Annysa Johnson:

Plans to build what is expected to be the second-largest private school in the Milwaukee Parental Choice voucher program passed its final hurdle at City Hall and could begin construction as early as April.

Milwaukee’s Board of Zoning Appeals unanimously approved a special use permit earlier this month for St. Augustine Preparatory School, the $45 million project unveiled last year by Waukesha County businessman and school reform advocate Gus Ramirez.

Ramirez, chairman of Husco International, declined to comment. He is expected to release updated plans, including school leadership, at an April 12 event at Discovery World.

Ramirez and a limited liability company known as Achieving Educational Excellence have been given the go-ahead to build a 170,000 square foot school at S. 5th St. and W. Harrison Ave. The school would accommodate up to 1,000 students in kindergarten through grade 12.

Arjun K. Manrai, AB; Gaurav Bhatia, MS; Judith Strymish, MD; Isaac S. Kohane, MD, PhD; Sachin H. Jain, MD:

Casscells et al1 published a small but important study showing that the majority of physicians, house officers, and students overestimated the positive predictive value (PPV) of a laboratory test result using prevalence and false positive rate. Today, interpretation of diagnostic tests is even more critical with the increasing use of medical technology in health care. Accordingly, we replicated the study by Casscells et al1 by asking a convenience sample of physicians, house officers, and students the same question: “If a test to detect a disease whose prevalence is 1/1000 has a false positive rate of 5%, what is the chance that a person found to have a positive result actually has the disease, assuming you know nothing about the person’s symptoms or signs?”

Mike Mullen:

That video shows the teacher with one kid in a headlock. That student doesn’t appreciate this, and tries lifting the teacher off the ground, while the second kid appears to give the teacher a shove; the combined effect takes the teacher to the cement floor, where the scuffle appears to break up.

Matthew Albright and Saranac Hale Spencer:

The success of those votes comes down to whether district officials can coax enough parents with children in public schools to go to the polls. They must outnumber those who don’t feel they have a stake in the schools or who feel districts should do more to prove they deserve a tax increase.

“If I go to my boss and haven’t done what I’m supposed to … I don’t ask for a raise,” said Susan Welsh, who wants to see Christina begin to improve student test scores and find efficiencies before she votes in favor. “I love my child enough to vote ‘no’ and hold them [the district] accountable to raising the ranking before I give them a raise.”

District supporters say referendums aren’t a luxury. They are a necessity.

Money that pays for schools is a mix of state, federal and local funds. While the state’s portion grows as districts enroll more students, the local portion comes from property taxes that don’t increase to match growing costs.

Malcolm Harris

The common idea across most of the American political spectrum is that compulsory state-funded education is the liberal way to create a knowledgeable and engaged democratic citizenry. Without it, children would either be left to work or would never bother to educate themselves. The specter of illiterate future generations is invoked by both school reformers and defenders of the current system. Although there are many people within the public education system who believe in the noble goals of civic pedagogy, that’s not what America’s schools were built to do. Goyal argues convincingly that, before compulsory schooling, unenslaved Americans were not only extraordinarily well-read by international standards but widely covetous of learning. Compulsory schooling was not introduced to solve the problem of uneducated, unengaged, or unthinking masses. If anything, the opposite is closer to the truth.

In 1837, Horace Mann, the founder of American compulsory education, established the Massachusetts Board of Education, the first such agency and one which would become the model for the nation. But Mann didn’t want a more intellectually engaged population—literacy in the state already stood at 99 percent. Social control was a serious concern for Western elites after a series of failed revolutions, and Mann was very impressed by the system he saw on a visit to Prussia. He returned with a plan for public education.

South China Morning Post:

From the 19th century onwards, “trailing spouses” have made their own way in Hong Kong, opening businesses and forging existences quite separate from their husband’s work role.

Among Hong Kong’s earliest such enterprises was a millinery and haberdashery shop set up on Queen’s Road Central in the early 1850s by Harriet Duddell, in premises let to her by her husband, Frederick, who, with his brother George, was in business in Hong Kong. Harriet never left the China coast; she died in 1857, and was buried in the Old Protestant Cemetery, in Macau. Duddell Street, in Central, is named after the family.

Not all “hobby” businesses are intended to turn a profit – or are operated by trailing spouses. Have you ever wondered just how – in times of catastrophically spiralling rents – various small “businesses” found across Hong Kong can possibly make any money? From Kennedy Town to Tai Hang, examples abound of chic patisseries selling “artisanal” this or “hand-made” that, or tiny boutiques lightly stocked with virtually one-of-a-kind homewares or garments.

:

the fall of 2013, Yue Zou decided that she wanted to leave Hegang, the city where she lived in the Heilongjiang province of China, and attend college in the United States. Her boyfriend, already a student at the University of Pittsburgh, was eager to help her get admitted to a competitive university.

He didn’t help to edit her essay or arrange for her to be tutored for the SAT. Instead he contacted a Chinese company that specializes in finding American-based test-taking proxies who, for a fee, obtain high scores on the SAT, the graduate school admission test called the GRE, and English-proficiency exams like the TOEFL for their wealthy Chinese clients.

According to court documents, Zou’s boyfriend negotiated a deal with the test broker. Zou then paid the broker $6,000 for the TOEFL and $2,000 for the SAT. The broker then arranged for a graduate student to take Zou’s college-entrance exams in Pennsylvania, the court documents say.
The scheme succeeded, at least for a time. Zou applied to and was accepted at Virginia Tech, where the average SAT score range for the math and reading sections is between 1160 and 1340. She enrolled there in the fall of 2014.

Chris Rickert:

I guess when you risk losing your monopoly over publicly funded education, you’re not likely to roll out the welcome mat for anyone chosen to oversee the creation of non-district-controlled charter schools — no matter what his credentials.

As the man who will establish and lead the new Office of Educational Opportunity for the University of Wisconsin System, Gary Bennett will have a lot of influence over what kinds of independent charter schools Madison and Milwaukee students and their familieswill be able to choose from in the future.

Astra Taylor:

Have you heard the latest wisecrack about Harvard? People are calling it a hedge fund with a university attached. They have a point—Harvard stands at the troubling intersection between higher education and high finance, with over 15 percent of its massive $38 billion endowment invested in hedge funds. That intersection is getting crowded. Yale’s comparatively modest $26 billion endowment, for example, made hedge fund managers $480 million in 2014, while only $170 million was spent on things like tuition assistance and fellowships for students. “I was going to donate money to Yale. But maybe it makes more sense to mail a check directly to the hedge fund of my choice,” Malcolm Gladwell tweeted last summer, causing a commotion that landed him on NPR.

Chris Rickert:

In a brief speech last weekend at the shindig for John Matthews — who retired in January after 48 years as executive director of the Madison teachers union — Kloppenburg said she “couldn’t miss gathering with some of the best people in Wisconsin to honor the most amazing John Matthews.”

Matthews is not known for his politically independent views — or his circumspection. He hasn’t been shy about hating on the Madison School Board, for example.

Kloppenburg’s campaign has also hinged on painting Bradley as a partisan because she’s a three-time Walker appointee to the bench and a member of conservative groups such as the Federalist Society.

By contrast, Kloppenburg’s website describes her as “running for Supreme Court to help maintain a judiciary that is non-partisan, independent and free from special interests.”

Bradley makes the same hollow promises on her website, but also self-identifies as a conservative with a few well-known code phrases (e.g., her approach “is to interpret the law, not invent it”).

Much more on John Matthews, here Event photos.

Candidate Links: Joanne Kloppenburg and Rebecca Bradley.

MTI Voters political contributions.

Alan Borsuk:

Point one: If Milwaukee has demonstrated anything to the nation with its long, broad and deep school choice offerings, it is that school quality is generated far more at the level of individual schools than sector by sector.

There are MPS schools where students score much above the Milwaukee averages and, in a few cases, above the state averages. There are voucher schools where that is true. And the same for charter schools. And there are MPS, voucher and charter schools with scores that raise major questions about the school.

Nobody has a monopoly on success or failure. It’s really a school-by-school subject — and, often times within schools, a classroom-by-classroom subject, with some teachers leading their students to much better outcomes than others.

Point two: There’s little reason to find joy in the overall scores, no matter the sector. Third- through eighth-graders in independent charter schools did better than voucher and MPS students for language arts (also generally labeled, “reading”). That means about a third of the charter kids were rated proficient or advanced, compared with a quarter, give or take several points, of other kids.

Nick Cohen:

always admired the liberal Muslims in the Quilliam Foundation. It is hard to take accusations of betrayal from your own community. Harder still to keep fighting when the thought feeling keeps nagging away that out there, somewhere, there are Islamists who might do you real harm.

But Quilliam keeps fighting. To mark the launch by students of the Right2Debate campaign, which seeks to make universities live up to their principles and respect the right to speak and dispute, they have collected accounts from atheists and secularists of the wretched state of higher education.

I should pause to explain that last sentence to the confused.

aud.life:

The research (and clearly the hype about) blockchain in education continues. Look for some more formal articles/analysis from me in the coming weeks. Other posts in this series:

Claudia Rowe:

But when Bay State reformers began their work two decades ago, school outcomes in Massachusetts looked a lot like ours — possibly worse. Thirty percent of elementary- and middle-school kids could not do basic math. Some schools had a student-teacher ratio of 50-to-1. Business leaders worried that a growing underclass could cripple the economy. And there was a lawsuit, similar to the McCleary case in Washington.

“The education of all children was seen as a matter, not only of fairness but of economic self-interest,” said Paul Reville, who was the state’s secretary of education during the overhaul and now teaches at Harvard University.

In his opinion, three strategies — all of them costly and most aimed at low-income schools — are making the difference: beefed-up early education; an expanded school day resulting in significant salary increases; and huge boosts to teacher training.

“You can’t say if I put in x more dollars, I’ll get y results,” he added. “It’s how you spend the money that matters. If you do more of the same, you’ll get more of the same.”

Ben Wildavsky:

But he’s also one of the leading advocates for adding a big dose of humanities and social sciences to the curriculum of Hong Kong’s universities.

Chung and other backers of an unprecedented three-year-old curriculum-reform effort are determined to steer the city’s eight universities away from the rote learning, test obsession, and narrow career focus that still characterize much of the Asian education system. They think it’s past time for colleges to introduce a broader range of subjects, to promote greater intellectual curiosity, and to foster creative thinking. And they’re convinced that these changes will, in turn, build a workforce of rigorous, creative thinkers—just what they think is needed to meet the fast-changing needs of a transforming global economy.

John Elder Robison:

What happens to your relationships when your emotional perception changes overnight? Because I’m autistic, I have always been oblivious to unspoken cues from other people. My wife, my son and my friends liked my unflappable demeanor and my predictable behavior. They told me I was great the way I was, but I never really agreed.

For 50 years I made the best of how I was, because there was nothing else I could do. Then I was offered a chance to participate in a study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching center of Harvard Medical School

Sarah Yatsko

Michelle King, the new superintendent at Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), has been on a listening tour. A 30-plus year veteran of the district who has risen from the teacher ranks, King wants to connect with parents and share her plans for the district, then hear their concerns—standard practice for an incoming schools’ chief. But for her first stop, King chose a low-income neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, where there are some strong and popular charter schools. In front of 700 parents, she made Los Angeles Times headlines when she “called for traditional public school and charters…to work together.” She added that delivering a strong education is “something we need to do together. I can’t do this alone.”

Attracta Mooney:

Olivia Mitchell, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said public pension plans face “grave difficulties”.

“I do believe that US cities and towns will continue to suffer, and there will be additional bankruptcies following the examples of Detroit and the cities of Vallejo, Stockton and San Bernardino,” she said.

The worsening pension deficit means cities and states will have to contribute more to retirement plans, according to Mr Aaron, forcing them to either find new sources of revenue, such as by raising taxes, or reducing workforces or cutting services.

The Moody’s research additionally found that fewer than half of the 56 pension plans it examined received government pension contributions at an adequate level to reduce the funding gap.

A study by Wilshire Associates, the consultancy, published earlier this month, showed that state-sponsored pension plans in the US had just 73 per cent of the assets they needed to pay current and future retirees in mid-2015, down from 77 per cent in 2014. In 2007, this was 95 per cent.

Paul Hill

Nobody wins as a result of America’s neglect of its rural schools.

Moderate investments of time, money, and thought could unlock the potential of millions of students growing up, but it’s essentially going nowhere in rural areas.

Rural K-12 schools face unique challenges brought on by isolation, limited access to qualified faculty, declining economic bases, and community conflict over taxation and funding. Many face sudden changes in student population – declines in some places and rapid increases in others, the latter often due to influxes of children from former migrant worker families.

State and federal policies on school funding and operation also pose challenges, as they often require bureaucratic capacities that small rural districts can’t and shouldn’t have. Categorical funding programs often force schools to spend money in ways that don’t fit rural needs. Rigid state teacher salary schedules make it difficult for rural schools to compete for talent.

Patrick Denice, Betheny Gross, Karega Rausch

Fair use of exclusionary discipline is a rising concern in public schools. At issue is whether this type of discipline is disproportionately applied to certain groups of students and whether some charter schools use it more frequently. For the first time, data compiled by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights capture discipline practices from all public schools, allowing for comparison between the traditional public and charter sectors. However, because they are reported at the school level, not at the individual student level, these data paint an incomplete picture.

To truly understand discipline practices between and within school sectors, a panel of experts recommends a more comprehensive approach to capturing discipline data and evaluating and comparing school discipline practices. A robust research agenda on school discipline might include the reasons why different approaches to discipline policy are developed, how schools define and conceptualize discipline practices, the impact of discipline practices on teacher supply and turnover, the interplay between school culture and discipline and the effects of exclusionary discipline on the affected students and their peers and teachers.

Liz the Developer:

work at a bootcamp. I’ve chosen to remain in this role long past the average bootcamp-lead-instructor burnout time – just one year. I’ve been doing this since 2012, the beginning of the bootcamp industry. Why haven’t I burnt out? I believe a whole helluva lot in this thing, and keeping it alive, honest, and improving is a worthwhile way to spend my life. I firmly believe that bootcamps are outperforming universities.

It’s a new model for making programmers – a cross between traditional academia and the bootstrapped-learning of the tinkering children of the 70s, 80s, 90s. To me, a bootcamp is like finding another kid at school who also spends their nights nerding out, fiddling with the same toys you’re fiddling with. Only now that kid isn’t on an island in a sea of people disinterested or actively annoyed with your passion. Now that kid is a group of people, learning with you, fascinated by the same stuff.

Brook Larmer:

For most of her childhood, Monica did as she was expected to. She gave up painting and calligraphy, and rose to the top of her class. Praised as a “study god”, she aced the national high-school entrance exam, but inside she was beginning to rebel. The agony and monotony of studying for that test made her dread the prospect of three more years cramming for the gaokao, the pressure-packed national exam whose result – a single number – is the sole criterion for admissions into Chinese universities.

One spring evening two years ago, Monica, then 15, came home to the compound and made what, for an acquiescent military daughter, was a startling pronouncement. “I told my parents that I was tired of preparing for tests like a machine,” she recalls. “I wanted to go to university in America.” She had hinted at this desire before, talking once over dinner about the freedom offered by an American liberal-arts education, but her parents had dismissed it as idle chatter. This time, they could see that she was dead serious. “My parents were kinda shocked,” she says. “They remained silent for a long period.”

Several days passed before they broke their silence. Her father, a taciturn career officer educated at a military academy, told her that “it would be much easier if you stayed in China where your future is guaranteed.” Her mother, an IT engineer, said Monica would very likely get into China’s most prestigious institution, Peking University, a training ground for the country’s future leaders. “Why give that up?” she asked. “We know the system here, but we know nothing about America, so we can’t help you there. You’d be totally on your own.” Then, after cycling through all the counter-arguments, her mother finally said: “If your heart is really set on going to the US, we will support your decision.”

Annysa Johnson:

Third- through eighth-grade students in Milwaukee’s private voucher and independent charter schools outperformed their public school counterparts in math and language arts, according to statewide assessment data released Wednesday by the Department of Public Instruction.

But Racine public school students overall outscored their voucher school counterparts. And on the ACT, voucher schools outscored their public counterparts in Milwaukee, Racine and the state.

Those are among the findings that emerged Wednesday after DPI made public the voucher, independent charter and the district-level public schools’ results of the 2014-’15 Badger Exam, ACT scores and the Dynamic Learning Maps exam given to students with severe cognitive disabilities.

School choice and charter school advocates touted the results as proof of the programs’ successes.

David Pilling:

Yet she’s not happy. “We have not changed the mindset. We have not changed attitudes toward honesty, integrity, hard work. Maybe our educational system has failed us,” she says, almost to herself. “I don’t know. Maybe we’ve had too much turmoil. It’s a history of boom, bust,” she says of an economy whose fortunes have been almost entirely dependent on the vagaries of the weather and commodity prices. “Things are moving up. All of a sudden, boom.” Her hand explodes over the table. “Something happens. Whatever it is. Boom. Then we start to climb again. Boom.”

“The integrity issue is systemic,” she says. I tell her I was stopped by police, only a few days before, at a makeshift roadblock. “Somebody wanted money from you,” she snorts. “Integrity is a longstanding issue in this country. What contribution does deprivation make to this? What contribution does poverty make to this? What contribution does dependency make to this?”

Isn’t Liberia itself in a permanent state of dependency, I say, pointing to its constant need for donor cash. “We’ve been too dependent for too long on giveaways,” she concedes, adding that the country has been a rubber exporter for decades but has never produced a single tyre. “Our budget should be at a much higher level,” she says of the tiny amount at her government’s disposal.

Suddenly she is pointing menacingly at a young waitress. “Do you pay taxes?” demands the president, eliciting a nervous giggle from the startled girl. “You’re terrifying her,” I say.

Paul Hill:

A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research is one of the relatively few recent studies reporting a negative voucher effect—students using vouchers in Louisiana learned a good deal less than similar students in regular public schools. The reason: students with vouchers had few good choices, since the available schools were weak and had lost large numbers of tuition-paying students.

Citizen Stewart:

Maybe I shouldn’t have tangled with people who have advanced education. These folks with acronyms before and after their names are sensitive about their scholarship and they want recognition for their expertise.

Since then I’ve met a stream of Doctors of education who see themselves as the producers of the tablets we should carry down from the mountain, into the hood. They want me to see that charters, choice, testing, and focus on teacher quality aren’t reforms aimed at improving education. Those reforms, they say, are merely vices of a malevolent upper class who design and fund neo-slavery.

Can’t I see the proposals I support are really disguised weapons against my own people?

Maybe I’m a cynical simpleton, but the most learned people are the most tiring for me. Especially those in higher education. Is there some secret room in the academy where their brains are rewired so they wander intellectually, permanently in nuance, without a return ticket to practicality?

“we know best“….

Oxford Dictionaries :

2015 marks the centenary of the death of James Murray, the first Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Murray’s work as a lexicographer is well known, but there was a great deal more to him than lexicography. We are therefore marking the anniversary with an occasional series of articles highlighting other aspects of his life and achievements.

Throughout his life Murray was a devout member of the Congregational Church: not only devout, but also very active. Already in his teens he was a Sunday school teacher in his home town of Denholm, and he was soon also giving addresses and sermons. After he took up a teaching post at Mill Hill School—a well-known school for the sons of Nonconformists—in 1870, he gave many sermons in the school chapel. Former Mill Hill boys recalled the vividness of his preaching and reading; one recalled his reading of the biblical passage about the confrontation between Elijah and the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (which was in fact one of his favourite readings: ‘I never tire of reading it’, he later said). ‘How he scorched them. Why, I am sure many boys of that period felt convinced that Elijah sure had a red beard and wore a scarlet hood.’

The Blaze:

During the Democratic presidential debate in Flint, Michigan, Hillary Clinton used a question about teachers’ unions to blame the state of the education system on a lack of funding.

When asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper if “unions protect bad teachers,” Clinton replied in part:

A lot of what has happened—and honestly it really pains me—a lot of people have been blaming and scapegoating teachers because they don’t want to put the money into the school system that deserve the support that comes from the government doing its job.

Douglas Belkin and Miriam Jordan:

a huge wave of Chinese students entering American higher education seems beneficial for both sides. International students, in particular from China, are clamoring for American credentials, while U.S. schools want their tuition dollars, which can run two to three times the rate paid by in-state students.

On the ground, American campuses are struggling to absorb the rapid and growing influx—a dynamic confirmed by interviews with dozens of students, college professors and counselors.

Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):

On March 7, MTI Executive Director Doug Keillor and MTI Office Manager Yvonne Knoche presented the recommended 2016-17 MTI Budget to MTI’s Finance Committee. The Committee unanimously approved the recommendation. In acknowledgment of the financial uncertainties ahead, the Budget recommends a 20% reduction in MTI expenditures for the 2016-17 school year, achieved primarily via staff salary and benefit savings. The Budget also recommends no dues increases, and the compression of teacher unit dues from twenty (20) levels to only four (4).

Pursuant to MTI Bylaws, the Budget will next be presented at the March 15 MTI Faculty Representative Council meeting. The meeting will commence at 4:15 p.m., at the Madison Labor Temple (Room 201B). All MTI members, from all bargaining units, are welcome to attend. In addition to an explanation of the Budget, we will also discuss the upcoming MTI membership campaign, as we transition from payroll deduction of Union dues to “direct dues” payment via electronic funds transfer.

Following the presentation at the Faculty Representative Council meeting, the Bylaws require that the Budget next be presented for approval at a meeting of MTI’s Joint Fiscal Group (JFG). The JFG is comprised of representatives of all five MTI bargaining units. That meeting will take place at the April 19 Faculty Representative Council meeting.

7 March 2016 Issue (PDF):

When the Collective Bargaining Agreements expire on June 30, 2016, additional Act 10 prohibitions will apply to MTI, including the elimination of fair-share payments and the prohibition of payroll deduction for Union dues. To prepare for these changes, MTI will be engaging in a membership campaign this spring to transition from “payroll deduction” of Union dues to “direct dues” payment (i.e., payment via electronic funds transfer/automatic bank draft).

MTI has contracted with a vendor to develop a “direct-dues” platform (webpage) that will allow Union members to simply log-on to a website and enter their checking/savings account information to have their monthly union dues deducted automatically from their account (rather than deducted from their paycheck). MTI is also working on establishing the MTI budget for 2016- 17, including the dues amounts. After the draft budget is approved by the MTI Finance Committee, an overview of the budget will be shared at the March 15 MTI Faculty Representative Council meeting. MTI members from all units are welcome to attend this meeting to learn more about the budget and the membership campaign.

Once the “direct-dues” platform is operational and the MTI budget is established we will commence a membership campaign to convert MTI members from payroll deduction to direct dues payments. Those who complete this process and continue their membership will continue to benefit from MTI representation and assistance. Those who elect to discontinue their membership will no longer receive MTI representation or assistance.

29 February 2016 Issue (PDF).

Barry Garelick, via a kind email:

“Hell hath no fury like a mathematician whose child has been scorned by an education system that refuses to know better,” Barry Garelick wrote in his first published article on math education in 2005. He has been at it ever since, and his focus has remained the same: why many of today’s practices for teaching math are ineffective and often destructive.

Garelick states: “In writing these articles, I have often felt that I am explaining in detail why jumping out of an airplane without a parachute will result in death. And while I am heartened that my readers have found these articles useful, I am also disheartened when I hear the education establishment react with arguments that are tantamount to ‘Oh but if you jump out of an airplane the right way, you can survive.’ ”

Nevertheless there is a growing momentum in the U.S. against the well-intentioned but highly injurious nonsense that passes for math education. This collection of articles will assure those people who are convinced that it is being taught poorly that they are right.

Robin Lake:

The question the UCLA report tries to answer is important: Do charter schools use overly harsh discipline practices? There are serious negative consequences for students who are subjected to harsh discipline practices, including loss of learning time, negative self-image, and an increased likelihood of disengagement and dropping out of school. Serious research is needed both to understand where students are being hurt and how schools can do much better. Unfortunately, this report creates more confusion than clarity.

At CRPE, we are committed to an honest assessment of equity and performance in charter schools and we are as interested as anyone in calling out bad actors. CRPE has worked diligently with a panel of research experts to develop principles for how to draw fair comparisons on discipline between charter schools and traditional public schools so that legitimate problems can be tackled head on: The UCLA report disregards most of these principles.

Our expert panel agreed that comparisons must be apples to apples—among individual schools, not between schools and whole districts; among schools serving the same grade levels and demographic groups; and among schools in communities with similar rates of student attendance and school completion. Student behavior issues and penalties must also be defined consistently and recorded in ways that, for example, distinguish between a student’s tenth offense and her first, and between a one-period exclusion from class and a two-week suspension from school. Without appropriate comparisons, one school that is doing a better job than similar schools can actually appear to be doing much worse, and vice versa.

Robin Lake:

As part of the iZone effort, the district looked for new ways to procure novel solutions to instructional and other challenges in the school system. This new attempt to connect entrepreneurs with educators and curate new solutions, called “Innovate NYC Schools,” is the subject of the paper we’re releasing today. Steven Hodas, who managed the Innovate NYC effort, writes about why the district took on this challenge and what he and his colleagues learned from the experience. Little things, like locating the office among tech entrepreneurs and doing hack-a-thons and video challenges, rather than traditional RFPs, are examples of how hard Steven tried to shake things up.

Lauren Camera:

Flint, Michigan, Democratic presidential candidates were asked what they’d do to turn around financially flailing and academically failing school systems, like that of nearby Detroit.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders blamed congressional inaction and front-runner Hillary Clinton said she would create a “SWAT team” at the Department of Education and reinstate a federal program to assist states and districts with funding to repair and modernize schools.

The list of big-city school districts around the country that are broke or well on their way to being in the red is growing. But the real reasons behind their dire financial straits weren’t mentioned by either candidate.

A recent k-12 spending report.

Olivia Goldhill:

In 2005, John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, published a paper, “Why most published research findings are false,” mathematically showing that a huge number of published papers must be incorrect. He also looked at a number of well-regarded medical research findings, and found that, of 34 that had been retested, 41% had been contradicted or found to be significantly exaggerated.

Since then, researchers in several scientific areas have consistently struggled to reproduce major results of prominent studies. By some estimates, at least 51%—and as much as 89%—of published papers are based on studies and experiments showing results that cannot be reproduced.

Researchers have recreated prominent studies from several scientific fields and come up with wildly different results. And psychology has become something of a poster child for the “reproducibility crisis” since Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, coordinated a Reproducibility Initiative project to repeat 100 psychological experiments, and could only successfully replicate 40%.

Leslie Brody & Mike Vilensky:

Advocates for New York City charter schools expressed outrage Monday that the state Assembly’s proposed budget aims to toughen laws requiring charters to serve sufficient numbers of hard-to-teach students.

The United Federation of Teachers said in January that pushing “anti-creaming” legislation was a priority. The budget bill released over the weekend by the Democrat-led Assembly, long allied with labor, includes harsher penalties for charters that don’t enroll and retain the same share of students who are poor, disabled or English language learners as their community.

For example, the bill says that if one site of a charter network falls short of an enrollment target, the entire network can’t open new locations until it hits its goal.

The bill also says that if a charter misses a demographic target, it must keep slots open for students in that underserved category. Charter backers say that requirement would make charters lose per-pupil funding and deny slots to needy students.

Collin Brinkley

Despite the calls for transparency, record requests made by The Associated Press to dozens of the nation’s wealthiest colleges show a continued push to keep investments secret.

Out of 50 public and private universities asked to disclose their investments, 39 schools with combined endowments of $255 billion refused to provide a single record. Four never responded to the requests sent in September. None of the private universities, which are not subject to open-records laws, released any information.

Most public universities, which operate with taxpayer money, kept their investments secret. The universities that did provide records in most cases revealed only a small fraction of their portfolios.

Colleges drew on a variety of reasons to withhold records. The University of Virginia and four other public universities said they house their endowments in outside foundations that are not subject to open-records laws. Michigan State University, also public, cited a state law that explicitly keeps college investments confidential. Private Vanderbilt University said it made agreements with financial managers not to share investment details.

Charles Murray:

Dear Virginia Tech community,

Since President Sands has just published an open letter making a serious allegation against me, it seems appropriate to respond. The allegation: “Dr. Murray is well known for his controversial and largely discredited work linking measures of intelligence to heredity, and specifically to race and ethnicity — a flawed socioeconomic theory that has been used by some to justify fascism, racism and eugenics.”

Let me make an allegation of my own. President Sands is unfamiliar either with the actual content of The Bell Curve — the book I wrote with Richard J. Herrnstein to which he alludes — or with the state of knowledge in psychometrics.

Madison, spending more than $17,000 per student, is truly the land of milk and honey, as this useful comparison reveals. Achievement, however…

Bruce Baker, Danielle Farrie, Theresa Luhm and David G. Sciarra:

The National Report Card (NRC) evaluates and compares the extent to which state finance systems ensure equality of educational opportunity for all children, regardless of background, family income, place of residence, or school location. It is designed to provide policymakers, educators, business leaders, parents, and the public at large with information to better understand the fairness of existing state school finance systems and how resources are allocated so problems can be identified and solutions developed.

Amy Harmon:

On Feb. 29, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the third Nobel Prize laureate biologist in a month to do something long considered taboo among biomedical researchers: She posted a report of her recent discoveries to a publicly accessible website, bioRxiv, before submitting it to a scholarly journal to review for “official’’ publication.

It was a small act of information age defiance, and perhaps also a bit of a throwback, somewhat analogous to Stephen King’s 2000 self-publishing an e-book or Radiohead’s 2007 release of a download-only record without a label. To commemorate it, she tweeted the website’s confirmation under the hashtag #ASAPbio, a newly coined rallying cry of a cadre of biologists who say they want to speed science by making a key change in the way it is published.

Get it right:

For example, Ms. Richard notes that the previous English/language arts standards might have asked students to identify a main character in a story. “Now, I may ask my students, ‘How do the actions of the main character affect the plot of the story?'” she said. “They’re going so much deeper. They’re having to look at the author’s craft, how the author wrote what they did and why they chose the words they used.”

Should political forces in the state force teachers to revert back to lower-level standards, these teachers say they will still continue to teach Common Core’s higher-level concepts because they have seen the advantages for their students. Listen to the podcast, or read the transcript below for more information.

Jill LePore:

ed Cruz’s campaign autobiography is called “A Time for Truth.” “This guy’s a liar,” Donald Trump said at a recent G.O.P. debate, pointing at Cruz. Trump thinks a lot of people are liars, especially politicians (Jeb Bush: “Lying on campaign trail!”) and reporters (“Too bad dopey @megynkelly lies!”). Not for nothing has he been called the Human Lie Detector. And not for nothing has he been called a big, fat Pinocchio with his pants on fire by the fact-checking teams at the Times, the Washington Post, and Politifact, whose careful reports apparently have little influence on the electorate, because, as a writer for Politico admitted, “Nobody but political fanatics pays much mind to them.” “You lied,” Marco Rubio said to Trump during the truth-for-tat February debate. Cruz tried to break in, noting that Rubio had called him a liar, too. Honestly, there was so much loudmouthed soothsaying that it was hard to tell who was saying what. A line from the transcript released by CNN reads:

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I tell the truth, I tell the truth.

Eat your heart out, Samuel Beckett.

On the one hand, not much of this is new. “Gen. Jackson is incapable of deception,” Andrew Jackson’s supporters insisted, in 1824. “Among all classes in Illinois the sobriquet of ‘honest Abe’ is habitually used by the masses,” a Republican newspaper reported of Lincoln, in 1860. The tweets at #DumpTrump—“This man is a hoax!”—don’t quite rise to the prose standard of the arrows flung at supporters of John Adams, who Jeffersonians said engaged in “every species of villainous deception, of which the human heart, in its last stage of depravity is capable.”

“When a President doesn’t tell the truth, how can we trust him to lead?” a Mitt Romney ad asked last time around, during an election season in which the Obama campaign assembled a so-called Truth Team to point out Romney’s misstatements of fact. Remember the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, from 2004? This kind of thing comes and goes, and, then again, it comes. Cast back to Nixon: Among all classes, the sobriquet of “Tricky Dick” was habitually used by the masses. “Liar” isn’t what opponents generally called Ford or Carter or the first George Bush, but a Bob Dole ad, in 1996, charged that “Bill Clinton is an unusually good liar,” and much the same was said of Hillary Clinton, dubbed “a congenital liar” by William Safire. A Bernie Sanders campaign ad refers to him, pointedly, as “an honest leader”; his supporters have been less restrained. At a rally in Iowa, they chanted, “She’s a liar!”

Prakash Venkant:

The ancient Greeks were said to be the first people who used encryption. Every coded message was comprised of two parts: the message itself, and a cipher that decoded it. The most famous set was the scytale a stick of set diameter that, when a piece of parchment with a coded string of text was wrapped around it, the message was legible across the face of the stick.

This was a beautiful solution to the problem of keeping secrets from those not in-the-know. All the receiving party needed was a stick of the right diameter and they could decode any message. In the case of the scytale, “encryption” was writing the message in such a way that it would be unintelligible without having the right decoder stick.

Molly Beck:

More than 700 students in the Madison School District opted out in 2015, part of the 8,104 public school students who opted out statewide, a substantial increase from the 87 and 583 students, respectively, who opted out last year, state and school district data show.

The surge nationwide in recent years represents a movement of parents opposing testing in growing numbers. Opposition to the number of tests given, how scores are used by lawmakers in determining school accountability, and using scores to evaluate teachers contributes to the growing numbers nationwide.

The increase in Wisconsin also came as lawmakers moved to get rid of the Badger Exam, Wisconsin’s version of the Smarter Balanced exam that was developed using questions from a consortium of states aligned to Common Core, which state Superintendent Tony Evers adopted in 2010.

Statewide data is available here.

Michele R. Pistone and Michael B. Horn

Facing dramatic declines in enrollment, revenue, and student quality at the same time that their cost structure continues to rise and public support has waned, law schools are in crisis. A key driver of the crisis is shrinking employment opportunities for recent graduates, which stem in part from the disruption of the traditional business model for the provision of legal services.

Although this root problem will soon choke off the financial viability of many schools, most law schools remain unable or unwilling to address this existential problem in more than a marginal way, as they instead prefer to maintain the status quo and hope that the job market soon improves. In reaction to the growing crisis, most law schools have accordingly continued to focus their attention and energies on maintaining their existing status within the legacy model used to rank and compare law schools: the U.S. News & World Report’s annual law school rankings. In the face of the crisis, the dominant focus of law schools and their administrators has been to retain their school’s ranking so that their school can outlast competitor law schools—some of which, the argument goes, may have to shut their doors—until, in the long run they hope, the market evens out and everything returns to the pre-crisis status quo.

Eleanor Bader:

As Parrent speaks, her voice breaks and it is clear that Brian is still vivid in her mind’s eye. “I remember that he was wearing a white shirt and when the teacher finally opened the door, he was covered in blood. My first thought was that he must have cut himself, but no. He’d had a nosebleed, something that happened to him all the time. It was awful. He might have deserved to be reprimanded; I don’t know. What I do know is that more than 50 years later, I can still see the blood.”

Despite the lasting impact of this incident on Parrent — we can only guess how it affected Brian as he continued his schooling and came of age — it’s tempting to assume that this type of discipline is a thing of the past. After all, the encounter took place in 1963

Jamie Doward:

More than half a century of sweeping educational reforms have done little to improve Britain’s social mobility, according to one of the country’s leading experts on equality.

Instead, young people from less well-off families entering today’s labour market have far less favourable prospects than their parents or even their grandparents, despite having gained much better qualifications.

Giving the British Academy sociology lecture on 15 March, Dr John Goldthorpe, a sociologist at the University of Oxford, whose work on class has proven widely influential, will claim that little has changed in British society since the second world war, largely because more advantaged families are using their economic, cultural and social advantages to ensure that their children remain at the top of the social class ladder.

The new findings offer a sobering corrective to the prevailing view, favoured by successive governments, that improving access to education has been a powerful weapon in promoting social mobility in Britain

Kathy Boccella:

This month, for the fourth time in as many years, Dollard flew to China to spend three weeks sales-talking parents. She hands out pens and magnets bearing her school’s name and all-American eagle mascot – giveaways that, she hopes, will help Conwell-Egan stand out among the hundreds of private and parochial schools crowding a fast-growing international market.

Conwell-Egan is one of three high schools in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia capitalizing on a trend that has been building for a decade: foreign students, largely Asian, enrolling in U.S. high schools with the goal of honing their English, acclimating to American culture, and scoring an advantage with admissions officers at top colleges here.

Eva Moskovitz:

school enrollment grew by 260,000 students nationwide. Most of the fastest-growing charter networks, including Success Academies in New York City, which I run, believe we have a responsibility both to push children to achieve their potential and to protect them from the mayhem that in district schools often robs students of their opportunity to learn.

This stricter approach has encountered fierce criticism in certain quarters. The New York Times, for example, has bemoaned Success Academy’s “stringent rules about behavior” that require students to have their “eyes following the speaker” and walk “in formation reminiscent of the von Trapp children at the beginning of ‘The Sound of Music.’ ”

David Blaska:

You want local control? The ultimate local control pushes decision-making down to the family kitchen table. The Republican state government gave the UW System authority to create charter schools that are independent of the school district. This is something that the Madison School District asked for, however unknowingly, when it denied Madison Urban League’s proposed Madison Prep charter school.

Under this UW aegis, the state per-pupil stipend follows the student to the independent charter school.

One bright spot: Madison schools Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham appears to get it. “My intent is to make [the independent charters] obsolete — that our schools will be serving students so well that there isn’t a need.” (Quoted here.)

WNYC:

New York City charter schools retain more of their students, on average, than traditional public schools, according to Department of Education data obtained and analyzed by WNYC.

Citywide, across all grades, 10.6 percent of charter school students transferred out in 2013-14, compared to 13 percent of traditional public school students. But there is wide variety among these schools and among the different networks. You can see all of our data here.

Peter Dreier:

I don’t know if there is a statute of limitations on confessing one’s sins, but it has been six years since I did the deed and I’m now coming clean.

Six years ago I submitted a paper for a panel, “On the Absence of Absences” that was to be part of an academic conference later that year—in August 2010. Then, and now, I had no idea what the phrase “absence of absences” meant. The description provided by the panel organizers, printed below, did not help. The summary, or abstract of the proposed paper—was pure gibberish, as you can see below. I tried, as best I could within the limits of my own vocabulary, to write something that had many big words but which made no sense whatsoever. I not only wanted to see if I could fool the panel organizers and get my paper accepted, I also wanted to pull the curtain on the absurd pretentions of some segments of academic life. To my astonishment, the two panel organizers—both American sociologists—accepted my proposal and invited me to join them at the annual international conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science to be held that year in Tokyo.

Annysa Johnson:

Messmer Catholic Schools will spend $500,000 to boost teacher salaries by 10% to 30% over the next two years in a move intended both to sustain recent academic gains and uphold the church’s teachings on social justice, its president said.

“If we’re going to exhibit Catholic values of justice, that means appropriate compensation and fulfilling our mission,” said Jim Piatt, whose system employs about 100 teachers on three campuses.

“Teachers should not be paid at a level that qualifies them for assistance or free and reduced lunch,” he said.

The move by Messmer is an attempt to raise its teacher salaries to about 90% of their public school counterparts in and around Milwaukee, said Emily Koczela, its newly hired chief financial officer, who like Piatt had worked in the Brown Deer School District before joining Messmer.

She stressed that the money for the raises would come from internal savings and increases in state-funded voucher payments, and not new pleas to donors.

Koczela said she expects at least some of the other 100-plus schools in the 10-county Archdiocese of Milwaukee to follow suit.

“We’re pretty sure this is going to be a beacon,” she said.

Nick Pinto:

Andrew Cuomo, the archetypal politician — fickle, conviction-less, his soul shriveled to a crushing singularity from which only ego can escape — has of late been feeling the political winds blowing left-wise and has grudgingly drifted accordingly. Indeed, a Martian visitor freshly descended to the Empire State might be forgiven if, surveying recent political developments, she came to the belief that the governor is motivated by progressive ideals. Ignorant of history and blessedly unfamiliar with the howling void at the center of Cuomo’s being, she might look at his recent advocacy for paid family leave or increases in the minimum wage and conclude that he is committed to the use of government to benefit and protect working-class New Yorkers.

Our Martian might believe this, that is, until she came across the headlines of the past few months announcing Cuomo’s plan to gut nearly half a billion dollars in state funding — a full 30 percent — from the City University of New York. CUNY, the public conglomeration of community colleges, four-year institutions, and graduate and professional schools that serves students in New York City, is the third largest university system in the United States. Thirty-eight percent of its quarter of a million students are immigrants. Three-quarters of them are people of color. Forty-two percent represent the first generation in their family to go to college. As Barbara Bowen, the head of CUNY’s faculty union, puts it, “You can’t be progressive without being progressive on CUNY. Cuomo’s position is a glaring swerve from his position of being the champion of working people and people of color.”

Megan McArdle

The lazy rivers. The dining-hall steakhouse. The hot tubs. The dazzling fitness centers. Journalists who cover higher education love these lists of amenities in student housing, and readers love to hate them.

Take the latest trend in college housing: luxury off-campus apartment buildings that rent only to students. This is, on the face of it, somewhat mysterious. Students are not known for their fantastic credit. Nor for taking excellent care of their surroundings. I myself recall moving into a rather standard off-campus rental that first had to be cleared of the 57 bags of garbage that the previous occupants left behind. Everything you would infer from that fact about the condition of the house is correct.

Yet apparently today’s students have a rather more inviting option: student-only apartment buildings considerably nicer than those occupied by, say, many successful journalists of my acquaintance. This naturally raises the question: Where are the students getting the money for this?

Claudio Sanchez:

Before I became a reporter, I was a teacher. After 27 years on the education beat, I’ve met a few fantastic teachers and a few bad ones. So I’ve wondered, where would I have fit in? Was I a good teacher?

Recently I went back to the site of the school where I taught so many years ago, just outside Tucson, Ariz. Treehaven was both a day school and a boarding school for so-called “troubled kids.”

The actual school and the people who ran it are long gone. The property, now called Circle Tree Ranch, houses a residential drug-rehabilitation facility for families and children. The company that runs the place today has nothing to do with Treehaven, but one of the administrators was nice enough to give me a brief tour.

Miriam Hall:

Last Friday was “match day” for New York City’s eighth graders, when they found out whether they’d been admitted to one of the city’s elite high schools. And not shockingly, the numbers were appalling when it came to diversity.

There are nine of these selective high schools in New York City. At eight of them, students take a test to get in, and at one—La Guardia High School, which specializes in the performing arts—students must audition. Of the schools that “test in,” black and Latino students will likely make up no more than 4 and 6 percent, respectively, of the student populations next year. Yet across the city, those two groups make up 70 percent of the public school population.

Doug Erickson:

Also, incidents occurring anywhere on or adjacent to a high school campus or across the street from the campus were captured in the data. So in a handful of cases, district officials said, the person arrested may have been an adult or a juvenile not currently enrolled in the district.

Black individuals were more likely to be arrested and cited than non-black individuals, the district said. However, “there has been a consistent decrease in arrest incidents and arrest charges for African-American individuals over the last three years,” the report said.

In a separate data category unrelated to arrests, the district said the number of citations issued for truancy fell 19 percent, from 134 to 108, between the comparison years.

Related: Gangs and school violence forum and police calls: 1996-2006.

Angus Chen:

By the time they’re in elementary school, some kids prove to be more troublesome than others. They can’t sit still or they’re not socializing or they can’t focus enough to complete tasks that the other kids are handling well. Sounds like ADHD. But it might be that they’re just a little young for their grade.

Studies done in several countries including Iceland, Canada, Israel, Sweden and Taiwan show children who are at the young end of their grade cohort are more likely to get an ADHD diagnosis than their older classmates.

Megan Thielking:

More and more teenage girls are using intrauterine devices and other long-acting reversible contraceptives, or LARCs. That’s one reason the teen pregnancy rate has plunged. But those girls are using condoms less often than girls who take oral contraceptives, according to a new analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics.

Why it matters:

LARCs are more than 99 percent effective at preventing pregnancy, and their use has doubled between 2010 and 2015. But IUDs and hormonal implants — which work by preventing sperm from fertilizing an egg — don’t protect women from sexually transmitted diseases or infections.

Dick Startz:

When it comes to student behavior, what’s polite or rude—what counts as acting out versus what’s seen as healthy youthful exuberance—depends not only on actual behavior but on how teachers read behavior. Black and white American cultures are still sufficiently different in that how teachers read behavior depends in part on the teacher’s race. New research shows that black and white teachers give very different evaluations of behavior of black students. When a black student has a black teacher that teacher is much, much less likely to see behavioral problems than when the same black student has a white teacher.

Scott Greenberg:

deduction is the deduction for state and local taxes. Out of the 44 million households that itemize deductions, almost 43 million deduct the taxes they pay to state and local governments. It’s not surprising that nearly all taxpayers that itemize claim a deduction for state and local taxes, because almost everyone pays some income, sales, or property tax to state and local governments.

Next most popular is the charitable deduction. 36 million households claimed a deduction for their charitable contributions, or 82 percent of all households that itemize. On average, households making less than $100,000 claimed a charitable deduction of $2,820, while those making over $100,000 claimed an average charitable deduction of $8,495.

Michael Grothaus:

issued by the National Center for Education Statistics has found that American workers rank “dead last” out of 18 industrial nations when it comes to problem-solving skills using technology, the Wall Street Journal says. The report is based on Program for the International Assessment for Adult Competency (PIACC) data that tested thousands of adults aged 16 to 74 on literacy, numeracy, and digital problem-solving.

The results show that in the 1970s the U.S. had the most educated workforce in the world—but since 2000 the skills and knowledge of high-school graduates here have stagnated while other countries have seen a rapid increase in those traits.

Japan Times:

The education system is not taking adequate care of the increasing number of foreign children living in Japan. According to a recent Kyodo News survey, 41 out of 72 municipal governments have failed to confirm the whereabouts of more than 10,000 non-Japanese children not attending school. That lack of oversight does not happen with Japanese children, whose truancy is typically tracked and investigated by boards of education.

The number of students potentially left out of the system is roughly 10 percent of the 100,000 school-age children of foreign nationality in Japan. These kids are not receiving an education, or even any attention, during their most important years. Such negligence violates the Convention of the Rights of the Child, a United Nations treaty that went into force in 1990 and stipulates that all children have the right to attend school.

Steve Wilson:

Under House Bill 4, also known as the Parent Involvement and Accountability Act, teachers would be required to grade parents’ involvement with their children’s education.

The legislation, by state Rep. Gregory Holloway (D-Hazlehurst), would mandate a section be added to each child’s report card on which the parents are graded on their responsiveness to communication with teachers, the students’ completion of homework and readiness for tests, and the frequency of absences and tardiness.

hayom:

Tamar Barbi from Hod Hasharon is only in the 10th grade, but she has already chalked up an impressive achievement: developing a new geometric theorem.

Barbi, who is studying mathematics on the highest matriculation track offered in Israel, discovered while doing her geometry homework that the theorem she was using to solve one of the problems on her homework didn’t actually exist.

“I checked with my teacher, Sean Gabriel-Morris, I asked relatives abroad who are involved with mathematics, and I consulted my parents, and [then] I realized that the theorem really didn’t appear anywhere, even though it’s very logical and basic.”

A Teacher:

This is a claim used to justify dumbing-down, the idea being that if technology changes working life really quickly then there is no need to teach content as it will be irrelevant by the time our students get to the workplace. The widespread use of the claim in educational environments can almost all be traced back to the “Did You Know?” or “Shift Happens” videos that went viral among fashionably minded educators some time back. These consisted of a variety of poorly sourced and dubious claims about the future accompanied by enough bright colours and loud music to hypnotise the congenitally gullible. The sources were available here (but no longer, let me know if you have an up to date link) and when they were they indicated that it can be traced back to a claim attributed to a US politician in an obscure out of print book. This would be reason enough to discount it, however (just in case you think the second hand utterances of the political classes are a reliable source of information), I should also point out that the book was published in 2004 and was a prediction and not a fact. Did it turn out to be true? Well I know of no definitive list of the most “in demand jobs”, but I can find several attempts to find something similar. HR magazine published a list (from a now defunct website) of the Top 10 “in demand” occupations in 2009:

Jenna McLaughlin:

“Why isn’t ‘government must always have the ability to access plaintext’ the more ‘absolutist’ view?” asked Julian Sanchez, privacy and technology senior fellow at the Cato Institute, in a tweet. “‘Swallow arsenic.’ No. ‘Ok, a little hemlock then.’ No. ‘Well, c’mon, you can’t be an ABSOLUTIST about this,’” he joked.

Kevin Bankston, the director of the Open Technology Institute, tweeted that he was “disappointed” Obama resorted to fearmongering. “Opens w/child kidnapping & terror, closes w/child porn & terror, vague talk of balance,” he wrote.

Jonathan Zdziarski:

We, as everyday Americans, should also encourage the idea of warrant proof places. The DOJ believes, quite erroneously, that the Fourth Amendment gives them the right to any evidence or information they desire with a warrant. The Bill of Rights did not grant rights to the government; it protected the rights of Americans from the overreach that was expected to come from government. Our most intimate thoughts, our private conversations, our ideas, our -intent- are all things our phone tracks. These are concepts that must remain private (if we choose to protect them) for any functioning free society. In today’s technological landscape, we are no longer giving up just our current or future activity under warrant, but for the first time in history, making potentially years of our life retroactively searchable by law enforcement. Things are recorded in ways today that no one would have imagined, even when CALEA was passed. The capability that DOJ is asserting is that our very lives and identities – going back across years – are subject to search. The Constitution never permitted this.

The bottom line is this: Our country actually recognizes warrant proof data, and Apple has every right and ethical obligation to recognize it in the design of their products. As Americans, we should be demanding our thoughts, conversations, and identities be protected with the highest level of security. This isn’t just about credit cards.

Valerie Strauss:

new world ranking of countries and their literacy rates puts the United States at 7th. Who’s Number one? Finland.

The study, conducted by John W. Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut, analyses trends in literate behaviour and literacy in more than 60 countries. It found that Nordic countries are among the most literate in the world, but countries in the Western Hemisphere didn’t do well.

Alan Borsuk:

There’s a surge of new programs at Auer Avenue Community School, and there are some positive results. People within the school, in the Milwaukee Public Schools administration, in the immediate neighborhood, and in the broader community are joining together to support the school and improve the lives and academic success of the children who go there.

Is there a long way to go? Yes. Is it going to take sustained and well-executed work to make big progress? Yes.

But, in a morning at the school one day last week, what I believe I saw growing there was the kind of school culture — energized, focused, positive, committed — that, even in demanding circumstances, can move a school and its students forward in big ways.

Auer Avenue, near N. 24th and W. Burleigh St., is one of four schools in MPS that was designated last year as a “community school.” What does that mean? Answering that question was one of the reasons I wanted to visit the school.

The other reason was simply this: The way things had been going at Auer Avenue for years had made it somewhat symbolic of central city schools with poor results. Last year, a rumor gained currency that Auer Avenue would be an early target of a new law that gives the Milwaukee County executive power to take schools away from MPS and turn them over to outside operators. Teachers and others held hands while surrounding the school to protest the idea (which has not come to pass, at least so far).

Ronald Brownstein:

But for Hathcoat, returning to school on a more regular basis to finish her degree involves difficult trade-offs of time and money. Besides working, she’s also raising a daughter. Covering the cost of childcare would greatly multiply the expense of returning to college. “It’s really, really a high cost,” she says. “Having an eight-hour job, I would have to put my daughter in daycare, and that’s something I’m not wanting to do.” Though she believes completing a degree would improve her long-run prospects, “personal and … financial” considerations have convinced her she needs to wait.

A new Atlantic Media/Pearson Opportunity Poll suggests that many Americans recognize Hathcoat’s dilemma. Americans appear to have internalized the conclusion that in the information age, they will earn more if they learn more. Across racial lines, a significant majority of American adults said in the poll that they believe they could obtain a better and higher-paying job if they acquired more education or training.

But respondents also identified a thicket of obstacles centered on money and time that prevents them from obtaining more credentials. “There’s lots of different certifications, or courses or classes I’d like to take,” says Ryan McGraw, a software consultant in Nashville who responded to the poll. “And it’s just difficult to create the time and money to do so.”

Liz Stinson:

Ito describes the process as “peer-to-peer” review. The goal, he says, is for ideas presented in the journal to morph and evolve and become interconnected over time. “You can imagine that after a few weeks, all of the papers coming out on this journal are all referring to and quoting each other, so it looks like a network rather than a bunch of isolated papers,” he says. In this way, the journal seeks to incorporate voices from as many interested disciplines as possible. “The idea that going deep deep deep to get better results is giving way to the idea that the way to get the most interesting results is to be able to go a bit diagonal,” Slavin says. Both Slavin and Ito reference the field of synthetic biology as an example of where this intersection is happening, and point specifically to the work of Kevin Esvelt.

Olivier Gergaud, Morgane Laouénan, Étienne Wasmer:

Last and not least, we find a positive correlation between the contemporaneous number of entrepreneurs and the urban growth of the city in which they are located the following decades. More strikingly, the same is also true for artists, with the contemporaneous number or share of artists positively affecting city growth over the next decades. In contrast, we find a zero or negative correlation between the contemporaneous share of “militaries, politicians and religious people” and urban growth in the following decades.

Deborah Merritt:

Education opens doors. In law schools, we have tried for decades to open one particular door: the one that welcomes more minority graduates into the profession. In some ways, we have succeeded admirably. The percentage of minority law graduates almost tripled between 1983 and 2012, from 8.6% to 24.2%. The absolute number of those graduates rose almost four-fold during the same years, from 3,169 per year to 11,951 annually.

Today, all of us can name successful minority lawyers, judges, and law professors–as well as minority business people, nonprofit directors, and policymakers with law degrees. Legal education can even point with pride to the first African American President of the United States.

Just as the doors started to open, however, new obstacles emerged. Research shows that minority students earn lower law school grades than white students–even after controlling for entering credentials. We have also dramatically raised the cost of legal education as our student bodies diversified. And, perhaps most disturbing, we now know that these high costs fall disproportionately on Black and Latino/a students. New data from the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) show that these students assume substantially more law school debt than their white and Asian American classmates. That debt gap is new–and growing.

Maya Pope-Chappell:

At the center of the fight is Oakland Unified Public School Superintendent Antwan Wilson. Besides making school choices easier and more transparent, Wilson argues that a single form would provide valuable data that could be used to scale up more options that parents want. (There are currently 40 different enrollment processes in Oakland, says Wilson).

Denver—where Wilson worked as an assistant superintendent—and New Orleans were the first cities to implement common enrollment systems that included district and charter options. Similar systems have been launched in Washington D.C. and Newark.

Oakland’s school board is set to to vote on the common enrollment plan in June. I spoke to Wilson about the battle, the lessons he’s learned in Denver and what schools across the country can do to create more equity and access to quality education.

Edited excerpts:

Q: The New York Times recently wrote about you and the row over enrollment in Oakland. The article quoted Robert C. Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, as saying, “If he gets it right, it’s a model for moving past the polarized sense of reform that we have right now.” Would you agree with his statement about you?

I would agree with that. I find that the polarization in the arguing is distracting and it’s harmful. What we really need to focus on is quality and getting people access and equity. By moving away from arguing about district versus charter and moving towards giving parents the same opportunities that more affluent parents have to determine where their children go to school, puts parents and families in the driver’s seat.

Q: During your tenure in Denver, the city enacted its single-enrollment system. Similar concerns were raised there. Why is enrollment such a polarized issue and what have you learned?

There are some families who are concerned about the quote, unquote ‘competition’ and the drain of resources from schools. But to me, the issue isn’t around district-run or charter, it’s around monopoly, and monopolies are slow to innovate. What ends up happening is people begin to peel off and innovate. And when we as a district begin to innovate, then we will put ourselves in a position to offer parents more of what they want. What Denver has learned is that both district schools and charters benefit when the parents’ needs are put at the center. If arguing about school governance worked in terms of improving student achievement and increasing enrollment and parent/student satisfaction, I’d jump into that argument. It just doesn’t.

Q: Early results from Denver and New Orleans show some successes, but parents there have complained that there aren’t enough quality schools to choose from. An enrollment system can’t resolve that on its own, so what are some other ways to create more equity and access to quality education—especially among low-income families?

I think funding is a huge piece—giving more money to kids who need it most. Expanding school time, [which] benefits all children. Another strategy is mentoring and tutoring. These are strategies we know work. And then the last thing, you have to address access to rigorous programming in schools.

Madison School District Administration (PDF)

Salary and Wage Notes:

Step Advancement (background) is funded in v3.0 of the budget. The employee handbook calls for ‘step advancement’ on existing wage/salary schedules. The cost of ‘steps’ is estimated at 1.75% of total wage/salary rates. ($4,528,492)

Lane Movement (background) for Professional Learning is funded in v3.0 of the budget. The handbook calls for ‘lane movement’ on the existing salary schedule. Lane movement is budgeted for as a lump sum estimate. ($400,000)

A Base Wage allowance is funded in v3.0 of the budget up to the limit allowed per statute, which is 0.12% base wage increase for July 1, 2016 agreements. ($240,000)

Attrition rates very significantly across job types, with food services workers (17.8%), security assistants (17.2%), and the clerical/technical unit (15.0%), having the highest rates over the past year

The attrition rate among teaching staff, the largest job type in MMSD, reached a five-year high at 9.4%, driven by an increase in retirements. This falls below national teacher attrition rates, estimated to be around 11%

Typical attrition rate for MMSD is significantly greater than the position reductions in the proposed budget

Madison spends more than $17K/student, though I’ve not seen a total budget number for some time…

Additional documents: Proposed administrative changes and a look at school staffing.

Jim Stingl:

For 75 years now, two bronze life-size figures of teenagers have been standing proud inside the front doors of what used to be Steuben Junior High School.

Steuben closed in 2004 and gave up the building to Milwaukee French Immersion School, but still the statues keep watch, chins up and sights set on however bright the future looked in 1941.

Tarnished plaques on each pedestal say one statue is called Male Student, the other Female Student.

But to 89-year-old Leroy Konrath, that bronze boy was his classmate, Earle Albright, who posed for the sculptor. Konrath called to tell me that he spotted Albright’s death notice in the Journal Sentinel this month, and he drove to the school at 2360 N. 52nd St. to tell them, too, and see if the statues remain.

“Sure enough, there they are just as big as life,” said Konrath, a retired police officer living in Fox Point.

He also remembers the girl model’s name, Jean Zilavy, who was in his class, as well. I found Jean in Florida, very much alive and nearing 90 years old.

To be fair, other students also posed for the statues, according to a Milwaukee Journal article from June of 1941. The story mentions Zilavy and says she was an excellent model who did much of the posing for the girl figure. The boy was said to be a composite, though Konrath can still picture Albright doing the honors.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

MMSD’s goal is to minimize police involvement for minor student infractions that should be managed with the Behavior Education Plan. The District is committed to a non-criminal enforcement model that supports restorative justice concepts, early intervention and problem solving rather than reliance on law enforcement. However, it certainly doesn’t mean that police will never be needed in our schools. The following are circumstances where involvement of the police may be necessary

Educational Resource Officer (ERO) Slides (PDF) and ERO contract with the city of Madison.

Colleen Flaherty:

Repeatedly during the meeting, Millner and other regents cited the need, in an era of tight budgets, for “flexibility” to close programs — and eliminate faculty jobs in the process. The votes here marked the near-end of two years of debate over a tenure policy that saw the university system’s tenured faculty go from having among the strongest protections in the nation (written into state law) to having a system that many professors fear will make it too easy to dismiss them and eliminate programs they believe should be preserved. When the idea of removing tenure from state statute first surfaced — at the behest of Governor Scott Walker, a Republican — he and others said that necessary protections for faculty members could all be preserved in system policy. But the system adopted Thursday differs in key ways from what was removed from state law — especially after a series of amendments were rejected.

Millner weighed in on an amendment proposed by Tony Evers, a fellow regent, that — if passed — would have addressed one of the biggest faculty concerns about the proposed policy regarding layoffs of tenured faculty: that it conflates financial and educational considerations in assessing programs for possible closure (and subsequent faculty job losses).

Ellen Wexler:

Soon after Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled his budget for fiscal year 2017, the protests began at New York City’s public colleges.

Nearly 500 students and faculty members traveled to Albany two weeks ago to attend a rally, and another group returned Tuesday to meet with legislators. Last week, the University Student Senate held a press conference on the steps of City Hall.

Why are you targeting our colleges? they asked. Do you know how much the higher education system matters to our city?

For decades, the state has paid for most of the operating funds of the City University of New York’s four-year colleges and universities, much like it does for campuses of the State University of New York (though CUNY’s community colleges do receive city funds). But in January, Cuomo announced his plan to reduce state funding by $485 million. On Thursday, the New York State Assembly rejected the plan in its one-house budget, which proposes restoring the $485 million and freezing tuition for two years. But the matter is far from resolved.

Ellie Bothwell:

When US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders painted a picture of the perfect model of higher education, he didn’t reference Harvard, Yale or Stanford; instead he cited universities in Germany and Scandinavia. He held up their education systems as ones that the US should ape when pledging to make tuition free at public colleges and universities last year.

“This is not a radical idea,” he wrote on his campaign website. “Last year, Germany eliminated tuition because they believed that charging students $1,300 [£894] per year was discouraging Germans from going to college…Finland, Norway, Sweden and many other countries around the world also offer free college to all of their citizens. If other countries can take this action, so can the United States of America.”

Jenna McLaughlin:

Lena is 17, a senior at Niles West High School outside Chicago. She’s a former video game junkie with the build of a great blue heron, and part of a top-ranked, two-girl “policy debate” team. Lena’s partner is Faith Geraghty, 18, a blonde pit bull in Doc Martens and a former ice hockey champion who traded in her skates for an ever-present MacBook — now crammed full of information about things like the upcoming congressional debate on NSA spying programs authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Jonah Jacobs, a dark-haired junior at Glenbrook North High School, also near Chicago, gave up football for debate after a bad concussion. He tells me he spent the entire summer researching the ways intelligence sharing with other countries benefits the U.S. economy. Jonah’s partner, Anthony Trufanov, was half of the national championship team last year. Many high school policy debaters literally gasp for air as they rush to make their arguments, but Anthony breathes between words, using an inhalation technique he learned from mastering Systema, a form of Russian martial arts. He says he’s enjoying debating about surveillance because he likes finding “nuanced solutions to complex problems.”

Eben Moglen: Snowden and the future.

Radley Balko.

Maggie Shepard:

When they return to their collegelike charter school campus tucked away in Sandia Park in the East Mountains, they’ll get back to their small, intimate classes and after-school sports – all publicly funded.

East Mountain High School was the first charter school launched immediately after the state fully authorized charter schools in 1999.

Fifteen years later, it is one of 99 in the state and one of 54 in Albuquerque. That represents 11 percent of public schools in the state; the current statewide enrollment for charter schools is 23,593 students.

East Mountain High School has some of the highest math and reading proficiency rates and test scores in the state.

It’s one of the schools Public Education Department Secretary Hanna Skandera means when she says some charter schools “deliver incredible opportunities.”

“Some set a very high bar. Some of our top 10 schools in the state are charter schools,” she said.

And some of the top schools in the nation are New Mexico charter schools. Cottonwood Classical Preparatory School and Albuquerque Institute for Mathematics and Science have consistently landed in national rankings for challenging and successful schools.

Laura Yuen:

Students like Simmons get knocked off track for a complex mix of reasons. But by one measure, Minnesota schools provide the weakest safety net in the country: No other state spends less of its education dollar on non-classroom student support.

Abysmal graduation rates for minority students have not only rattled education officials, but are worrying policymakers and civic leaders over the implications for Minnesota’s economy. The state needs skilled workers. And the fastest-growing segment of the future workforce is students of color — the students least likely to earn diplomas.

Many schools here and elsewhere have improved their graduation rates in part by following a simple formula of early intervention. They identify students who are at risk of dropping out, then match them with the support they need.

Emily Badger:

Using panel data on more than 100,000 American households over seven years, they tracked purchases of toilet paper, which has the great benefit of being non-perishable and steadily consumed (it’s hard to go without, but we also don’t use more just because we happen to have more in the house). That’s nearly 3 million toilet paper purchases.

When Orhun and Palazzolo compared households with similar consumption rates shopping at comparable stores — and controlling for two-ply TP — they found that the poor were less likely than wealthier households to buy bigger packages, or to time their purchases to take advantage of sales. By failing to do so, they paid about 5.9 percent more per sheet of toilet paper — a little less than what they saved by buying cheaper brands in the first place (8.8 percent).

Perhaps this sounds like a subtle discovery about minor household goods. But it supports a larger point about poverty: It’s expensive to be poor. Or, to state the same from another angle: Having more money gives people the luxury of paying less for things.

In the case of toilet paper, or any number of other storable goods like canned tomatoes, rice or paper towels, shoppers have to pay more up front to reap savings over time. And the poor often can’t afford to do that — to pay $24 for a 30-pack instead of $5 for a four-pack. Then, because they can’t stock up, they can’t afford to wait until the next sale comes around. When the toilet paper runs out, they have to run to the store for another small quantity of it — whatever it costs in that moment. Because they can’t use one money-saving strategy, they can’t use the other, either.

The use of connected math has not helped. More, here.

Emma Brown:

The Detroit public school system is running out of cash so quickly that it likely will not be able to make payroll after April 8 unless state lawmakers take action soon, the new state-appointed emergency manager said Wednesday.

Steven Rhodes, who assumed the helm of Detroit Public Schools at the beginning of March, urged members of the House Appropriations Committee to move quickly to pass legislation to deal with the school system’s mounting debt, the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News reported.

“We can’t print money,” he said, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Detroit plans to spend $768,893,425 during the current school year or $8,481/student for 90,660 students.

Madison, the land of milk and honey, spends more than $17,000/student.

Jason Leopold:

The Obama administration has long called itself the most transparent administration in history. But newly released Department of Justice (DOJ) documents show that the White House has actually worked aggressively behind the scenes to scuttle congressional reforms designed to give the public better access to information possessed by the federal government.

The documents were obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports journalism in the public interest, which in turn shared them exclusively with VICE News. They were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — the same law Congress was attempting to reform. The group sued the DOJ last December after its FOIA requests went unanswered for more than a year.

WAMC:

The PIAAC study — the Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies — looks at the skills adults need to do everyday tasks, whether it’s at work or in their social lives.

“Clearly, we have some work to do in this country,” says Peggy Carr, the acting commissioner of the government’s National Center for Education Statistics. The study compared countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Japan and Finland led the group in literacy, math and technology skills, while the United States’ performance was average or well below average in each category.

Doug Erickson:

Gary Bennett, a former public school teacher, will begin April 1, according to the UW System.

He will establish and lead the new Office of Educational Opportunity, an entity proposed by Darling and other Republican legislators and approved last year as part of the state’s biennial budget process.

The office will have the ability to bypass local school boards and directly authorize new charter schools in districts with more than 25,000 students. Currently, that’s just Madison and Milwaukee.

A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school several years ago.

Unfortnately, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending more than $17k/student during the 2015-2016 school year.

Corey DeAngelis, Patrick J. Wolf:

report we examine crime rates for young adults who experienced Milwaukee’s citywide voucher program as high school students and a comparable group of their peers who had been public school students. Using unique data collected as part of a longitudinal evaluation of the program, we consider criminal activity by youth initially exposed to voucher schools and those in public schools at the same time. We also consider subsequent criminal activity by the students that stayed in the voucher program through 12th grade compared to those who were in public schools for the same period. We show that the mere exposure to private schooling through a voucher is associated with lower rates of criminal activity but the relationship is not robust to different analytic samples or measures of crime. We find a more consistent statistically significant negative relationship between students that stayed in the voucher program through 12th grade and criminal activity (meaning persistent voucher students commit fewer crimes). These results are apparent when controlling for a robust set of student demographics, test scores, and parental characteristics. We conclude that merely being exposed to private schooling for a short time through a voucher program may not have a significant impact on criminal activity, though persistently attending a private school through a voucher program can decrease subsequent criminal activity, especially for males.

Allie Conti:

For years, millennials have been derided as lazy, narcissistic leaches whose spoiled upbringing has left them ungrateful for the world of technological wonders they’ve been born into. But a new Guardian investigation into data about incomes in Western countries has found that young people have reason to complain—in seven wealthy nations in particular, they’re statistically destined to end up worse off financially than their parents. In the US, young people are now poorer than retirees.

The Guardian reported that even as the incomes of young people in countries like the US, Canada, Australia, and France have declined, the fortunes of older people have increased. “It is likely to be the first time in industrialised history, save for periods of war or natural disaster, that the incomes of young adults have fallen so far when compared with the rest of society,” according to the Guardian.

Tomohiro Osaki:

As this year’s elementary school graduates enter junior high school in April, one of their biggest concerns will be which extracurricular club to join.

Known as bukatsu, the clubs are so central to the Japanese junior high and high school experience that they not only determine students’ friendships but also affect their later development.

But this long-held tradition is now coming under fire, and from an unexpected quarter: The teachers forced to supervise them say the expectations placed on them are inhumane and driving them to exhaustion.

We look at the emerging controversy over extracurricular clubs:

Thomas Toch:

The Obama administration has worked hard to strengthen public-school teaching—a $400 billion-plus workforce, and perhaps the single strongest lever in schools for raising student achievement. But just after Thanksgiving, the president signed a major new education law that largely abandoned the cornerstone of his teacher agenda: pressing states and school districts to take more seriously the task of identifying who in the profession was doing a good job, and who wasn’t.

Two powerful forces at opposite ends of the political spectrum had attacked the president’s strategy—teacher unions wanting to end the new scrutiny of their members and Tea Party members targeting the Obama plan as part of a larger anti-Washington campaign. As a result, the new Every Student Succeeds Act terminates the Obama administration’s incentives for states and school districts to introduce tougher teacher-evaluation systems. And the law effectively bans the U.S. Secretary of Education from promoting teacher-performance measurements in the future.

Clay Travis:

The fallout from the fake Mizzou protests continues to destablize the University of Missouri. Today the interim chancellor of the university emailed students that the university will enroll 1500 less students than projected and faces a budget shortfall of $32 million this year.

While the 1500 fewer students aren’t broken out by year, the vast majority of them will come from the entering freshman class. How substantial is the decline in enrollment? Based on Mizzou admission data from past years we’re talking about a potential 20% drop in enrolled freshmen.

Molly Bloom:

Atlanta school Superintendent Meria Carstarphen’s plan to turn around the struggling school system calls for closing schools that, by Atlanta standards, are succeeding and merge those students with now-failing schools.

The closures will allow her to replace hundreds of teachers, bring in new leaders and save money by closing half-empty schools. District officials says the goal is to improve education for thousands of Atlanta children.

In addition to closing three schools, Carstarphen has also proposed hiring charter school groups to run five low-performing schools.

But her plan doesn’t make sense to some parents.

“Why would you close a school that’s improving?” asked Antonia Mickens, whose daughter attends one of the schools up for closure.

Meanwhile Madison is expanding its least diverse middle school: Hamilton.

TIANHUI MICHAEL LI and ALLISON BISHOP

Can you remember the last time you did calculus? Unless you are a researcher or engineer, chances are good it was in a high-school or college class you’d rather forget. For most Americans, solving a calculus problem is not a skill they need to perform well at work.

This is not to say that America’s workforce doesn’t need advanced mathematics—quite the opposite. An extensive 2011 McKinsey Global Institute study found that by 2018 the U.S will face a 1.5 million worker shortfall in analysts and managers who have the mathematical training necessary to deal with analysis of “large data sets,” the bread and butter of the big-data revolution.

The question is not whether advanced mathematics is needed but rather what kind of advanced mathematics. Calculus is the handmaiden of physics; it was invented by Newton to explain planetary and projectile motion. While its place at the core of math education may have made sense for Cold War adversaries engaged in a missile and space race, Minute-Man and Apollo no longer occupy the same prominent role in national security and continued prosperity that they once did.

Ed Hughes:

long arc of successful school improvement efforts, we should pay more attention to long-term trends than test-to-test or even year-to-year progress. This requires a kind of patience that coexists uneasily with the sense of urgency for our urban public schools.

It also calls for the kind of long-term commitment that isn’t very compatible with the traditional model of school board governance. Folks generally aren’t inspired to run for school board by a desire to refrain from monkeying around with an approach that seems to be working. “Let’s leave well enough alone” isn’t much of a campaign slogan. And yet, if a school district is headed in the right direction, as I think we are in Madison, that can be exactly what is called for.

The bottom line is, education is complicated. Change is hard, system-wide change is harder, system-wide change for the better is harder still. The kind of long-term positive changes we want to see in our urban school districts will certainly take longer than five years and may take a decade of sustained effort to achieve. And incremental progress along the way may be all that we can expect to see.

Much more on Ed Hughes, here.

Unfortunately, despite spending more than most, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Speaking of the long view, this, from 2007 is worth reading.

Monika Schmid:

addition to this overall and gradual advantage for younger learners, there is one notable qualitative difference: even very good older language learners differ from younger ones when it comes to using grammar correctly and consistently. Every time I mark a run of scripts from my adult students, most of whom are from non-English-speaking backgrounds, I find that while they are amazingly good at using a wide range of vocabulary, appropriate style and complex grammar, they often struggle with some simple grammatical rules.

For example, many adult learners never fully master the distinction between “he walks” and “they walk”. They also often fail to grasp that “I have lived in Colchester for two years” means that I still live there, while “I lived in Colchester for two years” means that I do not. Why are simple and highly frequent rules apparently impossible to master, while words that have been encountered only a few times sink in easily?

Betsy Hammond:

Oregon’s charter school movement is on life support, ranking worst among 18 states where at least 2 percent of students attend charter schools, a report by a pro-charter school group says.

One of the biggest problems: Oregon’s nearly 30,000 charter school students made less progress in reading and much less in math than students in traditional public schools from 2008 to 2011, the report found.

Oregon’s 100-plus charter schools also serve a more heavily white and much more heavily middle-class population than other public schools, it said. Charter schools by their nature strive to reach students poorly served by traditional schools, so charter schools ideally should serve more minority and low-income students than regular public schools, the study’s authors said.

Australasian Science:

There are well-recognised problems with student participation and achievement in maths and science. Widespread shortages of suitable secondary maths and science teachers and low levels of students studying these subjects at secondary and tertiary levels are not just problems faced by Australia, but have become international issues.

A number of interrelated factors that form a self-perpetuating cycle contribute to this situation.

,