Alan Borsuk:

While the proposal didn’t specify a targeted zone, there were more than 40 Milwaukee public schools in the state’s lowest performance category (“fails to meet expectations”) in the most recent round of school report cards.

Kooyenga said in an interview last week that he and Darling wanted to get feedback before they created a formal proposal. And they’ve gotten plenty.

That includes adamant opposition from the Milwaukee School Board and the Milwaukee teachers union. For example, the board brought to Milwaukee three people last week who are critics of what has happened in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And the union has been making opposition to charter schools outside of MPS one of its urgent focal points.

But the feedback also includes advice from some who are more favorably inclined, including some charter leaders in Milwaukee. Their message: Go slow, mostly because there isn’t much alternative. The higher quality existing charter operators in town are not interested in growing rapidly and know the difficulties of doing that. And better national charter organizations are not eager to enter the Milwaukee scene, given the frustrations and difficulties such operations have encountered already.

“Doing it wholesale, taking every school that doesn’t meet expectations, and (saying) let’s flip those schools around next year, is a scaling problem,” as Kooyenga put it.

But a small number of schools — that’s different. Kooyenga said the goal is for legislative action before summer and to launch the “turnaround” schools in 2016. Kooyenga said he and Darling are working on what to propose when it comes to specifics, such as how schools would be picked and who would have oversight.

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.
– See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/929-academia-s-1-percent#sthash.P9IHjPLv.dpuf

Tom LaMont:

Failure is universal in a way that success is not. A failure confessed tends to make somebody endearing, while their successes, told aloud, may make us want to bite them. And still it is success we dwell on. Search your social media newsfeeds for admissions of failure, and you’ll find them; but the success story, the achievement post, rules.

My daughter loved the app. Her friends loved it. And, of course, you feel this is going to be the next Snapchat
I became interested in failure having got up close to a good few success stories myself. As a writer, I’ve profiled people who have got somewhere close to where they want to be: high in the album charts, at a Cup final or in a CEO’s chair, front and centre in a Hollywood film. Research and retell the histories of enough achievers, and their rise begins to look less talent-fuelled – not so much the result of hard, solitary toil – and more like a bet that has paid off. The flourishing musician, the medal-winning sportsperson, the profitable entrepreneur: all of them took a punt, once, and we come to consider their story because that punt came good.

There’s another narrative we’ve become familiar with: failure as a past-tense business, something overcome. It’s a narrative that fuels a self-help industry, books titled Success Through Failure, How To Fail Most Successfully, How I Raised Myself From Failure, Fail Better, Fail Up and Failure: The Womb Of Success. But I wonder what there is to learn from the countless others we don’t hear about, those relative failures without whom there could be no corresponding successes. The people who simply fail.

What does failure feel like in the low, crummy moment of it? I speak to a couple of musicians, hopefuls who had high ambitions in rock or pop and for whatever reason had to shelve them. It is possible to get by as perfectly OK teachers, lawyers, chefs or journalists, but there are certain pursuits that seem to insist on binary dealings with success and failure, and the music industry is one.

Gothamist:

The tipster who sent it works in admissions, and said that the request was widely perceived as “tone deaf,” though “unfortunately somewhat indicative of the culture within the university, particularly within the upper echelons of the administration.”

“The ever-increasing tuition is very much a concern for our students and some of our administration, so that request to employees for money to help subsidize financial aid awards is absurd and asinine,” the tipster writes. “Especially when you factor in the millions of dollars spent on expansion of the University’s presence around the world and NYC.”

So where is the money going? That’s the question posed by Professor Mark Crispin Miller, who teaches media studies at the school. “It’s not going to the faculty,” he said, adding that he and his colleagues receive, on average, raises of 2.5 percent—a “stark contrast” to the princely sum poured into the coffers of the higher-ups.

Nor, he said, is it going to the “lower administrative level.” After the Princeton Review ranked the school’s financial aid and administration the worst in the country, Miller said the quality has only continued to diminish: “There just aren’t enough people who know how to get things done—they’ve been kind of squeezed out,” he said.

<A href=”http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/03/25/guest-opinion-the-sorrows-of-young-palo-altans”>Carolyn Walworth</a>: <blockquote>We are not teenagers. We are lifeless bodies in a system that breeds competition, hatred, and discourages teamwork and genuine learning. We lack sincere passion. We are sick.

We, as a community, have completely lost sight of what it means to learn and receive an education.

Why is that not getting through to this community? Why does this insanity that is our school district continue?

It is time to rethink the way we teach students. It is time to reevaluate and enforce our homework policy. It is time to impose harsher punishments upon teachers who do not comply with district standards such as not assigning homework during finals review time. It is time we wake up to the reality that Palo Alto students teeter on the verge of mental exhaustion every single day. It is time to realize that we work our students to death. It is time to hold school officials accountable. Right now is the time to act.</blockquote> 

Oxford:

ARE you sitting comfortably? Here is the Story of the Decline of the Academic Library.

Once Upon A Time libraries were the gatekeepers to most of the information students and academics needed. Books had the information and libraries had the books. Then one day the Big Bad Internet came along and made hundreds of millions of books, articles and manuscripts freely available to anyone with access to a computer. The library was no longer the only game in town. Most of today’s students have used computers since a young age and Googling is second nature to them. Why would they go to a library when they could find the answers from the comfort of their own home — or Starbucks?

Vanessa Romo:

But Hilary McLean, communications director for CORE, says the absence of an agreement on a three-tier system is not a deal breaker. Even without an agreement, “we believe that LAUSD will be in a position to submit an application,” she told LA School Report.

“This is also a somewhat iterative process,” McLean added, explaining that even after the district plans are submitted, “CORE is constantly in communication with the Department of Education so even as we meet certain deadlines on the calendar, we continue sharing information for their review purposes.”

The district will submit a proposal regardless of whether it can strike a deal with UTLA. But Cortines said in a statement today, “I think it’s important we do this together…It’s more powerful if we do it together.”

Teacher evaluations have been part of the current contract negotiations between the district and the union, which are now in the hands of a federal mediator who is not scheduled to meet with the sides again until April 6 and April 15.

The Economist:

“AFTER God had carried us safe to New England, and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship and settled Civil Government, one of the next things we longed for and looked for was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity.” So ran the first university fundraising brochure, sent from Harvard College to England in 1643 to drum up cash.

America’s early and lasting enthusiasm for higher education has given it the biggest and best-funded system in the world. Hardly surprising, then, that other countries are emulating its model as they send ever more of their school-leavers to get a university education. But, as our special report argues, just as America’s system is spreading, there are growing concerns about whether it is really worth the vast sums spent on it.

The American way
The modern research university, a marriage of the Oxbridge college and the German research institute, was invented in America, and has become the gold standard for the world. Mass higher education started in America in the 19th century, spread to Europe and East Asia in the 20th and is now happening pretty much everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa. The global tertiary-enrolment ratio—the share of the student-age population at university—went up from 14% to 32% in the two decades to 2012; in that time, the number of countries with a ratio of more than half rose from five to 54. University enrolment is growing faster even than demand for that ultimate consumer good, the car. The hunger for degrees is understandable: these days they are a requirement for a decent job and an entry ticket to the middle class.

Akane Otani:

For a report released this week, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analyzed job postings on 15,000 websites to see where jobs were most plentiful. Massachusetts, Delaware, and Washington produced the most job ads per college-educated worker, while West Virginia, Rhode Island, and South Carolina produced the fewest. “If you look at college degrees on average, the numbers on the payoff [for a degree] are very positive and powerful,” says Anthony Carnevale, director of the center and one of the report’s authors. But the return on investment for a college degree “really depends on not just your major, but also what part of the country you’re in.”

David Johns:

This school year is the first in U.S. history where the majority of public school students are non-white. Long referred to as “minority,” the term no longer applies.

This has huge implications for our schools and kids. As we seek to do more to support the learning and development of our most diverse group of American students yet, we face a major challenge. Today, while student demographics shift, our teaching force remains mostly white. African-American and Latino teachers comprise less than 15 percent of the teaching workforce. In over 40 percent of public schools there is not a single teacher of color. Working to close the teacher diversity gap stands as a critical element of our work to close the educational opportunity gap more broadly. As in all industries, we need leaders as diverse as the people they serve.

Erin Richards:

The new standardized state achievement exam has been in the works for years, and is expected to be a much better gauge of student performance than the old pencil-and-paper, fill-in-the-bubble Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam.

The Badger Exam will be taken online and should be tougher, because it will align with the more rigorous Common Core academic standards.

It was also designed to feature test questions that would automatically adapt to individual students’ skill levels, but that feature was dropped because it wasn’t ready.

Because of concerns about testing time, DPI also eliminated a set of performance tasks that were to accompany the English portion of the exam.

State officials blamed the problems on Educational Testing Service, the company it contracted to administer the exam. It has not yet paid anything to the company, DPI Spokesman John Johnson said in an interview Thursday.

Pasi Sahlberg:

Finland’s plans to replace the teaching of classic school subjects such as history or English with broader, cross-cutting “topics” as part of a major education reform have been getting global attention, thanks to an article in The Independent, one of the UK’s trusted newspapers. Stay calm: despite the reforms, Finnish schools will continue to teach mathematics, history, arts, music and other subjects in the future.

But with the new basic school reform all children will also learn via periods looking at broader topics, such as the European Union, community and climate change, or 100 years of Finland’s independence, which would bring in multi-disciplinary modules on languages, geography, sciences and economics.

It is important to underline two fundamental peculiarities of the Finnish education system in order to see the real picture. First, education governance is highly decentralised, giving Finland’s 320 municipalities significant amount of freedom to arrange schooling according to the local circumstances. Central government issues legislation, tops up local funding of schools, and provides a guiding framework for what schools should teach and how.

Chalkdust.

Charles Murray:

Spring is here, which means it’s time for elite colleges to send out acceptance letters. Some will go to athletes, the children of influential alumni and those who round out the school’s diversity profile. But most will go to the offspring of the upper middle class. We all know why, right? Affluent parents get their kids into the best colleges by sending them to private schools or spending lots of money on test preparation courses. Either way, it perpetuates privilege from generation to generation.

The College Board provides ammunition for this accusation every year when it shows average SAT scores by family income. The results are always the same: The richer the parents, the higher the children’s SAT scores. This has led some to view the SAT as merely another weapon in the inequality wars, and to suggest that SAT should actually stand for “Student Affluence Test.”

It’s a bum rap. All high-quality academic tests look as if they’re affluence tests. It’s inevitable. Parental IQ is correlated with children’s IQ everywhere. In all advanced societies, income is correlated with IQ. Scores on academic achievement tests are always correlated with the test-takers’ IQ. Those three correlations guarantee that every standardized academic-achievement test shows higher average test scores as parental income increases.

Sophie Monk:

A few days ago, audio emerged from negotiations between university management and members of the Free Education occupation of Rootes Building from last term. The recording features our Academic Registrar Mike Glover and head of security Mark Kennel telling students that the only way to make their complaint heard is through something called the ‘democratic channels’ of the university.

In other words, if you have a problem, it can only be mediated through the student’s union. We are certainly lucky to have an SU that supports and sympathises with our aims, but how is it that the terms of our dissent are now being dictated to us by the object of that dissent – by the very structure we oppose?

This is problematic firstly because the notion that the university is responsive and cooperative with our legitimate concerns, is patently a lie. Since presenting our reasons for fossil fuel divestment to the university’s finance managers last spring, followed by submissions of letters of support from members of our sabbatical team and university staff, we have been persistently ignored and stalled at every turn. Every attempt at dialogue has been met with shallow attempts to distract and repress us, and the promise of these issues being taken to Council has been repeatedly postponed, from February, to May, to July.

Kate Taylor:

“In New York last year, about 99 percent of the teachers were rated effective while only 38 percent of high school graduates are ready for college or careers,” he wrote in an op-ed article in Newsday this month. “How can that be?” (During his State of the State address, he was even more blunt, calling it “baloney.”)

The governor’s proposal, which is strongly opposed by the state’s teachers’ unions, would reduce the weight of principals’ observations to just 15 percent of a rating. The judgment of an independent evaluator from outside the school would make up 35 percent. Fifty percent would be based on how much students improved, or slipped, on state exams; alternative measures would be used for teachers whose subjects do not include state exams, like art and physical education.

Whether the Legislature will go along with his plan is still unclear. But if nothing else, the fight between the governor and what seems like every principal, teacher and parent-teacher group in the state shows the enduring difficulty of finding an evaluation system that works.

Mariko Oi:

A few hours later, they queue quietly before being served their lunch.

Towards the end of their education this conformist attitude is still evident. Each year, more than half a million university students start looking for work together.
The first step is to perfect a handwritten resume, or CV, because many in Japan believe that students’ characteristics and personalities can be judged by the way they write.
All dressed in a black “recruit suit”, they then visit hundreds of companies. Bold hues of black, navy or dark grey are the recommended colours for their job-hunting suits.
Stripes are not encouraged. According to the teachers and career counsellors, it is considered risky to be fashionable.

<A href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/business/economy/grading-teachers-by-the-test.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share“>Eduardo Porter</a>: <blockquote>The question is, what will happen when teachers are systematically rewarded, or punished, based to some extent on standardized tests? If we really want our children to learn more, the design of any system must be carefully thought through, to avoid sending incentives astray.

“When you put a lot of weight on one measure, people will try to do well on that measure,” Jonah Rockoff of Columbia said. “Some things they do will be good, in line with the objectives. Others will amount to cheating or gaming the system.”

The phenomenon is best known as Goodhart’s Law, after the British economist Charles Goodhart. Luis Garicano at the London School of Economics calls it the Heisenberg Principle of incentive design, after the defining uncertainty of quantum physics: A performance metric is only useful as a performance metric as long as it isn’t used as a performance metric.</blockquote> 

Max Ehrenfreund:

Finland’s classrooms are very different from America’s — far more permissive, with less of an emphasis on academics. There are no standardized tests until high school, and children get 15 minutes of recess in between lessons — more than an hour of recess a day. “Play is important,” one Finnish teacher told the Smithsonian magazine. “We value play.”

Yet Finnish kids always get good grades on comparisons of student achievement between countries. Their average scores on the Program for International Student Assessment, a test that’s given to 15-year-olds in 65 countries, are among the highest in the developed world. As a result, critics of education reform in the United States often cite the Finnish example. It’s a stark contrast to America’s reliance on using test scores in public school teacher evaluations, or the strict, “no-excuses” model of discipline in charter schools that many have touted as improving academic results.

Now, Finnish schools are embracing an even more radical approach to teaching. One major initiative is to encourage teaching by topic instead of by subject. According to The Independent, instead of teaching geography and foreign language classes separately, teachers will ask kids to name countries on a map in a foreign language. Instead of separate lessons on history and economics, they’ll talk about the European Union.

Charles Hugh-Smith:

ote to the higher education industry: issuing diplomas doesn’t magically create new jobs in the real world.

By virtually any standard, wealth inequality has soared to historic levels in the six years of “recovery” since the Great Recession of 2008-09. Economist Emmanuel Saez, who has long collaborated with Thomas Piketty, described the recent extremes of wealth inequality in a recent paper Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States, which provides an in-depth look at the widening gulf between the top 1% and the bottom 90% from 2009 to 2012.

Here is a chart of the top 10% share of income, based on their research (the note in red marking the beginning of financialization in 1982 is my own):

Drew Magory:

I never took an AP course in high school. I’m pretty sure it was because I never qualified for it (I went straight B-minuses throughout my high school career), but it was also because I went to school back when taking AP courses wasn’t the dire necessity that it is for today’s students. According to this article, taking just one AP course now doubles your odds of getting a college degree; according to this other article, “Approximately 85 percent of selective colleges and universities reported that they looked at whether or not a student had taken an AP course to make their admissions decision.”

In other words, if you haven’t taken an AP class, you are fucked. Or, at the very least, you will feel as if you are inadequate, dumb, and doomed to a life of washing cheese off of fajita platters at the local Don Pablo’s. Students and parents alike know all this by now: They also know that doing well in an AP course gets you college credit (and I like that you can learn so much in high school that expensive colleges will be like, “Yeah, you don’t have to learn as much here”). I wonder if there are advanced placement courses WITHIN the AP infrastructure, so that Harvard can only admit kids who have taken AP AP AP AP calculus. I have children in the public school system, and I’m already a bit intimidated by all this potential AP jockeying. It lords over everything.

Jonathan Grey:

On 24 February 2015, mounted police, live television crews, protestors and crowds of onlookers surrounded a building called the Bungehuis, a six storey art deco style construction that currently houses the University of Amsterdam’s humanities faculty. The building is scheduled to be converted into a luxury hotel and spa complex as part of an international chain of private members’ clubs called Soho House.

Only 11 days earlier dozens of students had occupied the Bungehuis in response to a programme of sweeping changes that the university’s administration was apparently unwilling to discuss.

The students’ demands for a “new university” included greater democratisation of university governance, greater transparency of the university’s finances, halting plans to restructure and cut a number of departments, a referendum on plans for departmental mergers with other universities, better conditions and protections for temporary staff, and an end to risky financial and property speculation with university funds.

The pretext for the cuts and structural changes being opposed is an unprecedented crisis in the university’s finances – including a deficit rumoured to be up to €12m or €13m, according to an internal letter sent by a professor.

Alan Smith:

After 114 years of educating young women in rural Virginia, Sweet Briar College recently announced that the 2015 academic year would be its last. It’s closing its doors, administrators say, because its model is no longer sustainable.

There are plenty of people coming out of the woodwork to explain Sweet Briar’s problems. Dr. James F. Jones, the school’s president, claims that there are simply not enough people who want to attend an all-women’s rural liberal arts school (though application numbers and some pundits disagree); he blames the discount that the school was giving to low-income students for the institutional budget shortfall. Billionaire investor Mark Cuban says that Sweet Briar has fallen victim to the student loan bubble and that students are unwilling to commit the money to attend, which sounds a lot like the blame-the-homeowner narrative that came out of the 2008 financial crisis. Others are wringing their hands that small colleges in general are doomed.

These takes are varied and complex, but they are all missing an important point: that predatory banking practices and bad financial deals played an important and nearly invisible role in precipitating the school’s budget crisis.

A quick look at Sweet Briar’s audited financial reports (easily available in public records) reveals enough confusing and obfuscating financial-speak to last a lifetime, but a few days of digging did manage to unearth a series of troubling things.

Ricardo Lopez:

More than two-thirds of Minnesotans believe performance, not seniority, should be the deciding factor in determining which teachers keep their jobs when public schools conduct layoffs.

The Star Tribune Minnesota Poll, taken March 16-18, found that 68 percent of the state’s residents say layoffs should be based on a teacher’s performance, as measured by recently implemented state evaluation standards.

Support for performance over seniority was strong across the state, among all age groups, and across party lines.

Fewer than one in five Minnesotans agree that seniority should continue to be the primary factor in determining who loses their jobs, as currently dictated by state law and union contracts.

“Experience does come with teaching for a number of years, but I don’t think it should be the only factor in teachers being laid off,” said Janelle Kanz, 77, a retired educator and Winona resident. “Seniority is for the advantage of the teacher. Performance is for the advantage of the student.”

Matthew T. Hora and Ross J. Benbow and Amanda K. Oleson :

While touring a factory in northern Wisconsin that makes millions of aluminum cans on a daily basis, we asked the plant manager whether he thought regional colleges and universities were meeting his company’s needs. He looked surprised by the question and answered, “You can’t teach [in a classroom] the way we make cans here.” If he had employees with basic skill sets in the field, he said, his company could train new hires to use their machinery and learn their procedures.

Similarly, the human resources director of a large plastics manufacturer told us, “As long as [employees] have the basic knowledge and certain abilities, we can typically teach them the skills that they need on the job — that’s the bottom line.”

Such responses beg the question: What are these fundamental, even nonnegotiable skill sets that employers seek in their employees? This is a question that our research group is investigating within the biotechnology and advanced manufacturing industries in Wisconsin. As part of a three-year study, we have interviewed over 150 C.E.O.s, plant managers and human resource directors in companies large and small, as well as educators and administrators at two- and four-year colleges and universities across the state, asking them about the skills and aptitudes required to succeed.

Anne Cadet:

“My parents are psyched,” said student Sarah Fader.
“My fake parents are psyched,” said Ms. Devereux.

“I need to find some parents,” said Mr. Chu.

During the arts-and-crafts session, Ms. Fader, a 35-year-old Park Slope mother of two, decorated a folder with purple finger paint and sequins. “I despise organization, so I’m trying to embrace this,” she said.

She is a substitute teacher, blogger and the CEO of a fledgling mental-health nonprofit with chapters around the globe. There is not much time in her schedule for fun. “It sounded so freeing, to go play and not deal with adult problems,” she says of the preschool.

The very notion of a preschool for adults has inspired a lot of negative commentary online, much of it unprintable.

Michael Conway:

Before the release of Selma, I wonder how many people ever reflected on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s attitude toward the 1965 marches in Selma. I wonder if anybody thought that conventional wisdom afforded him either too much or too little credit for the Voting Rights Act. I imagine that Johnson’s legacy was not on the average American’s radar until Selma ripped it into the public consciousness.

The movie compelled many Americans to reconsider their perceptions of Johnson. The curators of his legacy lambasted the film for portraying the 35th president as a prickly antagonist to Martin Luther King Jr., asserting that the film unfairly reduces Johnson to an irascible politician who was forced by King into advancing the Voting Rights Act. Joseph A. Califano Jr., Johnson’s top assistant for domestic affairs from 1965 to 1969, wrote in the Washington Post that Selma distorts these facts so considerably that the movie “should be ruled out this Christmas and during the ensuing awards seasons.” Selma director Ava DuVernay fired back, tweeting that the “notion that Selma was LBJ’s idea is jaw dropping.”

Robert Eaglestone:

These seem to be very bad times for graduate research students in the arts and humanities, the intended audience for this book. The job market is not great; funding is scarce; casualisation, which might appear to serve grad students but actually exploits them, proceeds apace; the smooth, high walls of the ivory tower seem ever more exclusive and imposing; the groves of academe (odd, I’ve always thought, to have groves inside a tower) ever more remote. Even from the pages of Times Higher Education, our little world’s local paper, opinion pieces declare that, to prevent them getting “exalted notions of themselves” (forfend!), researchers in the arts and humanities should realise that they are simply “trainspotters in their field” about whom no one cares (wait: trainspotters in a…field?). Instead of doing research, it’s argued, they should simply teach, concentrating, as Jorge of Burgos demands, in Umberto Eco’s bestselling 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, on “the preservation of knowledge” or at best “a continuous and sublime recapitulation” of what is known.

Into this bleak picture comes the first English translation of Eco’s How to Write a Thesis, continuously in print in Italy since 1977. That was a long time ago in academia, and, at first sight, lots of this book looks just useless, rooted in its historic and specific Italian context. Who uses index cards any more? (I mean, I used to, but I wrote my PhD on a computer with no hard drive, using 5¼-inch diskettes, when the internet was still for swapping equations at Cern or firing nukes at Russia.) Who has typists copy up their thesis? The sections on using libraries and research sources sound like an account of a lost, antediluvian culture.

Corey Robin:

Facebook can be a weird place on Martin Luther King Day. Some of my friends post famous passages from MLK’s speeches. Others post statistics on racial inequality. Still others, mostly white parents, post photographs of their children assembled in auditoriums and schoolyards. These are always hopeful images, the next generation stirring toward interracial harmony. Except for one thing: nearly everyone in the photos is … white.

In her public school this year, my first-grade daughter learned that Daisy Bates helped integrate the Little Rock schools. She knows that Ella Baker, someone I’d never heard of till I went to college, was part of the civil rights movement. Meanwhile, her school has a combined black and Latino population of 15 percent, down from nearly 30 percent just seven years ago.
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In school, white children are taught to be conscious of race and racism in a way I never was when I was as a kid in the 1970s. Yet they go to schools that are in some respects more segregated now than they were in the 1970s. In 1972, under Richard Nixon, 36 percent of black students in the South attended white-majority schools. By 2011, under Barack Obama, that number had plummeted to 23 percent. In every region of the country, a higher percentage of black students go to nearly all-minority schools than was the case in 1988. The same is true of Latino students in the South, the West and the Midwest.

Related: One size fits all vs. increased rigor and expanding the least diverse schools.

Room for Debate:

A recent article about the demand for welders in Texas and the Gulf Coast region highlighted a growing partnership between the energy industry and community colleges. As the economy still struggles, and a so-called skills gap persists, who should pay for workers’ training?

Yet, we spend more than any other country. What’s missing?

Margaret Andrews:

I’ve worked in management education for over fifteen years and continue to do so because I believe that developing management talent is important, the need is universal and growing, and that how we develop talent will continue to evolve. While educating managers is expensive, not educating them is even more costly – to the individuals they manage, the companies they run, and the societies in which they live.

All of this said, the management education landscape is evolving rapidly, offering both opportunities and threats for universities and their business schools. New players are entering the market, students have an expanding array of offerings – and providers – from which to choose, the need for internationally-savvy managers is increasing, society questions the value of what business schools produce in terms of research and student skills, and technology is changing the way we think about and deliver education – and has the potential to create new winners and losers in the m

American Academy of Arts & Sciences (PDF), via a kind Richard Askey email:

The Academy is also working with the university community to identify steps that could be taken on campuses across America to advance the recommendations from Restoring the Foundation. Com- mittee member Venkatesh Narayanamurti (Harvard University) presented the report at the November 2014 annual meeting of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities as part of a panel moderated by Kelvin Droegemeier, Vice President for Research at the University of Oklahoma and Vice Chair of the National Science Board. The Academy is now working with Dr. Droegemeier to orga- nize a conference in the summer of 2015 that will convene univer- sity research vice presidents and state officials from nsf epscor (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research). The objective of the meeting is to foster new interinstitutional collab- orations that encourage the sharing of experience and the rapid adoption of innovative policies and practices.

The conversations taking place across the country will provide a venue for a system-wide assessment of progress on overcoming barriers to the discovery of new scientific knowledge and technol- ogies, the translation of these discoveries to business and industry, and the training of a future stem workforce that is commensurate with maintaining America’s position of scientific leadership in the world. Together, they will ensure that Restoring the Foundation–and similar reports from other organizations–do not fade from the col- lective consciousness, but continue to drive thoughtful discussions for years to come.

Robert D. Ballard video presentation.

Alan Borsuk:

Some of the best schools in Milwaukee are independent charters, Ziebarth said, and he’s right. Later Wednesday, I got a news release from a reputable research organization known as CREDO at Stanford University, which found that students in independent charter schools in Milwaukee were making more progress overall than students in Milwaukee Public Schools.

Why aren’t there more green lights to create such schools? Ziebarth asked. Good question.

Then, in the afternoon, I got a call encouraging me to take an interest in a statement signed by the leaders of more than 30 government and nongovernment bodies involved in Milwaukee’s complex education scene. A lot of them aren’t known for cooperating with one another, and this was an encouraging example of working together, initiated by the Milwaukee Succeeds campaign.

Many of the signers have bigger fish to fry with the Legislature and state budget now. But they set that aside to support a relatively modest request for $250,000 in each of the next two years to increase tutoring in reading for children in all types of schools. One of the most shocking statistics about Milwaukee as a whole is that close to six out of seven third-graders do not read proficiently.

Madison School District (PDF):

Purpose Overview

“Great teaching matters most! Great teaching, when well defined and supported, benefits all students and should serve as the foundation for success” (MMSD Strategic Framework, 2013). This will serve as the focus of our teacher teamwork. Teacher teams will use data to inform their long-term and short-term planning and to monitor implementation and outcomes throughout the year. Teams will demonstrate effective data use, analysis, and instructional planning that is communicated with other school teams as needed. The Teacher Team Toolkit provides a set of guidelines and resources to support the important work of teacher teams.

Overview
The Teacher Team Toolkit begins with the MMSD Great Teaching
Framework. This is followed by information on Multi-Tiered System
of Supports (MTSS) and how teacher teams fit into MTSS. Together,
these frame MMSDs effective teaching practices and the work of
highly effective teacher teams. The toolkit is then organized into
five sections. The first section, Prepare for Success, provides
guidance on developing collaborative and effective teacher
teams. This is followed by the components of the Great Teaching
cycle. At the center is Culturally & Linguistically Responsive Practices. Around this is Plan, Teach, Reflect & Adjust. As teacher teams move through the cycle, they intentionally ask and answer: What do we want all students to know and be able to do? How will we know they have learned it? What instructional strategies will we use? and How will we respond when they haven’t learned it? or What do we do for those who already know it?

Within each of these components, the toolkit provides:

An overview of the section
The actions teacher teams take
The purpose
The tools and resources to support actions

Great Teaching Matters Framework (PDF):

Strengthening core instruction through weekly planning that focuses on the Great Teaching cycle.

Great Teaching Matters (PDF):

Research shows that the teacher is the strongest school-based predictor of student success (Cantrell, S. & Kane, T., 2013). MMSD’s Great Teaching Matters Framework communicates the district’s vision and goals for effective teaching that is responsive to the cultural and language assets of all students. This vision is grounded in a commitment to all students as we prepare them to be college, career and community ready. Culturally and linguistically responsive practices are at the center and embedded throughout Great Teaching. The plan, teach, reflect and adjust cycle represents key teacher actions that advance students learning.

Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):

Plan now to attend one of the MTI ALL-MEMBER meetings scheduled for the week of March 23. Because of the importance of the Employee Handbook, MTI has scheduled meetings, hopefully one convenient to all members, on March 23, 24 and 26.

Governor Walker’s 2011 Act 10 eliminated all public employee collective bargaining agreements (except for police and firefighters) and mandated that terms and conditions of employment be placed in an “employee handbook.” Of 424 Wisconsin school districts, MTI members have the benefit of the only Contracts which run through the 2015-16 school year. It has been agreed that the various current Collective Bargaining Agreements will be the foundation of the handbook. A joint Union/District committee is now in the process of developing the handbook. Union committee members include five MTI appointees; two from AFSCME and one from the Building Trades Council. Three building principals and five other administrators round out the joint committee.

The handbook will replace the Collective Bargaining Agreements when they expire at the end of the 2015-16 school year. Come and learn about the handbook development process, and share your thoughts about what you believe the Union’s priorities should be.

Much more on the “employee handbook“, here.

Kabir Chibber:

Finland already has one of the best school education systems. It always ranks near the top in mathematics, reading, and science in the prestigious PISA rankings (the 2012 list, pdf) by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Teachers in other countries flock to its schools to learn from a country that is routinely praised as just a really, really wonderful place to live.
But the country is not resting on its laurels. Finland is considering its most radical overhaul of basic education yet—abandoning teaching by subject for teaching by phenomenon. Traditional lessons such as English Literature and Physics are already being phased out among 16-year-olds in schools in Helsinki.

Instead, the Finns are teaching phenomena—such as the European Union, which encompasses learning languages, history, politics, and geography. No more of an hour of history followed by an hour of chemistry. The idea aims to eliminate one of the biggest gripes of students everywhere: “What is the point of learning this?” Now, each subject is anchored to the reason for learning it.

Juniper Russo:

My first clue that I gave my child autism came when she was in the middle of an evaluation by a speech-language pathologist at two and a half years of age. The therapist had noted that her eye contact was poor, but acceptable for her age.

“Oh,” I explained, looking straight at my lap, “Well, that’s probably a learned behavior. We just don’t really ‘do’ eye contact in our little family. I’ve never been much of an eye contact type.”

The speech therapist bit her lip.

The same pattern was played out time and time again as we danced between physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, neurologists, psychologists, and teachers.

“No, she’s not potty-trained, but I still had accidents all the way into second grade. It just runs in the family.”

“Hyperlexia? Yeah, she’s a great reader. My family is full of early readers.”

“Picky eating is just something she got from me. I don’t like food much. And as a kid, I would completely flip out if someone tried to make me eat with a spoon or eat foods that had touched each other on my plate. No big deal.”

“Clumsiness runs in the family. I couldn’t ride my bike until I was eight, so the motor delays are just in her DNA, that’s all.”

“Oh, sure, she won’t wear her pants correctly, but that’s just another thing she got from me. You should have seen how I use to shriek if someone put a turtleneck on me!”

Stephanie Simon:

But Pearson is hardly the only company keeping a watchful eye on students.

School districts and colleges across the nation are hiring private companies to monitor students’ online activity, down to individual keystrokes, to scan their emails for objectionable content and to scrutinize their public posts on Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram and other popular sites. The surveillance services will send principals text-message alerts if a student types a suspicious phrase or surfs to a web site that raises red flags.

David Gelernter

Most children learn nothing about serious music in school and don’t expect to learn anything. Outside school, the music world is being upended and shaken vigorously. The ways we choose music and listen to it are being transformed by iTunes and Spotify and other such sites.

For most young people, music is a minor consumable, like toothpaste. Musicians and music majors aside, my students at Yale—and there are no smarter, more eager, more open students anywhere—just barely know who Beethoven is. Beethoven. “He composed music”—that is the general consensus.

To know nothing about Beethoven? That is cultural bankruptcy. That is collapse. It goes far beyond incompetence, deep into betrayal and farce.

“Why should we know anything about Beethoven?” The question was asked in all seriousness by a sophomore just a few months ago. When I dredged up old, tired clichés, he listened carefully—and seemed convinced! What could be sadder? He was only waiting for the smallest bit of encouragement.

Ironically, the Madison School District Administration tried for a number of years to kill the “strings program“.

Martin Conrad:

One important answer is that most of our inflation in the period has been concentrated in the government-subsidized sectors of education, housing, and health care, which are all less affordable because costs for social engineering far outran benefits.

Millions of students leave increasingly expensive public schools prepared for mass consumption and mass opinions but unable to do simple arithmetic or to read or write simple sentences.

College students have accumulated more than $1 trillion of debt, and their default rates are soaring. Too often they are paying for a commodified education and empty credentials that don’t guarantee the practical problem-solving skills employers want.

The U.S. spends twice as much of our gross domestic product as other developed nations do for health care, yet we rank only 34th (tied with Costa Rica) in longevity. Studies show that a third of that spending is unnecessary.

The true success of our government housing policies can be measured in the trillions of dollars and millions of jobs that were lost in the recent meltdown.

Indeed, we spend more than any country on education.

Sabine Muscat

Sometimes I wonder what my son’s first year would have been like if he had been born in my native Germany. Or what my first year as a mother would have been like.

As a German expat and mother of a one-year-old living in the U.S., I find myself constantly torn between family policies and attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic – and I often wish that it would be possible to combine the best of these two worlds.

American moms are tough – because they have to be. This starts at giving birth. Most pregnant women in the U.S. work until at least a week or two before their due date. Once labor sets in, most are in and out of the hospital in less than 48 hours.

Paul Fain:

Administrators and instructors at Austin Community College decided to go big when they tried a new approach to remedial math — like 600 computer stations in the nation’s largest learning lab big.
“We wanted to do something very bold,” said Richard Rhodes, Austin’s president. “After all, we’re in Texas.”
Most students arrive at community colleges with remedial needs in math and English. And relatively few ever complete their developmental course work, often dropping out of college completely.
Dismal remedial success rates have been a problem at Austin, which enrolls 60,000 students. So faculty members from the college looked around for alternative approaches to teaching math.

Molly Hensley-Clancy:

When Yale announced it last week that it would offer its first fully online degree, the backlash was almost immediate. Students and alumni of of the physician assistant program that Yale will offer online vocally opposed the move, urging the university to reverse the decision and stoking a letter-writing campaign. At a meeting in the wake of the announcement, they warned that offering an online degree would devalue the program, the profession, and the university.

On the student newspaper’s article about the move, the most popular comment read simply: “This seems like an unbelievably bad idea.”

But the idea received a much more positive response from another group: investors in 2U Inc., the online education company that is partnering with Yale to offer the degree. 2U’s stock is up 24% since the announcement, and its market capitalization is now just shy of $1 billion — a rapid rise for a company that had flown relatively under the radar since it went public last April. It is not yet profitable, but revenues have grow steadily , and it expects to turn a profit by 2017.

BBC:

Most of the incidents of cheating this year have been reported from Saharsa, Chhapra, Vaishali and Hajipur districts.

Local newspapers have been full of photos of parents and relatives trying to help their children cheat even at considerable risk to their own lives, BBC Hindi’s Manish Saandilya reports from the state capital, Patna.

Some photos even show policemen posted outside the centres accepting bribes to look the other way, our correspondent adds.

Maggie Ginsberg interviews Brandi Grayson:

Can you give an example of what you’ve described as “intent versus impact?”

The Behavior Education Plan that the [Madison Metropolitan] school district came up with. The impact is effed up, in so many words, and that’s because the voices that are most affected weren’t considered. It’s like standing outside of a situation and then coming in and telling people what they ought to do and should be doing, according to your experience and perspective, which is totally disconnected from the people you’re talking to and talking at. In order to come up with solutions that are effective, they have to come from the people who are living in it. When I first heard about this Behavior Education Plan, I immediately knew that it was going to affect our kids negatively. But people sitting on that board thought it was an amazing idea; we’ll stop suspensions, we’ll stop expulsions, we’ll fix the school-to-prison pipeline, which is all bullcrap, because now what’s happening is the impact; the school is putting all these children with emotional and behavioral issues in the same classroom. And because of the lawsuit with all the parents suing for advanced placement classes and resources not being added, they’ve taken all the introduction classes away. They can’t afford it. So then our students who may need general science or pre-algebra no longer have that. So then they take all these students who aren’t prepared for these classes and throw them in algebra, throw them in biology and all together in the same class. And you know it’s very intentional because if you have a population of two percent Blacks at a school of two thousand and all the Black kids are in the same class, that is not something that happens by random. And then you have kids like my daughter, who is prepared for school and can do well in algebra, but she’s distracted because she’s placed in a class with all these kids with IEP issues who, based on the Behavior Education Plan, cannot be removed from the classroom. So what does that do? It adds to the gap.

Speaking of education, you’ve mentioned the critical need to educate young Black kids on their own history.

Our children don’t know what’s happening to them in school, when they are interacting in these systems. Whether it’s the system of education, the justice system, the human services system, the system within their own families—that’s programming them to think they’re inferior. We have to educate our kids so they know what they’re dealing with. In Western history, we’re only taught that our relevance and our being started with slavery, but we know as we look back that that’s a lie. That we are filled with greatness and magnificence and if our children can connect the link between who they are and where they’ve come, then they can discover where they’re going. But with that disconnection, they feel hopeless. They feel despair. They feel like this is all life has to offer them and it’s their fault and there’s no way out. We have to begin to reprogram that narrative at kindergarten on up. We have to teach our children the importance of reading and knowledge and educating yourself and not depending on the education of the system because it’s already biased, based on the very nature of our culture.

Related: Brandi Grayson.

Talented and gifted lawsuit

English 10

High School Redesign

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results. This is the core issue, one that has simmered for decades despite Madison spending double the national average per student.

Ironically, the April, 2015 Madison schools tax increase referendum includes a plan to expand two of the least economically diverse schools:

Van Hise Elementary / Hamilton Middle

Problem: With enrollment numbers on the rise, this combination elementary/middle school exceeded capacity in 2013 and 2014. Because the building is designed for a smaller student enrollment, simply adding classroom space is not a solution.

Proposed Solution: Relocating the library to the center of the building and dividing it into elementary and middle school spaces will free up seven classroom-sized spaces currently used for library activities. Est. Cost: $3,151,730 – View Plan Details.

Chris Rickert:

Finances are always a consideration; they can also be an excuse. The district has cried poor at budget time for years, and yet somehow continued to find the money to, say, cover the full cost of union employees’ health insurance.

Board member Ed Hughes said he wouldn’t vote for Madison Prep because the district’s plan to address the gaps is better now.

“As compared to 2011, there is much more of a districtwide focus on addressing the achievement gap as well as improving outcomes for all students through an emphasis on a rigorous, coherent curriculum and great teaching in every classroom,” Hughes said.

The district’s shifting efforts to address the achievement gap is a story in itself.

After Madison Prep failed, then-Superintendent Daniel Nerad proposed a plan to address the gap that would have cost $105 million over five years. It was later whittled down to $49 million. Current Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham’s plan was advertised as costing nothing.

:

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.”