Preparing world-class teachers

Louis Freedberg, Ph.D., and Stephanie Rice, via a kind email (PDF):

Despite the fundamentally important role of teachers in our public school system, how they are prepared is receiving far less attention than other current reforms, such as the Common Core State Standards, the Local Control Funding Formula, and new ways to assess and hold schools accountable for student performance.

Teachers are routinely blamed for almost every underperforming child and every short- coming of the nation’s public school system. The length of time it takes them to get tenure, seniority protections in the layoff process, and the regulations protecting them from dismissal have all come under attack.

In addition, teachers were laid off in large numbers during the Great Recession. Paralleling these developments, enrollments in teacher preparation programs plummeted to less than 20,000 in the 2012-13 school year, according to latest figures—a decline of 74 percent since 2001-02.
It has been more than 15 years since the last major reform of California’s system of teacher preparation and credentialing (with the passage of Senate Bill 2042 in 1998). Fortuitously, numerous groups have carried out a substantial amount of work that focuses on this crucial element of the state’s education system.

Most influential have been the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which issues credentials and oversees preparation programs; the Task Force on Educator Excellence, which released its influential “Greatness by Design” report in 2012; and the Teacher Prepara- tion Advisory Panel, which concluded its work in 2013.

Punctuation Tips

Janis Bell:

Punctuation marks are to writing what vocal delivery is to speech. Can you imagine talking in a monotone without pause? Your audience would have difficulty making sense of your words, let alone figuring out where emphasis and nuance belong.

If you drain the punctuation from your writing, you have no louds, no softs, no expression, no innuendo. If you use only a few punctuation marks, you seriously restrict your style. If you misuse punctuation marks, you send your reader down the wrong road, maybe even up a tree.

You need to understand exactly what each mark can and cannot do, as well as the message it gives to your reader.

Project Cybersyn and the origins of the Big Data nation.

Evgeny Morozov

In June, 1972, Ángel Parra, Chile’s leading folksinger, wrote a song titled “Litany for a Computer and a Baby About to Be Born.” Computers are like children, he sang, and Chilean bureaucrats must not abandon them. The song was prompted by a visit to Santiago from a British consultant who, with his ample beard and burly physique, reminded Parra of Santa Claus—a Santa bearing a “hidden gift, cybernetics.”

The consultant, Stafford Beer, had been brought in by Chile’s top planners to help guide the country down what Salvador Allende, its democratically elected Marxist leader, was calling “the Chilean road to socialism.” Beer was a leading theorist of cybernetics—a discipline born of midcentury efforts to understand the role of communication in controlling social, biological, and technical systems. Chile’s government had a lot to control: Allende, who took office in November of 1970, had swiftly nationalized the country’s key industries, and he promised “worker participation” in the planning process. Beer’s mission was to deliver a hypermodern information system that would make this possible, and so bring socialism into the computer age. The system he devised had a gleaming, sci-fi name: Project Cybersyn.

Why gifted education doesn’t make sense

Jay Matthews:

A new book out by nationally known gifted-education expert James R. Delisle, a former fifth grade special education teacher and Kent State University professor, says our schools are making war on our nation’s finest young minds by failing to fund enough programs for the gifted.

What’s the problem with that? He — and others involved with gifted education — doesn’t address what I see as the biggest problem with gifted education: its ill-considered selectivity.

After a school district has designated a certain group of students as gifted, what should it do for the children who missed being admitted by one or two IQ points, one or two votes on the selection committee or some other narrow margin in the variously complicated ways this is done?

Given the unavoidable imprecision of any selection criteria, many children being denied gifted services would be for all practical purposes identical to many of those selected. If gifted services are as necessary for the gifted as Delisle says they are, how can he deny them to children with the same capabilities and needs?

Every Child Reading: Linking Knowledge and Practice to Support School Systems

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

Dyslexia 101: Wisconsin Institute for Dyslexia/Learning Disabilities is repeating Dyslexia 101 this Saturday, October 11, from 9-12, at the WILDD center in Madison. $10 [Brochure – PDF]

Free webinar: Dr. Margie Gillis presents Every Child Reading: Linking Knowledge and Practice to Support School Systems
Tuesday, October 28, 1-2 PM CT
Sponsored by Learning Ally
Margie is president of Literacy How, Inc., and a research affiliate of Haskins Laboratories and Fairfield University. She is a frequent presenter at the International Dyslexia Association annual conference and has a wealth of information. We encourage you to tune in to learn about:
supporting school leadership
using data transparently for accountability
coordinating a multi-tier system of support
providing embedded professional development based on best practice
engaging parents and families

Click on the webinar title to register

Why the White House Fudged the Numbers on Student Loans

Liz Peek:

Unfortunately, it turnsout the numbers are bogus.

In keeping with a White House that talks a good game on transparency but that is cloaked in secrecy, the Department of Education moved the goalposts at the last minute, changing how the default rates were calculated and thus sparing some colleges from tough penalties. It has so far refused to say which schools were given a reprieve, though it appears likely that black colleges were the major beneficiaries.

The academic world has been anxiously awaiting the Department of Education’s annual announcement on student loan defaults. As of this year, schools with three consecutive years of default rates above 30 percent (or one year above 40 percent) will risk losing federal financial aid. The review was expected to clobber the for-profit sector, but also to penalize some smaller schools characterized by higher-then-average

Connecticut Targets Homeschoolers

Matthew Hennessy:

But while Lanza’s abnormal social and emotional development surely contributed to his crime, homeschooling neither exacerbated his mental illness nor obscured it from local education officials. Lanza attended traditional public schools up to the eighth grade. From the beginning, everyone knew he was different. As Andrew Solomon detailed earlier this year in The New Yorker, Lanza suffered from sensory issues and received speech and occupational therapy beginning in kindergarten. At every juncture of his early life, he was analyzed and agitated over by psychologists, counselors, behaviorists, and other state-credentialed educators. Yet Lanza’s troubles deepened, and his anti-social behavior grew worse. Peter and Nancy Lanza were as desperate to help their son find psychological peace as they were to identify a school environment in which he could thrive. At 13, he was sent to a private psychologist, who diagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome. At 14, he underwent a psychiatric assessment at the Yale University Child Study Center, where obsessive-compulsive disorder was added to his growing list of personality disorders. The Lanzas considered moving 50 miles away, to a town with a school district known for excellence in special education. They briefly enrolled him in a Catholic school.

Notes on the Academic Job Market

Gerry Canavan:

I’ve been puttering around on Twitter this afternoon thinking through my sense that framing academic job searches as a “lottery” might actually encourage, rather than combat, the cruel optimism involved in the process. The commonplace description of the market as a “lottery” has emerged in response to the framing of academia as a “market” or even as a “meritocracy,” both of which suggest some rationalistic evaluation of a candidate’s value vis-à-vis the other candidates, with the “best” candidate ultimately being selected. The market/meritocracy framing is naturally a source of anxiety for academic job-seekers, to which the lottery framing is experienced as a relief (especially for those who have been through one or more cycles without finding tenure-track employment): not getting a job isn’t “failure,” it’s the arbitrary outcome of a random and capricious system. That the applicants-to-job ratio for the most desirable jobs is now in the many-hundreds-to-one undoubtedly fuels this pervasive sense that all you can do is hope your name is the one that gets pulled out of the hat.

But the lottery framing, despite its comforts and its useful provocations, also has its limits, including some conceptual problems that may cause more harm than good in prospective job seekers. Some of this can be seen from the thought experiment of simply taking the lottery idea seriously. People use the idea of the lottery as a critique of a logic of merit and moral desert — but, perversely, nothing could be more fair than random allocation by lottery. (This contradiction is why many people who call the academic job market a lottery in practice describe something more like an anti-meritocracy: only the worst, least-deserving people get picked.)

The History Of The English Language In One Chart

George Dvorsky:

Triangulations blogger Sabio Lantz recently put together this rather clever diagram showing how the English language has evolved over the past 3,000 years.

And yes, though it first emerged as a West Germanic language spoken in early medieval England, its roots go as far back as the Celts. It was carried by Germanic settlers to various parts of the Netherlands, northwest Germany, and Denmark. One of these Germanic tribes, the Angles, eventually made its way to what is now Britain. At the time, the native population in Roman Britain spoke Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, that had certain Latin features.

Lantz’s diagram is also fascinating in that it beautifully illustrates how cultural injections influence the evolution of language. For English, this ranged from the Viking and Norman invasions through to the Renaissance mixing and empiric imports, such as Hindi and Arabic.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate-The history of inequality: breaking the camel’s back

The Economist:

ANGUS MADDISON, who died in 2010, was among the most influential of economic historians; his book on the world economy over the past 2,000 years is a classic. Now, one of the institutions he worked for, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, has teamed up with the University of Utrecht to produce an account of the conditions of life in 25 countries since 1820. It details everything from builders’ wages in 1920s Japan to homicide rates in 19th-century Italy. It bridges the gap between Maddison’s macroeconomic panorama and microeconomic studies by historians such as Peter Laslett, author of “The World We Have Lost”, about early modern England.

For the most part, the findings confirm what is suspected, if not known in such detail. The number of years in education has increased everywhere. Average heights have risen almost everywhere (by 1.1cm more in America in 1820-1990 than in China). The purchasing power of construction workers’ wages has grown everywhere, though in Britain the rise was tenfold in 1820-2000; in Indonesia it was only twice.

There is an exception to this generalisation, though: inequality. You would expect that the world of the Qing dynasty, Tsar Nicholas I and the British East India Company would be more unequal than today’s. Yet in China, Thailand, Germany and Egypt, income inequality was about the same in 2000 as it had been in 1820. Brazil and Mexico are even more unequal than they were at the time of Simón Bolívar. Only in a few rich nations—such as France and Japan—do you find the expected long-term decline in income inequality.

What is true for individual countries is also true if you treat the world as a single nation. The study uses the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality in which zero represents perfect equality—everyone has the same income—and 100 perfect inequality—one person has everything. The global Gini rose from 49 in 1820 to 66 in 2000. But this was not caused by widening disparities between rich and poor within countries (inequality in its usual sense). Inequality of that sort fluctuated for 130 years to 1950, before falling sharply in 1950-1980, in what the report calls an egalitarian revolution. Since 1980 it has risen again (as Thomas Piketty, a French economist, has shown), back to the level of 1820.

That implies the two-century rise in global inequality must come from elsewhere: from what is called “between-country inequality”, the gap between rich and poor nations. This gap has widened sharply. In 1820 the world’s richest country—Britain—was about five times richer than the average poor nation. Now America is about 25 times wealthier than the average poor country. The Gini coefficient for between-country inequality stood at only 16 in 1820 (ie, very low). It soared to 55 in 1950, and has been stable since. The driving force of inequality since 1820, in other words, has been industrialisation in the West.

Why Aid for College Is Missing the Mark

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 know the half of it.

It’s not just that many colleges and universities are bleeding taxpayers. The government’s overall strategy to subsidize higher education is failing at its core task: providing less privileged Americans with a real shot at a college degree. Alarmingly, it is burdening low-income students with risks they cannot bear and steering them into low-quality educations.

“Institutions of higher education in the United States extract a lot of money without delivering value but the government has no way of influencing that,” said Andreas Schleicher, the top education expert at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the research organization for the world’s major industrial powers. “It has very few levers of control over equity-related issues.”

Lessons From “The Smartest Kids in the World”

Laura Isensee

The data is clear: Finland, South Korea and Poland are outpacing the United States in grade-school education.

Many kids there can make complex arguments and solve challenging problems.

Journalist Amanda Ripley tells what it’s like to be a student in one of these education superpowers in her book: “The Smartest Kids in the World —and How They Got That Way”.

This is What the Empty Room Means

Autistic Hoya:

Today, the Georgetown University Center for Student Engagement (formerly known as the Center for Student Programs) hosted a Lunch & Learn training session aimed at student organization leadership. The goal of these trainings is to provide student leaders with knowledge and skills to assist them in running a student organization. Topics could range from strategies for bringing in outside speakers to budgeting for programs or partnering with other student groups. Today’s training was to be on accessible and inclusive event planning.

About a month ago, CSE asked if I would be willing to present during a training on accessibility in event planning. I said yes, enthusiastically yes. The outline for the event included an introduction from CSE, a presentation from our disability support services office on Georgetown’s policies for accommodation requests, and a presentation from me about the importance of accessibility and inclusion, as well as an overview of the great diversity of possible alterations and accommodations that planners might consider when developing an activity or program.

Community College Students Face a Very Long Road to Graduation

Ginia Bellafonte:

On a Friday afternoon last spring, Dennis D’Amelio, an artist and teacher in late middle age was presiding over a class in color theory at LaGuardia Community College, whose location in the immigrant hub of western Queens makes it one of the most ethnically diverse colleges in the country. It was the end of the semester and the students were tackling a challenging assignment — a test of the reactive properties of color, which required the meticulous rendering of small sequential blocks of paint, an exercise that would serve as a lesson in deductive reasoning and consume hours.

Vladimir de Jesus, a child of Puerto Rican parentage and Soviet enthusiasms, had arrived early with various supplies and considerable energy. At 23, he had been at LaGuardia sporadically over six years, amassing fewer than half of the credits he needed to progress to a four-year college.

For all of that time, and really for so long before it, he had known that he wanted to pursue a life in the arts. In an essay he wrote in March, he talked about painting and drawing pastels as a young boy, and the link that art provided to his mother, who had also painted and who died in the early 1990s of AIDS, a disease that also claimed his younger sister.

How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math

Barbara Oakley:

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now—someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler’s equation. It’s hard to believe I’ve flipped from a virtually congenital math-phobe to a professor of engineering.

One day, one of my students asked me how I did it—how I changed my brain. I wanted to answer Hell—with lots of difficulty! After all, I’d flunked my way through elementary, middle, and high school math and science. In fact, I didn’t start studying remedial math until I left the Army at age 26. If there were a textbook example of the potential for adult neural plasticity, I’d be Exhibit A.

Learning math and then science as an adult gave me passage into the empowering world of engineering. But these hard-won, adult-age changes in my brain have also given me an insider’s perspective on the neuroplasticity that underlies adult learning. Fortunately, my doctoral training in systems engineering—tying together the big picture of different STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) disciplines—and then my later research and writing focusing on how humans think have helped me make sense of recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology related to learning.

In the years since I received my doctorate, thousands of students have swept through my classrooms—students who have been reared in elementary school and high school to believe that understanding math through active discussion is the talisman of learning. If you can explain what you’ve learned to others, perhaps drawing them a picture, the thinking goes, you must
understand it.

The Secret Sauce of College Admissions

Dr. Brian Mitchell:

Moody’s issued a report last week pointing to a basic discrepancy in how we view college admissions that underscores the collapse of the college tuition-dependent finance model.

In its report, Moody’s noted that applications to private colleges rose 70 percent from 2004 to last year but the annual total of new high school graduates rose only five percent. The credit rating agency argued that the rise in applications created a perception of far greater selectivity than actually occurred at many colleges and universities.

While the argument made centered upon private colleges and universities, the same may be said for many public sector institutions. Indeed, it seems that the only group isolated from this perception was a handful of the most selective colleges and universities, whether private or public. In these cases, global branding, consumer perceptions, alumni “feeder” and job placement networks, and financial aid policies may play a larger role to assure more broadly-based, genuinely highly selective admission classes.

The truth is that selectivity is often based on how you measure and value it. Many colleges and universities have “carve out,” “conditionally accepted,” or wait list graduates lined up to create the illusion of far greater selectivity than actually exists. Thus, while the aggregate applicants/admit number may be correct, the route to acceptance may vary widely depending on what each candidate brings to the table.

The Plot Against Public Education How millionaires and billionaires are ruining our schools.

Bob Herbert:

Bill Gates had an idea. He was passionate about it, absolutely sure he had a winner. His idea? America’s high schools were too big.

When a multibillionaire gets an idea, just about everybody leans in to listen. And when that idea has to do with matters of important public policy and the billionaire is willing to back it up with hard cash, public officials tend to reach for the money with one hand and their marching orders with the other. Gates backed his small-schools initiative with enormous amounts of cash. So, without a great deal of thought, one school district after another signed on to the notion that large public high schools should be broken up and new, smaller schools should be created.
This was an inherently messy process. The smaller schools—proponents sometimes called them academies—would often be shoehorned into the premises of the larger schools, so you’d end up with two, three or more schools competing for space and resources in one building. That caused all sorts of headaches: Which schools would get to use the science labs, or the gyms? How would the cafeterias be utilized? And who was responsible for policing the brawls among students from rival schools?
But those were not Gates’s concerns. He was on a mission to transform American education, and he would start with the high schools, which he saw as an embarrassment, almost a personal affront. They were “obsolete,” he declared. “When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad,” he said, “I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow.”
There used to be a running joke in the sports world about breaking up the Yankees because they were so good. Gates felt obliged to break up America’s high schools because they were so bad. Smaller schools were supposed to attack the problems of low student achievement and high dropout rates by placing students in a more personal, easier-to-manage environment. Students, teachers and administrators would be more familiar with one another. Acts of violence and other criminal behavior would diminish as everybody got to know everybody else. Academic achievement would soar.

Related: Madison’s disastrous reading results.

Small Learning Communities.

English 10.

Adobe is Spying on (students) Users, Collecting Data on Their eBook Libraries

Nate Hoffelder:

Adobe has just given us a graphic demonstration of how not to handle security and privacy issues.

A hacker acquaintance of mine has tipped me to a huge security and privacy violation on the part of Adobe. That anonymous acquaintance was examining Adobe’s DRm for educational purposes when they noticed that Digital Editions 4, the newest version of Adobe’s Epub app, seemed to be sending an awful lot of data to Adobe’s servers.

My source told me, and I can confirm, that Adobe is tracking users in the app and uploading the data to their servers. (Adobe was contacted in advance of publication, but declined to respond.)

Ending higher ed’s tuition addiction to produce teachers we need

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 more effective STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) teachers as well as teachers of color. President Obama endorsed the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’s 2010 report that called for the recruitment and development of 100,000 new STEM teachers over the next decade. Despite being over half of all public school students, people of color only represent 15 percent of teachers (projected 5 percent by 2020). Since collegiate teacher prep programs educate 90 percent of all teachers, universities must lead the charge in cultivating these areas of need.

Technology in Schools (Reading?)

Meghan Murphy:

For an entire school year Hillsborough, New Jersey, educators undertook an experiment, asking: Is the iPad really the best device for interactive learning?

It’s a question that has been on many minds since 2010, when Apple released the iPad and schools began experimenting with it. The devices came along at a time when many school reformers were advocating to replace textbooks with online curricula and add creative apps to lessons. Some teachers welcomed the shift, which allowed their students to replace old poster-board presentations with narrated screencasts and review teacher-produced video lessons at any time.

Four years later, however, it’s still unclear whether the iPad is the device best suited to the classroom. The market for educational technology is huge and competitive: During 2014, American K-12 schools will spend an estimated $9.94 billion on educational technology, an increase of 2.5 percent over last year, according to Joseph Morris, director of market intelligence at the Center for Digital Education. On average, he said, schools spend about a third of their technology budgets on computer hardware.

Madison’s disastrous reading results.

K-12 tax & spending climate: The middle class is poorer today than it was in 1989

Matt O’Brien:

The fundamentals of the economy are, well, okay.

It’s been slow and steady, but the recovery has chugged along enough to get us back to something close to normal. The economy has surpassed its pre-crisis peak, unemployment is at a six-year low, and stocks have more than tripled from their 2009 low. It’s not the best of times, but it’s certainly not the worst — which was a very real possibility after Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy threatened to send us into a second Great Depression.

President Obama and his fellow Democrats, naturally, would like to claim some of the credit for that. If voters credited them with this economic turnaround, Obama and his party might have a better chance of holding the Senate this fall, an outcome that looks precarious. Indeed, Obama will give a high-profile speech Thursday at Northwestern University, trying to remind voters of all the economic success he’s had.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: “Wage Growth listless & apartment rents are growing at a faster rate than household income”

Anthony Sanders

US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew repeated First Lady Michelle Obama’s talking points that “the US Economy is Moving Strongly in the Right Direction!” It has been six years since the Great Recession ended in June 2009.

This misleading statement will be repeated many, many times leading up to the mid-term elections in November.

Let’s review the facts.

Real median household income and average earnings growth are NOT moving strongly in the right direction. In fact, their movement is rather listless. And apartment rents are growing at a faster rate than household income.

Treasury Secretary Lew did mention the declining unemployment rate, but failed to discuss the massive dropout from the labor force that has been occurring. The labor force fell by 97,000 in the latest jobs report. Those not in the labor force increased by 315,000.

So, Mr. Lew is correct that there is improvement … in sheer numbers of jobs added, but not true about the QUALITY of jobs.

And you wonder why mortgage purchase applications are in the toilet? Hint: it ISN’T overly tight credit standards. It’s a lack of income growth and inability to meet DTI requirements.

Is Google Making Students Stupid?

Nick Romeo:

One of the oldest metaphors for human interaction with technology is the relationship of master and slave. Aristotle imagined that technology could replace slavery if devices like the loom became automated. In the 19th century, Oscar Wilde foresaw a future when machines performed all dull and unpleasant labor, freeing humanity to amuse itself by “making beautiful things,” or simply “contemplating the world with admiration and delight.” Marx and Engels saw things differently. “Masses of laborers are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine,” they wrote in the Communist Manifesto. Machines had not saved us from slavery; they had become a means of enslavement.

Today, computers often play both roles. Nicholas Carr, the author of the 2008 Atlantic cover story “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, confronts this paradox in his new book, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, analyzing the many contemporary fields in which software assists human cognition, from medical diagnostic aids to architectural modeling programs. As its title suggests, the book also takes a stand on whether such technology imprisons or liberates its users. We are increasingly encaged, he argues, but the invisibility of our high-tech snares gives us the illusion of freedom. As evidence, he cites the case of Inuit hunters in northern Canada. Older generations could track caribou through the tundra with astonishing precision by noticing subtle changes in winds, snowdrift patterns, stars, and animal behavior. Once younger hunters began using snowmobiles and GPS units, their navigational prowess declined. They began trusting the GPS devices so completely that they ignored blatant dangers, speeding over cliffs or onto thin ice. And when a GPS unit broke or its batteries froze, young hunters who had not developed and practiced the wayfinding skills of their elders were uniquely vulnerable.

Throw out the college application system

Adam Grant:

THE college admissions system is broken. When students submit applications, colleges learn a great deal about their competence from grades and test scores, but remain in the dark about their creativity and character. Essays, recommendation letters and alumni interviews provide incomplete information about students’ values, social and emotional skills, and capacities for developing and discovering new ideas.

This leaves many colleges favoring achievement robots who excel at the memorization of rote knowledge, and overlooking talented C students. Those with less than perfect grades might go on to dream up blockbuster films like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg or become entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Barbara Corcoran and Richard Branson.

English proficiency index

Third Edition:

Seven countries join the index for the first time: Estonia, Slovenia, Latvia, Ukraine, Sri Lanka, Jordan, and Iraq. Three have been removed due to insufficient data: Dominican Republic, Syria, and Pakistan.

The first two editions of the EF EPI used archival data spanning three years each from 2007 to 2009 and 2009 to 2011, respectively. Due to the overwhelming interest generated by the previous two reports, we have decided to publish the EF EPI annually from this edition forward using a single year’s data. This annual report format will allow us to capture and report trends as they occur.

In this third EF EPI report, we have used test data from the 750,000 adults who took our English tests in 2012 to create the global country rankings, while at the same time analyzing the English proficiency trends that have emerged over the past six years (2007 to 2012), using test data from nearly five million adults.

We zoom in on ten countries and one territory to consider the contexts for the improvement in English skills in China, Russia, Spain, and Brazil; the stagnation in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Germany, and Mexico; and declining English skills in France. These eleven spotlights illustrate the diversity of the challenges faced and strategies devised to train a capable workforce for today’s globalized economy.

Philadelphia School Reform Commission Cancels Teacher Union Contracts

Kristen Graham and Martha Woodall:

In a stunning move that could reshape the face of city schools, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission voted Monday to unilaterally cancel its teachers’ contract. The vote was unanimous.

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers was given no advance word of the action — which happened at an early-morning SRC meeting called with minimal notice — and which figures to result in a legal challenge to the takeover law the SRC believes gives it the power to bypass negotiations and impose terms.

Jerry Jordan, PFT president, called the move “cowardly” and vowed to fight it strongly.

“I am taking nothing off the table,” a clearly angry Jordan said at an afternoon news conference. Job actions could be possible, once he determines what members want to do. “We are not indentured servants.”

Standing desks are coming to schools

Ben Schiller:

Increasing numbers of adults are throwing away their office chairs in favor of standing desks, believing that staying on their feet during working hours will improve their health. Should we be encouraging kids to do the same?

Yes, according to a study from three schools in Texas. It shows that when kids are given the opportunity to stand during classroom time, they burn more calories and seem to have greater attention span.

Retired Watertown teacher donates story for news project

Jenny Stepanski:

One year ago, retired Watertown Riverside Middle School teacher, Frances Milburn, wrote a children’s story that was featured in the Daily Times for Newspapers in Education use. Since then, Newspapers in Education newspapers around the country have chosen to publish her story, allowing teachers and children to benefit at no cost. Now she is at it again.

Starting Thursday, Milburn’s latest serial story, “Roscoe’s Treasure,” will be featured in the Daily Times. The story will be released in sections, with parts in the paper on Thursday and Oct. 7, 9, 14, 16, 21, 23, 27 and 28. Local teachers who wished to participate were invited to sign-up with the Times and will receive up to 20 copies of each paper in which the story is featured. Teachers are also provided with a lesson guide also written by Milburn.

“Roscoe’s Treasure” is a story about Roscoe, the family dog, who goes missing only to return with a surprise — a mysterious set of dentures. The story follows Roscoe and his family on a hilarious adventure to return the dentures to their rightful owner. Milburn said she was inspired to write the story after hearing about a similar true-life occurrence from a friend of hers. “I heard the story and how frustrating it was and thought ‘Wow! What a great idea that would be for a story!” said Milburn.

Wisconsin 6th Best State for Teachers

Todd Milewski:

A data analysis has put Wisconsin as the sixth-best state for teachers.

The analysis by personal finance website WalletHub scored states and the District of Columbia based on 18 factors, including salary, job openings and school safety.

Wisconsin ranked no higher than seventh in any category, but it scored among the top 15 in five areas: average number of hours worked, best school system, wage disparity, commute time and median annual salary.

States that had higher rankings than Wisconsin in some individual categories were brought down in the weighted overall score for low performance in other areas, said WalletHub spokesperson Jill Gonzalez.

She stressed it was an objective look at the landscape for educators.

“It’s not like we took a survey and asked teachers what they think,” Gonzalez said. “This is just the raw data.”

Wyoming ranked as the best state for teachers, followed by Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Massachusetts and Virginia.

North Carolina was at the bottom of the list, trailing Mississippi and West Virginia.

On Campus: Enrollment dips at UW System schools

Dan Simmons:

About 800 fewer students are on campuses that make up the sprawling University of Wisconsin System this fall, a drop of about half a percentage point from last year, the System announced Wednesday. Among freshmen, the drop is more dramatic, at 2.2 percent.

System officials said the drop was expected due to an improving economy and a decline in the number of high school graduates in the state.

“College enrollments often spike during economic downturns and then level off as the economy begins to rebound,” President Ray Cross said in a statement. “This is a natural, expected trend.”

The enrollment numbers won’t be final until early next year. They include all students who were on campus as of the 10th day of fall classes.

Seven of the System’s four-year schools and the two-year UW Colleges actually saw an increase in enrollment, although each was modest. UW-Whitewater leads the gainers at 1.1 percent. UW-Platteville is next at 1.0 percent.

Related: Madison area high schools UW System and UW-Madison enrollment:



A look at UW-Madison freshman enrollment from Madison area high schools, 1983-2012.


















Data via the UW-Madison registrar’s office.

Act 10 was no mistake; in fact, it should be expanded

Edmund Henschel & Russell Knetzger

In its Sept. 17 editorial about Gov. Scott Walker’s second term agenda, the Journal Sentinel Editorial Board said, “Act 10 was a mistake” (“Gov. Scott Walker’s second term? Same as the first,” Our View). Act 10 virtually ended collective bargaining for many, but not all, state and local public employees.

It was not a mistake and should be followed up with Act 10.2 and Act 10.3. One would address the expensive early retirement feature included in the Wisconsin pension plan for all state and local public employees, and the other would bring in police and fire personnel, left out in Act 10. Police and fire together amount to about 60% of most local budgets, leaving only 40% covered by Act 10.

Wisconsin was the first state in the Union to allow public employees to bargain collectively, and, by the 1970s, unionization was showing its worst feature. That feature was, and will always remain, that unions cannot resist the temptation to try to control both sides of the bargaining table. They do this by being politically active in electing union-sympathetic public officials and in de-electing taxpayer sympathizers. The state teachers union was the first to consistently apply this power both in local and state elections and was very effective at both levels.

Wisconsin, having first created public collective bargaining, rightfully should be the first state to remove it. Indiana was slightly earlier, but the Indiana public at referendum put it back in place. That action, and the current race for Wisconsin governor, shows just how much unions are fighting to regain this power.

Early public employee unions recognized that public employee strikes did not sit well with the public. In exchange for removing the right to strike, unions were given arbitration, a power that likely gained more for unions than striking. The problem with arbitration is it becomes an averaging of the surrounding lowest and highest wages.

As the wealthier tax bases raise their wages and benefits, over time the lower tax base communities rise to the previous average of the higher base. If they both can rise faster than inflation, which they have done by a ratio of 2.5-3 to 1, in only a few successive contract periods the lower tax base pay equals the former high base levels.

Much more on Wisconsin Act 10, here.

Degrading Campus Free Speech

Colleen Flaherty:

Professors and students are usually the biggest defenders of academic freedom and free speech on their campuses. But a pair of new books argues that students and faculty members themselves are degrading those values. Professors, one book says, are increasingly adopting notions of academic freedom that are too expansive, leaving the academy open to criticism from without. Students, meanwhile — says a second book — are increasingly trying to clip speech with which they feel uncomfortable, threatening free speech over all.

In Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (University of Chicago Press), Stanley Fish, the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished Professor of Law and the Humanities at Florida International University, argues that there’s been a slow but undeniable academic freedom “creep” spanning his career. That is, where the term’s emphasis was once on “academic,” he argues, it’s now on “freedom,” promoting a kind of mythical notion of the professor as revolutionary. That creep helps explain what Fish sees as various “schools” of academic freedom, for which he creates a taxonomy in Versions.

With $40 Million In New Cash, Parent-Teacher App Remind Targets A Billion Users Worldwide

Alex Konrad:

Lost permission slips and forms sent by a teacher to their student’s parents have long been a right of passage, but perhaps not for much longer. With nearly every student, parent and teacher all carrying a mobile phone, the question isn’t so much whether there’s an easier way to communicate from the classroom to the home, but how to do it in a way that doesn’t feel invasive or forced.

A startup called Remind thinks it’s figured out the balance, and its user growth would suggest that cofounder Brett Kopf is on to something. And two top Silicon Valley venture capital investors agree, betting another $40 million on Kopf in a Series C round announced Tuesday.

Legacy: just a byproduct of a broken system

Tass Saperstein:

Even after years of campaigns for diversity, increased financial aid, and accessibility to all students, Harvard’s campus still does not accurately reflect society today. A recent article in The Crimson, “What Should Harvard’s Legacy Be” urged the College to “eliminate legacy preference in admissions, to make the admissions process more transparent…and to actively strive toward a legacy of equal access for its many qualified applicants” in order to better combat its homogeneity. Unfortunately, in a society dominated by institutional benefits for the wealthy, preference for legacy applicants is a tiny detail in the larger picture of Harvard’s massively flawed “meritocracy.”

First of all, it must be established that legacy applicants don’t have such high acceptance rates simply because of their legacy status. Different studies have cited a multitude of statistics; the most commonly cited stating that in the 30 most elite universities, primary legacies are 45.1 percent more likely to be accepted. There is a fundamental problem with this data. These statistics not only downplay the merit of these applicants, but they also ignore the institutional educational benefits they have received. Being a Harvard legacy means that they are significantly more likely to come from a family of wealth that values education. The annual survey by The Crimson of the current freshman class states that on average, legacy students have higher test scores than their non-legacy counterparts. Furthermore, 37.3 percent of legacies come from families with incomes of $500,000 or more. They have more access to key resources such as college counselors, SAT tutors, and job or internship opportunities. All of these factors create a significantly more desirable college applicant. They aren’t being accepted to Harvard solely because they are legacies; they are being accepted because they are taking advantage of the plethora of resources at their disposal. And who can blame them?

New Milwaukee Public Schools’ chief Darienne Driver: Not the same old, same old

Alan Borsuk:

Driver was one of the few MPS leaders who developed some good relationships with education leaders independent of the system, including those involved in charter and private schools. She admits that earned her a fair amount of heat from within MPS last year. I suspected it might impede choosing her as superintendent or she might feel confined to existing ways if she were selected.

Notes and links on Darienne Driver, here.

Use grades to improve remedial placement

Judith Scott-Clayton, Peter M. Crosta & Clive Belfield:

At an annual cost of roughly $7 billion nationally, remedial coursework is one of the single largest interventions intended to improve outcomes for underprepared college students. But like a costly medical treatment with non-trivial side effects, the value of remediation overall depends upon whether those most likely to benefit can be identified in advance. This NBER working paper uses administrative data and a rich predictive model to examine the accuracy of remedial screening tests, either instead of or in addition to using high school transcript data to determine remedial assignment.

The authors find that roughly one in four test-takers in math and one in three test-takers in English are severely mis-assigned under current test-based policies, with mis-assignments to remediation much more common than mis-assignments to college-level coursework. Using high school transcript information—either instead of or in addition to test scores—could significantly reduce the prevalence of assignment errors. Further, the choice of screening device has significant implications for the racial and gender composition of both remedial and college-level courses. Finally, if institutions took account of students’ high school performance, they could remediate substantially fewer students without lowering success rates in college-level courses.

Via Noel Radomski.

Ivy League grade inflation

The Economist:

“WE DO not release statistics on grade-point averages so we can’t speak to the accuracy of the information you have.” That was a flack for Yale, but other Ivy League colleges—with the partial exception of Princeton—were equally reluctant to discuss their grading practices with The Economist.

Are they trying to hide something? Perhaps. Stuart Rojstaczer, a critic of grade inflation, has estimated average grades over time by combining dozens of unofficial and official sources. The results are startling (see chart). In 1950, Mr Rojstaczer estimates, Harvard’s average grade was a C-plus. An article from 2013 in the Harvard Crimson, a student newspaper, revealed that the median grade had soared to A-minus: the most commonly awarded grade is an A. The students may be much cleverer than before: the Ivies are no longer gentlemen’s clubs for rich knuckleheads. But most probably, their marks mean less.

Translator Keyboard For iOS Makes Writing Foreign Missives A Breeze

Natasha Lomas:

The keyboard apps are coming in thick and fast for iOS 8 — which finally opened up Apple’s mobile platform to Qwerty disruption.

Earlier this week we came across Phraseboard, a keyboard that puts custom phrases at your fingertips for speedier texting. Now here’s another keyboard that can deal with whole sentences at a time — although not to speed up the basic typing process but rather for faster translation.

The Translator Keyboard for iOS 8 can translate what you’ve typed into one of 44 other languages — including French, Spanish and even Welsh. Beth annisgwyl!

The app, which is the work of UK developer Steven Barnegren, is using the Microsoft Translate API to do the grunt work of turning whatever you’ve typed into fair foreign phrasing.

So how does it work? Swiping left along the top of the keyboard brings in the language selection interface where you can specify your current language and the one you want to translate your words into.

Inspire students in manufacturing

Vince Bertram, Via Erich Zellmer:

American manufacturing has faced many challenges over the past few decades. Today, it is facing a new one: Employers cannot find enough qualified workers with the knowledge and skills needed to meet the industry’s job demands.

The National Association of Manufacturers reports more than 600,000 unfilled jobs this year. There simply aren’t enough workers with the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) knowledge and skills needed for these and other high-tech, high-skill jobs. Schools must prepare our students now, and that preparation must start at an early age.

As the country continues to rebound from the Great Recession, manufacturing is among the fastest-growing economic sectors. The Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index climbed to 59% in August, representing the 15th consecutive month of growth and the highest reading since March 2011.

Cash & Awards fail to improve test results

Richard Adams:

Offering rewards such as cash payments or free trips make pupils work harder in class but fail to improve their exam results, according to an intensive £1.6m study involving 10,000 children.

The project involved pupils studying for GCSE exams at 63 schools in deprived areas across England, and was aided by a team of academics that included superstar professors such as Steven Levitt, the co-author of Freakonomics, and John List of the University of Chicago.

Long Island High School Football Player Dies After Game

Mason Levinson:

A high school football player from Long Island, New York, died after colliding with an opponent in a game last night.

Tom Cutinella, a junior at Shoreham-Wading River High School in New York, died after colliding with a player from John Glenn High School’s team in Elwood, New York, Steven Cohen, superintendent of Shoreham-Wading River School District, said in a statement posted on the district website.

He was the third high-school football player to die in the past week, according to ESPN. Cornerback Demario Harris Jr. of Charles Henderson High School in Troy, Alabama, died after collapsing on the field following a tackle, and linebacker Isaiah Langston of Rolesville High School in North Carolina died after collapsing following pregame warmups, ESPN said.

At U.S. universities, hour-long celebrity speeches equal more than four years of tuition

Bloomberg News:

Hundreds of University of South Florida screaming students rose as the 56-year-old actor took the stage to discuss philanthropy, social engagement and the pastime he inspired: “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”
“It’s 1994 and I’m just out there minding my own business, making movies and trying to support my family and all of a sudden people start talking to me about this game,” said Bacon, best known for his role as a dancing rebel in the 1984 film “Footloose.”
“It had taken off as this drinking game spreading across campuses, and I thought I was going to be responsible for all this young alcoholism.”
The crowd laughed as Bacon paced in black jeans and a black leather jacket, telling jokes and doing impressions.
Bacon collected $70,000 for the April lecture at the Tampa campus.
From California to New York, public universities routinely pay fees that exceed four years of tuition for speeches that last little more than an hour. The practice drew scrutiny after University of Nevada at Las Vegas students protested Hillary Clinton’s $225,000 honorarium in June. A Bloomberg News review of public records at state universities in California, New York and Florida shows a rich market for those with something to say, regardless of traditional academic accomplishment.

Job insecurity among Japan’s university teachers is a recipe for further decline

Hifumi Okunuki:

Universities in Japan are caught up in a cutthroat struggle for survival. As the population of children plummets, so, in turn, does the number of college entrants.

The decline is particularly stark considering that the number of universities had swelled on the back of the postwar baby boom and bubble economy. Institutions of higher learning are frantic to seize a share of the dwindling “customer base.” Universities choosing students is a thing of the past: Now students select universities.

Born in the early 1970s, I’m what’s known in Japan as a second-wave baby boomer. As a college student in the early 1990s, I experienced the emotional stress and hardship of entrance-exam hell. Many uni hopefuls failed their exams and became so-called wandering ronin for a year until the next round of tests. The term was derived from samurai in the Meiji Era and earlier who left their feudal domain and thus belonged nowhere. During this “nowhere time,” these modern-day academic ronin often studied from early morning until late at night, leading to nervous breakdowns and even cases of children murdering their overbearing parents.

Reading Test Developers Call Knowledge a Source of Bias

Lisa Hansel:

You might expect to see a headline like this in the Onion, but you won’t. The Onion can’t run it because it isn’t just ironic—it’s 100% true.

A few years ago, a researcher at one of the big testing companies told me that when developing a reading comprehension test, knowledge is a source of bias. He did not mean the obvious stuff like knowledge of a yacht’s anemometer. He meant typical K–12 subject matter.

Since reading comprehension depends chiefly on knowledge of the topic (including the vocabulary) in the passage, the student with that knowledge has a large advantage over the student without it. And since there have always been great educational inequities in the United States, students’ knowledge—acquired both at home and at school—is very strongly correlated with socioeconomic status.

A logical solution would be to test reading comprehension using only those topics that students have been taught. Teachers can do this, but testing companies can’t—how would they have any idea what topics have been taught in each grade? It’s rare for districts, much less states, to indicate what or when specific books, people, ideas, and events should be taught.

Without a curriculum on which to base their assessments, testing companies have devised their own logic—which is sound given the bind they’re in. They distinguish between common and specialized knowledge, and then they select or write test passages that only have common knowledge. In essence, they’ve defined “reading comprehension skill” as including broad common knowledge. This is perfectly reasonable. When educators, parents, etc. think about reading comprehension ability, they do not think of the ability to read about trains or dolphins or lightning. They expect the ability to read about pretty much anything one encounters in daily life (including the news).

Via Will Fitzhugh.

Comment by Chrys Dougherty — October 1, 2014 @ 10:51 pm:

In this context, I would draw readers’ attention to the description in the ACT Technical Manual (p. 11) of the content areas from which selections are drawn for the ACT Reading Test:

“a. Prose Fiction. The items in this category are based on short stories or excerpts from short stories or novels.

“b. Social Studies. The items in this category are based on passages in the content areas of anthropology, archaeology, biography, business, economics, education, geography, history, political science, psychology, and sociology.

“c. Humanities. The items in this category are based on passages from memoirs and personal essays and in the content areas of architecture, art, dance, ethics, film, language, literary criticism, music, philosophy, radio, television, and theater.

“d. Natural Sciences. The items in this category are based on passages in the content areas of anatomy, astronomy, biology, botany, chemistry, ecology, geology, medicine, meteorology, microbiology, natural history, physiology, physics, technology, and zoology.”

These passages reflect the wide range of reading that a college-ready student or an avid adult reader should be able to do. A student who receives a broad, content-rich education in preschool through high school is more likely to have the necessary “common knowledge” from these fields to have an advantage on the ACT, in college, and in life.

Higher Education’s Aristocrats

David Francis Mihalyfy:

Last week, the Barack Obama Foundation announced that the University of Chicago is one of four finalists to house the Obama Presidential Library, according to its mission of finding a site that reflects “President Obama’s values and priorities throughout his career in public service.”

If Obama chooses UChicago, however, he risks tying his legacy to the American university that perhaps most exemplifies higher education’s current crisis of mission. Rather than being institutions that prioritize free inquiry, research, and high-quality education, universities are increasingly acting like the worst of Wall Street, where anything goes in order make a buck for the people at the top.

The latest sign of identity crisis at UChicago? Hefty pay raises to a large number of top staff, who have enriched themselves at great cost to their institution.

New analysis of tax data from publicly available IRS 990 forms shows that eight high-level UChicago administrators have received more than $7.6 million in compensation increases since 2007-2008, even as the school moved toward and suffered a credit downgrade.

Are Ivy League schools overrated?

Andrew:

I won’t actually answer the above question, as I am offering neither a rating of these schools nor a measure of how others rate them (which would be necessary to calibrate the “overrated” claim). What I am doing is responding to an email from Mark Palko, who wrote:

I [Palko] am in broad agreement with this New Republic article by William Deresiewicz [entitled “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League: The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies”] and I’ll try to blog on it if I can get caught up with more topical threads. I was particularly interested in the part about there being a “non-aggression pact” outside of the sciences.

This fits in with something I’ve noticed. I know this sounds harsh, but when I run across someone who is at the top of their profession and yet seems woefully underwhelming, they often have Ivy League BAs in non-demanding majors (For example, Jeff Zucker, Harvard, History. John Tierney, Yale, American Studies). My working hypothesis is that, while everyone who graduates from an elite school has an advantage in terms of reputation and networks, the actual difficulty of completing certain degrees isn’t that high relative to non-elite schools. Thus a history degree from Harvard isn’t worth that much more than a history degree from a Cal State school.

Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

Howard Hotson:

During the past eight years, university tuition fees were introduced into most west German federal states. Yet in a few months, every single state will have abolished them. These facts raise a series of topical questions that cast current English higher education policy in a fresh and revealing light.

Why did Germany introduce tuition fees in the first place? The answer, in short, is that politicians favoured the idea. Self-styled “modernisers” had been advocating tuition fees since German reunification in 1990. Cultural differences between east and west initially hindered this plan, but the main obstacle was a federal law banning tuition fees, which echoed provisions guaranteeing free education in the constitutions of individual states. In 2005, however, the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe ruled that moderate fees, coupled with affordable loans, would safeguard these constitutional provisions. Within two years, a cascade of laws had swept through most of the federal Länder. The attraction of shifting some of the funding burden to individual beneficiaries was irresistible. So was the compulsion to imitate the changes made elsewhere, lest universities in one’s own state should remain less well funded, and the public purse more stretched, than in neighbouring states.

Seven out of 10 states in west Germany introduced fees in 2006 or 2007; an eighth, Bremen, was prevented from doing so by a lawsuit. Only two – Rheinland-Pfalz and Schleswig-Holstein – resisted the tide completely.

If such unanimity had been maintained, policymakers would now be declaring these changes inevitable. Yet within a single electoral cycle, their long-sought policy was comprehensively overturned. The only state still charging tuition fees in 2014, Lower Saxony, will cease to do so at the end of this academic year.

A boy was accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life.

Jennifer Gonerman:

In the early hours of Saturday, May 15, 2010, ten days before his seventeenth birthday, Kalief Browder and a friend were returning home from a party in the Belmont section of the Bronx. They walked along Arthur Avenue, the main street of Little Italy, past bakeries and cafés with their metal shutters pulled down for the night. As they passed East 186th Street, Browder saw a police car driving toward them. More squad cars arrived, and soon Browder and his friend found themselves squinting in the glare of a police spotlight. An officer said that a man had just reported that they had robbed him. “I didn’t rob anybody,” Browder replied. “You can check my pockets.”

The officers searched him and his friend but found nothing. As Browder recalls, one of the officers walked back to his car, where the alleged victim was, and returned with a new story: the man said that they had robbed him not that night but two weeks earlier. The police handcuffed the teens and pressed them into the back of a squad car. “What am I being charged for?” Browder asked. “I didn’t do anything!” He remembers an officer telling them, “We’re just going to take you to the precinct. Most likely you can go home.” Browder whispered to his friend, “Are you sure you didn’t do anything?” His friend insisted that he hadn’t.

At the Forty-eighth Precinct, the pair were fingerprinted and locked in a holding cell. A few hours later, when an officer opened the door, Browder jumped up: “I can leave now?” Instead, the teens were taken to Central Booking at the Bronx County Criminal Court.

An Alarming Gap

Sam Atkinson:

The venture is also an attempt to alleviate what Mr. Agarwal sees as an alarming gap between high school students’ college eligibility and their college preparedness. He pointed to a recent study by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and the Southern Regional Education Board, which found that 60 percent of first-year college students were underprepared for postsecondary studies.

In an interview with Education Week, Mr. Agarwal said he hopes the new curriculum will give more high school students exposure to higher-level coursework, allowing them to enter college having already completed many of their first-year classes.

He also believes high school teachers will utilize the MOOC content to supplement their existing curricula—a common practice among college professors.

Via Will Fitzhugh.

Ranking Universities Based on Career Outcomes

Navneet Kapur:

More than ever, students go to college because they want to get jobs — good jobs. To that end, students and parents want to know which schools give them the best chance at getting a desirable job after graduation. This is where we can help.

By analyzing employment patterns of over 300 million LinkedIn members from around the world, we figured out what the desirable jobs are within several professions and which graduates get those desirable jobs. As a result, we are able to rank schools based on the career outcomes of their graduates.

Defining “desirable jobs”
We define a desirable job to be a job at a desirable company for the relevant profession. For example, we define desirable finance jobs as finance jobs at companies desirable for finance professionals.

We start with identifying desirable companies for each profession.We let the career choices of our members tell us how desirable it is to work at a company. To illustrate this, imagine there are two companies, A and B. If more finance professionals are choosing to leave company A to work at company B, the data indicates that getting a finance job at B is more desirable. This is based on the hypothesis that when a professional moves from one company to another, she gives the company she moves to a strong vote of confidence.

Explore Linkedins’ University rankings.

Preemptive personalization

Rob Horning:

Nicholas Carr’s forthcoming The Glass Cage, about the ethical dangers of automation, inspired me to read George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which contains a lengthy tirade against the notion of progress as efficiency and convenience. Orwell declares that “the tendency of mechanical progress is to make life safe and soft.” It assumes that a human being is “a kind of walking stomach” that is interested only in passive pleasure rather than work: “whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working — that is, of living.” Convenience is social control, and work, for Orwell at least, is the struggle to experience a singular life. But the human addiction to machine-driven innovation and automation, he predicts, fueled apparently by a fiendish inertia that demands progress for progress’s sake, will inevitably lead to total disempowerment and dematerialization:

Venture Capitalists Are Poised to ‘Disrupt’ Everything About the Education Market

Lee Fang:

In his book, Finding the Next Starbucks: How to Identify and Invest in the Hot Stocks of Tomorrow, Michael Moe describes how carefully crafted business strategies have transformed markets to create huge profits in unlikely sectors. The title relates to how Starbucks became a global corporation of almost $15 billion in revenue by capturing and streamlining the café experience. Moe, a former director at Merrill Lynch, wrote that at one point in the United States, even healthcare was an undesirable and difficult industry for investment, and that bankers once worried if profit-making in such a realm was worth their effort. In 1970, healthcare spending comprised 8 percent of GDP, yet market capitalization in healthcare stood at less than 3 percent. That shifted quickly not only as the boomer generation aged, but as a wave of privatization hit hospitals, insurers, and other segments of the healthcare system. More than thirty years later, Moe wrote, healthcare companies are among the largest in the world, and represent more than 16 percent of US capital markets. “We see the education industry today as the healthcare industry of 30 years ago,” Moe predicted.

That book came out eight years ago, before the current wave of education investing, when the prospect for growth seemed dim. Unlike in healthcare, energy and other areas of the economy that have moved from public to private hands, K-through-12 education has stubbornly remained largely out of the control of investors.

Student Union of Michigan

Student Union of Michigan:

Like many public research universities around the country, the University of Michigan has raised tuition significantly over the past two decades. But administrators argue that in the end tuition hikes don’t make it harder for low-income students to attend.[1] Through financial aid, they claim, the high tuition paid by wealthier students who can afford it is used to offset tuition for lower income students. The argument is that the “high tuition/high aid” model works like a kind of progressive taxation, so paradoxically what those who criticize the university’s high tuition are in fact advocating is punishing the poor.

Unfortunately, the administration’s theory has some serious problems. It is true that the poorest students at U-M receive excellent financial aid packages made up primarily of grants instead of loans or work-study, which means they aren’t forced into debt or exploited to pay tuition. However, the number of students who meet these qualifications is steadily decreasing in both absolute terms and relative to the entire student body. Looking at the class composition of the student body, we can see some major changes over the past 15 years. Between 1997 and 2010, the percentage of the student body whose family income is under $75,000 a year dropped from 38.5% to 26.5% (a decrease of 12%), while the percentage whose family income is over $200,000 a year rose from 14.8% to 27.6% (an increase of 12.8%).[2] The growth in the richest sector of students was so significant that they actually added an extra income category to the list—instead of the maximum being $200,000 and above, they bumped it up to $250,000 and added another in between. The latest data only confirm this trend. As of 2014, a full 31% of admitted students have a family income of $200,000 and above.[3] These changes in the socioeconomic status of the student body have also intensified the ongoing exclusion of underrepresented minority students on campus. The implication is that even as the university brings in more tuition money—and therefore, according to the “high tuition/high aid” model, more aid—the number of students who actually need this aid is shrinking significantly.

Excellent Sheep : The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

Douglas Greenberg:

WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ IS ANGRY about the miseducation of young people at the nation’s most prestigious universities. He has written a book on the subject, and he thinks we all should be worried. Really worried. It’s a case of what Louis CK famously called “white people problems,” which he said were “when your life is so amazing that you have to make shit up to be upset about.”

Deresiewicz is definitely upset, and he is also making shit up. He is upset with Columbia and Yale, from which he holds degrees, but he is also upset with Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and an ill-defined group of other private universities. His widely reviewed Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite has something unpleasant to say not only about these institutions but about everyone associated with them: the students, their parents, the faculty, the administrators, the donors, the alumni. Many of these criticisms of elite private higher education have some merit. Yet the tone of the book is so egocentric and intemperate and the framing of the issues is so narrow and sensationalistic that it might not merit a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books if it had not already received so much attention in the national press. Somehow this book has captured the entire national conversation about higher education, although it is mainly concerned with a subset of a small and atypical group of private research universities whose importance can be easily exaggerated, particularly by people who work for, graduated from, or pay tuition to them — or hope someday to do any of the three.

Teacher Union Money Talks: NEA and AFT together spend roughly $700 million per year

Dmitri Mehlhorn:

One of the most-hotly debated questions is how strong is the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers compared to the school reform movement. When it comes to the money that is key to political influence, there is no doubt: The NEA and AFT together spend roughly $700 million per year, consistently, on a broad spectrum of political communication activities opposed to reform. This means that the financial (and political) muscle of the two unions is far greater than that of school reform organizations such as Democrats for Education Reform, StudentsFirst (for which I used to work), Stand for Children, Black Alliance for Educational Options, and the American Federation for Children.

To understand the unions’ advantages, start with the AFT and NEA national budgets. The AFT has 1.6 million members and generated $233 million in revenue (net of borrowing) as of 2013-2014, according to this week’s Dropout Nation analysis of financial data; the NEA had 3.1 million members and national revenues of $387 million in 2012-2013. This total is only the beginning. Although teachers have “unitary dues” where they pay once for national, state, and local affiliates, the state and local portions of the bill vary greatly and can be quite significant. In the state of New Jersey, for instance, compulsory dues come to $936 per teacher, less than $200 of which go to national. In Chicago, the compulsory dues that the AFT’s Chicago Teachers Union deducts from paychecks amount to $1,060 per teacher a year, several hundred dollars more than go to Illinois and national combined. Average dues of nearly $1,000 per year appear quite common.

The $63 million spent by Walton family on ed reform last year < 1/10th amount spent by NEA and AFT.

ComputerCOP: The Dubious ‘Internet Safety Software’ That Hundreds of Police Agencies Have Distributed to Families

Dave Maass:

For years, local law enforcement agencies around the country have told parents that installing ComputerCOP software is the “first step” in protecting their children online.

Police chiefs, sheriffs, and district attorneys have handed out hundreds of thousands of copies of the disc to families for free at schools, libraries, and community events, usually as a part of an “Internet Safety” outreach initiative. The packaging typically features the agency’s official seal and the chief’s portrait, with a signed message warning of the “dark and dangerous off-ramps” of the Internet.

As official as it looks, ComputerCOP is actually just spyware, generally bought in bulk from a New York company that appears to do nothing but market this software to local government agencies.

who and what is the university for?

Freddie DeBoer

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign with activist friends of mine. We went to protest in support of Dr. Steven Salaita and the several unions and student groups who were rallying for better labor conditions, for the principle of honoring contracts, for collective bargaining rights, for recognition by the administration, and for respect. It was a beautiful, brilliant rally; I estimated 400 people, many more than I had thought to hope for. And it posed the simplest question facing academics today: who and what is the university for?

The labor unions in attendance that day were fighting for better conditions and more honest, direct bargaining with the university administration, as labor unions in Illinois have fought for decades. Some fought for fair pay and transparent, equitable rules for advancement and compensation. The school’s young graduate union, the GEO, fights simply to be recognized by the university, in an academic world in which universities could not survive without graduate student labor. What was remarkable about the event was how easily and naturally these labor issues coincided with the fight for Dr. Salaita. Some might mistake these issues for disconnected and separate, but in fact they are part of the same fight. The fight for Dr. Salaita is about Palestine, and about academic freedom. But it is also about labor and the rights of workers. It’s about faculty governance in a university system that has seen ceaseless growth in higher administrators and an attendant growth in the cost of employing them. It’s about recognizing that a university is not its endless vice provosts and deputy deans, nor its sushi bars and climbing walls, nor its slick advertising campaigns, nor its football team, nor its statuary. A university is its students and its teachers. To defend Dr. Salaita is to defend the notion that, in an academy that crowds out actual teaching and actual learning in myriad ways, the actual teachers in the academy must preserve the right to hire other teachers, and to honor those commitments once they are made.

The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil

Camille Paglia

Young women today do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature

The disappearance of University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham two weeks ago is the latest in a long series of girls-gone-missing cases that often end tragically. A 32-year-old, 270-pound former football player who fled to Texas has been returned to Virginia and charged with “abduction with intent to defile.” At this date, Hannah’s fate and whereabouts remain unknown.

Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

Why The Christensen Institute Says Competency-Based Ed Is Disruptive

Robert McGuire:

Post -secondary competency-based education obviously has a lot of momentum, as we have reported on extensively in the past. But the Christensen Institute, a think tank co-founded by Clayton Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Jason Hwang to analyze issues in education and healthcare, argues that it’s much more than a trend.

Online competency-based education is the innovation that will shake up higher ed, they say. While most of us had our eye on the fascinating potential of MOOCs, the mixture of online ed and CBE programs has cohered into the much more significant force.

That thesis is laid out in a new ebook co-authored by Clayton Christensen and Senior Research Fellow, Michelle Weise. Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution, available free for download at the institute’s website, argues that “online competency-based education is revolutionary because it marks the critical convergence of multiple vectors: the right learning model, the right technologies, the right customers and the right business model.” Inexpensive and cost-effective online CBE programs that are “good enough” are releasing working adults and employers from the tyranny of the credit hour model and can respond to marketplace needs much more quickly than traditional higher ed programs.

“What Are the Children Who Grow Up to Become Police Officers Learning in School?”

Rachel Toliver:

This summer, in Missouri, America got an awful tutorial in the realities of racism. We were taught—yet again, through bullets and teargas­—what it means to be black in this country. There is much to be done to prevent future Fergusons, of course. But as a teacher, I find myself wondering what our schools can contribute.

In Philadelphia, where I live and teach high school, we have a course that could help to improve race relations. But some students believe that it doesn’t go far enough.

Here in Philly, students are required to take a one-year course in African-American history; if they don’t take the class, they won’t graduate. The scope of the course is comprehensive, focusing not only on resistance and protest traditions, but also on the cultural history of Africa and the African diaspora. This mandate, the first—and virtually the only—of its kind, has been around for almost a decade. But its story begins 40 years before that.

In 1967, a coalition of about 4,000 African-American students held a peaceful demonstration before Philadelphia’s Board of Education building. In tandem with similar movements nationwide, they demanded that the African-American experience be made more visible in their schools. One of their 25 demands was that curricula be expanded beyond the superficial-at-best treatment of African-American history. The protest remained nonviolent until Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo spurred two busloads of his officers to attack the students with teargas and clubs. According to witnesses, Rizzo galvanized his men with a rallying cry of “get their black asses!”

Carceral Educations

Sabrina Alli:

For two years, I commuted to a ground-level room in a building in the Bronx a few days a week to teach GED preparation courses. My students were 17-to 24-year-olds with some sort of criminal record. We used to make jokes about the mice running across the ceiling tiles above us to lighten the mood. But we were hidden under an apartment building. I was teaching and my students were learning in a shithole. The clouded windows were covered by cracked venetian blinds and there was a poster on the wall with a handsome young man holding a baby that read, “Today’s a good day to be a dad.”margin-ad-right

I taught in one of the many social-service organizations known in the nonprofit industrial complex as “re-­entry.” Re-entry’s primary goal is to induct people back into the workforce once they are released from prison or are mired in the bureaucracy of one of the state’s “community supervision” programs, which include jails, probation, parole, or ATIs (alternatives to incarceration). In practical terms, re-entry provides “services,” broadly construed, to economically disenfranchised people who are targeted by the police and as a result are under some form of surveillance by the carceral network.

Student-Loan Debt: A Federal Toxic Asset

Joel & Eric Best:

Let’s call her Alice. One of us has known her for years. She earned her Ph.D. in the mid-1990s when academic jobs were scarce, and she wound up an academic gypsy. She left graduate school to take a one-year full-time academic appointment, but then found herself cobbling together part-time teaching jobs at different community colleges in a large metropolitan area, earning a couple of thousand dollars for each course she teaches. She is a dedicated teacher, but her annual income is between $30,000 and $40,000.

Alice owes $270,000 in student loans. She only borrowed about $70,000 to pay for grad school, but she’s never been able to afford much in the way of payments, and after consolidating her loans and accumulating interest charges for years, she’s watched her debt roughly quadruple.

If Alice taught students in a low-income high school or was a recent graduate, she would be eligible for various programs that would allow her to discharge at least some of her debt. But since she graduated at a time before income-based repayment and loan-forgiveness programs, there is no federal program to help established part-time community-college faculty discharge their old student-loan debts.

Nation’s Largest Teachers Union Plans To Spend More Than $40 Million In 2014

Jacob Fischler:

The nation’s largest teachers union plans to spend between $40 and $60 million in this year’s election cycle, two sources at the National Educational Association told BuzzFeed News.

On Monday, the American Federation of Teachers, which has about half the membership of the NEA, said it would spend about $20 million in the same time frame. Those numbers encompass all election spending, from Senate races down to local ballot measures.

While AFT President Randi Weingarten said they are spending more this year than they’ve spent in any cycle before, NEA Political Director Karen White said her union’s estimate is roughly on par for what they usually spend in non-presidential election years.

In an internal memo White sent last week to top NEA leaders, she wrote that education is “emerging as a top issue” in some of tighter gubernatorial races and in the country as a whole.

The six paths of the typical US college graduate—and why they’re all wrong

Andrew Yang, via Kate Zellmer:

There are currently six prominent paths for achievement-minded recent college graduates: financial services, management consulting, law school (still), med school, and grad school/academia. The sixth is Teach for America, which continues to draw approximately 5,000 graduates (and 50,000 applicants) a year from universities across the country.

Study contends voucher programs save money, benefit public schools

Erin Richards:

Milwaukee’s long-running school voucher program that allows certain children to attend private and religious schools at taxpayer expense has saved Wisconsin more than $238 million since its inception in 1990, according to a new study by a national voucher advocacy group.

The study released Tuesday by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice said that across the country, publicly funded vouchers to offset tuition for about 70,000 children attending private schools in 10 cities has saved a total of $1.7 billion.

That’s not a surprisingfinding — vouchers are generally lower in cost than public school education.

But the study’s more provocative point is that the savings from those voucher programs in Milwaukee and other cities are passively plowed back into public schools or other public programs.

Author Jeff Spalding, the director of fiscal policy and analysis at the foundation, said he lacks the data to track exactly where those savings went in each state, but said it’s just common sense that government savings from vouchers would naturally flow into other public purposes, such as schools, roads, law enforcement or health care.

Critics pounced on that reasoning, noting that taxpayer dollars to private schools in the form of vouchers siphon resources away from the public schools.

Also, the study predates new rules in Wisconsin that allowed more students to use vouchers, both by expanding the Milwaukee program and establishing the Racine and statewide private-school voucher programs.

The statewide program is now funding vouchers predominantly for students who were already attending those private schools.

Related: Comparing Milwaukee Public and Voucher Schools’ Per Student Spending
.

Commission: Evaluate some home-schooled kids for emotional issues (!)

Ken Dixon:

Parents who home-school children with significant emotional, social or behavioral problems would have to file progress reports prepared by special education program teams, under a proposal being considered by the governor’s Sandy Hook Advisory Commission.

Commission members acknowledged Tuesday that the proposal, contained in a tentative section of the panel’s final report, could be controversial and prompt opposition from parents of home-schooled children across the state.

But the commission, which is preparing its final report to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, said tighter scrutiny of home-schoolers may be needed to prevent an incident such as the December 2012 slaughter of 20 first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. The murders were carried out by Adam Lanza, a disturbed 20-year-old who had been home-schooled by his mother, Nancy Lanza, whom he also shot to death on the morning of his murder spree.

On Math Education: JFK, the Beatles and Getting Back in the Swing of Things

Barry Garelick, via a kind email:

After my assignment at the high school I took on various short-term sub assignments. These seemed relatively straightforward compared to the difficulties I had been through. In fact, I was reluctant to start subbing at first, but after the first few times, I started to regain my confidence.

I had applied to various full time jobs for teachers and was waiting to hear. As the school year approached November and I was subbing more, the TV and the internet were full of discussions about the JFK assassination, which was approaching its 50 year anniversary. Like most people, I recall what I was doing at the infamous moment: I was taking a Spanish test. I remember girls in the class crying, and later, when passing in the hall, seeing the woodworking/drafting teacher outside his classroom, seemingly distant, whistling “Hail to the Chief ”.

I continued to sub, and by January, TV and the internet were focusing on the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ appearance on Ed Sullivan. While Kennedy’s assassination is irrevocably linked in my mind to a Spanish test, the Beatles’ U.S. debut is linked to Mr. Dombey’s algebra class where I recall many discussions about the Beatles taking place. I can recall both the Kennedy assassination and the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with complete and unrelenting clarity.

By the third week in January, I was eating lunch during a sub assignment, and was at a point where I had accepted that my age was probably preventing me from being hired as a full time teacher. At that moment, my wife called me on the cell phone to tell me that the principal of the Lawrence Middle School was desperately trying to reach me, and that they had a long-term sub assignment for teaching math.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Recertification Campaign

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):

As previously reported, Governor Walker’s Act 10 requires public sector unions, except police & fire, to participate in an annual recertification election to enable Union members to retain representation by their Union. The election by all MTI-represented District employees will be conducted between November 5 and November 25, via telephone or on-line balloting (details forthcoming when received from the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission).

MTI Faculty Representatives and EA Building Representatives at every school/work location have been asked to recruit colleagues to assist in building awareness of the importance of the recertification election, and to make sure that staff at their school/work location VOTE in the recertification elections.

These individuals are being referred to as MTI Member Organizers and will be essential to successful recertification elections. The Union needs Member Organizers from every bargaining unit (MTI, SEE-MTI, EA-MTI, SSA-MTI & USO-MTI). Retired union members are also encouraged to assist in organizing. Assuring that each and every person vote is of great importance, because Act 10 requires that to win recertification, the Union must win 51% of all eligible voters.

If you are willing to support your Union by serving as a Member Organizer, or have additional questions about what this entails, see your MTI Faculty Representative/EA-MTI Building Representative, or contact MTI Assistant Director Doug Keillor (keillord@madisonteachers.org; 257-0491). Additional information will also be available at a MTI Member Organizer Q & A Session on Saturday, October 4, from 10:00-11:30 a.m., at MTI Headquarters.

Reasons for Recertification #2: Preserving and Protecting Your Collective Bargaining Agreements – MTI has successfully negotiated Collective Bargaining Agreements which preserve the vast majority of Contract rights and benefits for both the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years and provide the Union the means to enforce those rights and benefits.

Madison Schools’ Mental Health Programs Cheered

Kelly Meyerhoffer:

Eight years ago, a community health report from the Fox Valley uncovered an alarming trend among local high school students: one in four reported experiencing depression, and more than one in 10 had attempted suicide.

An experiment soon followed that placed licensed therapists with expertise in children’s mental health in elementary, middle and high schools.

“We decided if students had trouble making their appointment (at community clinics), let’s bring the appointment to them,” said Mary Wisnet, one of the program’s officers.

Parenting as a Gen Xer: We’re the first generation of parents in the age of iEverything

Allison Slater Tate:

On the days that I drive the middle school carpool, I purposely choose a route that takes us past a huge river. Some mornings, the water looks like glass; others, it reflects the moody clouds above with choppy waves – either way, it’s gorgeous. Every time we drive past it, I point it out to my car full of 12-year-olds: “Look at the water today. Isn’t it beautiful?” No one in the car looks up. They are all looking down at their phones, playing games with each other, texting a friend or watching a YouTube video. Sometimes, if I am lucky, I will get a mercy grunt out of one or two of them in reply.

It struck me recently, after one of my quiet carpool rides, that my generation of parents – we of the soon-to-be or recently 40 year old Gen X variety, the former latchkey children of the Cold War and an MTV that actually played videos, former Atari-owners who were raised by the the Cosby Show and John Hughes, graduated high school with the kids from 90210, then lumbered through our 20s with Rachel, Ross, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Joey and flip phones – is perhaps the last to straddle a life experience both with and without the Internet and all its social media marvels. After all, I didn’t even learn to use e-mail until I was 19 and a sophomore in college in 1993, and only for a slightly cringe-worthy reason: a cute boy at another college asked me to e-mail him.

How college ed programs try, fail to recruit teachers of color

Andre Perry:

Nationally, black males account for 2 percent of the teacher population. Blacks in total represent 8 percent of all teachers; Latinos, 7 percent; and Asians, 2 percent. My 3-year-old son could have approximately 50 different teachers by the time he graduates from high school. How many times should he expect to see an African American male teacher before graduation? This is a “Common Core” question I struggle with.

In a seminar titled, “How Do We Get More Black Male Teachers in America’s Classrooms?” At the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s 44th Annual Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C., an audience member asked, “Are colleges even recruiting black male teachers?” As someone who is charged with building a teacher prep program, I can say most universities aren’t built to recruit from black communities.

Black and brown people represent 30 percent of the population. But they represent 15 percent of teachers, and that figure is in decline. Woodrow Wilson reports that if current trends hold, the percentage of teachers of color will fall to an all-time low of 5 percent by 2020. But today for the first time in American history, the majority of public school students are of color.

Banking’s future: Goodbye credit cards, hello social media probes

CNBC:

Advancements in technology will make banking very personal within the next decade—it may require your eye or finger to pay for shopping and your social network profile may determine your access to credit, the Daily Mail reports.

Banks may request access to clients’ Facebook account and see whether users have a stable friends network—a sign they may be less of a credit risk than users who change friends frequently, financial technology expert Gi Fernando told the Daily Mail.

Freshman; Here are the Friends We Want You to Have

Adam Kissel:

For years, some colleges assigned new students roommates from different regions, races or classes. The idea, not very controversial, was to broaden the horizons of freshmen.

Now a more intrusive version of that plan has turned up via the University of Denver, where the chancellor believes a bit of social engineering will push students toward a diverse range of friendships. The chancellor, Rebecca Chopp, argued, “I don’t think it is enough to leave new relationships to chance. … Let’s cultivate practices in which students make friends not by chance but because we are cultivating friendships around community values.”

This idea does not always go well. In 2006, the University of Delaware infamously issued before-and-after surveys to find out whether students had become more willing to date people of any gender, race, ethnicity, or religion following the Office of Residence Life’s intervention, which it called a “treatment.”

State, local laws force public employees to pay labor unions

Jason Hart:

Nearly half of all U.S. states allow public-sector union contracts to require mandatory dues as a condition of employment, based on a review of U.S. Department of Labor records, state labor laws and a National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation study from 2012.

Many of these states and local governments automatically deduct union fees from public employees’ pay, funneling taxpayer money directly to labor bosses.

Although Missouri and Kentucky do not explicitly ban public-sector agency fees, DOL reports indicate no major labor union in either state takes such fees from government workers. Among the states where agency fees are permitted, statutes governing the practice are far from uniform.

Wisconsin’s 2011 Act 10 labor reforms ending forced unionism for most government workers exempted public safety unions. Michigan’s 2012 right-to-work law included similar exceptions for public safety unions.

The Manipulators: Facebook’s Social Engineering Project

Nicholas Carr:

SINCE THE LAUNCH of Netscape and Yahoo! 20 years ago, the development of the internet has been a story of new companies and new products, a story shaped largely by the interests of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The plot has been linear; the pace, relentless. In 1995 came Amazon and Craigslist; in 1997, Google and Netflix; in 1999, Napster and Blogger; in 2001, iTunes; in 2003, MySpace; in 2004, Facebook; in 2005, YouTube; in 2006, Twitter; in 2007, the iPhone and the Kindle; in 2008, Airbnb; in 2010, Instagram; in 2011, Snapchat; in 2012, Coursera; in 2013, Google Glass. It has been a carnival ride, and we, the public, have been the giddy passengers.

This year something changed. The big news about the net came not in the form of buzzy startups or cool gadgets, but in the shape of two dry, arcane documents. One was a scientific paper describing an experiment in which researchers attempted to alter the moods of Facebook users by secretly manipulating the messages they saw. The other was a ruling by the European Union’s highest court granting citizens the right to have outdated or inaccurate information about them erased from Google and other search engines. Both documents provoked consternation, anger, and argument. Both raised important, complicated issues without resolving them. Arriving in the wake of revelations about the NSA’s online spying operation, both seemed to herald, in very different ways, a new stage in the net’s history — one in which the public will be called upon to guide the technology, rather than the other way around. We may look back on 2014 as the year the internet began to grow up.

Academia or industry

Daniel Lemire:

Tenure is overrated. Most folks in industry that have worked just as hard as tenured professors, have savings, reputation and skills that are in demand. But if you are risk averse, then a government job is also quite safe even if you don’t formally have tenure. And academics with tenure lose their jobs all the time. There is always a clause saying that under “financial hardship” management can dismiss professors. And even with tenure, you still have to justify your job, constantly. If you create trouble, people can make your life hell. If you fail, people can humiliate you publicly. If you get into a fight with a tenured colleague, the fight can last decades and be unpleasant.

It is a lot easier to move back and forth between these occupations that people make it out to be. So while you can’t go back in time per se, professors move to industry all the time, and vice versa. To a point, you can even do both. It is not difficult to get some kind of honorary position with a research institute when you work in industry.

Student Course Evaluations Get An ‘F’

Anya Kamenetz:

At Denny’s, diners are asked to fill out comment cards. How was your meal? Were you satisfied with the quality of service? Were the restrooms clean?

In universities around the world, semesters end with students filling out similar surveys about their experience in the class and the quality of the teacher.

Student ratings are high-stakes. They come up when faculty are being considered for tenure or promotions. In fact, they’re often the only method a university uses to monitor the quality of teaching.

Recently, a number of faculty members have been publishing research showing that the comment-card approach may not be the best way to measure the central function of higher education.

Philip Stark is the chairman of the statistics department at the University of California, Berkeley. “I’ve been teaching at Berkeley since 1988, and the reliance on teaching evaluations has always bothered me,” he says.

Stark is the co-author of “An Evaluation of Course Evaluations,” a new paper that explains some of the reasons why.

Why Academics Stink at Writing

Steven Pinker:

Together with wearing earth tones, driving Priuses, and having a foreign policy, the most conspicuous trait of the American professoriate may be the prose style called academese. An editorial cartoon by Tom Toles shows a bearded academic at his desk offering the following explanation of why SAT verbal scores are at an all-time low: “Incomplete implementation of strategized programmatics designated to maximize acquisition of awareness and utilization of communications skills pursuant to standardized review and assessment of languaginal development.” In a similar vein, Bill Watterson has the 6-year-old Calvin titling his homework assignment “The Dynamics of Inter­being and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes,” and exclaiming to Hobbes, his tiger companion, “Academia, here I come!”

No honest professor can deny that there’s something to the stereotype. When the late Denis Dutton (founder of the Chronicle-owned Arts & Letters Daily) ran an annual Bad Writing Contest to celebrate “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles,” he had no shortage of nominations, and he awarded the prizes to some of academe’s leading lights.

A story about Jessica

Swift in Security

I want you to imagine someone for me. Her name is Jessica and she is 17 years old. She lives in a two bedroom apartment with her mother and uses an old laptop she got from one of her mom’s ex boyfriends. With it, she browses the portals that serve as her connection to the community constructed around attending the same high school. She is concerned with boys and love and the next rent payment keeping her and her mother in the apartment.
She doesn’t have the money for a new laptop. She doesn’t have the money to upgrade it, either. She doesn’t even know how you do that. She has other interests, like biology. She just worries about how she would pay for college, if she can keep her grades up enough to get a scholarship somehow.
The only person she knows in her whole life that’s good with computers is Josh, in English class. She knows she needs an antivirus, so she asks him. He gives her an option that costs $50 a year, but he notices her sudden discomfort and kindly mentions about an antivirus that’s free. When she goes home she downloads and installs it. It took some effort and it seemed complicated and took awhile, but there was now a reassuring new icon in the bottom right of her screen that says “Protected” when she hovers the mouse icon thing over it.

Common Core Math Will Reduce Enrollment in High-Level High School Courses

Pioneer Institute via a kind Richard Phelps email:

Study Finds Common Core Math Standards Will Reduce Enrollment in High-Level High School Math Courses, Dumb Down College STEM Curriculum

Lower standards, alignment of SAT to Common Core likely to hurt low-income students the most

Common Core math standards (CCMS) end after just a partial Algebra II course. This weak Algebra II course will result in fewer high school students able to study higher-level math and science courses and an increase in credit-bearing college courses that are at the level of seventh and eighth grade material in high-achieving countries, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

The framers of Common Core claimed the standards would be anchored to higher education requirements, then back-mapped through upper and lower grades. But Richard P. Phelps and R. James Milgram, authors of “The Revenge of K-12: How Common Core and the New SAT Lower College Standards in the U.S.,” find that higher education was scarcely involved with creating the standards.

“The only higher education involvement was from institutions that agreed to place any students who pass Common Core-based tests in high school into credit-bearing college courses,” said Phelps. “The guarantee came in return for states’ hoped-for receipt of federal ‘Race to the Top’ grant funding.” “Many students will fail those courses – until they’re watered down,” he added.

Perhaps the greatest harm to higher education will come from the College Board’s decision to align its SAT tests with Common Core. The SAT has historically been an aptitude test – one designed to predict college success. But the new test would become an achievement test – a retrospective assessment designed to measure mastery of high school material. Many high-achieving countries administer a retrospective test for high school graduation and a predictive college entrance examination.

Much more on the Common Core, here.

Leveled reading: The making of a literacy myth

Robert Pondiscio & Kevin Mahnken, via a kind reader’s email:

Among opponents of the Common Core, one of the more popular targets of vitriol is the standards’ focus on improving literacy by introducing higher levels of textual complexity into the instructional mix. The move to challenge students with more knotty, grade-level reading material represents a shift away from decades of general adherence to so-called “instructional level theory,” which encourages children to read texts pitched at or slightly above the student’s individual reading level. New York public school principal Carol Burris, an outspoken standards critic and defender of leveled reading, recently published an anti-Common Core missive on the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog that was fairly typical of the form. Where, she wondered, “is the research to support: close reading, increased Lexile levels, the use of informational texts, and other questionable practices in the primary grades?”

The blog post, which has already been intelligently critiqued by Ann Whalen at Education Post, expanded on remarks delivered by Burris earlier this month at an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate with Fordham president Michael Petrilli and former assistant secretary of education Carmel Martin. There, too, she demanded evidence of literacy improvements arising from the use of complex texts.

A fair request and one that warrants a thorough response. But first, for the benefit of readers who are neither teachers nor literacy specialists, a quick explainer on how these two theories of reading work: In leveled reading, a teacher listens as her student reads a piece of text at a given reading level. If the child makes two-to-five mistakes per one hundred words, that is considered her “instructional” level. Zero or one mistakes means the book is too easy; six or more mistakes and that level is deemed her “frustration” level. Children are then offered lots of books at their “just right” level on the theory that if they read extensively and independently, language growth and reading proficiency will follow, setting the child on a slow and steady climb through higher reading levels. It sounds logical, and, as we will see, there are definite benefits to getting kids to read a lot independently.

By marked contrast, Common Core asks teachers to think carefully about what children read and choose grade-level texts that use sophisticated language or make significant knowledge demands of the reader (teachers should also be prepared, of course, to offer students support as they grapple with challenging books). Instead of asking, “Can the child read this?” the question might be, “Is this worth reading?”

Leveled reading is intuitive and smartly packaged (who wants kids to read “frustration level” books?), but its evidence base is remarkably thin. There is much stronger research support for teaching reading with complex texts.

What’s the source of the blind faith that Burris and others have in leveled reading instruction? “In the decades before Common Core, an enormous amount of the instruction in American elementary and middle schools has been with leveled text,” says David Liben, a veteran teacher and Senior Content Specialist at Student Achievement Partners. “The generally poor performance of our children on international comparisons speaks volumes about its effectiveness. To become proficient, students need to have the opportunity to read, with necessary support, rich complex text. But they also need to read—especially if they are behind—a huge volume and range of text types just as called for in the standards.” Students could read many of these less complex texts independently. “Instruction with complex text at all times is not what is called for, even by Common Core advocates,” Liben takes care to note.

Burris and others, however, offer a reflexive defense of leveled instruction. At the Intelligence Squared event, she claimed that “We know from years of developmental reading research that kids do best when they read independently with leveled readers.” Such surety is belied by a surprising lack of rigorous evidence. Literacy blogger Timothy Shanahan, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, recently detailed his discovery of the inauspicious origins of instructional level theory as a young scholar.

Made famous in Emmett Betts’s influential, now-little-remembered 1946 textbook Foundations of Reading Instruction, leveled reading theory actually emerged from a more obscure study conducted by one of Betts’s doctoral students. “I tracked down that dissertation and to my dismay it was evident that they had just made up those designations without any empirical evidence,” Shanahan wrote. When the study—which had in effect never been conducted—was “replicated,” it yielded wildly different results. In other words, there was no study, and later research failed to show the benefits of leveling. “Basically we have put way too much confidence in an unproven theory,” Shanahan concluded.

A pdf version of the post is available here, via a kind reader.

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

The Source of Bad Writing

Steven Pinker:

Why is so much writing so bad? Why is it so hard to understand a government form, or an academic article or the instructions for setting up a wireless home network?

The most popular explanation is that opaque prose is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to cover their anatomy. Plaid-clad tech writers get their revenge on the jocks who kicked sand in their faces and the girls who turned them down for dates. Pseudo-intellectuals spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook.

But the bamboozlement theory makes it too easy to demonize other people while letting ourselves off the hook. In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool I reach for is Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. The kind of stupidity I have in mind has nothing to do with ignorance or low IQ; in fact, it’s often the brightest and best informed who suffer the most from it.

I once attended a lecture on biology addressed to a large general audience at a conference on technology, entertainment and design. The lecture was also being filmed for distribution over the Internet to millions of other laypeople. The speaker was an eminent biologist who had been invited to explain his recent breakthrough in the structure of DNA. He launched into a jargon-packed technical presentation that was geared to his fellow molecular biologists, and it was immediately apparent to everyone in the room that none of them understood a word and he was wasting their time. Apparent to everyone, that is, except the eminent biologist. When the host interrupted and asked him to explain the work more clearly, he seemed genuinely surprised and not a little annoyed. This is the kind of stupidity I am talking about.

Democracy Requires a Patriotic Education The Athenians knew it. Jefferson knew it. Somehow we have forgotten: Civic devotion, instilled at school, is essential to a good society.

Donald Kagan:

What is an education for? It is a question seldom investigated thoroughly. The ancient philosophers had little doubt: They lived in a city-state whose success and very existence depended on the willingness of citizens to overcome the human tendency to seek their individual, self-interested goals and to make the sacrifices needed for the community’s well-being. Their idea of education, therefore, was moral and civic, not merely instrumental. They reasoned that if a state or community is to be good, its citizens must be good, so they aimed at an education that would produce virtuous people and good citizens.

Some two thousand years later, from the 16th through the 18th centuries, a different group of philosophers in Italy, England and France introduced a powerful new idea. Their world was dominated by ambitious princes and kings who were rapidly asserting ever greater authority over the lives of their people and trampling on the traditional expectations of individuals and communities. In the philosophers’ view, every human being was naturally endowed with three essential rights: to defend his life, liberty and lawfully acquired property.

The responsibility of the state, therefore, was limited and largely negative: to protect the people from external enemies and not to interfere with the rights of individual citizens. Suspicious of the claims of church and state to inculcate virtue as mere devices to serve the selfish interests of their rulers, most philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that moral and civic instruction was not the business of the state.

For School Tests, Measures to Detect Cheating Proliferate

Cameron McWhirter & Caroline Porter:

A scandal that has enveloped the public-school system here for years is transforming how educators across the country are approaching test security, giving rise to a burgeoning industry in detecting cheating on standardized exams.

School districts from Delaware to Idaho are employing tactics such as hiring anti-cheating consultants, buying software to spot wrongdoers, and requiring testing companies to offer anti-cheating plans when seeking contracts.

“Nobody wants to be Atlanta,” said Gregory Cizek, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Education and an expert on the prevention of cheating in tests.

Opening arguments have been scheduled to begin next week in the conspiracy trial of former educators in the Atlanta school system, one of the nation’s largest. In 2011, special investigators found widespread cheating on state standardized tests by Atlanta educators. The report said teachers altered students’ answers in response to pressure from then Superintendent Beverly Hall’s administration to show an improvement in the district’s scores, or face discipline or lower pay.

K-12 tax & spending climate: Middle-class families struggling with accelerating costs

Christopher S. Rugaber:

Three years ago, Jason Prosser was stunned to discover the cost of child care for his newborn son — so much so that he and his wife postponed having a second child.

The day care center they found near their Seattle home tops $10,000 a year. Next year, their son, now 3, can attend a Catholic preschool less than half as costly.

“It’ll be nice to have enough relief next year,” Prosser said. “It’s just funny that the relief will be a private school.”

He and his wife are among legions of middle-class families who are straining under the weight of accelerating costs for a range of essential services from day care to health care. And now a study by the Center for American Progress shows just how heavy the burden has grown: For a typical married couple with two children, the combined cost of child care, housing, health care and savings for college and retirement jumped 32% from 2000 to 2012 — and that’s after adjusting for inflation.

Compounding the pain is that average pay for Americans is barely topping inflation.

The figures help explain why many Americans feel stressed even as the economy has strengthened — and why some feel bewildered to hear that overall inflation in the United States is, if anything, too low.

From TVs, computers and cellphones to clothing and cars, many goods have dropped in price in the past decade. Those declining prices have helped keep overall inflation historically low — even lower than the 2% the Federal Reserve thinks is ideal.

Yet when you consider that average health care and college costs rocketed more than 80% from 2000 to 2012, it’s easier to understand why many families feel they are struggling.

Building a Library a Day

Ramesh Menon:

Rural entrepreneur and Pune based activist Pradeep Lokhande is a man in a hurry. In the last 675 days he has set up 1,255 school libraries — almost two every day. He is convinced that education is the key to building a new India and helping millions contribute to the nation’s development in whatever way they can.

With a systematic plan in place, Lokhande has set up libraries in rural schools of Maharashtra, one each day. Till now, he has managed to set up over 1,500 such libraries. Many of these schools did not even have the basic infrastructure to start with. By October 2014, he would have set up over 3,000 libraries in as many rural secondary schools of Maharashtra that will benefit around 850,000 rural secondary school students.

“We will get into the Guinness Book of World Records,” says his daughter Kadambari with a smile, as she actively helps him in this revolutionary effort. Encouraged and fulfilled, Pradeep Lokhande now wants to spread the movement to other parts of India. His near-future plan includes Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, before panning out into nearly 85,000 villages of India in other states.

The genesis

As an entrepreneur working on research for companies wanting to market in rural areas, something like this had never crossed his mind. But in 2009, feeling an urge to give back to society, he travelled around rural areas of Maharashtra with his wife Seemantini to ascertain what they could do to drive change.

Show and Tell on your college applications

Richard Perez-Pena:

Madeline McDonough had a wistful “what if?” moment, pondering the offer that her school, Goucher College, has made to applicants: Instead of showing us your grades, send us a video.

“I really wish there had been options like that when I was applying to college,” said Ms. McDonough, 19, a junior studying sociology. “I didn’t have the best numbers, and I was stressed, worrying about how to show that I deserved the same opportunities as anyone else.”

Under the policy announced this month by Goucher, a 1,400-student liberal arts college near Baltimore, a prospective student may apply by submitting two pieces of work (at least one of them a graded high school writing assignment) and a two-minute video, rather than a high school transcript. José A. Bowen, Goucher’s new president, readily admits that he has no idea how many applicants will go that route, how many will be accepted or whether they will work out

Adult Employment and Empty Milwaukee Public Schools’ Buildings

Erin Richards:

Spurred by a deal gone sour between Milwaukee Public Schools and the developer commissioned to renovate one of its empty buildings — a deal that kept a private school from buying the facility — Common Council President Michael Murphy has introduced an ordinance that would position the city to take charge and sell unused MPS property.

“The state granted us the authority to sell these properties, and I’m going to recommend a process for that to occur,” Murphy said.

The proposed ordinance comes on the heels of the latest twist in the Malcolm X Academy development deal: A School Board decision to cut ties with the developer and renovate part of the building for a new school on its own, but not before paying for work performed so far that the districts pegs at a little under $500,000 — though the developer says it’s owed closer to $1 million for its time and products.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said he’s not pleased with the way the Malcolm X development deal has gone, especially since the city played a significant role in improving the initial proposal from MPS.

“I’m not happy at all that taxpayers are on the hook for these development costs,” Barrett said. “The city has the responsibility to put these buildings to their highest and best use.”

And state lawmakers Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) and Rep. Joe Sanfelippo (R-West Allis) — perennial advocates of selling MPS property to non-district school operators — also weighed in, saying that the Legislature should try again in the next session to pass a law that would more forcefully compel the City of Milwaukee to sell MPS property.

They reiterated their view that the Malcolm X deal was phony from the start, designed by MPS to simply block St. Marcus Lutheran School from buying the building and expanding to serve more students.

Stop running the system for the sake of the system.

A focus on adult employment.

College Enrollment Declines for Second Year in a Row, Census Bureau Reports

United States Census:

College enrollment declined by close to half a million (463,000) between 2012 and 2013, marking the second year in a row that a drop of this magnitude has occurred. The cumulative two-year drop of 930,000 was larger than any college enrollment drop before the recent recession, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics from the Current Population Survey released today. The Census Bureau began collecting data on college enrollment in this survey in 1966.

As the nation’s students and teachers return to the classroom, the Census Bureau has published School Enrollment in the United States: 2013, detailing national-level statistics on the characteristics of students, from nursery school to graduate school. The data were collected in the October School Enrollment Supplement to the 2013 Current Population Survey.

“The drop-off in total college enrollment the last two years follows a period of expansion: between 2006 and 2011, college enrollment grew by 3.2 million,” said Kurt Bauman, chief of the Census Bureau’s Education and Social Stratification Branch. “This level of growth exceeded the total enrollment increase of the previous 10 years combined (2.0 million from 1996 to 2006).”

As recruiting intensifies, UW-Platteville grows enrollment

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 want to study engineering or another high-demand field at a big school.

Nestled in southwestern Wisconsin about 20 miles from the Iowa and Illinois borders, the school known for engineering has figured out how to increase both enrollment and revenue while state support for higher education is waning and declining birthrates that began 20 years ago are making the competition for high school graduates stiffer.

Meanwhile, UW-Madison this week reported flat preliminary fall enrollment numbers. Several other UW System campuses saw fall enrollments creep up, and UW-Milwaukee reported it has reversed a seven-year decline in freshmen enrollment with stepped-up recruiting efforts.

How many young women can a school legally punish for dress code violations?

Jessica Valenti:

In the last few weeks, almost 200 students – almost all of them female – at Tottenville High School in Staten Island, New York have been given detention over dress code violations. Many of the young women showed back up to school in crop tops and tank tops, deliberately breaking the code in protest.

But what makes an outfit inappropriate? A peek of shoulder? An inch of midriff? Or maybe it’s just being young and female that school administrators find offensive. Because while these school dress codes are supposed to address both female and male students, it’s predominantly girls who are targeted as “violators” – and that could be a violation of federal law.

In a statement, Tottenville High School Superintendent Aimee Horowitz said in schools that don’t have uniform requirements “students have the right to determine their own dress except where such dress creates a distraction, is dangerous or interferes with the learning and teaching process.”

The Tottenville students’ outrage comes on the heels of a high school girl in Florida being made to wear a “shame suit” for breaking her school’s dress code and a middle schoolers in Illinois protesting their schools ban on leggings.

Success still evasive, but Howard Fuller remains warrior in education

Alan Borsuk:

In his last days as superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools in 1995, Howard Fuller went to visit an elementary school on the northwest side. He pledged when he became head of the system in 1991 to visit every school in MPS and, after almost four years, this was the only one he hadn’t been to.

It was a nice visit. The staff was welcoming, the kids were cute, the school seemed to be running well.

But achievement wasn’t good and whatever it might take to change that, there was little reason to think it was going to happen at this school.

As we drove away, Fuller was pensive. He wondered out loud what happens that makes eager kids like these turn out so often to have sour conclusions to their education.

I told him my take on what he was thinking was this: Something different needed to happen, he didn’t know what it was, but he knew these kids needed it. So try different things, most anything, to see if they work. Put the desks on the ceiling, see if it improves things, as I put it.

Fuller laughed. Yes, he said. There have to be better ways. But what are they?

Guilty until proven innocent: How letting my kid play alone outside led to a CPS investigation

Kari Ann Roy:

Monday. Late-morning. Hotter than hot.

Not even 24 hours home from vacation, and I was going through the piles of mail. There was a knock at the door, which was weird because no one ever knocks on our door unless it’s the UPS guy, and he doesn’t come until dinnertime. Corralling the crazy barky dog, I looked out the front-door window and saw a woman I did not know — and my 6-year-old.

I whipped the door open, trying to figure out what was happening. The woman smiled. My son frowned. And as soon as the door opened he flew into the house, running as far away from the woman as he could.

Online Learning is Just as Effective as Traditional Education, According to a New MIT Study

Lauren Landry:

More than 7.1 million students are currently taking at least one online course. Despite the apparent popularity, however, educators have given the trend low marks.

But a new study from MIT suggests naysayers should think otherwise. Massive open online courses are not only effective, researchers have discovered, they are as effective as what’s being traditionally taught in the classroom — regardless of how prepared or in the know students are.

Researchers’ findings have been published in the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, and co-author David Pritchard, MIT’s Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics, knows they will be controversial.

“A number of well-known educators have said there isn’t going to be much learning in MOOCs,” said Pritchard to MIT News, “or if there is, it will be for people who are already well-educated.”

The group, comprised of researchers from MIT, Harvard and Tsinghua University, completed a before-and-after test on students taking “Mechanics ReView,” an introductory mechanics course offered on massive open online learning platform edX. Researchers then conducted a similar test on students taking the class residentially, discovering:

Madison School Board Member & Gubernatorial Candidate Mary Burke Apologizes to Neenah’s Superintendent over Act 10 Remarks

The Neenah Superintendent wrote a letter to Madison School Board Member & Gubernatorial Candidate Mary Burke on 19 September.

Ms. Burke recently apologized for her Act 10 remarks:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke has apologized to the superintendent of the Neenah school district for comments she made on the campaign trail.

Burke had been citing the district as an example of negative effects she says have been caused in Wisconsin schools by the law known as Act 10 that effectively ended collective bargaining for teachers.

District administrator Mary Pfeiffer said Friday that Burke reached out to her on Wednesday and apologized by phone. Pfeiffer says Burke agreed not to use Neenah as an example again.

Neenah Superintendent Dr. Mary Pfeiffer’s letter to Mary Burke, via a kind reader (PDF):

Neenah Joint School District
410 South Commercial Street
Neenah, WI 54956
Tel: (920) 751-6800
Fax: (920) 751-6809

Burke for Wisconsin
PO Box 2479
Madison, WI 53701
September 19, 2014

Dear Ms. Burke,

On behalf of the Neenah Joint School District I would like to express my disappointment regarding your use of our District as an example of your perceived negative impact of Act 10 on education as reported by John McCormack in the Weekly Standard and at least one additional news publication in the Green Bay Press-Gazette.

In your position as a Madison school board member, I’m sure you’ve seen that Act 10 has created a variety of challenges for school districts across Wisconsin, but I’m sure you’ve also seen plenty of positives as well. It is unfair and misleading to claim that Act 10 is the primary reason why one specific candidate chose to accept a position in Minnesota over an opening in the Neenah Joint School District. There are many reasons why candidates choose to work in other districts and certainly some effects of Act 10 may factor into those decisions. However, to make a blanket statement that Act 10 is the reason why teachers are leaving school districts in Wisconsin (in this case the Neenah Joint School District), especially by citing only one candidate’s decision to go elsewhere, is an unfortunate exaggeration at best.

We are extremely proud of our schools in Neenah and incredibly proud of the staff we have assembled both prior to and since the passage of Act 10. We have never settled with an inferior candidate to fill a position and will never do that to our students or families.

Since you have not reached out to me to learn more about our District, I will provide to you some data points that you might find revealing about why we continue to be a high performing District in Wisconsin.

Since Act 10, we have faced, and met, the difficult challenges necessary to support student learning while retaining our excellent staff.

we have significantly reduced an unsustainable $184 million unfunded liability regarding our Other Post Employment Benefits (OPEB). Meanwhile, we still provide all of our most veteran employees a $100,000 retirement benefit. New employees are also provided OPEB benefits and that is something most districts have eliminated. As you are aware, this is in addition to the state retirement benefit.

we have reduced class sizes and increased the number of our certified staff.

we have had no certified staff (teacher) layoffs since Act 10.

our school board has supported pools of dollars for 2% salary increases (above the CPI) and 2% one-time stipend awards every year for all employee groups for a total of4%.

over the past two years, 57 certified staff members have received a $5,000 or more increase in their salary.

more than 33% of certified staff received a 3% or higher salary increase in 2013-14,

with 6% of them receiving a 6% increase or higher.

our insurance costs are the lowest in our area.

we have no long-term debt.

our mill rate remains the lowest in our area at $8.53 and a decrease for the third consecutive year.

I respectfully ask that you stop using Neenah as an example of the negative ramifications of Act 10. This request has nothing to do with my personal feelings or political stance. It is about a dedicated staff that is proud to work in Neenah. I would be p1eased to speak with you further about this issue.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Dr. Mary Pfeiffer ~
Superintendent of Schools
Neenah Joint School District
Copy: Neenah Joint School District Board of Education Members

Act 10 notes and links.

Neenah plans to spend $80,479,210 for 6,226 students (DPI) during the 2014-2015 school year, or $12,926 per student (PDF Document). Ms. Burke’s Madison School Board plans to spend more than $15,000 per student during the same period, 16% more than Neenah.

Plenty of Resources“.

Pub school teachers earn 21% more than pvt school teachers, on average. Both earn less than other comparable workers

Bureau of Labor Statistics:

A study using Current Population Survey data shows that, from 1996 to 2012, elementary, middle, and high school teachers earned less than other college graduates, but the gap was smaller for public school teachers and smaller still if they had union representation; moreover, the mitigating effects are stronger for female than male teachers, so the within-gender pay gaps are much larger for male teachers.

The current school choice debate has many possible consequences, not just for students, but also for teachers. Broadly speaking, schools are either publicly or privately funded. Public schools are funded by the government through federal, state, and local taxes, and most are part of a larger school system. Elected school board members and education officials implement and oversee strict rules and procedures that public schools must follow. Private schools do not receive government money and thus have to raise their own funds. Private school officials may have more leeway to run schools as they see fit, but funders and others may play a significant administrative role.

Given the proliferation in school privatization, this article analyzes the fundamental differences between the two sectors with regard to teacher staffing and pay disparities. We employ the Current Population Survey (CPS) to document differences between teachers in the two sectors with regard to unionization density, gender and race or ethnicity, educational attainment, and relative pay gaps between public and private sector teachers and between both and other college graduates.

The debate about school privatization and the push toward both publicly and privately funded charter schools should include differences in teacher staffing and relative pay by school ownership. Staffing and pay differences across type of ownership may be due to or may influence factors such as teacher cohesion and student achievement. For example, teachers may trade off between pay and safer schools or smaller class sizes. (The pupil–teacher ratio in 2010 was 16.0 for public schools and 12.2 for private schools.)1 Or it could be that lower paid teachers desire to work at higher paying schools but competition prevents them from finding such employment.

Reframing the Common Core discussion: A battle for our freedom

Laurie Rogers, via a kind email:

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” – Voltaire
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” – George Orwell

If I were to build a list of the worst systemic problems in public education, the Common Core State Standards would not be at the top of the list. The Common Core (CCSS) is a huge problem, to be sure. It’s dictatorial, inadequate, experimental, expensive, developmentally inappropriate, politically infused – it’s nearly everything critics have said it is. But it isn’t the worst problem we face.

That dishonor goes to The Network, a moniker I’ve given to the conglomeration of corporate and government interests (and their allies) that have seized control of America’s classrooms. The Network is huge – containing most of the K-12 education mob, plus its allies in the Department of Education; colleges of education; unions; media; government agencies, associations and legal teams; foundations; corporations; legislatures; fundraising groups; colleges and universities; business; and even the courts.

The Network prefers to operate quietly, promoting supposedly good intentions. Its hallmark phrase: “It’s all about the kids.” But try opposing The Network on behalf of a child – yours or anyone else’s. If you can’t be put off, persuaded, ignored, bullied or bought out, The Network has no problem getting nasty. The more honest and honorable you are, the nastier The Network becomes.

This isn’t about left or right, Democrat or Republican. It’s about “in” and “out”; money and power; agenda and ideology. The Network spends a lot of taxpayer money growing itself, feeding itself and shielding itself from accountability. The bigger it is, the more power it has. The more power it has, the more friends it gains. The more friends it gains, the more money it gets. The more money it gets, the bigger it grows – even as it completely fails our children. Allies of all stripes play along.

In Washington State, legislators and judges now tout the additional billions they’ll rip from taxpayers for failed school districts. They don’t say how much is spent currently or what it buys. They don’t hold districts accountable. Education already is a bottomless pit of wasted dollars; they don’t seem to care.

Did primary school teachers in England game the phonics check?

Richard Adams:

The phonics check, a simple test of reading given to five and six year-olds at the end of year one of primary school in England, comprises words and “pseudo-words” that children are expected to pronounce. In 2012 and 2013, the Department for Education announced in advance what the “pass” mark was to be. Looking at the chart below, with the yellow line for 2012 and blue line for 2013 results, can you guess what the pass mark out of 40 was?

Curated Education Information