David Weinberger: The internet started out as the Information Highway, the Great Emancipator of knowledge, and as an assured tool for generating a well-informed citizenry. But, over the past 15 years, that optimism has given way to cynicism and fear — we have taught our children that the net is a swamp of lies spun … Continue reading Rethinking Knowledge in the Internet Age→
Megan Thielking: More and more teenage girls are using intrauterine devices and other long-acting reversible contraceptives, or LARCs. That’s one reason the teen pregnancy rate has plunged. But those girls are using condoms less often than girls who take oral contraceptives, according to a new analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics. Why it matters: LARCs are … Continue reading Teens who use IUDs to prevent pregnancy often skip condoms→
Colleen Flaherty: Repeatedly during the meeting, Millner and other regents cited the need, in an era of tight budgets, for “flexibility” to close programs — and eliminate faculty jobs in the process. The votes here marked the near-end of two years of debate over a tenure policy that saw the university system’s tenured faculty go … Continue reading Commentary On UW System Tenure Changes→
JimQ: stumbled across an article in the Financial Times the other day revealing why Philadelphia’s infrastructure is crumbling, with absolutely zero possibility of reversing the downward spiral. I find it fascinating a foreign publication had to uncover the ugly truth, while the liberal rag Phila. Inquirer is completely silent on the issue. They just spout … Continue reading MORE THAN 30 BLOCKS OF FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY→
David Gelernter, via Will Fitzhugh: Donald Trump is succeeding, we’re told, because he appeals to angry voters—but that’s obvious; tell me more. Why are they angry, and how does he appeal to them? In 2016, Americans want to vote for a person and not a white paper. If you care about America’s fate under Obama, … Continue reading Political correctness is the biggest issue facing America today.→
Margaret Wente: When I was six, I had a dream. I dreamed of being a ballet dancer, floating across the stage in my white tutu and tights. I would dazzle the world! Alas, I never made it. I was built like a brick, and had no sense of rhythm. I had plenty of determination, but … Continue reading Why grit is highly overrated→
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences In the last twenty years, and especially since the onset of the Great Recession, states have dramatically reduced their contributions to public higher education. While the cuts have affected every public higher education institution, the cuts at public research universities have been the most severe, averaging a 26 … Continue reading Public Research Universities: Understanding the Financial Model→
Jennifer Brown: I wish I could say that this honor was for jovial purposes. It wasn’t. I appeared before the committee not to discuss the amazing job our teachers are doing in classrooms across the state, but instead to defend Alabama’s College and Career Ready Standards from the latest legislative attempt to reverse what the … Continue reading We should reject efforts to repeal College & Career Ready Standards→
Laura Waters: Poor Andrew Cuomo: he just can’t get it right. First he signed the Education Transformation Act of 2015 that, in part, ties teacher evaluations to student outcomes and was toasted by those who believe that we can do a better job of ensuring that effective teachers are in New York State classrooms. Then … Continue reading Teachable Moment for Andrew Cuomo: Lead the State, Not Just the Loud→
The Atlantic: Just as President Obama steps back from student testing and governors coast to coast retreat from high-stakes accountability in schools, China’s leaders are pushing to enrich their national exams and nudge teachers away from rote instruction, aiming to nurture cognitively nimble and socially committed graduates. No Child Left Behind—for all its blemishes and … Continue reading A Shifting Education Model in China→
Philip Longman: What, then, is the missing piece? A major factor that has not received sufficient attention is the role of public policy. Throughout most of the country’s history, American government at all levels has pursued policies designed to preserve local control of businesses and to check the tendency of a few dominant cities to … Continue reading K-12 Tax and Spending Climate: The price of growing Federalization→
The Economist: Mr Thrun insists that nanodegrees are distinct from massive open online courses (MOOCs), the digital lecture series which are now offered by many higher educational institutions. Udacity analyses individual students’ learning data (using AI) in an attempt to increase their retention and completion rates. “We effectively reverse-engineer the human learning brain to find … Continue reading “We can now deliver a top-notch education at home in a way that was never possible before.”→
Chris Rickert: The case heard by the state Supreme Court on Tuesday pits Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s administration against Evers and public education backers who object to the 2011 Act 21. That law gave the governor power to approve or reject the administrative rules state agencies create to implement statutes. A court blocked the law … Continue reading Commentary on Wisconsin’s K-12 Governance Model→
Patrick Marley: In 1996, the high court unanimously ruled the elected superintendent is in charge of education, finding the governor and lawmakers could not strip the office of those powers. Now, the court is being asked to overturn that decision. Justice David Prosser was the speaker of the state Assembly during the legal battle two … Continue reading K-12 Governance Question Before The Wisconsin Supreme Court→
April Kelly-Woessner When Samuel Stouffer first wrote on political tolerance during the McCarthy era, he concluded that Americans were generally an intolerant bunch. Yet, finding that younger people were more tolerant than their parents, he also concluded that Americans would become more and more tolerant over time, due to generational replacement and increases in education. … Continue reading How Marcuse made today’s students less tolerant than their parents→
Education News, via a kind reader:: Catching up to our global peers will require changing education policy and culture Intel’s recent announcement that it will cease sponsoring and underwriting the prestigious Science Talent Search (which it took over from Westinghouse in 1998) is another nail in the coffin of “gifted education” in the United States. … Continue reading America’s Smart Kids Left Behind→
Charles Moore: Go back, for a moment, nearly 30 years. In March 1987, Margaret Thatcher visited Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in Moscow. Sitting in the Kremlin, the two argued for hours. At one point, Mr. Gorbachev accused Mrs. Thatcher of leading the party of the “haves” … Continue reading The Middle-Class Squeeze→
Molly Beck: The conservative legal group Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty in a court filing this week asked the state Supreme Court to reverse an appeals court decision that upheld Evers’ rule-making authority related to education. The brief was filed on behalf of the state’s largest business lobbying group Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the … Continue reading Wisconsin DPI “Rule Making” vs. Legislation in the Courts..→
Alan Borsuk: Being superintendent was a pretty low profile matter for much of the last 166 years, but no more. Here are three reasons why: Vouchers: DPI oversees administration of the private school voucher program. Evers and his two predecessors were big advocates of the conventional public school system. Voucher advocates generally regard all of … Continue reading Commentary On Wisconsin’s State School Superintendent→
Molly Beck: “I know our entire party is not happy with a public school system that can’t even get 37 percent of the students proficient in reading.” According to DPI data, 36.6 percent of the state’s students were considered proficient in reading in the 2013-14 school year, the latest data set available. DPI spokesman John … Continue reading Wisconsin Schools’ Superintendent Rhetoric→
Why pay special attention to high-ability girls and boys? Won’t they do fine anyway? Shouldn’t we concentrate on kids with problems? Low achievers? Poor kids?
Good questions all, particularly when American education leaders (and their counterparts in most other advanced countries) are preoccupied with equalizing opportunity, closing gaps, and giving a boost to those most challenged—and when resources are chronically scarce. Yet such questions have two compelling answers.
Megan McArdle: The problem was that the money he was using was, essentially, the nation’s seed corn. Venezuelan crude oil is relatively expensive to extract and refine and required a high level of investment just to keep production level. As long as oil prices were booming, this policy wasn’t too costly because the increase offset … Continue reading Civics: Printing Money Goes Haywire in Venezuela→
Anya Kamenetz: So it’s not surprising that his grandkids got him wondering about — and researching — a big question: How well is the U.S. educating its top performers? His answer: not very. “High achievers are being neglected in all sort of ways by schools that had no incentive to push them farther up.” His … Continue reading How The U.S. Is Neglecting Its Smartest Kids→
Erin Richards: Wisconsin’s Class of 2015 posted an average ACT composite score of 22.2, tying the state for second nationally among states where the majority of students take the national college entrance exam, according to results released Wednesday. The results come from the 73% of Wisconsin students who graduated in 2015 and took the exam … Continue reading Wisconsin ACT scores hold steady at No. 2 for Class of 2015→
Crains: There are many paths to failure. But to understand how Illinois’ pension system became the worst in the nation, it’s instructive to look at what happened 10 years ago in the final, hectic days of the annual state legislative session in Springfield. A dense, 78-page bill aimed in part at curbing pension abuses in … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Illinois’ Pension Disaster→
Vivian Wang: Laying down a new marker in the competition for school enrollment in Milwaukee, the School Board has approved a high-profile young educator’s proposal for a new charter school, after he promised to ramp up efforts to reverse the flow of students leaving the district for voucher schools and other options. Maurice Thomas’ planned … Continue reading MPS approves ‘no excuses’ charter school with vow to draw students back→
Mike Antonucci: changed nothing, and Scott Walker is running for President of the United States. In June 2012, it didn’t require a crystal ball to write , “Now that the recalls are over, we’re likely to see a WEAC in a few years that’s no better than half what it was at its peak.” That … Continue reading WEAC Falls Below 40,000 Active Members→
Erin Richards: Education issues have been some of the most controversial elements of the 2015-’17 state budget. The proposal calls for allowing much more public money to flow to private, mostly religious schools while keeping public school funding mostly flat. Public schools would see a modest increase in funding in the second year of the … Continue reading Wisconsin schools chief urges Scott Walker to veto education measures→
Timothy Ready: The Promise abruptly reversed the district’s long-running enrollment slide, as the previous blog in this series showed. School enrollment has increased by nearly 25 percent and the city’s population once again has begun to grow. College-going rates have increased significantly, as Brad Hershbein will show later this week. However, there has been no … Continue reading Free college is not enough: The unavoidable limits of the Kalamazoo Promise→
Ebony McGee: The answer is complicated. Increasing school resegregation – the renewal of segregation – and the continuing inequality of black students is resulting in lower achievement and graduation rates, signalling a reversal of civil rights gains. Achievement disparities, referred to widely as the black-white achievement gap or test-score gap, frequently position black students at … Continue reading How do US black students perform at school?→
Guillermo Lastarria: On Thursday, April 16th more than 150,000 students, teachers, workers and citizens marched down Santiago’s main thoroughfare under the slogan “Less Corruption, More Democracy”. The protest had been called by the national roundtable of student federations, known as the CONFECH, as the first in a promised series of renewed mobilizations. The turnout was … Continue reading “Less Corruption, More Democracy”→
Mark Wilson: A few years ago, the Internet was awash in groundbreaking data visualizations. There was Aaron Koblin’s deeply influential map of flight patterns around the U.S. Periscopic’s exhaustive, haunting portrait of gun violence in the United States. Jer Thorp and John Underkoffler’s Minority Report-like interface for exploring the galaxy. Today, you’d be lucky to … Continue reading Data visualization has finally grown up and gotten a job.→
Todd Milewski: “There should be some room for inflationary increases, and our schools have been really constrained for several biennia now. So zero is not a win. Certainly, it’s better than what it was but, frankly, nothing has changed over the last six months so maybe the budget should have been put in place as … Continue reading Commentary On Wisconsin’s K-12 Tax & Spending Climate→
Lenore Skenazy: There are 18-wheelers with brake problems, hungry bears just stumbling out of hibernation, and lawnmowers that suddenly shift into reverse. And then there’s the unparalleled danger of Double Stuf Oreos. Thank goodness this teacher requires parents to sign off on cookie consumption—if they dare.
Tom LaMont: Failure is universal in a way that success is not. A failure confessed tends to make somebody endearing, while their successes, told aloud, may make us want to bite them. And still it is success we dwell on. Search your social media newsfeeds for admissions of failure, and you’ll find them; but the … Continue reading My big fail: losers come clean on their all-time low→
Molly Hensley-Clancy: When Yale announced it last week that it would offer its first fully online degree, the backlash was almost immediate. Students and alumni of of the physician assistant program that Yale will offer online vocally opposed the move, urging the university to reverse the decision and stoking a letter-writing campaign. At a meeting … Continue reading Yale’s First Online Degree Gets Complaints From Alumni, Cheers From Investors→
Paul Voosen: Magic has entered our world. In the pockets of many Americans today are thin black slabs that, somehow, understand and anticipate our desires. Linked to the digital cloud and satellites beyond, churning through personal data, these machines listen and assist, decoding our language, viewing and labeling reality with their cameras. This summer, as … Continue reading The hidden story behind the code that runs our lives→
Mike Antonucci: Will Teachers’ Unions Exit Stage Left? We established last week that cognitive linguistic analysis would not be the salvation of teachers’ unions. Recent events dictate we revisit the possibility that teachers’ unions will revitalize themselves by moving to the left. Yes, yes, I know many of you think there cannot possibly be any … Continue reading Will Teachers’ Unions Exit Stage Left?→
Patrick Marley: Parents of students and members of teachers unions sued Walker over the law as it applied to rules put together by the Department of Public Instruction, which is headed by Evers. Walker is a Republican and Evers is aligned with Democrats, though his post is officially nonpartisan. The state constitution says that “the … Continue reading Court rules against measure letting Scott Walker halt school administrative rules→
Gary Davis: Teaching is commonly associated with instruction, yet in evolution, immunology, and neuroscience, instructional theories are largely defunct. We propose a co-immunity theory of teaching, where attempts by a teacher to alter student neuronal structure to accommodate cultural ideas and practices is sort of a reverse to the function of the immune system, which … Continue reading Is teaching about instruction or selection?→
Erin Richards: Wisconsin’s 16 technical colleges could establish independent charter high schools staffed by college instructors, under a proposal being circulated by two Republican lawmakers that aims to better prepare students for the workforce. Rep. Tom Weatherston (R-Racine) says charter high schools focused on occupational education or technology could attract students who would not otherwise … Continue reading Governance Diversity: Measure would allow tech colleges to run charter high schools→
Erin Richards: Costs to administer the new test have gone millions of dollars over budget. And administrators learned last week that a key technological feature of the new test — its ability to adapt to students’ individual ability levels by offering harder or easier questions as they take the exam — won’t be ready this … Continue reading Problem’s Swirl Around Wisconsin’s next student test….→
Robert P. George and Yuval Levin, via Will Fitzhugh: “If broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered.” This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family. The full series will appear … Continue reading Family Breakdown and Poverty To flourish, our nation must face some hard truths→
Alan Borsuk: Of course, Evers had a less sweet-spot-like reason for saying that. He went on to call for Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans in the Legislature not to mess things up with “divisive mandates” and “constrained revenue.” Evers said, “I am very fearful that the balance will shift under the guise of school reform.” … Continue reading Wisconsin K-12 Governance Commentary→
Via a kind reader’s email. Despite spending double the national average per student and delivering disastrous reading results – for years – Madison’s Superintendent pushes back on school accountability: The Wheeler Report (PDF): Dear Legislators: Thank you for your efforts to work on school accountability. We all agree that real accountability, focused on getting the … Continue reading Madison School District Superintendent “Reverts to the Mean”….→
Tim Damos: The number of Wisconsinites who received a high school equivalency certification plummeted by 92 percent this year, in part due to more rigorous standards and an increase in testing fees. Officials say the switch to a new General Education Development test this year was necessary to better prepare graduates for today’s workforce, and … Continue reading Wisconsin saw far fewer GED graduates in 2014→
Carl Campanile: How do you spell illiterate? A majority of students training at scores of New York colleges to become teachers flunked a literacy test they have to pass to be licensed, new figures show. The state Board of Regents for the first time is requiring would-be teachers to pass the Academic Literacy Skills exam. … Continue reading Majority of New York city’s trainee teachers flunked literacy tests→
Natasha Singer: Admissions officers at Morehouse College in Atlanta were shocked several years ago when a number of high school seniors submitted applications using email addresses containing provocative language. Some of the addresses made sexual innuendos while others invoked gangster rap songs or drug use, said Darryl D. Isom, Morehouse’s director of admissions and recruitment. … Continue reading College Applicants Sanitizing Social Media Profiles→
Erin Richards & Kelly Meyerhoffer: State Superintendent Tony Evers wants to boost funding for Wisconsin’s K-12 schools by $613 million in the next biennial budget, combined with increases to the amount of money schools can raise in local taxes, and a new way of funding the Milwaukee voucher program. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s … Continue reading Wisconsin superintendent seeks an Increase in Redistributed State Tax Dollars to $12,800,000,000→
Risa Doherty: Imagine finding a bill for $200 in your mailbox because your daughter was late to a couple of sorority events. Imagine, too, that those who snitched were her new best friends. This is one of the unwelcome surprises of sorority membership. Depending on the generosity of the vice president of standards, a fine … Continue reading Greek Letters at a Price→
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF): Getting Organized! MTI now has over two hundred (200) Member Organizers including teachers, educational assistants, clerical-technical employees, substitute teachers, security assistants, and retired MTI members who are committed to helping the next generation maintain their Union. Member Organizers are volunteers who have agreed … Continue reading Voter Turn-out Needed for MTI Recertification Elections→
Rebecca Koenig: With metaphors like those, brain-game companies entice people to buy subscriptions to their online training programs, many of which promise to increase customers’ “neuroplasticity,” “fluid intelligence,” and working memory capacity. They even claim to help stave off the effects of aging. Leading scientists have criticized those promises, though. The loudest objection came on … Continue reading Brain-Training Companies Get Advice From Some Academics, Criticism From Others→
Stephanie Simon: Florida students no longer need chemistry, physics or Algebra II to graduate from high school. Texas just scrapped its Algebra II requirement. And the Washington state board of education last month reversed its own resolution calling for a foreign language mandate, over concerns that it appeared too elitist. A standards rebellion — or … Continue reading School Standards Rebellion→
Edoardo Porter: In 1987, when he was Ronald Reagan’s education secretary, the conservative culture warrior William J. Bennett wrote a famous essay denouncing federal aid for higher education because it allowed colleges “blithely to raise their tuitions,” at little benefit to students. Nearly two decades later, it seems, he was broadly right. Indeed, he didn’t … Continue reading Why Aid for College Is Missing the Mark→
Andre Perry: If colleges want to reverse the declining number of teachers of color, create more STEM teachers, and calibrate teacher supply with district demand, then teacher preparation programs need to become less dependent on individuals’ tuition. The current tuition-driven system is incentivizing teacher preparation programs to prioritize quantity over districts’ needs. The country needs … Continue reading Ending higher ed’s tuition addiction to produce teachers we need→
Karen Herzog: The fastest-growing campus in the University of Wisconsin System has set another record for fall enrollment, thanks in large part to an initiative that capitalizes on its proximity to Iowa and Illinois. UW-Platteville is effectively drawing students from three states with strategic pricing and a smaller campus that appeals to those who don’t … Continue reading As recruiting intensifies, UW-Platteville grows enrollment→
Susan Dynarski: College costs have been rising for decades. Slowing — or even better, reversing — that trend would get more people into college and help reduce student debt. The Obama administration is working on an ambitious plan intended to rein in college costs, and it deserves credit for tackling this tough job. Unfortunately, I … Continue reading Why Federal College Ratings Won’t Rein In Tuition→
Wisconsin Reading Coalition via a kind email: With the beginning of a new school year, here is some timely information and inspiration. You can make a difference: At WRC, we are often focused on top-down systemic change that can improve reading outcomes for students across our state. However, bottom-up, individual efforts are equally important. A … Continue reading Reading and Curricular Suggestions & Links as the school year begins→
Patrick Jakeway The classic novel Brave New World describes a future in which people have lost all of their liberty and in which they have become drugged robots obedient to a central authority. It also details how this control was first established. First, the rulers had to erase all history and all the people’s memory … Continue reading College Board Erases the Founding Fathers. Protect the Spirit of ’76.→
Scott Heil, Liza Reisel & Paul Attewell: How much of a difference does it make whether a student of a given academic ability enters a more or a less selective four-year college? Some studies claim that attending a more academically selective college markedly improves one’s graduation prospects. Others report the reverse: an advantage from attending … Continue reading College Selectivity and Degree Completion→
Mark Peters & Caroline Porter: Wisconsin’s highest court upheld a law ending most collective-bargaining rights for government employees in the state, a blow for public-sector unions that have been stymied in their efforts to reverse the controversial measure championed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker. The law, passed in 2011, rocked the state, leading to mass … Continue reading Wisconsin Court Upholds Law Curbing Unions’ Rights→
Kevin Carey: Last week I wrote that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no reason to believe that American colleges are, on average, the best in the world. A number of people who responded, including several in letters to The Times, raised issues worth addressing more broadly. Several of the questions concerned whether the American … Continue reading More on American Colleges’ Standing in the World→
Helen Fraser: Today, it was reported that a girls’ state school in Bradford has been criticised by Ofsted for only employing female teachers. Feversham College, a Muslim school, has been told to hire positive male role models for its 664 girls, aged 11-18, who currently have an ‘all-female learning environment’. Its head teacher has stated … Continue reading Girls’ school chief: we need diversity in the staffroom as well as the boardroom→
Carl Zimmer: A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning. … Continue reading This Is Your Brain on Writing→
The Economist: OBESITY, according to a government-sponsored report, could make the current generation of Americans the first in history to live shorter lives than the previous one. A major change in food habits is needed to reverse the trend of widening waistlines (a development which we recently illustrated on our blog Graphic detail). Recognising that … Continue reading Greased palms and dried fruit→
Beaudry, Paul, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand: We document that successive cohorts of college and post-college degree graduates experienced an increase in the probability of obtaining cognitive jobs both at the start of their careers and with time in the labor market in the 1990s. However, this pattern reversed for cohorts entering after … Continue reading The Declining Fortunes of the Young since 2000→
Anthony Lonetree: The St. Paul School District plans to become the largest in the state to put iPads in the hands of all students. The decision, to take effect in the 2015-16 school year, was announced Friday by Superintendent Valeria Silva and represents a reversal of the stance taken by the district in 2012. That … Continue reading St. Paul schools to put iPads in hands of all students→
Joshua Rothman: A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm shift,” and I described … Continue reading Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?→
Deborah Fallows: One warm and misty May morning in Columbus, Mississippi, the lobby of the classroom building at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS) (more) was full of teen-agers milling about, waiting for morning classes to begin. In one corner of the glassy space was a grandfather clock, probably about 8 feet tall, … Continue reading A Mississippi School Striving for Excellence→
Edward Luce: America – so the song says – is the land of the free and home of the brave. It does not always feel that way. Last week the Food and Drug Administration said it would regulate e-cigarettes like normal tobacco. This is in spite of the fact there is no proof it leads … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: America’s compulsive urge to regulate→
Richard Adams & Sian Elvin: Caroline Beevers and her family moved to Stotfold, Bedfordshire, for the usual reasons: a pretty village, fast transport links to central London and the promise of good schools. The trouble was, they were not the only ones. “It’s a nice village, the people are nice, there’s lots for the kids. … Continue reading Class war in English villages as lack of primary school places hits families→
Susan Headden (PDF): PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHING is a profession in transition. Already the largest occupation in the United States, it is expanding faster than the nation’s student population. Teachers of color are entering the profession at twice the rate of white teachers, reversing an exodus after civil rights victories opened many other doors to African … Continue reading What the Changing Demographics of Society Mean for Schools, Students & Society→
Pew Research: More moms are staying home: The share of mothers who do not work outside the home has risen over the past decade, reversing a long-term decline in stay-at-home mothers. (In the U.S. today, 71% of all mothers work outside the home.) Two-thirds are “traditional” married stay-at-home mothers with working husbands, but a growing … Continue reading 7 key findings about stay-at-home moms→
Jason Read: “Whenever you have a ‘southern’ or a ‘northern’ or an ‘eastern’ or a ‘western’ before an institution’s name, you know it will be wildly underfunded.” –Richard Russo On March nineteenth the Chancellor of the University of Maine System, as well as the President, and select members of the Board of Trustees gathered in … Continue reading As Maine Goes, So Goes the Nation: A Brief Report from the University of Southern Maine→
Karl Zinsmeister: Many have been puzzled by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s skepticism toward charter schools, his calls for ending space-sharing and charging them rent, and his $210 million cut of a construction fund important to the schools. Education reformers are also anxious about the failure of President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan … Continue reading The Charter School Performance Breakout→
Nick Anderson: Britt Freitag, an admissions officer at George Washington University, confessed she was “slightly nervous” about a candidate for the Class of 2018. His grades were solid, but not stellar. The student had taken some tough courses, but not as many as Freitag would have liked. Test scores, she said, were “definitely on the … Continue reading Inside the admissions process at George Washington University→
Stephen Steinberg: The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld Penguin, $27.95 The tiger couple is chasing its own tail, which is to say, they are stuck in circular reasoning. In their new book, The Triple Package, Amy Chua, author of … Continue reading Tiger Couple Gets It Wrong on Immigrant Success→
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter via a kind Linda Doeseckle email (PDF): Does it matter to you when school begins in the fall? How about when and how long winter or spring break is? And, how about when the school year ends? Have you thought about how many days you work for your annual salary, … Continue reading What Does Your MTI Contract Do for You? School Calendar→
Marian Wang: At the center of the admissions and financial-aid process is a massive information imbalance: Schools make their decisions with detailed data about each applicant that goes well beyond test scores and transcripts. Many universities have access to comprehensive financial profiles, sometimes down to the type of cars a family drives. Some analyze patterns … Continue reading How Exactly Do Colleges Allocate Their Financial Aid? They Won’t Say.→
Michelle Roberts: Passive smoking causes lasting damage to children’s arteries, prematurely ageing their blood vessels by more than three years, say researchers. The damage – thickening of blood vessel walls – increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes in later life, they say in the European Heart Journal. In their study of more than 2,000 children … Continue reading Passive smoking ‘damages children’s arteries’→
Jim Zellmer: Good afternoon, Leigh Let’s begin with your education. Leigh Turner: Like increasing numbers of people in today’s modern world, I grew up in several countries, in Nigeria, in Britain, then again in Lesotho, in southern Africa, and then again in Britain. I went to several different, as we would say in English, schools … Continue reading A Conversation with Leigh Turner→
A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm shift,” and I described how this phrase had been used and abused, much to Kuhn’s dismay, by postmodern insurrectionists and nonsensical self-help gurus. People seemed to like the essay, but they were also uneasy about it. “I don’t think you’ll be able to publish this in an academic journal,” someone said. He thought it was more like something you’d read in a magazine.
Was that a compliment, a dismissal, or both? It’s hard to say. Academic writing is a fraught and mysterious thing. If you’re an academic in a writerly discipline, such as history, English, philosophy, or political science, the most important part of your work–practically and spiritually–is writing. Many academics think of themselves, correctly, as writers. And yet a successful piece of academic prose is rarely judged so by “ordinary” standards. Ordinary writing–the kind you read for fun–seeks to delight (and, sometimes, to delight and instruct). Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. It’s supposed to be dry but also clever; faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its deepest ambiguity has to do with audience. Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds. But, because it’s intended for a very small audience of hyper-knowledgable, mutually acquainted specialists, it’s actually among the most personal writing there is. If journalists sound friendly, that’s because they’re writing for strangers. With academics, it’s the reverse.
The Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:
The following links provide a lot of additional details on the legislation that would replace the Common Core State Standards within 12 months with model academic standards created in Wisconsin. Please stay informed and contact your legislators with your thoughts.
Today, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty sent a letter to Superintendent Evers of the Department of Public Instruction, raising serious concerns about whether the DPI is misapplying the open enrollment laws in a way that discriminates against students with disabilities in violation of state law as well as Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (“ADA”) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
Explained CJ Szafir, WILL Education Policy Director, “Every school year, hundreds of students with disabilities are denied the right to open enroll by their school district. When parents appeal the decision, records and interviews with parents have shown that the DPI is not protecting the rights of those students but is instead approving the rejections without conducting the analysis that it is legally required. The whole process leaves parents frustrated, and trapped in a school district that does not serve the needs of their child.”
The purpose of Wisconsin’s open enrollment program is to allow parents to choose a school district for their child other than the school district where they reside. But, students with disabilities have their applications for open enrollment rejected at a much higher rate than those without a disability. A major cause of this disparity is the resident school district claiming that they would incur an “undue financial burden” if the child leaves the school district.
The increasing concentration of wealthy students at highly selective colleges is widely perceived, but few analyses examine the underlying dynamics of higher education stratification over time. To examine these dynamics, the authors build an analysis data set of four cohorts from 1972 to 2004. They find that low-income students have made substantial gains in their academic course achievements since the 1970s. Nonetheless, wealthier students have made even stronger gains in achievement over the same period, in both courses and test scores, ensuring a competitive advantage in the market for selective college admissions. Thus, even if low-income students were “perfectly matched” to institutions consistent with their academic achievements, the stratification order would remain largely unchanged. The authors consider organizational and policy interventions that may reverse these trends
The operation and financing of primary and secondary public schools in the US is highly decentralized. Most of the budget of each of the 13,000+ school districts comes from a combination of local and state revenues. State constitutions and statutes determine the degree of local district autonomy and scope of taxing power.
As part of an ongoing project on the political economy of education finance, this paper reports on some developments in school spending in one state during a time when some of the state’s constitutional rules governing local school district taxing powers changed. In part, the paper provides a replication of tests of a model of bureaucratic agenda-setting in the financing of elementary and secondary public education. In that agenda-setting model, a budget-maximizing agenda setter makes a proposal for a locally funded operating levy that must be approved by a referendum. In the basic model, the referendum is modeled as an ultimatum game where the agenda setter makes a take-it-or leave-it proposal to some pivotal voter. If a majority of the electorate rejects the proposal, the levy is an exogenously specified reversion level. The optimal, budget-maximizing proposal makes the pivotal voter indifferent between the proposal and the
Wisconsin’s public school open enrollment application period will start in February for the 2014-15 school year, according to a release.
The program allows parents an opportunity to send their children to any public school district in the state, officials said. The enrollment period runs from Feb. 3 to April 30.
Children in the state are usually assigned to public school districts based on the location of their parents’ home, according to the release. The open enrollment application period is the only tuition-free opportunity for most parents to apply for their children to attend a public school in a school district other than the one they live in.
The program is an inter-district choice program that started in the 1998-99 school year, according to the release. Wisconsin is among 12 states with inter-district open enrollment.
“Wisconsin is among a number of states nationwide that offer public school open enrollment across school districts. The state’s long-running program supports parental involvement and shared responsibility for educating children,” State Superintendent Tony Evers said in the release.
Gov. Scott Walker has asked State Superintendent Tony Evers to begin hearings on revoking the teaching license of a Middleton teacher reinstated to his job earlier this month after being fired in 2010 for looking at pornographic images at school.
“After hearing from concerned parents, I am asking you to act efficiently in your investigation into the actions of Mr. Harris and to initiate revocation proceedings,” Walker wrote in a letter dated Jan. 28. “The arbitration process afforded to Mr. Harris failed the school district and the students. It has taken both a financial and emotional toll on the district. Cases, such as this one, are a good example of why our reforms are necessary.”
Walker also wrote cases like the one in Middleton “prompted me to sign 2011 Act 84 giving the State Superintendent clear authority to take action.”
The law allows the Department of Public Instruction to revoke a license for immoral conduct, defined under state law to include looking at pornography at school.
Fourth grade teacher Carissa Franz starts her lessons by outlining the Common Core standards she and her students will focus on. Franz is in her second year at Ray W. Huegel Elementary School, and uses the standards to drive her teaching this year.
She and teachers throughout Madison are integrating the new Common Core State Standards, adopted by State Superintendent Tony Evers in 2010, into their curriculums with the help of new Common Core-aligned materials and district-supported teacher teams
The changeover to Common Core is a deliberate process. Franz meets monthly with the superintendent as part of a teacher advisory board that shares the “voice of the teachers” with the district, she said.
Every week, she meets with a group of teachers representing each grade level in her school to discuss how to align the standards and the math materials used district-wide with the needs of Huegel’s classrooms.
Sections IV-I and IV-J of the MTI Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement set forth the procedures which principals are contractually required to use when management notifies a teacher that he/she is being considered for non-renewal of contract. By Contract, the District is obligated to advise a teacher before May 1, if they are considering non-renewal. Under Wisconsin State Statutes, such a notice must be delivered to the teacher on or before May 15. Such notice could also be on one’s evaluation that must occur by April 15 per your Collective Bargaining Agreement.
MTI staff should be present at any and all meetings
between the teacher and any administrator in this regard, given that the meeting may indeed affect the teacher’s continued employment status. The teacher has the legal right to MTI representation and does not have to begin or continue a meeting without representation. See the reverse side of your MTI membership card.
For probationary teachers, a request for a hearing before the Board of Education must be submitted within five (5) days of the teacher’s receipt of the notice that the Board of Education is considering non-renewal of the teacher’s contract. For non-probationary staff, a request for arbitration must be made within fifteen (15) days of a non-renewal notice. It is extremely important for any teacher receiving such a notice to immediately contact MTI.
School district employees received some encouraging news prior to winter break. Wisconsin school employees chose “UNION” by large margins. Between November 29 and December 19, 2013 the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) conducted recertification elections for over 500 local unions representing over 56,000 classroom teachers, clerical/technical workers, educational assistants, bus drivers, custodial workers and other school district employees. Over 98% of those voting, voted Union YES!
Of the 39,872 total votes cast, 39,107 voted to recertify their union, with only 765 (less than 2%) voting against recertification. Annual union recertification elections are mandated by Governor Walker’s Act 10. In his ruling in MTI’s lawsuit, Judge Colas found requiring such elections to be unconstitutional. That decision was reversed by the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Abrahamson and Justice Walsh Bradley expressing strong dissent, in a 26 page opinion. Not surprisingly, Dane County school districts had a particularly strong showing; Monona Grove teachers had nearly 90% of all eligible voters cast ballots and, of those, nearly 96% voted Union YES. But it wasn’t only the Dane County districts that voted Union. Even those school districts in largely conservative counties voted affirmatively. Waukesha teachers voted 648-14 to maintain their Union as their certified bargaining agent; Wauwatosa teachers 367-7; and West Allis Educational Assistants voted 47-1. The largest school districts in the state also enthusiastically voted Union YES. Appleton Substitute teachers voted 159-2; La Crosse Secretaries voted 40-0; Milwaukee teachers voted 3,728-35 and Milwaukee Ed Assistants voted 875-10.
More than a decade ago, demographic projections signaled an important reversal for Chicago Public Schools: Enrollment was about to shrink dramatically.
Yet CPS leaders appointed by former Mayor Richard M. Daley issued billions of dollars in bonds to repair, expand or replace the vast majority of the district’s schools regardless of future needs and without voter input, a Tribune investigation found.
In total, CPS officials have borrowed more than $10 billion in general obligation bonds since 1996 to fund school construction projects, debt that has contributed to the system’s current financial crisis. Officials poured $1.5 billion of that money into schools that today are less than 60 percent full.
Along the way, CPS invested $100 million in schools it closed this year, in part, because they were underused. About half of that spending came after demographic projections predicted districtwide enrollment drops.
Two big evaluations of education in the Sunshine State came out this week–and readers can be excused for feeling a bit confused, because they tell rather different stories about the state of Florida’s schools.
Eleven newspapers around the state went front-page this week with stories highlighting the release of teacher evaluation data. The vast majority of Florida teachers–98 percent–were rated “effective” or “highly effective.”
Meanwhile, two papers–the Lakeland Ledger (which ran wire copy) and The Palm Beach Post (subscription-only) gave A1 placement to stories about Florida’s results on the Program for International Student Assessment, which tests students in more than 60 countries. (Florida was one of three US states to pay for state-specific results.) The numbers weren’t sparkling: Florida kids fared roughly in line with the US and international averages in reading, and similar to the lackluster US average but well below the international standard in science. In math, the state’s results were worst of all: well below the US average and “similar to Croatia,” as the Post story put it, with 30 percent of students scoring as “low achievers.”
The demographic challenges in Florida’s schools are real, but still there’s an obvious question here: How can the state’s teachers be doing such a great job while students can’t compete with international peers and struggle to keep up with already-middling US scores?
When asked if politics and the resistance from the tea party had eroded the chances of Common Core moving forward in Wisconsin, Evers said the politics surrounding the issue have created a lot of misinformation.
“It’s important for everyone, including those on these committees, to realize that this is about our students being college and career ready,” Evers said. “These standards have been embraced by districts across the state for the past three years. I think it is the right thing to do for the kids to keep the standards in place. That’s the bottom line.”