Michael Jonas:

As online education continues to grow, says Bill Tucker, the managing director of Education Sector, a Washing­ton, DC, think tank, we need to strike a balance that encourages innovation while also holding schools and companies accountable for results. “I want the sector to have the space to grow,” says Tucker, who specializes in education technology and virtual school issues. “At the same time, it would be foolish or naïve just to think, ‘OK, let everybody do what they want and it will just naturally get better.'”
When it comes to full-time virtual schools, the state is now trying to figure out how to strike that balance. Mitchell Chester, the state’s education commissioner, says he thinks there is “a small percentage of the population for whom this mode of learning would be beneficial.” But he says he is “very uncomfortable” with the provision of the 2010 reform law that allows districts to decide on their own to open virtual schools that enroll students statewide. The Green­field-based school is “a statewide school with no role for the state,” he says.

Frank Donoghue:

First, let’s break down the staggering $1-trillion in student debt that has become so familiar a number to all of us in the last year or so. First, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as quoted in Sheryl Nance-Nash’s recent article in Forbes, “Unlike other consumer credit products, student debt keeps growing at a steady clip. Students borrowed $117-billion in just federal loans last year. And students continue to borrow private student loans, which lack the income-based repayment and deferment options of federal student loans.” The average total loan debt for undergraduates is $26,000, with the debt for those choosing to attend law school, medical school, or business school obviously much greater.
This enormous amount of debt has consequences for all of us since–although few economists discuss it at length–it represents a tremendous drain on the economy and is slowing our recovery from the recession that began in 2008. College graduates and postgraduates, instead of buying cars, buying houses, getting married, having children–in other words, becoming full-fledged consumers are, as Nance-Nash puts it, “running back home.” That hurts us all.

Howard Karsh:

The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association recently asked its members to voluntarily contribute a week’s salary to help improve class sizes in Milwaukee Public Schools. The teachers overwhelmingly voted no.
They had a right to do that. They are angry about the new laws enacted by Gov. Scott Walker that will affect them at the end of their current contract. They are angry about the attack on collective bargaining.
But it was teachers who said that, had they been asked to the table instead of attacked, they would have done the right thing. Could the recent vote make that claim now look like something less?
Many of the strongest proponents of the recall effort against Walker are MPS teachers. They were in Madison last spring during the protests and were well-represented at rallies and foremost in collecting recall signatures.
They have a right to be proud of their efforts. And it has been their voices that have been loud and clear about the harm they believe is being caused by the Walker administration to the very kids they teach – the kids who need more teachers and more resources.

Alan Borsuk:

It’s 8:45 on a weeknight and five students are gathered in a dimly lighted corridor of Waukesha West High School. They’re dedicated. They’re energized. They’re getting ready to compete for a national championship. They’re part of what may well be the most dominating high school team in Wisconsin.
They’re reading out loud parts of essays they have written about the impact of British colonialism in Africa and Asia between 1800 and 1900. They’re critiquing each other. You spent much time lately interpreting Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, “Heart of Darkness?” These kids have.
They’ve been doing activities like this almost every night after school since last fall. Last week, school was out for spring break, but they and their teammates were at school from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day.
This is the Waukesha West Academic Decathlon team. State champions 11 years in a row – can any sports team claim a run like that? They’re getting ready to go to Albuquerque, N.M., at the end of this month for another shot at the national championship. The school won once, in 2002, and has finished in the top five repeatedly.

Progress Illinois:

Chicago Public School teachers work almost double their required daily instruction hours, according to a new study released Monday, and the findings worry some teacher advocates as the district gets ready to extend the school day.
On average, public school teachers work 58 hours per week, according to the report, “Beyond the Classroom: An analysis of a Chicago Public School Teacher’s Actual Workday.”
The study– put together by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Labor Education Program — analyzed surveys from nearly 1,000 CPS teaches and found on a typical school day teachers work more than 10 hours.
Teachers can also rack up more than five additional hours during weekday evenings and on the weekend, according to the report.

Three times a year, The Boston Globe (in the Athens of America) has a 14-16-page Special Supplement celebrating local “scholar-athletes” with pictures and brief write-ups. These are high school students who have taken part in soccer, tennis, golf, football, swimming, baseball, basketball, softball, wrestling, and what-have-you, and done well by various measures. Their coaches, too, get their pictures in the paper and sometimes a paragraph of praise. In addition to these supplements, hardly a day goes by during the school year when some high school athletes, team, coach or event doesn’t get “covered” by The Boston Globe. A local philanthropic group has recently raised several million dollars to promote sports in our public high schools.
As we all know, sports involve students, parents, boosters and the like, and they build teamwork, discipline, character, equality (of a sort), ambition, competition, and attendance. Parents do not need to be dragged to games the way they do to school meetings or Parents’ Night to talk to teachers. In many cases, they pay fees to allow their youngsters to participate in sports, and some even raise money as boosters for trips to games, tournaments, etc. Community involvement is fairly easy to get in sports, and there are very few edupundits who find work advising schools and communities on how to get parents and other community members involved when it comes to school sports. I know of no new initiatives or workshops to teach parents how to get involved in their children’s sports programs. Athletes also enjoy rallies, cheerleaders, and coverage in their high school newspaper as well.
Recently a young student basketball player in Massachusetts, 6’10” and very good at his sport, “reclassified” himself (changed from a Junior to a Senior?), so that he could choose among the many colleges whose coaches want him to come play at their institutions. His picture not only appeared several times in his local school newspaper, but also showed up several times with stories in The Boston Globe (the Sports Section is one of only four main sections in the paper each day). Apparently we want to know who our good high school athletes are, and what they are achieving, and what they look like, etc.
There is another group in our high schools, which might be called not “scholar-athletes,” but perhaps “scholar scholars,” as their achievements are in the academic work for which, some believe, we build our schools with our taxes in the first place. But we tell those “scholar scholars” that we really don’t want to know them. Their work does not appear in The Boston Globe. Their pictures and stories do not appear in the three-a-year Special Supplements or in the daily paper (there is no “academics” section in the paper of course), or even in their local high school newspaper.
Whenever the subject of students who do exemplary academic work in our schools comes up, our cliché response tends to be that “they can take care of themselves.” But if we don’t seem to feel that good high school athletes should have to get along in anonymity, why do we think that anonymity for our best high school students will serve them (and us) well enough, in our education system, and in the country, which is in a serious fight to stay up with other countries who take their best students and their academic achievement very seriously indeed.
Sometimes when I mention that it might serve us well if we gave some recognition to our best high school “scholar scholars” people say that I must be “against sports.” I am not. I am just critical of the huge imbalance between our attention to athletes and what we give to scholars at the high school level. 100 to zero doesn’t make the best balance we can achieve in recognizing them, in my view.
Of course, I am biased, because for 25 years I have been publishing exemplary history research papers by high school students (so far 1,022 papers from 46 states and 38 other countries) in a unique quarterly journal, and none of them ever gets mentioned for their history scholarship in The Boston Globe. Folks tell me this practice is not limited to the Athens of America, of course.
If we are worried about the performance of our student athletes, then the relentless coverage of their efforts might seem justified. I know we are worried about the academic achievements of our public high schools, yet when scholar scholars in the high schools get published in The Concord Review (and then go on to Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton (as about 35% of our authors do), or get to be Rhodes Scholars (as several have), they don’t get mentioned in The Boston Globe. Actually one author, Jessica Leight from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, did get her picture in the paper when she got her Rhodes Scholarship, after being named Junior Eight Phi Beta Kappa and graduating summa cum laude at Yale, but no mention was made of her Emerson Prize-winning paper on Anne Hutchinson, which was published in that unique international journal when she was still in a local public high school.
So let’s do continue to praise our local high school athletes and their coaches. But isn’t it time at long last now to think about the message such publicity sends to our diligent and successful scholar scholars and their coaches (I mean their teachers–who are also ignored) about what we value as a society? Why has it been so important all these years to send them, when they are doing not only what we ask them to do in school, but well above and beyond what we have expected, the message that, sorry, but “We Don’t Want to Know About You”?
The Concord Review

Erin Loury, via a kind Richard Askey email:

Monkeys banging on typewriters might never reproduce the works of Shakespeare, but they may be closer to reading Hamlet than we thought. Scientists have trained baboons to distinguish English words from similar-looking nonsense words by recognizing common arrangements of letters. The findings indicate that visual word recognition, the most basic step of reading, can be learned without any knowledge of spoken language.
The study builds on the idea that when humans read, our brains first have to recognize individual letters, as well as their order. “We’re actually reading words much like we identify any kind of visual object, like we identify chairs and tables,” says study author Jonathan Grainger, a cognitive psychologist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, and Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France. Our brains construct words from an assembly of letters like they recognize tables as a surface connected to four legs, Grainger says.
Much of the current reading research has stressed that readers first need to have familiarity with spoken language, so they can connect sounds (or hand signs for the hearing-impaired) with the letters they see. Grainger and his colleagues wanted to test whether it’s possible to learn the letter patterns of words without any idea of what they mean or how they sound–that is, whether a monkey could do it.

newton:

A new method of teaching is turning the traditional classroom on its head.

Libby Nelson:

WASHINGTON — A long-held wish of many community colleges is on the verge of becoming reality: the Education Department has announced its plans to change how student success is measured in higher education, taking into account students who transfer, part-time students and students who are not attending college for the first time.
The department outlined its plans Wednesday to carry out the recommendations of the Committee on Measures of Student Success, a federal panel that called for changing how data on completion rates and other measures at community colleges is reported in the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System, or IPEDS.

Ed Wallace:

A question asked in numerous stories a week ago was put best in a headline at the Atlantic: “Why Don’t Young Americans Buy Cars?” A year or so ago, of course, the question was why young people don’t read a newspaper; and before that it was something else young people don’t do that we seem to expect them to. While it’s been a great while since I sat inside dealerships to see exactly what the demographical makeup of their buyers was in any given month, it was fairly obvious decades ago that the makeup of car buyers was changing dramatically.
The Atlantic story gave out a few important facts, including that only half of kids 19 or younger now hold a driver’s license, down from “nearly two-thirds in 1998.” Following that statistic the magazine covered CNW Marketing Research’s study, which showed that young adults “between the ages of 21 and 34 buy just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America.” And that was down by 11 percentage points from 1985.
The Automotive News, in a similar story, pointed out that in 1983 fully 94 percent of persons in their 20s held a driver’s license as compared to just 84 percent today.y

Jamie Smyth:

Dublin plans to remove hundreds of schools from the control of the Roman Catholic Church to reflect Ireland’s increasingly diverse population, in the biggest shake-up of its education system in almost a century.
Ruairi Quinn, Ireland’s minister for education, said on Tuesday that there was a need to transfer the patronage of hundreds of Roman Catholic schools to provide more choice for people of other faiths and reflect changes that had taken place in Irish society.
The proposals come amid a bitter debate about the role of the Church in Irish society, prompted by revelations of clerical child sex abuse and subsequent cover-ups by the Church authorities. But they also follow a sharp rise in the number of foreign-born residents – which now account for 17 per cent of the Irish population, up from 6 per cent in 1991 – as well as a growing secularisation of society.

Gillian Tett:

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column lamenting the dismal state of America’s local public sector pensions system. For with some $3,000bn (or more) of unfunded liabilities, the maths looks truly alarming – particularly given the gridlock besetting so much of the American political machine.
But what my column did not address, for reasons of space, was what might fix these woes. So, in the spirit of spring (and Easter) cheer, it is worth noting one small example where a local American government is now attempting some fiscal rebirth – not least because it holds some intriguing lessons for investors, both in America and Europe.
The location in question is Rhode Island, the iconic north eastern US state. Three years ago, this epitomised everything wrong with American state finances: the public pension fund was underfunded by more than 50 per cent, and it looked as if the state would soon be using a third of all its annual tax revenue to meet claims. Big spending cuts loomed, and the unions and politicians were at loggerheads.

Pete Brook:

On any given night in the U.S., there are approximately 60,500 youth confined in juvenile correctional facilities or other residential programs. Photographer Richard Ross has spent the past five years criss-crossing the country photographing the architecture, cells, classrooms and inhabitants of these detention sites.
The resulting photo-survey, Juvenile-In-Justice, documents 350 facilities in over 30 states. It’s more than a peek into unseen worlds — it is a call to action and care.
“I grew up in a world where you solve problems, you don’t destroy a population,” says Ross. “To me it is an affront when I see the way some of these kids are dealt with.”

Danny Hakim:

Public employees are working without contracts in cities and counties across New York State, as labor negotiations stall because local governments say they cannot afford to raise wages.
But many union members are still taking home larger paychecks, thanks to a state law that allows workers to continue receiving longevity-based salary increases after their contracts expire.
The pattern is seen throughout the state. All labor contracts in Albany, New Rochelle and Yonkers have expired. So have seven of nine contracts in Syracuse, six of eight in Buffalo and most of the contracts in New York City.

Nakonia (Niki) Hayes:

As a teacher and administrator for 28 years, I rebelled against the disastrous fad of constructivism that began in the 1980’s. While its drumbeaters declared it was a higher form of intellectualism, it didn’t seem all that “intelligent” to me. Frankly, I thought it would help create failures among all groups of students–regular, special, and gifted.
For those who don’t know what “constructivism” is, it is an educational theory that, in practice, looks like this in America’s classrooms:

Tom Breen:

For Bill Zandi, the son of Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi, enrolling as a student at a prestigious private institution like Wake Forest University was less surprising than the student’s choice of major: philosophy.
“Originally I was going to follow in my dad’s footsteps, but I’ve always been more interested in philosophical ideals,” the younger Zandi said.
With the cost of higher education soaring, from Ivy League schools to community colleges, an increasingly loud chorus of voices is questioning whether the results justify the cost, and whether the traditional liberal arts education, with its ideal of shaping well-rounded lives, is outmoded in the contemporary world of high-tech work.

Matthew DeFour:

Madison School District property taxes would increase 4.1 percent, or about $10 million, under superintendent Dan Nerad’s proposed 2012-13 budget.
The increase would be a change from last year’s $245 million school property levy, which was a slight decrease from the previous year.
The district estimates a $255 million levy would increase property taxes by $108 on an average Madison home. However, updated property assessments for the city won’t be available until the end of next week, city assessor Mark Hanson said.
The $379.3 million proposed budget would increase total spending by $6.3 million, or 1.7 percent, from this past year’s budget.
The district is increasing property taxes partly to keep up with state-imposed revenue limits and qualify for additional state aid, Nerad said.

Notes and links on the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 budgets.

Steve Peha:

The recent draft release of a Common Core exemplar lesson on The Gettysburg Address caused quite a kerfuffle.
Proponents of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) approach view the lesson as a strong example of good teaching. It’s tightly scripted and focused on a particular view of “close reading” through instructions like the following:
“Refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset…. This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students as they seek to comprehend Lincoln’s address.”

Teresa Watanabe and Howard Blume:

It’s 7:30 a.m. and the chief of the Los Angeles Unified School District briskly launches a powwow on the sensitive topic of how to place the strongest math teachers with the weakest students.
Supt. John Deasy leads two dozen administrators through statistics showing the schools where the district’s most effective algebra instructors teach. They brainstorm incentives to get principals and teachers to buy into the plan, aimed at raising abysmal scores on state math tests. Some may believe it a waste to put their best with the worst, one administrator cautions, but Deasy’s response is quick and characteristically blunt:
“You really shouldn’t teach in LAUSD if you believe that,” he says.

Tina Barseghian:

Much of the anxiety around tweens and social media lies in the fear that they don’t care about or understand privacy settings. Parents worry that kids will either willingly or unintentionally expose themselves to dangerous anonymous predators, or that they don’t fully understand that the information they share about themselves can be used against them.
But tweens are much more savvy about their privacy settings than adults give them credit for, even when it comes to subtleties of “frenemies” dynamics, according to a small, qualitative study by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education that’s forthcoming in the journal Learning, Media, & Technology.
“Tweens value privacy, seek privacy from both strangers and known others online, and use a variety of strategies to protect their privacy online,” wrote researchers Katie Davis and Carrie James, who conducted in-depth interviews with 42 middle-school students for the study. “Tweens’ online privacy concerns are considerably broader than the ‘stranger danger’ messages they report hearing from teachers.”

Katy Murphy:

Bella Vista School teachers gathered on this last morning before spring break for a treat — breakfast prepared by three retired teachers. The delicious repast included home fries, grits, donuts, and cheesy scrambled eggs. Tired staff, looking forward to the coming break almost as much as their students, took time to gather, enjoy the food, and spend some time together before the last day.
Carolyn Matson, Louise Broome, and Karen Chin have always been generous when it comes to sharing their cooking gifts with the staff at Bella Vista; ask any member of the staff from the past four decades and she will remember a potluck (or several) featuring one of Mrs. Broome’s tasty cooked treats, and for the past several years the social committee has been helmed by the dedicated, enthusiastic Mrs. Matson and Ms. Chin.

David DeSchryver:

Change is difficult in public education. There are many reasons for this but the way we finance our schools is one of the larger obstacles. Our school districts are not set up to fund innovation. They distribute funds based on staff positions, personnel benefits, and selected programs. These expenses repeat annually and, over time, become entrenched costs. Anything new or different is usually just layered onto the base. Simply adding new programs to existing services may be feasible in good economic times, but it is not an option when funding is scarce.

Richard Rider:

I’ve written before about the absurdly low cost of California community colleges, and the resulting 30% class “drop rate.” Here’s a more national perspective on the widespread failure of community colleges to graduate students. It’s even worse than I thought.

Kimberly Hefling:

Students like Delano Coffy are at the heart of brewing political fights and court battles over whether public dollars should go to school vouchers to help make private schools more affordable.
He was failing in his neighborhood public elementary school in Indianapolis until his mother enrolled him in a Roman Catholic school. Heather Coffy has scraped by for years to pay the tuition for Delano, now 16 and in a Catholic high school, and his two younger siblings, who attend the same Catholic elementary as their brother did. She’s getting help today from a voucher program, passed last year at the urging of GOP Gov. Mitch Daniels, that allows her to use state money for her children’s education.
“I can’t even tell you how easy I can breathe now knowing that for at least for this year my kids can stay at the school,” said the single mother, who filed a petition in court in support of the law. The state Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to the law, which provides vouchers worth on average more than $4,000 a year to low- and middle-income families. A family of four making about $60,000 a year qualifies.

Andres Oppenheimer:

Two new studies confirm what we have long suspected: Latin American companies cannot effectively compete in the world economy because their countries’ educational systems are totally disconnected from reality.
The Global Information Technology Report 2012, a 442-page report by the World Economic Forum and the INSEAD business school, places most Latin American countries far behind the world’s most technologically connected countries in its ranking of “network readiness.”
The index takes into account various measurements, including internet use and people’s ability to use it productively, from international organizations and a survey of more than 15,000 executives worldwide.
According to the report, Latin America “continues to suffer from an important lag” in adopting information and communications technologies to improve countries’ competitiveness in a hyper-connected world.

Richard Garner:

The Government’s flagship free schools are seriously damaging the education of children in neighbouring schools, according to research published today.
Analysis of those free schools already approved by the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, reveals that many have been set up in areas where existing schools already have surplus places.
Their arrival has caused a loss of pupils for existing comprehensives – threatening their viability, says the report. In one school – an academy highly rated by Ofsted, the education standards watchdog – the headteacher estimated he will lose £1m a year as a result of a new free school being set up.
So far, 24 free schools have been opened by the Government – run by parents, teachers and faith groups. A further 70 will open in the next 12 months.

Matthew DiCarlo:

Education Week reports on the growth of websites that attempt to provide parents with help in choosing schools, including rating schools according to testing results. The most prominent of these sites is GreatSchools.org. Its test-based school ratings could not be more simplistic – they are essentially just percentile rankings of schools’ proficiency rates as compared to all other schools in their states (the site also provides warnings about the data, along with a bunch of non-testing information).
This is the kind of indicator that I have criticized when reviewing states’ school/district “grading systems.” And it is indeed a poor measure, albeit one that is widely available and easy to understand. But it’s worth quickly discussing the fact that such criticism is conditional on how the ratings are employed – there is a difference between the use of testing data to rate schools for parents versus for high-stakes accountability purposes.

Erin Allday:

Human beings have all kinds of irrational fears and anxieties about everyday objects and situations: spiders and snakes, heights and enclosed spaces, airplanes and needles. Math.
That last one, in fact, may be very common, just going by the number of adults who freely admit to hating math or being bad at it. That supposed dislike of math, scientists say, may be disguising a real phobia that probably begins at an early age.
Stanford researchers studying math anxiety in second- and third-grade students found that kids who were stressed about math had brain activity patterns similar to people with other phobias. When the children were faced with a simple addition problem, the parts of their brain that feel stress lit up – and the parts that are good at doing math deactivated.
Interestingly, the children with math anxiety weren’t actually bad at math – they got about the same number of answers right as their anxiety-free peers – but it took them more time to solve the problems.

Bob Sutton:

Last year, I wrote a post about how Justin Snider, who teaches education at Columbia, asserted that “the best principals are PRESENT, constantly interacting with teachers, students, and parents.” I was especially interested in his comment about an intriguing if rough measure of how well a principal is doing the presence thing:

“[A] great back-of-the-envelope measure of whether a principal is generally doing a good job is how many students’ names he or she knows. In my experience, there’s a strong correlation between principals who know almost all students by name and those who are respected (and seen as effective) by students, parents and teachers.”

I thought of Jason’s assertions about the power of presence after getting this depressing email from a middle school teacher about her horrible principal. This boss defines lack of presence. I have reprinted most of the story below in this teacher’s words, as I found it most compelling. But note the key point: “She never comes out of her office, and never spends time in the building, seeing how it functions. I can literally go weeks without catching sight of her.” Scary, huh?

Lisa Rein:

Federal agencies must report their progress this week in complying with the Plain Writing Act, a new decree that government officials communicate more conversationally with the public.
Speaking plainly, they ain’t there yet.
Which leaves, in the eyes of some, a basic and critical flaw in how the country runs. “Government is all about telling people what to do,” said Annetta Cheek, a retired federal worker from Falls Church and longtime evangelist for plain writing. “If you don’t write clearly, they’re not going to do it.”
But advocates such as Cheek estimate that federal officials have translated just 10 percent of their forms, letters, directives and other documents into “clear Government communication that the public can understand and use,” as the law requires.
Official communications must now employ the active voice, avoid double negatives and use personal pronouns. “Addressees” must now become, simply, “you.” Clunky coinages like “incentivizing” (first known usage 1970) are a no-no. The Code of Federal Regulations no longer goes by the abbreviation CFR.

Chris Rickert:

The ink on Madison School superintendent Dan Nerad’s resignation letter is barely dry and already the hand-wringing over finding his replacement has begun.
The applicant market is tight, the job is tough, other places offer more attractive terms, warn the school administrators professional association and executive search firms, who arguably have something of a vested interest in tight markets that drive up school administrators’ salaries and require executive search firms to navigate.
Not that the locals are doing much of a sell job. I’d be pretty freaked out about applying for a position with the kinds of very high, yet mostly nonspecific, expectations voiced by the education and community bigwigs quoted in this paper on Sunday. (What exactly is a “bridge builder that can create a bold vision,” as Michael Johnson, head of the county Boys & Girls Club, put it?)
Hiring Madison’s superintendent in these days of shrinking state aid, uncertain labor rules and an embarrassing racial achievement gap is not to be taken lightly.

Much more, here.

Alison Damast:

Kevin Wanek was one semester away from graduation at Western State College of Colorado in 2010 when he found himself in a bind. He no longer wanted to be an accountant, the field he had studied, but owed more than $50,000 in student loan payments to Wells Fargo (WFC)and other private lenders. Reluctant to take on further debt and close to reaching his borrowing limit, he decided to drop out. Says Wanek: “I started adding up what I owed, and it really hit me.”
Since he was a college dropout, his career options were limited, but he found an entry-level job at iTriage, a Denver-based mobile health-care application company. In the past two years, he has become a self-taught computer programmer and received a promotion. He now wants to go back to school and finish his degree online, this time with a focus on technology and computer science. But with nearly all his disposable income going toward his $600 monthly student loan payments, Wanek, 24, worries he’ll never be able to save enough money to complete his bachelor’s degree.

The Press Association:

UK schools are segregated along class lines, leaving the poorest children struggling to achieve against poverty and deprivation, a teachers leader has warned.
Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) said stratified schools are “toxic” for deprived youngsters as it means they fail to learn important qualities such as aspiration and effort from their richer classmates.
It is the coalition Government’s “dirty little secret” that their education cuts and reforms are making the lives of the poorest children tougher, she suggested. And she raised concerns that schools are held up as the scapegoat for educational failure, accusing ministers and Ofsted of “seeking to wash their hands, like Pontius Pilate” of the problem.
In her speech to ATL’s annual conference in Manchester, Dr Bousted said: “We have, in the UK, schools whose intakes are stratified along class lines. We have schools for the elite; schools for the middle class and schools for the working class.

Melissa Korn:

Knowledge is power.
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School hopes that knowledge is also a powerful branding message as it rolls out a new marketing campaign later this month.
The Philadelphia business school’s new advertising tagline, “Knowledge for…” will be completed with a variety of words–“action,” “global impact” and “life.”
“There was a certain inconsistency” in the school’s previous branding efforts, says Thomas Robertson, Wharton’s dean and a marketing professor. The school’s 20 research centers “weren’t immediately identifiable as Wharton.”

Pennsylvania Property Taxpayers Cyber Coalition:

n November 15, 2011, David Baldinger, Administrator of the Pennsylvania Taxpayers Cyber Coalition, gave a presentation on the school property tax problem and the Property Tax Independence Act solution to a group of concerned taxpayers. This meeting, sponsored by the Citizens For Constitutional Government, was held at the Quakertown Public Library in Bucks County, PA.
The event was attended by about fifty concerned taxpayers and was reported here in the Perkasie News-Herald.

aag.org:

The Association of American Geographers (AAG) will undertake one of the most ambitious and potentially far-reaching publication projects in the recent history of the fields of geography and GIScience. This will be a 15-volume work, to be published both in hard copy and online, tentatively entitled The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology.
This four-year project will engage geographers, GIScientists, and geographic societies around the globe, and its editors and contributors will reflect the international and interdisciplinary nature of our activities. The sheer scale of this undertaking, in terms of its length, depth, and international scope, has not, to my knowledge, been attempted before.

Josh Stevenson:

In January, The New York Times released a front-page report on the iEconomy, Apple’s vast and rapidly growing empire built on the production of tech devices almost exclusively overseas. The fascinating story created a wave of attention when it was published, and it’s back in the news after NPR’s “This American Life” retracted its story about working conditions at Foxconn, one of Apple’s key suppliers of iPhones and iPads.
The end of the “This American Life” episode includes a discussion (audio | transcript) between host Ira Glass and Charles Duhigg, the NYT reporter who wrote the iEconomy piece, on Apple’s supply chain and the reason the tech giant doesn’t produce its insanely popular devices in the U.S. Perhaps you thought the main reason was labor costs; Apple would have to pay American workers much more than the estimated $17 a day (or less) many Chinese workers at Foxconn make. That’s part of it, but “an enormously small part,” Duhigg told Glass.
Duhigg explained that, in terms of labor costs, producing the iPhone domestically would cost Apple an additional $10 (on the low end) to $65 (on the high end) more per phone. “Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward,” he wrote in the NYT piece.

CT state Sen. Toni Boucher:

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy maintains that education reform is the “civil rights issue of our time.”
Yet, the Education Committee chairs recently passed a watered down version of the governor’s original bill. The committee bill was heavily influenced and, many feel, was crafted by special interests behind closed doors.
There are provisions that all sides agree on such as the ability to hire teachers from other states by removing barriers; increased early childhood education slots for priority districts; and increasing grants for charter schools and non-Sheff magnet schools, but much more is left to be negotiated.
Areas still outstanding include:

Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg:

GIS and geospatial education are hot topics in 2012 as students try to find the right path to careers and employers try to select new contributing employees. These articles, podcasts and webinars reveal the variety of topics we covered in the first quarter of this year.

Julia Angwin & Jeremy Singer-Vine:

Many popular Facebook apps are obtaining sensitive information about users–and users’ friends–so don’t be surprised if details about your religious, political and even sexual preferences start popping up in unexpected places.
Not so long ago, there was a familiar product called software. It was sold in stores, in shrink-wrapped boxes. When you bought it, all that you gave away was your credit card number or a stack of bills.
Now there are “apps”–stylish, discrete chunks of software that live online or in your smartphone. To “buy” an app, all you have to do is click a button. Sometimes they cost a few dollars, but many apps are free, at least in monetary terms. You often pay in another way. Apps are gateways, and when you buy an app, there is a strong chance that you are supplying its developers with one of the most coveted commodities in today’s economy: personal data.

Kevin Carey:

In the grand University of California system, the Berkeley and UCLA campuses have long claimed an outsized share of the public imagination. It’s easy to forget that the state system has more than two great institutions of higher education. In the heart of the Central Valley, UC-Davis has grown in a hundred years from being the “university farm” to becoming one of the world’s most important research universities. Now it’s part of a process that may fundamentally redefine the credentials that validate higher learning.
Throughout the 20th century, scientists at UC-Davis, a land-grant institution, helped significantly increase crop yields while leading research on plant genetics, water conservation, and pest control. When the present century began, Davis leaders knew the times called for not just production but conservation and renewal. So they created a new, interdisciplinary major in sustainable agriculture and food systems. Many different departments were involved in crafting curricula that range across life sciences, economics, and humanities, along with experiential learning in the field.
The university also conducted a detailed survey of practitioners, scholars, and students to identify the knowledge, skills, and experiences that undergraduates most needed to learn. The survey produced answers like “systems thinking,” “strategic management,” and “interpersonal communication.” They sound like buzzwords–and they can be­–but if taken seriously are nothing of the kind. Simultaneously understanding the intricacies of hydrology and plant DNA, the economics of federal agricultural subsidization, and the politics of community development is a high order of systems thinking. The first students enrolled in the program this past fall.

Kevin Kiley:

A year ago, the notion that Smith College — with a $1 billion endowment, high student demand, and frequently cited educational quality — was raising existential questions, particularly about its economic model, seemed a fairly radical notion.
But an idea that seemed striking in the past — that elite liberal arts colleges might have to make significant changes in the next few years if they are to remain relevant (or present) in the current educational market — is now the hottest topic in the sector.
A conference this week here at Lafayette College entitled “The Future of the Liberal Arts College in America and Its Leadership Role in Education Around the World,” drew more than 200 college administrators, including about 50 college presidents, out of an invite list of U.S. News and World Report’s list of top national liberal arts colleges. Judging by the turnout, the discussion, and the fact that several other conferences addressing these questions are scheduled over the next few months, it’s clear that the questions are on everybody’s mind.

Philip Howard:

Successful schools don’t have a formula, other than that teachers and principals are free to follow their instincts.
America’s schools are being crushed under decades of legislative and union mandates. They can never succeed until we cast off the bureaucracy and unleash individual inspiration and willpower.
Schools are human institutions. Their effectiveness depends upon engaging the interest and focus of each student. A good teacher, studies show, can dramatically improve the learning of students. What do great teachers have in common? Nothing, according to studies — nothing, that is, except a commitment to teaching and a knack for keeping the students engaged (see especially The Moral Life of Schools). Good teachers don’t emerge spontaneously, and training and mentoring are indispensable. But ultimately, effective teaching seems to hinge on, more than any other factor, the personality of the teacher. Skilled teachers have a power to engage their students — with spontaneity, authority, and wit.

Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club.

Nathan Myers:

I found this essay in the Fall ’91 issue of Whole Earth Review. It finally clarified for me why American school is such a spirit-crushing experience, and suggested what to do about it.
Before reading, please set your irony detector to the on position. If you find yourself inclined to dismiss the below as paranoid, you should know that the design behind the current American school system is very well-documented historically, in published writings of dizzying cynicism by such well-known figures as Horace Mann and Andrew Carnegie.

Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:
The first lesson I teach is: “Stay in the class where you belong.” I don’t know who decides that my kids belong there but that’s not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.

Oliver Chou:

Global public health crisis and a fast-growing epidemic: these were the stark terms used by experts at an international summit held here last weekend to describe the cost of autism. The descriptions are backed up by grim figures. In South Korea, as many as one in 38 children are diagnosed as having autism spectrum disorders.
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reports prevalence at about one in 88 youngsters in the country. Hong Kong doesn’t have an official estimate, but groups say the number ranges from 70,000 to 200,000, depending on the screening criteria.

Jason Clayworth:

The Iowa Senate passed its version of education reform Monday, a significant step in what is becoming a legislative melee to find agreement between the governor and both parties in the final weeks before lawmakers go home.
Unlike Republican versions, the Senate’s doesn’t address such issues as high school student testing that would mandate end-of-course exams be factored into graduation requirements.
There are also key differences on how teachers would be evaluated, how online schools would be limited in scope and if third graders who fail to accomplish key literacy goals would be able to advance.

Linda Yeung:

A US-based arts college, which sparked controversy when it won the right to use a heritage site ahead of local groups, remains short of its recruitment target, 18 months after it opened.
The Hong Kong campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design, housed in the former North Kowloon Magistracy building in Sham Shui Po, cited an initial target of 300 students and an eventual enrolment of 1,500 in bidding for the site.

SRI International:

SRI International, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), and the University of Maine have received a $3.5 million award from the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education to evaluate the effectiveness of an online tutoring system for mathematics homework. The research team will study seventh-grade mathematics students and teachers in more than 50 schools throughout Maine using WPI’s ASSISTments system.
ASSISTments aims to transform homework by giving students instant feedback and tutoring adapted to their individual needs. It also provides teachers with customized reports each morning on their students’ nightly progress. Teachers in the study will receive training in how to use these reports to adapt their lesson plans to better suit students’ needs.

Angela Harrison:

A teachers’ union is calling for a boycott of a new phonics reading test, saying it risks making failures of five-year-olds.
The government in England wants all children to be taught to read using phonics, where they learn the sounds of letters and groups of letters.
And it says the new “phonics check” for five and six-year-olds will help identify children who need extra help.
But the National Union of Teachers says it will not tell teachers anything new.
And the union fears the results could be used in league tables.

TED Blog:

All semester, TED Fellow Nina Tandon has been using TED Conversations as part of her class in bioelectricity at Cooper Union. Yesterday in the TED offices, she hosted a Live TED Conversation to answer questions about using TED Conversations in her class. Here are some highlights:
Sarah Meyer: So your students asked questions of the TED community as they studied? Did any of their conversations get particularly good responses? Did you or your students learn anything from any of the comments?
Nina Tandon: We’ve been just blown away from the response — our TEDinClass Conversations, for example, have been trending in the top five for 9 weeks straight, and each conversation is being viewed in up to 60 countries. And in total, the conversations are reaching about half a million Facebook users via shares. The students are also learning a ton content-wise through responding to comments. And then there’s the more-difficult-to-measure but equally important lessons in poise and maturity that comes from leading. It’s been amazing.
Emily McManus: What did you worry about most when starting this experiment, and how did you control for it?

Associated Press:

Critics, including a U.S. senator, are convinced that a main motivation behind a plan to merge Rutgers University’s Camden campus into Rowan University is an effort to improve the Glassboro school’s financial position.
But Rowan officials say they don’t yet know how the money would work out. And it’s the same with the bond-rating agency that’s often cited in the debate.
“So many things could change, it’s hard to play the what-if game,” said a vice president and senior credit officer at Moody’s Investors Service, Edie Behr, who has studied the merger plans. “Who’s going to be responsible for the payment of which bonds? Whether bonds will be refinanced are restructured, whether the state will help to offset the costs in some way.”
Gov. Chris Christie is pushing for an agreement for the merger to be in place by July 1 as part of a bigger reconfiguration of the state’s higher-education system.
In addition to combining the two southern New Jersey campuses into an institution that would be treated as the state’s second comprehensive public research university, the University of Medicine and Dentistry would be broken up, with some of its schools being taken over by Rutgers and the remainder being renamed the New Jersey Health Sciences University.

Debra Monroe:

In the mid-1990s I set out to adopt a baby. I made phone calls to adoption agencies, and staff members asked warily if I’d consider a transracial adoption. I said yes. At one agency, the receptionist snapped: “Do you understand what transracial means?” Her tone startled me. “I think so,” I said, parsing syllables, “adoption across races.” Impatient, she said, “You’ll get a black baby!”
I lived in a small town without internet access and had done my research–on adoption laws, policy, advice–at a library twenty miles away. I’d found references to a 1972 position paper issued by the National Association of Black Social Workers that objected to transracial adoption as “cultural genocide,” an understandable position, given the state of race relations in 1972. The few agencies that had been doing black-white adoptions stopped because of the position paper. I didn’t find references to a time when agencies started doing transracial adoptions again because the Metzenbaum Act–passed in 1994 to address the fact that children of color were overrepresented in the child welfare system–had been amended, making “race-matching” as the sole determinant for the placement of a child unambiguously illegal.
Some staff members welcomed the change but weren’t sure if adoptive parents would. Other staff members objected to the change–take the receptionist who’d thought I must not know what transracial meant based on my answer. In the end, I used an agency whose staff members were able to discuss race without anger or recoil.

Scott Jaschik, via a kind reader’s email:

Most elite colleges and universities describe their admissions policies as “holistic,” suggesting that they look at the totality of an applicant — grades, test scores, essays, recommendations, activities and so forth.
But a new survey of admissions officials at the 75 most competitive colleges and universities (defined as those with the lowest admit rates) finds that there are distinct patterns, typically not known by applicants, that differentiate some holistic colleges from others. Most colleges focus entirely on academic qualifications first, and then consider other factors. But a minority of institutions focuses first on issues of “fit” between a college’s needs and an applicant’s needs.
This approach — most common among liberal arts colleges and some of the most competitive private universities — results in a focus on non-academic qualities of applicants, and tends to favor those who are members of minority groups underrepresented on campus and those who can afford to pay all costs of attending.

Further discussion, here.

I majored in English literature at Harvard, and had such wonderful professors as B.J. Whiting for Chaucer, Alfred Harbage for Shakespeare, Douglas Bush for Milton, Walter Jackson Bate for Samuel Johnson, and Herschel Baker for Tudor/Stuart Drama. In my one year at Cambridge after graduation, I had the benefit of lectures by Clive Staples Lewis, F.R. Leavis, Joan Bennett, and R.T.H. Redpath.
But in high school and in college I didn’t read any history books and I didn’t think twice about it. Many years later, when I was asked to teach United States History at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I panicked. I read Samuel Eliot Morison’s Oxford History of the American People to get started and I have been reading history books ever since (thirty years), but I never knew enough history to be as good a history teacher as my students deserved.
Since 1987, (I left teaching in 1988) I have been the editor of The Concord Review, the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students, and we have now published 1,022 history research papers by high school students from 46 states and 38 other countries. This has only increased my understanding that high school students should be not only encouraged to read complete history books (as I never was in school) but assigned them as well. It is now my view that unless students in our high schools get used to reading at least one complete history book each year, they will not be as well prepared for the books on college nonfiction reading lists as they should be.
In addition, as adherents to the ideas of E.D. Hirsch know well, understanding what one reads depends on the prior knowledge of the reader, and by reading history books our high schools students will learn more history and be more competent to read difficult nonfiction material, including more history books, in college.
When I discuss these thoughts, even with my good friends in the education world, I find a strange sort of automatic reversion to the default. When I want to talk about reading nonfiction books, suddenly the conversation is about novels. Any discussion of reading nonfiction in the high schools always, in my experience, defaults to talk of literature. It seems virtually impossible to anyone discussing reading to relax the clutches of the English Departments long enough even to consider that a history book might make good reading material for our students, too. Try it sometime and see what I mean.
I realize that most Social Studies and History Departments have simply given up on having students read a history book, even in those few cases where they may have tried in the past. They are almost universally content, it seems, to leave the assignment of books (and too much of the writing as well) entirely in the hands of their English Department colleagues.
One outcome of this, in my view, is that even when the Common Core people talk about the need for more nonfiction, it is more than they can manage to dare to suggest a list of complete history books for kids to read. So we find them suggesting little nonfiction excerpts and short speeches to assign, along with menus, brochures, and bus schedules for the middle schoolers. Embarrassing.
Nevertheless, if asked, what history books would I suggest? Everyone is afraid to mention possible history books if they are not about current events, or civics, or some underserved population, for fear of a backlash against the whole idea of history books.
But I will offer these: Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough for Freshmen, Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer for Sophomores, Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson for Juniors, and The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough for Seniors in high school.
Obviously there are thousands of other good history books, and students should be free to read any of these as they work on their Extended History Essays or the very new Capstone Essays the College Board is beginning to start thinking about. And of course I do realize that some history took place before 1620 and even in countries other than our own, but these books are good ones, and if students read them they will actually learn some history, but perhaps more important, they will learn that reading a real live nonfiction history book is not beyond their reach. I dearly wish I had learned that when I was in high school.
www.tcr.org

Associated Press:

The Board of Trustees at Santa Monica College voted Friday to postpone a two-tiered fee increase that led to angry campus protests where students were pepper-sprayed.
The board decided at an emergency meeting to delay a plan to deal with budget cuts by offering high-demand core courses at about four times the regular price.
The 6-0 vote followed the recommendation of college President Chui Tsang, who circulated a memo before the meeting urging that the plan be put on hold at least for summer classes to allow more time for community input.
His request to the board also reflected the college funding woes that prompted the fee plan.

Daniel Willingham:

The insidious thing about tests is that they seem so straightforward. I write a bunch of questions. My students try to answer them. And so I find out who knows more and who knows less.
But if you have even a minimal knowledge of the field of psychometrics, you know that things are not so simple.
And if you lack that minimal knowledge, Howard Wainer would like a word with you.
Wainer is a psychometrician who spent many years at the Educational Testing Service and now works at the National Board of Medical Examiners. He describes himself as the kind of guy who shouts back at the television when he sees something to do with standardized testing that he regards as foolish. These one-way shouting matches occur with some regularity, and Wainer decided to record his thoughts more formally.

PDF Solidarity Newsletter:

Among the excellent benefits available to MTI members is the additional worker’s compensation benefit provided by MTI’s various Collective Bargaining Agreements.
Wisconsin Statutes provide a worker’s compensation benefit for absence caused by a work-related injury or illness, but such commences on the 4th day of absence and has a maximum weekly financial benefit.
MTI’s Contracts provide one’s full wage, beginning on day one of an absence caused by a work-related injury or illness, with no financial maximum. Also, under MTI’s Contract provision, one’s earned sick leave is not consumed by such an absence.
Although MTI is working to preserve this benefit, it is at risk due to Governor Walker’s Act 10.

Kevin Carey:

American college students now owe more than $1 trillion on their student loans, more than total borrowing on credit cards or auto loans. Given how much people in our society like to drive cars and put their shopping bills on plastic, this is an astonishing sum. Borrowing for higher education used to be rare. Now students routinely leave college with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and, in the current job market, shaky prospects for paying it back.
The average amount of student debt carried in the United States by graduating seniors? $25,000. But many owe more than twice that, and forget about it if you plan to get a professional degree.
This represents an inter-generational betrayal with far-reaching consequences for the shape of civic life. Basically, our parents have sold us out.

Erin Richards:

After narrowly missing the cutoff last year to receive a share of $500 million to support early childhood education, Wisconsin has been offered another opportunity to apply for federal funding for its youngest learners, U.S. Education Department officials announced Monday.
The pool of grant money — $133 million — is smaller this time, but Wisconsin’s chances of winning are better than before because it would be competing against only four other states.
Department officials said the second round of the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge will be open to Wisconsin, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico and Oregon — all states that barely missed the minimum score needed to receive funding in the first round.
Wisconsin’s score sheet from the first round shows it received 234 points out of a possible 300, but department officials said Monday that score had been revised to 224. They said the scores were revised for five states because of “inconsistencies” the department noticed in its review of applicant and reviewer feedback. The revised scores did not affect the overall outcome of the first round of the competition.

Ken Miller:

The Oklahoma Board of Education approved six public schools Monday that must work with the state Department of Education to improve student performance.
The board chose the six as “priority schools,” though delayed action on a seventh school that department officials wanted on the list.
The department initially identified 75 schools as the lowest-performing in Oklahoma in terms of student achievement, then cut the list to seven. The criteria included being in the bottom 5 percent in reading and math scores, having graduation rates below 60 percent and receiving federal School Improvement Grants.
The board agreed with the department to list Keyes Elementary, Farris Public Schools, Okay High School, McLain High School in Tulsa, and Shidler Elementary School and Roosevelt Middle School in Oklahoma City.

Wisconsin State Journal:

Sometimes public education can be like the weather: Everybody wants to talk about it, but nobody ever does anything about it.
The school-focused Planning for Greatness initiative in Madison aims for talking, yes; but especially, the project aims for doing things to improve and revitalize our public education system.
The effort launched back in November, followed by a series of large-group discussions involving educators and community leaders. Now, Planning for Greatness is entering a key “next phase” moment, as those initial discussions have produced a series of eight key topics.
One smaller “study group” session has already been held — on the topic of early childhood learning opportunities — and the other seven study group sessions designed to dig into the priority topics start Monday.
All the topics make sense, and are critical to any desire to rethink how we do public education, and how our community is involved in that process. Planning for Greatness is first on a deep fact-finding mission — which is what the upcoming study groups are all about — and ultimately will make recommendations and proposals for improving our schools and the school/community interaction.

Rachel Louise Ensign & Melissa Korn:

So Harvard has put you–or someone you know–on its waitlist. Great news! Or maybe not.
A spot on a waitlist from an elite school doesn’t necessarily mean a candidate is closer to the finish line. Some may be waitlisted, for example, because though their grades weren’t quite good enough or they didn’t take enough advanced placement classes, they still piqued the interest of admissions officers. Others are offered spots purely out of courtesy, such as family members of alumni or children of donors who failed to make the academic cut.
Schools often pad their waitlists to protect their “yield,” or the proportion of accepted students who choose to attend. They can admit fewer students on the first pass, to maintain their aura of exclusivity, then move on to the waitlist if accepted students turn them down.

Laura De-Roche Perez, via a kind email:

On Monday May 7, 2012 from 12-130 pm, the Department of Educational Policy Studies at UW-Madison will host a brownbag on the topic “What is the Madison Metropolitan School District achievement gap — and what can be done about it?” It will feature EPS faculty and affiliates Harry Brighouse, Adam Gamoran, Nancy Kendall, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Linn Posey.
The brownbag will take place in the Wisconsin Idea Room at the Education Building, 1000 Bascom Mall.

Much more on Adam Gamoran, including a video interview, here.

Jay Matthews:

You may have seen that Harvard just set a record for low undergraduate admission rate. Only 5.9 percent of applicants for the class of 2016 were accepted. I was going to do one of my many rants on why we should wake up and see that being admitted to the Ivies and certain other schools is no more a sign of depth and brilliance than winning the Mega Millions lottery. I was going to point out that Harvard could admit a full class of its rejects that would be just as good as the students it accepted. But I already wrote a book about that, “Harvard Schmarvard.” And yesterday I got an e-mail that says it better than I ever did.
So I offer this as a theme for this week’s discussion. The writer declined to be identified other than as “Concerned Student.” I usually don’t print anonymous contributions, but I am making an exception in this case since he speaks well for his college age group. Tell us what you think.
By “Concerned Student”

Matthew DeFour:

WANTED: A K-12 schools leader with experience uniting a divided community, managing tight budgets and closing achievement gaps in an urban school setting.
PROBLEM: A shrinking pool of such dynamic leaders and a growing number of urbanizing districts like Madison seeking top talent.
“It is a tight market,” said Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “The number of experienced superintendents that have done well in their districts and have the reputation of having done well — those are relatively few and those are the ones that everyone is going after.”
Madison will soon be conducting a search for a new schools chief after superintendent Dan Nerad announced he plans to depart by June 2013, when his current contract expires. He recently was named a finalist for a superintendency in Omaha, Neb., and though he wasn’t selected, he hasn’t ruled out moving to another job before the next school year starts.
Though Nerad’s time in Madison will have been short-lived compared to his predecessor, Art Rainwater, who retired after 10 years, the average superintendent in a mid- to large-sized city holds the job for an average of 3.5 years, Domenech said.

Much more on the Madison Superintendent search, here.

Mike Antonucci:

While you may find debatable much of Mark Brenner’s editorial at Labor Notes, you will also find some important insights regarding the decision by the California Federation of Teachers to drop its “millionaire’s tax” initiative and hammer out a deal with Gov. Jerry Brown and the California Teachers Association.
It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here a few excerpts:

Paul Jablow:

If you’ve never heard of the Common Core standards, it’s time to take note: They could have a big effect on what students will learn – and maybe also on the tests that measure their progress.
This attempt at creating uniform academic standards stringent enough to ensure that students in every state are ready for college or career has been years in the making. It is being pushed by the Obama administration, with help from organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The goal is to raise the bar nationally and make American students more competitive with those abroad.
Longtime proponents point out that individual state standards are all over the place in terms of rigor and expectations. They argue that clear standards for what students at each grade level should know and be able to do, drawn up by top educators and used nationwide, can benefit everyone. And they say it doesn’t require dictating what happens in the classroom.

Barry Adams:

Beloit has the state’s highest unemployment rate at 12.5 percent, and property values in the Beloit School District averge $198,000 per student — one of the lowest ratios in the state.
But on Tuesday, voters in the southern Rock County school district approved one of the costliest referendums in state history.
The $70 million plan to renovate most schools in the district, build a middle school and a pool, is being called historic for the city. It will not only benefit education but, according to supporters, serve as a catalyst for economic development.
“From a marketing aspect, I shuddered every time I saw the figures. It’s a heck of a lot of money,” said Randy Upton, president of the Greater Beloit Chamber of Commerce, which publicly supported the plan. “By providing the facilities, it’s going to make people proud and make people look at Beloit as a place to live and invest.”
Beloit wasn’t alone Tuesday in its referendum success.

Jennifer Conlin:

HARDLY a week goes by without an article or a book suggesting the newest, best — or oldest, but still best — way to raise a child. The most recent fixation is with the supposed superiority of the French.
I have been reading with great nostalgia Pamela Druckerman’s musings on the calmness of French parenting in “Bringing Up Bébé.” I too was a parent in France, having given birth to my son there some 15 years ago, after having a daughter, now 20, in England, and her sister, now 16, in Belgium.
In fact, it wasn’t until 18 months ago, when my husband and I finally returned to the States, that I first experienced motherhood in America. Until then, all I knew were the joys of European parenting as presented by Ms. Druckerman, from the way my children ate everything from coq au vin to kedgeree to our tranquil family life of weekend walks, nightly dinners and relaxing vacations.

Alan Borsuk:

Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Gregory Thornton was fired up when he spoke recently to a crowd of about 250 at a north side church. I need your help, he told the audience. Help me tear down MPS and build up a better one.
I don’t think I’d ever heard a school superintendent say he wants to tear down the system he heads, but I understand where Thornton was going. The status quo in MPS is not so thrilling. Some things have to go if you want to get to a better place.
But I have a serious concern that, because of circumstances mostly beyond Thornton’s control, things may be going better on the “tearing down” side of Milwaukee Public Schools than on the “building up” side.
What does it take to have a successful school system? Let’s focus on a few key ingredients: People, money and a unifying, energizing sense of mission.
People, both in terms of quality and numbers. MPS is in a precarious state on these scores. When teachers voted a week ago by a decisive margin not to give up a week’s pay next year to ease cuts in classroom services, they played a serious part in the unfolding plot for 2012-’13 to be a grim year for MPS.

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Phil Gramm & Steve McMillin:

In the stagnant days of the Carter administration, when inflation was approaching 13.5% and interest rates were peaking at 21.5%, income was more evenly distributed than in any period in 20th-century America. Since the days of that equality in misery, the measured income of the top 1% of income tax filers has risen over three and a half times as fast as the income of the population as a whole.
This growth in income inequality is largely the result of three dynamics:
1) Changes in the way Americans pay taxes and manage their investments, which were a direct result of reductions in marginal tax rates.
2) A dynamic shift in the labor-capital ratio, resulting from the adoption of market-based economies around the world.

Richard Perez- Pena:

How well does a college teach, and what do its students learn? Rankings based on the credentials of entering freshmen are not hard to find, but how can students, parents and policy makers assess how well a college builds on that foundation?
What information exists has often been hidden from public view. But that may be changing.
In the wake of the No Child Left Behind federal education law, students in elementary, middle and high schools take standardized tests whose results are made public, inviting anyone to assess, however imperfectly, a school’s performance. There is no comparable trove of public data for judging and comparing colleges.

Mike Ford:

In other words, MPS had a surplus of teachers because older teachers were not retiring so as not to lose state pension benefits. Hence, a second pension to offset any loss was created. However, since 1982 the early retirement penalty for teacher has been reduced or eliminated, turning the second pension into an additional benefit which MPS states it had “no intent to establish.”
The survival of the second pension long past its justifiable usefulness is a result of a collective bargaining process that rarely gives back established benefits (see, for example, MTEA’s 2011 rejection of concessions that would have saved teacher jobs). Former MPS superintendent Howard Fuller, school choice advocate George Mitchell, and former WPRI staffer Michael Hartman did a good job documenting in a 2000 book chapter (see figure one) the dramatic growth of the MPS/MTEA contract from an 18 page document in 1965 to a 232 page document in 1997. The most recent published contract? 258 pages.

Much more, here.

Anna Phillips:

Leaders of a national education reform movement, including Joel I. Klein and Michelle Rhee, the former schools chancellors in New York and Washington, have formed a statewide political group in New York with an eye toward being a counterweight to the powerful teachers’ union in the 2013 mayoral election.
The group, called StudentsFirstNY, is an arm of a national advocacy organization that Ms. Rhee founded in 2010. Like the national group, the state branch will promote the expansion of charter schools and the firing of ineffective schoolteachers, while opposing tenure.
Led by Micah Lasher, who is leaving his job next week as the director of state legislative affairs for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the campaign is beginning while advocates of reform have an ally in the mayor. But their eyes are focused on 2014, when a new mayor — most likely one who is more sympathetic to the teachers’ union than Mr. Bloomberg has been — enters office.

Richard Vedder:

Here is arguably the most startling statistic you have heard this year: It is likely that there are at least as many adult Americans with student-loan debts outstanding as there are living bachelor’s degree recipients who ever took out student loans. That’s right: as many debtors as degree holders! How can that be? First, huge numbers of those borrowing money never graduate from college. Second, many who borrow are not in baccalaureate degree programs. Three, people take forever to pay their loans back.
Let’s do the math. Recent data suggest there are about 40 million holders of student-loan debt. The New York Fed in a study puts the number a little lower, but estimates by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) suggest a somewhat higher figure. There are, give or take a million, roughly 60 million college graduates. Yet a good proportion, somewhere around one-third, of college graduates, never borrowed money to go to college (that is probably doubly true of graduates in the early 1990s). In other words, at most 40 million adults with four-year degrees borrowed money. Bottom line: an awful lot of people borrow to go to college and never graduate, and/or take forever to pay off their student loans.

Jordan Weissman:

Traditionally, for-profit colleges have operated on the lowest rungs of America’s educational ladder, catering to poor and lower-middle-class students looking for a basic, convenient degree or technical training. Aspiring Ivy Leaguers have remained far out of the industry’s sites.
That is, until now.
This week, the Minerva Project, a startup online university, announced that it had received $25 million in seed financing from Benchmark Capital, a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm known for its early investments in eBay, among other successful web companies. Minerva bills itself as “the first elite American university to be launched in a century,” and promises to re-envision higher education for the information age. The chairman of its advisory board: Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and Harvard president. Among others, he’s joined on the board by Bob Kerry, the former United States senator and president of The New School.

Helene Mulholland:

Schools could be hit by fresh waves of strikes from this summer after two teaching unions put the government on notice that they intend to continue their campaign against the government’s planned reforms to their pensions.
The National Union of Teachers passed a resolution behind closed doors at its annual conference in Torquay seeking fresh walkouts as early as this summer amid concerns over the government’s changes to public sector pensions.
The resolution was passed just hours after the NASUWT, which is holding its conference in Birmingham, agreed to step up its industrial action campaign against what they see as a series of attacks on pay, pensions, working conditions and job losses – raising the possibility of strikes in the autumn term.

Superintendent Dan Nerad:

This memo is follow up to a discussion of MMSD high school completion rates and on track status from February. Highlights of this follow up are:

• Preparedness matters. Results from the Kindergarten Screener are predictive of a student’s likelihood of completing high school. Of students starting their school years unprepared, over 25% will drop out and nearly half will take longer than four years to complete high school.
• Attendance matters. Over half of the students with a high school attendance rate less than 80% will drop out.
• Credits matter. Students not earning the required number of credits in Grade 9 are less likely to complete high school. Students earning one credit or less face a dropout rate of 63%.
• Tenure matters. The length of time a student is with MMSD or in one of its high schools has an impact on the likelihood he or she will earn a diploma or equivalency. Getting a student to attend longer than his or her first year is critical.
• Behavior matters. Students with one or more suspensions per year complete high school only one third of the time.

Revised on track calculations still indicate a decline among Hispanic, black and ELL students. However, the decline is not as pronounced as it was once the numbers for 2009-10 presented in February were revisited.
The Board had also asked about the characteristics of certain students. Students enrolled less than four years with MMSD are more likely to be black, Hispanic, low income, and ELL. They are less likely to have earned 5.5 credits in Grade 9 and are less likely to have high attendance. Interestingly, they are less likely to be identified as special ed and are less likely to have been suspended. These may reflect the shorter duration of their enrollment with MMSD.
Black students known to be continuing beyond four years in high school are more likely to be low income, special ed, enroll in SAPAR, and have at least on out-of-school suspension. They are also less likely to have earned 5.5 credits in Grade 9.

Deena Winter:

Omaha’s new school superintendent is no stranger to controversy, having survived nepotism charges as the schools’ chief in Des Moines.
Nancy Sebring’s tenure presiding over 31,000 Des Moines students since 2006 has been controversial at times – particularly when her twin sister was hired as director of Des Moines’ first charter school 15 months ago.
Despite questions about how her sister got the job, Sebring has said she had nothing to do with an advisory board’s decision. The charter school’s launch has been rocky. It opened six months behind schedule and enrollment has not met projections, with 40 percent of students leaving its first year. The school has not provided quarterly reports as required and its budget is nearly twice as big as projected, according to the Des Moines Register.

Alexandra Chang:

Math nerds and historians, it’s time to get excited. Minds of Modern Mathematics, a new iPad app released Thursday by IBM, presents an interactive timeline of the history of mathematics and its impact on society from 1000 to 1960.
The app is based on an original, 50-foot-long “Men of Modern Mathematics” installation created in 1964 by Charles and Ray Eames. Minds of Modern Mathematics users can view a digitized version of the original infographic as well as browse through an interactive timeline with more than 500 biographies, math milestones and images of relevant artifacts.
IBM hopes that classes and students will use the app, provoking more people to pursue math, science or technology-related educations and jobs.
“Careers of the future will rely heavily on creativity, critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration — all themes that were core to the ‘Minds of Modern Mathematics’ movement and remain equally relevant today,” Chid Apte, IBM Director of analytics Research and Mathematical Sciences said in a press release. “What better way than a mobile app to reintroduce this timeless classic to inspire a new generation of learners?”

Chris Cook:

A teachers’ union leader has accused ministers of being “like Pontius Pilate”, seeking to avoid responsibility for the “educational failure over which they . . . have more control than anyone else”.
Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said on Wednesday that schools cannot close attainment gaps on their own: “If we are to raise educational standards we need to look at our schools, yes. But that is not enough.”
The ATL is the third-largest teachers’ union in the UK with 160,000 members. It is renowned for its moderate stance and is the largest union in independent schools. The ATL went on strike for the first time last year over pension rights.

Daniel A. Nerad, Nancy Yoder, Sally Schultz:

To meet the goal of “100 percent graduation,” the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) provides a mix of educational choices as diverse as the students and families it serves. The Alternative Education system is designed to give a wider range of appropriate education options to students. These alternatives provide a continuum of choices that allows students to develop skills and successfully transition to their next learning environment, whether that is a regular education classroom, another alternative setting, a post-secondary program, or an adult work setting.
Students with disabilities are eligible to attend any of the MMSD Alternative Programs. These students must meet eligibility criteria like any other student and go through the appropriate referral processes. An IEP [blekko clusty google] committee must recommend a change of placement before the student can attend. Some programs are designated for special education students, for students involved in the court system, for students in a specific high school attendance area or for students who meet

Dylan Pauly, Legal Services:

Dr. Nerad recently announced his retirement effective June 30, 2013. Consequently, over the next few months this Board will be required to begin its search for the next District leader. While some members of the Board were Board members during the search that brought Dr. Nerad to Madison, many were not. A number of members have asked me to provide some background information so that they may familiarize themselves with the process that was used in 2007. Consequently, I have gathered the following documents for your review:
1. Request for Proposals: Consultation Services for Superintendent Search, Proposal 3113, dated March 19, 2007;
2. Minutes from Board meetings on February 26,2007, and March 12,2007, reflecting Board input and feedback regarding draft versions ofthe RFP;
3. Contract with Hazard, Young and Attea;
4. A copy of the Notice of Vacancy that was published in Education Week;
5. Minutes from a Board meeting on August 27, 2007, which contains the general timeline used to complete the search process; and,
6. Superintendent Search- Leadership Profile Development Session Schedule, which reflects how community engagement was handled during the previous search.
It is also my understanding that the Board may wish to create an ad hoc committee to handle various procedural tasks related to the search process. In line with Board Policy 1041, I believe it is appropriate to take official action in open session to create the new ad hoc. I recommend the following motion:

Dave Zweiful shares his thoughts on Dan Nerad’s retirement.
Related: Notes and links on Madison Superintendent hires since 1992.

Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater’s recent public announcement that he plans to retire in 2008 presents an opportunity to look back at previous searches as well as the K-12 climate during those events. Fortunately, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, we can quickly lookup information from the recent past.

The Madison School District’s two most recent Superintendent hires were Cheryl Wilhoyte [Clusty] and Art Rainwater [Clusty]. Art came to Madison from Kansas City, a district which, under court order, dramatically increased spending by “throwing money at their schools”, according to Paul Ciotti:

2008 Madison Superintendent candidate public appearances:

• Dan Nerad
• Steve Gallon
• James McIntyre

The Madison Superintendent position’s success is subject to a number of factors, including: the 182 page Madison Teachers, Inc. contract, which may become the District’s handbook (Seniority notes and links)…, state and federal laws, hiring practices, teacher content knowledge, the School Board, lobbying and community economic conditions (tax increase environment) among others.

Superintendent Nerad’s reign has certainly been far more open about critical issues such as reading, math and open enrollment than his predecessor (some board members have certainly been active with respect to improvement and accountability). The strings program has also not been under an annual assault, lately. That said, changing anything in a large organization, not to mention a school district spending nearly $15,000 per student is difficult, as Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman pointed out in 2009.

Would things improve if a new Superintendent enters the scene? Well, in this case, it is useful to take a look at the District’s recent history. In my view, diffused governance in the form of more independent charter schools and perhaps a series of smaller Districts, possibly organized around the high schools might make a difference. I also think the District must focus on just a few things, namely reading/writing, math and science. Change is coming to our agrarian era school model (or, perhaps the Frederick Taylor manufacturing model is more appropriate). Ideally, Madison, given its unparalleled tax and intellectual base should lead the way.

Perhaps we might even see the local Teachers union authorize charters as they are doing in Minneapolis.

Nancy Kober and Alexandra Usher, via a kind Richard Askey email:

The 2012 Public Education Primer highlights important and sometimes little-known facts concerning the U.S. education system, how things have changed over time, and how they may change in the future. Together these facts provide a comprehensive picture of the nation’s public schools, including data about students, teachers, funding, achievement, management, and non-academic services.

nowoczesna Polska:

Polish Prime Minister Office yesterday accepted „Digital School program” with „Digital Textbooks” component included. With 45 million PLN (approx. 15 million USD) funding it has been the biggest governmental Open Educational Resources initiative in Poland so far. The government has decided to fund creating full set of educational materials for grades 4-6 (9-11 year olds). All those resources will be available under CC BY license, which is fully free license according to the Definition of Free Cultural Works.
„Digital School” program (with „Digital Textbooks” component) was initially drafted and proposed to the Prime Minister Office by Jarosław Lipszyc (Modern Poland Foundation), Piotr Pacewicz, Alicja Pacewicz (Center for Civic Education), Alek Tarkowski (Creative Commons Poland) with cooperation of Witold Przeciechowski (Prime Minister Office). All those organizations are members of Open Education Coalition, a network of NGOs and educational institutions promoting OER in Poland. This draft was accepted by Ministry of Education, but at a later stage of preparations the free licensing requirement was left out. Both Open Education Coalition and Modern Poland Foundation took part in the public consultation process; their comments in support of free licensing were taken on board in the very last minute. The final version of this program was yesterday accepted by the Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

Melissa Korn:

Undergraduate business majors are a dime a dozen on many college campuses. But according to some, they may be worth even less.
More than 20% of U.S. undergraduates are business majors, nearly double the next most common major, social sciences and history.
The proportion has held relatively steady for the past 30 years, but now faculty members, school administrators and corporate recruiters are questioning the value of a business degree at the undergraduate level.
The biggest complaint: The undergraduate degrees focus too much on the nuts and bolts of finance and accounting and don’t develop enough critical thinking and problem-solving skills through long essays, in-class debates and other hallmarks of liberal-arts courses.

Andrew Rotherham:

When a little girl, who I’ll call Tina, arrived in a pre-kindergarten program in Washington, D.C. she was unable to recognize any sounds or letters. By the time she left for kindergarten she knew all her letters and more sounds than D.C.’s standards require. Now, six years later, Tina’s teachers say she’s “on a roll” in school.
There are plenty of legitimate debates about what works in education, but the importance of early-childhood education is not one of them. High-quality early-childhood programs help kids in school and in life. Why? Research shows that good programs can improve a variety of outcomes and University of Chicago economist and Nobel Laureate James Heckman points out that dollars invested early are higher leverage than later remediation. But it’s also common sense. Tina’s teachers say that until she learned behavioral and participatory skills she was simply unable to engage with and benefit from instruction at school. It’s good for parents, too, because good programs teach them about how to be involved and advocate for their child’s education.

Eric Smith:

Last week, the nation’s top public school officials gathered in Washington, D.C. for the annual legislative conference of the Council of Chief State School Officers.
The hot topic, unsurprisingly, was the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary. Several attendees — charged with implementing the law in their respective states — have applied for federal waivers from this law.
Some school officials have found it difficult to meet the law’s standards requiring that every student — even those that are poor or in minority groups — make progress each year.
NCLB might need some tinkering. As the discussion about reauthorization continues, it’s vital for students and the future of this country that the core principles of accountability, transparency and equality be preserved.
The George W. Bush Institute recently released ten “principles” that serve as guidance for state accountability. These principles show how to build on the foundation established by NCLB and then further improve the key areas of standards, student groups, parental choice, and college and career readiness.

Noam Chomsky:

Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere.
California is also a battleground. The Los Angeles Times reports on another chapter in the campaign to destroy what had been the greatest public higher education system in the world: “California State University officials announced plans to freeze enrollment next spring at most campuses and to wait-list all applicants the following fall pending the outcome of a proposed tax initiative on the November ballot.”
Similar defunding is under way nationwide. “In most states,” The New York Times reports, “it is now tuition payments, not state appropriations, that cover most of the budget,” so that “the era of affordable four-year public universities, heavily subsidized by the state, may be over.”
Community colleges increasingly face similar prospects – and the shortfalls extend to grades K-12.

Melissa Korn:

More than ever, Chinese students have their sights set on U.S. graduate schools.
Application volume from that country rose 18% for U.S. master’s and doctoral programs starting this fall, according to a new report from the Council of Graduate Schools that provides a preliminary measure of application trends. Specific programs of interest include engineering, business and earth sciences.
That is on top of a 21% jump last year and a 20% rise in 2010–and is the seventh consecutive year of double-digit gains from China, according to the graduate-school industry group. Applications from China now comprise nearly half of all international applications to U.S. graduate programs.

JENNIFER LEVITZ, MELISSA KORN and SCOTT THURM:

Laura Marino, a senior at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J., was spooked last year when a recent graduate there was accepted to only a couple of colleges, despite having top grades and strong test scores.
So Ms. Marino spread applications far and wide, adopting an increasingly common strategy among prospective college students, many of whom have learned the fate of their applications in recent weeks. She applied to 14 colleges, including 1,177-student Haverford College in Haverford, Pa.; University of Michigan, with more than 27,000 undergraduates; and six of the eight Ivy League schools.

Cameron McWhirter:

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam is likely in the coming days to sign into law a bill requiring that public schools allow science teachers to discuss purported weaknesses of theories such as evolution and global warming in their classrooms.
Supporters, including a socially conservative organization in the state and supporters of creationism, say the law allows teachers and students to critique scientific theories they believe have flaws. They point out the bill says the law “shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine.”
No major cases of Tennessee science teachers being punished for questioning widely held theories have come to light, but the bill’s proponents argue it will provide a safeguard for those who want to raise questions.

George Lightbourn:

How did this happen? How did conservatives come to find themselves glaring across the battleground at tens of thousands of Wisconsin’s teachers? In the long run, the confrontation is not one that is likely to end well for conservatives.
Too often conservatives fall into the trap of equating teachers with the teachers’ unions. While hostility toward the unions might be justified – after all, they have reflexively opposed conservative school reform ideas for decades and have inappropriately intruded into classroom activities with the passive concurrence of union supported school board members – this hostility should not be transferred to teachers themselves. Anyone who ignores the distinction between teachers and teachers’ unions does so at their own peril.
There are several arguments supporting this reasoning; I offer up two of the better ones here.
First, there’s no getting around it, teachers are the people who need to, well, teach. While a handful of misguided teachers might drag their ideology into the classroom, most do not. When the bell rings, nearly all teachers set about doing their best to attain the same goal espoused by every educational reformer: to improve the performance of the students in their charge. Some are better at their job than others, but these are not malicious people.

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial

Congratulations to all of Tuesday’s spring election winners — especially those willing to take on the challenges facing our public schools.
First-time candidate Mary Burke and incumbent Arlene Silveira won big in their bids for Madison School Board.
They and their opponents (Michael Flores and Nichelle Nichols, respectively) deserve credit for leading a community conversation on the future of Madison schools during their high-profile campaigns.
Now comes the time for action. And something bold is needed to boost dismal graduation rates for blacks and Latinos. The status quo isn’t working for a huge portion of minority students.

Notes: Fund Balance is a District’s reserve cash/assets. The Madison School District’s fund balance, or equity declined significantly during the mid-2000’s, but has grown in recent years.

*The most recent survey was conducted by the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators and used a different format. The other surveys were conducted by the Wisconsin Education Association Council. WEAC didn’t respond to questions about whether it had results for the 2008-09, 2009-10 or 2010-11.

SOURCE: WASDA/WEAC surveys with comments from local newspaper reporter Matthew DeFour & Clay Barbour:
Matthew DeFour & Clay Barbour:

Wisconsin superintendents survey last fall found state budget cuts prompted school districts to eliminate thousands of staff positions, increase class sizes, raise student fees and reduce extracurricular offerings this school year.
But this week, Gov. Scott Walker’s office said those results don’t tell the full story and that similar surveys from past years show school districts fared better after his education changes went into effect.
Further, the governor’s office contends the organizations that conducted those surveys — the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators and the Wisconsin Education Association Council — were unhelpful, and in WEAC’s case actually worked against the administration as staff tried to compare recent results to past surveys.
“It’s unfortunate that WEAC stands in the way of survey data that they have released in the past, which shows the governor’s changes are working and are good for their members and the state’s schoolchildren,” said Cullen Werwie, Walker’s spokesman.
The older surveys show more school districts increased class sizes, reduced extracurricular programs, raised student fees and tapped reserves to balance their budgets in each year between 2002 and 2008 than they did in 2011-12.
In past years, about two-thirds to three-quarters of districts reported increasing student fees each year. This year, 22 percent of districts reported doing so.

Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators, Sparks fly over Wisconsin budget’s labor-related provisions and Teachers Union & (Madison) School Board Elections.
Describing the evil effects of revolution, Thucydides writes, “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.” (P. 199 of the Landmark edition)
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell (1946).

Madeline Edison, James Kindle, Alicia La Croix & Sarah Schultes, via a kind Rick Kiley email:

A heavy burden rests on our shoulders as teachers: Alleviate Minnesota’s large achievement gaps, accelerate learning gains, and get all children college- and career-ready. We’re up to the challenge.
Teachers are the No. 1 in-school factor affecting student success. Research says a highly effective teacher can help students achieve as much as an additional year’s worth of academic gains over one school year compared with a less effective teacher.
That’s why it is so disheartening to see great teachers let go without regard to their performance.
Consider what happened late last month, when nearly 50 teachers in Eden Prairie received layoff notices.
These particular teachers were not laid off because they were bad teachers, because they had failed their students, or because parents, students or administrators wanted them to go. They were laid off because of a simple number: their number of years teaching in the district.
It’s become a common scene across the state, and it will repeat itself in the coming weeks and months because of the “last in, first out” teacher layoff policy, or LIFO. The policy requires school districts to look solely at the length of time a teacher has worked in the district when making layoff decisions, without any consideration of performance.

Stephen Sawchuk:

The panelists charged with rewriting federal teacher-preparation rules faced a grueling day today during which major tension points emerged with little resolution, all of which served to call into question whether they will be able to reach consensus by Thursday.
You don’t have to take my word for it: During some of the breaks, I spoke to a handful of negotiators–they all, reasonably, wanted to speak on background since the process isn’t finished yet–and by and large, they weren’t optimistic:
“It seems doubtful.” “Probably not good.” “I don’t know.” “I think the answer is probably no.”
If the panelists don’t reach a final consensus, the U.S. Department of Education gets to go it alone when writing the regulations.
Some of the tensions that emerged today have been brewing under the surface for a while, but as of the last session, there at least seemed to be agreement on the Education Department’s proposal to classify their teacher-preparation programs into four categories: “low performing,” “at risk,” effective,” and “exceptional,” based on a mix of input- and output-based measures.

Mike Ford:

The Milwaukee Teachers Education Association (MTEA) Children’s Week concept was a noble one. The idea was to have Milwaukee teachers, as well as high-profile business and community members, donate a week of their salary to the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). Union members, however, rejected the idea on a 2,296 to 1,635 vote.
I call the effort noble for several reasons. First, it would have put a little more money into classrooms at a time when MPS’ budget situation is dire. The district soon will be paying almost $50,000 per-employee in health care benefits for current employees and retirees. The legacy costs in particular are responsible for a perverse situation where MPS’ per-pupil costs (over $14,000 according to DPI) far exceed what a classroom or school actually receives for education purposes. MTEA’s proposed gesture would have at least given classrooms additional resources next year.

Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club.

Ariel Sacks:

I’ve always struggled with calculating students’ participation grades. I have experimented with rubrics for students to fill out for themselves, or ways for them to track their participation grades daily or weekly. I’ve tried ditching it altogether and just grading students for distinct speaking activities.
Often, I settle for making up a participation grade for each student at the end of the period. I tend to criticize myself for this imprecise method, but this time, I had an idea. What goes through my head when I “make up” this grade? I thought. If I could just find a way to put that down on paper for my students to understand…