Category Archives: Budget/Financing

The Dance of the Disrupted: Observations from the education front lines

Aswath Damodaran:

Each option has its pluses and minuses. My site will include everything I offer my regular class, including emails and announcements but it is an online site without any bells and whistles. The iTunes U site is the most polished in terms of offerings, but there is no forum for interaction and requires more work if you don’t have an Apple device. Yellowdig is a new add-on to my menu and it is a site where you will be able to access the classes and material and hopefully interact with others in the class. (You will have to register on Yellowdig and it is restrictive on what email addresses it will accept.) YouTube is the least broadband-intensive forum, since the file size adjusts to your device, but you will be able to get only the class videos (and not the material).

If you are wondering why I would disrupt businesses that I am part of, I have three responses. The first is that, with four children, I am a consumer of the products/services of these businesses and I am sick and tired of paying what I do for textbooks, college tuition and minor financial services. The second is that it is so much more fun being a disruptor than the disrupted and being in a defensive posture for the rest of my life does not appeal to me. The third is that with Asia’s awakening, we face a challenge of huge numbers and the systems (education, public and financial services) as we know them don’t measure up.

Student fury over ‘impossible’ economics exam

Judith Burns:

Final year economics students at Sheffield University are furious after an exam this week contained questions they found “impossible”.

The paper, on the economics of cities, contained compulsory questions on topics they had never been taught, say the students.
More than 90% of those who took the exam have now signed an online petition demanding the university investigate.

The university said all questions were based on topics taught in the course.

But, in a tweet, one candidate complained: “Question three may as well have been in Chinese.”

K-12 Tax, Spending and Referendum Climate: Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out Instead of Climbing Up

Dionne Searcey & Robert Gebelhoff:

The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century.

In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today’s dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year. Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets.

But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow, the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom. At the same time, fewer of those in this group fit the traditional image of a married couple with children at home, a gap increasingly filled by the elderly.

Too Much Tech?

Susan Pinker:

More technology in the classroom has long been a policy-making panacea. But mounting evidence shows that showering students, especially those from struggling families, with networked devices will not shrink the class divide in education. If anything, it will widen it.

In the early 2000s, the Duke University economists Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd tracked the academic progress of nearly one million disadvantaged middle-school students against the dates they were given networked computers. The researchers assessed the students’ math and reading skills annually for five

Thousands of early English books released online to public by Bodleian Libraries and partners

Bodleian Libraries:

Image of EEBO-TCP Michigan homepageFrom Shakespeare and Milton to little-known books about witchcraft, cookery and sword fighting, this rich data set comprises fully-searchable text files that can be read online or downloaded in a variety of formats.

This corpus of electronic texts has been created and released by the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP), an international collaboration among universities, funders and ProQuest, an information company central to global research. Previously, the texts were only available to users at academic libraries involved in the partnership but the data was released into the public domain on 1 January.
‘We are opening up these fantastic books to people who wouldn’t normally be able to access them. I’m fascinated to see what people will do with them,’ said Michael Popham, Head of Digital Collections at the Bodleian Libraries.

Members of the public, teachers and researchers around the world can now have access to thousands of transcriptions of English texts published during the first two centuries of printing in England. The corpus includes important works by literary giants like Chaucer and Bacon, but also contains many rare and little-known materials that were previously only available to those with access to special collections at academic libraries.

The text-only files are a unique resource for members of the public to browse for curious and interesting topics and titles ranging from witchcraft and homeopathy to poetry and recipes. In addition to browsing and reading text-only versions of these early English books, users of EEBO-TCP can also search the entire corpus, which contains more than two million pages and nearly a billion words. The text has been encoded with Extensible Markup Language (XML), allowing individuals to search for keywords and themes across the entire collection of works, in individual books or even within specific sections of text such as stage directions or tables of contents.

Visualisation of which parts of the multiplication table 5-8 year old students found the most difficult

Reddit:

I found it interesting that the chart is asymmetrical… They should be the same though I guess at the age where you are learning times tables you wouldn’t really grasp the symmetry of mathematical operators

That’s the first thing I noticed too. But then again when I was taught multiplication, we learned the numbers in order: our “4s” then our “5s” etc. I imagine that’s the issue. seeing 4×8 you think of your 4s, seeing 8×4 you think of your 8s and don’t know those as well. And like you said. We know they’re the same now, but we didn’t when we were 8, I think.

University of Texas Endowment Tops $25 Billion, Passing Yale

Michael McDonald & Lauren Streib:

The University of Texas endowment surpassed Yale University’s as the second-wealthiest in U.S. higher education, according to an annual survey released Thursday by Commonfund and the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

The value of the Texas System’s fund grew 24 percent to $25.4 billion in the year ended June 30, the biggest after Harvard University’s $35.9 billion. Yale’s endowment, which had ranked second since at least 2002, increased 15 percent to $23.9 billion.

Students to Receive Free Bitcoin in McGill University ‘Airdrop’

Yessi Bello Perez:

Six hundred students at Canada’s McGill University are set to receive 30 mBTC ($7) each as part of a joint initiative to promote bitcoin adoption.

The event, launched by the McGill Cryptocurrency Club and Montreal’s Bitcoin Embassy, is due to take place in the spring and is seeking donations from the public that will be held in a multisig wallet.

The McGill Cryptocurrency Club said:

“Our hope is that by running an airdrop, we will bring more students from the informational and communal fringe into the heart of the [bitcoin] community. “

College Admissions Racket: They’re Not Going to Let You In Anyway

Janet Lorin:

After losing interest in attending the University of Chicago, high school senior Sarah Schmoller didn’t bother to apply before the Jan. 1 deadline. The university, though, wouldn’t take no for an answer. Over winter break, the school offered to extend the deadline to Jan. 5 so that Schmoller could “sleep in, and eat cookie after delicious cookie” and “take these extra days to relax a bit.” When she didn’t respond, an e-mail signed by admissions director Daniel Follmer popped up in her inbox on Jan. 7, giving her two more days. “We’re Missing Your Application,” the subject line read.

This year, at least a dozen elite colleges, including Chicago, Duke, Dartmouth, and Columbia, have offered extensions of once-sacrosanct January admissions deadlines. The University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt, and Bates are among schools whose admissions deans said they were doing so for the first time, aside from individual hardship cases or such emergencies as storms and major website failures.

Is There Money to Be Made in Oil? New Grads Don’t Think So

Zain Shauk:

Six months ago, a degree in petroleum engineering was a ticket to a job with a six-figure salary. Now it’s looking like a path to the unemployment office.

The oil crash that’s forcing companies to slash billions from their budgets and cut tens of thousands of workers is derailing an industry campaign to attract top college graduates. It comes at a time when the future of drilling is increasingly tied to new technology that lets companies pull more oil and natural gas from the ground, faster and cheaper.

As Google abandons its past, Internet archivists step in to save our collective memory

Andy Baio:

Google wrote its mission statement in 1999, a year after launch, setting the course for the company’s next decade:

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

For years, Google’s mission included the preservation of the past.

In 2001, Google made their first acquisition, the Deja archives. The largest collection of Usenet archives, Google relaunched it as Google Groups, supplemented with archived messages going back to 1981.

University Of Texas Looks To Limit Administrative Bloat

Tom Lindsay:

Bill McRaven, the new Chancellor of the University of Texas System, has announced his intention to take a “hard look” at administrative expenses on the System’s fifteen campuses. Given the research demonstrating the decades-long explosion in administrative personnel and expenses nationwide, McRaven’s hard look promises to expose some even-harder truths about the phenomenon commonly referred to as university “administrative bloat.”

Benjamin Ginsberg’s 2011 book on the subject, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, came as a thunderclap to the world of higher education. Forty years ago, reports Ginsberg, “U.S. colleges employed more faculty than administrators. But today, teachers make up less than half of college employees.” “Forty years ago, the efforts of 446,830 professors were supported by 268,952 administrators and staff. Since then, the number of full-time professors increased slightly more than 50 percent, while the number of administrators and administrative staffers increased 85 percent and 240 percent, respectively.” Adjusting for inflation, from 1947 to 1995, “overall university spending increased 148 percent. Administrative spending, though, increased by a whopping 235 percent. Instructional spending, by contrast, increased only 128 percent, 20 points less than the overall rate of spending increase.” Senior administrators have done particularly well under the new regime. From 1998 to 2003, deans and vice presidents saw their salaries increase as much as 50 percent, and “by 2007, the median salary paid to a president of a doctoral degree-granting institution was $325,000.”

Doing the Math on Teacher Pensions: How to Protect Teachers and Taxpayers

NCTQ:

Doing the Math on Teacher Pensions: How to Protect Teachers and Taxpayers challenges the claims of pension boards and other groups about the cost-effectiveness, fairness and flexibility of the traditional defined benefit pension plans still in place in 38 states. The report includes a report card on each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia with a detailed analysis of state teacher pension policies.

Also, the State Teacher Policy Dashboard has additional state specific and national overview information on pension systems.

To Protect His Son, A Father Asks School To Bar Unvaccinated Children

Lisa Aliferis:

Carl Krawitt has watched his son, Rhett, now 6, fight leukemia for the past 4 1/2 years. For more than three of those years, Rhett has undergone round after round of chemotherapy. Last year he finished chemotherapy, and doctors say he is in remission.

Now, there’s a new threat, one that the family should not have to worry about: measles.

Rhett cannot be vaccinated, because his immune system is still rebuilding. It may be months more before his body is healthy enough to get all his immunizations. Until then, he depends on everyone around him for protection — what’s known as herd immunity.

But Rhett lives in Marin County, Calif., a county with the dubious honor of having the highest rate of “personal belief exemptions” in the Bay Area and among the highest in the state. This school year, 6.45 percent of children in Marin have a personal belief exemption, which allows parents to lawfully send their children to school unvaccinated against communicable diseases like measles, polio, whooping cough and more.

Change may be difficult, but One Newark plan is worthwhile

Cami Anderson:

I recently had an opportunity to engage with state legislators on a range of topics affecting students in Newark. I sincerely appreciated a forum where decorum was upheld, questions could be answered, and tough, frank dialogue could occur. Our children’s lives depend on our ability to deliver radically better results than we have to date. That requires difficult conversations and a willingness to confront dysfunctional past practices.

Change is hard. Breaking down and rebuilding a failed bureaucracy requires tough decisions – ones about which reasonable people can disagree. I left the hearing asking myself how we can move forward together to find ways to ensure equity while building excellent public schools, and how we can deepen our connection with families in Newark and those that represent them.

Newspapers Persecute Schools For Enforcing The Rules

Teaching Battleground:

I’m sure I’ve moaned about this before, but the Daily Mail often annoys me with its hypocrisy about school discipline. It seems to run two, contradictory, types of stories on school discipline. The first type is the “school discipline is not strict enough” story. Here are some examples of Daily Mail stories either calling for better discipline or reporting sympathetically on others doing so (found after Googling “Daily Mail School Discipline” and “Daily Mail Behaviour in Schools”):

More than 25% of students at Minnesota’s colleges must take remedial classes

Beth Hawkins, Tom Nehil and Alan Palazzolo:

In high school, Latasha Gandy was an academic star. She had a GPA of 4.2 and graduated second in her class from St. Paul Public Schools’ now-defunct Arlington High School.

But when Gandy went to enroll in college, she got a rude surprise. She needed to retake classes she’d aced in high school. She needed a costly year and a half of English and more than a year of math — for no credit.

“I remember feeling when I made it there like, ‘How can this happen?’ ” says Gandy. “I had all these thoughts about did I belong here? And everything I was hearing from my community about black people didn’t go to college.”

Not only would Gandy have to pay for the remedial, or “developmental,” classes, she wouldn’t get any credit. So there’d be no chance she could graduate in four years — especially problematic since she has two daughters to support.

Gandy eventually made it through, earning an associate’s degree as a paralegal at Inver Hills Community College and a B.A. in legal studies at Metropolitan State University. But at tremendous expense.

Public engagement: hidden costs for research careers?

Richard Watermeyer:

It is often assumed that academics’ efforts to engage the public are inherently a good thing.

The Public Understanding of Science movement has long backed the idea that the public must be included in science governance if science is to achieve openness, transparency and accountability, and that this approach helps to preserve public trust and confidence in science, or restore it where it has been lost or fractured.

Over the years, there has been a shift in emphasis from communication and understanding to dialogue and debate, captured by the term “public engagement”. This has come to symbolise a wider shift in higher education from universities as “ivory towers” to universities as transparent, porous, public institutions. Public engagement is touted by its advocates as a means with which to mobilise and empower the public and academe through a two-way relationship of trust, respect and interdependency, leading to collaboration and even co-production. These are honourable ambitions, which the academic community would do well to be guided by.

Teacher Evaluations Still Need to Be Better

:

In the past few years, more states have incorporated student success as part of teacher evaluation systems. However, as TNTP reports on its blog, implementation is not measuring up to policy, and in most cases evaluations don’t offer enough meaningful feedback or put forth specific criteria by which to measure teachers.

Overwhelmingly positive evaluation results teachers continue to receive aren’t helping teachers, either. The primary purpose of evaluation should be to lay out clear performance standards and provide fair, accurate feedback on performance against those standards to help teachers improve. Our best teachers want that feedback. When virtually all teachers are told they don’t need to improve, no one wins.

China Communist Party magazine blasts professors who spread ‘Western values’

Minnie Chan:

The Communist party’s influential magazine Qiushi Journal yesterday lashed out at university professors for defaming China by spreading Western values, raising concerns about academic freedom on the mainland.

A commentary by Xu Lan, an official with the publicity office of Ningbo, Zhejiang province, and posted on Qiushi’s website, criticised Peking University legal professor He Weifang for defaming the mainland’s legal system through promoting “the rule of law” on Weibo.

Xu also assailed well-known painter Chen Danqing, who also uses his Weibo account to criticise the current state of civil society on the mainland while glossing over US culture. Chen appeared to be “inducing Chinese people to go to the US”, Xu wrote.

Chen, a former art lecturer at Tsinghua University, is well-known for lampooning the differences between the legal and civil systems of the mainland and Western countries.

“It will be a disaster if we fail to set up standards and a bottom line to prevent high school and university teachers spreading Western values through internet platforms to defame our communist ideology,” Xu wrote.

He Weifang said that compared with former leaders like Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, who keenly promoted the concept of rule of law and constitutional government before the party came to power in 1949 after the civil war.

The children of the rich and powerful are increasingly well suited to earning wealth and power themselves. That’s a problem

The Economist:

“MY BIG fear,” says Paul Ryan, an influential Republican congressman from Wisconsin, is that America is losing sight of the notion that “the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life.” “Opportunity,” according to Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, “is slipping away.” Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida, thinks that “each element” of the sequence that leads to success “is eroding in our country.” “Of course you have to work hard, of course you have to take responsibility,” says Hillary Clinton, a former first lady, senator and secretary of state, “but we are making it so difficult for people who do those things to feel that they are going to achieve the American dream.” When discussing the chances of ordinary Americans rising to the top, politicians who agree about little else sound remarkably similar.

Before the word meritocracy was coined by Michael Young, a British sociologist and institutional entrepreneur, in the 1950s there was a different name for the notion that power, success and wealth should be distributed according to talent and diligence, rather than by accident of birth: American. For sure, America has always had rich and powerful families, from the floor of the Senate to the boardrooms of the steel industry. But it has also held more fervently than any other country the belief that all comers can penetrate that elite as long as they have talent, perseverance and gumption. At times when that has not been the case Americans have responded with authentic outrage, surmising that the people at the top are, as Nick Carraway said, “a rotten crowd”, with bootlegging Gatsby better than the whole damn bunch put together.

Testing Time: Jeb Bush’s educational experiment

Alex MacGillis:

That year, Bush found a compatible source for ideas on education when he joined the board of the Heritage Foundation, which was generating papers and proposals to break up what it viewed as the government-run monopoly of the public-school system through free-market competition, with charters and private-school vouchers. Bush found school choice philosophically appealing. “Competition means everybody gets better,” he said.

He enlisted Fair to help promote a state law authorizing charter schools, which, unlike vouchers, were gaining some Democratic supporters, including President Bill Clinton, who saw them as a way to allow educators to innovate within the public-school system. The law passed in 1996, with bipartisan support, and that year Bush and Fair founded the first charter school in the state—an elementary school in an impoverished, largely African-American section of Miami, called the Liberty City Charter School. Bush brought his mother in for classroom visits and dropped by unannounced to make sure that things were running smoothly. If he found wastepaper lying around, he’d leave it on the desk of the principal, Katrina Wilson-Davis. The message was clear, she recalls: “Just because kids are poor and at risk doesn’t mean that their environment shouldn’t be clean and orderly.”

Obama goes where the money is to pay for ‘free’ education programs – your savings account.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds:

Bank robber Willie Sutton is said to have explained his career this way: “That’s where the money is.” Whether Sutton ever really said that, it’s an aphorism that, according to Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle, explains President Obama’s plans to go after middle class assets like 529 college savings plans and home appreciation.

Though millions of Americans have been putting money into “tax free” 529 plans to save for their children’s increasingly expensive college educations, President Obama would change the law so that withdrawals from the plans to fund college would be taxed as ordinary income. So while you used to be able to get a nice tax benefit by saving for college, now you’ll be shelling out to Uncle Sam every time you withdraw to pay for Junior’s dorm fees.

This doesn’t hurt the very rich — who just pay for college out of pocket — or the poor, who get financial aid, but it’s pretty rough on the middle– and upper–middle class. In a double-whammy, those withdrawals will show up as income on parents’ income tax forms, which are used to calculate financial aid, making them look richer, and hence reducing grants.

Likewise, Obama proposes to tax the appreciation on inherited homes. When you sell property at a profit, you pay capital gains on the difference between the basis (what you paid) and what you sell it for. (Obama also proposes to increase the capital gains rate). That’s not a big issue for most middle class people, because right now if your parents leave you their house, you get what’s called a “step-up” in basis.

The Cobweb: Can the Internet be archived?

Jill Le Pore:

Two weeks before the crash, Anatol Shmelev, the curator of the Russia and Eurasia collection at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, had submitted to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in California, a list of Ukrainian and Russian Web sites and blogs that ought to be recorded as part of the archive’s Ukraine Conflict collection. Shmelev is one of about a thousand librarians and archivists around the world who identify possible acquisitions for the Internet Archive’s subject collections, which are stored in its Wayback Machine, in San Francisco. Strelkov’s VKontakte page was on Shmelev’s list. “Strelkov is the field commander in Slaviansk and one of the most important figures in the conflict,” Shmelev had written in an e-mail to the Internet Archive on July 1st, and his page “deserves to be recorded twice a day.”

On July 17th, at 3:22 P.M. G.M.T., the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of Strelkov’s VKontakte post about downing a plane. Two hours and twenty-two minutes later, Arthur Bright, the Europe editor of the Christian Science Monitor, tweeted a picture of the screenshot, along with the message “Grab of Donetsk militant Strelkov’s claim of downing what appears to have been MH17.” By then, Strelkov’s VKontakte page had already been edited: the claim about shooting down a plane was deleted. The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine.

Commentary on Indefinite Tenure

Dan Subotnik:

A specter haunting the academy today is of an intellectually wizened white male professoriate refusing to step aside for au courant, energetic, ambitious, and of course diverse younger faculty. Part of a larger concern with tenure itself, the fear in question is that tenured old-timers, of which I am one, are holding fast to financial and administrative perks, limiting institutional control and stifling institutional development in the process.

Sometimes the fear is expressed openly. Intractable seniors, according to a recent, widely debated Chronicle Review post (“The Forever Professors”) often “crush the young” through their “selfish[ness].” A law school colleague argues that, having enjoyed our share of university bounty, responsible seniors should facilitate succession by quickly and gracefully exiting the stage. Such a development might be contrasted with what is actually happening today: seniors in effect extorting rich buyouts to retire.

More of the time, of course, the critique is not explicit. Yet who among us seniors has not felt the sting of “what are you still doing here, gramps” looks from junior law faculty and deans?

A visceral response to critics may be tempting here, but we must show our maturity. Beating up the young for impertinence would show both ignorance and hypocrisy. Inter-generational, oedipal struggle, we have learned, is the way of the world, and, it must be admitted, many of us felt the same way 30 years ago about our predecessors in law. They would never have gotten their jobs in the competitive environment of 1985, we self-righteously told ourselves, just like we would not get ours in today’s environment, when two good law review articles are required just for a job interview.

Education and class: America’s new aristocracy

The Economist:

WHEN the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination line up on stage for their first debate in August, there may be three contenders whose fathers also ran for president. Whoever wins may face the wife of a former president next year. It is odd that a country founded on the principle of hostility to inherited status should be so tolerant of dynasties. Because America never had kings or lords, it sometimes seems less inclined to worry about signs that its elite is calcifying.

Thomas Jefferson drew a distinction between a natural aristocracy of the virtuous and talented, which was a blessing to a nation, and an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, which would slowly strangle it. Jefferson himself was a hybrid of these two types—a brilliant lawyer who inherited 11,000 acres and 135 slaves from his father-in-law—but the distinction proved durable. When the robber barons accumulated fortunes that made European princes envious, the combination of their own philanthropy, their children’s extravagance and federal trust-busting meant that Americans never discovered what it would be like to live in a country where the elite could reliably reproduce themselves.

Now they are beginning to find out, (see article), because today’s rich increasingly pass on to their children an asset that cannot be frittered away in a few nights at a casino. It is far more useful than wealth, and invulnerable to inheritance tax. It is brains.

America is one of only three advanced countries where the government spends more on schools in rich areas than in poor ones. Its university fees have risen 17 times as fast as median incomes since 1980, partly to pay for pointless bureaucracy and flashy buildings. And many universities offer “legacy” preferences, favouring the children of alumni in admissions.

Many schools are in the grip of one of the most anti-meritocratic forces in America: the teachers’ unions, which resist any hint that good teaching should be rewarded or bad teachers fired. To fix this, and the scandal of inequitable funding, the system should become both more and less local. Per-pupil funding should be set at the state level and tilted to favour the poor. Dollars should follow pupils, through a big expansion of voucher schemes or charter schools. In this way, good schools that attract more pupils will grow; bad ones will close or be taken over. Unions and their Democratic Party allies will howl, but experiments in cities such as battered New Orleans have shown that school choice works.

Familiar themes in Madison, where one size fits all reigns, while spending double the national average per student.

Most Chicago public school students who switch schools after closing “bad schools ” chose higher performing institutions

Lauren Fitzpatrick:

Though most of the 11,000 students who were pushed out when Chicago Public Schools permanently closed their schools in 2013 ended up at schools the district deemed higher-performing, a third still landed at schools with CPS’ lowest rating.

When closing a record 50 schools, CPS promised children would end up in better schools but just 20 percent of students ended up at schools with the district’s top rating, according to a new report published Thursday by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Via Molly Beck.

NJ Gov Christie gives the bird to a school choice program almost everyone loves

Laura Waters:

“It’s a great program,” says New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney. It “meets an important need, and it does so utilizing New Jersey’s excellent public schools,” says New Jersey Education Association. “We knew there would be interest in this program because of enrollment trends” and we’re “very supportive,” says N.J. School Boards Association.

This object of this rare consensus among lobbyists and legislators — not to mention parents and students — is N.J.’s Interdistrict Public School Choice Program (IPSCP), which allows students to attend public schools in other districts even if their parents can’t afford to live there. But there appears to be one dissenter from this happy unanimity: the Christie Administration. While the Governor continues, as recently as this month’s State of the State address, to hawk a pipedream of parochial school vouchers, he has steadily diminished budgetary support for a program that offers a non-polarizing and popular form of school choice.

Look at the UK’s free school lunch policy

Andy French:

WHILE five-year-old Lewis Heudi gets a hot school meal his older brother Sebastian does not.

Staff at Woodstock Primary School can see the situation is unfair and are trying to do something about it.

But they have missed out on Government funding that would have allowed them to build new kitchen facilities to provide hot lunches for all pupils.

The county council bid to the Department for Education for about £1.1m for six schools following the government’s free school meals scheme for infants aged four to seven.

Under the government scheme, pupils across the country aged four to seven get free school meals but Key Stage Two pupils aged seven to 11 have to pay for hot lunches.

Three schools were awarded grant funding but Woodstock Primary, in Shipton Road, was not one of them.

Why lowering (UK) tuition fees is more complicated than you think

Chris Cook:

Labour is toying with the idea of fiddling with the English university tuition fees system, but doing so may have counterintuitive effects.

Early in the parliament, Labour said their preferred policy was to introduce a £6,000 upper limit on what universities in England can charge students each year – not £9,000, as it currently stands. But they haven’t committed to it – and there are a range of good reasons why they might not.

First, it would rile the universities. Labour has sought to soothe their concerns by promising university vice-chancellors it would make up the difference in their institutions’ income.

But this is probably not a good deal for the universities, who have no guarantee that this money – which could eventually increase the usual measure of public spending by around £2bn a year – would not be taken from their other state-backed budgets. Nor do they know how it would be distributed.

Comptroller and Auditor General’s Report on the Department for UK Education financial statements 2013-14

National Audit Office:

“I recognize the importance of not placing unnecessary additional burdens on the academy sector. But the inability of the Department for Education to prepare financial statements providing a true and fair view of financial activity by its group of bodies means that it is not meeting the accountability requirements of Parliament. In particular, I believe that, if the challenge posed by consolidating the accounts of so many bodies and the fact that so many have a different reporting period is to be surmounted, the Department and Treasury need to work together to find a solution.”

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, 21 January 2015

Amyas Morse, the Comptroller and Auditor General, has provided an adverse opinion on the financial statements of the Department for Education. An adverse opinion indicates that he considers the level of error and uncertainty in the statements to be both material and pervasive. He has also qualified his opinion because the Department has exceeded one of its expenditure limits authorized by Parliament.

Today’s report comments on the financial management challenges faced by the Department and the impact this has on the ability of the Department and the Treasury to discharge their accountabilities to Parliament. Since 2012-13, the Department’s group financial statements have consolidated the financial statements of academy trusts, alongside those of the Department itself, its executive agencies and NDPBs. For 2013-14, there are 2,591 bodies consolidated into the group financial statements. This includes 2,585 academy trusts operating 3,905 individual academies.

Wisconsin spent $14B on education during 2014.

Kaiser study: Clusters of unvaccinated children in Bay Area

Lisa Krieger:

Researchers have identified several geographic hot spots in the Bay Area where parents are not vaccinating their children, triggering concern about potential outbreaks of dangerous and preventable infectious diseases.

This unique study — which uses statistical software to match electronic medical records to home addresses of Kaiser patients — reveals precisely where physicians can target their vaccination efforts and detect disease outbreaks quicker.

One cluster is in the East Bay communities of El Cerrito, Berkeley, Oakland and Alameda, where parents rejected vaccines for 10.2 percent of children. The second was in the northern part of San Francisco, as well as Marin County and the southwestern part of Sonoma County, with a 6.6 percent rate of vaccine refusal.

“Anecdotally, doctors have reported that a lot of parents in a particular neighborhood or county have hesitations about vaccines,” said lead investigator Dr. Tracy A. Lieu of Kaiser’s Division of Research, based in Oakland. “This is the first time we’ve used computers to actually find these clusters.”

Hill fight on No Child Left Behind looms

Maggie Severns:

Alexander raised eyebrows last fall when he indicated he might be willing to get rid of the law’s annual testing mandate. No Child Left Behind requires schools to test students in reading and math each year from third through eighth grades and once in high school. And students must be tested in science once each in elementary, middle and high school. The tests results are used to track student progress, school performance and though not required by NCLB, in some places the scores gauge the effect teachers have on students.

Testing has become a hot-button issue and a growing number of parents are encouraging their children to refuse to take tests. The “opt-out movement” has been attributed in part to growing pressure on schools associated with the Common Core standards and new tests based on those more challenging standards.

“There needs to be more local autonomy, and what needs to change is the culture of ‘the schools can’t be trusted,’ ” said Jia Lee, a special education teacher who will testify at a Senate hearing Wednesday on federal testing requirements. Last year, more than half of students at the small public school Lee teaches at in New York City opted out of their tests, she said.

“number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years”

American Institutes for Research and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting:

The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures. The table is sortable and searchable. Institutions that do not appear did not exist in 1987-88, or did not report this information that year.

The Rising Costs of Youth Sports, in Money and Emotion

Paul Sullivan:

“What I hope parents understand is that there are some three million high school players and by the time they scale that down to the quarterback position there are a couple of hundred thousand starters,” he said. “Then you get to Division I and II, and there are 360 quarterbacks. When you get to the N.F.L. there are 64. When you think about the odds, that’s not very good odds.”

Even so, he said, football can provide children with opportunities they might not have had otherwise. Mr. Trombley agreed, saying he looked at baseball and football as sports that might get him into a better college than he would otherwise.

“There is no question that baseball got me into Duke University,” he said. “I think I lucked out making it a profession. It just kind of happened by accident. It wasn’t all or nothing. We stress that with our kids: It’s wonderful to play a sport, but it could go away.”

Yet today, Mr. Trombley, 47, a financial adviser in his hometown, Wilbraham, Mass., laments that the highest level of youth sports may be out of reach for many children. He said the farthest he ever traveled for a game was a couple of towns over, but recently his family drove hours to a weekend-long high school tournament in New Jersey.

Mark Hyman, an assistant professor at George Washington University who has written books on youth sports, said that parents whose goal is to give their children the best chance in life or to get them a scholarship to college were not looking at the statistics.

“Parents think these investments are justified; they think it will lead to a full ride to college,” he said. “That’s highly misinformed. The percentage of high school kids who go on to play in college is extremely small. In most sports it’s under 5 percent. And the number for kids getting school aid is even smaller — it’s 3 percent.”

His advice? “What I tell parents is if you want to get a scholarship for your kids, you’re better off investing in a biology tutor than a quarterback coach,” he said. “There’s much more school dollars for academics.”

2015 Predictions: Competency-Based Ed To Grow, Debt Could Topple Some Schools

Dian Schaffhauser:

Online learning will grow this year, but only modestly; more colleges and universities will test out competency-based assessment; and education technology will continue expanding as an industry, driven by investment capital. Those are three of the predictions for the coming year from higher education research and advisory firm Eduventures.

“By nearly every measure, 2014 was a challenging year for higher education. Enrollments fell for the third consecutive year, funding to public institutions in 48 states remained flat or declined, operating costs rose, and we saw an unprecedented increase in federal oversight, with heightened attention paid to the issue of access and affordability,” said President and CEO Tony Friscia. In the coming year, he added, “The rhetoric of 2014 will become the reality of 2015 with the proposed reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the continued emergence of new and innovative learning models, the further expansion of the technology sector and the ongoing need to clearly demonstrate outcomes.”

For parents, now begins the anxious waiting game for college financial aid

Jeffrey Selingo:

For the many high-school seniors who already have submitted their college admissions applications, the season of waiting for an acceptance letter has begun. For their parents, there’s a different anxiety-ridden waiting game: For the financial-aid offers that will spell out just how much this is all going to cost.

Paying for college is now a lot like buying a plane ticket. You have no idea how much the person sitting next to you is paying because most schools discount their tuition to maximize their enrollment numbers and revenue. It’s no different than the airlines trying to fill as many of their seats at the highest prices.

The average discount for first-year students at private colleges is now a staggering 46 percent. But who gets a discount and how big of one a student gets is less straightforward than ever before. It used to be that colleges awarded their own aid dollars based mostly on a student’s finances: the more your family made, the more you usually paid, unless you were an exceptional student the school really wanted.

But with more and more colleges widely employing the practice of “enrollment management” during the past three decades, the distribution of financial aid has become a lot less predictable. Now everyone, regardless of income, believes they deserve some sort of financial help. Half of colleges “front-load” their aid, meaning they give more to students the first year of college than in the subsequent years, hoping an emotional attachment will keep students enrolled.

Only 1 in 10 education reforms analysed for their impact, finds OECD report

The Conversation:

Only a tenth of education reforms carried out around the world since 2008 have been analysed by governments for the impact they have on children’s education.

A new report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) think-tank looked at 450 education reforms carried out by its 34 member countries between 2008 and 2014. It found that only one in ten of these reforms were scrutinised for impact.

Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director of education and skills, said it was “more the exception than the rule” for education policies to be evaluated by governments. “If we want to improve education outcomes we need to have more systematic and evidence-based approach to reforms”, he said.

Teacher of the Year: Consider What Children Need Most When Rewriting Our Nation’s Education Law

Lee-Ann Stephens:

As federal legislators spend the next few months battling over the provisions of the education law known as No Child Left Behind, I want them to consider this:

I am a veteran teacher and I want to be accountable. I want my school to be accountable. Not for some of our students. For all of them. Not for certain grades and select years. For every year and every grade currently required.

That means we can’t abandon the federal mandate that requires all states to administer one standardized test every year for all students in grades three to eight and at least once in high school. That means we can’t walk away from teacher evaluation systems that consider, in part, how much students learn in a given year from a given teacher.

Free tuition debate will reverberate into the future

Roger Boughton:

The airwaves have been filled with stories about Congress soon to debate free education at community colleges across the nation. The Minnesota State Legislature is about to bring to the table at the Capitol a debate on free tuition at Minnesota Community Colleges. It will be an interesting debate as states have gone down this road before. California had free tuition for residents at all institutions of higher education until 1969 when the model changed to a tuition based funding model with high fees. Today there are 11 institutions of higher education in the United States that offer free tuition.

They range from the College of the Ozarks to the five academies. Other than the five academies, the colleges that are free are all private institutions, other than the community colleges of Tennessee which will offer free tuition beginning in 2015.

Why free tuition? After World War II our country had a desperate need to place millions of young men returning to the country in a meaningful experience as well as thank them for a job well done. The GI Bill was introduced to pay their tuition, fees and other expenses. We were also in the middle of a transformation from an agriculture economy to an economy producing manufacturing goods, and we needed a skilled workforce. The second transformation came when Russia sent up Sputnik. The country identified the need for counselors and math and science teachers. The National Defense Act of 1959 was born, and there were programs that paid students to major at graduate school in one of the fields listed in the Act. Students coming out of Appalachia were favored. I am a product of that era in that I lived on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains in southwest Virginia. I received stipends to obtain a graduate degree when I was married with one child. I was certainly not able to complete a degree with a growing family and attend the University full time.

The third transformation is what we are presently going through at this point in time. We are moving from the manufacturing to the digital and information age, which requires new skills for the future. Rather than use the words of free education the language that we should be using is; building a skilled based workforce for the future, providing opportunity for our future workforce rather than a dead-end job or creating a workforce that has hope rather than despair.

92 Percent of College Students Prefer Reading Print Books to E-Readers

Alice Robb:

Readers have been dreading the rise of e-books since before the technology even existed. A 1991 New York Times piece predicting the imminent invention of the personal e-reader spurred angry and impassioned letters to the editor. One reader wrote in to express his worry that the new electronic books wouldn’t work in the bath.

Twenty-three years later, half of American adults own an e-reading device. A few years ago, Obama set a goal of getting e-textbooks into every classroom by 2017. Florida lawmakers have passed legislation requiring public schools to convert their textbooks to digital versions.

Despite the embrace of e-books in certain contexts, they remain controversial. Many people just don’t like them: They run out of battery, they hurt your eyes, they don’t work in the bath. After years of growth, sales are stagnating. In 2014, 65 percent of 6 to 17-year-old children said they would always want to read books in print—up from 60 percent two years earlier.

Test Finds College Graduates Lack Skills for White-Collar Jobs

Douglas Belkin:

Four in 10 U.S. college students graduate without the complex reasoning skills to manage white-collar work, according to the results of a test of nearly 32,000 students.

The test, which was administered at 169 colleges and universities in 2013 and 2014 and released Thursday, reveals broad variation in the intellectual development of the nation’s students depending on the type and even location of the school they attend.

On average, students make strides in their ability to reason, but because so many start at such a deficit, many still graduate without the ability to read a scatterplot, construct a cohesive argument or identify a logical fallacy.

“Even if there is notable growth over four years, many students are starting at such a low point they may still not be proficient at the point of graduation,” said Jessalynn K. James, a program manager at the Council for Aid to Education, which administered the test. The CAE is a New York-based nonprofit that once was part of Rand Corp.

Collegiate Learning Assessment.

64 Dartmouth College students face discipline over cheating

Matt Rocheleau:

Up to 64 Dartmouth College students — including some athletes — could face suspension or other disciplinary action for cheating in an ethics class this past fall.

Dartmouth officials said students implicated in the cheating scandal misrepresented their attendance and participation in the undergraduate course, “Sports, Ethics & Religion.”

The class used electronic hand-held “clickers,” registered to individual students, to answer in-class questions. Officials at the Hanover, N.H., college said the students charged with cheating either gave their clickers to classmates instead of attending class themselves, or helped others cheat by using the clickers to answer questions on their behalf.

Some of the students have been found in violation of the school’s honor code and have been told they will be suspended for one term, a college official with knowledge of the proceedings said.

An upstart charter school is challenging the status quo in Clayton County. After beating the odds to open its doors, can Utopian Academy for the Arts live up to its vision?

Rebecca Burns:

The students of Utopian Academy for the Arts are being called on the carpet. Yesterday, their middle school mischief found the classic victim: a substitute teacher. The seventh-grade science room grew so loud that the classes on either side could hear the commotion through the walls.

Today, as they do every morning, the children have assembled in the cafeteria, with its red and blue cinder block walls and folding tables arranged in long rows, Hogwarts style. The whole school is here—all 180 students. The girls from Mr. Henderson’s class. The boys from Ms. Terry’s. The girls from Mr. Moore’s. The boys from Mr. Farrior’s. It is 7:55 in the morning; the school day won’t end for another eight hours, and many students will remain on campus until 6:30 p.m. This is a charter school, so Utopian Academy plays by its own set of rules. Eight-hour school days. Classes every other Saturday. A longer school year. A tougher curriculum. Dance, music, theater, and arts for all. And a rigid code of conduct.

“Good morning,” says a man from the stage. His name is Frederick A. Birkett, and he is not smiling. Birkett looks precisely how you’d imagine a former military man who went into academia might: bow tie, spit-shined shoes, ramrod posture. Just over a year ago, Birkett was an education professor at the University of Hawaii. But then he learned about this upstart school in Clayton County, Georgia, where the school board was so dysfunctional that the entire system lost its accreditation a few years ago. Birkett had never heard of such a thing, and this is a man who knows something about schools; he’s got a master’s in education from Harvard and ran pioneering charter schools in Harlem, Boston, and Kailua, Hawaii. When it comes to charters, he literally wrote the book—Charter Schools: The Parent’s Complete Guide.

Here’s the New Way Colleges Are Predicting Student Grades

Jon Marcus:

Data algorithms cover millions of grades from thousands of students

Dupaul, the associate provost for enrollment management at Southern Methodist University, is one of a growing number of university administrators consulting the performance data of former students to predict the outcomes of current ones. The little-known effort is being quietly employed by about 125 schools around the U.S., and often includes combing years of data covering millions of grades earned by thousands of former students.

It’s the same kind of process tech behemoths like Amazon and Google employ to predict the buying behavior of consumers. And many of the universities and colleges that are applying it have seen impressive declines in the number of students who drop out, and increases in the proportion who graduate. The early returns are promising enough that it has caught the attention of the Obama Administration, which pushed for schools to make heavier use of data to improve graduation rates at a White House higher education summit last week.

The payoff for schools goes beyond graduation rates: tracking data in this way keeps tuition coming in from students who stay, and avoids the cost of recruiting new ones, which the enrollment consulting firm Noel-Levitz estimates is $2,433 per undergraduate at private and $457 at four-year public universities.

“It’s a resource issue, it’s a reputational issue, it does impact — I’ll say it — the rankings” by improving graduation rates, Dupaul says.

Standardized testing opponents find themselves on the wrong side of civil rights

Laura Waters:

On Monday U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan outlined his wish-list for the next iteration of No Child Left Behind. It will be the seventh generation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which began in 1965.

Duncan again emphasized the administration’s support for mandatory standardized testing of children in grades three through eight.

The anti-testing cadre gave a collective hiss on the internet. Nothing new there: opposition to annual standardized student assessments is the new craze. But, remarkably, sloganeers of “toxic testing,” including teacher union leaders and suburban parents, find themselves at odds with some of America’s most prominent civil rights groups.

From a statement issued earlier this month from an umbrella group called The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights”

New Jersey Education Association’s Finances

Mike Antonucci:

Having Chris Christie as governor doesn’t seem to have affected the New Jersey Education Association’s revenues, but it certainly affected its political spending. The union sent $1 million to its candidate PAC, $5.5 million to Garden State Forward and $3 million to One New Jersey (both SuperPACs).

NJEA also spread cash to outside advocacy groups both large and small. It contributed $550,000 to the Education Law Center and $5,000 to FairTest.

NJEA executive officers do particularly well salary-wise, plus each receives an annual $1,000 in clothing allowance.

Total membership – 200,314, up 5,356

Total revenue – $126.5 million (90% came from member dues), up $2.7 million

Budget surplus – $3.2 million

Ucas warns some UK students may be disadvantaged by A-level changes

Ricard Adams:

Ucas, the organisation that handles British university admissions, is warning that some students applying for places may be disadvantaged by the uneven and confusing wave of A-level exam changes taking place later this year.

In a survey of 500 secondary schools, Ucas found many unsure how to respond to the A-level changes in England, which strip out AS-level exams as part of A-level grades and introduce a series of new two-year linear exams from September this year until 2017.

Commentary on Wisconsin’s K-12 Governance model

Alan Borsuk:

So now, Walker wants to go back to letting parental choice drive quality?

There are those who agree. George Mitchell, a central and adamant figure in the history of voucher advocacy, sent me an email last week, saying, among other things:

“If there was a true open enrollment system in Wisconsin that included private and charter schools, a system that ALL parents were eligible for, a system that did not give ‘public’ schools a decided fiscal advantage, there would be an accountability revolution.

“This would require that the state provide parents with Consumer Reports-style information. The result, among other things, would be a meaningful reduction in the number of low-performing schools.”

Mitchell added, “…given the demonstrable inability of officials and experts in Madison to craft an alternative, what could go wrong in giving true parent-based accountability a try?

“Such a system would not be perfect. I only argue that it would be (far) better compared to the current system.”

There was little evidence that Republican legislative leaders were buying Walker’s idea that there was no need for bureaucrats to create steps for dealing with low success schools.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos was quoted saying that passing a bill that didn’t include state-initiated ways aimed at change “would just be political theater.” Rep. Jim Steineke, majority leader of the Assembly, posted an essay online, saying, “It is unconscionable that we would look at the children left at these schools and tell them that by slapping a grade on their schools, we have somehow accomplished something.”

On the one hand, you have to ask if Walker is serious about what he said — or is he, perhaps, striking a posture that might help position him in the race for the Republican presidential nomination? If he’s serious, will he really push for no new government-based accountability steps, except something like better report cards?

Superkids K-2 Core Reading Program From Rowland Reading Foundation

Zaner-Bloser via a kind reader:

Rowland Reading Foundation, of Madison, Wisconsin, today announced the acquisition of its Superkids Reading Program by Zaner-Bloser, an educational publisher providing curricula and digital resources in literacy, language arts, writing instruction and handwriting.
The Superkids program is a rigorous phonics-based literacy curriculum that integrates reading with writing, spelling and grammar for students in kindergarten through second grade. It features a cast of characters called the Superkids whose adventures are told in its books and online materials.

The program was written by Pleasant Rowland, creator of American Girl®, and developed by Rowland Reading Foundation, whose mission is to improve reading instruction in the primary grades. In addition to its Superkids curriculum, the Foundation provides classroom coaching and professional development for teachers and conducts research into effective reading instruction.
“Teaching children how to read and to love to read has been my personal passion and the focus of my career,” said Ms. Rowland, chairman of Rowland Reading Foundation. “As I approached retirement, I wanted to find a good home for Superkids. I believe Zaner-Bloser is that good home, not only because of its long commitment to literacy for young children but, of greater importance, because the missions and values of our two organizations are so closely aligned.”

Disastrous reading results have long been a challenge in Madison.

A New Study Reveals Much About How Parents Really Choose Schools

Anya Kamanetz:

The charter school movement is built on the premise that increased competition among schools will sort the wheat from the chaff.

It seems self-evident that parents, empowered by choice, will vote with their feet for academically stronger schools. As the argument goes, the overall effect should be to improve equity as well: Lower-income parents won’t have to send their kids to an under-resourced and underperforming school just because it is the closest one to them geographically.

But an intriguing new study from the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans suggests that parent choice doesn’t always work that way. Parents, especially low-income parents, actually show strong preferences for other qualities like location and extracurriculars — preferences that can outweigh academics.

Colleges ratchet up recruiting of applicants — just to turn them down

Laura Colarusso:

When Tel Kelley began his college search, he knew he wanted to go to a big school with a top-notch sports medicine program and big-time intercollegiate teams.

But as his senior year began at Alamosa High School in Alamosa, Colorado, Kelley started hearing over and over again from about a dozen schools he’d never contacted and in which he had no interest. He estimates that each school sent him two to three emails a week, plus letters and brochures encouraging him to apply.

It’s been “overwhelming,” said the 18-year-old Kelley, an A student who has already been accepted to Oklahoma State and Arizona State universities. Now, as the emails keep pouring in, he said, “I just delete them immediately so I don’t have to deal with it.”

As college-admissions season kicks into high gear, Kelley is a target of a little-known practice among colleges and universities called “recruit to deny,” under which they try to make their admissions process look more selective by boosting their number of applicants — then turning many of them down — through hard-sell marketing techniques.

One major reason for this is that the more selective an institution appears to be, the higher it ends up in the college rankings, said David Hawkins, executive director of education content and policy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC.

“The rankings drive this,” Hawkins said. “But if the rankings went away tomorrow, you would still have college presidents, trustees, alumni, students and all sorts of other stakeholders who care about how selective their college is.”

How the Romans taught Latin

Peter Jones:

Barely a week passes without someone complaining about the teaching of English or foreign languages, usually because it involves too much, or too little, grammar. The ancients also had to face the problem. Clearly, non-Romans who wanted a career in Roman high society, the courts, civil administration or the army needed to learn Latin. So they did, and by the 2nd century AD, the Greek essayist Plutarch was able to say that almost all men used Latin. Certainly, as the Vindolanda tablets demonstrate, the Latin of the Germanic officer Cerealis was very respectable.

But Romans also admired Greek culture enormously, and Latin literature drank deeply at its well (the statesman Cicero could switch effortlessly between Latin and Greek). Trade too provided incentives for Romans to learn Greek; and as it was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean, and there were huge numbers of Greek slaves in Rome as well as immigrants, more Greek was probably spoken in Rome than the local lingo.

Cracking Down on Skipping Class

Douglas Belkin:

Skipping class undetected for a game of ultimate Frisbee might become a thing of the past as more universities adopt mandatory-attendance policies and acquire high-tech trackers that snitch when students skip.

At Villanova University, student ID cards track attendance at some lectures. Administrators at University of Arkansas last semester began electronically monitoring the class attendance of 750 freshmen as part of a pilot program they might extend to all underclassman. And at Harvard, researchers secretly filmed classrooms to learn how many students were skipping lectures.

The moves reflect the rising financial consequence of skipping too many classes and, consequently, dropping out. More than four in 10 full-time college students fail to graduate in six years. Many are stuck with crippling student debt and no credentials to help them pay it back. Graduation rates also figure into closely watched school rankings.

L.A. Unified’s iPad program plagued by problems early, review says

Howard Blume:

LAUSD’s $1.3-billion iPad program was plagued by lack of resources and inadequate planning, review says
U.S. Department of Education study finds similar problems with a faulty student records system

A $1.3-billion iPads-for-all program in Los Angeles schools was plagued by lack of resources and inadequate planning for how the devices would be used in classrooms and, later, how they would be evaluated, according to a federal review.

Better to get reading right….

Silicon Valley Turns Its Eye to Education

Natasha Singer:

“Education is one of the last industries to be touched by Internet technology, and we’re seeing a lot of catch-up going on,” said Betsy Corcoran, the chief executive of EdSurge, an industry news service and research company. “We’re starting to see more classical investors — the Kleiner Perkinses, the Andreessen Horowitzes, the Sequoias — pay more attention to the marketplace than before.”

While rising sharply, the values of ed tech financing deals are chump change compared with the money flowing into consumer software. Uber, the ride-hailing app, for instance, raised $2.7 billion last year.

The smaller sums going into ed tech illustrate the challenges facing start-ups as they try to persuade public school systems to adopt their novel products. Companies often must navigate local school districts with limited budgets and slow procurement processes. To bypass the bureaucracy, many start-ups are marketing free learning apps and websites directly to teachers in the hopes that their schools might eventually buy enhanced services.

Still, it is too early to tell whether that direct-to-consumer “freemium” strategy, as it is often called, will pan out for education software.

The missing piece to changing the university culture

Maximiliaan Schillebeeckx, Brett Maricque & Cory Lewis:

As graduate students, we have become disillusioned with our academic training. We began graduate school full of ambition, drive and optimism but have long since come to realize that we have joined a system that does not meet our diverse interests. We yearn for a community that supports creativity and the expression of future career goals instead of one with a narrow, focused interest.

Current PhD training programs are focused primarily on the academic career track despite its disheartening outlook: the number of awarded PhDs is significantly outpacing the available positions1, 2, fiscal pressures have slowed the growth of available independent research jobs3 and the time it takes to earn a PhD has not improved over the past two decades4. Each year, there are seven times more PhDs awarded in science and engineering than there are newly available faculty positions (Fig. 1). As a result, only about 25% of biomedical sciences PhD recipients are in tenure-track positions five years after earning their degree4, 5. The percent of PhDs starting postdoctoral fellowships, however, has not changed, with close to 70% of life science PhDs pursuing a postdoc after graduation in 2010 (ref. 4), which suggests that PhD students are unsure of their career goals or unequipped for a nonacademic career. In addition to the discouraging job prospects, the time required to complete a PhD adds to the bleak outlook. Despite a downward trend, the average time to degree in life sciences and engineering is still high, with half of PhD candidates requiring seven years or more to complete their degree; one-third of candidates who begin will never finish1, 4. With over 40% of graduate students indifferent or unsatisfied to some degree with their graduate school experience6, it is clear that initiatives must be taken to revamp the research training paradigm.

Academic Job archives

Jonathan Goodwin:

Around last year at this time, I became interested in what the archived editions of the MLA Job Information List could tell us about how the profession has changed over time. The MLA provided page-scans of all the JILs going back to 1965, and Jim Ridolfo used commercial OCR software to make them searchable. Once the documents were searchable, finding the first occurrence of various key words and graphing their frequency over time became feasible. One detail that became clear to me as I read each single issue of the JIL was that the formats differed enough to make graphs of relative frequencies somewhat misleading. Some of the editions are three times the size of others, and even normalizing over years doesn’t necessarily help here. So this image, for example, of the relative frequency of “shakespeare” in the JIL, needs additional interpretation:

The Unappreciated Success Of Charter Schools

Adam Ozimek:

I think the conventional wisdom on charter school evidence could be summed up thusly: ”some charter schools appear to do very well, but on average charters do no better and no worse than public schools”. But I would like to propose a better conventional wisdom: “some charter schools appear to do very well, and on average charters do better at educating poor students and black students”. If the same evidence existed for some policy other than charter schools, I believe this would be the conventional wisdom.

Two of the most widely cited charter studies are a 2009 and 2013 analysis of charters in 16 and 27 states respectively by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO). The results that many cite are the charter schools do no better or worse than nearby public schools on average, which was the conclusion of the 2009 study. However, I think this claim really missed the bigger picture. While overall charters and public schools compare relatively closely, both the 2009 and 2013 study found that charters did better for students in poverty. In addition, performance gap is growing over time:

Regular naps are ‘key to learning’

James Gallagher:

Trials with 216 babies up to 12 months old indicated they were unable to remember new tasks if they did not have a lengthy sleep soon afterwards.

The University of Sheffield team suggested the best time to learn may be just before sleep and emphasised the importance of reading at bedtime.

Experts said sleep may be much more important in early years than at other ages.
People spend more of their time asleep as babies than at any other point in their lives.

Pittsburgh hopes to attract more diverse group of applicants for top teaching jobs

Eleanor Chote:

As one of the ways to recruit current city teachers to the positions, the district today will host information sessions at board headquarters focused on “teachers of color,” although the session is open to all.

“This would be aligned with what we do when trying to build strong and diverse application pools,” said Jody Spolar, chief human resources officer. “If you want to advance the goal of diversity in your workplace … you have to be deliberate about making sure you have a strong applicant pool.”

Currently, 15 percent of the teaching staff are minorities while 11 percent of the career-ladder teachers are minorities. Sixty-six percent of students are minorities.

A notice about today’s session that went out to all teachers stated: “The district strives to ensure that teacher leaders are racially representative of our student population and aims to staff a strong and racially diverse cohort of Career Ladder educators for 2015-16.”

Black And Hispanic Students Are Making Meaningful Gains, But It’s Hard To Tell

Mikhail Zinshteyn:

Political leaders are fond of saying the United States is in an education crisis.

The U.S. is often shown to be losing ground internationally. We revisit a Sputnik moment every time international test scores are released, and some of the Sturm und Drang over our decline is a response to America’s middling ranking among other wealthy countries. However, the U.S. has historically underperformed on such cross-national comparisons. We came in 11 out of 12 on the first international assessment of math in 1964, for instance.

“People like the simple story,” said Jack Buckley, the head of research at the College Board, who previously led the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm. “And the simple story is we’re treading water while the others are pushing ahead of us. I think [that] is the narrative of the times.”

But the truth is more complicated than the image of a U.S. education system stuck in the mire. And by one important measure, the nation’s students have been improving at a steady pace for decades.

Always a presence’: Longtime Madison School District superintendent Douglas Ritchie dies

Molly Beck:

Ritchie’s son John, of Madison, said becoming a superintendent was important to his dad, to the point of packing up the family of seven and moving to Boulder, Colorado, during the summer of 1962 to live in an apartment while Ritchie worked on his PhD. Ritchie’s children later attended Madison schools while he was heading the Madison School District.

“You tend to be credited for all of his decisions,” John Ritchie joked.

John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., arrived in Madison to head MTI about a year after Ritchie became superintendent. Matthews described their working relationship as competitive, but ultimately became “a joy,” and one with more more problems solved than created — notably ending a two-week strike in early 1976.

“Although tempers got a bit hot, he and I were able to work to resolve issues because we had developed such an honorable working relationship,” said Matthews. “Because of that, we were able to resolve the strike and move forward without animosity between staff and management. It was because of that ability that he remained so highly respected.”

How Parents & Community Groups Use Data

Christina Esquivel:

Meaningful family involvement in schools can make a huge difference for a child’s learning and for driving improvement in the school system as a whole. Extensive research has shown that students with involved parents have higher attendance, social skills, grades, test scores, and graduation rates. We learned a lot more about this topic when PP200_0we attended a presentation about parent engagement at the City College of New York as part of their Colloquium Series on Data and Data Driven Instruction.

Norm Fruchter of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform presented the session, entitled “How do parent & community groups use data for organizing?” Fruchter’s documentary, Parent Power, explores how parents and community groups leveraged data to advocate for educational improvement in New York City schools from 1995 to 2009. The film tells the story of a group of parents from the South Bronx who came together after learning that only 17% of their students were reading at grade level in elementary school.

Racial Isolation in Public Schools

NY Times:

This is not an easy problem to solve. But the state cannot just throw up its hands. It has a moral obligation to ensure that as many children as possible escape failing schools for ones that give them a fighting chance. And history has shown that districts can dramatically improve educational opportunities for minority children — and reduce racial isolation — with voluntary transfer plans and especially with high-quality magnet schools that attract middle-class families.

This problem is especially urgent in New York’s second-largest city, Buffalo, where federal civil rights officials are enforcing an agreement intended to expand minority access to the better schools in a dysfunctional system, which has suffered from years of abysmal leadership and middle-class flight. Today nearly half the city’s public schools either have low graduation rates or rank in the bottom 5 percent of state schools in math and English.

Obama education legacy: Pomp and fizzle?

Stephanie Simon:

President Barack Obama’s proposal to give millions of students free tuition at community colleges made a big splash on Friday, as the administration had intended.

But the moment also exposed the limits of Obama’s power on education, as his ambitions for big, legacy-defining initiatives run smack into a buzzsaw of opposition from across the political spectrum.

Congress is highly unlikely to approve a new entitlement with an estimated price tag of $60 billion over the next decade. Republicans quickly dismissed the college proposal as a political stunt. And leading Democrats expressed, at best, polite support.

In the K-12 arena, too, Obama can command the spotlight when he lays out his vision — but his clout doesn’t extend much beyond that at this point.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is preparing to deliver a major policy speech Monday outlining the administration’s goals for revamping the No Child Left Behind law that governs some $78 billion in annual federal education spending. Yet the administration’s education policies have proved so toxic on both the left and the right that it has little leverage on the Hill, according to analysts from across the political spectrum.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan to outline education priorities and defend testing

Lyndsey Layton:

As a new Congress gets to work to rewrite the 2002 federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, the Obama administration is drawing what Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls a “line in the sand”: The federal government must continue to require states to give annual, standardized tests in reading and math.

In a speech scheduled for Monday at an elementary school in the District, Duncan is expected to insist that any new law retain the trademark of No Child Left Behind, requiring that every public school student be tested annually in math and reading in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and also be tested in science at three points during those years.

“He will outline the need to widen and ensure opportunity for all students — the original purpose of this landmark law,” said Dorie Nolt, Duncan’s spokeswoman. “He will call for quality preschool for every child, improved resources for schools and teachers, and better support for teachers and principals. He will also call on states and districts to limit unnecessary testing so that teachers can focus needed time on classroom learning.”

Booming University Staff Count

Björn Brembs:

UPDATE, 09/01/2015: A commenter made me aware of data rows in the raw data we had overlooked before. In our analysis, we evaluated all non-scientific staff, e.g., also technical support or library staff. As I’m actually quite fond of the libraries and the technical support we have, I looked at the trends for the ‘pure’ permanent administration staff and found and increase of 17% from 2005 to 2012, while permanent scientist positions increased only by 0.04%. Taking only these two groups of employees, the ratio between scientists and administrators shrinks to 0.57 in 2005 and 0.64 in 2012, i.e., the average administrator has to support less than two permanently employed scientists. In my opinion, this would have been the better data to use, but my co-author is not quite as convinced. Either way, even focusing on ‘pure’ admin staff conveys essentially the same message as the full overall data, albeit perhaps less dramatically. This is precisely why I am an open science advocate: making your data open allows you to discover more and improve your science!

Noam Chomsky, writing about the Death of American Universities, recently reminded us that reforming universities using a corporate business model leads to several easy to understand consequences. The increase of the precariat of faculty without benefits or tenure, a growing layer of administration and bureaucracy, or the increase in student debt. In part, this well-known corporate strategy serves to increase labor servility. The student debt problem is particularly obvious in countries with tuition fees, especially in the US where a convincing argument has been made that the tuition system is nearing its breaking point. The decrease in tenured positions is also quite well documented (see e.g., an old post). So far, and perhaps as may have been expected, Chomsky was dead on with his assessment. But how about the administrations?

Why a Christie presidential bid is good for New Jersey’s teachers union

Laura Waters:

The nation’s atwitter about a potential Republican nomination brawl between Jeb Bush and Chris Christie, as well as a posse of Tea Party candidates.

One of the wedge issues, pundits predict, will be education policy. Picture it now: Bush and Christie, both moderate Republicans, saddled up at debate podia and straddled by an assortment of more conservative cowboys like Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and maybe even Mike Huckabee. Remember what happened to Mitt Romney with his maladroit references to the “47%” and “corporations are people too?” Suddenly two more moderate Republican governors, one from purplish Florida and one from blue Jersey, may be forced to shift right by the collective heft of conservatives who demean the Common Core State Standards and standardized assessments.

Here’s another prediction: the likely airing of this Bush/Christie spaghetti western will warm up the political relationship between the 2015 New Jersey State Legislature and the N.J. Education Association. This shift will, in turn, affect debates and outcomes on unresolved education policies at the Statehouse this year, which include yet another effort to update the state’s twenty-year old charter school law, the future of PARCC standardized testing, school funding, local control in Newark, and the sun-setting of the pension/health benefits reform act on July 1.

The 16 year old coder, Part 1: Why My Daughter No Longer Attends Public High School

Joe Eames:

This is the first in what I intend to be a series of blogs about getting my daughter into the programming industry.

These last 12 months have been a strange adventure for myself, my wife, and our 16 year old daughter Katya.

Last year I kind of coerced my daughter into taking a Web Design class at her high school. This was her sophomore year. She was rather reluctant, but still agreed. I didn’t put too much pressure on her, but enough that she probably would have chosen a different elective without my influence. After a few months in it, she was really enjoying it and found out about a program that our school district runs where she could spend half her day in a full on web development class. She decided to apply and was accepted for her Junior year.

Chattering Away to Babies Is Even Better for Them Than Reading

Melissa Dahl:

Parents of tiny babies: When you’re home with the kid, keep a one-sided conversation going about anything and everything while you’re folding laundry, making dinner, or doing whatever else around the house. A steady stream of idle chatter from mom or dad’s mouth improves the child’s cognitive development, even more so than reading to them does, according to the results of a study recently published in the journal Language Teaching and Therapy.

Aisling Murray, of the Economic and Social Research Institute in Ireland, initially set out to investigate the importance of reading, and whether reading to infants was associated with higher scores on indicators of cognitive development than other language-based interactions between parent and infant, like talking. She expected that reading would win out; the question, really, was how much better reading was for language skills.

GOP bill would make failing public schools charters

Jason Stein & Erin Richards:

The state would convert failing public schools to independent charter schools and cut off all state payments to failing private schools for at least four years, under a draft bill offered by Assembly Republicans Wednesday.

The sweeping measure would create a new board to assign letter grades of A through F to all publicly funded schools in the state and then lay out eventual penalties for those receiving D’s and F’s. In a shift from current law, the measure would allow private schools to use a different exam from the state test to measure student learning, though it would create a process for comparing those differing tests.

Molly Beck covers the story as well.

One wonders how long term, disastrous reading results play in the governance equation?

What Students in China Have Taught Me About U.S. College Admissions

Terry Crawford:

I talk to more Chinese high school students than anyone else in the world.

At least I think I do: I operate — along with my wife — a company in China that interviews students on behalf of selective U.S. colleges and boarding schools. Instead of taking a standardized language test, a prospective student can participate in an unscripted conversation with one of our interviewers. We videotape the interview and then provide it “as-is” to admission officers. Admission officers like our interviews because they provide a trustworthy and unfiltered look at an applicant’s communication skills.

A fascinating aspect of this job is that we have a front-row seat to one of the greatest migrations of talent in history. Our thousands of conversations with students often include some variation of the question, “Why do you want to go to the U.S. for school?” Almost every interviewee responds with a version of the following: They don’t like the gaokao (the national college entrance exam), and even more they dislike the prospect of their major being determined by their gaokao score.

College Ratings and Affordable Education

Rafiq Dossani:

On Friday, December 19, 2014, the Department of Education released its much-awaited “College Ratings Framework” paper. One key goal of the proposed ratings system is to help students, particularly those who are underprivileged, make better, more affordable college choices. Will the new ratings system help achieve this goal?

There are reasons to believe that students from the middle- and lower-income tiers of society are not making affordable college choices. College debt has been rising sharply over the past several years, with $33,000 now being the average amount owed by a graduating student. For poorer students, college debt is even higher, even with financial aid factored in. Furthermore, this figure does not account for the nearly 50 percent of freshmen who will never graduate, in many cases because high college debt forced them to drop out.

Such debt seems high compared with what it should be, especially for lower-income students. The national average for annual college tuition at a four-year public college is a little less than $7,500. At a public community college, it is $3,000. However, the “net price” (i.e., including living costs and supplies), for a stay-at-home, in-state, low-income student, after considering grants and scholarships and living costs, is substantially lower. For example, while tuition at San Jose State University (which, incidentally, is the single largest source of engineers who work in Silicon Valley) is $7,500, equal to the national average, the net price for a stay-at-home student with a family income of $40,000 is $5,500. And the net price for such a student at Foothill College, a community college from which students may transfer to San Jose State University, is $3,300. In such a case, over a four-year period, a student who spends two years at the community college and then transfers to the four-year college will accumulate debt of $17,600, even if the student and his family are unable to contribute anything.

The Tyranny of Meritocracy

Lani Guinier:

The term “meritocracy” was coined by the British sociologist Michael Dunlop Young as a spoof. In his 1958 satire, The Rise of Meritocracy, 1870-2033, Young gave an imaginary account of a smug elite: Instead of ancestry, ability had determined their social position. Rule by this select few appeared both benign and bountiful because of a talent-based formula for assigning status. Test scores (or other suitable substitutes for innate talent or aptitude) mattered the most. Because those who had risen in the status hierarchy had attained their positions through talent and effort, they were better able to justify their continued rule—they had earned it.

To Young, such a testocracy was not a shining vision but a nightmare. And more than 40 years after the publication of his book, he was “sadly disappointed” at how the word he coined has “gone into general circulation, especially in the United States.” He intended to warn society about what might happen if, in assigning social status, it continued to place formal educational qualifications over all other considerations. In Young’s fictional world, anyone unable to jump through educational hoops would be barred from a new, exclusive social class as discriminatory as older ones based on inheritance.

Gallery of Math Ideas

Lucas/VB::

Below is a mostly comprehensive gallery of all images — illustrations, diagrams and animations — that I have created for Wikipedia over the years, some of which have been selected as featured pictures, or even picture of the day. As you’ll probably notice, they’re mostly related to physics and mathematics, which are my main areas of interest.

If you have any comments, requests, suggestions or corrections, feel free to drop me a message on my talk page. But please, before making a suggestion, first take a look and see what sort of stuff I can do. Due to time, knowledge and complexity constraints, I cannot guarantee I’ll be able to make a good illustration of any topic.

NPR: Six Education Stories To Watch in 2015

Claudio Sanchez:

5. Teacher Evaluation, Training, And The Vergara Fallout
This past year, the Vergara ruling in California reinvigorated the debate over teacher tenure, especially termination and due process rights.

In 2015, critics of teacher quality will take on unions in more states, beginning in New York. This will also draw more attention to colleges of education, which this past year came under fire from the National Council for Teacher Quality in a scathing report. NCTQ and Vergara supporters argue that low-income and minority students are more likely to be subject to poorly trained and incompetent teachers.

Politics & Wisconsin’s K-12 Governance: 2015 edition

Alan Borsuk:

Accountability. Or to put it in plain language, what are we going to do about bad schools statewide?

Public, private, charter, there are schools in all sectors where students chronically don’t achieve well. There’s lots of talk about new ideas — some Republicans want to create a state accountability board to deal with school quality.

Seems to me it would be hard to turn the idea into a reality that will have positive results.

How to Learn Efficiently

Daniel Lemire:

I am convinced that much of the gap between the best college students and the worst is explained by study habits. Frankly, most students study poorly. To make matters worse, most teachers are incapable of teaching good study habits.

Learning is proportional with effort

Sitting in a classroom listening to a professor feels like learning… Reading a book on a new topic feels like learning… but because they are overwhelming passive activities, they are inefficient. It is even worse than inefficient, it is counterproductive because it gives you the false impression that you know the material. You can sit through lecture after lecture on quantum mechanics. At some point you will become familiar with the topics and the terminology. Alas you are fooling yourself which is worse than not learning anything.

Considering K-12 Governance Changes

Erin Richards:

While those ideas get batted around, here’s what’s been going on in state-run districts in other states:

The Louisiana Legislature created the Recovery School District in 2003 and gave it more latitude to reshape the landscape of schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Today the Recovery School District comprises 57 independent charter schools enrolling more than 30,000 students in New Orleans, according to the organization’s annual report.

The standardized test scores for the district rose faster than any other public school system in the state, according to results from spring 2013.

But others have questioned reports of academic improvement for children in the system.

The Achievement School District in Tennessee was created in 2010 as a result of the state’s winning application for Race to the Top federal education funds.

According to its website, the district intends to be overseeing 30 schools and about 10,000 students by 2015-’16.

The goal of the Achievement School District is to boost the state’s bottom 5% of schools into the top 25% of schools, either by running them itself, or selecting charter school management companies to do so. The Achievement School District answers to the Tennessee Department of Education.

Long term disastrous reading results surely merits more than status quo governance.

K-12 tax & Spending Climate: Taxpayers stand to gain if on-demand labour is used to improve efficiency in the provision of public services

The Economist:

This sense of nuance should inform policymaking. Governments that outlaw on-demand firms are simply handicapping the rest of their economies. But that does not mean they should sit on their hands. The ways governments measure employment and wages will have to change. Many European tax systems treat freelances as second-class citizens, while American states have different rules for “contract workers” that could be tidied up. Too much of the welfare state is delivered through employers, especially pensions and health care: both should be tied to the individual and made portable, one area where Obamacare was a big step forward.

But even if governments adjust their policies to a more individualistic age, the on-demand economy clearly imposes more risk on individuals. People will have to master multiple skills if they are to survive in such a world—and keep those skills up to date. Professional sorts in big service firms will have to take more responsibility for educating themselves. People will also have to learn how to sell themselves, through personal networking and social media or, if they are really ambitious, turning themselves into brands. In a more fluid world, everybody will need to learn how to manage You Inc.

Confessions of a Fixer – Athletics

Brad Wolverton:

Fifteen miles from his home, tucked in a corner of a 10-by-10 storage unit, under an antique table, is a gray filing cabinet. Locked inside he keeps the test answers for more than a dozen online courses.

Among his files is a pink steno pad of names, covering the front and back of 80 pages, that includes some of the biggest stars in college sports. Next to the names are credit-card numbers and PINs, log-ins, passwords, Social Security numbers, and addresses.

The handwritten notes, by a onetime academic adviser and college-basketball coach, are part of an elaborate scheme. Over the past 14 years, he says, he has used test keys to cheat for hundreds of athletes, helping them meet the eligibility requirements of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

For some players, he says, he did their work outright. For others, he provided homework answers and papers that the students would submit themselves. At exam time, he lined up proctors and conspired with them to lie on behalf of students.

The two cultures of mathematics and biology

Bits of Dna:

I’m a (50%) professor of mathematics and (50%) professor of molecular & cell biology at UC Berkeley. There have been plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with biologists and then gone off at night with some mathematicians. I mean that literally. I have had, of course, intimate friends among both biologists and mathematicians. I think it is through living among these groups and much more, I think, through moving regularly from one to the other and back again that I have become occupied with the problem that I’ve christened to myself as the ‘two cultures’. For constantly I feel that I am moving among two groups- comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who have almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate have so little in common that instead of crossing the campus from Evans Hall to the Li Ka Shing building, I may as well have crossed an ocean.1

I try not to become preoccupied with the two cultures problem, but this holiday season I have not been able to escape it. First there was a blog post by David Mumford, a professor emeritus of applied mathematics at Brown University, published on December 14th. For those readers of the blog who do not follow mathematics, it is relevant to what I am about to write that David Mumford won the Fields Medal in 1974 for his work in algebraic geometry, and afterwards launched another successful career as an applied mathematician, building on Ulf Grenader’s Pattern Theory and making significant contributions to vision research. A lot of his work is connected to neuroscience and therefore biology. Among his many awards are the MacArthur Fellowship, the Shaw Prize, the Wolf Prize and the National Medal of Science. David Mumford is not Joe Schmo.

Laptops & Classrooms

Tal Gross:

I settled on my New Year’s resolution while giving a lecture to 85 masters students.

It was one kid who unintentionally suggested the idea. He was sitting in the back row, silently pecking away at his laptop the entire class. At times, he smiled at his screen. But he rarely looked up at me.

I had a choice. I could disrupt the class to single him out. Or I could do what most teachers in higher education do: just ignore it. After all, these students are adults, and they have to take a final exam. Do I have to be the disciplinarian?

When I was a student myself — not that long ago — no one brought laptops to class. I took notes on legal pads, and the remains of those legal pads are still filed away in my office. Today, few students take notes by hand.

The plot to overhaul No Child Left Behind

Maggie Severns:

The president may be hard-pressed to veto even a very conservative bill, though the administration has signaled in the past it will take a hard line when it comes to preserving annual tests and other provisions that focus on equal access to education in NCLB. The Obama administration ushered in what has been labeled a dismantling of the law by giving states huge leeway on some of its key provisions, but the so-called waiver policy is unpopular in the states in no small part because it helped encourage the proliferation of the Common Core standards.

Lobbyists swarmed Capitol Hill in December to sway lawmakers’ positions in chaotic education debates over how often to test students and what role — if any — school vouchers should have in the law. These debates are set to erupt in January, though some groups have put themselves ahead of the curve: The National Education Association, the country’s largest teacher’s union, has been pushing to roll back testing requirements for years and is seizing on recent anti-testing sentiment in the states to make a fresh case for getting rid of annual tests on Capitol Hill.

Part of the difficulty in rewriting the law is that the most hated parts of the bill are deeply intertwined with its heralded civil rights provisions: The testing requirements, for example, allowed the government for the first time to spotlight the achievement gaps between white students with higher-income families and their peers when those test results were broken down by race and socioeconomic status. NCLB put a public spotlight on schools and districts that were falling flat when it comes to helping disadvantaged students — and pressed them to improve when no one else was.

(Homeschooled) King of Clickbait

Andrew Marantz:

When Emerson Spartz was a child in La Porte, Indiana, he had the highest batting average on his Little League team. “I quickly started seeing patterns,” he told me. His coach instructed only the fastest players to steal bases. Spartz was not fast, but he noticed that the catchers were unpracticed at throwing to second base, allowing runners to advance. “I started stealing pretty much every time,” he said. “It worked extremely well, but that wasn’t what the coach cared about, apparently.” To punish Spartz for disobedience, the coach batted him eighth. “I gave him a statistical explanation of why it made no sense to put your best hitter at the bottom of the order,” Spartz said. “You can imagine how that went over.”At school, he was a precocious student who chafed at classroom structure.

A few weeks into seventh grade, he asked his parents if he could be homeschooled. His mother, Maggi, was the breadwinner, working at a local philanthropic foundation. His father, Tom, became Emerson’s teacher.

The Death of Expertise

Tom Nichols:

Universities, without doubt, have to own some of this mess. The idea of telling students that professors run the show and know better than they do strikes many students as something like uppity lip from the help, and so many profs don’t do it. (One of the greatest teachers I ever had, James Schall, once wrote many years ago that “students have obligations to teachers,” including “trust, docility, effort, and thinking,” an assertion that would produce howls of outrage from the entitled generations roaming campuses today.) As a result, many academic departments are boutiques, in which the professors are expected to be something like intellectual valets. This produces nothing but a delusion of intellectual adequacy in children who should be instructed, not catered to.

We know best” has surely expired….

Making Language Immersion Fun for the Kids

Danielle Pergament:

It was summer in Tuscany. The rolling hills were adorned with their famous haystacks. The cypress trees were majestically verdant against the golden backdrop. We were in the picturesque Renaissance town Pienza, its spire shooting up into a cloudless sky. I watched as my children boarded a scuolabus with 15 Italian kids they’d never met before. The bus pulled away, heading to a local terra-cotta museum. I looked at the faces of my children — crying, hysterical, their tiny hands banging on the windows. And I was filled with joy.
I should explain.

What brought me to this pocket of Italy for a month, and inspired me to take a leave of absence from work and my husband? I wanted my children to learn Italian. To be clear: I hate watching them cry as much as the next loving, fallible mother. But this was different. These tears — as well as the not insubstantial expense of the endeavor — were collateral damage toward a larger, longer-term goal.

Inside a Chinese a Test a Prep Factory

Brook Larmer:

The main street of Maotanchang, a secluded town in the furrowed hills of eastern China’s Anhui province, was nearly deserted. A man dozed on a motorized rickshaw, while two old women with hoes shuffled toward the rice paddies outside town. It was 11:44 on a Sunday morning last spring, and the row of shops selling food, tea and books by the pound stood empty. Even the town’s sacred tree lured no supplicants; beneath its broad limbs, a single bundle of incense smoldered on a pile of ash.

One minute later, at precisely 11:45, the stillness was shattered. Thousands of teenagers swarmed out of the towering front gate of Maotanchang High School. Many of them wore identical black-and-white Windbreakers emblazoned with the slogan, in English, “I believe it, I can do it.” It was lunchtime at one of China’s most secretive “cram schools” — a memorization factory where 20,000 students, or four times the town’s official population, train round the clock for China’s national college-entrance examination, known as the gaokao. The grueling test, which is administered every June over two or three days (depending on the province), is the lone criterion for admission to Chinese universities. For the students at Maotanchang, most of whom come from rural areas, it offers the promise of a life beyond the fields and the factories, of families’ fortunes transformed by hard work and high scores.

Wisconsin saw far fewer GED graduates in 2014

Tim Damos:

The number of Wisconsinites who received a high school equivalency certification plummeted by 92 percent this year, in part due to more rigorous standards and an increase in testing fees.

Officials say the switch to a new General Education Development test this year was necessary to better prepare graduates for today’s workforce, and that there already are signs that the downward trend in graduates is beginning to reverse.

As the year came to a close, only 912 people have graduated from Wisconsin’s GED program, according to the state Department of Public Instruction. That’s a dramatic decline from 2013, when 11,378 people got their GEDs.

Madison’s Omega School, which has provided free one-on-one GED test preparation for 42 years, saw the number of graduates drop from about 139 two years ago to 15 in 2014, executive director Oscar Mireles said. In a typical year, the school has 100 graduates, half of whom are minorities.
“Students are getting frustrated,” Mireles said. “It just appears to be more daunting and they say, ‘Why should I even try.’ That’s probably the worst aspect of the change.”

Wisconsin wasn’t alone. Many other states saw a similar drop this year in the number of people seeking high school equivalency degrees, according to GED Testing Service, which contracts with states to provide the course.

The Hidden Student-Debt Bomb

Jason Delisle:

It is time to re-evaluate how we measure the performance of student-loan programs—particularly whether borrowers are or are not meeting their obligations. The traditional measures of nonrepayment—delinquencies and defaults—might be fine for most types of loans, but not for outstanding student loans, nearly all of which are held or backed by the federal government. Lawmakers have provided students with options that let them punt on repayment without triggering delinquency or default. Lately, students have been availing themselves of those options at rising levels.

The forbearance benefit, for example, lets borrowers postpone payments for up to three years. By law, loan-servicing companies have a lot of discretion to grant forbearances, and getting one usually takes only a phone call on the part of the borrower. Some borrowers might have to complete a simple form and meet a payment-to-income test. But overall it is the easiest and fastest way for a borrower to suspend student-loan payments.

What are the best ways to learn a language as an adult?

Quora:

I set up a routine where I did the same things every day.

In the mornings, I woke up and wrote out longhand the regular and irregular verb tables for 1.5-2 hours. I managed to get through an entire pad of paper in two weeks. I still believe that writing things out by hand is the best way to memorize things.

While I wrote, I would listen to Michel Thomas’ language learning mp3s (http://www.michelthomas.com/). On the CDs you listen as he teaches French to other English speakers. It’s really helpful to hear other students make mistakes that you can learn from, just like a regular classroom environment. In two weeks I listened to the foundation, advanced and language building courses twice.

I would run for 45-60 minutes in the early afternoon in the French countryside listening to catchy French music. Music is a great way to learn the intonation of a language and train your facial muscles as you sing along.

Finland is not a fan of standardization in education. However, teacher education in Finland is carefully standardized

Pasi Sahlberg:

In the United States, for example, there are more than 1,500 different teacher-preparation programs. The range in quality is wide. In Singapore and Finland only one academically rigorous teacher education program is available for those who desire to become teachers. Likewise, neither Canada nor South Korea has fast-track options into teaching, such as Teach for America or Teach First in Europe. Teacher quality in high-performing countries is a result of careful quality control at entry into teaching rather than measuring teacher effectiveness in service.

In recent years the “no excuses”’ argument has been particularly persistent in the education debate. There are those who argue that poverty is only an excuse not to insist that all schools should reach higher standards. Solution: better teachers. Then there are those who claim that schools and teachers alone cannot overcome the negative impact that poverty causes in many children’s learning in school. Solution: Elevate children out of poverty by other public policies.

20 years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower

AEI interview with Bill Gates:

“Software substitution, whether it’s for drivers or waiters or nurses … it’s progressing. … Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set. … 20 years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. I don’t think people have that in their mental model.”

The Changing Framework of Online Learning

Janet Burns:

The online learning landscape has long been dominated by Blackboard, Pearson, and other large corporate platforms, which have provided virtual classrooms, hosted online course content, and supported discussion features for various on- and off-line colleges and universities. In the past several years, however, many new platforms — some reinventing the traditional pay model, and others providing free content — have arrived on the scene, taking root in their own right and changing the face of web-based education.

As higher-education writer Justin Pope noted in MIT’s Technology Review, options for online learning are forever expanding; for-profit platform Coursera and edX, the Harvard- and MIT-led nonprofit consortium, for example, “are up to nearly 13 million users and more than 1,200 courses between them.” Content from free online platform Khan Academy — borne of humble beginnings as a YouTube series — is now being incorporated into classroom learning worldwide, and made Lifehack’s list of its top 25 preferred sites for free online courses alongside Udemy, which also offers material from various sources, and Harvard Extension, one example of institution-specific course platforms. The New York Institute of Finance (NYIF), too, recently announced its plans to transition all of its test-prep courses into an online-only format as of January 2015 using the Open edX platform, making it one more in a long line of traditional institutions to take the online learning plunge.

Commentary on education reform and status quo governance

Anthony Cody:

There is growing evidence that the corporate-sponsored education reform project is on its last legs. The crazy patchwork of half-assed solutions on offer for the past decade have one by one failed to deliver, and one by one they are falling. Can the edifice survive once its pillars of support have crumbled?

Teach For America: This project had as its central premise the idea that what was wrong with the teaching profession was that not enough really smart people were becoming teachers. So we will recruit some high flyers and fill the gaps in high needs schools. And because these folks are sooo smart, they do not need the year or two of preparation that regular old teachers needed – they could learn to crunch data, manage a class and prepare for tests in just five weeks. And if they leave after a couple of years, that’s ok too. They can transform education as the next generation of leaders and policymakers, because they will have brains that classroom experience, and TFA’s no excuses philosophy to guide them.

But this year TFA is hitting some serious headwinds. They are finding that recruitment has dropped for some reason, and the organization is even closing its New York training institute office. Perhaps students have been finding out some of the problems with the program, discovering in advance that five weeks is not adequate preparation for the challenge of teaching in a challenging school. Perhaps potential recruits have encountered TFA alums sharing their experiences, or even some of those organizing to resist the program. And word may have leaked out that TFA is not the best vehicle for those concerned with social justice – given that corps members are sometimes being used to replace veteran teachers.

We cannot pass laws that declare others “accountable” for making sure 100% of our children will be proficient and act as though we have accomplished something. It is time to go back to basic premises, and in every community, ask ourselves what we want from our schools? How can we meet the challenge of educating all our children – not leaving any behind? The answers will not come easily or cheaply. But just as a previous generation faced the challenge of the 20th century Civil Rights movement, our generation must respond.

Status quo governance has a substantial price as well – see Madison’s long term disastrous reading results -despite spending double the national average per student.

It’s time parents accept not all kids should go to college

Dustin McKissen:

“Not every kid is meant for college.” That statement, or some close variation of it, is something I hear and read more and more. It’s usually followed by a comment on the debt associated with a degree, the need for kids to learn a trade, and the role schools should play in identifying and directing those kids toward job training, so they can be equipped to go to work out of high school.

There is no data showing that the average person stands a better chance in the employment market without a degree than with one. There are multiple studies that demonstrate the lifetime value of a bachelor’s degree—or put another way, the cost of not being meant for college.

The Cost of Higher Ed: How Changing Staffing and Compensation Impact Tuition

American Institute for Research:

Colleges and universities increasingly rely on part-time faculty to meet instructional demands and rein in costs, but that hasn’t led to lower tuitions for students.

In this video interview, Donna Desrochers, a researcher at AIR, explains how rising benefit costs and increased hiring for other types of positions has undercut those savings and what that means for rising college tuitions. Desrochers is the co-author of the report by the Delta Cost Project at AIR called Labor Intensive or Labor Expensive? Changing Staffing and Compensation Patterns in Higher Education.