Antonio Regalado:

When prominent U.S. universities began offering free college classes over the Web this year, more than half of the students who signed up were from outside the United States. Consider the story of one of them: Carlos Martinez, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of El Salvador.
Last spring, Martinez enrolled in a class on electronic circuits offered by edX, the $60 million collaboration between MIT and Harvard to stream “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, over the Web. He thought it was so good that he began traveling around El Salvador to convince others to join the class and launched a blog in English to document his adventures as his country’s first “MOOC advocate.”

Professor Baker’s Blog:

Beginning public school teachers who earn their credentials from alternative types of programs in Tennessee are as effective as veteran teachers in some subject areas and even more effective in a few areas, according to a state report released this morning.
The alternative programs, such as Teach for America, allow college graduates from other fields to teach while participating in a fast track to certification.
“In looking at both traditionally and alternatively licensed graduates, there are four programs that stand out,” said Jamie Woodson, president and CEO of the State Collaborative on Reforming Education, or SCORE.

Jason Stein:

In the state budget, Walker and GOP lawmakers sharply reduced aid to schools and then also dropped by more than 5% the cap on how much money schools can raise through state aid and local property taxes.
To offset that cut amounting to $451 million in the first year, Walker and lawmakers eliminated through the Act 10 legislation most collective bargaining for teachers and most other public workers and then required most public employees to pick up at least half the required contributions to their pensions. The legislation also required state workers to pay 12% of their health insurance premiums and allowed schools to require the same of their employees.
These changes, however, don’t currently apply in districts such as Milwaukee Public Schools, where unions and the district still have a valid contract laying out different terms.
The taxpayers alliance found that districts reduced their benefit costs by $366.3 million overall, which amounted to 81% of the total amount of revenue cuts to schools. However, part of that was due to schools shedding staff.
The study found that, through layoffs or simply not filling vacancies, districts statewide cut 2,312 positions, or 2.3%, last year, up from 1,519 positions, or 1.5%, the previous year.
Those staff cuts accounted for about $79 million of the overall benefits savings. They also contributed to a statewide rise in average student-to-teacher ratios to 14.4, up from 14.1 in 2011 and 13.9 in 2010.

Madison Teachers, Inc., via a kind Linda Doeseckle email 82K PDF.

he Sick Leave Bank (see Section VII-G of MTI’s Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement) is an innovative and progressive Contract provision. Because of its value to those in need, unions across the country have tried to emulate it. A sign of Union solidarity, the Sick Leave Bank (SLB) has provided income to many teachers who otherwise would go without.
The SLB was created by MTI’s 1980 negotiations, with each member of MTI’s teacher collective bargaining unit donating three sick days to fund the “Bank”. The Sick Leave Bank acts as a short-term disability policy for teachers needing to be off of work for medical reasons and who have consumed their earned sick leave. SLB benefits begin after a teacher has been absent eleven (11) consecutive work days and has exhausted his/her Personal Sick Leave Account. SLB benefits are payable for a maximum of forty-four (44) days, or until the Contract provided long term disability benefit begins, whichever occurs first. The SLB Contract provision enables pay at 100% of the individual’s daily rate of pay for each work day from the SLB. Without the SLB, teachers without sufficient sick leave to cover an extended illness would be forced to go without pay until long term disability benefits begin when one is absent for 55 work days; i.e. until one qualifies for long term disability coverage.
Teacher recipients are not required to “repay” the bank for days withdrawn; rather all teachers are assessed an additional day from their personal sick leave account, when the balance of days in the SLB drops below the contractually defined threshold of six (6) days per teacher. To help offset the need for assessment, MTI negotiated that 80% of the unused sick leave of the Retirement Insurance Account of one who resigns or dies is transferred to the SLB. This has minimized the need for members of the bargaining unit to be assessed days to fund the Bank.
The SLB is yet another way that, through our collective efforts, MTI members are able to assist each other.
Given that the Sick Leave Bank balance has now dropped below the contractual minimum, all teachers will be assessed one earned sick leave day on their February 1 paycheck. Teachers who do not have at least one sick day in their personal sick leave account may be docked one day’s pay on the February 1 paycheck. This is only the fourteenth (14th) time in the thirty-two (32) year existence of the SLB that an assessment has been necessary.

Jennifer Zahn and Erin Richards:

State Superintendent Tony Evers on Monday reintroduced a proposal from two years ago to increase state funding for public education and change the way the state finances its public schools as part of his 2013-’15 budget request.
The proposal calls for a 2.4% increase in state aid in the first year of the budget and a 5.5% increase in 2014-’15, which Evers said would put the state back on track to return to two-thirds’ state support for public school costs by 2017.
The Department of Public Instruction’s 2013-’15 budget proposal guarantees state funding of $3,000 per pupil and would result in every school district either getting more state money or the same money as before, but Republican legislators on Monday did not express confidence in the total package.
Luther Olsen, chair of the Senate Education Committee and a Republican from Ripon, said Evers’ “Fair Funding for our Future” plan just shifts money around between districts and doesn’t really award more money to schools.
Olsen did say he would like to increase districts’ revenue limit authority per student – or the combined amount they can raise in state general aid and local property taxes – by at least $200 per pupil starting in the first year of the next biennial budget.
Evers announced his 2013-’15 state public education budget request Monday at Irving Elementary School in West Allis.

WisPolitics:

Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie said the proposal will be reviewed in the context of the overall budget, but said education is one of Walker’s top budget priorities.
“The governor will work to build off of the work done with Superintendent Evers on school district accountability and Read to Lead as he creates the first version of the state budget, which will be introduced early next year,” Werwie said.
Evers also said he’ll run for re-election next year, adding that despite the funding cuts, he’s excited to continue pushing reform and accountability.
“In order for us to create a new middle class and to move our state forward in a positive way, our public schools need to be strong, and the reforms we’re implementing now are going a long way toward accomplishing that,” Evers said. “We’re in a great place as a state and we’ll keep plugging away.”
Various conservative education sources said no candidate has come forward to challenge Evers yet, but talks were ongoing with potential challengers. Nomination papers can be circulated Dec. 1 and are due back to the GAB Jan. 2.

Matthew DeFour has more.

Teacher Union proposal via sp-eye:

Really? You really think that under the new climate in Wisconsin that your existing contract should be allowed to stand? What the teachers union needs to come to grips with is that its getting harder and harder for the public to support their petulant positioning.
Can you name one…just one…occupation that gets an automatic 3% pay raise every year just for being a year older? And then…on TOP of that, you expect a big raise from the school board as well? About 4-6 weeks ago, you fine folks made a plea for a 3.1% increase. Those on “the grid” would then receive a 6.1% increase. What other occupation still gets an annual “step increase for basically continuing to work and having a birthday.

The District’s Contract proposal, via sp-eye:

SPEA, and across the state other teachers’ unions, have long spoken out about the low wage paid to entry level teachers. In the past, the “grid” has impeded the district’s ability to single out one group of SPEA members for above average pay increases. In addition, SPEA, like many teachers unions, establishes a “negotiations committee” which is heavily (if not totally) comprised of teachers earning wages either at the far end of the salary grid, or even “off” the grid. It can be argued that these “negotiators” are looking out more for their own interests than those of their lesser paid brethren.
Act 10, however, changed all that. And SPASD administration and members of the school board worked diligently to develop an offer that would earmark roughly one-third of the budgeted $552,392 towards raising the base wage for all entry level teachers. The new starting salary would be raised from $32,505 to $35,000 for a Bachelor’s Degree and $38,000 for a Master’s Degree. 96 SPEA members (roughly 17% of all SPEA members) would see their base wages increased to $35,000.
How could SPEA’s negotiation team argue against such a plan? It’s a no-brainer, right? Raising the floor would allow SPASD to be more competitive and attract the best and brightest teachers to work in the district. And that’s consistent with SPEA’s desires…right?

American enterprise Institute:

Although education was not the most salient issue of the 2012 US election season, a panel of education experts unveiled the issue’s growing significance at an AEI event on Thursday. AEI’s own Andrew Kelly began by asking what America’s largely status-quo election results mean for education.
Panelists agreed that Indiana State Superintendent Tony Bennett’s defeat was the most surprising outcome for education. AEI’s Rick Hess noted that the incumbent Republican’s loss is a foreboding trend on the national education horizon, one that indicates both union strength and a frustration with the highly partisan nature of the Common Core State Standards.
Panelists expressed a less-unified response to the next four years of education policy. Kristen Soltis of the Winston Group emphasized that the Obama administration must shift public opinion about education policies such as teacher pay, teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and class sizes to make progress in education reform and improve student outcomes.

Yvette Kantrow:

Albert Einstein once said, “Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.” And these days, experts on aging agree. Studies continue to show that lifelong learning is the key to keeping our minds sharp and our brains strong, an important contributor to wellness overall, as we grow older. “Cognitive decline is not a normal function of aging,” insists Andrew J. Carle, executive in residence and the founding director of the program in senior housing administration at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “The brain doesn’t have to be in decline. You can keep it strong; you can exercise your brain.”
For many years, the idea of cognitive calisthenics conjured up images of silvered-hair retirees playing bridge or noodling over the New York Times crossword puzzle, ideally while relaxing by the pool. While those activities certainly do contribute to brain health, they’re only the tip of the iceberg of what’s available to mature adults who want to educate themselves in effective, enjoyable, and, in some cases, luxurious, ways. From downloading Harvard lectures to their computers, to spending a semester at sea with a ship full of students and professors, options for lifelong learners abound. Here are five of the best:
Lectures in the Living Room
You don’t have to leave home to exercise your brain — just pop a disc into your CD or DVD player, or download a digital video. The Great Courses of Chantilly, Va., formerly known as the Teaching Company (thegreatcourses.com), makes and sells video and audio recordings of some 390 classes, taught by professors of top universities, on everything from literature to math to wine-tasting. Best sellers include “Understanding the Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy” ($229.95 on DVD); and “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music” ($699.95 on DVD).

David B. Cohen:

Note: in November 2012, Accomplished California Teachers (ACT) released the policy report “Promoting Quality Teaching: New Approaches to Compensation and Career Pathways.” The following post is the second in a series of profiles showing how California teacher leaders are beginning to develop and follow diversified career pathways. California teachers, and our peers around the nation, are looking for opportunities to innovate and lead in our field, but without having to leave the classroom. Our argument is that educational leadership will improve the more its carried out by those still in the classroom, and that students will benefit from having more accomplished educators remaining the in classroom rather than taking on entirely non-teaching positions.
This profile focuses on the Algebra Success Academy (see video, below), a project founded and directed by math teacher Wendy Gallimore, and funded in part by the California Teachers Association through its Institute for Teaching. The program has become a model of collaboration involving a district, union, and university. The policy recommendations in our report, if adopted, would pave the way for districts to staff similar programs, and to cultivate the conditions that lead to similar innovations aimed at improving student learning.

Scott Reeder:

A while back, I showed up at the post office a half-hour before closing time and got in line to mail a package.
An officious man came up to me, pointed at the clerks working behind the counter and said, “If you are still in line at 5:30 p.m. you’ll have to leave because I’m not going to pay those people overtime.”
So I left the post office and drove across town to FedEx.
I can’t imagine standing in line to pay for groceries at the supermarket and being turned away out of fear that maybe I’d still be in line past closing time.
To be sure, I’ve had my share of annoying experiences with private businesses.

Lyndsey Layton:

Teachers unions scored political victories in several states Tuesday, beating back proposals that ranged from merit pay to school vouchers and unseating a Republican school superintendent with a national reputation for aggressively changing the way teachers are evaluated and compensated.
But the unions also lost several battles, including an attempt to enshrine bargaining rights in the Michigan constitution and to quash proposals to create public charter schools in Washington state and Georgia.
The mixed election results reflect the complexity of a larger national debate about how to improve public education.

via a kind Kaleem Caire email:

Join John Legend, Geoffrey Canada and Madison’s own education luminaries, Gloria Ladson-Billings and Sal Carranza as they discuss what our children need to succeed in school and life, and answer questions from the audience.
Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings is the Kellner Family Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and former president of the American Education Research Association.
Salvadore Carranza is a Senior Academic Planner in the Office of Academic and Student Affairs at the University of Wisconsin System and co-founder and Chair of the Latino Education Council of Dane County.

Dave Murray:

Proposal 2, which unions and Democrats hoped would restore some of the clout lost in the 2010 elections and potentially head off right-to-work legislation in Michigan, apparently was soundly rejected by voters.
With more than $45 million spent by both sides, the campaign was the most expensive for a ballot issue in the state’s history, drew national attention and, was considered a potential template for unions in other states.
The measure failed 58 percent to 42 percent, with 2,571,501 voting against the proposal and 1,855,063 voting in favor, with 95 percent of the precincts counted..
The coalition backing Proposal 2 said its goal was to protect workers from corporate special interests, restoring the ability for employees to have a voice in a state with a rich tradition of organized labor.

Doug Erickson:

Two years ago, administrators at Sacred Hearts Catholic School noticed a sudden drop in the number of students buying hot lunches from the cafeteria.
They soon learned a boycott was under way, led by a group of seventh-graders and involving dozens of students.
“We weren’t getting the nutrition we needed,” said Kelly Brehmer, 13, an eighth-grader who took part in the boycott as a sixth-grader. The food wasn’t healthy enough, she said, and the menus were too repetitious.
The student revolt led to sweeping changes. Made-from-scratch meals, using fresh vegetables grown locally, replaced much of the highly processed government food. An amped-up salad bar sprouted garbanzo beans, cabbage and pea pods. Sweet desserts faded to just a twice-a-month treat.

Matthew Ladner:

Let me start by noting that what I write here, as always, is my own personal view. It does not reflect the views of my employer or any other group with whom I collaborate. It is my hope, for reasons I will explain below, to serve as an equal opportunity offender. Three days later I can speak only daggers to both sides of our currently idiotic Common Core debate.
A few days before the election some polling data was released from Indiana showing that Superintendent Tony Bennett had a problem with-of all people-conservative Republicans. It has quickly passed into the Conventional Wisdom that Tony’s support for Common Core cost him re-election. This result is an insult to a dumpster fire for both sides of the Common Core debate.
Let’s get two things clear from the outset: no one has yet to convince me that Common Core is a good idea and Common Core opponents have revealed themselves to be unsophisticated ya-hoos as easily led by weak arguments as any Ravitch-zombie. Whether Indiana adopts or chooses not to adopt Common Core is ultimately of trivial to modest importance in driving academic outcomes in Indiana. Neither side of the argument in Indiana seemed to appreciate this stunningly obvious fact.

TNTP:

Launched in 2012, the Fishman Prize for Superlative Classroom Practice is an annual award for exceptionally effective teachers working in high-poverty public schools. No more than five teachers are awarded the prize each year. The prize is named for Shira Fishman, a TNTP-trained math teacher currently teaching at McKinley Technology High School in Washington, DC.
In addition to receiving $25,000 each, Fishman Prize winners participate in an intensive summer residency during which they reflect critically on their classroom practice, explore the larger issues that shape their profession, and write a short paper on the elements of effective teaching. The residency enables the winners to share their expertise with educators across the country without taking time away from the classrooms where they do their best work.

Jody Lawrence-Turner:

Although votes are still being counted on Washington’s charter school initiative, Spokane Public Schools officials have already decided the district will apply to have one if it passes.
“If we are trying to do some innovative programs, we should have a good shot,” said Superintendent Shelley Redinger, who helped set up a charter school as a superintendent in Oregon. “Part of it is if we don’t have one to offer our community and someone else does, I’m afraid the students will go elsewhere.”
Initiative 1240, which in Thursday night vote totals was leading with 51 percent approval, allows for as many as 40 charter schools – eight per year, set up over the next five years. They would be established either by public school districts or by nonprofit organizations.

Darnell Heywood & Jen Fitzpatrick:

For this week’s installment of The Choice on India Ink, we present our Counselor’s Calendar, designed to keep students on track during the college admissions process.
We’ve asked Darnell Heywood and Jen FitzPatrick, the director and associate director of college counseling at Columbus Academy in Gahanna, Ohio, for admissions advice for high school seniors. — Tanya Abrams
Seniors often need to brace themselves around this time of year, when relatives all ask the same question: “So, where are you going to college next year?”
In our experience, this is the last question seniors want to hear. They want a break. They need a break. Many feel vulnerable, as this question has been posed to them hundreds of times over the last three months.

Meg Henderson:

Troubled children are driving many adoptive parents to nervous breakdowns – or worse – because the social services aren’t giving them adequate support.
In Glasgow two months ago a 14-year-old boy was jailed for seven years for fatally stabbing his 34-year-old foster mother. The incident took place a year ago. In the days leading up to the murder, the boy had been grounded, and his Xbox, mobile phone and laptop – which he used to keep in contact with his natural mother – were taken from him as punishment for his behaviour. According to his foster father, Bryan McKenzie, who had left the family home an hour before the attack, the boy didn’t seem overly upset by the punishment. Dawn and Bryan McKenzie were first-time foster parents and were, perhaps, through no fault of their own, out of their depth with the boy. As seasoned fosterers/adopters are aware, there is a fine line when it comes to disciplining children who are already disturbed by their backgrounds, and taking so much from him was obviously inadvisable.

Alan Borsuk

I watched President Barack Obama’s first inaugural address four years ago with hundreds of students at Northwest Secondary School.
The truth is, the adults in the room were paying attention, but hardly any of the kids were. They were noisy and unfocused. Maintaining control was clearly a challenge and priority for the staff. Whatever anyone thinks about hope and change in terms of Obama – not my subject here – I left the Milwaukee Public Schools building near N. 76th St. and W. Silver Spring Drive that day feeling unhopeful about change there.
With barely a ripple, the Milwaukee School Board voted a couple weeks ago to make official what Superintendent Gregory Thornton’s administration effectively set in place a year ago: The school will be closed at the end of this year.
The decision comes a year after MPS leaders took the extraordinary step of pulling more than 500 eighth- and ninth-graders out of the school midyear, citing, at various times, the poor academic results, safety issues and the inability to find qualified teachers willing to work there. (My reaction, in order, is ugh, ugh and wow.)
The demise of Northwest Secondary speaks to several major issues shaping MPS and Milwaukee education in general. Among them:

Hays Golden:

Diagnosed rates of autism spectrum disorders have grown tremendously over the last few decades. I find that assortative mating may have meaningfully contributed to the rise. I develop a general model of genes and assortative mating which shows that small changes in sorting could have large impacts on the extremes of genetic distributions. I apply my theory to autism, which I model as the extreme right tail of a genetic formal thinking ability distribution (systemizing). Using large sample data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I find strong support for theories that autism is connected to systemizing. My mating model shows that increases in the returns to systemizing, particularly for women, can contribute significantly to rising autism rates. I provide evidence that mating on systemizing has actually shifted, and conclude with a rough calculation suggesting that despite the increase in autism, increased sorting on systemizing has been socially beneficial.

Agri-View:

The Wisconsin Christmas Tree Producers Association (WCTPA) announces the winner of its Logo Design Contest as Lisa Feigl, a junior from Madison West High School in Madison. Her entry received the highest number of votes by Christmas tree growers at the WCTPA summer convention. The contest was open to Wisconsin high school students, giving them an opportunity to use their skills in a real life situation.

John Chubb, via a kind email:

“My manicurist requires a license to do my nails, but our nation isn’t sure we should license teachers.” Camilla Benbow, Peabody College
Camilla Benbow is the dean of the top-ranked school of education in the United States, Peabody College at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Under her leadership, which began in 1999, Peabody has risen in stature–passing Harvard, Stanford, and other elite institutions–to reach the top spot in the U.S. News & World Report rating system, which it has occupied since 2009. Peabody is the only school of education in an elite national university that trains undergraduates to become licensed K-12 teachers.
Because Vanderbilt is a very selective institution overall (ranked in the top twenty of national universities), and because the brightest high school students in the United States have few choices if they wish to become teachers upon graduation from a four-year institution, Peabody enrolls extremely high-achieving students. Their average SAT combined math and critical reading score in 2011 was 1438.3

Cheyenne Langkamp:

The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents discussed Thursday the national and state higher education climate in relation to economic development–a topic that Board of Regents President Brent Smith said will be brought up in many upcoming board meetings.
The board streamed a video conference with Anthony Carnevale, research professor and director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, who spoke about the nation’s increasing skills gap.
According to Carnevale, while technology-based, post-secondary skills are becoming increasingly necessary to get a job, access to higher education is becoming less attainable.
Carnevale said he predicts this inconsistency will continue and may prevent economic improvement, saying access to the middle class is becoming more and more dependent on access to post-secondary education.

TJ Mertz:

Or who should be held accountable for the accountability design work being done by MMSD? These aren’t easy questions. Accountability is confusing, maybe not as confusing as the Abbott and Costello routine, but confusing (who should or should not be held accountable for the results of accountability measures is even more confusing….add teachers, families, the economy, inequality, …. to the list below). The chain of accountability goes from the voters who elect Board Members, to the Superintendent who the Board hires, fires and evaluates, to the administrators the Superintendent hires (with the consent of the Board, but for better or worse this has been a rubber stamp consent), supervises and evaluates. It also loops back to the Board, because they are responsible for making sure administrators have the resources they need to do good work, but this chain continues back to the Superintendent and the administrators who prepare draft budgets and should communicate their needs and capacities to the Board. The Superintendent is the bottleneck in this chain each time it loops around because the the MMSD Board has almost entirely limited their action in evaluation, hiring and firing to the Superintendent. Right now MMSD has an Interim Superintendent, so evaluation, hiring and firing is moot and the key link in the chain is broken. Like I said, confused.
What is clear is that the only lever of accountability community members hold is their vote in school elections. Three seats are up in April (Board President James Howard has announced his intent to run for re-election; Maya Cole and Beth Moss have not publicly stated their plans).
…………
Mary Burke noted that the left hand and the right hand didn’t appear to be coordinating. To be more specific, she pointed out that on page 15 (of the pdf) there is a chart with the stated goal “95% of all 11th graders will take the ACT in 2012-13,” but chart itself shows annual incremental increases, culminating at 95% for all groups in 2016-17. It was long ago decided that all students would take the ACT in 2012-13, whoever prepared the left part of the chart knew this, but whoever did the increments on the right did not (and apparently didn’t read the left part). Here it is:

This is not the first time administrative accountability issues have been raised.
It would certainly be a new day in the Madison schools should radical governance change arrive via school board elections.

Richard Garner, via a kind reader’s email:

Children are to be barred from using calculators in the maths national curriculum tests for 11-year-olds.
Schools Minister Elizabeth Truss is announcing the move today in a bid to encourage pupils to master mental arithmetic skills whilst in primary school.
Research shows 10-year-olds from England are amongst the highest users of calculators in the world – with 98 per cent resorting to them in lessons compared with an international average of 46 per cent.
Ms Truss said children were too reliant on calculators at present, adding that there was a need to get more rigour into maths lessons. Calculators should omnly be introduced when pupils were confident in their mental and written arithmetic and knew their times tables.

Geoffery Gagnon:

When he was 14, Wilson built a nuclear-fusion reactor. Then, a bomb-sniffing device that impressed even the president. Now 18, the prodigy is skipping college and using a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship to try to crack the riddle of harnessing energy from nuclear fusion–a feat that plenty consider impossible.
I was about 10 when I got into nuclear science. That was when that spark hit me. It took a few years of research, but when I was 14, I produced my first nuclear-fusion reaction.
Since then, the areas where I’ve made a lot of innovation are counterterrorism and nuclear medicine. I’ve been focused on detecting nuclear terrorism at ports, in cargo containers, and I developed and built detectors that are extremely cheap and also very sensitive. My other big development is a system to produce medical isotopes that are injected into patients and used to diagnose and treat cancer. It’s a design that costs less than $100,000 and wheels right into a hospital room–replacing multimillion-dollar, warehouse-size facilities.

Daniela Fairchild:

The sun rises in the East. Grass is green. And teachers are the most important in-school factor in determining student achievement. This last truth has long guided the push for more robust teacher-preparation programs, heartier evaluation systems, and altered HR policies. This short report by Raegen Miller highlights another strategy, small but fruitful, for eking more out of today’s instructional workforce: Ensure that teachers come to school each day. Using data from the Civil Rights Data Collection survey, Miller discovers that, on average, 36 percent of teachers were absent (whether for sick or disability leave or vacation time) ten or more days during the 2009-10 school year. Nationally, these missed school days cost taxpayers $4 billion.

TJ Mertz

The current “accountability” madness is almost all based on misusing metrics of questionable value to make comparisons among students, among teachers, among schools, among districts, among nations (see here and here for two recent manifestations). If we are going to be “holding people accountable,” I’d prefer the metric be whether they are providing all students with the “opportunities to employ his [or her] own powers in activities that have meaning.”

Simon Mundy and Laeticia Ock:

At no time this year was South Korea’s national obsession with education more starkly on show than on Thursday, as more than 660,000 youngsters sat their university entrance exams. Traffic was diverted away from exam halls, airline schedules were tweaked to avoid distractions and police cars were put at the disposal of students who risked arriving late for their exams.
Such a sweeping show of support would doubtless be appreciated by stressed-out, sleep-deprived examinees in other countries. But the degree of national interest in the entrance exams reflects what, according to critics, is an excessive level of pressure on the shoulders of the country’s youth.

Andrew Rotherham:

The 2012 Presidential election sidestepped the issue of school reform. Neither candidate spent much time laying out, let alone talking up, an education policy agenda. But around the country, there were ballot referendums and state and local races with big implications for schools. Teachers unions had a good night, but so did charter schools. In other words, Nov. 6 left the country with an education mandate as unclear as the electoral mandate overall. Still, what happened in various states will influence what happens in Washington during President Obama’s second term. Here are four key education issues to watch:
The biggest omen for the Obama Administration is, ironically, the defeat of a high-profile Republican, Indiana state schools superintendent Tony Bennett. He has been a quiet Obama ally, most notably in the fight to reform teacher evaluations and develop common academic standards in all 50 states. The latter effort didn’t endear him to conservatives, and Bennett’s Democratic opponent said she’d pull the state out of the standards initiative. Bennett also angered teachers unions with his blunt talk and his support for one of the toughest teacher-evaluation laws in the country. This left-right convergence led to Bennett’s losing on the same night a conservative Republican won the governorship, and that doesn’t bode well for Obama’s centrist approach to education reform. Or, for that matter, for GOP leaders on these issues including former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who has championed many of the initiatives that got trounced on Tuesday night.

Laura Waters:

Ask any New Jersey parent: it’s been a long week and a half with most school districts shuttered by Hurricane Sandy; many still remain closed. But parents got an unexpected gift when the New Jersey Education Association announced that it was cancelling its convention in Atlantic City, scheduled for November 8-9 this year.
According to the union, that’s the first time that’s happened in 158 years.

Not only did NJEA cancel the convention, but it also generously supported local districts’ desire to reclaim those two days for instruction and deserves hearty applause. But let’s push this a little further: the tragedy of Sandy is an opportunity to reconsider the wisdom of cancelling school for two days in November. 



DC Public School Charter Board:

The DC Public Charter School Board (PCSB) provides school performance reports as a way to share how PCSB evaluates each public charter school. Although each charter school is unique, PCSB’s Performance Management Framework (PMF) enables the board to look at school performance across common measures. See the frequently asked questions sheet for further information on how the PMF works. See a brief PowerPoint presentation on the School Performance Reports here.

Senator Kathleen Vinehout:

Every student received a report card at the end of the first quarter. This fall every school also received a report card.
The Department of Public Instruction recently released report cards on almost all of Wisconsin’s over 2,000 schools. High schools, middle schools, elementary schools and charter schools are all rated.
The report card gives a grade from 0 to 100. The grade is based on four priority areas: student achievement, student growth, on-track and post secondary readiness including attendance, ACT participation and graduation rates, and closing gaps among disadvantaged and disabled students.
Most of our area schools scored average or above average; an exception was the Whitehall Middle School where over half of the students are economically disadvantaged.

Past the chicken coop and up a hill, in a spot on campus where the wooden buildings of the Mountain School can seem farther away than the mountains of western New Hampshire, there sometimes can be found a single bar, sometimes two, of cellphone reception.
The spot, between the potato patch and a llama named Nigel, is something of an open secret at the school in this remote corner of Vermont where simplicity is valued over technology. “We’re at the periphery of civilization here,” said Doug Austin, a teacher.
But that is about to change.
The school offers high school juniors, many from elite private institutions in the Northeast, a semester to immerse themselves in nature. The students make solo camping trips to a nearby mountain for a day or two of reflection, and practice orienteering skills without a GPS device. Between English and environmental science classes, they care for farm animals, chop wood and read the works of Robert Frost. And in the process, many say, they stop scouring the campus for its sparse bars of reception and lose the habit of checking their Facebook pages at every opportunity.

Lisa Alva Wood:

United Teachers Los Angeles may be on the brink of an unwelcome change. Currently, there is a groundswell of teachers nominating themselves for the UTLA House of Representatives – teachers who have not been actively involved in UTLA in the past but who are motivated to do something now. For teachers who are alienated by the current brand of union rhetoric or feel de-professionalized by narrow perspectives, this is a terribly important time. It’s election time at the union.
The UTLA House of Reps is the policy-making body of the union. Decisions made here are binding on UTLA leadership. A UTLA member can nominate herself and likely be “elected” in an uncontested race until November 9. What an excellent opportunity this is for bringing children and education to the forefront of policy debate, and for hearing education professionals who currently feel alienated or unrepresented. This is also, perhaps, not in the best interest of the status quo.

Michael Noer:

“I could have started a for-profit, venture-backed business that has a good spirit, and I think there are many of them-Google for instance,” says Khan, his eyes dancing below his self-described unibrow. “Maybe I could reach a billion people. That is high impact, but what happens in 50 years?”
It’s a fair question, with an increasingly sure answer: The next half-century of education innovation is being shaped right now. After decades of yammering about “reform,” with more and more money spent on declining results, technology is finally poised to disrupt how people learn. And that creates immense opportunities for both for-profit entrepreneurs and nonprofit agitators like Khan.

Stephanie Simon:

(Reuters) – Teachers unions won several big victories in both red and blue states Tuesday, overturning laws that would have eliminated tenure in Idaho and South Dakota, defeating a threat to union political work in California, and ousting a state schools chief in Indiana who sought to fundamentally remake public education.
The night didn’t belong entirely to big labor; advocates of charter schools, which are typically non-union, scored a win in Georgia and looked likely to prevail in a tough fight in Washington state.
But unions had the bigger trophies – none bigger than in Indiana, where they stunned pundits by handing a loss to State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, who was running for a second term.

Jason Hong:

One of Blog@CACM’s new bloggers, Philip Guo, has been doing a great job in discussing grad school from the PhD student’s perspective (here and here). I figured it would be good to offer an complementary perspective of graduate school, distilling what I’ve learned over the past years in advising and working with PhD students.
Break Out of the Undergraduate Mentality
A common challenge for a lot of new PhD students is that they still have an “undergraduate mentality,” where they believe that grades still matter (they do, but only marginally so), and that there will always be someone there to tell you what to do.

Edward Frenkel:

When I was growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, I thought math was a stale, boring subject.1 I could solve all of the problems and ace all of the exams at school, but what we discussed in class seemed pointless, irrelevant. What really excited me was Quantum Physics. I devoured all the popular books on this subject I could get my hands on. But these books didn’t go far enough in answering deeper questions about the structure of the universe, so I wasn’t fully satisfied.
As luck would have it, I got help from a family friend. I grew up in a small industrial town called Kolomna, population 150 thousand, which was about seventy miles away from Moscow, or just over two hours by train. My parents worked as engineers at a large company, making heavy machinery. One of their friends was a mathematician by the name of Evgeny Evgenievich Petrov, who was a professor at a local college preparing school teachers. A meeting was arranged.

Dwayne Truss:

Chicago Public Schools just released its draft guidelines for school actions as required by state law. The draft guidelines can be reviewed here.
After reviewing the guidelines, I had to take a shot of vodka because of the blatant lie that the CPS community engagement process resulted in CPS adding the space utilization criteria.
CPS poorly attempted a facade of community engagement in the drafting of the 2012 School Actions Guidelines by providing a confusing online survey for the public to comment on the 2011 guidelines and organizing orchestrated community roundtable meetings in which participants were only given 24 to 48 hour notices of the meetings.

Barry Adams:

Overcrowding at the elementary schools and aged facilities at Kromrey Middle School will be corrected after voters in the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a nearly $60 million referendum.
The proposal was the largest in the state this fall and was approved after voters turned back referendums in 2005 and 2009.
“What we tried to do is combine and do a common-sense plan that everyone could understand, was fiscally responsible and looked at the long-term needs of the community,” Superintendent Don Johnson said.
The district was among nine area school districts that combined to ask 12 referendum questions in south central Wisconsin.

Related: Minnesota voters approve most school levy requests

Most Minnesota school districts with levy referendums on the ballot yesterday met with success.
Voters in 29 of 40 districts approved levies, essentially pledging local taxpayer support for their schools, in addition to state-provided funds.
This year’s approval is better than average in a year crowded with local, state and federal races, said Greg Abbott, a spokesman for the Minnesota School Boards Association.
“This passing percentage is a good 20, 25 percent above what a presidential [election] year usually runs,” Abbott said. “That means they really did their work and they got out there and got people to the polls.”

I recently had an opportunity to talk [42mb mp3 file] with the intriguing Peg Tyre. Tyre recently wrote “The Writing Revolution” for The Atlantic:

For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance–not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. So, faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject–one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform.

Peg has authored two books: The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids The Education They Deserve, The Trouble with Boys and blogs here.
An excerpt:

Peg: You cover crime for a long time and you realize that it’s very banal. You start to realize that one person killed another person in a horrendous way, but if you look at their lives, it looks like it was two trains on a track heading for each other. The miracle would have been if they didn’t end up killing each other.
Interviewer: [laughing]
Peg: They became a kind of inevitability to the conflicts that I saw. I asked my self, my intellectual journey of why is this happening? Why are theses trains set on a collision course? What I came to was lack of opportunity. You dig deeper into that, and it’s lack of education.
Interviewer: Right.
Peg: I actually come at education… Most journalists come at education because they have kids or they think that kids are cute or they have parents who are teachers and they have warm feelings about school. I have really mixed feelings about school. Yes, kids are cute, but I actually come at this from a social…I don’t know. It’s sort of like a harder nosed perspective.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Peg: Also, I hate education blah blah. I hate people using school words and pretending that their having a dialogue when they’re really just jargoning at each other.
Interviewer: [laughing]
Peg: I hate people telling me they have the answer to poverty, that they have the answer to the achievement gap, when you know and I know every intelligent person who’s listening to this knows that it’s more complicated than that. I’m not exactly misanthropic, but I’m an investigative reporter by trade, so I’m just like a “show me” kind of gal. I’m just like, “Yeah, really? Very interesting froth. Show me.”

Listen to the interview via this 42mb mp3 file , or read the transcript.

Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick:

Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick are co-authors of The Untold History of the United States (Gallery Books, $30)
It has become commonplace to deplore U.S. students’ dismal performance in math and science when their test results are compared to those of students in other advanced and not-so-advanced industrial countries.
But, it turns out, according to the Nation’s Report Card, or National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federally administered test results released in June 2011, the area in which U.S. students perform most poorly is actually U.S. history. According to the results, only 12 percent of high school students were proficient in U.S. history. And only a scant 2 percent could identify the social problem addressed in Brown v. Board of Education, even though the answer should have been obvious from the wording of the question itself.
Historically-challenged students turn into historically-challenged adults who make for unqualified citizens. Our republican system requires a literate, educated, and knowledgeable public. No wonder Santayana’s famous comment that “he who forgets the past is condemned to repeat it” has been borne out repeatedly over the past century and a quarter of U.S. history.

Center on Reinventing Public Education via a kind Deb Britt email:

In an effort to raise student performance, a growing number of schools are embracing the principles of student-centered learning (SCL)–an approach that espouses personalized, authentic instruction and takes learning beyond the typical school schedule and calendar. Given the interest in SCL and concerns about spending, researchers from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington and from the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University-Newark, with funding from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, conducted comparative case studies of seven public high schools in six states. The case studies explore three questions:
1) How is SCL delivered?
2) What resources are needed to implement SCL?
3) How does district spending on SCL compare with spending on traditional schools?
The cross-case analysis finds that SCL can be delivered for the same price as traditional schools, provided that districts offer (and schools take advantage of) resource flexibility. In this webinar, the authors will share their findings and policy recommendations, as well as answer questions about their research. Their full report, “Getting Down to Dollars and Cents: What Do School Districts Spend to Deliver Student-Centered Learning?”will be available on November 15.

Larry Cuban:

On the eve of the nation’s voters going to the polls, a truth about policymakers’ use of evidence arrives in plain sight. Sure, the obscene spending from Super PACs on political ads shows how evidence can be bent into grotesque shapes to support one candidate over another. Fact-checkers have had a bumper season. But political ads are a genre that all of us can shrug and accept as part of life. Much like accepting that garbage is collected weekly.
But when I read that the U.S. Senate Republican leadership had put pressure on the independent Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan department of the U.S. Library of Congress, to withdraw an economic analysis of the top tax rates and economic growth that the CRS had published in September, well, that was taking away the fig-leaf that covers the persistent practice of decision-makers selectively choosing evidence to support their policies.
The New York Times described Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) questioning the report’s methodologies, language, and conclusions. What did the economist who did the analysis say in the report?

Jeffrey Young:

A new kind of university has begun to emerge: Call it Star Scholar U.
Professors with large followings and technical prowess are breaking off to start their own online institutions, delivering courses with little or no backing from traditional campuses.
Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project–akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.
Two recent examples are Marginal Revolution University, started by two economics professors at George Mason University, and Rheingold U, run by the author and Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold. To be clear, these professors are using the word “university” loosely–they award no credit and claim no spot on any college ranking. And they probably won’t become rich through their teaching. But the gambit gives them full control over the content and delivery methods. And it offers their personal brands as a kind of credential.

Julie Sipple:

A new study shows many Minnesota high schools offer unhealthy snacks in vending machines or snack bars.
The results come from a nationwide analysis by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Minnesota ranked among the best in the nation in the percentage of schools offering healthy snacks, like fruit. But it was one of the worst on a measure of schools offering cookies, pastries or crackers.
Erik Olson, directer of food programs at The Pew Charitable Trusts, said those snacks compete with healthier options.

Melinda Beck:

For people who are colorblind, life involves little workarounds and big compromises alike. Daily challenges range from not knowing whether meat is fully cooked to not being able to read whether a horizontal traffic light is showing green or red. More serious repercussions include being shut out of a dream job, like piloting planes, because misreading landing-strip lights can have life-or-death consequences.
Now, a host of new research and tools promise to improve life for the estimated 32 million Americans–8% of men and 0.5% of women–who have some degree of colorblindness. For many, getting through the day–avoiding wardrobe perils and worse–has often involved bringing in a second pair of eyes. But new websites and smartphone apps offer to help identify or enhance hard-to-see colors. Videogame manufacturers are increasingly including “colorblind” modes in their games. And researchers are homing in on more specific vision tests that may allow mildly colorblind people to qualify for jobs that, until now, have been closed to them.

Patrick Barta:

The University of Yangon was once one of Asia’s best colleges. Today, abandoned buildings rot away on its overgrown campus, with some walkways deserted except for dogs.
Its state of affairs embodies a crucial challenge for leaders as Myanmar opens to the outside world. The military junta that dominated the country for five decades all but destroyed the university system after a series of student protests convinced its leaders that schools were breeding grounds for dissent.
But now that the lifting of most Western sanctions has paved the way for an expected wave of investment, companies are finding a nation largely bereft of skilled workers. Doctors and lawyers often lack up-to-date training, and other professions are desperately short of qualified staff with even basic critical-thinking skills, employers say.

TJ Mertz:

The WKCE testing and related assessments are scheduled for next week in the Madison Metropolitan School District schools (full schedule of MMSD assessments, here), but your child doesn’t have to be part of it. You can opt out. Families with students in grades 4,8, & 10 have a state statutory right to opt out of the WKCE; I have been told that it is district practice to allow families to opt out of any and all other, discretionary, tests. We opted out this year. In order to opt out, you must contact your school’s Principal (and do it ASAP, (contact info here).
The WKCE does your child no good. Just about everyone agrees that even in comparison to other standardized tests, it is not a good assessment. Because results are received so late in the year, it isn’t of much use to target student weaknesses or guide instruction. There are no benefits for students.

Jason Pontin:

Early in Nicholson Baker’s slim first novel, The Mezzanine (1988), whose entire action takes place during an escalator ride at lunchtime, the narrator describes buying milk and a cookie, and then pauses to consider, in a page-long footnote, the “uncomfortable era of the floating drinking straw”:
I stared in disbelief the first time a straw rose up from my can of soda and hung out over the table, barely arrested by burrs in the underside of the metal opening. I was holding a slice of pizza in one hand, folded in a three-finger grip so that it wouldn’t flop and pour cheese-grease on the paper plate, and a paperback in a similar grip in the other hand–what was I supposed to do? The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback.
Baker speculates about how the straw engineers had made “so elementary a mistake,” designing “a straw that weighed less than the sugar-water in which it was intended to stand”; pardons the engineers who had forgotten to take into account how bubbles of carbonation might affect a straw’s buoyancy; explains how such unsatisfactory straws came to be sold to restaurants and stores in the first place; and, in a kind of musical resolution, concludes by remembering the day when he noticed a plastic straw, “made of some subtler polymer,” once again anchored to the bottom of a soda can.

George Gopen, Judith Swan:

Science is often hard to read. Most people assume that its difficulties are born out of necessity, out of the extreme complexity of scientific concepts, data and analysis. We argue here that complexity of thought need not lead to impenetrability of expression; we demonstrate a number of rhetorical principles that can produce clarity in communication without oversimplifying scientific issues. The results are substantive, not merely cosmetic: Improving the quality of writing actually improves the quality of thought.
The fundamental purpose of scientific discourse is not the mere presentation of information and thought, but rather its actual communication. It does not matter how pleased an author might be to have converted all the right data into sentences and paragraphs; it matters only whether a large majority of the reading audience accurately perceives what the author had in mind. Therefore, in order to understand how best to improve writing, we would do well to understand better how readers go about reading. Such an understanding has recently become available through work done in the fields of rhetoric, linguistics and cognitive psychology. It has helped to produce a methodology based on the concept of reader expectations.

Stacy Teicher Khadaroo::

Some 40 percent of students are failing to graduate from college in six years. A study calls for higher-quality college prep, with more advanced math, advanced placement classes, and better advising.
But what if high schools had a better recipe for preparing their students to stay in college? The National School Boards Association released a study Thursday afternoon highlighting some key ingredients: more advanced math courses, challenging courses such as Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB), and better academic advising.
If students are exposed to those factors – even if they don’t earn high scores on the course exams – they are more likely to continue college after their first year, a point at which many drop out, the study notes.

From the report:

We analyzed longitudinal data tracking high school sophomores in 2002 through their second year in two- and four-year colleges in 2006 (ELS 2002-2006). We were able to identify three factors that were related to increasing a postsecondary students’ chances of staying on track to a credential as much as 53 percent, and the process begins in high school. Moreover, the impact of these factors is greatest for students who enter college as the least likely to succeed: students who began high school with below average achievement and below average socioeconomic status.
What it takes to stay on track
High-level mathematics: Our findings comport with previous studies that show the highest level of math in high school can be one of the largest predictors of college success (Adelman 2006, Conley 2007). Our analysis found that a student with above average SES and achievement had a 10 percent better chance of persisting in a four-year institution if that student had taken Pre-calculus or Calculus or math above Algebra II. Low SES/achievement students with high-level math were 22 percent more likely to persist.
The impact is greatest for students in two-year institutions: The persistence rates of students who took mathematics beyond Algebra II in high school increased by 18 percent for the higher SES/achievement group and 27 percent for the lower SES/achievement students.
Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate courses: Taking an AP/IB course had a dramatic effect on students’ chance of persisting even when students fail the end-of-course test. Low achieving and low SES students who took an AP/IB course were 17 percent more likely to persist in four-year colleges and 30 percent more likely to persist in two-year institutions. The more of these courses a student took, the higher their persistence rates were.