Search Results for: courage to teach

Unsure robots make better teachers than know-alls

Douglas Haven, via a kind reader:

The best way to learn is to teach. Now a classroom robot that helps Japanese children learn English has put that old maxim to the test.
Shizuko Matsuzoe and Fumihide Tanaka at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, set up an experiment to find out how different levels of competence in a robot teacher affected children’s success in learning English words for shapes.
They observed how 19 children aged between 4 and 8 interacted with a humanoid Nao robot in a learning game in which each child had to draw the shape that corresponded to an English word such as ‘circle’, ‘square’, ‘crescent’, or ‘heart’.
The researchers operated the robot from a room next to the classroom so that it appeared weak and feeble, and the children were encouraged to take on the role of carers. The robot could then either act as an instructor, drawing the correct shape for the child, or make mistakes and act as if it didn’t know the answer.


Chicago Teachers Union on Strike – Administration offered 16% Salary Increase over 4 Years, Charter Schools Unaffected

Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Joel Hood and Kristen Mack:

“This is about as much as we can do,” Vitale said. “There is only so much money in the system.”
The district said it offered teachers a 16 percent pay raise over four years and a host of benefit proposals.
“This is not a small commitment we’re handing out at a time when our fiscal situation is really challenged,” Vitale said.
Lewis said the two sides are close on teacher compensation but the union has serious concerns about the cost of health benefits, the makeup of the teacher evaluation system and job security.

More from
Justin Katz and Daily Kos.

Chicago teachers are officially on strike.We stand with @ctulocal1 because they are fighting for what is best for our students.

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) September 10, 2012


Analysis: Striking Chicago teachers take on national education reform.

Chicago teachers walk picket lines for first time in 25 years.
Update: Madison Teachers’, Inc. [PDF] on the CTU Strike:

MTI Stands with Chicago Teachers
In August, over 90% of the members of the Chicago Teachers’ Union voted for authorization to strike. Our CTU brothers and sisters have long been fighting against the charter school initiatives supported by Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel and a Democratic city council. On August 22, several MTI members attended a “Solidarity with CTU” night at SCFL. MTI members made up almost half the room. CTU member Becca Kelly spoke passionately about the injustice, inequity and blatant racism present in Chicago Public School policies and closures. In an interview, Chicago Teachers’ Union President Karen Lewis stated, “Our students deserve smaller class sizes, a robust, well-rounded curriculum, and in-school services that address their social, emotional, intellectual and health needs. They deserve culturally-sensitive non-biased and equitable education, especially students with IEPs, emergent bilingual students and early childhood children. And all of our students deserve professional teachers who are treated as such, fully resourced school buildings and a school system that partners with parents.” This is what the CTU is fighting for.
This past year CTU fought side by side with parents to halt 17 schools closings or “turn arounds” in the city. The parents did secure a meeting with the city council, but all 17 schools were closed. Next year, Kelly shared, there are over 70 Chicago Public Schools identified for “turn around or closing.”
On August 22, the MTI Board voted unanimously to support the resolutions put forth by the CTU. The MTI Board also recommended further fundraising efforts. MTI President Kerry Motoviloff spoke in support of the CTU that evening. She called for MTI members to stand with our CTU brothers and sisters as they stood with us when we called them. Speaking of the anti-worker movement, she said, “This is not a Madison issue. This is not a Chicago issue. This is not a Wisconsin issue. This is not even limited to a union issue. This is a worker issue.” She continued, “Scott Walker, Rahm Emanuel, they cannot define us. They can make things difficult. They can give us hoops to jump thorough. They can try to throw us off our focus to play defense. But the more we control our message, our voice, the more potent our acts become. This is all one fight. We are all one movement. We will win this.” The Chicago Teachers Union has published a booklet and a page of 10 talking points, both can be downloaded in PDF on the CTU website. Members are encouraged to visit it for more details. MTI will keep members abreast of future solidarity actions.

CTU Parent Flyer (PDF) and CTU in the news (PDF).
Stephanie Banchero:

The Chicago battle has pitted Karen Lewis, one of the country’s most vocal labor leaders, against Mr. Emanuel, one of its most prominent mayors and the former White House chief of staff for President Barack Obama. The Democratic mayor has made efforts to overhaul the city’s public education a centerpiece of his administration.
The two sides have been negotiating for months over issues including wages, health-care benefits and job security. The city has offered teachers a 3% pay raise the first year and 2% annual raises for the next three years. The average teacher salary in Chicago is about $70,000.
On Sunday night, city officials and union leaders said the wage issues aren’t the sticking point. Rather, the two sides are at loggerheads over a new teacher-evaluation system and how much of it should be weighted on student test scores, and over job security for teachers laid off from low-performing schools.


A Look At The Changes To D.C.’S Teacher Evaluation System

Matthew Di Carlo:

D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) recently announced a few significant changes to its teacher evaluation system (called IMPACT), including the alteration of its test-based components, the creation of a new performance category (“developing”), and a few tweaks to the observational component (discussed below). These changes will be effective starting this year.
As with any new evaluation system, a period of adjustment and revision should be expected and encouraged (though it might be preferable if the first round of changes occurs during a phase-in period, prior to stakes becoming attached). Yet, despite all the attention given to the IMPACT system over the past few years, these new changes have not been discussed much beyond a few quick news articles.
I think that’s unfortunate: DCPS is an early adopter of the “new breed” of teacher evaluation policies being rolled out across the nation, and any adjustments to IMPACT’s design – presumably based on results and feedback – could provide valuable lessons for states and districts in earlier phases of the process.
Accordingly, I thought I would take a quick look at three of these changes.


Utah ed leaders: Share teacher data with parents

Lisa Schencker:

Parents may soon be able to learn how their children’s individual teachers rate when it comes to student achievement.
But the general public will not be given access to that information.
The Utah state school board jumped this week into what’s become a national debate over whether individual teacher performance data should be released publicly. The board voted 9-6 on Friday to encourage school principals to share classroom-level achievement data with parents who ask for it. But the data will not be posted publicly, meaning nonparents will not have access to it, and parents will not likely be able to see that information for schools other than their own.


This Morning @ Madison’s Thoreau Elementary School While Voting; Latest Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter



The 2012 Wisconsin recall election primary is today. Teacher appreciation week is underway as well.
teacher-appreciation.info

Teachers – the people who educate us and give us the vital knowledge which we need to live our lives. They encourage, support, discipline and prepare us for the road ahead and now it’s time for us to show them our appreciation. Teacher Appreciation Week begins on the 7th until the 11th of May 2012, which will be the perfect opportunity for us to show teachers how thankful we are for their support. So boys and girls, it’s time for us to demonstrate how much our teachers mean to us, let’s all say a big thank you to the people who work really hard so that we can have a better future.
The 8th of May 2012 will mark Teacher Appreciation Day and students all across America will show their appreciation by rewarding their teachers with lovely gifts. These gifts can come in a variety of shapes and sizes – remember, it’s the thought that counts! Your school will also have a special schedule lined up which will provide many outlets for you to show how much you’re teacher means to you. Maybe you could write your teacher a poem or even a story about your favorite memory. You may also choose to make you’re teacher a “best teacher in the world” award, and present it to him or her during the week.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF):

If you are not among those who voted early, be sure you vote tomorrow. The terrible legislation, Act 10, which has put your economic security and your employment security at risk would not be on
the books if voter turnout in 2010 had been as great as in 2008. 812,086 fewer people voted in Wisconsin in 2010 than in 2008. Governor Walker won by only 124,638. Every MTI member doing their part will help reverse Act 10 and restore your rights and security. No matter who wins the primary, we need ALL HANDS ON DECK to rid our state of Governor Walker’s divisive approach to balancing the budget on the backs of working families, cuts to public education, women’s health and the dismantling of the safety net, in favor of continued tax breaks to out-of-state corporate interests funding his campaign and his legal defense fund. The far-right is trying to make Wisconsin the model for how to break unions. Join those standing up against Act 10 by ensuring that everyone votes on June 5!
MTI Faculty Representatives will schedule a meeting at each work site to discuss the effective ways to increase voter turnout. Make contact with friends and family, encourage them to vote, make a phone call or send a note or email the importance of this election. Personal contact makes a big difference.
MTI members will be making calls to union households from the Labor Temple and participating in door-to-door contacts. These efforts are aimed at reaching the infrequent voters, particularly those who voted in 2008 and did not vote in 2010. We need them to assure success. This election will directly impact the future of your profession, your pay and your benefits, your security and the future of public education.
Action is needed to assure success. See www.madisonteachers.org for ways to get involved.


How can schools teach students to be more innovative? Offer hands-on classes and don’t penalize failure

Tony Wagner:

Most of our high schools and colleges are not preparing students to become innovators. To succeed in the 21st-century economy, students must learn to analyze and solve problems, collaborate, persevere, take calculated risks and learn from failure. To find out how to encourage these skills, I interviewed scores of innovators and their parents, teachers and employers. What I learned is that young Americans learn how to innovate most often despite their schooling–not because of it.
Though few young people will become brilliant innovators like Steve Jobs, most can be taught the skills needed to become more innovative in whatever they do. A handful of high schools, colleges and graduate schools are teaching young people these skills–places like High Tech High in San Diego, the New Tech high schools (a network of 86 schools in 16 states), Olin College in Massachusetts, the Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford and the MIT Media Lab. The culture of learning in these programs is radically at odds with the culture of schooling in most classrooms.


Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter

Madison Teachers Inc 92K PDF Newsletter:

EMOCRACY IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT. That is one message that should be evident with all that has happened in the last year. A functioning democracy requires an informed and engaged citizenry. Such is as true with union democracy as it is in a political democracy. MTI is a union of 4,700 members in five bargaining units, each with Bylaws enabling democratic governance to ensure the union reflects the will of its members. Each MTI unit elects its leadership – every member has a vote, and is free to seek office. Also, Collective Bargaining Agreements are subject to member ratification, with every member having a vote. Similarly, the MTI Budget is enacted only after approval by the MTI Finance Committee and by approval by the MTI Joint Fiscal Group, which is comprised of representatives proportionate to the membership of each of the five bargaining units. But,just like the right of suffrage cannot ensure voter participation, neither can union Bylaws ensure member participation in the union. Only you can. YOU ARE THE UNION.
In the coming months, your union will be engaging in a number of initiatives to further engage individuals in discussion about your union, what we have achieved together, what is at risk, and where we can go from the terrible situation created by Governor Walker’s Act 10. Beginning with a Member Engagement Survey which is being sent to the personal e-mail addresses of all MTI members who have shared their email address with the Union from all five bargaining units. Members are encouraged to take ten minutes to complete the on-line survey and share their thoughts. If you have not already provided your personal e-mail address to MTI, please do so now by contacting kantzlerr@madisonteachers.org. Those for whom MTI does not have a personal email address may access the survey on MTI’s webpage www.madisonteachers.org or by calling MTI Headquarters (257-0491).


The Headless Horseman (Teacher-Proof Rides Again)

Jeremiah Chafee via Will Fitzhugh:

The high school English department in which I work recently spent a day looking at what is called an “exemplar” from the new Common Core State Standards, and then working together to create our own lessons linked to that curriculum. An exemplar is a prepackaged lesson which is supposed to align with the standards of the Common Core. The one we looked at was a lesson on “The Gettysburg Address.”
The process of implementing the Common Core Standards is under way in districts across the country as almost every state has now signed onto the Common Core, (some of them agreeing to do in hopes of winning Race to the Top money from Washington D.C.). The initiative is intended to ensure that students in all parts of the country are learning from the same supposedly high standards.
As we looked through the exemplar, examined a lesson previously created by some of our colleagues, and then began working on our own Core-related lessons, I was struck by how out of sync the Common Core is with what I consider to be good teaching. I have not yet gotten to the “core” of the Core, but I have scratched the surface, and I am not encouraged.
Here are some of the problems that the group of veteran teachers with whom I was with at the workshop encountered using the exemplar unit on “The Gettysburg Address.”

Each teacher read individually through the exemplar lesson on Lincoln’s speech. When we began discussing it, we all expressed the same conclusion: Most of it was too scripted. It spelled out what types of questions to ask, what types of questions not to ask, and essentially narrowed any discussion to obvious facts and ideas from the speech.
In some schools, mostly in large urban districts, teachers are forced by school policy to read from scripted lessons, every day in every class. For example, all third-grade teachers do the same exact lessons on the same day and say exactly the same things. (These districts often purchase these curriculum packages from the same companies who make the standardized tests given to students.)
Scripting lessons is based on several false assumptions about teaching. They include:

  • That anyone who can read a lesson aloud to a class can teach just as well as experienced teachers;
  • That teaching is simply the transference of information from one person to another;
  • That students should not be trusted to direct any of their own learning;
  • That testing is the best measure of learning.

Put together, this presents a narrow and shallow view of teaching and learning.
Most teachers will tell you that there is a difference between having a plan and having a script. Teachers know that in any lesson there needs to be some wiggle room, some space for discovery and spontaneity. But scripted cookie-cutter lessons aren’t interested in that; the idea is that they will help students learn enough to raise their standardized test scores.
Yet study after study has shown that even intense test preparation does not significantly raise test scores, and often causes stress and boredom in students. Studies have also shown that after a period of time, test scores plateau, and it is useless, even counter-productive educationally, to try to raise test scores beyond that plateau.

Another problem we found relates to the pedagogical method used in the Gettysburg Address exemplar that the Common Core calls “cold reading.”
This gives students a text they have never seen and asks them to read it with no preliminary introduction. This mimics the conditions of a standardized test on which students are asked to read material they have never seen and answer multiple choice questions about the passage.
Such pedagogy makes school wildly boring. Students are not asked to connect what they read yesterday to what they are reading today, or what they read in English to what they read in science.
The exemplar, in fact, forbids teachers from asking students if they have ever been to a funeral because such questions rely “on individual experience and opinion,” and answering them “will not move students closer to understanding the Gettysburg Address.”
(This is baffling, as if Lincoln delivered the speech in an intellectual vacuum; as if the speech wasn’t delivered at a funeral and meant to be heard in the context of a funeral; as if we must not think about memorials when we read words that memorialize. Rather, it is impossible to have any deep understanding of Lincoln’s speech without thinking about the context of the speech: a memorial service.)
The exemplar instructs teachers to “avoid giving any background context” because the Common Core’s close reading strategy “forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all.” What sense does this make?
Teachers cannot create such a “level playing field” because we cannot rob any of the students of the background knowledge they already possess. Nor can we force students who have background knowledge not to think about that while they read. A student who has read a biography of Lincoln, or watched documentaries about the Civil War on PBS or the History Channel, will have the “privilege” of background knowledge beyond the control of the teacher. Attempting to create a shallow and false “equality” between students will in no way help any of them understand Lincoln’s speech.
(As a side note, the exemplar does encourage teachers to have students “do the math:” subtract four score and seven from 1863 to arrive at 1776. What is that if not asking them to access background knowledge?)
Asking questions about, for example, the causes of the Civil War, are also forbidden. Why? These questions go “outside the text,” a cardinal sin in Common Core-land.
According to the exemplar, the text of the speech is about equality and self-government, and not about picking sides. It is true that Lincoln did not want to dishonor the memory of the Southern soldiers who fought and died valiantly. But does any rational person read “The Gettysburg Address” and not know that Lincoln desperately believed that the North must win the war? Does anyone think that he could speak about equality without everyone in his audience knowing he was talking about slavery and the causes of the war? How can anyone try to disconnect this profoundly meaningful speech from its historical context and hope to “deeply” understand it in any way, shape, or form?

Here’s another problem we found with the exemplar: The teacher is instructed in the exemplar to read the speech aloud after the students have read it to themselves; but, it says, “Do not attempt to ‘deliver’ Lincoln’s text as if giving the speech yourself but rather carefully speak Lincoln’s words clearly to the class.”
English teachers love Shakespeare; when we read to our classes from his plays, we do not do so in a dry monotone. I doubt Lincoln delivered his address in as boring a manner as the Common Core exemplar asks. In fact, when I read this instruction, I thought that an interesting lesson could be developed by asking students to deliver the speech themselves and compare different deliveries in terms of emphasis, tone, etc.
The exemplar says, “Listening to the Gettysburg Address is another way to initially acquaint students with Lincoln’s powerful and stirring words.” How, then, if the teacher is not to read it in a powerful and stirring way? The most passionate speech in Romeo and Juliet, delivered poorly by a bad actor, will fall flat despite the author’s skill.

Several years ago, our district, at the demand of our state education department, hired a consultant to train teachers to develop literacy skills in students. This consultant and his team spent three years conducting workshops and visiting the district. Much of this work was very fruitful, but it does not “align” well with the Common Core.
The consultant encouraged us to help students make connections between what they were reading and their own experience, but as you’ve seen, the Common Core exemplar we studied says not to.
Was all that work with the consultant wasted?
At one point during the workshop, we worked with a lesson previously created by some teachers. It had all the hallmarks of what I consider good teaching, including allowing students to make connections beyond the text.
And when it came time to create our own lessons around the exemplar, three colleagues and I found ourselves using techniques that we know have worked to engage students — not what the exemplar puts forth.
The bottom line: The Common Core exemplar we worked with was intellectually limiting, shallow in scope, and uninteresting. I don’t want my lessons to be any of those things.


Dumbing down of state education has made Britain more unequal than 25 years ago; In the name of equality, anti-elitist teachers are betraying the hopes of the young.

Toby Young:

A controversy broke out on Twitter earlier this week about an article in the Times Educational Supplement in which a teacher called Jonny Griffiths describes a conversation with a bright sixth-former who’s worried about his exam results. “Apart from you, Michael, who cares what you get in your A-levels?” he says. “What is better: to go to Cambridge with three As and hate it or go to Bangor with three Cs and love it?”
The controversy was not about whether the teacher was right to discourage his student to apply to Cambridge – no one thought that, obviously – but whether the article was genuine. Was Jonny Griffiths a real teacher or the fictional creation of a brilliant Tory satirist? Most people found it hard to believe that a teacher who didn’t want his pupils to do well could be in gainful employment.
Alas, Mr Griffiths is all too real. Since 2009, when I first mooted the idea of setting up a free school devoted to academic excellence, I’ve come across dozens of examples of the same attitude, all equally jaw-dropping.

We’ve certainly seen such initiatives locally. They include English 10, Connected Math and the ongoing use of Reading Recovery.
Perhaps Wisconsin’s Read to Lead initiative offers some hope with its proposal to tie teacher licensing to teacher content knowledge.
Related: Examinations for teachers, past and present.
There are certainly many parents who make sure that their children learn what is necessary through tutors, third parties, personal involement, camps, or online services. However, what about the children who don’t have such family resources and/or awareness?


It’s The Teacher!

Harrison Blackmond:

My views about education are, like many others, informed by my own experiences. Born the son of a black sharecropper in rural Alabama near the end of WWII, I attended segregated schools for most of my early years of education, including the first three. And, my teachers in Alabama were all black, all female. The remainder of my primary and secondary schooling was in low income, mostly black communities in Cincinnati, Ohio. All of my teachers in Cincinnati were white and mostly female. I had both good and bad educational experiences in Alabama and Ohio. The one thing these experiences had in common was that those experiences, both good and bad, were determined by the quality of teachers I had. No surprise there.
What is surprising is that the good teachers I had overcame all the “social and economic disabilities” a student like me brought to class with him. My parents were typical of most black families: uneducated or under-educated. My father had no education and could not read or write. My mother had a fifth or sixth grade education. So she could read and write, but knew little about how urban education systems worked. We were very poor, living on the largess of the landowners where we lived in Alabama and on welfare most of the time in Cincinnati. I worked at school and after school from seventh grade on. My experience was not atypical. Most of my classmates had similar stories. Some of us succeeded against great odds. The ones who did succeed educationally did so because there were teachers along the way who encouraged, inspired, and demanded our best.


Teach to the Test? Most of the problems with testing have one surprising source: cheating by school administrators and teachers.

Richard P. Phelps, via a kind email:

Every year, the education magazine Phi Delta Kappan hires the Gallup Organization to survey American opinion on the public schools. Though Gallup conducts the poll, education grandees selected by the editors of the Kappan write the questions. In 2007 the poll asked, “Will the current emphasis on standardized tests encourage teachers to ‘teach to the tests,’ that is, concentrate on teaching their students to pass the tests rather than teaching the subject, or don’t you think it will have this effect?”
The key to the question, of course, is the “rather than”–the assumption by many critics that test preparation and good teaching are mutually exclusive. In their hands, “teach to the test” has become an epithet. The very existence of content standards linked to standardized tests, in this view, narrows the curriculum and restricts the creativity of teachers–which of course it does, in the sense that teachers in standards-based systems cannot organize their instructional time in any fashion they prefer.
A more subtle critique is that teaching to the test can be good or bad. If curricula are carefully developed by educators and the test is written with curricula in mind, then teaching to the test means teaching students the knowledge and skills we agree they ought to learn–exactly what our teachers are legally and ethically obligated to do.


The courage of Kaleem Caire

Dave Cieslewicz:

Kaleem Caire has only been back in Madison for less than two years, but he sure has grabbed our attention.
Caire didn’t waste any time after coming home from a successful private sector career on the East Coast to be the new president for the Urban League of Greater Madison, starting to shake up the local establishment more or less immediately upon arrival. He has been pushing a bold proposal to attack the long-standing issue of minority underachievement in the Madison public schools. His idea for the Madison Preparatory Academy was vetted well in Nathan Comp’s cover story for Isthmus last week.
For well over a year now, Caire has been shuttling between the district administration, Madison Teachers, Inc. (MTI) union leaders, school board members, parents, editorial boards and community meetings fighting for this idea.
In response to union and district administration concerns, he changed the proposal to make the school an “instrumentality” of the district, meaning it would be under school board control and be staffed by MTI member teachers. But that proposal came in at a cost for the district of $13 million over five years. Superintendent Dan Nerad, for whom I have a lot of respect, told the League that he couldn’t support anything over $5 million.


Duncan encourages states to ditch No Child Left Behind

Prescott Carlson:

A week after President Obama said he planned to rollback No Child Left Behind requirements, a majority of states have indicated they’re on board with the plan, and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is encouraging others to do the same.
In a recent appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Duncan said that he wants “to get out of the way of the states,” and that teachers need “room to move and we can’t keep beating down from Washington.”
In a letter to state education officials, Duncan stated that he was encouraging state and local government agencies to request waivers to NCLB, which Duncan says he is able to enact through a section in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The new waivers will provide flexibility to school curriculum, provided that the governing bodies meet certain requirements.


Madison Prep and Teacher’s Union Collaborate: What’s it all about?

Kaleem Caire, via email:

October 3, 2011
Dear Friends & Colleagues.
As the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times newspapers reported over the weekend, the Urban League of Greater Madison, the new Board of Madison Preparatory Academy and Madison Teachers, Inc., the local teachers’ union, achieved a major milestone last Friday in agreeing to collaborate on our proposed charter schools for young men and women.
After a two-hour meeting and four months of ongoing discussions, MTI agreed to work “aggressively and proactively” with Madison Prep, through the existing collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District, to ensure the school achieves its diversity hiring goals; educational mission and staff compensation priorities; and staff and student performance objectives.
Where we started.
In March 2011, we submitted a proposal to MMSD’s Board of Education to start an all-boys public charter school that would serve 120 boys beginning in the 2012-13 school year: 60 boys in sixth grade and 60 boys in seventh grade. We proposed that the school would operate as a “non-instrumentality” charter school, which meant that Madison Prep would not employ teachers and other relevant support staff that were members of MTI’s collective bargaining unit. We also proposed a budget of $14,471 per pupil, an amount informed by budgets numbers shared with us by MMSD’s administration. MMSD’s 2010-11 budget showed the projected to spend $14,800 per student.
Where we compromised.
A. Instrumentality: As part of the final proposal that the Urban League will submit to MMSD’s Board of Education for approval next month, the Urban League will propose that Madison Prep operate as an instrumentality of MMSD, but have Madison Preparatory Academy retain the autonomy of governance and management of both the girls and boys charter schools. MTI has stated that they have no issue with this arrangement.
What this means is that Madison Prep’s teachers, guidance counselor, clerical staff and nurse will be members of the MTI bargaining unit. As is required under the current CBA, each position will be appropriately compensated for working extra hours to accommodate Madison Prep’s longer school day and year. These costs have been built into our budget. All other staff will employed by Madison Preparatory Academy, Inc. and the organization will contract out for some services, as appropriate.
B. Girls School Now: When we began this journey to establish Madison Prep, we shared that it was our vision to establish a similar girls school within 12-24 months of the boys school starting. To satisfy the concerns of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction about how Madison Prep complies with federal Title IX regulations, we offered to start the girls school at the same time. We have since accelerated the girls school in our planning and look forward to opening the girls and boys schools in August 2012 with 60 sixth grade boys and 60 sixth grade girls. We will add one grade per year in each school until we reach a full compliment of 6th – 12th grades and 840 students total.
C. Costs: Over the past six months, we have worked closely with MMSD’s administration to identify an appropriate budget request for Madison Prep. Through an internal analysis of their spending at the secondary level, MMSD recently reported to us that they project to spend $13,207 per pupil on the actual education of children in their middle and high schools. To address school board members’ concerns about the costs of Madison Prep, we worked hard to identify areas to trim spending without compromising our educational mission, student and staffing needs, and overall school effectiveness. We’ve since reduced our request to $11,478 per pupil in Madison Prep’s first year of operation, 2012-13. By year five, our request decreases to $11,029 per pupil. Based on what we have learned about school spending in MMSD and the outstanding educational needs of students that we plan to address, we believe this is a reasonable request.
Why we compromised.
We have more information. After months of deliberation, negotiation and discussion with Board of Education members, school district administration, the teacher’s union and community stakeholders, we’ve been able to identify what we believe is a clear path to getting Madison Prep approved; a path that we hope addresses the needs and interests of all involved without compromising the mission, objectives and needs of our future students.
We believe in innovation and systemic change. We are very serious about promoting change and opportunity within our public schools, and establishing innovative approaches – including new schools – to respond to the educational needs, interests and challenges of our children, schools and community. Today’s children are tomorrow’s workforce; tomorrow’s leaders; tomorrow’s innovators; and tomorrow’s peacekeepers. We should have schools that prepare them accordingly. We are committed to doing our part to achieve this reality, including finding creative ways to break down boundaries rather than reinforce them.
The needs and desires of our children supersede all others. Children are the reward of life, and our children are our first priority. Our commitment is first and foremost to them. To this end, we will continue to seek ways to expand opportunities for them, advocate on their behalf and find ways to work with those with whom we have differences, even if it means we have to compromise to get there. It is our hope that other organizations and individuals will actively seek ways to do to the same.
We see the bigger picture. It would not serve the best interests of our community, our children, our schools or the people we serve to see parents of color and their children’s teachers at odds with each other over how best to deliver a quality education to their children. That is not the image we want to portray of our city. We sincerely hope that our recent actions will serve as a example to areas businesses, labor unions, schools and other institutions who hold the keys to opportunity for the children and families we serve.
Outstanding Issues.
Even though we have made progress, we are not out of the woods yet. We hope that over the next several weeks, the Board of Education will respond to your advocacy and work with us to provide the resources and autonomy of governance and leadership that are exceedingly important to the success of Madison Prep.
We look forward to finding common ground on these important objectives and realizing our vision that Greater Madison truly becomes the best place in the Midwest for everyone to live, learn and work.
Thank you for your courage and continued support.
Madison Prep 2012!
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Fax: 608-729-1205
www.ulgm.org


WEAC (Wisconsin Teacher Union): Who Benefits?

Why this area teacher chose the non-union option

Elijah Grajkowski:

If the teachers union is as wonderful as it claims, then it should have no problem attracting members, without the need to force teachers to join. How is this any different from any other professional organization that teachers, as professionals, may choose to join? It’s a question I have been pondering since I became a public school teacher in Wisconsin.
For years, I have chosen not to be a member of the union. However, this is a choice I didn’t exactly have before Gov. Scott Walker’s collective-bargaining bill became law. As a compulsory union state, where teachers are required to pay union dues as a condition of employment, the most I could hope for was a “fair share” membership, where the union refunded me a small portion of the money that was taken from my paycheck that lawyers have deemed “un-chargeable.”
Every September, after lengthy, bureaucratic and unadvertised hurdles, I would file my certified letter to try to withdraw my union membership. Then, the union would proceed to drag its feet in issuing my small refund. I often wondered why this kind of burden would be put on an individual teacher like me. Shouldn’t it be up to the organization to convince people and to sell its benefits to potential members afresh each year?
Why should I have to move mountains each fall to break ties with this group that I don’t want to be a part of in the first place? Something seemed dreadfully wrong with that picture.

Union’s efforts help all students, educators and schools

WEAC President Mary Bell:

I became a Wisconsin teacher more than 30 years ago. I entered my classroom on the first day of school with my eyes and heart wide open, dedicated to the education of children and to the promise public schools offer. I was part of our state’s longstanding education tradition.
Like many beginning teachers, I soon encountered the many challenges and opportunities educators face every day in schools. About 50% of new educators leave the profession within their first five years of teaching. New teachers need mentors, suggestions, support and encouragement to help them meet the individual needs of students (all learning at different speeds and in different ways) and teach life lessons that can’t be learned from textbooks.
That’s where the union comes in. In many ways, much of the work the Wisconsin Education Association Council does is behind the scenes: supporting new teachers through union-led mentoring programs and offering training and skill development to help teachers with their licenses and certification. Our union helps teachers achieve National Board Certification – the highest accomplishment in the profession – and provides hands-on training for support professionals to become certified in their fields. These are efforts that benefit all Wisconsin educators, not just a few, and no single educator could accomplish them all alone.


StoryCorps Launches National Teacher Initiative

W J Levay:

StoryCorps — a national oral history project whose interviews you’ve probably heard on public radio — kicked off its National Teacher Initiative earlier this week with AFT president Randi Weingarten participating at the White House event.
The project, which launched Sept. 19, celebrates and honors the courageous work of public school educators nationwide. “This is a fantastic opportunity to hear from teachers — the people who are closest to the kids,” said Weingarten. “Their stories will be a window to the world on today’s public education — what’s working, what’s not, and what we can do better to prepare our children for the 21st-century knowledge economy.”
StoryCorps is looking to partner with schools, districts, teachers unions, community groups, and others to conduct an on-site recording day, and will send their staff and equipment to schools or events if the local or state federation can guarantee that at least eight interview pairs that include at least one teacher are available to participate. Each interview takes 40 minutes, and the participants will receive a CD of their interview.


New technologies are promising, but what about the teachers?

Monica Bulger:

This post is not going to promise dramatic learning gains from using a new technology. It’s not one of those stories where at first a teacher was skeptical, but in the end, the classroom was like a sports movie where the technology scored the winning homerun. I feel skeptical when I read those stories. I don’t doubt the success, but I wonder whether the learning gains, increased student interest/participation, or higher levels of reported satisfaction have less to do with the iPad, blog, twitter stream, or virtual environment and more to do with who is in the classroom.
Cathy Davidson recently described an idyllic experience of teaching a course in which she and the students shared in the discovery of new applications of technologies for learning. She describes the process of developing the course, the thrill when the students actually invited and facilitated a guest lecture, and the ways in which the students challenged her to really be collaborative, even in grading.
If we step back for a moment, though, and consider a class with Davidson and those same students without the new technologies, what would the learning experience be like? I imagine it would still be exceptional, because Davidson is an obviously engaged teacher and the students are obviously engaged learners. She employs teaching strategies that were effective before the new technologies she describes. In particular, she encourages students to take ownership of their learning experience and creates a flexible environment to support whatever direction they take. When developing assignments, Davidson incorporates research in motivation, particularly students’ likelihood to put more effort into writing for an authentic audience. She also has deep experience with her topic and an obvious enthusiasm for both the content and the teaching. These factors are consistently linked to positive learning experiences in educational research. Additionally, the students clearly seem motivated to learn. She describes the class list as a diverse collection of disciplines, so the students appear to be choosing the course. They demonstrate active involvement with the assignments and content and even provide substantive feedback for future courses.


Raise for Verona superintendent leaves teachers, staff feeling betrayed

Susan Troller:

Coming out of negotiations this spring, Verona School District teachers and staff felt hopeful. In the face of unprecedented cuts in state aid to public schools, they were encouraged by the words of their administrators and School Board members about the value of shared sacrifice and the importance of pulling together to ensure a quality education for the district’s students.
Then, last week, the School Board gave district Superintendent Dean Gorrell a more than 7 percent raise.
Now many Verona teachers and support staff — education aides, cooks and custodians, among others — feel betrayed, both by their School Board and their administration. They say it’s not the additional money — just under $9,500 — that Gorrell will receive on top of his $130,000 annual salary, but the principle involved.
“It’s not the dollar figure,” insists Jennifer Murphy, a high school math teacher who is president of the Verona Area Education Association, the union representing the teachers.


When teachers weren’t maligned

Craig Barbian:

When I was growing up, there was a special mystique about teachers. They were looked up to and respected. No matter if you liked a teacher or not, you appreciated his or her efforts to educate children and prepare them for their future, no matter what that future would be.
Today, teachers are being portrayed as self-centered union lackeys who feel entitled to extraordinary benefits provided by taxpayers. Teachers appear to have suddenly morphed from members of a noble profession to members of the world’s oldest profession. What a turnaround.
My teachers over the years left an indelible mark on me and the person I became. They helped shape me, gave me encouragement and taught me to think for myself and question the status quo.
My first-grade teacher was Miss Darling (honestly). She was a sweet lady who I remember for her kindness and her patience as I struggled to master the simple act of tying my shoes. It has been almost 50 years since then, but I remember her clearly, drying my tears of frustration and embarrassment and helping me practice until I could finally tie my shoes.


Advocating Teacher Content Knowledge: Lessons From Finland #1 – Teacher Education and Training

Bob Compton:

One of the many things I learned producing my film The Finland Phenomenon, was the importance of setting a very high standard for the education and training of teachers.
Finland’s high school teachers are required to have both a Bachelors and Masters degree in the subject they teach (e.g. – math, physics, history, etc) combined with one-year of pedagogical training with very heavy emphasis in real classroom teaching experience under the guidance of an outstanding seasoned teacher.
By contrast, most U.S. States require only a Bachelors degree from a college of education with an emphasis in the subject to be taught – and frequently that subject matter is taught by professors in the Education School, not in the actual subject department. Think of it as content and rigor “light” for teachers.
So, what should America do to apply this obvious lesson from Finland? My thoughts:
1- each U.S. State needs to cut off the supply of teachers not sufficiently prepared to teach this generation at its source. The source is colleges of education. A State legislature and Governor can change the requirements to be a teacher in their State. All it takes is courage to withstand the screams from colleges of education – the sacred cash cow of most universities.
2- To teach at the high school level, a State should require the prospective teacher to have at least an undergraduate degree in the subject they plan to teach and from the department that teaches that subject (e.g. – teaching math? Require a B.S. from the Math department).


Teacher Appreciation

Susan O’Doherty:

I was a little shell-shocked after reading the comments on Aeron’s June 15 post. I hadn’t looked at them when I wrote last week about my enjoyment of her column, and I was amazed at the vitriol. I have taught only a few brief seminars myself, and each has taken a gazillion hours of preparation, as well as intense, sustained focus and concentration during the actual teaching hours. I am in awe of real teachers’ dedication and stamina.
So I want to use this week’s post to express appreciation for a great teacher I am in the process of taking leave of.
Three years ago, when I registered for my first singing class in over 20 years, I had to walk around the block several times to get up the courage to walk in the door. I had been traumatized by a voice teacher, until my singing voice got so small and weak it almost disappeared. I hadn’t tried to sing in front of others for years, until Ben started asking me to sing with him. The thought made me so anxious I knew I needed professional help.
A friend walked me to the first class, to be sure I didn’t succumb to the urge to hightail it home at the last minute. When Martha, the teacher, asked each of us to articulate what it was that we wanted from the class, all I could think to say was, “I want to be able to get through a song without passing out.”


Letters to the WiSJ on Madison Teachers’ John Matthews

Merle Lebakken:

Following the exploits of Madison Teachers Inc. leader John Matthews in the State Journal makes it obvious that he is a negotiator extraordinaire.
He’s managed to have his people on one side of the “negotiating table” and at least some he helped elect on the other side, so it is not a “bargaining table” but a “collaboration table.”
Maybe, however, he has gone too far in not enthusiastically promoting measuring teacher performance, as encouraged by President Barack Obama. Now it seems Wisconsin’s taxpayers need to take back some of the functions, like measuring employee performance, usually ascribed to management but, through negotiation, given to the employee.

Thomas Kavanagh:

I appreciated the respect for John Matthews’ achievements conveyed by Madison labor mediator Howard Bellman’s comment in Sunday’s article, and his concern about the possible effect of Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to destroy the Madison teachers union and public employee unions throughout Wisconsin:
“It would be like somebody watching all their paintings burn up… What he’s accomplished over the years would have been just a memory.”
However, that analogy fails to give consideration to the value of his work beyond creating a robust and effective union. For the artist, the joy of the creation might be lasting, but the product of his efforts would be gone. That would not be the case for what Matthew’s efforts have produced.

Bob Hartwig:

fter encouraging Madison teachers in February to stage an illegal sick-out, which robbed children of educational opportunities and caused disruption for many parents, he now says teachers are “ready to do whatever it takes” to continue the protest of state budget reductions. He was also quoted as saying; “It’s going to get down and dirty.”
Wow! This kind of rhetoric coming from a 71-year-old man who receives about $310,000 in annual income and benefits from union fees. Makes you ask the question: What is his priority?


Education Psychology: When should you teach children, and when should you let them explore?

The Economist:

IT IS one of the oldest debates in education. Should teachers tell pupils the way things are or encourage them to find out for themselves? Telling children “truths” about the world helps them learn those facts more quickly. Yet the efficient learning of specific facts may lead to the assumption that when the adult has finished teaching, there is nothing further to learn–because if there were, the adult would have said so. A study just published in Cognition by Elizabeth Bonawitz of the University of California, Berkeley, and Patrick Shafto of the University of Louisville, in Kentucky, suggests that is true.
Dr Bonawitz and Dr Shafto arranged for 85 four- and five-year-olds to be presented, during a visit to a museum, with a novel toy that looked like a tangle of coloured pipes and was capable of doing many different things. They wanted to know whether the way the children played with the toy depended on how they were instructed by the adult who gave it to them.
One group of children had a strictly pedagogical introduction. The experimenter said “Look at my toy! This is my toy. I’m going to show you how my toy works.” She then pulled a yellow tube out of a purple tube, creating a squeaking sound. Following this, she said, “Wow, see that? This is how my toy works!” and then demonstrated the effect again.


A Trial Run for School Standards That Encourage Deeper Thought

Fernanda Santos:

Until this year, Ena Baxter, an English teacher at Hillcrest High School in Queens, would often have her 10th graders compose papers by summarizing a single piece of reading material.
Last month, for a paper on the influence of media on teenagers, she had them read a survey on the effects of cellphones and computers on young people’s lives, a newspaper column on the role of social media in the Tunisian uprising and a 4,200-word magazine article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
A math teacher, José Rios, used to take a day or two on probabilities, drawing bell-shaped curves on the blackboard to illustrate the pattern known as normal distribution. This year, he stretched the lesson by a day and had students work in groups to try to draw the same type of graphic using the heights of the 15 boys in the class.


Teacher colleges balk at being rated Wisconsin schools say quality survey from national nonprofit and magazine won’t be fair

Erin Richards:

A controversial review of America’s teacher colleges has met resistance in Wisconsin, where education school leaders in the public and private sector say they will not voluntarily participate.
The National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit advocacy group, and U.S. News & World Report, known for its annual rankings of colleges, announced in January they would launch a first-ever review of the nation’s roughly 1,400 colleges of education. The recruitment and training of teachers have become a hot-button issue tied to education reform, but university system presidents in Wisconsin as well as New York, Georgia, Oregon and Kentucky have expressed misgivings about the process of assessing and ranking their education schools.
“While we welcome fair assessment and encourage public sharing of our strengths and weaknesses, we believe your survey will not accomplish these goals. We therefore wish to notify you that our entire membership has decided to stand united and not participate further in the survey process,” says an April 7 letter by Katy Heyning, president of the Wisconsin Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, and addressed to the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News. Heyning also is the dean of the College of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
The council, meanwhile, is filing open-records requests to get information about the public education schools in states that won’t provide it voluntarily. Arthur McKee, manager of teacher preparation programs at the NCTQ, said the council had not received the letter from Heyning. But it had received a letter from UW System President Kevin Reilly.
That letter from March 28 says that UW’s 13 teacher colleges declined to participate because of “serious concerns” about the survey’s methods of data collection, analysis and reporting.

Much more, here.


Blaska Blogs the smoking gun of the Madison teachers union’s illegal sick-out

David Blaska:

Only a fool would think that the sick out that closed down Madison schools for five days in February was anything but an illegal, union-coordinated, illegal strike.
But there are a lot of fools in Madison, aren’t there?
Now there is proof that the sickout was a premeditated, union-authorized job action — a phone tree of teachers calling other teachers to close down the schools. This kind of activity is prohibited by the union’s own contract and illegal in WI Statute Chapter 111.84(2)(e):
It is unfair practice for an employee individually or in concert with others: To engage in, induce or encourage any employees to engage in a strike, or a concerted refusal to work or perform their usual duties as employees.
The problem, of course, is finding an impartial prosecutor — but that would require a level of professionalism sorely lacking in the Doyle-appointed incumbent.


Next US education reform: Higher teacher quality

Christian Science Monitor
Compared with more than 70 economies worldwide, America’s high school students continue to rank only average in reading and science, and below average in math. But this sorry record for a wealthy nation can be broken if the US focuses on recruiting and keeping first-rate teachers.
That’s the conclusion of a new paper that looks at the latest achievement tests of 15-year-olds in the 34 developed countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as many other nations.
America has been trying to raise its academic standards for more than two decades, an effort that cannot be abandoned in tough times. But it can learn more from other countries about the difficult task of teacher training, selection, and compensation – even as cash-strapped states take on teacher unions.
The government-union wrangling would be less if both sides focused on quality investments in better teachers. The goal is not debatable. Studies show that matching quality teachers with disadvantaged students is an effective way to close the black-white achievement gap. Good teachers are more effective than small class sizes, for instance.
For starters, the United States needs to increase its pool of quality teachers. Almost half of its K-12 teachers come from the bottom third of college classes. Classroom leaders such as Singapore, South Korea, and Finland select from the top ranks. In Finland, only 1 in 10 applicants is accepted into teacher training.
Part of the hurdle in the US is compensation. Teaching offers job security but not great pay compared with other professions that top college graduates might choose. As states tussle over budgets, one solution might be to lower teacher benefits and end tenure while bulking up salaries.
And yet pay isn’t the only consideration. Last year, 11 percent of graduates from US elite colleges applied to the federally funded Teach for America program. Participants teach in low-achieving rural and urban districts for two years.
In Finland, teachers earn only about what their American counterparts do (US teacher pay starts, on average, at $39,000). The difference is that in Finland, teaching is a high-status, well-respected job, right up there with doctoring and lawyering.
Another US hurdle is teacher training. Many states require a master’s degree in education in order to be certified to teach. This automatically locks out a talented population such as second-career experts in a field who don’t want to invest the time or money in a graduate degree that’s often short on classroom skills and long on pedagogy.
President Obama’s “Race to the Top” fund encourages states through competitive grants to open up alternative, effective routes to teacher certification. Hopefully, that fund will survive budget cutting (same for Teach for America).
Public schools won’t be able to attract and keep high quality teachers if they don’t reward and develop them once they get into the classroom.
That’s next to impossible given the standard operating procedure of teacher unions. As the nation is witnessing, a rigid rule such as last-hired, first-fired lops off enthusiastic newcomers in favor of those with seniority. Experience is important in education, but it does not always add up to quality. Performance must be the determiner.
Unions need to accept that the main goal is high teacher performance and student outcomes, not job preservation. That’s what the teacher union did in Ontario, Canada, according to the paper based on the OECD findings.
Teachers in Ontario are heavily organized. Yet, in 2003, the union and the premier of Ontario reached a grand bargain based on the need to elevate student achievement.
“The educators, through their union, agreed to accept responsibility for their own learning and the learning of their students; the government agreed to supply all of the necessary support,” according to the report.
The paper, called “What the U.S. Can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Education Reform Efforts,” says that Ontario students subsequently shot up from the bottom to the top of test scores.
Investing in high quality teaching is necessary to boost US economic competitiveness. The study argues that the US also needs to elevate the teaching profession to one of high status and respect. But respect doesn’t come overnight. Government and educators will have to earn it by working together to improve teacher quality.


Madison School District reaches tentative contract agreement with teachers’ union

Matthew DeFour:

The Madison School District has reached a tentative agreement with all of its unions for an extension of their collective bargaining agreement through mid-2013.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said the agreement includes a 50 percent employee contribution to the pension plan. It also includes a five percentage point increase in employees’ health insurance premiums, and the elimination of a more expensive health insurance option in the second year.
Salaries would be frozen at current levels, though employees could still receive raises for longevity and educational credits.
The district said the deal results in savings of about $23 million for the district over the two-year contract.
The agreement includes no amnesty or pay for teachers who missed four days last month protesting Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to strip public employee collective bargaining rights. Walker’s signing of the bill Friday prompted the district and MTI to reach an agreement quickly

Channel3000:

A two-year tentative contract agreement has been reached between the Madison Metropolitan School District and the Madison Teachers Union for five bargaining units: teachers, substitute teachers, educational and special educational assistants, supportive educational employees and school security assistants.
District administrators, with the guidance of the Board of Education, and Madison Teacher Inc. reps negotiated from 9 a.m. Friday until 3 a.m. Saturday when the tentative agreements were completed.
Under details of the contract, workers would contribute 50 percent of the total money that’s being contribution to pension plans. That figure according to district officials, is believed to be very close to the 12 percent overall contribution that the budget repair bill was calling for. The overall savings to the district would be $11 million.

David Blaska

I present Blaska’s Red Badge of Courage award to the Madison Area Technical College Board. Its part-time teachers union would rather sue than settle until Gov. Scott Walker acted. Then it withdrew the lawsuit and asked the board for terms. No dice. “Times have changed,” said MATC’s attorney.
The Madison school board showed a rudimentary backbone when it settled a contract, rather hastily, with a newly nervous Madison teachers union.
The school board got $23 million of concessions over the next two years. Wages are frozen at current levels. Of course, the automatic pay track system remains, which rewards longevity.

NBC 15

The Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison Teachers, Inc. have reached tentative contract agreements for five bargaining units: teachers, substitute teachers, educational and special educational assistants, supportive educational employees, and school security assistants.
District administrators, with the guidance of the Board of Education, and MTI reps negotiated from 9:00 a.m. Friday until 3:00 a.m. Saturday when the tentative agreements were completed.
The Board of Education held a Special Meeting today at 2:00 p.m. and ratified the five collective bargaining agreements. The five MTI units must also ratify before the contracts take effect.
Summary of the agreements:


Providence plans to pink slip all teachers Due to Budget Deficit

Linda Borg:

The school district plans to send out dismissal notices to every one of its 1,926 teachers, an unprecedented move that has union leaders up in arms.
In a letter sent to all teachers Tuesday, Supt. Tom Brady wrote that the Providence School Board on Thursday will vote on a resolution to dismiss every teacher, effective the last day of school.
In an e-mail sent to all teachers and School Department staff, Brady said, “We are forced to take this precautionary action by the March 1 deadline given the dire budget outline for the 2011-2012 school year in which we are projecting a near $40 million deficit for the district,” Brady wrote. “Since the full extent of the potential cuts to the school budget have yet to be determined, issuing a dismissal letter to all teachers was necessary to give the mayor, the School Board and the district maximum flexibility to consider every cost savings option, including reductions in staff.” State law requires that teachers be notified about potential changes to their employment status by March 1.
“To be clear about what this means,” Brady wrote, “this action gives the School Board the right to dismiss teachers as necessary, but not all teachers will actually be dismissed at the end of the school year.”

Providence’s 2010-2011 budget is $405,838,878 for 23,715 students ($17,113.17 per student). Locally, Madison’s per student spending this year is 15,490.13.
The Wisconsin Association of School Boards PDF:

The layoff clauses and the later deadlines for issuing layoff notices that are established by many of the layoff provisions in teacher collective bargaining agreements may be unavailable to districts if the budget repair bill passes in its current form. If this happens, the only way to reduce staff size for 2011-12 in some districts may be through the nonrenewal provisions of Wisconsin Statute 118.22. The absolute latest deadline for giving preliminary notice of nonrenewal to teachers for 2011-2012 would be February 28, 2011, but it would be preferable to have such notices issued by the 25th. Further, school districts that have always adhered to the section 118.22 nonrenewal deadlines to enact staff reductions must consider whether there is a need to issue additional preliminary notices of nonrenewal/staff reduction by the statutory deadline.
ACTION: WASB’s Employment and Labor Law Staff encourages all school districts to give public notice of a special school board meeting for Thursday February 25, 2011 (or Friday February 26th if meeting on the 25th is not possible).

WASB website.


Teaching in schools: Michael Gove wants to change how and what schools teach, as well as how they are organised

The Economist

ALLOWING teachers, parents, charities and religious groups to open new schools funded by the state, but independent of local authorities, is a central plank of the government’s plans for improving education in England. Despite the enthusiasm of the education secretary, Michael Gove, for such radical reform, take-up has been lacklustre: he has approved just 25 “free-school” proposals so far. Likewise his bid to encourage existing state schools to become academies–again, funded by the state but independent of local authorities–has failed to take off.
On November 24th Mr Gove unveiled his latest plan for curing ailing schools, this time by changing what is taught in them, and who does the teaching. He is thus revisiting the policy terrain on which the previous Labour government focused (arguing that “standards, not structures” were what mattered) until its final term in office.
Britain’s best independent schools attract pupils from around the world. But most British families cannot afford the steep fees such schools charge. Just 7% of British children are educated privately; the rest attend state schools, where standards are generally much lower. The Labour government doubled school spending in real terms during its 13 years in power; despite the splurge, the attainment gap between the two systems has widened.


Seattle Public Schools: A teachable moment – Inaccurate District Administration Data

Reuven Carlyle

It’s hard not to reflect carefully upon the Seattle Public School District’s dramatic acknowledgement that a major data point used by parents, educators, school board members and others to highlight the district’s quality is absolutely wrong. I have been thinking long and hard about this issue since it hit the newspaper last week. Without question, I have been one of the elected officials most guilty of perpetuating the (incorrect) data, and it doesn’t feel good.
While there are some who will see a more cynical conspiracy, I see a profoundly troubling mistake that needs to be discussed openly and courageously in all corners of our community.
The real issue is obviously not that a mistake was made. The district’s admission this week that a key piece of data is wildly inaccurate is more than an embarrassing glitch, it’s a symbolic reflection of a more systematic challenge facing many elected boards statewide that have fiduciary obligations to oversee billions in tax dollars and policy but lack access to the professional, independent staff to do the job.
School districts across the state and nation are well versed in the inconsistent arrangement by which part-time, unpaid community leaders (who campaign for the job) are then expected to volunteer thousands of hours without the ability to get the answers to their tough questions that may run counter to professional staff interests. The real issue is that the district’s administration didn’t strive to aggressively correct the inaccuracy from day one. They need to ask themselves why and, hopefully, share the truth with the community.


10 Ways Teachers Make a Difference

Education-Portal

Education is one of the building blocks of society. Educated individuals tend to be happier and healthier, and study after study has found that an educated populace leads to a stronger economy. So what’s behind all these educational benefits? Teachers. To show our appreciation, we here at Education Portal would like to take a moment to reflect on some of the ways in which teachers make a difference in our world.
1. Inspiring
Maybe your love of poetry was inspired by your first grade teacher reading Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends. Or perhaps you became an engineer because of that cool experiment in your fifth-grade science class. So often it is teachers who provide that initial inspiration that becomes a lifelong passion.
2. Encouraging
As a kid, this blogger never had any trouble with reading but was terrified by math. But with the patient encouragement of my teachers, I learned to like – and excel at – math all the way through calculus. When students say ‘I can’t,’ teachers are always there to say ‘yes you can.’


Putting Teachers to the Test

Carl Bialik

My print column this week examines the debate over so-called value-added measures for teachers, which evaluate their performance based on how much they improve their students’ standardized test scores.
Douglas Harris, associate professor of educational policy and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, is a cautious advocate of these measures, but points out that concerns about teaching to the test could be heightened if teachers, as well as principals and school districts, are evaluated based on test results. “Teacher can generate high value-added measures by drilling the test over and over,” Harris said.
If these measures catch on, they could also encourage more teachers to cheat. “If we start to place a lot of weight on these things, [you] have to expect some degree of malfeasance,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “You want the benefits to outweigh the costs, and you want to police it in a smart way.”
Will the benefits outweigh the costs? “That’s the big unknown,” Michael Hansen, a researcher in the Urban Institute’s Education Policy Center in Washington, D.C., wrote in an email. “What is known is that the way most districts currently hire, evaluate, and pay teachers is misaligned with the public goal of increasing overall student learning.”


Teachers, by the numbers A team of Times reporters is giving the public its first glimpse of some surprising findings on teachers and their performance in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Los Angeles Times:

The Los Angeles Unified School District has done an admirable job of collecting useful data about its teachers — which ones have the classroom magic that makes students learn and which ones annually let their students down. Yet it has never used that valuable information to analyze what successful teachers have in common, so that others can learn from them, or to let less effective teachers know how they’re doing.
For the record: This editorial says the federal Race to the Top grant program pushed states to make students’ test scores count for half or more of a teacher’s performance evaluation. Although the program has encouraged this by awarding its first grants to states that promised to do so, it has not formally required it.
If it weren’t for the work of a team of Times reporters, this information might have remained uselessly locked away. Now that the paper is reporting on the wide disparities among teachers, the public is getting its first glimpse of some surprising findings.

Marketplace has more as does Daniel Willingham.


Obama Defends Teacher Policy

Laura Meckler:

President Barack Obama on Thursday delivered a fresh call to hold teachers accountable for student achievement, defending his administration against complaints from unions, civil rights groups and Democratic lawmakers.
These groups, usually backers of the president, have objected to the administration’s Race to the Top program, which seeks to drive change at the local level through a competition for $4.3 billion in federal grants.
To qualify for funding, states are encouraged to promote charter schools and tie teacher pay to performance. Unions have questioned both goals.
Mr. Obama, defending his administration’s approach in a speech before the National Urban League, said teachers should be well paid, supported and treated like professionals but those who fail should be replaced.


Wisconsin Gubernatorial Candidate Mark Neumann Wants To Get Rid Of Teacher Certification

Channel3000.com, via a kind reader:

Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Neumann is proposing to get rid of state certification for teachers as part of an education reform plan.
Neumann also is proposing a series of incentives that will encourage private schools and public charter schools to compete with and replace failing public schools.
Neumann is outlining his plans during news conferences in Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay.
In a phone interview, he said the state should provide suggested qualifications for educators, but actual hiring decisions should be left up to local school boards, superintendents and principals.
Neumann acknowledges that many of his proposals would need approval from the Legislature.

Related: Janet Mertz: An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria.


Replacing the teacher replacements

Beatrice Motamedi:

There’s a Shakespearean echo in the reform-minded pronouncements about education emanating from the media these days.
“Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers,” urged a headline in the March 15 issue of Newsweek. A secondary headline observed: “In no other profession are workers so insulated from accountability.” Another thundered: “Bad Teachers: Reform Them or Retire Them?” The story pondered whether “educators are born or made.”
Although I’m a teacher, I can’t claim to know the answer to that question. But it does remind me of the moment in “Henry VI” in which Jack Cade, a pretender to the throne, boasts about the utopia he’ll create if he becomes king, saying he’ll slash the price of bread and encourage the drinking of beer.


Texas education schools need to do a better job preparing teachers

William McKenzie:

The National Council on Teacher Quality has come out with an assessment of how Texas’ schools of education prepare instructors for the classroom. The bottom line is some of our schools need a lot of work.
In this Viewpoints piece, David Chard, dean of SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development, is honest about the shortcomings of his program, which actually does okay on this survey. As we talk here about quality teachers, I hope we have more voices like Chard’s saying this is what we need to do to improve. Better that, than defensive reactions.
If you have time over the weekend, I encourage you to read Chard’s piece and this accompanying DMN story. The way in which teachers are prepared – or not prepared – directly affects the classroom.


“Anything But Knowledge”: “Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach”

from The Burden of Bad Ideas Heather Mac Donald, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000, pp. 82ff.
America’s nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation’s teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores–things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. “Let’s be honest,” darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University’s Teachers College last February. “What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?” It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation’s teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)–self-actualization, following one’s joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity–but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in “constructing one’s own knowledge,” or “contextualized knowledge.” Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to “professionalize” teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats’ pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in “Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education” that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
As with most education classes, the title of Professor Nelson’s course doesn’t give a clear sense of what it is about. Unfortunately, Professor Nelson doesn’t either. The semester began, she said in a pre-class interview, by “building a community, rich of talk, in which students look at what they themselves are doing by in-class writing.” On this, the third meeting of the semester, Professor Nelson said that she would be “getting the students to develop the subtext of what they’re doing.” I would soon discover why Professor Nelson was so vague.
“Developing the subtext” turns out to involve a chain reaction of solipsistic moments. After taking attendance and–most admirably–quickly checking the students’ weekly handwriting practice, Professor Nelson begins the main work of the day: generating feather-light “texts,” both written and oral, for immediate group analysis. She asks the students to write for seven minutes on each of three questions; “What excites me about teaching?” “What concerns me about teaching?” and then, the moment that brands this class as hopelessly steeped in the Anything But Knowledge credo: “What was it like to do this writing?”

(more…)


Building a Better Teacher

Elizabeth Green:

ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.
Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.
But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers’ instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn’t have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.


Teachers as reformers: L.A. Unified teachers won the right to run several new or underperforming schools. Can they pull it off?

Los Angeles Times Editorial:

Los Angeles schools did not undergo the transformation we had expected from the Public School Choice initiative, which in its first year opened more than 30 new or underperforming public schools to outside management. Top-notch charter operators applied for relatively few schools and then were removed from the running at the last minute. The school board once again mired itself in political maneuvers instead of putting students first.
What transformation there was came, more surprisingly, from the teachers. They agreed to allow and create more pilot schools, which are similar to charter schools but employ district personnel. They formed partnerships and, with the help of their union, United Teachers Los Angeles, drew up their own, often strong applications for revamping schools. It would be wrong to underestimate the effort and skills needed to pull this off. The time frame was short and the list of requirements long. Unlike charter operators, which submit such applications as a matter of course, the teachers had no particular background for this work. They met with parents who have long fumed that the schools discourage their participation. They listened. They responded.
This is a tremendous step in a school district where, too often, teachers and their union have not been the agents of change but impediments to it. In fact, had the process worked as it was supposed to, the reform initiative would have served as a much stronger application for federal Race to the Top funds than anything the Legislature came up with.


Teaching Without Gimmicks

Diana Senechal:

In discussions of “effective” teaching, we often hear about the “objectives” that teachers should spell out and repeat, the “learning styles” they should target, the “engagement” they should guarantee at every moment, and the constant encouragement and praise they should provide–all in the interest of raising test scores. The D.C. public schools IMPACT (the teacher assessment system for D.C. public schools) awards points to teachers who implement such practices; Teach For America addresses some of them in its forthcoming book.
Except for the misguided notion of targeting learning styles, none of these techniques is wrong in itself. But together they raise a barrier. Instead of bringing the subject closer to the students, this heap of tools proclaims: “No entrance! The subject is too hard without spelled-out skills, too boring without adornment, and too frustrating without pep talks and cheers!”
Worse still, such techniques take precedence over the lesson’s content. A literature teacher is evaluated not for her presentation of specific poems, but for stating the objectives, keeping all students “on task,” reminding them about the relation between hard work and success, using visuals and manipulatives, and, ultimately, raising the scores. It matters little, in such a system, whether the poem is excellent or trivial, what kind of insight the teacher brings, or what the students might take into their lives.


California’s neediest high school students have the least prepared teachers, study says

Mitchell Landsberg:

The neediest students in California high schools are being taught by the least prepared teachers, a new study shows.
Fewer than half the principals in high-poverty schools said their teachers had the skills to encourage critical thinking and problem-solving among their students, while more than two-thirds of their counterparts in wealthier communities said their teachers possessed those abilities, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning said in a study being released today.
The nonprofit center also found that teachers in the lowest-performing schools are more than twice as likely as those in the highest-achieving schools to be working without at least a preliminary credential.
The center’s study, “The Status of the Teaching Profession 2009,” is the latest to show that the most disadvantaged students don’t have access to the same quality of teaching as those in more affluent, high-achieving schools.

Jill Tucker has more.


How Teachers Learn to be Radicals

Sol Stern:

Imagine you are a parent with a child in fifth grade in an inner-city public school. One day your child comes home and reports that the teacher taught a lesson in class about the evils of U.S. military intervention in Latin America.
You also learn that after school the teacher took the children to a rally protesting U.S. military aid to the Contras, who were then opposing the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
The children made placards with slogans such as:
“Let them run their land!” “Help Central America, dont kill them.” “Give the Nicaraguans their freedom.”
Your child reports that the teacher encouraged the students to write about their day of protest in the class magazine and had high praise for the child who wrote the following description of the rally:
“On a rainy Tuesday in April some of the students from our class went to protest against the contras. The people in Central America are poor and bombed on their heads.”
A fantasy? An invention of some conspiracy-minded right-wing organization? Not at all. It happened exactly as described at a bilingual Milwaukee public school called La Escuela Fratney. The teacher who took the fifth-graders to the protest rally and indoctrinated them in international leftist politics is Robert Peterson.


NEA moves to help poor schools with best teachers

Greg Toppo:

The USA’s largest teachers union will encourage local chapters to ignore contract provisions that in the past have kept school districts’ best teachers out of schools that serve mostly poor and minority students.
Testifying Tuesday before the House education committee, National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel said the union, which represents about 3.2 million teachers and other workers, will ask local affiliates to draw up memoranda of understanding with local school districts that would “waive any contract language that prohibits staffing high-needs schools with great teachers.”
Van Roekel said the move is part of the union’s “Priority Schools” campaign that will also encourage “the most accomplished teachers-members” to start their teaching careers in high-needs schools, remain there or transfer there.
In the past, NEA has come under fire from critics for supporting contracts that allow experienced teachers with more seniority to transfer to schools that serve more middle-class children.


REACH day Wednesday; Pay Your Teachers Well; NO MORE ‘SCHOOL’S OUT FOR SUMMER’; comment; A New School Leader in New York; Dollars for Schools; A DC Schools Awakening; Bronx Principal’s Tough Love Gets Results; TFA Young Professionals event

1) A final reminder to please join me (Wednesday) at the REACH Awards Day from 10-12:30 at the Chase branch on 39th and Broadway (see full invite at the end of this email).
REACH (Rewarding Achievement; www.reachnyc.org) is a pay-for-performance initiative that aims to improve the college readiness of low-income students at 31 inner-city high schools in New York by rewarding them with up to $1,000 for each Advanced Placement exam they pass. I founded it, with funding from the Pershing Square Foundation and support from the Council of Urban Professionals.
This past year was the first full year of the program and I’m delighted to report very substantial gains in the overall number of students passing AP exams at the 31 schools, and an even bigger gain among African-American and Latino students (exact numbers will be released at the event). As a result, more than 1,200 student have earned nearly $1 MILLION in REACH Scholar Awards! (An additional $500,000 or so is going to their schools and educators.) Tomorrow the students will come to pick up their checks, Joel Klein will be the highlight of the press conference at 11am, and there will be a ton of media. I hope to see you there! You can RSVP to REACH@nycup.org.
2) A spot-on editorial in yesterday’s WSJ, which underscores the point I’ve been making for a long time: one shouldn’t get angry with unions for advancing the interests of their members — that’s what they’re supposed to do! — but it’s critical to understand that their interests and what’s best for children are often FAR apart… Pay Your Teachers Well Their children’s hell will slowly go by.

The conflicting interests of teachers unions and students is an underreported education story, so we thought we’d highlight two recent stories in Baltimore and New York City that illustrate the problem.
The Ujima Village Academy is one of the best public schools in Baltimore and all of Maryland. Students at the charter middle school are primarily low-income minorities; 98% are black and 84% qualify for free or reduced-price school meals. Yet Ujima Village students regularly outperform the top-flight suburban schools on state tests. In 2006, 2007 and 2008, Ujima Village students earned the highest eighth-grade math scores in Maryland. Started in 2002, the school has met or exceeded state academic standards every year–a rarity in a city that boasts one of the lowest-performing school districts in the country.
Ujima Village is part of the KIPP network of charter schools, which now extends to 19 states and Washington, D.C. KIPP excels at raising academic achievement among disadvantaged children who often arrive two or three grade-levels behind in reading and math. KIPP educators cite longer school days and a longer school year as crucial to their success. At KIPP schools, kids start as early as 7:30 a.m., stay as late as 5 p.m., and attend school every other Saturday and three weeks in the summer.
However, Maryland’s charter law requires teachers to be part of the union. And the Baltimore Teachers Union is demanding that the charter school pay its teachers 33% more than other city teachers, an amount that the school says it can’t afford. Ujima Village teachers are already paid 18% above the union salary scale, reflecting the extra hours they work. To meet the union demands, the school recently told the Baltimore Sun that it has staggered staff starting times, shortened the school day, canceled Saturday classes and laid off staffers who worked with struggling students. For teachers unions, this outcome is a victory; how it affects the quality of public education in Baltimore is beside the point.
Meanwhile, in New York City, some public schools have raised money from parents to hire teaching assistants. Last year, the United Federation of Teachers filed a grievance about the hiring, and city education officials recently ordered an end to the practice. “It’s hurting our union members,” said a UFT spokesman, even though it’s helping kids and saving taxpayers money. The aides typically earned from $12 to $15 an hour. Their unionized equivalents cost as much as $23 an hour, plus benefits.
“School administrators said that hiring union members not only would cost more, but would also probably bring in people with less experience,” reported the New York Times. Many of the teaching assistants hired directly by schools had graduate degrees in education and state teaching licenses, while the typical unionized aide lacks a four-year degree.
The actions of the teachers unions in both Baltimore and New York make sense from their perspective. Unions exist to advance the interests of their members. The problem is that unions present themselves as student advocates while pushing education policies that work for their members even if they leave kids worse off. Until school choice puts more money and power in the hands of parents, public education will continue to put teachers ahead of students.

(more…)


Teaching Kids About Money the Hard Way

Karen Blumenthal:

It’s getting harder for parents to raise financially independent young adults.
Many banks refuse to open individual checking accounts for 16- and 17-year-olds, requiring parents to jointly own the account, even if the youngsters have a job. Colleges urge parents to link their bank accounts or credit cards to the prepaid cash cards that double as their students’ ID cards, to ensure a regular flow of funds from the Bank of Mom and Dad.
And under the new credit-card law that goes into effect early next year–part of a broader move toward aggressive consumer protection–parents of those under 21 will have to agree to take responsibility for their kids’ credit cards unless the young applicants can show they have the income to qualify.
All of this seems to encourage parents to interfere with–and maybe even bail out–these young adults. And it comes at an age when the youngsters themselves should be taking on personal responsibility and making their own financial decisions.


Teaching Kids About Money the Hard Way

Karen Blumenthal:

It’s getting harder for parents to raise financially independent young adults.
Many banks refuse to open individual checking accounts for 16- and 17-year-olds, requiring parents to jointly own the account, even if the youngsters have a job. Colleges urge parents to link their bank accounts or credit cards to the prepaid cash cards that double as their students’ ID cards, to ensure a regular flow of funds from the Bank of Mom and Dad.
And under the new credit-card law that goes into effect early next year–part of a broader move toward aggressive consumer protection–parents of those under 21 will have to agree to take responsibility for their kids’ credit cards unless the young applicants can show they have the income to qualify.
All of this seems to encourage parents to interfere with–and maybe even bail out–these young adults. And it comes at an age when the youngsters themselves should be taking on personal responsibility and making their own financial decisions.


All children deserve only the best teachers

Arlene C. Ackerman

Teachers are the bedrock of our schools and the single most important key to student success. To achieve great results, every student needs a great teacher, and every teacher deserves a fair and accurate evaluation that enhances their capacity to grow and improve without fear that the process will threaten their position or their professional standing.
To put the best interests of our children front and center, the School District of Philadelphia is determined to do everything in its power to recruit the best, brightest, and most dedicated teachers; to encourage, reward, and retain our highest performers; to provide meaningful assistance and support for teachers who are struggling to be successful and effective; and to create a comprehensive system that provides all instructional staff with ongoing opportunities for career and talent development.
We stand with President Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in placing an aggressive and unrelenting focus on teacher effectiveness as a critical factor in creating better public schools. If we are committed to student success, then it is up to all of us – teachers, administrators, parents, policymakers, and legislators – to make a commitment that all of our teachers will have the skills they need to be successful educators and that all will be equitably placed where their talents are most needed.
We are morally obligated and collectively responsible to ensure that anyone entrusted with the education of our children is capable of doing a great job, is recognized for the excellence of their performance, and is justly rewarded for results. If we care about the success of our students, we must also care about the success of their teachers and treat them as the professionals they are.
Recently, the New Teacher Project released a report on “the nation’s failure to assess teacher effectiveness, treating teachers as interchangeable parts.” The two-year study describes a “widget effect” that has prevented schools and school districts from “recognizing excellence, providing support, or removing ineffective teachers.”
The study, available at www.widgeteffect.org, describes a “national failure to acknowledge and act on differences in teacher effectiveness” and faults teacher-evaluation systems that codify the “widget effect” by allowing excellence to go unrecognized and the need for improvement to go unaddressed. The authors noted that less than 1 percent of 40,000 teachers in the study were ever rated unsatisfactory.

(more…)


Teachers asked to bring green mapmaking to schools

Desy Nurhayati:

High school teachers in Greater Jakarta participating in an environmental workshop Saturday, were encouraged to bring the Green Map system to their students, to raise their environmental awareness.
In one of the workshops, volunteers from the Green Map Indonesia community shared their experience of mapmaking toward a sustainable community development with teachers.
The teachers were expected to be able to deliver the system to their students and start mapping out their green surroundings, volunteer Elanto Wijoyono said during the session.
“Students can start by mapping out their schools before expanding to other areas.”
“They can also explore many interesting things they find during the mapping activities,” he said, adding the system could be a more enjoyable approach to learning, combined with other subjects in the curriculum.
Creating Green Maps would make students more responsive to preserving the environment, said Marco Kusumawijaya, another Green Map volunteer.


“Twitter” as a Teaching Tool……

Erica Perez:

Facebook may be the social medium of choice for college students, but the microblogging Web tool Twitter has found adherents among professors, many of whom are starting to experiment with it as a teaching device.



People use Twitter to broadcast bite-sized messages or Web links and to read messages or links posted by others. It can be used as a source of news, to listen to what people in certain groups are talking about, or to communicate with experts or leaders in certain fields.



Marquette University associate professor Gee Ekechai uses Twitter to discuss what she’s teaching in class with students and connect them with experts in the field of advertising and public relations.



Instructor Linda Menck, who also teaches at Marquette, encourages students to include social media as a strategy in marketing campaigns for clients.



Twitter is helping these professors build community in their classes in a way that appeals to some members of a Facebook-addicted generation. The phenomenon is certainly not ubiquitous, and some professors have found Twitter doesn’t do anything for them in the academic realm.



But others, particularly those who teach in communications fields, are finding that Twitter and other social media are key devices for students and faculty to include in their professional toolbox.

All of these things have their place, I suppose. However, much like the excesses of PowerPoint in the classroom, it is surely better to focus on sound reasoning and writing skills first.


Two Teachers, 16,000 Students, One Simple Rule

Richard Kahlenberg:

Jay Mathews is a bit of a journalistic oddball. Most reporters see the education beat as a stepping stone to bigger things, but much to his credit Mathews, who writes for The Washington Post, returned to covering schools after an international reporting career. He is best known for his book on Jaime Escalante, who taught low-income children in East Los Angeles to excel in AP calculus and was featured in the film “Stand and Deliver.” Now Mathews is back to profile two young teachers — Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin — who founded the wildly successful Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a chain of 66 charter schools now educating 16,000 low-income students in 19 states and the District of Columbia.
While I have some quarrels with the book’s implicit and explicit public-policy conclusions, “Work Hard. Be Nice” provides a fast-paced, engrossing and heartening story of two phenomenally dedicated teachers who demonstrate that low-income students, if given the right environment, can thrive academically. In 52 short and easily digestible chapters, Mathews traces the story of two Ivy League graduates who began teaching in Houston in 1992 as part of the Teach for America program. Both struggle at first but come under the tutelage of an experienced educator, Harriett Ball, who employs chants and songs and tough love to reach students whom lesser teachers might give up on. Levin and Feinberg care deeply: They encourage students to call them in the evening for help with homework, visit student homes to get parents on their side and dig into their own pockets to buy alarm clocks to help students get to school on time. In Mathews’s telling, it’s hard not to love these guys.


Chamber: Teacher quality key in improving schools

Nashville Business Journal:

The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce released its 16th annual education report card Thursday, saying teacher quality is one of the most important factors in raising student achievement.
The chamber brings together business people and citizens each year to assess the school system.
Metro schools has missed the required No Child Left Behind benchmarks five times in the past six years. That moved the school system into “restructuring” from “corrective action” under the federal act, one year away from a possible state takeover.
The Education Report Card Committee said it was encouraged to see Metro offering a modest incentive pay plan to help recruit teachers in hard-to-staff subjects, as well as Mayor Karl Dean’s recruitment of two national nonprofits, The New Teacher Project and Teach for America, to bring new talent into the classrooms.
While there were some improvements in 2008, the committee said the city cannot have another year of waiting for a common vision for the standards the schools want to reach.
The chambers recommendations include:


Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer Advocates Math & Science Teacher Accreditation

Steve Ballmer’s speech to a recent Democrat party retreat at Kings Mill Resort in Williamsburg, VA.:

This means investment in education is critical, and I’m really encouraged by the very heavy emphasis on education that’s in the stimulus package.
We really need to transform math and science education in America. We need to improve teacher training, teacher quality.
I was talking earlier in the day with some folks about just how many of our math and science teachers don’t have the correct training and accreditation, and that stands in the way of us really breaking through.
For those who are already in the workforce, we need programs that provide ongoing education and training, so they can be successful in this knowledge-based economy. For those who are unemployed, we need new technical skills training to give those people a start back up the economic ladder. And we are going to need lifelong learning programs to keep people fresh, as innovation and technology continues to power the economy.
The second thing we need-and I’ll tell the Speaker this was written even before our meeting this morning-we need greater government investment in our nation’s science and technology infrastructure.
I came in, flew in red eye, was a little groggy this morning when I got here. I sat down with the speaker at 8:00 AM, and she woke me right up. She said there are four things I want you to make sure you understand are a priority: science, science, science, and science. I was awake by the end of the fourth science for sure, and I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly.


UW’s Delta Teaching Program

Kiera Wiatrak:

In its first five years on campus, Delta has made a profound impact on UW-Madison’s teaching and learning culture. A fall 2008 review found that more than 400 faculty and instructional staff enhanced their teaching practices in some way as a direct result of Delta workshops.
As Delta grows, it continues to receive recognition for its efforts. On Monday, Feb. 9, Delta will be presented with the National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education’s Award for Leveraging Excellence.
Delta members are encouraged to take Delta courses and small-group-facilitated programs, attend roundtable dinners and seminars, and participate in the Delta internship program to learn how to implement Delta’s three pillars — teaching-as-research, learning community and learning-through-diversity — into the classroom.


Teacher puts fitness lesson in 50-state trip

Paul Smith:

Haugen teaches eighth-grade science in Denver, and he is on a unique summer project. To raise awareness of childhood obesity and encourage Americans to get outdoors, he’s attempting to climb the highest point in each of the 50 states in 50 days.
Haugen is joined on the trip by avid climbers Lindsay Danner from Denver and Zach Price from Seattle, and Jordan Mallan, an independent film producer from Los Angeles who is preparing a documentary on the trip. The group is traveling to all sites in the lower 48 in a midsize SUV with a trailer.
The effort may set a record, now held by Ben Jones of Lynnwood, Wash., who reached the top of all 50 in 50 days, 7 hours and 5 minutes.
Haugen’s 50-50 challenge started June 9 when he reached the top of 20,320-foot Mount McKinley in Alaska. As he reaches down to tag the benchmark on Timm’s Hill Saturday at 1 p.m., he notches his 30th peak in 19 days.

website.


There’s a Hole in State Standards And New Teachers Like Me Are Falling Through

A Second Year Teacher:

All states should have clear, specific, grade-by-grade, content-rich standards. When they don’t, it’s the students who miss out on a top-notch education and the teachers—especially the new teachers—who find more frustration than fulfillment. Below, we hear from a new teacher who laments the lack of direction she received in her first year on the job. We have withheld her name and school district to allow her to speak frankly and to emphasize that new teachers across the country are facing similar challenges.
–Editors

First days are always nerve-racking—first days attending a new school, first days in a new neighborhood, and especially first days at a new job. My first day as a high school English teacher in a large, urban public school was no exception. It was my first “real” job after graduating college just three months earlier, and to add to my anxiety, I was hired just one day, precisely 24 hours, before my students would arrive. But my family and friends, mentors, and former professors all assured me that, like all other first days I had conquered, this day would be a successful start to a successful career. Unfortunately, this time they were wrong.
My first day on the job, I entered the building expecting to be greeted by the principal or chairperson, guided to my classrooms, and provided with what I considered to be the essentials: a schedule, a curriculum, rosters, and keys. Instead, the only things I received were a piece of paper on which two numerical codes were written, and a warning not to use the women’s bathroom on the second floor. After some frantic inquiring, I learned that the codes signified that I would be teaching ninthand tenth-grade regular English. As various colleagues pulled at my paper to get a glance, some nodded approvingly, while others sighed sympathetically. Eager to make a judgment of my own, I asked a question that, two years later, has yet to be answered: “What is taught in ninth- and tenth-grade regular English?” In response, I was given book lists containing over 20 books per grade, ranging from Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender to William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew on the freshman list alone, and even greater disparities on the other three lists. I was told to select six books from the appropriate list for each grade I taught, and “teach a book for every six weeks of the school year.” Unsatisfied with this answer, yet slowly beginning to feel foolish for asking (Should I know the answers to these questions? Am I unqualified to be a teacher if I don’t know what ninth- and tenth-grade English means?), I gathered the courage to inquire further. “What concepts are we supposed to teach the students through these books?” Now growing visibly agitated, several colleagues responded, “Teach literary elements and techniques. They need to re-learn those every year, and prepare them for the state test, and teach them some grammar and vocabulary as well as whatever concepts each book calls for.”

Much more on Wisconsin’s standards here.


Teacher’s high standards help kids tackle math

Marty Roney:

Failure is not an option in Linda Jarzyniecki’s math classes. If Jarzyniecki needs to give a pep talk or threaten to call parents to get the job done, then so be it.
“Students come into my class hesitantly,” says Jarzyniecki (Jar-za-NEEKY), or “Mrs. J.,” who teaches advanced algebra, trigonometry and calculus at Greenville High. “I want to challenge my students, but I want them to experience some success so they don’t become discouraged and they remain in mathematics.”
Mrs. J. faces challenging demographics. Greenville High is a school with about 750 students in a rural central Alabama town of about 8,000. The median income for a family of four is about $25,000 a year, according to Census figures, and 69% of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
“Despite the high poverty rate our children live with, many students are diligent, industrious young people who have a goal to complete a two- or four-year college or technical school,” she says. But they often feel pressure to work to help support the family.


Teaching Boys & Girls Separately

Elizabeth Weil:

On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.
Foley Intermediate School began offering separate classes for boys and girls a few years ago, after the school’s principal, Lee Mansell, read a book by Michael Gurian called “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” After that, she read a magazine article by Sax and thought that his insights would help improve the test scores of Foley’s lowest-achieving cohort, minority boys. Sax went on to publish those ideas in “Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.” Both books feature conversion stories of children, particularly boys, failing and on Ritalin in coeducational settings and then pulling themselves together in single-sex schools. Sax’s book and lectures also include neurological diagrams and scores of citations of obscure scientific studies, like one by a Swedish researcher who found, in a study of 96 adults, that males and females have different emotional and cognitive responses to different kinds of light. Sax refers to a few other studies that he says show that girls and boys draw differently, including one from a group of Japanese researchers who found girls’ drawings typically depict still lifes of people, pets or flowers, using 10 or more crayons, favoring warm colors like red, green, beige and brown; boys, on the other hand, draw action, using 6 or fewer colors, mostly cool hues like gray, blue, silver and black. This apparent difference, which Sax argues is hard-wired, causes teachers to praise girls’ artwork and make boys feel that they’re drawing incorrectly. Under Sax’s leadership, teachers learn to say things like, “Damien, take your green crayon and draw some sparks and take your black crayon and draw some black lines coming out from the back of the vehicle, to make it look like it’s going faster.” “Now Damien feels encouraged,” Sax explained to me when I first met him last spring in San Francisco. “To say: ‘Why don’t you use more colors? Why don’t you put someone in the vehicle?’ is as discouraging as if you say to Emily, ‘Well, this is nice, but why don’t you have one of them kick the other one — give us some action.’ ”
During the fall of 2003, Principal Mansell asked her entire faculty to read “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” and, in the spring of 2004, to attend a one-day seminar led by Sax at the school, explaining boys’ and girls’ innate differences and how to teach to them. She also invited all Foley Intermediate School parents to a meeting extolling the virtues of single-sex public education. Enough parents were impressed that when Foley Intermediate, a school of 322 fourth and fifth graders, reopened after summer recess, the school had four single-sex classrooms: a girls’ and a boys’ class in both the fourth and fifth grades. Four classrooms in each grade remained coed.
Separating schoolboys from schoolgirls has long been a staple of private and parochial education. But the idea is now gaining traction in American public schools, in response to both the desire of parents to have more choice in their children’s public education and the separate education crises girls and boys have been widely reported to experience. The girls’ crisis was cited in the 1990s, when the American Association of University Women published “Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,” which described how girls’ self-esteem plummets during puberty and how girls are subtly discouraged from careers in math and science. More recently, in what Sara Mead, an education expert at the New America Foundation, calls a “man bites dog” sensation, public and parental concerns have shifted to boys. Boys are currently behind their sisters in high-school and college graduation rates. School, the boy-crisis argument goes, is shaped by females to match the abilities of girls (or, as Sax puts it, is taught “by soft-spoken women who bore” boys). In 2006, Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old in Milton, Mass., filed a civil rights complaint with the United States Department of Education, claiming that his high school — where there are twice as many girls on the honor roll as there are boys — discriminated against males. His case did not prevail in the courts, but his sentiment found support in the Legislature and the press. That same year, as part of No Child Left Behind, the federal law that authorizes programs aimed at improving accountability and test scores in public schools, the Department of Education passed new regulations making it easier for districts to create single-sex classrooms and schools.


Advocating Teach for America in Wisconsin

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

It’s exhausting work, the pay is low, the fruits of the labor are sometimes hard to see. But those facts haven’t discouraged thousands of America’s brightest college students from applying to work for the fast-growing non-profit Teach for America.
Wisconsin’s most troubled urban school districts might benefit from this program, in which new graduates from some of America’s most prestigious universities spend two years teaching in low-income schools.
State education officials, local administrators and the teachers unions should make reasonable accommodations so that no artificial barriers prevent the program from being launched in Wisconsin. The Kern Family Foundation of Waukesha, which has education reform as part of its mission, is pushing to bring Teach for America to the state.
Teach for America grew out of a senior thesis by founder Wendy Kopp at Princeton University. During its first year in 1990, the organization sent 500 people into six low-income communities. This year, 5,000 TFA teachers are working across the country, and the TFA alumni network numbers thousands more.
Teach for America recruits and trains recent graduates from schools like Dartmouth, Princeton, Notre Dame, Marquette and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The 2007 class has 43 UW alumni; nearly 500 from Wisconsin’s public and private schools have participated since the program’s inception. TFA trains the new teachers and helps them obtain alternative certifications; the schools pay their salaries.


Using a Robot to Teach Human Social Skills

Emmet Cole:

Children with autism are often described as robotic: They are emotionless. They engage in obsessive, repetitive behavior and have trouble communicating and socializing.
Now, a humanoid robot designed to teach autistic children social skills has begun testing in British schools.
Known as KASPAR (Kinesics and Synchronisation in Personal Assistant Robotics), the $4.33 million bot smiles, simulates surprise and sadness, gesticulates and, the researchers hope, will encourage social interaction amongst autistic children.
Developed as part of the pan-European IROMEC (Interactive Robotic Social Mediators as Companions ) project, KASPAR has two “eyes” fitted with video cameras and a mouth that can open and smile.
Children with autism have difficulty understanding and interpreting people’s facial expressions and body language, says Dr. Ben Robins, a senior research fellow at the University of Hertfordshire’s Adaptive Systems Research Group, who leads the multi-national team behind KASPAR.


Live Chat: Teachers and Performance Pay

via a reader involved in these issues:

WHEN: Wednesday, June 6, 4 p.m. to 5 p.m., Eastern time
WHERE: edweek-chat.org
Submit questions in advance here.
Earlier this spring, a panel of 18 highly accomplished teachers assembled by the Center for Teaching Quality—and known as the TeacherSolutions group— released a report that strongly advocates performance-pay systems for teachers.
Under TeacherSolutions’ recommendations, teachers would be paid more over time as they advance along a career ladder that extends from “novice” to “expert,” but they could also receive extra pay for taking on leadership roles, improving students academic performance, acquiring new knowledge and skills, and working in low-performing schools. According to the report, in Wake County, N.C., for example, novice teachers could make as little at $30,000, while experts could make up to $130,000 per year depending on their performance.
“We have to provide more for those teachers who continually go above and beyond to ensure high academic gains,” Betsy Rogers, a member of TeacherSolutions, wrote in an article for teachermagazine.org. “[TeacherSolutions’] goal is to encourage—even provoke—a deep conversation about quality teaching and how a variegated pay system could support the development of teaching as a profession.”
In this chat, two members of the TeacherSolutions group, Nancy Flanagan and Lori Nazareno, will be online to take your questions about their recomendations, current issues in teacher compensation and career advancement, and the challenges of evaluating teacher performance.
Please join us for the discussion.
Submit questions in advance here.


Teachers Must be Up for Count

Via a reader’s email; Solomon Friedberg:

Mathematics is crucial in the modern world. It is the foundation of modern science and engineering, and the prerequisite to any number of careers. Children’s formal learning of mathematics occurs throughout elementary school, and their success or failure at this level will have an impact on the entire rest of their lives.
Thus it is vital that elementary teachers be well-prepared to teach mathematics.
You would think that all elementary teachers know elementary math. After all, they are college graduates. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. For example, mathematics educator Liping Ma, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, reports that only 43 percent of a group of “above average” U.S. elementary teachers chosen for their interest in math could carry out a simple calculation involving division of fractions.
Moreover, teaching elementary school math requires more than simply knowing how to do elementary school math. Teachers must be able to present mathematics as a coherent body of knowledge rather than a bunch of arbitrary rules, to recognize and address a range of misconceptions, to encourage mathematical thinking and develop student self-confidence. They need to know elementary math well enough to teach it in all its subtlety.
In Ma’s study, only 4 percent of U.S. teachers were able to write a story problem that corresponded to the division of fractions problem. If that’s the case, how can they teach this subject well?

(more…)


Madison Literary Club Talk: Examinations for Teachers Past and Present

2.1MB PDF
First, a disclaimer. I am far from an expert on most of the topics which will be illustrated by questions. One of my aims in giving this talk is to let others know about a serious problem which exists beyond the problem of mathematical knowledge of teachers.
I have written about the problem in mathematics and hope that some others will use the resouces which exist to write about similar problems in other areas.
In his American Educational Research Association Presidential Address, which was published in Educational Researcher in 1986, Lee Shulman introduced the phrase “pedagogical content knowledge”. This is a mixture of content and knowing how to teach this content and is the one thing from his speech which has been picked up by the education community. However, there are a number of other points which he made which are important. Here is an early paragraph from this speech:

We begin our inquiry into conceptions of teacher knowledge with the tests for teachers that were used in this country during the last century [the 19th] at state and county levels. Some people may believe that this idea of testing teacher competence in subject matter and pedagogical skill is a new idea, an innovation spawned in the excitement of this era of educational reform, and encouraged by such committeed and motivated national leaders as Albert Shanker, President, American Federation of Teachers, Bill Honig, State Superintendent of Schools, California, and Bill Clinton, Governor of Arkansas. Like most good ideas, however, it’s roots are much older.

It took Wisconsin almost 20 years to adopt this “good idea”.


Seattle’s Teaching of Math adds up to Much Confusion

Jessica Blanchard:

Rick Burke remembers looking at his elementary-school daughter’s math homework and wondering where the math was.
Like many Seattle schools, his daughter’s school was teaching “reform” math, a style that encourages students to discover math principles and derive formulas themselves. Burke, an engineer, worried that his daughter wasn’t learning basic math skills.
“It was a lot of drawing pictures and playing games,” he said. “Her whole first-grade year was pretty much a lateral move.”
So for the past few years, Burke and his wife have been tutoring their three children after school — and this fall, they plan to switch them to North Beach Elementary, which uses a more traditional approach to math.

Sarah Natividad adds:

The biggest problem is that the teachers currently in service never learned enough math to begin with, and so can’t be expected to teach what they don’t already know. We only think our teachers know math because they know just as little math as we do. If you want to know how scarily ignorant of math our teachers are, I suggest reading Liping Ma’s Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics for a start.
I’ve written about this on my own blog, and I’m not just talking out of my butt here. I’ve taught math to these potential teachers. They lack the prerequisite skills to pass a college algebra class. You can tell who in the class is in the Elementary Education program; they’re the ones sitting in the back row, getting a D on every exam because they have to use a calculator to do three times two (and they think this is normal). So when Bob Brandt of Bellevue says “How do you know three times two equals six? Any idiot knows that,” I would counter that an exceptional idiot must be teaching his kids math. We’ve raised an entire generation of teachers who don’t even know enough about math to know that they are ignorant of it.

D-Ed Reckoning touches on math as well.


Parent Involvement – from NCLB to easing the work of teachers

Madison School Board Seat 1 Candidate Maya Cole:

Did you know that the No Child Left Behind legislation requires school districts that receive Title 1 funds to involve parents with their children’s schooling?
One goal I have for the school board is to encourage and model increased parental participation in the schools. We need to focus on building consensus on the board, with the parents and in the community.
I am hoping as a school board member to visit a different school every week for the academic year. I think it would also be helpful to volunteer in that same school for an hour during the visit as well.
As parents, many of us recognize the need to augment or encourage creative and social learning for our children outside of the classroom. What better way to share this with other kids than by involving parents?…..
We need more effective communication between the district and the community. We need to be open to new ideas, voices and perspectives of education in our community.

Maya’s opponent in the April 4, 2006 election is Arlene Silveira. Learn more about the candidates here.


High Quality Teaching make the difference

Young, Gifted and Black, by Perry, Steele and Hilliard is a little gem of a book. (Hereafter, YGB). The subtitle is “Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students”. Though specifically addressing African-American kids, the descriptions and proscriptions proposed can be applied to all – important, given the continual poor showing of U.S. students generally on international tests (OECD PISA, TIMSS).
It is the section written by Asa Hilliard, Professor of Urban Education at Georgia State University, that addresses the real “gap” and real “reform”. The following attempts to summarize his positions and arguments:
The real gap for all students, not just Black, is the gap between student performance and excellence. Where does one start to close the gap? – by relying on the experiences of teachers who do not fail to achieve excellence in all their students, regardless of background – these experiences have always been around, but few educators want to acknowledge. It is in this protected environment of excellence in education that the theories of curriculum, and excuses of deprivation, of language, of failure can be unmasked.

(more…)


Study Great Ideas, But Teach to the Test

Four letters to the editor in response to Michael Winerip’s recent article on teaching to the test:

Ms. Karnes learned all sorts of exercises to get children excited about writing, get them writing daily about what they care about and then show them how they can take one of those short, personal pieces and use it as the nucleus for a sophisticated, researched essay.
“We learned how to develop good writing from the inside, starting with calling the child’s voice out,” said Ms. Karnes, who got an A in the university course. “One of the major points was, good writing is good thinking. That’s why writing formulas don’t work. Formulas don’t let kids think; they kill a lot of creativity in writing.”
And so, when Ms. Karnes returns to Allendale High School to teach English this fall, she will use the new writing techniques she learned and abandon the standard five-paragraph essay formula. Right?
“Oh, no,” said Ms. Karnes. “There’s no time to do creative writing and develop authentic voice. That would take weeks and weeks. There are three essays on the state test and we start prepping right at the start of the year. We have to teach to the state test” (the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, known as MEAP).

Read the full article here. Read the letters to the editor by clicking on the link:

(more…)


Does ‘No Child Left Behind’ Encourage All to Move Forward?

by Ruth Robinson (President, Wisconsin Association for Talented and Gifted) and Susan Corwith (President, Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth)

(more…)


Parenting

Zvi:

  1. What makes someone a better parent? Haidt says right wingers and religious folks make better parents, citing that they are increasingly happier and more rooted in communities, liberal kids are more depressed and more vulnerable to phones. But while we should and do care a lot about it, being a good parent is not primarily about whether your kids are happy now. There are realistic margins where it is highly correct to make kids less happy now to give them better futures, and instill in them better skills, values and habits.
  2. (0:01:20) Tyler says then, why not be a right winger, isn’t this the most important thing? Haidt says no, values do not work that way, you don’t get to simply adapt the ones with better outcomes. He is right. Haidt will note later he is now a centrist, seeing both extremes as too illiberal, which he largely attributes to social media. Also being sufficiently conscious of the need for community and the dangers of phones and dangers of identitarianism (which he discusses later) can plausibly screen off the related mechanisms.
  3. (0:02:00) Tyler asks who Haidt has met who is most wise, Haidt names two and finds many role models for wisdom. I notice that I find the opposite. I know plenty of very high intelligence (INT) people but find it hard to name very high wisdom (WIS) people I have met. Who is the wise man among us? Perhaps my standards are wrong.
  4. (03:15) Asked about Covid reactions, Haidt attributes the right-wing reaction to concerns about government control rather than purity, notes purity can also be high on the left with spirituality and yoga. I notice he does not mention wokeness or cancel culture as having a strong purity component, despite describing what is happening on campus as psychologically akin to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
  5. (07:30) Haidt values the Bible because of the need of every culture to have shared stories and reference points, comparing it to Homer and the Greek myths for ancient Greece and Rome. I agree that we need these shared reference points, and I increasingly worry about the fragmentation there, not only away from the Bible but also away from sharing popular culture stories as well, if we also increasingly don’t watch the same TV shows or movies or even play similar video games. If the AI is making up stories and games for you, then they will be different from someone else’s stories and games. Haidt says Babel is the Bible story he gets the most from, whereas he doesn’t get Job. I can guess what he draws from Babel but I think I got those bits from elsewhere.
  6. (09:00) Haidt opposes identitarianism in the sense of putting identity first as an analytical lens, and especially orienting others in this way, often in a mandatory way. He also warns of monomania, a focus on one thing, and notices that it seems rather terrible to teach young people that life is centrally about ranking people according to how good the various races are, no matter which races are put on top.
  7. (11:00) Tyler asks about ‘the disability concept,’ notes that people with say Tourette Syndrome do not obviously have worse outcomes, so do we ‘need some kind of identitarian movement’ to avoid this being called inferior, as ‘both the left and the right go along with this’? Should we be outraged? That… doesn’t seem like what is going on at all, to me? I would ask, don’t we already have such a movement, and isn’t its core strategy to label those who disagree with them or fail to ensure equality of their outcomes as exhibiting ableism? And is not this strategy sufficiently effective that one could reasonably worry about the consequences of saying various things in response? Haidt instead responds that identitarian political movements organizing for politics is fine, it just doesn’t belong in a classroom, citing past rights movements. And he asks, does turning up your identity in the sense of ‘I am a person with ADHD’ lead to better outcomes? He says we don’t know, but that it is ancient wisdom that it is our interpretation of things that upsets us, that such thinking is probably bad for you but he could be wrong. Haidt strikes me as someone who feels unable to speak their mind on this, who is choosing his words carefully and out of fear.
  8. (13:10) Tyler asks, why won’t AI soon solve the screen time problem? The AI agent will process the information and then talk to you. Skipping ahead first to his next question, he asks (in a clearly actually curious tone) “Screen time seems super inefficient. You spend all this time — why not just deal with the digest? Maybe in two, three years, AI cuts your screen time by 2X or 3X. Why is that so implausible?”
  9. Haidt absolutely nails the response, pointing out that Tyler is plausibly the fastest and most prolific processor of information on the planet, and he is modeling screen time as someone attempting to efficiently process incoming information to complete a fixed series of tasks. If AI can process information and help you complete those tasks twice as fast, then you could finish your screen tasks in half the time.
  10. For Tyler specifically, I buy that this is a lot of what he does with screens, although even then I would ask whether he would want an AI to speed up his watching of movies or NBA games. But let’s exclude those cases from the analysis, since the concern is about phones, and say that mundane AI doubles Tyler’s productivity in using screens to process information and complete tasks. What will happen to Tyler? Well, obviously, he will follow the supply and demand curves, and respond to decreased cost of information by increasing his consumption of information and resulting completion of tasks. It is entirely non-obvious that we should expect this to involve less time on screens, especially if we should effectively include ‘talking to an AI to complete tasks and seek information’ as part of screen time.
  11. When thinking about my own consumption, and wow do I have a lot of screen time, I would first strongly say that I think all my interactions with AI should effectively count as screen time. I almost never talk to the AI with voice rather than text, better tech does not seem like it would change that so much, and if I did it would not be functionally different. I also notice that over time, as the efficiency of screens has gone up, my time allocation to screens as responded by rising, not by falling. The ability to use LLMs has definitely net increased my screen time so far. I can imagine ways to reverse this trend, using AI to arrange to be more social and interact more with the world, but at minimum that seems like it requires an active effort, and it does not seem like the way to bet.
  12. Tyler later emphasizes once again converting to spoken word. That’s worse, you do get how that’s worse? Why would we want to lower the bandwidth, even if you like voice interactions? Even if it wasn’t worse, why the repeated emphasis on earbuds and voice? That is all still ‘screen time’ for all practical purposes, and one could see that as being even more of a steady stream of interruption.
  13. For an average person, or an average child, the picture here looks gloomier still, to me. Time spent on television or watching videos or playing games will be made more addictive and to involve better selection via AI, and improve in quality in various senses, but that should tend to increase rather than decrease consumption. A better AI for TikTok that finds better matches to what you want is not going to reduce time on TikTok. Yes, we can get the same level of informed or handle the same number of emails in less time in that future, but our requirements and usage will expand to match. Historical parallels suggest the same, as screens improve we consume more screen time not less. So the question here is whether the new uses are transformative of our ‘screen time’ experience such that they are positive uses of time, especially for children?
  14. Returning back to the first question here, Haidt says the primary problem with screens is opportunity cost of time, that they are experience blockers, and half his book is about the importance of play. Kids used to play for hours a day, even though that involved ‘real danger,’ and now they do not do that. Yet we refuse to let kids be kids, do not permit them to go play unsupervised, often this is even illegal. I see this as the best counter-argument against ‘the phones did it,’ if the kids wouldn’t be allowed to play anyway then of course they will be on their phones and computers and televisions. He also points out a bit later that video games used to be scarce and physical enough to encourage playing with friends and being somewhat social, and now you play alone or online (online can still be socially valuable, but is even at its best missing key elements.) AI, Haidt says, is not going to return children to a play-based childhood, it is not going to get you to spend time with friends.
  15. Could AI instead be implemented in ways that simulate true play, that involve physical activity, that gives you virtual people to interact with that challenge you and train your social skills and other talents? That is definitely technologically feasible if we want it enough. But will the market give that to us, in practice? Will we choose to consume it? What we have seen so far should make us highly skeptical.
  16. Haidt agrees with that prediction: “In theory, I’m sure you’re going to say, “Well, why can’t we just train an AI friend to be like a real friend and get in fights with you sometimes?” Maybe in theory that’s possible, but that’s not what it’s going to be. It’s going to be market-driven. It’s going to be friends and lovers who are incredibly great for you. You never have to adjust to them. You never have to learn how to deal with difficult people, and it’s going to be a complete disaster for human development.”
  17. (17:00) Tyler then responds with a statement that I think generalizes a lot of his perspective on so many things: “Complete disaster strikes me as too strong a term for something that hasn’t happened yet. I think you’re much too confident about that.
  18. I do actually think Haidt is overconfident here, if we confine to the kind of mundane AI (e.g. GPT-5-style) that is under discussion here, with an otherwise untransformed world. But I see the bolded sentence and paraphrases of it often used, by Tyler and by others, to dismiss concerns about future outcomes, in various ways, and especially to dismiss existential risks. If it has not happened yet, this reasoning goes, then how do you know what the consequences would be? How would you even dare to say such a thing is a plausible outcome requiring us to pay real costs to try and prevent it? And my answer is, again and again, that sometimes and in some ways you should be highly uncertain about future outcomes, especially when you lack parallels, but that one still has to use reason and consider how things might work and form probability estimates and not make excuses to look away.
  19. There are indeed many things that have not happened yet, that I am confident would be ‘a complete disaster’ if they did happen, or that were clearly highly predictable ‘complete disasters’ before they happened. A large asteroid impact. A widescale global thermonuclear war and many other wars too. A pandemic, consider Covid predictions in January 2020. Various political proposals, especially for redistributions of wealth or widescale political violence. Getting rid of gifted and talented education programs and magnet schools, or not teaching kids advanced skills in the name of ‘equity,’ or many other educational reform proposals. Having the As play three years in a minor league ballpark in Sacramento. The correct response to a large percentage of movie previews. Etc.
  20. (17:30) Haidt then responds a different way: “What do you mean it hasn’t happened yet?” And Tyler clarifies the real question, which is: If screens are making children so miserable, why won’t they use new AI innovations to fix that? Why are they so ‘failing to maximize’? To which the obvious retort is, it is not like there are no alternatives or innovations available now, yet the kids remain miserable. They are not maximizing now. The ‘market’ here has failed us. Children, even more than adults, do not optimize their consumption basket taking into account all dynamics and long term effects, mostly they (as per our experiments, this is not speculation) end up using apps with Skinner boxes and delayed variable rewards and minimal active thinking and applications of various forms of social pressure and so on, in ways that have network effects and punish non-participants, in ways that in practice make people miserable. If you think ‘AI innovations’ will break us out of that, why do you think that? What would that look like?
  21. (18:00) Hadit responds by highlighting the collective action aspect, pointing out the Leonardo Bursztyn paper that many kids would love if everyone else would quit too but otherwise they can’t afford to, even TikTok has strong network effects from shared cultural knowledge.
  22. (20:15) Tyler challenges the importance of face-to-face interaction by noticing that the pandemic didn’t damage well-being for kids too much. Haidt points out that time spent with friends was dramatically down already by 2019, starting in 2012 with smartphones. Tyler counters that time in school is time with people and friends, so the decline in 2020 must have been dramatic, yet well-being problems did not change much.
  23. I note that I would be prepared to defy the data (if I need to do that) that mental well-being did not decline a lot for kids, or for everyone else, in 2020 and 2021? I mean, what? Alternatively, we actually have an explanation for this, which is that schools are very bad for children’s mental health, as you would expect given what physically takes place there and how they treat children in most schools. So in 2020, yes we had less social interaction which was bad, but also we had less de facto torture of children via school, which was good, and it roughly cancelled out.
  24. (22:15) Haidt points out time use studies don’t count school as time with friends, that we are talking time out of school. He also points out that time within school is now largely spent with phones, not interacting with friends or those physically next to you, most students check their texts during class. So to the extent that time used to count, now it mostly doesn’t. After 2012, academic achievement goes down, loneliness in school goes up.
  25. I would say: You can sort of count time when you are forcibly imprisoned next to arbitrary other people as social time, but that stops working if you instead have the option to ignore them and be on your phone. Also we should totally ban phones in schools, as I’ll discuss later, how is this even a question if teachers are otherwise losing the fight on texting during class, if you don’t think we should ban the phones then at that point we should instead dismantle the schools, what is the point.
  26. (24:15) Tyler reiterates that this was a rather strong natural experiment via shutting down schools. I agree, and I do think Tyler has a good point that school time is more social than time spent isolating in a pandemic even with ubiquitous phone use. My response to that is noted above: That the schools are toxic and depressing. Which Haidt points out. As he says, it’s not a clean experiment.
  27. (25:30) Tyler asks why around 1900 European culture became more neurotic, depressive, negative and hostile, and then 1700s weirdness, and asks aren’t big shifts in mood often happening for small reasons, why attribute it to the phones? Why not simply say that big mood shifts we can’t explain are the norm?
  28. But this isn’t history. It is now, and we can observe it in real time, and we indeed have a very good explanation of what happened. It is fine to say we do not today know what caused some previous shifts but why should we then feign ignorance over this one? Yes, in theory it could have been something else that happened at the same time, but so what? And even if it was, shouldn’t we assume that this something that changed was related to the change from phones or social media anyway? What changes in the early 2010s culture weren’t related to that?
  29. Tyler keeps pounding on this later, so I want to say clearly: If there was an ‘exogenous mood shift’ in the 2010s, then all plausible candidates for it, including the rise of both wokeness and Trump and the loss of credibility of elites, are causally heavily intertwined with phones and social media. I also want to note that if everyone else is on their phones all the time, your social activities are already crippled by negative network effects, so you might be in a no-win situation, where not using phones would also cripple your social life.
  30. (27:15) Haidt responds also that this happened very quickly, in a single year, what is an example of those that we can’t explain? Tyler says, they kill the British king, the French Revolution. But of course such events are usually a long time coming, and also it is not like we lack an explanation. We know many things that helped cause the French Revolution, this is not a mystery, and it is no mystery why we saw rapid changes once it started. I looked up English kings that got killed to see which ones would count here, which leaves Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI and Charles I. In three cases, it seems like clear reaction to a perception of tyrannical actions by the King, and in the fourth by a dynastic civil war? Is any of that a mystery?
  31. (29:00) Tyler says there are two pieces of evidence that don’t seem to support Haidt’s story out of sample. First, he says, the impact is mostly the Anglosphere and Nordics, so why shouldn’t we say this is a ‘negative mood for reasons we mostly don’t understand’?
  32. (30:00) Both agree girls are more mimetic, and this is one cause of them being impacted more by whatever is happening.
  33. (30:30) Haidt says within the last two months he has learned that conservatives and religious people are protected, and that there is a huge religious impact here: “But that hides the fact that in Eastern Europe, which is getting more religious, the kids are actually healthier now than they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Whereas in Catholic Europe, they’re a little worse, and in Protestant Europe, they’re muchworse… It’s rather, everyone in the developed world, even in Eastern Europe, everyone — their kids are on phones, but the penetration, the intensity, was faster in the richest countries, the Anglos and the Scandinavians. That’s where people had the most independence and individualism, which was pretty conducive to happiness before the smartphone. But it now meant that these are the kids who get washed away when you get that rapid conversion to the phone-based childhood around 2012. What’s wrong with that explanation?”
  34. It seems important to be precise here. What this is saying is that it is the combination of smartphones and individualism that causes the issue. It seems reasonable to have the problems arrive and have biggest impact in the Anglosphere first, where we are richer and most individualistic, and the internet is in our language and we adapt such things faster and have freer societies and more free market attitudes, and already had less emphasis on socialization in various forms including declines in religiosity. (I wrote most of that before hearing Haidt’s explanation, then moved it later.)
  35. I do agree that this is still the strongest argument against attributing too much of this to phones alone, but similar concerns are being raised around the world, and I generally don’t see this point as being that strong at this point.
  36. (31:40) Tyler notes that old Americans also seem grumpier. I would say that this is also plausibly downwind of phones and social media. Even if they are not using the devices directly, they see the impact in a rapidly changing culture, in transformed politics and the widespread assertiveness of wokeness, even if you think wokeness is correct and vital you know that putting it in the faces of old people is going to make them grumpier, whether you consider that a cost or a benefit is up to you.
  37. (31:45) Tyler also notes that phone usage explains only a small part of variance in happiness outcomes. Haidt agrees that the overall correlation coefficient is only something like 0.04, but if you focus on social media and girls the correlation coefficient gets up to something like 0.17, that even the skeptics are at between 0.1 and 0.15 without splitting by gender. As noted above, a lot of the impacts here are cultural shifts and network effects, so the coefficient could easily fail to capture a lot of the impact here. We also have to ask what directions causation goes to what extent. It is plausible that being depressed causes you to spend either more time or less time on social media, I can think of mechanisms for both.
  38. (34:10) Tyler asks, why no talk in your book about the extremely large benefits of social media? Which certainly sounds to me like ‘but you will be so much more cool if you smoke and drink with us cool kids,’ but yes, fair, and Haidt says tell me about it, especially for 11-13 year olds.
  39. Tyler makes a pretty bold claim here: “At Emergent Ventures, we support many teenagers, young women. Many of them not 13 years old, but very often 16 to 19 years old. They’re doing science. They’re remarkably smart. They get in touch with their collaborations and with each other using social media. They exchange information. They’re doing phenomenally well. They’re an incredible generation, smarter, more dynamic, probably more productive than any other scientific generation ever, and that’s because of social media.”
  40. I can totally buy that there are a lot of very smart teenagers out there, that those that are bold and talented and ambitious benefit from using social media to find collaborations. But… the most dynamic and scientifically productive generation? Oh my is citation needed here, I do not believe this, I do not see evidence of this. What seems more likely here is that Tyler gets to see the success stories, the most extraordinary people who make the tech work for them, and does not see others that do not? And of course it is not clear how much of that, even if true, would be due to social media. Yes, it makes it easier to find collaborations, but it also destroys rival means of finding such collaborations, and so on. With earlier tech there were already plenty of places to find like-minded people, and indeed it was in many ways easier to focus on that without distractions, because you were going to dedicated places, both real and virtual.
  41. (35:00) Haidt says he does have a section on benefits, which (matching Tyler’s statement) is almost always for older teenagers, he can see the collaboration story for them, but for 11-13 year olds they have different needs. And Haidt points out that the rival methods social media is crowding out, even on the internet, were superior especially for that group, that the overall non-social-media internet is great.
  42. (36:30) Tyler clarifies that Twitter is how these kids meet, and Haidt confirms Twitter is social media. I am not as sure about that. I see Twitter as a hybrid, that can be used in any mix of both, and as much less of the bad thing than other social media, but of course I am biased, it is vital for my work. I would be happy for a compromise that said kids get Twitter at 13 outside of school hours, say, but other ‘purer’ social media only at 18. Or even better, as per later discussions, you can get only the non-algorithmic ‘following’ version of Twitter at 13.
  43. (36:45) Tyler once again: “It could be the case, maybe only 5 percent of teenagers benefit from this Twitter function, but that could, by far, outweigh the costs, right?” This seems to be a common pattern in Tyler’s thinking that is behind many of his weirdest takes, where he finds things he thinks are massively oversized in their benefits because in a small minority they promote the kinds of talent development or inspiration or capital formation (or what not) that he thinks is most important, and he is willing to throw the rest of life under the bus to get it – see for example discussions over congestion pricing in New York City. It is of course possible that the benefits outweigh the costs even when benefits are concentrated like this, but (aside from not being confident that the
  44. In this case, one easy response is to say that this is the kind of child who should have special technical chops and determination and be impossible to stop, and who would rise to the challenge if we tried to stop them, the way hacker kids got around restrictions in the 1980s. If they’re all that do you think you can keep them off Twitter? So the correct solution would be to not let kids have social media, and then be fine when they got onto Twitter anyway. Or of course you could soon have an AI check their usage to confirm they were using it For Science.
  45. (37:10) Tyler agrees that girls 12-14 are likely worse off because of Instagram. He dodges the question of TikTok, but it seems like his objection at that age is entirely about Twitter? Haidt says that we must talk price, the question is whether the age threshold should be 14 or 16, and he thinks that algorithmic feeds should be gated to age 16.
  46. (37:45) Tyler says these kids start doing their online science thing at 13 even if he only sees them at 16, alternatives would be much harder. Haidt points out they could meet in other ways, says it would only be a little harder.
  47. (38:25) Tyler asserts they ‘all make this decision’ to switch Twitter to a non-algorithmic feed. So the common ground seems very obvious here?
  48. (38:45) Haidt claims Gen-Z spends a huge portion of their time and attention managing their network connections, it is the first and last thing they do every day. If true (and I think it is) this seems horrible, they are paying very high maintenance costs and not getting much in social benefits in return, in a way that makes it very costly to opt out. He literally estimates 5-10 hours a day for these activities plus consuming content to keep up. One way to look at this is that we have raised social signaling costs that people can pay and made such payments highly visible, with the opportunities to do this becoming available at random times, and one can see why this would be bad, the worst kind of anxiety-infused life-consuming Skinner box. Haidt refers to Collision noticing no major person in software is under 30, that Gen-Z aren’t starting companies and doing things. What young people are impacting the world?
  49. (40:10) Tyler says young people are doing well where we can measure success, such as at chess. But chess is almost a failure mode for our brightest minds, in many senses, and also illustrates how much current generations are drawn to obsessing over improving legible numbers in various ways that don’t depend on learning through child-style play. Tyler says that these people aren’t founding companies because you need all these synthetic abilities and the nature of production has changed. But one might also say it is the path to developing those styles of abilities that has been effectively blocked by time on phones. Haidt points out that GenZ talent tends to disappear into the prestige economy of social media itself, to likes and followers.
  50. (41:30) Tyler says many at OpenAI and Anthropic are ‘extremely young’ and doing amazing things, that is historically common in software so hard to know how this compares. He again points to Emergent Ventures and says they’re so much smarter and more productive and attentive and disciplined than kids in his day. But how would one know that? I would argue that instead those kids have been better selected. Haidt agrees that this sounds like selection.
  51. (42:45) Tyler once again goes back to, whatever problems there are, why not just think we’ll adjust to them? We adjusted to agriculture and fire and cities, that often the early ride is bumpy but it turns out fine. Sounds a lot like what he says about AI, this super strong prior that people adjust to things and then we’ll be better off. One response would be yes, we adjust, but taking social media away from kids like we took away leaded gasoline is exactly the kind of way in which we adjust.
  52. (43:30) Haidt learns not to trifle with Cowen in adjustment trivia by asking about scurvy. I wonder how the British Navy forgetting why their cure worked and reintroducing scurvy fits into this, but they did rediscover the issue eventually, but it does seem like a poor example, because there are various ways to efficiently fix the issue, the issue is very clear when it is happening, and people have heavy incentive to find an answer. The obvious current lack of adjustment question would likely be fertility, if AI proves somehow not to be transformational. Are we going to adjust? How fast, and how?
  53. (45:00) Tyler says, this 5-10 hour flow of message, the AI will do that for you, and you’ll have a lot more time again. Alas, I think Tyler misunderstands the purpose of that flow of messages. The reason it is a 5-10 hour flow of messages is that this is costly signaling. If everyone hands their message flow to the AI, then the response will be, oh if she cared about me she wouldn’t let the AI handle the messages, or she would but then she would spend time customizing her replies, the replies are either too fast and the AI is doing them without her in the loop or too slow and she is not giving me attention, which means she does not care enough about me.
  54. And so on. This is not the kind of trap that efficiency gains can solve, the thing will eat any gains, that is exactly why the situation got worse when the tools got better. Similarly, when Tyler says Gemini will ‘give them a digest’ of what is going on in their friend’s lives, so they can keep up for when you meet in person, well guess what? Now the standard is ‘show me you did not only read the digest.’
  55. Could you imagine a world in which AI is so good that no one can tell the difference? You can, but then one must ask why we are even still around and what is our purpose in life and our way of producing things and so on. If we are not even handling our own social communications, are we even ourselves anymore? I don’t know. It is weird.
  56. This seems like a very particular goldilocks scenario to me, where the AIs are exactly good enough and given exactly enough leeway and authority to free us where we want to be free, but somehow the world remains fully normal and economic normal, and I don’t have reason to think the zone in question exists at all unless we are engineering it very intentionally. It feels like wishcasting even above and beyond the parts where one doesn’t want to look at existential, catastrophic and systemic risks. I’d love to get the AIs to do the work we dislike and for us to live the parts of our lives we like without AI, but… how? What is the plan, in detail? Can we write stories in that world, maybe, and make them make sense? Seems hard.
  57. Later Tyler suggests for example people saying “‘I’m going to form like a little polycule but without sex, and my polycule will be based around not doing so much social media.’ Like my friends and I in high school — we didn’t go to parties. We seceded from that.” This was young Tyler’s solution to the collective action problem, a small group took the collective action, nice solution if everyone is fine with that being the entire collective. And yes, some people will always (in normal worlds) be able to form close-knit groups that ignore everyone else, and a small group of friends can do very well on all fronts, but that has always been highly limited as a strategy, most kids and people are incapable of it or won’t do it under the pressure.
  58. Yes, as Tyler says, meeting up with your friends is fun, but when he says ‘kids will find ways of doing this,’ they are not currently finding ways of doing this. Time with friends is way down. Most social activities are way down. Relationships, sex and children are way down. That does not mean we will never adjust, but I see no reason to expect adjustments that fix this. There are lots of things that people used to enjoy a lot or benefit from, that we stopped doing at various points in history, and I do not expect most of them to come back.
  59. (46:15) Haidt frames this as, there’s going to continue to be a ‘dip’ in terms of mental health impact, but that Tyler might be right, we could get superhuman generations in 30-50 years. Well, yes, we could get a lot of very exceptional things in 30-50 years if AI continues to improve.
  60. (47:30) Flagging the huge agreement by all three of us that there is far too much homework, especially in the early grades. My kids school has them do homework with the justification that they need to learn how to do homework, the generalized version of which I would call the worst argument in the world if Scott Alexander hadn’t used that term first for the non-central fallacy. Perhaps instead the worst justification in the world? Which is ‘you need to endure bad thing X now on purpose, so that you get the benefit that it will then be less bad when bad thing X happens to you again later.’ Madness.
  61. (48:00) Haidt frames his book as offering four norms that solve collective action problems and that would help get children time and ability to play as they need to, with number one being no smartphone before high school, let them use flip phones. Second, no social media until sixteen. Third is phone-free schools. Fourth is far more childhood independence, a la Free-Range Kids and Lenore Skenazy.
  62. I am strongly in favor of all four planks as norms to strive for, especially taken together, and for the laws to at least facilitate all this. We need to stress the fourth one most of all, you can only take away the phones if kids can otherwise use that time.
  63. (51:05) Tyler asks the right question on the social media rule, who is enforcing these norms? The government or the parents? For the others it is easier to see. For free range kids it is sufficient that the government allowing and encouraging it. For phones in schools that is clearly on the schools and thus mostly the government.
  64. (51:15) Haidt responds that parents cannot enforce this alone without outside help. Quite right, at least once you let them have a phone or computer. So what should we do? Right now, Haidt notes, even the kids below 13, that they are supposed to not allow, do not get kicked out even when it is obvious. Haidt wants to raise the age to 16 and see it enforced as his number one option.
  65. (52:00) Tyler makes clear he is totally opposed to the government telling parents they can’t let their kids use social media. He says ‘so the government will stop me from raising my 15-year-old the way I want to. I’m totally against that.’ I don’t see Tyler generalizing this principle enough, if so? Either way, we agree the social media decision needs to be up to the parents, at least at age 15. That you should require very clear opt-in from the parents, but if you have it, then go ahead.
  66. The emphasis on ‘sign a contract to hand over data’ is weird. This cannot be the true objection, can it? Shouldn’t we draw the line where we actually care?
  67. (53:40) Tyler says, Instagram has parental controls but no one uses them. Haidt points out few people are able to use such controls well. I would add, the implementation matters. The defaults matter a ton. Having something in an options menu sounds like a good libertarian solution but in practice adaptation of that will always be very low. Defaults or GTFO. If you made it such that the parents had to give very clear permission for a kid-friendly account, and then again give very clear permission for a fully unlocked account, and you actually made this hard to spoof or to happen without the parents being aware, then you would have something. You need something like the Certificate of Dumb Investment, where you impose some trivial but real inconveniences in the process.
  68. (54:10) Haidt asks the obvious question, what about PornHub? And Tyler says, no, you’re trying to shift it to me, but fundamentally it has to be either up to parents or up to government, and if it is up to parents it will not matter much, and points out Haidt is at least raising the intervention possibility.
  69. And I say, no, it is not a binary choice. It is at least a tertiary choice, with a middle third option. If you leave it ‘up to the parents’ as in the parents can in theory tell the child what to do, then that is better than saying the child has a ‘right’ to do it, but in practice we all know that won’t work here. If we say ‘the government bans it’ then that is not good either, although ‘it is banned but parents who want to make it happen anyway by giving them accounts and logins that technically are in the parent’s names can’t actually get stopped or punished in a real way, at most we ever impose a modest fine’ might be a practical response.
  70. The third option is that the parents can give the kid an account, but we impose real friction costs of doing so as part of actually enforcing it, in a way that if the kid tries to do it without permission and isn’t unusually savvy, they will definitely get caught. And that the parents have that extra push not to do it, they can’t just go ‘oh fine, it’s easier to let you, sure’ and that’s it. They have to mean it. And have the services actually enforce these rules and procedures often enough that if you don’t go through the hoops, your account might well get deleted.
  71. (55:00) Haidt says a lot about how the government is not doing anything to enable safeguards. Tyler points out that any version of this is effectively a ban, that it would bankrupt such companies if they could be sued every time a kid got on without permission. Haidt says he is not saying that the government should decide, but he thinks parents should be able to sue these companies, that we should sue them over things like constant refresh and endless scroll as well, that section 230 should only apply to what people post.
  72. Presumably this is one of those ‘either our legal system has rules for liability that work, or it does not’ situations? As in, if parents sue over their child having access without permission, then that should not automatically entitle them to thousands or millions in damages, they should have to demonstrate that the company was negligent in allowing this. And if they sue over the endless scroll, our legal system should say that is a dumb lawsuit, and toss it. When tech companies say they cannot survive ordinary liability law, that implies strongly that either we should change that underlying law for all cases, or there is something deeply wrong with the business. And we should check to see if what the tech company is doing is regulatory arbitrage.
  73. Tyler doubles down, says even if Meta was 99% effective, they’d still be sued into oblivion on the other 1%. Whereas Haidt says correctly, that would be incredible, great success, we happily accept a 1% or even 5%-10% failure rate here. And Haidt says, again I believe correctly, that if Meta did have a 95% or 99% success rate, that success rate would be a strong defense in a lawsuit. Or, alternatively, we could perhaps write a safe harbor rule here to ensure this? As in, you are required to ensure that your system is 95% effective, meaning that for every 5 kids that are on your platform, there are 95 that attempted to get on the platform without permission beyond ‘I tried to sign up, told the truth and was told no,’ and failed to do so, or something similar.
  74. I think this is actually a lot easier and less tricky than PornHub. With social media the whole point is a persistent identity. It seems reasonable to provide age verification or parental permission once. Whereas with PornHub, as Snoopy once said, there are some times that you prefer not to be recognized. It would be a major imposition and security risk to require providers of pornography to verify identity.
  75. I also don’t feel like the full solution space of this problem is being searched. There feel like there should actually be good technical solutions available.

As a bonus, here are two sections that would have been in my next childhood roundup:

Ban Phones in Schools

England to give the power to ban mobile phone use on primary and secondary school grounds, students will have to switch them off or risk confiscation. Reactions like this always confuse me:

However, teachers’ unions said that the crackdown was misguided because most schools already imposed a ban. Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, branded the reform a “non-policy for a non-problem” and said ministers should focus on limiting children’s access to social media platforms.

I fail to see why this is an issue? I am pretty sure this is not a ‘non-problem.’

Jay Van Bavel: My kids go to a public middle school in NYC where they lock up their phones for the day. This is what the school observed:

“Overall, the program has been a massive success. We are happy to share that we continue to see the benefits of using Yondr, with increased student engagement in the classroom, less time spent in the bathrooms and hallways, more genuine connections within the community and a decrease in reports of cyberbullying.”

We need some RCTs on removing smartphones from entire schools or classrooms to see the impacts (which are often network effects, rather than on individuals).

Some parents worry this will mean they can’t find their kids in case of an emergency.

Not true.

The kids carry the pouches and parents can still easily track their location (if necessary). In an emergency kids can just break open the pouch. It only costs ~$20 to replace.

Sounds good to me as a way to quiet the concerns. It should not be actually necessary to carry the pouches, and I think psychologically it would be better not to do that so kids are not tempted to break the pouch and don’t have to spend willpower to avoid it.

Phil McRae: SMARTPHONE BAN

In the US, a teacher (Mary Garza) instructed her students to set their phones to loud mode. Each time a notification was received they’d stand up & tally it under a suitable category. This occurred during ONE class period. Each mark is a learning disruption

A story confirmed to not mean anything.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: “I grew up in the City Where Nobody Can Sneak Up On Anybody, forced to wear a little hat that went ‘ding ding’ every 2 seconds anytime I went outside my house. I hated that hat. When I was six years old, enough deaf people had moved into the City that the hat acquired flashing LED lights.

Thankfully when we started to get deaf and blind people they stuck to their own city subsection and we didn’t *all* have to wear the vibrating boots that let people feel us coming through their toes… anyways, I hated that City and I told anyone I met that as soon as I was thirteen and had my own bank account I was moving somewhere, anywhere else; and they’d always nod wisely and say, ‘Valid.’

And then I turned thirteen and moved out and it was awesome. Every city is a quiet city for me now. I decided that I’d make my own kids grow up wearing hats that said ‘ding ding’, just so they could appreciate the quiet when they grew up. And for this, they make me move to the City of Clever Parenting Ideas?”

This story doesn’t mean anything, so please don’t try to decode it.

Did you know that Snapchat+, the $4/month subscription service, offers friend rankings? You can check how often a friend interacts with you relative to how often they interact with others. This often goes exactly the way you would think, with both friend and relationship drama ensuing when someone is not ranked high enough.

Even without Snapchat+, the app can show teens where they stand with friends via emojis. This occurs if two people are on each other’s private eight-person best-friend lists.

A yellow heart indicates “Besties” status—these two have sent the most snaps to each other. If they’re besties for at least two consecutive months, they graduate to “Super BFF,” indicated by two red hearts.

Jonathan Haidt: I have said much less about Snapchat than other apps because I know less. But the more I learn, the worse it looks. It’s not just the streaks, designed to hook kids. Their “solar system” maps are even worse.

Katy Potts: I call it the “anxiety app” in online safety training I run – grim – unbelievable they get away with it.

This is the kind of social information where we benefit from lack of clarity. There is a reason groups strive to avoid a known pecking order outside of the top and bottom ranks. Even if you know you are not so relatively close, you don’t need the details in your face, and real ambiguity is even better. For teens I am confident this is far worse, and also it will lead to people strategically gaming the system to get the outcome they want, and every implementation of that I can imagine only makes the whole thing worse.

Jonathan Haidt went on the Free Press podcast, in addition to the one with Tyler Cowen. On TFP, he laid out the case that smartphones are the primary thing ruining childhood this way.

Suppose a salesman in an electronics store told you he had a new product for your 11-year-old daughter that’s very entertaining—even more so than television—with no harmful side effects of any kind, but also no more than minimal benefits beyond the entertainment value. How much would this product be worth to you?

What the smartphone user gives up is time. A huge amount of it.

Around 40 hours a week for preteens like your daughter. For teens aged 13 to 18, it’s closer to 50 hours per week. Those numbers—six to eight hours per day—are what teens spend on all screen-based leisure activities.

I should note that researchers’ efforts to measure screen time are probably yielding underestimates. When the question is asked differently, Pew Research finds that a third of teens say they are on one of the major social media sites “almost constantly,” and 45 percentof teens report that they use the internet “almost constantly.”

As I said in the main part of the post, if kids are indeed being allowed to spend that kind of time on their phones, that seems obviously deeply unhealthy, and the decision to permit this seems bonkers levels of nuts. No, I do not need a study to see this.

If you are spending that much time on a phone, then unless something is deeply engrossing in a way that for example school almost always isn’t, every minute that you are not on your phone, you are spending part of that minute jonesing for your phone. You are thinking about pulling out your phone. You are using willpower not to.

There aren’t zero useful things to do with phones, but at that point, come on.

There is also this. You can say it isn’t smartphones. It’s obviously largely smartphones.

I do not buy that this can be explained by ‘some unexplained shift in mood.’

Haidt also wrote a book, The Anxious Generation. As I noted earlier I haven’t had opportunity to read it. Candice Odgers reviews it here in Nature. Here is the teaser line of the review.

The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes.

Remember The Law of No EvidenceAny claim there is “no evidence” of something is evidence of bullshit.

One could add a corollary, The Law of Distracting Us From the Real Issue. Which henceforth is: If someone warns that paying attention to X could distract us from the real issue, that is evidence that X is the real issue.

This is because the phrase in question is an attempt at deep magick, to act as if evidence has been presented or an argument made and social cognition has rendered a verdict, when none of that was otherwise the case.

There are of course many cases where X is indeed a distraction from the real issue Y. What these cases mostly have in common is no one using the phrase ‘could distract us from the real issue.’

One could also point out that phones are themselves a massive distraction and time sink, thus even if something else is ‘at fault’ somehow, getting rid of the phones would be a first step to addressing it. Candice doesn’t even have any real objections to Haidt’s actual proposals, calling them mostly reasonable, or objecting to them on the grounds that they would be insufficient because teens would work around them. Which is not exactly making me want to instead do nothing.

Candice does of course pull out the no evidence card as well, saying studies fail to find effects and so on. Yeah, I don’t care. The studies are asking the wrong questions, this is dumb. Then of course she says ‘there are, unfortunately, no simple answers,’ so I am confused what we are even at risk of being distracted from. What does she offer?

Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation as leading contributors.

The idea that kids today have more contact with guns, violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse than they did in the past is obviously backwards. Yes, of course those things continue to make the world worse, but they are much better than they used to be, so it can’t explain a new trend.

Economic hardship is complicated, as I’ve discussed in the past, but certainly there has not been a dramatic rise in economic hardship starting in the mid-2010s.

That leaves the opioid epidemic and social isolation, which are indeed getting worse.

Of course, citing ‘social isolation’ while denying that phones are at fault is a pretty rich thing to say. I am pretty sure a new activity soaking up most non-school hours is going to be bad for social isolation.

The opioid epidemic is bad, but this can’t be primary. The fall in child well-being doesn’t map onto the opioid epidemic. The rate of opioid abuse under 18 is relatively low, only about 1.6%. Even if you include parents, the numbers don’t add up, and the maps don’t match.

Yes, there is narrative among the youth that all these things are worse than ever. And that narrative is bad for mental health. But do you know what is a prime driver of that? Social media and everyone constantly being on their phones. And you know what else? Articles and academics like this one, pushing a narrative that is patently false, except where it is self-fulfilling.

There is an alternative hypothesis that does make sense. One could say that kids are on their phones this much exactly because we do not let kids be kids. If kids are not allowed to go off and do things, then of course they will end up on their phones and computers. We give them no other options.

So yes, we should cover that base as well. Let kids be kids.

The contrast between this and Tyler Cowen’s must better challenges is very clear.

Let Kids be Kids

People have gone completely insane. Do not put up with this insanity.

I mean, this would be insane at any age, but thirteen? At thirteen I do not even feel entitled to know which friend’s house my children are going to.

Hannah Posts: It would never occur to me that this would be unexpected or inappropriate. If I’m at Mary Ann’s house playing dolls, ofc her mother’s dearest old friend Miss Margaret would be in the kitchen chatting.

Can you imagine getting that call? Your kid is over at a friend’s house and their mom calls you to ask if her sister can stop by for a coffee

Andrew Rettek: parents like this don’t just stiffle their own kids, they mess with your kids, calling the ~cops if you give your kids “too much” autonomy. And they teach childless people, including their own kids, that this is reasonable behavior and anything less is negligent.

We used to let kids babysit other kids. I remember having at least one sitter, a neighbor from upstairs, who was only twelve or so. As opposed to now, when someone is terrified their 13-year-old is in a house with a friend, their mom and an uncleared third adult. We still use the term ‘babysitter’ but it means paying an adult at least $25 an hour, rather than letting kids learn some responsibility and earn some cash. It is all so insane. I would of course happily let a normal (non-adult) babysitter take the job for my kids, if I could find them and was confident no one would call the cops.

Also, let your kids pay cash or have their own debit card?

Patrick McKenzie: An anecdotally common user behavior I wouldn’t have guessed: many children old enough to go out with friends but not old enough to have independent purchasing power (or payment methods) now order in restaurants via a text message to Mom, who places order through app and pays.

At minimum this requires Mom to be by the phone willing to respond. That is not always an option. What do you do when she is busy?

Also you should not be tracking your kids and their spending like this. If you are old enough to go out with friends, and it is worth spending money to go to a place to eat, then give the kid the money. Don’t scrutinize their food orders. The responses seem confused by this as well.

In reasons you don’t need to devote crazy amounts of attention to your kids news:

Robert Wiblin: If incremental parenting effort for infants had large benefits you’d expect second and third children to do worse than they in fact do, seeing as how they have to share their parents’ attention with siblings while firstborns do not.

They do [a bit worse] but the effect is pretty modest given the reduction in parental effort is presumably large (20%, 30%, maybe more). (Though I guess one could argue it’s offset by learning effects.)

Daniel Eth: Unless there was a similar-sized effect in the opposite direction from better parenting due to learning.

Another hypothesis is that having older siblings is actively helpful, and this makes up for some of the difference. I generally am inclined to believe this.


Maybe Homeschooling is Easier Than You Think

Ted Balaker:

Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars so your children can spend four to seven years under the tutelage of the world’s worst therapist. 

Too often that comes pretty close to describing the modern college experience. Universities routinely toss out wisdom that’s been accumulated over centuries and backed up by modern psychology in favor of fashionable claptrap that makes students miserable. 

Psychologists have long known that people who believe they have a good deal of control over their life outcomes are more likely to be happy. But colleges teach students, especially those from minority groups, that systemic “isms” will undermine their hard work. 

Our minds are threat-generating marvels, but those who embrace Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) learn how to separate the countless fake threats from the relatively few real ones. Too bad universities fill students’ heads with microaggression dogma, which trains them to interpret benign, everyday interactions as threats. 

And that’s just the beginning. Universities whip up tribalism, encourage fragility, and leave students with broken moral compasses

But as frustrating as college can be, it’s important to avoid myopia.


Notes on redistributed state taxpayer funds and the madison School District’s budget

Abbey Machtig:

State aid payments are influenced by factors like enrollment, district spending and local property values. Assistant Superintendent of Financial Services Bob Soldern told the Wisconsin State Journal via email the district had been planning to receive about $50 million in state support.

Nichols said she doesn’t think the additional money from the state dramatically changes the district’s financial situation.

“I don’t think for the long haul in terms of the future forecasting of our budget … there will be a huge shift,” she said.

Statewide, the general aid paid to school districts for 2024-25 totals $5.6 billion, according to DPI. Nearly 70% of districts are estimated to receive more general aid from the state, while about 30% are estimated to receive less. Eight districts are estimated to have no change in aid.

DPI is anticipating “greater than usual volatility” in the estimates due to inaccuracies and delays in financial reporting from Milwaukee Public Schools.

The state aid amounts will be finalized in October.

——-

John Jagler:

Dear Milwaukee media. Stop saying MPS is going to “lose” $81 million this year. Or that aid will be cut. It makes it seem like the district is a victim. Instead try: MPS received $81 million more than it should have because of incompetence and is now being held accountable.

Corrinne Hess:

Quinton Klabon, research director with the conservative Institute for Reforming Government, said solving the budget gap will be painful. 

“No cut will be invisible, so every curriculum purchase, every contract, and every staffing decision must justify itself going forward,” Klabon said. “How MPS handles these summer months will determine whether students get the education and services they deserve. Rebuilding trust with parents begins now.”

State aid is the largest form of state support for Wisconsin public schools

DPI calculates general school aids through a formula that uses property values in the district, enrollment and district spending.

The current estimates are based on the 2023-25 biennial budget and pupil count and budget data reported by school districts to the DPI. 

Due to previously reported delays in financial data reporting by Milwaukee Public Schools, the DPI anticipates greater than usual volatility in these estimates.

“Figures used in this estimate may change by a greater than usual amount for the certification of general school aids,” according to a DPI press release. “The department therefore encourages caution when utilizing this estimate.”

Statewide, estimated general school aids for 2024-25 total $5.58 billion, a 4.2 percent increase from 2023-24. 

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending. Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

Enrollment notes.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?


K-12 Administration Development Program

Abbey Machtig

A new collaboration between the UW-Madison School of Education and three Wisconsin school districts — Madison, Lake Mills and Middleton-Cross Plains — proposes a solution: Through the District Leadership Preparation Pipeline, a group of Wisconsin teachers will earn their master’s degree from UW-Madison for no cost. In return, they commit to working in their home school districts as a principal or assistant principal for at least two years.

Teachers get to further their education and increase their salaries, and districts get to expand their pool of qualified leaders.

“Pre Act 10, when teachers took credit for master classes, the compensation was there to pick yourself back up on the pay scale, so it made sense to go back for a master’s degree,” Olson said, referring to the 2011 law that effectively ended most public sector labor unions in Wisconsin. “But now, I think with teacher compensation not keeping pace with inflation, it has become increasingly difficult for teachers to go back to school for any type of master’s degree.”

Sasha Casper, one of the Middleton-Cross Plains teachers who is participating, said colleagues have frequently encouraged her to consider moving into leadership roles


Did the Striving ReadersComprehensive Literacy GrantProgram Reach Its Goals?

Michael S. Garet, Kerstin Carlson Le Floch, Daniel Hubbard, Joanne Carminucci and Barbara Goodson:

Boosting literacy among school-age children remains a national priority. Nearly one third of students in the United States have not developed the foundational reading skills needed to succeed academically, with students living in poverty, students with disabilities, and English learners especially at risk. Starting in 2010, Congress invested more than $1 billion for state literacy improvement efforts through the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy (SRCL) program. SRCL was intended to focus funding on disadvantaged schools, encourage schools to use evidence-based practices, and support schools and teachers in providing comprehensive literacy instruction. These efforts were expected to lead to improved literacy outcomes for students. This study assesses how well SRCL implementation was aligned with these goals, using information collected from states, districts, and schools in all 11 states awarded grants in 2017.

Key Findings


Shall I Compare New Jersey’s Curriculum to a Summer’s Day?

Paul Rice:

The three Rs are taking a back seat to climate change in New Jersey schools.

As one of the lead state partners for the Next Generation Science Standards developed by the National Research Council, New Jersey has been integrating climate change into its K-12 science curriculum for the past decade. The Garden State has upped the ante in recent years by becoming the first state to incorporate climate change into all school subjects, not only science.

In 2020, the state board of education adopted a new set of climate-focused student learning standards. Gov. Phil Murphy’s wife, Tammy, was the primary cheerleader for these standards, which were implemented in the 2022-23 school year after a pandemic-related delay. Under those standards, all public school districts across the state are required to teach and test students in every grade about climate change. The requirement covers core content areas including science, computer technology, social studies, world languages, visual and performing arts, health and physical education, and life and career planning. Districts are encouraged to incorporate climate change into English language arts and mathematics instruction.

Climate education resources distributed by Trenton’s first-in-the-nation Office of Climate Change Education provide sample lesson plans to illustrate how teachers can highlight climate change in class while constantly reminding students that New Jersey is suffering “the worst impacts of global warming.” When learning about U.S. and world history, students are required to explain how natural resources such as fossil fuels remain a source of conflict, both at home and abroad. When mastering a foreign language, students are asked to discuss “the impact of climate change on the target language region of the world.” And in school performances, students are encouraged to use climate change to “inform original dances expressed through multiple genres, styles and varied cultural perspectives.”


“Phonics and fluency are now non-negotiables.”

Linda Jacobson:

In interviews with The 74, EdReports officials say they’ve gotten the message.

Starting in June, its reviews of early reading materials will reflect a fuller embrace of the science of reading. “Phonics and fluency are now non-negotiables” for a green rating, said Janna Chan, EdReports’ chief external affairs officer.  

Reviewers will also verify that materials no longer use “three-cueing” — a practice associated with balanced literacy that encourages students to identify unfamiliar words by picking up clues from text or pictures. Since 2021, at least 10 states have banned the practice.

An internal memo sent to EdReports staff in February and obtained by The 74 acknowledged growing doubts about the organization’s credibility as states pass new reading laws. CEO Eric Hirsch wrote that the organization is “most vulnerable to criticism around our reviews” of comprehensive English language arts programs called basals or “big box” curricula — programs that some have attacked for being “bloated” and giving lip service to the science of reading. Hirsch wrote the memo in response to a Forbes article that critiqued the organization and highlighted newer groups providing alternatives to its reviews.


When Professional Development Becomes Unprofessional It’s Time For A Change

Beanie Geoghegan

Teaching is a profession. As with any profession, it is sometimes necessary to hone or fine-tune the skills that improve performance, or productivity. But the question remains: why do so many school districts patronize and condescend to teachers by requiring them to participate in “professional development” sessions that not only don’t help them become more effective teachers, but are demeaning to their intelligence, experience, and education level? 

When DEI Hijacks Professional Development 

For instance, this February during Black History Month, some districts opted to focus on divisive ideologies and agendas rather than offering professional development highlighting the fantastic contributions, achievements, and successes of so many Black Americans over the years. In the largest district in Kentucky- Jefferson County- teachers were required to participate in an “Implicit Bias Training” designed by Millennium Learning Concepts. The training titled,  “A Walk in My Shoes” is a four-hour series of lessons “that will raise awareness, provoke thought, and encourage action around implicit bias.” Every teacher must also submit a Racial Equity Improvement Plan to the administration following the training. 


Civics: Taxpayer supported Federal Government Press Persecution

Chris Bray:

The  lawyer and former congressman Clement Vallandigham was arrested by soldiers and tried by a military court for (among other things) calling Abraham Lincoln a tyrannical king who had usurped power by unilaterally suspending the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War.

The administration of Woodrow Wilson shut down dozens of newspapers and magazines for criticizing American participation in World War I and questioning the use of conscription, while the socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer were prosecuted for distributing leaflets that encouraged men to resist the draft.

From time to time throughout our history, the federal government arrests people for saying things the government doesn’t like. It’s a tradition, like beer luge or bad cover bands.

Steve Baker is about to get the Late Federalist shaming parade for covering the January 6 protest as an independent journalist. As he recently wrote, his arrest on Friday is being stage-managed for optics: “The prosecutor informed my attorney that I am to arrive at the @FBI field office wearing ‘shorts and sandals. …’ Rather than issuing a simple order to appear, they seem to feel the need to give me a dose of the personal humiliation treatment.”


These Teenagers Know More About Investing Than You Do

Hannah Miao and Gunjan Banerji:

Seventeen-year-old Sophia Castiblanco doesn’t just drive a Tesla. She also owns shares of the company.

Sophia, a high school junior in the Chicago suburbs, invests in stocks such as Tesla, Apple and Amazon.com. When she started making money as a social-media content creator three years ago, her parents encouraged her to put some of her earnings in investments likely to grow over time, rather than parking all her cash in a savings account.

She now has several thousand dollars invested in accounts set up by her father at Charles Schwab, Edward Jones and Robinhood. Last year, she saved up money to buy a new Tesla Model 3, which starts at around $40,000, through a payment plan she is splitting with her parents. On TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, she makes videos teaching her thousands of followers about investing basics.

“I’ve always had a business mindset of wanting to make money, and I’m very OK with taking risk,” Sophia said. “There’s really no minimum age to start.”


Sources of isomorphism in the Milwaukee voucher school sector

Michael R Ford and Fredrik O Andersson

In this article, 25 years of data are utilized from nonprofit schools operating in the United States’ oldest and largest private school voucher program to test theories of isomorphism. We find that startup and religious schools belonging to an umbrella organization such as an archdiocese are particularly likely to serve similar student bodies at similar costs. In addition, we find that isomorphic pressures increase the longer a school participates in the Milwaukee voucher program, and that increased program regulation is related to increased sector isomorphism. The results illustrate the difficulty of using New Public Management style reforms, at scale, to encourage a diversity of nongovernment providers to provide a service traditionally provided by the public sector. The results will be of interest to scholars studying nonprofit institutional theories, school choice, and New Public Management style reforms.

Jill Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?


More of the Same in the taxpayer supported K-12 School District

Dave Cieslewicz:
Anyone hoping for improvement in Madison’s public schools will need to keep waiting. Incumbent school board members Savion Castro and Maia Pearson will be reelected by default in April as no challengers showed up before the filing deadline yesterday. Sincere congratulations to Castro and Pearson. They’ve stepped up. They put their names on the line. I strongly disagree with their views, but I have to respect the fact that they’ve put themselves in the arena. It’s ironic that the story of their de facto reelection appeared on the same day as a story about how MMSD is moving away from letter grades. Failing a class? Heading for a “D”? Turns out you’re not failing at all. You’re “emerging.” It wasn’t at all clear what MMSD is trying to accomplish by moving away from letter grades. They admit that it will create more work for already over-burdened teachers and they’ll need to translate “emerging” into a “D” at some point so that high school students can have a GPA for their transcripts when applying for college. I guess it spares a kid’s feelings in the short-run, maybe. Also, attendance and behavior won’t be taken into account with the new non-grading system either. In fact, this board seems to view good behavior as some sort of privileged cultural hegemony. I see it as just good behavior. It’s being respectful of your fellow students and teachers. Maybe I just don’t get it. I guess you’d have to say that when it comes to my grasp of MMSD policies my work is emerging. This is precisely the kind of stuff about this school board that drove me to encourage challengers to the incumbents. When this board, or any group of leaders, sees every issue in terms of race and gender they’re pretty much guaranteed not to solve the problem because they’ve misdefined it from the start. The problem is not a racial achievement gap. The problem is that there are some kids, of every race, who aren’t learning. To cover that up with words like “emerging” is just moving us further away from solutions rather than confronting the problem. We’ve got a school system where more than 60% of students are consistently performing below grade level in English and math, where behavioral problems are going unaddressed thanks to an ill-conceived “Behavior Education Plan,” and where parents have been voting with their feet for over a decade. And now we’re going to continue down that same road by phasing out the accountability (and yes, the pressure — it’s a good thing) that comes with real grades.

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?


Texas and the Politics of School Choice

Wall Street Journal:

Texas is a rare GOP-led state with no school-choice programs, but Gov. Greg Abbott has made establishing one a top priority. This autumn he called legislators back to Austin to pass a universal education savings account (ESA) bill. Each student would be eligible for $10,500 annually, which parents could spend on private school tuition and other education expenses.

Thirteen states including Florida, Arizona and Iowa boast broad ESA programs. But the teachers unions are trying to contain their spread and mounted a firewall in Texas. Melting under union heat, 21 House Republicans last month joined Democrats in stripping ESAs from an education-funding bill that also included some $7 billion in new money for union-run public schools.

Unions falsely claimed that public schools, especially in rural areas, would be harmed by the bill even though they would have received more state funding. The ESAs might encourage more education alternatives such as learning pods in rural areas, requiring the unions to compete for students.


Pornography and under 18 school libraries

Judd Legum:

Last month, Baggett submitted a form seeking to remove The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold from a Santa Rosa school library, alleging the book was pornographic. On October 25, the librarian from Milton High School reached out to Baggett and said the first step in the challenge process was to have a meeting at the school to discuss her concerns. Baggett responded that she would not participate in a meeting and warned the librarian of “the legalities that could arise if this book remains accessible to minors.”

—-

Another view:

Even before the Southern Poverty Law Center, the discredited far-left smear factory, put the parental rights group Moms for Liberty on its “hate map” alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, left-leaning outlets had repeated claims that the parental rights group’s leaders had harassed school board members or other moms who disagreed with them. 

The Daily Signal has examined many of these claims and found them baseless. In many cases, the Moms for Liberty leaders themselves appear to have suffered harassment in situations where outlets such as Media Matters and activist groups such as GLAAD portray them as the villains.

Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich repeatedly have condemned threats and harassment. They have insisted there is no evidence that Moms for Liberty leaders encouraged or engaged in school board threats.

“These are not our people, we denounce it,” Descovich told ABC affiliate WFTS-TV in Tampa Bay, Florida, back in 2021. 

The list below mostly focuses on the incidents highlighted by Media Matters in April. It doesn’t address a Moms for Liberty chapter that took heat for quoting Adolf Hitler, because that chapter clearly quoted Hitler sardonically to illustrate a point, not as an endorsement.

——

Meanwhile:

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?


“Some schools with less than 5% proficiency in math and English are rated as “Meets” or “Exceeds” expectations on the current report card”

Will Flanders:

WILL Research Director Will Flanders’s new policy brief, Needs Improvement: How Wisconsin’s Report Card Can Mislead Parents, provides an important explanation of how Wisconsin’s school report cards work and how the various inputs work towards a school’s score. Specifically, Flanders highlights:

The Report (PDF).

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?


Arnn responds to FIRE’s free speech warning label

Maddy Welsh

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has a fundamental misunderstanding of college education, according to College President Larry P. Arnn in an op-ed titled “There’s More to Education Than Free Speech.”

“I wrote the piece to assert what education is,” Arnn told The Collegian. “FIRE seems like most activists: they want to do education policy, which is not the same thing as education.”

FIRE is a nonprofit advocacy group “dedicated to defending free speech rights across the country,” particularly on college campuses, according to its Director of Policy Reform Laura Beltz. When FIRE released its 2024 College Free Speech rankings earlier this year, it labeled Hillsdale College a “warning” school. Arnn addressed this in his op-ed, published in The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 19.

“A college’s purpose isn’t merely to encourage speech,” Arnn wrote. “A college’s purpose, through speaking and thinking — the two go together — is to teach students to think and speak better in search of knowledge.”


California’s Math Misadventure Is About to Go National

Brian Conrad:

When I decided to read every word of California’s 1,000-page proposal to transform math education in public schools, I learned that even speculative and unproved ideas can end up as official instructional policy. In 2021, the state released a draft of the California Mathematics Framework, whose authors were promising to open up new pathways into science and tech careers for students who might otherwise be left behind. At the time, news reports highlighted features of the CMF that struck me as dubious. That draft explicitly promoted the San Francisco Unified School District’s policy of banishing Algebra I from middle school—a policy grounded in the belief that teaching the subject only in high school would give all students the same opportunities for future success. The document also made a broad presumption that tweaking the content and timing of the math curriculum, rather than more effective teaching of the existing one, was the best way to fix achievement gaps among demographic groups. Unfortunately, the sheer size of the sprawling document discouraged serious public scrutiny.

I am a professional mathematician, a graduate of the public schools of a middle-class community in New York, and the son of a high-school math teacher. I have been the director of undergraduate studies in math at Stanford University for a decade. When California released a revised draft of the math framework last year, I decided someone should read the whole thing, so I dove in. Sometimes, as I pored over the CMF, I could scarcely believe what I was reading. The document cited research that hadn’t been peer-reviewed; justified sweeping generalizations by referencing small, tightly focused studies or even unrelated research; and described some papers as reaching nearly the opposite conclusions from what they actually say.


Notes on single parenting

Tyler Cowen:

So what does a Tyler Cowen pro-parent plan look like?  I can think of a number of candidates for interventions, but most of them don’t strike me as things you would advocate for either because of their limited effectiveness or their unintended consequences.  Some possibilities that I can think of:

  1. Parenting interventions in poor communities (i.e. an army of social workers descending on poor communities to teach parenting and advocate for children).
  2. Shorter/fewer prison sentences in order to allow more poor men to be present for their children and improve the sex ratio in poorer communities (thereby encouraging more committed relationships).
  3. Similarly – more drug decriminalization?  Less?
  4. Tax reforms of the kind advocated for by people like Brad Wilcox to encourage rather than penalize marriage.  (Seems like a good idea to me, but I don’t know how many people there really are out there who choose not to wed for tax reasons).
  5. Better/more jobs for working class men and all-out brutes?  (Seems like an obvious idea, but how?  More unions? Fewer?  More tariffs and less free trade?  Get rid of the Jones Act?  More immigration? Less?  A larger standing army?  A return to more vocational education as advocated for by people like Mike Rowe?)
  6. The re-churching of America?  If so, what are your suggestions for how to accomplish this (evangelical minds would like to know)?

“Sustainable development goals”

Harry Waters

Just over seven years ago the United Nations developed the 2030 agenda. The central theme of this agenda was the development of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But what are the SDGs? Why are they relevant to my English classroom? And how can I incorporate them into the curriculum? 

Let’s take a look at how, when and why we should be using the Sustainable Development Goals. We’ll change them from simply being a poster on the wall to being an effective learning tool and look at how to genuinely encourage students to engage in and connect with the 17 SDGs.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?


K-12 Governance: Student Identity and Parents

College Fix summary:

CBS Colorado notes that while the JeffCo Public Schools district says it is “unclear” whether surveys about “preferred pronouns” are in violation of state law, it advised teachers against using them as lawsuits are ongoing.

Federal and state law forbid mandatory surveys that ask about kids’ “protected information,” and voluntary surveys must include a parent opt-out.

But an email from the Jefferson County Education Association told teachers that if they give such surveys, to make sure to they are pencil and paper … because “any digital records are more permanent and may be requested under federal law.”

The email also “encouraged” teachers to “make […] notations about students and not hold on to the documents.”


Notes on the “science of Reading”

Matt Barnum:

In the long-running reading wars, proponents of phonics have won.

States across the country, both liberal and conservative, are passing laws designed to change the way students are taught to read in a way that is more aligned with the science of reading.

Statesschools of educationdistricts, and — ultimately, the hope is — teachers, are placing a greater emphasis on phonics. Meanwhile, the “three-cueing” method, which encourages students to guess words based on context, has been marginalized. It’s been a striking and swift change.

But there has been much less attention paid to another critical component of reading: background knowledge. A significant body of research suggests students are better able to comprehend what they read when they start with some understanding of the topic they’re reading about. This has led some academicseducators, and journalists to call for intentional efforts to build young children’s knowledge in important areas like science and social studies. Some school districts and teachers have begun integrating this into reading instruction.

Yet new state reading laws have almost entirely omitted attention to this issue, according to a recent review. In other words, building background knowledge is an idea supported by science that has not fully caught on to the science of reading movement. That suggests that while new reading laws might have real benefits, they may fall short of their potential to improve how children are taught to read. 

“It’s an underutilized component,” said Dan Trujillo, an administrator and former teacher in the San Marcos Unified School District in California. “There’s a lot of research about that: The more a reader brings into a text, the more advanced their comprehension will be.”


40 years since “A Nation at Risk,” reform measures are more disruptive

Rick Hess:

While it’s not widely remembered today, the apocalyptic language in “A Nation at Risk” was married to an intense faith in the conventional schoolhouse. What do I mean? Consider the report’s major recommendations:

All of these recommendations sought to make the traditional school systems more rigorous, time-consuming, and demanding. None of it envisioned any fundamental alterations to the schoolhouse as understood by Horace Mann or the architects of David Tyack’s One Best System. One consequence was that, especially in a less polarized era, leading figures on the left and right basically agreed on the merits of more courses, more testing, more minutes in school, and more pay for teachers. (Whether this agreement led to the kind of change they hoped for, or even any change at all, is another story.)

Today? For better or worse, the conversation about school improvement has fundamentally changed. Instead of more rigor, time, or testing, the most popular proposals tend to be more controversial and more disruptive to familiar routines.


Mississippi rules in reading

Joanne Jacob’s:

Mississippi students used to rank dead last in learning, writes Phil Bryant, the former governor of the state, on Real Clear Education. Not any more. “Mississippi fourth-graders, when adjusted for demographics, are ranked as the nation’s top performers in reading and second in math,” according to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

Bryant credits legislation passed in 2013 that included “school choice, early childhood education, scholarships for dyslexic students, teacher-education reform — and a requirement that third graders demonstrate reading proficiency to be promoted. 

The “third-grade reading gate” was controversial, writes Bryant, who now advises the America First Policy Institute. Education experts claimed held-back students would be discouraged and push up the dropout rate. 

Instead, graduation rates are now about 10 percent higher than the national average, despite the state’s high poverty rate. Mississippi hired regional coordinators and school-based literacy coaches in the lowest-performing schools, writes Bryant. “A Literacy Coaching Handbook was developed for coaches, K–3 teachers, administrators, and university faculty teaching early literacy,” so everyone understood language structure and how to improve instruction. 

The results are “dazzling,” writes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. He visited a second-grade class in Jackson, where nearly all students come from low-income, black families.

Legislation and Reading: the Wisconsin Experience 2004 –

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?


Notes on Madison tax and spending priorities

Scott Girard;

The encouragement comes as the union and the Madison Metropolitan School District disagree over a proposed wage increase in next year’s budget, among other items. Hundreds of MTI members and supporters showed up to the April School Board meeting, where the 2023-24 budget proposal was made public, to demand an 8% increase in base wages and smaller class sizes.

In a challenging budget cycle full of uncertaintyover what the state will provide, the district’s current proposal includes a 3.5% base wage increase.

Teacher Appreciation Week runs May 8-12 this year. Last year during Teacher Appreciation Week, MTI and the district officially exchanged proposals for base wage increases that were significantly far apart.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?


How Academic Freedom Died at Princeton

Abigail Anthony

“Thirty-one academic departments have DEI committees.”

Princeton’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are misnamed: They divide, exclude, and ostracize students of all political affiliations by rendering it socially dangerous to express any criticism of progressive mantras. Thirty-one academic departments have DEI committees, which could explain the land acknowledgementsin syllabi and the deluge of departmental anti-racism statements that inform students what can and can’t be said in class. The university’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning offers recommendations for “inclusive teaching” and encourages instructors to “address blatantly offensive and discriminatory comments and hold students accountable for their behavior,” which seems to contravene the university’s adoption of the University of Chicago’s Free Speech Principles. Princeton’s Office of the Provost encourages departments to “develop a departmental procedure for the regular examination of syllabi to ensure the representation of a diverse array of scholars in the field” and to “redesign the curriculum to address inequities in access and retention.”

In the name of diversity, some requirements have been dropped and others have been added. In 2021, the Princeton classics department began “removing barriers to entry” and stopped requiring study of Greek or Latin, while the politics department introduced a Race and Identity track. The Provost recommendsboosting the number of “underrepresented discipline-specific scholars and researchers to participate in departmental events.”

To ensure that faculty hiring results in a diverse work force, academic departments (possibly illegally) appoint a search officer who is the “only individual who can see the confidential individual, self-identified demographic data, including data about gender, race, and ethnicity,” and the officer should “monitor the recruitment and selection processes for tenure-track and tenured faculty positions.” The guidance states that “before the short list is sent to the associate dean for academic affairs or the deputy dean, the search officer must review it for gender and racial/ethnic representation.”

The search officer indicates to the search committee whether the applicant pool is diverse enough and recommends specific individuals without explicitly stating why, thereby circumventing federal and state laws prohibiting race-based hiring. Unsurprisingly, the university has documented a rise in Asian and black tenure and tenure-track faculty since fall 2018, while the white tenure and tenure-track faculty fell by 4.4 percent. Although Princeton doesn’t require diversity statements for hiring, the university has developed guidelines for departments that do wish to ask for such affirmations.


The Heroes of the Nashville School Shooting

Wall Street Journal:

The heroes in Nashville were the police, who were on the scene quickly. With great discipline and courage, they entered the building, ran toward the shots, and killed the attacker once she was cornered. Two have been identified as Officer Rex Engelbert and Officer Michael Collazo. A timeline posted by the Tennesseean says the attacker entered the elementary school at 10:11 a.m., shooting out the glass doors. A call to police came at 10:13.

By 10:23, officers were inside the school. They shot the attacker at 10:25. Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told reporters that “someone took control and said, ‘Lets go, lets go.’” The department has released body camera footage that is harrowing.

Waiting to confront the attacker was the mistake last year in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed. “Three minutes after the subject entered,” the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety later testified, “there was a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract and neutralize the subject.”


Do we need more ‘parental rights’ — or help fixing the real problems in education?

Liz Willen:

What sounds like increased protection for children is part of a Republican campaign slogan, one that may or may not resonate with our country’s fragile public-school parents, teachers and children in the post-pandemic era. Republicans hope it will, though many parent groups and Democrats disagree.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Parents Bill of Rights Act,” which would guarantee parents access to more information online, including curriculum, budgets, reading lists and library books, while requiring them to be notified of student requests to change their gender-identifying pronouns.

“This is about empowering the parents, it’s about opening up the schools to the parents,” said Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

“Orwellian to the core,” countered Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who said it has no chance of passing the Senate. The bill some Democrats dubbed “the politics over parents” bill passed the House 213 to 208, in part because five Democrats were absent.


Madison k-12 students express their top issues…. (Achievement, Reading?)

Scott Girard:

Madison students found a soapbox Thursday and used it to share the biggest challenges their generation faces.

Ninety middle and high school students attended the Project Soapbox event at the Overture Center, giving speeches that responded to the prompt, “What is the most pressing issue facing young people today and what should be done about it?”

From concerns about racial discrimination and anti-transgender legislation to fat-shaming and climate change, the students who spoke during the afternoon’s “mainstage” event demonstrated a passion for their subjects and encouraged the dozens of peers and adults listening to them to take action.

“It is time that we take a stand to correct this longstanding issue,” said Lee K-P, talking about the challenges of youth mental health. “You could be the difference this world needs.”

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?


“deeply flawed” reading curricula

By LaTonya Goffney, Sonja Santelises and Iranetta Wright:

America is finally acknowledging a harsh truth: The way many schools teach children to read doesn’t work. Educators, and indeed families, are having a long overdue conversation about how one of the nation’s most widely used curricula, “Units of Study,” is deeply flawed — and where to go from here.

The problem became a mainstream topic of conversation after parents got a closer look at their children’s lessons over Zoom during the pandemic, and journalist Emily Hanford released a podcast exposing how schools and teachers were “Sold a Story.” 

As Hanford explained, “Units” was not crafted on the science of reading — or what research shows are the best ways to build literacy. Such research-based methods focus on developing content knowledge, an understanding of letter-sound and sound-spelling relationships, word recognition, and language comprehension and fluency. Multiple, rigorous studies over 40 years prove these are the most effective ways to teach reading.

Yet “Units” instead encourages children to “cue” their thinking by looking at pictures or other words on the page to figure out what they don’t know. This approach is wholly inadequate — it does not build knowledge and skills, is especially problematic for children with a limited vocabulary, and often amounts to little more than guessing. 

But the “Units” curriculum has been popular, championed by respected voices, and too few teachers know about or study the science of reading as part of their preparation programs and professional development. Many administrators have also assumed that instructional programs peddled to their districts have a solid research base and are supported by data.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?


Can 95% of Children Learn to Read?

Nate Joseph:

Over the years, I have on numerous occasions seen the claim that 95% of students can learn how to read proficiently, so long as they are provided adequate tier 1/2 instruction. Truthfully, it has always stuck out to me as a strange figure, for three reasons. First, most academic research does not typically use percentages in this sort of manner. Second, I often see this figure unaccompanied by a citation. And third, it seems low; I find it hard to believe that 5% of students just cannot learn how to read. That said, I have never really looked into the claim, because the general purpose of citing this figure seems to be to encourage evidence-based practices for reading instruction and this seems like a positive goal. That said, I recently saw some skepticism of the idea, based on the belief that the number is too high and that 95% of students cannot learn how to read. For this figure to have scientific validity, it would need experimental research demonstrating it to be true. Ideally, I would want to see multiple large scale studies, due to the universality of the claim. Intrigued by the discussion, I put out a public call on twitter asking if anyone had a citation for the figure. To my pleasant surprise, I was sent dozens of comments and direct messages, with links to studies and papers on the topic. 

 

Some of the citations I was sent were policy papers, by authors and institutions that used this claim. However, these papers were not experimental and usually cited popular Science of Reading books, not experimental research. There was also, interestingly, one research paper sent to me from the 1980s, that made the claim, but did not cite any evidence to support it. So it appears that this claim has been in circulation for a long time. The most common source listed for this claim seemed to be Louisa Moats, who has written about this rule on numerous occasions. However, she does not claim that 95% of students can reach grade level, based on just core instruction, but rather in totality. Louisa Moats cites 4 sources in support for this rule. In Kilpatrick’s book Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties; a 2009 paper by Lim, et al. on students with Down Syndrome; a 2005 paper by Mathes, et al, examining the rate of risk reduction for struggling reading, with intensive intervention instruction, and a literature review of risk reduction, by Joseph Torgersen. In my opinion, the last two citations provide some experimental evidence to support this claim.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?


Gov. Mike DeWine enters the ‘reading wars’ with budget proposal to fund change to ‘science of reading’

Laura Hancock:

His budget proposal contains $162 million over the next two years to get the science of reading instructional approach into all of Ohio’s public schools.

At the same time, Ohio State University has been an epicenter of the approach to reading instruction that DeWine wants to get away from – known as “balanced literacy” or “whole language” – since 1984, holding a trademark for an intervention program used to catch struggling readers up with their peers. Hundreds of thousands of students across the country have been educated using the program – called Reading Recovery – which OSU professors take into local schools across the country.

Balanced literacy encourages students, when they encounter a word they don’t know, to use strategies such as looking at the book’s pictures and considering context, sentence structure and the word’s letters.

But DeWine, in his State of the State speech, cited the most recent results of Ohio’s State Test as a reason for schools to change their approach. Just 60.1% of third-grade students scored proficient or higher on reading.

Note that spending increases annually, with Madison taxpayers supporting at least $23,000 per student.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?








schoolinfosystem.org