Lisa Grace Lednicer:

I know a divorced, single mom who is raising three children in what can only be described as a chaotic household. Her ex-husband lives in a different city, her parents live in a different state, and her high-energy kids — a tween boy and girl and their younger sister — require someone with the organizational skills of a logistics specialist to keep track of their lives. I sometimes questioned her parenting decisions until something she did stunned me.

One day, she ignored the piles of laundry and household chores, packed her kids into the car and drove north for the weekend just because the weather was gorgeous and who knew when they’d have a weekend like that again? I envied her confidence — not just because her kids will remember that trip instead of the day-to-day messiness of their lives, but because I would never think of doing something that spontaneous with my 6-year-old. Which means, maybe, I’m a bad mom.

Anna North:

Self-control, curiosity, “grit” — these qualities may seem more personal than academic, but at some schools, they’re now part of the regular curriculum. Some researchers say personality could be even more important than intelligence when it comes to students’ success in school. But critics worry that the increasing focus on qualities like grit will distract policy makers from problems with schools.

In a 2014 paper, the Australian psychology professor Arthur E. Poropat cites research showing that both conscientiousness (which he defines as a tendency to be “diligent, dutiful and hardworking”) and openness (characterized by qualities like creativity and curiosity) are more highly correlated with student performance than intelligence is. And, he notes, ratings of students’ personalities by outside observers — teachers, for instance — are even more strongly linked with academic success than the way students rate themselves. The strength of the personality-performance link is good news, he writes, because “personality has been demonstrated to change over time to a far greater extent than intelligence.”

Lani Guinier:

A special lottery is to be held to select the student who will live in the only deluxe room in a dormitory. There are 100 seniors, 150 juniors, and 200 sophomores who applied. Each senior’s name is placed in the lottery 3 times; each junior’s name, 2 times; and each sophomore’s name, 1 time. What is the probability that a senior’s name will be chosen?

Does this kind of question look familiar? For most of you, it probably does: it represents just one of the nearly two hundred questions that presently make up the SAT. (The answer, by the way, is 3/8, or 37.5 percent, for those among us who prefer percentages to fractions.) For nearly a century, universities across the country have used SAT scores and other quantifiable metrics to make decisions about admitting one candidate versus another—decisions that can have far-reaching impact on both the admitted and declined candidates’ educational, social, professional, and financial futures. On the basis of what? we might ask. Originally the acronym SAT stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test, on the strength of the argument that a high schooler’s success on the test correlated with his or her success in the increasingly rigorous environment of college. As evidence of this correlation dwindled, the name was changed first to the Scholastic Assessment Test (keeping the handy, well-known acronym) and later to the SAT Reasoning Test. Call it what you will, the SAT still promises something it can’t deliver: a way to measure merit. Yet the increasing reliance on standardized test scores as a status placement in society has created something alien to the very values of our democratic society yet seemingly with a life of its own: a testocracy.

Allow me to be clear: I’m not talking about all tests. I’m a professor; I believe in methods of evaluation. But I know, too, that certain methods are fairer and more valuable than others. I believe in achievement tests: diagnostic tests that are used to give feedback, either to the teacher or to the student, about what individuals have actually mastered or what they’re learning. What I don’t believe in are aptitude tests, testing that—by whatever new clever code name it goes by—is used to predict future performance. Unfortunately, that is not how the SAT functions. Even the test makers do not claim it’s a measure of smartness; all they claim is that success on the test correlates with first-year college grades, or if it’s the LSAT (Law School Admission Test), that it correlates with first-year law school grades.

Barry Garlic, via a kind email:

When I was hired for the long-term sub assignment, the principal told me it would likely last the whole semester. In order not to unduly alarm the parents, he had announced I would be there for just the third quarter. But the day came when I told my classes that Mrs. Halloran would not be coming back and I would be their teacher for the remainder of the semester.

All my classes cheered wildly. But as much as I wanted to believe I was entirely worthy of such adulation, I suspected they were reacting to the news that the super-strict Mrs. Halloran would not be returning.

My doubt was tied in large part to the email I had received from Brian’s mother , which suggested that Brian’s poor performance in algebra this semester was due to me. In even larger part, my doubt was tied to other news I received from one of the school counselors, a young woman named Robin. She had met with me the day before I made my announcement. She started on a complimentary note: “I can’t imagine walking in mid-year like you’ve done and trying to figure this all out,” and then got down to business. Two students had complained to her about my algebra 1 class. Who they were she could not disclose. The essence of the complaint was that I didn’t teach like Mrs. Halloran.

“They said she taught things one topic at a time, but you do several,” she said. This made no sense to me at first, until I remembered that in my lesson on word problems, I presented both mixture, and rate and speed problems. Ironically, Mrs. Halloran’s lesson plans called for one more, but I felt that would be too much.

“I asked them if they had talked to you about this,” Robin said. “They said they didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” As touching as this may have been to Robin, I was not impressed. I strongly suspected that 1) Brian was one of the students and 2) they feared retribution rather than hurting my feelings.

Moriah Balingit and T. Rees Shapiro:

A grim picture of academic performance was emerging at Carlin Springs Elementary. Fewer than half of the school’s third-graders had passed the reading and math portions of the Virginia Standards of Learning exam, and numbers for history and science weren’t much better.

Teachers pored over the data, dumbfounded.

“To get information like that back can be like a shock to your system,” said Mary Clare Moller, a literacy teacher at the Arlington, Va., school, reflecting on test results that came in after the 2012-2013 school year. “You’re just thinking, like, ‘But I taught this information. I don’t understand why the kids didn’t get it.’ ”

Moller and other third-grade teachers devised a strategy for the following fall: They led six weeks of daily test preparation lessons, tracked students’ progress with a new computer program and provided extra tutoring for students who seemed at risk of missing the mark.

Carol Dweck:

A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son’s confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.

Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 35 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.

Ongoing education spending rhetoric often lacks facts, such as the recent Wisconsin State Journal Headline replaying annual school budget theatre (thankfully, the article did mention the planned 9(!) increase in healthcare spending).

I recently requested historic data on Wisconsin education spending and have posted the results below, along with the raw data. Tap the charts to view a larger version.

I hope that readers will find this information useful, particularly when considering the effectiveness of these precious tax dollars.

Raw data (xlsx format) Charts in PDF format.

Philip Ball:

We’re surely now in the Age of the Brain. In the United States, the BRAIN Initiative, announced in 2013 and with a projected cost of $3bn, aims to map the activity of every neuron in the brain—first, those of mice and other animals, then of humans. The European Union has assigned €1bn to the ten-year Human Brain Project, which intends to deduce the brain’s wiring circuit in order to build a complete computer simulation of it. And now Japan has launched its own ten-year initiative, called Brain/MINDS, with a focus on understanding brain diseases and malfunctions such as Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and autism.

Of all these projects, the Japanese effort is the most modest, and likely to be the most useful. It will use a combination of brain imaging and genetics to try to figure out what goes wrong and why, in particular using marmosets as a model for humans. The European project, meanwhile, has already run into serious problems. Many neuroscientists are concerned that its ambitions are premature, and last July 130 researchers from labs around the world signed an open letter complaining of the “overly narrow approach, leading to a significant risk that it would fail to meet its goals.” The signatories say that the project could prove to be a huge waste of money, and criticize what they see as the opaque and unaccountable way the project is being run.

Some of those complaints are about infrastructure and management. But some go to the heart of what modern brain science is attempting to do, and what its realistic limits are. Those issues are searchingly explored in a new book, The Future of the Brain, edited by cognitive scientist Gary Marcus and neuroscientist Jeremy Freeman, which I have recently reviewed for Prospect.

Christine Rosen:

One Monday in June 2009, at the start of the evening rush hour in Washington, D.C., a computer killed nine people. At least that’s one possible interpretation of the crash that occurred at a suburban Metrorail station. The train was in ATO, or “automatic train operation” mode, which means a computer was in control. Investigators later determined that the complicated automatic sensor mechanisms embedded in the trains and tracks had failed, causing one train traveling at almost 50 miles per hour to crash into the back of another stopped at the station. The human operator of the train, realizing too late what was happening, tried in the last few seconds to pull the emergency brake. She died along with eight others that day. It was the worst transportation disaster in the history of the D.C. Metro system.

No one would claim a computer intentionally killed, of course, but the day’s events were the unforeseen, tragic consequence of something that increasingly governs many aspects of our daily lives: computer automation.

Sarah Garland:

Every Saturday morning at 10 a.m., Jason Zimba begins a math tutoring session for his two young daughters with the same ritual. His youngest, Claire, 4, draws on a worksheet while his oldest, Abigail, 7, pulls math problems written on strips of paper out of an old Kleenex box, decorated like a piggy bank with a pink snout on one end and a curly-cue tail on the other, and adds the numbers as fast as she can. If she gets the answer “lickety-split,” as her dad says, she can check them off. If she doesn’t, the problem goes back in the box, to try the following week.

Zimba began the Saturday lessons to make up for what he felt was subpar math instruction at Abigail’s public elementary school in Manhattan after it switched to the Common Core, a set of controversial new math and English standards adopted by most states in 2010. The standards have been in place in many districts for three years, but most textbooks, curriculum and teacher training have yet to catch up to the Common Core’s grand vision. The math standards, in particular, have caused outrage across the country as parents have grappled with confusing homework and garbled word problems labeled Common Core. Several states are currently reconsidering the standards in response to the growing backlash.

But Zimba, a mathematician by training, is not just any disgruntled parent. He’s one of the guys who wrote the Common Core.

“I would be sleeping in if I weren’t frustrated,” Zimba says of his Saturday morning lessons, which he teaches in his pajamas. Instead, four years after signing off on the final draft of the standards, he spends his weekends trying to make up for the lackluster curriculum at his daughters’ school and his weekdays trying to make up for the lackluster curriculum and teaching at schools around the country that are struggling to shift to the Common Core.

Alan Borsuk:

Who you calling bad?

It’s such an important and hot question now, as Republicans in the state Assembly make ambitious and fast-paced moves to launch a new accountability system for schools in Wisconsin.

They introduced a sweeping proposal Wednesday, and there is a public hearing on it this coming Wednesday, amid signs of divisions within the conservative ranks.

But let me start with my own bad problem.

Last week in this space, I said the accountability issue was about to heat up, and I said the term accountability was a fancy way of asking, “What are we going to do about bad schools statewide?”

I go to great lengths to avoid using a word like “bad” as a general label for schools where low percentages of students are rated as proficient or better in reading and math.

I’ll describe them as high-needs schools, low-performing schools, schools with low levels of academic success, high-poverty schools and a few other labels.

I stay away from “failing schools,” which is one of the labels the draft of the new proposal uses. At least I don’t call them “Schools Identified for Improvement,” which is what Wisconsin officials called them for several years.

But this time, being a bit too flippant and wanting to talk plain talk, I said, “bad.”

Madison School District (PDF):

We know that our vision as a District doesn’t come to life without a thriving workforce. That is why we have worked hard to provide our employees with the resources and support they need to do their best work. To be successful for all students, we must be a District that attracts, develops and retains the best employees.

The District’s current employee contracts expire after the 2015-16 school year. As a result of Act 10, the District is responsible for developing a handbook that will take the place of those contracts. The MMSD Employee Handbook will be collaboratively developed and reflective of expectations of both employees and of the District.

This document outlines our approach and recommended process for developing the MMSD Employee Handbook.

Guiding Principles
Our approach to the handbook will be through the following guiding principles. The handbook
development process must:

1. Apply a clear strategy and transparent process. How will our work support our overall goal of recruiting, developing and retaining a thriving workforce?

2. Create a culture of excellence with equity. How does our work ensure that both employees and students are held to high expectations and provided the support to reach them?

3. Encourage collaborative, respectful discussion and interest-based problem solving.

4. Strategically align resources.

5. Avoid redundancies and create consistencies. Process:

1) Establish Oversight Group

a) 5 members appointed by MTI
b) 2 members appointed by AFSCME
c) 1 member appointed by Building Trades Council d) 3 building principals; up to 5 other administrators

Timeline (PDF).

Chris Rickert:

Teachers who reach goals in the new compensation plan can also move up the pay scale faster than they were able to move up the old salary schedule, Busler said, while those not interested in reaching goals can expect nothing more than annual cost-of-living salary increases.

But overall, the amount the district would put into teacher compensation is greater than the amount it would have had to put in under the old salary schedule, he said.

I was curious about why the district bothered to include seniority and degree-attainment in the new compensation plan at all, given that research has shown seniority isn’t correlated with more effective teaching beyond about five years on the job, and there’s little, if any, connection between getting more college credit and better teaching.

School Board member Charles Uphoff, who sat on the committee that created the new plan, said a main goal of the new plan is to pay the “profession of teaching more professionally.”

It’s nice to see someone in public education realizing teachers are not, say, interchangeable workers on an assembly line.

Meanwhile, back in Madison, the school district is possibly the last one in the state still wedded to a salary schedule — by way of a collective-bargaining agreement repeatedly extended by a union-beholden School Board while Act 10 was held up in court.

In 2013, Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said “What will be different, this time“? The Superintendent further cited Long Beach and Boston as beacons in her Rotary speech.

However, based on recently released 2015-2016 budget slides (PDF) and Molly Beck’s summary, it appears that the same service, status quo governance model continues, unabated.

A focus on Adult Employment:

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

Are Administrators Golden?

The Single Best Idea for Reforming K-12 Education; ” Stop Running the system for the sake of the system.

Dirty little secret of US ed spending: Since 1950, “US schools increased their non-teaching positions by 702%.”; Ranks #2 in world on non teacher staff spending.

“Reverting to the mean“.

Ruth Robarts, writing in 2005:

However, the administration’s “same service” budget requires a revenue increase of more than 4%. The Gap for next year is $8.6M.

Next will come a chorus of threats to slash programs and staff to “close the gap”. District staff will come on stage bearing long lists of positions and programs cut in previous years to close the gap. The mood will be ominous when the curtain comes down on Act 1.
On March 7, Act 2 opens with the administration revealing— with great reluctance— the annual “Cut List”. On the Cut List will be programs that motivate our kids to excel at school, such as fine arts, extracurricular sports, environmental field trips, and classes for students with special talent. Also on the list will be staff positions that assist kids with special problems, such as choosing classes and colleges, overcoming difficult home circumstances, learning job skills, or having special educational needs. School custodians may again appear on the Cut List, but not central administrators. “We have no choice” is the theme of Act 2.

Molly Beck

District spending would increase by 4.8 percent during the 2015-16 school year, largely based on staff pay and a projected health insurance rate increase of 9 percent, according to the district’s projections, and is expected to exceed district revenues by $10.1 million.

Spending grows annually, yet, reading results have long been disastrous.

Related: Madison’s Superintendent “reverts to the mean.”

Via a kind reader’s email.

Despite spending double the national average per student and delivering disastrous reading results – for years – Madison’s Superintendent pushes back on school accountability:

The Wheeler Report (PDF):

Dear Legislators:

Thank you for your efforts to work on school accountability. We all agree that real accountability, focused on getting the best outcomes for all children, is important. From our first review of the bill introduced today, it is clear there is a lot of work to be done before a school accountability bill can be passed.

There are several parts of this bill that need more thoughtful consideration to be the type of real accountability that our students and families deserve:

– using multiple tests that would not fairly compare public and private schools

– requiring charter conversion rather than creating a true path to improvement

– assigning letter grades that do not accurately communicate how a school is performing

– removing control from locally elected school boards.

We need an accountability bill that supports our efforts to produce the best results for all children rather than a flawed one that is rushed to pass in order to make a political point.

I would urge you to work with districts to develop a true accountability system that holds all schools to the same standards and supports them in getting the best results for children. We have not yet been given the opportunity to work with you but we would welcome it. I would be happy to answer any questions, give input or discuss with you more.

Thank you for your time and consideration. Sincerely,

Jennifer Cheatham, Ed.D.
Superintendent, Madison Metropolitan School District

A further example, try to find total spending in this 2015-2016 Madison Schools’ Budget slideware document (PDF).

Auto-pilot spending and governance practices continue:

General Fund expenditures will increase by approximately 4.8%, based on existing wage and salary commitments and an estimated health insurance rate increase of 9%, unless budget actions are taken to intervene

A Budget Gap of 2.8% (2% Revenue vs. 4.8% Expenditures) or $9-$10 million will occur unless budget actions are taken to intervene

Note the use of “General Fund”. The document neglects to mention total spending, or recent increases in redistributed state tax dollars to the Madison Schools.

A party insider recently mentioned that the “days of Dane County Democrats harvesting tax dollars from around the state and spending them here, are over”.

I further recall lunch a few years ago with a long time Madison elected official: “Always blame the State”.

Wolfram: Reverting to the mean.

Josh:

As the title of this post suggests, I have made the tough decision to leave the classroom for good at the end of this school year.

The decision is a painful one — both personally and professionally. It is also a public one, as I’ve been honored as recently as last month by the Waynesboro Rotary Club as its 2014 High School Teacher of the Year, my fourth such honor in six years.

In that respect, I feel an explanation is in order, as well as a prescription for what we — as a community — can do to right the ship.

Every workplace has its imperfections and challenges. I accept that. But public education is painted as a career where you make a difference in the lives of students. When a system becomes so deeply flawed that students suffer and good teachers leave (or become jaded), we must examine how and why we do things.
Waynesboro is small enough that we can tackle some of the larger problems that other school systems can’t. I want this piece, in part, to force a needed, collective conversation.

Github.

David Schultz:

Sometimes greatness is hard to spot. Before going on to lead the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships, Michael Jordan was famously cut from his high school basketball team. Scientists often face rejection of their own—in their case, the gatekeepers aren’t high school coaches, but journal editors and peers they select to review submitted papers. A study published today indicates that this system does a reasonable job of predicting the eventual interest in most papers, but it may shoot an air ball when it comes to identifying really game-changing research.

Studying peer review is difficult due to the confidential nature of the process, but sociologist Kyle Siler of the University of Toronto in Canada and colleagues were able to examine the peer-review history of 1008 articles that were submitted to three elite medical journals: Annals of Internal Medicine, The BMJ, and The Lancet. In total, just 62 of the manuscripts were accepted (6.2%), confirming just how difficult it is to be published in a top-tier journal. Editors “desk rejected” 722 of the manuscripts, meaning they never made it to the journal’s peer-review stage. However, 757 of the initially rejected articles eventually went on to be published elsewhere. This allowed Siler and his team to analyze if, like Jordan, the vetoed papers would go on to achieve greatness.

The researchers found that, by and large, the gatekeeping system was predictive of a paper’s eventual number of citations. Papers that were accepted outright by one of the three elite journals tended to garner more citations than papers that were rejected and then published elsewhere, they report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Additionally, papers that were desk rejected went on to receive fewer citations than papers that were approved by an editor, but then rejected during the subsequent peer-review process. “It’s a sign that these editors making snap decisions really quickly still have a nose for what quality is and isn’t,” Siler says.

Susan Frey:

During Daisy Montes Cabrera’s final week of her first quarter at UC Davis, her father, who was terminally ill, died. Cabrera, a first-generation college student, wanted to leave Davis to be closer to her family in San Jose. But her high school college adviser, principal and teachers all encouraged her to stay, she said.

Cabrera’s high school – KIPP San Jose Collegiate – is part of the Knowledge Is Power Program charter school organization, which focuses on preparing low-income and first-generation students for college. For the past few years, KIPP has expanded its K-12 program to include supporting “KIPPsters” through their college years.

As part of the KIPP Through College program, the charter group has partnered with more than 50 public and private universities nationwide, seeking their support to help KIPP alumni integrate both academically and socially into college life. In California, 11 universities, including UC Davis, work with KIPP. Steve Mancini, communications director for KIPP, says that he doesn’t know of any other K-12 programs in the country that have this type of partnership with a wide range of universities.

“I wanted to quit Davis,” Cabrera said, “but right away I got calls and messages from all my high school teachers to keep going. I got a Facebook message from my principal saying, ‘let us know what you need.’”

Jason Stein:

Top GOP leaders in the Assembly say they hope to unveil their version of an accountability bill by as soon as Wednesday. But Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke (R-Kaukauna) said there are still differences with Senate Republicans over whether the proposal should include upfront consequences or other “interventions” for failing schools or leave those to be determined later.

“We think there should be some accountability with the accountability bill,” he said.

This same disagreement helped stymie passage of the schools bill in the previous legislative session.

Republicans from both houses met Tuesday on the proposal, which leaders in the Senate and Assembly have said is their first priority in the legislative session opening this week.

The accountability bill seeks to place similar standards on all schools receiving taxpayer dollars, from traditional public and charter schools to private voucher schools accepting state money. The proposal is closely linked to a separate push from Republicans to expand the role of and funding for voucher schools statewide.

Both Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) said that they hope to have standards legislation introduced soon in each house.

David Whitehouse:

Public schools accustom children to the discipline of the capitalist workplace; children are separated from their families to perform a series of tasks alongside others, under the direction of an authority figure, according to a schedule ruled by a clock. The school reform movement of the 1830s and 40s also aimed to shape the students’ moral character. The effect of this was supposed to be that students would willingly submit to authority, that they would be able to work hard, exercise self­-control, and delay gratification.

In fact, the concepts of good citizenship that came out of school reform movement were perfectly aligned with the concepts of criminology that were being invented to categorize people on the street. The police were to focus not just on crime but on criminal types—a method of profiling backed up by supposedly scientific credentials. The “juvenile delinquent,” for example, is a concept that is common to schooling and policing—and has helped to link the two activities in practice.

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

Buoyed by the election which provided Republican majorities in both the Assembly (+27 majority) and the Senate (+5 majority), conservative anti-worker/anti-union legislators have announced that they will introduce Right to Work legislation when the January session begins. Right to Work laws limit collective bargaining, make it easier to outsource jobs and cut wages and benefits. Their plan was to do this in 2012, but legislators were worried that it was too soon after the 2011 protests against Act 10, and would cause public backlash. On average, workers in Right to Work states earn $7,030 a year less, according to the Congressional Research Service (6/20/12), and the rate of workplace deaths is 52.9% higher. Workers in Right to Work states are even more likely to be uninsured (16.8%, compared with 13.1% overall).

Governor Walker’s Act 10 has already done great damage to Wisconsin’s public sector workers and the economy. Act 10 has been described as “Right to Work on Steroids.” But now, the far-right is coming after the 13% of Wisconsin’s private sector workers who have the benefit of union representation. And it is because CEOs and company owners care more about big business and profits than they do about workers who create them. And, middle class families become struggling families. Right to Work will surely shrink the middle class.

Despite its misleading name, such a law does not guarantee anyone a job and it does not protect against unfair firing, i.e. it provides NO “right to work”.

Rather, a Right to Work law prohibits employers and employees from negotiating an agreement – also known as a union security clause – that requires all workers who receive the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement to pay their share of the costs of the Union in representing them. A Right to Work law mandates that unions represent every employee, whether or not he or she pays Union dues. In other words, such laws enable workers to pay nothing and still get the benefits of union membership. Imagine if a Madison resident, who sends their children to MMSD schools, but can opt out of paying property taxes to finance the schools.

Karen Herzog:

For the past three years, Teresa Piraino of South Milwaukee has diligently filled out the federal application for financial aid for her son Anthony, who is studying criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

In the next few weeks, the Pirainos will scramble to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid again — this time for two kids, as daughter Jessica plans to study nursing at Alverno College in the fall.

“I want to get right on it,” Teresa Piraino said of the online form known as FAFSA, which becomes accessible every Jan. 1. “The stakes are high and I want to get the most we can because I can’t give them the money they’ll need.”

With the cost of college escalating — and with it, student debt — no one wants to leave money on the table.

But for many families, procrastinating on filing FAFSA may mean missing out on thousands of dollars in Federal Work-Study, low-interest Federal Perkins Loans and the Wisconsin Grant for state residents — all need-based aid awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. When the limited pool of money is gone, students who otherwise would qualify are out of luck, and are left with higher-interest federal and private loans that can pile up debt.

A low-income student potentially could leave more than $6,000 on the table in first-come, first-served money that doesn’t have to be paid back or that can be repaid at a lower interest rate than other available loans, according to financial aid officials at several Wisconsin universities.

Daniel McGraw

As he sits in a study room at Project Learn — a non-profit on Euclid Avenue that offers adult education programs — with sample questions for the GED (General Education Diploma) waiting on a computer screen, 29-year-old Derwin Williams explains why getting his diploma is so important. He wants to get into the construction trade, maybe as a roofer or drywall hanger, and he knows he needs a diploma to get into vocational technical classes to get that done.

Williams dropped out of East High School more than a decade ago, in part because of a gunshot wound that left him hospitalized for six months and required the removal of his kidney. He’s had some legal problems since then too, mostly from a DUI conviction a few years ago, but he’ll be sober three years this coming March. He started thinking about a GED when his probation program encouraged him to do so.

Williams is unemployed and has been studying for the four-part GED since January. In previous years, 11 months of prep would likely have given him a decent chance of success. But the test was radically changed in January, and like many, Williams hasn’t yet made enough progress to take any of the four sections. According to some sample tests he’s taken, he’s getting close in the math and science portions, but is still pretty far out in the social science and language parts.

Michael Meranze & Christopher Newfields

Some new things did happen in 2014 higher ed, and some of them were good.

1. The College Liberation Movement. The splashy version came from some Ivy League humanist dissidents who described elite private universities as sorting machines for those reared to rule our newly post-middle class society. There was the “excellent sheep” debate, started by William Deresiewicz’s July article, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League” and carried on in his book, Excellent Sheep, sustained by attacks on him by Jim Sleeper among others, and brought in quieter form to the big screen by the film Ivory Tower.

Dr. Deresiewicz drew a sharp line between what happens at places like Yale, described as training in “the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions,” and actually learning how to think. However one felt about the details, the discussion put the humanistic goal of personal development at the center of the college agenda. It cut against the naïve vocationalism that has justified corporate reach-ins to core educational functions. It clarified that colleges must do what businesses cannot do, according to their own vision and expertise.

I have my quarrels with this Ivy humanism, starting with my dislike for the overdrawn contrast between liberal and practical arts. I think that the systematic inculcation of deep skills are next on the to-do list of public universities. But higher ed leaders have so completely lost confidence in the special powers of higher learning that they needed every kind of explanation of why teaching is not a business.

2. A New Deal for Faculty Governance. When the chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced that she was pocket vetoing the appointment of Steven Salaita to a professorship that had been approved by every campus agency, she awakened the closest thing to a national faculty outcry that the country had seen in years. Prof. Salaita remains in limbo, and governance procedures have not been fixed. But I don’t know a single faculty member who isn’t now aware of the fall of the faculty, having in 2014 seen faculty be overridden in a main area of authority. The premature MOOC contracting of 2013 showed admin to be as ready to redesign the curriculum as it is to make all financial decisions on its own. Many faculty who weren’t worried about MOOC-mediated governance got worried about the suspension of hiring protocols by senior managers under donor pressure.

Other kinds of encroachments also got faculty attention. The newly-hatched Board of Trustees for the University of Oregon planned to write the faculty senate out of the university’s new constitution, with the effect of “relegat[ing] university stakeholders to supplicants.” Faculty generated an imposing counterattack. We learned all over again that faculty bodies, once awakened, have more than enough brains at their disposal to stop any train that “has already left the station.”

Matt Connolly

In 1925, one of college football’s biggest stars did the unthinkable. Harold “Red” Grange, described by the famous sportswriter Damon Runyan as “three or four men rolled into one for football purposes,” decided to leave college early in order to play in the National Football League.

While no fan today would begrudge an All-American athlete for going pro without his diploma, things were different for Grange. The NFL was only a few years old, and his decision to take the money in the pros before finishing his degree at the University of Illinois was a controversial one. It was especially reviled by Robert Zuppke, his coach at Illinois.

As the story goes, Grange broke the news to Zuppke before promising to return to finish his degree. “If I have anything to do with it you won’t come back here,” Zuppke replied, furious that a respectable college man would drop out and try to make a living off playing a game. “But Coach,” Grange said. “You make money off of football. Why can’t I make money off of football?”

It’s a question that has underscored the development of modern college football ever since. Aside from scholarships and (some) health insurance, the players remain unpaid. They are also subject to draconian National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules that banish them to hell for such sins as signing an autograph for cash or selling a jersey. Meanwhile their coaches enjoy ever-swelling salaries, bonuses, paid media appearances, and other perks like free housing. According to Newsday, the average compensation for the 108 football coaches in the NCAA’s highest division is $1.75 million. That’s up 75 percent since 2007. Alabama’s Nick Saban, college football’s highest-paid coach, will earn a guaranteed $55.2 million if he fulfills the eight-year term of his contract.

AFP

Since the bombing, Muntasser is “in another world” and refuses to go to school, says the father.
“What if he were to try and kill one of his classmates?”

Suddenly Muntasser begins to speak, his eyes fixed on the floor.
“I don’t want to go to school. Before, I used to go with Zakaria, he helped me spell my name. Now he’s dead,” says the boy.

“I don’t want to do anything, I just want to get a Kalashnikov and kill them all to avenge Zakaria and my cousins,” he shouts.

For a few seconds the boy is silent before saying how he dreams of them each night.
“I dream that I am holding them in my arms. I will never go to the beach again because that’s where they died.”

Health professional Samir Zaqqut says the children of Gaza have been too traumatised to live a normal life.

The Economist:

DR BOB SEARS, a paediatrician from Orange County, California, does not like to call his patients “free-riders”. True, he specialises in treating vaccine-sceptics, those families who resent being told to immunise their children against nasty diseases, from measles to whooping cough. It is also the case that, as a trained doctor, he believes that immunisation works. He agrees that some scary illnesses have almost vanished in America because more than 90% of children are inoculated against them, creating a herd immunity that leaves diseases with few places to lurk. Yet he differs from many doctors in the conclusion that he draws from that success.

Precisely because most children are immunised, he tells parents that it is probably safe to skip or delay jabs for their offspring. This strategy amounts to “hiding in the herd”, he says delicately, as he sips a late-afternoon coffee near his surgery. Put another way, his patients worry more than most about possible side-effects from vaccinations, above all the (thoroughly discredited) claim that vaccines cause autism. Dr Bob—as he is known to fans of “The Vaccine Book”, his best-selling guide to “selective” immunisation—does not say that worried parents are right. He just thinks that, on balance, they can safely indulge their anxieties by “taking advantage of the herd all around them.” When pushed, he makes “no claim” that the alternative vaccine plans that he offers (involving fewer jabs, or jabs administered over a longer period than most doctors recommend) are safer. He concedes that if everyone refused vaccinations, some diseases would roar back.

The Economist:

The main reason for the closures is financial. Catholic schools used to be financed by tuition payments, with help from the parish and archdiocese to fill the gaps. But demography has undermined this model. In 1950 76% of all Catholics lived in the north-east and the Midwest, which is where most of the schools are. Today, just under half do. In the south-west Catholics are more plentiful, but they are not sending their children to Catholic schools as European immigrants once did, because those schools do not yet exist.

Schools in the north-east and Midwest have been hit by both declining revenue and rising costs. Many parishes operate at a loss. Paedophilia scandals have added to the financial stress. Twelve dioceses and archdioceses have filed for bankruptcy since 2004. Legal fees and settlements have cost the American Catholic church billions. School buildings are ageing and expensive to maintain. Labour is dear too: half a century ago, 97% of teachers were in holy orders. Today almost all are laymen, who cost more (nuns were not so concerned about pension plans). Catholic schools also face competition from charter schools, some of which even rent space in their empty buildings. Almost all the closed Catholic schools in Detroit are now occupied by charters.

Madison spends about $17K per student….

Jonathan Margolis:

Do you send emails in literate, properly spelt English, broken down into crisp, relevant paragraphs, signed at the end, even with the mandatory extra space inserted after each full stop?

If you do, you are almost certainly old. How old? From a not hugely scientific study of everyone I happen to know, I’d say over 40, but more likely 10 years north of there.

What are the tells that make a speedy, clear, informative email the mark of advancing years?

Well, the main one is that you are emailing at all. For reasons I fail to understand (but then I am quite old) most of my younger friends prefer the cumbersome, hit-and-miss messaging of social media sites, or to use fiddly phone messaging utilities such as WhatsApp. They reserve the directness and unambiguousness of email for writing to, well, old people.

Oguz:

Today, I want to share my story, not a big deal but I felt like I should write about it.

When I was 14, I took OKS exam, high school entrance exam in Turkey of 2007, and I was able to go and register to any high school I want. During those days, I went to Ankara from Istanbul with my family to see graduation ceremony of one of my cousins at Middle East Technical University. My cousin took us around and made me meet his friends graduated from top high schools of Turkey. After having met a few friends, he introduced me to the top student of the department. By the way, my cousin is a graduate of computer engineering department. After having introduced, I asked him, “Where did you go to high school?”, and he answered, “Bursa High School of Science”. At that moment, believe me, it was the sentence passing through me: “Alright Oguzhan, here goes your life; first, you are going to study in Bursa High School of Science, then you are going to come here to study computer engineering.”. I never mentioned but, CS was my thing since 1998, the time when my father brought a computer to home. I simply fell in love with that box and wanted to be of those creating that technology, one day.

And I accomplished what I told myself that day. It was hard years for me, especially leaving home at 14 years old, moving to another city with 10$ in my box and no close friend or relative etc. but I had a strong purpose. It was the thing that kept me alive there.

Wisconsin State Journal:

Last month, Yvette Updike coached the Platteville girls volleyball team to its first WIAA state tournament appearance in 20 years.

Last week, Updike lost her coaching job.

On Dec. 10, the Platteville School Board decided against renewing Updike’s contract, adding another chapter — perhaps not the final one — to a long-running saga of acrimony between Updike and one or more parents of players in the program.

Stephanie Simon:

New data out from the Education Department find sizable — and in some states, huge — disparities in children’s access to fully qualified and experienced teachers.

In Pennsylvania, for instance, more than 20 percent of teachers are unlicensed in the schools with the largest concentration of minority students. In largely white schools, just 0.2 percent of teachers lack a license, the data show.

Or consider Louisiana: Nearly 20 percent of classes in the most impoverished schools are taught by teachers who don’t meet the federal definition of “highly qualified” — which generally means they lack a bachelor’s degree, are unlicensed or don’t have a strong academic background in the subject they’re teaching. In the wealthier schools, fewer than 8 percent of classes are led by a teacher who’s not highly qualified.

Jose Romaniello:

The game is about connecting capsules to create various kinds of “models”. Each capsule has a different mechanical or electrical purpose. Those models are mostly vehicles for both water and land, although it is possible to build cranes, robots, water pumps and even a cleaner dust vacuum. While the game manual comes with a vast collection of photos with models you can create, much more interesting is to let your imagination flow and build things in your head, a “crawler crane vacuum”? sounds interesting.

Every model starts from a fundamental capsule that contains the motor and two terminals that you need to “connect” to the batteries (which in turn is placed inside another capsule) or a switch using the power wires.

Mechanical capsules with gears inside are beautiful, these are real common components that exist in the mechanical industry. The explanations that comes in the manual are beautiful as well: