Shirley Wang:

Why do boys get diagnosed with autism four times as often as girls?
New research, including some of the latest data from the International Society for Autism Research annual conference last week, addresses this question, one of the biggest mysteries in this field. A growing consensus is arguing that sex differences exist in genetic susceptibility, brain development and social learning in autism–and they are meaningful to our understanding of the disorder and how it will be treated.
Yale University researchers presented results showing that being female appears to provide genetic protection against autism. Meanwhile, scientists at Emory University showed in preliminary work that boys and girls with autism learn social information differently, which leads to divergent success in interactions with other people.

Laura Waters:

“A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform” just had its 30th birthday, so it seems appropriate to pay our respects. After all, this report, issued by the Reagan Administration’s National Commission on Excellence in Education, continues to inform current educational debates and is just as relevant now as it was a generation ago.
To give you a taste of the document, here’s a line from the introduction: “If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
Not much nuance there, but a lot of clout. Over the last 30 years Americans have gradually accepted the premise of “A Nation at Risk” and many agree that our system of public education needs to be reformed. That’s a huge change in perception, especially for a system so resistant to change: remember, schools in America still follow an agrarian calendar and most classrooms look no different than school houses in the 19th century, 25 kids or so with a teacher in the front, modeled after schools that Horace Mann saw in Prussia in 1843.

Laurie Rogers:

I was asked recently to articulate to a legislator my thoughts and concerns about public education funding and accountability. Ah, so much to say … about funding; accountability, the Common Core initiatives, and the McCleary Decision on education funding.
Legislators love to give more of our tax dollars to K-12 education, but they aren’t good at pursuing accountability or transparency from administrators and school boards. That’s partly because they listen too much to the Edu Mob, and not enough to We, the People.
What legislators hear from the Edu Mob is usually contrary to what actually needs to be done for the children, so we advocates have little hope of ever nailing down solutions. After six+ years of advocacy, I’m profoundly tired of hearing legislators state, year after year, “Education needs more money!”
FUNDING:
Question #1: What basis do legislators have for saying that K-12 education is underfunded, or that funding has been cut, or that more money will produce a better education system?

Great and timely. Listen to or read an interview with Laurie Rogers, here.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students–in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all–opened their books and turned on their computers.
For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University-Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer–and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing earbuds.
Although the students had been told at the outset that they should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.

Edward Frenkel & Hung-Hsi Wu:

The Common Core State Standards are a set of rigorous academic standards in mathematics and English language arts. They are the culmination of a meticulous, 20-year process initiated by the states and involving teachers, educators, business leaders and policy makers from across the country and both sides of the aisle.
The standards form a foundation for a high-quality education, have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia, and are slated for full implementation in 2014.
Unfortunately, the Republican National Committee recently adopted a resolution rejecting the Core Standards, calling them a “nationwide straitjacket on academic freedom and achievement.” This resolution and efforts under way to repeal the Core Standards in several states are misguided and have to be resisted.
Mathematical education in the U.S. is in deep crisis. The World Economic Forum ranks the quality of math and science education in the U.S. a dismal 48th. This is one of the reasons the 2010 report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” by the National Academies warned that America’s ability to compete effectively with other nations is fading.

Greg Duncan and Katherine Magnuson:

Programs beginning before 1980 produced significantly larger effect sizes (.33 standard deviations) than those that began later (.16 standard deviations). Declining effect sizes over time are disappointing, as we might hope that lessons from prior evaluations and advances in the science of child development would have led to an increase in program effects over time. However, the likely reason for the decline is that counterfactual conditions for children in the control groups in these studies have improved substantially. We have already seen in Figure 1 how much more likely low-income children are to be attending some form of center-based care now relative to 40 years ago. This matters because, though center-based care programs have varying degrees of educational focus, most research suggests that center-based care is associated with better cognitive and achievement outcomes for preschool age children (NICHD Early Childcare Research Network and Duncan 2003).
Even more impressive are gains in the likely quality of the home environment provided by low-income mothers, as indexed by their completed schooling. In 1970, some 71 percent of preschool age children in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution had mothers who lacked a high school degree, while only 5 percent of the mothers had attended at least some postsecondary schooling…

Peter Bazalgette:

When people who fundamentally agree purport to disagree, you have a non-debate. This was the upshot a few days ago when Maria Miller, secretary of state for culture, sensibly asked the arts sector to help her make the economic case for arts funding.
Everyone agrees the arts are not a commodity; you can’t reduce it all to money; pure instrumentalism is the enemy of creativity. Indeed, John Maynard Keynes – the economist instrumental in setting up the Arts Council – spoke of “enjoyment” and “serious and fine entertainment”. He did not refer to endogenous growth theory. So, to be clear, no one disputes that we invest in the arts to fire our imaginations, stimulate our culture and assure our quality of life. But there is an economic benefit, too.
Had Keynes been discussing what we can afford in a time of austerity, I am confident he would have pointed to the benefits of our world-class arts and culture, including the way they regenerate our communities and plant our flag on the world stage. And I am sure he would not have failed to point out that they return 0.4 per cent of UK gross domestic product on less than 0.1 per cent of government spending.

Chris Hedges:

A tiny tip of the vast subterranean network of governmental and intelligence agencies from around the world dedicated to destroying WikiLeaks and arresting its founder, Julian Assange, appears outside the red-brick building on Hans Crescent Street that houses the Ecuadorean Embassy. Assange, the world’s best-known political refugee, has been in the embassy since he was offered sanctuary there last June. British police in black Kevlar vests are perched night and day on the steps leading up to the building, and others wait in the lobby directly in front of the embassy door. An officer stands on the corner of a side street facing the iconic department store Harrods, half a block away on Brompton Road. Another officer peers out the window of a neighboring building a few feet from Assange’s bedroom at the back of the embassy. Police sit round-the-clock in a communications van topped with an array of antennas that presumably captures all electronic forms of communication from Assange’s ground-floor suite.

Mark Lavers:

Among the major benefits of being a teacher in a foreign country are the opportunities it provides for meeting and speaking with the “natives”. Over my “career” in Japan, I’ve interacted with a broad spectrum of students: from 2 year-old children (and younger) to people in their 80’s, from office ladies and blue collar workers to professionals and company presidents. Students’ motivations for studying have ranged from being forced to study by their parents (or company) to viewing the acquisition of a second language as a vehicle to a better life. During these 15 plus years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of Japanese about a vast array of topics, including education. As a former teacher in my native country, education has always been a topic of profound personal interest. Recently, I spoke at length with a young student, whom I have been teaching for 5 years, about his educational experiences, first in elementary school, which he attended in North America, and his subsequent experiences upon returning to Japan. The conversation was very enlightening, for several reasons.
DON’T ASK WHY!
The first example of the difference in education “styles” occurred shortly after he started school back in Japan. About 1 month after school started, his parents received a letter from the school instructing them to instruct their son to stop asking “why” questions during class. Basically, the letter said that their son was asking too many questions and was a disruptive influence in the classroom.
“WE”, NOT “ME”
My student’s first major “social” adjustment was the necessity of being aware of, and thinking about, the “feelings” of others. He spoke of becoming physically ill due to the stress caused by having to “learn” to restrain himself from speaking or acting “impulsively”, how he had to constantly reign in his “normal”, natural “impulses, and instead, reflect on how his actions might potentially “hurt” someone. Essentially, he said, his initial response was to become almost paranoid about speaking or “participating” in class.

Charles Hugh Smith:

The economy has changed in structural ways; preparing for the old economy is a sure path to disappointment.
Millions of young people will be graduating from college over the next four years, and unfortunately, they will be entering an economy that has changed in structural ways for the worse. It’s easy to blame politics or the Baby Boomers (that’s like shooting fish in a barrel), but the dynamics are deeper than policy or one generation’s foolish belief in endless good times and rising housing prices.
1. Getting a college degree, even in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects, no longer guarantees a job. As I have often noted, producing more graduates does not magically create jobs. The economy can only support a certain number of jobs in any one field. Producing 10 times as many graduates in that field does not create 10 times more jobs.
According to this analysis of supply, employment, and wage trends in information technology (IT) and other high-tech fields, Guestworkers in the high-skill U.S. labor market (via B.C.), only half of those graduating with STEM degrees get jobs in STEM fields.

Michael Roth:

My Coursera course, “The Modern and the Postmodern,” might have been labeled “course least likely to become a MOOC.” In many ways, it is an old-fashioned “great books” course, although I prefer to call it a “good-enough books” course, and in the 20 years I’ve been teaching it, it has always relied heavily on student interaction in the classroom.
We’ve always started in the late 18th century, usually with Kant and Rousseau, and then wound our way through 200 years of mostly European intellectual history–Karl Marx, Gustave Flaubert, and Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, and Michel Foucault in the 20th. In recent years we’ve finished up with the philosophers Kwame Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek. We are interested in what happens when the modern search for the “really real” is replaced by the postmodern embrace of intensity and difference. We explore how modernist artists and writers have looked for a foundation that will ground their ideas and formal experimentation, while postmodernists have given up the search for a firm base.
Last summer my institution, Wesleyan University, where I am president, became the first liberal-arts college to join Coursera. I’d been discussing online education with the faculty, students, and board members, and I had a notion that we should start our own program. But after reading about Coursera’s success in attracting large numbers of students to courses taught by talented professors at strong universities, it seemed to me that we should become a partner. The Coursera folks wanted to know which classes we would offer, but at that point summer was half over, and I wasn’t certain who among my colleagues would want to participate. I knew I could volunteer myself for starters, and so that’s what I did. Eventually, professors from six different departments agreed to join me in offering courses.

Michael Molinsky:

Why is it that you, without embarrassment, publish the fact that 70% of the staff of your Washington office can’t perform simple arithmetic? One can go into virtually any office and find someone who will freely admit that ‘I can’t do math.’
— John C. Nelson, in a letter to the Wall Street Journal
“I can’t do math.” It’s probably one of the most common statements I hear as a teacher, and it would be difficult for me to come up with a statement that irritates me more (although saying “my bad” when you mean “my mistake” comes close). It is especially irritating because the person who says it invariably sounds happy and content with this assertion of inability. And it isn’t merely students; last year, I sat in a meeting while four Tennessee Wesleyan College personnel smiled cheerfully and told me one after the other that they couldn’t “do” math.
Stating that you can’t “do” math, it seems to me, is roughly equivalent to stating that you can’t read and can’t write. And while illiteracy is a serious concern (according to a 1993 report from the U.S. Department of Education, about 23% of all citizens of the United States are functionally illiterate), you are not likely to find many college students (or college personnel, for that matter) bragging with a grin that they can’t read a sentence or write their own name. And if someone told you that they couldn’t “do” history, you probably wouldn’t pat them on the head and say, “There, there, I can’t do history, either.” But this is exactly what happens in mathematics.

Audrey Watters:

In the fall of 2011, Stanford University offered three of its engineering courses–Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Introduction to Databases–for free online. Anyone with Internet access could sign up for them. As Sebastian Thrun, the director of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, tells the story, he assumed just a handful of people would enroll in his graduate-level AI class. Instead, more than 160,000 students registered. A massive number.
That’s when the enormous hype began about massive open online courses, better known as “MOOCs.” Since then, Thrun and his fellow lab professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng have founded education organizations that offer free online classes. Thrun’s start-up is called Udacity (in part, a takeoff on the word “audacious”), and Koller and Ng’s is Coursera. In December 2011, in response to Stanford’s initiatives, MIT launched its own effort, called MITx (short for “Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange”), and a few months later joined forces with Harvard, drolly changing the name of the organization to edX. A consortium of British universities has also created its own MOOC platform, Futurelearn. So far, more than 90 universities worldwide have teamed up with one or more of these MOOC providers, prompting the New York Times to crown 2012 as “The Year of the MOOC.”
Although it’s clear that there’s a flurry of interest in MOOCs among universities, higher-ed students, the tech industry, and pundits, these free online courses are also likely to have a significant impact on K-12 librarians and other educators. As Joyce Valenza, a teacher librarian at Springfield Township High School in Pennsylvania, pointed out on her SLJ blog, “Never Ending Search,” MOOCs “can reach tens of thousands of students of all ages, regardless of geography or social class. They have the potential to be equalizers. MOOCs have the potential to disrupt traditional education platforms. And experts predict they will.”

Christina Farr:

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan spoke frankly to a roomful of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors about the state of the nation’s education system.
At the NewSchools Summit this afternoon, the former head of Chicago’s public schools said he believes that technology not only improves access to education but also graduation rates. In a discussion with Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, Duncan referred to many schools and universities as glorified “dropout factories” and called for teachers and parents to “knock at his door or the governor’s door” and demand better for their children.
Duncan has made significant steps in his tenure as education secretary — although his efforts have incurred significant criticism from the National Education Association. Duncan has secured increases in Pell grants for students to attend college, and he is a supporter of innovation through programs like “Race to the Top” and “Investing in Innovation.” Additionally, he has helped secure an additional $10 billion to avoid teacher layoffs and $500 million for a national early learning competition.
But these efforts are not nearly enough, and Duncan conceded that “we have so far to go.”

Related: www.wisconsin2.org

Eric Horowitz:

I’ve been making my way through Richard Kahlenberg’s biography of Albert Shanker, and one of the recurring themes that jumps out at me is the way long-lasting policies can emerge from the confluence of short-lived circumstances. Previously I wrote about this kind of “policy stickiness” in the context of higher salaries for teachers with master’s degrees, but you can also see it play out with regard to dismissing teachers based on seniority, a practice known as “last in, first out” (LIFO).
Recently, reformers have attempted to do away with LIFO because it’s an arbitrary, albeit straightforward, way of determining whom to dismiss. But according to Kahlenberg, 30 years ago the climate of discrimination in the country was so bad that Shanker felt we needed LIFO because it was arbitrary.

Shanker and the AFT argued that seniority was worth preserving. Seniority “has proven to be the most effective mechanism for protecting workers–regardless of race, religion, sex or age–against capricious and arbitrary actions of their employers,” the union said. Seniority prevented racist employers from firing blacks first. And it also protected workers “from the whims and prejudices of their employers” not related to race. Finally, seniority was important as a union principle because it “prevents divisiveness among working people by distributing scarcity in a way that is objectively fair and therefore perceived to be fair.” (p. 241)

Matthew DeFour:

About 10 percent of Wisconsin kindergartners weren’t prepared for classroom reading instruction, according to the results of a test administered for the first time statewide last fall.
The main purpose of the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening, or PALS test, is to identify students who struggle with certain literacy fundamentals and need intervention, said Patrick Gasper, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Instruction.
Teachers can use the results to tailor their reading instruction, he said.
“A child not meeting the benchmark could be (a sign of) inadequate experience with literacy, a special education need, or it could be general slow development,” said Beth Graue, a UW-Madison education professor and expert on early childhood education.
Gov. Scott Walker has proposed $2.8 million in his biennial budget to add the test in grades 1 and 2 and 4-year-old kindergarten starting in fall 2014.
The State Journal obtained the results under the state’s Open Records Law. DPI doesn’t plan to publish the information because the test is a tool for classroom instruction and not meant to compare students, schools and districts, Gasper said.

In the Madison area, 92% of Middleton’s Kindergarten students met the benchmark while Verona students scored 87%, Madison 84%, Waunakee 97%, Monona Grove 98%, Oregon 97%, McFarland 93%, DeForest 92% and Sun Prairie 88%.
Related: Madison’s disastrous reading results.

Mike Antonucci:

Devastating Budget Cuts Still Look Like Increases So Far. The National Center for Education Statistics issued its “First Look” at comprehensive school district revenues and expenditures for the 2009-10 school year. It’s a welcome report, though not exactly a “first look” since it uses U.S. Census Bureau figures available since last fall.
According to the authoritative National Bureau of Economic Research, America’s “Great Recession” began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009. Because of the vast number of agencies involved, it takes years to gather and report definitive public education revenue and spending data. So while we may eventually see figures that corroborate the tales of woe we hear from those quarters, that time has not yet arrived. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Here are a few of the center’s findings:
School districts reported $599.9 billion in total revenues.
That was an increase of 0.8 percent from the previous year, in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Current expenditures per-pupil, however, rose 1.0 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Status Quo Costs More: Madison Schools’ Administration Floats a 7.38% Property Tax Increase; Dane County Incomes down 4.1%…. District Received $11.8M Redistributed State Tax Dollar Increase last year. Spending up 6.3% over the past 16 months.

Chris Rickert:

If Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed expansion of the state’s school voucher program wasn’t dead already, a letter from the feds calling into question the program’s legality could be the final nail in the coffin.
Among other things, the April 9 letter requires the Department of Public Instruction to monitor voucher schools to make sure they are in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and to report complaints they get from parents who allege the voucher program discriminated against their disabled children.
For the American Civil Liberties Union and Disability Rights Wisconsin, whose complaint led to the letter, “this is a big win,” said Julie Mead, a professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at UW-Madison.
And a big loss for voucher proponents, who detest the kind of government oversight and bureaucracy the feds are requiring. Even worse for them is that the feds’ criticism is just one more reason for Republicans who were already iffy on Walker’s expansion to oppose it.
Now the question is whether the state’s existing voucher program — which has proven popular with parents, or at least with parents of non-disabled students — can survive the federal order.

Matthew DiCarlo:

One can often hear opponents of value-added referring to these methods as “junk science.” The term is meant to express the argument that value-added is unreliable and/or invalid, and that its scientific “façade” is without merit.
Now, I personally am not opposed to using these estimates in evaluations and other personnel policies, but I certainly understand opponents’ skepticism. For one thing, there are some states and districts in which design and implementation has been somewhat careless, and, in these situations, I very much share the skepticism. Moreover, the common argument that evaluations, in order to be “meaningful,” must consist of value-added measures in a heavily-weighted role (e.g., 45-50 percent) is, in my view, unsupportable.
All that said, calling value-added “junk science” completely obscures the important issues. The real questions here are less about the merits of the models per se than how they’re being used.
If value-added is “junk science” regardless of how it’s employed, then a fairly large chunk of social scientific research is “junk science.” If that’s your opinion, then okay – you’re entitled to it – but it’s not very compelling, at least in my (admittedly biased) view.

Andrew Rotherham

Last year at TIME I took a look at the new websites where teachers can share their work – in some cases for personal profit and in some cases under circumstances where vendors can profit. The idea has great potential – especially with Common Core – for teachers to share work in an anytime/anywhere manner. But as the column noted – greatly upsetting some readers who thought there should simply be no question – there are also a complicated set of legal questions swirling around these sites about who owns content teachers produce in the course of their work. [You can read some terms of use language from key sites here] Not a lot of case law yet but a New York court ruled that school districts own the rights to lesson plans teachers create as part of their employment and with employer provided tools. That’s a generally accepted, if infrequently enforced, standard.
Now the National Education Association has released its new statement on digital learning and it includes a statement about the ownership issue seeking to create a new standard – and include this issue in collective bargaining:

…education employees should own the copyright to materials that they create in the course of their employment. There should be an appropriate “teacher’s exception” to the “works made for hire” doctrine, pursuant to which works created by education employees in the course of their employment are owned by the employee. This exception should reflect the unique practices and traditions of academia.

Kelly Amis:

“I’m pro-union (for jobs in which people are nearly powerless and easily replaced, like farm or factory workers, I’m just not sure it is helping teaching as a profession).” Regarding unions, I think it’s not only a matter of skill and replaceability, but also power imbalances. Teachers I know and hear from in non-unionized states describe the arbitrary and punitive use of power to silence troublemakers and embolden poor, unethical, even illegal practices in administration and school governance. There’s also considerable political pressure and involvement in education that necessitates the strength in numbers that comes with unions. Think of the science teachers who dare to teach about evolution as a fact, health teachers who mention birth-control, LGBTQ teachers harrassed or silenced, or teachers who dare to suggest that a student with two moms comes from a family every bit as normal as others, journalism teachers pressured to restrict their students’ First Amendment rights, librarians who allow students to check out controversial books, English teachers who use controversial books or creative writing assignments, social studies teachers who teach students about the Islamic Golden Age… Think about the teachers who give the starting point guard an F that will remove him from the playoffs, teachers who bust the school board member’s child for plagiarism, teachers who say something unpopular in the public sphere, signing anti-war petitions or letters to the editor, etc.
These are not hypothetical issues – they happen all the time. Daily. A vinidictive (or intimidated) administrator has so much power over a teacher – even with union support. A principal can ruin a teacher’s year, ruin a career, run their their health and morale into the ground. Removing the union actually makes it harder for most of us to do good work in difficult circumstances, harder to speak up on behalf of students and families. I think the overall educational outcomes in union vs. non-union states and countries undercut your suggestion that unions do not help education. True, I’ve also heard stories about local associations and union reps who are bad for schools and kids. It happens. But I don’t see those exceptions as an argument against unions – it’s an argument for better governance, management, and ethical decision-making by those individuals.

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

Thanks to the volunteers who helped make phone calls at MTI on April 23. With few volunteers, 51 callers were “patched through” to leave a message for Senator Sheila Harsdorf that voucher expansion is bad for Wisconsin and that public schools must be fully funded. The Governor’s proposed budget will take $96 million from public schools to fund private and parochial “voucher” schools and private charter schools.
This program was a great success in other Senate Districts as well, generating well over 200 contacts last week. Any member interested in giving this a try, another night of calling is being considered for Thursday, May 9, 4:30 – 7:30 p.m., at MTI. The constituents we are calling are targeted based on their likelihood to respond positively and include WEAC members and voters favorable to public schools. This fight is critical because if we lose, voucher schools will be coming to Madison, whether we want them or not, with slick marketing campaigns designed to lure tax dollars into their pockets by denigrating our public schools. Don’t let this happen! We need seven confirmed volunteers to make this set-up worthwhile.
If you can join us next Thursday, please contact Jeff Knight (knightj@madisonteachers.org / 257-0491).

The Madison School District:

It came down to a very close finish but in an overtime session the Spring Harbor Middle team overtook the O’Keeffe Middle team at the African American History Bowl held on Saturday, April 13.
As first-place finishers, team members (pictured below l-r) Odoi Lassey, Russell McGee, James Horton (alternate), Shania Weaver (backup alternate) and Coach Sara Johnson will travel to New Orleans on an all-expenses paid trip to complete in the 100 Black Men National History Bowl Challenge in June.

The Madison School District, via a kind reader. Much more on Jennifer Cheatham, here.

Jay Matthews:

The index score is the number of college-level tests given at a school in 2012 divided by the number of graduates that year. Also noted are the percentage of students who come from families that qualify for lunch subsidies (Subs. lunch) and the percentage of graduates who passed at least one college-level test during their high school career, called equity and excellence, (E&E). A (P) next to the school’s name denotes a private school.

While Middleton (#1097) and Verona (#1529) made the 2013 index, no Madison high schools were included. Interestingly, thirteen (13) high schools from the Austin, Texas area were included along with two from Minneapolis, MN, two from St. Paul, MN, one from Ann Arbor, one from Portland, one each from Mobile and Birmingham, AL.
Jay Matthews:

I have been ranking the most challenging schools in the country and this region for 15 years. Rarely have I encountered anything like the American Indian Public Charter High School of Oakland, Calif., the No. 1 school on my 2013 list. It has risen to the top just as its city school board is trying to shut it down.
I visited the high school and its two American Indian charter middle schools two months ago. They hold classes in offices downtown and in a run-down residential part of the city, where they set an extraordinary standard of achievement.
The students enroll in Advanced Placement courses in the ninth grade and eventually take more of those college-level classes and exams per student than any high school in the Washington area. In their white shirts and dark slacks and skirts, the 243 students bustle around their little campus. Eighty-one percent of them are from low-income families, but their AP test-passing rate of 41 percent is higher than any D.C. school except Wilson and the School Without Walls, which have mostly middle-class students.
The three Oakland charter schools are in trouble because Ben Chavis, the unorthodox educator responsible for their success, has been charged by the school district with misappropriating public funds. Chavis denies doing anything wrong. He left the school in late 2011 to tend his cattle farm in North Carolina, leaving parents and new school leaders — with their own internal disputes — to fight for survival. The city school board voted last month to withdraw the schools’ charter by a narrow 4 to 3 margin, but the county or state school board could overrule that decision.

Carolyn Miller, Kathryn Zickuhr, Lee Rainie and Kristen Purcell:

The vast majority of parents of minor children — children younger than 18 — feel libraries are very important for their children. That attachment carries over into parents’ own higher-than-average use of a wide range of library services.1
The ties between parents and libraries start with the importance parents attach to the role of reading in their children’s lives. Half of parents of children under age 12 (50%) read to their child every day and an additional 26% do so a few times a week. Those with children under age 6 are especially keen on daily reading with their child: 58% of these parents read with their child every day and another 26% read multiple times a week with their children.
The importance parents assign to reading and access to knowledge shapes their enthusiasm for libraries and their programs:

Donna St. George:

Thousands of students in Montgomery County failed final exams in high school math courses last semester, according to data that raise questions about how well students have learned the material and whether there is a disconnect between the test and the course work.
Recently released figures show failure rates of 62 percent for high school students taking the county’s geometry final and 57 percent for those taking the Algebra 2 exam. Among students taking the same courses on the honors level, 30 percent to 36 percent failed the end-of-semester tests in January, according to data from the school system.
The numbers have alarmed parents in the high-performing school system, where nearly 16,000 high school students in seven math courses did not pass their finals — a majority of the roughly 30,000 students taking those tests.
Schools Superintendent Joshua P. Starr said a work group would begin meeting this summer to unravel the reasons behind the poor test results, which he said could involve issues of teaching, student support, or alignment between the curriculum and the exam.

Associated Press:

The US Department of Homeland Security, criticised for failing to check the student status of a Kazakh man charged in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, has tightened procedures for admitting foreigners with student visas, a US official said
The new procedure is the government’s first security change directly related to the attacks last month.
The order, effective immediately, was issued by a senior official at US Customs and Border Protection, David Murphy. It was circulated on Thursday, a day after the Obama administration acknowledged a student from Kazakhstan accused of hiding evidence for one of the Boston bombing suspects was allowed to return to the United States in January without a valid student visa.
The student visa for Azamat Tazhayakov had been terminated when he arrived in New York on January 20. But the border agent in the airport did not have access to the information in the Homeland Security Department’s student and exchange visitor information system, called SEVIS.

Lisa Wachtel:

MMSD offers Read 180 and System 44 as a reading intervention to adolescent students who are two or more years behind their grade level in reading in regular education, special education and the English as a Second Language program. Read 180 and System 44 are integrated into the District’s Response to Intervention (RtI) plan to provide students with access to these research-based intervention materials in all district secondary sites, including middle schools, high school and alternative programs.
Read 180 is an intensive reading intervention program that meets the needs of struggling adolescent readers whose reading achievement is below proficient. The program addresses individual needs through differentiated instruction, adaptive and instructional software, high-interest literacy and explicit instruction in reading, writing and vocabulary development.
The Read 180 instructional model provides a way to organize instruction and classroom activity. Each session begins and ends with whole-group teacher-directed instruction. During the class, there is a structure for the use of time including whole group and small student groups. In the small group time, students rotate among three stations, including:
Computer center – students use the READ 180 software independently, providing them with intensive, individualized skill practice;
Small group – students receive diagnostically informed instruction where individual needs can be met;
Independent center – students read from READ 180 paperbacks and audiobooks. Journal writing, reader responses and reading strategies are applied.
System 44 is an intervention program that is designed for struggling adolescents that need basic support in letter sounds, decoding, word recognition, word-level fluency and strategies for unfamiliar words. System 44 helps middle and high school students “crack the code” on the 44 sounds and 26 letters in the English language. It is intended to be a short term intervention, with students only remaining in the program until they have mastered the sounds of the English language. When student master the decoding, skills as determined by the Scholastic Phonics Inventory, they may advance to Read 180 or another intervention if appropriate. System 44 incorporates a screening tool for reading and phonics to assist with the proper identification of students into either System 44 or Read 180. While MMSD has used Read 180 for several years, System 44 was made available district-wide in 2012-13.

Data issues regarding READ 180 and System 44 by Andrew Statz

Because of these discrepancies and uncertainty over which students actually received the READ 180 or System 44 curriculum, any data staff of READ 180 and System 44 updates generated by MMSD would be misleading and could lead to improper estimates of the results these programs produce, which could in turn lead to misinformed decisions about the direction and effectiveness of these programs. As a result, the Research & Program Evaluation Office cannot report on these programs until data discrepancies are resolved in the future.
Next Steps. District staff are working with teachers and school staff to correct the errors in READ 180 and System 44 participant lists for the 2012-13 school year.
This process includes identifying specific students whose records are inconsistent and attempting to standardize their records, as well as meeting with middle and high school schedulers to emphasize the importance of consistent record keeping for these programs and discuss plans to make sure accurate records are maintained in the future. In, addition, district staff will conduct quarterly audits of READ 180 and System 44 participation to compare transcript and SAM records and correct disparities as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, because SAM only stores a current list of READ 180 and System 44 participants, it is not known if there is a way to repair errors in historical MMSD data on these two programs. More exploration with the vendor is needed to determine what history, if any, can be recovered.

Matthew DeFour:

At a recent rally in a Latino community center in Waukesha, Gov. Scott Walker urged a group of mostly private school parents, students and administrators to advocate for his proposal to expand vouchers beyond Milwaukee and Racine.
“I need your help,” Walker told a crowd of about 350 people, the majority of them children, on April 25. “We need you to help us spread that message to other lawmakers in our state Capitol, because they need to understand this is not a political statement; this is not a political campaign. … This is about children.”
A week earlier at First United Methodist Church in Downtown Madison, representatives from the Department of Public Instruction and the Wisconsin Association of School Boards laid out the arguments against voucher expansion to a group organized by Grandparents United for Madison Public Schools.
“This is a Waterloo moment for public education,” WASB lobbyist Joe Quick told about 60 people.
“You’ve got good schools here,” concurred DPI financial adviser Jeff Pertl. “We’ve got to fight to protect them.”
In recent months, in gymnasiums, libraries, churches and offices across Wisconsin, both sides in the voucher debate have ramped up their efforts to sway public opinion, especially in the districts of a handful of key Republican senators.

Sue Schaar, Madison Schools’ TAG Coordinator:

The Compliance Plan, including the timeline with benchmarks, is being drafted to outline the activities and processes that will take place in the next 13 months in order to bring MMSD into full compliance with DPI by May 31, 2014. A final document will be scheduled for Board review before the May 31, 2013 submission to DPI.
This document highlights areas of infrastructure that must be addressed as we move forward, including instructional design at the school level and consistent messaging from central office with measures of accountability incorporated. Clearly, our efforts in this area must be aligned with other improvement efforts as we move forward.
Issues around which decisions have been made:
Fine Arts and TAG will be creating a portfolio system to be utilized in the identification processes in areas of Leadership, Creativity, and Visual/Performing Arts
MMSD will incorporate the use of USTARS and utilize local norms into the identification processes for all 5 areas
Professional development regarding the characteristics of advanced learners, including those from typically under represented groups, will be accomplished at the local school level through a 45 minute DVD that the TAG department will create over the summer. This professional development should take place at all schools prior to winter break in 2013-14. Schools will have a menu of choices about how to deliver this PD.
Discussion is still occurring around:
Incorporation of advanced interventions into multi-tiered system of support and how to incorporate in School Improvement Plans
A review of consistent, qualitative difference between High School core courses and embedded and/or other Honors Courses as demonstrated by a review of the syllabi
The tension between implementing interventions for advanced learners through clusters, flexible groups or enrichment periods coupled with differentiated instruction throughout the school day

Robin Lake:

Watch for the seventh edition of Hopes, Fears, & Reality, releasing May 9, 2013.
The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has been producing Hopes, Fears, & Reality since 2005, after a set of major studies showed conflicting results about charter school performance and caused quite a dustup. CRPE created this annual report and its overall research program on charter schools with two goals in mind: (1) to provide an even-handed assessment of charter school outcomes to date so that people involved in policy and practice can make sense of the research without having to rely on simplistic headlines or read complex and conflicting journal articles, and (2) to create a forum for leading thinkers to push charter sector leaders to look to the future and improve on the past.
We at CRPE are quite proud of the data and essays that have appeared in Hopes, Fears, & Reality across the years. With support from the National Charter School Resource Center at American Institutes for Research, we are excited that the report can continue to reach new audiences through this venue. If you are new to this series, please look at the past editions. I hope you will find them useful–even surprising and provocative. As a research organization, CRPE is committed to following the evidence wherever it leads. For that reason, our work points out both the beauty marks and the warts of the charter sector. Because we believe that students urgently need better public school options, CRPE commissions essays that push policymakers and charter leaders to anticipate issues that few people are thinking about now but that could greatly enhance the sector’s effectiveness and reach.

Deborah A. Gist:

I am enthusiastic about the passion that all of us feel about public education, and I welcome the diversity of viewpoints among us. All of us understand that our schools – and our children – represent the future of Rhode Island. All of us understand that every step we take to advance public education will help advance the economic prosperity of our state.
As we work together to transform our schools, there is an important factor that has remained constant: the unwavering support from the membership and the leadership of this General Assembly. House Speaker Fox, Senate President Paiva Weed, and you, the members of the General Assembly, have been steadfast allies of our schools, our teachers, and our students. My colleagues in other states are envious of the support we receive from our elected officials in Rhode Island – and I am very grateful. Speaker Fox and President Paiva Weed: Thank you for your leadership.
You have many important education matters before you this session, including a package of bills on school safety. Above all else, our schools must be safe places for teaching and learning. These bills, which Representative McNamara and Senator Gallo have sponsored, will help us better ensure the safety of our teachers and students.
We must also ensure that our communities have the resources they need as we work to transform education in our state. Governor Chafee is a champion of education. Even in these difficult economic times, he has consistently maintained support for education funding. This year, Governor Chafee’s budget again supports Year Three of our Funding Formula, including important categorical funding:

Andrew Rotherham:

Something you hear a lot from charter school opponents is that they’d be OK with charters if the schools more consistently produced gains for students. Yet in places that have done a good job with charter quality the opposition from special interests remains. Some new polling data that will become public next week in Massachusetts casts a light on this issue.
The poll of 625 registered voters in Boston found that just 23 percent of respondents supported keeping current limits on charter schools while 64 percent are in favor of expanding charters. 66 percent think the city should lease vacant buildings to charters and 67 percent think charters should get state funding for construction and renovation. Perhaps most interesting, 73 of voters said they support allowing charter schools with a proven record of success to expand – essentially a “smart cap” idea (pdf).

Elaine Weiss:

As many of us have long suspected, the impacts of popular market-oriented reforms are not as positive as their proponents would have us believe. Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and then-CEO and now-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who ran the school systems in New York, Washington, DC and Chicago, respectively, along with the mayors who controlled the school systems they led, all exaggerated their successes. In fact, the report I recently co-authored as National Coordinator of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, “Market-Oriented Reforms’ Rhetoric Trumps Reality,” discovers that using student test scores to make high-stakes decisions did little good and more than a little harm.
We found that across all three cities, student NAEP test scores rose less than they did in comparable high-poverty urban districts. In Chicago, reading scores, already below average, fell further. New York City students achieved the second-lowest average test score growth across fourth and eighth grade reading and math of the ten districts studied, beating only Cleveland. And Washington, DC students, who had been gaining ground in both subjects, saw that growth stop or even begin to fall. Moreover, what small gains did accrue went heavily to white and higher-income students, so many achievement gaps grew rather than narrowed. Closing schools neither helped students nor saved money, and drove teacher turnover, not teacher quality.

Barry Garelick, via a kind email

The tendency to interpret the standards along the ideological lines of the reform movement can be seen most readily in how the Standards for Mathematical Practice are interpreted. The SMP themselves are sensible and few mathematicians or teachers would disagree with their principles. Their interpretation and implementation is another matter, however.

Standards for Mathematical Practice: The Cheshire Cat’s Grin.
Standards for Mathematical Practice: Cheshire Cat’s Grin, Part Two
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Standards for Mathematical Practice: Cheshire Cat’s Grin, Part Three

Peter Sacks:

In my 1996 book Generation X Goes to College, I predicted that virtually anyone with a computer and a modem would have access to the storehouse of human knowledge. As a result, higher education as we know would become an anachronism, if not obsolete. The university’s status would diminish because it would lose its competitive advantage in disseminating information.
The recent emergence of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), however, raises obvious questions. Are these new teaching methods as effective, in terms of student performance, as real-life classrooms? Can these new technologies bring down higher education costs? Former Princeton president William G. Bowen takes on these questions and others in his new book Higher-Ed in the Digital Age. Once a skeptic, Bowen now concludes that online learning programs will reduce the cost of higher education without harming student learning outcomes.
His conversion is inspired by the findings of ITHACA, a non-profit organization that conducted “the most rigorous assessment to date” on the economics of online learning technology. That study demonstrated that student learning outcomes, as measured by standardized tests, are no worse in online courses than in traditional classes. Not better, just not worse. Though these results might sound unimpressive, Bowen asserts that they are “very important” because they disprove the common prediction that online education will harm students.

Alan Borsuk:

Think of all the different ways you can say the word interesting. Different inflections carry different messages. Different accents change what letters are sounded or the number of syllables and can hint at your background. Probe the word and it can become really interesting – and educational.
Here’s another thing that’s interesting, educational and, I would add, a special jewel in Milwaukee education: The linguistics class at the Milwaukee School of Languages taught by Suzanne Loosen.
If I had taken this class when I was in high school, I would remember it to this day, 45 years later. Which got me thinking about two questions:
What makes a high school class especially memorable and valuable? What are we doing to encourage, support and respect classes such as this one and teachers such as Loosen?
A few things are special about Loosen’s class:
First, the course itself. Linguistics – “the scientific study of language,” as Loosen teaches her students – is normally a college-level subject. Best as Loosen knows, the course, an elective for 10th through 12th-grade students, is the only high school class in the nation devoted entirely to the subject, although many teachers include linguistics as part of broader courses.
Second, the enterprising aspects of creating the course. There are pluses to the increasingly standardized, regulated and monitored world of education. But there are minuses, like not seeing very often what Loosen offers: the creativity and zest of teaching a beloved subject that is a bit off the conventional path.

Grant Wiggins:

The title of this post refers to the title of an article I wrote twenty years ago: The Immorality of Test Security. It is basically immoral to hold people accountable for improved results on tests that are so secure that teachers aren’t even allowed, in some cases, to see them. And as more states back off releasing tests and allowing teachers to score them, it seems timely to revisit the argument. (See this and this article on the changes to make the Regents exam no longer teacher scored).
As I have long written, I have no problem with the state doing a once-per-year audit of performance. But what far too many policy-makers and measurement wonks fail to understand is that if the core purpose of the test is to improve performance, not just audit it, then most test security undercuts the purpose. Look, I get the point of security: you can get at understanding far more easily and efficiently (hence, cheaply) if the student does not know the specific question that is coming; I’m ok with that. But complete test security after the fact serves only the test-makers: they get to re-use items (and do so with little oversight), and they make the entire test more of a superficial dipstick, using proxies for real work, than a genuine test of transparent and worthy performance.

Jenny Anderson:

Parenting in a pathologically competitive, information-saturated city can make anyone crazy, even those parents lucky enough to be worried about fennel burgers in school lunches. And while Avenues offers its students every imaginable educational benefit — a 9-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio, a Harvard-designed “World Course” — it has also tapped into an even deeper, more complicated parental anxiety: the anxiety of wanting their kids to have every advantage, but ensuring that all those advantages don’t turn them into privileged jerks.
As Manhattan, and particularly downtown, is transformed by a staggering infusion of wealth, there is a growing market for creating emotionally intelligent future global leaders who, as a result of their emotional intelligence, have a little humility. In fact, when the nearby Grace Church School was researching whether to start its own high school, it asked top college-admission officers what was lacking in New York City applicants. The answers coalesced around the idea of values, civic engagement, inclusiveness and diversity — in a word, humility.
And so Avenues students may run to their “Empire State of Mind: Thinking About Jay-Z in a New Way” “mini-mester” while passing a Chuck Close self portrait, but they do so with the intent of being “humble about their gifts and generous of spirit,” as the school’s mission statement puts it. “We wanted a school that was innovative and wouldn’t force our kids into any particular mold,” says Sheree Carter-Galvan, an Avenues parent and a general counsel at Yale University. Or, as Ella Kim, mother of a 4-year old, explains, Avenues took the anxiety of a New York parent — albeit of a certain type — “and designed a school around that.”
Last winter, a group of Avenues 4-year-olds ventured out to the 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in Chelsea to view the work of John A. Parks, an English painter, who fingerpainted his childhood memories. Schulman thought it segued seamlessly with a unit they were doing on abstract art, which included studies of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Schulman, who always seems to be brimming with excitement, explained how the subject matter and the field trip were perfect for the immersion classes. “You can use the vocabulary in both languages,” she said, to learn about the art.

Much more on Avenues, here.

Robin:

I frequently have my undergrad and grad students read Bill Easterly’s excellent book, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. They are often a bit depressed after reading the chapters on growth, noting how little we seem to know about growth in the real world. It is the education chapter, however, which really gets to them. In it, Easterly points out what has been known for ages but is rarely mentioned in print (see Lant Pritchett’s “Where has all the education gone?” for a refreshing exception), namely, that education is not positively and significantly related to economic growth for most samples. Sometimes you can find a weakly positive t-stat in a sample of OECD countries, but you are lucky if you merely find zero correlation (instead of a negative and significant) in the developing world.

Related www.wisconsin2.org.

The Guardian:

Education in rural areas has been in the headlines recently, with scandals over missing textbooks, overcrowded classrooms and inadequate facilities. A group of South African dignitaries visited the Eastern Cape province recently to witness conditions for themselves. This is what they saw:

Inside Higher Ed:

There are more than 120 programs in the Football Bowl Subdivision – the top level of National Collegiate Athletic Association competition – but only 23 of them turned a profit in 2012, according to a new NCAA report on athletic department finances. That is despite upward movement in generated revenues: a 4.6 percent increase at FBS programs and a 9.06 percent increase at the smaller Football Championship Subdivision ones. While the median spending at FBS programs is $56 million, for other institutions, it hovers around $14 million. FBS median expenses increased 10.8 percent above the previous year, compared to 6.8 percent at FCS programs and 8.8 percent at Division I institutions without football. The report also notes the gap in the growth of expenses between institutional and athletics spending. At FBS programs, the median athletics expenses increase was 4.4 percent higher than the institutional increase. At FCS and Division I no-football colleges, the gap was 3 percent and 3.1 percent, respectively.

Temple Grandin and Richard Panek:

The following article is adapted from The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
I was fortunate to have been born in 1947. If I had been born 10 years later, my life as a person with autism would have been a lot different. In 1947, the diagnosis of autism was only four years old. Almost nobody knew what it meant. When Mother noticed in me the symptoms that we would now label autistic–destructive behavior, inability to speak, a sensitivity to physical contact, a fixation on spinning objects, and so on–she did what made sense to her. She took me to a neurologist.
Bronson Crothers had served as the director of the neurology service at Boston Children’s Hospital since its founding, in 1920. The first thing Dr. Crothers did in my case was administer an electroencephalogram, or EEG, to make sure I didn’t have petit mal epilepsy. Then he tested my hearing to make sure I wasn’t deaf. “Well, she certainly is an odd little girl,” he told Mother. Then when I began to verbalize a little, Dr. Crothers modified his evaluation: “She’s an odd little girl, but she’ll learn how to talk.” The diagnosis: brain damage.

George Hesselberg:

Some Verona grade school boys may remember the “hard lockdown” Thursday at their elementary school as the day they got to pee in a bucket in a janitor’s closet.
Verona Area School District Superintendent Dean Gorrell emailed a frank letter of apology to parents Friday for “not having adequate (or any) communication” about the lockdown while authorities searched for a dangerous suspect nearby.
As for the boys and their temporary bathrooms, that was simply a matter of protocol, safety and expedience, as the elementary school gymnasium where staff and students were under lockdown has no immediate access to bathrooms.
Gorrell said he had received no complaints about that as of Friday afternoon. The children were not allowed to go to bathrooms outside of the gym because it would have required their presence in a hallway, and staff “made provisions for students to relieve themselves in private,” he said.
On the topic of communication to parents and others about the lockdown, Gorrell said a new notification system called SchoolReach Instant Parent Contact has already been purchased and should be online for the next school year.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Legislators should be skeptical of a proposal by Gov. Scott Walker to sharply expand the school voucher program. There isn’t much evidence that students in voucher schools are better educated; in fact, they seem to perform at about the same level as their peers in mainline public schools.
We also remain deeply skeptical of the move by the Legislature two years ago to open up the program to lower middle-income families. If there is any justification for the voucher schools, it’s to give impoverished families a “choice.” We have long supported choice for the poor and believe the program should be limited to those families. Republicans essentially are advocating a shadow school system. Why not work harder to adequately fund and hold accountable the system we have?
Walker’s plan would expand private voucher programs to at least nine other districts outside Milwaukee and Racine. Families with income of to about $70,000 a year would be eligible.
Before they act, legislators should take a close look at outcomes.
In a report released last month, the state Department of Public Instruction found that students attending voucher schools in Milwaukee and Racine scored lower than public school students in Milwaukee Public Schools and the Racine Unified School District on the state standardized achievement test.

Comparing Milwaukee Public and Voucher Schools’ Per Student Spending

I find discussions of the per-pupil funding level of different types of Milwaukee schools usually turns into a debate on how to make a true apples-to-apples comparison of per-pupil support for the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). While basic differences in MPS and MPCP schools and their cost-drivers make any comparison imperfect, the following is what you might call a green apples to red apples comparison.
DISCLAIMER: if you not interested in school funding, prepare to be bored.
Per-pupil support for MPS
Note I am not trying to calculate per-pupil education funding or suggest that this is the amount of money that actually reaches a school or classroom; it is a simple global picture of how much public revenue exists per-pupil in MPS. Below are the relevant numbers for 2012, from MPS documents:
…….
Though not perfect, I think $13,063 (MPS) and $7,126 (MPCP) are reasonably comparative per-pupil public support numbers for MPS and the MPCP.

W. Lee Hansen, via a kind reader’s email:

This paper presents estimates of the full resource costs of Minority and Disadvantaged Student Programs for UW-Madison and the UW System. It shows that for 2008-09 the total resource costs of M/D programs are almost 60 percent higher than the published expenditure figures for UW-Madison and more than 75 percent higher than the published expenditure figures for the UW System. It provides several alternative estimates of the per student resource costs of these programs. Finally, it cumulates the value of the resources committed to M/D programs during Plan 2008 and in the years subsequent to 2008. These differences occur because the UW System’s Minority and Disadvantaged Student Annual Report (M/D Report) fails, without explanation, to include the full array of M/D program costs even though it openly acknowledges these omissions.
Based on the full resource costs estimates developed here, these costs range from as little as $1,000 per student to as much as $80,000 per student, depending on which groups of students receive the most benefit from these programs.
The results presented here for 2008-09 provide at best a snapshot view of the resource costs of M/D programs. Additional perspective comes from cumulating the resource costs of M/D programs for UW-Madison and for the UW System during the decade-long Plan 2008, and from estimates of these costs for the duration of Plan 2008 plus the first five years under UW’s new diversity plan called Inclusive Excellence.
The constant-dollar estimates of the resource costs incurred by UW-Madison during Plan 2008 total $280,000,000, and they approximate $500,000,000–half a billion dollars–for the 15-year period beginning in 1998-99 and continuing through 2012-13. Comparable estimates for the UW System are substantially greater, totaling $680,000,000 during Plan 2008 and approximating $1,150,000,000–more than one billion dollars–for this same 15-year period.
By understating the resource costs of its M/D programs and failing to provide evidence on the success of its M/D programs, the UW System fails to meet its commitments to transparency and accountability, and in the process compromises its institutional integrity.

Susan Schwartz Wildstrom:

I am moved to respond to Sol Garfunkel’s “Opinion” article.1 I am a long-time high school mathematics teacher in a public school. I started teaching around the time of SMSG and have been in the trenches throughout several of the math wars. I know Dr. Garfunkel’s fine work in creating interesting modeling projects and his outspoken opinion that using technology to solve problems that apply the mathematics we are teaching will better concretize students’ understanding of the underlying mathematics. It sounds like a fine idea, but the reality is often very different.
Our problems in teaching mathematics begin in elementary school. Sadly, many teachers working with our children at the start of their mathematical journeys are not themselves comfortable with the mathematics they are trying to teach. They often only know one way to teach an idea and they may not fully understand how that method works and why it gives the right answers. Such a teacher confronted with an alternate creative method (perhaps suggested by a clever child or a seasoned colleague) may reject the alternative rather than trying to see how and why two methods produce the same result. Beyond stifling the creativity of students and discouraging them from trying to see how the mathematics works, such an approach is not fertile ground for applications and modeling projects in which creative exploration and possibly unorthodox methods are encouraged as a means of truly understanding what is happening. Teachers who lack confidence in their own understanding of the ideas may not want to include these sorts of activities in their classrooms.

Related: Math Forum audio & video.

Daniel Bice:

Rarely has the political payoff for a special interest group been as quick or blatant.
The American Federation for Children, one of the leading advocates for school choice in the country, brags in a recent brochure that it spent more than $325,000 – far more than the group has previously made public – to help elect state Sen. Rick Gudex in a closely contested Wisconsin race last fall.
Gudex won his seat by less than 600 votes.
Then, last week, the freshman lawmaker joined two other Senate Republicans in saying they were drawing a line in the sand by vowing to oppose a state budget bill if it doesn’t include an expansion of the state’s school voucher program.
“The American Federation of Children got exactly what they wanted,” said Mike McCabe, head of the left-leaning election watchdog group Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. “They want legislators who will go to the mat and make expanding the voucher program the bottom line.”
Just as interesting, McCabe said, is that the school choice organization is saying in its own material that it spent twice as much helping Gudex as it reported to state regulators. McCabe said his group is looking into filing an election complaint.
A source familiar with the American Federation’s political spending in Wisconsin called such a complaint “frivolous.” The organization, the source said, had abided by Wisconsin election laws.

Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators.

Sean Silverthorne:

Boston College’s greatest marketing campaign lasted about six seconds.
It’s called the “Flutie Effect.” In a 1984 game against the University of Miami, BC quarterback Doug Flutie threw a last-second “Hail Mary” pass 48 yards that was miraculously caught for a game-winning touchdown–a climactic capper on one of the most exciting college football games ever.
The play put BC on the map for college aspirants. In two years, applications had shot up 30 percent.
Ever since, marketing experts and school deans have acknowledged the power of the Flutie Effect’s ability to transfer a successful collegiate athletic program into a hot ticket for admission. Georgetown University applications multiplied 45 percent between 1983 and 1986 following a surge of basketball success. Northwestern University applications advanced 21 percent after winning the Big Ten Championship in football.

Felix Salmon:

This manages to be both incomprehensible and incredibly offensive at the same time. I have no idea what Friedman thinks he’s talking about when he blathers on about disappearing protective floors; I can only hope that he isn’t making a super-tasteless reference to the recent disaster in Bangladesh. But it’s simply wrong that today’s world is “tailored” for anybody who happens to be “self-motivated”. Both the self and the motivation are components of labor, not capital, and as such they’re on the losing side of the global economy, not the winning side.
Friedman is a billionaire (by marriage) who — like all billionaires these days — is convinced that he achieved his current prominent position by merit alone, rather than through luck and through the diligent application of cultural and financial capital. His paean to self-motivation recalls nothing so much as Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society” quote: “parenting, teaching or leadership that ‘inspires’ individuals to act on their own will be the most valued of all,” he writes, bizarrely choosing to wrap his scare quotes around the word “inspires” rather than around the word “leadership”, where they belong.
True leadership, in a society where the workers are failing to be paid even half the fruits of their labor, would involve attempting to turn the red line in Blodget’s chart around, and to spread the nation’s prosperity among all its citizens. Rather than telling everybody that they’re “on their own” and that if they’re not a success then hey, they’re probably just not “self-motivated” enough.

Related: Status Quo Costs More: Madison Schools’ Administration Floats a 7.38% Property Tax Increase; Dane County Incomes down 4.1%…. District Received $11.8M Redistributed State Tax Dollar Increase last year. Spending up 6.3% over the past 16 months.

The Economist:

BRITISH universities can be depressing. The dons moan about their pay and students worry they will end up frying burgers–or jobless. Perhaps they should try visiting McDonald’s University in London’s East Finchley.
Students are often “rough and ready”, with poor qualifications and low self-esteem. But ambition-igniting murals display the ladder of opportunity that leads from the grill to the corner office (McDonald’s chief executives have always started at the bottom). A map of the world shows the seven counterpart universities. Cabinets display trophies such as the Sunday Times award for being one of Britain’s best 25 employers.
McDonald’s is one of Britain’s biggest trainers. It gets about 1m applicants a year, accepting only one in 15, and spends £40m ($61m) a year on training. The Finchley campus, opened by Margaret Thatcher, then the local MP, in 1989, is one of the biggest training centres in Europe–many of the classrooms are equipped with booths for interpreters. It is part of a bigger system. An employees’ web-portal, Our Lounge, provides training as well as details about that day’s shifts, and allows employees to compete against each other in work-related video games.

Tom Foremski:

John Wihbey at Journalist’s Resource has highlighted an important problem: Young people aren’t very good at search.
Since Google’s algorithms have trouble in distinguishing between spam and good content, a search-based education isn’t much use if students don’t know how to evaluate sources of information.

Cindy Koeppel, via a kind email:

* NEW SPECIAL PROJECT * “Civility in the Golden Age, 1959-1969”
On April 16, 2013, Dirksen Center staff member delivered remarks entitled “Civility in the Golden Age, 1959-1969” to a conference, “Returning Civility to Our Public Discourse,” funded by The Center and sponsored by the Institute for Principled Leadership at Bradley University.
Mackaman used documents from Everett Dirksen’s papers to illustrate the nature of civil discourse among the political leaders in the 1960s.
Read the remarks at: http://www.dirksencenterprojects.org/Civility.pdf

Lisa Hansel, via a kind reader’s email:

So why haven’t we ensured that all children get a rigorous, supportive education?
This is a question I ask myself and others all the time. I think it’s more productive than merely asking “How can we?” Those who ask how without also asking why haven’t tend to waste significant amounts of time and resources “discovering” things that some already knew.
Okay, so I’ve partly answer the why question right there. Much better answers can be found in Diane Ravitch’s Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, and Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
But still, those answers are not complete.
Right now, Kate Walsh and her team with the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) are adding to our collective wisdom–and potentially to our collective ability to act.
NCTQ is just a couple months away from releasing its review of teacher preparation programs. The results may not be shocking, but they are terrifying. Walsh provides a preview in the current issue of Education Next. In that preview, she reminds us of a study from several years ago that offers an insiders’ look at teacher preparation:

The most revealing insight into what teacher educators believe to be wrong or right about the field is a lengthy 2006 volume published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Studying Teacher Education. It contains contributions from 15 prominent deans and education professors and was intended to provide “balanced, thorough, and unapologetically honest descriptions of the state of research on particular topics in teacher education.” It lives up to that billing. First, the volume demonstrates the paucity of credible research that would support the current practices of traditional teacher education, across all of its many functions, including foundations courses, arts and sciences courses, field experiences, and pedagogical approaches, as well as how current practice prepares candidates to teach diverse populations and special education students. More intriguing, however, is the contributors’ examination of the dramatic evolution of the mission of teacher education over the last 50 years, in ways that have certainly been poorly understood by anyone outside the profession.
Studying Teacher Education explains the disconnect between what teacher educators believe is the right way to prepare a new teacher and the unhappy K-12 schools on the receiving end of that effort. It happens that the job of teacher educators is not to train the next generation of teachers but to prepare them.

Huh? Really? How exactly does one prepare without training? Walsh goes on to explain that. But the only way to prepare yourself to comprehend the teacher educators’ reasoning is to pretend like “prepare them” actually means “brainwash them into believing that in order to be a good teacher, you have to make everything up yourself.” Back to Walsh:

Harking back perhaps to teacher education’s 19th-century ecclesiastical origins, its mission has shifted away from the medical model of training doctors to professional formation. The function of teacher education is to launch the candidate on a lifelong path of learning, distinct from knowing, as actual knowledge is perceived as too fluid to be achievable. In the course of a teacher’s preparation, prejudices and errant assumptions must be confronted and expunged, with particular emphasis on those related to race, class, language, and culture. This improbable feat, not unlike the transformation of Pinocchio from puppet to real boy, is accomplished as candidates reveal their feelings and attitudes through abundant in-class dialogue and by keeping a journal. From these activities is born each teacher’s unique philosophy of teaching and learning.
There is also a strong social-justice component to teacher education, with teachers cast as “activists committed to diminishing the inequities of American society.” That vision of a teacher is seen by a considerable fraction of teacher educators (although not all) as more important than preparing a teacher to be an effective instructor.

Kate Walsh:

Nowhere is the chasm between the two visions of teacher education–training versus formation–clearer than in the demise of the traditional methods course. The public, and policymakers who require such courses in regulations governing teacher education, may assume that when a teacher takes a methods course, it is to learn the best methods for teaching certain subject matter. That view, we are told in the AERA volume, is for the most part an anachronism. The current view, state professors Renee T. Clift and Patricia Brady, is that “A methods course is seldom defined as a class that transmits information about methods of instruction and ends with a final exam. [They] are seen as complex sites in which instructors work simultaneously with prospective teachers on beliefs, teaching practices and creation of identities–their students’ and their own.”
The statement reveals just how far afield teacher education has traveled from its training purposes. It is hard not to suspect that the ambiguity in such language as the “creation of identities” is purposeful, because if a class fails to meet such objectives, no one would be the wiser.
The shift away from training to formation has had one immediate and indisputable outcome: the onus of a teacher’s training has shifted from the teacher educators to the teacher candidates. What remains of the teacher educator’s purpose is only to build the “capacity” of the candidate to be able to make seasoned professional judgments. Figuring out what actually to do falls entirely on the candidate.
Here is the guidance provided to student teachers at a large public university in New York:
In addition to establishing the norm for your level, you must, after determining your year-end goals, break down all that you will teach into manageable lessons. While so much of this is something you learn on the job, a great measure of it must be inside you, or you must be able to find it in a resource. This means that if you do not know the content of a grade level, or if you do not know how to prepare a lesson plan, or if you do not know how to do whatever is expected of you, it is your responsibility to find out how to do these things. Your university preparation is not intended to address every conceivable aspect of teaching.
Do not be surprised if your Cooperating Teacher is helpful but suggests you find out the “how to” on your own. Your Cooperating Teacher knows the value of owning your way into your teaching style.

Related: When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?.
Wisconsin has recently taken a first baby step toward teacher content knowledge requirements (something Massachusetts and Minnesota have done for years) via the adoption of MTEL-90. Much more on teacher content knowledge requirements, here.
Content knowledge requirements for teachers past & present.

Jordan Weissmann:

When you look at the average performance of American students on international test scores, our kids come off as a pretty middling bunch. If you rank countries based on their very fine differences, we come in 14th in reading, 23rd in science, and 25th in math. Those finishes led Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to flatly declare that “we’re being out-educated.”
And on average, maybe we are. But averages also sometimes obscure more than they reveal. My colleague Derek Thompson has written before about how, once you compare students from similar income and class backgrounds, our relative performance improves dramatically, suggesting that our educational problems may be as much about our sheer number of poor families as our supposedly poor schools. This week, I stumbled on another data point that belies the stereotype of dimwitted American teens.
When it comes to raw numbers, it turns out we generally have far more top performers than any other developed nation.
That’s according to the graph below from Economic Policy Institute’s recent report on America’s supply of science and tech talent. Among OECD nations in 2006, the United States claimed a third of high-performing students in both reading and science, far more than our next closest competitor, Japan. On math, we have a bit less to be proud of — we just claimed 14 percent of the high-performers, compared to 15.2 percent for Japan and 16.2 percent of South Korea.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org

Stephanie Banchero:

Classrooms across the country roll out universal math and reading standards, a growing group of critics are pressing officials to slow their implementation or dump the learning goals entirely.
This is the first school year that most states are using voluntary academic standards known as Common Core, which lay out what students should know from kindergarten through 12th grade. Written by a group of governors, state school officials and other experts with the goal of better preparing students for college and careers, the standards have been adopted entirely by 45 states and the District of Columbia since 2010. A 46th state, Minnesota, has adopted only the language-arts portion.
Now, the Common Core effort is under attack from an unlikely coalition: conservatives who decry the implementation costs and call the standards an intrusion into local education decisions; union leaders who worry that states have tied, or plan to tie, teacher evaluations to new Common Core exams; and some parents who contend their children are ill-prepared for the Common Core tests.

George Skelton:

Now we know what Gov. Jerry Brown really cares about — what gets him riled and raring to rumble.
“The battle of their lives,” he promises opponents. “This is a cause.”
When a governor bares his soul like that, not only is he waving a nasty stick, he’s tacking up a big sign that reads, “Name your price.”
Brown’s passion: pouring more tax money into inner-city schools at the expense of the suburbs.
It’s not that simple, of course. Nothing about California school finance is.
Not all urban districts would benefit from Brown’s school funding redistribution scheme. Oakland Unified, for example. Brown’s hometown, where he was mayor, would get shortchanged.
Oakland’s schools would receive $228 less per pupil under his plan when fully implemented than under the current funding formula, according to the state education department. The governor’s own budget office also shows Oakland as a loser.
So the governor might want to tweak his proposal to eliminate at least one unintended consequence.
Brown’s plan would allot significantly more money for districts with large percentages of poor children — those eligible for subsidized lunches — and English learners. But that would mean less than otherwise for middle-class and better-off districts where the vast majority of kids speak English at home.
Among the 50 largest districts, more than half would be losers under Brown’s plan, based on education department calculations.

Ryan Lillis:

But Shirey said he would withdraw that recommendation if the Sacramento Police Officers Association, the union representing city police officers and sergeants, does not agree to have its members pick up the full employee contribution into their pensions by July 1.
Most city employees pay an employee share of pension contributions; the city picks up an employer share. The police union is the largest in the city that does not pay into its retirement plan.
Dustin Smith, the head of the police officers union, said the organization and city officials are in “active bargaining sessions” and that more talks are planned.
“We’re still hoping we can bargain some type of deal that works out for both the community and the officers who serve it,” he said.
The City Council will receive its first formal briefing on the budget at its May 7 meeting and is scheduled to adopt the budget June 11.

The Wisconsin State Journal:

School principals should know who their best teachers are, and those top performers deserve higher pay.
Jeff Charbonneau, honored last week by President Barack Obama at the White House as national teacher of the year, helps show why.
Charbonneau teaches chemistry, physics, engineering and architecture at Zillah High School in Zillah, Wash.
“I fight a stigma,” Charbonneau wrote in his award application. “Students hear the words ‘quantum mechanics’ and instantly think ‘too hard’ and ‘no way.’ It is my job to convince them that they are smart enough, that they can do anything.”
He’s succeeding. About two-thirds of juniors and seniors at the small, rural school are signing up for chemistry and physics. And nearly every student is graduating with some college credit, according to the Associated Press.
Charbonneau can award college credits to his high school students because he attained adjunct faculty status with local universities, and many of his fellow teachers at Zillah now are doing the same. Zillah offers 72 classes that can lead to college credits, and 90 percent of students go on to college, an apprenticeship or the military.

Much more, here.

Jay Bullock:

Back when I used to blog about politics, I was a constant critic of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s PolitiFact operation. Or, as I called it, Politi”Fact,” with the emphasis on the sarcasm quotes.
Why? Because PolitiFact Wisconsin, as the local franchise is known, tries to set itself up as a neutral arbiter, and so it usually plays the “both sides do it” card. It can’t be too critical of one side, even if that one side plays far more fast and loose with the facts than the other side does. (Also: there are only two sides, so the truth must lie in the middle!)
This kind of faux-neutrality is the hallmark not of fact-checkers but of a distant, entitled media, hoping to maintain an “above it all” reputation and the good graces of the folks who generously douse the state’s largest media operation with significant political ad buys every couple of years.
In Monday’s paper, the PolitiFact crew examines some claims made about school vouchers by groups both favoring the program’s expansion (including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker) and opposing it, claiming it is “sorting out the truth” about voucher schools. It should be no surprise that I oppose expansion, though I am not personally involved in the anti-voucher groups cited in this story.

David Blaska:

The Madison School Board recently voted 7-0 to encourage the state Legislature to say no to school choice. The surprise would have been had they voted otherwise.
I suspect Madison’s school board is like yours in Neenah and others throughout the state. Given their druthers, they’d just as soon have no competition. Makes management ever so much simpler.
Of course, those who can afford to do so can send their children to private schools – but first they must pay the monopoly school district, or move out of town. What a business model! Kim Jong-un would approve!
Our school board has the firm backing of the teachers union – the same one that unilaterally closed down Madison schools for a week during the Siege of the Capitol in February-March 2011. It should! The union elected them!

Greg Toppo:

Schools that want to do a better job fighting bullying ought to start with one key step, a group of researchers said Tuesday: Stop using the term “bullying.”
Because it’s “being used for everything from rolling eyes to ‘not wanting to be your friend’ to sexual assault, the word ‘bullying’ has really obscured our ability to focus on what’s happening” to children, said Dorothy Espelage of the University of Illinois.
Educators have been “spinning our wheels for decades” in a bid to treat bullying, but they’re often hampered by policies that require mistreatment to be repetitive, for example, part of the classic definition of bullying. That focus also obscures whether specific acts are happening more or less, she said.

Felix Salmon:

Peter Cooper understood this well. A wealthy man, he owned a lot of land in Manhattan — including the land underneath what is now the Chrysler Building — and he knew that land would, literally, produce healthy rents in perpetuity. A philanthropist, Cooper knew exactly what he wanted those rents to be spent on: he created the Cooper Union, a college with the defining characteristic that it would charge its students nothing. It was — and is — a noble cause. And in the early days, its trustees quite literally bought into that cause: they helped out with its endowment, and covered its deficits in years where it lost money.
Cooper understood that free education doesn’t really scale. If you’re charging, then extra students provide extra income which can pay for extra teachers and administrators and buildings. But if you’re giving education away for free, then it’s imperative that you operate strictly within your means. The only way to grow is if you persuade some new generations of wealthy benefactors to contribute their own money or land. But at Cooper Union, that hasn’t happened for many decades.
As a result, Cooper Union has always been an extremely special educational institution, the kind of place where a little went a very long way. The faculty was not well paid; the facilities were bare-bones. But the students were fantastic, because Cooper could pick the very best of the very best. And the college’s overriding social mission engendered a huge amount of loyalty and love for the institution, as well as being reflected deep in its curricula. Here’s Sangamithra Iyer, for instance:

The Washington Post:

As public schools across the country transition to the new Common Core standards, which bring wholesale change to the way math and reading are taught in 45 states and the District, criticism of the approach is emerging from groups as divergent as the tea party and the teachers union.
The standards, written by a group of states and embraced by the Obama administration, set common goals for reading, writing and math skills that students should develop from kindergarten through high school graduation. Although classroom curriculum is left to the states, the standards emphasize critical thinking and problem solving and encourage thinking deeply about fewer topics.
But as the common core shifts from theory to reality, critics are emerging. State lawmakers are concerned about the cost, which the Fordham Institute estimated could run as high as $12 billion nationally. Progressives fret over new exams, saying that the proliferation of standardized tests is damaging public education. Teachers worry that they haven’t had enough training and lack the resources to competently teach to the new standards. And conservatives say the new standards mean a loss of local control over education and amount to a national curriculum. They’ve begun calling it “Obamacore.”
On Tuesday, the head of the American Federation of Teachers and a strong supporter of the Common Core standards will warn that the new approach is being poorly implemented and requires a “mid-course correction” or the effort will fall apart.
“The Common Core is in trouble,” said Randi Weingarten, the union president who is slated to speak Tuesday in New York about the issue. “There is a serious backlash in lots of different ways, on the right and on the left.”

Jess Cotton:

Described as the “Alex Ferguson of University Challenge”, for 16 years librarian Stephen Pearson has been the driving force behind the rigorous selection and training procedures of Manchester University’s quiz team, leading them to three victories since 2005. Ahead of tonight’s final between Manchester and UCL, he gives five insights into what makes a successful team.
1. Fingers on buzzer
The ability to buzz in on starter questions is actually more important than pure knowledge. The starters are the key to a team’s success – even if a contestant has copious amounts of general knowledge, if they don’t have the instinct to buzz in straightaway, they’re simply not going to get the starter points. Contestants should buzz in even if they are not 100 per cent sure of the answer.
2. Team building
A cohesive team is essential. When picking the contestants I ensure that there’s at least one candidate who’s strong on literature, history, geography and science. The training sessions allow the contestants to understand when to leave certain questions to the expert in that field. The first practice session is for them to get to know each other as people as much as anything else. I use a similar format to business team-building exercises – there should be lots of bonding and harnessing of team spirit. I’m getting a bit old for it now, but I know that after the practice sessions current and previous contestants will go to the pub for, I’m told, informal mentoring over drinks.
3. The classics
Many of the University Challenge questions include clues which refer to the Latin and Greek derivations of words – particularly scientific terms. This means that people who know their classics can respond even if they’ve got no idea about the science involved. Kwasi Kwarteng, now an MP for the Conservative party, showed this to great effect in his performance as part of the winning Trinity College Cambridge team of 1995.

Vauhini Vara:

A battle is heating up in California over Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to boost funding for all schools, but funnel more money to districts where many students are poor and struggle with English and less to wealthier districts.
Since Mr. Brown, a Democrat, unveiled the “weighted funding” plan in January, school chiefs in poorer areas have pushed hard for the state legislature to pass it.
But superintendents in richer districts argue that the proposed redistribution is unfair and that they want a bigger slice of the pie now that the state’s finances have improved, thanks to a stronger economy and a tax increase.
Public schools in California, as in other states, are financed by a mix of federal, state and local dollars. Local funding includes property taxes and donations, which tend to bring in more money in wealthier areas.Federal funding, which includes Title I funding for low-income districts, generally brings more money to low-income districts.

Doug Erickson

As the Rev. Richard Sunderlage entered the elementary classroom at Resurrection Lutheran School one recent morning, all five students shot up out of their desks.
Students at the school are required to stand whenever an adult enters the room. They also must address their elders as “ma’am” or “sir.”
Such rules set the school apart, but so do many other things. It is tiny — just 12 students in first grade through high school — and it is not affiliated with a church. Even rarer, it charges no tuition or fees.
“We don’t want there to be any barriers,” said Sunderlage, the school’s driving force.
Now in its third year, the school appears to be the only no-tuition, no-fees, first-through-12th-grade private school in the state. Matt Kussow, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Religious & Independent Schools, said he is not aware of any others.
Good Shepherd Lutheran School in Wisconsin Rapids also is tuition-free, but it stops at eighth grade, charges a book fee and caps enrollment at 15. Resurrection Lutheran turns no one away. It has had as many as 33 students and could hold up to 100.

The Chicago Tribune:

Indiana lawmakers are proposing huge increases in state education funding this year. Ditto those in Wisconsin.
Here in Illinois, The Deadbeat State? Just the opposite. Education funding is being strangled by the same python that is strangling the rest of state government’s finances: pension obligations. Every day that the Legislature delays the enactment of pension reform, the unfunded liability of the state’s five pension funds grows by $17 million, according to Gov. Pat Quinn’s office.
In this state, we’re not arguing about how to, say, give more money to schools because great schools drive growth and innovation, attract businesses, create jobs.
No, we’re arguing instead about which school kids will get cheated more than other school kids because state lawmakers dither on a pension fix — kids from richer districts or those from poorer districts? That’s the depressing debate we’re having.
Here’s why: In Illinois, the Legislature sets a “foundation” funding level that the state says every student needs for an adequate education. That’s the starting point for a calculation that determines how much state aid each district receives. The calculation considers each district’s local taxing ability to meet that foundation level, and also looks at how many students in the district need extra support because they’re from low-income families. Districts that have relatively lower revenue and educate relatively more higher-need students receive more state aid.

Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 Madison Rotary Speech:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Pamela Cotant:

Students at Wingra School only needed to travel across the street for a day in the outdoors as part of its annual all-school unit called Outdoor Odyssey.
Last week, students ages 5 to 14 culminated the unit by working in multi-age teams to complete a variety of challenges throughout the UW Arboretum, across Monroe Street from the school.
The challenges, created by Wingra teachers and UW Arboretum naturalists, included identifying animal skin and bones, a scavenger hunt, identifying scat and measuring the weather with different instruments made by the students.
Wearing a matching raincoat and boots with a bug design, kindergartener Leo Langer, 5, used a trowel to dig up invasive plants under the supervision of teachers and Arboretum staff. He said it was his favorite activity so far that day.
“I learned a new way to dig out (dame’s rocket) instead of just pulling stuff out with your hands,” he said.

Mary Beth Faller:

Harold Begay drives around Tuba City, on the Navajo Reservation, showing a visitor boarded-up buildings and ramshackle houses abandoned by the federal government and left to rot.
Begay, who is superintendent of Tuba City Unified School District, tells his visitor about high unemployment on the reservation and the sense of alienation in many young people who feel cut off from their culture and the traditional Arizona classroom. Like most Arizona districts on American Indian reservations, Tuba City’s is struggling.
Begay is familiar with the disconnect between the traditional values of the Navajos and modern education.
A quiet man whose soft speech is inflected with the tones of his native Navajo language, Begay spent his childhood tending his family’s corn and sheep a few miles from where his Tuba City office now stands. He greeted the sunrise with prayers and ended evenings with a family meal and stories about what it means to be Navajo, or “Dine” as they call themselves.
After enduring troubles in school on the reservation, Begay joined the Marines and, after leaving the military, drove a school bus. He eventually went back to school, earned a doctorate and traveled the world before being drawn back to Tuba City, a few square miles of modest homes on the mesas of the Painted Desert, 75 miles north of Flagstaff.

The Madison School District:

The team from West High School won at the Wisconsin Science Olympiad State Tournament on Saturday April 13th at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The team competed against high school teams from across the state. West High performed at a high level, winning many individual medals (8 first place medals) and the overall team championship. West followed up last year’s win with back to back titles. They also won the honor to represent the state of Wisconsin at the national tournament where the top Math and Science high schools will compete for national honors. Hamilton Middle School will also attend the national tournament.

Congratulations.

Margot Peppers:

Mona Lisa and Kip Harding from Montgomery, Alabama, home-school all ten of their kids – six of whom started college by the age of 12.
The remaining four children are ten and under and also aim to go to college early.
A mother who home-schools her ten children in Montgomery, Alabama, has opened up about how six of them began their college degrees by the age of 12.
Those of the Harding siblings who have already graduated from college have gone on to become a doctor, an architect, a spacecraft designer and a master’s student. Another two – 12 and 14-years-old – are still finishing up their degrees.
But despite the Hardings’ incredible achievements at such young ages, their parents – Mona Lisa and Kip – insist they are a family of ‘average folks’ who simply find and cultivate their children’s passions early on.

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

MTI has filed notice with the Board of Education and the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) to open bargaining for 2014-15 Collective Bargaining Agreements for all five (5) MTI bargaining units. Bargaining is enabled by Judge Colas’ decision that Act 10, which sought to bar public sector bargaining, is unconstitutional. The City of Madison and the County of Dane have contracts with all City and County unions through 2015.
Last week MTI filed an additional petition with Judge Colas because of the failure of the Governor and the WERC Commissioners to implement those parts of Act 10 which Colas found to violate the Wisconsin Constitution. The WERC Commissioners contend that, because Judge Colas did not issue an injunction, they may ignore his declaratory judgment when considering cases filed at the WERC. The WERC Commissioners and the Governor apparently believe that without a specific injunction directing them to abide by the Court’s declaration of unconstitutionality, they are free to apply the law as they, not the Court, interprets it.
MTI Executive Director John Matthews said, “The above-described actions of the WERC Commissioners and the Governor, who are parties to the case, are unprecedented. They argued that the law was constitutional and they lost. They asked for a stay from the Circuit Court and the Court of Appeals and they lost. By implementing and enforcing a law determined to be unconstitutional, they are saying ‘We are above the law.’ That is intolerable. Consequently, MTI has returned to court to seek an injunction to force the WERC Commissioners, and the Governor who controls them, to respect the Courts and follow the law.”
MTI expects to exchange bargaining proposals with the District within the next few weeks. MTI represents approximately 5,000 District employees in five different bargaining units. They are teachers (MTI), educational assistants (EA-MTI), clerical/technical employees (SEE-MTI), substitute teachers (USO-MTI) and school security assistants (SSA-MTI).
In addition to the usual topics, MTI bargaining will include District proposals to amend Contract terms about parent-teacher conferences and possible extension, in some schools, of the school day and school year.

Fascinating. It appears likely that Madison’s “status quo” governance model will continue.
Commentary on Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes’ Teacher Salary Increase Colloquy.
Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.

Tamar Lewin:

Dazzled by the potential of free online college classes, educators are now turning to the gritty task of harnessing online materials to meet the toughest challenges in American higher education: giving more students access to college, and helping them graduate on time.
Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes. That early detour can be costly, leading many to drop out, often in heavy debt and with diminished prospects of finding a job.
Meanwhile, shrinking state budgets have taken a heavy toll at public institutions, reducing the number of seats available in classes students must take to graduate. In California alone, higher education cuts have left hundreds of thousands of college students without access to classes they need.

Greg Toppo:

In 2002, educator Ryan Hill opened his dream school with all of 80 students, four teachers and one office manager. “I was there till midnight every single night,” he said. “It was really hard.”
Like many startups, the Newark middle school started with a single grade level and grew by adding a grade each fall. Eleven years later, TEAM Academy belongs to what is essentially a four-campus mini-district: two elementary schools, another middle school and a 525-student high school, each of which grew the same way. The TEAM charter school network, part of the national KIPP schools movement, enrolls 1,800 students, with plans to double over the next few years to 10 schools. Its waiting list, almost 9,000 names long, covers nearly one in four Newark students.
The secret to Hill’s success: starting from scratch. “Learning how to manage four people is not easy,” he said, “but (it’s) way easier than learning how to manage 40. It allows you as a principal to grow into the role and makes it possible for more people to pull it off.”
The Obama administration has long supported charter school startups like TEAM Academy, but it now invests much more — $3 billion in all — into a very different strategy. Instead of starting from scratch, Obama wants to “turn around” the USA’s worst public schools, improving the schools we’ve got.

Danielle Curtis:

Kim Wright took a few college courses after graduating high school but never earned a degree.
Though she thought about going back to school for years, financial constraints always held her back.
So when her employer told her about a self-paced online program that would help her earn her associate degree in less than two years, she jumped at the chance.
“I always want to challenge myself, to get more knowledge and prove that I can do it,” Wright said Wednesday. “I’m just excited to see how far I can go.”
Wright, facilities manager at The Moore Center in Manchester, which provides care to individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities and brain injuries, is one of about 500 employees from companies and organizations around the country participating in an eight-month pilot program of Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America online, competency-based degree program.

Tarak Barkawi:

The New York Times, Slate and Al Jazeera have recently drawn attention to the adjunctification of the professoriate in the US. Only 24 per cent of university and college faculty are now tenured or tenure-track.
Much of the coverage has focused on the sub-poverty wages of adjunct faculty, their lack of job security and the growing legions of unemployed and under-employed PhDs. Elsewhere, the focus has been on web-based learning and the massive open online courses ( MOOCs), with some commentators celebrating and others lamenting their arrival.
The two developments are not unrelated. Harvard recently asked its alumni to volunteer their time as “online mentors” and “discussion group managers” for an online course. Fewer professors and fewer qualified – or even paid – teaching assistants will be required in higher education’s New Order.
Lost amid the fetishisation of information technology and the pathos of the struggle over proper working conditions for adjunct faculty is the deeper crisis of the academic profession occasioned by neoliberalism. This crisis is connected to the economics of higher education but it is not primarily about that.
The neoliberal sacking of the universities runs much deeper than tuition fee hikes and budget cuts.

Charlie Mas:

That represents a grievous failure to manage. That’s a simple fact. The absence of any assessment of the quality and efficacy of these programs constitutes an indisputable failure to manage the programs. How can the District make decisions based on data if there is no data?
The Board has a duty to oversee the district’s management – not to meddle or micromanage, but to confirm that the management work is getting done. Given the poor documentation, rapid turnover at the executive level, and history of non-management, this duty carries more than ordinary weight.
Towards that end, the Board conducted a work session to review the management of two of these efforts – Advanced Learning and Native Education. The Board not only noticed the absence of reports on the quality or effectiveness of these programs, but throughout the department. Director Carr decried the absence of any meaningful metrics or benchmarks for the entire C & I operation. She noted the absence of Key Performance Indicators. Others noted the mismatch between objectives, measures, and targets for the department. It wasn’t lost on them.

Jurjen van Rees:

For the Netherlands, and its capital Amsterdam in particular, 2013 is promised to be a momentous year. On April 13th the city celebrated the re-opening of its famous Rijksmuseum with the centre of attention pointed at the Rembrandt’s Nightwatch. Jubilees in the city in 2013 include the Artis zoo, the Royal Concert Gebouw, its Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and 400 years of constructing the iconic canals of Amsterdam. Adding to the festivities is the inauguration of the new king Willem Alexander who is succeeding his abdicated mother queen Beatrix on April 30th. As if these weren’t enough reasons to plan a visit to the Venice of Northern Europe, the city government is hosting a competition to start a new research university with the alluring title Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions.
The establishment of a new university in Amsterdam should first and foremost be seen in the light of supra-national policy goals set by the European Union.
It all starts in 2000 in Lisbon with the European Commission determined to transform Europe into the top-region in the world for research, innovation and educational excellence through the Lisbon Strategy. When it comes to EU policy strategies, the Dutch have a strong tendency to act accordingly to their proclaimed status of being the bravest and smartest young child in the classroom. Together with their ‘big brother’ Germany, the Netherlands holds a comparable approach when it comes to the national deficit not exceeding 3% of the gross national income on which EU member states agreed upon in 1997. The European Union pours billions of euros – 50,5 to be precise – in fundamental research through their 7th Framework Programme up till 2013, followed by another subsidy programme Horizon 2020 with an estimated 80 billion Euros being invested in the European knowledge economy between 2014 and 2020. From a European perspective the Dutch feel they have a knowledge-intensive responsibility to live up to.

Eric Smith:

It has been 30 years since the landmark report “A Nation At Risk” documented the failings of America’s public-school system, and the past three decades have seen much promising reform on the local, state and federal levels, in legislatures, on school boards and in classrooms. Yet today the trend lines again are moving in the wrong direction, with federal policy inviting states to back away from their duty to ensure that students receive the education they deserve.
Since 2011, the U.S. Department of Education has granted waivers to 34 states and the District of Columbia exempting them from some of the core accountability measures in the bipartisan 2001 No Child Left Behind law. Ten more states have waiver applications pending. Meanwhile, the Texas legislature is considering loosening public-school testing standards, and nine districts in California have independently moved to submit NCLB waiver requests.
No Child Left Behind was based on the idea that schools should establish measurable educational goals and be held accountable for meeting them. This is the only proven formula for improving education in this country–and NCLB has generated some amazing results, particularly in low-income minority communities. Unfortunately, opponents of the law have relied on disingenuous claims in pushing for waivers.

Bill Bush:

On Tuesday, the commission released a list of recommendations that would significantly change the management of Columbus City Schools. Those included:
The mayor, city council president, school board president, city auditor and county probate judge would appoint an independent auditor to monitor the school board.
A fund overseen by a panel from the private sector, schools and city government would oversee a fund of $35 million to $50 million to help replicate high-performing city schools and successful charter schools. A portion of that money would come from property taxes paid by district residents.
The mayor would re-start a department of education in his administration. The director would sit on the school board as a non-voting, advisory member.

Reimagine Columbus Education.

Katie Zhu:

My frustrations are with the rigidity of my actual degree requirements – the credits I have to take in order to graduate. The credits for which I’ve wasted hours of email back and forth, running around getting signatures, and filling out petition forms in order to get them to line up with my little degree chart so I can check off the appropriate boxes and graduate on time.
My frustrations are with the lack of an applicable concentration that reflects the state of the news industry in 2013.
How is it okay that journalism students are able to graduate without ever taking a real statistics or mathematics class, given the crazy demand for data journalists? Or without ever taking a programming class?
The field of journalism has always been interdisciplinary, though traditionally this has been with the non-technical disciplines – the humanities, economics, political science.

Great points.

Carolyn Luby:

These are serious marks against both our athletic program and our university as a whole — marks that, other than a decision made by Coach Kevin Ollie to suspend Wolf indefinitely, have gone unaddressed, unmentioned, and unacknowledged by UConn authorities. What does this timeline say when juxtaposed with your justification? It beckons the question, what does UConn do with marks like these? The answer appears to be: we turn them blue and shape them into something new.
Instead of giving these problematic aspects of male athletic peer culture at UConn a second look or a giving the real face of athletics a true makeover, it appears that the focus of your administration is prioritizing the remodeling of the fictional face of the Husky Logo. Instead of communicating a zero tolerance atmosphere for this kind of behavior, increasing or vocalizing support to violence against women prevention efforts on campus in the face of such events, or increasing support to student run programs that seek to work with athletes on issues of violence as well as academic issues, it would appear that your administration is more interested in fostering consumerism and corporatization than education and community. Another example of this shift in priorities can be seen in the current administrations selection of the new logo — a selection made with no involvement from or consultation with the normal, everyday, non-Olympian student body:
Contrary to speculation, the Husky will not appear to be mean, snarling, or capable of frightening small children! Instead he will be rendered as the sleek, beautiful animal a real Husky truly is.

Jeffrey Selingo:

May 1 is fast approaching, and with it the deadline for high-school seniors to commit to a college. At kitchen tables across the country, anxious students and their parents are asking: Does it really matter where I go to school?
When it comes to lifetime earnings, we’ve been told, a bachelor’s degree pays off six times more than a high-school diploma. The credential is all that matters, not where it’s from–a view now widely accepted. That’s one reason why college enrollment jumped by a third last decade and why for-profit schools that make getting a diploma ultraconvenient now enroll 1 in 10 college students. But is it true that all colleges sprinkle their graduates with the same magic dust?
With unemployment among college graduates at historic highs and outstanding student-loan debt at $1 trillion, the question families should be asking is whether it’s worth borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for a degree from Podunk U. if it’s just a ticket to a barista’s job at Starbucks. When it comes to calculating the return on your investment, where you go to school does matter to your bank account later in life.
Not surprisingly, research has found that a degree from a name-brand elite college, whether it’s Harvard, Stanford or Amherst, carries a premium for earnings. But the 50 wealthiest and most selective colleges and universities in the U.S. enroll less than 4% of students. For everyone else, the statistics show that choosing just any college, at any cost for a credential, may no longer be worth it.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

A legislative move to expand a planned audit of the University of Wisconsin System is entirely appropriate given the recent revelation that the system has $648 million in reserves spread across hundreds and possibly thousands of accounts.
Students and families who faced 5.5% tuition increases in recent years deserve to know why those increases were necessary when university officials were setting aside money in those accounts for various purposes. Couldn’t the university have set aside fewer funds, still have a (albeit smaller) contingency and not raised tuition?
The public also deserves to know more about the reserves, including where the money came from, how the university determined the level of reserves and how the funds are allocated across the system. Are those funds in interest-bearing accounts?
And university officials need to address issues of transparency and accountability. Legislators are rightly angry that they were unaware of the size of the reserve funds, which came to light in a report by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. That should not have been the case.
University officials have acknowledged that they should have been more forthcoming about the numbers and should have done a better job of explaining them. Absolutely: System officials have mishandled this from the moment the report came to light, and they haven’t been getting much better. It’s a public relations disaster for the UW System.

Alan Borsuk:

Let’s take a trip to the basement of Wisconsin educational success.
The spotlight on student success is almost always on the top levels – “advanced” and “proficient,” as they are labeled. I’ve done it that way for years myself, focusing on what percentage of kids were doing well.
How many were at what I would call the ground level of success (labeled “basic”) or basement level (“minimal”) got little attention.
But as I strolled through some of the scores for schools across the state that were released last week by the state Department of Public Instruction, I found my focus shifting to the “minimal” totals.
Why? The results differ so dramatically from previous years. The bar for putting a student in the higher categories for reading and math has been raised sharply, which means the number of students in those categories has fallen sharply. There are a lot more kids in the basement now – 24% of all test-takers in the state were rated “minimal” in reading, compared to 5% a year ago.
We’ve never given a school respect for keeping down the number of kids who show minimal proficiency. In the new approach, maybe it’s time to do that. That’s especially true in Milwaukee, where students at high-risk of not doing well are so plentiful.
There is a wide variation from school to school in how many students are rated “minimal,” as compared to “basic,” even in schools dealing with similarly challenging kids. There are schools with extraordinary concentrations of “minimal” kids, which I take as not a good sign about the school.

In Business:

Kids have been trying to sneak portable electronic devices into classrooms for decades. From the old Coleco handheld football game to today’s smart phones, anything that glowed, made obnoxious noises, and could fit neatly inside a knapsack was enough to satisfy kids’ appetite for distraction.
Well, here’s some bad news for students: Your ongoing rebellion will now have to take another form. For fun, try sneaking a slide rule onto campus. But bring your iPad. You’re going to need it for class.
“The way that technology has provided mass customization to many other industries, it’s starting to do the same thing for education.” – Jon Tanner, Oregon School District
The technological revolution that’s overtaking the business world, our social lives, and nearly every other nook and cranny of society is quickly reshaping education, and locally, the Oregon School District is among the leaders in the movement.
At the December School Leaders Advancing Technology in Education (SLATE) conference, participants identified preparing for advances in technology as the number one issue facing Wisconsin schools.

500K PDF, via a kind reader’s email.

The Economist

ABOVE the entrance to America’s Supreme Court four words are carved: “Equal justice under law”. The court is pondering whether affirmative action breaks that promise. The justices recently accepted a case concerning a vote in Michigan that banned it, and will soon rule on whether the University of Texas’s race-conscious admissions policies are lawful. The question in both cases is as simple as it is divisive: should government be colour-blind?
America is one of many countries where the state gives a leg-up to members of certain racial, ethnic, or other groups by holding them to different standards. The details vary. In some countries, the policy applies only to areas under direct state control, such as public-works contracts or admission to public universities. In others, private firms are also obliged to take account of the race of their employees, contractors and even owners. But the effects are strikingly similar around the world (see article).
The burden of history
Many of these policies were put in place with the best of intentions: to atone for past injustices and ameliorate their legacy. No one can deny that, for example, blacks in America or dalits in India (members of the caste once branded “untouchable”) have suffered grievous wrongs, and continue to suffer discrimination. Favouring members of these groups seems like a quick and effective way of making society fairer.
Most of these groups have made great progress. But establishing how much credit affirmative action can take is hard, when growth also brings progress and some of the good–for example the confidence-boosting effect of creating prominent role models for a benighted group–is intangible. And it is impossible to know how a targeted group would have got on without this special treatment. Malays are three times richer in Singapore, where they do not get preferences, than in next-door Malaysia, where they do. At the same time, the downside of affirmative action has become all too apparent.

The Economist:

WILLIAM POWERS is the president of the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin). Lino Graglia holds an endowed chair at its law school. Both have kindly demeanours, impressive records and that crucial perk of academic success, offices with great views: Mr Powers looks out over the heart of the university’s campus, Mr Graglia at its football stadium.
They also hold strong and opposing opinions on whether admissions to their state-run university ought to take account of race. Mr Powers believes that using “race as one factor in an overall holistic view of the candidate” helps the university build a diverse campus, an achievement which has “an educational value for all of our students”. Mr Graglia thinks “lower[ing] standards to admit members of preferred groups” is “a bad idea”.
America has a number of policies and practices designed to increase the presence of minorities in various areas of life from which they have historically been excluded. But the role of such affirmative action in university admissions has garnered the most attention. Schools and universities provided many of America’s desegregation battlegrounds. And gaining entry to America’s elite universities is difficult; the perception, right or wrong, that race can in some circumstances trump merit strikes many as unjust, not least because universities play a large role in social mobility.
The Supreme Court is about to weigh in on the matter. In March it agreed to hear a case that could determine whether a state may ban affirmative action in university admissions on the basis of a referendum. In 2006 a majority of Michigan’s voters approved such a measure, but last November a federal appellate court ruled that the measure violates the equal-protection clause of the constitution, which requires states to treat all citizens equally, by preventing affirmative-action supporters from pressing their case to individual universities. And the court will soon rule on a suit brought against UT-Austin by Abigail Fisher, a white woman who was not admitted to the university

Tom Beebe:

Many observers have called Gov.Scott Walker’s proposal to expand private school vouchers bad education policy. I agree. Today I would like to address voucher expansion from the perspective of fiscal policy.
If voucher advocates are successful in expanding private school vouchers in this budget, vouchers will eventually become one of the largest taxpayer-funded entitlements in Wisconsin.
I realize this is a strong statement. I also understand that voucher proponents argue the Governor’s proposal increases voucher eligibility to just nine new school districts in 2013-14. If you let the nose of the camel inside the tent, however, it won’t be long before the rest of the camel is inside the tent as well.
The ultimate objective of private school voucher advocates is a statewide system of private school vouchers for all Wisconsin school children. Voucher advocates, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, have repeatedly voiced their support for statewide vouchers. This objective became crystal-clear in a recent news interview when School Choice Wisconsin Vice-President Terry Brown identified the goal of voucher proponents as “a voucher in every backpack.”
So, how much could this entitlement end up costing Wisconsin taxpayers?

NPR Around the Nation:

In his cover story for the April 29 issue of The New Republic, “The Hell of American Day Care,” Jonathan Cohn writes that “trusting your child with someone else is one of the hardest things a parent has to do — and in the U.S., it’s harder still, because American day care is a mess. And about 40 percent of children under 5 spend at least part of their week in the care of somebody other than a parent.”
Cohn’s article examines how we ended up with a day care system that is barely regulated and sometimes unsafe. It’s a system that is difficult for many working parents to afford, yet offers many of its workers a barely livable income.
“One of the tragedies of the situation,” Cohn tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, “is that parents need these day cares to work, to make a living. You’re talking about single parents a lot of the time. You’re talking about families that aren’t making a lot of money. They desperately need someone to watch the kids or they’re not going to be able to make it, and there are just not a lot of options out there.”

Mike Ford:

I had my first chance to read through the new Milwaukee Public School (MPS) budget proposal yesterday, and I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. Compared to trends of the last decade or so, things are definitely looking better for the district.
Most important, MPS is increasing their staffing in key areas next year. Despite all the talk about governance structure the most important place in education is the school itself. MPS is increasing its school level staffing by 120.8 full-time-equivalent employees in FY14. A good number of those positions, 51, are teachers and educational assistants (though on the negative side the federal sequestration is responsible for the loss of 24 title 1 teachers). The district is also adding assistant principals, safety assistants, social workers, and nurse associates in schools. All of this is particularly impressive when overall enrollment is projected to decline 1%.
So how did they do this? A big part is the aggressive action the district has taken to reduce its benefit costs. MPS notes in their budget that their average teacher salary is increasing but their “school operations and categorical benefit” rate will drop to 58.4% from almost 70% just two years ago. Part of this is due to Act 10, and part of this is due to the willingness of MPS to take needed action.

Milwaukee’s $1,170,867,945 budget will spend $15,011 for each of its 78,000 students during the 2013-2014 school year. Madison spends a similar amount per student.

M. D. Kittle:

In January 2011, just as one of the most tumultuous sessions of the Wisconsin Legislature was getting underway, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett wrote an urgent letter to state Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills.
Barrett begged the lawmaker to push forward legislation that would transfer control of vacant and underutilized Milwaukee Public Schools real estate to the city of Milwaukee.
The mayor described the sad state of affairs in some Milwaukee neighborhoods, where “once thriving parts of their communities now sit barren and quiet.”
What the city needed, Barrett wrote, was a law that would allow the city to “take a more holistic approach to the management of these assets by addressing the needs and concerns of neighborhoods where buildings stand vacant as well as better meeting the educational needs of our community.”

M. D. Kittle:

The governor also touched on statewide proficiency data released by the state Department of Public Instruction earlier this week.
DPI on Tuesday released test scores comparing Milwaukee Parental Choice Program students to Milwaukee Public Schools students, failing to account for disparate income levels between the students.
“The vast majority of families in that program are low income,” Walker said. “If you compare the same income categories of students who come from families in Milwaukee Public Schools with Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, you’ll find that in almost every category the kids in the choice schools outperform those in the public schools.”
He added he wanted all schools to perform better.
DPI’s release showed that 19.4 percent of MPS students were proficient or advanced in mathematics compared to 13.2 percent MPCP students participating in the Wisconsin Student Assessment System.
It also showed 14.2 percent of MPS students were proficient or advanced in reading, compared to 11.1 percent of MPCP students.
Data released by the voucher advocacy organization School Choice Wisconsin, however, showed that MPCP students outperformed MPS students everywhere except math, including reading, language arts, science and social studies when comparing only students in low income families.
Free and reduced lunch is available for students whose parents earn less than 185 percent of the federal poverty line, about $41,000 for a family of four. Until last school year, the income eligibility for the school choice program was 175 percent of the federal poverty line.

Christian D’Andrea:

High school dropouts adversely impact the state of Wisconsin each year–financially and socially. Dropouts’ lower incomes, high unemployment rates, increased need for medical care, and higher propensity for incarceration create a virtual vortex that consumes Wisconsinites’ tax dollars at a vicious rate. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on these high school dropouts every year.
Not only does the state spend hundreds of millions of dollars on high school dropouts, the Wisconsin economy missed out on $3.7 billion in 2011 due to a lower average income for residents without a diploma.
This study examines the state’s costs across three major state funding mechanisms: state tax collections, Medicaid expenses, and the costs of incarceration. All three aspects compose substantial parts of Wisconsin’s operating budget. In 2010 alone, prison expenses cost the state more than $874 million (1).
However, these costs could be reduced if the state had a smaller population of these under-educated adults. By eliminating a group of residents that typically relies more on state-based aid and is more likely to end up in prison, Wisconsin could save hundreds of millions of dollars each year. These funds could have instead been invested in other efforts to improve the lives of Wisconsinites across the Badger State.

Chris Rickert:

“Our teachers haven’t had a raise for the last three years.” — Ed Hughes, clerk and candidate for president of the Madison School Board
There are a lot of employees who haven’t seen their pay go up in three years, but the vast majority of Madison public school teachers aren’t among them.
And yet, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re taking home more money.
Confused? Welcome to the world of public school teacher compensation, post-Act 10.
Hughes isn’t the first public school representative whose definition of “raise” doesn’t jibe with the way the rest of the world defines “raise” — i.e., an increase in salary for a job well done.
During teachers union contract negotiations, public school and union officials routinely refer to a “raise” as something that is distinct from and in addition to the automatic bumps in salary teachers are already getting for remaining on the job and accruing more college credit. Essentially, such raises are across-the-board increases in a district’s salary range, known as a salary schedule.
But if a district refuses to increase that range, teachers continue to get longevity and degree-attainment pay raises under the old salary schedule.
It’s such parsing that allows Hughes to say teachers haven’t gotten raises — and to be right, at least in one context.

Related: MTI & The Madison School Board, written by Ed Hughes in 2005:

The WSJ article also states that “This year’s salary and benefits increase, including raises for seniority or advanced degrees, was projected at 4.9 percent, or $8.48 million.” So the school board, with all the budgetary problems it confronts, is apparently willing to pay for salaries and benefits an increase that is about twice as much as state law will permit the overall budget to rise next year, and $1.9 million more than the amount necessary to avoid arbitration. (Using the same numbers, a 3.8% increase would be $6.57 million.)
What could be the justification for this? I understand that, as a practical matter, the increase has to be more than 3.8% in order for the district to obtain any sort of concessions. (Across the state for 2004-2005, the average total package increase per teacher was 4.28%.) Does anyone know if there are concessions on the table that might explain what seems to be an excessive increase in these difficult times? Or what other justification for this level of increase there might be?

Related: Up, Down & Transparency: Madison Schools Received $11.8M more in State Tax Dollars last year, Local District Forecasts a Possible Reduction of $8.7M this Year.
Status Quo Costs More: Madison Schools’ Administration Floats a 7.38% Property Tax Increase; Dane County Incomes down 4.1%…. District Received $11.8M Redistributed State Tax Dollar Increase last year. Spending up 6.3% over the past 16 months.