Hilde Kahn, via Will Fitzhugh:

One of few bright spots in the just-released National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) results was an increase in the number of students reaching “advanced” level in both math and reading at the 4th- and 8th-grades.

But the results masked large racial and economic disparities. While 30 percent of Asian students and 13 percent of white students scored advanced on the 8th-grade math test, for example, just 2 percent of blacks, 4 percent of Hispanics, and 3 percent of low-income students reached that level.

The highly selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in suburban Washington, D.C., known as TJ, offers a window into a significant source of the disparity, and suggests a solution to the problem.

A recent survey of TJ parents revealed that Asian-American students, who make up a disproportionate percentage of students admitted to elite public STEM schools like TJ, are spending their afternoons, weekends, and breaks learning math.

Most of them enroll in advanced math classes as early as possible in their school careers, even though by their parents’ admission fewer than one third of them are highly gifted in math. But more importantly, their parents do not rely on school programming to prepare their children for TJ admissions or any other milestone on their way to top STEM careers.

Instead, they make sure that at every step of the way their children have access to high-quality extra-curricular math that prepares them for, clarifies, complements, and extends the instruction they’re obtaining in their accelerated public school programs.

If we’re really serious about increasing the number of low-income students and students from underrepresented groups who are learning math at the level required to contribute to our increasingly computational world, we should take a page from the playbook of those who are already successful: We should provide high-quality math enrichment for many more kids, as early in their educational lives as possible.

In focusing in recent years on raising the bottom of the learning curve, the nation has neglected those at the top, essentially ignoring the growing “excellence gap” between groups of high-performing students. But this is not the only reason that the gap has been growing.

Even when policymakers and administrators have made closing the excellence gap a priority, they have had little success because they have focused almost exclusively on expanding access to public school advanced programs. Unfortunately, increasing the number of students from underrepresented groups in advanced programs has not automatically led to increased achievement. That’s because, as the families of the most successful students recognize, even the most advanced programs at the best public schools are insufficient to prepare students to achieve at the highest levels.

In focusing in recent years on raising the bottom of the learning curve, the nation has neglected those at the top, essentially ignoring the growing “excellence gap” between groups of high-performing students. But this is not the only reason that the gap has been growing.

Even when policymakers and administrators have made closing the excellence gap a priority, they have had little success because they have focused almost exclusively on expanding access to public school advanced programs. Unfortunately, increasing the number of students from underrepresented groups in advanced programs has not automatically led to increased achievement. That’s because, as the families of the most successful students recognize, even the most advanced programs at the best public schools are insufficient to prepare students to achieve at the highest levels.

Nor are the families of successful students the only ones who know the secret to STEM success. Education experts have long been aware that extra-curricular math is essential for high-level math achievement.

Almost 20 years ago, a College Board task force found that “some of the most academically successful groups in our society have created a network of supplementary opportunities for their children that may best be described as a parallel educational system.” The panel recommended that “a much more extensive set of supplementary education institutions and programs…for minority students should be deliberately designed to provide the breadth of supplementary opportunities available to many youngsters from more educationally advantaged and successful groups.”

The reason we haven’t implemented the suggested programs is because providing students from underrepresented groups with years of quality math enrichment takes time, money, faith in the ability of students to prevail against all odds, and a willingness to acknowledge the limits of our educational system—all of which are in short supply. It is far more politically expedient to heed repeated calls for quick-fix measures such as admission quotas for exam schools like TJ that alter the numbers while doing nothing to provide students with needed skills.

In addition to the above challenges, misguided beliefs about the causes of the excellence gap hinder our ability to reverse it.

Myth 1: The excellence gap is primarily a result of socioeconomic disparities.

At New York City’s elite Stuyvesant High School, the school with the City’s most competitive admissions process, 68 percent of students admitted to the Class of 2022 were Asian; and at TJ, 65 percent of students admitted to this fall’s class were Asian. In both cases, most of these Asian students were the children of immigrants.

But the similarities end there. At TJ, 61 percent of families with two Asian immigrant parents have incomes over $200,000 per year and 76 percent have advanced degrees. In fact, only seven of the 485 students admitted to this fall’s class were eligible for free or reduced lunch. At Stuyvesant, however, Asian students make up the overwhelming majority of the 45 percent of students who are eligible for free or reduced lunch. Yet, despite financial and other constraints, Stuyvesant’s low-income Asian students obtain high-quality math enrichment, and it is perhaps even more critical to their success than it is to the success of TJ’s upper-middle-class Asian students.

Myth 2: The excellence gap is primarily a result of cultural, or even innate, differences.

Asian immigrant parents have high expectations for their children’s academic performance and believe hard work matters more than natural ability. They prioritize education, sacrificing time, money, and other goals in order to give their children the best chance at a better future. And they bring a competitive approach to education from their home countries.

These factors undoubtedly contribute to their children’s academic success. But cultural norms do not automatically lead to learning. Whatever the bright children of Asian immigrant parents are doing to master challenging math topics at younger and younger ages, other bright children can do as well.

Every diverse urban and suburban school district in this country would benefit from an intensive STEM enrichment program that targets capable students from underrepresented groups and begins as early as possible. Such programs should also embrace features of successful extra-curricular academies that serve low-income Asian students, including outreach to parents and an emphasis on fostering an environment where it’s not only OK to be good at math but where students are admired for their genuine interest, aptitude, and perseverance. Sadly, very few such programs exist, and most of them are underfunded.

One is Boston’s well-financed Steppingstone Academy, which provides summer, after-school, and weekend enrichment to low-income students, beginning in 5th- or 6th-grade. It has been phenomenally successful in increasing opportunities for students, 90 percent of whom gain admission to their schools of choice, including competitive public magnet schools.

Another promising program is New York City’s BEAM (Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics) program, which identifies 6th grade students from low-income neighborhoods and provides intensive math instruction, relying heavily on curriculum from Art of Problem Solving (AoPS). Thanks to a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation grant, BEAM recently expanded to Los Angeles.

In a pilot program intended to test the benefits of reaching students at younger ages, an AoPS academy recently partnered with the foundation that supports the STEM magnet at Montgomery Blair High School (Blair Magnet) located across the river from TJ in Montgomery County, Maryland. The program, the Magnet Pipeline Project, aims to provide three years of after-school or weekend math enrichment to select students, beginning in 3rd grade, with the goal of increasing the number of underrepresented students admitted to the middle-school program that feeds into the Blair Magnet. The foundation has raised about $20,000 toward the cost of the program, largely from Blair Magnet alumni.

For its part, TJ provides summer STEM courses, mentorships, and test-prep for underrepresented 7th- and 8th-graders through a program launched with Cooke Foundation funding. And a company run by a TJ alum provides free test-prep for 8th-graders applying to the school. But these programs have had limited effect because they aren’t reaching students early enough with the kind of math enrichment that makes a real difference.

We’re going to need a lot more leadership and significantly more funding to ensure that programs like these succeed, and to spread the most successful ones to other school districts. We’ll need the support of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who know very well what it takes to achieve at the highest levels and who constantly complain of the lack of diversity in their applicant pool.

We’ll also need buy-in from other STEM industry leaders who consider themselves stewards of their communities and likewise suffer from a lack of available talent. Closing the excellence gap should be the highest philanthropic priority of all who value what is most precious about this country, the unlimited opportunities it provides to those willing to put in the hard work.

Thirty-five years ago, A Nation at Risk linked the end of America’s industrial dominance to a scarcity of workers with sufficient technological training and blamed both on our educational system, which it recognized as the institution responsible for ensuring that all children fulfill their potential. The report’s warning is no less compelling today.

It is both a moral and political imperative that every student be able to reach his or her potential. In an era when Americans compete for jobs against, as well as work alongside, the graduates of educational systems from around the world, it is no longer enough that our strongest students graduate from college; they must enter the workforce with the skills necessary to succeed in a global economy.

Now that technology is available to do much of the easy work, our best graduates must be prepared for the complex work of building, training, and working with existing technologies, inventing new ones, and mastering any number of unknown and unpredictable challenges. Eliminating excellence gaps is therefore nothing less than “an issue of equity and social justice, community development, economic advancement, and national security.”

Instead of viewing the excellence gap as a symbol of systemic failure, we should follow the lead of parents of the most successful students and aim to provide students from underrepresented groups with the most powerful extra-curricular interventions money can buy—even as we redouble our efforts to ensure that schools provide advanced course work for talented students of every background.

Hilde Kahn is the parent of three Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology graduates and served for nine years on the board of the school’s private foundation.

Related:

“They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!.

English 10

TAG Complaint

Small Learning Communities

Round and round and round and round we go.

Kevin Mahnken:

Goldhaber has published multiple studies and briefs trying to get at the importance of teachers’ performance in the classroom and how that performance ought to be calculated. He says that the development of teacher quality gaps isn’t particularly surprising, since states and school boards tend to view teacher job assignments as fungible — even if it’s actually much harder to teach in a high-poverty district or school than a more affluent one.

“You’d expect that there would be teacher quality gaps because there’s very little differentiation between teacher salaries within a school system,” he told The 74 in an interview. “Teachers don’t have quality measures stamped on their forehead, but you could imagine that the better teachers would have some advantages in that kind of labor market, and would get the choice teacher assignments.”

Related: Wisconsin’s thin teacher content knowledge requirement: Foundations of Reading.

Scott Aaronson:

If ever a book existed that I’d judge harshly by its cover—and for which nothing inside could possibly make me reverse my harsh judgment—Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education would seem like it. The title is not a gimmick; the book’s argument is exactly what it says on the tin. Caplan—an economist at George Mason University, home of perhaps the most notoriously libertarian economics department on the planet—holds that most of the benefit of education to students (he estimates around 80%, but certainly more than half) is about signalling the students’ preexisting abilities, rather than teaching or improving the students in any way. He includes the entire educational spectrum in his indictment, from elementary school all the way through college and graduate programs. He does have a soft spot for education that can be shown empirically to improve worker productivity, such as technical and vocational training and apprenticeships. In other words, precisely the kind of education that many readers of this blog may have spent their lives trying to avoid.

I’ve spent almost my whole conscious existence in academia, as a student and postdoc and then as a computer science professor. CS is spared the full wrath that Caplan unleashes on majors like English and history: it does, after all, impart some undeniable real-world skills. Alas, I’m not one of the CS professors who teaches anything obviously useful, like how to code or manage a project. When I teach undergrads headed for industry, my only role is to help them understand concepts that they probably won’t need in their day jobs, such as which problems are impossible or intractable for today’s computers; among those, which might be efficiently solved by quantum computers decades in the future; and which parts of our understanding of all this can be mathematically proven.

Granted, my teaching evaluations have been [clears throat] consistently excellent. And the courses I teach aren’t major requirements, so the students come—presumably?—because they actually want to know the stuff. And my former students who went into industry have emailed me, or cornered me, to tell me how much my courses helped them with their careers. OK, but how? Often, it’s something about my class having helped them land their dream job, by impressing the recruiters with their depth of theoretical understanding. As we’ll see, this is an “application” that would make Caplan smile knowingly.

Joanne Jacobs:

But what will happen to math achievers who do want to take calculus and pursue STEM majors in college? Will they get what they need in untracked classes?

Black students are more likely to wait until 11th or 12th grade to take Algebra 1, according to the U.S. Education Department, he reports in an earlier story. Native Americans have similar patterns.

“Research indicates that forcing students to take Algebra I before they’re ready can be harmful,” writes Sawchuk. “Is it because they’ve correctly assessed students’ ability and put them in the appropriate course?” said Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “Or is it because there’s some amount of discrimination going on?”

Related: Math Forum Audio/Video.

Alan Borsuk:

There was not much reaction and certainly no surge of commitment and effort.

Jump ahead to now. Everything that was true in 2004 remains true.

NAEP scores come out generally every two years and a new round was released a few days ago. The scores for Wisconsin stayed generally flat and were unimpressive. Wisconsin’s ranking compared to other states has slid gradually for many years. Broken down by ethnic and racial groups, Wisconsin does worse than the national averages in every grouping, including that white kids do worse than white kids nationwide.

But other places are making more progress than Wisconsin, and that, too, has been true for years. If you’re into this subject, you are betting I’m about to mention Massachusetts and Florida. You win. Both of those states have been determined, consistent, and rigorous overall in pursuing strategies to improve reading scores. They are far from perfect, but we ought to be learning more from them.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Wisconsin, unlike Massachusetts, has just one (barely) teacher content knowledge requirement, manifested by the Foundations of Reading examination.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has recently attempted to “dumb down” the Foundations of Reading requirement. The DPI is lead by Tony Evers, who is also running for governor.

A Capitol conversation on Wisconsin’s reading challenges (2011!).

“Too often, according to Mark Seidenberg’s important, alarming new book, “Language at the Speed of Sight,” Johnny can’t read because schools of education didn’t give Johnny’s teachers the proper tools to show him how”.

Tom Kertscher:

Evers says that despite a recent increase in school funding, Walker “has taken over a billion dollars from the public schools.”

In Walker’s first year as governor, he cut school aid by $426.5 million from the previous year, Doyle’s final year as governor.

Because it took five years to get school funding back to that base level, it can be argued that Walker “took” a total of $1.17 billion from schools over that period.

But since then, Walker has increased school funding to the point that the deficit, in comparison to the base year, is $183.6 million.

For a statement that contains only an element of truth, our rating is Mostly False.

Links:

SIS on Tony Evers and Scott Walker

Campaign Websites: Tony Evers (lots of others running in the August 14, 2018 Democrat Party Primary) and Scott Walker.

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student, despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition:

Teachers and more than 180,000 non-proficient, struggling readers* in Wisconsin schools need our support

While we appreciate DPI’s concerns with a possible shortage of teacher candidates in some subject and geographical areas, we feel it is important to maintain teacher quality standards while moving to expand pathways to teaching.

Statute section 118.19(14) currently requires new K-5 teachers, reading teachers, reading specialists, and special education teachers to pass the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading Test (WI-FORT) before getting an initial license to teach. The intent of this statute, passed in 2012 on a bipartisan vote following a recommendation of the non-partisan Read to Lead task force, was to enhance teacher quality by encouraging robust reading courses in educator preparation programs, and to ensure that beginning and struggling readers had an effective teacher. The WI-FORT is the same test given in Massachusetts, which has the highest 4th grade reading performance in the country. It covers basic content knowledge and application skills in the five components of foundational reading that are necessary for successfully teaching all students.

The annual state Forward exam and the newly-released results of the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) highlight the importance of having high-quality teachers in Wisconsin classrooms. 65% of our 4th graders were not proficient in reading on the NAEP. Our national ranking has slipped to 34th, and all sub-groups of students perform below their national averages. Our black students rank 49th among black students in the country, and our white students rank 41st.

The revised teacher licensure rules that DPI has presented to the legislature in the re-written administrative rule PI 34, create a new Tier I license that provides broad exemptions from the WI- FORT.

We encourage the education committees to table the adoption of this permanent rule until it is amended to better support teacher quality standards and align with the intent of statute 118.19(14).

We favor limiting the instances where the WI-FORT is waived to those in which a district proves it cannot find a fully-qualified teacher to hire, and limiting the duration of those licenses to one year, with reading taught under the supervision of an individual who has passed the WI-FORT. Renewals should not be permitted except in case of proven emergency.

We favor having DPI set out standards for reading instruction in educator preparation programs that encompass both the Standards for Reading Professionals (International Literacy Association) and the Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading (International Dyslexia Association). This will enable aspiring teachers to pass the WI-FORT and enter the classroom prepared to teach reading.

We favor having DPI implement a corrective action plan for educator preparation programs where fewer than 85% of students pass the WI-FORT on the first attempt in any year. Students putting in four years of tuition and effort should be able to expect to pass the WI-FORT.

As written, PI 34 provides the following exemptions from the WI-FORT that we find overly-broad:
34.028 (2) (a) and (c) will allow an in-state or out-of-state graduate of an educator preparation program to become a teacher of record, with full responsibility for students, under a Tier I license without passing the WI- FORT. An employing district need not show a lack of fully-qualified applicants for the position. The Tier I license is granted for one year, but then may be renewed indefinitely under 34.028 (4) (a) and (b) through a combination of teacher and district request without the teacher ever passing the WI-FORT.

34.028 (2) (d) will grant a Tier I license to any graduate of an accredited college or university without passing the WI-FORT if an employing school district conducts a search for a full-licensed candidate, but cannot find an acceptable candidate. This is the “emergency” situation of teacher shortage under which a Tier I license might be justified, provided the district conducts a thorough search and explains why any fully-licensed candidates were not acceptable. This Tier I license is also granted for one year, but then may be renewed indefinitely under 34.028 (4) (c) without the teacher passing the WI-FORT and without any further requirement that the district seek a fully-licensed teacher.

34.029 essentially allows districts to train their existing teachers (licensed under Tier I, II, III, or IV) for a new position not covered by their current license. The teacher is granted a Tier I license in the new subject or developmental level, and training consists of whatever professional development and supervision the district deems necessary. These teachers do not need to pass the WI-FORT, either at the beginning or conclusion of their training, even if their new position would otherwise require it. The district need not show that it cannot find a fully-licensed teacher for the position. This license is granted for three years, at which point the district may request a jump-up to a lifetime Tier III license for the teacher in this new position. District training programs may be as effective as traditional preparation programs in teaching reading content, but without the teachers taking the WI-FORT, there is no way to objectively know the level of their expertise.

*There are currently over 358,000 K-5 students in Wisconsin public schools alone. 51.7% of Wisconsin 4th graders were not proficient in reading on the 2016-17 state Forward exam. Non-proficient percentages varied among student sub-groups, as shown below in red and black, and ranged from approximately 70-80% in the lower-performing districts to 20-35% in higher-performing districts.

65% of Wisconsin 4th graders were not proficient on the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Non- proficient percentages varied among student sub-groups, as shown below in red and black, and all shown sub-groups performed below the national averages for those sub-groups. Black students in Wisconsin were the 3rd lowest-performing African-American cohort in the country (besting only Iowa and Maine), and Wisconsin had the 5th largest black-white performance gap (tied with California and behind Washington, D.C., Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois).

Foundations of Reading Test.

Wisconsin posts lowest ever NAEP Reading score in 2017.

Long time Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Tony Evers is currently running for Governor.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Tyler Durden:

The US is starting to admit that it has a spending problem.

According to the latest Monthly Treasury Statement, in March, the US collected $210.8BN in receipts – consisting of $88BN in individual income tax, $98BN in social security and payroll tax, $5BN in corporate tax and $20BN in other taxes and duties- a drop of 2.7% from the $216.6BN collected last March and a clear reversal from the recent increasing trend…

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student, far more than most K-12 taxpayer supported Districts.

Natalie Wexler:

Cognitive scientists have known for decades that simply mastering comprehension skills doesn’t ensure a young student will be able to apply them to whatever texts they’re confronted with on standardized tests and in their studies later in life.

One of those cognitive scientists spoke on the Tuesday panel: Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia who writes about the science behind reading comprehension. Willingham explained that whether or not readers understand a text depends far more on how much background knowledge and vocabulary they have relating to the topic than on how much they’ve practiced comprehension skills. That’s because writers leave out a lot of information that they assume readers will know. If they put all the information in, their writing would be tedious.

But if readers can’t supply the missing information, they have a hard time making sense of the text. If students arrive at high school without knowing who won the Civil War they’ll have a hard time understanding a textbook passage about Reconstruction.

Students from less educated families are usually the ones who are most handicapped by gaps in knowledge. Another panelist—Ian Rowe, who heads a network of charter schools serving low-income students in New York—provided a real-life example during his remarks. A sixth-grader at one of his schools was frustrated that a passage on a reading test she’d taken kept repeating a word she didn’t understand: roog-bye. The unfamiliar word made it hard for her to understand the passage. When Rowe asked her to spell the word, it turned out to be rugby.

Wisconsin ranked 34th nationally reading, our lowest ranking to date

Wisconsin has just one (!) teacher content knowledge requirement: Foundations of Reading. The Tony Evers lead DPI has been attempting. to weaken this lone requirement.

Compare Massachusett’s MTEL.

Stretch Targets.

Many links on UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg’s new book:

“Too often, according to Mark Seidenberg’s important, alarming new book, “Language at the Speed of Sight,” Johnny can’t read because schools of education didn’t give Johnny’s teachers the proper tools to show him how”

Patrick Marley:

A group of teachers and parents sued, arguing the law didn’t apply to Evers because of the powers granted to him by the state constitution. A Dane County judge agreed with them in 2012 and the state Supreme Court upheld that ruling in 2016.

In 2017, Walker signed a new, similar law. Evers did not follow that law in the way that he wrote new rules, saying he didn’t need to because of the past court rulings.

Soon afterward, a group of teachers and local school board members represented by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty asked the Supreme Court to take up anew whether Evers had to follow the law on writing state rules.

Under Friday’s ruling, the high court agreed to decide that case.

The 2016 decision was unusual in that two liberals — Shirley Abrahamson and Ann Walsh Bradley — joined with conservatives Michael Gableman and David Prosser to rule on the side of Evers’ allies.

Wisconsin ranked 34th nationally reading, our lowest ranking to date

Wisconsin has just one (!) teacher content knowledge requirement: Foundations of Reading. The Tony Evers lead DPI has been attempting. to weaken this lone requirement.

Compare Massachusett’s MTEL.

Stretch Targets.

Many links on UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg’s new book:

“Too often, according to Mark Seidenberg’s important, alarming new book, “Language at the Speed of Sight,” Johnny can’t read because schools of education didn’t give Johnny’s teachers the proper tools to show him how”

Cori O’Connor Petersen and Libby Sobic:

This is shocking and should send chills down the spines of state lawmakers in Madison. Republicans in Madison have worked tirelessly to roll back the administrative state. Yet, as DPI indicates, at least one state agency is finding a way to work around state law by relying on federal law. This raises significant federalism concerns.

If the education agency can get away with reporting to the federal government, what will prevent other agencies such as the Department of Natural Resources or the Department of Transportation from circumventing Wisconsin state law?

The Wisconsin agency also overstepped the rulemaking process in other ways. The guidelines for promulgating a rule require the agency to compare its rule to similar ones in its four neighboring states. Instead, DPI simply provided a paragraph explaining state requirements to comply with federal law.

A plain language analysis of what the rule-change means is another requirement. Presumably, this requirement is meant to provide curious legislators and voters with an understanding of the rule, and the tasks their tax dollars go to support. But in place of the analysis, DPI only provides a one-sentence explanation on the changes to the current administrative rule.

DPI is the agency responsible for overseeing K-12 education in Wisconsin. Everything from educator licensing to school lunches and programs such as English learners and school choice are in the agency’s wheelhouse. The agency holds vast responsibility and in a democratic government, responsibility must come with checks and balances, which the rule-making process is designed to ensure.

So why does DPI think it can exercise this authority? Perhaps it’s that DPI is directed by a state superintendent who is elected every four years in an off election year in the spring. And this has produced superintendents, such as Tony Evers, who has a track record of being hostile to education reform and the rule of law. All other agencies are led by governor-appointed officials. But a difference in agency leadership doesn’t excuse DPI from the rule-making process to which other agencies adhere very closely. Like other agencies, DPI is subject to laws passed by the state legislature.

Elise Young:

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy proposed taxing online-room booking, ride-sharing, marijuana, e-cigarettes and Internet transactions along with raising taxes on millionaires and retail sales to fund a record $37.4 billion budget that would boost spending on schools, pensions and mass transit.

The proposal, 4.2 percent higher than the current fiscal year’s, relies on a tax for the wealthiest that has yet to be approved and lacks support from key Democrats in the legislature. It also reverses pledges from Murphy’s predecessor, Republican Chris Christie, to lower taxes in a state where living costs are among the nation’s highest.

Murphy, a Democrat who replaced term-limited Christie on Jan. 16, said his goal is to give New Jerseyans more value for their tax dollars. He has promised additional spending on underfunded schools and transportation in a credit-battered state with an estimated $8.7 billion structural deficit for the fiscal year that starts July 1.

Joshua Rothman:

A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm shift,” and I described how this phrase had been used and abused, much to Kuhn’s dismay, by postmodern insurrectionists and nonsensical self-help gurus. People seemed to like the essay, but they were also uneasy about it. “I don’t think you’ll be able to publish this in an academic journal,” someone said. He thought it was more like something you’d read in a magazine.

Was that a compliment, a dismissal, or both? It’s hard to say. Academic writing is a fraught and mysterious thing. If you’re an academic in a writerly discipline, such as history, English, philosophy, or political science, the most important part of your work—practically and spiritually—is writing. Many academics think of themselves, correctly, as writers. And yet a successful piece of academic prose is rarely judged so by “ordinary” standards. Ordinary writing—the kind you read for fun—seeks to delight (and, sometimes, to delight and instruct). Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. It’s supposed to be dry but also clever; faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its deepest ambiguity has to do with audience. Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds. But, because it’s intended for a very small audience of hyper-knowledgable, mutually acquainted specialists, it’s actually among the most personal writing there is. If journalists sound friendly, that’s because they’re writing for strangers. With academics, it’s the reverse.

Milovan:

Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.

Now, while academia has turned into an athletic contest, Wittgenstein held the exact opposite viewpoint: if anything, knowledge is the reverse of an athletic contest. In philosophy, the winner is the one who finishes last, he said.
…
In some areas, such as gender studies or psychology, the ritualistic publishing game gradually maps less and less to real research, by the very nature of the agency problem, to reach a Mafia-like divergence of interest: researchers have their own agenda, at variance with what their clients, that is, society and the students, are paying them for. The opacity of the subject to outsiders helps them control the gates. Knowing “economics” doesn’t mean knowing anything about economics in the sense of the real activity, but rather the theories, most of which are bullshit, produced by economists. And courses in universities, for which hard-working parents need to save over decades, easily degenerate into fashion. You work hard and save for your children to be taught a post-colonial study-oriented critique of quantum mechanics.
…
The deprostitutionalization of research will eventually be done as follows. Force people who want to do “research” to do it on their own time, that is, to derive their income from other sources. Sacrifice is necessary. It may seem absurd to brainwashed contemporaries, but Antifragile documents the outsized historical contributions of the nonprofessional, or, rather, the non-meretricious. For their research to be genuine, they should first have a real-world day job, or at least spend ten years as: lens maker, patent clerk, Mafia operator, professional gambler, postman, prison guard, medical doctor, limo driver, militia member, social security agent, trial lawyer, farmer, restaurant chef, high-volume waiter, firefighter (my favorite), lighthouse keeper, etc., while they are building their original ideas.

Alan Borsuk:

But look at other aspects of all this.

Mental health for students, running the spectrum from more routine problems to the extremes of the Florida shooter, have been getting more attention recently than in previous years. The bad news is that the overall problem appears to have grown. The good news is that more help might be in the offing. Shouldn’t that be an urgent goal?

There were many indications that the Florida shooter was unhinged, dangerous and open about wanting to shoot up a school. There were specific calls to authorities about him. They brought no helpful response. Wouldn’t improving the effectiveness of systems for dealing with people such as him be a good investment, better than putting more guns into schools?

How about more effort to stabilize the lives of the many children who live in very troubled circumstances? Moving all the time, unsure where food or shelter is coming from, shifting from one family setting to another or lacking stable adult connections. The Florida shooter (yes, I’m intentionally not using his name) fit some of that description.

At the risk of alienating just about everybody, permit me to say a few words about our general culture. What do kids take in every day? They learn from the world around them, starting from the earliest days after birth and never stopping. How do people around them talk to each other? What’s life like at home? What are they seeing on television, on all their different screens, in the recreation activities they choose, in the social interactions around them?

If it’s rude, crude, violent and more, what surprise is it that some kids lean in those directions?

Related Satire – “Proud of Our Nation”, via “Anonymous”:

I am very proud of you all and our great nation that understands so well the need for GUNS in our American life! We have now learned to accept a ritual after each mass killing that goes from shock to prayers to outrage to intense introspection/national soul searching to debate in Congress to forgetting until the next incident. Whether the victims are grade schoolers, high schoolers, adult concert or movie goers and or minority gang members in places like Chicago i.e. irrespective of demographics or geography …from ‘sea to shining sea’, the format is now fortunately securely in place. Nor does it matter whether the victims are Congress members or gang members or the 60% of suicide victims who used a firearm…No matter, we patriots ARE secure!

And does the media ever profit from the killings along with ourselves from all of the increased viewers. When fellow Americans hear that overall crime rates in the USA are indeed down, we convince them that it is because of our guns. Instead of GUN regulations, we are fortunate that often more guns are accepted after each of these killings. Look at the attempts now to get guns into the hands of 10 year old hunters in WI, and access to every churchgoer in certain Southern states…perhaps in the future to all school teachers as well. After Vegas and Texas, the House Judiciary Committee then passed another gun owners rights bill to allow owners with state issued concealed weapons to carry them to any state that allows such weapons. We are sailing, brothers with now some 265 million guns in our nation, half of all of the civilian guns in the entire world….and growing. Well done, brothers & sisters!

Even with some 80% of the public wanting gun controls, our increasing bribes to Congressmen, even some Democrats ..over $50 million to Senators and last year alone the $31 million to Trumps campaign, has sure paid off! No worry about stopping our gun flow. Senator Richard Burr for example said after Las Vegas that “ tragic violence has absolutely no place in America”. Yet no worry. He has already received $6.986 million from us at NRA. Uh, huh! And the Supreme Court after a recent killing turned away two appeals from firearm advocates on banning assault weapons (And even if some day, real comprehensive gun control laws were passed, it would take our great country some 20 years to really see an impact on mass killings. No fear, brothers. By then another GOP administration would be in place to reverse any such legislation.)

True, we have convinced these Congressmen that we Americans are indeed a unique species of Homo sapiens. That even if nations like Canada and & Japan with so little gun violence have as many real mental health , domestic violence, suicide, isolated troubled youth and wealthy middle class crazies as we in America, our good propaganda (& $$) has convinced them that only in America do our people need weapons essentially available to all for protection AND to express publicly their illnesses and anger… And thank God, our DC leaders have committed their loyalty, not to their constituents, but first to us at NRA and our contributions!

And even a surprise to us faithful, assault weapons like AR-15s , and it appears even bump stocks, much less 100 round clips to turn them into full automatics, continue to be allowed and are circulating rapidly. We are looking now at some diversification for the future as we study the Second Amendment. Though many scholars believe it references only state militias, our good Supreme Court is convinced that any ordinary citizen has the ‘right to bear arms’. Why then would this not allow hand grenades & bazookas in our hands? Some day perhaps even nuclear devices in each home to protect ourselves?

It is indeed good times for us. Despite heavy human costs, we Americans are uniquely the most free in the world with our rightful many and growing number of ‘arms’. And we at NRA are highly profitable, and my annual compensation of $4 million as well as yours will continue to grow and grow! God bless America!

Zoë Carpenter :

February 23, 2017: Law-enforcement officers point their weapons at two water protectors praying near the Sacred Fire of the main resistance camp of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Both men were arrested, along with the photographer, shortly after this image was taken. (Tracie Williams)

On February 23 of last year, a day when the frozen ground had started to turn to mud, law-enforcement officers rolled into the Oceti Sakowin camp near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota. Donald Trump had been inaugurated a month earlier, and the new president quickly reversed an Obama administration decision to deny Energy Transfer Partners a permit to finish construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a $3.78 billion project running directly under the Missouri River. The water protectors, as protesters called themselves, had been fighting the pipeline since the spring of 2016, concerned that the proposed route cut through ancestral land of spiritual significance, and that a pipeline leak could contaminate the primary water supply to the reservation. The small group who had remained through the bitter winter at Oceti Sakowin had been ordered to leave by February 22 or face eviction and arrest. Most did; a few dozen remained the following the day, when Humvees with snipers on their roofs rolled into camp, a helicopter buzzing above them.

Andrew McCarthy:

So we arrive at the knotty question for Obama political and law-enforcement officials: How do we “engage with the incoming team” of Trump officials while also determining that “we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia”?

How do we assure that an investigation of Trump can continue when Trump is about to take over the government?

What is the answer? Let’s consider what happened the next day.

Related:

Everyone from President Trump to a petty thief is at the same disadvantage when talking to prosecutors. :

Former federal prosecutor Ken White created a stir with his recent argument at Reason.com that neither President Donald Trump nor anyone else should voluntarily meet with investigators. By anyone else, White does not simply mean other people facing scrutiny in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. He means you and me. Ever.

According to White, the only reason prosecutors ever really want to interview targets is to trap them into a story and catch them in a lie. If they’re after you, you can’t talk your way out of trouble. Sure, you might have information that would exonerate you, but your lawyer can instead convey it informally to the investigators, without any risk.

White is right, but he doesn’t go far enough. Prosecutors want to catch you in a lie because, when they can’t prove an underlying crime, it’s often easy to prove that you lied to them. That’s where the problem arises. I’ve been telling my astonished law students for decades that except in certain well-defined circumstances, lying to investigators shouldn’t be a crime. And it shouldn’t. Period.

Part of the reason for my position involves symmetry. As long as government investigators are allowed to deceive you, you should be allowed to deceive government investigators. And deceive you they may — rather willy-nilly. If a suspect confesses after police falsely tell him that his fingerprints were found at the crime scene, fine. If a suspect confesses after police falsely tell him that they have satellite images and DNA evidence linking him to the crime, fine. My view is that suspects should have the same freedom. If you can throw the police off the scent by telling them you weren’t there … fine. 1

This last point is important. White argues that investigators rarely talk to suspects without strong evidence of their guilt. Again, you’re not likely to be able to talk them out of pursuing you. So if your lie changes the course of the investigation, the case must not have been that strong to begin with. Another reason not to criminalize the lie.

BuzzFeed believes that evidence of the alleged D.N.C. break-in by Russian hackers might help the online publisher in a libel suit. But the D.N.C. says releasing information might make it vulnerable to more hacking.

FISA Court.

More, here.

Mark O’Connell:

If you’re interested in the end of the world, you’re interested in New Zealand. If you’re interested in how our current cultural anxieties – climate catastrophe, decline of transatlantic political orders, resurgent nuclear terror – manifest themselves in apocalyptic visions, you’re interested in the place occupied by this distant archipelago of apparent peace and stability against the roiling unease of the day.

If you’re interested in the end of the world, you would have been interested, soon after Donald Trump’s election as US president, to read a New York Times headline stating that Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, considered New Zealand to be “the Future”. Because if you are in any serious way concerned about the future, you’re also concerned about Thiel, a canary in capitalism’s coal mine who also happens to have profited lavishly from his stake in the mining concern itself.

Thiel is in one sense a caricature of outsized villainy: he was the only major Silicon Valley figure to put his weight behind the Trump presidential campaign; he vengefully bankrupted a website because he didn’t like how they wrote about him; he is known for his public musings about the incompatibility of freedom and democracy, and for expressing interest – as though enthusiastically pursuing the clunkiest possible metaphor for capitalism at its most vampiric – in a therapy involving transfusions of blood from young people as a potential means of reversing the ageing process. But in another, deeper sense, he is pure symbol: less a person than a shell company for a diversified portfolio of anxieties about the future, a human emblem of the moral vortex at the centre of the market.

Dave Zweifel:

The MTI case was a narrow one. Like all public unions, thanks to Scott Walker’s infamous Act 10 MTI has to hold an annual certification election supervised by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission to continue representing workers. But Act 10 requires approval of not the majority of those voting, but a majority of all members, whether they vote or not.

During a recent multiday election, the union had asked WERC for a list of members who had voted, but WERC turned down the request, claiming that it might open employees who hadn’t voted to intimidation from the union. MTI filed suit for the list under the state’s open records law and won in Dane County Circuit Court.

The state appealed to the high court, which quickly reversed the lower court’s decision. It shouldn’t, given the current control of the court, have come as a surprise.

What was a surprise, though, was the court’s cavalier dismissal of the open records argument, a dismissal that many openness advocates believe could spell huge problems for future records cases. In essence, the court ruled that it is more important to protect union members from the possibility they may be pressured to vote than to uphold the state’s historic openness laws.

Much more on Madison Teachers, Inc., here.

World Economic Forum:

As the types of skills needed in the labour market change rapidly, individual workers will have to engage in life-long learning if they are to achieve fulfilling and rewarding careers. For companies, reskilling and upskilling strategies will be critical if they are to find the talent they need and to contribute to socially responsible approaches to the future of work. For policy-makers, reskilling and retraining the existing workforce are essential levers to fuel future economic growth, enhance societal resilience in the face of technological change and pave the way for future-ready education systems for the next generation of workers.

Yet while there has been much forecasting on transformations in labour markets, few practical approaches exist to identifying reskilling and job transition opportunities. Towards a Reskilling Revolution: A Future of Jobs for All provides a valuable new tool that will help individual workers, companies, and governments to prioritize their actions and investments. Using big data analytics of online job postings, the methodology in this report demonstrates the power of a data-driven approach to discover reskilling pathways and job transition opportunities. The methodology can be applied to a variety of taxonomies of job requirements and sources of data.

Matthew DeFour:

“I’m glad to see at least last year there was pretty broad-based support,” Walker said.

Immediately after Walker’s speech, Evers came on stage to hand out an award and deadpanned, “How ironic,” before responding: “Any time any governor adopts my budget, it’s a good day.”

In an interview with the State Journal afterward, Evers said he’s happy that Walker added money for K-12 schools — some $649 million in new spending over the biennium — “but the fact is for the last five years he cut $1 billion out (and) not counting inflation we’re not back to where we should be.”

“We’re still running behind,” Evers said. “That’s one of the reasons why I’m running (for governor). We haven’t made up that money they took from us in the past.”

Evers, who spoke at the convention on Wednesday, said school board members told him they saw the increased education funding as either not enough, given how many districts are still proposing referendums to exceed state-imposed revenue limits, or they see it as a political ploy.

Locally, Madison spends far more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Stephanie Marsh:

Jody Day is giving a TEDx talk to a room full of people against a backdrop of signposts she has chosen for the occasion: “Crazy cat woman”, “Witch”, “Hag”, “Spinster”, “Career woman”. “What comes to mind when you see those words?” she asks the audience. They shift uneasily. Gently, she answers her own question: “All of them are terms used for childless women … I’m a childless woman. And I’m here to tell you about my tribe – those one in five women without children hidden in plain sight all around you.”

Day is involuntarily childless. She remembers the moment she realised she was definitely never going to be a mother. It was February 2009 and, at 44-and-a-half, she had left a bad long-term relationship and moved into a grotty London flat. “I was standing by the window, watching the rain make dusty tracks down the glass, when the traffic in the street below seemed to go silent, as if I’d put it on ‘mute’. In that moment, I became acutely aware of myself, almost as if I were an observer of the scene from outside my body. And then it came to me: it’s over. I’m never going to have a baby.”

We now know that 20% of British women born, like Day, in the 1960s, turned 45 without having a child. The number is double that of their mother’s generation – we’ll have to wait for the next census in 2021 to find out whether the numbers rose or fell for women born in the 70s and 80s (and whether or not government statisticians revise the fertility cutoff point – the age at which it is assumed women will stop having children – to extend beyond 45). And yet, on that February afternoon eight years ago, Day could find nothing on the internet or in books about her painful, irreversible situation. When she typed “childless woman” into any search engine, she was directed to sites run by women who had elected to be “child-free” – “some of them saying really hateful things about how awful kids were”. She knew no one like her, and felt alone and frightened. There followed “four years of hell”: “My personality completely changed. There were loads of things I couldn’t deal with. I withdrew from all my relationships. I saw doctors, therapists – nobody knew what the matter with me was.”

Alan Borsuk:

Sadly, but probably inevitably, the debate over what to do about students behaving badly is polarized by race and politics.

Look at the controversy over suspending and expelling students from school. On a national level, in 2014, the Obama administration told school districts across the nation that the data showed there was racial discrimination — black students were being suspended disproportionately. Change this or face civil rights investigations, the administration said. Suspensions declined across the country.

Some say the Obama move backfired and climate in schools has gotten worse. Some say the Obama position was a step toward wiser policies because suspensions don’t help kids. Building their social and emotional abilities is what is needed.

No surprise: The Trump administration is heading toward reversing the direction Obama took.

Sarah Fischer:

Facebook announced that it will no longer use “Disputed Flags” — red flags next to fake news articles — to identify fake news for users. Instead it will use related articles to give people more context about a story.

Why it’s happening: The tech giant is doing this in response to academic research it conducted that shows the flags don’t work, and they often have the reverse effect of making people want to click even more. Related articles give people more context about what’s fake or not, according to Facebook.

Why it matters: Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg says Facebook is a technology company that doesn’t hire journalists. Without using editorial judgement to determine what’s real and what’s not, tackling fake news will forever be a technology experiment.

Tawnell Hobbs:

Private schools are lowering tuition, ramping up marketing and targeting traditionally underrepresented communities to reverse a national enrollment decline.

Enrollment in private schools for grades pre-K to 12, including parochial schools, dropped by 14%—to 6.3 million in 2016 from 7.3 million in 2006, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Overall school enrollment was nearly flat during that time, with public schools educating 2% more students to reach almost 52 million in 2016, the data shows.

Researchers and private-school associations attribute the decline to a host of factors: more affordable Catholic schools have closed; traditional public schools provide better options; families cut their budgets after the 2007 recession; and charter schools and other alternatives have expanded. School voucher programs and tax-credit scholarship programs have spread to just over a dozen states and are believed to have helped private-school enrollment some, but not enough to make up losses dating back years.

Sara Carter:

A controversial NSA surveillance program used to monitor foreigners was also being used by the FBI as ‘backdoor’ to gain warrantless access to American communications, according to numerous former U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials with knowledge of the program.

The whistleblowers, who recently disclosed the program’s process to Congressional oversight committees, say concern over the warrantless surveillance mounted when it was disclosed earlier this year that Obama officials had accessed and unmasked communications of members of President Trump’s 2016 campaign, allegedly without clear justification.

The process, known as ‘reverse targeting,’ occurs when intelligence and law enforcement officials use a foreign person as a legal pretense for their intended target, an American citizen, the officials stated. The program, as it exists, failed to prevent terror attacks and in many cases made incorrect connections between a foreign target and an innocent American, they stated.

Evgeny Morozov:

The digital turn of contemporary capitalism, with its promise of instantaneous, constant communication, has done little to rid us of alienation. Our interlocutors are many, our entertainment is infinite, our pornography loads fast and arrives in high-definition – and yet our yearnings for authenticity and belonging, however misguided, do not seem to subside.

Beyond the easy fixes to our alienation – more Buddhism, mindfulness and internet detox camps – those in the digital avant-garde of capitalism have toyed with two solutions. Let’s call them the John Ruskin option and the De Tocqueville option. The former extended the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement, with its celebration of craftsmanship and romantic, artisanal labour by Ruskin, William Morris and their associates, into the realm of 3D printers, laser cutters and computerised milling machines.

Makerspaces and fablabs were to be a refuge from the office, with workers finally seizing the means of production. “There is something unique about making physical things. These things are like little pieces of us and seem to embody portions of our souls,” mused Mark Hatch, CEO of TechShop, a chain of mostly US makerspaces, in The Maker Movement Manifesto in 2014.

The De Tocqueville option hailed the use of digital tools to facilitate gatherings in the real world in order to reverse the trends described by Robert Putnam in his bestselling Bowling Alone. The idea was that, thanks to social networks, people would be able to find like-minded enthusiasts, creating a vibrant civil society à la De Tocqueville.

Emily Fang:

The Chinese Communist party has ordered foreign-funded universities to install party units and grant decision-making powers to a party official, reversing an earlier promise to guarantee academic freedom as President Xi Jinping strengthens political control over all levels of education…

Foreign-invested universities and institutes will need to show co-operation over the next few months, the two people said.

Discussions over the new directive began in August among party and education officials. The formal decision to implement it was made after the party’s recently concluded 19th congress, at which Mr Xi said: “Government, military, society and schools — north, south, east and west — the party is leader of all.

Todd Richmond:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) filed a lawsuit directly with the Supreme Court. The lawsuit argues the Department of Public Instruction has been writing administrative rules without permission from the Department of Administration and the governor as required by the REINS Act.

Republicans passed the act this summer. It requires state agencies to submit rule proposals to DOA and the governor before drafting anything. Rules are the legal language that enacts statutes and agency policy. Requiring permission from DOA and the governor before agencies can start writing them essentially gives the governor oversight of every major move the agency makes.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

Julia A. Gwynne and Paul T. Moore :

This study—the Consortium’s first in-depth look at charter high schools—examines four key dimensions of charter high schools in Chicago Public Schools (CPS): school organization and policies; incoming skills and characteristics of charter high school enrollees; school transfers; and student performance. It expands the existing research base on charter schools in important ways by moving beyond test scores to look at a range of outcomes, and by examining variation among charter high schools.

This study finds differences between charter and non-charter high schools in CPS in terms of students’ incoming characteristics, performance in high school, and performance on post-secondary outcomes. It also finds variation on outcomes across charter schools. The study finds charter high schools in Chicago enroll students with higher eighth-grade attendance but similar or lower eighth-grade test scores than non-charter high schools. Once enrolled, students in charter high schools reported more challenging instruction, had higher attendance, and had higher test scores, on average, compared to students in non-charter high schools with similar attendance and test scores in the middle grades. Rates of four-year college enrollment and enrollment in more selective colleges were higher, on average, for students at charter schools than similar students at non-charter high schools. Using the five essentials framework to measure school climate, the study finds, on average, CPS charter high schools looked similar to non-charter, non-selective schools on some dimensions of organizational capacity, such as leadership, but looked quite different on other dimensions, such as preparation for post-secondary.

Lauren FitzPatrick:

Looking at data for students who attended high school between 2010 and 2013, researchers found that about one in every four ninth graders who started at a charter high school ended up at another Chicago school by 12th grade, compared to about one in six kids at a CPS-run school.

“I would say it’s a noteworthy difference and definitely something that should be investigated further,” lead author Julia A. Gwynne, said, adding that the transfers occurred not only for low-achieving students — whom charter critics suspected of being counseled out to keep numbers up — but also for high-achievers. The transfer rates were highest for students at charters with weak academic records — or ones too new to have any track record, where perhaps parents who opted into school choice continued to look for their child’s best option, Gwynne said.

Dr.dk:

Det skal være muligt for gymnasier at gennemsøge elevers private computere for at forhindre eksamenssnyd.

Det mener undervisningsminister Merete Riisager (LA) ifølge Information.

Også elevernes aktivitet på sociale medier skal gymnasierne have adgang til at undersøge i samme forbindelse.

Det fremgår af et udkast til en ny bekendtgørelse om reglerne for prøver og eksamener, som ministeren har sendt i høring.

I udkastet står der blandt andet, at eksaminanden skal give skolen adgang til at undersøge hjælpemidlers indhold, søgehistorik og logfiler samt anvendelsen af materialer, konti på sociale medier med videre på internettet.

Cambridge news:

The Cambridge School Board will consider Monday night, Oct. 16, whether to approve a petition to create an outdoor-agriculture charter school.

The board’s decision, to be made at its regular meeting at 7 p.m. Monday at Cambridge High School, will be preceded by a public hearing at XXX.

Jennifer Scianna, director of the Severson Learning Center, the school farm in the town of Christiana, where Cambridge ACRES – Agriculture Center for Rural Environmental Sustainability – would be located, said the hearing will last about an hour. It will start with her giving an abbreviated version of a presentation about the school she made last month to the Cambridge School Board. Then, it will open up for comments and questions from community members.

Wisconsin DPI, via a kind reader:

Wisconsin won more than $95 million from a competitive, five-year federal grant for the Wisconsin Charter Schools Program, according to an announcement last week by the U.S. Department of Education.

The grant, the largest in the country this year, will support the growth of high-quality charter schools, especially secondary schools that serve educationally disadvantaged students; strengthen and improve charter authorizing quality; and promote and support collaboration and sharing of best practices across the state.

“Our federal grant will help us expand charter school access throughout Wisconsin, especially for our high school kids who are from low-income families,” said State Superintendent Tony Evers. “All kids, regardless of their circumstances, deserve access to innovative opportunities through our public schools. This grant will help us promote more collaboration and partnerships to take the lessons learned in charter schools and apply that success across the state.”

Wisconsin was an early adopter of the charter school concept, enacting legislation in 1993 with 13 public charter schools created under the initial law. Today, the state has 234 charter schools, enrolling more than 44,000 students. This is Wisconsin’s sixth and largest federal grant to support charter school development.

Unfortunately, Madison’s long non diverse K-12 environment has lead to disastrous reading results, despite spending nearly $20,000 per student.

Sally Adee:

We’re getting stupider – and our ageing population may be to blame. Since around 1975, average IQ scores seem to have been falling. Some have attributed this to the evolutionary effect of smarter women tending to have fewer children. But new evidence suggests population-wide intelligence could in fact be sinking because people now live longer, and certain types of intelligence falter with advanced age.

For about a century, average IQ scores in wealthy nations rose in a steady and predictable way – by about three points a decade. This is thought to be thanks to improvements in social conditions like public health, nutrition and education. Since this trend – called the Flynn effect – was first noticed in the 1940s, it has been seen in many countries, from the Netherlands to Japan.

But by 2004, researchers had begun to notice what appears to be a reversal in this trend, with average IQ scores going into decline. “The drop is around 7 to 10 IQ points per century,” says Michael Woodley of the Free University of Brussels in Belgium.

Tom Jackman

A device that tricks cellphones into sending it their location information and has been used quietly by police and federal agents for years, requires a search warrant before it is turned on, an appeals court in Washington ruled Thursday. It is the fourth such ruling by either a state appeals court or federal district court, and may end up deciding the issue unless the government takes the case to the U.S. Supreme Court or persuades the city’s highest court to reverse the ruling.

The case against Prince Jones in 2013 involved D.C. police use of a “StingRay” cell-site simulator, which enables law enforcement to pinpoint the location of a cellphone more precisely than a phone company can when triangulating a signal between cell towers or using a phone’s GPS function. Civil liberties advocates say the StingRay, by providing someone’s location to police without court approval, is a violation of an individual’s Fourth Amendment right not to be unreasonably searched. The D.C. Court of Appeals agreed in a 2 to 1 ruling, echoing similar rulings in the Maryland Court of Special Appeals and federal district courts in New York City and San Francisco.

BEENA RAGHAVENDRAN AND MARYJO WEBSTER:

Once it was the biggest school district in the state. Now Minneapolis Public Schools is the biggest loser in Minnesota’s robust school-choice environment, surrendering more kids to charter schools and other public school options than any other district.

And unlike most other school districts in the state, most of the defections in Minneapolis are occurring among black families. The 9,000 departing black students make up more than half of the districtwide total, according to a Star Tribune analysis of state enrollment data.

Families cite a variety of reasons for leaving the city’s school system, ranging from safety concerns to a belief that academics elsewhere are better than in Minneapolis, which has struggled for years to close the more than 50-percentage-point gap between white and black student achievement.

Minneapolis schools officials say they’re confident they can reverse the trend and boost academic achievement so high that families will once again choose the city’s schools.

But some parents can’t wait for promised change. Jessica Rogers, a south Minneapolis mom who used to work for the district’s nonprofit arm, sent her son to a Robbinsdale-run elementary school and has picked Minnehaha Academy for middle school.

“He needs nurturing,” Rogers said. “That’s not going to happen at Minneapolis Public Schools.”

Related:

Open enrollment leavers.

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

They are all rich white kids and they will do just fine – NOT!

Madison now spends nearly $20,000 per student….

Thomas Frank:

Tough-minded columnists will sputter against fancy colleges that are covering up offensive sculptures and censoring offensive speakers. Readers will be invited to gape at the latest perversity served up by our radicalized professoriate and to mourn the decline of their dear old alma mater. What, oh what is this generation coming to, they will cry.

But while they weep, let us turn our attention to an entirely different aspect of life on the American campus that doesn’t fit into the tidy narrative of fancy colleges coddling the snowflake generation. Let us look instead into the actual conditions under which the work of higher education is done. Let us talk labor.

In August 2016, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Washington decided that graduate students who teach classes at private universities can be considered employees of those universities, eligible to form unions and bargain collectively with their employers. It was the end point of a decades-long process in which the Board has oscillated between ruling in favor of grad student unions and then against them.

In the aftermath of the NLRB decision, graduate student teachers at Columbia and Yale universities, both schools in the Ivy League, held elections and voted to form unions. More organizing elections are scheduled for the next few weeks at a number of other private universities, and as the school year gets under way grad students should rightfully be negotiating new contracts throughout the United States.

But here’s the catch: thanks to the election of Donald Trump last November, the NLRB will soon be under the sway of his extremely anti-union Republican party.

Once Trump’s members are seated on the Labor Board, there is every likelihood they will revisit the matter of graduate student teachers and reverse themselves on the question, which would in turn permit university administrations to refuse to negotiate and even to blow off the results of these elections.

Annysa Johnson:

Marc Sternberg:

On Thursday, a million New York City children will return to school. Educators have long been concerned about a “summer slide” — the learning loss that often occurs when students are out of school for two months. It’s a serious problem. But it’s not just students who can slide backward during these months. Facing political and budgetary pressures, an entire school system can slide without strong leadership. That’s now happening in New York.

In July, two weeks after the State Legislature reauthorized mayoral control of the public school system, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration quietly announced a policy reversal: In the coming year, schools will once again be forced to hire teachers that no other school has wanted to hire. As a former principal of a high school in the Bronx, I find it hard to imagine receiving worse news.

The new policy concerns the approximately 800 teachers in the city’s Absent Teacher Reserve pool, a remnant of a teacher-placement system based on seniority, not what’s best for schools or children. These are teachers who, for whatever reason, have not gotten a job in any of the city’s 1,700 schools, sometimes for many years. The city is in this position because the union contract makes dismissing teachers a virtual impossibility. A result is that taxpayers spend more than $150 million a year to pay them not to teach. Given the alternative, though, it’s money well spent.

Lucy Kellaway:

It was clear from the start — even to my partial eye — that many of the 1,000 applicants were going to be catastrophes in the classroom. One chief executive of a consultancy firm applied, claiming that he had a strong urge to teach. The following day he sent an email withdrawing his application. He had told his wife over supper what he was planning to do. She pointed out the flaw in his scheme: he didn’t like children very much — not even his own.

It was clear from the start — even to my partial eye — that many of the 1,000 applicants were going to be catastrophes in the classroom. One chief executive of a consultancy firm applied, claiming that he had a strong urge to teach. The following day he sent an email withdrawing his application. He had told his wife over supper what he was planning to do. She pointed out the flaw in his scheme: he didn’t like children very much — not even his own.

Many of the applicants had not set foot in a school since they attended one themselves 30 or 40 years earlier, and so were sent off for a week’s immersion. This weeded out all those who had a fond vision of themselves as Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. It also got rid of those unsuited to the rigidity of school life. One man was told to leave after his first day — he had sat at the back of class checking his emails and then proceeded to go to sleep.

But for many others, time in school had the reverse effect. Richard Lewis, a 64-year-old consultant, emailed exultantly: “This is the best fun I have had since I bought my new motorbike . . . and I’ve only been here for four lessons. I want to do this all the time!”

Those who survived the week were put through the same assessment as any 22-year-old entering the profession. I sat in on some of the early interviews, wincing as former corporate titans failed to jump through hoops set out for them by people three decades their junior. A senior partner of a magic circle law firm was asked to think of a time when he had received negative feedback and explain how it had made him feel. This floored him. “Gosh”, he replied. “That’s a hard one. I haven’t received any feedback at all in living memory. It’s me who gives it to others . . . ” He didn’t make it. Lots of others didn’t make it, either — they came over as too arrogant, too inflexible or entirely out of touch.

Julia Carrie Wong:

The primary principle at stake – that the US and the internet both remain free speech zones, even for Nazis – has never been more fraught.

“This is a really terrible time to be a free speech advocate,” said Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It’s a ‘First they came for the … situation,” she said, referring to the famous Martin Niemöller poem about the classes of people targeted by Nazis, “only in reverse”.

Though these are dark days for American exceptionalism, the US remains distinct in its commitment to freedom of speech. Even as many Americans increasingly favor European-style limitations on hate speech, the constitution’s first amendment ensures that any such legislative effort is likely a non-starter.

But the fate of the Daily Stormer – as vile a publication as it is – may be a warning to Americans that the first amendment is increasingly irrelevant.

Andre Spicer::

As students have been celebrating their exam results, pundits from across the political spectrum have been commiserating the state of British universities. Andrew Adonis, an education minister during the Blair years, has excoriated universities for offering costly courses while jacking up the pay of their senior leaders. Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s ex-advisor, thinks UK universities are an unsustainable “Ponzi scheme”. The universities minister, Jo Johnson, has written about the need to put further pressure on seats of higher learning so students get good value for money.

Behind the political point-scoring are more serious issues. The university sector has been growing for decades, but now that growth is going into reverse. The number of undergraduates applying to universities has fallen by 4% this year. Although close to 50% of the population goes through higher education, only about 20% of jobs require an undergraduate degree. One US study found that 46% of students showed no improvement in their cognitive skills during their time at university. In some courses, like business administration, students’ capacity to think got worse for the first few years. And after they graduated, many struggled to find full-time work while being loaded down with debt. Nearly a quarter of graduates were living with their parents or relatives.
Fewer UK students gain place on degree course, Ucas figures show
Read more

On top of all this, UK universities have some significant financial difficulties. The university pension scheme is £17.5bn in the red. Senior managers have been on a building spree that has been almost entirely funded by new borrowing on the bond market. Many institutions are locked into costly private finance initiatives.

Alison Gopnik and Tom Griffiths:

One day not long ago, Augie, a 4-year-old Gopnik grandchild, heard his grandfather wistfully say, “I wish I could be a kid again.” After a thoughtful pause, Augie came up with a suggestion: Grandpa should try not eating any vegetables. The logic was ingenious: Eating vegetables turns children into big strong adults, so not eating vegetables should reverse the process.

No grown-up would ever come up with that idea. But anyone with a 4-year-old can tell similar stories. Young children’s creativity seems to outstrip that of even the most imaginative adults.

How does the ability to come up with unusual ideas change as we grow older? Does it begin to flag in adolescence? Before then? To investigate these questions, we and our colleagues recently conducted several experiments, which we relate in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Adrian Jeffries:

Mic started riding the Facebook wave early in 2012. Individual stories kept going viral, pulling in 2 million, 3 million, 5 million unique visitors per piece. Former staffers described the viral power of Mic’s stories as a fluke, something they’d never witnessed before and have never seen again. Every month brought a new record, former staffers told me. It felt like Mic was unstoppable — but it was not to last. In August 2015, Mic’s Facebook traffic dropped dramatically, former staffers said. This happened every so often; traffic would dip, the audience and editorial teams would adjust a bunch of levers, and the crisis would blow over. This time was different, possibly due to changes made by Facebook that included a penalty for clickbait, as indicated by readers clicking on a story but not spending much time with it.
 
 Mic had already exhausted its outrage vocabulary by the time Trump’s election supercharged civil rights violations
 
 Mic, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, had already hired Bleacher Report veteran Michael Cahill in May 2015 as its director of search engine optimization. His task was to translate Mic’s Facebook optimization process to Google. This meant analyzing search trends in order to generate key phrases — everything from “What time is the convention” and “Watch Trump’s speech live” to “How to pick up women” — and assigning those key phrases to a staff of SEO writers, who then reverse-engineered stories around them. “He starts building this little team. They’re off in their own world. Garbage shit. Typos everywhere. ‘Keyword keyword 2017 colon how when where why.’ These poor kids are writing like ten of these a day,” said the former staffer who left in late 2016. “That strategy just kind of overtook the entire newsroom. The desk editors would have weekly meetings with his little lackey… they would have a spreadsheet of like 50 different story ideas that had a bunch of keywords in them, and we had to sit down and assign them to writers together

C.J. Szafir and Libby Sobic , via a kind email:

Today state legislators all over the country are deciding how to comply with ESSA. When the last deadline for submitting proposals arrives this September, we may see a crop of promising plans for the future of K-12 education. Yet in Wisconsin, the planning process has been so flawed that Sen. Alexander’s vision of “innovation” and “ingenuity” seems like a pipe dream.

Wisconsin’s woes have little to do with ESSA itself, which largely delivers on the promise of greater flexibility. To receive funding from Washington, states must submit plans that comply with Titles I through IX of the federal education code. The requirements for these plans are basic: States must maintain a statewide report-card system for public schools, establish methods to measure teacher effectiveness, set policies to reform low-performing schools, and so forth. Each plan must be granted final approval by the Education Department.

The Badger State ought to be taking full advantage of the freedom ESSA provides to enact bold education reform. After all, Wisconsin already has a broad range of educational options, including successful voucher programs and charter schools. Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP-controlled Legislature have established a strong record on education.

The problem is that Wisconsin’s plan for complying with ESSA has fallen to the state’s education agency, the Department of Public Instruction. Its leader, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, is a notorious opponent of education reform. Mr. Evers’s greatest hits include calling the expansion of school vouchers “morally wrong” and routinely criticizing Gov. Walker’s Act 10 reforms of public-employee unions. It’s worth noting that in opposing the governor, Mr. Evers may have more than the students’ interest in mind. He recently filed paperwork to enter Wisconsin’s 2018 gubernatorial race, hoping to upset Mr. Walker’s shot at a third term.

So far, the department has cleverly worked to avoid any oversight of its ESSA plan by the legislature. To create the illusion of accountability, Mr. Evers formed the Equity in ESSA Council, an advisory board made up of legislators, school administrators, union leaders and education reformers. In truth, however, the council has no power to set the agenda or control the provisions of the state’s ESSA proposal.

Related:

Tony Evers

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Madison spends far more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Stephen Machin and Tuomas Pekkarinen:

Do boys and girls differ in their intel- lectual and cognitive abilities and, if so, in what way? These questions have raised considerable debate, both in terms of average performance and in terms of variability around the average.
Empirical research on gen- der differences in achievements produces mixed conclusions, with some evidence that favors boys and some that favors girls (1–4). In many countries, girls show superior performance in school examinations, which is also reflected in higher rates of attendance in tertiary educa- tion. In addition, girls have been improving their position rela- tive to boys (5, 6). In countries with a more gender-equal cul- ture, the gender gap that is usu- ally in favor of boys in average mathematics test scores is erased or even reversed in favor of girls (7).

Wisconsin democracy campaign:

Spending by the candidates and outside special interest groups in the state school superintendent’s race last spring totaled about $1 million, a Wisconsin Democracy Campaign review found.

Fundraising and spending reports filed this week show the three candidates spent about $767,650.

Candidate spending was led by incumbent School Superintendent Tony Evers, whose campaign doled out about $553,000 to win reelection to his third four-year term. Evers’ general election opponent, Lowell Holtz, spent about $143,900. The third candidate John Humphries, who lost in the February primary, spent $70,680 through March 20. There was no campaign report available for Humphries for the latest fundraising and spending period through June 30.

Jordan C. Axelson:

To address the need, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers last month approved Wisconsin’s Computer Science Standards for K-12 education. Wisconsin is the 10th state to establish such a model.

Each school district will have the choice to accept the standards in full, use them as a foundation to write their own version, or disregard them.

The document outlines learning objectives for students, but each district will decide on how to develop their own programs. Nationally, only 40% of schools now offer computer programming — and the standards are intended to help change that.

The standards propose integrating fundamental computer science concepts, such as using numbers or symbols to represent objects, into elementary school classrooms and progressing to technical courses in high school.

“It’s really important to start early,” said Dennis Brylow, associate professor of math, statistics and computer science at Marquette University and co-chair of the Computer Science Standards Writing Committee.

In middle school, students already begin to set themselves on STEM tracks or to pursue other career paths. “We really need students to not be afraid of these courses in th

Fascinating.

Reading progress?

Molly Beck:

Two years ago Preston Bratz made the mistake of trying to buy a joint for 10 bucks.

Bratz, who was a 15-year-old sophomore at La Follette High School at the time, got caught arranging the purchase at school and was immediately put on track to be kicked out of school.

But after an aggressive campaign to reverse that decision, spearheaded by Bratz’s grandmother, Bratz’s recommended expulsion was thrown out and his case helped push the Madison School Board to rethink its zero-tolerance discipline policies.

Alan Borsuk:

t’s an emergency. It says so right there on the legal papers: “Order of the State Superintendent for Public Instruction Adopting Emergency Rules.”

But it’s a curious kind of emergency. Elsewhere in the paperwork, it uses the term “difficulties.” Maybe that’s a better way to put it.

Underlying the legal language lie questions that are causing big concern in perhaps every school district and independent school in Wisconsin this summer:

Who’s going to fill the remaining open teaching jobs we have? How are we going to put together a staff when some specific positions are proving hard to fill? Are we really getting the best people we feasibly could to work in our classrooms?

And one question that was prominent in my thoughts as I sat through a public hearing in Madison on Thursday on these “emergency” changes to some of the rules governing teacher licensing in Wisconsin:

Would you call these new rules “good” or call them “necessary because of the shape things are in”?

If you’re hanging around with school administrators, you hear a lot of talk about teacher shortages. The “pipeline” leading into classroom jobs is not nearly as full as it used to be. Certain jobs — science, math, special education, bilingual, to name four — are a challenge to fill. Some areas, especially the most rural and the most urban, are finding it particularly difficult to attract top candidates for jobs.

Overall, how much of a shortage is there? The situation “has proven to be very difficult to quantify,” Tony Evers, the state superintendent, told me after Thursday’s hearing. Nonetheless, Evers said, he hears about shortages from school officials all the time.

Jon Bales, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, sat quietly in the audience of about 30 at the public hearing. But he told me that the emergency rules were regarded as very important by the administrators he represents.

Will there be classrooms without regularly assigned teachers come the start of the school year? Yes, Bales said. Not a large number, but some. There is a real need to get more people into the pool of candidates applying for teaching jobs.

The “emergency rules” that have now been put in place make it easier to get a Wisconsin teaching license in a variety of circumstances — to name several, if you’re close to meeting the existing requirements for a specific license, if you’re moving to Wisconsin from another state, if you haven’t quite met the existing requirement to demonstrate knowledge of the content you’ll be teaching, and so on. There are several things going on here.

Much more on the attempts to weaken Wisconsin’s thin teacher content knowledge requirements, here.

Bradford, Fuller & Stewart:

Education reform is at a crossroads in this country. And it seems the issue of parent choice — who should have it, how much of it there should be, and for what schools — will determine the direction many reformers will take.

While some may have difficulty defining where they stand on “choice,” others of us — who have spent years, decades, and lifetimes advocating for the liberation of Black children from schools that have not worked for them — do not suffer this crisis of clarity. Our belief is that low-income and working-class families need, as one of the few levers of power at their disposal, the power to choose the right school for their children — and that those choices should include traditional public, public charter, and private schools. Our belief is grounded not just in our understanding that no one type of school is the right fit for every type of child, but in the frank, stark, brutal reality and history that colors the pursuit of education by Black people in this country.

Black history teaches us liberation and education go hand in hand, which is why the struggle by Black people in America to be free has also always included the struggle to be educated. Black people are the only Americans for whom laws were passed prohibiting their education. Despite this, from the moment Black folks became “free” we worked to build our own schools and educate our own children. Yet, still today, Black parents must fight to access schools of their own choosing.

Williamson M. Evers and Vicki E. Alger::

At the behest of the Education Department, the Mathematica Policy Research Group studied a TRIO program and found weaknesses, which it first reported in 2004. The final report found “no detectable effects” on college-related outcomes, including enrollment and completion of bachelor’s or associate’s degrees. In a striking acknowledgement that these programs don’t hold up under scrutiny, lobbyists for the programs got Congress to ban the Education Department from setting up control-group evaluations of TRIO and GEAR UP.

Another sign of dysfunction is that — despite a demonstrable lack of success — grants to run TRIO and GEAR UP programs almost always get renewed. For example, in California, 82% of those who had grants in 2006 to manage this “no detectable effects” TRIO program still had those grants a decade later.

The K-12 programs proposed for elimination in the Trump budget are similarly ineffective.

In 1994, the Clinton administration started the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which promised to provide disadvantaged children with after-school enrichment to improve their academic performance. Nearly $18 billion spent over two decades later, there’s scant evidence of success. “It’s a $1.2 billion after-school program that doesn’t work,” according to Mark Dynarski of the Brookings Institution. He should know.

Dynarski worked at the U.S. Department of Education during the Clinton administration and directed the 21st Century Community Learning Centers’ national evaluation while he was a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research. The three evaluations published between 2003 and 2005 concluded that the achievement of participating students was virtually the same, but their behavior was worse, compared with their peers who weren’t in the program.

Natasha Korecki::

It’s increasingly possible that Rauner — who promised that he carried negotiation credibility and the know-how to fix the state’s finances — could complete his four-year term in office without ever having passed a budget. At that point, economic forecasts indicate the state’s unpaid bill pile would soar beyond $20 billion. The bill backlog was at about $6 billion when Rauner first took office.

To put it into perspective, the Republican-dominated Kansas Legislature just overrode a veto by its governor from the same party that reversed the governor’s tax cuts and created $1.9 billion in revenue. Lawmakers there panicked after the state found itself $900 million in the hole — a drop in the bucket compared to Illinois.

Few Illinois state pols seem to be panicking. That could be a reflection of voters who don’t seem rattled.

Instead of voting on full-fledged budgets, including possibly increasing revenue, the governor and the General Assembly have signed off on stopgap spending plans. That means they’re cherry picking certain areas to fund — keeping schools open and roads paved.

“This impasse has been sort of cleverly positioned to diminish the immediate, obvious impacts on your middle-class voters,” said Andrea Durbin, chief executive officer of Illinois Collaboration on Youth. “Those voters are being deceived, because every single one of us is going to pay more every single day that this goes on. Having the DMV open, state parks, highway construction and K-12 open, it allows your sort of average middle-class voter to be deceived about what is going on.”

Illinois was creative in how it pays its bills long before Rauner took office. It has for years taken the politically palatable option of avoiding tax hikes while borrowing from pension funds, allowing its pension backlog to balloon and failing to sock away money for emergencies. Illinois is just one of nine states to not have a rainy day fund, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.

Last month, a group of protesters was so fed up with the stalemate that it took drastic measures to draw attention to the crisis. They walked 200 miles from Chicago to Springfield, stopping in towns along the way to talk about the budget. Once inside the capital, some demonstrators were dragged from the House chamber. In the evening, another group tied their wrists together, chanted traditional protest chants and sat in a circle outside the governor’s office before about three dozen were arrested.

Mark Musser:

The student antics at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington have recently garnered some national media attention – but not nearly enough. Tucker Carlson interviewed progressive biology professor Bret Weinstein, who had the moral dexterity to show up to teach his own class as contracted by the college in spite of the fact that students had decided to impose on the campus an anti-white imperialism day. The point of the student protest was that any white person who came to the college on that particular day was demonstrating that he is not in alliance with their anti-racist crusade. Blaming Trump’s election, such a proposal was a reversal of a long standing practice at the college where students gave themselves a day of absence to protest racism.

Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca and Jimmy Narang:

We estimated rates of “absolute income mobility”—the fraction of children who earn more than their parents—by combining data from U.S. Census and Current Population Survey cross sections with panel data from de-identified tax records. We found that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. Increasing GDP growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility to the rates experienced by children born in the 1940s. However, distributing current GDP growth more equally across income groups as in the 1940 birth cohort would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the “American dream” of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is shared more broadly across the income distribution.

Madison School District budget data.

John Nichols:

The DeVos interventions are not about improving public education; they are about pushing a political agenda that is rooted in ideological obsessions rather than an understanding of how to improve schools. As the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights noted with regard to DeVos: “She has never been an educator or worked directly with children and families in public schools. She has never led a school, district or state agency tasked with educating students. She has never been a public school parent or a public school student. This lack of experience makes her uniquely unfamiliar with the challenges and opportunities facing the nation’s students, families, educators and schools.”

DeVos and her ilk have succeeded in politicizing the education debate to such an extent that historically nonpartisan contests have seen clear divides between candidates who defend public education (and are often backed by Democrats, progressives and teacher unions) and candidates who align with the DeVos agenda (and who are often backed by Republicans, social conservatives and corporate interests that favor privatization).

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

How are Wisconsin students doing?

Stretchtargets.org

Alyssa Shuman:

Television crews from as far away as the Netherlands and Japan had come to film this moment, when the oldest plant of the nation’s largest automaker turned out its last.

Janesville, Wis., lies three-fourths of the way from Chicago to Madison along Interstate 90. The county seat of 63,500 people is the home town of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R) — an old United Auto Workers town in a state led by a new generation of conservative, Gov. Scott Walker (R). It is a Democratic town still, though the economic blow that befell Janesville is the kind of reversal of fortune that drove many working-class Americans to support Donald Trump for president.

The assembly plant began turning out Chevrolets on Valentine’s Day 1923, and, for 8½ decades, the factory, like a mighty wizard, ordered the city’s rhythms. The radio station synchronized its news broadcasts to the shift change. Grocery prices went up along with GM raises. People timed their trips across town to the daily movements of freight trains hauling in parts and hauling away finished cars, trucks and SUVs.

And so, when the plant stopped in the midst of the Great Recession, the people of Janesville — even as they began to reinvent themselves and their town — clung to a faith that GM would reopen the plant so their future could be like their past. Over time, though, people began to confront a question they had not considered before: What choices to make when there were no more good choices left?

Mike Hutchens:

Life is becoming increasingly less predictable. From the political volatility of Donald Trump and Brexit to the vast societal changes of globalisation, drastic, seismic change is in the air.

While unpredictability is already problematic for many, for future generations there are no signs of things calming. If we accept that the role of education is to furnish our children with the best understanding, skills and values for a prosperous and happy life, then how do we arm them for a future that we can’t imagine? Do we even need knowledge in a world of Alexa and Siri? Is the skill of agility now more valuable than the gaining of knowledge?

We’ve prioritised the acquisition of knowledge around what we assume society would deem most “worthy”. For much of history, knowledge was rooted in theology: it was about explaining the world in a supernatural way, seeing goodness as a tenet. The industrial revolution saw a vast shift away from this to a way of maximising return on investment in a production-centric environment. In recent years, we have considered maths, reading, and writing as the basic building blocks for survival; the best levers for our labour to produce value.

Jeff Jacoby:

Of the three R’s, says Will Fitzhugh, the founder and publisher of The Concord Review, the middle R has long been the most neglected. It was true in his own case — when he arrived at Harvard as a freshman 61 years ago, he had never had to write a single term paper — and it remains true now. On the whole, American students graduate from high school incapable of writing a coherent, well-researched essay. Most of those who continue to college don’t become competent writers there, either.

For years, blue-ribbon panels and high-powered commissions have bewailed this state of affairs, to little visible effect. The last time the federal government measured writing skills among middle and high school students, it found that nearly 3 out of 4 could not pass a test of writing proficiency. Employers are forced to spend enormous sums on remedial writing courses for their workers — by one estimate, as much as $3.1 billion per year.

Fitzhugh, who worked for the Apollo space program, Westinghouse, and the Peace Corps before finding his calling as a teacher, didn’t have billions when he launched The Concord Review in 1987. All he had was $80,000 he had inherited from his father, some familiarity with desktop publishing software, and the fervent conviction that what works for high school athletics could work for writing: Promote and praise the top achievers, and other students will be inspired by their example.

Three decades later, Fitzhugh’s journal has become the world’s foremost showcase for first-rate history research by secondary school students. To date, the review has published 1,230 essays by authors from 44 states and 40 other countries, on an astonishing variety of historical topics. These are not short compositions of a few hundred gauzy words. On average, papers published in The Concord Review run 7,000 words, along with detailed endnotes. Among the offerings in the latest issue are a paper on the Opium Wars, written by Stephanie Zhao; an essay on Ronald Reagan and the Cold War by Siddharth Tripathi; and a study of the Treaty of Trianon by Milan Kende Loewer.

Much more on Will Fitzhugh, here.

Bari Weiss:

When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy.

“The great majority of college students want to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight against evil.”

Alan Borsuk:

And Holtz said, “There is no scientific correlation between higher spending and higher academic achievement… Adequate funding is important, but money is not the thing that is going to save our failing schools.”

Evers said, “Frankly, our public schools have been deteriorating in their state support, everybody knows that.” Referring to differences in facilities and success between schools in places such as Milwaukee and in more affluent communities, he said, “Resources are at the core of this.”

In short, Evers sees himself as an advocate for more money for schools. Holtz doesn’t.

The state budget. When Walker says he is going to fight for more money for schools, who does he expect to fight with? It seems certain Democrats will back his proposal, as compared to any involving lower amounts. But some Republican legislators are sending signals they are likely to favor smaller increases, given other pressures on the state budget (which is mostly to say, roads).

WisPolitics:

Holtz also slammed Evers for the state’s achievement gaps, saying it’s “not acceptable to be the worst” in the country. He said one of the main reasons why it exists is because schools aren’t safe

“We’re turning our back on generations of minority kids and saying, ‘Sorry, we didn’t fix the problem,’” he said.

He also asked Evers why he let the achievement gap widen during his eight years as state superintendent.

Evers said the achievement gap is tied to poverty, which he’s not responsible for, but refuted Holtz’s claims that he’s done nothing on the issue. The state has “spent a lot of time, effort and money” to help address the issue and noted there’s lots of collaborations with other state agencies happening to provide mental health treatment, services for parents and developing job centers.

Dave Umhoefer:

In his bid to unseat Tony Evers as state school superintendent, self-described “kidservative” Lowell Holtz criticizes Wisconsin’s dubious distinction of graduating white high school students at much higher rates than minority students.

On his campaign blog, Holtz says his attention to safety and discipline as Beloit school superintendent from 2006 to 2009 improved the completion rate among high school students of color.

Specifically, he claimed: “Our minority graduation rate went from levels below Milwaukee and Madison, to above 80%.”

Lisa Speckhard::

Common Core educational standards may not seem like a subject asking for fiery debate, but the candidates for the April 4 election for Wisconsin state superintendent proved their passion for the issue on TV Sunday.

Incumbent Tony Evers, running for his third term, and Dr. Lowell Holtz, former district superintendent for Beloit and Whitnall schools, appeared on this week’s installment of “UpFront with Mike Gousha,” and ended a joint appearance on a rocky note.

The candidates talked over each other while debating the Common Core State Standards, which Holtz argued was a mandatory “federal intrusion.”

“We had no choice, Tony,” Holtz said.

“This is not federal intrusion. If you’re worried about federal intrusion, you should be worried what Betsy DeVos is doing to us with the new budget,” Evers said. “We’re cutting our after-school programs. That is federal intrusion, my friend.”

Abigail Becker:

Wisconsin has been labeled one of the worst states in the nation for black children based on measures including poverty, single-parent households and math proficiency. Statewide, just over 15 percent of black students tested proficient on statewide exams in math, compared to 43 percent of white students, according to 2013-14 test scores from the state Department of Public Instruction.

Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public instruction since 2009, conceded there is only one way to describe Wisconsin’s achievement gap: “It’s extraordinarily horrible.”

The gap, he said, has racial and economic causes.

“Wisconsin has a history of not being able to solve this issue and, frankly, not being able to lift people of color out of poverty in any significant way,” Evers said.

“Can we do more in our schools? Yes, and we should do more. But the fact of the matter is, we need the entire state to rally around people of poverty or this will never be solved in a satisfactory way.”

Bob Segall, via a kind reader:

In the past three years, thousands of new, would-be Indiana teachers have failed the state’s CORE content area assessment exams. The tests, which are each designed to evaluate teacher knowledge in a very specific subject area, are a prerequisite for new teachers to obtain their Indiana state teaching license.

The CORE teacher assessment tests are administered by Pearson Education, one of the nation’s largest standardized testing companies. In 2014, the Pearson tests replaced what was referred to as the Praxis II teacher exams, which had long been used to assess teachers’ content mastery. The Praxis II tests have a high passage rate for Indiana teachers. That is not the case for many of the Pearson exams, which have pass rates that are horrible.

During the 2015-2016 academic year, only 36% of prospective English teachers passed the CORE middle school English language arts exam.

A dismal 32% of would-be Indiana math teachers passed the CORE middle school math test.

And only 18% of aspiring science teachers passed the CORE middle school science exam.

Other CORE exams – including history, social studies, reading, economics and geography – all show first-time pass rates of less than 50%, according to state testing data obtained by WTHR.

Related: MTEL and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s attempts to weaken teacher licensing requirements.

Related: When A stands for average. 

Mo Bitar:

Reading is complex. It requires specialized knowledge and a decade of practice. But by a certain age, reading becomes a thoughtless activity — you couldn’t imagine not knowing how to do it.
Deploying a server and setting up a reverse proxy engine: that’s pretty complex too. The difference between reading and managing servers is childhood.

Kids today are growing up with iPads in their laps that teach them how to code. Do you think this change will be inconsequential? In a hundred years, advanced tech savviness by all individuals will be as standard as reading.

Meg Jones:

“Here’s my concern about the bully pulpit. If her position is ‘I’m going to Milwaukee and I’m going to go to taxpayer subsidized parochial or private schools that are part of the choice program,’ that’s great. But she also has to visit public schools. …

“She better talk about both in a positive way. She represents all kids, all 680,000 public school kids in the state of Wisconsin. We need her to be an advocate for those kids,” Evers said.

Holtz, the former Whitnall superintendent, said he talked to a friend who knows DeVos and said the new secretary of education has always been dedicated to children and wants students to be successful. He also said the Trump administration has promised not to meddle in decisions by local school districts.

“Assuming they are people of their word, as President Trump says ‘we’re not going to be involved in the states as they have in the past.’ I welcome that with open arms. I don’t want D.C. dictating what we’re doing in Wisconsin,” Holtz said. “I want Wisconsin to choose the path moving forward. I do think she’s going to help us with that.”

The candidates were asked when they last taught in a classroom. Evers said it was in 1980, but as the state superintendent he visits classrooms around the state at least once a week — last week he was in Durand and this week in Green Bay.

Molly Beck:

“I’m still not sure that I violated anything. But if I did, I really am the kind of person who is willing to name it, own it and fix it,” said Holtz. “And I obviously fixed it because I’m not working at the school district. I wanted to keep that separation so I could run 100 percent of the time and not worry about that. If the ethics commission says it was a problem, which I’m not sure they’re going to, then of course whatever the remedy is (I’ll accept).”

During his 2009 campaign, Evers was fined $250 after he sent an email from his personal email account to a Green Bay education administrator on his work account to assist in planning a fundraiser and increasing turnout.

Holtz suggested the race should focus on issues, not his email use, but Evers said the emails are relevant because integrity matters to voters.

“I paid a small fine and learned the lesson on pressing the right button,” Evers said. “Yeah, I think there should be an investigation. It’s clear that I never thought integrity would be an issue in this campaign but it’s clear it’s going to be. People in Wisconsin should be concerned that someone in a position that Lowell Holtz was would be using his email to kind of plan and plot strategy.”

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

Annysa Johnson:

Evers, 65, said his large margin Tuesday reflected Wisconsin voters’ commitment to public education. But he could face a tough fight ahead, he said, if Holtz attracts funding from school reform proponents across the country.

“They both vowed to go after national voucher money, and I assume that will be Mr. Holtz’s M.O.,” Evers said of his challengers. “If that happens…we will work as hard as we can to raise money and get people out to vote the next time around.”

Holtz, 59, was not available for comment, according to his spokesman, because he was celebrating with friends and family. The candidate issued a statement saying he would present “an alternative vision for the future of Wisconsin’s students to that of Dr. Tony Evers.”

Humphries congratulated both candidates in a statement and urged voters to learn more about Holtz’s proposals and to ask Evers what he plans to do differently.

“I remain convinced that Wisconsin students can achieve so much more with the right leadership at DPI.”

So far, Evers has a significant edge financially. As of Feb. 14, he had raised more than $245,000 over the past 13 months, compared to Holtz’s $54,280. But Holtz is expected to pick up many of Humphries’ conservative supporters and could attract outside funding from education reform advocates who see a chance to bring Wisconsin in line with the views of new U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has been critical of Common Core and supports the expansion of taxpayer funded vouchers.

Higher-than-expected turnouts in Madison and Dane County at large — as much as 18% to 22%, according to early estimates — likely helped Evers. Madison and Dane County clerks could not say whether the DPI race brought voters to the polls.

Molly Beck:

The state superintendent race pits two former school district superintendents and longtime educators against each other — a proponent of expanding school choices and an opponent of the state expansion of taxpayer-funded school vouchers.

On the April 4 ballot will be two-term incumbent Tony Evers, a public school advocate backed mostly by liberals and teachers unions who has been at odds with Republicans for years over his adoption of the Common Core State Standards and his opposition to the expansion of private school vouchers in the state.

He took about seven of every 10 votes in the primary.

His challenger, Lowell Holtz, is backed mostly by conservatives and school voucher supporters. He is making his second run for the position and opposes the Common Core State Standards and favors expansion of educational options — including taxpayer-funded vouchers — other than public schools.

Holtz got 23 percent of the vote Tuesday, and was dogged by allegations that he sought to get out of the race in exchange for a guaranteed, taxpayer-funded $150,000 job that would let him oversee the state’s largest school districts, including Madison.

Evers is seeking a third term in the wake of massive membership losses for the state’s largest teachers union, a strong campaign contributor for Evers in the past, setting the stage for the potential of third-party groups spending on behalf of Holtz to ensure the election of a voucher supporter.

Dane County results.

Heather Vogell and Hannah Fresques:

Sunshine’s 455 students — more than 85 percent of whom are black or Hispanic — sit for four hours a day in front of computers with little or no live teaching. One former student said he was left to himself to goof off or cheat on tests by looking up answers on the internet. A current student said he was robbed near the strip mall’s parking lot, twice.
Sunshine takes in cast-offs from Olympia and other Orlando high schools in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Olympia keeps its graduation rate above 90 percent — and its rating an “A” under Florida’s all-important grading system for schools — partly by shipping its worst achievers to Sunshine.

Sunshine collects enough school district money to cover costs and pay its management firm, Accelerated Learning Solutions (ALS), a more than $1.5 million-a-year “management fee,” 2015 financial records show — more than what the school spends on instruction.
But students lose out, a ProPublica investigation found. Once enrolled at Sunshine, hundreds of them exit quickly with no degree and limited prospects. The departures expose a practice in which officials in the nation’s tenth-largest school district have for years quietly funneled thousands of disadvantaged students — some say against their wishes — into alternative charter schools that allow them to disappear without counting as dropouts.

“I would show up, I would sit down and listen to music the whole time. I didn’t really make any progress the whole time I was there,” said Thiago Mello, 20, who spent a year at Sunshine and left without graduating. He had transferred there from another alternative charter school, where he enrolled after his grades slipped at Olympia.

The Orlando schools illustrate a national pattern. Alternative schools have long served as placements for students who violated disciplinary codes. But since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 refashioned the yardstick for judging schools, alternative education has taken on another role: A silent release valve for high schools like Olympia that are straining under the pressure of accountability reform.
As a result, alternative schools at times become warehouses where regular schools stow poor performers to avoid being held accountable. Traditional high schools in many states are free to use alternative programs to rid themselves of weak students whose test scores, truancy and risk of dropping out threaten their standing, a ProPublica survey of state policies found.

5th Circuit (PDF):

Before WIENER, CLEMENT, and HIGGINSON, Circuit Judges. WIENER, Circuit Judge:
Plaintiff-Appellant Phillip Turner was video recording a Fort Worth police station from a public sidewalk across the street when Defendants- Appellees Officers Grinalds and Dyess approached him and asked him for identification. Turner refused to identify himself, and the officers ultimately handcuffed him and placed him in the back of a patrol car. The officers’ supervisor, Defendant-Appellee Lieutenant Driver, arrived on scene and, after Driver checked with Grinalds and Dyess and talked with Turner, the officers released Turner. He filed suit against all three officers and the City of Fort Worth under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging violations of his First and Fourth Amendment rights. Each officer filed a motion to dismiss, insisting that he was entitled to qualified immunity on Turner’s claims. The district court granted the officers’ motions, concluding that they were entitled to qualified immunity on all of Turner’s claims against them. Turner timely appealed. We affirm in part and reverse and remand in part.

Molly Beck:

“I think our track record is pretty good,” Evers said, citing decreased suspensions and expulsions, increased number of students taking college-level courses while still in high school and modest increases in reading proficiency.

“Is it where we want? Absolutely not,” he said.

Reading a key issuefor Humphries
The state’s reading proficiency levels have been a key issue for Humphries, who has said the DPI must have new leadership in order to improve those levels and students’ skills in other subjects.

Since the early 2000s, Wisconsin’s ranking for reading skills has dropped, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

He said DPI is not aggressive enough in translating their priorities to school officials in an effort to combat some persistent academic problems.

“Unless DPI is held accountable in making sure schools understand the importance … we’re not likely to have an impact, Humphries said. “We’ve seen that with academic achievement gaps.”

Humphries and Holtz have proposed writing new state academic standards, and Humphries said he would introduce a process that would allow persistently low-performing schools to be converted into new ones under new administration, including private voucher schools and charter schools, as long school boards agree.

Notes and links on Tony Evers and John Humphries.

WisPolitics: Lowell Holtz John Humphries Tony Evers

Molly Beck:

Two state superintendent candidates publicly called each other liars on Friday — days before the two are set to face each other in a three-way primary with incumbent Tony Evers.

It was the latest twist — punctuated by a Democratic lawmaker crashing a news conference — in an increasingly turbulent race.

At the news conference, candidate John Humphries called opponent Lowell Holtz “a liar” who is falsely blaming unnamed business leaders for Holtz’s proposal for one of them to get out of the race in exchange for a six-figure, taxpayer-funded job should the other win.

Holtz later fired back, calling the Friday event a “three-ring circus” orchestrated by Humphries.

Notes and links on Tony Evers and John Humphries.

Molly Beck

State superintendent candidate John Humphries offered to consider negotiating a consulting contract with opponent Lowell Holtz at the Department of Public Instruction if Humphries defeated incumbent Tony Evers, according to a copy of an email from Humphries.

The Dec. 23 email, which Humphries provided to the Wisconsin State Journal, suggests it was a response to a suggestion from Holtz a day earlier that one of the two candidates drop out of the race on condition the other give him a taxpayer-funded $150,000 job upon winning the state superintendent race.

“My offer includes an opportunity for Lowell to participate in crafting my campaign message,” Humphries wrote. “Lowell would be working alongside me in the campaign, and then in Milwaukee and other urban areas after I am elected. I think the most effective way to do that would be to consider a consulting agreement that would be negotiated once I am elected. Negotiating a contract prior to election would at the very least have an appearance of impropriety. For that reason, I need to be careful with what I agree to but I am interested in continuing our discussions.”

Holtz said that offer amounted to a “bribe” to get out of the race. Humphries campaign spokesman Brian Schupper said that characterization was “ludicrous” since Holtz proposed a day before Humphries leave the race, and that Humphries was offering to discuss ways to possibly work together in the future.

The Humphries campaign released the email Thursday after state Superintendent Tony Evers called on his opponents to release more details about an alleged plan — crafted at the request of unnamed business leaders — to take over the state’s urban school districts.

Notes and links on Tony Evers and John Humphries.

Peter Hotez:

It’s looking as if 2017 could become the year when the anti-vaccination movement gains ascendancy in the United States and we begin to see a reversal of several decades in steady public health gains. The first blow will be measles outbreaks in America.

Measles is one of the most contagious and most lethal of all human diseases. A single person infected with the virus can infect more than a dozen unvaccinated people, typically infants too young to have received their first measles shot. Such high levels of transmissibility mean that when the percentage of children in a community who have received the measles vaccine falls below 90 percent to 95 percent, we can start to see major outbreaks, as in the 1950s when four million Americans a year were infected and 450 died. Worldwide, measles still kills around 100,000 children each year.

The myth that vaccines like the one that prevents measles are connected to autism has persisted despite rock-solid proof to the contrary. Donald Trump has given credence to such views in tweets and during a Republican debate, but as president he has said nothing to support vaccination opponents, so there is reason to hope that his views are changing.

Ed Stannard:

NEW HAVEN >> Yale University’s Calhoun College will be renamed to honor Grace Murray Hopper, a Yale alumna who was a “trailblazing computer scientist, brilliant mathematician and teacher, and dedicated public servant,” Yale President Peter Salovey announced Saturday.

The decision, made Friday by the 19-member Yale Corporation, reverses the trustees’ decision in April not to rename Calhoun, at the end of an academic year in which debates and discussions were held across campus.

Jenny Peek:

When it comes to selecting a leader of the public school system, Wisconsin is the only state in the country that calls on “qualified electors” to make the choice.

The state superintendent of public instruction, a position established by the Wisconsin constitution, lasts four years and is housed within the executive branch of state government. In most states, superintendents are appointed by a state school board or governor.

John Witte, UW-Madison professor emeritus of public affairs and political science, says while the post is meant to be nonpartisan, it has always toed the political line.

“Everybody knows which party they’re in and who is supporting them,” Witte says.

The superintendent runs the administrative apparatus of the state’s schools — across 424 school districts — overseeing teacher licensing, curriculum standards and student aid, and implementing educational programs, some of which are mandated by state law. The superintendent also sits on the Wisconsin Technical College System Board and the UW Board of Regents.

“Around the 1980s things began to change throughout the U.S., and they changed dramatically here in Wisconsin. Superintendents became much more proactive for education, and as the roles of the states increased, so did the roles of state superintendents,” says Witte, referring to state oversight of curriculum and testing standards. “The state superintendent is like a governor for the state school system.”

This spring, Wisconsinites will vote for the next school “governor.” The Feb. 21 primary includes three candidates on the ballot: incumbent Tony Evers; John Humphries, a school administration consultant; and Lowell Holtz, a retired district superintendent. Rick Melcher, who teaches math at Park High School in Racine, is running a write-in campaign. The two candidates with the most votes in the primary will face off in the April 4 general election.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via email:

On January 27th, the Leadership Group on School Staffing Challenges, convened by DPI Superintendent Tony Evers and Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators (WASDA) Executive Director Jon Bales, issued its Full Summary of Preliminary Licensing Recommendations. Together with earlier recommendations from the State Superintendent’s Working Group on School Staffing Issues and the Wisconsin Talent Development/Professional Standards Council Strategic Plan, this document identifies the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading Test (WIFoRT) as a roadblock to licensure for potential teachers.

The WIFoRT, written into State law in 2012, is supposed to be a roadblock to licensure for those who cannot pass it, as it objectively measures a candidate’s knowledge of the foundations of reading acquisition and effective pedagogical approaches. Given our stagnant reading scores since 1992, our low reading proficiency rates, the large gaps in proficiency between different subgroups of students, and our diminished national ranking in reading performance, the legislature agreed with the Read to Lead task force that something needed to be done. The WIFoRT was selected as one way to improve reading education for our children.

The WIFoRT, along with the requirement that student passage rates be reported annually, serves three purposes:

1. Provides incoming college students and their families with comparative WIFoRT passage rates for all institutions of higher education
2. Assures that new teachers are equipped to effectively teach reading (practicing teachers are not covered)
3. Serves as a litmus test on the quality of teacher preparation in reading in our colleges of education

WIFoRT passage rates have not yet been published by DPI or the individual teacher preparation programs (though the test has been required since January of 2014), so our incoming college students lack this information in comparing programs.

The three reports referenced above indicate that inadequately prepared teachers are in fact not being licensed. While that is unfortunate for those aspiring teachers, and reduces number of the candidates in the hiring pool, it is also safeguarding our young and struggling readers by imposing some minimum quality assurances.

Based on the groups’ concerns over the WIFoRT failure rates, we can surmise that there is room for improvement in our teacher preparation programs when it comes to reading. The WIFoRT is a rigorous but not impossible test. A well-prepared college student should not have trouble passing. However, none of these reports addresses improving the standards for teacher preparation. Instead, they suggest lowering the cut score, changing state statutes, putting teachers in charge of classrooms without passing the exam, and allowing unspecified alternative ways to judge a teacher’s competency in foundational reading skills.

Once again, we see our DPI and its advisory groups prioritizing adults over children, and seeking to hide or ignore uncomfortable facts. This is unfair to Wisconsin children as well as potential teachers who deserve to be adequately prepared. If you expect better from our state educational agency, be sure to vote in the February 21st primary and the April general election for state superintendent.

Complete Wisconsin Reading Coalition Commentary “DPI’s Response to Reading Educator Preparation Problem is a Case Study of Evers’ Tenure: Obfuscate the Evidence Rather than Solve the Problem”:

It seems to be official: too many potential educators are failing the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading Test (WIFoRT). It’s been difficult to find this information. We have yet to see any of the statutorily-required annual reports listing passage rates for the WIFoRT, first given in 2014. Allowing itself 2-1/2 years to get results posted, DPI is still working on the 2012-13 year, and individual campuses are following suit. However, three separate DPI-convened groups in the past year have identified WIFoRT as a significant impediment to aspiring educators receiving initial teaching licenses. There must be a problem here. Some relevant quotes:

• “Members asserted that otherwise qualified candidates struggle to pass the state-required reading exam, reducing the supply of potential educators in certain disciplines.”
• The State Superintendent’s Working Group on School Staffing Issues, Final Report, June, 2016 “State statute 118.19 (14) (a) went into effect January 30, 2014 which requires special education teachers to pass the Foundations of Reading Test for Wisconsin. This additional requirement may cause some teacher candidates to take longer to complete preparation programs in order to post a passing score on the test.” Wisconsin Talent Development Framework/Professional Standards Council Strategic Plan Recommendations Draft, November, 2016
• “Members also raised significant concerns about the Foundations of Reading Test (FoRT). While members acknowledged the importance of raising the knowledge and preparation level of all elementary and special education teachers in teaching reading, they also cited the law’s rigidity as a significant barrier to entry. Without a waiver policy or other flexibility, students who have been successfully trained and are sought by school districts are currently unable to achieve full licensure unless they pass this exam. This lack of flexibility is of increasing concern, particularly as recent law changes allow a teacher prepared out of state with only one year of teaching experience to become eligible for a teaching license in Wisconsin without passing the FoRT exam. . . . [T]here are candidates currently on emergency licensure who have completed every portion of their preparation except for successfully passing this exam.” Leadership Group on School Staffing Challenges, January, 2017

Let’s be clear: the WIFoRT is doing exactly what it is intended to do: assuring that new teachers in our elementary children’s classrooms, plus new special education teachers, reading teachers, and reading specialists, have a minimum of competency in the critical area of reading. State law requires these potential educators to pass the WIFoRT before obtaining an initial teaching license and becoming responsible for the reading education of our students. We wish that out-of-state teachers coming to Wisconsin with just one year of experience were held to the same standard.

The WIFoRT is identical to the MTEL 90 reading test pioneered in Massachusetts and now used in other states. It covers information about reading acquisition and effective pedagogical methods that are both fundamental and critical for teachers to be effective. If candidates have been properly prepared by their educator preparation programs, the WIFoRT should not be a difficult test to pass. The cut score for passing in Wisconsin is no higher than it is in other states.
So what is the appropriate response if large numbers of potential educators fail the WIFoRT one or more times? We would hope that our Department of Public Instruction, which sets standards for teacher preparation programs, would look to improving those standards in reading education so that more education students could realize their dream of becoming licensed and effective educators. The failing scores aren’t the problem, they are the symptom of the problem.
Sadly, that is not what has happened in Wisconsin under the tenure of Superintendent Tony Evers. In fact, a DPI process begun over three years ago to create new reading standards for educator preparation programs was never completed. And now we see these troubling recommendations from the three groups mentioned above:

• Adjust the passing cut score on the WIFoRT
• Recommend statute changes [presumably to eliminate or diminish the WIFoRT]
• Delay taking the WIFoRT for a “significant time” while the “otherwise qualified” provisional educator practices teaching and implementing reading strategies as a classroom teacher
• Create a new “Tier 1” license under which an aspiring educator could teach for a year without passing the WIFoRT
• Allow Tier 1 educators to show competence in an alternative way, such as providing “multiple measures of improved student performance in reading,” gaining full licensure without ever passing the WIFoRT
• Allow educators prepared out-of-state to be fully licensed if they have passed the edTPA
• Allow educators prepared out-of-state without passing the edTPA to obtain a Tier 1 license for a year without passing the WIFoRT, then become fully licensed after a year of “successful teaching experience in Wisconsin based on multiple measures of success”

In other words, pass the test unless you can’t pass the test. What kind of safeguard is that for our children? Nowhere is there any mention of working on the standards in reading for teacher preparation programs. The emphasis once again is on making things convenient for the adults while ignoring the damage we will inflict on our students. How will we select which children are assigned to the classroom, reading intervention, or special education care of a new teacher who cannot pass a test in reading foundations? Wisconsin deserves better solutions.

Much more, here on relaxing Wisconsin’s thin K-12 teacher standards.

Molly Beck:

A group of school officials, including state Superintendent Tony Evers, is asking lawmakers to address potential staffing shortages in Wisconsin schools by making the way teachers get licensed less complicated.

The Leadership Group on School Staffing Challenges, created by Evers and Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators executive director Jon Bales, released last week a number of proposals to address shortages, including reducing the number of licenses teachers must obtain to be in a classroom.

Under the group’s proposal, teachers would seek one license to teach prekindergarten through ninth grade and a second license to teach all grades, subjects and special education.

The group also proposes to consolidate related subject area licenses into single subject licenses. For example, teachers would be licensed in broad areas like science, social studies, music and English Language Arts instead of more specific areas of those subjects.

Wisconsin adopted Massachusett’s (MTEL) elementary reading content knowledge requirements (just one, not the others).

Much more on Wisconsin and MTEL, here.

National Council on Teacher Quality ranks preparation programs…. In 2014, no Wisconsin programs ranked in the top group.

Foundations of Reading Results (Wisconsin’s MTEL):

Wisconsin’s DPI provided the results to-date of the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading exam to School Information System, which posted an analysis. Be aware that the passing score from January, 2014 through August, 2014, was lower than the passing score in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Since September of 2014, the Wisconsin passing score has been the same as those states. SIS reports that the overall Wisconsin pass rate under the lower passing score was 92%, while the pass rate since August of 2014 has been 78%. This ranges from around 55% at one campus to 93% at another. The pass rate of 85% that SIS lists in its main document appears to include all the candidates who passed under the lower cut score.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s proposed changes: Clearinghouse Rule 16 PROPOSED ORDER OF THE STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION REVISING PERMANENT RULES

A kind reader’s comments:

to wit “Of particular concern is the provision of the new rule that would allow teachers who have not otherwise met their licensure requirements to teach under emergency licenses while “attempting to complete” the required licensure tests. For teachers who should have appropriate skills to teach reading, this undercuts the one significant achievement of the Read to Lead workgroup (thanks to Mark Seidenberg)—that is, requiring Wisconsin’s elementary school and all special education teachers to pass the Foundations of Reading test at the MTEL passing cut score level. The proposed DPI rule also appears to conflict with ESSA, which eliminated HQT in general, but updated IDEA to incorporate HQT provisions for special education teachers and does not permit emergency licensure. With reading achievement levels in Wisconsin at some of the lowest levels in the nation for the student subgroups that are most in need of qualified instruction, the dangers to students are self-evident”.

Related, from the Wisconsin Reading Coalition [PDF]:

Wisconsin 4th Grade Reading Results on the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

Main takeaways from the 2015 NAEP 4th grade reading exam:

• Wisconsin scores have been statistically flat since 1992
• 37% of our 4th graders score proficient or advanced
• Our 4th graders rank 25th nationally: we have been in the middle of the pack since 2003
• Our African-American students have the second lowest scores in the country (behind Michigan) and statistically underperform their national African-American peer sub-group
• We have the second largest white/black score gap in the country (behind Washington, D.C.) Our Asian students statistically underperform their national Asian peer sub-group
• Only our English Language Learners statistically outperform their national peer sub-group

Statements by our Department of Public Instruction that there was a “positive upward movement” in reading (10/28/15 News Release) and especially that our 4th graders “might be viewed” as ranking 13th in 4th grade reading (11/5/15 DPI-ConnectEd) are inaccurate and misleading.

Proficiency Rates and Performance Gaps
Overall, 8% of Wisconsin 4th graders are advanced, 29% are proficient, 34% are basic, and 29% are below basic. Nationally, 9% of students are advanced, 27% are proficient, 33% are basic, and 31% are below basic.

As is the case around the country, some student groups in Wisconsin perform better than others, though only English Language Learners outperform their national peer group. Several groups are contrasted below.

Subgroups can be broken down by race, gender, economic status, and disability status. 44% of white students are proficient or advanced, versus 35% of Asian students, 23% of American Indian students, 19% of Hispanic students and 11% of African-American students. 40% of girls are proficient or advanced, compared to 34% of boys. Among students who do not qualify for a free or reduced lunch, 50% are proficient or advanced, while the rate is only 19% for those who qualify. Students with disabilities continue to have the worst scores in Wisconsin. Only 13% of them are proficient or advanced, and a full 68% are below basic, indicating that they do not have the skills necessary to navigate print in school or daily life. It is important to remember that this group does not include students with severe cognitive disabilities.

When looking at gaps between sub-groups, keep in mind that a difference of 10 points on The NAEP equals approximately one grade level in performance. Average scores for Wisconsin sub-groups range from 236 (not eligible for free/reduced lunch) to 231 (white), 228 (students without disabilities), 226 (females), 225 (non-English Language Learners), 222 (Asian), 220 (males), 209 (Hispanic), 207 (American Indian or eligible for free/reduced lunch), 198 (English Language Learners), 193 (African-American), and 188 (students with disabilities). There is a gap of almost three grade levels between white and black 4th graders, and four grade levels between 4th graders with and without disabilities.

Scores Viewed Over Time
The graph below shows NAEP raw scores over time. Wisconsin’s 4th grade average score in 2015 is 223, which is statistically unchanged from 2013 and 1992, and is statistically the same as the current national score (221). The national score, as well as scores in Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, D.C., and other jurisdictions, have seen statistically significant increases since 1992.

Robust clinical and brain research in reading has provided a roadmap to more effective teacher preparation and student instruction, but Wisconsin has not embraced this pathway with the same conviction and consistency as many other states. Where change has been most completely implemented, such as Massachusetts and Florida, the lowest students benefitted the most, but the higher students also made substantial gains. It is important that we come to grips with the fact that whatever is holding back reading achievement in Wisconsin is holding it back for everyone, not just poor or minority students. Disadvantaged students suffer more, but everyone is suffering, and the more carefully we look at the data, the more obvious that becomes.

Performance of Wisconsin Sub-Groups Compared to their Peers in Other Jurisdictions
10 points difference on a NAEP score equals approximately one grade level. Comparing Wisconsin sub-groups to their highest performing peers around the country gives us an indication of the potential for better outcomes. White students in Wisconsin (score 231) are approximately three years behind white students in Washington D.C. (score 260), and a year behind white students in Massachusetts (score 242). African-American students in Wisconsin (193) are more than three years behind African-American students in Department of Defense schools (228), and two years behind their peers in Arizona and Massachusetts (217). They are approximately one year behind their peers in Louisiana (204) and Mississippi (202). Hispanic students in Wisconsin (209) are approximately two years behind their peers in Department of Defense schools (228) and 1-1/2 years behind their peers in Florida (224). Wisconsin students who qualify for free or reduced lunch (207) score approximately 1-1/2 years behind similar students in Florida and Massachusetts (220). Wisconsin students who do not qualify for free and reduced lunch (236) are the highest ranking group in our state, but their peers in Washington D.C. (248) and Massachusetts (247) score approximately a grade level higher.

State Ranking Over Time
Wisconsin 4th graders rank 25th out of 52 jurisdictions that took the 2015 NAEP exam. In the past decade, our national ranking has seen some bumps up or down (we were 31st in 2013), but the overall trend since 1998 is a decline in Wisconsin’s national ranking (we were 3rd in 1994). Our change in national ranking is entirely due to statistically significant changes in scores in other jurisdictions. As noted above, Wisconsin’s scores have been flat since 1992.

The Positive Effect of Demographics
Compared to many other jurisdictions, Wisconsin has proportionately fewer students in the lower performing sub-groups (students of color, low-income students, etc.). This demographic reality allows our state to have a higher average score than another state with a greater proportion of students in the lower performing sub-groups, even if all or most of that state’s subgroups outperform their sub-group peers in Wisconsin. If we readjusted the NAEP scores to balance demographics between jurisdictions, Wisconsin would rank lower than 25th in the nation. When we did this demographic equalization analysis in 2009, Wisconsin dropped from 30th place to 43rd place nationally.

Applying Standard Statistical Analysis to DPI’s Claims
In its official news release on the NAEP scores on October 28, 2015, DPI accurately stated that Wisconsin results were “steady.” After more than a decade of “steady” scores, one could argue that “flat” or “stagnant” would be more descriptive terms. However, we cannot quibble with “steady.” We do take issue with the subtitle “Positive movement in reading,” and the statement that “There was a positive upward movement at both grade levels in reading.” In fact, the DPI release acknowledges in the very next sentence, “Grade level scores for state students in both mathematics and reading were considered statistically the same as state scores on the 2013 NAEP.” The NAEP website points out that Wisconsin’s 4th grade reading score was also statistically the same as the state score on the 2003 NAEP, and this year’s actual score is lower than in 1992. It is misleading to say that there has been positive upward movement in 4th grade reading. (emphasis added).

Regarding our 4th grade ranking of 25th in the nation, DPI’s ConnectEd newsletter makes the optimistic, but unsupportable, claim that “When analyzed for statistical significance, the state’s ranking might be viewed as even higher: “tied” for . . . 13th in fourth grade reading.”

Wisconsin is in a group of 16 jurisdictions whose scores (218-224) are statistically the same as the national average (221). 22 jurisdictions have scores (224-235) statistically above the national average, and 14 have scores (207-218) statistically below the national average. Scoring third place in that middle group of states is how NAEP assigned Wisconsin a 25th ranking.

When we use Wisconsin as the focal jurisdiction, 12 jurisdictions have scores (227-235) statistically higher than ours (223), 23 jurisdictions have scores (220-227) that are statistically the same, and 16 have scores (207-219) that are statistically lower. This is NOT the same as saying we rank 13th.

To assume we are doing as well as the state in 13th place is a combination of the probability that we are better than our score, and they are worse than theirs: that we had very bad luck on the NAEP administration, and that other state had very good luck. If we took the test again, there is a small probability, less than 3%, that our score would rise and theirs would fall, and we would meet in the middle, tied for 19th, not 13th, place. The probability that the other state would continue to perform just as well and we would score enough better to move up into a tie for 13th place is infinitesimal: a tiny fraction of a percentage. Not only is that highly unlikely, it is no more true than saying we could be viewed as tied with the jurisdiction at the bottom of our group, ranking 36th.

Furthermore, this assertion requires us to misuse not only this year’s data, but the data from past years which showed us at more or less the same place in the rankings. When you look at all the NAEP data across time and see how consistent the results are, the likelihood we are actually much better than our current rank shrinks to nearly nothing. It would require that not only were we incredibly unlucky in the 2015 administration, but we have been incredibly unlucky in every administration for the past decade. The likelihood of such an occurrence would be in the neighborhood of one in a billion billion.

Until now, DPI has never stated a reason for our mediocre NAEP performance. They have always declined to speculate. And now, of all the reasons they might consider to explain why our young children read so poorly and are falling further behind students in other states, they suggest it may just be bad luck. Whether they really believe that, or are tossing it out as a distraction from the actual facts is not entirely clear. Either way, it is a disappointing reaction from the agency that jealously guards its authority to guide education in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition PDF summary.

Jon Kelvey:

A bunion, you may have the misfortune to know, is a bony growth that forms at the base of your big toe. When that bump begins to irritate the rest of your foot, it has to go.

Wincing would be the correct reaction here. On the pain scale, a bunionectomy doesn’t compare to having a limb sawn off; nor is it particularly medically risky. But since it “involves shaving off extra bone and cutting the big toe in half and pinning it back together,” says David Soergel, chief medical officer of the pharmaceutical company Trevena Inc, “it’s actually a very painful surgery.” That wince-worthy quality makes it the perfect surgery on which to test cutting-edge new pain relievers—such as Oliceridine, Trevena’s newest and most promising opioid compound.

Molly Beck:

He said the revision is necessary because the current state report card system should be more “honest and transparent” about how well schools are educating students. The current system rates schools higher than student test scores indicate, he said.

“Fundamentally, the ratings are very likely to go down because that represents how our kids are actually doing,” Humphries said of his proposal. “You’ve got to have the honest conversation … it’s not a warm and fuzzy kind of a thing to be telling people, but they need to know the truth.”

Wisconsin’s WKCE standards were long criticized for their weakness.

The incumbent Superintendent is Tony Evers.

More on political dynamics, here.

Senator Olson’s wife (Joan Wade) works for the DPI.

The Economist:

THE HYPE OVER MOOCs peaked in 2012. Salman Khan, an investment analyst who had begun teaching bite-sized lessons to his cousin in New Orleans over the internet and turned that activity into a wildly popular educational resource called the Khan Academy, was splashed on the cover of Forbes. Sebastian Thrun, the founder of another MOOC called Udacity, predicted in an interview in Wired magazine that within 50 years the number of universities would collapse to just ten worldwide. The New York Times declared it the year of the MOOC.

The sheer numbers of people flocking to some of the initial courses seemed to suggest that an entirely new model of open-access, free university education was within reach. Now MOOC sceptics are more numerous than believers. Although lots of people still sign up, drop-out rates are sky-high.

Molly Beck:

Overall on school funding, Evers said that the state is not spending enough on schools and that more funding should be sent to schools with higher numbers of students in foster care, students living in poverty and students who don’t speak English as a first language.

Humphries said academic achievement — particularly elementary reading levels — should be raised and budget efficiencies should be found before funding levels are increased. He said schools also should be held accountable on whether they’re spending money on programs that are found not to be effective after years of use.

Wisconsin School Administrators:

As you know on December 22, 2016, the SAA asked the candidates for State Superintendent to respond in writing to several questions on current education issues impacting Wisconsin public schools and public school children.

We have received responses from State Superintendent Tony Evers and John Humphries. Lowell Holtz did not provide responses to the questions but has offered a statement that we are posting for SAA members.

Ashe Schow:

But two days after senior player Drew Wolitarsky spoke at a press conference about the boycott, the team reversed course and accepted the suspensions. The reversal came after media outlets received documents pertaining to the police investigation into the alleged sexual assault (police twice refused to charge the players) and the school’s own investigation.

Claeys defended his team on Twitter after the boycott was announced, writing: “Have never been more proud of our kids. I respect their rights & support their effort to make a better world!” Sources later told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he was initially reluctant about supporting the boycott, but came on board after speaking with the players after the press conference.

Claeys’ stance put him at odds with Coyle and university president Eric Kaler, who released a joint statement when the boycott was announced claiming people upset over the suspensions didn’t “have all the facts.”

Annysa Johnson

After years of complaints from constituents, Wisconsin lawmakers say they are serious about overhauling the state’s school funding formula.

But it will be no easy task, with daunting legal and political risks. And without a large infusion of cash — from the state, local property taxpayers or both — it is unlikely to succeed, many say.

“Unless we can put a lot more money into it, there will be winners and losers. And that will be a challenge for us,” said state Rep. Joel Kitchens (R-Sturgeon Bay), vice chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, who has been tapped by Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) to spearhead the process.

Educators, including Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, welcomed the overture.

“I’m pleased to hear that,” said Evers, who has asked the Legislature for an additional $700 million for schools in the next biennium.

“My guess is they have heard what I’ve been hearing all this time — that the system is broken, so let’s fix it.”

Despite the rhetoric, K-12 spending continues to grow. Madison spends around $18,000 per student.

Molly Beck:

“This is a sleazy deal that lets a candidate for public office keep getting paid by taxpayers, with no oversight for how he spends his days,” said Ross. “All the while promoting selling out our public schools to chase campaign cash from the private school voucher industry and the billionaires that support it.”

Humphries said Ross’ comments were “unfortunate.”

“Running for office is quite challenging if you are not independently wealthy and I am making a very serious commitment to this effort while also trying to sustain my family,” he said. “I hope Mr. Ross could recognize this.”

Humphries is one of two candidates backed by conservatives seeking to defeat Evers in his bid for a third term as the head of DPI.

Madison’s former assistant Superintendent for Business Services administrator Erik Kass left (2012) to setup a consulting firm. (Linkedin)

Riseling Group.

Several current public employees offer consulting services via the Riseling Group, including University of Wisconsin-Madison Vice Provost and Dean of Students Lori Berquam and Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

Jake New:

In 2011, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague letter that urged institutions to better investigate and adjudicate cases of campus sexual assault. The letter spelled out how the department interprets Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and for the past five years it has been the guiding document for colleges hoping to avoid a federal civil rights investigation into how they handle complaints of sexual violence.

The department’s views were praised by victims and their advocates and led to many changes on college campuses, particularly on the issue of burden of proof when campus judicial systems handle sex assault charges. Republican lawmakers and other critics have argued that the guidance goes farther than just clarifying Title IX. They say the department illegally expanded the gender discrimination law’s scope without going through proper notice-and-comment procedures. At the center of that argument — as well as several recent lawsuits against colleges and the Department of Education — is the lower standard of proof.

aljazeera:

Saada governorate, the most heavily bombed region in Yemen, has the world’s highest stunting rates among children, affecting eight out of 10 in some areas, it said.

Stunting – where a child is short for their age – is another sign of chronic malnourishment and has irreversible consequences for both physical health and cognitive function.

Other governorates – Hodeida, Taiz, Hajjah and Lahej – were also badly affected after 20 months of war, UNICEF said.

Laura Ungar & Mike Nichols:

All of this endangers millions of people across the country, mostly in remote and rural communities. Utilities like East Mooringsport Water, serving part of a bayou town of about 800 people, where drinking water went untested for more than five years. Or Coal Mountain, W.Va., a remote 118-person outpost where a retired coal miner pours bleach into untested water at the system’s wellhead in hope of keeping it clean. Or Orange Center School outside Fresno, Calif., where for more than a decade regulators let about 320 grade-school kids drink water that had tested high for lead.

Individually, the communities served by small utilities seem tiny. But together, the number of people getting lead-contaminated drinking water, or water not properly tested for lead, since 2010 is about 5 million.
Virginia Tech’s Marc Edwards, one of the nation’s top experts on lead in drinking water who helped identify the crisis in Flint, Mich., laments that people in America’s forgotten places — rural outposts, post-industrial communities and poor towns — are most at risk from the dangers of lead exposure, such as irreversible brain damage, lowered IQ, behavioral problems and language delays.

John Tierney:

My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science?

My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?

Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. Yes, George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy). Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.

Bob Davis

Barely half of 30-year-olds earn more than their parents did at a similar age, a research team found, an enormous decline from the early 1970s when the incomes of nearly all offspring outpaced their parents. Even rapid economic growth won’t do much to reverse the trend.

Economists and sociologists from Stanford, Harvard and the University of California set out to measure the strength of what they define as the American Dream, and found the dream was fading. They identified the income of 30-year-olds starting in 1970, using tax and census data, and compared it with the earnings of their parents when they were about the same age.

In 1970, 92% of American 30-year-olds earned more than their parents did at a similar age, they found. In 2014, that number fell to 51%.

Jeff Amy:

Graduating high school seniors: does the University of Southern Mississippi have a deal for you!

The 14,500-student school has cut annual out-of-state tuition and fees from $16,529 this year to $9,964 next fall, even as it increases the cost for Mississippi residents by 4 percent, to $7,963.

The idea is to reverse a 2,000-student enrollment dip by pricing a USM education below some public universities in nearby states, and attract enough high-schoolers from Houston, Dallas and San Antonio to raise overall revenue.

“I really believe that this pricing strategy is going to open us up to people looking at the University of Southern Mississippi from places we traditionally haven’t drawn from,” said Douglas Vinzant, USM’s vice president for finance and administration.

Southern Mississippi is joining a trend: The Associated Press counted at least 50 public colleges and universities nationwide that have lowered nonresident tuition by more than 10 percent in recent years without making similar reductions for in-state students.

quantblog

Education in Victoria is succeeding in some areas, but failing in many others – we have new school buildings, but they are overflowing and the school rolls climbing so quickly that teachers and principals have no bandwidth left for improving educational outcomes. Schools are adapting to technology, but failing to handle the wide range of ability and rates of learning our kids have. The system is not flexible enough to handle the needs of low achievers and high achievers in specific areas.

Every couple of months there is a new study showing how badly Australia is doing compared to other countries in areas such as Math. We know there are approaches that have worked elsewhere but we seem unwilling or unable to change and adopt them.

Homeschooling is an important right for Victorians – in many cases it is the only way to solve problems with bullying, with low achieving students and with high achieving students. Homeschooling is a rising demographic which serves as an important barometer of how well our schools are serving students and parents.

Glenn Greenwald

LAST WEEK, A MAJOR censorship controversy erupted when Facebook began deleting all posts containing the iconic photograph of the Vietnamese “Napalm Girl” on the ground that it violated the company’s ban on “child nudity.” Facebook even deleted a post from the prime minister of Norway, who posted the photograph in protest of the censorship. As outrage spread, Facebook ultimately reversed itself — acknowledging “the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time” — but this episode illustrated many of the dangers I’ve previously highlighted in having private tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google become the arbiters of what we can and cannot see.

more.

By David Shepardson, Malathi Nayak and Julia Love

Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google faces a tougher regulatory landscape as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration looks poised to reverse Obama administration policies that often favored the internet giant in the company’s battles with telecoms and cable heavyweights, analysts say.

Google had close ties with outgoing Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration, and its employees donated much more to defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton than to the Republican Trump.

In the most concrete sign yet that the tech policy balance may be tipping in favor of telecom firms ahead of Trump’s presidency, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday halted action on contentious regulatory reform measures opposed by companies such as AT&T Inc (T.N) and CenturyLink Inc.(CTL.N)

Molly Beck:

Over all, Evers is seeking about a $707 million increase in spending including a $525 million increase in general school aid and other changes that would comprise a funding formula overhaul. The request seeks a 2.7 percent increase in overall spending in the 2017-18 school year and a 5.4 percent increase in the 2018-19 school year.

The request marks the fourth time Evers has asked the Legislature to change the state’s funding formula.

Part of the overhaul would eliminate a special funding stream to pay for students living in high poverty and factor more money into the main funding formula for the same purpose.

The budget also asks for increases in state-imposed revenue caps and would set a minimum amount of money the state sends to schools, regardless of how wealthy the district is. Each district would receive a minimum of $3,000 per student under the request.

Molly Beck:

He said school districts can save money because of reduced health insurance costs for staff and can be creative in retaining teachers, like providing bonuses.

Humphries said in an interview that Evers was too focused on objecting to the expansion of private voucher and independent charter schools and not focused enough on raising student achievement and closing the gap in academic achievement between white and black students.

“When student learning — not politics — is our focus, there is nothing that we cannot do,” Humphries said Tuesday.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

Luigi Guiso, Ferdinando Monte, Paola Sapienza, Luigi Zingales:

results, we classified countries according to several measures of gender equality. (i) The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index (GGI) (10) reflects economic and political
The existence (1), degree (2), and origin (3, 4) of a gender gap (difference between girls’ and boys’ scores) in mathematics are highly debated. Biologically based explanations for the gap rely on evi- dence that men perform better in spatial tests, whereas women do better in verbal recall ones (1, 5, 6). However, the perform- ance differences are small, and their link with math test per- formance is tenuous (7). By contrast, social conditioning and gender-biased environ- ments can have very large ef- fects on test performance (8).
To assess the relative
importance of biological and
cultural explanations, we
studied gender differences
in test performance across
countries (9). Cultural inequal-
ities range widely across
countries (10), whereas re-
sults from cognitive tests do
not (6). We used data from
the 2003 Programme for
International Student Assess-
ment (PISA) that reports on
276,165 15-year-old students
from 40 countries who took
identical tests in mathematics
and reading (11, 12). The
tests were designed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develop-
ment (OECD) to be free of
cultural biases. They are sufficiently chal- lenging that only 0.6% of the U.S. students tested perform at the 99th percentile of the world distribution.

by country (see chart, above): in Turkey, –22.6, whereas, in Iceland, 14.5. A similar variation exists in the proportion of girls over boys who score above 95%, or 99% of the country-level distribution (fig. S2A).
opportunities,
Math and reading gender gaps. In more gender-equal cultures, the math gender gap dis- appears and the reading gender gap becomes larger. (Top) Gender gaps in mathematics (yellow) and reading (gray) are calculated as the difference between the average girls’ score and the average boys’ score. A subset of countries is shown here (see SOM for complete data set and calculations). In many countries, on average, girls perform more poorly than boys in mathematics. In all countries, girls perform better than boys in reading. The gender gap in mathematics and reading correlates with country measures of gender status within the cul- ture, one of which measures is the GGI (bottom). Larger values of GGI point to a better aver- age position of women in society. Besides USA, the countries are abbreviated as their first three letters, except for PRT, Portugal, and ISL, Iceland.
The gender gap is reversed in reading. On average, girls have reading scores that are 32.7 higher than those of boys (6.6% higher than the mean average score for boys), in Turkey, 25.1 higher and in Iceland, 61.0 higher (see chart). The effect is even stronger in the right tail of the distribution. In spite of the difference in levels, the gender gap in reading exhibits a variation across countries similar to the gender gap in math. Where girls enjoy the strongest advantage in reading with respect to boys, they exhibit the smallest disadvantage (sometime even an advantage) in math. [The correlation between the average gender gaps in mathematics and reading across countries is 0.59 (fig. S4)].
0.81), our statistical model suggests that the mean score performance in mathematics of girls relative to boys would increase by 23 points, which would eliminate the Turkish gender gap in math (see table, p. 1165). In more gender-equal countries, such as Norway and Sweden, the math gender gap disappears. Similar results are obtained when we use the other indicators of women’s roles in society. These results are true not only at the mean level, but also in the tail of the distribution (table S3). In Iceland, the ratio of girls to boys who score above the 99th percentile of the country distribution in math scores is 1.17.
70 60 50 40 30 20 10
0 -10 -20 -30
0.8 0.75 0.7 0.65 0.6 0.55 0.5
TUR
Gender gap, math Gender gap, reading
KOR ITA USA PRT
Women’s emancipation (GGI)
FRA POL
NOR SWE ISL
GGI index Test score differences between girls and boys

Erin Richards

State Superintendent Tony Evers announced Monday that as part of the next budget, he’ll ask the Legislature to change state law to allow MPS to start the academic term earlier than Labor Day so that Superintendent Darienne Driver can pursue an aggressive slate of credit-recovery programs for high school students.

“It’s time to look at doing some things differently for Milwaukee Public Schools,” Evers said. “If they can do credit recovery in a robust way, that could raise the graduation rate.”

The achievement gap is so stark in Wisconsin because graduation rates are very high for white students and very low for black students. Almost 93% of white students earn diplomas on time in Wisconsin, which ranks just behind white students in New Jersey (94%) and Texas (93.4%). But Wisconsin’s graduation rate for black students is 64.1%, which ranks 6th lowest among states. Nevada is the worst, with a 55.5% black graduation rate, and Minnesota ranks fourth-lowest, at 62%.

Nationally, 74.6% of black students graduate on time.