Average GPA in Core Subjects in 8th and 9th Grades and Percentage of Students Receiving a D or F in a Core Course in 9th Grade, by Feeder School, 2010 – 2013:

Madison School District 1.3MB PDF Presentation:

In focus groups, several teachers noted what they perceived to be a lack of adequate preparation their students received in previous years, and in some cases a lack of understanding about the curriculum to which their students have been exposed.

In focus groups at each MMSD school, a broad majority of students stated they have been in classes where the instructional purpose and relevance of what they were learning was unclear.

Each set of stakeholders interviewed for this project referenced the challenges posed by poor alignment of instruction from one grade level to the next, particularly between middle and high schools.

In focus groups, several teachers and students alike noted that adjusting to increased levels of homework in high school was a challenge for many.

Student focus groups reported varying experiences in Middle School with homework counting towards students’ overall grades may be contributing to a difficult transition into high school for some students

There is significant lack of course syllabi across schools.

When asked what a diploma should mean, there was much consensus across stakeholder groups that it should include the following, but also a lack of confidence that an MMSD diploma currently represented each of these for all graduates:

Competence in core subject areas
Exposure to a broad curriculum including the arts
Reading and critical thinking skills
Having a global perspective
Knowledge and ability to access employment and/or postsecondary education
Ability to work in groups
Curiosity as a lifelong learner
“Real world” experience tied to the classroom
Citizenship and self-sufficiency
“21st Century skills”

Recommendations
Redefine What an MMSD Diploma Means By Setting Common Learning Outcomes and Assessments for All Graduates

Create Clear Personalized Student Pathways

Define Multiple Career-Field and Academic Pathways for High School Students

Engage Deeply with Local Postsecondary Stakeholders for Alignment and Expansion of Dual Credit Options

Continue to Engage With Local Employers for Alignment and Student Work-Based Learning Opportunities

Continue to Promote and Develop AVID as a Pathway Option, While Monitoring More Closely Before Expanding

Encourage Innovation in Projects and Assessments

Regarding the “lack of course syllabi”, full, required implementation of Infinite Campus (or similar) would address this issue. Millions have been spent…

Number of Students in Class of 2013 Who Took AP World Language Courses, by High School and Feeder Middle School, 2010-2013

The Most Failed Courses in 9th Grade with Percentage of Students With One Failed Semester by School, 2013

AP courses available at all four comprehensive high schools:

Calculus AB
Calculus BC
French Language
Spanish Language
Environmental Science
Statistics
European History

Select AP courses not available at all high schools:

Proportion of Students Enrolled in AP Courses and Scoring a 3 or Higher on AP Exams by Race and SpEd/ELL Status, 2013

The Most Failed Courses in 9th Grade with Percentage of Students With One Failed Semester by School, 2013

Background links: English 10

Small Learning Communities

High School “Redesign”

William Major:

I. Close the Business Schools

Ask anyone professing the humanities today and you come to understand that a medieval dimness looms. If this is the end-times for the ice sheets at our poles — and it is — many of us also understand that the melt can be found closer to home, in the elimination of language and classics departments, for instance, and in the philistinism represented by governors such as Rick Scott of Florida and Patrick McCrory of North Carolina, who apparently see in the humanities a waste of time and taxpayer subsidies. In the name of efficiency and job creation, according to their logic, taxpayers can no longer afford to support bleary-eyed poets, Latin history radicals, and brie-nibbling Francophiles.

That there is a general and widespread acceptance in the United States that what is good for corporate America is good for the country is perhaps inarguable, and this is why men like Governors Scott and McCrory are dangerous. They merely invoke a longstanding and not-so-ugly stereotype: the pointy-headed humanist whose work, if you can call it that, is irrelevant. Among the many easy targets, English departments and their ilk are convenient and mostly defenseless. Few will rise to rush the barricades with us, least of all the hard-headed realists who understand the difficulties of running a business, which is what the university is, anyway.

Lawrence Wittner:

Americans committed to better living for bosses can take heart at the fact that college and university administrators — unlike their faculty (increasingly reduced to rootless adjuncts) and students (saddled with ever more debt) — are thriving.

In 2011, the last year for which figures are available, 42 private college and university presidents received more than a million dollars each for their work. Robert Zimmer (University of Chicago) was the best-paid, at $3,358,723. At public colleges and universities, nine top administrators garnered more than $1 million each in 2012-2013, with the best-paid, E. Gordon Gee (Ohio State University), receiving $6,057,615.

Since then, it’s likely that the number of millionaire campus presidents has increased, for their numbers have been growing rapidly. Indeed, in 2012-13, the number of public university presidents receiving at least $1 million for their services more than doubled over the previous year.

In addition to their formal compensation, college and university presidents receive some very lavish perks. These at times include not only free luxury cars and country club memberships, but free university housing. James Milliken, the chancellor of the City University of New York, attended by some of the nation’s most impoverished students, lives rent-free in an $18,000-a-month luxury apartment on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side. From 2000 to 2007, when Gordon Gee was chancellor at Vanderbilt University, he benefited from a $6 million renovation of the university mansion in which he and his wife resided. According to a New York Times article, after Gee moved on to his multi-million dollar job at Ohio State, he was known for “the lavish lifestyle his job supports, including a rent-free mansion with an elevator, a pool and a tennis court and flights on private jets.”

Economic inequality in the United States has been receiving a lot of attention. But it’s not merely an issue of the rich getting richer. The typical American household has been getting poorer, too.

The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline, according to a study financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. Those are the figures for a household at the median point in the wealth distribution — the level at which there are an equal number of households whose worth is higher and lower. But during the same period, the net worth of wealthy households increased substantially.

The Russell Sage study also examined net worth at the 95th percentile. (For households at that level, 95 percent of the population had less wealth.) It found that for this well-do-do slice of the population, household net worth increased 14 percent over the same 10 years. Other research, by economists like Edward Wolff at New York University, has shown even greater gains in wealth for the richest 1 percent of households.

Caroline Porter

On a recent weekday here, a steady stream of people dropped by one central location for food stamps, family counseling and job ideas—their local school.

While instruction has ended for the summer, these classrooms remain open as part of a wider trend around the country of “community schools,” where public and private groups bring services closer to students and residents year round and, in some cases, help boost student performance.

With backing at local, state and federal levels, the decades-old idea for improving schools and neighborhoods is gaining ground despite some funding uncertainties and doubts about community schools’ success.

The largest coordinator of such programs, Communities in Schools, saw a 6% increase in its reach in the 2012-13 school year, covering schools with a total of more than 1.3 million students in 26 states.

Alan Borsuk:

Gregory Thornton, the former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, was good at talking about the positive things underway for the schools. He’d get revved up as he rattled off initiatives and data. At the start of school a year ago, he did in a conversation with me.

Then he abruptly changed tone.

“I’ve got 15 or 20 schools that just need a lot of help,” he said.

They just needed to start over. He said he was going to propose seeking ideas for anyone who had them on how to turn around those schools. Could that include independent charter school operators? Yes, he said. Whoever had a good plan for getting better success.

It’s almost a year later, and MPS is launching a program to improve low-performing schools. Is it the shake-things-up, turn-around vision Thornton held out? For better or worse, no. This is Milwaukee. This is MPS.

I hope the tastes-milder, maybe-more-filling version of revving up low-performing schools is successful. Fourteen schools have been designated as “commitment schools” based on proposals the staff of each one made.

In broad terms, each of the proposals includes fresh ideas on what the schools will offer and how they’ll offer it, and, I’m assured by MPS leaders, fresh willingness by staff members to work together on better outcomes.

Seven of the 14 schools are large high schools with reputations for being, shall we say, challenging: Bradley Tech, James Madison, North Division, Pulaski, South Division, Vincent, and Washington. An eighth is Barack Obama School of Career and Technical Education, a new kindergarten through 12th-grade school combining two faltering schools in the former Custer High School building.

Pat Schneider:

As Madison teachers prepare to head back to school, big changes they’re facing include a new teacher evaluation system mandated by the state and a new discipline policy adopted by the Madison School Board, according to Madison Teachers Inc. president Mike Lipp.

“There’s a lot of confusion and some apprehension” about the new teacher evaluation system, Lipp said. And of the district’s new Behavior Education Plan, designed to cut the number of suspensions, Lipp said he is “100 percent for keeping kids in class. There’s a cost, though.”

“I’m hoping these things work, I really do,” said Lipp, athletic director at West High School, where he formerly taught science.

The teacher evaluation and student behavior initiatives will be the focus of professional development sessions for teachers on Aug. 27 and 28. Students begin returning to school on Sept. 2, the day after Labor Day, with staggered start days according to grade.

Teachers have long been evaluated and sections of the union contract have called for evaluation, Lipp said. But Wisconsin school districts are required under state law to implement one of two codified systems this coming school year.

Molly Hensley-Clancy:

Five years ago, Arizona State University (ASU), like many other giant public universities, was lagging in the field of online education, with just 1,200 students enrolled in its degree programs. Today, that enrollment has swelled to 10,000, and by next year, when an influx of Starbucks baristas enroll in online programs through a highly publicized partnership announced last month, it is expected to have more than twice as many online students. But for ASU, 25,000 students is hardly enough. The school has set its sights on growing online enrollment to at least 100,000 students in the next five years — more than tripling a 2011 goal of 30,000 students by 2020.

“If the University of Phoenix can have 400,000 students, most of them online, why can’t a real university like Arizona State grow to a similar size?” Phil Regier, the dean of ASU’s online programs, asked rhetorically in an interview with BuzzFeed.

The goal, Regier said, is to make ASU into an online giant, but one that doesn’t fall into the familiar traps of the University of Phoenix and other for-profit universities. For-profits like Phoenix were the original pioneers in online education but have struggled in recent years with low completion, high student loan default rates, and allegations of poor quality and misleading marketing practices.

Michael Crow, ASU’s dynamic president of 12 years, has trumpeted the expansion of ASU Online as a mission of increased access and educational innovation. But some critics say that its rapid growth is something else: a pursuit of profit that has already taken the university too far in the direction of corporatization, leading it to operate more as a business concerned with generating revenue than as a public university. The deal with Starbucks, they say, is a prime example of a blurring line between for-profit companies and public universities’ online programs.

Sam Levin:

In an effort to establish better working conditions and increased job security, 78 percent of adjunct faculty at Mills voted in May to join SEIU Local 1021, the union that represents more than 50,000 public sector and nonprofit workers in Northern California. That means that non-tenured professors at the college now have basic union protections and representation. And last week, professors, union representatives, and administrators began the process of negotiating the college’s first-ever union contract for adjuncts. Mills was the first private, nonprofit college in the Bay Area to have its adjuncts unionize and a number of other local schools are now following suit.

While activists celebrate this milestone, Mills administrators have, according to a number of adjuncts and labor activists, responded with a series of retaliatory actions. SEIU 1021 has already filed four unfair labor practice charges against Mills, alleging that the college has implemented policy changes without giving the union proper notice or an opportunity to bargain — and has retaliated and discriminated against two faculty members for union organizing. Critics say the administration’s actions reflect an ongoing failure to support adjuncts and a level of resistance to unionization that contrad

kcrw.com

Faced with a cash crunch, UC campuses are cutting back on new students from California. Out-of-state newcomers have to pay more, so they’re on the increase. The “Crown Jewel of the Golden State” now depends on tuition — and California parents are organizing against what they call a “betrayal.” We’ll hear from one of them and get the University’s explanation.

Janesville Gazette:

Is it good policy? Perhaps Act 10 was an overreach with its union-busting provisions, but it addressed a fiscal need in Wisconsin and the school districts and municipalities that receive state aid.

Public employee benefits had become overly generous and burdensome on employers, and Act 10 addressed that by requiring employees to contribute their fair shares. The result has saved the state and local governments millions of dollars. Those savings have helped those local governments address state aid cuts and ongoing budget challenges.

Now that the legal questions surrounding Act 10 are resolved, let’s move forward with a clear understanding that the law is here to stay and that public employers and employees still must work together to ensure that quality workers continue to provide quality services.

Sly Podcasts – Madison Teachers, Inc. Executive Director John Matthews.

Alan Borsuk:

With freedom comes responsibility.

This is one of the important lessons most parents hope their children learn, especially teenagers. OK, you got a driver’s license. You’re hot about all the things you can do. But there are an awful lot of things you shouldn’t do, and won’t do if you’re smart.

So what will teens learn from school leaders all across Wisconsin in the next few years? I’m hoping they’ll learn that with freedom comes responsibility, and I’m even somewhat optimistic that, overall, they will. That won’t be universally true. There are always the kids who just can’t resist flooring it when the light turns green.

But in most school districts, the freedom school boards and administrators were given in 2011, when Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans in the legislative majorities won the battle of Act 10, has been used with restraint and good judgment. A lot of superintendents and principals, and even teachers, are seeing pluses to life without the many provisions of union contracts.

I don’t want to overstate that — there are also a large number of teachers still feeling wounded from the hostility toward educators that was amped up by the polarizing events of 2011. Many teachers are anxious about how the greater freedoms their bosses now have to judge, punish and reward will be used. There also remain serious reasons to worry about who is leaving teaching and whether the best possible newcomers are being attracted to classrooms.

David Blaska:

More mystifying is why The Capital Times would do a story focusing solely and entirely on that minority dissent. (“Act 10 is ‘textbook’ example of unconstitutionality.”) Can’t expose its tender readers to the majority opinion, apparently.

Local government here in the Emerald City has done its best to evade the law, extending union contracts into 2016. County Exec Joe Parisi likes to say the union has saved the county money. At the very least, AFSME costs its members dues. There is nothing to prevent county managers from working cooperatively with employees to determine best practices. That is Management 101.

Ditto the teachers union, plaintiff in the just-decided Supreme Court case. The teachers union — as we argued in “Hold your meetings where there is beer” — runs the County Board. Now Mary Burke’s complicity with succoring MTI — she’s got their endorsement — becomes the lead issue in the governor’s race.

If you are a Madison public school teacher who doesn’t want to make fair share payments, let me know. We’ll bring suit. Post a private message on Facebook.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Pew Charitable Trusts:

Medicaid is the largest health insurance program in the United States, covering both acute and long-term care services for over 66 million low-income Americans—children and their parents, as well as elderly and disabled individuals.1 This report focuses on the impact of Medicaid on the states, including trends in spending and enrollment, and the anticipated effects of the Affordable Care Act.

Luke Johnson:

My favourite subject at school was chemistry but I never imagined that one particular biochemical reaction would dominate my career. Yet so it has proved. And that almost magical natural event is called fermentation. It shows how what we learn in the classroom can play an unexpected role in adult life.

This fantastic process underlies the production of not just alcohol, but bread too – and indeed pizza. Under anaerobic conditions, certain single-cell fungi called yeast will convert carbohydrates into a variety of products. For bread the dough is leavened with baker’s yeast, then allowed to rise (or proofed). This step releases carbon dioxide into the dough, as well as a complex mix of other compounds such as ketones, alcohols, aldehydes and esters. Many of these are evaporated by subsequent baking. Others impart particular flavours and consistency to the crust and crumb of the bread.

There is something transcendent in seeing flour transformed via fermentation and baking into a delicious loaf, be it a ciabatta, baguette or bloomer. Bakers at both my companies Patisserie Valerie and Gail’s take simple ingredients and transform them into delicacies produced via fermentation, ranging from croissants to muffins to cupcakes. And I have been involved with countless restaurants, from PizzaExpress to Rocket, that take flour, water, yeast, salt, cheese and tomato and transmute them into enticing pizza.

Patti Waldmeir::

It is summer in the land of the midnight Tiger Mum, the gruelling Chinese school year has finally drawn to a close, and mainland children are recovering from late-night homework projects by doing what? Attending summer school.

According to a recent survey by the Shanghai Education Commission, one-third of the city’s students wish they had less homework over the summer holiday. It is a remarkable testament to the mainland’s culture of education that the other two-thirds did not immediately agree: half just said they wanted homework that was less boring.

Of course summer schools are in full swing throughout the northern hemisphere now, not just in study-crazy China. Pre-school grads around the world are sweating it out in summer school because someone told their tiger parents that it would give them a jump on kindergarten.

Knowledge @ Wharton:

In a new research paper, Christian Terwiesch, professor of operations and information management at Wharton, and Karl Ulrich, vice dean of innovation at the school, examine the impact that massive open online courses (MOOCs) will have on business schools and MBA programs. In their study — titled, “Will Video Kill the Classroom Star? The Threat and Opportunity of MOOCs for Full-time MBA Programs” — they identify three possible scenarios that business schools face not just as a result of MOOCs, but also because of the technology embedded in them. In an intereview with Knowledge@Wharton, Terwiesch and Ulrich discuss their findings.

An edited transcript of the interview appears below.

Knowledge@Wharton: Christian, perhaps you could start us off by describing the main findings or takeaways from your research?

Terwiesch: Let me preface what we’re going to discuss about business schools by saying that Karl and I have been in the business school world for many, many years. We love this institution, and we really want to make sure that we find a sustainable path forward for business schools.

Business schools in the world of these massive online courses are somewhat threatened, and a lot of that has to do with our cost structure. We are very expensive organizations. There are two main reasons for that. We do two things. We teach and we do research, but only the teaching part comes with revenues, and so often, the research work that we do, all this great research work that is funded for us, is funded by our students. The second thing is, honestly, like most non-profits, we don’t always have an eye on efficiency. If you and I were running an airline together and we were to fly our planes half empty, very quickly, bad things might start to happen. Yet that culture of efficiency and productivity is something that we haven’t had in the business schools. As these MOOCs come along, the cost pressure on our institutions is going to change because suddenly, there’s a very serious alternative to coming to a two-year degree program at Wharton.

The Wall Street Journal:

Labor unions like to promote their generous defined-benefit pensions. Yet when these benefits prove unsustainable, workers can lose their jobs and retirement savings. The kicker is that taxpayers may soon be tapped to perpetuate this double fraud.

That’s the main take-away from a new report by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), which insures multi-employer pension plans for 10.4 million workers and retirees. The federal agency projects that its deficit for multi-employer plans will balloon to $49.6 billion by 2023 from $8.3 billion. Last year the PBGC forecasted a deficit of $26.2 billion in 2022, and its upward revision reflects the increasing likelihood that more plans will become insolvent and sooner.

Multi-employer plans are prevalent in industries like mining, manufacturing and construction where workers often shift among employers. Because unions collectively bargain benefits across multiple employers, workers don’t lose pension benefits when they change jobs. While unions cite portability as a selling point, it’s also a fatal design flaw because the plans require multiple businesses for support.

Barney Jopson and Robin Harding:

The issue is high on the US political agenda ahead of November’s midterm elections and Mr Trumka – a mustachioed former coal miner and scourge of America’s wealthiest “1 per cent” – is using it to bring new life and new allies to his organisation. “The public is in front of the policy. They’ve been talking about this before [Thomas] Piketty’s book came out,” he says, referring to the unexpected bestseller on inequality.

Stagnant wages have contributed to rising wealth disparity and Mr Trumka, who became AFL-CIO president in 2009, has underscored that its mission is fighting for higher pay. “Every place I go, that’s all people talk about,” he says. “They really don’t talk about the deficit or the Federal Reserve. They talk about wages, and how they’re stretched, and how they’re losing ground all the time, and how their kids’ college loans are eating them alive.”
Beyond the minimum wage itself, Mr Trumka lobbies President Barack Obama and Congress on a range of issues – including trade, immigration and criminal justice – with policies that he says would lift private sector pay, or at least stop corporate executives from forcing it down.

Don Troop:

On the heels of a similarly downcast assessment by Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service has issued a negative outlook for the higher-education sector in the United States. The credit-rating agency also issued individual reports on median benchmarks for the finances of public and nonprofit private colleges, noting significant tuition-revenue declines at both types of institutions.

While American higher education faces limited growth prospects over the next 12 to 18 months, Moody’s says, positive trends like strong long-term demand for higher education and reduced household debt could help create conditions for colleges to stabilize over the next year. But Moody’s cautions that the institutions will face continued financial pressures in the near term.

Amanda Ripley:

In the meantime, it does appear that U.S. principals are overestimating poverty compared to principals in other countries. Does it matter? It depends on the principal. No matter how you measure it, child poverty is high in the U.S. compared to other developed countries, so the problems are real and present in many U.S. schools. But hyper-awareness of poverty can make a mediocre principal worse—by providing a compelling explanation for education failures that conveniently shifts much of the blame to the home and society at large. And when combined with the reductionist, blame-poverty narratives propagated in many U.S. education colleges, books and blogs, this mindset can excuse all manner of in-school failures.

One of the things I noticed while interviewing principals and teachers in other countries is that they were not nearly as conscious of poverty stats as their American peers. In every country I visited (including Poland and South Korea, which have higher poverty rates than, say, Finland), I asked principals roughly what percentage of their kids would be considered disadvantaged. None of them could tell me off the top of their heads.

In a strong system, that obliviousness can be an asset. One Finnish teacher who had a significant number of refugee students in his class explained it to me this way: “I don’t want to think about their backgrounds too much. I don’t want to have too much empathy for them because I have to teach. If I thought about all of this too much, I would give better marks to them for worse work. I’d think, ‘Oh, you poor kid. Oh, well, what can I do?’ That would make my job too easy.”

The pursuit of redistributed taxpayer funds (“grants”, referendums, annual spending growth, staffing) drives everything.

Alex Pollock:

Looking at the rapid growth of student loans and the escalating price of college from a financial perspective, we see a typical interaction of credit expansion and price, quite similar to what happens in a housing bubble or any other bubble. Pushing credit at a sector makes its prices rise. The rising prices, in the cases of both housing and higher education, lead to cries that since the prices are now unaffordable, there has to be more credit. More (and more heavily subsidized) credit the politicians often enough deliver, and the escalation goes on.

This self-reinforcing dynamic is intensified when there are important parties who get cash from the loans for themselves, but have no risk at all when the loans default. In the most recent housing bubble such parties included lenders who promoted and originated but then sold their mortgage loans. In education, the most important risk-free beneficiaries are the colleges themselves, which keep raising their prices, promote the loans, get the cash from the loans, and don’t have to worry about what happens when the loans they promoted subsequently default.

Interacting credit-price expansions inevitably come to face growing defaults. In a recent paper*, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York observes that “the measured delinquency rate on student debt is the highest of any consumer debt product.” This measured rate of student loans 90 days or more past due is 17%–indeed very high delinquency. But, the New York Fed goes on to say, the real or “effective delinquency rate,” which they calculate by comparing 90 day past dues specifically to those student loans where borrowers are being asked to repay, is over 30%!

Q: You began your career at a time when barriers began to come down in public education. What was that like?

A: I saw the integration of schools. I saw it in the area of race, and I saw it in special education. Many kids who couldn’t attend school before suddenly had access to school.

[Before 1978], there were kids who were mentally fine and cognitively fine, but because they happened to be in a wheelchair they were given homebound instruction. That was supposed to be equal to coming to school every day, but we all knew it wasn’t.

I’m sure it was [an answer to the prayers] of so many parents. It was also eye-opening to me as an educator because I got a chance to work with people who specialized in individualized instruction.

Madison School District 600K PDF:

July 1 Equalization Aid estimate was $4.8 million less than budget. Before any cost cutting, the November 2014 tax levy estimate would change from a 1.99% increase to a 3.86% increase.

However, the November 2014 tax base estimate has also changed from a 0.0% increase to a 3.5% increase. This was based on the City of Madison assessed data released in April 2014

The tax rate, which estimates the tax impact on the average value home, was presented in the Budget Proposal as increasing from $11.86 (per $1,000) to $12.11 (per $1,000) or an estimated $57.88 increase on the property tax bill of an average value home.

The tax rate estimate has been revised to $11.91 (per $1,000), or an estimated $11.55 increase on the property tax bill of an average value home.

Tap for a larger version.

Might Low income student distribution be addressed?

Madison has long supported a wide variation in school demographics. The chart above, created from 2013-2014 Madison School District middle school demographic data, illustrates the present reality, with the largest middle school – near west side Hamilton – also featuring the smallest percentage low income population.

Much more on Madison’s 2014-2015 402M budget, here.

Alex Clark:

HOW DO YOU SPOT a chess prodigy? Is there a moment—perhaps when he makes a boldly brilliant move out of nowhere or plasters his bedroom with pinups of Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov—when it all becomes clear?

Well, that wasn’t quite how it happened for Henrik Carlsen and Sigrun Øen, parents of 23-year-old Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian who became a grandmaster at 13 and the youngest-ever world No. 1 at 19, and whose peak World Chess Federation rating (2,882) is the highest in history. Last November, Carlsen defeated Viswanathan Anand to become the World Chess Champion, a title he will defend against Anand later this year in a yet-to-be-decided location—possibly Norway.

Elaine Weiss and Emma García

Growing up black or Hispanic in the United States today means high odds of living in concentrated poverty: in neighborhoods in which at least 40 percent of the residents are poor. This connection between minority status and being surrounded by poor peers is true, as well, in the school setting. Not only do most U.S. kids begin school in classrooms that are heavily segregated—white kids in heavily white classrooms, minority kids in heavily black and Hispanic classrooms—black and Hispanic kindergartners are also disproportionately surrounded by poor peers.

Nationwide, 25 percent of kindergartners are from low-income households. If schools reflected this makeup regardless of the racial composition of classrooms, students would be in classes in which about one in four of their peers were low-income. Yet most white students (three in five) are in classrooms in which just a little more than one in ten of their classmates are poor. Only 11 percent of Hispanic and only 7 percent of black students enter school into such low-poverty classrooms.

Jay Mathews:

My worst memory of homework was the Tootsie Roll log cabin project our daughter did for what otherwise seemed a well-run elementary school in Scarsdale, N.Y. All parents have had such moments. They reappear in nightmares long after the kid has gotten a job and a health plan and doesn’t need our help with anything anymore.

Mel Riddile knows this and wants to prevent such occurrences. Riddile is a former national high school principal of the year. He led both J.E.B. Stuart High School in Fairfax County and T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria and has much to say about the homework complaints that pour into me from readers.

“I had a particular pet peeve regarding poster board projects, which I referred to as more work for middle-class moms,” Riddile said. “Working in a high-poverty school, it was easy to see how students, who either could not afford or could not get parental help to construct elaborate poster board projects, were penalized both emotionally and academically for what amounted to glorified busywork.”

Cassandra MD Hart:

This study examines public school characteristics, and public and private school market characteristics, associated with participation among elementary-aged students in a means-tested school voucher program in Florida. Participants are more likely than eligible nonparticipants to come from disadvantaged public schools on multiple dimensions. On average, participants’ public schools have lower aggregate student achievement, and higher rates of disciplinary incidents. Participants’ schools receive less positive ratings on various measures from principals and teachers. Participants face more competitive private school markets, and less competitive public school markets, than do nonparticipants. When these factors are considered together, the mean achievement and disciplinary incident rate of students’ own public schools, as well as public and private school market variables, independently predict voucher use.

Val Hopper & Channa Herath:

This study explored the impact of the Internet on our reading behaviour. Using an exploratory survey, it examined the online and offline reading behaviour of individuals, and determined the underlying patterns, the differences between online and offline reading, and the impacts of the online environment on individuals’ reading behaviour. The findings indicated that there were definite differences between people’s online and offline reading behaviours. In general, online reading has had a negative impact on people’s cognition.
 
 Concentration, comprehension, absorption and recall rates were all much lower while reading online than offline.

Drew Henshaw:

An elderly Muslim met his end under a hail of rocks hurled from a Christian mob during a flare-up of religious hatred here in February. The first stone flew from a 13-year-old Boy Scout.

Children are being drawn into violence in new ways in several parts of Africa—including this country, Nigeria, and Somalia—as religious strife changes the face of conflict. The young have long occupied the front lines of civil wars on the continent, but most of those have ended.

Now, nations here confront a changing, more asymmetrical kind of conflict, featuring Islamic terrorists who use children as martyrs, or Christian lynch mobs who kill Muslims with help from neighborhood teenagers. That puts governments and aid workers up against boys like Anicet N’gueretoum, who aren’t quite child soldiers, but also not innocent kids anymore.