Alex Bellos:

My post yesterday about Alan Turing’s library list was my most read ever!
There’s obviously an appetite for Turing stuff – and so here is some more.
Rachel Hassall, the archivist at Sherborne, where Turing was at school, has transcribed his entire school reports, printed below.
It’s interesting to see how he changes from an untidy and careless mathematician to a distinguished scholar.
At the end of his first term headmaster O’ Hanlon writes: “He has his own furrow to plough & may not meet with general sympathy…”
At the end of his second term the maths teacher writes that he “should do well if he can quicken up a little.” Er, yes…

Eric Hill:

You’ve undoubtedly read about the Madison Metropolitan School District’s recent initiative to close the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap that’s been plaguing the city for decades. This sudden shift in collective focus is likely the result of the Urban League of Madison’s recent Madison Prep charter school proposal. If not, it’s important to note that the proposal would open two schools to serve a portion of youth from some of city’s most under-served communities. They would borrow from formulas being used by highly effective charter schools across the country to get at-risk youth achieving at levels consistent with their more fortunate counterparts. But despite it being sound, well-funded and supported by evidence, the plan was ultimately voted down by the Madison school board in favor of the unchanging system that guarantees nothing but persistent failure.
The only silver lining to emerge from the school district’s disappointing decision is that the community has a renewed sense of urgency around the issues of education inequality in Madison.

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.

Seth Godin:

The economy has changed, probably forever.
School hasn’t.
School was invented to create a constant stream of compliant factory workers to the growing businesses of the 1900s. It continues to do an excellent job at achieving this goal, but it’s not a goal we need to achieve any longer.
In this 30,000 word manifesto, I imagine a different set of goals and start (I hope) a discussion about how we can reach them. One thing is certain: if we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’ve been getting.
Our kids are too important to sacrifice to the status quo.

Ruth Franklin:

The other day, a friend and I were walking down a crowded sidewalk when we noticed a little boy of about three. We noticed him not because he was adorable (though he was), but because he was hitting his father with a giant stick. As they passed us–the boy hitting, the father ignoring–the boy’s flailing stick hit my companion. Only the boy’s mother, running after them, seemed to notice. “Sorry,” she flung out breathlessly, smiling.
We were, of course, in Brooklyn, the epicenter of permissive parenting. A look at the landscape is enough to demonstrate that our children are running our lives–the “progressive preschools” that brighten the storefronts every few blocks, the new paint-your-own-pottery shop and “origami studio,” the never-ending parade of burger joints. In the latest viral video, “Sh*t Park Slope Parents Say,” a pair of insufferable hipster parents and their friends trade barbs of condescension. The only time these people are speechless is when they’re trying to make plans for a date night out.

National Center for Policy Analysis:

Last year there was an unprecedented wave of new school choice programs launched across the country. Following 20 years of heated debate, new programs reflect a growing sophistication regarding the design and implementation of school choice policies. In a report for Education Week, scholars and analysts who support school choice examine the track record so far of these programs. They find it is promising and provides support for continuing expansion of school choice policies.

• Among voucher programs, random-assignment studies generally find modest improvements in reading or math scores, or both.
• Achievement gains are typically small in each year, but cumulative over time.
• Graduation rates have been studied less often, but the available evidence indicates a substantial positive impact.
• Some high-quality studies show that charters have positive effects on academic outcomes; in other contexts, the findings are more mixed.
• In general, charters seem most likely to have positive effects on student achievement at the elementary level, in math, if the school is part of a well-established charter network, if the student has been enrolled for a while, if the student is disadvantaged, and if the school is in an urban area.

Jeffrey Young:

In just a few short years, Salman Khan has built a free online educational institution from scratch that has nudged major universities to offer free self-guided courses and inspired many professors to change their teaching methods.
His creation is called Khan Academy, and its core is a library of thousands of 10-minute educational videos, most of them created by Mr. Khan himself. The format is simple but feels intimate: Mr. Khan’s voice narrates as viewers watch him sketch out his thoughts on a digital whiteboard. He made the first videos for faraway cousins who asked for tutoring help. Encouraging feedback by others who watched the videos on YouTube led him to start the academy as a nonprofit.

Jon Hilsenrath:

The most interesting anecdote to come out of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s semiannual testimony to Congress: His son, who is in medical school in New York, is likely to rack up $400,000 of student loan debt in the process of getting his degree.
The rapid growth of U.S. student loan debt, Mr. Bernanke said, required “careful oversight” from regulators.
The student loan tidbit wasn’t the only piece of “regular guy” information Mr. Bernanke divulged in today’s hearing. He also said he does his own grocery shopping.

Christie Taylor:

Bills currently winding through the state Legislature would allow special education students to join Racine and Milwaukee students in receiving vouchers worth up to $13,593 to attend private schools.
Republicans on the Assembly’s education committee already passed one version, AB 110, on a 7-4 party line vote, and the bill could hit the floor as soon as next week.
Meanwhile, the most recent version of the bill, SB 486, was the subject of a public hearing Tuesday where advocacy groups, special education teachers, and the Department of Public Instruction itself raised concerns that the bill would starve already-lean school budgets, and provide no guarantees to special education students in return. The bill does not cap how many students may receive vouchers through the program in an individual district, but the Assembly version limits the number to five percent of special education students in the state.

Dave Cieslewicz:

John Matthews, the very long-time president of the Madison teachers union said something that shouldn’t go unnoticed in today’s Cap Times story about the Madison school board races.
Referring to Mary Burke, a candidate for an open seat on the board, Matthews is quoted as saying, “you want somebody who understands what it’s like to be a parent and understands the needs of parents to be involved.” Burke has no children.
There’s little room to interpret that statement as anything but a claim that childless adults need not apply for positions on the school board as far as John Matthews is concerned. John did not go on to suggest that his members who teach children but don’t have any themselves are unqualified to teach, but that would seem to be a logical conclusion.
John can’t be serious. Single-person households now make up one out of four American households and the percentage is almost half in large cities. While all of those single person homes are not made up of childless individuals, there’s a good chance that the trend indicates that there are more of us who have made that choice to not have kids.

Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichele Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
1.25.2012 Madison School Board Candidate DCCPA Event Photos & Audio
Listen to the event via this 77MB mp3 audio file.
Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A

Jack Craver:

Since 2007, there have been nine elections for seats on the Madison School Board. Only two have been contested. Thus, in seven instances, a candidate was elected or re-elected without having to persuade the community on the merits of his or her platform, without ever facing an opponent in a debate.
This year, two seats on the School Board are hotly contested, a political dynamic that engages the community and that most members of the board welcome.
“What an active campaign does is get the candidate out and engaged with the community, specifically on larger issues affecting the school district,” says Lucy Mathiak, a School Board member who is vacating one of the seats that is on the April 3 ballot.
Competition may be healthy, but it can also be ugly. While the rhetoric in this year’s School Board races seems harmless compared to the toxic dialogue we’ve grown accustomed to in national and state politics, there is a palpable tension that underpins the contests.
Teachers and their union worry that Gov. Scott Walker’s attacks on collective bargaining rights and support for school vouchers could gain more traction if candidates who favor “flexibilities” and “tools” get elected to the board. Meanwhile, many in the black community feel their children are being neglected because policy-makers are not willing to challenge the unions or the status quo. District officials must contend with a rising poverty level among enrolled students and concerns about “white flight.”
In addition to massive cuts to education funding from the state, the current anxiety about the future of Madison’s schools was fueled by last year’s debate over the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, a charter school plan devised by Kaleem Caire, the head of the Urban League of Greater Madison, to help minority students who are falling behind their white peers in academic achievement. Minority students in the Madison district have only a 48 percent four-year graduation rate and score much lower on standardized tests than do white students.
Objections to Madison Prep varied. Some thought creating a school focused on certain racial groups would be a step backward toward segregation. Others disliked the plan for its same-sex classrooms.
However, what ultimately killed the plan was the Urban League’s decision to have the school operate as a “non-instrumentality” of the Madison Metropolitan School District, meaning it would not have to hire union-represented district teachers and staff. In particular, Caire wanted to be able to hire non-white social workers and psychologists, few of whom are on the district’s current staff.

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.
Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichele Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
1.25.2012 Madison School Board Candidate DCCPA Event Photos & Audio
Listen to the event via this 77MB mp3 audio file.
Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A

A. David Dahmer:

Earlier this month, Superintendent Dan Nerad announced a preliminary plan to close the Madison Metropolitan School District’s persistent racial and socioeconomic achievement gap. Along with that proposal came the hiring of Shahanna McKinney-Baldon, the district’s first chief diversity officer, who is charged with coordinating initiatives to foster diversity in the district.
“It’s so exciting,” McKinney-Baldon tells The Madison Times at her office in the Doyle Administration Building downtown. “This is a wonderful opportunity. Madison a unique city and you have so many people engaged in the process. Everybody has been so welcoming here in Madison. People have been so willing to share their thinking. It’s been exciting to be able to identify recurring themes as I talk to people throughout the city.”
Year after year, Madison has attempted to lessen its more than 40-year-old racial achievement gap, with little positive results. With the announcing of its elaborate strategic plan and the hiring of McKinney-Baldon, MMSD hopes to signal to the community that it is “all in” as far as its efforts to end the systematic educational disenfranchisement of students in certain groups.

Jack Hough:

Fannie Mae said Wednesday it lost $2.4 billion during the fourth quarter of 2011 and $16.9 billion for the full year.
It has had worse years, remarkably. Fannie lost about $60 billion in 2008 and $72 billion the following year-two of the 10 largest corporate losses ever. Sibling Freddie Mac is responsible for a third, a $51 billion loss in 2008.
Fannie Mae was established in 1938 to promote home ownership by making federal funds available to lenders. In the 1950s and 1960s, it transformed into a profit-seeking corporation, with the goal of purchasing mortgages and selling them to investors, thereby replenishing funds to banks for fresh loans. Freddie Mac was created in 1970 to spur competition.

Related:, via WISTAX:

Purchase the newsletter, which includes a discussion of the Wisconsin state budget, here.

Knowledge @ Wharton:

Michael Horn sees the Internet providing access to a range of products and services that will help improve the way people can learn. While adult education is where on-line learning initially got its start, Horn predicts that half of high school courses in the U.S. will be taken online in less than a decade. Horn co-wrote the bestselling book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns with Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen. He and Christensen later co-founded The Innosight Institute, a non-for profit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to problems in the social sector.
In the future, Horn predicts the majority of students will be engaged in what he calls “blended learning” where they’ll learn online with control over the pace of their learning in schools with teachers providing guidance. As new technologies and applications are introduced into schools, he also predicts the future of teaching shifting into three roles: Teachers who act as mentors and motivators; content experts; and case workers that help students deal with non-academic obstacles to learning. Horn sees such changes creating a more student-centric education system where each child can learn at a customized pace and path.

Andrew Delbanco:

If there’s one thing about which Americans agree these days, it’s that we can’t agree. Gridlock is the name of our game. We have no common ground.
There seems, however, to be at least one area of cordial consensus–and I don’t mean bipartisan approval of the killing of Osama bin Laden or admiration for former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s courage and grace.
I mean the public discourse on education. On that subject, Republicans and Democrats speak the same language–and so, with striking uniformity, do more and more college and university leaders. “Education is how to make sure we’ve got a work force that’s productive and competitive,” said President Bush in 2004. “Countries that outteach us today,” as President Obama put it in 2009, “will outcompete us tomorrow.”

Brother Bob Smith:

The issue of school choice has been at the forefront of political debate, media attention and community discussion for a number of reasons in recent years, and that’s good. This successful program has provided hundreds of lower-income southeastern Wisconsin families with the opportunity to choose a school that best fits their educational needs, and the more attention, review and consideration it receives, the better.
Now comes debate as to whether special education students have similar choice options and discussion about whether the program should grow, how students qualify and providing equal per-pupil reimbursements to public and private choice schools. But most troubling to me and Messmer Catholic Schools, however, is a topic that hasn’t been openly discussed but alluded to by actions of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
As you may know, DPI recently filed a waiver request with the U.S. Department of Education seeking to be excused from the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Instead, DPI proposed its own accountability standards and intervention procedures for under-performing Wisconsin schools.

Elizabeth Lopatto:

Maybe, as the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested, the rich really are different. They’re more likely to behave badly, according to seven experiments that weighed the ethics of hundreds of people.
The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behaviour at work, researchers reported Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Taken together, the experiments suggest at least some wealthier people “perceive greed as positive and beneficial,” probably as a result of education, personal independence and the resources they have to deal with potentially negative consequences, the authors wrote.
While the tests measured only “minor infractions,” that factor made the results, “even more surprising,” said Paul Piff, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a study author.

Matthew DeFour:

The Middleton-Cross Plains School District shouldn’t have fired a teacher who viewed pornographic images at work and must reinstate him with back pay and benefits — estimated at about $200,000 — an arbitrator has ruled.
Superintendent Don Johnson and the School Board said in a joint statement Wednesday they were disappointed in the decision by a private arbitrator. They plan to discuss whether to appeal the decision at a meeting scheduled for Monday at 6:30 p.m.
“This ruling completely minimizes conduct that cannot be tolerated,” the statement said. “It sends the message that it is acceptable for employees to view pornography at school, during the student-school day, on school equipment. It also flies in the face of the need to provide a professional work environment and a safe place to educate our children.”
The teacher, Andrew Harris, said in an interview he was grateful for the ruling.

Room for Debate:

If you turn on the TV, or flip through standardized tests, or spend a mindless hour on YouTube, it’s hard not to wonder: Is our species devolving? Are people getting dumber?

Warren Olney:

Evaluations of teachers based on student test scores have been made public in New York and Los Angeles. Will that make public schools better or worse? Will teachers be shamed, fired or leave the profession for the wrong reasons?

channel3000.com:

Theft charges have been filed against four Madison teens, including two players on Madison Memorial High School’s basketball team.
A criminal complaint charges Albert “Junior” Lomomba, 19, and Jamar Morris, 18, both top players on the basketball team, with misdemeanor retail theft.
Lomomba has a full-ride scholarship to play for Cleveland State.
The complaint also charges Max W. Genin, 17, and Lavell D. Nash, 18, with misdemeanor retail theft.

Christopher Mims:

When the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under 2 spend exactly zero time in front of screens, what its members are concerned about is substitution — all the time those children aren’t spending acquiring new skills and language through one-on-one interaction.
Yet a new effort by researchers at MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group will attempt to create a programming environment suitable for toddlers. It’s hard to imagine that any but the most precocious children would be able to interact with Scratch Jr. before the age of two, but as Heather Chaplin reports for KQED, the new software will be aimed squarely at children who have barely learned their colors, much less how to read.

Michael Sakpinker:

A French diplomat recently shrugged at news that Tunisians were rejecting his language and enrolling in English classes. “You can’t be in this globalised world without being able to speak English,” he said.
How will these eager new English speakers fare? If you believe Jean-Paul Nerrière, they will learn enough to communicate with Peruvians and Indonesians but not enough to talk to Britons, Americans or Australians.
As a long-time IBM executive, Mr Nerrière, a Frenchman, spent years observing English conversations. When a Japanese employee met a Belgian, a Chilean and an Italian, they managed. None spoke English brilliantly but each knew the others were making mistakes too. When an American or British manager walked in, everything changed. The native speakers talked too fast and used mysterious expressions, such as “from the horse’s mouth” (which horse?). The others clammed up.