New York Times:

On this year’s New York Regents Algebra I exam, which was aligned with the Common Core curriculum, the percentage of students passing fell, even as the minimum passing grade was scheduled to increase. Below is a sample of questions from the test.

Patrick Marley:

The union Madison Teachers Inc. on Nov. 10 sought documents under the open records law that would show who had voted so far in the election that ran from Nov. 4 to Nov. 24.

On June 16, the commission’s chairman, James Scott, denied the request, saying the ballots were in the hands of a contractor who runs the elections for the commission and arguing the interests of “avoiding the potential for voter coercion while balloting is ongoing outweigh the interests favoring disclosure.” Scott also contended releasing the records would undermine the secrecy of the ballot because non-votes are considered “no” votes.

Doug Erickson follows up.

Much more on Madison Teachers, Inc. and Act 10, here.

Meanwhile, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Ben Casselman:

The numbers tell a different story. Whether by choice or economic circumstance, young Americans are still more likely to leave the city for the suburbs than the other way around.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data released this week, 529,000 Americans ages 25 to 29 moved from cities out to the suburbs in 2014; only 426,000 moved in the other direction. Among younger millennials, those in their early 20s, the trend was even starker: 721,000 moved out of the city, compared with 554,000 who moved in.1 Somewhat more people in both age groups currently live in the suburbs than in the city.

Indeed, for all the talk of the rebirth of American cities, the draw of the suburbs remains powerful. Across all ages, races, incomes and education groups, more Americans are still moving out of cities than in. (Urban populations are still growing, but because of births and immigration, not internal migration.)

Kathleen Parker:

This isn’t necessarily to excuse them. Everyone has a choice whether to ignore a perceived slight — or to form a posse. But as with any problem, it helps to understand its source. The disease, I fear, was auto-induced with the zealous pampering of the American child that began a few decades ago.

The first sign of the epidemic of sensitivity we’re witnessing was when parents and teachers were instructed never to tell Johnny that he’s a “bad boy,” but that he’s “acting” like a bad boy.

Next, Johnny was handed a blue ribbon along with everyone else on the team even though he didn’t deserve one. This had the opposite effect of what was intended. Rather than protecting Johnny’s fragile self-esteem, the prize undermined Johnny’s faith in his own perceptions and judgment. It robbed him of his ability to pick himself up when he fell and to be brave, honest and hardy in the face of adversity.

Khan Academy:

LearnStorm rewards hustling to learn new things, rather than just testing what you already understand.

You only have to know one thing:
you can learn anything.

Melinda Anderson

In February 1960, four black students from North Carolina A&T walked into Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat down at its “whites only” lunch counter. Every day for six months black students returned to the lunch counter; over time their numbers swelled. The sit-in—central in the fight for black civil rights—soon sparked similar nonviolent protests across the South. From its inception, the 1960s civil-rights movement was fueled by youth leaders and student activists. In many cases college students were the ones leading marches, voter-registration drives, and social-justice actions. Yet in lesser known, equally defining moments, younger students of color were spearheading efforts to tackle inequalities and systemic factors that worked against them.

This was the case in Chicago, where public schools in segregated black neighborhoods were under-resourced and overcrowded. In what’s been called “one of the largest and most overlooked civil rights actions of the 1960s” 250,000 students staged a one-day boycott in October 1963. Estimates are that half of Chicago students participated in the walkout, with about 20,000 marching to the Chicago Board of Education in a mass demonstration for equitable resources for black children. The following year (1964) over 450,000 black and Puerto Rican students protested de facto segregation in New York City’s public schools, a decade after Brown v. Board of Education struck down segregated schooling.

Steven Pearlstein:

Universities in the United States are the best in the world, but the cost of attending them is rising faster than the cost of almost anything else. Professors blame administrative bloat, administrators blame a decline in state funding, politicians blame unproductive faculties who’ve become too set in their ways.

Yet while students are paying more, they are getting less, at least as measured by learning outcomes, intellectual engagement, time with professors and graduation rates. And although students are working more hours at outside jobs and receiving more tuition assistance, student debt now exceeds credit card debt and has become something of a national obsession.

Justin Wm. Moye:

Jennifer Scharf was told that the free class she taught at the University of Ottawa had been canceled. (Courtesy of Jennifer Scharf)
In studios across the nation, as many as 20 million Americans practice yoga every day. Few worry that their downward dogs or warrior poses disrespect other cultures.

But yoga comes from India, once a British colony. And now, at one Canadian university, a yoga class designed to include disabled students has been canceled after concerns the practice was taken from a culture that “experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy,” according to the group that once sponsored it.

Wall Street Journal:

By now you’ve heard that the insurrections at Yale University and the University of Missouri have spread to campuses from California to New Hampshire. The grievances and student demands for safe spaces vary, but the disease is the same: Faculty and administrators who elevate racial and gender diversity above all other values, including free speech.

The road trip begins at Yale, which erupted a few weeks ago after a faculty member suggested that the administration shouldn’t dictate what is an appropriate Halloween costume. In a better era she’d have won free beer at every party on campus, but this time the resulting ruckus featured a student cursing out a Yale sociologist on a lawn for being “insensitive.”

Bret Stephens:

“Liberal Parents, Radical Children,” was the title of a 1975 book by Midge Decter, which tried to make sense of how a generation of munificent parents raised that self-obsessed, politically spastic generation known as the Baby Boomers. The book was a case study in the tragedy of good intentions.

“We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling,” Miss Decter told the Boomers. “While you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices.”

Meager devices came to mind last week while reading the “Statement of Solidarity” from Nancy Cantor, chancellor of the Newark, N.J., campus of Rutgers University. Solidarity with whom, or what? Well, Paris, but that was just for starters. Ms. Cantor also made a point of mentioning lives lost to terrorist attacks this year in Beirut and Kenya, and children “lost at sea seeking freedom,” and “lives lost that so mattered in Ferguson and Baltimore and on,” and “students facing racial harassment on campuses from Missouri to Ithaca and on.”

Malcolm Harris:

If America is going to keep existing, then young people are going to have to form households. You can’t sleep on Twitter or take a shower on Instagram or raise a child on Facebook. At least not exclusively. A generation often characterized by its digital connections still has to go somewhere. So how should a good millennial live?

There are three main options, though very few people have all of them. A third of 18-34 year olds live in households headed by a parent or other family member according to a Pew Research survey from July. A smaller portion, 14 percent, own their own home, many of whom received help from their parents with the down payment. For the plurality there’s renting, and paying half their income is normal, especially in high-cost cities where young adults are concentrated.

Fast Company:

It’s not a great time to be a mid-career adult. While youngsters are thriving in the modern world and happier than ever before, people in their thirties are hitting a wall. This is the fault both of the Internet and of our own unrealistic expectations.

A new study out of San Diego University looks at the difference in happiness levels in the U.S. between 1972 and 2014, broken down by age, and based on a metric called subjective well-being.

Subjective well-being—which is simply how you perceive your own happiness—can be affected by income, lifestyle, and leisure as well as social support and relationships (to name only a few examples). The factors vary depending on age, with the surprise that older people live more for the moment, whereas the young plan for the future:

:

Let’s take a look at our boxer, Gox,
Who cheaply makes those yellow socks. His socks are oh so slightly different,
And he makes them most efficient. Buyers yell and buyers shout:
“Gox’s socks we can’t go without!
His socks are better than the rest,
His socks! His socks! They are the best!”

Doug Erickson:

He said sometimes the tablet isn’t the most efficient way for him to do something. His typing skills are so-so, he said, and he sometimes finds it hard to edit on a screen.

During the single longest stretch of tablet use, students spent about 30 minutes in math class learning the rules that define which procedures to perform first — add, subtract, multiply — to solve an equation. They used their fingers to write the equations on their tablet screens as Alt walked them through it by projecting her work on the large screen.

“Who wants to mirror with me?” Alt asked, as hands shot up.

The technology allows Alt to instantly show, or mirror, a student’s tablet on the large screen for everyone to see. It’s akin to the old and often dreaded practice of being called to the chalkboard to solve a problem in front of the class, yet this approach seems to be considered an honor.

Somewhat ironically, Madison has unused capacity in a number of schools, yet a successful Spring, 2015 referendum will spend another $41M+ to expand certain schools, including some of the least diverse such as Hamilton Middle School.

Madison School District (PDF):

Key Findings
1. Most MMSD schools are not over capacity. Six of the 32 elementary schools and one of the 12 middle schools had Third Friday enrollment numbers above their calculated capacities.
2. Thirteen of the 32 elementary schools, two of the 12 middle schools, and one of the five high schools had Third Friday enrollment numbers above the ideal 90% of capacity.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

1. Enrollment is down slightly (0.3%) since last year. Enrollment projection begin to climb again in 2017-18.

2. Six elementary schools are over capacity this year. Referendum-funded construction eliminates overcrowding among these schools in the five-year projection.

3. Most students continue to attend their home attendance area. This year 60% of transfer requests were approved.

4. The net number of enrollment leavers increased from last year.

Additional reports:

Internal Transfers (PDF).

4K Enrollment (PDF).

Open Enrollment (PDF).

Madison plans to spend $454,414,941.93 or $16,724.26 per student during the 2015-2016 school year.

Jeff Guo:

For the kind of student who stresses over Ivy League college applications, economists have some good news: Attending an “elite” institution probably won’t have much impact on your future earnings.

The best research on this subject comes from Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger, who have shown that after controlling for individual ability, the selectivity of your alma mater doesn’t particularly matter. Their work, which has been widely publicized, has also been somewhat misunderstood.

At first glance, the data analyzed by Dale and Krueger shows a clear advantage to attending a top college like Yale or Williams. Between students with similar SAT scores and GPAs, the ones who end up at more selective institutions earn more after graduation on average.

But that’s because SAT scores and GPAs give an incomplete picture of a student’s potential. It’s hard to measure things like grit, or creativity — or intelligence that’s literally off the charts. When elite applicants have indistinguishably sterling transcripts, top colleges have to use other information, like teacher recommendations, personal essays, and participation in extracurricular activities.

The Macro:

The Macro : The Detroit Water Project has helped more than 950 families keep access to running water since it was founded just 16 months ago. Can you take us back to the beginning? How did this start?

Tiffani Ashley Bell : Last summer in 2014, I was a Code for America fellow, working on software with the City of Atlanta. With government stuff, when you’re working on projects at that level, there is often a lot of downtime as you wait for things to go through.

Before I get up in the morning, I usually scroll through Twitter on my phone. One morning in July of last year I read an article in the Atlantic about how there were 100,000 people in Detroit who were about to have their water shut off for owing money to the water company. The article said that something like 50 percent of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s customers were behind on their bills. If you were $150 behind for at least 2 months, you were eligible for shut off.

This story really bothered me. It just really bothered me. This was a city-run water company having this issue. I thought it was shady that this was the city’s solution. How is turning off a household’s access to clean water helping people who are already hurting, who are already behind on their bills?

Madison’s government schools have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

The Economist:

Mr Thrun insists that nanodegrees are distinct from massive open online courses (MOOCs), the digital lecture series which are now offered by many higher educational institutions. Udacity analyses individual students’ learning data (using AI) in an attempt to increase their retention and completion rates. “We effectively reverse-engineer the human learning brain to find out what it means for a person to engage,” says Mr Thrun. “It’s my dream to make learning as addictive as a video game.”

Online lessons and automated tests are free, although students pay for feedback from real humans and to obtain a certificate on completion. Because the teachers are usually recent nanodegree graduates rather than traditional professors, Udacity can keep prices to just a couple of hundred dollars a month, which is about a tenth of the price of a university. Mr Thrun also claims that over 60% of Udacity students finish their courses, compared with around 10% for MOOCs.

Depending on their complexity, nanodegrees are designed to take just 4-12 months to complete. Shorter courses like these are appropriate for today’s high-paced workplace, says Mr Thrun. “The dream of lifetime employment has gone. In my field, whatever you’ve learned becomes obsolete within five years. If you only spend six months on your first degree, as opposed to the average six years for a bachelor’s degree today, you can afford to get more education when you need it again later on.”

Josh Eidelson:

A Supreme Court decision coming by the end of June could be devastating for organized labor. The case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association (CTA), challenges a 1977 ruling allowing public-sector unions to charge nonmembers covered by union contracts mandatory fees to pay for the costs of collective bargaining. The lead plaintiff, Rebecca Friedrichs, is an elementary school teacher. She claims that being forced to pay money to California’s politically powerful and overwhelmingly Democratic teachers’ union as a condition of her employment violates her First Amendment rights.

Related: an emphasis on adult employment.

Jill Tucker:

The idea is to bring goods and services closer to the customers. And in East Oakland, there’s a big demand for preschool — and not a lot of supply.

The preschool on a bus is a pilot program, serving 14 children, most age 4, for four months this fall. The experiment is a collaboration between Aspire Schools, a chain of 38 charter schools, and Tipping Point Community, a nonprofit philanthropy group focused on fighting poverty.

The bus is a rental, a field trip and party vehicle converted three hours a day, three days a week into a preschool classroom.

Troy Hunt:

little bit too conditioned to data breaches lately. They’re in the mainstream news on what seems like a daily basis to the point where this is the new normal. Certainly the Ashley Madison debacle took that to a whole new level, but when it comes to our identities being leaked all over the place, it’s just another day on the Web.

When it’s hundreds of thousands of children including their names, genders and birthdates, that’s off the charts. When it includes their parents as well—along with their home addresses—and you can link the two and emphatically say “Here is 9-year-old Mary, I know where she lives and I have other personally identifiable information about her parents (including their password and security question),” I start to run out of superlatives to even describe how bad that is.

George Will:

thanks this day for some indirect blessings of liberty, including the behavior-beyond-satire of what are generously called institutions of higher education. People who are imprecisely called educators have taught, by their negative examples, what intelligence is not.

Melissa Click is the University of Missouri academic who shouted “I need some muscle over here” to prevent a photojournalist from informing the public about a public demonstration intended to influence the public. Click’s academic credentials include a University of Massachusetts doctoral dissertation titled “It’s ‘a good thing’: The Commodification of Femininity, Affluence, and Whiteness in the Martha Stewart Phenomenon.” Her curriculum vitae says she has a graduate certificate in “advanced feminist studies.” Advanced. The best kind.

Jon Gabriel:

More money for schools with no new taxes: What’s not to like? A lot, apparently. Mr. Ducey’s plan disrupted the usual coalition of teachers unions and public school districts, leading some in the K-12 establishment—those administrators and union officials who have a way of soaking up dollars while doing little for students—to take the unfamiliar position of objecting to new education funding.

The superintendent of Mesa Public Schools, Arizona’s largest district, launched an email and robocall campaign to turn parents against the proposal. He insisted he was fighting for “the children,” but he was less upfront about disclosing that his lobbying effort was funded with school-district money that could have been put into the classroom instead.

On the other side of the aisle, several of Gov. Ducey’s fellow Republicans preferred to keep the state lands in reserve as a safety net for the future. The green-eyeshade crowd was suspicious of any new spending, even without added taxes. State Treasurer Jeff DeWit, the most prominent official to criticize the plan, lobbied GOP legislators against his own governor. A political newcomer, Mr. DeWit worried that the plan would shortchange the state land trust by several billion dollars—40 years from now. The trust is one of the few fiefdoms that Mr. DeWit controls, and he wanted to keep that money in his back pocket, collecting interest. His re-election campaign three Novembers from now might be tougher if his balance sheet shows a short-term dip.

The disruptive nature of Gov. Ducey’s proposal was unmistakable. With the legislature weighing whether to place his plan on the next ballot, the two sides in the lawsuit were forced to the mediation table after judges’ pleas for the parties to settle had failed. After tense meetings at the governor’s office between legislative and education leaders, a deal was struck that would give schools $3.5 billion over 10 years—$2 billion from the land trust and $625 million reallocated from the state’s general fund. The legislature quickly passed the bargain, and Gov. Ducey signed it on Oct. 30.

Kevin Carey:

There is much truth in this diagnosis. But it does not explain the plight of Liz Kelley, a Missouri high school teacher and mother of four who made a series of unremarkable decisions about college and borrowing. She now owes the federal government $410,000, and counting.

This is a staggering and unusual sum. The average undergraduate who borrows leaves school with about $30,000 in debt. But Ms. Kelley’s circumstances are not unique. Of the 43.3 million borrowers with outstanding federal student loans, 1.8 percent, or 779,000 people, owe $150,000 or more. And 346,000 owe more than $200,000.

The Obama has largely federalized student loans, placing the burden on all Americans.

Our debt, via the handy US Debt Clock app:

  

Laura Waters:

Here’s the problem, Madam Secretary: The nature of teacher union contracts — rigid and prescriptive — is what typically precludes wider adoption of successful charter school innovations. While Clinton’s recitation of teacher union scripture may win her endorsements, it won’t win any votes from parents of New York City’s 95,000 charter school students, most of whom are Latino and black, nor will it win her the votes of the parents of another 50,000 city students who sit on charter school waiting lists, nor the the support of the parents of three million students who attend charter schools nationwide.

Can we blame them? The most recent CREDO study out of Stanford notes that New York City’s charter schools “stand out for providing positive gains for their students in both math and reading and serving a student body with achievement equal or higher than the average achievement within the state,” including black and Hispanic students, those from high-poverty backgrounds and those with disabilities.

Let’s take one simple example of the way in which teacher contracts forestall realistic implementation of innovative approaches to learning. While typical New York City school students attend school for a contractually-prescribed 178 days, 6 hours and 20 minutes per day, public charter schools are free to extend both the length of the school day and the length of the school year. Many N.Y.C. charter school students attend school for between 190 to 200 days per year, and about eight hours a day.

connecting dots together:

I often think back to the times when I was in school and to which of the kids, who are adults now, really did turn out to be someone really successful or someone I admire for what they have done with their lives.

Very often, the people I find myself admiring were the weird kids in school. They were the kids that dressed funny, spoke funny or had really odd hobbies. They were the kids that simply did whatever they wanted to do, without letting the negative comments of others make them conform to societal norms. They knew from very young ages what they wanted to do, and they just did it. They never appeared to be affected by the need to fit in or to be a part of a group; they seemed to be just fine on their own, or at least fine enough so they wouldn’t try as hard as others to fit in.

Jason Belzer:

The answer is, in fact, that there are many different answers. Depending on the level which the university participates in college sports, coupled with the overall goal of the institution, often dictates how its president approaches the day to day management of its athletic program. While you would be hard-pressed to find any university that holds athletic success above academic success, it is not uncommon to find situations in higher education where it appears that the tail is wagging the dog. There is little denying the importance that athletics plays in the overall campus environment, and as we recently saw with the University of Missouri, sports can be at the very center of critical campus conversations and a catalyst for academic and social change. Presidents need to give sports special priority while also keeping them somewhat in perspective.

How do university presidents manage the dynamic of academics and athletics on campus? Can presidents be too hands-on? How does money factor into their decision-making process regarding sports? Do competing interests and priorities on campus cause friction between presidents and athletic directors?

Erica Klarreich:

his Yale University colleague Gil Kalai about a computer science problem he was working on, concerning how to “sparsify” a network so that it has fewer connections between nodes but still preserves the essential features of the original network.

Network sparsification has applications in data compression and efficient computation, but Spielman’s particular problem suggested something different to Kalai. It seemed connected to the famous Kadison-Singer problem, a question about the foundations of quantum physics that had remained unsolved for almost 50 years.

Over the decades, the Kadison-Singer problem had wormed its way into a dozen distant areas of mathematics and engineering, but no one seemed to be able to crack it. The question “defied the best efforts of some of the most talented mathematicians of the last 50 years,” wrote Peter Casazza and Janet Tremain of the University of Missouri in Columbia, in a 2014 survey article.

Jeff Guo:

In fact, girls are pretty much the only reason the high school graduation rate went up in past 40 years, according to calculations by Harvard economist Richard Murnane. The male high school graduation rate has been stuck at 81 percent since the 1970s, while the female graduation rose from 81 percent to 87 percent.

Women have been so persistently superior it is perhaps time for a new stereotype about the sexes — girls as bookish mavens like Lisa Simpson; boys as goof-offs like Bart.

Lenore Skenazy:

Sacramento, California, mom who let her 4-year-old son play outside at a playground 120 feet from her home was arrested. Her neighbors called 911 when they saw the kid outside. While many people might think four is too young for a boy to be outside on his own, the bigger question is: Is this a criminal offense? And doesn’t the boy’s mother have the right to make that choice?

The boy (whose name is Tomahawk) was in a gated apartment complex and on a playground. He’s an outdoorsy kid who loves exploring and sounds like he can take care of himself fairly well.

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta:

The United States has used many types of currency, and each piece has a story behind it. Below are eight bills that are or were once legal tender. Using drag and drop, match the currency with the fact associated with it.

HeterodoxAcademy.org:

A month before the Yale Halloween meltdown, I had a bizarre and illuminating experience at an elite private high school on the West Coast. I’ll call it Centerville High. I gave a version of a talk that you can see here, on Coddle U. vs. Strengthen U. (In an amazing coincidence, I first gave that talk at Yale a few weeks earlier). The entire student body — around 450 students, from grades 9-12 — were in the auditorium. There was plenty of laughter at all the right spots, and a lot of applause at the end, so I thought the talk was well received.

But then the discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had. I don’t mind when people ask hard or critical questions, but I was surprised that I had misread the audience so thoroughly. My talk had little to do with gender, but the second question was “So you think rape is OK?” Like most of the questions, it was backed up by a sea of finger snaps — the sort you can hear in the infamous Yale video, where a student screams at Prof. Christakis to “be quiet” and tells him that he is “disgusting.” I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob — a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking.

After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male. I began to search the sea of hands asking to be called on and I did find one boy, who asked a question that indicated that he too was critical of my talk. But other than him, the 200 or so boys in the audience sat silently.

Alexander Russo:

Things have begun to look pretty bad for the multistate assessment known as PARCC in Massachusetts, according to a November 21 New York Times story:

State education chief Mitch Chester was “walking away” from the Common Core-aligned tests he helped create. The state would now “go it alone” rather than using one of the multistate consortia.

According to the Times story (penned by Kate Zernike and headlined “Massachusetts’s Rejection of Common Core Test Signals Shift in U.S.”), the state would “abandon the multistate test in favor of one to be developed for just this state.” A paragraph later, the move is described as an “about-face.”

Symbolically, no doubt the decision was a big one. The state once leading the way on high, uniform standards was modifying its approach in the face of opposition and concern – following a process that has unfolded in several other states that have renamed the standards and dropped or modified the assessments.

Doug Ericsson:

The financial ramifications are significant. A school district gaining a student receives a share of the student’s home district’s state aid to help pay for educating that student. The Madison School District will lose about $6.5 million in state aid this school year because of open enrollment, the report said.

“Obviously, I am not pleased,” said Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham. “I want Madison to be the first choice for families. That’s what we’re working on.”

She said that while the report is disappointing, it will motivate her and others to work harder.

Overall, the district’s enrollment this school year is 25,231 in grades K-12, down 0.3 percent, or 74 students. There are an additional 1,778 students enrolled in 4-year-old kindergarten.

Much more on Madison’s $454,414,941.93 2015-2016 budget and open enrollment, (about $17K per student!).

Despite spending far more than most K-12 government schools, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

More, here.

Laua Frazier:

Twenty out of 29 of the district’s K-8s have too few students in the middle grades, making it challenging to offer the same level of programming middle schools can, the district found. The district also has 11 schools that are over-crowded and nine that are under-enrolled.

The district developed performance indicators to show the impact of each proposal. Both would drop the number of over-crowded and under-enrolled schools to one. The percentage of students attending over-crowded schools would decline from 20 percent to 1 percent.

Madison is currently expanding one of its least diverse schools – Hamilton Middle School.

Scott Mahaskey:

The Navajo reservation that stretches across vast swaths of desert in northern Arizona and New Mexico is home to 66 schools run by the Bureau of Indian Education. The landscape might be breathtaking, but the dilapidated condition of the schools is eye-popping for another reason. Despite well-documented needs for renovations, the schools linger unattended for years. The buildings that often need the most attention is housing for teachers, who sometimes must commute hours to reach the remote campuses. This makes hiring qualified instructors more difficult and hinders efforts to improve abysmally low scores on reading and math tests.

Jackson Geller:

When looking at the data, it’s clear that about 6-7 of the top 10 prospects carve out legitimate NBA careers every year. Some don’t always live up to expectations, but they find a spot in the league and make plenty of money. There are only a few prospects billed as “can’t miss” who actually didn’t “miss” and went on to become all stars. Those are your John Walls and Kevin Durants — others include, if you’re interested: Kevin Love, Derrick Rose, DeMarcus Cousins, Kyrie Irving, Anthony Davis and Andrew Wiggins.

Plenty “can’t miss” guys ended up having fine careers, but didn’t ascend to the level scouts anticipated: Gerald Green, Greg Oden, Michael Beasley, BJ Mullens, Josh Selby and Shabazz Muhammad.

But there are factors that vary for all these players. Some were billed can’t miss only because they were the best players in a relatively weak high school class (Green and Muhammad). Others were just overrated (Selby and Mullins). Then Oden and Beasley, both seen to be generational talents, floundered due to circumstances beyond their skill sets.

Alice Flarend:

This brings me back to technology. Technology can provide efficient access to content but it teacher must manipulate the technology to fit the student, the curriculum. Google can provide factual information on almost any topic, but without design, those facts remain a pile of useless lumber. A simulation could be effective at addressing a common scientific misconception. The students could use it to test their prior knowledge, gather data to find a pattern or model a complex scenario. Without a design, however, the students will “play” but fail to develop a robust understanding. Too often the lesson is built around the technology rather than the technology helping to build the lesson.

Mary Ryerse and Tyler Nakatsu:

While it’s pretty intuitive to know our expressions of gratitude might benefit another person (and that’s enough motivation!), there are also many scientifically proven benefits of gratitude, including:

Gratitude opens the door to more relationships
Gratitude improves physical health
Gratitude improves psychological health
Gratitude enhances empathy and reduces aggression
Grateful people sleep better
Gratitude improves self-esteem
Gratitude increases mental strength

Paul Fain:

Southern New Hampshire University used an outside testing firm to assess the learning and skills in areas typically stressed in general education that were achieved by a small group of students who are halfway through an associate degree program at the university’s College for America, which offers online, self-paced, competency-based degrees that do not feature formal instruction and are completely untethered from the credit-hour standard.

The university was the first to get approval from the U.S. Department of Education and a regional accreditor for its direct-assessment degrees. A handful of other institutions have since followed suit. College for America currently enrolls about 3,000 students, most of whom are working adults. It offers associate degrees — mostly in general studies with a concentration in business — bachelor’s degrees and undergraduate certificates.

Doug Erickson:

Of the 2,838 Madison School District teachers eligible to vote, 86 percent cast a ballot to recertify the Madison Teachers Inc. union, according to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, the state agency responsible for administering collective bargaining laws. The 20-day voting period ended at noon Tuesday.

Much more on Madison Teachers, Inc. and Act 10, here.

Austin Gunter:

The best resumes have a number of statements that look exactly like the above. If your bullets meander, or don’t have specific deliverables and quantified results, then you need to go back and re-work them.

If you’ve never done this before, it will be difficult because you may not have thought about your career in terms of deliverable results. However, this is exactly how a business will think about you. When you are hired, you are an asset to the business that can deliver a very specific sort of value, and you should be aware of this and be ready to explain how you have delivered similar value in the past, and how you can deliver even greater value to your future company.

:

Worse off than their parents? Young people will not be as rich as earlier generation says the IFS.

Young people are on track to be poorer than their parents at every stage of their lives, according to a new report.

The study, by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), added that households actually grew richer during the financial crisis.
But it said that the reason for the growth between 2006-12 was the increase in pension values over the period.

And the slow rate of growth in overall wealth suggested that young people would lag behind earlier generations.

Dave Innes, a research economist at the IFS and an author of the report said: “Despite the financial crisis, household wealth on average increased in real terms over the late 2000s, driven by increases in private pension entitlements.”

Caroline Bermudez:

In a city with the greatest economic inequity in the country and with a rapidly expanding charter school now serving nearly half of the city’s students, D.C. is one of the few traditional public school districts in the country with enrollment gains and is on track to exceed 50,000 students by 2017. Much of the credit goes to Henderson’s leadership.

STRONG LEADERSHIP
Henderson’s relentless energy and boundless public praise in support of her teachers and principals has created positive morale and considerable buy-in among classroom educators to what is one of the most ambitious reform agendas in the country.

She has also maintained labor peace even while driving an aggressive teacher quality agenda that links evaluation and compensation in part to student growth, something few other urban superintendents can claim.

Madison rejected a proposed IB charter school several years ago.

“An emphasis on adult employment“.

time

Imagine you are green, and most of the people in your country, particularly people in positions of power, are blue.

Your first week as a freshman at one of the most powerful institutions in your country, you walk into the huge hall, called Commons, with its colossal blue and white banner bearing a single word: YALE. It’s beautiful. Your heart swells with pride when you see it.

And then you scan the room. There are roughly 60 tables with about 10 people per table. Fifty-eight of those tables are filled with mostly blue people, with a few orange, purple and green people mixed in. Two of those tables, front left, are full of green people. A green person motions for you to come over. You smile widely.

It is the first time in almost a decade you have had enough fellow green people at your school to fill two whole tables. Two tables out of sixty. You are excited about this.

You glance over at the people clearing tables and serving food. As you expected, they are mostly green like you.

Jesse Singal:

Over the last two weeks, the news has been dominated by coverage of two very different instances of campus turmoil at Yale and the University of Missouri. In both cases, students are protesting over what they see as administrations that turn a blind eye to the problems faced by marginalized students on their campuses. Some of the students involved have gotten upset or confrontational, leading to dramatic YouTube videos that are hard to watch.

For many observers, these incidents only proved what they already knew: College students are getting increasingly fragile and prone to meltdowns. Too emotional and skewed in their thinking, they latch on to petty issues and scream and cry until they get their way. “Yalies Whining for Protection, Not Fighting Adversity” was a Hartford Courant columnist’s headline. “College Is Not for Coddling,” scolded the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus. In a piece that was picked up by Fox News, the Manhattan Institute’s Heather McDonald decried the “pathological narcissism” of college students today. “This isn’t the behavior of people who are capable of weighing opposing ideas, or of changing their minds when they are confronted with evidence that suggests that they are wrong,” USA Today’s Glenn Reynolds wrote of students on both campuses.

Stephen Wolfram:

Not many years ago, the idea of having a computer broadly answer questions asked in plain English seemed like science fiction. But when we released Wolfram|Alpha in 2009 one of the big surprises (not least to me!) was that we’d managed to make this actually work. And by now people routinely ask personal assistant systems—many powered by Wolfram|Alpha—zillions of questions in ordinary language every day.

Chris Rickert:

The case heard by the state Supreme Court on Tuesday pits Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s administration against Evers and public education backers who object to the 2011 Act 21. That law gave the governor power to approve or reject the administrative rules state agencies create to implement statutes.

A court blocked the law from applying to Evers’ Department of Public Instruction in 2012, ruling that it unconstitutionally elevated the governor’s authority over the state superintendent’s. An appeals court agreed in February. Lawmakers continue to review rules as they did before the law was signed, but they have not had the power to reject them without passing a law to that effect.

As you might imagine, administrative rule-making doesn’t usually come with the high political drama that lawmaking does.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction brought us decades of low academic standards via the oft-criticized WKCE.

Paul Voosen:

Before Laszlo Polgár conceived his children, before he even met his wife, he knew he was going to raise geniuses. He’d started to write a book about it. He saw it moves ahead.

By their first meeting, a dinner and walk around Budapest in 1965, Laszlo told Klara, his future bride, how his kids’ education would go. He had studied the lives of geniuses and divined a pattern: an adult singularly focused on the child’s success. He’d raise the kids outside school, with intense devotion to a subject, though he wasn’t sure what. “Every healthy child,” as he liked to say, “is a potential genius.” Genetics and talent would be no obstacle. And he’d do it with great love.

Julie Makinen:

Internet users in America voiced outrage this fall over the imminent launch of a Yelp-style app intended to let anyone post public reviews of their friends, acquaintances and yes, enemies — with no opt-out option.

The outbursts prompted the creators of the app, Peeple, to reconsider. But in China, government authorities are hard at work devising their own e-database to rate each and every one of the nation’s 1.3 billion citizens by 2020 using metrics that include whether they pay their bills on time, plagiarize schoolwork, break traffic laws or adhere to birth-control regulations. And there’s no opt-out option.

Susan Dynarski:

Charter schools are controversial. But are they good for education?

Rigorous research suggests that the answer is yes for an important, underserved group: low-income, nonwhite students in urban areas. These children tend to do better if enrolled in charter schools instead of traditional public schools.

There are exceptions, of course. We can’t predict with certainty that a particular child will do better in a specific charter or traditional public school. Similarly, no doctor can honestly promise a patient she will benefit from a treatment.

James Vincent:

familiar narrative of teens and technology is one of natural proficiency — that young people just get technology in a way that older generations don’t. But research suggests that just because children feel at home using smartphones, it doesn’t mean they’re more aware of the nuances of how the web works. In a new report published by the UK’s telecoms watchdog Ofcom, researchers found that only a third of young people aged 12 to 15 knew which search results on Google were adverts, while this figure was even lower — less than one in five — for children aged 8 to 11.

“The internet allows children to learn, discover different points of view and stay connected with friends and family,” Ofcom’s director of research, James Thickett, told the Financial Times. “But these digital natives still need help to develop the knowhow they need to navigate the online world.”

Giovanni Tiso and Hilary Stace (PDF):

When meeting with the parents of a prospective student with a learning disability or other impairments, a school principal has a range of options. If the child comes from outside the school’s zone, they can refuse admission outright, or make it subject to the school’s special enrolment conditions. Otherwise, the Education Act 1989 gives disabled children the same access to compulsory education as others. The question then becomes: how inclusive should the school be? A school not wishing to burden itself with children with disabilities can adopt a soft approach. The principal can, for instance, be less than totally welcoming at the pre-enrolment interview, or complain about the lack of funding, or praise the great work that the school down the road does in this area, or point to a drab, uninviting special room. Parents of children with special needs are quick to pick up on these signals and will look elsewhere.

Laura Waters:

Today’s New York Times features a doomsday article on the demise of the PARCC assessments aligned with the Common Core State Standards in Massachusetts. In language that would have warmed the cockles of Cotton Mather’s heart (fun fact: the Puritan Boston preacher predicted the end of the world in 1697), the Times describes the “dizzying” and “strange” alliance between the Pioneer Institute, a conservative, Koch Brothers-funded think tank that decries the Common Core and PARCC, in part, because they use an “unproven approach to teaching Euclidean geometry,” and the Massachusetts Education Association, which has waged a relentless campaign against the aligned tests in order to protect teachers from performance-based evaluations.

Colin Macilwain:

Nowhere is this more true than in the United Kingdom, where reforms instigated by former prime minister Margaret Thatcher 30 years ago have enabled vice-chancellors to extend their grip over matters that were once controlled by academics, such as what subjects to teach, which kinds of grant to chase and criteria for hiring staff. By shifting decision-making to committees dominated by their close allies, many vice-chancellors now operate as if they were chief executives.

This managerial approach, and the growing reach and expanse of administrative staff that has accompanied it, is gathering pace worldwide. That is largely because British and US universities dominate international university league tables, and many countries’ higher-education policies seek to emulate their model. Germany’s Excellence Initiative, for example, has selected a small number of promising institutions and given them the money to build up stronger central administrations.

Doonesbury.

The tables below show a three-year history of kindergarten attendance and chronic absenteeism (attendance less than 90%) across the seven HERE! Schools together (Allis, Falk, Lapham, Leopold, Mendota, Midvale, and Orchard Ridge).

PDF Version.

Background links.

NPR (November 12, 2015), Getting kids to show up.

Molly Beck on MMSD Attendance Report for 2013-14 (WSJ) (August, 2014)

MMSD 2013-14 Attendance Report.

Via a kind reader.

Alan Borsuk:

“For us, stability is key.”

Mark Flaten, principal of Green Bay West High School, said that to 10 members of the state Assembly when they visited last week at the school as part of the work of a legislative task force on urban education.

Flaten was talking about challenges faced at the school, where about a quarter of the students come or go during a school year or between school years, not counting incoming ninth-graders and graduating seniors.

Flaten could have been speaking for many educators across Wisconsin and beyond who every day face the challenges of trying to create educational stability in the lives of students whose circumstances aren’t so stable, sometimes in big ways.

In short, stability is a big plus when it comes to educational success, but change, both good and bad, is part of our times and the lives of large numbers of children. One central challenge for schools is to provide as much of the former as possible, given the high degree of the latter.

The notion that kids enroll in a school and stay there until they move up to the next level of schooling is not what it used to be. That’s the case across the board, but it is particularly true at schools serving a higher percentage of low-income students and students who are new to the United States.

If you think this is “a Milwaukee problem,” you’re right and wrong. It certainly is a big issue in Milwaukee, where thousands of students have unstable personal circumstances.

Carolyn Walworth:

As I sit in my room staring at the list of colleges I’ve resolved to try to get into, trying to determine my odds of getting into each, I can’t help but feel desolate.

As a junior at Palo Alto High School, and a student who has been through the entire PAUSD system, I feel qualified to speak about problems at our schools.

My stress began in elementary school, where students were segregated into separate class meetings as “early” and “late” readers. Although we were just elementary schoolers, we perceived this as a differentiation between the less and more advanced students and either felt superior due to our intellect or shamed for a “lack” thereof.

Randall Munroe, via a kind Richard Askey email:

There once was a doctor with cool white hair. He was well known because he came up with some important ideas. He didn’t grow the cool hair until after he was done figuring that stuff out, but by the time everyone realized how good his ideas were, he had grown the hair, so that’s how everyone pictures him. He was so good at coming up with ideas that we use his name to mean “someone who’s good at thinking.”

Two of his biggest ideas were about how space and time work. This thing you’re reading right now explains those ideas using only the ten hundred words people use the most often.1 The doctor figured out the first idea while he was working in an office, and he figured out the second one ten years later, while he was working at a school. That second idea was a hundred years ago this year. (He also had a few other ideas that were just as important. People have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how he was so good at thinking.)

The first idea is called the special idea, because it covers only a few special parts of space and time. The other one—the big idea—covers all the stuff that is left out by the special idea. The big idea is a lot harder to understand than the special one. People who are good at numbers can use the special idea to answer questions pretty easily, but you have to know a lot about numbers to do anything with the big idea. To understand the big idea—the hard one—it helps to understand the special idea first.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Is it misguided, inefficient and wasteful to compel school districts to resort to referenda for authority to meet the rising costs of school operations? Not everyone thinks so. For example, Republican Jeremy Thiesfeldt, chair of the Assembly Committee on Education, does not see a problem with government by referendum. “A school district, if they decide that they need additional money to provide a quality education, what is wrong with them having to sell this to the providers of the tax dollars, the voters?” Thiesfeldt says.

We shouldn’t require our school boards to win voter approval for their annual budgets any more than we should hold a statewide referendum every other year so voters can weigh in on the biennial budget. Representative Thiesfeldt voted in favor of requiring a civics test for high school graduation so he should know that our government does not operate by plebiscite. We have a representative democracy and elect office holders to make decisions so that the voters don’t have to.

Voters become understandably irritated if they are called to the polls every year for a referendum on school district spending. There are dedicated volunteers in every school district, but other community members have other priorities and would not welcome the obligation to educate themselves every year on school district finances in order to cast an informed vote on a referendum. That’s the kind of thing they elect school board members to take care of.

Madison spends $16,700 per student, substantially more than the national average. This, despite long standing, disastrous reading results.

Much more on Ed Hughes, here.

The Economist:

HALLOWEEN is supposed to last for one night only. At Yale University (motto: “Light and Truth”) it has dragged on considerably longer. As happens at many American universities, Yale administrators sent an advisory e-mail to students before the big night, requesting them to refrain from wearing costumes that other students might find offensive. Given that it is legal for 18-year-old Americans to drive, marry and, in most places, own firearms, it might seem reasonable to let students make their own decisions about dressing-up—and to face the consequences when photographs of them disguised as Osama bin Laden can forever be found on Facebook or Instagram. Yet a determination to treat adults as children is becoming a feature of life on campus, and not just in America. Strangely, some of the most enthusiastic supporters of this development are the students themselves.

Lyndsey Layton:

With Congress poised to pass a law that would shift power over K-12 public school policy from the federal government back to the states, the debate about improving schools is shifting from Washington to the 50 state capitals.

Congress is expected to take a final vote on a bill to replace No Child Left Behind, the current federal law, after Thanksgiving. House and Senate conferees endorsed the new legislation 39 to 1 on Thursday, and while some conservatives are unhappy with it, the bill is expected to pass and the White House has indicated that President Obama will sign it.

Nicholette Zeliadt:

The latest estimate of autism prevalence in the U.S., released last week, suggests the condition is even more common than previously thought. But the apparent rise in autism coincides with a decline in other developmental disorders, highlighting the complexity folded into this seemingly simple statistic.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 1 in 45 children have autism, up from 1 in 80 in 20131. The new figure is based on the annual door-to-door National Health Interview Survey, which asks parents whether a doctor has ever told them their child has autism, intellectual disability or another type of developmental delay.