Isthmus:

Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.
The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker’s revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers’ evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district’s achievement gap between white and minority students.
In the race for Seat 3, former La Follette High School teacher and low-income housing provider Dean Loumos is running against retired Madison police lieutenant Wayne Strong. The winner will replace retiring school board member Beth Moss.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we’d pose our own questions to candidates. We start by asking the candidates about their experience, and how they would address the achievement gap in the district.

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

Robin Lake & Betheny Gross, via a kind Deb Britt email:

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has received a $500,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study the financial and resource allocation implications of blended learning models.
Led by Director Robin Lake and Research Director Dr. Betheny Gross, CRPE will analyze the financials of 30 K-12 blended learning schools, including schools funded through the Next Generation Learning Challenges, a Gates-funded competition to promote college readiness and completion and education technology.
Blended learning combines online and face-to-face instruction, allowing students to master content at their own pace and teachers to track progress and tailor lessons accordingly. There is tremendous interest nationally in its promise to dramatically customize and improve student learning by deploying technology and instructional resources in new ways. Understanding how schools can use technology, dollars, and teacher time in innovative ways will be key to the continued expansion and success of blended learning models.
CRPE will answer questions critical to the field, including:

Pamela Cotant:

Third- and fourth-graders at Our Redeemer Lutheran School created the look of a wax museum by dressing up and remaining still in poses for about six minutes at a time.
Visitors to the exhibit Feb. 21 at the West Side school could push a button pinned to the students’ costumes to have them recite one of three facts they memorized about their characters. Tri-fold boards set on tables behind the students offered full biographies of the people they chose to portray from Henry Ford to Harry Houdini to Pocahontas.
“Some poses are harder than others,” said fourth-grader Anika Stone, 9, who wore a gold coat and a diamond tiara to portray Queen Elizabeth.
“When you’re standing, it’s a little harder,” said fourth-grader Erin Zenk, 10, who also portrayed royalty by wearing a white strapless gown as Princess Diana.
Anika as Queen Elizabeth interacted with another student, third-grader Will Popp, 8, who was dressed as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, to depict when she made him an honorary knight.

Matthew DeFour:

Madison middle school students could soon have an extra class period and smaller class sizes without adding minutes to the school day under a plan being developed by the Madison School District.
Joe Gothard, assistant superintendent for secondary education, said an eight-period day with 45-minute classes instead of seven 47- to 51-minute classes would give students opportunities to take more electives and help the district implement interventions for students struggling in reading and math. It also would be in line with some of the other area middle school schedules.
“We’re looking for ways we can increase success for all students,” Gothard said. “This is one way we’re looking at.”
Gothard said Cherokee and Black Hawk middle schools are closer than the district’s other middle schools in possibly using an eight-period day next school year. The change wouldn’t cost additional money and doesn’t require School Board approval, he added.
The district planned to send a letter to parents over the weekend alerting them to the possible change.

e

Benjamin Scaffidi:

America’s K-12 public education system has experienced tremendous historical growth in employment, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. Between fiscal year (FY) 1950 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students in the United States increased by 96 percent, while the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) school employees grew 386 percent. Public schools grew staffing at a rate four times faster than the increase in students over that time period. Of those personnel, teachers’ numbers increased 252 percent, while administrators and other non-teaching staff experienced growth of 702 percent, more than seven times the increase in students.
That hiring pattern has persisted in more recent years as well. Between FY 1992 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students nationwide grew 17 percent, while the number of FTE school employees increased 39 percent. Among school personnel, teachers’ staffing numbers rose 32 percent, while administrators and other non-teaching staff experienced growth of 46 percent, 2.3 times greater than the increase in students over that 18-year period; the growth in the number of teachers was almost twice that of students.
The two aforementioned figures come from “The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools.” This companion report contains more state-specific information about public school staffing. Specifically, this report contains:

Dennis Sparks:

The notes of the lecturer are passed to the notes of the listener – without going through the minds of either. – Mortimer Adler
Mortimer Adler succinctly describes the mindless learning that follows mindless teaching.
Visualize a continuum with that form of teaching and learning at one end. At the other end place the kind of teaching that produces high levels of engagement, meaningful involvement with the subject matter, and the acquisition and exercise of complex cognitive skills. (A good share of the teaching students experience each day falls between those two extremes.)
The professional learning of teachers and administrators can be placed along a similar continuum.
To update Adler’s description, at one end of the continuum the PowerPoint slides of the presenter are passed to the tweets of the students without going through the minds of either. At the other end is professional learning with qualities that closely resemble those described above for students–high levels of engagement, meaningful involvement with the subject matter, and the acquisition and exercise of complex cognitive skills
In my experience, the kinds of teaching/learning processes used in professional development have a profound effect on the teaching/learning processes used in the vast majority of’ classrooms. Put another way, mindless professional learning produces mindless teaching. And vice versa.

Matthew DeFour:

The Wisconsin Catholic Conference backed Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed voucher expansion Tuesday.

In a letter to the Legislature, Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukee, Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison and the bishops of Green Bay, LaCrosse and Superior said their support for the expansion was not based on it potentially benefiting Catholic schools.
“We back this effort out of a conviction that parents, as the primary educators of their children, must have the community’s support in selecting a form of education that best meets their child’s needs — academic, psychological, emotional, spiritual and physical,” they wrote.
The bishops also rejected the argument from voucher opponents that the proposal undermines public schools.

Pat Schneider:

Can you have a public discussion on closing the achievement gap in Madison without inviting Kaleem Caire, the architect of a would-be charter school plan that pushed the issue of the Madison School District’s persistent race-based gap to the front burner of local civic debate?
Caire, CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, is not on the roster for the March 13 installment of Ed Talks Wisconsin, a UW-Madison-sponsored series on current education topics, when a Madison panel will discuss “Closing the Achievement Gap: Toward a Community-Wide K12 Agenda.”
Joel Rogers, director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, the equity advocacy group that organized the achievement gap panel discussion, said Monday that the presentation was conceived as a response to Caire’s education forum featuring such lights of the “school reform” movement as Geoffrey Canada, John Legend and Howard Fuller. At that two-day event last December, people heard a lot of talk promoting charter schools and greater teacher accountability as the answer to lagging performance by students of color.
“We wanted voices of people who think that, whatever its defects, public education is important in the 21st century,” Rogers said, adding that Madison Mayor Paul Soglin urged him to organize a program.
For his part, Soglin said that Caire has organized a number of discussions, like December’s “Educate to Elevate,” and “he did not invite anyone with different opinions on charter schools to participate.”
…….
The achievement gap presentation in Ed Talks was in response to the Urban League’s education summit, but other programs in the eight-day series were suggested by a variety of other groups as early as last fall, organizer Sara Goldrick-Rab [SIS], an associate professor in the School of Education, told me.
The final event on March 21 is part of a two-day educational policy conference that the university has hosted for years, she said.
Ed Talks is funded by some $5,000 in donations from a variety of university entities, but some $8,000 in funding for the educational policy conference includes $300 from the local branch of the American Federation of Teachers and $500 from WEAC, Goldrick-Rab said.

Related Does the School Board Matter? Ed Hughes argues that experience does, but what about “Governance” and “Student Achievement”?

As American parents, students, educators, and concerned citizens, we are united in opposition to the agenda of those corporate, foundation, and government interests that seek to influence local district boards of education, state boards of education, state governments, governors, and the Office of the Secretary of Education. This agenda calls for standardization of national curricula in the form of the Common Core Standards mandated in the Federal initiative “Race to the Top,” data-driven assessments of students and teachers, and the creation and implementation of standardized discrete item testing to measure compliance to the Common Core Standards. The president of the College Board’s recent announcement that a new SAT will be created to measure Common Core Standards skills proficiency also alarms us. In addition, the Secretary of Education’s former press secretary has recently used the “revolving door” of public office to acquire a job with a company that is related to Pearson LLC.
We demand transparency and public accountability for decisions that are being made on the above issues without open hearings or public debate on the influence of corporate lobbying and marketing at local, state, and federal levels. We strongly suspect the existence of quid pro quo understandings between the current Secretary of Education and Bill Gates, The Bill and Melina Gates Foundation, The College Board and David Coleman, The Educational Testing Service (ETS), and Pearson Education LLC that amount to collusion between a Federal Public servant(s) and corporate interests that appear to be working together to limit competition in an open marketplace.
We therefore resolve:
1) That State Attorneys General investigate possible quid pro quo agreements between the above parties and members of state boards of education and commissioners,
2) That State Attorneys General investigate lobbying of the above parties to determine whether bribery laws have been violated,
3) That all state governments conduct investigations of the contributions of Pearson LLC, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Students First Foundation to local school board elections and the elections or appointments of state education commissioners and state boards of education,
4) And that each state file a complaint with the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice in Washington preliminary to discovery of evidence of possible collusion of the above parties.
5) We call for a Joint House-Senate Committee to be formed to investigate possible collusion and influence peddling between the above parties.
6) We call for the Attorney General of the United States to select an independent prosecutor to investigate the possibility of quid pro quo dealings and collusion between the parties above.
7) We understand that the Tunney Act does not apply to this case and we argue that is precisely why collusion is involved, to avoid merger or the appearance of merger that would trigger a court hearing.
8) We strongly recommend that the Special Prosecutor (6) investigate all contracts let by the Department of Education to Pearson Education LLC.
9) We strongly recommend that all State Attorneys General investigate all state contracts let by Pearson LLC.
Read more, here.
Paul Horton
State Liaison
Illinois Council for History Education
History Instructor
University High School
The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
773-702-0588
phorton@ucls.uchicago.edu
www.ucls.uchicago.edu

Katy Jordan:

While Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) may allow free education on an enormous scale, one of the biggest criticisms raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information about enrollment and completion rates from MOOCs appears to be ad hoc at the moment – that is, official statistics are not published for every course. This data visualisation draws together information about enrollment numbers and completion rates from across online news stories and blogs.

Don Boudreaux:

In a bold effort to improve the educational fortunes of students who perform at academic levels significantly below the average of their peers, Congress has mandated a minimum grade to be assigned to each student in each course taught at any school in the country. Starting in September, it shall be unlawful for any teacher, professor, or instructor charged with assigning course grades to assign to any student a grade lower than C-.
Sponsors of the Fair Academic Standards Act decry the injustice that occurs each time a student earns a low grade, such as a D or an F. “It’s impossible for students with ‘D’s and ‘F’s on their transcripts to succeed as they deserve in life,” remarked Sen. Bernie Franken, an Independent from Elitia. “This law ensures that no American will ever again suffer that hardship.”
Opponents of the Act worry that the requirement of a minimum grade will prompt schools to refuse to enroll students whose academic preparation or skills aren’t yet sufficient to enable them actually to earn good grades.
Sen. Paul Rand, an outspoken opponent of the bill, admits that ‘D’s and ‘F’s are poor grades that are not likely to win good jobs for students that have many such grades on their transcripts. Sen. Rand argues, however, that the Act will steer schools away from enrolling less-prepared students and, as a consequence, deny these very students the opportunity to acquire the education that will enable them in the future to perform better in the classroom. “It’s an unintended bad consequence of Sen. Franken’s good intentions,” suggests Sen. Rand.

Clive Cookson:

Sixty years ago this weekend the race to pin down the structure of DNA, the molecule of inheritance, was at a critical stage. In Cambridge Francis Crick and Jim Watson were realising how well a double helix would fit the available data. Meanwhile at King’s College London the dysfunctional team of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, who had provided Crick and Watson with their most important evidence, were still unaware of the breakthrough in Cambridge.
At this point Wilkins sent Crick a letter looking forward to the imminent departure of “our dark lady” – Franklin – to a new job at Birkbeck College. This would leave him free to take part in a final push to discover how genes are encoded. “I have started up a general offensive on nature’s secret strongholds on all fronts,” he wrote. “At last the decks are clear and we can put all hands to the pumps! It won’t be long now.”

Anthony Finkelstein:

PJ O’Rourke, the US journalist and humourist wrote a book of essays entitled ‘Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut’. Tempting as it is for a man in his fifties to make this point it is not my purpose in writing.
We have a cult of youth in academia, certainly in the sciences. This widespread cult pays its obeisances to the dynamism of the ‘early career’ researcher and ‘junior research fellow’. The cult shows sufficient awareness of the strictures of age discrimination legislation not to actually say ‘young’ though we are clearly to understand that is what is meant. The basis of the cult is that, supposedly, the young are particularly gifted with energy, creativity and the willingness to break the bonds of convention. These judged as the sole prerequisites of scientific achievement.
Evidence for this contention is drawn from the observation that in some areas of work, mathematics being a case in point, younger researchers are more frequently associated with ground breaking developments. It is propped up by examples of youthful genius culled from the history of science. It owes most however to the introspection of men (and yes, I mean this) in their fifties and sixties who either feel their creative powers waning or reflect, who knows how accurately, on their own careers.
None of this, I would humbly submit, is a sound basis for policy. The fact that younger scientists perform well in an age-diverse scientific community does not necessarily suggest that concentrating on (or worse concentrating) younger scientists is the way to achieve the desired outcomes. It is also unclear whether it is the career imperatives and personal situation of younger researchers that drives productivity rather than youthful creativity. Thus, the harsh ‘up or out’ US tenure system achieves its results by very direct economic and job incentives and not by any fairy dust sprinkled on younger researchers.

NPR:

The hallways at Westlake High School in Maryland are just like thousands of other school hallways around the country: kids milling around, laughing and chatting on their way to class.
On a recent morning, about 30 kids took their seats in a classroom that initially seems like any other. The major difference here is that instead of a chalkboard and a lectern at the head of the class, there are two enormous flat-panel screens and thin, white microphones hanging in four rows across the ceiling.
Greeting the students via Skype this morning is a dapper, bearded man in a brown vest. But it’s not their history teacher, it’s Kenneth C. Davis, author of Don’t Know Much About History, who was invited to talk to the students about America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This type of teaching is a novel approach, but it can be an expensive one. That has some asking whether the billions being spent on educational technology is worth the cost.

Roma Downey & Mark Burnett:

Have you ever sensed in your own life that “the handwriting was on the wall”? Or encouraged a loved one to walk “the straight and narrow”?
Have you ever laughed at something that came “out of the mouths of babes”? Or gone “the extra mile” for an opportunity that might vanish “in the twinkling of an eye”?
If you have, then you’ve been thinking of the Bible.
These phrases are just “a drop in the bucket” (another biblical phrase) of the many things we say and do every day that have their origins in the most read, most influential book of all time. The Bible has affected the world for centuries in innumerable ways, including art, literature, philosophy, government, philanthropy, education, social justice and humanitarianism. One would think that a text of such significance would be taught regularly in schools. Not so. That is because of the “stumbling block” (the Bible again) that is posed by the powers that be in America.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Bettner email(PDF):

During the next few weeks, many teachers will be advised by their principals that they have been declared “surplus” for the 2013-14 school year. While being declared surplus from one’s position can be stressful, the stress is heightened by one confusing “surplus” with “layoff”. These two provisions of the MTI/MMSD Collective Bargaining Agreement are separate and distinct with far different implications for the individual. Both are defined in Section IV-O of MTI’s Teacher Contract (surplus procedures for MTI-represented EA, SEE and SSA employees differ and will be explained in future articles).
A teacher who has been declared “surplus” is defined in the MTI/MMSD Collective Bargaining Agreement as any teacher presently teaching under a regular full-time or regular part-time contract who has been declared by their principal to be above staff requirements at their school for the ensuing school year or semester. Simply stated, a “surplus teacher” is a staff member who is no longer needed, in the school in which they currently teach, but is needed to teach elsewhere in the District.
A teacher who is issued notice of layoff is a staff member no longer needed to teach anywhere in the District, because they are above staff requirements for the District. Surplus declarations typically occur in March, while layoff decisions are made by the end of May.
This year, the District’s Human Resources Department provided staff allocations to principals/supervisors on March 1, giving them until March 11 to respond to HR with surplus declarations. Therefore, while the Contract deadline to declare surplus remains July 1, most surplus declarations are expected to occur by March 11 of this school year.
Issuing declarations of surplus is a two-step process
which, in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Contract, must begin with the principal first requesting volunteers. The purpose of requesting volunteers is to give teachers, who would otherwise not be declared surplus, an opportunity to change their assignment using the surplus/reassignment procedure. The principal does not have to accept the volunteer as surplus if the teacher volunteering to be surplus would result in the remaining teachers at the building not being certified to teach the remaining assignments at the school. If there are no volunteers, or if there are an insufficient number of volunteers, then the principal must declare the teacher(s) surplus using the procedure set forth in Sections IV-O-2 & 3 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement as follows:

Erin Richards:

ACT Inc. has a standard characterization for how many students across the country earn a perfect 36 composite score on its flagship college admissions exam: less than 0.1% of more than 1 million test takers annually.
This year, Nicolet High School is hosting an unusually large number of them.
Superintendent Rick Monroe reported Monday that two juniors, twin sisters Alexandra and Rachel Heuer, earned scores of 36 on the exam.
Junior Ben Lawton learned earlier this year that he earned a perfect ACT score.
So did seniors Nancy Gao and Annie Jen, who is 15.
Jen’s twin brother, William Jen, who has similarly fast-tracked high school to become a senior before he can drive, just missed membership in the elite club. He scored a 35 on the ACT, according to Monroe.

Nicolet high school’s annual report (2012) PDF. Nicolet high schools 2012 budget was $19,016,495 for 1310 students, or $14,516/student. Madison spends $14,242/student, including pre-k.

Jordan Weissman:

Not every Ph.D. student aspires to a career as a tenured college professor. But in plenty of fields, particularly the humanities, spending your life buried up to your elbow patches in books and papers is the gold standard of success. So while breaking down the National Science Foundation’s data for my last two pieces on the job market for doctorate holders, I took a bit of time to look at just what fraction of new graduates were landing jobs in the academy.
The good news? The numbers have only dropped a few percentage points in 20 years. The bad news? They were pretty low to begin with.

Elizabeth Auritt & Delohibe Rodrik:

On a Thursday night in the spring of 2012, students huddled in study groups in Lamont Café, racing against the clock to finish an assignment due the next day. Notes and textbooks were shared, suggestions passed back and forth. There were dozens of students there, or at least enough that voices echoed to amplify the buzz of discussion.
The task’s guidelines for completion were hazy, and the fact that the course had many section leaders with varying expectations heightened the confusion. It was easy for members in the crowd to help each other out. For those who didn’t understand, didn’t have time, or just didn’t care, group work turned into copying.
That summer, after Lamont had emptied out for the semester, the accusations came. The cheating was “unprecedented in anyone’s living memory,” according to Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris.
But the students who had collaborated in Lamont that spring evening faced no accusations. They had not been enrolled in Government 1310.
***
The students in Lamont, who were described by a fellow classmate, had been working on a problem set for Economics 10. It was Government 1310, though, that received national attention after Harris announced in August that the Administrative Board was investigating approximately 125 students for inappropriate collaboration on a take-home final in a spring course.

Clay Christensen:

Harvard Business School Professor Clay Christensen is the father of the idea of disruptive innovation, and one of a select few business thinkers who can claim that their theories influence the behavior of top companies.
Right now, he thinks that his own employer is ripe for disruption. He’s argued previously that higher education as a whole “is on the edge of the crevasse,” and will be disrupted by online competitors. In a discussion at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab (full video available here) Christensen focused specifically on the disruption of the MBA.
“You guys need to stay tuned because it’s happening to the Harvard Business School,” Christensen said. “It truly is and nobody at Harvard even thinks about it.”
There are two things that make MBA programs like Harvard’s ripe for disruption, Christensen argues. The first is the cost.
“To get a Harvard MBA, you gotta to be the best of the best of the best to get yourself admitted, and then we empty your pockets to the tune of $120,000,” Christensen said. “Then you have two years of foregone salary. So this is a very intensive investment.”

David Carr:

More than 10,000 students across Idaho will be getting Khan Academy videos for homework, as the tutorial website launches its first state-wide pilot aimed at integrating online education with the regular classroom experience.
Khan Academy is best known as a place where elementary, high school and college students go for help learning a concept they did not quite grasp when their instructor explained it. Particularly strong in mathematics and science, Khan Academy has been broadening its curriculum to encompass all subjects.
Khan’s JavaScript-based tutorials on computer science were also cited in this week’s Code.org marketing campaign arguing that all students should learn basic programming skills.

Algebra 1 Teachers:

If you have not seen GapMinder yet, it is a must from every math and history teacher!
I was introduced to this amazing graphing software about a year ago at a conference, and I was so excited to play with it and use it in my classroom. But the how was a bit vague… Unfortunately the craziness of getting back to my classroom after three days out distracted me from the goal of figuring it out.
Well, the Common Core placing statistics back into Algebra 1 pushed me forward. I am so grateful. I want my students to understand numbers in the context of the larger world around them. And this is the perfect tool!

Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Post-Secondary Education (2.6MB PDF):

To answer the guiding research questions, we developed a comparison group of academically and demographically similar non-participants to compare outcomes with AVID/TOPS students based on 8th grade pre-participation data. Using a statistical matching method called propensity score matching, we matched every AVID/TOPS student with a similar non-AVID/TOPS student at the same high school to create the comparison group.
Using these groups, we test for statistically and practically significant differences on key measures of academic preparation (cumulative GPA, enrollment and GPA in core courses, enrollment and GPA in AP/Honors courses, and credit attainment), college knowledge (test-taking rates and performance on the EXPLORE, PLAN, and ACT tests), and student engagement (attendance rates and behavioral referrals).
Statistically significant differences are differences that are unlikely to have occurred through random chance and are large enough to reflect meaningful differences in practice. In this report, we highlight statistically significant differences with a red symbol: .To focus attention on underrepresented students’ achievement, we disaggregated the measures by income and race. Though we report disaggregated findings, many of these groups are not mutually exclusive; for example, low-income students may also be African-American and therefore also represented in that data disaggregation. We do not report data from disaggregated groups that have fewer than five students in them. We then analyze this data at the program, grade cohort, and high school levels.
This assessment does not make causal claims about AVID/TOPS, nor does it present a longitudinal analysis of AVID/TOPS student achievement. Rather, the findings represent a single snapshot for achievement during the 2011-12 school year of the program’s 9th, 10th, and 11th graders.

Alan Borsuk:

The youth was on his way to class at the start of the day at Milwaukee South Division High School. But first he stopped to leave his headphones with Paola Felix Encarnacion.
That was one small victory for the education of this young man who is in ninth grade for the second year – and one small accomplishment for Paola and the organization she works for, City Year.
I spent much of the spring of 2006 visiting large Milwaukee Public Schools high schools for a series of stories in this newspaper. At most of the schools, I spent a day following a specific student. Not surprisingly, schools generally matched me with one of their stars.
At South, I was paired with Paola. She was a junior then, the kind of kid you hope goes on to do good things for herself and others. Every time I passed near South Division in the last few years, I wondered what she was up to.
Last fall, I was invited to meet with the 50 or so young adults who are City Year “corps members” in Milwaukee this year. A nationwide program, City Year members work in eight MPS schools. The red jackets make them highly visible. They don’t teach, but do lots of things to help students get engaged constructively in school. They run programs and clubs, mentor and tutor “at-risk” students, promote attendance and good behavior. A key to the work is just staying in touch daily with specific students. City Year is funded by AmeriCorps and by private money, including support from some of the most prominent donors in Milwaukee.

Toma:

Academic publishing is changing fast. In this post, I’ll describe not only the exciting recent policy developments, but also several new models for the publication of scientific research.
Undoubtedly open access in set to truly break through this year, mainly thanks to strong funder mandates (e.g. RCUK and Horizon 2020). The debate has started to shift to the relative merits of author-pays-gold (or rather, funder-pays; see below) and institutional-repositories-green models. (Please see Peter Suber’s widely accepted definitions for the terminology). Richard Poynder continues his important coverage of the developments, describing in detail the controversy over the UK’s gold-first policy in the international context:

Chris Rickert:

Since Sarah Manski dropped out of the Madison School Board race two days after winning her primary, she’s been pilloried not only by the school district’s smattering of conservatives but by the same liberal, pro-democracy folks she once epitomized.
Leaving the race effectively left voters with little choice in who will get the seat she briefly coveted. It will either be second-place primary finisher T.J. Mertz or whomever the board appoints should Manski — whose name will remain on the April general election ballot — get the most votes.
Sure, Manski deserves the criticism.
But in creating the current mess, she had quite a bit of help from people pulling the district’s strings back when she was just a kid.
Until 1985, if one candidate dropped out of a school board race it mattered less because candidates weren’t required to run for particular, numbered seats.
Instead, they filed as candidates, primaries were held if the number of candidates was more than twice the number of seats up for election and, in the general election, voters voted for their top two or three choices, depending on whether there were two or three seats on the ballot.
Under that system, the people who actually got the most votes were assured of winning seats. And if one person dropped out of a six-person race — say, after a primary — you still had five to choose from.

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

Michael L. Gourlie:

The hiring process for Madison School District superintendent had its strange twists, but it appears all are euphoric with first impressions of Jennifer Cheatham. Our new superintendent received the School Board’s blessing, commendations from the mayor and community support for her pedigree and ability to relate to others.
However, one question that jumped out and either was never asked or not reported is why she never held a job longer than two years since she advanced to administration from a teacher position in 2003.
It’s not as if she was upwardly mobile within one school district, but rather she switched cities and districts at every stop except the first. Madison is her fifth change of city in 10 years, according to a Friday article.
Generally candidates with this type of resume are either opportunists jumping at the next ladder rung, or they move on before their performance catches up with them.

Much more on Jennifer Cheatham, here.

A kind reader forwarded a number of notes and links on the recent Wisconsin “open records” hearing:

Wisconsin eye video archive.
This bill (8 R + 1 D sponsors) is making some strange, strange bedfellows: Bill Lueders speaking approvingly of Gov. Walker’s open records release policy (unredacted emails) and criticizing (without calling out by name) Erpenbach for fighting MacIver Institute’s open records lawsuit.
Former Madison Schools’ counsel Dan Mallin is presently counsel to WASB, who is supporting the bill…perhaps an element of “Mallin’s revenge” for the State AG/MMSD “spam” smackdown forever memorialized in footnote 10 of the supreme court opinion that this bill is seeking to overturn?
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recap:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/state-panel-raises-concerns-about-bill-allowing-charges-for-public-records-redactions-k38v0pq-193626741.html
Isthmus recap:
http://www.isthmus.com/daily/article.php?article=39271
this should have been titled “Journalists and citizen testify against”.
WSJ editorial:
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/opinion/editorial/don-t-charge-to-delete-information/article_3a8d4bac-819e-11e2-8ffc-0019bb2963f4.html

The footnote 10 matter related to this SIS open records request…..

Dale Stephens:

Imagine that you have been accepted to Harvard Business School. The ivy-covered buildings and high-powered faculty whisper that all you need to do is listen to your teachers, get good grades and work well with your peers. After two years, you’ll emerge ready to take the business world by storm. Once you have that degree, you’ll have it made.
But don’t kid yourself. What matters exponentially more than that M.B.A. is the set of skills and accomplishments that got you into business school in the first place. What if those same students, instead of spending two years and $174,400 at Harvard Business School, took the same amount of money and invested it in themselves? How would they compare after two years?
If you want a business education, the odds aren’t with you, unfortunately, in business school. Professors are rewarded for publishing journal articles, not for being good teachers. The other students are trying to get ahead of you. The development office is already assessing you for future donations. Administrators care about the metrics that will improve your school’s national ranking. None of these things actually helps you learn about business.

Joe Ross:

My daughter recently broke her finger playing basketball. When we went to the clinic, the waiting room was packed with dozens of patients, and there were only a couple of medical doctors on duty. We spent 20 minutes with a nurse, ten minutes with the X-ray technician, seven minutes with the orthopedic resident, and just two to three minutes with a doctor. Against apparent odds, our visit turned out very well. Thanks to the combination of talents, expertise and communication styles provided by several professionals, my daughter experienced a remarkably effective – and efficient – healing experience.
In the school day of the future, imagine a similar scenario playing out in classrooms and schools here in California and across the country. The role of the teacher would evolve from that of a soloist to a choreographer, bringing together people and resources in different combinations to create a vibrant learning environment that efficiently serves a growing, evolving population and provides enrichment through a combination of caring relationships.

Laura Waters:

The Star-Ledger thinks it’s unveiled a conspiracy among retired NJ school superintendents. In “an investigation by the New Jersey Watchdog,” the paper reports that these retired school administrators, while collecting generous pensions, proceed to “double-dip” by taking jobs as interim superintendents for up to two years. This sleazy practice is costing state taxpayers “millions of dollars” every year. Here’s an example in the Watchdog report:

“There are a lot of superintendents who are retiring and coming back to the work force,” said longtime South Jersey school chief Ralph E. Ross Sr.
Ross collected $292,272 last year – $149,256 in salary as interim superintendent of Deptford Township schools in Gloucester County, plus $143,016 from pension as retired superintendent of Black Horse Pike Regional schools in Camden County.
“Of course, people are going to call it double-dipping because you get paid twice,” said Ross. “I don’t apologize for any money I get. My services are worthwhile and appreciated.”

When Ross hit the two-year mark at Deptford, the 72-year-old retiree didn’t have to go far for his next post-retirement job. Ten miles away, the Monroe Township school district quickly hired him as its $136,500 interim assistant superintendent.

Madison has had some if this as well.

Geoff Decker:

How much voting power does a New Yorker really wield? How can statistics presented by the media manipulate readers? How do you raise sweatshop wages without sacrificing profit?
These are a few of the questions that math teachers in New York City are asking their students as they try to bring complex and abstract concepts to life. To answer them, students must supplement the equations and formulas found in textbooks by grappling with real-world applications.
The lessons cover a mathematical practice known as modeling that has been around for decades but is now getting a closer look in schools around the city as teachers try to align their math lessons to Common Core standards that require real-world applicability.
Using modeling to present lessons is one of two instructional focuses that the Department of Education has laid out this year for math teachers.
“It’s the practice of solving real-world problems,” said Brooklyn Technical High School’s Patrick Honner, a teacher at Brooklyn Technical High School who in December won a $10,000 award for an innovative math lesson he developed.

Laura Waters:

From yesterday’s NJ Spotlight article on NJ’s progress towards updating our charter school laws:

“This is exciting,” said Carlos Perez, executive director of the New Jersey Charter Schools Association. “We’ve talked about the need for a charter reform bill for some time now. The administration is absolutely correct that a strong charter law is the pathway to high quality charter schools.”
Others with a different vision for revising the charter-school law continued to oppose Christie’s approach and policies.
“What the overwhelming majority of New Jersey residents want added to the charter law is local approval of new charter schools and of charter expansions, more transparency and accountability, and an end to the terrible segregation between charters and traditional public schools,” said Julia Sass Rubin, a founder of Save Our Schools-New Jersey.
“Instead, the Governor is proposing failed for-profit charter schools and an increase in charter schools being forced on unwilling communities,” she said. [Assemblyman Patrick] Diegnan, who has sided more with the positions of SOS and other critics of the Christie administration’s policies, said he would continue to press for tighter controls.
For instance, Diegnan said his bill would include a controversial provision requiring a vote by local residents before any new charter school is approved to open.
“I remain a big advocate for that,” he said.

This excerpt is a useful window into some of the rhetoric surrounding the issue of local control and school choice. First, a reality check. There’s no evidence that the “overwhelming majority” of NJ residents prefer local referenda on charter school expansion. Certainly there’s terrible segregation among NJ’s public schools, but that has nothing to do with charter schools. SOS’s contention that school choice proponents are jockeying for “failed for-profit charter schools” is just silly.

Abby Ohlheiser:

Just over half–or 54.1 percent, to be exact–of first-time college students starting school in 2006 graduated within six years. That’s according to new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The full report, which breaks down completion rates by state, age, type of school, and enrollment status (part-time or full-time), shows some notable gaps in completion rates for those categories.
For four-year public colleges, 81 percent of students enrolled full-time for the duration of their college experience graduated within six years–70 percent from the same institution they started with. But just 19 percent of those who attended school part-time graduated within six years. You’d think that’s because it may be taking students longer than six years to complete a four-year degree part-time, right? Not really. Almost 70 percent of exclusively part-time students hadn’t graduated and were no longer enrolled at any institution after six years. Meanwhile, mixed-enrollment students had an overall graduation rate of just under 47 percent. Four-year private nonprofit schools had a similar breakdown in graduation rates by enrollment status.

Sue Shellenbarger:

A wave of recent research has pointed to the risks of overpraising a child. But for parents, drawing the line between too little praise and too much has become a high-pressure balancing act.
Cara Greene, a mother of three children ages 1 to 8, is wary of deliberately pumping up her kids’ egos, for fear of instilling the sense of entitlement she sees in young adults “who have been told they’re wonderful and they can do anything.” But she also wants them to have healthy self-esteem.
THE SITUATION: Your child is getting straight As inavery advanced math class.
DO: Say, ‘I love seeing how hard you are working in this class. Life is going to bring some tough challenges, and putting in that kind of effort is going to help you.’
DON’T: Say, ‘Look at your grades–all As! You’re so smart you’re off the charts.’ (Lets child’s self-esteem get out of line with reality, setting her up for a shock later.)
“We wouldn’t be doing our children any favors by overinflating their egos. At the same time, I want them to have the confidence to tackle any challenge that is placed before them,” says Ms. Greene, of New York City.

Jessica Lahey:

There’s one lovely aspect to the deep, dark winter in New Hampshire: It is a reprieve from The Season of Dress Code Enforcement.
I teach middle school. And for as long as I have been a teacher, I have worried that my female students are so concerned with their newfound sex appeal that they forget to appreciate all the other gifts they offer to the world. I know it sounds petty, this interest in whether or not the girls in my classes show their legs, or shoulders, or breasts, to the world. My concerns sound like something a repressed, puritanical schoolmarm would worry about over her evening Earl Grey tea.
But when I worry about students, it tends to be the girls. They are the ones I lose sleep over. I am not just worried about inches of exposed anatomy: I am concerned for their souls, their being, and their sense of self.

Sara Shepherd:

If first-grade creative writing were a language, it would be an obscure one. And Gini Shoulberg would be fluent.
The nekes stashun.
My fimliy luv miu.
The wepuns.
Under Shoulberg’s direction, hand-penciled passages like these are carefully translated into comprehensible nuggets and, eventually, strung together into stories.
The next station.
My family loves me.
The weapons…
For more than a decade, the first-grade language arts teacher at St. John Catholic School has led weekly writing workshops for all the school’s first-graders. While spelling and punctuation are important, she says, children don’t need to wait to master those skills before they start writing.

Paul Sullivan:

THE decision by Grinnell College to continue — for now — to admit students regardless of their ability to pay raises a question that more and more parents are asking: how much does your financial situation matter in getting your children into college?
Parents have long used their wealth to try to sway admissions officers, of course. But that doesn’t always work. And it isn’t necessarily true that a needier student is passed up.
“The misperception is schools first look at all the kids who can pay full freight and then look at the kids who are left over,” said Kalman A. Chany, a financial aid consultant in New York and author of “Paying for College Without Going Broke.” “Parents like to use this as an excuse. They’ll say that if my kid didn’t have to apply for aid, he’d get in. It’s overblown. It’s a rationalization.”
Still, the vote by the board of trustees at Grinnell, a liberal arts college in Iowa, reflects a broader trend in financial aid. The college counselors I spoke to this week said the majority of colleges had already downgraded their policies to “need aware” — meaning that the colleges accept most of their students without looking at their need for aid but will consider financial need for some percentage of the applicants. Others are already considering a parent’s ability to pay in many of their admissions decisions.

Don Goble:

Building a digital legacy is an issue I believe doesn’t garner enough attention in our personal and professional lives. In fact, some of the heaviest users of online tools and social media are our young students, who are growing up as a generation of visual learners and visual attention seekers. This is in fact the Facebook and YouTube generation, and the reality is that many teens are unconcerned about the dangers of sharing personal information online.
A highly respected education advocate, Kevin Honeycutt, once asked me if any of us from our generation (GenX and before), had ever made a mistake in puberty. He then asked if our mistakes are “Googleable.”
The reality is that our mistakes from puberty are not “Googleable”. But our students’ mistakes are. “They’re on the record you see, ” Kevin continued, “so if they’re gonna do it (live online) anyway, I think it behooves us a educators to help our students shape and build a positive legacy.”
With that in mind, I have developed some important facts and opinions that our students should be completely aware of as they live in their digital world, creating digital footprints along the way.

m

Channel3000:

An annual event for Monroe Elementary School in Janesville will be a fundraiser for the school’s principal. Principal Lori Burns remains on medical leave battling stage four breast cancer. She surprised her students by returning to school Thursday for their pep rally to kick off “Monroe Madness,” the school’s annual students verses staff basketball game. After three weeks, Burns returned to Monroe Elementary School to cheers, high fives and applause. “I have lesions on my brain, on my liver, my lungs and my vertebrae.

Suzanne Lucas:

A bachelor’s degree is now required for jobs that used to be held by high school grads. Could this actually hurt your business?
There’s an idea that the person with a degree is “better” than a person without one. Indeed, The New York Times recently reported on the relatively new phenomenon of companies hiring people with college degrees for jobs that historically didn’t require college degrees. Are you doing this in your business?
If so, I have to ask, better for what? Yes, having a four year degree does show a degree of dedication. You have to pick a major, take class after class, write paper after paper and work on dreaded group projects. (Which, in my humble opinion, should be banished off the face of the educational earth unless the professor is willing to act as a proper manager, which most are not.) But, anyway, in theory you learn some things and you demonstrate that you have stick-to-itiveness. This is worth something.
But what? You also have to assume that no one enrolled in college, shelled out fantastic amounts of tuition and studied for hours to memorize the philosophies of 40 different dead people with ambitions of becoming an administrative assistant. No, they had other goals.

Ruth Simon & Rachel Louis Ensign:

The number of young borrowers who have fallen behind on their student loan payments has soared over the past four years, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said in a report released Thursday.
According to the report, 35% of people under 30 who have student loans were at least 90 days late on their payments at the end of last year, up from 26% in 2008 and 21% at the end of 2004.
The new figures, which exclude borrowers who are still in school or aren’t yet required to make payments, show that young Americans are having a tougher time repaying college loans as debt loads increase and job prospects remain shaky.

Kevin Hudson:

The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies has launched Smithsonian Quests, a digital badge program designed to foster project-based learning and inspire students to explore their own ideas and interests.
To earn digital badges, students complete a series of online activities and submit their work for review by Smithsonian education experts. All quests engage students in exploring a topic of interest, either as part of a formal standards-aligned school curriculum or as a student-driven after school activity.
Activities offered include subjects such as creative writing, photography, oral histories, and graph-making. The cross-curricular, standards-aligned programs are intended to prepare students for college and future careers by incorporating knowledge and skill-building into the quests, according to a Smithsonian release.

Matthew DeFour:

On a typical school night, while most chemistry students are solving homework problems, Verona High School junior Alison Ford is watching her teacher lecture on her iPod Touch.
The next day in class she huddles with two classmates to work on equilibrium equations based on the recorded lecture while her teacher moves between groups of students to answer questions about the assignment.
“It’s a lot nicer because instead of tying up class time trying to explain everything, it really allows you to learn at your own pace,” Ford said.
Welcome to the “flipped classroom,” a learning model that is going viral across Wisconsin and the nation. It’s being employed not only in local elementary and high schools, but also at Madison Area Technical College, UW-Madison and even the Madison Fire Department.

February 21, 2013 hour 1 mp3, hour 2 mp3

Matthew Defour

Manski declined to name the other people who recruited her and has not returned calls since last Friday.
Soglin said when he spoke to Manski he did not know who the other candidates were or which seat she was going to run for.
“I thought she would be a good candidate committed to public education,” Soglin said. “The only discussion I had with Sarah Manski was her candidacy for the School Board. There was nothing else to discuss.”
Soglin said he was “disappointed for our community and disappointed for her” at the news of her withdrawal.
Matthews said in an email that Soglin referred Manski to him for a discussion about her candidacy, but that the grad school application never came up. He said he learned Manski would be moving to California when she called him at 6 p.m. on Feb. 20, the night before she announced her withdrawal from the race.

Related: “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools” by Madison Mayor Paul Soglin.
Madison’s long time disastrous reading results and the school board.
2013 Madison School Election Intrigue (Public!)
Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.
I’m glad DeFour continues to dig.

Derrell Connor:

When Sarah Manski pulled out of the school board race because her husband was accepted to graduate school in California, many asked, myself included, why would she wait until after the primary to do so?
Now we know: It was all part of a plan to silence Ananda Mirilli, restorative justice manager at the YWCA in Madison, and also a person of color. Mirilli was unfairly and falsely targeted by Sarah Manski and her husband Ben as someone who was part of a movement to privatize public schools.
When I heard about this, I immediately assumed several members of Madison’s white elite progressive community was behind this. I believe that there is a movement in this community to silence anyone that doesn’t walk in lockstep with the status quo. They will trample over voices of color in order to preserve it.
I was accused by some of rushing to judgment. Yet I have not heard any of these people call for an investigation into who else knew about Manski’s plan and when.
In my last column, I wrote that Madison’s communities of color needed to become involved and engaged. They need to get off the sidelines and get in the game.
What I failed to add to that was it’s also hard to become a part of the game when it’s rigged against you.
If these had been two Republicans placing first and second in this primary with a Democrat finishing third under the same circumstances, progressives would be storming the Capitol right now. There would be hard-hitting editorials in progressive newspapers accusing conservatives of rigging elections, not the fluff pieces that we’ve been reading.
Madison’s communities of color are constantly told by white progressives that people like Governor Scott Walker, radio talk show host Vicki McKenna and blogger Dave Blaska are the enemy. While some may agree, they haven’t been the ones silencing, patronizing and marginalizing folks of color in Madison. That distinction belongs to the liberal establishment in this community.
You have consistently done the most harm to us, and it stinks. We’re tired of it.
As a former Urban League board member and chair, I am also disgusted by the way this organization has been treated by some of Madison’s political establishment. The Urban League has been at the forefront of many issues concerning the disenfranchised and people of color in this community, in particular, education. Yet over the past couple of years they have been treated like garbage.
Ever since CEO Kaleem Caire shined a bright light on an achievement gap and low graduation rates for students of color that has plagued the Madison Metropolitan School District for decades — even offering an idea to help to address it — Caire has been painted as a right-wing operative with the intent to privatize and destroy public schools. Almost anyone else who supported Madison Prep has been labeled the enemy because communities of color are asking for a better future for their children.
The smear campaign began with Nichele Nichols failed run for school board last year, and now Mirilli this year.
While I’m angry about what happened to Mirilli, I’m also happy she decided not to run as a write-in candidate. She had no chance of winning and running would have made white progressives in this city feel better about themselves.
They’d say, “At least she had a chance.”
Make no mistake about it: She had no chance. Everyone knows it.
I understand that it’s not fair to paint all white liberal progressives in Madison with a broad brush. Many are just as outraged by what’s been happening to folks of color in this community as we are.
If you sit by and watch while it happens and fail to stand up for what’s right, you become just as complicit as the ones who are doing it.
To the communities of color in Madison, I say this: Don’t forget what happened here. If there was ever a time to organize and become engaged, it is now.

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

Michael Horn & Clay Christensen:

Everyone’s going MOOC-crazy these days. From frequent media coverage of online courses and platforms like Coursera, edX, Udacity, and Udemy to discussions about the complexities and business models of online education, the excitement around MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) has finally “bubbled” over.
The question is not just whether MOOCs are going to disrupt traditional education, but how. Is it just about lower costs and access? Is it really going to be a Napster-like moment with entrenched “Teamsters in tweed” worried about the erosion of their research, publishing, and teaching?
This is where we can leave the realm of hype and commentary to draw on our own years of research into disruption theory. Because the curious thing about the MOOC wave of disruption is that the market leaders — not just upstarts from the edges — are the ones pioneering it. And that rarely happens.

Philip Ball:

There’s something deeply peculiar about the way we teach children to play the violin. It’s a very difficult skill for them to master–getting their fingers under control, holding the bow properly, learning how to move it over the strings without scratching and slipping. But just as they are finally getting there, are beginning to feel confident, to hit the right notes, to sound a bit like the musicians they hear, we break the news to them: we’ve taught them to play left-handed, but now it’s time to do it like grown-ups do, the other way around.
Alright, I’m fibbing. Of course we don’t teach violin that way. We wouldn’t do anything so absurd for something as important as learning an instrument, would we? No–but that’s how we teach children to write.
It’s best not to examine the analogy too deeply, but you see the point. The odd thing is that, when most parents watch their child’s hard-earned gains in forming letters like those printed in their storybooks crumble under the demand that they now relearn the art of writing “joined up” (“and don’t forget the joining tail!”), leaving their calligraphy a confused scrawl of extraneous cusps and wiggles desperately seeking a home, they don’t ask what on earth the school thinks it is doing. They smile, comforted that their child is starting to write like them.

Conn Carroll:

“Nothing is more determinative of our future than how we teach our children,” California Gov. Jerry Brown said in his January State of the State address. “If we fail at this, we will sow growing social chaos and inequality that no law can rectify.”
Bad news, governor: California is already failing its children. And it wasn’t always this way.
According to RAND Corp., as late as the 1970s California’s public schools still had an “excellent” reputation. Then, in 1975, Brown (in his first stint as California’s governor) signed the Rodda Act, giving government unions the power to take money directly out of government employees’ paychecks.
The California Teachers Association quickly poured this new revenue stream into an organizing drive, more than doubling the union’s ranks. The Golden State’s politics have never been the same since — nor has the quality of its public schools. Between 2000 and 2010, the CTA spent more than $211 million to influence California voters and elected officials. That is more money than the oil, tobacco and hospital industries combined.
The CTA’s first big political victory came in 1988, when it helped pass Proposition 98, which amended the California Constitution to mandate that at least 39 percent of the state budget be spent on K-12 education spending. Since then, California teacher salaries have skyrocketed and are now among the highest in the nation (only Massachusetts and New York pay more).

Nicholas Carr:

Because the horse is not dead, I feel I’m allowed to keep beating it. So: Another study of student attitudes toward paper and electronic textbooks has appeared, and like earlier ones — see here, here, here, for example — it reveals that our so-called digital natives prefer print. The new study, by four researchers at Ryerson University in Toronto, appears in the Journal for Advancement of Marketing Education. “Although advocates of digitized information believe that millennial students would embrace the paperless in-person or online classroom, this is not proving to be the case,” they write, as studies to date find “most students reiterating their preference for paper textbooks.”
They point out that a lot of the research up to now has started “with the assumption that the innovation [in e-textbooks] is an improvement over previous technology”:

Undergraduate students are generally assumed to be skilled in using digital resources for acquiring the knowledge necessary to achieve success in tests and exams. However, researchers often overlook students’ personal beliefs about how they learn and study most effectively. Their resistance to replacing paper textbooks with e-textbooks together with an ongoing desire to be able to print electronic content suggests that paper-based information serves students’ needs better in the educational context.

Sarah Carr:

One spring afternoon, O. Perry Walker High School Principal Mary Laurie made her way to the school’s courtyard, where a lone student sat at a picnic table with a large stack of papers in front of him and a frustrated look on his face. Laurie recognized the student as a shy senior with one of the highest GPAs in his class.
The documents, it turned out, were all from Tuskegee University. Tuskegee had accepted the 18-year-old, offering him a full scholarship. But they required a $500 deposit within the next few days if he wanted to secure his spot. The student had no idea what to do.
“If that’s where you want to go, let me know,” Laurie said. “I’ll try to get the five hundred dollars.”
The student said nothing.
“You want to go to college, baby?” Laurie asked gently.

Marc Cutillo:

“Half of life is just showing up.” I once loved repeating that to my students who were regularly absent from school. Like all good quotes, it owns a perfect blend of simplicity, adaptation, and sublimity. I used to love saying it, that is, until a young child curtly responded, “Sometimes I can’t find a way to show up.” I wasn’t sure if he meant that, or if he was attempting to create his own unique axiom, but it certainly struck me. After all, if he cannot find a way to show up to school, how can we expect him to succeed?
Chronic absenteeism–missing more than 10 percent of school a year–occurs at rates three to four times higher in high-poverty areas, according to a study of six states conducted by Johns Hopkins University in May of last year. In these low-income communities, it is normal to find a quarter of the class missing every day, with some students missing 30 to 40 days a year–a fact that, as an inner-city English teacher, I regularly witness firsthand.
The most alarming part is that multiple studies across various states show kindergartners to have the highest rate of absenteeism outside of high school students. Educators and policymakers have known for years that falling behind before 3rd grade has a high correlation not just with high school dropout rates, but with incarceration rates as well. Children this young are not playing hooky or uninterested in learning–five minutes alone with any 1st grader yields more questions than you can answer without jumping on Wikipedia. The reasons these children stay home can all be traced to poverty.

David Blaska:

Over the past week, I have been debating one Jeff Simpson over at Forward Lookout, the Progressive Dane-inspired blog site he shares with Madame Brenda and Lukas Diaz. Jeff is an appointed member of the Monona Grove School Board, a defender of teachers unions, an opponent of parental school choice, and a reliable messenger for ever-higher school spending. (Last spring Simpson testified during MG school budget hearings in favor of a $13 million hike in MG school district property taxes.)
I highlight this discourse as an example of the “one-size-fits-all” mentality that controls the education establishment, which is resistant to educational reform. It is a command-control philosophy one would have thought discredited at the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Matthew M. Chingos (PDF):

Why such fervor? Such anguish? In an era of budgetary belt tightening, and in the wake of the 2008 market crash, state and local policymakers are finally awakening to the impact of teacher-pension costs on their bottom lines. Recent reports demonstrate that such pension programs across the United States are burdened by almost $390 billion in unfunded liabilities. Yet most states and municipalities have been taking the road of least resistance, tinkering around the edges rather than tackling systemic (but painful) pension reform.
Many have suggested that one solution to the pension crisis is to offer teachers the option of a 401(k)-style plan (also known as a “defined contribution” or DC plan) in lieu of a traditional pension (known as “defined benefit” or DB plans). We see much merit in that approach, but we also wondered whether this alternative would appeal to teachers. Would certain types of teachers–new, veteran, more educated, etc.–naturally gravitate to one type of retirement plan or the other? Might it be the case that more (or less) effective teachers or teachers in harder-to-staff subjects would prefer DC plans due to their portability or other advantages (real or perceived)? If so, this would suggest that offering alternatives to traditional DB pensions could be a useful tool for improving teacher quality and/or supply. If the opposite is true, this could raise concerns about moving away from traditional DB systems.
To investigate these possibilities, we turned to Professor Martin West of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who is also an executive editor of Education Next and deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). West tapped his colleague Matthew Chingos, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy. This dynamic duo advised us that Florida was uniquely positioned to address our questions, it being one of just two states that allow teachers to choose between DB and DC plans, and the only place, at least for now, that can link information about teachers’ pension-plan decisions with administrative data on those same teachers and their students (including value-added achievement data).

Sara Goldrick-Rab:

Milton Friedman must be dancing in his grave at the moment. In every economic crisis there’s an opportunity to impose change, he professed, and no smart leader let such an opportunity pass by. Especially when it comes to undermining public goods.
Leaders of MOOC movements across the nation, including here at home in UW-Madison, are telling us that this is simply the right time to take the leap into a transformed space in higher education, one enabled by technology. I have absolutely no doubt that they sincerely believe this. And I have equally little doubt that most are entirely unaware of their place in history, and the degree to which they are acting out a narrative written many decades earlier.
MOOCs are not primarily or even secondarily about bringing open, no-cost education to the masses. Instead, these efforts created by private elite institutions and for-profit businesses squarely aim to outsource traditional governmental functions in education, and divert taxpayer dollars from the building of public assets and institutions to create long-term revenue streams and profit for corporations. That’s privatization, period.

BYU News:

The idea that boys are better at math and in competitions has persisted for a long time, and now we know why: Nobody bothered to schedule the rematch.
Most school math contests are one-shot events where girls underperform relative to their male classmates. But a new study by a Brigham Young University economist presents a different picture.
Twenty-four local elementary schools changed the format to go across five different rounds. Once the first round was over, girls performed as well or better than boys for the rest of the contest.
“It’s really encouraging that seemingly large gaps disappear just by keeping them in the game longer,” said BYU economics professor Joe Price.
Price co-authored the study with the University of Miami’s Christopher Cotton and Rutgers’ Frank McIntyre. Their report is published by the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

Save our Public Schools – #GRUMPS Press Conference against vouchers with a focus on Madison. 3/5 – 10:30 AMDetails bit.ly/13qKwIA

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) February 28, 2013

SAVING MADISON PUBLIC SCHOOLS
GRUMPS (GRandparents United for Madison Public Schools) will be joined by leaders from the business and non-profit sectors to speak out in support of the Madison Metropolitan School District and against legislative efforts that may weaken our schools. Vouchers, private charter schools, special education vouchers will fragment our community and weaken MMSD, a strong public school district whose doors are open to all students.
Date: Tuesday, March 5
Time: 10:30 am
Location: Madison Senior Center, 330 W. Mifflin St.
Speakers:
GRUMPS: Nan Brien, Carol Carstensen
Businesspersons: Betty Custer, Founder and Managing Partner at Custer Financial Services,
Robert Gibson, Chairman and President, Composite Rebar Technologies, Inc.
Non-profit leaders: Michael Johnson, CEO, Boys & Girls Club of Dane County; Sal Carranza, Latino Education Council of Dane County; Eileen Mershart, Retired CEO, YWCA Madison
LWV: Andrea Kaminski, Executive Director, League of Women Voters, Wisconsin
Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.

Marc Eisen:

The schools are failing to educate the district’s growing population of minority kids. Note that in 1991, 21% of students were non-white; 20 years later, the figure was 53%. Only about half of black and Latino youth graduate. The percentage deemed to be college-ready is embarrassingly small.
The district’s problems are not new. Almost a decade ago, John Wiley, then chancellor of UW-Madison, convened a meeting to discuss how the Madison schools, once a draw for faculty recruitment, were becoming a hindrance. Among the complainants, Wiley recounts, were top black UW faculty and staff who did not like how their children were treated in the Madison schools.
Those concerns, of course, echo loudly today in the efforts of the Urban League’s Kaleem Caire to address the problems of minority students in the Madison schools. For that effort, Caire has been ostracized by progressive leaders. My opinion is very different. I belong to the Urban League, and I think that Caire is uncommonly brave in facing unpleasant facts.
Like it or not, we’re in an era of change and choice in education. Extending public vouchers to private schools in Madison may be wild overreach by the governor, but Madison parents already have choices for schooling.
If they don’t like their neighborhood school, parents can open-enroll their child in any Madison school or even in a suburban district. They can pack up and move to a suburban district. They can enroll their kid in a public charter school like Nuestro Mundo. They can send their child to a private school. They can home-school. They can sign their kid up for one of the many online schools.
This is a good thing. As long as academic programs address state educational standards and meaningful accountability is in place, why shouldn’t parents be able to pick a school setting they feel best suits their child’s needs? More to the point, why shouldn’t the district’s response to the painful achievement gap demonstrate this flexibility?

The Madison School Board, Experience and our long time Disastrous Reading Results
Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board Elections, here.

A David Dahmer, via kind reader:

That’s because there are two Madisons. At our own fun, liberal, near-eastside extravaganzas — La Fete de Marquette, Willy Street Fair, Marquette Waterfront Fest, Orton Fest, etc. — there’s nary a brown face or a black face in the crowd. Slightly less than you’d find at a Republican Convention. In the same vein, at all of the fantastic minority events that I go to in Madison, I am almost always the only white person in the room (except for Mr. Jon Gramling).
I often hear conversations among my white liberal friends talking smack about and making fun of Milwaukee and its hyper-segregation, its tremendous white flight, its subtle and overt racism. I want to shout at them. “WE ARE MILWAUKEE JR.”
In short, our white-dominated liberal events and organizations in Madison never come close to resembling our growing diverse population and never include multiple voices, styles, and cultural norms. While our discussion of the horrendous achievement gap that has existed in Madison for 40-plus years was finally started by a black guy, it’s only allowed to be discussed and solved by a small group of whites who have no feel for, connection to, or dialogue with the minority communities they want to save.
So, the challenge I issue today to all the nice white liberals in America’s third-best city to be a nice, white liberal is to finally make an effort to get to know all of the people of your city. Because you won’t slander somebody you know. You won’t fabricate things about them. You won’t silence their voices. You won’t ignore them. You won’t segregate them if you know them. Right?
As it turns out, Ananda was way more knowledgable, passionate, and qualified than Manski. As it turns out, she has no illicit ties; no evil far-right Republican intentions — just a Brazilian immigrant with incredible educational expertise and experience who has a minority child in a district that has for decades upon decades failed minorities.
But it’s too late for Ananda now. She should be at forums, debates, radio shows, and conferences expounding upon her vast and unique experience with education as we use our democratic system to flesh out the best candidate for the School Board job at this extremely crucial juncture in Madison.
But her voice has been silenced.
You can write her in (as I will) but a write-in candidacy is nearly impossible. My challenge to Madison is to get to know Ananda and all of the Anandas out there … before you completely dismiss them.

The Madison School Board, Experience and our long time Disastrous Reading Results
Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board Elections, here.

Pat Schneider:

It was a blistering blog last week by conservative David Blaska about the Madison School Board race that also-ran Ananda Mirilli says prompted her to protest that her campaign was a victim of political shenanigans long before Sarah Manski’s jaw-dropping withdrawal from the race.
Blaska called Seat 5 primary winner Manski’s pullout from the School Board race 48 hours after the primary as “so cheap and tawdry it defies explanation” and skewered the local liberal “Tammany Hall” that endorsed her.
Negative reaction to Manski’s move isn’t just coming from the right: “Has Madison politics ever seen such high-handed, self-absorbed behavior as that of leading vote-getter Sarah Manski?” asks former Isthmus editor Marc Eisen in a column.
In the aftermath of Manski’s withdrawal, people have questions. Some are speculating whether there was a conspiracy to recruit Manksi to run, knowing she might drop out, and then replace her on the School Board with a union-friendly pick. “Now we might have a conspiracy of liberals putting a person of color down … what about other conspiracies that people were pegged in to?” asks Mirilli, whose third-place primary finish keeps her off the April 2 ballot.
Mirilli said she doesn’t know what to make of the timing of Manski’s withdrawal: “It’s a coincidence — who knows who is telling the truth? But without a doubt, there was a conspiracy to say that I was pro-voucher,” Mirilli told me Wednesday. “But no one is investigating that.”
Mirilli shared an old email exchange Wednesday, before announcing that she would not pursue a write-in campaign, as many observers had been urging.

The Madison School Board, Experience and our long time Disastrous Reading Results
Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board Elections, here.

WU Yingkan, via a kind Richard Askey email (PDF):

xamination is a critical issue in education system in China. Zhongkao is a kind of graduation examination of junior high school, and at the same time, the entrance examination to senior high school. This paper describes the structure, features and changes in zhongkao mathematics in China based on a detailed analysis of 48 selected zhongkao mathematics papers from eight regions in recent six years. Examples of examination items are given to illustrate the identified features and changes. Zhongkao Mathematics, examination, features, changes, junior high school graduates
INTRODUCTION
China is the birthplace of examination system. The imperial examination was started in 597 during the Sui Dynasty, and was banned in 1905 during the Qing dynasty (Li & Dai, 2009; Zhang, 1996). It lasted for about 1300 years. With the influence of the long existence of the imperial examination system, examination is of great importance in China. It attracts attention from parents, educators, teachers, students, policy makers and so on. It is a big issue in education.
There are two significant examinations for students in school education in China, which are called “zhongkao” and “gaokao”. Figure 1 shows the school education system in China. Students start their nine-year compulsory education usually at six years old. Most of them stay at elementary school for six years, and junior high school for three years. In some districts like Shanghai, students stay at elementary schools for five years and junior high school for four years. At the end of Grade Nine, all students take zhongkao, which is summative assessment of the nine-year compulsory education, and more importantly, the entrance examination to senior high school. Nearly 90% of junior high school graduates continue their study. About half of them go to senior high schools, and the other half enter secondary vocational schools (Ministry of education of China, 2010a). The results of zhongkao decide whether students go to key senior high school, ordinary senior high school or vocational school. At the end of three-year senior high school study, students take gaokao, which is the entrance examination to universities. About 80% senior high school graduates are promoted to tertiary education (Ministry of education of China, 2010a). The results of gaokao decide whether senior high school graduates go to key university, ordinary university, college, or other high education institutes.

Quentin Hardy:

My son is 19 and has an autistic spectrum disorder akin to Asperger’s. Technically it’s NLD, but close enough. He also graduated from a high school specialized in kids on the spectrum, and attended numerous social skills groups. I’ve probably been around 100 people with something like Asperger’s. I’ve got another son who is, as they say, neurotypical, so I have some experience in contrast.
My first reaction is to point out that this is a highly individualized neurological condition. Any response you get is going to be rather particular, and comes through the prism not just of a disorder, but of an individual human personality.
Some people have Asperger’s and are cheerful, some are dark. Some are intelligent, some are not. Some are self-conscious, some are blithe. Some have large souls, and some are pinched. Like people. Asperger’s can be mild, which is what you usually see in the notable people who are said to have Asperger’s, or it can be severe, which is quite limiting.
In general though, you’ve got a kid without a ton of social skills. That means some things that come easy and natural around communication, particularly with peers, can be tough. This doesn’t matter much in the early years, and in some cases the kid’s oblique way of looking at things can make them attractive to other kids. As school progresses though, and other kids learn social nuance, an Asperger’s kid can be increasingly left out.
That is hard to watch, sometimes to a point of heartbreak – that depends in part on how much your kid cares about what other kids think, and again this varies. As someone watching various types of rejection happen to my kid, I have never yearned harder for normality. Not most popular, not the academic star, just…normal.

m

Laura Waters:

In this review of Diane Ravitch’s book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education,” Gary Houchens, a former teacher, principal, and school administrator, criticizes Ravitch for the “mistake” she makes in conflating school choice and testing. Houchens writes, “There are many excellent public schools throughout the U.S. But Ravitch and defenders of the educational status quo seem blind to the fact that millions of children are being grossly underserved by government-run schools, which are the only option for most families of modest means. ”
Houchens, now a professor of Educational Administration, Leadership, and Research at Western Kentucky University, continues,

And this is another fundamental point that Ravitch and many other school choice opponents seem to miss. Just like traditional public schools, some schools of choice will be successful, while others will fail. The difference is that schools of choice that fail to satisfy their clients will go out of business, whereas failing public schools will continue to drain millions of dollars of taxpayer money forever. School choice is not a panacea for all of education’s problems, but it gives many families something they can only dream of under the current system: an option.

Justin Reich:

This is the time of year where I have the great pleasure of teaching an education class to undergraduates at MIT. We address two questions during the semester: “What’s worth learning?” and “How do we know that students are learning what’s worth learning?”
Most weeks, we have an online discussion about current events in education. This week, students chose to examine an article on a school district that just committed to a district-wide 1-1 iPad program. Their responses are characteristically thoughtful, and here are a few of their perspectives. We’ll be discussing this during our class meeting Wednesday at 2:30, so leave a comment or tweet a response (@bjfr) by then, and I’ll make sure the students get it.
For Individuals not Groups
As I said above, individual iPads for each student create barriers in the classroom. It’s hard for me to see how doing something on an iPad is better than doing without it. The best way to teach is to engage and motivate, and if throwing expensive technology is the school district’s plan, in my opinion they are wasting a lot of money. If everyone has an individual tablet, then it’s hard to make the argument that these iPads will bring the classroom together. Whenever we worked with laptops in my high school, the classroom felt empty when everyone quietly labored away on their keyboards. Even if the classroom is brought together through this technology, what is preventing them from working together without any Apple products? Ideally, it sounds nice to present every student with the best technology out there to do their work, but not at the expense of deteriorating classroom cohesiveness.
While I’m against the idea of having iPads in the classroom, I’m not opposed to using them outside the classroom. Great teaching is done with groups and collaboration, but reinforcement of material could be greatly improved with interactivity, social aspects and new technology. These are all areas where I think the iPad could be beneficial to learning.

Yann Morell y Alcover

French management schools are rethinking their apprenticeship policies as competition for public funding increases. While some schools are already reducing the number of apprentices, other schools are getting around this problem by setting up apprenticeship-like schemes through scholarships, internships or temporary contracts.
“The main challenge for the development of apprenticeships is the funding issue,” says Pierre Tapie, president and dean of Essec Business School and head of the Confédération des Grandes Écoles, a body which represents over 200 higher education institutions in France. Essec has already reduced the number of apprenticeships it offers to 650 from its peak of 760 in 2010.
Apprenticeships in France make it possible for people aged 16 to 25 to combine academic learning with concrete professional experience. The system involves a working contract signed by the employer, the apprentice and the training institution. Originally designed for vocational courses in the French lycées, it was opened to higher education in the late 1980s.

America’s Promise Alliance:

The most comprehensive graduation research report of late found that for the first time the U.S. is on track to meet the national Grad Nation goal of a 90 percent high school graduation rate by the class of 2020. The national high school graduation rate increased 6.5 percentage points since 2001 with an average growth of 1.25 percentage points each year from 2006-2010 to 78.2. As a result of this acceleration more than 200,000 additional students received diplomas in 2010 than in 2006. The 2013 report update of Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic, released February 25 by the Alliance for Excellent Education, America’s Promise Alliance, Civic Enterprises, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, shows that the nation continues to make progress.
This growth was driven in large part by significant gains in Hispanic and African American graduation rates, with Hispanic rates achieving the greatest gains, jumping 10 percentage points from 61 percent in 2006 to 71.4 percent in 2010. Similarly, African American graduation rates rose from 59.2 percent in 2006 to 66.1 percent in 2010. The South also contributed to this accelerated pace, home to five of the top 10 states with the greatest improvements since 2006 but also the top seven states with the greatest decline in “dropout factory” high schools. A “dropout factory” is a high school in which 12th grade enrollment is 60 percent or less of 9th grade enrollment three years earlier.

Randal Archibold:

The leader of Mexico’s powerful teachers’ union, the largest labor syndicate in Latin America, has been arrested on accusations that she embezzled millions of dollars in union funds for personal expenses, including California residences, cosmetic surgery and artwork, the country’s attorney general announced Tuesday night.
The arrest of the union boss, Elba Esther Gordillo, a bombastic figure viewed as a kingmaker among politicians for her ability to deliver votes and suppress enemies, stunned a nation accustomed to seeing powerful figures escape scrutiny despite whispers of their spending habits.
“She was this mixture of political patron, incredibly powerful union boss and very, very wildly ‘entrepreneurial,’ ” said Gabriel Guerra, a political analyst in Mexico City.
Ms. Gordillo was arrested a day after President Enrique Peña Nieto signed into law sweeping changes in education law, designed to break the union’s grip on hiring and the administration of schools, and a day before the union planned to meet on a strategy to fight the changes. The timing of the arrest is sure to raise questions; Mexican presidents have been known to use the power of federal prosecutors to go after rivals, only for the cases to fall apart eventually.

Jessica Vanegeren:

Two years ago when Gov. Scott Walker introduced a budget packed full of controversial changes that drastically affected public education statewide — including record funding cuts and the crippling of teachers unions — another change simultaneously hit the Racine public schools.
“The budget passed in July (2011) and the voucher program started in August,” says Marc Duff, the Racine Unified School District’s budget director and a former Republican state representative until 2002. “It all happened so quickly and at the same time we were dealing with all the other changes to collective bargaining and Act 10.”
Now, for the second budget in a row, Walker is talking vouchers. It’s a program first started in Milwaukee two decades ago that requires the state and school district to share in the cost of educating a student at a private rather than a public school. In the 2011-13 budget, Walker extended the voucher program to Racine.
Walker says they improve student educational performance and provide an alternative for parents whose children are in struggling public schools.

More here and here.

The Capital Times:

Sarah Manski did the right thing when she quit the race for an open Madison School Board seat just days after finishing first in the Feb. 19 primary. Manski’s strong primary finish had positioned her as the front-runner in the general election April 2. But after she learned that her husband had been accepted for graduate school in California, she recognized that it is not appropriate to seek a term of office she could not complete.
Manski brought to the race big ideas and a commitment to build real coalitions to expand and improve upon Madison’s support for public education. She was relentless, and right, in her unequivocal rejection of Gov. Scott Walker’s cuts to school funding and assaults on local democracy. That’s why she won more than 45 percent of the vote in the primary.

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

The Souix City Journal:

Please listen up. We are all being conned by the Obama administration. This year, the American taxpayer will fork over about $571 billion to pay for educating children in the nation’s public schools. All told, the country spends close to $16,000 per student every year on primary through college education. That’s the highest per-student spending rate in the world.
However, according to President Obama, it’s not enough. He wants more tax dollars, especially for “early education.” He said so in his State of the Union address, and it drew big-time applause from his crew. Of course we need to spend more on education. And anyone who opposes that hates kids!
The centerpiece of the president’s early-education vision is the “Head Start” program, which has been in place since 1965. Over the past 48 years, the feds have spent close to $200 billion on Head Start. But there’s one big problem: The program is not working.

More, here.

Matthew DeFour:

Wisconsin school boards would have less control over their own charter schools under Gov. Scott Walker’s state budget proposal.
The changes could have major implications for districts such as Madison, where the School Board has exerted tight control over charter school expansion, including rejecting a school proposed by Urban League of Greater Madison president Kaleem Caire that sought exemptions from district policies.
On Monday night, Madison School Board members said they might have to halt plans to revamp the district’s charter school policy.
“We’ve saved money and we’ve implemented programs and then with the swipe of a pen we have been outnumbered and outmanipulated by a governor who apparently wants to run for president,” board member Maya Cole said.
“I hope he’s really happy.”
The majority of charter schools in the state have less autonomy than others around the country, said Carrie Bonk, executive director of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association. Walker’s proposal would change that.

Georgetown Center for the Study of the Legal Profession:

As we enter 2013, the legal market continues in the fifth year of an unprecedented economic downturn that began in the third quarter of 2008. At this point, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the market for legal services in the United States and throughout the world has changed in fundamental ways and that, even as we work our way out of the economic doldrums, the practice of law going forward is likely to be starkly different than in the pre-2008 period. The challenge for lawyers and law firms is to understand the ways in which the legal market has shifted and to adjust their own strategies, expectations, and ways of working to conform to the new market realities. While there is certainly evidence that some firms and lawyers have begun to make these adjustments, many others seem to be in denial, believing (or perhaps hoping) that the world will go “back to normal” as soon as demand for legal services begins to grow again.
Legend has it that in 1519, when he and his cohort of some 500 soldiers and 100 sailors landed on the shores of the Yucatan intent on conquering the large and powerful Aztec empire, Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez promptly ordered his men to “burn the ships.” Cortez knew that, unless more tempting alternatives were removed, it would be difficult to motivate his men to take on an empire with a large army that had been in power for more than six centuries. Hence, his bold and decisive order.

Al Jazeera Inside America:

Multiple research in the US has shown that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. And now the Equity and Excellence report, commissioned by the US Congress, says the US education system is largely to blame.
“This is a question of priorities, much of what has made the US great in the last decade was our investment in our people, human capital in our education system and what we are seeing is an unravelling of that system …. we see a constant defunding of the education system in the US… Instead of seeing the government push for education we see a push to privatise education. Education should mitigate the inequality at the starting gate and we should bring everyone to the starting line so everyone has an equal opportunity.”
– Sylvia Allegretto, a labour economist
The study says: “Ten million students in US’s poorest communities … are having their lives unjustly and irredeemably blighted by a system that consigns them to the lowest-performing teachers, the most run-down facilities, and academic expectations and opportunities considerably lower than what we expect of other students.”
So what has become of the American dream? Despite growing up with economic hardships do you still have the opportunity for prosperity and financial success through hard work?
It is a notion that President Barack Obama recently alluded to in his inaugural address: “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”
However, the report on education says that in no other developed country has the system stacked the odds against so many of its children.

Chris Rickert:

It’s ironic that democracy activist Sarah Manski would run for the Madison School Board knowing that if she won, she might have to resign before her term was up.
As it happened, she dropped out of the race on Thursday, just two days after winning her primary — turning what had been a solidly democratic contest among three candidates into a cakewalk for one. T.J. Mertz is now the only person on the ballot who could actually take the seat.
Ironic, too, that fellow progressive and current board vice president Marj Passman would allegedly — i.e., Passman denies it — tell Manski not to worry about having to resign because if she did, the board would, as Manski claims Passman told her, “appoint somebody good.”
But I can’t be that shocked about a pair of progressives in democratically engaged Madison engaging in some democratically questionable behavior when the process for electing school board members in Madison is itself a minor mockery of democracy.
Here’s why:

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

Annie Murphy Paul:

Classroom design can have a significant effect on students’ academic progress, reports Adi Bloom in the Times Educational Supplement:
“Academics from the University of Salford in Britain examined how much pupils’ environment affects their performance, looking at whether certain types of classrooms encourage learning learning. Their findings were published in the latest issue of the journal Building and Environment.
Researchers examined the academic achievement of 751 pupils, studying in 34 classrooms across seven schools. Their observations found that 73 per cent of the variation in pupils’ performance could be explained by environmental factors.
In fact, the difference between the academic performance of an average pupil placed in the worst classroom, compared with that of a pupil placed in the best classroom, was equal to the average improvement of a child during an entire academic year.”

Michigan State University:

Low-birth-weight babies with a particular brain abnormality are at greater risk for autism, according to a new study that could provide doctors a signpost for early detection of the still poorly understood disorder.
Led by Michigan State University, the study found that low-birth-weight newborns were seven times more likely to be diagnosed with autism later in life if an ultrasound taken just after birth showed they had enlarged ventricles, cavities in the brain that store spinal fluid. The results appear in the Journal of Pediatrics.
“For many years there’s been a lot of controversy about whether vaccinations or environmental factors influence the development of autism, and there’s always the question of at what age a child begins to develop the disorder,” said lead author Tammy Movsas, clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at MSU and medical director of the Midland County Department of Public Health.

The Wisconsin State Journal:

Four years ago the State Journal editorial board worried that Tony Evers would “be a spokesman for the status quo” if elected state superintendent of schools.
Boy, were we wrong.
Evers has distinguished himself during these hyper-partisan times as a leader who cares more about results for Wisconsin schools and students than he does politics or publicity.
The State Journal strongly endorses his re-election April 2.
Like most of the educational establishment, Evers opposed Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s big cut in state aid to public schools coupled with strict limits on collective bargaining for teachers.

For my family, one of the unexpected assets of the Madison School District was the Strings Program. Perennially under attack during the Superintendent Rainwater reign, I’ve seen little mention of the District’s String’s program, now available from grades 5 to 12. I only found this snippet on the Madison School District’s website:

Music opportunities continue to expand in Grades 5 through 12. Strings instruction is available to students starting in 5th grade and the curriculum is based on the Wisconsin Model Academic Standards for Instrumental Music. Students in grades 6 and 7 choose to participate in Band, Chorus, General Music, or Orchestra, which also have curriculum based on the Wisconsin Model Academic Standards. In grades 8-12, students may elect to enroll in one of these classes or the additional elective courses at our high schools. These course in connection with the community musical offerings, provide a breadth of experiences to help build student skills and knowledge of music.

Is there more?

National Geographic:

The Road Map Project brought together experts in geography, education, and research from across the U.S. to create a set of landmark reports focusing on key issues for educational improvement: instructional materials for students, education of teachers, assessment, research, and public attitudes. These road map reports will chart a course for the large-scale improvement of K-12 geography education in the U.S.
Funded by a 2-year, $2.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation, this project responds to the growing recognition among business leaders and policy makers that Americans lack the critical geographic understanding and reasoning skills that will be required for careers and civic life in the 21st century.

Evgeny Morozov:

Would you like all of your Facebook FB -0.56% friends to sift through your trash? A group of designers from Britain and Germany think that you might. Meet BinCam: a “smart” trash bin that aims to revolutionize the recycling process.
BinCam looks just like your average trash bin, but with a twist: Its upper lid is equipped with a smartphone that snaps a photo every time the lid is shut. The photo is then uploaded to Mechanical Turk, the Amazon-run service that lets freelancers perform laborious tasks for money. In this case, they analyze the photo and decide if your recycling habits conform with the gospel of green living. Eventually, the photo appears on your Facebook page.
You are also assigned points, as in a game, based on how well you are meeting the recycling challenge. The household that earns the most points “wins.” In the words of its young techie creators, BinCam is designed “to increase individuals’ awareness of their food waste and recycling behavior,” in the hope of changing their habits.

Matthew DeFour

The Madison School District should screen all elementary school students for mental health problems and develop school-based mental health clinics for older students, according to a district task force.
The Mental Health Task Force said in a report to the School Board on Monday that dwindling community resources, poor communication between service providers and school psychologists, and minority students not accessing mental health services to the same degree as their white peers are problems that need to be addressed.
“These are huge issues,” district chief of staff Steve Hartley said. “The president is talking about it. The governor is talking about it.”
The report comes as mental health has taken on greater prominence in the wake of the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. Gov. Scott Walker has proposed a $30 million increase for spending on mental health services in his 2013-15 budget.
The report includes seven recommendations of a mental health task force formed nearly two years ago by former superintendent Dan Nerad.

Wow.
As an aside, it is quite fascinating that DeFour’s article lacks any links, much less to the report (255K PDF). What year is it?

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes

Call me crazy, but I think a record of involvement in our schools is a prerequisite for a School Board member. Sitting at the Board table isn’t the place to be learning the names of our schools or our principals.
Wayne Strong, TJ Mertz and James Howard rise far above their opponents for those of us who value School Board members with a history of engagement in local educational issues and a demonstrated record of commitment to our Madison schools and the students we serve.

Notes and links on Ed Hughes and the 2013 Madison School Board election.
I’ve become a broken record vis a vis Madison’s disastrous reading results. The District has been largely operating on auto-pilot for decades. It is as if a 1940’s/1950’s model is sufficient. Spending increases annually (at lower rates in recent years – roughly $15k/student), yet Madison’s disastrous reading results continue, apace.
Four links for your consideration.
When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use. This program continues, despite the results.
3rd Grade Madison School District Reading Proficiency Data (“Achievement Gap Plan”)

The other useful stat buried in the materials is on the second page 3 (= 6th page), showing that the 3rd grade proficiency rate for black students on WKCE, converted to NAEP-scale proficiency, is 6.8%, with the accountability plan targeting this percentage to increase to 23% over one school year. Not sure how this happens when the proficiency rate (by any measure) has been decreasing year over year for quite some time. Because the new DPI school report cards don’t present data on an aggregated basis district-wide nor disaggregated by income and ethnicity by grade level, the stats in the MMSD report are very useful, if one reads the fine print.

Madison Schools Distort Reading Data (2004) by Mark Seidenberg.
How many School Board elections, meetings, votes have taken place since 2005 (a number of candidates were elected unopposed)? How many Superintendents have been hired, retired or moved? Yet, the core structure remains. This, in my view is why we have seen the move to a more diffused governance model in many communities with charters, vouchers and online options.
Change is surely coming. Ideally, Madison should drive this rather than State or Federal requirements. I suspect it will be the latter, in the end, that opens up our monolithic, we know best approach to public education.

Dave Cieslewicz:

I know Sarah and Ben Manski, and I wish them well in California. Congratulations to Ben for getting into a prestigious graduate program there.
But graduate schools don’t just call you up out of the blue and say you’re in! It’s not like the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes — you plan for this.
So, the question is, if Sarah Manski knew that her husband had a good chance of getting into school out there, and she knew she would go with him, then why did she run for school board in the first place? And while she was running, why didn’t she disclose that possibility?
Both Manskis have put transparency and concern about the process at the center of their careers. So why was it lacking here?

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

David Blaska:

The Madison Machine has put the fix in to elect a school board wholly beholden to the teachers union. No one suffers more than the poorly served minority community in Madison. Its candidates are being undermined for the benefit of the insider power structure that has allowed the minority achievement gap to grow to alarming levels.
Madison School Board member Mary Burke supports my suspicions. She says Madison Teachers Inc. president John Matthews is the brains behind Sarah Manski’s Trojan horse candidacy. Whoever is its author, the gambit succeeded in blocking a freethinking minority candidate, Ananda Mirilli, from surviving the front-end-loaded primary, so precipitously concluded.
For the record, John Matthews responded with a monosyllabic “no” mid-Sunday afternoon to my inquiry: “Is Mary Burke correct? Are you the brains behind the Sarah Manski bait and switch?”
So far, School Board member Marj Passman, the union’s most vociferous defender, and a longtime water carrier for the union, is left holding the bag. Matthew DeFour’s fine reportage in Saturday’s Wisconsin State Journal reports this:
Manski said she didn’t plan to run for School Board, but entered the race because Passman and a few other people [my italics] very strongly encouraged her to run. She declined to say who the other people were.

Madison Teachers, Inc. newsletter (PDF) via a kind Jeannie Bettner email

Does it matter to you when school begins in the fall? How about when and how long winter or spring break is? And, how about when the school year ends? Have you thought about how many days you work for your annual salary, or how many hours make up your school day? In members’ responses to many years of MTI bargaining surveys, all of these factors are “very important” to those in MTI’s various bargaining units.
It was MTI’s case in 1966 which gave teacher unions an equal voice on all of the above topics. Ruling for MTI, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the school calendar is a mandatory subject of bargaining, meaning that a school district in Wisconsin must negotiate with the Union to determine each of the factors described above. Unfortunately, Governor Walker’s Act 10 in effect overturned the Supreme Court’s ruling because Act 10 removed workers’ rights to collectively bargain.
Impact? Act 10 enables a school board without a good conscience to engage in mischief or abuse of all MTI-represented staff, especially teachers, because teachers are paid an annual salary not on an hourly basis.
So far, the Board of Education has continued to negotiate the school calendar with MTI. In 2012’s negotiations, the calendar was agreed upon through the 2013-14 school year. MTI is fighting to overturn Act 10 and to restore the Union’s right to negotiate over the school calendar.

Lindsay Christians:

Willie Ney, a self-described “multicultural activist” on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus in the 1990s, heard teens performing poetry and saw revolutionary potential.
Starting in 2003, Ney took an exploding, coast-to-coast movement of spoken word poetry and created the country’s first hip-hop academic program on a university campus. Ney is now executive director of the UW-Madison’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, which oversees the First Wave Spoken Word and Urban Arts Learning Community.
Each year, First Wave accepts 15 students, gives each of them a full-ride scholarship, and crafts a curriculum to encourage their skills in poetry, political activism, music, dance and theater. Their success could prove what Ney predicted years ago.
“Whichever university takes a risk on these kids, the cutting-edge kids of the 21st century, they’ll revolutionize the institution,” Ney said. “This is the most exciting thing happening in high school. These kids are literary geniuses, so it correlates well to academics.

The Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind reader’s email:

The bad news: A Harvard Study using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) finds that Wisconsin ranks 38th out of 41 states in progress in reading and math between 1992 and 2011. Both low and high performing states from 1992 have outperformed us, and they tend to be states where serious reforms were made in instructional content and pedagogy. The top 10 show up on many lists of states with improved reading instruction: Maryland, Florida, Delaware, Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia. Some of these states served as models for our recent Wisconsin legislation on early reading screening and a new reading exam for teacher licensure. A logical next step is to look at what they are doing for professional development for their in-service teachers of reading. Which leads to . . .
The good news: A committed group of 38 teachers and tutors will spend 12 Saturdays in 2013 being trained in LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling). LETRS is a comprehensive professional development program created by Louisa Moats, the primary author of the foundational reading standards of the Common Core State Standards. LETRS is quite common elsewhere in the country: in some states it is the official state-funded development tool for teachers of reading, and in some cases it is required for certain teaching licenses. Despite its popularity and proven value, it has not been available in Wisconsin. The current opportunity is being sponsored by the Milwaukee Summer Reading Project, an initiative of Howard Fuller’s Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University. UW-Milwaukee School of Continuing Education is hosting at their conference facilities in downtown Milwaukee. The training is being presented by Alicia Sparks through the Rowland Reading Foundation, which is a LETRS affiliate site. Participants include teachers from public and charter schools in Milwaukee and Wausau, as well as tutors from a variety of literacy programs for children and adults in Milwaukee and Madison. This training is at capacity, but other communities interested in sponsoring LETRS training can contact the Rowland Reading Foundation in Middleton.

Marguerite Roza, Monica Ouijdani, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Constrained revenues are forcing some districts to cut staff, which can drive up class sizes. While media reports tell us class sizes are rising to concerning levels, some researchers and education leaders suggest that repurposing class-size reduction funds to pay for other reforms may not be such a bad idea.
Consideration of whether smaller classes are preferable to larger ones requires some recognition of the opportunity costs involved. While smaller classes are on many levels desirable, they come with a hefty price tag. And so, in an environment of scarce resources, those seeking better outcomes in education have begun rethinking previous decisions to lock up their funds in small classes.
Practically speaking, class sizes vary from state to state, and any discussion of tradeoffs makes most sense in the context of the existing arrangement. Political tolerance for raising class sizes might depend on the magnitude of current class sizes, as well as the level of funds that can be repurposed in doing so.

Jay Schalin:

It is getting harder to ignore the fact that American higher education is in great need of reform. Academia is lurching along unsteadily down an unsustainable and uncertain future–with rising student debt, suffocating political correctness, falling standards, and unrestrained debauchery. Change is inevitable; whether it will come from deliberate policy changes or as an inevitable collapse remains to be seen.
The problems do not come from a shortage of viable ideas to set academia on the right path, but, rather, from Ivory Tower intransigence and denial. Ideas for reform are everywhere; some are proven, some are untried, some are still up for judgment, but many can certainly improve the status quo.
In celebration of the 100th issue of Academic Questions, a publication of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), 100 academics, higher education critics, and independent scholars were asked for their suggestions on how to improve this obstinate and arrogant institution, the Ivory Tower. The results appear in the 100th issue, entitled “One Hundred Great Ideas for Higher Education.” The publication of these ideas coincides with the NAS’s 25th anniversary celebration. (For more information about that celebratory event in New York City on March 1-2, 2013, please visit the organization’s website.)

Stephanie Simon:

For the first time in decades, the United States is making steady gains in the number of high school students earning diplomas, putting it on pace to reach a 90 percent graduation rate by 2020, according to a new analysis released Monday.
But the good news comes with a big asterisk: students with learning disabilities and limited fluency in English face long odds to finish high school, with graduation rates for those groups as low as 25 percent in some states, the analysis found. Minority students also continue to fall well behind their white peers, with about one-third of African-American students and 29 percent of Hispanic students dropping out before graduation.
The “Building a Grad Nation” report – which was co-authored by Robert Balfanz, a leading scholar of dropout rates at Johns Hopkins University – found strong improvements in graduation rates in a diverse collection of states including Tennessee, Louisiana, Alaska, California, Texas and New York. The national graduation rate jumped from 71.7 percent in 2001 to 78.2 percent in 2010, with the pace of improvement accelerating in the past few years.
“For the first time in 40 years, we have seen significant, sustained improvement,” said John Bridgeland, a co-author of the study and the chief executive of Civic Enterprises, a public policy group in Washington, D.C.

Janice Fiamengo:

“I fell asleep often.” This is an anonymous comment by a student on the website “Rate My Professors,” where instructors are ranked as “Good Quality,” “Average Quality,” and “Poor Quality,” with anecdotal assessments included. The comment by the sleepy student is not an admission of ill-preparedness, a confession of intellectual laziness, or even simply an acknowledgement of too many nights at the pub. It is a self-evident accusation: the professor who can’t keep this student awake is a dull fellow, and other students should beware.
As anyone knows who has checked this public site, Rate My Professors is full of such accusations against professors — for being boring, overly demanding, or ungenerous about marks or deadlines. “He means well but his grading is very hard on students,” reads one such complaint, with the implication produced by the ambiguous wording that low marks are an unjust hardship. Professors are frequently castigated for sins of “over-intellectualizing,” “droning on about versification,” and — a frequent lament — having “unreasonable expectations.” One instructor is “not very personable” while another “does not give students the opportunity to excel.” Another prof “makes such meticulous effort to choose her vocabulary that much of her lecture loses all meaning.” The same commentator warns, in explanation of a “Poor Quality” ranking, “Be prepared to listen HARD and think.”

John Roach:

I feel like my head is going to explode.
As a Dem-leaning, Urban League board member; fiscally cautious, small business-owning product of both private and public education; and a native Madisonian proud of our city’s progressive past, why do I feel caught in a remake of the Temptations’ old-school classic “Ball of Confusion”?
Maybe it began December 19, 2011. That’s when I heard Madison School Board member Marj Passman painfully explain why she was going to vote against Madison Prep, the initiative designed to get more of Madison’s black students college ready.
In artfully prepared notes, an emotional Passman, who is a former teacher and proud Madison Teachers Inc. member, echoed her earlier op-ed for the The Capital Times defining her view of public schools, including the important and noble benefits of equal opportunity and the responsibilities of preparing students to be economically self-sufficient and improving social conditions.
Yet Passman voted against the sentiment of black parents that night who eloquently described an experience in Madison’s schools that ran counter to the very goals she listed.
Passman was caught in a progressive conundrum of the first order. Vote for current educational models and justice for teachers unions, or listen to the voices of a community asking for new ideas and justice for their struggling kids? A tough call for any progressive.
The head spun more during a conversation with MTI leader John Matthews. He offered his view on teacher accountability. A champion of union rights, Matthews maintained teachers shouldn’t compete against each other for pay, but rather work together collaboratively to create better schools. Yet, at a later meeting, Matthews was put on his heels when Urban League president and native Madisonian Kaleem Caire asked why, in 2010 with less than fifty percent of young black males in Madison graduating from high school, not one of Madison’s 2,700 teachers was dismissed for any reason, including substandard performance.
Our kids compete for grades and are held accountable for performance. Yet teachers shouldn’t compete, and accountability for them is a word rife with conflict? So a champion of Madison’s black poor challenges the champion of teachers. The head spins.

Related: And so it continues……

Superintendent Richard Zimman:

The Ripon teacher compensation model was designed around three basic concepts: 1) individual annual improvement; 2) peer collaboration; 3) professional environment. As compared to the traditional step and lane salary schedule based on years of experience and graduate credits or the merit-pay system based on competitive ranking of teachers, the Ripon model is intended to build a collaborative, professional environment which supports each teacher in building his/her craft as an effective instructor. We firmly believe that five years from now our schools will be better places to work and learn than those schools where teachers are compensated by the other systems.
Let me explain why I can make that statement.
First, we focus on individual annual improvement. If we hire the right people, support them with appropriate staff development, and evaluate them with a research-based coaching model (we use the CESA 6 Teacher Effectiveness Program), then our goal is to help these teachers grow and improve each and every year. Rather than having them compete with each other, we want them to compete with themselves like a runner or swimmer trying to better his/her time with deliberate practice. If every one of our teachers is better next year than this year, and better in two years than next year, and this cycle of annual improvement continues, then our students will be receiving better instruction every year which will result in higher student achievement. Just imagine five years into the future after five continuous years of every teacher improving (or removed if performance is not up to standard). We’ll put that future against the result of any other system because they either create complacency or winners and losers in a competitive ranking.

760K PDF document:

Background
The RASD Teacher Salary Plan was designed in the 2011-12 school year by a joint committee of Ripon teachers, administrators, and school board members. Modeled loosely on the collegiate promotion system in use at Ripon College, the driving vision was to reinforce quality instruction by fostering a culture of professionalism through peer review, accountability through a job-embedded salary structure, and continuous improvement through lifelong learning. This compensation system recognizes that there are significant differences between business and academic organizations, public and private sectors, and the development of people and products. A goal of the RASD Teacher Salary Plan is to promote a positive and collaborative learning environment in which teachers are compensated for their professionalism.
II. Overview
A single-lane, career ladder is used as the basis for salary advancement (see Appendix I). There are five distinct levels through which a typical teacher will pass through during a career spanning 2-3 decades of employment with the RASD. Teachers typically move from one level to the next level every six years through a promotion process based on peer review. Instead of the promotion process, the top level uses an evidence-based, professional growth model with financial incentives in the form of annual bonuses. Advancement requires collaboration, professionalism, and evidence of continuous improvement based on personal reflection and ongoing feedback from peers, administrators, students, and parents. In addition to the salary amount indicated on the salary structure, annual stipends are provided throughout a teacher’s career for advanced degrees and National Board certification.
III. Career Levels
The single-lane salary structure is based on a sequence of six-year career levels (Beginner, Intermediate, Associate, Lead) which were loosely based on collegiate levels (e.g., Instructor, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Full Professor). The final career level is the much-respected Veteran status, similar to the collegiate capstone of an endowed chair. It is very important to note that these levels are stages in a career for all teachers and are not based on proficiency or skill level. Just as the collegiate system does not equate a full professor rank with a higher teaching proficiency rating than an assistant professor rank, the RASD Salary Plan does not contain any proficiency ranking of teachers. Promotions from one career level to another are based on evidence of professional improvement in a multi-faceted review process. This is a professional advancement career ladder and not a merit-based or performance-based pay system.

The New York Times:

Even before the cost estimates and program details have been made public, President Obama’s proposal for expanding high-quality preschool education has encountered criticism from House Republicans. Yet decades of research has shown that well-designed preschool programs more than pay for themselves by giving young children the skills they need to move ahead. The challenge at the federal level will be to make sure that taxpayer dollars flow to proven, high-quality programs instead of being wasted on subsidies for glorified day care.

Daniel Willingham, via a kind reader’s email (pdf):

Virtually everyone would agree that a primary, yet insufficiently met, goal of schooling is to enable students to think critically. In layperson’s terms, critical thinking consists of seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new
evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts, solving problems, and so forth. Then too, there are specific types of critical thinking that are characteristic of different subject matter: That’s what we mean when we refer to “thinking like a scientist” or “thinking like a historian.”
This proper and commonsensical goal has very often been translated into calls to teach “critical thinking skills” and “higher-order thinking skills” – and into generic calls for teaching students to make better judgments, reason more logically, and so forth. In a recent survey of human resource officials1 and in testimony delivered just a few months ago before the Senate Finance Committee,2 business leaders have repeatedly exhorted schools to do a better job of teaching students to think critically. And they are not alone. Organizations and initiatives involved in education reform, such as the National Center on Education and the Economy, the American Diploma Project, and the Aspen Institute, have pointed out the need for students to think and/or reason critically. The College Board recently revamped the SAT to better assess students’ critical thinking. And ACT, Inc. offers a test of critical thinking for college students.

Daniel Sellers:

We’ve had generations to act on our public education shortcomings. But we haven’t. The Deep South now outpaces Minnesota by numerous accounts. We trail the nation.
If Minnesota’s white students posted nation-worst achievement and graduation rates, we’d have redesigned education overnight.
Instead we protect status quo, punishing those who are “different” than us.
Our toilsome history
In 1865, the U.S. Congress voted “yea” on the Thirteenth Amendment. Passing in the House of Representatives by a mere two votes, we abolished slavery and brought closure to the bloody Civil War.

Catharine B. Hill:

The recession continues to create challenges for higher education in the US. Appropriate responses depend on expectations for the economy in the future, and whether the shocks we have experienced are short- or longer-term trends. Moody’s US Higher Education Outlook Negative in 2013 report does little to address these issues.
The optimal response to a cyclical change is to not allow significant changes to the structure of the colleges and universities. But if a change is permanent, adjustments are warranted. Of course, it is difficult to know whether shocks are permanent or temporary – there is a tendency to assume positive shocks are permanent and negative ones temporary, leading to inappropriate policy responses when wrong. This explains some of the problems facing many colleges and universities.
One of the most important developments in the US economy is the growth of real incomes. In the past decade, real incomes have suffered, putting downward pressure on tuition increases at many institutions. If real income growth picks up, so will the ability of some institutions to increase tuition.

Joseph Stiglitz:

President Obama’s second Inaugural Address used soaring language to reaffirm America’s commitment to the dream of equality of opportunity: “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”
The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible. The Pew Research Center has found that some 90 percent of Americans believe that the government should do everything it can to ensure equality of opportunity.
Perhaps a hundred years ago, America might have rightly claimed to have been the land of opportunity, or at least a land where there was more opportunity than elsewhere. But not for at least a quarter of a century. Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches stories were not a deliberate hoax, but given how they’ve lulled us into a sense of complacency, they might as well have been.