Oxford University:

The University of Oxford is today releasing a set of sample interview questions from tutors who conduct Oxford interviews, in an attempt to explain the reasoning behind even the most strange-sounding questions.
The questions have been released to mark the deadline day for students to apply to study at Oxford University next year. Students applying for biological sciences might be asked whether it is easier for an organism to live on sea or land, history applicants might be asked which historical figure they would like to interview and why, while aspiring philosophers might be asked to distinguish between ‘lie’, ‘deceive’ and ‘mislead’.
‘When considering an application to Oxford, we look very carefully at GCSE results, aptitude test scores, personal statement, teacher’s reference and interview performance, and we know that for many students the interview is the most daunting part of the process,’ says Mike Nicholson, Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Oxford University. ‘Academic interviews will be an entirely new experience for most students, so we want to show students what they are really like so they aren’t put off by what they might have heard.
‘Interviews are designed to give candidates a chance to show their real ability and potential, which means candidates will be pushed to use their knowledge and apply their thinking to new problems in ways that will both challenge them and allow them to shine. Interviews are an academic conversation in a subject area between tutors and candidate, similar to the undergraduate tutorials which current Oxford students attend every week. Like tutorials, interviews are designed to get students to think, not recite specific facts or answers.’

Jessica Gross:

Since the suburban boom of the post-World War II era, parents of means have moved from cities to affluent areas with better schools. Despite what facile style section pieces tell you, this has long been a trend. But a new analysis of census data featured in the Wall Street Journal shows that wealthy people with kids are now twice as likely to segregate themselves from the poor than they were in the 1970s. Conversely, poor families now cluster together as well.
According to an analysis of census data by Kendra Bischoff of Cornell University and Sean Reardon at Stanford University, the proportion of families living in affluent areas doubled from 1970 to 2009–it went from 7 to 15 percent. At the same time, the percentage of families living in poor areas also more than doubled–it went from 8-18 percent.
So what’s going on here? Why are more affluent Americans with children clustering together now than they did in the ’70s? Presumably wealthy people have always wanted their kids to live in areas that had good public schools and low crime rates–what’s changed?
I asked my former colleague Tim Noah, contributing writer for MSNBC and the author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, why he thinks more wealthy families are now living in affluent communities than they did 40 years ago. He wrote in an email:

Christy Choi:

With the faint whiff of eugenics about it, the act of choosing the sex of your baby may be anathema to many people.
But increasing numbers of Hong Kong and mainland parents are getting around laws which ban the procedure at home by hiring the services of middlemen to smooth the way – at a price.
These facilitator businesses partner with clinics and hospitals in places like Thailand and the United States, where an IVF procedure can cost anything from HK$250,000 to HK$2.3 million.
“We have people who want a boy and a girl at the first go,” says 32-year-old Tina Fong Wai-lan, who runs Eden Hospitality with her husband Alfred Siu Wing-fung. Set up in 2008, it has arranged for more than 300 couples to go overseas on IVF and sex selection packages. “If it’s the first time they’re having children, the [Chinese] government won’t penalise them,” she said. Others look to even out the sex balance in their families.
Business has spiked with their client base tripling to 300 in the past year – about 70 per cent from the mainland and the rest from Hong Kong. The increase could be partly due to an advertising strategy which offers marriage packages alongside baby sex selection services.

Rec Jahncke:

Universal pre-kindergarten schooling, every progressive’s fondest dream, is back in the news. Bill de Blasio, the overwhelming favorite in the New York mayoral race and the likely future head of the nation’s largest school system, is pushing universal pre-K as his No. 1 policy proposal. President Obama offered a national version of this idea in his February State of the Union address and has since pushed hard in other settings. Two problems: Such programs would have negligible educational value, and they would be massively expensive.
Mr. de Blasio wants to raise taxes on the city’s rich to collect $530 million annually mostly to fund full-day pre-K. The money would go for 68,000 lower-income New York City children, most of whom already attend publicly funded pre-K either full- (20,000) or part-time (38,000) at a current annual cost of about $190 million. Mr. de Blasio’s proposal means nearly tripling the annual cost for roughly the same group of children.
“Universal” is a misnomer. since Mr. de Blasio’s program would serve only lower-income kids out of a total New York population of about 120,000 four-year-olds. Perhaps, by saying “universal,” Mr. de Blasio intends to rally public support with something seemingly equally available to all. Mr. Obama takes a similar tack, offering the combination of a lofty “universal pre-K” vision with a more limited and targeted program in practice. Yet his program would also cost tens of billions of dollars.

Madison School Board President Ed Hughes:

As I hope someone might have noticed, I have not been posting much lately. Part of the reason is that I have another outlet. I have been writing a column in the school district’s bi-weekly family newsletter.
My latest column focused on a recent School Board retreat where we learned more about the Common Core State Standards. Even though the family newsletter is a district publication, I should point out that the views I express in the column (as well as in this blog) are my own and do not necessarily represent the views, positions or policies of the Madison Metropolitan School District. But however unofficial my words may be, here is what I wrote:
On Saturday, September 28, the Madison School Board held the first of our quarterly board retreats. We get together on a Saturday for an extended discussion of a few topics of particular interest. Our focus this time was on the much-misunderstood Common Core academic standards for literacy and math.

Madison School Board President Ed Hughes:

Mary Burke’s past activities are coming under increased scrutiny now that she is an active candidate for governor. Mary has generously supported different educational initiatives for many years. Her primary focus has been the AVID/TOPS partnership between the Madison School District and the Boys and Girls Club. But her pledge of support for the Madison Prep charter school proposal has drawn the most attention. Since I was more involved in the Madison Prep saga than most, I thought it might be helpful if I provided a summary of what I know about Mary’s involvement.
In December, 2010, the Urban League of Greater Madison presented an initial proposal to the Madison School Board to establish a charter school called Madison Prep. The Urban League described the school as “a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men, particularly young men of color.” The school was intended to inculcate a culture of hard-work and achievement among its students through a host of practices, including single-sex classrooms, an International Baccalaureate curriculum, longer school days and school years, intensive mentoring, and obligatory parental involvement.
Madison Prep was controversial from the start and the initial proposal was adjusted in response to various concerns. By the fall of 2011, Madison Prep was planned to be an instrumentality charter school, like our existing charter schools Nuestro Mundo and Badger Rock. As an instrumentality, all teachers and staff would have been union members.

Burke’s candidacy will bring additional statewide attention (and rhetoric) to the Madison schools, particularly its challenges. It will be interesting to see what, if anything Mary Burke says about her time on the local school board.

Joel Kotkin:

Perhaps no urban legend has played as long and loudly as the notion that “empty nesters” are abandoning their dull lives in the suburbs for the excitement of inner city living. This meme has been most recently celebrated in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
Both stories, citing research by the real estate brokerage Redfin, maintained that over the last decade a net 1 million boomers (born born between 1945 and 1964) have moved into the city core from the surrounding area. “Aging boomers,” the Post gushed, now “opt for the city life.” It’s enough to warm the cockles of a downtown real-estate speculator’s heart, and perhaps nudge some subsidies from city officials anxious to secure their downtown dreams.
But there’s a problem here: a look at Census data shows the story is based on flawed analysis, something that the Journal subsequently acknowledged. Indeed, our number-crunching shows that rather than flocking into cities, there were roughly a million fewer boomers in 2010 within a five-mile radius of the centers of the nation’s 51 largest metro areas compared to a decade earlier.
If boomers change residences, they tend to move further from the core, and particularly to less dense places outside metropolitan areas. Looking at the 51 metropolitan areas with more than a million residents, areas within five miles of the center lost 17% of their boomers over the past decade, while the balance of the metropolitan areas, predominately suburbs, only lost 2%. In contrast places outside the 51 metro areas actually gained boomers.
Only one city, Miami, recorded a net gain in the boomer population within five miles of the center, roughly 1%. Much ballyhooed back to city markets including Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco suffered double-digit percentage losses within the five-mile zone.

Audre Watters:

Here are the notes from the brief 10-minute talk I gave yesterday at the University of Mary Washington at a “conference before the conference” (Namely: OpenVA). I was part of an afternoon-long event called “Minding the Future,” that brought together a number of educators and technologists. (Namely: Kin Lane, Gardner Campbell, David Wiley, Alan Levine, and myself). We each spoke for 10 minutes about our thoughts on the future of higher education, then took 20 minutes of questions. And at the end of the evening, we sat on a panel, taking questions from Jeff McClurken and the audience. Video and slides are also embedded below.

Jeff Simpson:

Marshfield School District has been in the news lately, This time they have shown us the consequences of ACT10.
First this story from the Administrators where they praised ACT10:

Jon Swedien:

Tom Larson is one of the legislators responsible for reviewing the set of academic standards for public schools in Wisconsin, yet the rural Colfax assemblyman admitted last week that he was still trying to catch up with the arguments swirling around the “Common Core.”
In 2010, state schools Superintendent Tony Evers voluntarily agreed to adopt the Common Core State Standards, which cover math and English and promote literacy in history/social studies, science and technical subjects for students from kindergarten through high school. According to the Common Core website, the standards also define a vision of what it means to be a literate person in the 21st century.
On paper, that all sounds good, but, in the real world, the Common Core standards have sparked a firestorm of controversy in the Badger State and elsewhere.
Speaking Monday before a group of local education officials in Eau Claire, Larson said he had been selected as one of nine representatives to sit on the Assembly Select Committee on Common Core Standards.

Related: the oft criticized WKCE.

Julia Ryan:

Sarah Theule Lubienski didn’t set out to compare public schools and private schools. A professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she was studying math instructional techniques when she discovered something surprising: Private schools–long assumed to be educationally superior–were underperforming public schools.
She called her husband, Christopher A. Lubienski, also a professor at the university. “I said, ‘This is a really weird thing,’ and I checked it and double checked it,” she remembers. The couple decided to take on a project that would ultimately disprove decades of assumptions about private and public education.
Studying the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, they have found that, when controlling for demographic factors, public schools are doing a better job academically than private schools. It seems that private school students have higher scores because they come from more affluent backgrounds, not because the schools they attend are better educational institutions. They write about these conclusions–and explain how they came to them–in their book, The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools. Here’s an interview with the Lubienskis about their work, edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Andrew Hill:

For more than 200 years from its beginnings in the 1770s, the Dead Letter Office was where Americans’ letters and parcels were sent if they were unclaimed or undeliverable. Some items were redirected: the DLO had a “blind reading” department trained to decipher illegible or vague addresses (“To my Son he lives out West he drives a red ox the rale rode goes By Thar”).
The office would incinerate the others or auction their contents, which included, according to one sale list, anything from wedding rings to “False Bosoms” and quack medicines, such as “the cure-all Tennessee Swamp Shrub”. It was estimated that 6bn pieces of mail were posted in the US in 1898, of which 6.3m ended up at the DLO in Washington, DC. “What romance was to be had in an undelivered or undeliverable letter!” Simon Garfield writes in To The Letter. “And what mystery and sadness too.”
Well, the romance and mystery have certainly gone. The US Postal Service has renamed the DLO the Mail Recovery Center, consolidated four locations into one in Atlanta, Georgia, and is pushing through a “Lean Six Sigma” process improvement project to make it more efficient. Asked if they write letters, most people would echo the DLO’s famous fictional former clerk Bartleby in the Herman Melville story: “I would prefer not to.”
Plainly, instant electronic means of communication – email, of course, but increasingly social media such as Twitter and Facebook – have pushed pen, paper and postboxes to the edge of most private correspondents’ consciousness. It may be nice to think that investors’ enthusiasm for this month’s public offering of shares in Britain’s Royal Mail, the world’s oldest postal service, is based on a revival of letter writing, “the humane art, which owes its origins to the love of friends”, in Virginia’s Woolf’s words. In fact, Royal Mail’s daily postbag is at its lowest for 20 years, and it predicts the volume of letters – most of which are for business and marketing – will fall at up to 6 per cent a year. The Royal Mail’s future lies in delivery of items ordered on the internet. Even Postman Pat, the children’s cartoon character, has had to amend his theme tune to reflect the fact he now brings more “parcels through your door” than letters.

Alan Borsuk:

And if there’s a happy future in the whole MPS buildings issue, it’s unlikely to lie in vacant buildings. It lies in doing something different with current schools that chronically get poor results. What if those buildings housed something much better? Keep watch to see if there is fresh action on that front, including offering some to charter schools.
The specific factors around the Malcolm X matter are one reason for the big fight now. But the bigger reason, in my view, is the continuing failure by, oh, close to everybody to get past those sharp divisions among us and to take actions that best serve the largest number of kids by creating the largest number of quality schools.

Beth Hawkins:

A cynic would be forgiven for wondering whether the press conference Minneapolis mayoral candidate Mark Andrew held Monday afternoon, flanked by five members of the school board, was at least partly an exercise in damage control.
At the session, held in the library at Windom Dual Immersion School in southwest Minneapolis, Andrew announced a three-pronged education agenda. At its center: a promise to convene a collaborative headed by education advocates with divergent philosophies, Mike Ciresi and Louise Sundin.
“The conversation about improving educational outcomes for kids of color has gotten extremely polarized and increasingly heated in the past several years,” Andrew explained in the plan. “The reformers vs. unions dichotomy is unproductive, and doesn’t serve the best interests of our children or find Minneapolis solutions to the problems in Minneapolis’ schools.”

Minneapolis plans to spend $524,944,868 (PDF budget book) during the 2013-2014 school year for 34,148 students or 15,364 per student, about the same as Madison.
Yet, property taxes are substantially lower in Minneapolis where a home currently on the market for $279,900 has a 2013 property tax bill of $3,433. A $230,000 Madison home pays $5,408.38 while a comparable Middleton home pays $4,648.18 in property taxes. Madison plans to increase property taxes 4.5% this year, after a 9% increase two years ago, despite a substantial increase in redistributed state tax dollar receipts. Yet, such history is often ignored during local tax & spending discussions. Madison Superintendent Cheatham offers a single data point response to local tax & spending policy, failing to mention the substantial increase in state tax receipts the year before:

When we started our budget process, we received the largest possible cut in state aid, over $8 million,” Cheatham said. “I’m pleased that this funding will make up a portion of that cut and help us accomplish what has been one of our goals all along: to reduce the impact of a large cut in state aid on our taxpayers.”

A bit more background.

Emily Badger:

High-cost cities tend to have higher median incomes, which leads to the simple heuristic that, sure, it’s costlier to live in San Francisco than in Akron, but the people who pay bills there make enough money that they can afford it.
In reality, yes, the median household income in metropolitan San Francisco is higher than it is in Akron (by about $30,000). But that smaller income will buy you much, much more in Ohio. To be more specific, if you make the median income in Akron – a good proxy for a spot in the local middle class – 86 percent of the homes on the market there this month are likely within your budget.
If you’re middle-class in San Francisco, on the other hand, that figure is just 14 percent. Your money will buy you no more than 1,000 square feet on average. That property likely isn’t located where you’d like to live. And the options available to you on the market are even fewer than they were just a year ago, according to data crunched by Trulia. To frame this another way, the median income in metro San Francisco is about 60 percent higher than it is in Akron. But the median for-sale housing price per square foot today is about 700 percenthigher.

Des Moines Register:

Funding the state’s public universities based on performance will be examined by an Iowa Board of Regents task force on Friday.
The task force will study how state dollars are awarded to Iowa’s universities, and determine what metrics should be used to measure performance. The regents board governs the state’s universities.
Across the country, some state legislators have sought to hold public universities accountable for better performance. In Tennessee, 100 percent of higher education funding is based on a variety of performance measures, including graduation rates.

Dan Kahan:

Because the “asymmetry thesis” just won’t leave me alone, I decided it would be sort of interesting to see what the relationship was between a “science comprehension” scale I’ve been developing and political outlooks.
The “science comprehension” measure is a composite of 11 items from the National Science Foundation’s “Science Indicators” battery, the standard measure of “science literacy” used in public opinion studies (including comparative ones), plus 10 items from an extended version of the Cognitive Reflection Test, which is normally considered the best measure of the disposition to engage in conscious, effortful information processing (“System 2”) as opposed to intuitive, heuristic processing (“System 1”).
The items scale well together (α= 0.81) and can be understood to measure a disposition that combines substantive science knowledge with a disposition to use critical reasoning skills of the sort necessary to make valid inferences from observation. We used a version of a scale like this–one combining the NSF science literacy battery with numeracy–in our study of how science comprehension magnifies cultural polarization over climate change and nuclear power.

Pat Schneider:

745.
That’s the number of students in the Madison Metropolitan School District identified as homeless seven weeks into the 2013-14 school year. The count is on a pace to continue record-setting numbers of homeless children over the past decade, say school officials.
The number of homeless children and youth in the school district has climbed more than 2-1/2 times since the 2004-2005 school year, from 485 to 1,263 in the 2012-2013 school year, according to district statistics.
“We’re learning more and more that the trauma created by having to go through homelessness stays with them the rest of their lives,” Amy Noble, a social worker with the school district, told participants at Homelessness in Dane County, a summit hosted Tuesday by Leadership Greater Madison.
The number of students in families who are homeless rises over the course of the school year as families lose housing and students’ circumstances are recognized by school personnel. The count, under federal law, includes children whose families are doubled up for economic reasons, a common circumstance for low-income families not included in most other calculations of the homeless population.

Rachel Lu:

Students taking China’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, according to a popular saying, resemble an army of 10,000 rushing across a narrow log. So what happens to those who fall off?
Each year, more than 9 million Chinese students endure the gaokao, as the exam is known. A grueling two or three days’ experience — it varies by region — the test covers Chinese, mathematics, a foreign language, chemistry, physics, geography, and history, among other subjects. The test results, which range from the 200s to the 600s (scores of over 700 sometimes make headlines), comprise almost the entirety of a student’s college application portfolio. While some of the multiple-choice questions would be familiar to U.S. teenagers sweating over Advanced Placement exams, gaokao essay prompts are sometimes so bizarre that even Chinese state media challenged its mostly adult readers to answer some of the more notorious essay prompts, such as this one: “It flies upward, and a voice asks if it is tired. It says, ‘No.'”
Because Chinese parents often expect their children to become family breadwinners, the pressure to perform is intense. Faced with the gaokao’s high stakes and frustrating unpredictability, tens of thousands of test takers choose to sit through the ordeal again, when their scores fall short of their — or their parents’ — expectations. Having already graduated from high school, some of these re-takers hunker down at home for a year to study. Others attend cram schools like Maotanchang High School, which lies tucked away in a small town in the mountains of central China’s Anhui province and specializes in the dark art of military-style test prep. With an annual enrollment of more than 10,000 students, the school, known as Maozhong, has earned the dubious honor of being called “China’s Largest Gaokao Factory” in Chinese state media.

Wolfram Alpha:

We are proud to announce Wolfram Problem Generator, a website where students decide which topic they want to practice and we provide the questions and solutions. This is an exciting new way to help students with their classes: previously, students provided their own practice questions and Wolfram|Alpha helped them find answers with Step-by-step solutions. Students can now ask Wolfram|Alpha for help with practice and homework questions and can do practice problems with Wolfram Problem Generator.
Currently, there are six main topics that Wolfram Problem Generator covers: arithmetic, number theory, algebra, calculus, linear algebra, and statistics. The topics range from early elementary school all the way through college calculus. Moreover, for elementary and secondary education material, we are closely following the Common Core Standards initiative to provide a comprehensive list of topics.

Richard Adams:

The education secretary, Michael Gove, has urged politicians to stop “lying to children” about their life chances and allowing inflated exam grades that he compared to Soviet tractor production propaganda.
“For years, ministers in previous governments looked at the way more and more people were getting GCSEs and they congratulated themselves, like Soviet economics ministers on the growth in statistics,” Gove a US summit on education reform on Thursday night.
Slipping into a mock Russian accent and syntax, Gove said: “Look in Russia, thousands more get GCSEs. Surely now we are education powerhouse?”

Gillian Tett:

A few years ago John Donoghue, professor of neuroscience at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, met Cathy Hutchinson, a young woman who was suffering from locked-in syndrome following a stroke. Until recently, this would have condemned her to a life of helplessness and hopelessness: locked-in syndrome means that somebody cannot move their limbs, even if their brains are functioning normally (as Jean-Dominique Bauby described so movingly in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).
But Hutchinson had a dream: she longed to drink a cup of coffee on her own, in one vestige of normality. And Donoghue was convinced he could help. Over the past few years, he has run a project called Braingate that combines the latest advances in computing science, engineering and mathematics with neuroscience, to map the connections inside the brain – and replicate them on a computer.
More specifically, this project uses the impulses that our brains send whenever the body makes a movement – or even just thinks about a movement – to activate a robot, via a computer.

Josh Orr:

So my daughter’s computer class has progressed now from typing Word documents to Excel spreadsheets. What the hell does a 6th grader need with Excel? Is she realistically going to balance her piggy bank with a complicated spread sheet formula? Or is that meant to inspire her to enter the Future Excel Drones of America(c) club?
When I was in 6th grade I was learning HyperCard. We were animating stick figures and making choose your own adventure decks. You know, the kind of things that are appropriate for a 6th grader. In the process the groundwork was laid for my programming career.

David Leonhardt:

The education research of recent years has pointed overwhelmingly to the importance of teachers. Perhaps more than anything else – quality of principal, size of school, size of class – the strength or weakness of classroom teachers influences how much students learn and even how they fare later in life.
The great unknown is how to improve teacher quality, be it by attracting more good teachers, weeding out more bad teachers or helping teachers become better at their craft.
A new study released on Thursday, offers powerful if still tentative evidence that teacher-evaluation programs can play an important role. The study is especially notable because past research about evaluation programs suggested they had little effect. The new paper, however, studies an evaluation program – called Impact, in the District of Columbia school system – that is far larger, with bigger rewards and stiffer penalties, than most programs.
Impact, which began under Michelle Rhee while she was chancellor, has been a hotly debated program, and the new study is sure to attract attention from both supporters and critics of teacher evaluation. New York state’s plan to begin evaluating teachers has also been the subject of intense praise and criticism, as have such programs elsewhere.

Corey Kilgannon:

A research group that named Hunter College High School the saddest tweeting spot in Manhattan now says it was mistaken in its finding. The group’s acknowledgment of the error came to light after many questions were raised about an initial post on the study.
In August, the group, New England Complex Systems Institute, released a study assessing the moods of New Yorkers based on their Twitter posts. The lead researcher on the study, Prof. Yaneer Bar-Yam, told media outlets that Hunter High School, an elite public school on the Upper East Side, had the highest percentage of “negative sentiment” posts of any place in Manhattan.
This was determined, he said, by a computer program that sorted geo-tagged posts into negative or positive sentiment designations, based upon their language and emoticons.
Hunter High School was the source of an unusually high percentage of negative Twitter messages, even higher than hospital locations and spots with particularly frustrating rush-hour traffic, said Professor Bar-Yam, who offered possible reasons that included the high school’s lack of windows, high workload and the fact that the posts were collected just as the students had returned from spring break and were facing final exams.

Hillel Aron:

It’s unusual for a man like the influential Deasy to enjoy being sued. But these are unusual times. As Deasy had hoped, Superior Court Judge James Chalfant tentatively ruled that Los Angeles Unified School District’s leaders had ignored a key state law, the 1971 Stull Act, which requires LAUSD to grade not just its students but its teachers.
Hailed 31 years ago as a key reform, the Stull Act requires all school districts to evaluate their educators annually. Teachers were to be assessed on many criteria, including how well pupils progressed under their tutelage.That never happened.
Assessing teachers by how well their students learned was all but ignored statewide. LAUSD, which educates one in every nine children in California, never bothered.
Deasy’s courtroom loss inDoe v. Deasy “did exactly what has been my position,” Deasy says. Chalfant ordered school districts to take student progress into account in grading their teachers.

Jamie Gass, via Will Fitzhugh

He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,” Mississippi’s William Faulkner said of man upon receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, “but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.”
New Englanders can rightfully claim to have been America’s 19th-century literary hub, but no other regional landscape dominated 20th-century literature like the South and its genius for storytelling. Famously, Faulkner’s imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, Chickasaw for “split land,” provided the setting for his most inspired novels.
American high school students should read Southern writers like Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, author of the 1962 National Book Award-winning “The Moviegoer.” Percy crafted stories about “the dislocation of man in the modern age,” while contributing to a “community of discourse” around fiction writing. His Greenville, Miss., was a wellspring of outstanding writers.
Greenville’s patriarch, William Alexander Percy, was a lawyer, planter and poet from a suicide-plagued family. He authored the best-selling 1941 memoir “Lanterns on the Levee.” His second cousin, Walker Percy, and Walker’s lifelong best friend, Shelby Foote, were both young when they lost their fathers. Will Percy’s book-filled house became a sanctuary for writers, journalists and musicians, as the man himself mentored a region.

Reed Albergotti:

Facebook Inc.’s move Wednesday to let teenagers share items more widely reflects growing competition among social networks for the attention of teens–and the advertisers that want to reach them.
Facebook said it would let users between the ages of 13 and 17 make posts “public” so that they can be seen by anyone on the network. Previously, teenagers’ posts could be seen only by their friends and “friends of friends.”
With the shift, Facebook will operate more like such rivals as Twitter Inc. that let teens share publicly. Twitter, unlike Facebook, also lets users post anonymously or with pseudonyms.
Analysts said Facebook risks losing the next generation of young users if it doesn’t keep pace with competitors. But some privacy advocates are more concerned about public posts on Facebook than on other sites because of its vast reach. It has 1.2 billion users world-wide, roughly five times as many as Twitter. Facebook also allows users to post a wider range of media and to comment more broadly than Twitter does.
“This is about monetizing kids and teens,” said James Steyer, founder and chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit devoted to online privacy.
Aaron Everson, president of Shoutlet, a Madison, Wis., company that helps brands manage social-media campaigns, said Facebook wants to “compete against other networks that might have a younger demographic, and potentially help them reel in more advertisers.” Marketers will have to be creative in grabbing the Web-savvy teen’s attention without alienating parents, he added.

Nicholas Bakalar:

A regular bedtime schedule is unquestionably helpful for parents, but a new study has found it that it may be even more beneficial for their children.
British researchers interviewed mothers when their children were ages 3, 5 and 7, asking how often their children had a regular bedtime: always, usually, sometimes or never. The mothers and the children’s teachers also completed questionnaires about behavioral difficulties.
Almost 20 percent of 3-year-olds had no regular bedtime, compared with 9.1 percent of 5-year-olds and 8.2 percent of 7-year-olds. After controlling for many social, economic and parental behavioral factors, the scientists found that children with a regular bedtime, whether early or late, had fewer behavioral problems. And the longer irregular bedtimes persisted, the more severe the difficulties were.
The study, published Monday in Pediatrics, also found that children who had irregular bedtimes at ages 3 and 5 had significant improvements in behavior scores if their bedtime was regular by age 7.
Still, the lead author, Yvonne Kelly, a professor of lifecourse epidemiology at University College London, warned against exaggerating the importance of the findings.

Matthew DiCarlo:

The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) has recently released the first round of results from its new principal evaluation system. Like the system used for teachers, the principal ratings are based on a combination of test and non-test measures. And the two systems use the same final rating categories (highly effective, effective, minimally effective and ineffective).
It was perhaps inevitable that there would be comparisons of their results. In short, principal ratings were substantially lower, on average. Roughly half of them received one of the two lowest ratings (minimally effective or ineffective), compared with around 10 percent of teachers.
Some wondered whether this discrepancy by itself means that DC teachers perform better than principals. Of course not. It is difficult to compare the performance of teachers versus that of principals, but it’s unsupportable to imply that we can get a sense of this by comparing the final rating distributions from two evaluation systems.
These are different, completely untested systems measuring different jobs. Moreover, the principal evaluations (appropriately) employdifferent measures than those used for teachers, and they are combined in a different way. For instance, principals can only be rated effective if they meet their proficiency targets in either math or reading and “make gains” in the other. (Side note: Cross-sectional proficiency gains are a terrible measure that, in my view, should not be used in these systems.)

Patrick Wintour:

Education in England is no better than mediocre, and billions of pounds have been wasted on pointless university courses and Sure Start schemes for young children, Michael Gove’s special adviser has said in an outspoken private thesis written a few weeks before he is due to step down from his post.
Dominic Cummings, the most influential adviser to the education secretary in the past five years, also argues in a revealing 250-page paper that “real talent” is rare among the nation’s teachers – and, eye-catchingly, says educationists need to better understand the impact of genetics on children. The adviser, known for making fierce demands of civil servants, writes that the endgame for the Department for Education should be to reduce its role to acting as accountants and inspectors, employing hundreds and not thousands of civil servants – and creating an environment in which private and state education would be indistinguishable.
The Cummings manifesto claims that “the education of the majority even in rich countries is between awful and mediocre”, and that the quality of maths education, in particular, is poor.
“In England, few are well trained in the basics of extended writing or mathematical and scientific modelling and problem-solving,” he writes.
One of the best-known and most controversial of many special advisers working in government, Cummings is due to leave Gove at the end of the year. He worked in the department for two years, having previously advised Gove before the election, although his appointment within the department was initially blocked by David Cameron’s then director of communications, Andy Coulson, who regarded Cummings as untrustworthy.

Edward Frenkel:

What is wrong with the way most of us are introduced to math?
The way mathematics is taught is akin to an art class in which students are only taught how to paint a fence and are never shown the paintings of the great masters. When, later on in life, the subject of mathematics comes up, most people wave their hands and say, “Oh no, I don’t want to hear about this, I was so bad at math.” What they are really saying is, “I was bad at painting the fence.”
So what is it really like to be a mathematician?
You don’t discover something beautiful every day. Most of the time, you work on something for weeks or months, only to realize that it doesn’t work. But you never give up, you go back and try to analyze the data that you have, and try to see the analogies and connections to try to come up with a new hypothesis. Then you try to test that.
What is the ultimate goal of all these efforts?
Another analogy is solving a jigsaw puzzle. Imagine that somebody gives you a puzzle, but they don’t give you the box, just the pieces. You take those different pieces and try to put them together to create something of value, something beautiful and powerful. You can think of mathematics as the grand project of building this enormous jigsaw puzzle, with different groups of people working on different parts. Then, every once in a while, somebody finds a bridge between two parts, a way to assemble pieces together so that big chunks of the puzzle connect.

M G Siegler:

A simple link. That’s all it took to unleash a hailstorm of angry emails, messages, tweets, and comments. Why? I dared wonder if libraries will continue to exist in the future.
I mean, it’s not that crazy a notion, right? (If you’re a librarian, you’re not allowed to answer that.)
Last Monday, I linked to this piece by Art Brodsky for Wired from my blog. In it, he argues that beyond the recent hoopla around e-book pricing, the real problem with e-books is what they’re doing to libraries. That is, killing them.
As Brodsky notes:

Imagine walking into a library or bookstore and needing three or four pairs of different glasses to read different books manufactured to specific viewing equipment. Or buying a book and then having to arbitrarily destroy it after say, two weeks. That’s just nuts. But it’s the current situation we’re in with ebooks.

John McDermott:

“Life is better now than at almost any time in history”, Angus Deaton writes in The Great Escape. The Princeton economist’s account of health and wealth is a fundamentally positive story. Lives are longer, healthier, richer and more satisfying than ever before. To take one statistic from this compendium of progress: in every country in the world, infant and child mortality is lower than it was in 1950. On average, humankind is having a pretty good run.
Our incomplete flight from deprivation and early death is, however, more than a story of averages. Deaton’s lucid book celebrates the riches brought by growth while judiciously explaining why some people are always “left behind”. He draws a distinction between the inequalities that are opened up by advances in knowledge and those caused by flawed political systems. For it is humanity’s lot that, ultimately, “inequality is the handmaiden of progress”.

Ryan Mclaughlin:

About a week ago I began deleting all photos and videos of my children from the Internet. This is proving to be no easy task. Like many parents, I’ve excitedly shared virtually every step, misstep and milestone that myself and my children have muddled our way through.
To be honest, aside from making sure my Facebook privacy permissions were set, I hadn’t given a whole lot of thought about sharing photos of the kids online. I’ve run this blog (in various formats) for about a decade, and sharing stuff on it was just what I did. What I’ve always done. It’s sort of the point of it. And when in the last few years I’ve started blogging less and posting on Facebook more, I carried that same sense of “my life is an open book” with me to the social network.
My view on sharing photos of the kids has always been that the advantages of having an easy, centralized way of sharing photos with an extended family that are thousands of kilometres away outweighed the largely fictional threat of creepy people having access to them.

Michael Hancock and Kevin Johnson, Angel Taveras and Julian Castro:

Lagging far behind their international peers. Shamefully low reading and math competency. A staggering achievement gap. We’ve heard the alarming statistics about the trajectory of American students. After 10 years, No Child Left Behind has failed to put American children back on a competitive academic track.
But we are beginning to see real results in America’s cities, the epicenters of innovation, including the four we lead: Denver; Providence, R.I.; San Antonio; and Sacramento, Calif.
Long before we entered the political arena, each of us lived in the city we now lead. We attended public schools and sat at those desks — and through that connection, we know that public education can work.
One lesson is that education doesn’t need to be a partisan battleground. Far from Washington, smart education policy is uniting even the most strident opponents.
Take the Common Core curriculuma which was first promoted by the National Governors Association and has now been adopted by 45 states. Common Core improves on NCLB by putting more influence into the hands of those on the ground, breathing new life into an old Tip O’Neill axiom: Not only is all politics local, but effective education policy is even more local.

Kevin Werbach:

I’m participating in the #WWEOpen13 MOOC about open online teaching. For the first unit, we were asked to post our “teaching philosophy.” These kinds of questions typically tie me in knots. They seem inherently circular and unsolvable: to say how I should teach, I need to know what students need to learn, which isn’t something I can just declare. For whatever reason, this time I was able to tap out ten statements. I don’t know that I’d call them a philosophy, but they ring true as commitments I feel comfortable with.
Good teaching is good learning… for both the student and the instructor. Learning means new connections and themes and lessons that weren’t there at the beginning.
I believe in a balance between what the instructor and the students contribute. Teaching shouldn’t be a monologue, but it also shouldn’t be purely a peer conversation: students want the guidance and validation and knowledge that the instructor can orchestrate.
Every student should feel they are part of the experience and encouraged to contribute their unique perspectives. In particular, students should not be unfairly disadvantaged by factors such as gender, race, national origin, language, or disability.

Betsy Hammond:

Oregon high school students are broadly dissatisfied with their public education experience, saying school isn’t challenging enough, too many teachers are careless or incompetent and too many students are falling through the cracks.
Those are among the findings of a survey of 200 Oregon high school students representative of the geographic, grade-level and racial/ethnic make-up of the state’s high school population. The small sample means the survey has a margin of error of about 7 percentage points.
The survey, done by survey firm DHM Research and non-profit education advocacy group The Chalkboard Project, was designed to inject the student voice into the adult-dominated conversation about education reform in Oregon.

Matt McGrath:

A new study from the RSPB suggests that large numbers of children in Britain are missing out on the natural world.
The three-year projectfound that only 21% of children aged 8-12 were “connected to nature”.
Girls were much more likely than boys to be exposed to the great outdoors, while children in Wales had the lowest score across the UK.
The RSPB says that a perception among some adults that nature is dangerous or dirty could be holding children back.
There has been an increasing amount of research in recent years underlining the lack of contact and experience with nature among modern children.

Mark Robinson:

In the weeks leading up to the publication of our cover story about Sergio Juárez Correa and the students of José Urbina López Primary School, it became clear that WIRED could help. We decided to sponsor the school and Juárez Correa, providing them with supplies and equipment they need, like a projector, printer, and laser pointer.
But there also are powerful ways you can get involved with the burgeoning student-centered style of learning and teaching. Whether you want to bring this approach into an existing school, start a program of your own, donate to a program, or find a teacher who has asked for specific help, we’ve got suggestions. Here are four ways to take action:
1. Last year, the TED prize gave $1 million to Sugata Mitra, one of the movement’s leading thinkers. If you are interested in supporting Mitra and his School in the Cloud project emailTEDPrize@TED.com or make contributions payable to:

Edushyster::

What were you most surprised by?
The open bar. Just kidding! When I asked the people I talked to about how they got involved in the education reform movement nearly all could point to a transformative event in which they’d confronted some frustrating aspect of the education bureaucracy. I was struck by how similar their stories were to the ones that teachers tell me–and fascinated by how it is that we could have arrived at such different analyses of both the problem and the solution. For example, one of the reasons I’m so passionate about teachers having some kind–any kind–of job protections is because I’ve seen how often they have to get up in the grill of their principal or other administrators to advocate for their students. But that’s a topic for another day. You want to know if I spotted any celebs…

Erica Green:

The Baltimore City school board has requested that the district follow through on a plan to assess the effectiveness of teachers who are alternatively certified through programs like Teach for America that for years have funneled teachers into the city’s struggling schools.
The city school board approved last week the $880,000 contract to hire and train 125 to 150 Teach For America teachers for the 2013-2014 school year.
The board also approved a $735,000 contract to hire the same amount of teachers from the Baltimore City Teaching Residency, a program similar to Teach for America that has more rigorous certification requirements.

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

Record keeping by an employee is important. Don’t wait for trouble to start before you begin to compile your own personnel records. Having good records is also very important, should you become involved in a grievance over your Contract rights or benefits, or in a matter involving discipline or dismissal. To enable the Union to provide the best possible protection and representation, every employee should maintain his/her own “personnel” records.
One’s file should contain such documents as: college transcripts, evaluations, accumulated sick leave and days used, direct deposit (wage) records, records of student disciplinary referrals, Wisconsin Retirement System (DETF) records, personal leave, documentation of honors and awards, notes on student accidents and confrontations with parents or administrators, copies of all correspondence with supervisor(s) and administrators, and for teachers – individual teacher contracts for each year, licenses, and teaching assignments by year with subjects taught.

Mark Vandevelde:

The ancient university that has been seated at Oxford at least since Norman times has little in common with the modern one at Loughborough in the English Midlands that is descended from a council-run technical college. Yet one thing that is the same in both places is the £9,000-a-year fee. Britain’s universities are barred from charging more than that, and only a quarter of them opt to charge less.
Andrew Hamilton, Oxford’s vice-chancellor, detects that something is amiss. Noting the oddity of “a market in which every item, virtually regardless of content and quality, is the same price”, he argues that universities should have the freedom to charge more.
Yet America’s experience of allowing universities to set their fees is a cautionary tale. In real terms, tuition at US universities costs on average five times more than it did 30 years ago. Annual fees can run to $45,000 (roughly £28,000). Two-thirds of students who graduated in 2011 had gone into debt, borrowing an average of $26,000.

Daniel Willingham:

The results of this experiment probably won’t surprise you. What surprised me was the fact that we didn’t already have data like this in hand.
The researchers (Sadler et al., 2013) tested 181 7th and 8th grade science teachers for their knowledge of physical science in fall, mid-year, and years end. They also tested their students (about 9,500) with the exact same instrument.
Each was a twenty-item multiple choice test. For 12 of the items, the wrong answers tapped a common misconception that previous research showed middle-schoolers often hold. For example, one common misconception is that burning produces no invisible gases. This question tapped that idea:

Jesse Ritka:

There are six new sets of bleachers at Kletzsch Park, and a 12-year-old is responsible. It’s a project that’s helping him make history.
Standing next to the bleachers he helped build, James Hightower III recited the Scout Oath “On my honor I will do my best, to do my duty to God and my country, and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.”
His father, James Hightower II, tells TODAY’S TMJ4’s Jesse Ritka how much being in The Boy Scouts means to the Hightower family, “We believe in scouting. Where else can a young man, at the age of 10 or 11 start a oath by saying ‘on my honor’? It starts with saying ‘on my honor’ and those are very powerful words and words to live by.”
They’re words that the Glen Hills 7th grader takes seriously. James joined The Boy Scouts when he was eight years old and now he is the youngest African-American Eagle Scout in the country. An accomplishment the now twelve-year-old is proud of, “It’s awesome, it’s… I’ve impressed myself.”

Bill Korach, via Will Fitzhugh:

A new video war game “Call of Duty” integrates women as the objects of violence while time spent on homework declines to about two hours per week. This is not a formula designed to produce an educated literate society that will be competitive in the global economy. On the other hand, spending 8 ½ hours per day on media including games of shocking violence is a formula that will continue to coarsen our culture and even produce real violence. Recall that the Columbine killers were avid video game players.
The Kaiser Foundation reported in January 2010, that:
“Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in media use among young people. Five years ago, we reported that young people spent an average of nearly 61/2 hours (6:21) a day with media–and managed to pack more than 81/2 hours (8:33) worth of media content into that time by multitasking. At that point it seemed that young people’s lives were filled to the bursting point with media. Today, however, those levels of use have been shattered. Over the past five years, young people have increased the amount of time they spend consuming media by an hour and seventeen minutes daily, from 6:21 to 7:38–almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day, except that young people use media seven days a week instead of five. [53 hours a week]”

A. Barton Hinkle:

“My goal,” says the candidate, “is a healthier America. That is why I am setting an ambitious target of sending 1 million more Americans to the hospital in the next five years. To make sure they get there, I am announcing a new, low-interest loan program to help them pay for their treatment. This will ensure that hospital costs stay within reach of the typical American family.”
If you heard a speech like that, you probably would start scratching your head. Sure, people with acute medical conditions need hospital care. But most people don’t have to lie for weeks in a hospital bed to get healthy. And lavishing more money on hospital care will simply drive the price up — just as giving everyone a $2,000 vehicle subsidy would jack up prices for cars and trucks.

Tara Bahrampour:

Teachers are significantly more likely than people in other professions to be diagnosed with progressive speech and language disorders, according to a new Mayo Clinic study.
Speech and language disorders, or SLDs, affect patients’ ability to communicate through speaking or writing, rendering them unable to come up with words, produce sentences with correct grammar or articulate properly. It is different from Alzheimer’s dementia, which primarily involves loss of memory. SLDs become progressively more severe over time, with death occurring on average between seven and 10 years after onset.
The study, whose results were published this month in the American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias, came about after Mayo Clinic doctors noticed that a high percentage of their SLD patients were educators.
Using Alzheimer’s patients as a control group, the study found that the odds of being a teacher with SLD were 3.4 times higher than being a teacher with Alzheimer’s dementia. For other occupations, there was no statistical difference between the SLD group and the Alzheimer’s group. The study controlled for the percentage of teachers in the general population as counted in the U.S. Census.

Deborah Fallows:

I found Principal Brian Williams in the lunchroom of the Sustainability Academy, a pre-K – 5 magnet school in the Old North End of Burlington, Vermont. He was easy to spot, the biggest guy in the room, sitting on a very small chair, talking with an 8-year-old tousled-haired boy who was having trouble with his writing. It was noontime, and Principal Williams asked me if I would like some of today’s lunch: “Beef stew. I made it myself.”
I was about to chuckle a “Sure, sure” when I stopped and thought that actually, maybe he had made the stew himself. It seemed like such a place where the principal might also be the cook.
Just 5 years ago, the Sustainability Academy (SA) was known as the Lawrence Barnes Elementary School, one of two failing schools (the other was H.O. Wheeler) in the needy, sketchy part of Burlington, where about 95% of the kids were on free or reduced lunch (the nation’s most reliable proxy for poverty), test scores were very low and enrollment was declining. The school’s neighborhood is home to a mix of the down-and-out, the frontier-pushers, and is also the first stop for many of Burlington’s constant influx of refugees and immigrants.

The Burlington, VT school district will spend $59,615,950 to education about 3,600 students during the 2013-2014 school year, or $16,559.98 per student. Madison will spend about $15k/student this year, about twice the national average.

Alan Borsuk:

I had a depressing experience a few nights ago. (Don’t worry, I’ll end on a more optimistic note.) Someone sent me an email, asking for a copy of a story about him that ran in the Milwaukee Journal in 1986. He said I wrote it. This was totally news to me, but it turned out the guy was right. Glad to help.
My life was better organized in those days. I kept scrapbooks. In the course of trying to help this person, I found one with stories I wrote in 1986. I paged through it and came upon a story from September of that year about the gap in success between black students and white students in Milwaukee. The story was based on observations in classrooms, data and interviews.
The depressing part: With some cosmetic changes, that story could appear right here, right now. No one would think it was out of date. Twenty-seven years ago! In the big picture, so little has changed.
Here are some of the central points from the 1986 article:
“Many black children are not getting support from their homes that would help them do well in school.”
“Economic poverty is connected to academic poverty.”
“While some teachers are excellent, others can hardly control a classroom.”
“The dominant classroom characteristic of many students is indifference, not misbehavior.”
“Extremely high pupil turnover within schools impairs the progress of children.”
The story described a middle-grade class where students were engaged and doing good work under one teacher. Her period ended and the next teacher took over the same class — and disorder reigned.

Drake Bennett:

Yesterday I got back from a vacation on which I broke my noise-cancelling headphones, snapping off one of the ear cups when I crammed them into my suitcase. I had originally bought the headphones for trips, for blocking out the roars of jet engines (which, apparently, are deadly), snoring neighbors, and the klaxon wails of babies reacting (in a way I myself would sometimes like to) to the traumatizing experience of modern air travel. But as I was reminded upon my return, what I really use the headphones for, what I need them for, is getting anything done at work.
Like many people, I work in an open-plan office. There are rows of long shared desks, as on a bond trading floor. That means that at any one time, I am within earshot of approximately three dozen phone conversations–it would be more if one of my neighbors wasn’t a laser printer. In addition, from where I sit, there are six TV screens within my line of sight, which are usually tuned (soundlessly, thank God) to 24-hour news channels. There’s a Kurt Vonnegut short story set in a dystopian future in which everyone is supposed to be exactly equal, mentally and physically, so smart people have to wear little devices in their ears that blast horrible noises every 20 seconds to disrupt their thinking. That is how my office sometimes feels. And so yesterday I found myself groping repeatedly for the spot on my desk where the noise-canceling headphones used to sit–and breaking into a cold sweat when I couldn’t find them.

Madison’s Thoreau Elementary School originally featured an open plan design. No longer.

Barry Garelick, via a kind email:

An important part of the job of teaching math in K-12 is to stretch students–to teach them creative and personal engagement with the material. At some point this must involve expecting students to come up with previously unfamiliar steps on their own for new problems that do not lend themselves to known algorithms, prescribed methods, and predictable approaches. An effective way of doing this is to extend routine problems that students know how to solve into nonroutine problems.
Over the past two decades, however, disagreements between advocates of traditional or conventional math teaching and the math reform movement have resulted in a fragmented approach to teaching math. A key area of disagreement centers on the distinction between “exercises” and “problems”. Math reformers generally believe that conventional math teaching consists mainly of routine problems that are nonthinking, repetitive, tedious and do not lead to students learning to solve nonroutine problems.

Valerie Strauss:

he Guardian newspaper in England published a post in its Secret Teacher blog, written by teachers who write anonymously, with this headline: “There’s an insidious prejudice against older teachers.’ The piece refers to a program in England called “Teach First,” which, it turns out, is a founding partner with Wendy Kopp’s Teach For America in a growing network of dozens of organizations in countries around the world that try to change the teacher corps. It’s called Teach For All, which I wrote about in this post:
Teach for All is a network of like-minded school reform organizations in countries around the world that, as the website says, “all recruit outstanding university graduates and young leaders of a variety of disciplines and career interests to commit two years to teach in high-need areas, providing a critical source of additional teachers who ensure their students have the educational opportunities they deserve, despite socioeconomic factors.”
Teach First, whose patron is Prince Charles, is having the same effect on many veteran teachers in England as Teach For America is having in the United States, at least according to this Secret Teacher blog post. Here’s part of it:
Until not so long ago I was a happy classroom teacher, with happy pupils in a happy school. A teacher who had been officially and consistently recognised as teaching successfully over a long period of time, by many different professionals – leaders and colleagues, visiting headteachers and Ofsted inspectors. Now, despite years of successful practice, I am feeling vulnerable and hunted….

James Grant

“There is precedent for a government shutdown,” Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, remarked last week. “There’s no precedent for default.”
How wrong he is.
The U.S. government defaulted after the Revolutionary War, and it defaulted at intervals thereafter. Moreover, on the authority of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the government means to keep right on shirking, dodging or trimming, if not legally defaulting.
Default means to not pay as promised, and politics may interrupt the timely service of the government’s debts. The consequences of such a disruption could — as everyone knows by now — set Wall Street on its ear. But after the various branches of government resume talking and investors have collected themselves, the Treasury will have no trouble finding the necessary billions with which to pay its bills. The Federal Reserve can materialize the scrip on a computer screen.
Things were very different when America owed the kind of dollars that couldn’t just be whistled into existence. By 1790, the new republic was in arrears on $11,710,000 in foreign debt. These were obligations payable in gold and silver. Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, duly paid them. In doing so, he cured a default.

Chris Rickert:

More important than whether UW-Madison might take a chance on Madison Prep, though, is whether such a school chartered by UW-Madison would work. Caire said “higher education institutions tend to be more careful about who gets a charter and tend to charter some high-quality schools.”
There appears to be some evidence of this. Ten of 11 UW-Milwaukee-authorized charters have an average state report card score some 14 points higher than the Milwaukee Public Schools generally, with one charter school not rated.
The MPS and charter schools have comparable rates of poverty, although MPS schools have higher proportions of disabled students and English language learners. A special state test for disabled students and other accommodations can help mitigate the negative effect on a school’s overall performance but not necessarily completely, according to James Wollack, an associate professor and expert in testing and evaluation at UW-Madison.

Much more on the Madison Preparatory Academy, an IB charter school proposal rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board.
Madison’s non-diverse K-12 governance model spends about double the national average per student yet has sustained disastrous reading results for some time. The “same service” governance model has long run its course.

Kopin Tan:

You’ve got to learn a foreign language. At least one! This is not 1953. America’s relative position in the world will continue to decline, and Americans must know about and engage the rest of the world. If I can do just one thing, I would shake up the American education system and make Americans learn more about the world. We have the largest debt in the world. The days when we can get away with not caring about the world are coming to an end.

Aki Ito:

“You have this enormous pool of people that’s being missed because of the way the entire industry goes after the same kinds of people, asking, did you go to Stanford, did you work at this company?” said Erik Juhl, head of talent at Vungle Inc.
They can drive cars, win Jeopardy and find your soon-to-be favorite song. Machines are also learning to decipher the most human qualities about you — and help businesses predict your potential to be their next star employee.
A handful of technology companies from Knack.it Corp. to Evolv Inc. are doing just that, developing video games and online questionnaires that measure personality attributes in a job applicant. Based on patterns of how a company’s best performers responded in these assessments, the software estimates a candidate’s suitability to be everything from a warehouse worker to an investment bank analyst.
Welcome to hiring in the age of big data, an ambition marrying automation with analysis in the race to better allocate talent. Having people work at what they do best would make them more productive, bolstering the economy’s capacity to expand, according to Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Bruce Feiler:

Now that the school year is under way, my wife and I are busy managing our children’s after-school schedules, mixing sports practices, music lessons, homework and play dates. It can be a complicated balancing act for our elementary-age daughters, as some days end up overstuffed, some logistically impossible, some wide open. Still, compared to when we were children, the opportunities they get to sample on a weekly basis is mind-blowing.
There’s only one problem: To absorb the conventional wisdom in parenting circles these days, what we’re doing to our children is cruel, overbearing and destructive to their long-term well-being. For years now, a consensus has been emerging that a subset of hard-driving, Ivy-longing parents is burdening their children with too many soccer tournaments, violin lessons and cooking classes. A small library of books has been published with names like “The Over-Scheduled Child,” “The Pressured Child,” “Pressured Parents, Stressed-Out Kids” and so on.

Charlotte Deleste:

At a far west Madison school, the News 3 Topnotch Teacher for October 2013 is imparting on students the power that words can have on others.
In early October, Dana Munoz’ sixth-grade class at Toki Middle School was working on its class contract, an agreement about how the students are going to interact with each other for the school year.
“Those usually include things they believe about themselves or they believe about the world and that they really want to happen,” Munoz said. “It sets the tone or the foundation for the rest of the year. I refer to it all the time.”
Munoz, who’s been working at Toki for five years, teaches language arts and likes to emphasize to her students that words, whether written or spoken, can be quite powerful in good or bad ways.
“The words we say, the impact we have on others can make or break someone’s day,” Munoz says. “Not only is it important to read and write, how we relate to one another can change the world.”
Munoz chose to use her words to change the world through teaching. The University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate admits it’s not always easy.

Toki Middle School “Report Card” (PDF).

Jayachandran and Pande:

Height-for-age among children is lower in India than in Sub-Saharan Africa. This presents a puzzle since India is richer than the average African country and fares better on most other development indicators including infant mortality. Using data from African and Indian Demographic and Health Surveys, we document three facts. First, among firstborns, Indians are actually taller than Africans; the Indian height disadvantage appears with the second child and increases with birth order. Second, investments in successive pregnancies and higher birth order children decline faster in India than Africa. Third, the India-Africa birth order gradient in child height appears to vary with sibling gender. These three facts suggest that parental preferences regarding higher birth order children, driven in part by cultural norms of eldest son preference, underlie much of India’s child stunting.

Douglas Belkin:

In the past decade, college tuition has risen three times as fast as the consumer-price index and twice as fast as medical care.
To answer those questions, The Wall Street Journal invited three economists with distinctly different orientations within higher education to discuss the issue.
Rudy Fichtenbaum teaches at Wright State University, Fairborn, Ohio, and is president of the American Association of University Professors, which promotes academic freedom and shared governance on college campuses. Katharine Lyall was president of the University of Wisconsin System from 1992 to 2004. Richard Vedder is director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Washington, D.C., which researches cost and efficiency in higher education.
This conversation was conducted by email between Aug. 28 and Sept. 3. Here are edited excerpts.

Wall Street Journal:

What explains the high, and rising, cost of college in the U.S.?
JON ERICKSON: Among the obvious factors affecting the rising costs of a college education in the U.S. are declining state funding coupled with increased services. However, there are other factors that may not be so apparent.
Among these factors are the staggering costs of remedial education. Our data show that far too many high-school graduates arrive on college campuses ill-prepared to succeed in standard first-year courses. According to some studies as many as 40% of college students must take at least one remedial course. Conservative estimates just within Texas put the cost at nearly $250 million.
Since remedial courses don’t count toward degree attainment, this also places a significant strain on students, delaying graduation, costing them more money in tuition and fees, and deferring the salary they will earn after they obtain their degree. Improving the college readiness of our high school graduates could help reduce college costs for many students.

Michael Barry (PDF):

MMSD financial results for 2012-13 were favorable in comparison to budget expectations. The General Fund Balance, which was budgeted to decrease by ($5.5) million to support several one-time expenditures, actually decreased by just ($1.6) million. This puts the District’s balance sheet in a stronger opening position for 2013-14. The primary reason for the favorable result was an unbudgeted revenue influx of $3.2 million from Medicaid reimbursements.
However, the Food Service Fund struggled in 2012-13, recording a net loss of $386,000 on total revenues of $10.5 million. Labor cost overages were the primary cause of the net loss. The Business Office is working closely with the Food Service department on budgetary expectations for 2013-14. Overall participation in the program decreased slightly last year.
….
Open enrollment results show 370 students enrolling in to MMSD from elsewhere and 1,206 MMSD residents enrolling outside of the district. The net out is -836. (Enrollment background data & District statistics)
(Last year, MMSD had 379 students enrolling in and 1,118 enrolling out, for a net out of -739.)

Much more on open enrollment here.
Suburban Districts vs. Madison, 1995-2012.
Madison School District: Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Surveys (June, 2009).

Christine Campbell & Betheny Gross, via a kind Deb Britt email:

When people lament that innovation is not possible in “regular” districts–ones that are overseen by elected school boards and working with active teachers unions–we at CRPE often point to Denver Public Schools. We’re not alone in noticing Denver–cities around the country have heard about its energy, new ideas, and solid implementation. Last year alone, more than a dozen city teams visited Denver to try to bring some of its ideas back to their own communities.
But this enthusiasm is not universal. In a recent Denver Post article about the challenges facing Superintendent Tom Boasberg in the upcoming school board race, one interviewee remarked that his “national notoriety is pinned more to the change that DPS has been willing to initiate and less on the results that it has produced.”
Actually, Denver has produced results. During Boasberg’s tenure, graduation rates rose and dropout rates fell. According to a 2012 study by a local foundation, over four years, 68 percent of new charter schools and 61 percent of new innovation schools exceeded the district median in student growth. Independent researchers found that the district’s teacher compensation reform was associated with improved student achievement. And the district’s new enrollment system, which allows families to apply for any of the city’s public schools with a single application, matched 83 percent of students to one of their top three choices and, as hoped, showed that families across the city demand high-performing schools.
Concerns remain, of course–but the city is working to address them. When the foundation report revealed that only 32 percent of the city’s turnaround schools performed above the district average, the district sought to open new schools rather than rely on turnarounds. Researchers found that the high-quality schools that families prefer aren’t evenly distributed across the city; local civic leaders are keeping a close eye on the progress of the district’s landmark effort to improve schools in the historically underserved Far Northeast section of the city.

Alex Tabarrok:

Here’s a TV schedule from 1963. If you wanted to watch Hootenanny you needed to be in front of the television on Saturday night between 7:30 and 8:30 pm. Have something else to do that night? Too bad. No pause or rewind either.

Andover:

“Our mission is a world-class education for anyone anywhere, and when people think of world class, they think of places like Phillips Academy…”
One night last August, Bill Scott sent a new batch of math problems to Khan Academy from his home computer in Andover. By then, the chair of Phillips Academy’s math department was beginning to get the hang of things, turning out 30 problems for the website in a matter of hours rather than days. He turned off his computer and headed to bed, with the latest problem set–graphs, functions and their derivatives–still on his mind.
In the morning, Scott logged on to the Khan Academy website–and could see that Sal Khan himself had uploaded the problem set to the live site at 9:20 a.m. (that’s 6:20 a.m. for Khan in Silicon Valley). Scott checked back three hours later to find that Khan already had created four new videos to accompany Scott’s lesson. “That guy is incredible,” Scott marveled. “He’s got a lean and mean operation.” So, too, does PA’s math department, whose members have been mining, finding and organizing their favorite BC calculus problems to help beef up Khan Academy’s highest-level math offerings as part of an unprecedented partnership with the online learning site. “This is the first time we’ve partnered with a high school to substantively drive a lot of our core content,” said Khan.

Diane Ravitch:

Some critics of my book “Reign of Error” say that “reformers” are not privatizers. Who, me, they say, in all innocence?
I invite them to read this post by veteran reporter Bobby Tanzilo in Milwaukee. Here is a city with a thriving voucher program, a thriving charter sector, and a shrinking public school system (that contains disproportionate numbers of students with disabilities and English learners who are unwanted by the other two sectors).
All of this competition among the three sectors was to produce dramatic improvement, but it didn’t. Milwaukee has had school choice for 23 years. Today, it is one of the lowest performing urban districts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
But the business leaders of Milwaukee, Tanzilo writes, want more choice. They want more privatization. They want the entire city school district turned into a “Recovery School District,” to emulate those in New Orleans and Memphis.

Wall Street Journal:

What explains the high, and rising, cost of college in the U.S.?
KARL ULRICH: Higher education does not have to be costly. Utah Valley University, a fast-growing school with an enrollment of more than 30,000, educates students for about $8,000 per year. That’s one third less than the average cost of educating a high-school student in the U.S.
Most of the noise about the cost of higher education surrounds the flagship state universities and the elite private institutions. Those schools are very costly. For instance, Haverford College, where my son is a student, spends $68,000 per year for each of its students. (Note that the average student pays less than $30,000 at Haverford because of financial aid.)

Catherine Michna:

For the past nine years, I’ve been an instructor, a Ph.D. student, adjunct professor, and post-doctoral fellow in humanities departments at several different universities. During this time, many students have asked me to write recommendations for Teach for America. My students generally have little to no experience or training as teachers, but they are lured by TFA’s promises that they can help close the education gap for children in low-income communities. For humanities majors, TFA is a clear path to a job that both pays a living wage and provides a stepping stone to leadership positions in a cause of national importance.
I understand why my students find so much hope in TFA. I empathize with them. In fact, I’m a former Teach for America corps member myself. But unless they are education majors–and most of them aren’t–I no longer write Teach for America letters of recommendation for my students. I urge my higher-ed colleagues to do the same.
There is a movement rising in every city of this country that seeks true education reform–not the kind funded by billionaires, corporations, and hedge funds, and organized around their values. This movement consists of public school parents and students, veteran teachers, and ex-TFA corps members. It also consists of a national network of college students, such as those in Students United for Public Education, who talk about the damage TFA is inflicting on communities and public schools. These groups and others also acknowledge the relationship between the corporatization of higher education and the vast impact of corporate reform on our youngest and most needy children. It is these children who are harmed by the never-ending cycle of under-trained, uncertified, first- and second-year teachers that now populates disadvantaged schools, and by the data-obsessed approach to education that is enabled by these inexperienced teachers.

Amanda Winkler:

We felt like our family was totally violated by the sheriff’s department and the school district,” says Doug and Catherine Snodgrass of Temecula, California. Last December their 17-year-old autistic high school son was arrested after twice buying marijuana for an undercover Riverside county police officer.
The undercover operation, titled “Operation Glass House,” spanned a few months and included undercover officers in three area high schools: Chaparral, Temecula Valley, and Rancho Vista Continuation. The officers posed as regular high school students and would ask other students for drugs. Twenty-two students were arrested – the majority of them are reported to be special needs students like the Snodgrass’ son.
Their son, who wished to remain unnamed, is noticeably handicapped and has been diagnosed with autism as well as bipolar disorder, Tourettes, and several anxiety disorders.
“Everyday is a challenge for him,” says his father.
Their son’s list of disabilities have many in the community wondering why he was targeted in this undercover drug operation.

Gabriel Kahn:

Ten years from now college might not look too different from the outside–the manicured quads, the football games, the parties–but the learning experience students receive will probably be fundamentally different from the one they get today.
Textbooks. Lecture halls. September-to-spring calendars. Over the next decade, technology may sweep away some of the most basic aspects of a university education and usher in a flood of innovations and changes. Look for online classes that let students learn at their own pace, drawing on materials from schools across the country–not just a single professor and a hefty textbook.
All those changes probably won’t make a university education cheaper–alas–but they will likely upend our perceptions about how we value it. Traditionally, schools have been judged by how many prospective students they turn away, not by how many competent graduates they churn out.
“Those are status rankings, driven by exclusivity and preservation of an old model,” says Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University. But as new technologies seep into the classroom, it will be easier to measure what students actually learn. That will “make universities more accountable for what they produce,” Dr. Crow says.

Ron Radosh via Will Fitzhugh:

Do you know who Diane Ravitch is? If not, you should. No other educator has been acclaimed in so many places as the woman who can lead American education into the future. Her new book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, had a first printing of 75,000 copies and quickly made the New York Times non-fiction best seller list.
Recently, the leading magazine for left-liberal intellectuals, The New York Review of Books, featured a cover story about Ravitch by Andrew Delbanco. He compares the approaches of the educator most despised by the Left, Michelle Rhee, with Ravitch. He calls Ravitch “our leading historian of primary and secondary education.” Having established that, he goes on to note Ravitch’s condemnation of Rhee, which he says “borders on contempt.” Delbanco also dislikes Rhee. He does not agree with what he calls her “determination to remake public institutions on the model of private corporations.” Rhee is pro-corporate, a woman who wants “to introduce private competition (in police, military, and postal services, for example) where government was once the only provider.” In other words, Rhee stands with the enemies of the Left who want school choice for poor children, vouchers, charter schools, and competition, rather than more pay for teachers, smaller classes, and working with and through the teachers’ unions.

Andrea Anderson:

Jennifer Cheatham, Madison School District superintendent, said what type of devices and how much funding the plan will need has not been determined.
“We believe that in order to be college-, career- and community-ready they need to know how to use the technology available to them,” Cheatham said.
At Sandburg, the iPads are used in lesson plans daily and stay with the students through the end of elementary school. By the end of the year, about 70 percent of the instruction and learning involve an iPad, according to Coblentz. Currently, students are not allowed to take them home.
The students start using the iPads in second grade with access to seven educational apps and no access to the Internet or the camera. Week by week the students learn how to use the iPad in additional subjects.
Coblentz and Wilfrid said the limited functionality is intentional. They want the younger students to learn how to correctly use the camera and Internet, and have students realize it is a privilege to use the devices and to demonstrate they are ready for other features.

I disagree somewhat with the Superintendent’s sentiment. The iPad per se is not terribly important at this point. Rather, reading continues to be job one along with math and science.
The third grader using an iPad today will be interacting with information in a very different way in tech school or college. Accomplished reading, math, science and critical thinking skills are far more important.

Mustapha Abiola

It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation. If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else, or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so. If you want to succeed at whist, either be a good whist-player, or play with marked cards. You may want a book about jumping; you may want a book about whist; you may want a book about cheating at whist. But you cannot want a book about Success. Especially you cannot want a book about Success such as those which you can now find scattered by the hundred about the book-market. You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners. If these writers, for instance, said anything about success in jumping it would be something like this: “The jumper must have a clear aim before him. He must desire definitely to jump higher than the other men who are in for the same competition. He must let no feeble feelings of mercy (sneaked from the sickening Little Englanders and Pro-Boers) prevent him from trying to do his best. He must remember that a competition in jumping is distinctly competitive, and that, as Darwin has gloriously demonstrated, THE WEAKEST GO TO THE WALL.” That is the kind of thing the book would say, and very useful it would be, no doubt, if read out in a low and tense voice to a young man just about to take the high jump. Or suppose that in the course of his intellectual rambles the philosopher of Success dropped upon our other case, that of playing cards, his bracing advice would run-“In playing cards it is very necessary to avoid the mistake (commonly made by maudlin humanitarians and Free Traders) of permitting your opponent to win the game. You must have grit and snap and go in to win. The days of idealism and superstition are over. We live in a time of science and hard common sense, and it has now been definitely proved that in any game where two are playing IF ONE DOES NOT WIN THE OTHER WILL.” It is all very stirring, of course; but I confess that if I were playing cards I would rather have some decent little book which told me the rules of the game. Beyond the rules of the game it is all a question either of talent or dishonesty; and I will undertake to provide either one or the other-which, it is not for me to say.

Michael Tortorello:

Here is a truth about children with autism: they grow up to become adults with autism. Advocates estimate that over the next decade some 500,000 such individuals will come of age in the United States.
No one can say for sure what adulthood will hold for them. To start, where will everyone live and work? A 2008 Easter Seals study found that 79 percent of young adults with autism spectrum disorders continue to reside with their parents. A solid majority of them have never looked for a job.
And yet the life expectancy of people with autism is more or less average. Here is another truth, then, about children with autism: they can’t stay at home forever.
This realization — as obvious as it is worrying — has recently stirred the beginnings of a response from researchers, architects and, not least, parents. In 2009, a pair of academics, Kim Steele and Sherry Ahrentzen, collaborated on “Advancing Full Spectrum Housing,” a comprehensive design guideline for housing adults with autism. (An expanded book on the topic is scheduled to come out next year.)

Paul Hannon:

Workers in Spain and Italy are the least skilled among 24 developed countries surveyed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a deficit that is likely to impede the ability of those two countries to boost their competitiveness as part of efforts to overcome the euro-zone fiscal crisis.
In a report that covered a wide range of countries, the OECD also concluded that in both the U.S. and the U.K., younger people are significantly less-skilled relative to their peers than older people, while Japan and Finland boast the most-skilled workers.
Most assessments of the quality of human capital available to national economies have focused on time spent in education. The OECD’s study is the most extensive effort to date to measure the skills acquired during education.

Related: wisconsin2.org.

Jennifer Roland:

There has been a steady and growing call for more students to learn computer programming. In an app-centric world, many see the immediate possible benefits of a more highly skilled workforce that can create the computer-based tools we all depend on. And tech companies love the idea. Adobe’s Worldwide Education Programs Lead Tacy Trowbridge said coding is “an important and increasingly relevant form of creative expression” that has been instrumental in the growth of their business model to the cloud.
As they try to answer that call, some educators are looking beyond stand-alone lessons or separate programming classes and integrating coding into their core curriculum.
Beaver Country Day School (BCDS), a private school for students in grades 6-12 located just outside Boston, launched a school-wide coding initiative this academic year to help prepare their students for a new world of work and to, they hope, encourage more students to study computer science in college.
However, rather than just offering required stand-alone computer science courses, said Math Teacher and Department Head Rob MacDonald, they are integrating it into the core curriculum.
“I’ve actually been teaching a very successful coding elective for several years now,” he said, “but I was thrilled when I got the okay to integrate coding into our core math courses.”
MacDonald said he had been interested to hear about “interesting work around coding that was being done in schools, makerspaces, and extra-curricular programs, but very few places seemed willing to take the leap and make coding universal.”

Gretchen Reynolds via a kind John Dickert email::

Tire your brain and your body may follow, a remarkable new study of mental fatigue finds. Strenuous mental exertion may lessen endurance and lead to shortened workouts, even if, in strict physiological terms, your body still has plenty of energy reserves.
Scientists have long been intrigued by the idea that physical exertion affects our ability to think, with most studies finding that short bouts of exercise typically improve cognition. Prolonged and exhausting physical exercise, on the other hand, may leave practitioners too worn out to think clearly, at least for a short period of time.
But the inverse possibility — that too much thinking might impair physical performance — has received far less attention. So scientists from the University of Kent in England and the French Institute of Health and Medical Research, known as INSERM, joined forces to investigate the matter. For a study published online in May in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, they decided to tire volunteers’ brains with a mentally demanding computer word game and see how well their bodies would perform afterward.

Melissa Korn:

After years of hefty tuition increases, a few colleges are cutting prices and trying to wean families from discounts.
More than a half-dozen schools have slashed their sticker prices starting this fall or next as part of simplifying the college-financing process, which has become a patchwork of aid deals and discounts for families. Administrators say the price cuts could actually make schools money by attracting more new students and helping retain cost-conscious ones.
Published tuition rates have soared in the last decade, but only a small percentage of families actually pays full freight. Between grants to needy students and merit scholarships to entice other desirable candidates, schools these days are giving back nearly 50% of gross tuition revenue in the form of aid and awards, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
Such discounting has become so widespread that many small, private colleges say they are stuck in a vicious cycle: They won’t meet enrollment goals if they charge full price, even to affluent families, but they can’t afford to continue cutting everyone a deal.

Kate Allen:

South Korea is perhaps the most over-educated country in the world.
More people are enrolled in its universities and colleges than are in the target age group for tertiary education. This is probably due to older people and foreigners.
Although the proportion of students who are foreign is low – just 1.6 per cent in 2011 according to the OECD – their numbers are increasing fast. In the past decade they’ve grown more than a thousandfold. In particular Korea attracts a lot of Chinese students.
Although it’s the most extreme example, it’s not the only country to see people pour into higher education over the past decade. Plenty of other developed nations are seeing education levels soar. A recent paper found that half of American and European workers’ education level is mismatched with their current job – the majority of whom are over-educated, and under-employed.

Todd Milewski:

Scott Rohlfing left Verona’s football game at Madison La Follette feeling like his brain was going to bulge out of his eye sockets.
The senior offensive lineman and team captain doesn’t remember much about the Sept. 12 game, but knows he took a pretty good hit to the helmet in the second quarter. He continued to play, but well into the second half, the pain was too much.
“I just could not stand it,” Rohlfing said. “The lights were getting extremely bothering. At some point probably midway through the fourth quarter, I ended up just pulling the plug on it and talked to the trainer.
“I sat on the sideline with cotton balls in my ears and basically with my eyes closed and my head down, watching as much as I could just because the sound and lights were pretty intense.”
Rohlfing was diagnosed with a concussion. His doctor ordered him to avoid electronics and school work. And state law forbid him from practicing or playing until he received written clearance from a health care provider.

Related: League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis.

Andreas Schleicher:

For the first time, the Survey of Adult Skills allows us to directly measure the skills people currently have, not just the qualifications they once obtained. The results show that what people know and what they do with what they know has a major impact on their life chances. On average across countries, the median wage of workers who score at Level 4 or 5 in the literacy test – meaning that they can make complex inferences and evaluate subtle arguments in written texts – is more than 60% higher than the hourly wage of workers who score at or below Level 1 – those who can, at best, read relatively short texts and understand basic vocabulary. Those with poor literacy skills are also more than twice as likely to be unemployed. In short, poor skills severely limit people’s access to better-paying and more-rewarding jobs.
It works the same way for nations: The distribution of skills has significant implications for how the benefits of economic growth are shared within societies. Put simply, where large shares of adults have poor skills, it becomes difficult to introduce productivity-enhancing technologies and new ways of working. And that can stall improvements in living standards.
Proficiency in basic skills affects more than earnings and employment. In all countries, adults with lower literacy proficiency are far more likely than those with better literacy skills to report poor health, to perceive themselves as objects rather than actors in political processes, and to have less trust in others. In other words, we can’t develop fair and inclusive policies and engage with all citizens if a lack of proficiency in basic skills prevents people from fully participating in society.

Pew Health

Over the past four decades, the obesity rate among children and adolescents ages 6 to 19 has more than tripled.This has increased the risk of young people developing health problems such as cardiovascular disease, depression, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, breathing problems, sleep disorders, and high cholesterol. More than 31 million U.S. children participate in the National School Lunch Program each school day, and many students consume up to half of their daily calories at school. As a result, schools have the potential to help reverse the national childhood obesity epidemic.
In January 2011, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, proposed updated nutrition standards for school meals to align them with the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and current information on children’s nutrient requirements. USDA’s standards call for schools to offer more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and to serve only fat-free and low-fat milk. In addition, the standards place limits on calorie and sodium levels, and eliminate foods with trans fatty acids, or trans fats. Schools were required to implement the new standards for lunches in school year, or SY, 2012-13 and for breakfasts in SY 2013-14.
As school food authorities,* or SFAs, work to implement the new meal standards, they may face challenges,including limitations in existing kitchen equipment and infrastructure, and in the training and skills of food service staff. In January 2012, the Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project–a joint initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation–began conducting the first national study to assess the needs of SFAs. The Kitchen Infrastructure and Training for Schools study examined challenges SFAs encountered in implementing the new meal requirements under the National School Lunch Program, and collected data on their reported needs for new equipment, infrastructure changes, and staff training.

Andrea Anderson:

Pernille Ripp needed a change.
The West Middleton Elementary School teacher was unhappy with her teaching methods, felt she wasn’t doing her students justice and had no idea how she was going to fix it.
Then, one summer night in 2010, Ripp and her husband, Brandon, were driving down a road in Lodi listening to author Neil Gaiman speak about his One Book, One Twitter project in which people read the same book and discuss it on Twitter using the same hashtag.
“I looked at my husband and said that would be so cool to do with kids,” Ripp said. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, you should do that.'”
And so she created the Global Read Aloud Program that now has 132,000 students globally and revitalized her love for teaching.

Carlos Puig:

On Sunday the teachers’ union from Oaxaca, one of Mexico’s poorest states, decided that all 70,000 of the state’s teachers should go back to class — some seven weeks after the rest of the country resumed school.
The strikers headed home after spending five months protesting in Mexico City, trying and failing to stop sweeping education reforms, including new evaluation rules for hiring, promoting and dismissing teachers.
For a time they camped out in front of the National Palace in the Zócalo, the capital’s — and the country’s — main public square. After they were dislodged by the police on Sept. 13, they resettled on Revolution Square, a couple of blocks away.
Throughout the summer they demonstrated in Mexico City’s main avenues. They blocked access to the airport and to Congress. They marched to the president’s official residence.
At first they were asking Congress not to pass the proposed laws. When Congress passed the laws, they asked it to repeal them. When Congress didn’t repeal the laws, they decided to go back to work.

Lindsay Knake:

When Gov. Rick Snyder was a student at Lakeview High School in Battle Creek, he started taking college courses at Kellogg Community College.
He had 23 credits by the time he was a senior. But the credits didn’t count toward his high school graduation, he said after speaking Oct. 4 at an event at Saginaw Valley State University promoting science, math, engineering and technology instruction as key to preparing public-school students for the careers of the future.
Now, Snyder is a proponent of dual-enrollment for high school students as a means to save money on their college educations. He would like the college credits to also count toward a high-school diploma.
“It’s a great opportunity. Students could complete a year of college before they graduate high school,” he said.
That would save them 25 percent on a degree at a four-year university or 50 percent toward an associate’s degree at a community college, Snyder said.

Related: Credit for non-Madison School District Courses.

Alan Borsuk:

A lot of the currently hot controversy over the Common Core State Standards for kindergarten through 12th grade has to do with the role of standardized testing. Being a contrary kind of person, that leads me to offer this highly unstandardized test, including a few comments on some of the questions:
One: Do you have any idea what we’re talking about?
This really interests me. Just about every school in Wisconsin is deep into some pretty important changes in the goals for what kids should learn and how they should be taught when it comes to reading, language arts and math. This is part of a nationwide effort called the Common Core State Standards, launched several years ago by the National Governors Association and the organization of education chiefs of each state, with backing from major business leaders. Forty-five states are taking part. But opposition to the standards has been rising. An eight-hour public hearing Thursday before a legislative committee in Madison was called largely so foes of the standards could air their views. Three more hearings around the state (none in the Milwaukee area) are scheduled this month.

Adrienne Lu:

Professor Susan Gibbs Goetz, left, videotapes St. Catherine University student and aspiring teacher Jasmine Zeppa, right, during a science lesson at Crossroads Elementary in St. Paul, Minn. A growing number of states are judging aspiring teachers based on their performance in the classroom. (AP)
Most candidates for a teaching license in the United States have to pass written exams testing their knowledge of teaching theory and specific subject areas, such as English or biology.
Now, a growing number of states and teacher preparation programs are focusing more on how an aspiring teacher performs in the classroom. The goal is to ensure that teachers are able to translate book learning into effective instruction.
“This is what a beginning practitioner must know and be able to do,” said Sharon Robinson, head of theAmerican Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. “This is somebody who can be entrusted with the responsibilities of beginning practice.”

Tom Geoghegan:

An estimated 20 million Americans live in mobile homes, according to new Census figures. How did this become the cheap housing of choice for so many people?
“From the state where 20% of our homes are mobile ’cause that’s how we roll, I’m Brooke Mosteller, Miss South Carolina.”
Not the usual jaunty PR message you expect to hear at Miss America. And Mosteller caused a minor storm for presenting what some South Carolina natives felt was a negative slight on the state.
A few days after her comments, US Census figures confirmed that her state did indeed have the highest proportion of mobile homes – also known as trailers or manufactured housing – though the figure is closer to 18% than 20%.
Mobile homes have a huge image problem in the US, where in many minds they are shorthand for poverty. But how accurate is this perception?

Sarah Mishkin:

Chinese companies are increasingly designing sophisticated components for Apple’s iPhones and iPads instead of just supplying low-cost labour for assembling the high-tech devices.
The shift is an indication of how Chinese companies’ rising technological capabilities are threatening the Taiwanese, Japanese and South Korean companies that now dominate the global electronics supply chain.
The number of Chinese companies supplying Apple with components such as batteries has more than doubled from eight in 2011 to 16 this year, according to Apple’s published lists of suppliers and research from the brokerage CLSA.
“There are very, very serious companies emerging in China” that are beginning to see the pay-off of many years of rapid growth in their spending on research, said Nicolas Baratte, regional head of technology research for CLSA.

Rachel Pannett:

At the request of strict Asian parents, the days of college as an opportunity to work hard and play hard are fast being replaced by a new regime of alcohol-free dorms and gender-segregated floors. The University of New South Wales in Sydney offers nightly bed checks for younger students to ensure they are in their rooms by 10 p.m.–and alone.
“My mom’s happy about the fact that our apartments are under 24/7 campus security coverage,” said Mike Lin, a 22-year-old commerce student from Fuzhou, in southern China, who is studying at the university. “I do think domestic students tend to party a bit much at university-they seem to enjoy the university life better than us.”
Alarmed by a sharp decline in foreign students, Australian universities are upending the traditional college model to meet the standards of strict Asian parents. Residential dorms now offer prayer rooms and private en-suites. Newly built studio apartments gleam with hotel-style bathrooms and kitchenettes, the latest in IT technology and soundproof rooms for study groups, as well as 24-hour security and a telephone hotline for parents.

Erin Richards:

Darling’s proposed amendment to Senate Bill 76 would allow the University of Wisconsin System two- and four-year campuses, as well as technical colleges and regional state entities known as Cooperative Educational Services Agencies, to approve charter schools to operate independent of school districts. It would also allow independent charter schools performing 10% higher in achievement than their local districts for two years in a row to automatically add new campuses. And it would allow charter schools that do not employ district staff to opt out of the state’s new educator evaluation system.
The legislation has the support of the chairman of the Senate Education Committee, Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), as well as business groups and charter school advocates, who believe independent charter schools should have more opportunities to expand and replicate.
The state Department of Public Instruction, the associations that represent school boards and superintendents in Wisconsin, and the state’s largest teachers union are all against the proposal.
“This bill takes money out of the budgets of schools in western Wisconsin,” Sen. Kathleen Vinehout (D-Alma) said.

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:

Today, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty – along with Education Action Group – have launched a website that will make it easier for teachers in Wisconsin to exercise their rights. A new website, TeacherFreedom.org, helps teachers opt out of their public unions.
After filling out a short questionnaire on the website, an opt- out letter is automatically created. The teacher then must mail the signed letter to his or her union officer. “TeacherFreedom.org serves as a tool to enable teachers to leave their union if they so choose,” explains Rick Esenberg, WILL President and General Counsel.
“Under Act 10, teachers can resign from their labor union and choose to stop paying union dues, saving money in the process. For the first time, teachers are free agents and not bound to the rigid union employment rules,” he continued.

William Wan:

BEIJING — For years, Yang Jie’s friends warned her to save up for her daughter’s education. Not for tuition or textbooks, but for the bribes needed to get into this city’s better public schools.
A strong-willed, self-made businesswoman, Yang largely ignored their advice. “Success in life,” she told her daughter, “is achieved through hard work.”
But now, with her daughter entering the anxiety-filled application process for middle school, Yang is questioning that principle. She has watched her friends shower teachers and school ­administrators with favors, ­presents and money. One friend bought a new elevator for a top school. His child was admitted soon after.

Pat Schneider:

Kelly Ruppel grew up on a dairy farm outside Racine, headed to the west coast for college and worked in Washington D.C. before moving back to the Midwest and becoming a private consultant to the embattled Chicago Public Schools system.
When she received a job offer from new Madison Schools Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, whom she met when Cheatham was a top administrator at Chicago Public Schools, she and her husband packed their bags.
Today Ruppel is Cheatham’s chief of staff, one of five top administrators hired by Cheatham with ties to Chicago since taking the reins of the Madison School District in April.
In addition to Ruppel, a former principal at Civic Consulting Alliance, they include:
Alex Fralin, assistant superintendent for secondary schools and former Deputy Chief of Schools for CPS
Rodney Thomas, special assistant to the superintendent and former director of Professional Development and Design for the Chicago Board of Education
Nancy Hanks, deputy assistant superintendent for Elementary Schools and a former Chicago public elementary school principal
Jessica Hankey, director of strategic partnerships and innovation, formerly manager of school partnerships at The Field Museum in Chicago.

Fascinating. Are these new positions, or are the entrants replacing others? 10/2013 Madison School District organization chart (PDF).
Related: “The thing about Madison that’s kind of exciting is there’s plenty of work to do and plenty of resources with which to do it,” Mitchell said. “It’s kind of a sweet spot for Jen. Whether she stays will depend on how committed the district is to continuing the work she does.”

Andrea Anderson:

Under the new contracts clerical and technical employees will be able to work 40-hour work weeks compared to the current 38.75, and based on the recommendation of principals, employees who serve on school-based leadership teams will be paid $20 per hour.
Additionally, six joint committees will be created to give employees a say in workplace issues and address topics such as planning time, professional collaboration and the design of parent-teacher conferences.
Kerry Motoviloff, a district instructional resource teacher and MTI member, spoke at the beginning of the meeting thanking School Board members for their collective bargaining and work in creating the committees that are “getting the right people at the right table to do the right work.”
Cheatham described the negotiations with the union as “both respectful and enormously productive,” adding that based on conversations with district employees the contract negotiations “accomplished the goal they set out to accomplish.”

Pat Schneider:

“Madison is in the minority. Very few teachers are still under contract,” said Christina Brey, spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Education Association Council. Fewer than 10 of 424 school districts in the state have labor contracts with teachers for the current school year, she said Wednesday.
And while Brey said WEAC’s significance is not undermined by the slashed number of teacher contracts, at least one state legislator believes the state teacher’s union is much less effective as a resource than it once was.
Many school districts in the state extended teacher contracts through the 2011-2012 school year after Act 10, Gov. Scott Walker’s law gutting collective bargaining powers of most public employees, was implemented in 2011. The Madison Metropolitan School District extended its teacher contract for two years — through the 2013-2014 school year — after Dane County Judge Juan Colas struck down key provisions of Act 10 in September 2012.
The contract ratified by the members Monday will be in effect until June 30, 2015.

Andrea Anderson:

On Thursday, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty emailed a letter to Cheatham and the School Board warning that a contract extension could be in violation of Act 10.
Richard Esenberg, WILL president, said he sent the letter because “we think there are people who believe, in Wisconsin, that there is somehow a window of opportunity to pass collective bargaining agreements in violation of Act 10, and we don’t think that.”
If the Supreme Court rules Act 10 is constitutional all contracts signed will be in violation of the law, according to Esenberg.
Esenberg said he has not read the contract and does not know if the district and union contracts have violated collective bargaining agreements. But, he said, “I suspect this agreement does.”

Pat Schneider:

The contract does not “take back” any benefits, Matthews says. However, it calls for a comprehensive analysis of benefits that could include a provision to require employees to pay some or more toward health insurance premiums if they do not get health care check-ups or participate in a wellness program.
Ed Hughes, president of the Madison School Board, said that entering into labor contracts while the legal issues surrounding Act 10 play out in the courts was “the responsible thing to do. It provides some stability to do the important work we need to do in terms of getting better results for our students.”
Hughes pointed out that the contract establishes a half-dozen joint committees of union and school district representatives that will take up issues including teacher evaluations, planning time and assignments. The contract calls for mediation on several of the issues if the joint committees cannot reach agreement.
“Hopefully this will be a precursor of the way we will work together in years to come, whatever the legal framework is,” Hughes said.
Matthews, too, was positive about the potential of the joint committees.

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:

WILL President and General Counsel Rick Esenberg warns, “The Madison School Board is entering a legally-gray area. Judge Colas’ decision has no effect on anyone outside of the parties involved. The Madison School Board and Superintendent Cheatham – in addition to the many teachers in the district – were not parties to the lawsuit. As we have continued to say, circuit court cases have no precedential value, and Judge Colas never ordered anyone to do anything.”
He continued, “If the Madison School District were to collectively bargain in a way that violates Act 10, it could be exposed to litigation by taxpayers or teachers who do not wish to be bound to an illegal contract or to be forced to contribute to an organization that they do not support.” The risk is not theoretical. Last spring, WILL filed a lawsuit against the Milwaukee Area Technical College alleging such a violation.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s letter to Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (PDF).
The essential question, how does Madison’s non-diverse K-12 governance model perform academically? Presumably, student achievement is job one for our $15k/student district.
Worth a re-read: Then Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Kurtis Droge:

Rising levels of student debt have raised alarm bells in the minds of economists and recent college graduates alike. With a bachelor’s degree virtually indispensable in today’s workplace — and a master’s necessary in many fields, as well — many people, be they fresh out of high school or not, have found themselves needing to a seek a higher education in order to pay the bills.
The problem is that these days, college is far from cheap. Tuition for a four-year college can cost easily more than $10,000 per year, ranging all the way up to $50,000 or even more for top-of-the-line institutions. With many inbound college students finding themselves strapped for cash, their only option — aside from obtaining federal aid — is to seek loans to cover the difference between the costs of college and living and any income they might obtain in the meantime. This can amount to a crippling debt load by the time students graduate.
However, student debt rates are not the same across the nation: In fact, there is a surprising amount of variance, according to numbers collected by College In Sight. The average graduate of a four-year institution (or higher) with student debt has less than $20,000 of debt in Utah or Arizona. Let’s take a look at eight states at the other end of the spectrum, those with the highest amounts of student debt in the country.

Stephanie Simon:

Ever since the administration filed suit to freeze Louisiana’s school voucher program, high-ranking Republicans have pummeled President Barack Obama for trapping poor kids in failing public schools.
The entire House leadership sent a letter of protest. Majority Leader Eric Cantor blistered the president for denying poor kids “a way into a brighter future.” And Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal accused him of “ripping low-income minority students out of good schools” that could “help them achieve their dreams.”
But behind the outrage is an inconvenient truth: Taxpayers across the U.S. will soon be spending $1 billion a year to help families pay private school tuition — and there’s little evidence that the investment yields academic gains.
In Milwaukee, just 13 percent of voucher students scored proficient in math and 11 percent made the bar in reading this spring. That’s worse on both counts than students in the city’s public schools. In Cleveland, voucher students in most grades performed worse than their peers in public schools in math, though they did better in reading.
In New Orleans, voucher students who struggle academically haven’t advanced to grade-level work any faster over the past two years than students in public schools, many of which are rated D or F, state data show.

Notes and links on Simon’s Politico article here. Fascinating.