USA Today Editorial:

Critics — whether district superintendents or teachers’ unions or school boards or a traveling band of academic doubters — snipe at the newcomers, arguing that they’re siphoning students and money from traditional public schools.
But as evidence from the 20-year-old charter experiment mounts, the snipers are in need of a new argument. There’s little doubt left that top-performing charters have introduced new educational models that have already achieved startling results in even the most difficult circumstances.
That doesn’t mean all charters are automatically good. They’re not. But it’s indisputable that the good ones — most prominently, KIPP — are onto something. The non-profit company, which now has 125 schools, operates on a model that demands much more of students, parents and teachers than the typical school does. School days are longer, sometimes including Saturday classes. Homework burdens are higher, typically two hours a night. Grading is tougher. Expectations are high, as is the quality of teachers and principals, and so are the results.
KIPP’s eighth-grade graduates go to college at twice the national rate for low-income students, according to its own tracking. After three years, scores on math tests rise as if students had four years of schooling, according to an independent study.

Related: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools”
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A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school.
Minneapolis teacher’s union approved to authorize charter schools
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Eduardo Porter:

James Heckman is one of the nation’s top economists studying human development. Thirteen years ago, he shared the Nobel for economics. In February, he stood before the annual meeting of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry, showed the assembled business executives a chart, and demolished the United States’ entire approach to education.
The chart showed the results of cognitive tests that were first performed in the 1980s on several hundred low-birthweight 3-year-olds, who were then retested at ages 5, 8 and 18.
Children of mothers who had graduated from college scored much higher at age 3 than those whose mothers had dropped out of high school, proof of the advantage for young children of living in rich, stimulating environments.
More surprising is that the difference in cognitive performance was just as big at age 18 as it had been at age 3.

Emma Boyd:

As the world of big business lurches from one crisis to the next, a quiet change of perspective is taking place in many European business schools. The focus on schooling students to expect the prize of a well-paying executive-level position at a large multinational is giving way to a fresh look at one of the oldest types of enterprise in the world – the family business.
While some schools are looking to ramp up their family business education offering, others are expecting to benefit from never having taken their eye off the ball.
The number of family businesses in Europe supports the rationale for renewed interest in such enterprises. Julian Franks, professor of finance at London Business School, estimates that in Italy, which he considers to be the European country with the strongest tradition of family businesses, 60 per cent of companies are family-owned or family-controlled. In France and Germany the proportion is 40 per cent, and in the UK it is only 20 per cent.
Marina Puricelli, professor of small and medium-sized enterprises and family business at SDA Bocconi School of Management in Italy, believes the numbers for Italy are even stronger than Prof Franks thinks. She estimates that 90 per cent of Italiancompanies have fewer than 10 employees.

Tim Harford:

A couple of years ago, I showed my daughters a video put online by the Khan Academy, which has become famous as a pioneer in open-access education. The video was an amateurish but charming explanation of basic arithmetic. We had fun but the girls were not transformed into mathematical prodigies. Their mathematical education remains the sole responsibility of a rather traditional school in North Oxford. The only thing YouTube has taught them is how to draw manga cartoons.
That experience would not surprise the British educational establishment. Massive Online Open Courses (Moocs) are all the rage but the top universities seem to regard them as mere amusements, unlikely to threaten traditional methods, which may be costly but are exclusive and of excellent quality.
The vice-chancellor of Cambridge university, in a speech in January, said that online courses would “challenge the nature of higher education” but that they would not change what happened at Cambridge.
Educational expert Karan Khemka seems to agree, explaining in this newspaper’s comment page that the Mooc approach would eventually improve higher education, but “through incremental change rather than massive disruption”.

Rick Esenberg:

The MPS teachers’ union wants to negotiate a new contract. They think that contract need not be compliant with Act 10 because of a Dane County circuit court decision holding that the law is unconstitutional. As I have written before, that decision does not create a window of opportunity to violate Act 10. Whether or not the union will ultimately be able to avoid Act 10 will depend on the decision of a higher court – almost certainly the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
If that court concludes that the Dane County circuit court was wrong – a conclusion that is highly likely – then any new contract that violates Act 10 will be unlawful and presumably void.
Moreover, the fact that a single circuit court judge in Madison thinks the Act is unconstitutional will have exactly no impact on the deliberation of higher courts. Lower court decisions are entitled to deference when they involve factual findings or the exercise of discretion. The decision holding Act 10 to be unconstitutional involved neither and is subjected, as lawyers like to say, to de novo
Negotiating a new contract would be even more problematic than that. The attorney for the plaintiffs in the Dane County case seems to think that a municipality that does not agree to negotiate terms that are forbidden by Act 10 would be engaged in an unfair labor practice. In his view, the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission – to whom such charges are initially directed – would be bound by the circuit court decision because its members were defendants in the case.
But there are at least two problems with his argument. First, it us unclear that WERC, in its capacity as a tribunal, can be bound by a declaratory judgment in adjudicating the rights of a party who is not itself bound by that judgment. For example, if the Mequon-Thiensville School District is charged with an unfair labor practice for complying with Act 10, it was not a party to the case finding it to be unconstitutional. The question is one that only a civil procedure professor (and I’ve been one of those) could love.

Nat Hentoff:

The March 18 headline in USA Today blares: “More teachers are grouping kids by ability.” What’s wrong with that? Because the actual problems of individual kids are overlooked when students, especially those starting in elementary schools, are tracked as a group by what they’ve learned.
But Patrick Boodey, principal of the Woodman Park School in Dover, N.H., tries to remind us in the same story: “As a teacher, you know in your heart you need to meet the needs of each child” (Greg Toppo, USA Today, March 18).
Really? How many teachers do know that and act accordingly?
Disturbing answers to that question are documented in the most important article on education I’ve seen in many years: “The ‘Quiet’ Troubles of Low-Income Children,” by Richard Weissbourd of the Harvard School of Education. The article was first published in the March/April 2008 issue of the Harvard Education Letter and is also included in a valuable book: “Spotlight on Student Engagement, Motivation and Achievement” (Caroline T. Chauncey and Nancy Walser, editors; Harvard Education Press, 2009).

Matthew Yglesias:

One of the worst things about “public” schools in many American jurisdictions is that even though the facilites are financed by the public they’re de facto the private property of local homeowners. In DC where I live, for example, all you have to do to get your kid into a relatively high-performing DCPS school is move to the most expensive neighborhoods in the city. Meanwhile if you’re poor you’re out of luck.
Charter schools aren’t free of this kind of concern. Obviously if you plop a school down in an affluent area you’re likely to attract a disproportionately affluent group of applicants if only because convenience counts. And there are things you can do with marketing to try to select the applicants you want. But a real virtue of charters in DC is that they need to be at least formally open to applicants from anywhere in the city, while Ward 3 “public” schools can simply refuse to take any kids from the poor parts of the city. For now, that is. One of our newer Council members, David Grosso, says charter schools should give preference in admissions to kids from nearby neighborhoods. And according to Rahul Merand-Sinha this kind of arrangement is fairly common and exists already in major cities such as New York and Chicago.
In my view, over the long term the question of how linked schools are to particular places is a more important issue than the cliché debate over “charters” vs “traditional” public schools. In a zoning-free Yglesiastopia this might not be such a big deal. But in a real world where real estate markets are defined by location, location, location tying school access to location turns the school system into a form of private property. You can call a facility “public” all you like, but if the only way to gain access to it is to first buy your way into an expensive neighborhood then there’s nothing public about it. It’s just owned collectively by the residents of the neighborhood, in much the way that a luxury condo might have a fitness center or a gated community might have a golf course.

Ruthie:

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might as well have viewed it as an act of war,” wrote T.H. Bell in the 1983 report, “A Nation At Risk.” Now thirty years after this groundbreaking report, the Fordham Institute’s video, “A Nation at Risk: Thirty Years Later” discusses progress in education and what lies ahead.
Experts including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former Washington, D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michele Rhee, Fordham Institute President Chester Finn Jr., American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess, and several former Secretaries of Education speak about the report’s impact on both yesterday and today.
One of the video’s panelists describes the report as the single most influential document in the history of American education. Before “A Nation at Risk,” most Americans thought our country’s education system was exceptional. The report was revolutionary because it revealed extreme inequality and deficits in student’s learning. The report’s call for choice, increased technology use, and common standards was what one panelist said made the report the “biggest wave in a very wavy ocean.” The research and arguments continue to raise awareness of the big problems facing our education system.

Politifact:

Controversy continues to rage over the requirement that Rhode Island high school students score highly enough on the New England Common Assessment Program test to receive a diploma.
The latest testing data show that 40 percent of students failed to meet the minimum math standard and risk being unable to graduate if their skills don’t improve.
During the March 22 edition of Rhode Island Public Television’s “A Lively Experiment,” state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist defended the requirement.
Gist said that if you let students graduate without proficiency you’re shortchanging them.
“Anyone who’s telling these students that . . . it doesn’t matter that they’re able to do math at a basic level when they leave high school is just wrong. And it’s not fair to them because what’s going to happen to them when they leave our high schools and they go to the community college where 70-75 percent of them have to pay to take remedial courses to get the exact same math that we’re talking about?”
Seventy to seventy-five percent of Rhode Island high school graduates who go to community college have to take remedial courses in math? That struck us as a huge percentage, even for those graduates who wanted a higher education but might not have had the grades, test scores or money to get into a four-year school. So we decided to check the numbers.

Related: What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level mathematics placement?.

Michael Horn:

Listening to Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, speak on stage to several hundred attendees at the 5th Anniversary Gala last week for Innosight Institute–the non-profit that I co-founded–I thought about how Clayton Christensen and I have speculated for some time that the long-term future of much of educational content will be in the business model of a facilitated network, a platform in which users essentially exchange modular pieces of educational content with each other.
As Khan explained how his team is setting up its network, it reminded me that those who are discounting the long-term value of entities such as the Khan Academy and Knewton, an adaptive learning platform, may be making a significant mistake, as both are positioning themselves to make a run at being the learning platform of the future.
A common rap heard about the Khan Academy is that it’s just a bunch of videos for homework help, nothing more. Even worse, people say, it perpetuates a failed lecture model of learning.
What these critics miss is the evolution of a disruptive innovation–and the steps that the Khan Academy is taking to improve what started as a “good enough” video solution for students who didn’t have access to a tutor.

Tom Humphrey:

Legislation to cut welfare benefits of parents with children performing poorly in school has cleared committees of both the House and Senate after being revised to give the parents several ways to avoid the reductions.
The state Department of Human Services, which worked with Republican sponsors to draft the changes, withdrew its previous opposition to SB132. But the measure was still criticized by Democrats, including Rep. Gloria Johnson, D-Knoxville.
The bill is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, and Rep. Vance Dennis, R-Savannah. It calls for a 30 percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to parents whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school.
As amended, it would not apply when a child has a handicap or learning disability or when the parent takes steps to try improving the youngster’s school performance — such as signing up for a “parenting class,” arranging a tutoring program or attending a parent-teacher conference.

Steve Schuster:

The new White House Score Card gives comparative information on the costs and success of colleges which should be helpful for students and their parents. At first glance, the information is shocking. It shows that a college education in Milwaukee can cost a great deal more than at Harvard University, long rated the nation’s top university.
According to the data, the average cost for one year of an undergraduate program at Marquette University runs about $28,746, which is $10,000 per year more than Harvard which charges $18,277. Also more expensive than Harvard is Milwaukee School of Engineering ($24,546), the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design ($24,285) and even the privately owned University of Phoenix-Milwaukee ($22,231).
Where does that number come from?

Tamzin Baker:

In 1996, Waters set up the Edible Schoolyard Project, a small organic garden and classroom kitchen at Martin Luther King Jr middle school, in Berkeley, where students learn the values of healthy eating by growing their own lunch. Similar programmes have been set up in New Orleans and Greensboro, North Carolina, where obesity levels are among the highest in the country.
“I’m trying to get to a place where we educate children at a very early age and give them a meal in school that is free,” says Waters. “But it doesn’t happen without a curriculum that goes with it. They’ve tried to give kids healthier lunches and kids just throw them in the garbage. Kids have to be engaged with hands-on experience of growing and preparing the food. And so I have an idea for setting up an edible schoolyard at a high school. In fact that’s why I’m going to meet with the mayor of Sacramento.”

Jenny Anderson:

Across the country, education reformers and their allies in both parties have revamped the way teachers are graded, abandoning methods under which nearly everyone was deemed satisfactory, even when students were falling behind.
More than half the states now require new teacher evaluation systems and, thanks to a deal announced last week in Albany, New York City will soon have one, too.
The changes, already under way in some cities and states, are intended to provide meaningful feedback and, critically, to weed out weak performers. And here are some of the early results:
In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or highly effective in the most recent evaluations. In Tennessee, 98 percent of teachers were judged to be “at expectations.”
In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better.
Advocates of education reform concede that such rosy numbers, after many millions of dollars developing the new systems and thousands of hours of training, are worrisome.
“It is too soon to say that we’re where we started and it’s all been for nothing,” said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and policy organization. “But there are some alarm bells going off.”

Laura Waters:

Today’s Star-Ledger reports that the Superintendent of West Winsor/Plainsboro Public Schools (Mercer County), Victoria Kniewel, is leaving in order to avoid a salary cut. Her contract, which sets her salary at $192.6K, expires in two years. Under NJ’s superintendent salary cap, Kniewel would could earn no more than $175K under a new contract. Princeton’s superintendent, Judith Wilson, is also leaving; she makes over $220K, and the salary cap would lop $57K off her annual earnings. (Caps are linked to total enrollment; the more students, the higher the cap.)
The West Windsor School Board president comments that the salary cap interferes with districts’ ability to “attract quality candidates” because other states don’t enforce salary caps. That’s true. But other states don’t have as many school districts as we do; one could argue that NJ’s abundance of central offices — superintendents, business administrators, personnel directors, etc. — leads to redundancy and inefficiency. We can’t pay our superintendents as much as other states because each one is responsible for far fewer students.

Marian Wang:

At the University of California Santa Cruz, where tuition runs to nearly $35,000 for non-residents, students every year pay more than 30 additional fees — including a small charge for what’s billed as “free” HIV testing. Students at Oklahoma State University pay a handsome sum to attend one of the state’s flagship schools, but they are also responsible for covering 18 different fees, including a “life safety and security fee.”
The $100 “globalization fee” at Howard University is listed — without explanation — in the school’s tuition and fees brochure. A school spokeswoman said the fee “supports internationalization initiatives” such as study abroad. Students pay the fee even if they have no intention of studying abroad themselves.
Worcester State University in Massachusetts, however, might have one of the most arresting fees. Students fortunate enough to be admitted face the challenge of paying the required tuition. But before they step foot on campus, they also will be hit with a fee to, well, step foot on campus. A portion of the school’s “parking/pedestrian fee” goes to the upkeep of the sidewalks on campus.

Amanda Ross:

Hays County’s state representative has filed a comprehensive piece of legislation that could pave the way for a new approach to public education.
House Bill 300, filed by State Rep. Jason Isaac (R-Dripping Springs) on March 7, would create an alternative to the mandate-filled education code currently followed by all Texas school districts. The bill would give school districts the option to create their own agendas, goals and measurements of success, bucking the current one-size-fits-all approach mandated by the state government, Isaac said.
“(HB 300) gives school districts the flexibility to manage their own curriculum, teachers the freedom to attend to the needs of their students and parents the ability to have more say in ensuring the best education for their children,” Isaac said.
The current education code, which is approximately 1,100 pages long, would be replaced with 50 pages of framework that school districts could tailor to fit their individual needs, Isaac said. For instance, the bill would give school districts the control to allocate financial resources as they see fit and focus on individual programs and areas as needed.

Ry Rivard:

Duke University faculty members, frustrated with their administration and skeptical of the degrees to be awarded, have forced the institution to back out of a deal with nine other universities and 2U to create a pool of for-credit online classes for undergraduates.
Duke’s Arts & Sciences Council, which represents faculty from Duke’s largest undergraduate college, voted 16-14 on Thursday against plans to grant credits to Duke students who would have taken online courses from the pool. The vote effectively killed Duke’s participation in the effort, and it immediately withdrew.
The courses were to be offered by Duke and other top-tier universities in a partnership organized by 2U, formerly known as 2tor. Unlike massive open online courses, or MOOCs, only a few hundred students were expected to enroll in each course – which would feature a mix of recorded lectures and live discussions – but each course would be divided into sections of no more than 20 students led by an instructor, perhaps a graduate student. The effort, known as Semester Online, will go on without Duke and offer its first classes this fall, 2U’s CEO said.

Ian Robinson:

I ended my previous post by arguing that (1) if teaching is at least as valuable as research, and (2) nontenure-track (NTT) faculty teach at least as well as tenure-track (TT) faculty, then the very large pay disparities between the two classes of faculty that characterize American universities today violate a basic principle of workplace fairness: equal pay for equal work. When conditions (1) and (2) are met, then, all an institution can do to defend current practice is plead poverty: we can’t afford to do what we ourselves must acknowledge to be “the right thing.”
But what about places like the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where I work? Is condition (1) met in what are sometimes called “R1” universities like mine? If not, maybe big pay disparities are warranted by the fact that, in such universities, research is a much higher institutional priority than undergraduate teaching. If teaching is a low enough priority, current pay inequalities could be justified by the fact that NTT faculty are not paid to do research and publishing – even though many of them do it – and, conversely, that most TT faculty pay is for their research and publishing, rather than their teaching.
We can estimate what we might call the “implicit” value of teaching at a place like UM-AA, by starting with the unrealistic assumption that TT and NTT faculty are paid the same to teach a course. At my university, the median full-time NTT faculty member, if they start (as most do) as a Lecturer I, will be paid an average of $38,289 to teach six courses. That is about $6,381 per course. The median Assistant Professor will be paid $80,361 to teach three courses. Three courses at $6,381 per course is about $19,144. This implies that the value of the median Assistant Professor’s non-teaching work (mainly research, though there is some service work here too) is $80,361-$19,144 = $61,217.

528K Powerpoint Presentation. Via a kind reader.

Notes and links on the Madison School District’s “Strategic Planning Process”, begun under former Superintendent Dan Nerad.

Jennifer Miller:

At last year’s State of the City speech, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced the creation of a public high school called the Academy for Software Engineering. The school would be part of an ambitious expansion of computer science education in the city, and Mr. Bloomberg called it the “brainchild” of a local teacher named Michael Zamansky.
Mr. Zamansky was seated on the stage, a few steps from the mayor. But by that point, he said recently, the project was his in name only: he said he had been effectively cut out of the school’s planning process, and his vision of an elite program had given way to one that was more focused on practical job skills.
“I don’t know if they think my plans are too grandiose, or too unrealistic or if I’m an elitist snob,” he said.
The mayor spoke about other efforts to train the city’s future engineers and entrepreneurs. But Mr. Zamansky worried that the new school would be too small: not enough students, not enough ambition.
Mr. Zamansky, 45, had spent two decades developing the computer science program at Stuyvesant High School. Former students now working at Google and Facebook call him a mentor, a role model, a man who showed them their future.

Related: Primary School Computer Science (!) Curriculum in Vietnam and, Dave Winer comments.

Alan Borsuk:

I’m in favor of spending more money on schools. Education is important. Important things need to be given the right support.
Am I in favor of spending more of my money on schools? A trickier question. I mean it when I say I support education spending. But I don’t like getting the bill. There are a lot of competing demands on my money, starting with my own needs.
How do I navigate this? How do I get it right when it comes to balancing what I favor supporting and what I actually am going to pay for? Come May and June, resolving this is going to be one of the most interesting, controversial and important plot developments in the final stretch of the state budget drama going on in Madison as we as a state decide this.
You can see tension between what people want in general and what they want when the discussion gets specific in results from the Marquette Law School Poll released a few days ago. (Disclosure: I am one of the people who work on the poll and I helped draft the education-related questions.)
When a sample of people statewide were asked if they support spending more money on public education, their answers were overwhelmingly yes. Sixteen percent said they wanted the amount given to support schools to increase more than the rate of inflation (about 2% over the last year). Another 41% said they thought the amount should go up in line with the rate of inflation. And 14% said they favored an increase of 1% a year (a figure used because it has been proposed by some Republican state senators).
That comes to 71% in favor. Gov. Scott Walker has proposed keeping the “revenue cap” on schools flat for the next two years, which would have the general effect of keeping spending for operations unchanged. Seventeen percent favored no increase in public school spending. And 8% wanted to reduce the amount given to public schools.
But not so fast in concluding there is big support for more money for schools. The poll also asked what was more important to people, to reduce property taxes or increase school spending. Walker’s budget proposal increases state aid to schools by about 1.5%, but, because the revenue cap would be flat, the money would go, in effect, to property tax relief.

Superintendent Jane Belmore (PDF):

The professional learning priorities for 2013-14 are improving practices on both academic and behavior sides of the Multi-tiered System of Support (MTSS) Triangle. More specifically, these priorities are in (a) literacy/English Language Arts and Common Core State Standards and (b) Positive Behavior Supports/Social Emotional Learning. An essential part of this professional learning involves their integration with a MTSS, the Danielson Framework for Teaching, and culturally & linguistically responsive practices. Math will also remain a focus at the secondary level and a summer focus for elementary. Our student data demonstrate the need to focus professional learning on Tier I “core” practices within a MTSS, where the needs of 80-90% of students should be met.

Rocketship:

Rocketship Milwaukee is Rocketship Education’s first expansion city outside of California. This is a unique opportunity to collaborate and contribute – with Rocketship Education’s executive staff – on the development of a regional entity, ensuring success for not only the city of Milwaukee and its communities, but many cities to come.
Rocketship Milwaukee’s Managing Director is responsible for the academic, operational and financial success of Milwaukee’s Rocketship schools and continued growth. The Managing Director leads a team of Rocketeers including regional staff, school leaders and teachers towards closing the achievement gap for students and the Milwaukee community. The Managing Director will grow Rocketship Education’s impact from one school in 2012 to 8 schools within 5 years as it works to eliminate the elementary achievement gap in Milwaukee. Internally, the Managing Director manages the regional leadership team that supports school staff, ensures strong and strategic financial management, and partners with national staff to build the best supports for schools possible.
Externally, the Managing Director builds deep community engagement and fosters public and political support for Rocketship to expand its impact as it works with the Milwaukee community to build first class options for all parents. Specifically, the Managing Director will oversee all community development, funder and authorizer relationships in order to drive regional growth.

Peter Reinhardt:

I’m extremely excited about online education, but I’ve noticed that online education products have a really serious problem: low retention. I’ve used Coursera, EdX, HackDesign, Duolingo, Codecademy… and I’ve churned from all of them. I bet you did too!
I don’t want to tear down these products or the people who’ve built them, I’m rooting for them all the way. They just need some tough love, and so this article explains why I churned: the starting commitment is too high, the re-engagement emails are terrible, and the pacing is impersonal.
How low IS their retention?
Coursera founder Daphne Koller said last year that only 7-9% of students who sign up actually “finish” the class. The definition of finish is a bit fuzzy, so I wanted to collect some more data.

Harrison J. Kell, David Lubinski & Camilla P. Benbow:

Youth identified before age 13 (N = 320) as having profound mathematical or verbal reasoning abilities (top 1 in 10,000) were tracked for nearly three decades. Their awards and creative accomplishments by age 38, in combination with specific details about their occupational responsibilities, illuminate the magnitude of their contribution and professional stature. Many have been entrusted with obligations and resources for making critical decisions about individual and organizational well-being. Their leadership positions in business, health care, law, the professoriate, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) suggest that many are outstanding creators of modern culture, constituting a precious human-capital resource. Identifying truly profound human potential, and forecasting differential development within such populations, requires assessing multiple cognitive abilities and using atypical measurement procedures. This study illustrates how ultimate criteria may be aggregated and longitudinally sequenced to validate such measures.

Steve Hsu has more.

Ben Casselman:

284,000:Number of American college graduates working in minimum-wage jobs in 2012.
The Wall Street Journal this week reported on the troubling trend of college graduates getting stuck in low-skilled jobs, a problem that new researchsuggests may endure even after the economy improves.
As the story noted, college graduates tend to earn more than their less-educated coworkers, even within the same field. But that isn’t true for everyone: According to the Labor Department, there were 284,000 graduates–those with at least a bachelor’s degree–working minimum-wage jobs in 2012, including 37,000 holders of advanced degrees. That’s down from a peak of 327,000 in 2010, but double the number in 2007 and up 70% from a decade earlier

Shane Lopez and Preety Sidhu:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Teachers in the United States rate their lives better than all other occupation groups, trailing only physicians. They have an average Life Evaluation Index score of 68.8, besting workers in most other types of jobs, including managers and executives, nurses, and business owners.
The research is based on interviewing conducted as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which consists of six sub-indexes that measure Americans’ physical, emotional, and financial health. The nation’s teachers score higher than almost all occupational groups on life evaluations plus four of the other five areas of wellbeing — including emotional health, healthy behaviors, basic access, and physical health. In life evaluations, emotional health, and basic access specifically, teachers come in second — trailing only physicians, who typically earn a much higher salary. The one area in which teachers do not score as well is work environment. More generally, teachers earn the second-highest score on the overall Well-Being Index, which is based on all six sub-components, as Gallup and Healthways previously reported.

Matthew DeFour:

“I have no doubt that the way we’re going to improve student achievement is by focusing on what happens in the classroom,” Cheatham said.
Clash with unions

Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews and others say poverty drives the achievement gap more so than classroom factors.
“We do have a high-quality teaching force in Madison — it’s been that way for years,” Matthews said. He added that one challenge he’d like to see Cheatham address is the administration’s tendency to adopt new programs every few years.
Cheatham’s salary will be $235,000, 17 percent more than predecessor Dan Nerad. Unlike Nerad, a former Green Bay social worker and superintendent, Cheatham has never led an organization. She also hasn’t stayed in the same job for more than two years since she was a teacher in Newark, Calif., from 1997 to 2003.
Mitchell, who beat out Cheatham for the top job at Partners in School Innovation where she worked for a year before moving to Chicago, said Cheatham has the talent to become schools chief in a major city like Chicago or New York in seven to 10 years. That’s a benefit for Madison because Cheatham is on the upswing of her career and must succeed in order to advance, Mitchell said.
“The thing about Madison that’s kind of exciting is there’s plenty of work to do and plenty of resources with which to do it,” Mitchell said. “It’s kind of a sweet spot for Jen. Whether she stays will depend on how committed the district is to continuing the work she does.”

Related: A history of Madison Superintendent experiences.
I asked the three (! – just one in 2013) 2008 Madison school board candidates (Gallon, Nerad or McIntyre), if they supported “hiring the best teachers and getting out of the way”, or a “top down” approach where the District administration’s department of “curriculum done our way” working in unison with Schools of Education, grant makers and other third parties attempt to impose teaching models on staff.
Union intransigence is one of the reasons (in my view) we experience administrative attempts to impose curricula via math or reading “police”. I would prefer to see a “hire the best and let them teach – to high global standards” approach. Simplify and focus on the basics: reading, writing, math and science.

Madison School Board Seat 5 Candidate TJ Mertz Sued Twice for Unpaid Utility Bills by WKOW TV.
Missed Campaign Finance Filings: Paging Sarah Manski: You can’t leave for California just yet by David Blaska.
Sarah Manski keeps Nan Brien out of court; reports lots of Green by David Blaska:

She blew through Monday’s campaign finance reporting deadline as blithely as she ran – and then quit – her race for Madison School Board. (“Paging Sarah Manski: You can’t leave for California just yet.”) But Sarah Manski has finally made an honest woman of her treasurer and protector of the union-dominated old guard, Nan Brien.
(The former school board member, nemesis of public schools chartered to address the racial achievement gap, told WKOW TV-27 that her role as treasurer was only as a figurehead. Like Sgt. Schultz, so many in Madison are saying about the Manski campaign: “I knew nothing!”)
The Manski fundraising report filed Friday – four days late – reveals quite the haul in just a few weeks for a local race: $7,733 since Feb. 5 for a race that she ended two days after the Feb. 19 primary election. That makes a total of $11,136 since entering the race in December. That’s a lot of Green! As in very Green green.
Now, if Sarah had been a conservative instead of a professional Walker stalker (see: Wisconsin Wave), The Capital Times would have staged one of its pretend ethics meltdowns about the evils of out-of-state money. An example of their situational ethics is “Pat Roggensack’s out-of-state cash”:

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Pat Roggensack makes little secret of her ideological and partisan alliances. And most of [her] money is coming from outside Wisconsin.

You want “outside Wisconsin”? How about St. Louis, Mo.; Lansdale, Pa.; N. Hollywood, Calif.; Edina, Minn.; Mishakawa, Ind.; Vancouver, Wash.; Kensington, Md.; Palo Alto, Calif.; New York, N.Y.; Port Orford, Ore.; Flossmoor, Ill.; Sheffield, Mass.; Orange, Calif.; Syracuse, N.Y.; Chevy Chase, Md.; Charleston, S.C.; Chicago, Ill.; Corvallis, Ore.; Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; Redlands, Calif.; Charlotte, N.C.; Austin, Texas; Los Angeles, Calif.; Tampa, Fla.; Boulder, Colo.; San Bernardino, Calif.; Detroit, Mich.; Santa Fe, N.M.; Seattle, Wash.; Carmel, Calif.; Houston, Texas; Philadelphia, Pa.
That is only a partial list of postmarks for “Manski for Wisconsin,” as her Madison School Board campaign was grandiosely named. Yes, when it comes to “outside cash,” John Nichols’ protégés get a pass. Manski collected 107 contributions in the latest reporting period, of which only 32 bore a Madison address, including: MTI boss John Matthews, $50; Mayor Soglin aide Sarah Miley’s husband, $100; and of course, Marj “Somebody Good” Passman, $50.

T.J. Mertz: How did Act 10 prevent you from paying your electric bill, and what about your conflict of interest? by David Blaska

Blaska’s Bring It! finds that Mertz’s spouse, Karin Schmidt, is employed by the Madison Metropolitan School District as a special education assistant at Madison West High School. That necessitates that Mertz recuse himself on such important votes as teacher and staff salary, benefits, working conditions, length of school day and year.
The odd thing is that nowhere on his campaign website does Mertz refer to his wife. He mentions two sons but no spouse. Why is she The Woman Who Must Not Be Named?
“No particular reason why she is not listed there,” Mertz told me today. Seriously? And what about the obvious conflict of interest?
“If elected, I will recuse myself as advised by district legal staff,” Mertz told this blog. I asked what would trigger a recusal. He responded, “As to recusals, I don’t know. I will take the legal advice of the district counsel. You could ask her; I have not yet, as it is not appropriate for her to be giving advice to a candidate.”
Really? You’re running for school board but you don’t know when and on what you can vote?
I have posed the conflict-of-interest issue to MMSD legal staff as well as to the Wisconsin School Board Assn. This being the Easter weekend holiday, answers may not be forthcoming before the election. However, Mertz supporter Bill Keys, the former school board president who banned the Pledge of Allegiance at Madison schools, a year ago declared that school board candidate Nichelle Nichols “will be unable to work fully with her colleagues,” because she was a Madison Urban League employee:

When I served on the board, our attorney instructed me to avoid Madison Teachers Inc. negotiations and not even be in the room during discussions. As a retired teacher, I benefited only from the life insurance policy provided by the district. Even so, discussions or votes on MTI benefits would violate state law.

Barry Garelick:

Is it my imagination, or have you noticed that some public high school courses that are now called “honors” are equivalent to the regular “college prep” curriculum of earlier eras? And have you also noticed that what is now called “college prep” is aimed largely at students who are deemed low achievers or of low cognitive ability?
In fact, this trend is nobody’s imagination. Over the past generation, public schools have done away with “tracking” — a practice that began in the early 1900′s. By the 20′s and 30′s, curricula in high schools had evolved into four different types: college-preparatory, vocational (e.g., plumbing, metal work, electrical, auto), trade-oriented (e.g., accounting, secretarial), and general. Students were tracked into the various curricula based largely on IQ but sometimes other factors such as race and skin color. Children of immigrants, and children who came from farms rather than cities, were often assumed to be inferior in cognitive ability and treated accordingly.
During the 60’s and 70’s, radical education critics such as Jonathan Kozol brought accusations against a system they found racist and sadistic. They argued that public schools were hostile to children and lacked innovation in pedagogy. Their goal — which became the goal of the larger education establishment — was to restore equity to students, erasing the lines that divided them by social class and race. The desire to eliminate inequity translated to the goal of preparing every student for college. The goal was laudable, but as college prep merged with the general education track, it became student-centered and needs-based, with lower standards and less homework assigned.
Some of the previous standards returned during the early 80’s, when the “Back to Basics” movement reacted against the fads of the late 60’s and the 70’s by reinstituting traditional curricula. But the underlying ideas of Kozol and others did not go away, and the progressive watchword in education has continued to be “equality.”

Related: English 10.

Tap or click for a larger version of the above chart.

Madison Superintendent Jane Belmore:

In investigating the options for data to report for these programs for 2011-12 and for prior years, Research & Program Evaluation staff have not been able to find a consistent way that students were identified as participants in these literacy interventions in prior years.
As such, there are serious data concerns that make the exact measures too difficult to secure at this time. Staff are working now with Curriculum & Assessment leads to find solutions. However, it is possible that this plan will need to be modified based on uncertain data availability prior to 2011-12.

Much more on Madison’s disastrous reading results, here. Reading continues to be job one for our $392,000,000 public schools.


Tap or click to view a larger version of the above image.
Measuring Madison’s Progress – Final Report (2.5MB PDF).
Given the results, perhaps the continued $pending and related property tax increases for Reading Recovery are driven by adult employment, rather than kids learning to read.
UPDATE: April 1, 2013 Madison School Board discussion of the District’s reading results. I found the curriculum creation conversation toward the end of the meeting fascinating, particularly in light of these long term terrible results. I am not optimistic that student reading skills will improve given the present structure and practices. 30 MB MP3.

UPDATE: December, 2017…. ….

Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results:

The teachers are angry because we are being held accountable for things that we didn’t do at the high school level. Of those 24 students, 21 of them have been enrolled in Madison for four or more years.

Of those 24 students one is Caucasian the rest of them identify as some other ethnic group.

I am tired of the district playing what I called whack-a-mole, (in) another words a problem happens at Cherokee boom we bop it down and we we fix it temporarily and then something at Sherman or something at Toki or something at Faulk and we bop it down and its quiet for awhile but it has not been fixed on a system-wide level and that’s what has to change.

2018: Seeing the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship Between Madison School District (WI) Graduation Rates and Student Achievement.

Mark Bowden:

CATHOLIC SCHOOL was not the ordeal for me that it apparently was for many other children of my generation. I attended Catholic grade schools, served as an altar boy, and, astonishingly, was never struck by a nun or molested by a priest. All in all I was treated kindly, which often was more than I deserved. My education has withstood the test of time, including both the lessons my teachers instilled and the ones they never intended.
In the mid-20th century, when I was in grade school, a child’s self-esteem was not a matter for concern. Shame was considered a spur to better behavior and accomplishment. If you flunked a test, you were singled out, and the offending sheet of paper, bloodied with red marks, was waved before the entire class as a warning, much the way our catechisms depicted a boy with black splotches on his soul.
Fear was also considered useful. In the fourth grade, right around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, one of the nuns at St. Petronille’s, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, told us that the Vatican had received a secret warning that the world would soon be consumed by a fatal nuclear exchange. The fact that the warning had purportedly been delivered by Our Lady of Fátima lent the prediction divine authority. (Any last sliver of doubt was removed by our viewing of the 1952 movie The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, wherein the Virgin Mary herself appeared on a luminous cloud.) We were surely cooked. I remember pondering the futility of existence, to say nothing of the futility of safety drills that involved huddling under desks. When the fateful sirens sounded, I resolved, I would be out of there. Down the front steps, across Hillside Avenue, over fences, and through backyards, I would take the shortest possible route home, where I planned to crawl under my father’s workbench in the basement. It was the sturdiest thing I had ever seen. I didn’t believe it would save me, but after weighing the alternatives carefully, I decided it was my preferred spot to face oblivion.

Related: English 10

Wall Street Journal:

School vouchers are usually opposed by teachers unions and their Democratic allies, but a dirty little secret is that some suburban Republicans oppose them too. The latter is the case in Wisconsin, where GOP Governor Scott Walker’s plan to get more kids out of failing schools is facing opposition from short-sighted members of his own party.
The Badger State’s 22-year-old voucher program currently covers Milwaukee and Racine. But in his budget for fiscal 2014-15, Mr. Walker wants to expand it to nine of the state’s worst school districts and increase funding by 9%. Under the proposed formula, students in districts that have at least two schools that get a D or F on their 2011-2012 performance report cards could use a voucher at a private school.
The plan would cover 500 new students in the first year, 1,000 in the second, and thereafter as many as qualified under the formula, which extends the voucher to students in failing schools whose families make 300% of the poverty level. The new areas include Beloit, Green Bay, Kenosha, Waukesha and Fond du Lac, and more than 40,000 children who currently attend lousy public schools would be eligible.
……
While Wisconsin schools score better than most, in 2010 the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that Wisconsin’s black fourth grade students had the worst reading scores in the country. By eighth grade, black students did worse on English tests than students for whom English was a second language.

Suzy Lee Weiss:

Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It’s simple: For years, they–we–were lied to.
Colleges tell you, “Just be yourself.” That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself! If you work at a local pizza shop and are the slowest person on the cross-country team, consider taking your business elsewhere.
What could I have done differently over the past years?
For starters, had I known two years ago what I know now, I would have gladly worn a headdress to school. Show me to any closet, and I would’ve happily come out of it. “Diversity!” I offer about as much diversity as a saltine cracker. If it were up to me, I would’ve been any of the diversities: Navajo, Pacific Islander, anything. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, I salute you and your 1/32 Cherokee heritage.

Alexandra Sifferlin:

If high school students took charge of their education with limited supervision, would they learn? A Massachusetts school is finding out.
“Some kids say, I hate science or I hate math, but what they are really saying is: I hate science class or I hate math class,” says high school senior Matt Whalan.
Whalan is writing a novel. That’s a notable feat for a 17-year-old, and he has a semester to finish it. Whalan is enrolled in the Monument Mountain Regional High School’s Independent Project, an alternative program described as a “school within a school,” founded and run by students. The semester-long program is in its third year, and Whalan has completed the program three times during his high school career and says it has saved his grades.
“I’ve been a writer all through high school, and my grades were suffering because I was devoted to writing instead of school,” says Whalan. Thankfully, that changed for him when a fellow schoolmate launched the Independent Project at the Great Barrington, Mass., school.

Phil Hands:



It is difficult to comprehend the words Madison schools and “reform” in practice. Such is the pressure to maintain the “status quo“. More, here.

Amy Barrilleaux:

Reaction was swift and angry.
“Enough is enough of this. Hypocrisy is alive and thriving in Madison!” read a Facebook post from United Migrant Opportunity Services board chair Juan Jose Lopez.
“It was all part of a plan to silence Ananda Mirilli,” wrote radio host and former Urban League board member Derrell Connor in a blog post entitled “Madison liberals hurting communities of color.”
“To the communities of color in Madison, I say this: Don’t forget what has happened here. If there was ever a time to become organized and engaged, it is now.”
And perhaps most scathing of all, an editorial from The Madison Times:
“The MMSD School Board race that came crashing down pretty much typifies the status of race relations we see every day and the tremendous racial divide we have in Madison right now. White elite liberals dictating to, condescending to and manipulating Madison’s communities of color. This is when they are kind enough to not completely ignore them, which, unfortunately, is most of the time.”
This outcry was the result of a Madison school board primary in February. It didn’t seem like a big deal at first: Only 18,452 voters bothered to cast ballots.
“The interest was certainly greater after the election than it was before,” says TJ Mertz with a laugh. “There’s no question about that!”
Mertz, who finished second in the primary, is now the only candidate actively campaigning to win Seat 5 on April 2. First-place finisher Sarah Manski stunned voters when she dropped out of the race the day after the primary, citing her husband’s acceptance to a graduate school in California. Election rules say her name must remain on the ballot, though, and that leaves off the third-place finisher, Ananda Mirilli, who is Latina. Mirilli has decided not to pursue a write-in campaign.

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.

Chris Rickert

The bill’s author and primary sponsor, Republican Rep. Joel Kleefisch of Oconomowoc, says that broadcasters have poured lots of money into their operations to make them compatible with an increasingly digital world, and he lauds the “distinctive link” between the stations and the communities they serve.
Co-sponsor Rep. Brett Hulsey, a liberal Madison Democrat not usually given to signing on to Republican bills, is more blunt.
“I co-sponsored this bill because employers from the TV and radio stations in my district asked me to,” he said. “There are four TV stations and 13 radio stations, and they employ over 200 people in the district.”
This is typical of the approach legislators take to taxes, according to Berry. “Somebody will come to them and ask them to carve out some teeny exemption.”
And over time, they add up.

Much more on fiscal indulgences and our political class, here.

Superintendent Jane Belmore 2.5MB PDF

When the Building Our Future plan was approved in June 2012, BOE members approved two motions to assure that specific accountability plans and progress indicators would be provided for each program receiving funding. Research & Program Evaluation staff have worked since then to create a comprehensive report to monitor progress on district priorities and strategies related to the plan. It is noted that while this plan officially indicated 17 specific strategies to address closing achievement gaps, every instructional decision in the district and at the school level is made with the intention of all students learning to potential and all learning gaps closed.
The overarching priorities section of the report has been developed this year to provide the direction for and measure of all of the energies that are going into all students reaching high levels of academic performance. This section of the report can stand alone as direction for and measures of overall district improvement efforts.

Summary of “Building Our Future” activites (2.3MB PDF)

A. Synthesis of Topic: The Building Our Future Plan is a comprehensive set of strategies designed to eliminate achievement gaps while at the same time increase the achievement of all students. Attached to this report are Summary of Activities for the strategies approved by the Board of Education in each of the identified foundational areas: Instructional support, College and Career Readiness, Culturally Relevant Practices, Safe and Positive School Environments, Family Engagement, and Diverse and Qualified Workforce. Each of the summaries provides activities implemented, challenges, and future recommendations. All strategies now have outcome measures identified.
B. Recommendations: We are recommending, for budget purposes, all year two activities be moved to year three and that next year will be a combination of completion of year one activities and some recommended year two activities. These specific recommendations will come through the 2013/14 budget process. As with any implementation phase, some of the strategies needed to be modified and adapted. We continue to see this plan as the frame work by which the district will close the achievement gap.

Related: Madison’s disastrous reading results.

Tap on the image to view a larger version. Source: The Global Report Card.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the Madison school district’s achievement gap problems and other challenges we face. I’ve also been responding to the outlandish notion that Madison is a failing school district whose students deserve private school vouchers as their only lifeline to academic success.
At times like this, I find it helpful to remember that Madison’s schools are educating many, many students who are succeeding. Some of them are succeeding spectacularly. With apologies to those I’m overlooking, here’s a brief run-down on some of our stars –
Madison Memorial’s recently-formed science bowl team won the Wisconsin state championship in January. The team of seniors Srikar Adibhatla, Sohil Shah, Thejas Wesley and William Xiang and sophomore Brian Luo will represent Wisconsin in the National Science Bowl Championship in Washington, D.C. in April.

Related:
Credit for non-Madison School District courses and the Talented and Gifted complaint.
Census.gov on Madison’s demographics, compared to College Station, TX. 52.9% of Madison residents have a bachelor’s degree, compared to the State’s 26%. 57.5% of College Station, Texas’s residents have a college degree.
Madison High School UW-Madison and University of Wisconsin System enrollment trends 1983-2011:
East LaFollette, Memorial, West, Edgewood.
Where have all the students, gone? A look at suburban Madison enrollment changes.
National Merit Semifinalists & Wisconsin’s cut scores.
Madison’s nearly $15k per student annual spending, community support and higher education infrastructure provide the raw materials for world class public schools. Benchmarking ourselves against world leaders would seem to be a great place to begin.

Fernando Sotos & Motoko Rich:

A growing number of lawmakers across the country are taking steps to redefine public education, shifting the debate from the classroom to the pocketbook. Instead of simply financing a traditional system of neighborhood schools, legislators and some governors are headed toward funneling public money directly to families, who would be free to choose the kind of schooling they believe is best for their children, be it public, charter, private, religious, online or at home.
On Tuesday, after a legal fight, the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the state’s voucher program as constitutional. This month, Gov. Robert Bentley of Alabama signed tax-credit legislation so that families can take their children out of failing public schools and enroll them in private schools, or at least in better-performing public schools.
In Arizona, which already has a tax-credit scholarship program, the Legislature has broadened eligibility for education savings accounts. And in New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie, in an effort to circumvent a Legislature that has repeatedly defeated voucher bills, has inserted $2 million into his budget so low-income children can obtain private school vouchers.
Proponents say tax-credit and voucher programs offer families a way to escape failing public schools. But critics warn that by drawing money away from public schools, such programs weaken a system left vulnerable after years of crippling state budget cuts — while showing little evidence that students actually benefit.

Lessons on school choice from Sweden.

Poynter:

The Des Moines Register published then removed an interactive map Wednesday that looked at how school resource officers are deployed in Iowa after it drew criticism from people who thought the map showed unprotected districts. Or as Fox News host Megyn Kelly put it, “If I’m some psycho, I might wanna play my odds.”
The map “identifies more than 100 public schools, from kindergarten through high school and community college campuses that have no security,” Mike Opelka wrote on The Blaze.
The Register changed the map to show only districts with full-time security, Fox News reports, then ditched that map, too. The article, which has drawn some angry comments, now has no map — and no note explaining what happened.
Register Editor Rick Green told Kelly that the map was an attempt, in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre, to answer questions from parents about what sort of police presence their school districts had. It “showed no schools, showed no addresses [and] it did not go into detail,” Green said. He said it was “incredibly unfortunate” that The Blaze was displaying a non-interactive version of the map on its site.

Benjamin Scafidi:

America’s K-12 public education system has experienced tremendous historical growth in employment, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. Between fiscal year (FY) 1950 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students in the United States increased by 96 percent, while the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) school employees grew 386 percent. Public schools grew staffing at a rate four times faster than the increase in students over that time period. Of those personnel, teachers’ numbers increased 252 percent, while administrators and other non-teaching staff experienced growth of 702 percent, more than seven times the increase in students.
That hiring pattern has persisted in more recent years as well. Between FY 1992 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students nationwide grew 17 percent, while the number of FTE school employees increased 39 percent. Among school personnel, teachers’ staffing numbers rose 32 percent, while administrators and other non-teaching staff experienced growth of 46 percent, 2.3 times greater than the increase in students over that 18-year period; the growth in the number of teachers was almost twice that of students.
The two aforementioned figures come from “The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools.” This companion report contains more state-specific information about public school staffing. Specifically, this report contains:

Related: Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club

TED Talks:

How can we measure what makes a school system work? Andreas Schleicher walks us through the PISA test, a global measurement that ranks countries against one another — then uses that same data to help schools improve. Watch to find out where your country stacks up, and learn the single factor that makes some systems outperform others.
What makes a great school system? To find out, Andreas Schleicher administers a test to compare student performance around the world. Full bio »

Robbie Brown & Kim Severson:

A grand jury on Friday indicted Beverly L. Hall, the former superintendent powerhouse of the Atlanta School District, on racketeering and other charges, bringing a dramatic new chapter to one of the largest cheating scandals in the country.
The grand jury also indicted 34 teachers and administrators in addition to Dr. Hall, who resigned in 2011 just before results of an investigation into the scandal was released. The panel recommended $7.5 million bond for Dr. Hall, who could face up to 45 years in prison.
In a list of 65 charges against the educators that includes influencing witnesses, theft by taking, conspiracy and making false statements, Fulton County prosecutors painted a picture of a decade-long conspiracy that involved awarding bonuses connected to improving scores on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, the state’s main test of core academic subjects for elementary and middle schools, and a culture where, in some schools, cheating was an acceptable way to get them.
“Prosecutors allege the 35 named defendants conspired to either cheat, conceal cheating or retaliate against whistle-blowers in an effort to bolster C.R.C.T. scores for the benefit of financial rewards associated with high test scores,” according to the indictment.

Jacob Thomas:

Set goals….
and do them! Set them out of reach, but able to be accomplished. Make them possible to do, but impossible to do right now. After all, the whole purpose of a goal is personal growth right? Set your goals so you need external information or help from somebody else. You are guaranteed to pick up new information, grow as a person, and gain new skills. The feeling from achieving something you didn’t think you could do is worth the whole (usually painful) process.
Find a passion….
and chase it. Find something you love to do and become good at it. Whenever you feel like something is wearing you down, go do what you love, then come back to the issue at hand. It allows you to disconnect for a while, but when you come back to the issue you will have renewed vigor. I’ve found that the more unrelated to school it is, the better. I’m going to school for business, but outdoor activities and building UAV’s are my passion. Whenever I feel like I’m overloaded in school, I go ski for a while or work on a new personal project. The schoolwork doesn’t get any less painful, but my mindset changes.
Be creative.
Some people are born creative, but most people work at it. Creativity isn’t a talent that just appears after a crazy weekend in Tijuana; it’s a skill that takes work. The more effort you put into being creative, the more you will get out of it. Dream up something crazy, and build it. Brainstorm about a crazy system or program, and see through to its end. See what other people are doing, analyze it, and figure out how it can be done better. See how you can make something stronger, less expensive, look better, function better, sound better, or simply hype something up more than someone else. In most cases, little changes can have huge effects. Do you spend $600 every semester on books for school? Stop. Rent, trade, or barter to get the material. Need beer money? Find something people want, make it, and sell it to them. DIY is the new cool.

John Katzman:

Americans have learned to trust free markets. Republican or Democrat, we believe the unimpeded exchange of goods and services will yield better solutions than five-year plans set by even the most well-meaning public servants. Free markets have sometimes led to excess — reality TV and supersized soft drinks come to mind — but have also given us incredible innovation, a remarkable degree of choice and the world’s strongest economy.
And yet free markets are absent from K-12 education. We grant each school district a geographic monopoly, which creates a monopoly on how students within the (sometimes arbitrary) district lines are taught. Worse, we are setting state and national standards that move steadily toward greater central control of education.
The people who favor that control have the right intentions. Just as doctors don’t extemporize while performing open-heart surgery, why, they ask, should 3 million K-12 teachers be inventing their own ways to teach? We need to figure out what works and then make every teacher do it.
It sounds so simple, but consider these facts:

Isthmus

Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.
The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker’s revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers’ evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district’s achievement gap between white and minority students.
In the race for Seat 4, incumbent James Howard is running against Greg Packnett, a Democratic legislative aide.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we’d pose our own questions to candidates.
For this fourth and final week of questions, we ask candidates to evaluate Gov. Scott Walker’s proposals for the Wisconsin’s 2013-15 budget, and consider how it would impact schools in the state. Along similar lines, we ask candidates to share their thoughts on the proposal to expand voucher schools in Wisconsin.

Wayne Strong and Dean Loumos (Isthmus) TJ Mertz (Isthmus).

Valerie Strauss:

So the Indiana Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s school voucher program is constitutional. It isn’t the first time a supreme court has made a questionable call but, apart from the legal argument, the decision doesn’t mean that vouchers are a good educational or civic idea.
They aren’t.
Indiana is one of a growing number of states with school voucher programs. These allow public dollars to be used at private schools, including religious schools, including those religious schools that use creationist materials that teach anti-scientific notions such as the idea that the universe is no more than 10,000 years old, and that humans lived at the very same time as dinosaurs.
With Tuesday’s decision by the Indiana Supreme Court, Indiana can now expand its program, in which more than 9,300 low-income students already are enrolled. Under the program, students in grades 1-8 can receive up to $4,500 annually for private school tuition, and high schoolers can get a little bit more. The court ruled that the money is going to families, who use it as they wish, rather than the schools themselves, which the justices believe is an argument that gets around the separation between church and state.

Jack Nicas:

Indiana’s Supreme Court upheld a law that lets taxpayer funds pay for private schools, boosting an effort to expand what is already the broadest such voucher program in the U.S. and rebuffing critics who say it undermines public education.
The court’s five judges unanimously rejected the argument of the state’s largest teachers union and other plaintiffs that the Indiana voucher program violates the state Constitution because it uses public funds to support religious education. Most of the voucher funding goes to parochial schools. The judges, upholding an earlier trial-court decision, ruled that as long as the state maintains a public-education system, using Indiana tax dollars to help fund the private-school educations of low- and middle-income children doesn’t violate the state Constitution.
Proponents say vouchers offer parents important alternatives to public schools. Twenty-two states and Washington, D.C., have some sort of program that funds private schools, but most limit eligibility to low-income or otherwise disadvantaged families, said Robert Enlow, chief executive of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, a national advocacy group for vouchers. In Indiana’s two-year-old program, families are eligible if their income is up to 150% more than the threshold to qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, which translates to as much as $64,000 a year for a family of four.

John Baker:

Both of my parents are educators, and from my travels around the world, there is a clear understanding that we need a major change in how we educate students. The traditional model of education, born in the industrial age with a one-size-fits-all approach, is not meeting the needs of our knowledge economy. We can do much more to give the next generation a personalized educational experience that equips them with the skills, values, characteristics and knowledge they need to thrive in our modern society.
The role of the employee in today’s knowledge economy is very different from the role of the employee in yesterday’s industrial economy. To prepare for industrial work, K-12 students were taught how to read and write, along with topics that could help them in their everyday lives such as history and arithmetic. The education system emphasized memorization and judged students by their ability to recall factoids on multiple-choice exams.
If the education system didn’t provide the specific abilities to perform a function in a factory, the employer could fill the void. Employees could spend a few weeks of on-the-job training and be ready for a lifetime of work without the need for continued education.

SchoolMattersMKE:

Why vote in this race?
There are almost a million reasons.
If you are writing a column and you want people to take a nap while pretending to read it, try writing about the exciting race for Superintendent of Schools in Wisconsin.
But once you shake your head to rid it of exciting thoughts you may have a little space to consider an office that has wide-ranging impact on how we all live – those with children and not.
This is kind of a classic race. The incumbent is Dr. Tony Evers, a veteran educator with a decades-long file of experience. He’s being challenged by Don Pridemore, a right-wing lawmaker from Hartford who has no meaningful education experience and has made a name for himself by saying single parenthood is the leading cause of child abuse and that abused women should just remember the good times and the reasons they got married in the first place.
See what I mean?
This is not the first time that we’ve had a candidate with experience and credentials being challenged by a weirdo. That’s our system.

Steven Verburg:

The Madison girl who won the state spelling bee Saturday almost didn’t show up for the event, even though she qualified to be there with a victory in last month’s citywide bee.
Aisha Khan, 13, said she felt too upset a few weeks ago after she and her parents returned from a sad visit to India, where they comforted Aisha’s maternal grandmother in the days before she died of cancer at the age of 63.
The grandmother, Asgari Noor, helped raise Aisha, and the girl visited her for three months every summer, so it took some effort to overcome her grief. In the end, Aisha took her place in the state competition because of something her grandmother told her.
“That was the last thing she told me to do, ‘Get first place,'” Aisha said.
Aisha did just that in the state bee, which is sponsored by the Wisconsin State Journal, by outlasting 47 other top spellers from around the state.
Aisha now advances to the national competition in Washington, D.C., held May 26 to June 1.

Nina Rees:

President Obama will soon release his federal budget for 2014, and a top priority is likely to be early-childhood education, particularly for the poor. But will the proposal seek much funding for the growth of charter schools–at least more than the paltry 0.4% of federal education spending that currently supports these exciting and demonstrably successful schools?
Last month, the respected private firm Mathematica Policy Research published a multiyear study (PDF) of students enrolled in KIPP (the Knowledge Is Power Program), a network of 125 charter schools serving 41,000 students in 20 states and the District of Columbia. The study found that after three years students in the KIPP program were 11 months ahead of their traditional-public-school peers in math and eight months ahead in reading. Also after three years (or four for some children in the study), KIPP students were 14 months ahead in science and 11 months ahead in social studies.
These gains are substantial. For every three (or four) years they spend in the program, KIPP students are benefiting from almost a full year of greater learning growth than they would if they remained in traditional public schools.

Jay Matthews:

My eldest grandson, Ben Mathews, just turned four. According to the New York Times, that is a perilous age in that big city. Many four year olds are toiling through exercises designed by their parents and tutoring companies to prepare for kindergarten gifted program entrance tests.
It gets worse. Adults are fighting over the very nature of those exams. Should they, as they do now, measure how much academic preparation preschoolers have had? Or should they assess the magic essence of giftedness, something much talked about but so far poorly understood.
Ben can relax. The public schools where he lives in South Pasadena, Calif., like most schools in the Washington area, don’t have gifted programs for kindergartners to compete for. Fairfax and Montgomery counties have separate elementary and middle school classes for those designated gifted, but like many other districts here they provide similarly imaginative teaching and opportunities for creative work to children who don’t score that high on IQ tests. High schools in the Washington area, as well as South Pasadena High, offer the most challenging college-level courses to anyone, gifted or not, who wants to take them.

Erin Richards:

In the race to head the state Department of Public Instruction – overseeing 870,000 public school students in Wisconsin – the incumbent superintendent and longtime public schools employee is facing a challenge from a Republican lawmaker who supports leaner government and private school vouchers.
The election Tuesday will pit Tony Evers, the incumbent superintendent of public instruction, against Republican Rep. Don Pridemore from Erin in Washington County.
Officially, the state superintendent is a nonpartisan office. But Evers, 61, has historically won support from Democrats and teachers unions. He was opposed to Gov. Scott Walker’s legislation that rolled back collective bargaining, and he signed the petition to recall Walker.
Pridemore, 66, wants to see more local control and believes teachers unions have monopolized education. He favored Walker’s Act 10 legislation and has called for an audit of the Department of Public Instruction.
So where do the candidates stand on many of the state’s other hot-button education issues?

On Point:

The internet headline was “engineering genius babies” out of China. Not true. But the reality is very interesting. We’ll check it out.
The headline flying all over the digital universe was head-turning: “China is engineering genius babies.” “Superbabies” was the follow-on. And it was not exactly correct. But it wasn’t entirely wrong, either.
And it’s not just China stepping toward that brave new world. China is studying the genetics of intelligence, and how to apply them.
The whole world – the U.S. very much included – is studying genetics and reproduction. How to avoid defects and disease via the test tube. Will sex for reproduction soon look primitive?

Channel3000:

The Sun Prairie High School ProStart Culinary Team took first place in the state competition held mid-March in Milwaukee at the Wisconsin Restaurant Expo. The win makes the team eligible for the first time to go on to the national competition in Baltimore.
Under guidance from Family and Consumer Educator and ProStart Coordinator Gerry Fritsch, the culinary team took first place out of 29 other schools had teams participating.
“The students earned this recognition because of their dedication to the industry and their passion for cooking,” Fritsch said.
The culinary team chefs include students Claire Sanders, Darnell Morris, Zach Newby, Grace Singer, and Dillon Muir as an alternate.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson:

Teenage applicants from as far afield as India and Mongolia are catching western colleges’ attention by taking so-called “massive online open courses” designed for older students.
Schoolchildren taking courses on their own initiative already account for about 5 per cent of the 800,000 students at edX, the non-profit online venture founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some have used their results to apply to the colleges that pioneered MOOCs.
Amol Bhave, a 17-year-old from Jabalpur, India, learnt last week that he had been accepted to MIT after scoring 97 per cent on edX’s circuits and electronics course. He received the good news on March 14 – or “pi day”, as he put it in a Skype conversation with the FT.
“I am like the first person in my city to get into MIT ever so I have become sort of pretty famous,” he said. “I was so motivated by how we were taught [by edX] that I decided that maybe I belong to MIT after all.”

Mary Thompson:

One wrong turn on the “road to school” issues, was embodied by Milton Friedman’s idea of government funded school vouchers as free market enterprise to ostensibly create competition for government funded schools. Why advocates for private free market enterprise would not/could not grasp that no reasonable entity, whether private or government, ever funds its own demise through competition with itself, unless private schools were the target to be usurped by government control and regulation, is a question of the era. The idea of competitive free market enterprise has no conceptual room for funding with government funds which are obtained by virtue of government “power of the sword” to compel. There is simply no way to synthesize the two concepts except to confound the principles of free market and government funding. That is currently in high gear as well with what is called “public-private partnerships”. The dichotomy of charter schools as “competition” in real terms being the darling of the “right” is equally as mystifying.
Not possessing the ability to read minds, one can only wonder at the contradictions. The definition of political principles is becoming blurred as political parties become more meaningless with every election, labels for “Conservative” or “Liberal are also rapidly becoming obfuscated.

The Strobist:

Or, more accurately, what they could choose to eat if they happen to attend a Howard County public school.
A few months ago at a New Year’s Eve gathering I happened to meet Judith Schardt-Shure, who is the cafeteria manager for Burleigh Manor Middle School in Ellicott City. Over the course of the next 30 minutes, Judith proceeded to dispel one myth after another that I held about the HCPSS school lunch program.
Other people are noticing our school lunches, too. The Howard County Public School System’s Food & Nutrition Service recently earned an “A+” grade from the Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine. They also received, for all 73 schools, a HealthierUS Schools Bronze Award, which includes a letter from First Lady (and fitness maven) Michelle Obama.

Edward Jay Epstein:

I wandered into Lit 311 at the beginning of my sophomore year at Cornell in September 1954. It was not that I had any interest in European literature, or any literature. I was just shopping for a class that met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings so that I wouldn’t have any Saturday classes, and “literature” also filled one of the requirements for graduation. It was officially called “European Literature of the Nineteenth Century,” but unofficially called “Dirty Lit” by the Cornell Daily Sun, since it dealt with adultery in Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.
The professor was Vladimir Nabokov, an émigré from tsarist Russia. About six feet tall and balding, he stood, with what I took to be an aristocratic bearing, on the stage of the two-hundred-fifty-seat lecture hall in Goldwin Smith. Facing him on the stage was his white-haired wife Vera, whom he identified only as “my course assistant.” He made it clear from the first lecture that he had little interest in fraternizing with students, who would be known not by their name but by their seat number. Mine was 121. He said his only rule was that we could not leave his lecture, even to use the bathroom, without a doctor’s note.
He then described his requisites for reading the assigned books. He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them, aside from a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines. He assured us that the authors he had selected–Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Robert Louis Stevenson–would produce tingling we could detect in our spines.

Joshua Gans:

MIT Strategy professor Michael Cusumano published a lengthy opinion piece where he argued that free online courses may have much higher costs and consequences than the socially minded people promoting them intended.

I worry, however, based on the history of free products and services available on the Internet and their impact on the software products business as well as on the music, video, book publishing, and newspaper and magazine businesses. We have learned that there can also be “negative” network effects. In education, this would occur if increasing numbers of universities and colleges joined the free online education movement and set a new threshold price for the industry–zero–which becomes commonly accepted and difficult to undo. Of course, it is impossible to foresee the future. But we can think about different scenarios, and not all of them are good.

The piece is a bit frustrating with some internal inconsistencies that would take too long to go through. But, by way of example, as I’ll get to in a moment, Cusumano’s concern is that free online courses by elite institutions may wipe out the non-elite ones but at the same time suggests that a free price sends a signal that those courses are of low value. So, on the one hand, their free price combined with high value will wipe out the non-elite courses while their free price sends a signal of low value compared to non-free courses offered by non-elite institutions. You can’t have it both ways.

Jack Craver:

There’s no doubt about it. Madison is home to an embarrassing gap in achievement between white students and minority students, as well as between the well-to-do and the poor. In most discussions of the issue, the figure that is often used to convey the crisis is the dismal 50 percent graduation rate for African-American students.
That figure, however, represents only the percentage of students who graduate in four years of high school. It leaves out a critical mass of kids who take longer to obtain their diplomas, some through alternative programs.
“If we concentrate only on that number then all of the hard work that you’re doing is being ignored,” T.J. Mertz, a candidate for Madison School Board, told a group of students last week at Operation Fresh Start, a program in Madison that helps high school dropouts obtain their GED or high school equivalency diploma (which is slightly more comprehensive). Participants in the program, which is partnered with AmeriCorps, split their time between working on a job site (either building housing or engaging in conservation projects) and the classroom.
The organization had invited all five School Board candidates to discuss their plans for the district with the students, as well as to take questions from the young adults, who range in age from 16-24. The only candidate who did not attend was Greg Packnett, who is challenging School Board President James Howard.

Christian Schneider

Among the ways of calling people greedy, there is no more puzzling way than accusing them of wanting to “have their cake and eat it, too.” It would seem that cake’s inherent utility, without being eaten, is limited. What are you supposed to do with it if you don’t eat it? Dress it up like Harry Potter? Use it as bait for a ring of international cake thieves?
Thus, in order to characterize the avaricious nature of Wisconsin taxpayers, I have decided to coin my own soon-to-be-popular phrase. For instance, Wisconsin citizens want “to go on a date with a girl and have it end without her throwing a drink on them,” which, given my past experience, is really the best-case scenario.
A Marquette University poll released last week shows that as taxpayers, we think we can have it all. In the poll, respondents strongly supported increasing funding for public schools – 71.9% believed the increase should be somewhere between 1.5% and greater than the rate of inflation. But when given a choice between increasing funding for schools and cutting property taxes, more respondents favored the tax cuts. The message: Go ahead and increase funding for schools, as long as we don’t have to pay for it.
The highway funding system also gets similar treatment in the poll. A small number (27.9%) of Wisconsin residents support raising gas taxes or vehicle registration fees to pay for transportation projects, and an even smaller group (24%) supports borrowing money to build roads. Conversely, a much higher number (42.5%) of Wisconsinites oppose reducing transportation spending if it delays road projects. At least in the short term, these numbers appear to be incongruous, as it seems the state will have to pick one or the other.

In the United Kingdom the number of reports of the verbal and physical abuse of teachers is growing at a sad and steady rate. In the United States as well, a number of fine teachers say that they are leaving the profession primarily because of the out-of-control attitudes and behavior of poorly-raised children who will not take any responsibility for their own education and don’t seem to mind if they ruin the educational chances of their peers.
David McCullough tells us that when Harry Truman took over the artillery outfit, Battery ‘D’, “the new captain said nothing for what seemed the longest time. He just stood looking everybody over, up and down the line slowly, several times. Because of their previous (mis) conduct, the men were expecting a tongue lashing. Captain Truman only studied them…At last he called ‘Dismissed!’ As he turned and walked away, the men gave him a Bronx cheer….In the morning Captain Truman posted the names of the noncommissioned officers who were ‘busted’ in rank…the First Sergeant was at the head of the list…Harry called in the other noncommissioned officers and told them it was up to them to straighten things out. ‘I didn’t come here to get along with you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to get along with me. And if there are any of you who can’t, speak up right now, and I’ll bust you back right now.”
Now, I do realize the classroom is not a military unit, and that students cannot be busted back to a previous grade, however their behavior suggests that they don’t belong in a higher grade. But Truman realized poor discipline would endanger the lives of the men in his unit, and teachers, however much they yearn to be liked, relevant, and even loved, need to realize and accept that poor discipline in their classes will destroy some of the educational opportunities of their students. As it turned out, his unit respected and loved Truman in time, and lined Pennsylvania avenue for his inauguration parade.
For years, the Old Battleaxe was offered as a stereotype of the stern, demanding teacher who represented the expectations of the wider community in the classroom and required students to meet her standards.
In The Lowering of Higher Education, Jackson Toby quotes the experience of one man with an Old Battleaxe:
“Professor Emeritus of Religion at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, Walter Benjamin, wrote about a demanding freshman English teacher, Dr. Doris Garey, whose course he had taken in 1946, in an article entitled ‘When an ‘A’ Meant Something.’ Professor Benjamin praised the memory of Dr. Garey and expressed gratitude for what her demanding standards had taught him.
‘Even though she had a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke and a doctorate from Wisconsin, Miss Garey was the low person in the department pecking order. And physically she was a lightweight–she could not have stood more than 4-foot-10 or weighed more than 100 pounds. But she had the pedagogical mass of a Sumo wrestler. Her literary expectations were stratospheric; she was the academic equivalent of my [Marine] boot camp drill instructor…The showboats (other instructors) had long since faded, along with their banter, jokes and easy grades. It was the no-nonsense Miss Garey whose memory endured.'”
In my view, too many of our teachers have been seduced by the ideas that they should be making sure their students have fun, and that their teaching should include “relevant” material from the evanescent present of her students, their egregiously temporary pop culture, and from current events of passing interest.
Once discipline and student responsibility for their own learning is established and understood, there can be a lot of interesting and even entertaining times in the classroom. Without them, classes are in a world of trouble. Samuel Gompers used to read aloud for their enjoyment to a room full of employees making cigars, but they continued to make the cigars while he did it.
In education reform discussions in general, in my view practically all the attention is on what the adults are and/or should be doing, and almost no attention is given to what students are and should be doing. Leaving them out of the equation quite naturally contributes to poor discipline and reduced learning.
A suburban high school English teacher in Pennsylvania wrote that: “My students are out of control,” Munroe, who has taught 10th, 11th and 12th grades, wrote in one post. “They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.” And one of her students commented: “As far as motivated high school students, she’s completely correct. High school kids don’t want to do anything…It’s a teacher’s job, however, to give students the motivation to learn.”
As long as too many of us think education is the teacher’s responsibility alone, we will have failed to understand what the job of learning requires of students, and we will be unable to make sense of the outcomes of our huge investments in education.
————————-
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

Stephanie Simon:

(Reuters) – The Indiana Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously upheld the nation’s broadest school voucher program, which gives poor and middle-class families public funds to help pay private school tuition.
Opponents, including the state teachers’ union, had sued to block the program on grounds that nearly all the voucher money has been directed to religious schools.
Voucher systems have drawn criticism across the United States from critics who say they drain money from public schools and subsidize overtly religious education. Supporters say they offer families greater choice on where to educate their children.
In a 5-0 vote, the Indiana justices said that it did not matter that funds had been directed to religious schools, so long as parents – and not the state – decide where to use the tuition vouchers.
“Whether the Indiana program is wise educational or public policy is not a consideration,” Chief Justice Brent Dickson wrote. The program is constitutional, he wrote, because the public funds “do not directly benefit religious schools but rather directly benefit lower-income families with school children.”

Steve Lohr:

That the acronym MOOCs rhymes with “nukes” seems apt. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs — led by two profit-making start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, founded by entrepreneurial Stanford professors — are a new disruptive force in education. Leading universities have scrambled to join or offer alternatives like edX, a collaboration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and others.
The MOOCs movement has been greeted with equal parts enthusiasm and angst. The MOOC champions predict a technology-fueled revolution in the distribution and democratization of high-quality education. The MOOC skeptics have a variety of qualms, but especially about what is lost in the retreat of face-to-face teaching — a point eloquently made by Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia University, in an article in the current New Republic, “MOOCs of Hazard.”
Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., raises a different issue in an essay published this week: the economics of MOOCs and the implications.
His article appears in Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, and he had circulated a version of it earlier to his M.I.T. colleagues. After reading it, L. Rafael Rief, M.I.T.’s president, asked Mr. Cusumano to serve on a task force on the “residential university” of the future, including online initiatives.

Harry Eyres:

After an hour-and-a-half rehearsing Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Overture “Romeo and Juliet” with a mixed youth orchestra from east London and Los Angeles, Gustavo Dudamel felt the need to sit down on the podium. “I must be getting old,” he joked (in fact he had every reason to feel a little weary, having just returned from a flying visit back to Venezuela to conduct at the state funeral of Hugo Chávez). It was not entirely a joke, because Dudamel, in his thirties, a little bit more rounded than when I last saw him, suddenly appeared if not middle-aged, then old enough to be a (young) father to the youngest of the musicians in the orchestra.
And not entirely a joke because one of Dudamel’s great calling-cards has always been his youth; he has been the whizz-kid and posterboy of the classical music world, mamboing with the exuberant teenagers of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela in their Latin American encores. But time waits for no man or woman; the SBYOV itself is not as youthful as it was, and Dudamel is now chief conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a grown-up in a grown-up’s world. Having enjoyed ecstatic press, he has had to endure a few critical brickbats.
If you wanted to be cynical, you might question the whole premise of a youth orchestra project carried out under the banner “Discover Dudamel”. But then the man himself questions it: “I don’t like that,” he said, pointing at the “Discover Dudamel” T-shirts worn by all the members of the orchestra – a gesture which no doubt brought on unpleasant palpitations in a host of PR and marketing people. He hardly needed to explain further; the point was not really to discover Dudamel, but to explore and discover the music. In the end I think the young players from the Barbican Youth Orchestra, the Centre for Young Musicians, Junior Guildhall, the London boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Redbridge, Barking and Dagenham and Youth Orchestra Los Angeles discovered even more than the music. We will come to that.

Rick Burke:

Days are getting longer, the weather is warmer. The smell of spring is in the air. But if you inhale deeply down by JSCEE, there’s another smell. It’s the smell of math. After years of sideways movement, the stars are aligned for systemic changes to math instruction in Seattle Public Schools.
When you look at Seattle kids’ math achievement against other urban districts, Seattle might seem to be doing OK. As a district-level statistic, we’re not too bad. But closer inspection of disaggregated data and the view from inside the system prompt a cry for help. Seattle still has a large number of struggling students and a persistent achievement gap which we can’t shake. Outside tutoring has become commonplace, with math as the most frequent remediation subject. However, recent national and state developments have identified common ground and outcome-proven methods which can serve as a model for Seattle.
This brings us around to a community support initiative for math education. Seattle has a math-focused School Board, and Seattle’s new superintendent, Jose Banda, came to Seattle from proven math success with a diverse student population in Anaheim. Recent news reports are that staff at JSCEE are planning a K-8 math instructional materials adoption soon. Examples of success are scattered through Seattle classrooms and it’s time for those successes to take root across the district.

Related: Math forum audio/video and Seattle’s “Discovery Math” lawsuit.

Rachel Krinsky:

f you are tired of all the talk about the achievement gap in our school district, take heart. Newly appointed Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham’s entry plan is a promising beginning.
From racial disparities in academics to the race politics in the School Board primary election, the feeling of frustration has been palpable. The YWCA Madison suggests the reason this talk hasn’t created much tangible progress is that these issues are part of a larger system of racial inequalities. Individual strategies, action plans or initiatives are less likely to be successful if they are not part of a larger racial equity strategy.
So we are delighted to see Cheatham’s plan is based on values including commitment to equity and systemic improvement. If our community is serious about racial equity in education, we will join Cheatham in learning what kids of color need to be successful, and then making those resources and solutions the priority.
We will also consider every education-related decision and discussion with racial equity in mind. We will think holistically about Dane County’s future as a more racially diverse community and welcome and retain professionals, including educators, of color.
Let’s be part of a community-wide commitment to equity, and let’s remember that we’re doing it for the kids.

Related: And, so it continues.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

First, I provide some background on the private school voucher imposition proposal. Next, I list thirteen ways in which the proposal and its advocates are hypocritical, inconsistent, irrational, or just plain wrong. Finally, I briefly explain for the benefit of Wisconsin Federation for Children why the students in Madison are not attending failing schools.

Related: Counterpoint by David Blaska.
Does the School Board Matter? Ed Hughes argues that experience does, but what about “Governance” and “Student Achievement”?
2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

2009: 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use. This program continues, despite the results.
2004: Madison Schools Distort Reading Data (2004) by Mark Seidenberg.
2012: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools”
Scott Bauer

Almost half of Wisconsin residents say they haven’t heard enough about voucher schools to form an opinion, according to the Marquette University law school poll. Some 27 percent of respondents said they have a favorable view of voucher schools while 24 percent have an unfavorable view. But a full 43 percent said they hadn’t heard enough about them to form an opinion.
“There probably is still more room for political leadership on both sides to try to put forward convincing arguments and move opinion in their direction,” pollster Charles Franklin said.
The initial poll question about vouchers only asked for favorability perceptions without addressing what voucher schools are. In a follow-up question, respondents were told that vouchers are payments from the state using taxpayer money to fund parents’ choices of private or religious schools.
With that cue, 51 percent favored it in some form while 42 percent opposed it.
Walker is a staunch voucher supporter.

More on the voucher proposal, here.
www.wisconsin2.org
A close observer of Madison’s $392,789,303 K-12 public school district ($14,547/student) for more than nine years, I find it difficult to see substantive change succeeding. And, I am an optimist.
It will be far better for us to address the District’s disastrous reading results locally, than to have change imposed from State or Federal litigation or legal changes. Or, perhaps a more diffused approach to redistributed state tax dollar spending.

Milwaukee Public Television 4th Street Forum:

Can parents make informed decisions? How does the community benefit from these school options? And how important are standards, accountability, and transparency?
ALAN BORSUK is an education columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Until 2009, he worked full time for the paper as an education reporter. Mr. Borsuk is a Law and Public Policy senior fellow for Marquette University Law School where he continues his research and writing on education.
ANNELIESE DICKMAN, JD is the research director for Public Policy Forum, a Milwaukee-based, nonpartisan think tank. The focus of her research and writing is on education policy, including financing and governance. Ms. Dickman was the Forum’s lead author of their 15th annual report on education, “Cost and Performance in Choice Schools.”
LATISH REED, PhD is an assistant professor of educational leadership at UW-Milwaukee. Earlier in her career, she was a middle school teacher and an assistant principal for Milwaukee Public Schools. Professor Reed also helped to start a charter school, Malcolm X Academy, which has since closed.

Tom Beebe:

Question: When is $129 million not $129 million?
Answer: When it is the additional aid Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker promised to send to the state’s public schools.
Despite the Governor’s claimed increase for 2013-15─an anemic and inadequate one percent even if true─it is really only $39 million …. a paltry half-percent increase or $44.83 per student even if schools could spend it (but more on that later).
This is a cruel joke on kids who only want a quality education. It is also public policy that calls into question the moral commitment of the administration to public education.

Related: Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding.

Marquette University Law School Poll:

A statewide Marquette Law School Poll conducted March 11-14 finds that voters view charter schools as enabling more choice in education options but are doubtful that students learn more in charter schools than in public schools. Seventy-one percent said charter schools offer more choice, while 18 percent disagreed. Thirty-four percent think students learn more in charter schools, but 51 percent disagree. The poll finds that voters have a mix of views about charter schools, reflecting varied evaluations of them as education alternatives.
Charter schools are publicly funded, independently operated schools that are allowed more flexibility over instruction and subject matter than traditional public schools. The poll also touched upon views of vouchers, which support students attending private and religious schools.
A large majority, 72 percent, think charter schools provide flexibility to meet student needs that may not be met in traditional public schools, while 16 percent disagree. Voters doubt that charter schools skim the best students: 31 percent think they do, but 58 percent disagree. Opinion is more evenly divided on whether charters take needed money away from traditional public schools: 40 percent think they do, while 48 percent think they do not drain money from traditional schools. Forty-six percent think competition with charter schools makes public schools better, but 42 percent disagree.
Voters are concerned that the public pays for charter schools but has little control over school quality, with 47 percent agreeing and 38 percent disagreeing.
Charter schools are viewed favorably by 42 percent of voters statewide, while 16 percent have an unfavorable view of them. However, 42 percent say they don’t know enough about charter schools to offer an opinion. That is a higher favorability than toward voucher schools, which are seen favorably by 27 percent and unfavorably by 24 percent. An even larger segment, 49 percent, said they didn’t know enough to express an opinion about voucher schools. Public schools, in contrast, were viewed favorably by 72 percent of the public with 18 percent having unfavorable views and 10 percent unable to say. Likewise, 24 percent said they were very satisfied with the public schools in their community and 57 percent said they were satisfied. Eleven percent were dissatisfied and 2 percent very dissatisfied

Poll topline views (PDF).

Andrew Trounson:

Some Australian universities are paying about $100,000 a year each to employ full-time managers dedicated to working with ranking agencies and developing strategies aimed at climbing league tables.
The University of New South Wales recently advertised for a manager of strategic reputation, while La Trobe University was seeking a manager of institutional rankings. For $100,000, responsibilities included maintaining relationships with ranking agencies to “maximize” or “optimize” their positions in rankings.
Observers say such positions highlight the growing importance of rankings in influencing research and teaching plans. But there are concerns that the professionalized management of rankings risks warping university strategies and may prove more a marketing effort than an effort to boost the substance of an institution’s performance.
The deputy vice chancellor at New South Wales, Les Field, said the position wasn’t new and was part of a team that ensured the information sent to annual data collections and the ranking agencies was accurate.

Hannah Richardson:

Dr Teresa Belton told the BBC cultural expectations that children should be constantly active could hamper the development of their imagination
She quizzed author Meera Syal and artist Grayson Perry about how boredom had aided their creativity as children.
Syal said boredom made her write, while Perry said it was a “creative state”.
The senior researcher at the University of East Anglia’s School of Education and Lifelong Learning interviewed a number of authors, artists and scientists in her exploration of the effects of boredom.
She heard Syal’s memories of the small mining village, with few distractions, where she grew up.

Alan Borsuk:

It’s been several years since I thought about tumult and division at the top of the Milwaukee Public Schools system, which was fine with me on several levels.
The run ended last week with several conversations that left me wondering what lies ahead on several important fronts for the state’s epicenter of education concerns.
To jump to the bottom line: My guess is that Superintendent Gregory Thornton will stay on for a while, the School Board, which will have one and possibly two new members after the April 2 elections, will stay on more or less the course it’s on, and the school system as a whole will continue to be faced with big problems of declining enrollment and increasing challenges in serving students well.

Steve Kolowich:

What is it like to teach 10,000 or more students at once, and does it really work? The largest-ever survey of professors who have taught MOOCs, or massive open online courses, shows that the process is time-consuming, but, according to the instructors, often successful. Nearly half of the professors felt their online courses were as rigorous academically as the versions they taught in the classroom.
The survey, conducted by The Chronicle, attempted to reach every professor who has taught a MOOC. The online questionnaire was sent to 184 professors in late February, and 103 of them responded.
Hype around these new free online courses has grown louder and louder since a few professors at Stanford University drew hundreds of thousands of students to online computer-science courses in 2011. Since then MOOCs, which charge no tuition and are open to anybody with Internet access, have been touted by reformers as a way to transform higher education and expand college access. Many professors teaching MOOCs had a similarly positive outlook: Asked whether they believe MOOCs “are worth the hype,” 79 percent said yes.
Princeton University’s Robert Sedgewick is one of them. He had never taught online before he decided to co-lead a massive open online course titled “Algorithms: Part I.”
Like many professors at top-ranked institutions, Mr. Sedgewick was very skeptical about online education. But he was intrigued by the notion of bringing his small Princeton course on algorithms, which he had taught for five years, to a global audience. So after Princeton signed a deal with an upstart company called Coursera to offer MOOCs, he volunteered for the front lines.
His online course drew 28,000 students when it opened last summer, but Sedgewick was not daunted. He had spent hundreds of hours readying the material, devoting as much as two weeks each to recording and fine-tuning videotaped lectures. The preparation itself, he said, was “a full-time job.”

Maria Popova:

What Alice in Wonderland has to do with electromagnetic theory, relativity, and Pluto.
“You are a mashup of what you let into your life,” it’s been said. Since creativity is combinatorial, the architecture of mind and character is deeply influenced by the intellectual stimulation we choose to engage with — including the books we read. There is hardly anything more fascinating than the private intellectual diet of genius — like this recently uncovered list of books computing pioneer and early codehacker Alan Turing borrowed from his school library. Though heavy on the sciences, the selection features some wonderful wildcards that bespeak the cross-disciplinary curiosity fundamental to true innovation. A few personal favorites follow.