Josh Lederman:

Open your notebooks and sharpen your pencils. School for thousands of public school students is about to get quite a bit longer.
Five states were to announce on Monday that they will add at least 300 hours of learning time to the calendar in some schools starting in 2013. Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee will take part in the initiative, which is intended to boost student achievement and make U.S. schools more competitive on a global level.
The three-year pilot program will affect almost 20,000 students in 40 schools, with long-term hopes of expanding the program to include additional schools — especially those that serve low-income communities. Schools, working in concert with districts, parents and teachers, will decide whether to make the school day longer, add more days to the school year or both.

Andrew Rotherham:

Harriet Sanford of the NEA Foundation discusses the idea of rounds – like medical students – and more generally at the problem of reform churn. The idea of rounds and clinical-style training for new teachers has a lot of merit, but more generally it seems everyone wants education to be like medicine – or law. The “new” idea for a “bar exam” for teachers (Albert Shanker floated the concept in 1985) modeled on how they do it in the legal field is back in the news as the AFT rolls it out as a new initiative.
But a few questions don’t get asked enough. Perhaps most importantly, what if education isn’t really like law or medicine? What if it’s more like other professions, say journalism, public policy, or business where credentials are valued but weighed alongside other factors because there isn’t a field-wide core of knowledge or skills all practitioners must have? It’s a narrow view of “professional” these days that brings you back to just law and medicine.
And what if we don’t know as much as we like to presuppose? We don’t ask enough about the limits today. In early-childhood reading or special education, there is some professional knowledge that’s established and (sometimes) reflected in credentialing regimes. What truly makes a great 10th-grade English teacher or 12th grade government teacher? Outside of content knowledge, that’s less clear. My colleagues Sara Mead, Rachael Brown, and I recently looked at this issue in the context of teacher evaluations in this paper but, it’s a broader one.

Maisie McAdoo:

High School Progress Reports, which the Department of Education released on Nov. 26, have yet another new way to measure schools: the college and career readiness index, which now counts for 10 percent of a school’s grade.
As if the 2011 reports, at 205 columns of Excel data per school was not enough, the 2012 reports arrived on a 305-column spreadsheet, boasting 39 new columns of college and career readiness data points. That doesn’t count the “additional information,” 72 columns of supplemental data, in case the first 39 didn’t quite get at everything you wanted to know about college readiness.
Give them points for trying. But some of this data is going to wind up in “deleted items” and never get crunched.
Even the DOE didn’t try. It didn’t put out PowerPoint slides or anything that summarizes (or spins) the information.

Hoppy Kercheval:

It’s understandable that friends and admirers of former state school superintendent Jorea Marple are upset with her firing.
Marple spent a lifetime in public education in West Virginia, and she built strong relationships.
The board did not help its case by potentially running afoul of the state’s open meetings law when it dismissed Marple two weeks ago.
On Thursday, the board held a special meeting, allowed Marple supporters to vent, and then cured any legal question with a do-over of Marple’s firing.
Her dismissal is apparently a result of a clash of ideas between Marple, school board president Wade Linger, and others on the board over how to respond to the independent audit of the school system released nearly a year ago.

Josh Lederman:

Schoolteachers should have to pass a stringent exam — much like the bar exam for lawyers — before being allowed to enter the profession, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions said Monday.
The American Federation of Teachers called for a tough new written test to be complimented by stricter entrance requirements for teacher training programs, such as a minimum grade point average.
“It’s time to do away with a common rite of passage into the teaching profession, whereby newly minted teachers are tossed the keys to their classrooms, expected to figure things out, and left to see if they and their students sink or swim,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten, calling that system unfair to students and teachers alike.
The proposal, released Monday as part of a broader report on elevating the teaching profession, calls for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to take the lead in developing a new test. The nonprofit group currently administers the National Board Certification program, an advanced, voluntary teaching credential that goes beyond state standards.

Eleanor Beardsley:

In the name of equality, the French government has proposed doing away with homework in elementary and junior high school. French President Francois Hollande argues that homework penalizes children with difficult home situations, but even the people whom the proposal is supposed to help disagree.
It’s 5:30 p.m. and getting dark outside, as kids pour out of Gutenberg Elementary School in Paris 15th arrondissement. Parents and other caregivers wait outside to collect their children. Aissata Toure, 20, is here with her younger sister in tow. She’s come to pick up her 7-year-old son. Toure says she’s against Hollande’s proposal to do away with homework.
“It’s not a good idea at all because even at a young age, having individual work at home helps build maturity and responsibility,” she says, “and if it’s something they didn’t quite get in school, the parents can help them. Homework is important for a kid’s future.”

Richard Minerich:

As of today I’ve completed my fifth course at Coursea, all but one being directly related to Machine Learning. The fact that you can now take classes given by many of most well known researchers in their field who work at some of the most lauded institutions for no cost at all is a testament to the ever growing impact that the internet has on our lives. It’s quite a gift that these classes started to become available at right about the same time as when Machine Learning demand started to sky rocket (and at right about the same time that I entered the field professionally).
Note that all effort estimations include the time spent watching lectures, reading related materials, taking quizes and completing programming assignments. Classes are listed in the order they were taken.

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Motoko Rich:

The school day and year are about to get longer in 10 school districts in five states, where schools will add up to 300 hours to their calendars starting next fall.
In an effort to help underperforming students catch up on standardized tests and give them more opportunities for enrichment activities, 35 schools that enroll about 17,500 students will expand the school day and year in the 2013-14 academic year. Forty more schools that enroll about 20,000 students will also extend classroom and after-school time in the next three years.

Madison Teachers, Inc. via a kind Linda Doeseckle email (PDF)

We know all too well the many changes that have occurred since Scott Walker became Governor and, aided by big corporate money, anti-worker lobbyists and a right-wing legislature, destroyed Wisconsin’s public sector collective bargaining and what it has produced for workers and their families. Many MTI members worked tirelessly on the protests, elections, recalls, recounts and numerous forms of organizing when the troubles began almost two years ago.
Where do we go from here? While the fall elections are behind us, we must gear up for the next round; the spring of 2013. We need to rebalance the State Supreme Court, and we need to again make our voices heard by electing employee – friendly Board of Education (BOE) members. Three seats are up for election this spring: Seat 4, currently held by BOE president James Howard; Seat 3, currently held by Beth Moss (who has indicated that she will not run for re-election); and Seat 5, currently held by Maya Cole.
MTI members need to remain attentive, educated, and ready to act on all matters that affect their jobs and well-being. It was only a short time ago that the District began work on an employee handbook that DID NOT include any input from their own employees; fortunately, MTI got an opportunity, due to Judge Juan Colas finding Act 10 unconstitutional in several parts, to call for an additional year of collective bargaining, and the employee handbook has been shelved for now. With immediate and strong support, MTI members gave Board members a quick reminder that District staff demands a voice in the work they do and how they do it.
There are many forces within the District, the current Governor’s office, and other political and big corporations that will continue in their attempts to weaken the worker’s voice. MTI encourages members to attend Board of Education meetings to keep a watchful eye on what they’re doing and the direction they’re going. The Board meets in its various subcommittees almost every Monday night. Unlike the past, current Board committees discuss issues and make decisions by the time they meet as a full Board at the end of each month. Anyone may register to speak at any Board meeting, and Board members are listening to MTI members. Information on all Board meetings can be found easily – Google “mmsd boe” or go to the MTI website and scroll down the right hand column to “other links” and choose “MMSD BOE Info. Station”. Meetings will also be posted in each week’s MTI Solidarity! newsletter. Protect yourself by staying current, attending BOE meetings, and sharing information with your union brothers and sisters.

Julia Turner:

The answer is less obvious than you might think. Sure, you are familiar with your own scrawled to-do lists, or the brief missives you leave on the kitchen counter for houseguests or your spouse. Perhaps you take notes by hand in meetings (though if you’re like me you consult them only sporadically after the fact). But when was the last time you filled a page of foolscap–or Mead college rule, for those of us who’ve never been quite sure what foolscap is–with lines and lines of unbroken lettering, trying to express an argument or make a developed point? When was the last time you used pen and ink for writing, and not just for jotting?
The Missing Ink, from British novelist Philip Hensher, makes the case that it has probably been too long. Subtitled “The Lost Art of Handwriting,” the book is an ode to a dying form: part lament, part obituary, part sentimental rallying cry. In an age of texting and notes tapped straight into tablets, we are rapidly losing the art and skill it takes to swiftly write, with a pen, a sentence that is both intelligible and attractive. The time devoted to teaching handwriting in elementary schools around the globe has dwindled. Hensher opens his book with the plaintive question: “Should we even care? Should we accept that handwriting is a skill whose time has now passed? Or does it carry with it a value that can never truly be superseded by the typed word?”

Scott Bauer:

Republican state Rep. Don Pridemore launched his campaign to become Wisconsin’s top education leader on Monday, saying he would bring a conservative approach to the job while refusing to talk specifically about what policies he would push.
Pridemore is taking on incumbent Tony Evers, who has held the nonpartisan job of secretary of the Department of Public Instruction since 2009. The election is April 2, and there will be a Feb. 19 primary if three or more people run.
Evers said he looked forward to contrasting his record with Pridemore’s.
“All I know is I’ve been out front on education for 36 years,” said Evers, a former teacher, principal, district superintendent and deputy state superintendent. “I’m believing that he has not.”

Wisconsin State Journal:

It’s a big week ahead, and the start of a big month, for potentially reshaping the future of our public schools.
Two public events this week have been organized by the Urban League of Greater Madison, the Madison School District, the United Way of Dane County and a community education reform effort called Planning for Greatness. First is an education forum and small group discussion Thursday afternoon, followed by a broader innovation summit on Friday.
Meanwhile, December starts the application period for families at Sennett and Toki middle schools in Madison who wish to participate in the Scholars Academy program being advanced by the Urban League and the Madison district.

Since the disaster of the Marxist/Victims-history standards produced by UCLA in 1996, which were censured by a vote of 99-1 in the United States Senate, (the one negative voter thought the “standards” were even worse), History has become, in the comment this year of David Steiner, former Commissioner of Education in New York State, “so politically toxic that no one wants to touch it.”
This situation has developed in part because every tiny little multicultural group in the country is outraged if their history does not receive equal (or better) treatment in any history textbook, and in part because the late Howard Zinn’s proudly Marxist textbook of United States History has sold more than 2 million copies (not bad for an anti-capitalist who believed “private property is theft”).
Most of those who write about the dashing new nonfiction reading suggestions of the Common Core lament the altered and unreasonable burdens on English teachers, and they all seem to have forgotten that most of our high schools have both History departments and History teachers as well. But it seems to be inconceivable and unmentionable that our History teachers might dare to assign history books (nonfiction) and history research papers (nonfiction writing).
The story of how all reading and writing became the complete monopoly of the English Departments is surely a long and complicated one, but however it developed, it seems clear that our History departments have given away any responsibility for assigning books and research papers they may once have owned to the English teachers.
In an October 24, 2012 article in the Wall Street Journal, Michael S. Malone argues that even tech company CEOs are now looking for people who can tell stories (about their enterprise, their product, etc.), and so Mr. Malone of course looks to the English departments to offer the needed expertise in storytelling:
“Could the humanities rebuild the shattered bridge between C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” and find a place at the heart of the modern world’s virtual institutions? We assume that this will be a century of technology. But if the competition in tech moves to this new battlefield, the edge will go to those institutions that can effectively employ imagination, metaphor, and most of all, storytelling. And not just creative writing, but every discipline in the humanities, from the classics to rhetoric to philosophy. Twenty-first-century storytelling: multimedia, mass customizable, portable and scalable, drawing upon the myths and archetypes of the ancient world, on ethics, and upon a deep understanding of human nature and even religious faith.
The demand is there, but the question is whether the traditional humanities can furnish the supply. If they can’t or won’t, they will continue to wither away. But surely there are risk-takers out there in those English and classics departments, ready to leap on this opportunity. They’d better hurry, because the other culture won’t wait.”
Where did we lose the understanding that History is all storytelling, with the additional benefit that it is based on evidence, which is not always so important with fiction? Mr. Malone mentions English and classics departments (“classics to rhetoric to philosophy”), but perhaps for him History has lost its membership in the Humanities? He wants “imagination, metaphor and most of all, storytelling…and myths and archetypes of the ancient world,” but he leaves unmentioned the sources of the greatest true stories (nonfiction) ever told in the world–our Historians.
Nevertheless, he is in the mainstream of those who, when asked to think, talk and write about reading and writing in the schools, faithfully and regularly default to the work of the English department and its wonderful world of fiction as the only place to introduce nonfiction!
When did the ideas of having our high school students read an actual complete history book or two and write an actual history research paper or two disappear into the woodwork? The result is that our students arrive in college poorly prepared to read nonfiction books and to write the required term papers, not to mention their inability to do any research.
Neil Postman tells us that “Cicero remarked that the purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present.” That freedom seems more and more out of reach among those who cannot even think about History, which has made History the most unmentionable among all the necessary academic subjects in our schools.

Some fiction and memoir programs are a waste of classroom time. Others sharpen students’ thinking and provide them with unmatched insight. Good teachers know the difference.
by Rebecca Wallace-Segall, via a kind email:

“I’m not sure if eight-year-olds should be permitted to have death or murder references in their short stories,” said a New York City public school principal to me at the end of the day today. “But I’ll set a meeting with my teachers tomorrow to discuss your views and theirs and see where we get.”
Three hours later, I am still moved and humbled by the principal’s thoughtful consideration of a topic so new and strange to her. We had just started a residency in her school. We had discussed a no-censorship approach for this workshop and the children had immediately come to life when they were told they could write a fictional story about anything they wanted.
But by week two, some of the teachers were concerned to see the heavy material that emerged, here and there, throughout the grade, from the special ed class to the “gifted and talented.” Human beings young and old love exploring dark, fantastical themes. But what are we supposed to think when our youngest members do it? When should our admiration turn to worry, and when does it become a school’s responsibility?
It is not easy to teach creative writing within the confinement of school. It is not easy to tackle the issues that arise, and it’s not easy to learn how to teach fiction and memoir writing well. But it is possible. And many teachers are doing it, and doing it well, across the country.

Jack Craver:

CT: How has the method changed?
Bell: Literally it is member to member. It’s every member of the union talking to other people in those positions, reinforcing to them that collective action and collective advocacy is more than a collective bargaining agreement. Don’t get me wrong — I believe in collective bargaining and believe it’s a right our members ought to have, but shy of restoring it at the state level, collective advocacy is what the union is all about.
CT: And how has the “collective advocacy” changed?
Bell: We’re working more with organizing our members to engage their communities.
CT: Could you give me an example?

Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators.

Tom Simonite:

Learning a new language is tedious and demands a lot of practice. Luis von Ahn doesn’t want all that effort to be wasted. In fact, it might be a gold mine.
Von Ahn, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is the co-creator of Duolingo, a free language-­learning site that turns students into an online workforce. His software uses their answers to simple exercises in a translation service that he expects to charge money for.
It’s clever stuff: an education that pays for itself. That achievement is important as education moves toward being given away online (see “The Most Important Educational Technology in 200 Years”). Teachers and universities are now running into the same problem journalists and movie studios have faced: how will they make any money if the content is free? No matter how cheap it is to pipe information across the Web, producing lessons and coursework is still demanding and expensive.

Benjamin Rifkin:

Having been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 15 years, I follow the news from the state closely, and was very disappointed to read about Governor Scott Walker’s plan to make significant changes to state funding for education. Governor Walker said a few things about K-12 education and education in the technical college system, but he also said this about how the state should judge the performance of its public universities:
In higher education, that means not only degrees, but are young people getting degrees in jobs that are open and needed today, not just the jobs that the universities want to give us, or degrees that people want to give us?
This approach is wrong for four fundamentally important reasons:
First, economically, the “Walker Plan for Higher Education” seems to be premised on increasing the efficiency of the pipeline from higher education to the economy. But the assumption made by Governor Walker that the state can predict which programs of study would be most beneficial for the state’s economy is false, as demonstrated by some spectacular counterexamples.

Erin Richards and Jennifer Zahn:

” Sawadee ka!” announced with palms together and a slight bow, was the most common greeting heard Monday morning in Lodi High School’s Southeast Asia studies class.
The lead teacher in Thailand – where for her it was late Monday night – surveyed the room from an oversize Mac monitor on a rolling cart. Her floating visage and voice beaming to Lodi over Skype had, by this point in the semester, lost its novelty.
What’s still unusual is this small rural high school’s flourishing relationship with Sa-nguan Ying School, a public seven-12 school halfway around the world in Suphanburi, Thailand.
The partnership started as a student/teacher exchange and evolved into dual distance-learning classes that feature Wisconsin students taking an accredited Asian cultural studies course from a Thai teacher, and Thai students learning U.S. history from a retired Lodi teacher.
The Lodi-Thailand program is not the only example of innovative global learning projects in Wisconsin’s schools, many of which use technology that makes it easier than ever to connect to other parts of the world. But it exemplifies how schools can fundamentally deepen and enrich the traditional American learning experience, with little financial cost, if educators persist in thinking beyond the boundaries of their community and country.

Adam Toobin:

Just more than 58 percent of students oppose the University’s consideration of race in student admissions decisions, while over 34 percent of students said they supported the policy, according to a recent Herald poll. Of the students who are opposed to the consideration of race, more than half support the consideration of an applicant’s socioeconomic status. Just over a quarter of students oppose the consideration of race, socioeconomic status or any other demographic factor in admission decisions.
Most students said their answers were tied to their beliefs about the University’s race-based affirmative action policy. Currently, the University considers an applicant’s race as a single factor among many — including grades, test scores and extracurricular activities — and does not weigh socioeconomic status in determining whether the applicant should be admitted to Brown.

Kevin Kiley:

When Florida Governor Rick Scott announced earlier this week the creation of two four-year, $10,000 bachelor’s degree programs in Florida, he could have easily been mistaken for another Republican governor named Rick.
Less than two years ago Texas Governor Rick Perry called on his state’s colleges and universities to create bachelor’s-degree programs that cost families no more than $10,000. The call set off a firestorm of debate about whether it was possible to control or lower the cost of offering a degree through the use of technology and competency-based assessment, or whether it was possible to find alternative subsidies that would drop the price for students and their families.
Perry and Scott appear to agree on much more than an ideal price tag. The two — along with another Scott, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who unveiled his own higher education agenda earlier this month — appear to be at the forefront of what could be an emerging Republican approach to higher education policy, built largely around cost-cutting, which seems to appeal to some voters, if not to the academy itself.

the Economist:

Running the numbers
ON THE face of it, American higher education is still in rude health. In worldwide rankings more than half of the top 100 universities, and eight of the top ten, are American. The scientific output of American institutions is unparalleled. They produce most of the world’s Nobel laureates and scientific papers. Moreover college graduates, on average, still earn far more and receive better benefits than those who do not have a degree.
Nonetheless, there is growing anxiety in America about higher education. A degree has always been considered the key to a good job. But rising fees and increasing student debt, combined with shrinking financial and educational returns, are undermining at least the perception that university is a good investment.
Concern springs from a number of things: steep rises in fees, increases in the levels of debt of both students and universities, and the declining quality of graduates. Start with the fees. The cost of university per student has risen by almost five times the rate of inflation since 1983 (see chart 1), making it less affordable and increasing the amount of debt a student must take on. Between 2001 and 2010 the cost of a university education soared from 23% of median annual earnings to 38%; in consequence, debt per student has doubled in the past 15 years. Two-thirds of graduates now take out loans. Those who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2011 graduated with an average of $26,000 in debt, according to the Project on Student Debt, a non-profit group.

The Economist:

NEWARK’S public schools are dreadful. Although they have been under the supervision of New Jersey’s state government since 1995, there has been little improvement since then. Only 40% of students read to the standard prescribed for their age, and in the 15 worst-performing schools the figure is less than 25%. More than 30% of pupils do not graduate. Few of those who do are ready for higher education. Of those who entered one local establishment, Essex County College, in 2009, a whopping 98% needed remedial maths and 87% had to take remedial English. As a result, fed-up parents are taking their children out of Newark’s public high schools and placing them in independent charter schools. Many public-school buildings now stand half-empty. The best teachers often leave in despair.
Things might now start to change. On November 14th members of the Newark teachers’ union approved, by 1,767 to 1,088, a new agreement with the district which, it is hoped, will help to retain good teachers. It introduces, for the first time in New Jersey, bonus pay. Teachers can now earn up to $12,000 in annual bonuses: $5,000 for achieving good results, up to $5,000 for working in poorly performing schools, and up $2,500 for teaching a hard-to-staff subject. Newark will be one of the largest school districts in the country to offer bonuses. The idea was made palatable to the union, which had been reluctant to accept it, because the evaluation process will unusually be based on peer review, though the school superintendent and an independent panel will still make the final decision on each case.

Cindy Cohn & Parker Higgins:

The holiday shopping season is upon us, and once again e-book readers promise to be a very popular gift. Last year’s holiday season saw ownership of a dedicated e-reader device spike to nearly 1 in 5 Americans, and that number is poised to go even higher. But if you’re in the market for an e-reader this year, or for e-books to read on one that you already own, you might want to know who’s keeping an eye on your searching, shopping, and reading habits.
Unfortunately, unpacking the tracking and data-sharing practices of different e-reader platforms is far from simple. It can require reading through stacked license agreements and privacy policies for devices, software platforms, and e-book stores. That in turn can mean reading thousands of words of legalese before you read the first line of a new book.

Alisha Azevedo:

Salman Khan’s dream college looks very different from the typical four-year institution.
The founder of Khan Academy, a popular site that offers free online video lectures about a variety of subjects, lays out his thoughts on the future of education in his book, The One World School House: Education Reimagined, released last month. Though most of the work describes Mr. Khan’s experiences with Khan Academy and his suggestions for changing elementary- and secondary-school systems, he does devote a few chapters to higher education.
In a chapter titled “What College Could Be Like,” Mr. Khan conjures an image of a new campus in Silicon Valley where students would spend their days working on internships and projects with mentors, and would continue their education with self-paced learning similar to that of Khan Academy. The students would attend ungraded seminars at night on art and literature, and the faculty would consist of professionals the students would work with as well as traditional professors.
“Traditional universities proudly list the Nobel laureates they have on campus (most of whom have little to no interaction with students),” he writes. “Our university would list the great entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives serving as student advisers and mentors.”

Alyssa Coppelman.

Alan Borsuk:

Ceria M. Travis Academy is a private school that had 486 kindergarten through 12th-grade students as of September in two buildings, one on the west side, one on the north side. Its partner school, Travis Technology High School on the far northwest side, had 214 students.
Atlas Preparatory Academy, also a private school, had 979 kindergarten through 12th-grade students in three locations on the south side.
Few students in either set of schools did well on Wisconsin’s standardized tests in 2011. More than five out of six at both Travis schools either were rated “minimal” in reading and math, the lowest category, or, in unusually large numbers, didn’t take the tests at all. Almost all the required students at Atlas took the tests, but more than 70% were minimal in reading and more than 60% minimal in math.
How many were rated proficient or better? At the Travis schools, it was under 2% in reading, just over 2% in math. At Atlas, it was 4.2% in reading, 5.5% in math.
…..
MPS schools have elaborate accountability systems and tons of information is available about each school. The accountability systems haven’t been so effective historically, but there are signs of improvement as more low-performing schools are closed. That said, there are still plenty of MPS schools that get results that are not much different from those of Travis and Atlas (and at much higher cost per student).
Milwaukee charter schools also are required to report quite a bit of information publicly and, in many cases, the charter authorizer (at MPS, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee or City Hall) has been pretty effective in holding schools to performance standards, closing quite a few. That said, there are still low-performing c

Madison Superintendent Jane Belmore

Unlike other assessments, MAP measures both student performance and growth through administering the test in both fall and spring. No matter where a student starts, MAP allows us to measure how effective that student’s school environment was in moving that student forward academically.
This fall’s administration serves as a baseline for that fall to spring growth measure. It also serves as an indicator for teachers. As we continue professional development around MAP, we will work to equip schools to use this data at the classroom and individual student level. In other words, at its fullest use, a teacher could look at MAP data and make adjustments for the classroom or individual students based on where that year’s class is in the fall, according to these results.
Meeting growth targets on the fall administration indicates that a student met or exceeded typical growth from Fall 2011 to Fall 2012. Typical growth is based on a student’s grade and prior score; students whose scores are lower relative to their grade level are expected to grow more than students whose scores are higher relative to their grade level.
In Reading, more than 50% of students in every grade met their growth targets from Fall 2011 to Fall 2012. In Mathematics, between 41% and 63% of students at each grade level met their growth targets. The highest growth in Mathematics occurred from fourth to fifth grade (63%) and the lowest growth occurred from fifth to sixth grade (41%).
It is important to note that across student groups, the percent of students making expected growth is relatively consistent. Each student’s growth target is based on his or her performance on previous administrations of MAP. The fact that percent of students making expected growth is consistent across student subgroups indicates that if that trend continues, gaps would close over time. In some cases, a higher percentage of minority students reached their growth targets relative to white students. For example, at the middle school level, 49% of white students met growth targets, but 50% of African American students and 53% of Hispanic students met their growth targets. In addition, English Language Learners, special education students, and students receiving free and reduced lunch grew at similar rates to their peers.
MAP also provides status benchmarks that reflect the new, more rigorous NAEP standards. Meeting status benchmarks indicates that a student would be expected to score “Proficient” or “Advanced” on the next administration of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE).
That means that even though overall scores haven’t changed dramatically from last year, the percent of students identified as proficient or advanced will look different with these benchmarks. That is not unique for MMSD – schools around the state and nation are seeing this as they also work toward the common core.
While these scores are different than what we have been used to, it is important to remember that higher standards are a good thing for our students, our districts and our community. It means holding ourselves to the standards of an increasingly challenging, fast-paced world and economy. States all around the country, including Wisconsin, are adopting these standards and aligning their work to them.
As we align our work to the common core standards, student achievement will be measured using new, national standards. These are very high standards that will truly prepare our students to be competitive in a fast-paced global economy.
At each grade level, between 32% and 37% of students met status benchmarks in Reading and between 36% and 44% met status benchmarks in Mathematics. Scores were highest for white students, followed by Asian students, students identified as two or more races, Hispanic students, and African-American students. These patterns are consistent across grades and subjects.
Attachment #1 shows the percentage of students meeting status benchmarks and growth targets by grade, subgroup, and grade and subgroup. School- and student-level reports are produced by NWEA and used for internal planning purposes.

Related: 2011-2012 Madison School District MAP Reports (PDF Documents):

• District Summary
• District Growth Summary
• Growth by Ethnicity
• Allis Elementary
• Black hawk Middle School
• Chavez Elementary School
• Cherokee Middle School
• Crestwood Elementary School
• Elvehjem Elementary School
• Emerson Elementary School
• Falk Elementary School
• Glendale Elementary School
• Gompers Elementary School
• Hamilton Middle School
• Hawthorne Elementary School
• Huegel Elementary School
• Jefferson Middle School
• Kennedy Elementary School
• Lake View Elementary School
• Leopold Elementary School
• Mendota Elementary School
• Nuestro Mundo Elementary School
• O’Keeffe Middle School
• Olson Elementary School
• Orchard Ridge Elementary School
• Randall Elementary School
• Sandburg Elementary School
• Schenck Elementary School
• Sennett Middle School
• Sherman Middle School
• Shorewood Elementary School
• Spring Harbor Middle School
• Stephens Elementary School
• Thoreau Elementary School
• Toki Elementary School
• Van Hise Elementary School
• White Horse Middle School
• Wright Middle School

I requested MAP results from suburban Madison Districts and have received Waunakee’s Student Assessment Results (4MB PDF) thus far.

Madison School District 600K PDF:

The overarching priorities were identified by the MMSD Management Team in the areas of Attendance, Behavior, Growth and Achievement. The rationale for these priorities is based on the following theory of action:
When our teachers apply strong, explicit teaching skills within an aligned multi-tiered system of instruction and support, and students attend school regularly with behavior that doesn’t interfere with their learning or the learn- ing environment, then students will show growth and achievement academically, socially and emotionally.

Much more on the Madison School District’s “achievement gap” plan, here.

The Economist:

THE international community’s perception of Afghanistan over the past 12 years may be in for a bracing shot of reality when the foreign troops leave in 2014. Political agendas back home are shifting in ways that are likely to change the long-distance view of this country. In particular, the effects of the past decade of Western intervention will need no longer be viewed through rose-coloured glasses.
Meanwhile Afghan children’s perception of their own history over the past four decades is being subjected to a surreal bit of air-brushing, thanks to a few departing American agencies. The new edition of textbooks for Afghanistan’s high schools were paid for partly by the American forces’ foreign-aid arm, the Commander’s Emergency Response Programme. Cultural advisers to the American army revised these books with an eye to eliminating any inappropriate material such as might, for instance, incite religious intolerance or violence.

Josh Mitchell:

U.S. student-loan debt rose by $42 billion, or 4.6%, to $956 billion in the third quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Tuesday. Overall household borrowing fell during that period.
Payments on 11% of student-loan balances were 90 or more days behind at the end of September, up from 8.9% at the end of June, a rate that now exceeds that for credit cards. Delinquency rates for all other consumer-debt categories fell or were flat.
Nearly all student loans–93% of them last year–are made directly by the government, which asks little or nothing about borrowers’ ability to repay, or about what sort of education they intend to pursue.

Katie Yezzi:

IN 2011, I started a public charter elementary school as the principal. My organization, Uncommon Schools, manages charter schools for the bottom line, which in our case is student achievement. Some 92 percent of my school’s students live below the poverty line, and the urgency of our faculty’s work is what motivates us to be great every day.
But the overwhelming need to be great can also swallow people up. If teachers are underperforming, or if student achievement appears to be plateauing, teachers can become paralyzed and fall prey to self-doubt or frustration.
We have found an antidote to this sense of defeat: practicing and preparing outside the classroom. Practice, I have found, is one of the most powerful ways to improve performance.
Last March, as I was preparing to conduct midyear reviews with the teachers, my managing director, Doug Lemov, asked me if I wanted to practice any of them in advance. I immediately took him up on the opportunity to practice one review of a teacher who was struggling. I was dreading the review. I didn’t want to be harsh, but I also didn’t want to water down the message and give this teacher a false impression. I knew that I wasn’t ready to have that conversation, so Doug and I practiced.

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Mary Niederberger:

To Community College of Allegheny County’s president, Alex Johnson, cutting hours for some 400 temporary part-time workers to avoid providing health insurance coverage for them under the impending Affordable Health Care Act is purely a cost-saving measure at a time the college faces a funding reduction.
But to some of the employees affected, including 200 adjunct faculty members, the decision smacks of an attempt to circumvent the national health care legislation that goes into effect in January 2014.
“It’s kind of a double whammy for us because we are facing a legal requirement [under the new law] to get health care and if the college is reducing our hours, we don’t have the money to pay for it,” said Adam Davis, an adjunct professor who has taught biology at CCAC since 2005.

Melissa Korn:

With graduation approaching this spring, Jessica McSweeney has a sinking feeling. A senior Human Development major at Cornell University, she has completed her required science and writing classes and looks forward to traveling this summer.
But one thing stands between the 21-year-old Ms. McSweeney and her diploma: three lengths in the school’s 25-yard swimming pool.
Cornell students must take the plunge in order to graduate, either by passing a swim test or enrolling in a beginner’s swim class. Ms. McSweeney, who hasn’t been in a pool much since grade school, is less than lukewarm on the tradition.
“I guess it’s a noble skill to have,” she says, “but I don’t intend to be a water-going person.”
Cornell’s century-old requirement is among the last remaining at colleges. The tests, which generally require students to prove they can paddle a few lengths of the pool, are among the more unusual graduation requirements in academia. But as schools focus more on career skills than on life skills, support for the requirements has been drying up.

Stacy Teicher Khadaroo:

The portion of young adults in the United States who have completed a four-year college degree hit a record high in 2012. A full third of 25-to-29-year-olds now hold degrees.
Ninety percent have completed high school or an equivalent credential, and 63 percent have done some college course work – both peak rates as well.
Progress in “educational attainment … has a lot of implications, both for the wealth and well-being of the young adults themselves … and [for] the productivity of the workforce and future economic growth,” says Richard Fry, a senior research associate at the Pew Research Center and coauthor of its new report on the subject.
For years, the idea has been growing that college is as necessary as high school was 40 years ago. In 2010, 75 percent of Americans said college was very important, compared with just 36 percent in 1978, the report notes.

Sue Shellenbarger:

Homework can be as monumental a task for parents as it is for children. So what’s the best strategy to get a kid to finish it all? Where’s the line between helping with an assignment and doing the assignment? And should a parent nag a procrastinating preteen to focus–or let the child fall behind and learn a hard lesson?
As schools pile on more homework as early as preschool, many parents are confused about how to assist, says a 2012 research review at Johns Hopkins University. Some 87% of parents have a positive view of helping with homework, and see it as a beneficial way to spend time with their kids, says the study, co-authored by Joyce Epstein, a research professor of sociology and education.
Yet sometimes parental intervention may actually hurt student performance. During the middle-school years, such help was linked to lower academic achievement in a 2009 review of 50 studies by researchers at Duke University. Parents who apply too much pressure, explain material in different ways than teachers or intervene without being asked may undermine these students’ growing desire for independence, according to the study, published in Developmental Psychology.

jsharf.com

According to the FY2011 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, in 2011, the Board decided to terminate benefits for anyone who hadn’t reached the thresholds of age 50, and 20 years of service as of the end of the 2011 plan year, 8/31/2011. “The plan is still operational for active and deferred vested participants and beneficiaries in receipt of payment.” It is those members who will be asked to take a cut in their benefits. The district has also “determined that additional contributions for the foreseeable future would not be made to the Plan.” (Note 16, P. 72)
The funded ratio has fallen to 50.6%, and the unfunded liability as of August 31, 2010 is $8.8 million.

Mike Ford:

“Is it helpful to compare student performance across school districts with differing demographics?”
The question was spurred by the reaction to the recent release of their annual report on school performance in Racine. I answer their question with an enthusiastic yes. In fact I will go further, it is not only helpful, it is essential.
Why? Well, graduates of districts across the state will be competing for the same spots in universities, and/or for the same jobs. It is crucial that districts know how their students are faring compared to others, regardless of their students’ demographics and socio-economic situation. If we do not know how they compare, how can we even begin to close achievement gaps?
It is not enough to simply present data on how students of any given school district are faring given the non-classroom challenges they face. That does not mean we shouldn’t measure and celebrate (or lament) how Milwaukee is performing compared to other urban districts. We should. But we also need to know where students stand compared to others they will compete with in the real world.

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Andrea Van Niekirk:

Foreign students are flocking to the higher education system in the US. A recent study found that in 2011-2012, the number of international students in the US increased by 6.5% over the last year to a record high of 764,495 students. Of these, 56% came from only five countries: China, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Canada.
The reasons for the shift and the consequences of this massive migration have been discussed at great length within universities, in papers with titles such as “The Chinese are Coming.” When the students arrive on American campuses, however, they have to wrestle with social and educational experiences that are fundamentally foreign to them. Most anticipate their American adventure as an exciting opportunity laced with some inevitable adjustments, caught off guard by the extent and nature of the obstacles they encounter, in the classroom and on campus.
Studying and writing in a foreign academic language is difficult enough, but it is often the classroom dynamic that is most daunting to foreign students. They are disconcerted by the interaction, often marked by an easy familiarity and questioning rapport, between American teachers and students. Yongfang Chen, one of the authors of A True Liberal Arts Education, co-written about his academic experiences as a Chinese student at Bowdoin, noted in an interview after the book was published, that, “Coming from a culture in which a ‘standard answer’ is provided for every question, I did not argue with others even when I disagreed. However, Bowdoin forced me to re-consider ‘the answer’ and reach beyond my comfort zone.” The intense and narrow focus required of Chinese students as they spend high school preparing for the gaokao, the national test that is the sole determinant of entry into China’s universities, is also at odds with an American emphasis on ongoing assessment through tests and midterm exams.

Ron Unz:

Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University history, in which nearly half the students taking a Government course on the role of Congress had plagiarized or otherwise illegally collaborated on their final exam.1 Each year, Harvard admits just 1600 freshmen while almost 125 Harvard students now face possible suspension over this single incident. A Harvard dean described the situation as “unprecedented.”
But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America’s most prestigious academic institution? In the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together with their professional schools. The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible today, as even America’s most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected former Harvard students. Indeed, the early success of Facebook was largely due to the powerful imprimatur it enjoyed from its exclusive availability first only at Harvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League.

Chris Cook:

Qatar has enormous oil and gas reserves, but the little state is trying to kick the petroleum habit and become a high-tech society. It wants a sustainable economy for when the oil runs out – and a more cultured society in the meantime.
The Qatar Foundation is the institution that is leading this drive: I am in the little Gulf state this week for WISE, their annual summit on education, where I was a speaker on the finance of education. The whole thing is rather spectacular.
When they say they are going to do something, they go big – sometimes to a rather baffling degree. One of my favourite examples of this is their super-duper equine health centre, which trains horse-handlers and apparently features a sauna for the horses.

Element Collection:

The Alexander Arrangement is a three-dimensional paper sculpture of the periodic table designed by Roy Alexander, with whom I collaborated on this version. For the first time this clever form of the table has been combined with my photographs of real element samples, resulting in a quite lovely object.
If you know anyone who likes elements, chemistry, or science in general, and you need a gift that you know they don’t have yet, this is it! It’s completely new for x-mas 2012.

Mary Wisniewski:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said on Monday he wants a five-year moratorium on closing public schools after anticipated cuts in 2013, but the teachers union called his gesture a “sleight of hand.”
The third-largest school district in the United States, which was hit with a strike by public school teachers in September, was already facing a financial crisis that was made worse by granting pay rises to teachers.
The school district forecasts a $1 billion deficit next year and is widely expected to try to balance its budget in part by closing public schools.
Enrollment in Chicago Public Schools has fallen nearly 20 percent in the last decade, mainly because of population declines in poor neighborhoods. The district said it can accommodate 500,000 students, but only about 400,000 are enrolled.
Some 140 schools are half-empty, according to the district. The union said 86 Chicago public schools have closed in the past decade, but the district could not confirm that number.

Lara Seligman:

Texas is experimenting with an initiative to help students and families struggling with sky-high college costs: a bachelor’s degree for $10,000, including tuition fees and even textbooks. Under a plan he unveiled in 2011, Republican Gov. Rick Perry has called on institutions in his state to develop options for low-cost undergraduate degrees. The idea was greeted with skepticism at first, but lately, it seems to be gaining traction. If it yields success, it could prompt other states to explore similar, more-innovative ways to cut the cost of education.
Limiting the price tag for a degree to $10,000 is no easy feat. In the 2012-13 academic year, the average annual cost of tuition in Texas at a public four-year institution was $8,354, just slightly lower than the national average of $8,655. The high costs are saddling students with huge debt burdens. Nationally, 57 percent of students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2011 from public four-year colleges graduated with debt, and the average debt per borrower was $23,800–up from $20,100 a decade earlier. By Sept. 30, 2011, 9.1 percent of borrowers who entered repayment in 2009-10 defaulted on their federal student loans, the highest default rate since 1996.

Economist intelligence Unit:

The Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment compares the performance of 39 countries and one region (Hong Kong) on two categories of education: Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment. The Index provides a snapshot of the relative performance of countries based on their education outputs.
The indicators used in this Index are:
– Cognitive Skills: PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS scores in Reading, Maths and Science
– Educational Attainment: literacy and graduation rates
How is the Index calculated?
The overall index score is the weighted sum of the underlying two category scores. Likewise, the category scores are the weighted sum of the underlying indicator scores (see below for the default weights applied). Each indicator score is calculated on the basis of a z-score normalisation process. This process enables the comparison and aggregation of different data sets (on different scales), and the scoring of countries on the basis of their comparative performance.
What is a z-score?
A z-score indicates how many standard deviations an observation is above or below the mean. To compute the z-score, the EIU first calculated each indicator’s mean and standard deviation using the data for the countries in the Index, and then the distance of the observation from the mean in terms of standard deviations.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org

Brian Shane:

At schools in Pinellas County, Fla., students aren’t paying for lunch with cash or a card, but with a wave of their hand over a palm scanner.
“It’s so quick that a child could be standing in line, call mom and say, ‘I forgot my lunch money today.’ She’s by her computer, runs her card, and by the time the child is at the front of the line, it’s already recorded,” says Art Dunham, director of food services for Pinellas County Schools.
Students take about four seconds to swipe and pay for lunch, Dunham says, and they’re doing it with 99% accuracy.
“We just love it. No one wants to go back,” Dunham says.
Palm-scanning technology is popping up nationwide as a bona fide biometric tracker of identities, and it appears poised to make the jump from schools and hospitals to other sectors of the economy such as banking and retail. It also has applications as a secure identifier for cloud computing.

Ben Casselman:

The rising cost of a college education is hitting one group especially hard: the millions of students who drop out without earning a degree.
A bachelor’s degree remains by far the clearest path to the American middle class. Even today, amid mounting concerns about the rising cost of higher education and questions about the relevance of many college degrees, recent graduates have lower rates of unemployment, higher earnings and better career prospects than their less educated peers.

Lawrence Messina:

Jorea Marple was carrying out numerous recommendations from the much-discussed audit of West Virginia’s public schools system when she was fired as superintendent, by Board of Education members eager to signal to Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and the Legislature that they supported the extensive review of education spending, policy and organization.
Those board members have cited the need for change when explaining Marple’s ouster, in light of struggling student performance. At least one member, Gayle Manchin, has commented further.
“My viewpoint was, we should all embrace this audit and garner from its findings and recommendation that would help us make the changes that needed to be made,” Manchin told The Associated Press last week. “My personal opinion is that wasn’t necessarily the way it was received at the Department of Education.”

Matthew DeFour:

Madison’s newest charter school opened in a state-of-the-art green building this fall, but parents and teachers are already worried there isn’t enough room for additional students next year.
It’s not that the classrooms at Badger Rock Middle School are cramped — they’re more spacious than most others in the district. But parents and teachers say there just aren’t enough rooms to serve the needs of the school.
The principal had to negotiate with the building owner to carve out an area for private meetings between teachers, parents and students. The nurse’s clinic doubles as a teacher break room. And when the number of students increases from 100 to 150 next year, a grade level will move into what is now the art and science room.
“When they planned out the building they said, ‘We have this great idea and it looks like this,'” said Tom Purnell, the parent of twin seventh-graders at Badger Rock. “Do I want to send my kids where the vision is or where the reality is?”

Leonard Pitts:

Indeed, for all the talk about the so-called reverse racism of affirmative action, I have long argued that the real problem with it – and the reason it needs an expiration date – is that it might give African-American kids the mistaken idea they carry some inherent deficiency that renders them unable to compete with other kids on an equal footing.
We should be wary of anything, however well-intentioned, however temporary, which conveys that impression to our children. I am proof we have been doing just that for a very long time. And it burns – I tell you this from experience – to realize people have judged you by a lower standard, especially when you had the ability to meet the higher one all along. So this “interim” cannot end soon enough.
Because ultimately, you do not fix education by lowering the bar. You do it by lifting the kids.

Related:

• 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:.
  “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!

James Causey:

One of the best lines in the movie “Lean on Me” was delivered by high school Principal Joe Clark, who told a custodian to “tear down” the cages in the cafeteria that were used to protect the cooks from the students.
“If you treat them like animals, that’s exactly how they will behave,” said Clark, portrayed by Morgan Freeman.
Clark is right, and that’s why Milwaukee Public Schools should not subject thousands of children to daily metal detector scans.
Metal detectors and hand-held wands only give educators, students and parents the false illusion that their schools are safe, when there is little proof that they cut down on violence.
The district says it does the scans to be proactive in light of the workplace and school shootings that have taken place across the country since 1999’s attack at Columbine High School in Colorado.
MPS spokesman Tony Tagliavia said, “We’d much rather have a conversation on why we scan instead of having the conversation on why we didn’t.”

Mary Meeker’s Address on the State of USA Inc.

1) America is losing its edge – some of this is inevitable as other countries improve their competitiveness, some of this is self inflicted.
2) Financial strength is vital to competitiveness – it’s core to a healthy economy, job creation, vibrant education / culture and military leadership.
3) Positive cash flow and a strong balance sheet are key to financial strength – bottom line, it’s bad to spend more than one brings in, as America is doing. In effect, as each day passes – with our rising losses and debt load – we rob just a little bit more from the future.
4) America does not need to lose its edge, it needs conviction and leadership to move its ‘business model’ in the right direction – we are all in this together, we need to understand and acknowledge our problems and agree to move forward with collective inspiration and sacrifice.
5) American tax dollars fund our government – we all need to understand where our taxes go and decide if we believe our hard-earned dollars are put to their highest-and-best use. The politicians we elect decide where our money goes.

View Meeker’s complete presentation, here (1.6MB PDF).

Stephanie Simon:

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush soared to rock star status in the education world on the strength of a chart.
A simple graph, it tracked fourth-grade reading scores. In 1998, when Bush was elected governor, Florida kids scored far below the national average. By the end of his second term, in 2007, they were far ahead, with especially impressive gains for low-income and minority students.
Those results earned Bush bipartisan acclaim. As he convenes a star-studded policy summit this week in Washington, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential education reformers in the U.S. Elements of his agenda have been adopted in 36 states, from Maine to Mississippi, North Carolina to New Mexico.
Many of his admirers cite Bush’s success in Florida as reason enough to get behind him.
But a close examination raises questions about the depth and durability of the gains in Florida. After the dramatic jump of the Bush years, Florida test scores edged up in 2009 and then dropped, with low-income students falling further behind. State data shows huge numbers of high school graduates still needing remedial help in math and reading.

Dennis Conta And Sean Robert:

Erin Richards’ Oct. 22 article on Wisconsin’s new school report cards shed light on the limitations of the proposed accountability system and illustrated the need to improve it.
The report card is a good idea with much promise, but in its current form it places high schools, especially those serving low-income and minority students, at a serious disadvantage.
The ratings assigned to schools are supposed to be based on reading and math test scores recalculated to meet a higher proficiency bar, test scores growth and the progress schools are making toward closing achievement gaps. In theory, it is a balanced system that will judge schools not on the types of students they receive but the actual impact a school has on student achievement.
But because of data limitations, the report card does not measure what it is designed to for high schools.

Laurie Rogers, via a kind email:

What’s the mission of any school district? Most parents seem to agree that it’s academics. Schools should prepare students academically for postsecondary life – whether it’s college, a trade, a career, the military or some other endeavor.
Alas, many public schools don’t focus on college or career readiness, and their mission statements don’t say they have to. Instead, other, more nebulous goals are their stated priorities, such as turning students into global citizens, “challenging” them, helping them develop “supportive relationships,” and having them engage in “relevant, real-life applications.”
“Equity” and “social justice” also are emphasized in many districts. Some districts have created new departments, applied for federal grants or hired $100,000+ personnel – supposedly to foster equity and social justice. But what’s behind the terminology?
Actual equity and social justice entail providing ALL students with the academic skills they need to lead a productive postsecondary life. But in public education, the terms tend to be ambiguous and politically laden, focusing instead on perceived unfairness. In the typical social-justice curriculum, America frequently is portrayed as the bad guy.

Chris Cook:

Last week, the excellent Paul Francis, political editor of the Kent Messenger, reported that Kent, the most significant selective county left in England had come up with a clever plan: to make the entry test for grammar schools “tutor-proof”.
This idea comes up a lot, largely from people promoting selection. You can see why: it is often presented as a means of squaring a problem. They can argue that grammar schools help bright poor children while dealing with the fact that very few get into them.
But, in truth, a properly administered test, which accurately captures the education enjoyed by people at the age of 11, should exclude large numbers of poor children. Not because they are intrinsically less able. But, at 11, the poor-rich divide is already a chasm.

Laura Waters:

David McCullough, author of Truman and John Adams and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, was interviewed by Morley Safer on Sixty Minutes recently. During a discussion regarding Americans’ “historical illiteracy,” McCullough opined on teacher training:

Well we need to revamp, seriously revamp, the teaching of the teachers. I don’t feel that any professional teacher should major in education. They should major in a subject, know something. The best teachers are those who have a gift and the energy and enthusiasm to convey their love for science or history or Shakespeare or whatever it is. “Show them what you love” is the old adage. And we’ve all had them, where they can change your life. They can electrify the morning when you come into the classroom.

Related: When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That? and the National Council for Teacher Quality has been looking into school of education curriculum.

Stephanie Banchero:

Five years ago, students in the public-school system here were almost as likely to drop out as earn a diploma. School-board meetings routinely devolved into shouting matches, with a board member once pouring a pitcher of ice water over an administrator’s head.
St. Louis schools chief Kelvin Adamsmeets with his management team this fall to review such data as the number of students expelled or truant.
Then, the state of Missouri stepped in, stripped the district’s accreditation and installed a new board to run the schools. That board hired Kelvin Adams, an unpretentious leader who had spent the previous 18 months as the chief of staff of the New Orleans Recovery School District, which had been created by the state to transform the hurricane-ravaged schools.
Since taking over here, Mr. Adams has lifted the high-school graduation rate by 18 percentage points and eliminated $25 million in debt. Attendance is up and misbehavior is down. State test scores are still painfully low–about three-quarters of elementary-school students can’t read or do math at grade level–but the progress on tests was enough to persuade state officials last month to grant the district provisional accreditation.

Timothy Gowers:

The most important thing that a young mathematician needs to learn is of course mathematics. However, it can also be very valuable to learn from the experiences of other mathematicians. The five contributors to this article were asked to draw on their experiences of math- ematical life and research, and to offer advice that they might have liked to receive when they were just setting out on their careers. (The title of this entry is a nod to Sir Peter Medawar’s well-known book, Advice to a Young Scientist.) The resulting contributions were every bit as interesting as we had expected; what was more surprising was that there was remarkably little overlap between the contributions. So here they are, five gem intended for young mathematicians but surely destined to be read and enjoyed by mathematicians of all ages.
I. Sir Michael Atiyah
Warning
What follows is very much a personal view based on my own experience and reflecting my personality, the type of mathematics that I work on, and my style of work. However, mathematicians vary widely in all these char- acteristics and you should follow your own instinct. You may learn from others but interpret what you learn in your own way. Originality comes by breaking away, in some respects, from the practice of the past.

Clusty search: Timothy Gowers.

Matthew DeFour

It’s official. Wisconsin has the second-highest high school graduation rate in the country.
The U.S. Education Department reported Monday for the first time a list of state graduation rates based on a uniform formula developed by the National Governors Association.
The new method tracks a cohort of ninth graders who graduated with a diploma in 2011. Wisconsin was one of 26 states that saw graduation rates decline under the new measurement.
Wisconsin officials have long touted the state as having one of the top graduation rates in the country, but it was never an apples-to-apples comparison until now. According to the Education Department, “the varying methods formerly used by states to report graduation rates made comparisons between states unreliable.”
The new graduation data show:

Anders Böhlmark Mikael Lindahl

What will free schools mean for the quality of education — in the new schools, and in the old ones they compete with? In Sweden, they don’t have to guess. They have almost 400 free schools, and data from millions of pupils. The latest study has just been published, and has strong results that I thought might interest CoffeeHousers (you can read the whole paper here). It makes the case for Michael Gove to put the bellows under the free school movement by following Sweden and let them be run like expanding companies (that is to say, make a profit). It finds that:

1. Growth of free schools has led to better high school grades & university participation, even accounting for other factors such as grade inflation.
2. Crucially, state school pupils seem to benefit about as much as independent school ones. When ‘bog standard comprehensive’ face new tougher competition, they shape up. They know they’ll lose pupils if they don’t. As the researchers put it: ‘these positive effects are primarily due to spill-over or competition effects and not that independent-school students gain significantly more than public school students.’
3. Free schools have produced better results on the same budget. Their success cannot be put down to cash. Or, as they say, ‘We are also able to show that a higher share of independent-school students in the municipality has not generated increased school expenditures.’
4. That the ‘free school effect’ is at its clearest now because we now have a decade’s worth of development and expansion.

Via Competition in Schools by Chris Cook.

Read the paper here (500K PDF).

Andy Smarick:

By putting the district on the clock, Christie can offer a brighter future to Newark’s residents and, in the process, emerge as the nation’s most aggressive and forward-thinking education reform governor.

Via Laura Waters.

Pamela Cotant:

Memorial High School senior Sohil Shah is at an academic level above most of his peers.
Sohil, 17, who takes classes and conducts research at UW-Madison, also is more advanced than many college students.
Findings from his nanoscience research project were published in the prestigious Journal of Materials Chemistry — a feat that could be expected of third-year doctorate students, said Robert Hamers, chemistry professor at UW-Madison and Sohil’s mentor.
“Sohil is the most amazing high school student I have ever seen,” said Hamers, who is impressed by the high school student’s overall scientific knowledge and outstanding math skills. “It’s hard to remember that he’s not a college student.”

Laura Waters:

Earlier this month Jersey City Education Association President Ron Greco refused to sign off on the district’s $40 million Race to the Top application (see coverage here) and wrote a letter to JCEA members explaining that he vetoed the grant because “not one cent is dedicated to negotiation of a new contract. Diane Ravitch then blogged about Mr. Greco’s decision, noting his “courage, insight, wisdom, and conviction.”
A reader who calls herself Jersey Mom, a parent of a Jersey City public school student, responded to Dr. Ravitch and also posted her rebuttal on NJLB’s comment section. (See here.) In addition to pointing out various factual errors in Dr. Ravitch’s blog, she also references Jersey City Superintendent Marcia Lyle’s recent presentation, “Mind the Gap,” which details some of the district’s challenges:

Elementary ESL Teacher:

“Why did you choose this text?”, I asked the ninth grader, noticing the I Have A Dream speech in his hands.
“I had always heard about MLK and wanted to read the speech,” he smiled. He gave me a copy and gathered the other two members of his group to the table.
They began to read aloud together and at the second sentence, a student breached, or stopped the group, “Five score? What does that mean?”
“A game?” a student replied.
There were no handy dictionaries, so I gave them my phone to google it. They learned a score was equal to twenty years, so five score meant 100. “Why didn’t he just say that?” a student quipped. “Well, it’s a speech, and that’s an old-fashioned way of speaking, so maybe he is just trying to make it sound special or formal.” Satisfied, the group kept reading.

Erin Richards:

Bob Kazmierski once struggled in a traditional high school classroom setting where he couldn’t get enough individualized attention, so he turned to Connects Learning Center, an alternative high school program in Cudahy.
Alternative schools often carry a stigma of catering to students lacking ambition, but Kazmierski said Connects serves students who simply learn differently. He graduated last year and has been working full-time at a fast food restaurant to save money for Gateway Technical College, where he’s registered to start classes in January.
“It’s not like (Connects) classes are easier at all,” Kazmierski said. “It’s just in a different format.”
The small school’s emphasis on personalized help for students is a key part of that, but its operational structure may be its most innovative feature. Connects is a charter school run by multiple districts that work together to provide a cost-efficient alternative path for students.

Linda Shaw:

The first charter schools in Washington probably won’t be run by the nation’s best-known charter groups with years of experience and strong reputations.
During the successful campaign for Initiative 1240, which will allow as many as 40 charters to open here over five years, supporters talked about wanting Washington students to have a chance to attend the kind of schools operated by the nation’s top charter operators.
But the highest profile chains are in such demand that most won’t be looking to expand here anytime soon — if at all.
Instead, assuming the new law survives a legal challenge, Washington likely will start out with kitchen-table charters, cooked up by a teacher or principal or two with a passion to try something new.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity enewsletter (PDF), via a kind Linda Doeseckle email:

As the District contemplates consequences for those teachers who are not using Infinite Campus, MTI has heard from several members about the difficulty in meeting this District expectation. District Assistant Superintendent Joe Gothard sent a letter to all middle and high school teaching staff in late August, mandating that they use the grade book within IC and enter grades at least once weekly. While this poses challenges across the board, it has been especially difficult for specials teachers as they see literally hundreds of students each week.
MTI Executive Director John Matthews and Assistant Director Sara Bringman have spoken with Gothard about how to alleviate this burden for specials teachers. Gothard reports that he has spoken with principals and shared this message: “If specials teachers have large classes, and/or an A/B day (schedule), they would not be held to the standard of weekly input. At a minimum they should be using it for progress and grade reports.” Gothard’s accommodation should help allay concerns among specials teachers for not following the District’s earlier mandate.

Cathy Payne:

Are American students making the grade when it comes to ethics?
A new survey from the Josephson Institute of Ethics finds that the portion of high school students who admit to cheating, lying or stealing dropped in 2012 for the first time in a decade. The reasons aren’t totally known, but the results of the poll of 23,000 high school students give leaders of the Los Angeles-based non-profit organization hope.
The survey is “a pretty good sign that things may be turning around,” said Michael Josephson, the founder and president of the Josephson Institute. “I’m quite optimistic this is the beginning of a downward trend.”
Among the highlights from the survey, which is done every two years:

For the first time in a decade lying cheating stealing among American students drops:

A continual parade of headline-grabbing incidents of dishonest and unethical behavior from political leaders, business executives and prominent athletes suggests that we are in a moral recession. But a new report — the 2012 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth — suggests that a robust recovery is underway.
The survey of 23,000 high school students, which was conducted by the Los Angeles-based Josephson Institute of Ethics, reveals that for the first time in a decade students are cheating, lying and stealing less than in previous years. The Institute conducts the national survey every two years.
CHEATING: In 2010, 59 percent of students admitted they had cheated on an exam in the past year; in 2012 that rate dropped to 51 percent. Students who copied another’s homework dropped 2 percent, from 34 percent in 2010 to 32 percent this year. Other good news:
LYING: Students who said they lied to a teacher in the past year about something significant dropped from 61 percent in 2010 to 55 percent in 2012. Those who lied to their parents about something significant also dropped from 80 percent to 76 percent. In 2012, 38 percent of the students said they sometimes lie to save money; that is a drop of 3 percent from 2010.

Ben Casselman:

The rising cost of a college education is hitting one group especially hard: the millions of students who drop out without earning a degree.
A bachelor’s degree remains by far the clearest path to the American middle class. Even today, amid mounting concerns about the rising cost of higher education and questions about the relevance of many college degrees, recent graduates have lower rates of unemployment, higher earnings and better career prospects than their less educated peers.

Los Angeles Times Editorial:

By now, it should be apparent that charter schools have been the spark to the education reform flame in the Los Angeles Unified School District. At first, applicants hoping to open publicly funded but independently operated charter schools had to fight for every new campus, opposed by school board members who were strong union allies. But as charters showed remarkable progress with disadvantaged and minority students who had been failing in regular public schools, appreciation for them increased. New laws limited the grounds on which the school board could reject charter applications, and the election of a more reform-oriented board brought the number of students attending charter schools to nearly 100,000, about twice as many as in the New York City school system.
Yet misguided attacks on charter schools still occur, most recently when L.A. Unified school board member Steve Zimmer introduced a resolution to temporarily halt the approval of new charters. The resolution was softened, but eventually, and rightly, it was rejected by the board.

Kevin Hartnett:

On Aug. 30, a Japanese mathematician named Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers to his faculty website at Kyoto University. Rumors had been spreading all summer that Mochizuki was onto something big, and in the abstract to the fourth paper Mochizuki explained that, indeed, his project was as grand as people had suspected. Over 512 pages of dense mathematical reasoning, he claimed to have discovered a proof of one of the most legendary unsolved problems in math.
The problem is called the ABC conjecture, a 27-year-old proposition considered so impossible that few mathematicians even dared to take it on. Most people who might have claimed a proof of ABC would have been dismissed as cranks. But Mochizuki was a widely respected mathematician who’d solved hard problems before. His work had to be taken seriously.

Lisa Foderaro:

In the East Village, children planted garlic bulbs and harvested Swiss chard before Thanksgiving. On the other side of town, in Greenwich Village, they learned about storm water runoff, solar energy and wind turbines. And in Queens, students and teachers cultivated flowers that attract butterflies and pollinators.
Across New York City, gardens and miniature farms — whether on rooftops or at ground level — are joining smart boards and digital darkrooms as must-have teaching tools. They are being used in subjects as varied as science, art, mathematics and social studies. In the past two years, the number of school-based gardens registered with the city jumped to 232, from 40, according to GreenThumb, a division of the parks department that provides schools with technical support.
But few of them come with the credential of the 2,400-square-foot garden at Avenue B and Fifth Street in the East Village, on top of a red-brick building that houses three public schools: the Earth School, Public School 64 and Tompkins Square Middle School. Michael Arad, the architect who designed the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, was a driving force behind the garden, called the Fifth Street Farm.

NPR:

Many of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities are facing financial problems, and some have had to shut down altogether. Guest host Celeste Headlee discusses the issue with Dillard University President Walter Kimbrough and Professor Marybeth Gasman of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

Adrian Sainz, via a kind reader’s email:

Clarence Mumford Sr. is facing more than 60 fraud and conspiracy charges after authorities said he made tens of thousands of dollars from aspiring teachers who paid to have someone else take tests for them.
It was a brazen and surprisingly long-lived scheme, authorities said, to help aspiring public school teachers cheat on the tests they must pass to prove they are qualified to lead their classrooms.
For 15 years, teachers in three Southern states paid Clarence Mumford Sr. — himself a longtime educator — to send someone else to take the tests in their place, authorities said. Each time, Mumford received a fee of between $1,500 and $3,000 to send one of his test ringers with fake identification to the Praxis exam. In return, his customers got a passing grade and began their careers as cheaters, according to federal prosecutors in Memphis.
Authorities say the scheme affected hundreds — if not thousands — of public school students who ended up being taught by unqualified instructors.
Mumford faces more than 60 fraud and conspiracy charges that claim he created fake driver’s licenses with the information of a teacher or an aspiring teacher and attached the photograph of a test-taker. Prospective teachers are accused of giving Mumford their Social Security numbers for him to make the fake identities.

Joe Rodriguez:

In a recent opinion piece, James L. Huffman requests Oregonians to ask “why those who run our public schools have seen fit to increase their own ranks at three times the rate of growth in student enrollment while allowing for a small decline in the number of teachers relative to students” (“Oregon’s schools: Are we putting money into staff at students’ expense?” Commentary, Nov. 17).
He references a report by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice that uses data from the National Center for Education Statistics to document that K-12 personnel growth has outstripped K-12 student enrollment growth. The data are completely accurate, but the conclusions Huffman and the report reach are erroneous.
Huffman writes that some might be suspicious of the foundation as the source of the data. In reading the report’s conclusion (pages 19-22), such suspicion is justified.

Related: The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools:

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 staff experienced growth of 702 percent, more than seven times the increase in students.
In a recent Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, Lindsey Burke (2012) reports that since 1970, the number of students in American public schools increased by 8 percent while the number of teachers increased 60 percent and the number of non-teaching personnel increased 138 percent.
That hiring pattern has persisted in more recent years as well. This report analyzes the rise in public school personnel relative to the increase in students since FY 1992. Analyses are provided for the nation as a whole and for each state.
Between FY 1992 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students nationwide grew 17 percent while the number of full-time equivalent school employees increased 39 percent, 2.3 times greater than the increase in students over that 18-year period. Among school personnel, teachers’ staffing numbers rose 32 percent while administrators and other staff experienced growth of 46 percent; the growth in the number of administrators and other staff was 2.7 times that of students.

1.2MBPDF report and,

Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:

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

Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons:

The myth about learning styles was the most popular: 94% of the teachers believed that students perform better when lessons are delivered in their preferred learning style. Indeed, students do have preferences about how they learn; the problem is that these preferences have little to do with how effectively they learn.
Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham explained this conundrum in his 2009 book “Why Don’t Students Like School?” In the best tests of the learning-styles theory, researchers first ascertain students’ preferred styles and then randomly assign them to a form of instruction that either matches their preferences or doesn’t. For example, in one study, students were randomly assigned to memorize a set of objects presented either verbally (as names) or visually (as pictures). Overall, visual presentation led to better memory, but there was no relationship between the learners’ preferences and the instruction style. A study comparing “sensing” to “intuitive” learners among medical residents being taught new procedures reached a similar conclusion.
Of course, good teachers sense when students are struggling or progressing, and they adjust accordingly. Students with disabilities have individual needs that should be addressed. But a comprehensive review commissioned by the Association for Psychological Science concluded that there’s essentially no evidence that customizing instruction formats to match students’ preferred learning styles leads to better achievement. This is a knock not on teachers–we are teachers ourselves–but on human intuition, which finds the claim about learning styles so self-evident that it is hard to see how it could be wrong.

Ed Yong:

Ed Boyden, an engineer turned neuroscientist, makes tools for brain hackers. In his lab at MIT, he’s built a robot that can capture individual neurons and uses light potentially to control major diseases — all in his quest to ‘solve the brain’. To break into a neuron within a living brain, you need a good eye, extreme patience, months of training, and the ability to suck with gentle care. A mouse lies in front of you, brain exposed. Your mission is to impale one of its neurons with the micrometre-wide tip of a glass pipette.
An electrode in the pipette measures the resistance at its tip, and relays the signal to a monitor. You’re watching out for the subtle spikes that tell you that the tip has struck cellular gold. When it is in place, you suck on a rubber tube connected to the pipette – gently at first, to form a seal, and then slightly harder to create a small hole.
If it works, you now have full access to the neuron’s inner workings. You can inject a dye through the hole to map the cell’s many branches. You can measure its electrical activity as it communicates with its neighbours. You can suck out its contents to analyse the chemicals inside it. If you did that for hundreds of connected neurons, you could start to understand the molecules and electric pulses behind the rodent’s thoughts, emotions and memories.

Alan Borsuk:

Step this way for a guided tour of the amazing, morphing education system in Milwaukee!
See the shrinking giant! Before your very eyes, watch the rapid growth of America’s most significant program to use public money for children to go to religious schools! Look in awe as thousands of kids head every day to the suburbs! Don’t miss the opening of new schools run by people from distant places!
In other words, the last figures are in and we can now take our annual tour of the many and sometimes wondrous ways a child can get publicly funded education in one of America’s most complex education environments. Here are some high points:
The shrinking giant: It was amazing several years ago to say that one out of every three Milwaukee children getting a publicly funded education was going to a school outside the traditional Milwaukee public school system. It signaled how much the definition of public education was being reshaped here. But that statement is out of date. It’s not 33% any more. It’s very close to 40%. The figure goes up about 1 1/2 points a year, which it did again this year.

John Markoff:

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.
The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.
The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications’ speech recognition service, and in Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

The Browser:

Children learn in many different ways and the best science books for young people reflect that, says the science writer. Her suggested reading takes in robots used to explain sex and a picture book about dinosaurs.
hat first got you interested in science?
When I was little, my mum was very keen on taking me to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum in London. We would go to Kensington Gardens and play in the playground, and then walk down to Exhibition Road where she’d drag me round the dinosaurs and the spaceships. I found them a bit boring, but if I hung out with her at the spaceships and the dinosaurs then I would get to go and play in the Launchpad gallery, and have a go with some physics, which I enjoyed.

Jay Stanley:

One of the technology-related civil liberties battles that ACLU affiliates around the country have been fighting in recent years involves defending students’ rights to privacy and free expression in the new electronic media that are becoming such a large part of their lives. For some reason many school officials seem to believe that when it comes to online communications, students have no such rights
We have a case underway in Minnesota, for example, that exemplifies these problems. I got on the phone with Teresa Nelson, Legal Counsel at the ACLU of Minnesota, and she told me about it:

Erin Richards:

Unions actively reorienting themselves – even in states without Act 10-like legislation in place – are mobilizing teachers around curriculum and instruction issues. That could mean organizing teachers to champion what’s working best in the classroom by bringing new ideas to the school board, or working to get the community to support specific practices.
It means working more collaboratively, and offering solutions.
But collaboration can break down over ideological differences regarding what’s best for kids. Or teachers.
For example, while WEAC has supported a statewide evaluation system for educators in recent years, it has resisted emphasizing test scores in such evaluations. Others argue that robust data on test-score performance can say a lot about a teacher’s quality and should be used to make more aggressive decisions in termination or promotion.
Asking teachers to take a more active role in their union could also become an additional stress.

Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators.

Michael Brick via a kind Dan Dempsey email:

IN his speech on the night of his re-election, President Obama promised to find common ground with opposition leaders in Congress. Yet when it comes to education reform, it’s the common ground between Democrats and Republicans that has been the problem.
For the past three decades, one administration after another has sought to fix America’s troubled schools by making them compete with one another. Mr. Obama has put up billions of dollars for his Race to the Top program, a federal sweepstakes where state educational systems are judged head-to-head largely on the basis of test scores. Even here in Texas, nobody’s model for educational excellence, the state has long used complex algorithms to assign grades of Exemplary, Recognized, Acceptable or Unacceptable to its schools.
So far, such competition has achieved little more than re-segregation, long charter school waiting lists and the same anemic international rankings in science, math and literacy we’ve had for years.
And yet now, policy makers in both parties propose ratcheting it up further — this time, by “grading” teachers as well.
It’s a mistake. In the year I spent reporting on John H. Reagan High School in Austin, I came to understand the dangers of judging teachers primarily on standardized test scores. Raw numbers don’t begin to capture what happens in the classroom. And when we reward and punish teachers based on such artificial measures, there is too often an unintended consequence for our kids.

TaxProf:

Following up on Tuesday’s posts:
Number of LSAT Test-Takers Falls 16.4% (Nov. 20, 2012)
The Job Market for Law Grads Has Been Declining for a Long Time (Nov. 20, 2012)

No Camels:

The results constitute a challenge to existing theories of unconscious processes that maintain that reading and solving maths problems – two prime examples of complex, rule-based operations – require consciousness.
To present sentences and equations unconsciously, the researchers used a cutting-edge technique called Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS). In CFS, one eye is exposed to a series of rapidly changing images, while the other is simultaneously exposed to a constant image. The rapid changes in the one eye dominate consciousness, so that the image presented to the other eye is not experienced consciously. Using this technique, more than 270 students at the Hebrew University were exposed to sentences and arithmetic problems.
In one set of experiments using this technique, participants were asked to pronounce numbers that appeared on a computer screen. These numbers were preceded with unconscious arithmetic equations. The results of the experiments showed that participants could more quickly pronounce the conscious number if it had been the result of the unconscious equation. For example, when 9-5-1 was shown non-consciously, the participants were faster in pronouncing 3 than 4, even though they did not consciously see the equation.

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Steven Elbow:

To complete the hat trick, late last month Pines, representing Madison Teachers Inc. and the Wisconsin Education Association Council, stuck it to Republicans again when Dane County Judge Amy Smith struck down part of a law that consolidated rule-making authority in the governor’s office. That law gave Gov. Scott Walker control over rules that govern agencies like the Attorney General’s Office, the Government Accountability Board, the Employment Relations Commission, the Public Service Commission and the Department of Public Instruction, all of which were previously independent. Pines argued, and Smith agreed, that State Superintendent Tony Evers had constitutional powers beyond the governor’s reach.
“They extended (the law) to the Department of Public Instruction despite the fact that they were told in the brief legislative hearings they held on that bill that it was likely unconstitutional,” says Pines. “But they didn’t care. They just did it.”
While Pines’ recent wins are likely to be appealed, one thing is clear: He’s on a roll. How did he get to be such a pain in the collective GOP butt?

Morton Bast:

Mathematics gets down to work in these talks, breathing life and logic into everyday problems. Prepare for math puzzlers both solved and unsolvable, and even some still waiting for solutions.
Ron Eglash: The fractals at the heart of African designs
When Ron Eglash first saw an aerial photo of an African village, he couldn’t rest until he knew — were the fractals in the layout of the village a coincidence, or were the forces of mathematics and culture colliding in unexpected ways? Here, he tells of his travels around the continent in search of an answer.

Erin Richards:

One of the largest school systems in the state is considering changing its salary structure to reward teachers based on the quality of their performance, rather than on their seniority and education.
According to a contract proposal completed this month in the Waukesha School District, the administration wants to bring on national consultant Battelle for Kids to design a compensation and benefits system.
Waukesha’s School Board is holding off on voting on that approximately $77,000 contract until December, but individual board members said they supported the exploration.

Michael Fitzgerald:

Ask Ariel Diaz why he’s taking on the college textbook industry and he’ll tell you, “Quaternions.”
Quaternions are a number system used for calculating three-dimensional motion, popular in computer graphics. And Diaz needed a crash course to help him with a consulting gig after his online video platform startup, Youcastr, had failed. He started with Wikipedia and found it was surprisingly good at explaining this complicated mathematics.
Diaz, who still resents how much he’d paid for textbooks in college and graduate school, realized he’d hit on his next business idea. In 2011, he started Boundless Learning, a Boston company that has begun giving away free electronic textbooks covering college subjects like American history, anatomy and physiology, economics, and psychology.
What’s controversial is how Boundless creates these texts. The company trawls for public material on sites like Wikipedia and then crafts it into online books whose chapters track closely to those of top-selling college titles. In April, Boundless was sued by several large publishers who accused the startup of engaging in “the business model of theft.”

David Kravets:

2:30 p.m. PST UPDATE: A local Texas judge on Wednesday tentatively blocked the suspension, pending further hearings next week.
A Texas high school student is being suspended for refusing to wear a student ID card implanted with a radio-frequency identification chip.
Northside Independent School District in San Antonio began issuing the RFID-chip-laden student-body cards when the semester began in the fall. The ID badge has a bar code associated with a student’s Social Security number, and the RFID chip monitors pupils’ movements on campus, from when they arrive until when they leave.
Radio-frequency identification devices are a daily part of the electronic age — found in passports, and library and payment cards. Eventually they’re expected to replace bar-code labels on consumer goods. Now schools across the nation are slowly adopting them as well.

Robin Lake, Betheny Gross, Patrick Denice, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Responding to concerns that charter schools do not provide equal access to students with special needs, advocates in districts, states, and courts across the country have sought to improve such access. Lawsuits and complaints allege that some charter schools systematically discriminate against high-needs students. Additionally, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report showing that charter schools, on average, serve a smaller proportion of students with disabilities than do district-run public schools. In response, policymakers in some states are looking for ways to better ensure that financial, incentive, and support systems are in place to aid charter schools in providing greater access and services to students with special needs.
This report provides some context to these policy responses by describing the distribution of students with disabilities in New York State charter and district-run schools. The analysis shows that different levels of comparison–state level, school type, district level, and authorizer level–yield different results, and comparisons at high levels of aggregation (such as those made at the state level) mask important information and variation. Whether, and in what ways, charter schools appear to systemically underserve students with special needs depends on how you answer the question, “Compared to what?”

Dan Levin:

For Chinese children and their devoted parents, education has long been seen as the key to getting ahead in a highly competitive society. But just as money and power grease business deals and civil servant promotions, the academic race here is increasingly rigged in favor of the wealthy and well connected, who pay large sums and use connections to give their children an edge at government-run schools.
Nearly everything has a price, parents and educators say, from school admissions and placement in top classes to leadership positions in Communist youth groups. Even front-row seats near the blackboard or a post as class monitor are up for sale.
Zhao Hua, a migrant from Hebei Province who owns a small electronics business here, said she was forced to deposit $4,800 into a bank account to enroll her daughter in a Beijing elementary school. At the bank, she said, she was stunned to encounter officials from the district education committee armed with a list of students and how much each family had to pay. Later, school officials made her sign a document saying the fee was a voluntary “donation.”
“Of course I knew it was illegal,” she said. “But if you don’t pay, your child will go nowhere.”

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Ki Mae Hauser:

Since launching in April, Coursera has been on a tear, enrolling more than 1.8 million students and forging partnerships with 33 top-tier universities from around the world.
But, to date, the vast majority of Coursera students haven’t been able to receive credit for their online classes or count them toward a degree.
If all goes according to plan, however, that could change in a matter of months because, on Tuesday, the startup announced that it was working with the American Council on Education (ACE) to evaluate credit equivalency for its courses.
“Ever since we launched Coursera, we’ve known that university degrees are important,” said Coursera co-founder and Stanford professor Andrew Ng. “We wanted a more systematic way for students to earn academic credit… This is just a step in that direction.”
Over the past few months, a few institutions, including the University of Helsinki and the University of Washington, have unilaterally announced that they would award credit for some Coursera courses. And, last month, the Palo Alto startup announced a licensing deal with Antioch College that would enable Antioch students to take some Coursera courses for college credit, at a cost that is less than the per-credit cost of traditional courses.

Vincent Bevins:

JUAZEIRO, Brazil — As 6-year-old Ana Jamil skips up to the school gates, she has a simple question for the principal: “Is there class today?”
Children here are in the habit of asking, because their teachers often don’t show up, as hers didn’t the day before.
When Jose Pereira da Silva Municipal School does hold class, students spend just a little more than three hours a day with teachers who are woefully unprepared.
“Around here, there are teachers who can’t even read and write,” principal Maria Olivia Andrade says. “We’re waiting for the government to install air conditioning. We need a library. That’s essential. But by far the thing we need most desperately is training for the teachers.”
With salaries starting at just $350 a month and their jobs as state workers secure, teachers regularly stay at home. Although more kids are showing up for class, partly because of free lunches and government programs, they still have little chance of leaving with a decent education.
At Andrade’s school, the annual goal is that 70% will learn to read and write before they leave at age 14.

Tyler O’Neil:

President Barack Obama and the Democrats have portrayed themselves as supporters of public education, but their policies have turned public schools into strongholds for powerful private groups of teachers unions, critics say.
“The union is not some branch of public government–they’re just a private corporation,” said James Sayler, a 20-year public school teacher and founder of Colorado Educators for Bush in 2000 and 2004.
“Should a school district give away public authority to a private organization?” Sayler asked. “The unions, with the blessing and cooperation of the Democratic Party, have privatized education.”

Bill Kaczor:

Margaret Goodman says she received high marks from all five principals she’s worked for during 39 years, yet Florida’s new evaluation system gave her a low rating of “needs improvement.”
The third-grade teacher at St. Petersburg’s Westgate Elementary School on Tuesday said the system’s value-added model, or VAM, is demoralizing and unfair. It’s based on student test scores, but Goodman said her evaluation was based on exams taken by students she didn’t teach.
“The reality is the value-added model has nothing at all to do with adding, nor does it have anything to do with my proficiency as a teacher,” Goodman said.

Larry Ferlazzo:

Here is my annual humble attempt to identify the best and the worst education news that occurred during the past 12 months. I don’t presume to say it’s all-encompassing, so I hope you’ll take time to share your own choices in the comment section.
I’ll list the ones I think are the best first, followed by the worst. However, it’s too hard to rank them within those categories, so I’m not listing them in any order.
You might also be interested in seeing my previous year-end “round-ups”:

Ron Isaac:

The best thing to happen to democracy in recent years may be the popularity of blogs. They’re especially influential in politics and education. Anyone can access everyone these days. The marketplace of ideas is wide open. Edwize is, of course, the UFT’s blog. But the views contained in the following piece are solely those of the author and are independent of the UFT’s positions and policies.
Remember Rick Perry, the governor of Texas and unflappable former front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination until he blew his chances during a debate by plumb forgetting the name of the federal agency that he had sworn a thousand times to destroy? It was a helluva “aw shucks” moment for the supporter of state-sponsored murder.
But last year he showed leadership, for better or worse, in a way that is both highly uncharacteristic and typical of him. He signed into law a bill that extended rights to teachers but at the expense of their students. Whether that trade-off is fair is the question I pose to you.

Constance Clark and Peter W. Cookson Jr.:

The Common Core State Standards, adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia, promise to raise achievement in English and mathematics through rigorous standards that promote deeper learning. But while most policymakers, researchers, and educators have embraced these higher standards, some question the fairness of raising the academic bar on students who are already struggling.
Do higher standards hurt struggling students? High Standards Help Struggling Students: New Evidence, argues that the answer to that question is “no.” In the analysis, Education Sector analysts Constance Clark and Peter Cookson Jr. use state-by-state NAEP data to examine the effect of high standards on student achievement. They find there is no evidence that high standards have hurt low-achieving students. In fact, they found that higher standards have probably helped.
Clark and Cookson compare struggling students ─ those who score at “below basic” levels on the NAEP in reading and math ─ across states with low and high standards in 2003 and 2011. To define the rigor of the standards, they use a measure proposed by researchers Paul E. Peterson and Frederick M. Hess that evaluates standards based on the cut scores states use to set proficiency categories. The higher the cut score, the higher the state’s standards are judged to be. Here is what Clark and Cookson found on the extremes of the Peterson-Hess rating:

I K Gyasi:

If not, why does the NDC appear to take up the position that free secondary education is not only impossible to achieve, but also, that free secondary education is poor quality education?
On Tuesday, November 13, 2012, Joy FM played the voice of Dr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, one-time Minister of Education. I heard Dr. Spio-Garbrah say, “If you don’t pay for what is important, you don’t get the right quality.”
As someone who fully benefitted from a policy of free education, I find the idea that free education is synonymous with poor quality education as strange, ridiculous, nonsensical and offensive.
My father paid for my elementary school education at the Adansi Brofoyedru Methodist Primary School all the way to the T. I. Ahmadiyya Secondary School in Kumasi. He paid my examination registration fee.