Ashley Jochim, Patrick J. Murphy , via a kind Deb Britt email:

The push to raise standards and increase student outcomes has placed state education agencies (SEAs) at the center of efforts to improve the performance of the nation’s lowest-performing schools, but few are well positioned to deliver on that imperative. Federal and state initiatives like Race to the Top, School Improvement Grants, and Common Core State Standards pose challenges that most agencies are not prepared to meet.
Seeking to understand what SEAs are doing to meet new and existing obligations, researchers conducted interviews with state chiefs and analyzed agency initiatives and budgets in 10 states with varied approaches to school and district improvement. They found no evidence that those with the most money had better data systems or more comprehensive accountability systems. And few SEAs engage in the type of budget analysis that would enable them to assess whether their investments align with their priorities or are paying off.
While the lack of legal authority to intervene in failing schools sometimes limited the ability of states to act on their school improvement strategies, the researchers found that states that had such authority rarely used it.

In 1891, when Mr. James Naismith (he got his MD in 1898) put two peach baskets with the bottoms out at about 10 feet up at each end of the gymnasium in Springfield, Massachusetts, how many high school students do you think could make the three-point shot? Zero.
Today, when people see the exemplary history research papers published in The Concord Review, the most common reaction is: “These were written by High School Students?!” The reason for this disbelief is that most adults (even Edupudits, etc.) today no more expect high school student to write 11,000-word research papers than people in 1891 expected them to be able to make a three-point shot or dunk the basketball.
Theodore Sizer, late Dean of the Harvard School of Education and Headmaster of Phillips Academy, Andover, wrote, in 1988, that:
Americans shamefully underestimate their adolescents. With often misdirected generosity, we offer them all sorts of opportunities and, at least for middle-class and affluent youths, the time and resources to take advantage of them. We ask little in return. We expect little, and the young people sense this, and relax. The genially superficial is tolerated, save in areas where the high school students themselves have some control, in inter-scholastic athletics, sometimes in their part-time work, almost always in their socializing. At least if and when they reflect about it, adolescents have cause to resent us old folks. We do not signal clear standards for many important areas of their lives, and we deny them the respect of high expectations. In a word, we are careless about them, and, not surprisingly, many are thus careless about themselves. “Me take on such a difficult and responsible task?” they query, “I’m just a kid!” All sorts of young Americans are capable of solid, imaginative scholarship, and they exhibit it for us when we give them both the opportunity and a clear measure of the standard expected. Presented with this opportunity, young folk respond. The Concord Review is such an opportunity, a place for fine scholarship to be exhibited, to be exposed to that most exquisite of scholarly tests, wide publication. The Concord Review is, for the History-inclined high school student, what the best of secondary school theatre and music performances, athletics, and (in some respects) science fairs are, for their aficionados. It is a testing ground, and one of elegant style, taste and standards. The Review does not undersell students. It respects them. And in such respect is the fuel for excellence.”
Since 1987, The Concord Review has published more than a thousand 6,000-word, 8,000-word, 11,000-word, 15,000-word, and longer history papers by secondary students from 46 states and 38 other countries, and, as we only take about 5% of the ones we get, evidently several more thousands of high school students have written serious history papers and submitted them. But I was recently asked, “How many high school students do you think could actually write papers like that?”–Suggesting that it must be a very small number indeed! As small perhaps as the number of high school students who could make that three-pointer in 1891?
Some examples: Colin Rhys Hill, of Atlanta, Georgia, decided to write a 15,000-word history research paper on the Soviet-Afghan War; Sarah Willeman of Byfield, Massachusetts, decided she wanted to write a 21,000-word paper on the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah in 1857; Nathaniel Bernstein, of San Francisco, chose to write an 11,000-word paper on the unintended consequences of Direct Legislation reforms in the early 1900s in California; and Jonathan Lu, of Hong Kong, wrote a 13,000-word paper on the Needham Question (why did Chinese technology stall after 1500?)…(send to fitzhugh@tcr.org for pdfs of these papers).
“Where there’s a Way, there’s a Will,” I sometimes think. If peach baskets exist, some day somewhere a high school student or two will try to shoot a ball through one. Obviously by now the number of such students who can make a three-point shot is very large. We even have nationally-televised high school basketball games in which they can demonstrate such an achievement. If an international journal for the academic history research papers of secondary students exists, perhaps some students will actually write and submit them?
Most people may tell a high school students that they are not capable of doing the reading and the writing for a long serious history research paper. Most of their teachers do not want to spend the time coaching for and reading them. But my advice to any prospective high school author is (pay no attention to the people who tell you that you are only capable of writing a five-paragraph essay), and:
Prepare yourself over hours, weeks, months, and years of practice.
Make sure your feet are behind the three-point line.
Take the shot.
—————————
“Teach by Example”
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The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
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Ben O’Steen:

We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.
Which brings me to the point of this release. We are looking for new, inventive ways to navigate, find and display these ‘unseen illustrations’. The images were plucked from the pages as part of the ‘Mechanical Curator’, a creation of the British Library Labs project. Each image is individually addressible, online, and Flickr provies an API to access it and the image’s associated description.
We may know which book, volume and page an image was drawn from, but we know nothing about a given image. Consider the image below. The title of the work may suggest the thematic subject matter of any illustrations in the book, but it doesn’t suggest how colourful and arresting these images are.

Dave Brockington:

This essay on the current experience at the University of Michigan published on Inside Higher Ed, made the rounds last week. Titled “Corporate Values”, it includes several quotes that speak directly to my ten year experience at my current institution. To wit:

America’s public research universities face a challenging economic environment characterized by rising operating costs and dwindling state resources. In response, institutions across the country have looked toward the corporate sector for cost-cutting models. The hope is that implementing these “real-world” strategies will centralize redundant tasks (allowing some to be eliminated), stimulate greater efficiency, and ensure long-term fiscal solvency.

As I’ve argued in the past, the experience in Britain serves as both a model and a warning to my colleagues in the United States. Decisions are taken purely on a revenue-stream criterion. If eliminating one undergraduate program will allow resources to be shifted to another, thus resulting in a marginally enhanced revenue stream on a per-student basis, then such a move has appeal. Those of us providing the “content” are treated as interchangeable parts, have superficial input in decision making (which is typically window dressing as one of many “stakeholders” in the institution, designed to assuage concerns of consultation). Management decisions are conducted with no transparency, and handed down as edicts. There’s no entertainment of feedback, let alone constructive criticism. Again this resonates:

Rebecca Harris:

Earlier this fall semester, Dr. Anne-Marie Womack (Tulane), a colleague from my graduate institution, and I had a piece about the academic job market in English published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the piece, we make the argument that departments should strive to make the first round of job applications free of cost for candidates. The idea for this piece arose when we were on a flight together to campus visits and we got into a discussion about how much money we had spent on Interfolio during the job search “season”. Both of us had applied to more than 100 jobs, and for myself the Interfolio cost alone was north of $600. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Interfolio, it is a dossier service that allows a candidate to put his or her materials together, including confidential letters of recommendation, and send them as one package to the hiring committee responsible for the job search. The minimum cost for sending a dossier through Interfolio is $6, and in the case of print materials, the price increases as the page count goes up. For most jobs I applied to, the committee required at minimum a CV, three confidential letters of recommendation, a teaching philosophy, a writing sample, and a job letter in the first round of application.
Due to the volume of this type of application, the cost for a single Interfolio dossier could go as high as $20. Given such a high cost to applicants, most often graduate students, adjuncts, and postdoctoral fellows, and the fact that many jobs in English had as many as 500 applicants in the first round, we argued that departments and schools should work to make the process free to applicants by requiring only an electronic submission of a CV and job letter in the first round.
We further argued that this system would also provide feedback and reassurance to applicants advanced to the next round of the search by contacting them for materials like the writing sample and confidential letters of recommendation. Requesting more materials from a short list, we claimed, “would also alert us of our success and would mark a significant personal accomplishment in what can be a very anonymous process.”

Brenna Bhandar:

On 4 December, the University of London was granted an injunction from the High Court that prohibits ‘persons unknown (including students of the University of London) from ‘entering or remaining upon the campus and buildings of University of London for the purpose of occupational protest action’ for the next six months. Many such injunctions have been granted to universities across the country over the past four years, with increasing frequency and ever wider restrictions on student protest. In this case, the University of London argued that the occupation of Senate House threatened the liberty and freedom of senior university personnel, and presented a risk of damage to property, despite assurances from the occupiers that staff were free to come and go from the building and no such damage would occur. The eventual eviction of the occupiers was rough and violent. On 5 December, 35 students were arrested and several of them detained overnight. Some were assaulted by the police.
‘The action is restorative,’ the occupiers’ official statement said, ‘displacing the undemocratic and unaccountable management with a democratic space for the free pursuit of knowledge, critical enquiry and dissent.’ Their specific demands related to the democratic deficit in university governance, the privatisation of service provision and the student loan book, and the working conditions of academic, cleaning and maintenance staff.
The use of injunctions to quash protest is an indicator of how deeply privatisation has taken root in British universities. Injunctions are a private law remedy. They are being granted to prohibit protest as if universities, as legal persons, were like any other private property owner; as if students were like any people at large, violating the property rights of the university. The claimant in this case alerts the court to the Code of Student Discipline, implying that students who take part in sit-ins and occupations are in breach of their contract with the university. The right to express dissent, the rights of freedom of association and expression, and entirely legitimate concerns about university governance, are excised from the ostensibly private realms of property and contract.

Matt Taibbi:

The first thing you notice about Camden, New Jersey, is that pretty much everyone you talk to has just gotten his or her ass kicked.
Detroit’s Debt Crisis: Everything Must Go
Instead of shaking hands, people here are always lifting hats, sleeves, pant legs and shirttails to show you wounds or scars, then pointing in the direction of where the bad thing just happened.
“I been shot six times,” says Raymond, a self-described gangster I meet standing on a downtown corner. He pulls up his pant leg. “The last time I got shot was three years ago, twice in the femur.” He gives an intellectual nod. “The femur, you know, that’s the largest bone in the leg.”
“First they hit me in the head,” says Dwayne “The Wiz” Charbonneau, a junkie who had been robbed the night before. He lifts his wool cap to expose a still-oozing red strawberry and pulls his sweatpants down at the waist, drawing a few passing glances. “After that, they ripped my pockets out. You can see right here. . . .”
Even the cops have their stories: “You can see right here, that’s where he bit me,” says one police officer, lifting his pant leg. “And I’m thinking to myself, ‘I’m going to have to shoot this dog.'”
“I’ve seen people shot and gotten blood on me,” says Thomas Bayard Townsend III, a friendly convicted murderer with a tear tattoo under his eye. “If you turn around here, and your curiosity gets the best of you, it can cost you your life.”

Kathryn Joyce:

At 10 P.M. on a Sunday night in May, Lauren and John,* a young couple in the Washington, D.C., area, started an emergency 14-hour drive to the state where Lauren grew up in a strict fundamentalist household. Earlier that day, Lauren’s younger sister, Jennifer, who had recently graduated from homeschooling high school, had called her in tears: “I need you to get me out of this place.” The day, Jennifer said, had started with another fight with her parents, after she declined to sing hymns in church. Her slight speech impediment made her self-conscious about singing in public, but to her parents, her refusal to sing or recite scripture was more evidence that she wasn’t saved. It didn’t help that she was a vegan animal-rights enthusiast.
After the family returned home from church, Jennifer’s parents discovered that she had recently been posting about animal rights on Facebook, which they had forbidden. They took away Jennifer’s graduation presents and computer, she told Lauren. More disturbing, they said that if she didn’t eat meat for dinner she’d wake up to find one of the pets she babied gone.
To most people, it would have sounded like overreaction to innocuous forms of teenage rebellion. But Lauren, who’d cut ties with her family the previous year, knew it was more. The sisters grew up, with two brothers, in a family that was almost completely isolated, they say, held captive by their mother’s extreme anxiety and explosive anger. “I was basically raised by someone with a mental disorder and told you have to obey her or God’s going to send you to hell,” Lauren says. “Her anxiety disorder meant that she had to control every little thing, and homeschooling and her religious beliefs gave her the justification for it.”

Bonnie Stewart:

The short version (see slide 4) is this: there are currently two solitudes in the MOOC conversation, and it’s not a cMOOC/xMOOC divide. One solitude – the mainstream media discourse – is essentially a unicorn, in the sense that its promises are fantasies of salvation and solutionism that have very little to do with the actual practice of higher education. The other – the practitioners’ discourse(s), broadly represented by the various interests around the table at #mri13 – is a Tower of Babel. Still, this solitude, loosely and cacophonously affiliated as it is, nonetheless leans towards discussing MOOCs in terms of learning. And in the wake of twenty-odd months of hype in which the dominant public narratives about higher ed have been all glorious revolution or ghastly spectre, I think it’s time to seize this (likely momentary) lull in unicorn sales and try to talk about MOOCs as learning. We need to make ourselves familiar with what the post-hype landscape of higher ed looks like, and address the issues and opportunities it’s left us with. In learning terms. On as many public platforms as we can. In stereo.
In other words, challenge the empty narratives that your administrators or your faculty have been sold. Find ways to talk about why what you’re doing matters. Change the narrative from unicorns back to what education is about: learning. End story.

NY Times Editorial, via a kind reader:

“Federal, state and local governments and school districts have put little effort into identifying and developing students of all racial and economic backgrounds, both in terms of intelligence and the sheer grit needed to succeed. There are an estimated three million gifted children in K-12in the United States, about 6 percent of the student population. Some schools have a challenging curriculum for them, but most do not.”
…..
In a post-smokestack age, there is only one way for the United States to avoid a declining standard of living, and that is through innovation. Advancements in science and engineering have extended life, employed millions and accounted for more than half of American economic growth since World War II, but they are slowing. The nation has to enlarge its pool of the best and brightest science and math students and encourage them to pursue careers that will keep the country competitive.
But that isn’t happening. Not only do average American students perform poorly compared with those in other countries, but so do the best students, languishing in the middle of the pack as measured by the two leading tests used in international comparisons.
On the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment test, the most recent, 34 of 65 countries and school systems had a higher percentage of 15-year-olds scoring at the advanced levels in mathematics than the United States did. The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland all had at least twice the proportion of mathematically advanced students as the United States, and many Asian countries had far more than that.
Other tests have shown that America’s younger students fare better in global comparisons than its older students do, which suggests a disturbing failure of educators to nurture good students as they progress to higher grades. Over all, the United States is largely holding still while foreign competitors are improving rapidly.
Federal, state and local governments and school districts have put little effort into identifying and developing students of all racial and economic backgrounds, both in terms of intelligence and the sheer grit needed to succeed. There are an estimated three million gifted children in K-12 in the United States, about 6 percent of the student population. Some schools have a challenging curriculum for them, but most do not.

Related: parents file talented & gifted complaint with the Madison School District.

Ariel Kaminer:

At Cooper Union, it was outrage over a new tuition policy. At City College, it was anger over the closing of a community center. At both Manhattan colleges, student protest shut down buildings, garnered headlines and largely defined campus life over the past year. Now those two very different institutions are considering policies that could restrict how, when and where students can express dissent, while raising the penalties for those who disobey.
Representatives of Cooper Union’s student government were surprised when, a few weeks ago, administrators showed them a draft of a new code of conduct. In addition to addressing matters like fire safety and drug use, the document would forbid “deliberate or knowing disruption of the free flow of pedestrian traffic on Cooper Union premises” and “behavior that disturbs the peace, academic study or sleep of others on or off campus.” A section on bullying and intimidation mentions communication, in any medium, that “disrupts or interferes with the orderly operation of the Cooper Union.”

Grace:

Pristine was born in Japan and she was only 3 years old when we moved to Dubai in 2007. She only spoke Japanese then but as our stay in the UAE became longer and longer (7 years in a few weeks!) and with Pristine attending British curriculum international school, she has lost her grip not just on the language but also being away from Japan too long, been detached from the Japanese culture and tradition aspect.
When we went for vacation to Japan this summer, we enrolled Pristine in the local Japanese public school – something we’ve always wanted to do for years now. She has spent more of her years here than in Japan and we didn’t want her to forget half of what she is.
More specifically, we want her to experience both worlds.
Taiken nyuugaku: a special program for Japanese kids who lived overseas. They come home for the summer, and experience life in a Japanese school. We knew lots of children who did it. We thought it was a great way to reconnect with her roots, not mention hone her Japanese language skills and most importantly, to be with Japanese children her age, in Japan.

Audrey Watters:

Barely a week has gone by this year without some MOOC-related news. Much like last year, massive open online courses have dominated ed-tech conversations.
But if 2012 was, as The New York Times decreed, the year of the MOOC, 2013 might be described as the year of the anti-MOOC as we slid down that Gartner Hype Cycle from the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and into the “Trough of Disillusionment.” For what it’s worth, Gartner pegged MOOCs at the peak back in July, while the Horizon Report says they’re still on the horizon. Nevertheless the head of edX appeared on the Colbert Report this year, and the word “MOOC” entered the Oxford Online Dictionary – so whether you think those are indications of peak or trough or both or neither, it seems the idea of free online university education has hit the mainstream.
MOOCs: An Abbreviated History
To recap: in 2008, Dave Cormier coins the term “MOOC” to describe George Siemens’ and Stephen Downes’ course “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge.” In the Fall of 2011, Stanford offers open enrollment in online versions of three engineering classes: Artificial Intelligence (taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig), Machine Learning (taught by Andrew Ng), and Databases (taught by Jennifer Widom). In December 2011, MIT unveil MITx. In January 2012, Thrun announces he’s leaving Stanford to launch Udacity. In April 2012, Ng, along with Stanford colleague Daphne Koller, launch Coursera. In May 2012, Harvard and MIT team up for edX. In December 2012, 12 British universities partner to launch their MOOC platform, FutureLearn. And in 2013…

Madison’s latest budget spends about $15K per student.

Indystar:

I read with interest all of the comments about the Glenda Ritz/Indiana State Department of Education controversy, both pro and con. I am of the opinion that the office, regardless of who is elected or appointed, or Democrat or Republican, will have little if any effect on the kind of education our children will continue to receive.
I grew up in rural South Texas and went to two-room schools through middle school and to a 100-student high school. The 21 graduates in my high school class all could read by second grade and none ended up in prison or with a felony conviction. I think that held true for most of the students in that era. We had no stadium, no swimming pool, no state and federal education standards, no teachers union, minimal school funding, and yet we all learned to read and write and do basic math, and how to get a job and get to work.
Today, our public schools are about everything but teaching the basics, and yet that is what makes the most difference in our students’ future. Vast amounts of public tax dollars are spent on impressive buildings and facilities, indoctrinating instead of teaching, teaching a vast array of non-essential subjects, political correctness, huge sports complexes, and on and on. Yet many of our students do not gain the basic skills of reading and writing and financial literacy.

Alan Borsuk:

It is not easy to make Tom Phillipson happy when it comes to the way a child who needs special education is being served in Milwaukee.
He’s a charming, warm guy in many ways. But get him involved in a child’s needs and he’s demanding and persistent. I doubt “puppy dog” is the phrase that comes to mind first for people on the receiving end of his attention.
It is time to sing praises of Phillipson and to provide some perspective on changes in how special education is handled in Milwaukee and beyond. In some ways, the last few years have been a time of significant improvements, but there is much more distance to go.
The improvements can be summed up with two points:
There are more ambitious goals for children with special-education needs than there used to be.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act, 12 years old now, has a lot of failings. But one good thing it did was set out that schools were expected to see every segment of their student population achieve, and that included kids in special-ed. It was a bold statement that led to much more focus on the academic needs of the children, not just on taking care of them in school.
And, with a lot of pushing, compliance with special-education laws has gotten better. Milwaukee Public Schools is a good example of that. The impact of a lawsuit brought against MPS in 2001 is one of the reasons.

Michelle Chen:

After years of being backed into a corner, on Monday public-school teachers stood up in defiance against what they see as their chief bully–budget-slashing school reforms that have made school more stressful and less fulfilling for both them and their students.
Under the banner of a National Day of Action to Reclaim the Promise of Public Education, educators, students and community groups coordinated demonstrations, rallies and other public gatherings in dozens of cities. In the long run, the day of action kicked off a broader campaign by a coalition of unions and community groups to chart an alternative path to education reform.
According to a policy statement by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the leading union behind the campaign, and its partner groups, the goal is to foster “a community-union movement for educational equity and excellence.” While that agenda may sound neutral to the uninitiated, it speaks to growing resentment toward the prevailing reform rhetoric pushed by the White House and many politicians: corporate-oriented “standards” and “management,” leading to a test-heavy curriculum focused on math and reading at the expense of all else. First imposed under the No Child Left Behind law of the Bush administration, this hardline approach rests on the belief that a lack of academic rigor and “ineffective” educators are impeding U.S. students’ performance. The prescription has been an avalanche of high-stakes testing, public-school funding cuts and free-market privatization measures such as charter schools, often funded by corporate-oriented philanthropists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Kissairis Munoz via a kind Wisconsin Reading Coalition email:

What’s it like to have dyslexia? These eight videos chosen by our community will give you a peek into the experience of dyslexia–from brain function to celebrities’ take on it, and more. Click on the colorful brain image below to start the slideshow, and add your favorite videos in the comments.

Michael Porter 150K PDF via Whitney Tilson.

Related: Madison’s long term disastrous reading results and wisconsin2.org.

David Scott:

When pressed on what the main issues confronting educators in the 21st century are, Deborah Howes is unequivocal in her response. “The biggest challenge in looking ahead is letting go of familiar habits preventing you from reaching other audiences that expect and need to learn in different ways.”
Ms Howes, the Director of Digital Learning at New York’s iconic Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), is well placed to reflect on the future of education, particularly as it increasingly evolves – and involves – online.
MoMA’s digital education offerings include seven fee-based courses (offered via their website) and, more recently, a free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) offered via Coursera.

via Noel Radomski.

To the best of our knowledge via the Wisconsin Reading Coalition:

Jim Fleming: Maryanne Wolf knows as much as anybody on the planet about what the human brain is actually doing when it reads. She runs The Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University and enjoyed significant popular success for her last book, “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” But as Anne Strainchamps found out, Wolf is equally passionate about the dyslexic brain.
Maryanne Wolf: I like to say that the dyslexia brain is proof and daily evidence that the brain was never wired to read. Now there are all these children in the world, all these individuals are walking around with brains that are so often, I can’t say that for every single person, but so often these are brains that are wired to see spatial patterns, to see the big picture, to go outside of the box, to think holistically. Often they’re artists, they’re architects and yeah, that same advantage or set of advantages which made them before literacy, our generals, out builders, a lot of our great figures, that made a disadvantage at the same time for some of the wiring that goes into left hemisphere language processes.
Now the real, if, if you wanna know my real task in life, it’s to re-conceptualize or to help re-conceptualize dyslexia from being thought of as a deficit or something wrong with the brain, to realizing this is an extraordinary and beautiful brain that we have failed as an educational system to know how to teach easily when it comes to reading. But that is the failure, not the child, but of us to understand.
And one of the joys for me in brain imaging is that we’re able to look and see how many of our individuals with Dyslexia have such interesting right hemispheric processes, and when you look at how t hey read are using the right hemisphere inefficiently for a left hemisphere-like task.

Alan Schwarz:

After more than 50 years leading the fight to legitimize attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Keith Conners could be celebrating.
Severely hyperactive and impulsive children, once shunned as bad seeds, are now recognized as having a real neurological problem. Doctors and parents have largely accepted drugs like Adderall and Concerta to temper the traits of classic A.D.H.D., helping youngsters succeed in school and beyond.
But Dr. Conners did not feel triumphant this fall as he addressed a group of fellow A.D.H.D. specialists in Washington. He noted that recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the diagnosis had been made in 15 percent of high school-age children, and that the number of children on medication for the disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990. He questioned the rising rates of diagnosis and called them “a national disaster of dangerous proportions.”

Judy Willis:

For many students, the brain isn’t a hot topic of conversation. This is especially true for younger students who are still trying to understand the world around them, and are still far from developing physiological self-awareness of the very thing that gives them that self-awareness.
But helping students develop “brain literacy” doesn’t have to be a matter of dry science pumped full of confusing jargon. Understanding the brain can be empowering for students as they recognize their ability to strengthen it each time they use it. As a teacher, you can emphasize how using the executive functions, both in the classroom and outside of school, increases their strength for academic success. Practice makes perfect!
To reduce anxiety about new “stuff” in the classroom — whether related to Common Core State Standards, struggles with reading, or something else entirely — you can find opportunities to emphasize students’ ability to literally build the brains they want. Remind them that, when they turn in a story, demonstrate a science principle in a skit, or even raise their hand to respond to a question, they grow more dendrites and add new layers of myelin to their axons. To them this may sound gross, but it’s actually good news. By activating these brain networks, they continuously use their executive functions as they apply new learning. Like a muscle, the brain responds to interaction and activity.

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (4.6MB PDF).

Samuel Arbesman:

I noticed recently that books with the phrase “The Last Man Who Knew Everything” all share in common that their subjects lived during the period close to the Scientific Revolution, roughly between 1550 to 1700. (The examples I own are about Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit priest born in 1602; Thomas Young, who studied topics such as optics and philology and was born in 1773; and Philadelphia area professor Joseph Leidy, who was born in 1823.)
It’s as if the Scientific Revolution — and the knowledge it spawned — killed the ability to Know Everything. Before then, it was not only possible to be a generalist or polymath (someone with a wide range of expertise) — but the weaving together of different disciplines was actually rather unexceptional. The Ancients discussed topics such as ethics, biology, and metaphysics alongside each other. The Babylonian Talmud discusses everything from astronomy and biology to morality and law, weaving them together into a single compendium.
So what changed? Scientific knowledge exploded in size, mainly due to the application of the scientific method to our surroundings. As that knowledge base and its domain experts grew exponentially, we began classifying and ordering all that we understood — from the classification taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus to manuals for categorizing mental disease. We made sense of our world by dividing information into manageable portions and distinct areas of proficiency.

PBS NewsHour:

GWEN IFILL: Here’s an idea for improving the learning environment in a low-performing urban school: Stand the traditional classroom model on its head. That’s the experiment under way in a suburban Detroit school.
Jeffrey Brown has the story as part of our American Graduate project, a public media initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
MAN: So, you see how they are in the same family.
JEFFREY BROWN: What if you took the traditional school day and flipped it on its head, not literally, of course, but having lessons offered at night at home and homework done by day in the classroom?
That’s the experiment under way at Clintondale High School just outside Detroit, an area still reeling from the economic and social ills of the nearby city. The school serves many low-income families and faces tight budgets and declining enrollment.
MAN: So what’s the number part that I’m going to need for all three?
RELATED INFORMATION
Creating the flipped ‘lecture’ for at-home use

Laura Waters:

Philadelphia’s Mastery Charter Schools is hoping to run a school in Camden. This week, Camden Public Schools announced that is now accepting applications from charter operators. But despite Mastery’s track-record, not everyone is excited by this idea.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported this week that New Jersey’s Education Law Center (ELC), the primary advocate for New Jersey’s 31 poor Abbott districts, believes that the Camden Board of Education should not approve any more charter schools and instead focus on facilities repairs.
It’s not so hard to divine the politics of ELC’s anti-charter school stance. After all, the non-profit has made its bones lobbying for equitable school funding in the traditional public school sector and is closely allied with anti-choice groups that look askance at progressive instructional models. ELC was also one of the very few opponents to the Urban Hope Act, a 2011 bipartisan piece of legislation that allows non-profits to build up to four new schools in Camden, Trenton, and Newark, subject to approval by the local school board.

Maisie McAdoo:

TUDA results for New York City will be exceptionally important this year. While Mayor Bloomberg has highlighted selected indicators of improvement during his tenure, the Trial Urban District Assessment results will be a final, objective assessment of student progress during the Bloomberg years. They will also allow us to measure New York City against other major urban districts, including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Houston, Atlanta, and a large-U.S. cities average.
What TUDA results have showed so far — and 2011 was the last time they were updated — is that New York City’s 4th- and 8th-graders have improved in 4th grade math and reading and 8th grade math, but not as much as their peers in other major cities. On 8th-grade reading between 2003 and 2011, the city showed an especially disturbing trend of no improvement. New York used to lead among urban districts. But city scores have moved towards the middle of the pack of major urban school systems over the past decade. – See more at: http://www.edwize.org/trial-urban-districts-assessment-what-the-results-could-show#sthash.zCd2n4Op.dpuf

William & Mary

Academic departments and programs already have been reviewing their course offerings in relation to the new curriculum, looking at possible changes in courses that already exist, new courses, and courses that will no longer be needed. That planning ramps up in Spring 2014 with more formal assessments conducted with the A&S Dean’s Office. Simultaneously, Provost Halleran will join President Taylor Reveley in a full review of the proposed curriculum, including projected costs.
There will be some development and transition costs, Halleran said, as faculty design and implement the new courses, and some modest increased permanent costs in expanding the engaged learning model that characterizes a W&M education. Now that faculty have approved the new curriculum, the A&S Dean’s Office will conduct a formal assessment of temporary costs, associated costs such as increased faculty support and new, direct costs.
“From what I’ve seen so far, those costs appear to be reasonable and appropriate,” said Halleran, adding the College will support the new curriculum through a combination of resources, including reallocation of existing funds, budget priorities through W&M’s annual strategic planning process and private donations.

William & Mary.

Chris Rickert:

Lead researcher Sara Goldrick-Rab also said the most recent study — released Monday, of the 2012-13 school year — provides better evidence that the advancements probably come as a result of the program (i.e., they aren’t just a coincidence or a result of other causes).
This is good news for a district that has seen the percentage of low-income students reach 50 percent and now enrolls more students of color than whites.
But it’s not as if these demographic changes were sudden, and the district’s failure to reach low-income, minority students is longstanding.
The achievement gap is clear in state testing data online that goes back to 1996, but it almost certainly existed for many years before that.

Much more on the achievement gap, here.

Jay Matthews:

Last month, I asked whether parents and grandparents were worried about threats to annual testing caused by the national switch to the Common Core standards.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had warned that California would be shortchanging students and their families if it held to its plan not to report school test averages next year. Almost everyone who responded to me said Duncan was wrong.
I proposed in that column a year’s respite from reporting state test results, while teachers adjusted to the new Common Core lessons and tests. “Schools can give the new tests but use the results only for improving teaching methods, not for assessing students and teachers,” I wrote.
Virginia parent Wendy Hoskins was among many who think that was a good idea. In fact, she said she would be happy if her kids didn’t take the tests at all.
“Standardized tests do not give a true sense of a child’s abilities,” she said. “If it’s so great, why don’t private schools jump on the bandwagon?”

channel3000.com:

Responses from nearly 100 school superintendents across Wisconsin with their feelings about the Common Core academic standards have been released by a legislative committee.
The special panel created by Republicans to study the standards released results of the four-question survey on Tuesday. The committee is expected to release its recommendations related to the Common Core curriculum on Wednesday and vote on it Thursday.
The survey was sent to all 426 public school districts in Wisconsin and 94 superintendents responded. Their comments can be seen online.

View the complete report, here (24mb PDF).

Corey Robin:

Rick Perlstein has a great piece on how faculty respond to grad student unions.
He quotes at length from a letter that a professor of political science at the University of Chicago sent to graduate students in his department who are trying to organize a union there.
What always amuses me about these sorts of statements from faculty is how carefully crafted and personal they are — you can tell a lot of time and thought went into this one — and yet somehow they still manage to attain all the individuality of a Walmart circular. No union contract was ever as standardized or as cookie-cutter as one of these missives. The very homogenization and uniformity that faculty fear a union will foist upon their campus is already present in their own aversion.
Anyway, here’s what the good professor has to say:

Gideon Rachman:

What defines the west? American and European politicians like to talk about values and institutions. But for billions of people around the world, the crucial point is simpler and easier to grasp. The west is the part of the world where even ordinary people live comfortably. That is the dream that makes illegal immigrants risk their lives, trying to get into Europe or the US.
Yet, even though the lure of the west remains intense, the western world itself is losing faith in its future. Last week Barack Obama gave one of the bleakest speeches of his presidency. In unsparing terms, the US president chronicled the increasing inequality and declining social mobility that, he says, “pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the world”.
A Pew Research Center opinion survey, conducted in 39 countries this spring, asked: “Will children in your country be better off than their parents?” Only 33 per cent of Americans believed their children would live better, while 62 per cent said they would live worse. Europeans were even gloomier. Just 28 per cent of Germans, 17 per cent of Brits, 14 per cent of Italians and 9 per cent of French thought their children would be better off than previous generations. This western pessimism contrasts strongly with optimism in the developing world: 82 per cent of Chinese, 59 per cent of Indians and 65 per cent of Nigerians believe in a more prosperous future.

The term “autodidact” is usually reserved for those who, like Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, and so on, did not have the advantages of spending much time in school or the help of schoolteachers with their education.
I would like to suggest that every student is an autodidact, because only the student can decide what information to accept and retain. Re-education camps in the Communist world, from Korea to Vietnam to China, no doubt made claims that they could “teach” people things whether they want to learn them or not, but I would argue that the threat of force and social isolation used in such camps are not the teaching methods we are searching for in our schools.
And further, I would claim that even in re-education camps, students often indeed reserve private places in their minds about which their instructors know very little.
My main point is that the individual is the sovereign ruler of their own attention and the sole arbiter of what information they choose to admit and retain. Our system of instruction and examination has no doubt persuaded many sovereign learners over the years to accept enough of the knowledge we offer to let most of them pass whatever exams we have presented, but the cliché is that after the test, nearly all of that information is gone.
Teachers have known all this from the beginning, and so have developed and employed all their arts to first attract, and then retain, the attention of their students, and they have labored tirelessly to persuade their students that they should decide to attend to and make use of the knowledge they are offering.
One of the best arguments for having teachers be very well-grounded in the subjects they are teaching is that the likelihood increases that they will really love their subject, and it is easier for teachers to convince students of the value of what they are teaching if they clearly believe in its value themselves.
It should not be forgotten, however, that the mind is a mercurial and fickle instrument, and the attention of students is vulnerable to all the distractions of life, in the classroom and out of it. I am distressed that so many who write about education seem to overlook the role of students almost entirely, concentrating on the public policy issues of the Education Enterprise and forgetting that without the attention and interest of students, all of their efforts are futile.
It seems strange to me that so little research is ever done into the actual academic work of students, for instance whether they ever read a complete nonfiction book, and whether they every write a serious academic paper on a subject other than themselves.
For many reformers, it seems the only student work they are interested in is student scores on objective tests. Sadly, objective tests discover almost nothing about the students’ interest in their experiences of the complexity of the chemistry, history, literature, Chinese, and other subjects they have been offered.
There was a time when college entrance decisions were based on essays students would write on academic subjects, and those could reveal not only student fluency and knowledge, but something of their attachment to and appreciation for academic matter.
But now, we seem to have decided that neither we nor they have time for extended essays on history and the like (except for the International Baccalaureate, and The Concord Review), and the attractions of technology have led examiners to prefer tests that can be graded very quickly, by computer wherever possible. So, when the examiners show no interest in serious academic work, it should not surprise us that students may see less value in it as well.
The Lower Education teachers are still out there, loving their subjects, and offering them up for students to judge, and to decide how much of them they will accept into their memories and their thoughts, but meanwhile the EduPundits and the leaders of the Education Enterprise [Global Education Reform Movement = GERM, as Pasi Sahlberg calls it], with lots of funding to encourage them, sail on, ignoring the control students have, and always have had, over their own attention and their own learning.
——————————-
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Zerlina Maxwell

Most of us have heard the term the “school-to-prison” pipeline, but perhaps you aren’t completely clear on what it is or how it works. A new video by the Advancement Project that uses throwback clips of classic television shows, “The Cosby Show” and “Saved By the Bell,” is meant to illustrate exactly what drives the mass incarceration of Black and Latino youth. The video highlights the fact that kids today are more poorly behaved than in the past, but that punishment for even minor disciplinary infractions in school casts them criminals. When Zach Morris was disciplined for using a phone in class, we didn’t see Mr. Belding calling the cops.
“It has been this way for a long time but in the 1980s, there was a shift in the discourse around young people and there was this new term used to describe them, ‘superpredator.’ Young people had been dubbed superpredators right in the middle of the crack cocaine epidemic and the height of the war on drugs,” Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, told EBONY.com. “The intersection of these things, were the leading cause to a crackdown on young people’s [behavior].”
“Schools then started to adopt ‘zero tolerance policies’ along with drug sniffing dogs and metal detectors. Then came the 1990s, with the Drug Free School Zones Act which requires expulsion for carrying a gun on school grounds. Zero tolerance policies are the kind of discipline that requires a particular kind of exclusion and it is a practice of harsh discipline.”
It wasn’t always like this. Before and during part of the 1980s, kids engaged in many of the same behaviors that are the grounds for suspension and expulsion now. Talking on a cell phone, having a food fight in the cafeteria, lateness, dress code violations,disrupting class—-minor infractions that used to result in a trip to the principal’s office and maybe a few days of detention. Now, these types of behaviors can result in criminal penalties, fines, and young people getting caught up in the criminal justice system with ramifications that can last a lifetime.

Philip G. Altbach:

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are the latest effort to harness information technology for higher education. While they are still in a nascent stage of development, many in academe are enthusiastic about their potential to be an inexpensive way of delivering an education to vast audiences.
Yet one aspect of the MOOC movement has not been fully analyzed: who controls the knowledge. MOOCs are largely an American-led effort, and the majority of the courses available so far come from universities in the United States or other Western countries. Universities and educators in less-developed regions of the world are climbing onto the MOOC bandwagon, but it is likely that they will be using the technology, pedagogical ideas, and probably significant parts of the content developed elsewhere. In this way, the online courses threaten to exacerbate the worldwide influence of Western academe, bolstering its higher-education hegemony.
For the most part, MOOC content is based on the American academic experience and pedagogical ideas. By and large, the readings required by most MOOC courses are American or from other Western countries. Many of the courses are in English, and even when lectures and materials are translated into other languages, the content largely reflects the original course. The vast majority of instructors are American. It is likely that more diversity will develop, but the basic content will remain the same.

James Murphy, via Carrie Zellmer:

On several occasions in the past year, David Coleman, the president of the College Board, which administers the SAT, has suggested that changes need to be made to the vocabulary tested on the exam. In a talk he gave at the Brookings Institution a year ago, Coleman remarked, “I think when you think about vocabulary on exams, you know, how SAT words are famous as the words you will never use again? You know, you study them in high school and you’re like, gosh, I’ve never seen this before, and I probably never shall.” Coleman co-opted an old criticism of the SAT, that it forced students to learn difficult vocabulary that is useless for much of anything other than scoring well on the exam. He went on, “Why wouldn’t it be the opposite? Why wouldn’t you have a body of language on the SAT that’s the words you most need to know and be ready to use again and again? Words like transform, deliberate, hypothesis, right?”
Jim Montoya, the College Board’s Vice President of Higher Education, in an interview on NPR, reiterated Coleman’s criticism of “SAT words.” Asked why the SAT is “always [testing] the word ‘unscrupulous’,” Montoya replied, “Yes, you’re right. It’s one of those words people identify as an SAT word. All I can say is that as we move forward, one of the things we want to make absolutely certain of is that the vocabulary that students are expected to know will be vocabulary that they will be able to use as college students, and which will be valuable to them.”
Coleman’s comments on vocabulary provoked little response at the time, although one commentator accused him of “sending a message that devalues language.” The notion that some words are not worth knowing is bound to raise the hackles not only of people who love the wealth and power of all kinds of words, including fancy ones, but also of people who know just how much importance educational experts attribute to what they call “lexical richness,” or a large and diverse vocabulary. Coleman just so happens to be both of those kinds of people, and he understands that the question is less what vocabulary students should learn vocabulary than how they should learn it.

Michael Skapinker

If they are to make progress, children should start learning early. But Mandarin is very different from European languages and harder for an English speaker to learn than French or German. Also, in the race to learn other languages, the Chinese are way ahead in learning English. Although the English-language component of the Chinese university entrance exam has been reduced, there are 50,000 English-language teaching companies in the country. Internationally-minded companies regard English as important. Lenovo, the Chinese computer company, has made it its official language.
Throughout Europe, English is now essential for anyone wanting to reach a senior corporate position. It is a given, a background skill like knowing how to create a PowerPoint presentation or find your way to the office.
That will be the case in China too. Foreign Mandarin speakers may establish better contacts and win business. But if China follows the European pattern, its future young executives will listen as their anglophone counterparts struggle a while in their school-learnt Mandarin and they will then switch to English because it wastes less time.

Jose de Cordoba:

During a recent teachers strike in this Zapotec Indian town in the poor southern state of Oaxaca, parents who brought in replacement instructors discovered that the children hadn’t been taught the words to Mexico’s national anthem. Instead, they had been trained to sing a popular leftist song which acts as an unofficial anthem to a local chapter of the teachers union.
“We don’t know the words to the Mexican anthem,” said Leticia Diego, a student, apologizing to a visitor one recent morning. About a dozen seventh-graders then shyly sang the leftist anthem, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated.”
The union here is the National Coordinator of Educational Workers, or CNTE, a radical and powerful wing of the country’s national teachers union. Analysts say it has long maintained an iron grip over some of Mexico’s poorest states–one that goes beyond what children are taught, and extends to lengthy strikes, disruptive protests and violent clashes. Now, as Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto begins to implement an overhaul of Mexico’s troubled public school system, the CNTE has stepped up its efforts to fight the government.

Austin Goolsbee:

Most of us watching the looming budget showdown do so with a sense of dread. The last one left congressional approval at 9%, the president’s popularity at a new low, and consumer confidence at levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis. The trouble, of course, is finding common ground on a 10-year budget framework or even on a six-week punt. Hopefully, they will find common ground.
If we are committed to evidence, though, there’s one area where we ought to be able to agree: early-childhood education. Investments in pre-kindergarten education have among the highest payoffs of any government policy, and whatever budget agreement emerges should restore the country’s long-standing commitment to early education.
The budget-sequester cuts agreed to in 2011, under the guise of saving money, have knocked as many as 70,000 kids out of such programs. How myopic. It doesn’t save money beyond the narrowest definition of the immediate term. Incarceration, special education, teen pregnancy, low earnings–avoiding these outcomes will actually save money, and early education helps achieve that.

Peter Schrag:

Release of the numbers last month, amplified by an attention-getting analysis authored by retired UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor John Cummins and graduate student Kirsten Hextrum, has sent shock waves around the campus. The department of athletics and its friends are playing full-court damage control.
Sandy Barbour, Berkeley’s director of athletics, acknowledged the problem and promises to turn things around. Early indicators of academic progress in the past year are encouraging, she says, “But, we need to do better.”
A year ago she fired football coach Jeff Tedford, in part, say her friends, because he failed to do enough to help his players succeed academically. In the sports world, the explanation was simpler: Tedford’s three losing seasons. Barbour told me it was some of both: “downward trends” both on the field and in the classroom.
But in the eyes of some Berkeley professors and administrators – and for many beyond the campus – the attention given the new numbers about athletes’ graduation rates seems to raise the specter of older and more fundamental issues.

John Cummins and Kirsten Hextrum (PDF):

This white paper is based on a larger project being conducted with the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library. The purpose of the research is to explore the history of the management of Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley from the 1960s to the present. The project began in 2009 and will include, when completed, approximately 70 oral history interviews of individuals who played key roles in the management of intercollegiate athletics over that period of time – Chancellors, Athletic Directors, senior administrators, Faculty Athletic Representatives, other key faculty members, directors of the Recreational Sports Program, alumni/donors, administrators in the Athletic Study Center and others. The interviews are conducted by John Cummins, Associate Chancellor – Chief of Staff, Emeritus who worked under Chancellors Heyman, Tien, Berdahl and Birgeneau from 1984 – 2008. Intercollegiate Athletics reported to him from 2004 – 2006. A publication of the results is underway and will be co- authored by Cummins and Kirsten Hextrum, a PhD student in the Graduate School of Education, a member and two-time national champion of Cal Women’s Crew from 2003 – 2007, and a tutor/adviser in the Athletic Study Center since 2009. This paper addresses administrative and management issues that typically concern those responsible for the conduct of a Division I-A intercollegiate athletics program. It assumes that such a program will continue for many years to come and that it provides important benefits for the Cal community. Its focus is principally with the market driven, multi-billion dollar phenomenon of the big-time sports of Men’s football and basketball, their development over time and their intersection with the academic world. The Olympic or non-revenue sports at UC Berkeley more closely resemble the amateur intercollegiate ideal with high graduation rates and successful programs. Even these sports programs, however, are gradually being pulled into the more highly commercialized model.
In the spring of 1999, a Professor in Ethnic Studies provided passing grades to two football players who did little or no work for his course. The NCAA cited Cal for academic fraud and a lack of institutional control, and placed the department on probation for five years. These kinds of incidents exact an emotional toll on the AD and the senior administration. They are a major embarrassment for the campus and remain so. In the NCAA’s own accounting of schools by major violations in its history, Cal, along with a few other schools including UCLA, with 7, ranks just behind Oklahoma (8) and Arizona State and Southern Methodist University (9). Stanford has none. Future work by these authors will investigate the nature of these violations, the culture that led to them and suggest efforts to mitigate further infractions. This paper primarily addresses the academic issues.
…..
Kasser did complete the Haas Pavilion during his watch despite the conflicts and difficulties associated with it, unquestionably a major accomplishment. He made great strides in addressing the inequities between the Men’s and Women’s programs. He upgraded the coaching in some of the Olympic Sports and his appointment of Ben Braun as the Men’s Basketball coach, who brought an inclusive, team oriented approach to management boosted the morale of the department. Kasser valued the Rec Sports program as part of the merged department and was an excellent public ambassador for Cal.
…..
The graduation rate for UC Berkeley’s revenue generating teams are the lowest in the department. Men’s basketball went four years with none of their scholarship student athletes graduating. This brought down their average to a 58% graduation rate over this eight year period. Football also has sub-par graduation rates. Over the past eight years, football graduation rates have ranged from a high of 72% to a low of 31%. Football has the lowest average team graduation rate with only 50% of their scholarship athletes graduating. The numbers are even more grim when broken down by race. In particular, the black scholarship football players, many of whom are special admits, have gone from a high of 80% to a low of 18%. The NCAA also tracks graduation rates by compiling four-year averages to even-out any anomalies. In this data set, the black graduation rates range from a high of 63% to a low of 30%. Three of the seven four-year averages mark the black graduation rate in the 30s.
…..
With a new Chancellor, a new football coach, a new stadium and high performance center, a larger and more monied conference, the present surely marks a transitional period for intercollegiate athletics at UC Berkeley. These changes all signal Cal’s continued escalation as a Big-Time sports program, and the difficult dilemmas campus administrators face. To fund an intercollegiate program of this magnitude they cannot alienate a substantial donor base. The recent blowback after the elimination, and subsequent reinstatement of five varsity sports, makes the possibility of cutting sports again as a cost saving measure extremely remote for years to come. Further, the athletic deficit places enormous pressures to win. This increases the temptation to gain an extra edge on the competition whether through newer facilities, higher-paid coaches, or longer practices. All this must be achieved on the backs of student athletes who are enrolled in a full-time course load at one of the most prestigious academic universities in the world. Rather than resolving the dilemma of how to maintain a nearly $70 million per year athletic enterprise while still providing a world-class education for the participants, campus administrators continue to muddle through.

Dana Goldstein:

Is school backward? In the latest education trend, “flipped learning,” students watch video lectures at home, and then do what is often traditionally thought of as homework–problem solving, writing, or hands-on activities–in the classroom, with personal assistance from their teachers. Who’s excited about this? Tech companies, app developers, and some teachers have eagerly embraced “the flip.” But other educators are skeptical. Is more screen time what our kids need? In this episode, I talk to Jonathan Bergmann, a teacher and educational technology advocate, and Frank Noschese, a science teacher and blogger who is skeptical of flipping.

Matt Wixon:

The start of the week was expected to include football teams preparing for UIL semifinals and celebrating TAPPS state titles. Instead, on the day when the Cowboys play the Chicago Bears on Monday Night Football, high school teams are joining the party.
A dozen teams from North Texas will be playing Monday, starting with the 1 p.m. showdown of DeSoto (13-0) and Euless Trinity (11-2) at Waco ISD Stadium. Both schools are releasing students early so they can head south for the Class 5A Division I Region I final.
Playing on Monday won’t be a big adjustment, DeSoto coach Claude Mathis said.
“But playing in the cold weather? That’s something different,” he said. “But we’ve played some in the cold, too.”

Veronique de Rugy:

Chairman Issa, Ranking Member Cummings, thank you for the opportunity to testify today regarding the limitations of government intervention.
Despite Washington’s recent focus on the disastrous Affordable Care Act website rollout, policymakers are missing what the rollout glitches symbolize: the fundamental flaws that imbue government intervention.
The work of public choice economists such as Nobel laureate James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Mancur Olson, and William Niskanen has shown that, despite good intentions and lavish use of taxpayer resources, government solutions are not only unlikely to solve most of our problems–they often make problems worse.
Public Choice Economics: Politics without Romance
Congress spends a great deal of time discussing the need to address market failures such as monopolies and pollution.
However, even when such a problem does exist, the policies implemented to address it are often ineffective or undesirable.1 That’s because, as public choice economists have pointed out, while there may be market failures, there are also government failures. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, popularized in his famous essay “Public Choice: Politics without Romance,” James Buchanan explains why looking to government for solutions often results in more harm than good.2

makerbot:

We are on a mission to put a MakerBot Desktop 3D Printer in every school in the United States of America.
MakerBot and America Makes are teaming up to get thousands of 3D printing bundles into schools all across our nation.

Fawn Johnson:

LaGuardia Community College is a GED machine. At this urban school, near the Long Island Expressway in the New York City borough of Queens, the prep courses for the state’s high school equivalency exam aren’t just textbook reviews–they are professional-development classes. There is a course for would-be health workers, another for business students, and yet another for anyone interested in technology and engineering.
LaGuardia’s free classes, funded by state, city, and foundation grants, have a months-long waiting list. Students willing to pay for courses (at about $3.50 per hour of instruction) can usually get a spot in the next scheduled class, although those fill up, too. Most students are black or Latino.
Gail Mellow, LaGuardia’s president, says postsecondary educators who don’t reach out to high school dropouts are ignoring many of the young people who most need their help. In big cities such as New York, almost 40 percent of students who enter high school don’t finish. “To really educate the American populace,” she says, “we cannot forget people who did not graduate from high school.”

Pamela Cotant:

The foam board models of dream homes created by seventh-grade students at Glacial Drumlin School in Cottage Grove sported extra features like swimming pools, an airplane and the “world’s biggest hot tub.”
While they were busy conceptualizing their fantasy homes, the students were using math as they learned how to create something to scale.
Trenton Herber, 12, and Henry Huston, 13, decided to make a house in the shape of a pyramid, which was spray-painted gold and taken apart in three pieces to reveal the interior, which included a basketball court.
“It was pretty hard because all the angles had to be like perfect or it would just fall apart,” Trenton said.
Peyton Blang, Anissa Dimmig and Ali Dorn, all 12 years old, had a Cape Cod-style home in mind when they used Popsicle sticks to create siding for their home. The group ended up making adjustments when they realized their blueprints didn’t account for the thickness of the foam board.

The Onion:

Recent Wesleyan University graduate Zach Wallace confided to reporters Thursday that he has no clue how his parents are supposed to earn enough money to settle his $40,000 in student loan debt. “My God, they’ll be lucky if they’re able to pay this off while they’re still in their 70s,” said the 23-year-old film studies major and unpaid intern, noting the minimum monthly payments his father and mother will need to make just to keep their heads above water. “The student loan system takes advantage of a lot of parents who simply don’t realize what they’re getting into. Then four years later it’s like, ‘Welcome to the real world, Mom and Dad!'” Citing the present trend of tuition hikes and stagnant wages, Wallace added that his parents might well be forced into bankruptcy by the time he has completed a decent Ph.D. program.

Gayle Worland:

He went on to found the Kentucky Youth Symphony in Louisville, and later was hired by Boston University to start the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, which performed for President John F. Kennedy at the White House. At age 50, Rabin was lured to Madison to help shape and lead WYSO.
Rabin received countless service awards, including the 2000 Wisconsin Governor’s Award in Support of the Arts. Both WYSO and the American String Teachers Association named awards for outstanding arts leaders in his honor.
“Marvin Rabin was the most passionate advocate for youth orchestras that the world has ever known,” said Bridget Fraser, executive director for WYSO, which plans to memorialize Rabin at its Winterfest concerts in March.
“He really believed in making music accessible, and not an elitist thing,” his son Ralph told the State Journal in a 2011 profile. “As a teacher, he makes students feel the importance of who they are and what they can become.”

A great example of what one person can accomplish. I am thankful for the many arts opportunities available to our students. Much more on Marvin Rabin, here.

Stephanie Simon:

It’s designed to be an impressive show of force: Thousands of unionized teachers plan to rally Monday in cities from New York to San Francisco to “reclaim the promise of public education.”
Behind the scenes, however, teachers unions are facing tumultuous times. Long among the wealthiest and most powerful interest groups in American politics, the unions are grappling with financial, legal and public-relations challenges as they fight to retain their clout and build alliances with a public increasingly skeptical of big labor.
“I do think it’s a moment of truth,” said Lance Alldrin, a veteran high-school teacher in Corning, Calif., who has split from his longtime union after serving for a decade as the local president.
The National Education Association has lost 230,000 members, or 7 percent, since 2009, and it’s projecting another decline this year, which will likely drop it below 3 million members. Among the culprits: teacher layoffs, the rise of non-unionized charter schools and new laws in states such as Wisconsin and Michigan freeing teachers to opt out of the union.
The American Federation of Teachers has been able to grow slightly and now represents 1.5 million workers — but because many new members are retirees or part-timers who pay lower dues, union revenue actually fell last year, by nearly $6 million, federal records show.

Marian Wang:

Sallie Mae and other large student-loan servicers — the companies that act as a go-between for borrowers and lenders — will soon be getting some regular oversight from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency announced this week.
ProPublica and others have long documented student borrowers’ troubles with the companies that handle the day-to-day collection of student-loan payments and communicate with borrowers.
“Student loan servicers can have a profound impact on borrowers and their families,” CFPB Director Richard Cordray said Monday in a call with reporters. “Given how quickly this market has grown and the recent uptick in delinquency rates, it is important for us to ensure that borrowers receive appropriate attention from their servicers.”

WISTAX: On December property tax bill, statewide school levies up 0.8%, counties up 1.2%, technical colleges up 1.3%

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJMattD4) December 9, 2013

Madison’s school property taxes will increase by 3.38% after a 9% increase a few years ago. Meanwhile, Middleton’s property taxes are 16% less than Madison’s on a similar home.

Pat Schneider:

But statistics showing African-American students in the district were eight times more likely to get an out-of-school suspension than white students last year raises questions about whether the discipline code works against efforts to close the achievement gap.
Among big school districts reconsidering such measures is Broward County in Florida, where a zero-tolerance policy led to arrests for such infractions as possessing marijuana or spraying graffiti, the New York Times reports. That district, which had more than 1,000 arrests in the 2011 school year, entered into an agreement last month with community organizations to overhaul its policies to de-emphasize punishment. School districts in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Denver are undertaking similar reviews of get-tough policies.
“Everybody knows that suspensions don’t always achieve a change in behavior,” says Tim Ritchie, dean of students at Madison Memorial High School. “When we send some kids out of school (on suspension) they don’t have anywhere appropriate to go — their homes can be very chaotic environments.”

Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum.

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

t would be terrific if three or more people run for Passman’s open seat, triggering a Feb. 18 primary, followed by the general election April 1. That would allow more debate — and community engagement — on the future of our schools.
The School Board seat held by president Ed Hughes also is up for election this spring. We admire Hughes for his public service. He’s capable and level-headed.
But incumbents shouldn’t get a free pass. We hope someone — or more than one challenger — will step forward to give voters a choice.
When it comes to School Board elections, the more candidates, the better. Our community deserves the best leaders possible.

Much more on the 2014 Madison School Board election, here.

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

The District is currently experiencing a shortage of substitute teachers, which has led to a high number of unfilled assignments when a teacher or SEA is absent. As a result, many principals are asking teachers and other professional staff to cover for the absent teacher. When this occurs, members of MTI’s “Teacher” Bargaining Unit are likely to qualify to receive “class coverage compensation.” Class coverage pay is $22 for each hour of covering another teacher’s students. The Contract mandates that in the event a teacher’s absence cannot be covered by a substitute, volunteers must first be solicited to cover the classes. If no volunteers come forward, the building administrator can assign other certified staff.
Compensation for class coverage is provided by Section III-R of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and is paid under the following conditions:

450K PDF:

Reminders of Best Practice
Current Practice
Data from MMSD
Review input from Focus Groups
Examine Implications for Policy
Examine Implications for Practice

Related: Parent talented & gifted complaint, MAP Assessment results, English 10, credit for non-Madison school district courses and outbound open enrollment.

Greg:

But this year, thanks to Ohio’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee and State Board of Education, the magic number is 28 points. Score more than 27 and it is presumed that the child is wholly prepared to advance forward without required intervention while a score of 27 or less forces the child, the school, and the parents to engage in interventions that may not be appropriately aligned to any particular reading deficiency nor specifically aligned to the exact struggles the child is dealing with.
It is this type of one-size-fits-all educational approach that has widespread opposition from a diverse group of education advocates on the left and the far right:
“When it comes to learning, one size does not fit all.” – School Choice Ohio
“In this environment, and especially in this age of sophisticated data, we shouldn’t put too much stock in an instrument as crude as a “one size fits all” standardized test.” – NEA President Dennis Van Roekel
“I think one of the problems that we have had in public education is thinking that one size fits all, and we just know that doesn’t work for all children.” – Ohio Superintendent Richard Ross

DD Guttenplan:

Like a school principal handing out a clutch of C grades, Andreas Schleicher unveiled the results from the latest round of the Program for International Student Assessment tests last week.
For Britain, the United States and most of Western Europe, the results ranged from “average” to “poor.” British students, for example, scored exactly average in mathematics and slightly above average in reading and science. French students were slightly below average in science and slightly above in reading and mathematics. The United States were below average in mathematics and science but slightly above in reading.
For Asian countries, the news was much more encouraging, with students from Shanghai topping the chart by a considerable margin, but with students from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea all closely bunched at the high end.
Mr. Schleicher, the head of education at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the tests every three years to about half a million 15-year-olds in 65 countries around the world, also noted significant improvement in Vietnam. He described it as a poor country whose students outperformed peers from many wealthier nations — and did even better once differences in income were taken into account.
“On a level playing field, the British look even worse,” he said at a press conference here.
Western countries, Mr. Schleicher warned, should not to comfort themselves with the myth that Asian high performance is the result of education systems that favor memorization over creativity.

Ryan Lawler

Clever launched about a year and a half ago to provide a standardized API for K-12 schools that allows them to unlock and share data with outside developers. It’s managed to get 10,000 schools signed up to use its tools since then. Now, according to our sources, the company has raised $10 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital.
The funding comes as Clever is finding ways to make schools more connected and accessible for developers. Most schools today use a variety of legacy Student Information Systems (SIS) as a way to store student data. But many of those systems tend to be outdated or custom-built, meaning that the information held within — which includes class lists, attendance, and grades — can’t be shared or accessed by outside developers.
For developers, that means integrating with individual schools on a one-to-one basis, and that just doesn’t scale. Clever, by contrast, provides a single, universal API that will allow developers and education companies to access all the data that has been locked up in legacy silos and use it in their apps.

Ravi Sinha:

It is unusual for school students to be worrying about the “collective”. But, then, yours seems to be an unusual school. When I was here the last time, you were pondering the “continuum”. I find it truly remarkable. To grapple with issues and concepts that are deeply philosophical and at the same time of immense practical value – and doing so at a young age – is an ingredient that goes into the making of great civilizations. In a world that seems to revel in everything that is crass and commercial, and in a country that appears like a continent of cacophony and shallowness, this is not expected of you. You and your teachers must be congratulated for swimming against the tide.
Collective is something that falls between a collection and the composite. There is ample space between these two categories, and where exactly does a collective fall in this space depends on what kind of collective we are talking about. But let us first talk a bit about the endpoints of this space.A collection can be gathering together of arbitrary and distinct elements as in a mathematical set. A set comprising of a frog, a princess, a pencil and a magic wand will qualify as a collection. A collection can also be of identical but distinct elements. A collection of four identical horses pulling Raja Dasharath’s chariot – or ten identical horses pulling King Solomon’s chariot – is also a collection, although you could also call it a team of horses. You may notice that we are already shifting from the concept of an arbitrary collection, although you would still not say that the chariot is being pulled by a collective of horses.

Sarah Johnson:

For some juniors and seniors at Union High School, their choice of electives will soon be seemingly endless.
The R-XI school board unanimously approved a program that will allow these students to take Massive Open Online Courses, or “MOOCs” for a half a credit next semester.
The class will be pass/fail and will not count toward the student’s overall grade point average.
MOOCs are offered by universities worldwide, including some of the most highly accredited U.S. institutions such as Harvard, Yale or MIT.
They cover just about any subject imaginable, from The Beatles to the Big Bang Theory, or foreign languages to physics.
Dr. Justin Tarte, director of curriculum and support services, said about 40 students are already in the required application process to take these courses next semester.
Students must go through an interview process with their guidance counselor and other officials to justify why they want to take MOOCs. Once approved for the program, students will be responsible for finding enough of them to fill an 18-week semester.

Alan Borsuk:

The test results aren’t good. Get different tests.
That may sound like a kill-the-messenger response to why American kids keep getting unsatisfying results on standardized tests. Tests don’t give wrong answers — kids do.
But that’s one way of looking at the huge changes afoot for testing, including in Wisconsin. At the same time, criticism of testing is gaining momentum and may have an effect I would not have expected even recently. There is a chance we could see, in Wisconsin and nationwide, a much better, more insightful world of standardized tests soon. And there is a chance we’re heading toward a colossal testing mess.
“I think the country is at a moment of truth on testing, a really important one,” Marc Tucker, CEO and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and a major figure in national efforts to raise education standards, said last week. Tucker spoke in response to release of a high-profile round of international tests that showed no progress for American kids in reading and math and a growing number of nations doing better than the United States.
The building heat around testing has several big themes.
For one, it is the partner issue with the controversies over the Common Core standards that are being implemented in 90% of states, including Wisconsin, and which are drawing increasing criticism. Standards are goals for what children should learn. Broad-scale tests are the way to find out how they’re doing and compare kids in, say, your school or state with kids in another school or state. But that is valid only if the tests are worthy of the task — which is where a lot of debate lies.

James Somers:

“It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.” Douglas Hofstadter is in a grocery store in Bloomington, Indiana, picking out salad ingredients. “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say–maybe they wouldn’t go this far–but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done.”
Hofstadter says this with an easy deliberateness, and he says it that way because for him, it is an uncontroversial conviction that the most-exciting projects in modern artificial intelligence, the stuff the public maybe sees as stepping stones on the way to science fiction–like Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing supercomputer, or Siri, Apple’s iPhone assistant–in fact have very little to do with intelligence. For the past 30 years, most of them spent in an old house just northwest of the Indiana University campus, he and his graduate students have been picking up the slack: trying to figure out how our thinking works, by writing computer programs that think.

Susannah Newsmith:

Two big evaluations of education in the Sunshine State came out this week–and readers can be excused for feeling a bit confused, because they tell rather different stories about the state of Florida’s schools.
Eleven newspapers around the state went front-page this week with stories highlighting the release of teacher evaluation data. The vast majority of Florida teachers–98 percent–were rated “effective” or “highly effective.”
Meanwhile, two papers–the Lakeland Ledger (which ran wire copy) and The Palm Beach Post (subscription-only) gave A1 placement to stories about Florida’s results on the Program for International Student Assessment, which tests students in more than 60 countries. (Florida was one of three US states to pay for state-specific results.) The numbers weren’t sparkling: Florida kids fared roughly in line with the US and international averages in reading, and similar to the lackluster US average but well below the international standard in science. In math, the state’s results were worst of all: well below the US average and “similar to Croatia,” as the Post story put it, with 30 percent of students scoring as “low achievers.”
The demographic challenges in Florida’s schools are real, but still there’s an obvious question here: How can the state’s teachers be doing such a great job while students can’t compete with international peers and struggle to keep up with already-middling US scores?

Jessica Vanegeren:

When asked if politics and the resistance from the tea party had eroded the chances of Common Core moving forward in Wisconsin, Evers said the politics surrounding the issue have created a lot of misinformation.
“It’s important for everyone, including those on these committees, to realize that this is about our students being college and career ready,” Evers said. “These standards have been embraced by districts across the state for the past three years. I think it is the right thing to do for the kids to keep the standards in place. That’s the bottom line.”

Michael Stratford:

The average debt that borrowers of student loans had at graduation continued to rise last year, climbing to $29,400 for the class of 2012, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS).
This year’s figure is up by almost 10 percent compared with the group’s estimate last year of $26,600 and increased an average of 6 percent each year from 2008 to 2012, the report says. TICAS derives its estimates from data the federal government collects every four years as well as information that colleges report on a voluntary basis to an annual survey by Peterson’s college guide.
As in previous years, the report shows a wide variation in average student debt loads across different states and institutions. Delaware and New Hampshire lead the list of the highest-debt states, with average debt levels of $33,649 and $32,698, respectively. Meanwhile, New Mexico’s average student debt of $17,994 gives the state the distinction of the lowest-debt state. California was the second-lowest-debt state with $20,269.

Susan Newman:

Lately the question “Is College Necessary?” has been under debate. One factor sparking the debate is the record 85 percent of recent college grads living with their parents. While economists and academics argue about the benefits of a college education and the loan debt incurred by many students, what are recent college grads thinking, especially those who can’t find jobs or if they do, cannot support themselves?
In this guest post, Cristina Schreil, a 2011 graduate of New York University who majored in English Literature and Journalism, investigated how her generation feels about the expectations they had and what they feel now–diplomas in hand. Like many of her peers, she admits, “in no way am I supporting myself 100 percent, but I am still pursuing the goal of working in journalism full time. I think it’s going to be a long journey.” Here is what Cristina learned about her peer’s attitudes and struggles:

Ann Lukits:

Learning how to wave bye-bye is an important milestone for an infant that usually occurs between the age of 10 months and a year. A study in Pediatrics International found premature infants mastered the bye-bye gesture significantly later than full-term babies and used different hand and wrist motions.
Babies are born with an innate ability to imitate that develops throughout infancy. Research has shown this ability is controlled by circuitry in the brain that regulates the development of the visual and fine motor skills required to imitate others. The timing of bye-bye imitations and the type of hand motions used may be an important indicator of a premature infant’s developmental state, the researchers said.
The study in Japan compared bye-bye waving in 597 full-term and 95 premature infants, using their corrected age, or their age if they had been born full term. (Corrected age estimates a premature baby’s developmental age by subtracting the number of weeks the infant was premature from his chronological age.)
Mothers reported the age at which their babies started to wave bye-bye. The infants’ hand motions were analyzed from video recordings made at well-baby checkups, where researchers said goodbye to each infant orally and with hand motions.

OECD Publishing:

Students in 2012 were more likely than their counterparts in 2003 to have attended at least one year of pre-primary education.
While more 15-old students reported to have enrolled in pre-primary education during the period, many of the students who reported that they had not attended pre-primary school are disadvantaged – the students who could benefit most from pre-primary education.
If offered a choice of schools for their child, parents are more likely to consider such criteria as “a safe school environment” and “a school’s good reputation” more important than “high academic achievement of students in the school”.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Missouri’s most pressing public policy problem is what to do about school districts in urban areas that fail to make the grade. When the Missouri Legislature returns in January, resolving both the issue of what to do with unaccredited school districts, and how to make sure students in those districts have an opportunity to attend quality schools, should be the top priority.
Unfortunately, as is too common in Missouri, the two primary sides of the debate — the education establishment and reformers who want some form of school choice — are once again at odds.
Make no mistake: This fight is personal, particularly for education commissioner Chris Nicastro and suspended Ferguson-Florissant schools superintendent Art McCoy, who are battling for their jobs for daring to support elements of the reform movement.

Abby Wisse Schachter:

It sounds like the opening line of a joke, “A father walked up to his kid’s school and gets arrested…” but watch the video of Jim Howe trying to pick up his kids from South Cumberland Elementary School in Cumberland County, Tennessee, and you’ll sooner cry than laugh. That’s because Howe’s alleged crime waswalking into the school building and asking to take his children now that classes were over. Howe was supposed to wait, you see. All walking parents are supposed to cool their heels until a long line of drivers have picked up their kids, and only then retrieve their own children. That’s because school authorities are convinced that making parents drive up to school for pick-up is somehow safer than allowing choice in the matter.
“Previously, parents were coming out to pick up children, they were just getting out of cars and coming to school,” Donald Andrews, the director of Cumberland County Schools told the Huffington Post. “In this day in age, the PTO [parent teacher organization] was concerned that it was a safety issue, someone could come up and grab [any] kid.”

Matthew DiCarlo:

The recently released study of IMPACT, the teacher evaluation system in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), has garnered a great deal of attention over the past couple of months (see our post here).
Much of the commentary from the system’s opponents was predictably (and unfairly) dismissive, but I’d like to quickly discuss the reaction from supporters. Some took the opportunity to make grand proclamations about how “IMPACT is working,” and there was a lot of back and forth about the need to ensure that various states’ evaluations are as “rigorous” as IMPACT (as well as skepticism as to whether this is the case).
The claim that this study shows that “IMPACT is working” is somewhat misleading, and the idea that states should now rush to replicate IMPACT is misguided. It also misses the important points about the study and what we can learn from its results.
First, to reiterate from our first post about the study, the analysis focuses solely on the teachers who are near the minimally effective (ME) and highly effective (HE) cutoff points. It is not an “overall” assessment of the system, as there is no way to know how teachers who are not close to these thresholds (i.e., the vast majority of teachers) are responding to the system. And improvement among all teachers is an extremely important outcome (as is how the system might affect the teacher labor supply).

Andrew Adams:

A Utah lawmaker says compulsory education in Utah wrongly places too much emphasis on attendance and not on outcomes, and he now plans to introduce three bills in the upcoming legislative session to shift the focus.
“We have no accountability — no meaningful accountability measures — on parents and students when it comes to the educational outcome,” said Sen. Aaron Osmond, R- South Jordan on Tuesday.
The state senator’s plan, first outlined in a post on the Utah Policy website, would require parents to attend parent-teacher conferences and agree to support children in completion of homework assignments, while exempting children being educated at home or in private schools from state requirements like classroom time and testing.
Osmond said to this point, too much has been expected and required of teachers.
“For us to turn all of that responsibility over to the teachers is not right,” Osmond said.

Melanie Trottman:

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the bankruptcy court ruling that Detroit is eligible for bankruptcy protection is morally and legally troubling, and her union will be part of an appeal.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes’s Tuesday ruling dealt a major blow to unions, which had argued that pension cuts are protected by a provision in Michigan’s constitution. During his 90-minute presentation outlining his ruling, Judge Rhodes said the power of the federal court superseded that state provision.
“Pension rights are contract rights under the Michigan constitution” and contracts are at risk for cuts under federal bankruptcy law, Judge Rhodes said. The state is one of only seven with constitutional provisions protecting government-worker pensions, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
Ms. Weingarten sees it differently. “Pension benefits are deferred wages” that people expected to get and need, she told reporters Wednesday morning at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in downtown Washington, D.C.

Colleen Flaherty:

Is talking about race at Minneapolis Community and Technical College grounds for punishment if white students are offended? That’s what some supporters of a professor recently under investigation for talking about race there are asking. One supporter went so far as to create a parody logo of the college with its initials and the text: “Making it a Crime to Talk about Color.”
Minneapolis media and activists have been following the story of Shannon Gibney, a full-time adjunct professor of English. She says a student complaint about a recent lecture on structural racism triggered a meeting with administrators about her conduct and that the meeting was followed by a written letter of reprimand. She also says she was directed to the college’s chief diversity officer for sensitivity training.
But the college denies her account, saying it never reprimanded her for talking about structural racism — what it calls an important topic for students and faculty.

David Stout:

The results from a global exam that evaluates students’ reading, science and math skills are in and, once again, Chinese students appear to be reigning supreme while American students continued to underperform.
But before you shake your head ruefully and scoff at the decline of Western-style education, take a look at how the data is organized.
The OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams are held every three years. Coming first and third respectively in the 2012 exams are the Chinese cities of Shanghai and Hong Kong.
However, China is uniquely not listed as a country in the rankings — unlike the U.S., Russia, Germany, Australia and other nations judged on the basis of their country-wide performances. Instead, China only shares Shanghai’s score with PISA. (Hong Kong, a Special Autonomous Region of China, sends its own data.)

Gary Jason:

Here, in a nutshell, is the human toll of the student-loan mess: it is forcing many recent grads to defer marriage and having children; it is hobbling many prospective entrepreneurs that our economy badly needs and may well delay the retirement of new grads by 11 or 12 years.
The total student-loan debt hit $1 trillion dollars two years ago, eclipsing total durable goods debt, and credit card debt. It is now one-fifth higher, at about $1.2 trillion. Student loan debt tripled between 2004 and 2012, with more than 40% of 25-year-olds now carrying student loan debt, averaging $24,000 per debtor. And remember, it is nearly impossible to discharge student-loan debt in bankruptcy.
By “debacle,” I mean this sad process: the ramping up of federal government guarantees for banks lending money to more and more students over the last 15 years (culminating in the complete nationalization of Sallie Mae in 2008), which led to an explosion in college tuition and consequently an explosion in total loan debt.

Pat Schneider:

The agreement for Scholars Academy was one of about 10 being developed as part of a process to make sure that all programs provided by outside organizations are in alignment with the school district’s strategic plan for closing the achievement gap, says Jessica Hankey, director of strategic partnerships and innovation for the district.
As part of a policy for community partnerships adopted by the district in February, the district is looking critically at how programs that partners offer are benefiting students, Hankey says.
There are more of those programs than you might imagine. Hankey says a “diverse portfolio” of up to 150 programs is offered to school district students by outside organizations. Some, like 100 Black Men of Madison’s Backpacks for Success, involve minimal participation by the district. Others, like some MSCR programs, are not focused primarily on academics.
The agreements now being developed in collaboration with the partnership organizations are focusing on programs with “high intensity” alignment with the district’s mission. They cover such things as goals, collaboration with school principals, program staff structure, sharing of data and metrics to measure outcomes, Hankey says.

Are current school district programs held to the same standard?

:

PISA 2012 is the programme’s 5th survey. It assessed the competencies of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science (with a focus on mathematics) in 65 countries and economies.
Around 510 000 students between the ages of 15 years 3 months and 16 years 2 months participated in the assessment, representing about 28 million 15-year-olds globally.
The students took a paper-based test that lasted 2 hours. The tests were a mixture of open-ended and multiple-choice questions that were organised in groups based on a passage setting out a real-life situation. A total of about 390 minutes of test items were covered. Students took different combinations of different tests. They and their school principals also answered questionnaires to provide information about the students’ backgrounds, schools and learning experiences and about the broader school system and learning environment.

Laura Waters:

Among the 34 OECD countries, the United States performed below average in mathematics in 2012 and is ranked 26th…Performance in reading and science are both close to the OECD average. The United States ranks 17 in reading, (range of ranks: 14 to 20) and 21 in science (range of ranks: 17 to 25). There has been no significant change in these performances over time.
Mathematics scores for the top-performer, Shanghai-China, indicate a performance that is the equivalent of over two years of formal schooling ahead of those observed in Massachusetts, itself a strong-performing U.S. state.
While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance. For example, the Slovak Republic, which spends around USD 53 000 per student, performs at the same level as the United States, which spends over USD 115 000 per student.
Just over one in four U.S. students do not reach the PISA baseline Level 2 of mathematics proficiency – a higher-than-OECD average proportion and one that hasn’t changed since 2003. At the opposite end of the proficiency scale, the U.S. has a below-average share of top performers.
Students in the United States have particular weaknesses in performing mathematics tasks with higher cognitive demands, such as taking real-world situations, translating them into mathematical terms, and interpreting mathematical aspects in real-world problems. An alignment study between the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and PISA suggests that a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains also in PISA.

Dana Goldstein::

While these results always make news, this year there is an added tempest in the teapot of the education policy world: The OECD and the Obama administration worked in advance with a selected group of advocacy organizations to launch a media campaign called PISA Day. Which organizations? The College Board, ACT, America Achieves, and the Business Roundtable–all key architects of the Common Core, the new national curriculum standards whose increased rigor and standardized tests have led to a much-publicized protest movement among some parents, teachers, and kids. Groups that support the Core have an interest in calling attention to low American test scores, which today they will use to argue that the Core is the solution not only to our academic woes, but also to reviving the American economy. Happy PISA Day!
But the truth is that the lessons of PISA for our school reform movement are not as simple as they are often made out to be. PISA results aren’t just about K-12 test scores and curricula–they are also about academic ability tracking, income inequality, health care, child care, and how schools are organized as workplaces for adults.

Julia Ryan:

Not much has changed since 2000, when the U.S. scored along the OECD average in every subject: This year, the U.S. scores below average in math and ranks 17th among the 34 OECD countries. It scores close to the OECD average in science and reading and ranks 21st in science and 17th in reading.
Here are some other takeaways from the report:
America Is Struggling at Math
The U.S. scored below the PISA math mean and ranks 26th out of the 34 OECD countries. The U.S. math score is not statistically different than the following countries: Norway, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Russian Federation, Slovak Republic, Lithuania, Sweden, and Hungary.
Do American Schools Need to Change? Depends What You Compare Them To
On average, 13 percent of students scored at the highest or second highest level on the PISA test, making them “top performers.” Fifty-five percent of students in Shanghai-China were considered top performers, while only nine percent of American students were.

Stephanie Banchero:

For the last few years, many U.S. educators and policy makers have looked to Finland, noting its high test scores and laser-like focus on attracting and retaining the best teachers. Although Finland still posts high scores, they have slid in the past few years.
Poland, on the other hand, has seen sharp improvement. The only European country to have avoided the recession, Poland undertook a host of education overhauls in 1999, including delaying by one year the system that places students into academic or vocational tracks, and crafting better systems to identify struggling students and get them help.
“Poland launched a massive set of reforms and, while we cannot say for sure they caused the improvement, they certainly are…a sort of plausible explanation,” said Andreas Schleicher, deputy director for education and skills at the OECD.
In Massachusetts, educators and policy makers credit the good showing, in part, to a 1993 effort that boosted spending and ushered in rigorous standards and achievement tests that students have to pass to graduate.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org

Tamar Jacoby:

After years of disfavor, vocational education is being transformed for young people seeking jobs that require more than high school but less than college.
Instead of going through Congress and making the initiative bipartisan, President Obama acted alone in mid-November, promising $100 million in grants to specialized high schools — such as New York City’s Pathways in Technology Early College High School — that prepare students for technical careers. The president’s on the right track, but why make it partisan? Schools like P-TECH are an idea whose time has come — one that can be adopted by both parties and by business as well as government.
Vocational education fell from favor decades ago because it was seen as an inferior track for less able students. More Americans attend college today than ever before: this year, 42% of young people 18 to 24 years old. Even among high school students in the bottom quarter of their class, 90% expect to go to college. And there’s no question that, for many Americans, college is a ticket to the middle class.
But there’s also mounting evidence that the college-for-all model isn’t working. Nearly half of those who start a four-year degree don’t finish on time; more than two-thirds of those who start community college fail to get a two-year degree on schedule. Even students who graduate emerge saddled with debt and often without the skills they need to make a decent living.

The Economist:

PEER review, many boffins argue, channelling Churchill, is the worst way to ensure quality of research, except all the others. The system, which relies on papers being vetted by anonymous experts prior to publication, has underpinned scientific literature for decades. It is far from perfect: studies have shown that referees, who are not paid for their services, often make a poor fist of spotting serious mistakes. It is also open to abuse, with reviewers susceptible to derailing rivals or pinching their ideas. But it is as good as it gets.
Or is it? Marcus Munafò, of Bristol University, believes it could be improved–by injecting a dose of subjectivity. The claim, which he and his colleagues present in a (peer-reviewed) paper just published in Nature, is odd. Science, after all, purports to be about seeking objective truth (or at least avoiding objective falsity). But it is done by scientists, who are human beings. And like other human endeavours, Dr Munafò says, it is prone to bubbles. When the academic herd stampedes to the right answer, that is fine and dandy. Less so if it rushes towards the wrong one.
To arrive at their counterintuitive conclusion the researchers compared computer models of reviewer behaviour. Each began with a scientist who had reached an initial opinion as to which of two opposing hypotheses is more likely to be true. The more controversial the issue, the lower the confidence. He then sends the manuscript supporting one of the hypotheses to a reviewer, who also has a prior opinion about its veracity, and who recommends either rejecting or accepting the submission. (In this simple model journal editors are assumed to follow reviewers’ advice unquestioningly, which is not always the case in practice.) Subsequently, the reviewer himself writes and submits his own paper advocating one of the hypotheses to the journal, and the process repeats itself.

Dana Goldstein:

Polls show that smaller class sizes are incredibly popular with parents and teachers. But with the Great Recession forcing school budget cuts, class size is once again a matter of debate, with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, megaphilanthropist Bill Gates, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg all suggesting that larger class sizes could be a good idea.
What do we really know about how class size affects student learning? Is there an ideal class size? In this episode, I talk to Larry Ferlazzo, a public school teacher and blogger, and Matthew Chingos, a class-size researcher at the Brookings Institution.

Matthew Clarida & Nicholas Fandos:

The median grade at Harvard College is an A-, and the most frequently awarded mark is an A, Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris said on Tuesday afternoon, supporting suspicions that the College employs a softer grading standard than many of its peer institutions.
Harris delivered the information in response to a question from government professor Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 at the monthly meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“A little bird has told me that the most frequently given grade at Harvard College right now is an A-,” Mansfield said during the meeting’s question period. “If this is true or nearly true, it represents a failure on the part of this faculty and its leadership to maintain our academic standards.”
Harris then stood and looked towards FAS Dean Michael D. Smith in hesitation.
“I can answer the question, if you want me to.” Harris said. “The median grade in Harvard College is indeed an A-. The most frequently awarded grade in Harvard College is actually a straight A.”

Ann Robertson & Bill Leumer:

A recent New York Times editorial took a moment out to lecture mayor-elect of New York City Bill de Blasio on how he should treat teachers and their unions. We hope he doesn’t listen.
The editorial began by endorsing a pay raise for New York City teachers, but insisted that “any sort of raise will require concessions in exchange,” including loosening “work rules that stifle innovation and favor senior teachers over younger ones who may in fact be more talented.” This general philosophy was spelled out on a number of different fronts.
For example, the editorial continued: “Seniority trumps everything and is treated as a proxy for excellence. Under current rules, a school that has an enrollment shortfall or budget problem and has to cut one of its five math teachers cuts the least senior teacher, period. In progressive systems, like the one in Washington, D.C., which has made big gains on federal assessment tests, decisions about which teachers to cut are based on a combination of factors, including how they stack up on evaluations and whether they possess special skills. The goal is to keep the most talented teachers.”
There are a number of problems here. First, The New York Times editorial board is simply accepting – no questions asked – that in the richest country in the world it makes sense for schools to cut teachers because of a “budget problem.” The U.S is engaged in an insane, entirely irrational campaign of underfunding its public schools on a massive basis, thereby robbing the country of the benefit of a future well-educated citizenry. How The New York Times expects any teacher to succeed in nurturing critically thinking students, when they are surrounded by policy makers who lack any semblance of logic and who give corporations generous tax breaks rather than adequately fund schools, is at least, questionable.

Matthew DeFour:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke launched a new, more detailed website Tuesday with one notable omission: her only experience in elective office, as a Madison School Board member.
But after the State Journal inquired about it, the campaign said it would update the site to include her role on the board.
A campaign spokesman called the omission an “oversight.” However, the website in several places downplays Burke’s ties to the city where she lives.
The website focuses on Burke’s experience as a top executive at Waterloo-based Trek Bicycle, which her father founded, and her time as Commerce secretary in the Gov. Jim Doyle administration.
Burke, the only Democrat so far who announced plans to run against Gov. Scott Walker next fall, launched burkeforwisconsin.com in October with a video announcement and ways for supporters to provide an email and donate to the campaign.

Madison schools’ academic challenges and above average spending & taxes will likely receive greater scrutiny during the upcoming gubernatorial election.
That said, a healthy debate on Madison’s long time, agrarian era governance model vs the more dynamic school choices available in most urban areas would be welcome.
– Phil Hands

Doug Lederman:

Wondering how much more your college’s sports program spends per athlete than your institution does in academic funds per student? What your university spends on coaching salaries per player? What your campus pays to subsidize its sports program out of institutional funds?
Then the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics has the database for you.
The commission, which next year will mark 25 years since issuing its first report on college sports reform, is today releasing a database designed to provide campus officials, policy makers, reporters and others with better — and more accessible — statistical information about how colleges in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I finance their sports programs. It does so by marrying data from several existing sources in a unique way.

Unschoolery:

I tell all my kids they should start their own businesses someday. I think it’s an amazing way to make a living, an amazing mindset to have, and it’s a school like no other that you keep learning from all the time.
Besides marrying my wife and having my kids, starting my business is the best thing I’ve done.
And then a little while ago, I realized that there’s nothing stopping them from starting a business now, while they’re young.
Yesterday my 14-year-old daughter Maia became the first to officially launch her business: a vegan cupcake venture!
I encouraged her to start one a few months ago, and in that time she’s experimented with a handful of recipes, doing taste tests with her siblings (who have absolutely loved the process of course). She’s found recipes that worked.

Project on Student debt:

Seven in 10 college seniors (71%) who graduated last year had student loan debt, with an average of $29,400 per borrower. From 2008 to 2012, debt at graduation (federal and private loans combined) increased an average of six percent each year.
Details, including state- and college-level data, can be found in the full report and by clicking on the map and other links on this page.

Jeffrey Williams:

Imagine a diorama in an American Museum of Occupations showing the evolution of the professor. The exhibit starts in the early 1800s with an austere, black-suited man in a minister’s collar, perhaps looking over the shoulder of a student at a rustic desk, with a Greek text open in front of him. In the next scene, from around 1900, he morphs into a pince-nez-wearing gentleman in starched collar and cravat, at a podium delivering a lecture. The professor of 1950 adopts the rumpled bearing of a tweed jacket, pointing with his pipe to a poem or a physics equation on a chalkboard. In the next frame, circa 1990, she wears jeans and is sitting in front of a computer screen.
How would the diorama represent the professor of 2020?

Brooke Donatone:

Amy (not her real name) sat in my office and wiped her streaming tears on her sleeve, refusing the scratchy tissues I’d offered. “I’m thinking about just applying for a Ph.D. program after I graduate because I have no idea what I want to do.” Amy had mild depression growing up, and it worsened during freshman year of college when she moved from her parents’ house to her dorm. It became increasingly difficult to balance school, socializing, laundry, and a part-time job. She finally had to dump the part-time job, was still unable to do laundry, and often stayed up until 2 a.m. trying to complete homework because she didn’t know how to manage her time without her parents keeping track of her schedule.
I suggested finding a job after graduation, even if it’s only temporary. She cried harder at this idea. “So, becoming an adult is just really scary for you?” I asked. “Yes,” she sniffled. Amy is 30 years old.

Mark Niesse:

Two-thirds of Atlanta’s school board will be filled with new representatives following a runoff election Tuesday that ousted the board’s chairman.
Reuben McDaniel, an investment banker who led the school board during the last two years, lost re-election to attorney Cynthia Briscoe Brown, who collected 66 percent of the vote.
Brown, an attorney, criticized McDaniel’s leadership of the school system following the nation’s largest cheating scandal, scrutiny from the school system’s accrediting body and an investigation of racism allegations at North Atlanta High School.
McDaniel was the only incumbent facing a runoff challenge. Three other runoff races decided Tuesday involved political newcomers for seats in which incumbents didn’t seek re-election.

The City of Madison Clerk has posted a helpful candidate guide (PDF), here.
Two Madison School Board seats will be on the spring, 2014 ballot: Seat 6 and Seat 7. It is never too early to run for school board, particularly in light of the District’s long term, disastrous reading results.
The 2014 Spring Primary will be held on February 18, 2014 if necessary. The spring election is scheduled for April 1, 2014.
Much more on Ed Hughes and Marj Passman. Incumbent Ed Hughes has not had a competitive race in his previous two elections.

EDW Lynch:

How To Sharpen Pencils, An Instructional Film on Proper Sharpening Technique with Expert Sharpener David Rees
by EDW Lynch on November 29, 2013
Expert pencil sharpener David Rees provides exacting instructions for proper pencil sharpening in the short film “How To Sharpen Pencils” by Kenneth Price. You can order a newly sharpened #2 pencil on Rees’ Artisan Pencil Sharpening website (sold out until 2014), and read his book on pencil sharpening, How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening. We previously posted about Rees’ artisan pencil sharpening business back in 2012.

Alexandre Afonso:

In 2000, economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about the internal wage structure of a Chicago drug gang. This piece would later serve as a basis for a chapter in Levitt’s (and Dubner’s) best seller Freakonomics. [1] The title of the chapter, “Why drug dealers still live with their moms”, was based on the finding that the income distribution within gangs was extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities, let’s say at McDonald’s. They calculated 3.30 dollars as the hourly rate, that is, well below a living wage (that’s why they still live with their moms). [2]
If you take into account the risk of being shot by rival gangs, ending up in jail or being beaten up by your own hierarchy, you might wonder why anybody would work for such a low wage and at such dreadful working conditions instead of seeking employment at Mc Donalds. Yet, gangs have no real difficulty in recruiting new members. The reason for this is that the prospect of future wealth, rather than current income and working conditions, is the main driver for people to stay in the business: low-level drug sellers forgo current income for (uncertain) future wealth. Rank-and file members are ready to face this risk to try to make it to the top, where life is good and money is flowing. It is very unlikely that they will make it (their mortality rate is insanely high, by the way) but they’re ready to “get rich or die trying”.

Rhema Thompson

The search for a few good men and women, a few good readers, writers and artists are in focus this week.
Escambia County School District officials will soon be forming a new task force to help close the achievement gap among the district’s students.
During a special workshop earlier this month, Escambia County Schools Superintendent Malcolm Thomas said he would be working with the school board’s new chairwoman Linda Moultrie to organize a committee of community members dedicated to “solution-finding” in the coming months.

Jeffrey Solochek:

A Florida mother’s child visitation court battle has become the Home School Legal Defense Association’s latest cause.
The mom, Therese Cano, had been home-schooling her children and, according to the HSLDA, a court psychologist had found the kids were doing well academically. But a guardian ad litem for the children told the court she believed they would benefit from the socialization aspects of public schooling.
The judge then ordered the children into public schools, overruling a court order permitting the home schooling. The HSLDA quotes the judge as saying, “When are they going to socialize? Is homeschool going to continue through college and/or professional schooling? At which point are these children going to interact with other children, and isn’t that in their best interest?”

Sherri Ackerman:

ome Florida private schools face an unexpected dilemma this school year: Find extra dollars to pay for state college courses their high school students want to take – or deny them the option.
The problem stems from a new law requiring public school districts and individual private schools to cover tuition for students enrolled in the state’s popular dual enrollment program.
Though it’s unclear how many private school schools and students are affected, the change has left some schools curbing participation and others anxious about what they’ll do if local colleges, prompted by the new law, end up hiking charges.
The change “caught everybody off guard,” said Howard Burke of the Florida Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, and immediate past president of Florida Association of Academic Nonpublic Schools (FAANS). “This is a hardship for parents already paying taxes for public schools and paying for private school.”

Jennifer Chambers:

A new report urges state lawmakers to proceed with plans to introduce the Smarter Balanced exam as a replacement for the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, saying it remains the only viable option for the 2014-15 school year.
Michigan education officials released the 23-page report Monday outlining options for a new state assessment tool to be used as early as next year to test K-12 students under Common Core state standards. State schools administered the MEAP for what is supposed to be the last time this fall.
The report, requested by lawmakers in late October after they removed a funding block for implementation of Common Core, examines 12 test options in the marketplace.
The report provides summaries on the cost of each test, scoring and reporting methods, test security transparency and overall design.
Of the 12 options, only Smarter Balanced and two other tests were aligned to Common Core, a more rigorous set of standards adopted by the State Board of Education in 2010 for math and English. The other exams aligned to the standards are Measured Progress and PARCC.

Investors Business Daily:

Education: Parents pay a fortune to send their kids to big-name colleges, and they expect strong scholarship in return. More and more, what they’re getting ranges from drivel to leftist indoctrination.
Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald shocked a New York City audience at the 2013 Wriston Lecture this month with some examples of what leftist academics have done to the American college curriculum.
“Until 2011,” she noted, “students majoring in English at UCLA had been required to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton — the cornerstones of English literature.

Rebecca Onion:

These “confiscation cabinets,” assembled by veteran teacher and artist Guy Tarrant, are an unusual archive: toys taken from London schoolchildren in 150 different schools, over thirty years.
Tarrant became interested in the toys as tokens of resistance to school routines and teacherly discipline. He enlisted other teachers to donate their own confiscated items to his project. In all, he made eight such cabinets, which are currently on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood in London.
Besides showcasing the creativity of some rebellious children–improvised pea shooters, World Cup finger puppets, and mix CDs feature in the collection–the grouping lets us see some differences between American and British toys.
A “Scooby doo” appears in the girls’ cabinet, and seems to be some kind of a friendship bracelet. In the boys’ cabinet, there’s a Sikh kirpan, or ceremonial sword, reflecting the large Sikh immigrant population in the UK. (Recently, Sikh advocacy groups have fought the confiscation of such items as a restriction of religious freedom.) And there’s a “39’er,” which appears to be a “conker” (or horse chestnut) used in the traditional British kids’ game.