Budget/Financing – Page 10 – School Information System

Adults lying to them

A year or so ago, I was a guest lecturer in NYU’s Intro to Journalism class, 200 or so sophomores interested in adding journalism as a second major. (We don’t allow students to major in journalism alone, for the obvious reason.) One of the students had been dispatched to interview me in front of the class, and two or three questions in, she asked “So how do we save print?”

I was speechless for a moment, then exploded, telling her that print was in terminal decline and that everyone in the class needed to understand this if they were thinking of journalism as a major or a profession.

The students were shocked — for many of them, it was the first time anyone had talked to them that way. Even a prompt from me to predict the date of Time magazine’s demise elicited a small gasp. This was a room full of people would would rather lick asphalt than subscribe to a paper publication; what on earth would make them think print was anything other than a wasting asset?

And the answer is “Adults lying to them.” Our students were persuaded to discount their own experience in favor of what the grownups who cover the media industry were saying, and those grownups were saying that strategies like Kushner’s might just work.

People who ought to have known better, like Ryan Chittum at Columbia Journalism Review and Ken Doctor at Nieman, wrote puff pieces for Kushner, because they couldn’t bear to treat him like the snake-oil salesman he is.

The Tuition Puzzle

Paul Campos

This is the first of what will probably be several posts about the extraordinary increases in law school tuition over the past half century (In this as in so many other respects, law school is merely a particularly extreme version of something that has happened all across higher education in America).

First, some numbers:

Law School Transparency has done a nice job graphing what has happened to law school tuition since 1985, in both current and inflation-adjusted dollars. Private law school tuition has gone from just over $16K to just under $42K in 2013 dollars. Public resident tuition has gone up even more sharply, from $4,300 to $23,000, again in constant inflation-adjusted dollars.

These numbers are startling enough, but they obscure the extent to which by the mid-1980s tuition had already skyrocketed over the course of the previous 25 years. LST is using data the ABA posts on its web site, which only go back to 1985. Looking back to 1960, private law school tuition averaged around $7000 in 2013 dollars, while public law school tuition was perhaps a third of that, i.e., essentially nominal (These estimates are based on Harvard’s and Michigan’s law school tuition at the time. They assume that tuition at HLS was around 20% higher than at the average private law school, which has been the norm over the past three decades, and that Michigan’s resident tuition was typical of state law school resident tuition. If anything this latter estimate probably overstates public law school resident tuition in the 1960s).

This is, in the context of normal economic activity, a remarkable situation. People often speak these days of a “tuition bubble,” but a classic price bubble involves a sharp short-term run-up in prices, followed by an even more sudden collapse when the bubble bursts. For example, the US housing market was relatively stable between 1970 and 2000, with median home prices staying between $150,000 and $180,000 in real terms. The housing bubble featured a five-year run up, during which the median price rose by nearly 70%, before falling back to pre-bubble levels just three years after the peak.

Year later, much has been learned about school closings Chicago Public Schools say attendance, grades didn’t suffer

Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah:

Nerves were a little shakier than usual when the 2013-14 school year started in Chicago, as parents and city officials anxiously watched thousands of children heading off to classrooms in unfamiliar neighborhoods because of the district’s move to close almost 50 elementary schools.

But when classes let out Friday, most of the fears of September were unrealized. The Safe Passage program to protect kids on their way to and from those schools appears to have performed as promised. And Chicago Public Schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett on Friday said there was an uptick in performance at schools designated to take in students whose buildings were closed.

Madison tried to consolidate school facilities in 2007, unsuccessfully. Bricks and mortar are largely irrelevant if one has great teachers.

Greased palms and dried fruit

The Economist:

OBESITY, according to a government-sponsored report, could make the current generation of Americans the first in history to live shorter lives than the previous one. A major change in food habits is needed to reverse the trend of widening waistlines (a development which we recently illustrated on our blog Graphic detail). Recognising that people’s dietary preferences develop at an early age, John List of the University of Chicago and Anya Savikhin Samek of the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined in a recent study whether children can be “nudged” (or incentivised) to eat more fruits and less sweets. Their results suggest that the answer is yes.

In a field experiment carried out in Chicago over several weeks, Mr List and Ms Savikhin Samek tested the impact of giving kids an incentive to choose food they normally would not. During after-school programmes dubbed “Kids’ Cafes” in 24 different locations across the city, children aged 6-18 were offered a free snack and could select either a cup with dried fruit (dried banana with acai or dried mango) or a cookie (such as snickerdoodle or chocolate chip). A group of the Kids’ Cafes was randomly selected to offer the children at their particular site an incentive to pick the cup; each time an individual chose the dried fruit over the cookie and ate it in the cafeteria, he or she would receive a small prize worth 50 cents or less (for example a wristband, pen or keychain).

How one unvaccinated child sparked Minnesota measles outbreak

Amy Norton

A measles outbreak in Minnesota offers a case study of how the disease is transmitted in the United States today: An unvaccinated person travels abroad, brings measles back and infects vulnerable people — including children who are unprotected because their parents chose not to vaccinate them.

That’s the conclusion of a report published online June 9 in Pediatrics that details the 2011 outbreak that sickened 19 children and two adults in the state.

It began when an unvaccinated 2-year-old was taken to Kenya, where he contracted the measles virus. After returning to the United States, the child developed a fever, cough and vomiting. However, before measles was diagnosed, he passed the virus on to three children in a drop-in child care center and another household member. Contacts then multiplied, with more than 3,000 people eventually exposed.

NJ civil rights lawyers should sue over teacher seniority rules

New Jersey Star Ledgee:

A California judge ruled this week that a poor kid’s equal right to a quality education isn’t just a matter of funding — it’s also about the barriers to success that lawmakers have imposed on the system. This includes tenure, seniority and other employment policies that make it unduly hard to fire a bad teacher.

They’ve helped perpetuate a hierarchy in which the best teachers generally wind up at the most desirable schools, and some of the worst ones at high-poverty schools, where it can take years of bureaucracy and tens of thousands of dollars to get rid of them.

Not only is this absurd, the judge argued; it’s unconstitutional. It violates a clause in many state constitutions, including New Jersey’s, that assures students a “thorough and efficient education.” This was the same clause under which advocates sued in the famous 1985 New Jersey Supreme Court case, Abbott v. Burke, to challenge the lack of equal funding for students in the poorest districts.

To improve our schools, we need to make it harder to become a teacher.

Amanda Ripley:

So far this month in education news, a California court has decimated rigid job protections for teachers, and Oklahoma’s governor has abolished the most rigorous learning standards that state has ever had. Back and forth we go in America’s exhausting tug-of-war over schools—local versus federal control, union versus management, us versus them.

But something else is happening, too. Something that hasn’t made many headlines but has the potential to finally revolutionize education in ways these nasty feuds never will.

In a handful of statehouses and universities across the country, a few farsighted Americans are finally pursuing what the world’s smartest countries have found to be the most efficient education reform ever tried. They are making it harder to become a teacher. Ever so slowly, these legislators and educators are beginning to treat the preparation of teachers the way we treat the training of surgeons and pilots—rendering it dramatically more selective, practical, and rigorous. All of which could transform not only the quality of teaching in America but the way the rest of us think about school and learning.

Wisconsin took one very small step toward teacher content knowledge, MTEL a few years ago.

Common Core, in 9-Year-Old Eyes

Javier Hernandez:

He could have written about the green toy truck he kept hidden in his room, a reminder of Haiti, a place he did not yet fully understand.

He might have mentioned the second-place trophy he had won for reciting a psalm in French at church — “le bonheur et la grâce m’accompagneront tous les jours de ma vie…” — his one and only award.

He could have noted his dream of becoming an engineer or an architect, to one day have a house with a pool and a laboratory where he would turn wild ideas about winged cars and jet packs into reality.

But on a windy April afternoon, as the first real sun of spring fell on Public School 397 in Brooklyn, and empty supermarket bags floated through the sky, Chrispin Alcindor’s mind was elsewhere.

much more on the Common Core, here.

Will California’s Ruling Against Teacher Tenure Change Schools?

Dana Goldstein:

On Tuesday, a California superior-court judge ruled that the state’s teacher tenure system discriminates against kids from low-income families. Based on testimony that one to three percent of California teachers are likely “grossly ineffective”—thousands of people, who mostly teach at low-income schools—he reasoned that current tenure policies “impose a disproportionate burden on poor and minority students.” The ruling, in Vergara v. California, has the potential to overturn five state laws governing how long it takes for a teacher to earn tenure; the legal maneuvers necessary to remove a tenured teacher; and which teachers are laid off first in the event of budget cuts or school closings.

Tenure has existed in K-12 public education since 1909, when “good-government” reformers borrowed the concept from Germany. The idea spread quickly from New Jersey to New York to Chicago and then across the country. During the Progressive Era, both teachers unions and school-accountability hawks embraced the policy, which prevented teaching jobs from being given out as favors by political bosses. If it was legally difficult to fire a good teacher, she couldn’t be replaced by the alderman’s unqualified sister-in-law.

Commentary on Madison’s special Education and “inclusive” practices; District enrollment remains flat while the suburbs continue to grow

Pat Schneider:

That was one issue that brought together family activists who formed Madison Partners for Inclusive Education [duckduckgo search] in 2003, Pugh said.

“A parent in an elementary school on the west side could be seeing high-quality inclusive expert teaching with a team that ‘got it,’ and someone on the east side could be experiencing exactly the opposite,” Pugh said. Families and the school district are still striving to provide the best learning experience to all students with disabilities.

The key is to establish a culture throughout the district where participation in the classroom by students with disabilities is expected and valued. In addition, all teachers need to be trained to work collaboratively with special education teachers to make that happen, she said.

“It comes down to leadership,” said Pugh, who added that she is heartened by Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham’s remarks about raising expectations for all students. “That’s where we start.”

The district had an outside consultant review its special education programs earlier this year.

“In the next several weeks, we’ll use this information, our own data and expertise in the district to develop an improvement plan, including what our immediate steps will be,” spokesperson Rachel Strauch-Nelson said.

There has been no small amount of tension over Madison’s tactics in this matter from the one size fits all English 10 to various “high school redesign” schemes.

Yet, Madison’s student population remains stagnant while nearby districts have grown substantially.

Outbound open enrollment along with a Talented and Gifted complaint are topics worth watching.

This French tech school has no teachers, no books, no tuition — and it could change everything

Dylan Tweeney:

École 42 might be one of the most ambitious experiments in engineering education.

It has no teachers. No books. No MOOCs. No dorms, gyms, labs, or student centers. No tuition.

And yet it plans to turn out highly qualified, motivated software engineers, each of whom has gone through an intensive two- to three-year program designed to teach them everything they need to know to become outstanding programmers.

The school, housed in a former government building used to educate teachers (ironically enough), was started by Xavier Niel. The founder and majority owner of French ISP Free, Niel is a billionaire many times over. He’s not well known in the U.S., but here he is revered as one of the country’s great entrepreneurial successes in tech.

He is also irrepressibly upbeat, smiling and laughing almost nonstop for the hour that he led a tour through École 42 earlier this week. (Who wouldn’t be, with that much wealth? Yet I have met much more dour billionaires before.)

Change to our agrarian era $15k+/student public school organizations looms.

Math for seven-year-olds: graph coloring, chromatic numbers, and Eulerian paths and circuits

Joel David Hamkins:

As a guest today in my daughter’s second-grade classroom, full of math-enthusiastic seven-and-eight-year-old girls, I led a mathematical investigation of graph coloring, chromatic numbers, map coloring and Eulerian paths and circuits. I brought in a pile of sample graphs I had prepared, and all the girls made up their own graphs and maps to challenge each other. By the end each child had compiled a mathematical “coloring book” containing the results of their explorations. Let me tell you a little about what we did.

We began with vertex coloring, where one colors the vertices of a graph in such a way that adjacent vertices get different colors. We started with some easy examples, and then moved on to more complicated graphs, which they attacked.

Wisconsin Gubernatorial candidate Act 10 Commentary

Matthew DeFour:

Mary Burke, who has already been endorsed by more than a dozen of the state’s largest private- and public-sector unions, said she supports making wages, hours, benefits and working conditions mandatory subjects of bargaining for public employees.

She called the annual elections, the prohibition on requiring union dues of all employees, and a ban on automatic dues collections “nothing more than heavy-handed attempts to punish labor unions” and said she would work to repeal those provisions.

She said she would have used the collective bargaining process to achieve the pension and health insurance contributions that helped balance the state budget. But she does not want to reset the law to before Act 10, when state employees could pay no more than 20 percent of health insurance premiums and could bargain with employers to cover their full pension contribution.

Burke also agreed the way contract disputes were settled for decades needed to change, but disagreed with eliminating interest arbitration. She said the factors used in the process should allow for “effective, efficient and accountable government workforce and institutions,” though she didn’t offer a specific plan for reinstating it.

The Walker campaign responded that Burke’s position on Act 10 “mirrors her willingness to concede to unions as a Madison School Board member, and is yet another example of how she would take Wisconsin backward.”
Unions weigh in
Rick Badger, executive director of AFSCME Council 40, which represents many Dane County-area municipal employees, said some of his members are unhappy Burke won’t promise to repeal the law entirely. But they like that she expressed interest in listening to different points of view, whereas Walker never responded to requests to meet after he was elected.

“She’s made it clear she’ll sit down with us,” Badger said. “After what employees went through over the past three years, it’s great to hear someone say, ‘Your concerns still matter.’ ”

Much more on Wisconsin Act 10, here.

Technology in classrooms: The latest innovations promise big improvements in teaching

The Economist:

WHO killed Edgar Allan Poe? The mysterious death of the 19th-century author features in a new online school curriculum from Amplify, the education arm of News Corp. Pupils follow clues that require close reading of Poe’s stories (the assassin’s identity varies, to prevent cribbing), and take machine-graded comprehension and vocabulary tests along the way. Another section teaches mathematics by setting quests, such as an Alaskan dog-sled race for which pupils must plan, budget and manage provisions.

Two decades of fitting classrooms with computers and whiteboards have gobbled rich countries’ school budgets and done little for attainment. But the latest technology promises to improve teaching methods, rather than merely shifting them from blackboard to screen, and to give all children the personalised education once only available to the rich. Game-style lessons let pupils progress at their own pace, getting instant feedback at every step. Even homework is more fun: when Pearson (a part-owner of The Economist) supplied tablet-based courses to schools in Alabama, they were such a hit that Wi-Fi was installed on school buses so it could be done en route.

The Fall of Teacher Unions

Stephanie Simon:

Yet the share of Americans who see teachers unions as a negative influence on public schools shot up to 43 percent last year, up from 31 percent in 2009, according to national polling conducted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and the journal Education Next. By contrast, 32 percent see unions as a positive force, up from 28 percent in 2009, the poll found.

Labor’s fading clout was evident earlier this month in the California primary, when unions representing teachers and other public-sector workers spent nearly $5 million to boost state Superintendent Tom Torlakson to a second term — but failed to bring in enough votes for him to win outright.
Instead, Torlakson will have to fight for his seat in a runoff against a fellow Democrat, former charter school executive Marshall Tuck, who has bucked the teachers unions on many issues — and who has been endorsed by every major newspaper in California. In backing Tuck, most of the editorial boards specifically cited the urgent need to curb union influence.

Another sign of the shifting sands: the ruling this week in Vergara v. California striking down laws governing the hiring and firing of teachers. In a withering opinion, Judge Rolf M. Treu essentially blamed the unions for depriving minority children, in particular, of a quality education by shielding incompetent teachers from dismissal.

The unions argue that the laws in question simply guarantee teachers due process. They plan to appeal. But the judge’s rhetoric clearly hit a nerve. Education Secretary Arne Duncan hailed the ruling. So did Rep. George Miller, a leading Democratic voice on education policy in Congress. He called the union policies “indefensible.” A New York Times editorial went further, referring to the laws the unions had defended as “shameful,” “anachronistic” and straight-up “stupidity.”

Exorbitant Cost of Pseudo-Educating America: The Next Two-Trillion Dollar Bubble

Tanosborn:

At $1.2 trillion student debt, we may only be 60 percent along the way, but rest assured that it won’t take but 3 to 5 years before this spectacular bubble bursts… and it will do so on the economic backs of the poor, and the ghostly – ghastly might be more apropos – remnants of a fast disappearing middle class.

Two weeks ago, while doing a final screening of old papers kept for no-apparent good reason, I came across a few notes from a graduate business course which I taught over three decades ago. An underlined hyphenated-word stood in front of me teasing both my memory and reason for its use: Porno-Economics. Then, I quickly recalled that my reason for its use had absolutely nothing to do with the economics of porn; and how I explained to my class – mostly graduate engineers with families trying to attain an MBA attending evening classes to improve their chance for career advancement – with my intended meaning appearing in parenthesis in the notes: “worthless economic activity for no other reason than to stimulate and fulfill greed.” It would be more than a decade later that the true father of Porno-Economics, and Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, would show up (December 1996) with his celebrated cute-ism of Irrational Exuberance… as prelude to the infamous Dot-com bubble burst (1999-2001).

Putting Teacher Tenure In Context

Adam Ozimek:

One piece of evidence against this comes from the study Goldstein cites, which found that the teachers who were dismissed were: 1) more likely to have frequent absences, 2) received worse evaulations in the past, 3) have lower value added scores, and 4) have less qualifications. While this policy only applied to newer teachers and thus can’t deal with things like experience or expensive teachers, it is evidence that administrators do consider teacher effectiveness.

The allegation that expensive or experienced teachers would be fired is an interesting one. Why, after all, would an administrator want to fire experienced teachers when experience is a quality that contributes to outcomes? And if teachers are paid in a way that is commensurate with their effectiveness, then why would more expensive and therefore more effective teachers be fired? The problem, as Ravitch surely knows, is that older teachers are overpaid relative to younger teachers. As Michael Petrilli has shown in a piece called “The Case For Paying Most Teachers The Same”, the teacher pay scale is far more back-loaded than in other professional jobs. You can see this clearly in Petrilli’s figure below that compares average teacher pay by age to doctors and lawyers. If there is a risk that administrators will find older teachers too expensive relative to younger teachers, it’s because of this payscale problem. Effectively preventing schools from firing people is a pretty poor way to respond to the problem of overpaid older teachers and underpaid younger teachers.

The 1 Thing That Will Improve Math Learning

Daniel Willingham:

How can we do a better job of teaching kids math? A different curriculum? New pedagogical strategies? Personalized instruction through technology? All these worthy ideas have their adherents, but another method — reducing math anxiety — may both improve performance and help kids enjoy math more. Sian Beilock and I recently reviewed the research literature on math anxiety with an eye towards remediation. Here are some of the highlights.

Math anxiety means, unsurprisingly, that one feels tension and apprehension in situations involving math. What is surprising is the frequency of the problem, and the young age at which it can start. Fully half of first and second graders feel moderate to severe math anxiety. And many children do not outgrow it; about 25 percent of students attending a four-year college suffer from math anxiety. Among community college students, the figure is 80 percent.

Here’s Why the Student Loan Market Is Completely Insane

Eric Chemi:

President Obama made news this week by expanding a student loan program to broaden the eligibility of borrowers and proposing to limit monthly payments to 10 percent of a student borrower’s income. On the margin, such moves might help. But the administration’s efforts don’t address a more fundamental problem: These loans aren’t calibrated for risk. In other words, students from Harvard and less-prestigious regional colleges are thrown in the same bucket, despite quite different risk profiles.

Under Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) rules governing the insurance of banks, lenders can’t differentiate among schools in assessing credit risk as they do with home buyers and car owners. As a result, “the government has made it difficult for banks to price to default rates,” says Mike Cagney, founder of Social Finance, a socially based student lending operation known informally as SoFi. “By accepting FDIC insurance, banks lose pricing flexibility and can’t charge interest rates commensurate with the quality of schools—and default rates vary widely by schools.”

SoFi has funded more than $650 million in loans to 7,000 borrowers since its founding in 2011. Says Cagney: “The definition of a predatory lender is someone who pushes loans on an individual who can’t afford to pay them back. Under that definition, many of the educational loans made today could be considered predatory.”

A Case Study in Lifting College Attendance

David Lepnhardt:

Sydney Nye was a straight-A student with an SAT score high enough to apply to any college in the country. When her senior year of high school in Wilmington, Del., started about nine months ago, she had dreams of becoming a chemical engineer.

But she did not spend much time dreaming about where she would go to college. The notion of attending anything other than a local college seemed too far-fetched. She knew her parents — a dental assistant and a hairdresser, neither of whom had attended college — would have a hard time paying the nearly $100 application fee to elite colleges, let alone the tuition.

Fortunately, Ms. Nye lives in the state that has arguably become the most aggressive at trying to ensure that its college-ready teenagers attend college.

Around the same time that she was turning her attention to college applications, Delaware’s governor, Jack Markell, announced a program called Getting to Zero. Its goal was to get all high-school seniors with an SAT score of at least a 1,500 (out of 2,400) on the SAT to enroll in college. In recent years, state data show, about 20 percent of such teenagers did not.

Information technology and higher education

Steve Hsu. Worth a look.

Expanding the Reach and Lifelong Impact of Teachers

For years I have been reporting on and learning from ASCD, previously the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Its characteristic challenge to teachers in “The Myth of Student Engagement” (inservice.ascd.org, April. 15) begins:

“Each day that you enter your classroom, are you educating students? Or are you teaching at them?

“Do your lessons only improve their academic knowledge? Or do they foster their personal growth?”

And then: “You could shift your perspective to stop teaching at students and begin learning about them.”

In a few places around the nation, it’s not only ASCD asking and doing something about these questions. Before examining where this is happening, I cannot resist starting with a single teacher who is answering those questions by herself — without the exceptionally knowledgeable and creative ASCD staff.

On College Debt & lack of K-12 Math Teaching

Heidi Moore:

And the contract terms on private college loans are rigid to the point of cruelty. Borrowers have almost no say and little ability to renegotiate the terms if financial trouble occurs – an inevitability. Many private lenders don’t allow students to pay down the principal of a loan, which means endless payments just to cover the high interest, without ever chipping away at the real amount. Payment options like forbearance are temporary and restricted; prepayment or consolidation are largely forbidden. The most dangerous part for such a significant debt is that there is no escape, no way to ease the burden.

Private or publicly guaranteed student loans are a sideshow. Our K-12 schools should be teaching basic math, skills that students can use to understand the implications of their choices.

The Latest Student-Loan Charade

Wall Street Journal:

You can tell an election is coming, because President Obama is promising more student-loan relief to young people who are growing less enthralled with his economic record. The latest exercise unveiled Monday is also supposed to make these young people forget the loan burden that earlier free lunches supposedly provided. The taxpayer losses will come on some other President’s watch.

Specifically, Mr. Obama announced an expansion of the burgeoning disaster known as his Pay As You Earn program. This gift from taxpayers caps monthly student-loan payments at 10% of a borrower’s discretionary income, regardless of how much the borrower owes. Even better, the borrowers have their debts entirely forgiven after 20 years—or merely 10 years if they work in government or nonprofits. Those who work outside the profit-making economy don’t even have to report the forgiven loans as income.

On Wisconsin’s Teacher Tenure Practices

StudentsFirst:

During a reduction in force (RIF), Wisconsin requires that layoffs are conducted in order of inverse seniority. To ensure effective teachers are retained, the state should require districts to base dismissals during a RIF on performance and explicitly prohibit seniority from being a factor in these decisions except as a tie-breaker for similarly rated teachers.

“Of 275,000 teachers statewide, 2.2 teachers are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance per year–0.0008 percent”

Students Matter:

We think it’s simple: reward and retain passionate, motivating, effective teachers and hold those accountable who are failing our children. By striking down the following laws, Vergara v. California will create an opportunity for lawmakers, teachers, administrators and community leaders to design a system that’s good for teachers and students. Because when it comes to educating our kids, there should only be winners.

Permanent Employment Statute: The permanent employment law forces administrators to either grant or deny permanent employment to teachers after an evaluation period of less than 16 months—before new teachers even complete their beginner teacher induction programs and before administrators are able to assess whether a teacher will be effective long-term.

Dismissal Statutes: The process for dismissing a single ineffective teacher involves a borderline infinite number of steps, requires years of documentation, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and still, rarely ever works. Out of 275,000 teachers statewide, 2.2 teachers are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance per year on average, which amounts to 0.0008 percent.

“Last-In, First-Out” (“LIFO”) Layoff Statute: The “LIFO” law forces school districts to base layoffs on seniority alone, with no consideration of teachers’ performance in the classroom.

Autism costs ‘£32bn per year’ in UK

Helen Briggs:

The economic cost of supporting someone with autism over a lifetime is much higher than previously thought, research suggests.

It amounts to £1.5m in the UK and $2.4m in the US for individuals with the highest needs, say UK and US experts.

Autism cost the UK more than heart disease, stroke and cancer combined, said an autism charity.

But only £6.60 per person is spent on autism research compared with £295 on cancer, according to Autistica.

The research looked at the costs to society of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in both the UK and US.

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin on Special Education spending (2007).

Are lectures a good way to learn?

Philip Dawson:

Imagine a future where university enrolment paperwork is accompanied by the statement:

Warning: lectures may stunt your academic performance and increase risk of failure.

Researchers from the United States have just published an exhaustive review and their findings support that warning. They read every available research study comparing traditional lectures with active learning in science, engineering and mathematics. Traditional lecture-based courses are correlated with significantly poorer performance in terms of failure rates and marks.

Taking the learning tablets

The Economist:

WHO killed Edgar Allan Poe? The mysterious death of the 19th-century author features in a new online school curriculum from Amplify, the education arm of News Corp. Pupils follow clues that require close reading of Poe’s stories (the assassin’s identity varies, to prevent cribbing), and take machine-graded comprehension and vocabulary tests along the way. Another section teaches mathematics by setting quests, such as an Alaskan dog-sled race for which pupils must plan, budget and manage provisions.

Two decades of fitting classrooms with computers and whiteboards have gobbled rich countries’ school budgets and done little for attainment. But the latest technology promises to improve teaching methods, rather than merely shifting them from blackboard to screen, and to give all children the personalised education once only available to the rich. Game-style lessons let pupils progress at their own pace, getting instant feedback at every step. Even homework is more fun: when Pearson (a part-owner of The Economist) supplied tablet-based courses to schools in Alabama, they were such a hit that Wi-Fi was installed on school buses so it could be done en route.

Judge Rules Union Priorities Violate Kids Civil Rights

Stephanie Simon:

A court ruling on Tuesday striking down job protections for teachers in California deals a sharp blow to unions — and will likely fuel political movements across the nation to eliminate teacher tenure.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu found five California laws governing the hiring and firing of teachers unconstitutional. But it was his language, more than the ruling itself, that will shake the political debate.

Treu found that the statutes permit too many grossly incompetent teachers to remain in classrooms across the state — and found that those teachers shortchange their students by putting them months or years behind their peers in math and reading.

He ruled that such a system violates the state constitution’s guarantee that all children receive “basic equality of educational opportunity.” In a blunt, unsparing 16-page opinion, Treu compared his ruling to the seminal federal desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, decided 60 years ago last month. “The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience,” Treu wrote.

How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution

Lyndsey Layton:

The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support.

But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money — tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute national standards.

So they turned to the richest man in the world.

On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.

1 in 10 Students Enrolled Exclusively in Online Courses

David Nagel:

A little more than 12 percent of all American post-secondary students were enrolled exclusively in online courses or online degree programs in 2012, according to the latest figures released by the National Center for Education Statistics, with another 13 percent taking at least some courses online.

On the whole, more than one-quarter — 25.8 percent — of post-secondary students took at least some courses online in fall 2012 (the latest period for which data are available).

Among undergraduates, 2.6 million (14.2 percent) took just some courses online, with 2 million (11 percent) taking their courses exclusively online.

The percentage of students taking courses exclusively online spiked among post-baccalaureate students, with 22 percent (639,343) enrolled exclusively online. Another 7.8 percent (227,467) took just some courses online.

According to the new report, “Enrollment in Distance Education Courses, by State: Fall 2012,” public two-year colleges had the highest percentage of students taking just some courses online (17.3 percent, or 1.2 million students), followed by public four-year institutions, at 15.1 percent (1.2 million). About 16 percent, or 2.4 million, of all students enrolled at public institutions took just some courses online, with 8.3 percent (1.25 million) taking all of their courses online.

NEA Aims to Revive Organizing as Membership Drops

Stephen Sawchuck:

The nation’s largest teachers’ union is attempting to revive a fundamental labor principle: organizing.

With its membership down by more than 230,000 members over the past three years, the National Education Association is imploring local affiliates to better engage current and potential members. It has launched a Center for Organizing to provide tools and training, has put millions of dollars behind local affiliates’ plans, and is pushing regional support staff to lead the charge.

Not since the 1970s, when its teachers helped win public-sector collective bargaining laws across the country, has organizing been such a priority for the 3 million-member NEA. What’s more, the union is promoting membership as an avenue to better teaching and learning conditions, rather than relying on traditional recruitment drives.

“I can stand here until you sign a membership form, but the minute I leave, you need to see the value in that engagement,” summarized Jim Testerman, the director of the NEA Center for Organizing, of the case he expects organizers to make.

The work is not without its challenges, union officials acknowledge. Among them is getting affiliates who have been locked into a “service” mentality — handling grievances and collective bargaining — to add the more active role of organizing to their “to do” list.

Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media Tuition is up 1,200 percent in 30 years. Here’s why you’re unemployed, crushed by debt — and no one is helping

Thomas Frank:

The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation of college grads with debt. Today, thanks to those enormous tuition prices, young Americans routinely start adult life with a burden unknown to any previous cohort and whose ruinous effects we can only guess at.

On the assumption that anyone in that generation still has a taste for irony, I offer the following quotation on the subject, drawn from one of the earliest news stories about the problem of soaring tuition. The newspaper was the Washington Post; the speaker was an assistant dean at a college that had just announced a tuition hike of 19 percent; and the question before him was how much farther tuition increases could go. “Maybe all of a sudden this bubble is going to burst,” he was quoted as saying. “How much will the public take?”

Productivity And The Education Delusion

Danny Crichton:

There is a constant tension about education in labor economics these days. On one hand, education is strongly correlated with income and employability. Workers with college degrees, or even just some university-level courses, are significantly more likely to have a job and to be paid better, as well. This is borne out by today’s U.S. jobs report, which showed a decrease of unemployment for college graduates, but an increase of unemployment for high school graduates.

The tension comes when you look at the government’s projections for job growth over the next decade. The jobs with the highest expected growth are also among the jobs that are least likely to provide a living wage, occupations like personal care aides (median salary: $19,910 per year), retail sales people ($21,110 per year), home health aides ($20,820 per year), food preparation workers ($18,260 per year), and the list goes on. In fact, of the top 20 occupations with greatest expected job growth, only two of the categories are above the current median wage of the country.

This is the largest problem facing society this century.

There has been much discussion over the past few weeks about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty focuses on the increasing divergence of the income and wealth distributions between the top percentile and everyone else. Left mostly unanalyzed in the book, however, is how people at the top of the labor market are able to leverage their abilities so much more than those in the middle or base of the market due to a combination of technology and finance.

Frustrated Scholar Creates New Way to Fund and Publish Academic Work

Avi Wolfram- Arent:

In 2011, Tim Peterson was your archetypal frustrated academic. He’d just landed a paper in the journal Cell but had grown disillusioned with the publishing process after nine months of back-and-forth among his team, the reviewers, and the editors.

“I was just totally disgusted by the whole process,” says Mr. Peterson, now 37 and working as a postdoctoral fellow in biology at Harvard University. “I remember when I stood up and said I don’t want to be a part of this anymore.”

So Mr. Peterson began to think. Then he taught himself to code. And finally, on May 14, all that thinking and coding converged to form a website, Onarbor.

The site is intended as a publishing and funding platform for academics, kind of like a Kickstarter for scholarly work. Among its features is that it allows donors to support projects with either Bitcoin or Dogecoin, two popular cryptocurrencies.

An Update on Georgia Tech’s online Program

Carl Straumshein:

Administrators at the Georgia Institute of Technology are optimistic but “not declaring victory” after one semester of its affordable online master’s degree program in computer science. While the program has been well-received by students, administrators are still striving to solve an equation that balances cost, academic quality and support services.
“We’re not all the way there yet, but I couldn’t ask for a much better start,” Zvi Galil, dean of the College of Computing, wrote last month in an email to Georgia Tech faculty on the one-year anniversary of the program’s announcement.

The initiative has been closely watched since last spring’s announcement — and not just because of the dramatic savings it offers compared to the university’s on-campus program. A three-credit-hour online course costs less than a single credit hour of face-to-face education — $402 versus $472, based on spring 2013 tuition rates. The goal is to get much larger than a traditional program could sustain, but also much smaller than the average MOOC.

The savings gap may narrow as Georgia Tech scales the program. “We hope to be able to stick with this tuition, but whether this is the right tuition, we don’t know yet,” said Galil, who estimated an enrollment of a few thousand students could be enough to balance the budget.

The Future Of College Financial Aid, According To The Man Who Influences Billions Of It

Troy Onink:

With college costs continuing to rise and the US economy still sputtering, financial aid for college is more important than ever to families trying to foot the bill. The big question then is what is the future of college financial aid? For that answer I turned to the man at the top, Justin Draeger, the President of the National Association of Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA). The nation’s college aid professionals make up NASFAA’s membership, allowing Draeger to keep his finger on the pulse of what is going on with billions in college aid. Ahead of NASFAA’s annual conference later this month in Nashville, Mr. Draeger took time for the Q&A below.

1. Admissions Deans offer admission to more students than they have room for because they know that not all of those students will enroll. For the same reason, financial aid officers award millions more in aid than is actually budgeted. How do admissions and financial aid professionals collaborate to fill a college’s seats without breaking the financial aid bank?

Generally, the planned collaboration between admission and financial aid offices occurs through an institution’s enrollment management plan and/or policies. This is typically derived from intricate statistical analyses that calculate the probability of students choosing to attend, the students’ expected financial need, and the institutional financial aid dollars available at the school.

UW Badgers rank second in country for athletic spending

Rich Kirchen:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison athletic department spent the second-highest amount of money on its athletic program among public universities in 2013, trailing only the University of Texas, according to new figures compiled by USA Today.

UW generated $149.14 million in revenue through athletics and spent $146.7 million, USA Today said. Texas collected $165.7 million and spent $146.8 million.

Wisconsin’s expenditures jumped more than $44 million in 2013 primarily due to higher buildings and grounds costs. However, UW’s contributions, which count as revenue, increased almost as much, by about $39 million.

UW ranked first among Big Ten schools. Michigan was fourth overall with $131 million in expenditures and $143 million in revenue and Ohio State was fifth overall with $116 million in expenses and $139.7 million in revenue.

The Case for Banning Laptops in the Classroom

Dan Rockmore:

A colleague of mine in the department of computer science at Dartmouth recently sent an e-mail to all of us on the faculty. The subject line read: “Ban computers in the classroom?” The note that followed was one sentence long: “I finally saw the light today and propose we ban the use of laptops in class.”

While the sentiment in my colleague’s e-mail was familiar, the source was surprising: it came from someone teaching a programming class, where computers are absolutely integral to learning and teaching. Surprise turned to something approaching shock when, in successive e-mails, I saw that his opinion was shared by many others in the department.

My friend’s epiphany came after he looked up from his lectern and saw, yet again, an audience of laptop covers, the flip sides of which were engaged in online shopping or social-media obligations rather than in the working out of programming examples. In a “Network”-inspired Peter Finch moment, he quickly changed the screen of his lecture presentation to a Reddit feed and watched some soccer highlights. That got everyone’s attention.

Kenosha School Board settles lawsuit over Act 10 dispute

Erin Richards:

Kenosha schools and the teachers union were at odds over the issue of automatic dues deduction for non-union members. Supporters of the contract argued the agreement and terms within it, such as the provision for automatic dues deduction, were legal because of the Colás decision.

Kenosha Unified spokeswoman Tanya Ruder explained the School Board negotiated with the unions and signed the agreement on Nov. 12 only after receiving notice from the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission in October that the unions were still the certified collective bargaining representative of the teachers.

Legal rulings after that agreement resulted in WERC then informing Kenosha that the unions were not, in fact, certified collective bargaining representatives at the time, Ruder said.

That meant the union didn’t actually represent the employees in November when the collective bargaining agreements were reached, Ruder said.

Much more on Act 10 here.

Locally, Madison continues to automatically deduct union dues from teacher paychecks.

Mining Student Results & Metadata: “massive increase in the demand for proficiency-based adaptive learning”

David Liu:

Recently, we celebrated Knewton’s sixth birthday. It seems that each year brings more progress and change than all the previous years combined, and this past year was no different.

We’re using our latest round of funding ($51 million) to continue to extend our technological leadership and support rapid growth globally, including a new office across the pond in London. Our partnerships with leading education companies brought Knewton-powered products to over 4 million students in 250,000 classrooms in 120 countries around the globe. We expect to have over 7 million students using products powered by the Knewton platform by the end of this year.

I joined Knewton back in 2010. The company was still getting off the ground, but the vision was the same as it is today — to provide personalized learning for everyone on the planet. Every individual deserves the opportunity to maximize their learning potential. It’s inspiring to see how far we’ve come, and to go to work every day knowing that we’re helping to make education more effective and accessible for students worldwide.

In the past year, we’ve seen a massive increase in the demand for proficiency-based adaptive learning, both in the U.S. and internationally. While it was always Knewton’s vision to create an adaptive learning platform to benefit every student in the world, it wasn’t always straightforward for education companies and others to understand this mission. Now, these organizations are using our platform to push the envelope to create products that will have a meaningful impact on student outcomes. Knewton enables our partners to focus on innovating new content and user experiences — while leveraging Knewton’s infrastructure and network effects to provide powerful personalization for students and actionable metrics for instructors.

Polarizing Plutocracy: Our Broken Higher Education System

Kathleen Geier:

The American political system is broken, and one unmistakable sign of it is our inability to bring down soaring levels of student debt or to regulate predatory for-profit colleges. The best solution the Obama administration has been able to propose in this area is a college ratings system that would evaluate colleges on the basis of factors like graduation rates and graduates’ earnings and debt loads.

Frankly, the idea that a ratings system will fix what ails American higher education is a little nuts. It views education as if it were a market like any other, and treats colleges like consumer products. “It’s like rating a blender,” burbled Education Department official Jamienne Studley last week to the New York Times. But while blenders can be tested in a lab, employment statistics can be all too easy to game, as anyone who’s followed recent reporting about bogus law school employment rates can attest.

By taking an approach to regulation that emphasizes “transparency” of information, the Obama administration also places the burden of evaluating schools on students and their families. Less affluent students, who often are poorly advised during the college application process in general, won’t fare particularly well under this system. A more aggressive approach is needed to protect them from the predatory for-profits. For many in this group, far more generous financial aid is needed to make going to college an economically rational decision in the first place.

Who Profits from the Master’s Degree Pay Bump for Teachers?

Matthew Chingos:

The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research. In a study published in 2011, Paul Peterson and I confirmed this finding by comparing the student achievement of the same teachers before and after they earned master’s degrees, and found no impact.[1]

This finding may be non-controversial among researchers, but it has largely been ignored by policymakers. Ninety-six percent of the 112 major U.S. school districts included in the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) Teacher Contract Database pay teachers with MA degrees more than those with BA degrees, with an average difference of $3,205 in the first year of teaching, $4,176 in the fifth year, and $8,411 at the top of the salary schedule. The size of this pay bump varies widely, topping out at over $30,000 in three districts in Maryland.[2]

It is not surprising that teachers respond to these incentives by earning MA degrees. In 2011-12, nearly half of U.S. teachers held such a degree. However, it comes at a price. As higher education costs continue to rise, teachers are going deeper into debt in order to earn these degrees. The proportion of education MA students with graduate debt increased from 49 to 60 percent between 2004 and 2012, and median graduate debt levels increased (in constant dollars) from $27,455 to $35,350. Factoring in undergraduate debt pushes the 2012 figure to $50,879.

Teachers also generally receive annual years of service increases.

University slated for $20 million cut to administrative spending; Minnesota President Kaler’s budget for next year axes more than 100 top leadership positions.

Ann Millerbernd:

The University of Minnesota’s administrative spending is slated for $20 million in cuts next year.

President Eric Kaler proposed the cuts at a Board of Regents meeting earlier this month as part of a larger plan to reduce administrative spending by $90 million over six years, following widespread criticism of the institution’s pay to top executives.

The plan cuts 115 full-time administrative positions, mostly through methods like retirement, voluntary layoffs and by leaving some positions vacant when employees’ contracts expire, said Associate Vice President for Budget and Finance Julie Tonneson.

Administrative employees will feel the weight of $20 million in administrative cuts as part of the institution’s $90 million savings goal, and University managers say those cuts will eliminate positions and create more work for current employees.

Jobs cuts include two associate program director positions in the College of Biological Sciences and 12 spots in the College of Education and Human Development.

A review of Coursera & other Education Apps

Kit Eaton:

MASSIVE Open Online Courses — or MOOCs — are a snowballing revolution in education.

Thousands of courses from some of the world’s finest institutions are available free online, covering everything from astrophysics to the arts. For each course, students, sometimes numbering in the thousands, take part from home — where they view video lectures, take tests and submit essays through a Web interface. It’s a digital classroom with no actual “room,” and where you can study more or less when you like.

Nowadays of course, your smartphone means you can also study when you’re on the move.

Coursera’s free iOS and Android app is perhaps the very best way to take part in a MOOC through a phone or tablet — maybe during your commute to work or your lunch break. The app gives you limited access to Coursera’s list of available courses as well as any you have already signed up for.

The Key to Better US News College Rankings

Ry Rivard:

What would it take for a well-regarded institution — such as the University of Rochester, and a few dozen more like it — to be among U.S. News & World Report’s top 20 national universities? Hundreds of millions of dollars and a prayer, according a new peer-reviewed paper co-written by a former Rochester provost and his staff.

The study, published by the journal Research in Higher Education, argues that small movements in the rankings are simply “noise” and that any kind of sustained upward movement is both immensely expensive and nearly impossible.

Ralph Kuncl, a former Rochester provost who is now president of University of Redlands, in California, co-wrote the paper, which was a decade in the making. He started thinking about changes in the rankings when he was vice provost at Johns Hopkins University.

He said “the trustees would go bananas” when Johns Hopkins dropped in the rankings. The administration would then have to explain what had happened.

Parents fight student data mining (do they use google & Facebook?)

Stephanie Simon:

Moms and dads from across the political spectrum have mobilized into an unexpected political force in recent months to fight the data mining of their children. In a frenzy of activity, they’ve catapulted student privacy — an issue that was barely on anyone’s radar last spring — to prominence in statehouses from New York to Florida to Wyoming.

A months-long review by POLITICO of student privacy issues, including dozens of interviews, found the parent privacy lobby gaining momentum — and catching big-data advocates off guard. Initially dismissed as a fringe campaign, the privacy movement has attracted powerful allies on both the left and right. The American Civil Liberties Union is pushing for more student privacy protection. So is the American Legislative Exchange Council, the organization of conservative legislators.

Academic Journal on Publisher Price Gouging: Resignations threat over Taylor & Francis ‘censorship’

Paul Jump:

A journal’s editorial board has been left on the brink of resignation after an eight-month standoff with its publisher Taylor & Francis over the publication of a debate on academic publishing and the profits made by major firms.

The debate, in the journal Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation, was due to appear last September, but was delayed by Taylor & Francis and published only at the end of last month.

Its “proposition” paper, “Publisher, be damned! from price gouging to the open road”, by four academics from the University of Leicester’s School of Management, criticises the large profits made by commercial publishers on the back of academics’ labours, and the failure of the Finch report on open access to address them.

The paper compares academic publishing with the music industry, which, it says, has “booming” sales after lowering prices in the face of widespread piracy. It suggests that “doing nothing to prevent the trading of electronic copies of our academic work” could also force prices down in publishing.

Facing low enrollment, Minnesota Law School gets a $2.2 million boost

Tyler Gieseke:

As its enrollment continues to drop, the University of Minnesota’s Law School is set to receive more money to fight financial woes.

President Eric Kaler’s proposed budget for next year includes a $2.2 million allocation to help the Law School cover a loss in tuition revenue, an issue plaguing law schools nationwide.

The University’s Law School has had relatively consistent enrollment over the past few years, but Dean David Wippman said the applications to the school and the number of first-year students are sharply declining.

In fall 2014, he said, about 180 students will enroll, compared to about 220 first-year students in 2013.

“That’s a pretty significant drop,” Wippman said.

Nationally, the number of applicants to American Bar Association-approved schools has dropped by more than 10 percent in each of the past three years, while first-year enrollment has dropped by more than 7 percent each year.

Mathematicians Urge Colleagues To Refuse To Work For The NSA

Kashmir Hill:

In January, the math community had its big event of the year — the Joint Mathematics Meeting — where 3,000 mathematicians and math students gathered to talk about new advances in the field and jostle for jobs. The National Security Agency is said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the country and so it always has a sizeable presence at the event to recruit new candidates. This year, it was even easier for the agency as the four-day conference took place at the Baltimore Convention Center, just 22 minutes away from NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. Thomas Hales, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who describes himself as a “mathematician who’s upset about what’s going on,” is dismayed at the idea of the brightest minds in his field going to work for the agency. In reaction to the Snowden revelations — which started exactly a year ago – about NSA’s mass surveillance and compromising of encryption standards, Hales gave a grant to the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation to fly a representative to Baltimore to try to convince mathematicians young and old not to go help the agency with data-mining and encryption-breaking.

Big Data, Common Core, and National Testing

Pioneer Institute:

May 2014 A Pioneer Institute White Paper by Emmett McGroarty, Joy Pullmann, and Jane Robbins New technology allows advocates for education as workforce development to accomplish what has long been out of their reach: the collection of data on every child, beginning with preschool or even earlier, and using that data to track the child throughout his/her academic career and his/her progression through the workforce. This paper explores the many initiatives that the federal government has worked with private entities to design and encourage states to participate in, in order to increase the collection and sharing of student data, while relaxing privacy protections. The authors offer recommendations to protect student privacy, including urging parents to ask what kinds of information are being collected on digital-learning platforms and whether the software will record data about their children’s behaviors and attitudes rather than just academic knowledge. If parents object to such data-collection, they should opt out. The authors also urge state lawmakers to pass student privacy laws, and they recommend that Congress correct the 2013 relaxation of FERPA.

Two educators, two very different visions, one question

Kate Torovonick May:

Take two education activists with very different theories — and give them a chance to work together on a goal they both care about. That’s the thinking in the video above, the kick-off of Microsoft’s new Work Wonders project, which pairs up unlikely collaborators to spark new ideas. Watch as TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra joins forces with TEDx speaker Adam Braun to tackle a bold mission: Use technology to rethink education in severely underserved communities.

They’re a bit of an odd couple. Mitra, who created the School in the Cloud to enable kids to explore questions that matter to them on their own, believes that traditional schools are becoming more and more obsolete; meanwhile Braun, who founded Pencils of Promise to rally communities in the developing world to build schools, believes that traditional classrooms are the answer to opening up opportunity.

Above, watch the first in a series of mini-docs following this collaboration as it unfolded over the past three months. This episode shows Mitra and Braun meeting for the first time and thinking about how the other’s talents could help strengthen their own vision.

Microsoft, a longtime TED partner, will be revealing more episodes over the next month, so you can join the pair as they explore how to adapt Mitra’s Self-Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) tools for use in three Pencils of Promise schools in Ghana, with the help of Office 365 products and services, and how to build a SOLE starter kit to roll out across Pencils of Promise’s global network. This kit, designed with the needs of underserved communities in mind, could even get distribution far beyond that.

How my school rejected an app made for students

theiostream

In Sep 16, 2013, I pushed the first commit to PortoApp’s GitHub repo. Back then, I wanted to make an experiment on managing sessions on iOS. I shamelessly got chpwn’s news:yc’s authentication model, copied his entire login controller by hand and I logged in at my school’s server.

Then, I implemented a news parser for the school’s website. Then, I made a grades viewer/simulator. Then, I displayed the school’s memos decently (and to do so I had to write a whole ASP.NET view state parser in C). The last pre-release commit was in 23 Apr 2014.

Roughly one month later (today), after finishing a four-hour test, my school called me for a meeting. I met with the Educational Councillor (a somewhat psychologist for student issues), the Educational Vice-Director, the Educational Technology Director and the IT Department Director of the school. They told me I was infringing copyright over their website’s content and had the “challenge to think about how what I did was ethically wrong”. It was a big sermon on how I’d be sued if it was the real world, and how they were being so friendly by talking to me, and so on. They never said it, but they naturally meant that there would be legal consequences for me if I did not remove connecting to their website as a feature in my app. In other words, I should turn it into a generic “grade calculator”.

How Much Does It Cost to Recruit a Star College Athlete?

Jonah Newman:

My colleague Brad Wolverton has a terrific story this week that takes you inside the big-time college-sports recruitment process through the eyes of Marvin Clark, a promising high-school basketball player who dreams of playing in the NBA.

Mr. Clark was heavily recruited by half a dozen colleges, whose coaches flew to Kansas to see him play, brought him and his mother to their campuses for VIP tours, and gave him hours of personal attention on top of the hundreds of text messages they sent him. Mr. Clark’s story got us thinking: What does it cost for a college to recruit a single athlete?

We looked at four of the universities that pursued Mr. Clark most vigorously: Indiana University at Bloomington, and Iowa State, Kansas State, and Michigan State Universities.

Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison

Jessica Pishko:

WHEN the Center for Investigative Reporting recently visited the Santa Cruz County Juvenile Hall — widely considered one of the best juvenile detention centers in the country — they found remarkably prison-like conditions, ranging from the bare, concrete walls to the use of solitary confinement as a method of disciplining youth. There are currently no federal or state laws that regulate the use of solitary confinement for juvenile offenders, despite overwhelming evidence of its harmful effects. But the abuses don’t stop there. A 2012 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a division of the Department of Justice, determined that youth held in adult prison facilities suffered less instances of sexual violence than their peers in juvenile facilities. And in some facilities, the rate of juvenile recidivism is over 80 percent, meaning that the bulk of these young people will eventually add to the burgeoning prison population.

There seems to be a consensus that the prison system as a whole isn’t working, and this is particularly true when it comes to juvenile detention. The United States incarcerates more young people under the age of 18 than any other industrialized country in the world. (By comparison, South Africa, our closest competitor, incarcerates its youth at one-fifth the rate of the United States.) Most juveniles who are sent to these facilities are from racial minorities. Many of them suffer abuses in prison that are heinous for adults and potentially ruinous for youth — solitary confinement, rape, repeated physical abuse, deprivation of sunlight, insufficient food and affection. Perhaps worst of all, children leave these facilities with additional traumas under their belts and no promise that their outside lives will improve.

And yet, despite protestations from all political parties that our society values children, despite the proliferation of New York Times bestsellers on how to raise children, despite growing scientific evidence that the confinement of adolescents may profoundly stunt their brain development, despite the fact that juvenile crime is steadily declining, change has not followed. Why?

Roll Call: The importance of teacher attendance

National Council on Teacher Quality:

This report breaks down teacher attendance for 40 districts in the nation’s largest cities in the 2012-2013 school year. We identify districts with the greatest percentage of teachers with excellent attendance as well as those with the biggest percentages of chronically absent teachers. In addition to identifying districts that are leaders and laggards in school attendance, the report takes a look at the impact of school poverty levels on teacher attendance and whether or not policies to curb absences made a difference.

Why School Boards Shouldn’t Have a Say in Charter School Authorization

Laura Waters:

It starts here:

Last week Assemblyman Troy Singleton (D-Camden) released a bill that updates New Jersey’s 20-year-old charter school law. The draft of the bill invests local school boards with the power to control 30 percent of an aspiring charter’s application score…

What’s wrong with delegating charter approval to democratically-elected school board members? After all, local districts pay tuition and transportation for charter school students. Shouldn’t community representatives have power to deter perceived threats to traditional district dominance?

Madison Teachers, Inc. Contract Ratification Meeting – Tuesday, June 3!

MTI Website:

This meeting is scheduled to consider ratification of Contract terms for 2015-16 for all five MTI bargaining units. This is a membership meeting. 2013-14 membership cards are required for admission.

Those who need assistance with membership issues, and those who are not members at this time and wish to join to enable participation in the meeting can be assisted by reporting to the “MTI Membership Table”.

This meeting will be conducted under MTI Bylaws and Roberts Rules of Order.

Notice of the meeting will also be on MTI’s webpage (www.madisonteachers.org), MTI Facebook, and by email to all who have provided MTI with their home email address.

Teacher Union Collective Bargaining Continues in Madison, Parent Bargaining “like any other union” in Los Angeles.

Act 10.

Mary Burke.

St. Paul schools to put iPads in hands of all students

Anthony Lonetree:

The St. Paul School District plans to become the largest in the state to put iPads in the hands of all students.

The decision, to take effect in the 2015-16 school year, was announced Friday by Superintendent Valeria Silva and represents a reversal of the stance taken by the district in 2012.

That year, the district sought and won voter approval of a $9-million-per-year technology initiative dubbed “Personalized Learning Through Technology.” Its proponents insisted that the initiative was not about supplying devices to students. They emphasized instead the creation of a “teaching and learning platform,” or Facebook-like Web page, through which teachers and students could interact — with the goal of giving students the power to learn anytime, anywhere.

But the district and Dell, its partner in the project, have failed to develop a customized platform that could serve students and teachers “directly enough or quickly enough,” Silva said. That work has been halted — with Dell agreeing to refund the $665,000 it has been paid in the form of future technology upgrades.

MIT and Harvard release de-identified learning data from open online courses

MIT News:

“We are excited to be able to present the data behind the reports we released in January. This step opens the door to more sophisticated analyses that build on what we have already done,” says co-lead researcher Isaac Chuang, a professor in MIT’s electrical engineering and computer science and physics departments. “MITx and HarvardX are committed to upholding learner privacy as well as advancing learning research. These data are a public good.”

Harvard’s Andrew Ho, Chuang’s co-lead, adds that the release of the data fulfills an intention — namely, to share best practices to improve teaching and learning both on campus and online — that was made with the launch of edX by Harvard and MIT in May 2012.
Ho and Chuang anticipate that the data will offer insight to other educational researchers. Moreover, the methods used to protect learner privacy comply with FERPA (Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act) regulations, which govern the release of such data. The practice should inform the release of future datasets from edX and offer lessons more broadly.

Business School, Disrupted

Jerry Useem

The question: Should Harvard Business School enter the business of online education, and, if so, how?

Universities across the country are wrestling with the same question — call it the educator’s quandary — of whether to plunge into the rapidly growing realm of online teaching, at the risk of devaluing the on-campus education for which students pay tens of thousands of dollars, or to stand pat at the risk of being left behind.

Who or What Broke My Kids?

Brooke Powers:

I am Desperate

I am on a desperate search to find out who or what broke my students. In fact I am so desperate that I stopped class today to ask them who broke them. Was it their parents, a former teacher, society, our education system or me that took away their inquisitive nature and made math only about getting a right answer? I have known this was a problem for a while but today was the last straw.

A Probability Lesson Gone Wrong

It started out innocently enough working on the seventh grade Common Core standard 7.SP.C.5 about understanding that all probabilities occur between zero and one and differentiating between likely and unlikely events which I thought would be simple enough. After the introduction and class discussion we began partner work on this activity from the Georgia Common Core Resource Document (see page 9). The basic premise of the activity is that students must sort cards including probability statements, terms such as unlikely and probable, pictorial representations, and fraction, decimal, and percent probabilities and place them on a number line based on their theoretical probability. I thought it would be an interactive way to gauge student understanding. Instead it turned into a ten minute nightmare where I was asked no less than 52 times if their answers were “right”. I took it well until I was asked for the 53rd time and then I lost it. We stopped class right there and proceeded to have a ten minute discussion on who broke them.

Brentwood parents of special education students unite to call for school district reform

Paula King:

Parents of special education students who recently protested in front of Brentwood Union School District headquarters are calling for districtwide reform, including greater inclusion for special needs children on campuses and an end to alleged retaliation against proactive parents by district officials.

Parents for Special Education Reform claim that their children are being treated unfairly and even excluded from grade-level field trips. Group members said parents who advocate on behalf of their children by filing complaints against the district with the state or taking legal action are being targeted.

An independent agency needs to help guide the district with its special education program, according to the group. Recently, 13 Brentwood families filed complaints with the federal Office for Civil Rights in San Francisco, and a six-month investigation into the retaliation and discrimination claims is underway.

New Orleans Public Schools go 100% Charter

Lyndsey Layton:

The second-graders paraded to the Dumpster in the rear parking lot, where they chucked boxes of old work sheets, notebooks and other detritus into the trash, emptying their school for good.

Benjamin Banneker Elementary closed Wednesday as New Orleans’ Recovery School District permanently shuttered its last five traditional public schools this week.

With the start of the next school year, the Recovery School District will be the first in the country made up completely of public charter schools, a milestone for New Orleans and a grand experiment in urban education for the nation.

Locally, Madison continues with its agrarian era school structure, unchallenged.

Efforts to Curb College Costs Face Resistance Schools, Lawmaker Balk at Rules on Career Training, New Rating System

Josh Mitchell:

Obama administration initiatives intended to help restrain soaring college costs are facing resistance from schools and from a bipartisan bloc of lawmakers looking to protect institutions in their districts.

Groups representing colleges and universities this week formally opposed the administration’s plan to more tightly oversee programs that officials say leave students in steep debt but with weak job prospects. The new rules cover for-profit schools along with career-training programs—those that lead to certificates, but not degrees, in a given field, such as mechanics or cosmetology—at public schools and nonprofits. A bipartisan group in Congress is seeking ways to kill the plan, which the administration wants to have in place by November.

At the same time, the administration is planning to delay the rollout of its signature higher-education initiative: a college-rating system that would score institutions based on their affordability and quality. Education Department officials, hoping to have that proposal in place by late 2015, said they need more time to draft the rules after criticism from school officials unnerved by the prospect of federal officials’ making value judgments on a school’s worth.

Stop subsidizing student loans. That one move will solve many problems.

From Invisible to Visible: Being Able To “See” the Crisis in Learning

Rukmini Banerji:

Engagement and Understanding: The First Step in Assessment and Action

The group of mothers sitting in the sun in a village in north India was happy to chat. We talked about children and about their school. “Are they going to school?” I asked. “Of course,” said the mothers proudly. Some went further to say, “we even send them for private coaching after school.” “How are they doing with their education?” The common word for education in Hindi is the same as reading-writing. The chatter stopped. One mother looked at me sternly and said, “How do we know? We are illiterate. Anyway, that is the business of the school and of the teachers.”

For decades it has been assumed that schooling leads to learning. This is the assumption that has been widely held by parents and practitioners, policymakers and public. It is also assumed that “more is better”—more years of schooling are better than less. It is only recently that the world is beginning to realize that schooling does not necessarily lead to learning. For many in India and in other countries, at ground level and at higher levels, this is a new learning. Accustomed to years of measuring inputs and expenditures, the switch to measuring outcomes—especially learning outcomes—is new and still unfamiliar. We are just beginning to figure out how to think about learning beyond, and in addition to, schooling.

MOOCs’ disruption is only beginning

Clayton M. Christensen and Michelle R. Weise:

JOURNALISTS, AS 2013 ended, were busy declaring the death of MOOCs, more formally known as massive open online courses. Silicon Valley startup Udacity, one of the first to offer the free Web-based college classes, had just announced its pivot to vocational training — a sure sign to some that this much-hyped revolution in higher education had failed. The collective sigh of relief from more traditional colleges and universities was audible.

The news, however, must have also had the companies that had enthusiastically jumped on the MOOC train feeling a bit like Mark Twain. When newspapers confused Twain for his ailing cousin, the writer famously quipped, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Undoubtedly pronouncements over MOOCs’ demise are likewise premature. And their potential to disrupt — on price, technology, even pedagogy — in a long-stagnant industry is only just beginning to be seen.

How important is disruption in higher education? Tuition costs have been ballooning faster than general inflation and even faster than health care. And what do we get in return? Nearly half of all bachelor’s-degree holders do not find employment or are underemployed upon graduation. At the same time, employers have not been satisfied with degree candidates. Two recent Gallup polls showed that although 96 percent of chief academic officers believe they’re doing a good job of preparing students for employment, only 11 percent of business leaders agree that graduates have the requisite skills for success in the workforce. And this is all occurring while higher education leaders were convinced that they were innovating all along.

Is College Worth It? It Depends on Whether You Graduate

Ben Casselman:

In The New York Times on Tuesday morning, David Leonhardt took on the “Is college worth it?” question. His answer? An unequivocal yes. The college wage premium — how much more college grads earn than everyone else — is the widest it’s ever been, Leonhardt wrote. Graduates are much more likely to find jobs than nongraduates. And despite mounting fears about student debt levels, the average student’s loan burden pales in comparison to the long-term benefits of a bachelor’s degree.

“For all the struggles that many young college graduates face,” Leonhardt wrote, “a four-year degree has probably never been more valuable.”

That’s probably true. Sure, some people end up with unmanageable debt loads, and not everyone who earns a bachelor’s degree easily gets a job, let alone a good one (all points that Leonhardt acknowledges). But on average, college graduates are much better off than nongraduates.

Machines v. Lawyers As information technology advances, the legal profession faces a great disruption.

John McGinnis:

Law schools are in crisis, facing their most substantial decline in enrollment in decades, if not in the history of legal education. Applications have fallen over 40 percent since 2004. The legal workplace is troubled, too. Benjamin Barton, of the University of Tennessee College of Law, has shown that attorneys in “small law,” such as solo practitioners, have been hurting for a decade. Attorney job growth has been flat; partner incomes at large firms have recently recovered from the economic downturn, but the going rate for associates, even at the best firms, has stagnated since 2007.

Some observers, not implausibly, blame the recession for these developments. But the plight of legal education and of the attorney workplace is also a harbinger of a looming transformation in the legal profession. Law is, in effect, an information technology—a code that regulates social life. And as the machinery of information technology grows exponentially in power, the legal profession faces a great disruption not unlike that already experienced by journalism, which has seen employment drop by about a third and the market value of newspapers devastated. The effects on law will take longer to play themselves out, but they will likely be even greater because of the central role that lawyers play in public life.

Finns beat U.S. with low-tech take on school

Caitlin Emma:

At the start of morning assembly in the state-of-the-art Viikki School here, students’ smartphones disappear. In math class, the teacher shuts off the Smartboard and begins drafting perfect circles on a chalkboard. The students — some of the highest-achieving in the world — cut up graphing paper while solving equations using their clunky plastic calculators.

Finnish students and teachers didn’t need laptops and iPads to get to the top of international education rankings, said Krista Kiuru, minister of education and science at the Finnish Parliament. And officials say they aren’t interested in using them to stay there.

Teacher content knowledge surely trumps tech gizmos and endless grant driven schemes.

How a college with 340 students lost $220 million in five years

Jon Marcus:

The Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, with its sleek, glass-walled buildings around a peaceful grass oval, has earned glowing international attention for the successful ways it has pioneered the teaching of undergraduate engineering.

Built from scratch with hundreds of millions of dollars from a private foundation and a commitment to charging no tuition, 12-year-old Olin has attracted standout faculty, even though it does not give tenure. Top companies recruit its high-achieving students, who graduate at enviable rates into jobs with above-average starting salaries.

Behind the accolades, however, Olin has been bleeding red ink.

Colleges Are Buying Stuff They Can’t Afford and Making Students Pay For It

Michelle Chen:

With tuition costs more than doubling over the past generation, and student debt now exceeding $1 trillion, everyone knows the cost of college is too damn high. About 40 million people nationwide are weighed down by education debts that often reach into the tens of thousands. But those numbers are just a sliver of the bleak shadow that Wall Street casts over higher education.

A new study on debt across the higher education system reveals that the massive debts borne by both students and their institutions has climbed to about $45 billion per year. So the debt-related payments to the financial sector—including Wall Street investors, institutional lenders and the mammoth federal student loan system—drive about one tenth of all spending on higher education nationwide. These debt-servicing costs are tied to tuition lending as well as financial debts accrued by schools themselves, which finance investments of all kinds, from professors’ salaries to libraries to indulgences like sports teams and administrators’ bonuses.

According to researchers with University of California–Berkeley’s Debt & Society Project, a project of the Center for Culture, Organizations, and Politics with research support from the American Federation of Teachers, the a key factor in the rising cost of college is driven by expenditures largely unrelated to either the quality of the education, teaching or maintaining campus facilities. Rather, college is getting unimaginably expensive for both institutions and students because it costs so much to finance the business of education, thanks to Wall Street lenders. While there are many controversial budget items in higher education—critics lament bloated administrations and the cost of sports teams and flashy amenities—the report focuses on debt itself, and the massive volume of borrowing, as a major overlooked burden on institutions.

A College Degree is No Guarantee

Janelle Jones & John Schmitt:

The Great Recession has been hard on all recent college graduates, but it has been even harder on black recent graduates.

This report reviews evidence on the labor-market experience of black recent college graduates during and after the Great Recession.

Key findings include:

In 2013 (the most recent full year of data available), 12.4 percent of black college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 were unemployed. For all college graduates in the same age range, the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent.

Between 2007 (immediately before the Great Recession) and 2013, the unemployment rate for black recent college graduates nearly tripled (up 7.8 percentage points from 4.6 percent in 2007).

In 2013, more than half (55.9 percent) of employed black recent college graduates were “underemployed” –defined as working in an occupation that typically does not require a four-year college degree. Even before the Great Recession, almost half of black recent graduates were underemployed (45.0 percent in 2007).

Black recent college graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors have fared somewhat better, but still suffer from high unemployment and underemployment rates. For example, for the years 2010 to 2012, among black recent graduates with degrees in engineering, the average unemployment rate was 10 percent and the underemployment rate was 32 percent.

In part, these outcomes reflect the disproportionate negative effect of economic downturns on young workers and, in part, they reflect ongoing racial discrimination in the labor market. A college degree blunts both these effects relative to young black workers without a degree, but college is not a guarantee against either set of forces.

Teaching Economic Concepts with a Bag of Chocolate: A Classroom Experiment for Elementary School Students

Nicholas Rupp

This paper describes a classroom experiment suitable for elementary school students in which participants are actively engaged in making trading decisions. Students are provided an endowment of gum and are asked to make trading decisions to acquire chocolate. As the op- portunity cost of acquiring a piece of chocolate rises, fewer students are willing to make trades. This interactive classroom exercise illustrates three fundamental economic concepts: the law of demand, opportunity costs, and gains from trade. Assessement test results reveal that two days after this classroom exercise, fifth grade students register significant improvements in their understanding of three fundamental economic concepts.

The Ripple Effects of Rising Student Debt

Phyllis Korkki:

What are the roads not taken because students must take out loans for college? A collection of studies shows that the burden of student debt may well cause people to make different decisions than they would otherwise — affecting not just individual lives but also the entire economy.

For one thing, it appears that people with student loans are less likely to start businesses of their own. A new study has found that areas with higher relative growth in student debt show lower growth in the formation of small businesses (in this case, firms with one to four employees).

The correlation makes sense. People normally have only a certain amount of “debt capacity,” said Brent W. Ambrose, a professor of risk management at Pennsylvania State University and a co-author of a preliminary paper on the research along with Larry Cordell and Shuwei Ma of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

School spyware in coursebooks

Jean-Marc Liotier:

Recently, a number of schools have started using a program called CourseSmart, which uses e-book analytics to alert teachers if their students are studying the night before tests, rather than taking a long-haul approach to learning. In addition to test scores, the CourseSmart algorithm assigns each student an “engagement index” which can determine not just if a student is studying, but also if they’re studying properly. In theory, a person could receive a “satisfactory” C grade in a particular class, only to fail on “engagement

This immediately reminded me of Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, Snow Crash where a government employee’s reading behavior has been thoroughly warped into simulacrum by a lifetime of overbearing surveillance:

Y.T.’s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:

Fat-Cat University Administrators at the Top 25

New York Times:

Confronted with punishing state budget cuts, the public colleges and universities that educate more than 70 percent of this country’s students have raised tuition, shrunk course offerings and hired miserably paid, part-time instructors who now form what amounts to a new underclass in the academic hierarchy. At the same time, some of those colleges and universities are spending much too freely on their top administrators.

A report from the Institute for Policy Studies, a research group, says that the presidents at the 25 public universities that pay their presidents the most have seen their compensation soar since 2008. The average pay for presidents at all public research universities is hardly shabby, increasing by 14 percent, to $544,554, between 2009 and 2012. But average compensation for the presidents at the 25 highest-paying universities increased by a third, to $974,006.

Related: Financial Aid Leveraging.

25.62% of Madison’s $402,464,374 2014/2015 budget to be spent on benefits; District’s Day of Teacher Union Collective Bargaining; WPS déjà vu

The Madison School Board

Act 10 duckduckgo google wikipedia

Madison Teachers, Inc.

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

School Board Decisions on Employee Health Insurance Contributions Could Further Reduce Wages

Under MTI’s various Collective Bargaining Agreements, the District currently pays 100% of the health insurance premiums for both single and family coverage, but retains the ability to require employees to contribute up to 10% of the monthly premium for both single and family coverage.

District management has recommended to the Board of Education that they adopt a Budget which would allow for up to a 5% increase in health insurance premiums to be paid by the District. If the Board agrees, this would require employees to pay any increase above 5%, and insurance carriers of District plans currently propose premium increases greater than 5%. The Board is currently discussing whether to require the employee to pay the increase. If the Board does, that would further decrease employees’ take-home pay. Even a 2% employee premium contribution would cost employees over $120 per year for the least expensive single coverage, and over $300 per year for the least expensive family coverage, i.e. any increase would compound the loss of purchasing power described above.

2014-2015 budget documents, to date.

Several articles on the legal controversy regarding Wisconsin “collective bargaining”:

WILL to Madison School Board: Comply With Act 10 or Face Lawsuit.

Mary Burke (running for Governor) votes for labor talks with Madison teachers.

Madison School Board nearing extension of union contracts.

Madison School Board flouts the law in favor of teachers union.

Liberals look to one last chance to overturn Scott Walker’s reforms, in a judicial election.

The Madison School District’s substantial benefit spending is not a new topic.

How Children What?

Alec:

John Holt and Paul Tough are a half-century apart. Both were interested in children and how they learned. One wrote a book called How Children Learn, the other a book called How Children Succeed. Their juxtaposition has a lot to tell us about how we think about and treat our young people.

In 1967, John Holt published How Children Learn. In 2013, Paul Tough published How Children Succeed.

Holt was following up on the publication of his 1964 book, How Children Fail. Beginning in 1952, Holt taught elementary and middle school—first in Colorado, then Boston. For eleven years, Holt kept a journal of his experiences. This journal grew into his first books, How Children Fail and How Children Learn. The first explored how children, “used their minds badly.” The second explored what it looked like for children to “act as bold, effective learners.” Both were grounded in Holt’s own, concrete stories and experiences. The fundamental thesis of both is that learners’ motivation is essential and that because this cannot be forced, we must trust learners, working with them and their interests if they are to grow into empowered adults. Semiotically, Holt now parses as hippie, especially given his position as father of the United States homeschooling movement.

Tough is a journalist who has covered education, child development, and poverty for the past decade. Tough has never taught. After writing about Geoffery Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone in Whatever It Takes, he felt dissatisfied with his understanding of why only some children go on from such programs to succeed. Tough sought out researchers, economists, neuroscientists, psychologists, doctors, and the occasional teacher or administrator to find his answer. The fundamental thesis of How Children Succeed is that kids will be more successful in school and more secure in life if we focus on developing their ‘non-cognitive skills,’ like the ability to persevere or maintain healthy emotional hygiene. Semiotically, Tough parses as a pragmatic journalist uncovering heroic possibilities for education reform.

Typical high school student survey

Grant Wiggins:

Let’s have our first look at constructed response, in closing this post. Students were asked on the last question: if you could ask your teachers to make one change to make classes more interesting, what would you say? Here is what the “A” students said (I have selected these answers randomly by just selecting the middle 20+):

Try something creative when teaching something new

To not talk the entire time and give us more hands on things to do /work on.

Provide more opportunities for the students to learn for themselves, without just providing them with everything.

Only talk as much as you need to and leave most of the investigative discussions to the class

Nothing

I would say to make sure everything is clear for the students

Get a better grading scale and do more variety of things because in biology we do the same thing every unit and then just have a test randomly

Have students teach for once to see if they know what they’re doing.
Don’t make tests or assignments just about memorization, because then no one will actually understand it.

Well, some teachers are great and teach me very well. It’s the few teachers that really need to step it up. Also they have to realize that we can’t prioritize their work first if every teacher wants their work prioritized.
The teachers should slow down their teaching a little bit when asked to because by not slowing down, it’s not helping students learn to their best ability.

To relate assignments more to the students and make them less busywork and more in terms of variety. They should provide variety in class every week to keep things interesting

Make projects more fun to do by giving us more options and more visuals in class because some people learn better that way.

To help those even if they have advanced thinking, and teachers should put more energy in paying attention to children, and fix the situation where those who are good kids get yelled at more often than those who fool around on a daily basis.

Make sure the students fully understand what’s being taught before moving on to something new. Try to get to know students and talk to them before class or something to make everyone feel comfortable around you. So you’re not the “mean” teacher.
Slow down and teach the subject more instead of assuming we know and understand the material.

Just be more understanding and try to put themselves in the students shoes.

The Problem with Outcome-Oriented Evaluations

David Cohen:

Imagine I observe two poker players playing two tournaments each. During their first tournaments, Player A makes $1200 and Player B loses $800. During her second tournament, Player A pockets another $1000. Player B, on the other hand, loses $1100 more during her second tournament. Would it be a good decision for me to sit down at a table and model my play after Player A?

For many people the answer to this question – no – is counterintuitive. I watched Player A and Player B play two tournaments each and their results were very different – haven’t I seen enough to conclude that Player A is the better poker player? Yet poker involves a considerable amount of luck and there are numerous possible short- and longer-term outcomes for skilled and unskilled players. As Nate Silver writes in The Signal and the Noise, I could monitor each player’s winnings…

Educating the educators University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Willingham, PhD, is dedicated to helping schools and families determine which new educational tools and strategies are scientifically supported and worth adopting

Amy Novotny:

There are myriad books and professional development materials devoted to the study of learning styles. The problem, says University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, PhD, is that most of them don’t rely on good science.

“If you talk to teachers frequently, they’re surprised there isn’t a firm research base for different learning styles,” says Willingham, author of the books “When Can You Trust the Experts?” and “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

That lack of good information is among the reasons Willingham has devoted his work to researching the application of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to K–12 education — and popularizing the information for the general public. In addition to providing commentary about science and education on the education blog RealClearEducation.com, he is working to help schools and families determine which educational approaches — from games and software to training programs and workbooks — are scientifically supported and worth adopting.

Willingham spoke with the Monitor about the importance of offering students a challenging curriculum and providing motivation and praise to help struggling students.
What are some of the other unfounded beliefs teachers have about what works in the classroom?
One example is so-called neuromyths, or beliefs that some educators may have about the brain. For example, the characterization of left-brain versus right-brain thinking is not well-supported and really never has been.
The truth is that most teachers in my experience really have a lot of common sense. There are ideas that are peddled to them that are wrong, but most teachers are pretty skeptical of them. They’re in the classroom every day, so they have a sense of what works and what doesn’t work with kids.

The One Percent at State U

Andrew Irwin & Marjorie Wood:

State universities have come under increasing criticism for excessive executive pay, soaring student debt, and low-wage faculty labor. In the public debate, these issues are often treated separately. Our study examines what happened to student debt and faculty labor at the 25 public universities with the highest executive pay (hereafter “the top 25”) from fall 2005 to summer 2012 (FY 2006 – FY 2012). Our findings suggest these issues are closely related and should be addressed together in the future.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, executive pay at “the top 25” (see Appendix 2) has risen dramatically to far exceed pre-crisis levels. From fall 2005 to fall 2011, low-wage faculty labor and student debt at these institutions rose faster than national averages. In short, a top-heavy, “1% recovery” occurred at major state universities across the country, largely at the expense of faculty and students.

Key Findings:

How Education Drives Inequality Among the 99%

Brenda Cronin:

Recent hand-wringing about income inequality has focused on the gap between the top 1% and everyone else. A new paper argues that the more telling inequities exist among the 99%, primarily driven by education.

“The single-minded focus on the top 1% can be counterproductive given that the changes to the other 99% have been more economically significant,” says David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and author of the study.
His paper, “Skills, Education and the Rise of Earnings Inequality Among the ‘Other 99 Percent’,” comes as something of riposte to French economist Thomas Piketty, whose bestselling “Capital in the 21st Century” has ignited sales and conversation around the world with its historical look at the fortunes of the top 1%.

How Do We Teach Digital Literacy to Digital Natives?

CJ Kettler:

Is it possible for our students to be both digital natives and digitally unaware?

Young people today are instant messengers, gamers, photo sharers and supreme multitaskers. But while they use the technology tools available to them 24/7, they are struggling to sort fact from fiction, think critically, decipher cultural inferences, detect commercial intent and analyze social implications. All of which makes them extremely vulnerable to the overwhelming amount of information they have access to through the digital tools they use—and love!—so much.

In fact, teachers surveyed in a recent Pew Study say they worry about “students’ overdependence on search engines; the difficulty many students have judging the quality of online information; and the general level of literacy of today’s students.” In total, 83% of teachers surveyed agreed that the amount of information available to students online is overwhelming, and 60% agreed that today’s digital technologies make it harder for students to track down and use credible sources.

A Personal “Brain Trainer”

Elevate. “A new set of challenges, daily”.

Cronyism blamed for half of Univ. of Texas law school grads’ inability to pass the bar

David Ferguson:

A mushrooming scandal at the University of Texas has exposed rampant favoritism in the admissions process of its nationally-respected School of Law.

According to Watchdog.org, Democratic and Republican elected officials stand accused of calling in favors and using their clout to obtain admission to the law school for less-than-qualified but well-connected applicants.

US Spent $595,000,000,000 on K-12 Education in 2012, down .08% from 2012

Caroline Porter:

Funding for U.S. public elementary and secondary schools decreased by $4.9 billion in fiscal year 2012, the first recorded drop since the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting the data in 1977, according to a report released by the bureau Thursday. Total funding of nearly $595 billion was down 0.8% from the previous year.

An approximate 19% downturn in federal dollars from the previous year—to about $60 billion in 2012 from about $74 billion in 2011—explains the shortfall for schools, according the Census Bureau. Revenue from state and local sources went slightly higher—about $270 billion and almost $265 billion respectively—in the same time frame.

Fiscal year 2012 represents roughly the same time period as the 2011-2012 school year.

The decrease in school funding reflects changes in revenue patterns during and after the recession, according to Mike Griffith, a school finance consultant for the Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan research group.

“What we saw was the phase out of the additional federal dollars in stimulus funding,” said Mr. Griffith. “Those dollars had helped prop up state budgets during the recession. We saw state budgets recuperate in 2011-2012 at same time as federal money was disappearing…but states hadn’t recovered enough to make up for the federal dollars lost, so overall funding dropped.”

The largest slice of 2012 spending was for instructional salaries, which totaled about $207 billion, or nearly 35% of total spending.

“Expenses grow every year,” said Mr. Griffith, referring in part to teacher salaries and benefits. “The decrease in revenue is a problem for school districts because they will have to make cuts.”

Empty classrooms expose flaws in UK private colleges boom

Shiv Malik, Andrew McGettigan and John Domokos:

A private college in north London is offering government-funded places to people who “blatantly” don’t have the skills, recruiting candidates off the street and from countries in eastern Europe – and in at least one case lecturing to a class with no students.

So serious are the problems that the London School of Science and Technology (LSST) in Wembley has been called the “cashpoint college” or “the ATM” by students who believe they can obtain loans and grants of up to £11,000 a year and then not show up to learn.

The higher education institution has taken £6.5m in public money in the last three years, and has tripled in size since ministers relaxed controls over student loans in 2012. Even if these full-time students take out the loans and do no work, LSST benefits from the increased numbers paying £6,000 a year in tuition fees.

The chaotic organisation of LSST demonstrates serious flaws in the planned expansion of privately run higher education colleges that was unveiled by David Willetts, the higher education minister, in 2011. Little-known private colleges were allowed to recruit unlimited amounts of students so they could compete with established universities.

Taxing a Professor’s Privilege

Megan McArdle:

I’ve been reading Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” You’ll have to wait on my thoughts on the book until they’re a bit more fully formed. As I’ve been reading, though, I keep returning to a question I heard at an economics conference a couple of months back: If we did implement a wealth tax, should it tax tenure?

Professorial tenure is, after all, a valuable asset. As long as you show up and teach your classes, and you don’t make passes at your students or steal from the department’s petty cash drawer, you can draw a paycheck for the rest of your working life. And since the abolition of mandatory retirement ages, that working life can be as long as you like.

Ah, you will say, there are risks: Your school could go out of business, or you might get ill and be unable to work, or inflation could eat away at the value of that paycheck. Just so. All assets are risky. That doesn’t make them worthless; it just means that the price has to take the potential downsides into account.

Why single out professors? you ask. Isn’t this just more academic-bashing? You’re quite right: We shouldn’t single out professors. Everyone with civil-service protections or similar employment guarantees should probably have that asset taxed.

“We don’t have too many seats for students but too many seats for administrators.”

Ry Rivard:

To avoid enrollment shortfalls heading into the summer, some tuition-dependent private colleges are changing how they package financial aid for students.

Some colleges are offering more aid upfront to try to avoid shortfalls altogether. Others adjusted swaths of aid packages as it became clear they were unlikely to enroll as many students as they had planned by May 1, the traditional but decreasingly relevant decision day for students going to selective colleges.

Even colleges that have successfully met their enrollment goals are worried about poaching by others still looking to meet their goals, and are beginning to offer more tuition discounts to lure students.

All are signs of the continued challenges faced especially by tuition-dependent and smaller private colleges, some of which remain under the weather for a variety of reasons, including the rebound of public university budget and the wariness of some students to graduate with liberal arts degrees that don’t seem to offer a clear career path.

Madison School District proposes using screening test to predict teachers’ impact on student success

Molly Beck:

The Madison School Board is considering spending $273,000 on a screening program its creators say can better predict whether prospective teachers will improve student achievement.

The proposed three-year contract with Chicago-based TeacherMatch would provide the district with a system to track and recruit applicants, ask teacher candidates a timed series of questions and assign each applicant a professional development profile to show principals or human resources staff what kind of help applicants may need once hired based on their answers, said Ron Huberman, executive chairman of TeacherMatch.

One board member is concerned that the program puts too much emphasis on the impact candidates may have on student test scores and that the public won’t be able to scrutinize how the screening program judges prospective teachers. And the leader of the local teachers union says computer-based screening tools don’t work as well as personal interviews.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Jersey pension system beyond saving at any reasonable cost

Steve Malanga:

For three years now PSI has been warning (see here and here ) that New Jersey had neglected its government employee pension system for so long that the state’s 2010 and 2011 reforms were inadequate to save the system. At some point we said (numerous times) the state would have to admit it could not possibly keep to the refunding schedule it had set for itself.

Yesterday Gov. Christie declared as much when he announced he would help erase the state’s current budget deficit by paring back its pension contributions. But even the payments that Christie announced he couldn’t afford to make amount to about half of what it would cost the state every year to adequately fund its pension system. The numbers, quite frankly, are staggering.

Christie said he would make a nearly $700 million pension payment this year, instead of the $1.6 billion the state originally committed to, and he’s planning to cut next year’s payment to $681 million, from a projected $2.25 billion. The lower figures are what the state estimates it costs to pay for pension benefits that state workers are earning this year; the additional costs are to pay back what Christie describes as the sins of past neglect.

Here Is What I Would Tell the Rutgers Graduating Class of 2014…

PJ O’Rourke

I hear Condoleezza Rice stood you up. You may think it was because about 50 students—.09 percent of your student body—held a “sit-in” at the university president’s office to protest the selection of Secretary Rice as commencement speaker. You may think it was because a few of your faculty—stale flakes from the crust of the turkey pot pie that was the New Left—threatened a “teach-in” to protest the selection of Secretary Rice.

“Sit-in”? “Teach-in”? What century is this?

I think Secretary Rice forgot she had a yoga session scheduled for today.

It’s shame she was busy. You might have heard something useful from a person who grew up poor in Jim Crow Alabama. Who lost a friend and playmate in 1963 when white supremacists bombed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Who became an accomplished concert pianist before she tuned her ear to the more dissonant chords of international relations.

Secretary Rice was Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Denver and received a B.A. cum laude in political science—back before the worst grade a student had ever heard of was a B-.

The Class of 2014 Just Made History in the Worst Imaginable Way

Zak Cheney-Rice:

The news: Congratulations, class of 2014!

Not for graduating — though that’s nice, too — but for earning one of the more dubious distinctions in recent memory: You’ve officially been named “the most indebted class ever.”

According to the Wall Street Journal and data compiled by analyst Mark Kantrowitz, the average loan-holding 2014 college graduate will have to pay back $33,000. That’s up from around $31,000 in 2013 and under $10,000 in 1993:

Digital education could make Americans more competitive, close achievement gap

Sarah Garland:

To technology advocates, these are visions of how technology could transform U.S. classrooms. With a desktop or portable computer, a tablet or even a smartphone available to every student and every teacher, the idea is that school will be better tailored to students’ needs and also better able to prepare them for the sorts of high-skilled, technology-centric jobs that will dominate in the future. It could even help close the achievement gap for disadvantaged students.

“If a teacher has class of 30 students and they don’t have technology, the very best teachers are bouncing from student to student,” said Karen Cator, president of Digital Promise, a nonprofit working with individual school systems that are going high tech. “When students have technology they can be helping themselves in some sense, and the teacher can come in when they’re most needed.”

Fresh Thinking On Public Education: 100 SF School Principals Heading To Deloitte University For Leadership Boost

Tom Foremski

Deloitte, the giant audit and consulting group, is planning to send as many as 100 principals of San Francisco public schools to its Deloitte University in early June, for a three-day leadership program in a bid to help struggling public schools create a generation of highly motivated and college-bound students.

I spoke with Teresa Briggs, vice chair of Deloitte and head of its Western Region, about the venture and what it hopes to achieve. Here are some notes from our conversation:

– Deloitte wanted to help public schools create a college-bound culture as part of its philanthropic activities in giving back to communities. There are studies that show student performance is influenced and connected to the leadership abilities of school principals. Deloitte knew that its leadership courses were very effective for business leaders, why not offer the same to public school principals.

Indicting Education Crimes

Michelle Renee Matisons. & Seth Sandronsky:

You act like we’re in a state of martial law. You act like you deployed the army on us…

–Natasha Allen, mother of a Newark high school junior, to Newark School Superintendent Cami Anderson

It is exciting, and rare, to see politicians who really represent people triumph over corporate sponsored sycophants who only represent their backers’ bank accounts. Democrat Ras Baraka’s May 13, 2014 mayoral victory over Democrat Shavar Jeffries in Newark, New Jersey is especially important because one major issue emerged to dominate the election: local control over public education. While corporate education reformers unabashedly push their anti-democratic agenda nationally, Baraka’s victory is a reminder that participatory democratic values and common sense principles (such as local control and economic justice) can win over education reformers’ criminal activities.

As Newark voters just reminded us, educational sovereignty is not an abstraction–but a concrete necessity. Parents know when their children are being denied, neglected, and abused. Teachers know when they are being used and discarded: their jobs are reduced to rote mouthpieces for profiteering edu-speak. Children feel their futures being stolen from them. They feel more alienated from schools, teachers, lesson plans, and standardized tests. Baraka’s victory is about creating the educational climate–supported by larger goals of racial/ economic justice–that are required for thriving students.

The Teacher Evaluation Test

Mike Antonucci

A lot of arguments in public education revolve around how to marry the measurable and the unmeasurable. Teachers have seniority provisions in their contracts – a measurable factor – because they don’t trust administrators to use unmeasurable and subjective means to evaluate them.

On the other hand, teachers also distrust a host of measurable factors that might be used to evaluate them, most notably student test scores.

They have a point. No one wants to be judged on the performance of others. Still, they’re not teaching in a vacuum. If quality teaching doesn’t result in quality learning, what good is it?

The problem for teachers’ unions is to enunciate a viable means to evaluate teaching that doesn’t sound like a dodge. Ted Nesi, a political reporter for WPRI in Providence, Rhode Island, interviewed the three candidates for president of the Providence Teachers Union and asked them the same simple question: “ Should teacher evaluations be tied to student performance? If no, how would you like to measure a teacher’s success? ”

All three had serious reservations – to varying degrees – about judging teachers on student performance. But it was the second question that elicited the most illuminating answers.