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RSS Newsletter·2024 Referendum·Gell-Man Amnesia Effect

Why do college students love getting wasted?

Thomas Rogers:

Like many North American college students, I am an experienced binge drinker. Most weekend nights during my undergraduate years, I would “pregame” with my dorm mates, before moving to local bars, and then one of my college town’s crappy dance clubs, before staggering home, and, often, ending up with my head perched above the toilet. As part of my college’s crew team, I would celebrate our victories (and losses) by drinking half-liters of vodka straight out of the bottle. And I would often make my way to my morning classes feeling like one of the worms from “Tremors” had just tried to wedge itself into my forehead.
In retrospect, all of this sounds both obnoxious and exhausting, but when I was 18 years old, drinking held a real, magical appeal. When drunk, I would feel socially skilled, and wonderfully impulsive, and far more fun than I’d ever been before. I was drawn to alcohol because it allowed me to escape my natural shyness and bond with people I barely even knew.

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Three Radical Ideas to Reform Education. Surprise. They Don’t Involve School Buildings

The Innovative Educator, via a kind James Dias email:

Earlier this year, I shared my disappointment with Fast Company’s compilation of “13 Radical Ideas for Spending $100 Million to Overhaul Schools” The problem was that these ideas really just weren’t all that radical. Even Will Richardson, who was featured in the article, commented on my blog that he agreed (see comment here). Richardson did feature a radical idea in his own blog a few years back in his post, One Town’s Reform…Close the Schools. The article explains how a UK community shut down its 11 schools replacing them with dynamic learning centers that looked very different than traditional compulsory schools. According to their site, they are still going strong.
The learning center idea has certainly taken off as more and more people are realizing that the compulsory, oppressive, disconnected, test-driven schools that exist today are not the best option when it comes to preparing children for success in the world.

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Arrests, citations reach lowest level in 10 years at Madison high schools

Matthew DeFour:

The number of arrests and citations for incidents at Madison’s four main high schools dropped last year to the lowest level in more than a decade, according to police data.
But arrests and citations at West and Memorial were twice the number at East and La Follette — a reversal of the situation 10 years earlier when there were more than twice as many at the city’s East Side high schools.
West was the only school with an increase from the previous year.
The Wisconsin State Journal obtained the data from the Madison Police Department amid a debate over whether the Madison School District should use drug-sniffing police dogs in random sweeps of high schools. The School Board was to consider the issue Monday but delayed a vote until late September — in part to review the arrest and citation data.
District officials say an increase in drug-related disciplinary referrals in recent years, and the use of drug dogs in area school districts, support the use of police dogs. Community surveys also have showed strong support.
Luis Yudice, the School District’s security coordinator, who introduced the drug-sniffing dog proposal with the support of Madison police, is concerned drugs in schools can lead to more gang activity, fights and weapons in schools as students arm themselves in self-defense. He views the police dog policy as a possible deterrent that could prevent a crisis.

Related: Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006.
Gangs & School Violence Forum Audio/Video.

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Intellectual Development vs. Jobs?

Casey Wiley:

Spurred by a “Why are you in college?” discussion I held with my Penn State composition students one day late last semester when rumors swirled of potential state education funding cuts and tuition hikes, an enthusiastic freshman journalism/English major from outside of Pittsburgh came to my office to “talk about her future.” She’s a good writer, works hard, talks a few times per class. She got right to the point: “Can I get a job with an English degree?”
I wanted to tell her not to worry about the college-to-job equation, that she’s in college to broaden her mind, to question, to grow intellectually — all the learning clichés that hold true. And anyway, what gets a person a job? Solely a degree typed on a resume? The direct skills learned within the major? The subtle, everyday-acquired social and organizational and problem-solving skills? But it is pompous and insular for me to expect my students — most 18 or 19 years old — to consider scoffing at this simplified college-to-job equation and just learn for learning’s sake — meaning, maybe, that hard learning now should lead to a solid, dare I say, happy, future. Be it as it may.

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At Last, A Reason Why Stress Causes DNA Damage

Duke Medicine News and Communications:

For years, researchers have published papers that associate chronic stress with chromosomal damage.
Now researchers at Duke University Medical Center have discovered a mechanism that helps to explain the stress response in terms of DNA damage.
“We believe this paper is the first to propose a specific mechanism through which a hallmark of chronic stress, elevated adrenaline, could eventually cause DNA damage that is detectable,” said senior author Robert J. Lefkowitz, MD, James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at Duke University Medical Center.
The paper was published in the August 21 online issue of Nature.

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Tight on Cash, One State Taps 529 Plan Reserves

Annamaria Andriotis:

Recent controversy over one state’s use of the funds in its college savings plans has raised new concerns for parents and students across the country with money in 529 plans.
In a game of fiscal hot potato, the Nevada legislature re-allocated money from a state scholarship fund to the state’s budget gap last year; the state later took $4.2 million worth of accumulated fees from 529 plan reserves to cover the shortfall in the scholarship fund, according to a recent report from the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank. The plans’ overseers had other intentions — traditionally, those monies have been used to support the plans — and critics now say the result could be higher fees and a weaker prepaid tuition plan.

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Is NEA Following the Path of the Industrial Unions?

Mike Antonucci:

The National Education Association has always been an outlier in the world of organized labor. A member of neither the AFL-CIO nor Change to Win, the union experienced consistent and substantial growth during the same decades industrial union membership was disintegrating.
The last couple of years have provided the first opportunity to observe NEA’s actions during a period of declining membership. It appears the teachers’ union is following the AFL-CIO model for remaining relevant despite dwindling numbers – accelerated political action.
One of the constant internal battles in the labor movement has been over organizing vs. political action. Do you devote resources to growing membership in order to increase political clout, or do you increase political contributions in order to establish a friendly organizing environment? Although there have been fits and starts in both directions, overall the latter choice prevailed.

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Where GOP stands in war on Wisconsin Education ‘triangle’

Alan Borsuk:a

The start of the school year isn’t normally the time for issuing report cards. But it’s been an unusual and momentous year, so as the first day of classes approaches for almost every school in the state, here’s a report card on what I’ll call the war against the triangle.
Last winter, before Scott Walker was sworn in as governor, a leading Republican told a group of people (according to a reliable person who was present) that there was a triangle that was blocking the path to educational improvement in Wisconsin and his party was going to take out each leg of the triangle.
What were the legs?
Teachers unions, particularly the Wisconsin Education Association Council. WEAC spent hugely on political campaigns and was pro-Democratic. It also was the largest lobbying force in the Capitol. WEAC represented the unwillingness of teachers organizations to change and the need to get rid of most collective bargaining matters.
The state Department of Public Instruction, which represented the status quo, overregulation of schools and how things couldn’t change if they were in the hands of government bureaucrats.
Milwaukee Public Schools, which represented – well, which represented Milwaukee Public Schools. Or, to put it another way, a money pit where there was never any positive change.

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New Ways to Protect Your Kids Online

Kelli Grant:

Most parents can safely assume that if their kids are at large, they’re also online. What they’re doing in cyberspace is another matter. With sexting and cyber-bullying in the headlines, a new set of programs is promising to help parents keep track.
Already some 50% of parents have installed software or another monitoring program to keep tabs on their kids’ online activities, more than double the parents who had three years ago, according to software company Symantec. But unlike the old offerings, which typically monitor only the home computer, the new programs are specifically aimed at today’s hyper-mobile, socially-networked teens. For up to $100 per month, they promise to keep track of online posts and communiqu s that show up on your kid’s social networking accounts from wherever a teen sends them — via a laptop, smartphone or even a friend’s iPad. “Parents feel overwhelmed and out-gunned with the level of social media their kids are using,” says Caroline Knorr, a spokeswoman for advocacy group Common Sense Media. “These programs can offer a measure of control and supervision.”

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The Liberal Education offered by the Americans is truly a gift to mankind.”

The Daily Mirror:

Never have there been so many choices in the field of international Higher Education than at present. One is faced with questions of affordability and language, both of which can be tackled with guidance in the right direction. To my mind, USA provides the best all round education I can think of. Buckminster Fuller, one of the best known academic personalities of this time said that in his study of many scientists he found most of them had their first Degrees from a Liberal Arts College. “The Liberal Education offered by the Americans is truly a gift to mankind.” A Sri Lankan Professor when speaking in the USA last year at one of the better known Liberal Arts colleges said pretty much the same thing namely that the American Universities offer the finest education in the many disciplines students choose today.
The generosity of the American world of Higher Education cannot be bettered. From Ivy League Universities down to the simple Community Colleges, offers of financial aid ranges from 100% downwards depending on the financial standing of the University. Hundres of Sri Lankans have benefitted by this generosity and continue to do so thanks to good advisors like Principals of International schools, alumni from USA and those who work closely with the Admission offices of American Colleges like Mr. and Mrs. P Dissanayake of Scholarships for USA (PVT) Ltd who have partnered Asian International School in many placements.

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Breakthrough

TEACHERS NOT ENOUGH? WHO KNEW?
This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students…
It is settled wisdom among Funderpundits and those to whom they give their grants that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality.
However, a small number of dissenting voices have begun to speak. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in Academically Adrift have suggested that (p. 131) “Studying is crucial for strong academic performance…” and “Scholarship on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of shifting attention from faculty teaching to student learning…”
This may seem unacceptably heterodox to those in government and the private sector who have committed billions of dollars to focusing on the selection, training, supervision, and control of K-12 teachers, while giving no thought to whether K-12 students are actually doing the academic work which they are assigned.
In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Domed to Fail (p. 150) that: “Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education.” More recently, and less on the fringe of this new concern, Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) (p. 162) that “One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students’ academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers’ influence.”
There are necessarily problems in turning attention toward the work of students in judging the effectiveness of schools. First, all the present attention is on teachers, and it is not easy to turn that around. Second, teachers are employees and can be fired, while students can not. It could not be comfortable for the Funderpundits and their beneficiaries to realize that they may have been overlooking the most important variable in student academic achievement all this time.
In February, when the Associated Press reported that Natalie Monroe, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania, had called her students, on a blog, “disengaged, lazy whiners,” and “noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS,” the response of the school system was not to look more closely at the academic efforts of the students, but to suspend the teacher. As one of her students explained, “As far as motivated high school students, she’s completely correct. High school kids don’t want to do anything…(but) It’s a teacher’s job…to give students the motivation to learn.”
It would seem that no matter who points out that “You can lead a student to learning, but you can’t make him drink,” our system of schools and Funderpundits sticks with its wisdom that teachers alone are responsible for student academic achievement.
While that is wrong, it is also stupid. Alfred North Whitehead (or someone else) once wrote that; “For education, a man’s books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his.”
As in the old story about the drunk searching under the lamppost for his keys, those who control funds for education believe that as long as all their money goes to paying attention to what teachers are doing, who they are, how they are trained, and so on, they can’t see the point of looking in the darkness at those who have the complete and ultimate control over how much academic achievement there will be–namely the students.
Apart from scores on math and reading tests after all, student academic work is ignored by all those interested in paying to change the schools. What students do in literature, Latin, chemistry, history, and Asian history classes is of no interest to them. Liberal education is not only on the back burner for those focused on basic skills and job readiness as they define them, but that burner is also turned off at present.
This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students. And students, who see little or no pressure to be other than “disengaged lazy whiners” will continue to pay the price for their lack of education, both in college and at work, and we will continue to draw behind in comparison with those countries who realize that student academic achievement has always been, and will always be, mainly dependent on diligent student academic work.
——————————
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics(r)
www.tcr.org/blog

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Ohio preparing new way to rank school districts

Angela Gartner and Jean Bonchak:

School districts in they future won’t just receive report card ratings from the state, they will be ranked from best to worst in a new system.
The mandate in Gov. Kasich’s $112 billion executive budget was handed to the Ohio Department of Education to devise the ranking procedure.
The listing may be ready for the beginning of the 2012-2013 school year, according to ODE spokesperson Patrick Gallaway.
The ODE is now required to rank schools within comparable groupings on the basis of student results and cost effectiveness, according to the fifth book of the governor’s budget containing selected reforms.

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A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin’s Reading Challenges

UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg and I had an informative conversation with two elected officials at the Capitol recently.
I am thankful for Mark’s time and the fact that both Luther Olsen and Steve Kestell along with staff members took the time to meet. I also met recently with Brett Hulsey and hope to meet with more elected officials, from both parties.
The topic du jour was education, specifically the Governor’s Read to Lead task force.
Mark kindly shared this handout:

My name is Mark Seidenberg, Hilldale Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, seidenberg@wisc.edu, http://lcnl.wisc.edu. I have studied how reading works, how children learn to read, reading disabilities, and the brain bases of reading for over 30 years. I am a co-author of a forthcoming report from the National Research Council (National Academy of Sciences) on low literacy among older adolescents and adults. I’m writing a general audience book about reading research and educational practices.
We have a literacy problem: about 30% of the US (and WI) population reads at a “basic” or “below basic” level. Literacy levels are particularly low among poor and minority individuals. The identification of this problem does not rest on any single test (e.g., NAEP, WKCE, OECD). Our literacy problem arises from many causes, some of which are not easy to address by legislative fiat. However, far more could be done in several important areas.
1. How teachers are taught. In Wisconsin as in much of the US, prospective teachers are not exposed to modern research on how children develop, learn, and think. Instead, they are immersed in the views of educational theorists such as Lev Vygotsky (d. 1934) and John Dewey (d. 1952). Talented, highly motivated prospective teachers are socialized into beliefs about children that are not informed by the past 50 years of basic research in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.
A vast amount is known about reading in particular, ranging from what your eyes do while reading to how people comprehend documents to what causes reading disabilities. However, there is a gulf between Education and Science, and so this research is largely ignored in teacher training and curriculum development.
2. How children are taught. There continue to be fruitless battles over how beginning readers should be taught, and how to insure that comprehension skills continue to develop through middle and high school. Teachers rely on outdated beliefs about how children learn, and how reading works. As a result, for many children, learning to read is harder than it should be. We lose many children because of how they are taught. This problem does NOT arise from “bad teachers”; there is a general, systematic problem related to teacher education and training in the US.
3. Identification of children at risk for reading failures. Some children are at risk for reading and school failure because of developmental conditions that interfere with learning to read. Such children can be identified at young ages (preschool, kindergarten) using relatively simple behavioral measures. They can also be helped by effective early interventions that target basic components of reading such as vocabulary and letter-sound knowledge. The 30% of the US population that cannot read adequately includes a large number of individuals whose reading/learning impairments were undiagnosed and untreated.
Recommendations: Improve teacher education. Mechanism: change the certification requirements for new teachers, as has been done in several other states. Certification exams must reflect the kinds of knowledge that teachers need, including relevant research findings from cognitive science and neuroscience. Instruction in these areas would then need to be provided by schools of education or via other channels. In-service training courses could be provided for current teachers (e.g., as on-line courses).
Children who are at risk for reading and schooling failures must be identified and supported at young ages. Although it is difficult to definitively confirm a reading/learning disability in children at young ages (e.g., 4-6) using behavioral, neuroimaging, or genetic measures, it is possible to identify children at risk, most of whom will develop reading difficulties unless intervention occurs, via screening that involves simple tests of pre-reading skills and spoken language plus other indicators. Few children just “grow out of” reading impairments; active intervention is required.

I am cautiously optimistic that we may see an improvement in Wisconsin’s K-12 curricular standards.
Related: Excellence in Education explains Florida’s reading reforms and compares Florida’s NAEP progress with Wisconsin’s at the July 29th Read to Lead task force meeting and www.wisconsin2.org.

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Evidence Supports Charter Autonomy from Milwaukee Public Schools Milwaukee’s Non-Instrumentality Charter Schools Outperform MPS on ACT

Christian D’Andrea:

There are two different types of charter schools in the City of Milwaukee, and by at least one measure, those not chartered by the Milwaukee Public Schools are performing better.
Milwaukee’s ACT scores rose in 2011, but they still weren’t able to match the production of the city’s non-union charter schools. In the end, the non-district charter schools left their instrumentality counterparts in the dust when it came to college readiness.
The city’s non-instrumentality charter schools outperformed the MPS average when it came to the ACT, a selective college readiness test, in the past school year. These schools aren’t operated or authorized by local school boards, and have been more successful in preparing students when weighed against the city’s average. In the four qualifying high schools, students averaged a score of 18.8.

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Don’t let Walker take credit for teachers’ good work

Nick Zweifel:

Now that Gov. Scott Walker’s major cuts for public schools have been enacted, my question for my fellow educators is: What do we do next? I am sick and tired of constantly reacting to bad news and bad policy and always being in the position of having to play defense. Educators and school districts should organize to go on the offensive.
Walker’s budget has significantly damaged one of the best public education systems in the country. He turned half of our community members against us using false information, and now we will be fighting a public relations battle while also working harder to educate students with fewer resources.
Through all of this, we Wisconsin educators will still stand tall and deliver a top-notch education for the children of this state, regardless of what Walker has done, because that is what Wisconsin professional educators do.
My fear is that after we deliver, Walker and his minions will use the media and their bully pulpit to take all the credit for the successes that we will achieve in our classrooms. I can see the headlines now of Walker proclaiming how well his budget cuts worked because schools are performing well under his budget.
So what do we do? What should our strategy be? Here are some suggestions:

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The Kids Should See This

Rion:

There’s just so much science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven’t seen. It’s most likely not stuff that was made for them…
But we don’t underestimate kids around here.

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Stop second-guessing educators on student placement

Chris Rickert:

I was reminded of this story after reading about the lobbying some parents of Madison elementary school children do to get their kids assigned to teachers who match their “learning styles.”
What a contrast between a parent who’s more or less OK with a school official delivering not only a beating, but an undeserved beating, and parents who seek to intervene in the basic decisions of professional educators.
Such lobbying and the district’s willingness to hear it have “been a common thing as long as I can remember,” said district public information officer Marcia Standiford, a former teacher and audio/visual specialist who has been with the district for 15 years. Parents of Madison elementary students have long been asked to fill out questionnaires about their kids to help in assigning them to teachers.

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Superintendent Comments on Wisconsin School Budgets

Susan Troller:

In his rural district, which serves 249 students, the 2011-13 state budget has been nothing to celebrate. In fact, it has accelerated a difficult process of belt-tightening that’s been going on for almost 20 years due to revenue controls that have limited the amount districts can increase taxes to keep up with rising costs. The revenue controls hit some schools especially hard, especially those with declining enrollment, high-needs students or high property values. The new state budget’s huge reduction in overall aid for schools — $793 million over the biennium — accompanied by new limits on how much money districts can raise in property taxes to offset those losses — has, for many school districts, made a bad situation worse.
According to Quinton, Pepin parents are supportive of education, and he credits his School Board and staff for helping run “a tight financial ship.” Nonetheless, many of the district’s programs and services have been trimmed once again, from transportation to teaching staff, athletics to academic assistance for at-risk students. Paring back has been a way of life in Pepin for many years, Quinton says, but the newest round of losses caused by this budget cut to the bone.

Related:

Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding and K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Wisconsin State and Local Debt Rose Faster Than Federal Debt During 1990-2009 Average Annual Increase in State Debt, 7.8%; Local Debt, 7.3%
Wisconsin’s essential challenge is to grow the economy. We’ve been falling behind Minnesota for decades.
Siobhan Hughes:

The U.S. economy will have another big budget deficit in fiscal 2011 and faces at least a couple more years of sluggish growth, as the effects of the recent recession persist, government forecasters said Wednesday.
The Congressional Budget Office projected a deficit of almost $1.3 trillion for fiscal 2011. Though that will mark the third straight year of deficits above $1 trillion, the deficit forecast was a slight improvement from the almost $1.4 trillion estimated in an April analysis and reflected higher-than-anticipated revenue from individual income taxes.
The outlook for the U.S. economy also remains challenging, with growth expected to remain too slow this year and next year to make a big dent in the unemployment rate. The jobless rate will fall to 8.9% by the end of calendar 2011 and 8.5% by the end of 2012, the forecast said, as the economy grows by 2.3% this year and 2.7% next year, measured from fourth quarter to fourth quarter.

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Grade Inflation for Education Majors and Low Standards for Teachers When Everyone Makes the Grade

Cory Koedel

Students who take education classes at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in every other academic discipline. The higher grades cannot be explained by observable differences in student quality between education majors and other students, nor can they be explained by the fact that education classes are typically smaller than classes in other academic departments. The remaining reasonable explanation is that the higher grades in education classes are the result of low grading standards. These low grading standards likely will negatively affect the accumulation of skills for prospective teachers during university training. More generally, they contribute to a larger culture of low standards for educators.
Key points in this Outlook:
Grades awarded in university education departments are consistently higher than grades in other disciplines.
Similarly, teachers in K-12 schools receive overwhelmingly positive evaluations.
Grade inflation in education departments should be addressed through administrative directives or external accountability in K-12 schools.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

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Shortchanged by the Bell

Luis Ubinas & Chris Gabrieli:

AFTER a summer of budget cuts in Washington and state capitals, we have only to look to our schools, when classes begin in the next few weeks, to see who will pay the price.
The minimum required school day in West Virginia is already about the length of a “Harry Potter” double feature. In Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, summer school programs are being slashed or eliminated. In Oregon and California this year, students will spend fewer days in the classroom; in rural communities from New Mexico to Idaho, some students will be in school only four days a week.
For all the talk about balancing the budget for the sake of our children, keeping classrooms closed is a perverse way of giving them a brighter future.

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The Mindset List

Beloit College:

This year’s entering college class of 2015 was born just as the Internet took everyone onto the information highway and as Amazon began its relentless flow of books and everything else into their lives. Members of this year’s freshman class, most of them born in 1993, are the first generation to grow up taking the word “online” for granted and for whom crossing the digital divide has redefined research, original sources and access to information, changing the central experiences and methods in their lives. They have come of age as women assumed command of U.S. Navy ships, altar girls served routinely at Catholic Mass, and when everything from parents analyzing childhood maladies to their breaking up with boyfriends and girlfriends, sometimes quite publicly, have been accomplished on the Internet.
Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit’s former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief and Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. Mindset List websites at Beloit College and at mindsetmoment.com, the media site webcast and their Facebook page receive more than a million hits annually.
Nief and McBride recently applied their popular format to 10 generations of Americans over 150 years in their new book, The Mindset Lists of American History: From Typewriters to Text Messages, What Ten Generations of Americans Think Is Normal (Wiley and Sons.).

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Wisconsin Reading program plans questioned Concerns raised about DPI’s approach to developing a model curriculum

Amy Hetzner:

So far, this has been the summer of education task forces in Wisconsin.
There’s one addressing school accountability, another tackling how to help school districts implement new academic standards and a third devoted to improving third-grade reading proficiency. That doesn’t even count other groups already in existence that are looking at reforming statewide tests or increasing teacher effectiveness.
“There’s so many work groups and task forces operating right now, it’s hard to keep track of them,” said state Rep. Steve Kestell (R-Elkhart Lake), chairman of the Assembly Education Committee and a member of some of those task forces.
Keeping all of the task forces on track may also prove difficult.
Earlier this month, a member of the group charged with helping school districts implement new reading standards sent an open letter to members of the governor’s Read to Lead Task Force expressing concerns about the approach that the state Department of Public Instruction was taking in developing a model reading curriculum. That letter was followed by another that recommended specific approaches that the task force should take. Dan Gustafson, a Madison-based pediatric neuropsychologist, said he wrote the letters because he was concerned that the DPI was moving ahead with a model reading curriculum without input from differing viewpoints on reading instruction.

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The Secret Language Code

Gareth Cook:

Are there hidden messages in your emails? Yes, and in everything you write or say, according to James Pennebaker, chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Pennebaker has been a leader in the computer analysis of texts for their psychological content. And in his new book, “The Secret Life of Pronouns,” he argues that how we use words like “I,” “she,” and “who” reveal secrets of our psychology. He spoke recently with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
COOK: How did you become interested in pronouns?
PENNEBAKER: A complete and total accident. Until recently, I never thought about parts of speech. However, about ten years ago I stumbled on some findings that caught my attention. In the 1980s, my students and I discovered that if people were asked to write about emotional upheavals, their physical health improved. Apparently, putting emotional experiences into language changed the ways people thought about their upheavals. In an attempt to better understand the power of writing, we developed a computerized text analysis program to determine how language use might predict later health improvements. In other words, I wanted to find if there was a healthy way to write.

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Out-of-State Admissions to State Universities

Kenneth Anderson:

Cohen particularly focuses on UCLA and UC Berkeley as examples of the new trend in college admissions:

Even colleges that shunned out-of-state students for years are showing a marked receptivity. The University of California’s top campuses–Berkeley and UCLA–have doubled and even tripled their rosters of out-of-state kids. At UCLA, the total percentage of out-of-state kids is still relatively low: only about 7 percent of last year’s entering class. But at Berkeley, it was a whopping 19 percent and will grow to 20 percent this year, according to Janet Gilmore, a university spokesperson. Five years ago, the percentage of out-of-state students at Berkeley was a mere 5 percent.
At most of these world-class universities, admission is still very selective. The acceptance rate for out-of-state students at UCLA was only 30 percent last year. But that was still better than what California residents experienced, which was a 21 percent acceptance rate. And it even got a tad easier for out-of-staters compared with previous years. Five years ago, out-of-staters applying to UCLA were admitted only 21 percent of the time, compared with their California counterparts, who saw a 23 percent admit rate.

My daughter was a beneficiary of this; she was accepted to both. I would not have thought she was competitive for either place as a pure out-of-stater even a few years ago. (It probably helps that very few private school kids in DC seem to apply to either UCLA or Cal; my daughter’s friends at Sidwell Friends, National Cathedral School, and St. Albans, where my wife teaches, went en masse to Michigan, but very few of them apply to the University of California.) When we visited the two UC schools, the admissions people were explicit in saying they were looking for out-of-state and international admissions, partly to keep their reputations up but mostly for the money.

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The school reform deniers

Steven Brill:

Every year I tell students in a journalism seminar I teach about the junior reporter for The American Lawyer – the magazine I founded and edited -who committed a classic error when he submitted a draft of a profile about some lawyer in the news who had made it big. Midway through the article, the young reporter described a showcase this lawyer had in his office that displayed a bunch of combat medals. The reporter declared, matter-of-factly, that our legal hero had won the medals for his heroics in Vietnam, which was relevant, he added, because the lawyer made his war record and his lock-n-load approach to his work part of his pitch to potential clients.
In the margin next to the statement about the lawyer having won the medals I wrote, “Who says?” When the reporter came to ask me what I had meant, I told him to check with the Pentagon about the supposed medals. Which the reporter did, and which caused a mini-scandal after we reported in our otherwise positive profile that our hero hadn’t won them.
The story has three points. First, that reporters should believe nothing told to them by a biased source, especially when what they are being told is a checkable fact. Second, that while opinions deserve balanced reporting of both sides’ views, facts are facts. They are knowable. The guy either got medals or he didn’t. Third, the best way to test facts that you think you know is to put them in front of the person with the greatest stake in refuting them. In this case when we confronted the lawyer with the Pentagon’s records that he had not won any medals, he produced no evidence to the contrary and, in fact, ultimately confessed his deception. Case closed.

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Seoul School Lunch Vote to Test Sentiment on Welfare

Evan Ramstad:

A municipal vote in Seoul on Wednesday over free school lunches is shaping up as a test of South Koreans’ sentiment on government welfare spending, and the outcome is expected to influence races in parliamentary and presidential elections next year.
Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon, a member of the conservative Grand National Party that controls the Parliament and presidency, pushed for the referendum as a challenge to the city council’s decision to expand a free-lunch program.
The council, which is controlled by the opposition Democratic Party, earlier this year voted to provide free school lunches to all of Seoul’s 850,000 elementary and middle-school students, at a cost of about $378 million a year. Supporters of the free-lunches-for-all policy say it removes the stigma that recipients of free lunches face.

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Stop ignoring key provision in Missouri education law

Kate Casas

But it is a lesser-known and never-enforced section of the act that has become the center of the education debate in Missouri.
This section, a consumer protection law of sorts, states:
“The board of education of each district in this state that does not maintain an accredited school pursuant to the authority of the state board of education … shall pay the tuition of and provide transportation … for each pupil resident therein who attends an accredited school in another district of the same or an adjoining county.”
The act provides important relief under law for children living in unaccredited school districts by providing them with a mechanism for escaping their failing schools and enrolling in successful ones.
There currently are two unaccredited districts in Missouri, Riverview Gardens and St. Louis City.

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Be realistic about paying for college costs

Jahna Berry:

State-budget cuts forced many colleges and universities to make huge tuition hikes. Job losses siphoned money for college savings accounts.
When home values nose-dived during the housing bust, students and parents lost the ability to tap home-equity lines for extra cash. The Dow’s wild swings have chewed up balances in 529 college-saving accounts, which often include stocks.
“Parents are desperate,” said April Osborn, executive director of the Arizona Commission for Postsecondary Education, which administers several federal and state grants that go to Arizona college students.
While college costs rise, there is less grant money to go around. Three state grants that awarded up to $2,000 to college students were suspended last year.
Two federal grants, including one that provided up to $3,000 for awardees, were eliminated and won’t be available starting this fall, she said.

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Visualized: A School Day as Data

Brandon Keim:

By putting RFIDs on children and monitoring their interactions over a single day, researchers have produced one of the most detailed analyses ever of the roiling, boiling social free-for-all that is school.
The findings, published August 16 in Public Library of Science One, document the minute-by-minute interactions and locations of 232 children aged 6 to 12 and 10 teachers.
Reconfigured as pulsing network maps and flows of color are the universal experiences of middle school: the between-class rush, playground cliques, snatched hallway conversation and the fifth-graders who are too cool for everyone else.
“We can compare different types of assumptions or modeling with a model that takes into account all interactions,” said Alain Barrat, who studies complex networks at the Institute of Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy.

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Why Math Works

Mario Livio:

Most of us take it for granted that math works–that scientists can devise formulas to describe subatomic events or that engineers can calculate paths for space­craft. We accept the view, initially espoused by Galileo, that mathematics is the language of science and expect that its grammar explains experimental results and even predicts novel phenomena.
The power of mathematics, though, is nothing short of astonishing. Consider, for example, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s famed equations: not only do these four expressions summarize all that was known of electromagnetism in the 1860s, they also anticipated the existence of radio waves two decades before German physicist Heinrich Hertz detected them. Very few languages are as effective, able to articulate volumes’ worth of material so succinctly and with such precision. Albert Einstein pondered, “How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality?”

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The Out-of-State Admissions Edge

Steve Cohen:

More than ever before, cash-crunched state schools are looking for out-of-state applicants to balance their budgets. Steve Cohen on which schools offer the biggest advantage.
Some kids apply to faraway colleges so they can break with their parents and party–er, study–in peace. But choosing a state school that’s not where you live isn’t just a good way to gain independence; it’s a smart admissions tactic, too.
College-admissions season is upon us, and it promises to be just as competitive as last year. And one of best-kept secrets in college admissions this year is that many top state universities will be admitting more out-of-state applicants than ever before.

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Charter management group just might help Milwaukee schools

Alan Borsuk:

First, a lesson from baseball: It was roughly a year ago that Brewers fans were wringing their hands that the pitching was bad and there was little prospect for fixing that in the off-season, given a weak free agent scene and limited finances. Now, the Brewers have pitching that is basically amazing.
Sometimes, things do improve dramatically. Sometimes, that happens even when there are sound arguments for why they won’t.
I could write this entire column – if not a book – on why I’m pessimistic about things getting a lot better on the Milwaukee education scene. I would present a pretty sound case, too.
Maybe I’m wrong. In fact, I hope I’m wrong. I’d like to see things take off like a rocket ship.

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Madison School District Trying Alternatives to Large Public Hearings

Matthew DeFour:

If you didn’t get the Madison School District’s invitation to Thursday’s meeting about a controversial proposal to let police bring drug-sniffing dogs into schools, don’t take it personally; neither did School Board President James Howard.
The meeting was for minority community leaders to ask questions and provide feedback about the proposal, which the School Board is expected to vote on Aug. 29.
School Board members weren’t invited, which Howard, who learned about the meeting Wednesday from a television reporter, said is a problem.
“Board members should always be informed of these meetings,” Howard said. “I don’t know why the ball got dropped.”
The School District’s revamped communications department organized the meeting at the Urban League on South Park Street as part of a new outreach effort, said Marcia Standiford, the department’s new manager.

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The Debt Crisis at American Colleges

Andrew Hacker & Claudia Dreifus:

How do colleges manage it? Kenyon has erected a $70 million sports palace featuring a 20-lane olympic pool. Stanford’s professors now get paid sabbaticals every fourth year, handing them $115,000 for not teaching. Vanderbilt pays its president $2.4 million. Alumni gifts and endowment earnings help with the costs. But a major source is tuition payments, which at private schools are breaking the $40,000 barrier, more than many families earn. Sadly, there’s more to the story. Most students have to take out loans to remit what colleges demand. At colleges lacking rich endowments, budgeting is based on turning a generation of young people into debtors.
As this semester begins, college loans are nearing the $1 trillion mark, more than what all households owe on their credit cards. Fully two-thirds of our undergraduates have gone into debt, many from middle class families, who in the past paid for much of college from savings. The College Board likes to say that the average debt is “only” $27,650. What the Board doesn’t say is that when personal circumstances go wrong, as can happen in a recession, interest, late payment penalties, and other charges can bring the tab up to $100,000. Those going on to graduate school, as upwards of half will, can end up facing twice that.

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Women See Value and Benefits of College; Men Lag on Both Fronts, Survey Finds

Pew Research Center:

Half of all women who have graduated from a four-year college give the U.S. higher education system excellent or good marks for the value it provides given the money spent by students and their families; only 37% of male graduates agree. In addition, women who have graduated from college are more likely than men to say their education helped them to grow both personally and intellectually. These results of a nationwide Pew Research Center survey come at a time when women surpass men by record numbers in college enrollment and completion.
The survey also found that while a majority of Americans believe that a college education is necessary in order to get ahead in life these days, the public is somewhat more inclined to see this credential as a necessity for a woman than for a man. Some 77% of respondents say this about women, while just 68% say it about men.

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An “Extreme Makeover” for U.S. Education — Can We? Should We?

Beverly Eakman:

A front-page August 16 Washington Times’ headline screamed: “Scores show students aren’t ready for college — 75% may need remedial classes.”
Seventy-five percent is a number that gets people’s attention. It isn’t the usual trifling stuff the U.S. Department of Education puts out about math or reading scores being up by two percent one year and down by three percent the next. Add to that another finding reported in the same article: “A 2008 report by the education advocacy group Strong American Schools found that 80 percent of college students taking remedial classes had a high school GPA of 3.0 or better.”
So are we saying that even when students score well, they don’t know much? Apparently. Readers who have been following this series (see links to other articles below) may recall U.S. Commissioner of Education Statistics’ Pascal D. Forgione, Jr., Ph.D., who famously admitted in a speech, “Our idea of ‘advanced’ is clearly below international standards.”
According to the news article, “75 percent [of college freshmen] likely will spend part of their [first] year brushing up on high-school-level course work.”

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Sending Your Child to College? Advice from Dr. Drew

Andrew Rotherham:

With thousands of kids starting to pack for their first year at college or preparing to return after the summer break, now is a good time to talk to them about some important health and wellness issues on campus. To help parents figure out what to look for and worry about, School of Thought asked Dr. Drew Pinsky, the best-selling author and TV and radio host who has been dubbed the “surgeon general of youth culture” by the New York Times. On his college radar: prescription drugs, hook-up culture and processed food. As a practicing physician and the father of triplets, Dr. Drew isn’t fielding abstract questions — his own kids are starting university this fall.
College isn’t always a bastion of healthy living. Late nights, pizza and stress can’t be good for you. What should parents talk to their children about when they leave for college?
Start with the easy stuff — safety. In the [college] age group, accidents are a major cause of morbidity, and alcohol is often involved in some fashion. Remind students that they’re on their own and are not invincible.
I’ve been to hundreds of colleges all over the country, and almost every one has an outstanding health and mental-health service. Tell them to take advantage of the screenings, services and mental-health services that are there if they need them.

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Not by The Book

University of Dayton:

Apply. Visit campus. Complete the financial aid form. Get four years of free textbooks.
First-year University of Dayton students can receive up to $4,000 over four years for textbooks by completing three steps of the fall 2012 application process by March 1.
“We want to help parents and students understand that from the very first day, a University of Dayton education is very rewarding,” said Kathy McEuen Harmon, assistant vice president and dean of admission and financial aid.
“Through this initiative, we want to underscore that a University of Dayton education is affordable and we are committed to helping families in very tangible ways,” she said.
With the economy still difficult, Harmon said the free textbook program will bring families clarity and certainty about one piece of the financial puzzle.

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The Age of Noise

Dmitry Fadeyev:

The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire–we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.

Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
Huxley is talking about the radio and the newspaper, the carriers of noise at the start of the 20th century, but his words could just as well have been written today. Today, silence is a thing to be shunned, with the social ecosystem of apps and devices ready to help you do just that.

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Should My Kid Learn Mandarin Chinese?

Tom Scocca:

I started to truly appreciate the power of early childhood Chinese-language education when our son, at the age of two, started speaking English wrong. “The blue of cup,” he would say, meaning his blue cup.
This wasn’t a random preschool linguistic hiccup, we realized. He was trying to use Chinese syntax: “of” was standing in for the Mandarin particle “de” to turn the noun “blue” into an adjective. And his odd habit of indicating things by saying “this one” or “that one”-he was rendering the Chinese “zhege” and “neige” in English. That is, he was speaking Chinglish.
The usual arguments in favor of Mandarin education say that he should be on his way to conquering the world. An extra language, the theory goes, supplies extra brainpower, and Chinese in particular is a skill that will prepare young children to compete in the global 21st-century marketplace of talent.

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Villanova law school censured after misreporting test scores

St. Petersburg Times:

The law school at Villanova University has been censured for submitting falsified admissions data for several years to the American Bar Association. Villanova’s average Law School Admissions Test scores were padded by two to three points from 2005 to 2009, law school dean John Gotanda said. The median GPA was raised by up to 0.16 points. Both data sets often factor into law school rankings. The law school could have lost its accreditation because of the scandal. The school must post the reprimand on its website for two years. School officials described the misreporting as an “odd” scheme, considering the inflation “didn’t propel us into the top 50.”
Displaced whale dies in Calif. river
A 45-foot gray whale that delighted people for more than a month after taking up residence in Northern California’s Klamath River died Tuesday after beaching itself on a sandbar. In June, the whale and its calf took refuge in freshwater for an unknown reason while migrating north from Baja California. Scientists said it may have been escaping from killer whales. The calf swam out to sea on July 23, about the right time for it to go off on its own.

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Kids, Privacy, Free Speech & the Internet

Adam Thierer:

In the field of Internet policy, 2011 has been the year of privacy. Congress has introduced six bills related to online privacy, and the Obama administration released two major reports recommending greater federal oversight of online markets. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appears poised to step up regulatory activity on this front. State-level activity is also percolating, led by California, which floated two major bills recently.
These efforts would expand regulatory oversight of online activities in various ways. Some measures would institute “Fair Information Practice Principles” (FIPPS), governing the collection and use of personal information online. Others would limit some types data collection, ban certain data or advertising practices, or create new mechanisms to help consumers block online ad-targeting techniques. Another measure would mandate websites adopt a so-called Internet “Eraser Button,” which would allow users to purge unwanted personal information from online sites and services.

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Chinese Students Flood U.S. Grad Schools

Melissa Korn:

Thanks to a thriving economy at home, an increasing number of Chinese students are attending U.S. graduate schools, according to a study to be released on Tuesday by a graduate-school industry group.
Graduate schools saw a 21% increase in Chinese applicants from the last school year and a 23% increase in admissions offers, for students slated to start this fall, according to a study by the Council of Graduate Schools. It is the sixth year in a row of double-digit percentage increases for Chinese students.
Applications and offers were up sharply for international students overall, jumping 11% compared with 2010, according to the report. The study looked at data for a total of 591,739 applications to U.S. graduate schools by prospective international students for fall 2011.

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Test scores same at Milwaukee public, voucher schools, auditors say; Vouchers Spend 50% Less Per Student

Dinesh Ramde:

State auditors on Wednesday confirmed a report that found little difference in test scores between students in Milwaukee’s school voucher program and those in the city’s public schools.
Wisconsin lawmakers had asked the state Legislative Audit Bureau to evaluate a study, conducted by privately funded education researchers, that analyzed test scores from both groups of students. The study had found no significant difference, a conclusion that state auditors also reached.
The researchers studied the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, a voucher program that allows low-income children in Milwaukee to attend private schools at taxpayers’ expense. The two-year budget signed by Gov. Scott Walker in June repealed the enrollment limit for voucher schools in Milwaukee and expanded vouchers to schools in suburban Milwaukee and Racine.

View the 950K PDF report, here.
Milwaukee Voucher School WKCE Headlines: “Students in Milwaukee voucher program didn’t perform better in state tests”, “Test results show choice schools perform worse than public schools”, “Choice schools not outperforming MPS”; Spend 50% Less Per Student.

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Experts say the earlier they can treat autistic children, the better their chances of improvement. But for many youngsters the waiting list is too long

Oliver Chou:

Dannen Chan Kim-wai vividly recalls the joy he felt when his son – “a lovely and healthy child” – was born in 2005. But there was a problem. As he grew, Rex didn’t speak a word, he says.
“Friends comforted us with the usual words, saying that boys typically start talking later than girls. But when all my boy uttered was a single syllable ‘da’ at age two, we decided not to wait. We took him to the Child Assessment Centre. There he was diagnosed as having symptoms of autism.”
Hong Kong is seeing a big leap in autism cases. Last year, the Health Department diagnosed about 1,500 children under the age of 12 with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared with 218 children in 2000. That is a five-fold increase over the past 10 years.

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ACT Trends: National, Wisconsin, Madison

Jeff Henriques, via email.

Many notes and links, here.

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Senate Hearing on College Readiness (Imaginary)

on the 17th of never, 2011
Senator, please allow me to express my thanks for including me in these vital hearings on the readiness of our high school graduates for college work.
It would be my sad duty to report to you that if high school football coaches no longer ask their athletes to learn to block and tackle, that would fail to prepare them for college teams. Oh–wait, Senator, that is not correct. (Shuffles papers, starts over).
It would be my sad duty to report that if our high school basketball coaches no longer taught their athletes to dribble, pass, and shoot baskets, then they too would fail at basketball in college.
Oh–my apologies, Senator, that is not my testimony–just a little bad joke. Of course our high school coaches take athletics much too seriously to allow that sort of thing to happen to our kids. In fact, The Boston Globe has more than 100 pages a year on high school athletes. No, Senator, there is no coverage for high school academic achievement.
But I am sorry to have to report that our History and English teachers at the high school level no longer ask our students to read complete nonfiction books or to write substantial research papers, and naturally, this unfits them for the nonfiction books they will be asked to read and the substantial research papers they will be asked to write at the postsecondary level, in what we might call Upper Education.
The famous and influential American educator, John Dewey, wrote in 1896 that: “The centrality of reading and writing was ‘one of education’s great mistakes.'” In following in his footsteps, many of our educators have pushed academic reading and writing so far to the periphery of the curriculum that, for too many of our high school students, they might just as well have fallen off the edge of the flat earth of American secondary education.
The California State College System recently reported that 47% of their Freshmen were required to take remedial reading courses. Of course they can’t handle nonfiction books as they have never been assigned one in their whole high school career.
I have had the privilege of publishing 956 serious (average 6,000 words) history research papers by secondary students from all over this country and from 38 other countries, and I have formed the opinion in the process that high school students are fully capable of reading complete nonfiction books and of writing serious research papers.
But it should be no surprise that so long as our educators never assign nonfiction books or ask students for research papers, they will continue to believe that their students may be able somehow to manage Calculus, European history, Latin, Chemistry, British Literature and the like, but they must still not be able, for some unexplained reason, to read a history book or write a real term paper.
While our colleges do complain, persistently, about the poor preparation in reading and writing of the students who come to them, what do they do in setting requirements for admission?
Senator, hard as it may be to believe, all the writing that colleges ask for is a 500-word “college” essay about the life of the applicant. It is hard to conceive of a more nonacademic task than that, or one more likely to retard the assignment of serious reading and writing at the high school level.
When we celebrate athletes and ignore scholars in our high schools, and when we set such low standards for the high school diploma and for college admission, we should not be surprised that more than one million of our high school graduates need to be in remedial courses when they get to college every year, and that more than half of those will never graduate.
Yes, Senator, I believe that until we take reading and writing more seriously at the secondary level, we can continue to push more and more students into college, but more and more of them will be sadly unprepared to take advantage of that academic opportunities there, and more and more of them will drop out before they graduate from college.
Thanks again for the opportunity to discuss these problems.
===============
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

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ACT Scores Decline Somewhat in Madison, Wisconsin Slightly Up, 32% of Badger Students “Ready” for College Level Courses in 4 Areas

Matthew DeFour:

The average ACT score among the Madison School District’s 2011 graduates dipped to its lowest level in 15 years, while the gap between white and minority student scores shrank for the first time in five years.
Though Madison’s average score dipped from 24.2 to 23.9, district students still outperformed the state average of 22.2 and national average of 21.1. A perfect score on the college entrance exam is 36.
Madison’s average scores in recent years have ranged from 23.5 in 1995 to 24.6 in 2007. The average score was also 23.9 in 2003.

Amy Hetzner:

With the highest percent of students taking the ACT in state history, Wisconsin’s Class of 2011 posted an average score slightly above that from the previous year’s graduates and maintained the state’s third-place ranking among states in which the test is widespread.
Seventy-one percent of the 2011 graduates from Wisconsin private and public schools took the college admissions test, averaging a 22.2 composite score on the 36-point test, according to information to be publicly released Wednesday. The nationwide average was 21.1 on the ACT Assessment, which includes tests in English, reading, mathematics and science.
State schools superintendent Tony Evers credited the results to more high school students pursuing more demanding coursework.
“The message of using high school as preparation for college and careers is taking hold with our students,” Evers said in a news release. “Nearly three-quarters of our kids said they took the rigorous classes recommended for college entry, up from just over half five years ago.”
Even so, ACT reported that only 32% of Wisconsin’s recently graduated seniors had test results that showed they were ready for college-level courses in all four areas. Results for individual subjects ranged from 39% readiness in science to 75% in English.

A few somewhat related links:

Ruth Robarts:

When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before.
On November 7 (2005), Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

“Penelope Trunk”: (Adrienne Roston, Adrienne Greenheart(

10. Homeschool. Your kids will be screwed if you don't.
The world will not look kindly on people who put their kids into public school. We all know that learning is best when it's customized to the child and we all know that public schools are not able to do that effectively. And the truly game-changing private schools cost $40,000 a year.

Notes and links on the recent, successful Madison Talented & Gifted parent complaint.

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More Student Loans are Past Due

Phil Izzo:

Student loans are on the rise, but so is the delinquency rate on them.
On Monday Real Time Economics noted that since the depths of the recession the only type of credit to notch growth was student loans. Credit to students also stands out when looking at delinquency rates.
In the second quarter, 11.2% of student loans were more than 90 days past due and the rate was steadily rising, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Only credit cards had a higher rate of delinquency — 12.2% — but those numbers have been on a steady decline for the past four quarters.

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Pushy dad learns his lesson

Rupert Chan:

At a recent charity dinner to raise funds for the Charles K. Kao Foundation for Alzheimer’s disease, my son, Phoebus, and his wife, Danielle, performed an improvised version of the theme to the Japanese movie Departures on piano and flute. The music was synchronised to a video on Professor Kao’s achievements, and included a mention of his visit to my home to appraise the music that Phoebus composed for Nancy Koh’s Buddhist-themed verse musical, The First Leaf of Dream Song.
All that reminded me of the endeavours that my wife Helena and I went to as young parents two decades ago to initiate our children into the world of music.
Our daughter and son, Phoebe and Phoebus, were enrolled in music classes at the age of four, when their ears could develop best. They both eventually achieved perfect pitch. They learned to play the piano, as well as the rudiments of aural, theory, composition and improvisation.

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Michigan accreditation system ‘no longer has relevance’

Dave Murray:

Michigan’s school accreditation system “no longer has relevance” state educators say, as every school in the state has met state criteria despite sliding backward on federal testing goals.
The state Education Department released announced Monday that 79 percent of Michigan’s public school buildings and 93 percent of the school districts made federal testing goals – called “adequate yearly progress” – for the 2010-11 school year.
That’s down from 86 percent of schools and 95 percent of districts making AYP the previous school year.

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Student Loan Debt is Up Sharply

Justin Lahart:

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s quarterly report on debt and credit, U.S. households had $11.42 trillion in debt outstanding in the second quarter. That was down from a peak of $12.5 trillion in the third quarter of 2008, when the financial crisis took hold, and the lowest since the first quarter of 2007. Mortgage debt, home equity loans, credit card debt and auto loans are all down sharply — partly because people are being more careful, but also because many have defaulted.
But student loans are up sharply. There was $550 billion in student debt outstanding in the second quarter, up 25% from $440 billion in the third quarter of 2008.

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Hong Kong Eco-primary school considers a step up to secondary

Chloe Lai:

Sitting under a parasol to avoid the fierce summer sun, two teenagers at a summer camp in the New Territories debate the criteria for an ideal secondary school. Rosemary and White Cloud – adopting nature-related nicknames is a tradition at the camp – are responding to a Q&A session held earlier, when two secondary school principals were quizzed on topics ranging from the logic of school uniform design to how to prevent teachers from abusing their power.
“The school must have strict rules so every student will behave and be polite,” White Cloud says.
Rosemary has very different ideas: “It is not going to work. Strict rules will only make the disobedient even more disobedient. My ideal school is one with no penalties.”
The two friends’ contrasting views reflect their exposure to Gaia School, an alternative private primary school in Tuen Mun that emphasises personal responsibility and learning from nature.

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Peter the Wild Boy

Roger Moorhouse:

A mysterious child from northern Germany, portrayed by William Kent on the King’s Grand Staircase, became one of the sensations of the Georgian age, as Roger Moorhouse explains.
In the summer of 1725 a peculiar youth was found in the forest of Hertswold near Hameln in northern Germany. Aged about 12, he walked on all fours and fed on grass and leaves. ‘A naked, brownish, blackhaired creature’, he would run up trees when approached and could utter no intelligible sound. The latest in a long line of feral children – in turn celebrated, shunned and cursed through the ages – ‘The Wild Boy of Hameln’ would be the first to achieve real fame.
After a spell in the House of Correction in Celle, the boy was taken to the court of George, Duke of Hanover and King of the United Kingdom, at Herrenhausen. There the young curiosity was initially treated as an honoured guest. Seated at table with the king, dressed in a suit of clothes with a napkin at his neck, he repelled his host with his complete lack of manners. He refused bread, but gorged himself on vegetables, fruit and rare meat, greedily grasping at the dishes and eating noisily from his hands, until he was ordered to be taken away. He was given the name of Peter, but was variously known as ‘Wild Peter’, ‘Peter of Hanover’, or, most famously, ‘Peter the Wild Boy’.

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Here’s how to get your children a great education

Greg Toppo:

Journalist Peg Tyre’s new book, The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve ($26, Henry Holt) out Aug. 16, condenses decades of education research to help parents make better choices about selecting schools for their children. Tyre, whose 2008 book The Trouble With Boys helped spark a national conversation, says, “Schools can’t reasonably be expected to both educate children and educate parents about education. Parents are going to have to get more sophisticated about what excellent education looks like — and demand it for their child.” Tyre recently spoke to USA TODAY:

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An Open Letter to Our Young, Gifted, Talented, and Black (YGTB)

The Milwaukee Drum:

Dear Young, Gifted, Talented, and Black (YGTB),
Something has occured within our Black Community which needs to be addressed and I’m going to peel the scab off of it. The chasm has been widened between those in our community who possess knowledge, resources, wisdom, creativity, and determination and those who should be moving into the fold to advance our race. It is a slow death which if prolonged, will choke off any feasible possibility for future survival and success for our people.
YGTB, I sit positioned between you and our elders… not young enough nor mature enough to be in either category. I am transitioning and this is what I want to give you now during my journey (breadcrumbs to follow). Our (some) elders have eaten of the tree of (trick)knowledge bearing the forbidden fruit integration. The false promises of this fruit tantalized those who tasted its flesh with the hope of equality to White People, justice, freedom, legacy, and political power in America (our wilderness).
YGTB, stop!!!!! I am telling you not to follow down their path! Reject this fruit and the lies which flow from its bosom. What you need only to do is observe the plight of our people and judge if the present course (last 2 generations) of our direction produced results that have uplifted the majority of our people? If you see what I do, then you agree that our condition is getting worse. Do not continue to do what has failed us.

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Pulling strings into a top school: More parents are getting their children to play the harp as a way into prestigious institutions

Lana Lam:

More Hong Kong youngsters are following in the footsteps of Botticelli angels by learning the harp, with parents encouraging this special option as a way to secure a spot in a prestigious school.
Demand for harp lessons had steadily increased in the last three years and its appeal was multi-faceted, said professional harpist Joan Lee Wai-ying, who opened a home-based harp school in Sha Tin in 2008.
“Many parents want to widen the musical knowledge of their children but it’s also because of the school admission test which requires a basic instrument like the piano but also a very special instrument like the harp,” Lee said, with the number of students at her school increasing fivefold since opening.

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Why are high school grads still learning to learn?

Chris Rickert:

I’m not surprised more students are taking college-readiness and remedial courses at community and four-year colleges.
In the 1990s, I taught introductory composition at a private, career-oriented college and at a public university in Chicago, where it became clear that many of my students still hadn’t learned the difference between “it’s” and “its,” for example, or proper use of a comma. Never mind critical thinking.
It was especially evident at the private college that many of these high school graduates were forking over thousands of dollars so some master’s level English major with no formal training in education could teach them what they should have learned for free in public school.
The experience puts “Learning to Learn Camp,” Madison Area Technical College’s nine-week, $478.75 incarnation of the college preparatory class, in something of a darkly comic light.

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Pre-college camps help incoming students learn how to learn

Deborah Ziff:

The fall semester hasn’t officially started yet, but this week a group of incoming Madison Area Technical College students gathered on campus to study in groups, submit homework, and take notes on lectures.
They won’t be tested. They’re just practicing.
Programs like this one at MATC — called Learning to Learn Camp — are increasingly common at colleges and universities as educators try to prepare students for the academic rigor and social stresses of college.
The courses tend to provide basic study skills such as note-taking and time management, as well as information on decidedly squishier topics, such as how to stay motivated or take personal responsibility.
“It all sounds very elementary, but particularly for community college and technical college students who often don’t have a college frame of reference, or somebody in their family who went to college, it’s really useful information,” said Melinda Mechur Karp, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York.

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Web site lets you compare Michigan high schools’ success

Lori Higgins:

The state will launch a Web site Monday that will eventually provide parents — and everyone else — a way to gauge how well individual high schools prepare their graduates for college.
By the end of September, the site, www.mischooldata.org , will include first-ever information on how many students from each school go to college, how many earn at least a year’s worth of college credit within two years of graduation, and how many have to take remedial courses in college.
The information could be used by parents and the public to rate high schools and for administrators to improve curricula.

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Double degree adds up for Hong Kong maths prodigy

Peter So:

The wonderkid who at nine became the city’s youngest undergraduate four years ago completed his bachelor’s and master’s programme this week at the age of 13.
March Boedihardjo will now head off to the United States for a research programme and, possibly, a doctorate. The youngster was admitted to Baptist University’s double-degree programme in mathematical science in 2007, finishing it in four years – a year early. March said he really enjoyed his university years, despite earlier concerns about how such a young boy would adapt to the life.

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The 15-Year-Old Creator Of The Trimit App Makes Regular Old Entrepreneurs Seem Like Slackers

Kit Eaton:

Trimit’s a recent $0.99 app for the iOS platform that does one simple thing very well: It boils down longer-form Net content into 1,000-, 500-, or 140-character summaries. The longer summaries are meant to be handy for people pressed for time to read bigger articles, perhaps during a commute, and the shorter summaries make it easy to share the body text of interesting content (more than just a “hey this is good!” introduction to a link in an email or tweet) on the web, with the 140-character limit obviously tailored for Twitter. It’s also useful for deciding if you want to, later, read a long-form article.
Its design taps into the same thinking as web acryonyms like LOL and TWSS, and there’s more than a little nod in the direction of hyper-abbreviated SMS language. Perhaps this thinking was boosted because the chap behind it is just 15.
App creator Nick D’Aloisio tells Fast Company that he came up with the idea for the app during exam studies when he was “required to research a vast amount of webpages.” Nick realized that while poring over sites was “browsing a lot of pages that were, in fact, irrelevant to the task and therefore wasting” a lot of his time. Thus the aha moment, where he realized a quick precis of a website could be invaluable in helping you decide if you wanted to browse the rest of it. D’Aloisio stressed that the intention really is to “aid users in consuming content on the web” rather than sharing it socially, though this is a natural benefit of its design.

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Building character is a worthy subject in schools

Alan Borsuk:

Would you rather have someone graduate high school with good computer skills or good character traits?
I grant it’s a false choice. You ought to have both, and they’re not in conflict. But I ask this as a way of asking what our priorities are when it comes to educating children.
It’s hard to find a school that doesn’t have lots of computers these days. The intense push to load schools up with computers seems to have eased, compared with a decade ago. Money is tighter now, and many schools don’t need much more because they have a lot already.
But it’s not so easy to find schools that have good character education programs.
Schools are held accountable for teaching reading and math and so on. The pressure is always on for academic records for each student and for a school as a whole. But students’ character? Other than attendance and discipline for behavior problems, interest in that is pretty inconsistent.
Of course, many would say, it’s not the school’s job to civilize children. That’s the parents’ job. Absolutely correct, and I think more should be done to try to get more parents to do that job.

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The ever-increasing burden of education

Ivan Lorentzen:

Even with all its flaws, I’m a proponent of public education in much the same way I remain committed to the fundamental principles of democracy despite recent events in D.C. having tested this commitment.
In terms of public education, there are countless books, articles, and research projects from numerous points of view and it’s clear one can find proponents and opponents to whatever perspective you may choose. One recent publication is noteworthy due to the clarity in writing and direct premise — “Schools Cannot Do It Alone” by Jamie Vollmer, former attorney, businessman, and harsh education critic, now an advocate and consultant to education. I’d like to quote and paraphrase from this book in the following column.
He argues schools need the trust, understanding, permission and support from their communities in order to improve the public education system and increase student success. In tracing his journey from critic to consultant, he weaves an interesting tale as he encounters “blueberries, bell curves, and smelly eighth graders,” and comes to two conclusions. First, we have a system problem, not a people problem. We need to modify the system in order to get the graduates we want. And second, we cannot touch the system without touching the culture of the surrounding town because everything that goes on inside a school is tied to local attitudes, values, traditions and beliefs. But in order to improve the system it’s vital that we first accurately understand the system that presently exists and how it came to be.
For the first time in history the security, prosperity, and health of our nation depend on our ability to unfold the full creative potential of every child — not just the easy ones, not just the top 20 percent of the class, and not just those who reflect our preferred values. The problem is that America’s public education system was never designed to do this. As Thomas Jefferson imagined it, schools should be designed to select and sort students into two groups: a small handful of thinkers and a great mass of obedient doers. Back then most everyone was a farmer, the pace of change was slow, options were few, and only a small handful of people were paid to think.

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Partnership between Elgin school, salon a cut above

Emily McFarlan:

U46 schools won’t start class until next week, but already on Thursday, 5-year-old Nicky Moraetes of Elgin leaned forward in his chair at Harriet Gifford Elementary School with a look of intense concentration on his face.
Nicky will start dual-language kindergarten Wednesday, Aug. 24, at Gifford, and he’ll look good when he does. As he squeezed his eyes shut, a smock wrapped around his shoulders, a Salon Professionals Academy stylist clipped short the back of his blond hair.
The 5-year-old was one of many Gifford students and their siblings who got free haircuts during registration at the elementary school Thursday afternoon.

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10 Reasons to Skip the Expensive Colleges

Reader’s Digest:

If you’re the parent of a high-achieving high school student prepared to spend whatever it takes to send your kid to an Ivy League college, authors Claudia Dreifus and Andrew Hacker have some unlikely advice: Don’t do it.
Dreifus, a New York Times writer and an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and Hacker, a veteran political science professor at Queens College in New York, spent three years interviewing faculty, students, and administrators and crunching statistics for their book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It. Their finding? That many of America’s colleges and universities — especially the elite — aren’t worth their tuition and serve faculty over their undergrads.
More outrageous, they say, is that tuition nationwide has jumped at more than twice the rate of inflation since 1982, so many kids graduate deeply in debt. “Tuition is probably the second-largest item you’ll buy in your lifetime, after your home,” Dreifus says. Given that, the authors suggest you consider the following as you bear down on the decision of where your child will spend the next four (or more) years.

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Louis Moreau Gottschalk on education

Chan Stroman:

Those favored by fortune can educate themselves in all countries: and it is for that reason that the American thinkers did not dedicate their cares to the aristocratic element of society, but rather to the lowest ranks of the great mass of the people, whom they have struggled to enlighten; comprehending that education ought not to be a privilege, but something which belongs to all, as much as the air we breathe; and that every citizen has as imprescriptible a right to the light of the Spirit as he has to the light of the sun which illuminates him.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk:

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Madison Mayor Paul Soglin on The Schools, Community, Curriculum & Parenting

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin Interview 8.12.2011 from Jim Zellmer.

I am thankful that Madison Mayor Paul Soglin took the time to chat yesterday.
Mobile (iPhone, iPad, iPod and Android) visitors, please use this link.
19MB mp3 version.

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Judge Blocks Colorado Voucher Plan

Stephanie Simon:

A state court judge on Friday blocked a suburban school district south of Denver from using public funds to help residents pay for private and religious schools.
Judge Michael A. Martinez ruled that a voucher program designed by the Douglas County School District violated the state constitution because it sent public funds to schools that infused religion throughout their curriculum, required students and faculty to meet certain standards of faith and required students to attend religious services.
The program “provides no meaningful limitations on the use of taxpayer funds to support or promote religion, and no meaningful protections for the religious liberty of participating students,” the judge wrote in a 68-page decision. He also said it amounted to direct public aid to churches and church-sponsored schools, in violation of the Colorado constitution.

Much more on the Douglas County voucher program, here.

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Robots put leadership under skills pressure

Andrew Hill:

We love robots – tireless, productive workhorses of the modern assembly line. But we also hate robots – sinister mechanical simulacra of the human workers they make redundant.
In the latest episode in our complicated relationship with automatons and automation, it is appropriate that Foxconn should have a lead role. The Taiwanese company manufactures the chattering classes’ favourite piece of science fiction come true, the Apple iPad, as well as devices for Nokia and Sony. It employs 1m people in China. It was the epicentre last year of concern about pressure on low-paid young workers, following a series of suicides at its Shenzhen factories. It is, in short, iPad users’ window on to dilemmas of assembly-line politics and management that the developed world last grappled with on this scale decades ago.

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The Trouble with Debt to Degree

Robert Kelchen:

I was pleased to see the release of Education Sector’s report, “Debt to Degree: A New Way of Measuring College Success,” by Kevin Carey and Erin Dillon. They created a new measure, a “borrowing to credential ratio,” which divides the total amount of borrowing by the number of degrees or credentials awarded. Their focus on institutional productivity and dedication to methodological transparency (their data are made easily accessible on the Education Sector’s website) are certainly commendable.
That said, I have several concerns with their report. I will focus on two key points, both of which pertain to how this approach would affect the measurement of performance for 2-year and 4-year not-for-profit (public and private) colleges and universities. My comments are based on an analysis in which I merged IPEDS data with the Education Sector data to analyze additional measures; my final sample consists of 2,654 institutions.
Point 1: Use of the suggested “borrowing to credential” ratio has the potential to reduce college access for low-income students.

Related: Debt to Degree.

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Super Teachers Alone Can’t Save Our Schools

Steven Brill:

A superstar teacher or charismatic principal rides to the rescue! Downtrodden public school children, otherwise destined to fail, are saved! We’ve all seen that movie–more than once, starting with “Stand and Deliver” and “Lean on Me” in the late 1980s and more recently with documentaries like “Waiting for Superman” and “The Lottery,” which brilliantly portray the heroes of the charter-school movement. And we know the villains, too: teachers’ union leaders and education bureaucrats who, for four decades, have presided over schools that provide comfortable public jobs for the adults who work there but wretched instruction for the children who are supposed to learn there.
One of the heroes of this familiar tale is Dave Levin, the co-founder of the highly regarded KIPP network of charter schools (KIPP stands for Knowledge Is Power Program). But Mr. Levin would be the first to tell you that heroes aren’t enough to turn around an American public school system whose continued failure has become the country’s most pressing long-term economic and national security threat.

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Facebook’s Privacy Issues Are Even Deeper Than We Knew

Chunka Mui:

Questions about what social networks mean for personal privacy and security have been brought to a head by research at Carnegie Mellon University that shows that Facebook has essentially become a worldwide photo identification database. Paired with related research, we’re looking at the prospect where good, bad and ugly actors will be able identify a face in a crowd and know sensitive personal information about that person.
These developments mean that we no longer have to worry just about what Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and other social sites do with our data; we have to worry about what they enable others to do, too. And it now seems that others will be able to do a lot.

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Thomas D. Parker: Time to downsize federal student loans

Thomas Parker:

I have spent much of my working life studying and promoting student loans. As a good liberal Democrat, I have spent years seeking to expand and then working for the old Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), which had its roots in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Currently, I consult to a for-profit student-loan company.
I am surprised, therefore, to hear myself saying that it is time to start downsizing the federal student-loan programs.
I am watching to see how the new Federal Direct Student Loan Program (FDLP) works out. I hope that it is successful.

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Is College Worth the Cost?

Christina Couch:

Today’s parents are paying substantially higher out-of-pocket costs for higher education than their parents did 30 years ago. And the public has noticed. Three out of four Americans say college is unaffordable for most people, according to the widely publicized survey Pew Research Center survey “Is college worth it?”
A four-year degree is becoming increasingly difficult to attain due to several factors:
–College costs are rising at nearly three times the rate of inflation, according to FinAid.org.
–More than 1 in 10 students graduate with more than $40,000 in undergraduate student debt, according to the Project on Student Debt.

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Online Education: A Word of Caution

Andrew Miller:

Online education is becoming a legitimate and viable option for education systems around the country. Both colleges and secondary schools are offering classes to students. In fact many states and schools are requiring students to take some method of mode of online learning. New York made major changes around seat time and face-to-face contact between student and teacher. The state’s intentions are good. They want to move away the focus from seat time, and they want to offer courses that might be hard to offer in certain areas of the state to all students. With all these innovative systemic changes, one might think we are completely on the right track. I offer a word of caution.
Online education is in danger of replicating a system that isn’t working. Yes, I wrote it. With all the potential for innovation that online education has to offer, we have fallen into the pitfall of replication. The keyword is “danger.” There is much that online education can do to innovate the education system, and much that has already been done as a result. Yet most of the actual courses and pedagogical structures that are in place are simply replicating the traditional style of education.

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Arguing With Success Eva Moskowitz’s aptly named Harlem charter schools.

The Wall Street Journal:

We write frequently about the charter-school wars in New York City because the battle touches so many aspects of the effort to give children from poor families the education necessary to escape their circumstances.
Today’s report has good news: Results released yesterday of test scores in the New York State Assessment Program showed that the most relentlessly attacked charter schools – Eva Moskowitz’s Harlem Success academies – have outperformed their public-school peers, often by a wide margin.
At all New York City’s public schools, 60% of third, fourth and fifth graders passed the math exam; at Harlem Success, 94% passed. In the state language arts exam, 49% from the city schools passed compared to 78% at the charters. The 94% pass rate for the academies’ black and Hispanic students surpassed the 73% pass rate for white students taking the exam in New York state.

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Jocks vs. Pukes

Robert Lipsyte:

In the spring of that hard year, 1968, the Columbia University crew coach, Bill Stowe, explained to me that there were only two kinds of men on campus, perhaps in the world–Jocks and Pukes. He explained that Jocks, such as his rowers, were brave, manly, ambitious, focused, patriotic and goal-driven, while Pukes were woolly, distractible, girlish and handicapped by their lack of certainty that nothing mattered as much as winning. Pukes could be found among “the cruddy weirdo slobs” such as hippies, pot smokers, protesters and, yes, former English majors like me.
I dutifully wrote all this down, although doing so seemed kind of Puke-ish. But Stowe was such an affable ur-Jock, 28 years old, funny and articulate, that I found his condescension merely good copy. He’d won an Olympic gold medal, but how could I take him seriously, this former Navy officer who had spent his Vietnam deployment rowing the Saigon River and running an officers’ club? Not surprisingly, he didn’t last long at Columbia after helping lead police officers through the underground tunnels to roust the Pukes who had occupied buildings during the antiwar and antiracism demonstrations.

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‘Star schools’ distort Taipei property market

Jens Kastner:

Epoch-making educational reform is predicted to leave its mark on the Taipei City property market. In 2014, Taiwan’s nine-year compulsory education will be extended to 12 years, and junior high school students will no longer have rigid entrance exams for senior high schools – it will all depend on their house address.
Instead of test scores in combination with household registration in desirable school districts, only the latter will determine the school that students get into. This, along with the huge faith ambitious parents put in the performance of so-called “star schools“, has caused dramatic rises in house prices and rents in the catchment areas of the best schools.

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Debating Early College and AP Tests

Kevin CareyL

When the producers at Fox & Friends asked me to get up early on Saturday morning to debate the merits of students earning college credits in high school, my third thought (after “Am I being set up as the liberal stooge?” and “Will this get me on The Daily Show?”) was, “Who could be against that?” The president of Belmont University, as it turns out. Here’s the clip.
While our education system is structured to move people along in age cohorts, some people obviously learn much faster than others. Falling behind is a problem, but so is falling ahead and getting stuck in boring classes that you don’t need. As I note, we’ve been running AP and IB programs in for decades now-I took seven AP tests as a high school student in the mid-80s. Curiously, the object lessons of this experience often seem lost in the broader education debate. People are constantly denouncing multiple-choice “fill in the bubble” standardized tests as horribly inadequate and a tool of corporatist oppression, yet well-off progressive parents scramble to enroll their children in high schools with a full slate of AP courses. “Teaching to test” is also a horrible sin, unless, apparently, the test is AP Physics and you’re angling for the Ivy League.

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Raising a dyslexic child: from guilt and confusion to progress

Dr Lau Yuk-king:

I would like to tell you about my experience as the mother of a child with dyslexia. According to the Health Department, children with dyslexia have difficulty with word recognition, reading and dictation. Without proper assistance, this may result in a severe disability in acquiring reading skills.
A 2008 study by the University of Hong Kong found that dyslexia affects 7 per cent to 9 per cent of children in Hong Kong, and up to 17 per cent of children worldwide.
My first child, a girl, is a “normal” child. As an enthusiastic and committed mother, I read books and took courses to equip myself with appropriate parenting knowledge and skills. My daughter learned to read before kindergarten.

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Parents see big gap in school fees among districts

Diane Rado, Mick Swasko and Jim Jaworski:

On top of hefty charges for textbooks, technology, bus rides, sports and clubs, school districts are hitting up parents to pay fees for hundreds of individual courses, from French I to American literature, history, foods and furniture-making.
The so-called course or lab fees can range from $10 or $20 to more than $100 per class, depending on the school, records show, pumping up parents’ bills and adding to the rising cost of a public school education in the Chicago region.
“This is like private school,” said parent Gio Chavez, who walked out of Oak Lawn Community High School’s registration this week shellshocked. The final tally for her sophomore son’s classes: $665.

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Big business of school reform

Sommer Brokaw:

Critics of public school “reform” say that it looks too much like a business model with education foundations that have big wallets taking control away from local communities.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, along with his wife, Melinda Gates, founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which had an endowment of $33.5 billion as of 2009. The foundation is “driven by the passions and the interests of the Gates family,” with an education goal to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology.
Another notable figure is Los Angeles entrepreneur and philanthropist Eli Broad (rhymes with road). With his wife Edythe, Broad founded The Broad Foundations, which have assets of $2.1 billion with a mission to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts.
“Priorities of some of these foundations nationally have taken precedence over parents and community members,” said Pam Grundy, co-founder of Mecklenburg Acts, the local affiliate of Parents Across America. “They’re trying to do a lot of things that have never been proven to work. We feel like our kids are like an experiment.”

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State board to run Bridgeport schools

Stephanie Reitz:

A banker, a professor, a hospital administrator, and a pastor are among the members of a newly created board to run Bridgeport’s school district and overhaul its finances and student achievement.
Acting state Education Commissioner George Coleman announced the six appointments yesterday, saying the new board will start its work immediately in place of the nine-member elected school board being swept out during the state takeover.
State education officials decided this summer that Connecticut needed to assume control of the troubled Bridgeport schools under provisions of a 2007 state law that lets it step in when students’ academic performance is in dire need of improvement.

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School choice is the ‘civil rights’ issue of the 21st century

Ed Jones & Todd Hollenbeck:

It is often difficult to feel optimistic about the future of liberty. Those of us who value individual liberty and free markets look only at the encroachment of government in our lives. We often overlook the victories that should give us hope for the future of liberty. The school choice movement is one of the most important fights in the future of liberty, and one that we are starting to win.
It is fitting to talk about this now, because July 31 would have been Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman’s 99th birthday. Over fifty years ago, Friedman jump-started the school choice movement with an article called “The Role of Government in Education.” In it, he laid out a plan for school vouchers that would allow parents to have a choice in where they send their children. In a 2005 interview with Reason Magazine, Friedman said, “I want vouchers to be universal, to be available to everyone. They should contain few or no restrictions on how they can be used.”

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Douglas County, Colorado school voucher hearings wrap up; What happens when citizens lose faith in government? 2011 Madison School District Open Enrollment Data (4.73% Leave)

Elbert County News:

Closing arguments in the case challenging the Douglas County School District’s voucher program ended three days of hearings that could halt the program in its infancy.
A standing-room-only crowd listened in Denver District Court while a legal team from the American Civil Liberties Union faced off against a team that included the Colorado Attorney General’s Office to decide the fate of the district’s school choice scholarship program.
Both sides agreed that any decision from Denver District Court Judge Michael Martinez will likely face an appeal, regardless of the ruling.
“There will be an appeal either way,” said Michael McCarthy, a plaintiff attorney representing the Taxpayers for Public Education. “What (the school district has) done is press the envelope as far as they can. For those interested in preserving public education in this state, they have got in their face as far as they can.”

More from the Wall Street Journal: Wall Street Journal:

In a bold bid to revamp public education, a suburban district south of Denver has begun handing out vouchers that use public money to help its largely affluent residents send their children to private and church-based schools. The Douglas County School District experiment is noteworthy because nearly all voucher programs nationally aim to help children who are poor, have special needs or are trapped in failing public schools. Douglas County, by contrast, is one of the most affluent in the U.S., with household income nearly double the national median, and has schools ranked among the best in Colorado. What do you think? Should vouchers only be used with lower-income students? Should they never be used? Do they violate the constitution?

Chrystia Freeland:

One answer comes from Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist. One of Mr. Krastev’s special interests is in the resilience of authoritarian regimes in the 21st century. To understand why they endure, Mr. Krastev has turned to the thinking of the economist Albert O. Hirschman, who was born in Berlin in 1915 and eventually became one of America’s seminal thinkers.
In 1970, while at Harvard, Mr. Hirschman wrote an influential meditation on how people respond to the decline of firms, organizations and states. He concluded that there are two options: exit — stop shopping at the store, quit your job, leave your country; and voice — speak to the manager, complain to your boss, or join the political opposition.
For Mr. Krastev, this idea — the trade-off between exit and voice — is the key to understanding what he describes as the “perverse” stability of Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia. For all the prime minister’s bare-chested public displays of machismo, his version of authoritarianism, in Mr. Krastev’s view, is “vegetarian.”
“It is fair to say that most Russians today are freer than in any other period of their history,” he wrote in an essay published this spring. But Mr. Krastev argues that it is precisely this “user-friendly” character of Mr. Putin’s authoritarianism that makes Russia stable. That is because Russia’s relatively porous dictatorship effectively encourages those people who dislike the regime most, and have the most capacity to resist it, to leave the country. They choose exit rather than voice, and the result is the death of political opposition: “Leaving the country in which they live is easier than reforming it.”

Related:
Madison School District May, 2011 Strategic Plan Update with Action Plans 1.8MB PDF

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For a Standout College Essay, Applicants Fill Their Summers

Jenny Anderson:

Josh Isackson, an 18-year-old graduate of Tenafly High School in New Jersey, spent the summer after his sophomore year studying Mandarin in Nanjing, China. The next year he was an intern at a market research firm in Shanghai. When it came time to write a personal statement for his college applications, those summers offered a lot of inspiration.
“When I was thinking about the essay, I realized that taking Chinese was a big part of me,” he said.
So Mr. Isackson wrote about exploring the ancient tombs of the Ming dynasty in the Purple Mountain region of Nanjing, “trading jokes with long-dead Ming Emperors, stringing my string hammock between two plum trees and calmly sipping fresh green tea while watching the sun set on the horizon.”

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Back-to-School Special: 5 Tips on Picking a Good School

Ryan McVay:

I’m a policy guy, not a daddy blogger. As a general rule, I don’t discuss my children in this column or on my Eduwonk blog. But when TIME asked me to write about how my wife (who also works in education) and I chose our kids’ elementary school, I figured why not? We are constantly besieged by friends and colleagues who want to know how we went about picking a school, as if there were some secret education-analyst methodology I was privy to. I wish that were true! But even though I don’t have access to the secret sauce, I do have a pretty good sense of how to kick a school’s tires. Plus, I think it would be a shame not to use all of our parental angst for the greater good. And so, as our kids start a new year at a public school, here are some lessons from our school-hunting experience that might help guide yours.
Look beneath the label. “Public” or “private” doesn’t really tell you much, so don’t scratch a school off your list just because of how it’s governed. There are terrific and lousy schools in the public, private and (publicly funded) charter-school sectors, so relying on labels alone is a big risk. Likewise, you should do more than glance at a school’s test scores or demographic data. My wife and I, for instance, are both products of public schools. I went to ones in Virginia that on paper were both excellent and diverse. But in practice, there were different tracks for different students, so most of the kids in my gifted or AP classes were like me: Caucasian, middle-class, ruggedly good-looking. Well, two out of three of those anyway. My wife grew up in an Ohio district known for great academics but with no diversity. As our kids approached school age, we hoped to find a good school that was racially, ethnically and economically diverse — a tall order given today’s housing patterns and school boundaries. But most important, we wanted to find the right fit for our kids, so we were not opposed to going private if we couldn’t find an option in the public sector that seemed to work for us. (See the 20 best- and worst-paid college majors.)

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Facial recognition software could reveal your social security number

Deborah Braconnier:

According to a new study which will be presented August 4 at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, technology has made it possible to identify and gain the personal information of strangers by using facial recognition and social media profiles like Facebook.
The study, led by Alessandro Acquisti from Carnegie Mellon University, combined the use of three different technologies – cloud computing, facial recognition and public information that can be found on various social networking sites.
They used these technologies in three different experiments. In the first experiment, Acquisti and his team were able to identify members of an online dating site where members do not use their real names for identification. The second experiment allowed the research team to identify college students in real life walking on campus based solely on their face and information gathered online.

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The myth of the extraordinary teacher

Ellie Herman:

Yes, we need to get rid of bad teachers. But we can’t demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence.
The kid in the back wants me to define “logic.” The girl next to him looks bewildered. The boy in front of me dutifully takes notes even though he has severe auditory processing issues and doesn’t understand a word I’m saying. Eight kids forgot their essays, but one has a good excuse because she had another epileptic seizure last night. The shy, quiet girl next to me hasn’t done homework for weeks, ever since she was jumped by a knife-wielding gangbanger as she walked to school. The boy next to her is asleep with his head on the desk because he works nights at a factory to support his family. Across the room, a girl weeps quietly for reasons I’ll never know. I’m trying to explain to a student what I meant when I wrote “clarify your thinking” on his essay, but he’s still confused.
It’s 8:15 a.m. and already I’m behind my scheduled lesson. A kid with dyslexia, ADD and anger-management problems walks in late, throws his books on the desk and swears at me when I tell him to take off his hood.

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More Business Schools To Accept GRE Scores

Melissa Korn:

Momentum for business schools to accept the GRE test, mainly used by graduate-school applicants in the social sciences and humanities, is building as those schools aim to attract less traditional applicants.
Since April, more than 100 business schools have said they will accept applications with GRE–Graduate Record Examination–scores. In the past, business schools have only accepted the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, which looks more at reading comprehension and reasoning. The GRE has a stronger focus on vocabulary and straightforward quantitative skills.

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Excellence in Education explains Florida’s reading reforms and compares Florida’s NAEP progress with Wisconsin’s at the July 29th Read to Lead task force meeting



Excellence in Education’s PowerPoint presentation: 1MB PDF, via a kind Julie Gocey email.
Related links: Video: Governor’s “Read to Lead” Task Force Meeting.
Wisconsin Reading Coalition.
Much more on Wisconsin’s Read To Lead Task Force, here.
How does Wisconsin compare? Learn more at www.wisconsin2.org

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The AFT’s Real Feelings About Parent Power

Rishawn Biddle:

When the AFT offers a road map on how to shut down Parent Power efforts, it offers a nice PDF document to do it. Apparently in a fit of celebration during last month’s TEACH 2011 conference, the nation’s second-largest teachers union offered up a presentation on how its Connecticut affiliate managed to make the state’s Parent Trigger law a little less harder for parents to use. (Dropout Nation is doing everyone a courtesy by making it available for public consumption; the orginal is still available at the AFT’s Web site. At least, for now.)

Rick Green has more.

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New Wisconsin School of Business Dean to Confront State Budget Woes

Melissa Korn:

François Ortalo-Magné takes the helm of the Wisconsin School of Business next month following Wisconsin’s contentious battle over collective bargaining rights for public-employee unions, which has presented challenges for the state university system.
Mr. Ortalo-Magné, however, sees those challenges as opportunities. The business school suffered some loss of funding–a small fraction of the nearly $100 million cut made to parent school University of Wisconsin-Madison. In exchange, the university system wrested some control over hiring and budgets from the state.

Nice pr in the Wall Street Journal…

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Teenagers ‘addicted’ to using smartphones

Maija Palmer:

Just under half of British children aged 12 to 15 own a smartphone, with many claiming to be “addicted” to the devices, which they use while eating, at the cinema and in bed.
Research published by Ofcom, the communications market regulator, on Thursday found that smartphone ownership was highest among younger teenagers, with 47 per cent owning a device, compared with 27 per cent of British adults.
About 60 per cent of teenagers who owned smartphones described themselves as “addicted” to their handsets and around 71 per cent of smartphone owning teens have their device switched on all the time.

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Union to defend teachers in cheating scandals

Greg Toppo:

The head of the USA’s second-largest teachers union on Monday said local affiliates will defend the rights of teachers caught up in cheating scandals, including the one now unfolding in Atlanta. But she said cheating “under any circumstances is unacceptable.”
Speaking to reporters during the American Federation of Teachers’ biannual training conference, Randi Weingarten said the union would “obviously” represent teachers accused of cheating “to make sure that people have some kind of fairness — and that it’s not some kind of witch hunt.”
A long-awaited report released last week by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, found teacher- or principal-led cheating in 44 of 56 Atlanta schools investigated. Investigators determined that 178 educators cheated. Of those, 82 confessed.

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School choice is risk-free, Pennsylvania education secretary says

Tracie Mauriello:

Tax dollars soon could go to schools where teachers aren’t required to be certified and where students aren’t required to take the same standardized tests as their public school counterparts.
That concerns Democrats, who expressed concerns about Republican school-choice measures that were the subject of a House Education Committee public hearing today.
Rep. Jim Christiana, sponsor of one bill in the education reform package, said school choice isn’t about turning public schools into private ones; it’s about letting parents choose where their children will be best educated.
“We’re not saying students shouldn’t have to take standardized tests. We’re just saying the tests should be based on the curriculum you’re offering,” said Mr. Christiana, R-Beaver.

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The Jobless Recovery and the Education Gap

Mark Perry:

The charts above show the differences in: a) monthly employment levels and b) monthly unemployment rates between 1992 and 2011 for: a) college graduates and b) workers with less than a high school degree. The differences are quite striking and interesting, and might help explain some of the labor market dynamics in the current “jobless recovery.”
Note that the employment level for college graduates flattened during the 2008-2009 recession, but is now at a record high level. In contrast, the employment level for workers without a high school degree is about 2.5 million below the pre-recession peak. Likewise the jobless rate for college graduates has increased by a few percentage points because of the recession (and is now at 4.4%), but the jobless rate for workers with less than a high school degree has increased by more than six percentage points (now at 14.3%), and was recently almost ten percentage points above its pre-recession level.

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Airy Labs Founder On ‘Higher Education Bubble’ Vs. Real World

Lizette Chapman:

On the surface, Andrew Hsu is a curious fit among the inaugural class of Thiel Fellows.
Andrew Hsu says there are some things you can’t learn in college. “In the real world it’s crazy,” he says.
PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel’s “20 Under 20” fellowship program awards $100,000 to 20 people under 20 years of age who drop out of college to pursue science and technological innovation. The program officially launched in May and is the first assault in Thiel’s war against the “higher-education bubble” – a system he says stymies innovation and burdens youngsters with debt.
Hsu, now 20, graduated with honors and degrees in neurobiology, biochemistry and chemistry and a minor in mathematics from the University of Washington at 16. He was a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Stanford’s neuroscience program when he left it earlier this year to launch Airy Labs Inc.

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Debt to Degree: A New Way of Measuring College Success

Kevin Carey & Erin Dillon:

The American higher education system is plagued by two chronic problems: dropouts and debt. Barely half of the students who start college get a degree within six years, and graduation rates at less-selective colleges often hover at 25 percent or less. At the same time, student loan debt is at an all-time high, recently passing credit card debt in total volume.1 Loan default rates have risen sharply in recent years, consigning a growing number of students to years of financial misery. In combination, drop-outs and debt are a major threat to the nation’s ability to help students become productive, well-educated citizens.
The federal government has traditionally tracked these issues by calculating, for each college, the total number of degrees awarded, the percentage of students who graduate on time, and the percentage of students who default on their loans. Each of these statistics provides valuable information, but none shows a complete picture. A college could achieve a stellar graduation rate by passing students
along and handing out degrees that have little value in the job market, making it difficult for graduates to earn enough money to pay off their debt. Alternatively, a college could keep tuition and loan default rates low while also providing a terrible education and helping few students earn degrees. Students choosing colleges and policymakers governing higher education need an overall measure of value, one that combines debt and graduation.
Education Sector has created such a measure, the “borrowing to credential ratio.” For each college, we have taken newly available U.S. Department of Education data showing the total amount of money borrowed by undergraduates and divided that sum by the total number of degrees awarded. The results are revealing:

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