NPR:
For hundreds of years, people have been talking about machines taking jobs from people. Less often discussed: machines creating new jobs.
In the first part of the 20th century, agricultural technology — the tractor, chemical fertilizers — meant a single farmer could suddenly grow much more food. So we didn’t need as many farmers. Technology destroyed a huge number of farming jobs.
economics, as the recession persuaded many young people to stay in or go back to school, while the subsequent recovery has pulled them into the job market. It is also simple demographics — the “echo boom” of births to baby-boomer parents in the U.S. peaked in 1990, and a lot of those kids entered college in 2008. Since then the number of Americans in their prime college-attending years has been going down.
The tax-exempt endowments of colleges and universities are coming under scrutiny in a presidential election year where the cost of higher education has become a top issue.
Leading Republican tax-writers in Congress have sent questions to 56 private institutions with endowments of over $1 billion, giving them until April 1 to respond. The answers they receive could lead to legislation.
The letters — which were sent in February and signed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) and Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) — stated that many colleges are raising tuition at rates above inflation despite having large and growing endowments.
The five private colleges with the largest endowments in fiscal year 2015 were Harvard University ($36.4 billion), Yale University ($25.6 billion), Princeton University ($22.7 billion), Stanford University ($22.2 billion) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($13.5 billion), according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and the Commonfund Institute.
Michael Puett & Christine Gross-Loh:
When students arrive at college these days, they hear a familiar mantra about the purpose of higher education: Find yourself. Use these four years to discover who you are. Learn flamenco dancing or ceramics, start a composting project, write for the student newspaper or delve into 19th-century English poetry. Self-discovery, they are told, is the road to adulthood.
So why is it that so many students feel such anxiety? On campus, we hear the same complaint again and again: “I’ve done lots of extracurriculars. I’ve taken a variety of courses. Why can’t I figure out who I am and what I want to do?”
Our answer: Read Confucius, Mencius, Zhuangzi and other Chinese thinkers who lived more than 2,000 years ago. Recognize that the contemporary Western emphasis on self-discovery and self-acceptance has led you astray.
Ron Fournier and Sophie Quinton:
Whitmire tells a familiar story of how public and private institutions derailed an American’s dream: In 2000, he bought the $40,000 house with no money down and a $620 monthly mortgage. He made every payment. Then, in the fall of 2010, his partially disabled wife lost her state job. “Governor [Mitch] Daniels slashed the budget, and they looked for any excuse to squeeze people out,” Whitmire says. “We got lost in that shuffle — cut adrift.” The Whitmires couldn’t make their payments anymore.
They applied for a trial loan-modification through an Obama administration program, and when it was granted, their monthly bill fell to $473.87. But, like nearly a million others, the modification was canceled. After charging the lower rate for three months, their mortgage lender reinstated the higher fee and billed the family $1,878.88 in back payments. Whitmire didn’t have that kind of cash and couldn’t get it, so he and his wife filed for bankruptcy. His attorney advised him to live in the house until the bank foreclosed, but “I don’t believe in a free lunch,” Whitmire says. He moved out, leaving the keys on the kitchen table. “I thought the bank should have them.”
Career politicians have become incredibly boring. This helps to explain the appearance of rebel parties in every Western democracy. These new splinter groups include the Ciudadanos in Spain, the National Front in France, the Tea Party in the United States, and the Independentists in Catalonia and Scotland. Voters have grown tired of accepting the same old tunes, whistled from both Left and Right. Constantly recycled policies and programs offer no solutions to difficult, long-term, and often intergenerational problems, such as unemployment among the unqualified youth, or the excessive dependence of certain groups on the welfare state. The same goes for the debate over immigration. One side demonizes globalization; the other decries nationalism.
New ideas are far from lacking, however. Economists and sociologists in universities, laboratories, and foundations provide a steady stream of fresh approaches to these problems. But politicians don’t seem to read much these days, preferring the advice of a closed circle of marketing consultants and dried-up slogan manufacturers. This makes Finland’s move toward instituting a universal basic income (UBI)—often referred to by economists as a negative income tax—all the more refreshing. The negative income tax is often associated with the free-market economist Milton Friedman, who defended it with passion and flair in the 1970s.
wsj:
Can you remember the last time you did calculus? Unless you are a researcher or engineer, chances are good it was in a high-school or college class you’d rather forget. For most Americans, solving a calculus problem is not a skill they need to perform well at work.
Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a young academic with coding savvy has become frustrated with the incarceration of information. Some of the world’s best research continues to be trapped behind subscriptions and paywalls. This academic turns activist, and this activist then plots and executes the plan. It’s time to free information from its chains—to give it to the masses free of charge. Along the way, this research Robin Hood is accused of being an illicit, criminal hacker.
This, of course, describes the tale of the late Aaron Swartz. His situation captured the Internet’s collective attention as the data crusader attacked research paywalls. Swartz was notoriously charged as a hacker for trying to free millions of articles from popular academic hub JSTOR. At age 26, he tragically committed suicide just ahead of his federal trial in 2013.
One of the most profound insights of modern science is that nature has a symmetrical structure. Since antiquity, naturalists have observed bilateral symmetry in plants and animals, as well as symmetrical hexagons in ice and snow. In the 19th century, scientists looked through microscopes and saw that nature’s building blocks (cells, crystals) are arranged in symmetrical patterns and come in left-right pairs. In 1905, Albert Einstein discovered the symmetry of mass and energy – mass can be converted into energy and vice versa (E = mc2). He soon developed the general theory of relativity to give an accurate description of the cosmos from any frame of reference.
Right about now, anxious high-school seniors around the globe are obsessively checking their mailboxes, awaiting decision letters from the U.S.’s elite colleges. For all but a tiny handful of the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who applied—pouring countless hours into agonizing over forms, editing personal essays, sitting through standardized tests, and nervously monitoring their GPA—those letters won’t bear good news.
Acceptance rates at highly selective colleges have plummeted in recent years. Exclusivity has always been baked into their brand: Only about 3 percent of 18-year-olds in the U.S. go to schools that admit fewer than half their applicants, making the “college-admissions mania,” as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson once put it, “a crisis for the 3 percent.” Still, it’s a mania to which more and more teens are subjecting themselves, pressuring applicants to pad their resumés and tout superficial experiences and hobbies, convincing them that attending a prestigious school is paramount. And critics say that mania has even spread into and shaped American culture, often distorting kids’ (and parents’) values, perpetuating economic inequality, and perverting the role of higher education in society as a whole.
It’s elite college admissions season, which means that it’s also the season for elite media handwringing about how stressful it for high school students to compete for the vanishingly small number of spots available in the Ivy League. These concerns are understandable, of course—any young person who has recently gone through this process, or any parent who has watched—knows that it can be agonizing and arbitrary. But most elite commentary on the subject—which imagines that the best way to slow down the rat race is for admissions offices to de-emphasize academic achievement and instead emphasize character traits like kindness and generosity—misses the mark by a rather wide margin. Take the Atlantic‘s recent contribution to this genre, which approvingly cites a college admissions overhaul agenda championed by the admissions deans of the nation’s most selective colleges and administrators at the most elite feeder schools:
The results are striking: Low-paying jobs (those paying less than $20 an hour, or under $40,000 a year for full-time workers) have an 83 percent chance of being automated. Medium-paying jobs ($20 to $40 an hour, or $40,000 to $80,000 a year) have a 31 percent chance, and high-paying ones (more than $40 an hour, or more than $80,000 a year) have only a 4 percent chance.
This may seem obvious. There are a whole lot of low-paying service jobs you can imagine being automated out of existence. Better Roombas could reduce the need for janitors, self-checkout machines are already replacing cashiers, etc.
But there are also high-paying professions that intuitively appear at risk. Just see this vintage 1998 Atul Gawande article about how artificial intelligence was already better than experienced cardiologists at interpreting EKGs. Radiologists, who spend much of their time visually interpreting test results, are also at risk. So are lawyers who formerly could spend hours scouring paper documents during discovery, charging the client throughout, and now are threatened by “e-discovery” software that makes those files easily searchable.
world has quietly been undergoing a performance revolution. In nearly all areas, people are continuously getting better at what they do. This is obvious when measured on running tracks and tennis courts. But it is happening in myriad other areas as well, from surgery to management—and even violin-playing. Better training is largely responsible, by breaking down activities into discrete parts, and measuring how people perform best.
Two new books promise to help people improve their abilities with a generous mix of fascinating anecdotes and a romp through the academic literature. In “Smarter, Faster, Better”, Charles Duhigg of the New York Times looks at the numerous ways that people can become more effective, whether in improving motivation, setting goals, making decisions or thinking creatively. Basically, Mr Duhigg’s is a self-help book for white-collar professionals.
are all familiar with the bracing “hero teacher” book or movie. A plucky, young (inevitably white) teacher ends up in a tough inner-city classroom filled with “those kids” – the ones that both school and society have written off as unteachable – and succeeds against all odds, through grit and compassion, embarrassing in the process those who run “the system.” Ed Boland’s “The Battle for Room 314” is the dark opposite. It’s a clear-eyed chronicle of first-year teaching failure at a difficult New York City high school, vividly written and wincingly frank.
Reading the book brought back a flood of memories of my own not dissimilar struggles as a new teacher at a low-performing public school in the South Bronx. Like Boland, I had my share of defiant and difficult students. If I’d been teaching high school, not elementary school, I likely would have made the same decision he did: to abandon ship and return to my previous career after one year, shell-shocked and defeated.
Via Joanne Jacobs.
Broome Street Academy, a tuition-free public charter high school in New York City, is doing big things. While 77 percent of the school is classified as economically disadvantaged, 82 percent of Broome Street’s first graduating class enrolled in a two-year or four-year college program in 2015.
Why is this rebellion permanent, at least until conditions improve? Because life in the U.S. is getting worse in a way that can be felt by a critical mass of people, by enough people to disrupt the Establishment machine with their anger. And because that worsening is seen to be permanent.
Bottom line, people are reaching the breaking point, and we’re watching that play out in the 2016 electoral race.
By the way, test scores can be a factor in evaluating teachers, but they have not emerged as a big factor. And the momentum behind connecting scores to ratings of teachers seems to have waned nationwide. (Why? Because it doesn’t really work.)
With the new scores, the “report card” for each school in the state will be relaunched, after a year off. This time, private schools with publicly-funded voucher students are slated to get report cards. Don’t expect the same level of data for voucher schools as public schools. Maybe that will take a few years to build up.
In the end, even as it is the third set of tests used in three years in Wisconsin, the Forward Test is pretty consistent with its predecessors. And, now on computers, the giant enterprise of testing our kids to get some broad handle on how they’re doing is on the move again.
Georgetown University professor John Hasnas writes in the Wall Street Journal of his experience with faculty candidate searches over the past twenty-plus years. Not only is there rarely any effort consider ideological or viewpoint diversity, but in some cases there have been efforts to squelch it.
in my experience, no search committee has ever been instructed to increase political or ideological diversity. On the contrary, I have been involved in searches in which the chairman of the selection committee stated that no libertarian candidates would be considered. Or the description of the position was changed when the best résumés appeared to be coming from applicants with right-of-center viewpoints. Or in which candidates were dismissed because of their association with conservative or libertarian institutions
Quora, via a kind Richard Askey email:
You are in Mordor now and way closer to Mount Doom.
There is suddenly so much less free time and everyone including the aunt of your neighbor kid’s cousin start to ask you how many years you have till “High School Entrance Exam”.Now the main subjects are:
Chinese
Math
English
Science (Physics, Chemistry, Biology)
PoliticsSecondary subjects are:
Physics
Information Technology
Music
Art
Moral training (Apologize for my inability to properly translate.. You are generally taught how to behave, to love the Party, etc)At the same time as an excellent student (score high is usually sufficient to earn that title), you will be taking National Math/Science Olympics Competition and spend loads of time on high school maths problems.
If unfortunately you don’t have a decent grade ensuring a good high school, you will have to spend much time on home tutorials apart from school.
I was of the second category, and spent 8 hours per week on Chinese, Math and Science, later English too.
Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter, via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):
While Act 10 limits bargaining to base wages only, all other issues and conditions of employment are addressed as part of the Employee Handbook development process. Last year, MTI worked with MMSD administration and the Board of Education to establish a new collaborative process for continued employee voice in the development of the Employee Handbook. That collaborative process commenced last summer and, after months of difficult discussions and eventual BOE approval, produced an Employee Handbook that continues the pay, benefits, and working conditions most critical to employees, while forging acceptable compromises in other areas. This summer, the joint Oversight Group of employee and management representatives will meet again to discuss, and possibly recommend, potential modifications to the Employee Handbook. Later this spring, MTI will be surveying MTI members to identify what changes they would like to see in the Employee Handbook.
Why not? A university degree, after all, is a credential crucial for economic success. At least, that’s what we’re told. But as with all such credentials—those sought for the ends they promise rather than the knowledge they represent—the trick is to get them cheaply, quickly, and with as little effort as possible. My students’ disaffection is the real face of this ambition.
That information void is a sore spot for Ozan Jaquette, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona who is emerging as a research leader on higher education enrollment policy. So far, Jaquette and a co-writer have published a journal article showing that a 10-percent drop in state appropriations is associated with a public research university increasing by five percent the number of non-resident freshmen it enrolls. He and his colleagues also found that at public research universities, spikes in the number of non-resident students who are admitted are associated with declines in the number of under-represented minorities and students who receive Pell grants (which are mostly issued to low-income students).
Jaquette talked with me about what effects non-resident students have on the racial and economic diversity of state universities. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows
Madison School District Administration Slides (PDF)
Learning is accelerated
Fewer students are at risk over time
Decisions about who needs Tier 2 or Tier 3 interventions are reliable and can be made rapidly
Rates of intervention success are high
Key decision makers look at the effects of implementation and troubleshoot regularly
Resources are allocated efficiently
I. Purpose
The purpose of this memo is to provide an update on MMSD’s strategy for literacy tiers of support, to highlight a targeted acceleration strategy implemented with intensive elementary schools this year, and to re-cap the major findings from two secondary program reviews along with next steps.II. Background Information
The Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) department is working strategically with many departments to help improve overall outcomes for students through a tiered approach to support. Critical to an effective MTSS system is high quality first teaching and a robust, guaranteed and viable curriculum. Efforts must be placed squarely in this arena as the effectiveness of our interventions and supports hinge on the effectiveness of our Tier 1. To this end, we have a multi- pronged approach to MTSS implementation. Increasing our capacity to implement and sustain literacy supports and intervention is one focus within the context of larger MTSS implementation. Given our student outcome data, we work in two main areas: prevention and intervention. Our ultimate goal is to prevent skill deficits from occurring in the first place (e.g., catching students before they fail), while simultaneously providing intervention for those students who already have skill deficits. Therefore, our efforts must rest in supplementing our core instruction in the early grades, while having a relentless focus on catching up our middle and high school students. This briefing sheet will detail our strategies and efforts in both areas.
An unfortunate data free update.
Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
While I’m open to interesting new challenges, starting in July my tentative plan (which sounds pretty good) is graduating my remaining students while continuing to coach interested faculty, revise textbooks, consult, travel, play soccer on Sundays, and attend the free faculty lunch on Mondays.
Poverty” just isn’t a word she identifies with. She points out that she and her niece live on a nice, suburban street, in a nice house … She pauses. “Without a lot of furnishings, or comforts that we’d like to have.”
Indeed, the walls are bare, and there’s little furniture in this house on an Austell cul-de-sac, where she’s lived for the past 13 months. Still, she insists that she doesn’t feel impoverished.
This is why it demoralized her when she recently had to make the 12-mile drive to Marietta to apply for food stamps.
“Because, um, it’s emotional,” she said. “It’s more than just paperwork. It’s the dramatization of, you know, ‘This is where you’re at.’ The whole tone of ‘I’m needy’ doesn’t sit well on your identity. Not me, anyway.”
College graduates from poor families were found to earn 91 percent more over their careers than high school graduates from the same income group. But college graduates from upper-middle-class families earned 162 percent more over their careers than those with just a high school diploma.
Graph courtesy the Brookings Institute. FPL is short for federal poverty level. You can read more about the smaller “bachelor’s bump” here.
Why the difference? Researchers point to disparities in family resources during childhood and the colleges that low-income students attend. Children born to highly educated women receive more of their parents’ time and money than those born to the less well-educated women. They also point out that poor students are more likely to attend lower ranked colleges than rich students. The researchers explicitly assume that this means poor students are receiving lower quality education than their richer peers.
James Piereson & Naomi Schafer Riley:
Earlier this month, students for the first time took a new, and allegedly improved, SAT. The test’s developer included more-contemporary vocabulary and removed penalties for guessing the wrong answer. The changes came with a predictable outcry—complaints, for instance, that too many word problems in the math sections disadvantage some students. There was also a familiar refrain from parents: Why do we have this exam at all? Why do colleges put so much stock in the results? And why-oh-why do our kids have to take so many tests?
It might seem unfair that admissions officers place almost as much weight on a one-morning test as they do on grades from four years of high school, as a 2011 survey from the National Association for College Admissions Counseling showed. But there’s a simple reason for this emphasis on testing: Policy makers and educators have effectively eliminated all the other ways of quantifying student performance
What Sanders’s plan, as spelled out in his College for All Act, does is provide federal matching grants to help defray the costs of eliminating tuition for in-state students.
Specifically, he is offering a 2-to-1 federal match for states that do this along with meeting a few other criteria like reducing reliance on adjunct faculty. This is a sufficiently attractive offer that some states would probably go for it. But it’s going to cost a lot of money, and tax-averse Republican governors like Walker pretty clearly aren’t going to do it.
What did happen was a sudden spike in enrolling out-of-state undergraduates, even as demand increased for spots at the University of California — and especially at the campuses at Berkeley, Los Angeles and, to a slightly lesser degree, San Diego. There has been plenty of grumbling by applicants, parents and politicians. Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, complained that “normal” students can’t get into Berkeley anymore.
The state auditor on Tuesday released a report that went well beyond complaints of rejected applicants. It accused the university system of admitting out-of-state applicants who didn’t meet standards set by the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education. And thousands of these non-Californians took the spots of more academically qualified Californians, the audit charged. This narrative counters the image that many admissions officials at popular flagships promote, which is that it is the out-of-staters who must meet higher standards.
“Race trumps class, at least when it comes to incarceration,” said Darrick Hamilton of the New School, one of the researchers who produced the study.
He and his colleagues, Khaing Zaw and William Darity of Duke University, examined data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a national study that began in 1979 and followed a group of young people into adulthood and middle age. The participants were asked about their assets and debts, and interviewers also noted their type of residence, including whether they were in a jail or prison.
The researchers grouped participants in the survey by their race and their household wealth as of 1985 and then looked back through the data to see how many people in each group ultimately went to prison. Participants who were briefly locked up between interviews might not be included in their calculations of the share who were eventually incarcerated.
n March 21, 2016, education historian and activist, Diane Ravitch, posted a communication dated March 17, 2016, from “a current high-level administrative employee at Teach for America.” The big news is that TFA will be cutting roughly 150 national and regional staff. The communication also notes that when TFA failed to reach its recruitment goals for 2015, jobs were cut, but not at the higher levels. This time (2016), TFA did not reach its recruitment goals for a second year, and this time, the job cuts are not just “rank and file staff.”
On the same day as Ravitch’s post, March 21, 2016, TFA posted news of the cuts on its own web site.
Liberal-arts colleges now find themselves in a brutal competition to attract a certain kind of paying student. By and large, students are not moneymakers for the college if they are poor enough to qualify for need-based aid, pedigreed enough to command major scholarship offers, or a minority who must be lured, with a nice tuition discount, to a place like Crawfordsville, Indiana. In short, white mediocrity is the bread and butter of the contemporary liberal-arts college.
But in order for the formula to work, these colleges must have a critical mass of students. There have to be enough profit-generating students to allow the college to take a loss on the students who will boost selectivity™ and diversity™. This is why Simon Newman wants to increase enrollment at MSMU and why college presidents everywhere lose sleep over enrollment numbers. These pressures are not unique to liberal-arts colleges, just more acute because of their relatively small size and their already inflated tuition.
Back in October, before the campus became a cauldron of student protests and angst-filled town hall forums, 12 members of Mills College’s student newspaper, the Campanil, gathered around a whiteboard for their weekly editorial meeting. As the all-female staff discussed what issues to report on, one student piped up with some important news: A campus-wide announcement was imminent, she said, and it would reveal proposed curriculum changes affecting multiple academic departments. She had been tipped off by staff members who worried that, once the news broke, students would become anxious and have questions. “I saw the faculty come out [of a meeting], and they didn’t look happy,” she reported to her colleagues.
Sure enough, not two hours after the news team wrapped up its meeting, a memorandum was disseminated among the campus community. Titled “Transforming Mills’ Curriculum for the 21st Century” and sent by the school’s departing president, Alecia DeCoudreaux, the email outlined proposed “teach-outs”—that is, closures—of three undergraduate programs. While it also announced the possible creation or expansion of certain programs, mostly in the STEM and education fields, the letter stated, “We must keep in mind that our programs need to operate with greater efficiencies; some will be revised, some will be created, some will grow, some will need to become more efficient; and some will be eliminated or sunset.” Or, in the plain English befitting a top-tier liberal arts college: Here comes the ax.
Hello there, if you like any of the lectures here can you give it an upvote. That would help to keep quality lectures to stay at the top. And if you know any great video lectures please don’t forget to share it here. Thanks alot!
This week is the first week of our #CodeStart School, a 13 month collaborative partnership between @AtlWorkforce @TechSquare @TheIronYard @OHUBAtl. 17 disconnected youth are in the program. Today, the 2nd full day of the program, we experience the following.
EFF:
Schools are issuing laptops and other digital devices to students under 18 years old, as well as requiring students to use cloud-based education platforms. We’re conducting a survey to learn more about these practices. Will you help us by reporting what’s happening at your school? This survey is open to parents, students at least 13 years of age, district or school administrators, and teachers.
Rowe is referring to a policy idea popularized by Bernie Sanders that taxpayers should heavily subsidize college — to the extent that it initially wouldn’t cost students anything out of pocket to attend. Obviously, there are some serious flaws in this idea. When one considers where tax dollars come from, it becomes apparent that students would ultimately end up paying for their tuition one way or another.
Under Sanders’s proposal, the difference is that instead of paying for their tuition at enrollment, students (and everyone else, for that matter) will pay for this “free” education when filing taxes every single year for the rest of their lives.
This won’t make college tuition less expensive, either. We can take a look at the impact government subsidies have had on higher education and determine that it’s done nothing to make college more affordable for anyone. In fact, for every dollar the federal government spends on college subsidies, the cost of tuition goes up by 55 to 65 cents.
The first major update in seven years of a database on grade inflation has found that grades continue to rise and that A is the most common grade earned at all kinds of colleges.
Since the last significant release of the survey, faculty members at Princeton University and Wellesley College, among other institutions, have debated ways to limit grade inflation, despite criticism from some students who welcome the high averages. But the new study says these efforts have not been typical. The new data, by Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University professor, and Christopher Healy, a Furman University professor, will appear today on the website GradeInflation.com, which will also have data for some of the individual colleges participating in the study.
The findings are based on an analysis of colleges that collectively enroll about one million students, with a wide range of competitiveness in admissions represented among the institutions. Key findings:
The achievement gap between students of color and their white counterparts in Dane County has been an area of concern for the past several years. In addition to what the Madison School District is doing to try and eliminate the gap, a local grassroots organization is hoping to reduce the achievement gap before kids start kindergarten.
Harold Rayford, pastor of The Faith Place Church in Sun Prairie and President of the African American Council of Churches, will launch the 1800 Days initiative on Tuesday, March 29, at 6 p.m. at the Central Madison Public Library.
1800 Days is a nonprofit organization focusing on a child’s first five years of life where significant intellectual development takes place, said Rayford. The emphasis will be on early childhood development so children can be academically and intellectually equipped to start kindergarten and stay on track once in school.
Rayford said the idea came about after he volunteered as an assistant librarian in a local middle school for about four years. He said he initially began the role to help teachers interact with minority students, but over time he realized the achievement gap was an issue that needed participation from everyone in the community, including minority groups.
discourse was a value all Americans hold dear. I presumed that when asked about what makes America so unique, many Americans would respond that our pluralistic society is the foundation of so much of our success. That it was understood that without a marketplace of ideas, our society simply could not flourish.
But then I started college.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service issued a proposed rule Monday to codify parts of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was championed by Mrs. Obama.
The regulation would punish schools and state departments with fines for “egregious or persistent disregard” for the lunch rules that imposed sodium and calorie limits and banned white grains.
Back in 1961, the gradual decline of many city centers in the U.S. began to puzzle urban planners and activists alike. One of them, the urban sociologist Jane Jacobs, began a widespread and detailed investigation of the causes and published her conclusions in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a controversial book that proposed four conditions that are essential for vibrant city life.
The French political journalist and supporter of the Royalist cause in the French Revolution, Jacques Mallet du Pan, famously summarized what often happens to extremists: “the Revolution devours its children.” I was thinking about this idiom—and its doppelgänger “what goes around comes around”—while writing a lecture for a talk I was invited to give at my alma mater California State University, Fullerton on the topic: “Is freedom of speech harmful for college students?” The short answer is an unflinching and unequivocal “No.”
Rafael Gomez held a forum this evening with unopposed candidates for three Madison School Board Seats: James Howard, Dean Loumos and TJ Mertz.
Listen via this 29MB 60 minute mp3 recording.
Katrease Stafford and Tresa Baldas
In its latest crackdown on school corruption here, the federal government Tuesday dropped a legal bomb on 12 current and former principals, one administrator and a vendor — all charged with running a nearly $1 million bribery and kickback scheme involving school supplies that rarely were delivered.
Among those charged: Ronald Alexander, principal at Charles L. Spain Elementary-Middle School that’s scheduled to receive more than $500,000 in donations from TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. Alexander’s charge, unrelated to DeGeneres’ announcement in February, is bribery for allegedly pocketing $23,000 money from Norman Shy in exchange for using the owner of Allstate Sales as a school-supply vendor, according to federal court records.
Renee Dudley, Steve Stecklow, Alexandra Harney and Irene Jay Liu
Internal documents show that the U.S. college entrance exam has been compromised in Asia far more often than acknowledged. And the newly redesigned SAT retains a key vulnerability that the test-prep industry has exploited for years.
Xingyuan Ding is a sophomore at the University of California, Los Angeles, one of America’s most exclusive public universities. In applying to schools, the 20-year-old from China took the SAT college entrance exam four times.
He had an advantage on his final try: a booklet compiled by a Shanghai test-preparation school he attended.
His study aid was far more valuable than the practice questions that students in America use to prepare for the SAT, the standardized test used by thousands of U.S. colleges to help select applicants. Known in Chinese as a jijing, the booklet was essentially an answer key. It revealed words from the correct responses to multiple-choice questions that had appeared on past SATs – many of which would be used again on the exam Ding took.
Thanks to the booklet, Ding said he already knew the answers to about half of the critical reading section of the SAT when he took the test in Hong Kong in December 2013.
“I felt really lucky,” Ding said.
His score on that section? A perfect 800, he said.
There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Few people know the struggle of correcting such lies better than David Spiegelhalter. Since 2007, he has been the Winton professor for the public understanding of risk (though he prefers “statistics” to “risk”) at the University of Cambridge.
In a sunlit hotel room in Washington DC, Quartz caught up with Spiegelhalter recently to talk about his unique job. The conversation sprawled from the wisdom of eating bacon (would you swallow any other known carcinogen?), to the serious crime of manipulating charts, to the right way to talk about rare but scary diseases.
About a year and a half ago, Jessica Schneider was handed a flyer by one of her colleagues in the child-advocacy community. It advertised a training session, offered under the auspices of the Illinois Principals Association (I.P.A.), in how to interrogate students. Specifically, teachers and school administrators would be taught an abbreviated version of the Reid Technique, which is used across the country by police officers, private-security personnel, insurance-fraud investigators, and other people for whom getting at the truth is part of the job. Schneider, who is a staff attorney at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, was alarmed. She knew that some psychologists and jurists have characterized the technique as coercive and liable to produce false confessions—especially when used with juveniles, who are highly suggestible. When she expressed her concerns to Brian Schwartz, the I.P.A.’s general counsel, he said that the association had been offering Reid training for many years and found it both popular and benign. To prove it, he invited Schneider to attend a session in January of 2015.
Finally, technology firms – thanks to data they collect – can always position themselves as essential to fighting the terrorist threat. For every Tim Cook fighting the FBI, there’s a Peter Thiel, the famed venture capitalist and the chairman of Palantir, a $20bn machine-learning giant that caters to the defence establishment. In a recent interview, Thiel even boasted that Palantir’s technology had helped thwart terrorist attacks.
The grim reality of contemporary politics is not that it’s impossible to imagine how capitalism will end – as the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson once famously put it – but that it’s becoming equally impossible to imagine how it could possibly continue, at least, not in its ideal form, tied, however weakly, to the democratic “polis”. The only solution that seems plausible is by having our political leaders transfer even more responsibility for problem-solving, from matters of welfare to matters of warfare, to Silicon Valley.
This might produce immense gains in efficiency but would this also not aggravate the democratic deficit that already plagues our public institutions? Sure, it would – but the crisis of democratic capitalism seems so acute that it has dropped any pretension to being democratic; hence the proliferation of euphemisms to describe the new normal (with Angela Merkel’s “market-conformed democracy” probably being the most popular one).
The waters of Lake Wobegon have flooded U.S. college campuses. A’s — once reserved for recognizing excellence and distinction — are today the most commonly awarded grades in America.
That’s true at both Ivy League institutions and community colleges, at huge flagship publics and tiny liberal arts schools, and in English, ethnic studies and engineering departments alike. Across the country, wherever and whatever they study, mediocre students are increasingly likely to receive supposedly superlative grades.
Several students sit around a conference table at Simon Gratz High School in North Philadelphia on a surly winter’s day, the kind that makes even the school’s drafty classrooms seem welcoming. They are there to give their assessment of the school – and they’re not afraid to be blunt.
“I like this school, but I kind of don’t,” says Chynah Perry, age 15, a thin girl with straight posture and stylish black-rimmed glasses. “It’s strict. Real strict.”
Quaseem Foxwell, a linebacker on the football team, says several of his friends left the school because of the tough rules. Yet he defends the strictures. He says he improved his own behavior after a heart-to-heart with his teachers and administrators. “When I came here and got into a fight, they told me I could get kicked out, or I could talk to the teachers and some of the deans,” he says. “The strict rules are all for a reason.”
Millions of would-be students turn to the federal government in order finance their education, each taking out thousands of dollars in loans. While that influx of funds allows borrowers to seek a better life by obtaining a degree, it also has to be repaid. And when that becomes impossible for some consumers, debt collectors hired by the Department of Education sometimes resort to garnishing wages.
According to recently released data from the Department of Education, that strategy paid off in the last three months of 2015, with debt collectors bringing in more than $176 million in garnishments [PDF].
Debt collectors, even those working for the federal government, can only garnish a borrower’s wages after they’ve defaulted on their debt — failed to pay for a certain number of months — and received a court order allowing the deductions.
The importance of principals. The school has had six principals in less than four years. That alone tells you a lot. I interviewed several people who are or were involved in the school and they all pointed to leadership as a problem. “Leadership sets the tone for everything happening in a building,” Knox said.
Lighthouse moved through several principals in rapid order at the start. Other circumstances around the school may have had an impact, but the bottom line is simply that having a good principal who provides steady, effective leadership is crucial to any school.
The importance of leadership more broadly. Adam Peck, current chair of the local Lighthouse board, summed up what went wrong: “Number one, leadership. You have to have the right leadership in place to run a school. And that’s leadership at all levels.”
Shenzhen’s government has doubled this year’s budget for programs related to attracting talented people to the city to 4.4 billion yuan this year in a bid to attract more academics and professionals to help nurture innovation.
The city government, which announced the plans through media outlets on March 21, made especially rich offers to top talents. It defined those as world-class scientists and researchers who have led nationally or internationally acclaimed research projects.
Shenzhen gave those luminaries three options should they come to the city. The first was a one-off cash payment of 6 million yuan. The second was a 10-year lease on a 200 square meter apartment, which could be kept if the person stayed for the entire period. That offer also included local household registration privileges, which entitle the holder to health care, education and other public services. The final option was 10 million yuan in cash and benefits, payable after 10 years.
Amid the cacophony of presidential campaign promises promising huge tax cuts and large spending increases, the Congressional Budget Office on Thursday renewed it’s warning that the Obama administration’s celebrated era of shrinking deficits has ended and that serious long- term debt problems are once again on the horizon.
By the end of the current fiscal year, the federal budget deficit will rise to $534 billion – about $100 billion more than last year’s shortfall but slightly better than a previous estimate in January. Then, as a new Democratic or Republican president takes control, the deficit will begin a steady upward march unless the new administration and Congress take steps to slow the rise.
Location: Sequoya Library at 513 Midvale Blvd. Madison, WI 53711
Date: March 29th. From 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.Sponsor by Schoolinfosystems.Org.
Any questions contact: Rafael Gomez at 608 445 2106
A St. Paul Central High School teacher is choked and body-slammed by a student and hospitalized with a traumatic brain injury. A teacher caught between two fighting fifth-grade girls is knocked to the ground with a concussion. Police are compelled to use a chemical irritant to break up a riot at Como Park High School.
Increasingly, some St. Paul Public Schools resemble a war zone. Ramsey County Attorney John Choi has branded the trend of violence “a public health crisis.” Teachers threatened to strike over the dangers they face, and their safety was a pivotal issue in recently concluded contract negotiations. “We are afraid,” one told the Pioneer Press.
Though many — including St. Paul school officials — seem reluctant to acknowledge it, the escalating violence and disorder follow a major change in school disciplinary policies. In recent years, district leaders have increasingly removed consequences for misbehavior, and led kids to believe they can wreak havoc with impunity.
By Col Bikram Singh
Winters had just set in, and so were the apprehensions of ‘What Next’ syndrome for an anxious father, who himself had missed the experience of a conventional college life. I had joined National Defence Academy and this intended venture was altogether a unique combat zone for me.
As the pre-boards were approaching, the journey dwindled like the grand annual migration of Wildebeest herd towards the great Mara River. The river was in proximity, its eerie noise was increasing day by day, and on its far bank, the green pastures full of life and freedom were alluring us.
Whenever I gazed at my son, I anticipated achievement; and his “look of silence” conveyed to me, “Buddy come what may, you will get me across to those green pastures”. It was a challenge for both of us to live up to. Another cord which connected us both was the “confusion”, which was growing day by day in our minds.
For starters, leftist activists are far more likely than anyone else to use sidewalk chalk and should be pushing to dispense with existing, rarely enforced campus regulations. The medium is unusually suited to the powerless, too: It is cheap, easy to use, and very hard to suppress. Yet they’re signing on to surveillance and punishment for chalk-wielding activism, as if it hasn’t even occurred to them that their allies stand to lose the most from future crackdowns, whereas Donald Trump 2016 could foreswear sidewalk chalk forever without suffering from it at all. I don’t know whether these students have an incoherent theory of how power works, or haven’t thought the matter through, but future leftist activists may rue their behavior.
What’s more, if the sidewalk-chalker is unmasked and punished, the effect will be to fuel the popularity of Trump 2016, not to undermine it. This is so obvious to everyone outside the bubble of campus leftism that I begin to wonder if activists at Emory don’t understand that, or just don’t actually care about outcomes beyond their bubble.
After 20 years of competing in land-based robotics competitions, students at the Limestone Career Technical Center are taking their skills beneath the waves.
For the first time, the school will compete in an underwater robotics competition to take place next month at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab.
The competition is representative of the growing presence of robotics in industrial applications and for scientific research.
It will test the students’ abilities to perform underwater tasks that engineers currently accomplish with remotely operated vehicles or ROVs, as well as tasks they hope swimming robots will perform in the future.
One of the most controversial elements of HB 7029 is a move to create more school choice even though there already are ample choices for students and parents in many school districts. The bill would allow parents from any school district in the state whose child is not suspended or expelled to enroll their child in any public or charter school that has an open seat. There are several reasonable parts of the provision, including giving preferential treatment to students who move because of their parents’ military assignment or who seek transfers because of court proceedings such as divorces. But on balance, open choice would create havoc for local districts. It also would create a bias toward students whose families have the time and resources to take them to the school of their choice miles away — even across county lines. It would not help poor children who could benefit from attending higher-performing schools with open seats or special programs but don’t have reliable transportation to get there.
Charter schools
There is another break for charter schools in the bill, although it’s not as generous as supporters originally sought. The bill would allow charter schools to receive capital funding within two years of being established instead of the three years required now. Reducing the time frame would shortchange taxpayers who deserve more proof that a charter school is sustainable and produces solid educational results before it gets construction money. Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Nice-ville, attempted to make it more difficult for charters to get state money, particularly if they have ties to private or for-profit entities, but unfortunately lost in horse trading among lawmakers. What remains would make charters even less accountable and foolishly siphon more money from traditional public schools.
The analysis, published by the state Public Service Commission, found that 2015 marked the first year that Wisconsin’s rates for residential, commercial and industrial electric customers ranked higher than Michigan as well as six other nearby Midwestern states.
But monthly residential electric bills on average stood at more than $97 a month last year — nearly $8 a month below the average of all eight Midwest states.
That’s because Wisconsinites are using 19% less electricity per month compared with the Midwest average.
Shortly after the incident, several student groups sent out a petition demanding Trump support be recognized as hate speech.
Many see President Wagner’s email as a harmless appeasement of the protesters’ demands. However, one should not underestimate the kind of precedent his response sets.
While the chalkers may have violated some parts of the vague chalking policy, the remedy for these violations is stated to be a clean-up fee, not a conduct hearing.
In the new report released today, “Undermining Pell III: The News Keeps Getting Worse for Low-Income Students,” Stephen Burd, Senior Policy Analyst with New America’s Education Policy Program, examines U.S. Department of Education data showing the average net price that students from low-income families attending 1,400 four-year public and private colleges paid in the 2013-2014 academic year. The average net price is the amount of money that students and their families have to pay after all grant and scholarship aid is deducted from the listed price.
Accompanying the research is a data visualization tool that allows users to view private and public institutions featured in this report—based on the percentage of their student population that receives Pell Grants and the average net price those students are charged per academic year.
The formal decline of tenure in Wisconsin has coincided with renewed media interest in faculty pay. System President Ray Cross said in an interview earlier last week that, while changes to tenure “are causes to make faculty nervous…the real reason I think faculty are being lured away is compensation packages.” The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported on faculty retention efforts at UW-Madison, detailing the tens of thousands of dollars in raises and additional research funds that a handful of faculty have negotiated in the face of job offers from elsewhere. The casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the end of tenure will bring a financial windfall for UW professors near and far.
Indeed, the elephant in the room last Thursday was money, particularly the Regents’ apparent unwillingness or inability to advocate for more of it in the face of legislative slashing and burning. The overarching goal of the new policies, we were repeatedly told, is to give chancellors flexibility. Flexibility, of course, is code for a host of austerity measures predicated on the consolidation of power in administrative hands. It can also be read here as a byword for Regental buck-passing: far from standing up to legislators, the Regents have turned around and told chancellors to stand up to faculty, all while adopting policies that create a glide path for further cuts. The time to draw a line in the sand was yesterday; instead, our new flexibility-enhanced chancellors will be able to use program prioritization and other means to enact a kind of financial emergency in slow motion.
As we become a more data-driven society, we need to consider education reforms that will address both.
In his new book The Math Myth, Andrew Hacker—a longtime political scientist at Queens College in New York and a professor of numeracy courses—looks at how a new approach to teaching math could help the world. He questions the benefit of advanced math, such as trigonometry and calculus, and says he’s “waiting to be shown that agility with polynomials produces sharper insights on other topics.” Hacker doesn’t deny the virtues of differential equations for budding engineers, but he argues that the way we teach math to millions of other students is deeply flawed and morally misguided. It alienates and fails many, contributes to the dropout rate in high school, blocks even a community college degree, especially for the socioeconomically disadvantaged (a “harsh and senseless hurdle”), and in turn ensures a less equal society. Given how dull most students find math, he’d much rather generate enthusiasm for numbers by focusing on complex real-world problems. He writes that students need to “read, speak, and think numerically,” particularly using public data, from IRS tax figures to census numbers to household spending trends
Richard Adams and Sally Weale:
sufficient qualification to be a school governor, the education secretary has suggested, as she said she wants families and councils to take a businesslike approach to her plans to convert all of England’s schools into academies.
In an interview with the Guardian, Nicky Morgan said she expected that the public were unlikely to have strong feelings about changes to school governance, including plans to scrap the right of parents to have representatives on schools’ boards of governors.
Both the U.S. Education Department and college administrators are fighting sexual harassment and assault on campuses in ways that trample faculty members’ rights to academic freedom, due process, and shared governance, the American Association of University Professors argues in a draft report released on Thursday.
Moreover, the report warns, colleges’ current focus on eliminating sexual harassment may be contributing to other campus inequities, and may actually be hindering broader efforts to fight sexual discrimination under the gender-equity law known as Title IX.
Kelly Henderson loves her job, teaching at Newton South High School in a suburb west of Boston. But she’s frustrated she can’t afford to live in the community where she teaches: It’s part of the 10th most expensive housing market in the nation.
“For people in the private sector, they’re probably saying ‘Oh poor you, you can’t live in the community where you work, what’s the big deal?’ ” says Henderson, 35. “And I guess part of the nature of public education and why it’s a different kind of job, is that it’s all-consuming — as it should be.”
initiative is going to ‘assist in the preservation of open debate’ by monitoring social media for ‘subversive propaganda’ and combating what it considers to be ‘the diffusion of false and misleading ideas?’ ” he wrote in an op-ed. “The concept seems to have come straight out of a George Orwell novel.”
Anyone competent in languages such as Python, Java, or even Web coding like HTML and CSS, is currently in high demand by businesses that are still just gearing up for the digital marketplace. However, as coding becomes more commonplace, particularly in developing nations like India, we find a lot of that work is being assigned piecemeal by computerized services such as Upwork to low-paid workers in digital sweatshops.
This trend is bound to increase. The better opportunity may be to use your coding skills to develop an app or platform yourself, but this means competing against thousands of others doing the same thing—and in an online marketplace ruled by just about the same power dynamics as the digital music business.
The common idea across most of the American political spectrum is that compulsory state-funded education is the liberal way to create a knowledgeable and engaged democratic citizenry. Without it, children would either be left to work or would never bother to educate themselves. The specter of illiterate future generations is invoked by both school reformers and defenders of the current system. Although there are many people within the public education system who believe in the noble goals of civic pedagogy, that’s not what America’s schools were built to do. Goyal argues convincingly that, before compulsory schooling, unenslaved Americans were not only extraordinarily well-read by international standards but widely covetous of learning. Compulsory schooling was not introduced to solve the problem of uneducated, unengaged, or unthinking masses. If anything, the opposite is closer to the truth.
In 1837, Horace Mann, the founder of American compulsory education, established the Massachusetts Board of Education, the first such agency and one which would become the model for the nation. But Mann didn’t want a more intellectually engaged population—literacy in the state already stood at 99 percent. Social control was a serious concern for Western elites after a series of failed revolutions, and Mann was very impressed by the system he saw on a visit to Prussia. He returned with a plan for public education.
After eight years as the Cook County State’s Attorney, Anita Alvarez may be voted out of the office on Tuesday for her role in Chicago’s scandalous police culture.
In the past few months, she’s been the subject of public outrage for her handling of Laquan McDonald’s shooting, which inspired calls for her resignation. But during her tenure as Chicago’s lead attorney, Alvarez has routinely covered up police violence and failed to prosecute cops for misconduct, including but not limited to deadly shootings, harassment, and making bogus arrests. She’s refused to reopen the cases of people who are likely innocent, criminalized people for recording officers, and bullied college students who were critical of her office.
Considered one of the most aggressive prosecutors in the country by Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice, Alvarez has also gone to great lengths to prosecute Chicago’s school children. That’s why the Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU), which boasts 27,000 members, endorsed one of Alvarez’ opponents in February — the first time the union ever endorsed a state’s attorney candidate. In February, CTU president Karen Lewis said, “Kim Foxx is (the) only candidate with a real plan to invest in our next generation that will help end the school-to-prison pipeline.”
But another reason one might think this movement has a longer history is the nature of its ambitions beyond the removal of these statues, though it is the issue of the statues, and allegations that the students involved wish to rewrite history to suit their sensitivities, that have attracted controversy, particularly in the British media. These larger ambitions of the movement – that is, to bring out into the open institutional racism in university life in South Africa and Britain, and to decolonise education – speak to concerns that many have had for a while. These concerns, by now, have a long itinerary, but they have been awaiting a forum for articulation.
Most of the controversy generated by the movement has revolved around the figure of Cecil Rhodes – but Rhodes himself is not really central to its aims. What is at issue is an ethos that gives space and even preeminence to such a figure, and hesitates to interrogate Rhodes’s legacy. That legacy does not merely include Rhodes’s financial bequests and their educational offshoots, like the Rhodes scholarships, but the vision embodied in his will, which called for:
Math is no more about equations than poetry is about spelling. Find your Aha! moment.
Zoe:
Most of you probably don’t know this, but I am a home schooled highschooler. Mind blowing, right? But, what made me want to start my art career this early? What made me think I was ready, when I hadn’t gone to art school and mostly just doodled in my spare time? Why would I be willing to dive into this scary business of illustrating a children’s book? Well, to be honest, I didn’t think I was ready, not even in the slightest. It was super scary getting started, and it will continue to be scary until I am done with the illustrations for this book. After all, I’m only fifteen. How could I possibly satisfy this person’s needs?
But here are the reasons why I will never ever regret getting a head start on my illustrating career in highschool, and you won’t either.
But over time, Chicago taxpayers will be forced to bear a far heavier, backbreaking burden because employees and retirees won’t be meeting them halfway.
The deal that Emanuel painstakingly negotiated with scores of union leaders raised employee contributions by 29 percent — from 8.5 percent currently to 11 percent by 2019 — and ended compounded cost-of-living adjustments for retirees ineligible for Social Security that have been a driving force behind the city’s pension crisis.
The city started collecting the higher payments on Jan. 1, 2015.
Emanuel initially proposed raising property taxes by $250 million over five years to bankroll the city’s increased contribution to save the two funds.
icky gazed up toward the pine trees as his mother, Cindy Preslar, pushed him along the village road in an orange jogging stroller. She was marking the route for the Summer 2014 Run Through the Clouds 10K, a fund-raiser for the public schools in Cloudcroft, N.M. “You’ll run with Dad and Max tomorrow,” she said. “Right, Ricky?” She ruffled his fine blond hair. By “run” she meant “ride” — Ricky was 7, but his legs were unable to bear his full weight. As a result of a complication during pregnancy, Cindy says, he was born with a form of cerebral palsy known as spastic quadriplegia with static encephalopathy, which meant permanent brain damage and severely limited eyesight because of cortical vision impairment.
Ricky’s problems were not recognized immediately. He was a fussy eater but an otherwise genial baby; the Preslars’ friends commented on the twinkle in his eyes. Then, at about 3 months, he began to jolt awake at night, the back of his pajamas soaked with sweat. One afternoon, when Cindy laid him on his changing table, he arched and crossed his arms, and his eyes rolled back in his head as if he were in the throes of a seizure. A CT scan taken soon after that revealed a scarred, atypically small, or microcephalic, brain. The Preslars don’t know how much Ricky understands, but based on medical assessments, he is thought to have the developmental age of a 6-month-old infant.
Schools with funds of $10 billion or more — affecting Yale only — could face a tax on endowment income, according to legislation introduced this month. Yale’s record $25.6 billion fund is the second largest in U.S. higher education, behind Harvard University’s $37.6 billion.
The richest college endowments, many at their highest values ever, also have drawn scrutiny from federal lawmakers. Last month, the U.S. Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees sent a joint inquiry to the richest 56 private schools about endowments, seeking to understand the impact of their tax-exempt status on the price tag of higher education, among other issues.
education equality index.
Madison has long spent more than most, despite long tolerating disastrous reading results.
Laura Waters comments.
Plans to build what is expected to be the second-largest private school in the Milwaukee Parental Choice voucher program passed its final hurdle at City Hall and could begin construction as early as April.
Milwaukee’s Board of Zoning Appeals unanimously approved a special use permit earlier this month for St. Augustine Preparatory School, the $45 million project unveiled last year by Waukesha County businessman and school reform advocate Gus Ramirez.
Ramirez, chairman of Husco International, declined to comment. He is expected to release updated plans, including school leadership, at an April 12 event at Discovery World.
Ramirez and a limited liability company known as Achieving Educational Excellence have been given the go-ahead to build a 170,000 square foot school at S. 5th St. and W. Harrison Ave. The school would accommodate up to 1,000 students in kindergarten through grade 12.
Casscells et al1 published a small but important study showing that the majority of physicians, house officers, and students overestimated the positive predictive value (PPV) of a laboratory test result using prevalence and false positive rate. Today, interpretation of diagnostic tests is even more critical with the increasing use of medical technology in health care. Accordingly, we replicated the study by Casscells et al1 by asking a convenience sample of physicians, house officers, and students the same question: “If a test to detect a disease whose prevalence is 1/1000 has a false positive rate of 5%, what is the chance that a person found to have a positive result actually has the disease, assuming you know nothing about the person’s symptoms or signs?”
That video shows the teacher with one kid in a headlock. That student doesn’t appreciate this, and tries lifting the teacher off the ground, while the second kid appears to give the teacher a shove; the combined effect takes the teacher to the cement floor, where the scuffle appears to break up.
Matthew Albright and Saranac Hale Spencer:
The success of those votes comes down to whether district officials can coax enough parents with children in public schools to go to the polls. They must outnumber those who don’t feel they have a stake in the schools or who feel districts should do more to prove they deserve a tax increase.
“If I go to my boss and haven’t done what I’m supposed to … I don’t ask for a raise,” said Susan Welsh, who wants to see Christina begin to improve student test scores and find efficiencies before she votes in favor. “I love my child enough to vote ‘no’ and hold them [the district] accountable to raising the ranking before I give them a raise.”
District supporters say referendums aren’t a luxury. They are a necessity.
Money that pays for schools is a mix of state, federal and local funds. While the state’s portion grows as districts enroll more students, the local portion comes from property taxes that don’t increase to match growing costs.
The common idea across most of the American political spectrum is that compulsory state-funded education is the liberal way to create a knowledgeable and engaged democratic citizenry. Without it, children would either be left to work or would never bother to educate themselves. The specter of illiterate future generations is invoked by both school reformers and defenders of the current system. Although there are many people within the public education system who believe in the noble goals of civic pedagogy, that’s not what America’s schools were built to do. Goyal argues convincingly that, before compulsory schooling, unenslaved Americans were not only extraordinarily well-read by international standards but widely covetous of learning. Compulsory schooling was not introduced to solve the problem of uneducated, unengaged, or unthinking masses. If anything, the opposite is closer to the truth.
In 1837, Horace Mann, the founder of American compulsory education, established the Massachusetts Board of Education, the first such agency and one which would become the model for the nation. But Mann didn’t want a more intellectually engaged population—literacy in the state already stood at 99 percent. Social control was a serious concern for Western elites after a series of failed revolutions, and Mann was very impressed by the system he saw on a visit to Prussia. He returned with a plan for public education.
From the 19th century onwards, “trailing spouses” have made their own way in Hong Kong, opening businesses and forging existences quite separate from their husband’s work role.
Among Hong Kong’s earliest such enterprises was a millinery and haberdashery shop set up on Queen’s Road Central in the early 1850s by Harriet Duddell, in premises let to her by her husband, Frederick, who, with his brother George, was in business in Hong Kong. Harriet never left the China coast; she died in 1857, and was buried in the Old Protestant Cemetery, in Macau. Duddell Street, in Central, is named after the family.
Not all “hobby” businesses are intended to turn a profit – or are operated by trailing spouses. Have you ever wondered just how – in times of catastrophically spiralling rents – various small “businesses” found across Hong Kong can possibly make any money? From Kennedy Town to Tai Hang, examples abound of chic patisseries selling “artisanal” this or “hand-made” that, or tiny boutiques lightly stocked with virtually one-of-a-kind homewares or garments.
the fall of 2013, Yue Zou decided that she wanted to leave Hegang, the city where she lived in the Heilongjiang province of China, and attend college in the United States. Her boyfriend, already a student at the University of Pittsburgh, was eager to help her get admitted to a competitive university.
He didn’t help to edit her essay or arrange for her to be tutored for the SAT. Instead he contacted a Chinese company that specializes in finding American-based test-taking proxies who, for a fee, obtain high scores on the SAT, the graduate school admission test called the GRE, and English-proficiency exams like the TOEFL for their wealthy Chinese clients.
According to court documents, Zou’s boyfriend negotiated a deal with the test broker. Zou then paid the broker $6,000 for the TOEFL and $2,000 for the SAT. The broker then arranged for a graduate student to take Zou’s college-entrance exams in Pennsylvania, the court documents say.
The scheme succeeded, at least for a time. Zou applied to and was accepted at Virginia Tech, where the average SAT score range for the math and reading sections is between 1160 and 1340. She enrolled there in the fall of 2014.
I guess when you risk losing your monopoly over publicly funded education, you’re not likely to roll out the welcome mat for anyone chosen to oversee the creation of non-district-controlled charter schools — no matter what his credentials.
As the man who will establish and lead the new Office of Educational Opportunity for the University of Wisconsin System, Gary Bennett will have a lot of influence over what kinds of independent charter schools Madison and Milwaukee students and their familieswill be able to choose from in the future.
Have you heard the latest wisecrack about Harvard? People are calling it a hedge fund with a university attached. They have a point—Harvard stands at the troubling intersection between higher education and high finance, with over 15 percent of its massive $38 billion endowment invested in hedge funds. That intersection is getting crowded. Yale’s comparatively modest $26 billion endowment, for example, made hedge fund managers $480 million in 2014, while only $170 million was spent on things like tuition assistance and fellowships for students. “I was going to donate money to Yale. But maybe it makes more sense to mail a check directly to the hedge fund of my choice,” Malcolm Gladwell tweeted last summer, causing a commotion that landed him on NPR.
In a brief speech last weekend at the shindig for John Matthews — who retired in January after 48 years as executive director of the Madison teachers union — Kloppenburg said she “couldn’t miss gathering with some of the best people in Wisconsin to honor the most amazing John Matthews.”
Matthews is not known for his politically independent views — or his circumspection. He hasn’t been shy about hating on the Madison School Board, for example.
Kloppenburg’s campaign has also hinged on painting Bradley as a partisan because she’s a three-time Walker appointee to the bench and a member of conservative groups such as the Federalist Society.
By contrast, Kloppenburg’s website describes her as “running for Supreme Court to help maintain a judiciary that is non-partisan, independent and free from special interests.”
Bradley makes the same hollow promises on her website, but also self-identifies as a conservative with a few well-known code phrases (e.g., her approach “is to interpret the law, not invent it”).
Much more on John Matthews, here Event photos.
Candidate Links: Joanne Kloppenburg and Rebecca Bradley.
MTI Voters political contributions.
Point one: If Milwaukee has demonstrated anything to the nation with its long, broad and deep school choice offerings, it is that school quality is generated far more at the level of individual schools than sector by sector.
There are MPS schools where students score much above the Milwaukee averages and, in a few cases, above the state averages. There are voucher schools where that is true. And the same for charter schools. And there are MPS, voucher and charter schools with scores that raise major questions about the school.
Nobody has a monopoly on success or failure. It’s really a school-by-school subject — and, often times within schools, a classroom-by-classroom subject, with some teachers leading their students to much better outcomes than others.
Point two: There’s little reason to find joy in the overall scores, no matter the sector. Third- through eighth-graders in independent charter schools did better than voucher and MPS students for language arts (also generally labeled, “reading”). That means about a third of the charter kids were rated proficient or advanced, compared with a quarter, give or take several points, of other kids.
always admired the liberal Muslims in the Quilliam Foundation. It is hard to take accusations of betrayal from your own community. Harder still to keep fighting when the thought feeling keeps nagging away that out there, somewhere, there are Islamists who might do you real harm.
But Quilliam keeps fighting. To mark the launch by students of the Right2Debate campaign, which seeks to make universities live up to their principles and respect the right to speak and dispute, they have collected accounts from atheists and secularists of the wretched state of higher education.
I should pause to explain that last sentence to the confused.
The research (and clearly the hype about) blockchain in education continues. Look for some more formal articles/analysis from me in the coming weeks. Other posts in this series:
But when Bay State reformers began their work two decades ago, school outcomes in Massachusetts looked a lot like ours — possibly worse. Thirty percent of elementary- and middle-school kids could not do basic math. Some schools had a student-teacher ratio of 50-to-1. Business leaders worried that a growing underclass could cripple the economy. And there was a lawsuit, similar to the McCleary case in Washington.
“The education of all children was seen as a matter, not only of fairness but of economic self-interest,” said Paul Reville, who was the state’s secretary of education during the overhaul and now teaches at Harvard University.
In his opinion, three strategies — all of them costly and most aimed at low-income schools — are making the difference: beefed-up early education; an expanded school day resulting in significant salary increases; and huge boosts to teacher training.
“You can’t say if I put in x more dollars, I’ll get y results,” he added. “It’s how you spend the money that matters. If you do more of the same, you’ll get more of the same.”
But he’s also one of the leading advocates for adding a big dose of humanities and social sciences to the curriculum of Hong Kong’s universities.
Chung and other backers of an unprecedented three-year-old curriculum-reform effort are determined to steer the city’s eight universities away from the rote learning, test obsession, and narrow career focus that still characterize much of the Asian education system. They think it’s past time for colleges to introduce a broader range of subjects, to promote greater intellectual curiosity, and to foster creative thinking. And they’re convinced that these changes will, in turn, build a workforce of rigorous, creative thinkers—just what they think is needed to meet the fast-changing needs of a transforming global economy.
What happens to your relationships when your emotional perception changes overnight? Because I’m autistic, I have always been oblivious to unspoken cues from other people. My wife, my son and my friends liked my unflappable demeanor and my predictable behavior. They told me I was great the way I was, but I never really agreed.
For 50 years I made the best of how I was, because there was nothing else I could do. Then I was offered a chance to participate in a study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching center of Harvard Medical School
Michelle King, the new superintendent at Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), has been on a listening tour. A 30-plus year veteran of the district who has risen from the teacher ranks, King wants to connect with parents and share her plans for the district, then hear their concerns—standard practice for an incoming schools’ chief. But for her first stop, King chose a low-income neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, where there are some strong and popular charter schools. In front of 700 parents, she made Los Angeles Times headlines when she “called for traditional public school and charters…to work together.” She added that delivering a strong education is “something we need to do together. I can’t do this alone.”
Olivia Mitchell, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said public pension plans face “grave difficulties”.
“I do believe that US cities and towns will continue to suffer, and there will be additional bankruptcies following the examples of Detroit and the cities of Vallejo, Stockton and San Bernardino,” she said.
The worsening pension deficit means cities and states will have to contribute more to retirement plans, according to Mr Aaron, forcing them to either find new sources of revenue, such as by raising taxes, or reducing workforces or cutting services.
The Moody’s research additionally found that fewer than half of the 56 pension plans it examined received government pension contributions at an adequate level to reduce the funding gap.
A study by Wilshire Associates, the consultancy, published earlier this month, showed that state-sponsored pension plans in the US had just 73 per cent of the assets they needed to pay current and future retirees in mid-2015, down from 77 per cent in 2014. In 2007, this was 95 per cent.
Nobody wins as a result of America’s neglect of its rural schools.
Moderate investments of time, money, and thought could unlock the potential of millions of students growing up, but it’s essentially going nowhere in rural areas.
Rural K-12 schools face unique challenges brought on by isolation, limited access to qualified faculty, declining economic bases, and community conflict over taxation and funding. Many face sudden changes in student population – declines in some places and rapid increases in others, the latter often due to influxes of children from former migrant worker families.
State and federal policies on school funding and operation also pose challenges, as they often require bureaucratic capacities that small rural districts can’t and shouldn’t have. Categorical funding programs often force schools to spend money in ways that don’t fit rural needs. Rigid state teacher salary schedules make it difficult for rural schools to compete for talent.
Patrick Denice, Betheny Gross, Karega Rausch
Fair use of exclusionary discipline is a rising concern in public schools. At issue is whether this type of discipline is disproportionately applied to certain groups of students and whether some charter schools use it more frequently. For the first time, data compiled by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights capture discipline practices from all public schools, allowing for comparison between the traditional public and charter sectors. However, because they are reported at the school level, not at the individual student level, these data paint an incomplete picture.
To truly understand discipline practices between and within school sectors, a panel of experts recommends a more comprehensive approach to capturing discipline data and evaluating and comparing school discipline practices. A robust research agenda on school discipline might include the reasons why different approaches to discipline policy are developed, how schools define and conceptualize discipline practices, the impact of discipline practices on teacher supply and turnover, the interplay between school culture and discipline and the effects of exclusionary discipline on the affected students and their peers and teachers.