Madison Teachers, Inc:

The Republican controlled State Senate Education Committee was forced to retract SB 286, a bill that would give away public assets to corporate run charter schools, because there was not enough votes for the bill in its current form. Objections came for both public school and voucher school supports. The bill would use high-stakes, standardized test scores, create an A-F grading system and then turn over the public school building and assets of ‘F’ rated schools to private or charter voucher school management. It even goes so far as to mandate that some percentage of schools be labeled as failing each year. It is a terrible idea with disastrous consequences for public education.
While the bill also would have required Voucher schools to have some accountability criteria, the standards are different and the consequences for failure nowhere near as punitive. If a voucher school fails using the same or similar criteria to the public school, they just can’t accept any new voucher students. They will continue to receive tax-dollars and their assets will not be seized by the state. The corporate reform interests who would benefit from this treatment object to any accountability or consequences for voucher schools, which is a significant reason why Olsen was forced to retract the bill after it had originally been scheduled for a vote on January 30. Governor Walker and his special interest cronies have waded into the discussion, demanding revisions that favor their interests. This bill is not likely to go away quietly.

Adam Morris:

THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT, while fading from the popular press, is perhaps only now being thoroughly metabolized in the fussier corners of academic thought. This seems fitting when we consider Hegel’s philosophy of history, which helps legitimate the university’s function as a sacred space for slow and deliberate contemplation and academic freedom. Hegel would have it that phenomena such as Occupy are only fully understood when they have worked through their formative contradictions, dissipated their energies, and reached their conclusion. The owl of Minerva flies at night, in other words, but Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience tolls not the witching hour of the Occupy movement so much as the doldrums of mid-afternoon.
We are still far from the historical perspective required to properly absorb the world-historical commotion that was, and still is, the Occupy movement. W.J.T. Mitchell admits as much: he starts with the disclaimer that these essays, which were originally published together in Critical Inquiry in mid-2012, attempt to explain a movement “still in process and whose outcome is unclear.” Subsequent events have justified this caution. While in the summer of 2012 it made sense for Mitchell to claim that “everyone agrees that Occupy Wall Street changed the conversation in the mass media from deficit reduction to economic inequality and joblessness,” this view already requires revision in the wake of October’s Tea Party tantrum over Obamacare and ensuing shutdown of the federal government, which cost American taxpayers billions of dollars.

Wray Herbert:

I went to college long before the era of laptops, so I learned to take notes the old-fashioned way: ink on paper. But that does not mean my note-taking system was simple. Indeed it was an intricate hieroglyphic language, in which asterisks and underscoring and check marks and exclamation points all had precise meaning, if only to me.
It’s a lost art. Many college students have some kind of electronic note-taking device nowadays, and most will swear by them. And really, only a Luddite would cling to pen and notebook in the 21st century. Typing is faster than longhand, producing more legible and more thorough notes for study later on.

Tom Daccord:

Over the last few years K-12 schools and districts across the country have been investing heavily in iPads for classroom use.
EdTechTeacher has been leading iPad professional development at many of these schools and we’ve seen firsthand how they approach iPad integration.
While we’ve witnessed many effective approaches to incorporating iPads successfully in the classroom, we’re struck by the common mistakes many schools are making with iPads, mistakes that are in some cases crippling the success of these initiatives. We’re sharing these common challenges with you, so your school doesn’t have to make them.

Miriam Jordan:

The federal program that brings foreign au pairs to the U.S. will come under review this year, as the State Department weighs better monitoring and other protections for the mostly young females who provide child care to American families.
Nearly 14,000 foreigners–typically young women from Europe, Latin America and Asia–came to the U.S. in 2012 to work as au pairs, traveling on visas designed to promote educational and cultural exchange. Au pairs are supposed to provide 45 hours of child-care-related work each week for a stipend and an educational allowance, as well as room and board and meals.
But there have been a spate of complaints from au pairs who say they quit after being overworked or otherwise mistreated. One au pair from Thailand said she had to carry heavy furniture and provide her own meals. An au pair from Brazil returned home last summer after she worked far longer hours than she expected. In 2011, a German woman sued the father of her Oregon host family and an au pair agency in state court over alleged sexual advances that he made toward her, according to court records. Both cases were settled on undisclosed terms without the father admitting or denying wrongdoing.

Bill Novak:

A senior chemistry student at UW-Madison has been selected as one of 14 Americans to win a Churchill scholarship, one of the most prestigious scholarships in higher education.
Green Bay native Joshua Shutter will be heading to the University of Cambridge in England to pursue a master of philosophy in chemistry degree, according to a news release from the university.
With the Churchill scholarship awarded to a UW-Madison student, the university is one of only four American universities to have Churchill, Rhodes and Marshall scholars in the same year. The other three are Harvard, Princeton and Georgia Tech.
“The potential to perform research alongside esteemed faculty was one of the primary reasons why I chose to attend UW-Madison,” Shutter said in the news release.
“Overall, the ability to perform research early on in my undergraduate career both motivated me and opened a variety of opportunities, from NASA to the Churchill scholarship, that would have seemed unimaginable to me four years ago.”

Marcus Winters:

Here’s what looks like a policy dilemma. To attain the economic growth that it desperately needs, the United States must improve its schools and train a workforce capable of competing in the global economy. Economists Eric Hanushek, Dean Jamison, Eliot Jamison, and Ludger Woessmann estimate that improving student achievement by half of one standard deviation–roughly the current difference between the United States and Finland–would increase U.S. GDP growth by about a full percentage point annually. Yet states and the federal government face severe budgetary constraints these days; how are policymakers supposed to improve student achievement while reducing school funding?
In reality, that task is far from impossible. The story of American education over the last three decades is one not of insufficient funds but of inefficient schools. Billions of new dollars have gone into the system, to little effect. Luckily, Americans are starting to recognize that we can improve schooling without paying an additional dime. In fact, by unleashing the power of educational choice, we might even save money while getting better results and helping the economy’s long-term prospects.
Over the last four decades, public education spending has increased rapidly in the United States. According to the Department of Education, public schools spent, on average, $12,922 per pupil in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available. Adjusting for inflation, that’s more than double the $6,402 per student that public schools spent in 1975.
Despite that doubling of funds, just about every measure of educational outcomes has remained stagnant since 1975, though some have finally begun to inch upward over the last few years. Student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)–the only consistently observed measure of student math and reading achievement over the period–have remained relatively flat since the mid-1970s. High school graduation rates haven’t budged much over the last 40 years, either.

Sean Corcoran, Thomas Romer & Howard Rosenthal (PDF):

The operation and financing of primary and secondary public schools in the US is highly decentralized. Most of the budget of each of the 13,000+ school districts comes from a combination of local and state revenues. State constitutions and statutes determine the degree of local district autonomy and scope of taxing power.
As part of an ongoing project on the political economy of education finance, this paper reports on some developments in school spending in one state during a time when some of the state’s constitutional rules governing local school district taxing powers changed. In part, the paper provides a replication of tests of a model of bureaucratic agenda-setting in the financing of elementary and secondary public education. In that agenda-setting model, a budget-maximizing agenda setter makes a proposal for a locally funded operating levy that must be approved by a referendum. In the basic model, the referendum is modeled as an ultimatum game where the agenda setter makes a take-it-or leave-it proposal to some pivotal voter. If a majority of the electorate rejects the proposal, the levy is an exogenously specified reversion level. The optimal, budget-maximizing proposal makes the pivotal voter indifferent between the proposal and the

Timothy Burke:

In the current wave of online ill-will between contingent and tenure-track faculty (which of course most faculty in either group will never see, know about or care about), one of the common sentiments that produces some modest degree of agreement is, “Blame the administrators”.
The common refrain, echoing the arguments of Benjamin Ginsberg’s Fall of the Faculty, goes something like this:
1) Faculty used to be firmly in control of most of the business of academic institutions.
2) Administrators took that control away from them.
3) Then administrators made more administrators and fewer faculty, and made most of the faculty contingent employees. Why? Because they’re bad, because they could, because they hate truth and justice, because they’re neoliberal capitalists.
4) And so here we are. We should retake governance, fire most of the administrators, and rehire most faculty as tenure-track faculty.
This at least is Ginsberg’s take. Every once in a while in Fall, he pauses to consider what the faculty role in the history of administrative growth might be, every once in a while he considers the role of federal and state regulations, every once in a while he thinks about larger trends in employment and the economy. But for the most part, he views faculty as having little or no role in the growth of administration and the rise of contingent labor, he almost never asks whether students played a part, treats academia as a self-contained institution that explains itself, and largely sees administrators, particularly the “deanlets” that he views with special contempt, as the deliberate and programmatic agents of the marginalization of the faculty.

Jaime Omar Yassin:

There are two public/private worlds in Oakland existing in parallel to one another. Mostly white, fairly affluent people live in one, where they are focused on issues of expression and personal privacy–especially in cyberspace. The privacy battlefield of this group is theoretical. While there is much generalized surveillance it is not yet directed at this demographic in any copious way, and much of the focus is preventative to avoid a reality suggested by everyone’s favorite rhetorical device, George Orwell’s 1984. Oakland’s other world is populated by mostly Black, Asian and Latino people in the city’s poor and of color neighborhoods. Privacy in that world has an entirely different set of parameters and connotations.
What is it like to have your every move in public surveilled? Many speakers on DAC, which appeared as the last item on the public safety agenda, mused on the idea with various projections. But the OPD report-back portion of the night’s meeting that filled up the first half of the night already gave some clue, though it passed almost without comment by city official or public citizen. Ceasefire was mentioned again and again by police captains reporting back on successes. Success in the case of Ceasefire is reached through questionable policing tactics meant to assure affluent voters that the police are taking their crime-fears seriously, while addressing the race-based economic inequalities that make liberals uncomfortable.

Tim Wu:

This week, the remains of fifty-five bodies were found in unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Florida School for Boys, in the panhandle town of Marianna. The reformatory school, which was operated by the state of Florida, and which closed in 2011, was notorious for its mistreatment of its students. In 1968, Florida’s governor at the time, Claude Kirk, said of the school, “Somebody should have blown the whistle a long time ago.” There have long been allegations of beatings, torture, and sexual abuse there; it now appears that some students were killed. The total number of bodies buried at the school has not been determined, but the forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle, the leader of the exhumation effort, which has been under way since September 2013, has said that it may exceed a hundred.
Some of the children died natural deaths, but the sheer number of bodies suggests that there may have been many killings, a possibility buttressed by eyewitness accounts. Yet Florida’s prosecutors have yet to file a single criminal charge, or even open a criminal investigation. To pass over crimes of this magnitude without investigation seems the very definition of injustice.

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

In a recent post on her blog, Diane Ravitch shared concerns about alternative routes to certification; in particular Teach for America (TFA). Her post centered on a parent’s letter to Senator Tom Harkin after her daughter had a bad experience with TFA. Ravitch posted two responses: Harkin’s actual response to the parent; and a mock response crafted by Professor Julian Vasquez Heilig, University of Texas. Harkin serves as the Chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and as Chair of the Education Appropriations Subcommittee. While Harkin “read” his constituent’s letter, it is apparent he did not incorporate Close reading strategies; his mind was made up. Harkin has supported funding for TFA and even tried to weaken the definition of “highly qualified”, so as to include teachers in training (thus enabling TFA teachers to be assigned to schools). Dr. Heilig points out several of the issues with TFA, primarily the turnover rate of the teachers in this program, which our federal government funds. He also notes that while these “teachers” don’t meet the standards of highly qualified, they are the teachers being disproportionately assigned to schools serving poor and minority children. Heilig also exposes the fact that TFA has access to and direct influence over the legislative process, as they provide cost-free education staffers for legislators on the Education and Workforce Committee. TFA lobbyists working inside the Capitol? No wonder Teach for America has been able to extend its reach so efficiently into so many districts around the country.

Alex Taborrock:

Private and charter schools appear to have significant but modest effects on test scores but much larger effects on educational attainment and even on long-run earnings. A new working paper from Booker, Sass, Gill and Zimmer and associated brief from Mathematica Policy Research finds that charter schools raise high school graduation, college enrollment and college persistence rates by ~7 to 13%. Moreover, the income of former charter school students when measured at 23-25 years old is 12.7% higher than similar students. Similar in this context is measured by students who were in charter schools in grade 8 but who then switched to a traditional high school-in many ways this is a conservative comparison group since any non-random switchers would presumably switch to a better school (other controls are also included).
The effect of charters on graduation rates is consistent with a larger literature finding that Catholic schools increase graduation rates (e.g. here’s and here). I am also not surprised that charters increase earnings but the earnings gain is surprisingly large; especially so when we consider that the gain appears just as large among charter and non-charter students both of whom attended college (i.e. the gain is not just through the college attendance effect).

Greg Hurst:

Children aged four will be expected to sit tests within weeks of starting primary school under controversial plans to be announced by the Government.
The Times has been told that “baseline” tests to measure each child’s level of development are to be moved from the age of seven to the beginning of the reception year. Ministers have decided that they will go ahead after consulting on proposals over the summer and autumn.

Andrew Solomon:

Parenthood as we know it — predicated on the unconditional exaltation of our children — is no more than 70 years old, and it has gone through radical readjustments over the past two generations. As children went from helping on the farm to being the focus of relentless cosseting, they shifted “from being our employees to our bosses,” Jennifer Senior observes in her trenchant and engrossing first book, “All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.” Senior, a contributing editor at New York magazine, examines what it means to be a parent, through interviews with a handful of families who are neither typical nor extraordinary. These are snapshots, not longitudinal documentaries, but in the way of good snapshots, they tell more than one might notice at first glance, and they allow for cautious universalizing. She supplements these vignettes with extremely impressive research, weaving in insights from philosophy, psychology and an occasionally overwhelming mélange of social science reports.

Eric Pianin

Nearly everyone agrees that recent college graduates are having an inordinately tough time finding work almost five years after the end of the Great Recession. Young people aged 18 to 34 have struggled with double-digit unemployment and account for half of the 10.9 million unemployed Americans, according to government figures.
Now a new study shows there is widespread disagreement between business leaders and young adults and their families over the root causes of this problem, beyond the obvious problem of a sluggish recovery.
Nearly three-quarters of hiring managers complain that millennials — even those with college degrees — aren’t prepared for the job market and lack an adequate “work ethic,” according to a survey from Bentley University, a private business school in Waltham, Mass.

Johnny Tam and Stuart Lau:

An article on the Education Bureau’s website claiming “Cantonese is not an official language” has been removed after criticism.
The article was posted on the website’s Language Learning Support section on January 24.
It aimed to promote the importance of bilingualism and trilingualism as the city “develops alongside the rapidly growing China” and “the daily usage of Mandarin [in Hong Kong] becomes common”.
It said: “Although the Basic Law stipulates that Chinese and English are the two official languages in Hong Kong, nearly 97 per cent of the local population learn Cantonese (a Chinese dialect that is not an official language) as their commonly used daily language.”
The article was removed yesterday. The webpage is now “being updated”.
Education sector lawmaker Ip Kin-yuen said the bureau had “done wrong” because it was not its business to define what language was official. But he commended it for quickly removing the article and apologising.

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Richard Adams:

In Michael Gove and Andrew Adonis’s wildest dreams, the academies and free schools their policies ushered into being would be filled with bright students in spotless classrooms, being encouraged to apply to top universities.
When the failures of the Al-Madinah and Discovery free schools dominated the headlines last year, that vision seemed the stuff of a madman’s hallucination. But not in Stratford, where in the shadow of the deconstruction of the 2012 Olympic venue the free school project finally had a gold medal winner in the London Academy of Excellence.
On Monday Gove will give his stamp of approval by delivering a speech on education reform at the LAE’s unprepossessing home, a 1980s former council office block near Stratford tube station. But the reform Gove is most likely to trumpet is that of LAE itself. A sixth form college funded under the free school programme that opened two years ago, LAE had kept a low profile, thanks in the main to its unfashionable location in Newham. But it made headlines in January with the announcement that six of its first cohort of students had been offered places at Oxford and Cambridge.
Robert Wilne, LAE’s energetic headmaster, says the school should be judged not on its success at Oxbridge entry but on the route its students took to get there.

One News:

Ripping up the playground rulebook is having incredible effects on children at an Auckland school.
Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don’t cause bedlam, the principal says.
The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.
Principal Bruce McLachlan rid the school of playtime rules as part of a successful university experiment.
“We want kids to be safe and to look after them, but we end up wrapping them in cotton wool when in fact they should be able to fall over.”

Clay Shirky:

Interest in using the internet to slash the price of higher education is being driven in part by hope for new methods of teaching, but also by frustration with the existing system. The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.
In the first half of the 20th century, higher education was a luxury and a rarity in the U.S. Only 5% or so of adults, overwhelmingly drawn from well-off families, had attended college. That changed with the end of WWII. Waves of discharged soldiers subsidized by the GI Bill, joined by the children of the expanding middle class, wanted or needed a college degree. From 1945 to 1975, the number of undergraduates increased five-fold, and graduate students nine-fold. PhDs graduating one year got jobs teaching the ever-larger cohort of freshman arriving the next.
This growth was enthusiastically subsidized. Between 1960 and 1975, states more than doubled their rate of appropriations for higher education, from four dollars per thousand in state revenue to ten. Post-secondary education extended its previous mission–liberal arts education for elites–to include both more basic research from faculty and more job-specific training for students. Federal research grants quadrupled; at the same time, a Bachelor’s degree became an entry-level certificate for an increasing number of jobs.

Alan Borsuk:

Whatever appeared to be coming together a week ago seemed to be reduced to splinters in the last few days when it came to pursuit of ideas for low performing schools in Milwaukee.
I think it’s contagious and my brain has splintered into thoughts about the fairly tumultuous recent developments. So instead of a single column, I offer fragments.
Fragment 1: Last week was a good one for fans of the status quo. Plans for Republicans in the Legislature to push through new and fairly dramatic steps came to a halt when the lead author said he couldn’t get enough votes.
Milwaukee School Board members went through much rhetoric on what to do in meetings two weeks in a row — and sent the whole issue back to committee. Maybe doing nothing is better than doing the things being suggested. In any case, “doing nothing” is ahead at the moment.
Fragment 2: It’s all about counting to 17. There’s a big roster of education ideas up for action in the Legislature — school accountability, including public and voucher schools; charter school expansion statewide; dealing with the future of the Common Core initiative.
But if 17 of the 18 Republican state senators don’t agree to get behind any of these, nothing will result, at least this year. So far, no one has counted to 17 on any of these fronts. What could change that? Maybe concerted involvement by Gov. Scott Walker. Maybe not. The Senate Republicans are not easy to unite.
Fragment 3: The hostility was strong in the large audiences at the two recent meetings of Milwaukee School Board members focused on low performing schools.
Much of it was aimed at anything to do with charter schools. At one point, mention by Superintendent Gregory Thornton of Teach for America, City Year and especially Schools That Can Milwaukee drew audible rumbling from the crowd.
These organizations are controversial to some folks, but I think they each are bringing positive, good energy and commitment to helping kids in Milwaukee. It’s one thing to disagree on approaches. It’s another to add so much anger to the environment.

Dan Kane:

A former interim dean of UNC-Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences has sent a letter to Chancellor Carol Folt and Provost Jim Dean, challenging their claims that the university was not admitting athletes unable to read at a high-school level.
Madeline Levine, a highly honored professor emeritus, said that as a dean, she was made aware of instances in which the university has admitted athletes with substantial academic challenges, including one she suspected was “functionally illiterate” during her tenure.
Levine also accused the university of resisting efforts to get to the bottom of a long-running academic fraud scandal that is drawing sustained national attention since it made The New York Times’ front page on New Year’s Day. She said Dean took the wrong tack two weeks ago in publicly lambasting whistle-blower Mary Willingham, a former learning specialist in the athletes’ tutoring program. Willingham said her research found that more than half of 183 athletes specially tested for learning deficiencies over an eight-year period could not read at a high-school level.
“Mary Willingham was courageous in speaking out about her experience as a reading specialist and academic counselor for such students,” Levine wrote. “It is appalling that the highest officials at UNC – before it became clear that attacking a whistle-blower is not a smart PR move – mounted a concerted public attack on the accuracy of Ms. Willingham’s statistical analysis and, by implication, against her personally, while steadfastly refusing to engage with the core issue that concerns her: the exploitation of student-athletes and the concomitant abuse of the academic values by which a great university should live.”

The Madison School District (PDF):

More rigorous and frequent reviews of progress (3.02, 4.04, 24)
Modify student achievement goals and include more robust measures of student performance (4.01, 4.02, 4.03, Appendix 1)
Clarify the admissions process, which is expressly aligned to the process used for other DLI programs (7.04)

Nuestro Mundo generally operates within the traditional District structures. Two proposed charter schools that largely wished to operate in a more independent manner – to varying degrees -, The Studio School and the Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School were rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board.

After a month, I drop out of Mumbai University. There is no particular reason, more of an aimless slide. Having told my parents that I’d try India before deciding about going abroad, I now accept an offer from Claremont McKenna–an American College comprised of words I mispronounce, the ‘Mck’ coming out as the ‘muck’ of muck and slime, rather than the ‘mec’ of McDonalds. The fee transfer is a family event. The four of us walk to the bank, each clutching assigned documents. Fifty thousand dollars–a sum so new, so gigantic, that the clerk who processes the transaction and I both roll our eyes. Once it’s paid, Claremont begins sending me emails: housing form, dining form, health form, orientation package. I reply vaguely, and then go about preparations in a daze, as if buying clothes and packing suitcases for someone else.
Then there is the matter of goodbyes. I am expected to throw a farewell party, and I do. The formality done, I provide my friends with a false (early) departure date so as to have a few weeks to myself. Not that anyone is harassing me. Lying and laying low just seem like the thing to do. The situation with my family is more difficult (though of course I myself don’t realize this just yet.) My older sister Shirya is giving up on me. I didn’t write to her from boarding school. It’s unlikely that I will from the States. My mother, who blindly loves me, finds this period especially hard. We spend a lot of time together: at the passport office, at the American consulate, in line outside the American consulate, at shopping malls, at foreign exchange bureaus and, of course, in the car–but our interaction is dead. She might as well be a chauffeur. My father claims to “know what was going on in [my] head,” because he is my father. Whether he really does, (I hope he doesn’t) or is given to psychoanalyzing, or has just taken it upon himself to keep things together, I don’t know. But he, more than the others, excuses my crankiness and lets me be.
As the date of departure approaches, I go further adrift, smoking openly in the building lobby, skipping meals without explanation, and even walking out on my grandparents when they arrive for a farewell visit. I listen to music until my head aches.

Madison School District (205K PDF):

The BOARD is committed to providing a strong instructional program that results in student growth for all students, including advanced learners. The BOARD recognizes that many advanced learners have unique academic and social-emotional needs that may require additional supports or interventions beyond the strong core instruction that is provided within a general education classroom if they are to achieve growth in their identified domain(s). The BOARD further recognizes the need to create systems for identifying, monitoring and serving advanced learners that are culturally responsive and sensitive to the needs and experiences of students with the potential for high performance but who are underperforming and students from underrepresented groups. The BOARD is committed to engaging the parents and guardians of advanced learners through outreach to, communication with and the inclusion of parents and guardians in education decisions that affect their students. In order to actualize these commitments for all students, all schools must, through professional collaboration and with the input from parents and guardians, appropriately identify and serve all advanced learners, including students from underrepresented groups, students who evidence high potential but are underperforming and twice exceptional learners, using the identification, monitoring and intervention systems set forth in the BOARD-approved Talented and Gifted Plan.
A. Differentiated Instruction – A best practice for all instructional staff across all grade levels and subjects that involves modifying the classroom curriculum, instructional model and/or expected evidence of learning to meet unique student needs within the classroom.
B. Advanced Learner – A student who demonstrates high performance capability or the potential for high performance in one or more of the following domains and requires enrichment and/or intervention beyond differentiated core instruction. The domains are general intellectual, creativity, specific academic, leadership and visual and performing arts.
C. Interventions – Research-based instructional practices and programs used systematically to provide support to students who exceed academic or behavioral benchmarks or who evidence high potential but have not yet demonstrated high performance. Interventions, which are provided in addition to or in replacement of differentiated, grade-level core instruction, are used to systematically provide an enhanced opportunity to learn, scaffold learning for students whose mastery of skills or content are below what is expected and/or provide a faster pace of learning.

Much more on the talented & gifted program, here and a parental complaint.

Rachel Schulze:

Rose Yang, a senior at UW-Madison, is starting to consider plans for graduate school. After she earns her bachelor’s in social welfare, she wants to complete a master’s and become a social worker.
“I want to help students very similar to myself, who didn’t have opportunities–or didn’t feel like they had the chance to go to college,” Yang said, reflecting on her experience growing up in a low-income household in Madison. “I want to be that person who helps advocate for students like me at one point to get to college.”
While the Madison Metropolitan School District’s 2011-12 graduation rate was 74.6 percent overall, the figure hides disparites. For white students the graduation rate was 86.7 percent, but it was lower for all other races: 80.8 percent among Asians, 63.2 among Hispanics, and 53.1 among blacks. The rate for economically disadvantaged students was 55.4 percent.
Disparity in Madison received fresh attention in October when the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families released the “Race to Equity” report. The document outlined disparity between blacks and whites in Dane County, focusing on differing outcomes in education, employment and arrest rates as well as other areas.
“I think that was a real litmus test that people in our communities were surprised by those numbers,” said Madeline Hafner, executive of the Minority Student Achievement Network, a Madison-based national coalition of school districts aiming to reduce their levels educational disparity.

Channel3000:

Wisconsin’s public school open enrollment application period will start in February for the 2014-15 school year, according to a release.
The program allows parents an opportunity to send their children to any public school district in the state, officials said. The enrollment period runs from Feb. 3 to April 30.
Children in the state are usually assigned to public school districts based on the location of their parents’ home, according to the release. The open enrollment application period is the only tuition-free opportunity for most parents to apply for their children to attend a public school in a school district other than the one they live in.
The program is an inter-district choice program that started in the 1998-99 school year, according to the release. Wisconsin is among 12 states with inter-district open enrollment.
“Wisconsin is among a number of states nationwide that offer public school open enrollment across school districts. The state’s long-running program supports parental involvement and shared responsibility for educating children,” State Superintendent Tony Evers said in the release.

Much more on open enrollment, here.

Ryan Wallerson:

If there’s an unofficial national day for America’s sports passion, it is Super Bowl Sunday, and one of the largest U.S. television audiences of 2014 is expected to watch the Seattle Seahawks face the Denver Broncos.
But ahead of this weekend’s spectacle in New Jersey, there is some sobering news about the country’s most-popular team sports: Fewer children are playing them.
Combined participation in the four most-popular U.S. team sports–basketball, soccer, baseball and football–fell among boys and girls aged 6 through 17 by roughly 4% from 2008 to 2012, according to an examination of data from youth leagues, school-sports groups and industry associations.

Claudia Dreifus:

In 2008, Salman Khan, then a young hedge-fund analyst with a master’s in computer science from M.I.T., started the Khan Academy, offering free online courses mainly in the STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Today the free electronic schoolhouse reaches more than 10 million users around the world, with more than 5,000 courses, and the approach has been widely admired and copied. I spoke with Mr. Khan, 37, for more than two hours, in person and by telephone. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversations.
Q. How did the Kahn Academy begin?
A. In 2004, my 12-year-old cousin Nadia visited with my wife and me in Boston. She’s from New Orleans, where I grew up.
It turned out Nadia was having trouble in math. She was getting tracked into a slower math class. I don’t think she or her parents realized the repercussions if she’d stayed on the slower track. I said, “I want to work with you, if you are willing.” When Nadia went home, we began tutoring by telephone.

Capital Times:

On a recent afternoon, the Rev. Alex Gee, pastor of Fountain of Life Covenant Church on Madison’s south side, facilitated a candid conversation with local African-American leaders on the realities facing blacks in Madison. The gathering was sparked by Gee’s powerful personal essay, “Justified Anger,” which ran in The Capital Times in December and generated enormous response. In it, Gee laid bare his frustrations with Madison — a city that prides itself on fair-mindedness — for its collective indifference toward the struggles of the African-American community here. A group of Cap Times staffers observed the meeting but did not participate. What follows is an edited transcript of the discussion.
ON EDUCATION
Statistics on black student achievement in Wisconsin are grim: According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the achievement gap between whites and blacks in Wisconsin is the widest in the nation. Eighth-grade reading scores for black students here are the worst in the nation; black students’ fourth-grade reading scores were the second-worst. At the same time, there are few minority teachers in Madison schools.
Rev. Lilada Gee: When I walk up to the schools and I see these huge banners — “School of Excellence” — I’m thinking, “OK. So if you can hide behind those laurels that you’re a school of excellence, where is your challenge to face the fact that that is not true for all of your children? When you have that big banner outside of your school and you’ve got the thumbs up, do you even look at the issues that there are these racial inequities that are going on, that there are droves of these black students that are not succeeding?”
I think that is kind of a metaphor of Madison. So much looks good on the outside, and they get so caught up at what looks good on the outside, that they don’t have to go in deeper.

Sam Altman:

Thanks to technology, people can create more wealth now than ever before, and in twenty years they’ll be able to create more wealth than they can today. Even though this leads to more total wealth, it skews it toward fewer people. This disparity has probably been growing since the beginning of technology, in the broadest sense of the word.
Technology makes wealth inequality worse by giving people leverage and compounding differences in ability and amount of work. It also often replaces human jobs with machines. A long time ago, differences in ability and work ethic had a linear effect on wealth; now it’s exponential. [1] Technology leads to increasing wealth inequality for lots of other reasons, too–for example, it makes it much easier to reach large audiences all at once, and a great product can be sold immediately worldwide instead of in just one area.

Glennon Doyle Melton via a kind reader:

A few weeks ago, I went into Chase’s class for tutoring.
I’d emailed Chase’s teacher one evening and said, “Chase keeps telling me that this stuff you’re sending home is math – but I’m not sure I believe him. Help, please.” She emailed right back and said, “No problem! I can tutor Chase after school anytime.” And I said, “No, not him. Me. He gets it. Help me.” And that’s how I ended up standing at a chalkboard in an empty fifth grade classroom staring at rows of shapes that Chase’s teacher kept referring to as “numbers.”
I stood a little shakily at the chalkboard while Chase’s teacher sat behind me, perched on her desk, using a soothing voice to try to help me understand the “new way we teach long division.” Luckily for me, I didn’t have to unlearn much because I never really understood the “old way we taught long division.” It took me a solid hour to complete one problem, but l could tell that Chase’s teacher liked me anyway. She used to work with NASA, so obviously we have a whole lot in common.
Afterwards, we sat for a few minutes and talked about teaching children and what a sacred trust and responsibility it is. We agreed that subjects like math and reading are the least important things that are learned in a classroom. We talked about shaping little hearts to become contributors to a larger community – and we discussed our mutual dream that those communities might be made up of individuals who are Kind and Brave above all.
And then she told me this.
Every Friday afternoon Chase’s teacher asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student whom they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her.

Erin Richards:

Odell Chalmers, a senior at Bradley Tech High School, dreams of starting a nonprofit that would grow vegetables inside blighted homes in Milwaukee.
The homes would have a purpose, he reasons, and neighbors could learn how to build and maintain aquaponics units, or self-contained ecosystems where plants grow in water fertilized by fish waste.
Chalmers’ vision may be idealistic, but it’s rooted in a passion spurred by exposure to aquaponics and hydroponics — cultivating plants in water — in school.
Milwaukee Public Schools received a $98,000 grant Wednesday from AT&T and the National Education Association Foundation to encourage more of that thinking, with the grant funds used to expand the district’s aquaponics offerings to 18, up from a dozen.
More teachers in the region and nationwide are trying to tap their students into the farm-to-table food movement and urban agriculture, creating partnerships with local farms, agriculture experts or college horticulture teachers to get students involved in aquaponics or hydroponics.

Paul Hill, via a kind Deb Britt email:

The recent news out of Columbus–that 17 of the 75 local charter schools had closed in the past year–is bad in so many ways. It throws up a big obstacle for reformers in that city, in Cleveland, and elsewhere who need to use chartering as a policy to create good options for all families. It buttresses opponents’ arguments that charter operators don’t know what they are doing. And it gives the press a field day reporting on how much public money was wasted.
But that’s not nearly the worst. The closure of these schools puts hundreds of children back at the tender mercies of a public school district that has failed students and defrauded the public about school performance and spending.
These children might be better off out of the failed charter schools than in them. But they are caught in a no-man’s land. No charter school or authorizer is responsible to provide something better for these kids. Charter schools and authorizers have the luxury of defining whom they will be responsible for; kids who don’t get into charter schools or are pushed out of them for some reason are no longer the school’s–or the sector’s–responsibility.

National Council on Teacher Quality (PDF):

1. The state should require teacher candidates to pass a test of academic proficiency that assesses reading, writing and mathematics skills as a criterion for admission to teacher preparation programs.
2. All preparation programs in a state should use a common admissions test to facilitate program comparison, and the test should allow comparison of applicants to the general college-going population. The selection of applicants should be limited to the top half of that population.
Wisconsin requires that approved undergraduate teacher preparation programs only accept teacher can- didates who have passed a basic skills test, the Praxis I. Although the state sets the minimum score for this test, it is normed just to the prospective teacher population. The state also allows teacher preparation programs to exempt candidates who demonstrate equivalent performance on a college entrance exam.
Wisconsin also requires a 2.5 GPA for admission to an undergraduate program.
To promote diversity, Wisconsin allows programs to admit up to 10 percent of the total number of students admitted who have not passed the basic skills test.
RECOMMENDATION
Require all teacher candidates to pass a test of academic proficiency that assesses reading, writing and mathematics skills as a criterion for admission to teacher preparation programs.
Even though the state’s policy that permits programs to admit up to 10 percent of students who have not passed the basic skills test is part of a laudable goal to promote diversity, allowing this exemption is risky because of the low bar set by the Praxis I (see next recommendation).
Require preparation programs to use a common test normed to the general college-bound population.
Wisconsin should require an assessment that demonstrates that candidates are academically com- petitive with all peers, regardless of their intended profession. Requiring a common test normed to the general college population would allow for the selection of applicants in the top half of their class, as well as facilitate program comparison.
Consider requiring candidates to pass subject-matter tests as a condition of admission into teacher programs.
In addition to ensuring that programs require a measure of academic performance for admission, Wisconsin might also want to consider requiring content testing prior to program admission as opposed to at the point of program completion. Program candidates are likely to have completed coursework that covers related test content in the prerequisite classes required for program admis- sion. Thus, it would be sensible to have candidates take content tests while this knowledge is fresh rather than wait two years to fulfill the requirement, and candidates lacking sufficient expertise would be able to remedy deficits prior to entering formal preparation.
For admission to teacher preparation programs, Rhode Island and Delaware require a test of academic proficiency normed to the general college- bound population rather than a test that is normed just to prospective teachers. Delaware also requires teacher candidates to have a 3.0 GPA or be in the top 50th percentile for general education coursework completed. Rhode Island also requires an average cohort GPA of 3.0, and beginning in 2016, the cohort mean score on nationally-normed tests such as the ACT, SAT or GRE must be in the top 50th percentile. In 2020, the requirement for the mean test score will increase from the top half to the top third.

via a kind Wisconsin Reading Coalition email:

After receiving a grade of D in 2009 and 2001, Wisconsin has risen to a D+ on the 2013 State Teacher Policy Yearbook released by the National Council on Teacher Quality.
In the area of producing effective teachers of reading, Wisconsin received a bump up for requiring a rigorous test on the science of reading. The Foundations of Reading exam will be required beginning January 31, 2014.
Ironically, Wisconsin also scored low for not requiring teacher preparation programs to prepare candidates in the science of reading instruction. We hope that will change through the revision of the content guidelines related to elementary licensure during a comprehensive review process that is underway at DPI this winter and spring.

University of Chicago Press:

Achievement tests play an important role in modern societies. They are used to evaluate schools, to assign students to tracks within schools, and to identify weaknesses in student knowledge. The GED is an achievement test used to grant the status of high school graduate to anyone who passes it. GED recipients currently account for 12 percent of all high school credentials issued each year in the United States. But do achievement tests predict success in life?
The Myth of Achievement Tests shows that achievement tests like the GED fail to measure important life skills. James J. Heckman, John Eric Humphries, Tim Kautz, and a group of scholars offer an in-depth exploration of how the GED came to be used throughout the United States and why our reliance on it is dangerous. Drawing on decades of research, the authors show that, while GED recipients score as well on achievement tests as high school graduates who do not enroll in college, high school graduates vastly outperform GED recipients in terms of their earnings, employment opportunities, educational attainment, and health. The authors show that the differences in success between GED recipients and high school graduates are driven by character skills. Achievement tests like the GED do not adequately capture character skills like conscientiousness, perseverance, sociability, and curiosity. These skills are important in predicting a variety of life outcomes. They can be measured, and they can be taught.

Laura Waters:

This is not Jersey’s best week. Revelations from Bridgegate, along with the peculiar backroom statecraft that spawned the scandal over the Hudson, seem to splatter daily across the front page. Jon Stewart and Jimmy Fallon get a second Christmas while Chris Christie appears pale and oddly flat.
As I’m writing this, the Bergen Record breaks the story that the Governor’s brother Todd bought and sold properties near the PATH station in Harrison which, coincidentally, had been just been awarded renovation funding to the tasty tune of $256 million.
And here’s another fresh Jersey lowlight: in Newark Tuesday night, state-appointed Superintendent Cami Anderson was booed off the stage during a rancorous meeting where 500 people, including the president of the American Federation of Teachers, reacted with disdain to her “One Newark” plan that would restructure the city’s school system. This plan includes universal enrollment procedures for both charters and traditional schools, expansion of charter schools, and closings of poorly-utilized school buildings.

Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:

I spent the beginning of last week in Detroit, a city that spawned one of the nation’s early charter laws, now home to one of the most unregulated charter sectors I have seen. I believe that Detroit families are better off as a result of choice. There are some very strong schools that wouldn’t exist otherwise, and the school district, whose performance has been dismal for decades, is trying to find a way to compete with charters. But while Detroit charter schools slightly outperform district-run schools (according to CREDOs study), that is saying very little. Most of these schools are doing nothing to change the life trajectory of Detroit’s children.
Of course, given that I’ve studied charter schools for nearly 20 years, I know that there are many low-performing ones. But it was disturbing to hear firsthand about parents’ unfulfilled struggles to get their kids a good education and civic leaders’ futile efforts to get control of quality.
There are dozens of Detroit charter schools that should probably be closed immediately. Competition for students is so vicious that schools are reportedly bribing parents with iPads and cash to drive up enrollment. Yet despite all of this competition, charter school quality is stagnant, and more charters are being approved every year by university and community college sponsors who operate outside the city and with little or no accountability for their actions. I heard from parents who do feel empowered, but are having a horrible time navigating their choices and figuring out how to enroll in schools. I heard about schools that closed midyear, leaving families to fend for themselves. I heard about schools that didn’t offer any counseling or special education services to students who come from severely distressed neighborhoods.

Ben Velderman:

Hundreds of Milwaukee families have discovered in recent years that having a school voucher doesn’t mean much if your private school of choice doesn’t have the classroom space to accommodate additional children.
In Bad Faith screen grab topSuch is the case for the city’s St. Marcus Lutheran School. The high-performing private school has a long waiting list for any available seats that open up, and it’s not difficult to understand why. By virtually all measures, St. Marcus Lutheran is outperforming Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) – its government-run counterpart – by a wide margin. The most telling statistic is probably the schools’ graduation rates: St. Marcus succeeds in getting a diploma into the hands of 96 percent of its students, compared to MPS’ dismal 65 percent graduation rate.
If families who qualify for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program could flee their neighborhood government school, many of them obviously would. More than 25,000 students already have fled the district, which has caused MPS’ enrollment to crater. The attendance drop, in turn, has led to a surplus of school buildings the downsized district no longer needs.
But MPS leaders don’t want alternative schools using the empty buildings.
MPS officials believe that St. Marcus Lutheran and other high-quality voucher and charter schools pose an existential threat to the district, which is why they’ve devised a very clever plan to block the schools’ size and future growth by denying them access to the city’s vacant and unused school buildings

Jan Uebelherr:

Hildegard Solzbacher was a charismatic speaker, a true believer in the child-centered Montessori way of teaching. She founded Milwaukee Montessori School and New World Montessori, and trained others in the Montessori method, in which children learn at their own rate.
Despite her inspiring lectures, there was a point where students became frustrated with her.
“What do you do about discipline?” they would ask. “How do you handle a misbehaving child?”
“She would say, ‘Well, that really never happened to me,'” said Priscilla Bovee, head of New World Montessori in River Hills.
Her students could see why that was the case
“She had a beautiful way with people,” Bovee said. “And children, of course, are just smaller people.”
Solzbacher, who introduced the Montessori way to Milwaukee and trained teachers worldwide, died Jan. 25 of natural causes at Community Memorial Hospital in Menomonee Falls. She was 83.
Solzbacher grew up in Bad Honnef, a small town in Germany, the youngest of 13 children.

Chris Rickert:

That old wintertime guessing game played out again earlier this week during a bitter cold snap.
Will schools be closed? Should they be closed? Why do they close? And finally, how could they close/open school?!
Madison was one of the few districts open on Monday, and if some of the commentary this sparked among parents is to be believed, sending my kids to school that day bordered on child abuse.
District attendance figures show that enough parents kept their kids home on Monday to bring the district’s absence rate to about 30 percent. Five percent or a little more is about average.
For those children who showed up, the day’s exposure to the cold was probably similar to what my kids experienced: an approximately 10-second walk to a partially warmed-up minivan and another 45-second walk from the minivan to the school doors.

Helen Walters:

Whenever something is declared the subject of “the year of,” you know said subject is ripe for a big fat backlash. So, when The New York Times declared 2012 “the year of the MOOC,” it thus came to pass that massive open online courses should next become the subject of massive, open, often online criticism, as critics gathered to air both their disappointment that said courses had not in fact proven the savior of a broken education system — and almost transparent delight and glee at same.
That’s not to say that the MOOC bubble couldn’t stand to lose some of its air. Maybe it’s no bad thing that some of that shiny techno-utopian language got buffed from the courses’ gilded surfaces. The reality is that those responsible for MOOCs are still figuring out how to make them work, and they’re experimenting and adjusting as they go.
Anant Agarwal: Why massive open online courses (still) matterAnant Agarwal: Why massive open online courses (still) matterCase in point: Anant Agarwal, who spoke at TED Global in Edinburgh in June 2013. Agarwal is president of edX, the non-profit “online learning destination” founded by Harvard and MIT. We caught up with him on the phone to find out what he makes of the anti-MOOC rhetoric — and why he thinks a “blended learning” model of education that includes online and offline resources might just prove the real key to a vibrant education system of the future. An edited version of our conversation follows.
So let’s start with the question on everyone’s lips: what do you make of the backlash against MOOCs?
Initially there was a lot of talk about MOOCs being the solution to all of the world’s problems. And clearly they’re important; they can increase access to students who don’t have access to good quality education. But even when we started edX, we talked about MOOCs and the blended model on campus and of campus education as being a key part of the whole equation. So for us it comes as no surprise that a pure MOOC model, a completely online model, will not work so well on campus. There, a blended model can be even better than a purely online model. The backlash you’re seeing was more a backlash to the statement that MOOCs can cure the world of all educational ills. The answer is no. MOOCs have a very important place in increasing access to a large community of students. At the same time, if you take MOOC technology and blend it with in-person class help, we can achieve the blended model, which is even better and can improve campus education.

Joey Ayoub:

I’m following a Coursera course entitled “Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World” and just received a rather odd email. All students from Syria, Sudan, Iran and Cuba will no longer be able to access Coursera. As some of you may know, Coursera is an online website that offers free courses from many of the world’s top universities.
Here’s the email, which can also be viewed on the Course’s main page.
Dear All, I write this email under protest and with a considerable degree of anger and sadness. Few things illustrate the bone-headedness, short-sightedness, and sheer chauvinism of the political structure of the United States better than the extent to which its ideologues are willing to go to score cheap domestic political points with narrow interests in the pursuit of a sanctions regime that has clearly run its course.
You might remember the Apple ad from a few years back, in which the company proudly announced that their machines were now so powerful that they fell under export restrictions: “For the first time in history a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the US government …”

Hannah Fry via a kind Caroline Zellmer email:

Eleven students at Corona del Mar High School were expelled Tuesday in connection with a cheating scandal that has rocked the high-performing Orange County campus.
School officials allege that the students hacked into the district’s computer system to change grades and access exams.
Newport-Mesa Unified School District trustees reached the decision early Wednesday after lengthy closed-door discussions.
In a statement, board President Karen Yelsey said the decision to expel the students — the most severe penalty being considered — follows the recommendations made by the school principal and district administration.
“The Board of Education has weighed each of the cases presented this evening on an individual basis and in careful detail,” she said. “We’ve focused on the cases for hours in closed session. As a Board of Education, we are unanimous in our resolve to ensure the academic integrity of CDM and the district, as well as in delivering justice for the cases before us.”
The votes of the board varied. Six decisions for expulsion were unanimous; others were split 4-3 and 6-1.
Last month, the district confirmed that students attached a keylogger — a small device that can be placed in the back of a computer to monitor keystrokes — to several teachers’ computers to swipe logins and passwords, allegedly with the help of a private tutor.

MD Kittle, via a kind reader:

“I can tell you that in general we do have guidelines that we expect employees to follow regarding appropriate conduct on social media, when they are representing or associated with the district. In any case when those guidelines are not followed, we follow up and take appropriate action.”
The spokeswoman did not return two follow-up emails from Wisconsin Reporter asking what “appropriate action” would be in a case like this.
As Right Wisconsin points out, the district’s Standards of Conduct for Internet and school email usage prohibit staff from using “any form of obscene, harassing, racist, sexist or abusive language or behavior on-line.”
Violations of the procedures or rules result in “appropriate disciplinary action up to and including discharge,” the conduct policy states. The policy, however, refers to usage of the district’s integrated technology network, and there is no evidence to suggest the comments were made on the district’s system.
Hosking appears to have commented on a photo Walker posted of his two sons and two nieces, who were with the governor at his State of the State address last week.

Lyndsey Leyton:

The national debate about teacher tenure is the focus of a trial set to begin Monday in a fifth-floor Los Angeles courtroom, pitting a Silicon Valley mogul with a star-studded legal team against some of the most powerful labor unions in the country.
The central question: Should it be easier to fire teachers?
David F. Welch, a 53-year-old founder of an optical telecommunications manufacturing firm, is challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections afforded public school teachers under California law.
He says that those policies allow the state’s worst educators to continue teaching and that those ineffective teachers are concentrated in high-poverty, minority schools, amounting to a civil rights violation.
His challenge is aimed at a core mission of the labor unions that represent 400,000 educators in the state: to protect jobs. It also sets up what could be a lengthy, expensive — and perhaps nationwide — fight over employment practices for teachers, which date back more than a century.

Kai Ryssdal:

One of the things people do when economies slowdown: Go back to school. The hope is, they’ll pick up training for new skills along with their law degree or doctorate.
But PhD’s don’t come cheap, and in fact, consultant Karen Kelsky says getting a doctorate can cost you more than its worth.
She runs a business that is in part about finding jobs for students with doctorates, and she’s an anthropology professor herself.
Kelsky says when it comes to fields like engineering or medicine, funding remains strong and pay in the workforce is high. But for “soft sciences,” like political science or anthropology, schools are investing less and less to support advanced degrees:

Teddy Nykiel, via a kind reader’s email:

About a dozen children are spread out at tables in the Simpson Street Free Press newsroom. They chat while poring over reference books and old issues of National Geographic to research stories. They jot down notes on large yellow pads.
Nancy GarduAo, a bright teenager whose immigrant parents have an elementary school education, is reading a book. She says she dreams of attending UCLA or Duke after she graduates from high school. She has already applied for more than 20 college scholarships and received a few of them. GarduÃo, 17, has been working at Simpson Street since she was 8 years old and says she struggled in school — especially with writing — before that.
“It really stinks when you’re stuck on a math problem and your friends can just go to their parents and ask for help, whereas I would have to wake up early and ride my bike to school to go talk to my teacher or something,” GarduÃo says.
Simpson Street became the place where GarduÃo could work on her writing, get help with homework and learn how to search for scholarships.
“I know my parents can’t afford it, which is why I didn’t even think I was going to go to college,” GarduÃo says. “But after getting some of those scholarships, it’s looking more realistic now.”
Simpson Street Free Press has been teaching kids to write and report for more than 20 years. The award-winning program started in a room at the Broadway-Simpson Street neighborhood center before moving across the street in 1996 to South Towne Mall. Over the years it has added more newsrooms and diversified its programming. Later this month it will launch Falk Free Press, its fourth newspaper, along with its first bilingual edition, La Prenza Libre de Simpson Street.

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

UST CAUSE does not mean “just because”. It establishes standards and procedures which must be met before an employee can be disciplined or discharged. Fortunately, for members of MTI’s bargaining units, all have protection under the JUST CAUSE STANDARDS. They were negotiated by MTI to protect union members.
There are seven just cause tests, and an employer must meet all seven in order to sustain the discipline or discharge of an employee. They are: notice; reasonableness of the rule; a thorough and fair investigation; proof; equal treatment; and whether the penalty reasonably meets the alleged offense by the employee.
MTI’s various Contracts enable a review and binding decision by a neutral arbitrator, as to whether the District’s action is justified. The burden of proof is on the District in such cases.
These steps are steps every employer should have to follow.
Unfortunately, every employer is not obligated to do so. However, MMSD must follow them, because of the rights provided to MTI members by MTI’s Contracts. Governor Walker’s Act 10 destroys these protections. MTI has preserved them.

Chris Rickert:

Teacher Andrew Harris is expected to be back in a Middleton classroom this week after an expensive, but failed, effort by the Middleton-Cross Plains School District to uphold a unanimous 2010 school board vote to fire him for repeatedly viewing pornography on his work computer.
The parties being blamed in this unhappy homecoming — other than Harris himself — are many.
Some say the board should have stopped spending money on appeals once an arbitrator ordered Harris’ reinstatement. Others blame Harris’ union for going to bat for a guy who, well, repeatedly viewed porn on his work computer. Then there are the arbitrator and the courts that took Harris’ side.
But really, the chief culprits in the Harris affair might be the school district’s residents, who have now learned a valuable lesson: Unions are good things, but like any other good thing, too much of it can make you sick.
Harris’ main defense was that he was treated unfairly in comparison with colleagues who were disciplined — but not fired — for engaging in some of the same sorts of conduct.

Erin Richards:

Starting in 2015’16, every school that receives taxpayer money would receive an A-F rating based on their performance in the following areas:
Achievement on state tests.
Achievement growth on state tests, based on a statistical analysis called value-added that estimates the impact schools and teachers have on student progress.
The progress in closing achievement gaps between white students and subgroups of students who are poor, of minority races or who have disabilities.
Graduation and attendance rate status and improvement.
The current school report card system went into effect two years ago and took the place of the widely disliked sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Gov. Scott Walker once pushed for using A through F grades, but a task force on school accountability had opted for a five-tiered system placing schools in categories from “significantly exceeds expectations” to “fails to meet expectations.”
The 2012-’13 report cards placed 58 schools statewide into the “fails” category. That included 49 in MPS — one is closed, so now there’s 48 — two independent charter schools authorized by the City of Milwaukee, four public schools in Racine and three public schools in Green Bay.

Matthew DeFour & Molly Beck:

Wisconsin’s lowest-performing public schools would be forced to close or reopen as charter schools and the state’s 2-year-old accountability report card would be revamped under a bill unveiled Monday.
The proposal also would require testing for taxpayer-subsidized students at private voucher schools while barring the lowest-performing schools from enrolling new voucher students. Participating private schools also could test all students for accountability purposes.
“We’re going to start holding anybody who gets public money accountable for getting results. That is the bottom line,” said Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, which plans to vote on the amended bill Thursday.
The bill makes several changes to the state’s K-12 school accountability system — including assigning schools letter grades — which itself recently replaced a decade-old system under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Molly Beck:

Gov. Scott Walker has asked State Superintendent Tony Evers to begin hearings on revoking the teaching license of a Middleton teacher reinstated to his job earlier this month after being fired in 2010 for looking at pornographic images at school.
“After hearing from concerned parents, I am asking you to act efficiently in your investigation into the actions of Mr. Harris and to initiate revocation proceedings,” Walker wrote in a letter dated Jan. 28. “The arbitration process afforded to Mr. Harris failed the school district and the students. It has taken both a financial and emotional toll on the district. Cases, such as this one, are a good example of why our reforms are necessary.”
Walker also wrote cases like the one in Middleton “prompted me to sign 2011 Act 84 giving the State Superintendent clear authority to take action.”
The law allows the Department of Public Instruction to revoke a license for immoral conduct, defined under state law to include looking at pornography at school.

Bryan Caplan:

Lant Pritchett is enjoying justified praise for his new The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain’t Learning. His central thesis: schooling has exploded in the Third World, but literacy and numeracy remain wretched.
The average Haitian and Bangladeshi today have more schooling than the average Frenchman or Italian in 1960:



On international literacy and numeracy tests, however, the average student in the developing world still scores far below the average student in the developed world. Gaps of one standard deviation plus are typical:

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education” – apparently from Mark Twain.

630K PDF Contract between Superintendent Cheatham and the Madison School District.
The lack of Superintendent oversight was an issue during the Rainwater era. Superintendent Cheatham’s contract includes this:

14.01 At least once each year, the BOARD of Education will provide the ADMINISTRATOR with an evaluation
a. The annual evaluation shall occur in closed session.
b. Prior to the BOARD conducting the SUPERINTENDENT’S evaluation, the SUPERINTENDENT shall provide the BOARD a self-appraisal. The BOARD shall take this self-appraisal into account in conducting its evaluation
c. All forms used and report formats requested as part of the evaluation process shall be collaboratively developed and mutually agreed upon by the ADMINISTRATOR and the BOARD.
d. While individual opinions may be expressed in the evaluation process, the final written record of performance evaluations shall include only narrative statements or opinions endorsed by a majority of the BOARD. The written evaluation shall be considered confidential to the extent permitted by law

Related: A Look At Compensation Packages for Wisconsin School District Superintendents.
Yet, reading, an issue for years in the Madison School District, remains a disastrous problem.

Peter Goodman::

Like children headed home with their report cards, the nations of the globe recently received grades on the educational achievement of their students via the test known as the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. Reactions ranged from celebration to resignation to recrimination, depending upon the results.
In the United States, France and Great Britain, educators and political leaders bemoaned another disappointing showing despite their enviable wealth. They looked to East Asia and Eastern Europe and sought to understand how poorer countries in these regions could achieve so much more with fewer resources.
In Germany, educators took a measure of satisfaction that they had arrested an alarming decline, though they were far from declaring victory. In Poland, where leaders congratulated themselves for a breakout performance, the impressive results reinforced a controversial set of reforms.
The unleashing of the latest PISA scores occasioned a familiar debate over the merits of reducing the quality of schooling to a data point. Even the man who coordinates PISA, Andreas Schleicher, cautions that the numbers can be taken too far.
“Any assessment is a partial reflection of what matters,” he told The WorldPost. “Math, science and literacy are the foundation for most of the other things, but they’re not everything.”

Tyler Cowen has more:

The data was provided to The WorldPost by Pablo Zoido, an analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the group behind PISA. It shows that students’ wealth does not necessarily make them more competitive on an international scale. In the United States, for example, the poorest kids scored around a 433 out of 700 on the math portion of PISA, while the wealthiest ones netted about a 547. The lower score comes in just below the OECD average for the bottom decile (436), but the higher score also comes in below the OECD average for the top decile (554).
“At the top of the distribution, our performance is surprisingly bad given our top decile is among the wealthiest in the world,” said Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Education who reviewed the data.

Eric Litke:

School district administrators often live in the crossfire, sandwiched between students and teachers, parents and school boards, taxpayers and state mandates. Even though salaries typically exceed $100,000, it’s a job not many want.
Those who take the job and keep it are in high demand, able to command an array of benefits and other enticements. A Gannett Wisconsin Media Investigative Team review of nearly 100 school administrator contracts around the state revealed perks including five-figure annuities, promised payouts of $60,000 or more at retirement, car allowances of at least $500 per month and bonuses of $10,000 or more for meeting performance goals, staying with the district or simply moving into the district.
“There’s a diminishing pool of people wanting superintendent jobs — mostly because of the nature of the job and the things that go with it, particularly politically — so district boards are often really focused today more on incentives to retain superintendents,” said Jon Bales, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators.

Related: Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham’s contract.

Wisconsin State Journal:

Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham is a strong supporter of technology in the classroom. That’s why she is putting a $27.7 million computer plan in front of the School Board tonight.
But Cheatham also knows what really drives education, from kindergarten to high school.
“It’s the quality of teachers that matters the most,” she told the State Journal editorial board during a recent meeting.
Putting a tablet computer into the hands of every Madison student “will absolutely help teachers with instruction,” Cheatham said.
In our multi-device, always-wired world, understanding and using the latest technology is a must for today’s students and can cater to their individual needs and interests.
Ultimately, the issue is not how many devices are in a classroom but, rather, how those devices are used. The technology needs to offer more than whiz-bang special effects. It needs to open new paths to learning.
The high-dollar technology plan has attracted critics who question the cost and worry about additional “screen time,” especially for the youngest students.

Pat Schneider

The Madison Metropolitan School District’s multi-million dollar Tech Plan is spending a lot of money on devices not proven to benefit student learning, according to an assistant professor of education at Madison’s Edgewood College.
In addition, the district isn’t giving teachers, parents or students opportunities to provide meaningful feedback on the plan, said Donna Vukelich-Selva in written remarks to the Madison school board shared Monday with The Cap Times.
The School Board is scheduled to vote Monday, Jan. 27, on what is now a revised, estimated $27.7 million, five-year plan that would greatly increase the use of computers in classroom instruction. The school district pared the proposal slightly, following a community update session last week, to include fewer devices for the youngest students. The plan now would provide one computer tablet in the classroom for about every two kindergartners and 1st-graders, and a one-to-one computer ratio for students in grades 2-12.
But Vukelich-Selva said concerns that the district is moving too fast on the Tech Plan, expressed by parents and teachers at the community update Jan. 22 at Memorial High School, were dismissed.
“It is clear that many significant stakeholders in the district were not taken into account,” she wrote.
The Madison school board first considered a draft of the plan on Jan. 13.
On hearing criticism that the proposal has advanced too quickly, Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said last week that the district has been “thorough and methodical in the development of the draft plan.”
Vukelich-Selva also said there was inadequate assessment of the impact of one-to-one computing on learning for younger students through fifth grade. She pointed to an apparent focus on technology itself rather than curricular goals.
“The huge numbers of ‘devices’ we are being told we need in our classrooms will help support a vastly expanded platform for more standardized testing,” she said.
Research shows that most large-scale evaluations of one-to-one computing initiatives have found mixed or no results, and underscore the importance of teacher mastery of using the devices, Vukelich-Selva wrote, referring specifically to an article in “Educational Leadership” from February, 2011, that is critical of one-to-one programs.

Much more on the Madison School District’s Technology Plan, here.
One would hope that prior multi-million dollar technology implementations such as Infinite Campus, would be fully implemented first.

TVNZ:

Ripping up the playground rulebook is having incredible effects on children at an Auckland school.
Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don’t cause bedlam, the principal says.
The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.
Principal Bruce McLachlan rid the school of playtime rules as part of a successful university experiment.
“We want kids to be safe and to look after them, but we end up wrapping them in cotton wool when in fact they should be able to fall over.”

Benjamin Tonelli:

With college-admission deadlines quickly approaching, my debt to the College Board keeps growing. Two SAT tests, five subject tests and six Advanced Placement (AP) tests later, I am ready to report my scores through the College Board website to the 10 colleges to which I am applying. On top of the total $102 I paid to take the SAT, $114 for the subject tests, and $534 for the AP tests, the College Board now demands $11.25 for each electronic submission of the test scores to the schools on my list.
It seems odd that the College Board–a nonprofit whose CEO, David Coleman, was pulling in $750,000 as of 2012–cannot send a few numbers over the Internet for just a dollar or two, or maybe even free. Instead, I am shoveling out another $100-plus just for electronic submissions, another contribution to the swelling pockets of the College Board (annual revenue in 2011-2012: more than $750 million).
With almost complete control over the business of pre-college standardized testing, the College Board squeezes every penny it can from high-school students–or their parents. The company charges at every turn while attempting to “connect students to college success,” loading on additional fees for every missed deadline and “rush” delivery of electronically sent scores, scores that apparently otherwise take weeks to navigate the labyrinth that is the World Wide Web.
The College Board should behave more like the nonprofit it claims to be. Lowering the cost of the SAT would encourage more students whose parents make modest incomes to retake the test and compete against students from higher income households who often take the test upward of four times, aiming for higher scores. (I took the test twice.)

Laurent Ortmans:

The FT Global MBA ranking and the English football Premier League have one thing in common. Pundits may argue about who will head the table, but most years there is little doubt about the top five.
So it is for 2014: Harvard Business School fended off competitors and kept the crown it regained last year. This is the fifth time Harvard has topped the rankings since they began in 1999. Stanford Graduate School of Business remained second, while London Business School leapfrogged the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania, pushing the latter into fourth place. Columbia Business School and Insead are joint fifth.
The FT ranking is based on two surveys of the business schools and their alumni who graduated in 2010. MBA programmes are assessed according to the career progression of their alumni, the school’s idea generation and the diversity of students and faculty.
Harvard leads the field for idea generation, coming first for research and second for its doctoral programme. The school’s alumni also boast the second-highest average salary three years after graduation (behind Stanford) and above-average salary increase. Harvard is also among the top schools for career progression and its MBA was the most highly commended by graduates from other schools.

Rhett Allain:

Sometimes I see a video or a blog post and think to myself…”yeah!” This is one of those times. This is a short speech from Tennessee student Ethan Young. He talks about education and issues such as common core and evaluations. Go ahead and watch the whole thing (only 5 minutes long).
Let me just point out a few of his points:
In regards to Common Core, Ethan says that “rigorous” standards are just a buzz word.
Common Core standards represent a mistrust of teachers.
Ethan claims that part of the problem with the administrative side of education (evaluation, standards, testing) is that we (the people) try to apply the same management model to education that we use for nuclear reactors.
Great quote: “Why don’t we just manufacture robots instead of students? They last longer and always do what they’re told.”
Another great quote regarding the measurement of teaching: “If everything I learned in high school was a measurable objective, I haven’t learned anything.”
What is the point of education? It is to free minds and to inspire. We do not teach to train for careers, those will come naturally.
All great points. When I think about the educational process, there are two other important pieces that present interesting ideas.
Lockhart’s Lament (pdf). This is an excellent essay from Paul Lockhart where he looks at the state of mathematics education. He creates an excellent analogy between the way we learn art and math. It’s a great essay.
Sir Ken Robinson’s Changing Education Paradigms (youtube). In this video, Robinson gives a great historical perspective as a reason for some of the way education works today.

Julie Watson:

Nine California public school students are suing the state over its laws on teacher tenure, seniority and other protections that the plaintiffs say keep bad educators in classrooms.
The case that goes to trial Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court is the latest battle in a growing nationwide challenge to union-backed protections for teachers in an effort to hold them more accountable for their work. The nonjury trial is expected to wrap up in March.
“The system is dysfunctional and arbitrary due to these outdated laws that handcuff school administrators,” said Theodore J. Boutrous, the lead attorney on the case sponsored by an educational reform group.
States across the nation have weakened teaching job protections, including generations-old tenure, to give administrators more flexibility to fire bad teachers.

US Census Bureau:

The U.S. Census Bureau today released the first-ever report examining the prevalence of non-degree certifications and licenses among American adults and their importance to the employment market. The report found that alternative credentials provide a path to higher earnings, underscoring that traditional educational attainment is just one way for workers to attain the skills needed in today’s global economy.
A skilled workforce is an essential part of a modern, innovative economy. However, many U.S. employers today are struggling to find workers with the skills to fill some of the 3.9 million open jobs. That is why, for the first time, the Commerce Department is focusing on skills training as part of its Open for Business Agenda.
The report, Measuring Alternative Educational Credentials, found that in fall 2012, 50 million U.S. adults, or one in four, had obtained a professional certification, license or educational certificate apart from a postsecondary degree awarded by colleges and universities. The report shows that, in general, these alternative credentials provide a path to higher earnings. Among full-time workers, the median monthly earnings for someone with a professional certification or license only was $4,167, compared with $3,433 for one with an educational certificate only; $3,920 for those with both types of credentials; and $3,110 for people without any alternative credential.

Benjamin Harold:

Undeterred by the high-profile problems experienced by other large school systems attempting to put digital devices in the hands of their students, the Houston Independent School District began distributing more than 18,000 laptop computers to high school students and staff members this month.
It’s the first phase of a multi-year plan that, unlike troubled initiatives elsewhere, will be defined by “realistic expectations” and a cautious implementation plan, said Lenny Schad, the chief technology officer for the 210,000-student district.
“We are going to have bumps in the road,” Schad said in a telephone interview. “But I feel very confident that when those bumps occur, we will be able to react, address the problems, and move on.”
The Houston initiative, known as PowerUp, aims to distribute roughly 65,000 laptops–enough for every high school student and high school teacher in the district–by the 2015-16 school year. Eventually, the initiative is expected to cost about $18 million annually; this year, the Houston ISD is dishing out $6 million, all of it existing funds that were reallocated from other sources. The 2013-14 school year is being devoted to a step-by-step pilot program, and Schad–who previously oversaw implementation of a successful “bring your own device” initiative in Texas’ 66,000-student Katy Independent School District–said the district is entering the 1-to-1 computing fray with eyes wide open.

Related: The Madison School District’s latest technology plan.

Amy Chua & Jed Rubenfeld:

A SEEMINGLY un-American fact about America today is that for some groups, much more than others, upward mobility and the American dream are alive and well. It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.
Indian-Americans earn almost double the national figure (roughly $90,000 per year in median household income versus $50,000). Iranian-, Lebanese- and Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years, Mormons have become leaders of corporate America, holding top positions in many of America’s most recognizable companies. These facts don’t make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.
Jewish success is the most historically fraught and the most broad-based. Although Jews make up only about 2 percent of the United States’ adult population, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a third of American Nobel laureates.

Kevin Welner:

Tuesday’s State of the Union address will apparently focus on issues of wealth inequality in the United States. The impact of poverty is extremely important for issues such as housing, nutrition, health and safety. Additionally, education researchers like me have been hollering from the rooftops, hoping policymakers and others will understand that poverty is the biggest impediment to children’s academic success. So this focus is long overdue and certainly welcome. Yet I worry that the president will slip from an accurate diagnosis to unproven and ineffectual treatments.
The diagnosis is straightforward. I expect that the president will have no trouble describing enormous and increasing wealth gaps. We learned from Oxfam last week that “the world’s 85 richest people own the same amount as the bottom half of the entire global population,” which is over 7 billion people.
In the United States, the picture is just as shocking. In a 2013 UNICEF report on child poverty in 35 developed countries, the United States came in 34th, second to last–between Bulgaria and Romania, two much poorer countries overall. Twenty-three percent (23%) of children in the US live in poverty.

Grant Wiggins:

What is “authentic assessment”?
Almost 25 years ago, I wrote a widely-read and discussed paper that was entitled: “A True Test: Toward More Authentic and Equitable Assessment” that was in the Phi Delta Kappan. Download it here: Wiggins.atruetest.kappan89 I believe the phrase was my coining, made when I worked with Ted Sizer at the Coalition of Essential Schools, as a way of describing “true” tests as opposed to merely academic and unrealistic school tests. I first used the phrase in print in an article for Educational Leadership entitled “Teaching to the (Authentic) Test” in the April 1989 issue. (My colleague from the Advisory Board of the Coalition of Essential Schools, Fred Newmann, was the first to use the phrase in a book, a pamphlet for NASSP in 1988 entitled Beyond standardized testing: Assessing authentic academic achievement in secondary schools. His work in the Chicago public schools provides significant findings about the power of working this way – Authentic-Instruction-Assessment-BlueBook.)

Mary Erpenbach (and This story was made possible by supp​ort from Madison Gas & Electric, Summit Credit Union, CUNA Mutual Foundation and Aldo Leopold Nature Center.):

Today, Caire’s tone has moderated. Somewhat.
“Teachers are not to blame for the problems kids bring into the classroom,” he says. “But teachers have to teach the kids in front of them. And Madison teachers are not prepared to do that. Now we have two choices: Make excuses why these kids can’t make it and just know that they won’t. Or move beyond and see a brighter future for kids.”
Many parents back him up. And many parents of students of color say that their experience with Madison’s public schools–both as students here, themselves, and now as parents–is simply much different and much worse than what they see white students and parents experiencing.
“I just always felt like I was on as a parent, like every time I walked through the door of that school I would have to go to bat for my son,” says Sabrina Madison, mother of a West High graduate who is now a freshman at UW-Milwaukee. “Do you know how many times I was asked if I wanted to apply for this [assistance] program or that program? I would always say, ‘No, we’re good.’ And at the same time, there is not the same ACT prep or things like that for my child. I was never asked ‘Is your son prepared for college?’ I never had that conversation with his guidance counselor.”
Hedi Rudd, whose two daughters graduated from East and son from West, says it has been her experience that the schools are informally segregated by assistance programs and that students of color are more likely to be treated with disrespect by school personnel. “Walk into the cafeteria and you’ll see the kids [of color] getting free food and the white students eating in the hall. I walked into the school office one day,” she recalls. “I look young and the secretary thought I was a student. She yelled, ‘What are you doing here?’ I just looked at her and said, ‘Do you talk to your students like that?'”
Dawn Crim, the mother of a daughter in elementary school and a son in middle school, says lowered expectations for students of color regardless of family income is an ongoing problem. “When we moved to Madison in 1996, we heard that MMSD was a great school district … and for the most part it has been good for our kids and family: strong teachers, good administrators, a supportive learning environment, and we’ve been able to be very involved.”
But?
“Regarding lower expectations for kids of color, not just disadvantaged kids, we, too, have experienced the lower expectations for our kids; overall there is a feeling and a sense of lower expectations,” Crim says. “And that should not come into play. All of our kids should be respected, pushed, have high expectations and should get the best education this district says it gives.”
In the meantime, the school district has been running programs in partnership with the Urban League of Greater Madison, UW-Madison, United Way of Dane County, the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County, and other organizations–all designed to lift scholastic achievement, close the gap, and get more kids graduated and on to college.
The Advancement Via Individual Determination program known as AVID (or AVID/TOPS, when coordinated with the Teens Of Promise program) is run by the district and the Boys and Girls Club here, and is a standout in a slew of public/private efforts to change the fate of students of color in Madison.
…..
At the end of the last school year, a total of four hundred forty-two students did not graduate on time from high school in Madison. One hundred nine were white, eighty-six were Hispanic, thirty-three were Asian and one hundred ninety-one were African American. If the graduation rate for African American students had been comparable to the eighty-eight percent graduation rate of white students, one hundred forty more African American students would have graduated from Madison high schools.
But they did not. While it’s true that the district actively searches out students who did not graduate on time, and works with them so that as many as possible do ultimately graduate, the black-and-white dividing line of fifty-five/eighty-eight remains for now the achievement gap’s stark, frightening, final face. What can be said is that many more Madisonians are paying attention to it, and many people in a position to make a difference are doing their level best to do something about it.
……
“One of the reasons we haven’t been as successful as we could be is because we’ve lacked focus and jumped from initiative to initiative,” she (Cheatham) says of the Madison schools.

Related: notes and links on Mary Erpanbach, Jennifer Cheatham and Madison’s long term disastrous reading scores.
Background articles:
Notes and links on the rejected Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.
When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before (2005).
Notes and Links on the Madison K-12 Climate and Superintendent Hires Since 1992.
My Life and Times With the Madison Public Schools
Latest Madison Schools’ 2013-2014 $391,834,829 Budget.

Nora Hertel:

Fourth grade teacher Carissa Franz starts her lessons by outlining the Common Core standards she and her students will focus on. Franz is in her second year at Ray W. Huegel Elementary School, and uses the standards to drive her teaching this year.
She and teachers throughout Madison are integrating the new Common Core State Standards, adopted by State Superintendent Tony Evers in 2010, into their curriculums with the help of new Common Core-aligned materials and district-supported teacher teams
The changeover to Common Core is a deliberate process. Franz meets monthly with the superintendent as part of a teacher advisory board that shares the “voice of the teachers” with the district, she said.
Every week, she meets with a group of teachers representing each grade level in her school to discuss how to align the standards and the math materials used district-wide with the needs of Huegel’s classrooms.

Erin Richards:

Class size: 49 students.
Number of principals in six years: five.
Percentage of student turnover in a school year: 55%.
To the people who teach in them, those are some of the characteristics of “failing” public schools in Milwaukee, 48 in all.
To the superintendent who oversees them, the latest potential solution is to turn some into charter schools.
The teachers’ response, at least for one day this past week, was to blast that idea and provide a vivid picture of the problems in their chronically underperforming schools, problems that never seem to get addressed by a revolving door of district reforms.
Once again, they said at a board committee meeting Thursday, the options on the table — and there are three in all — fail to address their biggest roadblocks to improvement. Almost every one of their students is poor. On average, one in four has a special need, usually an emotional or behavioral disorder. Many have unstable families and grow up in lives infused with violence.
Meanwhile, teachers said, their best resources to combat these issues have been cut. There are fewer art and music classes, despite district efforts lately to restore such specials. Class sizes can soar to between 40 and 50 students, inhibiting any kind of one-on-one attention. There is no additional staff to man in-school suspension rooms, so disruptive pupils affect the learning time — and likely, the ultimate reading and math test scores — of other students.

Much more on the Milwaukee Public Schools, here.

Alan Borsuk:

Commitment. What does that mean? What does it call for?
We’re about to get some very interesting and important lessons in “commitment” in terms of schools in Milwaukee — which is to say I’m quite interested in what will happen at two meetings scheduled for this coming Thursday, in part because of what happened at a meeting last Thursday.
I choose the term “commitment” for specific reasons:
For one, at Thursday night’s meeting of a Milwaukee School Board committee, Superintendent Gregory Thornton put forth a plan for dealing with 25 or so of the lowest performing schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system. One of the few details that was given was that this group of schools now would be known as “commitment schools.”
Here’s a second reason: It was clear at the meeting that a primary commitment of a full-house audience of about 300 — as well as of what appeared to be a majority of the School Board — was to solving MPS’ problems within the traditional public school system and fighting those who are pushing for more charter schools that would have leaders and teachers who are not MPS employees.
The commitment to actual improvement seemed to vary among people in the crowd.

Charlis Mas:

Seattle Public Schools has re-defined the word “curriculum” no fewer than six times in the past four years. It seems to change with each new Chief Academic Officer, Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning, or Executive Director of Curriculum. It also changes anytime the District needs to weasel or make other people (the Board or members of the public) appear ignorant.
Here is the most recent definition provided. It comes with the FAQ on Common Core:

Veronika Gulyas:

Several Hungarian student, undergraduate and teacher associations and groups joined Saturday to rally against the government’s centralizing education policy.
Some 700-800 people demonstrated on the birthday of Rozsa Hoffmann, state secretary for education.
The demonstrators at the “For a Free Education” spoke against the government’s policies saying the centralized system that was set up last year to handle all school-related matters from personnel to procurement has failed.
“There’s no paper in my school since early December,” Andras Meleg, a high school student, said in his speech at the demonstration in Budapest, in front of the ministry responsible for education.
The government moved schools that were previously under local government management to the central government’s care early last year. It introduced obligatory religion or ethics lessons at schools and a five-time-a-week physical education class countrywide, even in schools where the resources aren’t adequate. The government also nationalized the schoolbook-market and increased teachers’ working hours.

Jordan Weissman:

What’s are today’s young adults really like? For those who’ve spent too much time gazing into the dark recesses of Thought Catalog or obsessing over “Girls,” the Department of Education has a new report that offers up some enlightening answers.
In the spring of 2002, the government’s researchers began tracking a group of roughly 15,000 high school sophomores–most of whom would be roughly age 27 today–with the intention of following them through early adulthood. Like myself, many of those students graduated college in 2008, just in time to grab a front-row seat for the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the economic gore fest that ensued. In 2012, the government’s researchers handed their subjects an enormous survey about their lives in the real world. Here, I’ve pulled together the most interesting findings.
(One important note: I’ve shorthanded this group as “today’s 27-year-olds.” But again, not all of the study participants are precisely that age.)

Elaine Weiss and Dr. Thomas W. Payzant:

Every three years, American policymakers eagerly anticipate the release of scores for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). While any single test, no matter how strong, can explain only a limited amount about our education system, PISA provides some unique insights, testing students’ ability to apply knowledge and skills both in and out of school. It is taken only by 15-year-olds, making it a decent proxy for the “college-and-career readiness” that is the focus of current debates.
The 2013 headline is basically that the United States falls right in the middle of the pack, as it has for several decades. The U.S. Department of Education and its allies used those rankings to argue that U.S. schools are “stagnating” and to advance specific reforms it says will fix them. However, average scores may obscure and confuse more than they inform. Indeed, scores from individual states that have their own PISA rankings offer more policy-relevant insight than overall U.S. rankings. This makes sense — U.S. education looks more like a diverse patchwork than a unified system. Public investments in schools, and in students and their families, vary greatly across states, as do other policies that may boost or depress scores. Luckily, this year, three states received individual PISA rankings — as if they were independent countries. This can help us connect the dots between those disparities and scores.
Massachusetts is the good news story. If it were its own country, it would rank sixth in reading of 65 countries and economies included, behind only Singapore, Japan, Korea, and the Chinese regions of Shanghai and Hong Kong. Its students rank just above Finland and Canada, some of the world’s best readers. Though its math scores are slightly lower, Massachusetts keeps company with Belgium and Germany and is only slightly behind Finland and Canada, ranking 16 of 65. In science, Massachusetts ranks 11th, ahead of Canada and Germany. Connecticut, the second of three states with its own scores, falls just below Massachusetts, ranking 9th in reading, 18th in math, and 17th in science.

Phil Hill:

Reader Mike Himmelstein has rightly pointed out that our analysis of the new IPEDS data would benefit from using visualization tools instead of just tables. This comment led me to a multi-day investigation of which data visualization tool would best integrate into a WordPress blog while maintaining interactive data exploration. I tried MicroStrategy (great tool but cannot share without login), IBM Many Eyes (good public tool but limited in formatting), and several variations of Google Charts (not as rich in features as MicroStrategy, but close, and supports public sharing). In the end I’ve ended up using the Visualizer plugin to display Google Charts. All data below is for degree-granting institutions.
Let’s first look at the state-by-state data in a Geochart. This data tracks online ed in public higher ed institutions as of Fall 2012. I’m showing the data broken out by undergraduate and graduate students. The color scale is based on the percentage of students taking at least one online course, but if you hover over a state you can also see the percentage of students taking all of their courses online.

The Madison School District (1MB PDF):

Every school will be a thriving school that prepares every student to graduate from high school college, career, and community ready.
Highlights of the Tech Plan
Devices available to all students when needed to personalize learning and increase digital literacy
Resources for staff that will strengthen high-quality instruction
Flexible learning spaces for discovery, collaboration, and creation
Upgraded infrastructure for fast, reliable systems
Improved data systems to help tailor learning based on students’ needs
Professional learning to engage staff in ongoing learning around instructional technology

Much more on the District’s Technology Plan, including prior initiatives such as “Infinite Campus”, here.

Channel3000:

Middleton High School has a new policy in place for students during finals week after district officials made changes amidst cheating allegations.
Parents had the chance to attend a listening session Wednesday night at Middleton High School to learn more about recent academic integrity issues.
Last month, 250 students had to retake an Advanced Placement math test because a few allegedly cheated on tests using their cellphones.
District officials said it’s been a wake-up call, and they now have a new policy in place. On test days, students have to put their cellphones in a basket and will get them back when everyone has turned in their tests.
District officials said most teachers already have policies like this, but now the rule is official.

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

Sections IV-I and IV-J of the MTI Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement set forth the procedures which principals are contractually required to use when management notifies a teacher that he/she is being considered for non-renewal of contract. By Contract, the District is obligated to advise a teacher before May 1, if they are considering non-renewal. Under Wisconsin State Statutes, such a notice must be delivered to the teacher on or before May 15. Such notice could also be on one’s evaluation that must occur by April 15 per your Collective Bargaining Agreement.
MTI staff should be present at any and all meetings
between the teacher and any administrator in this regard, given that the meeting may indeed affect the teacher’s continued employment status. The teacher has the legal right to MTI representation and does not have to begin or continue a meeting without representation. See the reverse side of your MTI membership card.
For probationary teachers, a request for a hearing before the Board of Education must be submitted within five (5) days of the teacher’s receipt of the notice that the Board of Education is considering non-renewal of the teacher’s contract. For non-probationary staff, a request for arbitration must be made within fifteen (15) days of a non-renewal notice. It is extremely important for any teacher receiving such a notice to immediately contact MTI.

Stephanie Simon, with help from Caitlin Emma and Libby Nelson

CEOs DEBATE THE ROLE OF PROFIT IN EDUCATION: Top executives from Microsoft, Pearson, Discovery Education, Intel and other firms will gather in Davos, Switzerland today for a roundtable on education during the World Economic Forum. Joined by academics from Harvard and Stanford, the group will mull the risks and benefits of making a profit motive more central to education; swap tips on connecting corporations, schools and governments; and consider how to ensure that ed tech products rise or fall based on their impact in the classroom, not just their marketing budgets.
— The discussion will focus on the concept of “shared value,” which posits that companies can address social problems — and, not incidentally, boost profits — by intervening in K-12 and higher education. For example, Intel has sent anthropologists into schools to observe students using technology, in hopes of developing new products that drive up both sales and academic achievement. A report outlines other case studies: http://politico.pro/1aPtXpF

>

Jan Diehm & Joy Resmovits:

The WorldPost has gotten the first look at the math scores of students at every socioeconomic decile from the 65 countries that participate in the Programme for International Student Assessment. What they reveal about the correlation between wealth and a student’s academic performance is surprising.
The data was provided to The WorldPost by Pablo Zoido, an analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the group behind PISA. It shows that students’ wealth does not necessarily make them more competitive on an international scale. In the United States, for example, the poorest kids scored around a 433 out of 700 on the math portion of PISA, while the wealthiest ones netted about a 547. The lower score comes in just below the OECD average for the bottom decile (436), but the higher score also comes in below the OECD average for the top decile (554).
“At the top of the distribution, our performance is surprisingly bad given our top decile is among the wealthiest in the world,” said Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Education who reviewed the data.

Carl Benedikt Frey & Michael A. Osborne:

We examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation. To assess this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier. Based on these estimates, we examine expected impacts of future computerisation on US labour market outcomes, with the primary objective of analysing the number of jobs at risk and the relationship between an occupation’s probability of computerisation, wages and educational attainment. According to our estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk. We further provide evidence that wages and educational attainment exhibit a strong negative relationship with an occupation’s probability of computerisation.

Math Babe:

I don’t usually like to sound like a doomsayer but today I’m going to make an exception. I’m going to describe an effect that I believe will be present, even if it’s not as strong as I am suggesting it might be. There are three points to my post today.
1) Math research is a byproduct of calculus teaching
I’ve said it before, calculus (and pre-calculus, and linear algebra) might be a thorn in many math teachers’ side, and boring to teach over and over again, but it’s the bread and butter of math departments. I’ve heard statistics that 85% of students who take any class in math at a given college take only calculus.
Math research is essentially funded through these teaching jobs. This is less true for the super elite institutions which might have their own army of calculus adjuncts and have separate sources of funding both from NSF-like entities and private entities, but if you take the group of people I just saw at JMM you have a bunch of people who essentially depend on their take-home salary to do research, and their take-home salary depends on lots of students at their school taking service courses.

Tom Nichols:

I am (or at least think I am) an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy. When I say something on those subjects, I expect that my opinion holds more weight than that of most other people.
I never thought those were particularly controversial statements. As it turns out, they’re plenty controversial. Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy.
But democracy, as I wrote in an essay about C.S. Lewis and the Snowden affair, denotes a system of government, not an actual state of equality. It means that we enjoy equal rights versus the government, and in relation to each other. Having equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge. It assuredly does not mean that “everyone’s opinion about anything is as good as anyone else’s.” And yet, this is now enshrined as the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense.

Bill Gates:

By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in fact, Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world is getting worse. The belief that the world can’t solve extreme poverty and disease isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful. That’s why in this year’s letter we take apart some of the myths that slow down the work. The next time you hear these myths, we hope you will do the same.

Paul Caron

How are scholars ranked for promotion, tenure and honors? How can we improve the quantitative tools available for decision makers when making such decisions? Can we predict the academic impact of scholars and papers at early stages using quantitative tools?
Current academic decisions (hiring, tenure, prizes) are mostly very subjective. In the era of “Big Data,” a solid quantitative set of measurements should be used to support this decision process.

Chris Rickert:

But the writer’s view of Madisonians as a bunch of liberals whose actions belie their highfalutin ideals rings true when it comes to at least one Madison institution: the schools.
Despite decades of embarrassing gaps in achievement between white and minority and poor and rich students, the Madison School District has:
Moved slowly to ramp up the AVID/TOPS (Advancement Via Individual Determination/Teens of Promise) program, which has been shown to boost academic achievement among the district’s students of color, who make up more than half the student body. It served 7 percent of middle and high school students in 2012-13, up from 0.2 percent when AVID was introduced in 2007-08 (TOPS was added a year later).
Done nothing to change regressive union rules that make teachers’ career advancement and promotion almost entirely a matter of their seniority and degree attainment — as opposed to, say, their ability to engage and educate students of color and poor students.
Turned down a bid by the Urban League of Greater Madison to create a charter school that would have focused on serving poor and minority students.
Declined to broach the idea of year-round school despite research showing that students from poor families suffer most from the “summer slide.”
Declined to seek changes to a school board elections system that has already basically ensured a win for the one white candidate on the ballot this April. The black candidate and the Latino candidate will have to fight it out for the other districtwide seat.
None of this is news. What is new, however, is the attention Madison’s long-standing race-based disparities in the schools and other areas are getting from the politically liberal people who run this town.

Pat Schneider:

The board is being asked to approve the Tech Plan before it sets out the district’s annual budget later in the year, which Cheatham said will allow district administration “to move confidently toward implementation planning.”
“We’re confident we can fund major priorities of our district, as outlined in our strategic plan, through our zero-based budgeting process while also funding the Tech Plan, which undergirds those priorities,” she said. “We don’t believe we will be having to make major trade-offs.”
The zero-based budget process – new for MMSD – starts from scratch, allowing evaluation of all spending. “We will need to make tough decisions about work we will no longer fund that is not tightly aligned with those priorities,” Cheatham said.
What those might be, Cheatham said she can’t yet say.

Stephanie Banchero:

Nearly 140 teachers and administrators in Philadelphia public schools have been implicated in one of the nation’s largest cheating scandals, according to district officials, who also said Wednesday that they will spend the next few weeks disciplining or firing dozens of employees.
The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office also is conducting a criminal investigation into the allegations, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Three principals were fired late last week as part of the probe, which grew out of a 2009 state analysis of questionable erasure patterns on test booklets on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment math and reading exams. The district, which wouldn’t discuss the specific allegations, said those involved “violated basic testing integrity, ethical and moral standards.”

Beckie Supiano:

Skepticism over the value of a college degree, especially one in the liberal arts, is common these days. Rising college prices, increasing levels of student debt, and a still weak job market all heighten doubts. Return on investment has become a popular research question, and a higher-education association released on Wednesday a report arguing that a liberal-arts major is a worthwhile choice.
In recent years, new data have helped paint a detailed picture of what college graduates earn. Analyses have focused on what they make by major, or by degree program at particular colleges.
On Wednesday the Association of American Colleges and Universities–a champion of liberal education–stepped into the fray with a report, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, that examines the payoff of a liberal-arts degree over the course of a career.

Stephanie Simon:

Republicans eager to attract black and Latino voters believe they have hit on an ideal magnet: school choice.
Led by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, with high-profile contributions from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the GOP is pushing an election-year initiative to talk up school choice at every turn.
Calling for more charter schools, vouchers and tax credits to help parents pay private school tuition fits with the party’s mantra that the government works best when it gets out of the way and lets the free market flourish. But top strategists say it’s more than that: Talking about helping poor minority children softens the GOP’s image and lets candidates offer a positive vision instead of forever going on the attack. And unlike immigration reform, school choice is politically safe; there’s no chance of blowback from the tea party.
Plus, the photo ops are great. As the conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks put it in a strategic planning document: “Focus on kids and the future = excellent media opportunity.”

Miya Tokumitsu:

“Do what you love” is the mantra for today’s worker. Why should we assert our class interests if, according to DWYL elites like Steve Jobs, there’s no such thing as work?
“Do what you love. Love what you do.”
The commands are framed and perched in a living room that can only be described as “well-curated.” A picture of this room appeared first on a popular design blog, but has been pinned, tumbl’d, and liked thousands of times by now.
Lovingly lit and photographed, this room is styled to inspire Sehnsucht, roughly translatable from German as a pleasurable yearning for some utopian thing or place. Despite the fact that it introduces exhortations to labor into a space of leisure, the “do what you love” living room – where artful tchotchkes abound and work is not drudgery but love – is precisely the place all those pinners and likers long to be. The diptych arrangement suggests a secular version of a medieval house altar.

Lee Skallerup Bessette:

It is late December 2007. I am attending my first MLA Conference in Chicago, with the hopes of finding a job. I have a number of promising interviews lined up, and I am filled with hope. 2007 has been a good year for me (completed and defended the dissertation, had my first child, successfully teaching various classes in a relatively well-paying adjunct position), and the number of interviews I have received is the icing on the cake for me. My husband and daughter have accompanied me, in part for moral support, in part because I am still breastfeeding. My department, even though I am an adjunct, is funding a part of my trip. The rest goes on credit cards, on the seemingly reasonable gamble that I will get a job that will allow me to eventually pay off this trip. An investment, a necessity of the nature of the profession.
We stay at a non-conference hotel, using a new site that gives you a reduced rate, but requiring that you pay in advance. We receive word from the site that our stay may be “disrupted” for vague reasons, and it is too late for us to rebook anywhere else, so we keep our plans as they are. Turns out, the “disruption” consists of striking hotel workers who picket the front of the hotel. It is easy to walk quickly past the strikers, head down against the Chicago winter cold and wind. More disruptive is my daughter who is confused by the time change and cold weather, causing me to stay up all night before my day with two job interviews.
While the MLA interviews were not successful, I was offered a tenure-track job that academic job cycle. We packed up and moved across the country, on our own dime, with the hopes of starting my academic career, proving stability for my growing family (I was pregnant again) and the career I had been dreaming of for year. I literally never gave those striking hotel workers another thought.

Bob Samuels:

As I go around the country talking to different groups about my book on how to make public higher education free, I continue to encounter student debt horror stories, but there is perhaps no story more horrible than the recent Congressional Budget Office report on how the federal government raked in over $50 billion last year in profits from student loans. It turns out that after the feds took over the destructive private loan industry, the result was not to give students the best deal possible, but to cash in on the fact that the government can borrow money at virtually no interest and lend it to students at a much higher rate (of course the government profits go up much higher when students default or are penalized for late payments). In fact, the average student loan defaulter pays a penalty of over 100% of the principal, and the federal government is very good at collecting these debts.
Although I do not think it was the intention of the Obama administration to turn indebted students into cash cows, a systemic analysis tells us that the federal government is profiting from the state reduction of funding for public higher education, which in turn has helped to cause the increase in student tuition at public institutions, which increases student debt, and at the same time, increases in the number of students going to high-cost, low-performing for-profit colleges.

36MB mp3 audio. Also available here.

Anonymous:

In the last month of 2013 we were treated to two celebrations of the enduring public character of UC Berkeley. Not surprisingly Frederick Wiseman’s documentary ‘At Berkeley’, with its portrayal of Cal’s senior managers battling against the twin forces of a dis-investing state and a student movement resisting tuition hikes, got all the attention. Yet of arguably greater significance was an article by UC Berkeley’s Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, George Breslauer, that outlined the new common sense and guiding philosophy of Berkeley’s senior management at that time and perhaps still now.
Wiseman and Breslauer are fiercely critical of a political culture that has enabled the state to disinvest from higher education. According to Breslauer, even after the passage of Proposition 30 state funds now account for just 14% of Berkeley’s total budget, down from 30% in 1999 and 70% in 1971. Although, if one includes ‘restricted’ monies from federal and local government about 40% of Berkeley’s revenue comes from public sources, the withdrawal of state funding has indeed been calamitous. Despite this Breslauer’s polemic is that Berkeley is now more of a public university than it used to be in the fabled Master Plan era.
Breslauer’s contention is that UC Berkeley serves California more effectively now: our student population is more representative of its population, while our graduates contribute more to public service and the state’s economic growth than ever before. He lacks historical data to substantiate any of these claims. It is not even clear what metrics could be used to establish that Cal graduates, or the research conducted at Berkeley, contribute more to the state’s economy and public service than Stanford.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

There is a troubling pattern of racialized rhetoric to education activism. The latest to come to my attention is from Grant Wiggins, president of Authentic Education. He begins the short post with a definition of apartheid and ends it by making a parallel to teachers having separate eating and bathroom facilities from students.
I’m not kidding:

Huh! Where is there apartheid like this now?
In schools everywhere. Separate eating places and toilets for teachers and for students.

Wiggins clearly says that he being a little provocative. He underestimates himself. In eliding the racialized history of class distinctions he is being majorly provocative in all of the worst ways. He isn’t alone.
I have talked about how class analysis of contemporary higher education labor issues baldly ignores the racist roots of its activism. Too often the rhetoric coming from real, substantive, meaningful education activists lazily deploys racist imagery and history to evoke emotional responses. Poorly paid teachers and adjuncts are slaves, education is a new civil rights movement (as if Brown v Board wasn’t both about education and the “old” civil rights movement), and teacher bathrooms are apartheid.

Angus Johnston:

Cooper Union, as it has existed for the last century and a half, is dead.
“As we work together to find new ways to get The Cooper Union onto stable financial ground,” the board chair wrote in a statement released after yesterday’s unprecedented vote to impose tuition, “we will also work together to develop a contemporary mission for the institution.”
Got that? The old mission has been retired, but the college still exists, so a new mission must be found.
“Despite the changes, our admissions will continue to be based strictly on merit,” the statement said. And that will certainly be true, in a narrow sense, for now. But applications have already begun to fall — early admissions requests dropped by a third this year. The imposition of tuition will degrade the applicant pool, and it will change it. The students who apply, and the accepted students who choose to attend, will become both richer and less talented.
How did this happen? There’s a lot we don’t know. Despite the statement’s promises of inclusiveness and transparency there was no specific discussion of the board’s process in the statement — not even a vote count, much less a list of who voted which way. The Cooper Union board of trustees are not, in this sense, accountable to the Cooper Union community. One wonders how the process would have differed if individual trustees had known from the start that they would be voting and defending their votes in public.
The one trustee who did vote in public was Alumni Trustee Kevin Slavin. He published an essay laying out his intentions on Thursday, and a Facebook post discussing the meeting and the vote last night.