Alan Borsuk:

Time, time, time, see what’s become of Oconomowoc High School.
The nearly 1,500-student high school 30 miles west of Milwaukee attracted a lot of attention a year ago with a transformation plan: Reduce the staff, give most teachers increased workloads and pay, and implement learning approaches that call for more initiative by students and a lot of technology.
As Superintendent Patricia Neudecker (now retired) and high school Principal Joseph Moylan saw it, it was a way to tighten spending while personalizing and improving learning. As critics, including many teachers and students, saw it, it was a way to make things worse.
One year into the new reality, Oconomowoc High still stands. The critics haven’t been proved wrong, but it appears it was a pretty decent year by many measures. Change did not derail the basic flow of a healthy, energetic school and in some ways it helped. But there are signs of the stress the approach is putting on all involved, and change does not come easily.
With a bow to Simon and Garfunkel (“Hazy Shade of Winter,” of course), consider this an update focused on time, time, time.
Teachers’ time: For about a decade, the high school has used a block schedule, which means the school day is built around four longer periods rather than six or seven periods. The conventional teaching load in such a situation is three blocks a day. Many Oconomowoc teachers now teach all four blocks, which means they are in front of students just about all day.
Neudecker said the change was made to reduce staff and save money without reducing offerings to students. “We haven’t cut one program,” she said. “We have not increased our class size.”
In exchange for the heavier workload, teachers receive an additional $14,000 a year. For those affected, that has raised salaries to $50,000 at the starting level and $70,000 or more for experienced teachers.

Related: May, 2012: Budget Cuts: We Won’t Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That’s Okay. Indeed. Madison appears to have mastered the art of status quo governance.

Thomas Lindsay:

Higher education is reeling. A recent study demonstrates that a third of colleges and universities are now financially unstable through overbuilding, over-borrowing, and over-diversifying. But the good news is there are schools not only surviving but prospering in these harsh times.
This good news comes from ARAMARK Higher Education’s Presidential Perspectives Series, a national forum authored by college and university presidents. Its Responding to the Commoditization of Higher Education includes an article by Michael MacDowell, president of Pennsylvania’s Misericordia University. MacDowell traces the historical roots of the higher-education crisis. Key to how we got to this point was society’s decision that nearly all should attend college, which raised costs for taxpayers. Moreover, with more-universal admissions, greater numbers of entering-college students find themselves “not ready for the experience,” leading them to drop out (often with student-loan debt) or to “take many years to graduate, thereby increasing the cost to taxpayers, themselves, and their families.” Simply put, with rising access, costs increased while student success fell.

Chris Callison-Burch:

Omar F. Zaidan, a Jordanian citizen, was denied re-entry to the US on the eve of his PhD defense at Johns Hopkins University. It has been over a year and a half, and he has not yet been allowed to return. This is madness. Omar is exactly the type of person who the US should be actively recruiting to come to the country. Here is a shortlist of reasons why:

• The US government invested approximately $200,000 in Omar’s education through DARPA grants that paid for his tuition and his PhD stipend.
• Omar had accepted a job at Microsoft Research in Seattle, where he would have repaid his moral debt to the country many times over by paying taxes on his high salary, and through his intellectual contributions to the US tech industry.
• Omar is the best PhD student who I have supervised in the 6 years that I have been a computer science professor. Omar’s research into computational linguistics and Arabic dialects has implications for national defense as well as for the technology sector.
• Omar is a model Muslim. Omar perfectly assimilated into US culture, while being proud of his own culture and religion. He made efforts to be an ambassador for Islam, patiently explaining aspects of his religion (like fasting at Ramadan) to his friends and classmates.

Pat Schneider:

Fresh off a two-month tour to observe the operations of all 48 schools, various programs, and the Madison School District’s central administrative offices, Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham is promising to “ensure accountability at every level.”
Accountability as Cheatham describes it will include student achievement on standardized tests of the type that current school reform movements emphasize, but will go far beyond that to a new understanding of educators’ roles, the support they need to master them, and refined local measures of progress, she said.
“I worry that people perceive accountability as standardized test results, for example, and what I’m talking about is accountability for everybody playing well the function they are best positioned for in the service of children learning well,” Cheatham told me Thursday in an interview. “Educators at every level of the system lack clarity on what that particular function is for them.”http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2013/06/deja_vu_a_focus.php”>Accountability was one of five priority areas Cheatham identified in anEntry Plan Report released Wednesday. The others are: well-rounded, culturally responsive instruction; personal educational pathways for students; attracting, developing and retaining top-level talent; and engaging families and community members as partners.

Related: Deja Vu: A Focus on “Adult Employment” or the Impossibility of Governance Change in the Madison Schools.

Rob Reich:

The backlash against MOOCs and online learning in higher education has begun. Philosophers at San Jose State University recently wrote an open letter to Harvard’s Michael Sandel, explaining why they were declining to support the use of his acclaimed class, Justice, in an online format provided by edX, an online course platform created jointly by Harvard and MIT. “There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves,” they wrote.
Moving beyond Sandel’s class to MOOCs of all kinds, they broadly rejected “products that will replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”
The letter is an exceptional document, articulating with welcome clarity several distinct objections and concerns. In considering the future of higher education in an era of MOOCs and the expansion of online learning, these objections and concerns are worthy of widespread attention and debate.

The Economist:

ASK a researcher what annoys him most about scientific publishing, and slowness will come near the top of the list of gripes. It takes nearly six months, on average, for a manuscript to wend its way from submission to publication. Worse, before a paper is accepted by a journal, it is often rejected by one or more others. The reason need not be a fatal flaw in the research; sometimes the work is simply not splashy enough for outlets high up in the pecking order. But in the process, each journal’s editors send the paper for peer review–appraisal by experts in the relevant field–in much the way that each prospective purchaser of a house commissions his own survey. And, unlike those multiple, parallel surveys, the reviewers do not even get paid for their efforts.
Some publishers are at last beginning to twig that this is an awful waste of resources. Last month a number of them, including big ones like the Wellcome Trust, BioMed Central (BMC), the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the European Molecular Biology Organisation, said they would give authors of papers they reject the option of making referees’ reports available to the other publishers.

Joe Leahy:

A series of student protests against bus fare rises in São Paulo have turned increasingly violent, bringing chaos to the centre of South America’s largest city and highlighting discontent with inflation in Brazil.
Police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to stop protesters occupying the city’s main thoroughfare, Avenida Paulista, disrupting evening traffic and leaving office workers stuck in their buildings. There were similar clashes in Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre in Brazil’s south.
In Sâo Paulo, 232 people were detained and 12 officers hurt, police said, while figures for the number of protesters injured were not yet available. “There were [tear gas] bombs landing on all sides,” said a protester, Bruna Gisi Martins de Almeirda, a student at the University of São Paulo. “I took one [rubber] bullet in the leg and one in the arm.”
The intensity and violence of the protests, which follow those in Turkey and were dubbed by one economist as Brazil’s “tropical spring”, are uncommon for a country that has enjoyed a decade of economic growth and represent a new challenge for President Dilma Rousseff.

Related: US student loan bubble.

Motoko Rich
With school districts rushing to buy computers, tablets, digital white boards and other technology, a new report questions whether the investment is worth it.
In a review of student survey data conducted in conjunction with the federal exams known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nonprofit Center for American Progress found that middle school math students more commonly used computers for basic drills and practice than to develop sophisticated skills. The report also found that no state was collecting data to evaluate whether technology investments were actually improving student achievement.
“Schools frequently acquire digital devices without discrete learning goals and ultimately use these devices in ways that fail to adequately serve students, schools, or taxpayers,” wrote Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of the report. The analysis of the N.A.E.P. data found that 34 percent of eighth graders who took the math exams in 2011 used computers to “drill on math facts” while less than a quarter worked with spreadsheets or geometric figures on the computer. Only 17 percent used statistical programs.
The federal survey data showed striking differences among racial groups and income levels. More than half of the black students who took the eighth-grade math exam in 2011 said they used computers to work on math drills, while only 30 percent of white students said they did. Similarly, 41 percent of students eligible for free and reduced lunches said they used computers for math drills, compared with 29 percent of students whose families earn too much for them to qualify for the lunches. In high school science classrooms, the use of technology evidently has not advanced much past the 1980s. According to the report, 73 percent of students who took the 12th-grade National Assessment science exam said they regularly watched a movie or video in class.
Such data, Mr. Boser said, suggested that technology “doesn’t seem to have dramatically changed the nature of schooling.” Experts who study the effectiveness of instructional technology say there is potential for some digital programs to improve teaching. John Pane, a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation, said good technology allowed students to work at their own pace and independently while teachers worked with smaller groups.
Mr. Pane conducted a study, financed by the federal Department of Education, of an algebra software program created by Carnegie Learning, a math curriculum developer. He found that high school students who used the program, which was designed to accompany a teacher-led curriculum, showed gains on their state-standardized math tests that were nearly double the gains of a typical year’s worth of growth using a more traditional high school math curriculum.
Whether those gains came from the use of technology or changes in the curriculum, he said, was hard to say. But Steve Ritter, chief scientist at Carnegie Learning, said one of the benefits of the technology was that it used the principles of cognitive science to help students gain a deeper understanding of concepts rather than simply drill math problems. “We’re not just seeing whether they got the answer right or wrong,” Mr. Ritter said, “but why they got it right or wrong.”

Laura Waters:

Take over Camden Public Schools! Reform tenure and evaluate teachers and principals on student growth data! Strengthen and expand charter schools! Enact a school voucher bill!
Education reformers in New Jersey and elsewhere sure do love radical change, seven-league strides towards the imagined Bethlehem of high-achieving schools accessible to all children. We’ve no patience for baby-steps that gingerly transverse the mired ruts of the status quo, no time for triangulated compromises that slap a coat of paint on failing schools and call it an improvement.
But sometimes meaningful change does occur incrementally. This is hard to hear for die-hard reformers. But one particular Jersey-grown school reform measure argues for a gradual approach: the state’s Interdistrict Public School Choice Program.

Peter Crosta:

This paper examines the relationship between community college enrollment patterns and two successful student outcomes–credential completion and transfer to a four-year institution. It also introduces a new way of visualizing the various attendance patterns of community college students. Patterns of enrollment intensity (full-time or part-time status) and continuity (enrolling in consecutive terms or skipping one or more terms) are graphed and then clustered according to their salient features.
Using data on cohorts of first-time community college students at five colleges in a single state, the author finds that, over an 18-semester period, 10 patterns of attendance account for nearly half the students. Among the remaining students who persisted, there is astounding variation in their patterns of enrollment. Clustering these patterns reveals two relationships: the first is a positive association between enrollment continuity and earning a community college credential, and the second is a positive association between enrollment intensity and likelihood of transfer.

Stephanie Simon:

Several students from northeast Texas said they plan to file a federal complaint on Wednesday accusing their school districts of cruel and unusual punishment by prosecuting them in criminal court for missing school or being late for class.
The civil rights complaint, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, is directed at school districts in Dallas and three other communities.
The districts funnel truancy cases to a special court system that prosecuted more than 36,000 cases and collected $2.9 million in fines last year from students convicted of multiple unexcused absences or tardy arrivals, according to the complaint.
Students as young as 12 can be arrested and handcuffed at school. Once they turn 17, they can be jailed for failing to pay past fines, which can run into thousands of dollars, according to the complaint, which was drafted by the National Center for Youth Law and advocacy groups Texas Appleseed and Disability Rights Texas.
“I’m getting treated like a criminal,” Ashley Brown, 16, one of the complainants, told Reuters late on Monday. She said she had been erroneously sent to truancy court for four excused absences after her grandmother’s death.

Steve Prestegard:

The new money added to the K-12 system by 2010 equaled $4,714/pupil. Given public school enrollment of 872,000 students that year, Wisconsin taxpayers had provided public schools with a spending windfall of more than $4.1 billion a year by the time Governor Walker took office. So much for being “oblivious.”
Wisconsin journalists have failed to report this history. Further, they have failed to explain adequately that much of the new spending has not reached the classroom. Instead, it has gone to pension, health care, and other fringe benefits. Where such costs once equaled about a quarter of teacher salaries, in many school districts that share now exceeds fifty per cent. In the Milwaukee Public Schools, the meteoric rise in fringe benefits is the principal reason for reductions in education programming that have been part of recent budgets. …
The overall journalistic failure has predictable consequences when it comes to public opinion. In scientific polling, scholars at Harvard University have found that the public is clueless when it comes to public school spending and levels of teacher compensation.
These scholars have reported their findings in the respected journal Education Next. They find that the average citizen has a “wildly inaccurate” understanding of school finance. For example, “…[w]e asked respondents to estimate average per-pupil expenditures within their local school district and the average teacher salaries in their states…[W]e discovered that those surveyed, on average, underestimated per-pupil expenditures by more than half and teacher salaries by roughly 30 percent…”

Wisconsin Senator Tim Cullen:

Last week, I expressed my extreme disappointment when the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee voted along party lines to create a statewide unaccountable school voucher program.
Make no mistake – this plan creates two separate school systems in Wisconsin, both paid for by taxpayers.
In 1954, late Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Earl Warren said, “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” His words hold true today.
While the agreement creates a 500-student cap during the program’s first year and a 1,000-student cap in subsequent years, the cap could be lifted in the future or may be line-item vetoed by the governor. The ultimate goal of voucher supporters is not to open the voucher program to 500 or 1,000 students, but an unrestricted expansion of vouchers.
The private school voucher effort is a political movement, not an educational movement. It is a top-down movement funded by tens of millions of dollars in out-of-state campaign contributions and the hiring of several highly-paid lobbyists.

Important Press Conference – Can You Make It? – http://t.co/8VlrPf2rMD

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) June 15, 2013

DPI Superintendent, Tony Evers, and legislators who want to maintain Wisconsin’s proud system of public education, are holding a press conference on Monday, June 17 at 10 AM in the Assembly Parlor to address the recent decision by the Joint Committee on Finance to expand voucher funding at the expense of public schools. The Senate and Assembly will be voting to pass this extreme budget within weeks. Please join these folks to inform and educate the public about the negative impact that private school voucher expansion will have on Wisconsin’s public schools. Wear Red for Public Ed. We need a wall of support behind the speakers. Time is running short to stop this train wreck but we cannot allow our opposition to go unnoticed!
TIME / LOCATION: 10 am in the Assembly Parlor with Superintendent Tony Evers.

Governance change is apparently quite difficult within the present school district model.

The Madison School Board discussed the renewal of Administrator contracts (500K PDF) during their June 10, 2013 meeting (video, about 50 minutes into the meeting). Listen via this 5mb mp3 audio.
The timing and length of administrator contracts along with substantive reviews is not a new subject:
February, 2006: Are Administrators Golden?

Lawrie Kobza pointed out last night that 2-year rolling administrative contracts may be important for some groups of administrators and that the School Board should consider that issue. Otherwise, if the annual pattern continues, extensions will occur in February before the School Board looks at the budget and makes their decisions about staffing. Even though the Superintendent has indicated what positions he proposes to eliminate for next year, when the School Board has additional information later in the budget year, they may want to make different decisions based upon various tradeoffs they believe are important for the entire district.
What might the School Board consider doing? Develop criteria to use to identify/rank your most “valuable” administrative positions (perhaps this already exists) and those positions where the district might be losing its competitive edge. Identify what the “at risk” issues are – wages, financial, gender/racial mix, location, student population mix. Or, start with prioritizing rolling two-year contracts for one of the more “important,” basic administrative groups – principals. Provide the School Board with options re administrative contracts. School board members please ask for options for this group of contracts.
Ms. Kobza commented that making an extension of contracts in February for this group of staff could make these positions appear to be golden, untouchable. Leaving as is might not be well received in Madison by a large number of people, including the thousands of MMSD staff who are not administrators on rolling two-year contracts nor a Superintendent with a rolling contract (without a horizon, I think). The board might be told MMSD won’t be able to attract talented administrators. I feel the School Board needs to publicly discuss the issues and risks to its entire talent pool.
Mr. Nadler reported that MMSD might be losing its edge in the area of administration. He gave one example where there more than a few applicants for an elementary school position (20 applicants); however, other districts, such as Sun Prairie, are attracting more applicants (more than 100). The communities surrounding Madison are becoming more attractive over time as places to live and to do business. If we don’t recognize and try to understand the issues, beyond simply wages and benefits, the situation will continue to worsen. I feel the process in place needs to change in order to be a) more responseive to the issues, b) more flexible for the School Board in their decisionmaking processes, especially around budget time.

Administrator Contracts – School Board Adds to Agenda

Questions that are not clear to me include: a) is a two-year rolling contract required for all administrators, b) what is the difference between non-renewal and extension of a contract – is the end of January date really an extension?, c)is there a Board policy – if not, does one need to be developed, d) are there options open to the School Board to hold on one-year contract extensions due to upcoming cuts to the budget, e) how can changes be made by moving/retraining staff if needed, and f) can grant money being used to pay for administrators be used in other ways (not including grant oversight/accounting? We’re in the same spot as the past two years – not talking about administrator contracts until one week or so before a deadline.
I feel this information needs to be clear and to be transparent to all employees, the board and the community. I believe a multi-year staffing strategy as part of a multi-year strategic plan is important to have, especially given the critical nature of the district’s resources. This idea is not proposed as a solution to the public school’s financial situation – not at all, that’s not the point.

Retired Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman on the “adult employment focus”.
Additional administrator contract links, here.
It is ironic, in my view, that there has not been much change in the District’s administration from the Rainwater era….

Amy Li:

Days after dozens of Hubei teachers were attacked by angry students whose attempts at cheating on China’s highly competitive national college entrance exam were foiled, the nation is struggling to understand what exactly went wrong.
Shocked by the violence, many students and parents have urged an immediate overhaul of the gaokao, a system known to drill students into testing-taking machines.
The attack happened on Saturday afternoon outside a school in Hubei’s Zhongxiang city. After the exam, students besieged teachers who had reportedly imposed strict measures and stopped students from cheating.
Students and parents block teachers from leaving the Hubei school after the exam. Photo: Screenshot via WeiboMore than 50 teachers from outside Zhongxiang had been assigned to invigilate the exam on purpose, said media reports. Of those, two were attacked.

Laurie Rogers:

“Culture of Power”: That’s what a parent recently called the prevailing attitude in the local school district. It’s an apt description. Power is what people in public education know, and power is what they crave. In any culture of power, dissenters are seen as the problem and dealt with accordingly.
I’m privileged to know some teachers and staff members who care deeply about the children and who work hard to do what’s best for them. But there are many, many others whose interests begin and end with themselves and with their own economic/political/social agenda. Conversing with these self-interested people in a reasonable, intelligent way is impossible, a fruitless exercise. They want; they don’t want. It’s all they can see. Their logic is infantile and their perspective constricted and unyielding. With thin skins and fragile egos, it doesn’t take much for them to start showing teeth and claws.
Public education has been infiltrated by a willfully ignorant, bureaucratic, obscenely expensive, narcissistic, dictatorial mob. The Edu Mob is an enterprise concerned with enriching, maintaining and expanding itself — not with accountability, responsibility or transparency. Derelict in its duty to the children and morally bankrupt, the Edu Mob blames others, attacks dissenters, and finds creative ways to get more money (such as filing lawsuits; trading private student information for grants and other payments; and training children to support the enterprise without question).

Zahira Torres:

KayLynn McAbee is one of thousands of high school graduates across the state slated to take costly remedial courses that do not count toward her college degree.
But McAbee will not have to pay for the courses because of a new summer program developed by Denver Public Schools. The program, which will offer free remedial classes in math and English, is geared toward curbing the number of DPS graduates taking remedial courses in college.
“This will help a lot of students because they’re not just remedial classes, they’re also classes that will help kids be more confident in college,” McAbee said.
District officials said they came up with the program after the release of a report earlier this year from the Colorado

A. David Dahmer:

The Mann Scholars Ceremony was celebrated at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery Town Center on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus June 7.
“It’s a thrill to welcome you all here today to celebrate our new Mann Scholars and our graduating seniors,” said Madison Metropolitan School District Partnerships Coordinator Kathy Price. “The Madison Board of Education and our new [MMSD] Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham are extending their warmest wishes to you tonight and their sincere congratulations. For the Madison District, the Mann Scholars program represents one of our premiere collaboration of family, school, and community partners. This is one that has served as a model for additional scholarship programs that have been launched including the Sanchez Scholars and our the newest scholarship that we have launched — the Reading Recovery Scholarship Program.”
The Mann Educational Opportunity Fund is a scholarship that honors the late Bernard and Kathlyn Mann, long-time African American residents of Madison whose strong belief in education helped ensure the graduation of their five children from Madison Memorial High School and later from universities. The Mann Program’s goal is to provide mentoring and educational tools to students from the Madison Metropolitan School District who show potential for academic achievement but face significant challenges to reaching their full potential.
Mann Scholars are picked every year based on their academic promise, their motivation, their financial need, and the willingness of their families to encourage participation in enrichment activities. They are primarily, but not exclusively, students of color.

a Simon Davies:

In a landmark ruling, Sweden’s data protection authority (the Swedish Data Inspection Board) this week issued a decision that prohibits the nation’s public sector bodies from using the cloud service Google Apps.
The ruling – which bans Google cloud products such as calendar services, email and data processing functions – is based on inadequacies in the Google contract. A risk assessment by the Board determined that the contract gives Google too much covert discretion over how data can be used, and that public sector customers are unable to ensure that data protection rights are protected.
The assessment gives several examples of this deficiency, including uncertainty over how data may be mined or processed by Google and lack of knowledge about which subcontractors may be involved in the processing. The assessment also concluded that there was no certainty about if or when data would be deleted after expiration of the contract.

Many schools use Google apps.

Tyler Cowen:

“Early intervention” to benefit children is one of those sacred cows which I consider unproven and which also is cited in far too malleable a fashion. Here is a new paper by Alan Rushton, Margaret Grant, Julia Feast, and John Simmonds, probably gated for many of you, but worth a read if you can.
The abstract is too wordy, but the study is a follow-up on one hundred Chinese girls who first lived in Chinese orphanages, were later adopted into the UK, and who now are 40 to 50 years old. The orphanage involved deprivation and even some malnutrition (55% of sample). There was basic medical care and supervision, although no general one-to-one caregiver relationship.
Of the initial hundred children, 98 were still alive and 72 of those responded to the survey, which also involved extensive follow-up interviews.
Most entered the orphanage very early, in the first year of life, with a mean of three months old. Age at exit varied between eight months and 83 months, with a mean of 23 months, and with a mean of 20 months spent in the care of the orphanage.

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (PDF):

Strengths
Overall Themes
Quality of teachers, principals, and central office staff: By and large, we have quality teachers, principals, support staff and central office staff who are committed to working hard on behalf of the children of Madison. With clarity of focus, support, and accountability, these dedicated educators will be able to serve our students incredibly well.
Commitment to action: Across the community and within schools, there is not only support for public education, but there is also an honest recognition of our challenges and an urgency to address them. While alarming gaps in student achievement exist, our community has communicated a willingness to change and a commitment to action.
Positive behavior: District-wide efforts to implement an approach to positive student behavior are clearly paying off. Student behavior is very good across the vast majority of schools and classrooms. Most students are safe and supported, which sets the stage for raising the bar for all students academically.
Promising practices: The district has some promising programs in place to challenge students academically, like our AVID/TOPS program at the middle and high school levels, the one-to-one iPad programs in several of our elementary schools, and our Dual Language Immersion programs. The district also does an incredibly successful job of inclusion and support of students with special needs. Generally, I’ve observed some of the most joyful and challenging learning environments I’ve ever seen.
Well-rounded education: Finally, the district offers a high level of access to the arts, sports, world language and other enriching activities that provide students with a well- rounded learning experience. This is a strength on which we can build.
“AVID is totally paying off. Kids, staff, everyone is excited about what it has brought to the school.” – Staff member
“Positive Behavior Support has made a dramatic improvement in teaching and the behavior expected. We’ve seen big changes in kids knowing what is expected and in us having consistent, schoolwide expectations”
– Staff member
Challenges
Focus: Principals, teachers and students have been experiencing an ever-changing and expanding set of priorities that make it difficult for them to focus on the day-to-day work of knowing every child well and planning instruction accordingly. If we are going to be successful, we need to be focused on a clear set of priorities aimed at measurable goals, and we need to sustain this focus over time.
“One of the strengths of MMSD is that we will try anything. The problem is that we opt out just as easily as we opt in. We don’t wait to see what things can really do.”
– Staff member
Coherence: In order for students to be successful, they need
to experience an education that leads them from Pre-Kindergarten through 12th grade, systematically and seamlessly preparing them for graduation and postsecondary education. We’ve struggled to provide our teachers with the right tools, resources and support to ensure that coherence for every child.
Personalized Learning: We need to work harder than ever to keep students engaged through a relevant and personalized education at the middle and high school levels. We’ve struggled to ensure that all students have an educational experience that gives them a glimpse of the bright futures. Personalized learning also requires increased access to and integrated use of technology.
Priority Areas
To capture as many voices as accurately as possible, my entry plan included a uniquely comprehensive analysis process. Notes from more than 100 meetings, along with other handouts, emails, and resources, were analyzed and coded for themes by Research & Program Evaluation staff. This data has been used to provide weekly updates to district leadership, content for this report and information to fuel the internal planning process that follows these visits.
The listening and learning phase has led us to five major areas to focus our work going forward. Over the next month, we’ll dive deeper into each of these areas to define the work, the action we need to take and how we’ll measure our progress. The following pages outline our priorities, what we learned to guide us to these priorities and where we’ll focus our planning in the coming month.

Matthew DeFour collects a few comments, here.
Much more on Madison’s new Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, here.

Jim Rutenberg:

As he walked the East Hampton High School campus on the last day of classes last week, Adam S. Fine seemed to be one satisfied principal. Graduating seniors were moving on to colleges including Brown and Cornell Universities; class-cutting was down; and Newsweek had ranked the school among the 2,000 best public schools in the nation, all to be expected in a ZIP code synonymous with success.
But, asked to reflect on the year that was, he sighed and moved his hand up and down, suggesting a roller coaster. “Resiliency,” he said. “That’s my theme word for graduation.”
This has been a year like none other for East Hampton High, which faced an uncomfortable ethnic integration problem that had been festering in the background for years but was thrust to the foreground by a tragedy at the opening of the school year.
A 16-year-old junior from Ecuador, David Hernandez, hanged himself just a few days after homecoming in September; it was the second student suicide in three years. Two months later, a student who was about to transfer to the school committed suicide. Three suicides in three years in a school community of about 900 students is far above the regional average. And all of the students who killed themselves were Hispanic.

Motoko Rich:

David Javsicas, a popular seventh-grade reading teacher known for urging students to act out dialogue in the books they read in class, sometimes feels wistful for the days when he taught math.
A quiz, he recalls, could quickly determine which concepts students had not yet learned. Then, “you teach the kids how to do it, and within a week or two you can usually fix it,” he said.
Helping students to puzzle through different narrative perspectives or subtext or character motivation, though, can be much more challenging. “It could take months to see if what I’m teaching is effective,” he said.
Educators, policy makers and business leaders often fret about the state of math education, particularly in comparison with other countries. But reading comprehension may be a larger stumbling block.
Here at Troy Prep Middle School, a charter school near Albany that caters mostly to low-income students, teachers are finding it easier to help students hit academic targets in math than in reading, an experience repeated in schools across the country.
Students entering the fifth grade here are often several years behind in both subjects, but last year, 100 percent of seventh graders scored at a level of proficient or advanced on state standardized math tests. In reading, by contrast, just over half of the seventh graders met comparable standards.

Steve Norton:

The evidence is piling up that the Snyder administration was closely involved in the effort to construct an alternative “education” system whose top priority is to minimize public school costs, not improve education. According to emails obtained by the Detroit News, top advisers to Gov. Rick Snyder helped put the so-called “skunk works” group together or approved of its creation as early as September 2012.
From the parent perspective, one of the most disturbing discoveries was a statement by Gov. Snyder’s chief of staff, Dennis Muchmore. “Frankly, there’s nothing I enjoy more than seeing the education community in a fratz,” Muchmore wrote not long after the “skunk works” story first broke.
Thousands of parents, educators, and other concerned citizens who care about quality public education expressed their outrage at the secrecy and narrow vision of the “skunk works” project. Since when did we become the enemy? What kind of distorted lens must members of the Snyder administration be using that they see in concerned parents an opponent to be overcome rather than a constituency to be heard?

Amy Yee:

In a simple classroom above a storefront on a bustling street, four young men crowded around the colorful innards of an open computer hard drive while their teacher explained in Hindi how it all worked.
The computer repair course was among 25 offerings at Gras Academy, a private institution with 58 skills training centers across India, including this one in Ghaziabad, a city on the outskirts of New Delhi.
Gras is one of a burgeoning number of private academies providing hands-on job training in India, filling a gap between government vocational centers and four-year universities. These schools — which offer short, practical, nondegree programs — have been growing since the early 2000s.
India has a vast population of young people, with more than half of its population of 1.2 billion younger than 25. It faces the immense challenge of harnessing this generation as a productive work force, or else facing the combustible prospect of hundreds of millions of unemployed youth in the future. The Indian government estimates that 500 million young people must be trained by 2022 and has made skills training a major policy issue.
Inderjeet Singh, 19, is a first-year student at a government college; but attendance there is not mandatory, giving him time to attend Gras’s computer repair class. His college tuition is about 5,000 rupees, or less than $90, per year, but he is willing to pay 22,000 rupees for the six-month Gras course. He thinks it will be worth it, because 70 percent to 75 percent of Gras’s graduates find jobs immediately, according to the academy.

Mathematics Stack Exchange:

My 13-year-old sister has a problem which, given the way math is currently taught, I doubt is anything but all too common. She has a low grade in her math course and only ever attempts to memorize formulas and tricks, but never actually learn any of the reasoning behind the math. Cross multiplication is the perfect example.
She knows that from
35=x10
.. she can “cross multiply” to get
30=5x
.. and from there get x=6. She has absolutely no idea what any of this means, however. She’s simply memorized a pattern and is applying that pattern to a recognizable arrangement of numbers.

Elizabeth Hong:

Is the college admissions process fair? That’s been the question of this year’s college admission season, with articles like Suzy Lee Weiss’s Wall Street Journal Op-Ed “To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me” and the Fisher v. University of Texas Supreme Court case challenging race-based Affirmative Action. As a recent high school graduate from a private school in New York, I have thought much about this topic.
I first read Weiss’s piece when it was published in March. Since then, it has gone viral and has received a mostly negative response, with Weiss criticized for having a sense of white entitlement (See “To (All) the White Girls Who Didn’t Get Into The College of Their Dreams“). Weiss was lucky enough to get into some of the Big 10 schools, including the University of Michigan and Penn State, but was upset she did not get into more elite schools. She felt discriminated against for being Caucasian. In herWall Street Journal editorial, she wrote, “What could I have done differently over the past years? For starters, had I known two years ago what I know now, I would have gladly worn a headdress to school. Show me to any closet and I would’ve happily come out of it. ‘Diversity!’…If it were up to me, I would’ve been any of the diversities: Navajo, Pacific Islander, anything. Sen.”

Leslie T. Fenwick:

The truth can be used to tell a lie. The truth is that black parents’ frustration with the quality of public schools is at an all time righteous high. Though black and white parents’ commitment to their child’s schooling is comparable, more black parents report dissatisfaction with the school their child attends. Approximately 90 percent of black and white parents report attending parent teacher association meetings and nearly 80 percent of black and white parents report attending teacher conferences. Despite these similarities, fewer black parents (47 percent) than white parents (64 percent) report being very satisfied with the school their child attends. This dissatisfaction among black parents is so whether these parents are college-educated, high income, or poor.
The lie is that schemes like Teach For America, charter schools backed by venture capitalists, education management organizations (EMOs), and Broad Foundation-prepared superintendents address black parents concerns about the quality of public schools for their children. These schemes are not designed to cure what ails under-performing schools. They are designed to shift tax dollars away from schools serving black and poor students; displace authentic black educational leadership; and erode national commitment to the ideal of public education.
Consider these facts: With a median household income of nearly $75,000, Prince George’s County is the wealthiest majority black county in the United States. Nearly 55 percent of the county’s businesses are black-owned and almost 70 percent of residents own homes, according to the U.S. Census. One of Prince George’s County’s easternmost borders is a mere six minutes from Washington, D.C., which houses the largest population of college-educated blacks in the nation. In the United States, a general rule of thumb is that communities with higher family incomes and parental levels of education have better public schools. So, why is it that black parents living in the upscale Woodmore or Fairwood estates of Prince George’s County or the tony Garden District homes up 16th Street in Washington D.C. struggle to find quality public schools for their children just like black parents in Syphax Gardens, the southwest D.C. public housing community?

Larry Cuban:

K-12 online instruction attracts policy-inclined school reformers and reform-minded policymakers because it appears as a technological and inexpensive solution for serious problems at a time when public schools are viewed as a double failure: in urban districts where largely poor and minority youth get a third-rate education and many suburban and rural schools that fall short of producing skilled and knowledgeable graduates who can contribute to a strong, competitive global economy.
Here is a brief list of those problems that promoters say will get solved through virtual instruction.
Traditional whole-class instruction. Teaching lessons to the whole group of 25-30 students at one time generation after generation has resulted in tedium and boredom for students who already know the content or are too far behind to grasp the lesson. It has been difficult for teachers with these size classes and district and state requirements to cover the curriculum to hit the sweet spot of learning that brings all students along at the same time.

David Cohen:

My last professional development experience occurred at a bar, with a pitcher of beer passed among participants at the table. Don’t worry – no district funds were misspent. It was my second time joining an informal evening tweet-up (i.e., organized on Twitter) of Computer-Using Educators (CUE) in the San Francisco Bay Area. These gatherings go by hashtag #brewcue. There’s an occasional afternoon version – same idea, more caffeinated – called #coffeecue, with gatherings popping up in a wider variety of locations.
I won’t be able submit any paperwork from these experiences, won’t be reimbursed or move up the pay scale – but I have benefitted from the experience. At my first #brewcue I talked with peers about how we manage paperless assignments and grading, and even had a chance to talk with someone working on the technical side of this matter, developing a product called Voice Comments. Then I heard about how different schools organize teacher time in different ways to promote technology integration. And then I listened in as two tech gurus shared their perspectives on how to make informed and cost-effective purchasing decisions that promote student learning and autonomy. And then I learned how students can use Minecraft in a variety of educational ways. As the parent of a California fourth-grader, I found the online California Mission Reports particularly interesting.

Ruthie:

Everyone is familiar with camera surveillance at banks, high-end stores, and office buildings. In a post-Newtown world, however, surveillance cameras are becoming increasingly familiar in neighborhood schools. In fact, after the tragedy in December, over 62 of the 400 bills relating to school safety nationwide, pertained to surveillance cameras.
Proponents argue that cameras in schools can be an efficient, minimally intrusive method of security. Unlike metal detectors or guards, cameras do not significantly impact the daily lives of students and teachers. Cameras are also more affordable than other forms of security. “They (schools) can now buy 10 cameras where they could afford two before, so they’re becoming more mainstream,” said Bob Stockwell, a global technology leader with Stanley Security.
Cameras are not only easily accessible, they are also able to provide sharper images and greater storage capacity, enabling footage that is easy to view, store, and share. This technology is considered a cutting edge way of keeping schools safer.

Sara Goldrick-Rab:

The only problem is that neither the chart or the accompanying article addresses the likely assumption of many readers: students who can’t pay these costs, even by working, are “held harmless” through financial aid. For that reason, many say, we should simply raise tuition further and invest that additional revenue in financial aid distributed to the neediest students.
To evaluate that claim, let’s take a look at the “net price” of attending UW-Madison and UW-comprehensives– the cost paid by the poorest students after taking into account all grant/scholarship aid provided to offset the sticket price.
At UW-Madison, for the upcoming year 2013-2014, that amount is $13,635.00 for Pell recipients with no expected family contribution. As you can see in the chart above, that means students from families typically earning less than $30,000 a year are expected to either work 1,866 hours a year (~35 hours/week) or borrow around $68,000 (5 years is typical time-to-degree for these students at Madison). Is this a reasonable proposition?
In addition, consider that no more than say 3-4% of UW-Madison undergraduates come from this sort of family. After all, more than 85% of students do not receive any Pell at all. For those students, the net price is over $21,000 in the coming year (total cost in 2013-14i s $24,000). Redistribution is helping very, very well– and many students with substantial need deliberately overlooked by the federal “needs analysis” are being left out in the cold. It’s no wonder there’s now backlash against our financial aid system– there’s universal need and a narrow means-tested system. Never works.

Pat Schneider:

How does an elementary school adjust to a steep and rapid rise in the number of poor children coming through its doors?
With programs to build language and technological literacy, resilient character, and ties to the community, says Brett Wilfrid, principal of Sandburg Elementary School, 4114 Donald Drive, on Madison’s far east side.
“When people come and spend time in this school, they see a lot of happy children and adults. It is a wonderful, thriving community,” Wilfrid told me in a phone interview Thursday.
I spoke with Wilfrid after a Cap Times data report published this week showed that Sandburg Elementary had the greatest increase in the Madison School District — 34.3 percentage points — in the number of children from low-income families in the past decade.
The percentage of low-income children, based on eligibility for free or reduced price lunch, rose from 37.9 percent of Sandburg enrollment in the 2003-2004 school year to 72.2 percent this year.
(One district evening program to help students who have left school to get their high school diplomas saw a slightly higher rate of increase, 35.4 percent, in the percentage of low-income students enrolled.)

Related: Madison Schools’ Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) Assessment Results Released.

Cliff Mass:

If I was a Seattle Public School parent, I would be getting angry now.
Why? Most Seattle students are receiving an inferior math education using math books and curriculum that will virtually insure they never achieve mastery in key mathematical subjects and thus will be unable to participate in careers that requires mathematical skills.
There are so many signs that a profound problem exists in this city. For example,
Parents see their kids unable to master basic math skills. And they bring home math books that are nearly indecipherable to parents or other potential tutors.
Nearly three quarters of Seattle Community College students require remediation in math.
Over one hundred Seattle students are not able to graduate high school because they could not pass state-mandated math exams.
Minority and economically disadvantaged students are not gaining ground in math.

Much more on Seattle’s math battles, here.
Related:

• Connected Math
• Madison Math Forum Audio/Video

Madison Teachers Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeannie Bettner email:

In Governor Walker’s first legislative session, using the ruse that the State was millions in debt, he proposed eliminating collective bargaining for public employees as the means to fill in the alleged budget deficit. As he described it, he dropped the bomb.
Last week, another legislative session and another bomb. Walker’s budget will hit education and educators once again. It is a giant step to privatize education. This is done by forcing pubic schools to pay tuition for children to attend religious and private schools by giving the parents of such children a voucher which forces the public school district to send money to the religious or private school. Walker and his right- wing legislators made vouchers available in every school district in the State. To this, UW Education Dean Julie Underwood said, “School Boards beware”, that this is, “the model legislation disseminated by the pro-free market American Legislative Exchange Council’s network of corporate members and conservative legislators to privatize education and erode local control.” In criticizing the legislation, State Superintendent Tony Evers chided, “A voucher in every backpack.”
Public school districts lose twice. Once by having to use money intended to educate children in their schools, and also losing State aid because they cannot count the child attending the religious or private school on which State aid is based. It is projected that this will cost MMSD $27 million over the next five years. Vouchers provide parents $4,000 per year for an elementary school student and $10,000 for a high school student. State Senator Jennifer Schilling calls it, “Vouchers on steroids!” Research shows that most voucher schools in Wisconsin underperform compared to their public school counterparts.

Much more on vouchers, here.

Ben Austin, via a kind email:

Parents, educators, and education advocates have a lot in common when it comes to a kids-first first agenda. But we can never seize that common ground if those with whom we disagree are deemed to be “evil” and sentenced to Hell, as you did last week in your now infamous blog post.
If we can’t start from that basic premise, then we are no more mature than the children we endeavor to serve. We cannot purport to encourage tolerance and discourage bullying on the schoolyard if the adults in charge of the schoolyard can’t adhere to those same basic principles.
For the past year, the organization for which I serve as executive director – Parent Revolution – has been working with parents from the Watts neighborhood community school Weigand Avenue Elementary to help turnaround their failing school. Although there appear to be some areas of improvement at the school, Weigand is currently ranked 15th worst of nearly 500 elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), and has been on a continual overall downward slide for the past 3-4 years under its current school leadership.
Four years is a long time for parents to wait for improvements in a failing school, despite even the best of intentions from dedicated professionals like Weigand’s current principal. Unfortunately, the current principal was unable to make the progress needed to turnaround the school.
In 2011 many of these same parents petitioned along with Weigand’s teachers to oust their failed principal, but had no real power to force change, and the principal retained her job. Every teacher who signed that 2011 petition is now gone, and the school has gotten even worse since then.
Many of the kids have now “graduated” without having learned basic skills. Currently, more than half of kids at Weigand cannot read, write, or do math at grade level.

Ruthie:

Teacher pensions are in danger in many states. Educators deserve a secure retirement; however, lawmakers have for years promised benefits that the system cannot afford. According to some estimates, America’s pensions are underfunded by nearly one trillion dollars. This reality has caused experts to debate who is at fault, and what can be done to create a solvent system.
Yesterday, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute held a panel discussing a new report, “The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School District Budgets.” Participants included Sandi Jacobs from the National Council on Teacher Quality, Josh B. McGee from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Charles Zogby, Pennsylvania’s budget secretary, and Leo Casey, from the Albert Shanker Institute.
The panelists discussed the teacher pension issue through the lens of three school districts: Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. One panelist simplified the situation in these three states, stating that the cost to repair these underfunded systems lie either on the state (tax payers), retired teachers, or new teachers. Something must be done to ensure that teachers are compensated fairly and currently retired teachers do not lose promised benefits.
When Milwaukee was faced with a crippling pension situation in 2011, under Governor Walker’s Act 10 labor reforms, retiree costs were deescalated by requiring employees to pay in to their pension accounts, instead of being covered exclusively by the district. Similarly, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District was able to scale back retiree costs by increasing taxes on new employees, whose future pensions will be funded differently.

Danielle Arndt:

Ann Arbor Board of Education members earn $130 per month for attending meetings. Broken down per meeting, that’s about $43. Other school board members in Washtenaw County earn $25 or $30 per meeting — or nothing at all.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
It’s a statement that recently has played out in school districts across the state of Michigan, as the number of traditional public schools facing staggering deficits and elimination of key educational services for Fiscal Year 2014 grows.
In Ann Arbor, high school transportation; more than 80 employees, including about 50 teachers; middle school pools; and several athletics programs are on the chopping block for the 2013-14 academic year.
However, one item not on the table is school board members’ per diem stipends.

Chiew-Siah Tei:

My childhood memory is crowded with people, with their different languages and accents: my family spoke Mandarin and Hokkien; my playmates Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew and Hainan; there were Malays among my neighbours; and every evening the Indians got themselves drunk at the toddy hut opposite our house, before stopping by my father’s butcher stall for a piece of wild boar meat for dinner, if they had some cash left.
For a child, everything seemed to be natural, the languages and the way they were spoken. As I grew up, though, I noticed how these languages intertwined, and how new words, new phrases – shared by different languages – were created. ‘苦力’ (kuli), labourer, originated in the Malay synonym ‘kuli’; and vice versa, ‘巴刹’ (basha), market, derived from the Malay word ‘pasar’.
This form of integration, I realised years later, is no longer about language but culture. It is the need to be understood and to understand, the need for this understanding to be recognised and, most importantly, the natural drive of these cultures to complement each other that had created, not just the words and phrases, but a new form of culture, of life. This discovery had planted the seed of my interest in experimenting with language in future.

John Tamny:

Speaking in Providence, RI not too long ago, the post-speech conversation turned to college education. The word was that Brown University’s tuition alone had risen above $50,000 per year.
The above number is staggering. For the most part college students tune out during their four years on campus; that, or they memorize what’s needed to get As on the tests. Why then would any parent pay the sky-high tuition, and then barring parental help, what 18-year old would take on that kind of debt in order to be the recipient of lots of largely useless information?
Brown is course not alone in this regard. Whether at public or private schools, college tuition over the years has skyrocketed. One factor, though it’s certainly not as big as analysts presume, is the federal government’s growing role in the financing of education.
With the above entity increasingly the only market for college loans, and with that same entity rather generous with the money of others, colleges and universities have very little incentive to do anything but raise tuition. Since our federal government is price insensitive, tuition can keep rising.

Andrew Hacker & Claudia Dreifus, via a kind Erich Zellmer email:

IN April, some 1.2 million New York students took their first Common Core State Standards tests, which are supposed to assess their knowledge and thinking on topics such as “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and a single matrix equation in a vector variable.
Students were charged with analyzing both fiction and nonfiction, not only through multiple-choice answers but also short essays. The mathematics portion of the test included complex equations and word problems not always included in students’ classroom curriculums. Indeed, the first wave of exams was so overwhelming for these young New Yorkers that some parents refused to let their children take the test.
These students, in grades 3 through 8, are taking part in what may be the most far-reaching experiment in American educational history. By the 2014-15 academic year, public schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia will administer Common Core tests to students of all ages. (Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia have so far held out; Minnesota will use only the Common Core English test.) Many Catholic schools have also decided to implement the Common Core standards; most private, nonreligious schools have concluded that the program isn’t for them.
Many of these “assessments,” as they are called, will be more rigorous than any in the past. Whether the Common Core is called a curriculum or not, there’s little doubt that teachers will feel pressured to gear much of their instruction to this annual regimen. In the coming years, test results are likely to affect decisions about grade promotion for students, teachers’ job status and school viability.

Esther Cepeda:

When I saw a recent Pew Hispanic Center report with the sunny title, “Hispanic High School Graduates Pass Whites in Rate of College Enrollment,” I thought, “What’s the catch?”
There was none on this exact point. A record 69 percent of Hispanic high school graduates in the class of 2012 enrolled in college that fall. But this was the only bright spot in the Pew survey. The high school dropout rate is falling, but it is still far above the rate for whites. In 2011, 14 percent of Hispanics ages 16 to 24 were dropouts. This was half the level in 2000. White students, in comparison, had a 5 percent dropout rate in 2011.
And all those college-going Latinos don’t have such great prospects for earning a degree. According to Pew, Hispanic students are much less likely than their white counterparts to enroll in a four-year college (56 percent versus 72 percent). They are less likely to attend a selective college, less likely to be enrolled in college full time, and less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree.

Todd Milewski:

Where has the rise in poverty been the sharpest in Dane County schools over the last 10 years? Use our interactive graphic showing the changes in percentage of children approved for free or reduced-price meals by school or by district.

Vivian Yee:

It was once common for elementary-school teachers to arrange their classrooms by ability, placing the highest-achieving students in one cluster, the lowest in another. But ability grouping and its close cousin, tracking, in which children take different classes based on their proficiency levels, fell out of favor in the late 1980s and the 1990s as critics charged that they perpetuated inequality by trapping poor and minority students in low-level groups.
Now ability grouping has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country — a trend that has surprised education experts who believed the outcry had all but ended its use.
A new analysis from the National Assessment of Educational Progressa a Census-like agency for school statistics, shows that of the fourth-grade teachers surveyed, 71 percent said they had grouped students by reading ability in 2009, up from 28 percent in 1998. In math, 61 percent of fourth-grade teachers reported ability grouping in 2011, up from 40 percent in 1996.
“These practices were essentially stigmatized,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who first noted the returning trend in a March report, and who has studied the grouping debate. “It’s kind of gone underground, it’s become less controversial.”

We have seen this movie before English 10.
Much more on ability grouping, here.

Alan Borsuk:

I usually give awards for special distinction for work on kindergarten through 12th-grade matters only at year’s end. But we’re having bonus presentations now to mark completion of the work of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee on the state budget for the next two years.
The budget still has to go to the Assembly, Senate and Gov. Scott Walker, but Republican leaders are determined to kibosh any substantial changes, so it’s a strong bet this is basically the final version. Without further ado, the awards:
The Surprise! Surprise! Award:
Intense competition for this, given all that happened after a 10-hour, closed-door session of Republicans led to an all-nighter for the committee. The prize goes to tax credits for private school tuition. Never put forth earlier as a proposal, never subject to public input, it was introduced and approved around dawn Wednesday. Starting in 2014, taxpayers could deduct as much as $10,000 from their income for state tax purposes to offset private school tuition. That translates into as much as $600-plus in actual money for some families and probably somewhat of a boost to the appeal of private schools.

Julia Lawrence:

As the dissatisfaction with the U.S. education system among parents grows, so does the appeal of homeschooling. Since 1999, the number of children who are being homeschooled has increased by 75%. Although currently only 4% of all school children nationwide are educated at home, the number of primary school kids whose parents choose to forgo traditional education is growing seven times faster than the number of kids enrolling in K-12 every year.
Any concerns expressed about the quality of education offered to the kids by their parents can surely be put to rest by the consistently high placement of homeschooled kids on standardized assessment exams. Data shows that those who are independently educated typically score between 65th and 89th percentile on such exams, while those attending traditional schools average on the 50th percentile. Furthermore, the achievement gaps, long plaguing school systems around the country, aren’t present in homeschooling environment. There’s no difference in achievement between sexes, income levels or race/ethnicity.

Recent studies laud homeschoolers’ academic success, noting their significantly higher ACT-Composite scores as high schoolers and higher grade point averages as college students. Yet surprisingly, the average expenditure for the education of a homeschooled child, per year, is $500 to $600, compared to an average expenditure of $10,000 per child, per year, for public school students.

College recruiters from the best schools in the United States aren’t slow to recognize homeschoolers’ achievements. Those from non-traditional education environments matriculate in colleges and attain a four-year degree at much higher rates than their counterparts from public and even private schools. Homeschoolers are actively recruited by schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Stanford University and Duke.

Related: A focus on adult employment.

Libby Nelson:

A proposal is circulating quietly on Capitol Hill to ask accreditors to create a new, more flexible form of approval for new and nontraditional providers of higher education.
The measure, a slight 37 words, contains few details about the new system it envisions. Its odds are long; so far, no lawmakers have volunteered to sponsor it. And its backers are few, albeit potentially influential: Bob Kerrey, the former New School president and Nebraska senator and governor, and Ben Nelson, the founder of the Minerva Project, the for-profit, startup online university with Ivy League-level ambitions. (Kerrey is executive chairman of the Minerva Institute for Research and Scholarship, a fledgling nonprofit established by the Minerva Project.)
Still, the proposal represents a shot across the bow at the traditional system of higher education accreditation, which has been under increasing pressure since the second half of the Bush administration. Margaret Spellings, the former education secretary, tried to take on the system through tighter scrutiny and new regulations, but met opposition in Congress.

Joshua Katz:

Starting with the point-referenced data from Bert Vaux’s online survey of English dialects, we used a k-nearest neighbor smoothing algorithm to estimate the probability of seeing a particular answer–eg, whether a person would say soda, pop, or coke–at every point in the continental US.
The composite map gives a picture of the overall distribution, coloring each cell according to whichever answer is estimated to be most likely at that location. The more clearly one answer dominates, the darker the color. Individual maps show estimated probability of each particular answer at a given location, with larger probabilities shown in red and smaller probabilities shown in blue. At the moment, only the four most popular answers for each survey question are displayed.

Jon Bois:

“To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid.” – John Holt

My brother’s first-grade classroom was a repurposed janitor’s closet. There wasn’t enough room for aisles, so he and his 40 classmates would crawl over the tops of the desks to enter and exit the room. They went on exactly one field trip that year, to one of the actual, honest-to-God classrooms the Cherokee County, Georgia, school system was frantically building to catch up to the massive influx of families moving to suburban Atlanta. “You’d better be on your best behavior,” his teacher said, “or we’ll never move into this classroom.” They never did.
I reckon that my fourth-grade classroom, on the other end of the school, didn’t suffer from as many health-code violations. There were a half-dozen leaks in the ceiling, but those would have probably helped if the classroom had ever caught on fire. We didn’t really have aisles either; the desks were arranged in a sort of amorphous jumble to avoid the drips from above.
My parents were more concerned with the curriculum than what the classroom looked like. In third grade up North, I was learning long division, and then we moved to Georgia, where I stepped down to single-digit addition and subtraction. Worksheets featured such problems as 6-2, 3+9, even the occasional 1+1. One day, the kid next to me scooted his desk over. I thought he was going to laugh with me about the 1+1. He spoke in a thoroughly Southern drawl I was still getting used to. “You know how to do this? I don’t get it,” he said as he pointed at the first problem on his worksheet. Eight plus zero.

Kevin Drum:

You’ve probably seen this chart before, but it’s worth seeing again: Student loan debt is just flatly out of control. I understand why this has happened, and I understand why it’s hard to get a handle on, but we’re going to regret it if we don’t do something about this. We’re training a whole generation to be wary of going to college, and for those who do, we’re forcing them to start out their lives living under a mountain of debt. This is a recipe for disaster. More here from Maggie Severns.
It’s also yet another fault line between young and old that’s not likely to turn out well. My generation got a cheap college education when we were young, and we’re getting good retirement benefits now that we’re old. Pretty nice. But now we’re turning around and telling today’s twentysomethings that they should pay through the nose for college, keep paying taxes for our retirements, and oh by the way, when it comes time for you to retire your benefits are going to have to be cut. So sorry. And all this despite the fact that the country is richer than it was 50 years ago, and will be richer still 50 years from now.
But at least today’s kids don’t have to worry about being drafted. That’s something, I suppose.

Die Zeit:

How do families live these days? OECD’s comprehensive world education ranking report, PISA 2009, was published in December of 2010. All participants of the test (fifteen-year-old pupils) completed a questionnaire about their living situation at home. ZEIT ONLINE analyzed and visualized this data to provide you with a unique way of comparing standards of living in different countries. Click on any icon to see further details.

Paul Fain:

Mitch Daniels is agnostic on the various delivery modes of higher education or the tax status of colleges offering them, as long as students are getting a quality education at an appropriate price.
“I’m only interested in results per dollar charged,” Daniels, president of Purdue University and the former Indiana governor, said in a speech to for-profit-college leaders here on Thursday. “That’s the value equation.”
Daniels was speaking at the annual meeting of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, which is the for-profit sector’s primary trade group. The mood may have been glum here for some attendees, because most for-profits are coping with steep dips in enrollment and revenue.
However, the rest of higher education also faces challenges, Daniels said, many of which have similar dimensions to those that are buffeting for-profits. Tests for public universities include declining state support and questions from lawmakers and the general public about the value of college credentials.
“You must sense some of the same shifting of the ground that I do,” said Daniels.
Furthermore, no college will be exempt from the growing clamor for accountability, he said. “It’s coming and high time for it.”

Sources:

• General and Categorical Aid – Payments to School Districts
• WISTAX Facts & Figures
• Madison Schools 2013-2014 June 10, 2013 Budget Discussion Document (PDF)
• Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding
• Up, Down & Transparency: Madison Schools Received $11.8M more in State Tax Dollars last year, Local District Forecasts a Possible Reduction of $8.7M this Year – March, 2013. The June 10, 2013 District budget document (PDF) fails to mention the previous year’s large increase in redistributed State of Wisconsin tax dollars:
  

  Like all Wisconsin school districts, MMSD relies upon a state-local funding partnership. The actions of one partner greatly impact the other partner. The 2013-14 MMSD budget anticipates a major funding loss for MMSD (a loss of $8.7 in equalization aid) which shifts the funding burden onto the local property taxpayer.

The charts reveal several larger stories:
First, the State of Wisconsin “committed” to 2/3 K-12 funding in the mid-1990’s. The increase in redistributed state tax dollars is apparent. [Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau: State Aid to School Districts (PDF)]
Second, Madison’s substantial real estate growth during the 2000’s supported growing K-12 spending while reducing the property tax rate (the overall pie grew so the “rate” could fall somewhat). The real estate music stopped in the late 2000’s (“Great Recession) and the tax rate began to grow again as the District consistently raised property taxes. *Note that there has been justifiable controversy over Madison’s large number of tax exempt properties. Fewer exemptions expands the tax base and (potentially) reduces individual homeowner’s taxes.
Third, Madison has long spent more per student than most public schools.
Fourth, the District’s June 10, 2013 budget document fails to address two core aspects of its mission: total spending and program effectiveness. The most recent 2012-2013 District budget number (via a Matthew DeFour email) is $392,789,303. This is up 4.4% from the July, 2012 District budget number: $376,200,000. The District’s budget has always – in my nine years of observation – increased throughout the school year. The late, lamented “citizen’s budget” was a short lived effort to create a standard method to track changes over time.
Fifth, the June 10, 2013 document does not include the District’s “Fund balance” or equity. The balance declined during the 2000’s, somewhat controversially, but it has since grown. A current number would be useful, particularly in light of Madison’s high property taxes.
Sixth, I took a quick look at property taxes in Middleton and Madison on a $230,000 home. A Middleton home paid $4,648.16 in 2012 while a Madison home paid 16% more, or $5,408.38. Local efforts to significantly increase property taxes may grow the gap with Middleton.
Finally, years of spending and tax growth have not addressed the District’s long term-disastrous reading results. Are we doing the same thing over and over?

The Economist:

URSULA VON DER LEYEN, Germany’s labour minister, likes to point out that the two European Union countries with the lowest unemployment, especially among the young, have dual-education systems: Austria and Germany. Like Switzerland, they have a tradition of combining apprenticeships with formal schooling for the young “so that education is always tied to demand,” she says. When youths graduate, they often have jobs to walk into.
With youth unemployment in Germany and Austria below 8% against 56% in Spain and 38% in Italy, Mrs von der Leyen has won Europe’s attention. Germany recently signed memoranda with Greece, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain to help set up vocational-education systems. Mrs von der Leyen discussed the topic in visits to Madrid in May and to Paris this week. There is even talk of a “new deal” for Europe, including bringing youths from crisis-hit countries to work in Germany and making more loans.

David Mercer:

Two math-notebook pages recently authenticated as belonging to Abraham Lincoln suggest the 16th president, who was known to downplay his formal education, may have spent more time in school than usually thought.
And the Illinois State University math professors behind the discovery say the work shows Lincoln was no slouch, either.
Math professors Nerida Ellerton and Ken Clements said Friday at the university in Normal that they’d recently confirmed that the two pages were part of a previously known math notebook from Lincoln’s childhood. It was found in the archives of Houghton Library at Harvard University, where it remains.
The book, known as a cyphering book in Lincoln’s day, is a sort math workbook in which Lincoln wrote math problems and their answers. It’s the oldest known Lincoln manuscript.

Channel3000:

Madison College GED students graduated Thursday night before major changes are made to testing.
The class that graduated Thursday night is the last to graduate before GED requirements change January 2014. Starting in 2014 the tests will be computer-based and an essay portion will be added.
Students who don’t finish before the deadline will have to start over.
“The students have made quite an accomplishment tonight,” said Jim Merritt, director of testing and assessment at Madison College. “They have worked very hard and some of them have been working at it for years and have felt a little pressure to get done with the changes coming this year.”
For most students, it takes years to complete the degree they hope will lead to better employment.

Annalee Newitz:

Every ten years, the average IQ goes up by about 3 points. Psychologist James Flynn has spent decades documenting this odd fact, which was eventually dubbed the Flynn Effect. The question is, does the Flynn Effect mean we’re getting smarter? Not according to Flynn, who argues that the effect simply reveals that IQ measures teachable skills rather than innate ones. As education changed over time, kids got better at standardized tests like the IQ test. And so their scores went up.
But some thinkers cling to the idea that IQ measures an inborn intelligence that transcends culture and schooling. If that’s true, one would expect that the most abstract, “culture free” elements of IQ testing wouldn’t be subject to the Flynn Effect. But they are. And now two psychology researchers have shown why that is.

Jon Shelton:

Philadelphia is far from the only American city with major fiscal problems in the school system at the moment. Just a few weeks ago, a similar student walkout took place in Newark, and for much of this week, teachers and students have been protesting the Chicago Public School District’s plan to close fifty-four public schools, mostly in Hispanic and African-American neighborhoods. These are not mere coincidences; indeed, both Newark and Chicago have demographic and economic trajectories that are similar to Philly. It is high time that we stop slashing budgets, closing schools, and blaming teachers and instead revisit the notion of metropolitan and even federal solutions to the crisis in urban education, which has been exacerbated by our seemingly endless economic downturn. We need to reconsider bold solutions to these problems–like integrating city and suburbs or legislating counter-cyclical revenue sharing that would pump up urban budgets during times of economic difficulty.
Because of the fractured nature of American metropolitan areas, those who live in the suburbs enjoy many of the privileges that cities offer–high-paying professional jobs, top-notch restaurants, museums, public transit, sports arenas–without contributing nearly as much to the city’s tax base in return. Beyond that, all Americans have a vested interest in providing a great education for all young people: developing civic responsibility, an educated electorate, and the human capital necessary to compete in an integrated global economy should be in everyone’s best interest. We may not live in a time in which these policies seem politically possible, but we must introduce them into the political conversation, instead of wallowing in the limits of what seems doable. If those thousands of marching students have shown us anything, it is that each of them wants an education. When historians look back at this period, perhaps they can point to 2013 as a time when talk about viable long-term solutions began, and every student was ensured the kind of education they deserve, no matter where they live.

Philadelphia plans to spend 2,224,219,000 for 202,300 students or $10,994 each. Madison spends 36% more, about $15k per student.

The Roanoke Times:

Larry Sabato doesn’t need to teach a free online course to become a celebrity professor. The director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics is one of the most visible and quoted academics in the country, analyzing topics as broad as presidential elections and as close to home as your local House of Delegates race.
But this fall, Sabato will enter the brave, new world of “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs. Sabato will lead a free online course examining the administration of President John F. Kennedy and his legacy in the half-century since his assassination. The noncredit class will be offered through the educational technology company Coursera, a Silicon Valley startup that partners with some of the nation’s top universities to offer free online courses.
Sabato said he was willing to conduct the course as part of UVa’s experiment with MOOCs, one of the hottest trends in American higher education. Companies such as Coursera and Udacity and the nonprofit edX have partnered with scores of universities in the U.S. and abroad to offer online courses on their sites, potentially expanding the institutions’ reach to millions of students worldwide.
Virginia Tech, which has developed its own strong distance-learning program, is not making an institutional push to experiment with MOOCs. Nor is it discouraging faculty from exploring opportunities. The Roanoke Times reported Monday that Tom Sanchez, a Tech urban affairs and planning professor, teamed with an Ohio State colleague to teach a course through Coursera for 21,000 students.

Drew Houston:

Thank you Chairman Reed, and congratulations to all of you in the class of 2013.
I’m so happy to be back at MIT, and it’s an honor to be here with you today. I still wear my Brass Rat, and turning this ring around on graduation day is still one of the proudest moments of my life.
There are a lot of reasons why this is a special day, but the reason I’m so excited for all of you is that today is the first day of your life where you no longer need to check boxes.
For your first couple decades, success in life has meant jumping through one hoop after another: get these test scores, get into this college. Take these classes, get this degree. Get into this prestigious institution so you can get into the next prestigious institution. All of that ends today.
The hard thing about planning your life is you have no idea where you’re going, but you want to get there as soon as possible. Maybe you’ll start a company, or cure cancer, or write the great American novel. Or who knows? Maybe things will go horribly wrong. I had no idea.
Being up here in robes and speaking to all of you today wasn’t exactly part of my plan seven years ago. In fact, I’ve never really had a grand plan — and what I realize now is that it’s probably impossible to have one after graduation, if ever.

Adam Alter:

The German poet Christian Morgenstern once said that “all seagulls look as though their name were Emma.” Though Morgenstern was known for his nonsense poetry, there was truth in his suggestion that some linguistic labels are perfectly suited to the concepts they denote. “Dawdle” and “meander” sound as unhurried as the walking speeds they describe, and “awkward” and “gawky” sound as ungainly as the bodies they represent. When the Gestalt psychologist and fellow German Wolfgang Köhler read Morgenstern’s poem, in the nineteen-twenties, he was moved to suggest that words convey symbolic ideas beyond their meaning. To test the idea more carefully, he asked a group of respondents to decide which of the two shapes below was a maluma and which was a takete:

Kris Olds:

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were ‘invented’ in Canada in 2008, and then became transformed, institutionalized and scaled up via the efforts of people, universities, and firms, in the Boston and San Francisco Bay Area city-regions. In the process debates about MOOCs have blossomed, entangled as they are in discussions about online pedagogy through to longer-standing debates about lifelong learning, internationalization, austerity, ‘disruptive innovation,’ public service, deterritorialization, education reform, and many (many) other issues.
The European MOOCs in Global Context Workshop, a free and open access (i.e. no RSVP) event will be held in the Wisconsin Idea Room, Education Building, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 19-20 June 2013, This workshop is designed to engender discussion and debate about the MOOCs phenomenon from a European perspective, as well as about the implications of the MOOCs juggernaut for European universities and students. We seek to learn about MOOCs by contextualizing them, speaking about their histories and geographies, their technologies and aspirational futures, as well as their uneven geographies and power geometries. In doing so we hope that participants will become more astute thinkers about potentials and limits of MOOCs, not to mention how to situate the fast changing MOOCs phenomenon. Given this workshop attendees need not be Europeanists; you simply need to be interested in MOOCs, online learning, and the transformation of higher education more generally.

Matthew M. Chingos:

Advocates of expanding the educational options available to students from low-income families raise not only social justice arguments–pointing to the choices made by families that can afford to live close to a good public school or pay private-school tuition–but also the theory that competition induced by expanded school choice will be “the proverbial rising tide that lifts all boats.” Breaking the ironclad link between residence and school attended will, proponents argue, force schools to compete for students and resources in ways that increase the quality of education provided.
But critics of school choice policies argue that these reforms will lead to increased segregation by race and class as more motivated families move to better schools, leaving the most disadvantaged students behind in the worst public schools. Criticism has often focused on charter schools given the growth in the charter sector in recent years. Nationwide, charter enrollment grew from 1 to 3 percent of all students between 1999-2000 and 2009-10. Charters make up a much larger share of the market in several places, including 11 percent of Arizona students and 37 percent in the District of Columbia.

Ken Smith and Diana Nixon:

Different students learn in different ways–we know that. Students know that too.
A precalculus student I talked to on a recent afternoon failed the class last fall and was on her way to failing it again this spring. Sadly, she will probably fail the class in the fall, too. Despite all the class aids (and there were many), she had not reacted to her consistently low exam scores until I spoke to her after class.
Her science major requires that she complete Calculus 1 and possibly Calculus 2. Her mathematics SAT score was 380.
We talked a little bit about the class, her performance, and where she should go next. The student explained that my class is not compatible with her “learning method.” She said that she prefers “that multiplying method, you know, where there are letters, A, B, C.”
I said, “You mean, multiple choice?”

Jennifer Levitz & Douglas Belkin:

The humanities division at Harvard University, for centuries a standard-bearer of American letters, is attracting fewer undergraduates amid concerns about the degree’s value in a rapidly changing job market.
A university report being released Thursday suggests the division aggressively market itself to freshmen and sophomores, create a broader interdisciplinary framework to retain students and build an internship network to establish the value of the degree in the workforce.
This “is an anti-intellectual moment, and what matters to me is that we, the people in arts and humanities, find creative and affirmative ways of engaging the moment,” said Diana Sorensen, Harvard’s dean of Arts and Humanities. The division needs to show “what it is our work does so they don’t think we’re just living up in the clouds all the time.”

Emma Jacobs:

When Thorkil Sonne’s son Lars was diagnosed with autism at the age of two and a half in 1999, the last thing the chief technology officer expected was a career change. “I was a happy employee. I was happy to be employed by a big company,” he says.
Today, the 52-year-old who once oversaw technology at a spin-off of TDC, Denmark’s largest telecoms company, has sold his family home – after remortgaging it several times – and is relocating to the US state of Delaware. It is all part of his mission to persuade high-tech companies of the merits of employing autistic workers.
This month Specialisterne, the social enterprise he formed in 2004, which recruits autistic people for work on data entry, software programming and testing projects, announced a partnership with SAP, the German business software company. SAP’s ambition is to recruit hundreds of autistic employees to test its software. By 2020, the tech company aims to employ 650 autistic workers, or 1 per cent of its workforce.
The announcement, he says, has sparked interest from other employers.CAI, an IT consulting firm, last week announced it would work with Mr Sonne’s organisation to recruit autistic employees.

Denise-Marie Ordway:

For years, men and women wanting to take classes at their local community colleges have been discouraged to learn they must complete a remedial program before enrolling in college-level courses.
Almost 200,000 students, including recent high-school graduates, had to take refresher classes in math, reading or writing last school year. Some needed extra help in all three subjects, adding a semester or two or more — and hundreds of dollars in tuition — onto their educational plans.
It’s a situation that has prompted numerous students to drop out before they ever enroll in their first college-level course.
Educators and lawmakers have long agreed the system needs revamping, considering colleges statewide pay tens of millions of dollars a year for a program with dismal results. Nationally, fewer than 1 in 10 students who started in remediation graduate from community colleges within three years, according to one estimate. Recent reliable data for Florida students were not immediately available, but old figures show it’s just as bad.

quantstart:

Absolutely. In fact, a good fraction of quantitative analysts, traders and developers make the change to finance only in their late twenties or early-to-mid thirties. In this article I’m going to talk about how you can achieve the same thing.
Age really isn’t a barrier in financial markets. What matters the most is competence, drive and initiative. It is a very meritocratic industry (for better or worse!) in that good performers of all ages are well-rewarded. It is quite common to enter the industry after a stint elsewhere in some other technical field, particularly within the asset management (hedge fund) sector, so don’t be put off applying, even if you think you’re too senior for the roles.
If you’re considering a switch to quantitative finance then the first task you must carry out is to make a frank assessment of your background, experience and skill set. Most forms of quantitative finance are highly mathematical and require solid undergraduate experience in linear algebra, calculus (real analysis in the UK!), probability and statistics. If you have gained, or built upon, these skills in subsequent qualifications such as a MSc (science masters program) or quantitative PhD then so much the better. Prospective employers will also prefer you to have made use of such skills in previous roles.

Peg Tyre:

It’s first period at Harlem’s Cristo Rey high school, a private Catholic school for motivated low-income kids. In a third floor classroom, 10 sophomores and juniors stare into their wide Apple monitors and puzzle over what line of code they need to add to their rudimentary computer programs in order to make their names appear in a gray block between the word “‘Welcome” and an exclamation point.
Their teacher, Kevin Mitchell, 29, is a software engineer and volunteer at the tiny nonprofit startup, ScriptEd, which provides coding instruction in underserved high schools in New York City. Mitchell, a calm figure with an easy smile, suggests his students write a line of code: a word bookended by some simple punctuation. The students diligently attempt to implement it on their own.
For some, the code works on the first try. Welcome Jorge! Welcome Sonya! Around the room, a few other students make low groans–unexpected results. “Did you forget your curly brackets,” queries Mitchell, referring to the punctuation that looks like this “}” Other students have gotten no results at all.
Byron Acosta, a junior at Cristo Rey, seems satisfied when his name pops up. Before he took this class, Acosta says he didn’t know anyone with the skills he was learning in class. Even though he’s a self-described “English and history guy” he jumped at the chance to learn some basics. So far, he likes it. And he’s absorbed Mitchell’s Golden Rule: “You have to be specific in your language,” he offers. “One typo and you can mess everything up.”
Mitchell walks among the students, troubleshooting. Writing code is like giving commands, he tells the students. “The computer can’t know what you don’t tell it.”

Peg Tyre interview.

Hugh Schofield:

My primary thought is: Thank the Lord I was spared the torment.
I mean, can you imagine having to sit down one morning in June and spend four hours developing an exhaustive, coherent argument around the subject: Is truth preferable to peace?
Or: Does power exist without violence?
Or possibly: Can one be right in spite of the facts?
Perhaps you would prefer option B, which is to write a commentary on a text. In which case, here is a bit of Spinoza’s 1670 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Or how about some Seneca on altruism?
I take these examples from my daughter’s revision books. My heart bleeds for her, as I look at the list of themes that have to be mastered.
Ruby has chosen to take what they call a Bac Litteraire – the Literature Baccalaureat.
There are alternative, more science-biased versions of the Baccalaureat. They all include an element of philosophy.

Caralee Adams:

Record numbers of high school students are participating in Advanced Placement courses and International Baccalaureate programs in hopes of being better prepared for college. But a new report from the Education Trust finds students of color and those from low-income families are less likely to enroll in these rigorous programs, even if they show the academic promise to succeed.
Finding America’s Missing AP and IB Students by Christina Theokas and Reid Saaris from the Washington, D.C.-based organization notes that more students from all backgrounds are signing up for these programs, and efforts have been made to boost minority and low-income student participation, yet gaps exist. Nearly 91 percent of students attend a high school that offers AP. Those without the advanced programs tend to be rural, small, and high-poverty schools, the report says.
Each year, about 640,000 low-income students and students of color are “missing” from AP and IB participation–students who could benefit if they merely enrolled at the same rate as other students in their schools, the report says.
It is not just a matter access. About 1 million students do not attend schools that offer AP, and the authors note that only a small percentage of the gaps by race or family income can be accounted for by which schools do and do not offer the classes.

Jon Hilsenrath:

Everyone wants to psychoanalyze Ben Bernanke these days. Does he want another term as chairman of the Federal Reserve? Is he preparing to walk off into the sunset when his current term ends next January? What is his secret motive for skipping the Fed’s annual retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming this year?
In that vein, his unusually personal and wistful commencement address at Princeton University Sunday afternoon is sure to be closely scrutinized for hidden meaning. But let’s leave the psychobabble to unqualified bond traders and take the speech for what it is: His best graduation address as a public official.
Mr. Bernanke — a former Princeton economics professor — has delivered his share of clunkers before, such as a 2008 address to Harvard students about inflation, which was panned in the Harvard Crimson.
Others have been thoughtful but wound up rather dry, such as a recent talk on innovation and the economy’s long-run growth prospects at Bard College at Simon Rock.

Brendan Cronin:

Some household balance sheets have mended during the recovery but that may be thanks less to fiscal stewardship than the improving economy.
In fact, Americans’ grasp of concepts such as investment risk and inflation has weakened since the recovery began in mid-2009. Research released last week shows that on a five-question test (Take the test here), respondents did worse in 2012 than in 2009. The average number of correct answers fell to 2.9 in 2012 from 3.0 on the test in 2009.
The test, along with a wide-ranging survey of financial capability of more than 25,000 American adults, was conducted during the fall and funded by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Investor Education Foundation.
“People are finding it a little easier to make ends meet,” Finra Chief Executive Richard Ketchum said in presenting the 2012 National Financial Capability Study results last week in Washington. “More respondents have rainy-day funds, which puts them in a better position to deal with life’s unexpected events…But there are still very significant concerns,” he said, adding that debt continues to be a serious problem.

Stephen Wolfram:

I never liked calculational math, and was never good at it. But starting around the age of 10, I became increasingly interested in physics–and doing physics required doing math.
Electronic calculators arrived on the scene when I was 12–and I immediately became an enthusiast. And around the same time, I started using my first computer–an object the size of a large desk, with 8 kilowords of 18-bit memory, programmed mostly in assembler using paper tape. I tried doing physics with it, to no great success. But by the time I was 16, I had published a few physics papers, left high school, and was working at a British government lab. “Real” theoretical physicists basically didn’t use computers in those days. But I did. Alternating between an HP desk calculator (with a plotter!) and an IBM mainframe programmed in Fortran.
I was basically just doing numerics, though. But in the physics I wanted to do, there were all sorts of algebra. And not just a little algebra. Huge amounts. Expressions from Feynman diagrams with hundreds or thousands of terms, all of which had to be precisely right if one was going to get the right answer.

Akshita Nagpal:

It was only in 2012 that we got a subtle whiff of the broth brewing in the minds of the bosses of Delhi University. While this isn’t the first time that authorities have attracted opposition from everyone on the other side of the ideological fence, the repercussions of the present push for hasty implementation of the Four Year Undergraduate Programme(FYUP) might be much more damning. Refuting change is not what the displeased body of teachers and students mean to convey. The opposition is against the hasty implementation and lack of insight sharing on the workings of the new system. Keeping up with the absurd pace of implementation, procedural requisites as pivotal as UGC approval have been done away with!
Change can’t be injected like a shot of medicine, but has to be administered gradually, and in viable dosages if you mean to erect a healthier model. Anyone associated with DU would know how much precious time is lost due to strikes and protests. There was a spate of these in 2010, when the administration wanted to similarly inject semester system at the undergraduate level (which it eventually did). Though it is too soon to give any verdict, much less any polarised verdict, on the good and evils of the post-semester system quality of undergraduate education, some of its foibles have already exposed themselves. The swelled up scores are an amusing justification of the system by university authorities.
The university, in a hopeless bid to assuage allegations of being an authoritarian body held a 2 day Open House session to pretend to address the concerns of prospective students and their parents. But how impressively can a blatant façade function? Newspaper reports informed how the officials convening the session were suffering from selective hearing syndrome, owing to which they were able to comfortably dodge queries related to the viability of the FYUP and credence for a student putting in an extra year for graduation. Thus, the university seems to have failed to tide the opinions of the student community in favour of the hurried imposition of FYUP, who happen to be the direct beneficiaries or the ones to be saddled with encumbrance on account of any radical academic reforms. A recent General Body Meeting (GBM) of the Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA) held on May 12 concluded with the teaching fraternity projecting an immoveable opposition to the hasty changes. All this sets up the stage for the classic Creon-Antigone ideological clash; the establishment and the individual at loggerheads.

Jack Craver:

Last week, Sarah Karon of the American Civil Liberties Union argued in a Cap Times column that voucher schools should be held to the same standard of public scrutiny to which public schools are currently subjected.
She noted that many private schools that participate in the Milwaukee School Choice Program receive the great majority of their money from taxpayer-financed vouchers.
Open records advocates, such as the Wisconsin Newspaper Association and the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, agree. If voucher schools are receiving taxpayer dollars, then shouldn’t the fourth estate be allowed to shine a light on them?
“We feel that because there’s a significant amount of money from taxpayers and because there is intense public interest in the metrics (for evaluating schools), they should provide a comparable level of transparency that public schools provide,” says Bill Lueders, president of the WFIC.
Among Republicans, there appears to be a divide over just how much accountability taxpayers can demand from vouchers. Whereas the GOP leadership and Gov. Scott Walker are pushing measures that will subject vouchers to the Common Core academic standards and include voucher student test scores in the statewide Student Information System, conservative stalwart Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, one of the loudest advocates of voucher schools, believes those measures pervert the entire idea behind school choice.

Lauren McAlee
When parents imagine the ideal school for their kids, many probably envision a place where children can not only master basic skills and content, but also be valued as individuals, encouraged to delve into interesting topics, and safe to take healthy risks. Many schools offer this kind of rich education. Unfortunately, they disproportionately serve children who come from privileged backgrounds.
Right now, many students receive an imbalanced education. Kids need to develop defined sets of skills like reading and writing words and solving equations; they also need to know how to apply these skills and solve problems in open-ended contexts. Curriculum reform has found a relative balance, recognizing that students need to learn defined sets of skills as well as explore open-ended contexts to succeed in the 21st century. But students living in poverty disproportionately miss out on opportunities for balanced education.
Over 30 years ago, Jean Anyon wrote Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work, observing that in sample working-class schools, “work is following the steps of a procedure,” usually “involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice,” while in affluent and elite schools, “work is creative activity carried out independently” and “developing one’s analytical intellectual powers.”
Based on my experience working with educators and students around the country, this pattern persists.
Counterexamples such as Big Picture Learning schools, public Montessori and Expeditionary Learning schools, and schools using the Schoolwide Enrichment Model exist, but are the exception for students living in poverty, rather than the rule.
Having taught in both high- and low-poverty schools, I understand why open-ended thinking is easier to emphasize in privileged communities. Varying education and economic status of families creates a serious gap in vocabulary, reasoning, background knowledge, and social-emotional skills. Teachers in my pre-K through eighth-grade high-poverty school spend countless hours teaching students skills that affluent students already know. This leaves less school time for play, projects, and exploration.
In Teaching Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit writes that, “skills are a necessary but insufficient aspect of black and minority students’ education. Students need technical skills to open doors, but they need to be able to think critically and creatively to participate in meaningful and potentially liberating work inside those doors.”
Skating over open-ended competencies is impractical for any school as the Common Core State Standards shift learners towards deeper, more nuanced thinking. With or without Common Core, we cannot accept our current state of curriculum segregation.
So how can we fix curriculum segregation? We can do a lot, but none of it will be easy. Here are a few ideas to get started:

1. Urgently identify, study, and share learning about the existing pockets of educators who excel in balanced education for children living in poverty.
2. Provide more intensive school services for children who come to school with less formal knowledge, including longer school days and years, and deeper and wider school staffing. Students with more to learn need more support.
3. Share concrete tools. Open-ended education is harder to scale than defined education, and we need to share as much as we can.
4. Ensure teacher evaluations, especially those including unannounced observations, reward rather than punish healthy risk-taking.
5. Measure schools’ success with metrics that include students’ ability to think in robust, open-ended contexts.

Children in my school and around the country need all hands on deck to ensure their education is rigorous, rich, and respectful of their potential.

Michael F. Shaughnessy
Eastern New Mexico University
Portales, New Mexico
1) Will, you have been advocating for the high school term paper for years–why the persistence?
I have worked on The Concord Review for 26 years for several reasons. It pays almost nothing, but we have no children, the house is paid for and my wife has a teacher’s pension. Most of all, I am constantly inspired by the diligent work of high school students from 39 countries on their history research papers. I thought, when I started in 1987, that I would get papers of 4,000, words. But I have been receiving serious readable interesting history research papers of 8,000, 11,000, 13,000 words and more by secondary students, who are often doing independent studies to compete for a place in this unique international journal.
2) I remember with fondness, my term papers in both high school and college–and the feeling of accomplishment I received. Am I alone in this regard?
We did the only study done so far in the United States of the assignment of term paper in U.S. public high schools and about 85% of them never assign even the 4,000-word papers I had hoped for. Most American high school students just don’t do term papers. Teachers say they are too busy, and students are quite reluctant to attempt serious papers on their own, so they arrive in college quite unprepared for college term paper assignments. Many of our authors say that their history papers were the most important and most satisfying work they did in high school.
3) People write and talk about “curriculum issues”–are there any curriculums that you are aware of that focus on library research and writing?
As you know the hottest topic in American education now is “The Common Core Standards,” which are quite explicit in saying over and over that they are “not a curriculum.” They say that nonfiction reading is important, but they recommend no history books, and they say nonfiction writing is important, but they provide no examples, of the kind they might find, for example, in the last 97 issues of The Concord Review. To my mind, the CC initiative is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” as the man said. As you know, by a huge margin, the focus for writing in our schools is on personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, even for high school students.
4) Let’s discuss some of the skills needed to write a good term paper–what would you say they are?
The most important skill or effort that leads to a good term paper is lots and lots of reading. Too often our literacy experts try to force students to write when they have read nothing and really have nothing to say. So the focus becomes the students’ personal life, which is often none of the teachers’ business, and there is little or no effort to have students read history books and learn about something (besides themselves) that would be worth trying hard to write about. Many of our authors learn enough about their topic that they reach a point where they feel that people ought to know about what they have learned–this is great motivation for a good term paper.
5) You have been publishing exemplary high school research papers from around the world for years–how did you get started doing this and why?
I had been teaching for enough years at the public high school in Concord, Massachusetts to earn a sabbatical (1986-1987). That gave me time to read What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know, Horace’s Compromise, Cultural Literacy and some other books and articles that helped me understand that a concern over students’ knowledge of history and their ability to write term papers was not limited to my classroom or even to my school, but was a national issue. I had usually had a few students in my classes who did more work than they had to, and it occurred to me that if I sent out a call for papers (as I did in August, 1987) to every high school in the United States and Canada and 1,500 schools overseas, I might get some first-rate high school history essays sent to me. I did, and I have now been able to publish 1,066 of them in 97 issues of the journal. [Samples at www.tcr.org.] No one wanted to fund it, so I started The Concord Review with all of an inheritance and the principal from my teacher’s retirement.
6) Has the Internet impacted a high school student’s ability to research? Or is it a different kind of research?
I read history books on my iPad and so can high school history students. I also use the Internet to check facts, and so can students. There is a huge variety of original historical material now available on the Web, as everyone knows, but I would still recommend to students who want to do a serious history research paper that they read a few books and as many articles as they can find on their topic. This will make their paper more worth reading and perhaps worth publishing.
7) It seems that getting a paper into your Concord Review almost always guarantees admission to a top notch college or university–am I off on this?
Thirty percent of our authors have been accepted at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale, but I have to remember that these serious authors doing exemplary papers for my journal are usually also outstanding in many other areas as well. A number of our authors have become doctors as well, but at least at one point in their lives they wrote a great history paper!
8) I was recently on the East Coast and was reading The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. I was astounded by the quality of writing. There are still good writers out there–but do we treasure, promote and encourage good writing?
Those papers can hire a teeny tiny percent of those who want to make a living by their writing, and they provide a great service to the country, but for the vast majority of our high school students, reading and writing are the most dumbed-down parts of their curriculum. Many never get a chance to find out if they could write a serious history paper, because no one ever asks them to try. And remember, we have nationally-televised high school basketball and football games, but no one knows who is published in The Concord Review and they don’t ask to know.
9) What have I neglected to ask?
My greatest complaint these days is that all our EduPundits, it seems, focus their attention on guidelines, standards, principals, teachers, and so on, and pay no attention to the academic work of students. Indiana University recently interviewed 143,000 U.S. high school students, and found that 42.5% do one hour or less a week on homework. But no one mentions that. Our education experts say that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality (and thus all the attention on selection, training, assessment and firing of teachers). I maintain that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work, to which the experts pay no attention at all. But then, most of them have never been teachers, and so they usually do not know what they are talking about.
www.tcr.org
fitzhugh@tcr.org
The Concord Review

Justin Harper:

Turning out successful pupils is about more than making them sit at their desks for hours, according to top-performing schools overseas
Asia’s schools produce successful pupils by focusing on plenty of homework and a “meritocratic” approach, according to teachers, who rejected suggestions that longer hours in the classroom are key.
They were responding to recent remarks from the British education minister, Michael Gove, who pointed out that a longer school day is the norm in East Asian nations.

Bijoyeta Das:

Upon arriving in India, the first place Arif Ahmady visited was the Taj Mahal.
But it was hope for a better future that enticed Ahmady to leave his home in Kabul, Afghanistan last February. The second place he visted was Delhi University. Now he is busy scouting graduate schools to study computer science, checking out housing options, and connecting with other Afghan students in India.
“I want to study in a peaceful space, get an Indian degree because it has a great reputation in Afghanistan, go back and build a career,” says the 23-year-old, wearing a black cotton tunic, baggy pants, and a traditional Afghan scarf wrapped around his neck.
Indian cities such as New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Bhubaneswar attract thousands of Afghan youth to study. About 5,500 Afghan students are currently in the country, says Shaida Mohammad Abdali, Afghanistan’s ambassador to India, of whom about 300 are women.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

During her recent visit to CESAs 1 and 6 in Wisconsin, Louisa Moats recorded a podcast on the topic of reconciling the Common Core State Standards with reading research. This podcast, which comes in three parts for viewing, is an excellent source of information on what is necessary to effectively implement the CCSS in the area of reading. You can access the podcast at either of the following sets of links, depending on your computer system.
PART 1 –
aasaonline.mediasite.com/mediasite/Play/c70686d007f74391bc2bebe7c1ed
PART 2 –
aasaonline.mediasite.com/mediasite/Play/5352ade16e8549809f88db8397b1
PART 3 –
aasaonline.mediasite.com/mediasite/Play/ea05e4041b314797a8e7ad2efc8b
OR
PART 1 –
http://aasaonline.mediasite.com/mediasite/Play/c70686d007f74391bc2bebe7c1ed
8aea1d
PART 2 –
http://aasaonline.mediasite.com/mediasite/Play/5352ade16e8549809f88db8397b1
ede11d
PART 3 –
http://aasaonline.mediasite.com/mediasite/Play/ea05e4041b314797a8e7ad2efc8b
1f9d1d

Sarah Karon:

Back in 1990, when Milwaukee launched the nation’s first publicly funded voucher program, participating schools could enroll no more than 49 percent voucher students. These schools were considered private, because the majority of their students paid private tuition.
Fast-forward to 2013.
Now, more than half of Milwaukee’s 110 voucher schools have at least 95 percent of students on publicly funded vouchers. In one-fifth of these schools, every student receives a voucher.
Yet because voucher schools are still classified as “private,” they can — and do — ignore Wisconsin’s open records and meetings laws. It’s a double standard that undermines transparency and shields information from parents and the public.

Stephanie Simon:

A $100 million database set up to store extensive records on millions of public school students has stumbled badly since its launch this spring, with officials in several states backing away from the project amid protests from irate parents.
The database, funded mostly by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is intended to track students from kindergarten through high school by storing myriad data points: test scores, learning disabilities, discipline records – even teacher assessments of a child’s character. The idea is that consolidated records make it easier for teachers to use software that mines data to identify academic weaknesses. Games, videos or lesson plans would then be precisely targeted to engage specific children or promote specific skills.
The system is set up to identify millions of children by name, race, economic status and other metrics and is constructed in a way that makes it easy for school districts to share some or all of that information with private companies developing education software.
The nonprofit organization that runs the database, inBloom Inc, introduced the project in March with a presentation at an education technology conference, complete with a list of nine states that it said were committed partners.

Liz Peek:

President Obama and Congress are squabbling again – this time over the rates charged on federal college loans.
Surrounded by students nicely turned out in suits and dresses, looking more like the Mormon Youth Chorus than today’s undergraduates, Mr. Obama recently chastised Congress for not yet blocking a doubling of rates for new Stafford loans set to occur on July 1.
As the president well knows, the House has already passed a bill preventing the hike and tying new loan terms to market levels. The president’s solution is similar, but would lock in rates for the duration of the loan. The spat is like bickering over menu choices on the Titanic.

Matt Phillips:

Swedish colleges and universities are free. Yep. Totally free.
But students there still end up with a lot of debt. The average at the beginning of 2013 was roughly 124,000 Swedish krona ($19,000). Sure, the average US student was carrying about 30% more, at $24,800.
But remember: Free. College in Sweden is free. That’s not even all that common in Europe anymore. While the costs of education are far lower than in the US, over the past two decades sometimes-hefty fees have become a fact of life for many European students. Britain got them in 1998. Some German states instituted them after a federal ban on student fees was overturned in the courts. In fact, since 1995 more than half of the 25 OECD countries with available data on higher education have overhauled their college tuition policies at public institions, with many adding or raising fees.

Jason Stein

Lawmakers also want to expand school voucher programs beyond the borders of Milwaukee and eastern Racine County. The programs allow parents who meet income thresholds to send their children to religious schools and other private schools at taxpayer expense.
Under the motion approved 12-4 along party lines by Republicans on the budget panel:

• Public schools would receive $150 more per student in general aid this fall and another $150 increase the following year. The plan would cost $289 million over two years, with $231.5 million funded with state taxes and the rest with an additional $52 million in higher local property taxes and an increase in expected revenues from the state lottery.
  School districts would have the authority to spend this new money. Walker wanted to give schools $129 million in state aid but require all of it to go toward property tax relief, rather than be used for new expenses.
  Under the budget committee’s proposal, total property taxes would increase by less than 1% per year, with school levies going up somewhat more than that.

• A new voucher program would become available to all students outside Milwaukee and Racine. It would be limited to 500 students the first year and 1,000 students every year thereafter. Walker wanted no limits on the number of students in the program after the second year.
  If there are more students seeking slots in the program than allowed, the proposal would allocate the available slots by lottery. The slots would go to the 25 schools with the most applications, with each school getting at least 10 seats.

• The new program would be available to students in any school district. Walker wanted to make it available in districts with 4,000 or more students that were identified as struggling on school report cards issued by the state.
• No more than 1% of the students of any given school district could participate in the new program.
• Over 12 years, the negative financial impacts for the Milwaukee Public Schools from the voucher program here would be phased out.
• The new program would be available to students of families making 185% of the federal poverty level or less — well below the income thresholds for Milwaukee and Racine. Those programs are available to families making up to 300% of the federal poverty level, with a higher threshold for married couples.
• Voucher schools in all parts of the state would receive $7,210 per K-8 student and $7,856 per high school student — up from $6,442 currently. Walker wanted to provide $7,050 for students in kindergarten through eighth grade and the same larger increase to high school students.

Secret voucher ‘deal’ boosts their $ by 9% at the expense of WI’s 870,000 public school kids. owl.li/lHhx2 #WIedu

— Tony Evers (@WISuptTonyEvers) June 5, 2013

Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Tony Evers (PDF):

Today, Republican leaders are finalizing a deal to likely expand Wisconsin’s private school voucher program statewide. While this dramatic proposal has significant implications for citizens and taxpayers across Wisconsin, it has been developed behind closed doors with no public input, no public hearings, and no public fiscal analysis. If this proposal becomes law, taxpayers across Wisconsin will be financing a new entitlement for private school children whose tuition is currently paid for by their parents. To address the lack of information about the potential fiscal effects of this program, the attached table estimates potential long-term costs of statewide subsidization of private school tuition on a district-by-district basis. Cost to subsidize current private school students only: up to $560 million annually
While some lawmakers claim the purpose of the program is to provide educational choices to those who cannot afford it, the current school choice programs in Milwaukee and Racine provide vouchers to families who are already choosing to send their children to private schools. As many as 50% of the children participating in the Racine choice program were already in private schools when they began receiving a state-funded subsidy in
2011-12. If the voucher program is expanded statewide, it can be assumed that current private school families would also be eligible for this new entitlement.

Related:

• Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding
  
  
• “Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”
• Are MMSD Programs Effective? Who Knows.
• Tony Evers notes and links.
• Vouchers notes and links.

Jill Barshay:

Poverty is getting so concentrated in America that one out of five public schools was classified as as a “high-poverty” school in 2011 by the U.S. Department of Education. To win this unwelcome designation, 75 percent or more of an elementary, middle or high school’s students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. About a decade earlier, in 2000, only one in eight public schools was deemed to be high poverty. That’s about a 60 percent increase in the number of very poor schools!
This figure was part of a large data report, The Condition of Education 2013, released by the National Center for Education Statistics on May 23, 2013. There’s a lot to chew on in it. But school poverty jumped out at me as a really depressing data point showing the growing income inequality in America.

Coursera Blog:

It is impossible to overstate the benefit and happiness that Coursera has brought to our son Daniel and our family.
Five years ago (next month) our severely autistic son Daniel had a major breakthrough. Then twelve years old, with a using vocabulary of thirty or forty words (though we knew he understood far more) he suddenly learned to answer questions by picking the answers out, one letter at a time, on a letterboard. Within a couple of weeks, Daniel could use the thousands of words he had heard but could not speak.
The teacher who created this breakthrough, Soma Mukhopadhyay, also taught us how to read to Daniel: read him a sentence, stop, ask him a comprehension question, get his answer on the letter board, go on to the next sentence, ask another question…

Carl Zimmer:

I never heard from Davis again. But I have continued to get a steady stream of emails from other students. Some are a pleasure to read. They are the products of young minds opening up to the rich rewards of science. These young correspondents are starting to understand something important about the natural world, and that understanding triggers a flood of questions that will take them even deeper.
But a lot of the emails follow in the tradition of Davis. Essentially: I have homework. I need information from you.
In the past couple years, I’ve noticed a shift in the tone of these requests. They’re not furtive acts of desperation. They seem to bear the seal of approval from adults-either from teachers or parents.

NPR:

It still pays to earn a college degree. That is, if you get the right one. Georgetown University published a report Wednesday that looked into this dilemma.
Highlights From Georgetown’s Study:

(1.) Unemployment is generally higher for non-technical majors, such as the arts (9.8 percent) or law and public policy (9.2 percent).
(2.) Unemployment rates for recent graduates in information systems, concentrated in clerical functions, is high (14.7 percent) compared with mathematics (5.9 percent) and computer science (8.7 percent).
(3.) Unemployment rates are relatively low for recent graduates in education (5 percent), engineering (7 percent), health and the sciences (4.8 percent) because they are tied to stable or growing industry sectors and occupations.
(4.) Graduates in psychology and social work also have relatively low rates (8.8 percent) because almost half of them work in health care or education sectors.
— Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce
“The labor market demands more specialization. So, the game has changed,” says Anthony Carnevale, the report’s co-author and director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

Andy Kessler

Anyone who cares about America’s shortage of computer-science experts should cheer the recent news out of Georgia Tech. The Atlanta university is making major waves in business and higher education with its May 14 announcement that the college will offer the first online master’s degree in computer science–and that the degree can be had for a quarter of the cost of a typical on-campus degree. Many other universities are experimenting with open online courses, or MOOCs, but Georgia Tech’s move raises the bar significantly by offering full credit in a graduate program.
It comes just in time. A shortfall of computer-science graduates is a constant refrain in Silicon Valley, and by 2020 some one million high-tech job openings will remain unfilled, according to the Commerce Department.
That’s why Georgia Tech’s online degree, powered by Udacity, is such a game-changer. For the same $7,000 a year that New York City spends per student on school buses, you can now get a master’s from one of the most well-respected programs in the country. Moore’s Law says these fees should drop to $1,000 by 2020–a boon for students and for the economy.

Simpson Street Free Press.
David Maraniss mentioned his four pillars:
1 Go there
2 Get the docs
3 Interviews
4 Organization thinking figure it out
He urged the students to focus on telling stories and to be perpetually curious.

Shane Parrish:

One of the keys to getting smarter is to read a lot.
But that’s not enough. Reading is only one part of the equation.
We’re going to borrow a tip from Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, to make our reading go deeper and stay with us longer.
Cialdini revealed a trick that he uses, to a reader of Farnam Street, who was kind enough to share it with me.
While on the flight to Omaha, he was reading. He took notes on the material itself, and every time he completed a chapter he pulled out a sheet of white paper and wrote a single page summary on what he had just read. He places the paper in another folder. This is how he gets his learning deeper and this also enables him to refer to summaries in the future.

Professor Baker:

For more than 400 years, the personal essay has been one of the richest and most robust of all literary forms. Distinguished from the detached, formal essay by its warm, friendly, conversational tone, its loose structure and drive towards candor and self-disclosure, the personal essay seizes on the minutiae of daily life – vanities, fashions, food, culture, language and identity. It is poetry, it is song, it is speech, at once both call and response in the hands of a master story teller…
For some time now I have been researching into the schools of yesteryear. “5 Great Schools” is a gem that I wish to share with you. Though written over 100 years ago, the continued validity and wisdom displayed by President DeWitt (from Bowdoin College) is well worth a bit of reflection, even today…

ACT News:

Nearly one in five 2011 U.S. high school graduates who were prepared to succeed in first-year college coursework either never enrolled in college or didn’t return for a second year, according to national and state-specific reports from ACT entitled The Reality of College Readiness 2013.
The data show 19 percent of college-ready, ACT-tested 2011 graduates were not enrolled in a two- or four-year college a little more than a year later, in the fall of 2012, including 10 percent who had never enrolled. Those data are based on graduates who had achieved the ACT College Readiness Benchmark scores on at least three of the four sections (English, math, reading and science) of the ACT® college readiness exam, suggesting they were ready for success in first-year college coursework in core subject areas from an academic standpoint.
“Academic readiness is vital to college success, but other factors such as self-discipline, financial stress and effective educational planning can also have an impact,” said Steve Kappler, head of postsecondary strategy for ACT. “It’s important for students to find the right college, be aware of financial aid opportunities and ensure their major matches their personal interests, among other things. We need to pay attention to multiple dimensions of readiness in helping students achieve their educational goals.”

Former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson::

Nearly 25 years ago, business leaders in Milwaukee came to me deeply concerned that they couldn’t find enough qualified workers among the students leaving the Milwaukee Public Schools. At the same time, African-American parents came to me worried about their children’s future in a school system that wasn’t meeting their needs.
So, together, the city’s parents and the business community pleaded with state leaders to give these families a better option. Working with a Democratic Assembly and Senate, we created both the nation’s first private school choice program and a series of additional educational options including independent charter schools.
And it worked. Today, the children of Milwaukee have a wider array of educational options than students anywhere else in America. Children in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program are more likely to graduate from high school and go on to college than their peers in the Milwaukee public school system. That accomplishment is all the more impressive because graduation rates in the Milwaukee Public Schools are also up. Choice and competition has improved the graduation rates for all of Milwaukee’s students.
Now school choice must be expanded to other communities in Wisconsin where students are struggling to graduate from high school.
A high school degree is the first step to success in this economy. Yet, the chances that an African-American student will earn a high school diploma are now better in Milwaukee than in the Madison. The four-year graduation rate for African-American students in Madison is only 53 percent while in Milwaukee it is 59 percent. In Green Bay, the odds for an African-American student are even more daunting – only half of that city’s African-American students will graduate from high school.

John Dickert, via a kind email

1. The problem concerns the results of the half year exams given at the end of January. I have not heard anything on what the results are for the end of year exams.
2. This problem has been building up over 5 years.
3. These are county wide tests. I’m not sure what information about the range of coverage is given to teachers. One article I read spoke to the issue that not enough time is allotted for covering important topics.
4. Honors classes do better than regular classes, but the results are still not good. One (make that I) also wonders why honors classes are tested on the same materials as regular classes.
5. Not enough emphasis is given to the disconnect between what is taught and what is tested.
6. This is not a situation that would encourage students to continue in STEM disciplines.

Montgomery considers multiple factors in math exam failure rates.
Large percentages of Montgomery students fail final exams in English, history and biology
Links: Biology English Math

Lisa Wade & Gwen Sharp:

1. Don’t Worry About Making Your Dreams Come True
College graduates are often told: “follow your passion,” do “what you love,” what you were “meant to do,” or “make your dreams come true.” Two-thirds think they’re going find a job that allows them to change the world, half within five years. Yikes.
This sets young people up to fail. The truth is that the vast majority of us will not be employed in a job that is both our lifelong passion and a world-changer; that’s just not the way our global economy is. So it’s ok to set your sights just a tad below occupational ecstasy. Just find a job that you like. Use that job to help you have a full life with lots of good things and pleasure and helping others and stuff. A great life is pretty good, even if it’s not perfect.

Larry Cuban:

“Our four-year-olds do have a place in school, but it is not at a school desk,” said Ed Zigler, Yale University psychologist who helped design Head Start in President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and led the Office of Child Development in President Nixon’s administration. He wanted K-12 systems to welcome all young children but was concerned about pre-kindergartens becoming another academic boot camp for four-year-olds.
Many others, however, were strongly opposed to putting preschoolers into an already bureaucratized, ineffective K-12 system. For example, the head of the Commonwealth Foundation (PA) asked: “Would you hire a carpenter to remodel the first floor of your home if he was already working on the second and third floors and doing a poor job? Would you expect the results on the second and third floors to improve just because the carpenter was also remodeling the first floor?”
Both quotes stake out different positions on the significant policy question whether preschools for all children should be part of the existing K-12 system-as it is in Oklahoma, New York, Georgia, and New Jersey-or be part of the private market for child care in homes, churches, and corporate-owned facilities as it has been in most cities and suburbs for decades or, another option, a mix of public schools and private child care. These policy options capture the dilemma facing decision-makers on the issue of expanding access of three- and four-year-olds to preschool in the U.S.