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.

Map School:

What is a map? Examples of maps are common, interspersed in driving directions, visualizations, and political boundary disputes. Let’s look deeper and think about the fundamental elements of maps from the eye of the creator.
Maps are fundamentally composed of data. Data is in the abstract, composed of billions of points or just a few polygons, or a photo-like recording of colors and temperature. It is important that data is not specific to a certain usage.

David Blaska:

Nobody does guilt like a Madison liberal! The president of the Madison School Board tells me that I really didn’t make that. All along, I have been swimming in the water of white privilege.
I wish Ed Hughes had told me about white privilege when, growing up on the farm, I was mucking out the old barn with a shovel. I knew I was swimming in something but I didn’t think it was white privilege.
Ed is an honorable public servant, mindful of the dismayingly poor unemployment, incarceration, and graduation rates among people of color here in the Emerald City.
“We white folks pretty much get to set the rules in Madison,” Hughes apologizes. He meant “liberal white folks.” They’ve been running Madison for 40 years, since Paul Soglin first became mayor. It’s 50 years since LBJ’s Great Society. Something besides the Obamacare website ain’t workin’.
Allow this Madison minority — I’m a conservative — to propose a fix: If a crusading young black educator named Kaleem Caire returns to the Madison School Board with a plan for a school focused on tackling minority underachievement, give it a chance! Ed, you voted with the majority to kill Madison Prep.

Much more on the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, here.

University of Florida. Nice to see the public information.

Andrew Simmons:

A 12th-grader wrote a college admissions essay about wanting to pursue a career in oceanography. Let’s call her Isabella. A few months ago, we edited it in my classroom during lunch. The writing was good, but plenty of 17-year-olds fantasize about swimming with whales. Her essay was distinctive for another reason: Her career goals were not the highlight of the essay. They were just a means of framing her statement of purpose, something surprisingly few personal statements actually get around to making.
The essay’s core concerned the rhetoric that educators had used to motivate her and her peers–other minority students from low-income communities. She’d been encouraged to think of college foremost as a path to socioeconomic mobility. Since elementary school, teachers had rhapsodized about the opportunities that four years of higher education could unlock. Administrators had rattled off statistics about the gulf in earnings between college graduates and those with only high-school diplomas. She’d been told to think about her family, their hopes for her, what they hadn’t had and what she could have if she remained diligent. She’d been promised that good grades and a ticket to a good college would lead to a good job, one that would guarantee her financial independence and enable her to give back to those hard-working people who had placed their faith in her.
Thankfully, Isabella decried this characterization as shortsighted and simplistic. My guess is that only students like her ever have to hear it.

@jimzellmer She sees "lack of focus" as problem. District "has spread itself too thin." Throws so many strategies at problem. @MollyBeckWSJ

— Scott Milfred (@ScottMilfred) January 16, 2014

@jimzellmer On teaching and learning, district will now "execute on a few things & do them really well." @MollyBeckWSJ

— Scott Milfred (@ScottMilfred) January 16, 2014

I’m glad to see the apparent focus on doing a few things well. This is the only way forward given the District’s disastrous reading results. That said, I was disappointed when the new Superintendent largely continued the “same service” budget approach during the 2013-2014 financial discussions.
The District’s 2x per student spending (above the national average) has supported numerous initiatives, likely preventing a focus on those that are truly meaningful for our students. For example, Kerry Motoviloff noted that Madison Schools Administration has “introduced more than 18 programs and initiatives for elementary teachers since 2009”. Steven Sinofsky’s latest is also worth reading in this context.

Campbell Brown:

When a Michigan middle-school teacher was denied $10,000 in severance pay last month, the local teachers union filed a grievance against the school board on his behalf. Given the union’s mission to defend the rights of educators, this would appear to be routine. Not so fast: The teacher is a convicted sex offender.
Neal Erickson was sentenced in July to a 15- to 30-year jail term after acknowledging that he had sexual relations with a male student beginning when the boy was 14 years old. The school board denied him severance once he was charged. But the local chapter of the National Education Association thinks this criminal deserves his severance, which says a lot about the mindset of teachers unions, which are also trying to weaken a bipartisan bill in Washington that would help keep sexual predators out of schools.

Erin Richards

A proposal to allow special-needs students to attend private schools at taxpayer expense is being revived, the latest effort by Republicans in the Legislature to give parents more options outside traditional public schools.
The proposal is a revamped version of a measure that failed in Gov. Scott Walker’s 2013-’15 budget.
That measure would have allowed 5% of students with disabilities to attend schools outside their home districts with the help of a taxpayer-funded voucher. As part of a broader compromise, the portion on students with disabilities was dropped in favor of a limited expansion of private school vouchers statewide.
The revived Wisconsin Special Needs Scholarship bill is scheduled to be introduced Tuesday by State Sens. Leah Vukmir (R-Wauwatosa) and Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), and Reps. John Jagler (R-Watertown) and Dean Knudson (R-Hudson).
The primary concern of those who oppose special-needs vouchers is that private schools are not obligated to follow federal disability laws. They point to examples in other states where — in their eyes — underqualified operators have declared themselves experts, opened schools and started tapping taxpayer money.

Molly Beck:

About 14 years ago, school board candidate Michael Flores climbed into a green Plymouth Neon that was left idling outside a Middleton hotel with the keys still in the ignition.
The car’s owner — whom Flores didn’t know — was inside the hotel delivering pizza when Flores drove away. Flores, who said that he was intoxicated at the time, was arrested after police found him and the car about 20 miles away in east Madison, according to court records.
Flores, who was 22 at the time, pleaded guilty in 2000 to taking and driving a vehicle without the driver’s consent and was accepted to the Dane County District Attorney’s deferred prosecution program for first-time offenders. After about nine months of counseling and paying back the pizza deliveryman’s lost wages as part of the program, the felony charge against Flores was dismissed in 2001.
“It was a blessing in disguise,” said Flores. “It really showed me how fragile freedom can be. You make a mistake and it can be the end of your life as you know it. It was very scary. I have to kind of breathe sometimes … I still feel that. It’s good to remember because it keeps you from making the same mistake.”

The Economist:

INNOVATION, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swept aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were.
For those, including this newspaper, who believe that technological progress has made the world a better place, such churn is a natural part of rising prosperity. Although innovation kills some jobs, it creates new and better ones, as a more productive society becomes richer and its wealthier inhabitants demand more goods and services. A hundred years ago one in three American workers was employed on a farm. Today less than 2% of them produce far more food. The millions freed from the land were not consigned to joblessness, but found better-paid work as the economy grew more sophisticated. Today the pool of secretaries has shrunk, but there are ever more computer programmers and web designers.
Remember Ironbridge
Optimism remains the right starting-point, but for workers the dislocating effects of technology may make themselves evident faster than its benefits (see article). Even if new jobs and wonderful products emerge, in the short term income gaps will widen, causing huge social dislocation and perhaps even changing politics. Technology’s impact will feel like a tornado, hitting the rich world first, but eventually sweeping through poorer countries too. No government is prepared for it.

Susan Jones:

Under a new rating system for Florida’s state universities, schools must meet the state’s definition of an excellent school to earn state funding.
The benchmarks set by the Florida State University System’s Board of Governors will influence who gets into the school (Pell Grant students are favored) and what subjects students study (STEM degrees encouraged).
The new system is “designed to reward university excellence and improvement and maximize the return on investment for Florida students,” the Board of Governors said on Thursday.
Similar to the federal plan outlined by President Obama last August, the Florida model is intended to provide students with “a first-class education at an affordable cost, providing the best-possible opportunities for graduates to obtain and create good jobs and contribute to a successful Florida workforce,” the Board of Governors said.

Lynn Danielson:

In a December Cap Times cover story titled “Justified Anger,” the Rev. Alex Gee of Fountain of Life Covenant Church shared a first-person account of the racial discrimination he has experienced and sees all around him in Madison, and challenged our community to become concerned and involved. The story resonated with readers — it was one of the Cap Times’ best-read stories of 2013 and sparked lively discussions on social media and letters to the editor.
Both the Rev. Gee and the Cap Times are moving ahead to keep the conversation going about Madison’s racial discrimination problem — and to work on solutions.
The Cap Times opinion section is running a series of columns by community members responding to the Rev. Gee and sharing their views on the way forward. This week, there are four.
Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor in UW-Madison’s department of curriculum and instruction, writes that “nice” Madison is in denial about its racism. Ladson-Billings recounts how when she toured Madison schools nearly two decades ago, she predicted there would be no African-Americans in advanced math classes, and many in the “basic” science class. When she turned out to be correct, her white colleagues on the tour thought she was clairvoyant. Another striking anecdote she relays is how a diversity expert who conducted training here was rebuffed and attacked when he dared suggest Madisonians had issues with race — the only time he’d experienced such a reaction despite delivering a similar message in numerous communities.

Mitch Daniels:

One year ago today I took up my new assignment as your Purdue colleague. I did so with the deepest respect for Purdue’s great history and traditions, but also in the knowledge that we have entered a period of momentous change for all of higher education, with predictions in many quarters of upheaval or even widespread failure of long-standing institutions. Fortunately, one of Purdue’s strongest traditions is that of constant innovation, of continuous improvement, of steadily striving to build “one brick higher.”
In August, after months of consultation with faculty and other campus leadership, we announced a series of actions aimed at propelling our university further forward in both its teaching and discovery missions, and to addressing head-on many of the challenges now confronting all of higher education. Before I or anyone could devise a catchy label for the ten selected initiatives, an informal colloquialism stuck, and they have become known as the Big Moves. As a slogan, it may be pedestrian, but the ambition it embodies is not: Successful implementation would stamp Purdue as a global leader in areas that we believe fit our historic land-grant mission, and matter most to the society of today.
The Morrill Act, which Abraham Lincoln signed in 1862, committed the nation to construct new colleges with two principal goals: to throw open the doors of higher education to a much wider swath of the population, and to promote technological progress in “agriculture and the mechanical arts.” At its sesquicentennial, the act’s purposes are at least as relevant as at its inception. One study after another informs the nation that economic success requires thousands more engineers, scientists, and technologically adept citizens.

Peter Gray:

Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that formal education is what kids need to become productive, happy adults. Many parents do have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula, or more rigorous tests. But what if the real problem is school itself?
The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.
Children are required to be in school, where their freedom is greatly restricted, far more than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we’ve been compelling them to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there’s strong evidence that this is causing psychological damage to many of them. And as scientists have investigated how children naturally learn, they’ve realized that kids do so most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.

Bob Kampf:

Every tennis game starts with love.
Nowhere is that more evident than at FDR High School when tennis coach Bob Mayerhofer gathers his varsity players together to teach some of Hyde Park’s autistic children about their favorite sport.
“Before I retired from teaching,” said Mayerhofer, “I had been involved with Special Olympics and I wanted to find some way to keep helping young people with special needs.”
His wishes were granted when he learned about a program known as ACEing Autism, which was started in Boston in 2008 by tennis professional Richard Spurling and his wife, Shafali Spurling Jeste, a child neurologist. The program, which is offered free to children with autism spectrum disorders, currently spans six states, including Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, California and New York.
Hyde Park’s program was brought to fruition by Mayerhofer along with Lynn Forcella, the mother of an autistic child and other parents of autistic children, with support from Aviva Kafka, Assistant Superintendent for Special Education in Hyde Park. The program is one of only four active in the state. The others are located in Dobbs Ferry and Ithaca, and at Riverside Park in New York City.

Andrew J. Coulson & Jason Bedrick:

Should private schools be primarily accountable to parents or to government bureaucrats?
That’s the central question the Thomas B. Fordham Institute seeks to answer in the report it released Tuesday. The institute proposes that state governments should require private schools to administer state tests to all students participating in school-choice programs, and that the results should be publicized. Any private school the state deemed “persistently underperforming” would be expelled from the choice program.
”
The Fordham Institute’s recommendation for regulating subsidized private schools is dangerous.”
This policy is well-intentioned, but a bad idea. It isn’t supported by the evidence and would be detrimental to the hundreds of thousands of students participating in school-choice programs nationwide.
First, the evidence: It is telling that the Fordham Institute cites only one study that suggests its policy “may boost student achievement.” Problematically, one of the authors of that study has already publicly cautioned against drawing this conclusion, noting that his finding is “enticing and suggestive but hardly conclusive.”
But even if the support of that one study were not in question, it would still only be one study. And a single study, no matter how carefully executed, is not a scientific basis for policy.

Much more on the “Common Core”, here.

Inside Higher Ed:

The U.S. Education Department plans to provide guidance counselors and state agencies with more information about students who are filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as the FAFSA, Obama administration officials said Wednesday at the department’s so-called “Datapalooza” event.
The goal is to boost the rate at which students, especially those from low-income backgrounds, complete the FAFSA.
The department will “responsibly” share data with high school guidance counselors on which of their students have begun the FAFSA so they can work with those students on actually completing the forms, according to a department fact sheet. Department officials will also share that information with state student aid agencies “early” this year, the White House announced separately on Thursday.

KerryAnn O’Meara:

For the last 15 years, I have been involved in the study and reform of academic reward systems. Academic reward systems are fascinating to study because they reflect assumptions, values, goals, and aspirations held by institutions and fields.
I have studied academic reward system change in such areas as redefining scholarship, post-tenure review, stopping the tenure clock, and efforts to include ways to appraise new and diverse approaches to scholarly dissemination in the tenure process. My work has caused me to reflect on the current state of dominant academic reward systems, the assumptions that guide them, and the specific things I would like to see colleges and universities NOT do anymore, and start changing.
Universities pay a major price by not acknowledging bias and expanding their definitions of scholarship.
As a preamble to what I want us not to do anymore, I set forth the following principles. Most colleges and universities are charged with the goal of advancing knowledge within and through a diverse, inclusive community. By inclusive, I mean inclusive of both diverse individuals and diverse contributions to knowledge. Second, academic reward systems are about the valuing of professional lives and contributions. They are symbolic and concrete artifacts of what an institution values and aspires to become. Third, academic reward systems should ensure that faculty making excellent contributions to scholarship, teaching, and service should be retained and advanced. Yet, what excellence looks like in 2013 may differ from what it looked like in 1960 and 50 years from now.

Milwauee Journal-Sentinel:

‘Nonviolence . . . the most potent weapon’ is the theme of this year’s the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. student essay contest. The winning essays are published in this section. The contest, in its 31st year, is sponsored by the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association and the Journal Sentinel.

Patrick Wintour:

The shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, is to promise that every school in England and Wales will have a teacher dedicated to maintaining order.
He will say these specialist discipline teachers will be required to add simulated exercises to their training to ensure all who qualify are “classroom ready”.
Hunt is known to believe that discipline is the single biggest issue that motivates most voters about education, and in an article designed to court readers of the Sun, he promises to outflank the education secretary, Michael Gove, by being tough on classroom behaviour.
“For any great teacher, at the heart of it is behaviour management and concentration in the classroom,” he writes, adding “standards in our schools and kids getting jobs depend on it”.
Successive education secretaries have promised to act on discipline with policies ranging from quicker expulsions of disruptive children to improved pupil referral units.
It is not clear how much substance lies behind Hunt’s promise, made in a speech in which he sets out his plans for teachers to be subject to relicensing.

Rick Hess, via a kind reader’s email:

Education beats across the country have been speckled with nightmarish headlines about education technology failures in schools: big iPad acquisitions gone awry, melted chargers, broken screens, and students accessing social media on their school-granted devices. It seems like we haven’t had a lot to cheer about when it comes to digital learning. But who is really to blame here?
Of course, safety, security, and smooth execution of device roll-outs are important, but implementation glitches are to be expected when a school introduces any new system — both as devices need improving and as students, teachers, and administrators acclimate to using new technology.
Vilifying education technology is the wrong lesson. Technology is not the problem. As I point out in my new book, Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age, what’s more important is how schools plan to use it.

Related: Madison Superintendent Cheatham’s proposed $31,000,000 five year technology plan.

JD Roth:

At the grocery store yesterday, I passed a man and his daughter in the snack aisle. She was maybe ten or eleven, a little overweight, and begging for cookies. He was tall and muscular, a blue-collar type, clearly exasperated with her. “You have no conception of how hard your mother and I work to earn money, do you?” he said. There was desperation in his voice.
This brief encounter has been in my mind ever since. It reminds me of something I read over at the Seeds of Wisdom forum. Jim Anthony shared a story about how he is teaching his six-year-old the value of money. Anthony doesn’t like the idea of just giving his son money — he thought it created an “entitlement mentality” — but he doesn’t like the idea of tying the allowance to chores, either.

James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley:

As students spend the next few weeks completing their college applications, a question is hanging in the air: Is college worth it? It’s not only students who are wondering. It’s also employers who are starting to question what a college degree tells them about potential hires. Maybe a top name will suggest a student who performed well on the SATs, but the truth is that employers often have no idea what they’re getting.
As Carol Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, recently toldInsideHigherEd, “Our employer studies show that employers basically find the transcript useless in evaluating job candidates.” The people doing the hiring these days have no idea if students can write a coherent paragraph. And the courses listed on their transcripts do not really tell employers what skills they have actually mastered. According to the Department of Education, in 2012 there were more than 1,500 academic programs students could choose for a major. That number increased by more than 350in the decade before. What employer keeps track of what those programs entail?
This problem is not exactly new and the solution has been clear to many for years. As Charles Murray wrote in his 2008 book, Real Education, “The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know and are able to do, not where they learned it or how long it took them to learn it.”

George Leef:

In his first address to Congress President Obama argued that the U.S. needs to put far more people through college so that our economy will remain competitive with those of other nations. He set forth a goal of again having “the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”
Failure to raise our educational attainment level, on the other hand, “is a prescription for economic decline.”
The President’s thinking is shared by many others. Economic success, both individually and at the national level, tends to correlate with education. People (and countries) with little education are mostly poor, while people (and countries) with very advanced education are mostly wealthy. Therefore, it’s tempting to jump to the conclusion that partaking of more education will boost an individual’s income and that a country can increase prosperity by “investing” more in education.
Resist that temptation, which is based on fallacious reasoning. True, education correlates with prosperity and economic growth, but one of the crucial lessons of logic is that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. We must apply it here.
People who have high intelligence and ambition often earn college and advanced degrees. Sometimes that formal education is important in their later success, but many say that their education had very little to do with it. Conversely, some extremely successful people dropped out of college or never attended at all. And as those ridiculous Occupy Wall Street protests taught us, huge numbers of college graduates are unemployed or employed only in jobs that don’t call for anything more than basic trainability.

Kate Bahn:

I’m certainly not the first Ph.D. candidate who, with the end of graduate school in sight, has wondered: If I had to do it all over again, would I still pursue a doctoral degree?
The answer? Yes. But what’s been on my mind lately is why that’s my unequivocal response. After all, I haven’t had a full-time job in over five years, and I’ve racked up some student debt (albeit less than many of my peers) in the process. That’s something I wouldn’t have been disposed to do in the first place if it weren’t for my family background.
You might say advanced degrees run in my family. My mother has a Ph.D. in biology and is happily employed as a toxicologist in the private sector. Her father was a doctor; his brothers were another doctor and a lawyer. In fact, that side of my family is thick with Ph.D.’s, M.D.’s and J.D.’s. And while my dad was the first member of his family to go to college, he went on to earn an M.B.A. and worked in finance for years before ultimately turning in a more artistic direction. As a result, my parents take terminal degrees for granted–they’re just a step on the way to having a career you enjoy.
After working for a few years post-college, when I felt like I could go no higher on the career ladder without an advanced degree, I entered a master’s program. At the time, I thought an M.A. would be enough to get me where I wanted to go–into the upper echelons of a labor union or economic-policy think tank. But two semesters into a master’s program in economics, I realized I had so much more to learn! I couldn’t possibly tackle it all in a master’s program. I entered a Ph.D. program, aware of the intellectual difficulty, but not fully registering what it meant to pursue a doctorate and how privileged I was to be able to do so.

Randye Hoder:

My oldest child, Emma, just returned to campus after a long holiday break to finish up her last semester of college.
But even before she has put the final period on her senior thesis, friends and family have been bombarding me with one question: What is she going to do after graduation?
The job market is, after all, awfully tough. Just this month the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a study showing that “recent graduates are increasingly working in low-wage jobs or working part-time,” if they’re lucky enough to find work at all.
The bright spot, according to the Fed analysis, students who majored in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics–areas in which recent graduates “have tended to do relatively well, even in today’s challenging labor market.” But Emma is a student of the much-maligned humanities–an American Studies major with a focus on the politics and culture of food at a small liberal arts school.
For quite a while, I tripped all over myself to describe how her field of study is so trendy right now that I’m not the least bit worried she will find a decent job. “Emma’s concentration and interests could lead her in any number of directions,” I would tell people. “Writing for a food blog. Working at a nonprofit that improves health and nutrition for the urban poor. Managing social media for a food-related startup.”

Best Education Degrees

At Best Education Degrees our mission is simple. We want to help you find the best school to help you further your career in education.
Whether you are a teacher or administrator or educational consultant, your goal is to get the best education you can get, given your current circumstances. Many times educators are already in the workforce and looking to learn new skills and specializations. But working full time comes with added challenges. Thankfully today’s world offers many excellent options including part-time and online degree programs.

Compare the states here.

The Wisconsin State Journal:

Wisconsin has 243 charter schools.
Every one of them is a public school.
So don’t buy the “privatization” scare tactics surrounding legislation to expand chartering options across the state. Charter schools aren’t privatizing public education. They’re invigorating public education by trying new approaches to learning.
Charter schools cost the public less per student than traditional public schools. They often serve higher concentrations of minority and low-income students. And they are accountable for better results.
Local school boards have authorized the vast majority of charter schools in Wisconsin. Only UW-Milwaukee, UW-Parkside in Racine, Milwaukee Area Technical College and the city of Milwaukee are able to establish charter schools without local school board support.

Jordan Weissman:

These post-recession years have not been gentle on young college grads, and by now, you’ve heard plenty of stories about students matriculating from campus to life as a barista. But how many B.A.’s are really out there toiling in dead-end jobs? A new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York offers us an answer this week, which I think can be summed up as: Fewer than you probably think, but definitely more than we’re used to.
Using Census data, the bank’s researchers found that, through 2012, roughly 44 percent of working, young college graduates were “underemployed,” meaning they were in a job that did not require their degree. While the number sounds pretty daunting, it’s not actually without precedent. It’s about the same rate as in 1994.

Megan McArdle:

If you’re thinking about going to graduate school, read this (Google docs non open version or .xlsx version) before you apply. It’s an open spreadsheet where graduates have posted about their debt levels, why they acquired so much debt, and how they’re planning to pay it off.
Note that a lot of these people had funding. Before they go to grad school, people are warned that you shouldn’t go unless you’re fully funded (tuition paid, some sort of research or teaching stipend). And that’s absolutely correct. If a Ph.D. program admits you without funding, it’s telling you that it doesn’t care whether you come; the program is willing to take your money, but not willing to invest in you. That means you won’t have access to the opportunities and support required to have a viable career in academia.

via Karen Kelsky

Tabularusa Education:

Today is one of the worst days of the school year. They call it ‘Future Thinking’ day, I call it a complete nightmare. The whole school is off timetable and kids are directed to a series of ‘workshops’ or talks that aim to get kids to start thinking about life beyond school. It’s a great idea in principle, but unsurprisingly disastrous in practice. It goes a bit like this:
Period 1: Take tutor group to a talk from the Head in the assembly hall. Listen to him talk about the importance of getting a C. Die a little inside.
Period 2: Take tutor group to a ‘team work’ workshop, where they will carry out the types of trust exercises you might encounter on an episode of The Apprentice. Chaos ensues almost immediately and the facilitator (a poor unsuspecting woman from the real world) appears to regret ever agreeing to the gig.
Period 3: Off we go again! This time to a CV writing workshop run by the Head of PSE. Sit at the back and try not to get annoyed as name-calling, rudeness and idleness go unpunished.

Sebastian Thrun:

Today, marks the first day in class for Georgia Tech’s new online Master’s degree in Computer Science program, which Georgia Tech, Udacity, and AT&T have jointly developed. This is a very big day for us. Udacity’s mission is to democratize higher education. With this program, we are making a top-notch computer science education available to a much broader group of students. And we are doing this at a price point of less than 20% of an on-campus education. I believe this is a watershed moment for students around the world.
We are very pleased with the application numbers for this new program. A total of 2,360 students applied within the 3-week application period. This is about 75% more than normally apply for the on-campus degree over the duration of an entire year. Of this pool, 375 have been accepted and start today and several others have deferred admission.

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

School district employees received some encouraging news prior to winter break. Wisconsin school employees chose “UNION” by large margins. Between November 29 and December 19, 2013 the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) conducted recertification elections for over 500 local unions representing over 56,000 classroom teachers, clerical/technical workers, educational assistants, bus drivers, custodial workers and other school district employees. Over 98% of those voting, voted Union YES!
Of the 39,872 total votes cast, 39,107 voted to recertify their union, with only 765 (less than 2%) voting against recertification. Annual union recertification elections are mandated by Governor Walker’s Act 10. In his ruling in MTI’s lawsuit, Judge Colas found requiring such elections to be unconstitutional. That decision was reversed by the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Abrahamson and Justice Walsh Bradley expressing strong dissent, in a 26 page opinion. Not surprisingly, Dane County school districts had a particularly strong showing; Monona Grove teachers had nearly 90% of all eligible voters cast ballots and, of those, nearly 96% voted Union YES. But it wasn’t only the Dane County districts that voted Union. Even those school districts in largely conservative counties voted affirmatively. Waukesha teachers voted 648-14 to maintain their Union as their certified bargaining agent; Wauwatosa teachers 367-7; and West Allis Educational Assistants voted 47-1. The largest school districts in the state also enthusiastically voted Union YES. Appleton Substitute teachers voted 159-2; La Crosse Secretaries voted 40-0; Milwaukee teachers voted 3,728-35 and Milwaukee Ed Assistants voted 875-10.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto:

Eat your heart out, Harvard. You’re not as good as Northern Kentucky University.
It may seem like an embarrassing admission to make in a magazine that produces the world’s most influential international university rankings, but I mistrust academic league tables: I can never convince myself that there are suitable criteria for comparisons of value. I cannot bear to read the listings because rich, old and prestigious institutions exert routine, predictable preponderance. Of course, Harvard University is insuperable for wealth, recruiting power, research funding, social cachet, networking opportunities, quality of plant and for the size of the library. But if we shift focus and ask how much difference an undergraduate education at Harvard (or Yale or Princeton or Stanford or Oxford or Cambridge or any of their elite lookalikes) makes to most of their students’ lives, we have to acknowledge that it probably doesn’t amount to very much.

George Leef:

Is a college degree worth what it costs? More and more Americans are questioning the conventional wisdom that it is, as the price tag climbs while the educational value (at least for many students) falls.
That isn’t either a “right” or a “left” critique. Honest observers from all over the political landscape realize that to a great extent, colleges and universities are run more for the benefit of their faculty, than for the benefit of their students.
Two well-known liberal writers, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus made that point in their 2011 book Higher Education? “The schools almost function for (the professors), for their aspirations and interests. Students come and go every four years, administrators will move on, but the tenured stay on in Bloomington, College Park, and Chapel Hill, accumulating power, controlling resources, reshaping the university according to their needs,” they write.
The libertarian Peter Thiel, a Stanford graduate, thinks that the pursuit of the college degree is a waste of time for bright and energetic young people. He has established Thiel Fellowships for people like that, enabling them to bypass college and start their productive careers years sooner.
But just because much of our higher education system is now a poor value for students who really want to study, we shouldn’t think that worthwhile schools have disappeared. In fact, just a few years ago, a new, very small university was created — the University of Minnesota Rochester (UMR) – that does just what a college is supposed to do.

Andrew J. Coulson and Jason Bedrick:

Should private schools be primarily accountable to parents or to government bureaucrats?
That’s the central question the Thomas B. Fordham Institute seeks to answer in the report it released Tuesday. The institute proposes that state governments should require private schools to administer state tests to all students participating in school-choice programs, and that the results should be publicized. Any private school the state deemed “persistently underperforming” would be expelled from the choice program.
“The Fordham Institute’s recommendation for regulating subsidized private schools is dangerous.”
This policy is well-intentioned, but a bad idea. It isn’t supported by the evidence and would be detrimental to the hundreds of thousands of students participating in school-choice programs nationwide.
First, the evidence: It is telling that the Fordham Institute cites only one study that suggests its policy “may boost student achievement.” Problematically, one of the authors of that study has already publicly cautioned against drawing this conclusion, noting that his finding is “enticing and suggestive but hardly conclusive.”

The Royal Society:

The Universities Minister David Willetts yesterday confirmed there was no “direct connection” between the plans to expand student places and the Government’s intention to sell off student debts.
Appearing before the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Select Committee, Mr Willetts said the sell-off would act as “cash flow assistance”, and chimed with the Coalition’s plan to reduce the net debt. He noted that “if you can hold down Public Sector Net Debt, it makes it easier to have policies such as more students”.
Funding the cost of expansion through the sell-off of loans, such as the ‘new style’ income-contingent student loans, has been likened in some quarters to a ‘Ponzi’ scheme. Both policies were mentioned in the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, which seemed to offset the costs of expansion of student places with the money generated by selling of parts of the post-1997 student loan book.

University of Texas System:

Given that traditional revenue streams in higher education are declining across the country, and the cost of getting an education is increasing, it is critical for students, along with their families, to make informed decisions about their academic careers. The UT System has developed this website and complementary online tool that provide valuable data about employment earnings for the first five years after graduation, as well as average student loan debt, for graduates by degree major.
Even as the cost of earning a degree is rising, having a college degree has become a minimum requirement for even entry-level jobs in many fields. To finance an education, students and their families must find the right balance of available grant and scholarship aid and family financial contributions, with student loans making up the difference. Based on The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s 2011 estimate, 37 million borrowers owed $870 billion in student loan debt. And, while debt itself is not inherently bad, uninformed borrowing decisions can lead to burdensome debt loads.

Chris Rickert:

There’s not much evidence showing that children learn any more effectively by way of computer screen than by way of pencil, paper, chalkboard and textbook.
Although at the very least, the Madison School District’s $31 million plan to put a tablet or netbook in the hands of every student will familiarize them with the kinds of technology necessary to function in modern-day America.
What I can’t figure out is why a community as fond of wealth redistribution as Madison would want to spread some of the school district’s wealth to the already wealthy.
The district has said that it’s open to the possibility of students bringing their own computer devices to school. But for now, it’s planning to lease new tablets or netbooks for every child regardless of his or her family’s ability to lease or buy their own.
With few exceptions, this is contrary to the way the district and the community treat other student necessities — which tablets or netbooks might soon become.

Related: Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham proposes $31 million, five-year technology plan.

Pat Schneider:

Madison school board member James Howard is not convinced a proposed Student Conduct and Discipline Plan will end a pattern of suspending and expelling disproportionately high numbers of African-American students.
“It’s not clear to me that it will,” Howard says. “I could never vote for a code that does not address those disparities and disproportionalities.”
Howard, currently the school board’s sole African-American member, is leading the board committee overseeing the revamp of the discipline plan.
The plan includes a chart that matches up examples of student misconduct with appropriate responses from teachers and school administrators. If a student’s misbehavior escalates, the responses escalate as well. The stated goal of the plan is to give kids the “space to make mistakes, learn from them and receive support to make changes in their behavior.”
But Howard says research shows that adopting positive behavior support models, while reducing the total number of suspensions and expulsions, does little to erase racial disparities. And while the proposed plan spells out step-by-step responses to misconduct, Howard says he is not yet convinced that component will address the inconsistencies in enforcing discipline between schools and even within schools.

Sol Stern:

In his press conference introducing Carmen Fariña as New York City’s next schools chancellor, Mayor Bill de Blasio suggested that he had picked her over several other candidates because she was on the same page with him in opposing Bloomberg-era education reforms. Most of the city’s education reporters took the new mayor’s spin and ran with it, even though Fariña had served loyally as Michael Bloomberg’s second-highest-ranking education official. Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez predicted that Fariña would now bring “revolutionary” changes to the department of education that she left in 2006. A headline in The Hechinger Report claimed that Fariña wanted DRAMATIC–EVEN JOYFUL–DEPARTURE FROM BLOOMBERG ERA. But that depends on what Bloomberg era you’re talking about: during the years that she served in the administration, Fariña was fully on board with its education policies.
In fact, considering Fariña’s pivotal role during the first Bloomberg term in shaping the Department of Education’s radical initiatives, portraying her as a dissident from within seems absurd. Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in June 2002, but he knew little about what actually went on in the city’s classrooms. He appointed Joel Klein, a corporate lawyer with no background in instructional issues, as his first schools chancellor. Bloomberg and Klein deferred virtually all decision-making on classroom instruction and curriculum to a cadre of veteran progressive educators led by Diana Lam, Klein’s first deputy chancellor for teaching and learning. Lam and Fariña convinced Klein to introduce the constructivist “balanced-literacy” reading and writing program, developed by Lucy Calkins of Columbia Teachers College, along with a fuzzy constructivist-math program called Everyday Math, into just about every elementary school classroom in the city. (Klein would eventually realize that adopting balanced literacy was a serious mistake.)
In an early 2003 speech presenting his administration’s new education reforms, Mayor Bloomberg declared that the “experience of other urban school districts shows that a standardized approach to reading, writing, and math is the best way to raise student performance across the board in all subjects,” and therefore that “the chancellor’s office will dictate the curriculum.” And so it did. Lam soon became embroiled in a nepotism scandal and had to resign. Fariña then took over as deputy chancellor for instruction. She became the DOE’s enforcer, making sure that all teachers in the elementary schools toed the line and implemented Calkins’s constructivist methods for teaching reading and writing. Teachers received a list of “nonnegotiable” guidelines for arranging their classrooms, including such minute details as the requirement that there must be a rug on the floor for students to sit on in the early grades and that nothing but student work be posted on the walls.
Balanced literacy has no track record of raising the academic performance of poor minority children. No independent research study has ever evaluated its methodology. Nevertheless, it was popular in education schools because it promulgated two of progressive education’s key commandments: that teachers must abandon deadening “drill and kill” methods and that students are capable of “constructing their own knowledge.” Progressives such as Calkins evoked ideal classrooms, where young children naturally find their way to literacy without enduring boring, scripted phonics drills forced on them by automaton teachers. Instead, in a balanced-literacy classroom, students work in small groups and follow what Calkins calls the “workshop model” of cooperative learning. The program takes for granted that children can learn to read and write naturally, with minimal guidance. Calkins rejects E.D. Hirsch’s finding (based on an overwhelming consensus in cognitive-science research) that the key to improving children’s reading comprehension is grounding them in broad knowledge, which she and other progressives dismiss as “mere facts.” Calkins also believes that her model classrooms promote “social justice” for all. In an interview I conducted with her at the time the DOE selected her program, she told me that “It’s a great move to social justice to bring [balanced literacy] to every school in the city.”
That’s what Fariña tried to accomplish in the early years of the Bloomberg administration–including the social-justice part. She was instrumental in creating the most centralized, top-down instructional system in the recent history of American public education. Agents of the deputy chancellor (euphemistically called “coaches”) fanned out to almost all city elementary schools to make sure that every teacher was marching in lockstep with the department of education’s new pedagogical approach. Under the rubric of “professional development,” DOE central headquarters launched an aggressive campaign to force teachers to teach literacy and math only one way–the progressive way. Each of the city’s 80,000 teachers got a six-hour CD-ROM laying out the philosophy behind the new standardized curriculum and pedagogy. The CD portrayed the world of progressive education writ large, with all its romantic assumptions about how children learn. In addition to inculcating Calkins’s balanced literacy, the DOE’s training manual celebrated the theories of an obscure Australian education guru–Brian Cambourne of Wollongong University in New South Wales, a leader of the whole-language movement (a cousin of balanced literacy) then dominating Australian public schools. Cambourne’s ideas gave city teachers not only more balanced literacy (or whole language) theory, but also a warrant for social-justice teaching.
Cambourne claims that as a young teacher, he discovered that many of his poorly performing students were actually quite bright. To his surprise, almost all demonstrated extraordinary competence in performing challenging tasks. The son of the local bookie, for example, “couldn’t learn basic math,” according to Cambourne, “but could calculate the probability the Queen of Spades was in the deck faster than I could.” Cambourne decided that children learn better in natural settings, with a minimum of adult help–a staple of progressive-education thought. Thus the role of the educator should be to create classroom environments that stimulate children but also closely resemble the way adults work and learn. Children should no longer sit in rows facing the teacher; instead, the room should be arranged with work areas where children can construct their own knowledge, much as in Calkins’s workshop model of balanced literacy.
Such constructivist assumptions about how to teach literacy were enforced with draconian discipline in city schools for several years. Progressives like Calkins, Cambourne, and Fariña don’t insist that more learning occurs when children work in groups and in “natural” settings because they’ve followed any evidence. To the contrary, as much as it tells us anything on this issue, science makes clear that, particularly for disadvantaged children, direct, explicit instruction works best. But under Fariña, reeducation sessions for teachers were meant to overcome dissenting opinion and drive home the progressive party line. To quote the directives to teachers included on the CD: “Your students must not be sitting in rows. You must not stand at the head of the class. You must not do ‘chalk and talk’ at the blackboard. You must have a ‘workshop’ in every single reading period. Your students must be ‘active learners,’ and they must work in groups.”
As I reported at the time, some brave teachers objected. At Junior High School 44 in Manhattan, a teacher tried to point out to his supervisor, quite reasonably, that some teachers feel more comfortable with and get better results through direct instruction and other traditional methods. The school’s literacy coach, sent by the DOE, then responded: “This is the way it is. Everyone will do it this way, or you can change schools.”
Calkins was grateful for Carmen Fariña’s efforts in advancing her instructional agenda, her career, and her organization’s bottom line. (Calkins’s Readers and Writers Program at Teachers College received over $10 million in no-bid contracts from the city.) Calkins expressed her appreciation in a forward she penned for Fariña’s book, A School Leader’s Guide to Excellence, coauthored with Laura Koch, Fariña’s closest associate and collaborator at the DOE. “When Carmen and Laura took the helm of New York City’s school system, teachers, staff developers, and principals across the entire city let out a collective cheer of enthusiasm,” Calkins writes. She conjures a glorious history: “Within a week [of Fariña’s promotion to deputy chancellor for instruction] our education system began to change. Educators at every level could feel possibility in the air; the excitement was palpable.” And because of Fariña’s magic, “sound practices in the teaching of reading and writing became the talk of the town–the subject of study groups and hallway conversations in every school . . . The entire city began working together afresh to meet the challenge of improving education for all children.”
In reality, though, the balanced-literacy advocates failed in this task. The city’s eighth-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests barely budged over 12 years, despite a doubling of education spending–from $12 billion to $24 billion. There was no narrowing of the racial achievement gap. (In sounding his tale of two cities theme, Mayor de Blasio makes no accounting for the failure of progressive education programs to reduce the academic achievement gap between poor and middle-class children.)
Recognizing balanced literacy’s meager results, Chancellor Klein reverted to a system of more autonomous schools, giving principals far more discretion over instructional matters. Klein apparently came to believe that he had been misled by Fariña and Calkins. The chancellor then became a supporter of Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum, with its focus on direct instruction and the teaching of broad content knowledge. He set up a three-year pilot program, matching ten elementary schools using the Hirsch early-grade literacy curriculum against a demographically similar cohort of ten schools that used balanced literacy. The children in the Core Knowledge schools significantly outperformed those in the schools using the Calkins approach.
Still opposing the direct teaching of factual knowledge, Fariña recently shrugged off the pilot study, saying that not enough schools were involved. But if Fariña is serious about that criticism, she now has an opportunity to run a much larger evaluation of Core Knowledge. As a result of the city’s adoption of the Common Core State Standards and of aligned curricula emphasizing the “rich content knowledge” that the standards require, 71 elementary school principals have chosen to use Hirsch’s Core Knowledge literacy program in their schools.
Let Fariña visit and study those schools over the next year. If she really is committed to changing the tale of two cities, as she and the new mayor claim to be, one way to start would be to cast aside ideology and judge whether those Core Knowledge classrooms, drenched in “mere facts,” are actually the key to narrowing the devastating knowledge gap between middle-class kids and poor children, who begin school with little knowledge of the world and with a stunted vocabulary. She might also find that there is at least as much “joy” in classrooms in which children get taught explicitly about the world around them as there is in classrooms in which children “construct” their own knowledge.

Daniel Smith:

Pity the American parent! Already beleaguered by depleted 401(k)s and gutted real-estate values, Ponzi schemes and toxic paper, burst bubbles and bear markets, he is now being asked to contend with a new specter: that college, the perennial hope for the next generation, may not be worth the price of the sheepskin on which it prints its degrees.
As long as there have been colleges, there’s been an individualist, anti-college strain in American culture–an affinity for the bootstrap. But it is hard to think of a time when skepticism of the value of higher education has been more prominent than it is right now. Over the past several months, the same sharp and distressing arguments have been popping up in the Times, cable news, the blogosphere, even The Chronicle of Higher Education. The cost of college, as these arguments typically go, has grown far too high, the return far too uncertain, the education far too lax. The specter, it seems, has materialized.
It’s no surprise, given how the Great Recession has corroded public faith in other once-unassailable American institutions, that college should come in for a drubbing. But inevitability is just another word for opportunity, and the two most vocal critics are easy to identify and strikingly similar in entrepreneurial self-­image. In the past year or so, James Altucher, a New York-based venture capitalist and finance writer, has emerged through frequent media appearances as something of a poster boy, and his column “8 Alternatives to College” something of an essential text, for the anti-college crusade. The father of two young girls, Altucher has a very personal perspective on college: He doesn’t think he should pay for it. “What am I going to do?” he asked last March on Tech Ticker, a popular investment show on Yahoo. “When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?” To Altucher, higher education is nothing less than an institutionalized scam–college graduates hire only college graduates, creating a closed system that permits schools to charge exorbitant ­prices and forces students to take on crippling debt. “The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition.”

James Fallows

In 1978 Willis J. Stetson, known as Lee, became the dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania. The new job was quite a challenge. Penn at the time was in a weak position. In an era when big-city crime rates were still rising, its location in West Philadelphia was a handicap. Its promotional efforts took pains to point out that despite its name, the University of Pennsylvania was a private university and a member of the Ivy League, like Yale and Harvard, not of a state system, like the University of Texas. But within the Ivy League, Penn had acquired the role of backup or safety school for many applicants. “I would estimate that in the 1970s maybe forty percent of the students considered Penn their first choice,” Stetson told me recently. For the rest, Penn was the place that had said yes when their first choice had said no.
Stetson’s job, and that of the Penn administration in general, was to make the school so much more attractive that students with a range of options would happily choose to enroll. Through the next decade the campaign to make Penn more desirable was a success. As urban life became safer and more alluring, Penn’s location, like Columbia’s, became an asset rather than a problem. Stetson and his staff traveled widely to introduce the school to potential applicants. When Stetson first visited the Harvard School, a private school for boys in California’s San Fernando Valley, he found that few students had even heard of Penn. The school is now coed and known as Harvard-Westlake, and of the 261 seniors who graduated last June, more than a quarter applied to Penn. The Lawrenceville School, in New Jersey, and Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, have in recent years sent more students to Penn than to any other college. Colleges may complain bitterly about rankings of their relative quality, especially the “America’s Best Colleges” list that U.S. News & World Report publishes every fall, but a college is quick to cite its ranking as a sign of improvement when its position rises. When U.S. News published its first list of best colleges, in 1983, Penn was not even ranked among national universities. Last year it was tied with Stanford for No. 6–ahead of Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, and Brown in the Ivy League, and of Duke and the University of Chicago.

Robin West:

It is no surprise, given the stakes, that education reform is now one of the major battles in American politics. Particularly at the municipal and state levels–from Washington, D.C. to Boston to Chicago–it has created upheaval not only in schools, but also in elections, as Democrats and unions have parted ways and new pressure groups have emerged to funnel cash toward candidates who espouse the reform movement’s vision.
All of this leaves Diane Ravitch, a historian and assistant secretary of education under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, troubled. In her new book Reign of Error, she mounts a well-documented and generally compelling case against the agenda of the “corporate school reform movement” of the last twenty-five years. She takes on its advocacy of testing and accountability as a means of raising the quality of low-performing schools; its promotion of for-profit, nonprofit, and cyber charter schools; its urge to replace professional educators with inexperienced college graduates and swap school board members, superintendents, and principals for corporate executives.
These are familiar complaints. Ravitch’s particular contribution is to unpack the philosophical assumptions guiding the reform movement. Reformers’ goals–higher test scores for all students and a reduced gap in achievement between affluent and poor, white and nonwhite–seem admirable. But Ravitch argues that their achievement comes at the cost of replacing both the ideal and the experience of education as a public good–provided by publicly financed, publicly controlled institutions that aspire to educate future citizens for their public responsibilities and adult lives–with an understanding of education as a private commodity chosen by parents. This commodity, like others, would be produced by rival corporations motivated by profit. Corporations would seek to educate not for the responsibilities of citizenship but for success in competitive markets. The philosophical and ideological commitment to the corporate over the public, Ravitch contends, threatens real damage not only to the education of mostly low-income children, but, more broadly, to our republic and the social compact and civil society on which it rests.

Erin Richards:

A contentious proposal to expand independent charter schools in Wisconsin worries public-school advocates because it would further reduce aid to traditional districts and open the door for more private companies to run public schools.
But advocates of the bill, in a vigorous debate in Madison on Thursday, argued that’s largely the point — that it would offer more public-school options to families, as well as bring Wisconsin’s charter-school law in line with other states.
There are hints that such a change is too controversial to pass the Senate, primarily because of the financial effect it could have on school districts statewide. But that didn’t stop a robust, seven-hour debate about Assembly Bill 549 in the Assembly’s Committee on Urban Education — much of which revolved around differing ideologies about how to provide quality options for all in public education.

The Economist:

THEODORE “TEDDY” ROOSEVELT, soldier, president and outdoorsman, once summed up his vision for America as a “doctrine of the strenuous life”. Hunting lay at the heart of that doctrine: the virile business of learning to shoot straight, to track beasts through brutal heat or cold and to master “buck fever”–a nervous excitement felt in the face of prey that must be suppressed by effort of will. Years before he declined to blast a bear tethered to a tree by his hosts on a 1902 hunt, spawning admiring newspaper cartoons and the worldwide teddy-bear industry, Roosevelt crafted and promoted a “credo of fair chase”.
In addition to encouraging sportsmanship, his vision of the American hunt was democratic. Though he crossed oceans to shoot lions and scaled mountains to hunt bears, Roosevelt deplored Europe’s elitism, with its royal forests and aristocratic estates wherein lisping sons of privilege chased their father’s deer for sport. Closer to home Roosevelt and his allies were dismayed by the near-extinction of the buffalo and other species, driven by such forces as gun technology and competition for land.

studentsfirst:

Wisconsin can improve many of its educational policies to make its public school system more student-centered. Specifically, the state can do more to prioritize teacher effectiveness in decision-making and empowering parents with information and quality choices.
Despite educator evaluations that include student academic growth as a significant factor, Wisconsin continues to prioritize seniority, rather than effectiveness, in its personnel decisions. Wisconsin empowers parents with choices through public charter schools and a model opportunity scholarship program that prioritizes low-income students stuck in low-performing schools. However, the state lacks a strong charter accountability framework that holds authorizers accountable for school performance. Wisconsin also does not empower parents with accessible information regarding school and classroom performance, nor does it guarantee that no student will be placed with an ineffective teacher for two consecutive years.

Laura Waters takes a look at New Jersey’s report card.

Pat Schneider:

“When a teacher tells me they want to opt out of using technology because of their lack of comfort, it means students are not getting access to tools that have become an essential part of life, certainly of work life,” Cheatham told school board members Monday. “I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think that’s okay. We need to demand that all students have access to technology they will be expected to use when they go on to college and career.”
Cheatham’s remarks came at the end of a meeting where school board members heard an outline of her district technology plan, which calls for a one-to-one ratio of devices to students and teachers by the 2018-2019 school year.
“It’s scary. We’re asking people to think differently about the profession,” Cheatham said, recalling resistance to the daily use of email by some teachers when that technology emerged. “But an adult’s comfort level shouldn’t be something that stops us from doing the right thing for kids.”

It may well be time to simply let teachers buy their own equipment via a stipend.

Peter Wood:

Heather Mac Donald may be the Ida Tarbell of our age: a writer who combines a meticulous eye for facts, intellectual brilliance, a sure sense of the historical moment, and deep moral seriousness. Tarbell is famous for her History of the Standard Oil Company, serialized in McClure’s Magazine between 1902 and 1904, and is celebrated today by the Left for her having struck a blow against Big Business. She even merited her own postage stamp in 2002, along with three other women journalists.
It may be a while before Mac Donald wins such philatelic immortality. Like Tarbell, she is a deft expositor of the excesses of large enterprises that have grown unaccountable and corrupt. But Mac Donald’s preferred topics are big city government and, increasingly, academia. The Left has a hard time coming to grips with the prospect that the latter day equivalent of Standard Oil may be the University of California.
Witness the splenetic rage of Rebecca Schuman writing on Slate. The occasion was the republication in The Wall Street Journal of an essay that Mac Donald first published in City Journal: “The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity.” Mac Donald offered a fer instance of why students across the country are forsaking majors in the humanities and minimizing the number of courses they take in the traditional humanistic departments. Her essay explains what happened at UCLA in 2011, when the English Department deep-sixed its requirements in “the cornerstones of English literature” in favor of some theory-besotted junk. Schuman’s rebuttal takes the form of a series of snotty rhetorical questions meant to imply that Mac Donald is a cultural ignoramus.

Terence Lee:

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), a government agency in charge of the country’s internet industry, has announced plans to progressively introduce software programming classes into public schools, giving students an opportunity to write code in a classroom setting. The news was first reported on Good Morning Singapore in mandarin yesterday.
Given the rapidly changing nature of the technology industry, the agency hopes to roll out these classes quickly in the next few months with the ultimate aim of keeping the Singapore economy at the top.
“Infocomm technology is getting to be more pervasive, and we all recognize that it’s going to be a strategic catalyst for [Singapore’s] competitive advantage,” said James Kang, assistant chief executive of the government chief information office at IDA.
To be sure, topics like programming and 3D printing are already available in some schools as extra-curricular activities with IDA’s help, so it’s unclear for now how these classes differ from previous initiatives, and how the IDA works with the education ministry to introduce the field. Tech in Asia has contacted the agency for more details.

Related: Madison considers more hardware for schools.

Natalia Cecire:

The humanities are often represented as an irrelevant, moribund, and merely preservationist field, passing on old knowledge of old things without producing anything new. That’s why it keeps having to be “defended” by people saying, “no! old shit matters too!” (It does–witness one chapter from Washington Irving’s 1819-20 Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. getting rebooted yet again, this time as a goofy paranormal procedural–but this already accepts a basic misrepresentation of humanities scholarship.)
Yet it’s precisely the production of new knowledge in the humanities that powerfully influences the everyday lives of Americans, and which leads to pearl-clutching by those who insist on the humanities’ irrelevance. David Brooks, for example, is very sad that the humanities have failed to be stagnant. He claims that humanities enrollments have substantially declined (factually untrue) since the rise of critical theory and its concurrent attention to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability in the 1980s. But the humanities didn’t just turn to these categories for kicks (still less because it was “fashionable,” as culture-wars critics like Alan Sokal have claimed); turning to them was the result of research. Through research, scholars found out that these categories were complicated, powerful, and important for understanding culture. Brooks seems to suppose that doing research that has a broad impact makes your field irrelevant. This is deranged.*

Academic Kindness:

was spending time at my undergraduate school’s library putting the final touches on my Masters thesis, and I stopped in to the student union for lunch. While in line, I ran into a professor emeritus that I had taken classes from as an undergraduate. He asked what I was up to, as well as asking why I was on campus a year or so after graduating. I told him about my thesis, and that I was graduating in two weeks, and he told me to submit my CV to the department chair.
Two weeks later?
Masters degree in one hand and a very lucrative adjunct position in the other! This same department also went out of its way (when I was leaving!) to help me with my Ph.D. application materials.

Melonie Fullick:

In the past few weeks some interesting and contentious threads of discussion have been unwinding on “Academic Twitter”, in particular one that’s focused on the current conditions of the academic job market in the United States. It seems the debate was kicked off by a post from Rebecca Schuman at Pan Kisses Kafka blog, who criticized a UC Riverside department for the practice of sending out interview requests only five days before the interviews would take place at the annual MLA conference. This provoked a response from Claire Potter in her blog Tenured Radical, in which she insisted that there had to be reasonable explanations for the process. Potter also critiqued the tone of Schuman’s post, describing it as a “hissy fit”. Multiple follow-up posts ensued.
After the exchange between Schuman and Potter, the flames were further fanned by Karen Kelsky’s response at The Professor Is In, wherein she made a comparison between the denial of privilege by the tenured and the denial of racism by white people. The comparison is inappropriate, but Kelsky’s analysis of the advantages of the tenured hit home, and it set off another intense discussion about the responsibilities of tenured faculty in a context where non-tenured peers/colleagues are working in exploitative conditions.
I think there have been a couple of things happening in this debate. One of them is the underlying issue itself – the job market and hiring practices and, at root, the culture of academe and its professionalization process. This is tied closely to the nature of the academic workforce, which in the United States now comprises over two-thirds temporary and/or contingent faculty positions (hence “New Faculty Majority”); tenure is becoming exceptional. But also emerging from this heated exchange about academic working conditions is the question of how we talk with each other, and the issue of the “policing” of people’s participation in the name of civility or professionalism as illustrated in Potter’s response to Schuman.

Angela K. Dills, Rey Hernández-Julián, Nathan Hale:

Listed tuition–essentially the sticker price–for US colleges has increased significantly, even after adjusting for inflation. For all institutions of higher education, that increase averages 71 percent since 1990 and 36 percent since 2000.1 Tuition has increased faster in public, four-year institutions, where the increase has averaged 126 percent since 1990 and 62 percent since 2000, but listed tuition has increased in all categories–public and private, for-profit and not-for-profit, two-year and four-year. Private schools’ prices started in 1990 at much higher absolute levels, so although their increases since then have generally been lower in terms of percentage, they were often higher in terms of dollar amount.
In the 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama stated that “taxpayers cannot continue to subsidize the soaring cost of higher education. Colleges must do their part to keep costs down, and it’s our job to make sure they do.” In the same speech, the president argued that policies such as tax credits, grants, and subsidized loans have been important policy tools to “make college more affordable.” In 2007 President George W. Bush signed into law a bill that increased the maximum Pell Grant award–in order, he said, to “help millions of low-income Americans earn a college degree.” 2 Both presidents failed to mention that the policies they supported could themselves have been responsible for some of the increase in tuition. Considering two effects of the subsidies–direct price reduction and higher sticker prices–at the same time is important for understanding the intended and unintended consequences of higher education subsidies.

AUNBT:

If you’re reading this alongside the latest bargaining updates from UNB management, you could be forgiven for wondering if you’d strayed into a parallel universe. UNB management continues to assure the world that they are committed to a negotiated agreement. “Faculty are the lifeblood of any university”, we are told. “We are committed to continuing to negotiate to achieve a new collective agreement,” another email to students insists. Yet there has been little progress on key issues. UNB’s administration seems keen on continuing, but not on concluding, the contract negotiations that began ten months ago.
AUNBT has a simple response to these protestations: send a bargaining team to the table with an actual mandate to bargain.
Negotiating requires that the people in UNB management who make the decisions stop hiding in their offices and board rooms and roll up their sleeves. Merely sending a team to sit in a row at a long table day after day does not amount to negotiating. Denying that team a real bargaining mandate is not negotiating. Refusing even to discuss issues is not negotiating.
No-one strikes recreationally. Certainly not in New Brunswick in January. AUNBT is the only NB faculty union that has never gone on strike. But over 90% of our full-time members have become so frustrated with spending priorities at UNB that they are willing to take that step now. We are not willing to continue to circle the drain. AUNBT members came to UNB to contribute to a nationally competitive comprehensive university. Yet we are discovering that our work is not valued and that the current senior administration refuses to take concrete action to maintain our reputation and standing.

Molly Beck:

All students in the Madison School District would have their own tablets or notebook computers by the 2018-19 school year under a five-year, $31 million plan proposed by Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham.
If approved, the plan would increase the district’s current
$1.5 million annual technology budget to $4.2 million in the 2014-15 school year to start upgrading the district’s network infrastructure, upgrade or equip classrooms and libraries with new technology or computers, and provide notebook computers to all district teachers and administrators. Elementary teachers also would get tablet computers under the plan.
Costs to upgrade are projected to increase each of the five years of the plan for a total of $31 million spent in that time. Afterward, the annual budget for technology would be about $7 million per year going forward.
…..
Madison School Board members, who formally received the plan at their meeting Monday, were mostly optimistic about the plan. Board member T.J. Mertz questioned whether the program needed to be as extensive as it’s proposed given what he said were other unmet needs in the district and given research that he called “universally disappointing” surrounding such initiatives.
Mertz said in an interview after Monday’s board meeting that he agrees with the majority of the investments in technology under the plan, “but then there’s a third or a quarter where I think it’s going overboard.”
As an example, Mertz said he questions whether every kindergarten student needs their own tablet computer.

Prior to spending any additional taxpayer funds on new initiatives, I suggest that the District consider (and address) the status of past expensive initiatives, including:
Infinite Campus: is it fully implemented? If not, why? Why continue to spend money on it?
“Standards based report cards“.
Connected Math.
Small Learning Communities.
And of course, job number one, the District’s long term disastrous reading scores.
Madison already spends double the national average per student ($15k). Thinning out initiatives and refocusing current spending on reading would seem to be far more pressing than more hardware.

Felix Salmon:

The Cooper Union Board of Trustees today managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It was a depressing and yet entirely predictable vote, which resulted in a depressing and yet entirely predictable statement.
You might remember the tragedy of Cooper Union — the way in which a unique and irreplaceable institution was destroyed by the inflated egos of overpaid technocrats. Well, after many months of outcry and outrage, a glimpse of hope appeared in December: a detailed and hopeful 54-page Working Group Report was submitted to the board, explaining how the institution could still, amazingly continue without charging tuition. Today, the board voted on whether to adopt the report.
As Kevin Slavin explains, the stakes could hardly be higher:

If the vote goes one way, a new, lean, careful Cooper Union will tiptoe forward, tuition-free. It will require equal parts deep sacrifice, wild ambition, and straightforward pragmatism. And it will uphold a 150+ year tradition of free undergraduate education.
If it goes the other way, all of that will disappear. Not just the free tuition, but everything that was built on it. In its place we’ll find a tragic fraud. A joke. A zombie.

Alan Borsuk:

What do you say to someone who has given more than $30 million to helps schools and educators in Milwaukee?
My parents taught me to say thank you. Seems like a good practice.
But it’s not that simple when that someone is the Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the mega-billions heirs of Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart. Their generous, but ideological-oriented support leaves many people saying thank you and many others wishing the Waltons would go away.
The role of a dozen or so foundations with the assets to have nationwide impact in promoting change in education frequently brings out strong opinions.
The dividing line, not surprisingly, is often over ideas such as school choice, private school vouchers, independent charter schools, and the roles of entrepreneurs and teachers unions. Several of the big foundations, including Walton, strongly support what many call “reform” ideas.
You would think Milwaukee would be a primary venue for the philanthropic titans. We have the oldest and one of the largest urban voucher programs and an energetic charter school sector. But for whatever reasons, we haven’t seen that much of the “billionaire boys club,” as Diane Ravitch, an adamant and leading critic, has called it.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the giant among giants, put quite a bit of money into launching small high schools in Milwaukee a dozen years ago or so, leaving behind a few good schools but not too much overall. Otherwise, we’ve been kind of low on the Gates priority list, at least compared to some other places.

Charles Simic:

Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.
An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon. For starters, there’s more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.

Philip Guo:

As an Asian male student at MIT, I fit society’s image of a young programmer. Thus, throughout college, nobody ever said to me:
“Well, you only got into MIT because you’re an Asian boy.”
(while struggling with a problem set) “Well, not everyone is cut out for Computer Science; have you considered majoring in bio?”
(after being assigned to a class project team) “How about you just design the graphics while we handle the backend? It’ll be easier for everyone that way.”
“Are you sure you know how to do this?”
Although I started off as a complete novice (like everyone once was), I never faced any micro-inequities to impede my intellectual growth. Throughout college and grad school, I gradually learned more and more via classes, research, and internships, incrementally taking on harder and harder projects, and getting better and better at programming while falling deeper and deeper in love with it. Instead of doing my ten years of deliberate practice from ages 8 to 18, I did mine from ages 18 to 28. And nobody ever got in the way of my learning – not even inadvertently – because I looked like the sort of person who would be good at such things.

Michael Barone:

In a post-Christmas blog post my indefatigable American Enterprise Institute colleague Jim Pethokoukis points to a study that shows that no economy in the world rewards smart, skilled workers more than the United States. the study, by economists Eric Hanushek, Guido Schwerdt, Simon Wiederhold and Ludger Woessmann, and published by the National Bureau for Economic Research, quantifies the return on numeracy skills for the U.S. at 28 percent, significantly ahead of Ireland, Germany, Spain and the U.K., which range between 21 percent and 23 percent. Korea, Canada, Poland and Japan hover below 20 percent.
Pethokoukis argues that the higher returns come in “economies with more open, private-sector-based labor markets.” He goes on to ask, “Wouldn’t this seem to argue that higher U.S. inequality — based on pre-tax, pre-transfer market incomes — reflects 21st century market forces rewarding ability rather than some sort of breakdown in social norms.”
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To this (seemingly rhetorical) question I would answer “yes,” and would go on to say that it tends to confirm the thesis of my 2004 book Hard America, Soft America. In it, I contrasted Hard America — the parts of American society in which there is competition and accountability, and Soft America, the parts of American society in which there isn’t. K-12 education, in my view, is part of Soft America; the competitive market economy is part of Hard America.

Mark Peters:

After passing some of the most aggressive tax cuts in the nation, Kansas lawmakers are watching the state’s top court for a ruling that could force education spending to skyrocket.
The Kansas Supreme Court will determine whether the state must comply with a lower-court ruling requiring the GOP-led legislature and Republican Gov. Sam Brownback to increase annual funding for K-12 education by an estimated $450 million, or 14% above the previous year’s level. The timing of the ruling is unclear, but it could come to dominate the state legislative session that opens Monday.
The court battle, which came after school districts challenged how much money the state sends to towns and cities for K-12 education, is one of several across the U.S. that have pulled judges into the fights over how much states should spend on public education.
In Kansas, lawmakers started to push back against the courts last year. The Senate passed a bill to amend the state constitution so that such decisions on education spending would be up to the legislature. To go into effect, the proposed amendment would have to win approval in the House by a two-thirds majority and pass in a statewide vote.

Chris Rickert

“The test of any particular voting scheme is the quality of the candidates who are elected under it,” Hughes told me. “We currently have seven good board members. After the spring election we’ll continue to have seven good board members. I don’t see a problem.”
And here I thought that in a democracy the best test of a voting “scheme” was how well it represented the desires of the democracy’s citizens.
Silly me.

Saga Ringmar:

The western world watches China’s rise as a formidable world-power with a mixture of awe and apprehension. Sci-fi films depict a futuristic world where Baidu.com is the new Google and Mcdonalds has been replaced by Grandma Wang’s Dumpling Emporium. And yet again Shanghai is number one on the Programme for International Student Assessment’s (Pisa) 2012 ranking list of international education, and the US is once again at a low rank, this time 36th place. The US is desperate, and naturally the Chinese educational system seems like an answer. But let me tell you – this is not the case. I know; for two years I attended a local Shanghainese high school and this is the truth: they are terrible.
The biggest problem with Chinese education? It’s medieval. Shanghainese education is just like the stories my grandmother tells about high school in the 1940’s. Footage of military parades in Fascist Italy share an unnerving resemblance to the morning assemblies from my school in Shanghai. Chinese education would be a poison for America, not a remedy.
The problem is that there are too many Chinese students. Shanghainese classrooms have about 40 students and in the countryside classes have over 60. The most efficient way to organize all these children is by testing, categorizing and grading them – Chinese education is essentially elitist. Students that excel in school are rewarded with prizes and encouragement, but struggling students are abandoned. I once served as a translator for the principal of my school when seven Swedish principals came to visit Shanghai. The Swedes asked what the school did for students with “special needs” and the principal answered:

Bryan Alexander:

This concept, which I began to track in early 2012, built across multiple fronts in 2013. The bubble idea holds that colleges are overpriced, that student demand is questionable, and both could drop together. I have tested this concept throughout 2013 through social media and in-person presentation, using multiple trends and analyzes, and even developed an alternative model (peak higher education). My verdict now is… the bubble might be happening.
A series of major trends supported the bubble concept in 2013:
College and university tuition and fees continued to rise, despite several tuition freeze experiments. This is consistent with a rising bubble, among other interpretations.
Student debt rose throughout 2013, inspiring widespread anxiety. This is also consistent with a bubble (as well as other models: consumer behavior in a captive market, and also consumers reacting to media panic, etc.)
A number of institutions took drastic steps to stave off financial crisis, including merging with other campuses, ending academic programs, and laying off faculty (I dubbed the latter two “sacrificing the queen”). These events could be advance signs of a bubble about to pop.
The number of students taking classes went down across many sectors (see “Enrollment decline” above). If this continues, then that’s a sign of a bubble popping.
Some graduate programs suffered badly in 2013, most notably law schools, who saw declining revenues, applicants, graduates, and jobs.
Outside of campuses, political pressures remained steady. Some of this occurred in partisan terms, as Republicans extended their criticism of public K-12 to all of higher education, sometimes with an anti-union dimension.
Indeed, I find bubble arguments most often made by conservatives. However, 2013 also saw Democrats joining in for a full-court bipartisan press on higher education, from a presidential charge to build a new institutional assessment system to high-profile governors and mayors calling for reduced higher education fees.

Kimberly Hefling:

The GED test, for decades the brand name for the high school equivalency exam, is about to undergo some changes.
On Thursday, an upgraded GED exam and two new competing equivalency tests offered in several states will usher in a new era in adult education testing.
The GED (General Educational Development) exam was created in 1942 to help World War II veterans who dropped out of high school use college benefits offered under the GI Bill. This will be its first face-lift in more than a decade.
The revamped test is intended to be more rigorous and better aligned with the skills needed for college and today’s workplaces. The new test will only be offered on a computer, and it will cost more. What consumers pay for the test varies widely and depends on state assistance and other factors.
Even before its launch, officials in many states have balked at the cost increase and at doing away with paper-and-pencil testing. At least nine states — New York, New Hampshire, Missouri, Iowa, Montana, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine and West Virginia — severed ties with the GED test and adopted one of the two new tests that are entering the market. Three others — Wyoming, New Jersey and Nevada — will offer all three. Tennessee will offer the GED test and one other, and other states are expected to decide what to do in the coming months.

Kate Howard Perry

Name a factoid about a college — best party school, most military-friendly, et cetera — and a magazine or website somewhere is probably ranking it.
The implication of those measures is usually some publicity.
But a new ratings system proposed by President Barack Obama would put more than a college’s reputation at stake.
The nation’s colleges would be pitted against one another on measures such as graduation rates, student debt and cost of attendance under the president’s proposed system, aimed at putting a rating to the value colleges provide for their tuition dollars.
Obama said the plan is intended to hold down the cost of college and steer federal loans and grants toward those schools that rate the best. The schools that come out on top could eventually be rewarded with a bigger piece of the federal funding pie.

Radhika Nagpal:

As a young faculty member at Harvard, I got asked such questions a lot. Why did you choose this career? How do you do it? And I can’t blame them for asking, because I am scared by those myths too. I have chosen very deliberately to do specific things to preserve my happiness, lots of small practical things that I discovered by trial and error.
So when asked by graduate students and other junior faculty, I happily told them the things that worked for me, mostly in one-on-one meetings over coffee, and a few times publicly on panels. Of course, I said all these things without any proof that they lead to success, but with every proof that they led me to enjoy the life I was living.
Most people I talked to seemed surprised. Several of my close friends challenged me to write this down, saying that that I owed it to them. They told me that such things were not done and were not standard. That may be true. But what is definitely true, is that we rarely talk about what we actually do behind the scenes to cope with life. Revealing that is the scariest thing of all.
I’ve enjoyed my seven years as junior faculty tremendously, quietly playing the game the only way I knew how to. But recently I’ve seen several of my very talented friends become miserable in this job, and many more talented friends opt out. I feel that one of the culprits is our reluctance to openly acknowledge how we find balance. Or openly confront how we create a system that admires and rewards extreme imbalance. I’ve decided that I do not want to participate in encouraging such a world. In fact, I have to openly oppose it.

Dr. Bhashkar Mazumder:

In an era of rising income inequality, understanding the extent of economic mobility from one generation to the next in America has never been more important. Only if there is considerable opportunity for children from disadvantaged backgrounds to move beyond their parents’ place in the income distribution, may economic inequality be viewed as tolerable. This report introduces two new and flexible measures to examine upward relative mobility–the extent to which children can rise above their parents’ position when compared to their peers. The report also explores various factors that might account for racial differences in upward economic mobility rates.
Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and measuring family income averaged over several years, the report discusses the following key findings:
The vast majority of individuals, 71 percent, whose parents were in the bottom half of the income distribution actually improved their rankings relative to their parents. However, the amount of their movement was not large.

• Only about 45 percent of those who started in the bottom half moved
  up the income distribution by more than 20 percentiles relative to their
  parents’ ranking.

• Many of those who did manage to exceed their parents’ income started near the very bottom, where exceeding one’s parents is not a very steep hurdle.

As a result, only 38 percent of individuals who started in the bottom half of the income distribution moved to the top half of the distribution as adults

Eleanor Barkhorn:

When people talk about how to diversify the tech field, a common solution is, “Start earlier.” Rather than focus on getting women and minorities hired at tech startups or encouraging them to major in computer science in college, there should be a push to turn them on to the discipline when they’re still teenagers–or even younger.
“It’s already too late,” Paul Graham, founder of the tech entrepreneur boot camp Y Combinator, said last month in a controversial interview. “What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that.”
Right now, the “start early” strategy doesn’t seem to be working: The students doing advanced computer science work in high school remain overwhelmingly white and male. According to data from the College Board compiled by Georgia Tech’s Barbara Ericson, only a small percentage of the high-schoolers taking the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam are women. Black and Latino students make up an even lower percentage of the test-takers.

Douglas Belkin:

Well-off students at private schools have long subsidized poorer classmates. But as states grapple with the rising cost of higher education, middle-income students at public colleges in a dozen states now pay a growing share of their tuition to aid those lower on the economic ladder.
The student subsidies, which are distributed based on need, don’t show up on most tuition bills. But in eight years they have climbed 174% in real dollars at a dozen flagship state universities surveyed by The Wall Street Journal.
During the 2012-13 academic year, students at these schools transferred $512,401,435 to less well-off classmates, up from $186,960,962, in inflation-adjusted figures, in the 2005-06 school year.
Enlarge Image
Maria Giannopoulos, a 20-year-old junior at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, relies on the tuition help. Darren Hauck for The Wall Street Journal
At private schools without large endowments, more than half of the tuition may be set aside for financial-aid scholarships. At public schools, set-asides range between 5% and 40% according to the Journal’s survey.

Maria Konnikova:

In 1973, my high school, Acton-Boxborough Regional, in Acton, Massachusetts, moved to a sprawling brick building at the foot of a hill. Inspired by architectural trends of the preceding decade, the classrooms in one of its wings didn’t have doors. The rooms opened up directly onto the hallway, and tidbits about the French Revolution, say, or Benjamin Franklin’s breakfast, would drift from one classroom to another. Distracting at best and frustrating at worst, wide-open classrooms went, for the most part, the way of other ill-considered architectural fads of the time, like concrete domes. (Following an eighty-million-dollar renovation and expansion, in 2005, none of the new wings at A.B.R.H.S. have open classrooms.) Yet the workplace counterpart of the open classroom, the open office, flourishes: some seventy per cent of all offices now have an open floor plan.
The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve. In June, 1997, a large oil and gas company in western Canada asked a group of psychologists at the University of Calgary to monitor workers as they transitioned from a traditional office arrangement to an open one. The psychologists assessed the employees’ satisfaction with their surroundings, as well as their stress level, job performance, and interpersonal relationships before the transition, four weeks after the transition, and, finally, six months afterward. The employees suffered according to every measure: the new space was disruptive, stressful, and cumbersome, and, instead of feeling closer, coworkers felt distant, dissatisfied, and resentful. Productivity fell.

Madison’s Thoreau Elementary School was originally built with “open classrooms“.

D.G. Myers:

Tomorrow I will step into a classroom to begin the last semester of a 24-year teaching career. Don’t get me wrong. I am not retiring. I am not “burned out.” The truth is rather more banal. Ohio State University will not be renewing my three-year contract when it expires in the spring. The problem is tenure: with another three-year contract, tenure becomes an option. In an era of tight budgets, there is neither money nor place for a 61-year-old white male professor who has never really fit in nor tried very hard to. (Leave aside my heterodox politics and hard-to-credit publication record.) My feelings are like glue that will not set. The pieces fall apart in my hands.
This essay is not a contribution to the I-Quit-Academe genre. (A more accurate title in my case would be Academe Quits Me.) Although I have become uncomfortably aware that I am out of step with the purposeful march of the 21st-century university (or maybe I just never adjusted to Ohio State), gladly would I have learned and gladly continued to teach for as long as my students would have had me. The decision, though, was not my students’ to make. And I’m not at all sure that a majority would have voted to keep me around, even if they had been polled. My salary may not be large (a rounding error above the median income for white families in the U.S.), but the university can offer part-time work to three desperate adjuncts for what it pays me. A lifetime of learning has never been cost-effective, and in today’s university–at least on the side of campus where the humanities are badly housed–no other criterion is thinkable.

Mike Brownlee:

Ann Cook loved the library.
She spent hours upon hours during her 70 years there, reading about faraway lands, visions of the future and dramas about life and love.
As a gift to the institution that gave her so much joy, the former school teacher left $2.5 million to the Council Bluffs Public Library.
“I’m not surprised,” said Mildred Smock, head librarian from 1957 until her retirement in 1992.
“She was a great reader,” said Smock, who first met Cook when the library patron was a young girl. “She was in the library checking out books about once a week, very frequently. This was a long time ago, but in my recollection she read mostly fiction for pleasure.”
Cook supported the library financially throughout her life, thanks in part to money inherited from her parents, who also passed on their love of books and learning to their daughter. As an adult, Cook would stop by after school let out. She taught from 1964 to 1997 at Norris and the now-closed Bancroft Junior Highs in the Omaha Public Schools system. After retirement she spent even more time at the library, volunteering with the Friends of the Library organization.

Deborah Gerhardt:

My son Ben’s language arts teacher emailed one morning this winter to tell me she is leaving Ben’s school. I feel sick, but I don’t blame her. Three of Ben’s middle school teachers have left in the past year. North Carolina’s intentional assault on public education is working. It is pushing our best teachers out.
Ten years ago my family moved to Chapel Hill. A relatively low cost of living and bipartisan commitment to public education made North Carolina immensely attractive. There is plenty of historic precedent for devaluing public education in the South, and for many years North Carolina was not much different from its neighbors. In 1997 the state ranked 42nd in teacher pay. The year before, Gov. Jim Hunt had run on a platform to invest in public education. After he was elected, he worked with Republican House Speaker Harold Brubaker to focus on excellence in teaching and raised teacher salaries up to the national average in just four years. That bipartisan investment paid off. In the 1990s our public student test scores rose more than any other state’s. North Carolina became known as “the education state.” As recently as 2008, North Carolina paid teachers better than half the nation.
Things can change quickly, especially if you’re not looking. Now, the brand that attracted us–“the education state”–sounds like a grim joke. After six years of no real raises, we have fallen to 46th in teacher pay. North Carolina teachers earn nearly $10,000 less than the national average. And if you look at trends over the past decade, we rank dead last: After adjusting for inflation, North Carolina lowered teacher salaries nearly 16 percent from 2002 to 2012, while other states had a median decline of 1 percent. A first-year teacher in North Carolina makes $30,800. Our school district lost a candidate to a district in Kentucky because its starting salary was close to $40,000. It takes North Carolina teachers more than 15 years to earn $40,000; in Virginia it may take only four. Gap store managers on average make about $56,000.

Paul Fain:

Maryland’s public colleges are six months into complying with one of the nation’s most ambitious college completion bills. The state-mandated push puts Maryland in a class with Tennessee, Indiana and Georgia.
“It represents a defining moment for public higher education in the state of Maryland,” said Charlene M. Dukes, president of Prince George’s Community College. “It sets a whole new tone.”
A few educators said they were uneasy about the state’s Legislature getting so deep in the weeds with legislation that touches on everything from dual enrollment to remediation and completion plans for each student. (See below for more details about the measure.)
Making the many required changes has been a heavy lift at times. But several college leaders said the comprehensive nature of the legislation was a virtue.
That’s because Maryland’s completion law, which was enacted in July, deals simultaneously with K-12, community colleges and four-year institutions. Experts say attempted completion fixes, such as improving remedial course success rates, can benefit from reaching across the various stages of public education.
“If we really want to deal with developmental education,” said Bernie Sadusky, executive director of the Maryland Association of Community Colleges, “we have to go to the source of the problem. That is K-12.”

Stephen Sawchuk:

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has announced that she’ll call for the end of using “value added” measures as a component in teacher-evaluation systems.
Politico first reported that the AFT is beginning a campaign to discredit the measures, beginning with the catchy (if not totally original) slogan “VAM is a sham.” We don’t yet know exactly what this campaign will encompass, but it will apparently include an appeal to the U.S. Department of Education, generally a proponent of VAM.
Value-added methods use statistical algorithms to figure out how much each teacher contributes to his or her students’ learning, holding constant factors like student demographics.
In all, though, Weingarten’s announcement is less major policy news than it is something of a retreat to a former position.
When I first interviewed Weingarten about the use of test scores in evaluation systems, in 2008, she said that educators have “a moral, statistical, and educational reason not to use these things for teacher evaluation.”

Much more on “value added assessment”, here.

Associated Press:

A Los Angeles library plans to take its role as a place of learning a step farther and will start offering residents the opportunity to get an accredited high school diploma.
The Los Angeles Public Library announced Thursday that it is teaming up with a private online learning company to debut the program for high school dropouts, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.
It’s the latest step in the transformation of public libraries in the digital age as they move to establish themselves beyond just being a repository of books to a full educational institution, said the library’s director, John Szabo.
Since taking over the helm in 2012, Szabo has pledged to reconnect the library system to the community and has introduced a number of new initiatives to that end, including offering 850 online courses for continuing education and running a program that helps immigrants complete the requirements for U.S. citizenship.

Jordan Weissman:

When newspaper editors are in the mood to run a good old-fashioned screed about the collapsing value of college, they inevitably turn to Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist who runs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. Vedder likes to argue that the financial return on a B.A. is falling, graduates are chronically underemployed, and that our profligate universities are in for a reckoning once everyone wises up and stops throwing their money away. (For what it’s worth, I tend to disagree).
Today Vedder and one of his students, Christopher Denhart, have upped the ante a bit for The Wall Street Journal, where they’ve published an op-ed titled, “How the College Bubble Will Pop.” The reckoning, they say, is already upon us, as total college enrollment has fallen 1.5 percent since 2012.
“What’s causing the decline?” they ask. “While changing demographics–specifically, a birth dearth in the mid-1990s–accounts for some of the shift, robust foreign enrollment offsets that lack. The answer is simple: The benefits of a degree are declining while costs rise.”
It’s an alluring theory. But their evidence falls apart under even the lightest inspection.

Madison School District (PDF):

This budget forecast and those that will follow are intended to keep the board informed as the budget development process unfolds. The forecasts also provide an opportunity for board discussion and input into important budget development issues.
MMSD’s Strategic Framework establishes the direction of the school district. The framework is supported by the annual budget, which is simply the resource strategy behind the Strategic Framework. The budget process begins with a thorough review of district priorities, current spending patterns, and outcomes. The zero- based budget process requires a critical examination of all budget practices and how those practices influence resource deployment.
Based upon our budget work thus far, we believe there are opportunities to make the staffing process more responsive to individual school needs, to shift non- personnel resources from central office budgets to school budgets, and to improve budget accuracy by clarifying and simplifying account structures. We’re excited to explore these and other opportunities throughout the 2014-15 budget process.
Zero-based Approach to Budget Development:
A zero-based approach is being used to develop the expenditure budget. Unlike an ‘historical cost’ budget or a ‘cost to continue’ budget, the zero-based process is intended to go beyond marginal refinements of existing budgets and existing structures.
For example, MMSD has used essentially the same staffing allocation process for over ten years under the ‘cost to continue’ approach, with only minor modifications along the way. While the existing allocation process is uniform and consistent, it can be improved by making it more responsive to the challenges presented by individual schools. The senior leadership team, with input from the principals, is assessing the staffing allocation process this month before any allocation decisions are put into motion in February.
The existing staff allocation process consists of a series of departmental layers, with separate staffing allocations for regular education, special education, Title 1, OMGE, pupil services, PBS, etc. We are hopeful that a more integrated and responsive staffing allocation process, beginning this year and refined continuously in subsequent years, will produce a more tailored fit for each school. The zero-based approach is designed to uncover such opportunities.
The zero-based process also includes in-depth reviews of each central office department. We are particularly interested in identifying inter-departmental overlaps, gaps, and even redundancies. We are optimistic that this effort will produce new efficiencies and help push resources from the district office into the schools.
Strategic Priorities Drive the Budget:
The resource decisions contained in the annual budget are subject to continuous review, either directly through the zero-based budget process, or indirectly through the SIP process, district surveys, targeted studies (such as the Principal Pipeline study [PDF] and High School Reform study), and several active advisory committees. These are the sources which inform the budget development process.
The Strategic Framework identifies five key priorities which are aimed at providing schools with the tools, processes and resources they need to serve children and their families better than ever before. The five priorities are: (1) Coherent Instruction, (2) Personalized Pathways, (3) Family and Community Engagement, (4) A Thriving Workforce, and (5) Accountability at All Levels.
Each of the priorities in the Strategic Framework includes a set of high-leverage actions that have cost implications. A preview of some of the major actions with cost implications, organized by Priority Area, will be developed and refined throughout the budget development process. A preview of the major actions will be presented to the Operations Work Group along with this Budget Forecast.

The word cloud is interesting, particularly in light of the District’s job number one, addressing its long term disastrous reading results.
Related: numerous links on the District’s 2013-2014 budget, here. Madison spends about twice the national average per student ($15k).

Michael Staton:

The credential — the degree or certificate — has long been the quintessential value proposition of higher education. Americans have embraced degrees with a fervor generally reserved for bologna or hot dogs. Everyone should have them! Many and often! And their perceived value elsewhere in the world — in Asia in particular — is if anything even higher.
From the evaluator’s standpoint, credentials provide signals that allow one to make quick assumptions about a candidate’s potential contribution to an organization and their ability to flourish on the job. To a prospective student (or parent), the value lies in assuming these signals will be accepted in employment markets and other times of social evaluation. These signals have long been known to be imperfect, but they were often the only game in town. Thus, a degree from a top university has been seen to contain crucial information about a person’s skills, networks, and work habits.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Two factors have so far shielded the American university from the sort of criticism that it so freely levels against almost every other institution in American life. (1) For decades a college education has been considered the key to an ascendant middle-class existence. (2) Until recently a college degree was not tantamount to lifelong debt. In other words, American society put up with a lot of arcane things from academia, given that it offered something — a BA or BS degree — that almost everyone agreed was a ticket to personal security and an educated populace.
Not now. Colleges have gone rogue and become virtual outlaw institutions. Graduates owe an aggregate of $1 trillion in student debt, borrowed at interest rates far above home-mortgage rates — all on the principle that universities could charge as much as they liked, given that students could borrow as much as they needed in federally guaranteed loans.

Eleanor Barkhorn:

Record-low temperatures caused by the Polar Vortex have forced schools across the country to close this week. Weather-related school cancellations tend to raise anxieties about whether we’re a nation of wimps. During President Obama’s first winter in Washington, he complained when his daughters’ school closed for bad weather: “We’re going to have to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this town.” In response to this latest round of school closings, a Virginia mom sighed, “Hasn’t anyone heard of gloves, scarf and a hat when it’s cold?? Just bundle up–people do it all over the world. We are such wimps to cancel school.”
A story about a teacher assigned to a one-room schoolhouse in South Dakota in the 1880s will confirm suspicions that America has gone soft when it comes to dealing with the cold. The story is from These Happy Golden Years, the second-to-last book in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved “Little House” series about growing up on the American frontier. It describes the protagonist, a 15-year-old teacher named Laura, traveling a half a mile in the snow to get to school:

Richard Vedder & Christopher Denhart:

The American political class has long held that higher education is vital to individual and national success. The Obama administration has dubbed college “the ticket to the middle class,” and political leaders from Education Secretary Arne Duncan to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have hailed higher education as the best way to improve economic opportunity. Parents and high-school guidance counselors tend to agree.
Yet despite such exhortations, total college enrollment has fallen by 1.5% since 2012. What’s causing the decline? While changing demographics–specifically, a birth dearth in the mid-1990s–accounts for some of the shift, robust foreign enrollment offsets that lack. The answer is simple: The benefits of a degree are declining while costs rise.
A key measure of the benefits of a degree is the college graduate’s earning potential–and on this score, their advantage over high-school graduates is deteriorating. Since 2006, the gap between what the median college graduate earned compared with the median high-school graduate has narrowed by $1,387 for men over 25 working full time, a 5% fall. Women in the same category have fared worse, losing 7% of their income advantage ($1,496).
A college degree’s declining value is even more pronounced for younger Americans. According to data collected by the College Board, for those in the 25-34 age range the differential between college graduate and high school graduate earnings fell 11% for men, to $18,303 from $20,623. The decline for women was an extraordinary 19.7%, to $14,868 from $18,525.

Laura Waters:

Okay, maybe he’s no shrinking violet, but it’s worth taking note that almost exactly two years ago today Christie signed A-4394/S-3148, a law that gives school districts the right to bypass school budget votes if they move school board member elections to November.
After years of dissent from the New Jersey Education Association and the NJ School Boards Association, the bill, mostly sponsored by Democrats in the Statehouse, passed quietly, forever changing the dynamics of school board politics and fiscal strategy. Final vote tallies were 34-3 in the Senate and 62-11 in the Assembly.
Wait: you mean school board elections used to be in April?

Tom Lovelace:

In October 2013, I posted an essay, “PISA’s China Problem,” that called on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to fully disclose its arrangement with China regarding Shanghai’s participation in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The latest PISA scores were to be released in December, offering an excellent opportunity for the OECD to dispel the mystery surrounding Shanghai’s 2009 involvement with PISA. I noted that Shanghai, the wealthiest, most educated province in China, was the only mainland province officially participating in PISA 2009 and PISA 2012. Other data from rural areas of China had been talked about by PISA officials over the years, but never released to the public domain. I called on PISA to release those data.
When the latest PISA scores came out in December, nothing had changed. I followed up with a second essay. I again urged full transparency. I also challenged PISA’s portrayal of Shanghai as a “high equity” school system. An extensive literature–including excellent journalism and both qualitative and quantitative scholarship–documents the cruel effects of the hukou system on migrants in Shanghai. Hukou is an internal registration system in China that limits rural migrants’ access to urban public services, in particular, to schools. These migrants are Chinese citizens, mind you, not immigrants from other countries. They have simply moved from rural areas to China’s big cities, or, because the hukou is inherited, they were born in one of China’s big cities but because of their family’s rural hukou, have become second generation migrants in the eyes of the state.

Megan McArdle:

Last week, I wrote that collectively, faculty need to deal with the terrible market for professorships by producing fewer potential professors: admitting a lot fewer students to graduate school. Graduate school doesn’t exploit students the way that, say, a third-tier law school program does — the students are paid, not paying vast sums for degrees they can’t use. But by wildly overproducing graduate students, academia is doing something just as bad, in a different way: encouraging overoptimistic (OK, maybe arrogant) kids to spend their formative years in the labor market pursuing jobs they aren’t so likely to get, then hiring the excess students as essentially casual labor at low wages.
There are two criticisms I’ve received that seem worth responding to. The first is that I myself work in a profession that looks a lot like a tournament: a lucky few at the top, and a lot of hopefuls who don’t make it. That’s absolutely true. But I don’t encourage young people to seek jobs in the profession; I tell them the math is terrible and getting worse, and they should do something else. The economics of the industry are very bad, unless you are lucky enough to work for a place like Bloomberg News, which doesn’t depend on advertising. I certainly don’t get paid to train them for journalism jobs that they probably won’t get.
That said, most people don’t spend five or six or eight years just preparing to be eligible to get a job in journalism, and an additional four years or so cycling through post-docs before it becomes clear that that journalism job isn’t going to happen. Nor, when they are six years into their first permanent job, do they have a committee that meets to decide whether to fire them and put them back on the job market, quite possibly with very poor prospects. They don’t have to move to towns in the middle of nowhere or give up relationships because their partners will never be able to find work in the Ozarks. Female journalists do not have to put off starting a family until they’re pushing 40 because it would be insane to reproduce before the tenure committee approves them. The opportunity costs of trying to become a journalist are quite a bit lower than the opportunity costs of trying to become an academic.

David Kirp:

AMERICAN students are enrolling in college in record numbers, but they’re also dropping out in droves. Barely half of those who start four-year colleges, and only a third of community college students, graduate. That’s one of the worst records among developed nations, and it’s a substantial drain on the economy. The American Institutes for Research estimates the cost of those dropouts, measured in lost earnings and taxes, at $4.5 billion.
Incalculable are the lost opportunities for social mobility and the stillborn professional careers.
There’s a remedy at hand, though, and it’s pretty straightforward. Nationwide, universities need to give undergraduates the care and attention akin to what’s lavished on students at elite institutions.
If that help is forthcoming, graduation rates more than double, according to several evaluations of an innovative program at the City University of New York’s community colleges.

Jennifer Kabbany:

A Youth Misery Index that measures young Americans’ woes has skyrocketed under President Barack Obama and hit an all-time high.
The index, released Wednesday, was calculated by adding youth unemployment and average college loan debt figures with each person’s share of the national debt. While it has steadily grown over the decades, under Obama the figure has shot up dramatically, from 83.5 in 2009 to 98.6 in 2013.
The index has increased by 18.1 percent since Obama took office, the highest increase under any president, making Obama the worst president for youth economic opportunity, according to the nonprofit that released the figure.
“Young people are suffering under this economy,” said Ashley Pratte, program officer for Young America’s Foundation, which developed the index and calculates it annually using federal statistics. “They’re still living in their parent’s basements, unable to find full-time jobs that pay them what they need in order to pay back their debt.”
Youth unemployment in 2013 was 16.3 percent, and student loan debt came in at a record-breaking average of $29,400 last year, the foundation points out; what’s more, each person’s share of the roughly $17 trillion dollar national debt stands at its highest level ever: $52,948.

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

MTI represents nearly 3,000 teachers in the Madison Metropolitan School District. Of that number, over 96% are members of their Union. That number has been rising since Governor Walker, as he described it, “dropped the bomb” on public employees and collective bargaining almost three years ago.
However, there are currently several hundred MMSD employees in the teacher bargaining unit who are not members of MTI. They choose to be “fair share” contributors – that is, they pay a maintenance fee to the Union for all of the rights and benefits MTI has negotiated for them and provides to them, even though they are not members of their Union. These individuals have no voice in what issues MTI pursues; how MTI is governed; and can’t vote on MTI contracts, or in the election of MTI officers.
Faculty Representatives in each school and work location receive, on a monthly basis, updated lists of members and fair share contributors. What can you do? Share this article with fair share teachers at your work location, and have a discussion about the many rights and benefits MTI has negotiated on their behalf over the last 45 years, e.g., a never-ending salary schedule, health, dental and life insurance, due process, retirement, TERP, leaves of absence, paid sick leave, paid holidays and FMLA integration, to name a few.

Jon Marcus:

Greg Noll, a senior at Columbia University, balances his engineering major with a federally subsidized “work-study” job at the university’s fitness center, where he fills spray bottles, wipes sweat off the machines, and picks up towels for twenty hours a week. The $9-an-hour wage he’s paid is underwritten by the federal work-study program, which was launched in 1964 to support low-income students who would not otherwise be able to afford college.
While Noll and his counterparts at Columbia and other pricey, top-tier private colleges and universities no doubt benefit from the program–Noll says he uses the money to buy books and food and to go out with his friends on the weekends–they are not necessarily the intended recipients of aid from the $1.2 billion federal program. Noll’s family, for instance, makes $140,000 a year, which he says, rightly, puts them squarely in the upper-middle class. In fact, researchers at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, have found that only 43 percent of students who receive work study meet the federal definition of financial need as determined by whether they also receive Pell Grants. Work study “disproportionately benefits the students who need it the least,” says Rory O’Sullivan, research and policy director at the youth advocacy organization Young Invincibles.
A major source of the problem stems from the fact that the work-study program uses a fifty-year-old formula to determine how federal funds are allocated. Unlike other federal financial aid programs that distribute money according to how many students at a university actually need aid, money for the work-study program is based instead on how much a university received the previous year, and how much it charges for tuition.

Marian Wang:

Higher education may seem like a different world, but universities in many ways have been working from the same playbook.
Savvier college-bound consumers know that the so-called “sticker price” of tuition and fees at a given college or university isn’t what many – or even most – students pay.
Take American University, where 74 percent of full-time freshmen got a grant or scholarship – essentially, a discount off the list price – for the 2011-2012 school year. Or Drexel University, where that figure was 98 percent.
At nearly 200 schools, 100 percent of full-time freshmen got a scholarship, as DePaul University’s Jon Boeckenstedt points out.

Colin Robinson:

“TO read a novel is a difficult and complex art,” Virginia Woolf wrote in a 1925 essay, “How to Read a Book.” Today, with our powers of concentration atrophied by the staccato communication of the Internet and attention easily diverted to addictive entertainment on our phones and tablets, book-length reading is harder still.
It’s not just more difficult to find the time and focus that a book demands. Longstanding allies of the reader, professionals who have traditionally provided guidance for those picking up a book, are disappearing fast. The broad, inclusive conversation around interesting titles that such experts helped facilitate is likewise dissipating. Reading, always a solitary affair, is increasingly a lonely one.
A range of related factors have brought this to a head. Start with the publishing companies: Overall book sales have been anemic in recent years, declining 6 percent in the first half of 2013 alone. But the profits of publishers have remained largely intact; in the same period only one of what were then still the “big six” trade houses reported a decline on its bottom line. This is partly because of the higher margins on e-books. But it has also been achieved by publishers cutting costs, especially for mid-list titles.

Kate Howard Perry

Name a factoid about a college — best party school, most military-friendly, et cetera — and a magazine or website somewhere is probably ranking it.
The implication of those measures is usually some publicity.
But a new ratings system proposed by President Barack Obama would put more than a college’s reputation at stake.
The nation’s colleges would be pitted against one another on measures such as graduation rates, student debt and cost of attendance under the president’s proposed system, aimed at putting a rating to the value colleges provide for their tuition dollars.
Obama said the plan is intended to hold down the cost of college and steer federal loans and grants toward those schools that rate the best. The schools that come out on top could eventually be rewarded with a bigger piece of the federal funding pie.

Shanna Mallon:

As Mark Twain famously wrote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” His point? Strong writing is lean writing.
When you want to make your writing more powerful, cut out words you don’t need–such as the 10 included in this post:
1. Just: The word “just” is a filler word that weakens your writing. Removing it rarely affects meaning, but rather, the deletion tightens a sentence.
2. Really: Using the word “really” is an example of writing the way you talk. It’s a verbal emphasis that doesn’t translate perfectly into text. In conversation, people use the word frequently, but in written content it’s unnecessary. Think about the difference between saying a rock is “hard” and “really hard,” for example. What does the word add? Better to cut it out to make your message stronger.