Charles Blow:

It’s no secret that America’s educational systems could use some help. New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow charges that the country is in dire straits. Lining up statistics from a recent report, Blow details how students in the United States have little chance of besting their competitors — specifically, students in China.
This week, the Center for American Progress and the Center for the Next Generation released a report entitled “The Race That Really Matters: Comparing U.S., Chinese and Indian Investments in the Next Generation Workforce.” The findings were breathtaking:
Half of U.S. children get no early childhood education, and we have no national strategy to increase enrollment.

Marcella Kreiter has more.

The Center for Education Reform:

Only 25% of 2012 ACT test takers met college readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested. The ACT is a college-entrance exam that tests high schoolers in English, Reading, Math, and Science. The ACT defines college and career readiness as “the acquisition of the knowledge and skills a student needs
to enroll and succeed in credit-bearing first-year courses at a postsecondary institution (such as a 2- or 4-year college, trade school, or technical school) without the need for remediation.”
Breaking down college readiness by subject yields better numbers. For instance, 67% of students tested met English college readiness benchmarks. However, that means 33% of students taking the ACT have not been sufficiently prepared by their schools for learning at the next level. And that’s just students taking the ACT.

Diane Taylor:

A black teenager who says he has been stopped about 50 times by the Metropolitan police is planning to sue the force, claiming he has suffered almost four years of harassment and false charges, which he believes have been motivated by racism.
Between the ages of 14 and 17, the college student says he has faced a series of charges of which he has either been found not guilty or which have been dropped before getting to court, as well as numerous stops and searches and two strip searches, none of which identified any criminal activity. He says he has also been detained several times in police cells after which he was released without charge.
Last week the teenager appeared at Bromley youth court, south London, charged with assaulting a police officer. The case collapsed after CCTV footage contradicted the evidence in court of PC John Lovegrove, who claimed to have been assaulted by the youth during a stop and search.

Las Vegas Review-Journal:

If the loss of more than 1,000 teaching positions in this county’s underperforming school district wasn’t enough to alert the public to the state’s political and policy dysfunction, would the loss of 1,000 more do the trick?
That’s the scenario that could play out next summer if parents and taxpayers fail to demand massive changes to a collective bargaining process that discourages good-faith negotiations, rewards union obstinance, ignores the community’s interests and insulates elected officials from accountability.
The Clark County School District starts a new year Monday with about 1,000 fewer teachers in the classroom. That’s because last spring an out-of-state arbitrator awarded teachers pay raises the taxpayers couldn’t afford rather than accept the district’s offer of a pay freeze.

Jeanna Smialek, via a kind Zach Galin email:

U.S. colleges including New York University and Northeastern University are pushing freshmen into study-abroad programs — before the students even set foot on campus — to enroll larger classes and get more tuition dollars.
NYU and Boston-based Northeastern, which both charge more than $50,000 a year to attend, make some freshmen spend the first semester or two abroad. They then use the students and their tuitions to fill the beds of midyear dropouts and upper classmen heading overseas. While some students find the opportunity rewarding, others are disoriented at not starting off with their class or having a choice.

The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Teen drinking is a complicated issue. Just how complicated can be seen by taking a look at the Haddonfield schools.
The school board six years ago established a so-called “24-7 policy,” which was supposed to control even students’ off-campus behavior. Students charged with alcohol offenses were barred from extracurricular activities, including athletic teams, choir, and drama productions.
It seemed to be a good and reasonable measure to many Haddonfield residents, especially a year after the policy was implemented, when a reportedly intoxicated 17-year-old football player leaped to his death from the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.
Indeed, a central component of public education should be the protection of children. In that regard, children’s education should include showing them that bad personal decisions have consequences. Supporters of the 24-7 policy stressed that point. The policy, though, appears doomed.

The Economist:

IN THE summer of 2011 a 16-year-old girl called Dayana Vazquez-Buquer arrived at the reception desk of Roncalli High School, a nice private school in the south side of Indianapolis. Her parents were Mexican immigrants who could not afford the $8,030 tuition fees. Yet Miss Vazquez-Buquer felt Roncalli would be better for her than her current public school and said she had heard about a new school voucher scheme that would pay most of the fees. She was correct. Today she is a student at Roncalli and on track to attend university.
The voucher scheme, potentially the biggest in America, was set up a year ago as part of a big package of educational reforms led by Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels, and his superintendent of schools. These include teacher evaluations that take student performance into account, giving school heads more autonomy and encouraging the growth of charter schools. Jeanne Allen, president of the Centre for Education Reform, a Washington-based advocacy group, says the reforms are unique because Indiana has looked at education reform in its “totality”, rather than taking a piecemeal approach as many other states have done.

Roncalli’s tuition is currently $8,030 for the first student in a family. The Indianapolis Public Schools 2013 budget will spend $540,000,000 for 32,000 students, or $16,875/student. Madison will spend $15,128/student during the 2012-2013 school year.

Alan Borsuk:

The first question when ACT releases its annual wave of data on college entrance test results is: What’s our score?
The statewide answer in the results released last week was pretty good, which is to say, almost exactly the same as every year for more than a decade. Wisconsin (22.1 overall average score) did better than the nation as a whole (21.1). Some schools and districts were up, some down, most almost exactly the same.
But if you really want to know how we did, there are insights in the results that go deeper than one number. They deserve attention not only in schools but in every home where children are at the start of a new school year. Let’s look at four:
Early grades: In addition to college entrance tests, ACT offers tests such as EXPLORE, which assesses whether eighth-graders are on track to succeed. In fact, as part of the new “waiver” plan to improve student success, Wisconsin officials are going to push to have that test used more widely.
An eye-catching result, based on national data: ACT determines what percentage of eighth graders meets some or all of four benchmark goals. The percentages of kids who meet zero, one, two, three or all four goals in eighth grade are almost exactly the same as the percentages who meet comparable benchmarks in 12th grade.

Related: Madison’s ACT scores lowest since 1995, still above average.

Mark Hendrickson:

If you or anyone close to you is grappling with the decision of whether to commence or continue college or graduate studies, there are several important facts of life you should know about–facts that colleges themselves aren’t likely to mention. These are a few of the uncomfortable truths they won’t tell you:
1) “Far more people earn degrees in many liberal arts majors than can be employed in those fields.”
Consider the following statistics: More than half of Americans under the age of 25 who have a bachelor’s degree are either unemployed or underemployed. According to The Christian Science Monitor, nearly 1 percent of bartenders and 14 percent of parking lot attendants have a bachelor’s degree.
Adding additional degrees is no guarantee of employment either. According to a recent Urban Institute report, nearly 300,000 Americans with master’s degrees and over 30,000 with doctorates are on public relief.

Justine S. Hastings, Christopher A. Neilson, Seth D. Zimmerman:

Using data on student outcomes and school choice lotteries from a low-income urban school district, we examine how school choice can affect student outcomes through increased motivation and personal effort as well as through improved school and peer inputs. First we use unique daily data on individual-level student absences and suspensions to show that lottery winners have significantly lower truancies after they learn about lottery outcomes but before they enroll in their new schools. The effects are largest for male students entering high school, whose truancy rates decline by 21% in the months after winning the lottery. We then examine the impact attending a chosen school has on student test score outcomes. We find substantial test score gains from attending a charter school and some evidence that choosing and attending a high value-added magnet school improves test scores as well. Our results contribute to current evidence that school choice programs can effectively raise test scores of participants. Our findings suggest that this may occur both through an immediate effect on student behavior and through the benefit of attending a higher-performing school.

Alix:

Shadowbosses, released this week, tells a story of intrigue, drama, and corruption and reads like an organized crime novel. Amazingly, it is actually a true story of how public sector labor unions (including teacher unions) are spending member dues and controlling the political process.
Written by Mallory and Elizabeth Factor, this compelling and insightful book exposes how unions have organized federal, state, and local government employees without their consent, and how government employee unions force members into paying for partisan political causes and elections.
This is a great read for teachers interested in the history and path of modern-day teacher unions. Remember, forced unionism and forced dues are serious business for the unions. In 2010, teachers unions collected $2 billion in union dues. $1.3 billion of those dues came from states with compulsory unionism. This book sheds light on the lengths the unions take to bring members into the fold and illustrates their true priorities.

Aaron Swartz:

Carol Dweck was obsessed with failure. You know how some people just seem to succeed at everything they do, while others seem helpless, doomed to a life of constant failure? Dweck noticed that too — and she was determined to figure out why. So she began watching kids, trying to see if she could spot the difference between the two groups.
In a 1978 study with Carol Diener, she gave kids various puzzles and recorded what they said as they tried to solve them. Very quickly, the helpless kids started blaming themselves: “I’m getting confused,” one said; “I never did have a good rememory,” another explained.
But the puzzles kept coming — and they kept getting harder. “This isn’t fun anymore,” the kids cried. But still, there were more puzzles.
The kids couldn’t take it anymore. “I give up,” they insisted. They started talking about other things, trying to take their mind off the onslaught of tricky puzzles. “There is a talent show this weekend, and I am going to be Shirley Temple,” one girl said. Dweck just gave them even harder puzzles.
Now the kids started getting silly, almost as if they could hide their failure by making it clear they weren’t trying in the first place. Despite repeatedly being told it was incorrect, one boy just kept choosing brown as his answer, saying “Chocolate cake, chocolate cake.”1

Kalid Azad:

I was elated and furious: “Why didn’t they explain it like that the first time?!”
Paranoid I’d forget, I put my notes online and they evolved into this site: insights that actually worked for me. Articles on e, imaginary numbers, and calculus became popular — I think we all crave deep understanding. Bad teaching was a burst of gamma rays: I’m normally mild mannered, but enter Hulk Mode when recalling how my passion nearly died.
My core beliefs:
A bad experience can undo years of good ones. Students need resources to sidestep bad teaching.
Hard-won insights, sometimes found after years of teaching, need to be shared
Learning “success” means having basic skills and the passion to learn more. A year, 5 years from now, do people seek out math? Or at least not hate it? (Compare #ihatemath to #ihategeography)

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

As Wisconsin school districts enter their second year in a post-Act 10 world, some are beginning to experiment with performance-based pay. It’s a good idea.
But it’s also an idea that will work only if it’s based on sound measures to determine who gets that extra pay.
A few districts, including Hartland-Lakeside in Waukesha County, are trying performance-based pay on a voluntary basis this year; it would be mandatory for all teachers by 2015 in that district, reports the Journal Sentinel’s Erin Richards.
We think districts are wise to wait for full implementation until a new statewide educator evaluation system is in place. The Educator Effectiveness System is being piloted in a few districts this year and is expected to be implemented during the 2014-2015 school year.
“We have to get the evaluation part right in the beginning, or this won’t work,” state Superintendent Tony Evers said during a meeting with the Editorial Board last week. He’s right.
It’s important to acknowledge a few facts of life:

Caryl Davis:

In an effort to improve teacher quality, legislators and education reformers now are turning to performance-based pay.
Their aim appears to be noble: improving student outcomes.
But I can tell you from experience, it won’t work. And, in fact, it may be harmful if the whole range of factors that affects achievement isn’t considered.
Performance-based pay is a formula derived from behaviorist business models. Like the laboratory mouse and wheel, performance-based pay distributes rewards for correctly modeled behavior.
But this isn’t a realistic model for education; educators aren’t like employees in the business world where incentives are based on profit growth.
Why create an environment that breeds competition among colleagues, that creates situations in which one teacher is rewarded because her class gets high marks while another has less success because of the variables of her students in that particular year?
Also, since student success on standardized tests may be a large part of a teacher’s evaluation, a flaw with performance-based pay is that decision-makers haven’t decided yet on what our children should be learning. Do they want students to learn how to pass tests or to gain tools that will sustain them through life and careers?
Merit pay also will produce educators who teach to the test, which hurts students and teachers alike. As noted in the 2000 article by John R. Deckop and Carol C. Cirka, “The Risk and Reward of a Double-edged Sword: Effects of a Merit Pay Program on Intrinsic Motivation,” teachers are largely driven by two factors: helping students achieve and collaborating with colleagues. Effective teachers are motivated by their collective efforts to ensure the day-to-day growth of students.

Teach for America, via a kind Whitney Tilson email:

A snapshot of the local achievement gap, Teach For America’s place in reforming education, and how to apply national examples of success to Hawai’i

The New Common Core Standards call for a 50% reduction in “literary” [aka fictional noninformational texts] readings for students, and an increase in nonfiction informational texts, so that students may be better prepared for the nonfiction they will encounter in college and at work.
In addition to memos, technical manuals, and menus (and bus schedules?), the nonfiction informational texts suggested include The Gettysburg Address, Letter from Birmingham Jail, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, and perhaps one of the Federalist Papers.
History books, such as those by David Hackett Fischer, James McPherson, David McCullough, Ron Chernow, Paul Johnson, Martin Gilbert, etc. are not among the nonfiction informational texts recommended, perhaps to keep students from having to read any complete books while they are still in high school.
In the spirit of Turnabout, let us consider saving students more time from their fictional noninformational text readings (previously known as literature) by cutting back on the complete novels, plays and poems formerly offered in our high schools. For instance, instead of Pride and Prejudice (the whole novel), students could be asked to read Chapter Three. Instead of the complete Romeo and Juliet, they could read Act Two, Scene Two, and in poetry, instead of a whole sonnet, perhaps just alternate stanzas could be assigned. In this way, they could get the “gist” of great works of literature, enough to be, as it were, “grist” for their deeper analytic cognitive thinking skill mills.
As the goal is to develop deeply critical analytic cognitive thinking skills, surely there is no need to read a whole book either in English or in History classes. This will not be a loss in Social Studies classes, since they don’t assign complete books anyway, but it may be a wrench for English teachers who probably still think that there is some value in reading a whole novel, or a whole play, or even a complete poem.
But change is change is change, as Gertrude Stein might have written, and if our teachers are to develop themselves professionally to offer the new deeper cognitive analytic thinking skills required by the Common Core Standards, they will just have to learn to wean themselves from the old notions of knowledge and understanding they have tried to develop from readings for students in the past.
As Caleb Nelson wrote in 1990 in The Atlantic Monthly, speaking about an older Common Core at Harvard College:
The philosophy behind the [Harvard College] Core is that educated people are not those who have read many books and have learned many facts but rather those who could analyze facts if they should ever happen to encounter any, and who could ‘approach’ books if it were ever necessary to do so….
The New Common Core Standards are meant to prepare our students to think deeply on subjects they know practically nothing about, because instead of reading a lot about anything, they will have been exercising their critical cognitive analytical faculties on little excerpts amputated from their context. So they can think “deeply,” for example, about Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, while knowing nothing about the nation’s Founding, or Slavery, or the new Republican Party, or, of course, the American Civil War.
Students’ new Common academic work with texts about which they will be asked to Think & Learn Deeply, may encourage them to believe that ignorance is no barrier to useful thinking, in the same way that those who have written the Common Core Standards believe that they can think deeply about and make policy for our many state education systems, without having spent much, if any time, as teachers themselves, or even in meeting with teachers who have the experience they lack.
It may very well turn out that ignorance and incompetence transfer from one domain to another much better than deeper thinking skills do, and that the current mad flight from knowledge and understanding, while clearly very well funded, has lead to Standards which will mean that our high school students [those that do not drop out] will need even more massive amounts of remediation when they go on to college and the workplace than are presently on offer.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
24 August 2012

R. Scott Asen:

ANY parent of a private-school child will tell you that tuitions are painfully high — and getting worse every year. Many New York City schools are approaching the $40,000 mark. And it’s not just New York: charges at many private secondary boarding schools are now touching $50,000. Outrageous, many say.
But I would argue that, if anything, charges may be too low. At least for some of the customers.
Virtually every private-school parent has heard about “the gap” — the difference between tuition dollars received by the school and the actual costs of operating the institution. This information is usually delivered by the development (read fund-raising) office, along with a heartfelt plea to help plug that gap with a donation.

Laura Houser:

Coming to Birmingham from Madison — and from Green Bay, WI, before that — has been an adjustment for Nerad, he said, and not just because Birmingham is significantly smaller.
In Madison, Nerad and the school board there were mired in controversy, resulting in Nerad’s March announcement that he wouldn’t seek an extension of his contract, even though it didn’t expire until June 2013.
Nerad had served as Madison’s superintendent since 2008 and before that, was the superintendent in Green Bay, where he had moved up through the ranks, beginning his career as a school social worker.
“As much as I look at myself as a unifier, I don’t feel like I’ve necessarily been successful in doing that (in Madison),” Nerad said during his first interview with the school board in May.
However, Nerad said communities are what develop perceptions, and now that he’s in Birmingham, he’s dedicated to providing “child-centered” leadership, remaining transparent and adding value to programs already in place.
“There has to be a sense of trust (between a school district and a community),” Nerad said. “I think that exists here. Tensions can exist and it’s incumbent upon all of us to address those tensions and be available.”

Nature:

Mutations generate sequence diversity and provide a substrate for selection. The rate of de novo mutations is therefore of major importance to evolution. Here we conduct a study of genome-wide mutation rates by sequencing the entire genomes of 78 Icelandic parent-offspring trios at high coverage. We show that in our samples, with an average father’s age of 29.7, the average de novo mutation rate is 1.20 × 10−8 per nucleotide per generation. Most notably, the diversity in mutation rate of single nucleotide polymorphisms is dominated by the age of the father at conception of the child. The effect is an increase of about two mutations per year. An exponential model estimates paternal mutations doubling every 16.5 years. After accounting for random Poisson variation, father’s age is estimated to explain nearly all of the remaining variation in the de novo mutation counts. These observations shed light on the importance of the father’s age on the risk of diseases such as schizophrenia and autism.

Dan Walters:

California’s state government had 9.3 percent more employees in 2011 than it did 10 years earlier – closely tracking overall population growth – but its payroll costs had jumped by 42.4 percent, according to a new Census Bureau report.
That data are gleaned from the bureau’s annual report on state government employment, which also reveals wide swings in the makeup of the state’s workforce, which includes all agencies, regardless of funding source, and institutions of higher education.
In 2001, the state had the “full-time equivalent” of 372,678 employees and was paying them $1.7 billion a month. By 2011, the FTE’s, as they are dubbed, had increased to 407,321 and payroll costs to $2.4 million billion.

BBC:

Marlborough College is the latest well-known independent school to open an outpost in Asia.
Some 350 children are set to begin their first term at Marlborough College Malaysia on Monday.
The Wiltshire-based school joins the likes of Dulwich College, Harrow and Wellington College in the international school market.
Private schools, like universities, often use overseas outposts to fund bursaries and lower fees in the UK.
Speaking in advance of the launch, master of Marlborough Jonathan Leigh, described the move as a “significant expansion of one of England’s finest schools”.

The good

• 2011-2012 budget information is provided, but previous budgets are not available.
• Budget gap and tax impact options are provided.[1]
• School board members and their individual contact information are listed.[2]
• School board meetings and minutes are posted.[3]
• Administrative officials in differing departments are listed.[4]
• Recent budget information is provided.[5]
• Some information is provided on contracts and employment.[6]
• Audits are posted.[7]
• Recent statewide test results are posted.[8]
• Background check information is briefly reviewed in the employment tasks information.[6]

[edit]The bad
Does not archive past budgets.
No public records information is provided.
[edit]School board
The school board is comprised of a superintendent and “such other officers as the legislature shall direct.” The superintendent is appointed by the state legislature in the same manner as members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The superintendent can hold office for 4 years.[9] According to the state constitution the board of education may not prevent a non−union teacher from speaking of a bargaining issue at an open meeting, as was ruled in the U.S. Supreme Court case Madison School District v. Wisconsin Employment Commission.[10]

I support the Sunshine review initiative. However, the last paragraph, regarding the Superintendent, is of course incorrect.

Dan Babwin & Tammy Webber:

Teachers picketed outside a district office Wednesday in the shadow of a giant inflatable rat as school board members inside authorized spending $25 million in the event of the first Chicago teacher strike in a quarter-century.
The brinksmanship came just weeks after the two sides reached an agreement on hiring new teachers to allow for a longer school day. That issue once seemed to be the biggest roadblock to a new contract, but the bargaining and posturing has not let up as the two sides come down to the last few weeks before 400,000 Chicago students are all back in public schools.
“We have had 45 sessions of negotiations, and we’re still pretty far apart,” Karen Lewis, the teachers’ union president, told the Board of Education at Wednesday’s meeting.

www.socrative.com/

Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets.

Stephen Burd:

Gregory McNeil, 49, is living out his days at a veterans home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His room is so cramped he can barely fit his twin bed, dresser, and the computer desk he had to sneak in because it was against regulations. His only income comes from the Social Security disability payments he began receiving last year after undergoing quadruple-bypass heart surgery. These payments go directly to the veterans home, which then gives him $100a month for his expenses. McNeil fears that if he leaves the home, the government will seize a portion of his Social Security to pay off the federal student loan he defaulted on two decades ago. “This veterans home may become my financial prison,” he says. “And this is no way to live.”
McNeil’s fears are well grounded. For years, private collection companies acting under contract with the U.S. Department of Education have hounded him. The government garnisheed his wages for a time, and threatened to sue him. He says he always wanted to repay, but has never had the income he would need. Meanwhile, interest continues to accrue on his debt, and has already tripled the amount he owes.

Matthew Di Carlo:

D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) recently announced a few significant changes to its teacher evaluation system (called IMPACT), including the alteration of its test-based components, the creation of a new performance category (“developing”), and a few tweaks to the observational component (discussed below). These changes will be effective starting this year.
As with any new evaluation system, a period of adjustment and revision should be expected and encouraged (though it might be preferable if the first round of changes occurs during a phase-in period, prior to stakes becoming attached). Yet, despite all the attention given to the IMPACT system over the past few years, these new changes have not been discussed much beyond a few quick news articles.
I think that’s unfortunate: DCPS is an early adopter of the “new breed” of teacher evaluation policies being rolled out across the nation, and any adjustments to IMPACT’s design – presumably based on results and feedback – could provide valuable lessons for states and districts in earlier phases of the process.
Accordingly, I thought I would take a quick look at three of these changes.

Sara Mead:

During the 2010, 2011, and 2012 legislative sessions, a combination of federal policy incentives and newly elected governors and legislative majorities in many states following the 2010 elections sparked a wave of legislation addressing teacher effectiveness. More than 20 states passed legislation designed to address educator effectiveness by mandating annual evaluations based in part on student learning and linking evaluation results to key personnel decisions, including tenure, reductions in force, dismissal of underperforming teachers, and retention. In many cases states passed multiple laws, with later laws building on previous legislation, and also promulgated regulations to implement legislation. A few states acted through regulation only.

A. David Dahmer:

Literacy is also important to Belmore who has a background and training as a reading specialist. “I’m a person who has quite a bit of expertise in curriculum and literacy so I’m really interested in the literacy goals that go throughout,” she says.
One of the things that Belmore is going to be pulling together is a Literacy Summit that she will facilitate. “The Summit is bringing together all of the pieces of the literacy initiative — middle schools, high schools,” Belmore says. “We’re going to work with the people who have been guiding that work just to communicate better so that high school teachers have a better understanding of what elementary school teachers are doing. I think it helps people understand that they are not alone and that it really takes all of us to do this.”
Belmore has been reaching out to the community — going to functions and talking to parents and meeting with agencies and non-profits. “There is a fair amount of that that goes along with this role and I actually enjoy that part of it,” she says. “I like to get out with people and talk about the work we’re doing and seeing what kind of questions they have. I’ve met with a lot of major community partners already — many whom I already had relationships with at Edgewood.”

Notes and links on interim Madison Superintendent Jane Belmore, here.

Associated Press:

Though Americans clearly have opposing stances on many education issues, when the poll — conducted annually by Phi Delta Kappa International (PDK) in conjunction with Gallup — asked Americans whether they believe common core state standards would provide more consistency in the quality of education between school districts and states, 75 percent said yes. In fact, more than half of Americans (53 percent) believe common core state standards would make U.S. education more competitive globally.
Ninety-seven percent of the public also agrees that it is very or somewhat important to improve the nation’s urban schools, and almost two of three Americans (62 percent) said they would pay more taxes to provide funds to improve the quality of urban schools. Eighty-nine percent of Americans agree that it is very or somewhat important to close the achievement gap between white students and black and Hispanic students.
And though Americans are almost evenly split in their support for requiring that teacher evaluations include how well students perform on standardized tests, with 52 percent in favor, they are in agreement about increasing the selectivity of teacher preparation programs. In fact, at least three of four Americans believe that entrance requirements into teacher preparation programs need to be at least as selective as those for engineering, business, pre-law, and pre-medicine.

View the complete poll results via this 1.75MB PDF file.

Neal McCluskey:

Begin with Head Start, a nearly $8 billion program that’s politically untouchable, not only because it deals with education, but it’s for preschool kids. It’s almost tailor-made for demagoguery, with anyone who’d dare trim — much less eliminate — the program practically begging to be declared a rotten so-and-so who hates even the littlest of children.
But the fact is there’s no meaningful evidence the program does any good. In fact, the most recent federal evaluation found that Head Start produces almost no lasting cognitive benefits, and its few lasting social-emotional effects include negative ones. Only the people employed by Head Start money — and the politicians who appear to “care” — are really benefiting.
This is repeated in elementary and secondary education, only with a bigger bill. In 2011 Washington spent almost $79 billion on K-12 education, and the latest federal data show inflation-adjusted federal outlays per pupil ballooning from $446 in 1970-71 to $1,185 in 2008-09. Meanwhile, scores for 17-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the “Nation’s Report Card” — have been stagnant.
Oodles “invested,” no return.

Carol Inkellis:

Is it the best of times or the worst of times for charter schools in Marin?
Well, it certainly hasn’t been the best of times in the Lagunitas School District for the past few months. In fact, it seemed to be “deja vu all over again.” Forty years ago a group of parents and educators fought hard to bring the child-centric Open Classroom emphasizing individual learning styles to the small district–a program that continues to flourish.
In addition to the Open Classroom and a Montessori program, the district offers the Lagunitas Waldorf Inspired Program (LWIP), based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. It is one of very few public school Waldorf programs in the state or country. (The Novato Charter School is also a Waldorf-inspired model.)

Justin Van Fleet:

Last week, the UN Secretary-General, accompanied by his Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown and the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, visited Timor-Leste on an education tour. The trip came in advance of a major announcement in September of the Secretary-General’s new global education initiative, Education First, which aims to raise the political profile of education and accelerate progress towards the 2015 education goals and beyond.
The scenario in Timor-Leste was all too familiar for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, who grew up during war in South Korea knowing firsthand the power of the international community’s support for education. “All I had for a classroom was the tree we gathered around. We had no chalkboards or textbooks. I know education deprivation first-hand. I also know the power of education to transform,” Ban said in his speech to school children during his trip.

Allison Arieff:

The folks at McSweeneys’s McMullens (the children’s book department of McSweeney’s Quarterly & Books) totally get that. They realize that a lot of children’s literature is absurd but not in the way it should be. (It’s absurd, for example, that a child should be saddled with the name of Pinkalicious and not in a compelling sort of way.)
As such, it is genius to republish a book of stories from the ’70s written by Eugene Ionesco, one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. The stories in his Stories 1234 (available on Sept. 12) are silly, filled with sentences (and sauerkraut) and drawings that combine enough beauty, confusion and nonsense to captivate any kid.

Laura Waters:

New Jersey Journal examines the impact of the state’s superintendent salary caps on the retention of superintendents and asks whether they are fleeing to greener pasture. Roy Montesano, NJ’s 2012 Superintendent of the Year, is profiled: lately of Ramsey Public Schools, he’ll leave for New York State and the chief position at the public schools in Hastings-on-Hudson.
At Ramsey in Bergen County, Montesano made about $220,000 as superintendent of the five-school district with a total enrollment of 2,686 kids. The new cap would cut his salary to $165,000. At Hastings he’ll make $230,000.
Reactions in the field are mixed. Some say that more superintendents will flee to non-capped pastures, particularly in Bergen County, a short hop to New York. (That benefit could be short-lived since Gov. Andrew Cuomo is proposing a similar cap.) Others say that Jersey districts have had no trouble filling positions, and the Journal notes that “the cap was created in response to public outrage after a few administrators accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars in buy-outs and other compensations.”

Sarah Carr:

As Louisiana debuts one of the nation’s most extensive private-school voucher programs, deep divides persist over who should be accountable for ferreting out academic failure and financial abuse: the government or parents.
Across the country, vouchers have resurged in a big way over the last two years–both as a form of school choice and a political lightning rod. Republican governors in Louisiana, Indiana, New Jersey and other states have championed them as a solution to the challenges besetting public education. More recently, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney joined the chorus, saying he hopes to turn an eight-year-old voucher program in Washington, D.C. into a “national showcase.”

Matthew DeFour:

Madison’s average ACT score dipped last year to the lowest level since 1995, according to state and district records.
Madison’s average score of 23.7 out of 36 was still well above the state average of 22.1 and national average of 21.1 among 2012 graduates.
State records go back to 1996 and differ slightly from Madison records, but show last year’s average score was the lowest during that period. Madison records go back to 1995 when the average score was 23.5.
Madison’s scores once again highlight the achievement gap — white students scored 7.4 points higher than black students and 4.8 points higher than Hispanic students, according to the Department of Public Instruction.

Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute via a kind Richard Askey email:

These modules are prepared by AMSI as part of The Improving Mathematics Education in Schools (TIMES) Project.
The modules are organised under the strand titles of the Australian Curriculum

• Number and Algebra
• Measurement and Geometry
• Statistics and Probability

The modules are written for teachers. Each module contains a discussion of a component of the mathematics curriculum from early primary up to the end of Year 10. There are exercises that teachers may wish to undertake – answers are given at the end of the module and often screencasts giving a solution are linked and indicated by an icon.

Laura Waters:

The Star-Ledger discusses NJ’s “landmark” tenure reform bill passed earlier this year which “enjoyed near-universal support,” but notes that “there is also a consensus among leading Democrats and Republicans that it doesn’t go far enough for inner-city schools.”
Tough luck. From The Ledger: “Interviews with administration officials, Democratic lawmakers and NJEA leaders reveal that whatever momentum there was for education reform has mostly fizzled. Instead, they’re back to bickering over how much teachers should earn and which ones should be laid off first when budgets are tight. And nobody’s budging.”

Tom McBride:

This year’s entering college class of 2016 was born into cyberspace and they have therefore measured their output in the fundamental particles of life: bits, bytes, and bauds. They have come to political consciousness during a time of increasing doubts about America’s future, and are entering college bombarded by questions about jobs and the value of a college degree. They have never needed an actual airline “ticket,” a set of bound encyclopedias, or Romper Room. Members of this year’s freshman class, most of them born in 1994, are probably the most tribal generation in history and they despise being separated from contact with friends. They prefer to watch television everywhere except on a television, have seen a woman lead the U.S. State Department for most of their lives, and can carry school books-those that are not on their e-Readers-in backpacks that roll.
The class of 2016 was born the year of the professional baseball strike and the last year for NFL football in Los Angeles. They have spent much of their lives educating their parents to understand that you don’t take pictures on “film” and that CDs and DVDs are not “tapes.” Those parents have been able to review the crime statistics for the colleges their children have applied to and then pop an Aleve as needed. In these students’ lifetimes, with MP3 players and iPods, they seldom listen to the car radio. A quarter of the entering students already have suffered some hearing loss. Since they’ve been born, the United States has measured progress by a 2 percent jump in unemployment and a 16-cent rise in the price of a first class postage stamp.
Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit’s former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief and Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride, authors of The Mindset Lists of American History: From Typewriters to Text Messages, What Ten Generations of Americans Think Is Normal (John Wiley and Sons), it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references. It quickly became an internationally monitored catalog of the changing worldview of each new college generation. Mindset List websites at themindsetlist.com and Beloit.edu, as well as the Mediasite webcast and their Facebook page receive more than a million visits annually.

Todd Finkelmeyer comments, here.

John Schmitt and Janelle Jones:

The U.S. workforce is substantially older and better-educated than it was at the end of the 1970s. The typical worker in 2010 was seven years older than in 1979. In 2010, over one-third of US workers had a four-year college degree or more, up from just one-fifth in 1979. Given that older and better-educated workers generally receive higher pay and better benefits, we would have expected the share of “good jobs” in the economy to have increased in line with improvements in the quality of workforce. Instead, the share of “good jobs” in the U.S. economy has actually fallen. The estimates in this paper, which control for increases in age and education of the population, suggest that relative to 1979 the economy has lost about one-third (28 to 38 percent) of its capacity to generate good jobs. The data show only minor differences between 2007, before the Great Recession began, and 2010, the low point for the labor market. The deterioration in the economy’s ability to generate good jobs reflects long-run changes in the U.S. economy, not short-run factors related to the recession or recent economic policy.

John Peebles:

I’ve long believed that we seriously underestimate kids. Hanging around with my friend’s daughters who were 2, 3, and 5 when I was in college was really illuminating as I found myself interacting and conversing with his (admittedly smart) 2 year old daughter on a level that we often wouldn’t even attempt with highschoolers.
I have a very clear memory of being nine years old, reading an autobiography about a family who adopted several kids. At some point they became stranded in an airpot. Don’t worry though! It was no problem the author (and mother) helpfully pointed out, because nothing fascinates a nine year old like riding the elevator up and down for hours. What a load of crap, I thought to my nine year old self. It’s like that mom thinks we’re mentally disabled or something.

Melinda Beck:

Many parents of 20-somethings worry that their offspring haven’t yet found a career path, gotten married or become financially independent.
These parents should chill out, experts say.
Recent research into how the brain develops suggests that people are better equipped to make major life decisions in their late 20s than earlier in the decade. The brain, once thought to be fully grown after puberty, is still evolving into its adult shape well into a person’s third decade, pruning away unused connections and strengthening those that remain, scientists say.

BBC:

Fifteen-year-old high school student Jack Andraka likes to kayak and watch the US television show Glee.
And when time permits, he also likes to do advanced research in one of the most respected cancer laboratories in the world.
Jack Andraka has created a pancreatic cancer test that is 168 times faster and more than 1,000 times less expensive than the gold standard in the field. He has applied for a patent for his test and is now carrying out further research at Johns Hopkins University in the US city of Baltimore.
And he did it by using Google.
The Maryland native, who won $75,000 at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in May for his creation, cites search engines and free online science papers as the tools that allowed him to create the test.

Jeffrey Young:

Udacity, a start-up company offering free online courses, last week canceled a course, “Logic and Discrete Mathematics,” that was due to begin this summer, saying the lectures and materials it had prepared on the topic did not live up to its quality standards.
“We recorded the entire class and edited most of it, but in our internal tests it didn’t meet our quality bar,” said Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, in an e-mail interview on Sunday. “We have an enormous respect for our students’ time and don’t want to release anything that wouldn’t meet our bar.”
He declined to say how many students had signed up for the course or to answer further questions about the future of the offering.
The course had originally been slated to start in June. At first Udacity officials announced that it would be delayed a few weeks. But last week they said they would “not be launching this course.”

Luke Thomas:

There’s nothing more upsetting than knowing that you are being taken advantage of. I have four classes until I graduate college, and every semester the same thing happens time and time again.
I’m required to spend hundreds of dollars on the latest college textbooks and three months later I can barely fetch half of what I paid. It’s the same story, but this past semester I was confronted with something much worse.
The Textbook Salesmen
I rarely visit my professors’ office hours, but twice last semester I had the opportunity to watch salesmen from textbook giants (Cengage, Pearson, McGraw-Hill) work their way down through the faculty hallways, moving from office to office, with the goal of persuading my professors to purchase “custom editions” for their classes.
“Custom edition textbooks are tailored to your classes so only the content you choose is there. It’s great for you and your students,” they would say. I listened to this well-dressed team of salesmen with anger – I had just spent the last two weeks conversing with the university bookstore about unethical textbook practices by my English professor…

Tara Jenkins and Karen Pittar:

What makes a memorable family holiday? Certainly not the organisation: packing for five, finding someone to look after the family pet, stopping the newspaper delivery and buying a vat of sunscreen. So why, year after year, do we put ourselves through it?
Family holidays are all about building special bonds and memories, according to Kathy Wong Kin-ho, executive director of Playright Children’s Play Association in Hong Kong.
“They are a time for play and new experiences, a chance for adventure and exploration, and importantly, for rest and relationship building.”
Family holidays don’t have to be expensive or far-flung, Wong says – just fairly regular. “We all need time every day for rest, play, sleep, love and communication. The problem is we all live in cities, and city life has taken these basic things away from us. Family holidays are a time for us to re-experience these things, and we should look forward to a break every year, as much as possible.”

John Markoff:

At the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers. That is the old way.
At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human.
One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the people supervising them from being injured. And they do it all without a coffee break — three shifts a day, 365 days a year.
All told, the factory here has several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth as many as the plant in the Chinese city of Zhuhai.

TNTP Reimagine Teaching:

To identify and better understand the experience of these teachers, we started by studying 90,000 teachers across four large, geographically diverse urban school districts. We also examined student academic growth data or value-added results for approximately 20,000 of those teachers. While these measures cannot provide a complete picture of a teacher’s performance or ability on their own–and shouldn’t be the only measure used in real- world teacher evaluations–they are the most practical way to identify trends in a study of this scale, and research has demonstrated that they show a relationship to other performance measures, such as classroom observations.3 We used the data to identify teachers who performed exceptionally well (by helping students make much more academic progress than expected), and to see how their experiences and opinions about their work differed from other teachers’–particularly teachers whose performance was exceptionally poor.

Mark Graham:

Home-schooling children is a tough challenge, even with a support group in the neighbourhood and the help of internet resources.
American doctors Bill and Ana Moody made it even harder by moving to an out-of-the-way Chinese village where, despite the many obstacles, they successfully home-schooled their sons.
The upside of being in an isolated environment where little English is spoken or understood was that their boys learned to speak fluent colloquial Chinese. The eldest son, Matthew, is now at college in the US, where fellow students are dazzled by his command of the language.

Indiana University:

The way legislators, experts and other opinion leaders discuss the role of parents and schools in reducing educational inequalities has changed dramatically since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act first passed in 1965. Put simply, parents were viewed as part of the problem then, with schools seen as the solution. In recent years, with No Child Left Behind and more school choice options, these roles have flipped.
“There has been a continued focus on reducing educational inequalities; however, there are stark contrasts in the way policymakers and experts talked about what they saw as the root problems and how to solve them from 1965 to 2001 — especially the roles of parents and schools,” said Emily Meanwell, sociology doctoral student in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington.
The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act was the federal government’s first major education policy and is described by Meanwell as “one of the most important education policies in American history. Created to reduce educational inequalities found across the country, its goal was to increase opportunities for poor and disadvantaged children as part of the War on Poverty.”

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

A parent — usually a single mother — has the courage to pick up a phone and call for help.
That’s how most children and teenagers enter the Big Brothers Big Sisters program in Dane County.
But too many requests for mentors for the children of caring yet struggling single parents go unfilled. Some 700 young people in Dane County are on the organization’s waiting list, which has grown in recent years during the recession and slow economic recovery.
That’s almost as many children and teenagers as the 750 who now are matched with an adult to meet with them a few hours each week, either at an area school or on their own.
The push is on in Dane County to recruit more Big Brothers and Big Sisters for this fall to provide a positive influence in more kids’ lives.

University of Wisconsin System. Worth reading.

Kavita N. Ramdas:

Girls are hot. Reproductive rights are not. This is the strange and yet unspoken contradiction endemic in the current development discourse about gender equality. From the boardrooms of Exxon Mobil, to the World Bank, to the offices of the Nike Foundation and the overflowing halls at Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative, you can hear people talking about the importance of investing in girls. Women are often added as an afterthought–their inclusion is often phrased as “girls and women” rather than as “women and girls.” Most often you hear that “educating girls” is the magic bullet of the 21st century.
The last time I heard something being prescribed as often as the solution to everything from low GDP rates and malnutrition in infants to endemic poverty, it was the early 1990s and the buzz was about something started by a Bangladeshi man named Muhammad Yunus. Girls’ education is the new microfinance. Yet educating girls about their sexuality and providing funding for access to contraception, safe and legal abortion, and broad education about their reproductive health and rights–which was a significant emphasis of global philanthropy in the 1980s and 1990s–has now dwindled in popularity. Although a few dedicated foundations and the European bilateral aid donors continue their commitment to organizations such as the United Nations Population Fund, the new global actors are focused on girls’ access to schools and learning.

sp-eye:

Thanks to school board Veep John Welke’s attention to detail and investigative prowess, the public learned that the high school softball fields had been reserved ALL SUMMER LONG from 7:30 am to 8:00 PM. Talk about a monopoly.
Um…who’s paying for the exclusive use of those fields? Sure the SP Little League ponied up $75,000 initially, but how far does that go?
The cost of reserving the varsity softball field for 67 days at $300/day (12 hrs/day x $25/hr)= $20,100.
Add in the JV field and that comes to $40,200 JUST for the summer of 2012.
Shouldn’t SOMEONE be saying “Nay, Nay”?
We didn’t receive a dime. Who’s watching this? Who would have allowed one “renter” to reserve two complete fields for 12 hours or more EVERY day for 67 days this summer???? We’re think that SOMEONE with some common sense should have said, “Nay, Nay”.

Christina Hoag:

The high cost of educating students with special needs is disproportionately falling on traditional public schools as other students increasingly opt for alternatives that aren’t always readily open to those requiring special education.
The issue is particularly acute in districts where enrollment has declined due to demographic changes such as low birth rates and population shifts combined with an influx of charter schools and voucher programs that have siphoned off students.
School district officials say all schools that receive public funds should share the cost of special education.
“It raises an ethical responsibility question,” said Eric Gordon, chief executive officer of Cleveland Metropolitan School District. “We welcome our students with special needs, but the most expensive programming is on public districts.”

enetcolorado:

The goal of Teaching Using Spatial Analysis 101 is to provide confidence, skills, and the spatial perspective necessary to foster spatial analysis in geography, earth and biological sciences, history, mathematics, computer science, and in other disciplines.
It will accomplish this through a series of hands-on activities where participants investigate a series of fascinating issues relevant to the 21st Century, including population, natural hazards, energy, water, current events, sustainable agriculture, and more. These activities will be supplemented by short readings and reflections that will build a community of educators focused on the value of investigating the world through a spatial perspective.

Room for Debate:

“Grammar is my litmus test,” the C.E.O. of iFixit wrote recently in the Harvard Business Review. “If job hopefuls can’t distinguish between ‘to’ and ‘too,’ their applications go into the bin.”
But grammar often seems to be a low priority in education. A student could pass the New York State English Regents exam by writing: “These two Charater have very different mind Sets because they are creative in away that no one would imagen just put clay together and using leaves to create Art.”

Paul Fain:

The Saylor Foundation has nearly finished creating a full suite of free, online courses in a dozen popular undergraduate majors. And the foundation is now offering a path to college credit for its offerings by partnering with two nontraditional players in higher education – Excelsior College and StraighterLine.
The project started three years ago, when the foundation began hiring faculty members on a contract basis to build courses within their subject areas. The professors scoured the web for free Open Education Resources (OER), but also created video lectures and tests.
“I was able to develop my own material,” said Kevin Moquin, who created a business law course for Saylor. A former adjunct professor for a technical college and a for-profit institution, Moquin said the foundation gave him the “flexibility to adjust it as I needed.”

Erin Richards:

Before this summer, tramping around the woods near Chippewa Falls at an environmental science camp would have earned Alicia Moore personal fulfillment and knowledge to share with her students in the fall.
The camp would not have counted as the kind of formal education credit that, along with extra years of experience, has historically increased teachers’ salaries over their careers.
But the recent wilderness lessons may indirectly help Moore boost her salary this year in the Hartland-Lakeside School District, because the Waukesha County district is debuting a new compensation system that aims to reward good performance over seniority – something a few Wisconsin districts are experimenting with in the wake of state legislation that opened the door for rethinking how teachers are paid.
So while Moore, 34, plotted GPS coordinates and learned computer mapping software, she also planned how to teach those concepts to students and measure their learning. Later this school year she’ll include all that data in a portfolio to convince administrators and educators she’s worthy of a raise.
“You, as a teacher, have to now demonstrate that what you’re doing is having a transformational effect on student achievement,” explained Moore, who worked with about 17 other teachers to design the new compensation system.

Stephanie Banchero:

Early this month, as her cousins in Michigan spent their summer vacation splashing in area lakes, 11-year-old Ryan Duffin sat learning about the Great Lakes in social-studies class at Richview Middle School in Clarksville, Tenn.
“I could be enjoying my summer, but I’m stuck in class,” Ryan complained. “I hate it.”
Ryan is one of hundreds of thousands of students whose summer breaks ended early this year as schools from Toppenish, Wash., to Kettering, Ohio, to Harrisburg, Pa., have bucked a long–but waning–tradition of starting classes after Labor Day.

Agence France-Press:

A ranking of the world’s top schools compiled by a Chinese university has put Harvard first for the 10th year, in a list dominated by US institutions.
The rankings of the world’s top 500 universities, released by Shanghai’s Jiaotong University, have provoked controversy for emphasising scientific research.
Harvard has taken top spot every year since the survey started in 2003.
Of the top 20 schools in 2012, only two were outside the US – Britain’s Cambridge in fifth place and Oxford in 10th. The top Asian school was the University of Tokyo in 20th place.
The list uses six indicators, including the number of Nobel prizes and Fields medals won, the number of highly cited researchers on staff and the number of articles by faculty published in Nature and Science magazines.

Frank Bruni:

RANDI WEINGARTEN, the powerful president of the American Federation of Teachers, took a rare vacation last week, but tweeting knows no holidays, nor does frustration with what can sometimes seem like constant assaults on the men and women at the nation’s blackboards. So her Twitter account remained active, and on Wednesday it took on a soon-to-open Hollywood movie, “Won’t Back Down.”
In one tweet she expressed her wish that it “didn’t vilify teachers as so uncaring.” In another she noted that the main financing for the movie came from a school-privatization advocate who is no fan of teachers’ unions.
“Won’t Back Down” tells the David-versus-Goliath story of a single mother, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who leads a rebellion to wrest control of her daughter’s persistently abysmal public elementary school from local officials. It’s scheduled for release next month, although it was shown to Weingarten a few weeks ago. I saw it on Wednesday.
And it actually takes pains to portray many teachers as impassioned do-gooders who are as exasperated as parents are by the education system’s failures — and by uncaring colleagues in their midst. But I understand Weingarten’s upset. The union that represents one of those do-gooders (Viola Davis) has lost its way, resisting change, resorting to smear tactics and alienating the idealists in its ranks. What’s more, some of the people who are assertively promoting “Won’t Back Down” are those who cast teachers’ unions as a titanic impediment to the improvement of public education. So “Won’t Back Down” is emerging as the latest front in the continuing war between those unions and their legions of critics, and it has become yet another example of how negatively those unions are viewed.

Melissa Korn & Emily Glazer:

Schools are getting the message about messaging.
Elite colleges and universities are still attracting plenty of applicants, but weak job-placement numbers for graduates and heavy student debt loads have put schools on the defensive, forcing them to prove to families and state governments that a degree is worth the investment.
Enter the chief marketing officer. A relatively new academic position, these marketers manage schools’ identities and messaging, a role covering everything from admissions brochures and Twitter feeds to brand management.

Bill Joy coined a very useful phrase years ago: “The quality of a company’s software has an inverse relationship to the amount of money spent on marketing.” I have found this to always be true.

Neil Harbisson:

I had cables coming out of my head at first, snaking down into a big backpack with a laptop. It made people a bit uncomfortable. But now the eyeborg translates colour into sound using a chip at the back of my skull. It makes noise by pressing against my head, but from September it will be inserted into the bone. I have to recharge myself at a power socket, but I’m working on ways to use my blood circulation instead.
Thanks to the eyeborg, I’ve made a career by combining music and art. I do concerts where I plug myself into a set of speakers and play the colours of the audience back to them. The good thing is, if it sounds bad, it’s their fault! I also make sound portraits of individuals. Prince Charles sounds surprisingly similar to Nicole Kidman.

Al Baker:

Nearly half of New York City teachers reaching the end of their probations were denied tenure this year, the Education Department said on Friday, marking the culmination of years of efforts toward Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s goal to end “tenure as we know it.”
Only 55 percent of eligible teachers, having worked for at least three years, earned tenure in 2012, compared with 97 percent in 2007.
An additional 42 percent this year were kept on probation for another year, and 3 percent were denied tenure and fired. Of those whose probations were extended last year, fewer than half won tenure this year, a third were given yet another year to prove themselves, and 16 percent were denied tenure or resigned.

Adaeze Okoli:

I understand closing the achievement gap is a huge task. But the Madison School District often fails to take the right measures. It is a mistake, for example, to spend more money hiring top-level staff to coordinate meetings and oversee district plans. If we truly want to close the achievement gap, resources need to be on the front lines — at the schools working with kids. This is not the approach the district is choosing.
Recently, the School Board voted to hire a chief of staff for interim Superintendent Jane Belmore. The position will cost $170,000 and last one year. The superintendent said: “We’re about doing everything we can to start to close that achievement gap and in order to do that this position is critical.”
I disagree. I understand the need for staff support and accountability. Overseeing a large school district is a huge undertaking. But hiring more top-level staff who earn six figures will not teach third-graders at Glendale Elementary how to read and write.

Related: 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use.
Budget Cuts: We Won’t Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That’s Okay.
Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 Madison Rotary Club speech:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

SQL Dennis:

Did you know that we have a nice collection of puzzles here on less than dot? Some are harder than others so there is something for everyone. You can pic any language you want, you will see that there are solutions in Ruby, Python, Visual Basic, SQL, JavaScript, C++ and other.

Fraser Nelson:

To listen to ministers talk about university education, it is as if Britain has entered an academic arms race with the rest of the world. China’s universities, we’re told, are spewing out six million graduates a year: we must compete, or we’re doomed. In the Blair years, a national target was set: half of all young people ought to enter higher education. They’d have to get into debt, but they were reassured it would be a worthwhile investment. Having some letters after your name meant going further in your careers and earning far more. Those without a degree, by implication, would enter the workplace at a distinct disadvantage.
It is surprising that David Willetts should continue this line of argument, because he is clever enough to know what simplistic nonsense it is. It is understandable for the Universities Minister to be in favour of studying, but the real picture of education in Britain is far more complex. The idea of a binary divide in the career prospects of graduates and non-graduates is not a picture that would be recognised by employers. In many lines of work, those who did not get the A-levels for university now have a future just as bright (or otherwise) as the graduates.

Laura Diamond:

Emory University intentionally misreported data about its students for at least 12 years to groups that rank colleges, President Jim Wagner said Friday.
The deception meant that U.S. News & World Report, Peterson’s and others that have long ranked Emory as one of the nation’s top colleges did so with inflated data. Students and their families rely heavily on these rankings when deciding where to apply and enroll.
“They cooked the books and lied to students who think the university is better than it is,” said Mark Schneider, vice president for new education initiatives with the American Institutes for Research. “What we are talking about is a violation of consumer choice.”

Justin Pope:

Prestigious Emory University intentionally misreported student data to rankings magazines for more than a decade, the Atlanta school disclosed Friday, adding its high-profile name to a growing list of institutions caught up in scandals over rankings pressure.
As far back as 2000, Emory’s admissions and institutional research offices overstated SAT and ACT scores by reporting the higher average tallies of admitted students, rather than those enrolled, as is required, president Jim Wagner announced in a letter to the university community. Those figures were reported to organizations including college rankers, the most prominent of which is US News & World Report.

Stephanie Banchero:

Standing before a class of 28, Katie Filippini was losing the battle to teach her third-graders that the “er” in “germ” sounds the same as the “ir” in “dirt.” Ten minutes into the lesson, two boys fought over space on the blue carpet, a girl giggled at the commotion and a boy named Dandre stared out the window.
But Ms. Filippini wasn’t alone that winter day at the Morton School of Excellence. Veteran teacher Mauricia Dantes, Ms. Filippini’s yearlong mentor, quietly suggested having students clap out each sound, knowing that some children learn better with physical activity. Ms. Filippini did so, and Dandre and the other students began paying attention.
Now, as Ms. Filippini embarks on a new school year this week, she is drawing on those small victories as a trainee, confident that she is ready to teach on her own. “Last year gave me the confidence and experience to go into the classroom and control it.”

Mark Liberman, via a kind reader’s email:

Just out: Mark Seidenberg, “Politics (of Reading) Makes Strange Bedfellows”, Perspectives on Language and Literacy, Summer 2012. The article’s opening explains the background:
In 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker created the Read to Lead Task Force to develop strategies for improving literacy. Like many states, Wisconsin has a literacy problem: 62% of the eighth grade students scoring at the Basic or Below Basic levels on the 2011 NAEP; large discrepancies between scores on the NAEP and on the state’s homegrown reading assessment; and a failing public school system in the state’s largest city, Milwaukee. The task force was diverse, including Democratic and Republican state legislators, the head of the Department of Public Instruction, classroom teachers, representatives of several advocacy groups, and the governor himself. I was invited to speak at the last of their six meetings. I had serious misgivings about participating. Under the governor’s controversial leadership, collective bargaining rights for teachers and other public service employees were eliminated and massive cuts to public education enacted. As a scientist who has studied reading for many years and followed educational issues closely I decided to use my 10 minutes to speak frankly. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of my remarks.
From the beginning of those remarks:

Much more on Mark Seidenberg, here.

Sylvester Monroe, via a kind reader’s email:

They’re nearly all gone now. Those towering concrete monuments to a flawed public housing experiment called the “projects.” They had names like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, Fort Greene in Brooklyn, Desire in New Orleans and Cabrini Green in Chicago. The social architects sold them as stepping stones to a better life for the mostly poor black people who inhabited them. But decades after they were built in the years following the Second World War, they’ve been mostly blown up or bulldozed. And many of the people who once lived in high-rise public housing projects, and their children, are no better off than their parents were. Some are even worse off.
When the Robert Taylor Homes opened in 1962, then Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley channeled the high hopes of a new urban generation.
“This project represents the future of a great city, it represents vision,” Daley said at the opening. “We know that this community needs a better environment in which the future generation of a great city will be raised.”

Joel Klein

Given the costly chasm between the educational performance of U.S. students and those in other countries–and the shameful gap between white students and their black and Latino counterparts here at home–you’d think school improvement would be an all-hands-on-deck imperative in which the best minds in the public, private, and philanthropic sectors came together to lift our children’s prospects.
Yet such pragmatic problem,solving is threatened today by critics who condemn any private involvement in schools as a matter of “privatization,” “profiteering,” or worse. These ideological foes of business’ contribution to the public good ignore history in their attempt to protect a failed status quo. If their campaign to quash educational innovation succeeds, the real losers will be our kids.

Nayantara Mukherji:

Everyone in Madison seems to have an opinion about who the next superintendent of the school district should be.
Suzanne Swift, president of the Franklin Randall Elementary School PTO, wants a superintendent who can motivate a “demoralized staff,” develop relationships and advocate for the district at the state and national levels.
Education policy expert Sarah Archibald says a future superintendent should be willing to make tough decisions about allocating shrinking resources.
Eugenia Highland, program coordinator at Centro Hispano, wants someone who will focus on reducing the achievement gap.
School board member Ed Hughes says the district needs a leader who can “navigate the political shoals of serving in a place like Madison.”
Outgoing Superintendent Dan Nerad, who began his Madison tenure in 2008, insists his replacement must care about students and the community.

Notes and links on Madison Superintendent hires.

Mike Ivey:

In a disturbing sign the state economy remains in crisis, property values in Wisconsin have fallen for the fourth year in a row and showed the largest one-year drop in decades.
This news accompanies a surprising jump in the state unemployment rate announced on Thursday. The jobless rate rose in July to 7.3 percent, up from 7 percent in June, with the state losing an estimated 6,000 private-sector jobs for the month.
Meanwhile, figures released this week by the Department of Revenue showed total property values in Wisconsin down 3.2 percent for 2012, the largest drop in 50 years. That includes a 4 percent drop in residential property and a 1.5 percent decline in commercial property values.
The roughly $2 billion in new residential construction was more than offset by a $15.3 billion erosion in the value of existing homes. (See attached report.)

Maria Konnikova:

There’s a certain allure to the elegance of mathematics, the precision of the hard sciences. That much is undeniable. But does the appeal mean that quantitative approaches are always germane? Hardly–and I doubt anyone would argue the contrary. Yet, over and over, with alarming frequency, researchers and scholars have felt the need to take clear-cut, scientific-seeming approaches to disciplines that have, until recent memory, been far from any notions of precise quantifiability. And the trend is an alarming one.
Take, for instance, a recent paper that draws conclusions about the relative likelihood that certain stories are originally based in real-world events by looking at the (very complicated) mathematics of social networks. The researchers first model what the properties of real social networks look like. They then apply that model to certain texts (Beowulf, the Iliad, and Táin Bó Cuailnge, on the mythological end, and Les Misérables, Richard III, the Fellowship of the Ring, and Harry Potter on the fictional end) to see how much the internal social networks of the characters resemble those that exist in real life. And then, based on that resemblance, they conclude which narratives are more likely to have originated in actual history: to wit, Beowulf and the Iliad are more likely reality-based than Shakespeare or Tolkien or–gasp–even that most real-life-like of narratives, Harry Potter. (Táin, on the other hand, isn’t very lifelike at all–but if you remove the six central characters, which you can totally do since they are likely amalgams of real ones, it, too, starts looking historical.)

Susan Howe:

For some reason, my family seems to have produced more than its share of teachers. I don’t remember anyone encouraging us or discouraging us, but somehow we ended up with nine teachers in our extended family, including my husband and myself.
For many years, we were proud to be in this profession. Then Scott Walker was elected. Up to that point, I had not realized to what extent public schools across the nation were being undermined and that teachers had become targets. Governor Walker’s election opened my eyes and awakened a political activist. The recall election did not go as we planned and hoped. After much disappointment and discussion, my husband and I realized that the most important cause on which to focus our efforts was supporting strong public schools and emphasizing the benefits they give to all people in the state and nation. This led us to the Opportunity To Learn Campaign.
Through the OTL Campaign, I hope to inform others about the plight of public schools and the inequalities between districts. To that end, here are two stories about teachers in my family, the districts that employ them and how the inequalities in those districts have affected their students.

David Gelernter, via a kind Rick Kiley email:

We have big problems with our schools–and need new ideas about how to fix them. Deep changes are needed in our attitude toward teaching, leading education scholar Diane Ravitch wrote recently in the New York Review of Books. We need smarter, better-educated recruits to the profession. We need to value a teacher’s experience properly and discard the thought that idealistic college graduates with no experience make brilliant teachers automatically.
Fair enough. But we need other solutions too. We need plans that make direct use of our biggest assets: parental anger, and people’s selfish but reasonable willingness to give some time to improve their own children’s education now, versus someone else’s in 20 years.
Local Internet schools are a promising way to mobilize existing talent. Much infrastructure is required that doesn’t exist. But the parts are all spread out on the table. All we need is to fit them together properly.

Tom Friedman via a kind Rick Kiley email:

A big mismatch exists today between how U.S. C.E.O.’s look at the world and how many American politicians and parents look at the world — and it may be preventing us from taking our education challenge as seriously as we must.
For many politicians, “outsourcing” is a four-letter word because it involves jobs leaving “here” and going “there.” But for many C.E.O.’s, outsourcing is over. In today’s seamlessly connected world, there is no “out” and no “in” anymore. There is only the “good,” “better” and “best” places to get work done, and if they don’t tap into the best, most cost-efficient venue wherever that is, their competition will.

C.K. Yeung:

The “brainwashing” tag and the almost sinister overtone that has been attached to national education show just how badly Hong Kong needs a healthy dose of it.
This is particularly so for our young who know so little about China’s past and present, about its unspeakable sufferings and heartbreaking humiliations over the last 150 years, about how it manages to arrive at where it is today, and the price and sacrifices that the people and the country have paid along the road to national success.

Naomi Schaefer Riley:

Maggie Gyllenhaal, the ultimate hipster actress, stars in “Won’t Back Down,” an education-reform drama that hits theaters next month. When did school choice became cool?
The film is the tale of two parents (one a teacher) who decide to save their own kids and many others by taking over a failing school in a poor Pittsburgh neighborhood.
This follows “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” the 2010 documentary that depicted the fortunes of those desperately competing for a place at a charter school — from the same progressive filmmaker who gave us “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Scott Jaschik:

In state after state, one of the ways public colleges and universities are balancing their budgets is by aiming to admit more students from out of state (who are charged much higher tuition rates). In theory, this means more revenue for the entire university, although critics have warned about weakening the ties between public universities and their own states.
In California, where public higher education has experienced cut after cut, the choices are particularly difficult. For the spring semester of 2013, the California State University has told campus leaders they may not admit any Californian students to graduate programs. Given that tuition covers only a fraction of the costs of these students’ education, the university said it couldn’t afford them.

John Nichols:

The defeat AFC took was so sweeping that the group had to issue a statement Wednesday in which it “reaffirmed its support for legislators and candidates across Wisconsin who favor expanded educational options for families, following disappointing primary results last night.”
Yikes.
AFC, a group funded by billionaire right-wingers from Michigan (former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman Betsy DeVos and her husband, Amway heir Dick DeVos) and their wealthy allies across the country, poured more than $100,000 (perhaps a lot more) into “independent” campaigns on behalf of supporters of school “choice” and “voucher” schemes, which weaken public schools in Milwaukee and pave the way for privatization.
But the AFC candidates lost. Badly.
State Rep. Jason Fields, the Milwaukee Democrat whose re-election was the chief priority of AFC and its Wisconsin operative, former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, was defeated by community activist Mandela Barnes.

Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:

Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use.

Alix:

Expanding upon President Obama’s signature education initiative, the U.S. Department of Education announced Sunday that it has finalized the application process for the 2012 Race to the Top-District competition. The school district-specific competitive grant program will provide nearly $400 million to grantees to implement local reforms congruent with Obama administration education goals.
Initially launched in 2009, Race to the Top has spawned dramatic education reform nationwide. Grants have led 45 states and the District of Columbia to pursue state-wide education reform programs, including data-driven decision making, professional development programs for teachers and leaders, and turnaround interventions in chronically low-performing schools. This next phase is designed to build on those principles by offering the grants to school districts instead of entire states. According to administration officials, locally directed improvements in learning and teaching will directly improve student achievement and educator effectiveness by addressing local priorities.

Jennifer Ouellette:

There is, indeed, an important conversation to be had about education reform, and I heartily applaud any effort to address different learning styles and methodologies. If nothing else, Hacker’s misguided op-ed has fostered a discussion. And I agree that learning practical math like statistics and probabilities is dead useful for a good social citizen. I just think it should augment, not replace, the traditional curriculum.
Hacker tosses out a lot of statistics on students unable to pass algebra to support his “case,” but I don’t think anyone disagrees that this is a problem. I just can’t see how ditching algebra comprises a sensible solution. Hacker’s thinking seems to be that, because algebra is such a stumbling block for many students, we should throw up our hands and despair of ever teaching it to them. But do we really want to throw in the algebraic towel just because it’s, like, rilly hard?

Matthew DiCarlo:

I have reviewed, albeit superficially, the test-based components of several states’ school rating systems (e.g., OH, FL, NYC, LA, CO), with a particular focus on the degree to which they are actually measuring student performance (how highly students score), rather than school effectiveness per se (whether students are making progress). Both types of measures have a role to play in accountability systems, even if they are often confused or conflated, resulting in widespread misinterpretation of what the final ratings actually mean, and many state systems’ failure to tailor interventions to the indicators being used.
One aspect of these systems that I rarely discuss is the possibility that the ratings systems are an end in themselves. That is, the idea that public ratings, no matter how they are constructed, provide an incentive for schools to get better. From this perspective, even if the ratings are misinterpreted or imprecise, they might still “work.”*

Junct Rebellion:

A few years back, Paul E. Lingenfelter began his report on the defunding of public education by saying, “In 1920 H.G. Wells wrote, ‘History is becoming more and more a race between education and catastrophe.’ I think he got it right. Nothing is more important to the future of the United States and the world than the breadth and effectiveness of education, especially of higher education. I say especially higher education, but not because pre- school, elementary, and secondary education are less important. Success at every level of education obviously depends on what has gone before. But for better or worse, the quality of postsecondary education and research affects the quality and effectiveness of education at every level.”
In the last few years, conversations have been growing like gathering storm clouds about the ways in which our universities are failing. There is talk about the poor educational outcomes apparent in our graduates, the out-of-control tuitions and crippling student loan debt. Attention is finally being paid to the enormous salaries for presidents and sports coaches, and the migrant worker status of the low-wage majority faculty. There are now movements to control tuition, to forgive student debt, to create more powerful “assessment” tools, to offer “free” university materials online, to combat adjunct faculty exploitation. But each of these movements focuses on a narrow aspect of a much wider problem, and no amount of “fix” for these aspects individually will address the real reason that universities in America are dying.

Janet Ortegon:

In the state’s ongoing effort to create better ways to evaluate teachers and assess how much students are learning, the biggest question might be how to pay for them.
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers was in Sheboygan on Monday to talk about the DPI’s plan to help better prepare Wisconsin students for the future.
Part of the plan is school finance reform, which Evers said he is not giving up on despite major cuts to state aid that came about as a result of Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10. In fact, he said, a big part of the battle will be getting state leaders to realize that investment in public education is in the state’s long-term economic best interest.

William Gormley:

Yet only a fraction of our teachers are the best and the brightest of their generation. According to a 2010 McKinsey report, nearly half of U.S. teachers come from the bottom third of their class.
Here’s a simple idea that could dramatically improve the teaching quality: Hire a few good men.
Despite some inroads by men, teaching remains a female-dominated profession. This is especially true for younger children. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 2% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers and 18% of elementary and middle-school teachers are men.
The situation is more balanced, but not evenly balanced, in secondary school, where 42% of teachers are men.

Publisher’s Weekly:

This American Life contributor Tough (Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America) tackles new theories on childhood education with a compelling style that weaves in personal details about his own child and childhood. Personal narratives of administrators, teachers, students, single mothers, and scientists lend support to the extensive scientific studies Tough uses to discuss a new, character-based learning approach. While traditional education relies heavily on memorization, new research conducted by James Heckman suggests that the conventional wisdom represented by those third-grade multiplication tables has failed some of our most vulnerable students. Tough takes the reader through experiments that studied childhood nurture, or attachment theory, to report cards that featured character strength assessments (measuring “grit,” gratitude, optimism, curiosity, self-control, zest, and social intelligence). Focused on schools in Chicago and New York, Tough explores the effects of racial and socioeconomic divides through the narratives of survivors of an outdated system. The ultimate lesson of Tough’s quest to explain a new wave of educational theories is that character strengths make up perhaps the single most compelling element of a child’s education, and these traits are rooted deep within the chemistry of the brain. Tough believes that it is society’s responsibility to provide those transformative experiences that will create its most productive future members. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick & Williams. (Sept.)

Juan Williams:

Mooresville, N.C., is best known as “Race City, U.S.A.,” home of Nascar. But these days Mooresville is leading the nation in a different way–by using digital technology to improve public education.
“Fixing Our Schools,” a documentary I am hosting for the Fox News Channel this Sunday, looks at how digital learning is being used by schools like those in Mooresville to help fix our broken education system.
Our schools are undoubtedly in crisis. Prize-winning documentaries such as “Waiting for ‘Superman'” have revealed the terrible cost of losing young minds to failing schools. Dropout rates are particularly high among minority children in urban schools. But even parents in the best suburban schools are alarmed by the fact that the U.S. now ranks 30th world-wide in math, 23rd in science, and 17th in literacy.

Melissa Hammann, via a kind reader’s email:

So, the great and powerful Madison School District has started MAP testing and the results are, well, as they should have expected when viewed as a whole. White kids are above national averages and children of color are below them. MAP testing stands for Measures of Academic Progress. They are taken at the computer by each student and the questions are tailored to the individual student. They keep answering questions until they hit the wall of achievement level and the test is ended. Scores are known immediately and areas of strength and areas that need improvement are highlighted FOR EACH KID. It is supposed to be a tool for teachers to use in order to more adequately provide instruction in their classroom. This is called differentiated instruction, or DI in the education vernacular. MAP results are not really effective for national achievement comparison.
OK, I’m going out on a limb here and going to say to the critics of ECSD that we have been doing MAP testing in our district for 5 years now. My newly minted graduate was in the guinea pig group in 7th grade, so I am keyed in on this topic. We can thank Paula Landers for being ahead of the curve on implementing this tool. What seems to escape the writer of the article as well as our district is this. It’s very nice to know how one’s district stacks up as a whole against the state (WKCE) and nation (MAP, NAEP), but what exactly does this data provide in the way of improving individual student achievement? Exactly squat. In this world of inclusive learning, school districts must have tools to provide DI for all levels of learners. If you insist on teaching to some arbitrary mean that various test data indicates as the level of your class, you’ll lose the top 30 and bottom 30 percent of the curve. That’s 60 percent of the students being lost. Used properly, MAP results could be a very effective tool for the teaching arsenal to solve this problem.
Sadly, it is my experience that my kids’ teachers use it to verify what they already know about my kids, that they are above average, and use their MAP data to rationalize being satisfied with mediocre performance the rest of the year “because they are still above their peer average.” I have no data to indicate it is otherwise with other children. In fact, I have spoken to other parents with similar issues. In addition, over 35 percent of the students in the quadrant report that began the school year above their peer group in reading in our district in 10-11 did not reach the achievement goal the MAP test sets for them. It seems that the district thinks it’s OK that a child does not achieve to their potential. I am not of the same opinion.
……
Not only did my kid fail to reach his personal achievement goal set for him by the MAP test (gain less than they projected he should), but he ended 5th grade at a lower achievement level in reading than where he started. This loss of achievement happened while he got straight As all year long in language arts. I began a slow burn that has not stopped. I went to the principal, I went to the teacher and I went to the administrator in charge. “He started out so high that it was hard for him to achieve.” This is an unacceptable response. My child deserves to show some damn achievement after a year of instruction. I don’t care if he started out higher than the mediocre goals you set for the masses. This is thievery, plain and simple. That year, as I recall, the entire grade level failed to meet the 50% level, which basically says they have achieved grade level performance. Interpretation of MAP results is a bit confusing, so go with me here. Anything less than 50% for a grade level indicates they have not achieved a years worth of learning. There has been a shake up in the 5th grade teaching team, but I think it goes beyond individual teachers. If there is an endemic attitude that high achieving students are OK to ignore and an insistence on mistakenly using MAP data to compare to national averages (like the article in the Madison paper did) instead of using it for the amazing tool it could be, there will be no dang improvement in overall achievement.

Related: Madison Schools’ Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) Assessment Results Released. Unfortunately, the Madison School District has not published the school by school MAP results, though the information made its way to Matthew DeFour’s Sunday article.

David Youngberg:

When I decided to become a professor, I was comforted by its employment projections. Professors hired to teach the baby boomers are retiring: It’ll be a seller’s market. Now I’m told Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOC’s, threaten that rosy future. One person can teach the whole world with a cheap Webcam and an Internet connection. Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford University research professor and co-founder of the MOOC provider Udacity, told Wired that in 50 years there will be only 10 institutions in the whole world that deliver higher education.
I was scared. So in early 2012 I joined 90,000 other students who enrolled in one or both of Udacity’s first two courses. I selected CS101: Building a Search Engine. What with video lectures, online discussion boards, and learning from the field’s top minds, it was easy to believe that online education was the beginning of the end for the ivory tower. But I came to realize that MOOC’s have five fundamental problems.

I believe that Youngberg has taken a somewhat rose colored view of the changes at hand.
I see higher ed disruption playing out as follows (I have a $50 wager with a professor friend that in 20 years, the UW-Madison will have fewer on campus undergraduate students than today, God willing that I live long enough to collect!):
Investment groups will form relationships with certain professors and a few name educational institutions around the world. They will also cut bi-directional deals with business, NGO and Governments. These organizations will invest in the emerging, hybrid higher ed concerns AND, crucially, commit to hiring a fixed number of graduates. The big names will attract a good portion of the “best and brightest” students, offering a more wide-ranging experience than traditional bricks and mortar campuses. The hybrid institutions will provide both online and traditional education experiences along with a direct path to employment.
The synthesis between a number of “name” higher ed institutions, capital and employment will be very difficult to beat. Traditional institutions will need to soon rethink their mission and model. This being said, many new opportunities will arise during the transition.
“Lower ed” will not be exempt from such changes.

Wisconsin CESA, via a kind reader’s email:

The Department of Public Instruction has established performance standards (cut scores) for the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam (WKCE) reading and mathematics content areas to more closely align with national and international expectations of what is required to be college and career ready. The higher cut
scores are comparable to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) cut scores. The performance level descriptors that accompany the college and career ready cut scores have been revised to reflect the higher expectations required with these higher performance benchmarks.

John Resig:

We’re releasing a completely new platform that targets people with no programming knowledge and gives them an engaging and fun environment to learn in.
Over everything else we wanted to emphasize creativity and exploration and make it approachable for people of all ages, including young kids.
Sal Khan and I recorded a video giving a good introduction to what we’re releasing:

Marketplace:

Kai Ryssdal: I had a conversation a month or so ago with Steven Levitt about the Freakonomics of getting kids to get good grades. And how Levitt says we oughta just pay ’em. Fifty bucks for an A was what he got when he was a kid. Me: not one thin dime. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.
Anyway, Geri-Ellen Dow heard the segment and tweeted us a picture of two crisp $20 bills — one labeled “Great Expectations,” the other labeled “The Odyssey” — and a note saying the money was there for the taking by her 14-year-old son if he read the books in question.
So of course we had to call her up to see what happened. Geri, good to talk to you.
Geri-Ellen Dow: Thanks. It’s nice talking with you, Kai.

Stephen Ohlemacher:

If you retired in 1960, you could expect to get back seven times more in benefits than you paid in Social Security taxes, and more if you were a low-income worker, as long you made it to age 78 for men and 81 for women.
As recently as 1985, workers at every income level could retire and expect to get more in benefits than they paid in Social Security taxes, though they didn’t do quite as well as their parents and grandparents.
Not anymore.
A married couple retiring last year after both spouses earned average lifetime wages paid about $598,000 in Social Security taxes during their careers. They can expect to collect about $556,000 in benefits, if the man lives to 82 and the woman lives to 85, according to a 2011 study by the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank.
Social Security benefits are progressive, so most low-income workers retiring today still will get slightly more in benefits than they paid in taxes. Most high-income workers started getting less in benefits than they paid in taxes in the 1990s, according to data from the Social Security Administration.

AnnaMaria Andriotis:

For parents concerned about the rising cost of college, financial advisers have traditionally recommended public universities. After all, they almost always carry much smaller price tags than private universities. But many of these state schools are now raising tuition at double-digit rates — sometimes with very little advance notice — leaving some students and their families in a tight financial bind.
In some states, recent changes have been particularly dramatic. Average tuition and fees for in-state residents at public four-year colleges soared 16% to 21% last year in Arizona, California, Georgia and Washington, according to a report released last week by the College Board. (The average increase at public colleges over the same period was 8.3%; none of the figures in the report were adjusted for inflation.) What’s more, students in some of those states may see more hikes in the upcoming year: Washington recently approved a tuition increase at several of its public universities, while California students may face another double-digit increase in the second semester of this academic year. “The potential for this to get worse is very real,” says Rich Williams, higher education advocate at U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

Liv Finne:

Peter Callaghan of The News Tribune recently reported that federal intervention in the education of Washington students has pushed state lawmakers and top education officials to pass “more reform.” Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn says the intervention of the federal government has been “phenomenal.” “I take my hat off to them.”
My hat is staying on. The new teacher evaluation law, SB 5895, passed by lawmakers last session to exempt the state from No Child Left Behind rules, is not a real reform. The federal government wants a better bill, and is requiring Supt. Dorn and lawmakers to rewrite, or else the feds will not extend the one-year waiver from No Child Left Behind rules.

Jordan Weissman:

When it comes to paying for college, upper-middle-class families often get the worst of all possible worlds. They’re not wealthy enough to treat the cost of tuition as an afterthought. They’re not needy enough to qualify for big discounts. But they’re often status conscious enough to pay whatever’s necessary for their kids to attend an elite college.
And so somewhat unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal has found that in this age of rising student debt, its risen most of late among the upper-middle class. Between 2007 and 2010, the percentage of households taking out loans to pay for college grew fastest within the group earning between $94,535 and $205,335 a year.