Penn Radical Working Group:

Penn has become essential to preserving the present state of affairs. Not only does it literally reproduce America’s ruling class, sending more graduates off to Wall Street than any other university, it plays the far more important function of ensuring the reproduction of capitalism as a whole. Whatever its intentions, Penn’s structural function, like those of all educational institutions, is to transform students into precisely the kind of subject – trained with certain skills, molded for certain roles, guided by certain values, blindly wedded to certain ideological assumptions – needed to keep the exploitative gears of class society turning. So although it cultivates an image of civic entrepreneurialism, pathbreaking innovation, and social opportunity, Penn ultimately works to prop up a failing society. With its institutional values completely dominated by Wharton, the university boasts a “pre-professional” atmosphere: students compete like rats for the internships that will put them on the fast track to helping this society stay the same, or are shaped into the professional ideologues who will go on to craft capitalism’s next media soundbite or justify America’s next imperialist war.

Michael Maranze:

Marina Warner has a fascinating essay in the latest London Review of Books. Seeking to explain why she resigned from her position at the University of Essex, Warner describes a rapid collapse of the University’s traditions of scholarly openness and institutional democracy under the pressure of the Coalition government’s new funding model and (lack of) scholarly commitments. As she reveals, the tentacles of the new audit technocracy are infiltrating the University by means of the faculty review process.

Describing a meeting presided over by the Vice-Chancellor Anthony Forster, Warner describes a situation that may sound all too familiar:

David Greene:

College students are settling in for the fall semester and more and more it is happening in privately owned housing – instead of dorms. Over the past decade investors have been cashing in on this growing market. From Atlanta, Susanna Capelouto reports.

SUSANNA CAPELOUTO, BYLINE: Just on the edge of the Georgia Tech campus in Midtown Atlanta, lots of new dorms are in the making, though Stuart Bruening doesn’t call them dorms.

STUART BRUENING: I mean, it’s luxury apartment living catered towards college students.

Ed Stannard:

If you stroll up Chapel Street, Yale buildings rise up on either side of you.

On one side, between College and High streets, is the Old Campus quad.

On the other side is Claire’s Corner Copia, an Elm City vegetarian institution and Union League Cafe. Their landlord is Yale — through its University Properties office.

If you’re in downtown New Haven, whether on Chapel, York Street, Broadway or at Whitney Avenue and Audubon Street, it’s a good bet you’re near a Yale-owned building (click here to see chart and map).

It’s not true, though it may seem so, that “the city is the university,” as a visitor from Brazil, Susana Moreira, said recently on Broadway during a tour of the Northeast with her daughter.

Reed Jordan:

Fifty million children will start school this week as historic changes are under way in the U.S. public school system. As of 2011 48 percent of all public school students were poor* and this year, students of color will account for the majority of public school students for the first time in US history.

What is surprising about these shifts is that they are not leading to more diverse schools. In fact, the Civil Rights Project has shown that black students are just as segregated today as they were in the late 1960s, when serious enforcement of desegregation plans first began following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Despite our country’s growing diversity, our public schools provide little contact between white students and students of color. We’ve mapped data about the racial composition of US public schools to shed light on today’s patterns at the county level. These maps show that America’s public schools are highly segregated by race and income, with the declining share of white students typically concentrated in schools with other white students and the growing share of Latino students concentrated into low-income public schools with other students of color.

Join WEAC's Betsy Kippers in a #WPR conversation about school #vouchers at 7 a.m. Wednesday on @JoyCardinShow. http://t.co/ERTnY69RiW

— WEAC (@WEAC) September 9, 2014

Jason Stanford:

Rebellions sometimes begin slowly, and Walter Stroup had to wait almost seven hours to start his. The setting was a legislative hearing at the Texas Capitol in the summer of 2012 at which the growing opposition to high-stakes standardized testing in Texas public schools was about to come to a head. Stroup, a University of Texas professor, was there to testify, but there was a long line of witnesses ahead of him. For hours he waited patiently, listening to everyone else struggle to explain why 15 years of standardized testing hadn’t improved schools. Stroup believed he had the answer.

Using standardized testing as the yardstick to measure our children’s educational growth wasn’t new in Texas. But in the summer of 2012 people had discovered a brand-new reason to be pissed off about it. “Rigor” was the new watchword in education policy. Testing advocates believed that more rigorous curricula and tests would boost student achievement—the “rising tide lifts all boats” theory. But that’s not how it worked out. In fact, more than a few sank. More than one-third of the statewide high school class of 2015 has already failed at least one of the newly implemented STAAR tests, disqualifying them from graduation without a successful re-test. As often happens, moms got mad. As happens less often, they got organized, and they got results.

Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott, long an advocate of using tests to hold schools accountable, broke from orthodoxy when he called the STAAR test a “perversion of its original intent.” Almost every school board in Texas passed resolutions against over-testing, prompting Bill Hammond, a business lobbyist and leading testing advocate, to accuse school officials of “scaring” mothers. State legislators could barely step outside without hearing demands for testing relief. So in June 2012, the Texas House Public Education Committee did what elected officials do when they don’t know what to say. They held a hearing. To his credit, Committee Chair Rob Eissler began the hearing by posing a question that someone should have asked a generation ago: What exactly are we getting from these tests? And for six hours and 45 minutes, his committee couldn’t get a straight answer. Witness after witness attacked the latest standardized-testing regime that the Legislature had imposed. Everyone knew the system was broken, but no one knew exactly why.

Thomas Donlan:

Maybe they’re doing something right: American colleges and universities are highly regarded by an important subset of their students. One-fifth of students from other countries who study abroad are studying here in the U.S.

A recent Brookings Institution report found more than 800,000 foreign students in the U.S. in 2012, a record, and five times as many as were here in 2001. About 25% are from China, 15% from India, 10% from South Korea, and 5% from Saudi Arabia.

Some were sent here by their governments, others by their parents or their employers. Some come by their own unaided effort, making large financial sacrifices. No matter where the money comes from, foreign students mostly pay full freight to their institutions. From 2001 through 2012, they paid an estimated $56.5 billion in tuition and fees. Their living expenses added another $39.1 billion to U.S. gross domestic product.

The University of Southern California had the greatest number of foreign undergraduates, followed closely by Columbia University, the University of Illinois, New York University, and Purdue University.

Scott Jaschik & Doug Lederman:

Higher education is facing great pressure to change, and elsewhere in the PBS Newshour Rethinking College series, you’ll learn about some of the most visible trends that are unfolding.

Below are a handful of less-visible developments on college and university campuses — some of which have implications big and small for students and their families.

rethinkingcollegeGoodbye Mr. Chips

Many Americans — especially those who went to four-year, residential colleges — tend to think that professors have it easy: full-time work, summers off and, once they earn tenure, a job for life.

Three decades ago, that described a significant majority of college professors, with three in four either tenured or on a track to earning that status. Today, however, fewer than a third of all college instructors work full time and have a shot at tenure. More than half work part time, and while some do so by choice — the businesswoman or artist who teaches a little on the side — increasing numbers are trying to stitch together a living by teaching courses at multiple campuses, usually without benefits.

Michael Shapira:

In Uses of the University Clark Kerr talks about the multiversity combining the best of the German research university, the best of the English liberal arts model, and best aspects of American entrepreneurialism. Santa Cruz was meant to be part of the system as a beacon of UC’s commitment to undergraduate education, given the increased scale of enrollments as laid out by the California Master Plan (CMP). Do you think there was something salutary in the way that the UCSC experiment approached the growing imbalance between research, or graduate education, and undergraduate education, or the liberal arts tradition? Do you think that there can be something extracted from this initial period given that this pure college model is something that has been subsequently deemphasized at UCSC?

[Laughter] I suppose my laughter is part of the answer. When I was the chair of the campus budget committee, our then chancellor hired a management consultant to advise her on how UCSC could raise private funding by capitalizing on its advantages. The consultant said that our principle advantage was a loyal and successful alumni base from our early years who were still absolutely devoted to the college system — which had ceased to have any academic role in the way UCSC reorganized after it stopped growing by adding new colleges. That model was dead, so the consultant recommended that we turn one or more of the now-vestigial colleges into burial plots-with-a-view that could be sold to rich alumni who believed in the college system and still wanted to support it. I was willing to support this recommendation, but with the addition that we rename the college “Sunset College,” so that you could look west over the Pacific and contemplate your own sunset along with that of the college model. Despite my enthusiasm, the idea of colleges-as-graveyards was dropped and the chancellor said I hope you won’t mention this to anyone else — but here it is.

Going back to your question on the college model, Dean McHenry, who created my position as a junior faculty member to fill the gap left by the departure of Sheldon Wolin to Princeton, envisioned that Santa Cruz would grow and develop graduate programs slowly as the University of Oxford had, but in a way that was more deliberate and creative. Instead of competing with other new campuses to buy up the latest disciplinary fads, we would add college each year that defined an interdisciplinary model and that had as provost an interdisciplinary leader. In McHenry’s vision the science college would have someone like Ken Thimann as its first provost, an eminent interdisciplinary biologist, followed by Stephen Toulmin, who arrived when I did but didn’t last more than a year. The idea was that the provost in a science-themed college would develop an interdisciplinary faculty of scientists who were interested in the history and philosophy of science, alongside philosophers who were trained like [Thomas] Kuhn in the sciences in which they did their philosophy, and so on and so forth. Eventually, UCSC would develop more traditional disciplinary programs out of cross-college committees — we called them “Boards of Studies” — consisting of people from different disciplines who would set examining standards and course requirements for degrees in those disciplines that would be awarded by the campus, but through the student’s college.

William E. Tunmer, James W. economic communities. Disparities Chapman & Keith T. Greaney (PDF):

In this LDA Bulletin article, we summarise arguments and evidence reported in a detailed paper (Tunmer, Chapman, Greaney, Prochnow & Arrow, 2013) showing that New Zealand’s national literacy strategy has failed and particularly the role of Reading Recovery in contributing to that failure.

In response to growing concerns during the 1990s about New Zealand’s relatively “long tail” of literacy underachievement, the government established a Literacy Taskforce to provide recommendations aimed at raising the literacy achievement of all students but with particular attention given to “closing the gap between the lowest and highest students” (Ministry of Education, 1999, p.7). The recommendations of the Taskforce constituted the national literacy strategy for reducing the large disparity in reading achievement outcomes between good and poor readers.

A decade later, concerns were still being expressed about the literacy achievement gap. In December 2011, the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s Briefing to the Incoming Minister following the New Zealand general election (Ministry of Education, 2011) stated that:

“…the gap between our high performing and low performing students remains one of the widest in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). These low performing students are likely to be Mãori or Pasifika and/or from low socio-economic communities. Disparities in education appear early and persist throughout learning” (p.8).

Based on these findings, the Briefing concluded that, “The greatest challenge facing the schooling sector is producing equitable outcomes for students” (p.23). This conclusion can be taken as an admission that the national literacy strategy was failing to reduce the gap.

Related: Reading Recovery in madison….. 28% to 58%; lags national effectiveness average…..

Much more on Reading Recovery, here.

Via the Wisconsin Coalition on Reading:

Yet another research paper shows the ineffectiveness of Reading Recovery. Reading Recovery and the failure of the New Zealand national literacy strategy, by Tunmer, Chapman, Greaney, Prochnow, and Arrow, was published in November of 2013, and has been getting some more publicity lately. Aside from the Reading Recovery program itself, which is still in use in many schools in our state, Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) is based on the same instructional principles.

Check out this dyslexia PSA produced by students in Oregon.

Robert Milburn:

As the cost of a college education soars ever higher, private bankers are starting to deliver a harsh message to parents and grandparents: You may not be able to pay for it all yourself. The fear is that folks picking up the whole tab—perhaps more than $500,000 for two or three kids—may be putting the quality of their own retirements at risk.

“Students can always find ways to supplement their tuition costs via part time jobs, scholarships and loans,” says Katie Nixon, chief investment officer of Northern Trust Wealth Management. “And quite frankly, there isn’t a loan program available for retirement. Plus, I would note that ideally, education funding is accomplished through a coordinated, team effort among parents and both sets of grandparents.”

In other words, these are no longer times to go it alone, even for the wealthy Americans.

Madison School District (PDF):

1. What are our legal obligations?

2. What will be different this year?
– Advanced Learner IRT
– Identification process -Services for advanced learners -Monitoring progress
3. What have we done to prepare for these changes?

4. What’s next?
-Update on DPI Requirements for 2014-15

Who is an Advanced Learner?
A student who demonstrates high performance capability or the potential for high performance in one or more of the following domains: general intellectual, specific academic, visual and performing arts, leadership and creativity.

Madison Schools found non-compliant on Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Talented & Gifted Standards.

Amy Joyce:

Say your kid has a problem with a roommate. Maybe one “borrowed” his favorite t-shirt. Maybe your daughter’s roommate leaves old, stinky Chinese take out in the mini-fridge. Perhaps your child is so upset about this he texts you five times a day to complain.

Here’s the thing: Don’t call the college president to ask him to handle the situation. (Yes, that happens.)

Jonathan Gibralter, president of Frostburg State University, has had parents call him at his office to talk about a squabble their child is having with a roommate. “Don’t you trust your child to deal with this on his own?” he asks. “Rather than telling a son or daughter to talk to a [resident assistant] or [resident director], parents will immediately call my office. And that I consider to be a little over the top.”

Joanne Weiner:

Poor Sally. She has spent tens of thousands of dollars and four long years to get her college degree and has $26,000 in student loans to pay off, yet she can’t find a job that puts her degree to good use. Sally and her parents may be asking whether college was “worth it.”

Sally epitomizes many of her fellow college graduates who wonder why college graduates can’t find good jobs.

The experts give all sorts of explanations for Sally’s plight.

Eugene Volokh:

When you think you’re pretty well-off — and then you send your kids to private school, and see that you’re actually among the poorest families there.

(Not quite our family, as it happens, and not that it’s anything to be ashamed of; indeed, the school-poor families are probably the ones who are sacrificing the most for their children’s educations. But I’ve noticed people talking about this before, both from their own perspective and from the perspective they imagine their children taking, and it strikes me as an interesting phenomenon.)

Caroline Porter & Melanie Trottman:

Teachers unions are fighting back against a California ruling that gutted two things they hold sacred: tenure laws and seniority provisions. But they face an uphill battle to reshape their image as opponents—and even some allies—say they are standing in the way of needed improvements in education.

California’s teachers unions on Wednesday filed an appeal of the ruling, referring to the state judge’s decision as “without support in law or fact.” The move followed a separate appeal by Gov. Jerry Brown.

Meantime, the group behind the California case, called Students Matter and headed by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch, says it is exploring potential action in other states.

Last month, the New York state attorney general filed a motion to combine two related New York cases, one filed by a group called the New York City Parents Union and one brought by Partnership for Educational Justice, a group backed by former CNN anchor Campbell Brown.

Sol Stern & Peter Wood

he political fortunes of the Common Core are fast changing. When the Common Core first caught public attention in early 2010, it seemed like an unstoppable locomotive. It had the support of President Obama, and within a matter of a few months forty states and the District of Columbia had formally adopted it. Six more states soon followed. Republican and Democratic governors endorsed it. The Common Core was roaring ahead not just with bipartisan political support but with widespread enthusiasm from teachers unions, the press, and much of the D.C.–based education establishment.

As I write in the summer of 2014, the prospect is a bit different. That locomotive is nowhere to be seen and may be lying on its side in a dry gulch. The proponents of the Common Core are in retreat and fighting a defensive battle. Their dream of a one-size-fits-all set of national educational standards integrated with meaningful national tests is in ruins. The best they can now hope for is a remnant of the original idea: a handful of stalwart blue states that stick with the Core and a delayed and then watered-down system of tests.

To say that the larger project has failed the test of political support and public popularity, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that the Common Core was a bad idea. Could Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, be right when she says the Common Core was a great idea marred by poor implementation? In a word, no.

The Common Core was never a good idea. It was a sneaky idea—and sneaky ideas in American public policy tend to have exactly the lifespan that Common Core has had. The main sneakiness of the Common Core is that it was (and still is) presented as a state-level project. In reality, from the get-go it was intended to be a national project. Its official name is “The Common Core K–12 State Standards,” but the truth is that the Common Core is designed to work as a de facto set of national standards.

Via Will Fitzhugh.

Michael Meranze & Christopher Newfield

Very bad. Textbook prices are outrageous. Who gets to explain the problem? Dan Rosensweig, the chief executive of Chegg, an education services company. “Learning has been an inefficient market,” he says. This fits with the stereotype that teaching is inefficient and teachers like it that way, so they are just fine with overpriced texts. Chegg.com’s comparative shopping service is apparently the answer – improving price information will make textbooks a more efficient market and thereby lower prices.

Actually, no. Students aren’t price gouged by universities or their generally sad, post-book “bookstores” that sell big gulp water bottles and school sweatshirts. Students aren’t price gouged by faculty, who have zero control over text pricing. Students are price gouged by publishing monopolies, who set prices on a captive audience. Academic publishers are gradually strangling university libraries to get 20-36% profit margins on scientific journals, where investigators review for free but pay to publish. The same goes for textbooks. You can’t write a good article on excessive textbook prices unless you can say “exploitative economics of academic publishing,” but that’s what this ed-tech article does. Textbook prices have risen because for-profit educational services make as much money as they possibly can off students, and seek market positions that protect this pricing power. Sure enough, Chegg charges for tutoring and job placement services that universities currently provide their students for free. And yet we are supposed to think that Chegg-style for-profit services will cure cost problems that their sector has produced

Chris Rickert

District spokeswoman Rachel Strauch-Nelson acknowledged that some teachers had been evaluated “inconsistently” but noted that the new evaluations, while time-consuming, will be limited to once every three years.

School Board President Arlene Silveira also said the board has made it clear to Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham that evaluations are a priority and “the hope is that they will be more of a focus.”

The Department of Public Instruction says the new Wisconsin Educator Effectiveness System can be used “as one piece of data” when making “high-stakes human resource decisions,” such as termination and giving pay raises.

That’s not going to happen anytime soon in Madison, the only district in the state that, according to Lipp, still has a collective bargaining agreement three years after the union-killing Act 10.

“As long as we have a union contract, it won’t,” he said.

Strauch-Nelson said “the new system won’t change how the district makes employment decisions or compensation,” but it “will be used to tailor support for teachers and inform professional development.”

Bennett Carpenter and Laura Goldblatt and Lenora Hanson:

When Starbucks announced in June that the company would offer many of its employees a discounted online college education through Arizona State University, social theorists, business analysts, and education commentators quickly weighed in, often with compelling analyses of the relative (de)merits of digital and distance learning,the commodification of knowledge, and the future of higher ed. Such responses are right to point out the self-serving nature of the initiative and the ways that it furthers a two-tiered educational system.

Yet Starbucks’ actions collect a set of issues that have long dogged debates about the future of the university into a single body—that of the low-income-worker-as-student. As Svati Kirsten Narula points out, a student without financial aid or family resources would have to work 48 hours a week at minimum wage in order to cover the costs of tuition—a feat that, as she puts it, “would require superhuman strength, or maybe a time machine.” Low-income students thus often face a “choice” between accruing crippling financial debt or, as the Starbucks example illustrates, pursuing a second-tier education at a for-profit institution.* Meanwhile, the university contains a large number of low-income food and service workers whose labor ensures the smooth functioning of the educational system but who are themselves denied access to educational opportunities.

Joseph Fruscione:

Editing a column like this is different when the contributors are good friends and former colleagues.

Because Katie and Shonda are friends and colleagues, their pairing took on a life of its own. I originally put them together not only because they knew each other but also because they’re very aware of the many issues facing adjunct faculty. I knew they’d work out a focus for the column, so I essentially told them to just do their thing. I spent 15+ years working and teaching at their university — one becoming increasingly known for rampant pay disparity between senior administrators and others — so I have an insider’s knowledge of some issues they allude to or discuss, such as adjunct working conditions. All in all, I’m thrilled with the smart, engaging work they did here with issues of labor, activist rhetoric, and maintaining their multifaceted professional roles.

Madison 2005 (reflecting 1998):

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, 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.

In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level”. We adopted this goal in response to recommendations from a citizen study group that believed that minority students who are not competent as readers by the end of the third grade fall behind in all academic areas after third grade.

As of 2013, the situation has not changed, unfortunately.

Madison, 2014, the view from Milwaukee:

The largest state teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, gave $1.3 million last month to the Greater Wisconsin Committee, a liberal group that has been running ads critical of Walker. Two of WEAC’s political action committees have given a total of $83,128 to Burke directly.

On the other side, the American Federation for Children said last year in a brochure that in the 2012 elections in Wisconsin, including the recalls that year, it had spent $2.4 million supporting pro-voucher candidates.

Along with family members, Dick and Betsy DeVos have given about $343,000 to Walker since 2009. The Grand Rapids, Mich., couple made their fortune in the marketing firm Amway and now support the voucher school movement.

The elections are critical because in general, each candidate’s stance on the issue of vouchers is largely dictated by their political party affiliation. If Republican candidates maintain control of both houses and the governor’s seat, voucher-friendly legislation is more likely to pass.

Democrats are trying to take control of the state Senate. Republicans hold the chamber 17-15, with one GOP-leaning seat vacant. Republicans have a stronger majority in the Assembly and the election is unlikely to change that.

Senate Democrats would oppose the expansion of voucher schools until standards and requirements are established that put those private schools on the same footing as public schools, Senate Minority Leader Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) said.

…….

Walker on Wednesday also challenged Burke’s record on the Madison School Board.

He noted that the graduation rate for black students in Madison is lower than the graduation rate for black students in MPS.

Walker said Burke has had a chance to use his Act 10 law to save the taxpayers millions in Madison, and put those dollars toward alleviating the achievement gap.

“She’s failed to do that,” Walker said.

Burke responded that Madison is a fiscally responsible district that is one of the few in the state operating under its levy cap.

Madison still has a contract because the teachers union there challenged the Act 10 law in court, and a circuit court judge ruling initially swung in its favor. The teachers union subsequently bargained a contract this year and next year with the district.

Then this summer, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld Walker’s Act 10 law.

Madison 2014, gazing into the mirror:

Gov. Scott Walker took the campaign against Democratic opponent Mary Burke to her front door Wednesday, accusing the one-term Madison School Board member of not doing enough to improve black students’ graduation rates in Madison.

Walker argued that the Madison School Board could have put more money toward raising graduation rates and academic achievement if it had taken advantage of his controversial 2011 measure known as Act 10, which effectively ended collective bargaining for most public workers, instead of choosing to negotiate a contract with its teachers union for the 2015-16 school year earlier this summer.

“Voters may be shocked to learn that the African-American graduation rate in Madison (where Mary Burke is on the board) is worse than in MKE,” Walker tweeted Wednesday morning.

Burke shot back that Walker’s comments were “short sighted” and showed “a lack of knowledge” of how to improve student academic achievement.

In 2013, 53.7 percent of black students in Madison graduated in four years. In Milwaukee, the rate was 58.3 percent, according to state Department of Public Instruction data. That gap is smaller than it was in 2012, when the 4-year completion rate among black students was 55 percent in Madison and 62 percent in Milwaukee.

Overall, the 2013 graduation rates for the two largest school districts in Wisconsin was 78.3 percent in Madison and 60.6 percent in Milwaukee.

Under Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, the district has made progress in the last year toward improving overall student achievement, Burke said in a call with reporters. School Board president Arlene Silveira also said Wednesday the district has started to move the needle under Cheatham.

“Is it enough progress? No. We still have a lot of work to go, and whether you’re talking about African-American (graduation rates) in Madison or talking about (rates) in Milwaukee, they are too low,” Burke said. “But the key to improving student learning, that anyone who really looks at education knows, is the quality of the teacher in the classroom.”

Decades go by, yet the status quo reigns locally.

A few background links:

1. http://www.wisconsin2.org

2. Wisconsin K-12 Spending Dominates “Local Transfers”.

3. Mandarins vs. leaders The Economist:

Central to his thinking was a distinction between managers and leaders. Managers are people who like to do things right, he argued. Leaders are people who do the right thing. Managers have their eye on the bottom line. Leaders have their eye on the horizon. Managers help you to get to where you want to go. Leaders tell you what it is you want. He chastised business schools for focusing on the first at the expense of the second. People took MBAs, he said, not because they wanted to be middle managers but because they wanted to be chief executives. He argued that “failing organisations are usually over-managed and under-led”.

Mr Bennis believed leaders are made, not born. He taught that leadership is a skill—or, rather, a set of skills—that can be learned through hard work. He likened it to a performance. Leaders must inhabit their roles, as actors do. This means more than just learning to see yourself as others see you, though that matters, too. It means self-discovery. “The process of becoming a leader is similar, if not identical, to becoming a fully integrated human being,” he said in 2009. Mr Bennis knew whereof he spoke: he spent a small fortune on psychoanalysis as a graduate student, dabbled in “channelling” and astrology while a tenured professor and wrote a wonderful memoir, “Still Surprised”.

2009: The elimination of “revenue limits and economic conditions” from collective bargaining arbitration by Wisconsin’s Democratically controlled Assembly and Senate along with Democratic Governer Jim Doyle:

To make matters more dire, the long-term legislative proposal specifically exempts school district arbitrations from the requirement that arbitrators consider and give the greatest weight to revenue limits and local economic conditions. While arbitrators would continue to give these two factors paramount consideration when deciding cases for all other local governments, the importance of fiscal limits and local economic conditions would be specifically diminished for school district arbitration.

A political soundbyte example:

Candidate Burke’s “operating under its levy cap” soundbyte was a shrewd, easily overlooked comment, yet neglects to point out Madison’s property tax base wealth vs. Milwaukee, the District’s spending levels when state revenue limits were put in place and the local referendums that have approved additional expenditures (despite open questions on where the additional funds were spent).

I hope that she will be more detailed in future comments. We’ve had decades of soundbytes and routing around tough choices.

Madison’s challenges, while spending and staffing more than most, will continue to be under the political microscope.

I hope that we see a substantive discussion of K-12 spending, curriculum and our agrarian era structures.

The candidates on Education:

Mary Burke:

Education has always offered a way up to a good job and a better life. It’s the fabric of our communities, and it’s the key to a strong economy in the long term.

As co-founder of the AVID/TOPs program, a public-private partnership that is narrowing the achievement gap for low income students, Mary knows that every Wisconsin student prepared to work hard can realize their dreams if given the support they need. By bringing together area high schools, the Boys & Girls Club, technical colleges, businesses and the University, Mary made a real difference for students, many of whom are the first in their family to attend college. The first class graduated last spring, and in September, over 90% of those students enrolled in post-secondary education.

Mary believes Wisconsin schools should be among the best in the nation—and she knows that making historic cuts isn’t the way to do it. She’ll work every day to strengthen our public education system, from K-12 to our technical colleges and university system. Mary strongly opposed the statewide expansion of vouchers—as governor, she’ll work to stop any further expansion, and ensure that all private schools taking public dollars have real accountability measures in place.

Scott Walker:

“We trust teachers, counselors and administrators to provide our children world-class instruction, to motivate them and to keep them safe. In the vast majority of cases, education professionals are succeeding, but allowing some schools to fail means too many students being left behind. By ensuring students are learning a year’s worth of knowledge during each school year and giving schools the freedom to succeed, Wisconsin will once again become a model for the nation.” — Scott Walker

For years, Wisconsin had the distinction of being a national leader in educational reform. From the groundbreaking Milwaukee Parental Choice Program to policies aimed at expanding the role of charter schools in communities across the state, Wisconsin was viewed as a pioneer in educational innovation and creativity.

Wisconsin used to rank 3rd in fourth grade reading, now we’re in the middle of the pack at best with some of the worst achievement gaps in the nation.

Fortunately, Wisconsin has turned a corner and is once again becoming a leader in educational excellence by refocusing on success in the classroom. This has been done by pinpointing the following simple but effective reforms:

• Improving transparency
• Improving accountability
• Creating choice

We are working to restore Wisconsin’s rightful place as an education leader. Our students, our teachers, and our state’s future depend on our continued implementation of reform.

A look at District spending:

Per student spending: Milwaukee’s 2013-2014 budget: $948,345,675 for 78,461 students or $12,086/student. Budget details (PDF).

Madison plans to spend $402,464,374 for 27,186 students (some pre-k) this year or about $14,804/student, 22% more than Milwaukee. Details.

And, finally, 2010: WEAC: $1.57 million for four senators.

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

Members of MTI’s Board of Directors, Bargaining Committee and Union staff greeted the District’s 200+ newly hired teachers at New Teacher Orientation last Monday. Sixty- five have already joined the union.

MTI Executive Director John Matthews addressed the District’s new teachers during Monday’s gathering. In doing so, Matthews provided a brief history of the Union, its reputation of negotiating outstanding Collective Bargaining Agreements which provide both employment security and economic security, and in explaining the threat to both, given Act 10, said all MTI members would need to pull together to preserve the Madison Metropolitan School District as a quality place to teach.

Molly Beck

A new way to evaluate teachers, known as the Wisconsin Educator Effectiveness System, begins this school year across Wisconsin — giving equal weight to teachers’ performance in the classroom as judged by principals and student academic achievement.

The evaluations are mandated as part of Wisconsin’s waiver to the No Child Left Behind requirements. Under the program, each teacher sets a student performance goal.

Madison Teachers Inc. president Mike Lipp said teachers welcome the new evaluations as a way to improve their instruction, noting that some longtime teachers haven’t been reviewed in decades.

Now, principals and assistant principals will need to evaluate each of their teachers in a more extensive way once every three years — the same for principals, who will be evaluated by Cheatham and other administrative staff.

Principals have received training to help them balance their new load of administrative duties with what’s already on their plate, including working with parents, Cheatham said.

Richard Kallenberg & Halley Potter:

ALTHOUGH the leaders of teachers unions and charter schools are often in warring camps today, the original vision for charter schools came from Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

In a 1988 address, Mr. Shanker outlined an idea for a new kind of public school where teachers could experiment with fresh and innovative ways of reaching students. Mr. Shanker estimated that only one-fifth of American students were well served by traditional classrooms. In charter schools, teachers would be given the opportunity to draw upon their expertise to create high-performing educational laboratories from which the traditional public schools could learn.

Mr. Shanker was particularly inspired by a 1987 visit to a public school in Cologne, Germany, which stood out for a couple of reasons. Teams of teachers had considerable say in how the school was run. They made critical decisions about what and how to teach and stayed with each class of students for six years. And unlike most German schools, which are rigidly tracked, the Cologne school had students with a mix of abilities, family incomes and ethnic origins. Turkish and Moroccan immigrants were educated alongside native German students in mixed-ability groups. Sixty percent of the school’s students scored high enough on exams to be admitted to four-year colleges, compared with 27 percent of students nationally.

Mr. Shanker argued that charter schools could help reinvigorate the twin promises of American public education: to promote social mobility for working-class children and social cohesion among America’s increasingly diverse populations. There is considerable research to back up this vision. Richard M. Ingersoll, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has found that where teachers have more say in how their school is run, the school climate improves and teachers stay longer — trends that have been independently associated with increased student learning. And data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in Mathematics show that low-income fourth graders who attend economically integrated schools are as much as two years ahead of low-income students stuck in high-poverty schools.

Alan Borsuk

In recent years on this Sunday, the last before most kids start school, I have offered thoughts on what is new and worth watching on the school scene in Wisconsin and particularly in Milwaukee.

I started to make up a list for this year and was struck by how, um, boring it was. Permit me to try a different approach, namely, a debate with myself (I win!) over this proposition:

Wisconsin education is suffering a serious case of the blahs.

In defense of this statement, I point to how few new schools, new programs and initiatives there are this year, particularly in Milwaukee.

With its large voucher and charter sectors and with Milwaukee Public Schools frequently undergoing changes, you could count on Milwaukee to offer new developments each fall in recent years.

This year, there’s not much. A few programs are being launched or growing, such as the addition of parent centers in many Milwaukee schools that didn’t have them until now. But it’s really kind of status quo out there. And it’s a status quo in which less than one in five MPS students are rated as proficient or better in reading.

Consider my snapshot summary of the three big sectors of Milwaukee schools:

Unfortunately, status quo governance has become the norm in Madison and generally across the Badger State. Our agrarian era K-12 governance structures persist, mostly on the fumes of the past. Yet, spending continues to grow, with Madison’s $15,000+ / student double the national average, despite long term disastrous reading results. A 2012 comparison with the Austin, TX school district is worth a look.

Wall Street Journal:

1. Set up a student bank account.

Entering college comes with many new responsibilities, including being accountable for your money, whether acquired from your parents or from your own efforts. Setting up a bank account is a good place to start! Keep track on a regular basis of what goes in and what goes out. Balance a checkbook! Also, make sure you understand all of the account fees and their justification before signing up. In addition, setting up an account will make it easy for your parents to send you money; the best way to do this is to find out what banks have branches located on your college campus, and then see if any of them also have a branch in your hometown.

2. Learn to budget your expenses and don’t overspend.

Make a budget and stick to it. Here are some small ways to get the most out of what you have:When you go out to eat, order an appetizer. Appetizers are usually meant to be shared by a party of four, yet are cheaper than an entree.

Buy as much food as you can in bulk (from Costco, COST 0.00% if you can), and don’t waste any of it. If fruit starts to go bad, then freeze it and make it into a smoothie later.

Peggy Noonan:

Tenderfoot is in big sky country. On the drive from the airport to the ranch, the Tetons, a range of great splendor and dignity that Tenderfoot had thought were two mountains called Grand, are spread before her. It is dusk. To the left the Snake River curls softly against the road. To the right, open fields, working ranches, herds of buffalo. In the air the scent of sage. The sky is huge, a dome of softening blue. All this is expected—this is how the West looks—yet the real thing startles and overwhelms. You stare dumbly at the wonder of it.

“God’s country,” her host says, not as a brag but with awe still in his voice after more than 20 years here.

Tenderfoot’s host, a friend of many years, a substantial and numeric man, tells her Wyoming facts. There are fewer people in this state than any other. (“They must be lonely,” she thinks.)

Tenderfoot doesn’t really like to be in a place where there aren’t a lot of . . . witnesses. She’s from the city and knows the canyons of downtown, the watering holes of the theater district. She knows her Brooklyn, her Long Island, her Jersey, is a walker in the city and a lost rube in the country. She is here because she loves her friends and will go far to see them. She does have a relationship with the American West and does in fact love it, but it is the West as mediated by John Ford, Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry. She doesn’t really know the real one.

Welcome to campus, class of 2018!

You’ve survived the modern college admissions rat race and wrangled your mother into buying you that overpriced shower caddie at Bed Bath & Beyond. BBBY 0.00% It would seem the hard part is over, but not so fast.

Sure, you’ve crossed your t’s and dotted your i’s, but you haven’t yet learned to “check your privilege.” That’s what orientation is for. Perhaps you’re only now learning that white is a synonym for racist. Brace yourselves for lectures all week on how to spot diversity and workshops about how to ensure your room is a safe space.

Here are some tips for surviving PCU, the politically correct university of your choice:

Your course catalog may include offerings like “Transnational Transgender Social Formations: Political Economies and Health Disparities” (at Columbia) or “Romantic Extremities: Madness, Revolution, Sublimity, and the Celtic Fringe” (Wesleyan) or “Made from Scrap: The Poetics and Politics of Salvage in the Americas” (Berkeley). If you don’t know what any of that means, you’re not alone.

Stick to classes where you understand every word in the course title. Subjects with two syllables are a good bet: Econ. Latin. Great Books. Con Law. Plato. Austen. Milton. Dante. Nietzsche.

Sue Shellenbarger:

One great way to make yourself cringe is to watch video of yourself as a teenager. If only you could go back in time and give yourself a little advice to ease the way forward.

Young adults from the York School Class of 2004 in Monterey, Calif., were confronted with their teenage hopes and dreams when they gathered earlier this month for their 10-year high school reunion. Each viewed a video “message to my future self” recorded more than a decade ago during senior year. The videos—mostly about a minute long—are a 15-year tradition at York, a private high school with a diverse enrollment of 230 students, 35% to 40% of them on financial aid.

While the videos elicited plenty of laughter and eye-rolling, the 14 members of York’s 53-student Class of 2004 who attended the reunion saw value in pausing to revisit goals set long ago. Many found that their teenage selves had sketched out achievable road maps—though they’d underestimated the confidence and patience needed to pursue them.

The members of the York Class of 2004 were unusually well-equipped to achieve their ambitions. Nearly all York students attend college and 83% graduate in four years, more than twice the national average. Still, they exited college into a recession, and most of them had trouble building the careers they wanted.

T. Keung Hui

North Carolina’s home schools are growing at a record rate and are now estimated to have more students than the state’s private schools.

New figures from the state show there were 60,950 home schools in the 2013-14 school year, a 14.3 percent increase from the prior year and a 27 percent increase from two years ago. The state estimates there are 98,172 home-schoolers, marking the first time that North Carolina’s home-school enrollment has surpassed the number in private schools.

Last school year, there were 95,768 students at the state’s private schools, a total that’s been dropping annually since the 2007-08 school year.

“If you’re dissatisfied with public education, you really have two routes,” said Kevin McClain, president of North Carolinians For Home Education, a statewide support group. “You can send your child to a private school – which is really expensive – or you can home-school. The economy means that, for many people, you home-school.”

Emily Badger, via a kind reader:

In the beginning, when they knew just where to find everyone, they pulled the children out of their classrooms.

They sat in any quiet corner of the schools they could claim: the sociologists from Johns Hopkins and, one at a time, the excitable first-graders. Monica Jaundoo, whose parents never made it past the eighth grade. Danté Washington, a boy with a temper and a dad who drank too much. Ed Klein, who came from a poor white part of town where his mother sold cocaine.

They talked with the sociologists about teachers and report cards, about growing up to become rock stars or police officers. For many of the children, this seldom happened in raucous classrooms or overwhelmed homes: a quiet, one-on-one conversation with an adult eager to hear just about them. “I have this special friend,” Jaundoo thought as a 6-year-old, “who’s only talking to me.”

Later, as the children grew and dispersed, some falling out of the school system and others leaving the city behind, the conversations took place in McDonald’s, in public libraries, in living rooms or lock-ups. The children — 790 of them, representative of the Baltimore public school system’s first-grade class in 1982 — grew harder to track as the patterns among them became clearer.

Margaret Sullivan:

Last year, as a college freshman, Jack Fischer decided to put some casual observations to the test.

He had noticed during his college search that public colleges and universities seemed to get short shrift in many publications, including The Times, while the Harvards and Dartmouths of the world were celebrated and constantly mentioned.

As the 19-year-old recalls: “It just seemed like there wasn’t much being said about a lot of public institutions, especially in light of the intense coverage of similar private schools. I don’t know who said it, but there’s a quote that goes something like ‘The most exciting thing isn’t ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny …’.”

Molly Beck, via a kind reader:

One in three black students was chronically absent from school during the 2013-14 school year, according to a Madison School District report.

Thirty-six percent of the district’s black students have an attendance rate lower than 90 percent. That corresponds to missing, on average, one half day of school every week, or 18 days during the year. The rate has remained steady for the past three school years.

Overall, 20 percent of students were chronically absent last school year, up from 19 percent during the two previous school years, according to the report, which was presented to the School Board on Monday. The district’s total attendance rate was 93 percent.

Nearly one in three students from low-income households was chronically absent compared to one in 10 students who didn’t qualify for free or reduced-price meals.

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham and board members said the data illustrate the need to further emphasize school attendance — especially as the district seeks to close the achievement gap between white and minority students and as it works to increase academic rigor in middle and high schools.

“On average the district does pretty well, but we have subgroups that we simply need to be sure they are in school more,” said James Howard, board vice president. “You can’t learn if you’re not in school — it’s just that simple.”

How to Get Kids to Class: To Keep Poor Students in School, Provide Social Services

FOR the 16 million American children living below the federal poverty line, the start of a new school year should be reason to celebrate. Summer is no vacation when your parents are working multiple jobs or looking for one. Many kids are left to fend for themselves in neighborhoods full of gangs, drugs and despair. Given the hardships at home, poor kids might be expected to have the best attendance records, if only for the promise of a hot meal and an orderly classroom.

But it doesn’t usually work out that way. According to the education researchers Robert Balfanz and Vaughan Byrnes at Johns Hopkins, children living in poverty are by far the most likely to be chronically absent from school (which is generally defined as missing at least 10 percent of class days each year).

Amazingly, the federal government does not track absenteeism, but the state numbers are alarming. In Maryland, for example, 31 percent of high school students eligible for the federal lunch program had been chronically absent; for students above the income threshold, the figure was 12 percent.

Thanks to groundbreaking research compiled by Hedy Nai-Lin Chang, the director at Attendance Works, we have ample proof that everything else being equal, chronically absent students have lower G.P.A.s, lower test scores and lower graduation rates than their peers who attend class regularly.

The pattern often starts early. Last year in New Mexico, a third-grade teacher contacted the local affiliate of Communities in Schools, the national organization that I run, for help with a student who had 25 absences in just the first semester. After several home visits, we found that 10 people were living in her two-bedroom apartment, including the student’s mother, who had untreated mental health issues. The little girl often got lost in the shuffle, with no clean clothes to wear and no one to track her progress. Nor was there anything like a quiet place to do homework.

Bill Glauber

“I’m a conformist,” said Henry Tyson, superintendent of St. Marcus Lutheran School. “I like rules and I like order.”

To hear that Tyson considers himself a conformist is a surprise, given his background and his mission.

How this British-born educator came to Milwaukee is the stuff of chance, circumstance and an intense personal faith to live, work and educate children in the inner city.

Tyson’s ability to shake up the education establishment in recent years has made him a target of critics, who see him as an interloper.

Even those who are not intimately involved in the hothouse of education politics in Milwaukee may have heard of Tyson’s so-far unsuccessful quest to buy empty Milwaukee Public Schools buildings and expand the private voucher school he oversees.

On Friday, St. Marcus announced a deal to lease space for an early childhood education center at a non-MPS building, the Aurora Weier Educational Center building at 2669 N. Richards St.

The move marks a truce, of sorts. Yet the fight likely isn’t over. For his part, Tyson has been stung by criticism.

“What absolutely shocked me is that I became the nemesis of public education,” Tyson said. “Like I have always articulated, we will not move this city forward enough, or at least significantly, until the fighting stops.”

Last week, the fall term began at St. Marcus’ main campus at 2215 N. Palmer St. The sparkling facility buzzed with the energy of 730 students in grades K-8 and more than 100 staff. Nearly all of those students — 93% — attend on a taxpayer-paid voucher. The student body is 89% African-American, Tyson said.

Listen to an interview with Henry Tyson.

Molly Beck:

Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham has “brought a fresh lens to the district,” and exceeded the School Board’s expectations, according to her first evaluation by the board.

The work completed in the district under Cheatham is “moving in the right direction,” board members wrote in a seven-page evaluation.

Cheatham was hired in the spring of 2013.

There will be no changes to Cheatham’s pay or benefits associated with the evaluation, according to district spokeswoman Rachel Strauch-Nelson. Cheatham is currently paid $235,000 annually.

Cheatham exceeded expectations in the areas of organizational climate and culture, instructional leadership, talent performance and management and in relations with the Madison community.

“You stepped into the leadership role of an organization experiencing many stresses,” board members wrote. “You did not shy away from taking control and setting direction.”

Communication with board members, budget and operations management were areas where Cheatham “met expectations.”

Much more on Superintendent Reviews, here.

Alan Borsuk:

Grit — it’s been a hot term in education. To succeed, students need grit, meaning determination, persistence, the capacity to deal with challenges, and resilience when something doesn’t go right.

Schools need grit, too. That’s true in any circumstance, but it’s especially true for schools starting up in places where the challenges are bigger.

Sure enough, grit is one of the character traits highlighted on a wall near the entrance of the Milwaukee Environmental Sciences School, 6600 W. Melvina St., which used to be the Sixty-Fifth Street School of Milwaukee Public Schools.

The goal of opening a school such as this is to add something better and different to the education scene. But launching a school is tough for something like 10,000 reasons, and growing it to fulfill its goals is even harder.

A year ago, I singled out three new schools that I thought were especially worth following. I should have made Milwaukee Environmental Sciences the fourth. As a new school year gets started, I decided to check up on the four — and the reports seem fairly encouraging.

David Perry:

Until a few weeks ago, Steven G. Salaita was on his way to join the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a tenured professor in its American Indian studies program. He had left his position at Virginia Tech and was prepared to move across the country with his family. All that was left was the usually pro-forma step in which the chancellor sends the appointment to the university’s board for approval. In this case, shockingly, Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise decided to block his appointment. The alleged reason was that he was too rude when criticizing Israel on Twitter.

This case has arrived in the wake of numerous others in which online speech has resulted in censure and, in some cases, the enactment of new policies intended to restrict public speech. The decision to void Salaita’s hiring over criticizing Israel, already a polarizing topic in American academic culture, escalates the situation.

I come to this topic not as a partisan in the specifics of Salaita’s situation but as an advocate for faculty engagement with the public. Over the last year, I have written periodic columns for The Chronicle about the ways that academics can and should write for general audiences. Recently, I even suggested that “sustained public engagement” of any sort should count for hiring, tenure, and promotion.

Tracey Meares:

Ad ay after his visit to Ferguson, Missouri, Attorney General Eric H. Holder stated in a press conference that, “History simmers beneath the surface in more communities than just Ferguson.” To what history was he referring? Many assumed General Holder meant the longstanding tensions between the mostly black residents of Ferguson and the mostly white police force, but I believe General Holder meant a deeper and broader history that goes well beyond policing. The anger in Ferguson is not just in reaction to shabby treatment by the police, but also the city’s housing, educational, and other civic institutions.

The history of racial mistrust in Ferguson can be found in the legacy of residential segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area, enforced from the early to the middle twentieth century through mechanisms such as racially restrictive covenants, zoning laws, realtors agreements, and assessors ratings, as research by Professor Colin Gordon demonstrates. Because of these longstanding policies, black Ferguson residents today are disproportionately renters without a strong political stake in the town’s governance and geographically concentrated in areas without economic power.

Teresa Watanabe:

Michael Davis experienced firsthand the negative effects of campus discipline when he received a police citation for tardiness in middle school and later was removed from class for failing to wear the school uniform at Manual Arts High in South Los Angeles.

After years of fighting for change, Michael and others Tuesday celebrated the unveiling of a groundbreaking move by Los Angeles Unified school police to stop giving citations for fighting, petty theft and other minor offenses. Students instead will be referred to counseling and other programs.

“So often students are just thrown to the cops and put in handcuffs without getting to the root of their problems,” said Michael, a 17-year-old senior. “This new policy is such an accomplishment and will definitely make a difference.”

Ned Resnikoff:

Hungry students don’t enter the on-campus food pantry at New York’s LaGuardia Community College; instead they sit in an office in the college’s financial services center while a staff member or volunteer runs upstairs to get their food, bringing them unmarked grocery bags to take home.

Little more than an unlabeled office, containing a series of unmarked file cabinets, the pantry goes undetected to most – and that’s the point.

Dr. Michael Baston, the college’s vice president of Student Affairs, says the whole process is designed to be invisible.

“We did this because we feel like it is a stigma reducing strategy,” he said. “Because we want students to feel like whatever the resource they need to sustain themselves, that would be available to them.”

Battling stigma is a challenge for food pantries of all stripes, but the struggle appears to be especially pronounced on college campuses. After all, universities are supposed to be islands of relative privilege. If you can afford to spend thousands of dollars a year on a college education, the thinking goes, you can’t possibly be hungry enough to require emergency food assistance.

David Bromwich:

Andrew Rossi’s documentary Ivory Tower prods us to think about the crisis of higher education. But is there a crisis? Expensive gambles, unforeseen losses, and investments whose soundness has yet to be decided have raised the price of a college education so high that today on average it costs eleven times as much as it did in 1978. Underlying the anxiety about the worth of a college degree is a suspicion that old methods and the old knowledge will soon be eclipsed by technology.

Indeed, as the film accurately records, our education leaders seem to believe technology is a force that—independent of human intervention—will help or hurt the standing of universities in the next generation. Perhaps, they think, it will perform the work of natural selection by weeding out the ill-adapted species of teaching and learning. A potent fear is that all but a few colleges and universities will soon be driven out of business.

It used to be supposed that a degree from a respected state or private university brought with it a job after graduation, a job with enough earning power to start a life away from one’s parents. But parents now are paying more than ever for college; and the jobs are not reliably waiting at the other end. “Even with a master’s,” says an articulate young woman in the film, a graduate of Hunter College, “I couldn’t get a job cleaning toilets at a local hotel.” The colleges are blamed for the absence of jobs, though for reasons that are sometimes obscure. They teach too many things, it is said, or they impart knowledge that is insufficiently useful; they ask too much of students or they ask too little. Above all, they are not wired in to the parts of the economy in which desirable jobs are to be found.

Patrick Jakeway

The classic novel Brave New World describes a future in which people have lost all of their liberty and in which they have become drugged robots obedient to a central authority. It also details how this control was first established. First, the rulers had to erase all history and all the people’s memory of a time before their bondage.

Today, the history of George Washington’s leadership has been erased in the new Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History test/curriculum, taking effect in the fall of 2014. The College Board, the organization that publishes the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) and AP tests, has also decided to completely blot out Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, among others. In this newly revised course, General Washington merits one fleeting mention in one sentence, in reference to his Farewell Address.

American history without George Washington? That is like the Beatles without Paul McCartney or the Super Bowl without Vince Lombardi. A former AP U.S. history teacher, Larry Krieger, provides insightful analysis of these sweeping changes here. The rebuttal of Trevor Parker, senior vice president for AP programs at the College Board, can be found here, and Mr. Krieger’s defense here. As an aside, it should be noted that the College Board’s new president, David Coleman, is also one of the major architects of Common Core.

The 98-page College Board AP U.S. History curriculum framework can be read here. Mr. Krieger’s analysis makes clear that this deletion was by design and not by accident. The new College Board U.S. history defines the USA as a racist, genocidal, imperialist nation. Their whole point is that America is bad so of course they leave America’s heroes out.

Some examples of this theme can be observed in the “Key Concepts” of the framework enumerated in each historical period as key guidelines for teachers:

Period 1: 1491-1607

Key Concept 1.1. Before the arrival of Europeans, native populations in North America developed a wide variety of social, political and economic structures based in part on interactions and each other. (Page 31)

Translation: American Indians lived in a natural state of peace in harmony with nature before the Europeans arrived. No mention of brutal inter-tribal wars and practices such as scalping.

Period 2: 1607-1754

Key Concept 2.1 Differences in imperial goals, cultures and the North American environments that different empires confronted led Europeans to develop diverse patterns of colonization.

Section II, A: English colonies attracted both males and females who rarely intermarried with native people or Africans, leading to the development of a rigid racial hierarchy. (Page 35)

Translation: The colonizing of the New World was one large imperialist, racist scheme. No mention of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower seeking religious freedom here.

Key Concept 2.2 European colonization efforts in North America stimulated intercultural contact and intensified conflict between the various groups of colonizers and native peoples.

Section II, A: “Continuing contact with Europeans increased the flow of trade goods and diseases into and out of native communities. Teacher’s example: population collapse of Catawba Nation” (Page 38)

Translation: The imperial efforts at cultural conquest resulted in genocide of the Native Americans. Left unmentioned are the millions of people who fled European wars in the 1600s, such as the “Pennsylvania Dutch” settlers fleeing the 30 Years’ War in Germany. Not exactly an imperialist effort.

Section II, B: “The resulting independence movement was fueled by colonial elites, as well as some grassroots movements.” (Page 42)

Translation: This war was mainly driven by a lot of well-connected, self-interested rich guys. Apparently, the overthrow of a monarchy by citizen militiamen seems not to merit as overthrowing “elites.”

Sample Test Questions:

Question 1: Some historians have argued that the American Revolution was not revolutionary in nature. (Page 114)

Sample Good Answers (Page115):

“Individuals who were wealthy, powerful and influential before the event continued to possess wealth, power and influence later. George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson could serve as examples.”

Translation: The poor continued to be oppressed by the rich. George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were rich bad guys.

“Other good responses might analyze the absence of revolutionary change for groups such as women, slaves, and Native Americans following the Revolution.” (Page 115)

Translation: The Revolution was actually bad. The Founding Fathers were racist and sexist.

So what does this “brave new history” hold for our children?

After suffering the blizzards of Valley Forge, improbably enduring for five years against the world’s superpower at that time, Great Britain, and prevailing at Yorktown, the victorious General Washington rejected all power after the War of Independence, rebuked those who would have made him king, and simply retired to his farm in Virginia. How could the College Board convince our children that our country is founded upon and hell-bent on conquest after learning about the father of our country? The answer is they could not. So the College Board had to erase the story of George Washington’s inimitable life.

The College Board explicitly instructs teachers to teach the history of the United States from the first settlers through the Declaration of Independence and into the present as being one long continuous period of racist, imperialist conflict. Thomas Jefferson is omitted from the framework. Yet “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” captured the spirit and hearts of a people yearning for freedom. In the words of John Adams, “the Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.” You cannot teach young people that our nation is inherently racist and also conduct an in-depth review the historical impact of Thomas Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration of Independence, up to and including its influence on the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. So Thomas Jefferson had to be erased. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also was deleted.

After gaining our liberty, James Madison was one of the key people responsible for the creation of the world’s first limited government of the people, by the people and for the people. This explains leaving James Madison out of this “brave new history.” You can’t omit the founding of the American republic based on individual liberty and limited government with a Bill of Rights if you discuss James Madison’s work. So “the Father of the Constitution” had to be erased.

This is more than just an academic spat among history teachers. America today is the freest, most prosperous land the world has ever known. Everything everyone has in this country exists because of the original gift of liberty bequeathed to us by General George Washington and our Founding Fathers. Let’s also not forget that hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people around the globe owe their current freedom to the United States of America and, by extension, to our Founding Fathers.

Benjamin Franklin was asked a question upon exiting Independence Hall after finishing the Constitution. “What kind of government have you given us, Dr. Franklin?” He replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” If your child never learns about Benjamin Franklin’s story or about how the Revolutionary War was won or about the Gettysburg Address or about the D-Day landing at Normandy (all erased in this “brave new history”), then he will never know that it is up to us to keep our Republic. It is for us the living never to forget our forefathers, who fought and sacrificed for us that we might live a life of liberty. It is for us to be dedicated here to the unfinished work they so nobly advanced.

Erasing the Founding Fathers from the premier U.S. history course for secondary students is unconscionable and intolerable. We must protect them from being erased. The list of people who make up the College Board’s Board of Trustees can be found in the Appendix below, listed alphabetically by state. Many of them are employed by public secondary school systems or state universities.

I suggest the following course of action:

If you are a parent of high school age students, boycott AP U.S. History with them together, and do not enroll.
Call-write your governor and state representatives and demand that they pass a resolution to drop the AP U.S. History course offering until the curriculum change is reversed.
Tell your state representatives that they should require each member of the Board of Trustees of the College Board who is a public employee (see list below) to renounce the new AP U.S. History course curriculum and vote to abolish it as a condition of his or her continued employment.
Consider the ACT as an alternative to the SAT for your college-bound teenager. The SAT has a dominant market position and has a powerful hold on the American mind as “the” vehicle to college. The security of this dominant position has bred arrogance in the College Board. I would not advocate that someone put his or her child’s future educational opportunities at risk; however, nowadays, universities readily accept both the ACT and SAT.

Our national anthem ends with a question. The College Board has answered and will be directing the teachers of America to instruct your children and mine that the USA is the land of the imperialist and the home of the racist. Now, you might ask yourself: will that star-spangled banner yet wave over the land of the free, or will it hang limp over the Brave New World? As for me and my children, I can confirm that the spirit of ’76 will not be erased.

Appendix

College Board of Trustees:

Arizona: Karen Francis-Begay, Asst. Vice President, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

California: Nathan Brostrom, Executive Vice President, University of California, Oakland, CA

California: Karen Cooper, Director of Financial Aid, Stanford University

Connecticut: Caesar Storlazzi, Director of Financial Aid, Yale University

D.C.: Daniel J. Rodas, Isaacson Miller

Florida: Luis Martinez-Fernandez, Professor of History, University of Central Florida

Hawaii: Belinda W. Chung, Director of College Counseling, St. Andrew’s Priory School, Honolulu

Indiana: Pamela T. Horne, Associate Vice Provost, Purdue University, Lafayette, IN

Indiana: Mary Nucciarone, Director of Financial Aid, Notre Dame University

Illinois: Margareth Etienne, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois

Illinois: Von Mansfield, Superintendent, Homewood-Flossmor High School, Flossmor, Illinois

Minnesota: Pam Paulson, Senior Director, Perpich Center for Arts Education, Golden Valley, MN

New Mexico: Margie Huerta, Special Assistant to the President, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM

New York: Shun Fang Chang, Assistant Principal, Bronx High School of Science, Bronx, NY

North Carolina: Shirley Ort, Vice Chair, Associate Provost, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Oklahoma: Paul W. Sechrist, Oklahoma City Community College

Pennsylvania: Maghan Keita, Chair, Villanova University, Philadelphia

Pennsylvania: Daniel Porterfield, President, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA

Rhode Island: Jim Tilton, Director of Financial Aid, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

South Carolina: Scott Verzyl, Associate Vice President, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC

Texas: Terry Grier, Superintendent, Houston Independent School District, Houston, TX

Texas: Michael Sorrell, President, Paul Quinn College, Dallas, TX

Texas: Paul G. Weaver, District Director of Counseling, Plano Independent School District, Plano, TX

Washington: Philip Ballinger, Associate Vice Provost, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

Washington: Chio Flores, Assistant Dean of Students, Washington State University, Pullman, WA

via Will Fitzhugh.

Bill Korach:

Will Fitzhugh, Publisher of The Concord Review, told The Report Card: “Exceptional students are often left to their own devices to develop their unique gifts. TCR surveys show that public school teachers don’t have the time to cultivate exceptional student. So we are announcing a coaching program to help these students develop superb writing and research skills.”

Mr. Fitzhugh should know, fully 42% of students published in The Concord Review are accepted at Ivy League schools and in addition, other top schools like The University of Chicago, and Stanford. Harvard agrees with Mr. Fitzhugh:
William R. Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Harvard College, has written: “All of us here in the Admissions Office are big fans of The Concord Review.”

Caroline Porter:

In a conciliatory move to appease opponents of recent testing policies, the U.S. Department of Education will give some states leeway in tying teacher evaluations to students’ test scores for the coming school year.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan made the announcement during a back-to-school meeting on Thursday with teachers at a District of Columbia public school.

In a blog post summarizing the news, Mr. Duncan said “the bottom line is that educators deserve strong support as our schools make vital, and urgently needed, changes.”

After Congress failed to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, the Obama administration granted waivers from the legislation to 43 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. Those waivers require that states make certain reforms, including tying student test scores to teacher evaluations.

Under the new policy, states can request a one-year delay in implementing the new evaluations, as long as they agree schools will collect student test scores and growth metrics and that schools will still share those metrics with teachers.

Not every state with a waiver will be able to take advantage of this delay, which only applies to the some 40 states that are transitioning to new tests this spring.

Hannah Gold:

By the time I was 7 years old I knew drugs were bad. I didn’t need a parent to sit me down on their knee and tell me this because Saturday morning cartoons were frequently interrupted by an advertisement brought to me by Partnership for a Drug-Free America in which an 18-year-old Rachael Leigh Cook smashed an egg, and then her entire kitchen, and told me this was so.

I didn’t know this mid-90s commercial was a revamp of an even more famous 1987 advertisement featuring a white, male authority figure and that same sinister egg. I didn’t know about the war on drugs, but I knew that Cook had the haircut I wanted. I couldn’t have known from this advertisement that kids not too much older than myself, swept up in the hysterical rhetoric of an inner-city epidemic of drugs and violence, were being locked up in droves, and that increasingly, these were children of color. The advertisement said drugs crack kids’ brains on stovetops; the other, silent reality was that the war on drugs cracked kids’ brains in solitary.

Make a minimum contribution to Truthout and receive Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Obtain it by clicking here.

That’s still the reality today. In the United States, it tends to be the case that the real wars we’re fighting are behind walls. The war on children has been one of those, and is, perhaps, the country’s greatest shame.

According to Nell Bernstein’s new book, Burning Down the House, there are currently 66,332 young people confined in juvenile facilities, two-thirds of them in long-term placement. Her impressive and immersive new book focuses on the criminalization of American young people, from the mid-80s when the trend first exploded to the present day when the United States incarcerates more of its kids than any other industrialized nation.

Ry Rivard:

Over much of the past half-century, state governors have helped keep public college tuition artificially low during gubernatorial election years, according to a new peer-reviewed article. But the study suggests more is at play than a governor’s own career.

The study, published in the June issue of Empirical Economics by Kent State University Professor C. Lockwood Reynolds, found inflation-adjusted tuition is 1.5 percent lower in gubernatorial election years than in other years.

“If you’re a sitting governor up for re-election you would prefer that voters are receiving good signals about the state of the state,” Reynolds said. “And one of those might be tuition at a four-year institutions, because it’s announced pretty close to an election, and lots of people want to send their kids to college, and they probably don’t want to pay for it.”

For a natural control group, Reynolds, an economist, looked at private college tuition during the same period, from 1972 to 2003. It didn’t follow the same pattern as in-state tuition sticker prices at all. Instead, he found that private college tuition went up slightly more in gubernatorial election years than in non-election years, although the percentage increase was statistically insignificant.

Pew Trusts

This report provides a first-of-its kind analysis of the costs and characteristics of state employee health plans, and offers a nationwide benchmark against which states can be compared.

Collectively, states spent about $31 billion to insure 2.7 million employee households in 2013, a slight uptick in spending from 2011 and 2012 after adjusting for inflation. The average per-employee per-month premium for employees’ and dependents’ coverage was $963. States paid $808 (84 percent) of the total on average, and employees covered the remaining $155 (16 percent). However, this average masks sharp differences across the states, due to factors such as plan richness, average household size, provider price and physician practice patterns, as well as the age and health status of enrollees.

Edgar Mendez:

The goal in Wauwatosa was to better attract and retain top-flight educators; the method was to change the way teachers are compensated.

A new compensation model, approved in February, calls for teachers to earn anywhere between $40,000 and $80,700 a year, based largely on their performance.

But teachers had concerns: Would principals alone determine the initial salary they’d start at in the new model? Did years of service matter at all anymore? Or was everything based on performance evaluations?

Those concerns still linger as Wauwatosa and other Wisconsin districts roll out new teacher compensation models this fall, thrusting the issue of teacher pay back in the spotlight.

The new compensation models are a result of Act 10, the legislation passed three years ago that limited collective bargaining and allowed districts to untether themselves from salary schedules in union contracts that called for pay increases based solely on years spent teaching and on higher-education credits.

Some districts, such as Hartland-Lakeside and Cedarburg, were early adopters of new performance-based models resembling what people often see in the private sector.

But many more districts are debuting new models this year. The timing coincides with a new statewide educator evaluation system rolling out this year.

Nazmi Al-Masri:

Over the one-year period from July 2013 to July 2014, I was supposed to participate in six international academic conferences and meetings as a partner in four international projects: three EU-funded projects (two from Erasmus-Mundus, one Tempus) and one British Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project. Because of the siege and the current war, I could not participate in any of these academic gatherings, which were held in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Jordan, and Cyprus. Many other colleagues have similar problems.

The Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) is currently a partner in four Erasmus Mundus exchange projects and about 50 students and staff members have won full scholarships to join about 30 universities in 14 European countries including the UK, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Greece, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Cyprus, Belgium, Austria and Czech Republic. All these grant holders were supposed to get visas in July and join their orientation and study programs in August or September, but it seems this is not going to happen.

On Saturday 2nd August 2014, the Islamic university of Gaza (IUG) was deliberately attacked as described by the Israeli “Defense” Minister Moshe Yaalon in a press conference held on the same day. The arts and education faculties, the university personnel and finance departments and other departments were reduced to rubble in a matter of minutes. This is not the first time Israel has destroyed higher education facilities in Gaza: in December 2008, two other buildings hosting the engineering and science faculties were leveled to the ground.

Maggie McGrath:

Despite the windowless, bunker-like atmosphere inside the Erie conference room of the Sheraton in downtown Chicago, Galen Graber has to be impressed by his audience: a swath of the 1,500 top admissions and financial aid officials from 635 different schools who have gathered to set policies that determine which kids get into which college and how much money they’ll receive.

Cutting to the chase, Graber, a consultant, launches by taking a poll: “How many of you would say that the primary motivation for offering students merit scholarships is to reward academic achievement?”

Not a single person raises his or her hand.

That response goes a long way to explain college tuition rates that have risen 12% in the last decade while median household income has declined 6% over the same period. And why student debt levels have hit $1.2 trillion, a burden that surpasses even U.S. household credit card debt.

Elite universities like Harvard, Stanford and others on the top of the FORBES list exist in their own orbit–they admit students without factoring in need, their multibillion-dollar endowments providing generous grants for the middle-class and poor. (Get into any Ivy League school with a family income of less than $60,000 and you can pretty much expect a free ride.)

Alexei Koseff:

Last spring, representatives from the University of California, Davis, made 20 trips to China to encourage admitted students to accept their offer to study in the United States.

The director of admissions at UC Santa Cruz met one young man in New Delhi, India, who had traveled hundreds of miles to make the case that he belonged at the coastal university thousands of miles from his home.

Overseas students interested in UC Riverside can request a Skype appointment with one of six international admissions counselors.

Pushed to look for alternative sources of revenue amid the deep budget cuts of the economic recession, schools in the UC system increasingly are recruiting nonresident applicants, who likely will make up a fifth of all freshman for fall 2014.

Even as state funding has begun to recover, campuses rely on substantial additional fees paid by out-of-state and international students who have brought in hundreds of millions of dollars for the university system in recent years.

Despite criticism from some parents and politicians, admissions officers at UC’s nine undergraduate campuses defend the shift as a mutually beneficial strategy, allowing them to broaden the undergraduate population with diverse perspectives and subsidize more seats for California students.

Walter Robinson, who directs undergraduate admissions at UC Davis, said it’s a necessary strategy in the current higher education environment.

University of California-Berkeley:

Everyone notices the academic superstars and failures, but what about the tens of millions of American teens straddling these two extremes? A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, has spotlighted a high school subculture that has made an art of slacking – even with ample educational resources – and may be destined to perpetuate the nation’s struggling lower-middle class.

UC Berkeley sociologist Michele Rossi studied white teenage girls in their last year of a well-funded high school. What she found was a group she dubbed “getting-by girls,” whose coping strategies include paying attention in class, placating teachers and other authority figures, copying one another’s schoolwork or cheating, avoiding challenges and bringing home B-average report cards.

But while getting-by girls put in just enough effort to meet the demands of schoolwork, athletics, school clubs and partying, their practice of sufficing keeps them from making the most of the academic resources at their disposal. The U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that reading, math and social science scores among 17-year-olds have flatlined since the 1980s while scores among middle school and elementary students have risen. Peer groups and school culture are said to have a major impact on academic achievement, particularly in high school, and Rossi’s two-year investigation reinforces this dynamic.

Robin Straaijer:

There’s a fair chance that at some point you’ve been told that you’re using hopefully wrong: Purists insist that it can only mean “in a hopeful manner” and not “it is to be hoped that.” But who are these purists, and when did people first start giving this advice? More generally, there’s a lot of advice about English usage that we largely take for granted, from split infinitives to dangling participles, but where did anyone get these ideas in the first place?

We can trace back this history to sources much older than your eighth-grade English teacher by looking at usage guides. These books that tell you how you should write English range from the venerable, like Henry Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, to the modern, like Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. When usage guides from different eras or countries agree or disagree with each other, this tells us something about which changes in the English language were happening when and how noticeable they were.

But we can do better than merely comparing a few guides offhand. For the past two and a half years, I’ve been working on a database of more than 75 usage guides and 123 usage problems in the English language, spanning a period of nearly 250 years. My two assistants and I call this project the Hyper Usage Guide of English or HUGE database and it’s based out of Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Sarah Jaffe:

Carolyn Hill still remembers the night, two years ago, when the Philadelphia Department of Human Services (DHS) came to take her nieces away. The girls, ages 1 and 2, had been placed with her about a year earlier, after being removed from their mother’s custody due to her mental health issues. Hill thought she’d begun the process of adopting the girls: She’d taken parenting classes at the request of the agency and had begun paperwork so that she could go forward with adoption.

But on Tuesday April 3, 2012, Hill got a call from the Lutheran Children and Family Service (LCFS), a nonprofit that had taken over her case the previous fall (Philadelphia’s DHS farms out its caretaking services to a number of nonprofits). The caller said that she needed to speak with Hill that day. The social worker who had called Hill arrived at her home after 5pm and, without prior warning, took Hill’s nieces away. “She didn’t even let them finish eating—I had stopped to get them some food, but she just took them right on out,” Hill tells In These Times. (LCFS did not return a request for comment.)

When Hill called DHS to find out why the girls had been removed from her care, she was told that everyone was on Easter vacation (Easter would fall on the following Sunday, a full five days away). “It felt like it was a set-up for them to come get the kids [at a time] when I can’t get in touch with anybody,” she says. Hill went to court the following Monday. She says she was not informed by the agency of how she could fight the removal: “I was supposed to go within 30 days [of the court hearing] and file an appeal—file for standing—but nobody told me about that.”

Two years later, she still isn’t sure why the girls were removed from her custody. The answers, she says, keep changing. The agencies brought up a drug conviction for which she served six months’ probation in 1999—something the city knew about when she first took custody of her nieces, she says—and accused her of having mental health issues because she possessed Ambien to help her sleep. They also complained that she did not have a GED.

Adam Gopnik:

Whence, and where, and why the English major? The subject is in every mouth—or, at least, is getting kicked around agitatedly in columns and reviews and Op-Ed pieces. The English major is vanishing from our colleges as the Latin prerequisite vanished before it, we’re told, a dying choice bound to a dead subject. The estimable Verlyn Klinkenborg reports in the Times that “At Pomona College (my alma mater) this spring, 16 students graduated with an English major out of a student body of 1,560, a terribly small number,” and from other, similar schools, other, similar numbers.

In response, a number of defenses have been mounted, none of them, so far, terribly persuasive even to one rooting for them to persuade. As the bromides roll by and the platitudes chase each other round the page, those in favor of ever more and better English majors feel a bit the way we Jets fans feel, every fall, when our offense trots out on the field: I’m cheering as loud as I can, but let’s be honest—this is not working well.

The defenses and apologias come in two kinds: one insisting that English majors make better people, the other that English majors (or at least humanities majors) make for better societies; that, as Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University, just put it in The New Republic, “ there are real, tangible benefits to the humanistic disciplines—to the study of history, literature, art, theater, music, and languages.” Paxson’s piece is essentially the kind of Letter To A Crazy Republican Congressman that university presidents get to write. We need the humanities, she explains patiently, because they may end up giving us other stuff we actually like: “We do not always know the future benefits of what we study and therefore should not rush to reject some forms of research as less deserving than others.”

Edgar Mendez:

Standing out is not easy at Rufus King International High School, recently named the third best high school in Wisconsin by U.S. News and World Report and one that consistently produces top scholars.

Meet Helen Fetaw. Last year’s senior class president. Swim and forensics team member. Head of a student organization and member of the Youth Health Service Corps.

And one other thing: She’s just 16 years old.

In a few weeks, the high-achieving Fetaw will be a freshman at the Ivy League’s University of Pennsylvania.

“I’ve never had one so young,” said Jill Boeck, guidance counselor at King, as she discusses the many successful students that walk through her door.

Boeck, who counsels 400 other college aspiring students a year, said to stand out among them, students have to work a little harder, and be more insistent.

“She seeks out opportunities when she sees them,” Boeck said. ‘She’s puts evertything into what she does.”

It’s a trait she learned from her parents, Fetaw said. They’re originally from Eritrea, which borders Sudan and Ethiopia, but emigrated to Italy, where Helen was born, before moving to the U.S. when she was 3.

Like many immigrants, her parents didn’t wait for opportunities to improve the family’s prospects. They went out and worked hard, she said.

Fetaw said she’d watch while her mother, Maria, sat for hours a day in the small kitchen table of their northwest side home, poring over her nursing books for school, all while also caring for Helen and her two sisters.

David Matthews:

“Graduates in non-graduate occupations” are such a clear trend in Britain that they now have their own acronym: “gringos.” But according to two academics, graduates working in pubs and call centers might be more to blame for their own fates, rather than the shaky state of the economy.

For those who have graduated in Britain since the 2008 financial crash, job hunting has often been a tale of woe – almost half of employed recent graduates in 2013 were working in what the Office for National Statistics classes as a “non-graduate role.”

Gringos see their non-graduate jobs as a “stepping stone” to a better position in the future, which stops them worrying about their career, according to Tracy Scurry, a lecturer at Newcastle University Business School, and John Blenkinsopp, a professor at Hull University Business School.

Unfortunately, this means that many do not hunt for roles that use their skills gained through higher education, they write in the latest edition of Graduate Management Trends, published by the Higher Education Careers Service Unit.

Alan Borsuk:

The zen of how to start a school.” That was one of the things Larry Rosenstock wanted to talk about at an elegant luncheon in June 2013 at the private University Club in downtown Milwaukee.

“You want to keep it simple,” he told an audience of 150 or so, including business leaders and philanthropists. He said you don’t want a school to be too stuck in its ways, and you want it to be a place that has, as he put it, a lot of oxygen.

Rosenstock was a carpenter, a lawyer and a business executive before becoming a nationally recognized education innovator.

He was the founder of High Tech High in San Diego. It opened with 200 students in 2000 and now has about 5,000 students in 12 schools. Its unusual program is built in large part on students learning by doing projects, and its student body is intentionally highly diverse by income and race. Data on student success is impressive and educators have come to observe from across the United States.

Rosenstock was at the luncheon in Milwaukee to support an idea, then called the Forest Exploration Center, that would include an eye-catchingly different school and other programs, based in a historic building on what is known now as the Innovation Campus in Wauwatosa.

He said such projects are exactly what is needed to get many teens on the path to success in education and careers. “We are all in with these folks,” he said.

That was the next to last time I heard anything about the plan that suggested forward movement. The last time was a short time later when the Legislature changed law provisions related to charter schools to make the idea feasible.

Other than that, what I heard was all about problems: The concept and leadership changed. It was tough getting support. There was a lot of resistance from officials in Wauwatosa who thought this was going to take away students and money from their school system.

Paul Campos

David Frakt isn’t easily intimidated by public-speaking assignments. A lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve and a defense attorney, Frakt is best known for securing the 2009 release of the teenage Guantánamo detainee Mohammad Jawad. He did so by helping to convince a military tribunal that the only evidence that Jawad had purportedly thrown a hand grenade at a passing American convoy in 2002 had been extracted by torture.

By comparison, Frakt’s presentation in April to the Florida Coastal School of Law’s faculty and staff seemed to pose a far less daunting challenge. A law professor for several years, Frakt was a finalist for the school’s deanship, and the highlight of his two-day visit was this hour-long talk, in which he discussed his ideas for fixing what he saw as the major problems facing the school: sharply declining enrollment, drastically reduced admissions standards, and low morale among employees.

But midway through Frakt’s statistics-filled PowerPoint presentation, he was interrupted when Dennis Stone, the school’s president, entered the room. (Stone had been alerted to Frakt’s comments by e-mails and texts from faculty members in the room.) Stone told Frakt to stop “insulting” the faculty, and asked him to leave. Startled, Frakt requested that anyone in the room who felt insulted raise his or her hand. When no one did, he attempted to resume his presentation. But Stone told him that if he didn’t leave the premises immediately, security would be called. Frakt packed up his belongings and left

Annamaria Andriotis:

Tuition and fees are rising, but the amount of merit-based aid is climbing even faster. AnnaMaria Andriotis discusses strategies for getting the largest possible award.joins the News Hub with Tanya Rivero. Photo: Getty Images.

With tuition and fees at a four-year private college or university averaging $30,094 a year, many students need help making ends meet. The good news is that scholarship money being handed out by corporations, foundations and other private-sector benefactors is on the rise.

That means families have new places to turn for assistance, even if they don’t qualify based on financial need. It also puts a growing premium on preparing early and researching the options for merit-based aid, which can be awarded on the basis of academic achievement, community service or special skills.

Undergraduates received $21.8 billion in merit aid for the 2011-12 academic year, the most recent term for which figures are available from the U.S. Department of Education, which releases figures every four years. That was up 64% from 2007-08, according to an analysis of the federal data by Edvisors.com, a financial-aid information website. Experts say the trend is continuing.

By contrast, tuition and fees rose 19% on average at private colleges and universities and 34% for in-state students at four-year public colleges over the same period, according to the College Board. In-state tuition and fees average $8,893 a year at four-year public schools.

Nick Heynen:

Using data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the report’s authors examined residential property taxes in every U.S. county from 2007 to 2011, looking at how much homeowners were paying on average and how that average compared to average home sale prices over the same time period.

The data contained some interesting, though perhaps not surprising, revelations about Wisconsin’s property taxes:

Dane County levied the state’s highest average property tax in dollars — $4,279 — and ranked 61st among all U.S. counties examined in the report.

Related: Madison’s 16% property tax increase since 2007 while median household income down 7.6%.

A Middleton home paid $4,648.16 in 2012 while a Madison home paid 16% more, or $5,408.38. Local efforts to significantly increase property taxes may grow the gap with Middleton.

Madison is planning a maintenance referendum for 2015, which will further increase property taxes. Madison spends about double the national average per student, around $15,000 annually.

Considering Madison school district boundaries vis a vis the planned referendum.

Madison taxpayers have supported additional maintenance and operating spending over the years, yet reading results remain disastrous.

Brian Gibbs:

Why AP courses are overrated: There’s too much to teach in too little time, a former LAUSD teacher argues

When The Times reported that the number of Advanced Placement exams taken in the Los Angeles Unified School District had hit an all-time high, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is that a good thing? AP courses help high school students gain admission to prestigious colleges, but not necessarily because of the course work. What matters is getting the AP course on the transcript.

Heralded as a civil rights success in some corners, AP classes are really a numbers racket and a way to play the college admissions game. Most colleges reward applicants for taking AP courses, the more the better. Rather than evidence of strong learning or superb college preparation, AP has become a credential that helps students gain access.

First seen as an exclusive feather in a cap, AP courses were added to the public school curriculum to keep elite students from fleeing. As courses have expanded to urban and rural schools across the country, they are invariably described as a “rigorous college-level curriculum in high school.”

As a former history teacher with L.A. Unified, I am most familiar with the AP U.S. history exam. It asks students to answer—in 55 minutes—80 multiple-choice questions covering 400 years of history, to respond to two essay questions and a “document-based question” that requires them to weave in material from sources they are seeing for the first time, all in 115 minutes.

I’m not really troubled by the skill sets pushed by the latter two components—the ability to decipher a challenging question, make and support an argument, analyze documents and synthesize information—although because the topics aren’t announced, teachers must teach as much content as possible to give students a fighting chance.

The skill set developed by AP courses seems antithetical to what college life should be— the exploration, deeper understanding and investigation of the world’s complexities.

I do have a big problem with the multiple-choice portion, which requires students to develop skills of little value—rote memorization and recall under pressure. Content from the pre-Columbian era forward must be covered. “Covered” is the operative word —not analyzed, evaluated or synthesized, words common to academic and intellectual investigation in a college class.

Some teachers teach against the AP test, determined to build in time for deep analysis, connection to present day, critique, writing genres and themes that connect historical movements. The AP system forces much content to be “taught” quickly, which leads to low retention and even less analysis. Students are generally on their own to read, process, understand and remember an outrageous amount of information.

I’ve seen gifted AP teachers who were compelled to reduce the complexity of World War II to two 55-minute classroom lectures, and to cover the New Deal and the civil rights movement in one class. To explain the compression, teachers cite the press of time, the wealth of material and the impending weight and doom of the final AP test, given a full month before the school year ends.

There is value in learning to examine complicated content, but the AP test takes it to an extreme. The exam also fails to reward exceptional or powerful writing, preferring a particular style of writing that fits a set rubric. The focus on multiple choice questions reduces complex historical events to “correct” answers: a, b, c or d.

College professors complain about students’ inability to write well and their lack of creative thought. Faculty members have told me that students seem so intent on providing the answer they think the professor wants that they all end up writing their essays in much the same way. Students seem uncomfortable with complexity and want professors to guide them to the proper answer.

The skill set developed by AP courses seems antithetical to what college life should be: the exploration, deeper understanding and investigation of the world’s complexities and uncertainties.

As AP courses have expanded, and as universities depend on them to separate and sort applicants, high schools have developed their own skill sets to ensure higher success and pass rates in both the courses and their associated exams. Sadly, the space for more inquiry- and discussion-driven, deeper and more complex learning is all but disappearing.

Brian Gibbs taught in LAUSD for 16 years. He is a doctoral candidate in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education.

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Graeme Wood:

On a Friday morning in April, I strapped on a headset, leaned into a microphone, and experienced what had been described to me as a type of time travel to the future of higher education. I was on the ninth floor of a building in downtown San Francisco, in a neighborhood whose streets are heavily populated with winos and vagrants, and whose buildings host hip new businesses, many of them tech start-ups. In a small room, I was flanked by a publicist and a tech manager from an educational venture called the Minerva Project, whose founder and CEO, the 39-year-old entrepreneur Ben Nelson, aims to replace (or, when he is feeling less aggressive, “reform”) the modern liberal-arts college.

Minerva is an accredited university with administrative offices and a dorm in San Francisco, and it plans to open locations in at least six other major world cities. But the key to Minerva, what sets it apart most jarringly from traditional universities, is a proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.

Nelson and Kosslyn had invited me to sit in on a test run of the platform, and at first it reminded me of the opening credits of The Brady Bunch: a grid of images of the professor and eight “students” (the others were all Minerva employees) appeared on the screen before me, and we introduced ourselves. For a college seminar, it felt impersonal, and though we were all sitting on the same floor of Minerva’s offices, my fellow students seemed oddly distant, as if piped in from the International Space Station. I half expected a packet of astronaut ice cream to float by someone’s face.

Faiz Siddiqui

Unpopular books flying off branch libraries’ shelves
Some bridle as Boston trims collections in effort to update offerings.

At the Dudley Branch of the Boston Public Library, clustered volumes fill only half of many long, red shelves; the rest stand empty. In the adult nonfiction section, some shelves are completely barren.

The library, in Roxbury, once brimmed with books. But officials have been steadily culling its collection the past few months as part of a push by BPL administrators to dispose of up to 180,000 little-used volumes from shelves and archives of branches citywide by year’s end. Library officials say the reductions help assure that patrons can comfortably sift through a modern selection that serves their needs.

The Dudley branch stands to lose up to 40 percent of its inventory, according to an internal memo acquired by the Globe. The branches at Egleston Square and Uphams Corner could lose 30 and 28 percent of their collections, respectively.

All but one of the city’s two dozen branch libraries will lose books, the exception being the newly opened East Boston library.

Some patrons, as well as current and former library employees, find the exodus of books troubling.

“You have students in the branches—high school students, junior high students—who are coming in to do reports. You’ve got to have a certain number of books, a certain number of hard-copy sources,” said Metro Voloshin, a former librarian at the Fields Corner branch who has served as curator of music for the library system.

It cuts into the branches’ core mission, critics say, eroding a service that can’t be duplicated by digital media. Even books that have not been checked out recently can still serve an essential purpose to the community, they said.

The plan, instituted in February, targets books that have not been checked out in varying periods: three years for small branches, four for medium-sized ones, and five for large libraries like Dudley. The volumes are to be sold at book fairs, listed on sites such as Amazon.com, digitally archived, or, in some cases, recycled.

Officials at the central library say the whittling of collections is intended to update the system’s database of more than 23 million items and further establish branches as a communal space where people go to make use of computers, study rooms, and general meeting spaces.

“It’s a changing landscape in terms of libraries,” said Amy Ryan, president of the Boston Public Library. “This is just a transition time as we’re getting the collection to the right size.”

Ryan acknowledged that more than a hundred thousand books may eventually be removed, but said some items filed for removal may be missing or duplicates. The library system continues to add 132,000 volumes to its overall collection each year, she said.

Ryan, who took the helm of the library system in 2008, said a 21st-century library should be modeled after the East Boston branch. Opened in November 2013, it carries the system’s smallest supply of books — with a capacity for 20,000 items — but has dedicated communal spaces for children, teenagers, and adults. The building has free Wi-Fi and 54 computers available for public use.

“People talk and laugh, which is our goal,” Ryan said. “It’s about helping close the achievement gap, it’s about doing our part in the digital divide, and then it’s just a friendly wonderful space too. And there’s books.”

Branch librarians who spoke to the Globe on the condition of anonymity said staffers have been working constantly to meet the monthly targets for the reductions. That goal is 75 percent of their quota every month, allowing staff to retain items they believe are essential to their collection.

At the Dudley branch, visitors can find a large selection of books on the slave trade, the Underground Railroad, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights Movement. Visitors flip through many of these books, an employee said, but never check them out.

“What we’re losing is things pertaining to minorities particularly,” the librarian said. “There’s a book about [blacks’] contribution to literature, which is an old book. The slave narratives are going to wind up being weeded, a lot of them.”

Advocates of the community libraries said books should remain at the heart of libraries’ mission, not simply as a part of it.

“I can’t begin to imagine what their thinking is in this wholesale removal of books,” said Jane Matheson, a member of Friends of Fields Corner Branch Library in Dorchester, which is being asked to cull up to 25 percent of its collection. “If you want books you’ve got to go look for them. . . . A whole lot of poor people are not running around with an iPad in one hand.”

In addition to books, branch libraries offer e-books, CDs and DVDs, and computer tablets and e-readers that may be borrowed.

At the Dudley branch, which is undergoing exterior renovations and is being considered for further improvements, a new, colorful mosaic outside the entrance greets visitors.

One student browsing shelves for summer reading materials Thursday was told that none of the five books were available on site. Ryan said some materials may have been shifted or moved to the system’s floating collection due to the ongoing work.

Another patron, Michele Ewing of Mattapan, said she has noticed the dwindling presence of old books. She has recently had to begin probing libraries around the city to find the works of her favorite authors: Harlan Coben and Robert Parker, a hunt she attributed to the book reductions at the branches.

“I find it kind of unproductive for readers,” said Ewing, 60. “It’s like they’re forcing readers to buy them.”

===============
“Teach with Examples”
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The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Academic Coaches [2014]
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Namrata Joshi:

We arrive at Madrassa Anwarul-Islam Salfia at 12.45 pm, a little before namaaz. As the students gather around the row of taps to wash their hands and feet and line up for prayers, this modest building in the dusty, narrow bylanes of Chauri in Jalalpur, in eastern UP’s Jaunpur district, looks exactly how we expect a madrassa to be: a place for rigorous study of Islam, Urdu, Arabic.

What we encounter instead is a complete contradiction.

“It’s ironical that madrassas should be nursing Sanskrit when it’s vanishing elsewhere,” says Salfia’s R.K. Mishra.

The bare, red brick walls of the Standard 7 classroom are yet to be plastered, the window frames still to be fitted. Here, 12-year-old Nadima Bano and Hishamuddin are reciting, their pronunciation perfect and elocution chaste, this ode to India, “Yasyottarasyamdishibhati bhumao Himalayah parvatraj eshah…” It’s a sloka in Sanskrit that translated means ‘the land shielded by the Himalayas in the north’. “Sanskrit padhne se zubaan saaf ho jaati hai (the diction becomes clear by learning Sanskrit),” Hishamuddin tells us. “Sanskrit is considered the mother of all languages,” says their teacher Rabindra Kumar Mishra. “It’s ironical that institutions like this madrassa should be nursing it while it’s vanishing elsewhere.”

Anjana Ahuja:

It was called the “Ten-Martini Problem”, a notorious mathematical conundrum considered so hard that its originator promised 10 cocktails to whoever solved it. Artur Avila was the little-known Brazilian wunderkind who conjured up the required algebra nine years ago, leaving Ivy League professors shaken and stirred, and announcing his arrival as one of the world’s most gifted mathematicians.

Now just 35, Mr Avila is one of four academics named on Tuesday as recipients of the Fields Medal, the highest honour in the rarefied world of mathematics. The announcement was a pleasing series of firsts: Mr Avila became the first Latin American winner (he now works in both France and Brazil, and has dual citizenship), and 37-year-old Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian professor at Stanford University, the first woman. The other winners are Martin Hairer, 38, an Austrian based at Warwick university, a colleague of whom once joked that his work was so incredible that it must have been downloaded into his brain by aliens; and Manjul Bhargava, a tabla-playing 40-year-old Canadian-American number theorist at Princeton, cited as having the Midas touch.

The attached purse is insignificant when compared to the Nobels, at just C$15,000 ($13,700), but the kudos is just as substantial. The gold medals are awarded by a secret committee of the International Mathematical Union, only once every four years, to between two and four scholars who must be aged 40 or under in the year in which the awards are dished out. Other brilliant names have been felled by this brutal age requirement, notably Andrew Wiles, the British mathematician who finally solved Fermat’s last theorem in 1995 aged 42. The mean age of Nobel laureates is 59.

Caroline Porter & Stephanie Armour:

When the federal government implemented new school-meal regulations in 2012, a majority of elementary-school students complained about the healthier lunches, but by the end of the school year most found the food agreeable, according to survey results released Monday.

The peer-reviewed study comes amid concerns that the regulations led schools to throw away more uneaten food and prompted some students to drop out of meal programs.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago surveyed administrators at more than 500 primary schools about student reaction to the new meals in the 2012-2013 school year. They found that 70% agreed or strongly agreed that students, by the end of the school year, generally liked the new lunches, which feature more whole grains, vegetables and fruits, and lower fat levels.

Matthew Richmond (PDF), via several kind readers:

Why do American public schools spend more of their operating budgets on non-teachers than almost every other country in the world, including nations that are as prosperous and humane as ours? We can’t be certain. But we do know this:
» The number of non-teachers on U.S. school payrolls has soared over the past fifty years, far more rapidly than the rise in teacher numbers. And the amount of money in district budgets consumed by their salaries and benefits has grown apace for at least the last twenty years.

Underneath the averages and totals, states and districts vary enormously in how many non-teachers they employ. Why do Illinois taxpayers pay for forty staff per thousand pupils while Connecticut pays for eighty-nine? Why does Orange County, Florida (Orlando) employ eleven teacher aides per thousand students when Miami-Dade gets by with seven?

What accounts for such growth—and such differences? We don’t know nearly as much as we’d like on this topic, but it’s not a total mystery. The advent and expansion of special education, for example, obviously gave rise to substantial demand for classroom aides and specialists to address
the needs of youngsters with disabilities. The widening of school duties to include more food service, health care, and sundry other responsibilities accounts for more.

But such additions to the obligations of schools are not peculiar to the United States and they certainly cannot explain big staffing differences from place to place within our country.

Retired Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Beth Baker:

Non-tenure-track—also known as adjunct or contingent—faculty members now make up more than 70 percent of those who teach in higher education. The trend—which shows little sign of abating—threatens national goals of maintaining global preeminence in science and technology, including biology, say education experts.

According to 2011 data from the National Center for Education Statistics (the most recent available), just under 30 percent of higher-education faculty members today are tenured or on the tenure track. In contrast, in 1969, 78 percent of faculty members were tenured or tenure track, and less than 22 percent were not. The majority of today’s non-tenure-track faculty members are low-paid part-timers, whose working conditions often adversely affect learning outcomes for students.

“In the biology department at Rowan University, it is possible for a freshman biology major to go their entire 4 years for a bachelor’s of science without taking a course taught by a tenure-track professor,” says Nathan Ruhl, an adjunct professor at the Glassboro, New Jersey–based school.

yes2counselors:

We’ve been asked to provide a list of resources for those who are interested in learning more about the impact of having police in schools. Below is a partial list of reports and articles that we have found very useful to our work.

Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools by the NYCLU (2007)

The Dangers of Putting More Armed Guards in Schools by Aviva Sen, Think Progress, Jan 17, 2013.

Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse-to-Jailhouse Track by the Advancement Project (2005)

Bob Samuels:

In looking at recent employment trends in at the university, we find that the there has been a significant increase in the number of highly compensated individuals. In fact, in 2004, there were 1,890 employees making over $200,000 a year, and eight years later, there were 5,461. This tripling of highly compensated individuals occurred during a period of reduced state funding and a financial crisis that resulted in layoffs, a salary furlough, massive tuition increases, and system-wide budget cuts. Furthermore, in 2012, the university employed, 262,415 people for a total payroll of $11.2 billion, and the people making over $200,000 represented just 2% of the employees, but they earned 14% of the income. In contrast, during 2004, the people earning over $200,000 represented less than 1% of the workers, and they took in 7% of the income. Just like the rest of the American economy, the trend thus has been to concentrate income at the top.

If we look at who the high earners are in the UC system, we discover that they are medical faculty, administrators, athletic coaches, law professors, business professors, and graduate faculty. Almost none of the employees have anything to do with undergraduate education and none of them are unionized. In contrast to this group of highly compensated individuals, we find the majority of teachers and workers who receive moderate incomes and are mostly unionized. One thing then to learn from this example is that unionization is clearly not driving tuition increases, and in the case of undergraduate instruction, wages have remained stable, but they have not kept up with the huge increases of the top earners.

Kelly Rogers and Simon Furse

We have both just been suspended from the University of Birmingham for nine months because of our part in an occupation that took place last November.

This year the university has collectively had us arrested three times, taken out an injunction banning us from occupational protest for a year, put us through a stressful nine-month-long disciplinary process, suspended us for two months, reinstated us briefly just to suspend us again only one month away from graduation.

Another student, Hattie Craig, has been given a six-month suspended sentence, meaning that if she breaks any university regulation between now and when she graduates she will immediately be suspended for six months. Publicly stating opposition to the actions of the University of Birmingham could end up with her being suspended on the basis that she brought the university into disrepute.

The University of Birmingham is trying to hide behind the quasi-legal process that it uses to conduct disciplinary actions. We were denied access to legal representation, despite us submitting multiple requests. The hearings were not held to any of the same evidential standards that would be required in a court: decisions were made on the balance of probabilities, and the outcomes shielded from scrutiny because the university does not allow recordings or take full notes.

Tunette Powell:

I received a call from my sons’ school in March telling me that my oldest needed to be picked up early. He had been given a one-day suspension because he had thrown a chair. He did not hit anyone, but he could have, the school officials told me.

JJ was 4 at the time.

I agreed his behavior was inappropriate, but I was shocked that it resulted in a suspension.

For weeks, it seemed as if JJ was on the chopping block. He was suspended two more times, once for throwing another chair and then for spitting on a student who was bothering him at breakfast. Again, these are behaviors I found inappropriate, but I did not agree with suspension.

Still, I kept quiet. I knew my history. I was the bad preschooler.

Greg Lukianoff:

I’ve rarely heard that argument made so directly. Essentially, just to summarize it, the way I’ve heard it made in the past is essentially that what we’re really saying is that 18- to 22-year-olds are children. And they must be therefore treated the same way as K through 12 are. They can’t handle the real world. They can’t handle the duties of citizenship. It’s an argument that I’ve definitely heard.

And if you’re saying that basically we should—that maybe below-graduate-level study should be ruled the same way high school students should be — I would disagree with you.

But that’s definitely an argument that people should make that straight out, but you run into a couple moral and philosophical problems with that.

One of them is the moral and philosophical underpinnings of the 26th Amendment. Essentially, we have decided in this country that 18-year-olds … that is considered the age for majority.

Karen Herzog:

At 18, Robyn Shemwell’s heart was set on attending Loyola University in Chicago to study social work.

“I was ready to take out $40,000 each year in student loans because at 18 years old, I had no reference point for that amount of money,” Shemwell, now 23, recalls. “I simply thought that all colleges would cost this amount and that this was a normal amount for students to take out in loans each year.”

She feels bad when she remembers the tears in her parents’ eyes as they told her they wouldn’t cosign a private loan.

“My hardworking, middle-class parents were upset with themselves for not being able to provide me with a ludicrous amount of tuition money so that I could go to my dream school,” Shemwell says.

After graduating from Madison West High School, Shemwell reluctantly went to a less expensive state school. She quickly grew to love it. Now an associate recruiter for ManpowerGroup RPO in Milwaukee, she has two bachelor’s degrees, a certificate and student loan debt from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee totaling less than one year’s tuition at Loyola.

Jennifer Kabbany

t’s a cleverly written and eye-opening report on how out-of-control, unsupervised, misguided, bloated, biased, abusive, corrupt and downright ugly student governments and the projects and groups they fund have become.

If I were to whittle down the article, I’d say this: With little supervision and scant accountability, student governments manage multi-million dollar budgets larger than many municipalities’ coffers, and direct that funding largely toward a slew of inappropriate and non-academic left-wing efforts and groups, several of which serve as breeding grounds and funding tools for Democratic politicians and liberal causes.

Yeah, yeah – we know this already, you say.

Leslie Brody:

The New York City Department of Education said Thursday it would pay $1.8 million in buyout packages for 115 teachers and other staff who had stayed on the payroll even though they had no permanent jobs.

The move aims to reduce an oft-criticized pool of tenured teachers called the Absent Teacher Reserve who lingered in limbo, often for years, after school closures or disciplinary proceedings made it hard for them to get lasting assignments. Many bounce around as substitutes.

The department said employees leaving the pool earned about $93,000 a year, on average, and would get an average of nine weeks’ pay. It said the group departing would have cost $15 million in the coming year, including benefits.

The new United Federation of Teachers contract, ratified in June, enabled such buyouts. A city analysis last summer said the pool of nearly 1,200 teachers cost at least $105 million in the 2012-13 school year in salaries and benefits—after counting the savings from not hiring regular substitutes.

Jessica Williams

Louisiana students who are pursuing career and technical educations instead of college preparation may soon gain credentials in more than 20 fields, state officials announced Thursday. The Jump Start career-education program provides high school graduates with certifications in fields such as welding, construction and plumbing.

The program launches in the 2014-15 academic year. It’s part of what Education Superintendent John White says is an effort to “dignify career education.” Only 1 percent of Louisiana’s high school graduates earn a career diploma, according to the Education Department.

Three regional teams in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and the Acadiana areas are the first to develop what are called graduation pathways, or multiple courses leading to credentials in a certain field. Students take nine course credits, at minimum, in a pathway. These may include high school courses, dual-enrollment college courses, internships and industry training. Thus far, 23 pathways have been crafted. More are expected from other regional teams in the coming months.

Average GPA in Core Subjects in 8th and 9th Grades and Percentage of Students Receiving a D or F in a Core Course in 9th Grade, by Feeder School, 2010 – 2013:

Madison School District 1.3MB PDF Presentation:

In focus groups, several teachers noted what they perceived to be a lack of adequate preparation their students received in previous years, and in some cases a lack of understanding about the curriculum to which their students have been exposed.

In focus groups at each MMSD school, a broad majority of students stated they have been in classes where the instructional purpose and relevance of what they were learning was unclear.

Each set of stakeholders interviewed for this project referenced the challenges posed by poor alignment of instruction from one grade level to the next, particularly between middle and high schools.

In focus groups, several teachers and students alike noted that adjusting to increased levels of homework in high school was a challenge for many.

Student focus groups reported varying experiences in Middle School with homework counting towards students’ overall grades may be contributing to a difficult transition into high school for some students

There is significant lack of course syllabi across schools.

When asked what a diploma should mean, there was much consensus across stakeholder groups that it should include the following, but also a lack of confidence that an MMSD diploma currently represented each of these for all graduates:

Competence in core subject areas
Exposure to a broad curriculum including the arts
Reading and critical thinking skills
Having a global perspective
Knowledge and ability to access employment and/or postsecondary education
Ability to work in groups
Curiosity as a lifelong learner
“Real world” experience tied to the classroom
Citizenship and self-sufficiency
“21st Century skills”

Recommendations
Redefine What an MMSD Diploma Means By Setting Common Learning Outcomes and Assessments for All Graduates

Create Clear Personalized Student Pathways

Define Multiple Career-Field and Academic Pathways for High School Students

Engage Deeply with Local Postsecondary Stakeholders for Alignment and Expansion of Dual Credit Options

Continue to Engage With Local Employers for Alignment and Student Work-Based Learning Opportunities

Continue to Promote and Develop AVID as a Pathway Option, While Monitoring More Closely Before Expanding

Encourage Innovation in Projects and Assessments

Regarding the “lack of course syllabi”, full, required implementation of Infinite Campus (or similar) would address this issue. Millions have been spent…

Number of Students in Class of 2013 Who Took AP World Language Courses, by High School and Feeder Middle School, 2010-2013

The Most Failed Courses in 9th Grade with Percentage of Students With One Failed Semester by School, 2013

AP courses available at all four comprehensive high schools:

Calculus AB
Calculus BC
French Language
Spanish Language
Environmental Science
Statistics
European History

Select AP courses not available at all high schools:

Proportion of Students Enrolled in AP Courses and Scoring a 3 or Higher on AP Exams by Race and SpEd/ELL Status, 2013

The Most Failed Courses in 9th Grade with Percentage of Students With One Failed Semester by School, 2013

Background links: English 10

Small Learning Communities

High School “Redesign”

William Major:

I. Close the Business Schools

Ask anyone professing the humanities today and you come to understand that a medieval dimness looms. If this is the end-times for the ice sheets at our poles — and it is — many of us also understand that the melt can be found closer to home, in the elimination of language and classics departments, for instance, and in the philistinism represented by governors such as Rick Scott of Florida and Patrick McCrory of North Carolina, who apparently see in the humanities a waste of time and taxpayer subsidies. In the name of efficiency and job creation, according to their logic, taxpayers can no longer afford to support bleary-eyed poets, Latin history radicals, and brie-nibbling Francophiles.

That there is a general and widespread acceptance in the United States that what is good for corporate America is good for the country is perhaps inarguable, and this is why men like Governors Scott and McCrory are dangerous. They merely invoke a longstanding and not-so-ugly stereotype: the pointy-headed humanist whose work, if you can call it that, is irrelevant. Among the many easy targets, English departments and their ilk are convenient and mostly defenseless. Few will rise to rush the barricades with us, least of all the hard-headed realists who understand the difficulties of running a business, which is what the university is, anyway.

Lawrence Wittner:

Americans committed to better living for bosses can take heart at the fact that college and university administrators — unlike their faculty (increasingly reduced to rootless adjuncts) and students (saddled with ever more debt) — are thriving.

In 2011, the last year for which figures are available, 42 private college and university presidents received more than a million dollars each for their work. Robert Zimmer (University of Chicago) was the best-paid, at $3,358,723. At public colleges and universities, nine top administrators garnered more than $1 million each in 2012-2013, with the best-paid, E. Gordon Gee (Ohio State University), receiving $6,057,615.

Since then, it’s likely that the number of millionaire campus presidents has increased, for their numbers have been growing rapidly. Indeed, in 2012-13, the number of public university presidents receiving at least $1 million for their services more than doubled over the previous year.

In addition to their formal compensation, college and university presidents receive some very lavish perks. These at times include not only free luxury cars and country club memberships, but free university housing. James Milliken, the chancellor of the City University of New York, attended by some of the nation’s most impoverished students, lives rent-free in an $18,000-a-month luxury apartment on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side. From 2000 to 2007, when Gordon Gee was chancellor at Vanderbilt University, he benefited from a $6 million renovation of the university mansion in which he and his wife resided. According to a New York Times article, after Gee moved on to his multi-million dollar job at Ohio State, he was known for “the lavish lifestyle his job supports, including a rent-free mansion with an elevator, a pool and a tennis court and flights on private jets.”

Economic inequality in the United States has been receiving a lot of attention. But it’s not merely an issue of the rich getting richer. The typical American household has been getting poorer, too.

The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline, according to a study financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. Those are the figures for a household at the median point in the wealth distribution — the level at which there are an equal number of households whose worth is higher and lower. But during the same period, the net worth of wealthy households increased substantially.

The Russell Sage study also examined net worth at the 95th percentile. (For households at that level, 95 percent of the population had less wealth.) It found that for this well-do-do slice of the population, household net worth increased 14 percent over the same 10 years. Other research, by economists like Edward Wolff at New York University, has shown even greater gains in wealth for the richest 1 percent of households.

Caroline Porter

On a recent weekday here, a steady stream of people dropped by one central location for food stamps, family counseling and job ideas—their local school.

While instruction has ended for the summer, these classrooms remain open as part of a wider trend around the country of “community schools,” where public and private groups bring services closer to students and residents year round and, in some cases, help boost student performance.

With backing at local, state and federal levels, the decades-old idea for improving schools and neighborhoods is gaining ground despite some funding uncertainties and doubts about community schools’ success.

The largest coordinator of such programs, Communities in Schools, saw a 6% increase in its reach in the 2012-13 school year, covering schools with a total of more than 1.3 million students in 26 states.

Alan Borsuk:

Gregory Thornton, the former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, was good at talking about the positive things underway for the schools. He’d get revved up as he rattled off initiatives and data. At the start of school a year ago, he did in a conversation with me.

Then he abruptly changed tone.

“I’ve got 15 or 20 schools that just need a lot of help,” he said.

They just needed to start over. He said he was going to propose seeking ideas for anyone who had them on how to turn around those schools. Could that include independent charter school operators? Yes, he said. Whoever had a good plan for getting better success.

It’s almost a year later, and MPS is launching a program to improve low-performing schools. Is it the shake-things-up, turn-around vision Thornton held out? For better or worse, no. This is Milwaukee. This is MPS.

I hope the tastes-milder, maybe-more-filling version of revving up low-performing schools is successful. Fourteen schools have been designated as “commitment schools” based on proposals the staff of each one made.

In broad terms, each of the proposals includes fresh ideas on what the schools will offer and how they’ll offer it, and, I’m assured by MPS leaders, fresh willingness by staff members to work together on better outcomes.

Seven of the 14 schools are large high schools with reputations for being, shall we say, challenging: Bradley Tech, James Madison, North Division, Pulaski, South Division, Vincent, and Washington. An eighth is Barack Obama School of Career and Technical Education, a new kindergarten through 12th-grade school combining two faltering schools in the former Custer High School building.

Pat Schneider:

As Madison teachers prepare to head back to school, big changes they’re facing include a new teacher evaluation system mandated by the state and a new discipline policy adopted by the Madison School Board, according to Madison Teachers Inc. president Mike Lipp.

“There’s a lot of confusion and some apprehension” about the new teacher evaluation system, Lipp said. And of the district’s new Behavior Education Plan, designed to cut the number of suspensions, Lipp said he is “100 percent for keeping kids in class. There’s a cost, though.”

“I’m hoping these things work, I really do,” said Lipp, athletic director at West High School, where he formerly taught science.

The teacher evaluation and student behavior initiatives will be the focus of professional development sessions for teachers on Aug. 27 and 28. Students begin returning to school on Sept. 2, the day after Labor Day, with staggered start days according to grade.

Teachers have long been evaluated and sections of the union contract have called for evaluation, Lipp said. But Wisconsin school districts are required under state law to implement one of two codified systems this coming school year.

Molly Hensley-Clancy:

Five years ago, Arizona State University (ASU), like many other giant public universities, was lagging in the field of online education, with just 1,200 students enrolled in its degree programs. Today, that enrollment has swelled to 10,000, and by next year, when an influx of Starbucks baristas enroll in online programs through a highly publicized partnership announced last month, it is expected to have more than twice as many online students. But for ASU, 25,000 students is hardly enough. The school has set its sights on growing online enrollment to at least 100,000 students in the next five years — more than tripling a 2011 goal of 30,000 students by 2020.

“If the University of Phoenix can have 400,000 students, most of them online, why can’t a real university like Arizona State grow to a similar size?” Phil Regier, the dean of ASU’s online programs, asked rhetorically in an interview with BuzzFeed.

The goal, Regier said, is to make ASU into an online giant, but one that doesn’t fall into the familiar traps of the University of Phoenix and other for-profit universities. For-profits like Phoenix were the original pioneers in online education but have struggled in recent years with low completion, high student loan default rates, and allegations of poor quality and misleading marketing practices.

Michael Crow, ASU’s dynamic president of 12 years, has trumpeted the expansion of ASU Online as a mission of increased access and educational innovation. But some critics say that its rapid growth is something else: a pursuit of profit that has already taken the university too far in the direction of corporatization, leading it to operate more as a business concerned with generating revenue than as a public university. The deal with Starbucks, they say, is a prime example of a blurring line between for-profit companies and public universities’ online programs.

Sam Levin:

In an effort to establish better working conditions and increased job security, 78 percent of adjunct faculty at Mills voted in May to join SEIU Local 1021, the union that represents more than 50,000 public sector and nonprofit workers in Northern California. That means that non-tenured professors at the college now have basic union protections and representation. And last week, professors, union representatives, and administrators began the process of negotiating the college’s first-ever union contract for adjuncts. Mills was the first private, nonprofit college in the Bay Area to have its adjuncts unionize and a number of other local schools are now following suit.

While activists celebrate this milestone, Mills administrators have, according to a number of adjuncts and labor activists, responded with a series of retaliatory actions. SEIU 1021 has already filed four unfair labor practice charges against Mills, alleging that the college has implemented policy changes without giving the union proper notice or an opportunity to bargain — and has retaliated and discriminated against two faculty members for union organizing. Critics say the administration’s actions reflect an ongoing failure to support adjuncts and a level of resistance to unionization that contrad

kcrw.com

Faced with a cash crunch, UC campuses are cutting back on new students from California. Out-of-state newcomers have to pay more, so they’re on the increase. The “Crown Jewel of the Golden State” now depends on tuition — and California parents are organizing against what they call a “betrayal.” We’ll hear from one of them and get the University’s explanation.

Janesville Gazette:

Is it good policy? Perhaps Act 10 was an overreach with its union-busting provisions, but it addressed a fiscal need in Wisconsin and the school districts and municipalities that receive state aid.

Public employee benefits had become overly generous and burdensome on employers, and Act 10 addressed that by requiring employees to contribute their fair shares. The result has saved the state and local governments millions of dollars. Those savings have helped those local governments address state aid cuts and ongoing budget challenges.

Now that the legal questions surrounding Act 10 are resolved, let’s move forward with a clear understanding that the law is here to stay and that public employers and employees still must work together to ensure that quality workers continue to provide quality services.

Sly Podcasts – Madison Teachers, Inc. Executive Director John Matthews.

Alan Borsuk:

With freedom comes responsibility.

This is one of the important lessons most parents hope their children learn, especially teenagers. OK, you got a driver’s license. You’re hot about all the things you can do. But there are an awful lot of things you shouldn’t do, and won’t do if you’re smart.

So what will teens learn from school leaders all across Wisconsin in the next few years? I’m hoping they’ll learn that with freedom comes responsibility, and I’m even somewhat optimistic that, overall, they will. That won’t be universally true. There are always the kids who just can’t resist flooring it when the light turns green.

But in most school districts, the freedom school boards and administrators were given in 2011, when Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans in the legislative majorities won the battle of Act 10, has been used with restraint and good judgment. A lot of superintendents and principals, and even teachers, are seeing pluses to life without the many provisions of union contracts.

I don’t want to overstate that — there are also a large number of teachers still feeling wounded from the hostility toward educators that was amped up by the polarizing events of 2011. Many teachers are anxious about how the greater freedoms their bosses now have to judge, punish and reward will be used. There also remain serious reasons to worry about who is leaving teaching and whether the best possible newcomers are being attracted to classrooms.

David Blaska:

More mystifying is why The Capital Times would do a story focusing solely and entirely on that minority dissent. (“Act 10 is ‘textbook’ example of unconstitutionality.”) Can’t expose its tender readers to the majority opinion, apparently.

Local government here in the Emerald City has done its best to evade the law, extending union contracts into 2016. County Exec Joe Parisi likes to say the union has saved the county money. At the very least, AFSME costs its members dues. There is nothing to prevent county managers from working cooperatively with employees to determine best practices. That is Management 101.

Ditto the teachers union, plaintiff in the just-decided Supreme Court case. The teachers union — as we argued in “Hold your meetings where there is beer” — runs the County Board. Now Mary Burke’s complicity with succoring MTI — she’s got their endorsement — becomes the lead issue in the governor’s race.

If you are a Madison public school teacher who doesn’t want to make fair share payments, let me know. We’ll bring suit. Post a private message on Facebook.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Pew Charitable Trusts:

Medicaid is the largest health insurance program in the United States, covering both acute and long-term care services for over 66 million low-income Americans—children and their parents, as well as elderly and disabled individuals.1 This report focuses on the impact of Medicaid on the states, including trends in spending and enrollment, and the anticipated effects of the Affordable Care Act.

Luke Johnson:

My favourite subject at school was chemistry but I never imagined that one particular biochemical reaction would dominate my career. Yet so it has proved. And that almost magical natural event is called fermentation. It shows how what we learn in the classroom can play an unexpected role in adult life.

This fantastic process underlies the production of not just alcohol, but bread too – and indeed pizza. Under anaerobic conditions, certain single-cell fungi called yeast will convert carbohydrates into a variety of products. For bread the dough is leavened with baker’s yeast, then allowed to rise (or proofed). This step releases carbon dioxide into the dough, as well as a complex mix of other compounds such as ketones, alcohols, aldehydes and esters. Many of these are evaporated by subsequent baking. Others impart particular flavours and consistency to the crust and crumb of the bread.

There is something transcendent in seeing flour transformed via fermentation and baking into a delicious loaf, be it a ciabatta, baguette or bloomer. Bakers at both my companies Patisserie Valerie and Gail’s take simple ingredients and transform them into delicacies produced via fermentation, ranging from croissants to muffins to cupcakes. And I have been involved with countless restaurants, from PizzaExpress to Rocket, that take flour, water, yeast, salt, cheese and tomato and transmute them into enticing pizza.

Patti Waldmeir::

It is summer in the land of the midnight Tiger Mum, the gruelling Chinese school year has finally drawn to a close, and mainland children are recovering from late-night homework projects by doing what? Attending summer school.

According to a recent survey by the Shanghai Education Commission, one-third of the city’s students wish they had less homework over the summer holiday. It is a remarkable testament to the mainland’s culture of education that the other two-thirds did not immediately agree: half just said they wanted homework that was less boring.

Of course summer schools are in full swing throughout the northern hemisphere now, not just in study-crazy China. Pre-school grads around the world are sweating it out in summer school because someone told their tiger parents that it would give them a jump on kindergarten.

Knowledge @ Wharton:

In a new research paper, Christian Terwiesch, professor of operations and information management at Wharton, and Karl Ulrich, vice dean of innovation at the school, examine the impact that massive open online courses (MOOCs) will have on business schools and MBA programs. In their study — titled, “Will Video Kill the Classroom Star? The Threat and Opportunity of MOOCs for Full-time MBA Programs” — they identify three possible scenarios that business schools face not just as a result of MOOCs, but also because of the technology embedded in them. In an intereview with Knowledge@Wharton, Terwiesch and Ulrich discuss their findings.

An edited transcript of the interview appears below.

Knowledge@Wharton: Christian, perhaps you could start us off by describing the main findings or takeaways from your research?

Terwiesch: Let me preface what we’re going to discuss about business schools by saying that Karl and I have been in the business school world for many, many years. We love this institution, and we really want to make sure that we find a sustainable path forward for business schools.

Business schools in the world of these massive online courses are somewhat threatened, and a lot of that has to do with our cost structure. We are very expensive organizations. There are two main reasons for that. We do two things. We teach and we do research, but only the teaching part comes with revenues, and so often, the research work that we do, all this great research work that is funded for us, is funded by our students. The second thing is, honestly, like most non-profits, we don’t always have an eye on efficiency. If you and I were running an airline together and we were to fly our planes half empty, very quickly, bad things might start to happen. Yet that culture of efficiency and productivity is something that we haven’t had in the business schools. As these MOOCs come along, the cost pressure on our institutions is going to change because suddenly, there’s a very serious alternative to coming to a two-year degree program at Wharton.

The Wall Street Journal:

Labor unions like to promote their generous defined-benefit pensions. Yet when these benefits prove unsustainable, workers can lose their jobs and retirement savings. The kicker is that taxpayers may soon be tapped to perpetuate this double fraud.

That’s the main take-away from a new report by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), which insures multi-employer pension plans for 10.4 million workers and retirees. The federal agency projects that its deficit for multi-employer plans will balloon to $49.6 billion by 2023 from $8.3 billion. Last year the PBGC forecasted a deficit of $26.2 billion in 2022, and its upward revision reflects the increasing likelihood that more plans will become insolvent and sooner.

Multi-employer plans are prevalent in industries like mining, manufacturing and construction where workers often shift among employers. Because unions collectively bargain benefits across multiple employers, workers don’t lose pension benefits when they change jobs. While unions cite portability as a selling point, it’s also a fatal design flaw because the plans require multiple businesses for support.

Barney Jopson and Robin Harding:

The issue is high on the US political agenda ahead of November’s midterm elections and Mr Trumka – a mustachioed former coal miner and scourge of America’s wealthiest “1 per cent” – is using it to bring new life and new allies to his organisation. “The public is in front of the policy. They’ve been talking about this before [Thomas] Piketty’s book came out,” he says, referring to the unexpected bestseller on inequality.

Stagnant wages have contributed to rising wealth disparity and Mr Trumka, who became AFL-CIO president in 2009, has underscored that its mission is fighting for higher pay. “Every place I go, that’s all people talk about,” he says. “They really don’t talk about the deficit or the Federal Reserve. They talk about wages, and how they’re stretched, and how they’re losing ground all the time, and how their kids’ college loans are eating them alive.”
Beyond the minimum wage itself, Mr Trumka lobbies President Barack Obama and Congress on a range of issues – including trade, immigration and criminal justice – with policies that he says would lift private sector pay, or at least stop corporate executives from forcing it down.

Don Troop:

On the heels of a similarly downcast assessment by Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service has issued a negative outlook for the higher-education sector in the United States. The credit-rating agency also issued individual reports on median benchmarks for the finances of public and nonprofit private colleges, noting significant tuition-revenue declines at both types of institutions.

While American higher education faces limited growth prospects over the next 12 to 18 months, Moody’s says, positive trends like strong long-term demand for higher education and reduced household debt could help create conditions for colleges to stabilize over the next year. But Moody’s cautions that the institutions will face continued financial pressures in the near term.

Amanda Ripley:

In the meantime, it does appear that U.S. principals are overestimating poverty compared to principals in other countries. Does it matter? It depends on the principal. No matter how you measure it, child poverty is high in the U.S. compared to other developed countries, so the problems are real and present in many U.S. schools. But hyper-awareness of poverty can make a mediocre principal worse—by providing a compelling explanation for education failures that conveniently shifts much of the blame to the home and society at large. And when combined with the reductionist, blame-poverty narratives propagated in many U.S. education colleges, books and blogs, this mindset can excuse all manner of in-school failures.

One of the things I noticed while interviewing principals and teachers in other countries is that they were not nearly as conscious of poverty stats as their American peers. In every country I visited (including Poland and South Korea, which have higher poverty rates than, say, Finland), I asked principals roughly what percentage of their kids would be considered disadvantaged. None of them could tell me off the top of their heads.

In a strong system, that obliviousness can be an asset. One Finnish teacher who had a significant number of refugee students in his class explained it to me this way: “I don’t want to think about their backgrounds too much. I don’t want to have too much empathy for them because I have to teach. If I thought about all of this too much, I would give better marks to them for worse work. I’d think, ‘Oh, you poor kid. Oh, well, what can I do?’ That would make my job too easy.”

The pursuit of redistributed taxpayer funds (“grants”, referendums, annual spending growth, staffing) drives everything.