The Economist:

THERE was plenty of red meat on offer to the 5,000 delegates at this week’s AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles. Speakers proclaimed class war, bashed corporations and trade deals, and demanded fresh taxes on the rich. One, to much cheering, threatened to punch the conservative Koch brothers in the face.
America’s largest trade-union grouping, with 57 affiliated unions and 12m members, convenes just once every four years; such jamborees are an opportunity to let off steam. But this year there was furrowed-brow introspection mixed with the tub-thumping. Richard Trumka, the AFL-CIO president, said the labour movement was in “crisis” and urged delegates to avoid the temptation of blaming outsiders.

The Economist:

AS THE new term starts across England, schools are chewing over this summer’s results in the 16-plus exams. One trend is clear–the coalition’s emphasis on pupils achieving five core academic subjects, including a language, in its new EBACC (English Baccalaureate) qualification has raised the number of candidates taking language exams.
This marks a reversal of a long period in which English schools turned out a rising number of monoglots (see chart). The past two decades have witnessed a sharp decline in the numbers of teenagers poring over French verbs, let alone the oddities of German, which as Mark Twain, a 19th-century American writer, observed, renders a girl neuter but a turnip feminine.
In 1993 over 315,000 pupils sat the 16-plus exam in French, compared with just over 177,000 this year. German had 108,000 entrants in 1993; there are fewer than 63,000 now. Only Spanish fared better, with 91,000 GCSE entrants this year, rising from 32,000 in 1993. Largely to blame for the slump was a decision by the Labour government in 2002 to end the compulsory status of a language in secondary schools. That accelerated a longer period of modern-languages decline, as pupils switched to subjects perceived to be easier or more practical. Now the coalition is claiming that the rise in this year’s exam entries at 16 marks the first step to correcting the resulting monolingualism. Yet progress has been modest–the number of GCSE French entrants, for example, merely returned to 2010 levels, around half the numbers of the 1990s.

The Economist:

STARTING pre-school poses tests for any four-year-old: sitting still, the risk of a yucky lunch, missing home. The stakes are still higher for 700 small Texans due to enter pre-kindergarten centres being opened by the city of San Antonio on August 26th. They are pioneers who will be watched all the way to the White House.
Not so long ago there was broad, bipartisan support for government provision of pre-school (called “pre-K”, since it precedes kindergarten): a year of classes and play designed to ensure that children are ready for the serious business of learning. Alas, pre-K has joined the long list of issues capable of provoking partisan rage. Critics include shrink-the-government types growling about expensive “babysitting”, joined by social conservatives arguing that young children are best off when cared for by married mothers, at home.

The Economist

BAMA Companies has been making pies and biscuits in Oklahoma since the 1920s. But the company is struggling to find Okies with the skills to fill even its most basic factory jobs. Such posts require workers to think critically, yet graduates of local schools are often unable to read or do simple maths. This is why the company recently decided to open a new factory in Poland–its first in Europe. “We hear that educated people are plentiful,” explains Paula Marshall, Bama’s boss.
Poland has made some dramatic gains in education in the past decade. Before 2000 half of the country’s rural adults had finished only primary school. Yet international rankings now put the country’s students well ahead of America’s in science and maths (the strongest predictor of future earnings), even as the country spends far less per pupil. What is Poland doing right? And what is America doing wrong? Amanda Ripley, an American journalist, seeks to answer such questions in “The Smartest Kids in the World“, her fine new book about the schools that are working around the globe.

The Economist:

ANDREW, an unemployed graduate in religious studies and creative writing, lives in Oregon with his parents. He is not alone. Some 21.6m Americans aged 18 to 31–36% of the total–still languish in the parental home, according to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank. This figure is slightly misleading, since it includes students, who may live at home only during the holidays. Nonetheless, the share of youngsters stuck with mom and pop is the largest since surveys began in 1968.
Andrew hates his situation with “an intense passion”. It is safe and dry and warm, of course, and he appreciates his parents’ help. But he is bored and frustrated and his love life has become “limited” since he moved back in with them. (The fact that his mother won’t let him cook makes preparing romantic meals for two a challenge.)

Daniel K. Lautzenheiser:

The cost of US higher education is at the forefront of the national consciousness. Tuition has more than doubled in real dollars since 1980, growing far faster than inflation, and total student loan debt finally cracked the $1 trillion threshold. Meanwhile, demand for higher education only continues to grow, prompted by the needs of a 21st-century economy and political rhetoric seeking to make the United States the most educated nation in the world. To meet this demand, higher education reformers must develop a bold vision for how to reduce costs. Harvard Education Press’s just-released volume Stretching the Higher Education Dollar: How Innovation Can Improve Access, Equity, and Affordability aims to explain why college has become so expensive, to offer solutions at both existing schools and via a raft of new providers, and to give policymakers new ideas for nurturing reform.
Key points in this Outlook:
US higher education has grown increasingly expensive, primarily because of a misaligned incentive structure that enables colleges to continue to raise money and because of an increasingly outdated vision of what “college” means.
Nascent reforms such as university-online partnerships, massive open online courses, and competency-based education seek to rethink the delivery of information and credentials.

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst :

The U.S. Department of Justice has entered into a lawsuit opposing Louisiana’s voucher system. The state’s program, passed into law in 2012, offers a voucher to attend a private school to students from families with incomes below 250% of the poverty line attending low performing public schools. Parents apply for the vouchers and to date about 90% of the recipients are black.
The DOJ is not intervening as you might naively expect because of concerns about the constitutionality of voucher programs, or because they believe that private schools in Louisiana discriminate, or because they think the state has designed its voucher program in a way that discriminates against minorities. No. Their argument is that the voucher program will have an impact on federal desegregation orders that require certain school districts to achieve a racial distribution in each of their schools that mirrors the racial composition of the district as a whole. So, if 40% of the school-aged population in these districts is black then each school has a target of 40% black enrollment.
Here is an example the DOJ provides of the harm caused by the voucher program they are intervening to halt:

Roger Taylor:

It is no surprise that parents struggle to make sense of data about schools: there is just so much of it. School league tables are among the most frequently viewed official datasets, but few of us use them to make decisions.
The Open Public Services Network aims to make the vast amounts of data now available about education, healthcare, policing and social care more useful to the people who rely on those services. Too often, the information makes sense to managers or professionals, but leaves the general public confused.
Our first project has been to look at schools and ask the question: how well does the information available to parents and children help them understand the education provided by a school? How might it be improved? We brought together a group of experts to consider this. The results of their deliberations can be found here.
One thing became clear early on in the discussions – there were some large gaps. For example the “culture of learning” within a school was seen as crucial but the information available gave limited insight into this. There was a desire to know much more about the views of parents, staff and pupils.

Marian Wang:

Shauniqua Epps was the sort of student that so many colleges say they want.
She was a high achiever, graduating from high school with a 3.8 GPA and ranking among the top students in her class. She served as secretary, then president, of the student government. She played varsity basketball and softball. Her high-school guidance counselor, in a letter of recommendation, wrote that Epps was “an unusual young lady” with “both drive and determination.”
Epps, 19, was also needy.
Her family lives in subsidized housing in South Philadelphia, and her father died when she was in third grade. Her mother is on Social Security disability, which provides the family $698 a month, records show. Neither of her parents finished high school.
Epps, who is African-American, made it her goal to be the first in her family to attend college.
“I did volunteering. I did internships. I did great in school. I was always good with people,” said Epps, who has a broad smile and a cheerful manner. “I thought everything was going to go my way.”

Chris Lydgate:

The Atlantic published a great article today about the hollowness of the college rankings compiled by US News and World Report. Written by retired Boston College professor John Tierney, the piece highlights the problems that plague the US News system–dubious data, arbitrary rules, and a one-size-fits-all approach, to name a few.
Of course, these were the same problems that persuaded Reed’s then-president Steve Koblik to pull out of the USN rankings back in 1995. It’s a shame to see that matters haven’t gotten much better.
Reed still doesn’t participate in USN, although the magazine insists on ranking us anyway. Which is too bad–as Tierney points out, the USN system remains surprisingly popular, despite an unrelenting stream of criticism through the decades. On the other hand, the last several years have witnessed the rise of more comprehensive alternatives. Perhaps one day they’ll supplant the USN juggernaut. In the meantime, USN has released its latest report. Like Tierney, I’ll probably peek at the rankings, but–as they say in the ads for the Oregon lottery–for entertainment purposes only.

Liz Peek:

One of the lesser-broadcast features of the most recent jobs report is that unemployment for African-Americans actually ticked higher, to 13 percent, even as the rest of the country held even at 7.3 percent.
Unemployment for Hispanics was 9.3 percent and for Asians 5.1 percent. Also worrisome, the number of African-American adults who held jobs actually declined last month, and fewer than 61 percent of blacks are working–the lowest participation rate since 1982.
While New York’s Mayor Bloomberg sees racism in the campaign of Bill deBlasio and Jay Z finds racism in the Trayvon Martin decision, I perceive racism in these jobs figures. Blacks are increasingly left behind, at least in part because their leaders do not demand better schools. The greatest source of “disparate impact” in this country, to borrow a phrase currently popular with the Justice Department, is that most black kids can’t read or write. Upward mobility for the African-American community, tenuous at best, is squashed the minute they enter kindergarten.
Too harsh? Not by half. Consider the results from the recent Common Core testing in New York, one of the first to measure how students meet the new nation-wide standards. Statewide, 31 percent of public school students in grades 3 through 8 were considered proficient in English; only 16 percent of blacks met that test, compared to 50 percent of Asians and 40 percent of whites – results which the state’s education department says reveals “the persistence of the achievement gap.”

Related: English 10 & Connected Math.

Beth Braverman

CCollege seniors who thought their days of taking standardized tests were behind them might have another think coming next spring.
More than 200 schools, including some in the Texas and California state systems, have signed on to offer students the new voluntary Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus (CLA+) test, designed to give employers an objective way to measure entry-level candidates.
Proponents of the CLA+ say the test scores are a better way of measuring student performance and career readiness than Grade Point Averages (GPAs), which have become so inflated they’re no longer as useful to employers as they once were. The average college GPA has risen over the past few decades from 2.3 to 3.2, according to Gallup.
The compromised value of a high GPA has little impact on students from highly selective, well known colleges who are likely to land a job regardless of their GPA. But it has hurt hard-working students at schools without a marquis name, says Robert Benjamin, executive director of the nonprofit Council for Aid to Education, which administers the CLA+.

Jon Ortiz:

The average retirement payout for new retirees in California’s biggest public pension system doubled between 1999 and 2012, according to CalPERS data, and initial monthly payments for one group nearly tripled in that period.
State and local cops and firefighters benefited the most.
In the 14 years covered by the data analyzed by The Sacramento Bee, average first-month pensions to state police and firefighters went from $1,770 to $4,978. California Highway Patrol officers’ first-month retirement payments doubled from $3,633 to $7,418, and local government safety employees’ pensions went from $3,296 to $6,867.
The figures from CalPERS’ internal annual reports, obtained by The Bee through a Public Records Act request, show how upgraded pension formulas that became fashionable during the late 1990s and early 2000s amplified the impact of pay raises to boost retirement allowances.

Stephanie Banchero & Kris Maher:

As Philadelphia students returned to school this week facing larger class sizes and slimmed-down arts programs, a fight raged over how to keep the district from sinking further into financial and academic distress.
One of the nation’s most troubled school districts, Philadelphia is buckling under financial pressure and has been unable to squeeze concessions from the teachers union. Teachers started the school year Monday without a contract after failing to reach agreement by Aug. 31, and state leaders are threatening to hold up additional funding unless teachers agree to pay cuts and other changes, such as performance-based pay and a longer school day.
Wanda Cantres, whose 7-year-old son reported to Henry C. Lea Elementary School for the first time after his school was closed, said she is worried about ballooning class sizes and the financial uncertainty.
“They can build prisons and put up high rises, but they can’t get school right,” she said. “There are going to be a lot of children that slip through the cracks.”

Anita Kar:

Scientists at The Neuro find important time factor in second-language acquisition
The age at which children learn a second language can have a significant bearing on the structure of their adult brain, according to a new joint study by the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – The Neuro at McGill University and Oxford University. The majority of people in the world learn to speak more than one language during their lifetime. Many do so with great proficiency particularly if the languages are learned simultaneously or from early in development.
The study concludes that the pattern of brain development is similar if you learn one or two language from birth. However, learning a second language later on in childhood after gaining proficiency in the first (native) language does in fact modify the brain’s structure, specifically the brain’s inferior frontal cortex. The left inferior frontal cortex became thicker and the right inferior frontal cortex became thinner. The cortex is a multi-layered mass of neurons that plays a major role in cognitive functions such as thought, language, consciousness and memory.

Ry Rivard:

ould public colleges be free?
Yes, says the head of the union for University of California’s 4,000 instructors and librarians.
How?
Trim non-essential functions, redirect a bunch of money and end tax breaks that mostly benefit wealthy college-goers’ families, argues University Council-American Federation of Teachers President Bob Samuels. Of course, not everyone would agree with his definition of non-essential, particularly researchers.
Samuels’ new book says students have become “slaves to debt” because colleges have decided to get into “expensive and disorienting” endeavors – research labs funded by external dollars, luxury dorms and athletics – that have little to do with instructing students. He says American higher education costs more than it should and undergraduates are forced to pick up the tab for university mission creep. On top of that, undergrads are suffering through large, impersonal classes and left in the hands of graduate students. While Samuels wants all of public higher education to be free, many of his examples of spending cuts are generally found at research universities with big-time athletics and don’t exist at, say, community colleges, which already charge bare-bones rates.

David Kirp:

The case for market-driven reforms in education rests on two key premises: The public school system is in crisis, and the solution is to let the market pick winners and losers. Market strategies–high-stakes teacher accountability, merit pay, shuttering “failing” schools–are believed to be essential if public schools are ever going to get better. And these maxims underlie the commitment to charter schools and vouchers. Freed from the dead hand of bureaucracy and the debilitating effects of school board politics, the argument runs, schools are free to innovate.
If you follow education debates, you’ve heard that again and again. Here’s what’s new: A spate of new books undercuts both propositions, simply decimating the argument for privatizing education.
Since The Death and Life of the Great American School System, her 2010 best-seller, Diane Ravitch has been the most prominent critic of the market-minded reformers. Americans love apostates, and the fact that, as assistant secretary of education in the first Bush administration, Ravitch acknowledged that she had “fallen for the latest panaceas and miracle cures and drunk deeply of the elixir that promised a quick fix,” has given her considerable credibility. Now she pops up everywhere, keynoting national conventions, urging on teachers at an Occupy the Department of Education rally, being profiled flatteringly in The New Yorker, deluging her supporters with emails, and sparring with ex-D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, the darling of the privatizers, about how to “fix” education.

Solidarity PDF Newsletter:

Given MTI’s victory in Circuit Court, wherein Judge Juan Colas found Act 10 unconstitutional, MTI and the District have agreed to commence Contract negotiations (PDF).
Details of this were announced in a joint letter to all District employees last Friday from Superintendent Jen Cheatham and MTI Executive Director John Matthews. Their letter stated that, “… to be successful this year and in the years to come, District employees must have a work environment that is both challenging and rewarding, and one which includes economic and employment security”. Matthews complimented the Superintendent and Board members for their progressive philosophy in recognizing the essentials in positive employment relations.
Contracts existed in all 423 school districts at the time Act 10 was passed in 2011. Currently, workers in only four school districts enjoy the wages, benefits and rights which a Collective Bargaining Agreement provides. The current Contracts for MTI’s five bargaining units expire June 30, 2014.
The State has appealed Judge Colas’ decision. The matter will be heard by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in November or December. In his ruling, Judge Colas stated that Act 10 was passed in a very controversial manner, skipping several steps mandated by legislative rules and Wisconsin law, and that it violated public workers’ Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, as well as the Constitutional guaranteed Equal Protection Clause.

I wonder what the sentiment across the teacher population might be? Perhaps there have been surveys?

Scott Jaschik:

A major new study has found that new students at Northwestern University learn more when their instructors are adjuncts than when they are tenure-track professors.
The study — released this morning by the National Bureau of Economic Research (abstract available here) — found that the gains are greatest for the students with the weakest academic preparation. And the study found that the gains extended across a wide range of disciplines. The authors of the study suggest that by looking at measures of student learning, and not just course or program completion, their work may provide a significant advance in understanding the impact of non-tenure-track instructors.
Many adjuncts will no doubt be pleased by the study’s conclusions on their teaching ability. But the study does not call for an end to the two-tiered system of academic employment between those on and off the tenure track. Rather, it says that the study may provide evidence that research universities benefit from more teaching by those who don’t have research obligations.

1.1MB PDF: Background information on the Madison School District’s 2013-2014 budget (PDF District Overview), which includes a 4.5% property tax increase, after 9% two years ago.
Middleton’s property taxes on a “typical” $230,000 home is 16% less than Madison’s.
Much more on the 2013-2014 Madison School District budget, here.

EduShyster
Hedge funder Whitney Tilson argues that a new generation of young Navy SEAL-like teachers can club the achievement gap out of existence.
Can a new generation of young, Navy SEAL-like teachers finally club the achievement gap out of existence? That is today’s fiercely urgent question, reader, and believe it or not, I do not ask it in jest. The call to send in the SEALs comes from hedge fund manager and edu-visionary extraordinaire Whitney Tilson. When Tilson read this recent New York Times story about high turnover among young charter school teachers, he went ballistic, to use a military metaphor. After all, turnover among Navy SEALs is also very high, notes Tilson, and no one complains about that.
Bigger rigor
So how exactly is the young super teacher in an urban No Excuses charter school like a Navy SEAL? Better yet, how are such teachers NOT like SEALs? Both sign onto an all-consuming mission, the SEAL to take on any situation or enemy the world has to offer, the teacher to tackle the greatest enemy our nation has ever known: teacher union low expectations. But as Tilson has seen second-hand, being a “bad a**” warrior is exhausting, which is why SEALs, like young super teachers, enjoy extraordinarily short careers.
But the work is incredibly intense and not really compatible with family life, so few are doing active missions for their career–they move on into management/leadership positions or go into the private sector (egads!). Could you imagine the NY Times writing a snarky story about high turnover among SEALs?!
Cream of the crop
Egads! indeed, reader. In fact, now that I think of it, *crushing* the achievement gap in our failed and failing public schools is almost exactly like delivering highly specialized, intensely challenging warfare capabilities that are beyond the means of standard military forces. For one thing, the SEALs are extremely choosy about who they let into their ranks, just as we’ll need to be if we’re going to replace our old, low-expectations teachers with fresh young commandos. Only the cream of the crop make it to SEALdom, and by cream, I mean “cream” colored. The SEALs are overwhelmingly white; just 2% of SEAL officers are African American.
See the world
And let’s not forget that SEALs and new urban teachers both get plenty of opportunities to experience parts of the world they haven’t seen before. The elite Navy men train and operate in desert and urban areas, mountains and woodlands, and jungle and arctic conditions, while members of the elite teaching force spend two years combating the achievement gap in the urban schools before they receive officer status. And while Frog Men live on military bases, our commando teachers increasingly live in special encampments built just for them.
And here is where our metaphor begins to break down ever so slightly….
Of course, there are a few teeny tiny areas where the SEALs differ from the young teachers who will finally club the achievement gap out of existence. There is, for instance, the teeny tiny matter of the training that the SEALs receive: 8-weeks Naval Special Warfare Prep School, 24-weeks Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/s) Training, 3-weeks Parachute Jump School, 26-weeks SEAL Qualification Training (SQT), followed by 18-months of pre-deployment training, including 6-month Individual Specialty Training, 6-month Unit Level Training and 6-month Task Group Level Training before they are considered deployable. TFA, which Tilson praises for its “yeoman” work in recruiting and grooming the next generation of urban teacher hot shots, relies upon an, ahem, somewhat different approach…
Send tips and comments to tips@edushyster.com.
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Christian Schneider

When she rolled out of bed on the morning of Aug. 31, University of Iowa student Samantha Goudie probably didn’t expect to end the day as a national Bluto Blutarsky-style college binge drinking mascot. But after Goudie was arrested trying to run on the field during an Iowa football game, she blew an astounding .341 into a police Breathalyzer — more than four times the legal limit.
Yet Goudie (whose now-defunct Twitter handle was, appropriately, “@Vodka_samm”) was coherent enough to tweet while being arrested. Sitting in the police station, she imparted wisdom like “I’m going to get .341 tattooed on me because its so epic.” Not exactly “Letters From a Birmingham Jail.”
Not to be outdone, one 19-year old woman with a blood-alcohol content of .33 was found staggering outside Camp Randall Stadium in Madison on Saturday before the Badgers football game. Another 19-year old female with a .37 blood alcohol level was found passed out on campus. “If no one called for help, this student may have died,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison police Chief Susan Riseling.

Charlie Eaton and Jacob Habinek:

With growing student debt in the headlines, Washington DC policymakers have focused on the interest rates students pay on the loans they take out to cover college costs. But student loan interest payments are a symptom more than the underlying cause of rising student debt. Colleges have steadily hiked tuition, to heights that now make attendance unaffordable for many students from families of modest means.
Tuition increases have been especially sharp at public research universities that once provided an affordable world-class education. The increases have been going on for a long time, but they have accelerated recently. Average tuition and fees at public research universities increased 56% between 2002 and 2010 from $5,011 to $7,824 a year. As the cost of going to college has escalated, so has student indebtedness. According to data from the Institute for College Access and Success, student debt at graduation from public four-year colleges increased by 32% between 2004 and 2010, when it hit an average of $21,605 per student.
Why are tuition and fees at public universities rising so sharply? Universities face higher costs to pay for all of their activities, while the public funding they receive has plummeted. Tuition hikes help make up the difference. Yet there is another factor at work, especially recently – because public universities are going into debt. Working with major Wall Street players like J.P. Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America, they issue bonds and make substantial interest payments to investors, many of whom also trade in university debt. Like their students, in short, public universities have developed a debt problem – indeed, the rising burden on the students is partly driven by the indebtedness universities have taken on.

The Washington Post

NINE OF 10 Louisiana children who receive vouchers to attend private schools are black. All are poor and, if not for the state assistance, would be consigned to low-performing or failing schools with little chance of learning the skills they will need to succeed as adults. So it’s bewildering, if not downright perverse, for the Obama administration to use the banner of civil rights to bring a misguided suit that would block these disadvantaged students from getting the better educational opportunities they are due.
The Justice Department has petitioned a U.S. District Court to bar Louisiana from awarding vouchers for the 2014-15 school year to students in public school systems that are under federal desegregation orders, unless the vouchers are first approved by a federal judge. The government argues that allowing students to leave their public schools for vouchered private schools threatens to disrupt the desegregation of school systems. A hearing is tentatively set for Sept. 19.

Ken Reed:

Following this Labor Day weekend, virtually all of the nation’s students in grades K-12 will be back in school. Unfortunately, fewer of them will be participating in physical education classes and intramural sports programs.
It’s mind-boggling that at a time when overweight and obesity levels are sky-high among our young people, and physical activity levels are down, our schools are cutting physical education classes, recess and intramural sports programs.
Due to No Child Left Behind mandates and the pressures of standardized state assessment tests, many schools are cutting back on physical education and recess under the mistaken belief that kids need more desk time to improve test scores. Based on the latest research on exercise and the brain, that’s the direct opposite approach that schools should be taking.
“Overall, I don’t think there’s any doubt that schools are feeling pressure from No Child Left Behind and standardized tests,” according to Brenda VanLengen, Vice Chair of PE4life, a physical education advocacy organization.

Dylan Matthews:

After voting to approve yet another tuition increase in 2011, University of California regent Bonnie Reiss lamented, “Faced with enormous financial cuts forced on us by political leaders, we only have a handful of options open to us, and all are horrible options.” Andrea Newman, a regent at the University of Michigan, agrees. Justifying her vote for higher tuition, Newman explained, “The budget cuts passed by the legislature are impossible to make up otherwise.”
The budget cuts are real. Some states, such as Arizona and New Hampshire, have cut as much of 50 percent of their per-student state spending on education since the financial crisis hit, according to a report by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

tpt National Productions:

Thanks to digital media, the Internet and new advances in understanding how students learn, educators are beginning to appreciate the importance of breaking out of the classroom and into the wider world. There’s a growing understanding that learning should not just be preparation for life, but is actually “life itself.”
Is School Enough? documents vivid examples of where new modes of learning and engagement are taking hold and flourishing. Featuring nationally recognized educators and researchers, Stephen Brown’s powerful stories show that when students have the opportunity to explore real interests and problems, they step up and perform at the highest level. This new approach reaches motivated students as well as kids that educators call “the bright and bored,” helping these learners tune in rather than drop out.
Is School Enough? introduces parents, educators, and everyone passionate about learning to:

Chris Rickert:

On the one hand, it’s nice to see Wisconsin’s public schools finally moving toward a human resources model that most of the rest of the working world has been using for years — i.e., rewarding or sanctioning employees based on how well they do their jobs.
On the other, given that public education isn’t exactly inventing the wheel here, it’s puzzling that the state would need to spend so much time and money coming up with and implementing ways to gauge how well educators do their jobs.
Then there’s the question of whether the new teacher evaluations — expected to cost about $6.9 million this school year and $6.7 million the next — will produce data that’s any more useful than that produced by the old, largely pro forma teacher evaluations.
Two systems have been approved for use so far. One was created by the Department of Public Instruction, the other by the publicly supported Cooperative Educational Service Agency for region 6, or CESA 6.
To my untrained eye, they seem fair and on point. Among the highlights:
Evaluators complete a series of announced and unannounced classroom observation visits.

Arvind Elangovan:

Since Michaela Cross’s experience was part of a study abroad program conducted annually by the University of Chicago, and I was part of the program – for three years as a graduate student assistant (for the Fall quarters of 2007-2009), and one year as faculty in the program (Fall of 2010) – I think I could most usefully contribute by highlighting a few facts about the program itself. In the process I would think aloud about some of the issues that have come up in the reception of Cross’s experience in India, especially in the responses of Rajyashree Sen and Ameya Naik. I choose Sen’s and Naik’s responses partly because they have been the most recent, but also because between them they represent the spectrum of possible positions that one could usefully take about this issue. Needless to add, there have been other responses, such as the one posted by another fellow University of Chicago student on the trip, an article titled ‘In Defence of Rose Chasm (Michaela Cross) and countless other comments, criticisms, and responses that have flooded the Internet world.
However, between Sen and Naik, the basic ends of the spectrum are quite clear. Sen contends that it is not only a white woman’s problem but an issue for all women and that some self-regulation and discipline would have gone a long way to avert the unsavory experiences if not completely eliminate their possibility. Naik, at the other end of the spectrum, points out that the expectation of preparedness or caution urged by Sen belies the possibility of questioning the pervasive culture of sexual violence, in which any cautionary attempt to be safe, is to pay merely lip service to acknowledging the crime of sexual violence, instead of combating more difficult questions about such a culture.

Alan Borsuk:

To attend the three central city schools in the Milwaukee College Prep system is to immerse yourself in a message: I may be 5 or 7 or 9 years old, but I’m here to get ready for college.
The classrooms and hallways in the charter schools feature pennants from the colleges that teachers graduated from. Banners identify each class by the year the students would enroll in college in the normal sequence of things. The new first-graders are the Class of 2025. In fifth grade, students begin making visits to colleges.
It’s a highly ambitious message and a highly ambitious school, with results to back up its goals. (Disclosure: I have a family member who works for the schools now, but I said the same things before that was true.) And pushing the college message to students who are predominantly black and low income is in line with what is being done at the best and most ambitious schools in many other central cities.
So is it a good idea to push the college so hard so young? In my mind, the answer is almost entirely yes. There are so many kids, families and schools with lower expectations, so many students who are already on a path at a young age to stay at the bottom of the economic spectrum.
If one of the goals of education is to open doors of opportunity, a crucial element is inculcating expectations and giving kids the capacity to pursue those expectations. Milwaukee College Prep and a few comparable schools in the city are doing that.

Jennifer Raff:

Last week’s post (The truth about vaccinations: Your physician knows more than the University of Google) sparked a very lively discussion, with comments from several people trying to persuade me (and the other readers) that their paper disproved everything that I’d been saying. While I encourage you to go read the comments and contribute your own, here I want to focus on the much larger issue that this debate raised: what constitutes scientific authority?
It’s not just a fun academic problem. Getting the science wrong has very real consequences. For example, when a community doesn’t vaccinate children because they’re afraid of “toxins” and think that prayer (or diet, exercise, and “clean living”) is enough to prevent bacterial infection, outbreaks happen.

Evan Salinger:

There’s a widely shared image on the Internet of a teacher’s note that says: “Dear students, I know when you’re texting in class. Seriously, no one just looks down at their crotch and smiles.”
College students returning to class this month would be wise to heed such warnings. You’re not as clever as you think–your professors are on to you. The best way to stay in their good graces is to learn what behavior they expect with technology in and around the classroom.
Let’s start with the million-dollar question: May computers (laptops, tablets, smartphones) be used in class? Some instructors are as permissive as parents who let you set your own curfew. Others are more controlling and believe that having your phone on means your brain is off and that relying on Google for answers results in a digital lobotomy.

Purav Patel:

Outside of research, few people even mention the science of teaching and learning. When research is mentioned, it’s often flatly wrong. Psychologists Paul Kirschner and Jeroen van Merriënboer reviewed three “urban legends” in education that have no solid basis in the research literature.
The first myth reviewed has two related parts. The myth claims that modern children are “digital natives” who can learn easily from technological sources (e.g. computers). Children now have become independent and creative learners who can communicate, learn, and solve problems easily with technology. Relatedly, children are thought to be able to multitask with technology efficiently (e.g. doing homework like using social media). With regard to the digital natives claim, the authors review research that questions how tech-savvy young people are according to research. Students in many Western countries were found to have low or limited knowledge of information technology. Their skills were resticted to email, mobile phones, and basic software programs. Another study claims that students demonstrate the butterfly defect, where they click through hyperlinks without delving into the content deeply. Researchers in Finland surveyed the technological knowledge of young student teachers and also found their knowledge to be limited. Technology was used primarily for passive consumption, not active creation.

Purav Patel:

At the 2007 American Educational Research Association (AERA) convention, scholars of education and the learning sciences debated the usefulness of constructivist versus explicit instruction. The debate inspired the writing of the book Constructivist Instruction: Success or Failure? by educational psychologists Sigmund Tobias and Thomas Duffy. Each week, a post will summarize and comment on the 18 chapters in this book. By the end of this series, we’ll develop some nuance on this contentious debate.
The book’s pedagogy is itself worth noting. In most chapters, one or several researchers argue in favor or contructivism or explicit instruction. At the chapters’ end, dissenting researchers question and critique the chapter’s authors. The main authors then reply to these critiques. This cycle of critiques and replies digs more deeply into the contructivist/instructivist debate than do scholarly articles.

Ilana Garon:

It happens a lot: I’ll introduce myself to a group of people I don’t know well, explaining that I’m a high school English teacher. And someone will invariably respond, “But you’re smart, what do you really want to do?” As backhanded compliments go, that one really rankles. What I find most irksome isn’t even the implication that my colleagues and I are typically mundane or that my work of the last decade has been a waste of my time. The most frustrating thing about hearing that I’m “too smart” for teaching is the counter-productive mentality about my profession that such a comment underscores.
In the early half of the 20th century, a bright woman’s best career option was to be a teacher. Now, thankfully, most every path is open to women, the only downside of which is the inevitable matriculation of top female graduates away from the field of teaching due to a plethora of other choices. This trend is compounded by the fact that teaching is now seen as a B-list job: Most top graduates of my college went into law, medicine, business, or academia. Those who did go into teaching, myself included, constantly encountered the assumption that this would be a short-term gig, the ubiquitous two-year foray (through Teach for America or the like) that would ultimately pad graduate school applications. For many, it was. Teaching wasn’t, and – 10 years later – still isn’t, seen as a “prestigious” career, even by liberal university graduates who would all agree that strong public education is an inviolable social good.

Doug Erickson:

Public schools in Dane County poured nearly $3 million into security upgrades over the summer, continuing a trend that began nearly 15 years ago with a school shooting in Columbine, Colo.
Almost all school buildings in the county will have secure entrances when classes begin this week, even in the small, rural districts of Belleville and Wisconsin Heights. All outside doors in both districts will be locked after the start of the school day, a first for both districts but a standard precaution now across much of the county.
Several districts, including Sun Prairie, added a layer of security beyond an intercom system, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to reconfigure entrances so that visitors walk directly into an office or a locked vestibule before being let into any other part of the school. At two schools in

Related: Police calls near Madison High Schools: 1996-2006.

Gus Lubin:

Aniruddh Chaturvedi came from Mumbai to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn., where he is majoring in computer science. This past summer he interned at a tech company in Silicon Valley.
During two years in the U.S., Chaturvedi has been surprised by various aspects of society, as he explained last year in a post on Quora.
Chaturvedi offered his latest thoughts on America in an email to Business Insider.
The most surprising things about America:

Denise Buffa:

Efforts to keep Connecticut schools safe have escalated since a lone gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown last year and shot to death 20 first-graders and six adults. But not all threats to school safety come from outside the building.
A Courant examination of state records, coming in Sunday’s Hartford Courant and on courant.com, revealed that hundreds of Connecticut public schools reported incidents involving weapons in the 2011-2012 school year. The weapons included at least 16 handguns and at least two rifles or shotguns.
Sunday’s report will include an online database of every school that reported an incident involving a weapon and a list of weapons reported at each school.
In the 2011-2012 school year, more than 400 knives were confiscated. There were also at least 37 box cutters, 20 razor blades, 17 switchblades, eight swords or machetes and six stun guns.

Related: Police calls near Madison High Schools: 1996-2006.

Congressional Budget Office:

Summary The Federal Pell Grant Program was created to improve the access of low-income students to postsecondary edu- cation. Grant recipients enroll at a variety of educational institutions, including four-year colleges and universities, for-profit schools, two-year community colleges, and institutions that specialize in occupational training. Grants are awarded on the basis of financial need and aca- demic course load, and the maximum grant a student can receive for the 2013-2014 award year is $5,645. During the most recent award year for which data are available (July 1, 2011, to June 30, 2012), the program provided $33.6 billion in grants to some 9.4 million students at U.S. educational institutions. The cost of the program has risen dramatically in recent years.
From 2006-2007 to 2010-2011, real (inflation-adjusted) spending on Pell grants increased by 158 percent. That change resulted from an 80 percent rise in the number of recipients and a 43 percent real increase in the amount of the average grant during those four years (see Figure 1). Spending for the program declined in 2011-2012 because of a reduction in the amount of the average grant.

Erik Sofge:

IN OLDEN TIMES, the most an ambitious young tinkerer could hope for in a toy was to be able to stick one funny-shaped piece onto another. Kids built airplanes with Tinkertoys and spaceships with Erector Sets. In large part, the joy was in the building.
But recreational tinkering has since taken a quantum leap forward. Once motors and computer processors got less expensive and the smartphone became ubiquitous, suddenly, toys could be programmed–not just remote-controlled, but given orders, even missions. Sure, it’s fun to scare your sister by hiding a toy spider in her dresser, but that’s nothing compared to outfitting a jerry-built arachnid with LED eyes and a motion-activated vibrating motor. Today, mini robots can be made to zigzag down the hall, patrol a home, greeting siblings with a friendly hello or a barrage of plastic missiles.

Madison leaders say trimming city workers’ pay might be necessary:

Scheduled pay raises for union-represented city employees may need to be trimmed to help balance the 2014 city budget, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin and City Council President Chris Schmidt said Friday.
Schmidt said he didn’t relish the step — calling city workers “already underpaid for the jobs they do” — but he argued there could be no other choice.
Revenue limits under state law, rising city costs for fuel and health insurance, and a steadfast goal to protect funding for basic city services increasingly tie the city’s hands, he said.
“It’s understandable why it’s on the table, why we’re discussing it,” he said about the possible action, in which a 3 percent raise scheduled to start in the last pay period in December could be scaled back or eliminated for many employees in March.

Andrea Anderson:

Contract talks for Madison School District employees set to start this month, letter says contract negotiations for Madison School District employees are set to begin later this month, according to a letter sent Friday to district staff by superintendent Jennifer Cheatham and Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews.
Cheatham said in a phone interview that she and employee unions will be negotiating “as soon as we can” in order to create collective bargaining agreements that will take effect after the current contracts end in June 2014.
MTI asked the district to begin collective bargaining in May, but the new superintendent wanted to adjust to her role, become acquainted with the staff and hear their requests before bargaining with the teachers union and other employee unions.
Although the timeline is unclear, Cheatham said she expects to complete the contracts “fairly quickly” while also taking time to ensure the process is done correctly and has an outcome acceptable to all parties.

Much more on the Madison School District’s 2013-2014 budget (including a 4.5 property tax increase, after 9% two years ago), here.

Nick Novak:

On Thursday, Chris Rickert – writer for the Wisconsin State Journal – thankfully reminded us about Madison’s dirty little secret. The district has a huge problem when it comes to the achievement gap – how students from different races are learning – and little in terms of a plan to fix it.
Indeed, Madison has one of the largest achievement gaps in Wisconsin. While 86.7 percent of white students in the district graduated in 2012, only 53.1 percent of their African American classmates could say the same. That’s a graduation difference of nearly 34 percent. Even Milwaukee, the state’s most embattled district, beats Madison on this very important issue. African American students in Milwaukee Public Schools were six percent more likely to graduate than their counterparts in MMSD.
For a city that goes out of its way to preach utopian equality and the great successes of union-run public schools, Madison’s lack of an answer for the achievement gap should come as a shock.
Here’s how the district stacked up, in terms of graduation rates, with the state’s other large districts:

Related: Madison’s disastrous reading results.

Amy Welborn:

That’s really not such a brilliant insight. The growth is already there, and constant – except when it pops up a bit.
And why is this?
Two reasons.
Parents and children are getting more and more frustrated with institutional schooling, both public and private.
Secondly, homeschooling is getting easier.
(A little easier. It’s always a challenge, but the Internet has transformed it, making it so much easier to connect with information, classes and other people)
I hesitate to even begin a post like this because the minute I do, my head explodes with a million ideas, concerns and stories, and I end up sitting here for three hours, just meandering.
I’m going to try to not wander down that road, and offer instead smaller bits and pieces.
I’ve talked before about why we’re here, doing this. That post is here.

Karen Farkas:

Oberlin College has modified its “No Trespass” policy and formed a community advisory board in the wake of campus and community concerns over how it was enforced.
The college, known as one of the most liberal in the country, made several changes to the policy after questions were raised about the secret list that barred people from campus without them knowing their offense.
The new policy includes allowing security to issue a written warning, providing a list of college property, providing more written information on the trespass order, creating a one-year trespass order and creating an appeals process.
“We have approached this work with a desire to create more effective policy and procedures that balance the need for safety with greater transparency and community involvement,” Dean of Students Eric Estes said in a news release.

Andrea Peterson:

Parents who yell at their adolescent children for misbehaving can cause some of the same problems as hitting them would, including increased risk of depression and aggressive behavior, according to a new study.
A good, warm relationship with Mom and Dad doesn’t protect teens from the negative effects of parents’ yelling, cursing or lobbing insults, such as calling teens “lazy” or “stupid,” the study found. Conducted by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Michigan, the study was published Wednesday on the journal Child Development’s website.
While spanking has become taboo in many U.S. communities, yelling doesn’t have nearly the same social stigma. Indeed, parents sometimes think yelling will make their charges listen and behave. But the study found the opposite to be true.
“Shouting cannot reduce or correct their problem behavior,” said Ming-Te Wang, an assistant professor in the departments of education and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and a co-author of the study. “On the contrary, it makes it worse.”
Timothy Verduin, clinical assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, who wasn’t involved in the study, said parents can effectively discipline kids by taking away privileges, such as screen time or the car keys.

Gerald Early:

One would think that the last thing the American reading public needs is yet another book on affirmative action. Even by the late 1990s, library shelves were groaning with dozens of books, pro and con, on the subject. The positions are clear:
The right is opposed to affirmative action on the grounds that it denies or perverts merit; that it emphasizes the group over the individual; that it generates reverse discrimination, which is pernicious; that it insists on equal results instead of equal opportunity, a goal that is patently un-American and can be realized only through egregious social engineering; and that it intensifies racial consciousness by creating a compensatory racial caste system as a form of bourgeois patronage.

Betsy Karasik

There is a painfully uncomfortable episode of “Louie” in which the comedian Louis C.K. muses that maybe child molesters wouldn’t kill their victims if the penalty weren’t so severe. Everyone I know who watches the show vividly recalls that scene from 2010 because it conjures such a witches’ cauldron of taboo, disgust and moral outrage, all wrapped around a disturbing kernel of truth. I have similar ambivalence about the case involving former Montana high school teacher Stacey Dean Rambold. Louie concluded his riff with a comment to the effect of “I don’t know what to do with that information.” That may be the case for many of us, but with our legal and moral codes failing us, our society needs to have an uncensored dialogue about the reality of sex in schools.
As protesters decry the leniency of Rambold’s sentence — he will spend 30 days in prison after pleading guilty to raping 14-year-old Cherice Morales, who committed suicide at age 16 — I find myself troubled for the opposite reason. I don’t believe that all sexual conduct between underage students and teachers should necessarily be classified as rape, and I believe that absent extenuating circumstances, consensual sexual activity between teachers and students should not be criminalized. While I am not defending Judge G. Todd Baugh’s comments about Morales being “as much in control of the situation” — for which he has appropriately apologized — tarring and feathering him for attempting to articulate the context that informed his sentence will not advance this much-needed dialogue.

Alan Barra:

This weekend, the National Football League would like you to see The Butler, We’re the Millers, or maybe The End of The World–anything but The United States of Football. Sean Pamphilon’s documentary, controversial even before its release, is about the dangers of America’s No. 1 sports obsession, football, from youth leagues to the pros. Pamphilon, a Emmy and a Peabody Award-winning filmmaker who exposed the New Orleans Saints’ “Bountygate” scandal in April 2012, has assembled nearly three years’ worth of investigative reporting on the damage football, as it’s played today at all levels, can do to the human brain.
Like the game itself, The United States of Football is, in turns, exciting, stimulating, and heartbreaking. There’s no other word but that last one to describe what too many hits to the head did to the late, great Baltimore Colts’ Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey: In 2000, when he was just 59, he became the first NFL player to be diagnosed with frontal temporal dementia. In Pamphilon’s film, Mackey’s wife Sylvia feeds him, constantly calling to him “John Mackey!” because, she says, “I don’t want him to forget his name.” The United States of Football also tells the story of Dave Duerson, an 11-year veteran, most notably of the 1985 Chicago Bears Super Bowl champions, who shot himself in the chest in 2011 at age 50. Neurologists later confirmed that Duerson suffered from a neurodegenerative disease linked to concussions.

Craig Davidson
:

The needle is 21 gauge, 1.5in. A hogsticker. Forty of them arrived in a package from Greece. Ever received a package from overseas? You get that puff of air when you rip it open – air that’s travelled thousands of miles. Foreign, like stepping into a stranger’s house. The syringe wrapper has instructions in Italian, French, Greek and Arabic – not a word of English. But it’s a needle. Operation is self-explanatory. I had put them out on my work desk a few days ago – an unignorable fact. An invitation. A threat.
Buck up, laddie. Fortune favours the brave.
What’s inside looks like oily urine. 1cc of Equipoise – a veterinary drug normally injected into beef cattle – and 2cc of Testosterone Cypionate: 10 times the testosterone a man my size produces naturally in a week.
It was going into my backside; plenty of meat there. But the sciatic nerve radiates from my hips; plus, if I hit a vein I could go into cardiac collapse. I tucked a bag of frozen corn beneath my underwear to numb the injection site. The hash marks on the syringe were smudged away by my sweaty hands. That couldn’t be a sign of quality medical equipment, could it?

Lindsay Gellman:

The kids are back in school. And you’ve probably shelled out for pencil cases, notebooks, a new backpack–and AP French.
“Free public education” clauses are written into state constitutions nationwide. Yet at many public schools around the country it has become anything but. Schools are charging parents for programs and items that have traditionally come standard–including fees for course supplies, school-run extracurricular activities, transportation and even basic registration fees.
School districts have seen their budgets slashed over the past few years as states cut back funding amid the economic downturn. And this year is no exception, even as the economy continues to slowly improve. Thanks to the federal budget sequester earlier this year, schools nationwide have had to adjust to additional budget cuts of 5%, says Dan Domenech, executive director of the AASA, the School Superintendents Association, a nonprofit public-education advocacy group based in Alexandria, Va.
Parents aren’t happy about having to cover some of the tab. And some are even fighting back.

JD Tuccille:

On a family vacatiEmpty classroom© Valentin Armianu | Dreamstime.comon a few weeks ago, my older nephew’s unhappiness with school was a major topic of conversation. His fifth grade teacher, it turns out, required all of the kids in class to read assigned books at the same rate–sprinting ahead was strictly forbidden. For a kid who just tested at the reading level of a high school senior, this was a pointlessly morale-killing rule that contributed to a very smart boy’s growing discontent with school. Sixth grade is now underway, and so are parental negotiations for a more flexible approach toward education, or else a healthier venue, including home. It’s with this experience in mind that I read research psychologist Peter Gray’s all too accurate piece in Salon comparing modern schools to prisons–horrible, curiosity-crushing institutions that teach all the wrong lessons. His points are excellent in themselves, and provide a major insight into why the school choice debate is often so off-base.
Gray, a professor at Boston College, writes:

Center for Education Reform:

September, 2013 Parent Power Index: How does your state stack up! See where your state ranks in ensuring great learning opportunities for your children.

Wisconsin ranks 7th.

Derek Bok:

American higher education is the envy of the world. Students flock to this country from all over, and the most highly ranked schools tend to be here. We should be proud!
American higher education is a mess. With high costs, low graduation rates, unhappy faculty members and coddled students, our universities are about to be radically disrupted by massive, technologically driven change. A good thing, too!
How to reconcile these opposing views? At a time when ambitious business-school professors and salivating entrepreneurs predict the end of the university as we know it, and at a time when we have never been more in need of an educated workforce and citizenry, the task of understanding the evolving mission and performance of American higher education has never been more urgent. Thank goodness Derek Bok, a two-time president of Harvard and a judicious, learned analyst of education, has taken on this undertaking. His book is too long to be called a report card, but it is a detailed progress report on the challenges and opportunities facing our nation’s colleges and universities.

John Murray Brown

People’s Palace’: the £189m Library of Birmingham, which opens on Tuesday
Birmingham officially opened its new public library, one of the largest in Europe, on Tuesday.
At a time when councils across the UK are trimming library services as part of the cuts in public funding, Birmingham city council has delivered a £189m building to grace the city centre.
The building, which has won critical and popular acclaim, replaces the brutalist concrete-clad Central Library, designed by John Madin, the foremost Birmingham architect of the postwar period.
Francine Houben, the new library’s Dutch architect, described it as a “people’s palace”.

Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:

In the last few years, those at the helm of the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) have become increasingly hostile to the city’s fast-growing charter school sector. Last year, the school board refused (despite a directive from the state to approve) a charter application from Great Hearts Academy, a respected Arizona charter management organization. This is despite the fact that only about 40% of the district’s students in grades 3-8 are meeting proficiency standards. In the past few weeks, the relationship between the MNPS directors and charter schools has deteriorated to the point that some describe as nuclear war. Schools Director Jesse Register has engaged lawyers to argue that the decade-old charter school law is unconstitutional.
Last week, a Nashville paper called for MNPS to adopt a portfolio strategy, meaning that the district should stop trying to be a monopoly operator of schools. Becoming a portfolio district would not mean that Nashville would put all its schools out to bid to charter schools. It would mean that the district would stop treating the students in Nashville charter schools as somebody else’s responsibility and start seeing its job as ensuring that all children in the city are well served by the public schools, no matter who runs them. If a particular neighborhood was not being well served and a renowned district principal wanted to open a new school there, great. If a high-performing charter school was in a position to open a new school there, great. Portfolio districts don’t have a preference for charters or district-run schools; they prefer whatever arrangement gets good results for kids.

Dave Zweifel:

The recent news release from the State Department of Public Instruction revealing that 67 percent of the applicants to the Walker administration’s expanded school voucher program are already attending private schools elicited cries of “scam” from many quarters.
And well it should have.
That two-thirds of the voucher applicants had their children already enrolled in private schools lays waste the argument by Wisconsin legislative Republicans and the governor that vouchers are needed so poor families can rescue their children from poorly performing public schools.
That has always been a spurious argument, even back in the days when Gov. Tommy Thompson shepherded the nation’s first school choice program through the Legislature for low-income Milwaukee families. It was sold based on the argument that poor families, said to be ill-served by Milwaukee’s public school system, ought to be able to send their children to private schools just as do rich people. So, in order to do that with taxpayers’ money, vouchers were devised to technically make tuition grants to the families, which in turn would use them to pay the private schools.

Dana Goldstein on Sweden’s voucher system.

Ry Rivard:

Over the past year and a half, the credit ratings of several prestigious liberal arts colleges have been downgraded or assigned a negative outlook by Moody’s Investors Service.
(Note: This article has been updated from an earlier version to note that these ratings were issued over the last 18 months, not the past several months.)
These are institutions — Haverford College, Morehouse College, Oberlin College and Wellesley College – that top students seek out, yet they are showing small but noticeable signs of fiscal stress several years after the end of the recession. Their downgraded ratings are still better than those of plenty of other institutions, and Moody’s has issued plenty of gloomy projects about colleges during the economic downturn. But the recent actions are notable because they affect colleges that are by many measures — money, prestige, history — among the most fortunate in the country.
“We do see pressure on small private colleges as a group and that’s primarily because they don’t have a lot of different things they can do, so they are primarily dependent on tuition revenue,” said a Moody’s analyst, Edie Behr.

Arthur King & Adam Bessie:

“The machine lasts indefinitely. It gets no wrinkles, no arthritis, no hardening of the arteries . . . Two machines replace 114 men that take no coffee breaks, no sick leaves, no vacations with pay,” proclaims the watch-twirling, hard-hearted CEO Wallace V. Whipple in a particularly prescient 1964 episode of The Twilight Zone. Despite the emotional pleas of the workers and their union, Whipple robo-sources 250,000 factory jobs to the “X109B14 modified, transistorized, totally automated machine.” The machine – a cardboard prop filled with vacuum tubes, twirling doo-dads and feverishly blinking diodes may be hilariously outdated, laughable even. But less laughable, though, is that this cautionary tale has come to pass: Today, 50 years later, American workers need not only compete with foreign labor, but with automatons. It’s no longer science fiction, but common-sense corporate practice.
Mr. Whipple was not a warning, but rather, a muse.
Nowhere has Mr. Whipple inspired more watch-twirling CEOs of late than in the Global Education Reform Movement, which seeks to privatize public education. Last year, Adam Bessie profiled this movement – lead by billionaires, industrialists and the Wall Street elite – in a three-part comic series with graphic journalist Dan Archer “The Disaster Capitalism Curriculum: The High Price ofEducation Reform” (See also episode II, and episode III).

Dave Stieber:

For the last seven years, Dave Stieber has taught history and social studies at public schools in Chicago’s South Side. He currently teaches at TEAM in Englewood. Dave will be online today between 12.30pm and 1.30 ET (5.30-6.30 BST) to answer your questions. What would you like to know? Toss your questions in the comments.
My typical work day consists of me waking up at 5am, walking the dog, breakfast, and getting dressed by 5.40. Giving my son and wife a kiss then out the door by 6.10am. I’m on the bus to work and at school by 6.40am.
I’m a morning person, so I need time before kids arrive to get everything set up and prepared and make sure my plans are ready to be carried out. Students come up at 7.30am and class starts at 7.45am.
I have five classes from 7.45am – 3.08pm, with one 48-minute block for meetings, one for preparing my lessons, materials/copies and grading, and another for lunch. Most days I have to stay after school to meet with students or prepare for the next day. Some days I have meetings or a spoken-word club that I along with two other teachers run.

Wisconsin State Journal:

Madison has plenty of challenges. That’s for sure. Yet the district has a lot going for it, too, as students return to classes Tuesday.
Cheatham has embraced higher standards and will publish annual progress reports. She’s a fan of using student data to measure for results and hold educators accountable.
Yet Cheatham also talks convincingly about supporting principals and teachers. She plans to focus intently on high-quality teaching practices, shared leadership and professional development. Teachers seem to appreciate her call for more consistent priorities and curriculum.
It’s almost a back-to-basics approach, using research and results to inform strategies.
Unlike her predecessor, Cheatham hasn’t proposed a long list of new spending initiatives. Money, of course, matters. Yet Madison already has lots of resources, and it does many things well. Cheatham wants to start with what’s working and build from there.
“The really exciting news is we have all the ingredients to be successful,” Cheatham said this summer.
That’s good to hear.

Linda Shaw:

Union leaders said the pay increases are the biggest that teachers have received in five years. By some counts, the new contract will maintain Seattle as one of the top-paid districts in the Puget Sound area, although some teachers point out that the cost of living is higher here, too.
Though the district succeeded in adding 30 minutes to elementary-school teachers’ workday, putting them on par with their middle- and high-school counterparts, it compromised in how they can use that time, with teachers retaining much flexibility.
The agreement also calls for the district to work toward setting limits in the caseloads for school psychologists, speech therapists, and occupational and physical therapists, and a pledge to add more such employees.
Two other groups within the SEA approved new contracts on Tuesday, too — paraprofessionals, such as classroom aides, and school secretaries.

Andrea Anderson:

When Madison public school students go back to class Tuesday, they’ll find some lessons will be tougher, according to Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham.
The gradual implementation of the Common Core standards, a series of benchmarks for what students should know and be able to do, will begin this year by helping educators, students and staff understand what the standards are and how instruction will change .
Teachers will implement Close Reading, a practice used to study literacy standards , to become more familiar with the increase in rigor and standards while monitoring how the students and the teachers themselves are faring .
“The study will allow teachers to better understand the standards and learn about what it will take to plan instruction using the standards and learn more about instructional practices necessary to teach the standards and learn about” ways to assess what students are learning, Cheatham said.
An example of a Close Reading lesson would be reading a primary source document in a history class and later answering short-answer questions. Teachers would review how students performed, what challenges there were and what the teacher could do to improve.

Pat Schneider

The Madison School Board is taking a “step in the right direction” in acknowledging the role of educational assistants in helping students succeed, says a union leader.
The 737 educational assistants in the district had been working without a pay raise since 2009 says Erin Proctor, president of their Madison Teachers Inc. collective bargaining unit.
The $433.6 million budget for the 2013-2014 school year approved Monday also includes a 1 percent salary hike for teachers and administrators. The budget will translate to a 4.47 percent increase in the property tax levy.
The pay increase will boost the starting base wage for educational assistants to $12.58 an hour which, with longevity increases, can rise to more than $20 an hour for some work assignments, according to the labor contract. But educational assistants typically don’t get as many work hours as most full-time workers do, Proctor says.

Much more on the Madison Schools’ 2013-2014 budget, here.

Nora Hertel:

Some critics of the new Common Core standards embraced by Wisconsin schools feel they set the bar for students too high too early.
Tina Hollenbeck, a former classroom teacher and homeschooler in Green Bay, believes the standards require abstract thinking that’s too hard for children in kindergarten and first grade. “That would be a huge stress that’s coming for these kids.”
Tuyet Cullen, an eighth grade math teacher in Madison, notes that Common Core has children multiplying fractions in fourth or fifth grade. Before, this skill was not usually taken up until sixth grade.
“Are their brains ready for that concept?” Cullen asked. “If (the standards) aren’t developmentally appropriate, they’re going to be too hard.”
Others argue that the standards are too easy.

Emily Kram, via a kind reader email:

With a sigh, Michelle Janz put a hand to her face and flipped through a folder of letters, memos and official forms. She shook her head over the mass of paperwork accumulated in eight months.
Nex a sigh, Michelle Janz put a hand to her face and flipped through a folder of letters, memos and official forms. She shook her head over the mass of paperwork accumulated in eight months.
“It shouldn’t be this hard,” she said. “We should have a choice like any other student.”
Janz, who lives in Superior, had spent the better part of a year applying for open enrollment, facing rejection and working through the appeals process. Her goal was to enroll her son, Travis, in another school district.
During the 2012-13 school year, Travis was a special education student at Superior High School. Like a typical 17-year-old, Janz said, Travis loves computers. He also enjoys skateboarding and spending time with his friends.
“Everybody knows Travis,” Janz said. “He loves school, and he loves being around kids.”

Much more on open enrollment, here.

Ramaa Sharma:

Over the next few weeks, the BBC wants to take you on an amazing journey through digital India.
Our special Digital Indians series will tell you stories of five successful technological innovators and explore their distinct connections with India.
The tales including a home-grown entrepreneur-turned public servant, a US-born Indian who migrated to his parents’ homeland to work with farmers and a businessman’s daughter who left the country to become the first female engineer at the world’s leading social networking site.
On Tuesday, we’ll give you a short history of India’s digital evolution and introduce you to the subjects of the series.

Vauhini Vara:

When we talk about the historic civil-rights gathering whose fifty-year anniversary will be celebrated on Wednesday, we usually call it the March on Washington. In fact, the full name of the event was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; early in his speech, Martin Luther King, Jr., lamented that black Americans lived “on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” The marchers had ten demands for Congress, at least four of which were aimed at improving black people’s financial circumstances and narrowing the gulf between black and white Americans’ economic opportunities.
Fifty years later, that gulf hasn’t changed much. By some measures it has widened. In 2011, the median income for black households was about fifty-nine per cent of the median income for white households, up slightly from fifty-five per cent in 1967, according to Census dataanalyzed by the Pew Research Center. But when you considerwealth–that is, everything a family owns, including a home and retirement savings–the difference seems to have grown. Pew found that the median black household had about seven per cent of the wealth of its white counterpart in 2011, down from nine per cent in 1984, when a Census survey first began tracking this sort of data.

Alex Spiegel:

In 1979, when Jim Stigler was still a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he went to Japan to research teaching methods and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth-grade math class.
“The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw three-dimensional cubes on paper,” Stigler explains, “and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, ‘Why don’t you go put yours on the board?’ So right there I thought, ‘That’s interesting! He took the one who can’t do it and told him to go and put it on the board.’ ”
Stigler knew that in American classrooms, it was usually the best kid in the class who was invited to the board. And so he watched with interest as the Japanese student dutifully came to the board and started drawing, but still couldn’t complete the cube. Every few minutes, the teacher would ask the rest of the class whether the kid had gotten it right, and the class would look up from their work, and shake their heads no. And as the period progressed, Stigler noticed that he — Stigler — was getting more and more anxious.

Ashley Lauren Samsa:

Across the nation, students and teachers are headed back to school. Teachers, such as myself, are furiously preparing their classrooms to welcome students and planning new lessons to ensure that this year is an educational one.
For many across the country, the planning and preparation has taken a new turn with the official adoption of the Common Core education standards – President Obama’s replacement for No Child Left Behind. The Common Core includes new definitions for school success as well as new national standards for core subjects such as reading, writing and math. Before the Common Core, states had the ability to create their own standards, meaning a student in Illinois might be held to one level of expectations while a student in Arkansas might be held to another. This caused many problems in education, especially when students moved from state to state. The Common Core now unites all of the participating states with the same standards that are both rigorous and skills-based with a focus on utilizing technology in the classroom.
In many ways, this is a great thing both for students and for teachers. Main subject classes have long been behind the curve when it comes to utilizing technology in the classroom. Being technologically competent is now considered a vital life skill, not to mention something today’s students need if they are ever going to be employable. English classes in particular have been a little lost in the digital age; when we English teachers went to school, we had been taught to teach literature as an art form for the sake of the appreciation of beauty. Now, with fewer and fewer students going on to study the humanities, we have been tasked with making our classes relevant to the masses. The Common Core’s skills based standards could help us do just that. With the focus no longer on content, we can teach whatever pieces we want in our classroom, as long as students are being taught how to read, write, and think critically.

Travis Andrews:

This piece is part of Mashable Spotlight, which presents in-depth looks at the people, concepts and issues shaping our digital world.
In the middle of Brooklyn’s high-end Dumbo neighborhood, 20 inner-city children sit around two wooden tables at what appears to be a small summer camp. Tablet computers are scattered across the tables, punctuated by plates of corn chips and bowls of salsa. The kids are restless on this sweltering July afternoon, fidgeting in their chairs and asking the handful of twenty-somethings if they can play Temple Run or maybe just head home for the day.
These kids aren’t technically campers, and these Millennials aren’t counselors. Instead, the children are product testers (paid weekly in $100 Amazon gift cards) for News Corp., the Rupert Murdoch-founded media conglomerate that began Fox News. The “counselors” are News Corp. employees, tasked with recording these children’s every reaction to the educational games into which News Corp. has poured at least $180 million, according to Bloomberg, on top of the $360 million it spent to acquire the technology.

Claudia Dreifus:

Steven Strogatz, professor of mathematics, Cornell University; author, “The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, From One to Infinity.”
If I could do one thing, I’d get real mathematicians who are math types to become math teachers. K-12 students need someone there with a real feel for the subject matter. Give them the freedom to teach what they want. It has to be discouraging to have to teach to a test and a set curriculum.
Freeman A. Hrabowski III, mathematician; president, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
When I give talks around the country, I often ask the audience: “How many of you knew you were an English/history type or a math/science type by the time you were in 11th grade?” Almost all the hands go up. And, when I ask why, I often hear, “Because I was better in English.”
The question is: How does someone know that at 15 or 16? The way that math or science works in our lives is not always obvious.
We need to create opportunities to excite students about how math and science connect to real life. Few teachers have opportunities to use their math skills outside the classroom. I would like to see more partnerships involving school systems, the corporate sector and government that provide teachers paid summer work opportunities applying their math skills to real-life problems.

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

WELCOME BACK!
To each and every one of the nearly 5,000 District employees who are represented by MTI, welcome, as the 2013-14 school year begins! MTI is the collective bargaining agent for all teachers and non-supervisory professional staff, educational assistants (EA-MTI), clerical/technical personnel (SEE-MTI), substitute teachers (USO-MTI), and school security assistants (SSA-MTI) who are employed by the Madison Metropolitan School District. It is the Union’s mission to negotiate the best possible Collective Bargaining Agreements, and to provide the best representation and service possible, when assisting members with any Contract or work-related matter. Contact your Union staff at MTI Headquarters (257-0491 or www.madisonteachers.org) should you have a question or need assistance with any Contract or work-related matter.
This school year will be one of challenge as MTI moves to preserve members’ wages, benefits and rights. MTI is one of the few public employee unions with contracts in place, given the devastating impact of Walker’s Act 10.
MTI Greets New Hires
Members of MTI’s Board of Directors, Bargaining Committee and Union staff greeted the District’s newly hired teachers at New Teacher Orientation last Monday. On Tuesday MTI hosted a luncheon for the 250 new members of MTI’s teacher bargaining unit.
MTI President Peg Coyne and MTI Executive Director John Matthews addressed the District’s new teachers during Tuesday’s luncheon. In doing so, Matthews provided a brief history of the Union, its reputation of negotiating outstanding Collective Bargaining Agreements which provide both employment security and economic security, and in explaining the threat to both, given Act 10, said all MTI members would need to pull together to preserve the Madison Metropolitan School District as a quality place to teach.
President Coyne gave a warm MTI welcome to those present, discussed MTI’s structure and stressed the need for member participation in political action, if public employees are to regain the right to collectively bargain and if schools are to be adequately funded.
District retiree Jan Silvers lighted up the room when discussing how her life and career was much more enjoyable and rewarding having MTI as her advocate, especially when it came to the ability to experience religious freedom and work during pregnancy. She was awarded 16 years of back pay plus interest as a result of MTI’s litigation. Teachers, through the early 1970’s, had to advise their principal “immediately upon becoming pregnant” and were obligated to resign when the pregnancy “began showing”. As a result of MTI’s accomplishments, such antiquated and degrading policies are history.

John Olson:

The Madison School Board and new Madison School Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham sure have the nerve proposing a new tax levy for Madison homeowners that will raise the average homeowner property tax bill in Madison by about $120.
Not only is it hard for those homeowners on fixed incomes (think retirees), but what about all of those public employees who are on reduced incomes as the result of the last several years of public employee bashing?
Most public employees in Madison will be lucky to get 2 percent raises over the course of the last 5 years, not to mention having to pay considerable more for their benefits.
Enough is enough. We all can’t afford to continually pay more.

Much more on the Madison Schools’ 2013-2014 budget, here.

A. David Dahmer:

Silvia Romero-Johnson is the Madison Metropolitan School District’s new executive director of multicultural and global education and she could not be more excited.
“This time of year right now is a very exciting time for me,” she tells The Madison Times. “It’s an exciting time when we start preparing for the year and we get our teams back together. I will be out in the schools on the very first day and after that will be visiting them regularly. It is exciting.”
But late August has always been an exciting time for Romero-Johnson who started out teaching as an English as a Foreign Language teacher in her home country of Argentina. After immigrating to the United States, she was a bilingual resource specialist (BRS), a bilingual classroom teacher, and a program support teacher (PST) for bilingual education programs. Two years later, she became the coordinator for Bilingual Education and Dual Language Immersion.
“I’ve had multiple roles in the District working in classrooms and supporting classrooms,” Romero-Johnson says. “I think I’ve done every position that our division supervises so that gives me experience and hopefully empathy for how the work takes place and how the work is done.”

Chris Stewart:

In one exchange with a particularly pharisaical special education teacher in Chicago I asked if she could tell me her story of choosing a school for her black children.
Sadly, that ended our conversation. I’ve asked the question of others too. Still, no response.
It isn’t meant to be a rude question. I’m willing to answer it because it forms the bases for why I care about education policy.
Two factors combined inspire all of my educational activism. The first is my own unremarkable k-12 career, and the second is the fear, worry, and great aspirations I had as a young father.
During my own time in K-12 I witnessed the real disparities in schools. I gained insight, as a kid, into the obvious differences between public and private, rich and poor, safe and dangerous, and so on. This included time in a west coast hippy school, a few poor southern schools, a working class Catholic school, a middle-class Midwestern school, and an ultra-wealthy school for children of privilege.
If we all carry our own experiences (and sometimes baggage) into family decisions about education, that’s mine.
When my first son was born I had all of the normal insecurities a young first-time father might have. But the normal anxieties were accelerated by love, fear, and low income. Suddenly I cared for someone so much more than myself, and I didn’t want my own experience to be his. Specifically, I didn’t want him to work in the service industry as I had up to that point.
There was only one real way to launch him toward his God-given potential, beyond the limitations of income, neighborhood, and demography. Education. It was my one shot at getting him on more equal footing with the children of millionaires I was working for at the time.
Now, many years later, many lessons later, and many confounding choices later, I’ve transformed from unremarkable student, to desperate father, to damn near full-time education activist. Not because my story is special. It’s not. Indeed, my story is too common.
Having seen the immense power of school choice, and the real need for parents to have options when they encounter an educational crossroads for their child, how could I be anything other than a school choice advocate?

via Laura Waters.
Related: A Majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison preparatory Academy IB charter school.

Daniel Willingham

What is the explanation? According to Ripley, there is a primary postulate running through the psyche of South Koreans, Finns, and Poles when it comes to education: an expectation that the work will be hard. Everything else is secondary. So anything that gets in the way, anything that compromises the work, will be downplayed or eliminated. Sports, for example. Kids do that on their own time, and it’s not part of school culture.
Several consequences follow from this laser-like focus on academic rigor. For example, if schoolwork is challenging kids are going to fail frequently. So failure necessarily is seen as a normal part of the learning process, and as an opportunity for learning, not a cause of shame.
If the academic work for students will be difficult, teachers will necessarily have to be very carefully selected and well trained. And you’ll do whatever is necessary to make that happen. Even if it means, as in Finland, offering significant financial support during their training.
So what is the primary postulate of American education?

Related: Madison’s disastrous reading scores.

Tyler Cowen:

Self-driving vehicles threaten to send truck drivers to the unemployment office. Computer programs can now write journalistic accounts of sporting events and stock price movements. There are even computers that can grade essay exams with reasonable accuracy, which could revolutionize my own job, teaching. Increasingly, machines are providing not only the brawn but the brains, too, and that raises the question of where humans fit into this picture — who will prosper and who won’t in this new kind of machine economy?
Who will do well?
THE CONSCIENTIOUS Within five years we will are likely to have the world’s best education, or close to it, online and free. But not everyone will sit down and go through the material without a professor pushing them to do the work.

Heather Kelly:

Carly and her mom are friends on Facebook, but that doesn’t mean they share everything.
The 17-year-old from Marin County, California, has refined her Facebook privacy settings so that her mother can’t see all the posts that fill her Timeline. Her father, meanwhile, never checks the social network.
“Right now, my mom can only see things that I post. She can’t see anything I’m tagged in or anything that my friends say to me on my profile,” said Carly, a high school senior who asked to be identified only by her first name. “She doesn’t know that, though. I’m like, 80% sure that every other teenager has done that too.”
With teen-agers and their parents (grandparents, even) increasingly active on social networks, both generations are joined in a delicate dance over privacy, safety and freedom of expression online.

Via Susan Poling

Antirez:

Paul Graham managed to put a very important question, the one of the English language as a requirement for IT workers, in the attention zone of news sites and software developers [1]. It was a controversial matter as he referred to “foreign accents” and the internet is full of people that are just waiting to overreact, but this is the least interesting part of the question, so I’ll skip that part. The important part is, no one talks about the “English problem” usually, and I always felt a bit alone in that side, like if it was a problem only affecting me, so in this blog post I want to share my experience about English.

Susan Guibert:

Social practices and cultural beliefs of modern life are preventing healthy brain and emotional development in children, according to an interdisciplinary body of research presented recently at a symposium at the University of Notre Dame.
“Life outcomes for American youth are worsening, especially in comparison to 50 years ago,” says Darcia Narvaez, Notre Dame professor of psychology who specializes in moral development in children and how early life experiences can influence brain development.
“Ill-advised practices and beliefs have become commonplace in our culture, such as the use of infant formula, the isolation of infants in their own rooms or the belief that responding too quickly to a fussing baby will ‘spoil’ it,” Narvaez says.

Maura Lerner:

Last spring, as Linzy Heim was narrowing down her list of college choices, she got a call from the softball coach at Concordia University in St. Paul.
Did she know that the century-old Lutheran college was slashing its tuition by $10,000?
Her mom, Denice, was stunned.
“When we started looking, the tuition was quite frightening,” she said. The price cut helped seal the deal.
Last weekend, Linzy, an All-Star softball pitcher from Plattsmouth, Neb., moved into the freshman women’s dorm, Luther Hall, as part of Concordia’s biggest entering class in decades.

Fascinating. quite different than Madison’s K-12 bubble, where we spend twice the national average per student despite disastrous reading scores.

Nicholson Baker, via a kind Marc Eisen email:

In 1545, Girolamo Cardano, a doctor, a wearer of magical amulets, and a compulsive gambler, published a math book in Latin called Ars Magna. The “great art” of the title was algebra. When Cardano was done, he knew he had come up with something huge and powerful and timeless; on the last page was the declaration, written in five years, may it last as many thousands. The equations in Ars Magna looked very different from the ones we are familiar with — here, for instance, is how Cardano wrote the solution to x3 + 6x = 20:
Rv : cu. : R108 p : 10m : Rv :cu. R108m : 10
But the algebraic rules Cardano described and codified are variants of the techniques that millions of students are taught, with varying degrees of success, today.

As we begin a new school year, this story reminds us that our struggling with learning is not any indicator of a lack of intelligence.
Alex Spiegel
In 1979, when Jim Stigler was still a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he went to Japan to research teaching methods and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth-grade math class.
“The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw three-dimensional cubes on paper,” Stigler explains, “and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, ‘Why don’t you go put yours on the board?’ So right there I thought, ‘That’s interesting! He took the one who can’t do it and told him to go and put it on the board.’ ”
Stigler knew that in American classrooms, it was usually the best kid in the class who was invited to the board. And so he watched with interest as the Japanese student dutifully came to the board and started drawing, but still couldn’t complete the cube. Every few minutes, the teacher would ask the rest of the class whether the kid had gotten it right, and the class would look up from their work, and shake their heads no. And as the period progressed, Stigler noticed that he — Stigler — was getting more and more anxious.
“I realized that I was sitting there starting to perspire,” he says, “because I was really empathizing with this kid. I thought, ‘This kid is going to break into tears!’ ”
But the kid didn’t break into tears. Stigler says the child continued to draw his cube with equanimity. “And at the end of the class, he did make his cube look right! And the teacher said to the class, ‘How does that look, class?’ And they all looked up and said, ‘He did it!’ And they broke into applause.” The kid smiled a huge smile and sat down, clearly proud of himself.
Stigler is now a professor of psychology at UCLA who studies teaching and learning around the world, and he says it was this small experience that first got him thinking about how differently East and West approach the experience of intellectual struggle.
“I think that from very early ages we [in America] see struggle as an indicator that you’re just not very smart,” Stigler says. “It’s a sign of low ability — people who are smart don’t struggle, they just naturally get it, that’s our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.”

Fabius Maximus:

To remember the loneliness, the fear and the insecurity of men who once had to walk alone in huge factories, beside huge machines. To realize that labor unions have meant new dignity and pride to millions of our countrymen. To be able to see what larger pay checks mean, not to a man as an employee, but as a husband and as a father. To know these things is to understand what American labor means.
— Adlai Stevenson, in a speech to the American Federation of Labor, New York City on 22 September 1952

Yin & Yang:

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

Brad King:

I believe in science, but I spend almost no time reading the academic literature where the science of my craft (journalism) has traditionally been published. I spend even less time trying to craft research that would get publishing in those outlets.
For most normal human beings, this is not a controversial stance. As a tenure-track professor, this cuts against the grain of how you are normally told to proceed. In the Academy, professors traditionally are expected to do research and then publish that research in one of a number of peer-reviewed journals.
A growing number of faculty, including myself, have begun to reject that road to tenure.
The reason: the academic publishing system is built around a 1-2 year publishing process that requires the best and brightest minds to turn over all of their intellectual property without any compensation for that work.

Ruth Conniff:

As kids and teachers head back to school, the future of education in our state is a boiling-hot topic.
And no one is more ready to plunge into the roiling waters of school controversy than Tim Slekar, the new dean of the school of education at Edgewood College.
Slekar, who just moved to Madison from Pittsburgh, has been blogging about the dangers of corporate-backed education reform for years atatthechalkface.com. He is also the cohost of the online chalkface weekly radio show on Sundays at 5 p.m. and a founder of United Opt Out, a group that encourages parents and teachers to refuse to participate in high-stakes standardized tests.

Related: NCTQ survey on teacher education quality.

By Eric Kelderman:

Ashland University, a private institution in Ohio, is joining a small but growing group of colleges that have sharply cut their tuition while also reducing the amount of institutional aid they offer, to come up with a sticker price that’s closer to what students actually pay. That strategy is one of many that smaller institutions are exploring to try to ease concerns about college costs and shore up enrollments.
Instead of being charged an estimated $30,000 for the 2014-15 academic year, the roughly 3,200 undergraduates at Ashland will pay a little less than $19,000–a decrease of 37 percent. And while the university is also reducing the institutional financial aid it offers, it says it is still lowering the net price that most students will pay.
The changes in tuition and aid are meant to reduce the sticker shock that potential students and parents might experience when weighing Ashland against other college choices, campus officials said in a news release.

Luke Muehlhauser:

Luke Muehlhauser: I’d like to start by familiarizing our readers with some of the basic facts relevant to the genetic architecture of cognitive ability, which I’ve drawn from the first half of apresentation you gave in February 2013:
The human genome consists of about 3 billion base pairs, but humans are very similar to each other, so we only differ from each other on about 3 million of these base pairs.
Because there’s so much repetition, we could easily store the entire genome of every human on earth (~3mb per genome, compressed).
Rather than scanning an entire genome, we can just scan the roughly 10 million locations where humans are likely to differ (these are called SNPs).
Scanning someone’s SNPs costs about $200; scanning their entire genome costs $1000 or more.
But, genotyping costs are falling so quickly that SNPs may be irrelevant soon, as it’ll be simpler and cheaper to just sequence entire genomes.
To begin to understand the genetic architecture of cognitive ability, we can compare it to the genetic architecture of height, since the genetic architectures of height and cognitive ability are qualitatively the same.
For example, (1) height and cognitive ability are relatively stable and reliable traits (in adulthood), meaning that if you measure a person’s height or cognitive ability at multiple times you’ll get roughly the same result each time, (2) height and cognitive ability arevalid traits, in that they “measure something real” that is predictive of various life outcome measures like income, (3) both height and cognitive ability are highly heritable, and (4) both height and cognitive ability are highly polygenic, meaning that many different genes contribute to height and cognitive ability.
All cognitive observables — e.g. vocabulary, digit recall (short term memory), ability to solve math puzzles, spatial rotation ability, cognitive reaction time — appear to be positively correlated. Because of this, we can (lossily) compress the data for how a person scores on different cognitive tests to a single number, which we call IQ, and this single number is predictive of their scores on all cognitive tests, and also life outcome measures like income, educational attainment, job performance, and mortality.
This contradicts some folk wisdom. E.g. parents often believe that “Johnny’s good at math, so he’s probably not going to be good with words.” But in fact, the data show that math skill is quite predictive of verbal skill, because (roughly) all cognitive abilities are positively correlated.
By convention, IQ is normally distributed in the population with a mean at 100 and a standard deviation of 15.

Robert Charette:

You must have seen the warning a thousand times: Too few young people study scientific or technical subjects, businesses can’t find enough workers in those fields, and the country’s competitive edge is threatened.
It pretty much doesn’t matter what country you’re talking about–the United States is facing this crisis, as is Japan, the United Kingdom,Australia, China, Brazil, South Africa,Singapore, India…the list goes on. In many of these countries, the predicted shortfall of STEM (short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers is supposed to number in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions. A 2012 report by President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, for instance, stated that over the next decade, 1 million additional STEM graduates will be needed. In the U.K., the Royal Academy of Engineering reported last year that the nation will have to graduate 100 000 STEM majors every year until 2020 just to stay even with demand. Germany, meanwhile, is said to have a shortage of about 210 000 workers in what’s known there as the MINT disciplines–mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, and technology.
The situation is so dismal that governments everywhere are now pouring billions of dollars each year into myriad efforts designed to boost the ranks of STEM workers. President Obama has called for government and industry to train 10 000 new U.S. engineers every year as well as 100 000 additional STEM teachers by 2020. And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B visas–temporary immigration permits for skilled workers–from 65 000 per year to as many as 180 000. The European Union is similarly introducing the new Blue Card visa to bring in skilled workers from outside the EU. The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the end of the decade.

Richard Hersh:

President Obama has put forth a comprehensive plan to increase higher education value, holding colleges and universities accountable via a rating system based on the “outcomes” of access, graduation rates, graduate earnings and affordability.
It is hard to argue with the President’s intentions, nor the shove-rather-than-nudge strategy he employs, given the decades of higher education’s failure to rein in its costs or improve the success rate of students. The plan affirms higher education’s crucial role in fostering economic and social progress, puts colleges and universities on notice that the time for systemic change is now, not tomorrow, and creates rewards and punishments for institutions and students alike.
The president’s plan largely fails, however, to appropriately tackle the more fundamental value issue – far too little student learning. Myriad studies over the past several decades document that too little “higher” learning is taking place; college students do not make significant gains in critical thinking, problem solving, analytical reasoning, written communication skills, and ethical and moral development.

Henry Mance:

I spy: technologists are helping parents keep track of their children with new devices, such as the Filip smartwatch
When Apple introduced the Find My iPhone app three years ago, its aim was to help people locate their lost smartphones. But EJ Hilbert, a 43-year-old former FBI officer, had a better idea – installing the app on his three children’s devices, so that he could track them wherever they went.
“They have it on their phone and that’s the way it’s going to be,” says Mr Hilbert, whose day job is investigating cyber crime.
By adapting the Find My iPhone app, Mr Hilbert is part of a wider trend. Until recently technology gave power to the children. Now it is starting to give something back to the parents.

Alan Borsuk:

Six. The new kids on the block. There are quite a few, but three new schools particularly interest me. They are:
Carmen North. Will the people involved in the successful Carmen High charter school on the south side successfully launch a middle school-high school program in a long-troubled MPS building on the northwest side?
Rocketship Southside Community Prep. This high-profile charter elementary, the first expansion for Rocketship Education beyond its base in San Jose, Calif., will be watched by education activists nationwide who heatedly debate the virtues of the program, which includes a strong component of technology-based learning.
Universal Academy for the College Bound This Philadelphia-based charter school operation is opening elementary and middle schools in two MPS buildings on the north side. The questions I had about how this will go were only compounded when the key Milwaukee leader, Ronn Johnson, was charged recently with sexually assaulting children. But Universal appears intent on weathering the damage that caused.
Seven. MPS leadership. There was a period in the spring when the future of Superintendent Gregory Thornton seemed in doubt.
I still don’t get why School Board members considered putting $80,000 in the budget for a superintendent search.
But last week the board voted to extend Thornton’s contract until 2016. I’d suggest the focus now should be on the rungs below Thornton.
There’s been a lot of change in administrative ranks and a continuing wave of changes in principals. It may be difficult for outsiders (including me) to figure out how this is going, but I know it’s really important.

Robert VerBruggen:

Today’s RealClearPolicy slate features a piece from Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post claiming that college is a good investment. It pushes back against arguments in the vein of critics like Charles Murray and Richard Vedder, who argue that too many people are going to college.
Several years ago, I wrote a few pieces for National Review outlining the Murray/Vedder view (here’s one from the website), but I hadn’t kept up with the debate, and Matthews’s piece features a lot of newer research on the subject. What follows isn’t necessarily a response, but more of an overview of the topic and a reconsideration of my views in light of the updated evidence. I have six main points to make.
1. It’s not about college, it’s about college-for-all.
Matthews spends a considerable amount of time explaining that attending college is a good idea for the average student. This is true — but to the best of my knowledge, no college critic disputes it. For a lot of high-paying jobs, you simply need a college degree, no matter how smart you are; today’s doctors, teachers, engineers, and so forth would not be nearly so well off if they’d stopped after high school.
What we argue is that not all students benefit from college the way that the average student does, and that efforts to draw even more students to college could do more harm than good, because such efforts are focused on students who today rationally decide that college isn’t for them. We especially bristle at the notion that America should aspire to send all students to college.

Celia Llopis-Jepsen:

Seaman High School senior Tori Munsell’s school day starts much like any other student’s. The 17-year-old has three classes in the morning — chemistry, government and British literature.
But in the afternoon, Munsell heads to the Washburn Institute of Technology, where she spends five afternoons a week learning graphic design.
“I feel like this is going to start my career faster,” Munsell said. “I can build a portfolio.”
Munsell is one of 400 high school students enrolled at the technical college so far this semester. They study alongside high school graduates, accruing college credit before even finishing school.

Anne Hyslop:

As Ed Money Watch previously reported, the U.S. Department of Education has placed three states – Kansas, Oregon, and Washington – on “high risk” status for their ESEA waiver plans related to new teacher evaluation systems. If they don’t get up to speed by the end of 2013-14, these states could face a series of increasing sanctions, from losing state administrative or programmatic Title I funding, to losing ESEA flexibility entirely. With the latter, the state would again be subject to all of the requirements and provisions of No Child Left Behind.
Now, the Department has released initial guidelines for all states seeking to renew their waivers this winter. Waivers granted from the first two application windows (November 2011 and February 2012) expire at the end of the current school year. Without the two-year extension, the consequences for these 35 states are the same as for those on high risk: NCLB, in full effect, in 2014-15. I won’t go into the details of the renewal process (yet), but for more analysis take a look at these thorough recaps from Education Week’s Michele McNeil and Politico’s Caitlin Emma.
Instead, I’d like to focus on the challenge the U.S. Department of Education faces in ensuring state compliance with flexibility. The Department has a few tools at its disposal to cajole states into cooperation, but these kinds of punishments are rare, if not unprecedented. Few states have lost Title I funding, administrative or programmatic, under NCLB. And several states have been placed on high risk for their Race to the Top plans, but the Department has yet to follow through on the warning and revoke a portion of states’ funding.

JD Bentley:

I have a never-ending fascination with the politics of education, principally because I drew the short end of the stick on that count. The district in which I attended school was (is) notoriously bad.
On multiple occasions, I can recall the State taking over the high school due to very poor test scores while also implementing some drastic measures, like removing administrators and scheduling mandatory reading/writing times in unrelated classes like Geometry or Physical Education.
I was so deeply affected by my education due to the inherent contradiction between what I experienced and what people told me I was experiencing.
On the one hand, I had teachers and family telling me that those were the best years of my life, that I was doing something noble and important, that I was being paid for attendance in a currency much more valuable than money-experience, knowledge, wisdom.
On the other hand, I spent most of my weekdays bored out of my mind or overly anxious about something of little consequence. I learned to game the system, doing just enough to satisfy whatever was required of me without devoting myself fully to what I ultimately found to be futile and asinine and an incredible waste of time. I never could believe those were the best years of my life. If I’d thought that had been the pinnacle of my existence, I’d have offed myself years ago.
So, that being the case, I have no sympathy for public education. It caused me nothing but trouble while blaming me for its own trouble. I don’t mean to say all public education is incompetent and ineffective (though perhaps most of it is). I only mean to give some background on why I’m opposed to the ideas presented in Allison Benedikt’s If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You are a Bad Persona.

Josh Brown:

For some high school students who want to get a head start on college, scraping together the roughly $160 needed to pay for a dual enrollment class in Tennessee can be a barrier.
Now, a coalition of business and education groups is shining light on the issue in a bid to reduce or eliminate the cost for students to participate in the classes, which count both as college and high school credit.
Earlier this year, the coalition led by the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce commissioned a study to look at how to improve the state’s dual enrollment program. The study, performed by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University, recommended increasing funding for the program.

Much more on dual enrollment here.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper:

A trio of Northern California students working for their high school newspaper successfully beat back a legal maneuver on Tuesday to ignore their status as reporters and have their confidential materials subpoenaed in a civil lawsuit related to the suicide of their classmate, 15-year-old Audrie Pott, that was filed by the dead teenager’s family.
The confrontation between a grieving family and school press amplifies a growing issue in the digital era, when the definition of who is or who is not a journalist has been blurred. The withdrawal of this demand, at least for the moment, lays the groundwork for the formal extension of shield laws to high school students.

Emily Badger:

Human mental bandwidth is finite. You’ve probably experienced this before (though maybe not in those terms): When you’re lost in concentration trying to solve a problem like a broken computer, you’re more likely to neglect other tasks, things like remembering to take the dog for a walk, or picking your kid up from school. This is why people who use cell phones behind the wheel actually perform worse as drivers. It’s why air traffic controllers focused on averting a mid-air collision are less likely to pay attention to other planes in the sky.
We only have so much cognitive capacity to spread around. It’s a scarce resource.
This understanding of the brain’s bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.

Peter Gray:

Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that’s what they need to become productive and happy adults. Many have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula and/or more rigorous tests.
But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.
School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.