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.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

The National Council on Teacher Quality has released its second annual report on teacher preparation programs, including a numeric ranking of programs for the first time. Results show an uphill climb ahead for Wisconsin.
No Wisconsin program earned the national “Top-Ranked” status, a distinction awarded to 107 programs in the nation.

Wisconsin is one of 17 states and the District of Columbia that had no Top-Ranked programs.

UW-Eau Claire has the highest ranked elementary program in Wisconsin.
22 programs in Wisconsin were in the bottom half of the national sample, and therefore were not ranked.

14 programs (9 elementary and 5 secondary) were in the top half and received a ranking.
Only 1 in 4 programs prepared teachers in effective scientifically-based reading instruction.

Alverno College, Edgewood College, Lakeland College, Lawrence University, Maranatha Baptist Bible College, St. Norbert College, Viterbo University, and Wisconsin Lutheran College did not cooperate in the review.

Read the report specifics here.

Report questions quality of UW System education schools.

Richard Seymour:

University reform in the UK can be understood in light of the following dilemma: the system must expand if it is to meet the demand for skill in the labour market, but the more it expands the less it fulfills its other major function of reproducing social division.

This is crucial because the transformation of higher education being implemented under the rubric of austerity indicates that austerity is not in the first instance about cutting spending. The evidence of past austerity projects demonstrates that cuts are a means rather than the primary objective, which is social engineering. In the case of higher education, a coalition government has cut state funding for universities while raising fees, on the pretext of debt consolidation. However, the major effects will be firstly to reorganise the system along market lines, re-pivoting the relationship between the student and the institution as a consumer-enterprise one, and secondly to reproduce social divisions on a new basis.

The coalition’s policies are based on a report by Lord Browne, a former chief executive of BP with no experience in higher education. The practice of hiring businessmen to reorganise the public sector runs deep in the neoliberal DNA. Since it is assumed that everything should be run like a competitive enterprise, who could know more about this than businessmen?

Choire Sicha:

Do you see where that says “based on households with people between 20 to 40 years old with at least some education debt”? That’s actually quite a bit of a fudge!

What’s the deal with these numbers? GLAD YOU ASKED. It’s not what it sounds like!

Those aren’t households with people between 20 and 40; those are households headed by people between 20 and 40. Which is to say, this data excludes all people living in households headed by, say, their parents, or other adults. The way Brookings put this is: “households led by adults between the ages of 20 and 40.” Just another way to say it excludes all households led by anyone over 40! (Those households might be identical in student debt to “young” households! Or they might not? WHO KNOWS!)

One effect of this age spread sample is that it includes college graduates from up to almost 20 years ago. This is literally not at all a study of college graduates of the last five years, or even ten years. We’re talking about people up to the age of 40, well into Gen X.

Also, in this survey, when there are multiple people in the household, the Brookings Institution simply divided the amount of college debt by number of people in the household. So one person’s $20,000 college debt becomes two people’s $10,000 college debt. This works out mathematically, of course, but not structurally.

Aram Mendoza and N. Finch in collaboration with Dewey teachers

Displacement of longtime low-income residents due to gentrification has been an all too common story in the Bay Area recently. Now the same insidious process is targeting some of the most “at-risk” students in Oakland.

Over the past two weeks, in the end of school rush, the Oakland Unified School District’s administration revealed they have been in close discussions with gentrifying developers that puts Dewey Academy, one of the public continuation high schools in the OUSD, in the cross-hairs of real estate agents and developers. The developers are already planning a 24-story luxury condo building overshadowing Dewey and now want to add Dewey and the old OUSD headquarters to the project.

What follows is an overview of the situation, why it’s problematic, how it’s situated in the context of gentrification in the Bay Area, and what those of us opposed to the displacement of Dewey and the gentrification of Oakland can do about it.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

Teachers, tutors, or anyone who is responsible for teaching children to read will be interested in an excellent and free online self-study course from Reading Rockets. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, and The Overbrook Foundation.

Although it is titled “First Year Teacher Self-Study Course,” it can provide valuable professional development for even veteran teachers of grades K-3; it could easily be incorporated into a Professional Learning Community or an individual Professional Development Plan.

The course is divided into 10 self-paced learning modules: print awareness, sounds of speech, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, spelling, comprehension, writing, and assessment. In addition to in-depth information, the course offers pre- and post-assessments, practical application in the classroom, articles and video demonstrations, assignments, and a curated list of online resources.

S.E. Smith

When Andrea Chandler, a disabled Navy veteran, used her GI bill funds to go to college, she expected to graduate with a BA that would allow her to build a career and establish a new life for herself. Instead, she never completed the requirements that would have allowed her to transfer to a four-year college, joining the ranks of the many disabled students who are unable to attain a four year degree—despite the rising number of disabled students entering academia.

Today, an estimated 60% of disabled young adults make it to college after high school, yet nearly two thirds are unable to complete their degrees within six years. Is this the fault of their disabilities, or is something more complex at play? The testimony of disabled students suggests that the problem lies not with their disabilities, per se, but with the numerous barriers they encounter in higher education, from failing to provide blind students with readers, to the refusal to accommodate wheelchair users in otherwise accessible classrooms.

In Chandler’s case, going to college after leaving the Navy seemed like the logical next step, but she knew she would need help navigating campus with her wheelchair or service dog, depending on the pain levels caused by her fibromyalgia. She contacted her community college to request accommodations for her service dog, a German Shepherd named Sid, and was ordered to provide information above and beyond Department of Education requirements: