Dan Walters:

years ago, the Legislature adopted a landmark measure to give parents – particularly poor parents – more power over their children’s educations.

The education establishment, especially unions, didn’t like it, but refusing to compete for a “Race to the Top” federal grant was an unpalatable option.

The best-known aspect of the measure, carried by Democratic Sen. Gloria Romero, was the “parent trigger” that allowed parents of children in low-performing schools to intervene – even seizing control.

Another provision, however, required the state schools superintendent, then and now Tom Torlakson, to publish annually a list of the state’s 1,000 lowest-achieving schools, as shown by academic tests, and allowed parents of children in those schools to move them to higher-rated schools.

The basis for those judgments was the Academic Performance Index, a test-based scoring system for schools that teacher unions and other elements of the education establishment also disliked.

Two years ago, the testing regime upon which the API was based was changed, and the API itself was suspended. The state Board of Education is devising a “multiple measures” accountability program that downplays testing and is likely to seek a repeal of the API.

Seb Schmoller:

Last week we released a big batch of new CC-BY licensed content for Citizen Maths a free online course for adults who want to improve their grasp of maths at what in the UK is known as Level 2 (the level that 16 year old school leavers are expected to reach, though many do not).

The new course content covers the powerful ideas in maths of “uncertainty” and “representation”. It sits alongside the content for “proportion” which was published last year.

Learning about each idea is supported by a mix of short video tutorials, practical exercises, and quizzes. The practical exercises use a range of approaches including:

James Pethokoukis:

McKinsey offers a great tool that looks at the automation potential of various job categories. Or to be more precise, the consultancy “analyzed more than 750 occupations in the United States to determine the percentage of time that could be automated by currently demonstrated technology.”

So this is less about robots replacing workers than parts of jobs being automated. Indeed, McKinsey has found “that even the highest-paid occupations in the economy, such as financial managers, physicians, and senior executives, including CEOs, have a significant amount of activity that can be automated.”

John Fallon:

The OECD has just released their annual ‘Education At A Glance’ report. At over 800 pages, there’s quite a lot to it. But you don’t need to read too far in to get to one of its key points: “Efforts to achieve universal access to education must go hand-in-hand with a renewed focus on education quality…”. In other words, access with progress.

At Pearson, we have put a huge focus on measuring how what we do helps to improve learning outcomes. It’s something we started talking about over two years ago, and though it’s a commitment that’s seen our company totally transformed, the basic principle remains unchanged – everyone in education should seek to measure the effect of their impact. The consequences are too important not to do so.

Here’s how I made the case back in June 2014 at the Harvard University Global Education Conference.

The Economist:

Disney is its determination to put storytelling at the heart of its business, and its ability to get its hands on new characters capable of bringing fans back again and again. Disney’s purchase of Pixar Animation Studios and Marvel Entertainment brought Buzz Lightyear of “Toy Story” and Iron Man of “The Avengers” to a stable of mice and Muppets. Lucasfilm added Star Wars to the cast of characters that the firm has amassed since Mr Iger succeeded Michael Eisner as CEO.

These new franchises have joined the world’s most formidable licensing and entertainment empire, one that encompasses toy shops, video games, theme parks, cruises, comics, music, television and feature films. Disney is commercialising childhood through lots of channels—and making the companies it bought, as well as itself, far more valuable in the process.

Alan Borsuk:

This just in: Every child in America will not be reading and doing math on grade level by the end of 2014.

You know that. You knew that years ago.

But as 2015 headed toward its end, it was the law of the land.

My actual focus today is on the new federal education law that is taking the place of the much-maligned No Child Left Behind law that was on the books for almost 14 years, which I’d suggest was at least nine too many. What will the new law mean to Wisconsin?

But first I can’t resist recounting an anecdote. In 2008, Margaret Spellings, then secretary of education for President George W. Bush, met with the editorial board of the Journal Sentinel during a visit to Milwaukee. I sat in.

I told her that it was obvious that 100% of students nationwide were not going to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, as the law required. I asked what was a realistic goal.

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

In order to understand why our children are making the decision to die, Silicon Valley parents need to be willing to examine what is perhaps our community’s most sacred cow: the false but tightly-held belief that students must attend a highly selective college to be worth anything in life, and that our worth as parents is also measured by that metric.

With this mindset as mantra, and with those colleges routinely denying 90-95% of applicants, we set our children on a grim racecourse to try to beat those nearly impossible odds. We’ve created a way of life in which kids have no time for play—which is an inalienable right for every child around the globe, according to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). Instead, we insist that every moment of our children’s lives be enriching, as if each activity, athletic endeavor, quiz, and piece of homework is a make or break moment for their future. As if every afternoon must be harnessed for usefulness.

Sean Michael Morris:

The only explanation for Ron Srigley’s recent article in the Los Angeles Review of Books is chagrin. His own, or his hope to lather with chagrin the parents of university students, his fellow teachers — in particular those he refers to as “not scholars but employees” — and even students themselves. His voice comes off the screen acerbic and self-satisfied, and the nakedness of his spite for current trends in education (“student-centered learning”, YouTube lectures, and the veering away from a tradition of classic texts, grade- and professor-centered university culture) is so palpable it’s a feast of bile.

I am not trying to shame or malign or even chide Ron Srigley. What would be the point of that? To respond to him in kind would be to agree with him. I do not agree with him; most particularly, I don’t agree with what his argument evidences of his pedagogy, namely that learning happens through shaming, maligning, chiding. For I think we can make no mistake in his intention: his article is not meant as just a testament or epistle — it’s meant to teach. To teach us and the rest of his audience about the insolence of today’s educators, the erosion of the ivy-covered tower, and to remind us about the inevitable laziness of college students. And he teaches through scorn. It’s that scorn I disagree with.

Jon Marcus and Holly K. Hacker

The main dining hall at Trinity College starts you off with a choice of infused water: lemon, pineapple, strawberry, melon. There are custom-made smoothies, all-day breakfasts, make-your-own waffles, and frozen yogurt, along with countless choices of entrees hovered over by white-jacketed chefs.

Sun pours in through windows overlooking the leafy, manicured campus fringed with stately red brick dorms and classroom buildings past which students stroll with their noses in books. A new student center that will include a Starbucks is going up beside the tennis courts. As a college worker clears her dishes, one senior talks over lunch about the job she’s already lined up after graduation with the help of an alumna.

British Library:

Portable almanacs were most probably made to be used by physicians and those with an interest in astronomy, astrology and prognostication. They were small, consisting usually of 6 to 8 parchment leaves folded in half and then into 4 or 6 oblong sections, sewn together at one edge with a tab that could be fastened to the girdle with a piece of cord. On the outside of each section were often titles for easy reference so that the correct page could be selected. – See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/12/all-manacs-on-line.html#sthash.7NFUandT.dpuf

Larry Sanger:

Support for democracy is declining. First, let’s talk a bit about support for democracy—yes, democracy itself, as in voting for your leaders and representatives and holding them accountable in the arena of public debate. Only one in five Millennials aged 18 through 29 cast a ballot in the 2014 elections—the lowest youth voter turnout in 40 years, says the Atlantic.

As Vox recently asked, “Are Americans losing faith in democracy?” The article makes a series of points illustrating that Americans, especially younger Americans, are ignorant of and aren’t engaging in American political life. The article’s main source is a forthcoming paper by Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk titled “The Democratic Disconnect,” together with the World Values Survey. The writers summarized their own work in the New York Times last September.

Asked how much interest they have in politics (as Vox reports), Americans born in the 1930s said “very interested” or “somewhat interested” almost 80% of the time; for those born in the 1970s, the figure dropped to about 50%, and for those born in the 1980s, it was continuing to drop just as precipitously.

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email:

(was a literature major in college, and only came to read history seriously afterwards. No one emphasized the benefits of history when I was in school. And I realize that the appreciation of history is a bit cumulative. That is, when a student first reads history she doesn’t know who these people are or what they are doing or why that might be important to know.

Teachers have to assume some responsibility for expressing their assurance that history is not only interesting but also essential—that is, if they are aware of that themselves. Things go slow in learning any new language. Students can’t love French poetry or Chinese philosophy right away. They have to work to learn the language basics first.

That goes for history as well. But after reading history for a few years, people and events come to be more familiar, and the chronology turns out to be no more difficult and perhaps even more interesting than irregular verbs.

Janet Lorin:

The U.S. government is sitting on a growing pile of debt backed by little more than parental love.

That’s because parents can borrow tens of thousands of dollars a year for their kids’ college education without showing they can pay it back. About 3 million parents have $71 billion in loans, contributing to more than $1.2 trillion in federal education debt. As of May 2014, half of the balance was in deferment, racking up interest at annual rates as high as 7.9 percent.

“It’s deeply problematic that the federal government is making relatively high-interest loans without thinking about, much less checking, whether the people they’re lending to will be crippled by this debt,” said Toby Merrill, a Harvard Law School lecturer who has counseled defaulted parents through the school’s Project on Predatory Student Lending. “We’re impoverishing the less-privileged population who are aging. That’s a terrible policy.”

Bruce Baker

A short while back, I explained how, in our fervor to rapidly expand charter schooling and decrease the role of large urban school districts in serving their resident school-aged populations, we’ve created some particularly ludicrous scenarios whereby, for example – charter school operators use public tax dollars to buy land and facilities that were originally purchased with other public dollars… and at the end of it all, the assets are in private hands! Even more ludicrous is that the second purchase incurred numerous fees and administrative expenses, and the debt associated with that second purchase likely came with a relatively high interest rate because – well – revenue bonds paid for by charter school lease payments are risky. Or so the rating agencies say.

So how much of this debt is accumulating? And when does it come due? Who is issuing this debt? Are we looking at a charter school subprime bubble? Here are some snapshots:

Madison’s government schools spend > $17K per student annually.

Peter Mandler:

The humanities are in crisis. It’s become orthodoxy. In fact, so much attention has been paid to the ‘crisis of the humanities’ that few have stopped to ask if there actually is such a crisis. Over just the past few generations, enormous changes have transformed higher education. These changes have brought a greater proportion of 18-year-olds to university. In the case of most countries apart from the United States, this brings a huge increase, from a low base – and thus tremendous changes in the composition of that student body in terms of class, gender, ethnicity and other key markers. In each generation, commentators have predicted (and policymakers have demanded) that the humanities would suffer from a more utilitarian, career-oriented, tech-savvy influx. But it hasn’t happened.

In the English-speaking world, over the past half-century, the proportion of students studying humanities at university has hardly changed. True, as one might expect, in the US, the United Kingdom and Australia, there have been fluctuations and important changes in educational demographics, most importantly more women going to college. The crude picture is this: in 1971, humanities students outnumbered business students; now it’s the other way around. But in 1971 there were also about 50 per cent more business majors than science majors; now there are about 250 per cent more.

Meredith Kolodner:

As racial unrest sweeps across major college campuses, and African-American students demand more equitable treatment, college administrators need look no farther than their own admissions offices to find one root of the problem.

The nation’s flagship public universities — large, taxpayer-funded institutions whose declared mission is to educate residents of their states — enroll far smaller proportions of black students than other colleges, and the number appears to be declining, according to federal records and college enrollment data analyzed by The Hechinger Report and The Huffington Post.

Desiree Lewis

VARIOUS COMMENTATORS, both in and beyond South Africa, are currently documenting and interpreting the waves of student protests in this country. These protests initially focused on the Higher Education and Training Minister’s announcement of massive fee increases, but the student call to reject the fee increase from 2016 has morphed into a broad-based movement focusing on South Africans’ constitutional rights to social justice and equality. At the time of this writing, student groupings at several campuses are continuing to act on the call to challenge University Management, the Education Department, and institutional arrangements that sanction inflated HE fees, the exploitation of outsourced workers on campuses, and the non-transformation of universities curricula, staffing, and student admission arrangements.

In my own effort to understand these movements, I’ve begun to reflect increasingly on regional and continent-wide processes. I have been reminded of two in particular: on the one hand, the use of crowdsourcing citizen journalism that culminated in Ushahidi (literally, “testimony” in Swahili), originally an activist movement that gathered knowledge from below in the wake of the violence in Kenya during 2007; and on the other, the centrality of student protest, also driven predominantly by crowdsourcing and ICT activism, at the core of the Egyptian revolutions from 2011.

Aman Sethi

On the night of 7 January 2012, a stationmaster at a provincial railway station in central India discovered the body of a young woman lying beside the tracks. The corpse, clothed in a red kurta and a violet and grey Puma jacket, was taken to a local morgue, where a postmortem report classified the death as a homicide.

The unidentified body was “a female aged about 21 to 25 years”, according to the postmortem, which described “dried blood present” in the nostrils, and the “tongue found clenched between upper and lower jaw, two upper teeth found missing, lips found bruised”. There was a crescent of scratches on the young woman’s face, as if gouged by the fingernails of a hand forcefully clamped over her mouth. “In our opinion,” the handwritten report concluded, “[the] deceased died of asphyxia (violent asphyxia) as a result of smothering.”

Nikhil Sonnad:

The story of Chinese characters begins with, of all things, turtle bellies.

The kings of the Shang Dynasty—which ruled from the 16th to the 11th centuries BC—had questions. Questions about what the king should do, like whether to “perform a ritual for Father Ding and offer to him thirty captives from the Qiang nomad tribe as well as five penned sheep,” according to one translation (pdf, p. 5). As with many ancient human-rights abusers, the king turned to his royal soothsayers to decide the lives of these captives.

Gillian Tett:

Earlier this month, I visited a hilly corner of North Carolina to spend time with family friends. As we sat around the kitchen table, a former musician whom I shall call Dave revealed that he had recently started an entrepreneurial sideline to supplement his meagre family income. During part of the week, he works in a local pawnshop but he does not lend out cash. Instead, Dave fills out application forms for people who want to buy firearms — but cannot read or write. He only charges a few dollars for this but the service is so popular that it provides a steady income. “Lots of people round here can’t read and write,” Dave told me with a rueful laugh. “But they all want guns. So they pay me to do that — I use their driving licences to get all the details.”

Welcome to an oft-ignored feature of America in 2015 — and I am not just talking about firearms. These days, there is hand-wringing aplenty, particularly on the political left, about income inequality. As a Financial Times series indicated last week, the gap between rich and poor is yawning ever wider as the middle class shrinks.

But what is often forgotten is that this income inequality reflects and reinforces other pernicious cultural chasms. Today, millions of Americans are enjoying the bonanza of an information boom, with once unimaginable power at their fingertips or, more specifically, on the buttons of their tablets and smartphones. They are “haves”, in the sense of having access to the 21st-century economy. But there is also an underbelly of “have-nots”, who lack access to this economic and information engine, sometimes for the most basic reason of not being able to read or write.

Much of the time this underbelly is concealed; at least from people like me, fortunate to live among information-blessed urban elites who take reading skills for granted. But the issue is surprisingly widespread. And it is not just a problem of rural communities or non-white groups — indeed, many of Dave’s North Carolina clients are white.

Madison, despite spending more than $17,000 per student annually, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Richard Rusczyk:

You love math and want to learn more. But you’re in ninth grade and you’ve already taken nearly all the math classes your school offers. They were all pretty easy for you and you’re ready for a greater challenge. What now? You’ll probably go to the local community college or university and take the next class in the core college curriculum. Chances are, you’ve just stepped in the calculus trap.

For an avid student with great skill in mathematics, rushing through the standard curriculum is not the best answer. That student who breezed unchallenged through algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, will breeze through calculus, too. This is not to say that high school students should not learn calculus – they should. But more importantly, the gifted, interested student should be exposed to mathematics outside the core curriculum, because the standard curriculum is not designed for the top students. This is even, if not especially, true for the core calculus curriculum found at most high schools, community colleges, and universities.

Developing a broader understanding of mathematics and problem solving forms a foundation upon which knowledge of advanced mathematical and scientific concepts can be built. Curricular classes do not prepare students for the leap from the usual – one step and done – problems to multi-step, multi-discipline problems they will face later on. That transition is smoothed by exposing students to complex problems in simpler areas of study, such as basic number theory or geometry, rather than giving them their first taste of complicated arguments when they’re learning a more advanced subject like group theory or the calculus of complex variables. The primary difference is that the curricular education is designed to give students many tools to apply to straightforward specific problems. Rather than learning more and more tools, avid students are better off learning how to take tools they have and apply them to complex problems. Then later, when they learn the more advanced tools of curricular education, applying them to even more complicated problems will come more easily.

Emma Green:

In seventh grade, kids study world geography and history, including a unit on “the Islamic world” up to the year 1500 A.D. “Williamson County parents and taxpayers have expressed concerns that some social-studies textbooks and supplemental materials in use in Tennessee classrooms contain a pro-Islamic/anti-Judeo- Christian bias,” one school-board member, Beth Burgos, wrote in a resolution. She questioned whether it’s right to test students on the tenets of Islam, along with the state and district’s learning standards related to religion. She also said the textbook should mention concepts like jihad and not portray Islam as a fundamentally peaceful religion. “How are our children to reconcile what they’re seeing happening in the Middle East when they’re not even exposed to the radical sects of Islam like ISIS?” she said at a working meeting in mid-October. (Burgos did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls requesting comment.)

Daniel Hannan:

Ah, well, you might say, after the monstrosities of apartheid, race is an understandably charged issue in South Africa. Perhaps a little bit of overshoot is only to be expected: a guilty conscience, allied to fear of a self-righteous mob, can be a powerful thing.

Except that this isn’t just happening in South Africa. Cecil Rhodes also handsomely endowed his – and, as it happens, my – old college: Oriel, Oxford. Having made a fortune in diamonds, Rhodes became a keen philanthropist and, among many similar bequests, left Oriel two per cent of his estate on his death in 1902. Part of that sum was used to fund a new building, to which a statue of the dapper nabob was added on its completion in 1911.

Now, an Oxonian mob, using the same cretinous #RhodesMustFall hashtag as in South Africa, has complained that walking past that statue inflicts violence on them. Incredibly, rather than telling them to mind their own business, Oriel has rushed out a statement to the effect that it is talking to the planning authorities about removing the effigy and, in the mean time, has put a notice next to it, with the following text:

Bill Kurtz:

Today the Colorado Department of Education released results from the Colorado standardized test (PARCC) from 2014-15. We are excited that under this much more rigorous test, our schools remain some of the highest performing in the city:

All of DSST’s high schools (DSST: Cole, DSST: GVR and DSST: Stapleton) rank in the top four out of 45 DPS high schools for English and math.

Pew:

Contemporary debates about parenthood often focus on parenting philosophies: Are kids better off with helicopter parents or a free-range approach? What’s more beneficial in the long run, the high expectations of a tiger mom or the nurturing environment where every child is a winner? Is overscheduling going to damage a child or help the child get into a good college? While these debates may resonate with some parents, they often overlook the more basic, fundamental challenges many parents face – particularly those with lower incomes. A broad, demographically based look at the landscape of American families reveals stark parenting divides linked less to philosophies or values and more to economic circumstances and changing family structure.

Clay Duda:

Threats by Tennessee lawmakers to defund the University of Tennessee’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion could have lasting impacts on the school’s academic standing if those representatives make good on their promises.

Several conservative legislators have called for action since that office published suggestions online earlier this month for making sure campus holiday parties did not emphasize one particular religion. In part, the recommendations (which have since been updated) advised staff to “ensure your holiday party is not a Christmas party in disguise,” and warned against participating in things like “Secret Santa” or “Dreidel.

David Margolick:

Phills assured the Stanford lawyer he was “speaking hypothetically.” Only he wasn’t. By the time of the seminar, the dean of the business school, Garth Saloner, had been involved with Phills’s estranged wife, Deborah Gruenfeld, a social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior there, for more than a year. And while Saloner had ostensibly removed himself from all decisions involving either Phills or Gruenfeld, Phills believed Saloner had remained enmeshed in his affairs, penalizing him professionally and injecting himself into his divorce and custody battles, all to drive him out of Stanford.

Some of this was not just conjecture. For three months in the summer and fall of 2012, as the incipient romance between Saloner and Gruenfeld developed, Phills, either sitting at his home computer or manning one of his other electronic devices—including, in one key instance, playing with the cell phone his wife had asked him to fix—had monitored and preserved the e-mails, text messages, and Facebook chats between the two. He’d followed their first walk together, and their first drinks, and their first date, and their first intimacies, real and cyber, fumbled and consummated. And all of this unfolded as he believed the Stanford Graduate School of Business (G.S.B.) was slowly squeezing him out, denying him crucial and lucrative teaching assignments and, by calling for a $250,000 loan to be repaid within less than a year, attempting to force him out of his house on the Stanford campus.

Karen Herzog:

A University of Chicago professor who fanned a firestorm over tenure with a recent survey of University of Wisconsin System faculty members came to Madison on Wednesday to reveal his results, including responses to his hot-button question about how much money it would take for faculty to give up their tenure protections.

The resounding message he received from faculty: Tenure is not for sale.

Faculty responded to the survey without knowing it was funded by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a think tank that is financially supported by the conservative Bradley Foundation.

After faculty became suspicious about the questions, and uncovered the funding source, 228 faculty members who had completed the survey asked the researcher if they could opt out, citing concerns about confidentiality of their responses and whether it was politically motivated as part of a Republican effort to kill tenure.

The researcher was forced to shut down the response window less than 48 hours after it opened in mid-September.

David Leonhardt:

When the Education Department releases its biennial scorecard of reading and math scores for all 50 states this week, Florida and Texas are likely to look pretty mediocre. In 2013, the last time that scores were released, Florida ranked 30th on the tests, which are given to fourth and eighth graders, and Texas ranked 32nd.

But these raw scores, which receive widespread attention, almost certainly present a misleading picture — and one that gives short shrift to both Florida and Texas. In truth, schools in both states appear to be well above average at teaching their students math and reading. Florida and Texas look worse than they deserve to because they’re educating a more disadvantaged group of students than most states are.

Madison, despite spending more than $17,000 per student annually, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Sun Times:

new test designed to see whether students are meeting tougher national educational standards has been attacked by more than a few vocal critics.

But rather than lambaste the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers test, critics should take a close look at one Chicago school that chose to make the test work — with amazing results.

At Lazaro Cardenas Elementary School, which serves low-income children, students scored far above Chicago Public Schools and state averages in math. It shouldn’t be a surprise. Three years ago, Cardenas teachers committed to new nationwide educational standards, called the Common Core, and decided as a team how to redesign their tea

Laura Waters:

Poor Andrew Cuomo: he just can’t get it right. First he signed the Education Transformation Act of 2015 that, in part, ties teacher evaluations to student outcomes and was toasted by those who believe that we can do a better job of ensuring that effective teachers are in New York State classrooms.

Then teacher union leaders fomented a boycott of Common Core-aligned tests by rich suburban white folk, who happen to be a key part of the Governor’s constituency. So, in what his advisors must have believed was a necessary political pander, Cuomo reversed himself and ordered a Task Force to review the state’s standards and assessments program.

Kate Taylor:

Among the things that set the Success Academy charter schools apart from public schools is the length of the school day: eight hours 45 minutes for elementary students, nine hours 15 minutes for middle schoolers.

But on Tuesday, Eva S. Moskowitz, the head of the Success network, which operates 34 schools in New York City, said the students’ days would get shorter. Her reasoning: Because we can now.

“We have gotten much better at teaching over time, and our teacher training has gotten more effective, so the amount of time it takes us to get to mastery has actually improved,” Ms. Moskowitz said in an interview on Wednesday.

Starting in August, elementary students will spend 45 minutes less at school, while middle schoolers’ day will be trimmed by one hour 45 minutes. Some middle school students in need of extra support will come in early for a “zero period.”

Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen and Joshua S. Graff Zivin:

We study the extent to which eminent scientists shape the vitality of their fields by examining entry rates into the fields of 452 academic life scientists who pass away while at the peak of their scientific abilities. Key to our analyses is a novel way to delineate boundaries around scientific fields by appealing solely to intellectual linkages between scientists and their publi- cations, rather than collaboration or co-citation patterns. Consistent with previous research, the flow of articles by collaborators into affected fields decreases precipitously after the death of a star scientist (relative to control fields). In contrast, we find that the flow of articles by non-collaborators increases by 8% on average. These additional contributions are dispropor- tionately likely to be highly cited. They are also more likely to be authored by scientists who were not previously active in the deceased superstar’s field. Overall, these results suggest that outsiders are reluctant to challenge leadership within a field when the star is alive and that a number of barriers may constrain entry even after she is gone. Intellectual, social, and re- source barriers all impede entry, with outsiders only entering subfields that offer a less hostile landscape for the support and acceptance of “foreign” ideas.

The Atlantic:

Just as President Obama steps back from student testing and governors coast to coast retreat from high-stakes accountability in schools, China’s leaders are pushing to enrich their national exams and nudge teachers away from rote instruction, aiming to nurture cognitively nimble and socially committed graduates.

No Child Left Behind—for all its blemishes and endless rules—did signal stiffer expectations for America’s schools, setting ambitious standards that they needed to meet in order to dodge sanctions. But the policy pendulum now swings back toward a lenient approach, enabling states to forge their own accountability tools, defining their own learning goals and tests.

New York eased expectations for students last month, as state officials revealed plans to simplify its math test, because pupil scores had fallen too low. Massachusetts, once setting the highest bar for pupil proficiency, has reversed its support for standards. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles school board has proclaimed that homework should not exceed 30 minutes of effort each night for high-school students.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom:

My provocation will take the form of a self-criticism. I want to come clean about an incident that haunts me, which found me altering my plans for publishing a commentary due to concern over possible repercussions. Aware that I am a China specialist, you might think you know where this is heading, especially given the intentionally misleading title I’ve chosen for this piece. I’m not, though, going to confess to an act self-censorship carried out due to wanting to maximize my odds of continuing to get visas to go to the Chinese mainland. Instead, I’ll describe a time that I worried about how people living on this side of the Pacific would respond to a U.S.-China comparison that I was convinced some Americans would not appreciate.

Let me begin, though, with the issue of my not being banned by Beijing, since colleagues and friends periodically express surprise that I keep being able to get PRC visas. This is natural. They’ve heard that some people in my field have had trouble getting them. They know I’m interested in hot button topics, such as the events of 1989, which Beijing’s leaders think should be avoided or talked about only in very circumscribed ways. This leads to them to make some or all of the following assumptions about me:

Ron Srigley

MY TITLE IS NOT AN AFFECTATION, or at least not entirely so. For years I have been attempting to persuade colleagues, university administrators, and students that something is going desperately wrong in modern universities. To no avail.

Readers may have a sense of the type of problem that concerns me from recent events at Yale, in which no less than 13 administrators felt compelled to compose a letter advising adult students on how to dress for Halloween. This was clearly an absurd thing to do, as was a segment of the student response to a lecturer who had the audacity to point out the absurdity in a reasoned and principled email. It was a strange situation in which students and administrators found themselves on the same side of the barricades on the question of the need for sensitivity and creating a place of comfort in the academy. Students siding with administrators against professors? Young people wanting comfort more than truth? If you’re over 50 it will seem strange indeed, but it’s not — not any more. It is the rule now, and it explains in part the trouble I’m having finding someone to talk to.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter, via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email:

Given the unique and retaliatory provisions of Act 10 that:

Any person eligible to vote in the recertification election who does not vote is counted as a NO vote;

To prevail in the election, a union must receive affirmative votes from 51% of those eligible to vote; and

For a Union to not receive at least 51% of the votes of those eligible to vote, it would not be recertified as the employees’ bargaining agent.
Thus, with so much at stake, assuring that all who are eligible to vote are aware of the importance of their vote is a high priority for the Union, and to all whom it represents. MTI had numerous volunteers, retirees and current members to assist with the important task of gaining the largest number voting as possible in the recently concluded recertification election. To be sure these individuals were not wasting their time calling and disturbing those who had already voted, MTI asked the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) for the names of those who had voted. The information should have been supplied under Wisconsin’s Open Records Law. MTI specified it did not want information as to how a person voted, only that they had voted. However, the WERC refused to comply with MTI’s request, claiming that providing the information would violate “the secrecy of the ballot.” That is not a valid claim. Who votes in any Wisconsin election is a public record. In its request, MTI specifically asked the WERC to redact any reference as to how one voted. Ironically, at the conclusion of last year’s and this year’s election, the WERC gave MTI the names of all who voted. Doing it during the election as MTI requested would be no different.

Of those eligible to vote, 82.78% voted and 98.36% of those voted for recertification.

Madison Teachers, Inc. 14 December 2015 newsletter is available here.

Abigail Becker:

Test results released in October from the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a set of tests known as the Nation’s Report Card, reaffirmed Wisconsin’s poor record of educating black children: The state had the worst achievement gap between black and white students in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math. This is the second time in a row Wisconsin has been ranked the worst among the states assessed.

Wisconsin also has the biggest disparity in graduation rates between black and white students, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Department of Education. The rate for black students in Wisconsin held steady in 2013-14 at 66 percent, while the graduation rate for white students rose a half-point from just over 92 percent to just under 93 percent.

The causes of this gap are complex and extend beyond the four walls of a classroom, often preceding students’ first steps through the schoolhouse doors, researchers say. Factors include poverty and unemployment, historic discrimination, segregated schools and neighborhoods, racial bias and low expectations that damage students’ motivation.

Madison, despite spending more than $17,000 per student annually, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Alexander Russo:

and journalism experts for their thoughts on (a) whether there has been a real decline in investigative work on local education coverage and (b) reasons why (beyond the obvious). I’ll let you know whatever responses I get.

In the meantime, it’s my impression that there have been some amazing examples of local investigative journalism about education, like the Tampa Bay Times series about the re-segregation of some schools in Florida’s Pinellas County (recently recognized by CJR as one of the best stories of the year), or Catalyst Chicago’s look into the infamous $20 million SUPES contract that led to the downfall of Barbara Byrd-Bennett. The LA Times’ Howard Blume unearthed the plan to expand charter schools in LA not too long ago.

There’s also been a bit of growth in local coverage thanks to a few outlets like ChalkBeat, and national coverage via EdWeek, Hechinger, and the mainstream outlets.

But either by intention or lack of sufficient resources, most of these outlets don’t seem particularly investigative in their focus — they’re usually covering events and announcements or telling sometimes amazing stories about schools and programs. The recent Baltimore Sun series on immigrant students was amazing and revealing but not particularly investigative in its focus. Ditto for the recent Hechinger Report series. Even The Seventy Four, which I had thought/hoped would be deeply investigative in its approach (along the lines of VICE or Al Jazeera), seems to have focused more on explainers and interviews.

Nick Gillespie:

Mike Rowe, the popular host of CNN’s Somebody’s Gotta Do It and former host of Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, lays into Bernie Sanders for pushing everyone to go to college.

Rowe, whom Reason interviewed in December 2013 (see below), isn’t against college, but he takes exception to the idea that the only legit way to get ahead these days is to get a university sheepskin. Rather, he argues, there are lots of excellent trade jobs available that many people would not only be successful at but happy to do. He sees a systematic, elitist attempt to denigrate such work in the name of college for all.

Stephanie Saul:

Before his 35-mile commute through Appalachian hills to classes here at the University of Tennessee, Michael Miceli eats a gigantic breakfast. It is his way of getting through the day without spending money on a campus lunch.

Food deprivation is merely one trick Mr. Miceli uses to minimize his college debt, now creeping past $22,000. So the $300 bill he got from the university this semester — for food — sent him into a tailspin.

“I was in near panic at the thought of having to borrow more money,” said Mr. Miceli, 23, a linguistics major.

For the first time this year, the University of Tennessee imposed a $300-per-semester dining fee on Mr. Miceli and about 12,000 other undergraduates, including commuters, who do not purchase other meal plans. The extra money will help finance a $177 million student union with limestone cornices, clay-tiled roofing and copper gutters, part of a campus reconstruction plan aimed at elevating the University of Tennessee to a “Top 25” public university.

Jake New:

Northeastern University is arming some members of its police force with semiautomatic rifles, despite the apprehensions of the nearby Boston Police Department and critics who worry about an increasing militarization of campus law enforcement.

The decision — motivated by a string of recent shootings on campuses and elsewhere — has proven to be controversial, and drawn sharp condemnation from Boston’s police commissioner. But in adding tactical rifles to its arsenal, the Northeastern University Police Department joins dozens of other campus forces that already carry military-style weapons.

“There is no higher priority than the safety and well-being of our campus community,” the university said in a statement Wednesday. “Like other universities with police departments, our officers are trained to employ a number of capabilities to protect the campus community, including the use of tactical rifles if necessary.”

Bee Wilson:

No loving parent sets out to make a child unhealthy or fat. So why are some 18% of American children aged 6 to 11 now obese, with many more overweight? Why are pediatricians seeing rising numbers of children who eat no vegetables at all?

We often blame the food industry for the terrible diet that many kids eat—who could resist those high-sugar concoctions in cute packages? But there is no intrinsic reason for children to prefer junk food to home-cooked lunches. Any child can enjoy a balanced diet. Our basic mistake is treating meals as occasions for getting a child quickly fed, rather than opportunities for learning how to eat.

As omnivores, children aren’t born knowing what or how to eat. Each of us learns that for ourselves, and the science shows that children’s food preferences are surprisingly malleable. We start life drinking milk, but after that, it’s all up for grabs.

Pat Schneider:

William Howell, the University of Chicago researcher behind a controversial survey of University of Wisconsin faculty’s views on tenure, is hosting a media event at the Madison Club Wednesday to release his findings.

Academics typically present the findings of such a study to peers for publication in a journal, said Mark Sorkin, associate director of communications for the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Instead, Howell will publicly release his survey results to the media without analysis or interpretation, Sorkin said Tuesday.

“Given the extraordinary amount of attention and concern around the survey, there was interest in presenting the findings with no interpretation and no policy prescriptions, purely in the interest of transparency,” Sorkin said.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter, via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email:

“In solidarity, we move forward together” came through loud and clear as MTI-represented District employees in all five (5) MTI bargaining units voted overwhelmingly to recertify MTI as their representative. Of those voting, the teacher unit voted 98.51% to recertify (as compared to 98.46% last year) with 2,484 voting. Of those voting, the educational assistant unit (EA-MTI) voted 99.97% to recertify (as compared to 98.92% last year) with 535 voting. Of those voting, the clerical/technical unit (SEE-MTI) voted 93.71% to recertify (as compared to 94.74% last year) with 175 voting. The substitute teacher unit (USO-MTI) voted 98.41% to recertify (as compared to 97.82% last year) with 378 voting. The security assistant unit (SSA-MTI) voted 100% to recertify (the same percentage as last year) with 18 voting. In all, 82.78% of those eligible voted (as compared to 85.35% last year). MTI has not been challenged for continued representation since it became the bargaining agent for teachers in 1964. Since its creation, MTI has grown from 900 to 4,700, and has gained the reputation as one of the most successful public sector Unions in the country. It is Governor Walker’s Act 10 that forced the recertification election. MTI had to pay fees of $3,550 to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission to conduct the election. Additional costs were experienced for educational and promotional materials related to the election which, under Act 10, must be conducted annually. MTI’s margin of victory last year and this were among the highest in the State.

The large turnout is a testament to MTI members’ appreciation and support of their Union’s accomplishments on the members’ behalf, to the hard work of the over 150 MTI Member Organizers who engaged their colleagues in conversations about their Union, and to the many members and retired members who made calls from Union headquarters reminding members to vote. MTI members clearly understand that students & staff are better served, if all “Stand Together.”
Thanks goes to all who made their voice heard loud and clear by voting!

MTI’s 23 November newsletter is available here.

“I would guess, frankly, that no other school district union in the country has had a leader who has served as long as John,” Bellman said. “Because a union is democratic, his longevity is vivid evidence of the way he’s perceived by the people he serves. His ability to interact with members, to serve them, to be appreciated by them — I just don’t think there’s anyone else in the country like that.”

Former Madison schools superintendent Art Rainwater, who led the district for 10 years with Matthews as head of the union, said that while the two had disagreements, “we also did a lot of good things together to strengthen the district.”

Asked if Matthews ever angered him, Rainwater said, “Of course, and I’m sure I made him mad. But the goal was not to let that anger linger or let that anger affect the way we worked.”

Regardless of the tenor of their interactions, “you never doubted when you worked with him that his primary interest was in protecting his employees,” Rainwater said. “That was his job, that was his role, and he was really good at it.”

To many MTI members, Matthews has been a beloved presence, known as much for his personal kindness as his fiery leadership. He routinely receives standing ovations from members when he’s introduced at union gatherings.

Notes and links on John Matthews, Art Rainwater and Act 10.

Susan Ferriss and Amy Isackson

His girlfriend walked off, and Muniz saw the officer approaching again and directing him to go with him. The cop reached out and “put his hand on my throat,” Muniz said. “That’s when I start freaking out. He tells me to stand up. And that’s when his grip on my throat got a little stronger and when I started really panicking.”

Alarmed, Muniz pushed at the officer to get him “just a little bit off me,” he said. They tumbled to the ground and the officer “showered” the student with pepper spray, Muniz alleges in a civil lawsuit that’s still pending. The cop handcuffed him, he said, dragged him into a nearby security office by the cuffs and planted a knee in between his shoulder blades while delivering “multiple blows” as Muniz lay face down on a carpet.

Julia Thiel:

Salgado is president and CEO of the Instituto del Progreso Latino, an organization that works to provide education, training, and employment opportunities for Latinos in Chicago. The 46-year-old has received numerous awards for his work, including, most recently, the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.

…..

run two charter schools, one focused on health care [the Health Sciences Career Academy]. Hospitals in the area said, “You’re doing a good job with nurses; we need doctors and surgeons.” They’re having to bring in talent from all over the world in order to meet their needs. Why can’t our kids achieve that?

A big part of the reason is they have to start thinking about it from seventh and eighth grade. Their parents are like mine—they’re factory workers, restaurant workers. They have to have course work that gets them ahead, because they’re going to have to compete for spots in nursing school or med school. So we created a school focused on incorporating a bunch of health-care courses, so that the kids that graduate really understand the human body.

Daniel Luzer:

Koch connected charities gave $19.3 million to colleges across the country but Soros’s Open Society Foundations awarded about $185-million in grants in 2013:

You read that right: Soros spent almost $10 for every $1 the Kochs donated in 2013. So I ask the #UnKoch crowd: do you want to #UnSoros your campus, too?

Soros funds a journalism venture at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

Rick Noack:

may have surprised supporters of her policies: “Multiculturalism leads to parallel societies and therefore remains a ‘life lie,’ ” or a sham, she said, before adding that Germany may be reaching its limits in terms of accepting more refugees. “The challenge is immense,” she said. “We want and we will reduce the number of refugees noticeably.”

Although those remarks may seem uncharacteristic of Merkel, she probably would insist that she was not contradicting herself. In fact, she was only repeating a sentiment she first voiced several years ago when she said multiculturalism in Germany had “utterly failed.”

Melissa Korn:

The Georgia Institute of Technology turned heads in 2013 when it announced plans to offer an inexpensive, online version of its master’s degree in computer science to what top administrators predicted would be a “massive” audience.

The program graduated its first class of students on Friday. All 20 of them.

Georgia Tech, with $3.5 million in backing from AT&T Inc., was on the forefront of an effort to harness the technology of massive, open, online courses, or MOOCs, to offer a high-quality education at a fraction of the cost of a traditional degree.

Ben Wallerstein & Jacob Stieglitz:

Asia accounts for nearly half of the mobile learning revenues in the world. Thousands of hagwons, or “cram schools,” line the streets in South Korea, which has about 15 percent of the global tutoring market. Parents spend an average of $1,000 per month on private tutoring — an estimated 20 percent of the monthly cost to raise a child there. In India, 7.5 percent of consumers’ monthly spending goes toward education. Affluent Chinese households devote 9.5 percent, and the Vietnamese spend a whopping 40 percent.

The U.S. consumer-education market is, in contrast, anemic. Parents in the middle-income bracket spend just 1 percent of their expenses on education. The highest tax bracket spends 3 percent. It’s not that U.S. parents are apathetic: GreatSchools.org, which provides school ratings, is one of the nation’s most viewed websites, but search Google for “algebra help” and you may not be served a single ad. That won’t hold.

Cristiano Antonelli was one of the first researchers to use the phrase “leapfrogging” to describe the concept that countries can speedily adopt new technologies by skipping intermediate technologies used in more developed countries (e.g., copper wire). The U.S. may be poised for its own leapfrog moment as big brands and new delivery models enable consumers to experience — for the first time — supplemental learning online.

Brooke Metz:

Recent graduates can relate to the report. Mary Kate Baumann, a 2010 graduate of a private college in upstate New York who also graduated from journalism and business graduate programs at the University of Missouri this year, said, “My undergraduate education was over $200,000 in total and my first job paid only $28,000. That’s a large disparity.”

Goldman Sachs calculated the economic return on college education as the “total all-in cost of college (net of grants and scholarships) and the wages foregone during the 4 years of study versus the wage premium that undergraduate degree holders enjoy versus high school graduates over their working life.”

While the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported in October that the job market for grads has seen recent improvements, Goldman Sachs said wages still aren’t cutting it to make up for education costs.

Justine McDaniel:

We don’t let concerns about censoring or banned books shape” our curriculum, the spokeswoman said.

In recent years, the ALA has recorded about 300 to 400 challenges each year, Caldwell-Stone said, which represent “a snapshot” of what’s happening across the country.

Removing a text from curriculum because of concerns about its content is generally considered a challenge to the book by those who track bans.

Alan Borsuk:

The Marcia Spector School District. That’s the term I used in 2005 to describe how Spector and Seeds of Health, the organization she leads, had created a set of schools in Milwaukee that were publicly funded yet independent in important ways from the conventional public schools system.

The schools were each good, and the rise of what I would call a mini district like this struck me as cutting edge.

It’s 2015 now and the Marcia Spector School District is doing well.

It now includes six schools with a total of about 1,250 students. A child can go from kindergarten through 12th grade entirely within the Seeds of Health network.

But Spector’s network is no longer cutting edge. The mini district has become a key part of the Milwaukee education landscape.

I count at least nine mini districts in Milwaukee, defined as schools that are not part of the conventional public school system and are run by organizations operating at three or more locations.

For this purpose, I’m not counting the general roster of Catholic schools, a much longer standing and not-so-mini district, but a bit of a different thing.

However, I am counting two Catholic schools that operate like mini districts.

The mini districts are enrolling about 12,500 students this year, more than 10% of the children getting publicly funded education in Milwaukee. Three are close to or above 1,900 students, which is more kids than in three-quarters of the public school districts in the state.

Jack Clark:

After a half-decade of quiet breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, 2015 has been a landmark year. Computers are smarter and learning faster than ever.

The pace of advancement in AI is “actually speeding up,” said Jeff Dean, a senior fellow at Google. To celebrate their achievements and plot the year ahead, Dean and many of the other top minds in AI are convening in Montreal this week at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference. It started in 1987 and has become a must-attend event for many Silicon Valley companies in the last few years, thanks to the explosion in AI. NIPS was where Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg chose in 2013 to announce the company’s plans to form an AI laboratory and where a startup named DeepMind showed off an AI that could learn to play computer games before it was acquired by Google.

QuickTake Artificial Intelligence

There should be plenty to discuss this week. The unprecedented advancements in AI research this year can be attributed to a confluence of nerdy factors. For one, cloud computing infrastructure is vastly more powerful and affordable, with the ability to process complex information. There are also more plentiful datasets and free or inexpensive software development tools for researchers to work with. Thanks to this, a crucial class of learning technology, known as neural networks, have gone from being prohibitively expensive to relatively cheap.

Dave Baskerville:

Madison will elect three School Board members in the spring. Our school taxes are set to rise 4.9 percent to accommodate a $504 million budget. A very well qualified and able superintendent is in place and will in several ways make the schools better.

So what’s missing? Simply no mention or concern by the educational community and citizens that our kids’ classroom achievements can ever come close to matching those of the rest of the First (and emerging) World.

Students age 15 in the United States rank 36th in math, 27th in science and 21st in reading, according to a worldwide assessment by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The “best and brightest” students in America are dead last versus their counterparts in a composite of those subjects among 30 countries.

Though no direct comparisons are available because we don’t administer the same test as most of the advanced world, our Madison kids likely are faring even worse.

Somehow we have convinced ourselves that rigorous academic achievement is not possible or necessary for social justice, individual self-esteem or the ability of our future science, technology, engineering, math and blue-collar workers to compete with the global workforce. We seem to think Wisconsin having average wages below Georgia is OK, and that 70 percent of Madison Area Technical College matriculants needing remedial reading is acceptable.

The aspirations of our black leaders are being dumbed down from a highly goal-oriented, disciplined and innovative preparatory school for boys to a goal of more “neighborhood schools.” Madison is seeking a few improvements in discipline and the achievement gap — as if that’s enough.

I would rather challenge our “progressive” Madison School Board to go back to the real progressive goals of “Fighting” Bob La Follette. We need real social and economic advancement for the “common man.” We need a challenging and sustainable 20-year goal that citizens can understand and monitor. The goal should be to raise the scores of our non-special education students to the top 10 globally in critical subjects.

Though no other school district has set radical and accountable long-term goals, I believe Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham is up to planning and executing it. It also would likely be the only way to keep a leader of Cheatham’s caliber in Madison.

Baskerville, of Madison, is an international business consultant. To learn more about his efforts to set high international goals for local schools: www.StretchTargets.org.

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (PDF):

Issue: The charter contracts for Badger Rock Middle School (BRMS) and James C. Wright Middle School (Wright) expire on June 30, 2016. Per respective contracts, the Board is required to make a decision whether or not to renew Wright’s contract at least six months before the contract’s expiration and BRMS’ contract at least three months before the contract’s expiration. As a result, the Board discussed both charter schools’ performance and future plans on December 7, 2015 to support final action to renew the contracts at the Regular Meeting on December 14, 2015.

Background: In November 2013, MMSD adopted a new charter school renewal process that requires charter schools and their governing bodies to prepare an evidence-based report detailing the implementation, efficacy and plan for the future term across six domains 1) Purpose and Vision, 2) Governance, 3) Teacher and Learning, 4) Operations, 5) Fiscal Management, 6) Legal Compliance. Given that the process was successful in supporting the Board’s renewal of Nuestro Mundo’s charter, we implemented the same process to support the renewal of BRMS and Wright. On February 12, information about the timeline for review and action by the Board was shared via the Weekly Update. In June and September, MMSD administration met with school leadership and governing council members to share the timeline and process for completing the term reports. Schools submitted first drafts of their term reports which were then reviewed by MMSD administration in October. Thereafter, MMSD administration provided feedback to support schools’ refinement of their reports. The final reports were then used to create executive summaries for the Board of Education to support final recommendations on renewal of the charter contracts. On December 4, per request of a Board member, the full term reports were shared with the Board.

If the Board approves the motion to renew contracts for BRMS and Wright, the contracts for each school will be revised to reflect clear expectations we have for improvement over the upcoming year (see detail in Analysis section below). There will also be certain modification we will need to make to reflect changes in state laws since the contracts were last negotiated, including changes to governance structures. The contracts will come back to the Board prior to the required April 1 finalization date. We anticipate providing ample time to the Board for review and consideration.

Much more on Wright Middle School (Originally conceived as “Madison Middle School 2000“) and Badger Rock Middle School.

Madison School District slides: Badger Rock Middle School:

Student Achievement
The first goal in the district’s Strategic Framework is for every student to be on-track to graduate as measured by key milestones which include proficiency and growth in literacy and mathematics as measured by MAP. Badger Rock showed positive trends in the percent of students meeting growth targets from 2012-2015, increasing annually in nearly all subgroups and is above the national average for growth. Overall proficiency, however, has seen a decrease over the last several years with the exception of a significant increase for students with disabilities. Note that some significant changes in proficiency and growth trends in certain subgroups may result from small numbers of students in those groups, an example being the change in reading proficiency for multiracial students.

While the results in MAP math growth vary, the percentage of students meeting growth targets is still far above the national average. While we have seen some incremental improvement overall in math proficiency, we’ve seen a decline in proficiency levels for African America students.

Looking at the data in a different way, the BRMS Governance Council compared fall to spring growth targets for BRMS students to MMSD middle schools overall. This comparison showed BRMS students outpacing MMSD middle school students each year in meeting math growth targets 2012-2015 as well as in meeting reading growth targets in 2014-2015.

Additionally, BRMS students have shown growth from year to year, outpacing MMSD middle school students in math growth target spring to spring 2012-2015 and in reading growth target spring to spring for 2014-2015.

and Wright Middle School:

Student Achievement
The first goal in the district’s Strategic Framework is for every student to be on-track to graduate as measured by key milestones which include proficiency and growth in literacy and mathematics as measured by MAP. While Wright showed some decline in the percent of students meeting MAP reading growth targets from 2012-2015, they are still above the national average and for almost all student groups. While improvement in reading proficiency has been incremental overall, there has been a more positive trajectory for African American students, which is a focus group for the school.

The trends in MAP math growth 2012-2015 varied but the school is above the national average and for most student groups. Trends for MAP proficiency across subgroups did not change significantly from 2012-2015; it is mostly flat or slightly down.

Wright examined students’ academic progress in comparison to the national average MAP reading RIT score. Graph 1 shows that overall and in all but one racial/ethnic groups for the past three years, an increasing percentage of Wright students outpace the national average MAP reading RIT score.

Graph 2 shows that overall and among economically disadvantaged students, an increasing percentage of Wright students outpace the national average for the past three years. Sixteen percent (16%) of Wright’s ELL students have met or surpassed the national average MAP RIT score in the last two years, while Wright’s students with identified disabilities showed a decrease (from 7% to 5%) in the percentage of students at or above the national average MAP RIT score.

Madison’s “charter” schools operate within the constraints of the legacy government schools. Unlike other districts, Madison has not offered significant governance model diversity, nor parental choice within the District. Perhaps that will change one day, given its long term, disastrous reading results.

The rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School would have operated independently, that is outside of the governance and teacher union contract requirements.

Martin Kich:

Academic Analytics, a private database contracted to measure faculty productivity at Rutgers, may undermine our tenure process, while narrowing the range of scholarship. If you belong to SASNB [School of Arts and Sciences—New Brunswick], please attend the School’s faculty meeting on Monday, 14 December from 2:00-4:00 p.m. in Voorhees 105 (College Ave.) to vote on a resolution addressing these issues.

Over the past year or so, many of you have shared concerns regarding the Administration’s use of a database owned by Academic Analytics, LLC. That firm tallies our productivity–measured quantitatively on the basis of articles, books, citations, awards, grants, grant dollars, and conference proceedings—and compares us against a global mean. The more details we’ve learned about Academic Analytics, the more convinced the union is that faculty must act to limits its use.

Priceonomics:

One of the greatest minds in 20th Century statistics was not a scholar. He brewed beer.

Guinness brewer William S. Gosset’s work is responsible for inspiring the concept of statistical significance, industrial quality control, efficient design of experiments and, not least of all, consistently great tasting beer.

But Gosset is certainly no household name. Books and articles about him are sparse, and he is rarely discussed among history’s most important statisticians. Because he used a pseudonym, his name isn’t even familiar to most people who frequently use his most famous discovery. Gosset is the “student” of the Student’s T-Test, a method for interpreting what can be extrapolated from a small sample of data.

Ross Baker:

As late as the mid-20th century, university presidencies were launching pads for the White House. Dwight Eisenhower’s decision to accept the presidency of Columbia University was designed to convey the impression of intellectual heft. Likewise, Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen’s occupancy of the presidential chair at the University of Pennsylvania was calculated to position him for a White House run. Going back as far as James Garfield’s leadership of Hiram College in Ohio, a university presidency was a crown jewel on the résumé of a presidential hopeful. Making a White House bid today from the top position on a U.S. campus would be justly viewed with puzzlement or even amusement.

While there is much debate over the value of political endorsements, top executives at American universities would probably be among the last people sought out to provide testimonials for a presidential aspirant; a Republican hopeful would do better getting the nod from the pastor of a small evangelical church and a Democrat from the leader of an obscure labor union. The political coinage of the university is debased.

Meeting Objectives

1. Reflect on the National Equity Project work

2. Review Strategic Framework implementation progress through an equity lens

3. Update the Board on the Priority 3: Family, Youth, and Community Engagement theory of action

4. Discuss strategy examples: Report Cards

Meeting Handouts

Targeted Universalism

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Kaveh Waddel

Computer scientists and cryptographers occupy some of the ivory tower’s highest floors. Among academics, their work is prestigious and celebrated. To the average observer, much of it is too technical to comprehend. The field’s problems can sometimes seem remote from reality.

But computer science has quite a bit to do with reality. Its practitioners devise the surveillance systems that watch over nearly every space, public or otherwise—and they design the tools that allow for privacy in the digital realm. Computer science is political, by its very nature.

That’s at least according to Phillip Rogaway, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, who has helped create some of the most important tools that secure the Internet today. Last week, Rogaway took his case directly to a roomful of cryptographers at a conference in Auckland, New Zealand. He accused them of a moral failure: By allowing the government to construct a massive surveillance apparatus, the field had abused the public trust. Rogaway said the scientists had a duty to pursue social good in their work.

Abby Schachter:

Dr Jean Twenge argues in her book Generation Me that those born in the 1980s and 1990s are “tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious but also disengaged, narcissistic, distrustful, and anxious.”

There’s the best-selling book How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims, which tracks this trend and chastises parents for how poorly they are preparing kids for adulthood. As she said in a recent Washington Post interview, “We want so badly to help them by shepherding them from milestone to milestone and by shielding them from failure and pain. But overhelping causes harm,” she writes. “It can leave young adults without the strengths of skill, will and character that are needed to know themselves and to craft a life.”

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

One thing that has changed is that I have to be more responsible now that I have a device. Google classroom has also changed how I learn. I can look at other people’s answers and that helps me learn and improve myself. I have assignments on TenMarks math and it has hints and videos to help me learn and finish my assignment. The picture on this slide is my homepage on TenMarks.

A friend and I are making a Google Slide Show together about dancing. We get to work on it during choice writing time. I e-mailed her and asked if I could edit our slides. We can both work on the same slide show at school or at home.

One time this year, we had to write about an occupation in Madison as part of a slide show. It was fun and I had to cooperate with other kids because I didn’t know a lot of things about making slide shows.

It is exciting when I get to create on my device. I love when I type and make new things. One time I made a calendar for a slide show. Another time I made a video to show good behaviors in the classroom. Not only is the device helping me, it is helping other students. I also get excited to do Kahoot quizzes on my device. This is a fun quiz that helps me improve what I know.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

Some of the ways in which MMSD has invested in people include:

Increased the number of PK-12 staff from 3,497 in 2008-09 to 4,027 in 2013-14. This effectively grew the district’s total employees by 15% over 5 years (largely due to 4K implementation during this time), while maintaining a student to all staff ratio of 6.7.

Covered 100% of the cost of employees’ benefits (90% for administrators) for employees working at least 19.5 hours per week. On average, benefits cost $21,188 per teacher and $12,927 per employee annually.

Increased the starting salary 2% per year, resulting in starting pay shifting to $36,108 in 2013-14 from $32,913 in 2008-09 – effectively, a 10% increase in starting salary for teachers over a 5-year period.

Madison has the lowest student to licensed staff ratio among the five largest Wisconsin school districts.

Compensation is, by far, MMSD’s largest expense, representing 85% of all costs

Emerging Opportunities
Starting and average salaries for teachers are:
Low relative to other industries in Madison
Near the middle of local and regional districts
Low compared to urban school districts, which presents a challenge for recruitment

It takes longer (compared to other districts and industries) to reach maximum salaries

A large portion of a teacher’s lifetime earnings are earned near the end of a teacher’s career

MMSD spent $7.6M in 2013-2014 on stipends and additive wages (e.g., teachers taking on extra duties both during school year and summer)

Salary schedules for different roles overlap

There is no cap on the number of steps

There are limited financial incentives to pursue leadership roles

MMSD does not offer financial incentives to work in hard-to-staff subjects or schools but has sole discretion on initial placement on the salary schedule

A focus on years of service and educational attainment misses key opportunities to promote equity, student engagement, employee engagement and employee retention

Some Districts have thought and operated differently regarding teacher opportunities and compensation. Oconomowoc is one example.

The Economist:

SPARK is determined to provide private education for less than the 18,000 rand ($1,200) a year that it costs to educate a state-school student. The schools specialise in “blended learning”: pupils spend some time in conventional classes and some time in a computer room where they complete lessons on the screen. The schools save money by renting their premises, centralising their administration, getting parents to help with maintenance and paying their teachers less than in state schools.

Ms Brewer and her business partner, Ryan Harrison, a fellow GIBS graduate, have scoured the world for ideas. They modelled SPARK on California’s Rocketship Schools, a chain of charter schools. They will measure SPARK students’ progress against the best in the world—British students in English and Singaporeans in mathematics. They believe that modern technology will allow them to scale up much faster than used to be possible in education: teachers can share materials over the internet and supporters can build the school’s brand via social networks.

Molly Hensley-Clancy:

Google’s Chromebooks have overtaken Apple products as the most popular devices in American classrooms, but Apple CEO Tim Cook says the company will not be following the search giant’s approach to the education market, which has been a stronghold for Apple since the early days of the Mac.

“Assessments don’t create learning,” Cook said in an interview with BuzzFeed News Wednesday, calling the cheap laptops that have proliferated through American classrooms mere “test machines.”

“We are interested in helping students learn and teachers teach, but tests, no,” Cook said. “We create products that are whole solutions for people — that allow kids to learn how to create and engage on a different level.”

Lauren Fitzpatrick:

Just one in five Chicago Public Schools students can do enough math to get into college, results released Wednesday from the first-ever round of tougher, new tests for measuring college readiness show.

CPS students overall fared somewhat better in reading and writing — one in about four students in grades three through eight and in high school performed at the pace experts say they’ll need for a post-secondary education. Statewide, 37.7 percent of students — or one in three — earned a proficient score on the English Language Arts test and 28.2 percent — or one in four — on math, according to the Illinois State Board of Education.

Stephen Wolfram:

Ada Lovelace was born 200 years ago today. To some she is a great hero in the history of computing; to others an overestimated minor figure. I’ve been curious for a long time what the real story is. And in preparation for her bicentennial, I decided to try to solve what for me has always been the “mystery of Ada”.

It was much harder than I expected. Historians disagree. The personalities in the story are hard to read. The technology is difficult to understand. The whole story is entwined with the customs of 19th-century British high society. And there’s a surprising amount of misinformation and misinterpretation out there.

Milwaukee NNS:

We are thrilled to be breaking ground to expand the North Campus, giving us the space we urgently need for both our students and to serve the surrounding community,” said Henry Tyson, St. Marcus’ Superintendent. “The outpouring of support from individual donors, foundations, community partners and corporations in the community has been a true blessing. This expansion allows St. Marcus to continue to grow its reach and respond to parent’s demands for a high-quality education for their children. Thank you to everyone who has supported St. Marcus scholars and made their success possible.”

The ceremony featured a student-centered welcome as 160 students greeted guests with a morning assembly singing “He knows my name” and “Underneath the shining star” and the school’s theme poem, Be Strong. Superintendent Henry Tyson addressed attendees and spoke about the struggles within the City of Milwaukee and the need to continue to grow so that as many students as possible receive a high-quality education. Tyson acknowledged and thanked all those who made the expansion possible starting with parents, staff, individual donors and foundation/corporate representatives in attendance. Attendees included representatives from the Fleck Foundation, Bradley Foundation, Lakeview Foundation, Siebert Lutheran Foundation, Sommer’s Automotive, Schools That Can Milwaukee, PAVE, Park Bank, Partnership Bank, Milwaukee Lutheran High School, Rinka Chung Architecture and Catalyst Construction.

Henry Tyson interview.

BBC:

Britain’s most secretive organisation – GCHQ – has added a cryptic twist to Christmas card season by including a baffling brainteaser.

This year spy agency director Robert Hannigan is sending out a complex grid-shading puzzle inside his traditional Christmas cards of the nativity scene.

Story Hinckley:

In all, 32 private university presidents earned $1 million or more in compensation in 2013. And private college presidents aren’t the only ones raking it in. The average public college president earned over $428,000 in 2014, reported the Chronicle.

“Many times when I talk to trustees, they refer to university presidents as running companies – which they could also do if they chose to enter the private sector – so to keep a president at the university they will pay what it takes,” Sandhya Kambhampadi, the lead author of the Chronicle report, tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview Tuesday. “They will pay the market value.”

National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) PDF:

Across America, there is much debate about charter schools. Some of that debate is about the existence of charter schools and whether there should be more or fewer of them. More of the debate is about the quality and oversight of charter schools.

This publication is part of that debate and speaks to the state laws and policies that greatly determine how many charter schools exist (accessibility), the exibility they have to operate (autonomy), and the standards of quality and oversight they must meet (accountability).

It is easy to nd zealous voices arguing for or against charter school policies based on theories or ideologies. Some believe charter schools should be heavily regulated, along the lines of school districts. Some believe that 6,700 charter schools serving more than 2.9 million children can somehow all be eliminated. Others argue for less regulation and faster growth, even in places where some charter schools or types of operators are failing.

The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) approaches this debate from a unique position— real-world experience—and that position is re ected in this publication. NACSA is a professional membership organization of the agencies that approve, monitor, renew, and sometimes close charter schools. NACSA staff has worked in virtually every state and major city with charter schools. Here is what we know from our experiences:

Perhaps someone will compare oversight practices with tradtional government schools.

Priscilla Wohlstetter, Ph.D.,
Dara Zeehandelaar, Ph.D., David Griffith:

More than twelve million American students exercise some form of school choice by going to a charter, magnet, or private school—or opting for homeschooling—instead of attending a traditional public school. Countless others use district-wide lotteries, attendance waivers, or interdistrict transfers to attend public schools other than the ones in their neighborhoods. But some cities are significantly more “choice-friendly” than others…and some are downright hostile.

Using nearly fifty markers of “choice friendliness,” this report shows which of thirty American cities are the best and worst for school choice.

NPR:

Americans have long lived in a nation made up primarily of middle-class families, neither rich nor poor, but comfortable enough.

This year, that changed, according to the Pew Research Center.

A just-released analysis of government data shows that as of 2015, middle-income households have become the minority. The trend is so firmly established that it may well continue; Americans have experienced “a demographic shift that could signal a tipping point,” Pew researchers concluded Wednesday.

Thanks to factory closings and other economic factors, the country now has 120.8 million adults living in middle-income households, the study found. That compares with the 121.3 million who are living in either upper- or lower-income households.

Moriah Balingit:

Millions of teenagers in high schools nationwide are using a smartphone app to anonymously share their deepest anxieties, secret crushes, vulgar assessments of their classmates and even violent threats, all without adults being able to look in.

The After School app has exploded in popularity this school year and is now on more than 22,300 high school campuses, according to its creators. Because it is designed to be accessible only to teenagers, many parents and administrators have not known anything about it.

Stephen Burd:

Grinnell is “need blind” in admissions, meaning that it doesn’t take financial considerations into account when admitting students. It also pledges to meet the full financial need of students with grants and a relatively small amount of federal loans.

These policies have proven to be extremely expensive for a college that admits such a large share of low-income students, enrolls far fewer “full-pay” students than many of its peers, and generates considerably less in philanthropic support that can be spent on need-based financial aid. Worried that these practices were not sustainable, the college’s Board of Trustees created a stir on campus when it considered abandoning the institution’s need-blind policy in 2012.

OECD:

Larger proportions of adults in the United States than in other countries have poor literacy and numeracy skills, and the proportion of adults with poor skills in problem solving in technology-rich environments is slightly larger than the average, despite the relatively high educational attainment among adults in the United States.

Socio-economic economic background has a stronger impact on adult literacy skills in the United States than in other countries. Black and Hispanic adults are substantially over- represented in the low-skilled population.

Literacy skills are linked not only to employment outcomes, but also to personal and social well-being. In the United States, the odds of being in poor health are four times greater for low- skilled adults than for those with the highest proficiency – double the average across participating countries.

Green Bay data and assessment:

A release of state ­level data is scheduled for Wednesday, January 13. The release will provide state ­level results in PDF format for the public (including media), not in the WISEdash Public Portal​.

via a kind reader.

Rather interesting that the resilts will be stick in pdf files….

The Wisconsin dpi provided us with decades of low standards via the WKCE.

Howard Blume:

A new organization set up to create new, higher-performing public schools in Los Angeles has released a list of 28 successful campuses that it said would serve as models.

Those schools, which include charters, magnets and traditional public campuses, are viewed as stellar examples of how to educate students in the L.A. Unified School District. They are being touted by those who, at least initially, had proposed enrolling half of L.A. students in charter schools over the next eight years.

Nina Rees:

of the reasons the late union leader Al Shanker advocated for the creation of charter schools was to give teachers more freedom to explore new ways of teaching without the bureaucratic stranglehold that comes with one-size-fits-all solutions. Nowhere is the need for this freedom more important than in large school districts like the Los Angeles Unified School District – the nation’s second-largest. Thanks to the freedom to create charter schools, LA now has the highest number of students in charter schools – and more than 68,000 students on charter school waitlists. LA also happens to have some of the nation’s strongest charter schools.

Some of the best are Alliance College-Ready Public Schools. Founded by a former LA Unified School District teacher, Alliance now runs 27 charter schools educating nearly 12,000 middle and high school students who are overwhelmingly from disadvantaged communities. More than 90 percent of Alliance students graduate from high school, and 95 percent of Alliance graduates are accepted to college. Many are the first in their families to ever have the opportunity to attend college.

Elizabeth J. Perry:

Why are some autocracies more durable than others? In analyzing the institutional mechanisms that sustain authoritarian regimes, and help to explain their historical longevity as well as their persistence in the 21st century, we may first want to take a brief detour back in time to consider the most durable authoritarian political system in world history: imperial China. Two millennia of Chinese imperial rule offer rich material for generating hypotheses about the bases of authoritarian resilience. Moreover the surprising success of the contemporary People’s Republic of China (PRC), where a largely unreformed Communist Party has presided over stunning and sustained economic growth, renders that country’s long experience with authoritarian rule of particular relevance. Inasmuch as PRC leaders and Party theoreticians frequently point to the Chinese past as a source of valuable lessons for present-day governance, consideration of China’s historical record is of more than arcane academic interest.

Leslie Lamport:

Mathematicians have made a lot of progress in the last 350 years, but not in writing proofs. The proofs they write today are just like the ones written by Newton. This makes it all too easy to prove things that aren’t true. I’ll describe a better way that I’ve been using for about 25 years.

Kristin Rizga:

Last week, during an event hosted by the nonprofit organization Muslim Advocates, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch expressed concerns about what she sees as an uptick in anti-Muslim incidents in schools. The Department of Justice has partnered with the Department of Education to advise schools on anti-bullying measures. Lynch added that the DOJ is investigating MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas; the school in September called the police and suspended 14-year-old Ahmed Muhammad when he brought a clock he had made to school, to show it to his engineering teacher. School administrators assumed it was a bomb.

Meribah Knight:

Even if you work at Chicago Public Schools, its organizational chart is probably foreign. At the top sits one all-powerful mayor, at least when it comes to schools. Then come his appointees: a seven-member school board, a chief executive officer and a chief education officer. Beneath them are nearly a dozen cabinet-level appointees overseeing the bulk of the district’s central office, which includes more than 60 administrative offices.

Let’s focus on just one of those offices: school networks. CPS clusters 431 of its 660 schools in 13 networks by geography. Each network is run by a chief, who, in turn, often employs a deputy, who, in turn, employs anywhere from five to 10 people. These mini-departments recruit principal candidates, administer budgets, oversee school progress and make sure schools are following policy and curriculum. (The other schools in CPS, including charters, schools slated for improvement with increased support and alternative schools, have their own deputy network chiefs and staffs, including a few teachers, some on the CPS payroll and some not.)

Alissa Quart:

“This school would be more of a safety,” Joyce Szuflita explained to the parents. She gestured at the colored paper handouts fanned out between them, and then pointed at another zoned school on a different sheet. “That’s a curated class of parents because they chose to move into the zone of the school that they wanted,” said Szuflita. “So, you don’t have to have G&T if you have that,” she added, referring to gifted-and-talented programs.

It was early morning at a diner in Brooklyn’s South Slope neighborhood, and the couple had contacted Szuflita for advice. The couple—an academic and a public-health researcher—was moving from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to New York City and was nervous about the schooling of their two-year-old and their not-yet-born child. They knew that securing a spot in one of the borough’s handful of coveted high-performing elementary schools was notoriously difficult.

Useful in many cities, particluarly those with vibrant charter and voucher options. Madison’s school climate has not materially changed in many decades. Parents face the “choice” of a largely monolithic, one size fits all government school system along with several private school options.

Barry Garelick, via a kind email:

I attended an “Ed Camp” recently. This is one of many types of non-professional development and informal gatherings where teachers talk about various education-related topics. The camp I attended was free of charge and took place at a charter school that prided itself on a student-centered approach to learning. In keeping with the school’s focus, the camp also took a student-centered approach which it boasted about in its announcement, calling the event an “unconference”. It stated that the Ed Camp “is not your traditional educational conference; sessions will be created by attendees.”

And that’s exactly what happened. Participants wrote ideas for sessions on Post-It notes which were placed on a whiteboard. The conference organizers then put the Post-It notes in categories that formed various sessions which were then led by whomever wanted to lead them.
– See more at: http://www.educationnews.org/k-12-schools/a-math-teachers-day-at-ed-camp/#sthash.YzUfm9L7.dpuf

Tea Leaf Nation:

Over the past decade, students from China — the world’s largest Communist country and America’s chief geopolitical rival — have flooded into U.S. universities. In 2014, according to the Institute for International Education (IIE), over 304,000 Chinese were studying at American colleges, almost one-third of the total international student population. The influx is notable for its sheer numbers alone. But set against the backdrop of official Chinese rhetoric increasingly critical of Western values, the phenomenon is even more remarkable.

China U. is an FP series devoted to higher education’s role as a major and growing node of connection between the world’s two powers. How will a new generation, fluent in China and in America, shape the future of bilateral ties?
The appearance, at least, of a growing schism between the two nations raises the question of what exactly happens to the worldview of a Chinese person who studies in today’s United States. Do the broad freedoms of information, assembly, and religion of which the United States is so proud open students’ eyes to new ideas and modes of thinking? Or, as some have reported, do Chinese students stick perhaps too tightly together, forming insular communities that sustain their old habits and worldviews until they are ready to return home?A Foreign Policy investigation suggests that the reality of Chinese student life in the United States defies both of these narratives. Chinese students in the United States learn much from the contrasts between America’s education system, media, and social and intellectual life and those they find at home. And they often emerge with more admiration for the United States as a result. But they also gain more respect for the enormity of the task involved in running China — and learn that America’s streets aren’t exactly paved with gold.

The Chronicle:

The Chronicle’s executive-compensation package has been updated with information on private-college presidents for the 2013 calendar year.

The update provides data on 558 chief executives at 497 private nonprofit colleges in the United States. The median salary for leaders in office for the full year was $436,429. Thirty-two of the presidents earned more than $1 million.

Public Policy Forum:

For the last 30 years, the Public Policy Forum has collected and analyzed education data to produce an annual report on the demographics, academic performance, and finances of public school districts in southeast Wisconsin. In the three decades of producing this report, few years have exhibited as much change and transformation as this one.

The 2014-15 school year saw a number of changes to student demographics, as well as a shifting regulatory environment. Southeast Wisconsin continues to enroll the majority of public school students in the state, but the number and makeup of those students both are changing. A new state assessment aligned to new academic standards – the Badger Exam – was implemented, but just as quickly discarded. The biennial budget process served as a vehicle for lawmakers to propose and adopt a number of provisions that modify and change state education policies.

Omar Rizwan:

This editorial argues that the dominant conception of computing ignores most of its transformative potential as a medium to express ideas, especially in the humanities and social sciences. I advocate, in the tradition of Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart, for a “real computer revolution” where computer technology enables immediate and dynamic exploration of systems. I suggest that the computer medium is best compared to writing in its possible cognitive and social impact. Finally, I reference promising early works, suggest principles which typify the new medium, and propose ways for the interested reader to become involved with this field.

Chess Academy:

Inspiring millions to learn chess every day

Gerry McGovern:

Everywhere we look we see corrupt, greedy, out-of-touch leadership. As customers become better and better informed, this narcissistic leadership is ushering in an era of deep distrust. That will have significant implications for design thinking.

The Irish Farmers Association (IFA) has had a long and successful history. It used to be that when you became head of the IFA you were paid enough to hire someone to run your farm while you were running the IFA. You also got paid basic travel expenses.

But something happened along the way and the ‘modern’ executives started giving themselves incredible pay rises until the head honcho was earning nearly half a million euro a year, not to mention lavish pension plans. Secrecy was everything to these boys. They absolutely scoffed at the idea of transparency, hiding behind the fact that some big accounting firm ‘audited’ them and agreed that, yes, these most super of supermen deserved to get paid super, super well.

Marshall Steinbaum and Kavya Vaghul:

More than 42 million Americans owe a total of $1.1 trillion in student debt, making it the second-largest liability on the national balance sheet. A generation ago, student debt was a relative rarity, but for today’s students and recent graduates, it’s a central fact of economic life that we don’t know much about. Mapping Student Debt is changing that. The maps below show how borrowing for college affects the nation, your city, and even your neighborhood, giving a new perspective on the way in which student debt relates to economic inequality.

Jess Bravin & Douglas Belkin:

The Supreme Court revisits affirmative action in college admissions Wednesday, and if recent history is a guide, the justices are likely to pare back the use of racial preferences to increase minority enrollment at public universities.

Two years ago, the court passed up a chance to undo affirmative action at the University of Texas, instead asking a lower court to decide whether the Austin campus adequately justified classifying individual applicants by race. Now the case is back at the high court. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the justices have, on issues such as campaign finance and voting rights, taken a partial step in an initial case that later paves the way for a more consequential opinion that shifts the law to the right.

Pat Schneider:

This first national testing of food and housing insecurity — students at Moraine Park Technical College in Wisconsin were among the total 4,300 surveyed — had a relatively low response rate of 9 percent. But Goldrick-Rab said the demographic characteristics of respondents correlated closely to community college students in general.

Because the survey was conducted by email and low-income students can have unreliable access to computers, Goldrick-Rab said she did not expect to see such high rates of food and housing challenges.

“If the rates are higher than this, I’m really worried,” she said.

More than half of all respondents, 52 percent, were at least marginally food insecure over the past 30 days, the survey found. “Food insecurity” was determined through six questions on access to meals used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

African American Intellectual History Society:

The idea of the #mizzousyllabus was conceived by Dr. Leah Wright Rigueur, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. An historian by training, Dr. Wright Rigueur received her B.A. in History from Dartmouth College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. Before joining the Kennedy School faculty, she was a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Her research interests include 20th Century United States political and social history, and modern African American history. Her first book, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton University Press, 2015) covers more than four decades of American political and social history, and examines the ideas and actions of black Republican activists, officials and politicians, from the era of the New Deal to Ronald Reagan’s presidential ascent in 1980. This semester, Professor Wright Rigueur is teaching a course entitled “Race, Riot, and Backlash in the United States.” You can download a copy here.

Jill Barshay:

Andreas Schleicher, an international education expert based in Paris, attended a summit at the White House last month, and left feeling frustrated by the anti-testing backlash in this country.

“I listened to several presentations. You got this impression, if they would only get rid of tests, everything would improve,” said Schleicher, who oversees the education and skills directorate at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). “That certainly isn’t the bottleneck for improvement. The U.S. is not a country of heavy testing.”

John Cochrane:

Here’s the nightmare scenario: Suppose that four years from now, interest rates rise 5 percent, i.e. back to normal, and the US has $20 trillion outstanding. Interest costs alone will rise $1 trillion (5% of $20 trillion6 ) – doubling already unsustainable deficits! This is what happened to Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Don’t think it can’t happen to us. It’s even more likely, because fear of inflation – which did not hit them, since they are on the Euro – can hit us.

Moreover, the habit of rolling over debt every two years leaves us vulnerable to a rollover crisis. Each year our Treasury does not have to just borrow $1 trillion to fund that year’s deficits. It has to borrow about $4 trillion more to pay off maturing debt. If bond markets say no, we have a crisis on our hands.

Going long buys us insurance against all these events. And bond markets are begging us to do it! Most large companies are issuing as much long-term debt as they can.