Sam Laird:

College students aren’t just concerned with getting good grades and finding the best parties. More than ever, they’re using their smartphones to navigate life on campus.
On the bus, waiting in line, in bed, on the treadmill and even while driving, college students can’t seem to put their phones down. Fifty-two percent say they often check their phones before getting out of bed in the morning, according to one study. Nearly half do so while in bed at night before they fall asleep.
Thirty-five percent say they sometimes use their phones while driving but stopped at a red light, and nearly 20% say they sometimes use them while the wheels are even moving. But it’s not all addiction and danger. Forty-five percent of college students say smartphones frequently help with school assignments, and 46% say they’re often helpful for work-related tasks.

Shirley Jinkins:

When Arlington teacher R.J. Williams speaks during her online multimedia classes, high school students all over Texas log on to listen.
Williams is among a growing number of educators who are teaching in the Texas Virtual School Network, a clearinghouse established by the Legislature in 2007. The network offers a statewide catalog of supplemental online courses to students in charter and public schools.
“This year is the only time I’ve had two students from Arlington,” Williams said of her summer online schedule. “They’re usually from Austin and all over the place. I’ve had a few from rural areas.”

Allison Hertog:

Mississippi recently became the first state in the nation to adopt a public and private school choice program in which state and federal monies are provided directly to schools which parents choose. Aimed at students with dyslexia, it’s also the second special needs school choice program in the country designed for children with a single type of disability. (Ohio’s Autism Scholarship Program enacted in 2003 was the first.)
What makes this new program interesting is that it may be a starting point for other state legislatures where special needs voucher bills have failed due to concerns about parent accountability – Wisconsin comes to mind – or where special needs voucher laws have come under increased scrutiny due to reports of private school abuse of public money – Florida comes to mind.
Mississippi’s program morphed from a dyslexia screening and treatment bill (supported by a governor who struggled with the learning disorder) into a school choice measure during the proverbial sausage-making legislative process. It’s not as carefully or as broadly designed as it could have been. It also appears there’s currently only one school in the state which is specialized enough to meet the exceedingly specific criteria to participate. But nonetheless, it succeeds in incentivizing the growth of more highly-accountable school options for parents.

Katherine Sellgren:

Two founders of a restaurant chain have been asked to carry out a review of school food in England.
Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent run the London-based Leon chain, which markets itself as offering healthy fast food.
Education Secretary Michael Gove has invited them to look at nutrition in schools and see how it can be improved.
But TV chef Jamie Oliver, who has long campaigned for better school meals, hit out at the announcement, saying it was “not the time for more costly reports”.

Alex Lo::

Our public education system may be beyond reform. Every attempt at reform either ends up accentuating the very features we were trying to change or making life worse for teachers and students. Take, for example, the new liberal studies curriculum, a signature programme of the government’s dismal, decade-old education reform.
A new study by University of Hong Kong academics has found that liberal studies, introduced in September and compulsory for all pupils in forms four to six, has achieved the opposite of the government’s original intention.
Most teachers, the study found, admitted they just spoon-fed students with liberal studies materials taken directly from textbooks, a practice they were explicitly told to avoid. Predictably, many of the 70,000 students who sat the first liberal studies exam in May simply repeated answers they had learned from textbooks. Nearly 90 per cent of 300 teachers said their main source of teaching materials came from textbooks. Only a small number of teachers believed pupils should be encouraged to explore new ideas through critical thinking. And while more than 200 teachers said bringing different perspectives to students was vital in liberal studies, only 50 of them said they would do so.

Katherine Sharpe:

When I was a college freshman in the late 1990s, antidepressants were everywhere. Prozac was appearing on magazine covers, and I’d just seen my first commercial for Paxil on TV. Halfway through the semester, I was laid out by a prolonged anxiety attack and found myself in the school’s campus health center, tearfully telling a newly minted psychiatry resident about my feelings of panic and despair. Given the spirit of the times, it wasn’t a complete surprise when she sent me away a few minutes later with a prescription and a generous supply of small cardboard boxes full of beautiful blue pills, free samples dropped off on campus by a company rep.
Photo Illustration by Stephen Webster
When young people who grew up on antidepressants become adults, should they stay on their medications or try to stop?
The school psychiatrist didn’t suggest talk therapy. She simply asked that I return for a “med check” every few weeks to make sure that the pills were working.

Alexandra Alter:

It takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy on the Kobo e-reader–about 57 pages an hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series: “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.” And on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first “Hunger Games” book is to download the next one.
In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them.

Elaine Yau:

Miss Chan, who has a daughter, did not want to leave anything to chance when she decided to have another child a year ago. For a foolproof way to conceive a boy, she turned to a local consultancy which arranges for couples to undergo gender-specific artificial insemination in Thailand and US. After spending HK$180,000 and 10 days in Bangkok, the 26-year-old’s wish came true six months ago.
“I had a test after returning from Thailand, and it confirmed that I’m carrying a boy. All the money and procedures are worth it as my mother-in-law wants a grandson very much,”she says.
Chan’s treatment consisted of in-vitro fertilisation and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) – also known as embryo screening – which tests embryos for genetic diseases and gender.
Gender selection is illegal in Hong Kong, so couples must travel to have the treatment in the US, Thailand, South Africa and the Middle East, the handful of countries where the process is legal.

Rory Cellan-Jones:

New technology can be inspiring, exciting or sometimes infuriating – but I can’t ever remember it being really moving. Until, that is, I met Ruby Dunn, whose life is being changed by a piece of software.
Ruby, who was born 14 weeks premature in 2006, has autism and has never spoken. She does, however, attend her local school – Sandford Primary in Somerset – and is well integrated into every aspect of school life. But it is an app which she uses on an iPod and an iPad which is making a big difference.
Ruby uses the app, Proloquo2Go, to communicate with her teachers, her family and other children. She taps on symbols, constructs a sentence and out it comes, spoken in a child’s voice. So in the playground, she taps “head, shoulders” to choose a game. At lunchtime she chooses “lasagne” and “carrots” adds “please” and “Tina” and hands it to the dinner lady. And in the classroom she reads a story and then taps out answers to questions about it via the iPad version of the app.

Jonathan Pearlman:

Sarah Hui Xin Wong, who attended an elite private girls’ school in Sydney, said she had a wrist problem, suffered discrimination and her mark should have been 100. Her result, a university entrance score, meant she beat 99.95 per cent of other students – but she believed she would have received the top mark if treated fairly.
Miss Wong was ridiculed for the appeal, as was her mother, who was inevitably labelled a “Tiger Mom” after it emerged she had lodged the initial complaint to the board of studies.
“What’s the 0.05 mark going to do?” said a comment on the news.com.au.” The mother needs to back down.”
Another said: “It’s probably a publicity stunt by her parents to get others to acknowledge her talent.”

CBC News:

Cowichan Valley School Board’s nine trustees have been fired by British Columbia’s education minister after failing to submit a balanced budget for the upcoming school year.
The School Act requires boards to pass balanced budgets, but in May School District 79 approved a budget with a $3.7-million shortfall, saying it had a duty to provide a quality education.
Board members were given until June 30 to comply but failed to do so and on Sunday, Minister of Education George Abbott followed through on his threat to relieve them of their posts.
Former Chair Eden Haythornthwaite said they were simply trying to protect students.

Erica Phillips & Stephanie Banchero:

In the past three years, at least 30 states have begun to use student achievement to evaluate teachers, spurred in part by President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top education initiative as well as by some Republican governors. California isn’t one of them.
That could change after a ruling by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. At a hearing Tuesday, Judge James Chalfant said the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the nation’s largest, violated California’s Stull Act, a 41-year-old law that requires teacher evaluations to take into consideration the performance of students.
The current evaluation system in Los Angeles focuses on teaching methods, such as how a teacher demonstrates knowledge or guides instruction, according to the district.
In his ruling, Judge Chalfant contrasted the high rate of positive teacher evaluations in the district–97.6 in the 2009-10 school year–with low student proficiency in English and math.

MIT Open Courseware:

“My name is Erik Demaine. You should call me Erik. Welcome back to 6.046. This is Lecture 2. And today we are going to essentially fill in some of the more mathematical underpinnings of Lecture 1. So, Lecture 1, we just sort of barely got our feet wet with some analysis of algorithms, insertion sort and mergesort. And we needed a couple of tools. We had this big idea of asymptotics and forgetting about constants, just looking at the lead term. And so, today, we’re going to develop asymptotic notation so that we know that mathematically. And we also ended up with a recurrence with mergesort, the running time of mergesort, so we need to see how to solve recurrences. And we will do those two things today. Question? Yes, I will speak louder. Thanks. Good…”

Laurie Rogers:

“As long as he keeps the bad people rich and the good people scared, no one’ll touch him. … What chance does Gotham have when good people do nothing?”
– The Rachel Dawes character in “Batman Begins”
How much does it cost to educate a child? Has anyone in education EVER answered this question? I’ve asked around, and nobody provides a number, but they’re all certain they need more money.
Districts keep saying K-12 education has suffered massive cuts. This stunning deceit is winning hearts and minds – largely because media lapdogs refuse to investigate. Repeat after me: There is no money shortage in K-12 public education. There are very few bottom-line cuts. Money has been shifted – away from classrooms and toward adults. Various groups complain about each other, but they’re all to blame.

Russ Rymer:

One morning in early fall Andrei Mongush and his parents began preparations for supper, selecting a black-faced, fat-tailed sheep from their flock and rolling it onto its back on a tarp outside their livestock paddock. The Mongush family’s home is on the Siberian taiga, at the edge of the endless steppes, just over the horizon from Kyzyl, the capital of the Republic of Tuva, in the Russian Federation. They live near the geographic center of Asia, but linguistically and personally, the family inhabits a borderland, the frontier between progress and tradition. Tuvans are historically nomadic herders, moving their aal–an encampment of yurts–and their sheep and cows and reindeer from pasture to pasture as the seasons progress. The elder Mongushes, who have returned to their rural aal after working in the city, speak both Tuvan and Russian. Andrei and his wife also speak English, which they are teaching themselves with pieces of paper labeled in English pasted onto seemingly every object in their modern kitchen in Kyzyl. They work as musicians in the Tuvan National Orchestra, an ensemble that uses traditional Tuvan instruments and melodies in symphonic arrangements. Andrei is a master of the most characteristic Tuvan music form: throat singing, or khöömei.

Mike Ford:

State aid, curriculum, technology, school boards. All are important factors in K-12 education; none educate a single child.
That task is of course in the hands of teachers. It follows that teachers are the most important employees in schools, and arguably the most important employees in the public sector. After all, hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites send their kids to spend the bulk of their childhoods learning from these employees. It only makes sense for the public to treat teachers with respect. But, as Alan Borsuk argues convincingly in the Journal Sentinel Sunday, this is not always the case.
I have written numerous times about the increasing financial burdens placed on teachers in the Milwaukee Public Schools and across the state. In general, districts offset some or all of last year’s 5.5% per-pupil reduction in revenue limits by increasing employee contributions to health and pension benefits. This means that teachers across the state received a cut to their take-home pay totally unrelated to their performance. It is easy to see why teachers felt they were being disrespected.

Henry Miller:

The Golden Goose Award makes use of a formal fallacy, a pattern of reasoning that is illogical and wrong, called “asserting the consequent.” It takes the form of: “If A, then B. B, therefore, A.” An example would be: “If Warren Buffett owned the British Crown Jewels, he would be rich. Buffett is rich; therefore, he owns the Crown Jewels.” The rationale for the award seems to be, “Some criticism of federally-funded research projects has been uninformed and ill-advised. People continue to criticize federally funded projects; therefore, their views are uninformed and ill-advised.”
It’s astonishing that some of the projects awarded passed any kind of peer-review for merit. The first two awards went to the National Science Foundation. The first NSF grant, for $84,000, was intended to discover why people fall in love. The second, for $500,000 (part of which was from two other federal agencies), was to determine which stimuli cause rats, monkeys, and humans to bite and clench their jaws.

Matt Miller:

There’s plenty that divides the parties in this pivotal election — from taxes to drones, from public workers to private equity. But there’s one uber-policy that brings Democrats and Republicans together that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
That policy involves you, younger Americans. You’re in big trouble. You don’t even know it. You’re busy trying to get a degree, land a job, start a family, save for a home. You don’t follow the news. But trust me — you’ve been taken for a ride by your elders.
The question isn’t whether such talk will stir up generational war. That’s already being waged — and you’re losing. The question is whether you’ll wake up and engage in a little generational self-defense. Let me see if I can motivate you.
How are you being swindled today? Let me count just some of the ways:
As many as 100 million Americans live in households today that are earning less than their parents did at a similar age. And this is happening well before we feel the full impact of global economic integration with rising economies like India and China.

Elizabeth Kolbert:

In 2004, Carolina Izquierdo, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, spent several months with the Matsigenka, a tribe of about twelve thousand people who live in the Peruvian Amazon. The Matsigenka hunt for monkeys and parrots, grow yucca and bananas, and build houses that they roof with the leaves of a particular kind of palm tree, known as a kapashi. At one point, Izquierdo decided to accompany a local family on a leaf-gathering expedition down the Urubamba River.
A member of another family, Yanira, asked if she could come along. Izquierdo and the others spent five days on the river. Although Yanira had no clear role in the group, she quickly found ways to make herself useful. Twice a day, she swept the sand off the sleeping mats, and she helped stack the kapashi leaves for transport back to the village. In the evening, she fished for crustaceans, which she cleaned, boiled, and served to the others. Calm and self-possessed, Yanira “asked for nothing,” Izquierdo later recalled. The girl’s behavior made a strong impression on the anthropologist because at the time of the trip Yanira was just six years old.

Julie McGuire:

My son is in Primary Five and doesn’t seem to take any interest in world affairs. I try to encourage him to read the newspaper and watch the news on television with me, but he’d rather play video games or watch television. Any ideas?
Computers and other electronic entertainment media have a very strong pull on children and can easily distract them from other interests. Research tells us that the pros and cons of spending a lot of time with them are complex and vary by the individual. In the short term, at least, you could limit your son’s time in front of a screen so that he has the opportunity to take an interest in other things.

Genevra Pittman:

Researchers have known that babies born premature are at risk for slowed brain development, but a new study suggests that even among those considered “normal term” – between 37 and 41 weeks – a couple of extra weeks in the womb might make a difference.
Kids born on the shorter end of that range scored lower on math and reading tests as eight-year-olds than those born later – but the differences were small and “shouldn’t be alarming,” one researcher who wasn’t part of the study team said.
“Certainly the vast majority of 37-weekers and 41-weekers would end up developing typically,” said Dr. Kimberly Noble, the lead author on the new study from Columbia University Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York.
Still, she said, until more research is done, “We would urge caution to both parents and physicians when considering early elective delivery.”

Geoff Mulvihill:

Lawmakers and education advocates came to a remarkable compromise in forging an overhaul of tenure laws to make it easier for public schools to oust ineffective educators. But building a consensus meant dropping a change that most other states have already made: Making teachers’ effectiveness a factor in determining which lose their jobs in case of layoffs.
GOP Gov. Chris Christie, who opposes using seniority to determine layoffs, is still deciding whether he’s willing to accept the compromise.
If he vetoes the bill, he’ll undo a deal among a unanimous Legislature and groups who don’t often agree on the details of improving schools.
If he signs it, he’ll have to sacrifice — for now, at least — something that’s been a core principle in his beliefs about school reform and leave New Jersey as one of only 11 states with a last-in, first-out policy for educators in the face of layoffs.

The Economist:

WHEN retailers want to entice customers to buy a particular product, they typically offer it at a discount. According to a new study to be published in the Journal of Marketing, they are missing a trick.
A team of researchers, led by Akshay Rao of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, looked at consumers’ attitudes to discounting. Shoppers, they found, much prefer getting something extra free to getting something cheaper. The main reason is that most people are useless at fractions.
Consumers often struggle to realise, for example, that a 50% increase in quantity is the same as a 33% discount in price. They overwhelmingly assume the former is better value. In an experiment, the researchers sold 73% more hand lotion when it was offered in a bonus pack than when it carried an equivalent discount (even after all other effects, such as a desire to stockpile, were controlled for).

Related: Math Forum.

textually:

New York city’s controversial ban on cellphones in schools has persuaded some kids to leave their devices at home — a stranger’s home! The New York Post reports.

Dozens of students at the former Bushwick HS campus have been paying $1 per day to store their phones at an alumnus’ apartment — just down the street from the Brooklyn campus.
Academy of Urban Planning graduate Giovanni Monserrate — known affectionately as either “Gio” or “The Mayor” — has padded his income as a Broadway usher by serving as a cellphone-storage site for between 30 and 100 teens daily over the last seven years.

Harry Eyres:

My first school was not just a small school but a very small school indeed. I think there were usually around 27 pupils, taught by two remarkable women: a charismatic, creative dynamo called Miss Allen and quiet, wise Miss Bagehot, who apart from keeping us reasonably calm (and providing voluminous bloomers for little girls who had accidents), I guess performed the same role for her gifted, volcanic colleague and friend.
I was always a little bit afraid of Miss Allen because of this explosive tendency but the brightness with which the school shone, the sense of possibilities it gave us, came from her. I went to Little House school aged five, much older than most children arriving at their first schools today, and with considerable reluctance. I had no great wish to go to school at all; I was very happy at home, with the big garden to explore, the vegetable patch where Mr Appleby in his seventies still hoed and dug potatoes and carrots for me to take down to the kitchen, with its wonderful smells of baking and roasting, the marmalade cat Diddles and then the black cat Dusk to play with – not to mention my mother and father and sister.

Jean Latz Griffin:

“It is idiotic to have an internal war when we are threatened with extinction from the outside,“ said Shanker. “We have to work together to improve public schools or the American taxpayers, in their wisdom, will simply go elsewhere.“
Shanker said public educators must do a better job of heeding the warning signs than automakers did.
“American car manufacturers went to Japan 10 years ago and saw what was happening, but they came back and did nothing,“ said Shanker. “They said that labor and management would have to make too many sacrifices to compete with the Japanese-style factories and predicted that no one would buy those little cars the funny names anyway.“
“We can`t make the same mistake,“ Shanker said. “Labor and management have to make significant changes, significant sacrifices to keep public education alive. Tinkering will no longer help.“
Shanker, head of the nation`s second largest teachers union for 10 years and its chapter in New York City for 20 years, has reversed several traditional labor stands since a number of national reports criticizing education spawned an education reform movement.

The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

Exxon Mobil:

ExxonMobil supports the efforts of local educators in 45 states who, along with community and business leaders, have come together to develop voluntary, rigorous Common Core State Standards in math and English. For the US to remain competitive globally, we must ensure all children, no matter where they live, are provided the best education possible and are prepared to go to work or college when they finish high school.
The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy. The Common Core State Standards are anchored by requirements for college and career success, providing a more accurate and rigorous description of academic readiness.

Exxon Mobil is running Olympic event television advertisements promoting the “Common Core“. Steve Coll’s latest book is worth reading: ExxonMobil: A ‘Private Empire’ On The World Stage.

Kathy Cecala:

It’s easy to forget that our crowded state of New Jersey, clogged with suburban sprawl and crisscrossed with busy highways, was once largely rural. Tales of farmers’ children ambling across fields and dirt roads to one-room schoolhouses often seem like bucolic fables when compared with our current era of internet scandals, bullying problems and school budget strife.
But Larry Kidder’s recently published book, “The Pleasant Valley School Story,” not only assures us such schools existed in New Jersey, he describes in affectionate and accurate detail the lives of the Hopewell Township school’s students and teachers, as well as the story of the surrounding agricultural community in the 19th and 20th centuries.
It is a truly American story of concerned citizens and hardworking farmers, committed teachers and local pride, with the little school at Pleasant Valley as its centerpiece. Kidder tells the tale with ease; though packed with careful research, photos and statistics, this local history is immensely and almost compellingly readable.
The story is universal, the gradual evolution of a small school through the years, from slate and chalk to mass-produced textbooks; and a school’s vital role in uniting a sometimes far-flung community.

Terrence McDonald:

“I’m not going to tell you that she’s going to come up there and everybody’s going to like her,” he said “But I’ve never seen her make a spiteful decision about a teacher or an educator.”
A group of local officials, teachers and parents have objected to Lyles’ appointment, arguing that they see acting state Education Commissioner Chris Cerf’s influence in the selection. Both Cerf and Lyles are graduates of the controversial Broad Superintendents Academy.
Young said he is “no friend of corporate educational reform,” calling the academy’s founder, billionaire Eli Broad, “meddlesome.” But he added that Lyles only cares for reforms that improve education for children in her district.
“If she didn’t like something Christopher Cerf tried to do, I think she would tell him and I think she would resist him,” he said.

Angela Baura:

With the long summer holidays upon us, many parents will be hoping to keep themselves sane and their children entertained by signing them up for summer classes. But with a plethora of programmes to choose from, selecting one that will entertain and educate your child can be a daunting task.
“One of the most important considerations when selecting a summer programme for your child is their interest,” advises Dr Caleb Knight, an educational and child psychologist at the Child and Family Centre in Central. “It is not productive to push a child into a programme of activity in which they show little motivation.”

Tracy Mitrano:

In response to my last blog, two commenters asked whether the intent was serious. The answer is yes. Why wouldn’t it be? Jumping off their comment as a foil (because I admittedly do not know their reply), allow me to delve a little deeper into an analysis.
Are many people still in the throes of anti-Microsoft views, now long in the tooth of Internet time? Are many still swimming in the miasma of Google glory? Or do they know something about the negotiations that higher education has had with both of these companies over the last many years that I don’t know?
Everyone knows that Google, for obvious business reasons and playing on its company’s consumer sex appeal, took well advantage of “free” to garner the major market share of outsourced mail services in higher education. What many do not know is how painfully difficult negotiating with Google can be for those services. Just getting some one on the phone is an achievement, but don’t expect a lawyer. Google is an engineering company, apparently with a powerful preference for project management where the law used to tread. A glorious revolution, you might say, but think about it from the perspective of the bargainer: for better or worse, at least a contract spells out actionable terms. We are a contracting separate party, not a distant cousin of the company to be project managed.

Rachael King:

Eight-year-old Daniel Katari isn’t just playing computers games this summer–he’s making them too.
Daniel, who will enter third grade in the fall, built five computer games within a week last month. He did this at iD Tech Camp, which specializes in teaching kids ages 7 to 18 everything from 3D modeling and animation to Web design and programming in C++. Daniel spent a week at the camp at Saint Mary’s College of California in Moraga.
“The best part is playing the games and seeing how they’re all put together,” says Daniel, who named one of his new creations Brick Braker II. Next summer, he says, he would like to enroll in a session for game design for the iPhone and iPad, which his 12-year-old brother, Michael, just completed.

Michael David Cohen:

By the first anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, Northerners had discovered how ill-prepared they were for a crisis. The peacetime Army had been tiny. Volunteers rallied to defend the Union, but what they brought in enthusiasm they lacked in experience. Many were too young to have fought in the Mexican War and, since most military academies were located in the South, few Northern youths had formal training in combat. To win the war, the Army had to create citizen-soldiers from scratch.
On July 2, 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed a bill designed to change that: the Morrill Land-Grant College Act, which offered federal financing to colleges that taught military tactics. When the next war began, its supporters believed, alumni of those colleges would be ready for battle. The law also required funded colleges to teach agriculture and engineering, thus preparing young men to serve their nation in both war and peace.
Since the United States’ founding, education had remained a local and state concern. Now, in the midst of the Civil War, the federal government began to play a major educational role. Indeed, while its requirements were responses to the country’s security and economic needs, the act proved to be one of the most transformative pieces of legislation in American history, seeding the ground for scores of high-quality public colleges and universities around the country.

sunshineportalnm.com:

The Sunshine Portal is the official transparency and accountability portal for New Mexico state government. This is your window into government spending, budgets, revenues, employees, contracts and more. Come back often to see new reports, enhanced features, and fresh data!

Albuquerque plans to spend about $1,200,000,000 for approximately 90,000 students during their 2013 budget cycle [PDF], or $13,333/student. Madison plans to spend about 13% more or $15,132 per student during the 2012-2013 budget.
The sunshine portal is a great idea, that should be available in every state.

Talila Nesher:

The Education Ministry has issued a public tender for outside organizations to hire teachers who would give many pupils an extended school day. The issue of outsourcing the hiring of teachers has been a source of controversy as many contract teachers do not get the same employment conditions as regular teachers.
Nir Michaeli, who heads the education department at the Seminar Hakibbutzim Teacher’s College in Tel Aviv, said: “The main thing that I am bothered by is the quality of service that will be provided to the public.” He said that instead of a long school day, the students will get a babysitting service that will be administered at the lowest possible cost.
The terms of the public tender explicitly state that the staff of these outsourced extended school day programs will not be considered government employees. Responsibility for hiring and firing and payment of the staff of the program lies with the outside organization, not with ministry.

Andrew Morse:

A Silicon Valley entrepreneur and the University of California are combining ready-made software, rented Web services and Apple Inc.’s AAPL +2.39% iPad tablet computer in a high-tech effort to bring career training to baby boomers looking to upgrade their skills.
Empowered Careers last week began enrolling students in 10 certificate programs to be taught by instructors at the UCLA Extension, the continuing-education arm of the University of California, Los Angeles. The programs target areas–such as patient advocacy, health-care management and new media marketing–that are expected to generate job growth.
The effort is part of a recent rush of colleges, start-ups and nonprofits tapping a mix of Web services and software to open online educational ventures. Coursera in April raised $16 million to start Web-based classes for four top schools, including Princeton and Stanford Universities. A month later, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they had committed a combined $60 million to create edX, a platform for teaching courses online. EdX courses are expected to start in the fall.

QS World University Rankings:

The world is changing, and higher education is no exception. The numbers of students participating in higher education is escalating globally, those doing so outside their own country is on the rise dramatically. In many countries funding is being slashed and tuition fees introduced or raised, international students have become a critical commodity for some universities and there is little compromise in the attempt to attract them.
Google (1998), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006) amongst others, have changed the face of communication and marketing and few universities hold back from using such tools to blast prospective international students with compelling messages. Never before has this crucial life decision involved so many options or such an unfathomable volume of information.
That is who we are for. The students. And more specifically, prospective international students.

QS top universities for geography, 2012, via the Guardian.

Sam Favate:

Delaware is on the verge of prohibiting schools from monitoring students’ social media activity without their consent.
The state Senate unanimously voted to ban public and private schools from requiring students to allow access to their social media lives, the Los Angeles Times reported. The bill, which also passed the Delaware House, only needs the governor’s signature to become law.
Some colleges and universities have required students to download social media monitoring software on their personal electronic devices or accounts as a condition of their scholarships or participation in athletics.
A recent revision in the University of North Carolina handbook on this matter is said to be typical, according to MSNBC.

Matthew DiCarlo:

The so-called “parent trigger,” the policy by which a majority of a school’s parents can decide to convert it to a charter school, seems to be getting a lot of attention lately.
Advocates describe the trigger as “parent empowerment,” a means by which parents of students stuck in “failing schools” can take direct action to improve the lives of their kids. Opponents, on the other hand, see it as antithetical to the principle of schools as a public good – parents don’t own schools, the public does. And important decisions such as charter conversion, which will have a lasting impact on the community as a whole (including parents of future students), should not be made by a subgroup of voters.
These are both potentially appealing arguments. In many cases, however, attitudes toward the parent trigger seem more than a little dependent upon attitudes toward charter schools in general. If you strongly support charters, you’ll tend to be pro-trigger, since there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain. If you oppose charter schools, on the other hand, the opposite is likely to be the case. There’s a degree to which it’s not the trigger itself but rather what’s being triggered – opening more charter schools – that’s driving the debate.
If, for example, the parent trigger originally arose as a mechanism for decreasing class size or eliminating the role of high-stakes testing within a school (or, ironically, converting charters back to regular public schools), I suspect that many (but certainly not all) of its current opponents would be more supportive, or at least silent, while a substantial proportion of advocates would likely protest.*

sp-eye:

Perhaps it’s time to reflect on that change and project the effect the new face of the school board could have on the Sun Prairie Area School District. One noticeable change we’ve observed is that rubber stamps seemed to have been traded in or discarded. We now have a clear majority of board members that care (or demand) to see and review hard data before making decisions. That is a huge change, people.

Cory Doctorow:

Palatre & Leclère did this spectacular remodel on the Ecole Maternelle Pajol in Paris’s 18th arrondissement. As Tuija Seipell writes on The Cool Hunter: “The building has kept its 1940s brick-wall feel, yet it radiates exuberance and has an up-to-date energy. Most likely its current users feel it was built just for them.”

Ted Sieffer:

After months of debate, the “school choice” bill is now law.
The Legislature on Wednesday voted to override the governor’s veto of Senate Bill 372, which allows businesses to receive tax credits for donations to scholarship funds to help low- and middle-income students attend private and religious schools.
The Senate voted 16-7 on Wednesday to override the veto of SB 372 – the exact margin needed to overrule the governor.
The House voted 236-108, also surpassing the two-thirds margin necessary for an override.
Republican leaders in both chambers have considered the “School Choice Scholarship Act” one of their highest priorities this session.
Democrats, including Gov. John Lynch, are roundly opposed to the bill, which they say would undermine public schools and downshift costs to local districts and property tax payers.

Mac Demere:

“Did you forget your glasses?” I asked the driver as politely as possible, hoping to hide my frustration under a joke. (The other choice was to throw my helmet, which is frowned upon but not unprecedented.) “I left them at home,” she said, her right foot planted firmly on the accelerator, and traffic cones flying everywhere. “I can’t see a thing!” I prayed, poorly, and said under my breath the motto of right-seat driving instructors everywhere: “Today’s a beautiful day to die.”
I’ve taught just about every kind of driving instruction, from a superspeedway-stockcar school to basic high school driver’s ed. I also used to work for one of the major tire companies and have ridden with more than 10,000 people (including the woman who couldn’t see a thing) while doing product presentations. Most of those were exercises in which we wanted the cars to spin out. These days I work weekends at an advanced teen driving school. “I’ve lived a long, good life,” I tell myself. Here are some stories from the right-hand seat.

A few links on Madison’s interim Superintendent, Jane Belmore. Belmore was Madison’s Assistant Superintendent for Elementary Schools before moving to the School of Education at nearby Edgewood College.

Madison School District links.
Blekko
Clusty
Bing
Google

And, of course, there are quite a few schoolinfosystem.org links, including this post on the District’s reading problems.
Reading, which is clearly the District’s job number one, continues to be a challenge, according to this 2009 Reading Recovery study: 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use.
Finally, a bit of history on Madison Superintendent hires over the years.
Dan Simmons article mentioned the School District’s spokeswoman: Rachel Strauch-Nelson. Interestingly, Ms. Strauch-Nelson formerly worked for Madison’s previous Mayor, Dave Cieslewicz and prior to that for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Chief Information Officer Andrew Statz also worked for the previous Mayor.

Judith Davidoff:

But Walsh, a lifelong Wisconsin resident whose parents were public school teachers, says she first ran up against the public/private divide when visiting a community in northwestern Wisconsin during the spring of 2008.
She says that a group of loggers, most of whom were self-employed, believed that while schoolteachers may work hard during the year, they have cushy positions. Among the perks: great benefits, health care, summers off and an annual salary of about $50,000 a year. “Nobody in this town makes anywhere near $50,000,” says Walsh, paraphrasing comments she heard. “At the lumber mill, they’re making $20,000 and losing their fingers!”
Walsh says when she probes further, asking why people see a public employee/private employee divide and not a rich/poor divide, she gets stares of disbelief.
It seems to come down to what is tangible and what can be controlled. Private-sector workers, many of whom are struggling, perceive that a large portion of their taxes are going to pay for the salaries of public workers. A cut to public-employee wages and benefits would, at least in theory, mean lower taxes.

The Economist:

One woman, Diane Windemuller (slide 7), “a former HR executive, lost her job in April 2011 and was very reluctant to look for anything less than a comparable position and salary…”. Meanwhile, “the Windemuller family is accessing public safety net services: the family has received rent assistance and goes to food pantries twice a week to shift money they otherwise would spend on food to other important bills.” It was, I believe, Ms Windemuller, who experienced her first visit to the local food bank as such a humiliation that she felt it necessary to park where no one she knew would see her car, and to try to sneak in unobserved, disguised by sunglasses and a hat. Yet, for a time, her family’s straitened financial circumstances were in part a direct consequence of her refusal to seek jobs she considered in some way beneath her prior executive post, and she took a temporary administrative position only after her unemployment benefits had run out, and her husband (whom she had criticised for not working harder to find a job more in line with his last one) started threatening to leave her.

Dave Cieslewicz:

But getting back to open courses offered online, here’s the problem. It looks a lot like what happened to journalism. As someone has written, “this is what happens when you let English majors run businesses.” They gave away the same content they were selling in their papers on the Internet for free. And all that free access to information has resulted in fewer newspapers, fewer professional journalists and, I would say, a poorer public exchange of ideas.
Could the same thing happen in academia? Maybe. The question is this: Why would any cash-strapped family pay north of $40,000 for an education in a bricks and mortar university when world-class knowledge is just a click away for free?
Well, the answer might be that there’s no substitute for being on campus — no substitute for seeing the professor and asking him questions, no substitute for mixing it up with your classmates from around the country and world, no substitute for getting shit-faced and walking home alone along Lake Mendota at midnight on a breezy, balmy early May night and lying on the grass outside Adams Hall, staring up at the stars shining through the old oaks and wondering where your life might take you, not to say anyone I know has done the latter.

Madison should be leading the online learning revolution.
I agree that online learning is not the be all/end all. BUT, it can augment and replace some aspects of traditional education. Again, Madison, with the UW, Edgewood College and MATC should be leading the revolution.
Links: Udacity, MIT Open Courseware, UW online plans and a field guide to online education startups.

Robin Good:

n the not too distant future you will learn new key skills through free or low-cost professional online courses, available both from prestigious world-class academic institutions as well as from private experts. Companies will in turn tap into these new learning ecosystems and knowledge providers to discover and hire their top talent.

Scott Jaschik:

A brief filed Tuesday with the U.S. Supreme Court seeks to shake up the legal and political calculus of a case that could determine the constitutionality of programs in which colleges consider the race or ethnicity of applicants. In the brief, four Asian-American organizations call on the justices to bar all race-conscious admissions decisions, arguing that race-neutral policies are the only way for Asian-American applicants to get a fair shake.
Much of the discussion of the case has focused on policies that help black and Latino applicants. And the suit that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court was filed on behalf of a white woman, Abigail Fisher, who was rejected by the University of Texas at Austin.
But the new brief, along with one recently filed on behalf of Fisher, say that the policy at Texas and similar policies elsewhere hurt Asian-American applicants, not just white applicants. This view runs counter to the opinion of many Asian-American groups that have consistently backed affirmative action programs such as those in place at Texas.

Paul Gross , Lawrence S. Lerner , John Lynch , Martha Schwartz , Richard Schwartz , W. Stephen Wilson:

Last month, Achieve unveiled and solicited comments on the first draft of the Next Generation Science Standards, the product of months of work by a team of writers on behalf of twenty-six states. This review by Fordham provides commentary, feedback, and constructive advice that we hope the NGSS authors will consider as they revise the standards before the release of a second draft later this year.

Associated Press:

The head of Florida’s Department of Education is writing parents to tell them that they shouldn’t be overly concerned about the results of the state-required exam that’s supposed to measure year-to-year improvements of students, teachers and public schools.

Related: Education wake-up call is looming.

Laura Waters:

One dispute over tying teacher evaluations to data on student growth has been the charge that teachers who are effective with wealthy students would see their value-added scores plummet with poor students. Those opposed to data-infused evaluations argue that even great teachers can’t maintain the same degree of effectiveness with needy kids. It’s the poverty, not the pedagogy.
However, there’s a new working paper out from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Educational Research, “Portability of Teaching Effectiveness Across School Settings,” that comes to a different conclusion. From the abstract:

Cynthia Starks:

I can’t remember ever crying at a commencement speech – not one I attended and heard live and certainly not one I read after it was given.
But that changed this week when I read the commencement address given on May 22 at the University of Pennsylvania by Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a New York City organization devoted to breaking “the cycle of generational poverty for the thousands of children and families it serves.”
Canada’s speech is powerful in its honesty about the shape of the world today; it brought me to tears because of a personal story he tells; yet it remains hopeful because of the redemptive possibility with which it ends.
Canada begins his speech by telling the class of 2012 their graduation “is a great moment for you, and it could be a great moment for our country.”
He explains, “You are graduating at a time when our country is desperate for highly educated women and men who will fight to see through the veils of pure self-interest and half-truths to search for what is truly moral and just.”

Teresa Watanabe:

Los Angeles schools chief John Deasy blasted state lawmakers Thursday for not passing a bill to speed up the teacher-dismissal process, which he and others pushed following the sex-abuse scandal at Miramonte Elementary School.
The bill fell one vote short of clearing an Assembly education committee when six of the seven Democratic members either opposed it or abstained. Committee Chairwoman Julia Brownley (D-Oak Park) supported the bill, as did four Republican colleagues.
The measure would have allowed school boards to immediately suspend without pay a teacher or administrator notified of dismissal for “serious and egregious unprofessional conduct” involving sex abuse, drugs or violence toward children.

Matthew DeFour:

Madison will be looking to its own collective bargaining agreement as well as handbooks adopted by other districts and input from employees, Nadler said. Unlike previous collective bargaining discussions, however, School Board meetings on the subject will be held in open session.
Madison Teachers Inc. Executive Director John Matthews, who in 45 years has had a hand in expanding the collective bargaining agreement from four to 157 pages, has been emphasizing since Act 10 passed that everything in the agreement has been jointly agreed upon by the School Board and union.
“Instead of collective bargaining it’s going to be meet and confer,” Matthews said. “We have really 50 years of developing things together that make the school system work.”
Don Severson, president of a conservative watchdog group and MTI critic, sees the handbook as an opportunity for the district to break away from MTI’s influence over school operations. He wants a middle school to be able to hire a math teacher from outside the district with math certification, for example, rather than be forced to hire a district teacher who meets minimum requirements but lacks such certification.
“They need to keep in mind that the only thing the union has any involvement or responsibility for is negotiating salary,” Severson said.

Related: Current 182 page Madison Teachers, Inc. Collective Bargaining Agreement (PDF) and Concessions before negotiations (“Voluntary Impasse Resolution Procedure“)
I suspect that 90% of the existing collective bargaining agreement will end up in the District’s “Handbook“. Perhaps someone might setup a prediction @ Intrade on this matter.
Conversely, some Districts will think differently and create a far different and more appealing world for some teachers.
New Wisconsin School District Handbooks take effect.

Brian Hayes:

Artificial intelligence began with an ambitious research agenda: To endow machines with some of the traits we value most highly in ourselves–the faculty of reason, skill in solving problems, creativity, the capacity to learn from experience. Early results were promising. Computers were programmed to play checkers and chess, to prove theorems in geometry, to solve analogy puzzles from IQ tests, to recognize letters of the alphabet. Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers, declared in 1961: “We are on the threshold of an era that will be strongly influenced, and quite possibly dominated, by intelligent problem-solving machines.”
Fifty years later, problem-solving machines are a familiar presence in daily life. Computer programs suggest the best route through cross-town traffic, recommend movies you might like to see, recognize faces in photographs, transcribe your voicemail messages and translate documents from one language to another. As for checkers and chess, computers are not merely good players; they are unbeatable. Even on the television quiz show Jeopardy, the best human contestants were trounced by a computer.

Dave Murray:

State educators are celebrating scores on standardized tests offered to high school students, but call achievement gaps between some student groups “shameful.”
Those concerns are echoed by an education advocacy group’s analysis of last week’s Michigan Merit Exam and ACT scores that show black and low-income students are falling even further behind the state’s white students.
While white student achievement has risen slightly over five years, scores for black and Hispanic students and students in poverty “remain grim,” according to the Education Trust-Midwest.

Barry Garelick:

In the never-ending dialogue about math education that has come to be known as the “math wars”, proponents of reform-based math tend to characterize math as it was taught in the 60’s (and prior) as “skills-based”. The term connotes a teaching of math that focused almost exclusively on procedures and facts in isolation to the conceptual underpinning that holds math together. The “skills-based” appellation also suggests that those students who may have mastered their math courses in K-12 were missing the conceptual basis of mathematics and were taught the subject as a means to do computation, rather than explore the wonders of mathematics for its own sake.
Without delving too far into the math wars, I and others have written that while traditional math may sometimes have been taught poorly, it also was taught properly. In fact, a view of the textbooks in use at that time reveal that they provided both procedures and concept. Missing perhaps were more challenging problems, but also missing from the reformers’ arguments is the fact that not only are procedures and concepts taught in tandem but that computational fluency leads to conceptual understanding. (See http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~siegler/r-jhnsn-etal-01.pdf )

Rob Nail:

Education is undergoing an incredible and exciting transformation, but I can’t help but wonder if the “experts” can’t see the forest for the trees. We are continuing to see roiling debates from the likes of Vivek Wadhwa and Peter Thiel over whether kids should go to college or not, administrations battling technologists over whether they need to flip the classroom, and politicians forcing us to pick sides as if there were only two options – all the while missing the extraordinary revolution taking place around us.
The education industry seems to be tracking similarly to every early stage tech industry or product with big potential – innovators are coming up with new products (check out Khan Academy, Udacity, or EdX), early adopters and investors (like Learn Capital, Apollo Group, Kapor Capital, and Education Growth Partners) enthusiastically take the initial risk, only some survive (rightfully so), and the good ones go mainstream or even viral.

Jim Newton:

A.J. Duffy is, at least for the moment, a man without a country.
He led United Teachers Los Angeles, the union that represents teachers in the nation’s second-largest school district, for six bruising years, tussling with the mayor and several superintendents and racking up critics. Then he went on to found a charter school, infuriating his old allies in labor who reflexively, and stupidly, reject charters as a threat to their existence. And then the school that Duffy helped create, Apple Academy, announced that it didn’t have room in its budget for a chief executive officer.
So Duffy’s back to teaching. He says he loves it, relishes the classroom, is especially gratified to be helping special education students. He was one himself many years ago, before he shook off drug addiction and developmental problems and launched his career in education and labor. But as Duffy talks about how happy he is, it’s fairly clear that he’s not. He was a high-roller for six years, and he isn’t anymore. He misses it. A lot.

CNN, via a kind reader’s email:

“It’s a pretty basic educational problem we have: Students’ willingness to learn is not there,” says 17-year-old Joseph A. Ryan, Jr.
Ryan posted his video in response to CNN iReport’s assignment question “What’s wrong with America’s school system?” He says the problem is not about technology or books, but about student motivation.
“I go to school where most kids don’t even want to learn….They don’t care, and teachers get in trouble for it,” says Ryan. “They have to see the value in education.”

More at college confidential.

Wisconsin Supreme Court 120K PDF, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:

This case is not about a direct denial of public access to records, but the issue in the present case directly implicates the accessibility of government records. The greater the fee imposed on a requester of a public record, the less likely the requester will be willing and able to successfully make a record request. Thus, the imposition of fees limits and may even serve to deny access to government records. In interpreting the Public Records Law, we must be cognizant that the legislature’s preference is for “complete public access” and that the imposition of costs, as a practical matter, inhibits access.

A number of open records requests have been published here, including 1996-2006 Police calls and a school district land purchase that lacked competitive offers.
Related: The Sunlight Foundation.

Steven DuBois:

The state Board of Education has approved guidelines for how Oregon teachers and administrators will be evaluated.
Starting in 2013, multiple measures will be used to evaluate how well individual teachers are doing in three broad areas: professional practice, professional responsibility and student learning and growth. The evaluations will not be made public and standardized test scores will not be the sole measure of student progress.
The Oregon Legislature approved a bill last year to create statewide teaching standards, and Friday’s action satisfied that requirement. Moreover, states seeking waivers from the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law must have teacher evaluation systems that factor in student progress. State education officials hope to obtain a waiver in the next week or two.

Dr. Richard Phelps, via a kind email:

It is common for education researchers to contend the topic they are studying or the policies they are promoting have never been researched before, says Dr. Richard Phelps in a new article for Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars. This is common even among well-known and influential researchers, he says. And its prevalence contributed to the much-hated and unwieldy No Child Left Behind Act.
Phelps joins the School Reform News podcast to discuss this curious and repeated assertion and its effect on education policy. He is the founder of the Nonpartisan Education Review and author of several books and the article prompting this discussion, titled “Academe’s Memory Hole.”

The Telegraph:

Gardening guru Titchmarsh, 63, also said he wants horticulture to be taught in all secondary schools as a “useful life skill”.
Titchmarsh, who left school at 15 to become an apprentice council gardener, hopes soaring university tuition fees will see teenagers turn to careers in gardening.
He told Amateur Gardening magazine: “We’ve been in this ridiculous system where we’re sending everyone to university.
“It’s a mad way of proceeding.
“We need practical skills to keep the country going and the fact that they’ve been undervalued, underrated and under catered for is a great mistake in terms of our civilisation. We need to value these skills again.

Erin Richards:

Almost two-thirds of Wisconsin’s 424 school districts will receive less general state aid in the 2012-’13 school year than they did last year, while some suburban Milwaukee school districts will get a sizable aid boost, according to preliminary state estimates released Friday by the Department of Public Instruction.
In all, the state will provide $4.29 billion in general aid to schools in the second year of Gov. Scott Walker’s biennial budget, a small increase over what the state budget set for aid last year – $4.26 billion, according to the DPI.
That’s far below what schools received in general aid before Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature dramatically cut funding for schools and limited districts’ ability to make up those funds by raising local taxes – changes that were passed as part of the biennial 2011-’13 state budget.
“It’s a bigger balance from last year, but if you compare this to what school districts had two and three years ago, it’s a reduction,” said Patrick Gasper, spokesman for the DPI.

Madison fared quite a bit better in this year’s redistributed state tax dollar program.

Mike Loukides:

Nikki Graziano’s intriguing integration of mathematical curves into her photography sparked a Radar discussion about the relationship between mathematics and the real world. Does her work give insight into the nature of mathematics? Or into the nature of the world? And if so, what kind of insight?
Mathematically, matching one curve to another isn’t a big deal. Given N points, it’s trivial to write an N+1 degree equation that passes through all of them. There are many more subtle ways of solving the same problem, with more aesthetically pleasing results: you can use sine functions, wavelets, square waves, whatever you want. Take out a ruler, measure some points, plug them into Mathematica, and in seconds you can generate as many curves as you like. So finding an equation that matches the curve of an artfully trimmed hedge is easy. The question is whether that curve tells us anything, or whether it’s just another stupid math trick.

Steven Chu:

John Hennessey (Stanford president) and Salman Khan (Khan Academy) discuss higher education and digital technology.
Learning or Credentialing? Signaling or Sorting?

Richard Rider:

Teacher Sharon Collins’ letter selflessly calls for higher taxes for education, citing socialist Sweden as her shining light.
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/jun/21/letters-sd-schools-teachers-labor-pact/?print&page=all
She didn’t do her homework.
She thinks Sweden values education more than America because they have a 25 percent sales tax (actually a VAT tax). But that high tax tells us nothing.
For a meaningful comparison, look at education spending per student. Of the 32 OECD counties (the economically advanced countries of the world) providing data, in 2008 Sweden ranks 6th in primary school per student spending, the U.S. 5th. Sweden ranks 9th in secondary school spending, the U.S. ranks 4th.
Sweden spent $9,080 per primary school student. The U.S. spent $9,940. Sweden spent $9,940 per secondary school student — the U.S. spent $12,007.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/888932463593

Mike Ford:

I was a little surprised by the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS)’ response to my recent Wisconsin Interest piece on the district’s long-term fiscal challenges. Specifically, I was confused by the following two paragraphs in a blog item posted yesterday by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel education reporter Erin Richards:

MPS officials on Wednesday objected to the assertion that the district is headed toward financial insolvency. They reiterated that they have raised the minimum retirement age, raised the number of years needed to reach retirement, and increased future retiree contributions, all of which should make a significant impact on legacy costs.

MPS Spokesman Tony Tagliavia reported there is a report coming out in the coming months that will reflect the impact of the changes made.
First off, my article makes clear that I took MPS’ aggressive actions to address their legacy costs into account (Incidentally I have also blogged about these actions and applauded MPS as they have been taken). In the article I write:

Barbara Jones:

After scrounging up $6.7 million to preserve free after-school care, the Los Angeles Unified board on Thursday approved a $6.3 billion budget that shortens the 2012-13 school year, eliminates thousands of jobs and reshapes some of the district’s most iconic programs.
The board’s 6-1 vote, with South Bay representative Richard Vladovic dissenting, capped an 11th-hour scramble to salvage the Beyond the Bell after-school program. It operates from 3-6 p.m. weekdays at every elementary and middle school in the district.
About $4 million will come from money the district had set aside to put a parcel tax on the 2013 ballot — although district officials are still considering that plan — and the balance from an unexpected surplus in preschool revenue in the state budget that Gov. Jerry Brown signed on Wednesday.

The Los Angeles School District’s 2011-2012 enrollment was 677,538 ($9,298.37/student spending). Madison spent $14,858/student during the 2011-2012 fiscal year, 40% more than Los Angeles.

Ben Wieder:

When Teach for America alumnus Bill Ferguson took on six-term incumbent George Della for a Maryland Senate seat two years ago, he benefited from the energetic support of his fellow Teach for America alumni–but he had to overcome the strident opposition of the teachers’ unions.
Ferguson upset Della in the Democratic primary and went on to win the general election, making him only the second Teach for America alumnus to secure a seat in a state legislature–following Mike Johnston, who joined the Colorado Senate in 2009.
Johnston and Ferguson aren’t likely to be alone for long: At least six TFA alumni are running for state legislatures this year, and many others are running for boards of education. Like Ferguson and Johnston, most of these former teachers likely will have to overcome union opposition to win.

Charles Glenn:

Editor’s note: America isn’t the only place where school choice raises questions about not only education, but pluralism, citizenship and social integration. Noted school choice expert Charles Glenn, a Boston University professor and American Center for School Choice associate, writes that European countries with far more evolved choice systems continue to wrestle with these issues – but have no reason to fear faith-based schools.
Early in June I was one of the speakers at a conference on educational freedom in The Netherlands and Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). It is no exaggeration to say these are the poster children of “school choice,” the two areas where its implications have been worked out most fully over the past two centuries (see my Contrasting Models of State and School, Continuum, 2011). Today, upwards of two-thirds of pupils in this area of some 23 million inhabitants attend non-government schools with full public funding.
Much of the discussion among the participants was about the details of how schools have been able – or not – to preserve their independence in the face of government regulation. I will not try to summarize that discussion here, except to note that as always the devil is in the details and we can learn a great deal from the experience over many decades of the interaction between schools seeking to maintain a distinctive religious or pedagogical character and government officials seeking to impose common standards. (The updated 2012 edition of Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education will include, in four volumes, detailed descriptions of how this relationship plays out in nearly 60 countries, most of them written by leading education law experts from each country, including these two.)

Matthew DeFour:

The 25.4 percent increase — from $43.3 million to $54.3 million — is the fifth-largest percent increase among the state’s 424 districts and by far the largest dollar amount increase.
Madison’s increase accounts for more than half of the $21.1 million increase in state aid for districts next school year.
School Board President James Howard said the development was good news, though he wouldn’t speculate whether the board would keep current spending levels or increase the preliminary $376.2 million budget when it takes up final approval of the tax levy in October.
…..
Howard, who was the only board member who voted against the preliminary budget, said he questions why the district was so far off in its state aid estimate, adding “there has always been discussion about why do we need to approve budgets so early.”

Related: Notes and links on Madison’s 2012-2013 $374,700,000 budget.

Ron Matus:

Florida’s public schools were handed another solid but overlooked report card this week from another respected, independent source.
The 27-page, data-stuffed, “Decade of Progress” progress report from the Southern Regional Education Board is yet more evidence that Florida’s public schools are making steady progress despite the claims of some critics. The trend lines are often especially strong for low-income and minority students.
For example, between 2003 and 2011, the percentage of low-income eighth-graders scoring at the basic level or above on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress rose from 55 to 65 percent in Florida – a 10-point gain. Over the same period, the percentage of more affluent eighth-graders who reached the bar rose 5 percentage points, from 78 to 83 percent.
For each of its 16 member states, the SREB looked at a wide array of academic indicators to see how much the needle moved over the past decade, and how those gains or losses compared nationally and regionally. Besides commonly cited indicators like NAEP scores, graduation rates and AP results, the board looked at less-publicized statistics like college enrollment rates, ninth-grade “enrollment bulges” and grade-level progression in high school.

Related: Excellence in Education explains Florida’s reading reforms and compares Florida’s NAEP progress with Wisconsin’s at the July 29th Read to Lead task force meeting.

Konstantin Kakaes:

When Longfellow Middle School in Falls Church, Va., recently renovated its classrooms, Vern Williams, who might be the best math teacher in the country, had to fight to keep his blackboard. The school was putting in new “interactive whiteboards” in every room, part of a broader effort to increase the use of technology in education. That might sound like a welcome change. But this effort, part of a nationwide trend, is undermining American education, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. It is beginning to do to our educational system what the transformation to industrial agriculture has done to our food system over the past half century: efficiently produce a deluge of cheap, empty calories.
I went to see Williams because he was famous when I was in middle school 20 years ago, at a different school in the same county. Longfellow’s teams have been state champions for 24 of the last 29 years in MathCounts, a competition for middle schoolers. Williams was the only actual teacher on a 17-member National Mathematics Advisory Panel that reported to President Bush in 2008.
Williams doesn’t just prefer his old chalkboard to the high-tech version. His kids learn from textbooks that are decades old–not because they can’t afford new ones, but because Williams and a handful of his like-minded colleagues know the old ones are better. The school’s parent-teacher association buys them from used bookstores because the county won’t pay for them (despite the plentiful money for technology). His preferred algebra book, he says, is “in-your-face algebra. They give amazing outstanding examples. They teach the lessons.”

Eric Nadelstern, via a kind Deb Britt email:

A growing number of districts have begun to understand that changing the role of the central office and giving principals more control over their schools’ money can yield dividends in improving student achievement. These districts don’t think the central office or any single organization can meet the needs of a diverse set of schools. They therefore allow schools to use their money to buy services from any vendor they choose, and encourage formation of a rich supply of independent support providers.
This paper is a personal account by Eric Nadelstern, a co-architect and collaborator to then-chancellor Joel Klein, about the effort in New York City to change the central office and create a system of support organizations to oversee networks of autonomous schools. The story of New York City shows how early investments in local outside organizations can lay the groundwork for this evolution, as well as how strongly political and community interests may resist this effort.

Steve Rankin, via a kind reader’s email:

The State Journal demonstrates once again that it values students primarily as athletes. If your gifts lie elsewhere, look for validation elsewhere.
Sunday’s paper devoted pages to the area “athletes of the year” — and that was only to cover spring sports. Every week includes “prep profiles,” again glorifying athletes.
Once a year the paper used to run a feature section on the top 4 percent of Dane County graduating seniors as scholars, but that section has been discontinued.
This year’s National Merit scholars, most of whom were announced to the press in April, are still a secret here. Music and theater are nowhere to be found, even though Madison is home to an entirely student-run orchestra. So kids, be a jock or get out of town!

Touch Press:

The Sonnets presents William Shakespeare’s immortal collection of love poems in an interactive digital edition that allows you to explore, appreciate and understand this great work of literature as never before. All 154 sonnets are performed to camera by a star-studded cast including Sir Patrick Stewart (Star Trek, X-Men, Royal Shakespeare Company), David Tennant (Dr Who, Hamlet), Kim Cattrall (Sex and the City), Fiona Shaw (The Waste Land, Harry Potter), Stephen Fry (The Hobbit) and Dominic West (The Wire). These performances – all specially filmed for the app – are synchronised to the text, which highlights line by line as each sonnet is spoken.

Touch Press does beautiful work.

Paul Hill, 17 page PDF.

Nora Tong:

There are times when Hayley Goldberg wishes she knew Chinese and could offer more help to her daughter Ativa. A Primary Two pupil, Ativa attends a local school in Ma On Shan, where every subject apart from English is taught and assessed in Chinese.
“At the beginning there were six notices from the school every second day. I didn’t know what was going on,” says Goldberg, a South African who teaches at an international school. “I have to get everything translated by my students. It’s crazy that I can’t be a part of my child’s life.”

Holly Watt and Claire Newell:

The official agent in Beijing for universities in the elite Russell Group claimed that it could secure over-subscribed places for a Chinese student purporting to have scored three C grades in their A-levels – when British students are required to have at least A, A and B.
Undercover reporters were also told to tell the UK authorities that the student would be returning home immediately after graduation – even if that was not their intention – in order to secure a visa.
Universities were accused of profiteering by rejecting tens of thousands of British teenagers, currently sitting A-levels, so they can fill places with more profitable foreign students.

Anne Blythe:

A virtual charter school with the potential to siphon millions of dollars from traditional public schools will pit school-choice advocates against the state’s education establishment at a Monday court hearing.
A Wake County Superior Court judge is scheduled to hear arguments on whether an online charter school program that would be run by a for-profit company should be allowed to open in North Carolina in August, as a state administrative law judge ruled in May.
The state Board of Education hopes to persuade the Superior Court judge that proper procedures were not followed for a new program that represents one of the more overt commercial aspects of the school-choice movement.

Mike Ford:

Mavis Roesch began teaching in the St. Louis Public Schools in 1967. Soon after, she moved to Milwaukee, teaching first at a private high school and then in the Milwaukee Public Schools. For the past 15 years, Roesch has taught at Rufus King High School, recently ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the top 200 high schools in the country.
“I care about young people and their future and the future of our city,” Roesch says with passion. “I believe that I make a difference in my students’ lives. I work to inspire them to do things they thought they couldn’t do. I believe that all children can learn — maybe in different ways and on different days, but I want to be there when it happens.”
And then Roesch, who runs King’s International Baccalaureate program, adds something that is already evident in her self-declared mission: “I do not work for a paycheck or benefits.”
Clearly, teachers like Roesch are not what ails MPS. Dedicated professionals like her are the reasons for academic success stories like Rufus King. Yet, paradoxically, she is soon to join the ranks of those who are at the root of MPS’ looming fiscal crack-up: Retirees.
By 2022, the cost of MPS pensions and health benefits will absorb just more than 50 percent of the district’s state aid and property tax, up from one-third in 2012. More to the point, less than half of MPS’ state aid and local tax revenue will be available for teacher salaries, classroom materials, new technology and other educational needs. There is little MPS can do to stem this decline in discretionary spending. As shown on the following chart, it could be a death knell for the district.

Carla Rivera:

Edward Yacuta felt rushed and nervous when he took a test to determine whether he was ready for college-level English classes at Long Beach City College.
The 18-year-old did poorly on the exam, even though he was getting good grades in an Advanced Placement English class at Long Beach’s Robert A. Millikan High School.
Most community colleges would assign students like Yacuta to a remedial class, but he will avoid that fate at Long Beach. The two-year school is trying out a new system this fall that will place students who graduated from the city’s high schools in courses based on their grades rather than their scores on the standardized placement tests.

BBC:

Your child’s education is a universal cause of anxiety for almost every parent.
In many countries, school systems are underfunded and over-enrolled while teachers have too much material to cover in too little time.
But one Silicon Valley entrepreneur has developed a teaching method that completely rewrites the basic principles as Sumi Das finds out.

Sara Goldrick-Rab:

Since I have established relationships with both Lumina and HCM Strategists, the consulting group in question, and have blogged (and hosted guest blogs) before on the large role that foundations are playing in pushing the higher ed reform agenda, I want to fully disclose as much as possible my role and assessment of this situation.
First, readers of this blog know my work as an expert on college student success, and as an outspoken champion for expanding college access to underserved populations. I am proud of the major role I played in the fight against the New Badger Partnership and other local efforts to prioritize institutional prestige over the needs of Wisconsin residents. I am constantly engaged in the struggle to ensure that public institutions of all types survive and thrive. At this point I have been active in Wisconsin research, policy, and activism circles for more than eight years.
In my work I spending a lot of time interacting with the higher education reform movements nationally. It is for this reason, over the last decade I have engaged with both Lumina and HCM many times. I am also very well-acquainted with the Gates education initiatives, having been both a grantee (to the tune of $1.2 million for the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study) and a consultant. Moreover, I participant frequently in the bipartisan higher education working group hosted by the American Enterprise Institute and funded by Gates.
Why do I do these things, despite recent evidence that these places have ties to ALEC and others?

Fascinating….

Matthew DiCarlo:

I have been writing critically about states’ school rating systems (e.g., Ohio, Florida, Louisiana), and I thought I would find one that is, at least in my (admittedly value-laden) opinion, more defensibly designed. It didn’t quite turn out as I had hoped.
One big starting point in my assessment is how heavily the systems weight absolute performance (how highly students score) versus growth (how quickly students improve). As I’ve argued many times, the former (absolute level) is a poor measure of school performance in a high-stakes accountability system. It does not address the fact that some schools, particularly those in more affluent areas, serve students who, on average, enter the system at a higher-performing level. This amounts to holding schools accountable for outcomes they largely cannot control (see Doug Harris’ excellent book for more on this in the teacher context). Thus, to whatever degree testing results can be used to judge actual school effectiveness, growth measures, while themselves highly imperfect, are to be preferred in a high-stakes context.

sp-eye:

On Monday June 25, 2012, the School Board will be going into closed session to “develop negotiations parameters” with SPEA and Local 60. We have a teensy weensy couple of issues with that.
First–and foremost– why on earth would the Board be discussing raises before the Board has seen even a peek at the budget? (Raises, of course, is what “negotiations parameters” means, since under Act 10, the only thing which CAN be negotiated is wage increases)

Kathie Bassett:

The East Alton Elementary School Board moved forward with the plan to implement a One to One iPad initiative and approved a lease-to-purchase agreement at Tuesday night’s meeting.
“We’ll be leasing them directly from Apple,” Superintendent Virgil Moore said. “At the end of the four-year lease, we will be able to buy the iPads for $1 apiece.”
Required by the agreement to lease in bundles of 10 machines, the district plans to order 650 iPads for student use. An additional 70 Mac Book Air laptops will be ordered for teachers to be able to write lessons that can be transferred to the students’ iPads.
The cost of the lease payment will be $129,000 per year, Moore said.
“We went through our current budget line by line and decided we could fund the leases ourselves,” Moore said. “When we looked at areas that we could reallocate funds from items we wouldn’t need to purchase once we have the devices, we were able to find $130,000.”

Ki Mae Heussner:

Online education is on a tear. Every few weeks or so, it seems like yet another startup offering online classes announces a multimillion dollar funding round. This week, San Francisco-based UniversityNow, which provides affordable higher education degrees online, said it raised $17.3 million. In the past three months, at least seven online course startups have launched or announced funding.
“I think we’re hitting a tipping point where online education is accepted,” said Gene Wade, CEO and co-founder of UniversityNow. “There’s enormous demand for education around the world.”
In the past decade, he said, more than a billion people have joined the middle class, creating new demand for educational opportunities. Globally, 150 million people will seek higher education in the next eight years and, domestically, 2 million will pursue higher ed over the next ten years.

All Things Digital:

A new app claims to be able to help you tear through documents improving your reading speed by at least a third, and in some cases more. WSJ’s Ben Rooney meets the start-up behind the app.

Helen Gao:

On the morning of June 7 every year, Beijing’s normally chaotic streets fall silent. Police patrol the main roads on motorcycles, as construction workers put down their hammers and power down their cranes, and rowdy taxi drivers finally take their hands off the horn. It is the first day of gaokao, the annual, nationwide college entrance exam, which will decide the college matriculation of the nine million or so students who take it. Sitting for nine hours over two days, students are tested on everything from Chinese and math to geography and government. The intense, memorization-heavy, and notoriously difficult gaokao can make the SAT look like a game of Scrabble. How they do on the test will play a big role in determining not just where they go to college but, because Chinese colleges often feed directly into certain industries and fields, what they do for the rest of their life. It’s an enormously important moment in any Chinese student’s life, which is part of why high schools here dedicate months or even years to preparing for the test.
In many ways, the gaokao is symbolic of China’s rise, with millions of Chinese striving and competing to pull up themselves and their nation. But it’s also symptomatic of how far China still has to go, as the country tries to shift its economy from exports to domestic consumption, from assembling products to designing them. China’s gaokao-style education system has been great at imparting math and engineering, as well as the rigorous work ethic that has been so integral to China’s rise so far. But if the country wants to keep growing, its state economists know they need to encourage entrepreneurship and creativity, neither of which is tested for on this life-determining exam.

Kyle Spencer:

Ellen Goldstein, the mother of first-grade twins at Public School 130 in Brooklyn, recalls with a twinge of nostalgia certain items that came home from school this year. There was the all-about-fish book, the Popsicle picture frames and two tissue-paper roses for Mother’s Day — all made by her sons.
What Ms. Goldstein, 46, will not miss plucking from her children’s backpacks are the seemingly endless requests for money and supplies that also came home from their small school on the border of Kensington and Windsor Terrace.
It began in September, Ms. Goldstein said, when she and her 6-year-olds lugged in $300 worth of construction paper, index cards, markers and crayons requested by their teachers. Soon, she was regularly receiving Scholastic booklets and permission slips for trips to bowling alleys and pizza parlors that required $5, $6 and $7 to be stuffed into envelopes. The school also organized two photo drives, including one in which she was sent key chains and bookmarks with images of her children on them.

Associated Press:

For North Koreans, the systematic indoctrination of anti-Americanism starts as early as kindergarten and is as much a part of the curriculum as learning to count. Toy pistols, rifles and tanks sit lined up in neat rows on shelves. The school principal pulls out a dummy of an American soldier with a beaked nose and straw-coloured hair and explains that the students beat him with batons or pelt him with stones – a favourite schoolyard game, she says.
“Our children learn from an early age about the American bastards,” Yun Song-sil says, tossing off a phrase so common here it is considered an acceptable way to refer to Americans.

Jeff Selingo, via a kind Rick Kiley email:

NO matter what the University of Virginia’s governing board decides today, when it is scheduled to determine the fate of the university’s ousted president, Teresa A. Sullivan, the intense interest in the case shows how much anxiety surrounds the future of higher education — especially the question of whether university leaders are moving too slowly to position their schools for a rapidly changing world (as some of Ms. Sullivan’s critics have suggested of her).
There is good reason for the anxiety. Setting aside the specifics of the Virginia drama, university leaders desperately need to transform how colleges do business. Higher education must make up for the mistakes it made in what I call the industry’s “lost decade,” from 1999 to 2009. Those years saw a surge in students pursuing higher education, driven partly by the colleges, which advertised heavily and created enticing new academic programs, services and fancy facilities.

Dr. Catherine Decker, via email:

1. Significantly improve the math department’s instruction to include completion of the entire Algebra I textbook in one school year, so that students are prepared to enter directly into geometry no matter what High School they attend. Teachers should ensure that the students completing Algebra I in middle school understand all of the materials on the high school placement exam to directly enter geometry in high school. Students who are strong in their baseline math skills simply have not had further challenging math instruction in VASD.
2. Discontinue the practice of using class time to have middle and high school students complete a 160+ question survey regarding their sexual & substance use practices (just to bring in more $ to the school district). Instead, if this is a desire of the Verona Area Superintendent, than he should ask parents to bring their children into the schools to participate in this ridiculous survey after class/instructional time. Really, what is the Superintendent thinking?

Jamie Vaznis:

The Massachusetts association considered the ballot question long and confusing and worried that passage would take away even more job security rights of teachers than the compromise legislation.
Richard Stutman, president of the Boston Teachers Union, which belongs to the teachers federation, said in an interview Wednesday night that it made no sense to wage a battle over legislation that already had garnered the support of the highest-ranking officials on Beacon Hill: Governor Deval Patrick, Senate President Therese Murray, and House Speaker Robert DeLeo. It is expected to land on the governor’s desk by July 3.
“We are not fighting it, because it’s a done deal,” Stutman said.
Jason Williams, executive director of Stand for Children Massachusetts, was pleased the two union organizations have decided not to fight the legislation. “It’s a positive step,” Williams said. “I feel there is strong momentum toward passage.”
Locally, support for the legislation appears to be is growing. The Boston City Council voted 8-5 Wednesday for a resolution supporting the measure. The vote was symbolic and does not directly impact the pending legislation.

Tyler Brule::

So far I’ve received a couple of these letters (from acquaintances and close associates) and had to restrain myself from firing back a frank response. While it’s generally recognised in the global workplace that there’s a serious issue with Generation Y and their neediness, lack of general knowledge (I’ll just Google that … ) and understanding of authority, it’s hard to write off a whole generation when their parents (and teachers) are largely responsible for creating such a culture of entitlement.
It’s increasingly rare that people applying for internships in my field (publishing and branding) have spent time stocking shelves, scooping ice cream, waiting tables or scrubbing floors. Sometimes I wonder if part-time jobs are left off CVs because they might say too much about a potential candidate, or whether many simply can’t be bothered to hold down a job between terms. Sadly, I suspect it’s more of the latter.