I first encountered the upper middle class when I attended a big magnet high school in Manhattan that attracted a decent number of brainy, better-off kids whose parents preferred not to pay private-school tuition. Growing up in an immigrant household, I’d felt largely immune to class distinctions. Before high school, some of the kids I knew were somewhat worse off, and others were somewhat better off than most, but we generally all fell into the same lower-middle- or middle-middle-class milieu. So high school was a revelation. Status distinctions that had been entirely obscure to me came into focus. Everything about you—the clothes you wore, the music you listened to, the way you pronounced things—turned out to be a clear marker of where you were from and whether you were worth knowing.
By the time I made it to a selective college, I found myself entirely surrounded by this upper-middle-class tribe. My fellow students and my professors were overwhelmingly drawn from comfortably affluent families hailing from an almost laughably small number of comfortably affluent neighborhoods, mostly in and around big coastal cities. Though virtually all of these polite, well-groomed people were politically liberal, I sensed that their gut political instincts were all about protecting what they had and scratching out the eyeballs of anyone who dared to suggest taking it away from them. I can’t say I liked these people as a group. Yet without really reflecting on it, I felt that it was inevitable that I would live among them, and that’s pretty much exactly what’s happened.
Monthly Archives: February 2015
Study: Even for college-educated blacks, road to full-time work is rocky
Months before he graduated from college, Jeramey Winfield was sending out resumes and applying for jobs online in Chicago.
The media studies major hoped to jump from Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire right into the Chicago workforce, in marketing or event planning, so he could get his own apartment and begin helping his family financially. But after more than a year of networking, sending out applications and asking mentors for help, Winfield still doesn’t have a full-time job. In fact, he said, he’s rarely been called back for an interview.
“I had this picture in my mind of working downtown, taking the train in and contributing to my profession,” said Winfield, who often wears dapper, fitted business suits. “I had this vision of helping my mom out, since she struggled to raise five of us. I wanted to give her some relief.”
Preparing Effective Teachers
Like so many teachers, when I first entered the classroom, I believed that I would be effective. Then I met Mohammed, and Jose, and Efrain. Mohammed was defiant. He refused to do work, disrupting the learning of my other students. Most days, Jose hid under his desk. Efrain turned eleven in 4th grade because he was retained in El Salvador before coming to the U.S. and couldn’t read a word in English or Spanish. I wanted more than anything to help these students. In fact, I wasn’t helping them. I was like most first year teachers. I needed more training. I needed coaching. I needed a veteran teacher who could guide my practice.
What I felt most acutely in those first few months of teaching was that all of the students in my class would be better off it they were across the hall in Mrs. Lewis’ class. Debbie Lewis was a skilled veteran teacher. She was the kind of teacher my kids deserved.
In the beginning, I despaired of ever becoming that teacher. But slowly that year, my teaching got better. That year, Debbie talked me through every challenge I experienced in my classroom, from instructional failures to behavior issues, and helped me problem-solve so that I did better the next day. She worked with me to create a class-wide behavior system that even Mohammed wanted to follow. Together, we differentiated my lesson plans so Jose and Efrain would make progress. Debbie wasn’t the only one. Other coaches came into my classroom to equip me with skills to become more effective.
How Spelling Keeps Kids From Learning
Johnny in Topeka can’t read, but Janne in Helsinki is effortlessly finishing his storybooks. Such a disparity may be expected by now, but the reason might come as a surprise: It probably has much less to do with teaching style and quality than with language. Simply put, written English is great for puns but terrible for learning to read or write. It’s like making children from around the world complete an obstacle course to fully participate in society but requiring the English-speaking participants to wear blindfolds.
Adults who have already mastered written English tend to forget about its many quirks. But consider this: English has 205 ways to spell 44 sounds. And not only can the same sounds be represented in different ways, but the same letter or letter combinations can also correspond to different sounds. For example, “cat,” “kangaroo,” “chrome,” and “queue” all start with the same sound, and “eight” and “ate” sound identical. Meanwhile, “it” doesn’t sound like the first syllable of “item,” for instance, and “cough” doesn’t rhyme with either “enough,” “through,” “furlough” or “bough.” Even some identically spelled words, such as “tear,” can be pronounced differently and mean different things.
What Does Your MTI Contract Do for You? Just Cause
Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):
JUST CAUSE does not mean “just because.” It establishes standards and procedures that must be met before an employee can be disciplined or discharged. Fortunately for members of MTI’s bargaining units, all have protection under the JUST CAUSE STANDARDS. They were negotiated by MTI to protect union members.
There are seven just cause tests, and an employer must meet all seven in order to sustain the discipline or discharge of an employee. They are: notice; reasonableness of the rule; a thorough and fair investigation; proof; equal treatment; and whether the penalty reasonably meets the alleged offense by the employee.
MTI’s various Contracts enable a review and binding decision by a neutral arbitrator, as to whether such an action by a District administrator/principal is justified. The burden of proof is on the District in such cases.
The provisions of just cause are steps every employer should be obligated to follow. Unfortunately, all administrators do not have a conscience that leads them to follow these principles. However, an MMSD administrator must follow them, because of the rights MTI members have under the Union’s Collective Bargaining Agreements.
Your lifetime earnings are probably determined in your 20s
Ah, your 20s: A decade of self discovery, smartphone dating and shopping for IKEA coffee tables — right?
A new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York sends a more sobering message to millennials: Your first 10 years in the labor market likely shape your lifetime earning potential.
“Across the board, the bulk of earnings growth happens during the first decade,” wrote economists Fatih Guvenen, Fatih Karahan, Serdar Ozkan and Jae Song, who studied the career paths of about 5 million workers over nearly 40 years.
The jump in pay could be largely driven by the steep learning curves early in your career, said Guvenen, an economics professor at the University of Minnesota.
Why Scott Walker’s allegedly mistaken attempt to change the University of Wisconsin’s mission statement is an omen for big changes to higher education in America
Last Wednesday, Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker released a biennium budget plan that had a strange twist nestled inside. This line item didn’t have much, if anything, to do with how he intended to spend the state’s money; it had no numbers, dollar signs, nor provisos. It did, however, deal ever-so-vaguely with Wisconsin’s economy—at least, what Walker envisioned it would look like down the line and how higher education would make that happen.
Walker proposed to rewrite the University of Wisconsin’s mission statement. He apparently wanted to strip out its frills (stuff like “extended training,” “public service,” improving “the human condition,” and “the search for truth”) and inject it with a more practical goal: meeting “the state’s workforce needs.”
Change is inevitable.
Accountability Bill Really Enables STATE TAKEOVER
Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):
The January 14 hearing by the Assembly Education Committee produced ONLY ONE speaker who favored the Accountability proposal, Assembly Bill 1 (AB 1), and that was the Bill’s author, Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt. During his testimony, Thiesfeldt refused to name either the person or organization who asked him to introduce it, the source of the information from which the Bill was produced, or who additional sponsors of the Bill are. Much appears to have come from the far-right group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Thiesfeldt did say that additional COMMON CORE STANDARDS would be added to his Accountability Bill proposal, as it proceeds through the legislative process.
Major opposition was heard from DPI policy advisor Jeff Pertl who testified that if AB 1 was in effect in 2015, $587 million in State education funds would be diverted from public schools to for-profit charter schools.
Senator Dave Hansen (Green Bay) said, “Some of the special interests in the Capitol might not like that fact, but a lot of the problems we’re seeing with AB 1 could have been avoided if a more inclusive effort had been made by the author.”PRIVATIZATION – the goal of AB 1 was made clear as the intent of the proposal in remarks by Rep. Eric Genrich (Green Bay) who said, “Today’s hearing has made clear that this most recent effort to take over certain public schools and further privatize public education is hastily and poorly crafted. This legislation is being rammed through the legislative process without giving deference to or seeking real input from the educational professionals and local school boards who serve our school kids every day.”
Program pairs Milwaukee students with mentors from business world
At Veritas High School, a small and mostly low-income school on Milwaukee’s south side, more than 95% of students graduate in four years, and almost all are accepted to college.
But only about two out of three actually enroll in postsecondary school. An even smaller share obtain a degree.
“Saying you’re going to college and actually going to college are two different things,” said Sherry Tolkan, principal at Veritas.
A new program may hold promise for boosting the numbers of students doing both.
As part of an experiment being tried nationwide, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Milwaukee has matched a group of Veritas freshmen with business professionals to support the teenagers not only through high school, but also college.
A secure online platform allows the volunteer mentors and students to develop relationships over email, and live meet-ups take place at school once a month.
Poll: 72 Percent of Americans Are Concerned About Public Pension Costs, 82 Percent Say Public Employees Should Contribute More to Their Own Retirement
The new Reason-Rupe national telephone poll of 1,003 adults finds 72 percent of Americans are concerned their state and local governments may not be able to afford the pensions that have been promised to government workers. With those worries in mind, 82 percent favor requiring current public employees to contribute more towards their own future pensions and benefits.
A majority of Americans, 53 percent, believe public employees should contribute at least 50 percent of the cost of their retirement benefits. Fifty-eight percent of Americans favor setting a cap on the maximum dollar amount of annual pension payments public workers can receive during retirement, while 35 percent oppose a cap on pension payments.
Madison School District’s Employee Benefit Discussion
Madison school officials are weighing property tax increases, significant program cuts and requiring employees to pay a portion of health insurance premiums to help close a huge budget deficit.
About $6 million could be saved by making aggressive changes to employees’ health care costs, including requiring staff to contribute toward health insurance premiums, renegotiating contracts with health care providers, and making plan changes, Michael Barry, assistant superintendent of business services, told School Board members Monday.
Overall, the district spends about $62 million in employee health care costs, which are expected to grow by about 8.5 percent next school year.
The budget shortfall for the fiscal year that starts July 1 was estimated in January at $10.1 million with the use of all of the district’s taxing authority. But it could jump by $4.1 million if state lawmakers accept Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to cut a special $150 per student funding stream for next school year, and keep revenue limits and general state aid flat.
Now district officials say the deficit in the roughly $400 million budget could be as much as $20.8 million or as low as $12.2 million for the 2015-16 school year, depending on how much of the school district’s unused taxing authority the board agrees to use.
Much more on Madison’s benefit plans and conundrum, here.
David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy is only 180 pages long — three essays, an introduction and an afterword — but I made more than 80 notes as I read it, underlining passages and dog-earing pages I wanted to come back to and/or read aloud to other people and talk about further.
Unlike the enormous and comprehensive Debt, Utopia of Rules is mostly argument, not history. It sets out to investigate the problem of “bureaucracy” — basically, rules, and the simmering threat of violence that underpins them. Hidebound adherence to awful, runaround bureaucracy was always the sin laid at the feet of slow-moving, Stalinist states under the influence of the USSR. Capitalism, we were told, was dynamic, free, and open. But if that’s so, why is it that since the USSR imploded, bureaucracy under capitalism has exploded? If you live in a western, capitalist state, you probably spend more time filling in paperwork, waiting on hold, resubmitting Web-forms, attending performance reviews, brainstorming sessions, training meetings, and post-mortems than any of your ancestors, regardless of which side of the Iron Curtain they lived on.
My fake college syllabus
In this class, we will analyze some of World Literature’s greatest short novels in an attempt to interrogate the essence of plot and character while reading as few words as possible. Each class session will begin with a student presentation of 15 to 20 minutes, so we’re looking at an effective class time of about an hour. I’d love to give you a five-minute break halfway through the period, with the tacit understanding that we actually blow 15, but then I’d have to pretend I didn’t notice when 36% of you didn’t bother to come back. Or I’d have to pass around the attendance sheet again, which is a major pain in the ass.
After the student presentation, which should cover structure and theme but will seldom rise above rote plot summary, I will provide whatever historical and biographical context is both critical to our understanding of the book and available on Wikipedia. But I will sound so authoritative and well-versed that you’d never know this, even if you had the book’s Wikipedia page open on the laptop you’re pretending to take notes on, rather than your Facebook newsfeed.
The rest of the period will be spent in class discussion, which by week three will have settled into an “Inside the Actor’s Studio”-esque conversation between me and one or two consistently prepared students whom the rest of you will quietly despise. Occasionally, another student may come out of nowhere, Jeremy Lin style, and dominate a particular class, only to break my heart by fading permanently back into the woodwork the following week, Jeremy Lin-style.
Why Chinese Promote Confining New Mothers for a Month
Giving birth is never easy, but for new Chinese mothers the month following a baby’s arrival is particularly fraught. Immediately after I became pregnant for the first time, I started to hear about zuoyuezi, or “sitting the month.” It’s a period during which new mothers are supposed to stay confined with their babies, and it’s considered crucial, full of strict, sometimes incredible requirements. “Don’t wash your hair.” “Stay away from air conditioning.” “Don’t touch cold water.” “Don’t use cell phones.” These were just some of the more common pieces of advice meted out by a well-meaning army of aunts, older friends, and the cacophony of Chinese social media.
The confinement tradition is so full of elaborate—sometimes contradictory—injunctions and taboos that many new mothers hire live-in professionals to help them navigate the process. An industry that’s both rooted in tradition and tailor-made for modern China has become big business: the yuesao, or “confinement ladies,” who spend a month or two living in the home of a new mother and her baby. Traditionally, a new mom could look to her own mother or mother-in-law to provide vital support during the confinement period. But many young mothers now eschew that arrangement. Having a separate apartment, after all, is now de rigueur among China’s urban newlyweds. And frequent depictions of visceral generational clashes in soap operas, popular novels, and online discussion forums have also instilled a fear of mothers-in-law into younger women.
Wisconsin students will take scaled back Common Core-aligned tests this spring
Wisconsin students are set to take a new kind of standardized test next month — one that is online, interactive and expected to be more rigorous than the annual pencil-and-paper exam given to students for years.
But a technical glitch in the creation of the new test for students in third through eighth grades will mean school districts will get a scaled-back version instead, according to records obtained from the state Department of Public Instruction.
As a result, DPI officials say the agency won’t pay the full $11.1 million cost and it will negotiate a new price with the test vendor and creators. About $1.2 million has been paid so far.
The test is linked to the controversial Common Core State Standards and tests students in math and English language arts.
Unfortunately, Wisconsin has long tolerated the sub standard WKCE assessment.
The Paradoxes of Education Reform Critics: “asymmetric incompetency”
There’s a lot of important, nuanced debate to be had between the most optimistic education reformers and those who are more skeptical. But I think there are many, though of course not all, on the education reform critic side who tie themselves in knots telling inconsistent stories about education in this country. So here are the most common paradoxes of that movement. This isn’t to say those who criticize some or even many aspects of education reform embody all these paradoxes, but I would argue they are relatively common. I think education reform critics spend a lot of times opposing individual policies or ideas or changes, and so it is hard to tie all of those disparate criticisms together into a coherent vision that also explains what education policy should be. These paradoxes, I would argue, identify a problem.
1. Administrators can’t be trusted with firing, but are perfect at hiring.
One of the arguments for lots of job protections in schools is that you can’t trust administrators to decide who to fire. If you give them discretion, they will fire good teachers who they don’t like, or who do anything other than toe the administration line, or for other cronyism reasons. On the other hand, we are told that firing more teachers won’t solve anything because we most teachers are good at their job or at the most just need more coaching. So while we can’t trust administrators to fire competently, we also have arrived at a place where their hiring decisions involve impeccable foresight to never make a bad hiring decision. It’s a strange paradox of asymmetric incompetency.
Adjunct professors get poverty-level wages. Should their pay quintuple?
It’s been true for a long time now that academia — or at least the part of it that teaches students — relies heavily on the labor of adjunct faculty. As the number of tenured professors has fallen, universities have filled more than half of their schedules with teachers who work on contract. And no wonder: They’ll work for less than half what a full-time professor makes, at a median wage of just $2,700 per course, with scant benefits, if any.
Now, a union that’s been rapidly organizing adjuncts around the country thinks that number should quintuple. Last night, on a conference call with organizers across the country, the SEIU decided to extend the franchise with a similar aspirational benchmark: A “new minimum compensation standard” of $15,000. Per course. Including benefits.
Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews
This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com.
The Myth of Charter-School ‘Cherry Picking’
There is a concept called the big lie, which holds that if you repeat a falsehood long enough and loudly enough, people will begin to believe it. Sadly, fearing the success of charter schools in New York City, the United Federation of Teachers and other education-reform opponents have been telling a big lie for years.
The UFT and its backers have kept up a steady drumbeat of false claims against charter schools in New York City: Charters cherry-pick their students, push out those who need extra support, and generally falsify their impressive results. Well, a recent report from New York City’s Independent Budget Office, a publicly funded, nonpartisan agency, proves that these accusations are false. Unfortunately, New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña is among those city officials who believe the big lie.
Uncovering Security Flaws in Digital Education Products for Schoolchildren
“A lot of education sites have glaring security problems,” said Mr. Porterfield, the principal engineer at a software start-up in Los Altos, Calif. “A big part of the problem is that there’s not even any consensus of what ‘good security’ means for an educational website or app.”
Contacted last week by a reporter, John Campbell, the chief executive of the Cambium Learning Group, the company behind Raz-Kids.com, said that his company took privacy very seriously and that the site did not store sensitive personal details like student addresses or phone numbers.
“We are confident that we have taken the necessary steps to protect all student and teacher data at all times and comply with all federal and state laws,” Mr. Campbell wrote in an emailed statement.
Many schools use Google’s cloud products. Google’s business model mines data to sell ads…
Get to know high school wood shop machines
K-12 Tax, Spending & Referendum Climate: The Legacy of Debt: Interest Costs Poised to Surpass Defense and Nondefense Discretionary Spending
The U.S. has come a long way since the days of trillion-dollar deficits, just a few years ago. The White House projects 2016 will have the smallest budget deficit in eight years. Yet the budgetary impact of the debt that’s been accumulated–$18 trillion in total, $13 trillion of that owed to the public–will reassert itself.
Currently, the government’s interest costs are around $200 billion a year, a sum that’s low due to the era of low interest rates.
Forecasters at the White House and Congressional Budget Office believe interest rates will gradually rise, and when that happens, the interest costs of the U.S. government are set to soar, from just over $200 billion to nearly $800 billion a year by decade’s end.
No profit left behind
A POLITICO investigation has found that Pearson stands to make tens of millions in taxpayer dollars and cuts in student tuition from deals arranged without competitive bids in states from Florida to Texas. The review also found Pearson’s contracts set forth specific performance targets — but don’t penalize the company when it fails to meet those standards. And in the higher ed realm, the contracts give Pearson extensive access to personal student data, with few constraints on how it is used.
POLITICO examined hundreds of pages of contracts, business plans and email exchanges, as well as tax filings, lobbying reports and marketing materials, in the first comprehensive look at Pearson’s business practices in the United States.
The investigation found that public officials often commit to buying from Pearson because it’s familiar, even when there’s little proof its products and services are effective.
The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, for instance, declined to seek competitive bids for a new student data system on the grounds that it would be “in the best interest of the public” to simply hire Pearson, which had done similar work for the state in the past. The data system was such a disaster, the department had to pay Pearson millions extra to fix it.
The issues are not only on the supply side. Wisconsin’s decade plus use of the weak and largely useless WKCE is worth a deeper dive.
Buy side issues merit equal attention.
Ms. Simon deserves applause for digging deep. It is so rare in our ever more expensive K-12 world.
Addressing the dismal state of civics education: Require citizenship test in schools
Jay Leno’s old Tonight Show man-on-the-street quizzes were particularly hilarious — and depressing — when he tested Americans’ knowledge of their own government.
One woman thought the colonies won their independence from Greece; a college instructor guessed that U.S. independence was won in 1922; and a man said the general who led our troops in the Revolutionary War was Winston Churchill.
Funny stuff, until you remember that these are the same citizens who elect the leaders who shape the nation’s future, if they bother to vote at all. Nor are these know-nothings outliers.
Surveys and tests repeatedly show that Americans’ knowledge of civics is pathetic. In 2010, just one in five eighth-graders tested proficient in civics on a national performance assessment — worse even than their dismal performance in reading and math.
A poll of Millennials, out last week, found that 77% of these 18- to 34-year-olds could not name even one of their home state’s U.S. senators.
A 2012 survey of adults by Xavier University found that one in three native-born citizens failed the civics portion of a test given to immigrants seeking U.S. citizenship. The pass rate for immigrants: 97.5%.
The worst of all forms of teaching, except for all the others
One can easily look at the concept of a didactic lesson and tear it apart. All the pupils know and can do different things. They will all pick up new concepts at different speeds. They will all require different amounts of practice to master a new skill. Nuthall found that pupils already knew 50% of what was taught. The problem is, they all knew differing parts of the domain. It’s not like you can cull 50% of the curriculum, because different pupils didn’t know different thing.
Whenever the teacher is talking, what they’re saying will be unnecessary to a certain portion of the class. This sounds like a real problem, right? Little Jonny already understands how to add fractions. Why are we making him listen to it being explained again?
Prescription: individualised instruction and eradicating teacher talk. The drive for overwhelming differentiation and reduced explicit instruction does, in part, seem to have its roots in this noble aim not to waste pupils’ time listening to stuff that’s too hard or too easy*. All they want is for everyone to be in the goldilocks zone of optimal porridge temperature.
When Children With Autism Grow Up
The heat that afternoon was intense. Weather maps across Iowa were deep red, and warnings flashed across the screen. A high school football player on the other side of the state had died from heat exhaustion the week before. Cornfields wilted and shrank into hills of despondent brown.
I was running late as I parked and shuffled to a dilapidated satellite classroom building. I introduced myself to a teacher sitting at a desk and told him that I was there to meet a 21-year-old man named “Scooter” — a childhood nickname, I’d later learn, that had stuck. (I’ve changed all names and some details to protect him and to comply with privacy laws.) I needed a summer job after my first year of grad school, and he needed staff.
My experience with autism had been limited to movies and anecdotes from friends who worked in “the field” — care industry shorthand for post-institutional residential and community-living nonprofits supporting people with developmental disabilities. (“We’re always looking,” the agency had said, and hired me without any sort of drug screening and a cursory, astonishingly fast background check. The drug screening was my only concern while filling out applications.)
Problem’s Swirl Around Wisconsin’s next student test….
Costs to administer the new test have gone millions of dollars over budget. And administrators learned last week that a key technological feature of the new test — its ability to adapt to students’ individual ability levels by offering harder or easier questions as they take the exam — won’t be ready this spring.
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction officials are downplaying the concerns.
“(It’s) a good test. It’s reliable,” said State Superintendent Tony Evers, while acknowledging the exam has turned out to be pricier than anticipated.
District superintendents are more critical. The timeline the Legislature approved for switching to a new exam tied to the Common Core standards this academic year has districts bearing the brunt of political and technological hangups with the test.
“If we administer this for one year only, which is likely, why are we shifting?” said Patricia Greco, superintendent of the Menomonee Falls School District. “We’re putting staff and students through a lot of change for a shift to a test that probably won’t produce the results we expected.”
The chinks in the armor of the new exam are coming to light at the same time that Walker has shifted his position on Common Core — again. Walker has had a complicated relationship with the standards, ranging from tacit early approval to an explicit call for their repeal last summer.
Now he’s eased away from throwing out the standards to booting the examination tied to them.
Wisconsin’s WKCE has long been criticized for its lack of rigor. Yet, we continue.
School Vouchers have new champions on the Hill
At Republicans’ recent retreat, Messer listened to GOP strategist Alex Castellanos promote school choice as one of a handful of issues that should make up a new agenda for the party.
“I thought, oh gosh — maybe I’m onto something here,” Messer said.
School choice has always been a hard sell in Washington: GOP lawmakers from rural states and those with powerful unions don’t stand to gain much from pushing the issue. In wealthier districts, too, parents may not feel they have much to gain if they are satisfied with their well-funded public schools. Other members of Congress don’t see why it’s worth the time.
“It’s an interesting challenge: Republicans believe this will be good for vulnerable kids and kids that need help,” said Frederick Hess, education policy director at the American Enterprise Institute. “But it’s also a fact that their local superintendents, and school boards, and kids, and parents are saying, ‘We don’t think this is a good idea’ in many cases.”
Was Larry Summers Right about Women in Science and Math?
As NPR reports, a childhood friend of his, Eileen Pollack, a former scientist and now a teacher of creative writing at the University of Michigan, has written a book exploring why there are so few women in STEM fields relative to men.
After Summers’ infamous 2005 speech on the subject—a watershed in his disastrous Harvard presidency—Pollack, who knew Summers in high school, sat down to write him a long email explaining why he was wrong to suggest that women had less genetic aptitude for math and science than men do. Pollack, who says that she always considered Summers an admirer of smart women, thought he had gone very wrong on this one. The email grew into the book, The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science is Still a Boys Club. (The book is blurbed, by the way, by MIT prof Nancy Hopkins, who stood up and walked out of that Summers speech, one of the main reasons why it got as much attention as did.)
Pollack argues that the primary reason for the lack of women in STEM is still a lack of support from more senior figures in those fields, and from their own peers—an explanation that certainly sounds much more credible than the idea that male and female brains are hardwired differently. (As I recall, Summers also suggested that those fields are so competitive, many women would have trouble succeeding at their highest levels because of greater family obligations, whether due to choice or social mores.)
There are two models of online education
1. Preparatory knowledge, in the form of course-based video-delivered teachings: Coursera, Udacity, Thinkful, etc.
2. On demand knowledge: Wikipedia, StackOverflow, Genius, etc.
Of the two, the latter has been much more widely spread and far more influential.
What works about on demand knowledge is that it is pull based (the knowledge you need, when you need it) and comes in digestible chunks. Unlike MOOCs, which are consumed far in advance of the knowledge being applied, Wikipedia and StackOverflow are the knowledge you need, now. Humans are lazy and working ahead requires discipline and foresight, which makes on demand knowledge far more appealing to most.
Why we are saying “uh” less and ‘um’ more
“It does seem to be the case that ‘um’ generally signals a longer or more important pause than ‘uh’,” says Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania.
At least that’s what he thought.
Liberman has been studying these so-called “filled pauses” for almost a decade, and he has made a rather curious discovery.
“As Americans get older, they use ‘uh’ more,” he says. “And at every age, men use ‘uh’ more than women.”
If you look at “um”, exactly the opposite is true. Younger people say “um” more often than older people. And no matter the age, women say “um” more than men. Nobody, not even the linguists, were expecting this result; until they studied these hesitations, they thought it was more about the amount of time a speaker hesitates than who that speaker is.
How to Raise a University’s Profile: Pricing and Packaging
One day in 2013, I sat down in a Starbucks in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington with Hugh Moren, then a junior at the nearby George Washington University. I asked him how much money he was borrowing to go to college.
“Eighty-two thousand dollars,” he said. “By the time I graduate, a hundred ten.”
The number shocked me, but not as much as the way it didn’t shock him.
Hugh Moren was born in Warwick, R.I., and like generations of smart young people raised in the country’s decaying industrial towns, he spent his adolescence plotting to leave. He wanted to study international relations and get a degree from a university with a good reputation. But his family didn’t have any money, and tuition, fees and room and board at George Washington ran almost $60,000 a year. So he borrowed as much as the federal government would lend him and went to private lenders like Sallie Mae to borrow more.
“I was given an institution and told, ‘Make this place better, and by the way, be embarrassed that you’re not Georgetown,’” says Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, former president of the George Washington University.
RICHARD A. BLOOM
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Politics and Academics in China
Tackling the academy was thus the next logical step. According to the January Central Committee Document, universities are to put a higher priority on teaching (research is only mentioned insofar it concerns Marxist and Socialist theory), strengthen a common ideological basis and enhance Party leadership in higher education. Political theory courses and textbooks are to be centralized, and new evaluation and performance management systems introduced, in order to standardize the curriculum. Teaching staff will be required to participate in regular ideology training and study sessions, and to spend time engaging in “social practice” outside campuses. In the weeks since this document was published, the heads of all elite education institutions have published pledges of allegiance in various Party media.
There are quite a few reasons why the academy is targeted. First, it has internationalized more than any other professional group in China. Many well-regarded Chinese professors have either been educated abroad, or have spent considerable time outside China as visiting researchers. This considerable time spent living in a different political environment has provided them with a more nuanced understanding of social and political organization in other countries than can be gained in short trips. Second, they have considerable input into policymaking processes. China’s technocratic governance mode has often valued expert input more than public participation. This, therefore, provides academics with avenues to transform imported ideas into reality. Third, “patriotic worrying” is a part of Chinese intellectual tradition, which compels academics to relentlessly search out flaws in the China of the present in order to perfect the China of the future. Fourth, as educators, they are crucial in shaping the worldview of a new generation. However, the current generation of millennials (balinghou and jiulinghou) is already seen as rebellious and hedonistic, and it seems the leadership has decided that they’d better not be further confused. Remember: political protests in China over the last century, from May Fourth to Tiananmen, have tended to originate from universities. [Editors note: Pang Xianzhi, the former Director of the CPC Central Committee Party Literature Research Center, recently said this explicitly in 关于意识形态问题的一些看法, an essay that was republished on People’s Daily Online. Pang wrote “历史经验证明，出事往往从高校而起.” ]
Thoughts on the Technical Track
My views on the merits of having a technical track align with those of many people in our industry. Management is a different job, with different skills. They’re not necessarily more difficult skills, they’re just different. By and large they’re unrelated to the day-to-day labor of the people who build technology products.
It doesn’t make any sense to divert your technical talent into a discipline where they will need to stop doing technical work. (That’s in the event that they intend to be effective managers, which I concede might be an unrealistic expectation.)
Other people have made this case, so I’ll just proceed as if we agree that there must be a way forward for people that are great programmers other than to simply graduate into not programming at all.
It’s Etch A Sketch time in Wisconsin for education policy
Every two years for the last couple decades or so, the governor and Legislature pick up the state education policy Etch A Sketch, turn it over, shake it and draw a new picture. The game also goes by the name of the biennial budget process.
In days gone by, the new picture often wasn’t all that different from the old one. Some new money here, some new rules on how to spend it, some new patterns for what was expected from kids. There were sometimes bigger deals, like in the mid-90s when it was decided to hold down how much school districts could spend and how much teacher compensation could go up in exchange for the state paying more of the total bill.
With the rise of private school vouchers starting in Milwaukee, state budget season became prime time for controversy over changing the rules on money, accountability and who could participate.
Then came 2011. Whoa, what an Etch A Sketch event that was. Take the whole system of teacher unions and contracts, turn it over, shake — presto, the screen was blank. Amazing. In the new etching, school spending was cut and teachers bore the brunt by paying more for health and retirement benefits.
Do our obsessions with maths add up?
Opinions differ over Alice Thomson’s belief that a good grounding in the basics is sufficient
Sir, Mathematics is not just about learning multiplication tables and algebra (“This obsession with maths doesn’t add up”, Opinion, Feb 4). Taught well, mathematics ignites curiosity and encourages confidence and creativity — the very qualities that Alice Thomson rightly points out we should nurture in Britain.
The scientific and mathematical thinking learnt in the classroom — logical and critical thinking, problem-solving — is vital in the real world and is much desired by employers. If we want an effective democratic society, people must be capable of balancing the benefits and risks of new science and be able to reason mathematically. The Royal Society
Camden Update: “Our Students Have the Potential to Change the World”
I graduated from Camden schools, and the quality of the education my children were getting has been far below what I received. I’m glad that the District is finally making some changes, and I’m glad that parents like me have more and better options to choose from.
That’s Camden parent Mary Jane Timbe, an alumna of Camden Public Schools who has a child at Mastery North Camden and another at Woodrow Wilson High School. She made that comment at Camden Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard’s “State of the Schools” report yesterday at Woodrow Wilson High School.Indeed, the district, New Jersey’s neediest, concurs with Ms. Timbe’s assessment. Superintendent Rouhanifard, appointed eighteen months ago when the State took over the long-failing district, noted in this most recent of his quarterly updates to the community, that “the School District is falling short. He went on to itemize the steps he will take to move the district forward, particularly at the high school level and with student and staff engagement.”
There is good news to report, although Rouhanifard was careful to note that the occasion of his update to the community “is not a celebration, but a public accounting.” Graduation rates are up 6%. Students feel significantly safer in the hallways and bathrooms. High school freshmen and sophomores are beginning to spend more time on reading and math and the district is in the midst of overhauling its vocational programs. (According to the Star Ledger, “absolutely zero high school students earned a vocational program certificate last year, despite hundreds of students enrolled in vocational education classes.”) Next week the Rouhanifard will begin a series of “Teacher Roundtables” and the week after that he’ll launch “Student Leader Roundtables” in order to enhance collaboration with stakeholders.
Chicago’s schools Hard work rewarded Rahm Emanuel’s school reforms are working
Some of the toughest decisions Mr Emanuel had to make in his first term concerned schools. He demanded merit pay for teachers and a longer school day (Chicago’s was only 5 hours 45 minutes) and earmarked for closure 50 half-empty schools in poor districts. Teachers went on strike for the first time in 25 years, but Mr Emanuel got the longer day and the closures went ahead in 2013. The teachers kept their seniority-based pay system.
Mr Emanuel ploughed some of the money saved by closures into charter schools, which made him even more unpopular with the teachers’ unions. But charter schools have worked well in Chicago. The Noble Network, which already runs 16 charter high schools with 10,000 pupils and plans to have 20,000 by 2020, has an attendance rate of 94% (compared with 73% for Chicago public schools) and a drop-out rate of only 0.4% (compared with 4.7%). It also gets better results on the ACT, a college-readiness test. It has an even higher percentage of minority students (98% compared with 92% at Chicago public schools), and slightly less public funding.
States weigh turning education funds over to parents
A radical new concept in school choice will come up for vote in at least a half-dozen states from Virginia to Oklahoma in the coming months, as lawmakers consider giving hundreds of thousands of parents the freedom to design a custom education for their children — at taxpayer expense.
Twenty-one states already subsidize tuition at private schools through vouchers or tax credits. The new programs promise far more flexibility, but critics fear they could also lead to waste or abuse as taxpayers underwrite do-it-yourself educations with few quality controls.
Called Education Savings Accounts, the programs work like this: The state deposits the funds it would have spent educating a given child in public schools into a bank account controlled by his parents. The parents can use those funds — the amount ranges from $5,000 to more than $30,000 a year — to pay for personal tutors, homeschooling workbooks, online classes, sports team fees and many types of therapy, including horseback riding lessons for children with disabilities. They can also spend the money on private school tuition or save some of it for college.
Calling a spade a spade: Mathematics in the new pattern of division of labour
The growing disconnection of the majority of the population from mathematics is increasingly difficult to ignore.
This paper focuses on the socio-economic roots of this cultural and social phe- nomenon which are not usually mentioned in public debates. I concentrate on math- ematics education, as an important and well documented area of interaction of math- ematics with the rest of human culture.
New patterns of division of labour have dramatically changed the nature and role of mathematical skills needed for the labour force and correspondingly changed the place of mathematics in popular culture and in mainstream education. The forces that drive these changes come from the tension between the ever deepening special- isation of labour and ever increasing length of specialised learning required for jobs at the increasingly sharp cutting edge of technology.
How Elementary School Teachers’ Biases Can Discourage Girls From Math and Science
We know that women are underrepresented in math and science jobs. What we don’t know is why it happens.
There are various theories, and many of them focus on childhood. Parents and toy-makers discourage girls from studying math and science. So do their teachers. Girls lack role models in those fields, and grow up believing they wouldn’t do well in them.
All these factors surely play some role. A new study points to the influence of teachers’ unconscious biases, but it also highlights how powerful a little encouragement can be. Early educational experiences have a quantifiable effect on the math and science courses the students choose later, and eventually the jobs they get and the wages they earn.
Proposed Changes to the Madison School District’s Student Promotion Policy
Madison School District Administration (PDF):
The Madison Metropolitan School District is committed to assuring that every student has the knowledge and skills needed for academic achievement and a successful life. As students progress from grade to grade, it is the responsibility of the School District to provide them with multiple opportunities to learn and then to certify that they have the knowledge and skills needed for academic achievement at the next level. This promotion policy, specifying criteria for promotion from Grade 4 to Grade 5 and from Grade 8 to Grade 9, is designed to afford students several different ways to demonstrate their knowledge. At the same time, the policy provides flexibility so students with disabilities may continue to be included with their non-disabled peers.
K-12 Governance Stasis
Why has this happened? Let me give both a libertarian and a conservative answer. The libertarian answer is that we have basically outlawed everything in the world of atoms but have left the world of bits mostly unregulated. It costs $100,000 to start a computer software company; it costs $1 billion to get a new drug approved through the Food and Drug Administration. Therefore it’s not surprising that we live in a world where people start video game companies rather than work on drugs that would save people’s lives. There is an extraordinary regulatory double standard.
From a more conservative perspective, there is the sense that we have become a more risk-averse society. We have lost hope for the future. I think this has seeped in in many subtle ways.
Among both libertarians and conservatives there exists a bias that the government can’t do things. But this isn’t absolutely true. The government succeeded with the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. It succeeded with the Apollo program, putting man on the moon.
Now we’re at a point where we can’t even get a website for Obamacare.
Whatever you think of the morality of nuclear weapons, building an atomic bomb is a far harder undertaking than building a website. We should not let our ideological biases obscure the objective decline that has happened.
Proposed changes to Madison’s Teacher recruitment, screening and selection
Deirdre Hargrove-Krieghoff (PDF):
In continuing the work of developing a thriving workforce, we are in the process of redesigning our recruiting, screening and selection activities to support finding high quality, diverse candidates as early as possible and support improved hiring decisions at the school level.
The current board employment policy (#8005) covers employment and hiring of all employees and is very detailed. The redesigned teacher hiring process will include an approach that is competency-based, ensuring that principals will be provided a set of more qualified teacher candidates that better match the needs of their individual school.
We would like to move forward with implementation of all design activities and are recommending that the Board of Education waive the provisions of Board Policy 8005 (Employment) as applied to the application, screening, interviewing and hiring processes for principals and assistant principals, teachers and other professional staff for the 2015-2016 school year.
The following provides the recommended approach, which will be finalized in mid-February, we will take with the recruiting, screening and selection of said candidates:
Competencies Measured in Madison Teacher Screening Process. This looks like a noble list.
Comparing Teacher & Principal Salaries (Excluding Benefits?)
Tap to view larger versions.
Deirdre Hargrove-Krieghoff:
In support of the continued work of developing a thriving workforce, the HR team conducted a survey of the 10 largest districts in the State of Wisconsin as well as districts in Dane County to provide a picture of our current compensation standing. It is our intent to develop and maintain a competitive salary structure for all of our employees, and we are committed to creating a structure that attracts the highest performers and is equity based.
The following information was developed for a specific budget-related purpose – to help determine, on a macro level, where the district stands relative to comparables for principal and teacher salaries, and whether a significant budget allowance (additional funding) is needed in 2015-16 for the specific purpose of adjusting to market comparables.
Please note:
When reviewing the data for Principals and Assistant Principals, it is illustrating the range that a candidate could make entering the district. For the Teacher base it shows the starting range for a beginning teacher. Maximum salaries are not listed, as most districts that reported are in the process of restructuring their salary schedules for teachers.Approximately 80 out of the 320 of teachers hired annually actually come in at the base step of $37,263.The data suggests that compared to other districts represented, MMSD is mid to low in salary placement for Assistant Principals and Teachers and mid to high for salary placement for Principals.
Some districts represented, have moved away from the traditional approach of funding salary steps and tracks within their schedules and are front loading their schedule to be more competitive, this shift may cause their ranges to be higher than MMSD.
Presumably, a real comparison might include total compensation and outcomes, not to mention qualification differences.
Notes and links:
Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes, writing in 2005:
“This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.”
Tap to view a larger version.
Comparing Madison and other District approaches to teacher benefits. Staffing compared: Madison, Long Beach & Boston.
Madison School District’s 2015-2016 Budget Goals & Priorities (Publish Total Spending?)
Madison School District (PDF):
A. Alignment to Strategic Framework- In our vision to make every school a thriving school that prepares every student to be ready for college, career and community, these budget resources support the district’s goals and priorities as defined in our Strategic Framework.
B. More equitable use of resources- As opposed to equal funding, which provides the same level of support to each school, equitable distribution of resources takes into account the needs of each school based on enrollment and student demographics.
C. Transparency in budget development- Transparency in the budget process creates greater awareness and accountability. For internal purposes, it enables central office departments and schools to take more ownership of their goals, priorities, and plans for improvement. For external audiences, transparency results in a more readable and informative budget document.
While working towards achieving these goals, the district is also committed to minimizing the tax levy and demonstrating strong stewardship of our public funds, as well as complying with legally required mandates.
Powerpoint slides (PDF). I’ve not seen total spending published for some time. The long lamented “Citizen’s Budget” has yet to be resurrected.
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 Techies Who Are Hacking Education by Homeschooling Their Kids
A couple of weeks ago, I wandered into the hills north of the UC Berkeley campus and showed up at the door of a shambling Tudor that was filled with lumber and construction equipment. Samantha Matalone Cook, a work-at-home mom in flowing black pants and a nose ring, showed me around. Cook and her family had moved into the house in April and were in the middle of an ambitious renovation. “Sorry,” Cook said, “I didn’t tell you we were in a construction zone.” A construction zone, it turns out, that doubles as a classroom.
We walked into the living room where Cook’s two sons, Parker and Simon, were sitting on the couch, silently scribbling. The boys, aged 12 and 10, had the air of young Zuckerbergs-in-training. Babyfaced and freshly scrubbed, they spoke with a somewhat awkward and adenoidal lilt and wore sweatshirts with the hoods flipped up and no shoes. The room around them was chaos—piles of art supplies were stacked around the floor and paint samples were smeared next to the doorways. The family’s two dogs, Dakota and Kaylee, wrestled loudly over a chew toy. The sound of pounding construction equipment drifted in from the basement. And yet the boys were focused on what I soon learned were math workbooks—prealgebra for Parker, a collection of monster-themed word problems for Simon.
The Cook boys are homeschooled, have been ever since their parents opted not to put them in kindergarten. Samantha’s husband Chris never liked school himself; as a boy, he preferred fiddling on his dad’s IBM PC to sitting in a classroom. After three attempts at college, he found himself unable to care about required classes like organic chemistry and dropped out to pursue a career in computers. It paid off; today he is the lead systems administrator at Pandora. Samantha is similarly independent-minded—she blogs about feminism, parenting, art technology, and education reform and has started a network of hackerspaces for kids. So when it came time to educate their own children, they weren’t in any hurry to slot them into a traditional school.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The College Loan Bombshell Hidden in the Budget Obama’s new repayment program comes with a record $22 billion shortfall.
In obscure data tables buried deep in its 2016 budget proposal, the Obama administration revealed this week that its student loan program had a $21.8 billion shortfall last year, apparently the largest ever recorded for any government credit program.
The main cause of the shortfall was President Barack Obama’s recent efforts to provide relief for borrowers drowning in student debt, reforms that have already begun to reduce loan payments to the government. For more than two decades, budget analysts have recalculated the projected costs of about 120 credit programs every year, but they have never lowered their expectations of repayments this dramatically. The $21.8 billion revision—larger than the annual budget for NASA, or the Interior Department and EPA combined—will be tacked onto the federal deficit.
“Wow,” marveled Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “Whether or not it’s good policy to help borrowers with their payments, it’s obviously costly for taxpayers.”
The 40 million Americans with student loans are now saddled with more than $1.2 trillion in outstanding debt. And with higher education costs rising much faster than inflation, the already massive program has been growing at a spectacular clip; direct government loans alone increased 44 percent over the last two years despite an aura of austerity in Washington. The Obama administration has tried to ease the burden for some borrowers by reducing their payments to 10 percent of their income and forgiving their loans after 20 years; this year, the Education Department plans to make all borrowers eligible for that “pay-as-you-earn” relief.
Middle School Reading Lists 100 Years Ago vs. Today Show How Far American Educational Standards Have Declined
There’s a delightful and true saying, often attributed to Joseph Sobran, that in a hundred years, we’ve gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.
Now comes even more evidence of the steady decline of American educational standards.
Last year, Annie Holmquist, a blogger for better-ed.org, discovered a 1908 curriculum manual in the Minnesota Historical Society archives that included detailed reading lists for various grade levels.
According to her research, the recommended literature list for 7th and 8th graders in Minnesota in 1908 included the following:
K-12 Tax, Spending & Referendum Climate: Global Debt has risen by $57 Trillion Since the Financial Crisis
Here are two things we know about how debt affects the economy.
First, in the abstract it doesn’t matter. For every debtor there is a creditor, and in theory an economy should be able to hum along just fine whether a country’s citizens have a great deal of debt or none. A company’s ability to produce things depends on the workers and machines it employs, not the composition of its balance sheet, and the same can be said of nations.
Second, in practice this is completely wrong, and debt plays an outsize role in creating boom-bust cycles across the world and through history. High debt increases the amplitude of economic swings. To think of it in terms of the corporate metaphor, high reliance on borrowed money may not affect a company’s level of output in theory, but makes it a great deal more vulnerable to bankruptcy.
Coming out as poor at an elite university
Chris Reynolds will never forget his first day on campus at the University of Michigan. He and his dad had gotten up super early to drive the nine hours from Sellersville, Pennsylvania to Ann Arbor.
“My father literally just dropped me off and then left,” says Reynolds. His dad couldn’t afford a hotel, so they took about an hour to unpack the car, said their goodbyes, and his dad drove off.
Chris Reynolds was officially on his own.
What follows are three stories about what it’s like to be the first person in your family to go, not only to college, but to an elite university like U of M.
A Week in the Life of the ‘Tiger Mother’
Woke up at 6:30 a.m. to something licking my chin. Opened my eyes and saw two big white fluffy faces staring hopefully down at me. Breakfast time? Both Coco and Pushkin sleep with us, keeping us warm at night, just as their brave and loyal Samoyed ancestors did back in Siberia 500 million years ago after pulling sleds all day.
Dogs are so much nicer than daughters. Sophia and Lulu, now somehow 22 and 19, are going back to college tomorrow. They’ve been home on break for almost a month, and frankly, we’ve had some rocky moments. But today is their last day at home, and I just want it to be a happy one for everyone.
11 a.m. Productive morning! Graded 10 exams, wrote three letters of recommendation and blurbed a book. No sign of either daughter.
School Voucher Climate Commentary
“My main concern is that right now we are at a 20-year low in funding for public education so our public schools are already in a state of crisis,” Moffit said.
Sierra disagrees and said vouchers are really about choice.
“We pay taxes also,” Sierra said. “Nothing against public schools, but we decided we wanted our children to come here. So why not use the vouchers and receive the help from the state like every other parent is receiving help?”
The plan faces an unclear future in the Legislature, with both Republicans and Democrats concerned about the funding structure in the plan.
The governor defended the plan in interviews Wednesday, calling it “a workable” plan.
Madison’s Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham blasted the school choice proposal in a statement Tuesday night.
Wednesday she said changes proposed would make it difficult, if not impossible, to do what is right for the district.
“When the announcement like the one that that we heard last night occurs, there’s no doubt that it feels like a punch to the stomach,” Cheatham said.
Cheatham called the political environment at the Capitol unsettling and distracting, and said the expansion of vouchers is very concerning to the future of the school district’s budget.
Madison spends around $15,000 per student, annually, roughly double the national average. Yet, it has long supported disastrous reading results.
Teachers Take Union Dues to Supreme Court
A group of public schoolteachers on Monday petitioned the Supreme Court to hear a challenge to laws allowing teachers unions to require dues from nonmembers who disagree with union positions and policies.
A decision in the teachers’ favor could change how public employee unions operate nationwide.
The lawsuit, first filed in April 2013, takes aim at the 300,000-member California Teachers Association and the affiliated National Education Association. The plaintiffs – 10 California teachers and the Christian Educators Association International – claim California’s “agency shop” law is unconstitutional and violates teachers’ First Amendment rights by forcing them to pay union dues regardless of whether they support or are a member of the union. Twenty-six states currently have such laws in place.
Fibbing for Rankings
The University of Missouri at Kansas City gave the Princeton Review false information designed to inflate the rankings of its business school, which was under pressure from its major donor to keep the ratings up, according to an outside audit released Friday.
The audit — by PricewaterhouseCoopers — described the process by which business school officials came up with creative reasons to provide data that many at the school believed to be false, and that the audit found to be false. In one case, for example, the university created a wish list of clubs that it might support to promote entrepreneurial students. The university then reported that its wish list was reality and that it had all of those clubs, which in fact did not exist.
Technology’s next 25 years belong to the world, not the US
These days many non-US tech groups, particularly those born and raised in China, are better positioned for the next 25 years than their American counterparts. The intergalactic technology battle has been joined.
Shortly after Mr Ma’s interview, I glanced at my inbox and found a briefing from Alibaba’s PR department and another update from its investor relations group. I cannot imagine many US or European groups communicating in a similar manner to interested followers in China, India or Indonesia.Everyone knows how the internet has transformed communications in the past 20 years but fewer people understand what it means for business formation. When I entered venture capital in the mid-1980s, company founders often appeared at our front door carrying an envelope containing a business plan. If we funded the business, the press didn’t give a hoot and it often took our competitors in Boston — then the other thriving US venture spot — months to figure out what we had done. Meanwhile, most people in large, established companies considered developments in Silicon Valley irrelevant or laughable.
Rich Colleges Get Richer and Richer
The 1%-vs-99% inequality dynamic that plagues America’s economy as a whole extends to the world of higher education. And the richest universities in America had a great year last year.
This is not all that surprising, considering the fact that prestigious universities play a key role in the creation and perpetuation of America’s ever-more-entrenched class system. It is only right that those catapulted to great wealth and power by elite universities would give something back, so that their own children might also be able to achieve outsize wealth and power one day. Last year was a record one for donations to colleges: a total of $37.5 billion, up nearly 11% from the year before. Of course, most of that was not going to your local community college. Inside Higher Ed notes that “The top 20 colleges in fund-raising brought in more than $10 billion. That means that 28.6 percent of the total was given to fewer than 2 percent” of schools.
The biggest recipient of all: Harvard, with $1.16 billion in donations. Stanford was second, with about $930 million, followed by USC, Northwestern, and Johns Hopkins. “Meanwhile,” the Wall Street Journal says, “schools in the middle of the pack are getting a smaller slice of the philanthropic pie, as they may not have such active, wealthy or well-connected alums.”
Why Harvard owns 10,000 acres of California vineyards
Harvard’s $36 billion endowment includes full ownership of a company called Brodiaea, Inc. And that company has been buying up vineyards and farmland in California’s Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties for the past two years. Harvard now owns more than 10,000 acres, making it one of the top 20 growers in California’s Paso Robles wine region, according to Reuters.
Paso Robles is getting more attention as a wine region — Wine Enthusiast said in 2013 that it was reinventing itself “with flair” — and Harvard expects the vineyards and land it’s buying to become more valuable over time. Reuters points out that the university’s endowment also owns water rights to deep-water wells in the area, a big issue because of the ongoing California drought.
The Medicalization of Reasonable Accommodation
In the U.S., much is being made of the 25 year anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In activist circles, commemoration has meant celebration of the progress that has been made alongside calls to action regarding systemic disadvantages that remain. It is fortuitous that the launch of this blog coincides with this anniversary, both inviting reflection on how this policy has made an impact on higher education.
First, I will briefly lay some conceptual groundwork. It is widely noted that the ADA is a civil rights law grounded in and justified by the social model of disability. Roughly, the social model maintains that a person’s biological differences – or perhaps impairments – become disabling only within a particular social context in which there is a mismatch between the mode in which she functions and the mode for which the social environment has been constructed. Thus, most of the disadvantages of disability are socially constructed, according to this model. In contrast, the medical model says that the disadvantages of disability are inevitable because disability is, ontologically speaking, a biological deviation from the norm that is, by definition, disadvantageous.
Big Gap in College Graduation Rates for Rich and Poor, Study Finds
College completion rates for wealthy students have soared in 40 years but barely budged for low-income students, leading to a yawning gap in educational attainment between rich and poor that could have long-lasting implications for the socioeconomic divide.
In 2013, 77% of adults from families in the top income quartile earned at least bachelor’s degrees by the time they turned 24, up from 40% in 1970, according to a new report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy and the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. But 9% of people from the lowest income bracket did the same in 2013, up from 6% in 1970.
A Case for Lifelong Kindergarten
Could it be that the best way to learn happens in kindergarten? It’s an intriguing proposition, one that’s being explored at M.I.T. by folks like Mitch Resnick, the creator of the famous computer programming site for beginners called Scratch.
Resnick brought up the idea last week at the New York Times’ School for Tomorrow summit, and proclaimed that “schools should be on the edge of chaos,” a comment that lit up the Twitterverse.
Resnick is one of three recipients, including Robert Beichner, a physics professor at North Carolina State University, and Julie Young, president of Florida Virtual School, of the McGraw Prize in Education. The three of them worked on a paper that exemplifies how technology should work seamlessly with learning.
College Marketing Madness
What is college? To Madison Comer, a confident 6-year-old, it is a very big place. “It’s tall,” she explained, outlining the head of Tuffy, the North Carolina State mascot, with a gray crayon. “It’s like high school but it’s higher.”
Elizabeth Mangan, who plans to be a veterinarian because she loves her puppy, pointed out that she, too, would attend North Carolina State. “Me and Madison are going to the same college,” she said.
And what is college? “It’s someplace where you go to get your career.”
Political Posturing
UW System leaders also lobbied for up to $200 million in one-time state money “until we have full tuition authority.” That would have reduced the cut to $100 million over two years, instead of the $300 million Walker will propose when he releases full details of his budget Tuesday.
In mid-November, UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank contacted a top Walker donor and friend of UW-Madison to seek his help, according to an email she sent Nov. 15 to the UW System’s key communications and political strategist, Jim Villa, Vice Chancellor for University Relations.
Blank referred to the donor, Mike Shannon, as “one of our best friends and donors” and said she planned to fly with him and “other UW-Madison folks” to the Packers game the next day, adding “Scott and Tonette Walker are supposed to be along on the trip as well.”
Shannon is founder of KSL Capital Partners LLC in Denver,
and a board member for the University of Wisconsin Foundation.
“As he said to me, ‘I’ve been a really big donor to the Wi Republican party, but I’ve never asked anything of them since I live outside the state,'” Blank recounted to Villa.
In another email exchange between Villa and UW System President Ray Cross on Jan. 8, Villa outlined budget projections, the political landscape and strategies and options intended to be used as “notes for regent phone calls.”
“Our political strategies over the decade have varied in style and purpose from collaborative to hostile,” Villa said in the email. “We have tried to engage, cajole, prod, threaten, beg, and even initiate a statewide marketing effort. Yet, we have lost influence and suffered continuous budget cuts.”
Villa noted that UW over the past year had worked “to more tightly connect some aspects of the university to the state economy.” While those efforts received positive comments, he said, “when the state’s budget projections became dismal, our request to invest in and help to rebuild the economy of the state was tossed aside… We need a new strategy!”
K-12 Tax, Referendum & Spending Climate
Jerry is in his late 50s. He is a sales representative in Southern Maryland for a multinational corporation. He has a college degree and makes about $80,000 a year. He considers himself a “moderate Democrat.” He voted for Obama in 2008 and O’Malley in 2010. He says of Obama in 2008, “He was a breath of fresh air.” But after Obama became president, Jerry became disillusioned. He didn’t like Obama’s stimulus program. “I really think Obama messed up with all the money that we were giving out,” he said. He suspects that both Obama and O’Malley primarily gave the money to “their constituencies”—most notably, labor unions. In 2012, Jerry voted for Romney, whom he admired as a “businessman.” In 2014, he voted for Hogan. Taxes were an important reason. “Every year I seemed to pay more with Maryland state taxes,” he explained. “I am not happy with what is happening with the taxes. I don’t seem to be getting anything more from them.” Brown, he feared, would continue along the same line as O’Malley. “Hogan seemed to have the message,” he said.
Connie is in her mid-40s, a college graduate and a paralegal at a property-management firm. She lives in north Baltimore County. She was a Democrat until a month before last November’s election, and she voted for Obama in 2008 and O’Malley in 2010. In 2012, having become disillusioned with Obama, she voted for Romney. “I was disenchanted. [Obama] made a lot of promises. I have just seen our country turn around and go backwards,” she said. “I work in property management. The number of young people living on entitlement programs is overwhelming to me. I have seen it increase as never before.” Last November, she voted for Hogan. “I was upset with the number of taxes that I was being hit with as a single parent,” she explained. “We are overspending, and someone needs to get a handle on it, and perhaps a businessman was the best person to do that.” Connie supports abortion rights, but she thought Brown misrepresented Hogan’s position. “Hogan is not for repealing anything,” she said. She characterized Brown’s attempt to paint Hogan as a foe of abortion rights as a “political jab.” Hogan’s antiabortion position “didn’t bother me,” she said.
James is in his early 30s, a college graduate and a coordinator of services at a university in Southern Maryland. He lives in Howard County. He is one of the millennial voters on whom Democrats have rested their hopes. He voted for Obama twice and O’Malley in 2010, but in 2014, he backed Hogan. “I didn’t entirely like Hogan,” James said. “But I liked the idea of reining in spending.” He also thinks there was “some point” to Hogan’s attack on Brown as a tax-hiker. “The important thing with Brown is that he was likely to spend money. That would mean more taxes,” he said. James rejects the idea that Republicans are antigovernment. “Republicans are skeptical of government,” he told me.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Global Debt Levels Change the Economic Environment
Moreover, the debt overhang (see chart 2) in many developed and in some emerging countries is dead weight on growth and inflation. In many major emerging markets, the slower economic expansion has been primarily noncyclical. Price pressures are wilting under the impact of cumulative demographic trends in many large economies, especially in Europe and Asia. The effect of aging populations so far conforms to theoretical predictions of slower potential growth and lower household savings rates, but in practice, the latter is being offset by the strong desire to save by companies and governments.
Education minister warns against “wrong Western values”
A Chinese newspaper has published an article by the country’s education minister in which he warns of textbooks with “wrong Western values” and claims college students and teachers are targets of infiltration by “hostile forces.”
Yuan Guiren’s article was carried by Monday’s edition of China Education Daily, which is affiliated to the Ministry of Education, and comes after Yuan told college officials last week to “never let textbooks promoting Western values appear in our classes” and asked them to have more oversight of textbooks and materials directly taken from Western countries.
Politics and Vaccines
Is bilingualism really an advantage?
In 1922, in “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” The words that we have at our disposal affect what we see—and the more words there are, the better our perception. When we learn to speak a different language, we learn to see a bigger world.
Many modern language researchers agree with that premise. Not only does speaking multiple languages help us to communicate but bilingualism (or multilingualism) may actually confer distinct advantages to the developing brain. Because a bilingual child switches between languages, the theory goes, she develops enhanced executive control, or the ability to effectively manage what are called higher cognitive processes, such as problem-solving, memory, and thought. She becomes better able to inhibit some responses, promote others, and generally emerges with a more flexible and agile mind. It’s a phenomenon that researchers call the bilingual advantage.
For the first half of the twentieth century, researchers actually thought that bilingualism put a child at a disadvantage, something that hurt her I.Q. and verbal development. But, in recent years, the notion of a bilingual advantage has emerged from research to the contrary, research that has seemed both far-reaching and compelling, much of it coming from the careful work of the psychologist Ellen Bialystok. For many tasks, including ones that involve working memory, bilingual speakers seem to have an edge. In a 2012 review of the evidence, Bialystok showed that bilinguals did indeed show enhanced executive control, a quality that has been linked, among other things, to better academic performance. And when it comes to qualities like sustained attention and switching between tasks effectively, bilinguals often come out ahead. It seems fairly evident then that, given a choice, you should raise your child to speak more than one language. Indeed, papers touting “Creativity and Bilingualism,” “Cognitive Advantages of Bilingual Five-Year-Olds,” “A Bilingual Advantage in Task-Switching,” “Bilingualism Reduces Native-Language Interference During Novel-Word Learning,” and “Good Language-Switchers Are Good Task-Switchers”—and the resulting books with provocative titles such as “The Bilingual Edge” and “Bilingual Is Better”—suggest that raising a bilingual child is, in large part, a recipe for raising a successful child.
Teacher Evaluation Plan Draws New Support
A coalition of teacher-preparation groups came out at the last minute to support a controversial federal plan to track how well new teachers fare as they start teaching in the classroom.
While the groups represent a small segment of the teaching profession—only about 80,000 teachers out of millions—the move sets up a showdown with traditional players in the field.
Teachers become certified in a variety of ways, often at undergraduate- and graduate-level colleges of education. Educators and administrators at such schools have raised questions about federal overreach, the practicality of trying to keep track of every teacher’s pathway after finishing training and the accuracy of relying on metrics to grade the programs.
Urban Teacher Center, Teach For America and seven additional alternative-certification programs planned to say on Monday that proposed rules by the U.S. Education Department, intended to weed out poor teacher-training programs, are essential to improving schools.
Much more, here.
A Newark Mother of Ten Children Explains Why Her Children Need Charter Schools
Shayvonne Anderson , a Newark mother of ten children who range in age from five to eighteen, explains in the Star-Ledger today why she sends her children to charter schools. Among all the complaints about charter schools from lobbying groups like NJEA, Save Our Schools-NJ, and Education Law Center – they discriminate against children with special needs, they practice a “drill and kill” pedagogy, they drain money from traditional schools — we rarely hear from parents on the ground.
Ms. Anderson skewers those complaints. At least three of her children have “unique learning needs,” yet they are well-served by several Newark Charter schools:
Testing Costs a Drop in the Bucket
The cost of standardized tests, long assailed by testing critics as too high, has resurfaced in the debate over reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act currently underway in Congress. The National Education Association (NEA) has argued that funds spent on testing could be “better spent on high-quality early childhood education, health care, after-school programs, and support services.” Recently, the New Jersey Education Association released poll results indicating that a majority of voters and parents think that “too much money is spent on testing.”
Testing critics usually point to estimates of total spending on assessments; a commonly cited figure—$1.7 billion spent by states each year—comes from a report I wrote in 2012. [1] But what these claims always miss is that, however calculated, spending on testing is barely a drop in the bucket of a public education system that spends over $600 billion per year.
If testing were eliminated entirely, what could schools do with the $1.7 billion saved? Very little, it turns out. Teacher salaries could be increased by one percent or pupil-teacher ratios could be reduced by 0.1 students. The $34 per student spent by states on federally and state-mandated tests simply isn’t very much in a system that spends about $10,000 per student. Put in the context of the NEA position, $34 per student would not buy very much early childhood education—only eight hours of preschool per student in Florida to be exact. [2]
Grammar A–Z
Some grammatical terms may be familiar to you, but others can be confusing or hard to remember. Clicking on any term below will give you a quick and clear definition. Below the categorized section you’ll find all the terms listed from A–Z, so you can browse that way if you prefer.
Lessons for higher education reformers
In response to growing concerns about the US higher education system, policymakers have launched a range of efforts to improve the system’s quality. But this
is easier said than done. The system is populated with a diverse array of programs offered through a mix of public, nonprofit, and for-profit providers. Further- more, the outcomes that students and the public care about are frequently difficult to measure and are integrally tied to the characteristics and behavior of students themselves. All these factors confound efforts to improve quality.In reality, however, numerous sectors suffer from these challenges in one way or another. Policymakers should, therefore, look to learn from efforts to ensure quality, accountability, and consumer protection in these other sectors. In that spirit, this paper examines four sectors that face many of these same challenges: health care (with a focus on transparency efforts), workforce development (specifically, the system’s long-standing emphasis on outcome measurement and accountability), charter schools (a model of deregula- tion and delegated oversight), and housing finance (an example of risk sharing).
Sign up now for the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies online course
At Princeton I taught a course on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies during the semester that just ended. Joe Bonneau unofficially co-taught it with me. Based on student feedback and what we accomplished in the course, it was extremely successful. Next week I’ll post videos of all the final project presentations.
The course was based on a series of video lectures. We’re now offering these lectures free to the public, online, together with homeworks, programming assignments, and a textbook. We’ve heard from computer science students at various institutions as well as the Bitcoin community about the need for structured educational materials, and we’re excited to fill this need.
We’re using Piazza as our platform. Here’s the course page. To sign up, please fill out this (very short) form.
The first several book chapters are already available. The course starts February 16, and we’ll start making the videos available closer to that date (you’ll need to sign up to watch the videos). Each week there will be a Google hangout with that week’s lecturer. We’ll also answer questions on Piazza.
The “Wild West” of Academic Publishing
Last summer, Harvard University Press (HUP) asked a book designer to create a T-shirt for its softball squad’s intramural season. The front of the shirt bore the expression r > g, signifying that the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of growth in income (g)—the central thesis of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty, which HUP’s Belknap Press had published in April. Capital had leapt to the top of The New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction and stayed on the list for 22 weeks. It continues to sell robustly worldwide in 30 languages, and in English alone there are nearly 500,000 copies in print—the fastest-selling book in the press’s nearly 102-year history.
The success of Capital is astonishingly unlikely. Acquired by London-based HUP editor Ian Malcolm, the book made French bestseller lists in 2013, but there were only about 40,000 to 50,000 copies in print there. “We knew it was an important subject and an important book, and he had data no one else had,” says William Sisler, HUP’s director. “But it was 700 pages by a French economist, so we had relatively modest expectations of it doing especially well in the United States.” Still, the press made Capital its lead book for spring 2014, and commissioned a translation by Art Goldhammer, an associate of Harvard’s Center for European Studies.
The Virtue of Scientific Thinking
Can science make you good?
Of course it can’t, some will be quick to say—no more than repairing cars or editing literary journals can. Why should we think that science has any special capacity for moral uplift, or that scientists—by virtue of the particular job they do, or what they know, or the way in which they know it—are morally superior to other sorts of people? It is an odd question, maybe even an illogical one. Everybody knows that the prescriptive world of ought—the moral or the good—belongs to a different domain than the descriptive world of is.
This dismissal may capture the way many of us now think about the question, if indeed we think about it at all. But there are several reasons why it may be too quick.
First, there are different ways of understanding the question, and different modern sensibilities follow from the different senses such a question might have. Some ways of understanding it do lead to the glib dismissal, but other ways powerfully link science to moral matters. Here are just a few of the ways we might think about the relationship between science and virtue, about whether aspects of science have the power to make us good:
Historians are losing their audience, and searching for the next trend won’t win it back.
History has a history, and historians rarely tire of quarreling over it. Yet for the past few centuries, historians have maintained an uneasy truce over the assumption that the search for “facts” should always take precedence over the more fractious difficulty of interpreting them. According to Arnaldo Momigliano, the great twentieth-century Italian scholar of ancient history, it was the Renaissance antiquarians who, though they did not write history, inadvertently made the modern historical profession possible by repudiating grand theory in order to establish cherished fact. The antiquarians collected remnants of the classical past, and understandably they needed to vouch for the reliability of their artifacts at a time when so many relics were wrongly sourced or outright fakes. Momigliano cited the nineteenth-century Oxford don Mark Pattison, who went so far as to remark about antiquarians—approvingly—that “thinking was not their profession.” It may remain the whispered credo required for admission to the guild.
More wary than anthropologists, literary critics or political scientists of speculative frameworks, historians generally have been most pleased with their ability simply to tell the truth—as if it were a secret to be uncovered through fact-finding rather than a riddle to be solved through interpretation. Anthony Grafton once honored Momigliano with the title “the man who saved history,” and it seems fair to say that the latter voiced the consensus of a profession that makes facts almost sacred and theories essentially secondary.
Free speech? Not at four in five UK universities
When Professor Thomas Scotto, of Essex University’s department of government, invited Israel’s deputy ambassador to give a talk to political science students, he hoped for “lots of disagreement: that the speaker would express his views and that the students would challenge him”.
Instead, a noisy protest outside the venue ramped up into an attempt to storm the building, students in the lecture theatre heckled the Israeli diplomat, and it became impossible for him to begin. With feelings running high, university security said they could no longer guarantee the speaker’s safety. The event had to be abandoned.
Plan for national UK college of teaching gains widespread support
The creation of a national college of teaching – a long-held dream for bolstering the credibility of the teaching profession – has moved a step closer after unions and pillars of the education establishment announced they were backing a proposal.
Claim Your College, the coalition behind the plan, published a list of supporters that included the general secretaries of the National Union of Teachers and the National Association of Head Teachers, as well as prominent educators, schools, organisations such as UCL’s Institute of Education, and the Independent Schools Council, which represents private schools.
Celebrate statistics as a vital part of democracy
From reading your editorial on the use of statistics in political debate (30 January) your readers might have come away with the impression that no numbers in the public arena can be trusted. They would be wrong. Of course statistics will be abused in the runup to an election. But the underlying quality of UK statistics (such as our census, our health statistics or even the new figures on wellbeing) is very high. And they quietly play an important role to help inform lots of day-to-day decisions: Where do we need new transport links? Who is at risk of flooding? Which medicines might work?
U.S. students improving – slowly – in math and science, but still lagging internationally
Scientists and the general public have markedly different views on any number of topics, from evolution to climate change to genetically modified foods. But one thing both groups agree on is that science and math education in the U.S. leaves much to be desired.
In a new Pew Research Center report, only 29% of Americans rated their country’s K-12 education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (known as STEM) as above average or the best in the world. Scientists were even more critical: A companion survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that just 16% called U.S. K-12 STEM education the best or above average; 46%, in contrast, said K-12 STEM in the U.S. was below average.
Standardized test results appear to largely bear out those perceptions. While U.S. students are scoring higher on national math assessments than they did two decades ago (data from science tests are sketchier), they still rank around the middle of the pack in international comparisons, and behind many other advanced industrial nations.
Conversations on the Rifle Range 23: The Quadratic Formula Ultimatum, and the Substrate of Understanding
t took me about three weeks to learn all the names of my students. Identifiable patterns of behavior took me a little longer. For example, Cindy, who is in one of the two algebra classes, tended to stop me in the midst of explaining a new procedure and say: “Wait, wait, I’m confused, I don’t understand.”
Over time it got so I could anticipate when this would occur. When showing the factoring of 9×2 –16, for example, I paused after writing down (3x + 4). As expected, I heard: “Wait. I’m so confused. Where did the 3x + 4 come from?” I knew it was Cindy.
“I just don’t understand why it works that way,” she said. I had started the lesson by having students multiply (x-y)(x+y) and other similar problems showing how the middle value drops out. It is not unusual for students to have difficulty extending the pattern of the x2– y2 form to one like 9×2–16. I explained how it worked. Students got it but Cindy persisted. Once she understood something, she got it, but until she did it was painful—particularly when she would get frozen and could not move on until she understood, which was the case here. Students who manage to get it groan when this happens. Someone told Cindy “Because it works out that way; just follow the rule and figure it out later.”
In politics and the classroom, setting expectations doesn’t come easy
One at a time, Cudahy High School seniors sat down at a table, across from six adults, several of whom they had never met, to describe what they learned in a semester of English.
“I should pass this semester because I’m a responsible student,” one student said. She handed the adults a loose leaf binder with a portfolio of her work, which she said meets or exceeds expectations.
Asked to talk about one of 41 standards for learning, she chose standard 27, presenting information clearly in an essay.
Another student described how he hadn’t been good at basic skills such as grammar and spelling, but aiming to meet the standards led him to work harder, and the portfolio helped him learn not to put things off until the last minute.
I was one of the intimidating adults on the other side of the table. The experience gave me glimpses into the students and their school lives — they were serious, they worked reasonably hard, they wanted to do well, but, for most, reading and writing weren’t personal passions.
I also got a glimpse into the changing world of determining what it means to do well in education.
Want to Build Knowledge, Skills, and Grit? Assign History Research Papers
Samantha Wesner, via Will Fitzhugh:
s a junior in high school taking American history, my class had two options for the final project: a PowerPoint presentation or an extended research essay. To many it was a no-brainer; the PowerPoint was definitely going to involve more pictures, fewer hours of work, and less solitude. But some of us went for the research paper, whether because we were naturally drawn to writing, seeking a new challenge, or presentation-averse (as I was).
The daunting task loomed. The essay length: fifteen to twenty pages. The topic I had chosen: The Spanish-American War of 1898. I was a slow writer, and the longest paper I had written before was a five-page English paper on Kurt Vonnegut. The English department had seen to it that I had plenty of practice writing shorter papers. But this new assignment was a leap forward rather than a step. I might have been better off with Will Fitzhugh’s “Page Per Year” plan: With each year, I would have written a paper to correspond with my grade—one page for first grade, nine pages for ninth grade, and so on.
I scoured the textbook for the few paragraphs it offered on the subject. And then what? I would have stopped there if I hadn’t known that other students had done it. Those of us writing a paper were given examples, plus guidance on paragraph structure, quoting, balancing primary and secondary sources, and footnoting. We toured the library and some online resources to get us started. With this essential how-to knowledge in hand, the assignment inched toward the realm of the possible in my mind.
Stacks of library books, reams of notes, and a twenty-page paper later, I had written what I now consider to be the capstone of my high school education. Years later, I remember 1898 better than the great majority of what I learned in high school. To this day, I really do “remember the Maine”; I have a lasting understanding of turn-of-the-century American imperialism, the power and danger of a jingoist press, the histories of complex relationships between the U.S. and the Philippines and Cuba, and Teddy Roosevelt’s unusual path to national prominence. My initial, vague interest blossomed into a fascination that I did not expect when I first set out. I felt a sense of pride as I tucked the stack of paper neatly into a binder to be handed in. Happy to be done, but even happier to have done it, I felt as if I had summited a peak that had seemed ineffably large from below. And I had certainly needed a big push.
Perusing class syllabi my first semester in college, I came upon a description of a final assignment in a history class that looked interesting: a fifteen- to twenty-page research paper. “I can do that,” I thought, “I’ve done it before.”
I didn’t know how lucky I was to be in the small minority of college freshmen who had learned how to write a research paper in high school. Most American high school students graduate without ever being encouraged to explore a topic in such depth, and yet this is exactly the kind of work they will encounter in college, especially in the humanities. In an era in which the president is invested in making college an opportunity all can afford, it’s only fitting that all should be afforded the proper preparation.
We do a disservice to students when we don’t ask them to do challenging work that will hold them in good stead in college and beyond. True, hard-working teachers, some of whom have over 150 students to teach, often simply do not have the time to grade this kind of assignment. In a perfect world, there would be time and resources to spare for extensive feedback to every student. But a research paper that receives even a little feedback is better than no research paper at all. The former still immeasurably deepens a student’s knowledge, skill set, self-discipline, and confidence.
I have my high school history teacher to thank for the confidence with which I approached my first college research paper. I ended up majoring in history and was comfortable writing a senior thesis of more than one hundred pages. Now, with The Concord Review, I have the wonderful task of recognizing student achievement. And yet, I’m painfully aware that The Concord Review’s young authors are the exceptions—those high schoolers who have written extensive history research papers. Those published go on to great things; many attend top colleges and four have been named Rhodes Scholars. Without a doubt, these are bright students. But how many bright students in the public school system have brilliant papers within them? If they aren’t afforded that first push, we may never find out.
Is College Worth it?
Earlier this month, after announcing his plan to make community college free, President Obama lauded a college degree as “the surest ticket to the middle class.”
New research in the prolific field of “Is College Worth It?” suggests it’s not that simple.
“‘Ticket’ implies a college degree is something you can just cash in,” said Alan Benson, assistant business professor at the University of Minnesota. “But it doesn’t work that way. A college degree is more of a stepping stone, one ingredient to consider when you’re cooking up your career. … It’s not always the best investment for everyone.”
Benson, along with M.I.T.’s Frank Levy and business analyst Raimundo Esteva, co-authored a new paper, released this week, examining the value of public university options in California. Factors like how long it takes to complete a degree — often longer than four years — and whether students make it to graduation, he learned, can significantly diminish the value of pursuing higher education.
Closing the math gap for boys
ON a recent afternoon, the banter of boisterous adolescents at Edwin G. Foreman High School, in a poor, racially and ethnically mixed Chicago neighborhood, echoed off the corridor walls. But Room 214 was as silent as a meditation retreat. Inside, 16 ninth- and 10th-grade African-American and Latino boys were working, two-on-one, with a tutor. They’re among 1,326 boys in 12 public schools in this city who are sweating over math for an hour every day.
Kids like these fare worst on every measure of academic achievement, from test scores to graduation rates. On the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the average reading and math scores of eighth-grade black boys are barely higher than those of fourth-grade white girls, and Latino boys score only marginally better. Dropping out is a near-certain ticket to poverty, and these youngsters quit or are pushed out at a dismaying rate. Only 57 percent of young black men and 62 percent of young Latino men graduate from high school in four years, compared with 79 percent of young white men.
The teenagers in Chicago’s math-tutoring-on-steroids experiment fit this dismal profile. They were as many as seven years behind in reading and 10 in math — 16-year-olds with the skills of third graders. The previous year they missed more than a month of school, on average, and when they did make an appearance they were often banished to the school disciplinarian. Nearly a fifth of them had arrest records. Not only were they disproportionately likely to drop out, they were also prime candidates for the school-to-gang-to-prison pipeline
Can Students Have Too Much Tech?
PRESIDENT OBAMA’s domestic agenda, which he announced in his State of the Union address this month, has a lot to like: health care, maternity leave, affordable college. But there was one thing he got wrong. As part of his promise to educate American children for an increasingly competitive world, he vowed to “protect a free and open Internet” and “extend its reach to every classroom and every community.”
More technology in the classroom has long been a policy-making panacea. But mounting evidence shows that showering students, especially those from struggling families, with networked devices will not shrink the class divide in education. If anything, it will widen it.
Anoka-Hennepin Schools May Start Depression Screenings
Minnesota’s largest school district is discussing screening high school students for depression and anxiety in the classroom.
As part of a state grant to improve mental health services, Anoka-Hennepin schools could offer a screening as soon as next fall.
Dr. Nita Kumar, a mental health consultant for the district, said Friday that the idea is to get students to talk about something they may hide from their parents or not even understand what is happening.
Some students and adults in the area shared their thoughts.
“I think it is a good idea just to be able to see warning signs early and see if maybe there is something this person needs to let out,” Stephanie Scheffler said.
Kumar said adolescents often have a harder time identifying when they are actually experiencing signs of depression.
The Dance of the Disrupted: Observations from the education front lines
Each option has its pluses and minuses. My site will include everything I offer my regular class, including emails and announcements but it is an online site without any bells and whistles. The iTunes U site is the most polished in terms of offerings, but there is no forum for interaction and requires more work if you don’t have an Apple device. Yellowdig is a new add-on to my menu and it is a site where you will be able to access the classes and material and hopefully interact with others in the class. (You will have to register on Yellowdig and it is restrictive on what email addresses it will accept.) YouTube is the least broadband-intensive forum, since the file size adjusts to your device, but you will be able to get only the class videos (and not the material).
If you are wondering why I would disrupt businesses that I am part of, I have three responses. The first is that, with four children, I am a consumer of the products/services of these businesses and I am sick and tired of paying what I do for textbooks, college tuition and minor financial services. The second is that it is so much more fun being a disruptor than the disrupted and being in a defensive posture for the rest of my life does not appeal to me. The third is that with Asia’s awakening, we face a challenge of huge numbers and the systems (education, public and financial services) as we know them don’t measure up.
Family Breakdown and Poverty To flourish, our nation must face some hard truths
Robert P. George and Yuval Levin, via Will Fitzhugh:
“If broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered.”
This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family. The full series will appear in our Spring 2015 issue to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 release of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (generally referred to as the Moynihan Report).
As a general rule, assistant secretaries in the Labor Department do not produce lasting historical documents. The so-called Moynihan Report, produced by Assistant Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the winter of 1965 and published under the title “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” is surely the only exception to that rule. But it is quite an exception.
The Moynihan Report gained notice and notoriety almost immediately. Its statistical analysis was cited, and its call to action was repeated, by President Lyndon Johnson within a few months of its publication—again, an uncommon fate for a Labor Department report. But its analysis was just as quickly resisted and disputed in the government and in the academy. Moynihan was accused of arguing that low-income black families were simply causing their own problems and of trying to undermine the civil rights movement. The social psychologist William Ryan actually coined the now-common phrase “blaming the victim” (which he used as a title for a 1971 book) specifically to describe the Moynihan Report.
Of course, Moynihan did no such thing. To the extent that he attributed blame at all, it was to the long and ugly legacy of slavery and to the persistence of racism in American life. Both, he argued, had worked to undermine the standing of black men, and thereby their roles in their own families, and to deform the structure of family life in the black community.
But Moynihan’s aim was in any case less to assign blame than to describe a peculiar problem. The problem first presented itself to Moynihan and his team in the form of a surprising divergence in the black community between unemployment rates and welfare application rates (which coincided with rates of single motherhood, since essentially only unmarried mothers could apply for the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program). Until the late 1950s, the two indexes had risen and fallen together. But starting in the late ’50s, welfare rolls increased even when unemployment was low and the economy was strong.
Moynihan came to understand that he was seeing something new and deeply troubling. Most impressive in retrospect is that he understood that this emerging pattern was troubling above all not for economic reasons, but for deeper and more significant reasons—reasons that are ultimately cultural. “The fundamental problem,” he wrote, “is that of family structure. The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.” Communities affected, he worried, faced “massive deterioration of the fabric of society and its institutions.” Such deterioration, should it prove in fact to be occurring, would constitute “the single most important social fact of the United States today.”
In the decades since Moynihan wrote those words, his work has been held up as an example of prophetic social science, and of constructive policy analysis. And his case has served as the foundation for efforts to focus attention and resources on strengthening family formation among the poor. But both the controversy surrounding the report and the continued attention devoted to it have acted to obscure somewhat the key achievement of Moynihan’s work and so, too, its foremost lesson for our own time.
The strength of the report was not in its analysis of the causes underlying the collapse of the family among lower-income African Americans. Moynihan was convinced that what he was witnessing was fundamentally a phenomenon of the black community, and so could be explained by the tragic history of African Americans, which rendered black families uniquely vulnerable to the kind of social and economic pressures many faced in poor urban environments.
There is of course no question that the savage inhumanity to which African Americans were subjected in our country for much of its history and the racism that has persisted far longer have had detrimental effects on the black community and on its families. But the particular pattern Moynihan began to observe in the 1960s has not in fact been limited to the black community. In the half century since he wrote, the pattern has shown itself in the lives of poor Americans of all races. The problems remain worst in the black community, and the history and realities of racism that Moynihan pointed to are surely important contributing factors, but the challenge of family disintegration plainly runs deeper and broader than that. Family breakdown appears to be a prevailing feature of modern American poverty. In this sense, Moynihan’s analysis of causes was not quite on target.
Focus on the Problem
The report is also notable for not proposing solutions to the disturbing set of problems it laid out, although the author did suggest policy prescriptions elsewhere. Indeed, Moynihan specifically committed the report to stick to diagnosis. “The object of this study has been to define a problem, rather than propose solutions to it,” he wrote. And the chief reason for doing so, he argued, was that “there are many persons, within and without the Government, who do not feel the problem exists, at least in any serious degree. These persons feel that, with the legal obstacles to assimilation out of the way, matters will take care of themselves in the normal course of events.”
And here we find the true core of Moynihan’s contribution. It was, simply put, to tell the truth, both about what emerging facts seemed to suggest about a troubling social trend and about the foreseeable implications of that trend for the lives of the people involved. The family appeared to be breaking down among lower-income black Americans, and to Moynihan broken families meant broken communities and broken lives. Both elements of that diagnosis were crucial, and both were hard pills to swallow.
The latter element in particular—the importance of the family to the health and flourishing of society—has been controversial in the half century that followed Moynihan’s report. Roughly halfway through that period, in 1992, Moynihan himself took up that controversy in a speech delivered at the University of Chicago (and later reprinted in the Public Interest). He was blunt. Despite President Johnson’s personal interest in his arguments, Moynihan said, the years that immediately followed his report—the era of the Great Society—brought an approach to social science and to public policy that made the problem he had diagnosed much more difficult to address effectively, and even to talk about honestly. Simply put, he said, the Great Society era “gave great influence in social policy to viewpoints that rejected the proposition that family structure might be a social issue.”
That was an understatement. The most striking, even shocking, feature of the sociological (and to some degree economic) literature in the several decades following Moynihan’s report is the sheer lack of interest in the question of what the breakdown of the family among the poor, which no one could deny was occurring, might mean in the lives of those involved. The few exceptions acted merely to prove the rule.
Those exceptions included the work of Moynihan himself during his academic career; most of the other people responsible for exceptional attention to this problem followed a path similar to his. “Think, for example, of the writing in the early editions of the Public Interest,” Moynihan noted in that 1992 lecture. “Almost without exception, the authors were political liberals who had stumbled upon things that weren’t entirely pleasing to them but which, as the song goes, could not be denied.” Many people, of course, did deny them. But ultimately, Moynihan suggested, facts were facts and their consequences could not help but follow.
Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976, Moynihan secured a seat on the Senate Finance Committee during his first term and served as its chairman
from 1993 to 1995.When he delivered the lecture, reflecting on his report some 27 years after its publication, Moynihan might have had some reason to suppose that his small band of truth tellers was finally getting heard. In retrospect, those early years of the 1990s seem like they might have been the apex of that band’s influence and stature in the public square. Moynihan was chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, with jurisdiction over welfare and entitlement policy, among much else. James Q. Wilson and James S. Coleman, both members of that original Public Interest circle, were, respectively, president of the American Political Science Association and president of the American Sociological Association. The Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1992 spoke about family breakdown and welfare in terms that even some Republicans had not always been comfortable with. And the academic wall of silence seemed to be cracking just a little, perhaps especially after William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) was released and sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur’s book Growing Up with a Single Parent (1994) powerfully documented the detrimental effects of family breakdown on children. It could well have appeared as though the tide was finally turning, and the vital importance of family structure would finally find its place in public policy and the public debate. Moynihan, in that moment, seemed almost optimistic.
But it was not to be. Family structure would remain off-limits, even as the underlying trends evolved to encompass more of the populace. Since the early 1990s, the fact that births out of wedlock are not fundamentally a matter of race has become far clearer. In 2010, 72 percent of African American births were to unwed mothers, but so were 53 percent of Hispanic births and 36 percent of white births—all far higher figures than those Moynihan saw in the black community in 1965, when he described a 25 percent rate as a social disaster. In our nation as a whole, 41 percent of children born in 2010 were born to unmarried mothers.
And the rate is growing faster among whites than among other groups: between 1992 (when Moynihan delivered his mildly hopeful lecture) and 2010, births to unwed black mothers rose modestly from 68 to 72 percentage points, but births to unwed white mothers saw a dramatic jump from 23 to 36 percent, an increase of more than 50 percent (see “Was Moynihan Right?” features, Spring 2015, Figure 2).
And what is more, the academy has not in fact grown much more hospitable to the notion that family structure is an essential social concern. Although some ground was surely gained in the 1980s and ’90s, much of it has been lost since, as taboos about studying and discussing the implications of family structure have again been hardening. Indeed, even many Republican politicians now shy away from arguments about the importance of marriage for fear of veering into the debate over same-sex marriage.
But as Moynihan noted half a century ago, one cannot deny either the data about family formation or the centrality of the family to the flourishing of society and its members. And today, far more than when Moynihan penned his report, the implications of these facts are grim and essential to understand.
Mapping the Consequences
It is customary to describe the consequences of social trends in economic terms, and that is surely one useful way to illustrate their costs. Some 40 percent of children raised by single mothers are living in poverty, according to the Census Bureau, while roughly 8 percent of children raised by married parents are poor (see “Was Moynihan Right?” features, Spring 2015, Figure 4).
Another way to think about the consequences of these trends is to look at the sociological and psychological effects. Children who grow up in single-parent families are significantly more likely to exhibit behavioral problems, to drop out of school, to experience mental-health problems, to attempt suicide, and to be out of the workforce as young adults. And as Brookings Institution scholar Ron Haskins has argued, this appears to be very much connected to the challenges that single parents face. “Married parents—in part simply because there are two of them—have an easier time being better parents,” Haskins argues. They can share the burdens and responsibilities of parenthood and can combine their efforts to set clear rules and reinforce them with consequences. Clearly, they have more time and energy.
If broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered.
None of this, of course, is to downplay the extraordinary and often heroic efforts of many single mothers to help their children avert negative consequences. On the contrary, findings like these help us see just how daunting the challenges faced by mothers raising children alone can be.
But describing the crisis of the family among low-income Americans in these economic and sociological terms may itself be a way of avoiding the deeper problem of which these are but symptoms. The family is the core character-forming institution of every human society. It is the source of the most basic order, structure, discipline, support, and loving guidance that every human being requires. It is essential to human flourishing, and its weakening puts at risk the very possibility of a society worthy of the name. It is hard to imagine how any of the social problems that take up the time and efforts of policymakers—problems of economic mobility, educational attainment, employment, inequality, and on and on—could be seriously mitigated without some significant reversal of the trends in family breakdown. These are ultimately human problems, problems of the soul, at least as much as they are economic and social problems. And the first step toward seriously taking them on must be a reinvigoration of our commitment to the family.
Exceptions to the traditional form of the family can of course be successful—guided by the traditional model. But if that norm itself is undone, if broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered. And this is precisely what is now happening across wide swaths of American society.
The Future of the Family
The facts about the collapse of the family among America’s poor are deeply discomfiting for the Left and the Right alike. They are uncomfortable for the Left because liberals don’t want to acknowledge what they show us about the importance of the family structure and about the need to reinforce it. And they are uncomfortable for the Right because conservatives don’t want to acknowledge what they show us about the destructive effects of persistent poverty, and about the difficulty of helping people rise out of it. These are facts that suggest both the importance of the family and the need for public action, and so they are perfectly suited to being ignored by everyone in our politics.
Moynihan could see that danger half a century ago, and his report was meant to warn of it. His concluding words, although shaped by his sense that race was at the core of the phenomena he had discerned, still ring through the decades. He wrote,
“The policy of the United States is to bring the Negro American to full and equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship. To this end, the programs of the Federal government bearing on this objective shall be designed to have the effect, directly or indirectly, of enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family.”
The promise of America, Moynihan understood, is unreachable in the absence of strong and stable families. That call should now be generalized into a case for making the strength of the family a key national priority. The lessons of the past half century, and especially of the Great Society’s mostly failed experiments in social policy, can help us think more clearly about the means by which this end could be pursued. But the end was well laid out by Moynihan’s prescient words. The end should be the reinforcement and recovery of the core institution of our society, and every society.
Putting that end at the center of our politics must begin by stating plainly that the future of the family will determine the future of the country. That may seem like a simple and straightforward fact. But as Daniel Patrick Moynihan showed half a century ago, responsible and constructive social science often consists of simply stating such facts, and making it difficult for people to deny or ignore them. His report offers a model of truth telling from which we all could stand to learn.
Robert George is professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University. Yuval Levin is the editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Advanced Curriculum Review in the Madison School District
As we begin the next portion of the presentation, I want to remind you of the three overarching goals in the Strategic Framework. Our Annual Report, which was distributed a few months ago, addressed and detailed progress around our first goal stating that every student is on track for graduation.
Tonight’s presentation represents our first look at Goal #2 “Every student has access to a challenging and well-rounded education as measured by programmatic access and participation data. And that is our theme for these instructional meetings for the year – access and participation. We share and provide this initial information as baseline data and we will point out our thoughts about next steps. Please know that we have looked at this data and we notice and acknowledge challenges – some of the same challenges you will notice.
Each data slide is dense as you may have already seen in your packet. We will call out certain features of the data and we acknowledge that there is much to study on each slide. Remember, this is our first look at baseline data and I want to thank Andrews shop, Bo, Beth and Travis for their efficient work gathering this information.
Youth Options
50 students total
45 white and Asian; fewer than 6 ELL, special education, and/or free/reduced lunch; 38 in grade 12
46 different courses taken
Total of 81 transcripted courses across the 50 students West – 31, Memorial – 25, East – 11, La Follette – 11, Other programs – 3
75 at UW-Madison, 6 at MATC
High grades – 60 of 81 are As, no com
Related: Credit for non-mmsd courses has been an open issue for some time.
Commentary on Wisconsin’s K-12 Tax, Spending & Governance Climate
Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter, via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):
It has been a long, well-planned attack. In 1993, in an action against their own philosophy; i.e. decisions by government should be made at the lowest possible level, the Republican Governor and Legislature began actions to control local school boards. They passed Revenue Controls on school boards to limit how much they can increase taxes. This in itself caused harm by instructional materials and textbooks becoming out-dated. School Boards had to make choices between providing “current” materials and texts, or small class sizes to enable optimum learning. Eventually, the legislated revenue controls caused a double-whammy – out-dated texts & materials and an increase in class size, because of layoffs caused by the legislated revenue controls.
Next, the Governor & Legislature enabled vouchers so those who choose to send their children to private or religious schools can use “vouchers” which cause the public school, where the child could attend, to forfeit public/tax funds to pay for the child to attend the private or parochial school.
With revenue controls crippling the means to provide the best quality education and adequate financial reward for school district employees; and vouchers taking another big chunk, Wisconsin’s Governor and Legislature say of the schools that they have been starving to cause their failure, now, because of your failure, we will close your schools and convert them to for-profit private charter schools. This plan is to appease the Koch Brothers and others, who provide large sums to buy the elections of those promoting these privatization schemes.
Assembly Bill 1, in the 2015 Wisconsin legislative session, is designed just to do what is described above, and it is on the fast-track for approval, just as Act 10 was a few years ago. If it is not stopped, it will rip the heart out of every community – the pubic school will be gone, as will quality public education for all of Wisconsin’s children. The smaller the community, the bigger the harmful impact on Wisconsin’s towns and villages because of AB 1.
Madison spends about double the national average per student.
Madison Teachers, Inc. 26 January, 2015 newsletter can be found here (PDF).
Student fury over ‘impossible’ economics exam
Final year economics students at Sheffield University are furious after an exam this week contained questions they found “impossible”.
The paper, on the economics of cities, contained compulsory questions on topics they had never been taught, say the students.
More than 90% of those who took the exam have now signed an online petition demanding the university investigate.The university said all questions were based on topics taught in the course.
But, in a tweet, one candidate complained: “Question three may as well have been in Chinese.”
K-12 Tax, Spending and Referendum Climate: Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out Instead of Climbing Up
Dionne Searcey & Robert Gebelhoff:
The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century.
In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today’s dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year. Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets.
But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow, the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom. At the same time, fewer of those in this group fit the traditional image of a married couple with children at home, a gap increasingly filled by the elderly.
Three interesting league tables from this year’s UK GCSE results
According to the latest GCSEs results tables, published by the Department of Education on Thursday, the number of English schools failing on GCSE targets has doubled in a year.
The complete tables, released by the DfE, show key stage 4 and key stage 5 results by school. We’ve taken a look at the dataset and pulled out some interesting tables which you can find below.
Best and worst local authorities for GCSE results
The Guardian’s education editor, Richard Adams writes today:
Too Much Tech?
More technology in the classroom has long been a policy-making panacea. But mounting evidence shows that showering students, especially those from struggling families, with networked devices will not shrink the class divide in education. If anything, it will widen it.
In the early 2000s, the Duke University economists Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd tracked the academic progress of nearly one million disadvantaged middle-school students against the dates they were given networked computers. The researchers assessed the students’ math and reading skills annually for five
Thousands of early English books released online to public by Bodleian Libraries and partners
Image of EEBO-TCP Michigan homepageFrom Shakespeare and Milton to little-known books about witchcraft, cookery and sword fighting, this rich data set comprises fully-searchable text files that can be read online or downloaded in a variety of formats.
This corpus of electronic texts has been created and released by the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP), an international collaboration among universities, funders and ProQuest, an information company central to global research. Previously, the texts were only available to users at academic libraries involved in the partnership but the data was released into the public domain on 1 January.
‘We are opening up these fantastic books to people who wouldn’t normally be able to access them. I’m fascinated to see what people will do with them,’ said Michael Popham, Head of Digital Collections at the Bodleian Libraries.Members of the public, teachers and researchers around the world can now have access to thousands of transcriptions of English texts published during the first two centuries of printing in England. The corpus includes important works by literary giants like Chaucer and Bacon, but also contains many rare and little-known materials that were previously only available to those with access to special collections at academic libraries.
The text-only files are a unique resource for members of the public to browse for curious and interesting topics and titles ranging from witchcraft and homeopathy to poetry and recipes. In addition to browsing and reading text-only versions of these early English books, users of EEBO-TCP can also search the entire corpus, which contains more than two million pages and nearly a billion words. The text has been encoded with Extensible Markup Language (XML), allowing individuals to search for keywords and themes across the entire collection of works, in individual books or even within specific sections of text such as stage directions or tables of contents.