Alan Borsuk:

Every school day, more than 8,000 children who live in the city of Milwaukee head off to school in Milwaukee suburbs.

I think of that as the equivalent of, say, six high schools or 16 elementary schools that are serving Milwaukee kids outside the city lines. That has a lot of impact, even as the complex picture of city-suburban school choice continues to evolve.

This is one form of evolution that Gov. Scott Walker is, presumably, willing to speak his mind on because his proposed state budget calls for ending the voluntary racial integration program known as Chapter 220, which is the oldest of the city-suburban programs.

But the story of city kids going to suburban schools actually has three chapters. In addition to 220, there is extensive use of the state’s open enrollment law and growing use of a provision, now four years old, that allows city kids to attend suburban religious schools.

Here’s a primer on these three often-overlooked but important aspects of educating the children of Milwaukee.

Related: where have all the students gone?

Roxana Daneshjou:

The first hint of sunlight glows off the horizon as I rush toward Stanford Hospital from the parking garage, white coat in hand, stethoscope bouncing against my chest. Every few steps, the diaphragm of my stethoscope ricochets off the silver pendant my mother gave me—a nine-pointed star etched with a symbol of my Bahá’í faith. My mother escaped Iran at 17 as the country was on the cusp of revolution—a revolution that would create a society where, to this day, Bahá’ís like myself are barred from obtaining a university education. But here, in the United States, I’ve spent more than a third of my life on a university campus.

The Bahá’í faith was founded in 19th century Persia, and is now the largest non-Islamic minority religion in Iran. Persecution of our religion has helped it expand around the world—my own family’s escape to the United States in 1979 guaranteed that I would be born to the freedom and opportunities denied to Bahá’ís back home.

Back in Iran, the state bans Bahá’ís from studying at universities as just one of many different forms of persecution, which has included desecration of cemeteries, confiscation of property, and wrongful imprisonment. However, because education is such a fundamental principal of our faith, Bahá’í students there have to learn in secret—usually through the Bahá’í Institute of Higher Education (BIHE), whose volunteers quietly teach classes in homes or via online portals. The threat of arrest is constant; the government recently imprisoned both BIHE students and professors, some at the notorious Evin Prison, which has held many prisoners of conscience. I, on the other hand, had the freedom to receive a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from Rice University and am now in an M.D.-Ph.D. program at Stanford University, filling my brain with pathophysiology and methods of statistical analysis, which I hope to use to serve the community.

Curt Guyette:

Emergency management has neither fixed the finances of Detroit Public Schools nor provided even an adequate education to most Detroit students.

The state’s takeover of the district, and the appointment of four different managers during those six years, has been like shuffling captains on the Titanic after the iceberg has been hit. Unless the hole gets plugged, the ship is going down no matter who is at the helm.

In the case of DPS, the district’s perpetual annual deficits (pegged at nearly $170 million for the current fiscal year) and its long-term debt (which is at more than $2.1 billion as of last June) aren’t just an issue of management. Unless severe structural problems are resolved, the district will continue sinking.

Wayne State University economist and law school professor Peter Hammer focused on the crisis facing DPS in a paper published in The Journal of Law in Society.

“The important point is that the dynamics of the problem are structural and largely transcend issues of governance,” wrote Hammer in a paper titled “The Fate of the Detroit Public Schools: Governance, Finance and Competition.“

Kelchen:

In spite of the vast majority of federal government operations being closed on Thursday due to snow (it’s been a rough end to winter in this part of the country), the U.S. Department of Education released financial responsibility scores for private nonprofit and for-profit colleges and universities based on 2012-2013 data. These scores are based on calculations designed to measure a college’s financial strength in three key areas: primary reserve ratio (liquidity), equity ratio (ability to borrow additional funds) and net income (profitability or excess revenue).

A college can score between -1 and 3, and colleges that score over 1.5 are considered financially responsible without any qualifications and can access federal funds. Colleges scoring between 1.0 and 1.4 are considered financially responsible and can access federal funds for up to three years, but are subject to additional Department of Education oversight of its financial aid programs. If a college does not improve its score within three years, it will not be considered financially responsible. Colleges scoring 0.9 or below are not considered financially responsible and must submit a letter of credit and be subject to additional oversight to get access to funds. A college can submit a letter of credit equal to 50% of all federal student aid funds received in the prior year and be deemed financially responsible, or it can submit a letter equal to 10% of all funds received and gain access to funds but still not be fully considered financially responsible.

Max Niesen:

Most business school rankings have one of Harvard or Stanford on top, their graduates command the highest salaries, and benefit from particularly powerful networks. But a report from student lender M7 Financial puts them below Brigham Young’s Marriott School, and alongside less prestigious schools including Ohio State’s and the University of Washington’s, while Bloomberg Businessweek’s top-ranked program, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, is in the second-lowest tier.

The difference between M7’s methodology and others is that it focuses entirely on an average student’s ability to pay back typical loan obligations after graduation. The list leaves out quite a few highly regarded schools, including Wharton, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, because they didn’t provide debt figures to US News, which is where M7 drew its debt data from.

Leslie Norton:

Yale University has done something that no other Ivy League school has attempted: built a new version of itself halfway around the world, in Singapore.

A year and a half ago, Yale accepted its first class of freshmen at this brand new university, a joint venture between Yale and the well-respected National University of Singapore. The goal is to create a new generation of leaders for Asia’s companies and governments. And what better institution for the job than Yale? Among the alumni of Yale’s leafy New Haven, Conn., campus are three recent U.S. presidents — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush — three sitting Supreme Court justices; and top business leaders, including Blackstone ’s Stephen Schwarzman, Liberty Media ’s John Malone, and PepsiCo ’s Indra Nooyi.

“The idea is that the Singapore program should be producing leaders in whatever sector of society they work in,” says Yale President Peter Salovey. In his view, the success of Yale’s Singapore experiment will be judged years from now by the success of its graduates. “Do they go on to the best graduate and professional programs? Do employers say they find these students articulate, creative, capable of teamwork? Those are some of the outcome measures,” says Salovey, adding, “I have a lot of optimism.”

“Our schools will show real, quantifiable student achievement and with those results finally dispel the misguided and simplistic notion that the union contract is an impediment to success.” So declared teachers union chief Randi Weingarten in 2005 upon launching the United Federation of Teachers charter school in Brooklyn, New York.

The UFT quietly let slip last week that this showcase K-8 charter school is closing after a legacy of failure. Ms. Weingarten’s experiment in education of the union, by the union and for the union is a case study in the problems with the status quo of union dominance over American public education.

In 2005 the UFT Charter School opened with a $1 million gift from the Broad Foundation and plans to reduce class sizes, increase collaboration among teachers with monthly “townhall meetings” and daily “community gatherings,” and replace principals with less adversarial “school leaders.” Instructional coaches were supposed to support teachers but not evaluate their performance.

On queue, yhe New York Times dives into a failed Florida charter.

Perhaps the reporters might compare charters with traditional public school performance along with spending and staffing data.

Li Zhou:

For children with autism, math problems are a lot easier if images are involved. Addition, for example, becomes significantly more clear if the equation and answer are accompanied by physical pictures representing the math taking place. Two cars plus three cars is logically depicted with images of five physical cars. Reinforcing every question with a visual reference helps make it more concrete and accessible.

Katie Hench, Christopher Flint and Lally Daley, all of whom have worked with autistic students as special education teachers or therapists, were inspired by their firsthand experiences to establish Infiniteach, a Chicago-based startup building mobile apps that cater to the specific ways that kids with autism learn. Their current app, Skill Champ, teaches ten vital skills, including number matching and object sorting, using approaches proven to resonate with autistic students.

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

Much like they did in enacting Act 10 a few years ago, Republican legislators once again adjourned the Committee hearing before all could be heard, and then voted to send the Right to Work Bill to the full Senate recommending that they adopt it. The Senate adopted it with all democrats and one republican (former Union member who values what the Union did for him) voting NO! The action by the Republican majority was an embarrassment to democracy. Sen. Hanson (Green Bay) said “Right to Work will destroy the middle class. That it has caused a reduction of wages and a loss of benefits in other states.”

The Bill was pushed through the Senate by Republican Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (Juneau). The Bill is nearly identical to the model recommended by conservative policy developer American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Fitzgerald, in speaking before the Committee hearing, said his proposal would “protect every worker” from being forced to join a union. The National Labor Relations Act already does that, and has for about 75 years. In some settings like MMSD, those who decide not to join the union at their workplace pay a representation fee, because they receive the wage increases, the fringe benefits, and the other rights which the union negotiates – and the union is obligated to represent them in things like discipline and dismissal. Fitzgerald’s claim of “forced unionism” is simply NOT TRUE.
It is interesting that a coalition of over 400 employers oppose the Bill, stating that they hire skilled workers through the union’s, apprenticeship program that they depend on and works well with the unions.

Right to Work provides no rights to working people. It will result in taking the guarantees of just cause and due process away from workers. At the peril of workers and their families, it will reduce income to line the pockets of corporate executives.

Kevin Carey:

Three years ago, technology was going to transform higher education. What happened?

Over the course of a few months in early 2012, leading scientists from Harvard, Stanford and M.I.T. started three companies to provide Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. The courses were free. Millions of students signed up. Pundits called it a revolution.

But today, enrollment in traditional colleges remains robust, and undergraduates are paying higher tuition and taking out larger loans than ever before. Universities do not seem poised to join travel agents and video stores on the ash heap of history — at least, not yet.

The failure of MOOCs to disrupt higher education has nothing to do with the quality of the courses themselves, many of which are quite good and getting better. Colleges are holding technology at bay because the only thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable price. What they don’t offer are official college degrees, the kind that can get you a job. And that, it turns out, is mostly what college students are paying for.

Dan Walters:

Brown, meanwhile, is negotiating privately with Napolitano – herself a former governor of Arizona – to see whether compromise is reachable. A first increment of the threatened tuition increase has been postponed, but publicly Napolitano is threatening to cap admissions by California students.

The amount of state UC aid involved is relatively tiny and were it just about money, a compromise could be easily found. But the underlying issue is how much control governors and legislators should exert over university operations, given the system’s constitutional independence, and that point is less susceptible to compromise.

The faculties and administrators of both systems may dislike being told to descend from their ivory towers and join the real world of financial limits and competing priorities.

But the conflicts in both states are two sides of the same coin – whether there are limits on how hard state university systems can hit taxpayers and students for money and whether they are answerable to politicians, voters and students for how they spend that money.

Page 8 is illustrated above, with Madison’s per student spending noted, not completely to scale.

36 Page PDF Slideware Presentation.

I’ve not seen a total spending number published in awhile (The last number I’ve seen was approximately $402,000,000) for 25,305 full time students and 1,962 4K participants. That’s roughly $15K per student, about double the national average.

Much more on the Madison School District’s 2015-2016 budget, here.

Related: Attrition Report. Equity based staff reduction summary.

<A href=”http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/03/03/389282733/where-have-all-the-teachers-gone“></a>: <blockquote>“The question, and one that needs to be empirically investigated, is ‘Are we overproducing certain kinds of teachers school districts aren’t looking for and under-producing certain types of teachers that schools and other types of employers are desperately looking for?’ “

There are, of course, alternative teacher certification programs across the U.S. including Teach for America. But TFA, too, has seen large drops in enrollment over the past two years.

One possible path out of this crisis is to pay teachers more.</blockquote> Related: Graduating more teachers than required.   

Laura Waters:

The union is wasting its time and making leaders look like wimps by denying the ‘joint accord’ mentioned by Christie in his budget address.

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop,” said pragmatist Herbert Stein, and the New Jersey public employee pension system appears to have hit that wall. Last week the bipartisan Pension and Health Benefits Study Commission declared that “the situation is not only getting worse, but is also fast approaching the point at which it will be beyond remedy.”

So what’s the cure for a pension system that Mark Magyar describes on this website as a “fiscal basket case?”

Douglas Belkin:

The Wall Street Journal invited three people to join in an email discussion of the issue. They are: Levi Bisonn, a senior at Olympia High School in Washington state who has applied to 13 schools, including Johns Hopkins University and the University of Washington; Patty Pogemiller, the director of talent acquisition at Deloitte; and Scott Thomas, dean of the School of Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California, who has researched opportunity in higher education.
Recruiting Edge

WSJ: Levi, the University of Washington and Johns Hopkins are both great schools but, depending on aid and scholarships, the price difference could be significant. If you were to pay full freight, Johns Hopkins would run you about twice as much. How much, if at all, will the price tag and prestige of the institution impact your decision if you get in to both schools?

Heather Holland:

A public elementary school is abolishing traditional homework assignments and telling kids to play instead — outraging parents who say they may pull their kids out of the school.

Teachers at P.S. 116 on East 33rd Street have stopped assigning take-home math worksheets and essays, and are instead encouraging students to read books and spend time with their family, according to a letter the school’s principal, Jane Hsu, sent to parents last month.

The Economist:

“IT’S all to do with their brains and bodies and chemicals,” says Sir Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College, a posh English boarding school. “There’s a mentality that it’s not cool for them to perform, that it’s not cool to be smart,” suggests Ivan Yip, principal of the Bronx Leadership Academy in New York. One school charges £25,000 ($38,000) a year and has a scuba-diving club; the other serves subsidised lunches to most of its pupils, a quarter of whom have special needs. Yet both are grappling with the same problem: teenage boys are being left behind by girls.

It is a problem that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. Policymakers who once fretted about girls’ lack of confidence in science now spend their time dangling copies of “Harry Potter” before surly boys. Sweden has commissioned research into its “boy crisis”. Australia has devised a reading programme called “Boys, Blokes, Books & Bytes”. In just a couple of generations, one gender gap has closed, only for another to open up.

Christian Schneider:

When the Madison Metropolitan School District School Board met in October of last year, members listened to teachers tell stories of being hit, bitten and kicked by students. The teachers were objecting to a new school district plan that sought to both allay the wide racial disparity in student suspensions and keep children in school for more instruction days. But teachers said the plan, which lessened punishment for many offenses that previously earned students out-of-school suspensions, was nothing short of a catastrophe.

Racial disparity in suspensions is an issue that has long plagued Wisconsin. According to a report released last week, Wisconsin ranks first in the nation in the rate of black secondary school students suspended. Previous studies have shown that in Milwaukee schools, black students represented 56% of the district’s total enrollment but made up 85% of the students who were given multiple out-of-school suspensions.

In Madison, however, the racial disparity is far more pronounced. Last year, black students made up only 18% of enrollment but comprised 59% of out-of-school suspensions. And the plan to lessen this disparity only seems to have made it worse; this year, while the total number of suspensions is down 41%, the rate of black students who earn out-of-school suspensions has risen to 64%. Further, teachers and parents alike argue that it leaves disruptive students in classrooms where they can lessen the quality of education for well-behaved students.

The Madison experiment’s problems are notable given the district’s proud status as a progressive stronghold. It would be difficult to find a district more sensitive to charges of racial insensitivity; and yet the district’s track record in dealing with black children is a near-scandal. In the 2013-’14 school year, 10% of the district’s black students were proficient in reading — that’s lower than the district’s special education students (14%) and students who speak English as a second language (19%). And this is occurring in one of the state’s wealthiest school districts.

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.

Chris Rickert:

From the way some of the more enthusiastic public school supporters talk, you’d think alternative forms of public education, such as voucher schools, were making millions on the backs of ill-treated kindergartners.
The vast majority of Wisconsin’s voucher schools are not-for-profit, though, and it seems unlikely that any of them is, say, forcing 8-year-olds into sweatshops or flogging them for chewing gum in class.

But you’d never know that from the Madison School District’s denial of an open records request from a pro-voucher organization on grounds that the request wasn’t education-related.

School Choice Wisconsin president Jim Bender says the “vast majority” of about 30 larger districts complied with the organization’s request for student directory data. It is considering plans to use the information to send out postcards reminding parents of the enrollment period for the statewide voucher program.

Jill Tatge-Rozell, via a kind reader:

Kenosha parents whose autistic child was not admitted into Paris Consolidated School through open enrollment have joined a lawsuit that claims Wisconsin’s open enrollment rules violate federal disability law.

Specifically, the suit claims open enrollment violates the Americans with Disabilities Act because it denies students with disabilities the benefits of a government program on the basis of disability.

“We view the open enrollment process as a government benefit,” said C.J. Szafir, education policy director for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. “Since the program is out there, all children should have equal access.”

Wisconsin law allows a school district to establish how many students with disabilities it will accept through open enrollment. In some cases, such as at Paris, districts do not accept any students with disabilities.

WILL is representing six children with disabilities from five families whose applications to attend schools outside their resident district were denied. The identities of the parents and the children are protected at this point in the proceedings.

However, Szafir said far more children with disabilities have had their open enrollment applications denied since the program started. For the 2013-14 school year alone, he said, more than 1,000 disabled children had their applications for open enrollment rejected solely on the basis of their disability.

Kevin Carey:

In 1796, in his final annual address to Congress, President George Washington called for the creation of:

“…a National University; and also a Military Academy. The desirableness of both these Institutions, has so constantly increased with every new view I have taken of the subject, that I cannot omit the opportunity of once for all, recalling your attention to them.”

The Military Academy was soon built at West Point. But despite leaving $22,222 for its establishment (a lot of money back then) in his last will and testament, Washington’s National University never came to pass.

Instead, lawmakers chose to rely on state governments and religious denominations to build and finance new colleges and universities.

Today, the American higher education system is in crisis. The price of college has grown astronomically, forcing students and parents to take out loans that now exceed $1.2 trillion in outstanding debt. Many of those loans are falling into default as graduates struggle to find work. The latest research suggests that our vaunted universities are producing graduates who haven’t learned very much.

<A href=”http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/03/04/private-colleges-no-show-business/“>The American Interest</a>: <blockquote>This “high tuition, high discount” strategy is common for private schools around the country, and the same problems apply. According to a report from last June, colleges are discounting their rates like never before, earning only 54 cents for every dollar of tuition charged. The National Association of College and University Business Officers records the average discount rate for private colleges as 36.1 percent in 2009 and 40.9 in 2013. Sweet Briar’s rate, clearly, was on the high side all along.

It’s no surprise that this strategy of charging high tuition and then slashing it selectively (whether for merit- or need-based aid) doesn’t always work. Whatever array of prices you charge, you still need enough customers to keep the doors open. We’d be shocked if Sweet Briar is the last school to pack in the show.</blockquote> 

Chris Granger:

This is certainly accurate, but defining literacy as interpreting and making marks on a sheet of paper is grossly inadequate. Reading and writing are the physical actions we use to employ something far more important: external, distributable storage for the mind. Being literate isn’t simply a matter of being able to put words on the page, it’s solidifying our thoughts such that they can be written. Interpreting and applying someone else’s thoughts is the equivalent for reading. We call these composition and comprehension. And they are what literacy really is.

Kirk Carapazza & Mallory Noe-Payne:

The next time you pull out your checkbook to pay that hefty tuition bill or pay down your student loan, consider this: there are countries where students pay nothing to attend university. Denmark, Sweden and Germany, all have tuition-free college.

WGBH Radio’s On Campus team wondered how these countries do it, and if there are things the U.S. can learn from their model. Their search to understand how German universities keep costs down and quality up began in the Rhineland.

Simona Chiose:

“With the current funding regime, we cannot afford for the university to have all courses taught by tenure-track appointments, although the research is important,” York University president Mamdouh Shoukri said in an interview.

The shift is changing the undergraduate experience. Most students at large and medium-sized universities will have limited contact with their universities’ top, internationally ranked talent. Instead, they are taught by professors who have more education but less job security than high school teachers. Some observers are beginning to wonder if universities are making the right choice. A report suggested last year that, rather than create a two or three-tiered labour force, universities should encourage tenured professors with middling research output to spend more time teaching.

However, universities are moving in the opposite direction.

Frank Shyong:

In a windowless classroom at an Arcadia tutoring center, parents crammed into child-sized desks and dug through their pockets and purses for pens as Ann Lee launches a PowerPoint presentation.

Her primer on college admissions begins with the basics: application deadlines, the relative virtues of the SAT versus the ACT and how many Advanced Placement tests to take.

Then she eases into a potentially incendiary topic — one that many counselors like her have learned they cannot avoid.

“Let’s talk about Asians,” she says.

Lee’s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column.

Fréderike Geerdinke:

1. Seems like there’s a lot of confusion even about the question of whether these schools are open or not. Right?

Right. Three schools for education in Kurdish were opened this Monday, on the first day of the new school year in Turkey: one in Yüksekova (the Dayîka Uveyş Primary School, named after the mother of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan), one in Cizre (Bêrîvan Primary School) and one in the Baglar district of the city of Diyarbakir (the Ferzat Kemanger Primary School, named after an Iranian Kurdish teacher, poet and human rights activist hanged by Iran in 2010). By Monday the police had already come to the school, but were prevented from entering by parents, teachers and their supporters. Only school inspectors were let in. Later the same day, after festivities celebrating the opening of the schools, they were closed down by the regional governors, who sealed the doors.

Hannah Rosin:

In December, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv had let their 10-year-old son Rafi and his 6-year-old sister Dvorah walk one mile home through Silver Spring alone. The kids got picked up by the police, who then turned the case over to child protective services. The Meitivs, as it happens, are “free-range parents” who have a very coherent philosophy about giving children more independence. They had let their children walk home alone that day only after practicing, and felt the kids were ready.

Stephanie Yang:

students in U.S. colleges outpaces that of any other country, the journey to get into an elite American university has only gotten more cutthroat and students are rising to the challenge in strange ways.

Think: Scalping tickets for tests, making up exotic adventures, and getting tutored at 1:00 am.

China is already known for one rigorous exam that students spend years preparing for – the gaokao. The determining factor in a high school student’s college placement, the gaokao is the cause of pressure, stress, and occasionally cheating among test takers.

Beth McMurtrie:

Mr. Gu is like many other Silicon Valley hopefuls, except in one respect. He is a Thiel fellow, one of a select few who were given $100,000 each to leave college to pursue their start-up dreams. “It has sort of good and bad associated with it,” Mr. Gu says of how people react when they find out that he is a fellow. “It comes with a whole set of assumptions and mixed views. People want to know if you think nobody should go to college.”

In the five years since the billionaire investor Peter Thiel announced his eponymous fellowship, the project has assumed outsize social significance, as Mr. Gu discovered. Mr. Thiel’s outspoken nature and his view that the value of college is oversold have earned him both enemies and accolades.

For some, Mr. Thiel is a dangerous man, seeking to undermine a system that has proved the surest path to economic success for millions of Americans. For others, his ideas represent the future of American education, in which brilliant minds are freed from the convention of college and are encouraged to educate themselves on their own terms.

D.Farish:

In the first of three parts of this series, I discussed the general topic of what has been called a “jobless recovery,” following the Great Recession of 2008. In parts two and three, I examined at length the culprits that have been implicated as being the cause of our weak economic recovery: an outmoded and, to date, unresponsive system of higher education; and income and wealth inequality.

Analyzing the root causes of this unusually poor economic recovery is important not merely to ensure that blame is correctly assigned. The real importance lies in our efforts to remedy the problem: If we are focused on the wrong cause, not only will our solution fail to revive the economy, but also the potential for harm in repairing something that wasn’t broken could be enormous – and, in the long run, further negatively impact the nation.

And it’s not possible to look at the issue of misdirected blame without asking if the misdirection has been inadvertent or purposeful: Are there people of power and influence who are knowingly misrepresenting the cause of our weak economy in order to protect another possible cause – or their own interests – from closer inspection?

Jeffrey Selingo:

Twenty-one years ago, as I entered my senior year in college, my alma mater reached a significant milestone: the price tag passed the $20,000 mark. Today, tuition, fees, room, and board for a senior at Ithaca College are more than twice that, at about $53,000.

Now, of course, Ithaca and most other private colleges and universities rightfully argue that just a small percentage of students pay those “sticker prices” because schools give out boatloads of financial aid (read: discounts). They’re right. The average discount for first-year students at private colleges is 46 percent.

[See a list of the 57 U.S. colleges and universities that have a “sticker price” of more than $60,000 a year.]

Even in the early 1990s, I received a significant break on my tuition. If I were a student at Ithaca today, for example, I’d pay an average “net price” of $29,000 based on my parent’s income when I was a student, according to the U.S. Education Department. (You can find a college’s net price by income level on the Education Department’s College Navigator).

This is the time of year when private colleges are setting their tuition levels for next year, if they haven’t already. And at most colleges the question that emerges every year is what’s the breaking point? How high can we go with tuition until it’s just too much?

Andrew Kelly:

Last month, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) added to a familiar refrain, releasing a new report on how American Millennials lag behind their peers in other countries on measures of literacy, numeracy, and “problem-solving in technology rich environments.” Using data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), the authors showed that American Millennials ranked at the bottom in both numeracy and problem-solving. Fully 64 percent of Americans scored below the lowest proficiency rating on the numeracy exam, compared to about 1/3 of Millennials in places like Finland, the Netherlands, and Japan.

The picture wasn’t much brighter among young workers with bachelors and graduate degrees. On the numeracy exam, American BA holders outscored their peers in only two countries—Italy and Poland. Those with grad degrees outscored counterparts in Italy, Poland, and Spain.

The authors point out the incongruity: “A nation with some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world houses a college-educated population that scores among the lowest of the participating OECD nations in literacy and numeracy.” “As a country,” the authors conclude, “simply providing more education may not be the answer. There needs to be a greater focus on skills…”

Andrew McGettigan:

Student loans are in principle a straightforward business. The government lends students money; after they graduate, they begin repaying it. From the perspective of politicians and the Treasury the advantage of loans over grants is clear: the money isn’t simply given away, it comes back over the lifetime of the loan. Even better, in the national accounts the loans are classified as ‘financial transactions’, not ‘expenditure’, and are excluded from calculations of the deficit.​1 When in 2012 the coalition all but ended the direct-grant funding of undergraduate teaching in English universities and colleges, the move could be sold as consistent with fiscal austerity – it had the effect of reducing government spending. But the income of universities and colleges was spared the cuts made elsewhere because the gap was more than filled by higher tuition fees backed by loans.

Since 2012 English higher education institutions have been able to charge new full-time students from the UK and EU up to a maximum of £9000 per year for tuition.​2 Anyone graduating from 2015 onwards is likely to owe £27,000 in tuition fee loans and more for maintenance loans, plus whatever interest accrued on the loans while they were studying. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons that on average student borrowers will owe £44,035 at graduation; for those who began their degrees before 2012, the figure was under £25,000.

Laurie Burkitt:

Chinese values are shifting.
A University of California at Los Angeles study assessed Chinese values by analyzing the words used in more than 270,000 Chinese-language books and found that China’s social core is undergoing a major transformation. The psychology researchers focused on word usage in books published between 1970 and 2008. Among the findings: the word “obedience” was used three times as much as the word “autonomy” in books from 1970, while the ratio flipped in 2008 books, with “autonomy” dominating.

Book authors used words like “choose,” “compete,” “private,” “autonomy” and “innovation” with increasing frequency as the nearly four decades progressed. The usage reflects greater individualism and sharp rises in “urban population, household consumption and education levels,” the study says.

The Economist:

IN THE first week of March university students in China will return from a break of six weeks or more. They will find a new chill in the air. While they have been away, officials have been speaking stridently—indeed, in the harshest terms heard in years—about the danger of “harmful Western influences” on campuses, and the need to tighten ideological control over students and academic staff.

Universities have always been worrisome to the Communist Party; they have a long history in China as wellsprings of anti-government unrest. The party appoints university presidents. Its committees on campuses vet the appointment of teaching staff. Students are required to study Marxist theory and socialism. They are not allowed to study politically sensitive topics such as the grievances of Tibetans or the army’s crushing of the student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Austin Dean:

Although he frequently weighs in on the issues haunting Chinese universities, Zhang gave fullest expression to his views in a 2011 book, Is Chinese Education Sick? The title is actually a misnomer. The book keeps a skeptical eye fixed on colleges and universities, not the entire educational system. The question mark at the end ultimately seems unnecessary; Zhang make it so clear throughout that he sees the answer as an affirmative one, that the book might as well as have been named Chinese Education Is Sick.

Some of his analysis is universal to academics everywhere. Other points, though, have certain “Chinese characteristics.”

Zhang reserves some of his harshest barbs for the bureaucratization of Chinese universities. Interestingly, to make his attack, Zhang leans on the language of Chinese history and the yamen, the name of a local administrative office in imperial China. The lowest level of the administrative hierarchy, yamens were also centers of corruption as different government clerks assisted in carrying out the work of the local magistrate. For Zhang Ming, Chinese universities today don’t resemble institutions of higher learning as people in other countries know them so much as they do yamens. They are not centers of learning but centers of administrators and bureaucrats, who implement a system of rules, regulations, measurements, and assessments. Corruption is everywhere.

Aerogramme Writers Studio:

I. The First Introduction
THAT’S RIGHT. I know it sounds like an ad for some sleazy writers’ school, but I really am going to tell you everything you need to pursue a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction, and I really am going to do it in ten minutes, which is exactly how long it took me to learn. It will actually take you twenty minutes or so to read this essay, however, because I have to tell you a story, and then I have to write a second introduction. But these, I argue, should not count in the ten minutes.

II. The Story, or, How Stephen King Learned to Write
When I was a sophomore in high school, I did a sophomoric thing which got me in a pot of fairly hot water, as sophomoric didoes often do. I wrote and published a small satiric newspaper called The Village Vomit. In this little paper I lampooned a number of teachers at Lisbon (Maine) High School, where I was under instruction. These were not very gentle lampoons; they ranged from the scatological to the downright cruel.

Louise Tickle:

It’s six months since headteacher Emma Payne opened a new kitchen to provide hot meals for her pupils. The problems of starting up are in the past. But now there are new issues to deal with. Because the meals are free, fewer parents are claiming free school meals, and that is going to cost the school £9,240 in pupil premium.

“It’s mostly new reception parents who haven’t realised they need to sign up,” says Payne. “We’ve tried really hard to explain why claiming is important.”

The Guardian has been following the progress of her school – St Mary Redcliffe Primary in Bristol – since February last year, as the universal infant free school meal (UIFSM) policy has been rolled out. At this large primary, where some pupils live in one of the 10% most deprived wards in the UK, the January census shows that the number on free school meals (FSM) in reception has gone down by almost 50% in a year.

Carrie Shanafelt:

It is tempting to chalk the adjunctification of college and university faculty up to money alone. That is, of course, what administrations always offer as the reason, so there can be no more discussion about it. Since that first adjunct position of mine in 2003, I began to feel that something didn’t add up. None of my new colleagues spoke to me as if I were a junior professional working my way through the tough lean days of youth. Most of them spoke to me, if at all, like I was a dog.

It wasn’t true at every college, or in the same amount from every colleague, but the harassment I experienced as an adjunct wouldn’t have been tolerated in any other workplace. I was mocked for my lack of familiarity with upper-class New York life, quizzed about my sexuality, sneered at that I must be wasting my students’ time. I learned to regret reporting academic dishonesty or threats of violence. My students called me “professor” out of habit, though I begged them to call me “Carrie,” because I knew how much it irritated my colleagues to hear that title conferred on someone like me.

The first possibility I considered, in tears on the subway, was that I was obviously and unusually stupid. I asked around, and discovered that other first-year adjuncts at certain schools were enduring similar harassment from senior colleagues. I heard about blatant racism, sexism, and transphobia, but mostly just a fog of contempt that seemed to follow adjuncts everywhere. If we’re so underqualified to participate in this glorious career for elegant intellectuals, I thought, then why did they hire us? You could throw a rock in Park Slope and hit five PhDs with publications. Why hire starving MAs and then mock them for being hungry?

Whenever one encounters a pack of sadists, it’s a good idea to back up and look at the institution that encases them. There they always are, right in the middle, squeezed by increasing demands from above, shoved sweatily down onto an underclass of hopeless, helpless, undignified workers. That underclass is not just the product of administrative corner-cutting or fiscal belt-tightening; it’s a management strategy to keep the faculty divided against one another.

When I was an adjunct, I had to suppress my rage whenever an assistant professor complained about assembling a tenure file, revising an article, or applying for conference reimbursement. I was sick to my stomach to hear associate professors complain about having to serve on curriculum committee or meet with advisees. My academic aspirations were not limited to mere survival. I was desperately jealous of my senior colleagues’ worst problems.

Gerry Canavan:

A multi-generation, multimillion-dollar institution (like a college) that has to administrate by emergency decree has in nearly every case been grotesquely failed by its leadership. And in the US today that describes nearly every college and university, in management rhetorics and policies dating back at least to the mid-2000s (when I first entered the profession as a graduate student).

If your college faced drastic emergency cuts after 2008, it was mismanaged. You expanded on an unsustainable basis, made the wrong commitments, spent too much.

If your college faces drastic emergency cuts now because enrollments will tick (slightly) downward in the 2010s, it was mismanaged. You had 18 years warning that this demographic wave was going to hit, 18 years to plan for what to do when it did.

As every college administration invokes generalized, free-flowing “emergency” as its justification for arbitrary policy after arbitrary policy — all of which need to be implemented now, en toto and without debate, even the ones that contradict the other ones — they are arguing that their management up to now has been so wildly and irredeemably poor that the university has been thrown into total system crisis. And yet the solution to the emergency is, inevitably, always more (and more draconian) administrative control, always centralized under the very same people who took us over the cliff in the first place!

Ry Rivard:

In largely unnoticed side deals with investors, several colleges have promised they will raise prices on students, force students to live in dorms and even increase class sizes as they lay off faculty.

These are not for-profit colleges. Instead, they are nonprofits running into trouble with their debts. Unable to fulfill promises made when the colleges borrowed money years earlier, these colleges have struck deals to head off severe penalties, including foreclosures of campus property.

The debt was borrowed in the form of bonds, usually for campus construction. These bonds come with a host of financial conditions colleges must meet. Colleges agree to make timely payments, of course, and also to set aside a certain amount of money to cover their debts.

But, as colleges struggle to find enough students or run into unexpected market conditions, they may not be able to fulfill all these promises. To avoid penalties, at least a handful of colleges have promised their bondholders they would do things that could substantially affect student life.

Julia Freeland:

As disconcerting as these findings may be, they got me wondering if a technology plan is really the right level of planning to focus on in the first place. Historically, technology planning had to do with wiring schools and making basic hardware and budget decisions. Today, with the rise of K–12 blended learning, technology planning looks more and more like instructional and curriculum planning with technology playing a supporting role in new school and classroom design. States continuing to focus on technology planning—as it’s been done historically—would seem to risk perpetuating the myth that we can cram technology into the existing instructional paradigm and expect new outcomes.

To think through what exactly we mean—or should mean—by a “technology plan,” I reached out to Warren Danforth, a consultant to the education sector in the planning, deployment, and adoption of technology to improve student learning. Danforth has 15 years of experience as a leader in the wireless industry and five years in education implementing longitudinal data systems and instructional improvement systems. He recently developed a guidebook for the United States Department of Education Reform Support Network to assist in the planning and deployment of Instructional Improvement Systems

Michael Meranze & Christopher Newfield:

Though we recognize that Chancellor Blank’s statements deviate from the talking points deployed by previous Chancellors and administration, intolerance for cuts has not been her position, as evidenced by her budget reduction test. By conducting this exercise, Chancellor Blank effectively trained the university’s workers to accept and prepare for cuts. In this sense, Chancellor Blank herself failed to organize campus and the broader UW community to fight back against cuts that are widely acknowledged as “self-inflicted” wounds produced by years of tax breaks for the wealthy. From an employee’s point of view, what exactly is “too much?” The Governor’s eight percent cuts or the ‘necessary’ six percent previously proposed by the administration?

Sarah Jaffe:

He never thought he would first be getting national press coverage as part of what may be the first organized student debt strike. But he and 14 other students, with the support of the Occupy Wall Street spinoff group The Debt Collective, are taking a stand and refusing to pay back the student loans they took out to attend the for-profit Corinthian colleges.

Corinthian is being dismantled and its students given debt relief on their private loans – the institution is under federal and state investigations and is the target of multiple lawsuits alleging predatory lending practices. But Hornes and the “Corinthian 15” are demanding relief for their federal student loans, too.

When Hornes moved to LA, he worked at Smashburger and Carl’s Jr to pay the bills while he pursued his dream: performing at the Staples Center, participating in a web series, even releasing two songs on iTunes. But two years in, he says, his mother began to press him to go to college.

Madison School District Presentation (PDF).

Timothy Aeppel:

Economist Erik Brynjolfsson had long dismissed fears that automation would soon devour jobs that required the uniquely human skills of judgment and dexterity.

Many of his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a big chunk of tomorrow’s technology is conceived and built, have spent their careers trying to prove such machines are within reach.

When Google Inc. announced in 2010 that a specially equipped fleet of driverless Toyota Prius cars had safely traveled more than 1,000 miles of U.S. roads, Mr. Brynjolfsson realized he might be wrong.

The Madison School District (PDF):

Provide overview and implications of current bilingual program guidance and implications for MMSD

Provide update on OMGE Cross-Functional team work and key findings

Provide initial data around access to bilingual programming across the district

Share and obtain feedback on recommended shifts and rationale for future bilingual programming in MMSD

Discuss next steps and general timeline

More (PDF):

The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) has a uniquely rich and diverse student and community population. We promote culturally and linguistically responsive (CLRP) practices that acknowledges the strong cultural heritages of all racial, ethnic and linguistic groups that live in Madison. Our promise is to build on that rich heritage and expand upon it to ensure that all students have the tools they need to achieve their dreams.

Purpose

The purpose of the bilingual chapter of the overall ELL plan is to provide a clear outline of the suggested changes designed to ensure that consistent, coherent services are provided to every English language learner (ELL) and bilingual learner (BL) in alignment with our vision and goals as well as state and federal mandates. Specifically, this chapter identifies nine shifts in practice as listed below.

Anya Kamenetz:

Were you ever the teacher’s pet? Or did you just sit behind the teacher’s pet and roll your eyes from time to time?

A newly published paper suggests that personality similarity affects teachers’ estimation of student achievement. That is, how much you are like your teacher contributes to his or her feelings about you — and your abilities.

“Astonishingly, little is known about the formation of teacher judgments and therefore about the biases in judgments,” says Tobias Rausch, an author of the study and a research scientist at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg in Germany. “However, research tells us that teacher judgments often are not accurate.”

This study looked at a group of 93 teachers and 294 students in eighth grade in Germany. Everyone took a short test to establish basic features of their personalities: extraversion, agreeableness and the like.

They gave the students reading and math tests too, sharing the test items with the teachers. Then they asked the teachers two questions: How good is this student compared to an average eighth grader? How well will this student do on this test?

Brett Arends:

Smart money moves aren’t more complicated than you think. They’re simpler.

Cut through all the jargon and pontificating and technical stuff, and everything you really need to know about personal finance fits into less than 1,000 words—no more than three to four minutes.

Ignore economic and financial forecasts. Their purpose is to keep forecasters employed. Most professional economists were blindsided in 2008 by the biggest financial collapse in 70 years—and by the stock market’s recovery.

Jennifer Fink:

Re-entry after winter break has not been easy for him. The rules and restrictions of school — Sit Still. Be Quiet. Do What You Are Told, Nothing More, Nothing Less. — have been grating on him, and it shows. His teacher recently emailed me; she’d noticed a change in his behavior (more belligerent, less likely to cooperate) and wanted to know if there was anything going on at home.
My guess, I said, was that he was upset about having to be back in school after break. I was right.

The lack of movement and rigid restrictions associated with modern schooling are killing my son’s soul.

Jared Knowles:

For the past two years I have been working on the Wisconsin Dropout Early Warning System, a predictive model of on time high school graduation for students in grades 6-9 in Wisconsin. The goal of this project is to help schools and educators have an early indication of the likely graduation of each of their students, early enough to allow time for individualized intervention. The result is that nearly 225,000 students receive an individualized prediction at the start and end of the school year. The workflow for the system is mapped out in the diagram below:

John Lanchester:

So what’s going to happen now? Your preferred answer depends on your view of history, though it also depends on whether you think the lessons of history are useful in economics. The authors of these books are interested in history, but plenty of economists aren’t; a hostility to history is, to an outsider, a peculiarly strong bias in the field. It’s connected, I suspect, to an ambition to be considered a science. If economics is a science, the lessons of history are ‘in the equations’ – they are already incorporated in the mathematical models. I don’t think it’s glib to say that a reluctance to learn from history is one of the reasons economics is so bad at predicting the future.

One historically informed view of the present moment says that the new industrial revolution has already happened. Computers are not a new invention, yet their impact on economic growth has been slow to manifest itself. Bob Solow, another Nobel laureate quoted by Brynjolfsson and McAfee, observed as long ago as 1987 that ‘we see the computer age everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.’ The most thorough and considered version of this argument is in the work of Robert Gordon, an American economist who in 2012 published a provocative and compelling paper called ‘Is US Economic Growth Over?’ in which he contrasted the impact of computing and information technology with the effect of the second industrial revolution, between 1875 and 1900, which brought electric lightbulbs and the electric power station, the internal combustion engine, the telephone, radio, recorded music and cinema.​3 As he points out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, it also introduced ‘running water and indoor plumbing, the greatest event in the history of female liberation, as women were freed from carrying literally tons of water each year’. (A non-economist might be tempted to ask why it was the women were carrying the water in the first place.) Gordon’s view is that we coasted on the aftermaths and sequelae of these inventions until about 1970, when

Michael Gordon:

Gather a crowd of historians and philosophers of science into a room and ask them to define “science.” On second thought, don’t try this at home, because you’d likely meet with stony-faced refusal on the part of the first and raucous disagreement from the second. Yet isn’t the task rather straightforward? Isn’t this just another classic instance of academics creating mountains out of molehills? Actually, no. The problem is fiendishly frustrating (and likely intractable) simply because of the kind of activity science actually turns out to be in practice.

Consider, for example, what it clearly isn’t. Science cannot be simply a collection of true propositions about nature. Most of what has counted uncontroversially as “science” during the past few centuries—geocentric astronomy, phlogiston chemistry, ether physics, the inheritance of acquired characteristics— is now considered to be false. Even worse, much of what we now consider to be science is doubtless going to be proven false, since nature was unkind enough to deny us the answer key. Science is also not merely the proper execution of method, both because various disciplines display a whole hodgepodge of different methods, and also because one can apply all the accepted methodology and come up with doctrines (parapsychology, eugenics, phrenology) that we would with alacrity exclude. The problem gets worse when you go farther back in time or across cultures. Mayan astronomy, Classical Chinese alchemy, Hippocratic medicine—all these are rather distinct from what we now consider to be “science,” and yet it strikes most scholars as rather churlish to dismiss them. No one has been able to come up with a broadly consensual definition of science, and I am certainly not about to do so here.f

Steve Chapman:

The breakdown of the black family is a sensitive topic, though it’s not new and it’s not in dispute. President Barack Obama, who grew up with an absent father, often urges black men to be responsible parents.

Nor is there any doubt that African-American children would be better off living with their married parents. Kids who grow up in households headed by a single mother are far more likely than others to be poor, quit school, get pregnant as teens and end up in jail.

But these facts were once inflammatory. Fifty years ago next month, a Labor Department official named Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a paper titled, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” which argued that “a tangle of pathology” afflicting black communities had emerged because “the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.” His key fact: Nearly one-fourth of black babies were born to unwed mothers.

Lynnell Mickelsen:

Indeed, the school reform movement does fall down without the data. So do the movements around climate change, civil rights, public health, banking reform, industrial safety, economic justice and more.

So it’s odd for a progressive outfit like Alternet (which is run by the former publisher of Mother Jones) and others to be cheering on the loss of data when it comes to the systematic failure of children of color in our traditional public schools.

pays.org

The people most often cited as “education experts” in blogs and news stories may have the backing of influential organizations – but have little background in education and education policy, a new study suggests.

The findings are cause for concern because some prominent interest groups are promoting reform agendas and striving to influence policymakers and public opinion using individuals who have substantial media relations skills but little or no expertise in education research, say the authors of the study, Joel R. Malin and Christopher Lubienski, both at the University of Illinois.

To examine possible links between individuals’ media presence and their levels of expertise, Malin and Lubienski compiled a diverse list of nearly 300 people who appeared on the lists of experts prepared by several major education advocacy and policy organizations, including the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the liberal National Education Policy Center.

Malin and Lubienski also added to their sample a handful of scholars not on those lists but who are prominent and influential in the field of education.

German School of Madison

The German School of Madison — Deutsche Schule Madison is a parent-founded non-profit organization located in Madison, Wisconsin. We offer affordable, high-quality German language classes for children with and without prior knowledge of German, taught at Neighborhood House Community Center (29. S. Mills Street). Our teachers are native or near-native speakers, with advanced degrees and extensive teaching experience.We also organize preschool classes for small children (“Deutsche Dachse”), social activities for teens, and family-friendly cultural events for German-speaking families in the Madison area.

We are working with the Central Agency for Schools Abroad (Zentralstelle für das Auslandsschulwesen, ZfA) towards being recognized as a member of the PASCH-Network, an initiative of the German Federal Foreign Office, and as a school authorized to administer tests for the German Language Diploma (Deutsches Sprachdiplom, DSD) and comparison exams (Vergleichsarbeiten).

Nice to see.

However, unlike Minneapolis or Milwaukee, Madison students lack full time German language immersion (charter) school options.

Doug Holton:

It’s a refrain throughout my work: we are suffering from an amnesia of sorts, whereby we seem to have forgotten much of the history of technology. As such, we now tell these stories about the past, present, and future whereby all innovations emerge from Silicon Valley, all innovations are recent innovations, and there is no force for change other than entrepreneurial genius and/or the inevitability of “disruptive innovation.”

This amnesia seeps from technology into education and education technology. The rich and fascinating past of education is forgotten and erased in an attempt to tell a story about the future of education that emphasizes products not processes, the private not the public, “skills” not inquiry. The future of education technology therefore is the story of Silicon Valley and a handful of elite private universities because the history of education technology has always been the story of Silicon Valley and a handful of elite private universities. Or so the story goes.

I’ve been working on a book for a while now called Teaching Machines that explores the history of education technology in the twentieth century. And this year I’ve started a series on my blog, Hack Education, that also documents some of this lost or forgotten history. (I’ve looked at the origins of multiple choice tests and multiple choice testing machines, the parallels between the “Draw Me” ads and for-profit correspondence schools of the 1920s and today’s MOOCs, and the development of one of my personal favorite pieces of ed-tech, the Speak & Spell.) See, I’m exhausted by the claims by the latest batch of Silicon Valley ed-tech entrepreneurs and their investors that ed-tech is “new” and that education — I’m quoting from the New York Times here — “is one of the last industries to be touched by Internet technology.” Again, this is a powerful and purposeful re-telling and revising of history designed to shape the direction of the future.

Anonymous:

Over the past decade, UMUC has slowly turned into a money-making venture in all but name. It is giving students with few higher education options a low-level college education, all for the sake of maximizing profit. By doing so, it is joining the likes of University of Phoenix and Kaplan University, who are also chasing the bottom-line over student satisfaction. There are other issues of profitability trumping quality education in higher education, including the intense focus on fundraising at institutions as varied as Stanford University and University of Texas-Austin. But with UMUC and perhaps other public institutions, though, this profitability focus has had an impact on the quality of teaching and learning available to students.

Last month, UMUC took its latest step towards redoing its public institution status. On 30 January, the University System of Maryland’s Board of Regents approved their request for semi-autonomy within the university system. This will allow UMUC to benefit from being part of a fully accredited state university system. Those benefits include continued access to federal higher education funds, less scrutiny from college accrediting organizations and remaining a school with a good reputation (as the public often mixes up UMUC with the University of Maryland at College Park, the state flagship campus). At the same time, this semi-autonomic status will allow UMUC administration to hire, fire and address faculty and staff grievances as they please, increase tuition without the need for state approval and exempt important records like retention and graduation rates from public disclosure.

Jane Slaughter:

Disappointed tourists saw their flights canceled on January 10. “In previous actions, they’d taken the highways leading to the Oaxaca airport,” said teacher-trainer Maria Elena Ramírez Avendaño, “but this time they took the runways for the first time.”

The actions are part of a year-and-a-half-long fight against constitutional amendments that require teachers to take a national competitive exam every four years in order to keep their jobs—among other changes that teachers see as harmful both to their own labor rights and to students.

The Oaxaca teachers called a three-day paro, or work stoppage, of their 80,000 members February 9-11 and mobilized members to travel to Mexico City to demonstrate along with teachers from other states. When police prevented them from reaching the capital city’s main square, they took over a major street, causing big traffic tie-ups and causing two subway stations to close.
– See more at: http://labornotes.org/2015/02/mexican-teachers-resist-their-own-brand-education-reform#sthash.CTOrpFaK.dpuf

Jade Davis:

The family computer recently stopped working. This wouldn’t be the end of the world normally, however, my oldest son’s second-grade classroom implemented a new homework policy. Instead of having homework on paper, all homework is done on the computer across three sites.

This new policy was implemented because it makes the homework “smarter.” The difficulty of the work can automatically adjust as the student improves. A report is sent to the teacher right away, letting her know how long it is taking the student to do the work. She gets a readout that can compare the student’s progress to the rest of the class, as well as a general readout of how the class is doing overall. And, since my oldest son is in a bilingual program, he can do Spanish dictation, record it, and send it to his teacher so she can hear if he is having pronunciation problems. Finally, since the work is algorithmically graded and monitored, the teacher can spend more time planning what to do in class, based on common issues of the students, instead of spending a good portion of time grading homework.

When the computer stopped working, we were suddenly forced to acknowledge some access limits. The first was, when my son comes home, my computer is not there. So, where would he be able to do his homework? We thought of the library, but there isn’t one very close to us, and going to one would add commute time to homework. Additionally, once there, having a young child yelling at the computer in Spanish seemed counter to the culture of the library. Given the added time, and the limits on what he could do, we decided against the library.

Banish Ahmed:

After the shootings, Mughal said her parents called her from Arizona to implore her to avoid public transportation, to get home early, and to refuse to open her front door for anyone.

Some Muslims I spoke to for this article described getting some form of that advice from their parents this week, but many more said discussions about avoiding conflict and concealing their religious beliefs were recurring ones in their families. Fourteen of 21 Muslims who responded to an informal survey I sent out to various Muslim listservs had been given a talk on personal safety by their parents and issued some version to their own children.

“I personally have been physically attacked while praying in public,” Mohammad Jehad Ahmad, a student at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, told me.

Barry Garelick, via a kind email:

I am currently working at a middle school in a neighboring school district. I do not have my own classes; I assist the math teachers there by identifying and working with students who are struggling. Like most schools these days, it has fallen under the spell of Common Core, with a disturbing amount of instruction spent on writing about how they solved a problem, explaining their reasoning and why they think the answer is reasonable. I work there four days a week; I started in August and will continue until school lets out. While I miss having my own classes, I like it for the most part. One key advantage is that it allows me to focus on teaching students the basic skills they are missing rather than on having them explain their reasoning for problems they cannot solve because of procedures they cannot perform.

The district I’m in has recently contracted with SVMI (the Silicon Valley Math Initiative), just like the school district where I was working last year. These are the folks who developed the Problems of the Month to stimulate “algebraic thinking” outside of algebra courses and who also constructed the test that was now being given as an extra barrier to taking algebra 1 in seventh or eighth grade in my old district. There is no word yet on raising the barriers for qualifying for the traditional algebra 1 course in 8th grade. But one never knows.

I have not kept in touch with anyone from my previous school (Lawrence Middle School), though occasionally I look at the website for pictures of the students. I see pictures of some of my seventh graders, now eighth graders. All appear to be doing well. I don’t know how any of my former eighth graders are doing now in high school.

In case you’re curious, my algebra classes managed to do better on the chapter test on quadratics than they had on the quiz. We moved on to algebraic fractions and various word problems had one last test, and that was that.

My prealgebra classes also wrapped things up nicely. I recall with particular fondness my Period 2 class. They were my favorite of all my seventh grade classes; they were generally very sweet, though over the months since I took over they were much more talkative and rambunctious as they proceeded on their relentless path to becoming eighth graders. On the day before the last test, we were reviewing multiplication of binomials and a boy asked “the question”: “Am I ever going to be using polynomials in my life?”

Out In Left Field: Conversations on the Rifle Range 25: Undoing a Conspiracy, and Heading to the End of the School Year.

Jeffrey Young:

Nineteen colleges now work with Coursera to offer what amount to microdegrees—it calls them Course Specializations—that require students to take a series of short MOOCs and then finish a hands-on capstone project. The serialization approach has proved an effective way to bring in revenue to support the free courses—to get a certificate proving they passed the courses, students each end up paying around $500 in fees.

By helping develop MOOC-certificate programs, companies are giving a seal of approval to those new credentials that may be more important to some students than whether an accredited university or a well-trained professor is involved.

Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, says that teaming up with companies can “really drive home the value proposition that these courses are giving you a skill that is valuable in the workplace.” She says it also lets Coursera play a role in “bridging the gap” between higher education and industry.

Change is well underway in the K-16 world.

Tom Rademacher:

My local and state unions were often places where I met involved teachers, teachers who cared about the world outside of their room, who cared about how things were going in my room. They were where I debated and discussed things with teachers I disagreed with, and where I learned we were stronger if we set a place for everyone at the table and went and got those who didn’t show up. In many ways, again and again, union work was an expression of my affection for teachers.

But there is another side to the story.

During one of my very first local meetings, a new teacher spoke up, asking for help from his union. He felt like he had to take on everything, say yes to everything, or he would be fired. He asked if more veteran teachers could help lighten the load of those still developing as teachers. He was told, by an executive council member, “That’s what tenure is for. Get through three years, then you never have to do that stuff again.” I don’t think that guy ever came back to a meeting. I don’t know why he would.

When I was secretary, I got a long, angry letter from another member of our executive council. He was upset that I was spending so much time making sure every member of our union voted in elections. It was his opinion that if they didn’t come to meetings, didn’t read union emails, and didn’t know where to vote, then we shouldn’t work to have their voices heard. He was a fan of a small group of people making large decisions on behalf of an unengaged many. He wasn’t alone.

Mr. Rademacher was the 2014 Minnesota Teacher of the Year.

In looking at the final product, one can only be shocked and amused. Much of the report is a simple narrative discussion of all that UC does and how it is hard to determine the cost of its many activities. When the UC finally gets to the discussion of the cost differences, the entire new methodology is explained in a single paragraph: “First, graduate students are considered full-time when taking 12 units a term whereas undergraduates are full-time at 15 units per term. This is a standard practice in other institutions and is the basis for the ratio of 1.25 (15/12) used in the NACUBO report. Second, the University collects data on the proportion of student credit hours (SCH) offered by level and that data includes the type of instructor delivering the student credit hours. There is a substantial differential between undergraduate and graduate students in the proportion of SCH taught by ladder faculty. For graduate students, 79% of SCH are taught by ladder faculty compared to 49% for undergraduates. Since expenditures for ladder faculty are higher than for other types of faculty, expenditures by level of faculty can be used to estimate an overall differential between undergraduate and graduate expenditures. The estimate of the differential for 2012-13 is 1.33. Combining these two factors – 1.25 for the FTE calculation times 1.33 for faculty type – results in an estimate that graduate expenditures per FTE for instruction are on average at least 1.7 times greater than undergraduates.” Really?!! How in the world did they come up with such a reductive methodology and why did it take them over a year to produce it?

John Myers:

If there’s one place to watch the really hard choices about what government can afford to spend on higher education and what a college degree should cost, it’s the meat grinder that now faces the University of California in Sacramento.

The stakes are high. The university, led by UC President Janet Napolitano, has insisted it will increase tuition for as long as the next five years if lawmakers don’t pony up enough taxpayer dollars. Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders, on the other hand, have demanded that the university system cut costs and keep tuition levels constant if it wants any additional dollars. You couldn’t ask for a more tense showdown than this one.

(There was a tiny easing of that tension on Wednesday, when Napolitano extended an olive branch by canceling a tuition hike for summer session students.)

Marcus Woo:

To be a professor is to belong to a select few—an insider’s club of vanishing tenured faculty positions. It’s no secret that a fancy diploma can help grads vying for those coveted spots. But while working on his PhD and contemplating his career prospects, computer scientist Aaron Clauset wanted to know just how much weight a prestigious alma mater—an MIT, a Stanford, a Harvard—carried. So he decided to dive into the data himself.

Clauset and a couple of grad school friends started gathering information about who’s hiring whom. After a break in the project, during which he graduated and landed a faculty position at the University of Colorado at Boulder (yup, he joined the club), Clauset started up again—recruiting his new students for help. They spent three years grabbing and analyzing hiring data from computer science, business, and history departments, collecting info on 19,000 faculty positions across North America.

Mike Antonucci:

Will Teachers’ Unions Exit Stage Left? We established last week that cognitive linguistic analysis would not be the salvation of teachers’ unions. Recent events dictate we revisit the possibility that teachers’ unions will revitalize themselves by moving to the left.

Yes, yes, I know many of you think there cannot possibly be any room remaining to them on that side, but it isn’t true. The officers and executive staff of NEA and AFT are committed liberals, but they are also very wealthy individuals overseeing a billion-dollar private enterprise. No matter what you hear coming out of their mouths, they won’t be leading the revolution, believe me.

But times are bad, and that is leading to upheaval in the ranks. Union activists further to the left than their superiors have been elected to lead large locals and one state affiliate. They believe they are approaching a critical mass to push the teacher union movement as a whole to the left.

Bob Peterson, president of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, is a long-time class warrior and recently had a manifesto reprinted in the pages of In These Times. It contains all the rhetoric you would expect, and a few targets you would not. Peterson decries teachers’ unions utilizing “a business model that is so dependent on staff providing services that it disempowers members and concentrates power in the hands of a small group of elected leaders and/or paid staff.”

Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, Daniel B. Larremore:

The faculty job market plays a fundamental role in shaping research priorities, educational outcomes, and career trajectories among scientists and institutions. However, a quantitative understanding of faculty hiring as a system is lacking. Using a simple technique to extract the institutional prestige ranking that best explains an observed faculty hiring network—who hires whose graduates as faculty—we present and analyze comprehensive placement data on nearly 19,000 regular faculty in three disparate disciplines. Across disciplines, we find that faculty hiring follows a common and steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequality. Furthermore, doctoral prestige alone better predicts ultimate placement than a U.S. News & World Report rank, women generally place worse than men, and increased institutional prestige leads to increased faculty production, better faculty placement, and a more influential position within the discipline. These results advance our ability to quantify the influence of prestige in academia and shed new light on the academic system.

Pam Chickering Wilson:

In addition, the ACA requires that the insurance employers offer must be “affordable.” If the cost of insurance rises above 9 1/2 percent of a family’s income, the employer can face a fine of $3,000.

One more measure coming down the pike — to take effect in 2018 — is the so-called “Cadillac tax” for excessively expensive plans. The thresholds for this tax are $10,200 per individual and $27,500 per family.

Kuelz remarked that Jefferson is nowhere near these amounts yet, but these totals bear watching, as health insurance costs for school districts have been rising at around 8 percent a year, far ahead of inflation.

He said that some planning will be required to keep Jefferson insurance costs down so they do not rise over this threshold by 2018. After that year, the Cadillac tax threshold will rise in accordance with the rate of inflation.

“One calculation we have been making for school districts is, they are asking, what if you gave the money directly to the employees and let them go on the exchange?” Kuelz said.

Using current figures, districts would incur more costs by giving the money to the employees directly, he explained. For starters, these districts would lose a tax break. Then they would be subject to penalties. In addition, any money given to employees to cover these costs would then be counted as taxable income, which opens a whole new can of worms for both the employer and the employees.
Right now, such a move would drive a district’s costs up significantly, Kuelz said. But this might change as costs go down on the exchange.

Madison is contemplating changes to their employee benefits approach.

National Alliance for Public Charters

Nearly 2.9 million students now attend charter schools, according to a report released today by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools that estimates growth in charter schools and their student enrollment. U.S. charter schools are serving almost 348,000 new students in 2014-15, up from 288,000 the previous school year.

“This has been our highest enrollment figure so far, and we are not surprised parents are choosing charter schools for their child’s education,” said Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “The growth in charter school enrollment shows parents’ demand for high-quality educational options. We are optimistic that the number of public charter schools will continue to grow to serve even more students and families.”

Apart from providing student enrollment estimates, the report also shines a light on estimates of the number of charter schools that opened for the 2014-15 school year and those that have closed during the past year. This year, 500 new public charter schools opened, while more than 200 schools that were open last year are no longer operating. These schools closed for a variety of reasons, including low enrollment, inadequate financial resources, or low academic performance.

“We want to see more high-quality charter schools serve students throughout the country. At the same time we advocate for strong accountability measures to ensure that only the highest-quality charter schools are serving our nation’s students,” said Rees.

Edward Morrissey:

My father hadn’t followed his own advice. He dropped out of the University of Arizona much like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker did later at Marquette, closer to a degree than I ever got, for personal reasons unrelated to academic achievement. He went into the aerospace industry and spent 29 years working on the space program, from Gemini to Apollo to the space shuttle. Dad was and still is an auto-didact, a man whose curiosity drove his intellectual growth, and he became a specialist in quality engineering, especially in non-destructive testing.

But the world had changed a bit since he started out in aerospace, and both of us knew it. More people went to college and got degrees, and my father saw how a lack of credentials put people in his industry at a competitive disadvantage. “All that matters is getting that piece of paper,” he’d tell me when my distinct lack of interest in studies manifested itself in academic problems at college. “That’s the ticket that opens doors. Once you’re in you can do whatever you like.”

I never got that ticket — and I paid a price for it, too. After working for a few years in the aerospace industry myself as a technical writer, I found myself out of work when that sector began its shift away from defense to commercial application. Without a degree, work in my field eluded me, and I took a couple of odd jobs — driving a cab for a couple of months in the Los Angeles area, which was interesting in a cold-sweats-and-nightmares kind of way, and picking up a shift as an overnight operator in an alarm call center. That job turned into an interesting and fulfilling career that would put me in middle management for a number of years, before the blogging revolution eliminated the credentialism of the writing and commentary fields and turned them into achievement-oriented environments.

Like any son who locks horns with his old man, I’d like to be able to argue that Dad turned out to be wrong. He wasn’t. Life turned out well for me — I am very blessed to make a living from my passion, writing — but the lack of a degree made it that more difficult to achieve that end. Credentialism became a hurdle to overcome at the start of my professional life, one that took me a decade to overcome in one career and two decades in another.

Steven Hodas, via a kind Deb Britt email:

In the past couple of years I’ve probably used the word “innovation” thousands of times and read or heard it thousands of times more. Naturally. I worked in an Office of Innovation (inside the Division of Talent, Labor and Innovation) running “Innovate NYC Schools” (Twitter handle @innovatenycedu), which was funded by a grant from the Investing in Innovation program (from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Innovation and Improvement). I’ve written here about “Innovation 1.0,” “Innovation 2.0,” and “failure[s] of innovation.” But it’s a lazy term for a hazy concept and I vote for a moratorium.

First, “innovation” manages to be both too vague (it can be applied to anything, and is) and too narrow (it’s usually just a trendier, TED-ier version of “technology”). Because it’s used so often without referring to anything in particular, it begins to feel like an incantation from the realm of magical thinking. Second, surveys show that outside of Silicon Valley, “innovation” has a terrible brand with most parents and educators. It worries the former and induces eye-rolls from the latter, so invoking it as a goal or a policy is not a great way to make new friends.

Madison School Board Quarterly Retreat (PDF):

Goal 1: Every student is on-track to graduate as measured by student growth and achievement at key milestones.

Goal 2: Every student has access to a challenging and well-rounded education as measured by programmatic access and participation data

Madison Teachers, Inc., via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):

Rights granted to an employee by the Union’s Contract are among the most important conditions of one’s employment. Those represented by MTI, in each of MTI’s five bargaining units, have numerous SENIORITY protections. Whether it is protection from involuntary transfer, being declared “surplus” (above staff requirements) or layoff, SENIORITY is the factor that limits and controls management’s action. Because of SENIORITY rights guaranteed by the Union’s Contract, for example, the employer cannot pick the junior employee simply because he/she is paid less. Making such judgments based on one’s SENIORITY may seem like common sense and basic human decency, but it is MTI’s Contract that assures it.

Beth Akers:

Late last year, researchers at the University of South Carolina and the University of California, Los Angeles, published a report[1] on the relationship between student loan debt and psychological well-being. This study comes in the midst of a plethora of new research attempting to quantify causal relationships between student loan debt and personal outcomes (including home ownership,[2] entrepreneurship and the macro economy). Despite the intense interest in this issue among researchers, this is the first paper that attempts to understand the emotional cost of carrying student loan debt. This question is, in fact, more fundamental than the others being posed in this genre of research, since it could help to explain the mechanism through which debt may be affecting other outcomes. Using a strict classical lens to examine this issue might lead one to conclude that the true cost of carrying debt could be measured in strictly financial terms. However, the widespread and growing discontent among households with student debt paired with the evidence that the financial circumstances of borrowers haven’t radically worsened[3] suggests that an alternate lens may be necessary. In particular, a lens that considers the possibility that student loans take an emotional toll on borrowers, even when wealth is held constant.[4

Richard Schmalbeck:

This paper was prepared for the annual conference of the National Center for Philanthropy and Law, held at the NYU Law School, held October 24-25, 2013. The overall topic was “Tax Issues Affecting Colleges and Universities,” and I was asked to address specifically those issues relating to athletics. This paper considers two specific issues that have in common only that they involve college sports, and are plagued by egregiously bad, (in this case, egregiously generous), tax treatment: the failure of the IRS to regard any part of the revenue from college sports as unrelated business income, and the choice by Congress to allow taxpayers to deduct 80% of contributions that they make to colleges or their “booster clubs,” even when those contributions entitle the donors to special privileges in purchasing tickets to college athletic events.

Most readers are probably familiar with the general rules regarding charitable contributions deductions, but a word about the unrelated business income tax may be helpful. An organization may qualify (or continue to qualify) as a tax-exempt organization, eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions, if its activities are primarily charitable. However, if the organization regularly carries on trade or business activities that are unrelated to its exempt purpose, the income from those activities is subject to federal income taxation at the same rates applicable to for-profit corporations. Although those rates are low for small businesses (those earning less than $75,000 per year), corporate earnings in excess of that amount are taxed at a rate of 34% on up to ten million dollars of income, and 35% beyond that amount. The unrelated business income tax raises very little revenue, but is thought to have an in terrorem effect, discouraging nonprofit organizations from engaging in unrelated business activities. While the unrelated business tax exists primarily because of Congressional concerns about unfair competition with for-profit businesses, a better description of its actual effect is that it discourages nonprofit organizations from pursuit of business activities that do not further any exempt purpose.

Associated Press:

Those are the findings of an AP investigation in which reporters sought disciplinary records in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The result is an unprecedented national look at the scope of sex offenses by educators – the very definition of breach of trust.

The seven-month investigation found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misconduct.

Young people were the victims in at least 1,801 of the cases, and more than 80 percent of those were students. At least half the educators who were punished by their states also were convicted of crimes related to their misconduct.

The findings draw obvious comparisons to sex abuse scandals in other institutions, among them the Roman Catholic Church. A review by America’s Catholic bishops found that about 4,400 of 110,000 priests were accused of molesting minors from 1950 through 2002.

Clergy abuse is part of the national consciousness after a string of highly publicized cases. But until now, there’s been little sense of the extent of educator abuse.

Beyond the horror of individual crimes, the larger shame is that the institutions that govern education have only sporadically addressed a problem that’s been apparent for years.

“From my own experience – this could get me in trouble – I think every single school district in the nation has at least one perpetrator. At least one,” says Mary Jo McGrath, a California lawyer who has spent 30 years investigating abuse and misconduct in schools. “It doesn’t matter if it’s urban or rural or suburban.”

Cory Robin:

This announcement was recently posted on the website of the graduate school of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst:

The University has determined that recent governmental sanctions pose a significant challenge to its ability to provide a full program of education and research for Iranian students in certain disciplines and programs. Because we must ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulations, the University has determined that it will no longer admit Iranian national students to specific programs in the College of Engineering (i.e., Chemical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mechanical & Industrial Engineering) and in the College of Natural Sciences (i.e., Physics, Chemistry, Microbiology, and Polymer Science & Engineering) effective February 1, 2015.

The full announcement and reasoning (US sanctions on Iran) behind this new policy can be found here.

During the fight over the American Studies Association’s vote for an academic boycott of Israel, putative defenders of academic freedom made a lot of noise about the threat that the boycott posed to academic exchange and international conversation.

But as many of us pointed out the time, nothing in the ASA vote precluded the exchange of individual scholars or students between the United States and Israel.

Now we have a public university, claiming to act in accordance with US policy, officially banning Iranian national students from entire graduate schools.

Colleen Flaherty:

By now, the secret is out in some disciplines: if you want to land a tenure-line faculty job, you’d better attend a highly ranked graduate program — not necessarily because they’re better but because the market favors prestige. But a new study suggests that “social inequality” might be worse than previously thought, across a range of different disciplines.

The study, published this week in Science Advances, is based on hand-curated data about placements of 19,000 tenure-line faculty members in history, business and computer science at 461 North American institutions with doctoral programs. Using a computer-aided, network-style analysis, the authors determined that just 25 percent of those institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenure-line professors, depending on discipline.

Using the Gini coefficient, a standard measure of social inequality, the authors found there’s extreme elitism even at the top of that quartile. The top 10 programs in each discipline produce 1.6 to 3 times more faculty than even the next 10 programs in the ranking. And the top 11 to 20 programs produce 2.3 to 5.6 times more professors than the next 10 programs.

Mark Greif

For years, the undigitized gem of American journals had been Partisan Review. Last year its guardians finally brought it online. Some of its mystery has been preserved, insofar as its format remains hard to use, awkward, and hopeless for searches. Even in its new digital form it retains a slightly superior pose.

The great importance of Partisan Review did not arise recently from its inaccessibility. The legendary items that first ran in its pages can be found in any good library, in collections by contributors who met as promising unknowns: Mary McCarthy, Clement Greenberg, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Hardwick, Leslie Fiedler, or Susan Sontag. Alongside those novices, PR had the cream of Europe, in translation or English original: Sartre, Camus, Jean Genet, Beauvoir; Ernst Jünger, Karl Jaspers, Gottfried Benn; plus T.S. Eliot, Orwell, Auden, Stephen Spender.

Partisan Review obtained the first work of the up-and-coming and often the best work of the famous, though it was notoriously underfunded and skeletally staffed. It gave readers the first glimpse of much of what would form the subsequent syllabus of midcentury American literature.

But Partisan Review has indeed mattered in more recent decades for its position in a debate to which its absence from view has been altogether relevant. More than any other publication of the mid-20th century, the journal has been a venerable stalking horse recruited into a minor culture war. The strife concerned what’s awkwardly called “public intellect”—that is, the sphere in which “public intellectuals” used to thrive. “Public intellectuals,” as Russell Jacoby defined them near the start of this culture war, in 1987, are simply “writers and thinkers who address a general and educated audience.” The customary sally was that PR exemplified a bygone world of politically strenuous, culturally sophisticated, and intellectually exacting argument standing in opposition to the university, because it was addressed to a broad, unacademic readership. It was said to be both more usefully influential and more rigorous than any forum we have now, reflecting poorly upon today’s publications and editors. Partisan Review stood as the phantom flagship of “what we have lost” since the late 1960s (the period in which the magazine began, not incidentally, its long-lasting decline).

Jacques Berlinerblau:

My undergraduates’ career plans are a peculiar mix of naked ambition and hair-shirt altruism. If they pursue investment banking, they do so not merely to make money. Rather, they wish to use their eventual wealth to distribute solar light bulbs to every resident of a developing nation. They’ll apply to the finest law schools in hopes of some day judging war criminals at The Hague. Countless want to code. They dream of engineering an app that will make tequila flow out of thin air into your outstretched shot glass. My students, I suspect, are receiving their professional advice from a council of emojis.

There is one occupation, however, that rarely figures in their reveries. Few of these kids hanker to become professors. Maybe that’s because undergraduates no longer believe that the university is where the life of the mind is lived. Or perhaps they are endowed with acute emotional intelligence; they intuit that their instructors are sort of sad and broken on the inside. It’s also possible that the specter of entombing oneself in a study carrel does not appeal to them.

I guess they must also read those headlines, the ones suggesting that the liberal arts as we know them, and the scholars who toil within, are about to get rolled. I rehearse, with light annotation, some of these headlines here. Tenure-track positions in the humanities are—poof!—continually evaporating. Contingent faculty make up around 75 percent of educators in postsecondary institutions. To read an account of a part-timer’s daily grind is like reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Chris Rickert:

Talk about putting your best foot forward only to get it stomped on.

Last week, in response to an open records request from this newspaper, the UW System released internal emails that showed System President Ray Cross throwing UW-Eau Claire chancellor James Schmidt under the bus for sending him “candid” ideas for how to cope with Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to cut $300 million from the System’s state aid in exchange for giving the System more autonomy.

“Incredible logic!!” Cross writes in an email forwarding Schmidt’s ideas to two other System administrators. “I find this most troubling!!! I thought Jim was a bit more thoughtful than this.”

As a mere civilian, I thought Schmidt’s ideas had merit. And after spending 25 minutes talking to him on the phone, I think the System would do well to hire more people like him.

Schmidt laid out 10 suggestions in all, with five more concerning initiatives specific to his campus.

They range from seeking different employee health care insurers, to creating links between four-year campuses and their nearby two-year campuses, to cutting down on administrative overhead, to shrinking and decentralizing System administration.

Cross, who declined my interview request, was particularly irked by what he called Schmidt’s proposed “elimination of the System” and his call for even greater autonomy for System campuses.

Schmidt didn’t back down from the value of his ideas or from the importance of coming up with them, although he acknowledged that on second look, some, like combining administrative functions at four-year campuses and their nearby two-year feeder schools, might not provide as much savings as he initially thought.

A focus on “adult employment“.

Alan Borsuk:

An important thing to understand about Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal for making an unlimited number of private school tuition vouchers available across Wisconsin is how unattractive, as a practical matter, his plan is to the schools that it could serve.

An upcoming gusher of private school vouchers? More likely, as it stands, it would mean a modest increase at most, and it might even be a setback.

Statewide uncapped vouchers would be something Walker could promote as an accomplishment —perhaps in Iowa or New Hampshire or to potential donors to a presidential campaign.

But as a practical matter? Look at the specifics.

Consider the predicament of HOPE Via, a Christian school that has been on track to open in Racine this fall. Part of the HOPE network that has five schools in Milwaukee, HOPE Via has obtained a building on Racine’s north side and hired a principal and managing director. School leaders were working on hiring teachers, enrolling students and launching a remodeling of the building.

Then came Walker’s budget message on Feb. 3.

This gets technical quickly, but, in short, the proposal envisions a new way of paying for vouchers, other than in Milwaukee, where things would stay basically as is.

Until now, voucher money has come from a separate state appropriation. Walker proposed taking it from the state aid that would have been sent to each school district if the child involved were attending a public school there.

David Perry:

nyone who writes articles on the web knows the maxim: “Don’t read the comments.” Fortunately for Yoni Appelbaum, a recent Ph.D. in history from Brandeis University, the well-known writer Ta-Nehisi Coates routinely ignores that rule.

A few years ago, while Appelbaum was supposed to be writing his dissertation, he spent far too much time participating in the lively comment section moderated by Coates at The Atlantic. Coates featured some of Appelbaum’s comments, then invited him to write essays. Appelbaum soon became a correspondent for the magazine. In January, he was announced as the new senior editor for politics.

There’s something perfect about Appelbaum becoming the political editor for a magazine with its origins in mid-19th-century political culture. His academic work examines associative republicanism from 1865 to 1900, which he puns as the “guilded age,” arguing for the centrality of groups like the Knights of Pythias, Chicago Lumber Exchange, Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and more. He brought that expertise in U.S. history, race, voluntary association, and related topics to the highly informed, and well-moderated, community of Coates’s readers.

– See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/From-Grad-School-to-The/189907/#sthash.O5G07Ve1.dpuf

Mitch Henck:

This is Madison. I learned that phrase when I moved here from Green Bay in 1992.
It means that the elites who drive the politics and the predominate culture are more liberal or “progressive” than backward places out state.

I knew I was in Madison as a reporter when parents and activists were fighting over whether to have “Sarah Has Two Mommies” posters in a grade school library. Concerned parents weakly stated at a public hearing that first-graders were too young to understand sexuality of any kind.

Activists at the public meeting said the children needed to understand tolerance. One conservative parent said: “Why don’t we vote by secret ballot?” An activist said, “No, we want a consensus.”

The Madison School District official who was presiding agreed, and the controversial posters stayed on the library walls. This is Madison.

Now we have the Madison School Board. It has been historically run by the teacher’s union. The same was true after Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 was passed, strictly limiting collective bargaining for public employees.

Three weeks before the state Supreme Court would rule on the constitutionality of the law, the union-owned School Board rushed through a teacher’s contract that largely ignored Act 10. Unlike any other school district in the state, the contract made sure Madison teachers were not required to share the cost of their health insurance premiums. Unlike any other school district, Madison collects union dues from teacher paychecks for its leader, John Matthews.

By the way, I would not want him in a dark alley with me.

The problem is the Madison School District has a projected budget shortfall for 2015-2016 of $12 million to $20 million, according to last week’s State Journal. About $6 million could be saved by making aggressive health care costs, including requiring staff to contribute toward insurance premiums, renegotiating contracts with health care providers, and making plan changes. That’s according to Michael Barry, assistant superintendent of business services.

In fact, the district spends about $62 million on employee health care costs, which are expected to grow by 8.5 percent next school year. Shockingly, Madison School Board member Ed Hughes said: “If we’re talking about taking not a scalpel, but a machete to our programs given the cuts we’ll make because we’re the only school district in the state that’s unwilling to ask employees to contribute to their health insurance, I think that would be an impression that we would deservedly receive ridicule for.”

Even board member Mary Burke said: “We would be irresponsible to the community where basically 99 percent of the people pay contributions to health care” if the board made up the savings with cuts to staff and heath care.

So now what? The contract expires in June 2016. Conservative blogger David Blaska sued to force Madison to live under Act 10. A local judge ruled last week Blaska did have standing as a taxpayer to carry out his lawsuit as he is joined by The Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty.

Madison teacher’s union leader John Matthews said by making employees contribute to health care premiums, the district is effectively asking them to pay for iPads and administrators. Huh?

Todd Berry of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance told me 90 percent of state cuts to education were covered by savings offered to school districts under Act 10 by changing work rules, by employee contributions to retirement and health insurance premiums, and by altering health plans.

That might fly for the rest of the state, but then again, this is Madison.

Much more on benefits and the Madison School District and Act 10.

A focus on “adult employment“.

Rick Barrett:

Growing up about 30 years ago, Super Steel Inc. President and CEO Dirk Smith says, he learned a work ethic and other essential skills that he believes are missing now in some job applicants.

“My parents instilled that in me,” said Smith, adding that he didn’t have to learn many of the “soft skills” in the workplace because he had already been taught them at home.

Now, Smith says, he sees young people lacking knowledge of basic things such as showing up to work on time. Sometimes they don’t have a bank account, which is a problem because Super Steel, a Milwaukee manufacturer and metal fabricator, has a direct-deposit payroll.

“We can teach kids the technical skills, on how to weld or operate a brake press. … But if they are missing the essential life skills, then all of that training is lost,” Smith said.

Addressing the issue, Super Steel has partnered with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Wisconsin in a welder skills development program where the curriculum includes classes in areas such as communication, teamwork and conflict resolution.

Robert Verbruggen::

The challenges involved in balancing work and family lead to some of the most difficult decisions any family faces. Decades of “women’s empowerment,” the rise of the working mother, and the economic pressures of modern family life have forced families to make difficult compromises. The implications of those compromises for children have led to highly controversial and emotionally charged debates that make all parents — regardless of their work and child-care choices — question whether they’ve done the right thing.

Most Americans have never really made their peace with the idea of full-time working motherhood. Pew recently found that 60% of Americans say children are better off with a parent at home, while 35% say that kids are just as well off either way. Another survey conducted last year gave respondents the option of a mother who works part-time, and, given this option, 42% said part-time work was best while another third opted for staying at home. Only 16% of respondents told Pew that it’s best for children if mothers work full-time.

Likely in part because of these beliefs (in addition to a multitude of other factors), more mothers have been choosing to stay at home in recent years. According to a recent Pew report, the percentage of mothers who stay at home with their children (a statistic that includes non-working single mothers) fell from 49% in the late 1960s to a low of 23% in 1999, but then rose to 29% by 2012. A more traditional measure of stay-at-home motherhood — the proportion of all mothers who are married, do not work, and have working husbands — has risen a bit, too, from about 17% in the mid-1990s to 20% in the early 2000s, with some minor fluctuations thereafter, indicating that the proportion of stay-at-home parents has roughly stabilized for now. (Stay-at-home fathers are becoming more common as well, though they remain a small fraction of all stay-at-home parents.)

Erin Richards:

Bender said he thinks it’s unlikely that districts would be bristling at the request if it had come from any entity or individual other than his. School district leaders say that’s not true; they’re concerned about their families’ personal information going out to anyone.

Historically it’s been a nonissue because nobody ever asks for it.

State open records law mandates districts release student directory information upon request, unless parents have opted out of the directory or unless districts have passed policies to further restrict release of the data.

Directory information includes information such as students’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, date and place of birth, major field of study, height, weight, athletic team participation, awards achieved and schools attended.

The information is key to rounding out important school items such as yearbooks, playbills, sports rosters, announcements to the media about student accomplishments and contact lists that help families communicate with each other.

Oshkosh School District Superintendent Stan Mack said his district will comply with releasing all the directory data that state law and its own district policy allow.

David Blaska:

Like the Sun Prairie groundhog, the Madison school district’s teachers contract has come back to bite the taxpayer. The Madison Metropolitan School District is looking at a $20.8 million budget deficit next school year.

Good Madison liberals worried about the state balancing its budget can now look closer to home.

To balance the budget, the district will most certainly have to raise taxes again; last year’s increase was a hefty 5.4%. It will probably cut programs. It may even lay off teachers. To ease the blow, will it ask those teachers to contribute to their excellent health coverage like 99% of the rest of the world?

This is the school district that thumbed its nose at Wisconsin law, the school district that eschewed using the flexibility given it by Wisconsin Act 10, the 2011 collective bargaining reform. Madison is the only district that collects union boss John Matthews’ dues for him, the only district that requires fair share payments, the only district that does not require its employees to contribute toward their very excellent health care insurance. A district that gave teachers longevity raises of 2% and 3% on top of free health insurance.

Much more, here.

Megan McArdle:

Millennials don’t want to work in sales, reports the Wall Street Journal. They think it’s exploitative. They also hate the idea of variable compensation; they want a nice, steady job where the company takes the risk, not the worker.

The feeling that sales is exploitative is not new; people have always been uncomfortable with the idea of selling something or being sold. And, of course, many people have always been uncomfortable with the idea of variable compensation. But if companies are having a harder time finding people to take sales jobs and reworking compensation packages to decrease the commission component, that is worth noting.

It’s not entirely surprising, of course. I’ve heard people who worked in New York City’s government during the 1970s noting that there was an unusually high number of very competent senior staff at the time — refugees from the Great Depression who ended up there because it was the only place where you could get a steady paycheck. That generation was risk-averse in ways that their children were not, with a high savings rate and a permanent aversion to equity investments. It would be natural for the millennial generation to have had a similar reaction to such a brutal formative experience.

Reihan Salam:

I first encountered the upper middle class when I attended a big magnet high school in Manhattan that attracted a decent number of brainy, better-off kids whose parents preferred not to pay private-school tuition. Growing up in an immigrant household, I’d felt largely immune to class distinctions. Before high school, some of the kids I knew were somewhat worse off, and others were somewhat better off than most, but we generally all fell into the same lower-middle- or middle-middle-class milieu. So high school was a revelation. Status distinctions that had been entirely obscure to me came into focus. Everything about you—the clothes you wore, the music you listened to, the way you pronounced things—turned out to be a clear marker of where you were from and whether you were worth knowing.

By the time I made it to a selective college, I found myself entirely surrounded by this upper-middle-class tribe. My fellow students and my professors were overwhelmingly drawn from comfortably affluent families hailing from an almost laughably small number of comfortably affluent neighborhoods, mostly in and around big coastal cities. Though virtually all of these polite, well-groomed people were politically liberal, I sensed that their gut political instincts were all about protecting what they had and scratching out the eyeballs of anyone who dared to suggest taking it away from them. I can’t say I liked these people as a group. Yet without really reflecting on it, I felt that it was inevitable that I would live among them, and that’s pretty much exactly what’s happened.

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

JUST CAUSE does not mean “just because.” It establishes standards and procedures that must be met before an employee can be disciplined or discharged. Fortunately for members of MTI’s bargaining units, all have protection under the JUST CAUSE STANDARDS. They were negotiated by MTI to protect union members.

There are seven just cause tests, and an employer must meet all seven in order to sustain the discipline or discharge of an employee. They are: notice; reasonableness of the rule; a thorough and fair investigation; proof; equal treatment; and whether the penalty reasonably meets the alleged offense by the employee.

MTI’s various Contracts enable a review and binding decision by a neutral arbitrator, as to whether such an action by a District administrator/principal is justified. The burden of proof is on the District in such cases.

The provisions of just cause are steps every employer should be obligated to follow. Unfortunately, all administrators do not have a conscience that leads them to follow these principles. However, an MMSD administrator must follow them, because of the rights MTI members have under the Union’s Collective Bargaining Agreements.

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

The January 14 hearing by the Assembly Education Committee produced ONLY ONE speaker who favored the Accountability proposal, Assembly Bill 1 (AB 1), and that was the Bill’s author, Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt. During his testimony, Thiesfeldt refused to name either the person or organization who asked him to introduce it, the source of the information from which the Bill was produced, or who additional sponsors of the Bill are. Much appears to have come from the far-right group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Thiesfeldt did say that additional COMMON CORE STANDARDS would be added to his Accountability Bill proposal, as it proceeds through the legislative process.

Major opposition was heard from DPI policy advisor Jeff Pertl who testified that if AB 1 was in effect in 2015, $587 million in State education funds would be diverted from public schools to for-profit charter schools.
Senator Dave Hansen (Green Bay) said, “Some of the special interests in the Capitol might not like that fact, but a lot of the problems we’re seeing with AB 1 could have been avoided if a more inclusive effort had been made by the author.”

PRIVATIZATION – the goal of AB 1 was made clear as the intent of the proposal in remarks by Rep. Eric Genrich (Green Bay) who said, “Today’s hearing has made clear that this most recent effort to take over certain public schools and further privatize public education is hastily and poorly crafted. This legislation is being rammed through the legislative process without giving deference to or seeking real input from the educational professionals and local school boards who serve our school kids every day.”

Erin Richards:

At Veritas High School, a small and mostly low-income school on Milwaukee’s south side, more than 95% of students graduate in four years, and almost all are accepted to college.

But only about two out of three actually enroll in postsecondary school. An even smaller share obtain a degree.

“Saying you’re going to college and actually going to college are two different things,” said Sherry Tolkan, principal at Veritas.

A new program may hold promise for boosting the numbers of students doing both.

As part of an experiment being tried nationwide, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Milwaukee has matched a group of Veritas freshmen with business professionals to support the teenagers not only through high school, but also college.

A secure online platform allows the volunteer mentors and students to develop relationships over email, and live meet-ups take place at school once a month.

Emily Ekins:

The new Reason-Rupe national telephone poll of 1,003 adults finds 72 percent of Americans are concerned their state and local governments may not be able to afford the pensions that have been promised to government workers. With those worries in mind, 82 percent favor requiring current public employees to contribute more towards their own future pensions and benefits.

A majority of Americans, 53 percent, believe public employees should contribute at least 50 percent of the cost of their retirement benefits. Fifty-eight percent of Americans favor setting a cap on the maximum dollar amount of annual pension payments public workers can receive during retirement, while 35 percent oppose a cap on pension payments.

Molly Beck:

Madison school officials are weighing property tax increases, significant program cuts and requiring employees to pay a portion of health insurance premiums to help close a huge budget deficit.

About $6 million could be saved by making aggressive changes to employees’ health care costs, including requiring staff to contribute toward health insurance premiums, renegotiating contracts with health care providers, and making plan changes, Michael Barry, assistant superintendent of business services, told School Board members Monday.

Overall, the district spends about $62 million in employee health care costs, which are expected to grow by about 8.5 percent next school year.

The budget shortfall for the fiscal year that starts July 1 was estimated in January at $10.1 million with the use of all of the district’s taxing authority. But it could jump by $4.1 million if state lawmakers accept Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to cut a special $150 per student funding stream for next school year, and keep revenue limits and general state aid flat.

Now district officials say the deficit in the roughly $400 million budget could be as much as $20.8 million or as low as $12.2 million for the 2015-16 school year, depending on how much of the school district’s unused taxing authority the board agrees to use.

Much more on Madison’s benefit plans and conundrum, here.

Cory Doctorow:

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy is only 180 pages long — three essays, an introduction and an afterword — but I made more than 80 notes as I read it, underlining passages and dog-earing pages I wanted to come back to and/or read aloud to other people and talk about further.

Unlike the enormous and comprehensive Debt, Utopia of Rules is mostly argument, not history. It sets out to investigate the problem of “bureaucracy” — basically, rules, and the simmering threat of violence that underpins them. Hidebound adherence to awful, runaround bureaucracy was always the sin laid at the feet of slow-moving, Stalinist states under the influence of the USSR. Capitalism, we were told, was dynamic, free, and open. But if that’s so, why is it that since the USSR imploded, bureaucracy under capitalism has exploded? If you live in a western, capitalist state, you probably spend more time filling in paperwork, waiting on hold, resubmitting Web-forms, attending performance reviews, brainstorming sessions, training meetings, and post-mortems than any of your ancestors, regardless of which side of the Iron Curtain they lived on.