Glenn H. Reynolds:

Like most professors, I hate doing administrative work. And since somebody has to do it, universities have increasingly built up a corps of full-time administrators. That’s fine, but lately, the administrative class has grown too numerous and too heavy-handed. As colleges and universities increasingly face financial pressures, it’s time to rethink.

Full-time administrators now outnumber full-time faculty. And when times get tough, schools have a disturbing tendency to shrink faculty numbers while keeping administrators on the payroll. Teaching gets done by low-paid, nontenured adjuncts, but nobody ever heard of an “adjunct administrator.”

But it’s not just the fat that is worrisome. It’s administrators’ obsession with — and all too often, abuse of — security that raises serious concerns. At the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Clyde W. Barrow, a leading professor, has just quit, complaining of an administration that isolates itself from students and faculty behind keypads and security doors.

Isolation is bad. But worse still is the growing tendency of administrators to stifle critics by shamelessly interpreting even obviously harmless statements as “threats.” A recent example took place at Bergen Community College, where Professor Francis Schmidt was suspended, and ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination over a “threat” that consisted of posting a picture of his 9-year old daughter wearing a Game Of Thrones T-shirt. The shirt bore a quote from the show, reading: “I will take what is mine with fire & blood.” Bergen administrator Jim Miller apparently thought the picture, which was posted to Schmidt’s Google Plus account, was somehow intended as a threat to him. (Schmidt had filed a labor grievance a couple of months earlier.)

Michael Stratford:

Some student loan borrowers have reported to federal consumer protection officials that their private lenders automatically placed them in default when their cosigner died or filed for bankruptcy, even when the borrowers were otherwise paying the loan on time.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau highlighted that issue on Wednesday in a report analyzing the more than 2,300 complaints it had received about private student loan companies from the beginning of last October through the end of March. (The volume of complaints was up by more than one-third compared to the same period last year).

The issue is that some private student loans contain terms allowing lenders to demand the full outstanding amount of a loan when a borrower’s cosigner — often a parent or grandparent — dies or files for bankruptcy protection, according to Rohit Chopra, the CFPB’s student loan ombudsman who authored the report.

Virginia Postrel:

The parents and newly admitted students visiting colleges this month are asking questions about social life, study habits and — everyone’s favorite topic these days — job prospects after graduation. These are all important subjects, but if you care about your child’s intellectual development, or just want to keep the kid out of trouble, you should also ask about the university’s attitudes toward free speech.

For more than a decade I’ve been on the board of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a civil-liberties watchdog group that defends the rights of college students and faculty. As you probably assumed, many cases FIRE gets involved in stem from “politically correct” censorship; but the range of university abuses is much wider than that. The motives often have less to do with ideology than with administrative bullying, paranoia or stupidity.

To take a particularly absurd example, in January a Bergen Community College professor was placed on leave after he posted on Google+ a photograph of his young daughter wearing a “Game of Thrones” T-shirt with the quote, “I will take what is mine with fire & blood.” An administrator deemed the photo a disturbing threat of violence.

Thomas Lindsay:

When Bill Ayers observed that “every revolution is impossible until it happens, and then, looking backwards, every revolution appears inevitable,” it is safe to say that he did not have in mind any endeavors of conservative Texas governor Rick Perry. But with his 2011 state of the state address, Perry may have launched a revolution of his own. Perry challenged Texas’s public universities to craft four-year degrees costing no more than $10,000 in tuition, fees, and books, and to achieve the necessary cost reductions by teaching students online and awarding degrees based on competency.

The idea met with skepticism. Andy Brown, who was then chairman of the Travis County Democrats, labeled Perry’s “scheme to serve up $10,000 college degrees … preposterous,” adding that “nobody in higher education believes that is even possible.” Peter Hugill, a Texas A&M professor who at the time was president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, posed the rhetorical question: “Do you really want a stripped-down, bare-bones degree?” Hugill went on to declare that “$10,000 seems to me a number someone pulled out of the air.”

If these reactions suggested Perry was out of step with the higher-education establishment, the public’s reaction suggested that defenders of the status quo had fallen out of step with students, their parents, and taxpayers. Baselice and Associates conducted a public-opinion survey commissioned by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, finding that 81 percent of Texas voters believed public universities could be run more efficiently. Nationally, a 2011 Pew study found that 57 percent of prospective students believed a college degree no longer carries a value worth the cost. Seventy-five percent of respondents declared college simply unaffordable.

USM Economics Blog:

Wanting to look into this, I did a little bit of Googling about Noel-Levitz to see if I could find out anything of use about them. As it mentions above, they are an “enrollment management” consulting firm- the largest in the United States. What enrollment management consulting firms tend to offer universities and university systems is something called “financial aid leveraging.” If you clicked that link, you’ll see that it’s pretty hard to understand exactly what that is. I found that an article from the Atlantic from a few years ago explained it far more clearly than the companies that do it: in short, financial aid leveraging is the act of repackaging financial aid so that it is specifically directed at students that a complex algorithm determines as most likely to make the school more money. Frequently, this means taking financial aid away from the people who need it the most and giving it to people who are more likely to stay in school. If you look at the operating budget documents, you’ll notice that a majority of Noel-Levitz’s recommendations are related to financial aid.

While you can have a discussion of ethics about this practice on its own, something else is what made me uncomfortable:

Noel-Levitz is a former subsidiary of Sallie Mae, the student loan giant. If you’re not acquainted with Sallie Mae’s reputation, a quick Google search should remedy that.

Now, Sallie Mae isn’t what it used to be; it’s no longer officially tied to the government (now it’s publicly traded and has changed its name to SLM). However, in 2013, Sallie Mae was contracted by the Department of Education as the servicer of almost 20% of new federal student loans. That means, in general, that the more federal student loans there are, the more money Sallie Mae makes. In addition, Sallie Mae will sometimes sell off some of its loans in the form of financial securities. However, the income from those contracts ($109 million in 2013) pales in comparison to its income from selling those securities ($13.8 billion in 2012) and offering their own private student loans ($37.5 billion in loans outstanding as of Dec 31, 2013). In fact, the direct federal loan program has been a huge source of competition for Sallie Mae.

In other words, since it’s no longer originating federal student loans (which used to be its biggest source of revenue), Sallie Mae will make more money if there are more private student loans (especially if those private student loans go to the students most likely to repay them. More on that in a minute).

From the Noel Levitz 2014 Discounting Report

Walter Hamilton:

Debbie Rohr lives with her husband and twin teenage sons in a well-tended three-bedroom home in Salinas.

The ranch-style house has a spacious kitchen that looks out on a yard filled with rosebushes. It’s a modest but comfortable house, the type that Rohr, 52, pictured for herself at this stage of life.

She just never imagined that it would be her childhood home, a return to a bedroom where she once hung posters of Olivia Newton-John and curled up with her beloved Mrs. Beasley doll.

Driven by economic necessity — Rohr has been chronically unemployed and her husband lost his job last year — she moved her family back home with her 77-year-old mother.

At a time when the still sluggish economy has sent a flood of jobless young adults back home, older people are quietly moving in with their parents at twice the rate of their younger counterparts.

George Anders:

Meet Alaric Blair, a 47-year-old elementary school teacher from Calumet City, Ill. He is strict, pleasant and ambitious. Right now, he’s taking advanced classes at Chicago’s Dominican University, hoping to recast himself as a school principal. It’s costing him $10,000 — and he has no desire to get tangled up in the current student-loan mess.

Anyone paying for higher education in the U.S. knows we’ve reached a financial crisis. Tuition keeps rising much faster than inflation. Going in debt to cover costs has become so common that education loans now exceed $1 trillion. Borrowers’ fates are shockingly inconsistent. Some graduates rapidly dig their way out of debt and enjoy better lives as fully accredited doctors, actuaries or the like. Others can’t finish costly programs or strike out in the job market, leaving them ill-served by easy credit. There’s no flexibility in this system: repayment schedules keep ticking.

Back in 1955, economist Milton Friedman argued in favor of financing education with variable-repayment systems that tied into students’ eventual earnings. Top earners would repay more. Dropouts and hard-luck cases would be treated more leniently. Modern-day researchers such as Miguel Palacios of Vanderbilt University continue to advocate equity-based financing, tied to a fixed percentage of future earnings. Yet such approaches exist mostly in academic white papers, rather than in the real world.

Minding the Campus:

For years, Washington has failed to make universities accountable to the students and taxpayers funding them. This failure was epitomized by the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act, which forbade the Department of Education from creating a “student unit record system, an education bar code system, or any other system that tracks individual students over time.” The bill, argued the New America Foundation’s Kevin Carey, sought to “prevent public officials from asking honest questions about what, exactly, taxpayers are getting in exchange for their support.” Though both Republicans and Democrats have recently called for accountability measures on the federal side, it’s unclear that they’ll make progress anytime soon.

Where Washington has failed, however, Texas already has succeeded. When it comes to Texas public higher education, knowing the truth could make you free–debt-free, that is, or, if not entirely free of debt, perhaps less burdened with it than the average college graduate today.

Texas is credited with having “the most sophisticated and publicly available higher-education data set in the country.” In 2004, Governor Rick Perry signed an executive order which asserted that “the public has the right to demand complete accountability for its investment in institutions of education.” Accordingly, the order, entitled “Relating to accountability of higher education systems and institutions,” calls on the state’s public universities to “provide the citizens of Texas, the Governor, and the Legislature with the information necessary to determine the effectiveness and quality of the education students receive at individual institutions.”

This wasn’t just talk. Last year, the Texas Legislature passed Texas House Bill 1296, which requires the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) to “prepare information comparing institutions of higher education in this state and post the information” on THECB’s website. This information is to be provided to any “public school student who requests the information.” The mandated information includes identifying “postsecondary education and career opportunities, including information that states the benefits of four-year and two-year higher education programs, postsecondary technical education, skilled workforce careers, and career education programs.”

Jay Matthews:

Walter Fields’s 15-year-old daughter is a sophomore at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J. She scored advanced proficient on state math tests in middle school and received an A in algebra in eighth grade.

For reasons that mystify Fields and his wife, their daughter was not recommended for the ninth-grade geometry course that would keep her on the track to Advanced Placement calculus her senior year. Only when they contacted the principal and the math department chair was she placed in that advanced course. The geometry teacher encouraged her dream to become an engineer. She had a B most of the year but slipped to a C because of the demands of lettering in basketball and track, her father said.

Now she is in a fix. Her Algebra 2 teacher made clear on Parents Night, her father said, that “she did not like school sports and suggested students needed to choose between being involved in a sport and being enrolled in her course.” The teacher has proved to be, her father said, very discouraging. His daughter has struggled.

“The teacher’s response to our questions regarding our daughter’s performance was ‘she just doesn’t seem to get it,’ ” Fields said. “When we pressed the teacher she curtly suggested that maybe this wasn’t the right class for our daughter.” Her geometry teacher was apparently so alarmed that she told Fields’s daughter to come see her if she needed help. Fields and his wife are well-educated African Americans. He thinks Columbia High is hindering his daughter’s progress because of her race. He and other parents are preparing to file a lawsuit on that issue. Fifty-six percent of Columbia students are black, but just 14.4 percent of AP calculus students in the 2011-12 school year were of that race. Seventy-three percent were white.

Michelle Singletary:

A year ago, I was where many parents are right now. My daughter Olivia was faced with the decision of where to attend college.

I’ll admit I was pretty adamant leading up to the choice that many families have to make by May 1, which is the deadline for accepted students to declare where they will attend college. No student loans. No debt for our daughter or us.

However, when Olivia started looking at schools that were out of our financial comfort zone, my husband and I realized this wasn’t going to be as easy as we thought. Our daughter is a great student. She took advanced placement classes and participated in extracurricular activities. And when she said her “I’ll-be-crushed-if-I-don’t-get-in” school was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we began to get anxious.

We didn’t have enough saved to cover all the out-of-state expenses for four years at UNC. Absent any aid, the cost at UNC would have been more than $183,000, including tuition, fees, room, board, books and supplies, travel and personal expenses. And that figure doesn’t include the likelihood of price increases.

Still, how could we deny her heart’s desire? She swooned after a tour of the campus. She bought UNC paraphernalia. Even the school color — light blue — is her favorite color.

She didn’t get into her dream school. And honestly, we were relieved.

You might think it’s easy for us now to say we wouldn’t have let her go. Yet, trust me, we would have had to break her heart.

Her rejection made the decision of where she would go easier for us. But what if it’s not as easy for you? What if your child does have a choice, and that choice is beyond your means?

James Gallagher:

Mathematicians were shown “ugly” and “beautiful” equations while in a brain scanner at University College London.

The same emotional brain centres used to appreciate art were being activated by “beautiful” maths.

The researchers suggest there may be a neurobiological basis to beauty.

The likes of Euler’s identity or the Pythagorean identity are rarely mentioned in the same breath as the best of Mozart, Shakespeare and Van Gogh.

The study in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience gave 15 mathematicians 60 formula to rate.

One of the researchers, Prof Semir Zeki, told the BBC: “A large number of areas of the brain are involved when viewing equations, but when one looks at a formula rated as beautiful it activates the emotional brain – the medial orbito-frontal cortex – like looking at a great painting or listening to a piece of music.”

The more beautiful they rated the formula, the greater the surge in activity detected during the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans.

“Neuroscience can’t tell you what beauty is, but if you find it beautiful the medial orbito-frontal cortex is likely to be involved, you can find beauty in anything,” he said.

Matt Bruenig:

I see it often claimed that the high rate of child poverty in the US is a function of family composition. According to this view, the reason childhood poverty is so high is that there are too many unmarried parents and single mothers, and those kinds of families face higher rates of poverty. The usual upshot of this claim is that we can’t really do much about high rates of childhood poverty, at least insofar as we can’t force people to marry and cohabitate and such.

One big problem with this claim is that family composition in the US is not that much different from family compositions in the famed low-poverty social democracies of Northern Europe, but they don’t have anywhere near the rates of child poverty we have.

Michael McDonald

At a Dowling College campus on Long Island’s south shore, a fleet of unused shuttle buses sits in an otherwise empty parking lot. A dormitory is shuttered, as are a cafeteria, bookstore and some classrooms in the main academic building.

“There’s a lot of fear here,” said Steven Fournier, a senior who lived in the now-closed dorm for his first three years. “It’s not the same college I arrived at.”

Dowling, which got a failing grade for its financial resources from accreditors last month, epitomizes the growing plight of many small private colleges that depend almost entirely on tuition for revenue. It’s been five years since the recession ended and yet their finances are worsening. Soaring student debt, competition from online programs and poor job prospects for graduates are shrinking their applicant pools.

Richard Vedder:

Here’s a scary statistic about American higher-ed: more than 40 percent of college students don’t graduate. But that number hides enormous variations in drop-out behavior. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has issued a “state supplement” report filled with interesting statistics; Here are some:

Completion rates are vastly lower for part-time students relative to full-time ones;

Students attending private schools are more likely to graduate than those at public institutions;

Far more two-year public college students fail to complete their degree than successfully do so;

Interstate variations in completion rates are large;

Roughly 20 percent of those completing schools graduate from an institution different than the one they originally attended, although that proportion is lower at four-year schools;

Those entering colleges right out of high school are much more likely to get a degree in six years than those who wait to attend college;
Women are more likely to complete school then men.

Nikole Hannah-Jones:

Though James Dent could watch Central High School’s homecoming parade from the porch of his faded white bungalow, it had been years since he’d bothered. But last fall, Dent’s oldest granddaughter, D’Leisha, was vying for homecoming queen, and he knew she’d be poking up through the sunroof of her mother’s car, hand cupped in a beauty-pageant wave, looking for him.

So, at about 4:30 in the afternoon on October 18, Dent, age 64, made his way off the porch and to the curb along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in the West End of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Soon he could hear the first rumblings of the band.

There was a time, little more than a decade ago, when the Central High School homecoming parade brought out the city. The parade started in the former state capital’s lively downtown and seemed to go on for miles. The horns of one of the state’s largest marching bands, some 150 members strong, would bounce off the antebellum mansions along the streets. Revelers—young and old, black and white, old money and no money—crowded the sidewalks to watch the elaborate floats and cheer a football team feared across the region.

Central was not just a renowned local high school. It was one of the South’s signature integration success stories. In 1979, a federal judge had ordered the merger of the city’s two largely segregated high schools into one. The move was clumsy and unpopular, but its consequences were profound. Within a few years, Central emerged as a powerhouse that snatched up National Merit Scholarships and math-competition victories just as readily as it won trophies in football, track, golf. James Dent’s daughter Melissa graduated from Central in 1988, during its heyday, and went on to become the first in her family to graduate from college.

But on that sunlit day last October, as Dent searched for Melissa’s daughter in the procession coming into view, he saw little to remind him of that era. More caravan than parade, Central’s homecoming pageant consisted of a wobbly group of about 30 band members, some marching children from the nearby black elementary schools, and a dozen or so cars with handwritten signs attached to their sides. The route began in the predominantly black West End and ended a few blocks later, just short of the railroad tracks that divide that community from the rest of the city.

More: Share Six Words on Race & Education.

Related: Madison has long supported a wide variation in school demographics. The chart above, created from 2013-2014 Madison School District middle school demographic data, illustrates the present reality, with the largest middle school – near west side Hamilton – also featuring the smallest percentage (18.3%) low income population. Nearby Cherokee Middle School’s low income population exceeds 60%!

The Madison School District (600K PDF):

This is the fourth and final installment of the series of updates designed to keep the board informed during the 2014-15 MMSD budget development process. The first update reviewed the budget process, priorities, and expected revenues. The second update explained our goals for a school-based staffing process that was more responsive to the needs of each school and its students. The third and most recent update explained our vision for reallocating at least $500,000 from central office accounts to schools’ non-personnel budgets. This update is a follow-up on that vision.

Zero-Based Budget Development: Central Office Departments
Throughout the 2014-15 budget process, we have remained focused on MMSD’s Strategic Framework, which emphasizes the importance of the work being done at each school, particularly as it relates to the School Improvement Plans (SIPs). We recognize that schools must have the support and resources needed to successfully implement their SIPs. At the same time, however, we are also faced with the limitations of the current school funding situation, which creates a finite pool of resources available to the district.

A key benefit of a zero-based approach to budget development is that it enables us to examine current resource distribution, identify district priorities, and then realign resources to support those priorities and student learning. Because the work of the central office is designed around the schools, our goal was to identify opportunities for redistributing resources from the central office departments to the schools with a targeted amount of $500,000 – $1,000,000.

Taking a collaborative approach to the process, we met with the leaders of each central office department to thoroughly review their existing budgets and find areas to create better efficiencies. Through this process, we were also able to improve their resulting budgets by aligning their resources with their actual budgetary needs and creating a cleaner set of accounts for them to use during the 2014-15 fiscal year.

After several rounds of meetings, we successfully identified $1,000,000 in the central office budgets that was available to be repurposed. We reallocated from accounts for supplies, travel, substitutes and temporary staffing, equipment and consulting services. Of the $1,000,000 amount, half will be used to fund locally staff that were previously funded, partially or wholly, by Title I[M1]

Related: Madison Schools 2013-2014 budget charts, background & missing data.

Matthew DeFour on Madison School Board Member and Gubernatorial Candidate Mary Burke:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke said Tuesday that if elected, she would eliminate the new statewide voucher program and private school tax deduction in the next budget.

Burke, a Madison School Board member, previously said she didn’t support the statewide voucher program.

In response to a question at a Wispolitics.com luncheon at the Madison Club about what she would cut in the next state budget, Burke went further, calling statewide vouchers “a new entitlement program we frankly don’t need.” She also identified the private school tax deduction as something she would cut.

“I respect people’s choice in making that, but I don’t think we should be subsidizing that choice,” Burke said, referring to sending children to private schools.

Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign issued a statement in response to Burke’s comment.

“Gov. Walker believes every child, regardless of ZIP code, deserves access to a great education, and parents should have the right to choose the best educational environment for their children, whether it’s a public, private, charter or home school,” spokeswoman Alleigh Marre wrote in an email.

Both the tax deduction and the statewide voucher program were introduced in the 2013-15 budget signed by Walker.

Uppity Wisconsin on Mary Burke (October 2013):

o, yesterday, when Mary Burke finally made a promise and told the Wisconsin State Journal that, although she opposed Walker’s statewide expansion of vouchers, she nonetheless would do nothing to remove the statewide voucher program, jaws dropped throughout Wisconsin’s progressive community:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke said Monday she wouldn’t have expanded private school vouchers statewide, which Gov. Scott Walker did in this year’s state budget.

However, Burke said if elected she would keep the statewide program in place with a cap of 1,000 students and seek accountability for private schools receiving public funds in Milwaukee.

Vouchers a conservative entitlement program — John Skille

Gov. Scott Walker says he believes every child deserves access to a great education. He believes parents should have the right to choose the best educational environment for their children, and extends that choice to private, charter and religious schools.

This is a campaign to privatize education in the belief competition will produce improvement in public education. Many fall victim to this notion and forget competition is the process by which both winners and losers are created.

Educators remind us we are not in the business of creating losers. We want all students to grow in an environment that challenges them.

If we create a system that results in closing or chastising schools because of student test scores, or firing or chastising teachers for the numerical averages of their students, you can see the “thin ice” on which this thesis rests.

Elizabeth Warren’s Quiet Support for Public School Vouchers by Carrie Lucas:

If all goes right for Massachusetts Democrats in November, they will fill the seat once held by liberal lion Sen. Ted Kennedy with a school voucher supporter who has proposed radically reforming public education in America.

You won’t find a call for school vouchers on Elizabeth Warren’s campaign website. Education is listed first among the candidate’s top priorities, but the website sticks to safe, poll tested platitudes calling for “good public schools, good public universities, and good technical training” as the key to a having a competitive workforce.

Yet in her 2003 book, The Two Income Trap, Warren and co-author Amelia Warren Tyagi cite the traditional public schools system, in which children are assigned to a school based on their residence, as a key source of economic pressure for families with children. Warren and Tyagi call for system-wide reforms to break the link between where a child lives and where they go to school, and specifically make the case for a fully-funded voucher program that would enable children to attend any public school.

Sweden’s School Choice: Vouchers for All and “The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”.

Carl Straumsheim:

he Maryland Higher Education Commission is cracking down on institutions that provide distance education to students in the state. But the commission has a problem: It doesn’t know who those distance education providers are.

The commission last month fired off letters addressed to presidents and provosts of institutions that offer fully online programs (seen at the bottom of this article), asking them to self-report if they enroll students in Maryland.

“As of July 1, 2012, higher education institutions offering fully online education to Maryland residents must submit an application to register with the Maryland Higher Education Commission,” the letter reads. “A review of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System has revealed that in 2012 your institution offered fully online programs and enrolled Maryland residents. If any of your current students are Maryland residents and are enrolled in fully online programs, the aforementioned regulation applies to your institution.”

After explaining how Maryland regulates out-of-state providers, the letter presents them with three options: Confirm that the institution enrolls students in Maryland, then pay an annual registration fee of $1,000 and a bond valued at five times the average cost of tuition; confirm that the institution is interested in enrolling students in Maryland, and pay the same fee; or decline any interest in enrolling students in Maryland, thereby barring those students from enrolling altogether.

D.D. Guttenplan:

Besides his name and email address Richard C. Levin’s new black-and-white business cards contain just two short lines of type: “Coursera” and “CEO.” Mr. Levin, the former president of Yale University, was named head of the online education company late last month.

With seven million registered users and 25 million course enrollments to date Coursera is the largest provider of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. A for-profit company, its main rivals include Udacity, another commercial firm, and edX, a nonprofit backed by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But with its sole revenue stream coming from a small minority of students who enroll in its “Signature Track” — which charges a fee of around $50 to verify a student’s identity, and issues a certificate upon successful completion of the course — questions have been raised about how long its backers will have to wait to see a return on their investment.

In a recent interview, Mr. Levin predicted that the company would be “financially viable” within five years. He began by disagreeing with Andrew Ng, Coursera’s co-founder, who described Coursera as “a technology company.”

Wisconsin State Journal:

First the good news: Reading scores in Wisconsin are improving.

The latest statewide test suggests 36.6 percent of students are proficient or advanced in reading, and 48.6 percent are proficient or advanced in math.

That’s up slightly from the previous year, with slow yet steady improvement over several years.

Let’s keep those scores going up.

Wisconsin also should stay committed to the higher state standards known as Common Core. Educators across Wisconsin have been preparing for Common Core for years. The Legislature wisely adjourned this spring without altering these important academic standards.

Common Core will make it much easier to compare the performance of Wisconsin students to their peers in other states and around the world. The state’s previous standards were vague and inadequately prepared students for college or career.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org.

John Ziker:

The days of the ivory tower are a distant memory. We may hear about them from our ancestors — our teachers’ teachers’ predecessors who lived in the days when social philosophers wrote voluminous comparative works and most teaching was done in small groups in the Socratic tradition. But my mentors also taught me to be wary of idealizing the past. Discrimination, sexism and exclusivity characterized those times. And the theories of human nature that social philosophers and historians expounded back then were biased as a result. No, the ivory tower is not some golden era to which academics are striving to return.

But one concept from those days of yore — the principle of academic freedom — remains hallowed in the minds of most scholars. Without academic freedom, it is likely that the spirit of inquiry and intellectual development would wither away under the ever-looming “bottom line.” Academic freedom is what keeps Homo academicans stomachs full and mental juices hot. Without academic freedom, higher education faculty would have all the drudgery without the satisfaction of discovery. We love what we do, and if we don’t, we get out.

Chris Stone

On 9 May 2013 I was stabbed in front of the US Embassy in Cairo. My attacker was a young college-educated Egyptian man who had come from his village that day to kill an American in “revenge over U.S. policies in the Middle East.” At the time, I was living in Egypt and conducting research as part of my sabbatical from Hunter College of the City University of New York where I teach Arabic. The day I was stabbed, I had come to the Embassy looking to have a translation of my marriage certificate authenticated so that my wife’s Egyptian residency permit might be renewed.

After the attack, a few Egyptian journalist friends wrote about the event, partly to rectify some of the early misreporting in the Egyptian press. The main shared goal of their articles, though, was to declare that my attacker could not have picked a less appropriate target, given my love of Arabic and Arab culture. These overly generous portrayals did not prevent me from asking myself very early on: was I really such an unsuitable target? Not that my attacker knew what I do for a living, but the thought crossed my mind that perhaps, someone out for revenge on US policy in the Arab and Islamic World after 11 September 2001 could do worse than inadvertently target a teacher of Arabic.

Gillian Tett:

A couple of decades ago Orin Starn, an American-based cultural anthropologist, went to Peru to conduct a study of a poor Andean community. It was a classic of the genre.

But since then Starn has made another important discovery: sometimes it is even more interesting to flip the lens and look at tribes in modern American life instead. He recently published a fascinating book on Tiger Woods, looking at golf as a cultural symbol. And as a self-styled “sport anthropologist”, who now works as professor at Duke University, North Carolina, he has also pondered the thorny question of lacrosse.

It is easy to see why. This week Bill Cohan, a banker turned journalist who has previously written exposés on Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns, published an account of a 2006 scandal about rape allegations against Duke University’s male lacrosse team. And after reading his exhaustive, fascinating tale, The Price of Silence, the only thing that surprises me is that there are not more academics working in this nascent discipline of sports anthropology, given how much material there is to explore.

Richard Perez-Pena:

Marilyn Ferreira has solved her share of financial puzzles — running a business, buying a home and arranging a mortgage, raising six children as a single mother. But none of that compared to the challenge of understanding the cost of sending her brood to college.

She and her daughter Kelsey are in the thick of it now, weighing Kelsey’s admissions and financial aid offers from various colleges before the May 1 deadline, trying to make meaningful comparisons and just hoping they aren’t blindsided by something they missed. She has an important advantage in making sense of the terminology and the numbers: a lot of experience, with two sons now in college and a daughter already graduated.

“But it’s still confusing to me, probably the most confusing thing I’ve had to deal with,” said Ms. Ferreira, 48, a dance instructor who lives midway between Boston and Providence, R.I. “I couldn’t have figured it out on my own the first time, and I’m still not sure I could.”

It becomes clear over a long conversation that she does not understand how colleges define basic, crucial terms like “need,” “aid” or “need-blind admission,” and she does not know that those definitions vary from place to place. Her confusion is distressingly common, as demonstrated in studies, surveys and interviews with students and parents.

An array of policy analysts from think tanks to the White House say things should change. “It’s a ridiculously complicated system, if you can even call it a system, and a lot of people don’t get it,” said Sandy Baum, a research professor at George Washington University’s graduate education school, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a leading expert on college pricing. “If you put five aid offers from different colleges together, they’re all different, and it’s very, very difficult to compare. That problem could be solved.”

Related: Questions About Financial Aid?

Shaila Dewan:

For rent and utilities to be considered affordable, they are supposed to take up no more than 30 percent of a household’s income. But that goal is increasingly unattainable for middle-income families as a tightening market pushes up rents ever faster, outrunning modest rises in pay.

The strain is not limited to the usual high-cost cities like New York and San Francisco. An analysis for The New York Times by Zillow, the real estate website, found 90 cities where the median rent — not including utilities — was more than 30 percent of the median gross income.

In Chicago, rent as a percentage of income has risen to 31 percent, from a historical average of 21 percent. In New Orleans, it has more than doubled, to 35 percent from 14 percent. Zillow calculated the historical average using data from 1985 to 2000.

Nationally, half of all renters are now spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, according to a comprehensive Harvard study, up from 38 percent of renters in 2000. In December, Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan declared “the worst rental affordability crisis that this country has ever known.”

Howard Blume:

A popular Los Angeles high school science teacher has been suspended after students turned in projects that appeared dangerous to administrators, spurring a campaign calling for his return to the classroom.

Students and parents have rallied around Greg Schiller after his suspension in February from the downtown Cortines School of Visual & Performing Arts. Supporters have organized a rally on his behalf at the campus for Thursday, gathered hundreds of signatures on a petition calling for his reinstatement and set up a social media page.

Schiller was ordered to report daily to a district administrative office pending an investigation after two students turned in science-fair projects that were designed to shoot small projectiles.

One project used compressed air to propel a small object but it was not connected to a source of air pressure, so it could not have been fired. (In 2012, President Obama tried out a more powerful air-pressure device at a White House Science Fair that could launch a marshmallow 175 feet.)

Another project used the power from an AA battery to charge a tube surrounded by a coil. When the ninth-grader proposed it, Schiller told him to be more scientific, to construct and test different coils and to draw graphs and conduct additional analysis, said his parents, who also are Los Angeles teachers.

Jonathan Keats:

IN THE early 1990s, 14 computer scientists at the University of Maryland were sharing an 80-megabyte hard drive. The drive was often overloaded, with expendable files taking up space in neglected sub-directories. Finding anything was like blindly reaching along all the branches of an overgrown tree.

There had to be a better way, thought departmental professor Ben Shneiderman. So he wrote a six-line algorithm that visualised the drive as a rectangle. Vertical divisions split the rectangle into smaller ones, representing directories, which then subdivided horizontally to show subdirectories. Each of the smallest rectangles corresponded to a megabyte of storage space, so free space was visible at a glance.

He called his invention a “treemap”, and it was adopted by computer labs around the world. It soon found other uses, such as in an interactive chart of stocks and shares, still popular today.

These hierarchical treemaps “epitomize the recent growth of information visualization”, writes Manuel Lima in The Book of Trees: Visualizing branches of knowledge. And as big data engulfs labs and lives, the need for such powerful visualisations will only increase.

Tara Bahrampour:

When Paul Vaughn, an economics major, was in his third year at George Mason University, he decided to save money by moving off campus. He figured that skipping the basic campus meal plan, which costs $1,575 for 10 meals a week each semester, and buying his own food would make life easier.

But he had trouble affording the $50 a week he had budgeted for food and ended up having to get two jobs to pay for it. “Almost as bad as the hunger itself is the stress that you’re going to be hungry,” said Vaughn, 22, now in his fifth year at GMU. “I spend more time thinking ‘How am I going to make some money so I can go eat?’ and I focus on that when I should be doing homework or studying for a test.”

A problem known as “food insecurity” — a lack of nutritional food — is not typically associated with U.S. college students. But it is increasingly on the radar of administrators, who report seeing more hungry students, especially at schools that enroll a high percentage of youths who are from low-income families or are the first generation to attend college.

Student Union of Michigan:

On April 1, 2014, the University of Michigan announced on The University Record that its Chief Financial Officer Tim Slottow would become the new president of the for-profit University of Phoenix. It sounded so ridiculous that even Michael Proppe, the president of the Central Student Government (CSG) and someone who we don’t usually see eye to eye with, was convinced it was an April fools joke. What could the CFO of a public university like the University of Michigan possibly know about running a for-profit private university like the University of Phoenix? Wouldn’t it be hard for him to adjust to the logic of a for-profit (recently probed by the Senate) after spending 12 years working at an ostensibly public institution? If Slottow’s tenure at the University of Michigan is any indication, the answer is a resounding “No.”

The institution whose finances Tim Slottow was charged with managing is no longer public in any meaningful sense of the word. During Slottow’s tenure as CFO at the University of Michigan from 2002 to 2014, one year of lower division undergraduate in-state tuition more than doubled, increasing from $6,395 to $12,948. If tuition had kept pace with inflation it would be about $8,346. Furthermore, the University has radically reshaped the student body, privileging wealthier students whose families can afford exorbitant out-of-state tuition while pricing out students from lower class backgrounds and Black, Latin@, and Native American students. There’s now more students at U-M whose parents make over $200,000 that there are students whose parents make less than $75,000.* Rich students want fancy facilities, so the university has dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to expensive, unnecessary construction projects. The University now brings in over $1 billion in revenue each year from students’ tuition (just under half of which are paid for with loans).

Slottow’s management of the University’s finances, however, must have been even more attractive to the University of Phoenix’s board of trustees. His accomplishments are duly noted in the University’s press release:

Alan Borsuk

Jean Maier says she now realizes two of the important qualities needed to make progress in dealing with Milwaukee’s reading crisis:

Humility and tenacity.

One piece of good news is that she has seen them in action in places such as Gwen T. Jackson School, 2121 W. Hadley St., a Milwaukee public school where improvement in reading achievement is an urgent need. (How urgent? Scores improved this year so only 84.7% of students were rated below proficient in reading in state test results released last week.)

Another — and I hope broader — piece of good news is that the carefully constructed (which can be read as “slow aborning”) efforts of Milwaukee Succeeds are entering the action stage. In recent weeks, I visited three pilot programs associated with the everyone-at-the-table campaign by civic leaders to improve the lot of children in the city.

I liked what I saw, in terms of the projects. I was sobered by the depth of the problem, both when I watched kids struggle with reading basics and when I looked at the new wave of test results. But I did feel like a lot of care, commitment and intelligence is going into finding more effective ways of helping kids with reading. That is one of several major focal points for the Milwaukee Succeeds effort.

Two of the Milwaukee Succeeds pilots I visited focused on tutoring. There are a lot of people who want to help kids improve their reading, including volunteers ranging from college students to retirees. But, frankly, there have been two big problems with tutoring efforts citywide.

One is that they focus too much on kids who are actually doing OK and too little on those who really need help. The Milwaukee Succeeds folks have put together compelling data to show this.

Ann Larson:

WWhen I enrolled in the PhD Program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center to study Composition and Rhetoric, I was idealistic about the future of the discipline and my own place in it. I believed that Comp and Rhet (as I came to call it) was asking crucial questions that were central to the mission of higher education in America. I still believe that. But, after working in the field in a number of full-time and part-time positions over several years, my idealism has turned to despair at what I now regard as Composition’s great shame. It has left me to doubt that there is a place in the field for me and for many others like me.

As anyone who teaches college writing is probably aware, the majority of such courses are taught by contingent faculty, including adjuncts and graduate students. These workers usually receive low wages and few benefits. (Some long-term CUNY adjuncts receive health care, but even this small benefit has recently come under attack.) This is not just a local problem. Recent data shows that adjuncts now earn a national average salary of just $2,758 per course, which means teaching eight to ten courses per year results in a salary of $22,064 and $27,500. These are poverty and near-poverty wages. More recently, Josh Boldt, who compiles information on the pay rates and overall treatment of adjunct faculty on his Adjunct Project blog, has confirmed in chilling fashion what we already know: many adjuncts have no access to benefits, no role in university governance, and are rarely told if they will have classes to teach from one semester to the next.

Playbook
 International Student Assessment (PISA) 1MB PDF.

The Wall Street Journal

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System has a well-deserved rap as a taxpayer drain. So to rehabilitate its image, the pension fund has produced a “study” purporting that public-worker pensions are California’s biggest jobs generator. As if Californians needed more reason to doubt the pension behemoth’s math.

According to the 14-page analysis, “CalPERS benefit payments and investments in California are essential to the state’s economy” (Calpers’s bolded emphasis). For instance, Calpers “supports” 1.5 million jobs in the state. That figure includes every job at a California business in which Calpers invests including the 664 companies in its public equity portfolio like Google, GOOGL -1.63% Apple AAPL -0.74% and Walt Disney. DIS -0.65% Who knew that the public pension fund was essential to the survival of so many successful California public companies?

Calpers also notes that “the economic impact of CalPERS benefits far exceed initial taxpayer contributions.” Lo, the fund claims to return $10.85 in “economic activity” for every dollar taxpayers contribute, which would make public pensions the best government stimulus of all time.

Lindsay Gellman:

Not long after Molly Patterson tossed her cap in the air with her fellow Yale College Class of 2013 graduates, she found herself in a new and unfamiliar city far from the East Coast where she grew up.

Instead of returning home to Reston, Va., the 22-year-old had relocated to Houston for a chemical-engineering position at a large oil-and-gas company.

Though she worked with a real-estate agent through her employer’s staff-relocation service, Ms. Patterson also spoke with Houston natives and scoured real-estate sites like Zillow.com Z -6.97% and Trulia.com to get the lay of the land.

To meet people and begin to put down roots, she quickly joined a local weekly trivia-night group and signed up to audit a Chinese-language course at nearby Rice University.

Carolyn Geer:

Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, 54 years old, didn’t have a lot of money growing up. What she did have was a role model in her father, Charles Schwab, who founded the brokerage firm that bears his name in a two-room office in 1971. “My dad was a struggling businessman until I was in my 20s,” she says.

As a teenager she worked (baby sitting, a paper route, secretary) and she saved—opening a savings account, moving back home after college to scrape together her first and last month’s rent and to buy herself a bed and a dresser.

And she is still working, now to impart the good money habits she learned first hand to those not fortunate enough to have role models like “Chuck.”

It’s no secret that financial illiteracy is rampant in the U.S., where less than one-third of the population can correctly answer three simple questions on interest rates, inflation and diversification, according to a study by Annamaria Lusardi of the George Washington University School of Business. But the jury is still out on what, if anything, to do about it.

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

Among the many excellent benefits available to MTI members, guaranteed by MTI’s various Collective Bargaining Agreements, is the additional worker’s compensation benefit, i.e., benefits greater than those provided by Wisconsin Statutes.

Wisconsin Statutes provide a worker’s compensation benefit for absence caused by a work-related injury or illness, but the benefit does not begin until the 4th day of absence, and has a maximum weekly financial benefit.
MTI’s Collective Bargaining Agreements provide that one absent from work because of a work- related injury or illness will receive his/her full wage, and that it begins on day one of the absence. Further, MTI’s negotiated benefits for worker’s compensation are not limited by Wisconsin Statutes, i.e., there is no maximum. MTI’s Contracts also provide that one’s earned sick leave is not consumed by absence caused by a work-related illness or injury.

Although MTI is working to preserve this benefit, it is at risk due to Governor Walker’s Act 10.

Ian Johnson:

In December, China stunned the world when the most widely used international education assessment revealed that Shanghai’s schools now outperform those of any other country—not only in math and science but also in reading. Some education experts have attributed these results to recent reforms undertaken by the Chinese government. Jiang Xueqin has been active in Chinese education since 1998, when as a Yale undergraduate he taught for six months at one of the top high schools in China, Beida Fuzhong, or the Affiliated High School of Peking University.

A Canadian citizen whose parents emigrated from China, Jiang, who is thirty-seven, helped establish an experimental high-school program in Shenzhen in 2008 and now works for Tsinghua Fuzhong, Tsinghua University’s Affiliated High School. He just published a book in China called Creative China about his experiences in Chinese public schools. I spoke to him in Beijing in late March about the future of education in China.

Susan Headden (PDF):

PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHING is a profession in transition.
Already the largest occupation in the United States, it is expanding faster than the nation’s student population. Teachers of color are entering the profession at twice the rate of white teachers, reversing an exodus after civil rights victories opened many other doors to African Americans. And women are again entering the profession in greater numbers after years of bypassing the field for other opportunities.1

But what may be most significant—to students, schools, and the nation—is that teachers today are younger and markedly less experienced than a generation ago.2 Experts consider teachers with five or fewer years of experience to be still learning their craft.3 By the end of the last decade, more than a quarter of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers were in that category, compared to only about 17 percent in the late 1980s. Back then, the most common teacher in America was a 15-year veteran; two decades later, she was a first-year neophyte. 4 “The flow of new teachers,” says Richard Ingersoll, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education who studies teacher trends, “has become a flood.”

Although the recent recession pushed back the tide somewhat, and has likely raised the level of experience, the sheer number of novices in public school teaching has serious financial, structural, and educational consequences for public education—straining budgets, disrupting school cultures and, most significantly, depressing student achievement.

Yet there has been scant discussion of the phenomenon by education policymakers. “I don’t know why everybody isn’t talking about this,” says Gail McGee, manager of new teacher induction for the Houston Independent School District. “It overwhelms me. Everybody, everywhere, is single-mindedly focused on the achievement gap, and nobody is spending any time talking about what potentially could be one of the biggest underlies of why we have one.”6

David Gurliacci:

Known as a P-TECH model school, the six-year academy is a collaboration with IBM, Norwalk Public Schools and Norwalk Community College.

Norwalk Early College Academy (NECA) will serve grades 9 to 14 and enable students to graduate with both a high school diploma and a no-cost Associate in Applied Science degree that will put graduates on the path to a good job.

Created by IBM and partners, P-TECH schools are innovative public schools that bring together the best elements of high school, college, and career. There are no tests or screening required for admission.

The new school in Norwalk will be located at the Norwalk High School, and graduates will be first in line for jobs at IBM.

“As Connecticut industry and government realign for the 21st Century, it has become clear that there is a skills gap in our national and state economies,” Governor Malloy said.

“However, Connecticut is home to many industries that will be growth and innovation sectors over the next 10 to 20 years, and we must prepare our students with the skills they need to succeed in that workforce.

Bryan Alexander

American higher education now seems to be recovering at last from the 2008 financial crisis. Some states are increasing their support for public universities and colleges. Backlash against the impact of budget cuts seems to have the idea of austerity down a peg, if not discredited it entirely, which might free up more budgetary room for governmental support of education. On the private side, institutional endowments are finally rising after years of stagnation and decline. Domestically, American college graduates still enjoy higher lifetime earnings than those with only high school experience. Internationally, the number of students traveling to study in the United States continues to grow.

But what if these cheerful data paint an inaccurate picture? What if a battery of other data points, driven by powerful forces, exerts pressure in the opposite direction, pushing American colleges and universities into contraction? Much like “peak car,” the demand for higher education may have reached an upper point, and started to decline. Like peak oil or peak water, it’s becoming more expensive and problematic to meet demand. As a thought experiment, let us examine these forces and consider this possible scenario under the header: Peak Higher Education.

Enrico Gnaulti:

Rates of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are not creeping up so much as leaping up. New numbers just released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that one in 68 children now has a diagnosis of ASD—a 30 percent increase in just two years. In 2002, about one in 150 children was considered autistic and in 1991 the figure was one in 500.

The staggering increase in cases of ASD should raise more suspicion in the medical community about its misdiagnosis and overdiagnosis than it does. Promoting early screening for autism is imperative. But, is it possible that the younger in age a child is when professionals screen for ASD—especially its milder cases—the greater the risk that a slow-to-mature child will be misperceived as autistic, thus driving the numbers up?

The science stacks up in favor of catching and treating ASD earlier because it leads to better outcomes. Dr. Laura Schreibman, who directs the Autism Intervention Research Program at the University of California, San Diego embodies the perspective of most experts when she says, “Psychologists need to advise parents that the ‘wait-and-see’ approach is not appropriate when ASD is expected. Delaying a diagnosis can mean giving up significant gains of intervention that have been demonstrated before age six.”

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez:

Southern California researchers are finding that foundations, set up to raise money for public schools, are reintroducing funding inequality that was supposed to be eliminated back in the 1970s, when the California Supreme Court ruled on the Serrano vs. Priest case.

“The court said spending needs to be equitable between school districts, you can’t have Beverly Hills spending twice as much as the other guys, per pupil, because a child’s education should not be dependent on the wealth of the area in which they happen to live,” said Cal State Fullerton professor Sarah Hill.

She and two colleagues have compiled information from about 1,500 education foundations and other fundraising groups such as booster clubs and PTAs, along with Internal Revenue Service data, to create a database Hill said is the first of its kind.

“We’re doing more of a sophisticated analysis looking at how wealth matters for which school districts are able to raise money. How demographics matter,” she said.

Some Northern California public school foundations are raising additional funds of about $2,000 per student. Researchers say that figure is a significant addition to the roughly $8,000 per student the state gives public schools each year. California’s current level of per pupil spending is the second lowest in the country.

Adam Liptak:

It was the last Monday in June, and the Supreme Court had just issued its latest decision on affirmative action. The debate was starting about how much the court had restricted the use of race in college admissions.

But Edward Blum, the legal entrepreneur who had orchestrated the case, wasted no time. He made a prediction that sounded a little like a threat.

“Those universities that continue using race-based affirmative action,” he said, “will likely find themselves embroiled in costly and polarizing litigation.”

It is now almost a year later. Admissions letters have just gone out, and there is no particular reason to think the court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas affected how students were selected. And the lawsuits Mr. Blum predicted have not materialized.

Abigail Fisher, who was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin, said her race was held against her.Justices Step Up Scrutiny of Race in College EntryJUNE 24, 2013
There are reasons for that, Mr. Blum told me last week. One is that it is hard to find plaintiffs willing to call attention to having been rejected by a prestigious institution, to blame that rejection on race discrimination and to persevere through years of litigation.

Alyssa Abkowitz:

Chinese businessman Li Sheng is looking for a $900,000, four-bedroom home in Australia, where he hopes his two children will someday attend college. At this point, neither child has finished grade school—one is still in diapers—but Mr. Li hopes to buy a family home in Melbourne in the next year.

Mr. Li, who lives in Harbin, an industrial city in northern China, sees the purchase as a good investment in both his real-estate portfolio and his children’s future. While China has plenty of universities, he and other affluent parents say they want their children to experience life abroad, where the educational system is less rigid. “In Chinese families, the parents make the choice for their kids,” Mr. Li, 40, says. When his children get older, “I don’t want to make choices for them. I want them to do it themselves.”

In an effort to increase the likelihood of their children studying abroad, a growing group of Chinese buyers is snapping up high-end real estate in college towns around the world. Some Chinese buyers are using the properties to meet the universities’ residency requirements. Luxury homes also offer their children an upscale alternative to dorm life. Most important, many hope that real-estate purchases will help pay the costly university tuition.

Center on Reinventing Public Education, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Tennessee’s state-run Achievement School District (ASD) has again received high marks on its implementation of the portfolio strategy for managing and improving schools. New York City, Denver, and the Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans also continue to lead among districts implementing these reforms.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington has released the new rankings as part of its work supporting a national network of over 40 portfolio school systems.

CRPE’s Portfolio Implementation Snapshot Tool rates each school system’s progress on portfolio reforms. The twice-yearly assessments are based on interviews with district or other system leaders and measure implementation progress on the strategy’s seven key components: good options and choices for all families, school autonomy, pupil-based funding, a talent-seeking strategy, new sources of support for schools, performance-based accountability, and extensive public engagement.

Districts can use the online tool to track progress (or lack of it) and see how they line up with best-in-class portfolio practices and other districts in the Portfolio School District Network. “These ratings show cities where they are and where they want to be,” says Christine Campbell, CRPE’s policy director. “The cities that invest the time in these interviews and bravely open themselves up for review are making a big step forward, whether they are currently at the top or the bottom of this list. In six months’ time, some of those just getting started will see big gains because they are becoming strategic about their work and actively making use of the network’s resources.”

Marni Bromberg & Christi Theokas (PDF):

Nationally, there are 61,250 students of color and 60,300 students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds who perform among the top 25 percent of all students in reading and math at the beginning of high school.

Many high-achieving students of color and students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, however, leave high school with lower AP exam rates, lower SAT/ACT scores, and lower GPAs than their high-achieving white and more advantaged peers — a reality that influences their choices beyond high school.

Schools can take action to better serve these students. Interviews with the principal of one successful school and with high-achieving students from around the country provide insight on what practitioners can do.

Related: “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!

Two of the most popular — and most insidious — myths about academically gifted kids is that “they’re all rich, white kids” and that, no matter what they experience in school, “they’ll do just fine.” Even in our own district, however, the hard data do not support those assertions.

When the District analyzed dropout data for the five-year period between 1995 and 1999, they identified four student profiles. Of interest for the present purpose is the group identified as high achieving. Here are the data from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Report from May, 2000:

Charles Kenny:

It is college acceptance season, and letters with financial aid offers attached are dropping on doormats nationwide. Many students and an even greater number of parents are facing the sticker shock associated with tertiary education. As college prices rise—the average annual cost hit $18,497 in 2010-11, according to the National Center for Education Statistics—the question inevitably arises: Is it worth it? For the average student in the U.S. and worldwide, the answer is affirmative: Education remains a fantastic investment for individuals. The tougher question is whether education at all levels is such a great investment for societies as a whole.

In the U.S., education leads to higher wages. Median weekly earnings in 2013 were $472 for someone with less than a high school diploma, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number rises to $1,108 for those with a bachelor’s degree and $1,714 for those with a professional degree such as an MBA or J.D. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper suggested that the educational payoff for “marginal” college students—the ones who might not attend if it weren’t for government support, for example—may be a lot lower. Still, for most students, the high cost of college is well worth it.

That’s true worldwide as well. Recent estimates (PDF) for Ghana, for example, suggest that each additional year a child stays in school translates into an average annual income 7 percent higher. In China, that figure is 12 percent.

Q&A with Christopher Chatham:

It’s happens to all of us: times when we simply cannot stop ourselves mid-action, whether running a yellow (or red) light, making an inappropriate comment, or reaching for our buzzing phone during dinner. Most of the time, adults can overcome these impulses. Children, however, are notoriously different – most of the time seemingly incapable of curbing impulsive responses. New research suggests the problem is not an inability to stop but rather that they lack awareness of their environment.

Our ability to proactively monitor our surroundings is what allows us to stop mid-action, says Yuko Munakata of the University of Colorado Boulder, who will presenting new work at the CNS conference on Tuesday. She, along with Nicolas Chevalier of the University of Edinburgh and Christopher Chatham of Brown University, tested this idea in 7- to 9-year-olds, seeing if monitoring their environments improved their ability to subsequently stop behaviors compared to simply telling them to stop.

Chatham, who will be co-chairing the session at the CNS meeting about response inhibition, talked with CNS about this new research and how it fits into the big picture of differences between children’s and adults’ capabilities.

Harold Wilde:

College presidents—and I was one for 22 years—have few more thankless jobs than procuring (and that’s the right word) commencement speakers.

The expectation of graduates and their families is that a big-time speaker will be there to put the cherry on top of the sundae that was their college experience (and all those tuition dollars). So expectations are high. The ideal commencement speaker is a household name, has landed on the moon, won a Nobel Prize and a few NBA championships, was on the cover of last week’s People magazine … and will bring front-page publicity to the school (like George Marshall’s announcement of the Marshall Plan at Harvard’s 1947 commencement), forever glorifying their graduation day.

This is a fantasy, and the commencement speaker may be a tradition that long ago outlived its usefulness. But the college president, sharing the platform with the speaker, has no choice but to be personally involved. Few mistakes on his or her watch will be more visible, or more challenging to avoid, than the wrong commencement speaker.

Start with the constituents. At many schools, the students are polled every year on their preferred list of speakers. The ones you’ve heard of (probably less than half, e.g., the rap artists) either carry a speakers bureau charge of $25,000 to $100,000— or will cost you even more in the support you lose from your biggest donors. And, anyway, you have no money to pay for a commencement speaker. “The honor of the occasion, receiving an honorary degree, it should be enough.” Right! That may work in the Ivy League and at flagship state universities, but not at 3,400 other institutions across the country.

The Hechinger Report:

Here’s a modest test result to bolster the argument of those who say the American educational system isn’t so terrible. On a new creative problem-solving test taken by students in 44 countries and regions, U.S. 15-year-olds scored above the international average and rank at number 18 in the world. That’s much better than the below-average performance of U.S. students on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) reading and math tests conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“We think teaching through problem solving is already more developed in the US than in other countries,” said the OECD’s Pablo Zoido, in explaining why US students have higher problem-solving scores than expected.

Still, Asian countries and regions dominate the top 10 spots in creative problem solving, with Singapore, Korea and Japan taking first, second and third place. Canada, Australia and Finland were the only non-Asian nations to make it into the top 10. Shanghai, which topped the PISA charts in math and reading, was relatively weaker in problem solving at number 6.

Pew Research:

More moms are staying home: The share of mothers who do not work outside the home has risen over the past decade, reversing a long-term decline in stay-at-home mothers. (In the U.S. today, 71% of all mothers work outside the home.) Two-thirds are “traditional” married stay-at-home mothers with working husbands, but a growing share is unmarried.

2 Americans say a parent at home is best: Despite the fact that most mothers in the U.S. work at least part time, 60% of Americans say children are better off when a parent stays home to focus on the family, while 35% say they are just as well off when both parents work outside the home.

Can someone please tell me why this isn't more informative than the unemployment rate? pic.twitter.com/SaZoaDIQmG

— Amir Sufi (@profsufi) April 9, 2014

Related: Madison’s planned $39,500,000 fall property tax increase referendum.

Minding The Campus:

s students and their families rethink the value of the liberal arts, defenders of traditional education are understandably ambivalent. On the one hand, the diminished stature of the liberal arts seems long overdue, and this critical reevaluation might lead to thoughtful reform. On the other, this reevaluation might doom the liberal arts to irrelevance. To that end, Minding the Campus asked a list of distinguished thinkers a straightforward question: should we be unhappy that the liberal arts are going down? Here are responses from Heather Mac Donald, Thomas Lindsay, and Samuel Goldman.

Heather Mac Donald, Manhattan Institute

We shouldn’t only be unhappy if the liberal arts are “going down.” We should be ashamed. Our highest duty as a civilization is to keep alive those works from the past that gave birth to our present freedoms and that constitute the most profound expressions of what it means to be human.

I see no evidence that a “critical evaluation” of the liberal arts is underway, beyond an ignorant flight on the part of some college students towards more allegedly marketable majors. This idea of a job-ready major is a fallacy; outside of vocational training and some select STEM fields, few majors, whether economics or philosophy, have a direct connection to most jobs.

But while the marketable major is an illusion, there is no question that the conceit is driving many students away from humanistic study. The irony is that colleges are themselves wholly responsible for endangering those fields that were once their very raison d’être. For it is their sky-high tuitions that are fueling this migration into purportedly more bankable fields and their adolescent politicization of the humanities that is failing to give students a reason to look back.

Tuition levels are the result of universities’ own decision-making–above all, their insatiable drive to expand their student services bureaucracy. No branch of that endlessly growing bureaucracy is more senseless and self-indulgent than the diversity superstructure, founded as it is on a demonstrable lie: that colleges are bastions of discrimination against minorities and females.

Sue Shellenbarger:

Those early childhood memories, which are so quick to fade, are important in influencing decisions in later life. WSJ’s Sue Shellenbarger reports on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.

What you can remember from age 3 may help improve aspects of your life far into adulthood.

Children who have the ability to recall and make sense of memories from daily life—the first day of preschool, the time the cat died—can use them to better develop a sense of identity, form relationships and make sound choices in adolescence and adulthood, new research shows.

While the lives of many youngsters today are heavily documented in photos and video on social media and stored in families’ digital archives, studies suggest photos and videos have little impact. Parents play a bigger role in helping determine not just how many early memories children can recall, but how children interpret and learn from the events of their earliest experiences.

“Our personal memories define who we are. They bond us together,” says Robyn Fivush, a psychology professor at Emory University in Atlanta and an author of dozens of studies on the topic. Children whose parents encourage reminiscing and storytelling about daily events show better coping and problem-solving skills by their preteens, and fewer symptoms of depression, research shows.

Douglas Belkin & Caroline Porter:

More companies are entering partnerships with colleges to help design curricula, as state universities seek new revenue and industry tries to close a yawning skills gap. Doug Belkin reports on Lunch Break. Photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick for The Wall Street Journal.

The University of Maryland has had to tighten its belt, cutting seven varsity sports teams and forcing faculty and staff to take furlough days. But in a corner of the campus, construction workers are building a dormitory specifically designed for a new academic program.

Many of the students who live there will be enrolled in a cybersecurity concentration funded in part by Northrop Grumman Corp. NOC -0.35% The defense contractor is helping to design the curriculum, providing the computers and paying part of the cost of the new dorm.

Such partnerships are springing up from the dust of the recession, as state universities seek new revenue and companies try to close a yawning skills gap in fast-changing industries.

Kingsley R. Browne:

Implicit in the materials for this conference is the assumption that any gap that exists between men and women in the workplace (at least if the gap seems to disfavor women) should be eliminated. The question is asked, “how can this gap be explained and rectified?,” implying that “rectification” should follow irrespective of how the gap is explained.

There are many statistical disparities between the sexes in our world, but only some become the subject of widespread concern. Ones that are perceived as favoring men are labeled “gaps,” while those that favor women are simply facts. Outside the workplace, men are arguably disadvantaged in a variety of arenas, whether in terms of health and longevity, crime and violence, domestic relations, or education. In the workplace, men are far more likely than women to be killed and to work long hours. None of these disparities is generally viewed as a “gap” deserving of intervention, however. Men earn a disproportionate number of Ph.Ds in some fields, while women earn a disproportionate number in others. Only the former set of disparities, however, is typically viewed as a “gap.”

Neil Munshi:

The Illinois legislature has passed a plan to overhaul two of the funds in the Chicago pension system, by far the most underfunded of any large US city.

The move is an important first step toward shoring up the combined $27bn unfunded liability the city and its school district have racked up after years of the government failing to pay its share. The massive liability has caused the city to suffer multiple credit rating downgrades in recent years.

The bill now moves to the desk of Governor Pat Quinn, who has not indicated whether he will sign it into law.

The reform addresses the pension funds for municipal employees and labourers, which are 37.6 per cent and 56.3 per cent funded, respectively. The bill would increase the funding levels to 90 per cent by 2055 through benefit cuts and increases in employee contributions.

Erin Richards & Kevin Crowe:

Reading and math proficiency for students attending private, mostly religious schools in Milwaukee with the help of taxpayer-funded vouchers ticked up in 2013 from 2012, according to the latest state standardized test score results.

On average, students in Milwaukee’s private-school voucher program still performed lower than students in the city’s traditional public school system.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released fall test score data for the taxpayer-funded private voucher schools on Tuesday, one day after allowing media to review the fall 2013 state test score results for public schools.

In all, reading and math achievement on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination for both the public and private voucher schools, especially in Milwaukee, continued to be low. That’s due in part to the state raising the bar for what’s considered a proficient score on the state test.

The WKCE will be replaced next year by a new, computer-based assessment in reading and math that is aligned to national standards and will allow for better comparisons of achievement between states.

Another issue that has cropped up is an increasing number of voucher-school families opting their children out of taking the state exams altogether — a legal option, but one seemingly at odds with the statewide push toward more transparency for schools.

Gov. Scott Walker signed two bills into law Tuesday that will bring more accountability to the private schools receiving taxpayer money.

Meanwhile, the latest state test results showed:

About 16% of Milwaukee voucher students who took the state test met or exceeded the bar for proficiency in math, and about 12% did the same in reading.

Much more on the oft criticized WKCE, here.

Sophia Grene:

Financial education falls into the motherhood and apple-pie category – almost everyone is in favour of it. So the news that a number of asset managers have taken part in an initiative by Redstart to provide financial education to English schoolchildren appears positive.

The move has raised concerns, however, chiefly the potential conflicts of interest. Should the vendors of financial products also be allowed to provide education about them?

The founders of Redstart hail from Redington, the investment consultancy. The company has little to gain from getting its name in front of schoolchildren. Redington does not deal with the retail market, so has neither products to push nor brands to promote.

But asset managers, who have proved happy to become involved, are likely to count on schoolchildren being their future customers.

“If financial institutions want to fund financial education, that is all well and good, as long as they have no part in designing it or delivering it,” says Mick McAteer, founder and director of The Financial Inclusion Centre, a think-tank. “If they are serious about doing it for public policy reasons, not just as a Trojan horse marketing stunt, let them fund financial education charities.”

Princeton Press (PDF):

The mathematics of ancient Iraq, attested from the last three millennia BCE, was written on clay tablets in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages using the cuneiform script, often with numbers in the sexagesimal place value system (§1.2). There have been many styles of interpretation since the discovery and decipherment of that mathematics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries CE (§1.1), but this book advocates a combination of close attention to textual and linguistic detail, as well as material and archaeological evidence, to situate ancient mathematics within the socio-intellectual worlds of the individuals and communities who produced and consumed it (§1.3)

Iraq—Sumer—Babylonia—Mesopotamia: under any or all of these names almost every general textbook on the history of mathematics assigns the origins of ‘pure’ mathematics to the distant past of the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Here, over five thousand years ago, the fi rst systematic accounting techniques were developed, using clay counters to represent fixed quantities of traded and stored goods in the world’s earliest cities (§2.2). Here too, in the early second millennium bce, the world’s first positional system of numerical notation—the famous sexagesimal place value system—was widely used (§4.2). The earliest widespread evidence for ‘pure’ mathematics comes from the same place and time, including a very accurate approximation to the square root of 2, an early form of abstract algebra, and the knowledge, if not proof, of ‘Pythagoras’ theorem’ defining the relationship between the sides of a right-angled triangle (§4.3). The best-known mathematical artefact from this time, the cuneiform tablet
Plimpton 322, has been widely discussed and admired, and claims have been made for its function that range from number theory to trigonometry to astronomy. Most of the evidence for mathematical astronomy, however, comes from the later fi rst millennium bce (§8.2), from which it is clear that Babylonian astronomical observations, calculational models, and the sexagesimal place value system all had a deep impact on the later development of Old World astronomy, in particular through the person and works of Ptolemy. It is hardly surprising, then, that ever since its discovery a century ago the mathematics of ancient Iraq has claimed an important role in
the history of early mathematics.

Cultural progressives often talk about something called “hegemonic masculinity.” By this progressives and feminists mean the standards we use to determine what an ideal man is in a particular culture. Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson, in The Gendered Society Reader, describe American hegemonic masculinity this way:

In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports . . . Any male who fails to qualify in any one of these ways is likely to view himself–during moments at least–as unworthy, incomplete and inferior.

With this definition, progressives and feminists are on what seems to be a campaign to “dismantle” any sense of “American” masculinity. Additionally, part of the mission is to redefine all of America’s problems in terms of what males, especially white males, have done to ruin society. As many have argued before, the first step in solving social ills is to pathologize boyhood and numb it into oblivion.

Esquire Magazine recently ran a story titled “The Drugging Of The American Boy” which highlights the seemingly settled disposition that developing masculinity is something to be diagnosed as ADHD and, therefore, a problem to be solved. The article cites this data:

Thomas Lin:

Freeman Dyson — the world-renowned mathematical physicist who helped found quantum electrodynamics with the bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and others, devised numerous mathematical techniques, led the team that designed a low-power nuclear reactor that produces medical isotopes for research hospitals, dreamed of exploring the solar system in spaceships propelled by nuclear bombs, wrote technical and popular science books, penned dozens of reviews for The New York Review of Books, and turned 90 in December — is pondering a new math problem.

“There’s a class of problem that Freeman just lights up on,” said the physicist and computational biologist William Press, a longtime colleague and friend. “It has to be unsolved and well-posed and have something in it that admits to his particular kind of genius.” That genius, he said, represents a kind of “ingenuity and a spark” that most physicists lack: “The ability to see further in the mathematical world of concepts and instantly grasp a path to the distant horizon that’s the solution.”

Priyamvada Gopal:

The once highly-regarded British public university is not quite dead but it is in terminal care. After half a century of global success on public funding that amounted to less than 1.5% of Britain’s GDP, in the space of two years we’ve seen the partial withdrawal of the state from the sector, and it is expected that this is a precursor to full withdrawal followed by extensive privatisation.

With the overnight tripling of tuition fees in 2010 (in the face of widespread protests) and with further rises in the offing, the student has been reframed as a consumer buying private goods in the form of a degree. Combine this with a mortgage and you have a large number of citizens who are unlikely to be debt-free at any point in their life.

Formerly known as a university, the service provider of higher education is now to sink or swim in response to the pressures of competition, as degree-awarding corporations rather than sites of inquiry and learning. Ironically, however, it turns out that the new fees regime which David Willetts, the Universities Minister, keeps bizarrely insisting is fairer than the previous one, is actually costing the exchequer more, through the rising costs of subsidising student loans.

Eva Dou:

In a concession to student protesters, Taiwan Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng said Sunday a review of a contentious services trade pact with China will be delayed until an oversight mechanism for cross-strait agreements is enacted.

The announcement is the largest gesture of conciliation from Mr. Wang since students stormed the legislature three weeks ago and barricaded themselves inside to protest the services trade agreement, which was signed last year.

The protesters have said negotiations between Taipei and Beijing weren’t transparent and demanded that the government set up a legally binding mechanism to oversee all cross-Strait deals, including the services trade pact, to ensure proper oversight and public input.

Pressure is mounting on the government to resolve an impasse over the trade pact that has moved thousands of students to camp inside and outside the legislature since March 18. More than 100,000 protesters gathered outside Taiwan’s Presidential Office Building in downtown Taipei last Sunday.

Alan Borsuk:

“It’s all about teacher quality,” Eric Hanushek said.

“What improves student achievement is improved instruction,” said Michael Casserly.

What’s needed, said Paul Hill, is “a mechanism to drive (the search for improvement) beyond the comfort zone of the school providers.”

If you were looking for one answer for improving American education outcomes, you didn’t find it in Milwaukee last week. But if you were looking for food for thought, the week brought rich offerings.

An unusual number of the nation’s — and in some cases, the world’s — leading thinkers and voices on education were involved in two separate events, one public, one invitation-only.

The public event, at Marquette University Law School, focused on what Milwaukee can learn from urban school systems where there are signs of improvement. (I was involved in organizing the session and moderated part of it.)

The private event was hosted by the low-profile but influential Kern Family Foundation, based in Waukesha County with more than a half billion dollars in assets and a strong interest in education.

Kern brought together 15 to 20 researchers and advocates at a downtown Milwaukee hotel to work on strategies for increasing U.S. success in international educational competitiveness. I sat in on several presentations (and will say more on what I learned later).

Ashley Jochim:

Lyndon B. Johnson once quipped, “Good politics is good government.” Johnson realized that whether a given public policy achieves its intended objectives is rarely a matter solely of technical design. Rather, success depends both on the quality of the plan and whether it is implemented fully enough to stand the chance of having an impact—a process that may take years.

It has been more than a decade since my colleagues at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, Paul Hill and Christine Campbell, wrote It Takes a City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform along with James Harvey. But its lessons about urban school reform are as relevant now as they were then. In analyzing systemic education reform in six cities, the authors posed a question of enormous consequence: How can city leaders construct reform strategies that promise to be powerful enough and last long enough to make a difference?

Fixing urban schools, they argued, requires more than lofty goals or incomplete strategies. The reform plans in the studied cities too often relied on “zones of wishful thinking”—assuming that teachers, principals, and district administrators would do what was right, rather than creating a plan that provided the incentives, freedom, and capacity for them to do so. Combining the best elements of each, the authors put forth three new reform models, including one option that would provide community oversight of a system of autonomous schools, much like the portfolio strategy does today.

Anne Tergesen:

As more couples delay having children, their parents have to wait longer for their first grandchild. Anne Tergesen joins Lunch Break with a look at the broader societal impact of couples having children later. Photo: Videoblocks.

It’s a natural part of growing older. People start to long for grandchildren—and many start to pressure their adult child, in overt or subtle ways, to produce those grandchildren.

For the current generation of would-be grandparents and their children, those desires are getting more urgent—and the pressure is getting a lot more intense.

It comes down to simple arithmetic. More individuals are waiting until their 30s and beyond to have their first child. Perhaps they want to get their finances or career in order first, find the right partner or take on other big projects like an advanced degree or world travel.

Whatever the reason, the result is that their parents have to wait longer for their first grandchild—perhaps to age 70 instead of age 60. They have to worry about whether they will be healthy enough to help out and enjoy the time they have with their grandchildren. Or if they’ll be alive at all.

Madison School District (PDF):

Understand the status of the MMSD evaluator certification process
Understand who will be evaluated and when

Understand the evaluation workflow

Understand professional development calendar to support implementation

When will staff be evaluated?

MMSD will “reset” the evaluation schedule, balancing one-third of evaluations, for each building, across the next 3 years

All new teachers to MMSD must be evaluated in their first year of employment

Referenced edu-jargon translation:

The Danielson Framework: Duck Duck Go | Google | Bing.

The Teachscape Evaluator: Duck Duck Go | Google | Bing.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation:

In this policy report, the Annie E. Casey Foundation explores the intersection of kids, race and opportunity. The report features the new Race for Results index, which compares how children are progressing on key milestones across racial and ethnic groups at the national and state level. The index is based on 12 indicators that measure a child’s success in each stage of life, from birth to adulthood, in the areas of early childhood; education and early work; family supports; and neighborhood context. The report also makes four policy recommendations to help ensure that all children and their families achieve their full potential.

Nicholas Simmons:

I’m a seventh-grade math teacher at Success Academy Harlem West, a public charter school. On April 30 and May 2, 3, the 272 students at my school, along with some 480,000 other New York City public school children, will sit for the state math exam. Last year, 89% of my seventh-graders and 83% of our sixth-graders passed the test, more than half scoring at the highest level.

But only 29% of all sixth-grade public-school students in the city passed the New York State Mathematics Test last year. Among sixth-grade black and Latino kids, only 15% and 17% passed, respectively. Among my sixth-graders, 97% are African-American or Latino, and three out of four of them are from low-income families.

Many teachers and parents—as well as New York City’s school chancellor and the mayor, have said there is too much emphasis on testing. But at Success Academy, we believe internal assessments and the results from state exams are essential feedback for how well we as teachers have done our job in the classroom. Students and teachers embrace academic rigor and take pride in having some of the top math scores in the city, in many cases outperforming the city’s gifted and talented programs.

Bill Korach, via Will Fitzhugh:

Delaney Moran, a senior at Lenox Memorial High School in Lenox, MA, has written an evocative account about the legendary Savoy Ballroom in Harlem for The Concord Review. “Stompin’ at the Savoy” the hit song written by Edgar Sampson and recorded separately by Benny Goodman and Chick Webb recalls the great days of the Savoy Ballroom in the 1930’s and 40’s. Since 1987, The Concord Review has been publishing the best high school papers in America. Each quarter, Will Fitzhugh, TCR publisher and his reviewers select the best papers for publication. The papers, from 6000-20,000 words represent the gold standard in high school writing. Fitzhugh and many others in education believe that reading and writing are the best way to learn and think. Writing was once an obvious and basic educational tool, but today as schools are dumbing down their students serious writing has all but vanished from the classroom. Happily, TCR continues to find and publish excellent work.

Delaney Moran’s paper opens with this account:

The entrance to the Savoy was at street level. You went down one flight to check your coat, then you walked back up two flights to the ballroom which was on the second floor. as I was climbing the steps that led to the ballroom, I could hear this swinging music coming down the stairwell, and it started seeping right into my body. I got to the top step, went through the double doors, and stopped for a moment with my back to the bandstand, taking it all in. When I turned around and faced the room…well, I just stood there with my mouth open. The whole floor was full of people—and they were dancing! The band was pounding. The guys up there were wailing! The music was rompin’ and stompin’. everyone was movin’ and groovin’.1
These were the remarks of Frankie Manning, a black dancer from Harlem, upon entering the Savoy Ballroom for the first time. This scene depicts a typical night at the Savoy Ballroom in 1930s Harlem. The Savoy was the most popular nightclub in the city and home to the best jazz and the best dancers New York had to offer.2 Remarkably, it was completely integrated from its inception in 1926, despite segregation in almost every other section of the country, including New York City.

Eleanor J Bader:

While we may tend to romanticize universities as bastions of free thought and intellectual rigor, Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira’s new book, The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, demonstrates their subjection to the same ideological underpinnings as the general body politic.

The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, Edited by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira University of Minnesota Press, 400 pages, $29.95.

For the past 10 years, I’ve taught English at a large, public community college in Brooklyn, New York. Most of my students are the first in their families to attend a university – and while some are disaffected, the majority are engaged and eager, hopeful that the promise of a higher education will open doors and provide them with a stable future. They’re also largely immigrants, and it is not uncommon for 28 students from 20 countries to find themselves sitting side-by-side in a classroom, arguing and debating about the meaning of a particular text.

Daisy Christodoulou, via Will Fitzhugh:

In 2007, I trained as a teacher and started teaching English in a secondary school in Southeast London that enrolls stu- dents between the ages of 11 and 18. One of the first things that struck me when I was teaching was that my pupils seemed to know so little. Even the bright and hard-working pupils seemed to me to have big gaps in their knowledge.

Before I became a teacher, I’d read newspaper articles about pupils lacking knowledge, but I had always assumed these reports had been exaggerated by the media. I wondered if my experiences were unusual, but the experiences of colleagues at other schools seemed similar to mine. Pupils who didn’t know where milk came from, who didn’t know the name of the British prime minister, who could barely name any foreign countries, and who had no idea of when important world-changing technologies had been invented.

I started researching the issue, and I found that my experiences weren’t atypical. I also found that many American teachers had the same experiences. For example, there’s a study showing that two-thirds of Americans can’t name the three branches of the United States government.1 In the United Kingdom, there’s a study showing that a third of pupils think the House of Lords is elected.

Hamilton Nolan:

America’s student debt burden has been on the rise for years, along with America’s class of incredibly well-educated retail workers. A new report reveals who’s driving the train to debt hell: grad students. Don’t do it!

Do you really need to go to grad school? For the vast majority of those of you considering going to grad school, the answer is “probably not.” So consider this a bit of data to encourage you to skip it. Take a year off. Travel the world. Hitchhike. Join the Peace Corps. Be a bartender. Huddle in a remote cabin and write your novel. Learn the trombone. All of these are good, affordable activities to pursue as you consider the findings of today’s New America Foundation report, which shows that the increase in the debt load of graduate students in the past decade makes the student debt load for undergrads look paltry by comparison. From the Wall Street Journal:

Jason Read:

“Whenever you have a ‘southern’ or a ‘northern’ or an ‘eastern’ or a ‘western’ before an institution’s name, you know it will be wildly underfunded.” –Richard Russo

On March nineteenth the Chancellor of the University of Maine System, as well as the President, and select members of the Board of Trustees gathered in front of a crowd of students, faculty and staff in the Hannaford Lecture Hall, a spacious and new lecture hall (more often rented out than used for classes) to unveil the University of Southern Maine’s new vision as a “Metropolitan University.” Two days later, on the twenty-first, twelve members of the faculty from such programs as economics, theater, and sociology met with the provost of the University to be “retrenched.” Both of these events followed the proposal to eliminate four programs (American and New England Studies, Geosciences, Recreation and Leisure Studies, and Arts and Humanities at the Lewiston Auburn Campus) the week before. It was a strange and tumultuous week, and one that I fear offers a frightening glimpse of a future of higher public education in the US.

All of these events, the rebranding and the cuts, were in a response to a system wide budget shortfall of $35 million, of which USM is slated to absorb $14 million in cuts. Claims of poverty on the part of public universities need to be contextualized against the massive decrease in state allocations, on the one hand, and the increasing connection between the university and financial services, on the other (on this point in general see Edward Kazarian’s post) in which bond ratings matter more than educational mission. With respect to the former the University of Maine system has followed the national trend of divestment in higher education. In 1999 appropriations accounted for 63 percent of the university’s budget while tuition and fees made up 37 percent, by 2014 this was reversed to 62 percent from tuition and 38 from allocation. During this period Maine went through the largest tax cut in its history, cutting taxes on inheritance and otherwise making it easier for the wealthiest to keep their money. A tuition freeze instituted in 2012 followed closely on the heels of this cut. (The latter is a perfect example of faux-populism, taking measures to supposedly cut college costs while failing to address the real cause of those costs.) During this same period USM added several new buildings, such as the lecture hall noted above. As enrollment dropped by six percent from 2008-2012 the combination of reduced appropriations, fixed tuition, and decreased enrollment led to a perfect storm of budget problems.

Eddie Small:

Kevin Floerke has been down this route before.

A student at Santa Rosa Junior College in Northern California, Floerke, 26 years old, already graduated in 2010 from UCLA, where he majored in archaeology.

This time, however, he’s not after a degree. He’s just trying to master a set of techniques and technologies that will help him verify the details he finds while doing fieldwork.

“I’m really there to learn the program itself and be able to use it in a professional setting,” he said.

Floerke, who leads tours for the National Geographic Society, is part of a group of students known as “skill builders” who are using conventional colleges in an unconventional way: not to get degrees but simply to learn specific kinds of expertise, without spending time or money on courses they don’t think they need.

It’s a trend being driven by the rising price of higher education and a growing emphasis on paying for training in only the most marketable skills.

Al Shanker via Will Fitzhugh:

Usually when I write this column, I’m trying to convince thousands of people about something. This time, I’m trying to reach one or two people. I don’t even know who they are, but they’ll have to be people receptive to spending some money on a good cause. Here’s the story.

Over the past several years, I’ve looked forward to seeing a quarterly history journal called The Concord Review come across my desk. The articles are a pleasure to read; they’re fresh, lively, well-researched and sometimes elegant. Their range is impressive. Among the essays I’ve found most interesting were ones on the Pullman Strike of 1894; on Lillie A. James, an African-American woman who pioneered education for African-Americans in Pensacola; and George W.G. Ferris, the inventor of the Ferris Wheel, which he meant to be the American answer to the Eiffel Tower. If you just picked it up and started reading, you’d never know the most extraordinary thing about The Concord Review—that all the essays are the work of high school students.

Editor Will Fitzhugh quit teaching and founded the journal five [27] years ago. He was impressed by the essays some of his own students produced, and he became convinced that there must be lots of other terrific history essays out there. Why not recognize, and encourage excellence by publishing some of them? The results have been wonderful. The essays come from both public and private school students, and they exemplify the level kids can achieve when they are interested in what they are doing and encouraged to pursue it.

The Review has won plenty of friends and admirers among people who are concerned about raising the standards of achievement in American education: Diane Ravitch, noted historian and assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education; Chester Finn, a former assistant secretary of education; Harold Howe, a former U.S. Commissioner of Education; James Freedman, president of Dartmouth College; and Theodore Sizer, founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, have all written in its support. I wrote an earlier column myself.

People in the front lines have been enthusiastic, too. Teachers from all over the world have sent student essays and money for subscriptions. And a commercial publisher has chosen four essays that appeared in the Review for a series on writing dedicated to secondary school students. One of Fitzhugh’s favorite testimonials is from an official of a foundation that didn’t offer the Review an financial support. Apparently, the man picked up a copy to glance at one essay and ended up reading the entire 150-page issue [now typically 270 pages].

But praise doesn’t pay the bills. The Review now [1992] has subscribers in 44 states and 15 foreign countries but nowhere near the number needed to make it self-supporting. This is no surprise. Fitzhugh, who has financed the journal largely with his own money, has never had the funds to promote it properly. And, as he points out, even Sports Illustrated, a magazine with mass-market appeal, and a yearly swim suit issue, took 10 years to break even. Unfortunately, he’s now at the point where he will have to close down operations in March—unless he can find the corporate or foundation support that has so far eluded him.

What’s the problem? Fitzhugh says some people have suggested that excellence of the kind that he is trying to encourage is elitist. In other words, the standards The Concord Review sets is too high for most kids. I don’t think that’s true. Jaime Escalante has shown us that expecting more of kids means you get more. This is as much the case with history as it is with math. If we encouraged students to raise their sights, many of them could measure up to the standards set by the Review; many more would enjoy reading essays written by other students and discussing them in class. And working with the journal would inspire everyone to do better—just the way watching a good runner inspires kids to go out and do as well as they can. Even if they have no hope of beating his record, they can try to break their own.

Or maybe the problem is that The Concord Review is ahead of its time. It’s a new idea so it doesn’t fit into the categories and priorities that foundations have identified. Fitzhugh says that when a foundation turns him down, that’s often what they tell him.

Something like this happened when he applied to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This federally funded agency is interested in history and it’s interested in raising standards. It also funds summer seminars for teachers. But NEH can’t consider Fitzhugh for a grant because he isn’t a teacher; they don’t fund student projects; and they don’t fund publications. In other words, The Concord Review falls through the cracks. And that, more or less, is the story with every foundation or agency that Fitzhugh has applied to.

Will Fitzhugh needs $150,000 a year [$250,000 needed 22 years later] and some time to build on the solid base he has already laid. There must be one or two people or a business or a foundation out there that can bend its guidelines so that this extraordinary publication won’t disappear.

© 1992 by Albert Shanker

Wu Nan:

Allegations that kindergartens gave prescription drugs to pupils without parents’ consent have led to calls for the laws governing them to be tightened.

It is alleged the drugs were administered to ensure high attendance rates and fees.

Lan Liqiang, a medical legal consultant advising some parents whose children were given the medicines, said the rules covering the operation of nursery schools were vague, out of date and in need of an overhaul.

“How could kindergartens as children’s guardians trade their health for money? The government should establish strict rules to prevent such incidents from happening again,” Lan said.

Parents are threatening legal action and some fear more kindergartens around the country may have fed pupils the anti-flu drug moroxydine hydrochloride without permission.

Some 10 nursery schools in Xian , Shaanxi , Jilin city in Jilin province, and Yichang in Hubei are so far thought to have given children the medicine.

Another kindergarten in Gansu province is said to have given pupils another antiviral treatment to ward off hand, foot and mouth disease.

The Ministry of Education and the National Health and Family Planning Commission have ordered nationwide inspections at all kindergartens and primary and middle schools to check the scale of the problem.

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

At the March 18 meeting of the MTI Faculty Representative Council, nominations were finalized for MTI Officers, as well as for the MTI Bargaining Committee relative to vacancies caused by terms ending in May, 2014. Nominated for President-Elect was current President Peg Coyne (Black Hawk). She will again serve as MTI President for the 2015-16 school year. Peg previously served as President during the 2011-12 school year. She is also a member of the Bargaining Committee. In addition, others nominated were Art Camosy (incumbent -Memorial) for Vice-President; Liz Donnelly Wingert (incumbent -Elvehjem) for Secretary; and Greg Vallee (incumbent – Thoreau) for Treasurer. Mike Lipp (West), who was elected last spring, will serve as President for the 2014-15 school year.

Nominated for the MTI Bargaining Committee were: High School Representative – Art Camosy (incumbent-Memorial); Middle School Representative – Nichole Von Haden (incumbent-Sherman); Elementary School Representative – Laurie Solchenberger (incumbent – Lincoln); At-Large Representative – Steve Pike (incumbent-West); Educational Services Representative-Middle School – Gabe Chavez (incumbent-Jefferson). The Bargaining Committee, from which the Bargaining Team is selected and which is the body responsible for MTI’s Teacher Contract negotiations, consists of 15 members, of which five are elected each year. MTI’s general election will be held April 28-30.

Kelsey Snell:

Millions of taxpayers struggling with student loan debt are being pitched what may seem like a dream come true this tax season: lower monthly payments and a chance to see a chunk of their debt disappear.

But there’s a catch: the potential for a huge tax bill down the road.

The new push from the Departments of Treasury and Education uses tax time to promote the opportunity for a borrower to have their entire debt repaid after 20 or 25 years. The agencies are partnering with TurboTax, the tax software used by more than 18 million Americans, to advertise the deal.

It’s part of an administration-wide effort to make college affordable, but consumer advocates worry that the tax-time pairing fails to fully disclose that the debt forgiveness counts as income and will likely lead to a bill from the Internal Revenue Service. Some even liken it to the too-good-to-be-true mortgages that played a role in the collapse of the housing market.

W. Michael Cox & Richard Alm

Education looms as both cause and cure for the decline of the middle class and the widening gap between rich and poor.

In today’s knowledge-based economy, poorly performing public schools leave many U.S. workers ill-equipped for jobs that pay middle-class wages.

So it follows that improving education is the only way to raise up the poor, reduce inequality and restore the American middle class.

We all want better schools — right-wingers, left-wingers, even business and labor are on board. Most proposals for improving education come down to the same thing — spend more of the taxpayers’ money.

But that’s what we’ve been doing for two or more generations, and it hasn’t worked. Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, calculates that inflation-adjusted spending per pupil more than doubled from $5,500 a year in 1970 to more than $12,500 in 2010.

…..

So why do some states have better public schools — if it’s not a matter of money? Statistical regressions using the adjusted spending and demographic data find that test scores improve significantly as parents get more education and earn higher incomes.

The intuitive story goes like this: Better educated and richer parents tend to appreciate the value of schooling. They insist on better schools for their children and stress education in the home. School districts that spend more tend to be those where the cost-of-living is higher, where income is higher and where adults are better educated.

It’s not the spending that improves scores, it’s the parents’ high expectations and emphasis on education.

Money can buy a lot in public schools — smaller classes, better teachers, modern facilities, computers and other technologies. So why hasn’t spending paid off in better educational outcomes? The biggest impediment is a government-run school system resistant to innovation, indifferent to student needs and mired in mediocrity.

Wisconsin ranks 12th in dollars spent and 24th in achievement among the 50 US states.

State Education Trends by Andrew Coulson:

ong-term trends in academic performance and spending are valuable tools for evaluating past education policies and informing current ones. But such data have been scarce at the state level, where the most important education policy decisions are made. State spending data exist reaching back to the 1960s, but the figures have been scattered across many different publications. State-level academic performance data are either nonexistent prior to 1990 or, as in the case of the SAT, are unrepresentative of statewide student populations. Using a time-series regression approach described in a separate publication, this paper adjusts state SAT score averages for factors such as participation rate and student demographics, which are known to affect outcomes, then validates the results against recent state-level National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores. This produces continuous, state-representative estimated SAT score trends reaching back to 1972. The present paper charts these trends against both inflation-adjusted per pupil spending and the raw, unadjusted SAT results, providing an unprecedented perspective on American education inputs and outcomes over the past 40 years.

Locally, Madison spends double the national average per student.

Center for Research on Education Outcomes (PDF):

Across the country, charter schools occupy a growing position in the public education landscape. Heated debate has accompanied their existence since their start in Minnesota two decades ago. Similar debate has occurred in California, particularly in Los Angeles, with charter advocates extolling such benefits of the sector as expanding parental choice and introducing market-based competition to education. Little of that debate, however, is grounded in hard evidence about their impact on student outcomes. This report contributes to the discussion by providing evidence for charter students’ performance in Los Angeles for four years of schooling, beginning with the 2008-2009 school year and concluding in 2011-2012.

With the cooperation of the California Department of Education (CDE), CREDO obtained the historical sets of student-level administrative records. The support of CDE staff was critical to CREDO’s understanding of the character and quality of the data we received. However, it bears mention that the entirety of interactions with CDE dealt with technical issues related to the data. CREDO has developed the findings and conclusions independently.

This report provides an in-depth examination of the results for charter schools physically located within the Los Angeles Unified School District boundary. It is the first separate analysis by CREDO of the performance of Los Angeles’ charter schools. However, charter schools in Los Angeles were included in the CREDO report on all California charter schools, which can be found on our website.1 This report has two main benefits. First, it provides a rigorous and independent view of the performance of the city’s charter schools. Second, the study design is consistent with CREDO’s reports on charter school performance in other locations, making the results amenable to being benchmarked against those nationally and in other states and cities.

The analysis presented here takes two forms. We first present the findings about the effects of charter schools on student academic performance. These results are expressed in terms of the academic progress that a typical charter school student in Los Angeles would realize from a year of enrollment in a charter school. The second set of findings is presented at the school level. Because schools are the instruments on which the legislation and public policy operate, it is important to understand the range of performance for the schools. These findings look at the performance of students by school and present school average results.

Compared to the educational gains that charter students might have had in a traditional public school (TPS), the analysis shows that in a year’s time, on average, students in Los Angeles charter schools make larger learning gains in reading and mathematics. Results for Hispanic charter students, especially Hispanic students in poverty, are particularly notable. At the school level, we compare the average performance over two growth periods to the average results for the school’s control group. The results in Los Angeles are among the strongest observed in any of the previous CREDO studies. Larger shares of schools outperform their local market in reading and math than was reported in the national study that was released in 2013.2

Meanwhile, a majority of Madison School Board members rejected the Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school a few years ago. The traditional – Frederick Taylor -, non diverse governance model remains well entrenched here.

Karl Zinsmeister:

Many have been puzzled by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s skepticism toward charter schools, his calls for ending space-sharing and charging them rent, and his $210 million cut of a construction fund important to the schools. Education reformers are also anxious about the failure of President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to defend charter schools in the face of these prominent reversals of New York City policy. Is this just about teacher-union politics, or are there perhaps legitimate performance reasons for tapping the brakes on charter schools in public education today?

The first thing to remember about charter schools is how recent an invention they are. Born in the 1990s, it wasn’t until 2006 that total enrollment reached a million children—out of 55 million pupils in the country. More than half of the charters in New York City are less than five years old.

With huge waiting lists for every available seat, though, charters are now beginning to mushroom. Well before Mr. de Blasio faces re-election in 2017, charters will educate 10% of New York City’s public-school students, and they already enroll a quarter of all pupils in some of the city’s poorest districts. Nationwide, charter schools will enroll five million by the end of this decade.

Shirley Wang:

Some employers increasingly are viewing autism as an asset and not a deficiency in the workplace.

Germany-based software company SAP AG SAP.XE +1.43% has been actively seeking people with autism for jobs, not because of charitable outreach but because it believes features of autism may make some individuals better at certain jobs than those without autism.

It’s a worthy initiative, according to disability experts, since 85% of adults with autism are estimated to be unemployed.

Piloted in Germany, India and Ireland, the program is also launching in four North American offices, according to an announcement Thursday.

SAP aims to have up to 1% of its workforce—about 650 people—be employees with autism by 2020, according to Jose Velasco, head of the autism initiative at SAP in the U.S.

People with autism spectrum disorder—characterized by social deficits and repetitive behavior—tend to pay great attention to detail, which may make them well suited as software testers or debuggers, according to Mr. Velasco, who has two children with the condition.

Josh Freedman:

Last week, the University of California got downgraded. Not in the U.S. News or other college rankings, where six of its campuses rank in the top 15 public colleges in the United States; nor in College Prowler’s list of schools with the most attractive men on campus (where flagship UC-Berkeley clocks in at a measly number 1185). Rather, the UC system has been downgraded in the credit markets: ratings agency Moody’s lowered the UC system’s general revenue bonds from Aa1 to Aa2.

People like to talk about student debt – read, for example, my five part series on the topic. (Ok, I know you’re busy. How about at least one part of it? Do it for me.) But university debt, although rarely discussed, is arguably more important. Schools across the country are borrowing more money, and the increasing reliance on debt-financing at universities is adding logs covered in lighter fluid to an already flammable higher education system. The University of California system, for example, has $14.5 billion in outstanding debt, more than double its level in 2005. The total volume of debt across colleges of all kinds has increased so much that interest payments per student have increased 86% since a decade ago despite low interest rates.

Harvard University Press Blog:

For decades, large corporations have been contracting whatever work they can to foreign suppliers—think manufacturing, call centers, etc. Meanwhile, the vitality of the domestic service sector, comprised of all those unable-to-be-outsourced jobs, has become an economic refrain. Yet large employers have also been rapidly shedding those service sector jobs, offering contracts to smaller firms that desperately squeeze costs, resulting in declining wages, eroding benefits, unhealthy workplaces, and greater inequality. In The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It, David Weil details the pressures of subcontracting, franchising, and supply chains, revealing the distressing state of the “secure” service sector. His book begins with the following series of “Vignettes from the Modern Workplace.”

—–

The-fissured-workplaceA maid works at the San Francisco Marriott on Fisherman’s Wharf. The hotel property is owned by Host Hotels and Resorts Inc., a lodging real estate company. The maid, however, is evaluated and supervised daily and her hours and payroll managed by Crestline Hotels and Resorts Inc., a national third-party hotel management company. Yet she follows daily procedures (and risks losing her job for failure to accomplish them) regarding cleaning, room set-up, overall pace, and quality standards established by Marriott, whose name the property bears.

A cable installer in Dayton, Ohio, works as an independent contractor (in essence a self-employed business provider), paid on a job-by-job basis by Cascom Inc., a cable installation company. Cascom’s primary client is the international media giant Time Warner, which owns cable systems across the United States. The cable installer is paid solely on the basis of the job completed and is entitled to no protections normally afforded employees. Yet all installation contracts are supplied solely by Cascom, which also sets the price for jobs and collects payment for them. The installer must wear a shirt with the Cascom logo and can be removed as a contractor at will for not meeting minimum quotas or quality standards, or at the will of the company.

Jefrrey Brown:

The financial security of a strong university endowment would seem to matter most when hard times come along—when revenues slow and core functions are in danger of being compromised. At such times, an endowment can help guard against shortsighted cost cutting that harms both near-term quality and long-run vitality. But it turns out that many universities do nothing of the sort.

During the recent recession, most endowments took a beating, with the average endowment losing a quarter of its value. That decline followed years of heady growth that led endowments to grow at a far faster clip than university spending did. As a result, the losses suffered in the market meltdown represented a much larger loss relative to universities’ annual operating budgets than did any previous market correction.

Claudia Dreifus:

The biochemist Ricardo E. Dolmetsch has pioneered a major shift in autism research, largely putting aside behavioral questions to focus on cell biology and biochemistry.

Dr. Dolmetsch, 45, has done most of his work at Stanford. Since our interviews — a condensed and edited version of which follows — he has taken a leave to join Novartis, where his mission is to organize an international team to develop autism therapies.

“Pharmaceutical companies have financial and organizational resources permitting you to do things you might not be able to do as an academic,” he said. “I really want to find a drug.”

Q. Did you start out your professional life studying the biochemistry of autism?

Timothy Burke:

What I’ll ask about is this: what stirs many tenured faculty in humanities departments at wealthy private colleges and universities to so often pick and fret and prod at almost any perturbation of their worlds of practice–their departments, their disciplines, their publications, their colleges and universities? Why do so many humanistic scholars rise to almost any bait, whether it is a big awful dangling worm on a barbed hook or some bit of accidental fluff blown by the wind into their pond?

The crisis in the humanities, we’re often assured, doesn’t exist. Enrollments are steady, the business model’s sound, the intellectual wares are good.

The assurance is, in many ways, completely correct. The trends are not so dire and many of the criticisms are old and ritualized. Parents have been making fun of the choice to major in philosophy for five decades. Or longer, if you’ve read your Aristophanes.

And yet humanists are in fact anxious. Judging from a number of experiences I’ve had in the last year at Swarthmore and elsewhere, there’s more and more tense feelings coming from more directions and more individuals in reaction to a wider and wider range of stimuli.

Andrew Davis:

Current government policy concerning reading favours synthetic phonics (SP), where children learn to recognise letters with their associated sounds – and how to blend those sounds to “read” the “words”.

The revised national curriculum, coming into force from September 2014, requires reception and year 1 students to be taught SP. Students aren’t meant to get help from clues such as context, meaning or illustration. It’s difficult to gauge how rigidly this will be enforced, but the situation certainly suggests there’ll be a significant increase in pressure on schools and teachers to conform.

The existing universal imposition of a phonics check on all five and six year-olds reinforces SP. Students are tested on isolated pieces of text – half of them are pseudo-words, such as “vap”, and all of them can be blended from conventional letter sounds.

Much of the current documentation around SP gives the impression that phonemes are sounds from which spoken words can be constructed. For example, the “cat” sound can be made up from |k|, |æ| and |t|. But the term “phoneme” doesn’t mean “sound”; it actually refers to sets of sounds in speech that distinguish one word from another. For instance, /æ/ and /a:/ are separate phonemes in English. /æ/ can be heard in the middle of “hat”, while /a:/ is heard in the middle of “hart”. The change in the middle sound gives us a different word.

Susan Bromley:

On average, less than one-third of students in third through eighth grades in the “>(Brandon) district are proficient in mathematics, according to the Michigan Educational Assessment Program.

MEAP scores released last month showed 28 percent of third grade students are proficient in math, compared with 40.2 percent statewide and 51 percent in the county. The gap grows larger by fourth grade. While the district showed 30 percent proficient in math at this grade, it was still behind the state at 45.3 percent, and far behind the county at 57 percent proficient.

Scores for science (tested in fifth and eighth grades) and social studies (tested in sixth and ninth grades) are even more dismal.

Less than 50 percent of district students tested proficient in writing in both fourth and seventh grades. The district’s strongest MEAP scores came in reading, ranging from 62 percent proficient in third grade, 55 percent proficient in seventh grade, to 77 percent proficient in eighth grade.

In every subject tested, at every grade level, district students underperformed compared to the county average, by as much as up to 27 percentage points. The district was also under the state averages at math for every grade level tested. The district did outperform the state average in reading for every grade tested besides seventh, and also did better than the state average in seventh grade writing, eighth grade science, and ninth grade social studies.

The district plans to be better prepared for whatever that test is with the board approval of $175,000 worth of new math materials for kindergarten through eighth grades. The materials, to be purchased at the end of this year, are the first new mathematics curriculum to be purchased at the elementary level in 12 years. Kindergarten through fifth grades will be using “Bridges” math curriculum, and sixth through eighth grades will use “Connected Math Project” to support the common core curriculum. Teacher representatives from all grade levels examined materials from several companies and selected Bridges and CMP as the best after sampling them in the classrooms and consulting with Geri Devine, a math consultant from Oakland Schools and district parent.

The materials are not traditional type textbooks, McMahon said, but for 6-8, bound books that each contain a unit of study, notebook like in size and shape. At the elementary level, the new materials are consumables, exercises and activities that a certain amount will have to be replaced yearly at a cost of roughly $20,000-$25,000.

“With the new materials, we should see an increase in scores,” McMahon said. “The publishers will give mathematics professional development and the district is also planning more professional development in the area of math, with instruction by expert users of the materials and those who have a proven track record for improving mathematical competency.”

Much more on Connected Math, here.