:

The nation’s student-debt tab has more than doubled since the recession to roughly $1.3 trillion, but the burden varies greatly by state.

The nation’s capital of Washington, D.C.—one of the most educated cities in the U.S. and home to high-priced private schools–is the most indebted compared with states when it comes to average federal student-loan debt. Some 140,000 borrowers in D.C. owe a whopping average of $40,885, according to new data released by the White House. Georgia is second on the list with 1.45 million residents owing an average $30,443. North Dakota sits at the bottom, with 114,000 borrowers owing an average $22,379.

Grand Central Tech:

Here at GCT, we spend a lot of time thinking about the intersection of education and technology – particularly as it relates to two key areas:

1.) As a robust and increasingly attractive market 2.) Through the lens of our educational programs, partnerships and outreach

Two of the companies in GCT’s first class aim squarely at educating students with real-life skills in unique and remarkable ways:

Hopscotch is a platform that kids use to code their own games and art in a fun, welcoming and collaborative environment. The thousands of projects that are published every week on the platform, and by an even split, across gender, highlight the appetite for, and opportunity to, teach students to love to code by placing it within the context of a fun and immersive experience.

Nathan McDonald:

The average American student graduating with a bachelors degree leaves with approximately $28,400 of debt to be repaid over the course of their career. In fact, over 70% of students graduating will be in this position, making it the norm.

Of course, that is simply a bachelors degree, which in today’s world will get you a management position working at McDonald’s. Let’s face reality. Most of those starting their post-secondary education today, will not find a job that is related to what they studied at university after graduation. At best you can chalk it up to a grand social experiment, although a costly one.

Bullitt County History:

This copy of the Eighth Grade Exam for Bullitt County Schools in 1912 was donated to the museum. We thought you might like to see what the test looked like a hundred years ago. Obviously it tested some things that were more relevant at that time than now, and it should not be used to compare student knowledge then and now.

Note that there are several typesetting mistakes on the test including a mistake in the spelling list. The word “eneeavor” should be “endeavor.” This version of the exam was probably a master version given out to the schools (note that the spelling words wouldn’t be written on a test.) The museum has been told that the exam was handed out in a scroll form (that is why the paper is long.) The typos would have been corrected simply by contacting the teachers and telling them to mark their copies accordingly, much like would be done today. And there might not be quite as many typos as you think; “Serbia” for example was indeed spelled “Servia” back then.

Bullitt County Schools were mostly one-room schools in those days, scattered around the rural county. Students came together at the county courthouse once or twice a year to take this “Common Exam.” It was apparently a big deal. The local newspaper urged students to do well, even urging seventh graders that it was not too early to start preparing. Some scholarships were provided to those who passed to go on to high school, which was also a big deal back then. In those days, high school was sometimes another county away and a rare thing for many farm children to be able to otherwise attend.

Economist:

THE most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation’s most prominent liberal scholars has joined the chorus.

Robert Putnam is a former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of “Bowling Alone” (2000), an influential work that lamented the decline of social capital in America. In his new book, “Our Kids”, he describes the growing gulf between how the rich and the poor raise their children. Anyone who has read “Coming Apart” by Charles Murray will be familiar with the trend, but Mr Putnam adds striking detail and some excellent graphs (pictured). This is a thoughtful and persuasive book.

Among the educated elite the traditional family is thriving: fewer than 10% of births to female college graduates are outside marriage—a figure that is barely higher than it was in 1970. In 2007 among women with just a high-school education, by contrast, 65% of births were non-marital. Race makes a difference: only 2% of births to white college graduates are out-of-wedlock, compared with 80% among African-Americans with no more than a high-school education, but neither of these figures has changed much since the 1970s. However, the non-marital birth proportion among high-school-educated whites has quadrupled, to 50%, and the same figure for college-educated blacks has fallen by a third, to 25%. Thus the class divide is growing even as the racial gap is shrinking.

Meanwhile, the Madison School Board & District administration plan to expand Van Hise and Hamilton schools via the April, 2015 referendum.

Hamilton and Van Hise are among Madison’s least diverse schools…..

Alexandra Harney:

American students are getting cold feet about studying Chinese in China, with many study abroad programs in the country seeing a substantial drop in enrolment over the last few years.

At the University of California Education Abroad Program (UCEAP), student enrolment in programs in China is expected to be less than half the level it was only four years ago. Washington-based CET, another leading study abroad group, says interest in China has been falling since 2013.

The apparent waning of interest worries some China watchers. Given the importance of the U.S.-China relationship, having a group of Americans across different industries who speak Chinese and understand the culture is “a matter of national interest”, says Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center in Washington.

“We can’t respond coherently, effectively and fully to China unless we understand China on its own terms,” he said.

Colonel David Arney and George Rosenstein:

The predecessor of the first national Putnam Competition was a mathematics contest between Harvard and the United States Military Academy. The details of this contest from William Lowell Putnam’s original idea for academic competition between schools in 1921 through the examination day in 1933 and later consequences of the competition are provided. Much of this history was compiled from original letters between the principle organizers found in a historical file of the Department of Mathematics, United States Military Academy (USMA). The role of the Mathematical Association of America, which has been involved in all 50 national Putnam Competitions, in this 1933 contest is also explained. A copy of the 22 question examination is provided.

Background

In an article in the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine [1] in December, 1921, William Lowell Putnam suggested the development of academic competitions between teams of undergraduate students of different schools in regular college studies. He believed that the motive of winning laurels for their college in team competition would provide students more interest in their studies. He concluded the article with: “It seems probable that the competition which has inspired young men to undertake and undergo so much for the sake of athletic victories might accomplish some result in academic fields.” The merits of his suggestion were shared by Mrs. Putnam and her brother, A. Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard. Mrs. Putnam established a trust fund in her will to support such competition [1].

The first experiment of such academic competition supported by the Putnams was held in 1928 in the subject of English between Harvard and Yale. The winner, Harvard, won a prize of $5000. While Harvard and the Putnams wanted to repeat this contest, potential adversaries, Yale and Princeton, declined to compete in another English examination, as did Cambridge University in Economics.

Anonymous:

I graduated from Harvard in 2006, and have spent eight of the last nine years working as an admissions officer for my alma mater. A low-level volunteer, sure, but an official one all the same. I served as one of thousands of alumni volunteers around the world—a Regional Representative for my local Schools Committee, if you want to get technical. And, as a Regional Rep, my duties fell somewhere between Harvard recruiter and Harvard gatekeeper.

But now I’m done with all that. For a long time, I believed in the admissions process. I thought that I could use my position to help regular smart people with great test scores and impressive extracurriculars break into an elitist system. After eight years, though, I’ve learned that modest goal is more or less unreachable. Ivy League admissions are a complete racket, rigged in favor of the privileged and completely impervious to change. So I’m quitting the business.

And because I’m quitting, that means I can tell you, the reader, all the secrets of being a Harvard admissions representative, and what it really takes to get in.

Audrey Waters:

The top 10 most popular education technology sites, as ranked by Teach 100, place on average of 10 trackers, that is, snippets of code that monitor what you do on a website and, oftentimes, share that with others. This is skewed admittedly by Alan Singer’s blog on the Huffington Post that places 49. The top 10 include the Department of Education’s Homeroom blog, which sends tracking information to YouTube, Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, and Foresee. “Visualized where your visitors click,” boasts Crazy Egg. (This sort of tracking data is not protected by FERPA, for what it’s worth.)

They’re not in the top 10, but Free Technology for Teachers places 15 trackers, according to Ghostery; Privacy Badger finds 21 on the site. Diane Ravitch’s blog places 4 according to Ghostery; Privacy Badger finds 3.

Hana Schank:

As a parent of two elementary school-aged kids, I know spring is approaching when my Facebook feed fills with desperate pleas for more time, calls for patience, and questions about the locations of retailers selling tri-fold posters.

Yes, it’s science-fair time.

Last year, one mother’s satirical science-fair poster titled “How Much Turmoil Does the Science Project Cause Families?” went viral as parents around the country vented their anger toward this most frustrating of school assignments. Science-fair angst has even made it into children’s literature, with myriad books about stressed-out kids and failed projects.

Steve Denning:

Given that the factory model of management doesn’t work very well, even in the few factories that still remain in this country, or anywhere else in the workplace for that matter, we should hardly be surprised that it doesn’t work well in education either.

But given that the education system is seen to be in trouble, there is a tendency to think we need “better management” or “stronger management” or “tougher management”, where “management” is assumed to be the factory model of management. It is assumed to mean more top-down management and tighter controls, and more carrots and sticks. It is assumed to mean hammering the teachers who don’t perform and ruthlessly weeding out “the dead wood”. The thinking is embedded in Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind.

These methods are known to be failing in the private sector, because they dispirit the employees and limit their ability to contribute their imagination and creativity; they frustrate customers, and they are killing the very organizations that rely on them. So why should we expect anything different in the education sector?

One size fits all continues to reign in Madison, despit its long term disastrous reading results.

Zocalo Public Square:

Free online courses, crowdsourcing, and big data are transforming the university from a gatekeeper to a public resource.

In 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it was going to put the university’s entire body of course materials online, for free. That meant syllabuses, as well as problem sets and exams—and their solutions. There were even going to be some video lectures online. In 2002, the MIT OpenCourseWare pilot project debuted with 32 courses. Today, according to MIT, 125 million visitors access material from 2,150 classes, including the very popular “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming,” which helps students feel confident about “writing small programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals.”

Erin Richards:

Milwaukee students enrolled in charter schools showed modestly higher levels of academic growth in math and reading compared to their peers in traditional public schools, according to a national study released Wednesday.

But the so-called “charter lift” is not enough to offset the overall achievement deficit facing children in urban Milwaukee compared to the rest of the state, the study said.

Still, charter-school advocates were quick to embrace the results, as bills to expand charter schools are pending in Wisconsin and other states.

“The (new) report is one more piece of evidence that charter schools in Milwaukee lead the way in closing the achievement gap,” said Sean Roberts, executive director of Milwaukee Charter School Advocates.

The Urban Charter School Study was conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University. It concludes that students in urban charter schools receive the equivalent of about 40 days of additional learning per year in math and about 28 additional days of learning in reading compared to their peers in conventional urban public schools.

In Milwaukee, the study showed the positive effect of charter schools relative to traditional public schools was stronger in math than in reading.

Charter schools are independently run, non-religous public schools. They receive flexibility from some some state rules in exchange for meeting academic performance targets spelled out in a contract with a state-approved authorizer.

Meanwhile, Madison continues its one size fits all K-12 governance model, despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Jennifer Senior:

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If you fancy yourself a normalish, reasonably rational parent, you probably read, with equal parts horror and fascination, about the recent travails of a Maryland couple that tried to allow their children to walk the one mile from a local park to their home in Silver Spring. They were charged by child protective services with “unsubstantiated” child neglect — itself a near-oxymoronic and self-canceling term — which means their case will be held on file for five years. There are many things wrong with this action, not least what it says about the excesses of parenting culture (more on this in a bit), but among the most egregious is that it runs completely contrary to the trends in child safety that have emerged in the past couple of decades. Bluntly put: It’s hard to think of a safer time and a better place than the United States of 2015 to raise children — but we act as though the opposite were true.

A quick scan of the data, provided by the meticulous researcher David Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire: The physical abuse of children declined by 55 percent between 1992 and 2011, while sexual abuse declined 64 percent; between 1997 and 2012, abductions by strangers also went down by 51 percent. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, motor vehicle deaths among kids 12 and under declined by 43 percent in the last decade.

Susan Engel:

In the past few years, parents, teachers, and policy makers have furiously debated whether standardized tests should be used to promote or hold back children, fire teachers, and withhold funds from schools. The debate has focused for the most part on whether the tests are being used in unfair ways. But almost no one has publicly questioned a fundamental assumption — that the tests measure something meaningful or predict something significant beyond themselves.

I have reviewed more than 300 studies of K–12 academic tests. What I have discovered is startling. Most tests used to evaluate students, teachers, and school districts predict almost nothing except the likelihood of achieving similar scores on subsequent tests. I have found virtually no research demonstrating a relationship between those tests and measures of thinking or life outcomes.

Charles Bonello:

Here at GCT, we spend a lot of time thinking about the intersection of education and technology – particularly as it relates to two key areas:

1.) As a robust and increasingly attractive market 2.) Through the lens of our educational programs, partnerships and outreach

Two of the companies in GCT’s first class aim squarely at educating students with real-life skills in unique and remarkable ways:

Hopscotch is a platform that kids use to code their own games and art in a fun, welcoming and collaborative environment. The thousands of projects that are published every week on the platform, and by an even split, across gender, highlight the appetite for, and opportunity to, teach students to love to code by placing it within the context of a fun and immersive experience.

Laura Waters:

Comparison in student outcomes between traditional and charter schools: “A substantial and persistent achievement gap exists in pass rates among students in Newark traditional public schools and charter schools. For example, while 71 percent of charter school students in Newark passed 3rd grade language arts tests in 2013–14 — higher than the state average of 66 percent — only 41 percent of students in Newark traditional public schools passed those tests. Similarly, just 42 percent of traditionals school students passed 8th grade math tests, compared to 75 percent for charter school students. Comparable trends can be seen throughout other grades and tests.”

Bottom line: charter schools in Newark are educating larger numbers of children with disabilities (the report doesn’t include percentages of English Language Learners, the subject of some anti-charter rhetoric) providing safer environments, and demonstrating higher academic gains for students.

That’s why there are 10,000 kids on waiting lists. How could it be different? Regardless of means, any parent wants the best school for his or her children. Families with wealth can exercise school choice by paying for private school or moving to a higher-achieving district. Families without wealth or mobility can exercise school choice by choosing a public alternative like a charter school.

Parent Toolkit:

While it may be true that divorce rates are still high and Americans are delaying marriage, the idea that American families are worse off and continuing to decline is up for debate. The findings of this new NBC News State of Parenting Poll which was sponsored by Pearson, paint a different story. The results are based on telephone interviews in English and Spanish with 803 parents, guardians, or primary caregivers of children ages 3-18 in the continental United States. Interviews were conducted on both landline telephones and cell phones from October 28 to November 16, 2014. This survey shows that parents are generally positive about the future, spending more time with their children than their parents did with them, and having family dinners together regularly.

Ian Leslie:

The video does not seem remarkable on first viewing. A title informs us that we are watching Ashley Hinton, a teacher at Vailsburg Elementary, a school in Newark, New Jersey. Hinton, a blonde woman in a colourful silk scarf, stands before a class of eight- and nine-year-old boys and girls, almost all of whom are African-American. “What might a character be feeling in a story?” she asks. She repeats the question, before engaging her pupils in a high-tempo conversation about what it is like to read a book and why authors write them, as she moves smartly around her classroom.

On an October morning last year, I watched Doug Lemov play this video to a room full of teachers in the hall of an inner-London school. Many had brought their copy of Lemov’s book, Teach Like a Champion, which in the last five years has passed through the hands of thousands of teachers and infiltrated hundreds of staffrooms. To my eyes, the video of Hinton’s lesson was a glimpse into the classroom of an energetic and likable teacher, and pleasing enough. After leading a brief discussion, Lemov played it again, and then a third time.

Shannon Mullen:

With his criminal conviction last week, former Wall schools chief James Habel left one exclusive club, and joined another.

No longer a member of New Jersey’s elite superintendati, he now finds himself among a group of ex-school district bosses who left their privileged posts under dubious circumstances.

Each was gifted enough for their school boards to shower them with high salaries, luxury cars, generous expense accounts and other cushy perks. They were treated like corporate CEOs, educational Zen masters, and rainmakers of state aid. Habel himself was once hailed as a “visionary.”

Some of the officials even had buildings named after them. Now, their names are forever linked to a “me first” era of educational leadership.

Xu Heqian & Wang Yucheng

Two top mainland universities climbed in the latest rankings of colleges around the world that is produced by a leading education publication in Britain.

Tsinghua University was ranked No. 26 in the 2015 Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings published on March 12 – an improvement of 10 spots for the university in China’s capital.

Peking University rose nine places to No. 32 on the fifth annual list of what is intended to be the world’s 100 most prestigious universities. The survey by Times Higher Education was based on responses from 9,794 senior academics from 142 countries around the world from November to January. Some 15.8 percent of the responses were from the United States, and about 10.6 percent were from China.

Robert Paul:

For most high-school juniors, the college search is on. Many students are pouring through college guides — like the one from U.S. News & World Report — looking for schools that match their skills and aspirations.

Too often, though, these guides present an incomplete picture of the higher education experience. They tend to focus on “inputs”– things like tuition and fees, class size, and student test scores. Such data can be helpful but provide little indication of what prospective students can expect after they graduate.

The Obama administration is trying to establish a new college ratings system to, in the president’s words, “give parents and students the kind of clear, concise information you need to shop around for a school with the best value for you.”

For any ratings system to successfully measure which institutions are doing the best job educating students, it must focus on outcomes, apply equally to all institutions, and take individuals’ attributes, such as family income, into account.

Thomson Reuters:

A recent OECD study shows that despite much progress reducing inequalities over the past century, new gender gaps in education are opening up. Today’s graphic visualizes the results from the study showing the gender gap in education across different countries.

LS Hall:

More than a decade ago, Milwaukee was ground zero of the education reform movement. Starting with a controversial private school voucher program launched in 1990, Wisconsin’s largest city went on to embrace not only vouchers, but charter schools and a series of reform initiatives in the Milwaukee Public Schools, one of the lowest-performing in the nation.

The Walton Family Foundation has been at the center of much of that work. Over the last decade, the funder has lavished more than $30 million in grants on school reform efforts in Milwaukee, supporting such organizations as Teach For America and Schools That Can Milwaukee, a nonprofit that promotes innovation and reform in private, charter, and traditional public schools.

But after years of such commitment, Walton is stepping back from Milwaukee. The funder announced it was redirecting its education grant-making activities to “places that we believe are most ripe for improving our education system.”

Kaleem Caire:

So far, our capital city, like so many other cities, has preferred to go another way. They have no problem limiting their investment to spending millions of dollars on safety and security strategies that focus on locking up black males and policing them. We spend more money on policing, jail and related services than we do on providing black men with scholarships for college and addressing their unique social circumstances on the front end of their lives. Our black boys are struggling from having no fathers at home and too few positive male role models in their lives who show them real love, build their confidence, teach them healthy values, demonstrate a strong work ethic and hold them accountable (in constructive and inspiring ways) to high standards of personal conduct and performance excellence. Fatherlessness is destroying the future of many black boys — and almost as fast as they come out of the womb.

Besides that, our young men are struggling to define themselves against stereotypes that pervade almost every facet of their lives. They are struggling with negative images America has of them, and the diminished view people have of their potential. Their role models now are Breezy, Yeh, Lil Wayne and a host of other rappers who limit their talents to undermining the talent development of others — except at the microphone. Unfortunately, some of our boys are being raised by 30- and 40-year-old men who see these young rappers as their role models, too.

Additionally, our young men are being raised in a community that doesn’t know what black male success really looks like. Not in mass. We don’t see it very often here, and when we do, we can’t always spot it. We’ve been conditioned to see black males as needy, incapable and unworthy. Unfortunately, that’s what some of our boys then give you — they show you the image that you saw them in. Give me a suit, a tie, a dress shirt, some dress shoes, a book bag, some great books and a place to unleash their creativity and potential, and some men and women who are great teachers, coaches and mentors, and who truly love our young black and brown men and believe in their potential, and I will give you highly confident, determined, purpose-driven and successful black males in return.

Madison continues its one size fits all governance approach, rejecting the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school despite long term, disastrous reading reults.

London Review of Books:

The first time I suggested an exercise to a roomful of creative writing students, something on the lines of ‘We’ve been reading Elizabeth Bowen, now think of a house where you were happy, but you no longer live there. Write it!’, they all bent their heads down over their paper and began writing. I couldn’t believe it. When students are tackling a task like that, you can feel the whirr and hum of thought: it feels woven of reciprocity, willing, ambition, the impulse to translate fugitive thoughts into communication with others. The same can happen with an audience at a concert, with readers in a library, or with visitors looking at pictures in a gallery. In Fred Wiseman’s recent documentary about the National Gallery, the camera watched as people looked at the paintings on the walls: a mysterious communion. One especially eloquent sequence showed a session for the visually impaired, ‘seeing feelingly’. You can’t tell what these spectators are feeling or thinking. Only that they are attending, lost to themselves in the act of looking, with their eyes or with their fingers, and that this is something that doesn’t cause pain or anxiety, something that is the contrary of discontent.

I went to university in 1964, a different era, when very few of us, around 5 per cent of the population, had the chance. We were undoubtedly a lucky generation. Now, many many more of us, young and older, are studying for degrees – between 35 and 40 per cent. I approve wholly of this social change; I believe education at every age and level is an unqualified good, unassailably beneficial to the individual and to society and the world. I believe it is as important an indicator of a society’s state of health as nutrition and housing. I entered full employment as an academic late in life. What have I learned since I began teaching at the University of Essex more than ten years ago? That something has gone wrong with the way the universities are being run. Above all, I have learned that not everything that is valuable can be measured.

Chinese Language Teachers Association of Greater New York:

Professor Moss Roberts of New York University, translator of The Three Kingdoms (三国演义), the Dao De Jing (道德经), and other Chinese books, wrote extensive notes on basic Chinese grammar. He has kindly offered to share these notes with students and teachers of Chinese. Although the notes were written in conjunction with the textbook Integrated Chinese, they can be used by students of other beginning textbooks of Chinese and may be of interest to Intermediate students as well. These notes can be accessed below:

Erin Richards

Eight years ago, a study found Wisconsin had one of the lowest bars in the country for rating students proficient in reading and math on the state standardized test.

That means children here looked more academically accomplished than they probably really were — something the state aimed to remedy by raising the scores needed for students to attain rankings of advanced, proficient or basic on the annual state test.

That effort has been applauded by a new study noting that Wisconsin aggressively tightened its state test proficiency standards by 2013, ranking it second in the nation behind New York for the rigor of its expectations.

This spring, Wisconsin is administering a new state test tied to the Common Core State Standards — 17 other states are administering the same test — which will have a common bar for proficiency. Wisconsin raised the bar on its old state test largely to prepare everyone for the switch to the tougher new test.

That’s partly what led Harvard University researchers Paul E. Peterson and Matthew Ackerman to suggest that the Common Core standards are responsible for states raising the bar for proficiency on their individual state tests between 2011 and 2013.

Wisconsin adopted the standards in 2010, and joined one of two consortia of other states committed to administering tougher, common tests tied to the new grade-level expectations in English and math.

The study found Wisconsin’s new bar for proficiency to be as strong or stronger than the bar used by a respected national standardized exam.

More: States Raise Proficiency Standards:

Which states changed the most? For the first time since this survey of state standards has been undertaken, no fewer than nine states receive a grade of “A,” indicating they have set a proficiency bar that is roughly comparable to that set by NAEP. Joining Massachusetts and Tennessee, the only two states given that top grade in 2011, are Kentucky, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Wisconsin. Five of these states (Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) have even set some standards that exceed those of NAEP. Six states (Kentucky, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah, Wisconsin, and Michigan) should be commended for improving by more than two letter grades between 2011 and 2013. All of these states have adopted CCSS. Meanwhile, only New Hampshire’s standards have dropped by a full letter grade.

CCSS may be driving these changes. One indication that this may be the case is that the six states that are not implementing CCSS for reading or math all continue to set low proficiency standards. Their grades: Virginia, C+; Nebraska, C; Indiana, C-; Texas, C-; Alaska, D+; and Oklahoma, D.

Let’s hope that this move to more rigor continues.

Background: Wisconsin’s low bar WKCE expedition.

Jennifer Breheny Wallace:

Today’s demands for measurable childhood success—from the Common Core to college placement—have chased household chores from the to-do lists of many young people. In a survey of 1,001 U.S. adults released last fall by Braun Research, 82% reported having regular chores growing up, but only 28% said that they require their own children to do them. With students under pressure to learn Mandarin, run the chess club or get a varsity letter, chores have fallen victim to the imperatives of resume-building—though it is hardly clear that such activities are a better use of their time.

“Parents today want their kids spending time on things that can bring them success, but ironically, we’ve stopped doing one thing that’s actually been a proven predictor of success—and that’s household chores,” says Richard Rende, a developmental psychologist in Paradise Valley, Ariz., and co-author of the forthcoming book “Raising Can-Do Kids.” Decades of studies show the benefits of chores—academically, emotionally and even professionally.

Giving children household chores at an early age helps to build a lasting sense of mastery, responsibility and self-reliance, according to research by Marty Rossmann, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota. In 2002, Dr. Rossmann analyzed data from a longitudinal study that followed 84 children across four periods in their lives—in preschool, around ages 10 and 15, and in their mid-20s. She found that young adults who began chores at ages 3 and 4 were more likely to have good relationships with family and friends, to achieve academic and early career success and to be self-sufficient, as compared with those who didn’t have chores or who started them as teens.

Simon Denyer:

Scholars in Hong Kong are growing concerned that the territory’s cherished academic freedom is coming under renewed attack from China in the aftermath of last year’s student-led pro-democracy protests.

Attacks in Communist Party-backed newspapers on a leading liberal professor, reports of government interference in academic appointments and renewed calls for “patriotic education” to be introduced into schools have stirred up emotions in the former British colony.

Academics are concerned that China and its conservative backers in Hong Kong are trying to subtly exert more control over universities and schools in order to gradually rein in criticism and silence a source of unrest.

Erin Richards:

Sen. Paul Farrow (R-Pewaukee), chairman of the Senate Committee on Education Reform and Government Operations and a supporter of charter schools, indicated some of the ideas might need to be corralled.

“I think we might be over-chartering ourselves and not developing a cohesive picture for what charter schools should look like,” he said in an interview.

Independent charter schools are public schools run by nonprofit companies instead of school districts.They have to report all the same data as traditional public schools, but get freedom from some other state rules — such as employing unionized teachers — in exchange for meeting performance goals in a contract with a state-approved authorizing agency. Failure to meet the targets means the agency can close the school.

Republicans often like independent charter schools because they’re run like small businesses, often with nonunion staff on one-year contracts. Many Democrats dislike charters because they can deplete enrollment at traditional public schools, often don’t employ unionized teachers and may not be able to serve children with the most significant special needs.

Spencer Robins:

Every philosophy major has at some point had to answer the standard challenge: “What are you going to do, teach?” It’s especially frustrating after you realize that, for someone with a humanist bent and a disinterest in worldlier things, teaching is a pretty good career choice. Unemployables in the humanities might take comfort from the fact that one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, made the same choice. He revolutionized philosophy twice, fought with shocking bravery in World War I, inspired a host of memoirs by people who knew him only glancingly—and for six years taught elementary school in the mountains of rural Austria. Biographers have tended to find this bizarre. Chapters covering the period after his teaching years, when Wittgenstein returned to philosophy, are usually called something like “Out of the Wilderness.” (That one’s from Ray Monk’s excellent Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. The next chapter is called “The Second Coming.”)

By the time he decided to teach, Wittgenstein was well on his way to being considered the greatest philosopher alive. First at Cambridge, then as an engineer and soldier, Wittgenstein had finished his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, at once an austere work of analytic philosophy and—for some readers, Wittgenstein apparently included—an almost mystical experience. In it, he claimed charmingly and not without reason to have solved all the problems of philosophy. This was because of the book’s famous “picture theory of meaning,” which held that language is meaningful because, and only because, of its ability to depict possible arrangements of objects in the world. Any meaningful statement can be analyzed as such a depiction. This leads to the book’s most famous conclusion: that if a statement does not depict a possible arrangement of objects, it doesn’t mean anything at all. Ethics, religion, the nature of the world beyond objects … most statements of traditional philosophy, Wittgenstein contended, are therefore nonsense. And so, having destroyed a thousand-year tradition, Wittgenstein did the reasonable thing—he dropped the mic and found a real job teaching kids to spell.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

We had a great time at our campaign kick-off event for One City Early Learning Centers at the CUNA Mutual Conference Center on March 6! More than 350 friends and champions for children joined us on a Friday night to learn about our plans to raise $1.4 million to establish a new type of preschool in the Madison area.

One City will take a two-generation community impact approach to providing young children with the learning and developmental experiences they need to become compassionate and high potential learners, leaders and students in school and life, and to be reading-ready by the time they reach kindergarten.

Attendees learned about our three strategic priorities:

1. Empowered and Happy Children
2. Strong and Happy Families, and
3. Healthy and Resource-Filled Neighborhoods

We shared our educational approach and plans for establishing One City’s Parent University and Family Resource Network. We highlighted the partnerships we are developing to support strong families and cultivate talented and successful children. We also shared how One City will be an active partner in efforts to continue the revitalization of South Madison. We want to ensure that children in our neighborhood and preschool are raised in safe, sustainable and enriching environments, and that parents have access to high quality, affordable and accessible early education opportunities for their children while they work and continue their education.

Additionally, Forward Community Investments announced their purchase of the South Madison Day Care facility for One City. This marks the first time FCI has purchased property and made such an investment in their 19-year history. The details of this unique partnership inspired everyone in attendance and we raised $40,126 towards our goal that night!

Thank you for your support, encouragement and partnership. We appreciate you! We also thank and appreciate CUNA Mutual Group Foundation, Forward Community Investments and Urban Assets Consulting for hosting and supporting the event, and supporting the launch of One City.

Building the Bridge to a Bright Future for Kids.

Onward.

Kaleem Caire
Founder, President & CEO
kcaire@onecityearlylearning.org
Phone: 608.268.8004

LEARN MORE

To take a virtual tour of our preschool (pre-renovation), which is located at 2012 Fisher Street on Madison’s South Side, click here.

To view photographs of our kick-off event, click here. As Dr. Frank Byrne, the recently retired president of St. Mary’s Hospital noted, “One City was here in this room this evening. It was beautiful.”

To review and download the PowerPoint presentation we gave at the kick-off event, and that many in attendance expressed an interest in obtaining, click here. To arrange a presentation, please contact Quinn Heneghan at quinn@urbanassetsconsulting.com or 608.819.6566.

To view a list of our early supporters, our Bridge Builders, click here.

Give what you can. We’ve had investors contribute $10, $10,000 and $50,000. We want as many people, businesses and institutions to contribute as possible so we can (a) achieve our fundraising goal, (b) get our school opened by September 1, 2015 and (c) live out the meaning and intent of our name – One City coming together to invest in the potential and future of its children.

To make your tax-deductible investment in One City and join our list of Bridge Builders – click here. You can also download and complete our pledge form by clicking here and mailing it along with your contribution (payable to One City Early Learning) to:

One City Early Learning Centers
c/o Scholz Nonprofit Law
16 North Carroll Street, Suite 530
Madison, WI 53703
Phone: 608.268.0076

Related:

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Kaleem Caire attempted to create the Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School. Unfortunately, it was rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board.

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

As a result of a joint MTI-MMSD committee on parent- teacher conferences, several changes were agreed upon. For the first time, teachers participating in evening parent-teacher conferences were provided a compensatory day off, which occurred last November 26. In exchange for the comp day, teachers must have conferences on two (2) evenings. For elementary teachers, the fall conferences occurred on November 19. The spring conference will occur on March 19. Conferences are in lieu of report cards, and staff are not required to do additional record-keeping beyond normal data collection and logging parent attendance at conferences. Conferences are recommended to be 15 minutes.

The joint MTI/MMSD committee agreed that the best use of time is to distribute any forms and information at other times and through other means, so teachers can spend all conference time reviewing student progress. The joint committee also agreed that conferences may occur at other than the scheduled times, if agreed between the parent and teacher.

Pursuant to Section V-M of the MTI/MMSD Collective Bargaining Agreement, in recognition of 4K, non-Sage 2nd grade, non-Sage 3rd grade, 4th grade and 5th grade teachers having more parent-teacher conferences due to increased class size shall be excused from the early release SIP-aligned activities on Mondays during the month of November and March.

Complete language regarding parent-teacher conferences can be found on MTI’s website (www.madisonteachers.org). Teachers who have further questions can call or email Eve Degen (degene@madisonteachers.org) at MTI headquarters.

Janet the Actuary:

In principle, I agree with the concept: instead of having an AP English class, create a dual-enrollment class of sufficient rigor that it’s transferable as a college course, through the supervision of the community college. Same with Calculus, or any of the AP science or history classes. Then the student is evaluated on their work product over the course of the semester rather than the outcome of a single exam.

But this approach? It won’t truly expose the student to the rigor of a college class, if a semester of learning is stretched out over two. It won’t even be at the level of rigor of an AP class, with their math offering being no more rigorous than other math classes offered at the high school level. And their requirements for enrollment in these classes — a minimum of a C average, plus certain qualifying scores for Composition and the math classes, and high school geometry — certainly don’t promise much rigor, but seem to treat these as interchangeable with any other high school class in terms of skill and preparation level. It would be far better to master “high school level” coursework first, rather than enrolling in classes solely for the sake of having some items labelled “college credit.”

Robert Milburn:

Her mission is deeply personal. Her father, Reginald Lewis, broke Wall Street’s glass ceiling in the 1980s, by founding a leveraged buyout firm—which ultimately put him on Forbes’ rich list. It’s that family legacy that Lewis Halpern hopes to keep alive in students graduating from All Star Code.

“The goal is to create a new generation of entrepreneurs, who are able to build tech start-ups after passing through our programming,” Lewis Halpern says.

HOPEFULLY, THEY WILL soon repeat in Silicon Valley what Reginald Lewis accomplished on Wall Street. Lewis was born into a middle-class family in 1942, in what was then segregated Baltimore, and was tapped by a 1960s Harvard Law outreach program for minorities. Lewis studied corporate law and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1968, moving up the ranks at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the big-time law firm, before founding his own leveraged buyout outfit, TLC Group. In 1987, Lewis became the first African-American to run a billion-dollar company, TLC Beatrice International, a major food processor.

Wealth didn’t stop Lewis from continuously learning. Hard-driven and known for brandishing large imported cigars, he moved his family to TLC Beatrice’s headquarters in Paris, where he learned and conducted business in French. It was there that he also built up a sizable art collection, with works by Picasso and Matisse. Then, in 1993, at the age of 50, Lewis died from a cerebral hemorrhage related to brain cancer. Among his last wishes: Twelve-year-old Christina and her older sister would join the board of the Reginald F. Lewis Foundation.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

Advanced Courses: For a February 2015 presentation to the Board of Education’s Instructional Work Group, advanced coursework was presented for high school students in five areas: Advanced Placement, Honors, Advanced, Dual Transcripted, and Youth Options. We recommend measuring advanced coursework at the high school level based on three course designations that appear on high school transcripts (Advanced Placement, Honors, and Advanced), as well as Dual Transcripted, Youth Options, and youth apprenticeships. This expanded definition of advanced coursework allows the district to account for a variety of advanced options aimed at both college and career readiness. It is intentionally broad and includes specialized courses outside the traditional core subjects designed as “Advanced,” which allows students with different interests and on different pathways to pursue high-level options that are relevant to them and also contribute to school and district advanced coursework participation goals. The broader definition of advanced coursework is grounded in the idea that every student, no matter their abilities and interests, is capable of accessing advanced coursework in some way every year. This is possible in part because advanced courses, which are designated by Curriculum & Instruction through a defined course-vetting and review process, exist across disciplines, including in the fine arts, physical education, and career and technical education. Increasing participation in advanced courses is not just about finding students with a certain academic profile who are not yet participating and encouraging them to participate; instead, it is about using a definition of advanced courses that reflects every student’s unique needs, is attainable for every student, and makes a goal of 100% completion by graduation aspirational but possible. It also includes advanced coursework designations that often are perceived as more objective and based on national standards (such as Advanced Placement) and those that are local decisions (such as Honors or Advanced course designations).

We do not recommend measuring advanced coursework at the middle or elementary school level given that there is no data available to distinguish advanced courses at these levels and less course-taking variation across students. Although we considered using middle school participation in algebra and geometry, which also is highly correlated with positive outcomes later on, we elected not to use this measure for two major reasons. First, unlike the advanced course definition we use for high school, this approach privileges one discipline above others by saying that only access to higher-level math is a priority. Second, research indicates that universal early algebra is most successful when accompanied by intensive support and increased instructional time, so asking our schools to increase participation in this area likely would require substantial changes to the structure of the school day and the support systems provided.

…..

Second, it is possible to increase advanced coursework completion simply by classifying more existing courses as advanced or Honors while making no efforts to encourage students to pursue an additional challenge. However, the new course vetting by Curriculum & Instruction should help alleviate this concern. Finally, as with the well-roundedness areas discussed earlier, formalizing four advanced credits as a goal has likely implications for staffing, scheduling, course creation, and graduation requirements.
Fine Arts and World Language: After exploring the data, we settled on a fine arts and world language profile of 2 world language credits and 1 fine arts credit earned. About 50% of students from the classes of 2011-13 completed this profile, so we have very large sample sizes for completion and non-completion that allow us to argue that completing this profile is highly associated with on-time high school completion and pursuing postsecondary education (PSE) overall and across student groups:

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

Strong organizations have a clear and compelling vision and a set of goals and indicators aligned to that vision

– Goal #1 – Student Growth and Achievement – in use with goals already set

– Goal #2 – Challenging and Well-Rounded Education – focus of today’s conversation and new goals set for 2015-16

– Goal #3 – School and District Climate – new goals will be set for 2016-17
These goals reflect instructional strategies to help us prepare every student to graduate college, career, and community ready and to help every school be a thriving school

Todd Zyweicki:

Alex McHugh has an interesting post at NRO picking up on my essay from a few weeks regarding my futile efforts to reform George Mason’s speech code. McHugh notes that additional costs of growing academic bureaucracies is not only that they expanded so rapidly in the good times of higher education but that they have now proven unusually resistant to shrinkage as budgets have tightened, especially those with politically sensitive constituencies. If budgets shrink and bureaucracy doesn’t: well, do the math, the savings have to come from somewhere, namely academic programs.

McHugh also notes that as the bureaucracy becomes larger and more sprawling it also becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of what all the bureaucrats are doing and making sure that their behavior is aligned with the academic values of the institution:

Amanda Ripley:

For the past four months, a group of Kentucky teenagers has been working to make a one-sentence change to a state law. In the history of student activism, this is not a big ask. They want local school boards to have the option—just the option—of including a student on the committees that screen candidates for superintendent jobs.

That’s it. They aren’t asking to choose the superintendent; the elected school board does that. They just want to have one student sit among the half-dozen adults (including two teachers, a parent, and a principal) who help vet candidates and make recommendations to the board.

“I thought everyone would view it as a no-brainer,” said Nicole Fielder, 18. She said this on Tuesday from Frankfort, the state’s capital, where she was missing classes in order to advocate—for the sixth time—for this bill.

Policymakers should be begging students to serve on committees and school boards, not the other way around. That’s because students are their secret weapons: Kids can translate abstract policy into real life with a speed and fluency that no adult can match.

Related: an emphasis on adult employment.

Lydia Dishman:

For Ashu Desai, a cofounder of Make School, Bando’s story validates a long-held belief that computer-science degrees from traditional universities may not be the best path into a highly competitive job market in this sector.

THE UNEMPLOYMENT RATE IN THE IT SECTOR IS ABOUT HALF THE NATIONAL AVERAGE, AT JUST 3%.
Desai himself was just 15 years old when he built an app that sold 50,000 copies on the App Store. “This was the coolest educational experience I ever had,” Desai tells Fast Company. He was able to see computer science as a really creative field that was about much more than getting grades. “It opened doors to internships and job opportunities,” he says.

Though he’d already built and shipped a product, Desai decamped to UCLA to earn a degree in computer science. It wasn’t long before he was frustrated by relearning some of the concepts he’d already put into practice and others that were not related to building products.

Gretchen Reynolds:

An easy, two-minute vision test administered on the sidelines after a young athlete has hit his or her head can help to reliably determine whether the athlete has sustained a concussion, according to a new study of student athletes, some as young as 5.

The test is so simple and inexpensive that any coach or parent potentially could administer it, the study’s authors believe, and any league afford to provide it as a way to help evaluate and safeguard players.

Those of us who coach or care for young athletes know by now that an athlete who falls or collides with something during play or seems dazed, dizzy, loses consciousness or complains of head pain should be tested for a concussion, which occurs when the brain is physically jostled within the skull.

But most of us are clueless about how to test young athletes. The most commonly recommended sideline test is the Standardized Assessment of Concussion, a multipart examination during which athletes are asked to name the date, describe how they feel, memorize and recall lists of words, and do jumping jacks and other tests of coordination. Ideally, this assessment should be administered and evaluated by a medical professional.

Natasha Singer:

At school districts across the country, the chief technology officers responsible for safeguarding student data are tearing their hair out.

Scores of education technology start-ups, their pockets full from a rush of venture capital, are marketing new digital learning tools directly to teachers — many are even offering them free to get a foothold in schools. That has enabled educators nationwide to experiment with a host of novel “adaptive learning” products, like math and foreign language apps that record and analyze students’ online activities to personalize their lessons.

But the new digital tools have also left school district technology directors scrambling to keep track of which companies are collecting students’ information — and how they are using it.

Christine Campbell, bia a kind Deb Britt email:

Ken began by asking Tonya and Raymond for their thoughts about the tension between having an urgent “children first agenda” and the need to take the time to really understand and engage a community. Long-term sustainability requires both, he said, but often we are forced into a false choice. He then asked, “How do we convince reform leaders and funders of the importance of engaging the community and doing it in deep and authentic ways?”

Among the important points they all raised:

Deborah Fallows:

People often remarked about our sons’ competitive public high school in the Washington, D.C., area that it was a great place for the kids at the top and at the bottom, but it left a lot of room for those in the middle to fall through the cracks. I wasn’t ever sure about that; it seemed that there was something for everyone at their school, from music to sports to media to service. But with that recollection in mind, I was especially curious to visit The Center For Advanced Research and Technology (CART), which is an ambitious and ambitiously named public high school in Fresno County, California.

CART began with the glimmer of an idea: that we could do better at educating students, especially those who were having trouble finding their way in a more traditional American high school environment. CART sought to offer an unconventional education, one where students could discover or follow their passions with a clear path toward a career.

CART draws about two-thirds of its students from the city of Fresno, whose overall challenges Jim described yesterday. The other third are from the much smaller and more affluent town of Clovis, which abuts the northeast section of Fresno. Rick Watson, who is CART’s CEO rather than its principal, said that in 1997 a group of educators, business people, and community leaders of Fresno pulled together in a feat of creativity and cooperation to imagine and build a rigorous career-track high school with a solid academic footing, an infusion of technology, and a spirit of real-worldism.

Greg Jones:

While these perceived dangers are admittedly more subtle than those that might accompany a rogue asteroid, they are worrying indeed. Automation might not wipe us out immediately, but it will almost certainly affect economies in Earth-shattering ways.

Forecasts differ on the specifics, but they generally point to automation being disruptive as far as traditional workplace roles are concerned. A recent Oxford University study put nearly half (47 percent) of all jobs at risk of replacement by automation in two decades. A Wired article puts the number at 70 percent by the end of this century.

Computers are getting smarter and stronger while employees, with their health insurance, pensions, and vacation time are becoming increasingly expensive. The writing is on the wall; plenty of jobs, at least as performed by humans, aren’t long for this world.

teachburge

Between 1972 and 1991, Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers tortured at least 112 African American men and youth. Victims were as young as 13 years old, and at least 26 officers were involved. CPD Detective Jon Burge, the leader of CPD’s Area 2 midnight shift on the South Side of Chicago, appears to have been primarily responsible for introducing the torture techniques, which included electric shock, suffocation, burns, many kinds of beatings, use of cattle prods, use of nooses, mock executions with guns, and genital pain. Burge likely learned the electric shock tactic during his service as a military police sergeant in a Prisoner of War camp during the Vietnam War. The practical goal of the torture was often to produce confessions from suspects that could be used to convict them or others of crimes under the purview of Area 2’s investigatory responsibilities, raising Area 2’s arrest and conviction rates and assisting Burge’s rapid rise through the CPD ranks. The torture was systemic and rooted in deeply held racist beliefs. In fact, Burge and his men referred to the apparently homemade electrical device that they used to shock men with as the “nigger box.” The torture became an “open secret” among both the CPD and the city’s political establishment.

Over the course of decades, torture survivors, their families and local organizers have fought for justice. The City of Chicago has acknowledged the torture, and the UN has called for redress. Yet scores of survivors still suffer from the ongoing impact of the trauma they endured – without compensation, assistance, or recourse.

Classroom Struggle

CS: School communities – school workers, students and families – have been carrying out various actions at their schools and at board meetings due to the neoliberal policy called the “Call for Quality Schools.” This policy is targetting 5 “underperforming” schools and putting them through an RFP process. RFPs, or Request For Proposals, are a way in which the OUSD administrators and school board members can treat each school’s management positions as a commodities to be put on the market. Charter School Organizations, non profits funded by corporate money, and other entities are being put in competition with the school sites to determine who has the “best plan” for running the schools.

The new Superintendent of OUSD, Antwan Wilson, is from Denver and has brought a bunch of highly paid and well connected administrators from Denver to take positions in the OUSD. They are carrying out this process in a very blunt and aggressive manner – steamrolling their proposals without considering the school community’s own needs and processes, making hasty decisions and putting them out over email prior to being clear on what’s happening.

All of this has lead to the emergence of a polarization against the OUSD administration that we have not seen in several years in Oakland.

Paul Campos:

Once upon a time, I began to look at the financing of law school education in America, and was amazed by what I found. Recently, I’ve been researching the economic structure of American higher education in general. My amazement is growing . . .

Everyone is aware that the cost of going to college has skyrocketed since [fill in any date going back to the middle of the last century]. Why has this happened? This post is about one possible explanation, that turns out not to have any validity at all: increases in faculty salaries. In fact, over the past 40+ years, average salaries for college and university faculty have dropped dramatically.

Salaries have increased, sometimes substantially, for a tiny favored slice of academia, made up of tenured professors at elite institutions, some professional school faculty (business, law, medicine), and most especially faculty who have moved into the higher echelons of university administration. Such examples merely emphasize the extent to which the economics of the New Gilded Age have infiltrated the academic world: the one percent are doing fabulously well, and the ten percenters are doing fine, while the wretched refuse of our teeming shores will adjunct for food.

Elizabeth Segran:

Between 2008 and 2012, Guillaume Dumas took courses at some of the best colleges in North America—Stanford, Yale, Brown, University of California Berkeley, McGill, and University of British Columbia, among others—without being enrolled as a student. He then went on to start a successful online dating business in Montreal.

For four years, the 28-year-old from Quebec lived the life of a wandering scholar, moving from one university town to the next, attending lectures and seminars, getting into heated debates with professors. Sometimes he was open about his unregistered status, but most of the time, fearing reprisal, he kept it quiet. To pay for his everyday expenses, he worked at cafes and occasionally earned money by writing papers for other students. He lived at co-ops or other cheap student housing, but at Brown, when funds got particularly low, a kind soul let him set up his sleeping bag and tent on the roof. At the end of all this, he never received a degree.

BBC:

The 12-year-old died on Sunday “after being beaten by a teacher the previous day,” a ministry statement said.

It said an “urgent inquiry” had been launched into the circumstances of the boy’s death and the teacher had been suspended by the school.

Local reports, which named the boy as Islam Sharif, said he was beaten for not doing his homework.

He had head injuries and suffered a brain haemorrhage, forensics department chief Hisham Abdel Hamid told the AFP news agency.

The teacher said he had “no intention to kill him but the beating was part of discipline,” state-run newspaper Al-Ahram Al-Masa’i reported.

Tanya Paperny:

Last week was the first ever National Adjunct Walkout Day, a grassroots protest to push for fair pay and better working conditions. Protests and teach-ins took place on as many as 100 campuses nationwide, prompting at least one university to create a task force to address labor concerns. It’s little wonder that a national movement has sprung up around the adjunct system, which offers little or no job security or access to benefits and significantly lower wages than regular faculty. I sympathize — I was an adjunct, and I could only tolerate the stress and exhaustion for two years.

I taught as many as five classes each semester at four campuses in D.C. and Maryland, crisscrossing town by bike and public transportation during work days that sometimes lasted 13 hours. I never knew what my employment would look like the following term and constantly applied for part- and full-time teaching positions in case I didn’t get rehired. Many of the courses I taught—composition, professional writing and journalism—were required for undergraduate or graduate students, yet those programs ran almost entirely on the backs of adjuncts.

Nick Cohen:

In a cheeringly Dickensian fashion, the names of our supposed experts on grammar imply they want to bind writers (Lynne Truss); send them awry (Kingsley Amis); besmirch their prose (H.W. Fowler); deafen them with moos (Simon Heffer); or snort at their legitimate constructions (John Humphrys).

At first glance, Oliver Kamm appears happy to keep them company. A leader-writer for the Times and its resident authority on style, Kamm is the most small ‘c’ conservative man I know. If he has ever left home without cleaning his shoes — and I doubt that he has — he would have realised his mistake before reaching the end of his road, and rushed back to apply the polish. Instead of joining the pedants, however, Kamm batters them. Accidence Will Happen is a joyous and joyously liberating assault on ‘rules’ of grammar which are little more than a hodgepodge of contradictory superstitions.

Kamm’s weapons are erudition and raw polemical vigour. Berating people on superstitious stylistic grounds is worse than self-defeating, he says. ‘It undermines the cause of clear writing and damages appreciation of the real study of language.’

Stefe Kolowich:

Lynn University, a small institution in Boca Raton, Fla., started giving away iPads to all its new students about a year and a half ago. Now there is a catch: If those students cut class, their iPads might tattle on them.

The university is planning to try out a new app, called Class120, to “ping” its students’ iPads during class periods. If GPS or the campus wi-fi network indicates that someone’s device is not present, the app will send the student an automated reminder, and may notify his or her academic coach as well. (At Lynn, students are expected to carry their iPads to classes.)

This sounds a little Big Brother-ish, and Lynn’s administrators are aware of that. But they say they have no interest in stalking students outside of regular class hours. “We’re not interested where you are on Friday night,” says Christian Boniforti, the chief information officer. “We’re just interested in whether you’re in the classroom when you’re supposed to be.”

Those assurances offer little comfort to Khaliah Barnes, director of the student-privacy project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Just because schools have access to tech does not mean it’s always appropriate to use it,” she says, “especially when it comes to tracking students.”

Stephanie Wood:

One of the world’s greatest minds is playing with a toy pony. He presses a plastic stethoscope into the soft toy’s body, feigns a pony cough. “Is he sick or is he well?” he asks. “You don’t know? Want a second opinion?”

Terence Tao – Terry, as he’s mostly known – is sitting on a leather sofa in his Los Angeles living room, thin, bare-footed and bespectacled, talking to his three-year-old daughter, Madeleine, just home from a birthday party. It’s hard to be intimidated by a man playing with a toy pony.

Yet this is a man with an intimidatingly rare and precious mind. Academics studied it with astonishment throughout his Adelaide childhood as he charged through IQ tests and International Mathematical Olympiads with unprecedented results. “Off the scale,” says Miraca Gross, an authority on the education of gifted children, describing his IQ. “Terry hears mathematics and sees and smells mathematics in a way we don’t.”

Laura Waters:

After all the NJEA-sponsored television and radio commercials that solicited parents to opt their children out of PARCC, after all of Save Our Schools-NJ’s anti-PARCC events,, students in New Jersey began taking the new standardized annual assessments that replace ASK and HSPA tests this week.

How successful was this campaign, motivated by anger against N.J.’s new tenure law that links student outcomes to 10% of teacher evaluations, as well as concerns about the switch from fill-in-the-bubble tests to computer-based assessments?

It’s fair to say that NJEA and SOS-NJ achieved success in four N.J. school districts: Princeton, Ridgewood, Livingston, and Delran. N.J. has 591 school districts.

<A href=”http://www.channel3000.com/news/opinion/For-the-Record-One-City-Early-Learning-Center/31611302“>Channel3000</a>: <blockquote>Neil Heinen talks with Salli Martyniak and Kaleem Caire about the opening of the One City Early Learning Center.</blockquote> 

Sarah Kendzior:

Will your Ph.D. lead to an academic job? To answer that question, prospective students are often encouraged to see how recent graduates fared — a task easier said than done. Department placement lists are catalogs of untold stories, a logroll of the disappeared. Those who left academia are erased: According to my own alma mater, for example, I never existed, along with the majority of my colleagues who failed to find academic jobs in the Great Recession. There is no placement list for the displaced.

A more useful indicator of whether your doctoral program is a pathway to employment lies in whom the department hires. Because chances are, you will see the same few institutional names again and again. During my own time in graduate school, my department hired several faculty members, all with different specialties and skills, all with one thing in common: Harvard, Harvard, Harvard, Harvard.

The evidence is not only anecdotal. A recent study by Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, and Daniel B. Larremore shows that “a quarter of all universities account for 71 to 86 percent of all tenure-track faculty in the U.S. and Canada in these three fields. Just 18 elite universities produce half of all computer science professors, 16 schools produce half of all business professors, and eight schools account for half of all history professors.” This study follows the discovery by political scientist Robert Oprisko that more than half of political-science professorships were filled by applicants from only 11 universities.

Alan Borsuk:

Every school day, more than 8,000 children who live in the city of Milwaukee head off to school in Milwaukee suburbs.

I think of that as the equivalent of, say, six high schools or 16 elementary schools that are serving Milwaukee kids outside the city lines. That has a lot of impact, even as the complex picture of city-suburban school choice continues to evolve.

This is one form of evolution that Gov. Scott Walker is, presumably, willing to speak his mind on because his proposed state budget calls for ending the voluntary racial integration program known as Chapter 220, which is the oldest of the city-suburban programs.

But the story of city kids going to suburban schools actually has three chapters. In addition to 220, there is extensive use of the state’s open enrollment law and growing use of a provision, now four years old, that allows city kids to attend suburban religious schools.

Here’s a primer on these three often-overlooked but important aspects of educating the children of Milwaukee.

Related: where have all the students gone?

Roxana Daneshjou:

The first hint of sunlight glows off the horizon as I rush toward Stanford Hospital from the parking garage, white coat in hand, stethoscope bouncing against my chest. Every few steps, the diaphragm of my stethoscope ricochets off the silver pendant my mother gave me—a nine-pointed star etched with a symbol of my Bahá’í faith. My mother escaped Iran at 17 as the country was on the cusp of revolution—a revolution that would create a society where, to this day, Bahá’ís like myself are barred from obtaining a university education. But here, in the United States, I’ve spent more than a third of my life on a university campus.

The Bahá’í faith was founded in 19th century Persia, and is now the largest non-Islamic minority religion in Iran. Persecution of our religion has helped it expand around the world—my own family’s escape to the United States in 1979 guaranteed that I would be born to the freedom and opportunities denied to Bahá’ís back home.

Back in Iran, the state bans Bahá’ís from studying at universities as just one of many different forms of persecution, which has included desecration of cemeteries, confiscation of property, and wrongful imprisonment. However, because education is such a fundamental principal of our faith, Bahá’í students there have to learn in secret—usually through the Bahá’í Institute of Higher Education (BIHE), whose volunteers quietly teach classes in homes or via online portals. The threat of arrest is constant; the government recently imprisoned both BIHE students and professors, some at the notorious Evin Prison, which has held many prisoners of conscience. I, on the other hand, had the freedom to receive a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from Rice University and am now in an M.D.-Ph.D. program at Stanford University, filling my brain with pathophysiology and methods of statistical analysis, which I hope to use to serve the community.

Curt Guyette:

Emergency management has neither fixed the finances of Detroit Public Schools nor provided even an adequate education to most Detroit students.

The state’s takeover of the district, and the appointment of four different managers during those six years, has been like shuffling captains on the Titanic after the iceberg has been hit. Unless the hole gets plugged, the ship is going down no matter who is at the helm.

In the case of DPS, the district’s perpetual annual deficits (pegged at nearly $170 million for the current fiscal year) and its long-term debt (which is at more than $2.1 billion as of last June) aren’t just an issue of management. Unless severe structural problems are resolved, the district will continue sinking.

Wayne State University economist and law school professor Peter Hammer focused on the crisis facing DPS in a paper published in The Journal of Law in Society.

“The important point is that the dynamics of the problem are structural and largely transcend issues of governance,” wrote Hammer in a paper titled “The Fate of the Detroit Public Schools: Governance, Finance and Competition.“

Kelchen:

In spite of the vast majority of federal government operations being closed on Thursday due to snow (it’s been a rough end to winter in this part of the country), the U.S. Department of Education released financial responsibility scores for private nonprofit and for-profit colleges and universities based on 2012-2013 data. These scores are based on calculations designed to measure a college’s financial strength in three key areas: primary reserve ratio (liquidity), equity ratio (ability to borrow additional funds) and net income (profitability or excess revenue).

A college can score between -1 and 3, and colleges that score over 1.5 are considered financially responsible without any qualifications and can access federal funds. Colleges scoring between 1.0 and 1.4 are considered financially responsible and can access federal funds for up to three years, but are subject to additional Department of Education oversight of its financial aid programs. If a college does not improve its score within three years, it will not be considered financially responsible. Colleges scoring 0.9 or below are not considered financially responsible and must submit a letter of credit and be subject to additional oversight to get access to funds. A college can submit a letter of credit equal to 50% of all federal student aid funds received in the prior year and be deemed financially responsible, or it can submit a letter equal to 10% of all funds received and gain access to funds but still not be fully considered financially responsible.

Max Niesen:

Most business school rankings have one of Harvard or Stanford on top, their graduates command the highest salaries, and benefit from particularly powerful networks. But a report from student lender M7 Financial puts them below Brigham Young’s Marriott School, and alongside less prestigious schools including Ohio State’s and the University of Washington’s, while Bloomberg Businessweek’s top-ranked program, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, is in the second-lowest tier.

The difference between M7’s methodology and others is that it focuses entirely on an average student’s ability to pay back typical loan obligations after graduation. The list leaves out quite a few highly regarded schools, including Wharton, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, because they didn’t provide debt figures to US News, which is where M7 drew its debt data from.

Leslie Norton:

Yale University has done something that no other Ivy League school has attempted: built a new version of itself halfway around the world, in Singapore.

A year and a half ago, Yale accepted its first class of freshmen at this brand new university, a joint venture between Yale and the well-respected National University of Singapore. The goal is to create a new generation of leaders for Asia’s companies and governments. And what better institution for the job than Yale? Among the alumni of Yale’s leafy New Haven, Conn., campus are three recent U.S. presidents — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush — three sitting Supreme Court justices; and top business leaders, including Blackstone ’s Stephen Schwarzman, Liberty Media ’s John Malone, and PepsiCo ’s Indra Nooyi.

“The idea is that the Singapore program should be producing leaders in whatever sector of society they work in,” says Yale President Peter Salovey. In his view, the success of Yale’s Singapore experiment will be judged years from now by the success of its graduates. “Do they go on to the best graduate and professional programs? Do employers say they find these students articulate, creative, capable of teamwork? Those are some of the outcome measures,” says Salovey, adding, “I have a lot of optimism.”

“Our schools will show real, quantifiable student achievement and with those results finally dispel the misguided and simplistic notion that the union contract is an impediment to success.” So declared teachers union chief Randi Weingarten in 2005 upon launching the United Federation of Teachers charter school in Brooklyn, New York.

The UFT quietly let slip last week that this showcase K-8 charter school is closing after a legacy of failure. Ms. Weingarten’s experiment in education of the union, by the union and for the union is a case study in the problems with the status quo of union dominance over American public education.

In 2005 the UFT Charter School opened with a $1 million gift from the Broad Foundation and plans to reduce class sizes, increase collaboration among teachers with monthly “townhall meetings” and daily “community gatherings,” and replace principals with less adversarial “school leaders.” Instructional coaches were supposed to support teachers but not evaluate their performance.

On queue, yhe New York Times dives into a failed Florida charter.

Perhaps the reporters might compare charters with traditional public school performance along with spending and staffing data.

Li Zhou:

For children with autism, math problems are a lot easier if images are involved. Addition, for example, becomes significantly more clear if the equation and answer are accompanied by physical pictures representing the math taking place. Two cars plus three cars is logically depicted with images of five physical cars. Reinforcing every question with a visual reference helps make it more concrete and accessible.

Katie Hench, Christopher Flint and Lally Daley, all of whom have worked with autistic students as special education teachers or therapists, were inspired by their firsthand experiences to establish Infiniteach, a Chicago-based startup building mobile apps that cater to the specific ways that kids with autism learn. Their current app, Skill Champ, teaches ten vital skills, including number matching and object sorting, using approaches proven to resonate with autistic students.

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

Much like they did in enacting Act 10 a few years ago, Republican legislators once again adjourned the Committee hearing before all could be heard, and then voted to send the Right to Work Bill to the full Senate recommending that they adopt it. The Senate adopted it with all democrats and one republican (former Union member who values what the Union did for him) voting NO! The action by the Republican majority was an embarrassment to democracy. Sen. Hanson (Green Bay) said “Right to Work will destroy the middle class. That it has caused a reduction of wages and a loss of benefits in other states.”

The Bill was pushed through the Senate by Republican Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (Juneau). The Bill is nearly identical to the model recommended by conservative policy developer American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Fitzgerald, in speaking before the Committee hearing, said his proposal would “protect every worker” from being forced to join a union. The National Labor Relations Act already does that, and has for about 75 years. In some settings like MMSD, those who decide not to join the union at their workplace pay a representation fee, because they receive the wage increases, the fringe benefits, and the other rights which the union negotiates – and the union is obligated to represent them in things like discipline and dismissal. Fitzgerald’s claim of “forced unionism” is simply NOT TRUE.
It is interesting that a coalition of over 400 employers oppose the Bill, stating that they hire skilled workers through the union’s, apprenticeship program that they depend on and works well with the unions.

Right to Work provides no rights to working people. It will result in taking the guarantees of just cause and due process away from workers. At the peril of workers and their families, it will reduce income to line the pockets of corporate executives.

Kevin Carey:

Three years ago, technology was going to transform higher education. What happened?

Over the course of a few months in early 2012, leading scientists from Harvard, Stanford and M.I.T. started three companies to provide Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. The courses were free. Millions of students signed up. Pundits called it a revolution.

But today, enrollment in traditional colleges remains robust, and undergraduates are paying higher tuition and taking out larger loans than ever before. Universities do not seem poised to join travel agents and video stores on the ash heap of history — at least, not yet.

The failure of MOOCs to disrupt higher education has nothing to do with the quality of the courses themselves, many of which are quite good and getting better. Colleges are holding technology at bay because the only thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable price. What they don’t offer are official college degrees, the kind that can get you a job. And that, it turns out, is mostly what college students are paying for.

Dan Walters:

Brown, meanwhile, is negotiating privately with Napolitano – herself a former governor of Arizona – to see whether compromise is reachable. A first increment of the threatened tuition increase has been postponed, but publicly Napolitano is threatening to cap admissions by California students.

The amount of state UC aid involved is relatively tiny and were it just about money, a compromise could be easily found. But the underlying issue is how much control governors and legislators should exert over university operations, given the system’s constitutional independence, and that point is less susceptible to compromise.

The faculties and administrators of both systems may dislike being told to descend from their ivory towers and join the real world of financial limits and competing priorities.

But the conflicts in both states are two sides of the same coin – whether there are limits on how hard state university systems can hit taxpayers and students for money and whether they are answerable to politicians, voters and students for how they spend that money.

Page 8 is illustrated above, with Madison’s per student spending noted, not completely to scale.

36 Page PDF Slideware Presentation.

I’ve not seen a total spending number published in awhile (The last number I’ve seen was approximately $402,000,000) for 25,305 full time students and 1,962 4K participants. That’s roughly $15K per student, about double the national average.

Much more on the Madison School District’s 2015-2016 budget, here.

Related: Attrition Report. Equity based staff reduction summary.

Douglas Belkin:

The Wall Street Journal invited three people to join in an email discussion of the issue. They are: Levi Bisonn, a senior at Olympia High School in Washington state who has applied to 13 schools, including Johns Hopkins University and the University of Washington; Patty Pogemiller, the director of talent acquisition at Deloitte; and Scott Thomas, dean of the School of Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California, who has researched opportunity in higher education.
Recruiting Edge

WSJ: Levi, the University of Washington and Johns Hopkins are both great schools but, depending on aid and scholarships, the price difference could be significant. If you were to pay full freight, Johns Hopkins would run you about twice as much. How much, if at all, will the price tag and prestige of the institution impact your decision if you get in to both schools?

Heather Holland:

A public elementary school is abolishing traditional homework assignments and telling kids to play instead — outraging parents who say they may pull their kids out of the school.

Teachers at P.S. 116 on East 33rd Street have stopped assigning take-home math worksheets and essays, and are instead encouraging students to read books and spend time with their family, according to a letter the school’s principal, Jane Hsu, sent to parents last month.

The Economist:

“IT’S all to do with their brains and bodies and chemicals,” says Sir Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College, a posh English boarding school. “There’s a mentality that it’s not cool for them to perform, that it’s not cool to be smart,” suggests Ivan Yip, principal of the Bronx Leadership Academy in New York. One school charges £25,000 ($38,000) a year and has a scuba-diving club; the other serves subsidised lunches to most of its pupils, a quarter of whom have special needs. Yet both are grappling with the same problem: teenage boys are being left behind by girls.

It is a problem that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. Policymakers who once fretted about girls’ lack of confidence in science now spend their time dangling copies of “Harry Potter” before surly boys. Sweden has commissioned research into its “boy crisis”. Australia has devised a reading programme called “Boys, Blokes, Books & Bytes”. In just a couple of generations, one gender gap has closed, only for another to open up.

Christian Schneider:

When the Madison Metropolitan School District School Board met in October of last year, members listened to teachers tell stories of being hit, bitten and kicked by students. The teachers were objecting to a new school district plan that sought to both allay the wide racial disparity in student suspensions and keep children in school for more instruction days. But teachers said the plan, which lessened punishment for many offenses that previously earned students out-of-school suspensions, was nothing short of a catastrophe.

Racial disparity in suspensions is an issue that has long plagued Wisconsin. According to a report released last week, Wisconsin ranks first in the nation in the rate of black secondary school students suspended. Previous studies have shown that in Milwaukee schools, black students represented 56% of the district’s total enrollment but made up 85% of the students who were given multiple out-of-school suspensions.

In Madison, however, the racial disparity is far more pronounced. Last year, black students made up only 18% of enrollment but comprised 59% of out-of-school suspensions. And the plan to lessen this disparity only seems to have made it worse; this year, while the total number of suspensions is down 41%, the rate of black students who earn out-of-school suspensions has risen to 64%. Further, teachers and parents alike argue that it leaves disruptive students in classrooms where they can lessen the quality of education for well-behaved students.

The Madison experiment’s problems are notable given the district’s proud status as a progressive stronghold. It would be difficult to find a district more sensitive to charges of racial insensitivity; and yet the district’s track record in dealing with black children is a near-scandal. In the 2013-’14 school year, 10% of the district’s black students were proficient in reading — that’s lower than the district’s special education students (14%) and students who speak English as a second language (19%). And this is occurring in one of the state’s wealthiest school districts.

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.

Chris Rickert:

From the way some of the more enthusiastic public school supporters talk, you’d think alternative forms of public education, such as voucher schools, were making millions on the backs of ill-treated kindergartners.
The vast majority of Wisconsin’s voucher schools are not-for-profit, though, and it seems unlikely that any of them is, say, forcing 8-year-olds into sweatshops or flogging them for chewing gum in class.

But you’d never know that from the Madison School District’s denial of an open records request from a pro-voucher organization on grounds that the request wasn’t education-related.

School Choice Wisconsin president Jim Bender says the “vast majority” of about 30 larger districts complied with the organization’s request for student directory data. It is considering plans to use the information to send out postcards reminding parents of the enrollment period for the statewide voucher program.

Jill Tatge-Rozell, via a kind reader:

Kenosha parents whose autistic child was not admitted into Paris Consolidated School through open enrollment have joined a lawsuit that claims Wisconsin’s open enrollment rules violate federal disability law.

Specifically, the suit claims open enrollment violates the Americans with Disabilities Act because it denies students with disabilities the benefits of a government program on the basis of disability.

“We view the open enrollment process as a government benefit,” said C.J. Szafir, education policy director for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. “Since the program is out there, all children should have equal access.”

Wisconsin law allows a school district to establish how many students with disabilities it will accept through open enrollment. In some cases, such as at Paris, districts do not accept any students with disabilities.

WILL is representing six children with disabilities from five families whose applications to attend schools outside their resident district were denied. The identities of the parents and the children are protected at this point in the proceedings.

However, Szafir said far more children with disabilities have had their open enrollment applications denied since the program started. For the 2013-14 school year alone, he said, more than 1,000 disabled children had their applications for open enrollment rejected solely on the basis of their disability.

Kevin Carey:

In 1796, in his final annual address to Congress, President George Washington called for the creation of:

“…a National University; and also a Military Academy. The desirableness of both these Institutions, has so constantly increased with every new view I have taken of the subject, that I cannot omit the opportunity of once for all, recalling your attention to them.”

The Military Academy was soon built at West Point. But despite leaving $22,222 for its establishment (a lot of money back then) in his last will and testament, Washington’s National University never came to pass.

Instead, lawmakers chose to rely on state governments and religious denominations to build and finance new colleges and universities.

Today, the American higher education system is in crisis. The price of college has grown astronomically, forcing students and parents to take out loans that now exceed $1.2 trillion in outstanding debt. Many of those loans are falling into default as graduates struggle to find work. The latest research suggests that our vaunted universities are producing graduates who haven’t learned very much.

Simona Chiose:

“With the current funding regime, we cannot afford for the university to have all courses taught by tenure-track appointments, although the research is important,” York University president Mamdouh Shoukri said in an interview.

The shift is changing the undergraduate experience. Most students at large and medium-sized universities will have limited contact with their universities’ top, internationally ranked talent. Instead, they are taught by professors who have more education but less job security than high school teachers. Some observers are beginning to wonder if universities are making the right choice. A report suggested last year that, rather than create a two or three-tiered labour force, universities should encourage tenured professors with middling research output to spend more time teaching.

However, universities are moving in the opposite direction.

Frank Shyong:

In a windowless classroom at an Arcadia tutoring center, parents crammed into child-sized desks and dug through their pockets and purses for pens as Ann Lee launches a PowerPoint presentation.

Her primer on college admissions begins with the basics: application deadlines, the relative virtues of the SAT versus the ACT and how many Advanced Placement tests to take.

Then she eases into a potentially incendiary topic — one that many counselors like her have learned they cannot avoid.

“Let’s talk about Asians,” she says.

Lee’s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column.

Fréderike Geerdinke:

1. Seems like there’s a lot of confusion even about the question of whether these schools are open or not. Right?

Right. Three schools for education in Kurdish were opened this Monday, on the first day of the new school year in Turkey: one in Yüksekova (the Dayîka Uveyş Primary School, named after the mother of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan), one in Cizre (Bêrîvan Primary School) and one in the Baglar district of the city of Diyarbakir (the Ferzat Kemanger Primary School, named after an Iranian Kurdish teacher, poet and human rights activist hanged by Iran in 2010). By Monday the police had already come to the school, but were prevented from entering by parents, teachers and their supporters. Only school inspectors were let in. Later the same day, after festivities celebrating the opening of the schools, they were closed down by the regional governors, who sealed the doors.

Beth McMurtrie:

Mr. Gu is like many other Silicon Valley hopefuls, except in one respect. He is a Thiel fellow, one of a select few who were given $100,000 each to leave college to pursue their start-up dreams. “It has sort of good and bad associated with it,” Mr. Gu says of how people react when they find out that he is a fellow. “It comes with a whole set of assumptions and mixed views. People want to know if you think nobody should go to college.”

In the five years since the billionaire investor Peter Thiel announced his eponymous fellowship, the project has assumed outsize social significance, as Mr. Gu discovered. Mr. Thiel’s outspoken nature and his view that the value of college is oversold have earned him both enemies and accolades.

For some, Mr. Thiel is a dangerous man, seeking to undermine a system that has proved the surest path to economic success for millions of Americans. For others, his ideas represent the future of American education, in which brilliant minds are freed from the convention of college and are encouraged to educate themselves on their own terms.

Jeffrey Selingo:

Twenty-one years ago, as I entered my senior year in college, my alma mater reached a significant milestone: the price tag passed the $20,000 mark. Today, tuition, fees, room, and board for a senior at Ithaca College are more than twice that, at about $53,000.

Now, of course, Ithaca and most other private colleges and universities rightfully argue that just a small percentage of students pay those “sticker prices” because schools give out boatloads of financial aid (read: discounts). They’re right. The average discount for first-year students at private colleges is 46 percent.

[See a list of the 57 U.S. colleges and universities that have a “sticker price” of more than $60,000 a year.]

Even in the early 1990s, I received a significant break on my tuition. If I were a student at Ithaca today, for example, I’d pay an average “net price” of $29,000 based on my parent’s income when I was a student, according to the U.S. Education Department. (You can find a college’s net price by income level on the Education Department’s College Navigator).

This is the time of year when private colleges are setting their tuition levels for next year, if they haven’t already. And at most colleges the question that emerges every year is what’s the breaking point? How high can we go with tuition until it’s just too much?

Andrew Kelly:

Last month, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) added to a familiar refrain, releasing a new report on how American Millennials lag behind their peers in other countries on measures of literacy, numeracy, and “problem-solving in technology rich environments.” Using data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), the authors showed that American Millennials ranked at the bottom in both numeracy and problem-solving. Fully 64 percent of Americans scored below the lowest proficiency rating on the numeracy exam, compared to about 1/3 of Millennials in places like Finland, the Netherlands, and Japan.

The picture wasn’t much brighter among young workers with bachelors and graduate degrees. On the numeracy exam, American BA holders outscored their peers in only two countries—Italy and Poland. Those with grad degrees outscored counterparts in Italy, Poland, and Spain.

The authors point out the incongruity: “A nation with some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world houses a college-educated population that scores among the lowest of the participating OECD nations in literacy and numeracy.” “As a country,” the authors conclude, “simply providing more education may not be the answer. There needs to be a greater focus on skills…”

Andrew McGettigan:

Student loans are in principle a straightforward business. The government lends students money; after they graduate, they begin repaying it. From the perspective of politicians and the Treasury the advantage of loans over grants is clear: the money isn’t simply given away, it comes back over the lifetime of the loan. Even better, in the national accounts the loans are classified as ‘financial transactions’, not ‘expenditure’, and are excluded from calculations of the deficit.​1 When in 2012 the coalition all but ended the direct-grant funding of undergraduate teaching in English universities and colleges, the move could be sold as consistent with fiscal austerity – it had the effect of reducing government spending. But the income of universities and colleges was spared the cuts made elsewhere because the gap was more than filled by higher tuition fees backed by loans.

Since 2012 English higher education institutions have been able to charge new full-time students from the UK and EU up to a maximum of £9000 per year for tuition.​2 Anyone graduating from 2015 onwards is likely to owe £27,000 in tuition fee loans and more for maintenance loans, plus whatever interest accrued on the loans while they were studying. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons that on average student borrowers will owe £44,035 at graduation; for those who began their degrees before 2012, the figure was under £25,000.

Louise Tickle:

It’s six months since headteacher Emma Payne opened a new kitchen to provide hot meals for her pupils. The problems of starting up are in the past. But now there are new issues to deal with. Because the meals are free, fewer parents are claiming free school meals, and that is going to cost the school £9,240 in pupil premium.

“It’s mostly new reception parents who haven’t realised they need to sign up,” says Payne. “We’ve tried really hard to explain why claiming is important.”

The Guardian has been following the progress of her school – St Mary Redcliffe Primary in Bristol – since February last year, as the universal infant free school meal (UIFSM) policy has been rolled out. At this large primary, where some pupils live in one of the 10% most deprived wards in the UK, the January census shows that the number on free school meals (FSM) in reception has gone down by almost 50% in a year.

Carrie Shanafelt:

It is tempting to chalk the adjunctification of college and university faculty up to money alone. That is, of course, what administrations always offer as the reason, so there can be no more discussion about it. Since that first adjunct position of mine in 2003, I began to feel that something didn’t add up. None of my new colleagues spoke to me as if I were a junior professional working my way through the tough lean days of youth. Most of them spoke to me, if at all, like I was a dog.

It wasn’t true at every college, or in the same amount from every colleague, but the harassment I experienced as an adjunct wouldn’t have been tolerated in any other workplace. I was mocked for my lack of familiarity with upper-class New York life, quizzed about my sexuality, sneered at that I must be wasting my students’ time. I learned to regret reporting academic dishonesty or threats of violence. My students called me “professor” out of habit, though I begged them to call me “Carrie,” because I knew how much it irritated my colleagues to hear that title conferred on someone like me.

The first possibility I considered, in tears on the subway, was that I was obviously and unusually stupid. I asked around, and discovered that other first-year adjuncts at certain schools were enduring similar harassment from senior colleagues. I heard about blatant racism, sexism, and transphobia, but mostly just a fog of contempt that seemed to follow adjuncts everywhere. If we’re so underqualified to participate in this glorious career for elegant intellectuals, I thought, then why did they hire us? You could throw a rock in Park Slope and hit five PhDs with publications. Why hire starving MAs and then mock them for being hungry?

Whenever one encounters a pack of sadists, it’s a good idea to back up and look at the institution that encases them. There they always are, right in the middle, squeezed by increasing demands from above, shoved sweatily down onto an underclass of hopeless, helpless, undignified workers. That underclass is not just the product of administrative corner-cutting or fiscal belt-tightening; it’s a management strategy to keep the faculty divided against one another.

When I was an adjunct, I had to suppress my rage whenever an assistant professor complained about assembling a tenure file, revising an article, or applying for conference reimbursement. I was sick to my stomach to hear associate professors complain about having to serve on curriculum committee or meet with advisees. My academic aspirations were not limited to mere survival. I was desperately jealous of my senior colleagues’ worst problems.

Gerry Canavan:

A multi-generation, multimillion-dollar institution (like a college) that has to administrate by emergency decree has in nearly every case been grotesquely failed by its leadership. And in the US today that describes nearly every college and university, in management rhetorics and policies dating back at least to the mid-2000s (when I first entered the profession as a graduate student).

If your college faced drastic emergency cuts after 2008, it was mismanaged. You expanded on an unsustainable basis, made the wrong commitments, spent too much.

If your college faces drastic emergency cuts now because enrollments will tick (slightly) downward in the 2010s, it was mismanaged. You had 18 years warning that this demographic wave was going to hit, 18 years to plan for what to do when it did.

As every college administration invokes generalized, free-flowing “emergency” as its justification for arbitrary policy after arbitrary policy — all of which need to be implemented now, en toto and without debate, even the ones that contradict the other ones — they are arguing that their management up to now has been so wildly and irredeemably poor that the university has been thrown into total system crisis. And yet the solution to the emergency is, inevitably, always more (and more draconian) administrative control, always centralized under the very same people who took us over the cliff in the first place!

Ry Rivard:

In largely unnoticed side deals with investors, several colleges have promised they will raise prices on students, force students to live in dorms and even increase class sizes as they lay off faculty.

These are not for-profit colleges. Instead, they are nonprofits running into trouble with their debts. Unable to fulfill promises made when the colleges borrowed money years earlier, these colleges have struck deals to head off severe penalties, including foreclosures of campus property.

The debt was borrowed in the form of bonds, usually for campus construction. These bonds come with a host of financial conditions colleges must meet. Colleges agree to make timely payments, of course, and also to set aside a certain amount of money to cover their debts.

But, as colleges struggle to find enough students or run into unexpected market conditions, they may not be able to fulfill all these promises. To avoid penalties, at least a handful of colleges have promised their bondholders they would do things that could substantially affect student life.

Michael Meranze & Christopher Newfield:

Though we recognize that Chancellor Blank’s statements deviate from the talking points deployed by previous Chancellors and administration, intolerance for cuts has not been her position, as evidenced by her budget reduction test. By conducting this exercise, Chancellor Blank effectively trained the university’s workers to accept and prepare for cuts. In this sense, Chancellor Blank herself failed to organize campus and the broader UW community to fight back against cuts that are widely acknowledged as “self-inflicted” wounds produced by years of tax breaks for the wealthy. From an employee’s point of view, what exactly is “too much?” The Governor’s eight percent cuts or the ‘necessary’ six percent previously proposed by the administration?

Sarah Jaffe:

He never thought he would first be getting national press coverage as part of what may be the first organized student debt strike. But he and 14 other students, with the support of the Occupy Wall Street spinoff group The Debt Collective, are taking a stand and refusing to pay back the student loans they took out to attend the for-profit Corinthian colleges.

Corinthian is being dismantled and its students given debt relief on their private loans – the institution is under federal and state investigations and is the target of multiple lawsuits alleging predatory lending practices. But Hornes and the “Corinthian 15” are demanding relief for their federal student loans, too.

When Hornes moved to LA, he worked at Smashburger and Carl’s Jr to pay the bills while he pursued his dream: performing at the Staples Center, participating in a web series, even releasing two songs on iTunes. But two years in, he says, his mother began to press him to go to college.

Madison School District Presentation (PDF).

Timothy Aeppel:

Economist Erik Brynjolfsson had long dismissed fears that automation would soon devour jobs that required the uniquely human skills of judgment and dexterity.

Many of his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a big chunk of tomorrow’s technology is conceived and built, have spent their careers trying to prove such machines are within reach.

When Google Inc. announced in 2010 that a specially equipped fleet of driverless Toyota Prius cars had safely traveled more than 1,000 miles of U.S. roads, Mr. Brynjolfsson realized he might be wrong.

The Madison School District (PDF):

Provide overview and implications of current bilingual program guidance and implications for MMSD

Provide update on OMGE Cross-Functional team work and key findings

Provide initial data around access to bilingual programming across the district

Share and obtain feedback on recommended shifts and rationale for future bilingual programming in MMSD

Discuss next steps and general timeline

More (PDF):

The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) has a uniquely rich and diverse student and community population. We promote culturally and linguistically responsive (CLRP) practices that acknowledges the strong cultural heritages of all racial, ethnic and linguistic groups that live in Madison. Our promise is to build on that rich heritage and expand upon it to ensure that all students have the tools they need to achieve their dreams.

Purpose

The purpose of the bilingual chapter of the overall ELL plan is to provide a clear outline of the suggested changes designed to ensure that consistent, coherent services are provided to every English language learner (ELL) and bilingual learner (BL) in alignment with our vision and goals as well as state and federal mandates. Specifically, this chapter identifies nine shifts in practice as listed below.

Anya Kamenetz:

Were you ever the teacher’s pet? Or did you just sit behind the teacher’s pet and roll your eyes from time to time?

A newly published paper suggests that personality similarity affects teachers’ estimation of student achievement. That is, how much you are like your teacher contributes to his or her feelings about you — and your abilities.

“Astonishingly, little is known about the formation of teacher judgments and therefore about the biases in judgments,” says Tobias Rausch, an author of the study and a research scientist at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg in Germany. “However, research tells us that teacher judgments often are not accurate.”

This study looked at a group of 93 teachers and 294 students in eighth grade in Germany. Everyone took a short test to establish basic features of their personalities: extraversion, agreeableness and the like.

They gave the students reading and math tests too, sharing the test items with the teachers. Then they asked the teachers two questions: How good is this student compared to an average eighth grader? How well will this student do on this test?

Brett Arends:

Smart money moves aren’t more complicated than you think. They’re simpler.

Cut through all the jargon and pontificating and technical stuff, and everything you really need to know about personal finance fits into less than 1,000 words—no more than three to four minutes.

Ignore economic and financial forecasts. Their purpose is to keep forecasters employed. Most professional economists were blindsided in 2008 by the biggest financial collapse in 70 years—and by the stock market’s recovery.

Jennifer Fink:

Re-entry after winter break has not been easy for him. The rules and restrictions of school — Sit Still. Be Quiet. Do What You Are Told, Nothing More, Nothing Less. — have been grating on him, and it shows. His teacher recently emailed me; she’d noticed a change in his behavior (more belligerent, less likely to cooperate) and wanted to know if there was anything going on at home.
My guess, I said, was that he was upset about having to be back in school after break. I was right.

The lack of movement and rigid restrictions associated with modern schooling are killing my son’s soul.

Jared Knowles:

For the past two years I have been working on the Wisconsin Dropout Early Warning System, a predictive model of on time high school graduation for students in grades 6-9 in Wisconsin. The goal of this project is to help schools and educators have an early indication of the likely graduation of each of their students, early enough to allow time for individualized intervention. The result is that nearly 225,000 students receive an individualized prediction at the start and end of the school year. The workflow for the system is mapped out in the diagram below:

John Lanchester:

So what’s going to happen now? Your preferred answer depends on your view of history, though it also depends on whether you think the lessons of history are useful in economics. The authors of these books are interested in history, but plenty of economists aren’t; a hostility to history is, to an outsider, a peculiarly strong bias in the field. It’s connected, I suspect, to an ambition to be considered a science. If economics is a science, the lessons of history are ‘in the equations’ – they are already incorporated in the mathematical models. I don’t think it’s glib to say that a reluctance to learn from history is one of the reasons economics is so bad at predicting the future.

One historically informed view of the present moment says that the new industrial revolution has already happened. Computers are not a new invention, yet their impact on economic growth has been slow to manifest itself. Bob Solow, another Nobel laureate quoted by Brynjolfsson and McAfee, observed as long ago as 1987 that ‘we see the computer age everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.’ The most thorough and considered version of this argument is in the work of Robert Gordon, an American economist who in 2012 published a provocative and compelling paper called ‘Is US Economic Growth Over?’ in which he contrasted the impact of computing and information technology with the effect of the second industrial revolution, between 1875 and 1900, which brought electric lightbulbs and the electric power station, the internal combustion engine, the telephone, radio, recorded music and cinema.​3 As he points out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, it also introduced ‘running water and indoor plumbing, the greatest event in the history of female liberation, as women were freed from carrying literally tons of water each year’. (A non-economist might be tempted to ask why it was the women were carrying the water in the first place.) Gordon’s view is that we coasted on the aftermaths and sequelae of these inventions until about 1970, when

Michael Gordon:

Gather a crowd of historians and philosophers of science into a room and ask them to define “science.” On second thought, don’t try this at home, because you’d likely meet with stony-faced refusal on the part of the first and raucous disagreement from the second. Yet isn’t the task rather straightforward? Isn’t this just another classic instance of academics creating mountains out of molehills? Actually, no. The problem is fiendishly frustrating (and likely intractable) simply because of the kind of activity science actually turns out to be in practice.

Consider, for example, what it clearly isn’t. Science cannot be simply a collection of true propositions about nature. Most of what has counted uncontroversially as “science” during the past few centuries—geocentric astronomy, phlogiston chemistry, ether physics, the inheritance of acquired characteristics— is now considered to be false. Even worse, much of what we now consider to be science is doubtless going to be proven false, since nature was unkind enough to deny us the answer key. Science is also not merely the proper execution of method, both because various disciplines display a whole hodgepodge of different methods, and also because one can apply all the accepted methodology and come up with doctrines (parapsychology, eugenics, phrenology) that we would with alacrity exclude. The problem gets worse when you go farther back in time or across cultures. Mayan astronomy, Classical Chinese alchemy, Hippocratic medicine—all these are rather distinct from what we now consider to be “science,” and yet it strikes most scholars as rather churlish to dismiss them. No one has been able to come up with a broadly consensual definition of science, and I am certainly not about to do so here.f