Credentialism: K-12 Teacher Licensing

Molly Beck:

The motion also adds a proposal allowing teachers or school administrators who have licenses from other states and have taught or worked for at least one year in that state to receive Wisconsin licenses. Administrators must have been offered a job in Wisconsin before they can apply for a license, the proposal says.

Officials with the state Department of Public Instruction, which blasted the licensing proposals when they were introduced this spring, said they were pleased to see the two most controversial provisions removed from the budget. DPI spokesman John Johnson said better pay and benefits, not lower licensing standards, will attract teachers to rural schools.

But Johnson also said the agency did not support the changes to licensing for technical education and out-of-state teachers — measures he said would mean lawmakers were lowering teaching standards for the third legislative session in a row.

When a stands for average.

China’s college students embrace stock trading, thanks to money from mom and dad

Zheping Huang:

While many of his peers get their sense of achievement from online video games, Li Shengyao, a 21-year-old sophomore at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, gets it from playing the stock market. He describes himself as a short-term trader who “can’t stop my fingers from making orders.”

Li spends at least three hours every night dissecting day-trading activity and company disclosures to prepare for the next morning. “When everyone else is losing like a dog,” he said. “I’m still making money.”

One thing Li is not: an outlier. In China, it’s surprisingly common for college students to be active traders on the nation’s volatile stock markets, often with their parents’ money and consent, and sometimes at the expense of their studies.

Healthcare Costs & The Madison School District

Pat Schneider:

“I will consider contributions to health care, depending on what we see in terms of costs and the budget,” Burke said. “But we need to look at compensation in its entirety to make sure we remain competitive while we are accountable to the taxpayers.”

The school district is in the process of preparing to hire a consultant to conduct a study of employee compensation, she said.

Representatives of Madison Teachers Inc. say the fully paid health care premiums are a benefit bought with concessions on salary increases over the years.

That’s exactly why it’s so important to look at the district’s compensation as a whole, Burke said.

“We want to make sure the school district is a place that can attract quality people. That’s why the survey will not only compare us to other school districts, but also to other professions,” she said.

The Madison Metropolitan School District’s three major health insurance providers — Group Health Cooperative, Dean Health Plan and Unity Health Insurance — each agreed to hold the line on premiums next year. That helped the school district hold the line on a major expense — more than $61 million annually — in a budget round that saw operating expenses up nearly 11 percent as state aid dropped.

Madison’s 2015-2016 budget and its long term disastrous reading results, here. Note that Madison has long spent more than double the national average per student.

STEM & Girls

Kate Russell:

It is a sad fact of life today that while women make up around 46% of the UK workforce, they are extremely poorly represented in the STEM professions – in other words science, technology, engineering and mathematics. According to recent Government figures, if you exclude medical professions just 15.5% of UK STEM jobs are filled by women, and that figure drops to 8% when you look at engineering jobs.

Despite the gender imbalance being a mainstream topic of debate the situation doesn’t seem to be improving. According to 2014 e-skills, the number of women working in the tech sector has fallen from 17% to 16% again this year – and that is a figure that’s been falling year on year for over a decade now. When you consider that UK businesses face an ever growing skills gap when it comes to recruiting digitally skilled workers, it seems a no brainer that we should try to boost the number of girls enterting the field.

How Parents Make High-Achieving Kids Miserable

Conor Fiedersdorf:

When William Deresiewicz published “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” his critique struck such a chord that he turned it into a book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.

On Tuesday, New York Times columnist David Brooks––who teaches high achieving kids at Yale––read a passage from that book to an Aspen Ideas Festival audience. It was filled with people whose kids or grandkids attend elite colleges or universities.

The passage:

What do you owe your parents?

Rare Book School

Andy Wright:

When summer rolls around, thoughts turn to how to spend the limpid months: Umbrella drinks by the pool? Backpacking through pristine wilderness? A digital detox?
But if you’re a certain kind of person, your dream destination might be Rare Book School in Charlottesville for a week of courses that include “Book Illustration Processes to 1900” or “The Handwriting & Culture of Early Modern English Manuscripts.” Rare book fanatics study not only the words on the page but also the way books were made in order to unlock a deeper cultural understanding of text. And while there are similar programs around the world, Rare Book School offers something they do not: A permanent space and a teaching collection of 80,000 items from books bound in supple goat leather to old Macintosh computers.

Why Taiwan is right to ban iPads for kids

Jake Wallis Simons:

Parents who fail to comply with the new “Child and Youth Welfare Protection Act” — or rather, fail to enforce it upon their children — may be fined 50,000 Taiwan dollars ($1,576).

Now, as much as I dislike the excesses of bloated, interfering governments, I couldn’t help but emit a yelp of joy when I read of these developments in Taiwan (which follow similar measures in China and South Korea).

Of course, there are obvious difficulties with the legislation. For a start, it fails to define a “reasonable” length of time, leaving its application open to interpretation and abuse.

A Dutch city is giving money away to test the “basic income” theory

Maria Sanchez Diez:

Some people in the Dutch city of Utrecht might soon get a windfall of extra cash, as part of a daring new experiment with the idea of “basic income.”

Basic income is an unconditional and regular payment meant to provide enough money to cover a person’s basic living cost. In January of 2016, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands and its partner, the University of Utrecht, will create several different regimes for its welfare recipients and test them.

A place for humanities in the global economy

Walt Gardner:

Faced with the demands of the new global economy, Japan and the United States have reached the conclusion that the humanities have little value in higher education. That’s a mistake they will regret in the years ahead.

The humanities have never been intended as training for a specific vocation. Instead, the study of languages, literature, the arts, history, philosophy and religion exists to provide students with the critical thinking skills needed for personal growth and participation in a democratic society.

Are our suburban heads in the sand?

Erika Sanzi:

Parents prefer relationships to data. Most of us enjoy people more than numbers and like parent teacher conferences better than bar graphs. We take comfort in knowing that our kids are being educated in a safe space and worry very little about the high school profile or SAT participation rate in our town.

It’s human nature to listen to our hearts instead of our heads and it’s normal to be driven by connections we feel to teachers and coaches and school leaders to whom we entrust our children every day.

Hard truths however are better learned early than too late. Parents in my little state of Rhode Island deserve to know how their kids match up educationally against kids from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and even Maryland. Is the education they’re receiving as good as it feels like it is or are there systemic and measurable deficiencies that parents need to acknowledge?

And will those deficiencies impact the future that they have already envisioned and perhaps even planned for their children?

For example, many parents do not realize that their child’s high school profile has a significant impact on how college admissions officers view their application. And unfortunately for top tier students especially, their applications are looked at less favorably because of what other kids in their class are or are not doing.

Related: where have all the students gone?

Cruel And All To Usual

Dana Liebelsoh:

When the video above was filmed, the girl on the bed was 17 years old. For the purposes of this story, I’ll call her Jamie. There was a time when she liked acting in goofy comedy skits at her Detroit church or crawling into bed with her grandmother to watch TV. She loved to sing—her favorite artist was Chris Brown—but she was too shy to perform in front of other people.

Jamie, whose mother was addicted to crack cocaine, was adopted when she was 3. At high school, she fell in with a wayward crowd and started drinking and smoking weed. Since she didn’t always get along with her adoptive mom, she lived with a close family friend from her church whom she referred to as her sister. One fall day in 2011, they got into a bad fight over their living arrangements. The friend told police that Jamie threw a brick at her, hitting her in the chest, and then banged the brick so hard on the front door that she broke the glass mail chute. Jamie denies the assault—and the police report notes that the brick may not have hit her friend—but she admitted to officers that she was “mad” and “trying to get back in the house.” The Wayne County court gave her two concurrent six-month sentences, for assault and destruction of a building.

It’s a mess: graduate schools are failing to prepare students for jobs

Leonard Cassuto:

Arthur Levine, the head of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, has been a vituperative critic of teacher education programs for years. His recent announcement that he’s partnering with MIT to start a new teacher education graduate degree program has brought new attention to these teacher training programs – and to teacher training generally.

Levine’s indictment of education school teaching has legs. The teaching of teachers is in a serious disarray. Requirements and standards for the master’s degree in education, the recognized certification credential for US public school teaching, vary wildly from university to university. And the effects of such variations ripple through the entire K-12 education system.

There is no doubt that education schools have faced some special difficulties. The number of master’s degrees in education awarded in the US has more than doubled since 1990. This increase has brought more attention to the problems with these degrees.

But these concerns should also draw our attention to a larger problem with the teaching in graduate schools in general.

Campbell Brown to Launch Non-Profit Education News Site That Won’t Shy From Advocacy

Campbell Brown:

Former CNN host Campbell Brown went from a career in journalism to a second life as an education-reform advocate. Now she is looking to combine the two.

Next month, Ms. Brown will be launching a non-profit, education-focused news site called The Seventy Four, which she says refers to the 74 million school-age children in classrooms across the U.S.

“There are a lot of entrenched interests that are standing in the way of some the best possibilities for innovation” in education, she said in an interview at the offices of her nascent site in Lower Manhattan. “We want to challenge and scrutinize the powers that be.”

But the creation of the site is likely to stir controversy. Since turning to advocacy in the years after she left CNN in 2010, Ms. Brown became a lightning rod for criticism from the teachers’ union and its supporters who have seen her efforts – most notably a push to reform tenure rules in New York – as part of a thinly-veiled campaign aimed at union busting.

Ms. Brown has denied wanting to destroy the union, and says she just wants to reform a system she says fails to adequately serve children. She says the site will be non-partisan but won’t shy away from advocacy.

Feds Probe Debt Collector Targeting Student Lenders

Daniel Wagner:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is investigating whether some collection agencies are involved in lawsuits against student loan borrowers even when the companies can’t prove their legal right to collect on the loans, according to agency documents and people familiar with the investigation. The CFPB is weighing “whether Bureau action is warranted” against the collectors, documents say.

If investigators can prove wrongdoing, thousands of low-income borrowers could be spared years of wage garnishment that would place them at greater risk for financial hardship, including bankruptcy.
The lawsuits mirror illegal practices by mortgage companies seeking to foreclose after the 2008 financial crisis. Banks have paid billions to settle charges related to “robo-signing” — the practice of swearing falsely that a person has direct knowledge about a loan and the chain of companies that owned it. The people claiming to have that knowledge turned out to be signing hundreds of affidavits a day, often without reviewing the underlying loan files.

In Regents We Trust? How Autonomy Put Tenure on the Chopping Block

Lenora Hanson & Elsa Noterman:

National attention has turned to Wisconsin yet again due to a Republican-led charge to eliminate longstanding and historically progressive state protections for employees. Last week, the Joint Finance Committee (JFC), a subcommittee of the Legislature, approved an omnibus motion that not only cuts the university budget by $250 million but also removes tenure protections for faculty from state statutes. The tenure item has led many around the country to conclude that Wisconsin is a conservative testing ground for ALEC-styled initiatives, while media representation would seem to suggest that there has been an active, political response to it. For instance, headlines last week read, “Wisconsin faculty incensed by motion to eliminate tenure,” “Faculty members protest tenure, shared governance changes,” and “Outraged UW-Madison faculty call for full court press on tenure.” (The titles of the first two pieces, written by Colleen Flaherty for Inside Higher Ed, have recently been changed to remove any mention of faculty response. They are now entitled “Trying to Kill Tenure” and “Losing Hope in Wisconsin.”)

But these titles are misleading, as we will outline here, for numerous reasons – and importantly for strategic reasons. Early on in February when the Biennial Budget first announced the potential magnitude of the cuts, there was widespread agreement among university administration and many faculty and students that protest and political action would only worsen the situation. Despite the ongoing attacks on the university system by the state legislature – and the seeming complicity of the UW System President, Ray Cross – many faculty and students continue to trust the Board of Regents (BOR), UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank, and Cross to diplomatically defend student and faculty interests against the conservative agenda set by the Legislature. By and large, faculty, students and others decided that political action would only ensure the passage of the $300 million cuts proposed in the 2015-17 Budget. Despite the fact that sixteen of the eighteen members of the Board of Regents are Governor Walker appointees, there was a hopeful assumption on the part of faculty that the Board would push back against the recent Joint Finance Committee’s motion – especially item #39 which alters the tenure system by moving tenure protections from state statutes to the Board of Regents.

Non-Public Revenue in Public Charter and Traditional Public Schools

Meagan Batdorff, Albert Cheng, Larry Maloney, Jay F. May & Patrick J. Wolf:

Public education funding relies on revenues from a variety of sources, from local taxpayers to federal programs targeting students with specific needs. The vast sum of funding collected—in excess of $600 billion annually— often masks which entities fund the education of our nation’s youth. Questions of funding adequacy and equity across school sectors, school districts and individual schools are prominent in discussions of how to improve educational outcomes, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. A year ago, our research team published the third in a series of national studies that uncovered a general lack of equity in the funding of the public charter school sector compared to the traditional public school (TPS) sector (Batdorff et al. 2014; Batdorff et al. 2010; Thomas B. Fordham Institute 2005). We found major discrepancies in the funding of all public schools, including traditional and charter. Nationally in academic year 2010-11, charter schools received a total of $3,814 less in per-pupil revenues from all sources than did TPS—a funding gap of 28.4% that has grown larger over time (Batdorff et al. 2014).
The funding of K-12 education comes from local, state and federal public sources, but TPS and public charter schools also generate funding from private and philanthropic sources (see Table 2 below). In the majority of cases, TPS received slightly more revenue ($571 per pupil) from non-public sources than did public charter schools ($552 per pupil). Based on our 2014 national study, non-public revenue in general does not allow the public charter school sector to close the revenue gap with traditional public schools. In fact, it makes the gap larger (Batdorff et al. 2014).

Teachers call for better professional development: report

Meg Anderson:

Over half of CPS teachers surveyed for a small-scale study by an education policy group said they do not regularly use strategies learned in professional development provided by the district.

In addition, nine out of 10 said have rarely or never used the district’s online professional development tool, Learning Hub.

The study of 220 teachers by the group Educators 4 Excellence reinforced long-standing complaints by many teachers that the district’s ongoing training for them is ineffective. The report highlighted ineffective practices and offered recommendations for improvement.

E4E listed four main problems with PD: inconsistent quality across the district; a disconnect between PD and the district’s teacher evaluation system, which is supposed to point teachers toward areas where they can improve; a lack of communication about what PD is provided; and few avenues for teachers to give feedback on PD they have received.

“I definitely see that in a district of 22,000 teachers, it’s hard to feel a personal connection,” says Laura Ferdinandt, CPS Manager of Teacher Leadership and Professional Development, after hearing the results. “We’ve got the foundations built. It’s just a matter of communicating.”

Tenure at UW System now seen as bellwether by educators across U.S.

Karen Herzog:

Last week, two conservative educators — both University of Wisconsin-Madison professors — echoed much of what many of their liberal-leaning colleagues have been saying for weeks, albeit with a twist.

Changing tenure rules would put their viewpoints at risk, too, Donald Downs and John Sharpless wrote in a Politico piece.

“As far as college campuses go, we’re a rare, endangered species: two long-tenured professors who lean right and libertarian,” the political science professor and history professor, respectively, wrote. “But we’re increasingly worried that in trying to take up another conservative crusade, our governor, Scott Walker, is going to silence the very voices he claims to support.”

Without strong tenure protections, they wrote, “professors like us who fight for free speech and liberty — values Walker himself espouses — could be even more at risk of being targeted on college campuses for our beliefs.”

Sharpless was a Republican candidate for Congress in a tight race with Democrat Tammy Baldwin in 2000; Downs served on his campaign strategy and finance committees. Both were leaders of the free speech/academic freedom movement at UW-Madison in the 1990s, when conservative and liberal professors with tenure protection stood together against speech codes that were perceived as censorship.

The second assumption in the national debate is that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — a certain presidential candidate in 2016 — is the behind-the-scenes architect of the provisions in the GOP plan put forward by the Legislature’s budget-writing Joint Finance Committee on May 29.

It’s unclear what role the governor played, if any, in the layoff language that faculty are most upset about. Walker has been noticeably silent on the matter.

The Frenzy About High-Tech Talent

Andrew Hacker:

Pronouncements like the following have become common currency: “The United States is falling behind in a global ‘race for talent’ that will determine the country’s future prosperity, power, and security.” In Falling Behind?, Michael Teitelbaum argues that alarms like this one, which he quotes, are not only overblown but are often sounded by people who do not disclose their motives. Teitelbaum vehemently denies that we are lagging in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, now commonly abbreviated as STEM. Still, he writes that there are facts to be faced:

In less than 15 years, China has moved from 14th place to second place in published research articles.

General Electric has now located the majority of its R&D personnel outside the United States.

Only four of the top ten companies receiving United States patents last year were United States companies.

The United States ranks 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering.