Victor Mair:

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

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

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

Issie Lapowsky:

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

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

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

David Leonhardt, Amanda Cox & Claire Cain Miller:

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

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

Stephen Moore

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

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

Moises Naim:

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

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

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

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

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

Jo Craven McGinty:

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

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

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

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

Fast Company:

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

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

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

Ross Douthat

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

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

A focus on “adult employment“.

Chris Hayes:

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

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

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

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

Tap for a larger view.

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

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

Brookings:

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

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

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

Jim Stingl:

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

Saving someone’s life will do that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Borsuk:

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

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

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

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

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

Nate Silver:

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

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

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

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

Stacey Patton:

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

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

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

Rick Reider:

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

1 Contributing to unemployment and declining labor market participation

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

2 Stymieing savings

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

3 Suppressing home buying

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

4 Worsening the class divide

Beijinger:

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

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

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

Sara Yu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16 News:

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

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

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

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

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

Emma Brown:

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

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

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

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

Donna Frake:

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

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

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

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

LILLIAN MONGEAU, EMMANUEL FELTON and SARAH BUTRYMOWICZ

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

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

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

Anica John:

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

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

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

Nick Gillespie:

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

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

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

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

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

Paul T. Hill, Ashley E. Jochim

People on the right and the left can readily agree with Mark Twain: “God first made idiots, but that was just for practice. Then he made school boards.”

Gov. Bruce Rauner is right, Chicago Public Schools is bureaucratic and patronage-ridden. Tack on ineffective at its core mission, educating Chicago’s children. And wasteful and programmed to go ever deeper into debt.

The failures are real, but what can be done? One reflex is to lay blame on the school board.

Twain’s comment is great snark, but the implication — to put different people in charge — isn’t the answer. There is a problem with school board performance, but the real problem is more the job than the people.

The school district and, therefore, the school board and superintendent, are in charge of everything from textbooks, buses and massive contracts for staff training, like the one that recently forced CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett to take a leave of absence. She is under federal investigation in connection with a $20.5 million no-bid contract that CPS awarded to her former employer, SUPES Academy, an executive training organization. Byrd-Bennett hasn’t been charged with anything.

District leaders know they will be blamed for teacher work stoppages so they will do anything, even plunge the system into hopeless debt, to maintain labor peace.

Nick Gass:

Only one-in-three Americans knows how many women serve on the Supreme Court, but 91 percent can identify Martin Luther King Jr., 47 years after his assassination.

That’s according to the latest Pew Research Center News IQ survey released Tuesday, which tests how well the American public knows the world in words, maps and pictures.

Almost all millennials surveyed — 96 percent — could pick out King from a list of names that included Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson and Thurgood Marshall. Older generations could mostly identify the slain civil-rights leader, as 89 percent of Gen Xers, Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation did.

But millennials apparently aren’t so great at identifying the current party makeup of the Senate. Only 47 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 were able to do so, compared to 52 percent overall. Those who described themselves as more politically engaged were more likely to know the upper chamber’s composition. (For the record, Republicans hold 54 seats; Democrats 44 seats; and Independents two seats.)

Anya Kamanetz

College is no different from jam, according to a surprising new book, Redesigning America’s Community Colleges. The authors, three Columbia University education researchers, argue that the best way to help the largest number of students get through college is to give them fewer pathways than they have now.

To many, that may sound counterintuitive. Here’s the problem. The typical broad-access institution offers short-term certificates, noncredit classes, remedial courses, technical and vocational two-year degree programs and general education requirements for students hoping to transfer to a four-year university — everything from “the exposition of esoteric Buddhism to the management of chain grocery stores,” as a Carnegie Foundation president put it back in 1929.

This is what Davis Jenkins, one of the book’s authors, calls the “cafeteria model.” But putting together a balanced meal from an all-you-can-eat buffet isn’t easy, especially for students who are more likely to be working adults with caregiving responsibilities and the first in their families to attend college.

Sarah Kaplan:

For Texas A&M – Galveston professor Irwin Horwitz, “enough was enough.”

Enough of what, exactly? Cheating, being told to “chill out,” being called a moron, fights among students, being the subject of rumors, feeling unsafe in his own classroom.

At least, those are the reasons he gave in an e-mail to his strategic management class last week, when he informed students that he was quitting the course — and leaving every one of them with a failing grade.

“None of you, in my opinion, given the behavior in this class, deserve to pass, or graduate to become an Aggie, as you do not in any way embody the honor that the university holds graduates should have within their personal character,” he wrote in the e-mail, which was published by Inside Higher Ed.

Sue Shellenbarger:

The old-fashioned flashcard is taking on new, digital life with a promise to make you smarter and more productive.

New flashcard programs on your phone or computer make it possible to memorize facts and concepts in what were wasted minutes waiting in line at the store or commuting to work. Users say they put a world of knowledge tantalizingly within reach, including Mandarin to programming, math, nutrition, bird calls and the bar exam.

The programs are based on research showing that spaced repetition, or repeated exposure to information at planned intervals, is the most powerful way to fix knowledge in one’s memory. Each digital flashcard is repeated at intervals, based on the degree of difficulty for the user. The hardest quiz items come up for review within a few hours or days, and easier ones are repeated every few weeks or months—when the user may be about to forget the answer.

Molly Beck

Even so, “I don’t think they followed the law,” Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council president Bill Lueders said after reviewing minutes from the meetings.

“I think they interpreted the (open meetings law) exemption overbroadly. The idea of an open meetings law is that exemptions are supposed to be for extraordinary circumstances and narrowly applied.”

Lueders said minutes from other closed School Board meetings obtained by the State Journal also raise questions about whether the discussions should have been held before the public.

April Barker, a Waukesha-based attorney and council member who specializes in open records issues, said some of the topics discussed were “bottom-line budget impact discussions and policy and procedure discussions,” which are not exempt from the state’s open meetings law.

“It looks like there are some troubling and overreaching exercises of closed session represented,” Barker said.

Arun D’ Souza:

When Bliss Broyard and Nico Israel decided to take what they call a family gap year with their children Esme, 8, and Roman, 5, the question of how to fit their lives into a couple of suitcases and a few backpacks was no small consideration.

Dr. Israel, an English professor at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, had a sabbatical coming up to research a new project on the history of Esperanto, contemporary globalization and world literature.

Jeremy Adam Smith:

San Francisco faces a challenge: promoting educational options without undermining classroom diversity

Each January, parents across San Francisco rank their preferences for public schools. By June, most get their children into their first choices, and almost three-quarters get one of their choices.

A majority of families may be satisfied with the outcome, but the student assignment system is failing to meet its No. 1 goal, which the San Francisco Unified School District has struggled to achieve since the 1960s: classroom diversity.

Since 2010, the year before the current policy went into effect, the number of San Francisco’s 115 public schools dominated by one race has climbed significantly. Six in 10 have simple majorities of one racial group. In almost one-fourth, 60 percent or more of the students belong to one racial group, which administrators say makes them “racially isolated.” That described 28 schools in 2013–2014, up from 23 in 2010–2011, according to the district.

Benjamin Fearnow:

“I was dealing with cheating, dealing with individuals swearing at me both in and out of class, it got to the point that the school had to put security guards at that class and another class,” said Horowitz. He said students’ complete lack of maturity and general incompetence proved they weren’t fit to enter the workforce.

Students in the class who received the email informing them they would fail the course expressed shock.

Diego Basch:

Of course there are other fields for which a formal education and certification is still important (medicine is the most obvious one). Also, there are other reasons to go to college besides increasing your value as a worker: it’s a life experience, a good way to meet like-minded people, and it provides a good place to learn from others (of course not the only place or even the best, as was the case before the internet). Unfortunately I do not believe those reasons justify the cost of college in the US for someone who’s not quite wealthy. I’m sure the deans of Ivy League universities would entertain a different opinion, given that the future of their industry depends on the perceived value of their services. What they won’t say is that the commoditization of degrees caused by the expansion of their business means that having one is no longer the differentiator it was one or two generations ago.

In conclusion, I don’t think it will be indispensable for my son to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a successful professional. He may choose to do so if he wants to enter a field requiring access to expensive laboratory equipment, or one requiring legal certification monopolized by universities. However, there’s a growing list of professions that will employ smart and resourceful people regardless of where or how they acquired their skills.

Pascuel-Emmanuel Gobry:

For many centuries, France was the official language of culture, and erudition. It was the language of diplomacy and arts. Aristocrats in Imperial Russia spoke French, even amongst themselves, as Tolstoy and many others documented. In short, if you wanted to be educated, you had to speak French.

Things have changed a lot since then. With the decline of France and the rise of the Anglosphere, English is now the world’s lingua franca. But French remains an official language in many international institutions, from the UN to the European Union to the Olympics Committee (founded by a Frenchman), and learning French still retains some cachet.

French may be a beautiful language, but few would argue it’s the most useful, and almost nobody would argue it’s the language of the future. John McWhorter spoke for many when he wrote an immediately viral piece titled, “Let’s Stop Pretending That French Is an Important Language,” attacking New York City’s bilingual education programs.

Here’s the thing: the data suggests that French language just might be the language of the future.

Christopher Mims:

Racing across the U.S. in your taco truck, you must fight off animals mutated by fallout from a nuclear war, and you must also turn them into delicious filling for the tacos you sell inside fortified towns. Your mission: Make it to the Canadian city of Winnipeg.

You are “Gunman Taco Truck.”

“It’s pretty much only a game that a kid would come up with,” says Brenda Romero, a videogame designer for more than 30 years and the mother of Donovan Romero-Brathwaite, the 10-year-old inventor of the game.

And yet GTT already has been licensed by a videogame publisher for Mac, PC, iOS and Android, and may also arrive on consoles. It’s quite an outcome for something born of Saturday programming lessons with Donovan’s dad John, also a videogame designer of note.

Donovan’s situation—access to two parents who are both programmers—is rare. In fact, in record numbers, children are picking up a skill their parents don’t possess: coding.

Ana Campoy:

Heather Betancourth, a representative from Chevron Phillips Chemical Co., told a crowded room of community college students what they wanted to hear: Her employer needs to fill 3,000 positions in the coming years. Starting salaries can top $100,000.

But here in the greater Houston region, dangling six-figure jobs is no longer enough to find qualified applicants for many positions. So the company has a scholarship program that covers community-college tuition, Ms. Betancourth elaborated, and pays interns around $18 an hour to work at its chemical facility.

Chevron Phillips, a joint venture between energy giants Chevron Corp. and Phillips 66, is among dozens of companies that are spending millions of dollars in the nation’s fifth-largest metropolitan area to train a local labor force that they say is unprepared to hold the jobs they are creating.

Kevin Donnelly:

Seventy teachers from the UK were sent to Shanghai to study classroom methods to investigate why Chinese students perform so well. Upon their return, the teachers reported that much of China’s success came from teaching methods the UK has been moving away from for the past 40 years.

The Chinese favour a “chalk and talk” approach, whereas countries such as the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand have been moving away from this direct form of teaching to a more collaborative form of learning where students take greater control.

Given China’s success in international tests such as PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS, it seems we have been misguided in abandoning the traditional, teacher-directed method of learning where the teacher spends more time standing at the front of the class, directing learning and controlling classroom activities.

USA Today:

Two Sundays ago, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv of Montgomery County, Md., got a call from Child Protective Services. Police had taken their two children, ages 10 and 6, into custody three hours earlier and were holding them at the crisis center.

Had the children been abused? No. Were they lost? No. So what prompted this extraordinary intervention? A concerned pedestrian had seen the children walking alone and called 911. It was the second time in four months that the Meitivs’ children were reported to authorities as they walked home from parks about a mile away.

OPPOSING VIEW: Allow children to be children

The Meitivs are part of a movement known as “free-range parenting,” a reaction to over­involved and hovering “helicopter” parenting. Free-range parents believe that allowing their kids more independence will teach them self-sufficiency. The Meitivs have trained 10-year-old Rafi and 6-year-old Dvora to navigate basic routes home by themselves, much as previous generations of kids have done on foot or bike, and have taught them basic safety precautions.

Monica & Casey

This blog has two owners: Monica A. and Casey M. from Minnesota, USA.

Monica: Hello! I’m an 18 year old Nigerian-American female. Obviously, I’m a fan of mathematics. I was one of those people who were lucky enough to find out that MATH IS AWESOME as early as middle school as opposed to later in life.

I created visualizingmath.tumblr.com the day after summer break began. Since then, it has been awesome. Thank you to Tumblr for putting us in your Science Spotlight and Education Spotlight. (Take a look at visualizingmath’s listing. I hope it was nerdy enough for you all.) Also, thank you to all our followers!

Mitch Dudek

2012, said a strike has repercussions.

“We got spanked for it,” she said, noting the closure of 50 public schools.

“So I want people to walk into this not romanticizing what we did, because I think that’s something I run into,” said Lewis, who added she “gets freaked out” when people recognize her on the street.

“We shouldn’t have any delusions about it,” said Lewis, who deflected praise for her role in the strike. “That strike was so not lead by me. It was lead by rank-and-file members saying they’d had enough, and they wanted some respect.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which includes the Chicago Teachers Union, also spoke at the event at The Drake Hotel.

Elizabeth Olson:

Jonathan Wang has not practiced law since he graduated from Columbia Law School in 2010, but he did not plan it that way.

When he entered law school, the economy was flourishing, and he had every reason to think that with a prestigious degree he was headed for a secure well-paying career. He convinced his parents, who work in Silicon Valley, that he had a plan. “I would spend three years at school in New York, then work for a big law firm and make $160,000 a year,” said Mr. Wang, 29. “And someday, I would become a partner and live the good life.”

Graduates from Harvard Law School celebrate their 2014 commencement. In big legal markets, $160,000 is the most common salary that large firms reported paying first years.Welcome to Your First Year as a Lawyer. Your Salary Is $160,000.

Mr. Wang, who works in Manhattan as a tutor for the law school admissions exam, is living a life far different from the one he envisioned. And he is not alone. About 20 percent of law graduates from 2010 are working at jobs that do not require a law license, according to a new study, and only 40 percent are working in law firms, compared with 60 percent from the class a decade earlier. To pay the bills, the 2010 graduates have taken on a variety of jobs, some that do not require admission to the bar; others have struck out on their own with solo practices. Most of the graduates have substantial student debt.

Molly Beck:

A $300,000 grant paid over the next three years from the Madison Community Foundation will begin the process of developing “full-service” community schools in the Madison School District.

“Our goal is to raise student achievement for all and narrow and close achievement gaps but we cannot do it on our own,” superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said Thursday. “By better coordinating our efforts (and) creating a quilt of strong neighborhood centers with strong, full-service community schools, we’ll be able to make sure that the families that need coordinated services can actually get them.”

The community school model is used in school districts across the country in an effort to address more than just academic needs of children, according to the Urban Strategies Council, and is especially used in areas with high poverty with neighborhood residents and families that may have poor access to health care services or meals.

Jesse Saffron:

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has released a report titled “The Unkindest Cut: Shakespeare in Exile 2015.” According to the report’s author, Dr. Michael Poliakoff, only 4 out of the top 52 liberal arts colleges and universities in the country require English majors to take a course on Shakespeare. “If reading Shakespeare is not central to a liberal education, what is? For English majors to miss out is far worse. A degree in English without serious study of Shakespeare is like a major in Greek Literature without the serious study of Homer. It is tantamount to fraud. A department that claims to cover the full span of literature written in English and represent the highest standards of academic study cannot marginalize the writer most honored and beloved in English literary history,” writes Poliakoff. The report notes that, while many colleges are giving Shakespeare superficial treatment, trendy courses, and even courses that focus on the works of children’s book authors, are growing in number. As ACTA’s president Anne Neal said in a recent interview, “It’s no wonder that the public is rapidly losing faith in our colleges and universities.”

David Leonhardt:

The fate of students like Mr. Escanilla is crucial to today’s debate over who should go to college: How much money should taxpayers spend subsidizing higher education? How willing should students be to take on college debt? How hard should Washington and state governments push colleges to lift their graduation rates? All of these questions depend on whether a large number of at-risk students are really capable of completing a four-year degree.

As it happens, two separate — and ambitious — recent academic studies have looked at precisely this issue. The economists and education researchers tracked thousands of people over the last two decades in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere who had fallen on either side of hard admissions cutoffs. Less selective colleges often set such benchmarks: Students who score 840 on the SAT, for example, or maintain a C+ average in high school are admitted. Those who don’t clear the bar are generally rejected, and many don’t attend any four-year college.

Such stark cutoffs provide researchers with a kind of natural experiment. Students who score an 830 on the SAT are nearly identical to those who score an 840. Yet if one group goes to college and the other doesn’t, researchers can make meaningful estimates of the true effects of college.

The Message:

This style has been huge for some time now. Do you love it, or hate it?

Me—I’m in! Mind you, I’m a fan of all the betentacled linguistic lifeforms that have emerged from our cambrian explosion online. These days, people write insanely more text than they did before the Internet and mobile phones came along. So the volume of experimentation is correspondingly massive and, for me, delightful. One joy of our age is watching wordplay evolve at the pace of E.coli.

Hugh McGuire:

Last year, I read four books.

The reasons for that low number are, I guess, the same as your reasons for reading fewer books than you think you should have read last year: I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters. Chapters often have page after page of paragraphs. It just seems such an awful lot of words to concentrate on, on their own, without something else happening. And once you’ve finished one chapter, you have to get through the another one. And usually a whole bunch more, before you can say finished, and get to the next. The next book. The next thing. The next possibility. Next next next.

I am an optimist

Still, I am an optimist. Most nights last year, I got into bed with a book — paper or e — and started. Reading. Read. Ing. One word after the next. A sentence. Two sentences.

Audrey Watters:

One of the most common ways to criticize our current system of education is to suggest that it’s based on a “factory model.” An alternative condemnation: “industrial era.” The implication is the same: schools are woefully outmoded.

As edX CEO Anant Agarwal puts it, “It is pathetic that the education system has not changed in hundreds of years.” The Clayton Christensen Institute’s Michael Horn and Meg Evan argue something similar: “a factory model for schools no longer works.” “How to Break Free of Our 19th-Century Factory-Model Education System,” advises Joel Rose, the co-founder of the New Classrooms Innovation Partners. Education Next’s Joanne Jacobs points us “Beyond the Factory Model.” “The single best idea for reforming K–12 education,” writes Forbes contributor Steve Denning, ending the “factory model of management.” “There’s Nothing Especially Educational About Factory-Style Management,” according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess.

I’d like to add: there’s nothing especially historical about these diagnoses either.
Blame the Prussians

The “factory model of education” is invoked as shorthand for the flaws in today’s schools – flaws that can be addressed by new technologies or by new policies, depending on who’s telling the story. The “factory model” is also shorthand for the history of public education itself – the development of and change in the school system (or – purportedly – the lack thereof).

Kate achelderachelder

s a college administrator, Mr. Daniels has also taken notice of the bureaucratic accreditation process that is a prerequisite for receiving federal funds. Six regional groups blessed by the Education Department, as well as a coterie of program-specific organizations, sign off on an institution’s programs. The ostensible goal when Congress coupled federal funding with accreditation in the 1952 G.I. Bill was to protect students from colleges hawking worthless degrees.

That hasn’t happened. Instead, universities devote considerable resources to a useless process. Almost no institution misses the mark, and since accreditation is done geographically, an upper-tier school like Purdue is accredited by the same agency that has given accreditation to Indiana University East, where the six-year graduation rate is about 18%.

Purdue pays $150,000 annually in direct accreditation fees, working with any combination of 17 agencies—but that doesn’t include time. Stanford University Provost John Etchemendy said in a 2011 letter that the school spent $849,000 in one year of a multiyear accreditation. “One suspects you have some basic inertia and some folks would rather spend their time being busy with this than doing something more productive,” Mr. Daniels says with a faint smile. “I refer of course to the people on other campuses.”

‘All this time and money and in the end some really lousy schools get accredited, so I’m not sure what the student—the consumer—learns. An awful lot of make work involved, or so it seems,” he says. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) is considering reforms, including untangling accreditation from federal funding, an idea that Mr. Daniels says “ought to be looked at.”

Christopher Ingraham

Imagine being 10 years old and being led, along with your 6-year-old sibling, into the backseat of a police cruiser. The police promise to take you home to your parents. It’s only three blocks away, and you know they are searching for you frantically.

But instead of taking you home, the police detain you there, in the car, for three hours, without a meal or access to a restroom. The sun sets, night falls. Eventually the cops take you to a facility maintained by Child Protective Services where you’re kept for another several hours. You still haven’t had any dinner. You aren’t reunited with your parents until 10:30 p.m., nearly six hours after your ordeal began.

Curriculum and units of instruction in English and Spanish Language Arts and designed and launched for entire school year

Re-design of summer school plan completed to expand access through increased enrollment and attendance

First phase of Parent Academy launched with new course offerings this summer

Academic tutoring framework completed to ensure that all tutoring services provided to students are aligned to best practice and support student learning

New teacher screening and selection process launched for this hiring season focused on quality and diversity of workforce

Toolkit to support high-functioning teacher teams developed and provided to schools

Improved school improvement planning toolkit on track to be provided to schools this spring for planning for next school year
Referendum passes with 82% of the vote

The documents include total spending, which is nice to see. Much more on the 2015-2016 budget, here.

140 page budget document (pdf).

Deirdre Hargrove-Krieghoff (PDF):

We know that our vision as a District doesn’t come to life without a thriving workforce. That is why we are working hard to provide our employees with the resources and support they need to do their best work. To be successful for all students, we must be a District that attracts, develops and retains the best employees.

The District’s current employee contracts expire June 30, 2016; after one more school year. The District is responsible for developing a handbook that will take the place of those contracts. The MMSD Employee Handbook will be collaboratively developed and reflective of expectations of both employees and the District (as the employer).

Purpose of the Handbook
As a result of Act 10’s restrictions on collective bargaining, school boards have been developing employee handbooks. The purpose of a handbook is to establish the foundation for the relationship between the District and its employees and outline mutual expectations. In general, an employee handbook is a compilation of the policies, procedures, working conditions, and behavioral expectations that guide employee actions in the workplace. A handbook also includes information about employee compensation and benefits, and additional terms and conditions of employment. The primary distinction between a CBA and a handbook is that a CBA mainly sets forth the obligations of the employer but a handbook also outlines obligations of the employee. It is our goal for the employee handbook to be a comprehensive resource/document for staff incorporating not only previous CBA provisions but also Board policies and Human Resources policies governing employment issues and providing links to applicable documents. We are also looking to create uniform language regarding benefits and conditions of employment across employee groups.

Process for Development
Pursuant to the process outlined for the handbook creation, the CBAs are to form the foundation for the development of the handbook. An Oversight Committee comprised of District and employee representatives has been working collaboratively in the initial stages to develop the table of contents for the handbook. The District representatives on the Oversight Group are: Jennifer Cheatham, Deirdre Hargrove-Krieghoff, Lisa Kvistad, Caroline Racine Gilles, Chad Wiese, Tremayne Clardy, Karen Kepler and Heidi Tepp. The employee representatives on the Oversight Group are: Doug Keillor, Mike Lipp, Peg Coyne, Kristopher Schiltz, Erin Proctor, Neil Rainford, Rob Larson and Dave Branson.

Table of Contents (PDF).

Strategic Framework includes vision and strategies

Vision 2030 is not a strategy; instead, it paints a vivid
and aspirational picture of what MMSD can be

Vision will work in concert with our Framework to
guide our actions, both big and small

Grounded in 2015-16 4K students – Class of 2029

MMSD Vision 2030: Prepared, Empowered Graduates (PDF).

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

MTI Executive Director John Matthews and MMSD Asst. Superintendent for Finance Mike Barry, along with District HR Director Deirdre Hargrove-Krieghoff and Benefits Manager Sharon Hennessy, have met with representatives of the three firms (Unity, GHC and Dean Health) which provide health insurance for District employees, to plead the case that premiums should be frozen for the ensuing fiscal year. Contract renewals for the insurers are effective July 1.

In the meetings, Matthews & Barry stressed that because of the impact of State revenue controls on school boards and Governor Walker’s proposed budget, the District and its employees face severe financial problems. One way to provide relief to employees, they told insurers, is to hold health insurance premiums at their current levels. The firms pledged to respond by the end of April. While Matthews talked about the large negative impact of Act 10 on wages, Barry told the firms that Walker’s proposed Budget would cause the District a shortfall of $12.5 million and he said District management would not recommend its employees contribute to the health insurance premium.

allset learning

If you’ve just started learning Mandarin Chinese, you’re correct to put a lot of effort into learning correct pronunciation. You really need to learn pinyin right away, and we strongly recommend you take the time to familiarize yourself with our pinyin chart.

But even if you’re an elementary learner or an intermediate learner, chances are you could still gain a lot from working a bit more on your pronunciation. Below is an example of how pronunciation topics can and should be studied across various levels.

Kristin DeCarr:

A recent survey by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice found that students who participate in the privately-funded Baltimore school choice program, set up for students of low-income families, are on average graduating high school earlier than those students who are not part of the program and are attending college at higher rates than local and national averages.

Released this week, the survey, called “The Achievement Checkup,” looked at the progress of students who received private school scholarships through the Children’s Scholarship Fund Baltimore from kindergarten through the eighth grade.

Author Alex Schuh discovered that 18% of students who received the scholarship graduated high school within three years. National data finds this percentage to be 2.9% for students who do not have the scholarship offered to them. On a local level, 97% of scholarship students graduated high school. Meanwhile, the graduation rate at Baltimore County Public Schools is 34 to 64%.

Michael Horn:

For 12 years, the Babson Survey Group in partnership with other organizations, including the Online Learning Consortium (formerly the Sloan Consortium), has done critical research into the growth of online learning in American higher education that it publishes in the report Grade Level: Tracking Online Education in the United States. The research has been enormously helpful in understanding the actual numbers of students learning online in accredited institutions and how the institutions themselves—from the administration to faculty—view online learning.

Initially, the research arguably gave a reasonably complete view of the state of online learning in all of higher education, as it showed online learning growing rapidly with growth rates of over 20 percent in 2003, 2005, and 2009. But as of late, the research has suggested that the growth of online learning is flattening. It was 6.1 percent in the fall of 2012 and, according to the most recent report published in January 2015, 3.7 percent in the fall of 2013. Does this mean that online learning is not the disruptive innovation it was heralded to be?

I don’t think it does. As Clayton Christensen is fond of saying, God didn’t create data; humans create data to try to capture the complexity of the world around them. By its nature, data is backward looking, and most data is incapable of telling the truth. In this case, I think the flattening growth rate of online learning for credit within accredited institutions misses the bigger picture—although I do think it suggests that the pending disruption may take somewhat longer than many have forecasted in the past.

Richard Berg:

The Young, Gifted and Truant crowd really “jumped the shark” when they blocked all traffic on East Washington Avenue recently. But let’s not forget who helped to enable this crowd of malcontents.

The Madison Police Department has bent over backward to accommodate this sort of action. And Madison School Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham helped bus students to a march.

So police and school leaders have basically issued licenses for truancy whenever the spirit moves the lawless students. Students blocked traffic at 10:30 a.m. on a work day. A real leader would have declared this an unlawful assembly that endangered the public by about 10:31 a.m. A real leader would have cleared the street by 10:35 a.m. End of story.

org theories:

Arizona State has been in higher ed news a lot this week. The Atlantic just published a fairly fawning article on ASU’s partnership with Starbucks, featuring trenchant critiques of traditional colleges like, “The customer service is atrocious.”

Today, the news is ASU’s announcement that it will offer its entire freshman year online, through MOOCs. (Just when you thought they were dead!) Here’s the deal: ASU is partnering with EdX, the nonprofit Harvard-MIT collaboration, to produce the MOOCs. Students don’t have to apply, and they don’t have to pay in advance. But after they complete the class, if they decide they want college credit, they can pay ASU $300-600 (the final price is not set) and it will show up on a transcript indistinguishable from any other class.

Of course, people love to hate on ASU president Michael Crow. Dean Dad pointed out that Maricopa Community College, in ASU’s backyard, only charges $250 a credit and provides library access, among other amenities. John Warner focuses on the importance of the first year to student persistence, implying that disadvantaged students will be hurt. Jonathan Rees amps up the rhetoric, calling ASU the first “predator university.”

Edward Morrissey:

Three incidents this week demonstrate the gap between education and indoctrination. Oberlin College in Ohio and Georgetown University in Washington DC both had groups invite Christina Hoff Sommers, a conservative critic of the current version of feminism, to speak on their campuses. Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, composes a weekly video blog called the Factual Feminist, and most of her work challenges both the assumptions and conclusions of “third-wave” feminism, especially as practiced on college campuses.

Much of what Sommers writes aims to counter the arguments that have become treated as unconditional truths, but which do not stand up to empirical tests. Those assumptions include the oft-cited and roundly debunked claim that one in five women on American college have been or will be victims of sexual assault during their student careers, or that women only earn 78 cents on the dollar compared to men. Both of these continue to be promoted not just by campus activists but also by the White House, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Chris Rickert:

Madison School District spokeswoman Rachel Strauch-Nelson said “test preparation is really limited to getting a feel for the technical part of the test, not the content.”

She wasn’t aware of any district survey to gauge student impressions of testing — something that, to me, wasn’t surprising. The education establishment often focuses as much on the needs of adults as on the needs of the children.

Personnel rules favoring the most senior, most educated teachers, for example (and not necessarily the most competent) have long been a part of public education.

Similarly, among the main concerns of parents who are opting their children out of testing is whether results will be used to evaluate teachers and schools.

Now if only what’s best for parents and other adults was always what’s best for children.

Related: A letter to parents supporting “no teacher left behind”.

Lauren Weber:

Among the hiring myths that took root during the recession, here’s a particularly tenacious one: A person with a college degree makes a better employee than a person with a high-school diploma.

A September 2014 report by labor market analysis firm Burning Glass Technologies documented pervasive “credential creep” in positions that historically didn’t call for a bachelor’s degree but now are more likely to require one. For example, Burning Glass found a 21% credential gap for computer helpdesk workers, meaning 39% of workers in that field hold a BA but 60% of current job postings require one.

Employers use a college degree as a proxy for many things—critical thinking or communication skills, technical prowess, or simply the ability to follow a goal through to the end.

But what if they’re wrong, at least some of the time? What if a degree really isn’t a predictor of success or, in some jobs, is an impediment to success?

A review of client data by Sunstone Analytics, a San Francisco recruiting startup that works with several large employers, turned up some unexpected insights about what high performers have in common at individual companies.

David Blaska

Voters just approved a $41 million spending referendum. Now the Madison Metro School District says it needs to cut $10.8 million to cover a deficit. This is after rewarding its unionized teachers and support staff with a 2.5% pay increase in the budget approved late last year.

Who is running this store? Hint: It ain’t the Koch Brothers.

The cuts will require eliminating 110 positions, mostly teachers. How does this help minority achievement?

The school board rushed to ratify union contracts four years ago while protesters were still camping overnight in the State Capitol. The district scheduled a special meeting on a Saturday morning with only the minimally required public notice. I attended that meeting, but the public — the three of us who found the meeting — were not allowed to speak. The contract required no teacher contribution to their generous health insurance coverage.

School districts that took advantage of Act 10 are not laying off teachers.

Madison is paying for this folly by collecting teachers union boss John Matthews’ dues for him. Some of that money finds its way back to finance the school board members’ election campaigns. Sweet deal for the union, wormy apples for the students and their families, self-tapping screws for the taxpayers.

I continue to find it fascinating that Madison plans to expand two of its least diverse schools: Hamilton and Van Hise, despite capacity elsewhere and the District’s long term disastrous reading results.

Lauren Weber:

The Delaware North Cos., a hospitality company whose customer-service representatives help people plan vacations at national parks, sometimes struggles these days to keep 80 or so seats filled at its call center in Fresno, Calif.—a city tied for the 9th-highest unemployment rate in the U.S.

The company has no shortage of job applicants. But finding the right candidates has gotten tougher since the company started using a customized assessment last year to see how applicants stack up against top call-center workers in such traits as friendliness, curiosity and the ability to multitask.

Managers said the new test, administered online, has reduced turnover and allowed Delaware North to more accurately select applicants who best fit the job. “Now we understand better what makes a great reservation sales applicant,” said Andy Grinsfelder, vice president of sales and marketing for the Buffalo, N.Y.-based company’s parks and resorts division.

Jackie Crosby:

She grew up in Maple Grove, went to college at the University of Minnesota, and lived in both St. Paul and Minneapolis. But when the 27-year-old met with a job recruiter last year, she was set on the Pacific Northwest.

“I don’t think I’ll be back,” said Sperzel, now with a Seattle ad agency.

States are scrambling for young professionals like Sperzel to help offset the wave of baby boomer retirements. Minnesota is falling behind in that competition.

The state has lost residents every year since 2002, with young adults most eager to leave. About 9,300 18- to 24-year-olds move out annually, according to the Minnesota State Demographic Center.

That — combined with a declining birthrate and an aging population — has demographers and civic leaders sounding alarms.

“It’s a lapel-grabbing moment,” said Peter Frosch, a vice president at Greater MSP, a St. Paul nonprofit focused on economic development in the Twin Cities metro.

Melissa Korn:

Arizona State University is teaming up with edX, a nonprofit platform for massive open online courses, to offer a full freshman-year curriculum to the public as it seeks to expand its student base and improve college attendance and graduation rates.

The program, Global Freshman Academy, will award up to a full year of academic credit to people who successfully complete eight web classes on general education subjects such as astronomy and Western civilization, designed and taught by Arizona State faculty.

Students can take the classes for no fee, or—after passing final exams—pay up to $200 per credit hour, or about $4,800 for the full year of credit. Those who finish the course sequence, which includes a mix of required and elective classes, would be able to apply to Arizona State for admission with sophomore standing.

Nick Anderson:

The 10 richest universities in America hold nearly a third of the total wealth, in cash and investments, amassed by about 500 public and private institutions. The 40 richest hold almost two-thirds of the total wealth.

And their financial edge is widening. These schools are drawing an outsized share of gifts to colleges and universities. Their assets grew at at a far faster rate from 2009 to 2014 than the portfolios of schools in the middle and bottom of the pack.

Those are the findings from Moody’s Investors Service, released Thursday, in a study of the balance sheets of 503 institutions in the portfolio of the credit-rating firm. The study illuminates the disparity between the haves and the have-nots in higher education.

Colleen Flaherty:

Full-time faculty members at Ohio public institutions are objecting to proposed legislation with big implications for their right to organize unions. Tucked deep into a 3,090-page budget bill pending before the state’s House Finance Committee is language that would reclassify professors who participate in virtually anything other than teaching and research as supervisors or managers, and therefore exempt from collective bargaining. So serving on a committee, for example, turns a professor into a manager.

The language is nearly identical to another, ultimately failed piece of state-level legislation from four years ago, but faculty members consider the new bill a serious threat — and they’re warning legislators of the possible consequences of its success.

“What would happen if this passes, I think, is that faculty would choose simply not to do service and without that, universities would grind to a halt,” said John McNay, chair of the history department at the University of Cincinnati’s Blue Ash campus and president of the Ohio conference of the American Association of University Professors. “People ought to be aware t

Rachel Cohen:

Twice a week for 30 minutes, fifth graders at KIPP Washington Heights, a charter school in New York City, attend “character class.” Each lesson is divided into three parts, according to Ian Willey, the assistant principal who teaches it. First, students find out what specific skill they’ll be focusing on that day. “This morning we’re going to learn how to set a long-term goal,” Willey might tell them. Next, students are asked to practice the skill. In this case, students may imagine they have a long-term project to complete, and then work to construct a timeline with incremental deadlines. In the final part of the lesson, students would take time to collectively reflect. “What was hard about this exercise?” Willey might ask. “What went well? Did anyone feel nervous? What did you do when you felt nervous?” And because part of KIPP’s mission is to help build character, the students would then classify their new skill as one or more of KIPP’s seven targeted character goals. In this example, the students were learning “grit.”

Few ideas inspire more debate in education circles than grit, which means having dedication to and passion for long-term goals. Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, first popularized the concept in 2007; she believes that if we can teach children to be “grittier” in schools, we can help them achieve greater success. Paul Tough, a journalist who published a 2012 bestseller, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, also brought grit into the national spotlight. Many policymakers and school leaders have since jumped at the idea. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan praised Tough’s “fantastic book”—arguing that teaching skills like grit “can help children flourish and overcome significant challenges throughout their lifetimes.” Districts all over the country are exploring how they can incorporate grit into their curriculum. In 2013, Duckworth was awarded $625,000 by the MacArthur Foundation to continue researching ways to cultivate grit in schools.

Professor K.C. Johnson

On April 6, 2015, Professor KC Johnson of Brooklyn College and City University of New York Graduate Center spoke on “Unlearning Due Process: Troubling Trends on Campus,” and a video of his presentation can be viewed below. This event was part of the Law & Liberty’s academic freedom project, which is generously funded by the Mailman Foundation. The event was co-sponsored with Federalist Society.

Emma Kolchin-Miller:

The National Labor Relations Board decided to review the current precedent that denies recognition for graduate student unions at private universities on Friday afternoon.

The decision comes after the New York chapter of the National Labor Relations Board dismissed a petition on Feb. 6 for union recognition from the Graduate Workers of Columbia—a group of Columbia graduate students seeking official union recognition. The National Labor Relations Board also decided to review a petition from graduate students at the New School on Friday, according to Capital New York.

Students from the Graduate Workers of Columbia say the decision is important, but expected.

“We expected the National Labor Relations Board to grant review,” Maida Rosenstein, president of United Auto Workers Local 2110, the union that GWC would join if it gained recognition, said. “This is the only just and democratic way to proceed, because there is no reason for teaching assistants and research assistants not to have the right to decide for themselves on whether or not they want to unionize.”

Ali Riaz:

This paper traces the history of madrassahs (Islamic seminaries) in South Asia from their inception in the 12th century until the end of colonial rule in 1947.The paper argues that many of the pre-colonial rulers of South Asia, including the Mughals (1526–1857), played key roles in promoting education and providing patronage of various educational institutions, including madrassahs. The policies of British colonial rule (1757–1947), however, made the most indelible marks on madrassah education, not only directly, wherein their policies have impacted on the structure, functions and curriculum of madrassahs, but also indirectly, through the prompting of responses from the ulama and the Muslim community that determined the contours and the content of madrassah education.The paper examines the roles of various strands of madrassah education, and the interplay of politics and curriculum of various major madrassahs. The paper demonstrates that madrassah as a concept and as an institution has come a long way, that its contents and contours have undergone changes, and that as an institution it has largely remained embedded within the society.

Timothy Doner:

During the past few years, I’ve been referred to in the media as “The World’s Youngest Hyperpolyglot” — a word that sounds like a rare illness. In a way it is: it describes someone who speaks a particularly large number of foreign languages, someone whose all-consuming passion for words and systems can lead them to spend many long hours alone with a grammar book.

But while it’s true that I can speak in 20 different languages, including English, it took me a while to understand that there’s more to language than bartering over kebabs in Arabic or ordering from a menu in Hindi. Fluency is another craft altogether.

I began my language education at age thirteen. I became interested in the Middle East and started studying Hebrew on my own. For reasons I still don’t quite understand, I was soon hooked on the Israeli funk group Hadag Nachash, and would listen to the same album every single morning. At the end of a month, I had memorized about twenty of their songs by heart — even though I had no clue what they meant. But once I learned the translations it was almost as if I had downloaded a dictionary into my head; I now knew several hundred Hebrew words and phrases — and I’d never had to open a textbook.

Ama Mazama:

Homeschooling, common among white Americans, is showing an increase among African-Americans kids, as well. African Americans now make up about 10 percent of all homeschooled children in this fastest-growing form of education. However, the reasons for black kids to be homeschooled may not be the same as for white kids. My research shows that black parents homeschool their children due to white racism.

This may come as a surprise since, for many, we live in an age of alleged color blindness and post-racialism, characterized by the declining significance of race and racism. My research found strong evidence to suggest that racism is far from being a thing of the past. I found covert institutional racism and individual racism still persist and are largely responsible for the persistence of profound racial disparities and inequalities in many social realms. Schools, of course, are no exception, which helps one understand why racism is such a powerful drive for black homeschoolers.

In the spring and fall of 2010, I interviewed 74 African-American homeschooling families from around the U.S. While the size of my sample does not allow me to claim that it is representative of the whole African-American homeschooling population, it was nonetheless large enough to allow me to capture the main reasons why black parents tend to homeschool their children.

Darwin BondGraham:

On December 9, 2014, at 4:48 p.m., an internal email with the subject line, “Reminder for Tonight and this week: Do Not Advise Protesters That We Are Following Them on Social Media,” circulated among dozens of California Highway Patrol commanders. The message read: “A quick reminder … as you know, our TLO [Terrorism Liaison Officers] officers are actively following multiple leads over social media.” The note continued, “this morning, we found posts detailing protesters’ interaction with individual officers last night. In the posts, protesters are stating that we (CHP) were claiming to follow them on social media. Please have your personnel refrain from such comments; we want to continue tracking the protesters as much as possible. If they believe we are tracking them, they will go silent.”

In recent years, police agencies throughout the United States have scoured social media as part of criminal investigations. But the police are also watching social media to spy on political protesters, especially those they suspect will engage in acts of civil disobedience. During the recent Black Lives Matter protests, local and state police agents monitored protesters on social media and activist websites. Several hundred CHP emails obtained by the Express show that social media is now a key source of intel for the police when monitoring political protests.

Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy:

“Test refusal is a mistake because it eliminates important information about how our kids are doing. Those who call for opting out really want New York to opt out of information that can help parents and teachers understand how well their students are doing,” he said. “We can’t go back to ignoring the needs of our children.”

Lisa Rudley, a founding member of NYS Allies for Public Education that has organized rallies and sponsored advertisements throughout the state promoting the opt-out movement, cheered the numbers.

“The governor and legislature spoke on April 1 with their plan for our children’s education,” said Rudley, also a parent with children in Ossining Union Free School District in Ossining, N.Y. “Parents are responding in force, ‘We do not consent!’ If it’s not good enough for the best private schools in the country, it’s not good enough for our kids.”

Terry Eagleton:

A few years ago, I was being shown around a large, very technologically advanced university in Asia by its proud president. As befitted so eminent a personage, he was flanked by two burly young minders in black suits and shades, who for all I knew were carrying Kalashnikovs under their jackets. Having waxed lyrical about his gleaming new business school and state-of-the-art institute for management studies, the president paused to permit me a few words of fulsome praise. I remarked instead that there seemed to be no critical studies of any kind on his campus. He looked at me bemusedly, as though I had asked him how many Ph.D.’s in pole dancing they awarded each year, and replied rather stiffly “Your comment will be noted.” He then took a small piece of cutting-edge technology out of his pocket, flicked it open and spoke a few curt words of Korean into it, probably “Kill him.” A limousine the length of a cricket pitch then arrived, into which the president was bundled by his minders and swept away. I watched his car disappear from view, wondering when his order for my execution was to be implemented.

Josh Mitchell:

Nearly one in three Americans who are now having to pay down their student debt–or a staggering 31.5%–are at least a month behind on their payments, new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests. That figure is far higher than official delinquency measures reported by the Education Department and the New York Fed. And it’s also likely the most accurate.

Here’s why: The official measures reflect delinquencies as a share of all Americans with student debt, but millions of borrowers aren’t even required to make payments yet. Many are currently in college or grad school and thus don’t have to make payments until six months after they leave. Others are out of school and past that grace period but have received permission by their lender—the federal government in most cases—to suspend payments for a range of reasons, such as being unemployed.

Alan Borsuk:

In the early 2000s, a high school was launched on the far south side without much fanfare. It was expected to be small, it was housed in part of an older Milwaukee Public Schools building, and, other than among those directly involved, expectations were modest.

Elsewhere on the south side, close to downtown, a large high school was launched with great fanfare, a striking new building, broad support, and great hopes that it would play an important role in building the workforce of Milwaukee’s future.

One turned out to be, in my big book, the best single development within the MPS main roster of schools in a generation. It was the unheralded small operation, Reagan High School, which has grown to well over 1,200 students and is known for its International Baccalaureate college-prep program.

The other turned out to be a sad, troubling disappointment: Bradley Tech. It had troubles from the time it opened in 2002, it has gone through waves of leaders and teachers, and it has never thrived. Few attend the school by choice. Discipline, attendance, and student success were weak.

Some measures have gotten worse in recent years and enrollment has declined. The technical and vocational programs it offers are actually good but are utilized by relatively few students. Overall, data suggest it may well be the lowest-performing large high school in the state.

A new effort, involving some of the biggest education and civic players in the city, was launched last week to turn around Bradley Tech, to make it “the Bradley Tech that was really promised,” as MPS Superintendent Darienne Driver put it. The heads of MPS, Milwaukee Area Technical College, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee spread the word about how committed they were to Bradley Tech and how closely they are working together.

Wall Street Journal:

Imagine a land where the most highly educated citizens work for a pittance. Where the local lord treats them more or less as he pleases because the supply of workers is greater than the work available. Where the nobles enjoy lives of relative ease and comfort while the people who do most of the work struggle to make ends meet.

These aren’t the sans-culottes of late 18th-century France. We’re talking about the modern American university. Specifically, Harvard—at least if you believe the complaints by the graduate students trying to unionize there. They have a case, too, even if their solution isn’t the cure they think it is. Even taking into account the value of the tuition relief that grad students receive in exchange for the teaching and research they do, their low pay and limited benefits are all too real.

These grad students (and part-time adjuncts) carry much of the teaching load at universities for one reason: They are cheaper. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, at Harvard the average professor’s salary is $205,000. Grad students get a fraction of this, and the glut of Ph.D.s means most will never find the professorships they seek.

Peg Tyre:

At the Carpe Diem-Meridian School in Indianapolis, row after row of students are wearing headphones and staring into computer screens. Although they look like employees at a call center, they are actually fifteen-year-olds tackling algebra concepts. Their lessons were delivered earlier in the day by a software program offered by Edgenuity and reinforced by an instructor. Now the students are working through problems on their monitors, to show they have mastered it. Their results will be quickly fed back to their instructors, who will use it to shape the next day’s instruction.

Two students finish quickly and check the overhead monitor for their next task. Others are sweating through sophisticated problems. A few, who are struggling with the material, are working on problems that a software algorithm has determined are simpler but will help build the foundational skills they need. And, as in any classroom, some students are using ancient technology that has become less central at Carpe Diem schools — a notepad and a pen — to make abstract doodles.

Asit Kiswas & Juliette Kirchherr:

MANY of the world’s most talented thinkers may be university professors, but sadly most of them are not shaping today’s public debates or influencing policies.

Indeed, scholars often frown upon publishing in the popular media. “Running an opinion editorial to share my views with the public? Sounds like activism to me,” a professor recently noted at a conference, hosted by the University of Oxford.

The absence of professors from shaping public debates and policies seems to have exacerbated in recent years, particularly in social sciences.

In the 1930s and 1940s, 20 per cent of articles in the prestigious The American Political Science Review focused on policy recommendations. At the last count, the share was down to a meagre 0.3 per cent.

Annamaria Andriotis:

High-school seniors could be forgiven for thinking that comparing college financial-aid offers requires an advanced degree.

The letters have been pouring in over the past few weeks. But along with the excitement comes a challenge: sorting through offers that often differ in ways that can blur the bottom line.

Many colleges and universities list grants together with loans that must be paid back, or gloss over fees and other expenses that can add up to thousands of dollars. Some letters show the total costs that students will bear, while others leave aspiring engineers and artists to do the math on their own.

UVA Students United:

As criticism of the Affordable Excellence model has intensified, Rector George Martin and Pres. Teresa Sullivan have kicked their PR machine into high gear. The pair wrote an open letter to the General Assembly pitching the new model. Sullivan sent out a vague, buzzword-packed email to the entire UVA community touting its supposed affordances. And administrators rolled out a slick new explainer website full of smiling faces. All of this obscures the damage this model will do and the outrageous lack of transparency behind its passing.

The BOV’s rushed attempts to approve the model signal that the body was anticipating student outrage. The proposed model was made available to the public during the same meeting it was introduced and voted on. When students tried to voice concerns the next day, they found themselves locked out of a public building and face-to-face with armed law enforcement officers.

Board member John Griffin claims the high tuition/high aid model represents a hybrid plan that maintains UVA’s ‘elite’ status while simultaneously helping low-income students. However, experts have thoroughly debunked the model, showing that it does little to lower the net cost of attendance or increase socioeconomic diversity (see the resources below). In addition, financial aid at UVA has not kept up with skyrocketing tuition, as evidenced by recent AccessUVA cuts. High tuition/high aid just absolves UVA from making a commitment to low-income students by forcing other students to bear the burden.

Brian Foglia:

“Hi Lucy. How are you today?” The young girl looked up at me as I gave her a friendly wave.

“Hello,” she replied. “Tomorrow’s my birthday.”

“Awesome! How old will you be?”

“Five.”

It wasn’t exactly an extraordinary conversation, but it was big for Lucy. We had met a year earlier, when I began interning at the Jersey Shore Free School: A Sudbury School, in Little Silver, N.J. I had decided to found my own democratic school, South Jersey Sudbury School, and wanted to first get some hands-on experience and mentoring from the Jersey Shore school’s founder, Dr. Jeri Quirk.

Pauline Rose:

Calls for a data revolution are putting the spotlight on the importance of more and better data as a means to hold policymakers to account for post-2015 goals. In many ways, education has been at the forefront of approaches to measuring progress over the past 15 years. The influence of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report (GMR) and the efforts of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) in improving the availability of education data provide important lessons for tracking progress post-2015. This experience should play an important contribution to informing the practical next steps for the data revolution.

Building on this experience, a roundtable held at the Overseas Development Institute on 17 November brought together over 40 technical experts, who debated approaches to measuring progress towards post-2015 education targets, with a focus on learning and equity. The meeting coincided with the launch of consultation on post-2015 education indicators by the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to the EFA Steering Committee. As noted in the opening remarks on the data revolution by Neil Jackson, Chief Statistician at DFID, in many ways the education sector is leading the way in thinking about how to monitor post-2015 progress in concrete ways.

One of the problems that the GMR and UIS faced in tracking progress over the past 15 years was that indicators were not set at the time of deciding on education for all goals in 2000, hence the importance of the current consultation process. Another was that data have not been available a sufficiently disaggregated form to track progress on the most disadvantaged subgroups within each country, that is those most likely to be left behind. The GMR’s World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE), drawing on internationally-comparable household survey data, has been one step forward in presenting data in an accessible format to show that the poorest children living in rural areas, and often girls, are still far from completing primary school in many countries, and that many are also not learning the basics in reading and mathematics even if they have spent time in school.

Jay Bullock:

I know that this problem is not unique to Milwaukee, and it’s probably not exclusively the fault of our marketplace, as much as I like to blame it. Comparable urban districts have high mobility rates even without a lot of school vouchers – a quick googling turns up annual figures like 30 percent for Minneapolis, 26 percent in Cincinnati, and a staggering 119 percent in St. Louis one recent year. This compares to the GAO’s finding that, nationally, the number is well under 10 percent.

So I guess that’s my challenge to Erin Richards while on her fellowship. What effect, exactly, does a voucher program and marketplace like here in Milwaukee have on mobility? And more than that, on school spirit and loyalty?

Because if MPS is banking on a strong alumni program to help its high schools, something needs to change in schools now to create those loyal graduates. As long as this city remains a marketplace, I fear that kind of school pride is never coming back.

School pride is irrelevant if students cannot read.

Malcolm Harris:

Why does college cost so much? Commentators continue to look for clues. So far, two main schools of thought have emerged. According to the first, fees have increased to make up for declines in government appropriations for higher education. According to the second, bloated administrations are wasting the money on frivolous extras unrelated to the core instructional mission.

Though the two views aren’t mutually exclusive and both are supported by evidence, there remains an ideological divide between them. People who believe educating citizens is the government’s job, no matter the cost (generally those on the political left), tend to believe the first, while people who would rather shrink government (generally those on the right) are more inclined to the waste hypothesis. As a result, explaining college-cost increases becomes a kind of proxy fight in which neither side accepts the other’s good faith and both are usually proved right.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, law professor Paul F. Campos widened the gap. While its title, “The real reason college tuition costs so much,” oversells the case a bit, its main point is sound: Government funding for higher education has gone up a lot. Even if funding per student is down a little bit as more kids pursue degrees, calling it a massive defunding is disingenuous. However, because Campos didn’t focus much on the subsidy per student, it opened him to attack from his opponents. And attack they did, in Slate, Crooked Timber, Inside Higher Ed and elsewhere. Still, Campos is right that the defunding explanation is weak, even in light of increased enrollment.

Sara Goldrick-Rab & Robert Kelchen:

One-third of colleges give students unrealistically low estimates of their living expenses, a new study finds.

It’s an exciting time of year for families and their college-bound students. Acceptance letters arrive, celebration ensues, college visits get scheduled. Now your biggest college worry switches to how you’re going to afford it.

As professors who study college affordability, we know that rising tuition is of real concern to parents and students. But our research has uncovered a surprising and previously little-known source of unnecessary confusion, worry, and heartbreak for students and parents: About one-third of colleges are providing families with cost of attendance estimates that are at least $3,000 less than the amount we estimate the school will really cost.

These are the findings of our recent study, in which we took a close look at what colleges estimate it costs to live off-campus, and what other sources say it really costs. We focused on the off-campus living costs because only 13% of today’s college students fit the traditional stereotype of living on campus. Fully 50% live off-campus on their own. (The rest live with their families and so tend to have lower living costs.)

Sara Goldrick-Rab, Robert Kelchen & Jason Houle (PDF):

Borrowing federal loans in order to finance college expenses is now a common student experience in American higher education. Half of all first-year undergraduates accept federal loans, with median debt among college seniors amounting to about $20,000 in 2011-12. Total outstanding student loan debt recently reached $1.11 trillion, up more than ten percent in the last year. More than ten percent of student loans are currently at least 90 days delinquent, a rate that has nearly doubled over the last decade.

As the volume of student debt in the country rises and becomes more visible, policymakers have become more vocal about their concerns with the size of loans, their purposes, and the likelihood of that they will be repaid, along with the potential impact of student loan debt on the economic, psychological, and social well-being of recent generations of young adults. Related discussions focus on rising college costs, rates of non- completion, and the declining purchasing power of grant aid. In upcoming debates over the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965, several responses are reportedly being considered, including efforts to hold colleges and universities more accountable for reducing student borrowing (through the use of cohort default rates) and/or lowering costs (by introducing college ratings), attempts to reduce borrowing by improving financial education and loan counseling, and changes in eligibility criteria for certain federal loans (particularly Parent PLUS Loans) in order to restrict borrowing.

Joss Winn:

I begin this article by discussing the recent work of academics and activists to identify the advan- tages and issues relating to co-operative forms of higher education, and then focus on the ‘worker co-operative’ organisational form and its applicability and suitability to the governance of and practices within higher educational institutions. Finally, I align the values and principles of worker co-ops with the critical pedagogic framework of ‘Student as Producer’. Throughout I employ the work of Karl Marx to theorise the role of labour and property in a ‘co-operative university’, drawing particularly on later Marxist writers who argue that Marx’s labour theory of value should be understood as a critique of labour under capitalism, rather than one developed from the standpoint of labour.

Ashby Jones:

Prompted partly by fathers concerned that men for too long have gotten short shrift in custody decisions, about 20 states are considering measures that would change the laws governing which parent gets legal and physical control of a child after a divorce or separation.

The laws generally encourage judges to adopt custody schedules that maximize time for each parent. Some of the measures, such as those proposed in New York and Washington state, take an additional step by requiring judges to award equal time to each parent unless there is proof that such an arrangement wouldn’t be in a child’s best interests.

Critics of these bills contend that they threaten to take discretion away from judges and risk giving leverage to abusive men. They also say the laws are poorly targeted because typically the only custody cases that end up in court are ones in which former spouses are too hostile toward each other to effectively practice shared parenting anyway.

Brandon Busteed:

A college degree is something Americans have always valued. Even Americans without a college degree believe that education beyond high school is important. But recent Gallup research indicates that 25% of all college graduates in the U.S. fail to thrive in their overall careers and lives. Gallup has found six elements of emotional support and experiential learning in college that are correlated with long-term career and life success, and one-quarter of college graduates — who otherwise met the academic standards to get a diploma — missed out on all six of these critical elements. These graduates’ outcomes — compared with those who hit all six — are so drastically worse off that it calls into question the value of their collegiate experience.

The Gallup-Purdue Index — a massive study of 30,000 college graduates in the U.S. — measured the degree to which graduates were engaged in their work and thriving in their purpose, social, financial, community and physical well-being. These measures of workplace engagement and well-being are important because they are predictive of critical outcomes such as worker productivity, absenteeism and healthcare cost burden, among many others. Beyond simply measuring graduates’ earnings — an important but very narrow measure of success — Gallup looked at the whole picture. Using these broader and arguably more important outcome measures, Gallup has found that simply getting a degree is not enough.

Barry Garelick, via a kind email:

“I am not an outright proponent of the philosophy that ‘If you want something done right, you have to live in the past’, but when it comes to how to teach math there are worse philosophies to embrace,” Barry Garelick explains as he continues from where he left off in his last book (“Letters from John Dewey/Letters from Huck Finn”). He describes his experiences as a long-term substitute teacher at a high school and middle school. He teaches math as he best knows how while schools throughout California make the transition to the Common Core standards. It is the 50th anniversary of key historical events including the JFK assassination and the Beatles’ arrival in the U.S. It is also the 50th anniversary of his first algebra course, the technical and personal memories of which he uses to guide him through the 21st century educational belief system that surrounds him. Among other things, he concludes that “the eighth grade traditional Algebra I class has become an endangered species open to a newly formed and very small elite.”

It is a book for anyone concerned with what Common Core is bringing about in the name of 21st century math education, STEM education, and “21st century skills.”

From the Introduction:

“This book takes place in the 21st century and a school district in California. Like many districts in the U.S., it is married to the groupthink-inspired conception known as 21st century learning. Those who have fallen under the spell of this idea believe that today’s students live in the digital world where any information can be Googled, and facts are not as important as “learning how to learn”. It is a brave new world in which students must collaborate, be creative, work as a team and construct new meanings. Teaching subjects such as math, history, science and English (now called Language Arts) as separate disciplines is an outmoded concept; they should be blended into an integrated discipline.

“In the world of 21st century learning, one prevailing belief is that procedures don’t stick; they are forgotten. Habits, however, are forever. Students are to be taught “learning skills”, “critical and higher order thinking” and “habits of mind” in order to prepare for jobs that have not yet been created.

“In short, it is an educational orientation that I and others like me 1) do not believe in and 2) find ourselves immersed in. It was the underlying belief system in which I had to work during two long-term sub assignments which are the subject of the book you are about to read.”

Audrey Watters:

To the contrary, I maintain that civil rights remain the civil rights issue of our generation. When we see, for example, the Supreme Court overturn part of the Voting Rights Act, when we see rampant police violence against marginalized groups, when we see backlash against affirmative action and against Title IX protections, when we see pervasive discrimination – institutionalized – in people’s daily lives, when we see widespread inequalities – socioeconomic stratification based on race, ethnicity, gender, geography – we need to admit: there are things that, as Tressie McMillan Cottom has argued, the “education gospel cannot fix.”

And yet the dominant narrative – the gospel, if you will – about education and, increasingly education technology, is that it absolutely is “the fix.”

Education technology will close the achievement gap; education technology will close the opportunity gap. Education technology will revolutionize; education technology will democratize. Or so we are told. That’s the big message at this week’s ASU-GSV Summit, where education technology investors and entrepreneurs and politicians have gathered (registration: $2995) to talk about “equity.” (Equity and civil rights, that is; not equity as investing in exchange for stock options and a seat on the Board of Directors, I should be clear. Although I’m guessing most of the conversations there were actually about the latter.)

Nicholas Kristof:

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”

That epigram from E.O. Wilson captures the dilemma of our era. Yet the solution of some folks is to disdain wisdom.

“Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?” Rick Scott, the Florida governor, once asked. A leader of a prominent Internet company once told me that the firm regards admission to Harvard as a useful heuristic of talent, but a college education itself as useless.

Parents and students themselves are acting on these principles, retreating from the humanities. Among college graduates in 1971, there were about two business majors for each English major. Now there are seven times as many. (I was a political science major; if I were doing it over, I’d be an economics major with a foot in the humanities.)

I’ve been thinking about this after reading Fareed Zakaria’s smart new book, “In Defense of a Liberal Education.” Like Zakaria, I think that the liberal arts teach critical thinking (not to mention nifty words like “heuristic”).

So, to answer the skeptics, here are my three reasons the humanities enrich our souls and sometimes even our pocketbooks as well.

First, liberal arts equip students with communications and interpersonal skills that are valuable and genuinely rewarded in the labor force, especially when accompanied by technical abilities.

Ilya Somin:

Montgomery County, Maryland police and Child Protective Services officials recently detained 10 year old Rafi Meitiv and his 6 year old sister Dvora, for hours merely because they were seen walking home from a local park alone (including a lengthy period when they were not allowed to contact their parents). They were picked up by police just three blocks from their home. CPS previously detained the children for exactly the same reason in December, investigated the parents for supposed “neglect,” and tried to pressure them into changing their parenting practices. The parents, who believe in following a “free range” approach to child-raising that fosters autonomy and responsibility, intend to file a lawsuit against CPS.

I. Parental Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment.

I don’t yet know for certain what issues will be raised in the suit. But I hope the Meitivs will make the case that the state has violated parental rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Longstanding Supreme Court precedent strongly suggests that “free range” parents are entitled to protection against the kind of state interference with their child-raising decisions that happened here.

In two landmark cases in the 1920s, Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Supreme Court ruled that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects parents’ and guardians “to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” In Pierce, the Court applied that right to strike down an Oregon law requiring all children aged 8 to 16 to attend public schools rather than private ones, despite the state’s argument that standardized public schooling would ensure that all children get a good education.

In the 2000 case of Troxel v. Granville, the Court reaffirmed the “fundamental right of parents to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children,” which it called “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court.” The plurality opinion by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (joined by three other members of the Court) emphasized that state officials must apply a strong presumption that parents’ decisions about the upbringing of their children are correct, and cannot abridge parental control over child-raising based on “mere disagreement” with the parents’ choices. In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas argued for even stronger protection of parental autonomy, noting that laws that infringe on “fundamental” constitutional rights are usually subject to “strict scrutiny” – the highest standard of judicial review. Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissenting opinion also advocated a strong presumption in favor of parental control.

Peter Gilliver:

Throughout his life Murray was a devout member of the Congregational Church: not only devout, but also very active. Already in his teens he was a Sunday school teacher in his home town of Denholm, and he was soon also giving addresses and sermons. After he took up a teaching post at Mill Hill School—a well-known school for the sons of Nonconformists—in 1870, he gave many sermons in the school chapel. Former Mill Hill boys recalled the vividness of his preaching and reading; one recalled his reading of the biblical passage about the confrontation between Elijah and the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (which was in fact one of his favourite readings: ‘I never tire of reading it’, he later said). ‘How he scorched them. Why, I am sure many boys of that period felt convinced that Elijah sure had a red beard and word a scarlet hood.’