Matthew DiCarlo:

The New Teacher Project’s (TNTP) recent report on teacher retention, called “The Irreplaceables,” garnered quite a bit of media attention. In a discussion of this report, I argued, among other things, that the label “irreplaceable” is a highly exaggerated way of describing their definitions, which, by the way, varied between the five districts included in the analysis. In general, TNTP’s definitions are better-described as “probably above average in at least one subject” (and this distinction matters for how one interprets the results).
I’d like to elaborate a bit on this issue – that is, how to categorize teachers’ growth model estimates, which one might do, for example, when incorporating them into a final evaluation score. This choice, which receives virtually no discussion in TNTP’s report, is always a judgment call to some degree, but it’s an important one for accountability policies. Many states and districts are drawing those very lines between teachers (and schools), and attaching consequences and rewards to the outcomes.
Let’s take a very quick look, using the publicly-released 2010 “teacher data reports” from New York City (there are details about the data in the first footnote*). Keep in mind that these are just value-added estimates, and are thus, at best, incomplete measures of the performance of teachers (however, importantly, the discussion below is not specific to growth models; it can apply to many different types of performance measures).

Daniel T. Willingham:

How does the mind work–and especially how does it learn? Teachers’ instructional decisions are based on a mix of theories learned in teacher education, trial and error, craft knowledge, and gut instinct. Such knowledge often serves us well, but is there anything sturdier to rely on?
Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology who seek to understand the mind. In this regular American Educator column, we consider findings from this field that are strong and clear enough to merit class- room application.
Question: Some of my students seem really sleepy–they stifle yawns and struggle to keep tired eyes open–especially in the morning. This can’t be good for their learning, right? Is there any- thing I can do to help these students?
Answer: Sleep is indeed essential to learning, and US teenag- ers (and teenagers in most industrialized countries) don’t get enough. Although recent work shows there is a strong biological reason that teens tend not to sleep enough, there is some good news in this research. First, the impact on learning, although quite real, does not appear to be as drastic as we might fear. Second, the sleep deficit teens tend to run is not inevitable; with some plan- ning, they can get more shuteye.

www.danielwillingham.com/

The Economist

Every morning five-year-old Tristan starts his school day by reading in bed with his mother. He especially likes Enid Blyton. And even though he often doesn’t bother to get out of his pyjamas in time for his first class of the day, at the age of five he has a reading age of between seven and eight. He is also ahead of his peers in a variety of subjects–all, his mother reckons, thanks to home schooling.
Three decades ago home schooling was illegal in 30 states. It was considered a fringe phenomenon, pursued by cranks, and parents who tried it were often persecuted and sometimes jailed. Today it is legal everywhere, and is probably the fastest-growing form of education in America. According to a new book, “Home Schooling in America”, by Joseph Murphy, a professor at Vanderbilt University, in 1975 10,000-15,000 children were taught at home. Today around 2m are–about the same number as attend charter schools.

Angelina Cruz:

We live in an era in which the perceptions of public education have been formed based upon political ideologues bent on reform by means of accountability measures. These accountability measures in large part tie both school and teacher performance to high-stakes standardized tests. While it is reasonable that there be expectations established for teacher performance, it is not OK to impose punitive measures upon those performing in the most challenging environments with variables that extend beyond the classroom which impact learning.
Recently, a non-partisan think tank, the Forward Institute, released their findings in a study examining school achievement and poverty in public and charter schools. A key finding is that poverty is closely linked to academic achievement, as measured by high-stakes standardized testing, in the state of Wisconsin.
According to the statistical analysis, charter schools, long lauded as the solution to the ills of the public school system, actually fare worse in addressing the needs of our most disadvantaged populations. Statewide, public school students from low socioeconomic backgrounds actually outperform their peers in charter school settings. This study places public education within the context of the 2011-2013 Wisconsin biennial budget (Act 32).

Los Angeles Times:

Stanford University: Write a note to your future roommate that reveals something about you or that will help your roommate — and us — know you better.
Carleton College: Have you ever tossed around a Frisbee___, a hot potato___, an idea___?
Connecticut College: Tell us about your favorite place and why it holds special meaning for you. It can be close to home or on another continent, your kitchen or a mountaintop.
Pomona College: You are walking down the street when something catches your eye. You stop and stare for a long while, amazed and fascinated. What are you looking at?

Matthew Ladner:

A few years ago while serving as a VP at the Goldwater Institute I received a request to come out hard against the adoption of Common Core standards in Arizona. I didn’t know whether it would have mattered or not but the request originated from people who I continue now to hold in a great deal of respect. I considered the matter very carefully. I had deep misgivings regarding Common Core at the time, the most serious of which was the governance of the standards over time. At the time I was of the opinion that unless Ben Bernanke took up the task of governing the standards that it would inevitably follow that Common Core would eventually result in the Great American Dummy Down.
Nevertheless in the end I decided not to oppose Arizona’s adoption of Common Core standards. Regardless of how bad Common Core started out or later became, Arizona simply had nothing to lose. Arizona had just about every testing problem you could imagine- dummied down cut scores, massive teaching to test items, and something at least in the direct vicinity of outright fraud by state officials regarding the state’s testing system. Our state scores had “improved” substantially through a combination of lowered cut scores and teaching to the test items, but NAEP showed Arizona scoring below the national average on every single test and precious little progress. The status quo was worse than a waste of time.

Rebecca Winthrop:

Recently at the Brookings Center for Universal Education (CUE), we were joined by colleagues from around the world in a two-day conference to discuss the status of global education and strategies for future action. Activities during the two-day conference included: a public event with United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown and Director of the White House National Economic Council Gene Sperling; a private meeting with a delegation from the Democratic Republic of the Congo; a meeting convened by Women Thrive Worldwide; a private all-day research symposium on ‘Learning in the Developing World’; and presentations by CUE’s Global Guest scholars.
The central theme of the events was to understand the new opportunities that Education First, the U.N. secretary-general’s new five-year global education initiative, affords our community. There was broad agreement that this new initiative has the potential to be a game-changer in global education if it succeeds in its mission to, in the words of Carol Bellamy, get existing and new actors alike to “do more and do better.” Not only does Education First inject much needed leadership and energy into global education advocacy and provide a bold vision for the future, but it also puts forward a set of concrete steps for actors to take if they want to lend their hands to the effort.

Colin Hitt:

So you say charter schools don’t work. That’s an empirical claim. It needs to be backed up by evidence. Here’s a helpful guide to the most rigorous research available. Once you’ve tackled this material, you’ll be in position to prove your point.
As you probably know, the gold standard method of research in social science is called random assignment. Charter schools are particularly well-suited for random assignment evaluations, since they’re usually required by law to admit students by lottery. The lotteries are fair to families – that’s why they’re put in place. But they also allow researchers to make fair comparisons between students who win or lose lotteries to attend charter schools.
To date, nine studies lottery-based evaluations of charter schools have been released. Let’s go through them, starting with the earliest work.
The first random assignment study of charter schools was released in 2004 by Caroline Hoxby and Jonah Rockoff. It focused on Chicago International Charter School. After three years, charter students had significantly higher reading scores, equal to 3.3 to 4.2 points on 100-point rankings. Gains were even stronger for younger students.

Pamela Cotant:

Jane Qualle found a nice fit with the CATCH Healthy Habits program when she looked for volunteer opportunities after she retired as a nurse.
CATCH Healthy Habits in Madison pairs adults 50 and older with children at various sites to encourage healthier eating and physical activity. It also is aimed at helping the adults, who can learn alongside the children and receive benefits by volunteering. CATCH stands for Coordinated Approach To Child Health.
After first volunteering at a site farther away from her home, Qualle volunteered at the Mendota Elementary School site, which was about a mile from home.
She usually walks, which allows her to get some exercise and serve as a role model for the children.
“I’m just a believer — the more active you are, the healthier you are,” Qualle said. “It’s an opportunity for kids to actually play rather than sitting in front of the TV or computer.”

Mike Thomas, via a kind reader’s email:

Kids in Singapore and Finland have long distinguished themselves on international academic tests, leaving American kids far, far, far behind.
They would rule the 21st Century while our kids would assemble snow globes, sew sneakers, man the call centers and figure out how to pay their parents’ entitlements on 93 cents a day.
If things weren’t bad enough, now we have the results of international fourth grade reading assessments. And not only were the usual suspects at the top of the list, we have a new nation to rub its superiority in our face, a nation that bested even Singapore and Finland.
The kids there not only significantly outperformed American kids, they had almost triple the percent of students reading at an advanced level when compared to the international average.

Related:
The PIRLS Reading Result-Better than You May Realize by Daniel Willingham, via a kind reader’s email:

The PIRLS results are better than you may realize.
Last week, the results of the 2011 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) were published. This test compared reading ability in 4th grade children.
U.S. fourth-graders ranked 6th among 45 participating countries. Even better, US kids scored significantly better than the last time the test was administered in 2006.
There’s a small but decisive factor that is often forgotten in these discussions: differences in orthography across languages.
Lots of factors go into learning to read. The most obvious is learning to decode–learning the relationship between letters and (in most languages) sounds. Decode is an apt term. The correspondence of letters and sound is a code that must be cracked.
In some languages the correspondence is relatively straightforward, meaning that a given letter or combination of letters reliably corresponds to a given sound. Such languages are said to have a shallow orthography. Examples include Finnish, Italian, and Spanish.
In other languages, the correspondence is less consistent. English is one such language. Consider the letter sequence “ough.” How should that be pronounced? It depends on whether it’s part of the word “cough,” “through,” “although,” or “plough.” In these languages, there are more multi-letter sound units, more context-depenent rules and more out and out quirks.

Lauren Weber:

Most college students understand that it’s probably a good idea to remove online photos of themselves drinking beer or mooning the camera as they plot their entry into the professional world.
But few realize they should spend just as much time highlighting the good news about themselves on the web.
Now some college career-services centers are providing tools to help their students influence the results a recruiter might see when typing their names into a search engine.
Schools, ever more conscious of their job-placement figures, are moving a step beyond simply warning students to clean up their profiles. They are encouraging students to put forward information that can help them land jobs – and investing in services to help them do so.

Clay Shirky:

Fifteen years ago, a research group called The Fraunhofer Institute announced a new digital format for compressing movie files. This wasn’t a terribly momentous invention, but it did have one interesting side-effect: Fraunhofer also had to figure out how to compress the soundtrack. The result was the Motion Picture Experts Group Format 1, Audio Layer III, a format you know and love, though only by its acronym, MP3.
The recording industry concluded this new format would be no threat, because quality mattered most. Who would listen to an MP3 when they could buy a better-sounding CD? Then Napster launched, and quickly became the fastest-growing piece of software in history. The industry sued Napster and won, and it collapsed even more suddenly than it had arisen.
If Napster had only been about free access, control of legal distribution of music would then have returned the record labels. That’s not what happened. Instead, Spotify happened. ITunes happened. Amazon began selling songs in the hated MP3 format.
How did the recording industry win the battle but lose the war? They crushed Napster, but what they couldn’t kill was the story Napster told.

Commentary here.

Caroline Dynes:

LSE’s public policy group put on an excellent conference programme on 4 December at Beveridge Hall. The conference explored the themes:1) the Economic impact of academic research; 2) impact and the new digital paradigm; 3) next steps in assessing impact; 4) impact as a driver for Open Access. Throughout the day there were break-out sessions on different types of social media for enhancing academic impact but sadly I was unable to attend those (for more info see here).
Upon arrival on a cold London morning, I was struck by the size of the pastries on offer but once I had assured myself of one I bustled into the main hall for the beginning of the day’s sessions. The economic impact of academic research was a striking title, and I was unsure how the pounds were going to be counted. Patrick Dunleavy set out the work he had been doing on the impact of social sciences and the artificial lines in the sand he had to draw to demarcate the social sciences from other work in an increasingly interdisciplinary world. This included impressive figures such as £4.8bn annually as the total value-added from social sciences to the economy.

Anand Giridharadas:

“I was raised into believing that money is everything,” said Maire Mendoza, 19, crying at her own tale.
Her parents are near-invisibles in this city that they’ve heard called a city of dreams. They left Mexico before Maire was born and have toiled anonymously ever since — her mother a baby sitter these days, her father a restaurant worker.
They raised their girls as pragmatic survivors. So it was startling when Maire came to them not long ago with an epiphany: “I now know that I don’t want to work for money,” she said, to bafflement. But her father, sensing his limitations, deferred. “You’re probably right,” she remembers him saying, “and it’s because you go to school and you know things that we don’t know.”

Joe Burris:

The State Department of Education on Monday unveiled a new way of assessing accountability of each school, a measure called the School Progress Index (SPI) that school officials say will cut in half the percentage of non-proficient students by 2017.
The Maryland State Department of Education unveiled Monday a new way of assessing accountability of each school in Maryland under the waiver that it received from the federal No Child Left Behind act.
The new measure, the School Progress Index, aims to cut in half the percentage of students who do not score at a proficient level on the state’s assessments by 2017, school officials said. It replaces the system of measuring school targets called adequate yearly progress.

David Wessel

Big budget deficits haven’t always been with us.
From the end of the Eisenhower years through the Carter presidency, the deficit averaged a modest 1.4% of the nation’s economic output. The budget was nearly balanced in seven of the 20 years from 1960 to 1979. And, as Bill Clinton reminds at every opportunity, the U.S. government was in surplus for four years at the end of his presidency.
In January 2001, the Congressional Budget Office projected annual surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion over the following 10 years. Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman at the time, worried out loud about the consequences of paying off the federal debt, such as the possibility that the government might invest its surpluses in corporate stock and meddle in management.

Laura Waters:

From NJ Ed. Comm. Chris Cerf’s just-released Education Funding Report:

It is the Department’s hope that in considering changes to the SFRA funding formula, the Legislature will also address some of the Education Funding Report’s recommendations. Three in particular are worth highlighting. First, notwithstanding the change to the State’s tenure law, where budget or other constraints require school districts to lay off teachers, state law forces them to do so based on seniority, not classroom effectiveness. The result is a system that prizes longevity over student outcomes. Such a system is tragically unfair to disadvantaged children and cannot be permitted to continue.

The other two recommendations Cerf refers to are creating incentives for school reform (“In fact, historically, the worse a school district was performing, the more state aid it received”) and phasing out “adjustment aid,” which was intended to protect districts as the state transitioned from the old funding formula (Abbott-driven) to the new one, the School Funding Reform Act (SFRA). From Cerf’s report:

Matthew DeFour:

Two yet-to-be-determined Madison elementary schools will split a $1.2 million grant to accelerate low-income and minority student achievement, the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools announced Wednesday.
School Board member Mary Burke contributed the funding for the grant, which will be awarded in $200,000 installments over three years.
The foundation currently distributes about $400,000 a year to Madison schools, so the grant will double that amount, foundation executive director Stephanie Hayden said. The goal of the grant is to demonstrate that closing the achievement gap can be done more quickly than currently expected.
“We would hope that others in the community would step forward and fund similar things,” Hayden said. “We really view these as a demonstration project to show it can be done.”
The eligible non-charter schools must have at least 50 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Eighteen elementary schools meet that threshold this year.

Grant Blume, Marguerite Roza via a kind Deb Britt email

There is a longstanding implicit bargain that comes with state-supported higher education: subsidized prices for in-state students, and resident preference in the admissions process.
News reports now suggest that public universities across the country are shifting more spots to nonresidents (who pay higher tuitions) in order to plug budget gaps, prompting critics to worry that residents are losing their advantage in the admissions process.
Do residents still have an advantage, or are admissions standards leveling for the two groups? Or, are admissions actually now favoring out-of-state applicants?
This case study examines admissions data at the University of Washington in order to quantify the effect on admissions standards for residents versus nonresidents. Like many other state flagship universities, the UW has suffered from constrained state revenues during the recent recessionary years. The findings suggest that Washington residents have indeed lost their edge in UW admissions, and in fact may have been at a disadvantage in 2011.

Madison Teaches, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter via a kind Linda Doeseckle email:

In order for one to be eligible for the MTI-negotiated Teacher Emeritus Retirement Program (TERP) [Clusty Search], he/she must be a full-time teacher, at least 55 years old, with a combined age (as of August 30 in one’s retirement year) and years of service in the District totaling at least 75. (For example, a teacher who is 57 and has eighteen (18) years of service to the MMSD would be eligible: 57 + 18 = 75.) Teachers who are younger than age 55 are eligible if they have worked for the MMSD at least 30 years. Up to ten (10) part-time teachers may participate in TERP each year provided they have worked full-time within the last ten (10) years and meet the eligibility criteria described above.
Retirement notifications, including completed TERP agreements, are due in the District’s Department of Human Resources no later than February 15. Appointments can be made to complete the TERP agreement and discuss insurance options at retirement by calling the District’s Benefits Manager, Sharon Hennessy at 663-1795.
MTI was successful in negotiations for the 2009-13 and 2013-14 Contracts in negotiating a guaranteed continuance of TERP. Thus, MTI members can be assured that TERP runs through 2014 and not feel pressured into retirement before they are ready.
MTI Assistant Director Doug Keillor is available to provide guidance and/or to provide estimated benefits for TERP , insurance continuation, application of one’ s Retirement Insurance Account, WRS and Social Security. Call MTI Headquarters (257-0491) to schedule an appointment.

Steven Rattner:

Eye-popping tales of growing income inequality are hardly new. By now, nearly every American must be painfully aware of the widening pay gap between top executives and shop floor laborers; between “Master of the Universe” financiers and pretty much everyone else.
But here’s what may not be as familiar: Widening income disparities are hardly limited to the commercial world, and even among very successful individuals performing similar tasks, income differences have grown.
Recently, thanks to data compiled by The Chronicle of Higher Education, I saw these macro trends reduced to the micro level in a perhaps unlikely setting: institutions of higher learning.

Much more on Steven Rattner.

Richard Epstein:

The age of big government is now upon us. The question is how to respond to this daunting reality. One possible approach is prudential acquiescence to the inevitable. Conservatives could work toward incremental reform within today’s political paradigm. The Hoover Institution’s own Peter Berkowitz offers this advice in his thoughtful column in the Wall Street Journal. Libertarians, in particular, must “absorb” the lesson that frontal assaults on New Deal-era policies are out. He writes:

[C]onservatives must redouble their efforts to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities. But to undertake to dismantle or even substantially roll back the welfare and regulatory state reflects a distinctly unconservative refusal to ground political goals in political realities.
Conservatives can and should focus on restraining spending, reducing regulation, reforming the tax code, and generally reining in our sprawling federal government. But conservatives should retire misleading talk of small government. Instead, they should think and speak in terms of limited government.

I fear the downside of Berkowitz’s counsel of moderation. For starters, no one can police Berkowitz’s elusive line between “small” and “limited” government. At its core, Berkowitz’s wise counsel exposes the Achilles heel of all conservative thought, which can be found in the writings of such notables as David Brooks and the late Russell Kirk. Their desire to “conserve” the best of the status quo offers no normative explanation of which institutions and practices are worthy of intellectual respect and which are not. No one doubts that politics depends on the art of compromise. But compromise only works for politicians who know where they want to go and how to get there.

sp-eye:

It seems only fair that if the teacher salaries were published, then we also publish the salaries for administrators.
We’ve got 10 members of the $100K club plus one that’s right on the edge.
The question in our minds right now is that a 2% pool was set aside for administrators, admin support, and Local 60. The average increases was 2% for these groups.

Robert McCartney:

For more than a decade, school standardized tests have been the magic keys that were supposed to unlock the door to a promised realm of American students able to read and do sums as well as their counterparts in Asia and Europe.
A generation of U.S. education reformers has assured us that if we would just rely mostly on test scores and other hard data to guide decisions, then all manner of good results would ensue. Foundations gave millions of dollars to encourage it. The Obama administration embraced the cause, lest it stand accused of short-changing kids.
It was always a fairy tale. Tests are necessary, of course, but the mania for them has become self-defeating. They don’t account for the vast differences in children’s social, economic and family backgrounds. Good teachers give up on proven classroom techniques and instead “teach to the test.”
Now, finally, somebody with standing is getting attention for denouncing the madness.
The truth-teller is one of our own from the Washington region, Montgomery County Superintendent Joshua P. Starr. He has only been here for a year and a half, but he arrived with an impressive résumé and is emerging as a credible national voice urging a more reasoned and deliberate path to educational progress.

Tim Post:

Imagine trying to read and solve math problems in a school where you don’t speak the language of your teacher and classmates.
That’s the challenge facing roughly 65,000 students in Minnesota, or 8 percent of the student population, who are learning English as they go through the school.
Despite some recent improvement in their test scores, English learners, whose numbers are growing, perform far below the state average in reading, math and science. Only slightly more than half graduate from high school in four years. To boost English learners’ performance, some Minnesota schools are trying new approaches designed to help them more quickly grasp the language. Among them is Kennedy Elementary in Willmar, Minn., which has a growing number of students from Somalia.

Matthew DeFour:

Madison School Board president James Howard has drawn an opponent setting up the likelihood of three races for the spring election.
Greg Packnett, a Democratic legislative aide, has filed paperwork to run for Howard’s seat. Howard has yet to file, but tells me he plans to do so by the Jan. 2 deadline.
Dean Loumos, executive director of low-income housing provider Housing Initiatives, and Wayne Strong, a retiring Madison police lieutenant, have filed to run for the seat being vacated by Beth Moss.
Adam Kassulke, a former Milwaukee teacher whose daughter attends Shabazz High School, and Ananda Mirilli, restorative justice coordinator with YWCA Madison and a Nuestro Mundo parent, have filed to run for the seat being vacated by Maya Cole.
One other update: State Rep. Kelda Roys and disability rights attorney Jeff Spitzer-Resnick, who previously said they were thinking about running, have decided not to run.

Collin Hitt:

So you say charter schools don’t work. That’s an empirical claim. It needs to be backed up by evidence. Here’s a helpful guide to the most rigorous research available. Once you’ve tackled this material, you’ll be in position to prove your point.
As you probably know, the gold standard method of research in social science is called random assignment. Charter schools are particularly well-suited for random assignment evaluations, since they’re usually required by law to admit students by lottery. The lotteries are fair to families – that’s why they’re put in place. But they also allow researchers to make fair comparisons between students who win or lose lotteries to attend charter schools.
To date, nine studies lottery-based evaluations of charter schools have been released. Let’s go through them, starting with the earliest work.
The first random assignment study of charter schools was released in 2004 by Caroline Hoxby and Jonah Rockoff. It focused on Chicago International Charter School. After three years, charter students had significantly higher reading scores, equal to 3.3 to 4.2 points on 100-point rankings. Gains were even stronger for younger students.

Related: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools”.

Kris Olds:

Are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) becoming mechanisms for international competition in global higher education? Where are Europe’s MOOCs in the context of the dearth of lifelong learning opportunities in the region, or both the internal and external/global dimensions of the European Higher Education Area? Who will establish the first MOOCs platform that spans the Arabic-speaking world? Are the MOOCs born in the United States (circa 2012) poised to become post-national platforms of higher ed given their cosmopolitan multilingual architects? And will my birth country of Canada ever sort out a strategy regarding MOOCs (a point also made by George Siemens), or will Canada depend on US platforms like it does in many sectors and spheres of life, for good and bad.
I couldn’t help but think about some of these questions when England’s Open University (est. 1969) announced last Thursday that it was going to establish a MOOCs platform that will be known as Futurelearn. Link here for the press release and here for some media coverage of Futurelearn. In total 12 UK-based universities will initially be associated with the Futurelearn platform:

Christopher Shea:

Uri Simonsohn, a research psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, did not set out to be a vigilante. His first step down that path came two years ago, at a dinner with some fellow social psychologists in St. Louis. The pisco sours were flowing, Simonsohn recently told me, as the scholars began to indiscreetly name and shame various “crazy findings we didn’t believe.” Social psychology–the subfield of psychology devoted to how social interaction affects human thought and action–routinely produces all sorts of findings that are, if not crazy, strongly counterintuitive. For example, one body of research focuses on how small, subtle changes–say, in a person’s environment or positioning–can have surprisingly large effects on their behavior. Idiosyncratic social-psychology findings like these are often picked up by the press and on Freakonomics-style blogs. But the crowd at the restaurant wasn’t buying some of the field’s more recent studies. Their skepticism helped convince Simonsohn that something in social psychology had gone horribly awry. “When you have scientific evidence,” he told me, “and you put that against your intuition, and you have so little trust in the scientific evidence that you side with your gut–something is broken.”
Simonsohn does not look like a vigilante–or, for that matter, like a business-school professor: at 37, in his jeans, T-shirt, and Keen-style water sandals, he might be mistaken for a grad student. And yet he is anything but laid-back. He is, on the contrary, seized by the conviction that science is beset by sloppy statistical maneuvering and, in some cases, outright fraud. He has therefore been moonlighting as a fraud-buster, developing techniques to help detect doctored data in other people’s research. Already, in the space of less than a year, he has blown up two colleagues’ careers. (In a third instance, he feels sure fraud occurred, but he hasn’t yet nailed down the case.) In so doing, he hopes to keep social psychology from falling into disrepute.
Simonsohn initially targeted not flagrant dishonesty, but loose methodology. In a paper called “False-Positive Psychology,” published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science, he and two colleagues–Leif Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Wharton’s Joseph Simmons–showed that psychologists could all but guarantee an interesting research finding if they were creative enough with their statistics and procedures.

Thomas Jerome Baker:

I am a member of many professional learning communities. I do a tremendous amount of reading, trying to be at the cutting edge of knowledge in my field: education. Here’s what I mean when I say “cutting edge”: to be one of the first people to know about new developments and news in the field of education in general, and English Language Teaching, specifically, which is my field in which I work, as an educator in an International Baccalaureate World School, located in Santiago, Chile.
Well, as I said, while reading I just came across an open question, asked by a colleague from Bengaluru, India, named Shivananda Salgame.
No, I didn’t make up that name, nor the question. Trust me, both the person and the question are real. In fact, let me first introduce you to Shivananda a bit, and then I’ll add my reflections to the question he posed.

Jeff Selingo:

When we read or hear stories in the news media these days about debt in higher education, we typically assume they are about the trillion dollars in student loans held by college graduates and their families.
But last week The New York Times put the spotlight on an often ignored angle to questions of debt in higher education: the amount of money owed by colleges and universities themselves.
“The pile of debt — $205 billion outstanding in 2011 at the colleges rated by Moody’s — comes at a time of increasing uncertainty in academia,” Andrew Martin of The Times wrote in a front-page story.
In some ways, the news is even worse. The Times only counted debt that is tracked by Moody’s, one of the big-three credit-rating agencies. Moody’s only rates the debt at a few hundred of the nation’s colleges, usually the ones that are in solid financial shape. Data from the Education Department paints a picture of more red ink for all of higher education: $277 billion, double what colleges held in debt in 2000.

Scott Thurm:

Though Colorado taxpayers now provide more funding in absolute terms, those funds cover a much smaller share of CU’s total spending, which has grown enormously. In 1985, when Mr. Joiner was a freshman, state appropriations paid 37% of the Boulder campus’s $115 million “general fund” budget. In the current academic year, the state is picking up 9% of a budget that has grown to $600 million.
A number of factors have helped to fuel the soaring cost of public colleges. Administrative costs have soared nationwide, and many administrators have secured big pay increases–including some at CU, in 2011. Teaching loads have declined for tenured faculty at many schools, adding to costs. Between 2001 and 2011, the Department of Education says, the number of managers at U.S. colleges and universities grew 50% faster than the number of instructors. What’s more, schools have spent liberally on fancier dorms, dining halls and gyms to compete for students.
Still, Colorado ranks 48th among states in per-person spending on higher education, down from sixth in 1970, says Brian Burnett, a vice chancellor at the University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus who recently published his Ph.D. dissertation on Colorado’s higher-education funding.

Peter Hancock:

The Lawrence school board hopes to finalize plans for an upcoming bond election, including plans for expanding career and technical education programs, when the board holds a special meeting this week.
The board meets at 7 p.m. Monday at the district office, 110 McDonald Drive.
Rick Henry, career and technical education specialist for the district, updated the board last week about the kinds of career and technical programs that officials would like to offer by forming partnerships with area community and technical colleges to teach classes at a facility in Lawrence.
Those programs include health sciences, machine technology, computer networking and commercial construction. Those would be in addition to the culinary arts program currently offered at the facility. Officials estimated the cost of launching those programs at about $4.4 million.

The Lawrence School District plans to spend $173,879,557 during 2012-2013 for 11,000 students or $15,807/student. PRK-12 Madison school district per student spending is $14,242 during 2012-2013.

Dave Trabert & Todd Davidson:

In the midst of a dismal recovery where every job counts, one fact stands out: States that tax less achieve better economic performance. Conventional thinking (at least within government) says that low state taxes are dependent upon having access to unusual revenue sources, but that’s not it. A state could be awash in oil and gas severance taxes and still have a high tax burden if the government will not exercise restraint.
The secret to having low taxes is controlling spending, and that’s exactly what low-tax-burden states do.
States with an income tax spent 42% more per resident in 2011 than the nine states without an income tax. States in the bottom 40 of the Tax Foundation’s Business Tax Climate Index (which assesses business, personal, property and other taxes) spent 40% more per resident. In the American Legislative Exchange Council’s “Rich States, Poor States” Economic Outlook (based on 15 policy variables), the bottom 40 spent 35% more than the top 10 states.

Jay Matthews:

Some people at the National Math and Science Initiative think I don’t appreciate them, but that’s not quite right. I enjoy their engaging television ads on great teachers and international competition. Few other private groups have done as much to make high schools more rigorous. They have some of the smartest school reformers I know.
The Dallas-based nonprofit organization has spent nearly $80 million, much of it from the ExxonMobil Foundation, in nine states. The first 136 schools in its program of teacher training, weekend study sessions and student supports have seen the number of passing scores on Advanced Placement math, science and English tests increase 137 percent for all students and 203 percent for African American and Hispanic students in three years. It now has 462 schools, including some in southern Virginia.
My hesitation to embrace its approach has to do with the way I was raised. My parents never paid me for good grades, while students at National Math and Science Initiative schools can get $100 for every AP exam they pass.

Nathan Harden:

In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.
We’ve all heard plenty about the “college bubble” in recent years. Student loan debt is at an all-time high–an average of more than $23,000 per graduate by some counts–and tuition costs continue to rise at a rate far outpacing inflation, as they have for decades. Credential inflation is devaluing the college degree, making graduate degrees, and the greater debt required to pay for them, increasingly necessary for many people to maintain the standard of living they experienced growing up in their parents’ homes. Students are defaulting on their loans at an unprecedented rate, too, partly a function of an economy short on entry-level professional positions. Yet, as with all bubbles, there’s a persistent public belief in the value of something, and that faith in the college degree has kept demand high.
The figures are alarming, the anecdotes downright depressing. But the real story of the American higher-education bubble has little to do with individual students and their debts or employment problems. The most important part of the college bubble story–the one we will soon be hearing much more about–concerns the impending financial collapse of numerous private colleges and universities and the likely shrinkage of many public ones. And when that bubble bursts, it will end a system of higher education that, for all of its history, has been steeped in a culture of exclusivity. Then we’ll see the birth of something entirely new as we accept one central and unavoidable fact: The college classroom is about to go virtual.

Dylan Barth:

The main focus of this post is KA-Lite: a lightweight web app for hosting Khan Academy content from a local server, without the need for an Internet connection.
“Education is all a matter of building bridges.” – Ralph Ellison
I love Khan Academy. To me, it’s that band that I listened to way before it became popular and everybody else jumped on the bandwagon. I remember discovering Khan way back in December of 2006, when it was just a YouTube channel and I was a wee little high school sophomore struggling to pay attention in my pre-cal class. At the time, I didn’t know how lucky I was to have found those videos. Sal (I call him Sal, because deep down I feel like we’re buddies) always managed to break concepts down in such a concise and visually digestible way. If I didn’t get it the first time, I could play it over and over again until I understood it without the risk of ridicule. It was a relief. It spurred my interest in the material for the first time. And I remember thinking, “Man… I wish Sal could teach all of my classes.”
Fast forward 6 years. The Khan Academy has grown into a full-fledged non-profit organization with funding from entities like Google and The Gates Foundation. It has delivered 217,336,268 lessons to date. Anybody with an Internet connection can type http://www.khanacademy.org into their address bar and have instant access to over 3,600 high-quality lessons on topics ranging from Art History and American Civics to Calculus and Computer Programming. How awesome is that?

Art Aisner and Laura Houser:

Parents and school officials concerned with potentially sweeping education reform currently making its way through the Michigan legislature are invited to sound off at a series of informational meetings starting Tuesday across Oakland County.
Dave Randels, assistant director of the office of government relations and pupil services for Oakland Schools, will speak about Gov. Rick Snyder’s education funding proposals from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Doyle Center in Bloomfield Hills.
“Michigan is embarking on a very radical experiment with our children — one that is untested and untried,” an alert on the Bloomfield Hills Public Schools website read Monday. “We need to come together to learn about this movement and what we can do about it.”

Former Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad is now leading the Birmingham School District.

Maria Konnikova:

MEDITATION and mindfulness: the words conjure images of yoga retreats and Buddhist monks. But perhaps they should evoke a very different picture: a man in a deerstalker, puffing away at a curved pipe, Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself. The world’s greatest fictional detective is someone who knows the value of concentration, of “throwing his brain out of action,” as Dr. Watson puts it. He is the quintessential unitasker in a multitasking world.
More often than not, when a new case is presented, Holmes does nothing more than sit back in his leather chair, close his eyes and put together his long-fingered hands in an attitude that begs silence. He may be the most inactive active detective out there. His approach to thought captures the very thing that cognitive psychologists mean when they say mindfulness.
Though the concept originates in ancient Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese traditions, when it comes to experimental psychology, mindfulness is less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way. The formulation dates from the work of the psychologist Ellen Langer, who demonstrated in the 1970s that mindful thought could lead to improvements on measures of cognitive function and even vital functions in older adults.
Now we’re learning that the benefits may reach further still, and be more attainable, than Professor Langer could have then imagined. Even in small doses, mindfulness can effect impressive changes in how we feel and think — and it does so at a basic neural level.

Esther Cepeda

It’s “Too Many Tamales” season in selected classrooms. A contemporary classic by Gary Soto, it tells the story of Maria, a girl who loses her mother’s diamond ring as she and her family prepare tamales for their big holiday feast.
I discovered it with my class of first-graders when I taught English-language learners. Unfortunately, only my class experienced “Too Many Tamales.” As the holidays approached, the rest of the school read more “traditional” holiday books. Those students lost out.
My students would have missed out on themes the rest of their grade was involved in had I not insisted that the bilingual students be included in the general curriculum. The “mainstream” teachers thought this was bizarre, as if Hispanic students couldn’t possibly be expected to learn about the same topics as the other first-graders without a mountain of “culturally correct” learning materials.

Todd Zywicki:

The gruesome sexual abuse scandal and cover-up within Penn State’s football program that exploded during fall 2011 rocked the conscience of a community, spawned a raft of criminal indictments of university officials, and ended the careers of the university’s storied football coach Joe Paterno and the university’s long-serving president.
The severity of the depravity at Penn State renders the incident nearly unique. But the response of the university’s leadership–to downplay and cover-up the allegations–is not.
Based on my experience serving as an independent trustee on the Dartmouth Board of Trustees and my academic study of higher education governance, I believe that the cowardly response of Penn State’s leadership is consistent with how many university boards today would respond. I submit that the core principle animating the modern university is a fundamental dishonesty that subverts its core mission. Although the events at Penn State are extreme, they merely magnify the smaller dishonesty and lack of integrity that characterize the modern university.

Laura Waters:

Two weeks ago the big New Jersey education story was the CREDO report, which surveyed student outcomes in NJ’s charter schools and found that, while performance in most urban districts was mixed, the results in Newark were remarkable: for every year a Newark student is in a charter schools, she advances seven and a half months in reading and a full year in math compared to a student in a traditional Newark public school.
The CREDO report sparked much debate and some criticism, especially from those feel that Newark’s charters “cream off” kids who are less poor, female, and without special education or English language learning needs. (See Bruce Baker, for example.)

Louis Menand:

The French President’s emancipation proclamation regarding homework may give heart not only to les enfants de la patrie but to the many opponents of homework in this country as well–the parents and the progressive educators who have long insisted that compelling children to draw parallelograms, conjugate irregular verbs, and outline chapters from their textbooks after school hours is (the reasons vary) mindless, unrelated to academic achievement, negatively related to academic achievement, and a major contributor to the great modern evil, stress. M. Hollande, however, is not a progressive educator. He is a socialist. His reason for exercising his powers in this area is to address an inequity. He thinks that homework gives children whose parents are able to help them with it–more educated and affluent parents, presumably–an advantage over children whose parents are not. The President wants to give everyone an equal chance.
Homework is an institution roundly disliked by all who participate in it. Children hate it for healthy and obvious reasons; parents hate it because it makes their children unhappy, but God forbid they should get a check-minus or other less-than-perfect grade on it; and teachers hate it because they have to grade it. Grading homework is teachers’ never-ending homework. Compared to that, Sisyphus lucked out.

Via Laura Waters

Allen Ruff & Steve Horn, via a kind email:

A number of prestigious, primarily U.S.-based universities are quietly working with the authoritarian regime in Kazakhstan under the dictatorial rule of the country’s “Leader for Life,” Nursultan Nazarbayev.
In a project largely shaped and brokered by the World Bank in 2009 and 2010, the regime sealed deals with some ten major U.S. and British universities and scientific research institutes. They’ve been tasked to design and guide the specialized colleges at the country’s newly constructed showcase university.
As a result, scores of academics have flocked to the resource rich, strategically located country four times the size of Texas. They remain there despite the fact that every major international human rights monitor has cited the Nazarbayev regime for its continuing abuse of civil liberties and basic freedoms.
Kazakhstan now serves as a key hub for the application of the World Bank’s “knowledge bank” agenda, a vivid case study of the far-reaching nature of a corporate – and by extension, imperial – higher education agenda.

Ruth Mantell:

Paying for A’s can actually discourage some kids from working hard. It can create frustration and resentment among kids with siblings. In fact, if the ultimate goal is to encourage the character traits that will help children fulfill their potential throughout life, paying for A’s can fail.
“It comes down to knowing the child and what they are working through,” says Dan Keady, a certified financial planner and director of financial planning at financial-services firm TIAA-CREF.
Facts of Life
Almost half of parents pay kids at least $1 for getting an A, according to a July poll conducted for the American Institute of CPAs, a New York-based professional association. Among those who pay, the average reward for an A is more than $16.
“Paying for grades is one way to prepare them for adult life,” says Mark DiGiovanni, a certified financial planner in Grayson, Ga.
“One of the big facts of adult life is that you do get paid for performing well,” he says. “So this is a way of showing young people that when you do something well, you can get financially rewarded for it. And when you do something poorly, you don’t.”

Madison School District:

The Changing Landscape of Education describes the many transitions taking place in the next few years, in response to state and federal mandates for greater accountability, to prepare our students for college and careers, and secure better educational outcomes for schools and students.

Matthew DeFour:

Over the past two years the Madison School District has implemented increased safety measures at its schools, including locking school buildings during the day.
As of this school year, all of the district’s buildings are to be locked during the school day, district security coordinator Luis Yudice said. The district works constantly with police to address any potential threats to school safety.
“We have the expectation that if any schools have any hint of threatening behavior, they will direct that to me,” Yudice said. “We try to work at the front end of the problem, before those issues come into the school.”
Yudice addressed questions about building security at Madison schools Friday in the wake of a mass murder at a Connecticut elementary school.

Alan Borsuk

A broad shift is under way from fiction to nonfiction, propelled by the Common Core English and language arts standards that are being implemented in 46 states and the District of Columbia. It almost certainly will mean fewer classics, more historical documents, fewer personal essays, more analytical writing.
The nonfiction shift is the current center of attention in the changing world of reading instruction.
But it comes in the context of other big shifts: Reading lists that increasingly reflect a diverse population, changes in classroom techniques that promote more student participation, intense focus on how to get more children up to par in reading by third grade and more pressure for schools and teachers to meet accountability standards built largely around reading.
The Common Core standards are intended to provide consistency and quality across the country in what children learn. When it comes to reading, the standards call for fourth-graders to read 50% nonfiction and 50% fiction – and, for 12th-graders, 70% nonfiction and 30% fiction. It’s not possible to compare that to the past, but it clearly moves the needle toward nonfiction.
Why? In general, advocates say, nonfiction gives students better preparation for college and careers by developing such things as analytical skills. And too much of what kids read and write has been too easy and too self-indulgent.

Andrew Martin:

A decade-long spending binge to build academic buildings, dormitories and recreational facilities — some of them inordinately lavish to attract students — has left colleges and universities saddled with large amounts of debt. Oftentimes, students are stuck picking up the bill.
Overall debt levels more than doubled from 2000 to 2011 at the more than 500 institutions rated by Moody’s, according to inflation-adjusted data compiled for The New York Times by the credit rating agency. In the same time, the amount of cash, pledged gifts and investments that colleges maintain declined more than 40 percent relative to the amount they owe.
With revenue pinched at institutions big and small, financial experts and college officials are sounding alarms about the consequences of the spending and borrowing. Last month, Harvard University officials warned of “rapid, disorienting change” at colleges and universities.

Edward Tufte: “@EdwardTufte: ET’s Law of University Growth: Bureaucracy doubles every 12 years, while number of students + faculty remains constant.”

Chad Aldeman:

NCTQ’s new report on the state of state teacher pension plans is well worth your time. If you’re new to the pension issue, it does a great job of breaking down the issues in simple and clear language. If you know your way around defined benefit plans, there’s still lots of good resources on, for example, the number of states that made changes to their pension formulas over the last four years. And, if you only care about a particular state, it has lots of tables where you can find exactly how your home state is doing.
So go read it all and save it as a resource. For this blog, I want to pull out one of its main findings and show why it matters. Since 2009, 13 states have changed their vesting requirements, and 11 of those 13 made this period longer. The vesting period is amount of time a teacher must be employed before becoming eligible for pension benefits. If they meet the minimum vesting requirement, they’re eligible for a pension. If they don’t, they typically can get their own contributions back and some interest on those contributions, but they forfeit the contributions their employer made on their behalf.

Stephanie Lowden:

With all due respect to John Legend and Geoff Canada, firing teachers is not the solution to the achievement gap in Madison schools. The two spoke in Madison last week, prompting Friday’s article “Reformers: City schools need institutional change.”
I have been a substitute teacher in many classrooms since 2005 in Madison schools. What do I see?
Teachers who come early and stay late. Teachers who keep a stash of granola bars in their desks for the child who doesn’t make it to school on time for breakfast. Aides who lovingly attend to children with serious special needs.
I see 5-year-olds so out of control they can disrupt a classroom in minutes. Kids who live in their cars.

Madison Superintendent Jane Belmore (2.5MB PDF):

For the past four years, MMSD has been aware that the current implementation of balanced literacy, our core instructional program for literacy at the elementary level, has not resulted in all students making the progress necessary to meet grade level standards. The research shows that three key things are necessary for students to gain proficiency in the common core standards:

• a highly qualified teacher in the classroom

• a strong instructional leader in the school and
• access to an aligned, guaranteed and viable curriculum (Marzano, 2003).

It is clear that MMSD has two out of these three in place: highly qualified teachers and strong instructional leaders. To maintain and develop strong teachers and leaders need well planned, embedded, ongoing professional development. The
School Support Team and Instructional Research Teachers provide us the mechanism for delivering this necessary professional development.
What is needed is a decision about a guaranteed, viable core instructional curriculum that is cohesive across all 32 elementary schools. All student will benefit from consistency across grades levels and schools. Our students from mobile families must have the security and consistency that this core will provide.

60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use.
When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before.

Laura Waters:

New Jersey School Boards Association has no truck with a new DOE proposal that would let school superintendents unilaterally call for school board meetings. Currently, meetings are held either by preapproved schedules, by board presidents, or through consensus of the board.

Here’s Mike Vrancik, director of NJSBA’s Governmental Relations Department:

Mike Antonucci:

There is a popular bumper sticker that reads, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” It might surprise you to learn that ignorance is making education more expensive.
The annual Education Next-PEPG Survey, published in Education Next’s Winter issue, unpacks the public’s knowledge of education issues and quantifies just how much ignorance affects one’s opinions on various topics – the most important of which are education spending and teacher pay.
Figure 8 shows what happens to support for increased public school spending after you tell people what we currently spend:

Dee J. Hall, via a kind reader’s email

From substitute teachers to cabinet secretaries, thousands of public employees in Wisconsin who retired in recent years returned to work, allowing them to earn both a paycheck and a state pension, according to a Legislative Audit Bureau report released Friday.
And while many employees and employers like the arrangement, the system can be abused, the report found.
The state lawmaker who blew the whistle on the practice last year, Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, thinks it’s time for it to be abolished.
“Steve is pretty emphatic — he thinks the report indicates double dipping needs to end,” Nass spokesman Mike Mikalsen said.
But Employee Trust Funds Secretary Robert Conlin said the audit bureau report supports continuation of the practice but with measures to crack down on those who cheat the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) by pre-arranging their return to government service. In a letter responding to the audit, Conlin said the Legislature should consider lengthening the mandatory 30-day separation between retirement and re-employment to cut down on abuse.
“The re-hire of WRS annuitants is a lawful practice that, as noted in the audit, appears to serve the needs of retirees and employers,” he said.

From the full report [1MB PDF] Page 35: “We received 1,169 responses to our survey, which is an 82.1 percent response rate. [….] Milwaukee Public Schools and the City of Madison responded, but Madison Metropolitan School District did not, even though we contacted it about responding to the survey.”

Matthew DeFour, via a kind reader’s email

The report card scores of nearly all Madison schools will be reduced slightly after the district discovered it had reported incorrect student attendance data to the state and revised it.
In most cases the new, lower scores — which the Department of Public Instruction plans to update on its website next week — have no impact on the rating each Madison school receives on the report card. But six schools will be downgraded to a lower category.
Randall and Van Hise elementaries, which were rated in the highest performance category, are now in the second-highest tier. Olson and Chavez elementaries are now in the middle tier. And Mendota and Glendale elementaries are in the second-lowest tier.
The corrections — prompted by a State Journal inquiry — have no immediate practical ramifications, though the implications are significant as state leaders contemplate tying school funding to the report card results.
Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, said it’s “extremely important” that the data used to rate schools is accurate. The report cards are part of the state’s new school accountability system, and DPI has proposed directing resources to schools struggling in certain categories.
“The report cards are only as good as the data that goes into them,” he said.

Props to DeFour and the Wisconsin State Journal for digging and pushing.
Related: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools”.
Where does the Madison School District Get its Numbers from?
Global Academic Standards: How we Outrace the Robots and www.wisconsin2.org.
An Update on Madison’s Use of the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) Assessment, including individual school reports. Much more on Madison and the MAP Assessment, here.
I strongly support diffused governance of our public schools. One size fits all has outlived its usefulness.

James Causey:

Kenisha Johnson will graduate from the not-for-profit Ottawa University with a bachelor’s degree in human resources in January. She has been trying to find a job in her field for more than a year.
In the process, she has applied for more than 50 jobs. She only received two calls.
To make matters worse, she was laid off from her last job at a collection agency. Ideally, Johnson would like to land a job in her field of study, but that may be unlikely. Only about 20% of recent college grads were lucky enough to find work in their fields.
The problem Johnson and others like her face is that the tight job market has made companies very selective. And while she will soon have a degree in hand, she lacks on-the-job experience.
“It’s discouraging, but right now I’m willing to take any kind of job because I do have bills to pay,” Johnson said.

Valerie Strauss:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, architect of a statewide voucher program that sends public money to religious schools which teach that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, ventured to the Brookings Institution in Washington to present his alternative education universe. Jindal, a rising figure in the Republican Party, spoke for more than an hour defending his voucher program — which was declared unconstitutional by a Lousiana state judge who said it improperly diverts public state and local money to private institutions — without actually mentioning the word “vouchers,” instead using euphemisms such as “scholarships.” Quite a feat.

Evan Miller:

They seem to agree on one thing: from a workaday perspective, math is essentially useless. Lisp programmers (we are told) should be thankful that mathematics was used to work out the Lambda Calculus, but today mathematics is more a form of personal enlightenment than a tool for getting anything done.
This view is mistaken. It has prevailed because it is possible to be a productive and well-compensated programmer — even a first-rate hacker — without any knowledge of science or math. But I think that most programmers who are serious about what they do should know calculus (the real kind), linear algebra, and statistics. The reason has nothing to do with programming per se — compilers, data structures, and all that — but rather the role of programming in the economy.
One way to read the history of business in the twentieth century is a series of transformations whereby industries that “didn’t need math” suddenly found themselves critically depending on it. Statistical quality control reinvented manufacturing; agricultural economics transformed farming; the analysis of variance revolutionized the chemical and pharmaceutical industries; linear programming changed the face of supply-chain management and logistics; and the Black-Scholes equation created a market out of nothing. More recently, “Moneyball” techniques have taken over sports management. There are many other examples.

Jim Fallows:

There are other topics to catch up on, but by serendipity three similar-themed responses on the UCal Logo Wars arrived at practically the same moment.
One by one, and even more powerfully in combination. they make the excellent point that this is not just about a logo and whether you prefer the “classic stateliness” of the old look or the “bold simplicity” of the new. These writers argue that this seemingly silly controversy in fact raises timely and surprisingly sweeping questions about the future identity, role, and financial underpinnings of great universities. I turn it over to the readers:
Embracing the new. One reader in North Carolina says that the people in charge at UC are merely trying to get ahead of technological and market reality:

Jay Matthews:

Teachers appear to be changing their minds about how they should be hired, assessed, paid and dismissed. This merits attention because we cannot have good schools if teachers are not happy with their compensation and working conditions.
Two new surveys show that teachers, particularly those new to the profession, are friendly to several proposed reforms. The American Federation of Teachers has even endorsed the equivalent of a lawyer’s bar exam for education school graduates.
It’s possible that nothing may come of this. A surge in non-teacher jobs for those with teacher skills or a sharp drop in teacher retirement benefits could leave school districts still scrounging for people with the skill and energy to raise student achievement. But teachers seem to be leaning toward new ways of supporting their work.
The education-policy group Teach Plus looked at teachers with 10 or fewer years of experience compared with those with 11 or more years. The think tank Education Sector compared teachers with fewer than five years experience with those with more than 20 years. Teach Plus used an online poll of 1,015 self-selected teachers, less reliable than the Education Sector’s random sample of 1,100 teachers.

Kevin Carey:

LAST month The Chronicle of Higher Education published a damning investigation of college athletes across the nation who were maintaining their eligibility by taking cheap, easy online courses from an obscure junior college.
In just 10 days, academically deficient players could earn three credits and an easy “A” from Western Oklahoma State College for courses like “Microcomputer Applications” (opening folders in Windows) or “Nutrition” (stating whether or not the students used vitamins). The Chronicle quoted one Big Ten academic adviser as saying, “You jump online, finish in a week and half, get your grade posted, and you’re bowl-eligible.”
On the face of it, this is another sad but familiar story of the big-money intercollegiate-athletics complex corrupting the ivory tower. But it also reveals a larger, more pervasive problem: there are no meaningful standards of academic quality in higher education. And the more colleges and universities move their courses online, the more severe the problem gets.

Chris Cook:

UK universities recruited 54,000 fewer UK and EU students this academic year following the rise in tuition fees, according to the university admissions service, with less prestigious universities suffering the worst of the drop.
The 11 per cent decline in student numbers implies that universities, which had incomes of £27bn last year, could have lost out on £400m of tuition fees, had they been able to sustain the same recruitment levels as last year.
Lifting the fee cap in England from £3,375 to £9,000 was one of the coalition’s most controversial policies, but concerns that poorer students would be particularly deterred have not been realised.
The new figures, released by Ucas, the university courses manager, reveal that the number of UK students from the fifth of households least likely to go to university fell by only 2.4 per cent – roughly in line with demographic change.

Karen Yi:

The Florida Department of Education may have said yes to Tony Bennett as its new commissioner of education, but parents and teachers in the community are pushing back with a resounding no.
“We’re in big trouble,” said Lisa Goldman, founder of Testing is Not Teaching, a Palm Beach County school group.
Bennett, Indiana’s outgoing state schools superintendent, was chosen unanimously Wednesday to replace Chancellor of Public Schools Pam Stewart. She served as interim commissioner after Gerard Robinson resigned in August.

Elizabeth Baier:

When Jhosi Martinez thinks of college, she remembers the words of her father.
“He’s always wanted me to graduate and he’s always wanted me to continue and go to college and become someone else,” the Northfield High School senior said.
Jhosi’s dad never graduated from high school. Neither did her mom nor her older sister. Her family is like that of tens of thousands of Mexicans who have moved to greater Minnesota in search of better opportunities.
Many of those families represent a persistent achievement gap between white students and students of color that Minnesota education have long grappled with.

Quentin Hardy:

Jobs like that are likely to be well worth having. But who says those robot operators have to be United States-based, just because the machines are? In a world like that, I asked Mr. Schmidt, what are the chances that the United States can expect to have unemployment of 6 percent or even lower?
“I don’t think anyone can say the answer, but we can state the risks,” Mr. Schmidt said. “The way to combat it is education, which has to work for everyone, regardless of race or gender. You’ll have global competition for all kinds of jobs.”
Understanding this, he said, should be America’s “Sputnik moment,” which like that 1957 Russian satellite launch gives the nation a new urgency about education in math and science. “The president could say that in five years he wants the level of analytic education in this country – STEM education in science, technology, engineering and math, or economics and statistics – has to be at a level of the best Asian countries.”
Asian nations, Mr. Schmidt said, are probably going to proceed with their own increases in analytic education. “Employment is going to be a global problem, not a U.S. one,” he said.

I agree with Schmidt on global standards. Learn more about Wisconsin’s challenges at www.wisconsin2.org.
A few background articles on Google Chairman Eric Schmidt: William Gibson:

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.
Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

Nicholas Carr:

In the wake of Google’s revelation last week of a concerted, sophisticated cyber attack on many corporate networks, including its own Gmail service, Eric Schmidt’s recent comments about privacy become even more troubling. As you’ll recall, in a December 3 CNBC interview, Schmidt said, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”
For a public figure to say “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” is, at the most practical of levels, incredibly rash. You’re essentially extending an open invitation to reporters to publish anything about your life that they can uncover. (Ask Gary Hart.) The statement also paints Schmidt as a hypocrite. In 2005, he threw a legendary hissy fit when CNET’s Elinor Mills, in an article about privacy, published some details about his residence, his finances, and his politics that she had uncovered through Google searches. Google infamously cut off all contact with CNET for a couple of months. Schmidt didn’t seem so casual about the value of privacy when his own was at stake.

Motoko Rich:

Fourth- and eighth-grade students in the United States continue to lag behind students in several East Asian countries and some European nations in math and science, although American fourth graders are closer to the top performers in reading, according to test results released on Tuesday.
Fretting about how American schools compare with those in other countries has become a regular pastime in education circles. Results from two new reports, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, are likely to fuel further debate.
South Korea and Singapore led the international rankings in math and fourth-grade science, while Singapore and Taiwan had the top-performing students in eighth-grade science. The United States ranked 11th in fourth-grade math, 9th in eighth-grade math, 7th in fourth-grade science and 10th in eighth-grade science.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org.

Jay Matthews:

Don Horrigan, former priest turned public school educator, thought Prince George’s County was a splendid district for an experiment beginning in 1991, requiring all ninth-graders to take Algebra I and all 10th-graders to take geometry. The superintendent and school board were for it. Parents seemed excited.
But when Prince George’s became one of seven districts nationwide to pilot the College Board’s Equity 2000 program, many teachers in the district thought it was too much. Sure, they said, students could learn algebra and geometry eventually, but why so soon? They thought 42 percent of Prince George’s ninth-graders were taking remedial arithmetic because they weren’t ready for anything more.
“It is unwise to push a child — especially a slower-paced learner — who is not ready,” a Prince George’s high school math department chair told researchers Carolyn DeMeyer Harris and Jessica L. Turner. “I believe that when we push them we make them feel like failures when in actuality it was merely a timing issue.”
According to Harris and Turner, who worked for the Alexandria-based Human Resources Research Organization and wrote a report on Equity 2000, one Prince George’s teacher told a supervisor that the program was another loser. “We’re like little pigs at the trough waiting for you to throw more slop at us, and then we wait for it to go away,” the teacher said.
In my new book about Equity 2000, “The War Against Dummy Math,” I devote a chapter to the battle in Prince George’s. It explores clashing attitudes toward acceleration that are still with us and how very long it takes for student achievement to catch up with expectations.

Tess Rinearson:

It’s CSEdWeek, everyone! CSEdWeek is a nationally recognized celebration of K-12 computer science education. This week, CSEdWeek is December 9 to December 15, 2012.
Now, I am by no means an expert on computer science education. But I, along with several of my friends, started programming in middle school. I’m grateful for that. I truly think that that was the right time to be introduced.
Unfortunately, not many schools teach computer science as part of their formal curriculum. I couldn’t find statistics on middle school CS, but, at the high school level, only 27% of American high schools teach rigorous computer science courses. I’m sure the number for middle schools is stunningly small.
But you don’t need a “formal” introduction to CS. Really, a homegrown introduction to computer science is just as good (if not better). I want to share some ideas on introducing your daughter/son/sister/brother/niece/nephew/cousin/friend to computer science. (These were all suggestions that I made via email to a family friend who wanted ideas on how to get his 12 year old son involved with computer science.)

AnnaMaria Andriotis:

While $199 might cover just a single credit (or much less) at a typical college, the same fee buys a month of unlimited classes at New Charter University, one of two online schools by startup firm UniversityNow. The pricing structure is similar to online college course provider StraighterLine’s model, launched in 2008, which charges $99 per month of enrollment, plus $49 per class.
By creating the college version of unlimited data plans, experts say for-profit schools aim to get a leg up on the competition. In recent years, for-profit colleges have come under fire by students and Congress for their excessive tuition costs and the large number of students who drop out and default on their loans. After growing every year for the past decade, enrollment in private, for-profit colleges fell for the first time in 2011 by 3%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. As demand drops, so does “their ability to charge high tuition,” says Rob MacArthur, president of Alternative Research Services, which has tracked for-profit colleges. For their part, both the companies say their goals are to offer a quality higher education while lowering costs for families. “Our model isn’t to spend a lot of money on marketing and charge you on the back end,” says Gene Wade, co-founder and CEO of UniversityNow.

One Teacher’s Perspective:

Much ado has been made about a proposed teacher dress code for my school district as non-teacher leaders formulate a new employee handbook to replace the expiring teacher contract.
A few weeks ago, school leaders unveiled a three-page draft of a proposed dress code for school employees to replace the current one-line (“wear appropriate dress”) policy. The proposed draft has been met with some push back from educators. The push back has been met with some push back. The teacher dissent is viewed as much ado about nothing by some school leaders. The dressing up of teachers feels like a dressing down.
Undoubtedly, the current employee handbook discussions distract all of us from the eightball of school reform. Nonetheless, between nothing and the eightball is a worthwhile discussion about professionalism in public education.

Mark Niquette, Michael B. Marois & Rodney Yap

The result isn’t only a heavier burden on California taxpayers. As higher expenses competed for fewer dollars, per- pupil funding of the state’s public schools dropped to 35th nationally in 2009-2010 from 22nd in 2001-2002. Californians have endured recurring budget deficits throughout the past decade and now face the country’s highest debt and Standard & Poor’s lowest credit rating for a U.S. state.
The story of one prison psychiatrist shows how pay largesse has spread.

Related news from the “too big to fail” banks.
The key, of course, is to grow the tax base. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel takes a look at the challenges Wisconsin’s paper industry faces from China.

Erin Richards:

Long-simmering resentment over a rule that requires Milwaukee Public Schools employees to live in the city may resurface this week when the School Board considers modifying the district’s long-standing residency rule.
Spurring the discussion is the imminent staffing crisis the district faces – it needs to recruit at least 750 new teachers and school leaders to replace a larger-than-usual crop of retirements expected at the end of this year, all on the back edge of a housing crisis that’s made it more difficult for many people to sell their homes or purchase new ones.
To ease the transition, the administration is proposing extending the time allowed for new employees to establish residency in the district from one year to three years from the point of hire. The board’s Committee on Legislation, Rules and Policies is scheduled to discuss the plan Thursday.
But the larger question may be whether that’s enough of a rule change to attract – and keep – the kind of talented educators the district needs.
“The lack of teachers for next year puts us in a different place than we’ve been in the past,” board member Terry Falk said. “One thing we know we can’t do is dramatically increase salaries, or offer some kind of signing bonus.”

Yong Zhao:

“America’s Woeful Public Schools: TIMSS Sheds Light on the Need for Systemic Reform”[1]
“Competitors Still Beat U.S. in Tests”[2]
“U.S. students continue to trail Asian students in math, reading, science”[3]
These are a few of the thousands of headlines generated by the release of the 2011 TIMSS and PIRLS results today. Although the results are hardly surprising or news worthy, judging from the headlines, we can expect another global wave of handwringing, soul searching, and calls for reform. But before we do, we should ask how meaningful these scores and rankings are.
“Numbers don’t lie,” many may say but what truth do they tell? Look at the following numbers:

Valerie Strauss has more.

Larry Winkler kindly emailed the chart pictured above.

Where have all the Students gone?

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin:

We are not interested in the development of new charter schools. Recent presentations of charter school programs indicate that most of them do not perform to the level of Madison public schools. I have come to three conclusions about charter schools. First, the national evidence is clear overall, charter schools do not perform as well as traditional public schools. Second where charter schools have shown improvement, generally they have not reached the level of success of Madison schools. Third, if our objective is to improve overall educational performance, we should try proven methods that elevate the entire district not just the students in charter schools. The performance of non-charter students in cities like Milwaukee and Chicago is dismal.
In addition, it seems inappropriate to use resources to develop charter schools when we have not explored system-wide programming that focuses on improving attendance, the longer school day, greater parental involvement and combating hunger and trauma.
We must get a better understanding of the meaning of ‘achievement gap.’ A school in another system may have made gains in ‘closing’ the achievement gap, but that does not mean its students are performing better than Madison students. In addition, there is mounting evidence that a significant portion of the ‘achievement gap’ is the result of students transferring to Madison from poorly performing districts. If that is the case, we should be developing immersion programs designed for their needs rather than mimicking charter school programs that are more expensive, produce inadequate results, and fail to recognize the needs of all students.
It should be noted that not only do the charter schools have questionable results but they leave the rest of the district in shambles. Chicago and Milwaukee are two systems that invested heavily in charter schools and are systems where overall performance is unacceptable.

Related links:

• Notes and links on the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School. [Kaleem Caire video interview]
• Comparing Milwaukee Public and Voucher Schools’ Per Student Spending
• When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before (2005)
• “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!
• Paul Soglin notes and links.
• Madison School District Open Enrollment Leavers Report, 2012-13 (2009 Open Enrollment Leaver Survey)
• Paul Vallas visits Madison; Enrollment Growth: Suburban Districts vs. Madison 1995-2012
• Where does MMSD get its numbers from?
• 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use
• Minneapolis teacher’s union approved to authorize charter schools

I am unaware of Madison School District achievement data comparing transfer student performance. I will email the Madison School Board and see what might be discovered.
Pat Schnieder:

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin has some pretty strong ideas about how to improve academic achievement by Madison school children. Charter schools are not among them.
In fact, Madison’s ongoing debate over whether a charter school is the key to boosting academic achievement among students of color in the Madison Metropolitan School District is distracting the community from making progress, Soglin told me.
He attended part of a conference last week sponsored by the Urban League of Greater Madison that he says overstated the successes elsewhere of charter schools, like the Urban League’s controversial proposed Madison Preparatory Academy that was rejected by the Madison School Board a year ago.
“A number of people I talked with about it over the weekend said the same thing: This debate over charter schools is taking us away from any real improvement,” Soglin said.
Can a new committee that Soglin created — bringing together representatives from the school district, city and county — be one way to make real progress?

The City of Madison’s Education Committee, via a kind reader’s email. Members include: Arlene Silveira, Astra Iheukemere, Carousel Andrea S. Bayrd, Erik Kass, Jenni Dye, Matthew Phair, Maya Cole and Shiva Bidar-Sielaff.

Grace Hood:

Welcome to the 21st century classroom: a world where students watch lectures at home — and do homework at school. It’s called classroom flipping, and it’s slowly catching on in schools around the country.
When Jessica Miller, a high school sophomore in rural Bennett, Colo., sits down to do her chemistry homework, she pulls out her notebook. Then she turns on an iPad to watch a video podcast. Whenever the instructor changes the slide, Miller pauses the video and writes down everything on the screen.
Miller can replay parts of the chemistry podcast she doesn’t understand, and fast forward through those that make sense. Then she takes her notes to class where her teacher can review them.
Back in the classroom, chemistry teacher Jennifer Goodnight walks up and down the rows of desks giving verbal quizzes, guiding students through labs and answering questions.

Amar Toor:

Widespread adoption of robotics has certainly lowered production costs around the globe, though it remains unclear whether a similar surge would help spur American tech manufacturing. Some say automation will be at the core of Apple’s plan to bring some Mac production back to the US, noting that the $100 million initiative could prove the feasibility of a robotics-based manufacturing model.
But labor costs are just one part of the equation. Companies like Apple currently depend on a complex, and well-ingrained supply chain, anchored largely in Asia. With some exceptions, most of Apple’s parts are sourced from within the same geographic area, making it relatively easy to orchestrate and implement rapid changes in a product’s design. Large scale Chinese manufacturing therefore allows Apple to execute orders with greater speed and flexibility, as the New York Times reported earlier this year.
Woo struck a similar chord last week, when Foxconn announced plans to expand operations to North America. In an interview with Bloomberg, Woo said the move came in response to demands for “Made in USA” products, though he acknowledged that the “supply chain is one of the biggest challenges for US expansion.” Overcoming this obstacle, Woo said, would require Foxconn to harvest American engineering — hinting, perhaps, at a more robotics-driven future. “Any manufacturing we take back to the U.S. needs to leverage high-value engineering talent there in comparison to the low-cost labor of China,” the spokesman said.

Related: Madison & US Districts vs the world.

Josh Noble:

Nayaka sat wrapped in a blanket and an extra set of monk’s robes, shivering in his Swiss hotel room. He pulled three hats on to his shaved head, and wound a thick woollen scarf around his face. The temperature outside was probably in the mid-teens – after all, it was only September. Yet it was the coldest he had ever been.
In spite of the late hour, there was no way he was going to bed. On the other side of the world, tens of thousands of his countrymen had taken to the streets in what many people thought was the start of a revolution, and an end to Myanmar’s military dictatorship. Alongside the crowds of students marched thousands of his fellow Buddhist monks, decked out in their burnt orange robes and red velvet sandals. But U Nayaka would watch it all unfold on the TV news. It was perhaps fitting. U Nayaka (“U” is a Burmese honorific) has spent the past 20 years trying to avoid politics. Instead he has devoted himself to being the headmaster of one of the country’s largest schools, Phaung Daw Oo, where he and his brother help to educate more than 6,000 impoverished children every day. (His visit to Switzerland in late 2007 was for an international education conference.) Yet despite his distaste for politics, U Nayaka – and many others like him – are now key players in the country’s move towards democracy.

Sandy Banks:

I was prepared for the dog-and-pony show — the choreographed “reveal” of a school makeover that’s been in the works for years.
I didn’t expect much beyond a grown-up version of show-and-tell. But I came anyway because I have a soft spot for Jordan High in Watts.
I’ve spent a decade tracking the school’s efforts to improve; watched reformers arrive with big plans and leave with broken dreams.
The school’s problems, they’d say, are too deep and expensive to fix; too intertwined with a neighborhood that will always be warped by dysfunction and poverty.
But on Wednesday, state schools Supt. Tom Torlakson visited the school with certificates announcing its improvement. Jordan’s 93-point jump on the state’s academic performance index was the biggest of any urban high school in California this year.

Richard Gonzales:

More than 200 school districts across California are taking a second look at the high price of the debt they’ve taken on using risky financial arrangements. Collectively, the districts have borrowed billions in loans that defer payments for years — leaving many districts owing far more than they borrowed.
In 2010, officials at the West Contra Costa School District, just east of San Francisco, were in a bind. The district needed $2.5 million to help secure a federally subsidized $25 million loan to build a badly needed elementary school.
Charles Ramsey, president of the school board, says he needed that $2.5 million upfront, but the district didn’t have it.

Justin Pope:

Compensation for private college presidents has continued to drift upward, while the number crossing the $1 million barrier — a signal of prestige, and a magnet for criticism — held steady at 36, according to a new survey.
The latest annual compilation by The Chronicle of Higher Education covers data from 2010, due to lag time in the release of federal tax information. That year, median compensation for the 494 presidents in the survey — leaders of institutions with budgets of at least $50 million — was $396,649, or 2.8 percent higher than in last year’s survey. But median base salary fell slightly, by less than 1 percent.
The highest paid was Bob Kerrey, who was president of The New School in New York until December 2010 before returning to Nebraska, where he made an unsuccessful run to return to the U.S Senate. Kerrey’s total compensation was valued at just over $3 million. His base salary was just over $600,000, but he received the remainder in the form of a retention bonus, deferred compensation and other benefits.

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Jess Bidgood:

Budget cuts have eliminated about 95 full-time teachers from the school district here over the past year, swelling class sizes and prompting parents to cry foul.
“We had students sitting on the floor with a clipboard,” said Jim O’Connell, the president of the Parent-Teacher Organization at Hillside Middle School. “It’s one degree separated from a 1700s classroom with chalk and a slate.”
Officials, seeking an overhaul, began to wonder if a 21st-century technology might help allay their struggles: having some students take courses online during the school day, without a teacher physically present.
But a plan to institute “blended learning labs,” which allow students to do just that, is stoking concern among parents and teachers. Some doubt the efficacy of online learning. Others say the proposed solution barely scratches the surface of systemic problems here.

Ron Unz:

Harvard only improved its standing during the successful American postwar decades, and by its 350th anniversary in 1986 was almost universally recognized as the leader of the world’s academic community. But over the decade or two which followed, it quietly embarked upon a late-life career change, transforming itself into one of the world’s largest hedge funds, with some sort of school or college or something attached off to one side for tax reasons.
The numbers tell the story. Each September, Harvard’s 6,600 undergraduates begin their classes at the Ivy-covered walls of its traditional Cambridge campus owing annual tuition of around $37,000 for the privilege, up from just $13,000 in 1990. Thus, over the last two decades, total tuition income (in current dollars) has increased from about $150 million to almost $250 million, with a substantial fraction of this list-price amount being discounted in the form of the university’s own financial aid to the families of its less wealthy students.
Meanwhile, during most of these years, Harvard’s own endowment has annually grown by five or ten or even twenty times that figure, rendering net tuition from those thousands of students a mere financial bagatelle, having almost no impact on the university’s cash-flow or balance-sheet position. If all the students disappeared tomorrow–or were forced to pay double their current tuition–the impact would be negligible compared to the crucial fluctuations in the mortgage-derivatives market or the international cost-of-funds index.
A very similar conclusion may be drawn by examining the expense side of the university’s financial statement. Harvard’s Division of Arts and Sciences–the central core of academic activity–contains approximately 450 full professors, whose annual salaries tend to average the highest at any university in America. Each year, these hundreds of great scholars and teachers receive aggregate total pay of around $85 million. But in fiscal 2004, just the five top managers of the Harvard endowment fund shared total compensation of $78 million, an amount which was also roughly 100 times the salary of Harvard’s own president. These figures clearly demonstrate the relative importance accorded to the financial and academic sides of Harvard’s activities.

Michael Knox Beran, via Will Fitzhugh:

Emerging as a force in American education a century ago, social studies was intended to remake the high school. But its greatest effect has been in the elementary grades, where it has replaced an older way of learning that initiated children into their culture [and their History?] with one that seeks instead to integrate them into the social group. The result was a revolution in the way America educates its young. The old learning used the resources of culture to develop the child’s individual potential; social studies, by contrast, seeks to adjust him to the mediocrity of the social pack.
Why promote the socialization of children at the expense of their individual development? A product of the Progressive era, social studies ripened in the faith that regimes guided by collectivist social policies could dispense with the competitive striving of individuals and create, as educator George S. Counts wrote, “the most majestic civilization ever fashioned by any people.” Social studies was to mold the properly socialized citizens of this grand future. The dream of a world regenerated through social planning faded long ago, but social studies persists, depriving children of a cultural rite of passage that awakened what Coleridge called “the principle and method of self-development” in the young.
The poverty of social studies would matter less if children could make up its cultural deficits in English [and History?] class. But language instruction in the elementary schools has itself been brought into the business of socializing children and has ceased to use the treasure-house of culture to stimulate their minds. As a result, too many students today complete elementary school with only the slenderest knowledge of a culture that has not only shaped their civilization but also done much to foster individual excellence.
In 1912, the National Education Association, today the largest labor union in the United States, formed a Committee on the Social Studies. In its 1916 report, The Social Studies in Secondary Education, the committee opined that if social studies (defined as studies that relate to “man as a member of a social group”) took a place in American high schools, students would acquire “the social spirit,” and “the youth of the land” would be “steadied by an unwavering faith in humanity.” This was an allusion to the “religion of humanity” preached by the French social thinker Auguste Comte, who believed that a scientifically trained ruling class could build a better world by curtailing individual freedom in the name of the group. In Comtian fashion, the committee rejected the idea that education’s primary object was the cultivation of the individual intellect. “Individual interests and needs,” education scholar Ronald W. Evans writes in his book The Social Studies Wars, were for the committee “secondary to the needs of society as a whole.”
The Young Turks of the social studies movement, known as “Reconstructionists” because of their desire to remake the social order, went further. In the 1920s, Reconstructionists like Counts and Harold Ordway Rugg argued that high schools should be incubators of the social regimes of the future. Teachers would instruct students to “discard dispositions and maxims” derived from America’s “individualistic” ethos, wrote Counts. A professor in Columbia’s Teachers College and president of the American Federation of Teachers, Counts was for a time enamored of Joseph Stalin. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1929, he published A Ford Crosses Soviet Russia, a panegyric on the Bolsheviks’ “new society.” Counts believed that in the future, “all important forms of capital” would “have to be collectively owned,” and in his 1932 essay “Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?,” he argued that teachers should enlist students in the work of “social regeneration.”
Like Counts, Rugg, a Teachers College professor and cofounder of the National Council for the Social Studies, believed that the American economy was flawed because it was “utterly undesigned and uncontrolled.” In his 1933 book The Great Technology, he called for the “social reconstruction” and “scientific design” of the economy, arguing that it was “now axiomatic that the production and distribution of goods can no longer be left to the vagaries of chance–specifically to the unbridled competitions of self-aggrandizing human nature.” There “must be central control and supervision of the entire [economic] plant” by “trained and experienced technical personnel.” At the same time, he argued, the new social order must “socialize the vast proportion” of wealth and outlaw the activities of “middlemen” who didn’t contribute to the “production of true value.”
Rugg proposed “new materials of instruction” that “shall illustrate fearlessly and dramatically the inevitable consequence of the lack of planning and of central control over the production and distribution of physical things. . . . We shall disseminate a new conception of government–one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interest of all people; and one that will successfully adjust the psychological problems among men.”
Rugg himself set to work composing the “new materials of instruction.” In An Introduction to Problems of American Culture, his 1931 social studies textbook for junior high school students, Rugg deplored the “lack of planning in American life”:
“Repeatedly throughout this book we have noted the unplanned character of our civilization. In every branch of agriculture, industry, and business this lack of planning reveals itself. For instance, manufacturers in the United States produce billions’ of dollars worth of goods without scientific planning. Each one produces as much as he thinks he can sell, and then each one tries to sell more than his competitors. . . . As a result, hundreds of thousands of owners of land, mines, railroads, and other means of transportation and communication, stores, and businesses of one kind or another, compete with one another without any regard for the total needs of all the people. . . . This lack of national planning has indeed brought about an enormous waste in every outstanding branch of industry. . . . Hence the whole must be planned.
Rugg pointed to Soviet Russia as an example of the comprehensive control that America needed, and he praised Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, which resulted in millions of deaths from famine and forced labor. The “amount of coal to be mined each year in the various regions of Russia,”
Rugg told the junior high schoolers reading his textbook,
“is to be planned. So is the amount of oil to be drilled, the amount of wheat, corn, oats, and other farm products to be raised. The number and size of new factories, power stations, railroads, telegraph and telephone lines, and radio stations to be constructed are planned. So are the number and kind of schools, colleges, social centers, and public buildings to be erected. In fact, every aspect of the economic, social, and political life of a country of 140,000,000 people is being carefully planned! . . . The basis of a secure and comfortable living for the American people lies in a carefully planned economic life.”
During the 1930s, tens of thousands of American students used Rugg’s social studies textbooks.
Toward the end of the decade, school districts began to drop Rugg’s textbooks because of their socialist bias. In 1942, Columbia historian Allan Nevins further undermined social studies’ premises when he argued in The New York Times Magazine that American high schools were failing to give students a “thorough, accurate, and intelligent knowledge of our national past–in so many ways the brightest national record in all world history.” Nevins’s was the first of many critiques that would counteract the collectivist bias of social studies in American high schools, where “old-fashioned” history classes have long been the cornerstone of the social studies curriculum.
Yet possibly because school boards, so vigilant in their superintendence of the high school, were not sure what should be done with younger children, social studies gained a foothold in the primary school such as it never obtained in the secondary school. The chief architect of elementary school social studies was Paul Hanna, who entered Teachers College in 1924 and fell under the spell of Counts and Rugg. “We cannot expect economic security so long as the [economic] machine is conceived as an instrument for the production of profits for private capital rather than as a tool functioning to release mankind from the drudgery of work,” Hanna wrote in 1933.
Hanna was no less determined than Rugg to reform the country through education. “Pupils must be indoctrinated with a determination to make the machine work for society,” he wrote. His methods, however, were subtler than Rugg’s. Unlike Rugg’s textbooks, Hanna’s did not explicitly endorse collectivist ideals. The Hanna books contain no paeans to central planning or a command economy. On the contrary, the illustrations have the naive innocence of the watercolors in Scott Foresman’s Dick and Jane readers. The books depict an idyllic but familiar America, rich in material goods and comfortably middle-class; the fathers and grandfathers wear suits and ties and white handkerchiefs in their breast pockets.
Not only the pictures but the lessons in the books are deceptively innocuous. It is in the back of the books, in the notes and “interpretive outlines,” that Hanna smuggles in his social agenda by instructing teachers how each lesson is to be interpreted so that children learn “desirable patterns of acting and reacting in democratic group living.” A lesson in the second-grade text Susan’s Neighbors at Work, for example, which describes the work of police officers, firefighters, and other public servants, is intended to teach “concerted action” and “cooperation in obeying commands and well-thought-out plans which are for the general welfare.” A lesson in Tom and Susan, a first-grade text, about a ride in grandfather’s red car is meant to teach children to move “from absorption in self toward consideration of what is best in a group situation.” Lessons in Peter’s Family, another first-grade text, seek to inculcate the idea of “socially desirable” work and “cooperative labor.”
Hanna’s efforts to promote “behavior traits” conducive to “group living” would be less objectionable if he balanced them with lessons that acknowledge the importance of ideals and qualities of character that don’t flow from the group–individual exertion, liberty of action, the necessity at times of resisting the will of others. It is precisely Coleridge’s principle of individual “self-development” that is lost in Hanna’s preoccupation with social development. In the Hanna books, the individual is perpetually sunk in the impersonality of the tribe; he is a being defined solely by his group obligations. The result is distorting; the Hanna books fail to show that the prosperous America they depict, if it owes something to the impulse to serve the community, owes as much, or more, to the free striving of individuals pursuing their own ends.
Hanna’s spirit is alive and well in the American elementary school. Not only Scott Foresman but other big scholastic publishers–among them Macmillan/McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt–publish textbooks that dwell continually on the communal group and on the activities that people undertake for its greater good. Lessons from Scott Foresman’s second-grade textbook Social Studies: People and Places (2003) include “Living in a Neighborhood,” “We Belong to Groups,” “A Walk Through a Community,” “How a Community Changes,” “Comparing Communities,” “Services in Our Community,” “Our Country Is Part of Our World,” and “Working Together.” The book’s scarcely distinguishable twin, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill’s We Live Together (2003), is suffused with the same group spirit. Macmillan/McGraw-Hill’s textbook for third-graders, Our Communities (2003), is no less faithful to the Hanna model. The third-grade textbooks of Scott Foresman and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (both titled Communities) are organized on similar lines, while the fourth-grade textbooks concentrate on regional communities. Only in the fifth grade is the mold shattered, as students begin the sequential study of American history; they are by this time in sight of high school, where history has long been paramount.

Today’s social studies textbooks will not turn children into little Maoists. The group happy-speak in which they are composed is more fatuous than polemical; Hanna’s Reconstructionist ideals have been so watered down as to be little more than banalities. The “ultimate goal of the social studies,” according to Michael Berson, a coauthor of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt series, is to “instigate a response that spreads compassion, understanding, and hope throughout our nation and the global community.” Berson’s textbooks, like those of the other publishers, are generally faithful to this flabby, attenuated Comtism.
Yet feeble though the books are, they are not harmless. Not only do they do too little to acquaint children with their culture’s ideals of individual liberty and initiative; they promote the socialization of the child at the expense of the development of his own individual powers. The contrast between the old and new approaches is nowhere more evident than in the use that each makes of language. The old learning used language both to initiate the child into his culture and to develop his mind. Language and culture are so intimately related that the Greeks, who invented Western primary education, used the same word to designate both: paideia signifies both culture and letters (literature). The child exposed to a particular language gains insight into the culture that the language evolved to describe–for far from being an artifact of speech only, language is the master light of a people’s thought, character, and manners. At the same time, language–particularly the classic and canonical utterances of a people, its primal poetry–[and its History?] has a unique ability to awaken a child’s powers, in part because such utterances, Plato says, sink “furthest into the depths of the soul.”
Social studies, because it is designed not to waken but to suppress individuality, shuns all but the most rudimentary and uninspiring language. Social studies textbooks descend constantly to the vacuity of passages like this one, from People and Places:
“Children all around the world are busy doing the same things. They love to play games and enjoy going to school. They wish for peace. They think that adults should take good care of the Earth. How else do you think these children are like each other? How else do you think they are like you?”
The language of social studies is always at the same dead level of inanity. There is no shadow or mystery, no variation in intensity or alteration of pitch–no romance, no refinement, no awe or wonder. A social studies textbook is a desert of linguistic sterility supporting a meager scrub growth of commonplaces about “community,” “neighborhood,” “change,” and “getting involved.” Take the arid prose in Our Communities:
“San Antonio, Texas, is a large community. It is home to more than one million people, and it is still growing. People in San Antonio care about their community and want to make it better. To make room for new roads and houses, many old trees must be cut down. People in different neighborhoods get together to fix this by planting.”
It might be argued that a richer and more subtle language would be beyond third-graders. Yet in his Third Eclectic Reader, William Holmes McGuffey, a nineteenth-century educator, had eight-year-olds reading Wordsworth and Whittier. His nine-year-olds read the prose of Addison, Dr. Johnson, and Hawthorne and the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Southey, and Bryant. His ten-year-olds studied the prose of Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Sterne, Hazlitt, and Macaulay [History] and the poetry of Pope, Longfellow, Shakespeare, and Milton.
McGuffey adapted to American conditions some of the educational techniques that were first developed by the Greeks. In fifth-century BC Athens, the language of Homer and a handful of other poets formed the core of primary education. With the emergence of Rome, Latin became the principal language of Western culture and for centuries lay at the heart of primary- and grammar-school education. McGuffey had himself received a classical education, but conscious that nineteenth-century America was a post-Latin culture, he revised the content of the old learning even as he preserved its underlying technique of using language as an instrument of cultural initiation and individual self-development. He incorporated, in his Readers, not canonical Latin texts but classic specimens of English prose and poetry [and History].
Because the words of the Readers bit deep–deeper than the words in today’s social studies textbooks do–they awakened individual potential. The writer Hamlin Garland acknowledged his “deep obligation” to McGuffey “for the dignity and literary grace of his selections. From the pages of his readers I learned to know and love the poems of Scott, Byron, Southey, and Words- worth and a long line of the English masters. I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selected scenes which I read in these books.” Not all, but some children will come away from a course in the old learning stirred to the depths by the language of Blake or Emerson. But no student can feel, after making his way through the groupthink wastelands of a social studies textbook, that he has traveled with Keats in the realms of gold.
It might be objected that primers like the McGuffey Readers were primarily intended to instruct children in reading and writing, something that social studies doesn’t pretend to do. In fact, the Readers, like other primers of the time, were only incidentally language manuals. Their foremost function was cultural: they used language both to introduce children to their cultural heritage [including their History] and to stimulate their individual self-culture. The acultural, group biases of social studies might be pardonable if cultural learning continued to have a place in primary-school English instruction. But primary-school English–or “language arts,” as it has come to be called–no longer introduces children, as it once did, to the canonical language of their culture; it is not uncommon for public school students today to reach the fifth grade without having encountered a single line of classic English prose or poetry. Language arts has become yet another vehicle for the socialization of children. A recent article by educators Karen Wood and Linda Bell Soares in The Reading Teacher distills the essence of contemporary language-arts instruction, arguing that teachers should cultivate not literacy in the classic sense but “critical literacy,” a “pedagogic approach to reading that focuses on the political, sociocultural, and economic forces that shape young students’ lives.”
For educators devoted to the social studies model, the old learning is anathema precisely because it liberates individual potential. It releases the “powers of a young soul,” the classicist educator Werner Jaeger wrote, “breaking down the restraints which hampered it, and leading into a glad activity.” The social educators have revised the classic ideal of education expressed by Pindar: “Become what you are” has given way to “Become what the group would have you be.” Social studies’ verbal drabness is the means by which its contrivers starve the self of the sustenance that nourishes individual growth. A stunted soul can more easily be reduced to an acquiescent dullness than a vital, growing one can; there is no readier way to reduce a people to servile imbecility than to cut them off from the traditions of their language [and their History], as the Party does in George Orwell’s 1984.
Indeed, today’s social studies theorists draw on the same social philosophy that Orwell feared would lead to Newspeak. The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities, a 2006 collection of articles by leading social studies educators, is a socialist smorgasbord of essays on topics like “Marxism and Critical Multicultural Social Studies” and “Decolonizing the Mind for World-Centered Global Education.” The book, too, reveals the pervasive influence of Marxist thinkers like Peter McLaren, a professor of urban schooling at UCLA who advocates “a genuine socialist democracy without market relations,” venerates Che Guevara as a “secular saint,” and regards the individual “self” as a delusion, an artifact of the material “relations which produced it”–“capitalist production, masculinist economies of power and privilege, Eurocentric signifiers of self/other identifications,” all the paraphernalia of bourgeois imposture. For such apostles of the social pack, Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Milton’s and Tennyson’s “soul within,” Spenser’s “my self, my inward self I mean,” and Wordsworth’s aspiration to be “worthy of myself” are expressions of naive faith in a thing that dialectical materialism has revealed to be an accident of matter, a random accumulation of dust and clay.
The test of an educational practice is its power to enable a human being to realize his own promise in a constructive way. Social studies fails this test. Purge it of the social idealism that created and still inspires it, and what remains is an insipid approach to the cultivation of the mind, one that famishes the soul even as it contributes to what Pope called the “progress of dulness.” It should be abolished.

Scott Jaschik:

Complaints about doctoral education in the humanities — it takes too long, it’s not leading to jobs, it’s disjointed — are rampant. So too are periodic calls for radical reform.
But Stanford University is encouraging its humanities departments to redesign humanities doctoral programs so that students could finish in five years (down from the current average of seven at the university and much longer elsewhere), and so that the programs prepare students for careers in and out of academe. While the university is not forcing departments to change, it last week gave all humanities departments a request for proposals that offered a trade: departments that give concrete plans to cut time to degree and change the curriculum will be eligible for extra support — in particular for year-round support for doctoral students (who currently aren’t assured of summer support throughout their time as grad students). The plans would need to be measurable, and the support would disappear if plans aren’t executed.
While some Stanford faculty members in the humanities have been speaking out about the need to reform humanities programs for some time, and while a few universities elsewhere have experimented with one or two programs, the Stanford initiative could shape up to be the broadest yet to encourage substantial change in humanities Ph.D. education.

Jack Stripling:

While this statement is surely sometimes true, it is also true that some of the nation’s top-paid presidents continue to receive perks that their corporate counterparts have relinquished under shareholder criticism.
Among the 50 highest-paid private-college presidents in 2010, half led institutions that provided top executives with cash to cover taxes on bonuses and other benefits, a Chronicle analysis has found. This practice, known as “grossing up,” has fallen out of fashion at many publicly traded companies, where boards have decided the perk is simply not worth the shareholder outrage it can invite.
“Those arrangements became radioactive over the last 10 years,” said Mark A. Borges, an expert on executive pay and a principal at Compensia, a consulting company.
Regardless of the amount of money involved, people typically recoil when they learn that an organization’s wealthiest employees are given help covering taxes, Mr. Borges said. In the throes of a national debate about tax fairness, those kinds of payments reinforce the perception that the well-off play by a different set of rules. They also point toward the significant bargaining power that presidents have in contract negotiations.
“The whole issue of paying people’s taxes on their behalf grates on people,” Mr. Borges said.

Jarrett Skorup:

When continually focusing in the media on being “forced” to represent people who don’t pay dues under a right-to-work law, union heads are implying that they spend the vast majority of their money on contract negotiations, representation or other non-political work. That is a myth.
For example, according to the most recent federal filings, the Michigan Education Association — the state’s largest labor union — received $122 million and spent $134 million in 2012. They averaged about $800 from each of their 152,000 members.
According to union documents, “representational activities” (money spent on bargaining contracts for members) made up only 11 percent of total spending for the union. Meanwhile, spending on “general overhead” (union administration and employee benefits) comprised of 61 percent of the total spending.
So MEA members who disagree with the leadership of the union are paying up to 90 percent of their dues, but the union is only spending about a tenth of the dues money representing them.

Grant Wiggins:

GRANT: So, Steve, talk to me about the interesting part of math, the creative side. So many kids think math is just drudgery plug-and-chug work. What does it mean to be creative as a mathematician?
STEVE: Well, there’s a question part and an answer part to what we do. The 1st part is to find good questions. The 2nd part is to turn well-formed questions into answers. Both demand some creativity, but it’s the questioning part that needs more emphasis in schools.
How do I know what to investigate or think about? Most people would be puzzled – “Isn’t math already done? Don’t we know all the numbers? Are you trying to think of bigger and bigger numbers or new kinds of shapes?” Well, no. There are all sorts of interesting theoretical and applied problems out there.

Jason Riley:

“For Young Latino Readers, an Image Is Missing.”
So goes the headline of a recent New York Times story that cites a lot of multiculturalist mumbo-jumbo to explain the learning gap between white and Hispanic students.
“Hispanic students now make up nearly a quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment,” notes the Times, “yet nonwhite Latino children seldom see themselves in books written for young readers.” The paper would have us believe that this contributes to the underperformance of Latinos on standardized tests. According to Department of Education data for 2011, 18% of Hispanic fourth graders were proficient in reading, compared with 44% of white fourth graders.
“Education experts and teachers who work with large Latino populations say that a lack of familiar images could be an obstacle as young readers work to build stamina and deepen their understanding of story elements like character motivation,” says the article.

The Global Report Card, via a kind reader’s email:

Ever wonder how your public school district stacks up when compared to the rest of the world? What about how your district compares to your state or even the nation?

Tap or click on the images to view larger versions. Learn more about Madison & Wisconsin versus the world at www.wisconsin2.org.
How Does Your Child’s School Rank Against the Rest of the World?

If your kids are in a good American public school, chances are you know it. (In fact, it’s probably the reason you traded in that urban loft for the property taxes of the suburbs.) But what if you woke up one morning and found that a Wizard of Oz-style tornado had dropped your entire district down in the middle of Singapore or Finland? How would your children’s test scores measure up then?
That’s more or less what the Bush Institute wants to you to imagine as you click through its Global Report Card, an interactive graphic that lets you rank your district against 25 other countries. “When you tell people there are problems in education, elites will usually think, ‘Ah, that refers to those poor kids in big cities. It doesn’t have anything to do with me,'” says Jay P. Greene, head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas and one of the lead researchers behind the Global Report Card. “The power of denial is so great that people don’t think a finding really has anything to do with them unless you actually name their town.”

Sir Ken Robinson:

There are two main themes in the talk. First, we’re all born with deep natural capacities for creativity and systems of mass education tend to suppress them. Second, it is increasingly urgent to cultivate these capacities — for personal, economic and cultural reasons — and to rethink the dominant approaches to education to make sure that we do. One reason the talk has traveled so far is that these themes resonate so deeply with people at a personal level. I hear constantly from people around the world who feel marginalized by their own education, who want to thank me for helping them to understand why that may be and that they’re not alone. In the talk, I mentioned a book I was writing about the need to find our true talents and how often people are pushed away from them. The responses I get show that this is a common experience that’s deeply felt and ultimately resented. (Incidentally, I said in the talk that the book is called Epiphany. I later changed the title to The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. It was too late to change the reference in the talk, which has since done wonders to promote sales of books called Epiphany… )
A second reason for the impact of the talk is that people and organizations everywhere can see that current systems of education are failing to meet the challenges we now all face and they’re working furiously to create alternatives. In many countries, they’re doing this in the face of national policies and cultural attitudes that seem locked in past. The dominant systems of education are based on three principles — or assumptions at least — that are exactly opposite to how human lives are actually lived. Apart from that, they’re fine. First, they promote standardization and a narrow view of intelligence when human talents are diverse and personal. Second, they promote compliance when cultural progress and achievement depend on the cultivation of imagination and creativity. Third, they are linear and rigid when the course of each human life, including yours, is organic and largely unpredictable. As the rate of change continues to accelerate, building new forms of education on these alternative principles is not a romantic whimsy: it’s essential to personal fulfillment and to the sustainability of the world we are now creating.

m

Howard Wainer:

What constitutes a dangerous equation? There are two obvious inter­ pretations: some equations are dangerous if you know the equation and others are dangerous if you do not. In this chapter I will not ex- plore the dangers an equation might hold because the secrets within
its bounds open doors behind which lie terrible peril. Few would dis- agree that the obvious winner in this contest would be Einstein’s iconic equation
E=MC2 (1.1)

Timothy Lee:

Many universities pay hefty subscription fees to provide their users unlimited access to archives like JSTOR. Most non-academics pay by the article. Swartz, who was a fellow at Harvard University in the fall of 2010, was apparently unhappy about this situation and so joined neighboring MIT’s WiFi network as a guest and began rapidly downloading JSTOR documents. He reportedly got 4.8 million of them.
When JSTOR blocked his IP address, Swartz allegedly connected with a different IP address. When MIT then cut off his laptop from the network, Swartz allegedly changed his MAC address to allow him to regain access. Eventually, the government says that Swartz entered an MIT networking closet and plugged his laptop directly into the campus network.
The updated indictment describes the scene when Swartz returned to the closet a few days later to pick up his laptop: “Swartz held his bicycle helmet like a mask to shield his face, looking through ventilation holes in the helmet. Swartz then removed his computer equipment from the closet, put it in his backpack, and left, again masking his face with the bicycle helmet before peering through a crack in the double doors and cautiously stepping out.”
Certainly there’s no excuse for breaking into a private network closet and installing equipment without permission. But the government seems to have lost all sense of proportion here. And the apparent legal theory behind the government’s case–that using a website in a manner that violates its terms of use constitutes felony computer hacking–could have serious unintended consequences.

Austin Hughes:

The temptation to overreach, however, seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science. Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth. And this attitude is becoming more widespread among scientists themselves. All too many of my contemporaries in science have accepted without question the hype that suggests that an advanced degree in some area of natural science confers the ability to pontificate wisely on any and all subjects.
Of course, from the very beginning of the modern scientific enterprise, there have been scientists and philosophers who have been so impressed with the ability of the natural sciences to advance knowledge that they have asserted that these sciences are the only valid way of seeking knowledge in any field. A forthright expression of this viewpoint has been made by the chemist Peter Atkins, who in his 1995 essay “Science as Truth” asserts the “universal competence” of science. This position has been called scientism — a term that was originally intended to be pejorative but has been claimed as a badge of honor by some of its most vocal proponents. In their 2007 book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, for example, philosophers James Ladyman, Don Ross, and David Spurrett go so far as to entitle a chapter “In Defense of Scientism.”
Modern science is often described as having emerged from philosophy; many of the early modern scientists were engaged in what they called “natural philosophy.” Later, philosophy came to be seen as an activity distinct from but integral to natural science, with each addressing separate but complementary questions — supporting, correcting, and supplying knowledge to one another. But the status of philosophy has fallen quite a bit in recent times. Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy. Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering such questions, but the only means of answering them. For most of those who dabble in scientism, this shift is unacknowledged, and may not even be recognized. But for others, it is explicit. Atkins, for example, is scathing in his dismissal of the entire field: “I consider it to be a defensible proposition that no philosopher has helped to elucidate nature; philosophy is but the refinement of hindrance.”

School Matters Milwaukee:

The Grammy Foundation has awarded Milwaukee Public Schools’ Milwaukee High School of the Arts a Grammy Signature Schools Community Award.
Milwaukee High School of the Arts is the first school in the Midwest to receive this designation. It was selected in part because of its students’ past involvement in All Star Grammy Jazz Ensembles, including last school year’s participant, Felix Ramsey.

Michele Molnar:

The U.S. has a shortage of demanding parents.
So says Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, speaking today in Washington, D.C. at the release of the NAACP’s blueprint for education reform called, “Finding Our Way Back to First: Reclaiming World Leadership by Educating All America’s Children.”
“One of the countries out-educating us by every measure is South Korea,” Duncan said, explaining that when President Barack Obama meets the President of South Korea, Obama routinely asks, “What’s your biggest educational challenge?”
The answer from Lee Myung-bak is this: “My parents are too demanding. Even my poorest parents demand a world class education,” according to Duncan.

Seth Godin.

Pat Schneider:

But divisions over strategy, wrapped in ideology, loom as large as ever. The mere mention that the education forum and summit were on tap drew online comments about the connection of school reformers to the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that generates model legislation for conservative causes.
Conspiracy theorists, opponents retorted.
Democratic state Rep. Brett Hulsey walked out early from the fundraising luncheon because he didn’t like what Canada and Legend were saying about the possibility of reform hinging on the ability to fire ineffective teachers.
Thomas J. Mertz, a parent and college instructor who blogs on education issues, expressed in a phone interview Friday his indignation over “flying in outside agitators who have spent no time in our schools and telling us what our problems are.”
Mertz said he also was concerned by the involvement of the Madison School District with events delivering anti-union, anti-public education, pro-charter school messages. The school district, for its part, took pains to say that the $5,000 it donated in staff time was for a Friday workshop session and that it had no involvement with the appearances by Canada and Legend.
Madison doesn’t need a summit to whip up excitement over the achievement gap issue, Mertz said when I asked if the Urban League events didn’t at least accomplish that. “It’s at the point where there’s more heat than light,” he said. “There’s all this agitation, but the work is being neglected.”
That’s a charge that School Board President James Howard, who says that the district might decide to mimic some of the practices presented at the summit, flatly denies. “We’re moving full speed ahead,” he said.
….
Caire told me that the school district and teachers union aren’t ready to give up their control over the school system. “The teachers union should be the entity that embraces change. The resources they get from the public should be used for the children’s advantage. What we’re saying is, ‘Be flexible, look at that contract and see how you can do what works.'”
Madison Teachers Inc. head John Matthews responded in an email to me that MTI contracts often include proposals aimed at improving education, in the best interests of students. “What Mr. Caire apparently objects to is that the contract provides those whom MTI represents due process and social justice, workplace justice that all employees deserve.”
If Caire has his way, Madison — and the state — are up for another round of debate over how radically to change education infrastructure to boost achievement of students of color.

More here and here.

Jerry Sun:

Since elementary school, we learned basic mathematics skills as little children. As we grew older, our math improved as we learned new concepts. Yet have people ever wondered why Americans lag behind Eastern Asian countries, such as China, in math? The answer might not easily be what you think:
The answer lies not only in the practice that Asian students receive but also, surprisingly, in the language we speak. Examine the following numbers: 8,2,4,6,7,5,1. Now look away for twenty seconds, and try to memorize the order of the numbers presented. Research has shown that you have a 50% chance of accurately memorizing that sequence perfectly, if you speak English.
Yet for those who speak Chinese, it is almost assured that you will get that sequence right. The reason is not due to intelligence, but actually the phonetics of our languages. Our brain is programmed to store numbers in a repetitive loop that lasts for only a short period of time. Chinese speakers are able to fit those 7 numbers into that span of time, while English speakers cannot. Hence, the Chinese speakers can memorize those numbers at a much more efficient rate than English speakers. How is this important?

Alan Borsuk:

Means, the superintendent of Mequon-Thiensville schools and the most prominent African-American involved in education in Milwaukee suburban schools, is pushing to have constructive conversations about a subject few have wanted to discuss publicly: the lower achievement overall of minority children in suburban schools, at a time when the number of minority children in those schools is rising.
Means’ presentation came on a recent evening before 35 people at Wauwatosa West High School, a session hosted by Wauwatosa and West Allis-West Milwaukee school officials.
A few weeks earlier, Means made a similar presentation at Whitefish Bay High School. He has made the same pitch in the district where he works and just about anywhere else people will listen to him.
He is spearheading the launch of a collaborative effort involving at least a half-dozen suburban districts aimed at taking new runs at improving the picture.
The gaps are widespread and persistent. Black kids and Hispanic kids do not do as well in school as their white peers, even in the schools with the highest incomes, best facilities, most stable teaching staffs and highest test scores.
But Means told the Wauwatosa audience that schools shouldn’t focus on societal factors they can’t control. There are things schools can do, he said, such as making more meaningful commitments to high expectations for all students, insisting on rigor in classrooms, and ensuring that culturally responsive teaching styles and relationship-building are prevalent.
Means advocated three broad routes for schools:

Mequon-Thiensville’s 2012-2013 budget is $51,286,130 or $14,024 for 3,657 students. Madison will spend $15,132 per student during the 2012-2013 school year.