Sir Ken Robinson:

There are two main themes in the talk. First, we’re all born with deep natural capacities for creativity and systems of mass education tend to suppress them. Second, it is increasingly urgent to cultivate these capacities — for personal, economic and cultural reasons — and to rethink the dominant approaches to education to make sure that we do. One reason the talk has traveled so far is that these themes resonate so deeply with people at a personal level. I hear constantly from people around the world who feel marginalized by their own education, who want to thank me for helping them to understand why that may be and that they’re not alone. In the talk, I mentioned a book I was writing about the need to find our true talents and how often people are pushed away from them. The responses I get show that this is a common experience that’s deeply felt and ultimately resented. (Incidentally, I said in the talk that the book is called Epiphany. I later changed the title to The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. It was too late to change the reference in the talk, which has since done wonders to promote sales of books called Epiphany… )
A second reason for the impact of the talk is that people and organizations everywhere can see that current systems of education are failing to meet the challenges we now all face and they’re working furiously to create alternatives. In many countries, they’re doing this in the face of national policies and cultural attitudes that seem locked in past. The dominant systems of education are based on three principles — or assumptions at least — that are exactly opposite to how human lives are actually lived. Apart from that, they’re fine. First, they promote standardization and a narrow view of intelligence when human talents are diverse and personal. Second, they promote compliance when cultural progress and achievement depend on the cultivation of imagination and creativity. Third, they are linear and rigid when the course of each human life, including yours, is organic and largely unpredictable. As the rate of change continues to accelerate, building new forms of education on these alternative principles is not a romantic whimsy: it’s essential to personal fulfillment and to the sustainability of the world we are now creating.

m

Howard Wainer:

What constitutes a dangerous equation? There are two obvious inter­ pretations: some equations are dangerous if you know the equation and others are dangerous if you do not. In this chapter I will not ex- plore the dangers an equation might hold because the secrets within
its bounds open doors behind which lie terrible peril. Few would dis- agree that the obvious winner in this contest would be Einstein’s iconic equation
E=MC2 (1.1)

Timothy Lee:

Many universities pay hefty subscription fees to provide their users unlimited access to archives like JSTOR. Most non-academics pay by the article. Swartz, who was a fellow at Harvard University in the fall of 2010, was apparently unhappy about this situation and so joined neighboring MIT’s WiFi network as a guest and began rapidly downloading JSTOR documents. He reportedly got 4.8 million of them.
When JSTOR blocked his IP address, Swartz allegedly connected with a different IP address. When MIT then cut off his laptop from the network, Swartz allegedly changed his MAC address to allow him to regain access. Eventually, the government says that Swartz entered an MIT networking closet and plugged his laptop directly into the campus network.
The updated indictment describes the scene when Swartz returned to the closet a few days later to pick up his laptop: “Swartz held his bicycle helmet like a mask to shield his face, looking through ventilation holes in the helmet. Swartz then removed his computer equipment from the closet, put it in his backpack, and left, again masking his face with the bicycle helmet before peering through a crack in the double doors and cautiously stepping out.”
Certainly there’s no excuse for breaking into a private network closet and installing equipment without permission. But the government seems to have lost all sense of proportion here. And the apparent legal theory behind the government’s case–that using a website in a manner that violates its terms of use constitutes felony computer hacking–could have serious unintended consequences.

Austin Hughes:

The temptation to overreach, however, seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science. Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth. And this attitude is becoming more widespread among scientists themselves. All too many of my contemporaries in science have accepted without question the hype that suggests that an advanced degree in some area of natural science confers the ability to pontificate wisely on any and all subjects.
Of course, from the very beginning of the modern scientific enterprise, there have been scientists and philosophers who have been so impressed with the ability of the natural sciences to advance knowledge that they have asserted that these sciences are the only valid way of seeking knowledge in any field. A forthright expression of this viewpoint has been made by the chemist Peter Atkins, who in his 1995 essay “Science as Truth” asserts the “universal competence” of science. This position has been called scientism — a term that was originally intended to be pejorative but has been claimed as a badge of honor by some of its most vocal proponents. In their 2007 book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, for example, philosophers James Ladyman, Don Ross, and David Spurrett go so far as to entitle a chapter “In Defense of Scientism.”
Modern science is often described as having emerged from philosophy; many of the early modern scientists were engaged in what they called “natural philosophy.” Later, philosophy came to be seen as an activity distinct from but integral to natural science, with each addressing separate but complementary questions — supporting, correcting, and supplying knowledge to one another. But the status of philosophy has fallen quite a bit in recent times. Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy. Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering such questions, but the only means of answering them. For most of those who dabble in scientism, this shift is unacknowledged, and may not even be recognized. But for others, it is explicit. Atkins, for example, is scathing in his dismissal of the entire field: “I consider it to be a defensible proposition that no philosopher has helped to elucidate nature; philosophy is but the refinement of hindrance.”

School Matters Milwaukee:

The Grammy Foundation has awarded Milwaukee Public Schools’ Milwaukee High School of the Arts a Grammy Signature Schools Community Award.
Milwaukee High School of the Arts is the first school in the Midwest to receive this designation. It was selected in part because of its students’ past involvement in All Star Grammy Jazz Ensembles, including last school year’s participant, Felix Ramsey.

Michele Molnar:

The U.S. has a shortage of demanding parents.
So says Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, speaking today in Washington, D.C. at the release of the NAACP’s blueprint for education reform called, “Finding Our Way Back to First: Reclaiming World Leadership by Educating All America’s Children.”
“One of the countries out-educating us by every measure is South Korea,” Duncan said, explaining that when President Barack Obama meets the President of South Korea, Obama routinely asks, “What’s your biggest educational challenge?”
The answer from Lee Myung-bak is this: “My parents are too demanding. Even my poorest parents demand a world class education,” according to Duncan.

Seth Godin.

Pat Schneider:

But divisions over strategy, wrapped in ideology, loom as large as ever. The mere mention that the education forum and summit were on tap drew online comments about the connection of school reformers to the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that generates model legislation for conservative causes.
Conspiracy theorists, opponents retorted.
Democratic state Rep. Brett Hulsey walked out early from the fundraising luncheon because he didn’t like what Canada and Legend were saying about the possibility of reform hinging on the ability to fire ineffective teachers.
Thomas J. Mertz, a parent and college instructor who blogs on education issues, expressed in a phone interview Friday his indignation over “flying in outside agitators who have spent no time in our schools and telling us what our problems are.”
Mertz said he also was concerned by the involvement of the Madison School District with events delivering anti-union, anti-public education, pro-charter school messages. The school district, for its part, took pains to say that the $5,000 it donated in staff time was for a Friday workshop session and that it had no involvement with the appearances by Canada and Legend.
Madison doesn’t need a summit to whip up excitement over the achievement gap issue, Mertz said when I asked if the Urban League events didn’t at least accomplish that. “It’s at the point where there’s more heat than light,” he said. “There’s all this agitation, but the work is being neglected.”
That’s a charge that School Board President James Howard, who says that the district might decide to mimic some of the practices presented at the summit, flatly denies. “We’re moving full speed ahead,” he said.
….
Caire told me that the school district and teachers union aren’t ready to give up their control over the school system. “The teachers union should be the entity that embraces change. The resources they get from the public should be used for the children’s advantage. What we’re saying is, ‘Be flexible, look at that contract and see how you can do what works.'”
Madison Teachers Inc. head John Matthews responded in an email to me that MTI contracts often include proposals aimed at improving education, in the best interests of students. “What Mr. Caire apparently objects to is that the contract provides those whom MTI represents due process and social justice, workplace justice that all employees deserve.”
If Caire has his way, Madison — and the state — are up for another round of debate over how radically to change education infrastructure to boost achievement of students of color.

More here and here.

Jerry Sun:

Since elementary school, we learned basic mathematics skills as little children. As we grew older, our math improved as we learned new concepts. Yet have people ever wondered why Americans lag behind Eastern Asian countries, such as China, in math? The answer might not easily be what you think:
The answer lies not only in the practice that Asian students receive but also, surprisingly, in the language we speak. Examine the following numbers: 8,2,4,6,7,5,1. Now look away for twenty seconds, and try to memorize the order of the numbers presented. Research has shown that you have a 50% chance of accurately memorizing that sequence perfectly, if you speak English.
Yet for those who speak Chinese, it is almost assured that you will get that sequence right. The reason is not due to intelligence, but actually the phonetics of our languages. Our brain is programmed to store numbers in a repetitive loop that lasts for only a short period of time. Chinese speakers are able to fit those 7 numbers into that span of time, while English speakers cannot. Hence, the Chinese speakers can memorize those numbers at a much more efficient rate than English speakers. How is this important?

Alan Borsuk:

Means, the superintendent of Mequon-Thiensville schools and the most prominent African-American involved in education in Milwaukee suburban schools, is pushing to have constructive conversations about a subject few have wanted to discuss publicly: the lower achievement overall of minority children in suburban schools, at a time when the number of minority children in those schools is rising.
Means’ presentation came on a recent evening before 35 people at Wauwatosa West High School, a session hosted by Wauwatosa and West Allis-West Milwaukee school officials.
A few weeks earlier, Means made a similar presentation at Whitefish Bay High School. He has made the same pitch in the district where he works and just about anywhere else people will listen to him.
He is spearheading the launch of a collaborative effort involving at least a half-dozen suburban districts aimed at taking new runs at improving the picture.
The gaps are widespread and persistent. Black kids and Hispanic kids do not do as well in school as their white peers, even in the schools with the highest incomes, best facilities, most stable teaching staffs and highest test scores.
But Means told the Wauwatosa audience that schools shouldn’t focus on societal factors they can’t control. There are things schools can do, he said, such as making more meaningful commitments to high expectations for all students, insisting on rigor in classrooms, and ensuring that culturally responsive teaching styles and relationship-building are prevalent.
Means advocated three broad routes for schools:

Mequon-Thiensville’s 2012-2013 budget is $51,286,130 or $14,024 for 3,657 students. Madison will spend $15,132 per student during the 2012-2013 school year.

Stephanie Banchero:

WASHINGTON–At Davis Elementary in this city’s mostly poor southeast section, 178 students are spread out in a 69-year-old building meant to hold 450.
Three miles away, the new, $30 million KIPP charter school teems with 1,050 children. Toddlers crawl over a state-of-the-art jungle gym and older students fill brightly decorated classrooms. A waiting list holds 2,000 names.
Many students who live within the Davis boundaries instead attend the charter school, one of 125 nationwide run by KIPP, a nonprofit. The exodus helped land Davis on a list of 20 schools targeted for closure next school year.

Peretz Partensky:

Back in the USSR in the 1980s, my schoolteacher warned me that if I didn’t study hard, I’d get drafted into the army and sent to die in Afghanistan. I studied hard. I moved to America. Twenty years later, I found myself in Afghanistan anyway.
After finishing my PhD in Biophysics, I realized that I didn’t envy my professors’ jobs. Instead of continuing on in academia, I shipped out to Jalalabad in December 2010 to join the Synergy Strike Force.
The SSF was assembled by a neuroscientist named Dave Warner, who has spent the past decade trying to apply science and communications to the problems of poverty and isolation, particularly in war-torn regions. The primary goal of the group in Jalalabad was to blanket the city with internet, to teach residents how to keep the internet functioning. The group was technically unaffiliated with the US government, but Dave had many contacts in the military, particularly at DARPA, and they knew we were there.

Brandon Fastman:

With his first book, Whatever It Takes, Paul Tough put educational reformer Geoffrey Canada on the map. Canada’s data-driven, cradle-to-career concept focuses not just on schools but on entire neighborhoods, leveraging all the resources necessary to fight the deleterious effects of poverty on children. His Harlem Children’s Zone has provided the model for Santa Barbara County’s THRIVE initiative. And when Santa Barbara Unified Assistant Superintendent Emilio Handall read, Whatever It Takes, he learned about a highly successful parent training program founded in San Antonio, Texas, called AVANCE. Before he knew it, a delegation of Santa Barbarans were in Texas learning about the AVANCE curriculum which is now offered at schools like Harding, McKinley, the Carpinteria’s Children’s Project at Main, and Isla Vista Elementary School.

Mario Koran:

But, Caire said, the biggest misperception about the achievement gap is that the same disparities exist across the county and that the problems are insurmountable.
“You guys, that’s just not true,” he said.
“People are doing this all over the country, proving it’s not the kids,” he added. “It’s the structure, and it is the adults that have to be changed. There’s some personal responsibility that has to be taken: we’re not going to allow the same thing that’s been going on to [keep] going on.”
Canada challenged school districts to rethink their approaches to education by engaging students; “to prove something can work, then scale that up.”
“We’re not saying privatize education, we’re saying let’s try some innovation, hold some people accountable, this is moderate stuff, but because the climate has been so resistant to change it sounds revolutionary,” he said.
Legend recognized that nationally, school districts face limited budgets but said countries with fewer resources are doing a better job of educating their students.

Anne Constable:

About one-third of teachers in the Santa Fe Public Schools were absent more than 10 days during the 2011-12 school year due to illness, bereavement or other personal reasons, according to a new analysis released Friday.
The report by Richard Bowman, chief accountability and strategy officer for the district, also showed that 33 percent of teachers were absent more than five days in the year for professional development, coaching or other school business.
The data show major differences among the schools. The percentage of teachers with more than 10 absences in the personal/sick category ranged from 12 percent at Salazar Elementary School to 53 percent at Atalaya Elementary School, for example.

From the report: From the Santa Fe Transition Report (3.6MB PDF):

mplement an electronic timekeeping program that will track employee attendance, tardiness, and overtime worked. The system should require intervention (in form of conference with deficient employees) after a set number of tardiness or absence infractions. The system should have several reporting capabilities for management to measure and detect trends, balances, and peak periods for comparisons and strategy planning. The system should automate payroll processes to better use, expend, save, and manage taxpayers’ funds.

More, here (PDF).

Nick Kristof:

THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.
Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.
“The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky. “It’s heartbreaking.”
This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.

Superintendent Jane Belmore (700K PDF):

For the 2012-13 school year, MMSD has 1041 leavers and 281 enterers for a net enrollment decrease of 760 students due to open enrollment.
Of the 1041 leavers for 2012-13, 663 were “continuing leavers” who open enrolled outside of the District in previous years. The other 378 leavers left MMSD for the first time this year.
The increasing number of total leavers in recent years results from many consecutive years of increases in first-time leavers who subsequently become continuing leavers.
First time leavers increased from 333 to 378 from 2011-12 to 2012-13.
About 40% of the MMSD residents who open enroll outside of the district for the first time never attended MMSD and could be considered “stayers” for other districts.
A 2009 survey of open enrollment leavers showed that personal preference led to about one third of the decisions to leave, including concerns about safety, drugs and negative peer pressure. Proximity to other districts’ schools accounts for about a quarter of the reasons for attending another district. About a quarter were related to curricular, after school or virtual programs.

Related: Much more on “open enrollment”, here, and the Madison School District’s enrollment forecast (PDF).

Tom Fowler & Dougles Belkin:

As a professor, James C. Wetherbe recognized the advantages that tenure provided. In his other roles as a board member and business consultant, though, he sensed that it sometimes undercut the credibility of his advice to clients and companies.
“I would get wisecracks…that it was easy for me to make some statements because I had a guaranteed job,” Mr. Wetherbe said. “So I decided to resign tenure.”
James C. Wetherbe, shown this week at Texas Tech in Lubbock, says he believes tenure can allow ineffective teachers to remain at schools.
Now Mr. Wetherbe claims in a federal lawsuit that his views on tenure have spurred officials at Texas Tech University, the Lubbock school he joined in 2000, to oppose his advancement, including to business-school dean. He calls it an ironic twist to the argument that tenure helps ensure academic freedom.
Mr. Wetherbe, an information-technology expert who formerly served on Best Buy Co.’s BBY -1.64% board of directors, maintains in the lawsuit filed this past week that Texas Tech has violated his First Amendment rights by penalizing him for his views on tenure when considering him for promotions.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity enewsletter via a kind Linda Doeseckle email (PDF):

When a union member files a grievance it means that the member and his or her union believe the employer has failed to live up to its end of the Collective Bargaining Agreement. They are called “agreements” for a reason: the union and the employer have agreed that what has been agreed upon in negotiations is what both parties will live by, that it is best for the employee and the employer. A Collective Bargaining Agreement is a legally binding Contract.
Filing a grievance sets in motion a process for resolving the employee’s complaint. Once a grievance is filed, the union and the employer meet in a process set forth in the Collective Bargaining Agreement to discuss the reasons it was filed. When the issue cannot be resolved through discussions, the union may take the complaint to a neutral third party (an arbitrator) who will decide whether the Contract has been violated. Wisconsin law assures that union- represented employees cannot be retaliated against because of filing a grievance.
The Collective Bargaining Agreement is the Constitution of the workplace, and only unionized employees, like members of MTI, are protected by a Collective Bargaining Agreement.

Stephanie Banchero:

U.S. students knew only about half of what they were expected to on a new vocabulary section of a national exam, in the latest evidence of severe shortcomings in the nation’s reading education.
Eighth-graders scored an average of 265 out of 500 in vocabulary on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the results of which were made public Thursday. Fourth-graders averaged a score of 218 out of 500.
The results showed that nearly half of eighth-graders didn’t know that “permeates” means to “spread all the way through,” and about the same proportion of fourth-graders didn’t know that “puzzled” means confused–words that educators think students in those grades should recognize.
Most fourth-graders did know the meaning of “created,” “spread” and “underestimate.” At eighth grade, most students knew “grimace,” “icons” and “edible.”

2011 NAEP reading results by state can be found here.

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

States today have sharply divergent views of what stakes, if any, to attach to test results for kids. Several have test-based 3rd-grade reading “gates” that you must pass to advance to 4th grade (Jeb Bush said the other day that “Seven states have started on this journey”). A few have “kindergarten-readiness” assessments (though those are more often teacher “checklists” than tests). And the last time I checked, about half the states have statewide exit tests that are prerequisite to graduating from high school, though it’s true that most peg such exams to what are today deemed 9th- or 10th-grade standards. (Under Common Core, I’d wager, a bunch of current state exit tests would correlate more with 7th- or 8th-grade standards!)
Some states also have end-of-course exams in high school, the passing of which is related to getting a diploma, and there’s a widening belief in educator-land that this is a better course of action than a single statewide exit test.
But a lot of states do none of those things because they don’t really believe in high stakes for kids (or can’t get away with it politically, or are totally into “local control”), and they tend to trust teacher judgment when it comes to passing students from grade to grade or awarding the course credits that, when accumulated, yield a diploma.

Trevor McKendrick:

Why do many people end up in the same socioeconomic rung as their parents?
There’s at least two reasons I can think of.
First, it’s easier to do something when you’ve seen someone else do it.
People thought the human body could not run a mile in less than four minutes until Roger Bannister did it in 1954. Once he had shown it was possible, two months later two other runners did it in the same race.
It’s the same with being raised by parents who got rich. You saw what they did, you know it can be done.
On the other hand, if you don’t know anyone who has gone to college you might not know how that process works or even consider trying.
Being the first to do something is hard.

Stephanie Simon:

Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White has a problem with schools.
They’re too confining, he says. They trap kids in chairs, in classrooms, in the narrow bounds of an established curriculum. So White and a handful of fellow revolutionaries have begun pushing a new vision for American public education.
Call it the a la carte school.
The model, now in practice or under consideration in states including Louisiana, Michigan, Arizona and Utah, allows students to build a custom curriculum by selecting from hundreds of classes offered by public institutions and private vendors.
A teenager in Louisiana, for instance, might study algebra online with a private tutor, business in a local entrepreneur’s living room, literature at a community college and test prep with the national firm Princeton Review – with taxpayers picking up the tab for it all.

Wisconsin State Journal:

Good teachers are more important than good teachers unions.
That’s worth noting as the Wisconsin Education Association Council loses membership and explores a possible merger.
WEAC has been hurt by Act 10, Gov. Scott Walker’s strict limits on collective bargaining for most public workers. Act 10 means most teachers across Wisconsin are no longer required to pay dues to a union. The legislation also prompted many aging teachers to retire sooner than planned.
WEAC membership has fallen from nearly 100,000 two years ago to around 70,000, with further decline expected as contract extensions in cities such as Madison, Janesville and Milwaukee expire.

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

Matthew DeFour:

Two national education reform advocates encouraged about 100 attendees at an Urban League luncheon Thursday to advocate for institutional changes in the school system or “watch your city disappear.”
Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City, and Grammy-award-winning R&B musician John Legend participated in an hour-long discussion moderated by local television journalist Neil Heinen.
Canada said Madison leaders need to allow more educational innovation, such as charter schools, if it wants to raise achievement for low-income and minority students.
“You’ve got the cancer, but no one’s allowed to do any research,” Canada said. “If you care about this city, you’re going to end this (achievement gap). There is no future in allowing large numbers of your citizens to fail.”
…..
State Rep. Brett Hulsey, D-Madison, left the luncheon early because he didn’t like what he was hearing from the presenters.
“What they’re saying, I don’t know what it had to do with making our schools better for our kids,” Hulsey said. “We need to invest in our schools to hire more teachers, not talk about firing more teachers.”

Much more on the rejected Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.

Erin Richards:

After losing previous rounds of federal Race to the Top grant competitions, Wisconsin won a slice of funding Thursday: a $22.7 million grant that will help expand and improve services for young children in day care centers, preschools and kindergarten classrooms.
Wisconsin joined four other states – Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico and Oregon – that will receive a share of the $133 million Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge grant, the U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday.
Wisconsin’s grant will be spent over four years on strengthening and expanding the YoungStar child care rating system and also accelerating work on a data system that would track kids in early childhood and target more disadvantaged children for services.
A main goal is to help close the “readiness” gap between children who are white and from middle- to upper-income families and those who are of color and/or from low-income households. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds often enter the K-12 system behind their more affluent peers in terms of social development and academic exposure.

Karen Herzog:

A slightly higher percentage of students from outside Wisconsin would be allowed to enroll at University of Wisconsin System campuses for the first time in more than 40 years, starting next fall, under a compromise expected to be approved Friday by the UW Board of Regents.
A regents committee Thursday unanimously approved the compromise, raising the nonresident enrollment cap by 2.5% – from the current 25% cap to 27.5% on a three-year rolling average.
UW-Madison had proposed a nonresident enrollment cap of 30% on a rolling three-year average to help manage its enrollment. But it quickly became clear that the 30% cap wasn’t going to fly.
UW-Madison is responding to complaints that too many bright Wisconsin kids can’t get admitted to the flagship. While raising the nonresident cap, the campus also is pledging to offer 200 more freshman seats to Wisconsin residents.

Mike Ford:

Jeff Ziegler is a “teacher leader” in the Madison Metropolitan School District who has never made any secret of his disdain for Gov. Scott Walker. Openly critical of the budget-repair bill that virtually eliminated collective bargaining, he didn’t just sign the recall petition against the governor. He circulated it and spoke up publicly at a school board meeting in his hometown of Marshall during the height of the protests in March 2011.
“I’d just like to say I do not support what the governor’s doing, with this motion to eliminate collective bargaining of public employees,” he was quoted as saying. “I am very disappointed in the WASB, the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, for initially coming out and supporting this and characterizing it as, I believe they said, it balanced the negotiations.
“I don’t see how you could characterize giving one side total control and the other side nothing and calling that balanced,” he said.
Both the protests and the recall, of course, fell short. And chances are the effort of the union to which he belongs, Madison Teachers Inc., to nullify the law in the courts will fail, too. But that doesn’t mean Ziegler, who said he was speaking only on behalf of himself that night, has no influence over how his local school board in Dane County — which he suggested has too much power — makes decisions.
Quite the opposite.

Sunny Schubert:

Forty years ago, Howard Fuller was an angry young man working as a community organizer for an anti-poverty program in North Carolina. He had an Afro, wore a dashiki, toyed with Marxism, and spoke disparagingly of racial integration.
He went by the name Owusu Sadaukai, which means “one who leads his people” in Kiswahili. He visited Africa and briefly took up arms with Communist-backed “freedom fighters” trying to overthrow the Portuguese colonial government of Mozambique. Back in the states, he founded a blacks-only university, as well as African Liberation Day, which for several years in the 1970s drew thousands of marchers in a variety of U.S. cities.
Today, Fuller, 71, lives in Milwaukee and is a nationally known leader in the education reform movement. And while once he was a darling of the left, today he’s a hero to conservatives for challenging the teachers unions and championing the school choice movement.
Dissertations and books have been written about Fuller’s remarkable life, and he was featured in the emotionally charged documentary about failing inner-city schools, “Waiting for Superman.” He’s been showered with enough awards to paper a wall, including four honorary doctorates.

Alisha Azevedo:

Students looking for massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, have many options, with a growing number of providers and course titles. A handful of Web sites have popped up over the past few months to help students find courses they’re interested in, much as a restaurant-goer might turn to Yelp. Some of the sites let students review the MOOC’s they’ve taken, incorporating their views into the sites’ overall guidance.
One new directory, Course Buffet, was started two months ago by Bruce Bolton, out of his frustration over trying to compare the quality of online resources. The site lists more than 500 courses from various MOOC providers, and each course is assigned a difficulty level (Psychology 100, for example), to help students move from easier to more difficult material. He hopes to turn a profit by selling advertising, such as by sending offers from certification companies to students.
Mr. Bolton plans to add an online-transcript feature to show a list of MOOC’s a user has completed, he said. “There’s no way to prove you have taken all those courses–we’ll have to work on that,” he said. “But it gives you something to show people.”

Motoko Rich:

Like many of his third-grade classmates, Mario Cortez-Pacheco likes reading the “Magic Tree House” series, about a brother and a sister who take adventurous trips back in time. He also loves the popular “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” graphic novels.
But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said.
Hispanic students now make up nearly a quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Hispanic Center, and are the fastest-growing segment of the school population. Yet nonwhite Latino children seldom see themselves in books written for young readers. (Dora the Explorer, who began as a cartoon character, is an outlier.)

Scott Jaschik:

A new study finds that, in political science, earning a Ph.D. from one of a relatively small number of universities is the key to landing a job at a research-intensive university. And the study suggests that the number of academic “superpowers” is so small that good candidates from less-favored institutions are likely being overlooked.
The study looked at the 116 universities ranked by U.S. News & World Report for political science graduate programs, and examined where all of the tenure-track or tenured faculty members earned their doctorates. The top four institutions in the magazine’s rankings of departments — Harvard, Princeton and Stanford Universities and the University of Michigan — were the Ph.D. alma maters of 616 of the political scientists at the 116 universities (roughly 20 percent of the total). The top 11 institutions were collectively responsible for the doctoral education of about half of those in tenured or tenure-track positions at the 116 universities, leaving more than 100 departments to “contest the remaining 50 percent of openings,” says the study.
The study is described in an article by Robert Oprisko, a visiting assistant professor of international studies at Butler University, in The Georgetown Public Policy Review.

The Economist:

THE old saying that where there’s muck, there’s brass has never proved more true than in genetics. Once, and not so long ago, received wisdom was that most of the human genome–perhaps as much as 99% of it–was “junk”. If this junk had a role, it was just to space out the remaining 1%, the genes in which instructions about how to make proteins are encoded, in a useful way in the cell nucleus.
That, it now seems, was about as far from the truth as it is possible to be. The decade or so since the completion of the Human Genome Project has shown that lots of the junk must indeed have a function. The culmination of that demonstration was the publication, in September, of the results of the ENCODE project. This suggested that almost two-thirds of human DNA, rather than just 1% of it, is being copied into molecules of RNA, the chemical that carries protein-making instructions to the sub-cellular factories which turn those proteins out, and that as a consequence, rather than there being just 23,000 genes (namely, the bits of DNA that encode proteins), there may be millions of them.

Tim Martin:

A coalition including education groups and others is working to organize opposition to a series of school reforms pushed by Gov. Rick Snyder and some Republicans in the Michigan Legislature.
The coalition – called Michigan for Quality Schools – said Monday the state should step back from the proposed changes and instead study and implement what it calls proven, successful education policies adopted by top-performing states.
Meanwhile, supporters of one of the Snyder-backed programs – the Education Achievement Authority – also appeared at the Capitol on Monday to speak in favor of the new district. The EAA – in its first year of operation and limited to 15 schools in Detroit – could be put into state law and expanded into other parts of the state through bills pending in the state Legislature.
The EAA issue could be voted on by the Legislature within the next couple of weeks. The key bills are House Bill 6004 and Senate Bill 1358. Other school choice and finance reforms likely won’t be taken up until 2013, but the pace of change is troubling much of the education community.

Nancy Marshall-Genzer

Kids may groan when their parents hire a tutor or drag them to music lessons. But some educators say that extra learning gives them a leg up on students who can’t afford after-school activities. So today, school and government officials, nonprofits and the Ford Foundation announced that almost 20,000 students will spend more time in school, starting next fall.
“The question we have is can we give all children the opportunity that our most affluent kids have,” said Luis Ubinas, president of the Ford Foundation.
To answer that question, the Ford Foundation and the National Center on Time and Learning have signed up dozens of public schools for a pilot program. They can opt for a longer school day or year.
Randi Weingarten heads the American Federation of Teachers union. She’s backing the program, albeit cautiously.

Outreach @ WIBA 18mb mp3 audio file

Derrell talks with Kaleem Caire current president of The Madison Urban League about an upcoming event to raise awareness in the graduation rate in the African American population.

Educate to Elevate is an education series that brings together local and national leaders to talk about their efforts, share lessons-learned and join us in rallying the Greater Madison community to support the education of our children and our schools.

Lyndsey Layton:

As states across the country implement broad changes in curriculum from kindergarten through high school, English teachers worry that they will have to replace the dog-eared novels they love with historical documents and nonfiction texts.
The Common Core State Standards in English, which have been adopted in 46 states and the District, call for public schools to ramp up nonfiction so that by 12th grade students will be reading mostly “informational text” instead of fictional literature. But as teachers excise poetry and classic works of fiction from their classrooms, those who designed the guidelines say it appears that educators have misunderstood them.
Proponents of the new standards, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, say U.S. students have suffered from a diet of easy reading and lack the ability to digest complex nonfiction, including studies, reports and primary documents. That has left too many students unprepared for the rigors of college and demands of the workplace, experts say.

Morgan Smith:

While skeptics say reporting requirements for state graduation rates contain too many loopholes, other education policy experts say Texas deserves credit for implementing innovative programs to keep students in school.
With witnesses in a school finance trial testifying daily on the challenges facing public education in the state, and with a chorus of state leaders citing the failings of traditional public schools in calling for reform, some may be surprised to hear that by one measure, Texas schools appear to be doing quite well.
Preliminary data released by the U.S. Department of Education this week shows that Texas — along with five other states — ranks fourth in the nation for its four-year high school graduation rates. With an overall rate of 86 percent in the 2010-11 school year, the state follows Iowa, with 88 percent, and Wisconsin and Vermont, both at 87 percent.
Though the statewide average has climbed steadily in the past five years, that has not always been the case. The last time the Texas Supreme Court ruled on the state’s school finance system, in 2005, it warned of a “severe dropout problem,” calling the lagging graduation rates of blacks and Hispanics “especially troublesome.”‘

Kelly Chen:

In an experiment aimed to raise achievement in America’s public schools, 11 school districts across five states — Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee — will be extending their class time learning by at least 300 hours, starting in 2013. The three-year pilot program, which will serve more than 20,000 students in 40 schools, hopes to improve under-performing schools and make students more competitive internationally.
By a standard school calendar, students attend six-and-a-half hour school days for 180 days a year. Of the 1,000 schools already participating in expanded-time schedules, students attend on average 7.8 hours of school a day, according to a report by the National Center on Time & Learning.
Under the pilot program, 11 school districts will add at least 300 more hours to the academic calendar by extending hours within a day or adding more days to the academic year.

Charlie Osborne:

Campaigners europe-v-facebook are planning legal action concerning Facebook in Ireland over the social network’s adherence to privacy and data protection.
The Austrian privacy campaign group said Tuesday that changes and concessions made by the social networking giant do not go far enough, even after a year of campaigns — and so plan to take on the Irish DPA.
Europe-v-facebook most notably won a petition to force Facebook to turn off its facial recognition feature in Europe. In addition, due to the campaigner’s complaints, Facebook now has to limit retention periods for certain data sets, and the firm must also disclose more information on how much data it holds for individual users.
However, after numerous complaints to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, privacy regulations are still “miles away from other European data protection authorities in its understanding of the law,” and “Facebook gave the authority the runaround,” the group said in a statement.
The group subsequently published a 70-page response (.pdf) to the Irish audit, dubbed a “counter report” which details all alleged violations of European law after a request from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. Max Schrems, speaker for europe-v-facebook, said that the report discovered the Irish authority has “not always delivered accurate and correct results,” and the group wonder if “blind trust” of the tech giant may have impeded the original audit.

Michael Horn:

My mission is to create a student-centric education system so that all children have an education that allows them to find their passions and fulfill their human potential, just as mine did for me. Today’s education system doesn’t do that; it’s modeled after a factory and is built to standardize the way we teach and test. The problem with this is that every child has different learning needs at different times. If we hope to educate each child effectively–an imperative in today’s society–then we need a system that can customize to meet each child’s unique needs. With the growth of online learning–a disruptive innovation–we stand at an unprecedented moment in human history where education is being transformed. If we leverage this innovation properly, over the next decade, we will be able to deliver a high-quality, customized learning experience to all children no matter their circumstances and transform not just the delivery of education, but the hopes, dreams, and realities for all children.
Michael B. Horn is the cofounder and Education Executive Director of Innosight Institute (http://www.innosightinstitute.org/), a non-profit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to solve problems in the social sector. He is the coauthor of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (http://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Class-Expanded-Edition-Disruptive/dp/0071749101/). Tech&Learning magazine named him to its list of the 100 most important people in the creation and advancement of the use of technology in education.
About TEDx, x = independently organized event
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized. (Subject to certain rules and regulations.)

Rob Glass:

Editor’s note:
The following is excerpted from “an urgent call to action” the superintendent of Bloomfield Hills Schools dispatched to parents and residents in his public school district this week.)
A package of bills designed to corporatize and dismantle public education is being hastily pushed through this current lame-duck legislative session. If we do not take immediate action, I believe great damage will be done to public education, including our school system.
We have just three weeks to take action before it’s too late. The bills are:
House Bill 6004 and Senate Bill 1358: Would expand a separate and statewide school district (the Education Achievement Authority) overseen by a governor-appointed chancellor and functioning outside the authority of the State Board of Education or state school superintendent. These schools are exempt from the same laws and quality measures of community-governed public schools. The EAA can seize unused school buildings (built and financed by local taxpayers) and force sale or lease to charter, nonpublic or EAA schools.

Bloomfield Hills’ 2013 budget is $82,233,213 for 6,772 students, or $12,143/student. Madison plans to spend $15,132/student during the 2012-2013 school year.

Josh Lederman:

Open your notebooks and sharpen your pencils. School for thousands of public school students is about to get quite a bit longer.
Five states were to announce on Monday that they will add at least 300 hours of learning time to the calendar in some schools starting in 2013. Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee will take part in the initiative, which is intended to boost student achievement and make U.S. schools more competitive on a global level.
The three-year pilot program will affect almost 20,000 students in 40 schools, with long-term hopes of expanding the program to include additional schools — especially those that serve low-income communities. Schools, working in concert with districts, parents and teachers, will decide whether to make the school day longer, add more days to the school year or both.

Andrew Rotherham:

Harriet Sanford of the NEA Foundation discusses the idea of rounds – like medical students – and more generally at the problem of reform churn. The idea of rounds and clinical-style training for new teachers has a lot of merit, but more generally it seems everyone wants education to be like medicine – or law. The “new” idea for a “bar exam” for teachers (Albert Shanker floated the concept in 1985) modeled on how they do it in the legal field is back in the news as the AFT rolls it out as a new initiative.
But a few questions don’t get asked enough. Perhaps most importantly, what if education isn’t really like law or medicine? What if it’s more like other professions, say journalism, public policy, or business where credentials are valued but weighed alongside other factors because there isn’t a field-wide core of knowledge or skills all practitioners must have? It’s a narrow view of “professional” these days that brings you back to just law and medicine.
And what if we don’t know as much as we like to presuppose? We don’t ask enough about the limits today. In early-childhood reading or special education, there is some professional knowledge that’s established and (sometimes) reflected in credentialing regimes. What truly makes a great 10th-grade English teacher or 12th grade government teacher? Outside of content knowledge, that’s less clear. My colleagues Sara Mead, Rachael Brown, and I recently looked at this issue in the context of teacher evaluations in this paper but, it’s a broader one.

Maisie McAdoo:

High School Progress Reports, which the Department of Education released on Nov. 26, have yet another new way to measure schools: the college and career readiness index, which now counts for 10 percent of a school’s grade.
As if the 2011 reports, at 205 columns of Excel data per school was not enough, the 2012 reports arrived on a 305-column spreadsheet, boasting 39 new columns of college and career readiness data points. That doesn’t count the “additional information,” 72 columns of supplemental data, in case the first 39 didn’t quite get at everything you wanted to know about college readiness.
Give them points for trying. But some of this data is going to wind up in “deleted items” and never get crunched.
Even the DOE didn’t try. It didn’t put out PowerPoint slides or anything that summarizes (or spins) the information.

Hoppy Kercheval:

It’s understandable that friends and admirers of former state school superintendent Jorea Marple are upset with her firing.
Marple spent a lifetime in public education in West Virginia, and she built strong relationships.
The board did not help its case by potentially running afoul of the state’s open meetings law when it dismissed Marple two weeks ago.
On Thursday, the board held a special meeting, allowed Marple supporters to vent, and then cured any legal question with a do-over of Marple’s firing.
Her dismissal is apparently a result of a clash of ideas between Marple, school board president Wade Linger, and others on the board over how to respond to the independent audit of the school system released nearly a year ago.

Josh Lederman:

Schoolteachers should have to pass a stringent exam — much like the bar exam for lawyers — before being allowed to enter the profession, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions said Monday.
The American Federation of Teachers called for a tough new written test to be complimented by stricter entrance requirements for teacher training programs, such as a minimum grade point average.
“It’s time to do away with a common rite of passage into the teaching profession, whereby newly minted teachers are tossed the keys to their classrooms, expected to figure things out, and left to see if they and their students sink or swim,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten, calling that system unfair to students and teachers alike.
The proposal, released Monday as part of a broader report on elevating the teaching profession, calls for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to take the lead in developing a new test. The nonprofit group currently administers the National Board Certification program, an advanced, voluntary teaching credential that goes beyond state standards.

Eleanor Beardsley:

In the name of equality, the French government has proposed doing away with homework in elementary and junior high school. French President Francois Hollande argues that homework penalizes children with difficult home situations, but even the people whom the proposal is supposed to help disagree.
It’s 5:30 p.m. and getting dark outside, as kids pour out of Gutenberg Elementary School in Paris 15th arrondissement. Parents and other caregivers wait outside to collect their children. Aissata Toure, 20, is here with her younger sister in tow. She’s come to pick up her 7-year-old son. Toure says she’s against Hollande’s proposal to do away with homework.
“It’s not a good idea at all because even at a young age, having individual work at home helps build maturity and responsibility,” she says, “and if it’s something they didn’t quite get in school, the parents can help them. Homework is important for a kid’s future.”

Richard Minerich:

As of today I’ve completed my fifth course at Coursea, all but one being directly related to Machine Learning. The fact that you can now take classes given by many of most well known researchers in their field who work at some of the most lauded institutions for no cost at all is a testament to the ever growing impact that the internet has on our lives. It’s quite a gift that these classes started to become available at right about the same time as when Machine Learning demand started to sky rocket (and at right about the same time that I entered the field professionally).
Note that all effort estimations include the time spent watching lectures, reading related materials, taking quizes and completing programming assignments. Classes are listed in the order they were taken.

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Motoko Rich:

The school day and year are about to get longer in 10 school districts in five states, where schools will add up to 300 hours to their calendars starting next fall.
In an effort to help underperforming students catch up on standardized tests and give them more opportunities for enrichment activities, 35 schools that enroll about 17,500 students will expand the school day and year in the 2013-14 academic year. Forty more schools that enroll about 20,000 students will also extend classroom and after-school time in the next three years.

Madison Teachers, Inc. via a kind Linda Doeseckle email (PDF)

We know all too well the many changes that have occurred since Scott Walker became Governor and, aided by big corporate money, anti-worker lobbyists and a right-wing legislature, destroyed Wisconsin’s public sector collective bargaining and what it has produced for workers and their families. Many MTI members worked tirelessly on the protests, elections, recalls, recounts and numerous forms of organizing when the troubles began almost two years ago.
Where do we go from here? While the fall elections are behind us, we must gear up for the next round; the spring of 2013. We need to rebalance the State Supreme Court, and we need to again make our voices heard by electing employee – friendly Board of Education (BOE) members. Three seats are up for election this spring: Seat 4, currently held by BOE president James Howard; Seat 3, currently held by Beth Moss (who has indicated that she will not run for re-election); and Seat 5, currently held by Maya Cole.
MTI members need to remain attentive, educated, and ready to act on all matters that affect their jobs and well-being. It was only a short time ago that the District began work on an employee handbook that DID NOT include any input from their own employees; fortunately, MTI got an opportunity, due to Judge Juan Colas finding Act 10 unconstitutional in several parts, to call for an additional year of collective bargaining, and the employee handbook has been shelved for now. With immediate and strong support, MTI members gave Board members a quick reminder that District staff demands a voice in the work they do and how they do it.
There are many forces within the District, the current Governor’s office, and other political and big corporations that will continue in their attempts to weaken the worker’s voice. MTI encourages members to attend Board of Education meetings to keep a watchful eye on what they’re doing and the direction they’re going. The Board meets in its various subcommittees almost every Monday night. Unlike the past, current Board committees discuss issues and make decisions by the time they meet as a full Board at the end of each month. Anyone may register to speak at any Board meeting, and Board members are listening to MTI members. Information on all Board meetings can be found easily – Google “mmsd boe” or go to the MTI website and scroll down the right hand column to “other links” and choose “MMSD BOE Info. Station”. Meetings will also be posted in each week’s MTI Solidarity! newsletter. Protect yourself by staying current, attending BOE meetings, and sharing information with your union brothers and sisters.

Julia Turner:

The answer is less obvious than you might think. Sure, you are familiar with your own scrawled to-do lists, or the brief missives you leave on the kitchen counter for houseguests or your spouse. Perhaps you take notes by hand in meetings (though if you’re like me you consult them only sporadically after the fact). But when was the last time you filled a page of foolscap–or Mead college rule, for those of us who’ve never been quite sure what foolscap is–with lines and lines of unbroken lettering, trying to express an argument or make a developed point? When was the last time you used pen and ink for writing, and not just for jotting?
The Missing Ink, from British novelist Philip Hensher, makes the case that it has probably been too long. Subtitled “The Lost Art of Handwriting,” the book is an ode to a dying form: part lament, part obituary, part sentimental rallying cry. In an age of texting and notes tapped straight into tablets, we are rapidly losing the art and skill it takes to swiftly write, with a pen, a sentence that is both intelligible and attractive. The time devoted to teaching handwriting in elementary schools around the globe has dwindled. Hensher opens his book with the plaintive question: “Should we even care? Should we accept that handwriting is a skill whose time has now passed? Or does it carry with it a value that can never truly be superseded by the typed word?”

Scott Bauer:

Republican state Rep. Don Pridemore launched his campaign to become Wisconsin’s top education leader on Monday, saying he would bring a conservative approach to the job while refusing to talk specifically about what policies he would push.
Pridemore is taking on incumbent Tony Evers, who has held the nonpartisan job of secretary of the Department of Public Instruction since 2009. The election is April 2, and there will be a Feb. 19 primary if three or more people run.
Evers said he looked forward to contrasting his record with Pridemore’s.
“All I know is I’ve been out front on education for 36 years,” said Evers, a former teacher, principal, district superintendent and deputy state superintendent. “I’m believing that he has not.”

Wisconsin State Journal:

It’s a big week ahead, and the start of a big month, for potentially reshaping the future of our public schools.
Two public events this week have been organized by the Urban League of Greater Madison, the Madison School District, the United Way of Dane County and a community education reform effort called Planning for Greatness. First is an education forum and small group discussion Thursday afternoon, followed by a broader innovation summit on Friday.
Meanwhile, December starts the application period for families at Sennett and Toki middle schools in Madison who wish to participate in the Scholars Academy program being advanced by the Urban League and the Madison district.

Since the disaster of the Marxist/Victims-history standards produced by UCLA in 1996, which were censured by a vote of 99-1 in the United States Senate, (the one negative voter thought the “standards” were even worse), History has become, in the comment this year of David Steiner, former Commissioner of Education in New York State, “so politically toxic that no one wants to touch it.”
This situation has developed in part because every tiny little multicultural group in the country is outraged if their history does not receive equal (or better) treatment in any history textbook, and in part because the late Howard Zinn’s proudly Marxist textbook of United States History has sold more than 2 million copies (not bad for an anti-capitalist who believed “private property is theft”).
Most of those who write about the dashing new nonfiction reading suggestions of the Common Core lament the altered and unreasonable burdens on English teachers, and they all seem to have forgotten that most of our high schools have both History departments and History teachers as well. But it seems to be inconceivable and unmentionable that our History teachers might dare to assign history books (nonfiction) and history research papers (nonfiction writing).
The story of how all reading and writing became the complete monopoly of the English Departments is surely a long and complicated one, but however it developed, it seems clear that our History departments have given away any responsibility for assigning books and research papers they may once have owned to the English teachers.
In an October 24, 2012 article in the Wall Street Journal, Michael S. Malone argues that even tech company CEOs are now looking for people who can tell stories (about their enterprise, their product, etc.), and so Mr. Malone of course looks to the English departments to offer the needed expertise in storytelling:
“Could the humanities rebuild the shattered bridge between C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” and find a place at the heart of the modern world’s virtual institutions? We assume that this will be a century of technology. But if the competition in tech moves to this new battlefield, the edge will go to those institutions that can effectively employ imagination, metaphor, and most of all, storytelling. And not just creative writing, but every discipline in the humanities, from the classics to rhetoric to philosophy. Twenty-first-century storytelling: multimedia, mass customizable, portable and scalable, drawing upon the myths and archetypes of the ancient world, on ethics, and upon a deep understanding of human nature and even religious faith.
The demand is there, but the question is whether the traditional humanities can furnish the supply. If they can’t or won’t, they will continue to wither away. But surely there are risk-takers out there in those English and classics departments, ready to leap on this opportunity. They’d better hurry, because the other culture won’t wait.”
Where did we lose the understanding that History is all storytelling, with the additional benefit that it is based on evidence, which is not always so important with fiction? Mr. Malone mentions English and classics departments (“classics to rhetoric to philosophy”), but perhaps for him History has lost its membership in the Humanities? He wants “imagination, metaphor and most of all, storytelling…and myths and archetypes of the ancient world,” but he leaves unmentioned the sources of the greatest true stories (nonfiction) ever told in the world–our Historians.
Nevertheless, he is in the mainstream of those who, when asked to think, talk and write about reading and writing in the schools, faithfully and regularly default to the work of the English department and its wonderful world of fiction as the only place to introduce nonfiction!
When did the ideas of having our high school students read an actual complete history book or two and write an actual history research paper or two disappear into the woodwork? The result is that our students arrive in college poorly prepared to read nonfiction books and to write the required term papers, not to mention their inability to do any research.
Neil Postman tells us that “Cicero remarked that the purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present.” That freedom seems more and more out of reach among those who cannot even think about History, which has made History the most unmentionable among all the necessary academic subjects in our schools.

Some fiction and memoir programs are a waste of classroom time. Others sharpen students’ thinking and provide them with unmatched insight. Good teachers know the difference.
by Rebecca Wallace-Segall, via a kind email:

“I’m not sure if eight-year-olds should be permitted to have death or murder references in their short stories,” said a New York City public school principal to me at the end of the day today. “But I’ll set a meeting with my teachers tomorrow to discuss your views and theirs and see where we get.”
Three hours later, I am still moved and humbled by the principal’s thoughtful consideration of a topic so new and strange to her. We had just started a residency in her school. We had discussed a no-censorship approach for this workshop and the children had immediately come to life when they were told they could write a fictional story about anything they wanted.
But by week two, some of the teachers were concerned to see the heavy material that emerged, here and there, throughout the grade, from the special ed class to the “gifted and talented.” Human beings young and old love exploring dark, fantastical themes. But what are we supposed to think when our youngest members do it? When should our admiration turn to worry, and when does it become a school’s responsibility?
It is not easy to teach creative writing within the confinement of school. It is not easy to tackle the issues that arise, and it’s not easy to learn how to teach fiction and memoir writing well. But it is possible. And many teachers are doing it, and doing it well, across the country.

Jack Craver:

CT: How has the method changed?
Bell: Literally it is member to member. It’s every member of the union talking to other people in those positions, reinforcing to them that collective action and collective advocacy is more than a collective bargaining agreement. Don’t get me wrong — I believe in collective bargaining and believe it’s a right our members ought to have, but shy of restoring it at the state level, collective advocacy is what the union is all about.
CT: And how has the “collective advocacy” changed?
Bell: We’re working more with organizing our members to engage their communities.
CT: Could you give me an example?

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

Tom Simonite:

Learning a new language is tedious and demands a lot of practice. Luis von Ahn doesn’t want all that effort to be wasted. In fact, it might be a gold mine.
Von Ahn, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is the co-creator of Duolingo, a free language-­learning site that turns students into an online workforce. His software uses their answers to simple exercises in a translation service that he expects to charge money for.
It’s clever stuff: an education that pays for itself. That achievement is important as education moves toward being given away online (see “The Most Important Educational Technology in 200 Years”). Teachers and universities are now running into the same problem journalists and movie studios have faced: how will they make any money if the content is free? No matter how cheap it is to pipe information across the Web, producing lessons and coursework is still demanding and expensive.

Benjamin Rifkin:

Having been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 15 years, I follow the news from the state closely, and was very disappointed to read about Governor Scott Walker’s plan to make significant changes to state funding for education. Governor Walker said a few things about K-12 education and education in the technical college system, but he also said this about how the state should judge the performance of its public universities:
In higher education, that means not only degrees, but are young people getting degrees in jobs that are open and needed today, not just the jobs that the universities want to give us, or degrees that people want to give us?
This approach is wrong for four fundamentally important reasons:
First, economically, the “Walker Plan for Higher Education” seems to be premised on increasing the efficiency of the pipeline from higher education to the economy. But the assumption made by Governor Walker that the state can predict which programs of study would be most beneficial for the state’s economy is false, as demonstrated by some spectacular counterexamples.

Erin Richards and Jennifer Zahn:

” Sawadee ka!” announced with palms together and a slight bow, was the most common greeting heard Monday morning in Lodi High School’s Southeast Asia studies class.
The lead teacher in Thailand – where for her it was late Monday night – surveyed the room from an oversize Mac monitor on a rolling cart. Her floating visage and voice beaming to Lodi over Skype had, by this point in the semester, lost its novelty.
What’s still unusual is this small rural high school’s flourishing relationship with Sa-nguan Ying School, a public seven-12 school halfway around the world in Suphanburi, Thailand.
The partnership started as a student/teacher exchange and evolved into dual distance-learning classes that feature Wisconsin students taking an accredited Asian cultural studies course from a Thai teacher, and Thai students learning U.S. history from a retired Lodi teacher.
The Lodi-Thailand program is not the only example of innovative global learning projects in Wisconsin’s schools, many of which use technology that makes it easier than ever to connect to other parts of the world. But it exemplifies how schools can fundamentally deepen and enrich the traditional American learning experience, with little financial cost, if educators persist in thinking beyond the boundaries of their community and country.

Adam Toobin:

Just more than 58 percent of students oppose the University’s consideration of race in student admissions decisions, while over 34 percent of students said they supported the policy, according to a recent Herald poll. Of the students who are opposed to the consideration of race, more than half support the consideration of an applicant’s socioeconomic status. Just over a quarter of students oppose the consideration of race, socioeconomic status or any other demographic factor in admission decisions.
Most students said their answers were tied to their beliefs about the University’s race-based affirmative action policy. Currently, the University considers an applicant’s race as a single factor among many — including grades, test scores and extracurricular activities — and does not weigh socioeconomic status in determining whether the applicant should be admitted to Brown.

Kevin Kiley:

When Florida Governor Rick Scott announced earlier this week the creation of two four-year, $10,000 bachelor’s degree programs in Florida, he could have easily been mistaken for another Republican governor named Rick.
Less than two years ago Texas Governor Rick Perry called on his state’s colleges and universities to create bachelor’s-degree programs that cost families no more than $10,000. The call set off a firestorm of debate about whether it was possible to control or lower the cost of offering a degree through the use of technology and competency-based assessment, or whether it was possible to find alternative subsidies that would drop the price for students and their families.
Perry and Scott appear to agree on much more than an ideal price tag. The two — along with another Scott, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who unveiled his own higher education agenda earlier this month — appear to be at the forefront of what could be an emerging Republican approach to higher education policy, built largely around cost-cutting, which seems to appeal to some voters, if not to the academy itself.

the Economist:

Running the numbers
ON THE face of it, American higher education is still in rude health. In worldwide rankings more than half of the top 100 universities, and eight of the top ten, are American. The scientific output of American institutions is unparalleled. They produce most of the world’s Nobel laureates and scientific papers. Moreover college graduates, on average, still earn far more and receive better benefits than those who do not have a degree.
Nonetheless, there is growing anxiety in America about higher education. A degree has always been considered the key to a good job. But rising fees and increasing student debt, combined with shrinking financial and educational returns, are undermining at least the perception that university is a good investment.
Concern springs from a number of things: steep rises in fees, increases in the levels of debt of both students and universities, and the declining quality of graduates. Start with the fees. The cost of university per student has risen by almost five times the rate of inflation since 1983 (see chart 1), making it less affordable and increasing the amount of debt a student must take on. Between 2001 and 2010 the cost of a university education soared from 23% of median annual earnings to 38%; in consequence, debt per student has doubled in the past 15 years. Two-thirds of graduates now take out loans. Those who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2011 graduated with an average of $26,000 in debt, according to the Project on Student Debt, a non-profit group.

The Economist:

NEWARK’S public schools are dreadful. Although they have been under the supervision of New Jersey’s state government since 1995, there has been little improvement since then. Only 40% of students read to the standard prescribed for their age, and in the 15 worst-performing schools the figure is less than 25%. More than 30% of pupils do not graduate. Few of those who do are ready for higher education. Of those who entered one local establishment, Essex County College, in 2009, a whopping 98% needed remedial maths and 87% had to take remedial English. As a result, fed-up parents are taking their children out of Newark’s public high schools and placing them in independent charter schools. Many public-school buildings now stand half-empty. The best teachers often leave in despair.
Things might now start to change. On November 14th members of the Newark teachers’ union approved, by 1,767 to 1,088, a new agreement with the district which, it is hoped, will help to retain good teachers. It introduces, for the first time in New Jersey, bonus pay. Teachers can now earn up to $12,000 in annual bonuses: $5,000 for achieving good results, up to $5,000 for working in poorly performing schools, and up $2,500 for teaching a hard-to-staff subject. Newark will be one of the largest school districts in the country to offer bonuses. The idea was made palatable to the union, which had been reluctant to accept it, because the evaluation process will unusually be based on peer review, though the school superintendent and an independent panel will still make the final decision on each case.

Cindy Cohn & Parker Higgins:

The holiday shopping season is upon us, and once again e-book readers promise to be a very popular gift. Last year’s holiday season saw ownership of a dedicated e-reader device spike to nearly 1 in 5 Americans, and that number is poised to go even higher. But if you’re in the market for an e-reader this year, or for e-books to read on one that you already own, you might want to know who’s keeping an eye on your searching, shopping, and reading habits.
Unfortunately, unpacking the tracking and data-sharing practices of different e-reader platforms is far from simple. It can require reading through stacked license agreements and privacy policies for devices, software platforms, and e-book stores. That in turn can mean reading thousands of words of legalese before you read the first line of a new book.

Alisha Azevedo:

Salman Khan’s dream college looks very different from the typical four-year institution.
The founder of Khan Academy, a popular site that offers free online video lectures about a variety of subjects, lays out his thoughts on the future of education in his book, The One World School House: Education Reimagined, released last month. Though most of the work describes Mr. Khan’s experiences with Khan Academy and his suggestions for changing elementary- and secondary-school systems, he does devote a few chapters to higher education.
In a chapter titled “What College Could Be Like,” Mr. Khan conjures an image of a new campus in Silicon Valley where students would spend their days working on internships and projects with mentors, and would continue their education with self-paced learning similar to that of Khan Academy. The students would attend ungraded seminars at night on art and literature, and the faculty would consist of professionals the students would work with as well as traditional professors.
“Traditional universities proudly list the Nobel laureates they have on campus (most of whom have little to no interaction with students),” he writes. “Our university would list the great entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives serving as student advisers and mentors.”

Alyssa Coppelman.

Alan Borsuk:

Ceria M. Travis Academy is a private school that had 486 kindergarten through 12th-grade students as of September in two buildings, one on the west side, one on the north side. Its partner school, Travis Technology High School on the far northwest side, had 214 students.
Atlas Preparatory Academy, also a private school, had 979 kindergarten through 12th-grade students in three locations on the south side.
Few students in either set of schools did well on Wisconsin’s standardized tests in 2011. More than five out of six at both Travis schools either were rated “minimal” in reading and math, the lowest category, or, in unusually large numbers, didn’t take the tests at all. Almost all the required students at Atlas took the tests, but more than 70% were minimal in reading and more than 60% minimal in math.
How many were rated proficient or better? At the Travis schools, it was under 2% in reading, just over 2% in math. At Atlas, it was 4.2% in reading, 5.5% in math.
…..
MPS schools have elaborate accountability systems and tons of information is available about each school. The accountability systems haven’t been so effective historically, but there are signs of improvement as more low-performing schools are closed. That said, there are still plenty of MPS schools that get results that are not much different from those of Travis and Atlas (and at much higher cost per student).
Milwaukee charter schools also are required to report quite a bit of information publicly and, in many cases, the charter authorizer (at MPS, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee or City Hall) has been pretty effective in holding schools to performance standards, closing quite a few. That said, there are still low-performing c

Madison Superintendent Jane Belmore

Unlike other assessments, MAP measures both student performance and growth through administering the test in both fall and spring. No matter where a student starts, MAP allows us to measure how effective that student’s school environment was in moving that student forward academically.
This fall’s administration serves as a baseline for that fall to spring growth measure. It also serves as an indicator for teachers. As we continue professional development around MAP, we will work to equip schools to use this data at the classroom and individual student level. In other words, at its fullest use, a teacher could look at MAP data and make adjustments for the classroom or individual students based on where that year’s class is in the fall, according to these results.
Meeting growth targets on the fall administration indicates that a student met or exceeded typical growth from Fall 2011 to Fall 2012. Typical growth is based on a student’s grade and prior score; students whose scores are lower relative to their grade level are expected to grow more than students whose scores are higher relative to their grade level.
In Reading, more than 50% of students in every grade met their growth targets from Fall 2011 to Fall 2012. In Mathematics, between 41% and 63% of students at each grade level met their growth targets. The highest growth in Mathematics occurred from fourth to fifth grade (63%) and the lowest growth occurred from fifth to sixth grade (41%).
It is important to note that across student groups, the percent of students making expected growth is relatively consistent. Each student’s growth target is based on his or her performance on previous administrations of MAP. The fact that percent of students making expected growth is consistent across student subgroups indicates that if that trend continues, gaps would close over time. In some cases, a higher percentage of minority students reached their growth targets relative to white students. For example, at the middle school level, 49% of white students met growth targets, but 50% of African American students and 53% of Hispanic students met their growth targets. In addition, English Language Learners, special education students, and students receiving free and reduced lunch grew at similar rates to their peers.
MAP also provides status benchmarks that reflect the new, more rigorous NAEP standards. Meeting status benchmarks indicates that a student would be expected to score “Proficient” or “Advanced” on the next administration of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE).
That means that even though overall scores haven’t changed dramatically from last year, the percent of students identified as proficient or advanced will look different with these benchmarks. That is not unique for MMSD – schools around the state and nation are seeing this as they also work toward the common core.
While these scores are different than what we have been used to, it is important to remember that higher standards are a good thing for our students, our districts and our community. It means holding ourselves to the standards of an increasingly challenging, fast-paced world and economy. States all around the country, including Wisconsin, are adopting these standards and aligning their work to them.
As we align our work to the common core standards, student achievement will be measured using new, national standards. These are very high standards that will truly prepare our students to be competitive in a fast-paced global economy.
At each grade level, between 32% and 37% of students met status benchmarks in Reading and between 36% and 44% met status benchmarks in Mathematics. Scores were highest for white students, followed by Asian students, students identified as two or more races, Hispanic students, and African-American students. These patterns are consistent across grades and subjects.
Attachment #1 shows the percentage of students meeting status benchmarks and growth targets by grade, subgroup, and grade and subgroup. School- and student-level reports are produced by NWEA and used for internal planning purposes.

Related: 2011-2012 Madison School District MAP Reports (PDF Documents):

• District Summary
• District Growth Summary
• Growth by Ethnicity
• Allis Elementary
• Black hawk Middle School
• Chavez Elementary School
• Cherokee Middle School
• Crestwood Elementary School
• Elvehjem Elementary School
• Emerson Elementary School
• Falk Elementary School
• Glendale Elementary School
• Gompers Elementary School
• Hamilton Middle School
• Hawthorne Elementary School
• Huegel Elementary School
• Jefferson Middle School
• Kennedy Elementary School
• Lake View Elementary School
• Leopold Elementary School
• Mendota Elementary School
• Nuestro Mundo Elementary School
• O’Keeffe Middle School
• Olson Elementary School
• Orchard Ridge Elementary School
• Randall Elementary School
• Sandburg Elementary School
• Schenck Elementary School
• Sennett Middle School
• Sherman Middle School
• Shorewood Elementary School
• Spring Harbor Middle School
• Stephens Elementary School
• Thoreau Elementary School
• Toki Elementary School
• Van Hise Elementary School
• White Horse Middle School
• Wright Middle School

I requested MAP results from suburban Madison Districts and have received Waunakee’s Student Assessment Results (4MB PDF) thus far.

Madison School District 600K PDF:

The overarching priorities were identified by the MMSD Management Team in the areas of Attendance, Behavior, Growth and Achievement. The rationale for these priorities is based on the following theory of action:
When our teachers apply strong, explicit teaching skills within an aligned multi-tiered system of instruction and support, and students attend school regularly with behavior that doesn’t interfere with their learning or the learn- ing environment, then students will show growth and achievement academically, socially and emotionally.

Much more on the Madison School District’s “achievement gap” plan, here.

The Economist:

THE international community’s perception of Afghanistan over the past 12 years may be in for a bracing shot of reality when the foreign troops leave in 2014. Political agendas back home are shifting in ways that are likely to change the long-distance view of this country. In particular, the effects of the past decade of Western intervention will need no longer be viewed through rose-coloured glasses.
Meanwhile Afghan children’s perception of their own history over the past four decades is being subjected to a surreal bit of air-brushing, thanks to a few departing American agencies. The new edition of textbooks for Afghanistan’s high schools were paid for partly by the American forces’ foreign-aid arm, the Commander’s Emergency Response Programme. Cultural advisers to the American army revised these books with an eye to eliminating any inappropriate material such as might, for instance, incite religious intolerance or violence.

Josh Mitchell:

U.S. student-loan debt rose by $42 billion, or 4.6%, to $956 billion in the third quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Tuesday. Overall household borrowing fell during that period.
Payments on 11% of student-loan balances were 90 or more days behind at the end of September, up from 8.9% at the end of June, a rate that now exceeds that for credit cards. Delinquency rates for all other consumer-debt categories fell or were flat.
Nearly all student loans–93% of them last year–are made directly by the government, which asks little or nothing about borrowers’ ability to repay, or about what sort of education they intend to pursue.

Katie Yezzi:

IN 2011, I started a public charter elementary school as the principal. My organization, Uncommon Schools, manages charter schools for the bottom line, which in our case is student achievement. Some 92 percent of my school’s students live below the poverty line, and the urgency of our faculty’s work is what motivates us to be great every day.
But the overwhelming need to be great can also swallow people up. If teachers are underperforming, or if student achievement appears to be plateauing, teachers can become paralyzed and fall prey to self-doubt or frustration.
We have found an antidote to this sense of defeat: practicing and preparing outside the classroom. Practice, I have found, is one of the most powerful ways to improve performance.
Last March, as I was preparing to conduct midyear reviews with the teachers, my managing director, Doug Lemov, asked me if I wanted to practice any of them in advance. I immediately took him up on the opportunity to practice one review of a teacher who was struggling. I was dreading the review. I didn’t want to be harsh, but I also didn’t want to water down the message and give this teacher a false impression. I knew that I wasn’t ready to have that conversation, so Doug and I practiced.

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Mary Niederberger:

To Community College of Allegheny County’s president, Alex Johnson, cutting hours for some 400 temporary part-time workers to avoid providing health insurance coverage for them under the impending Affordable Health Care Act is purely a cost-saving measure at a time the college faces a funding reduction.
But to some of the employees affected, including 200 adjunct faculty members, the decision smacks of an attempt to circumvent the national health care legislation that goes into effect in January 2014.
“It’s kind of a double whammy for us because we are facing a legal requirement [under the new law] to get health care and if the college is reducing our hours, we don’t have the money to pay for it,” said Adam Davis, an adjunct professor who has taught biology at CCAC since 2005.

Melissa Korn:

With graduation approaching this spring, Jessica McSweeney has a sinking feeling. A senior Human Development major at Cornell University, she has completed her required science and writing classes and looks forward to traveling this summer.
But one thing stands between the 21-year-old Ms. McSweeney and her diploma: three lengths in the school’s 25-yard swimming pool.
Cornell students must take the plunge in order to graduate, either by passing a swim test or enrolling in a beginner’s swim class. Ms. McSweeney, who hasn’t been in a pool much since grade school, is less than lukewarm on the tradition.
“I guess it’s a noble skill to have,” she says, “but I don’t intend to be a water-going person.”
Cornell’s century-old requirement is among the last remaining at colleges. The tests, which generally require students to prove they can paddle a few lengths of the pool, are among the more unusual graduation requirements in academia. But as schools focus more on career skills than on life skills, support for the requirements has been drying up.

Stacy Teicher Khadaroo:

The portion of young adults in the United States who have completed a four-year college degree hit a record high in 2012. A full third of 25-to-29-year-olds now hold degrees.
Ninety percent have completed high school or an equivalent credential, and 63 percent have done some college course work – both peak rates as well.
Progress in “educational attainment … has a lot of implications, both for the wealth and well-being of the young adults themselves … and [for] the productivity of the workforce and future economic growth,” says Richard Fry, a senior research associate at the Pew Research Center and coauthor of its new report on the subject.
For years, the idea has been growing that college is as necessary as high school was 40 years ago. In 2010, 75 percent of Americans said college was very important, compared with just 36 percent in 1978, the report notes.

Sue Shellenbarger:

Homework can be as monumental a task for parents as it is for children. So what’s the best strategy to get a kid to finish it all? Where’s the line between helping with an assignment and doing the assignment? And should a parent nag a procrastinating preteen to focus–or let the child fall behind and learn a hard lesson?
As schools pile on more homework as early as preschool, many parents are confused about how to assist, says a 2012 research review at Johns Hopkins University. Some 87% of parents have a positive view of helping with homework, and see it as a beneficial way to spend time with their kids, says the study, co-authored by Joyce Epstein, a research professor of sociology and education.
Yet sometimes parental intervention may actually hurt student performance. During the middle-school years, such help was linked to lower academic achievement in a 2009 review of 50 studies by researchers at Duke University. Parents who apply too much pressure, explain material in different ways than teachers or intervene without being asked may undermine these students’ growing desire for independence, according to the study, published in Developmental Psychology.

jsharf.com

According to the FY2011 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, in 2011, the Board decided to terminate benefits for anyone who hadn’t reached the thresholds of age 50, and 20 years of service as of the end of the 2011 plan year, 8/31/2011. “The plan is still operational for active and deferred vested participants and beneficiaries in receipt of payment.” It is those members who will be asked to take a cut in their benefits. The district has also “determined that additional contributions for the foreseeable future would not be made to the Plan.” (Note 16, P. 72)
The funded ratio has fallen to 50.6%, and the unfunded liability as of August 31, 2010 is $8.8 million.

Mike Ford:

“Is it helpful to compare student performance across school districts with differing demographics?”
The question was spurred by the reaction to the recent release of their annual report on school performance in Racine. I answer their question with an enthusiastic yes. In fact I will go further, it is not only helpful, it is essential.
Why? Well, graduates of districts across the state will be competing for the same spots in universities, and/or for the same jobs. It is crucial that districts know how their students are faring compared to others, regardless of their students’ demographics and socio-economic situation. If we do not know how they compare, how can we even begin to close achievement gaps?
It is not enough to simply present data on how students of any given school district are faring given the non-classroom challenges they face. That does not mean we shouldn’t measure and celebrate (or lament) how Milwaukee is performing compared to other urban districts. We should. But we also need to know where students stand compared to others they will compete with in the real world.

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Andrea Van Niekirk:

Foreign students are flocking to the higher education system in the US. A recent study found that in 2011-2012, the number of international students in the US increased by 6.5% over the last year to a record high of 764,495 students. Of these, 56% came from only five countries: China, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Canada.
The reasons for the shift and the consequences of this massive migration have been discussed at great length within universities, in papers with titles such as “The Chinese are Coming.” When the students arrive on American campuses, however, they have to wrestle with social and educational experiences that are fundamentally foreign to them. Most anticipate their American adventure as an exciting opportunity laced with some inevitable adjustments, caught off guard by the extent and nature of the obstacles they encounter, in the classroom and on campus.
Studying and writing in a foreign academic language is difficult enough, but it is often the classroom dynamic that is most daunting to foreign students. They are disconcerted by the interaction, often marked by an easy familiarity and questioning rapport, between American teachers and students. Yongfang Chen, one of the authors of A True Liberal Arts Education, co-written about his academic experiences as a Chinese student at Bowdoin, noted in an interview after the book was published, that, “Coming from a culture in which a ‘standard answer’ is provided for every question, I did not argue with others even when I disagreed. However, Bowdoin forced me to re-consider ‘the answer’ and reach beyond my comfort zone.” The intense and narrow focus required of Chinese students as they spend high school preparing for the gaokao, the national test that is the sole determinant of entry into China’s universities, is also at odds with an American emphasis on ongoing assessment through tests and midterm exams.

Ron Unz:

Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University history, in which nearly half the students taking a Government course on the role of Congress had plagiarized or otherwise illegally collaborated on their final exam.1 Each year, Harvard admits just 1600 freshmen while almost 125 Harvard students now face possible suspension over this single incident. A Harvard dean described the situation as “unprecedented.”
But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America’s most prestigious academic institution? In the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together with their professional schools. The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible today, as even America’s most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected former Harvard students. Indeed, the early success of Facebook was largely due to the powerful imprimatur it enjoyed from its exclusive availability first only at Harvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League.

Chris Cook:

Qatar has enormous oil and gas reserves, but the little state is trying to kick the petroleum habit and become a high-tech society. It wants a sustainable economy for when the oil runs out – and a more cultured society in the meantime.
The Qatar Foundation is the institution that is leading this drive: I am in the little Gulf state this week for WISE, their annual summit on education, where I was a speaker on the finance of education. The whole thing is rather spectacular.
When they say they are going to do something, they go big – sometimes to a rather baffling degree. One of my favourite examples of this is their super-duper equine health centre, which trains horse-handlers and apparently features a sauna for the horses.

Element Collection:

The Alexander Arrangement is a three-dimensional paper sculpture of the periodic table designed by Roy Alexander, with whom I collaborated on this version. For the first time this clever form of the table has been combined with my photographs of real element samples, resulting in a quite lovely object.
If you know anyone who likes elements, chemistry, or science in general, and you need a gift that you know they don’t have yet, this is it! It’s completely new for x-mas 2012.

Mary Wisniewski:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said on Monday he wants a five-year moratorium on closing public schools after anticipated cuts in 2013, but the teachers union called his gesture a “sleight of hand.”
The third-largest school district in the United States, which was hit with a strike by public school teachers in September, was already facing a financial crisis that was made worse by granting pay rises to teachers.
The school district forecasts a $1 billion deficit next year and is widely expected to try to balance its budget in part by closing public schools.
Enrollment in Chicago Public Schools has fallen nearly 20 percent in the last decade, mainly because of population declines in poor neighborhoods. The district said it can accommodate 500,000 students, but only about 400,000 are enrolled.
Some 140 schools are half-empty, according to the district. The union said 86 Chicago public schools have closed in the past decade, but the district could not confirm that number.

Lara Seligman:

Texas is experimenting with an initiative to help students and families struggling with sky-high college costs: a bachelor’s degree for $10,000, including tuition fees and even textbooks. Under a plan he unveiled in 2011, Republican Gov. Rick Perry has called on institutions in his state to develop options for low-cost undergraduate degrees. The idea was greeted with skepticism at first, but lately, it seems to be gaining traction. If it yields success, it could prompt other states to explore similar, more-innovative ways to cut the cost of education.
Limiting the price tag for a degree to $10,000 is no easy feat. In the 2012-13 academic year, the average annual cost of tuition in Texas at a public four-year institution was $8,354, just slightly lower than the national average of $8,655. The high costs are saddling students with huge debt burdens. Nationally, 57 percent of students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2011 from public four-year colleges graduated with debt, and the average debt per borrower was $23,800–up from $20,100 a decade earlier. By Sept. 30, 2011, 9.1 percent of borrowers who entered repayment in 2009-10 defaulted on their federal student loans, the highest default rate since 1996.

Economist intelligence Unit:

The Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment compares the performance of 39 countries and one region (Hong Kong) on two categories of education: Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment. The Index provides a snapshot of the relative performance of countries based on their education outputs.
The indicators used in this Index are:
– Cognitive Skills: PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS scores in Reading, Maths and Science
– Educational Attainment: literacy and graduation rates
How is the Index calculated?
The overall index score is the weighted sum of the underlying two category scores. Likewise, the category scores are the weighted sum of the underlying indicator scores (see below for the default weights applied). Each indicator score is calculated on the basis of a z-score normalisation process. This process enables the comparison and aggregation of different data sets (on different scales), and the scoring of countries on the basis of their comparative performance.
What is a z-score?
A z-score indicates how many standard deviations an observation is above or below the mean. To compute the z-score, the EIU first calculated each indicator’s mean and standard deviation using the data for the countries in the Index, and then the distance of the observation from the mean in terms of standard deviations.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org

Brian Shane:

At schools in Pinellas County, Fla., students aren’t paying for lunch with cash or a card, but with a wave of their hand over a palm scanner.
“It’s so quick that a child could be standing in line, call mom and say, ‘I forgot my lunch money today.’ She’s by her computer, runs her card, and by the time the child is at the front of the line, it’s already recorded,” says Art Dunham, director of food services for Pinellas County Schools.
Students take about four seconds to swipe and pay for lunch, Dunham says, and they’re doing it with 99% accuracy.
“We just love it. No one wants to go back,” Dunham says.
Palm-scanning technology is popping up nationwide as a bona fide biometric tracker of identities, and it appears poised to make the jump from schools and hospitals to other sectors of the economy such as banking and retail. It also has applications as a secure identifier for cloud computing.

Ben Casselman:

The rising cost of a college education is hitting one group especially hard: the millions of students who drop out without earning a degree.
A bachelor’s degree remains by far the clearest path to the American middle class. Even today, amid mounting concerns about the rising cost of higher education and questions about the relevance of many college degrees, recent graduates have lower rates of unemployment, higher earnings and better career prospects than their less educated peers.

Lawrence Messina:

Jorea Marple was carrying out numerous recommendations from the much-discussed audit of West Virginia’s public schools system when she was fired as superintendent, by Board of Education members eager to signal to Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and the Legislature that they supported the extensive review of education spending, policy and organization.
Those board members have cited the need for change when explaining Marple’s ouster, in light of struggling student performance. At least one member, Gayle Manchin, has commented further.
“My viewpoint was, we should all embrace this audit and garner from its findings and recommendation that would help us make the changes that needed to be made,” Manchin told The Associated Press last week. “My personal opinion is that wasn’t necessarily the way it was received at the Department of Education.”

Matthew DeFour:

Madison’s newest charter school opened in a state-of-the-art green building this fall, but parents and teachers are already worried there isn’t enough room for additional students next year.
It’s not that the classrooms at Badger Rock Middle School are cramped — they’re more spacious than most others in the district. But parents and teachers say there just aren’t enough rooms to serve the needs of the school.
The principal had to negotiate with the building owner to carve out an area for private meetings between teachers, parents and students. The nurse’s clinic doubles as a teacher break room. And when the number of students increases from 100 to 150 next year, a grade level will move into what is now the art and science room.
“When they planned out the building they said, ‘We have this great idea and it looks like this,'” said Tom Purnell, the parent of twin seventh-graders at Badger Rock. “Do I want to send my kids where the vision is or where the reality is?”

Leonard Pitts:

Indeed, for all the talk about the so-called reverse racism of affirmative action, I have long argued that the real problem with it – and the reason it needs an expiration date – is that it might give African-American kids the mistaken idea they carry some inherent deficiency that renders them unable to compete with other kids on an equal footing.
We should be wary of anything, however well-intentioned, however temporary, which conveys that impression to our children. I am proof we have been doing just that for a very long time. And it burns – I tell you this from experience – to realize people have judged you by a lower standard, especially when you had the ability to meet the higher one all along. So this “interim” cannot end soon enough.
Because ultimately, you do not fix education by lowering the bar. You do it by lifting the kids.

Related:

• When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:.
  “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!

James Causey:

One of the best lines in the movie “Lean on Me” was delivered by high school Principal Joe Clark, who told a custodian to “tear down” the cages in the cafeteria that were used to protect the cooks from the students.
“If you treat them like animals, that’s exactly how they will behave,” said Clark, portrayed by Morgan Freeman.
Clark is right, and that’s why Milwaukee Public Schools should not subject thousands of children to daily metal detector scans.
Metal detectors and hand-held wands only give educators, students and parents the false illusion that their schools are safe, when there is little proof that they cut down on violence.
The district says it does the scans to be proactive in light of the workplace and school shootings that have taken place across the country since 1999’s attack at Columbine High School in Colorado.
MPS spokesman Tony Tagliavia said, “We’d much rather have a conversation on why we scan instead of having the conversation on why we didn’t.”

Mary Meeker’s Address on the State of USA Inc.

1) America is losing its edge – some of this is inevitable as other countries improve their competitiveness, some of this is self inflicted.
2) Financial strength is vital to competitiveness – it’s core to a healthy economy, job creation, vibrant education / culture and military leadership.
3) Positive cash flow and a strong balance sheet are key to financial strength – bottom line, it’s bad to spend more than one brings in, as America is doing. In effect, as each day passes – with our rising losses and debt load – we rob just a little bit more from the future.
4) America does not need to lose its edge, it needs conviction and leadership to move its ‘business model’ in the right direction – we are all in this together, we need to understand and acknowledge our problems and agree to move forward with collective inspiration and sacrifice.
5) American tax dollars fund our government – we all need to understand where our taxes go and decide if we believe our hard-earned dollars are put to their highest-and-best use. The politicians we elect decide where our money goes.

View Meeker’s complete presentation, here (1.6MB PDF).

Stephanie Simon:

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush soared to rock star status in the education world on the strength of a chart.
A simple graph, it tracked fourth-grade reading scores. In 1998, when Bush was elected governor, Florida kids scored far below the national average. By the end of his second term, in 2007, they were far ahead, with especially impressive gains for low-income and minority students.
Those results earned Bush bipartisan acclaim. As he convenes a star-studded policy summit this week in Washington, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential education reformers in the U.S. Elements of his agenda have been adopted in 36 states, from Maine to Mississippi, North Carolina to New Mexico.
Many of his admirers cite Bush’s success in Florida as reason enough to get behind him.
But a close examination raises questions about the depth and durability of the gains in Florida. After the dramatic jump of the Bush years, Florida test scores edged up in 2009 and then dropped, with low-income students falling further behind. State data shows huge numbers of high school graduates still needing remedial help in math and reading.

Dennis Conta And Sean Robert:

Erin Richards’ Oct. 22 article on Wisconsin’s new school report cards shed light on the limitations of the proposed accountability system and illustrated the need to improve it.
The report card is a good idea with much promise, but in its current form it places high schools, especially those serving low-income and minority students, at a serious disadvantage.
The ratings assigned to schools are supposed to be based on reading and math test scores recalculated to meet a higher proficiency bar, test scores growth and the progress schools are making toward closing achievement gaps. In theory, it is a balanced system that will judge schools not on the types of students they receive but the actual impact a school has on student achievement.
But because of data limitations, the report card does not measure what it is designed to for high schools.

Laurie Rogers, via a kind email:

What’s the mission of any school district? Most parents seem to agree that it’s academics. Schools should prepare students academically for postsecondary life – whether it’s college, a trade, a career, the military or some other endeavor.
Alas, many public schools don’t focus on college or career readiness, and their mission statements don’t say they have to. Instead, other, more nebulous goals are their stated priorities, such as turning students into global citizens, “challenging” them, helping them develop “supportive relationships,” and having them engage in “relevant, real-life applications.”
“Equity” and “social justice” also are emphasized in many districts. Some districts have created new departments, applied for federal grants or hired $100,000+ personnel – supposedly to foster equity and social justice. But what’s behind the terminology?
Actual equity and social justice entail providing ALL students with the academic skills they need to lead a productive postsecondary life. But in public education, the terms tend to be ambiguous and politically laden, focusing instead on perceived unfairness. In the typical social-justice curriculum, America frequently is portrayed as the bad guy.

Chris Cook:

Last week, the excellent Paul Francis, political editor of the Kent Messenger, reported that Kent, the most significant selective county left in England had come up with a clever plan: to make the entry test for grammar schools “tutor-proof”.
This idea comes up a lot, largely from people promoting selection. You can see why: it is often presented as a means of squaring a problem. They can argue that grammar schools help bright poor children while dealing with the fact that very few get into them.
But, in truth, a properly administered test, which accurately captures the education enjoyed by people at the age of 11, should exclude large numbers of poor children. Not because they are intrinsically less able. But, at 11, the poor-rich divide is already a chasm.

Laura Waters:

David McCullough, author of Truman and John Adams and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, was interviewed by Morley Safer on Sixty Minutes recently. During a discussion regarding Americans’ “historical illiteracy,” McCullough opined on teacher training:

Well we need to revamp, seriously revamp, the teaching of the teachers. I don’t feel that any professional teacher should major in education. They should major in a subject, know something. The best teachers are those who have a gift and the energy and enthusiasm to convey their love for science or history or Shakespeare or whatever it is. “Show them what you love” is the old adage. And we’ve all had them, where they can change your life. They can electrify the morning when you come into the classroom.

Related: When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That? and the National Council for Teacher Quality has been looking into school of education curriculum.

Stephanie Banchero:

Five years ago, students in the public-school system here were almost as likely to drop out as earn a diploma. School-board meetings routinely devolved into shouting matches, with a board member once pouring a pitcher of ice water over an administrator’s head.
St. Louis schools chief Kelvin Adamsmeets with his management team this fall to review such data as the number of students expelled or truant.
Then, the state of Missouri stepped in, stripped the district’s accreditation and installed a new board to run the schools. That board hired Kelvin Adams, an unpretentious leader who had spent the previous 18 months as the chief of staff of the New Orleans Recovery School District, which had been created by the state to transform the hurricane-ravaged schools.
Since taking over here, Mr. Adams has lifted the high-school graduation rate by 18 percentage points and eliminated $25 million in debt. Attendance is up and misbehavior is down. State test scores are still painfully low–about three-quarters of elementary-school students can’t read or do math at grade level–but the progress on tests was enough to persuade state officials last month to grant the district provisional accreditation.