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

Rights granted to an employee by the Union’s Contract are among the most important conditions of one’s employment. Those represented by MTI, in each of MTI’s five bargaining units, have numerous SENIORITY protections. Whether it is protection from involuntary transfer, being declared “surplus” (above staff requirements) or layoff, SENIORITY is the factor that limits and controls management’s action. Because of SENIORITY rights guaranteed by the Union’s Contract, for example, the employer cannot pick the junior employee simply because he/she is paid less. Making such judgments based on one’s SENIORITY may seem like common sense and basic human decency, but it is MTI’s Contract that assures it.

Beth Akers:

Late last year, researchers at the University of South Carolina and the University of California, Los Angeles, published a report[1] on the relationship between student loan debt and psychological well-being. This study comes in the midst of a plethora of new research attempting to quantify causal relationships between student loan debt and personal outcomes (including home ownership,[2] entrepreneurship and the macro economy). Despite the intense interest in this issue among researchers, this is the first paper that attempts to understand the emotional cost of carrying student loan debt. This question is, in fact, more fundamental than the others being posed in this genre of research, since it could help to explain the mechanism through which debt may be affecting other outcomes. Using a strict classical lens to examine this issue might lead one to conclude that the true cost of carrying debt could be measured in strictly financial terms. However, the widespread and growing discontent among households with student debt paired with the evidence that the financial circumstances of borrowers haven’t radically worsened[3] suggests that an alternate lens may be necessary. In particular, a lens that considers the possibility that student loans take an emotional toll on borrowers, even when wealth is held constant.[4

Richard Schmalbeck:

This paper was prepared for the annual conference of the National Center for Philanthropy and Law, held at the NYU Law School, held October 24-25, 2013. The overall topic was “Tax Issues Affecting Colleges and Universities,” and I was asked to address specifically those issues relating to athletics. This paper considers two specific issues that have in common only that they involve college sports, and are plagued by egregiously bad, (in this case, egregiously generous), tax treatment: the failure of the IRS to regard any part of the revenue from college sports as unrelated business income, and the choice by Congress to allow taxpayers to deduct 80% of contributions that they make to colleges or their “booster clubs,” even when those contributions entitle the donors to special privileges in purchasing tickets to college athletic events.

Most readers are probably familiar with the general rules regarding charitable contributions deductions, but a word about the unrelated business income tax may be helpful. An organization may qualify (or continue to qualify) as a tax-exempt organization, eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions, if its activities are primarily charitable. However, if the organization regularly carries on trade or business activities that are unrelated to its exempt purpose, the income from those activities is subject to federal income taxation at the same rates applicable to for-profit corporations. Although those rates are low for small businesses (those earning less than $75,000 per year), corporate earnings in excess of that amount are taxed at a rate of 34% on up to ten million dollars of income, and 35% beyond that amount. The unrelated business income tax raises very little revenue, but is thought to have an in terrorem effect, discouraging nonprofit organizations from engaging in unrelated business activities. While the unrelated business tax exists primarily because of Congressional concerns about unfair competition with for-profit businesses, a better description of its actual effect is that it discourages nonprofit organizations from pursuit of business activities that do not further any exempt purpose.

Associated Press:

Those are the findings of an AP investigation in which reporters sought disciplinary records in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The result is an unprecedented national look at the scope of sex offenses by educators – the very definition of breach of trust.

The seven-month investigation found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misconduct.

Young people were the victims in at least 1,801 of the cases, and more than 80 percent of those were students. At least half the educators who were punished by their states also were convicted of crimes related to their misconduct.

The findings draw obvious comparisons to sex abuse scandals in other institutions, among them the Roman Catholic Church. A review by America’s Catholic bishops found that about 4,400 of 110,000 priests were accused of molesting minors from 1950 through 2002.

Clergy abuse is part of the national consciousness after a string of highly publicized cases. But until now, there’s been little sense of the extent of educator abuse.

Beyond the horror of individual crimes, the larger shame is that the institutions that govern education have only sporadically addressed a problem that’s been apparent for years.

“From my own experience – this could get me in trouble – I think every single school district in the nation has at least one perpetrator. At least one,” says Mary Jo McGrath, a California lawyer who has spent 30 years investigating abuse and misconduct in schools. “It doesn’t matter if it’s urban or rural or suburban.”

Cory Robin:

This announcement was recently posted on the website of the graduate school of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst:

The University has determined that recent governmental sanctions pose a significant challenge to its ability to provide a full program of education and research for Iranian students in certain disciplines and programs. Because we must ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulations, the University has determined that it will no longer admit Iranian national students to specific programs in the College of Engineering (i.e., Chemical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mechanical & Industrial Engineering) and in the College of Natural Sciences (i.e., Physics, Chemistry, Microbiology, and Polymer Science & Engineering) effective February 1, 2015.

The full announcement and reasoning (US sanctions on Iran) behind this new policy can be found here.

During the fight over the American Studies Association’s vote for an academic boycott of Israel, putative defenders of academic freedom made a lot of noise about the threat that the boycott posed to academic exchange and international conversation.

But as many of us pointed out the time, nothing in the ASA vote precluded the exchange of individual scholars or students between the United States and Israel.

Now we have a public university, claiming to act in accordance with US policy, officially banning Iranian national students from entire graduate schools.

Colleen Flaherty:

By now, the secret is out in some disciplines: if you want to land a tenure-line faculty job, you’d better attend a highly ranked graduate program — not necessarily because they’re better but because the market favors prestige. But a new study suggests that “social inequality” might be worse than previously thought, across a range of different disciplines.

The study, published this week in Science Advances, is based on hand-curated data about placements of 19,000 tenure-line faculty members in history, business and computer science at 461 North American institutions with doctoral programs. Using a computer-aided, network-style analysis, the authors determined that just 25 percent of those institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenure-line professors, depending on discipline.

Using the Gini coefficient, a standard measure of social inequality, the authors found there’s extreme elitism even at the top of that quartile. The top 10 programs in each discipline produce 1.6 to 3 times more faculty than even the next 10 programs in the ranking. And the top 11 to 20 programs produce 2.3 to 5.6 times more professors than the next 10 programs.

Mark Greif

For years, the undigitized gem of American journals had been Partisan Review. Last year its guardians finally brought it online. Some of its mystery has been preserved, insofar as its format remains hard to use, awkward, and hopeless for searches. Even in its new digital form it retains a slightly superior pose.

The great importance of Partisan Review did not arise recently from its inaccessibility. The legendary items that first ran in its pages can be found in any good library, in collections by contributors who met as promising unknowns: Mary McCarthy, Clement Greenberg, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Hardwick, Leslie Fiedler, or Susan Sontag. Alongside those novices, PR had the cream of Europe, in translation or English original: Sartre, Camus, Jean Genet, Beauvoir; Ernst Jünger, Karl Jaspers, Gottfried Benn; plus T.S. Eliot, Orwell, Auden, Stephen Spender.

Partisan Review obtained the first work of the up-and-coming and often the best work of the famous, though it was notoriously underfunded and skeletally staffed. It gave readers the first glimpse of much of what would form the subsequent syllabus of midcentury American literature.

But Partisan Review has indeed mattered in more recent decades for its position in a debate to which its absence from view has been altogether relevant. More than any other publication of the mid-20th century, the journal has been a venerable stalking horse recruited into a minor culture war. The strife concerned what’s awkwardly called “public intellect”—that is, the sphere in which “public intellectuals” used to thrive. “Public intellectuals,” as Russell Jacoby defined them near the start of this culture war, in 1987, are simply “writers and thinkers who address a general and educated audience.” The customary sally was that PR exemplified a bygone world of politically strenuous, culturally sophisticated, and intellectually exacting argument standing in opposition to the university, because it was addressed to a broad, unacademic readership. It was said to be both more usefully influential and more rigorous than any forum we have now, reflecting poorly upon today’s publications and editors. Partisan Review stood as the phantom flagship of “what we have lost” since the late 1960s (the period in which the magazine began, not incidentally, its long-lasting decline).

Jacques Berlinerblau:

My undergraduates’ career plans are a peculiar mix of naked ambition and hair-shirt altruism. If they pursue investment banking, they do so not merely to make money. Rather, they wish to use their eventual wealth to distribute solar light bulbs to every resident of a developing nation. They’ll apply to the finest law schools in hopes of some day judging war criminals at The Hague. Countless want to code. They dream of engineering an app that will make tequila flow out of thin air into your outstretched shot glass. My students, I suspect, are receiving their professional advice from a council of emojis.

There is one occupation, however, that rarely figures in their reveries. Few of these kids hanker to become professors. Maybe that’s because undergraduates no longer believe that the university is where the life of the mind is lived. Or perhaps they are endowed with acute emotional intelligence; they intuit that their instructors are sort of sad and broken on the inside. It’s also possible that the specter of entombing oneself in a study carrel does not appeal to them.

I guess they must also read those headlines, the ones suggesting that the liberal arts as we know them, and the scholars who toil within, are about to get rolled. I rehearse, with light annotation, some of these headlines here. Tenure-track positions in the humanities are—poof!—continually evaporating. Contingent faculty make up around 75 percent of educators in postsecondary institutions. To read an account of a part-timer’s daily grind is like reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Chris Rickert:

Talk about putting your best foot forward only to get it stomped on.

Last week, in response to an open records request from this newspaper, the UW System released internal emails that showed System President Ray Cross throwing UW-Eau Claire chancellor James Schmidt under the bus for sending him “candid” ideas for how to cope with Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to cut $300 million from the System’s state aid in exchange for giving the System more autonomy.

“Incredible logic!!” Cross writes in an email forwarding Schmidt’s ideas to two other System administrators. “I find this most troubling!!! I thought Jim was a bit more thoughtful than this.”

As a mere civilian, I thought Schmidt’s ideas had merit. And after spending 25 minutes talking to him on the phone, I think the System would do well to hire more people like him.

Schmidt laid out 10 suggestions in all, with five more concerning initiatives specific to his campus.

They range from seeking different employee health care insurers, to creating links between four-year campuses and their nearby two-year campuses, to cutting down on administrative overhead, to shrinking and decentralizing System administration.

Cross, who declined my interview request, was particularly irked by what he called Schmidt’s proposed “elimination of the System” and his call for even greater autonomy for System campuses.

Schmidt didn’t back down from the value of his ideas or from the importance of coming up with them, although he acknowledged that on second look, some, like combining administrative functions at four-year campuses and their nearby two-year feeder schools, might not provide as much savings as he initially thought.

A focus on “adult employment“.

Alan Borsuk:

An important thing to understand about Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal for making an unlimited number of private school tuition vouchers available across Wisconsin is how unattractive, as a practical matter, his plan is to the schools that it could serve.

An upcoming gusher of private school vouchers? More likely, as it stands, it would mean a modest increase at most, and it might even be a setback.

Statewide uncapped vouchers would be something Walker could promote as an accomplishment —perhaps in Iowa or New Hampshire or to potential donors to a presidential campaign.

But as a practical matter? Look at the specifics.

Consider the predicament of HOPE Via, a Christian school that has been on track to open in Racine this fall. Part of the HOPE network that has five schools in Milwaukee, HOPE Via has obtained a building on Racine’s north side and hired a principal and managing director. School leaders were working on hiring teachers, enrolling students and launching a remodeling of the building.

Then came Walker’s budget message on Feb. 3.

This gets technical quickly, but, in short, the proposal envisions a new way of paying for vouchers, other than in Milwaukee, where things would stay basically as is.

Until now, voucher money has come from a separate state appropriation. Walker proposed taking it from the state aid that would have been sent to each school district if the child involved were attending a public school there.

Mitch Henck:

This is Madison. I learned that phrase when I moved here from Green Bay in 1992.
It means that the elites who drive the politics and the predominate culture are more liberal or “progressive” than backward places out state.

I knew I was in Madison as a reporter when parents and activists were fighting over whether to have “Sarah Has Two Mommies” posters in a grade school library. Concerned parents weakly stated at a public hearing that first-graders were too young to understand sexuality of any kind.

Activists at the public meeting said the children needed to understand tolerance. One conservative parent said: “Why don’t we vote by secret ballot?” An activist said, “No, we want a consensus.”

The Madison School District official who was presiding agreed, and the controversial posters stayed on the library walls. This is Madison.

Now we have the Madison School Board. It has been historically run by the teacher’s union. The same was true after Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 was passed, strictly limiting collective bargaining for public employees.

Three weeks before the state Supreme Court would rule on the constitutionality of the law, the union-owned School Board rushed through a teacher’s contract that largely ignored Act 10. Unlike any other school district in the state, the contract made sure Madison teachers were not required to share the cost of their health insurance premiums. Unlike any other school district, Madison collects union dues from teacher paychecks for its leader, John Matthews.

By the way, I would not want him in a dark alley with me.

The problem is the Madison School District has a projected budget shortfall for 2015-2016 of $12 million to $20 million, according to last week’s State Journal. About $6 million could be saved by making aggressive health care costs, including requiring staff to contribute toward insurance premiums, renegotiating contracts with health care providers, and making plan changes. That’s according to Michael Barry, assistant superintendent of business services.

In fact, the district spends about $62 million on employee health care costs, which are expected to grow by 8.5 percent next school year. Shockingly, Madison School Board member Ed Hughes said: “If we’re talking about taking not a scalpel, but a machete to our programs given the cuts we’ll make because we’re the only school district in the state that’s unwilling to ask employees to contribute to their health insurance, I think that would be an impression that we would deservedly receive ridicule for.”

Even board member Mary Burke said: “We would be irresponsible to the community where basically 99 percent of the people pay contributions to health care” if the board made up the savings with cuts to staff and heath care.

So now what? The contract expires in June 2016. Conservative blogger David Blaska sued to force Madison to live under Act 10. A local judge ruled last week Blaska did have standing as a taxpayer to carry out his lawsuit as he is joined by The Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty.

Madison teacher’s union leader John Matthews said by making employees contribute to health care premiums, the district is effectively asking them to pay for iPads and administrators. Huh?

Todd Berry of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance told me 90 percent of state cuts to education were covered by savings offered to school districts under Act 10 by changing work rules, by employee contributions to retirement and health insurance premiums, and by altering health plans.

That might fly for the rest of the state, but then again, this is Madison.

Much more on benefits and the Madison School District and Act 10.

A focus on “adult employment“.

Rick Barrett:

Growing up about 30 years ago, Super Steel Inc. President and CEO Dirk Smith says, he learned a work ethic and other essential skills that he believes are missing now in some job applicants.

“My parents instilled that in me,” said Smith, adding that he didn’t have to learn many of the “soft skills” in the workplace because he had already been taught them at home.

Now, Smith says, he sees young people lacking knowledge of basic things such as showing up to work on time. Sometimes they don’t have a bank account, which is a problem because Super Steel, a Milwaukee manufacturer and metal fabricator, has a direct-deposit payroll.

“We can teach kids the technical skills, on how to weld or operate a brake press. … But if they are missing the essential life skills, then all of that training is lost,” Smith said.

Addressing the issue, Super Steel has partnered with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Wisconsin in a welder skills development program where the curriculum includes classes in areas such as communication, teamwork and conflict resolution.

Robert Verbruggen::

The challenges involved in balancing work and family lead to some of the most difficult decisions any family faces. Decades of “women’s empowerment,” the rise of the working mother, and the economic pressures of modern family life have forced families to make difficult compromises. The implications of those compromises for children have led to highly controversial and emotionally charged debates that make all parents — regardless of their work and child-care choices — question whether they’ve done the right thing.

Most Americans have never really made their peace with the idea of full-time working motherhood. Pew recently found that 60% of Americans say children are better off with a parent at home, while 35% say that kids are just as well off either way. Another survey conducted last year gave respondents the option of a mother who works part-time, and, given this option, 42% said part-time work was best while another third opted for staying at home. Only 16% of respondents told Pew that it’s best for children if mothers work full-time.

Likely in part because of these beliefs (in addition to a multitude of other factors), more mothers have been choosing to stay at home in recent years. According to a recent Pew report, the percentage of mothers who stay at home with their children (a statistic that includes non-working single mothers) fell from 49% in the late 1960s to a low of 23% in 1999, but then rose to 29% by 2012. A more traditional measure of stay-at-home motherhood — the proportion of all mothers who are married, do not work, and have working husbands — has risen a bit, too, from about 17% in the mid-1990s to 20% in the early 2000s, with some minor fluctuations thereafter, indicating that the proportion of stay-at-home parents has roughly stabilized for now. (Stay-at-home fathers are becoming more common as well, though they remain a small fraction of all stay-at-home parents.)

Erin Richards:

Bender said he thinks it’s unlikely that districts would be bristling at the request if it had come from any entity or individual other than his. School district leaders say that’s not true; they’re concerned about their families’ personal information going out to anyone.

Historically it’s been a nonissue because nobody ever asks for it.

State open records law mandates districts release student directory information upon request, unless parents have opted out of the directory or unless districts have passed policies to further restrict release of the data.

Directory information includes information such as students’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, date and place of birth, major field of study, height, weight, athletic team participation, awards achieved and schools attended.

The information is key to rounding out important school items such as yearbooks, playbills, sports rosters, announcements to the media about student accomplishments and contact lists that help families communicate with each other.

Oshkosh School District Superintendent Stan Mack said his district will comply with releasing all the directory data that state law and its own district policy allow.

David Blaska:

Like the Sun Prairie groundhog, the Madison school district’s teachers contract has come back to bite the taxpayer. The Madison Metropolitan School District is looking at a $20.8 million budget deficit next school year.

Good Madison liberals worried about the state balancing its budget can now look closer to home.

To balance the budget, the district will most certainly have to raise taxes again; last year’s increase was a hefty 5.4%. It will probably cut programs. It may even lay off teachers. To ease the blow, will it ask those teachers to contribute to their excellent health coverage like 99% of the rest of the world?

This is the school district that thumbed its nose at Wisconsin law, the school district that eschewed using the flexibility given it by Wisconsin Act 10, the 2011 collective bargaining reform. Madison is the only district that collects union boss John Matthews’ dues for him, the only district that requires fair share payments, the only district that does not require its employees to contribute toward their very excellent health care insurance. A district that gave teachers longevity raises of 2% and 3% on top of free health insurance.

Much more, here.

Megan McArdle:

Millennials don’t want to work in sales, reports the Wall Street Journal. They think it’s exploitative. They also hate the idea of variable compensation; they want a nice, steady job where the company takes the risk, not the worker.

The feeling that sales is exploitative is not new; people have always been uncomfortable with the idea of selling something or being sold. And, of course, many people have always been uncomfortable with the idea of variable compensation. But if companies are having a harder time finding people to take sales jobs and reworking compensation packages to decrease the commission component, that is worth noting.

It’s not entirely surprising, of course. I’ve heard people who worked in New York City’s government during the 1970s noting that there was an unusually high number of very competent senior staff at the time — refugees from the Great Depression who ended up there because it was the only place where you could get a steady paycheck. That generation was risk-averse in ways that their children were not, with a high savings rate and a permanent aversion to equity investments. It would be natural for the millennial generation to have had a similar reaction to such a brutal formative experience.

Reihan Salam:

I first encountered the upper middle class when I attended a big magnet high school in Manhattan that attracted a decent number of brainy, better-off kids whose parents preferred not to pay private-school tuition. Growing up in an immigrant household, I’d felt largely immune to class distinctions. Before high school, some of the kids I knew were somewhat worse off, and others were somewhat better off than most, but we generally all fell into the same lower-middle- or middle-middle-class milieu. So high school was a revelation. Status distinctions that had been entirely obscure to me came into focus. Everything about you—the clothes you wore, the music you listened to, the way you pronounced things—turned out to be a clear marker of where you were from and whether you were worth knowing.

By the time I made it to a selective college, I found myself entirely surrounded by this upper-middle-class tribe. My fellow students and my professors were overwhelmingly drawn from comfortably affluent families hailing from an almost laughably small number of comfortably affluent neighborhoods, mostly in and around big coastal cities. Though virtually all of these polite, well-groomed people were politically liberal, I sensed that their gut political instincts were all about protecting what they had and scratching out the eyeballs of anyone who dared to suggest taking it away from them. I can’t say I liked these people as a group. Yet without really reflecting on it, I felt that it was inevitable that I would live among them, and that’s pretty much exactly what’s happened.

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

JUST CAUSE does not mean “just because.” It establishes standards and procedures that must be met before an employee can be disciplined or discharged. Fortunately for members of MTI’s bargaining units, all have protection under the JUST CAUSE STANDARDS. They were negotiated by MTI to protect union members.

There are seven just cause tests, and an employer must meet all seven in order to sustain the discipline or discharge of an employee. They are: notice; reasonableness of the rule; a thorough and fair investigation; proof; equal treatment; and whether the penalty reasonably meets the alleged offense by the employee.

MTI’s various Contracts enable a review and binding decision by a neutral arbitrator, as to whether such an action by a District administrator/principal is justified. The burden of proof is on the District in such cases.

The provisions of just cause are steps every employer should be obligated to follow. Unfortunately, all administrators do not have a conscience that leads them to follow these principles. However, an MMSD administrator must follow them, because of the rights MTI members have under the Union’s Collective Bargaining Agreements.

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

The January 14 hearing by the Assembly Education Committee produced ONLY ONE speaker who favored the Accountability proposal, Assembly Bill 1 (AB 1), and that was the Bill’s author, Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt. During his testimony, Thiesfeldt refused to name either the person or organization who asked him to introduce it, the source of the information from which the Bill was produced, or who additional sponsors of the Bill are. Much appears to have come from the far-right group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Thiesfeldt did say that additional COMMON CORE STANDARDS would be added to his Accountability Bill proposal, as it proceeds through the legislative process.

Major opposition was heard from DPI policy advisor Jeff Pertl who testified that if AB 1 was in effect in 2015, $587 million in State education funds would be diverted from public schools to for-profit charter schools.
Senator Dave Hansen (Green Bay) said, “Some of the special interests in the Capitol might not like that fact, but a lot of the problems we’re seeing with AB 1 could have been avoided if a more inclusive effort had been made by the author.”

PRIVATIZATION – the goal of AB 1 was made clear as the intent of the proposal in remarks by Rep. Eric Genrich (Green Bay) who said, “Today’s hearing has made clear that this most recent effort to take over certain public schools and further privatize public education is hastily and poorly crafted. This legislation is being rammed through the legislative process without giving deference to or seeking real input from the educational professionals and local school boards who serve our school kids every day.”

Erin Richards:

At Veritas High School, a small and mostly low-income school on Milwaukee’s south side, more than 95% of students graduate in four years, and almost all are accepted to college.

But only about two out of three actually enroll in postsecondary school. An even smaller share obtain a degree.

“Saying you’re going to college and actually going to college are two different things,” said Sherry Tolkan, principal at Veritas.

A new program may hold promise for boosting the numbers of students doing both.

As part of an experiment being tried nationwide, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Milwaukee has matched a group of Veritas freshmen with business professionals to support the teenagers not only through high school, but also college.

A secure online platform allows the volunteer mentors and students to develop relationships over email, and live meet-ups take place at school once a month.

Emily Ekins:

The new Reason-Rupe national telephone poll of 1,003 adults finds 72 percent of Americans are concerned their state and local governments may not be able to afford the pensions that have been promised to government workers. With those worries in mind, 82 percent favor requiring current public employees to contribute more towards their own future pensions and benefits.

A majority of Americans, 53 percent, believe public employees should contribute at least 50 percent of the cost of their retirement benefits. Fifty-eight percent of Americans favor setting a cap on the maximum dollar amount of annual pension payments public workers can receive during retirement, while 35 percent oppose a cap on pension payments.

Molly Beck:

Madison school officials are weighing property tax increases, significant program cuts and requiring employees to pay a portion of health insurance premiums to help close a huge budget deficit.

About $6 million could be saved by making aggressive changes to employees’ health care costs, including requiring staff to contribute toward health insurance premiums, renegotiating contracts with health care providers, and making plan changes, Michael Barry, assistant superintendent of business services, told School Board members Monday.

Overall, the district spends about $62 million in employee health care costs, which are expected to grow by about 8.5 percent next school year.

The budget shortfall for the fiscal year that starts July 1 was estimated in January at $10.1 million with the use of all of the district’s taxing authority. But it could jump by $4.1 million if state lawmakers accept Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to cut a special $150 per student funding stream for next school year, and keep revenue limits and general state aid flat.

Now district officials say the deficit in the roughly $400 million budget could be as much as $20.8 million or as low as $12.2 million for the 2015-16 school year, depending on how much of the school district’s unused taxing authority the board agrees to use.

Much more on Madison’s benefit plans and conundrum, here.

Cory Doctorow:

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy is only 180 pages long — three essays, an introduction and an afterword — but I made more than 80 notes as I read it, underlining passages and dog-earing pages I wanted to come back to and/or read aloud to other people and talk about further.

Unlike the enormous and comprehensive Debt, Utopia of Rules is mostly argument, not history. It sets out to investigate the problem of “bureaucracy” — basically, rules, and the simmering threat of violence that underpins them. Hidebound adherence to awful, runaround bureaucracy was always the sin laid at the feet of slow-moving, Stalinist states under the influence of the USSR. Capitalism, we were told, was dynamic, free, and open. But if that’s so, why is it that since the USSR imploded, bureaucracy under capitalism has exploded? If you live in a western, capitalist state, you probably spend more time filling in paperwork, waiting on hold, resubmitting Web-forms, attending performance reviews, brainstorming sessions, training meetings, and post-mortems than any of your ancestors, regardless of which side of the Iron Curtain they lived on.

Adam Mansbach:

In this class, we will analyze some of World Literature’s greatest short novels in an attempt to interrogate the essence of plot and character while reading as few words as possible. Each class session will begin with a student presentation of 15 to 20 minutes, so we’re looking at an effective class time of about an hour. I’d love to give you a five-minute break halfway through the period, with the tacit understanding that we actually blow 15, but then I’d have to pretend I didn’t notice when 36% of you didn’t bother to come back. Or I’d have to pass around the attendance sheet again, which is a major pain in the ass.

After the student presentation, which should cover structure and theme but will seldom rise above rote plot summary, I will provide whatever historical and biographical context is both critical to our understanding of the book and available on Wikipedia. But I will sound so authoritative and well-versed that you’d never know this, even if you had the book’s Wikipedia page open on the laptop you’re pretending to take notes on, rather than your Facebook newsfeed.

The rest of the period will be spent in class discussion, which by week three will have settled into an “Inside the Actor’s Studio”-esque conversation between me and one or two consistently prepared students whom the rest of you will quietly despise. Occasionally, another student may come out of nowhere, Jeremy Lin style, and dominate a particular class, only to break my heart by fading permanently back into the woodwork the following week, Jeremy Lin-style.

Rachel Lu:

Giving birth is never easy, but for new Chinese mothers the month following a baby’s arrival is particularly fraught. Immediately after I became pregnant for the first time, I started to hear about zuoyuezi, or “sitting the month.” It’s a period during which new mothers are supposed to stay confined with their babies, and it’s considered crucial, full of strict, sometimes incredible requirements. “Don’t wash your hair.” “Stay away from air conditioning.” “Don’t touch cold water.” “Don’t use cell phones.” These were just some of the more common pieces of advice meted out by a well-meaning army of aunts, older friends, and the cacophony of Chinese social media.

The confinement tradition is so full of elaborate—sometimes contradictory—injunctions and taboos that many new mothers hire live-in professionals to help them navigate the process. An industry that’s both rooted in tradition and tailor-made for modern China has become big business: the yuesao, or “confinement ladies,” who spend a month or two living in the home of a new mother and her baby. Traditionally, a new mom could look to her own mother or mother-in-law to provide vital support during the confinement period. But many young mothers now eschew that arrangement. Having a separate apartment, after all, is now de rigueur among China’s urban newlyweds. And frequent depictions of visceral generational clashes in soap operas, popular novels, and online discussion forums have also instilled a fear of mothers-in-law into younger women.

Molly Beck

Wisconsin students are set to take a new kind of standardized test next month — one that is online, interactive and expected to be more rigorous than the annual pencil-and-paper exam given to students for years.

But a technical glitch in the creation of the new test for students in third through eighth grades will mean school districts will get a scaled-back version instead, according to records obtained from the state Department of Public Instruction.

As a result, DPI officials say the agency won’t pay the full $11.1 million cost and it will negotiate a new price with the test vendor and creators. About $1.2 million has been paid so far.

The test is linked to the controversial Common Core State Standards and tests students in math and English language arts.

Unfortunately, Wisconsin has long tolerated the sub standard WKCE assessment.

Lydia DePillis:

It’s been true for a long time now that academia — or at least the part of it that teaches students — relies heavily on the labor of adjunct faculty. As the number of tenured professors has fallen, universities have filled more than half of their schedules with teachers who work on contract. And no wonder: They’ll work for less than half what a full-time professor makes, at a median wage of just $2,700 per course, with scant benefits, if any.

Now, a union that’s been rapidly organizing adjuncts around the country thinks that number should quintuple. Last night, on a conference call with organizers across the country, the SEIU decided to extend the franchise with a similar aspirational benchmark: A “new minimum compensation standard” of $15,000. Per course. Including benefits.

Ben Schmidt:

This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

The Madison Metropolitan School District is committed to assuring that every student has the knowledge and skills needed for academic achievement and a successful life. As students progress from grade to grade, it is the responsibility of the School District to provide them with multiple opportunities to learn and then to certify that they have the knowledge and skills needed for academic achievement at the next level. This promotion policy, specifying criteria for promotion from Grade 4 to Grade 5 and from Grade 8 to Grade 9, is designed to afford students several different ways to demonstrate their knowledge. At the same time, the policy provides flexibility so students with disabilities may continue to be included with their non-disabled peers.

Deirdre Hargrove-Krieghoff (PDF):

In continuing the work of developing a thriving workforce, we are in the process of redesigning our recruiting, screening and selection activities to support finding high quality, diverse candidates as early as possible and support improved hiring decisions at the school level.

The current board employment policy (#8005) covers employment and hiring of all employees and is very detailed. The redesigned teacher hiring process will include an approach that is competency-based, ensuring that principals will be provided a set of more qualified teacher candidates that better match the needs of their individual school.

We would like to move forward with implementation of all design activities and are recommending that the Board of Education waive the provisions of Board Policy 8005 (Employment) as applied to the application, screening, interviewing and hiring processes for principals and assistant principals, teachers and other professional staff for the 2015-2016 school year.

The following provides the recommended approach, which will be finalized in mid-February, we will take with the recruiting, screening and selection of said candidates:

Competencies Measured in Madison Teacher Screening Process. This looks like a noble list.

Tap to view larger versions.

Deirdre Hargrove-Krieghoff:

In support of the continued work of developing a thriving workforce, the HR team conducted a survey of the 10 largest districts in the State of Wisconsin as well as districts in Dane County to provide a picture of our current compensation standing. It is our intent to develop and maintain a competitive salary structure for all of our employees, and we are committed to creating a structure that attracts the highest performers and is equity based.

The following information was developed for a specific budget-related purpose – to help determine, on a macro level, where the district stands relative to comparables for principal and teacher salaries, and whether a significant budget allowance (additional funding) is needed in 2015-16 for the specific purpose of adjusting to market comparables.

Please note:
When reviewing the data for Principals and Assistant Principals, it is illustrating the range that a candidate could make entering the district. For the Teacher base it shows the starting range for a beginning teacher. Maximum salaries are not listed, as most districts that reported are in the process of restructuring their salary schedules for teachers.Approximately 80 out of the 320 of teachers hired annually actually come in at the base step of $37,263.

The data suggests that compared to other districts represented, MMSD is mid to low in salary placement for Assistant Principals and Teachers and mid to high for salary placement for Principals.

Some districts represented, have moved away from the traditional approach of funding salary steps and tracks within their schedules and are front loading their schedule to be more competitive, this shift may cause their ranges to be higher than MMSD.

Presumably, a real comparison might include total compensation and outcomes, not to mention qualification differences.

Notes and links:

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes, writing in 2005:

“This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.”

Tap to view a larger version.

Comparing Madison and other District approaches to teacher benefits. Staffing compared: Madison, Long Beach & Boston.

A focus on adult employment.

Madison School District (PDF):

A. Alignment to Strategic Framework- In our vision to make every school a thriving school that prepares every student to be ready for college, career and community, these budget resources support the district’s goals and priorities as defined in our Strategic Framework.

B. More equitable use of resources- As opposed to equal funding, which provides the same level of support to each school, equitable distribution of resources takes into account the needs of each school based on enrollment and student demographics.

C. Transparency in budget development- Transparency in the budget process creates greater awareness and accountability. For internal purposes, it enables central office departments and schools to take more ownership of their goals, priorities, and plans for improvement. For external audiences, transparency results in a more readable and informative budget document.

While working towards achieving these goals, the district is also committed to minimizing the tax levy and demonstrating strong stewardship of our public funds, as well as complying with legally required mandates.

Powerpoint slides (PDF). I’ve not seen total spending published for some time. The long lamented “Citizen’s Budget” has yet to be resurrected.

Background:

Sources:

• General and Categorical Aid – Payments to School Districts
• WISTAX Facts & Figures
• Madison Schools 2013-2014 June 10, 2013 Budget Discussion Document (PDF)
• Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding
• Up, Down & Transparency: Madison Schools Received $11.8M more in State Tax Dollars last year, Local District Forecasts a Possible Reduction of $8.7M this Year – March, 2013. The June 10, 2013 District budget document (PDF) fails to mention the previous year’s large increase in redistributed State of Wisconsin tax dollars:
  

  Like all Wisconsin school districts, MMSD relies upon a state-local funding partnership. The actions of one partner greatly impact the other partner. The 2013-14 MMSD budget anticipates a major funding loss for MMSD (a loss of $8.7 in equalization aid) which shifts the funding burden onto the local property taxpayer.

The charts reveal several larger stories:
First, the State of Wisconsin “committed” to 2/3 K-12 funding in the mid-1990’s. The increase in redistributed state tax dollars is apparent. [Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau: State Aid to School Districts (PDF)]
Second, Madison’s substantial real estate growth during the 2000’s supported growing K-12 spending while reducing the property tax rate (the overall pie grew so the “rate” could fall somewhat). The real estate music stopped in the late 2000’s (“Great Recession) and the tax rate began to grow again as the District consistently raised property taxes. *Note that there has been justifiable controversy over Madison’s large number of tax exempt properties. Fewer exemptions expands the tax base and (potentially) reduces individual homeowner’s taxes.
Third, Madison has long spent more per student than most public schools.
Fourth, the District’s June 10, 2013 budget document fails to address two core aspects of its mission: total spending and program effectiveness. The most recent 2012-2013 District budget number (via a Matthew DeFour email) is $392,789,303. This is up 4.4% from the July, 2012 District budget number: $376,200,000. The District’s budget has always – in my nine years of observation – increased throughout the school year. The late, lamented “citizen’s budget” was a short lived effort to create a standard method to track changes over time.
Fifth, the June 10, 2013 document does not include the District’s “Fund balance” or equity. The balance declined during the 2000’s, somewhat controversially, but it has since grown. A current number would be useful, particularly in light of Madison’s high property taxes.
Sixth, I took a quick look at property taxes in Middleton and Madison on a $230,000 home. A Middleton home paid $4,648.16 in 2012 while a Madison home paid 16% more, or $5,408.38. Local efforts to significantly increase property taxes may grow the gap with Middleton.
Finally, years of spending and tax growth have not addressed the District’s long term-disastrous reading results. Are we doing the same thing over and over?

Jason Stevens:

There’s a delightful and true saying, often attributed to Joseph Sobran, that in a hundred years, we’ve gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.

Now comes even more evidence of the steady decline of American educational standards.

Last year, Annie Holmquist, a blogger for better-ed.org, discovered a 1908 curriculum manual in the Minnesota Historical Society archives that included detailed reading lists for various grade levels.

According to her research, the recommended literature list for 7th and 8th graders in Minnesota in 1908 included the following:

Jennifer Guerra:

Chris Reynolds will never forget his first day on campus at the University of Michigan. He and his dad had gotten up super early to drive the nine hours from Sellersville, Pennsylvania to Ann Arbor.

“My father literally just dropped me off and then left,” says Reynolds. His dad couldn’t afford a hotel, so they took about an hour to unpack the car, said their goodbyes, and his dad drove off.

Chris Reynolds was officially on his own.

What follows are three stories about what it’s like to be the first person in your family to go, not only to college, but to an elite university like U of M.

Amy Chua:

Woke up at 6:30 a.m. to something licking my chin. Opened my eyes and saw two big white fluffy faces staring hopefully down at me. Breakfast time? Both Coco and Pushkin sleep with us, keeping us warm at night, just as their brave and loyal Samoyed ancestors did back in Siberia 500 million years ago after pulling sleds all day.

Dogs are so much nicer than daughters. Sophia and Lulu, now somehow 22 and 19, are going back to college tomorrow. They’ve been home on break for almost a month, and frankly, we’ve had some rocky moments. But today is their last day at home, and I just want it to be a happy one for everyone.

11 a.m. Productive morning! Graded 10 exams, wrote three letters of recommendation and blurbed a book. No sign of either daughter.

Jessica Arp:

“My main concern is that right now we are at a 20-year low in funding for public education so our public schools are already in a state of crisis,” Moffit said.

Sierra disagrees and said vouchers are really about choice.

“We pay taxes also,” Sierra said. “Nothing against public schools, but we decided we wanted our children to come here. So why not use the vouchers and receive the help from the state like every other parent is receiving help?”

The plan faces an unclear future in the Legislature, with both Republicans and Democrats concerned about the funding structure in the plan.

The governor defended the plan in interviews Wednesday, calling it “a workable” plan.

Madison’s Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham blasted the school choice proposal in a statement Tuesday night.

Wednesday she said changes proposed would make it difficult, if not impossible, to do what is right for the district.

“When the announcement like the one that that we heard last night occurs, there’s no doubt that it feels like a punch to the stomach,” Cheatham said.

Cheatham called the political environment at the Capitol unsettling and distracting, and said the expansion of vouchers is very concerning to the future of the school district’s budget.

Madison spends around $15,000 per student, annually, roughly double the national average. Yet, it has long supported disastrous reading results.

The 2009 strategic plan goals… for 2015.

Allie Bidwell:

A group of public schoolteachers on Monday petitioned the Supreme Court to hear a challenge to laws allowing teachers unions to require dues from nonmembers who disagree with union positions and policies.

A decision in the teachers’ favor could change how public employee unions operate nationwide.

The lawsuit, first filed in April 2013, takes aim at the 300,000-member California Teachers Association and the affiliated National Education Association. The plaintiffs – 10 California teachers and the Christian Educators Association International – claim California’s “agency shop” law is unconstitutional and violates teachers’ First Amendment rights by forcing them to pay union dues regardless of whether they support or are a member of the union. Twenty-six states currently have such laws in place.

Scott Jaschik:

The University of Missouri at Kansas City gave the Princeton Review false information designed to inflate the rankings of its business school, which was under pressure from its major donor to keep the ratings up, according to an outside audit released Friday.

The audit — by PricewaterhouseCoopers — described the process by which business school officials came up with creative reasons to provide data that many at the school believed to be false, and that the audit found to be false. In one case, for example, the university created a wish list of clubs that it might support to promote entrepreneurial students. The university then reported that its wish list was reality and that it had all of those clubs, which in fact did not exist.

Michael Moritz:

These days many non-US tech groups, particularly those born and raised in China, are better positioned for the next 25 years than their American counterparts. The intergalactic technology battle has been joined.
Shortly after Mr Ma’s interview, I glanced at my inbox and found a briefing from Alibaba’s PR department and another update from its investor relations group. I cannot imagine many US or European groups communicating in a similar manner to interested followers in China, India or Indonesia.

Everyone knows how the internet has transformed communications in the past 20 years but fewer people understand what it means for business formation. When I entered venture capital in the mid-1980s, company founders often appeared at our front door carrying an envelope containing a business plan. If we funded the business, the press didn’t give a hoot and it often took our competitors in Boston — then the other thriving US venture spot — months to figure out what we had done. Meanwhile, most people in large, established companies considered developments in Silicon Valley irrelevant or laughable.

Hamilton Nolan:

The 1%-vs-99% inequality dynamic that plagues America’s economy as a whole extends to the world of higher education. And the richest universities in America had a great year last year.

This is not all that surprising, considering the fact that prestigious universities play a key role in the creation and perpetuation of America’s ever-more-entrenched class system. It is only right that those catapulted to great wealth and power by elite universities would give something back, so that their own children might also be able to achieve outsize wealth and power one day. Last year was a record one for donations to colleges: a total of $37.5 billion, up nearly 11% from the year before. Of course, most of that was not going to your local community college. Inside Higher Ed notes that “The top 20 colleges in fund-raising brought in more than $10 billion. That means that 28.6 percent of the total was given to fewer than 2 percent” of schools.

The biggest recipient of all: Harvard, with $1.16 billion in donations. Stanford was second, with about $930 million, followed by USC, Northwestern, and Johns Hopkins. “Meanwhile,” the Wall Street Journal says, “schools in the middle of the pack are getting a smaller slice of the philanthropic pie, as they may not have such active, wealthy or well-connected alums.”

Libby Nelson:

Harvard’s $36 billion endowment includes full ownership of a company called Brodiaea, Inc. And that company has been buying up vineyards and farmland in California’s Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties for the past two years. Harvard now owns more than 10,000 acres, making it one of the top 20 growers in California’s Paso Robles wine region, according to Reuters.

Paso Robles is getting more attention as a wine region — Wine Enthusiast said in 2013 that it was reinventing itself “with flair” — and Harvard expects the vineyards and land it’s buying to become more valuable over time. Reuters points out that the university’s endowment also owns water rights to deep-water wells in the area, a big issue because of the ongoing California drought.

Joseph Stramondo:

In the U.S., much is being made of the 25 year anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In activist circles, commemoration has meant celebration of the progress that has been made alongside calls to action regarding systemic disadvantages that remain. It is fortuitous that the launch of this blog coincides with this anniversary, both inviting reflection on how this policy has made an impact on higher education.

First, I will briefly lay some conceptual groundwork. It is widely noted that the ADA is a civil rights law grounded in and justified by the social model of disability. Roughly, the social model maintains that a person’s biological differences – or perhaps impairments – become disabling only within a particular social context in which there is a mismatch between the mode in which she functions and the mode for which the social environment has been constructed. Thus, most of the disadvantages of disability are socially constructed, according to this model. In contrast, the medical model says that the disadvantages of disability are inevitable because disability is, ontologically speaking, a biological deviation from the norm that is, by definition, disadvantageous.

Melissa Korn:

College completion rates for wealthy students have soared in 40 years but barely budged for low-income students, leading to a yawning gap in educational attainment between rich and poor that could have long-lasting implications for the socioeconomic divide.

In 2013, 77% of adults from families in the top income quartile earned at least bachelor’s degrees by the time they turned 24, up from 40% in 1970, according to a new report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy and the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. But 9% of people from the lowest income bracket did the same in 2013, up from 6% in 1970.