Nick Timiraos:

Last week’s WSJ/NBC poll found that Americans, by more than two to one, are more worried about their ability to get ahead financially than they are about the widening income gap.

A new book by Robert Putnam, the Harvard University political scientist, delivers some detailed insights into what’s behind those worries. Mr. Putnam joins President Barack Obama and Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, for a discussion on poverty at Georgetown University on Tuesday.

Mr. Putnam drew attention to the growing segregation of America along class lines at a conference hosted last month by the Federal Reserve on economic mobility in which he outlined key themes from the book, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.”

Even as Americans have become less segregated across racial and religious lines than they were a generation ago, they have grown more segregated along class lines. Americans are much less likely to go to school, live with, or marry people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, Mr. Putnam said.

GERELATEERDE ARTIKELEN

The regulations were announced last year, but have attracted almost no attention thus far in China and abroad. This week Rogier Creemers, a Belgian China-specialist at Oxford University, published a comprehensive translation of the regulations regarding the Social Credit System, which clarifies the scope of the system. In an interview with Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant he says: ‘With the help of the latest internet technologies the government wants to exercise individual surveillance’.

In his view this surveillance will have a wider scope than was the case under the former East German system: ‘The German aim was limited to avoiding a revolt against the regime. The Chinese aim is far more ambitious: it is clearly an attempt to create a new citizen.’

The intentions of the new system are not only economical, fighting fraudulent practices, but also moral. ‘This is a deliberate effort by the Chinese government to promote among its citizens “socialist core values” such as patriotism, respecting the elderly, working hard and avoiding extravagant consumption’, says Creemers. A bad ‘credit code’ can result in being not eligible for certain jobs, housing or credit to start a company. ‘On the labour market you might need a certain score to get a specific job.’

Brookings:

Every student at Harvey Mudd College who borrowed between 2009 and 2011 was making loan payments three years later, though only 326 borrowed. At Vasser, 99.3 percent of its 923 borrowers were current. Out of non-medical colleges with at least 1,000 borrowers, those attending Notre Dame had the highest repayment rates: Of 4,691 borrowers, just 43 had defaulted within three years.

Brookings’ new report on college quality attempts to evaluate schools based on their contributions to the economic success of alumni. Federal loan repayment is one of the measures, in addition to mid-career salaries and careers in high-paying occupations.

Terry Burnham:

Professor Kahneman discussed an intriguing finding that people score higher on a test if the questions are hard to read. The particular test used in the study is the CRT or cognitive reflection task invented by Shane Frederick of Yale. The CRT itself is interesting, but what Professor Kahneman wrote was amazing to me,

Dan Ghica

Unlike previous posts, this one precedes the math club meeting. The reason is that we need to tighten some loose ends in our emerging knot theory notation. The first two meetings (I and II) were all about exploring knots and ways to describe them using notations, and we made some impressive strides. But at this stage I need to exercise some authority and steer them firmly in the right direction:

We are going to use I rather than 0 (zero) to denote the identity of composition. Even though 0 is a neutral element for addition, as correctly spotted by the children, using it as the neutral element for composition is not idiomatic. 1 (one) is more standard, for various reason I will not get into here.

Anya Kamanetz:

“Welcome to Iowa State University. May I take your paper, please?”

A bill circulating in the Iowa state Senate would rate professors’ performance based on student evaluations. Just student evaluations.

Low-rated professors would be automatically fired — no tenure, no appeals.

The bill’s author, state Sen. Mark Chelgren, a Republican, argues that too many students are taking on student loan debt but not getting their money’s worth in the classroom. “Professors need to understand that their customers are those students,” Chelgren told the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Though the bill appears unlikely to pass, it has made national news because of the broader debate around student debt, the cost of college and what, exactly, students are getting for their money.

Kaitlyn Schallhorn:

An Indiana public school district segregated elementary field trips last week when administrators included only African-Americans on the college introduction tour.

According to ABC 57, South Bend Community Schools Corporation has planned a series of field trips to three local colleges for black third-graders in seven school districts. The excursions began last week with a trip to Ivy Tech Community College.

“I feel like all kids should be going.” Tweet This

Dr. G. David Moss, the director for the African-American student-parent services with the South Bend Community Schools Corporation, told ABC 57 that he wanted the third-grade students to begin to think of themselves attending college.

“I was hired to look at the issues facing African-American kids in the South Bend Community Schools Corporation and my job specifically says that I need to develop programs and develop strategies to help these kids and their families become more successful academically,” Moss said.

Kevin:

I was having a really good day today; recovering from post-semester burnout, recharging the batteries–all in all, getting to my Happy Place. But then I read Mark Bauerlein’s Op-ed in today’s New York Times, and now I’m all irritated. “What’s the Point of a Professor?” Bauerlein asks; he then goes on to tell us, basically, “not much.” And who’s responsible for this lamentable state of affairs, you might wonder? Well–there’s students, for one. In today’s consumerist and career-over-true-education society, they just don’t engage with professors outside of the classroom transaction. “They have no urge to become disciples,” according to Bauerlein. Why don’t they want to become disciples? Well, colleagues, there’s where it becomes our fault, too:

Sadly, professors pressed for research time don’t want them, either. As a result, most undergraduates never know that stage of development when a learned mind enthralled them and they progressed toward a fuller identity through admiration of and struggle with a role model

Who even realizes they want to become an acolyte of a rock-star professor if they never get to the right “stage of development?” College seems to be reduced, in this view, to a several-year series of rote careerist transactions between infantilized students and disinterested professors. Gone are the halcyon days of yore when professors dispensed wisdom to adoring throngs of geek-groupies, never to return. O THE POOR CHILDREN.

Sam Blumenfeld:

Most Americans assume that we’ve always had public schools, that they came with the Constitution and are an indispensable part of our democratic system. But nothing could be farther from the truth as I discovered when I wrote my book, Is Public Education Necessary?, published in 1981. In writing that book I wanted to find out why the American people put education in the hands of government so early in their history. I was quite surprised to find that it had nothing to do with economics or the lack of literacy. It was the result of a philosophical change in the minds of the academic elite.

The U.S. Constitution does not mention education anywhere. It was left up to the states, parents, religious denominations, and school proprietors to deal with. True, in the early days of New England, towns were required to maintain common schools supported and controlled by the local citizenry. This had been done to make sure that children learned to read so that they could read the Bible and go on to higher education. But there was much homeschooling, private tutoring, private academies, church schools, and dames’ schools for very young children. There were no compulsory school attendance laws, and no centralized state control over the curriculum.

This system, or lack of it, produced a highly literate population that could read the Federalist Papers, the King James Version of the Bible, and everything else that was published. All one has to do is read a Farmer’s Journal of those early days to realize the high level of literacy that was enjoyed by the general population in America prior to the advent of the public schools.

Not Very Jolley:

The small schools task force promised a more detailed report giving indicative costings and guidance for schools, with the initial hope it would be published some time prior to the implementation of UIFSM in September 2014. This was then delayed and eventually promised in November.

Then it came to light that their flagship school, Peyhembury junior school, despite all the extra advice provided by the small schools task force experts, had been unable to run a universal infant free school meal service. They were forced into asking for an extra £43,217 for new infrastructure. (oddly the SFP video promoting Peyhembury was taken down from youtube at around this time)

The original target of 30 schools in the south west was never met and the project seemed to lurch from one problem to another. To the point the small schools task force has all but disappeared from the school food plan website.

Resaerch Digest:

For adults, let alone children, time is a tricky concept to comprehend. In our culture, we carve it up into somewhat arbitrary chunks and attribute words to those durations: 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 of those in an hour and so on. We also have a sense of what these durations feel like. Children start using these time-related words at around the age of two or three years, even though they won’t master clocks until eight or nine. This raises the question – what do young children really understand about duration words?

Katharine Tillman and David Barner began by asking dozens of three- to six-year-olds to compare several pairs of durations (e.g. Farmer Brown jumped for a minute. Captain Blue jumped for an hour. Who jumped more?). As well as minutes and hours, other durations used were seconds, days, weeks, months and years. This test showed that by age four, the children were tending to get more of these questions right than would be expected if they were just guessing. With increasing age, the children got better at the task. In other words, from age four and up, children have a sense of the rank order of different duration terms.

What young children don’t have, according to the findings from further experiments, is a sense of the actual lengths of time that these terms refer to. When the comparison test was repeated, but with different amounts of each duration, the children were flummoxed. Take, for example, the question “Farmer Brown jumped for three minutes. Captain Brown jumped for two hours. Who jumped more?”As adults, we aren’t thrown by the minutes outnumbering the hours by three to two, because we know that an hour is 60 times longer than a minute, and that an hour feels much longer than minute. However, even five-year-olds, who know well the principle that an hour is longer than a minute, were thrown by these kinds of comparisons. This suggests they don’t yet have a very good understanding of the formal definitions of duration words, nor what the different durations feel like.

Todd Milewski:

“There should be some room for inflationary increases, and our schools have been really constrained for several biennia now. So zero is not a win. Certainly, it’s better than what it was but, frankly, nothing has changed over the last six months so maybe the budget should have been put in place as 0 percent to begin with and we could have worked from there. Now we’re working from a place of disadvantage.”

Some school districts have responded to state cuts by asking voters to approve referenda for funding. Last month, Madison voters approved a $41 million referendum that will pay for upgrades and expansions in 16 schools.

Evers said districts have a success rate of 60 to 70 percent when they go to referendum, but that kind of arrangement could lead to legal challenges.

Much more on Wisconsin’s K-12 tax & spending climate, here.

Nina Zito:

It’s 10 at night and my husband, Ilya, is breathlessly asking me if he can wake the kids to show them the online chess game he just finished. He’s joking. Mostly. Since it is a scene I witness often in daylight hours, I sense that if I weren’t scowling, he’d romp in and wake our son and daughter — both scholars and chess players at Success Academy Upper West — to show them a tactic he found that lets him win with a forced “mate-in-3 [moves].” Years ago, when we were first dating, he and I played chess all the time, frequently getting in two to three games a day while stretched out on a blanket in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow. He always won graciously, but still I’d be slightly irked and very stubborn, so I would challenge him again – sometimes with thinly veiled aggression. It was interesting, though, because I was learning how he thought. One happy Sunday afternoon when I finally did win, a non-sportsmanlike grin spread over my face as I finally checkmated his king. Victory was sweet. – See more at: http://successacademies.org/education-blog-item/what-chess-means-to-my-family/#sthash.yL1uuHXO.dpuf

Via Alan Borsuk

Betsy Thatcher:

@hat a difference a year makes in the world of Wisconsin’s prevailing wage law.

Last year, the Oakfield School District needed a small painting job done as part of a refurbishing project at one of the small district’s two schools. The project fell within the state’s prevailing wage law – which meant the Fond du Lac County District had to pay painters $22.53 per hour in wages and benefits, according to Jackie Hungerford, administrative assistant with the district.

The work won’t take place until this year, but because the district signed the contract with a local painter in 2014, it was able to lock in that year’s rate, Hungerford says. That’s a good thing. This year, she said, the state’s prevailing wage and benefits package

for that painter in Fond du Lac County is $42.35 per hour, nearly double the cost. “You never know from year to year what the dollar amount is,” says Hungerford. “It makes it hard to bid a job.”

While the painting job will be done, other projects affected by the prevailing wage law will not.

Vipal Monga:

Five years ago, 80 clerks and salespeople at Pilot Travel Centers LLC spent a combined 3,200 hours a week tracking and paying for orders for thousands of goods, ranging from candy bars to diesel fuel.

They typed the orders into an accounts-payable database, and printed out thousands of checks to pay suppliers. After slipping them into envelopes and adding postage, they put the checks in the mail.

“It was just awful,” said David Clothier, treasurer of the Knoxville, Tenn., company, which operates more than 500 Pilot Flying J truck stops nationwide. “There were humans everywhere.”

Today, a computer “robot”—basically software—automates these tasks. Suppliers send their invoices to Pilot Travel electronically. Its software sends out payments and records every transaction. As a result, the company needs just 10 clerks working a weekly total of 400 hours to pay suppliers.

Robots are taking over corporate finance departments, performing work that often required whole teams of people. Big companies such as Pilot Travel, New York-based Verizon Communications Inc. and GameStop Corp., of Grapevine, Texas, are among those using software to automate many corporate bookkeeping and accounting tasks.

Elizabeth Redden:

A recent investigative news program combined with a report from a governmental anticorruption commission have stirred up a debate in Australia about the prevalence of fraud in international student recruitment and the alleged slippage of academic standards as the country’s universities have grown increasingly dependent on the tuition these students bring. The debate in Australia — where international students account for more than a fifth of university enrollments, compared to just about 4 percent in the U.S. — arguably has implications for American universities as they seek to grow international student enrollments and increasingly embrace the use of commissioned agents in recruiting, a practice widely accepted in Australia.

Alan Borsuk:

Everyone was awaiting word from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau on revenue projections for the next two years. The hope was that the estimates would be raised from earlier figures, which would allow more money to be put into play and allow Republicans to get out from under some Walker proposals that have been highly unpopular. That included his idea of dropping state aid to schools for 2015-’16 by $127 million.

Public schools leaders around the state knew months ago not to expect much, if any, new money in the state budget, either in terms of state aid or in terms of permission from the state to spend more (using property tax increases, primarily).

In general, school officials wanted a funding increase that would take into account rising costs in some areas, especially given the spending lids schools have lived under and the reductions that have been made in recent years.

The school people were surprised when, instead of staying flat, they found themselves facing cuts under Walker’s proposal. Including in many Republican-oriented communities, a lot of opposition arose to cuts that would result.

In April, a Marquette Law School Poll (disclosure: I do some work on the polling effort) found 78% opposition to the $127 million cut. Other poll results also indicated a shift in sentiment toward supporting spending on public schools. Politicians noticed this.

But when the revenue estimate came out on Wednesday, it didn’t change prior projections. There would be no new money. That means big problems for a variety of parties, including the University of Wisconsin System.

But the main item to get attention was the $127 million K-12 problem. Republican leaders, including the governor himself, said they were not going to make that cut. Some said doing something about kindergarten through 12th-grade funding was their first priority.

Fine, but all that really was done was to go back to a flatline budget for state aid to schools, which was where the conversation stood in January. An inflation adjustment? Not much momentum behind that currently. Money is too tight, and there’s still that UW issue, among other things.

Related: Madison spends 16% of its $413,700,000 budget on healthcare.

Spencer Hsu

The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

Madison School District (PDF):

Annual Advanced Learning Department report in the fall

Parent Meeting and Listening sessions are providing valuable

Systematic communication plan is a priority for families and schools

Development of a year-at-a-glance calendar for enrichment opportunities and identification based on testing schedule

Greater focus on systems supporting underrepresented populations

Coaching and professional development for AL-IRTs

Train AL-IRTs to use OASYS and STAT Reports

Work with MTSS and C&I to develop guidance and options for schools within a more comprehensive system

Provide increased online Intervention Resources

Develop and implement Honors Guidance Document

Work collaboratively with Fine Arts and the Arts Rich Schools Blueprint to identify options for Advanced Learners

Madison School District

Why is it important for all of our children in Madison to have equitable access to a comprehensive arts education and to thrive in an arts rich school? Through creating, presenting, responding, and connecting in multiple art forms, students can come to recognize and celebrate their own unique ways of seeing, doing, and communicating. With access to a comprehensive arts education, our students can explore and problem-solve through productivity and teamwork. Skill development through an art form teaches students to describe, analyze, and interpret visual, aural, and kinesthetic images. This strengthens skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening within text and language of that art form, and contributes to their comprehensive literacy skills.

The arts also impact our local economy by creating a sense of place, developing skilled creative workers for non-arts related careers, helping to revitalize neighborhoods and giving communities a competitive edge in attracting businesses and talent. We believe that arts rich schools are a foundational piece of our community fabric that cultivate the creative thinking, innovation, and attractive community that will fuel our economic future. Students trained in the arts as part of their K-12 education will have the opportunity to contribute to one of our city’s major economic engines. The local abundance of cultural offerings and the arts are cited frequently as attributes that support Madison being listed as a top place to live in the United States.

The Arts Rich Schools Blueprint will also build on a long history of arts education support between the Madison Metropolitan School District and the community.

The Madison School District administration tried, a number of years ago, to kill the popular strings program.

View a longer version of the Arts Rich School Blueprint (PDF).

Arts Rich School Continnum Rubric – 2015-16 (PDF).

Madison Teachers, Inc., via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):

Work continues on the creation of an Employee Handbook to take effect once the Collective Bargaining Agreements expire in June, 2016. MTI-represented employees continue to be covered by Collective Bargaining Agreements through June 30, 2016. The Board of Education has approved a process for the development of the Employee Handbook which includes a joint Oversight Group composed of five (5) appointees by MTI, two (2) by AFSCME, one (1) by the Building Trades Council, three (3) building principals and up to five (5) other administrators. It was agreed in negotiations for the 2015-16 Contracts that the Collective Bargaining Agreements will serve as the foundation of the Handbook.

Madison School District (PDF):

MMSD will spend $61 million on health insurance this year.

One of Every Six Dollars is Spent on Health Insurance in the MMSD budget.

Health Insurance premiums account for 16% of the MMSD budget.

Over 3,900 employees are enrolled in the MMSD plan

The MMSD plan design lacks common features that promote efficient utilization – the plan has no deductibles, no co-insurance requirements, and no employee premium contribution

Our multi-year claims experience (medical loss ratio) does not suggest that MMSD should expect less-than-market pricing

Medical trend (inflation) continues to grow at 7-8% annual increases (including 3-4% ACA fees)

Health insurance costs have long been an issue in the Madison Schools.

Drew DeSilver:

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.

Related: connected math.

Math task force.

What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level mathematics placement

Ben Schmidt:

This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com.

You can enter any other word (or two-word phrase) into the box below to see how it is split across gender and discipline: the x-axis gives how many times your term is used per million words of text (normalized against gender and field). You can also limit to just negative or positive reviews (based on the numeric ratings on the site). For some more background, see here.

Not all words have gender splits, but a surprising number do. Even things like pronouns are used quite differently by gender.

Siobhan Roberts:

Vladimir Voevodsky had no sooner sat himself down at the sparkling table, set for a dinner party at the illustrious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, than he overturned his empty wine glass, flipping bowl over stem and standing the glass on its rim—a signal to waiters that he would not be imbibing. He is not always so abstemious, but Voevodsky, that fall of 2013, was in the midst of some serious work.

Founded in 1930, the Institute has been called “the earthly temple of mathematical and theoretical physics,” and is a hub for all manner of rigorous intellectual inquiry. Einstein’s old house is around the corner. In the parking lot a car sports a nerdy bumper sticker reading, “Don’t Believe Everything You Think”—which might very well be aimed directly at Voevodsky. Because during the course of some professional soul-searching over the last decade or so, he’d come to the realization that a mathematician’s work is 5 percent creative insight and 95 percent self-verification. And this was only reinforced by a recent discovery around the time of the dinner party: He’d made a big mistake.

Olivia:

Last week, a science teacher who had heard about the knowledge-led, mastery-focused curriculum at Michaela asked me, “do your kids hate Science yet?” On the same day, I attended a ‘knowledge versus skills’ science debate. The skills troops were gathered and I was offered an insight into the ideological battlefield. There was a real sense of dissatisfaction by how little their sevens’ loved Science. The troops seemed to agree that the reason why secondary school science does not inspire young minds is because there are not enough opportunities for discovery, creativity and awe-inspiring practicals.

I agreed that many science departments in secondary schools do not inspire young minds. However, this is because those departments do not have a high enough level of rigour in their curriculum at Key Stage Three. Even their lower ability pupils are not sufficiently challenged.
Quite frankly, science departments around the country patronise children. They do this by trying to get their children to be scientists and think like scientists. Ironically, by trying to treat the pupils like adult scientists, they end up patronising them by turning lessons into ‘playing grown-ups’. Even at Advanced Level, I did not think like a scientist. On starting out, even Aristotle did not think like a scientist. Instead, he was deeply influenced by his teacher, Plato. Aristotle’s work on geology, physics, metaphysics, psychology, biology and medicine were founded on the 20 years that he spent at Plato’s Academy, accumulating masses of knowledge and experience.

Julie O’Connor:

It is an unlikely place to see so many children celebrating college acceptance letters.

Here in the heart of Newark, a poor and violent city, sits a passage to another world. Just blocks from Barringer High School — where at least a dozen gangs recruit, cops break up fights with pepper spray, a girl was sexually assaulted and a boy stabbed to death — Newark Collegiate Academy is an oasis.

In a city where almost half the students don’t graduate, nearly all its kids finish, and a remarkable 95 percent of them go on to college.

This isn’t supposed to happen. The first rule of education in America is that poverty breeds failure. You can find 100 studies to show that. It’s normally true.

BBC:

Fewer than 400 so-called neuro-technology patents a year had been filed in 2000-09, research company SharpBrains said. But that had doubled to 800 in 2010. And 1,600 such patents had been lodged in the US in 2014.

Research company Nielsen holds the most neuro-technology patents – with 100.
Microsoft holds 89 patents for software that can assess mental states.

The expansion into non-medical uses represented a dawn of the “pervasive neuro-technology age”, said SharpBrains chief executive Alvaro Fernandez.

“Neuro-tech has gone well beyond medicine, with non-medical corporations, often under the radar, developing neuro-technologies to enhance work and life,” he added.

Jasmine Garsd:

For most college students May is a happy month: the senior class graduates and summer vacation beckons. But at Sweet Briar College, a women’s college in western Virginia, there’s little celebration this spring.

The board of directors says declining enrollment leaves them no choice: Classes ended this week for the year and forever.

Ryan Cooper:

Liberals care about higher education — a lot. It’s long been a top-tier issue of the left, from the construction of state universities decades ago to the Occupy Wall Street protests of this decade. So it’s no surprise that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has made higher education policy a major plank in his left-wing primary challenge to Hillary Clinton.

Higher education ought to be considered a “right,” Sanders said in an interview with The Huffington Post. Similarly, he has previously argued for large increases in government tuition assistance. By upping federal aid by $18 billion, matched by states, all Americans could effectively have two years of free college at public universities across the nation.

Amy Kazmin:

Yet in their zeal to build schools, and to encourage attendance with incentives such as free lunches, Indian policy makers have paid scant attention to what is taking place inside the new classrooms. There has been little serious national debate over how to teach fundamental skills effectively to millions of first-generation students.

“The government said let’s get children into school, we’ll worry about quality later, and we’ll worry about content of teaching later,” says Vimala Ramachandran, a professor at New Delhi’s National University of Educational Planning and Administration. “They separated the quantitative goals from what is happening inside the school.”

Ms Aiyar echoes that view: “The government focused entirely on getting schools to children and getting children into schools. It assumed the teaching-learning story would take care of itself.”

Some argue India’s low learning levels are the result of an “overambitious” national curriculum, which assumes all students will master reading in their first year of school, even if they come from “text-scarce” environments, with little or no prior exposure to written material. “By the end of grade 1, they are supposed to be done with reading,” says Ms Duflo. “It’s a complete fantasy.”

Madison, too, has long dealt with disastrous reading results.

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Gillian Tett:

But there is one glaring exception to this trend: student debt. Over the past decade, the level of outstanding student debt has almost tripled to $1.3tn.

And although the law makes it relatively hard to walk away from student debt, defaults are also strikingly high. There are many ways to measure this figure but the Department of Education reports that Americans who were due to start repaying their student debts in 2011 had a 13.7 per cent default rate last year. This is a touch lower than the previous year (14.7 per cent) but dramatically higher than it had been since the mid-1990s; and it is higher than the credit card default rate.

This figure may understate the problem, however. The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee released a report late last year which suggests that actual defaults (using its data) were just 9 per cent but the “shadow” default rate — the debt “delinquencies” that are not fully reported — could be 23 per cent. Other economists have similar estimates.

Nations Report Card:

Nationally, eighth graders’ average scores on the NAEP U.S. history, geography, and civics assessments showed no significant change in 2014, compared to 2010—the last assessment year. However, several student groups have made gains. In 2014, eighteen percent of eighth-graders performed at or above the Proficient level in U.S. history, 27 percent performed at or above the Proficient level in geography, and 23 percent performed at or above the Proficient level in civics. Students performing at or above the Proficient level on NAEP assessments demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.

This interactive report presents average score and achievement level results of the nation’s eighth-grade students by gender, race/ethnicity, parental education levels, and other student groups. The report also describes classroom practices and students’ attitudes regarding these subjects, and features sample questions and student performance on those questions. Below is an overview of the results and the assessment content for the 2014 U.S. history, geography, and civics assessments.

Alex Hernandez:

The families of 21,000 New York City students applied for 1,000 openings at public charter schools run by the nonprofit Achievement First. And 22,000 students hoped to land one of 2,300 slots at Success Academy Charter Schools.

During school enrollment season, families are telling school districts exactly which public schools they want their children to attend. To paraphrase former NBA player Rasheed Wallace, “[school choice] don’t lie.”

Marianne Lombardo:

Baltimore burned because black people’s lives are devalued by systematic, institutionalized unfairness in the justice, economic, and education systems. Anger is the manifestation of despair. The Telegraph writes “While black men of all economic backgrounds face many pressures, those without hope for economic opportunity are the most likely to explode.”

Earlier today, I read the story of Tamir Rice’s mother moving into a homeless shelter

(Tamir Rice was the 12 year-old killed by a police officer for playing with a toy guy in a Cleveland park). You can’t believe there’s going to be another life taken or another mother’s heartbreak, and then there is.

Spahn Murthy:

Believe it or not, 2014 is almost over and 2015 is right around the corner. With a new year comes new opportunities, and around this time we at LinkedIn are typically asked the following question: “Who’s getting hired and what are they doing?”

To get to an answer, we analyzed the skills and experience data in over 330 million LinkedIn member profiles. If your skills fit one of the categories below, there’s a good chance you either started a new job or garnered the interest of a recruiter in the past year.

Eva Moskowitz:

Teaching is everything. You build relationships, you inspire, you draw out human potential. There is no more important job or work than teaching and learning!
While this week is Teacher Appreciation Week, in my mind, every day is teacher appreciation day.
As the leader of this organization, I appreciate you; as a parent and as a Success Academy parent, as an educator, I appreciate all that you do!

I appreciate your hard work. I appreciate your high expectations. I appreciate the demands you make of our scholars. I appreciate the joy you infuse into your classrooms and how nurturing you are. I appreciate your willingness to collaborate and be school teachers rather than classroom teachers. I appreciate how invested you are in the whole child, in discovery-oriented science, conceptual math, and great critical and creative thinking!

Laura Waters:

I’ve been really good about not quoting Diane Ravitch, but I’m off the wagon. In a recent blog post she demeans national civil and human rights groups who are working hard to help the U.S. Senate understand the necessity of maintaining ESEA’s mandate of annual standardized testing. As these groups explained in a press release today, “we cannot fix what we cannot measure.”

We all know this. We know that the achievement gap between poor children and wealthier children, between whites and blacks, between children with and without disabilities, was only revealed through states’ analyses of disaggregated data from annual standardized tests.

Peter Schmidt:

College administrations react to hate crimes, hate speech, and other high-profile incidents of bias by focusing mainly on repairing their institution’s reputation, two new studies conclude.

The administrations’ responses generally paper over underlying prejudices in the campus culture, leaving the victims at risk of further harm in the future, argue the researchers, who presented the studies’ findings on Monday in Chicago, at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.

“College presidents are willing to address the racist but rarely the racism,” says a paper summarizing one of the studies, based on a rhetorical analysis of presidents’ statements in response to bias incidents.

Bull Market

When the subprime crisis hit, Congress agreed to bailout the financial industry only after they were promised homeowners would see relief, too. But in the years since, it’s become clear even to Tim Geithner, the architect of the bailouts, that while the Administration went out of its way to save the arsonists of the crisis, the people burned by it were left without an Emergency Room.

Today, history risks repeating itself, as students scammed by a predatory for-profit school have yet to see meaningful relief — even as the school itself was bailed out by the government. And just as in the foreclosure crisis, the very entity in charge of providing relief to victimized borrowers has a financial incentive to leave them screwed.

Steve Denning:

There was considerable interest in the Wall Street Journal article by Peter Sims, author of Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries (Free Press, 2011) about the possibility of a “Montessori Mafia”, given that the Montessori approach has spawned a creative elite, including Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, videogame pioneer Will Wright, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, cook Julia Child and rapper Sean “P.Diddy” Combs.

The Montessori learning method establishes a collaborative environment without grades or tests, multi-aged classrooms, as well as self-directed learning and discovery for long blocks of time.

Montessori methods go against the grain of traditional educational methods but they have uncanny parallels in the success of their alumni:

Richard Atkinson & Saul Geiser:

AT first glance, the College Board’s revised SAT seems a radical departure from the test’s original focus on students’ general ability or aptitude. Set to debut a year from now, in the spring of 2016, the exam will require students to demonstrate in-depth knowledge of subjects they study in school.

The revised SAT takes some important, if partial, steps toward becoming a test of curriculum mastery. In place of the infamously tricky, puzzle-type items, the exam will be a more straightforward test of material that students encounter in the classroom. The essay, rather than rewarding sheer verbosity, will require students to provide evidence in support of their arguments and will be graded on both analysis and writing. Vocabulary will move away from the obscure language for which the SAT is noted, instead emphasizing words commonly used in college and the workplace.

Reddit:

The distance of Maltese and Arabic seems greatly overestimated. The distance between Italian and Maltese is certainly underestimated, and the lack of correlation with English is baffling considering that almost a third of words in every day speech of the Maltese are English loanwords (that are now fully incorporated into the language).

The lexical distance between Polish and Ukrainian seems overestimated, but then I am no expert so I cannot confirm this. Also as was mentioned in the previous thread, I find it very unusual that the correlation between West Slavic (Polish, Czech) and German languages was not explored, especially considering how many common words in these languages are of full German origin.

Jonathan Rees:

Now that it’s in Arizona State’s financial interest to accept as much MOOC credit as possible, all prior restraint will disappear. Indeed, now that the cat is out of the bag, look for more schools to become predator universities any day now.

What this means for you superprofessors is that your time to “experiment” is now over. Whether you like it or not, people will soon be giving credit for your MOOCs to the exclusion of courses taught by living, breathing faculty all around the world. I think this gives you two options:

a) Explain exactly why your video lectures and computer algorithms are pedagogically superior to actual human beings with PhDs. Or

b) Get out of the MOOC business altogether.

Molly Knefel:

When he was young, Cadeem Gibbs was really into school. Bright, curious, and naturally rebellious, he enjoyed arguing the opposing point of view in a classroom discussion just to see how well he could do it. “I was always academically inclined,” says the Harlem native, now 24. “I always wanted to learn.”

But there were plenty of stressors in his young life—a violent upbringing, a household in poverty—and the struggle to navigate them pulled him away from his education. He started getting into trouble and ended up in the juvenile justice system at the age of 12. That first contact with “the system” began a 10-year cycle of incarceration that ended only when Gibbs was released from an upstate New York prison two years ago, at the age of 22. He was just a sixth grader when first arrested, but he would never complete a school year as a free child again.

Americans believe that education is the great equalizer, the key that opens the door to a better future and lifts young people out of poverty. And this is true, to an extent—those who finish high school or college have lower unemployment rates and higher incomes than those who don’t. But while people who don’t complete their education are more likely to stay in poverty, they’re also more likely to come from poverty. In the 21st century, so-called reformers have emerged to prescribe everything from charter schools to iPads in order to boost poor students’ educational achievements.

Sarah Brown Weisling:

Dear Evan, Lauren, and Zachary,

Many (many) years ago, there was this little girl who spent her summer afternoons creating neighborhood schools for all of the children on her block. She mimicked what school looked like to her: rows of desks, questions and answers, praise and encouragement from the teacher, stickers and stars on the top of “assignments.” She imagined what it would be like to free an idea in someone else’s mind. She was crestfallen when the game of tag pulled her “students” away all too soon in the afternoon. She would wake up early and try to think about how to make learning fun.

What I want you to know is that there are things in this world that you will choose, and there are things in this world that will choose you. That little girl was meant to be a teacher. Although it would take her years to recognize it, that meant you would, by default, know the life of a teacher.

Sometimes I wonder how you feel about this. Sure, there are parts of it you love: hanging out in mom’s classroom, feeling like little celebrities when my students see you at the grocery store. But there’s also the Saturday afternoons I’ve spent grading papers when you’re outside playing, or the dry cereal in to-go bags some mornings when I’ve already been up for hours trying to finish responding to that stack of papers.

Victor Mair:

The first thing we may say about the names of the chemical elements in Chinese is that every single one of them is monosyllabic. This actually causes great problems for Chinese chemists and other scientists, as well as the lay public, since there are so many homophones and near-homophones among them and with other monosyllabic words not on the list. Listening to a lecture or holding discussions that mention chemical elements and hearing the elements referred to by these monosyllabic names is challenging, to say the least. They just don’t stand out the way, say, “chlorine” and “hydrogen” do.

The vast majority of the Chinese characters for the elements contain the “gold / metal” radical 金. Next in number are characters that contain the “gas / vapor” radical 气. After that comes a smaller group of characters containing the “stone / rock” radical 石. Last, there are two characters that contain the water radical 氵/ 水: xiù 溴 (“bromine”) and gǒng 汞 (“mercury”). In terms of the classification of the elements by state (solid, liquid, gas, unknown) and type (metals [alkali metals, alkaline earth metals, lanthanoids, actinoids, transition metals, post-transition metals], nonmetals [halogens, noble gases, other nonmentals]), and metalloids, the division (according to character radicals) into metal, gas, stone, and water is not accurate.

Only a few of the characters for the elements existed in premodern times (e.g., those for “silver”, “copper”, “iron”, “tin”, “gold”, “lead”, “mercury”, “carbon”, “boron”, and “sulfur”). Most of the characters for elements that were isolated during the Industrial Age or discovered more recently have had to be invented from scratch to transcribe the sound of the initial part of the name of the element in Western languages. These characters serve no other purpose than to designate the elements in question, and a number of them do not exist in electronic fonts. Unicode strives to add these newly created characters to the higher levels of its latest versions, but there is always naturally going to be a time lag between the creation of new characters and the time they are actually implemented in Unicode. In addition, as more and more new elements are being discovered, chemists in China, Taiwan, and elsewhere have not yet devised any character for several of them. And that brings up the matter of multiple characters for the same elements and multiple readings for the same characters in Taiwan and China (see the list below).

Issie Lapowsky:

On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can’t quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about.

Then there’s the guy who’s standing at the front of the conference room, the school’s founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he’s unlike any school administrator you’ve ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say.

And so, if you are truly fed up with the school status quo and have $20,875 to spare (it’s pricey, sure, but cheaper than the other private schools you’ve seen), you might decide to take a chance and sign your 7-year-old up for this little experiment in education called AltSchool. Except it’s not really so little anymore. And it’s about to get a lot bigger.

David Leonhardt, Amanda Cox & Claire Cain Miller:

In the wake of the Los Angeles riots more than 20 years ago, Congress created an anti-poverty experiment called Moving to Opportunity. It gave vouchers to help poor families move to better neighborhoods and awarded them on a random basis, so researchers could study the effects.

The results were deeply disappointing. Parents who received the vouchers did not seem to earn more in later years than otherwise similar adults, and children did not seem to do better in school. The program’s apparent failure has haunted social scientists and policy makers, making poverty seem all the more intractable.

Stephen Moore

The scenes of Baltimore set ablaze this week have many Americans thinking: What can be done to rescue families trapped in an inner-city culture of violence, despair and joblessness?

There are no easy answers, but down the road from Baltimore in Washington, D.C., an education program is giving children in poor neighborhoods a big lift up. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which George W. Bush signed into law in 2004, has so far funded private-school tuition for nearly 5,000 students, 95% of whom are African-American. They attend religious schools, music and arts schools, even elite college-prep schools. Last month at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, I met with about 20 parents and children who participate in the program. I also visited several of these families in their homes—which are located in some of the most beaten-down neighborhoods in the city, places that in many ways resemble the trouble spots in Baltimore.

Moises Naim:

Do you understand money? Let’s see how well you do with the following questions.

1. Suppose you had $100 in a savings account and the interest rate was 2 percent per year. After five years, how much do you think you would have in the account if you left the money to grow? A) more than $102; B) exactly $102; C) less than $102; D) do not know; refuse to answer.

2. Imagine that the interest rate on your savings account is 1 percent per year and inflation is 2 percent per year. After one year, would you be able to buy A) more than, B) exactly the same as, or C) less than today with the money in this account?; D) do not know; refuse to answer.

3. Do you think that the following statement is true or false? “Buying a single company stock usually provides a safer return than a stock mutual fund.” A) true; B) false; C) do not know; refuse to answer.

The correct answers are 1-A; 2-C; and 3-B.

Jo Craven McGinty:

Academic researchers have repeatedly tried to determine whether coaching improves SAT scores. It is a difficult question to answer objectively because of the confounding variables.

Highly motivated students—like those who sign up for test-prep courses—are likely to improve no matter what. Just taking the test again often raises scores. And it is hard to distinguish the effects of test prep from other factors that may contribute to a better score.

Still, different studies over the years have suggested coaching tends to improve performance, though perhaps less dramatically than some test-prep companies suggest as researchers have found some improvement was likely to occur without coaching.

“The mythology is that students who are scoring in the 500s will get into the 750 range,” said Derek Briggs, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Education who has studied the effects of test preparation. “A realistic bump from commercial test prep might be about 20 to 30 points on math and verbal sections combined, but that’s on top of whatever baseline increase we’d expect of students who do everything except get commercial test prep.”

Martin Wolf:

Bourguignon makes clear that this is a global concern. “After a significant decline in the mid-20th century, followed by a long period of stability, inequality has begun to rise over the last two or three decades in the large majority of developed countries.” he writes. “It has also risen in a number of developing countries for which we have long-term data. This phenomenon is therefore not isolated to a few cases, such as the oft-cited examples of the United States and China.”

Yet, while inequality in the distribution of incomes has risen in most high-income countries, the scale of that increase varies. Atkinson notes that the US and UK have experienced exceptionally large rises in inequality since 1980. Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, Japan and Germany have experienced far smaller rises. France has even experienced a small reduction. The forces driving the increase in inequality in the high-income countries are strong, but cannot be overwhelming. This conclusion is supported by the fact that levels of inequality are also divergent: relatively low in the Nordic countries, far higher in the UK and US, but also in Italy and Japan, with France and Germany in between.

Fast Company:

Want a prestigious education? Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are the way to go. But if you’re looking for a high-paying career after graduation, you may want to look elsewhere.

A new study from the the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program ranks two- and four-year colleges based on economic outcomes for graduates—and none of the Ivy League even makes it to the top 10 for the four-year institutions. This is the data that the U.S. News and World Report rankings won’t tell you.

Some of the major findings: Schools with high completion rates and good financial aid are linked to better economic outcomes. And schools with lots of students in STEM majors (like computer science and engineering), as well as majors with paths to higher paying careers in business and health care, also have superior financial payback.

Ross Douthat

In an irony typical of politics, then, the right’s intellectual critique of public-sector unions is illustrated by the ease with which police unions have bridled and ridden actual right-wing politicians. Which in turn has left those unions in a politically enviable position, insulated from any real pressure to reform.

Yet reform is what they need. There are many similarities between police officers and teachers: Both belong to professions filled with heroic and dedicated public servants, and both enjoy deep reservoirs of public sympathy as a result. But in both professions, unions have consistently exploited that sympathy to protect failed policies and incompetent personnel.

A focus on “adult employment“.

Chris Hayes:

But my students are excited every time we read about new things. They use the rich vocabulary they are hearing, and they have unbelievable discussions and heated debates on a daily basis. I hear questions like, “Mrs. Hayes, why was it called the Trail of Tears when pioneers died on the Oregon Trail, too?” to which one student named Andrew responds, “Because the pioneers chose to move west, but the Cherokee were forced to go.” This same Andrew, who reads just barely on a second grade level, chose to read further about the Civil War and showed me where he found examples of historical notices posted in Boston warning runaway slaves of slave-catchers in the area.

I have never seen such a spark in all of my 20 years as an educator in Washoe County. The students are excited about learning, are pushing themselves to read complex text, and are so proud of what they know. And they are hungry for more.

Rather interesting data from the District’s latest $413,703,424 2015-2016 budget document.

The budget document includes total spending and a good amount of detail.

Tap for a larger view.

Van Hise and Hamilton are Madison’s least diverse schools, yet the District plans to expand their facilities. The staffing differences are rather illuminating, particularly when one considers the effectiveness of increased adult counts…

A PDF version is also available. The District document includes a few per school spending data points. It would be useful to see total spending per school.

Brookings:

The choice of college is among the most important investment decisions individuals and families make, yet people know little about how institutions of higher learning compare along important dimensions of quality. This is especially true for colleges granting credentials of two years or less, which graduate two out of five postsecondary graduates. Moreover, popular rankings from U.S. News, Forbes, and Money focus only on a small fraction of four-year colleges and tend to reward highly selective institutions over those that may contribute the most to student success.

Drawing on government and private sources, this report analyzes college “value-added,” the difference between actual alumni outcomes (like salaries) and the outcomes one would expect given a student’s characteristics and the type of institution. Value-added captures the benefits that accrue from aspects of college quality we can measure, such as graduation rates and the market value of the skills a college teaches, as well as aspects we can’t.

The value-added measures introduced here improve on conventional rankings in several ways. They are available for a much larger number of schools; they focus on the factors that best predict measurable economic outcomes; and they attempt to isolate the effect colleges themselves have on those outcomes, above and beyond what students’ backgrounds would predict.

Jim Stingl:

The way they see it, Sebastian Flynn and his second-grade teacher Debbie Groth are connected forever.

Saving someone’s life will do that.

A routine morning this week in Mrs. Groth’s classroom at Pershing Elementary School in West Milwaukee turned terrifying when Sebastian choked on a cracker during snack time. He couldn’t speak or breathe. The boy’s friend, Danny, noticed this and alerted the teacher.

After calling the office about the emergency, she spoke to the 7-year-old and explained she would get behind him and try to dislodge the cracker with the Heimlich maneuver. It was something she learned years ago and never had to use during her 18 years as a teacher.

She made a fist and pulled in and up just below the boy’s rib cage. Nothing happened.

“I’m going, ‘Oh my gosh, Debbie, you have to save this kid. You have to save this kid.’ I did it a second time. Nothing.”

Sixteen other students in Room 206 nervously watched, and a few ran into the hallway to summon more help.

“I know you’ve only got seconds, all that time with the oxygen not going to his brain. So I’m freaking out, but they don’t know that because I’m just in the zone. It’s all the adrenaline,” Mrs. Groth said.

Finally, on the third thrust, the cracker popped out.

Alan Borsuk:

Recently, Pledl, who has the title of “school to life coordinator” at Grafton High, also has put a lot of that energy and enthusiasm into an idea that could lead to more kids with substantial disabilities statewide having opportunities for transitioning from school to positive situations in life, particularly involving work.

In the enormous and complex work of creating a state budget for the next two years, the plan Pledl has been supporting is a relatively small matter. It’s a good example of the many programs and proposals that usually attract little, if any, attention, but which could have impact on people’s lives.

The budget process will move into a crucial stage in the next several days with the release of updated forecasts for state revenue. What gets put into and left out, what gets changed from Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal of three months ago, and who wins and loses in the end will be affected by how much money is forecast to be available. Indications last week were that the new estimate is not going to offer the rosy increases all sorts of people have been hoping for.

Where will that leave increased support for the idea Pledl is promoting?

Pledl has already accomplished a lot more than I would have bet. He’s been a car salesman and, yes, a football coach and he’s good at winning people over. As Mel Lightner, superintendent of the Grafton School District says, a lot of educators are not good sales people for ideas that open doors for their students. But as for Pledl, Lightner says, “He’s a salesman.” And he really wants to open doors for his students.

Nate Silver:

When I was a freshman at the University of Chicago in 1996, I heard the same thing again and again: Do not leave the boundaries of Hyde Park. Do not go north of 47th Street. Do not go south of 61st Street. Do not go west of Cottage Grove Avenue. 1

These boundaries were fairly explicit, almost to the point of being an official university policy. The campus police department was not committed to protecting students beyond the area,2 and the campus safety brochure advised students not to use the “El” train stops just a couple of blocks beyond them unless “traveling in groups and during the daytime.”

What usually wasn’t said — on a campus that brags about the diversity of its urban setting but where only about 5 percent of students are black — was that the neighborhoods beyond these boundaries were overwhelmingly black and poor. The U. of C. has, for many decades, treated Hyde Park as its “fortress on the South Side,” and its legacy of trying to keep its students within the neighborhood — and the black residents of surrounding communities out — has left its mark on Chicago.

Related: the expansion of Madison’s least diverse schools, despite long term disastrous reading results and the rejection of the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school.

Stacey Patton:

When that happens, one thing becomes clear: Their feelings about the quality of their work often don’t match the reality of their performance. Instead of seeing their grades as a reflection of how well they interpreted or executed their assignments, some students will come to a different conclusion: The assignment was too difficult. Or my professor doesn’t get me.

For many professors—especially faculty without tenure or the job security that comes with it—this poses a problem. Pleas to re-evaluate work can draw professors into annoying confrontations—or force them to explain the mechanics of grading to students, and sometimes angry parents, department chairs, or deans.

So I decided to ask a few professors, a learning consultant, and a graduate student how they would respond to these requests. Let’s say a student who received a C grade on a paper asks you to reread it and change their grade because they “worked so hard on it.” How would you respond?

Rick Reider:

4 reasons college costs & student debt are a major headwind to U.S. recovery

1 Contributing to unemployment and declining labor market participation

Due to the heavy financial burden college costs place on parents, many parents struggling to pay for their children’s education are left with less savings and more debt when they hit retirement age than they might otherwise have had. As a result, they’re forced to stay in the workforce longer, crowding out younger workers and making it harder for the younger generation to find jobs. In other words, the rising cost of college is one reason for the demographic-related headwinds facing the labor market today.

2 Stymieing savings

By some estimates, more than half of college students now borrow annually to cover the costs of education, and more than half of student loan borrowers still have outstanding debt balances into their 30s. This early-life debt means that the younger generation has less money to save–significant student debt lowers the average savings rate for young workers–and will likely have to work longer to cover future children’s college costs.

3 Suppressing home buying

Today, the first-time home buyer demographic is synonymous with student loan borrowers, posing a major headwind to recoveries in the lackluster housing market and in real estate-related employment. Thanks to high-interest student loan debt payments, along with disappointing employment opportunities and stagnant incomes, many young adults don’t have the savings required to make a down payment. Indeed, the proliferation of student loans in the early 2000s coincides with a decline in home ownership rates of 25 to 34 year olds, and the trend appears to be continuing. According to one recent report, rising student debt burdens reduced U.S. home sales by about 8% in 2014.

4 Worsening the class divide

Beijinger:

Three students from one of Beijing’s major international schools have been detained by police in an ongoing drug investigation over the past week, our sister magazine beijingkids has learned. In total eight students from the school were questioned, and five released.

According to an official school announcement sent to school parents Monday, four students, three seniors and one junior, were detained late Friday night at a private residence in the Beijing Riviera villa compound for alleged involvement with marijuana.

One teenager from the Friday night raid has been released while the remaining three are still in police custody. A videotape of the raid appeared on BTV and shows the police entering the residence to discover the four teens in the dark and their parents upstairs.

Sara Yu

On Thursday President Obama announced a plan to make $250 million worth of e-books available to public libraries as part of an effort to expand literacy and “digital connectivity” among low-income students. He spoke to Washington, D.C., students about his personal fondness for print books but stressed the importance of keeping up with technological advances.

Parents often ask me if it’s okay for their children to read on an iPad, Kindle, or other type of e-reader. New opinion polls and studies about e-reading come out every few months, and it seems like everyone has an opinion about this relatively new technology.
There are lots of reasons why e-books are more convenient than print books – weight, storage space, instant accessibility – but I’m going to lay aside those practical concerns for now and focus on what’s best for kids. And I’m going to be completely forthright here: This is new technology, and we’re still figuring it out. As we learn more about how kids read, we’ll adjust our teaching practice to make sure we’re meeting kids’ needs.

Notes and charts from the Districts’ most recent 2015-2016 budget document (5MB PDF):

Our 25,364 students are served by 4,076 Teachers & Staff (6.22 students per District employee).

Salaries and Wages
For 2015-16, MMSD has collective bargaining agreements in place with its represented employee groups, including teachers, aides, clerical, and custodial staff. The teachers’ collective bargaining agreement is based on a traditional salary schedule, including compensation components for additional years of service (step movement) and additional professional development (lane movement). In addition,

the Board approved an increase of 0.25% per cell for all teachers (cell increase). Together, the additional compensation for step movement and cell increases provides an average increase of 1.75% to employees, plus a reserve for lane changes of $400,000, for a combined budgetary impact of $4.5 million on district salaries. This budget proposal includes funding for these wage and salary commitments. MMSD’s other employee groups will experience similar increases in compensation.
Health Insurance

MMSD offers an attractive employee benefits plan to its employees. The district spends over $61 million per year on health insurance premiums, which is approximately 15% of the total district budget. Each year, the risk of rising health care costs creates significant budget uncertainty for the district: each one percent increase in health insurance rates costs MMSD about $610,000. The implementation of the Affordable Care Act brings additional fees and responsibilities for employers, including the requirement to offer affordable and valuable coverage to all employees who work 30 or more hours per week, starting July 1, 2015. Although the exact impact of this requirement is not yet known, MMSD could be required to provide coverage to approximately 120 employees not currently eligible for health insurance benefits.
The district contracts for health insurance with three Madison area HMOs. Group Health Cooperative (GHC) has covers approximately 60% of MMSD employees, while Dean and Unity each cover approximately 20%. Negotiations are continuing for July 1, 2015 rate renewals. The district, in collaboration with employee representatives, are working to minimize the budget impact for 2015-16. An update on the current status of health insurance rate renewals will be presented to the Board in May.

This year, MMSD launched its employee wellness program, which was developed with the input of the employee unions. A team representing a broad spectrum of employees has been selected to design the program activities and support district wellness. In addition, employees are asked to sign up for biometric screenings and health risk assessments, which will provide information that can be used to develop programs that meet the needs of MMSD employees and help curb long-term health care cost increases.

Mitch Henck Comments on Madison’s Spending and Tax Practices:

16 News:

Dear Parents, it is very important that all students have a nutritious lunch. This is a public school setting and all children are required to have a fruit, a vegetable and a healthy snack from home, along with a milk. If they have potatoes, the child will also need bread to go along with it. Lunchables, chips, fruit snacks, and peanut butter are not considered to be a healthy snack. This is a very important part of our program and we need everyone’s participation.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter, via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):

It is important for all to review the District’s social media policy before using electronic media to interact with families, students, colleagues and/or the general public. The District policy permits communication with parents and students via District-sanctioned electronic media and accounts, and cautions against interacting on your personal social media accounts or cell phones. Comments you make on Facebook, Twitter or other social media accounts that can be tracked to your work as a teacher or educational support staff can become problematic if they reflect poorly on the District or use unauthorized copies of students’ work, pictures or comments.

The policy contains the following phrase: Be advised that failure to adhere to these guidelines may result in disciplinary action. MTI strongly encourages members to review the policy and contact MTI with any questions or concerns.

www.madison.k12.wi.us/social-media-guidelines

Emma Brown:

New teachers are far less likely to leave the profession than previously thought, according to federal data released Thursday.

Ten percent of teachers who began their careers in 2007-2008 left teaching after their first year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But attrition then leveled off, and five years into their careers, 83 percent were still teaching.

That figure — indicating that just 17 percent of new teachers left their jobs in the first five years — stands in stark contrast to the attrition statistic that has been repeated (and lamented) for years: That between 40 percent and 50 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years.

The higher estimate, which has become a fixture in education debates, comes from the work of Richard Ingersoll, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading scholar on the nation’s teacher workforce.

Amir:

Homeschooling is interesting because, if some new approach is going to disrupt the current education system and change it radically for the better, it seems likely it would come from outside the system.

By necessity, parents who homeschool must try new approaches in order to find something that works for their child. With 1.77M homeschooled students in the US – 3.4% of the school-aged population – this is the community where experimentation / iteration amongst educational approaches is happening the fastest. As a result the future of education is likely to come out of this community.

Yet it is an overlooked community. For various reasons, the mainstream regard homeschooling as a niche approach suitable only for the weird or the wealthy. That’s a prejudice that doesn’t reflect the reality of the growing movement I’ve observed in the Bay Area.

Donna Frake:

After announcing it had reached an impasse in negotiations with the Oconomowoc Education Association, the Oconomowoc Area School District School Board approved a new contract for teachers for the 2015-16 school year.

The new compensation model approved in January this year, sets pay ranges, or bands, at five levels, each with more requirements for leadership, school and districtwide involvement and education, as well as a corresponding higher pay range.

According to the school district, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) currently in effect for base wage bargaining is 1.62 percent. In order to transition into the new compensation model, rather than cap the proposal at that rate, the district offered a 3.1 percent increase in the form of discretionary pay.

This offer allows all educators to receive a pay increase for 2015-16 in one of three methods, depending upon how each educator’s 2014-15 salary compares to the placement band salary range.

LILLIAN MONGEAU, EMMANUEL FELTON and SARAH BUTRYMOWICZ

Of the 21 states that plan to use the tests as part of teacher evaluations in the future, many have already specified that the score will count for only a percentage of the evaluation. For example, Wyoming plans to use test scores as 20 percent of teacher evaluations starting in 2020.

Related: Will test-based teacher evaluations derail Common Core?
Minnich, who describes himself as part of the “moderate middle” on testing and Common Core, said that the important message for students was that while the tests are important for adults to know how a class is doing, there’s no need to stress about the results. He admitted that the task of finding the right balance in delivering that message is not easy.

As for teachers, Minnich hopes that they can continue to be part of an ongoing conversation about the best way to use measures of student learning in evaluations. He said his members – the country’s state superintendents – were more or in agreement on the benefit of using scores as one of several teacher performance measures.
All of which is to say, yes, the tests are important. Decisions will be made based on how students perform on them. But the vast majority of states will use the scores only as one measure in a web of other factors when making staffing decisions. And most states have no plans to use the scores to make student advancement decisions.

Anica John:

I’m seven months along with my first child and feeling inundated with information and advice on baby products.

It’s no wonder, because registering for a baby shower can be daunting. I found myself stunned by the sheer volume of strollers and car seats (which, when put together are billed as “travel systems”), cribs and hundreds of other baby products.

Alongside these staples, I’m evaluating a new wave of devices that can now gather important health and wellness data about your baby.

Nick Gillespie:

Abetted by idiot administrators, today’s students seem incapable of living in the real world.

Every time we seem to have reached peak insanity when it comes to the intellectually constipated and socially stultifying atmosphere on today’s college campuses, some new story manages to reveal vast new and untapped reservoirs of ridiculousness. In a world of trigger warnings, microaggressions, and official apologies featuring misgendered pronouns that start a whole new round of accusations, wonders never cease.

So when ’60s-radical-turned-Reagan-fanboy David Horowitz shows up at University of North Carolina to equate Islam with terrorism for the thousandth time, the student body gets the vapors, tries to shut him down, and creates the hashtag #notsafeUNC.

When a student publication prints a story called “So You Want to Date a Teaching Assistant?” in a special satirical issue, the whole run gets pulped.

When Laura Kipnis, a feminist professor at Northwestern, publishes an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education extolling her experiences sleeping with professors while a student, two current undergrads lodge complaints with the university’s Title IX office.

Thomas Hale:

The £40m bond, which was launched this week by University College, Oxford and matures in 50 years, carries a coupon of 3.1 per cent.

The debt, which was pre-placed on the London Stock Exchange, is lower yielding than any bond issued by a UK university on record, according to Dealogic.

University College’s bond is a sign that a wider range of issuers — from the boardrooms of multinational corporations to the spires of august educational institutes — are increasingly aware of the opportunity to lock in long-term credit at historically low rates.

Marcus du Sautoy:

The Labour party has made a commitment to ensure that every young person studies mathematics up to the age of 18. Of course, the people it will affect don’t have the vote – although if it was up to Labour they would: to give 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote is one of their other promises. But what about all those people who do have the vote? Would they have appreciated the chance to carry on their mathematical education, or were they only too happy to give it up as soon as they could?

Labour plans for maths until 18 ‘best protection’ against unemployment

The majority reaction is probably “let me give it up” – but changing that attitude is partly what this initiative is all about. Certainly not everyone is maths averse. Many employers are crying out for a more mathematically and scientifically literate workforce: 60% of UK companies are not confident they will have employees with the mathematical skills to meet the needs of an increasingly scientific future. As a country we are so short of engineers that we are barely able to fill half the engineering jobs that our technical age demands.

Philip Stafford:

For many traders and investors, using Twitter has become as much a daily part of their routine as watching a Bloomberg terminal or Reuters screen.

Although some banks ban access to the social media site, many financial professionals rely on it for everything from inside jokes and sarcasm to breaking news and distribution of serious research.

Discussions around particular Russell 1000 securities on Twitter have grown from several hundred thousand messages per quarter in 2011 to several million in early 2014, according to Gnip, a US company that provides social media data to hedge funds. It was bought by Twitter last year.