Stephanie Simon:

It’s designed to be an impressive show of force: Thousands of unionized teachers plan to rally Monday in cities from New York to San Francisco to “reclaim the promise of public education.”
Behind the scenes, however, teachers unions are facing tumultuous times. Long among the wealthiest and most powerful interest groups in American politics, the unions are grappling with financial, legal and public-relations challenges as they fight to retain their clout and build alliances with a public increasingly skeptical of big labor.
“I do think it’s a moment of truth,” said Lance Alldrin, a veteran high-school teacher in Corning, Calif., who has split from his longtime union after serving for a decade as the local president.
The National Education Association has lost 230,000 members, or 7 percent, since 2009, and it’s projecting another decline this year, which will likely drop it below 3 million members. Among the culprits: teacher layoffs, the rise of non-unionized charter schools and new laws in states such as Wisconsin and Michigan freeing teachers to opt out of the union.
The American Federation of Teachers has been able to grow slightly and now represents 1.5 million workers — but because many new members are retirees or part-timers who pay lower dues, union revenue actually fell last year, by nearly $6 million, federal records show.

Marian Wang:

Sallie Mae and other large student-loan servicers — the companies that act as a go-between for borrowers and lenders — will soon be getting some regular oversight from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency announced this week.
ProPublica and others have long documented student borrowers’ troubles with the companies that handle the day-to-day collection of student-loan payments and communicate with borrowers.
“Student loan servicers can have a profound impact on borrowers and their families,” CFPB Director Richard Cordray said Monday in a call with reporters. “Given how quickly this market has grown and the recent uptick in delinquency rates, it is important for us to ensure that borrowers receive appropriate attention from their servicers.”

WISTAX: On December property tax bill, statewide school levies up 0.8%, counties up 1.2%, technical colleges up 1.3%

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJMattD4) December 9, 2013

Madison’s school property taxes will increase by 3.38% after a 9% increase a few years ago. Meanwhile, Middleton’s property taxes are 16% less than Madison’s on a similar home.

Pat Schneider:

But statistics showing African-American students in the district were eight times more likely to get an out-of-school suspension than white students last year raises questions about whether the discipline code works against efforts to close the achievement gap.
Among big school districts reconsidering such measures is Broward County in Florida, where a zero-tolerance policy led to arrests for such infractions as possessing marijuana or spraying graffiti, the New York Times reports. That district, which had more than 1,000 arrests in the 2011 school year, entered into an agreement last month with community organizations to overhaul its policies to de-emphasize punishment. School districts in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Denver are undertaking similar reviews of get-tough policies.
“Everybody knows that suspensions don’t always achieve a change in behavior,” says Tim Ritchie, dean of students at Madison Memorial High School. “When we send some kids out of school (on suspension) they don’t have anywhere appropriate to go — their homes can be very chaotic environments.”

Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum.

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

t would be terrific if three or more people run for Passman’s open seat, triggering a Feb. 18 primary, followed by the general election April 1. That would allow more debate — and community engagement — on the future of our schools.
The School Board seat held by president Ed Hughes also is up for election this spring. We admire Hughes for his public service. He’s capable and level-headed.
But incumbents shouldn’t get a free pass. We hope someone — or more than one challenger — will step forward to give voters a choice.
When it comes to School Board elections, the more candidates, the better. Our community deserves the best leaders possible.

Much more on the 2014 Madison School Board election, here.

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

The District is currently experiencing a shortage of substitute teachers, which has led to a high number of unfilled assignments when a teacher or SEA is absent. As a result, many principals are asking teachers and other professional staff to cover for the absent teacher. When this occurs, members of MTI’s “Teacher” Bargaining Unit are likely to qualify to receive “class coverage compensation.” Class coverage pay is $22 for each hour of covering another teacher’s students. The Contract mandates that in the event a teacher’s absence cannot be covered by a substitute, volunteers must first be solicited to cover the classes. If no volunteers come forward, the building administrator can assign other certified staff.
Compensation for class coverage is provided by Section III-R of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and is paid under the following conditions:

450K PDF:

Reminders of Best Practice
Current Practice
Data from MMSD
Review input from Focus Groups
Examine Implications for Policy
Examine Implications for Practice

Related: Parent talented & gifted complaint, MAP Assessment results, English 10, credit for non-Madison school district courses and outbound open enrollment.

Greg:

But this year, thanks to Ohio’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee and State Board of Education, the magic number is 28 points. Score more than 27 and it is presumed that the child is wholly prepared to advance forward without required intervention while a score of 27 or less forces the child, the school, and the parents to engage in interventions that may not be appropriately aligned to any particular reading deficiency nor specifically aligned to the exact struggles the child is dealing with.
It is this type of one-size-fits-all educational approach that has widespread opposition from a diverse group of education advocates on the left and the far right:
“When it comes to learning, one size does not fit all.” – School Choice Ohio
“In this environment, and especially in this age of sophisticated data, we shouldn’t put too much stock in an instrument as crude as a “one size fits all” standardized test.” – NEA President Dennis Van Roekel
“I think one of the problems that we have had in public education is thinking that one size fits all, and we just know that doesn’t work for all children.” – Ohio Superintendent Richard Ross

DD Guttenplan:

Like a school principal handing out a clutch of C grades, Andreas Schleicher unveiled the results from the latest round of the Program for International Student Assessment tests last week.
For Britain, the United States and most of Western Europe, the results ranged from “average” to “poor.” British students, for example, scored exactly average in mathematics and slightly above average in reading and science. French students were slightly below average in science and slightly above in reading and mathematics. The United States were below average in mathematics and science but slightly above in reading.
For Asian countries, the news was much more encouraging, with students from Shanghai topping the chart by a considerable margin, but with students from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea all closely bunched at the high end.
Mr. Schleicher, the head of education at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the tests every three years to about half a million 15-year-olds in 65 countries around the world, also noted significant improvement in Vietnam. He described it as a poor country whose students outperformed peers from many wealthier nations — and did even better once differences in income were taken into account.
“On a level playing field, the British look even worse,” he said at a press conference here.
Western countries, Mr. Schleicher warned, should not to comfort themselves with the myth that Asian high performance is the result of education systems that favor memorization over creativity.

Ryan Lawler

Clever launched about a year and a half ago to provide a standardized API for K-12 schools that allows them to unlock and share data with outside developers. It’s managed to get 10,000 schools signed up to use its tools since then. Now, according to our sources, the company has raised $10 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital.
The funding comes as Clever is finding ways to make schools more connected and accessible for developers. Most schools today use a variety of legacy Student Information Systems (SIS) as a way to store student data. But many of those systems tend to be outdated or custom-built, meaning that the information held within — which includes class lists, attendance, and grades — can’t be shared or accessed by outside developers.
For developers, that means integrating with individual schools on a one-to-one basis, and that just doesn’t scale. Clever, by contrast, provides a single, universal API that will allow developers and education companies to access all the data that has been locked up in legacy silos and use it in their apps.

Ravi Sinha:

It is unusual for school students to be worrying about the “collective”. But, then, yours seems to be an unusual school. When I was here the last time, you were pondering the “continuum”. I find it truly remarkable. To grapple with issues and concepts that are deeply philosophical and at the same time of immense practical value – and doing so at a young age – is an ingredient that goes into the making of great civilizations. In a world that seems to revel in everything that is crass and commercial, and in a country that appears like a continent of cacophony and shallowness, this is not expected of you. You and your teachers must be congratulated for swimming against the tide.
Collective is something that falls between a collection and the composite. There is ample space between these two categories, and where exactly does a collective fall in this space depends on what kind of collective we are talking about. But let us first talk a bit about the endpoints of this space.A collection can be gathering together of arbitrary and distinct elements as in a mathematical set. A set comprising of a frog, a princess, a pencil and a magic wand will qualify as a collection. A collection can also be of identical but distinct elements. A collection of four identical horses pulling Raja Dasharath’s chariot – or ten identical horses pulling King Solomon’s chariot – is also a collection, although you could also call it a team of horses. You may notice that we are already shifting from the concept of an arbitrary collection, although you would still not say that the chariot is being pulled by a collective of horses.

Sarah Johnson:

For some juniors and seniors at Union High School, their choice of electives will soon be seemingly endless.
The R-XI school board unanimously approved a program that will allow these students to take Massive Open Online Courses, or “MOOCs” for a half a credit next semester.
The class will be pass/fail and will not count toward the student’s overall grade point average.
MOOCs are offered by universities worldwide, including some of the most highly accredited U.S. institutions such as Harvard, Yale or MIT.
They cover just about any subject imaginable, from The Beatles to the Big Bang Theory, or foreign languages to physics.
Dr. Justin Tarte, director of curriculum and support services, said about 40 students are already in the required application process to take these courses next semester.
Students must go through an interview process with their guidance counselor and other officials to justify why they want to take MOOCs. Once approved for the program, students will be responsible for finding enough of them to fill an 18-week semester.

Alan Borsuk:

The test results aren’t good. Get different tests.
That may sound like a kill-the-messenger response to why American kids keep getting unsatisfying results on standardized tests. Tests don’t give wrong answers — kids do.
But that’s one way of looking at the huge changes afoot for testing, including in Wisconsin. At the same time, criticism of testing is gaining momentum and may have an effect I would not have expected even recently. There is a chance we could see, in Wisconsin and nationwide, a much better, more insightful world of standardized tests soon. And there is a chance we’re heading toward a colossal testing mess.
“I think the country is at a moment of truth on testing, a really important one,” Marc Tucker, CEO and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and a major figure in national efforts to raise education standards, said last week. Tucker spoke in response to release of a high-profile round of international tests that showed no progress for American kids in reading and math and a growing number of nations doing better than the United States.
The building heat around testing has several big themes.
For one, it is the partner issue with the controversies over the Common Core standards that are being implemented in 90% of states, including Wisconsin, and which are drawing increasing criticism. Standards are goals for what children should learn. Broad-scale tests are the way to find out how they’re doing and compare kids in, say, your school or state with kids in another school or state. But that is valid only if the tests are worthy of the task — which is where a lot of debate lies.

James Somers:

“It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.” Douglas Hofstadter is in a grocery store in Bloomington, Indiana, picking out salad ingredients. “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say–maybe they wouldn’t go this far–but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done.”
Hofstadter says this with an easy deliberateness, and he says it that way because for him, it is an uncontroversial conviction that the most-exciting projects in modern artificial intelligence, the stuff the public maybe sees as stepping stones on the way to science fiction–like Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing supercomputer, or Siri, Apple’s iPhone assistant–in fact have very little to do with intelligence. For the past 30 years, most of them spent in an old house just northwest of the Indiana University campus, he and his graduate students have been picking up the slack: trying to figure out how our thinking works, by writing computer programs that think.

Susannah Newsmith:

Two big evaluations of education in the Sunshine State came out this week–and readers can be excused for feeling a bit confused, because they tell rather different stories about the state of Florida’s schools.
Eleven newspapers around the state went front-page this week with stories highlighting the release of teacher evaluation data. The vast majority of Florida teachers–98 percent–were rated “effective” or “highly effective.”
Meanwhile, two papers–the Lakeland Ledger (which ran wire copy) and The Palm Beach Post (subscription-only) gave A1 placement to stories about Florida’s results on the Program for International Student Assessment, which tests students in more than 60 countries. (Florida was one of three US states to pay for state-specific results.) The numbers weren’t sparkling: Florida kids fared roughly in line with the US and international averages in reading, and similar to the lackluster US average but well below the international standard in science. In math, the state’s results were worst of all: well below the US average and “similar to Croatia,” as the Post story put it, with 30 percent of students scoring as “low achievers.”
The demographic challenges in Florida’s schools are real, but still there’s an obvious question here: How can the state’s teachers be doing such a great job while students can’t compete with international peers and struggle to keep up with already-middling US scores?

Jessica Vanegeren:

When asked if politics and the resistance from the tea party had eroded the chances of Common Core moving forward in Wisconsin, Evers said the politics surrounding the issue have created a lot of misinformation.
“It’s important for everyone, including those on these committees, to realize that this is about our students being college and career ready,” Evers said. “These standards have been embraced by districts across the state for the past three years. I think it is the right thing to do for the kids to keep the standards in place. That’s the bottom line.”

Michael Stratford:

The average debt that borrowers of student loans had at graduation continued to rise last year, climbing to $29,400 for the class of 2012, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS).
This year’s figure is up by almost 10 percent compared with the group’s estimate last year of $26,600 and increased an average of 6 percent each year from 2008 to 2012, the report says. TICAS derives its estimates from data the federal government collects every four years as well as information that colleges report on a voluntary basis to an annual survey by Peterson’s college guide.
As in previous years, the report shows a wide variation in average student debt loads across different states and institutions. Delaware and New Hampshire lead the list of the highest-debt states, with average debt levels of $33,649 and $32,698, respectively. Meanwhile, New Mexico’s average student debt of $17,994 gives the state the distinction of the lowest-debt state. California was the second-lowest-debt state with $20,269.

Susan Newman:

Lately the question “Is College Necessary?” has been under debate. One factor sparking the debate is the record 85 percent of recent college grads living with their parents. While economists and academics argue about the benefits of a college education and the loan debt incurred by many students, what are recent college grads thinking, especially those who can’t find jobs or if they do, cannot support themselves?
In this guest post, Cristina Schreil, a 2011 graduate of New York University who majored in English Literature and Journalism, investigated how her generation feels about the expectations they had and what they feel now–diplomas in hand. Like many of her peers, she admits, “in no way am I supporting myself 100 percent, but I am still pursuing the goal of working in journalism full time. I think it’s going to be a long journey.” Here is what Cristina learned about her peer’s attitudes and struggles:

Ann Lukits:

Learning how to wave bye-bye is an important milestone for an infant that usually occurs between the age of 10 months and a year. A study in Pediatrics International found premature infants mastered the bye-bye gesture significantly later than full-term babies and used different hand and wrist motions.
Babies are born with an innate ability to imitate that develops throughout infancy. Research has shown this ability is controlled by circuitry in the brain that regulates the development of the visual and fine motor skills required to imitate others. The timing of bye-bye imitations and the type of hand motions used may be an important indicator of a premature infant’s developmental state, the researchers said.
The study in Japan compared bye-bye waving in 597 full-term and 95 premature infants, using their corrected age, or their age if they had been born full term. (Corrected age estimates a premature baby’s developmental age by subtracting the number of weeks the infant was premature from his chronological age.)
Mothers reported the age at which their babies started to wave bye-bye. The infants’ hand motions were analyzed from video recordings made at well-baby checkups, where researchers said goodbye to each infant orally and with hand motions.

OECD Publishing:

Students in 2012 were more likely than their counterparts in 2003 to have attended at least one year of pre-primary education.
While more 15-old students reported to have enrolled in pre-primary education during the period, many of the students who reported that they had not attended pre-primary school are disadvantaged – the students who could benefit most from pre-primary education.
If offered a choice of schools for their child, parents are more likely to consider such criteria as “a safe school environment” and “a school’s good reputation” more important than “high academic achievement of students in the school”.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Missouri’s most pressing public policy problem is what to do about school districts in urban areas that fail to make the grade. When the Missouri Legislature returns in January, resolving both the issue of what to do with unaccredited school districts, and how to make sure students in those districts have an opportunity to attend quality schools, should be the top priority.
Unfortunately, as is too common in Missouri, the two primary sides of the debate — the education establishment and reformers who want some form of school choice — are once again at odds.
Make no mistake: This fight is personal, particularly for education commissioner Chris Nicastro and suspended Ferguson-Florissant schools superintendent Art McCoy, who are battling for their jobs for daring to support elements of the reform movement.

Abby Wisse Schachter:

It sounds like the opening line of a joke, “A father walked up to his kid’s school and gets arrested…” but watch the video of Jim Howe trying to pick up his kids from South Cumberland Elementary School in Cumberland County, Tennessee, and you’ll sooner cry than laugh. That’s because Howe’s alleged crime waswalking into the school building and asking to take his children now that classes were over. Howe was supposed to wait, you see. All walking parents are supposed to cool their heels until a long line of drivers have picked up their kids, and only then retrieve their own children. That’s because school authorities are convinced that making parents drive up to school for pick-up is somehow safer than allowing choice in the matter.
“Previously, parents were coming out to pick up children, they were just getting out of cars and coming to school,” Donald Andrews, the director of Cumberland County Schools told the Huffington Post. “In this day in age, the PTO [parent teacher organization] was concerned that it was a safety issue, someone could come up and grab [any] kid.”

Matthew DiCarlo:

The recently released study of IMPACT, the teacher evaluation system in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), has garnered a great deal of attention over the past couple of months (see our post here).
Much of the commentary from the system’s opponents was predictably (and unfairly) dismissive, but I’d like to quickly discuss the reaction from supporters. Some took the opportunity to make grand proclamations about how “IMPACT is working,” and there was a lot of back and forth about the need to ensure that various states’ evaluations are as “rigorous” as IMPACT (as well as skepticism as to whether this is the case).
The claim that this study shows that “IMPACT is working” is somewhat misleading, and the idea that states should now rush to replicate IMPACT is misguided. It also misses the important points about the study and what we can learn from its results.
First, to reiterate from our first post about the study, the analysis focuses solely on the teachers who are near the minimally effective (ME) and highly effective (HE) cutoff points. It is not an “overall” assessment of the system, as there is no way to know how teachers who are not close to these thresholds (i.e., the vast majority of teachers) are responding to the system. And improvement among all teachers is an extremely important outcome (as is how the system might affect the teacher labor supply).

Andrew Adams:

A Utah lawmaker says compulsory education in Utah wrongly places too much emphasis on attendance and not on outcomes, and he now plans to introduce three bills in the upcoming legislative session to shift the focus.
“We have no accountability — no meaningful accountability measures — on parents and students when it comes to the educational outcome,” said Sen. Aaron Osmond, R- South Jordan on Tuesday.
The state senator’s plan, first outlined in a post on the Utah Policy website, would require parents to attend parent-teacher conferences and agree to support children in completion of homework assignments, while exempting children being educated at home or in private schools from state requirements like classroom time and testing.
Osmond said to this point, too much has been expected and required of teachers.
“For us to turn all of that responsibility over to the teachers is not right,” Osmond said.

Melanie Trottman:

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the bankruptcy court ruling that Detroit is eligible for bankruptcy protection is morally and legally troubling, and her union will be part of an appeal.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes’s Tuesday ruling dealt a major blow to unions, which had argued that pension cuts are protected by a provision in Michigan’s constitution. During his 90-minute presentation outlining his ruling, Judge Rhodes said the power of the federal court superseded that state provision.
“Pension rights are contract rights under the Michigan constitution” and contracts are at risk for cuts under federal bankruptcy law, Judge Rhodes said. The state is one of only seven with constitutional provisions protecting government-worker pensions, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
Ms. Weingarten sees it differently. “Pension benefits are deferred wages” that people expected to get and need, she told reporters Wednesday morning at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in downtown Washington, D.C.

Colleen Flaherty:

Is talking about race at Minneapolis Community and Technical College grounds for punishment if white students are offended? That’s what some supporters of a professor recently under investigation for talking about race there are asking. One supporter went so far as to create a parody logo of the college with its initials and the text: “Making it a Crime to Talk about Color.”
Minneapolis media and activists have been following the story of Shannon Gibney, a full-time adjunct professor of English. She says a student complaint about a recent lecture on structural racism triggered a meeting with administrators about her conduct and that the meeting was followed by a written letter of reprimand. She also says she was directed to the college’s chief diversity officer for sensitivity training.
But the college denies her account, saying it never reprimanded her for talking about structural racism — what it calls an important topic for students and faculty.

David Stout:

The results from a global exam that evaluates students’ reading, science and math skills are in and, once again, Chinese students appear to be reigning supreme while American students continued to underperform.
But before you shake your head ruefully and scoff at the decline of Western-style education, take a look at how the data is organized.
The OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams are held every three years. Coming first and third respectively in the 2012 exams are the Chinese cities of Shanghai and Hong Kong.
However, China is uniquely not listed as a country in the rankings — unlike the U.S., Russia, Germany, Australia and other nations judged on the basis of their country-wide performances. Instead, China only shares Shanghai’s score with PISA. (Hong Kong, a Special Autonomous Region of China, sends its own data.)

Gary Jason:

Here, in a nutshell, is the human toll of the student-loan mess: it is forcing many recent grads to defer marriage and having children; it is hobbling many prospective entrepreneurs that our economy badly needs and may well delay the retirement of new grads by 11 or 12 years.
The total student-loan debt hit $1 trillion dollars two years ago, eclipsing total durable goods debt, and credit card debt. It is now one-fifth higher, at about $1.2 trillion. Student loan debt tripled between 2004 and 2012, with more than 40% of 25-year-olds now carrying student loan debt, averaging $24,000 per debtor. And remember, it is nearly impossible to discharge student-loan debt in bankruptcy.
By “debacle,” I mean this sad process: the ramping up of federal government guarantees for banks lending money to more and more students over the last 15 years (culminating in the complete nationalization of Sallie Mae in 2008), which led to an explosion in college tuition and consequently an explosion in total loan debt.

Pat Schneider:

The agreement for Scholars Academy was one of about 10 being developed as part of a process to make sure that all programs provided by outside organizations are in alignment with the school district’s strategic plan for closing the achievement gap, says Jessica Hankey, director of strategic partnerships and innovation for the district.
As part of a policy for community partnerships adopted by the district in February, the district is looking critically at how programs that partners offer are benefiting students, Hankey says.
There are more of those programs than you might imagine. Hankey says a “diverse portfolio” of up to 150 programs is offered to school district students by outside organizations. Some, like 100 Black Men of Madison’s Backpacks for Success, involve minimal participation by the district. Others, like some MSCR programs, are not focused primarily on academics.
The agreements now being developed in collaboration with the partnership organizations are focusing on programs with “high intensity” alignment with the district’s mission. They cover such things as goals, collaboration with school principals, program staff structure, sharing of data and metrics to measure outcomes, Hankey says.

Are current school district programs held to the same standard?

:

PISA 2012 is the programme’s 5th survey. It assessed the competencies of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science (with a focus on mathematics) in 65 countries and economies.
Around 510 000 students between the ages of 15 years 3 months and 16 years 2 months participated in the assessment, representing about 28 million 15-year-olds globally.
The students took a paper-based test that lasted 2 hours. The tests were a mixture of open-ended and multiple-choice questions that were organised in groups based on a passage setting out a real-life situation. A total of about 390 minutes of test items were covered. Students took different combinations of different tests. They and their school principals also answered questionnaires to provide information about the students’ backgrounds, schools and learning experiences and about the broader school system and learning environment.

Laura Waters:

Among the 34 OECD countries, the United States performed below average in mathematics in 2012 and is ranked 26th…Performance in reading and science are both close to the OECD average. The United States ranks 17 in reading, (range of ranks: 14 to 20) and 21 in science (range of ranks: 17 to 25). There has been no significant change in these performances over time.
Mathematics scores for the top-performer, Shanghai-China, indicate a performance that is the equivalent of over two years of formal schooling ahead of those observed in Massachusetts, itself a strong-performing U.S. state.
While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance. For example, the Slovak Republic, which spends around USD 53 000 per student, performs at the same level as the United States, which spends over USD 115 000 per student.
Just over one in four U.S. students do not reach the PISA baseline Level 2 of mathematics proficiency – a higher-than-OECD average proportion and one that hasn’t changed since 2003. At the opposite end of the proficiency scale, the U.S. has a below-average share of top performers.
Students in the United States have particular weaknesses in performing mathematics tasks with higher cognitive demands, such as taking real-world situations, translating them into mathematical terms, and interpreting mathematical aspects in real-world problems. An alignment study between the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and PISA suggests that a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains also in PISA.

Dana Goldstein::

While these results always make news, this year there is an added tempest in the teapot of the education policy world: The OECD and the Obama administration worked in advance with a selected group of advocacy organizations to launch a media campaign called PISA Day. Which organizations? The College Board, ACT, America Achieves, and the Business Roundtable–all key architects of the Common Core, the new national curriculum standards whose increased rigor and standardized tests have led to a much-publicized protest movement among some parents, teachers, and kids. Groups that support the Core have an interest in calling attention to low American test scores, which today they will use to argue that the Core is the solution not only to our academic woes, but also to reviving the American economy. Happy PISA Day!
But the truth is that the lessons of PISA for our school reform movement are not as simple as they are often made out to be. PISA results aren’t just about K-12 test scores and curricula–they are also about academic ability tracking, income inequality, health care, child care, and how schools are organized as workplaces for adults.

Julia Ryan:

Not much has changed since 2000, when the U.S. scored along the OECD average in every subject: This year, the U.S. scores below average in math and ranks 17th among the 34 OECD countries. It scores close to the OECD average in science and reading and ranks 21st in science and 17th in reading.
Here are some other takeaways from the report:
America Is Struggling at Math
The U.S. scored below the PISA math mean and ranks 26th out of the 34 OECD countries. The U.S. math score is not statistically different than the following countries: Norway, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Russian Federation, Slovak Republic, Lithuania, Sweden, and Hungary.
Do American Schools Need to Change? Depends What You Compare Them To
On average, 13 percent of students scored at the highest or second highest level on the PISA test, making them “top performers.” Fifty-five percent of students in Shanghai-China were considered top performers, while only nine percent of American students were.

Stephanie Banchero:

For the last few years, many U.S. educators and policy makers have looked to Finland, noting its high test scores and laser-like focus on attracting and retaining the best teachers. Although Finland still posts high scores, they have slid in the past few years.
Poland, on the other hand, has seen sharp improvement. The only European country to have avoided the recession, Poland undertook a host of education overhauls in 1999, including delaying by one year the system that places students into academic or vocational tracks, and crafting better systems to identify struggling students and get them help.
“Poland launched a massive set of reforms and, while we cannot say for sure they caused the improvement, they certainly are…a sort of plausible explanation,” said Andreas Schleicher, deputy director for education and skills at the OECD.
In Massachusetts, educators and policy makers credit the good showing, in part, to a 1993 effort that boosted spending and ushered in rigorous standards and achievement tests that students have to pass to graduate.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org

Tamar Jacoby:

After years of disfavor, vocational education is being transformed for young people seeking jobs that require more than high school but less than college.
Instead of going through Congress and making the initiative bipartisan, President Obama acted alone in mid-November, promising $100 million in grants to specialized high schools — such as New York City’s Pathways in Technology Early College High School — that prepare students for technical careers. The president’s on the right track, but why make it partisan? Schools like P-TECH are an idea whose time has come — one that can be adopted by both parties and by business as well as government.
Vocational education fell from favor decades ago because it was seen as an inferior track for less able students. More Americans attend college today than ever before: this year, 42% of young people 18 to 24 years old. Even among high school students in the bottom quarter of their class, 90% expect to go to college. And there’s no question that, for many Americans, college is a ticket to the middle class.
But there’s also mounting evidence that the college-for-all model isn’t working. Nearly half of those who start a four-year degree don’t finish on time; more than two-thirds of those who start community college fail to get a two-year degree on schedule. Even students who graduate emerge saddled with debt and often without the skills they need to make a decent living.

The Economist:

PEER review, many boffins argue, channelling Churchill, is the worst way to ensure quality of research, except all the others. The system, which relies on papers being vetted by anonymous experts prior to publication, has underpinned scientific literature for decades. It is far from perfect: studies have shown that referees, who are not paid for their services, often make a poor fist of spotting serious mistakes. It is also open to abuse, with reviewers susceptible to derailing rivals or pinching their ideas. But it is as good as it gets.
Or is it? Marcus Munafò, of Bristol University, believes it could be improved–by injecting a dose of subjectivity. The claim, which he and his colleagues present in a (peer-reviewed) paper just published in Nature, is odd. Science, after all, purports to be about seeking objective truth (or at least avoiding objective falsity). But it is done by scientists, who are human beings. And like other human endeavours, Dr Munafò says, it is prone to bubbles. When the academic herd stampedes to the right answer, that is fine and dandy. Less so if it rushes towards the wrong one.
To arrive at their counterintuitive conclusion the researchers compared computer models of reviewer behaviour. Each began with a scientist who had reached an initial opinion as to which of two opposing hypotheses is more likely to be true. The more controversial the issue, the lower the confidence. He then sends the manuscript supporting one of the hypotheses to a reviewer, who also has a prior opinion about its veracity, and who recommends either rejecting or accepting the submission. (In this simple model journal editors are assumed to follow reviewers’ advice unquestioningly, which is not always the case in practice.) Subsequently, the reviewer himself writes and submits his own paper advocating one of the hypotheses to the journal, and the process repeats itself.

Dana Goldstein:

Polls show that smaller class sizes are incredibly popular with parents and teachers. But with the Great Recession forcing school budget cuts, class size is once again a matter of debate, with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, megaphilanthropist Bill Gates, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg all suggesting that larger class sizes could be a good idea.
What do we really know about how class size affects student learning? Is there an ideal class size? In this episode, I talk to Larry Ferlazzo, a public school teacher and blogger, and Matthew Chingos, a class-size researcher at the Brookings Institution.

Matthew Clarida & Nicholas Fandos:

The median grade at Harvard College is an A-, and the most frequently awarded mark is an A, Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris said on Tuesday afternoon, supporting suspicions that the College employs a softer grading standard than many of its peer institutions.
Harris delivered the information in response to a question from government professor Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 at the monthly meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“A little bird has told me that the most frequently given grade at Harvard College right now is an A-,” Mansfield said during the meeting’s question period. “If this is true or nearly true, it represents a failure on the part of this faculty and its leadership to maintain our academic standards.”
Harris then stood and looked towards FAS Dean Michael D. Smith in hesitation.
“I can answer the question, if you want me to.” Harris said. “The median grade in Harvard College is indeed an A-. The most frequently awarded grade in Harvard College is actually a straight A.”

Ann Robertson & Bill Leumer:

A recent New York Times editorial took a moment out to lecture mayor-elect of New York City Bill de Blasio on how he should treat teachers and their unions. We hope he doesn’t listen.
The editorial began by endorsing a pay raise for New York City teachers, but insisted that “any sort of raise will require concessions in exchange,” including loosening “work rules that stifle innovation and favor senior teachers over younger ones who may in fact be more talented.” This general philosophy was spelled out on a number of different fronts.
For example, the editorial continued: “Seniority trumps everything and is treated as a proxy for excellence. Under current rules, a school that has an enrollment shortfall or budget problem and has to cut one of its five math teachers cuts the least senior teacher, period. In progressive systems, like the one in Washington, D.C., which has made big gains on federal assessment tests, decisions about which teachers to cut are based on a combination of factors, including how they stack up on evaluations and whether they possess special skills. The goal is to keep the most talented teachers.”
There are a number of problems here. First, The New York Times editorial board is simply accepting – no questions asked – that in the richest country in the world it makes sense for schools to cut teachers because of a “budget problem.” The U.S is engaged in an insane, entirely irrational campaign of underfunding its public schools on a massive basis, thereby robbing the country of the benefit of a future well-educated citizenry. How The New York Times expects any teacher to succeed in nurturing critically thinking students, when they are surrounded by policy makers who lack any semblance of logic and who give corporations generous tax breaks rather than adequately fund schools, is at least, questionable.

Matthew DeFour:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke launched a new, more detailed website Tuesday with one notable omission: her only experience in elective office, as a Madison School Board member.
But after the State Journal inquired about it, the campaign said it would update the site to include her role on the board.
A campaign spokesman called the omission an “oversight.” However, the website in several places downplays Burke’s ties to the city where she lives.
The website focuses on Burke’s experience as a top executive at Waterloo-based Trek Bicycle, which her father founded, and her time as Commerce secretary in the Gov. Jim Doyle administration.
Burke, the only Democrat so far who announced plans to run against Gov. Scott Walker next fall, launched burkeforwisconsin.com in October with a video announcement and ways for supporters to provide an email and donate to the campaign.

Madison schools’ academic challenges and above average spending & taxes will likely receive greater scrutiny during the upcoming gubernatorial election.
That said, a healthy debate on Madison’s long time, agrarian era governance model vs the more dynamic school choices available in most urban areas would be welcome.
– Phil Hands

Doug Lederman:

Wondering how much more your college’s sports program spends per athlete than your institution does in academic funds per student? What your university spends on coaching salaries per player? What your campus pays to subsidize its sports program out of institutional funds?
Then the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics has the database for you.
The commission, which next year will mark 25 years since issuing its first report on college sports reform, is today releasing a database designed to provide campus officials, policy makers, reporters and others with better — and more accessible — statistical information about how colleges in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I finance their sports programs. It does so by marrying data from several existing sources in a unique way.

Unschoolery:

I tell all my kids they should start their own businesses someday. I think it’s an amazing way to make a living, an amazing mindset to have, and it’s a school like no other that you keep learning from all the time.
Besides marrying my wife and having my kids, starting my business is the best thing I’ve done.
And then a little while ago, I realized that there’s nothing stopping them from starting a business now, while they’re young.
Yesterday my 14-year-old daughter Maia became the first to officially launch her business: a vegan cupcake venture!
I encouraged her to start one a few months ago, and in that time she’s experimented with a handful of recipes, doing taste tests with her siblings (who have absolutely loved the process of course). She’s found recipes that worked.

Project on Student debt:

Seven in 10 college seniors (71%) who graduated last year had student loan debt, with an average of $29,400 per borrower. From 2008 to 2012, debt at graduation (federal and private loans combined) increased an average of six percent each year.
Details, including state- and college-level data, can be found in the full report and by clicking on the map and other links on this page.

Jeffrey Williams:

Imagine a diorama in an American Museum of Occupations showing the evolution of the professor. The exhibit starts in the early 1800s with an austere, black-suited man in a minister’s collar, perhaps looking over the shoulder of a student at a rustic desk, with a Greek text open in front of him. In the next scene, from around 1900, he morphs into a pince-nez-wearing gentleman in starched collar and cravat, at a podium delivering a lecture. The professor of 1950 adopts the rumpled bearing of a tweed jacket, pointing with his pipe to a poem or a physics equation on a chalkboard. In the next frame, circa 1990, she wears jeans and is sitting in front of a computer screen.
How would the diorama represent the professor of 2020?

Brooke Donatone:

Amy (not her real name) sat in my office and wiped her streaming tears on her sleeve, refusing the scratchy tissues I’d offered. “I’m thinking about just applying for a Ph.D. program after I graduate because I have no idea what I want to do.” Amy had mild depression growing up, and it worsened during freshman year of college when she moved from her parents’ house to her dorm. It became increasingly difficult to balance school, socializing, laundry, and a part-time job. She finally had to dump the part-time job, was still unable to do laundry, and often stayed up until 2 a.m. trying to complete homework because she didn’t know how to manage her time without her parents keeping track of her schedule.
I suggested finding a job after graduation, even if it’s only temporary. She cried harder at this idea. “So, becoming an adult is just really scary for you?” I asked. “Yes,” she sniffled. Amy is 30 years old.

Mark Niesse:

Two-thirds of Atlanta’s school board will be filled with new representatives following a runoff election Tuesday that ousted the board’s chairman.
Reuben McDaniel, an investment banker who led the school board during the last two years, lost re-election to attorney Cynthia Briscoe Brown, who collected 66 percent of the vote.
Brown, an attorney, criticized McDaniel’s leadership of the school system following the nation’s largest cheating scandal, scrutiny from the school system’s accrediting body and an investigation of racism allegations at North Atlanta High School.
McDaniel was the only incumbent facing a runoff challenge. Three other runoff races decided Tuesday involved political newcomers for seats in which incumbents didn’t seek re-election.

The City of Madison Clerk has posted a helpful candidate guide (PDF), here.
Two Madison School Board seats will be on the spring, 2014 ballot: Seat 6 and Seat 7. It is never too early to run for school board, particularly in light of the District’s long term, disastrous reading results.
The 2014 Spring Primary will be held on February 18, 2014 if necessary. The spring election is scheduled for April 1, 2014.
Much more on Ed Hughes and Marj Passman. Incumbent Ed Hughes has not had a competitive race in his previous two elections.

EDW Lynch:

How To Sharpen Pencils, An Instructional Film on Proper Sharpening Technique with Expert Sharpener David Rees
by EDW Lynch on November 29, 2013
Expert pencil sharpener David Rees provides exacting instructions for proper pencil sharpening in the short film “How To Sharpen Pencils” by Kenneth Price. You can order a newly sharpened #2 pencil on Rees’ Artisan Pencil Sharpening website (sold out until 2014), and read his book on pencil sharpening, How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening. We previously posted about Rees’ artisan pencil sharpening business back in 2012.

Alexandre Afonso:

In 2000, economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about the internal wage structure of a Chicago drug gang. This piece would later serve as a basis for a chapter in Levitt’s (and Dubner’s) best seller Freakonomics. [1] The title of the chapter, “Why drug dealers still live with their moms”, was based on the finding that the income distribution within gangs was extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities, let’s say at McDonald’s. They calculated 3.30 dollars as the hourly rate, that is, well below a living wage (that’s why they still live with their moms). [2]
If you take into account the risk of being shot by rival gangs, ending up in jail or being beaten up by your own hierarchy, you might wonder why anybody would work for such a low wage and at such dreadful working conditions instead of seeking employment at Mc Donalds. Yet, gangs have no real difficulty in recruiting new members. The reason for this is that the prospect of future wealth, rather than current income and working conditions, is the main driver for people to stay in the business: low-level drug sellers forgo current income for (uncertain) future wealth. Rank-and file members are ready to face this risk to try to make it to the top, where life is good and money is flowing. It is very unlikely that they will make it (their mortality rate is insanely high, by the way) but they’re ready to “get rich or die trying”.

Rhema Thompson

The search for a few good men and women, a few good readers, writers and artists are in focus this week.
Escambia County School District officials will soon be forming a new task force to help close the achievement gap among the district’s students.
During a special workshop earlier this month, Escambia County Schools Superintendent Malcolm Thomas said he would be working with the school board’s new chairwoman Linda Moultrie to organize a committee of community members dedicated to “solution-finding” in the coming months.

Jeffrey Solochek:

A Florida mother’s child visitation court battle has become the Home School Legal Defense Association’s latest cause.
The mom, Therese Cano, had been home-schooling her children and, according to the HSLDA, a court psychologist had found the kids were doing well academically. But a guardian ad litem for the children told the court she believed they would benefit from the socialization aspects of public schooling.
The judge then ordered the children into public schools, overruling a court order permitting the home schooling. The HSLDA quotes the judge as saying, “When are they going to socialize? Is homeschool going to continue through college and/or professional schooling? At which point are these children going to interact with other children, and isn’t that in their best interest?”

Sherri Ackerman:

ome Florida private schools face an unexpected dilemma this school year: Find extra dollars to pay for state college courses their high school students want to take – or deny them the option.
The problem stems from a new law requiring public school districts and individual private schools to cover tuition for students enrolled in the state’s popular dual enrollment program.
Though it’s unclear how many private school schools and students are affected, the change has left some schools curbing participation and others anxious about what they’ll do if local colleges, prompted by the new law, end up hiking charges.
The change “caught everybody off guard,” said Howard Burke of the Florida Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, and immediate past president of Florida Association of Academic Nonpublic Schools (FAANS). “This is a hardship for parents already paying taxes for public schools and paying for private school.”

Jennifer Chambers:

A new report urges state lawmakers to proceed with plans to introduce the Smarter Balanced exam as a replacement for the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, saying it remains the only viable option for the 2014-15 school year.
Michigan education officials released the 23-page report Monday outlining options for a new state assessment tool to be used as early as next year to test K-12 students under Common Core state standards. State schools administered the MEAP for what is supposed to be the last time this fall.
The report, requested by lawmakers in late October after they removed a funding block for implementation of Common Core, examines 12 test options in the marketplace.
The report provides summaries on the cost of each test, scoring and reporting methods, test security transparency and overall design.
Of the 12 options, only Smarter Balanced and two other tests were aligned to Common Core, a more rigorous set of standards adopted by the State Board of Education in 2010 for math and English. The other exams aligned to the standards are Measured Progress and PARCC.

Investors Business Daily:

Education: Parents pay a fortune to send their kids to big-name colleges, and they expect strong scholarship in return. More and more, what they’re getting ranges from drivel to leftist indoctrination.
Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald shocked a New York City audience at the 2013 Wriston Lecture this month with some examples of what leftist academics have done to the American college curriculum.
“Until 2011,” she noted, “students majoring in English at UCLA had been required to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton — the cornerstones of English literature.

Rebecca Onion:

These “confiscation cabinets,” assembled by veteran teacher and artist Guy Tarrant, are an unusual archive: toys taken from London schoolchildren in 150 different schools, over thirty years.
Tarrant became interested in the toys as tokens of resistance to school routines and teacherly discipline. He enlisted other teachers to donate their own confiscated items to his project. In all, he made eight such cabinets, which are currently on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood in London.
Besides showcasing the creativity of some rebellious children–improvised pea shooters, World Cup finger puppets, and mix CDs feature in the collection–the grouping lets us see some differences between American and British toys.
A “Scooby doo” appears in the girls’ cabinet, and seems to be some kind of a friendship bracelet. In the boys’ cabinet, there’s a Sikh kirpan, or ceremonial sword, reflecting the large Sikh immigrant population in the UK. (Recently, Sikh advocacy groups have fought the confiscation of such items as a restriction of religious freedom.) And there’s a “39’er,” which appears to be a “conker” (or horse chestnut) used in the traditional British kids’ game.

Courtney Martin:

“Do you think this is the right color ribbon?” asked a petite brunette, her hair pulled back in a haphazard ponytail, her college sweatshirt engulfing her tiny frame. “And do you think these are the right length of sections I’m cutting? I don’t want it to be all funky when we pin them on.”
“Mmm … I’m not sure,” said the guy next to her, sucking on a lollipop, his football-player physique totally evident in his tight band T-shirt.
“Looks good to me,” his roommate said without even glancing over at the ribbon or the girl.
Meet the college anti-war movement.
I just got back from a two-week campus speaking tour during which I had the privilege of hanging out in a women’s center at a Catholic college, eating bad Mexican food with Mennonite feminists, and chatting with aspiring writers and activists at a college in which half the students are the first in their families to experience higher education. I heard the stories of transgender youth in Kansas City, jocks with food addictions in Jacksonville, and student organizers who are too overwhelmed to address all the world’s problems in Connecticut.

Miles Lasater:

Congress and the administration have recently been talking a lot about access to and affordability of higher education. The administration has proposed an ambitious overhaul of our entire higher-education system, including the development of a college scorecard to ensure that students and their families have all of the information they need to make an informed decision about their postsecondary education.
The college scorecard will be hugely useful for families only if the data used to create it are readily available and accurate. Innovative technology companies have already developed this technology and have been collecting and analyzing student and institution data and can be an effective partner to policymakers in creating a scorecard and other higher-education policies that will help families with one of the biggest financial decisions they will make.
The Higher Education Act, the federal law that governs all higher education, was first enacted in 1965 to pave the way for millions of students to access higher education. Once a vehicle of access to higher education, the law is now more than 1,000 pages long and has most recently been a barrier to innovation. The Higher Education Act includes pages and pages of regulations added during the 2008 reauthorization that have never been enforced. If Congress continues down this path, the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, due next year, will likely create hundreds of pages of more regulations that are never enforced and programs that are never funded.

Hwang Jurie:

What will people think of 16-month-old wonder child Jonathon Rader, able to play various musical instruments, if he decides not to pursue a career as a musician?
The answer seems to be “a failure,” when hearing the story from Kim Ung-yong, a 48-year-old record holder for the world’s highest intelligence quotient, in an interview with The Korea Herald.
“I was famous for having a 210 IQ and being able to solve intricate math equations at the age of four,” Kim said, adding, “Apparently, the media belittled the fact that I chose to work in a business planning department at Chungbuk Development Corporation.”

Hope Reese:

Laurel Sturt was a 46-year-old fashion designer in New York City whose career trajectory took an unlikely shift one day on the subway. A self-proclaimed social activist, Sturt noticed an ad for a Teaching Fellows program. Then and there, she decided to quit her job in fashion design and shift her focus to her real passion: helping others. She enrolled in the two-year program and was assigned to teach at an elementary school in a high-poverty neighborhood near the South Bronx.
A decade later, Sturt has written about the experience in her provocative memoir Davonte’s Inferno: Ten Years in the New York Public School Gulag. I spoke with her about how her time in the classroom affected her views on education today.
You got into teaching at the age of 46, which is later than most. What spurred you to make the big life change?
I had always been a social activist and felt there was a responsibility for the “haves” to help the “have-nots.” I used to fulfill that obligation by tutoring inner-city kids, but my actual career was in fashion design and illustration. I remember thinking: When someone’s on their deathbed, are they really going to think about the dress I designed for them? Not to put down fashion design, but it’s just not enough. I decided to flip the equation and instead of doing social activism part-time, make it a full time job.

Molly Beck:

“Snow” is this year’s pick for the Great World Texts program facilitated by UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities, a 9-year-old literacy initiative that provides Wisconsin teachers like Gibson with sets of novels chosen for their cultural and literary value, teaching guides and professional development, and provides students with a chance to respond to such work with projects of their choice that cover a theme of the book.
The culmination of that effort unfolds Monday, when about 500 students from 15 Wisconsin schools will meet at the Great World Texts conference at UW-Madison. The students will have a chance to meet and hear from the author they have been studying all semester, and to present and discuss their work together. Nine students have been chosen to have lunch with Pamuk.
The book was chosen for its global perspective, said program coordinator Heather DuBois Bourenane, but also because it is a text that is frequently asked about on Advanced Placement exams but not frequently taught in schools.

Rishawn Biddle:

The National Education Association filed its 2012-2013 LM-2 financial disclosure to the U.S. Department of Labor, and once again, the nation’s largest teachers’ union spent big to preserve its influence over education policymaking. The NEA spent $131 million on lobbying and contributions to like-minded groups in 2012-2013, a four percent increase over its $125 million spend in the previous year. These numbers don’t include the $51 million the union spent in 2012-2013 on so-called representational activities, which are often just as much geared toward political activity; that number, by the way, is little changed from spending levels in 2010-2011 and 2011-2012.
wpid-threethoughslogoAn analysis of the NEA’s spending shows that while it attempts to use some strategy in order to leverage its contributions to like-minded groups, it remains as scatter-shot as it has been in previous years. Over the past year, the NEA has attempted to get social justice groups it funds to echo its messaging and work more-closely with it in order to advance its agenda. This included meetings between the union’s executive director, John Stocks, with the top executives of past and current recipients. All this effort, however, has not ensured that NEA recipients are any more loyal to the union’s mission than at any other time.
For example, the NEA handed $30,000 to the Leadership Council for Civil and Human Rights, one of the leading civil rights-based players in the school reform movement, and dropped $75,000 into the National Council of La Raza’s political action fund even though the outfit is also a major reform player. Another recipient of NEA largesse is Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. It picked up $100,000 from the union in 2012-21013 in spite of the civil rights leaders longtime support of expanding the very charter schools the NEA opposes, $75,000 more than in the previous fiscal year.

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

MTI’s Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement provides that all members of MTI’s teacher bargaining unit will be provided with a daily duty-free lunch period of at least 30 continuous minutes. The 30 minutes cannot be abridged by one being directed to walk with students to the lunchroom.
More recently, once again, some teachers have been requested to open their classroom so students can have “a place to go”. Directing a teacher to sacrifice any portion of their 30 minute duty-free lunch period violates the Contract. If a teacher volunteers to do so, they are to be compensated at $9.10 per hour, with such computed in one-half hour lots.

In light of Alan Borsuk’s positive article, I thought it timely understand the mountain to be climbed by our traditional $15k/student public school district. The charts above are a brief update of the always useful “Where have all the Students Gone” articles.
Further, early tenure cheerleading is not a new subject. Those interested might dive into the Capital Times & Wisconsin State Journal Superintendent (recently easily searched, now rather difficult) archive:
Cheryl Wilhoyte (1,569) SIS
Art Rainwater (2,124) SIS
Dan Nerad (275) SIS
That being said, Superintendent Cheatham’s comments are worth following:

Cheatham’s ideas for change don’t involve redoing structure. “I’d rather stick with an imperfect structure,” she said, and stay focused on the heart of her vision: building up the quality and effectiveness of teaching.
Improving teaching is the approach that will have the biggest impact on the gaps, she said.
“The heart of the endeavor is good teaching for all kids,” Cheatham said in an interview. Madison, she said, has not defined what good teaching is and it needs to focus on that. It’s not just compliance with directives, she said.

Perhaps the State Journal’s new K-12 reporter might dive into what is actually happening in the schools.
Related: Madison’s long term disastrous reading results and “When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before“.

Molly Beck:

The 2.8 percent decrease between 2010 and 2012 at University of Wisconsin System campuses comes after a 6.8 percent increase between 2008 and 2010, according to System data reported to the federal Education Department provided to the State Journal by the UW System in response to a request for enrollment data for the System’s teacher-training programs. 
The numbers do not include students seeking teaching licenses with majors not classified by the UW System as education majors.
It’s unclear why the number of students enrolled in teacher-education programs has dropped, but Cheryl Hanley-Maxwell, associate dean of the UW-Madison School of Education, said some graduates there are now reporting feeling ill prepared for what they call the political atmosphere surrounding teaching.
“Until our most recent surveys, we’ve never had a complaint that ‘you didn’t prepare us for the political atmosphere'” of teaching, said Hanley-Maxwell about surveys the school sends to graduates who have been teaching for about three years.
She said about 60 percent of the school’s graduates respond to the after-graduation surveys that question how well the school prepared them for the teaching profession.

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

C. Derick Varn:

David Blacker studied at the University of Texas and holds degrees in philosophy and education from the University of Illinois. He is currently Professor of philosophy of education and Director of Legal Studies at the University of Delaware (USA). His books include Dying to Teach: The Educator’s Search for Immortality (Columbia University Teachers College), Democratic Education Stretched Thin: How Complexity Challenges a Liberal Ideal (SUNY), a US-state specific book series on law, ethics and education for education students. His most recent book is The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame (Zero Books, forthcoming this December). His is now working on a project concerning Spinoza and the idea of permaculture. Before becoming corrupted by the comforts of academia, he worked at the (sadly) now-defunct Guardian newspaper (“an Independent Radical Newsweekly”) in New York City.
What has led to both the increase in credentialization in higher education and the elimination of much of the funding of higher ed at the same time? And why is the political economy of education so little discussed directly?
These questions admit several layers of response, concentric causal circles converging on the contemporary trends. Let me take the funding question first. In the United States, the immediate cause of the funding crisis in higher education, particularly public higher education, is the decades-‘long withdrawal of the historic commitment to these institutions by state and local governments. In this sense, U.S. higher education has been a leading edge of austerity avant la lettre, well before opposition to “austerity” became a rallying cry of dissent. A generation or two ago, our leading public universities received most of their operating funds from the public coffers. Now at the marquee universities, the level of such funding has dwindled to the single digits. For example, the University of Virginia–long a symbol of American public education because of its Jeffersonian origins–now receives around 6% of its budget via public funds. A mere 6%! At this point it is fair to ask, in what sense are our “public universities” actually public anymore?
A second layer of answer to the funding question has to do with shifting policy justifications for state support of education that reflect general movements in ideology. While one must be careful to guard against a narrative of decline that implies some kind of golden age of public spiritedness, there was a certain degree of liberal idealism present in the nineteenth-century founding of American public universities qua “land grant” institutions charged with contributing to the public good. There has at times been a strong sense that there is a collective interest in maintaining a strong network of such institutions, a palpable sense that everyone benefits from them. Now, however, a relatively narrow and crabbed economism holds sway that fails to honor the “public good” nature of these institutions and instead regards them mainly as private benefits exclusive to the individuals involved in them. At a collective level they are at best “good for business” and economic development; in particular their educational side is seen as a pipeline for a shrinking elite corporate workforce. These expensive institutions are regarded as justified insofar as they add value to “human capital” for employers and also as in effect off-site research and development centers for corporations, particularly those in the high tech sectors. So at the aggregate level, education is viewed as a literal “investment.”

Nat Hentoff:

I often worry about today’s young growing up in a country where everybody is liable to be under secret government surveillance, with nearly all of these Americans never having violated any law. How much expectation of individual constitutional liberty can these young citizens have?
But now I am somewhat heartened by the results of a recent (reliable) poll by Quinnipiac University described in a Nov. 18 lead editorial in the New York Post:
“In 2008 and 2012, millennials — voters between ages 18 and 30 — came out in a big way for Barack Obama.”
But now, “something’s changed. The poll has young voters disapproving of the president by a 54 percent to 36 percent margin … Only 43 percent of the under-30s say the president is honest and trustworthy. By contrast, a majority — 51 percent — say he’s not.”
Moreover, “60 percent of young voters disapprove of the way the president’s handling the economy. Fifty-six percent disapprove of Obama’s handling of health care. Fifty-three percent disapprove of his handling of foreign policy” (“Young voters turn against President Obama,” New York Post, Nov. 18).

reclaimuc:

If you’ve been paying attention to the MOOC debate over the last year or so, you may have seen that for all intents and purposes the debate is pretty much over. MOOCs are dead. Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, recently acknowledged that his company makes a “lousy product.” Soon after, Daphne Koller admitted that her company Coursera could in no way compete with the traditional, brick-and-mortar university which teaches through face-to-face interaction: “The best place to acquire [much deeper cognitive skills] is by coming and getting an education at the best universities.”
But UC Online has always been, well, a ways behind everybody else. From the beginning, the project was unable to raise the private capital needed to get off the ground. The head of the project, former UC Berkeley Law School Dean Chris Edley, infamously claimed that he “should be shot” if he wasn’t able to raise that money himself — he was only able to put together the paltry sum of $748,000 — but in the end he had to crawl back to the administration begging for an interest-free, $6.9 million loan.

nodiplomacy:

I recently got into an argument with a professor online over the value of education and why people may still be politically sympathetic to “the cause,” but simply will not ever cancel classes. This is the single most common reason given for why faculty and graduate students would not abide the strike.
First of all, I would like to say that I thought we kind of already made the choice to join the union to protect our individual liberties, so we should probably stand up for our fellow colleagues. Because when we are injured we would want our colleagues to stand up and defend us… right?
Here is my most important point: generalizing “education as more important than” creates a very slippery dichotomy that erases the labor people of color have put into building the university and making it run every day, including today. At the strike in my University, it was not surprising that most of the rally and the picket chants were in Spanish. In fact, if you participated and did not know Spanish, chances were that you understood about 20% of what was conveyed. The reason for this is very simple: most AFSCME workers are people of color, predominately Latino service workers. This reality is very specific to the University of California, and it is a reality that the University management exploits every day with unlivable wages, unaffordable health care, and blatant discrimination and intimidation. No, your education is not more important than the struggles of these workers; in fact, it does not even come close. Your education is not more important than the actual daily struggle of having to put food on the table, or having to tell your children why you don’t have enough money to pay the rent. In fact, your education is not more important than any other struggle. It is simply not OK to argue that missing one day (or one week, or whatever that length of duration of a strike is) is comparable to the misery and pain of not earning a decent wage. It is also not OK to delegitimize a strike as unimportant or not a “real strike,” because there was not a hunger strike involved. Let’s set this straight – management has already proven that it does not care about its workers and its students, why in your right mind would you think they would care about your health? A hunger strike is a very risky form of protest, and I would not recommend it to anybody. It is largely contingent on whether you can get public awareness and sympathy to your struggles, and in a world where political struggles easily become marginalized and delegitimized (key word of the day), populism is a tough shot to guarantee your demands will be met without serious health repercussions.

Shanon Gibney:

I. I am waiting for a letter to arrive in the mail. It will be short, no more than one page, and will be covered in black ink, with the occasional flourish of institutional logo. The signature at the bottom will belong to a high-ranking officer at my Midwestern college of 12,000 students, and the words that preface it will briefly explain the method and, more importantly, the verdict, of an almost three-week long investigation, in which students, faculty, and staff were questioned by the school’s legal staff as to if, in fact, I had committed acts constituting an official case of racial harassment.
What happened to me in 2008 did not happen because I am a young, Black female faculty member at school that has over 50 percent students of color; what happened to me occurred because I turned the world backwards on an angry White male student. We were in a regular weekly meeting of the newspaper staff, and the students were discussing the fact of the new edition, how well it had turned out, and the editor-in-chief said that although he was proud of the paper’s developments, he was not pleased with the fact that so few students regularly picked up the publication. Theories were thrown around as to why this was–the aesthetics were all wrong, the design didn’t pop, the stories could be flashier. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a noose hanging from the ceiling. When I looked again, it was gone.

Charles Seife:

If there’s a gene for hubris, the 23andMe crew has certainly got it. Last Friday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered the genetic-testing company immediately to stop selling its flagship product, its $99 “Personal Genome Service” kit. In response, the company cooed that its “relationship with the FDA is extremely important to us” and continued hawking its wares as if nothing had happened. Although the agency is right to sound a warning about 23andMe, it’s doing so for the wrong reasons.
Since late 2007, 23andMe has been known for offering cut-rate genetic testing. Spit in a vial, send it in, and the company will look at thousands of regions in your DNA that are known to vary from human to human–and which are responsible for some of our traits. For example a site in your genome named rs4481887 can come in three varieties. If you happen to have what is known as the GG variant, there is a good probability that you are unable to smell asparagus in your urine; those blessed with the GA or AG varieties are much more likely to be repulsed by their own pee after having a few spears at Spargelfest.
At first, 23andMe seemed to angle its kit as a fun way to learn a little genetics using yourself as a test subject. (“Our goal is to connect you to the 23 paired volumes of your own genetic blueprint… bringing you personal insight into ancestry, genealogy, and inherited traits,” read the company’s website.) The FDA had little problem with the company telling you why you had dry ear wax (rs17822931) or whether you’re likely to sneeze when you look at a bright light (rs10427255).

Dana Goldstein:

Is your child “gifted”? What does that even mean? Some schools use old-fashioned IQ tests to identify gifted students. Others use teacher recommendations. A few schools are ending gifted programs altogether and are trying to implement gifted-level instruction for all kids. Which of these methods is fair? What should schools do to make sure that gifted tracks aren’t an option only for socio-economically advantaged children? In this episode, I talk to Sandy Darity, a researcher on giftedness at Duke, and Jeff Danielian, a Rhode Island teacher and giftedness advocate.

Rebecca Schuman:

If you’re planning to attend either Minnesota State University Moorhead or the University of the District of Columbia, best get in your Romeo and Juliet now–and while you’re at it, you should probably learn the formulas for velocity and momentum, and study up on the Spanish-American War. Because soon, these regional public universities may have no departments of English, physics, or history–nor a host of other programs often associated with “college,” including political science (MSUM), philosophy (MSUM), computer science (MSUM), and even economics (UDC).
What is confounding about these universities’ plans to possibly obliterate nearly half of their departments is why both institutions, faced with budget crises, went straight for the academic jugular. And not just by cutting highfalutin artsy disciplines, but with an eye toward fields of study that are actually valued in today’s cruel and fickle market. Nobody seems to notice that the structure of today’s higher-ed “business” model is backwards: It’s far easier to cut academics than it is to cut anything else, so that’s what universities are doing. The irony that the very raison d’être of a university–education!–is also its most disposable aspect seems lost on everyone (perhaps because nobody studies English, philosophy, or French anymore, so nobody recognizes irony or knows what a raison d’être is).

Mona Chalabi:

In a rousing attempt to capture the spirit of the former prime minister, Boris Johnson delivered the keynote speech at the annual Margaret Thatcher lecture last night. In it, he sought to justify his belief that inequality could be desirable “for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses” by claiming that inequality is inevitable. Why? Because of differences in our IQ.
Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85 … Over 16% anyone? Put up your hands.
Muted laughter followed. He then turned his attention to the 2% of the population who have an IQ above 130. We check those numbers.

Sara Germano:

Upon entering the massive Forever 21 store here at the Oak Park Mall, Goldia Kiteck and three of her close friends scattered like spilled marbles.
The high-school seniors were on separate missions and pursued them through corridors filled with clingy leggings, racks of chunky necklaces and tank tops with kittens across the front.
“It has all my favorite things, in one place,” Ms. Kiteck said of the store, where she spent $51 on a skirt, a pair of earrings and a black sweatshirt with the words “Super Awesome” emblazoned in gold print across the chest.
Fast-fashion chains such as Forever 21 and H&M HM-B.SK -0.11% are eating the lunch of traditional teen retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle Outfitters AEO +1.06% and Aéropostale. The sector’s onetime leader, Abercrombie, posted a loss of $11.5 million in the nine months ended Nov. 2, as sales fell nearly 7%.
To learn more about where teens are shopping and why, The Wall Street Journal went on an extended tour of the mall with two groups of committed shoppers, and it is clear why fast fashion is winning.
Teens’ tastes can be fickle, but on the Journal trips, buying decisions were almost invariably driven by two considerations: developing an individual style, and doing so for less.

Howard Schneider, via a kind Rick Kiley email:

As a high school junior, Hope Johnson thought she had things figured out. She’d been hit with wanderlust during an academic trip to Brazil, set her sights on London’s Richmond University and hoped to pursue a career in diplomacy.
It was just the kind of white-collar job that would take her far from the confines of this Southern city and please her dad, an elevator repairman who wanted his daughter to graduate from a four-year college.
That was before the 16-year-old was offered a life-defining choice by Siemens, the German industrial conglomerate: Drop everything, enroll in a competitive European-style apprenticeship, and get a free technical education and a job in return.
Johnson opted for the job. The allure of traditional college life was strong, she said, “but you gotta pay the bills.”

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

Teachers in Madison recently received an email inviting them to join AAE, and for a very inexpensive fee. For only $15 per month, they say, one can be eligible to apply for a scholarship, receive a publication, and information on professional development. Plus, they claim none of their income will be spent on political action, and a member receives protection via liability insurance. The facts are, that none of what AAE offers is needed.

• MTI negotiates a Collective Bargaining Agreement, and enforces the Collective Bargaining Agreement via grievance and arbitration.
• MTI represents teachers who are challenged by the District.
• The District is responsible by Statute to provide liability insurance and MTI members receive additional liability coverage provided through membership as a result of MTI’s
  affiliation with WEAC & NEA.
• AAE is anti-union. They even tried to stop the Kenosha
  School Board from ratifying the new recently agreed-upon Contracts.

According to the Massachusetts Teachers Association, “The American Association of Educators, is a group backed by some of the deepest pockets in the anti-public education movement (think Koch brothers). The AAE is partnering with the National Right to Work Committee to encourage educators to give up their (Union) membership and join an organization that has affiliates covering just six states. Right-wing foundations provide nearly all of the money to (operate) the AAE Foundation.”
AAE was able to write to each Madison teacher because they obtained teachers’ email addresses via an open records request from the District.

Raymond Li:

Tang Wanyuan, the father of a sixth grader in Beijing, said he has not paid much attention to the Communist Party’s decision to ban the practice of putting the elite pupils in special classes. Like most young parents, he has little faith in such initiatives.
The resolution of the Central Committee’s third plenum earlier this month said that educational authorities should no longer designate elite classes or elite schools for pupils who outperform their peers, or come from privileged families. The move was part of an effort to address inequality in the access to quality teaching.
“These schools are almost certain to continue operating the way they have, only under a different name such as ‘model schools’ or ‘schools with special characteristics’,” Tang said.
“If anything, parents want transparency over enrolments at elite schools. That way we’ll know what chance, if any, we stand of having our children admitted. Parents want policies that don’t cause more stress for us.”
Tang is more concerned about where his son will attend middle school, where standards of teaching differ tremendously.
These schools are almost certain to continue operating the way they have, only under a different name.

Abigail Walthausen:

Students in a lecture class can give the impression of lethargy: Maybe a student sleeps in the back of the classroom, maybe others fidget and doodle. The students who are paying attention may be too focused on their notebooks to flash a look of understanding and inspiration.
Perhaps because of this negative initial impression, lectures are under attack these days. The Common Core standards place far greater value on small-group discussion and student-led work than on any teacher-led instruction. The term “lecture” is entirely out of fashion, as is the unqualified word “lesson.” On recent planning templates released by New York’s Department of Education, only the term “mini-lesson” is used. The term gets its diminutive status because of the fact that only 10 to 15 minutes on the hour are allotted for teacher-disseminated information, while the rest of the class period is focused on student-centered practice in groups or project based learning. But the mini lesson is not even accepted as the most progressive way of teaching. Champions of the “flipped classroom” relegate lectures to YouTube channels. In a recent interview here at The Atlantic, futurist David Thornburg declared that lectures created a depressing experience for him in school.
The tendency to see lecture-based instruction as alienating and stifling to student creativity is not altogether new. In Paulo Friere’s 1970 Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the lecturing teacher was cast as an arrogant imperialist. Alison King coined the flip expression “sage on the stage” in a 1997 article and, although more than half of King’s article consists of ideas for working small group approaches into otherwise lecture-centric courses, demonstrating that she was in no way looking to eliminate the lecture entirely, everyone from Common Core advocates to edtech disrupters has co-opted “sage on the stage” as license to heckle the “out-of-touch expert.” Nevertheless, there is immense value in lecture, and it must not be written off as boring and ineffective teaching.

Noliwe Rooks:

“You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have.” It’s a line familiar to many African Americans, but when the political fixer Olivia Pope delivered it last month in an episode of ABC’s Scandal, black Twitter and Facebook came to life anyway.
I couldn’t help thinking that it was resonant for academics, too. It’s not necessarily the case that “blackademics” have to put in twice as many hours of literal toil as others seeking promotion, tenure, and a successful academic career. But too often, we have to work twice as hard to convince powerful committee members that our scholarly work has value. This is especially true when our work touches on subjects that are controversial, challenge or–worse yet–almost completely foreign to those whose approval we need.
After almost 20 years in the highly racialized terrain of the academy, I know that support and consent are no small things. At most four-year institutions, fewer than 10 percent of professors are people of color, so when it comes to promotion and tenure, those professors aren’t often in positions of authority. The problem this creates is clear: If we aren’t able to convince the faculty powerbrokers we do have that the subjects we want to pursue, familiar or not, are worthy of support, we may not get as far down the road as we want to go.

Continue reading Black Scholars: Explaining Your Work May Mean Fighting For It →

Chris Parr:

Universities do not have effective systems to help staff who have been subjected to online bullying and sexual harassment.
This is the opinion of Sara Perry, lecturer in cultural heritage management at the University of York, who surveyed professionals about their experiences of being harassed online after she was herself targeted by colleagues in the higher education sector.
“In one case, I was sent a message about my appearance, which included…photographs [of a sexual nature] detailing the things that they would like to do to me if we were not in a professional context,” she told Times Higher Education.
“Subsequent to that I moved institutions and had the same thing happen – first with a person in the university and then with someone from a different university. Some of them were academics, others were…supporting my work.”

Dayo Olopade:

Most of the buildings in Machakos, the former capital of Kenya, are made of concrete, with neat fences, informal gardens, indoor plumbing, and electricity, however erratic. By contrast, the local schoolhouse of Bridge International Academies is beyond basic: walls of corrugated tin, a plywood frame. There’s no electrical wiring in sight. A pair of latrines adjoin an open courtyard that doubles as a lunch and recreation area. A few young children loll on the patchy grass, engaged in unhurried conversation.
Yet this school is by no means a failure — in fact, it recently passed a 700-point inspection and is running exactly as planned. This is just one of 212 Bridge Academies that have opened in Kenya during the past four years. Bridge’s “schools in a box” spring up seemingly overnight: In January of 2013, the company launched 51 schools at once, while in September it opened another 78. Bridge now educates roughly 50,000 students in Kenya every day, and its global aspirations may transform the entire project of education for poor youth around the world.

Taksin Nuoret:

Ever since December 2001, when the results of the first PISA survey were made public, the Finnish educational system has received a lot of international attention. Foreign delegations are flocking to Finland, in the hope of discovering Finland’s secrets. Finland is also trying to take advantage of its PISA success by exporting its knowledge in education [1]; this strategy is supported by talks given in international events by representatives of the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture [2].
The explanation widely accepted is that the Finnish educational system is better. For example, the following aspects have been pointed out:
Schools routinely provide tutoring for weak students.
Each school has a social worker (“koulukuraattori”).
Substitute teachers are often provided when the teacher is ill.
Teachers are seldom on strike.
The methods used for teaching mother tongue are solid. Finnish first graders learn to read first by learning letters, then syllables, then words, then sentences. For example, throughout grade 1 (and most of grade 2), words are often printed with syllables separated by hyphens [3]. Adventurous approaches (such as starting with words or sentences as wholes) are not used.
Schools have more autonomy than in many countries. For example, schools can dismiss teachers if they are not satisfied with their work.
The profession of teacher is better recognized than in many countries.
Transition from low to high grades of the Finnish curriculum is smoother than in many countries.
Finnish students have a free canteen at their disposal.
Explanations not related to the educational system have also been proposed, including:
The Finnish society is homogeneous. The number of foreigners is lower than in most OECD countries (3.6% at the end of 2012 [4]), which makes the teachers’ job easier.
Finnish spelling is regular, thus easing Finnish students’ task.
Foreign TV programs are subtitled, instead of dubbed as in many OECD countries, thus easing acquisition of foreign languages.

Melinda Wenner Moyer:

A few nights ago, after cleaning up from the play date I had organized for my 2½-year-old, changing his diaper, and refilling his water, I was about to start cooking him dinner before giving him a bath when the subject of Thanksgiving came up. He didn’t know what it was, so I tried to explain it to him. But somewhere between It’s a special day when we all think about how grateful we are for what we haveand So, basically, it’s all about giving thanks, my son took off to terrorize our dog, and I was left stirring pasta that, five minutes later, I had to remind my son to thank me for.
My husband and I are incredibly lucky to be able to give our son what he needs and often what he wants, and we are raising him in a wonderful town in which many families do the same. Yet he’s growing up in a bubble, and that terrifies me. If he never truly struggles for things–important things–and he doesn’t spend much time with people who do, will he ever realize he’s got it so good? And will he ever want to do anything to make the world better? I know–rich/white/entitled people problems. This is the upper-middle-class parent’s existential enigma: How can we lovingly provide for our kids without turning them into spoiled brats? How can I teach my child to be thankful?

Lincoln on Thanksgiving.

Brian Kisida, Jay Greene & Daniel Bowen:

FOR many education advocates, the arts are a panacea: They supposedly increase test scores, generate social responsibility and turn around failing schools. Most of the supporting evidence, though, does little more than establish correlations between exposure to the arts and certain outcomes. Research that demonstrates a causal relationship has been virtually nonexistent.
A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.
Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions.
Crystal Bridges, which opened in November 2011, was founded by Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. It is impressive, with 50,000 square feet of gallery space and an endowment of more than $800 million.

Maria Godoy:

School lunch has never been the stuff of foodie dreams. I’m still haunted by the memory of my elementary school cafeteria’s “brain pizza” – a lumpy oval thing topped with fleshy white strips of barely melted mozzarella that clumped together like neurons.
And it looks like America’s school cafeterias are still turning out the culinary abominations, judging by the images on , a fascinating online project showcasing school lunch photos submitted by students across the country.
The project is the brainchild of Farah Sheikh, who manages education campaigns for , a nonprofit group that helps organize young people to take action around social change. She got the idea, she said, while researching student dropout rates. Nutrition, she noticed, “has a pretty big impact on student concentration and student performance in school,” she tells The Salt.

tressiemc:

Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, one of the most high-profile private sector attempts to “disrupt” higher education discovered inequality this week. Thrun has spent the last three years dangling the shiny bauble of his elite academic pedigree and messianic vision of the future of higher education before investors and politicos. He promised nothing short of radically transforming higher education for the future by delivering taped classroom lessons of elite professors through massive open online courses.So what went wrong?
After low performance rates, low student satisfaction and faculty revolt, Thrun announced this week that he has given up on MOOCs as a vision for higher education disruption. The “godfather of free online education” says that the racially, economically diverse students at SJSU,”were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives…[for them] this medium is not a good fit.” It seems disruption is hard when poor people insist on existing.
Thrun has the right to fail. That’s just business. But he shouldn’t have the right to fail students like those at San Jose State and the public universities that serve them for the sake of doing business.

Angus Johnston:

I’ve been saying for years that we need to have a national debate about whether we want to have a public higher education system in this country, and that our failure to have that debate is killing public higher ed. I believe that to be true. With taxpayer support for many public colleges sliding toward single-digit percentages, with out-of-state tuition at some public universities approaching Harvard’s, with in-state applicants losing seats to make room for those out-of-state revenue streams in students’ clothing, we’re abandoning the idea of public higher education without giving that idea the respect of saying so.
And yet something curious is happening as a result. Slowly, haltingly, but with growing confidence, voices are beginning to rise in support of the concept of a higher education that is not merely public, but actually free. Economist Jeffrey Sachs claimed in a 2011 book that we could eliminate tuition at public colleges and universities nationwide for an investment of little as $15 billion a year, and since then the idea has been popping up more and more frequently in public discussion.
It’s not a new idea, of course. As a delegate to the US Student Association’s congresses in the early 1990s I remember ritually endorsing an end to tuition in resolutions every summer. But in those days the idea felt more than a little pro forma. Of course college should be free, we’d say, and then we’d go back to fighting tuition hikes and lobbying against Pell Grant cuts.

Aaron Bady:

Public education should be free. If it isn’t free, it isn’t public education.
This should not be a controversial assertion. This should be common sense. But Americans have forgotten what the “public” in “public education” actually means (or used to mean). The problem is that the word no longer has anything to refer to: This country’s public universities have been radically transformed. The change has happened so slowly and so gradually — bit by bit, cut by cut over half a century — that it can be seen really only in retrospect. But with just a small amount of historical perspective, the change is dramatic: public universities that once charged themselves to open their doors to all who could benefit by attending — that were, by definition, the public property of the entire state — have become something entirely different.
What we still call public universities would be more accurately described as state-controlled private universities — corporate entities that think and behave like businesses. Whereas there once was a public mission to educate the republic’s citizens, there is now the goal of satisfying the educational needs of the market, aided by PR departments that brand degrees as commodities and build consumer interest, always with an eye to the bottom line. And while public universities once sought to advance the industry of the state as a whole, with an eye to the common good, shortfalls in public funding have led to universities’ treating their research capacity as a source of primary fundraising, developing new technologies and products for the private sector, explicitly to raise the money they need to operate. Conflicts of interest are now commonplace.

Sara Nović:

I’m ten the night my house explodes. The sound isn’t a sound, just a vibration so strong it rattles my chest. I come-to face down on the floor, impossibly unharmed, and pull myself on my elbows across the carpet and into the hallway. A section of the house–the part where my parents’ bedroom is supposed to be–is missing. I run. In the street, the pavement is warped from the treads of tanks that have plowed through the neighborhood. I spot a trench, jump down, and follow its rutted path toward the city center.
Deep underground in the public shelter I bypass the cluster of my classmates who are vying for their turn on the stationary bicycle that lights this airless cement box–surrogate playtime, a welcome distraction from boredom and fear. They let me cut the line, and I pedal fast until the lights glow full-strength and my joints stiffen with shock. It’s only when I stop that I notice the blood trickling from my ears and down my neck in thin red escape routes. Other people’s mothers ask me if I’m okay. I don’t like to talk about it.
People in the city are disappearing. People have been forced to walk east; people have become hemic vapor amidst the midnight explosions. We are fortunate they’ve blown up the TV tower, that we cannot turn on the news and see the images the rest of Europe is now viewing and ignoring: pictures of our neighbors, bald and emaciated in camps that the Serbian government is claiming, in the same broadcast, do not exist.
In the morning I run to my best friend Davor’s house. When I get there I double back, thinking I’ve missed it, the landscape rendered unrecognizable by shellings. I don’t find it, but eventually I find Davor. I ask him what happened to his family and he says nothing for the rest of the day.
Everyone left uniforms up into various shades of olive. Even we’ve been issued the smallest soldier-like attire obtainable–camouflage t-shirts and caps smuggled in from Hungary in vans with curtained windows. Davor and I line up with the rest of the town in front of the police barracks, where the sergeant is issuing weapons to people much stronger than us. I tuck my hair under my hat and hope the dirt on my face covers any traces of girlhood.

Dean Baker:

Given the evidence compiled by Mishel et al, it would be difficult to maintain that technology has been the main culprit in the upward redistribution of income that we have seen.
It is not difficult to identify other potential culprits – trade would certainly rank high on the list. A trade policy that quite deliberately puts factory workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while protecting doctors and other highly paid professionals, would be expected to redistribute income from the former to the latter.

Blair Hickman:

Middle schools and high schools often offer an array of classes and programs in order to serve students with a variety of educational needs. They include talented and gifted, special education, honors and advanced placements, career and technical education and basic courses. ProPublica is investigating whether these courses have also become a means of segregating students by race.
Help us investigate this issue by filling out the form below. We promise any personally identifying information will remain confidential. If you’d rather, you can also reach out to reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones directly at Nikole.Hannah-Jones@propublica.org

Related: English 10.

Jon Marcus:

Facing stagnant enrollment and increasingly price-conscious consumers, already cash-strapped universities will continue to see their revenues fail to keep up with inflation, the bond-rating agency Moody’s Investment Service says.
The proportion of public universities with expected revenue declines has doubled over last year.
Nearly 30 percent of public and one out of five private universities will suffer declines in revenue–more than the proportion that experienced this last year, and a sign that the problem is getting worse and not better, according to Moody’s, which annually reviews the financial condition of higher-education institutions whose bonds it rates.
Nearly half of universities expect to see declines in their enrollments.
Second-tier public universities and small private universities that are having trouble persuading families and students that they’re worth the price of their tuition are in the most danger, Moody’s says–and will have to take dramatic steps to win back business.
“At this pace, tuition-dependent colleges and universities will be challenged to make necessary investments in personnel, programs, and facilities to remain competitive over the longer term,” says Karen Kedem, a Moody’s senior analyst, who authored the report.

Jessica Bakeman:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is offering schools millions of dollars for academic initiatives that are overwhelmingly supported by education experts, and for the second time, districts aren’t interested in the money.
The vast majority of eligible school districts didn’t apply for Cuomo’s $75 million competitive grants this year, which would fund the creation of full-day pre-kindergarten, extend the school day or year, create “community schools,” where at-risk students can get health care, counseling and other services, and reward high-performing teachers in high-need districts.
Experts offered a variety of explanations for why participation in Cuomo’s programs is so low, after a first round of grants also drew a relative few applications. Mainly, schools don’t want to build programs they’ll have to dismantle when grants expire, leaders said.

The Common Core National Education Standards are, they say, very interested in having all our students taught the techniques of deeper reading, deeper writing, deeper listening, deeper analysis, and deeper thinking.
What they seen to have almost no interest in, is knowledge–for example knowledge of history, especially military history. As far as I can tell at the moment, their view of the history our high school students need to know includes: The Letter From Birmingham Jail, The Gettysburg Address, and Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.
While these are all, of course, worthy objects for deeper reading and the like, they do not, to my mind, fully encompass the knowledge of the Magna Carta, the Constitution of the United States, the Battle of the Bulge and of Iwo Jima and of Okinawa, or the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, or the U.S. transcontinental railroad, or the Panama Canal, or woman suffrage or the Great Depression, or a number of other interesting historical circumstances our students perhaps should know about.
Nor does it seem to call for much knowledge about William Penn, or Increase Mather, or George Washington, or Alexander Hamilton, or Robert E. Lee, or Ulysses S. Grant, or Thomas Edison, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Dwight David Eisenhower, or several hundreds of other historical figures who might be not only interesting, but also important for students to be familiar with.
In short, from what I have seen, the Common Core Vision of necessary historical knowledge includes what any high school Junior ought to be able to read in one afternoon (i.e. three short “historical documents”).
Ignorance of history has, it may be said, been almost an American tradition, and many Americans have discovered in their travels, and to their embarrassment, that people in other countries may know more about our history than they do.
We have, many times in the past, even invaded countries our soldiers knew next to nothing about, and sometimes that has been a disadvantage for us. But if the Common Core doesn’t care if our students know any United States history, they are certainly not going to mind if our students don’t know the history of any other country either.
But even in schools were history is still taught, and where the Common Core has not yet sunk its roots, one area of history is perhaps neglected more than any other. Was it Trotsky who said: “You may not be interested in War, but War is interested in you.”?
And Publius Flavius Vegetius argued that: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” In many of our school history departments, military history is regarded as “militaristic,” and the thought, apparently, is that if we tell our students nothing about war, then war will simply go away.
History doesn’t seem to support that notion, and if war does come to us again, it might be useful for students in places other than our Military Academies to know something about military history. In addition, military history tells absorbing stories of some of the most inspiring efforts ever made in the history of mankind.
We talk a fair amount these days about our Wounded Warriors and about what we owe to our veterans, past and present, but for some odd reason, that seldom translates into the responsibility to teach military history, at least to some minimal extent, to the students in our public high schools.
It is quite clear to me that ignorance of history does not make history go away, and ignorance of the lessons of history does not make us better prepared to understand the issues of our time. And certainly, in spite of whatever dreams and wishes are out there, ignorance of war has not ever made, and quite probably will not make, war go away.
We want to honor our veterans, but we do not do so by erasing knowledge of our wars, past and present, from our high school history curriculum, whatever the pundits who are bringing us the Common Core may think about, and plan for, the teaching of history.
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Dana Goldstein:

Teacher merit pay. It’s one of those perennially popular policy ideas that, historically, hasn’t worked very well.
A few years ago, New York City offered teachers in select schools $3,000 if the entire school’s test scores went up. But scores at the merit pay schools did not improve any faster than scores at control schools. (In some of the merit-pay schools, scores actually went down.) In Nashville, teachers who volunteered for a merit pay experiment were eligible for $5,000 to $15,000 in bonuses if kids learned more. Students of those teachers performed no better on tests than students in a control group. And in Chicago, teachers were paid more if they mentored their colleagues and produced learning gains for kids. Again, students of the merit-pay teachers performed no better than other kids.
That’s why the results of a new study, the Talent Transfer Initiative, financed by the federal government, are so important. Surprisingly, this experiment found merit pay can work.
In 10 cities, including Los Angeles, Miami, and Houston, researchers at Mathematica identified open positions in high-poverty schools with low test scores, where kids performed at just around the 30th percentile in both reading and math. To fill some of those positions, they selected from a special group of transfer teachers, all of whom had top 20 percent track records of improving student achievement at lower poverty schools within the districts, and had applied to earn $20,000 to switch jobs. The rest of the open positions were filled through the usual processes, in which principals select candidates from a regular applicant pool.

Robin Wilson:

Kean University’s president will ask the institution’s board next month to reject two-thirds of the professors up for tenure this year, further antagonizing a faculty that has been at odds with the administration for years.
Kean’s faculty union said…

Esther Cepeda:

With not a small amount of disdain, my youngest son — the one who’s addicted to his Xbox video game console — said to his parents the other day: “That’s all you two ever do: work and read.”
A lot of good it’s done us. How we managed to raise two boys who detest reading is beyond me.
Reading to them at bedtime every night, going to story time at our library and encouraging them to read everything from newspapers to magazines, comic books, read-along “books,” audio books, e-books — none of it has made much of a difference.
Some of our biggest professional disappointments also have revolved around not being able to inspire some of our students to love reading, too. But as with our own kids, love ultimately has nothing to do with it. Reading is too important to be left to taste or affinity.
My husband and I both determined long ago that for kids and students who don’t love books, the only solution is to treat reading like fruits, vegetables and time off from electronics: a non-negotiable requirement since they don’t think there are any books they’d enjoy.
This is anathema to today’s literacy experts who insist on making reading “easy,” “fun,” “personally meaningful” or “culturally relevant” instead of treating it as what it is: A challenging skill that must be approached with the same rigor and discipline that an algebra or chemistry teacher approaches abstract and symbolic reasoning.

Terrence Stutz:

State Board of Education members vetoed a proposed charter school in the Dallas area Friday after complaints were raised that its operator has a history of catering to white students from more affluent families.
Board members voted, 9-6, to deny a state charter to Great Hearts Academies. The group had hoped to establish at least four campuses in the Dallas area, beginning with Irving.
The board approved a Great Hearts charter school in San Antonio last year, but that campus won’t open until next fall.
Great Hearts was one of four independent charter schools that Education Commissioner Michael Williams authorized in September, subject to the board’s approval.
The three other schools, in Austin, El Paso and San Antonio, won board approval Friday.
Board member Mavis Knight, D-Dallas, noted that the 15 Great Hearts charter schools in Phoenix — where the charter operator is based — have a much higher percentage of white students than the regular public schools in the Phoenix area. While 42 percent of the public school students are Hispanic, only 13 percent of the enrollment at the Great Hearts schools is Hispanic.

David Jesse:

The federal government made enough money on student loans over the last year that, if it wanted, it could provide maximum-level Pell Grants of $5,645 to 7.3 million college students.
The $41.3 billion profit for the 2013 fiscal year is down $3.6 billion from the previous year but it’s a higher profit level than all but two companies in the world: Exxon Mobil cleared $44.9 billion in 2012, and Apple cleared $41.7 billion.
“It’s actually neither accurate nor fair to characterize the student loan program as making a profit,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said during a July conference call with reporters after the Free Press and other news media reported on profits from student loans. The department did not return calls or e-mails seeking comment this week.
The numbers track the entire fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. They come as concern continues to mount about the level of indebtedness by college students and graduates. Estimates show more than $1.2 trillion in student loan debt across the nation, more than the nation owes on credit cards.

Frank Bruni:

AT a middle school near Boston not long ago, teachers and administrators noticed that children would frequently return from a classmate’s weekend bar mitzvah with commemorative T-shirts, swag that advertised a party to which many fellow students hadn’t been invited.
So administrators moved to ban the clothing.
They explained, in a letter to parents, that “while the students wearing the labeled clothing are all chatting excitedly,” the students without it “tend to walk by, trying not to take notice.” What an ordeal.
Many parents favored the ban, a prophylactic against disappointment.
Some did not, noting that life would soon enough deal the kids much worse blows along these lines. And one observer, in a Facebook thread, said this, according to a local TV station’s report: “Perhaps they should dress the children in Bubble Wrap and tie mattresses to their backs so they don’t get hurt.”
I assume that’s facetious.
But these days, you never know.

Edward Luce

Optimists have scoured the dictionary for superlatives to describe the future of internet education. But the cult of the Mooc – massive online open courses – took a blow last week when one of its leading Silicon Valley pioneers, Sebastian Thrun, described it as a “lousy product”.
Students taking Mr Thrun’s online courses at Udacity performed far worse – and dropped out in far higher numbers – than those with a human instructor. Mr Thrun, who invented the self-driving car, is at least temporarily dropping out of the business. Luddites everywhere will be feeling vindicated.
Yet the need to reinvent US education is more pressing than ever. If America’s college dropout rates are not persuasive enough – nearly half of US students fail to complete their four-year degree within six years – the fate of those who make it ought to be. Graduate earnings have fallen 5 per cent since 2000. The college premium is still there but only because the earnings of those with a high-school diploma have dropped by far more. Meanwhile, the costs of getting a degree continue to rise, which means the trade-off of taking on ever larger debt to boost future earnings keeps getting weaker.
This is where online education comes in. Moocs can drive down costs to almost zero. Yet they will be hard-pressed to fix the cost problem if more than 90 per cent of their enrollees lose interest, which was the outcome of Udacity’s much-hyped experiment. This is twice the attrition of mainstream students.
Yet it makes only marginal difference whether a student gets his or her education from a computer or a real live human if the content is irrelevant to the jobs market. As the economist Tyler Cowen argues in his seminal book, Average is Over, there is a larger crisis in what US students are being taught. Content, rather than medium, is the problem.

Erin Adler:

Residents of an Apple Valley neighborhood aren’t happy with the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan School District’s plans to build a new early childhood and adult education center, citing worries about traffic and declining property values if the project proceeds.
They also believe the district hasn’t been completely clear about its plans and is rushing to build the facility, despite 14 meetings between December 2012 and the Nov. 12 school board meeting at which updates on the center were shared.
“As a neighborhood, we felt like we were blindsided,” said Steve Budnik, who lives on 144th St. W.
“I think it’s a lack of partnership with the neighborhood, it really is,” said Steve Robbins, who lives off 144th St. W. on Drumlin Court.
The district is already clearing the land for the proposed building, a two-story, 54,000-square-foot school that will house early childhood and adult education programs, currently held in leased spaces. Construction will begin in late winter, with completion planned in December 2014.
Residents’ reactions at the meeting were surprising, said Rob Duchscher, school board member.