Philip Guo:

OK finally onto academic jobs … why do academics so often feel overworked?

One common but unsatisfying answer is that academic work is harder or more all-consuming than industry work, so it simply takes more time. I don’t buy that, since I know people with ultra-challenging industry jobs as well. They also work really hard but don’t have as much trouble managing their workload.

I think the answer lies in the fact that, as an academic, your work comes from multiple independent sources. One claimed benefit of being a PI-level academic (e.g., a research scientist or tenure-track professor) is that you don’t have a boss. However, without a boss to serve as a single centralized source of work, academics end up taking work requests from multiple independent sources that have no knowledge of one another.

Academics receive work from at least seven independent sources:

Charles Pierce:

One of my favorite John Wayne movies is Trouble Along the Way, in which the Duke plays Steve Williams, a former major-college football coach reduced by circumstances and scandal to hustling pool and making book to raise his young daughter. Into their lives comes Donna Reed, as a straitlaced social worker who knows offensive line play, and Charles Coburn, as Father Burke, an elderly priest and the rector of St. Anthony’s, a struggling Catholic college1 somewhere in New York City. Donna has come to make sure that the little girl isn’t becoming too damaged living in a bar and grill. Coburn has come to offer Steve a job, and gives him carte blanche to turn the program around. So Steve starts raiding recruits from other colleges, hiring coal miners and returning war veterans, and cutting in the help on the concessions and all the other ancillary revenue. Naturally, the whole thing collapses, but it all collapses in a heartwarming way. Steve stays at St. Anthony’s, Father Burke retires, and it is clearly implied that Donna Reed and the coach soon will be making the ol’ single-wing with each other.

Michael Barker:

Controlling the spread and evolution of institutionalized education has always been a foremost concern of the ruling class. Barely disguised by the humanitarian rhetoric of philanthropy, white power brokers have played a central role in ensuring that the steady extension of educational facilities across the globe serves to miseducate the bulk of its recipients: promoting the freedom to exploit others (for a few) and the freedom to endure exploitation (for the rest).

William Watkins’ book The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865-1954 (Teachers College Press, 2001) thus provides a clear-sighted analysis of the history of black education. A historical undertaking which Manning Marable has described as “an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the complex relationships between white philanthropy and black education.”[1]

Watkins “destroys the myth that the debate between [W.E.B.] DuBois and Booker T. Washington over the character of schooling actually determined the future of educational policy toward African Americans.” Demonstrating that while the debates between such influential men may have been important, ultimately they “were minor players in the formation of black schooling and the philosophy that lay behind it.”

In this way Watkins “cuts to the very heart of the matter,” reviewing the key contributions made by the real power brokers such as General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, J.L.M. Curry, William Baldwin, Robert Ogden, Thomas Jesse Jones, Franklin Giddings, and the Rockefeller and Phelps Stokes’ family, friends and funds.[2]

George Joseph:

Over the summer, FBI agents stormed nineteen charter schools as part of an ongoing investigation into Concept Charter Schools. They raided the buildings seeking information about companies the prominent Midwestern charter operator had contracted with under the federal E-Rate program.

The federal investigation points to possible corruption at the Gulen charter network, with which Concept is affiliated and which takes its name from the Turkish cleric Fetullah Gulen. And a Jacobin investigation found that malfeasance in the Gulen network, the second largest in the country, is more widespread than previously thought. Federal contracting documents suggest that the conflict-of-interest transactions occurring at Concept are a routine practice at other Gulen-affiliated charter school operators.

The Jacobin probe into Gulen-affiliated operators in Texas, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California found that roughly $4 million in E-Rate contract disbursements and $1.7 million in Department of Education Race to the Top grantee awards were given to what appear to be “related parties.” Awarding contracts to firms headed by related parties would seem to violate the FCC’s requirement that the school’s bidding process be “competitive” as well as “open and fair.”

Related: Philadelphia Schools, Another Year, Another Crisis.

ReClaim UC:

The UC Regents want to hike tuition again. At their upcoming meeting, they are planning to vote on a new policy that, if ratified, would make 5% annual tuition increases the default for the next five years. According to Napolitano, the tuition hikes (as much as $3,400 over five years) would go forward unless the state government increases UC’s budget by amounts to be named later.

The Regents are trying to preempt what was supposed to be a four-year tuition freeze (spanning 2012/13 through 2015/16). They are threatening to end what has been a brief span without tuition increases and to again make annual tuition hikes the new normal.

The Regents’ strategy is fairly evident. In announcing the new tuition policy only two weeks before their meeting, they are hoping to establish the policy before mass student and worker opposition can materialize. And in making the decision to hike tuition contingent upon state inaction, they are trying to redirect students’ focus to Sacramento, and to create some ambiguity about when a tuition hike ultimately would happen, so as to prevent students from establishing a clear calendar of protest.

More broadly, the Regents are trying to set themselves up for a win-win situation. Either students, workers, and our allies, through our collective actions and power, will be able to compel the state to increase UC’s budget and to stave off hikes; or we won’t, and the Regents will get their money anyway in the form of higher undergrad tuitions.

Harvard Magazine:

During the question period, Harry R. Lewis, Gordon McKay professor of computer science (he is also director of undergraduate studies in computer science, and a former dean of Harvard College), rose and made the following statement:

Madam President, I learned recently from two of my faculty colleagues that students in their courses had been surreptitiously photographed throughout the past spring term using cameras trained on the seats in the lecture hall. This was done under the cloak of research on class attendance. A senior university official called in these professors and explained that by means of this electronic monitoring, images of all the students in attendance had been captured at each class. These faculty colleagues, neither of them tenured, first learned that their classes had been under surveillance when this senior central administration official called them in without informing the computer science area dean, and asked them to comment on the attendance data. And contrary to a basic principle of research involving human subjects, the students who were subjects of this study still, I believe, have not been informed that their images were captured and analyzed.

This study raises many important and troubling questions. Questions about the oversight relations between faculty, deans, and department heads in the FAS, and the plethora of provosts we now have. Questions about who controls the classrooms in which we teach—this study seems to me at odds with a vote of this Faculty that describes the classroom as “a special forum” where the teacher determines the agenda. But I will focus on just the most obvious and urgent action item.

This university took great efforts under your leadership and Professor Barron’s to get a grip on issues of electronic privacy. Yet some basic principles seem not to have sunk in everywhere. Just because technology can be used to answer a question doesn’t mean that it should be. And if you watch people electronically and don’t tell them ahead of time, you should tell them afterwards.

Dan Kane:

During the season that the UNC men’s basketball team made its run to the 2005 NCAA championship, its players accounted for 35 enrollments in classes that didn’t meet and yielded easy, high grades awarded by the architect of the university’s academic scandal.

The classes, some advertised as lectures but that never met and others listed as independent studies, were supervised by Deborah Crowder, a manager in African and Afro-American studies whoa report from former U.S. Justice Department official Kenneth Wainstein says graded required end-of-semester work leniently as part of a “paper class” scheme to keep athletes eligible. Crowder was not a professor and admitted to investigators that she assigned grades without reading the papers.

Of the 35 bogus class enrollments, nine came during the fall semester of 2004, when eligibility for the spring was determined. Twenty-six were during the spring semester, when the season climaxed with a victory over Illinois in St. Louis.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/11/08/4305374_2005-unc-basketball-champs-2-semesters.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Alan Borsuk:

January approaches and so, presumably, does the first hot round of education action of the second term of Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

There will be many other rounds, especially by the time the state budget is completed in June. In solidly re-electing Walker on Tuesday, Wisconsin voters made clear which side is going to prevail on some big questions about the future of kindergarten through 12th grade education.

But start with January, when the new Legislature convenes with solid Republican majorities in both the Assembly and Senate.

On July 17, Walker issued a remarkable, one-sentence statement:

“Today, I call on the members of the state Legislature to pass a bill in early January to repeal Common Core and replace it with standards set by people in Wisconsin.”

Pretty much nationwide, the Common Core went quiet as an issue during the several months leading up to the election.

At the time of Walker’s statement, several states had acted to drop out of the nationwide effort to have consistent goals for what students should learn in reading, language arts and math at each grade level.

The objecting states set standards of their own, and the Common Core had become a hot-button issue for opposing President Barack Obama and liberal educators, even if sometimes facts got in the way. Oh, well.

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

AFL-CIO Wisconsin President Phil Neuenfeldt presented MTI activist Michele Ritt with the State Union’s Public Sector Organizer of the Year Award, at last Tuesday’s MTI Faculty Representative Council meeting. Neuenfeldt commented that in spite of Governor Walker’s pledge to “divide and conquer” public sector Unions, that he sees the opposite as he travels Wisconsin. He said, “Solidarity among working people is really strong – and that it is because of activists like Michele Ritt, and Unions like MTI.” Neuenfeldt said success is built on one-to-one organizing and that MTI is in the forefront of that.

Michele enthusiastically recruited numerous new MTI members last school year and began recruiting during the summer at the school to which she transferred last school year. Last spring, Michele was elected to the Dane County Board. She also chairs MTI’s Special Education Sub- Committee.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

MMSD received a total of 3,081 responses to the online survey. However, only Question #1 received the maximum number of responses; Questions #2-13 averaged around 2,200 respondents. Normally, a response rate is calculated by dividing the number of responses by the number of invitations to complete the survey. However, it is difficult to estimate an exact response rate to this survey, given that there was not a set number of invitations. The denominator, or number of possible respondents, could be calculated in a variety of ways, and that the survey allowed for an individual or family to take the survey multiple times. However, we have provided a couple possibilities for calculating a response rate, which should be considered very coarse estimates:

Per Housing Unit in MMSD Boundaries – According to ACS data, MMSD has about 100,000 occupied housing units, so about 3% of households within MMSD boundaries responded to any portion of the survey.

Per Households of MMSD Students – About 1,600 respondents reported having children in MMSD, and MMSD’s students as of October 2014 live in about 17,000 different households, so about 9% of households with MMSD students responded.

These response rates are high enough to be relatively certain about the survey results; the 2,200 responses to most questions out of 100,000 households would lead to a margin of error of about 2% with 95% confidence, and the margin of error relative to MMSD households would be similar.

Madison’s 2014/2015 budget includes a 4.2% property tax increase while spending between $15,000 and 16,000 per student – double the national average.

Related:

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.

Substantial questions have been raised about the District’s last maintenance referendum. Unfortunately, we’ve not seen any additional information.

K-12 taxes and spending have increased substantially over the years, with little change in academic outcome.

Sandra Knisely:

As the cost of higher education increases, campus experts debate how to protect students from making disastrous choices — and explore whose responsibility it is to do so.

“This is insane.”

That’s what Susan Fischer ’73, ’79 told an out-of-state father when he called the UW–Madison Office of Student Financial Aid to discuss taking out a loan package totaling almost $160,000.

The response? “He said, ‘I appreciate your opinion, but our children want to go [to the UW], and we’re going to let them,’ ” says the office’s longtime director.

For the UW experts who study or work closely with student borrowers, discussions about debt usually lead to discussions with and about parents. After all, the current federal financial aid system is built on the assumption that parents will provide their college-aged children with at least some measure of financial support until age twenty-four. Yet for students who come from families less adept at financial decision-making, the existing student-loan structure can put them at a disadvantage.

A growing number of UW researchers are focused on developing a better understanding of the impact of indebtedness, both on the well-being of individual students and on the system of higher education as a whole. For example, School of Human Ecology Dean Soyeon Shim is overseeing the first longitudinal study of its kind to track the effect of financial literacy and indebtedness on young-adult well-being. And Nicholas Hillman, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy analysis, is developing ethical frameworks for college financial-aid strategies and policy recommendations related to student loans.

Jenny Price

Who decides how much college tuition will be each year? Why does it keep going up (and up)? Is it worth the price? Studies — and graduates — say yes.

Once upon a time, students could make enough money to cover the entire cost of going to college by working during their summer and winter breaks.

These days, that sounds like a fairy tale.

Consider this recent headline from the Onion, which didn’t quite feel like satire: “New Parents Wisely Start College Fund That Will Pay for 12 Weeks of Education.”

The price tag for attending college has increased dramatically over the last two decades, with tuition more than tripling at public universities between 1988 and 2008, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That trend includes the UW, where tuition went up 140.6 percent between the 2002–03 and 2012–13 academic years.

About one-fourth of that increase was directly due to the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates (MIU), a program students approved to address access to classes, improve advising, and offer more financial aid.

The intense focus over ever-increasing tuition bills even prompted New York Senator Charles Schumer to suggest penalizing schools that don’t keep tuition costs within the rate of inflation. Yet frustrated students and parents continue to find ways to pay because they believe that a four-year degree is worth the expense — and there is plenty of evidence that they are right.

open culture:

Benjamin’s youth and adult programming has been collected by Verso press in a new book entitled Radio Benjamin, which “brings together some of his most accessible” thinking. “Fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture,” writes Verso, Benjamin “wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio.” Between 1929 and 1932, he delivered around 30 broadcasts he called “Enlightenment for Children” (Aufklärung für Kinder), many of which you can hear read in the original German by Harald Wiesner at Ubuweb (German speakers, listen to an episode above). These, Ubuweb informs us, focused on “introducing the youth to various, some of them classical, natural catastrophes, for instance the Lisbon earthquake of the 1750’s that so shook the optimism of Voltaire and the century.”

Another of Benjamin’s subjects was “various episodes of lawlessness, fraud and deceit, much of it recent.” During one such broadcast, “The Bootleggers,” Benjamin wonders aloud rhetorically, “should children even hear these kinds of stories? Stories of swindlers and miscreants who break the law trying to make a pile of dough, and often succeed?” He admits, “It’s a legitimate question.” He then goes on to elucidate “the laws and grand intentions that create the backdrop for the stories in which alcohol smugglers are heroes” and tells, in fascinating detail, a few “little tales” of said heroes.

Risa Doherty:

Imagine finding a bill for $200 in your mailbox because your daughter was late to a couple of sorority events. Imagine, too, that those who snitched were her new best friends. This is one of the unwelcome surprises of sorority membership.

Depending on the generosity of the vice president of standards, a fine can be reversed with proof of a qualifying reason, such as a funeral, doctor’s appointment or medical emergency, so long as a doctor’s note is forthcoming. A paper due or a test the next day? No excuse. (Fraternities, by the way, rarely impose even nominal fines to enforce punctuality.)

Now imagine attending mandatory weekend retreats, throwing yourself into charitable work, making gifts for your sisters and, at tradition-thick schools like the University of Alabama and University of Missouri, investing 30 to 40 hours pomping — threading tissue paper through chicken wire to create elaborate homecoming decorations or parade floats that outdo rivals’.

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During fall or winter rush, sororities court starry-eyed freshmen. They showcase their joyful conviviality with skits and serenades. They stress the benefits of joining, and brag about attracting the prettiest, smartest or most athletic. At many traditional sororities, however, not much energy is spent explaining what is expected, leaving many pledges unaware of the considerable time commitment and costs.

Photo

Some sororities will fine members for being late to events. It can be reversed, with a doctor’s note.

J. Determine:

This article examines the depiction of the Crusades in Arab school textbooks. In theintroductory first part, perceptions of the Crusades manifest in Arab historiography aredescribed. In addition, modern political discourses referring to the Crusades among Arabauthors, politicians and representatives of political Islam are explained. In the second part,accounts of the Crusades in school textbooks from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon,Palestine, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia are analysed, focusing on the sources used by the books’authors, the terminologies, conceptions, reasoning, and narratives found in them, and the resultsof the Crusades as they are portrayed. The third part concludes by explaining three different approaches to how the textbooks relate the history, and shows the historical sensibilitiesconcerning the Crusades as taught by the schoolbooks

The South China Morning Post:

For Leo, one of about 5,000 Hongkongers studying at Jinan University in Guangzhou, the democracy movement feels achingly distant but its effects ripple through his daily campus life, widening the gulf with mainland students.

Leo often travels home on weekends to visit his family and has seen the street skirmishes up close.

He strongly supports the protest but, back on campus on weekdays, he’s careful about how he shows his interest. He shares photos about the movement with mainland friends but they express little interest, he says.

Organising a social activity, even one as benign as a Christmas get-together, is frowned upon by the campus administration, so a gathering with a political bent is out of the question.

“Many of us [Hongkongers] support and understand the students who remain in Admiralty, Causeway Bay and Mong Kok,” said Leo, whose full name cannot be used due to fears of possible reprisals by the school. “So far, we haven’t felt a taboo on talking about it on campus. But the conversations are usually only among the Hong Kong students.”

Jinan has the most international student body of any mainland university. Nearly a third of its 35,320 students come from Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan or overseas countries.

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

Getting Organized! MTI now has over two hundred (200) Member Organizers including teachers, educational assistants, clerical-technical employees, substitute teachers, security assistants, and retired MTI members who are committed to helping the next generation maintain their Union. Member Organizers are volunteers who have agreed to serve as point people in their building/work location to help build awareness and support for MTI’s recertification elections.

Get-out-the-vote! In political elections, voter turnout is critical. In Union recertification elections, it is even more critical. The experiences of other Wisconsin public sector Unions show that when employees vote, they overwhelmingly vote Union YES! Where recertification elections have lost, it is because less than 51% of the eligible voters cast a ballot. Unlike political elections, in recertification elections a non-vote counts as a “no vote”.

In MTI’s recertification election, ballots can be cast 24 hours per day, seven days per week, via phone or computer, beginning at Noon on November 5 and continuing through Noon on November 25. The process is quick and efficient and should take no more than a couple minutes. That said, others have reported difficulties where votes were not counted, when they failed to accurately complete each step in the balloting process. It is for that reason that MTI is providing all MTI-represented employees with detailed voting instructions on posters, flyers and palm cards.

The MTI Recertification Election palm cards provide MTI-represented staff the phone number, web address and voting instructions. On the reverse side of the palm card, voters are asked to complete their name, work location & bargaining unit and give the completed card totheirMTIFacultyRepresentativeorMemberOrganizer.

After doing so,one will receivean“IVoted”button. Someworklocations will hold raffles using the completed palm cards. By collecting completed palm cards, your Union organizing team will be able to try to assure that the 51% threshold is met, as mandated by Walker’s Act 10, during the 20-day election period. Additional information on MTI’s recertification elections is available at www.madisonteachers.org.

Caroline Porter:

The campaign for California’s top education post, typically a low-wattage contest, has become this state’s hottest race because of a division among Democrats over tenure rules and other policies that diminish teachers’ union power.

One sign of the high attention: Nearly $30 million has been spent on campaigns for the post—of state superintendent of public education,—compared with $13 million on the contested race at the top of the ticket, for governor.

The amount of direct campaign contributions, donations to independent groups and advertisements is more than triple the amount spent in the last superintendent’s race, in 2010, according to Autumn Carter, executive director of California Common Sense, a nonpartisan think tank.

The two candidates for superintendent,–incumbent Tom Torlakson and challenger Marshall Tuck, both Democrats,–are squaring off on hot-button issues in education, such as tenure laws, teacher evaluations and the role of testing in schools. Recent polls suggest voters are evenly split between the two men.

“The fact that the superintendent race is an almost $30 million race,…that’s a little mind-boggling,” said Ms. Carter.

Dive in:

Tom Torlakson: duckduckgo | Candidate Website.

Marshall Tuck: duckduckgo | Candidate Website.

In addition to supporting members of Congress and civil servants, U.S. taxpayers support welfare recipients. And they support them lavishly, too. Hawaii, Massachusetts, and D.C. residents receive sizeable welfare payments (read: salaries). Indeed, the magnitude of these payments exceeds the average salary of an American teacher, as well as a soldier deployed in Afghanistan, by at least $10,000 per year.

The public can forget all the clap-trap they are hearing about austerity. Indeed, a fairly dull knife could cut billions of dollars from the U.S. government’s largess.

James Pethokoukis:

October marks the 20th anniversary of “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life,” the extraordinarily influential and controversial book by AEI scholar Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. Here, Murray answers a few questions about the predictions, controversy, and legacy of his book.

It’s been 20 years since “The Bell Curve” was published. Which theses of the book do you think are the most relevant right now to American political and social life?

American political and social life today is pretty much one great big “Q.E.D.” for the two main theses of “The Bell Curve.” Those theses were, first, that changes in the economy over the course of the 20th century had made brains much more valuable in the job market; second, that from the 1950s onward, colleges had become much more efficient in finding cognitive talent wherever it was and shipping that talent off to the best colleges. We then documented all the ways in which cognitive ability is associated with important outcomes in life — everything from employment to crime to family structure to parenting styles. Put those all together, we said, and we’re looking at some serious problems down the road. Let me give you a passage to quote directly from the close of the book:

Predicting the course of society is chancy, but certain tendencies seem strong enough to worry about:

1. An increasingly isolated cognitive elite.
2. A merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent.
3. A deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive distribution.

Unchecked, these trends will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top, restructuring the rules of society so that it becomes harder and harder for them to lose. (p. 509)

Chris Rickert:

It’s no surprise Democratic nominee for governor and Madison School Board member Mary Burke isn’t saying how she plans to vote Monday on a proposed school district budget that includes a $100 tax increase for the average homeowner.
For purely political reasons, dropping that particular dime would be a pretty dumb thing to do.

Budgets are way more than just their impact on taxpayers/voters, though. They also reflect a school district’s priorities and approach to educating children and compensating teachers.

Burke hasn’t released an education plan in her campaign for governor, so it might be nice to know how she feels about some of those details before they start counting the votes nine days from now.

Specifically, I asked her about:

$4.1 million in spending on technology upgrades, including a plan to eventually put tablet computers in the hands of most students.

$1.5 million for a new behavior plan that de-emphasizes punishment in favor of teaching positive behavior skills.

$250,000 for a new staff evaluation system.

$150,000 for a “grow your own” system for recruiting employees, including ones that — in a district with an ethnically diverse student body but an almost all-white teaching staff — are “culturally responsive.”

Continuing to provide union staff with automatic raises for seniority and degree attainment.

Burke’s response was brief, emailed, unrevealing and on-message: “They all have merits but need to be considered in light of whether we can fund them while being responsible to the taxpayers.”

A scouring of the video recordings and available minutes of this year’s budget meetings also didn’t shed much light on where she stands.

She rarely offered an opinion during the meetings, but when she did it was usually as a voice of fiscal restraint, questioning the size of the tax levy and highlighting the need to take into account the current year budget’s effect on future years’ budgets.

Of course, it’s pretty safe to assume that Burke will vote against any budget that includes a tax increase. She has reminded reporters that’s what she did back in June when the preliminary budget was before the board. And she was the lone “no” vote on the final 2013-14 budget in November 2013, 27 days after she announced her run for governor.

Props to Rickert for diving into the details…. A no vote is rather easy, but this annual exercise simply perpetuates Madison’s monolithic K-12 governance model, despite its long term, disastrous reading results.

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

Over the past few weeks, discussions have been occurring throughout the District about MTI’s upcoming MTI Recertification Elections. One of the most frequently asked questions by newer staff, those who are not aware of MTI’s many accomplishments over the years is, “what is at risk if we lose the Union?” To answer that question, one only needs to look around the State of Wisconsin to see what has happened in other school districts where employees no longer have a collective voice in the workplace.

In many school districts, employers have increased employee health insurance premium
contributions to 12%. Such an increase would decrease an employee’s pay between $61 and $212 per month, depending on the plan the individual has selected. Your Union is currently working with the District to collaboratively identify potential sources for health insurance savings rather than implementing a premium co-pay. The five Contracts for MTI represented employees do not now mandate any employee contribution toward health insurance.

For teachers who are new parents, MTI’s Contract provides paid time off during maternity leave via a combination of personal sick leave and Sick Leave Bank benefits. Non-probationary teachers also have the Contract right to take unpaid child rearing leaves of absence for a semester, a full school year, or up to two school years should they need or desire to stay home with their child(ren) for a period of time regardless of the child’s age. Those rights could disappear or erode without a Union to advocate for them.

For longtime teachers, educational assistants, clerical-technical staff and security assistants approaching retirement, MTI’s Contracts provide retiring employees with 100% of the value of their accumulated sick leave for the payment of post-retirement insurances. Many school districts have capped or reduced such benefits, forcing longtime employees to work longer in order to afford post- retirement insurance premiums.

Other school districts have added classes to the workday (without additional pay); extended the work year (without additional pay); required mandatory evening obligations (without additional pay); reduced benefits for disabled employees; eliminated planning time; pro-rated insurance benefits based on part-time status; eliminated just cause and due process protections against unfair discipline or dismissal; and destroyed salary schedules.

MTI encourages all represented employees to spend a few moments to page through their Collective Bargaining Agreement to see the entirety of the issues that the Union has negotiated for them over the past decades. Any or all of those negotiated items would be subject to employer discretion or whim without a Union as your collective voice. Standing together, we can continue to advocate for working conditions/learning conditions that educational employees and students need. Voting to recertify is the first step towards maintaining your collective voice at work.

Robert Reich:

Imagine a system of college education supported by high and growing government spending on elite private universities that mainly educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class, and low and declining government spending on public universities that educate large numbers of children from the working class and the poor.

You can stop imagining. That’s the American system right now.

Government subsidies to elite private universities take the form of tax deductions for people who make charitable contributions to them. In economic terms a tax deduction is the same as government spending. It has to be made up by other taxpayers.

These tax subsidies are on the rise because in recent years a relatively few very rich people have had far more money than they can possibly spend or even give away to their children. So they’re donating it to causes they believe in, such as the elite private universities that educated them or that they want their children to attend.

Madison School District PDF:

For MMSD, the most important aspect of multi-year budget planning is the careful use of ‘unused tax levy authority’ which can be carried forward from one year to the next. For 2014-15, the budget has available just over $8.8 million of ‘unused tax levy authority’ which was carried forward from 2013-14.1

The 2014-15 budget calls for use of $5.1 million (or 58%) of this carried-over tax levy authority, with the balance of $3.7 million preserved and carried forward into the 2015-16 budget. Partial use of the carried-over tax levy authority was targeted early in 2014-15 budget development to support the new technology plan. It also supports the compensation increase included in this budget recommendation. We believe this is an appropriate extent of use and caution against any additional use of the $8.8 million in the 2014-15 budget year.
There are two primary reasons for this recommendation, both of which lie ahead in the 2015-16 school year and beyond.

First, greater use of ‘carried-over tax levy authority’ to support additional spending this year will decrease equalization aid next year. Equalization aid, which is the district’s second largest source of revenue (behind only property taxes) is based on a formula which contains disincentives for spending above a prescribed level (the ‘secondary shared cost ceiling’). For example, a sharp increase in shared cost per pupil in 2012-13 contributed to an 11% equalization aid loss in 2013-14.

Looking ahead to 2015-16, depending on the state budget, MMSD is expected to see a 5-10% aid loss next year. Additional spending in 2014-15 would only increase the expected aid loss. For every two dollars ($2) MMSD spends above the secondary cost ceiling, we lose one dollar ($1) in equalization aid.

Second, the 2015-16 revenue budget forecast is very uncertain. It is outside of the current two-year state budget, the framework which determines school district revenues. Therefore, we recommend carrying over the $3.7 million to provide sufficient revenues to meet the needs of the 2015-16 school year.

The uncertainty of 2015-16 revenues, along with anticipated cost pressures on next year’s budget, including health insurance costs and increased technology investments, to name just two factors, make it essential that unused tax levy authority is preserved and carried-over into 2015-16.

1. Facing a major aid loss in 2013-14, the district ‘under-levied’ by $8.8 million to hold the tax levy increase to 3.384% on 0.35% tax base growth.

The District continues to use a single data point analysis for “State Aid” or redistributed state dollars. The District received a substantial increase in state tax dollars during the prior year….

Much more on the District’s 2014-2015 budget, here.

Paul Bass:

“GESO—you are workers. The work you do is important,” Tyisha Walker told the crowd. Walker (pictured after delivering her remarks) is secretary treasurer of UNITE HERE Local 35, which represents Yale’s blue-collar workers; and a West River alder. She responded to the second, less-spoken case opponents have made against GESO in its earlier incarnation: That Yale’s blue-collar and pink-collar unionized workers will show up at rallies for the graduate students in order to earn their return support in contract battles with the university, but they’ll never risk their own jobs and go out on strike for GESO. “We stand with you,” Walker declared.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

We’ve been quiet because we’ve been building. We have some exciting updates to share with you as we move forward to establish One City Early Learning Centers on Madison’s South Side. Since August, we have:

Established a 15-member Board of Directors
Filed for nonprofit recognition with the IRS
Identified a site for our preschool on Fisher Street
Selected our logo mark (see above)
Identified an exceptional Director for our school
Recruited some wonderful volunteers
Secured the support, guidance and encouragement of key stakeholders in early childhood education, the Greater Madison community and the State of Wisconsin

Now, the heavy push to secure partnerships and financial support to get this preschool open begins. We would love to hear from you if you can help. Please email or contact us at our information below.

We hope to share the details of our plans and our excitement about this preschool with every single person we know, because this is that important. We’d love to share our plans with you, your friends and your colleagues at your home, office, service group, place of worship or community organization. To download the one page summary on One City, click here. We’ve also placed two short videos below that speak to the critical need for communities to nurture and support children early. Watch. Learn. Be inspired. We are!

Our mission: To prepare young children from birth to age 5 for success in school and life, and ensure they enter grade school reading-ready.

Our vision: A Greater Madison where every child is reading and succeeding at grade level by the time they complete third grade.

Our philosophy: A child’s ecosystem of support and the environments in which they are educated and raised must be healthy, safe, inspiring and provide adequate resources and stability in order for them to reach their full potential.

Our focus: Strong children, families and neighborhoods. Wherever we develop a One City preschool, we will also work to strengthen families, build community and partner with residents to develop the neighborhood. If the family and the village are healthy, the children will be, too.

We hope you will join us on this journey. Thank you.

Much more on Kaleem Caire’s relentless drive to improve rigor and opportunity in Madison.

Alan Borsuk:

The service counter guy at the hardware store understood what he was looking at as soon as he saw the screw. “This is from some old, special chair,” he told my wife when she stopped in on Monday.

Right. A chair with a special story that, I suggest, speaks to some of the core aspects of what can lead a child to a successful life.

My father was a very talented pianist as a child. In his early teens, he soloed with the Madison symphony, playing Gershwin’s Concerto in F. He loved piano and he had great potential.

My grandparents ran a corner grocery store near the University of Wisconsin campus. They and their five children lived in a small apartment over the store. This was the mid-1930s, the height of the Depression, so you know they didn’t have much.

One afternoon, my father came home from high school, climbed the stairs, and, as he tells the story, nearly fell to the floor. A Steinway grand piano was sitting in the living room.

Can you imagine the sacrifice my grandparents made to get that piano? That’s how important their children were to them. That’s how much they wanted to do all they could to help their children reach their potential and have a good life.

And those children did have good lives. They graduated from high school. They went to college. They worked, they married, and they were good citizens of communities as big as New York City, as small as Two Rivers. Each in his or her own way did well.

James Merriman:

This month, New York State approved 17 new city charter schools to open over the next few years. Sadly, they could be among the last.

Sometime in 2015, New York State will have to stop approving new charters. That’s not because these schools haven’t proven themselves (their achievement often far exceeds that of the districts they reside in). It’s not because there isn’t enough demand (50,000 families are on waitlists).

Rather, it’s because state law currently caps the number of charters allowed to open, and we’ve almost reached the limit.

Putting the brakes on a wildly successful education strategy is bad policy. It’s terrible for the city’s kids, thousands of whom will be denied schools that have shown they can close the achievement gap in some of our most disadvantaged neighborhoods.

There is an obvious answer: Simply eliminate this arbitrary and artificial barrier to creating more great public schools. After all, we’ve already twice raised the number of charter schools that can be opened in New York City, from 100 to 200 in 2007 and then again by another 114 in 2010.

Jonelle Marte:

Millennials are looking beyond beach vacations and nights out when it comes to finding the best way to use their cash.

More of them are putting money away for retirement, according to a new analysis released Thursday by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. About 40,000 workers in their 20s and early 30s signed up for their employer’s 401(k) plan for the first time during the first half of this year, the report found. That is up 55 percent from the same time last year and more than the 37 percent increase seen for all age groups.

“If you look at the millennials, they’re actually by nature better savers,” says Kevin Crain, managing director and senior relationship executive for Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The bank analyzed data from its 401(k) business, which has $128.9 billion in assets and includes 2.5 million participants.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Nicolet High School senior Sammi Castle juggles three Advanced Placement courses, an internship, two honors classes, four extracurricular clubs and two sports.

Winter is Castle’s off-season, but a soccer boot camp is starting next week. This “strongly encouraged” program runs twice a week until as late as 10 p.m. even though the season does not start until March.

She’s also in the midst of completing seven college applications.

“Everyone’s driven,” Castle said. “But everyone’s also sick of it.”

Welcome to the life of a Nicolet High School student — and a jam-packed schedule that has become, for many high-achieving high school students, all too typical.

Kenneth Ginsburg spoke this week to Nicolet, Shorewood and Whitefish Bay High School students about how to handle the stress and expectations attached to their diplomas. And although his message was geared to the trio of high-performing North Shore high schools, it would have resonated across the metro area in suburban schools that cater to families that are comparatively affluent.

Barry Garelick, via a kind email:

Back in September, when I was doing my sub-assignment for the high school, I attended a math department meeting the day before school began. Sally from the District office presided, and among the many things she told us at that session was that this year the students in the District would not have to take what is known as the STAR test, by order of the superintendent of the District. “And as you know, the Superintendent is like the Pope. What he says goes.”

While this last was uttered partly in jest, the reaction in the room was celebratory. The STAR exam has been an annual ritual in California and in May of each year about two weeks are devoted to a review and prep for this test, which is keyed to California’s pre-Common Core math and English standards. Such activities inspire accusations that schools are “teaching to the test”. But now in the midst of a transition to implementing Common Core math standards, California was looking at the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) exam that would be given officially starting the following school year. (Actually, they don’t call it an exam; they call it an “assessment”. You’ll forgive me if I call it an exam.) For now, however, the state would be field testing the exam. What this meant was anyone’s guess: perhaps this first go-round on SBAC would be to provide a baseline to see how students scored prior to full implementation of Common Core. Or perhaps it was to fine tune the questions. Or both. Or neither.

In any event, when I started my new assignment at the middle school, I had to have my classes take a practice SBAC exam. The day before I was to take all my classes into the computer lab for the practice exam, I attended an after-school faculty meeting.

I had started my assignment at the school earlier that week, so the principal introduced me to the group. I was welcomed by applause, and urgings by fellow teachers to help myself to the tangerines that were brought in for the occasion. I took two tangerines, and as if he were taking that as his cue, the principal started the discussion.

Sue Shellenbarger:

It’s one of the most dreaded rites of child-rearing—teaching a teenager to drive.

Many parents are riding shotgun with their teens for 40 hours or more to provide the supervised practice required to get a driver’s license in most states. Most do a good job of teaching steering, parking and controlling the car. Parents are not so good, however, at teaching the skills young drivers need to actually avoid accidents, according to new research. Now, there are new techniques and even guides that have grown out of new scientific research into the parent-child dynamic in the car.

Suzy Hoyle of Wallingford, Pa., has taught two of her three children to drive. “It’s a scary ride,” she says, “but I think it’s very important they gain confidence and learn that they can do it.” She has picked up tips from friends (have your teen drive on snow, stash the cellphone in the glove compartment) and refrained from criticizing her daughter Ashley, now 18, when she hugged the right shoulder, uncomfortably close to several trees.

Sumathi Reddy

It is one of the most common and hard-to-fix speech errors: making the “r” sound.

Researchers and speech therapists say the use of an unlikely tool—an ultrasound probe—could help children who have difficulty saying the letter “r” correctly. Instead of red, these children might say wed. Or buhd instead of bird.

About 10% of preschool children have some sort of speech or sound disorder, experts say. Many children naturally outgrow these, or get help correcting the problem with conventional speech therapy. But when the problem is pronouncing “r,” speech errors can persist; studies have estimated that 2% to 3% of college-age people still have trouble with the sound.

Molly Beck:

Mary Burke faces a key vote on the Madison School Board on Monday a week before the gubernatorial election: whether or not to back a $454 million budget that raises taxes and delivers a 1 percent base pay raise to teachers.

Burke, challenging incumbent Gov. Scott Walker in a tight race, declined Tuesday to say how she’d vote. But she pointed out to reporters that she voted against a preliminary version of the budget that included a smaller tax increase than the final proposal to be voted on Monday.
“We did have a preliminary budget earlier that had a similar type of tax increase and I voted against it because I thought it wasn’t being as responsible as we need to be to the taxpayers in Madison,” Burke said Tuesday before casting an early ballot for the Nov. 4 election. “Certainly that issue will come up Monday night.”

If she backs the budget, she risks giving ammunition to Walker and other Republicans in a race that is going down to the wire.

Much more, here.

2014-2015 Madison School District budget notes and links.

Gary Fields & John Emshwiller:

A generation ago, schoolchildren caught fighting in the corridors, sassing a teacher or skipping class might have ended up in detention. Today, there’s a good chance they will end up in police custody.

Stephen Perry, now 18 years old, was trying to avoid a water balloon fight in 2013 when he was swept up by police at his Wake County, N.C., high school; he revealed he had a small pocketknife and was charged with weapons possession. Rashe France was a 12-year-old seventh-grader when he was arrested in Southaven, Miss., charged with disturbing the peace on school property after a minor hallway altercation.

In Texas, a student got a misdemeanor ticket for wearing too much perfume. In Wisconsin, a teen was charged with theft after sharing the chicken nuggets from a classmate’s meal—the classmate was on lunch assistance and sharing it meant the teen had violated the law, authorities said. In Florida, a student conducted a science experiment before the authorization of her teacher; when it went awry she received a felony weapons charge.

Dave Girard:

Last November, my father took his own life. I’m frequently aware of the fact that the depression which helped drive him to that dark fate lives on in my genes. That’s a doozy of a legacy to inherit, but it’s one that has not been wholly negative for me.

Getting to the point where I could write this article involved a series of debates. I debated talking about my father’s suicide; I debated “outing” myself as a depression sufferer; I debated not talking about it and what that meant. I decided in the end that I would be the worst kind of hypocrite if I believed that dialog about depression was essential but was unwilling to start that dialog myself. I hope that my story can help others understand why the traits that cause depression have been both a plague and a gift to so many.

Nothing’s easy when talking about depression. Navigating this sensitive topic is fraught with traps and taboos that can make Israel the good option at dinner discussion. But this dialog is important, and hopefully we can lift the grim veil that hangs over this subject before disaster strikes someone we know and love. Even as it goes underreported, suicide now kills more people than car accidents in the US.

Pat Schneider

The Madison Metropolitan School District is launching a $27 million initiative that by 2018-19 will provide each student in grades second through twelve with a wireless computing device. Students in kindergarten and first grade will have computing access at a 2 to 1 ratio of students to devices.

But the MMSD tech plan does not include any additional technical support positions.

“We do need to make sure to have good technological support in place — it’s something we’ll have to monitor,” Andrew Statz, the district’s chief information and information technology officer told the school board early this year. But other school districts going to 1 to 1 computing are not hiring additional tech staff, Statz said.

Although now retired school board member Marj Passman suggested the ratio of tech support staff to devices would become unmanageable with the addition of thousands of new devices, Statz said things will be different because the new equipment will be leased, not owned by the school district.

“When you are looking at leased equipment, when something is faulty with the equipment, part of the lease is replacing it,” he said. “We’ve also identified an opportunity to create a course for students to take for credit that’s like the AV club back in the day — an opportunity for students who are interested to identify themselves, be supervised and get some real world experience,” he said.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that our monolithic public schools are planning to adopt a technology approach largely built around those of the now declining PC era.

It would seem that supporting (and perhaps subsidizing) a BYOD (bring your own device) model might be far more effective from a personal responsibility, cost and support perspective.

The District’s past Infinite Campus implementation experience (expensive and not required…) does not bode well for this new scheme.

Alice Woodhouse:

Almost 50 years ago, two-week-old Serena Sussex was found abandoned in a cardboard box in a Sai Ying Pun stairwell.

Last week Sussex, now a 49-year-old artist, visited the building on Hing Hon Road where she was found and said she wanted to reassure local birth mothers that their children could lead happy lives.

“I want to let mums that were forced or had to abandon [their children] due to their circumstances know that a lot of adoptees are very happy. If they wanted to get in touch there is an opportunity for them to find us,” Sussex said.

“I would have liked to have known my birth mother, who she was and what she is doing now.”

Sussex was 2½ years old when a British family adopted her and moved to the United Kingdom. She is now an award-winning artist based in Brighton, southern England, whose oil paintings are in exhibitions and collections across the world.

She spent her early years at the Chuk Yuen Children’s Reception in Wong Tai Sin, East Kowloon, where she believes there was little stimulation. She said her new parents had to teach her to cry and her speech was impaired.

Kathleen Geier, Nancy Folbre, Anna Clark and Susan Feiner

Should you go to college? The answer used to be self-evident: college was a path to upward mobility, a ticket to middle-class adulthood. Higher education played a particularly critical role for women looking to secure independence through financial stability. But increasingly, stories about college focus on the relentless burden of student debt and efforts to channel students toward majors that will help them beat the ugly job market. In this installment of The Curve, Anna Clark, Susan Feiner, Nancy Folbre and host Kathleen Geier do the math, exploring the role that colleges play in breaking or boosting the class hierarchy in today’s economic landscape.

Anna Clark: You can’t use the word “debt” without stumbling on its double meaning. A seemingly simple term for money owed, it is steeped in morality. “Forgive us our debts” goes the Christian prayer, meaning “sins.” As David Graeber points out, our language of business depends on our language of ethics. “Reckoning,” “forgiveness,” “accountability” and “redemption” refer to both the state of our soul and our credit status. Our understanding of who owes what to whom defines our vocabulary for right and wrong. History is as much a story of lenders and borrowers as it is a story of rich and poor.

Raquel Rutledge and Kevin Crowe

James Fleischman and his wife, Barbara, have lived in their five-bedroom ranch on Applewood Drive in Glendale for about three decades.

In recent years, the assessed value of their house hovered around $331,400, and they paid about the same in property taxes as their next-door neighbor.

But when the four-bedroom Cape Cod next door sold last year, all that changed. The assessor slashed the value from $319,400 to $249,900, a drop of nearly 22%.

That cut shaved $1,642 off the new owners’ tax bill.

When the Fleischmans opened their bill, they owed $640 more. In fact, all the residents of Glendale whose property values didn’t go down paid more.
Gary Porter
This Glendale home owned by James and Barbara Fleischman has had the same assessed value for years while the assessed value of a neighbor’s house dropped significantly after a sale.

That change in their neighbor’s value didn’t account for all of the Fleischmans’ tax increase. Glendale officials had increased the overall tax levy, and the assessor had lowered a smattering of other residential properties.

But the change violated the state constitution, which was crafted to make the tax burden fair. Assessors are not supposed to modify values of individual properties based on market conditions unless they are revaluing entire neighborhoods or communities.

Yet assessors are doing it.

Regularly.

Alan Borsuk:

What about Burke wanting to kibosh that small statewide program, while leaving the Milwaukee and Racine program alone (except, she says, she’ll take steps to deal with low-quality voucher schools)? If you oppose one voucher program, shouldn’t you oppose them all?

My reading of it is as simple as saying the statewide program is small and not yet deeply rooted. It’s vulnerable.

Undoing Milwaukee and Racine vouchers — especially Milwaukee – would most likely be a nightmare, as a practical matter. MPS is not ready to take on a flood of new kids and the impact on the state budget would be substantial. The Milwaukee and Racine programs are now deeply rooted. Parents like their schools. The fight over cutting off vouchers would be epic.

The political realities on vouchers for either Burke or Walker are almost sure to be difficult next year. Burke most likely would face an all-Republican or split legislature where she’ll have a ton of problems. Killing the statewide voucher program may be undoable.

For Walker, even with a Republican-controlled legislature, the same may be true when it comes to expanding vouchers. Too much opposition and too much cost would spell, at most, a small expansion for the statewide program, I bet.

As much as advocates on both sides of the voucher debate dream of big victories – unlimited vouchers or the death of vouchers – my guess is we’re in the zone where we’re going to stay. These programs will continue to be hot potatoes, but changing the potato recipe is not going to be easy.

Walker and Burke both know that, best as I can see.

Much more on vouchers, here.

Via a kind Will Fitzhugh email:

The Concord Review Academic Coaching Service, founded in 2014, provides individual online guidance for students worldwide in writing high-caliber history and social-science research papers of around 6,000 words or more. Our service provides the necessary support for high school students who are able to and interested in going academically above and beyond what their schools require. Students will be assigned one coach online, whose availability and historical expertise matches their needs. Our coaches are past Concord Review authors and often Emerson Prize winners who currently attend or have graduated from Columbia, the University of Chicago, New York University, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. Working with their coach, students will improve in academic writing, a skill necessary for any career path, to stand out in college and other competitive program admissions, and to excel in high school and beyond. We work with students writing papers outside of class and students writing International Baccalaureate Extended Essays, and on papers for any class where academic non-fiction writing is important. If you are interested in and/or have questions about The Concord Review Academic Coaching Service, please contact jessica@tcr.org or fitzhugh@tcr.org.

PDF

Pamela Druckerman:

I recently spent the afternoon with some Norwegians who are making a documentary about French child-rearing. Why would people in one of the world’s most successful countries care how anyone else raises kids?

In Norway “we have brats, child kings, and many of us suffer from hyper-parenting. We’re spoiling them,” explained the producer, a father of three. The French “demand more of their kids, and this could be an inspiration to us.”

I used to think that only Americans and Brits did helicopter parenting. In fact, it’s now a global trend. Middle-class Brazilians, Chileans, Germans, Poles, Israelis, Russians and others have adopted versions of it too. The guilt-ridden, sacrificial mother — fretting that she’s overdoing it, or not doing enough — has become a global icon. In “Parenting With Style,” a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economists Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti say intensive parenting springs from rising inequality, because parents know there’s a bigger payoff for people with lots of education and skills. (France is a rare rich country where helicoptering isn’t the norm.)

Cindi May:

Whether you’re the owner of the Dallas Cowboys or captain of the playground dodge ball team, the goal in picking players is the same: Get the top talent. Hearts have been broken, allegiances tested, and budgets busted as teams contend for the best athletes. The motivation for recruiting peak performers is obvious — exceptional players are the key to team success — and this belief is shared not only by coaches and sports fans, but also by corporations, investors, and even whole industries. Everyone wants a team of stars.

While there is no denying that exceptional players like Emmitt Smith can put points on the board and enhance team success, new research by Roderick Swaab and colleagues suggests there is a limit to the benefit top talents bring to a team. Swaab and colleagues compared the amount of individual talent on teams with the teams’ success, and they find striking examples of more talent hurting the team.

Steve Kolowich:

San Jose State University’s spending on technology over the past year has made the campus ground zero for heated discussions about how university leaders should try to innovate—and the role faculty members should play in those decisions. And it hasn’t been pretty: Just five months ago Mohammad H. Qayoumi, the president, had to apologize for bypassing “longstanding SJSU consultation practices” in his attempt to move quickly toward his goal of “engaging SJSU with Silicon Valley.”

That was in May. Now the San Jose Mercury News has published an article that lends more context to how Mr. Qayomi’s administration lost the faith of the rank and file.

According to the article, Mr. Qayoumi struck a sweetheart deal worth $28-million with Cisco Systems, the locally based technology giant, to overhaul the campus’s communications infrastructure. San Jose State did not take other bids for the contract, which draws on the university’s operating budget (among other sources) to fund tech upgrades that critics say are either unnecessary or available at much lower prices from other providers.

Dorothy Kim:

White media pundits and academics have a standard tactic: “Twitter is public.” Therefore, no one, and especially black women and other WOC, have rights or can complain about their digital bodies and intellectual property being taken without permission, plagiarized, used for media and academic data and news. This consistent appeal – “Twitter is public” – obscures the reality of Twitter as a digital publics, subject to the same problems of surveillance and ethics we find in geographical space.

In Mike Davis’s book City of Quartz, written before the LA Uprising of 1992, he discusses Los Angeles’s spatial panic around security. In a city lacking open public spaces, organized around the power of private property, and without a cohesive center, he writes:

The Economist:

CALLIGRAPHY has been a revered art form in China for centuries. Children are taught to write with brushes; endless copying of characters is a rite of passage in their schooling. Writing is a feat of memory. Mastery requires learning thousands of unique characters. Despite these ordeals, literacy rates have increased from around 20% in 1949 to over 95% now. But computers, smartphones and tablets are posing a new obstacle to progress. Penmanship is on the decline. Reading skills may follow.

Pundits the world over blame a reliance on computers for shoddy handwriting and spelling. In China the problem is particularly acute. The number of primary schoolchildren with severe reading difficulties is rising, according to a 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy

Sumatha Reddy:

Some teens doing homework while listening to music and juggling tweets and texts may actually work better that way, according to an intriguing new study performed by two high-school seniors.

The Portland, Ore., students were invited to the annual conference of the American Academy of Pediatrics in San Diego this past weekend to present a summary of their research, which analyzed more than 400 adolescents. The findings: Though most teens perform better when focusing on a single task, those who are “high media multitaskers”—about 15% of the study participants—performed better when working with the distractions of email and music than when focusing on a single activity.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via Jeannie Kamholtz (PDF):

So far, one-hundred and fifteen (115) MTI members, teachers, educational assistants, clerical-technical employees and substitute teachers have stepped up to serve as MTI Member Organizers for MTI’s forthcoming recertification election. The Organizers will help to ensure that everyone in their school building/work site understands the importance of the recertification elections which are scheduled for November 5-25. Phone banks are being organized to contact substitute teachers, and other employees who work district-wide or intermittently. Are you aware and informed? If not, see your MTI Faculty Representative or EA-MTI Building Representative to see how you can help, or call MTI (257-0491). It is crucial that every school/work site has a plan to build awareness and assure that every eligible person votes.

Each MTI bargaining unit (MTI, EA-MTI, SEE-MTI, USO-MTI & SSA-MTI) will have a separate election. Under Walker’s signature legislation Act 10, 51% of all eligible voters is required, in each unit, to gain recertification. The election by all MTI represented District employees will be conducted between 12:00 Noon on November 5 and 12:00 Noon on November 25. Voting will be via telephone or on-line balloting conducted by the American Arbitration Association. This will be a simple and efficient process and detailed information will be provided by MTI.

More, in the “>13 October 2014 newsletter.

The Economist:

“POVERTY”, wrote Aristotle, “is the parent of crime.” But was he right? Certainly, poverty and crime are associated. And the idea that a lack of income might drive someone to misdeeds sounds plausible. But research by Amir Sariaslan of the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, and his colleagues, just published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, casts doubt on the chain of causation—at least as far as violent crime and the misuse of drugs are concerned.

Using the rich troves of personal data which Scandinavian governments collect about their citizens, Mr Sariaslan and his team were able to study more than half a million children born in Sweden between 1989 and 1993. The records they consulted contained information about these people’s educational attainments, annual family incomes and criminal convictions. They also enabled the researchers to identify everybody’s siblings.

In Sweden the age of criminal responsibility is 15, so Mr Sariaslan tracked his subjects from the dates of their 15th birthdays onwards, for an average of three-and-a-half years. He found, to no one’s surprise, that teenagers who had grown up in families whose earnings were among the bottom fifth were seven times more likely to be convicted of violent crimes, and twice as likely to be convicted of drug offences, as those whose family incomes were in the top fifth.

The Economist:

FOR decades vocational education has suffered from the twin curses of low status and limited innovation. Politicians have equated higher education with traditional universities of the sort that they themselves attended. Parents have steered children away from “shop class”. And vocational studies have been left to languish: the detritus of an industrial era rather than the handmaiden of a new economy.

A recent report from a management consultancy, McKinsey, called “Education to Employment: Getting Europe’s Youth into Work”, paints a dismal picture of the state of vocational education. In four of the seven countries surveyed, more than half of young people taking an academic course said they would have preferred a vocational one. But they had been put off by disorganisation and lack of prestige. Britain has more than 20,000 vocational qualifications offered by 150 different bodies. In America responsibility is scattered among government departments.

The great exception to this has always been Germany, of course. But now there are signs that other countries are trying to turn a back road into an Autobahn. Politicians are banging the drum for vocational education. Australia, for example, has created a Workforce and Productivity Agency. Educational innovators are flooding into the vocational market.

Economist:

WARY of competition when it comes to global markets, the French embrace it wholeheartedly in the classroom. As school pupils enjoy the end of their summer holiday, few will relish a return to their harsh grading system. Termly reports in secondary schools record pupils’ marks, in Cartesian fashion, to the nearest two decimal points. Every child knows how they compare with the average. A result at the school-leaving baccalauréat exam of 16 out of 20 is considered outstanding. For younger children, a dictée to test spelling is marked by progressively deducting points for every error, which can crush the grade down to zero, or even into negative territory.

Benoît Hamon, the education minister, thinks the system, at least for younger people, is too harsh. He argues that “in France we are defined by failure”, and this begins with poor grades. He wants schools to “stimulate instead of discourage” and to give pupils more positive feedback. Mr Hamon has launched a review of the national grading system. It is due to report early next year.

The Economist:

TAKE any child outside on a clear night and science becomes exciting. But science lessons at school are often dismal. Teachers drone on in front of whiteboards that are filled with perfect spheres rolling down frictionless inclined planes (usually in some strange airless world without any wind resistance).

But it does not have to be this way. Randall Munroe is a former NASA roboticist who now draws the webcomic “xkcd”, which offers up an eclectic mixture of science, maths and whimsy three times a week. One of its spin-offs is a website called “What If?”, in which readers can submit questions to Mr Munroe that he will attempt to answer to the best of science’s ability. That website has, in turn, spawned a book full of such questions (half of which are recycled from the web, half of which are new).

The Economist:

LIKE many rural teenagers, Yan Jingtao, the lanky son of a watermelon farmer, did not have quite the stuff for a standard upper-secondary school. Last September, encouraged by his teacher, he and three classmates enrolled instead at a vocational school on the edge of the central city of Kaifeng to study computer animation. By November, he had quit; one of 23 dropouts in less than two months from a class that had started with 57. The students had often got into brawls and skipped school in order to play games at an internet café.

Now 18, Mr Yan has landed a decent short-term job as a guard at a local military airport. “My job is better than what my friends have,” he says. But he yearns to learn a skill and get a proper career. He will have too much company in that pursuit, and not much help.

In the past three decades China has made impressive gains in sending rural children to school. This has helped fuel its rise as a low-end manufacturing power. But the easy gains have been achieved. If the country is to create the “knowledge economy” it says it wants, the government will have to change the way rural teenagers are educated and schools in the countryside are funded.