachers.

Sam Knight:

Students look at equations from a PhD thesis that uses Bayesian analysis to examine the relation between bond trades and economic data releases. Got that?
On a recent winter’s afternoon, nine computer science students were sitting around a conference table in the engineering faculty at University College London. The room was strip-lit, unadorned, and windowless. On the wall, a formerly white whiteboard was a dirty cloud, tormented by the weight of technical scribblings and rubbings-out upon it. A poster in the corner described the importance of having a heterogenous experimental network, or Hen.
Six of the students were undergraduates. The other three were PhD researchers from UCL’s elite Financial Computing Centre. The only person keeping notes was one of them: a bearded, 30-year-old Polish researcher called Michal Galas. Galas was leading the meeting, a weekly update on the building of a vast new collection of social data, culled from the internet. Under the direction of the PhD students, the undergraduates were writing computer programs to haul millions of pages of publicly available digital chatter – from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and news stories – into a real-time archive which could be analysed for signs of the public mood, particularly in regard to financial markets. Word of the project, known as SocialSTREAM, had reached the City months ago. The Financial Computing Centre was getting calls most days from companies wanting to know when it would be finished. The Bank of England had been in touch.

Megan Garber:

This morning, Elon University and the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report about the cognitive future of the millennial generation. Based on surveys with more than 1,000 thought leaders — among them danah boyd, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, and Alexandra Samuel — the survey asked thinkers to consider how the Internet and its environment are changing, for better or worse, kids’ cognitive capabilities.
The survey found, overall, what many others already have: that neuroplasticity is, indeed, a thing; that multitasking is, indeed, the new norm; that hyperconnectivity may be leading to a lack of patience and concentration; and that an “always on” ethos may be encouraging a culture of expectation and instant gratification.
The study’s authors, Elon’s Janna Anderson and Pew’s Lee Rainie, also found, however, another matter of general consensus among the experts they surveyed: that our education systems will need to be updated, drastically, to suit the new realities of the intellectual environment. “There is a palpable concern among these experts,” Rainie puts it, “that new social and economic divisions will emerge as those who are motivated and well-schooled reap rewards that are not matched by those who fail to master new media and tech literacies.” As a result: “Many of the experts called for reinvention of public education to teach those skills and help learners avoid some of the obvious pitfalls of a hyper-connected lifestyle.”

Longitudinal study will not end the debate over education in Milwaukee. More work is still needed to improve education for disadvantaged kids.
A multiyear study tracking students in both Milwaukee’s private voucher schools and Milwaukee Public Schools found that the voucher schools were exceeding the public schools in several key areas. The report’s findings may be significant, especially on reading, but there are still questions, and the bottom line is that improvement and strong accountability are still required for all schools in Milwaukee.
The final installment of an examination of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program shows that voucher schools made significantly higher gains in reading in 2010-’11 than those of a matched sample of peers in MPS. And there also were indications that kids in the choice schools finish high school and go on to college at higher rates than do those in MPS.
The results of the five-year study by Patrick J. Wolf, the study’s lead author and a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, have been challenged (see op-eds on the cover of Crossroads and “Another View” below), so the waters certainly are far from crystal clear.

Study’s results are flawed and inconsequential by Alex Molnar and Kevin Welner:

To the evaluators of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, vouchers are like a vaccine. Once students are “exposed” to the voucher program – even if they subsequently leave – that “exposure” somehow accounts for any good things that happen later on.
And leave they did – a whopping 75% of them.
Here are the details: The evaluators began by following 801 ninth-grade voucher recipients. By 12th grade, only about 200 of these students were still using vouchers to attend private school. Three of every four students had left the program.
Given this attrition, the researchers had to estimate graduation rates (as well as college attendance rates and persistence in college) by comparing Milwaukee Public Schools students to students who had been “exposed” to the voucher program – even though most of those students appear to have actually graduated from an MPS school.

Milwaukee’s voucher schools: an assessment by Patrick J. Wolf and John F. Witte

In 2006, the State of Wisconsin passed a law mandating that the School Choice Demonstration Project evaluate the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the nation’s first private school choice program. The law required that we track a representative sample of choice students for five years and compare their results with similar students in Milwaukee Public Schools.
We did so using an innovative and reliable student matching system in 2006 to create a panel of 2,727 voucher students in grades three through nine and a comparison panel of 2,727 MPS students in similar grades, neighborhoods and with similar initial test scores.
We carefully tracked both groups of students and measured student outcomes from 2007 to 2011. The key outcomes were “attainment,” graduating from high school and enrolling and persisting in college; and “achievement,” measured by growth estimates on state of Wisconsin standardized tests. On Monday, in Milwaukee, we released the final reports from that evaluation.
Our most important finding was that choice students outperformed public school students in educational attainment. We call our attainment results the most important in our study because attainment is a crucial educational outcome. Students who graduate from high school live longer, earn more money during their lifetime and are less likely ever to be divorced, unemployed or incarcerated than students who do not graduate.

Milwaukee’s voucher schools: an assessment – Just a fig leaf for abandoning public schools by Bob Peterson

Good intentions are important, but they don’t ensure reliable information.
The latest privately funded report on academic achievement in the voucher schools, despite good intentions, is ultimately both unreliable and irrelevant.
The report, the final in a five-year longitudinal study, is unreliable for several reasons. First, while it touts findings such as increased high school graduation rates, it buries the fact that most ninth-graders left the voucher schools by their senior year.
Second, the figures on special education numbers are inflated and do not hold up to scrutiny. The only solid data at this point is based on the special-ed participation rate in the state’s standardized tests.
Last year, when for the first time the private voucher schools were required to give the state test, only 1.6% of voucher students were identified as students with special needs. The report can make whatever claims it wants, but that doesn’t mean its claims are legally or educationally legitimate.

Milwaukee’s voucher schools: an assessment – Focus on high-performing schools by Jim Bender

Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program are more likely to graduate from high school, get into college and stay in college than students in Milwaukee Public Schools. This is just one of the findings from the nation’s leading scholarly experts on school choice, the School Choice Demonstration Project, in the release of its final reports last week on programs in Milwaukee.
The project used rigorous methods to compare students in the choice program with MPS students.
The comparisons show that the choice program as a whole has higher graduation rates and superior growth in reading scores than MPS. While this is good news for choice students, we need to expand those gains across all sectors of the Milwaukee education market.
One step in that direction is being prepared by a coalition of traditional public, charter and private schools to create a common accountability report card for Milwaukee schools. The effort is led by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and others. School Choice Wisconsin and the Choice Schools Association have both been involved in its creation, and it will cover all sectors – traditional public, charter and choice.
The complexities of equitably comparing a wide variety of schools are challenging. Once finalized, the comparative information on schools in the report card will empower parents and community leaders to make better education decisions.

Significantly lower per student spending (voucher vs. traditional public schools) is a material factor in these discussions.

Chris Rickert:

I had a couple of ideas for what to write about the Middleton teacher reinstated to his job by an arbitrator this week after being fired two years ago by the school district for viewing pornographic emails at work.
Maybe a column about why the middle school teacher, Andrew Harris, would even want to return to a district that doesn’t want him.
Maybe decrying the fact his case has taken two years and hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to resolve.
Or maybe even looking at how similar cases might be handled now that union protections have been significantly weakened.
But after reading the arbitrator’s report, what I can’t get over is how a group of ostensibly well-educated professionals in the well-regarded Middleton-Cross Plains School District can come off looking like the cast of “Jersey Shore.”

Herb Kohl Educational Foundation:

Today the Herb Kohl Educational Foundation announced 2012 recipients of Excellence and Initiative Scholarships and Educator Fellowships. Each student recipient will receive a $1000 scholarship. Each educator recipient, and the recipient’s school, will receive $1000.

Liz Boardman:

More than 100 teachers, and some NEA-RI officials, filled West Kingston Elementary School’s cafetorium and spilled over into the library at Tuesday night’s School Committee meeting. They came bearing signs reading, “Stop the Bullies. Speak Up,” “Bully Free Zone,” “Hatchet Job” and “Where is your ‘good-faith’ assessment?'”
They were protesting termination notices given to three non-tenured special education teachers during an executive session on Sunday. Union officials said the fired teachers were not properly evaluated or given an opportunity to improve and were given five minutes to decide if they would prefer to resign.
In an interview Tuesday afternoon, Superintendent Kristen Stringfellow and School Committee Chairwoman Maureen Cotter said they could confirm only that there was an executive session on Sunday and three teachers were given non-renewal notices.
During public comment on Tuesday, social worker Christi Saurette, who works at Peace Dale and Matunuck elementary schools, talked about the district’s bullying policy, and how it teaches students to treat everyone with respect, and how it is important to stand up to a bully, and expose the behavior.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Just as a blind squirrel can occasionally find an acorn and a broken clock is right twice a day, the Wisconsin legislature every so often passes a bill affecting our schools that includes a sensible idea.
Among its grab bag of changes, Wisconsin Act 105, enacted last December, creates the following new statutory provision:

118.33 (1) (e) A school board may allow a pupil who participates in sports or in another organized physical activity, as determined by the school board, to complete an additional 0.5 credit in English, social studies, mathematics, science, or health education in lieu of 0.5 credit in physical education.

Currently, all high school students in Wisconsin must take three phys ed classes, spread out over three years. The new law would authorize School Boards to reduce the required number of classes by one, in order that the student could take instead a class in English, social studies, math, science or health education.

Appleton Post-Crescent:

We’ve pushed all along for school accountability.
That means accountability for all schools, not just public ones. Private schools that receive taxpayers’ dollars through a voucher program must be held to the same standard as public schools.
That’s why proposed education legislation regarding a statewide school accountability system is flawed. It must include private voucher schools before it is implemented.
Voucher schools were originally part of the new accountability system agreed to by lawmakers, the governor’s office and the Department of Public Instruction. Then, when push came to shove, Republican lawmakers pulled voucher schools out of the mix.

In the winter of 1959-1960, before I went into the Army, I worked at a Gulf Station (now gone) in Harvard Square. The owner of the franchise at the time refused to service VWs and other foreign cars because he said they were just a fad. At about the same time (before we had decided to put a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth), General Motors and other American car manufacturers had the attitude that the public would buy whatever vehicles they wanted to make.
Fast forward to the present, and, to a great extent American educators now believe that employers will hire whoever they give diplomas to. But foreign cars were not a fad, and employers in the second decade of the 21st century often do not want to hire the graduates of our high schools because they are not well-educated and they require quite a bit of not just on-the-job training, but basic remediation before they can become good employees. There are hundreds of thousands of American jobs which cannot be filled by Americans because they are not able to do them.
General Motors and its American peers, after many decades and many billions of dollars in losses, did wake up, and American cars are starting to compete again. Sales and profits are growing, after a long dry spell.
There is insufficient sign that American educators realize the crisis they are facing. After reading Marc Tucker’s Surpassing Shanghai, the strongest impression with which I came away was that in this country we are not really serious about education. Now, how can that be, when we have recently spent, as Susan D. Patrick reports, $60 billion on technology for the schools and we are completely awash in edupundits, reform initiatives, school improvement programs, federal initiatives, and professional development? Aren’t we doing all that could possibly be required to compete with our peers in other countries?
No, we aren’t. To take one very crucial first step as an example. In Finland, Singapore, and other successful educational systems, nine out of ten people who want to be teachers are not accepted for training. They want only the best, sort of the way we do when we select and train Navy SEALS. But in this country, just about anyone who thinks they want to try teaching can be accepted into the profession, even when we find that 50% leave within five years.
In South Korea, the country nearly shuts down the day of the very very important high school graduation exam, while in this country we really don’t think there should be one. We claim that anyone and everyone should go on to college, whether they have any chance of knowing enough or studying enough to reach graduation or not (and most don’t). We are being told that everyone who goes to our high schools should also go to our colleges, and our colleges should graduate them, whether they know anything or can do anything or not. They may be uneducated, but, by golly, they will be our college graduates!
How can I say such things, when there are so many diligent people trying to raise educational standards in so many states and so many school districts across the nation? Let me suggest one test. Where is there one public high school in the United States which has said, we will give up our sports and other extracurricular programs entirely until we can make sure that our graduates are truly well-educated and as competent as the best in any other country in the world?
This would be considered not an example of real seriousness, but an example of egregious folly and near-insanity, by our sports fan parents and alums, and immediate plans would follow for the termination of any educator who suggested it, while arrangements were being made to ride them out of town on a rail.
We love our academic mediocrity, because there is so much of it, and it is so very difficult to give up. We do not just have an obesity problem physically in the United States, we have too may fatheads who are addicted to educational junk food, and even in the face of innumerable fad diets, we just refuse to trim ourselves or raise our student accomplishments in education to current international educational standards.
I believe we can do it. We got 12 men to the Moon and brought them back, even during the decade of our American Red Guards yelling and screaming and trying to shut down our universities, with the help of an excited media cheering section.
But of course we cannot make sure all our high school graduates are well-educated, employable, and capable of completing a serious college program if they choose to do one, if we do not take education more seriously than we do now. And we need to start by paying more attention to what other countries are already doing if we are to make the necessary changes in good time.
———————————
“Teach by Example”
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The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
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TCR Institute [2002]
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Varsity Academics®
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Judith Burns:

Poor numeracy is blighting Britain’s economic performance and ruining lives, says a new charity launched to champion better maths skills.
The group, National Numeracy, says millions of people struggle to understand a payslip or a train timetable, or pay a household bill.
It wants to challenge a mindset which views poor numeracy as a “badge of honour”.
It aims to emulate the success of the National Literacy Trust.

Related:

• Math Forum audio/video
• Singapore Math
• Connected Math

Elizabeth Hill:

Governor Bobby Jindal’s goal is simple, provide every child in Louisiana an equal opportunity at a quality education.
He shared his plan for education reform today at the Lafayette Chamber of Commerce.
“We do that by first empowering parents, secondly by empowering great teachers, putting a great teacher in every classroom and third by cutting through the red tape and bureaucracy to give flexibility to our local schools and local school systems.”
Jindal has reiterated many times that more money and more time are not the answer for reform. He says it’s all about more efficient spending.

Melissa Korn:

Only 12% of applicants made it into Harvard Business School last year. It’s Dee Leopold’s job to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Ms. Leopold, managing director of M.B.A. admissions and financial aid at HBS, joined the admissions office after graduating in 1980 and took over its top spot in 2006. Though she doesn’t look at every one of the 9,000-plus submitted applications, Ms. Leopold personally reads applications for the 1,800 candidates invited to interview. About half of those are accepted.
Harvard is accepting more engineers than in the past, as well as students with international experience.

Keith Chen:

Keith Chen, an economist from Yale, makes a startling claim in an unpublished working paper: people’s fiscal responsibility and healthy lifestyle choices depend in part on the grammar of their language.
Here’s the idea: Languages differ in the devices they offer to speakers who want to talk about the future. For some, like Spanish and Greek, you have to tack on a verb ending that explicitly marks future time–so, in Spanish, you would say escribo for the present tense (I write or I’m writing) and escribiré for the future tense (I will write). But other languages like Mandarin don’t require their verbs to be escorted by grammatical markers that convey future time–time is usually obvious from something else in the context. In Mandarin, you would say the equivalent of I write tomorrow, using the same verb form for both present and future.
Chen’s finding is that if you divide up a large number of the world’s languages into those that require a grammatical marker for future time and those that don’t, you see an interesting correlation: speakers of languages that force grammatical marking of the future have amassed a smaller retirement nest egg, smoke more, exercise less, and are more likely to be obese. Why would this be? The claim is that a sharp grammatical division between the present and future encourages people to conceive of the future as somehow dramatically different from the present, making it easier to put off behaviors that benefit your future self rather than your present self.

South China Morning Post:  

The question of whether Hong Kong provides sufficient school places for foreigners who live and work here has been a subject of debate between the business sector and the government for quite some time. Various chambers of commerce have repeatedly warned that long queues to get into international schools have discouraged overseas talent from coming here, while education officials have maintained that there are more than enough places to meet the need.
Recently, both sides have stepped up their arguments, so much so that there is a danger of the debate turning into a confusing numerical game. Amid growing pressure to ease the shortage of school places, the government for the first time last year asked the Census and Statistics Department to look into the matter. Surprisingly, it found that more than 70 per cent of applicants said they had waited less than six months to get an international school place, undermining claims by critics that expatriate children are often on waiting lists for years. The department also found that only one in four pupils attending international schools planned to apply for secondary school places here.

Kevin Carey:

Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor’s degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn’t going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn’t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.
Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual–hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought–she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

Melissa Westbrook:

or the second time in a week, I have been dazzled by some great writing on education. The Times has an op-ed by SPS high school teacher, Dan Magill, in response to the op-ed by Brad Smith (whose piece was about needed ed reform).
He very plainly sets out the challenge and the goal:

I would like to reframe the reality. There aren’t two sides. There are four corners. And in the middle hangs the goal: a sober-minded, analytical, skilled population that seizes opportunities by the gray matter.
Waiting in corner one, the students — a word I’ll define shortly. Warming up in corner two, the good teachers. The bad teachers don’t get a corner, partly because there aren’t very many of them. Corner three features the employers — people who just want dependable, qualified employees. And in corner four, we have the reform crowd — ones who influence educational policy regardless of their qualifications for doing so. These are the “meddlers.”

Taylor Nye:

Madison, Wisconsin is a city divided. Downtown areas of predominately higher socioeconomic status are associated, in this case, with Caucasian residents. Other areas, such as South Park Street, are physically removed from downtown and are home to residents of lower socioeconomic status. These residents, to some degree, are of other ethnic groups, including African Americans and Hispanics.
In Madison, this seems an anomaly. We are a small city, the state’s capitol, and the seat of many social service agencies that serve Wisconsin. However, the disparity in socioeconomic status is still present and manifests itself in a very important way: the high school achievement gap. Unfortunately, this gap has yet to be addressed in a meaningful way, and it’s not looking good for the near future. As reported by the Capital Times, the four-year high school graduation rate of African Americans in Madison is 48% that of their white counterparts. African Americans also score much lower on standardized tests.
Many felt that the Madison School District was not doing enough to combat this glaring inequality. Therefore, Kaleem Caire, the head of the Greater Urban League of Greater Madison, drew up plans for a charter school for ethnic minorities. Fundamental tenets of the proposed school, Madison Preparatory Academy, included longer hours, uniforms, same sex classrooms, and teachers and advisors from ethnic backgrounds that would act as both instructors and mentors to students.

ed.gov via a kind reader’s email:

Event Date 1: March 02, 2012 10:00 am – 11:00 am
UPDATE: This event will be webcasted live at 10 a.m. ET. To watch, go to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/education-department. Viewers are also invited to join the conversation on Twitter at #EdCities.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will join New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel together with their Superintendents, Dennis Walcott, John Deasy and Jean-Claude Brizard, to host a forum titled, “Education Now: Cities at the Forefront of Reform.” The forum will be held Friday, March 2, from 10 to 11 a.m. at American University.

Simon Parry:

In the playground of a gated private housing estate in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, a businessman in a smart suit and winter coat stands beside a rope bridge as his four-year-old son steps gingerly across it. As the boy reaches the middle, his father suddenly shakes it violently from side to side.
Caught by surprise, the boy appears unsure whether to laugh or burst into tears. He clings grimly to the side of the rope bridge as the businessman throws back his head and laughs, shouting to his son: “Go on, go on.” Other parents look on with a mixture of alarm and bemusement.
This, as you have probably gathered, is no ordinary father. He Liesheng is the self-styled “eagle dad”, whose extreme tough-love approach to child-rearing made headlines worldwide when, on a winter break in New York, he forced his son, He Tide, to run nearly naked and do press-ups in the snow in temperatures of minus 13 degrees Celsius. In a bizarre 90-second video posted online, the young boy – known by his nickname Duo Duo, which means “more, more” – shivers pathetically and begs his parents in vain for a hug while standing in the snow wearing only his yellow underpants and a pair of trainers.

Alex Bellos:

My post yesterday about Alan Turing’s library list was my most read ever!
There’s obviously an appetite for Turing stuff – and so here is some more.
Rachel Hassall, the archivist at Sherborne, where Turing was at school, has transcribed his entire school reports, printed below.
It’s interesting to see how he changes from an untidy and careless mathematician to a distinguished scholar.
At the end of his first term headmaster O’ Hanlon writes: “He has his own furrow to plough & may not meet with general sympathy…”
At the end of his second term the maths teacher writes that he “should do well if he can quicken up a little.” Er, yes…

Eric Hill:

You’ve undoubtedly read about the Madison Metropolitan School District’s recent initiative to close the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap that’s been plaguing the city for decades. This sudden shift in collective focus is likely the result of the Urban League of Madison’s recent Madison Prep charter school proposal. If not, it’s important to note that the proposal would open two schools to serve a portion of youth from some of city’s most under-served communities. They would borrow from formulas being used by highly effective charter schools across the country to get at-risk youth achieving at levels consistent with their more fortunate counterparts. But despite it being sound, well-funded and supported by evidence, the plan was ultimately voted down by the Madison school board in favor of the unchanging system that guarantees nothing but persistent failure.
The only silver lining to emerge from the school district’s disappointing decision is that the community has a renewed sense of urgency around the issues of education inequality in Madison.

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.

Seth Godin:

The economy has changed, probably forever.
School hasn’t.
School was invented to create a constant stream of compliant factory workers to the growing businesses of the 1900s. It continues to do an excellent job at achieving this goal, but it’s not a goal we need to achieve any longer.
In this 30,000 word manifesto, I imagine a different set of goals and start (I hope) a discussion about how we can reach them. One thing is certain: if we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’ve been getting.
Our kids are too important to sacrifice to the status quo.

Ruth Franklin:

The other day, a friend and I were walking down a crowded sidewalk when we noticed a little boy of about three. We noticed him not because he was adorable (though he was), but because he was hitting his father with a giant stick. As they passed us–the boy hitting, the father ignoring–the boy’s flailing stick hit my companion. Only the boy’s mother, running after them, seemed to notice. “Sorry,” she flung out breathlessly, smiling.
We were, of course, in Brooklyn, the epicenter of permissive parenting. A look at the landscape is enough to demonstrate that our children are running our lives–the “progressive preschools” that brighten the storefronts every few blocks, the new paint-your-own-pottery shop and “origami studio,” the never-ending parade of burger joints. In the latest viral video, “Sh*t Park Slope Parents Say,” a pair of insufferable hipster parents and their friends trade barbs of condescension. The only time these people are speechless is when they’re trying to make plans for a date night out.

National Center for Policy Analysis:

Last year there was an unprecedented wave of new school choice programs launched across the country. Following 20 years of heated debate, new programs reflect a growing sophistication regarding the design and implementation of school choice policies. In a report for Education Week, scholars and analysts who support school choice examine the track record so far of these programs. They find it is promising and provides support for continuing expansion of school choice policies.

• Among voucher programs, random-assignment studies generally find modest improvements in reading or math scores, or both.
• Achievement gains are typically small in each year, but cumulative over time.
• Graduation rates have been studied less often, but the available evidence indicates a substantial positive impact.
• Some high-quality studies show that charters have positive effects on academic outcomes; in other contexts, the findings are more mixed.
• In general, charters seem most likely to have positive effects on student achievement at the elementary level, in math, if the school is part of a well-established charter network, if the student has been enrolled for a while, if the student is disadvantaged, and if the school is in an urban area.

Jeffrey Young:

In just a few short years, Salman Khan has built a free online educational institution from scratch that has nudged major universities to offer free self-guided courses and inspired many professors to change their teaching methods.
His creation is called Khan Academy, and its core is a library of thousands of 10-minute educational videos, most of them created by Mr. Khan himself. The format is simple but feels intimate: Mr. Khan’s voice narrates as viewers watch him sketch out his thoughts on a digital whiteboard. He made the first videos for faraway cousins who asked for tutoring help. Encouraging feedback by others who watched the videos on YouTube led him to start the academy as a nonprofit.

Jon Hilsenrath:

The most interesting anecdote to come out of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s semiannual testimony to Congress: His son, who is in medical school in New York, is likely to rack up $400,000 of student loan debt in the process of getting his degree.
The rapid growth of U.S. student loan debt, Mr. Bernanke said, required “careful oversight” from regulators.
The student loan tidbit wasn’t the only piece of “regular guy” information Mr. Bernanke divulged in today’s hearing. He also said he does his own grocery shopping.

Christie Taylor:

Bills currently winding through the state Legislature would allow special education students to join Racine and Milwaukee students in receiving vouchers worth up to $13,593 to attend private schools.
Republicans on the Assembly’s education committee already passed one version, AB 110, on a 7-4 party line vote, and the bill could hit the floor as soon as next week.
Meanwhile, the most recent version of the bill, SB 486, was the subject of a public hearing Tuesday where advocacy groups, special education teachers, and the Department of Public Instruction itself raised concerns that the bill would starve already-lean school budgets, and provide no guarantees to special education students in return. The bill does not cap how many students may receive vouchers through the program in an individual district, but the Assembly version limits the number to five percent of special education students in the state.

Dave Cieslewicz:

John Matthews, the very long-time president of the Madison teachers union said something that shouldn’t go unnoticed in today’s Cap Times story about the Madison school board races.
Referring to Mary Burke, a candidate for an open seat on the board, Matthews is quoted as saying, “you want somebody who understands what it’s like to be a parent and understands the needs of parents to be involved.” Burke has no children.
There’s little room to interpret that statement as anything but a claim that childless adults need not apply for positions on the school board as far as John Matthews is concerned. John did not go on to suggest that his members who teach children but don’t have any themselves are unqualified to teach, but that would seem to be a logical conclusion.
John can’t be serious. Single-person households now make up one out of four American households and the percentage is almost half in large cities. While all of those single person homes are not made up of childless individuals, there’s a good chance that the trend indicates that there are more of us who have made that choice to not have kids.

Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichele Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
1.25.2012 Madison School Board Candidate DCCPA Event Photos & Audio
Listen to the event via this 77MB mp3 audio file.
Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A

Jack Craver:

Since 2007, there have been nine elections for seats on the Madison School Board. Only two have been contested. Thus, in seven instances, a candidate was elected or re-elected without having to persuade the community on the merits of his or her platform, without ever facing an opponent in a debate.
This year, two seats on the School Board are hotly contested, a political dynamic that engages the community and that most members of the board welcome.
“What an active campaign does is get the candidate out and engaged with the community, specifically on larger issues affecting the school district,” says Lucy Mathiak, a School Board member who is vacating one of the seats that is on the April 3 ballot.
Competition may be healthy, but it can also be ugly. While the rhetoric in this year’s School Board races seems harmless compared to the toxic dialogue we’ve grown accustomed to in national and state politics, there is a palpable tension that underpins the contests.
Teachers and their union worry that Gov. Scott Walker’s attacks on collective bargaining rights and support for school vouchers could gain more traction if candidates who favor “flexibilities” and “tools” get elected to the board. Meanwhile, many in the black community feel their children are being neglected because policy-makers are not willing to challenge the unions or the status quo. District officials must contend with a rising poverty level among enrolled students and concerns about “white flight.”
In addition to massive cuts to education funding from the state, the current anxiety about the future of Madison’s schools was fueled by last year’s debate over the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, a charter school plan devised by Kaleem Caire, the head of the Urban League of Greater Madison, to help minority students who are falling behind their white peers in academic achievement. Minority students in the Madison district have only a 48 percent four-year graduation rate and score much lower on standardized tests than do white students.
Objections to Madison Prep varied. Some thought creating a school focused on certain racial groups would be a step backward toward segregation. Others disliked the plan for its same-sex classrooms.
However, what ultimately killed the plan was the Urban League’s decision to have the school operate as a “non-instrumentality” of the Madison Metropolitan School District, meaning it would not have to hire union-represented district teachers and staff. In particular, Caire wanted to be able to hire non-white social workers and psychologists, few of whom are on the district’s current staff.

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.
Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichele Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
1.25.2012 Madison School Board Candidate DCCPA Event Photos & Audio
Listen to the event via this 77MB mp3 audio file.
Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A

A. David Dahmer:

Earlier this month, Superintendent Dan Nerad announced a preliminary plan to close the Madison Metropolitan School District’s persistent racial and socioeconomic achievement gap. Along with that proposal came the hiring of Shahanna McKinney-Baldon, the district’s first chief diversity officer, who is charged with coordinating initiatives to foster diversity in the district.
“It’s so exciting,” McKinney-Baldon tells The Madison Times at her office in the Doyle Administration Building downtown. “This is a wonderful opportunity. Madison a unique city and you have so many people engaged in the process. Everybody has been so welcoming here in Madison. People have been so willing to share their thinking. It’s been exciting to be able to identify recurring themes as I talk to people throughout the city.”
Year after year, Madison has attempted to lessen its more than 40-year-old racial achievement gap, with little positive results. With the announcing of its elaborate strategic plan and the hiring of McKinney-Baldon, MMSD hopes to signal to the community that it is “all in” as far as its efforts to end the systematic educational disenfranchisement of students in certain groups.

Jack Hough:

Fannie Mae said Wednesday it lost $2.4 billion during the fourth quarter of 2011 and $16.9 billion for the full year.
It has had worse years, remarkably. Fannie lost about $60 billion in 2008 and $72 billion the following year-two of the 10 largest corporate losses ever. Sibling Freddie Mac is responsible for a third, a $51 billion loss in 2008.
Fannie Mae was established in 1938 to promote home ownership by making federal funds available to lenders. In the 1950s and 1960s, it transformed into a profit-seeking corporation, with the goal of purchasing mortgages and selling them to investors, thereby replenishing funds to banks for fresh loans. Freddie Mac was created in 1970 to spur competition.

Related:, via WISTAX:

Purchase the newsletter, which includes a discussion of the Wisconsin state budget, here.

Knowledge @ Wharton:

Michael Horn sees the Internet providing access to a range of products and services that will help improve the way people can learn. While adult education is where on-line learning initially got its start, Horn predicts that half of high school courses in the U.S. will be taken online in less than a decade. Horn co-wrote the bestselling book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns with Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen. He and Christensen later co-founded The Innosight Institute, a non-for profit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to problems in the social sector.
In the future, Horn predicts the majority of students will be engaged in what he calls “blended learning” where they’ll learn online with control over the pace of their learning in schools with teachers providing guidance. As new technologies and applications are introduced into schools, he also predicts the future of teaching shifting into three roles: Teachers who act as mentors and motivators; content experts; and case workers that help students deal with non-academic obstacles to learning. Horn sees such changes creating a more student-centric education system where each child can learn at a customized pace and path.

Andrew Delbanco:

If there’s one thing about which Americans agree these days, it’s that we can’t agree. Gridlock is the name of our game. We have no common ground.
There seems, however, to be at least one area of cordial consensus–and I don’t mean bipartisan approval of the killing of Osama bin Laden or admiration for former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s courage and grace.
I mean the public discourse on education. On that subject, Republicans and Democrats speak the same language–and so, with striking uniformity, do more and more college and university leaders. “Education is how to make sure we’ve got a work force that’s productive and competitive,” said President Bush in 2004. “Countries that outteach us today,” as President Obama put it in 2009, “will outcompete us tomorrow.”

Brother Bob Smith:

The issue of school choice has been at the forefront of political debate, media attention and community discussion for a number of reasons in recent years, and that’s good. This successful program has provided hundreds of lower-income southeastern Wisconsin families with the opportunity to choose a school that best fits their educational needs, and the more attention, review and consideration it receives, the better.
Now comes debate as to whether special education students have similar choice options and discussion about whether the program should grow, how students qualify and providing equal per-pupil reimbursements to public and private choice schools. But most troubling to me and Messmer Catholic Schools, however, is a topic that hasn’t been openly discussed but alluded to by actions of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
As you may know, DPI recently filed a waiver request with the U.S. Department of Education seeking to be excused from the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Instead, DPI proposed its own accountability standards and intervention procedures for under-performing Wisconsin schools.

Elizabeth Lopatto:

Maybe, as the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested, the rich really are different. They’re more likely to behave badly, according to seven experiments that weighed the ethics of hundreds of people.
The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behaviour at work, researchers reported Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Taken together, the experiments suggest at least some wealthier people “perceive greed as positive and beneficial,” probably as a result of education, personal independence and the resources they have to deal with potentially negative consequences, the authors wrote.
While the tests measured only “minor infractions,” that factor made the results, “even more surprising,” said Paul Piff, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a study author.

Matthew DeFour:

The Middleton-Cross Plains School District shouldn’t have fired a teacher who viewed pornographic images at work and must reinstate him with back pay and benefits — estimated at about $200,000 — an arbitrator has ruled.
Superintendent Don Johnson and the School Board said in a joint statement Wednesday they were disappointed in the decision by a private arbitrator. They plan to discuss whether to appeal the decision at a meeting scheduled for Monday at 6:30 p.m.
“This ruling completely minimizes conduct that cannot be tolerated,” the statement said. “It sends the message that it is acceptable for employees to view pornography at school, during the student-school day, on school equipment. It also flies in the face of the need to provide a professional work environment and a safe place to educate our children.”
The teacher, Andrew Harris, said in an interview he was grateful for the ruling.

Room for Debate:

If you turn on the TV, or flip through standardized tests, or spend a mindless hour on YouTube, it’s hard not to wonder: Is our species devolving? Are people getting dumber?

Warren Olney:

Evaluations of teachers based on student test scores have been made public in New York and Los Angeles. Will that make public schools better or worse? Will teachers be shamed, fired or leave the profession for the wrong reasons?

channel3000.com:

Theft charges have been filed against four Madison teens, including two players on Madison Memorial High School’s basketball team.
A criminal complaint charges Albert “Junior” Lomomba, 19, and Jamar Morris, 18, both top players on the basketball team, with misdemeanor retail theft.
Lomomba has a full-ride scholarship to play for Cleveland State.
The complaint also charges Max W. Genin, 17, and Lavell D. Nash, 18, with misdemeanor retail theft.

Christopher Mims:

When the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under 2 spend exactly zero time in front of screens, what its members are concerned about is substitution — all the time those children aren’t spending acquiring new skills and language through one-on-one interaction.
Yet a new effort by researchers at MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group will attempt to create a programming environment suitable for toddlers. It’s hard to imagine that any but the most precocious children would be able to interact with Scratch Jr. before the age of two, but as Heather Chaplin reports for KQED, the new software will be aimed squarely at children who have barely learned their colors, much less how to read.

Michael Sakpinker:

A French diplomat recently shrugged at news that Tunisians were rejecting his language and enrolling in English classes. “You can’t be in this globalised world without being able to speak English,” he said.
How will these eager new English speakers fare? If you believe Jean-Paul Nerrière, they will learn enough to communicate with Peruvians and Indonesians but not enough to talk to Britons, Americans or Australians.
As a long-time IBM executive, Mr Nerrière, a Frenchman, spent years observing English conversations. When a Japanese employee met a Belgian, a Chilean and an Italian, they managed. None spoke English brilliantly but each knew the others were making mistakes too. When an American or British manager walked in, everything changed. The native speakers talked too fast and used mysterious expressions, such as “from the horse’s mouth” (which horse?). The others clammed up.

George Mitchell:

During the last year, three different reports have claimed to compare the academic achievement of students in the Milwaukee Public Schools with students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
Two conclude, erroneously, that MPS students outperform students in the choice program.
The third reaches far different conclusions.
The difference?
Two of the three, from Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and the Milwaukee-based Public Policy Forum (PPF), used deeply flawed methods to conclude that MPS students outperform those in the choice program. Page one stories in the Journal Sentinel validated these erroneous reports. The paper compounded the errors by wrongly suggesting that the DPI and PPF data allow individual schools to be evaluated.
The third report comes from the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) at the University of Arkansas and is based on rigorous methods. Its reports, including several issued today, draw starkly different conclusions from those advanced by DPI, PPF, and Journal Sentinel news stories.
Responding to widespread attention generated by the DPI and PPF reports, the experts at the University of Arkansas refute the validity of those reports and demonstrate why they provide neither a basis for comparing MPS and Milwaukee’s school choice programs nor for evaluating individual schools.

Matthew DeFour:

Both races for Madison School Board feature matchups between a candidate with strong business acumen and boardroom experience versus a minority candidate with experience more representative of the district’s growing student population.
That contrast is especially pronounced in the contest between former Commerce Secretary and Trek Bicycle executive Mary Burke and firefighter Michael Flores.
Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews even characterizes Burke as a “1 percenter” who doesn’t know “what it is like for a child to go to bed or go to school hungry.”
Burke, a Democrat who was endorsed by former Gov. Jim Doyle, whose wife was a teacher and whose mother served as School Board president, objects to that description.
“People who know me sort of laugh, because I don’t fit the profile of what (Matthews) is saying,” Burke said, adding she supports Occupy Wall Street values such as progressive taxation and reducing the influence of corporations in government.

Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichele Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A
1.25.2012 Madison School Board Candidate DCCPA Event Photos & Audio

Nicolas Pottier:

This brings us to Udacity, which takes all the best parts of the above approaches and marries them into an incredible teaching tool.  Audacity combines the personal, approachable first person teaching style of Kahn Academy, but then backs it up with interactive programming in Python, all right in the browser.  
The teachers are ex-Stanford professors, so they have decades of experience teaching this material, which really shows in how they present it. So far in the first week of class, they have done a great job of covering fundamentals without getting bogged down in details, getting students to start learning intuitively, by doing, while still giving them the founding blocks to know why things work the way they do.
Perhaps most importantly, Udacity has structured their CS101 course around a brilliant concept, building a search engine in eight weeks. That single act makes the course not about learning, but about doing. The class never has to answer the question ‘why are we doing this?’, because each topic is directly tied to the overall goal of building your own little Google, every piece is practical.

Tony Kennedy & Jenna Ross:

Since retiring 18 months ago as chancellor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Kathryn Martin has collected more money from the U than she did in her last two years on the job.
One of nearly a dozen university executives to step down in the past two years, Martin was granted a two-month sabbatical, a 15-month “administrative transitional leave,” a final deposit to her retirement fund, and a severance check. Total: $535,700.
Hers was the biggest in a series of compensation packages signed by former university President Robert Bruininks worth more than $2.8 million. The deals routinely granted top administrators lengthy paid leaves, then allowed them to return to faculty positions or depart the U’s payroll.
A Star Tribune review of university documents shows that seven of 10 high-ranking officials in the Bruininks administration, including the former president himself, received at least a year off with pay at their executive salaries, as well as retirement and health insurance contributions. The deals often were vague about what the administrators would do on leave. Bruininks also repeatedly waived a university policy that executives repay their stipends in the event they left the U while on leave.

Lynn Nakagawa:

our of Hawaii’s five largest private K-12 schools are telling PBN they are planning tuition increases for the 2012-13 school year. The other one, Kamehameha Schools, has not finalized next year’s tuition, but a spokesman said it likely will increase, too.
Punahou School, Iolani School, Mid-Pacific Institute and Maryknoll School all confirmed tuition increases for next year ranging from $515 to $900.

Leigh Buchanan:

That genre–or rather, that industry (clarity trumps metaphor, as the storytelling-obsessed Tullman would tell you)–is vocational education. “It’s a shame that the United States is the only country in the world where it’s considered downscale and horrible to go to any kind of vocational school,” says Tullman, pecking at his computer, which is wired to a large screen that barrages visitors to his office with wow-inducing videos and applications created by Flashpoint students and faculty. “Everyplace else, there are apprenticeships, vocational training, all kinds of paths to be successful. We need that here.”
Tullman believes training young people to fill tomorrow’s jobs is this country’s best shot at reducing unemployment and staying globally competitive. Tomorrow’s jobs, of course, is code for technology, a subject, Tullman argues, traditional four-year colleges teach poorly because faculty aren’t in the field keeping current and students don’t work across departments in interdisciplinary teams, as happens in the real world. “Part One was that every other school was teaching in these silos with tenured faculty who weren’t learning new technologies,” says Tullman, explaining what attracted him to the idea for Flashpoint, which was brought to him in 2007 by Ric Landry, the company’s co-founder. “Part Two was you had a group of kids that were only interested in digital and were not going to go to a four-year liberal-arts school and end up with their futures in hock.”

Letters to the Wall Street Journal:

Regarding Robin Mamlet and Christine Vandevelde’s “Should Colleges Be Factories for the 1%?” (op-ed, Feb. 21): When I went to college (for an engineering degree quite some time ago), the costs were so affordable that I paid all of them from summer earnings, a little savings and an occasional part-time job while in school. I lived at home and commuted, but my parents never had to pay a tuition bill. By the time my children went to college, earning enough to pay just the tuition for a state school was impossible. Now, it’s totally out of the question; students regularly graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. In some cases, repayment is impossible from earnings based on their major.
It is a shame for parents to go into debt, give up vacations and other niceties, take on additional part-time work and endanger their retirement so that their children can go to college, but who then must move back in with their parents because they cannot find a job. Having a good idea of the likelihood of gainful employment should be part of the decision-making process, especially for those parents not in the “1%.”
Walter Ciciora

D.C. Briggs:

For students planning to apply to a four year college, scores on standardized admissions tests–the SAT I or ACT–take on a great deal of importance. It may be the quality and quantity of an applicant’s high school coursework that receives the closest scrutiny at the more prestigious institutions, but these are cumulative indicators of performance. Standardized admissions tests, by contrast, are more of a one shot deal. Such tests are blind to a student’s high school record–instead, they are intended as an independent, objective measure of college “readiness”. For students with a strong high school record, admissions tests provide a way to confirm their standing. For students with a weaker high school record, admissions tests provide a way to raise their standing. A principal justification for the use of the SAT I and ACT in the admissions process is that such tests are designed to be insensitive to the high school curriculum and to short- term test preparation. If short term preparatory activities prior to taking the SAT I or ACT can have the effect of significantly boosting the scores of students above those they would have received without the preparation, both the validity and reliability of the tests as indicators of college readiness might be called into question.

Bill Tomison:

High-stakes testing — forcing Rhode Island students to pass particular, certain tests to get a diploma — like the NECAP test, is going to have a devastating impact on every student in Rhode Island, according to a group of local organizations led by the ACLU.
Some local students also echoed the protest at a news conference Thursday morning.
The use of high-stakes testing is scheduled to be put into effect in 2014, under legislation proposed by Rhode Island Rep. Eileen Naughton and state Sen. Harold Metts. State assessments would be used to ultimately determine if students are eligible for graduation at the end of the school year.
“There is no data and no evidence anywhere that suggests that putting this test in place is going to stop the travesty of our young people not having the skills they need,” Ex. Dir. of Young Voices Karen Feldman said.

Samara Kalk Derby:

Madison has had valuable sister city relationships with cities such as Camaguey, Cuba; Freiburg, Germany; and Arcatao, El Salvador — some stretching back almost 30 years.
Now, a 29-year-old Madison native is forging a sister community center for the Meadowood Neighborhood Center with a planned neighborhood center in Camarones, Ecuador, about three hours northwest of Quito, the country’s capital.
To that end, Emily Kalnicky, who spent three months volunteering in Camarones last year, co-founded the nonprofit Camarones Community Coalition, and recently kicked off a unique fundraising push.
Her goal is to raise $30,000 in the 30 days leading up to her 30th birthday, March 19. So far she has raised about $2,000.

Matthew DeFour:

When Arlene Silveira first ran for School Board in 2006, there was community dissatisfaction with the “status quo.” In one race, a four-term incumbent was unseated. Silveira ran for an open seat and won, but only after a recount.
There hasn’t been as much interest in a School Board election until this year, when once again the election features a closely contested open seat and an incumbent facing a spirited challenge.
However, Silveira’s opponent, Nichelle Nichols, vice president of education and learning at the Urban League of Greater Madison, acknowledged she faces an uphill battle.
Silveira wrapped up numerous early endorsements, including Madison Teachers Inc., the local teachers union. Moreover, when asked to make an argument for why voters shouldn’t re-elect her opponent to a third term, Nichols treads lightly, crediting Silveira for shepherding the district through a strategic planning process and the hiring of Superintendent Dan Nerad.
“She hasn’t ruffled any feathers,” Nichols said. “No one can point out any specific flaws.”

012 Madison School Board Candidates:
Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichele Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A
1.25.2012 Madison School Board Candidate DCCPA Event Photos & Audio

Pamela Cotant:

The Fine Arts Festival at Edgewood High School goes beyond showcasing student talent by bringing in a variety of guest artists who have furthered their crafts.
The first day of the recent festival was Guest Artist Day, and students had a choice of artists to visit at each of the nine sessions held throughout the day. The 28 artists were chosen to represent different cultures, historical periods and genres.
“You just get involved and you get to see things you’ve never seen before,” said junior Maura Drabik, 16.
She was one of the students who got moved by the performance of the Latin band Grupo Candela and danced at the front of the auditorium.

The Economist:

IN ELDORADO, one of São Paulo’s poorest and most misleadingly named favelas, some eight-year-old boys are playing football on a patch of ground once better known for drug gangs and hunger. Although they look the picture of health, they are not. After the match they gather around a sack of bananas beside the pitch.
“At school, the kids get a full meal every day,” explains Jonathan Hannay, the secretary-general of Children at Risk Foundation, a local charity. “But in the holidays they come to us without breakfast or lunch so we give them bananas. They are filling, cheap, and they stimulate the brain.” Malnutrition used to be pervasive and invisible in Eldorado. Now there is less of it and, equally important, it is no longer hidden. “It has become more visible–so people are doing something about it.”

Frasier Speirs:

There was a time when iTunes U was just a section of the iTunes store where you could download audio and videos. Since Apple’s recent education event, that’s all changed. iTunes U is still a part of the iTunes Store but there’s now a dedicated iTunes U app for iOS devices.
The other major change to iTunes U was a policy change. iTunes U was previously only available to universities. At the January education event Eddy Cue stated that “starting today K-12 schools can sign up” to iTunes U. We didn’t get pre-announcement access but I signed up as soon as I could and Cedars has been accepted to iTunes U.

Maud Newton & Laura Miller:

Welcome to the second installment of “How We Will Read,” a series exploring the future of reading from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. This week, we talked to Laura Miller and Maud Newton, founders of The Chimerist, a new blog dedicated to exploring the imaginative potential of the iPad.
In addition to ruminating on the experience of using the iPad, Maud and Laura discussed the future of narrative forms, interactive storytelling, and their hopes for the evolution of publishing. What resulted was two poetic and nuanced views of what digital reading means to people who love books. Their work at The Chimerist had already distinguished Laura and Maud as thoughtful writers at the intersection of media and technology. It was incredible to hear what else they were thinking about as they navigate this new and rapidly changing space. Check out their interview below, and be sure to check out The Chimerist, too.

Deborah Gist:

The requirement that school committees must provide educators with layoff notices by a March 1 deadline is a ridiculous exercise that has to be stopped. This arbitrary deadline serves no purpose except to add to the stress of teachers who are working hard every day to provide our students with a world-class education.
I do believe that when school committees face difficult decisions about laying off teachers and other educators, teachers deserve to receive timely notice of these pending layoffs that may affect their livelihoods and their careers.

Christopher s. Rugaber

President Barack Obama wants to close dozens of loopholes that let some companies pay little or nothing in taxes. But he also wants to open new ones for manufacturers and companies that invest in clean energy.
To some analysts, the new loopholes risk upending the level playing field Obama says he wants to create.
Some also fear that companies could game the system to grab the new tax breaks.
“The administration is not making sense,” says Martin Sullivan, contributing editor at publisher Tax Analysts. “The whole idea of corporate tax reform is to get rid of loopholes, and this plan is adding loopholes back in.”
Economists across the political spectrum support a kind of grand bargain: cut corporate tax rates while deleting tax breaks that benefit a favored few.

Jerome Dancis, Ph.D. (math):

Many Math professors, who have looked at the Singapore K-6 Math Books, are strong advocates of them because these books
1. Do an especially good job in training students in Basic Skills and
2. Do an especially good job in providing students with Conceptual Understanding and
3. Provide an especially good background in Arithmetic and Arithmetic word problems, for the learning of Algebraic calculations and for learning how to solve Algebraic word problems.
4. Do an especially good job in training students in non-trivial Arithmetic word problems; while American texts largely avoid non-trivial Arithmetic word problems.

Charlie Mas:

The Seattle School Board will soon consider terminating the District’s contract with Teach for America. There is disagreement about this on the School Board, so we are likely to hear a discussion of the question with Board directors advocating for each side. This is good and healthy. This is what democracy looks like. I welcome a full discussion regardless of the eventual conclusion. I will, however, be deeply disappointed if the discussion is not honest. We have already seen the start of a dishonest discussion. This dishonest discussion needs to be stopped and it is the other Board directors who need to stop it. They need to stop it by exposing the dishonesty the moment it appears.
When the Curriculum and Instruction Policy Committee met and decided to advance this motion to the full board, one of the Board directors, Harium Martin-Morris, spoke against the termination of the Teach for America contract. Mr. Martin-Morris made one of the most loathsome and dishonest statements I have ever heard from a school board director. He said that the Board should make data-based decisions and that it was pre-mature to terminate the contract with Teach for America because they did not yet have the results of this experiment. There are so many lies packed into that statement that I’m going to need some time and space to unpack them all.

The Economist:

IN THE film “Superman 3”, a lowly computer programmer (played by Richard Pryor, pictured) embezzles a fat wad of money from his employer. The boss laments that it will be hard to catch the thief, because “he won’t do a thing to call attention to himself. Unless, of course, he is a complete and utter moron.” Just then the thief screeches into the car park in a brand new red sports car, radio blaring.
In the real world, embezzlers are seldom so obvious. The traditional way to snare them is to hire an accountant to scrutinise accounts for anomalies. But this is like looking for a contact lens in a snowdrift. So firms are turning to linguistic software to narrow the search.

Lisa Fleishder & Jacob Gershman:

As New York City parents and teachers struggled Monday to make sense of recently published schoolteacher rankings, education officials considered whether future releases should be illegal to protect a fragile truce on a new statewide system.
Legal experts said a series of court rulings have made it increasingly clear that statistics-based portions of teacher evaluations are public information, unlike those of police officers, firefighters and other public workers specifically protected under state law.
Only a change in law, experts said, would change that. Shielding teacher rankings from public view is likely to become a new pressure point in the debate over how to measure the effectiveness of teachers, lawmakers and officials said Monday.

Mary Ellen Bell:

At the height of the Occupy protests last fall, young people held signs announcing how much they owed in student loans. While the pundits were asking each other what, exactly, the protesters wanted, a big part of the answer was on those signs: Students are leaving colleges and universities with a staggering financial burden and bleak job prospects.
“When you get out of college at 21 with a 30-year loan, it’s soul crushing,” says Scot Ross, executive director of One Wisconsin Now, a progressive organization that is launching an advocacy campaign on the issue. Ross is on leave to serve as communications director for gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Falk.
The student loan landscape has shifted dramatically since the parents of current students and recent graduates left college. In 2006, the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics reported that most borrowers who finished college in the early 1990s were able to manage their student loan burden. Most paid the loans back in 10 years. Today, many students face 20 to 25 years of making payments. In the early ’90s, about half of students borrowed; in 2006, two-thirds had to borrow. And their loans are much bigger.

Matt Ridley:

It is now well known that people are generally accurate and (sometimes embarrassingly) honest about their personalities when profiling themselves on social-networking sites. Patients are willing to be more open about psychiatric symptoms to an automated online doctor than a real one. Pollsters find that people give more honest answers to an online survey than to one conducted by phone.
But online honesty cuts both ways. Bloggers find that readers who comment on their posts are often harshly frank but that these same rude critics become polite if contacted directly. There’s a curious pattern here that goes against old concerns over the threat of online dissembling. In fact, the mechanized medium of the Internet causes not concealment but disinhibition, giving us both confessional behavior and ugly brusqueness. When the medium is impersonal, people are prepared to be personal.

Erin Richards:

A sample of students in Milwaukee’s private voucher schools made gains in reading in 2010-’11 that were significantly higher than those of a matched sample of peers in Milwaukee Public Schools, but math achievement remained the same last school year, according to the results of a multiyear study tracking students in both sectors.
The results of the study are being released Monday in Milwaukee as the final installment of an examination of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, or voucher program.
The longitudinal study – meaning it tracked the same set of students over the testing period – was conducted by the School Choice Demonstration Project, a nonpartisan research center at the University of Arkansas. The group was selected by the state to conduct a long-term study of the voucher program and its impact on Milwaukee.
Rather than looking at scores of all students, the study matched a sample of 2,727 voucher students in third through ninth grades in 2006 with an equal number of similar MPS students. The study used a complex statistical methodology based on growth models.

Mike Ford and Christian D’Andrea have more.

Madison Teachers, Inc., via a kind Jeanie Bettner email:

Given MTI’s leadership during last year’s protests over Governor Walker stealing public employees’ rights and negating 46 years of MTI’s gains through collective bargaining, and because of MTI members’ leadership in the recall campaigns of anti-public employee Senators and the Governor, the Union has received and continues to receive requests for guidance.
Currently MTI President Peggy Coyne (Black Hawk) and MTI Faculty Representative & Recall Committee member Kathryn Burns (Shorewood) are in Osaka, Japan, where they will be presenters at a meeting of 200 to prepare for the Osaka Social Forum to be held in September. The public employees in Osaka City advise that they are facing the same kind of attacks by the new Mayor of Osaka City, who was formerly the Governor of Osaka Prefecture. The theme of this fall’s conference is how to organize resistence to the harsh attacks on union rights and public education.
In April, MTI Board of Directors’ Secretary Liz Wingert (Elvehjem) will travel to Edmonton, Alberta, where she will engage in a very similar meeting to that described above in Osaka, Japan. Similar to Wisconsin, Koch Industries registered last spring as lobbyists in Alberta. Their subsidiary, Flint Hills Resources, is among Canada’s largest crude oil purchasers, shippers and exporters. Koch Industries‘ [open secrets 2008 Senate Democrat contributions, including Obama, 2008 Republicans] Flint Hills Resources operates a crude oil terminal in Hardisty, and has offices in Calgary. Charles and David Koch are reportedly the 24th richest people in the world, with holdings worth $17.5 billion. It was David Koch who Governor Walker thought he was talking with last spring, only to have the caller being an impersonator. The New York Times reported that the Koch brothers were among Walker’s largest contributors. The Capital Times reported last Monday that David Koch said, “What Scott Walker is doing with public employee unions in Wisconsin is critically important.” The Koch brothers “Americans for Prosperity” has bought about $700,000 in TV ads in support of Governor Walker.
In Alberta, like Wisconsin, conservative legislators argue that public sector collective bargaining should be curtailed and that alternate means of delivering public services should be enabled. Alberta conservatives call it “privatization” and “managed competition”, where the lowest price gets the contract.

Will Carless:

For the last few years, the San Diego Unified School District has announced that it will have to lay hundreds of teachers off. But each year, the total number of teachers actually laid off has ended up just a slice of that worst-case-scenario.
This pattern happens because every January, the district has to project how it will balance its budget the following year. In lean times, it does that by projecting how many people it will have to lay off.
But, in January, the district doesn’t know how much money it will have to work with the following year. It doesn’t know that until the state comes out with its budget in the summer. A lot often changes in the few months between the district making its projections and the state’s final budget. The result: The district’s projections end up way off, as hundreds of layoff notices are cancelled.
The teachers union derides this pattern as “crying wolf” and says it brings about unnecessary distress at schools. Recently, the union called on the district to stop playing the budget game. In response, the district says it’s mandated by law to project and account for the worst possible situation for its budget, and said it’s happy to work to change a union-supported law that requires it to issue layoff notices before March 15 each year.

Future of Communications:

One of these slow alpha-waves of change in the telecosm is the upcoming decline and death of the GSM ecosystem. As the biggest and baddest technology ecosystem in the world, this is very significant. Let me point out how it might gradually corrode and collapse – albeit over a long period – and what might grow in its place.

We come to celebrate GSM

GSM is arguably the single most impactful technology on everyday human existence since the wheel. (OK, since the axle and second wheel – the first wheel was a confusing novelty.) Superlatives like “astonishing” are appropriate. In a mere two decades GSM has created a connected planetary populace. The spread and impact of even the printing press cannot compare. The core offer is a perfect packaging of human voice and simple text into GSM’s mobile telephony and SMS standards. A $20 GSM phone with a $3 service plan is near-miraculous source of value. The world’s richest man is an emerging-market GSM entrepreneur, not a software mogul or energy tsar. This is a technology that has outpaced even the spread of clean water and mains electricity.

This achievement cannot be understated, and should not be diminished. Too many Web-heads dismiss the benefits that GSM has brought. It wasn’t the Internet that connected billions, it was GSM.

Thanks to Brian S. Hall for the pointer.
Well worth Reading.

Michael Stratford:

Energized by his fellow adjunct professors who had gathered for a national meeting last month in Washington, D.C., Joshua A. Boldt flew home to Athens, Ga., opened his laptop, and created a Google document.
On his personal blog, the 32-year-old writing instructor implored colleagues to contribute to the publicly editable spreadsheet, detailing their pay per course and other working conditions, noting their institutions and departments. The goal of the crowdsourcing project, Mr. Boldt said, was to praise universities that treat adjunct professors well and “out” those institutions that do not.
“Let’s combine forces,” he wrote. “Fill in as much information as you feel comfortable doing, and be sure to tweet this document and share it. … “

RiShawn Biddle:

One would think education traditionalists would be as slightly relieved by the deal New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo forced the state’s education department to strike with the American Federation of Teachers’ state affiliate as school reformers are (slightly irrationally) exuberant. While Value-Added analysis of student test score growth over time culled from the state’s standardized tests would account for at least a fifth — and as much as 40 percent — of the overall evaluation, the overall evaluation will still be largely based on classroom observations that are generally less accurate in reflecting their performance than student surveys. Considering that districts can still base half of the test portion of evaluations from third-party instruments (instead of from state tests, as Cuomo had wanted), teacher evaluations will still remain less useful than they could be in rewarding high-quality teaching and helping teachers improve performance. From where your editor sits, the deal is just a slight change for the better, either for good-to-great teachers or for our children. For reformers, it’s a cosmetic victory, and for education traditionalists, it’s far less of a defeat than they could have otherwise expected.

Alan Borsuk:

I don’t know exactly what happened during a funeral at a church at N. 53rd and W. Burleigh streets last Tuesday, but I know it was bad.
I know a lot more about what happened in the library at Bradley Tech High School the next morning, and I know it was good.
I took rather personally the debacle at the church, where the funeral of a teenage murder victim attracted a large crowd of youths and a ruckus among them brought police rushing to the scene. I live nearby. My synagogue is about 50 yards from the church. My neighbors and my family don’t like visitors like these kids in our still-pretty-solid neighborhood.
The next morning, I was in the library at Bradley Tech as about 20 students from Tech and Vincent High School demonstrated the “restorative justice” program that helps them deal with problems and resolve disputes constructively. They were celebrating a $90,000 grant from AT&T to support that program and a program aimed at boosting math success.

Jack Hough:

Federal aid for students has increased 164% over the past decade, adjusted for inflation, according to the College Board. Yet three-quarters of Americans and even a majority of college presidents see college as unaffordable for most, and that sentiment has been steadily spreading, the Pew Research Center reports.
Two new studies offer clues on why. One measures the degree to which some colleges reduce their own aid in response to increased federal aid. The other suggests federal aid is helping to push college costs higher.

Superintendent Dan Nerad:

Under Open Enrollment, students may transfer into an MMSD school from another district or transfer out to another district – “enterers” versus “leavers.” This report focuses primarily on Open Enrollment leavers. There is also some discussion of the net effect of Open Enrollment, which is the number of leavers minus the number of enterers. This report does not discuss students attending private/parochial schools or home schooled students.
For the 2011-12 school year, MMSD has 913 leavers and 213 enterers for a
net effect of 700 students choosing to attend a district other than MMSD.
Of the 913 leavers for 2011-12, 580 were “continuing leavers” meaning they open enrolled outside of the District in previous years. That leaves 333 first time leavers for the current school year.
The growing number of leavers in recent years is the result of a cumulative increase over several years – those who are continuing leavers are still included in our counts in the following years. Because of this, it will take time to reverse the net number of leavers and first time leavers are of particular interest.
First time leavers increased only slightly from 2010-11 to 2011-12. If we discount the one-time bump for the first class of 4K, the number of first time leavers went down for the first time since at least 2005-06.
It is also important to note that nearly half of the students that are leavers never attended MMSD and could be considered “stayers” for other districts.
In terms of why people leave the district, we rely on a 2009 survey of leavers.

Charts (10MB PDF).

Peter Wood:

The most conspicuous part of President Obama’s agenda for higher education is his plan for gigantic increases in enrollment. Obama announced this goal very early in his term. In February 2009, in a speech to a joint session of Congress he declared, “by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” Translated into actual enrollments, that would mean more than doubling the number of domestic students attending the nation’s colleges and universities.
Last week in Obama’s Higher-Education Agenda I said I would in a series of posts examine the eight majors components of that agenda, and then try to put them together as a whole. His dream of gargantuan expansion comes first both as first-announced and as the foundation for everything else.
The idea of gargantuan expansion did not pop out of the blue. Rather it popped out of the College Board in a report released just before Obama’s inauguration, and it also popped out of a two-page ad that appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe in December 2008. The College Board report, Coming to Our Senses: Education and the American Future, called for granting college degrees to at least 55 percent of “young Americans” by 2025. The “young Americans” qualifier is important. This was a summons not for more more adult and continuing post-secondary education, but for a radical increase in college education for those under age 35. And it wasn’t just a call for increased enrollments, but for actual graduates.
The proposal was–there is no finer word for it–nuts.
As I pointed out at the time, in Cold Brine and The Battle of Bunker Hill, if you sat down and did the calculations on the basis of census data and actual enrollments, to grant 55 percent of young Americans college degrees by 2025 would mean awarding 129 million college degrees between 2009 and 2025–57 million more than would have been awarded at 2008 rates. Even if you think that is a good idea, American colleges and universities had then and still do not have anything like the capacity to accomplish it. To get there, colleges would need to more than double their enrollments and sustain them at that higher level. How many colleges and universities could have done that starting in 2009?

David Feith:

Where’s the toughest battlefield in American education these days? Certainly New Orleans and Harlem host controversially high concentrations of charter schools, while New Jersey and Louisiana boast governors who challenge teachers unions with verve. But for downright nastiness, Southern California is ground zero.
SoCal earns this dubious distinction largely because of the educational establishment’s rage over “parent trigger,” a reform that’s been on California’s books since January 2010. It’s a “lynch mob provision,” declared Marty Hittelman, president of the powerful California Federation of Teachers. Why? Because it gives unprecedented rights to parents whose children are stuck in failing public schools. If more than 50% sign a petition, they can force a school closed, shake up its administration, or turn it into a charter.
The first parent trigger was pulled in December 2010 at Compton’s McKinley Elementary School. Immediately, McKinley teachers began leaning on parents to rescind their signatures–first at a PTA meeting, then by pressuring their kids during school. Soon the school district insisted that parents validate their signatures by appearing at McKinley with official photo identification–naked intimidation of those who were undocumented immigrants and a violation of the First Amendment, said Los Angeles Superior Court. Yet the district persisted, soon rejecting every parent’s signature on technicalities that are still tied up in court a year later.

Chris Patten:

Tutorial: Dr Pangloss instructs his young charge in this illustration by Quentin Blake for the Folio Society’s 2011 edition of Voltaire’s ‘Candide’
What Are Universities For?, by Stefan Collini, Penguin, RRP£9.99, 240 pages
In recent years publishers have taken increasingly to decorating their covers with endorsements. Had I been asked to contribute some such remark on this book, I would have proffered (borrowing from Evelyn Waugh), “Up to a point, Lord Copper.”
Professor Stefan Collini, who holds a chair in intellectual history and English literature at Cambridge University, appears to come from what we might describe as the unregenerate, conservative left. Old Tories may have a little sympathy for his approach, particularly his refusal (at the very least) to make an idol of the market and his passionate defence of autonomous institutions. He does not go as far as that other, alas now dead, Cambridge man of the left, Tony Judt, in denouncing the “system of enforced downward uniformity” that has clipped and confined meritocracy over the past 40 years. But you feel that he would have quite liked to go that far, if only he had dared challenge the phony egalitarianism that has played such havoc with our education system.

Fernanda Santos:

LIKE a city unto itself, Stuyvesant High School, in Lower Manhattan, is broken into neighborhoods, official and otherwise. The math department is on the 4th of its 10 floors; biology is on the 7th. Seniors congregate by the curved mint wall off the second-floor atrium, next to lockers that are such prime real estate that students trade them for $100 or more. Sophomores are relegated to the sixth floor.
In Stuyvesant slang, the hangouts are known as “bars.” Some years ago, the black students took over the radiators outside the fifth-floor cafeteria, and the place soon came to be known as the “chocolate bar,” lending it an air of legitimacy in the school’s labyrinth of cliques and turfs.
It did not last long. This year, Asian freshmen displaced the black students in a strength-in-numbers coup in which whispers of indignation were the sole expression of resistance. There was no point arguing, said Rudi-Ann Miller, a 17-year-old senior who came to New York from Jamaica and likes to style her hair in a bun, slick and straight, like the ballerina she once dreamed of becoming.

QS Top Universities:

QS is proud to announce the first ever QS Best Student Cities ranking. Based on a complex set of measures taken from public information, surveys and data submitted as part of the QS World University Rankings, the results provide a new way of comparing the best cities around the world in which to be a student.
Click the city name in the table below in order to view the full details and profile for that city, including a list of all of the qualifying educational institutions, population size, quality of living, affordability and student mix.

Julie Ledger:

Today, in honor of the 11th annual “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Week,” I encourage you to do just that. Our country faces a critical need to increase the number of students entering engineering programs and professions if we are to continue to be a global leader in economic output, innovation and technology.
A recent study, performed by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, reported a staggering statistic: Only 11% of practicing engineers are women. The clear answer to this chronic shortage lies in encouraging more women to enter a profession in which they are currently outnumbered nearly nine to one.
And what better city to lead this effort than Milwaukee? Here, we have some of the best resources in the nation, including Marquette University’s state-of-the-art new facility for its College of Engineering, UWM’s anticipated construction of an engineering and research facility and, of course, the renowned Milwaukee School of Engineering, which boasts an impressive 95% placement rate for its graduates.
To effectively reach young women, we need to paint a more accurate picture of the rich professional life of an engineer and the many paths one can take with an engineering degree. Too often, people picture a career spent mulling over mathematical and scientific equations and a vast array of technical jargon. Yes, these are critical components of the profession, but it isn’t the end-all and be-all of a profession related to engineering – and it might not be the most appealing selling point to women.

Steve Hsu:

I went back to Bowles and Gintis to compare their results to those of Greg Clark that I posted about recently. The largest correlation reported by Bowles and Gintis for intergenerational earnings is 0.65, obtained when fathers’ and sons’ earnings are averaged over multiyear periods, whereas Clark finds a (roughly) 0.7 — 0.8 correlation between parental and children’s social and economic status. Clark was studying the past 200 years, using rare surnames, whereas Bowles and Gintis concentrated on the modern era. Even the lower value of 0.42 (more typical of results cited by Bowles and Gintis) implies some persistent stratification, as shown in the figure below.

Bobby White:

The Bay Area’s biggest city next week is expected to issue a five-year forecast that will likely become part of a rancorous debate over how to overhaul municipal pensions and ease their growing burden on San Jose.
With costs outpacing revenue, the city has laid off or cut the positions of more than 20% of its work force in the past three years.
The forecast, which is issued every year by the Office of Management and Budget, will be used by the City Council and mayor to decide what cuts need to be made to reach a balanced budget.
San Jose officials and unions disagree over the size of the city’s projected pension burden, but the city’s actual costs have been rising for years as returns on pension-fund investments haven’t kept pace with retiree payouts, which were negotiated during better economic times.
About 25% of San Jose’s police and fire retirees receive pensions of $100,000 or greater, according to city records.

Todd Finkelmeyer:

How much say should students have in how their mandatory fees are used?
It’s a topic UW-Madison sophomore Sarah Neibart is attempting to bring some attention to by contacting reporters and writing letters to the editor.
Here are some basics: A full-time student attending UW-Madison pays about $540 in mandatory segregated fees each semester (a figure that’s on top of tuition, which is $4,835 per semester for an in-state undergrad). Over the course of an entire academic year, this means students across campus contribute a combined $42 million in segregated fees.
When a unit on campus utilizes these dollars, it must submit an annual budget proposal outlining how they’re spent.