Gregg Graham:

Sebastian Thrun left his tenured teaching job at Stanford University after 160,000 students signed up for his free online version of the course “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.” The experience completely changed his perspective on education, he said, so he ditched Stanford and launched the private Web site Udacity, which offers online courses. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” Thrun said. “You can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture to your 20 students, but I’ve taken the red pill and I’ve seen Wonderland.” (Thrun is staying at Stanford as a research professor, but will not be teaching there).
What exactly was the “Wonderland” that Thrun saw that sent him into such euphoric zeal that he discarded his position at a premier institution of higher education like he was trading in an old clunker at the car dealer? He saw those phenomenal numbers signing up for his class, and it made him dizzy with delight. Anybody with a Twitter account or Facebook page can understand the feeling. Your number of followers or friends can be a source of affirmation, proof that what you have to say is important. I was on Twitter for several weeks following anybody I found remotely interesting, and then someone told me that it is better to have more followers than followees, so I promptly started culling my list. I didn’t want to be a Twitter loser. But surely those adolescent impulses don’t affect scholars like Thrun.

Emma Boyd:

Many in the world of higher education suspect they are witnessing the beginning of a revolution. The agent provocateur is the Mooc (massive open online course) and, if some pundits are proved correct, it could change the way all students experience learning – including those at business schools – and put a few professors out of a job.
Why the nerves? Moocs are free, millions have signed up and no one knows what the scene will look like after the dust has settled. Anant Agarwal, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and president of edX, a Mooc provider, thinks the result will be positive.
“I view online learning as a rising tide that will lift all boats. It will not only increase access, it will also improve the quality of education at all our universities.”

Charlotte Clark:

When asked about the use of social media tools in the classroom, Mike Nicholson, director of global learning at Durham University Business School in the UK, fondly remembers an ex-colleague, now retired, who used to position a bucket of water at the front of his classroom with the label: Phone disposal unit.
“He actually would drop phones into it if he found students using them in class,” he says, laughing at how times have changed since then. Indeed, in spite of his own initial misgivings, he has adapted his teaching technique to suit the growing trends of social media in education.
Or, as he would say, “flipped” things round so that he delivers lectures via YouTube video clips, to be watched at home and then sets his students work to do when they come to class, integrating Twitter and Vine, a mobile app by Twitter that enables its users to create and post short video clips.
“It’s working really well,” Dr Nicholson says. When he first set the task of using Vine to explain what Apple should do next, his students split into groups and were moving all round the school filming things. The six second limit of Vine worked like the 140 character limit of Twitter in ensuring they remained succinct in their responses.

Sara Goldrick-Rab:

For the first time, probably in UW-Madison’s history, we are enrolling more legacy students than first-generation students.
Enrollment of Wisconsin residents is at an historic low, while enrollment of international students is at an historic high.
Enrollment is a function of applications, admit rates, and yield. Arguably, changes in policies around cost and campus climate (e.g. the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates– see below) most often affect the yield. So let’s look at the yield rates– the percent of students who accept the admissions offer and choose to attend Madison. They are quite stable for some groups, but declining for others.

Related: Madison High School Freshman enrollment at UW System schools, including UW-Madison.

David Cohen:

Like many interested observers around the country, I’ve been following the school board elections in Los Angeles. That’s partly out of general interest in a high profile drama involving the politics of education, the same way I’d pay some attention to a large district election almost anywhere in the country. It’s also a personal interest in my hometown, in a district where I was a student, and where I have friends and relatives attending the schools and teaching in them. Yet at the same time I think every Californian involved in education is affected to some extent by what happens in Los Angeles Unified School District. I’ve referred to that district as the Jupiter of our solar system. Looking at the situation less metaphorically, consider the significance of LAUSD in our state legislature. This one huge district covers a densely populated area represented by at least a dozen state legislators. Meanwhile, my state legislators in the San Francisco Bay Area might be representing dozens of school school districts.
So, yes, I pay attention to the gravitational force of LAUSD politics and policy. I also pay close attention to the words people choose, perhaps just as part of my nature or perhaps as a result of many years teaching English. Looking at a recent report on the LAUSD school board elections, I found some very interesting word choices in this article posted at L.A. School Report: “Defiant Mayor Promises Continued Involvement.”

The Capital Times

The Madison School Board will face difficult, perhaps definitional, choices in the next several years. To make those choices, the board must have the right mix of members. Members must be absolutely committed to public education. Yet that’s not enough. They must have varied experience and bold visions for how to address the district’s challenges. With this in mind, we recommend: Howard, Mertz (Primary winner Sarah Manski dropped out of the race, remains on the ballot), Strong

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.

Isthmus:

Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.
The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker’s revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers’ evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district’s achievement gap between white and minority students.
TJ Mertz, an Edgewood College history instructor and education blogger, is running unopposed after Sarah Manski dropped out of the race for Seat 5 following the February primary. Her name will appear on the ballot, but she is moving to California. Mertz will replace retiring school board member Maya Cole.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we’d pose our own questions to candidates. This week, we ask the candidates about where they think incoming superintendent Jennifer Cheatham should direct her attention. We also ask about the changes in collective bargaining wrought by Act 10: How have they affected the district, and how should it respond to this new policy?

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.

Isthmus:

Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.
The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker’s revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers’ evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district’s achievement gap between white and minority students.
In the race for Seat 4, incumbent James Howard is running against Greg Packnett, a Democratic legislative aide.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we’d pose our own questions to candidates. This week, we ask the candidates about where they think incoming superintendent Jennifer Cheatham should direct her attention. We also ask about the changes in collective bargaining wrought by Act 10: How have they affected the district, and how should it respond to this new policy?

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections here.

Dale Stephens:

This is the time of year when high school seniors across the country are checking the mail obsessively. They’re rushing down the driveway whenever an unusually loud car goes by, hoping the letter carrier has delivered that all-important, life-altering piece of paper: the acceptance letter to their dream school.
You should know, however, that not everyone is paying attention to the mailbox. Some teenagers are making plans to engage in self-directed learning.
All your life, parents, teachers, and guidance counselors have drilled the idea into your head that you must go to college. It has been made clear that if you don’t get good grades and attend a four-year college, the rest of your life will be a dismal failure.
I’m arguing that all of this is wrong. The social cues that defined what you thought about education ought to be questioned.
There is a community of people who are making a different choice. Instead of going into debt, they are taking the future into their own hands. They are using the real world to find mentors and learn practical skills. They are traveling, volunteering, interning and apprenticing.

Anusha Shrivastava:

The minute you walk through the door, the clock is ticking on time to connect with your kids.
According to a recent study, what happens in the first couple of minutes after parents return home from work makes a big difference in how parents and kids relate to each other for the rest of the evening.
The study, described in this article in The Atlantic, was conducted by a team of UCLA researchers who tracked the lives of 32 dual-earning, middle-class families living in Los Angeles between 2001 and 2004.

Rdmag:

To students in Jennifer Burg’s computer science classes, making music is the main objective. But her goal is to get them to understand how the underlying technology works–and to love it so much they decide on a science-based career path.
And that, Burg’s study has shown, has helped Wake Forest University fulfill the national imperative to increase the number of majors in the STEM disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math.
The results of Burg’s research, “Computer Science ‘Big Ideas’ Play Well in Digital Sound and Music,” will be published during the upcoming Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education conference, on March 9 in Denver. The study was funded through two National Science Foundation grants totaling $700,000.

Starr Sackstein:

My students might have a coronary if I fail to answer an email at 10pm on a weekend.
With the creation of email, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, it’s near impossible for the human part of a teacher to go without notice in settings less familiar than school. Comfortably seated with my iPad and iPhone on either side of me and my Macbook Pro serving as heating pad to my belly, I’m in bed conferencing with my students using powerful new social mediums.
Whether answering quick project direction questions, putting out fires of uncooperative technology when an assignment is due, or chasing down newspaper leadership to make sure deadlines are met, I’m certain some of my older colleagues would writhe with discomfort at how available I am to my students.

Charlotte Clarke:

The entrance to Henley Business School’s Greenlands campus is reminiscent of a Jane Austen film, with its sweeping driveway leading to a stunning white country house. Indeed, once inside, most corners of the 19th-century building are conducive to afternoon tea. Oversized sofas and armchairs face each other, windows overlook the river Thames and nearby tables are stacked with selections of hot drinks.
Queen Elizabeth I is known to have visited the house on more than one occasion. But today, those most likely to be found drinking tea at the now triple accredited business school, founded in 1945, are students and faculty from the its executive education programmes, including the three-year flexible MBA which blends online learning with optional face-to-face workshops.
Since merging with the University of Reading in 2008, there is also the Whiteknights campus in Reading – a former country estate of the Marquis of Blandford – where Henley’s undergraduate, postgraduate taught masters, professional management and PhD programmes are delivered.

Adam Palin:

Amid the fanfare surrounding the nascent massive open online course (Mooc) movement have been looming questions concerning their economic viability. Leading platforms, including Coursera and edX, have committed themselves to providing higher education content online for free.
Until now, the costs of developing Moocs have been shouldered by the platforms themselves and the universities supplying courses, rather than consumers of the content.
Coursera, a for-profit Mooc platform that has more than 2.8m students, has raised venture capital to cover development costs. A $16m injection from Silicon Valley-based Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers – an early investor in Amazon and Google – has been the most notable. Udacity, a for-profit platform that does not partner with universities, has raised more than $21m in venture capital.

Chris Nuttall:

A MacBook, or any laptop, is usually the default educational tool of choice for students but there are signs that our latter-day electronic versions of slates are making serious inroads in modern education.
Apple disclosed in February that it had sold more than 8m iPads directly to educational institutions worldwide, quite apart from the unquantified number sold to individual students.
With Android and Windows devices benefiting from updated operating systems and software, as well as student-friendly accessories such as digital pens, tablets are set to storm the bastions of education.
In terms of screen size, Apple recognised the popularity of the 7in category when it launched the iPad mini in October.

James Dean:

James Dean: ‘Using traditional education as the gold standard is outmoded’
Can an online MBA programme be of the same high quality as a campus-based programme?
From a teaching and learning perspective, there can no longer be any doubt that online education can match and, in some ways, exceed the performance of conventional education.
Online MBA programmes match or exceed the quality of on-campus programmes when done right. Doing it right does not mean simply transmitting taped lectures or using Powerpoint slides with a voice-over lecture. It does mean:

Jennifer Levitz:

Massachusetts lawmakers are considering eliminating a cap on the number of charter schools that can operate in the lowest-performing school districts, including here in the capital city.
While other states also have weighed lifting caps, charter advocates point to left-leaning Massachusetts as a somewhat unlikely model for the movement. “This demonstrates that charter schools are a viable reform,” said Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a nonprofit aimed at advancing the movement. “If it can happen in Massachusetts, it can happen anywhere.”
Charter schools receive public funding but, unlike public schools, employ mostly nonunion teachers and have autonomy in school districts, which allows them to set their own conditions, such as longer school days. They have long been embraced by Republicans for introducing choice in education, but have been assailed by some teacher unions and others as hurting traditional public schools.

Madison appears to be going in the opposite direction.
Related: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: We are not interested in the development of new charter schools”

Bruce Schneier:

Google Docs is being used for phishing. Oxford University felt that it had to block the service because Google isn’t responding to takedown requests quickly enough.
Think about this in light of my essay on feudal security. Oxford University has to trust that Google will act in its best interest, and has no other option if it doesn’t.

Helen Warrell:

Traditional red brick universities risk extinction unless they respond creatively to growing competition from free online courses, private providers and increasing globalisation in higher education, a former government education adviser has warned.
The study, “An Avalanche is Coming”, is published after global university rankings this month showed a greater polarisation between elite “superbrands” such as Oxford and Cambridge, and others such as Leeds, which has dropped out of the top 100 for the first time. The league, compiled by the Times Higher Education magazine, signals that British universities are losing ground to institutions in emerging Asian economies.
Sir Michael Barber, the report’s author, is a former adviser to Tony Blair and chief education adviser at Pearson, which owns the Financial Times. He identified “the ordinary red brick university that just ticks over” as most vulnerable, but said it was hard to predict when the “avalanche” would strike.

Garth Saloner:

Higher education is entering a new era in which educational technology will bring – as the president of Stanford University John Hennessy put it recently – a tsunami of change. The MBA will be no exception. But how should it change?
Rooted in Silicon Valley among some of the most innovative organisations in the world, people ask me: “Why not make the MBA an online degree?” My answer? While technology can greatly enhance the learning experience, it simply cannot replace the faculty-student interaction, experiential learning and self-discovery that occur in the MBA classroom.
The issue is an incremental experience versus a transformational one. The two-year, residential MBA is an immersive experience that delivers a life-changing process for those who embrace it.
In Stanford’s two-year programme, students learn about themselves and how they want to lead others through highly interactive eight-person leadership labs in which coaches and fellow students provide real-time, personal feedback. They engage in hands-on, multidisciplinary classes where new products or processes go through brainstorming exercises and rapid prototyping sessions with scores of ideas flying across work tables as one student builds on another’s idea. MBAs serendipitously bump into potential business partners in the dining pavilion, which draws engineering, law and other students.

Frank Quinn:

The physical sciences all went through “revolutions”: wrenching transitions in which methods changed radically and became much more powerful. It is not widely realized, but there was a similar transition in mathematics between about 1890 and 1930. The first section briefly describes the changes that took place and why they qualify as a “revolution”, and the second describes turmoil and resistance to the changes at the time.
The mathematical event was different from those in science, however. In science, most of the older material was wrong and discarded, while old mathematics needed precision upgrades but was mostly correct. The sciences were completely transformed while mathematics split, with the core changing profoundly but many applied areas, and mathematical science outside the core, relatively unchanged. The strangest difference is that the scientific revolutions were highly visible, while the significance of the mathematical event is es- sentially unrecognized. The section “Obscurity” explores factors contributing to this situation and suggests historical turning points that might have changed it.

Michael Corkery & Jeannett Neumann:

For years, Illinois officials misled investors and shortchanged the state pension system, leaving future generations of taxpayers to foot the bill, U.S. securities regulators allege.
The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday charged Illinois with securities fraud, marking only the second time the agency has filed civil-fraud charges against a state.
Related Video
But the agency and the state also announced that a settlement had already been reached in which Illinois won’t pay a penalty or admit wrongdoing.

Laura Waters:

Politics K12 reports on Diane Ravitch’s new anti-reform organization, The Network for Public Education:

Education historian Diane Ravitch, a fierce critic of current education reform trends, is launching a new advocacy organization that will support political candidates who oppose high-stakes testing, mass school closures, and what her group calls the “privatizing” of public schools.
The new Network for Public Education is meant to counter state-level forces such as Democrats for Education Reform, Stand for Children, and Students First–all of which are promoting their own vision of education reform and supporting candidates for office, including with donations. That agenda backs things such as charter schools and teacher evaluations tied to student growth. Other powerful outside groups are also pushing such an agenda, though without the political donations, including former Gov. Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education and Chiefs for Change.

Della Bradshaw:

Although Kevin Werbach has made his name teaching about games, there are some things that the Wharton business school professor takes very seriously. One of those is the latest generation of online courses – Moocs, or massive open online courses – and just how his Ivy League institution, the University of Pennsylvania, can take advantage of them.
“They are an extraordinary opportunity for us,” says Professor Werbach. “For me it’s a platform to experiment on … I think these online resources free us up to do in the classroom the things that can only be done in the classroom.”
Though Moocs have been around for less than a year, they are one of the trendiest topics in education, says Jeff Seamen, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group, which publishes an annual report on online learning. “What we see at the moment is a genuine excitement that this represents a fundamental change in the way we can deliver education.”
On campus, business schools have often been quick off the mark to adopt the latest technologies. From Kindles to iPads, and from videoconferencing to the latest online networking, MBA programme directors have been enthusiastic adopters.

Laura Waters:

The honeymoon’s over. After years of attacking Gov. Christie and his education agenda full throttle – and losing authority, gravitas, and public support – NJEA’s leadership had seemed to undergo a makeover, fully backing the bipartisan bill that reformed teacher evaluation and tenure in New Jersey. Heck: NJEA even backed the Urban Hope Act, which allows charter operators to take over some of our worst-performing schools in Trenton, Camden, and Newark.
Of course, the Legislature made a huge concession to NJEA in negotiations over TEACHNJ, the tenure reform bill, at the last minute deleting the section of the bill that would have eliminated seniority-based lay-offs. Nonetheless, the resulting resolution was a huge step in partnership and collaboration.
Judging by today’s NJ Spotlight story, however, NJEA’s leadership has suffered a relapse, reverting back to the reactionary stance that undermined its brand in the first days of the Christie Administration. The first symptom was NJEA President Barbara Keshishian’s screechy response to Gov. Christie budget proposal, which increases state school aid, although not to the unattainable levels of Corzine’s School Funding Reform Act. The second symptom is covered in the Spotlight story, which recounts the union leadership’s retro reaction to the DOE’s proposed regulations for implementing the new tenure law.

Bruce Thornton:

The value of the university once lay in its providing a nurturing space for what English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold called “the free play of the mind upon all subjects,” which would foster the “instinct prompting [the mind] to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespective of practice, politics, and everything of the kind.”
Critical to these enterprises is the notion of academic freedom–the ability to study, teach, and talk about subjects, no matter how controversial, without fear of retribution or censorship. For only by discussing openly a wide range of subjects can the liberally educated mind “make the best prevail,” as Arnold put it, and turn “a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”

Matthew DeFour:

During her sophomore year at Madison East High School, Awa Fofana was facing a personal health crisis and her parents’ divorce when a teacher recommended she join the AVID/TOPS program.
Now a senior and headed to UW-Madison next fall to study nursing, Fofana credits the program, a partnership between the Madison School District and Boys & Girls Club of Dane County, with helping her succeed where other students facing similar challenges at home often do not.
“It’s hard to find someone who would support you through times like that,” Fofana said. “(AVID/TOPS) has been that push to do the things I need to do.”
AVID/TOPS — a college preparatory program for students in the academic middle — is one of the central pieces of an ambitious $15 million expansion the local Boys & Girls Club is planning over the next six years.
The expansion represents a shift for the organization from recreational after-school programming to academic support services. It comes as the School District renews its focus on raising low-income and minority student achievement, and reflects increasing ties between the club and the district.

Jennifer Lawinski:

Social graces are just as important to success as mastering astrophysics or engineering. But how do you take someone who’s grown up in the world of pocket protectors and get them thinking about suits, bow ties and the proper way to hold a wine glass, be it of red or white?
To help the next generation of nerd overlords be as socially savvy as they are smart, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology runs an annual day of etiquette classes it calls Charm School.
Founded in 1993, Charm School just celebrated its 20th birthday with classes in alcohol and gym etiquette, how to dress for work (for men and for women) and how to visit a contemporary art museum. There are also classes on how to make a charming first impression, the right way to tweet and even how to dance at weddings.
“We’re giving our students the tools to be productive members of society, to be the whole package,” Alana Hamlett of MIT’s Student Activities and Leadership Office told the Los Angeles Times. “It gets them thinking about who they are and what their impact and effect is, whether they’re working on a team in an engineering company, or in a small group on a project, or interviewing for a job.”
Because, as Charm School’s course listing says, “What you do or don’t do in the interview can make the difference in getting the job.”

Stephanie Banchero:

When President Barack Obama unveiled plans to vastly expand preschool access across the U.S., he singled out Oklahoma as a model–a state that shows the promise and the challenges of the undertaking.
In 1998, Oklahoma lawmakers passed one of the nation’s first state-funded preschool programs for all 4-year-olds. Since then, the number of children enrolled in preschool programs has soared to 40,000 this year, up from 9,000 when the program first started.
Many Oklahoma children now arrive in elementary school so well prepared that some districts have overhauled their kindergarten curricula.
Kim Jones, a kindergarten teacher at Western Oaks Elementary School near Oklahoma City, has seen the difference. She used to teach her students to recognize capital letters, add numbers up to five, follow directions and take turns. Now, most arrive from preschool with that knowledge. “We can jump right into the academics the first week,” Ms. Jones said.

Ruth Simon:

Tuition at public colleges jumped last year by a record amount as state governments slashed school funding, the latest sign of strain in the U.S. higher-education sector.
The average amount that students at public colleges paid in tuition, after state and institutional grants and scholarships, climbed 8.3% last year, the biggest jump on record, according to a report based on data from all public institutions in all 50 states to be released Wednesday by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Median tuition rose 4.5%.
The average state funding per student, meanwhile, fell by more than 9%, the steepest drop since the group began collecting the data in 1980. Median funding fell 10%. During the recession, states began cutting support for higher education, and the trend accelerated last year.

Alan Borsuk:

How high do we want to turn up the heat? Where’s the line between “justifiable and productive” and “we’ll be sorry”?
Not questions that are easy to answer, but they deserve very serious thought, especially as the state budget process heats up. The questions involve money, of course, but they also involve the huge amount of change that is going on within schools – the pressure for better results, major changes in learning standards and teaching styles, and new approaches to evaluating teachers and principals that could carry big career implications.
I’ve visited several schools lately, both city and suburban, and I’ve seen some really big changes in what is going on, much of it appealing and promising when it comes to how students get engaged in their learning and what is expected of them. Cool stuff.
But I’ve also talked to teachers who went from describing great work with their students, and, within seconds, have tears in their eyes when talking about how things are going for them personally and for their schools. These are people – some of the best we have in classrooms – working under enormous stress. It is in everyone’s long-term interest for teaching to be good and ultimately doable work. Negative forces can – and are – putting that at risk.
For the moment, let’s focus on how much money public schools will get for the next two years, to be determined by the state budget to be set this spring.

Matthew DeFour:

Andrew Statz recalls playing the city-building computer game SimCity in the mid-1990s when UW-Milwaukee called to offer him a teaching position in their urban planning graduate program.
His assignment: teaching college students how to play SimCity.
“It was serious geekdom,” said Statz, 43, the Madison School District’s chief information officer since January 2011.
Statz, who lives on the East Side with his wife, Ronda, worked as a state budget analyst under three governors before becoming former Madison mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s efficiency expert.
Now as the School District’s numbers guru (he also oversees the enrollment office and information technology), Statz is applying his love for systems analysis to helping the district make data-driven decisions.

Andrew has always been most cordial, professional and helpful in my experience.

Charlotte Clarke:

The past year has been a watershed year for learning online. At one end of the market, highly-ranked business schools have realised the value of teaching online, launching high-cost programmes for high-calibre students. But the past year has also seen an exponential growth in the number of free courses, or Moocs. Can these different types of programme co-exist?
On Wednesday, March 13, 2013, between 14.00 and 15.00 GMT, a panel of experts will answer these questions and others here on FT.com. Post your questions now to ask@ft.com and they will be answered on the day.

Alison Gopnik:

Why are children so, well, so helpless? Why did I spend a recent Sunday morning putting blueberry pancake bits on my 1-year-old grandson’s fork and then picking them up again off the floor? And why are toddlers most helpless when they’re trying to be helpful? Augie’s vigorous efforts to sweep up the pancake detritus with a much-too-large broom (“I clean!”) were adorable but not exactly effective.
This isn’t just a caregiver’s cri de coeur–it’s also an important scientific question. Human babies and young children are an evolutionary paradox. Why must big animals invest so much time and energy just keeping the little ones alive? This is especially true of our human young, helpless and needy for far longer than the young of other primates.
One idea is that our distinctive long childhood helps to develop our equally distinctive intelligence. We have both a much longer childhood and a much larger brain than other primates. Restless humans have to learn about more different physical environments than stay-at-home chimps, and with our propensity for culture, we constantly create new social environments. Childhood gives us a protected time to master new physical and social tools, from a whisk broom to a winning comment, before we have to use them to survive.

Lisa Jardine:

The request caught the attention of Dr Mary Cartwright, lecturer in mathematics at Girton College Cambridge. She was already working on similar “very objectionable-looking differential equations” (as she later described them).
She brought the request to the attention of her long-term colleague at Trinity College, Professor JE Littlewood and suggested that they combine forces. In a memoir written later in her life, she explained that he already had the necessary experience in dynamics, having worked on the trajectories of anti-aircraft guns during World War I.

Jane Belmore, Interim Superintendent (PDF):

Background Information: The Model School concept, to develop culturally relevant teaching practices, was approved as part of the Achievement Gap Plan.
The recommendation for a Cultural Practices that are Relevant (CPR) Model School addresses three primary needs:

• The need for the creation of better programs and services to increase achievement for underserved students. The need to create better support for teachers around implementing Response to Intervention (RtI) with cultural relevance at the core, according to the state and national RtI models, and
• The need for a school-based professional development environment on culturally and linguistically responsive practices, with an emphasis on promoting rigor in the content areas–beginning with literacy.

Additionally, the CPR model school’s combination of culturally responsive instruction, high expectations for achievement, early and extended learning, character development, and strong community partnerships will serve as an incubator for instructional improvement efforts in the district.

Dylan Pauly, Legal Counsel; Steve Hartley, Chief of Staff:

During last month’s Committee meeting, we presented a new, rewritten Policy 10000. At that time, we explained that the changes contained therein were intended to reflect the time the Board has spent reviewing and discussing Dr. Julie Mead’s work regarding principle-based policymaking. Over the course of the last meeting, several members suggested changes for and improvements to Draft 1 of the rewritten Policy 10000. Tonight we present Draft 2, which we believe incorporates the Board’s suggestions and input. Attached hereto is a redline draft highlighting the differences between Draft 1 of the rewritten policy and Draft 2.
The changes include:

• Express language stating only instrumentality schools will be considered (p. 10-1)
• Refinement of the guiding principles (pp. 10-1and10-2)
• Revisions to the timeline to include more Board involvement and specificity (p.10-3)
• Board review and approval of Initial Applications (p. 10-5)
• Clarification of the timing of the Superintendent’s Administrative Analysis (p. 10-6)
• Removal of the term “qualified” in Section IV (p. 10-7)
• Additional detail regarding location requirements (p. 10-8)

The changes in Draft 2 do not reflect any of the proposed statutory amendments contained in Governor Walker’s biennial budget. At this time, the changes are only proposals and may or may not be passed as law. Obviously, if any of the proposed changes, which primarily relate to independent and instrumentality charter schools, do become law, we will need to review Policy 10000 again to insure compliance.

Related: Madison Mayor Paul “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools” Soglin Asked Sarah Manski to Run for the School Board; “Referred” her to MTI Executive Director John Matthews.

Richard Perez-Pena:

Harvard secretly searched the e-mail accounts of several of its staff members last fall, looking for the source of news media leaks about its recent cheating scandal, but did not tell them about the searches for several months, people briefed on the matter said on Saturday.
The searches, first reported by The Boston Globe, involved the e-mail accounts of 16 resident deans, but most of them were not told of the searches until the last few days, after The Globe inquired about them. Resident deans straddle the roles of administrators and faculty members, teaching classes as lecturers while living in Harvard’s undergraduate residential houses as student advocates and advisers.
In August, an administration memo to the resident deans, on how to advise students being brought up on cheating charges before the Administrative Board, a committee of faculty members responsible for enforcing regulations, made its way to news organizations. The e-mail searches were intended to find the source of leak, but no one was disciplined in the matter.

John Torinus:

One small governmental entity has shown the way. The West Bend School District went self-insured years ago, then bid out its network needs, then went CDHP and now is putting in its own on-site clinic. It’s in the vanguard in learning from the private sector payers about what works and being a fast-follower.
Result? It is delivering first class health care for less than $10,000 per employee. That’s half of what many districts are playing for fully insured plans.
Think about the numbers. At a savings of $10,000 per employee and about 1000 employees, it is saving the taxpayers $10 million per year.
The district is giving raises; it has found funds for deferred maintenance; it found $5 million in reserves to put against a $25 million bond program for school construction.

Smart, anti-orthodoxy thinking.

James Palmer:

In 2004, fresh off the plane in Beijing, I was asked to judge an English competition for high-school seniors. My two co-judges were pleasantly cynical middle-aged sociologists, both professors at Tsinghua University. After listening to the umpteenth speech about how China used to be poor, but was now rich and powerful, I remarked to one of them that the students seemed a little sheltered.
‘They don’t know anything!’ she spat. ‘They don’t have any idea about how people live. None of this generation do. They’re all so spoilt.’
It’s a view I’ve heard time and again over the past eight years, and one of which the Chinese media never tire. The young get it from left and right. This January alone, the jingoistic Major General and media commentator Luo Yuan condemned the young for being physically and mentally unfit, ranting: ‘Femininity is on the rise, and masculinity is on the decline. With such a lack of character and determination and such physical weakness, how can they shoulder the heavy responsibility?’ Meanwhile the writer and social critic Murong Xuecun blasted them in the US magazine Foreign Policy because ‘fattened to the point of obesity with Coca-Cola and hamburgers [ …] the young generation only believes official pronouncements; some even think contradicting the official line is heretical. They do not bother to check the details’.

John McCrea:

Note the irony here: The only education system that actually worked for him was the self-education kind. And it is what is going to help him work his way into the highest-paying career.
His top-20 law school and private education in general are not to blame; they’re in the business (yes, the business) of providing a service that’s in demand, no matter how misinformed their “customers” may be. If you’ve got foolish customers who will overpay for something worthless, who’s really to blame? Oh, right, the institutions that hand them the money, at high rates of interest, so they can buy the goods–law degrees, for instance–that won’t work for them. Cheap financing of education can put a young life underwater, just as junk loans for McMansions did in the housing market, where older lives were put underwater. Too much debt, too little equity in the product itself: the worker or the house.
The current administration has pursued a cheap-money approach to student loans in order to produce as many four-year-degree students (and not always graduates) as possible. Instead, the goal should be to assess which schools and degrees can be the quickest to bring well-trained workers to market. When workers emerge from their initial education and find jobs, they’ll soon learn what skills can drive their careers forward; that’s the time for graduate school or further training courses. That’s when speculation turns into investment: a known need, and then a wise outlay to meet it. Our economy needs the most cost-effective education/hire ratio possible, and we should also measure retention to make sure schools are meeting needs. Mr. Overqualified trusted that his expensive education was an investment; instead, it was a fraud. Let’s stop this nonsense.

Christina Bonnington:

Matthew Stoltzfus could never get his students to see chemistry like he sees chemistry until he added a digital component to his lesson plan.
Stoltzfus, a chemistry lecturer at Ohio State University, struggled for years to bring complex chemical equations to life on the blackboard, but always saw students’ eyes glaze over. Then he added animations and interactive media to his general chemistry curriculum. Suddenly, he saw students’ faces light up in understanding.
“When I see a chemical reaction on a piece of paper, I don’t see coefficients and symbols, I see a bucket of molecules reacting,” Stoltzfus said. “But I don’t think our students see that big bucket of molecules. We can give students a better idea of what’s happening at a molecular level with animations and interactive elements.”
And many such students are getting this multi-faceted education on tablets. Tablets are reinventing how students access and interact with educational material, and how teachers assess and monitor students’ performance at a time when many schools are understaffed and many classrooms overcrowded. Millions of grade school and university students worldwide are using iPads to visualize difficult concepts, revisit lectures on their own time and augment lessons with videos, interactive widgets and animations.

Sophie Gould:

Yale’s libraries amassed new physical and digital holdings and expanded their influence on academia during the 2011-’12 academic year, University Librarian Susan Gibbons said in an annual report posted on the library’s website last week.
After working at the University for nine years, former University Librarian Alice Prochaska announced in June 2009 that she would be leaving Yale for a position at Oxford. Over the next two years, Yale’s libraries faced a rapidly changing digital world and significant cuts to library budgets under two interim University librarians, Gibbons told the News. But the library gained a measure of stability in July 2011 when Gibbons took over Prochaska’s position, and Gibbons said in her annual report that Yale’s librarians took great strides last year toward meeting modern needs for digital content while balancing their simultaneous roles as librarians, educators and teachers.
“This first year felt as if we were trying to reset ourselves, adjust to the new economic realities and chart a new course forward,” Gibbons said.

Katherine Beals:

Children have long been graded not just for academics, but also for elements of “character” — particularly behavior and emotional maturity. However, in the last few decades, socially eccentric children have seen their awkwardness or aloofness factored into their grades in math, language arts, and social studies. Ironically, this trend has coincided with a rise in diagnoses of autistic spectrum disorders.
For children on the autism spectrum, new social studies curricula pose a particular challenge. Once restricted to readings, worksheets, and essays on history, government, and politics, the subject increasingly requires students to reflect on their connections within their local communities. They are asked to present projects to their classmates (even in primary school), spend much of class time working in groups, and evaluate scenarios such as this one, from a worksheet for 3rd graders:

Harry Eyres:

The gangly young American Van Cliburn’s victory in the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958, six months after the first Sputnik went into orbit, was more than just a pianistic event. The innocent Texan (who died last month) suddenly became one of the key players in the cold war – or a cold war anti-warrior, an American emissary in a counter-war of peace and culture. While nuclear submarines and missiles squared up to each other across the Bering Strait, Van Cliburn’s sensitive fingers became one of the prime instruments of American soft power, matching or even outdoing the Soviets at what they thought they did best.
He became, in other words, part of a diplomatic great game which was bound, in the end, to swallow and swamp his pianistic gifts. The game was played with considerable skill by both American and Soviet political machines. When the jury at the Tchaikovsky in 1958 wanted to award Cliburn the first prize, it felt it had to ask permission from the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. “If he is the best, give it to him,” Khrushchev is reported to have replied. He was either being scrupulously honest and open, or playing a blinder by seeing that the USSR would gain by granting the prize to an American – showing its lofty impartiality and adherence to artistic standards, and keeping the Tchaikovsky as the gold standard of piano competitions.

Chrystia Freeland:

Here’s a novel way to address the problems caused by rising income inequality: give children the vote.
One virtue of this iconoclastic idea, recently advanced by the Canadian economist Miles Corak, is that it sidesteps the usual partisan debates. After all, the right and left have profound moral disagreements about economic inequality. But whatever your political stripe, you almost certainly believe in equality of opportunity.
Unfortunately, some of Corak’s most celebrated work has been to show that rising income inequality and declining social mobility go together. This relationship, which Alan B. Krueger, the head of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has dubbed the Great Gatsby Curve, is one of the most powerful reasons to care about rising income inequality.
That’s where the kids come in. In a policy paper published last month by Canada 2020, a Canadian progressive research group, Corak points out that the group that suffers most from declining social mobility is the young. As it happens, this is also one of the last human constituencies that doesn’t have the right to vote. That relationship may not be coincidental.
“Older individuals, and those with more education working in higher-skilled occupations, are more likely to vote,” Corak writes in the paper. “But, in addition, there is a broad bias by virtue of the simple fact that children are disenfranchised. Children’s rights are not adequately recognized and they have a reduced political voice in setting social priorities.”
Corak has a simple and radical solution to that bias: Give children the vote. “When you first hear about it, it sounds like a crazy idea, and that was my first reaction,” Corak told me, speaking by phone from Ottawa.

Yes.
Related: “the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment”

The Rantosphere:

#1: The gobsmacking amount of holidays
This is the main incentive or loving the exam days. The holidays. In our school (which is one of the meanest there), we get only 1 holiday between exams (as opposed to the 3 or 4 the others generously give).
But let’s not complain. Holidays are great. They are certainly one of my most productive times. This blog was started during my half-yearlies for example.
#2: Half-days
Even on the days we have school (3/7 in a week), we have half-days — i.e., we’re left at 11:30 instead of 1:30. That might not seem like much, but it’s a huge difference, really.

Ilya Volodarsky:

Sleepless nights at a train station and state-sponsored discrimination. This is the story of how my father came to finally attend college as a teenager in the Soviet Union.
In 1970 my father was 17 years old, living with his parents and brother in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He was interested in radio electronics, having built radios and clocks as a teenager. His father (my grandfather) was an electrical engineer, working at the time for the Uzbekistan Department of Auto-Transportation. My grandfather was a military man, having fought and been wounded at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. He encouraged my father to pursue a military career in electronics and telecommunication.
My father graduated from Tashkent High School #94 in May 1970. He knew he wanted to study telecommunications but his father insisted it be at a military university. At the time, my dad was reading electronics textbooks published by professors working at St. Petersburg’s Navy Academy. This specific academy trained sailors to man the country’s nuclear submarine fleet. The school had one of the premier telecommunication programs in the country, so my dad decided to apply there.

The Onion, via a kind reader’s email:

According to an alarming new report published Wednesday by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, third-graders in China are beginning to lag behind U.S. high school students in math and science.
The study, based on exam scores from thousands of students in 63 participating countries, confirmed that in mathematical and scientific literacy, American students from the ages of 14 to 18 have now actually pulled slightly ahead of their 8-year-old Chinese counterparts.
“This is certainly a wake-up call for China,” said Dr. Michael Fornasier, an IEA senior fellow and coauthor of the report. “The test results unfortunately indicate that education standards in China have slipped to the extent that pre-teens are struggling to rank among even the average American high school student.”
“Simply put, how can these third-graders be expected to eventually compete in the global marketplace if they’re only receiving the equivalent of a U.S. high school education?” Fornasier added.
Fornasier stressed that while the gap is not yet dramatically sizable, it has widened over the past two years after American high schoolers tested marginally higher in algebra, biology, and chemistry than, shockingly, most of China’s 8- and 9-year-olds.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org

Tom Coburn:

Now that budget sequestration is under way, it looks less like the fiscal apocalypse that had been predicted and more like a long-overdue intervention with politicians who are addicted to borrowing and spending.
I agree with President Obama that sequestration’s across-the-board rather than specific cuts are a “dumb” way to reduce spending. That is why I voted against the plan two years ago. But if sequestration is dumb, it’s even dumber not to cut spending at all.
Cutting spending can be a powerful pro-growth strategy, but the outcome of sequestration depends on how the administration chooses to cut. Not all dollars are spent equally: The Obama administration’s decision to spend federal dollars studying how cocaine affects the reproductive habits of Japanese quail didn’t multiply anything other than quail.
Shifting money to working families from quail research–and thousands of other frivolous expenditures–would mean fewer government workers furloughed. The $181,000 quail study alone could prevent 62 furloughs. If the federal government stopped sending unemployment checks to millionaires, it could save $14.8 million a year (according to IRS data) and prevent 5,103 furloughs. Smart savings would mean that single moms and others on a tight budget don’t have to work as much to finance wasteful government spending–and can keep more of their own money to spend, fueling economic growth in the process.
Sequestration will force cuts to waste that wouldn’t otherwise be cut. The administration has claimed that its hands are tied and terrible things will happen, yet its warnings seem calibrated to sound scary but not too scary. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said that cuts to air-traffic control will force flight delays but won’t compromise safety or cause air disasters.

Fabius Maximus has more.

Sarah Zielinski:

Should students who want to attend medical school have to slog through a year of physics, memorize the structures of dozens of cellular chemicals or spend months studying for the MCAT? Not necessarily.
There are a few nontraditional paths into medical school. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, for example, has admitted a quarter of its incoming students for the last 25 years through a program that gave early admittance to humanities students who didn’t have to take the full premed slate of science classes.
“It was designed to attract humanities majors to medicine who would bring a different perspective to education and medical practice,” says Dr. Dennis Charney, dean of the school. And it worked so well, he says, that the school expanded the program on Wednesday.

Mike Nichols:

Lost in the burgeoning debate in Madison over Special Needs Scholarships that would provide some public funding for children with disabilities in private schools is the fact that the current system already does exactly that – although not in a fair or logical or effective way.
The current system in Wisconsin is similar to the one in most other states.
It is driven by the federal law that entitles each child with a disability to a “free, appropriate public education” through the age of 21. The current method recognizes, at the same time though, that parents and public school officials often differ over what constitutes an “appropriate” education for a child with a disability. So it contains provisions designed to assure that such children in private schools — while they do not have the same absolute right to public resources — are assured of “equitable participation” in some federal funding and services.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen for a variety of reasons.
The current system gives responsibility for finding, identifying and evaluating children with disabilities — including those attending private schools — to local education agencies, or LEAs, that are almost always local school districts. It also essentially gives the local districts responsibility for ensuring the so-called equitable participation by private school children as a group.

Jessica Lahey:

It happens every time. As I hand the test out to my middle school students, one of them will invariably look up, pencil at the ready, and ask, “Does spelling count?”
Let’s ignore the fact that my students should know better than to even ask this question in the first place. I’ve answered it more times than I care to remember, usually in the fall of the new school year, and it goes something like this:
Yes. Spelling counts. I have lots of witty quips loaded up in my quiver about why it counts, but my new favorite comes from homeschooling mom of four Jodi Jackson Stewart who tweeted me with her answer to this question: “Spelling counts here because spelling counts out there.”

m

The Madison Times:

Students in the Madison Metropolitan School District’s Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) and the Boys & Girls Club’s Teens of Promise (TOPS) programs (www.avidtops.org) are achieving higher GPAs, enrolling in more advanced placement courses, and scoring higher on tests, according to a new analysis of the programs provided by the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE).
“We are so pleased that our ongoing partnership with the Boys & Girls Club is having a consistently positive impact on our students,” Superintendent Jane Belmore said. “It is because of this success that we have expanded AVID to middle schools this year. I want to thank the Boys & Girls Club for their work to make this partnership so effective.”

Dan Lewis:

A week or so ago, we gave my five year old son a little solar powered pocket calculator to play with. He explored the key pad and it didn’t take long before he had a question we didn’t really know how to answer. He saw the square root symbol and wanted to know what it was.
We — adults, generally — understand them, at least in a cursory way. The square root of 4 is 2, or 9 is 3, of 16 is 4, etc. until probably 100 or 144. But we learned it a long time ago, and we probably can’t remember how we learned it. And almost certainly, we learned the concept well after preschool. So not only do we not know how to teach the concept generally, but we certainly aren’t good at teaching it to people who are much, much younger than typically learn it.
But five year olds can be persistent so I gave it a go. I don’t know how much he understands the concept, but my son definitely gets some of it.

Bill Lueders:

The secrecy that attended the Madison School District’s pick of a new superintendent was bad form and bad public policy.
Prior to making its selection, the district announced just two finalists, one of whom was found to have a closet full of skeletons that prompted his withdrawal. The remaining finalist, Jennifer Cheatham, got the job.
State law requires that at least the top five contenders for such a position be named, but does not specify when. The Madison School District decided to do so after it was too late to matter.
And then, to add insult to injury, the district’s lawyer, Dylan Pauly, dissed the disclosure law that the district complied with only belatedly.
“We believe that by releasing these names, pursuant to our legal obligation, we are negatively contributing to the chilling effect that is occurring across the state with respect to school boards’ abilities to recruit and hire highly qualified individuals as superintendents,” she wrote.

A bit of history on Madison Superintendents. I fully agree with Lueders. I continue to be astonished at the ongoing lack of transparency in such public matters, from the local School District’s Superintendent search to the seemingly simple question of American citizen’s constitutional due process rights (is this being taught?)

Erin Richards:

When Miriam Oakleaf was 10 months old, her parents noticed something was wrong.
By 2 1/2 she had been formally diagnosed with autism, epilepsy and a rare skin and central nervous system condition called linear nevus sebaceous syndrome.
Now 8 and in second grade at Crestwood Elementary School in Madison, Miriam’s schooling requires extensive support and planning from a variety of education professionals – administrators, therapists, teachers and aides – in addition to her parents.
The story of Miriam and children like her is at the heart of a $21 million proposal in Gov. Scott Walker’s state budget that would allow 5% of kids with disabilities in Wisconsin to attend private or public schools outside their home districts on a taxpayer-funded voucher.
The proposal has driven a wedge through the state’s network of special-needs parents. Some believe it would open up more schooling options for their children while others contend it will drain more resources from their local public schools.

Frank Catalano:

“I think this is a special time for technology in education,” he began. But then he immediately cautioned, perhaps in light of some less-than-successful early Gates-funded initiatives (such as small high schools within high schools), “we try not to be naïve about how complex it’s going to be.”
On cost. During the last wave of interest and investment in education technology in the 1990s, Gates said that “it could cost several hundred dollars to store an hour of video on the Internet.” The balance in the money equation has now changed, and that same video storage costs pennies, he said.
But although most costs for educational technology are coming down, “Internet access is the most expensive piece” of edtech — even more so than student hardware devices. That, he said, has to change, since Internet access is not just important in the classroom, but for learning to continue at home.
On investment. Despite concerns over whether the recent increase in investor and tech press interest in edtech and startups may be overheated, Gates said the question should be if the investment in education is commensurate with its importance: “I would say absolutely not.” Instead, he contended not enough money is going into education R&D compared with other important sectors. “It would,” he said, “be rational for society for it to be a lot larger.”

Ross Danis:

When Facebook FB -0.72% founder Mark Zuckerberg hosted a fundraising event at his home in Palo Alto, Calif., last month for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the event set tongues wagging. The billionaire’s interest in the New Jersey politician was thoroughly dissected by the chattering class. Too bad there hasn’t been as much interest in analyzing Mr. Zuckerberg’s $100 million commitment to support the struggling public schools in Newark, N.J., or in studying the effectiveness of the many other education grants made by foundations to help in Newark.
To be fair, it is difficult to judge how well the philanthropy in Newark is working because precious few data have been collected. Truly useful metrics, therefore, haven’t been developed. The gap between good intentions and measurable results will be familiar anywhere in the country where philanthropies join efforts to improve education.
To address the shortfall in Newark, our organization, the Newark Trust for Education, has undertaken an effort to collect information about the foundations’ work that will help clarify for school administrators, principals, teachers, parents and students how best to improve K-12 public education.
Our primary objective: follow the money. Which philanthropies are spending how much, to do what, in which schools? No one really knew. In collaboration with the funding community, we created a tool called the NET Navigator. It allows anyone with an interest in tracking the tens of millions of philanthropy dollars now flowing into Newark schools to conduct online searches by funder, by school or by specific program. Soon the database will include individual school achievement data.

Caitlin Dewey:

A new assessment released today by the United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that some Syrian children have missed out on as much as two years of education in the midst of their country’s ongoing civil struggle.
“The education system in Syria is reeling from the impact of violence,” said Youssouf Abdel-Jelil, UNICEF’s Syria representative, in a statement. “Syria once prided itself on the quality of its schools. Now it’s seeing the gains it made over the years rapidly reversed.”
According to the report, schools are increasingly being used by armed groups and displaced persons seeking shelter. More than 1,500 schools have been damaged or converted into shelters, a problem illustrated in the map above.

Matthew DeFour:

The Department of Public Instruction and several state education organizations plan to hold a school safety summit this summer.
In announcing the event, State Superintendent Tony Evers didn’t mention last December’s massacre at a Connecticut elementary school that killed 20 children and six adults. But he referred to the national debate about school safety that has emerged since.
“Providing safe and respectful schools is an essential piece of our work to ensure every child can graduate ready for college and career,” Evers said. “As a state, and as a country, we have made this a serious focus, and building on that proactive tradition is as important as ever.”
Billed as the first “Wisconsin School Safety Summit,” the event will focus on four topics: policies and procedures, physical environment, climate and culture, and mental health services.

Monday 3/11/13!#31113RECOMMIT with @mtimadison and @werwisconsin ! Keep fighting, never give up! Details: bit.ly/15AxzdJ

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) March 7, 2013

Pat Schneider:

It’s a painful irony for Ananda Mirilli that the School Board run she tried to use to call the community to come together to do better for Madison kids ended up embroiled in such controversy.
“I’m seeing an even bigger divide in the community, and I’m sad that we are in that place,” Mirilli told me Wednesday. “But I’m hoping to continue to work to find healing in our community. We really need to have a conversation about the achievement gap.”
Mirilli, a Latina who lost her bid for Seat 5 on the Madison School Board in the Feb. 18 primary, decided against a write-in campaign when primary winner Sarah Manski dropped out of the race just two days later. But Mirilli hasn’t given up hope that the election — despite Manski’s surprise withdrawal and the allegations of dirty politics and hypocrisy it incited — can yet be made an occasion to bring together people now sometimes working at odds to improve education in Madison schools.
And as the Restorative Justice Program manager at YWCA Madison, Mirilli is wondering if restorative justice principles might be the way to do it.
“I’m wondering if we could hold a circle — not to find out the truth, but to see how we can move forward on this,” Mirilli told me.
Mirilli says she was wrongly depicted by Manski as pro-voucher because of a supposed association with Kaleem Caire of the Urban League of Greater Madison. Caire on Wednesday resurrected allegations of double-dealing by leaders of Madison Teachers Inc. in negotiating his Madison Preparatory Academy charter proposal that was rejected by the School Board two years ago.

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.
I appreciate Schneider’s ability to add links to her articles. This continues to be a rare event in Madison’s traditional media circles.

John Nichols:

As The Capital Times prepares to make endorsements in Madison School Board races that will be decided April 2, our editorial board will ponder issues ranging from the reactions of candidates to Gov. Walker’s voucher plan, the achievement gap and the challenge of maintaining quality schools in a time of funding cuts and shortfalls.
Our editorial board will make endorsements in two contested races, for Seat 3 between former La Follette High School teacher and low-income housing provider Dean Loumos and retired Madison police lieutenant Wayne Strong, and for Seat 4 between incumbent James Howard and challenger Greg Packnett, a legislative aide. The candidates all have strengths, and present voters with distinct options.
In the third race, there isn’t really a race. Candidates TJ Mertz and Sarah Manski won the primary Feb. 19. Then Manski surprised the community by dropping out of the contest several days later — announcing that her husband has been admitted to graduate school in California and that she would not be able to finish a term. We didn’t editorialize about the primary race. But after Manski dropped out, we said she had done the right thing because it would have been entirely inappropriate to maintain a campaign for a term she could not complete. But, as a board, we were disappointed by the loss of competition and urged the candidate who finished third in the primary, Ananda Mirilli, to make a bid as a write-in contender.
Mirilli made a great impression during the primary race and, had she waged a write-in campaign, she would have done so as an innovative thinker about how best to make great public schools work for all students. As the parent of an elementary-school student and a big proponent of public education, I’m familiar with a number of the people who organized Mirilli’s primary campaign, and who would have supported a write-in run. They form an old-fashioned grass-roots group that recalls the sort of organizations that traditionally backed School Board candidates in Madison. They could have mounted a fine campaign. But I also respect Mirilli’s decision not to run. The race would have been expensive and difficult. We’ve spoken several times, before the primary and since, and I’m convinced Mirilli’s voice will remain a vital one in local and state education debates. There’s a good chance she will eventually join the School Board, just as current board member Marj Passman was elected a year after she lost a close race to another current School Board member, Maya Cole.
Unfortunately, with Mirilli out of the running, the Seat 5 race is an uncontested one. That’s focused a good deal of attention on Manski, who I’ve known since she was writing for the Daily Cardinal on the University of Wisconsin campus. Among the several boards I have served on over the years, including those of the media reform group Free Press and Women in Media and News, I’ve been on the board of the reform group Liberty Tree, for which Manski has done fundraising work. Manski’s husband, Ben, worked for Liberty Tree before he left to manage Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s presidential run.

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board Elections, here.

David Blaska

Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, is speaking out against the campaign of deception waged against people of color and others who support doing something now about Madison’s yawning achievement gap instead of blaming Gov. Scott Walker.
In a statement issued this week, Caire writes, “As the 2013 Madison school board race continues, we (the Urban League) are deeply concerned about the negative politics, dishonesty and inaccurate discussions that have shaped the campaign. … We are concerned about how Madison Prep has become a red herring ….”
Walker had not even been sworn in as governor when the Urban League proposed establishing a charter school, Madison Preparatory Academy, to address an achievement gap in which barely half of black and Hispanic children graduate from high school in the Madison public schools.
Caire mentioned as the two worst offenders in this campaign of dishonesty T.J. Mertz, candidate for School Board seat #5, and Green Party activist Ben Manski.
Manski’s wife, Sarah, jumped into the seat #5 race hoping to squeeze out an already announced candidate, Latina immigrant Ananda Mirilli. Sarah Manski’s candidacy was apparently encouraged by both Mayor Paul Soglin, who gave her a glowing campaign testimonial, and teachers union boss John Matthews, to whom Soglin referred Sarah Manski. On Dec. 30, Ben Manski blasted an email containing this outright distortion of minority candidate Ananda Mirilli’s position:

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.

Isthmus:

Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.
The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker’s revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers’ evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district’s achievement gap between white and minority students.
TJ Mertz, an Edgewood College history instructor and education blogger, is running unopposed after Sarah Manski dropped out of the race for Seat 5 following the February primary. Her name will appear on the ballot, but she is moving to California. Mertz will replace retiring school board member Maya Cole.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we’d pose our own questions to candidates. We start by asking the candidates about their experience, and how they would address the achievement gap in the district.

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.

Ruth Conniff:

Sarah Manski did a lot of damage to Madison on her way out of town.
When she won the school board primary, sucking up endorsements from prominent local officials — apparently knowing all the while that she might not be hanging around to sit on the board — she did a major disservice to our community. As Madison Times editor A. David Dahmer observed, her highhanded use of the school board seat as a “backup plan” smacks of contempt for the people who care deeply about what is happening in our schools. Those people happen to include both of Manski’s opponents: school-policy blogger and educator TJ Mertz and Ananda Mirilli, a longtime advocate for Madison youth who’s on the board of the Spanish immersion charter school Nuestro Mundo.
Since Manski withdrew after she won the primary, her name — and not third-place finisher Mirilli’s — will appear on the ballot. That has convinced a lot of people of color that white liberals, including school board member Marj Passman, deliberately colluded to keep a woman of color off the board.

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board Election, here.

Nara Schoenberg:

You don’t want to get caught texting in Andrew Reiner’s class.
At the beginning of each semester, Reiner, a lecturer at Towson University in Maryland, makes his cellphone policy crystal clear.
“If there’s one thing that you will do that will really (tick) me off, that will completely send me through the roof, have your cellphone in your lap, under the desk, texting,” Reiner says.

David Toscana:

EARLIER this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school diploma.
Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life.
Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.

Marina Corbis:

This probably sounds familiar: You are with a group of friends arguing about some piece of trivia or historical fact. Someone says, “Wait, let me look this up on Wikipedia,” and proceeds to read the information out loud to the whole group, thus resolving the argument. Don’t dismiss this as a trivial occasion. It represents a learning moment, or more precisely, a microlearning moment, and it foreshadows a much larger transformation–to what I call socialstructed learning.
Socialstructed learning is an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards. The microlearning moment may last a few minutes, hours, or days (if you are absorbed in reading something, tinkering with something, or listening to something from which you just can’t walk away). Socialstructed learning may be the future, but the foundations of this kind of education lie far in the past. Leading philosophers of education–from Socrates to Plutarch, Rousseau to Dewey–talked about many of these ideals centuries ago. Today, we have a host of tools to make their vision reality.
Socialstructed learning is an aggregation of microlearning experiences driven not by grades but by social rewards.

,

Cory Doctorow:

Update: Kendra from Harvard sez, The online course called CopyrightX is a version of the HLS Copyright course taught on edX by Prof. Fisher. It’s facilitated by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the efforts of a number of HLS students. The materials are free and accessible at Prof. Fisher’s website: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/CopyrightX_Homepage_2013.htm The site linked in the current post is a student created website – not an official part of the course.

Eugene Kane:

Sarah Carr, a former Milwaukee education reporter who moved to New Orleans in 2009 to cover schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sees some similarities in both troubled public education systems.
“I think they both have their strengths and their weaknesses,” Carr said in a recent interview.
“I think both places have great and awful schools.”
In her new book , titled “Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children,” Carr writes about the New Orleans school system by focusing on the personal lives of various figures struggling to educate students in a city still suffering from the aftermath of Katrina.
Her book reports the progress of three different New Orleans schools in a city where charter reform movement has brought about drastic change for poor minority students , administrators and teachers. Carr took a personal approach to interviewing her subjects in order to tell the greater story of the challenges involved in a community where social conditions have a large impact on the education of students.

CBS New York:

It’s an education bombshell.
Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system.
The number of kids behind the 8-ball is the highest in years, CBS 2′s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday.
When they graduated from city high schools, students in a special remedial program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College couldn’t make the grade.
They had to re-learn basic skills — reading, writing and math — first before they could begin college courses.

Related: The Madison School Board & the District’s disastrous reading scores.

Peter Ludlow:

The suicide of the Internet wunderkind Aaron Swartz has given rise to a great deal of discussion, much of it centered on whether the penalty sought against him by the prosecutor was proportional to his “crime.”
The consensus so far has been that Swartz did something wrong by accessing and releasing millions of academic papers from the JSTOR archive. But perhaps it is time to ask whether Swartz did in fact act wrongly. We might entertain the possibility that Swartz’s act of civil disobedience was an attempt to help rectify a harm that began long ago. Perhaps he was not only justified in his actions but morally impelled to act as he did. Moreover, we too might be morally impelled to take action.
To put it bluntly, the current state of academic publishing is the result of a series of strong-arm tactics enabling publishers to pry copyrights from authors, and then charge exorbitant fees to university libraries for access to that work. The publishers have inverted their role as disseminators of knowledge and become bottlers of knowledge, releasing it exclusively to the highest bidders. Swartz simply decided it was time to take action.

The Economist:

WITH Republican control of state government now firmly consolidated, Mississippi is poised for wholesale education reform. In his state-of-the-state address in January, Governor Phil Bryant proposed a robust, if rather familiar, basket of reforms: expansion of the state’s current (and highly restrictive) charter-school laws, merit pay for teachers, and higher standards for teacher training. More controversially, Mr Bryant proposed allowing students to enroll in schools outside of the district in which they live (so-called open enrollment), as well as privately-funded scholarships for students to attend private schools. With the exception of these last, the proposals have been enthusiastically embraced by the state legislature.
The question is whether they will work. Some charter schools have proven successful and the much-touted KIPP programme has produced marked improvement in test scores for low-income children. The worst fears of sceptics (that charter schools would siphon better teachers and better prepared students away from traditional public schools; that the result would intensify economic and ethnic segregation) have not been realised. But taken as a whole, school choice has failed to produce across-the-board improvements in student learning.

Eugene Volokh:

That’s H.F. No. 826, which requires schools — including private schools that get any “public funds or other public resources” — to ban, among other things, “bullying” at school, defined as

use of one or a series of words, images, or actions, transmitted directly or indirectly between individuals or through technology, that a reasonable person knows or should know, under the circumstances, will have the effect of interfering with the ability of an individual, including a student who observes the conduct, to participate in a safe and supportive learning environment. Examples of bullying may include, but are not limited to, conduct that:

Isthmus:

Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.
The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker’s revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers’ evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district’s achievement gap between white and minority students.
In the race for Seat 4, incumbent James Howard is running against Greg Packnett, a Democratic legislative aide.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we’d pose our own questions to candidates. We start by asking the candidates about their experience, and how they would address the achievement gap in the district.

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.

The Times Higher Education:

The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings employ the world’s largest invitation-only academic opinion survey to provide the definitive list of the top 100 most powerful global university brands. A spin-off of the annual World University Rankings, the reputation league table is based on nothing more than subjective judgement – but it is the considered expert judgement of senior, published academics – the people best placed to know the most about excellence in our universities.

Mark Trumbull:

An impasse over the shape of the federal budget keeps boiling down to this basic plotline: Democrats say the solution to high deficits must include more tax revenue, while Republicans say the fundamental problem is spending.
Failure to reach a middle ground has prompted automatic spending cuts known as the “sequester” to go into effect. This wasn’t Plan A, or even Plan B, for either side.
As the politicians look for a way forward, conservative lawmakers say that new budget projections make their case for them. Federal tax revenue is forecast to hit a record $2.7 trillion this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Michelle Kerr:

“Ms K, I need to do my work with Ms. V. My education plan is my civil right!” Deon’s entire body was contorted in a geometric impossibility, the better to shout at me from the back of the room.
“Hey, Ms. K! Come here! What if both numbers are negative?” Sticks was waving me over.
“If the rise and run are both negative, the slope’s positive. Just like multiplying!” Jack argued, as Cal watched dispassionately.
Welcome to the first month of my math support class, for juniors and seniors who haven’t yet passed California’s High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE). Snapshots from a typical day:

Learninghouse.com:

Almost 3 million students are enrolled in a fully online program, and that number is only expected to grow. Learn who these students are and what they are looking for in a landmark new study. The Learning House, Inc. and Aslanian Market Research surveyed 1,500 former, current and future online students to discover who earns online degrees and why.
In the “Online College Students 2012: Comprehensive Data on Demands and Preferences” report, learn:
How students select online schools
Which fields of study interest online students
Which program features online students seek
What prompts students to choose online study
And more!

Peter Dreier:

For years, Los Angeles has been ground zero in an intense debate about how to improve our nation’s education system. What’s less known is who is shaping that debate. Many of the biggest contributors to the so-called “school choice” movement — code words for privatizing our public education system — are billionaires who don’t live in Southern California, but have gained significant influence in local school politics. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent contribution of $1 million to a political action committee created to influence next week’s LAUSD school board elections is only the most recent example of the billionaire blitzkrieg.
For more than a decade, however, one of the biggest of the billionaire interlopers has been the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who have poured millions into a privatization-oriented, ideological campaign to make LA a laboratory for their ideas about treating schools like for-profit businesses, and treating parents, students and teachers like cogs in what they must think are education big-box retail stores.

Cliff Mass:

There has been a lot of controversy about whether student assessments should be used to evaluate K-12 teachers. The media is full of debate about this topic (e.g., Wall Street Journal) and the Seattle Times has had many editorials pushing for the use of assessments such as MAP to evaluate teachers. And several foundations, supported by rich contributors, like the League of Education Voters and the Gates Foundation, are pushing teacher evaluation through student assessments.
I would like to argue that using student assessments to evaluate teachers not only has issues, but is putting the cart before the horse. First, we need to test teachers in a robust way to evaluate their knowledge of the subjects they are teaching and only allow teachers with strong subject knowledge to teach.

Jeff Glaze:

Incoming Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham will begin her new role in just a matter of weeks.
April 1 is the start date specified in Cheatham’s contract, which the School Board unanimously approved Wednesday evening.
The date is significantly earlier than the July 1 start date of her predecessor, Dan Nerad. School Board President James Howard said the goal was to begin the transition to the new superintendent right away.
“We didn’t have a superintendent, and we wanted to get a superintendent on board as soon as possible,” he said.
Cheatham will make $235,000 annually — the same amount the School Board offered her last month. That amount is higher than Nerad’s $201,000 salary but less than the roughly $250,000 salary that was advertised for the position.

Drew Faust and L. Rafael Reif:

IN 1837, the Massachusetts Board of Education devoted part of its first annual report to praising a recent classroom innovation called the blackboard. This “invaluable and indispensible” innovation enabled the “rapid and vivid communication of knowledge.” It created opportunities for teachers to engage learners in ways that had been unimaginable just a generation earlier.
The same and more will be said of online learning tools. We are at the beginning of a technology-led revolution in pedagogy: Our innovation is not the blackboard, but instead an evolving suite of tools that allows interactive learning online. While one outcome of this revolution has rightly caught the world’s attention — the power to democratize access to education on a scale never seen in history — we are just as excited about the promise that these new tools hold for colleges and universities throughout the world.

The Wisconsin State Journal:

Freezing public school spending in Wisconsin would be a mistake, given previous cuts and rising costs.
That’s the most glaring problem with Gov. Scott Walker’s two-year, $68 billion state budget proposal.
The Republican governor also stalls his considerable progress toward an honest and truly balanced budget. Having slain a giant budget gap two years ago, Walker shouldn’t be backtracking even a bit.
The Legislature has some fixing to do.
Yet some of Walker’s priorities are strong, including:

Paul Fain:

If higher education has a group of quintessential insiders, it’s probably the American Council on Education. Yet from a perch atop the higher education lobby’s headquarters here, the membership association of 1,800 college presidents is backing high-profile “disruptions” to the industry it represents.
The council says it wants more students to earn college credit for learning that occurs outside the college classroom. Some of these credit pathways are trendy and new; others have been around for decades. But interest in prior learning assessment has grown rapidly, particularly during the last six months, and ACE is riding the wave.
ACE’s leaders say they are giving a boost to alternative credit pathways because of the college “completion agenda,” work force development and money worries that are buffeting colleges.
“We are experiencing a confluence of forces of change,” Molly Broad, the council’s president, recently told the University of Wisconsin System’s Board of Regents. “All of this coming together is persuasive that business as usual is not in the future cards and we must innovate.”

Jason Stein & Patrick Marley:

Gov. Scott Walker’s ambitious plan to expand taxpayer-funded private schools faltered in the Legislature on Wednesday, with several influential GOP lawmakers making clear the proposal would need major changes to pass.
The lawmakers from the governor’s own party largely acknowledged that some expansion of voucher schools will pass the Legislature in the coming months. But the legislators – who included the top two Senate leaders and chairmen of the Legislature’s education committees – said the expansion would be different from the proposal Walker laid out in his budget bill last month.
Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) said a majority of GOP senators do not support Walker’s proposal as currently written. Fitzgerald said that he called a meeting held Tuesday with Walker’s aides, Assembly Republican leaders and representatives of voucher schools to see if a compromise proposal might be worked out.
“Some people in our caucus looked at what the governor proposed and said, ‘Hmm, let’s maybe think about that,’ and I must say the governor was open to that. He’s not dug in on anything,” Fitzgerald said of changes to the governor’s budget.
Walker is seeking to increase funding for voucher schools, expand them to nine new school districts in the state and allow special-needs students from around the state to attend private schools at taxpayer expense. At the same time, he wants to provide $129 million in new state aid to public schools over two years but keep schools’ spending in state aid and property taxes flat, ensuring that the state money will be used to lower local property taxes.

Paul Fain:

The credit hour is still higher education’s gold standard, even after President Obama’s vague endorsement last month of competency-based education and its focus on “performance and results” rather than seat time.
It’s unclear whether Obama’s call could help open the door for competency-based approaches by spurring changes to the current system of accreditation or the rules governing federal financial aid. Even so, colleges aren’t waiting on the feds.
Several institutions have continued to expand competency-based offerings aimed at working adults. And while all but one are still grounded in the credit hour, these online degree programs are typically self-paced and emphasize the testing of competency, sometimes even of learning that occurs outside of the traditional classroom.
A notable example is the continued growth of Western Governors University, which is launching two new state-based versions of its online, low-priced model — in Missouri and Tennessee. Governors of the two states announced the new universities last month, and both said they hope to cover some of the start-up costs with money from state coffers. The two new WGUs will join similar branches in Indiana, Texas and Washington.

The Economist:

HAPPY National Grammar Day, everyone. Today’s offering is only marginally on grammar. We’ve asked “What is grammar anyway?” here at Johnson. The layperson would almost certainly answer “those difficult rules that are drilled into you in school about how to use the language.” The linguist would reply with nearly the opposite: grammar is made up of the rules of language that a competent native speaker uses almost without effort, by the definition of “competent native speaker”. You use grammar every time you construct a sentence, not just those times when you’re scratching your head about whether to use “who” or “whom”.
Here’s a good example of how laypeople and linguists differ on grammar: OnlineSchools.com has created this handy infographic on the much-discussed punctuation mark known as the Oxford comma.

Holly Green:

Education budgets at the national, state, and local levels have all taken huge hits over the past few years. And while we all want our schools to have sufficient funding to educate our children, more money is not the magic bullet solution for what our educational system needs.
The truth is, our educational system is badly broken, and not just because the systems, structures, and philosophies that guide it are woefully out of date. Our educational system is grossly ineffective because the way we teach our children doesn’t align with what we know about how the brain learns.
In fact, the current system is the worst learning environment we could put our children into. And that’s not just my opinion. It also belongs to John Medina, noted molecular biologist and author of Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email

March 6, 2013
Dear Madison Leaders.
As the 2013 Madison school board race continues, we (the Urban League) are deeply concerned about the negative politics, dishonesty and inaccurate discussions that have shaped the campaign. While I will not, as a nonprofit leader, speak about the merits of individual candidates, we are concerned about how Madison Prep has become a red herring during the debates. The question of all the candidates has been largely narrowed to, “Did you support Madison Prep or did you not?”…as if something was horribly wrong with our charter school proposal, and as though that is the most important issue facing our school children and schools.
While the Urban League has no interest in partaking in the squabbles and confusion that has unfortunately come to define public conversation about our public schools, we do want to set the record straight about deliberations on Madison Prep that have been falsely expressed by many during this campaign, and used to dog individuals who supported the school proposal more than one year ago.
Here is how things transpired.
On May 9, 2011, Steve Goldberg of the CUNA Mutual Foundation facilitated a meeting about Madison Prep, at my request, between Madison Teacher’s Incorporated President, John Matthews and me. The meeting was held in CUNA’s cafeteria. We had lunch and met for about an hour. It was a cordial meeting and we each discussed the Madison Prep proposal and what it would take for the Urban League and MTI to work together. We didn’t get into many details, however I was sure to inform John that our proposal of a non-instrumentality charter school (non-MTI) was not because we didn’t support the union but because the collective bargaining agreement was too restrictive for the school model and design we were proposing to be fully implemented, and because we desired to recruit teachers outside the restrictions of the collective bargaining agreement. We wanted to have flexibility to aggressively recruit on an earlier timeline and have the final say on who worked in our school.
The three of us met again at the Coliseum Bar on August 23, 2011, this time involving other members of our teams. We got into the specifics of negotiations regarding the Urban League’s focus on establishing a non-instrumentality school and John’s desire to have Madison Prep’s employees be a part of MTI’s collective bargaining unit. At the close of that meeting, we (Urban League) offered to have Madison Prep’s teachers and guidance counselors be members of the collective bargaining unit. John said he felt we were making progress but he needed to think about not having MTI represent all of the staff that are a part of their bargaining unit. John and I also agreed that I would email him a memo outlining our desire to work with MTI, and provide the details of what we discussed. John agreed to respond after reviewing the proposal with his team. That memo, which we have not released previously, is attached [336K PDF]. You will see clearly that the Urban League initiated dialogue with MTI about having the teacher’s union represent our educators.
John, Steve and I met for a third time at Perkins restaurant for breakfast on the West Beltline on September 30, 2013. This time, I brought representatives of the Madison Prep and Urban League Boards with me: Dr. Gloria Ladson Billings, John Roach and Derrick Smith. It was at the close of this meeting that John Matthews told all of us that we “had a deal”, that MTI and the Urban League would now work together on Madison Prep. We all shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. Our team was relieved.
Later that evening, I received calls from Matt DeFour, a reporter with the Wisconsin State Journal and Susan Troller of The Capital Times. They both asked me to confirm what John had told them; that we had a deal. I replied by confirming the deal. The next day, The Capital Times ran a story, Madison Prep and MTI will work together on new charter school. The State Journal ran an article too, Prep School agrees to employ union staff. All was good, or so we thought.
Unfortunately, our agreement was short-lived. The very next day after the story hit the newspapers, my team and I began receiving angry letters from social workers and psychologists in MMSD who were upset that we did not want to have those positions represented by MTI. We replied by explaining to them that our reasoning was purely driven by the fact that 99% of the Districts psychologists were white and that there were few social workers of color, too. For obvious reasons, we did not believe MMSD would have success hiring diverse staff for these positions. We desired a diverse staff for two reasons: we anticipated the majority of our students to be students of color and our social work and psychological service model was different. Madison Prep had a family-serving model where the school would pay for such services for every person in a family, if necessary, who needed it, and would make available to families and students a diverse pool of contracted psychologists that families and students could choose from.
That Monday evening, October 3, 2011, John Matthews approached me with Steve Goldberg at the School Board hearing on Madison Prep and informed me that his bargaining unit was very upset and that he needed to have our Physical education teacher be represented by MTI, too. Our Phy Ed model was different; we had been working on a plan with the YMCA to implement a very innovative approach to ensuring our students were deeply engaged in health and wellness activities at school and beyond the school day. In our plan, we considered the extraordinarily high rates of obesity among young men and women of color. However, to make the deal with MTI work, that evening I gave MTI the Phy Ed teaching position.
But that one request ultimately became a request by MTI for every position in our school, and a request by John Matthews to re-open negotiations, this time with a mediator. At first, we rejected this request because we felt “a deal is a deal”. When you shake hands, you follow through.
We only gave in after current school board president, James Howard, called me at home to request that the Urban League come back to the negotiating table. James acknowledged not feeling great about asking us to do this after all we had been through – jumping through hoop after hoop. If you followed the media closely, you would recall how many times we worked to overcome hurdles that were placed in our way – $200K worth of hurdles (that’s how much we spent). After meeting with MMSD leadership and staff, we agreed to come back to the table to address issues with MTI and AFSCME, who wanted our custodial and food service workers to be represented by the union as well. When we met, the unions came to the negotiation with attorneys and so did we. If you care to find out what was said during these negotiations, you can request a transcript from Beth Lehman, the liaison to the MMSD Board of Education who was taking official notes (October 31 and November 1, 2011).
On our first day of negotiations, after all sides shared their requests and concerns, we (ULGM) decided to let AFSCME represent our custodial and food service staff. AFSCME was immediately satisfied, and left the room. That’s when the hardball towards us started. We then countered with a plausible proposal that MTI did not like. When we couldn’t get anywhere, we agreed to go into recess. Shortly after we came back from recess, former MMSD Superintendent Dan Nerad dropped the bomb on us. He shared that if we now agreed to have our staff be represented by MTI, we would have to budget paying our teachers an average of $80,000 per year per teacher and dedicating $25,000 per teacher to benefits. This would effectively increase our proposal from $15M over five years to $28M over five years.
Why the increased costs? For months, we projected in our budgets that our staff would likely average 7 years of teaching experience with a Master’s degree. We used the MTI-MMSD salary schedule to set the wages in our budget, and followed MMSD and MTI’s suggestions for how to budget for the extended school day and year parts of our charter school plan. Until that day, MMSD hadn’t once told us that the way we were budgeting was a problem. They actually submitted several versions of budgets to the School Board, and not once raising this issue.
Superintendent Nerad further informed us that MMSD was going to now submit a budget to the Board of Education that reflected costs for teachers with an average of 14 years’ experience and a master’s degree. When we shockingly asked Nerad if he thought the Board of Education would support such a proposal, he said they likely would not. We did not think the public would support such a unusual request either. As you can imagine, we left the negotiations very frustrated. In the 23rd hour, not only was the run we thought we had batted in taken away from us in the 9th inning, we felt like our entire season had been vacated by commissioners.
When we returned to our office that afternoon, we called an emergency meeting of the Urban League and Madison Prep boards. It was in those meetings that we had to make a choice. Do we completely abandon our proposal for Madison Prep after all we had done to see the project through, and after all of the community support and interests from parents that we had received, or do we go forward with our original proposal of a non-instrumentality charter school and let the chips fall where they may with a vote by the Board? At that point, our trust of MMSD and MTI was not very high. In fact, weeks before all of this happened, we were told by Nerad in a meeting with our team and attorneys, and his staff and attorneys, that the Board of Education had voted in closed session to unilaterally withdraw our charter school planning grant from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. They reversed this decision after we informed them we would file a lawsuit against them. We were later told that a certain Board member was pushing for months to have this done. Then, after months of not being able to get certain board members to meet with us, Marj Passman, decided to meet with me alone in my office. During that meeting, she told me that we (ULGM) didn’t have the votes for Madison Prep and that we were never going to get the school approved. She the offered to donate her personal funds to Madison Prep, if we pulled our proposal and decided to do a private school instead. I told her that I appreciated her offer, but declined.
After finally meeting with all seven board of education members, both the Madison Prep and ULGM boards decided unanimously that we must in good conscience go forward, put the needs and future of our children first, and reintroduce the non-instrumentality proposal to the School Board. You know the rest of the story.
Over the next 45 days, we (ULGM) were categorically painted as an anti-union conservative outfit who proposed a flawed school model that divided Madison and threatened to join the Scott Walker effort to eliminate unions. We were made to be the great dividers (not the achievement gap itself) and me, “an Angry Black Man”. Lost in the debate were the reasons we proposed the school in the first place – because so many children of color were failing in our schools and there was no effective strategy in place to address it even though the school system has known about its racial achievement gap since it was first document by researcher Naomi Lede for the National Urban League in 1965. That gap has doubled since then.
Ironically, two of the people behind the attacks on ULGM were Ben Manski and TJ Mertz. They were uniquely aligned in their opposition to Madison Prep. John Matthews even weighed in on video with his comments against us, but at least he told a story that was 80% consistent with the events that actually transpired. Watch the video and listen to the reason he gave for why he didn’t support Madison Prep. He didn’t call us union haters or teacher bashers. He knew better. So why all the fuss now? Why have those who knew exactly what went on in these negotiations not told the true story about what really happened with Madison Prep? Why has a charter school proposal been made the scapegoat, or defining lever, in a school board race where there are so many other more important issues to address?
If all it takes to win a seat on the school board now is opposition to charter schools, rather than being someone who possesses unique experiences and qualifications to serve our now majority non-white and low-income student body and increasingly challenged schools, we should all worry about the future of our children and public schools.
So, for those who were unaware and those who’ve been misleading the public about Madison Prep and the Urban League, I hope you at least read this account all the way through and give all of the candidates in this school board election the opportunity to win or lose on their merits. Falsehoods and red herrings are not needed. They don’t make our city or our school district look good to the observing eye. Let’s be honest and accurate in our descriptions going forward.
Thank you for reading.
We continue to move forward for our children and are more determined than ever to serve them well.
Onward.
Strengthening the Bridge Between Education and Work
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Main: 608.729.1200
Assistant: 608.729.1249
Fax: 608.729.1205
www.ulgm.org
www.madison-prep.org
Invest in the Urban League
Urban League 2012 Third Quarter Progress Report

The Memorandum from Kaleem Caire to John Matthews (Madison Teachers, Inc)

MEMORANDUM
Date: August 23, 2011
To: Mr. John Matthews, Executive Director, Madison Teachers, Inc.
From: Kaleem Caire, President & CEO, Urban League of Greater Madison
cc: Mr. Steve Goldberg, President, CUNA Foundation; Mr. David Cagigal, Vice Chair, Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM); Ms Laura DeRoche-Perez, Charter School Development Consultant, ULGM; Mr. David Hase, Attorney, Cooke & Frank SC
Re: Discussion about potential MTl-Madison Prep Relationship
Greetings John.
I sincerely appreciate your openness to engaging in conversation about a possible relationship between MTI and Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men. We, ULGM and Madison Prep, look forward to determining very soon what the possibilities could be.
Please accept his memo as a means to frame the issues.

1. The Urban League of Greater Madison initially pursued a non-instrumentality public charter school
   focused on young men to, first and foremost, eliminate the academic and graduate gaps between young people of color and their white peers, to successfully prepare greater percentages of young men of color and those at-risk for higher education, to significantly reduce the incarceration rate among young adult males of color and to provide an example of success that could become a learning laboratory for
   educators, parents and the Greater Madison community with regard to successful ly educating young men, regardless of th eir race or socio-economic status.

2. We are very interested in determining how we can work with MTI while maintaining independence with regard to work rules, operations, management and leadership so that we can hire and retain the best team possible for Madison Prep, and make organizational and program decisions and modifications as necessary to meet the needs of our students, faculty, staff and parents.
3. MTl’s collective bargaining agreement with the Madison Metropolitan School District covers many positions within the school system. We are interested in having MTI represent our teachers and guidance counselors. All other staff would not be represented by MTI.
4. The collective bargaining agreement between MTI and Madison Prep would be limited to employee wages and benefits. Madison Prep teachers would select a representative among them, independent of Madison Prep’s leadership, to serve as their union representative to MTI.

I look forward to discussing this with you and members of our teams, and hearing what ideas you have for the
relationship as well.
Respectfully,
Kaleem Caire,
President & CEO
CONFIDENTIAL

336K PDF Version
jpg version
Related Links:

Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School (Rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board).
Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman on “the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment.“.
John Matthews, Madison Teachers, Inc.
Kaleem Caire, Madison Urban League
The rejected Studio Charter School.
Union politics.
2013 Madison School Board Elections.
Update: Matthew DeFour’s article on Caire’s message:

Lucy Mathiak, who was on the board in 2011, also didn’t dispute Caire’s account of the board action, but couldn’t recall exactly what happened in the board’s closed sessions.
“Did (the Urban League) jump through many hoops, provide multiple copies of revised proposals upon request, meet ongoing demands for new and more detailed information? Yes,” Mathiak said. “It speaks volumes that Madison Prep is being used to smear and discredit candidates for the School Board and used as a litmus test of political worthiness.”
Matthews said the problems with Madison Prep resulted from Caire’s proposal to hire nonunion staff.
“What Kaleem seems to have forgotten, conveniently or otherwise, is that MTI representatives engaged in several discussions with him and several of his Board members, in attempt to reach an amicable resolution,” Matthews said. “What that now has to do with the current campaign for Board of Education, I fail to see. I know of no animosity among the candidates or their campaign workers.”
Passman and other board members who served at the time did not return a call seeking comment.

NBC 15:

If you’ve got a kid in third through eighth grade–or tenth–they took the WKCE exam this fall. “The Wisconsin content and knowledge exam and it’s been the statewide test for Wisconsin for quite a few years now,” said Dr. Jane Belmore, the superintendent of Madison schools.
Your student could score at one of these assessment levels: minimal, basic, proficient or advanced.”This year our WKCE test has been alligned with a nationally-normed test,” said Dr. Belmore.
Your student’s scores should be showing up soon and it’s possible he or she won’t be scoing as highly as in the past. “The results of this reallignment is that we’re holding ourselves and our students to a higher bar,” she said. “So students may be performing at the same level or even better than they were and yet still not get the kind of report that parents might be expecting.”
Dr. Belmore said it doesn’t necessarily mean your child is doing less well, everyone’s just being held to a higher standard. “If our students are being proficient and we’re expecting to see proficient we might see basic,” she said.

Much more on the oft-criticized WKCE, here.

“Vouchers, private charter schools, special education vouchers will fragment our community and weaken MMSD,” says GRUMPS. Thank You!

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) March 6, 2013

Much more on GRUMPS, here.

Mark Suster:

Who else does Clayton pray for? Apple. Yup! Watch the 30-minute interview to hear why but summary notes below.
Let me start by saying that Clayton is one of the most influential people on my thoughts about markets that led to both the concept behind my first startup and my main theses in investing. I have written about Deflationary Economics (one of my most read posts ever) & The Innovator’s Dilemma before. In a discussion I had with Fred Wilson at the Invesco LP meeting Fred said the same about the influence of Clayton.
So it was a real pleasure to be asked by Derek Anderson of Startup Grind to be able to interview Clayton for an audience of thousands (many in person, others by live broadcast). Startup Grind was a truly awesome conference and Derek the consumate host. I hope to be asked back for next year’s event.
Clayton Christensen certainly didn’t disappoint. It was one of funnest discussions I’ve held with a senior leader and he was surprisingly open and frank. If you have some time I highly recommend watching it.

Jason Stein & Patrick Marley:

Hunkered down in Illinois to block labor legislation back in Wisconsin, 14 Democratic senators gathered in Libertyville two years ago for a secret meeting at a teachers union office.
Arriving at the Illinois Education Association branch on Feb. 26, 2011, some Democrats in the group were surprised to find that they would be strategizing not just among themselves but also with three labor officials. That trio included the incoming head of a national teachers association, the biggest union in the country, who had worked with the Wisconsin lawmakers in the past and had just registered to lobby them again.
One senator skipped the meeting out of concerns over appearance and propriety. The other lawmakers got a pitch from the union leaders on why they should stay in Illinois to prevent a vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to repeal most collective bargaining for most public employees.
“The undercurrent message was, ‘You’re winning; stay out,’ ” recalled former Democratic Sen. Jim Holperin of Conover, one of those attending the meeting.
Behind the scenes, there was more to the Republican governor’s fight with public employee unions than just Walker’s speeches and the massive protests of union supporters. An in-depth review reveals a rich backstory, including the undisclosed visit to Wisconsin by President Barack Obama’s campaign manager just before the effort to recall Walker; the role played by a conservative Milwaukee foundation in pushing labor legislation in Wisconsin and elsewhere; and the tension between Walker’s office and law enforcement over handling the demonstrations that greeted the governor’s proposal.
Walker emerged from the legislative fight and the subsequent recall election with a majority of support among Wisconsin voters, deep opposition from Democrats, and a hero’s status among conservatives nationally. Public worker unions lost fundamental powers and in some cases their official status altogether.

Associated Press:

US universities have responded to China’s exploding demand for American higher education with branch campuses and aggressive recruiting. Now, some are trying to boost their brands by casting photos and other snippets of campus life out into the confounding sea of Chinese social media.
How confounding? Consider the mystery of the Chinese Yale zombies.
That’s “zombies” as in “zombie followers” on Sina Weibo — the hugely popular “weibo,” or microblogging, site that’s roughly akin to Twitter and has attracted more than 500 million followers since debuting in 2009. A common feature on Chinese social media, these zombie accounts could represent actual users who lurk inactively online. But often they’re fake, mass-produced accounts that mindlessly follow (hence the name “zombie”) and artificially boost another account’s follower numbers — and thus prestige.
Since its debut in December, Yale’s new Sina Weibo account — sharing photos and other assorted items from its Ivy-covered Connecticut campus — has exploded in popularity, apparently far faster than any other US institution’s.

Natalie Wolchover:

Shalosh B. Ekhad, the co-author of several papers in respected mathematics journals, has been known to prove with a single, succinct utterance theorems and identities that previously required pages of mathematical reasoning. Last year, when asked to evaluate a formula for the number of integer triangles with a given perimeter, Ekhad performed 37 calculations in less than a second and delivered the verdict: “True.”
Shalosh B. Ekhad is a computer. Or, rather, it is any of a rotating cast of computers used by the mathematician Doron Zeilberger, from the Dell in his New Jersey office to a supercomputer whose services he occasionally enlists in Austria. The name — Hebrew for “three B one” — refers to the AT&T 3B1, Ekhad’s earliest incarnation.
“The soul is the software,” said Zeilberger, who writes his own code using a popular math programming tool called Maple.
A mustachioed, 62-year-old professor at Rutgers University, Zeilberger anchors one end of a spectrum of opinions about the role of computers in mathematics. He has been listing Ekhad as a co-author on papers since the late 1980s “to make a statement that computers should get credit where credit is due.” For decades, he has railed against “human-centric bigotry” by mathematicians: a preference for pencil-and-paper proofs that Zeilberger claims has stymied progress in the field. “For good reason,” he said. “People feel they will be out of business.”

James Hendler:

In 2011, IBM achieved a quantum leap in artificial intelligence technology when its Watson computer program trounced human champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-day Jeopardy! tourney, taking home the million-dollar prize by outscoring the second place competitor by a three-to-one margin.
Since then, Watson has shown its computing prowess in the world of medicine and in other business settings. However, as was recently announced, IBM decided Watson could use a college education and so will join here us at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. With its help, we hope to further advance artificial intelligence in a number of key areas.
The Watson program is already a breakthrough technology in AI. For many years it had been largely assumed that for a computer to go beyond search and really be able to perform complex human language tasks it needed to do one of two things: either it would “understand” the texts using some kind of deep “knowledge representation,” or it would have a complex statistical model based on millions of texts.
Watson used very little of either of these. Rather, it uses a lot of memory and clever ways of pulling texts from that memory. Thus, Watson demonstrated what some in AI had conjectured, but to date been unable to prove: that intelligence is tied to an ability to appropriately find relevant information in a very large memory. (Watson also used a lot of specialized techniques designed for the peculiarities of the Jeopardy! game, such as producing questions from answers, but from a purely academic viewpoint that’s less important.)

Los Angeles Times:

As results in the Los Angeles school board election continued to be tabulated early Wednesday, two-term incumbent Monica Garcia held a strong lead in District 2, one-term incumbent Steve Zimmer maintained his slim lead in District 4 and Antonio Sanchez captured the most votes in the race for District 6 — but he could be headed for a runoff.
The school board race attracted national money and attention, becoming a battle over the reform policies of Supt. John Deasy.