Michael DeArmond, Ashley Jochim, Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Survey finds many city parents are choosing their child’s public school but challenges remain.

School choice is increasingly the new normal in urban education. But in cities with multiple public school options, how can civic leaders create a choice system that works for all families, whether they choose a charter or district public school?

To answer this question, CRPE researchers surveyed 4,000 parents in eight cities (Baltimore, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.) with high degrees of school choice. The researchers also conducted interviews with government officials, choice advocates, and community leaders in four cities, and looked at how many different agencies oversee schools in 35 cities.

The study found that:

In the eight cities surveyed, the majority of parents are actively choosing a school for their children.

Parents face significant barriers to choosing schools, including inadequate information, transportation, and lack of quality options.

Challenges facing families are not confined to the charter or district sector.

Responsibility for schools often falls to multiple parties, including school districts, charter school authorizers, and state agencies, weakening accountability and making it difficult for leaders to address the challenges facing parents.

Martin Smith:

If you spent the 1990s plucking songs from a stack of cassettes to make the perfect mixtape, you probably welcomed innovations of the next decade that served your favorite albums up as individual songs, often for free. The internet’s power to unbundle content sparked a rapid transformation of the music industry, which today generates just over half of the $14 billion it did in 2000—and it’s doing the same thing to higher education.

The unbundling of albums in favor of individual songs was one of the biggest causes of the music industry’s decline. It cannibalized the revenue of record labels as 99-cent songs gained popularity over $20 albums. It also changed the way music labels had to operate in order to maintain profitability. The traditional services of labels: identifying artists; investing in them; recording, publishing, and distributing their work; and marketing them—are now increasingly offered a la carte.

Pressure from labels then had downstream effects on content creators, specifically artists. The top one 1 per cent of artists now take home 77 per cent of revenue, and the rest is spread across an increasing number of artists. The pain of the record labels is forced on artists through smaller royalty payments.

Kyle Spencer:

When Michelle Arvelo returned to her prekindergarten classroom on June 30 after a weeklong vacation in the Dominican Republic, 18 exhilarated 4-year-olds sprinted to the door to greet her, wrapping their arms around her thin frame and inquiring about her tan, her haircut and whether her plane had a co-pilot in the cockpit.

Her boss at Cypress Hills Childcare Center in Brooklyn, which runs a year-round preschool, was thrilled to see her, too. But she was also worried that Ms. Arvelo might soon be departing again, this time permanently.

Ms. Arvelo has applied to the city in the hope of getting one of the new prekindergarten teaching jobs opening up in public schools. Directors who oversee dozens of independently run programs like Cypress Hills say that they cannot compete with the salary and benefits offered by the Education Department, so a program that promises to be a boon for families of young children may end up being a loss for them, an unintended consequence of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s prekindergarten expansion.

Matt McCaffrey:

The intellectuals are a paradoxical product of the market economy, because “unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.” Like Hayek, Schumpeter described intellectuals broadly as “people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word.” More narrowly, “one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs.” That is, intellectuals do not participate in the market (at least not in the areas they write about), and do not generally rely on satisfying consumers to earn a living. Add to this their naturally critical attitude—which Schumpeter argues is the product of the essential rationality of the market economy—and it is easy to see why intellectuals would be hostile to the market.

In other words, intellectuals are often out of place in entrepreneurial societies. The growth of the intellectual class is not a response to consumer demand, but to the expansion of higher education. Passing through the higher education system does not necessarily confer valuable skills, but it often does convince graduates that work in the market is beneath them:

Josh Hedtke:

Hillary Clinton gave a Luskin Thought Leadership lecture at UCLA last March for which she raked in $300,000 in speaking fees. The appearance was one of at least eight lectures she gave at various universities throughout the past year. Her minimum speaking fee at said universities was reportedly $200,000.

There has been outrage among some students of these universities, who lambaste their administrators for doling out stratospheric speaking fees while students are left to grapple with tuitions that have increased by 500 percent over the last thirty years.

In defense of Clinton’s exploits, it’s been noted that the fees she was paid did not come out of the pot of money funded by tuition but rather from privately donated grants. For instance, at UCLA, the Luskin Lecture for Thought Leadership fund established in 2011 by benefactors Meyer and Renee Luskin paid her fee.

The nascent Luskin Lecture for Thought Leadership program has thus far brought in three speakers: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Kofi Annan, all of whom are, incidentally (or not?), of the liberal bent.

It is correct to point out that, because she was paid by a private donation, it is not as if her speaking fee directly diminished the school’s ability to pay for classroom resources and the like.

The percentage of young first-time mothers who are married is dropping, according to Fertility of Women in the United States: 2012, a report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

In the early 1990s, at least half of all first births to mothers younger than age 23 occurred in marriage. Since 2005, more young mothers were cohabiting (38 percent) than were married (24 percent) at the time of their first birth. However, the majority of all women continue to have their first child within marriage.

Fertility of Women in the United States: 2012 uses data from the 2012 American Community Survey and the 2012 Current Population Survey. The report examines women’s marital status at the time of their first births, the completed fertility of women up to age 50 and the fertility patterns of young women. Fertility patterns are shown by race, ethnicity, age, citizenship and employment status, as well as state of residence.

Anne Marie Chaker:

Allowance has undergone a major overhaul at the McDermott household this summer.

Beatrice McDermott, 14, and her younger brother, Jack, 11, started getting $10 a month three years ago. Their parents paid them for a set of daily chores like setting the table, clearing dishes and emptying their lunch boxes after school.

But “it wasn’t truly teaching them how to save or spend,” says their father, Matthew McDermott, 45, a Washington, D.C. information technology manager. He and his wife, Christina Gorski McDermott, 43, would find crumpled up bills around the house. “These guys had no sense of money,” he says.

David Kaib:

Ho explains the compensation process on Wall Street as driven by a culture of high risk / high reward. Prior to being hired, as we saw before, non-monetary concerns are central to recruitment. But after being hired there is a denial that there is any motivation other than financial reward. Ho reports that her informants insisted that this is how jobs should be structured: “They enter into a ‘risk-reward’ bargain they fully accept, and it is through this experience that investment bankers learn ‘who is flexible and who can accept change.’” (274) Why is this flexible stance so important? Because of the strategy of no strategy: “to have no long term plans”, thus allowing “immediate responsiveness ” to a changing market. (275) Change is highly valued, partly to facilitate the taking of great risks. If these didn’t work out, they could land at another firm, and if the firms got into trouble, everyone assumed the government would bail them out (something the rest of us do not enjoy). That is, the risk that they accept is related to their immediate jobs, not their long-term prospects, the health of their firms or the systematic risks they impose on the world beyond.

Reformers have often engaged in attacks on public school teachers insisting that—as a class—they do not work hard, they are overpaid, and that “tenure,” meaning due process, allows lazy and unethical teachers to remain in their jobs forever leaving administrators with no recourse. These claims are made all the more strongly if those teachers are protected by a union. Teachers are lambasted for having summers off, for resisting increases in their hours (generally without any increase in pay). Traditionally teaching has been seen as a profession, which entails having a voice in how schools are run, a certain level of control over what is taught and how, and requiring significant training and an apprenticeship. Reformers have sought to challenge these notions, by placing power in the hands of “supermen” and introducing inexperienced and untrained but ‘smart’ TFA recruits to replace experienced teachers.

Andrew Helms:

“Right now the NCAA is like a dictatorship,” said Kain Colter, starting quarterback for the Northwestern University football team this past January. “No one represents us in negotiations. The only way things are going to change is if players have a union.”

Colter’s push to form a union with his Northwestern teammates has reignited a long-simmering debate over the status of college athletes. It’s no secret that many institutions of higher learning cohabitate with athletic programs that are professional in everything but name, and that the NCAA clings to the clever verbal conjunction “student-athlete” in order to claim that scholarships alone provide athletes with equitable compensation for their labor. But as billion-dollar television contracts continue to stuff NCAA coffers, it’s difficult to not agree with civil rights historian Taylor Branch’s conclusion that the current system carries a “strong whiff of the plantation.”

Bob Samuels:

I am currently working on a book, The Politics of Higher Education, Jobs, and Inequality. One of my main arguments is that there is a bipartisan consensus that higher education is the solution to all of our economic and social problems. There are several problems with this stance: 1) producing more people with college degrees does not create more good jobs; 2) higher education itself magnifies economic and social inequality; 3) political officials focus on higher education so they don’t have to talk about underemployment, exploitive labor practices, globalization, automation, de-unionization, de-professionalization, privatization, poverty, the minimum wage, and social welfare programs; and 4) the belief in higher education as a fair meritocracy serves to justify inequality.

These myths surrounding higher education and the economy were on full display during Arne Duncan’s and Larry Summers’ presentations at the Aspen Festival of Ideas this week. Duncan argued that since the value of having a college degree has never been greater, we have to find ways of making colleges and universities more accountable. For Duncan, this means that instead of the government simply giving schools more money with no strings attached, we need to judge higher education institutions on outputs like their graduation rates and number of Pell Grant students. Although these are important issues, they do not address the question of educational quality. Instead, the Obama administration is developing their own method of rating and ranking schools, and this feeds into the logic of the meritocracy and the idea that we know how to judge learning in a quantifiable way.

Ry Rivard:

Private colleges are continuing unabated their strategy of setting high sticker prices while giving most of their students steep discounts, according to the latest survey of private colleges by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
The colleges, many of which are struggling to meet enrollment goals, are taking in only 54 cents for every $1 they claim to charge in tuition.

The “high tuition, high discount” business model is often confusing to students and parents, but it’s how things are done at most private colleges: the colleges charge high prices and then offer students they want huge discounts. The discount comes in the form of need-based aid for low-income students and “merit” aid for students with characteristics that make them desirable to a college. At wealthy colleges, endowments may have actual funds to replace lost tuition revenue, but most colleges are just waiving the chance of getting more.

This so-called discount rate – the college’s aid dollars as a percentage of tuition and fees – is again at an all-time high.

Dave Zweifel:

Lafer’s report details how Rocketship teaches only basics like reading and math with “live” teachers, while the rest of the curriculum is taught online. There are no art, music or gym classes.

The teachers are recent education school grads who have volunteered for a couple of years with Teach for America, a private national program that was modeled after the Peace Corps, but aimed at American schools in poor and troubled neighborhoods.

Like many recently formed charter school companies, Rocketship uses the savings from its educational model to expand its schools throughout the country. Meanwhile, one of its directors runs a for-profit company that provides thousands of educational materials to the schools.

Indeed, it’s these kind of behind-the-scenes financial relationships that have raised eyebrows throughout the educational community.

To be sure, charter schools can be public schools if the school districts set them up to be accountable to the board and administrators. Madison has established three such charters — Wright Middle School, Badger Rock and Nuestro Mundo — that appear to have had good results experimenting with different educational methods and providing a different academic focus.

Related: The rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.

Javier Hernandez:

The reading lesson began like any other. Tara Bauer, a teacher at Public School 158 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, took her perch in front of a class of restless fourth graders and began reciting the beginning of a book about sharks.

But a few sentences in, Ms. Bauer shifted course. She pushed her students to assume the role of teacher, and she became a mediator, helping guide conversations as the children worked with one another to define words like “buoyant” and identify the book’s structure.

“Turn and talk,” she said as she raced around the classroom, prodding students to share their impressions.

The student-led approach to reading and writing used by Ms. Bauer, which is known as balanced literacy, is poised to make a comeback in New York City classrooms. The new schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, wants more schools to adopt aspects of balanced literacy, including its emphasis on allowing students to choose many of the books they read.

The move, while cheered by proponents of this method, is seen by some as a departure from recent trends in the city and nationwide.

The city’s Education Department turned away from balanced literacy several years ago amid concerns that it was unstructured and ineffective, particularly for low-income children. And Ms. Fariña is facing sharp resistance from some education experts, who argue that balanced literacy is incompatible with the biggest shift in education today: the Common Core academic standards.

Via Will Fitzhugh.

Much more on “balanced literacy”, here.

Martin Kich:

The “real problem” behind the exploitation of adjunct faculty is quite obvious: universities have continued to produce a reasonable number of Ph.D.’s but no longer are willing to hire a reasonable number of them into full-time, never mind tenure-track, positions.

This situation will change when enrollment in graduate programs starts to contract, and even to crater, because students confront the reality that they have significantly less than a fifty percent chance of finding full-time employment after completing their doctorates—when they confront the reality that the majority of them are spending up to a decade or more in graduate school, and in the process accumulating far more debt on average than undergraduates accumulate, all in order to earn a wage comparable to what they could earn as an “associate” at WalMart.

Because the current pool of adjunct faculty has been built up over several decades but is continually eroded by the grim realities of such employment, any sudden decline in graduate enrollments will have a very significant and immediate impact.

Tressie McMillan Cottom

It has been an eventful news cycle for Arizona State University.

Last week they announced a partnership with Starbucks employees that went from press release to critical analysis in about 48 hours. I chimed in with a few thoughts on a public college extracting revenue from Starbucks employees. It turns out that the public university will invest more in the partnership than Starbucks, who can ostensibly afford it.

This week the university billing itself as the “New American University” is back in the news with a more personal story about class (and race and gender). ASU campus police arrested professor Ersula Ore for jaywalking on a campus street. You can watch the video here:

Folks are circulating petitions, expressing outrage and support. This being the Internet, more than a few folks are also making the case in support of the campus police. You’ll find plenty of questions and critique along that gamut. I have a few different questions.

Call me odd but I wonder just want an Arizona State University professor has to deserve the university’s support when the campus police assaults and arrests them?

Ryan Anderson

The 1960s are over. When are we going to wake up and realize that it’s 2014 and our academic paradise is a smoldering ash heap, a sad leftover from thirty something years of complete and utter demolition? We no longer have a booming economy and tons of federal money going into the university system. The days of cheap, accessible higher ed are done and gone. And yet, we keep churning out graduate students as if they, too, are going to end up as university professors. As if each and every one of them will soon have their own hip little office full of books, dedicated students, and bright, starry-eyed careers ahead of them. It’s not happening. Paradise. In. Ashes.

In other words: there are no jobs in academia.

I’m a graduate student in anthropology. Ya, the discipline that Forbes rated as the “least valued” in all of the land. Lucky me. Over the years, people have often asked me: “Anthropology eh? So what are you going to do with that?” My response was invariably a version of something like “Well, there’s a LOT I can do with anthropology.” That usually followed with me thinking—hoping—that there actually was something on the other side.

Pamela Cotant:

Some of the tiniest inhabitants of the 1,260-acre UW Arboretum captivated young participants during a June Family Walk.
The free walk, which is held from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. every second Sunday, focused on insects last month.
Favorites for Jamison Wagner, 8, were the caterpillar and a spider.

“The spittlebugs were kind of cool, too,” said Jamison, who will be a third-grader at Randall Elementary School.

Other sitings on the walk led by naturalist Kristin Lamers included a stink bug, a butterfly, ants, flies, a weevil and other beetles.

Jane Lowy, 8, who will be a third-grader at Crestwood Elementary School, was enjoying the walk because she loves to be outside.

“It’s going great,” she said. “I like discovering all the bugs and plants and making observations.”

Danyon Wagner was on the walk with his wife, Sarah Wagner, their daughter, Claire Wagner, 4, who will be a kindergartner at Franklin Elementary School, and Jamison.

Sarah Mishkin:

Preparing young children for the future by enrolling in Mandarin classes is very last year. The thing to do now is teach them to code. Thanks to a host of new apps, websites, and even a popular board game featuring turtles, the least technical of parents or teachers can introduce kids to programming.

Homework

The goal of most of the apps and games designed to teach children computer science is not to instruct them in actual coding, but to use a visual interface with drag and drop commands to show how to think like a programmer.

That point is that they get kids thinking about basic logic structures – such as the concept that an action, gesture or particular input can trigger a defined response – and introduce them to the idea that a sequence of commands strung together can create something.

Barry Garelick:

Barry Garelick, who wrote various letters under the name Huck Finn and which were published here is at work writing what will become “Conversations on the Rifle Range”. This will be a documentation of his experiences teaching math as a long-term substitute. OILF proudly presents episode number two:

My back-to-school night was held on a Thursday evening during the first full week of school. Like most back-to-school nights, it was designed to give parents a peek at what goes on in their child’s school-day. And like most back-to-school nights that I’ve been to, parents shuffled from class to class, following their child’s schedule with somnambulistic fervor—each class lasting 10 minutes.

Of course, it wasn’t an exact replica of a school day: the school used block schedules, with hour and fifty minute classes and odd and even-period classes alternating every other day. I had three classes held during second, fourth and sixth periods—which meant that I taught every other day.

This was my first ever back-to-school night as a teacher. Parents from my three classes showed up, though attendance was fairly sparse. I assured all that I was certified to teach math, and that I would follow the teacher’s lessons and grading procedures. I had a list of topics that I would be teaching in my algebra classes and pointed to them. People nodded vaguely. I then said “I teach by providing instruction, worked examples, and lots of problems.” People nodded vaguely again. So far so good.

I was teaching the two-year sequence of Algebra 1. It is designed for students who are having difficulty in math. My high school, being very small, only offered the 2-year sequence. Students, who for whatever reason did not take Algebra 1 in 8th grade, unless they went to summer school, were therefore stuck with the two–year sequence of algebra, regardless of their ability to handle the one-year course in 9th grade. Two of my classes were the first year of the two-year sequence, and one was the second year.

I was most curious about the parents who showed up for my sixth period class “first year” algebra 1 class) since the students in that class were the most difficult. Out of 25 students, perhaps four were actually intent on learning anything. In fact the parents of a girl named Laura—one of the good students—showed up. She had two sets of parents. Her biological father was there; he bore tattoos on his neck including one of a poorly drawn heart with a number inside it. The step-dad and mother were there as well, along with Laura’s little sister—everyone but my student. And then there was a man who arrived late and sat in the back, looking somehow familiar, with a bored look on his face, slouched at a desk.

Part I: Not your mother’s algebra 1 & the guy who really knows.

Joey Garrison:

It delivered one of the biggest blows in Nashville’s fight over charter schools — a spreadsheet compiled by Metro Nashville Public Schools that suggested a suspiciously high number of students exit charters midyear and return to traditional schools.

The implication: Charters were weeding out low-performing students before end-of-year testing, improving the schools’ results.

But more than one year after a debate on student attrition widened a gulf between charters and the district, a team of Vanderbilt researchers contends there is no evidence of a larger exodus of students from charters.

Instead, a 75-page Vanderbilt Capstone study conducted at the request of Metro Schools calls poverty the root of a widespread mobility problem in Davidson County — students routinely moving from one school to another.

It recommends that the Metro school system improve its data collection on why students transfer, conduct exit interviews when students leave and enhance communication with transfers within both charter operators and the district.

Wayne Barrett:

I am a progressive, have been one since the 1960s, when I became a New York City public school teacher for a few years and learned that my union, the United Federation of Teachers, was much better at representing my interests than those of the kids I taught. It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise.

What was true then is true now.

Though the union masquerades to this day as an advocate for children, its job is to advance the interest of teachers. On some issues, like class size, decent salaries and school funding, teachers, parents and students are natural allies. On others, like protecting bad teachers behind seniority and tenure walls and resisting any form of effective evaluation, they are on a decades-long collision course.

As someone who’s spent a lifetime on the left, covering politics for nearly 40 years at the Village Voice, I’ve long been angered by the refusal of many on my side to even acknowledge that the UFT is a special-interest group. It’s never been more disturbing than it is now, six months into the first term of a mayor who is simultaneously a progressive paragon and an advance man for the union. We haven’t lived with that kind of contradiction before.

Leslie Brody:

A new advocacy group is helping parents prepare a challenge to New York’s teacher tenure and seniority laws, contending that they violate children’s constitutional right to a sound basic education by keeping ineffective teachers in classrooms.

Campbell Brown, a former CNN anchor who has been a critic of job protections for teachers, launched the group, Partnership for Educational Justice, in December. She said six students have agreed to serve as plaintiffs, arguing they suffered from laws making it too expensive, time-consuming and burdensome to fire bad teachers.

The preparations to challenge the state’s tenure laws this summer follow a landmark ruling in California earlier this month. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu struck down the state’s laws on tenure, dismissal and seniority, saying they disproportionately saddled poor and minority students with incompetent teachers. Evidence that ineffective teachers hurt learning, he wrote, “shocks the conscience.”

California unions that intervened in the case, Vergara v. California, said they would appeal, and legal analysts predicted the ruling would inspire similar suits around the country.

Student Union of Michigan:

This is part of an ongoing series of printable pamphlets designed to explain how money flows through public research universities in general and the University of Michigan in particular. The pamphlets are intended to clarify arguments and push back against pervasive and seemingly “common sense” narratives about the crisis of public higher education that impede, rather than advance, meaningful political action. We hope tactics and strategies will emerge from these counter-narratives—after all, we can’t fight what we don’t understand. Download the printable version of this pamphlet here and see the Resources page for the entire series.

Why has tuition grown so much and so fast at the University of Michigan? According to the administration, it has to do with “the long-term decline in state funding.”[1] We’re going to show you why this story is at best incomplete and at worst manipulative. It’s true that since the 1970s politicians around the country have cut budgets for many social services, including public higher education. Using the chart on the following page, the administration argues that state funding made up 78% of U-M’s general fund budget in the 1960s, but by 2012 this number had fallen to 17%. The chart suggests that tuition has increased to replace it, and the two streams are about equal.

So what’s missing from the administration’s story?

First, it’s important to recognize that the university’s budget is far more complex than the chart suggests. There’s not just two streams of revenue into the university. The general fund only represents a small piece of the university’s operating activities. As the pie chart on the next page indicates, other significant revenue sources include federal research grants (about $1 billion), distributions from the endowment (about $400 million), and gifts (about $150 million).[2] Why is this important? It shows that, even when we take the state’s budget cuts into account, overall revenue at U-M is actually increasing significantly. Over the last decade, for example, total revenue for operating activities (excluding the health system) has jumped from about $2.2 billion to $3.4 billion per year.[3] During that same period, state funding fell by just $41 million, while the revenue generated by student tuition increased by an astronomical $466 million. Even if state funding had remained constant, there would still be a lot more money floating around in the system, and students are more than making up for the difference.

Joy Resmovits:

As education policymakers untangle the implications of last week’s California court ruling that declared teacher tenure laws unconstitutional, an education think tank says its comprehensive survey of college teacher preparation programs shows they rarely provide new teachers with solid skills for the classroom.

The National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington group that advocates tougher teacher evaluations, said its second annual evaluation of teacher preparation programs, released on Tuesday, found that only 7 percent performed well enough to achieve “top status.” Only 1 in 15 programs provide new teachers with “solid preparation,” according to the group’s director, Kate Walsh. Three out of four programs “fail to insist that applicants meet even modest standards,” the group wrote, meaning at least a 3.0 grade point average, or scoring above the 50th percentile on the ACT or SAT.

“The whole set of issues that Vergara concerned itself with were what happened to teachers when they’re already in the classroom,” Walsh said, referring to the Vergara v. California tenure case. “The Vergara case, as supportive as we were of it, is emblematic of the country’s focus on teacher quality. That’s been very encouraging … but we’ve had the debate with almost no regard for teacher selection or preparation. The debate in that respect has been short-sighted.”

UW-Madison School of Education Dean on the NCTQ Results: “Don’t mean much”.

Jay Matthews:

Lucia and Ignacia Barajas are sisters who attend Compton High School in southern Los Angeles County. They want an education, but their school seems unable to give them enough time to get one.

During the 2011-2012 school year, Lucia’s biology teacher went on maternity leave. For two months there were nothing but short-term substitutes in the class, most staying only a few days. In the fall 2013 semester, Ignacia’s American history class had more than 10 substitute teachers, and some days none at all. The restless students waited outside the door until they were sent to the library or another classroom.

Wasting time is common in the nation’s low-income schools. Class schedules can be a mess at the beginning of the year, forcing students to wait days in the library for their assignments. Lockdowns because of neighborhood violence detract from learning time. Teacher absence rates are high, and instructors will often quit mid-year with no good replacements available.

Molly Beck

CUNA Mutual Group has promised more than $1 million to a new program aimed at training and keeping new teachers developed by the Madison School District and the UW-Madison School of Education.

Officials announced the company’s $1.2 million commitment Thursday at Wright Middle School. It is the largest grant the organization has awarded, said CUNA Mutual Foundation executive director Steve Goldberg.

“This is also the largest opportunity we’ll ever have to make a difference in the future trajectory of our community and especially the young people who live here,” Goldberg said.

The money will fund the mentoring of 150 new teachers starting this fall and for the next three years. District spokeswoman Rachel Strauch-Nelson said the district will “be working to develop a sustainable model for years” after that.

The project, dubbed “Forward Madison,” would provide mentors and coaches for new teachers, improve professional development for teachers, and create a program for district students to become teachers to diversify teaching ranks. The CUNA Mutual grant only pays for the mentoring.

CUNA funds have been involved in a number of Madison School District programs over the years. How have they performed?

My sense is that Madison has added many “programs” over the years, yet the District’s long term disastrous reading problem, remains.

Madison Schools’ Administration has “introduced more then 18 programs and initiatives for elementary teachers since 2009”.

I asked a former Madison Superintendent if the program, coaching and “professional development” program growth reflected an inability to address the core issues? The then Superintendent responded that “there is some truth to that”.

Perhaps the monolithic structure has run its course.

William Deresiewicz

While I was watching Ivory Tower, a documentary about the state of college in America that appears in select theaters this month (the movie also airs on CNN this fall), it occurred to me that of the many problems with higher education these days, not the least concerns the way we talk about it. “Efficiency,” “art-history majors,” “kids who graduate with $100,000 in debt,” “the college bubble,” the whole rhetoric of crisis and collapse: The public discourse is dominated by sound bites, one-liners, hearsay, horror stories, and a very great deal of misinformation.

Higher ed is not unique in this respect, of course, but it is particularly bad. College, as the movie points out, was always treated as a black box: 18-year-olds were inserted at one end, 22-year-olds came out the other, and as long as the system appeared to be working, no one bothered to inquire what happened in between. Americans, as a result, have very little understanding of what college is about—how it works, what it’s for, what larger social benefits it offers—and those employed in higher education have had very little practice in explaining it to them. The debate has been left to the politicians, the pundits, and increasingly, the hustlers and ideologues. Few who talk about college in public understand it, and few who understand it talk about it.

Ivory Tower, for the most part, is an honorable exception. The movie, directed by Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times), covers a lot of territory, and it covers it patiently, clearly, and thoughtfully. The headline issues of ballooning tuition and student debt are placed in their historical context: institutional competition, expansion, and borrowing; administrative bloat; the rise of the “party track” and its concomitant amenities as public universities have turned to full payers from out of state to deal with budgetary shortfalls; and the long-term withdrawal of public funding—the shift from taxes to student loans—that has been the fundamental factor in creating the entire mess.

Supt. Cheatam on 1st year of new school improvement effort: Schools moving away from wanting to be complaint, to adapting for their students

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeckWSJ) June 28, 2014

"You don’t get to opt out of doing what works in schools, but there are lots of ways that can look (for each school)."

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeckWSJ) June 28, 2014

Cheatham, board discussing ways to better communicate the district's direction to the community.

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeckWSJ) June 28, 2014

Board member Ed Hughes: We need results to show that the "theory of change" works.

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeckWSJ) June 28, 2014

"Give us stories to tell and we'll tell them."

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeckWSJ) June 28, 2014

T.J. Mertz, on getting more parents involved in school improvement effort: "The way to get people involved is to give them some real power."

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeckWSJ) June 28, 2014

Meeting agenda, here.

Related: Superintendnet Cheatham’s Rotary Club Talk – 2013

Chris Rickert:

Madisonians usually aren’t too keen on doling out public subsidies to people who don’t need them.

There’s that old saw about “tax breaks for millionaires,” of course, but also past outrage over a proposed taxpayer loan for Edgewater hotel renovators and brewing discontent over a potential taxpayer loan for the Judge Doyle Square developer.

Providing government-funded breakfast and lunch to every student in seven Madison public schools, though, probably won’t inspire similar objections about welfare for the schools’ middle- and upper-class children.

Free meals for some 2,800 children at Allis, Falk, Lake View, Leopold, Mendota, Sherman and Wright schools could start next year through a 4-year-old federal program to provide meals to all students at schools in high-poverty areas. On average, about 77 percent of students at the seven Madison schools were “economically disadvantaged” last school year, according to data from the state Department of Public Instruction. That means about 2,100 students were already eligible for subsidized meals though the federal government’s long-standing — and necessary — free-and-reduced-price lunch program.

But if the schools are accepted into the program, parents of the rest will no longer have to buy the Cheerios, juice boxes, and peanut-butter-and-jelly fixings they’ve proved capable of buying until now.

Assuming a 10 percent increase in meals, up to $1.5 million in federal dollars would cover the cost-shifting, according to district spokeswoman Rachel Strauch-Nelson. That would make the program cost-neutral for the district — if not for taxpayers at large.

The Madison School District (1.4MB PDF).

“All elementary boundaries are due for a long term review”. Agreed. A look at the maps below along with the wide demographic variation across Madison public public schools indicates that addressing boundaries is job #2 – after dealing with the long term disastrous reading results.

Going to referendum prior to addressing boundary and demographic issues appears to be a “cart before horse” strategy.

It will be interesting to see how gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke addresses this question.

Presentation slides (tap to view a larger version):

Related: Open questions from the 2005 maintenance referendum lead to calls for an audit.

Pat Schneider:

Wisconsin has had the second deepest slash in per-student spending in the nation since 2008 — second only to Alabama — according to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Spending per pupil in Wisconsin was down $1,038 from 2008 for the school year just ended. Alabama cut per-pupil spending by $1,242.

Alabama and Wisconsin led the list of at least 35 states providing less funding per student than they did before the recession hit.

Wisconsin spending per pupil is 15.3 percent lower than in 2008, making it among 14 states where per-pupil spending remains at least 10 percent lower than before the economic recession.

The state cuts to education leave local school districts forced to cut services, raise taxes or both, notes the study. The cuts also hamper economic recovery by reducing the number of teaching jobs and school district workers’ buying power, the authors say.

A deeper dive: Wisconsin K-12 Spending Dominates Redistributed Tax Dollars.

More, here.

Lastly, the article lacks any discussion of K-12 spending effectiveness. Compare state NAEP performance, here.