Daniel de Vise:

There are no professors in Virginia Tech’s largest classroom, only a sea of computers and red plastic cups.
In the Math Emporium, the computer is king, and instructors are reduced to roving guides. Lessons are self-paced, and help is delivered “on demand” in a vast, windowless lab that is open 24 hours a day because computers never tire. A student in need of human aid plants a red cup atop a monitor.
The Emporium is the Wal-Mart of higher education, a triumph in economy of scale and a glimpse at a possible future of computer-led learning. Eight thousand students a year take introductory math in a space that once housed a discount department store. Four math instructors, none of them professors, lead seven courses with enrollments of 200 to 2,000. Students walk to class through a shopping mall, past a health club and a tanning salon, as ambient Muzak plays.

Matthew DeFour:

The Madison School District’s lunch program serves as a window into the national debate over school nutrition and childhood obesity in an upcoming documentary film series.
The documentary, set to air on HBO on May 14 and 15 and for free on HBO.com, also features two Madison families who participate in the UW Hospital’s Pediatric Fitness Clinic.
The four-part series, titled “The Weight of the Nation” and produced in collaboration with the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, is intended as a wake-up call for the country. According to the CDC, over the past 30 years the adult obesity rate has doubled and the child obesity rate has almost tripled, fueling a surge in heart and kidney disease, diabetes, cancer and strokes.
But the segment featuring Madison schools as the typical American cafeteria experience should alarm a city that prides itself on its farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture, said Martha Pings, a local parent nutrition advocate who appears in the film.

Erin Richards:

In a move sure to capture the attention of school districts across the state grappling with how to reallocate resources in a time of reduced funding, the Oconomowoc Area School District administration on Tuesday proposed a profound restructuring of its high school, cutting staff and demanding the remaining educators take on more teaching duties.
The kicker: Those remaining staffers would each get a $14,000 annual stipend.
The plan requires reducing Oconomowoc High School’s core teaching force by about 20% – from about 75 to about 60 people – across the departments of math, science, social studies, language arts, foreign language, physical education and art, Oconomowoc Superintendent Pat Neudecker said Tuesday before a school board meeting where the plan’s details were released.
Oconomowoc’s dramatic step reflects a district responding to reduced resources amid an urgent push to reshape teaching, with newfound leeway to adjust compensation, staffing and school structures without having to bargain with unions.
“We haven’t ever moved around the pieces in education like this,” Neudecker said, adding that even with the stipends next year, the district would save $500,000 annually under the new plan.
“Our expectations are changing for teachers, but we’re also going to deploy resources to help them change,” Neudecker said.

Structural change rather than just ongoing, overall spending increases.
Oconomowoc’s 2011-2012 budget is $51,381,000 for 5,211 students results in per student spending of $9,860, 33% less than Madison. Madison’s 2011-2012 budget spends $369,394,753 for 24,861 = $14,858.40/student.
Update: Alan Borsuk:

Oconomowoc Superintendent Pat Neudecker calls the plan “the right thing to do for our students, our schools and the teaching profession.” Even before the financial belt got much tighter across Wisconsin, she was an advocate of changing classroom life to take better advantage of technology and make education more customized for students. Neudecker is currently president of the American Association of School Administrators; she was a leading figure in developing a statement issued by a group of Milwaukee area educators in 2010 that called for these kinds of changes.
Now, talk turns into action. Act 10, the Republican-backed state law that pretty much wiped out the role of teachers unions in school life, and cuts in education spending create the landscape for Oconomowoc to make big changes.
Oconomowoc High uses a block schedule, which means its days are built around four periods of about 90 minutes each, rather than, say, seven of 50 minutes. Generally, teachers teach three blocks and get one to work on things such as preparation. (If you think three blocks is a fairly light schedule, that’s because you haven’t done it.)
There is a big need to reduce spending for next year. For many school districts, that is going to mean reducing staff, keeping a tight grip on salary and benefits (as allowed now by state law), reducing offerings and increasing some class sizes – the four pillars of school cost cutting.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email [170K PDF]:

The selection of an early reading screener for Wisconsin is a decision of critical importance. Selecting the best screener will move reading instruction forward statewide. Selecting a lesser screener will be a missed opportunity at best, and could do lasting harm to reading instruction if the choice is mediocre or worse.
After apparently operating for some time under the misunderstanding that the Read to Lead Task Force had mandated the Phonological Assessment and Literacy Screen (PALS), the Department of Public Instruction is now faced with some time pressure to set up and move through a screener evaluation process. Regardless of the late start, there is still more than enough time to evaluate screeners and have the best option in place for the beginning of the 2012-13 school year, which by definition is the time when annual screeners are administered.
The list of possible screeners is fairly short, and the law provides certain criteria for selection that help limit the options. Furthermore, by using accepted standards for assessment and understanding the statistical properties of the assessments (psychometrics), it is possible to quickly reduce the list of candidates further.
Is One Screener Clearly the Best?
One screener does seem to separate itself from the rest. The Predictive Assessment of Reading (PAR) is consistently the best, or among the best, in all relevant criteria. This comment is not a comparison of PAR to all known screeners, but comparing PAR to PALS does reveal many of its superior benefits.
Both PAR and PALS assess letter/sound knowledge and phonemic awareness, as required by the statute.
In addition, PAR assesses the important areas of rapid naming and oral vocabulary. To the best of our knowledge, PAR is the only assessment that includes these skills in a comprehensive screening package. That extra data contributes unique information to identify children at risk, including those from low-language home environments, and consequently improves the validity of the assessment, as discussed below.
Both PAR and PALS have high reliability scores that meet the statutory requirement. PAR (grades K-3) scores .92, PALS-K (kindergarten) scores .99, and PALS (grades 1-3) scores .92. Reliability simply refers to the expected uniformity of results on repeated administrations of an assessment. A perfectly reliable measurement might still have the problem of being consistently inaccurate, but an unreliable measurement always has problems. Reliability is necessary, but not sufficient, for a quality screener. To be of value, a screener must be valid.
In the critical area of validity, PAR outscores PALS by a considerable margin. Validity, which is also required by the statute, is a measure of how well a given scale measures what it actually intends to measure; leaving nothing out and including nothing extra. In the case of a reading screener, it is validity that indicates how completely and accurately the assessment captures the reading performance of all students who take it. Validity is both much harder to achieve than reliability, and far more important.
On a scale of 0-1, the validity coefficient (r-value) of PAR is .92, compared to validity coefficients of .75 for PALS-K and .68 for PALS. It is evident that PAR outscores PALS-K and PALS, but the validity coefficients by themselves do not reveal the full extent of the difference. Because the scale is not linear, the best way to compare validity coefficients is to square them, creating r-squared values. You can think of this number as the percentage of success in achieving accurate measurement. Measuring human traits and skills is very hard, so there is always some error, or noise. Sometimes, there is quite a lot.
When we calculate r-squared values, we get .85 for PAR, .56 for PALS-K, and .46 for PALS. This means that PAR samples 51 to 84 percent more of early reading ability than the PALS assessments. The PALS assessments measure about as much random variance (noise) as actual early reading ability. Validity is not an absolute concept, but must always be judged relative to the other options available in the current marketplace. Compared to some other less predictive assessments, we might conclude that PALS has valid performance. However, compared to PAR, it is difficult to claim that PALS is valid, as required by law.
PAR is able to achieve this superior validity in large part because it has used 20 years of data from a National Institutes of Health database to determine exactly which sub-tests best predict reading struggles. As a consequence, PAR includes rapid naming and oral vocabulary, while excluding pseudo-word reading and extensive timing of sub-tests.
PAR is norm-referenced on a diverse, national sample of over 14,000 children. That allows teachers to compare PAR scores to other norm-referenced formative and summative assessments, and to track individual students’ PAR performance from year to year in a useful way. Norm referencing is not required by the statute, but should always be preferred if an assessment is otherwise equal or superior to the available options. The PALS assessments are not norm-referenced, and can only classify children as at-risk or not. Even at that limited task of sorting children into two general groups, PAR is superior, accurately classifying children 96% of the time, compared to 93% for PALS-K, and only 73% for PALS.
PAR provides the unique service of an individualized report on each child that includes specific recommendations for differentiated instruction for classroom teachers. Because of the norm-referencing and the data base on which it was built, PAR can construct simple but useful recommendations as to what specific area is the greatest priority for intervention, the intensity and duration of instruction which will be necessary to achieve results, and which students may be grouped for instruction. PAR also provides similar guidance for advanced students. With its norm-referencing, PAR can accurately gauge how far individual children may be beyond their classmates, and suggest enriched instruction for students who might benefit. Because they are not norm-referenced, the PALS assessments can not differentiate between gray-area and gifted students if they both perform above the cut score.
PAR costs about the same as PALS. With bulk discounts for statewide implementation, it will be possible to implement PAR (like many other screeners) at K5, 1st grade, 2nd grade, and possibly 3rd grade with the funds allocated by statute for 2012-13. While the law only requires kindergarten screening at this time, the goal is to screen other grades as funds allow. The greatest value to screening with a norm-referenced instrument comes when we screen in several consecutive years, so the sooner the upper grades are included, the better.
PAR takes less time to administer than PALS (an average of 12-16 minutes versus 23-43).
The procurement procedure for PALS apparently can be simplified because it would be a direct purchase from the State of Virginia. However, PAR is unique enough to easily justify a single-source procurement request. Salient, essential features of PAR that would be likely to eliminate or withstand a challenge from any other vendor include demonstrated empirical validity above .85, norm-referencing on a broad national sample, the inclusion of rapid naming and oral vocabulary in a single, comprehensive package, empirically valid recommendations for differentiated intervention, guidance on identifying children who may be gifted, and useful recommendations on grouping students for differentiated instruction.
Conclusions
The selection of a screener will be carefully scrutinized from many perspectives. It is our position that a single, superior choice is fairly obvious based on the facts. While it is possible that another individual or team may come to a different conclusion, such a decision should be supported by factual details that explain the choice. Any selection will have to be justified to the public as well as specific stakeholders. Some choices will be easier to justify than others, and explanations based on sound criteria will be the most widely accepted. Simple statements of opinion or personal choice, or decisions based on issues of convenience, such as ease of procurement, would not be convincing or legitimate arguments for selecting a screener. On the other hand, the same criteria that separate PAR from other screeners and may facilitate single-source procurement also explain the choice to the public and various stakeholder groups. We urge DPI to move forward reasonably, deliberately, and expeditiously to have the best possible screener in place for the largest possible number of students in September.

Although there is still a long way to go on improving reading scores, Brown Deer schools show that improvements can be made. by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

There are signs that the long struggle to close the achievement gap in reading has a chance of paying off. There is a long way to go – and recent statewide test scores were disappointing – but we see some reason for encouragement, nonetheless.
Alan J. Borsuk, a former Journal Sentinel education reporter and now a senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School, reports that black 10th-graders in the Brown Deer school district did better in reading than Wisconsin students as a whole, with 84.2% of Brown Deer’s black sophomores rated proficient or advanced in reading, compared with 78.1% for all students and 47.7% for all black 10th-graders in the state. Some achievement gaps remain in this district that is less than one-third white, but they are relatively modest.

Schools are working to improve reading

As vice chair of the Read to Lead Task Force, I am pleased that Wisconsin is already making progress on improving literacy in Wisconsin.
The Read to Lead Task Force members deserve credit for making recommendations that center on improving reading by: improving teacher preparation and professional development; providing regular screening, assessment and intervention; ensuring early literacy instruction is part of early childhood programs; and strengthening support for parental involvement in reading and early literacy programs.
Across Wisconsin, districts and schools are working to implement the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics. These standards are designed to increase the relevance and rigor of learning for students. Milwaukee’s Comprehensive Literacy Plan is a significant step that defines common expectations in reading for Milwaukee Public Schools students, who now receive reading instruction through one curriculum that is consistent across schools.

Learn more about Wisconsin’s Read to lead Task force and the planned MTEL teacher content knowledge standards, here.
www.wisconsin2.org.

Dan Snow:

I have recently undergone a Damascene conversion. I have fallen utterly head over heals for apps. It began as a bit of fun. I didn’t even own an iPad, or any device I could view apps on.
Brought up on books, living in a flat surrounded by books, an author of a couple of them, the son of one author and the nephew of another, I never listened to those who questioned whether the 500-year-old hegemony of words printed on paper was coming to an end.
Now I have all the zealotry of a convert.
I have spent the past six months working with a team to develop an app about the Second World War, Timeline World War 2. The process has given me a profound understanding and respect for exactly what is possible. Apps on a tablet device quite simply give you all the combined benefits of books, television, the web and radio, with few of the disadvantages.

Claire Needell Hollander:

We’d just finished John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” When we read the end together out loud in class, my toughest boy, a star basketball player, wept a little, and so did I. “Are you crying?” one girl asked, as she crept out of her chair to get a closer look. “I am,” I told her, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.”
But they understood. When George shoots Lennie, the tragedy is that we realize it was always going to happen. In my 14 years of teaching in a New York City public middle school, I’ve taught kids with incarcerated parents, abusive parents, neglectful parents; kids who are parents themselves; kids who are homeless or who live in crowded apartments in violent neighborhoods; kids who grew up in developing countries. They understand, more than I ever will, the novel’s terrible logic — the giving way of dreams to fate.

The Economist:

JUST three months after he unveiled it, Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, has signed into law an unprecedented overhaul of the state’s awful school system. His bold plan weakens teacher tenure, and therefore the teachers’ unions, while greatly expanding the use of school vouchers and the reach of charter schools. These reforms are modelled on, but go well beyond, the ones already employed to great effect in New Orleans, traditionally home to the state’s worst schools.
Until now, teachers in Louisiana earned tenure after three years in the classroom. They also had the right to a hearing before the local school board before they could be fired. Now they will get tenure only after being judged “highly effective” in five out of six years. The designation will be based on pupils’ test scores, and probably on classroom observation by a supervisor. Teachers who have tenure now will keep it, unless they become “ineffective”.

Jason Paul Titlow:

The iPad may only be two years old, but it’s already begun to change many things. Reading is one of them. Work is another. It is selling like crazy, but it will be some time before most of the people you know own a tablet.
The market for this type of device may only be in its infancy, but it’s already becoming clear how it will revolutionize certain aspects our lives. Education is a huge one, as recent developments have demonstrated.
In January, Apple made good on its late CEO’s vision to enter the digital textbook market with the launch of iBooks 2 and the iBooks Author production tool for e-books. That early effort was met with mixed reactions. While some were excited to see Apple move into a space that’s ripe for disruption, others pointed out the inherent limitations in Apple’s model, which for starters, will be cost-prohibitive for many school districts.

Henry:

This looks like a bombshell announcement to me (I’m not aware of the internal politics behind the announcement, but I’m presuming that Robert Darnton’s fingerprints are all over it). Discuss.
We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. … The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership, reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. … It is untenable for contracts with at least two major providers to continue on the basis identical with past agreements. Costs are now prohibitive. … since faculty and graduate students are chief users, please consider the following options open to faculty and students (F) and the Library (L), state other options you think viable, and communicate your views:

David Gurteen:

This short video clip Confessions of a Converted Lecturer from a talk by Professor Erik Mazur who teaches Physics at Harvard is quite mind blowing.
Professor Mazur discovered that his students can “learn” something conceptually and re-iterate it and pass exams but still fail to understand the subject or acquire the ability to apply that learning in real world situations. No amount of “lecturing”, how ever good, solves this problem.

Jamie Carter:

One in six Hongkongers has an iPad and half want one, but how many are being used as electronic babysitters? Stuffed with games, photos, music and video, there’s a worry that tablet computers and smartphones are handed over too easily to youngsters.
A survey by Nielsen last month reveals how prevalent iPad use is among children in North America. In households where at least one iPad was owned, 70 per cent of children used it, and what it’s being used for is hardly surprising. The vast majority of children download games – 77 per cent – and while 43 per cent also watch TV and films, an impressive 57 per cent use educational apps, too. At least, that’s what their parents say, over half of whom admit to using an iPad to pacify their children while travelling, or while eating in a restaurant.

Chris Davis:

Harvesting the vegetables he has helped to plant, nurture and cultivate, Vlado Vasile, a Year Seven student at South Island School, declares: “It is simply an amazing adventure that really makes you want to gasp.” In Hong Kong, where having a garden is often considered a luxury, Vlado, like many other children from 10 international and 10 local schools, has discovered the joys of horticulture and composting. That’s thanks to Growing Together, a one-year pilot project initiated by the British Chamber of Commerce and sponsored by HSBC.
Since last October, using micro gardens – box containers made of recyclable materials – children of all ages have been growing produce ranging from tomatoes, carrots and herbs to Chinese water spinach and bak choy. Using a Japanese Bokashi composting system, students have also been learning about recycling food waste from leftover school lunches. The fertiliser is then used to nurture the vegetables.

David Gurteen:

Too many students ‘get by’ and seek tactics that lead to good marks not good learning.
‘Never praise a child, praise what they did’ says Professor Black, and by this he meant praise the work of the learner and not the learner.
To praise the student encourages two ideas that are powerfully corrosive in learning; a) the idea that it’s all down to ability b) the idea that the ‘teacher’ likes me.

Gillian Tett:

In US election year, voters and politicians face a wake-up call on the budget deficit.
White House Burning The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt and Why it Matters to You, by Simon Johnson and James Kwak, Pantheon, RRP$26.95, 368 pages
Last year, the Washington Post newspaper and ABC television channel conducted a poll that showed that 95 per cent of Americans wanted to cut their country’s budget deficit by reducing government spending (either alone, or with tax rises). No surprise there, you might think: the issue of America’s debt has come to dominate the political debate this year as the fiscal problems have worsened.

Taxes & statistics.

Anjali Hazari:

The American high school diploma is considered less demanding than the IB and A-level qualification because students don’t undertake an external examination at the end of a high school career. Students (usually in 11th grade) may take one or more standardised tests depending on their post-secondary education preferences; that is, the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) or the American College Test (ACT), which evaluate the overall level of knowledge and learning aptitude. Competitive universities also require students to take two or three SAT subject tests that focus strictly on a particular subject matter.
The A-level qualification has been arguably the most widely recognised pre-university qualification. It places emphasis on in-depth knowledge, deep understanding, strong reasoning abilities and critical thinking and allows students to select three to four subjects in any combination. There are no educational systems where students could study fewer subjects and still meet the entrance requirements for a university.

Steve Prestegard:

When Gov. Scott Walker signed the public employee collective bargaining reform bill into law, most school districts used it to correct the relationship between the school district and its teachers.
Some did not, most notably Milwaukee, Kenosha and Janesville. Those three school districts have the lion’s share of teacher layoffs because they decided not to put their teacher unions in their correct place.
One Kenosha teacher, Kristi Lacroix, is writing about the result in her school district:

Linda Lutton:

Fifteen years after Chicago embedded International Baccalaureate programs in tough neighborhood schools, the programs have not attracted the middle class.
Middle-and upper-income Chicagoans scramble to get their kids into Chicago’s top high schools, turning to test prep, private tutors, and educational consultants.
If their kids don’t get in, for many it’s private school or the suburbs.
But Chicago has another set of high-quality high school programs–considered gems of the district–that middle-income parents have rejected. WBEZ looks at why.

Tony Bates:

Bean, E. (2012) Wrath of Khan?: Deconstructing the online learning academy Detroit Web 2.0 Examiner, March 12
Eric Bean is an educator who has signed up as a coach/volunteer for the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy has a library of over 3,000 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 315 practice exercises, all free. The focus is mainly on k-12, supporting home schooling or providing additional support for students outside (and sometimes inside) school.
Bean has a number of criticisms from the point of view of a ‘coach’. (Interesting use of language here by the Khan Academy: why not teacher or tutor or instructor? Is there a difference in Salman Khan’s mind, and if so, what is it?) Bean’s main criticism is that the interface and navigation for coaches is poor, especially compared to the student interface.
I have another criticism. As someone who struggles with math, the Khan Academy would seem perfect for me. My problem though is I don’t know where to begin. Just jumping at random into a video suddenly makes me aware that I need lots of prior knowledge before I can understand this video, but there’s no help on that. Also, where’s the feedback? If I still don’t understand after watching the video several times and doing the exercises, what do I do?

Robert Frank:

WILDLY implausible faux news stories appear each April Fool’s Day, some of which are taken seriously. This year’s clear winner was the National Public Radio feature about a preschool’s new requirement that all applicants submit DNA profiles.
As the segment begins, the host Guy Raz is greeted by Rebecca Unsinn, described as headmaster at a school called the Porsafillo Preschool Academy, located in a striking I. M. Pei-designed building in a leafy enclave on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Dr. Unsinn walks Mr. Raz through gleaming computer labs where toddlers master C++. She proudly describes the school’s Mandarin Chinese immersion program.
We are also told that Dr. Unsinn, a pediatric neurologist, was recruited to oversee the school’s new genetic tests, designed to help winnow 12,000 applications for 32 available spots in next year’s class. As she explains, “We now know that simple DNA testing can determine whether a child will end up at Yale or at Yonkers Community College.”

The Tax Foundation:

It is obvious that the absence of a major tax is a dominant factor in vaulting many of these 10 states to the top of the rankings. Property taxes and unemployment insurance taxes are levied in every state, but there are several states that do without one or more of the major taxes: the corporate tax, the individual income tax, or the sales tax. Wyoming, Nevada and South Dakota have no corporate or individual income tax; Alaska has no individual income or state-level sales tax; Florida has no individual income tax; and New Hampshire and Montana have no sales tax.
The lesson is simple: a state that raises sufficient revenue without one of the major taxes will, all things being equal, have an advantage over those states that levy every tax in the state tax collector’s arsenal.

Aaron R. Conklin:

It’s a Tuesday afternoon in March, and the woman the White House has tabbed to craft its national videogames policy is just a little stressed out. Her weekly flight from Madison to Washington, D.C., has been canceled, leaving only pricey last-minute alternatives flickering on her Macbook screen. And in less than an hour, she has to introduce her boss, Carl Wieman, associate director for science of President Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, to a crowded room of dignitaries at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
So it’s not surprising that she begins the interview with her right hand unconsciously pressed to her forehead, sinking back onto a couch in Aldo’s Café like it’s a life raft. “His research deals with lasers and atoms,” she says of Wieman. “I can start there, right?”

Steven Salzberg:

Let me begin by introducing myself as the Dean of the Georgia Tech College of Computing, a member of the NAE, and a Fellow of ACM and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I am also a former Dean of the School of Engineering at Columbia University and past President of Tel Aviv University.
I am writing to express, in the strongest possible terms, my concerns about the reckless proposal to dismantle the Department of Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the University of Florida. Of course, having served as both a Dean and a university President, I fully understand that budget realities sometimes dictate that painful cuts be made. Such cuts notwithstanding, I am amazed, shocked, and angered by the proposal to dismantle CISE. And I am by no means alone–the entire computer science/computing community is dumbfounded by the news coming out of Florida. It is unbelievable that a major AAU university would even contemplate such an action in the information age we live in today–an age fueled in great part by computer science!

Allysia Finley:

“California is God’s best moment,” says Joel Kotkin. “It’s the best place in the world to live.” Or at least it used to be.
Mr. Kotkin, one of the nation’s premier demographers, left his native New York City in 1971 to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. The state was a far-out paradise for hipsters who had grown up listening to the Mamas & the Papas’ iconic “California Dreamin'” and the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” But it also attracted young, ambitious people “who had a lot of dreams, wanted to build big companies.” Think Intel, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.
Now, however, the Golden State’s fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn’t Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.
Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.

Erin Loury, via a kind reader:

Monkeys banging on typewriters might never reproduce the works of Shakespeare, but they may be closer to reading Hamlet than we thought. Scientists have trained baboons to distinguish English words from similar-looking nonsense words by recognizing common arrangements of letters. The findings indicate that visual word recognition, the most basic step of reading, can be learned without any knowledge of spoken language.
The study builds on the idea that when humans read, our brains first have to recognize individual letters, as well as their order. “We’re actually reading words much like we identify any kind of visual object, like we identify chairs and tables,” says study author Jonathan Grainger, a cognitive psychologist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, and Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France. Our brains construct words from an assembly of letters like they recognize tables as a surface connected to four legs, Grainger says.

Mark Seidenberg emails:

here’s what you need to know:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3912
Basically, the study shows nothing of any interest about reading. it shows that baboons could pick up on differences in letter frequencies between word and nonword stimuli that allowed to tell them apart about 75% of the time.
This is trivial compared to what a reader knows about the properties of written English.
the paper is here:

https://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6078/245.full

Thu-Huong Ha:

So you hope to reach young people in Armenia.
Yes. As a parent you have to think about your kid and other kids. Recently there was a program on TV discussing environmental issues in Armenia. My son watched it, then he went to his room and started crying. He said, “I hate people because they do so much harm to our Earth. How are we going to change things?” I thought, What are we doing for our kids?
Actually my son is famous! In Armenia everybody knows he’s the reason I started TEDx. On the way here I was stopped in the airport by a British woman. She said, “Aren’t we friends on Facebook? Aren’t you the mom of this great kid who pushed you to do TEDxYerevan?”

Lori Higgins:

Teachers in the Madison School District said the Board of Education there violated the law by imposing a 10% pay cut last week that is retroactive to the beginning of the current school year.
Bobby Robinson, president of the Madison Education Association, which represents 77 teachers and other professional employees, said the union plans to file a lawsuit Monday.
He cited a May ruling in a case that said employers can’t apply a pay cut retroactively.
Robinson said he raised those issues with the district administration after the board took action Monday, but paychecks teachers received Friday reflected the deduction. District and board leaders could not be reached Friday.
“They ignored it,” Robinson said.

NCPA:

The Louisiana state legislature has approved a new school vouchers system that, when signed by Governor Bobby Jindal, will be one of the largest in the country. The move caps 18 months of extensive expansion of voucher programs nationwide and broadens the national argument about the future of public education, says the Wall Street Journal.
With growing systems in Florida, Virginia and Indiana joining older programs such as those in Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the use of vouchers has increased rapidly since 2010.

• Nineteen states and Washington, D.C., have either voucher systems or “scholarship” programs that provide tax benefits to individuals and businesses for contributions that help pay for students to attend private school.
• The vast majority of these programs are targeted at specific groups of at-risk students, such as low-income or those with special needs.
• The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, an organization that advocates vouchers, estimates that about 220,000 students are currently enrolled in the programs nationwide.

The Louisiana program would add hundreds of thousands of students to the voucher camp, and would also implement several innovative policy provisions that would help put the program at the cutting edge of education.

The Telegraph:

The celebrity chef, who has campaigned for healthier school meals over the past decade, warned the progress made in recent years risks being undone by new academies which are allowed to ignore nutrient-based Government standards.
In an interview with The Observer Food Monthly, Oliver said: “This mantra that we are not going to tell (academy) schools what to do just isn’t good enough in the midst of the biggest obesity epidemic ever.
“The public health of five million children should not be left to luck or chance.”
The chef said he was “totally mystified” as to why academies are being allowed to determine what food should be on offer, while state schools follow the national standards introduced in 2008.

Christian Science Monitor:

In order to become a US citizen, immigrants must pass the Naturalization Test. American citizenship bestows the right to vote, improves the likelihood of family members living in other countries to come and live in the US, gives eligibility for federal jobs, and can be a way to demonstrate loyalty to the US. Applicants must get 6 answers out of 10 in an oral exam to pass the test. According to US Citizenship and Immigration services, 92 percent of applicants pass this test.

Gayle Worland::

The analysis comes on the heels of a 2012-13 budget for the district proposed by Nerad that would increase Madison School District property taxes by 4.1 percent. Nerad’s $379.3 million budget did not specify a funding source for his high-profile plan to raise the achievement levels of low-income and minority students, originally estimated to cost $105.6 million over the next five years.
The report outlines several options for doubling the district’s maintenance funds, such as using money already within the district’s budget, increasing the property tax levy, using current and future equity reserves, long-term borrowing, or asking voters to approve a referendum that would allow for annual increases for maintenance.
The district spends $4.5 million, or 2.77 percent of its budget, on facility maintenance, which the committee recommended increasing by $4.2 million.
That would amount to $566 per pupil, according to the report. By contrast, the Monona Grove school district spends $1,825 per pupil on facility costs; Sun Prairie schools spend $1,787; and Waunakee spends $1,443, the report said.

Related regarding the most recent Madison School District maintenance referendum: Madison School Board member may seek audit of how 2005 maintenance referendum dollars were spent.

Jay Matthews:

Here is an example of a school assignment sent to me by an inventive high school psychology teacher:
“To gain a better understanding of Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development, you will go to a toy store and choose one toy for each stage of development. In a paper, you will discuss what aspect of the toy corresponds with what developmental milestone in Piaget’s theory. Additionally you will discuss the issue of gender identity formation, based on your visit to the toy store.”
It is one of many such ideas that pop up on my Class Struggle blog. The teacher who forwarded the assignment, Patrick Mattimore, suggested an activity in which readers send in effective teaching strategies. He and I would select the best entries. Knowing the state of newsroom budgets, Mattimore suggested a reward of some value but no cost: publicity for the winner.

sp-eye:

The Sun Prairie School District has “use data to drive decisions” as part of its credo.
So…here’s the data. This is how we stack up against other Dane Co. school districts.
As always, we highlight grades 4,8, and 10 because at these grades students are tested beyond reading an math. At these grades, all students are tested in Language Arts, Science and Social Studies in addition to Reading and Math.
You decide…are we doing as well as you think we should?
How about instead of some 200 page Monitoring Report that could cure the world’s worst case of insomnia, the school board hold a working session where they talk candidly about our district’s educational performance on the WKCE?

UW-Madison Center for European Studies, via a kind reader’s email:

The on-going global economic crisis has done much to highlight the significance of the study of international economics and the interconnectedness of regional and national economies worldwide. UW-Madison faculty, graduate students and regional outreach specialists along with guest speakers from the community will discuss aspects of the global economy, explore the ways in which specific regions and countries have been affected by economic crises, and present resources and opportunities available for the study and teaching of international economics, national economies, and business practices. Specific themes for this workshop include Fair Trade, Microfinance, NGOs, the European crisis and the prospects for the euro.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (92K PDF):

Layoff: Seniority is a right that is earned under MTI’s various Collective Bargaining Agreements. Seniority is based on one’s years of service and provides protection from indiscriminate layoff.
Under MTI’s Contracts, seniority protects members of MTI’s various bargaining units from subjective or discriminatory layoff. When layoff is necessary, the Contracts provide an objective means, including tie-breakers for those with the same seniority.
Governor Walker’s Act 10 puts seniority in jeopardy because all collective bargaining agreements in Wisconsin covering school district employees will disappear in 2013 under Walker’s Act 10 (blekko, clusty, google news).
What can you do to protect your employment security? Get involved in this spring’s RECALL ELECTION. There are only 15 days until the RECALL PRIMARY ELECTION. Candidates Barrett, Falk, La Follette and Vinehout have promised to reverse Act 10 and to restore public employees’ rights to collectively bargain.
Without your help, there is no chance of reversing the negative impact of Act 10 on school district employees. Call/email MTI Assistant Director Jeff Knight (jknight@madisonteachers.org / 608-257-0491) to offer assistance via your Union.

Sonia Saraiya:

What is the future of reading? How can we make it more social?

One of the things that bugs me about the Kindle Fire is that for all that I didn’t like the original Kindle, one of its greatest features was that you couldn’t get your email on it. There was an old saying in the 1980s and 1990s that all applications expand to the point at which they can read email. An old geek text editor, eMacs, had added a capability to read email inside your text editor. Another sign of the end times, as if more were needed. In a way, this is happening with hardware. Everything that goes into your pocket expands until it can read email.

But a book is a “momentary stay against confusion.” This is something quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital confusion. The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

More from Tom Tunguz.

Erica Breunlin:

The Greendale School District’s high-deductible plan has been in place for the past four years but was not available to teachers until last year. When the district first offered the plan, nonunion employees agreed to try it out but teachers declined, Green said. Once Act 10 came into effect, the district offered the high-deductible plan to teachers again. The district allowed teachers to choose between the high-deductible plan and the traditional plan this school year, and 70% decided to go the high-deductible route after seeing how it was working for other staff members, Green said.
The district runs the plan in conjunction with a health reimbursement account.
In addition to a wellness plan, the Greendale district provides an on-site nurse practitioner from Aurora Health Care.
Green said the high-deductible plan significantly reduces the price of health insurance plans for school districts. When factoring in the cost of the high-deductible plan each year plus what the district is putting into the health reimbursement account, the total is about $1,000 less per family plan per year than the traditional plan.

Related: The Madison School District recently ended their longtime support of a costly WPS healthcare plan.

Ken Dixon:

For months, Leeds Global Partners, a New York-based firm specializing in educational issues as “attractive investment opportunities,” has been closely involved in developing Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s proposed school reforms.
And while the governor’s major proposals, including teacher evaluations, changes to tenure and the expansion of charter schools are meeting opposition in the General Assembly and the state’s educational community, Leeds Global’s school-privatization agenda has been front and center in a variety of closed-door negotiations.
Unionized teachers and a leading state lawmaker take the privatization proposals — including plans to circumvent teacher contracts and public bidding procedures — as major threats, underscored by the company’s track record in creating individual agreements with teachers hired to turn around failing urban school districts.

David Hill:

April 30 marks the deadline for a contest challenging software developers to create an automated scorer of student essays, otherwise known as a roboreader, that performs as good as a human expert grader. In January, the Hewlett Foundation of Hewlett-Packard fame introduced the Automated Student Assessment Prize (ASAP…get it?) offering up $100,000 in awards to “data scientists and machine learning specialists” to develop the application. In sponsoring this contest, the Foundation has two goals in mind: improve the standardized testing industry and advance technology in public education.
The contest is only the first of three, with the others aimed at developing automated graders for short answers and charts and graphs. But the first challenge for the nearly 150 teams participating is to prove their software has the spell checking capabilities of Google, the insights of Grammar Girl, and the English language chops of Strunk’s Elements of Style. Yet the stakes are much higher for developing automated essay scoring software than the relatively paltry $60,000 first-place prize reflects.

Jay Matthews:

Lloyd Thacker is a former college counselor who has become a one-man movement for reform of the admissions process. He hates the U.S. News and other college rankings, although is kind to people like me who support the rankings but can see their flaws. He has created the Education Conservancy, a nonprofit organization promoting change, with the help of several friendly university admission deans and other good souls.

Alyssa Newcomb:

Samples of DNA were collected without parental consent from students at a Sacramento, Calif., middle school in connection with the murder of an 8 th grade student who was found stabbed, strangled and beaten to death near the dugout of a local park.
The Sacramento Sheriff’s Department, which has been spearheading the investigation into the murder of Jessica Funk-Haslam, 13, said parental consent was not required in the DNA collection and interview of minors, several of whom were taken out of class during the day last week at Albert Einstein Middle School.
“These are interviews, not interrogations,” Sheriff’s Deputy Jason Ramos told ABCNews.com. “They are all consensual. Once it’s done, there is a mechanism in place for school administrators to notify parents.”

Matthew DeFour:

Education is shaping up to be a key, yet complicated, issue in the upcoming recall election of Gov. Scott Walker.
Democrats vying to oust the first-term Republican say his cuts to state education funding are a top issue in the campaign, and it’s as important or even more so than the issue that sparked the recall effort — the governor’s rollback of public employee collective bargaining.
“It’s the major issue in the campaign why we’re recalling the governor,” said Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, D-Alma, one of four Democrats in the May 8 primary. “It comes back to the issue of priorities.”
But Walker is telling voters the cuts were necessary to balance the state budget, and that collective bargaining changes have allowed school districts to become more efficient.
In recent weeks he’s taken the fight to the state’s largest teachers union over how to interpret the impact of the cuts. In a recent campaign ad he highlighted that school property taxes declined 1 percent this year statewide.

2012’s Act 166 is Wisconsin’s most substantive K-12 change in decades. Learn more, here.

Jonathan Rothwell:

As the nation grapples with the growing gap between rich and poor and an economy increasingly reliant on formal education, public policies should address housing market regulations that prohibit all but the very affluent from enrolling their children in high-scoring public schools in order to promote individual social mobility and broader economic security.
View our interactive feature to find data on test scores, housing, and income.
Go to the profiles page for detailed statistics on your metropolitan area.
An analysis of national and metropolitan data on public school populations and state standardized test scores for 84,077 schools in 2010 and 2011 reveals that:
Nationwide, the average low-income student attends a school that scores at the 42nd percentile on state exams, while the average middle/high-income student attends a school that scores at the 61st percentile on state exams. This school test-score gap is even wider between black and Latino students and white students. There is increasingly strong evidence–from this report and other studies–that low-income students benefit from attending higher-scoring schools.
Northeastern metro areas with relatively high levels of economic segregation exhibit the highest school test-score gaps between low-income students and other students. Controlling for regional factors such as size, income inequality, and racial/ethnic diversity associated with school test-score gaps, Southern metro areas such as Washington and Raleigh, and Western metros like Portland and Seattle, stand out for having smaller-than-expected test score gaps between schools attended by low-income and middle/high-income students.
Across the 100 largest metropolitan areas, housing costs an average of 2.4 times as much, or nearly $11,000 more per year, near a high-scoring public school than near a low-scoring public school. This housing cost gap reflects that home values are $205,000 higher on average in the neighborhoods of high-scoring versus low-scoring schools. Near high-scoring schools, typical homes have 1.5 additional rooms and the share of housing units that are rented is roughly 30 percentage points lower than in neighborhoods near low-scoring schools.

Madison results can be viewed here (PDF).

Derek Thompson:

The most important issue in higher education might not be cost control. It might be advertising.
Have you heard about the dangerous, rising cost of not going to college? In the last 30 years, the typical college tuition has tripled. But over the exact same period, the earnings gap between college-educated adults and high school graduates has also tripled. In 1979, the wage difference was 75%. In 2003, it was 230%.
Over the last three decades, the cost of going to college has increased at nearly the exact same rate as the cost not going to college. How can the price of getting something and not getting something both rise at the same time?
That is the paradox of college costs.
BUYING THEIR ATTENTION
In the fight to put low-income kids on the college track, one of the simplest weapons is also one of the most controversial. It’s cash. If a student gets a good grade, he gets some money. If he doesn’t get a good grade, he gets no money. Same goes for teachers. If their students succeed, they get richer. If they don’t, then they don’t.

Christopher Caldwell:

This week the Pulitzer Prize board deemed the latest crop of American novels and short-story collections not up to scratch. Asked to choose between the late David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, the judges answered: none of the above. Since the prize was established in 1917 there have been 10 other years when no book got the nod, but it hadn’t happened since 1977. The publishing industry is reeling from the impact of ebooks. Editors and writers needed a morale-booster.
The novelist Ann Patchett complained in The New York Times that most readers would “just figure it was a bum year for fiction” – and would be wrong. Her fellow novelist Doug Magee, by contrast, declared himself “ecstatic”. He wrote: “The prize only serves to heighten and concentrate a hierarchy built primarily on promotion.” In this view, the judges’ demurral looks like a victory for standards. But the situation is probably more dire than Ms Patchett or Mr Magee realise.

Paul Fain:

Technical colleges in Texas are poised to up the ante on performance-based state funding, linking 45 percent of their operating budget to the employment rates and salaries of alumni.
State lawmakers have provided legislative encouragement to the Texas State Technical College System as it works on the still-developing proposal; the Legislature last year mandated that the system devise a funding formula that rewards “job placement and graduate earnings projections, not time in training.”
But system officials have voluntarily forged ahead with the plan, which they fully support and believe will help the system be more efficient.
“Some sort of outcomes-based methodologies are inevitable for likely all of public higher ed,” said Michael L. Reeser, the system’s chancellor. “We thought we’d be the first.”

Matthew DeFour:

The Madison School Board is moving quickly to conduct a search for a new superintendent to replace Dan Nerad.
The board plans to vote Monday on hiring a consultant for up to $3,000 to assist with the search process.
A board committee Friday recommended hiring George McShan, a former president of the National School Boards Association from Harlingen, Texas. McShan advised the board in 2007-08 when it hired Nerad.
The committee also recommended hiring a search firm by the end of July to help find the best candidate.
Separately, the board is considering candidates to hire on an interim basis should Nerad leave sooner than expected and the search for a permanent replacement is still ongoing.

A bit of history and perspective on recent Madison Superintendent hires.

Jason Stein and Patrick Marley:

Gov. Scott Walker used his broad new powers to reshape a state rule and effectively lower the cost-of-living raises that public worker unions can win through bargaining.
For workers in public schools and technical colleges, the revised emergency rule put in place Thursday could reduce the upper limit of their allowed salary increases by an estimated 30% or more. A spokeswoman for the Walker administration said that the change was necessary to properly implement the labor legislation signed by the Republican governor last year.
Under that law, unions’ bargaining is limited to cost-of-living adjustments and the change by Walker would limit that bargaining more than the original rule proposed by his own appointees.
Katy Lounsbury, a Madison labor attorney, said the rules effectively neuter teachers unions in their bargaining over salaries. She said the rules may result in legal action because she believes they violate people’s rights to associate.
“It certainly seems worthy of a challenge,” she said. “It penalizes members of a union.”

Kelly Field:

Karla De La Torre kept her end of the bargain.
After defaulting on her federal student loan, she entered into a “rehabilitation” agreement with the collection agency and made the required nine on-time payments toward the debt. According to the agreement, her loan was supposed to be restored to good standing last September.
Instead, Ms. De La Torre is stuck in default, the victim of a systems glitch that is taking the Education Department months to correct. Her collection agency told Ms. De La Torre, an executive assistant whose husband was laid off a year and a half ago, that she has to keep paying until the problems are fixed, and it can’t say for sure how long that will be.

Neil Shah:

The widening gap between America’s haves and have-nots (highlighted in a Journal article today) is fueling debate across the political spectrum. But here’s one less-appreciated take-way: It suggests getting a college education — and indeed, an advanced degree — might just be worth the hefty price tag.
Let’s back up. As most people know, the cost of a four-year college education is rising, forcing students to take on a pile of debt that some economists fear will spark America’s next debt mess. There’s talk of a student-loan “bubble.” And some feel America should be funneling more kids into vocational training instead of encouraging everyone to get seemingly useless liberal arts degrees — something Germany already does.

via a kind reader:

Alexander Russo linked the Badger Herald’s video excerpt:
(I hope that the common core standards will lead to high school graduates knowing when to use “fewer” instead of “less,” because evidently a Princeton degree doesn’t \snark. It’s interesting to see the Madison business community represented in this video, given the economic development implications of the district’s challenges.)
http://badgerherald.com/news/2012/04/18/us_sec_backs_forgivi.php
(Good reporting by the Badger Herald.)
http://www.ed.gov/blog/2012/03/wisconsin-community-targets-achievement-gap/
(The reflections by Dan Nerad and Sue Abplanalp on the district’s achievement gap plan may be of interest here.)
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/local_schools/u-s-education-secretary-praises-madison-schools-efforts-on-achievement/article_88563b3c-8983-11e1-97b5-0019bb2963f4.html?mode=story
(I think an earlier version of this article included a description of Kaleem Caire asking Secretary Duncan if he was aware of other places that have been successful in addressing the achievement gap, and Duncan replying something to the effect of ‘it’s a challenge for everyone.’ It would have been useful information for the audience if Duncan would have mentioned that Massachusetts reduced the percentage of low income black students performing at the below basic level on the NAEP in 4th grade reading from 54% to 43% between 2003 and 2011, compared to Wisconsin, where it went up from 62% to 67%.)

Barb Shelly:

The big news out of New York City is that the admissions test for the city’s gifted kindergarten programs is about to get tougher.
News organizations report that a portion of the current test, which assesses which 4-year-olds have an exceptional grasp of shapes, colors and numbers, will be replaced with a way to better gauge logic and reasoning skills.
It’s about time, is all I can say. The last thing we need in this country is a bunch of overrated preschoolers coasting into gifted kindergarten.
Wait a second … gifted kindergarten?
You have got to be kidding.

Kevin Carey:

By the time the police arrived with the pepper spray, sending throngs of college students choking to the ground, it was clear that Santa Monica College’s plan to raise tuition had gone badly awry.
Days earlier, the trustees of the 31,000-student community college had announced a novel strategy for dealing with the state of California’s latest round of punishing budget cuts. It would open up new sections of perpetually over-subscribed courses like English and Math–but only to students willing to pay four times the standard price. The college’s mostly-minority, low- and middle-income students saw this as an affront to the institution’s bedrock tradition of affordable higher education. They protested, the cops arrived, the pepper spray was deployed, cell-phone videos of screams and chaos were instantly broadcast, the media descended, and in short order the leadership caved and cancelled the plan.

Monica Hesse:

The barbarians have done it, finally infiltrated a remaining bastion of order in a linguistic wasteland. They had already taken the Oxford English Dictionary; they had stormed the gates of Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition. They had pummeled American Heritage into submission, though she fought valiantly — she continues to fight! — by including a cautionary italics phrase, “usage problem,” next to the heretical definition.
Then, on Tuesday morning, the venerated AP Stylebook publicly affirmed (via tweet, no less) what it had already told the American Copy Editors Society: It, too, had succumbed. “We now support the modern usage of hopefully,” the tweet said. “It is hoped, we hope.”

Cathy Davidson:

In his marvelously insightful and useful new book Net Smart: How to Thrive on Line, Howard Rheingold tells the story of what may be the world’s first email interruption. David Levy, formerly a researcher at the legendary PARC think tank in Palo Alto, was demonstrating how the very first email interface worked when a new email happened to come in. He switch from demonstrating to answering the email, thus ushering in (if you believe some pundits) The End of Civilization As We Know It.
This delightful story goes on. Now a professor at the University of Washington, Levy teaches a class called “Information and Contemplation.” Like so many digital innovators I work with, Levy is concerned with deep breathing, mindfulness, and introspection. Rather than that being in contradiction to email interruption or compensation for what Rheingold calls “our always-on lives,” mindfulness, according to Levy, is a response to attention overload not just for a digital age but for a modern age in which just about everything we do, for the last two hundred or so years, has come time-stamped. The Industrial Revolution required humans to act as much like machines as possible. Yes, the digital interrupts our well-learned assembly line rhythms. Yes, multimedia distract us. But returning to the nostalgia of the “good old days”–meaning any time before April of 1993 when the Mosaic 1.0 browser went public–is a misplaced nostalgia for the most recent attempt to mechanize the human soul. It is hardly a return (as Levy, Rheingold, and I would say) to an introspective, unregulated, mindful inner life that eludes not only the multimedia digital age but the regulated, machinic assembly line of industrialism too.

Stephen Burd:

The last several years has seen significant cuts to federal student aid funding to shore up the budget of the Pell Grant program, the primary source of government aid to low-income students. But in a new Chart You Can Trust, Education Sector’s Stephen Burd argues that there’s a better way to keep the Pell Grant program viable: elimination of the American Opportunity Tax Credit and the other federal tuition tax break programs.
Moving On Up: How Tuition Tax Breaks Increasingly Favor the Upper-Middle Class takes a look at tax breaks that have been portrayed as a way to help middle-class families. But the data show that increasingly, it is families with the highest incomes that benefit.

Sara Rosenberg:

Rhode Island is a tiny state with just over one million people in one thousand square miles. California is 37 times more populous and many times that size. And yet, when it comes to public employee pension reform, the tiny state of Rhode Island is acting both bigger and bolder.
For years, Rhode Island lawmakers watched fearfully as the state’s required pension contributions, the second-fastest-growing line item in its budget, exploded, doubling from 2003 to 2010. Without significant reforms, the liability was on track to double again by 2013. Lawmakers knew that if the pension liability remained unchecked, it would severely limit funding for other budget priorities.
California finds itself on a similarly unsustainable path. Earlier this month, the California Teachers’ Retirement Board announced that the $152 billion pension fund faces a $64.5 billion shortfall over the next three decades, an increase of $8.5 billion from last year. To put this in perspective, California spent $64.4 billion on K-12 education during 2010-11. Unless California acts to make its pension system more sustainable, the K-12 education budget – along with other important government priorities – will likely be carved up to feed the ever-growing pension deficit.

Tony Wagner:

Most of our high schools and colleges are not preparing students to become innovators. To succeed in the 21st-century economy, students must learn to analyze and solve problems, collaborate, persevere, take calculated risks and learn from failure. To find out how to encourage these skills, I interviewed scores of innovators and their parents, teachers and employers. What I learned is that young Americans learn how to innovate most often despite their schooling–not because of it.
Though few young people will become brilliant innovators like Steve Jobs, most can be taught the skills needed to become more innovative in whatever they do. A handful of high schools, colleges and graduate schools are teaching young people these skills–places like High Tech High in San Diego, the New Tech high schools (a network of 86 schools in 16 states), Olin College in Massachusetts, the Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford and the MIT Media Lab. The culture of learning in these programs is radically at odds with the culture of schooling in most classrooms.

Deborah Gage:

Backed by $16 million from two of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firms, Coursera launched today to deliver free online courses from elite universities to millions of people around the world.
Kleiner Partner John Doerr: “Elite education is too expensive, and it’s available for too few.”
The company is headed by two Stanford University computer science professors, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, who developed an online education platform last fall that served two courses that attracted about 200,000 students, despite having no marketing.
The project was such a success that Koller and Ng decided to spin it out of Stanford and create a company. New Enterprise Associates General Partner Scott Sandell, who backed a previous company founded by Koller’s husband, said he heard a brief pitch from Koller on a Saturday in October when the two families were eating lunch together at Sandell’s house.

More, here.

Kevin Carey:

In the grand University of California system, the Berkeley and UCLA campuses have long claimed an outsized share of the public imagination. It’s easy to forget that the state system has more than two great institutions of higher education. In the heart of the Central Valley, UC-Davis has grown in a hundred years from being the “university farm” to becoming one of the world’s most important research universities. Now it’s part of a process that may fundamentally redefine the credentials that validate higher learning.
Throughout the 20th century, scientists at UC-Davis, a land-grant institution, helped significantly increase crop yields while leading research on plant genetics, water conservation, and pest control. When the present century began, Davis leaders knew the times called for not just production but conservation and renewal. So they created a new, interdisciplinary major in sustainable agriculture and food systems. Many different departments were involved in crafting curricula that range across life sciences, economics, and humanities, along with experiential learning in the field.

Marina Hernandez:

Four Rhode Island school districts — Coventry, East Providence, Providence and Woonsocket — were flagged for suspicious test scores between 2008 and 2011 in a recent study of standardized testing by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The results have prompted debate on the need for high-stakes testing to evaluate teacher effectiveness and student proficiency.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigated 196 school districts nationwide and “flagged” those districts where more than 10 percent of classes — which are composed of all students enrolled in the same grade at the same school — demonstrated unusually high or low performance compared to the norm.
In Coventry, 14.29 percent of classes were flagged for abnormal performance in 2009, but this number dropped to below 4 percent in 2011, the study showed. In 2009, 12.5 percent of classes in East Providence scored unusually high or low. Nearly 30 percent of classes in the Woonsocket district demonstrated a large number of scores outside the norm in 2008, a rate more than double that of any other Rhode Island school district that year. Providence classes were flagged at rates of 13.27 percent in 2008 and 11.21 percent in 2011, but abnormal score levels fell below 10 percent in the years between.

Nick Collins:

A study of university students found that those who brought drinks, especially water, with them as they sat their exams performed up to 10 per cent better than those who did not.
Psychologists said it was unclear why drinking water would improve your performance but said that being better hydrated could have a helpful impact on the brain, and knowing you had a bottle with you might make you feel more reassured.
The researchers studied hundreds of university students in their first and second years of degree courses and at pre-degree “foundation” level and observed what drinks, if any, they brought into exam halls with them.
Their study, presented at the British Psychological Society annual conference in London on Wednesday, found that those who brought drinks in with them averaged five per cent better in exams.

Michael Horn:

Many of my friends in the education world are fond of talking about how the University of Phoenix is not in fact a disruptive innovation.
They don’t just stop this statement with the University of Phoenix of course. I’m using the University of Phoenix as shorthand. What they mean are many of the distinctly online universities that have emerged over the last couple of decades–everyone from Kaplan University to DeVry to Bridgepoint.
They are wrong. These online universities are disruptive innovations relative to traditional universities. They are now on their own sustaining innovation track, which every disruptive innovation moves to as it grows, expands, improves, and marches up market. It’s also true that not all of them will succeed in these endeavors.
The fact that I’m saying they are disruptive innovations in the face of many saying they aren’t strikes me as ironic, given that I often find my job is to correct people who want to declare nearly everything disruptive and misapply the term. I also readily admit that online learning isn’t inherently disruptive; when it’s used in a hybrid format to complement or extend traditional brick-and-mortar learning, chances are it’s being used as a sustaining innovation. No technology is inherently a disruptive innovation, as all technologies can be applied to sustain or disrupt the industry’s incumbents.

Alex Friedrich:

When many people picture the typical agriculture student at the University of Minnesota, chances are they’d think of a rural farm boy.
For a long time they would have been on target. Many students probably arrived as a freshman to learn agronomy, soil or animal science and planned to return to the family farm or go to work for a big agricultural company.
That’s no longer true. Professors are seeing a different kind of agricultural student on the Twin Cities campus.
“It’s a woman who grew up in suburban Twin Cities, and is a transfer student from some place in MnSCU,” said Jay Bell, associate dean the U of M’s College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences.

Daniel Willingham:

Most colleges have strict polices about student plagiarism, often including stringent penalties for those who violate the rules. (At the University of Virginia, where I teach, the penalty is expulsion.) Yet infractions occur. Why?
My own intuition has been that plagiarism is often due to oversight or panic. A student will fall behind and, with a deadline looming, get sloppy in the writing of a paper: a few sentences or even a paragraph makes its way into the student paper without attribution. In the rush to finish the student forgets about it, or decides it doesn’t matter.
Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob had a different idea.

Sue Shellenbarger:

Between the ages of 18 and 22, Jodi Romine took out $74,000 in student loans to help finance her business-management degree at Kent State University in Ohio. What seemed like a good investment will delay her career, her marriage and decision to have children.
Ms. Romine’s $900-a-month loan payments eat up 60% of the paycheck she earns as a bank teller in Beaufort, S.C., the best job she could get after graduating in 2008. Her fiancé Dean Hawkins, 31, spends 40% of his paycheck on student loans. They each work more than 60 hours a week. He teaches as well as coaches high-school baseball and football teams, studies in a full-time master’s degree program, and moonlights weekends as a server at a restaurant. Ms. Romine, now 26, also works a second job, as a waitress. She is making all her loan payments on time.
They can’t buy a house, visit their families in Ohio as often as they would like or spend money on dates. Plans to marry or have children are on hold, says Ms. Romine. “I’m just looking for some way to manage my finances.”

Laura Locke:

An innovative electronic pen which could replace whiteboards is to be tested in schools in the US.
Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest with 770,000 students, will soon try out the gadget, named Penveu.
The handheld wireless device “electronically” works on any surface such as a bare wall, computer monitor or pulldown screen.
Penveu’s makers say it is far cheaper than existing whiteboard systems.
The device, which writes, points, and highlights on any flat surface, costs $499 (£312) for educational use – far less than existing interactive whiteboards which can cost more than £2,000.

I’ve followed Horace’s excellent online writing (“precision, poetry”) for the past few years and had the opportunity to meet him at Friday’s asymconf.
I’ve been impressed by the depth and breadth of his writing and analytical presentations. That naturally led me to ask about his education (he moved 30+ times growing up), work and more recent experience with Finland’s system ( more here) as a parent. I also asked where he mastered such a broad command of the English language. Listen for the answer.
I hope you find this podcast (28mb mp3) as illuminating as I did.
Links: asymco.com, asymconf.com, quora and twitter.com/asymco.
Update (4.26.2012): A transcript is available here.

David Wessel:

Paul Vallas made his mark in education-reform circles as school superintendent in the big cities of Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans, post-Katrina. Now the superstar superintendent is trying to turn around the schools in much smaller Bridgeport, Conn.–in 150 days or so.
This is more than a curiosity: America’s economic future depends on fixing its public schools. And, as Mr. Vallas observes, “There are a lot of Bridgeports”–small, de-industrialized, cash-short cities with failing schools.
If he succeeds here–within “existing financial constraints,” as he puts it, and with strong unions–Bridgeport can inspire others. “There are models for school improvement that don’t cost $1 million a school,” Mr. Vallas argues, a not-so-subtle swipe at the cost of experiments elsewhere.
The saga of schools in Bridgeport (pop. 144,229), a poor city amid the wealth of Fairfield County, is too long for this space. The short version: For nearly a decade, the state has flunked the 20,250-student, 37-school system. Only 10% of tenth graders meet state math and reading standards. At the best-performing of the city’s three high schools, the dropout rate is 23%; at the worst, 45%.
For years, members of the elected school board were at odds both with each other and with the city. The city hasn’t increased school funding for four years.In July, with quiet backing from the mayor, governor and wealthy education-reform enthusiasts, the school board took the extraordinary step of voting itself out of existence and asked the state to take over. A new state-appointed board fired the superintendent and, in December, signed Mr. Vallas to a one-year contract, raising money from private donors whose identities weren’t disclosed to pay his $229,000 salary and settle with his predecessor. But in February, the state Supreme Court declared the takeover illegal, and ordered a special election for a new school board. The date has yet to be set.

Bridgeport’s 2010-2011 budget spent $215,843,895 for “more than” 21,000 students = about $10,278/student. Madison spent $14,858.40/student during the 2011-2012 budget cycle.

CBS:

Officials with the Los Angeles Unified School District were considering a plan on Wednesday that would require all students to take advanced courses and earn at least a “C” in order to graduate.
The proposal is part of the district’s effort to make every LAUSD graduate meet the minimum standards for admission to University of California and Cal State University Systems.
The change would require students graduating in 2016 to pass a third year of math and two years of foreign language courses. With these changes, the district would no longer require the currently mandated health and applied technology courses.

Phil Izzo:

We know that a college diploma boosts earnings, but a student’s choice of major also plays a big part.
The gap wages rates between electrical-engineering and general-education majors is nearly as large as the difference between college graduates and high school graduates, according to a wide-ranging study by Joseph G. Altonji, Erica Blom and Costas Meghir of Yale University.
The economists examine the large differences in labor-market outcomes across college majors in several ways. In one section of their paper, they look at data on wages by college major obtained through the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey. They find that among other things, math skills are correlated to higher earnings. “Wages tend to be high for engineers and low for elementary education majors, suggesting that perhaps much of the wage differences between majors are due to differences in mathematical ability and high school course work,” the authors write.

Matthew DeFour:

Madison School District officials are warning that the group financing a building for the city’s newest charter school is short of its fundraising goal, and families are wondering if their children will be in another temporary location in the fall.
The organization building an environmental campus that will include Badger Rock Middle School is “100 percent confident” it will be able to secure $1.1 million in loans and raise about $340,000 over the next two months.
Also, the construction manager for the project said Tuesday the building will be completed by July 31, in time for the school’s second year of operation.
“Although administration doesn’t share their confidence, we fully agree that there is sufficient time to finish this project if there is an increased sense of urgency on the job site in the very near future,” Superintendent Dan Nerad wrote in a memo to the Madison School Board last week.
Nerad briefed the board on the matter Monday night.

Ron Matus:

Florida has long given folks nationwide good reason to pay attention to school choice happenings at the state level. Now comes a compelling story at the local level.
Glen Gilzean, 31, is seeking a school board seat to help lead the 101,000-student Pinellas County school district. He’s a former staffer with the state education department; an education entrepreneur whose business helps low income kids; an energetic guy with a solid grasp of education issues. He also happens to openly support school choice options like vouchers and tax credit scholarships.
That support prompted headlines after Florida Gov. Rick Scott appointed Gilzean to the District 7 seat in January. And it was mentioned again when Gilzean announced last week that he’s running to hold on to the seat. It should be kept in perspective.

The Madison Metropolitan School District Board reviewed the almost $373 million budget proposed by Superintendent Dan Nerad Monday night.
If the superintendent’s budget is approved, Madison property taxes could increase more than four percent, about a $100 tax increase on the average home in Madison.
The estimate does not include a proposed $12.4 million put aside to help the achievement gap in Madison schools.
The budget already poses an estimated $12.4 million deficit.

Related: Singapore vs. Madison/US Schools: Do We (Americans) Put Money into Our Children?

U-T San Diego:

It’s become a pattern in California. An exhausted Legislature finally completes work on a tardy state budget. Soon afterward, it becomes obvious the budget is a farce stitched together with funny numbers and delusional assumptions.
With the 2012-13 budget, however, the process has accelerated. Even before Gov. Jerry Brown issues his May revised budget, decisions made by lawmakers, the courts and federal bureaucrats – combined with bad news on the revenue front – make it close to impossible to expect a spending plan with a shred of credibility or accounting substance.
The most basic problem is that the governor plans to introduce a budget premised on the idea that voters in November will approve a midyear increase in income taxes on the wealthy and sales taxes, with “trigger cuts” hammering public schools if they are rejected. This screwball brinkmanship bodes terribly for schools if it fails and sets a horrible precedent if it succeeds. Only in Sacramento could a budget strategy that evokes a legendary National Lampoon cover – “buy this magazine or we’ll kill the dog” – be seen as inspired.

Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad 188K PDF:

The important component of this information, is to realize that MMSD prior to re- financing for lower interest rates, had debt service for the unfunded pension liability all along with an interest rate of 7.8%. It wasn’t transparent as it was simply paid on an annual basis, but to recognize lower interest rates, we chose to issue bonds that will save the district over $13 million in interest costs.
There are a few ways to look at what the appropriate level of debt is for a school district, and we have attempted to put information together relative to each differing way. The ways are:

Judy Le & Pansy Hall:

Milledgeville’s acting police chief, Dray Swicord, said Tuesday that he stands by an officer’s decision to handcuff an elementary school student for safety Friday after she allegedly threw a tantrum.
Swicord said the arresting officer is not under investigation for his actions.
According to the police report, kindergartner Salecia Johnson is accused of tearing items off the walls and throwing furniture.

Laurie Rogers:

“There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.” ~Mark Twain
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” ~Malcolm X
It’s true; the media have the power to destroy. But their real job is to uphold truth, accountability and transparency; to inform the people; and to investigate and shine a light on wrongdoing.
Today’s media are struggling to remain afloat. Challenged by blogs and Web sites, and accused of shallowness and bias, traditional media are scrambling to remain relevant and to retain readership. Many have cut space and reporting staff and now depend heavily on wire reports. Basic principles of journalism have been ground into dust under the need to satisfy advertisers and allies. It’s become convenient for media to use “stories” already written by government agencies (including school districts) and corporations. In return, the agencies ask for favorable coverage, which they get.

Brad Feld:

I spent this weekend at LindzonPalooza. Once a year Howard Lindzon gets together a bunch of his friends at the intersection of financing, tech, media, and entrepreneurship, we descend on The Del in Coronada, and have an awesome 48 hours together. Many interesting and stimulating things were said, but one I remember was from Peter Pham over dinner. It was a simple line, “why do we teach languages in junior high and high school but not a computer language?” that had profound meaning to me.
When I was in high school, I had to take two years of a foreign language. I had three choices – French, Spanish, or German. I didn’t really want to learn any of them so I opted for French. I hated it – rote memorization and endless tedious classes where I didn’t really understand anything. Fortunately I liked my teacher for the first two years and I did fine academically (I got an A) and ended up taking a third year of French.

Laura DeRoche-Perez:

The Urban League of Greater Madison would like to inform you of our new ACT College Readiness Academies, which have recently been established through a generous grant we received earlier this year from Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation. As such, ULGM is currently seeking certified teachers to teach ACT prep classes. Please forward this paid opportunity to your staff. Classes run in the evenings or on Saturdays, making it possible for teachers who are currently working full-time to lend their expertise to our ACT Readiness Academies. Teachers should contact Stephen Perez at 608-729-1209 or sperez@ulgm.org if interested. Please forward this message to other educators.

Madison Teachers Inc 92K PDF Newsletter:

EMOCRACY IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT. That is one message that should be evident with all that has happened in the last year. A functioning democracy requires an informed and engaged citizenry. Such is as true with union democracy as it is in a political democracy. MTI is a union of 4,700 members in five bargaining units, each with Bylaws enabling democratic governance to ensure the union reflects the will of its members. Each MTI unit elects its leadership – every member has a vote, and is free to seek office. Also, Collective Bargaining Agreements are subject to member ratification, with every member having a vote. Similarly, the MTI Budget is enacted only after approval by the MTI Finance Committee and by approval by the MTI Joint Fiscal Group, which is comprised of representatives proportionate to the membership of each of the five bargaining units. But,just like the right of suffrage cannot ensure voter participation, neither can union Bylaws ensure member participation in the union. Only you can. YOU ARE THE UNION.
In the coming months, your union will be engaging in a number of initiatives to further engage individuals in discussion about your union, what we have achieved together, what is at risk, and where we can go from the terrible situation created by Governor Walker’s Act 10. Beginning with a Member Engagement Survey which is being sent to the personal e-mail addresses of all MTI members who have shared their email address with the Union from all five bargaining units. Members are encouraged to take ten minutes to complete the on-line survey and share their thoughts. If you have not already provided your personal e-mail address to MTI, please do so now by contacting kantzlerr@madisonteachers.org. Those for whom MTI does not have a personal email address may access the survey on MTI’s webpage www.madisonteachers.org or by calling MTI Headquarters (257-0491).

channel3000.com:

The nonprofit insurer that covered about two-thirds of Wisconsin school districts last year has seen its revenue decline almost $70 million after the state gave districts more freedom to switch insurers.
But WEA Trust said it’s still in good shape. Spokesman Steve Lyons said the insurer is expanding its customers from just school districts to municipalities and individual state employees.
The insurer’s business took a hit after Gov. Scott Walker eliminated certain collective bargaining rights for most public employees.
Walker’s office touts data showing that 52 school districts that switched carriers saved a total of $30 million.

Scott Jaschik:

For Wake Forest University students in the “Options in the World of Work” course on Wednesday, the topic was location. Heidi Robinson, the instructor, walked students through exercises in which they discussed how to evaluate job opportunities in different localities. The students were divided into small groups, each with an iPad with material designed to compare a specific job here (in a relatively small, affordable city) and a larger city such as Boston or Los Angeles. Salaries are provided for the jobs, and students are given websites to find out how much they would spend on groceries in a week, the cost of an apartment, and so forth.
Before they do the analysis, Robinson leads the class in a discussion of a range of issues to consider when deciding where to pursue jobs — the possibility for advancement (or moving to different companies in the same city), the quality of these jobs, opportunities for a social life. Then she listens in on the small groups, firing questions at the students. When someone boasts of finding an affordable apartment in Los Angeles, Robinson asks if she can see photos of the apartment and figure out whether the neighborhood is one she would want to live in. When a student jokes about being able to afford living in Boston if she could just skip buying any groceries, Robinson gently reminds the group that groceries aren’t optional for post-college life. As she moves around the room engaging with students, it’s clear she knows each student’s major, internship history and home town.

Kris Olds:

Over the last two years I’ve made the point numerous times here that world university rankings have become normalized on an annual cycle, and function as data acquisition mechanisms to drill deep into universities but in a way that encourages (seduces?) universities to provide the data for free. In reality, the data is provided at a cost given that the staff time allocated to produce the data needs to be paid for, and allocating staff time this way generates opportunity costs.
See below for the latest indicator of the business side of world university rankings. Interestingly today’s press release from Thomson Reuters (reprinted in full) makes no mention of world university rankings, nor Times Higher Education, the media outlet owned by TSL Education, which was itself acquired by Charterhouse Capital Partners in 2007. Recall that it was that Times Higher Education began working with Thomson Reuters in 2010.

Kathleen Gallagher:

M. Ryan Haley, a University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh economics professor, has started a company that he hopes will disrupt the academic textbook publishing industry and help college students save a lot of money.
CoreTxt Plus Inc. is distributing a free digital statistics textbook to UW-Oshkosh students that’s prepared the same way as at big publishing houses.
“We bypassed the middleman, which is the people making all the money off our students,” Haley said. “They’re putting new editions out every few years now and it’s absurd. Statistics hasn’t changed in 150 years.”
Haley estimates the e-text has saved UW-Oshkosh students $100,000 to $150,000 in textbook costs during the four semesters the school has been using it.

John Coons:

Editor’s note: As momentum builds across the United States for expanded school choice, it is important to understand the movement’s legal and philosophical foundations. For more than 40 years, John E. Coons, redefinED co-host and professor of law, emeritus, University of California at Berkeley, has argued that parents – and not government – have the primary legal and moral responsibility and authority to educate their children. Coons is a powerful thinker whose reflections are best consumed slowly and with respect. Enjoy this special post.
It takes a village to raise a child–or so they say, and perhaps it’s true. Humans are interdependent, and every particular village -whatever that word means – has influence, for good or ill.
But the phrase is murky and subject to many interpretations. It can be read as the quirky proposition that the village is what logicians call a “sufficient condition” of some outcome; alone, by itself, it determines the bundle of effects that will be the person called Andrew or Susie.

sp-eye:

Is this Title Envy Part 2?
At the Human Resources Committee this week, Part II of the Employee Handbook (i.e., replacement for bargaining union contract) will be discussed. Part I was general information for all district employees. Part II is for the teachers….er…better make that “Professional Educators”.
Beneath the surface the (former) teacher’s union (SPEA) has long desired to be treated as “professionals”…and so now, to underscore that, they now will be known as “Professional Educators”.
Will this mean that there will now be “Parent-Professional Educator conferences”?
Now you leave an apple on the desk for “Professional Educator”?
Does Van Halen need to re-release the single from their “1984” CD as “Hot For Professional Educator”?

Matthew Di Carlo:

Although most new teacher evaluations are still in various phases of pre-implementation, it’s safe to say that classroom observations and/or value-added (VA) scores will be the most heavily-weighted components toward teachers’ final scores, depending on whether teachers are in tested grades and subjects. One gets the general sense that many – perhaps most – teachers strongly prefer the former (observations, especially peer observations) over the latter (VA).
One of the most common arguments against VA is that the scores are error-prone and unstable over time – i.e., that they are unreliable. And it’s true that the scores fluctuate between years (also see here), with much of this instability due to measurement error, rather than “real” performance changes. On a related note, different model specifications and different tests can yield very different results for the same teacher/class.
These findings are very important, and often too casually dismissed by VA supporters, but the issue of reliability is, to varying degrees, endemic to all performance measurement. Actually, many of the standard reliability-based criticisms of value-added could also be leveled against observations. Since we cannot observe “true” teacher performance, it’s tough to say which is “better” or “worse,” despite the certainty with which both “sides” often present their respective cases. And, the fact that both entail some level of measurement error doesn’t by itself speak to whether they should be part of evaluations.*

Mike Magee:

This is a story of hope, but you will have to read all the way to the end to know why.
This past October, all of Rhode Island’s 11th grade public school students sat down to take the NECAP test. As recently reported in the Providence Journal, one of the questions went like this:
Courtney walks three laps around a ¼-mile track. How many feet does she walk? (1 mile = 5,280 feet.)
A 440 feet. B 1,320 feet. C 3,960 feet. D 7,040 feet.
Being able to multiply and divide four-digit numbers would have helped but as long as students understood the problem and the concept of fractions, a rough estimate (what is ¾ of 5280?) would have given them the answer: C.
Sixty-nine percent of them chose the wrong answer.

Mike Antonucci:

But in researching the history of this battle over the surveys, I came across something much more illuminating and – let’s face it – entertaining.
When the governor first began making his claims of improved schools last fall, WEAC reacted in the traditional manner – by drawing up talking points. One memo, dated November 29, is still posted on the web site of the West Allis-West Milwaukee Education Association. It’s not unusual, until you get to the sample statement/press release that locals were supposed to use as a model. I repost it here in its entirety – warts and all:

Jeremy Adam Smith, via a kind reader’s email:

Instead of being kicked out for fighting, stealing, talking back, or other disruptive behavior, public school students in San Francisco are being asked to listen to each other, write letters of apology, work out solutions with the help of parents and educators, or engage in community service. All these practices fall under the umbrella of “restorative justice”–asking wrongdoers to make amends before resorting to punishment.
The program launched in 2009 when the San Francisco Board of Education passed a resolution for schools to find alternatives to suspension and expulsion. In the previous seven years, suspensions in San Francisco spiked by 152 percent, to a total of 4,341–mostly among African Americans, who despite being one-tenth of the district made up half of suspensions and more than half of expulsions.
This disparity fed larger social inequalities: Two decades of national studies have found that expelled or suspended students are vastly more likely to drop out of school or end up in jail than those who face other kinds of consequences for their actions.

Chicago Tribune:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s school team is locked in a tense negotiation with the Chicago Teachers Union over a new teachers contract.
The threat of a teachers strike looms; CTU President Karen Lewis says that an informal poll of members at 150 schools shows “overwhelming” support for a strike. Lewis told reporters that she has “never seen anything like the hostile climate that exists right now.”
Strike talk in April. Before negotiations have even officially hit an impasse. Not a good sign.

Sheila Bair:

Are you concerned about growing income inequality in America? Are you resentful of all that wealth concentrated in the 1 percent? I’ve got the perfect solution, a modest proposal that involves just a small adjustment in the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy. Best of all, it will mean that none of us have to work for a living anymore.
For several years now, the Fed has been making money available to the financial sector at near-zero interest rates. Big banks and hedge funds, among others, have taken this cheap money and invested it in securities with high yields. This type of profit-making, called the “carry trade,” has been enormously profitable for them.
So why not let everyone participate?

and
Buffett Rule is a Political Gimmick That Won’t Work, and
Corruption Is Why You Can’t Do Your Taxes in Five Minutes

Gary Gutting:

Today I’m going to hopefully beg a question which will incentivize the reader to share their views. Yes, I’m writing about English grammar and usage.
Debates about linguistic norms typically set traditionalists against revisionists. The two sides are particularly entrenched because each is rooted in a fundamental truth: the traditionalists are right that the rules are the rules (for instance, pronouns do need to agree in number with their referents), and the revisionists are right that language does change over time (nouns can come to be used as verbs).

Jenny Anderson:

LAST month, two kindergarten classes at the Blue School were hard at work doing what many kindergartners do: drawing. One group pursued a variation on the self-portrait. “That’s me thinking about my brain,” one 5-year-old-girl said of her picture. Down the hall, children with oil pastels in hand were illustrating their emotions, mapping where they started and where they ended. For one girl, sadness ended at home with a yummy drink and her teddy bear.
Grappling so directly with thoughts and emotions may seem odd for such young brains, but it is part of the DNA of the Blue School, a downtown Manhattan private school that began six years ago as a play group. From the beginning, the founders wanted to incorporate scientific research about childhood development into the classroom. Having rapidly grown to more than 200 students in preschool through third grade, the school has become a kind of national laboratory for integrating cognitive neuroscience and cutting-edge educational theory into curriculum, professional development and school design.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Finally, the troubling differences in levels of student learning that give rise to our achievement gap present an enormous challenge for our teachers. We as a District have long been committed to inclusive and heterogeneous elementary school classrooms. Consequently, given the gap, our teachers frequently lead classrooms with a number of high-achieving students and a number of struggling students. Imagine how much dedication and ingenuity it must take for our classroom teachers to provide a learning environment where all their students can thrive. It would be helpful to hear from teachers about how they think they can be most effective in teaching all students in classes with such a wide span of developed capabilities, given our resource limitations.
Even test results as generally uninformative as the WKCE make clear the extent of our achievement gap in Madison. From the perspective of the WKCE and based on statewide averages, our white students on the whole seem to be doing just fine while our African-American students on the whole are struggling. This shouldn’t come as news to anyone, but it does underscore what’s at stake when over the next several weeks the School Board starts to decide what components of the superintendent’s achievement gap plan we’re actually willing to raise taxes to support.

Related: 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use

I read with interest Nathan Comps’ article on the forthcoming 2012-2013 Madison School District budget. Board Vice President Marj Passman lamented:

“If Singapore can put a classroom of students on its money, and we can’t even put our money into children, what kind of country are we?” asks Passman, Madison school board vice president. “It’s going to be a horrible budget this year.”

Yet, according to the World Bank, Singapore spends 63% less per student than we do in America on primary education and 47% less on secondary education. The US spent $10,441/student in 2007-2008 while Madison spent $13,997.27/student during that budget cycle. Madison’s 2011-2012 budget spends $14,858.40/student.
The Economist on per student spending:

Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question: what do the successful lot have in common? Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich countries.
In Finland all new teachers must have a master’s degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%.

Rather than simply throwing more money (Madison taxpayers have long supported above average K-12 spending) at the current processes, perhaps it is time to rethink curriculum and just maybe, give Singapore Math a try in the Madison schools.
Related:

• 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use
• Singapore Math and Math Forum.
• Singapore school statistics (PDF)
• When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
• Alabama, unlike Wisconsin, participated in the 2011 global TIMSS examinations. Perhaps one day, Wisconsin will have the courage to compare our students to the world.

Via the Global Report Card. The average Madison student performs better than 23% of Singapore students in Math and 35% in reading.

Michael Jonas:

As online education continues to grow, says Bill Tucker, the managing director of Education Sector, a Washing­ton, DC, think tank, we need to strike a balance that encourages innovation while also holding schools and companies accountable for results. “I want the sector to have the space to grow,” says Tucker, who specializes in education technology and virtual school issues. “At the same time, it would be foolish or naïve just to think, ‘OK, let everybody do what they want and it will just naturally get better.'”
When it comes to full-time virtual schools, the state is now trying to figure out how to strike that balance. Mitchell Chester, the state’s education commissioner, says he thinks there is “a small percentage of the population for whom this mode of learning would be beneficial.” But he says he is “very uncomfortable” with the provision of the 2010 reform law that allows districts to decide on their own to open virtual schools that enroll students statewide. The Green­field-based school is “a statewide school with no role for the state,” he says.

Frank Donoghue:

First, let’s break down the staggering $1-trillion in student debt that has become so familiar a number to all of us in the last year or so. First, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as quoted in Sheryl Nance-Nash’s recent article in Forbes, “Unlike other consumer credit products, student debt keeps growing at a steady clip. Students borrowed $117-billion in just federal loans last year. And students continue to borrow private student loans, which lack the income-based repayment and deferment options of federal student loans.” The average total loan debt for undergraduates is $26,000, with the debt for those choosing to attend law school, medical school, or business school obviously much greater.
This enormous amount of debt has consequences for all of us since–although few economists discuss it at length–it represents a tremendous drain on the economy and is slowing our recovery from the recession that began in 2008. College graduates and postgraduates, instead of buying cars, buying houses, getting married, having children–in other words, becoming full-fledged consumers are, as Nance-Nash puts it, “running back home.” That hurts us all.

Howard Karsh:

The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association recently asked its members to voluntarily contribute a week’s salary to help improve class sizes in Milwaukee Public Schools. The teachers overwhelmingly voted no.
They had a right to do that. They are angry about the new laws enacted by Gov. Scott Walker that will affect them at the end of their current contract. They are angry about the attack on collective bargaining.
But it was teachers who said that, had they been asked to the table instead of attacked, they would have done the right thing. Could the recent vote make that claim now look like something less?
Many of the strongest proponents of the recall effort against Walker are MPS teachers. They were in Madison last spring during the protests and were well-represented at rallies and foremost in collecting recall signatures.
They have a right to be proud of their efforts. And it has been their voices that have been loud and clear about the harm they believe is being caused by the Walker administration to the very kids they teach – the kids who need more teachers and more resources.

Alan Borsuk:

It’s 8:45 on a weeknight and five students are gathered in a dimly lighted corridor of Waukesha West High School. They’re dedicated. They’re energized. They’re getting ready to compete for a national championship. They’re part of what may well be the most dominating high school team in Wisconsin.
They’re reading out loud parts of essays they have written about the impact of British colonialism in Africa and Asia between 1800 and 1900. They’re critiquing each other. You spent much time lately interpreting Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, “Heart of Darkness?” These kids have.
They’ve been doing activities like this almost every night after school since last fall. Last week, school was out for spring break, but they and their teammates were at school from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day.
This is the Waukesha West Academic Decathlon team. State champions 11 years in a row – can any sports team claim a run like that? They’re getting ready to go to Albuquerque, N.M., at the end of this month for another shot at the national championship. The school won once, in 2002, and has finished in the top five repeatedly.