School Information System – Page 342 – Curated Education Information

A Mississippi School Striving for Excellence

One warm and misty May morning in Columbus, Mississippi, the lobby of the classroom building at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS) (more) was full of teen-agers milling about, waiting for morning classes to begin.

In one corner of the glassy space was a grandfather clock, probably about 8 feet tall, constructed by one of the students out of brightly colored plastic pieces. (Right.) On the hour, a little white ball would roll down a chute, tripping levers to ring a small chime. Upstairs in one of the science rooms was a 3-D printer, a rough-and-ready contraption that, with a little more luck, is approaching the final stages of actually printing something. Another of the students, a senior, had made it himself. I recognized several other students whom I had seen performing in an after-school stage production, one dressed as Eco-Man in blue and green tights, cape, and mask.

MSMS is a public boarding school in Columbus, occupying a few of the more modest buildings on the grounds of the elegant Mississippi University for Women, is called “The W”. The men who have enrolled at The W since it became co-ed, say they always have a time explaining themselves to those not in the know.

What ‘Hard Work U’ Can Teach Elite Schools

Stephen Moore:

Looking for the biggest bargain in higher education? I think I found it in this rural Missouri town, 40 miles south of Springfield, nestled in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. The school is College of the Ozarks, and it operates on an education model that could overturn the perverse method of financing college education that is turning this generation of young adults into a permanent debtor class.

At this college the tuition is nowhere near the $150,000 to $200,000 for a four-year degree that the elite top-tier universities are charging. At College of the Ozarks, tuition is free. That’s right. The school’s nearly 1,400 students don’t pay a dime in tuition during their time there.

So what’s the catch? All the college’s students—without exception—pay for their education by working 15 hours a week on campus. The jobs are plentiful because this school—just a few miles from Branson, a popular tourist destination—operates its own mill, a power plant, fire station, four-star restaurant and lodge, museum and dairy farm.

Some students from low-income homes also spend 12 weeks of summer on campus working to cover their room and board. Part of the students’ grade point average is determined by how they do on the job and those who shirk their work duties are tossed out. The jobs range from campus security to cooking and cleaning hotel rooms, tending the hundreds of cattle, building new dorms and buildings, to operating the power plant.

Spot on. Related: Financial Aid Leveraging (or, leveraging students).

Student Debt Grows Faster at Universities with Highest Paid Administrators

Tamar Lewin:

At the 25 public universities with the highest-paid presidents, both student debt and the use of part-time adjunct faculty grew far faster than at the average state university from 2005 to 2012, according to a new study by the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning Washington research group.

The study, “The One Percent at State U: How University Presidents Profit from Rising Student Debt and Low-Wage Faculty Labor,” examined the relationship between executive pay, student debt and low-wage faculty labor at the 25 top-paying public universities.

The co-authors, Andrew Erwin and Marjorie Wood, found that administrative expenditures at the highest-paying universities outpaced spending on scholarships by more than two to one. And while adjunct faculty members became more numerous at the 25 universities, the share of permanent faculty declined drastically.

New Jersey Per Student $pending up 5% in the past year, Average is $18,891!

Laura Waters:

“New Jersey schools spent an average of $18,891 to educate each student last year, an increase of $866, or almost 5 percent, from 2012,” says the Star Ledger, according to the State’s annual “Taxpayer’s Guide to Education Spending.” On average, costs are up 5% from last year. The highest cost per pupil district is Avalon School District at $43,775 per student and the lowest spending district is Rockaway Borough at $12,587 per student. Also see coverage from The Record, The Press of Atlantic City, and NJ Spotlight.

Children of parents in technical jobs at higher risk for autism

Deborah Mann Lakr:

Children of fathers who are in technical occupations are more likely to have an autism spectrum disorder, according to researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

The findings will be presented Friday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Atlanta.

During participation in the LoneStar LEND program, first author Aisha S. Dickerson, Ph.D., a researcher at UTHealth’s Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences, used the United States government’s Standard Occupational Classification system. Parents were divided into those who had more non-people-oriented jobs (technical) or more people-oriented jobs (non-technical).

Fathers who worked in engineering were two times as likely to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Those who worked in finance were four times more likely and those who worked in health care occupations were six times more likely to have a child on the autism spectrum.

On Education Reform: Spending & Structure

Paul Campos:

The law school reform movement gets a boost from an unexpected source:

It is no mystery what has prompted the current calls for a two-year law degree. It is, quite simply, the constantly increasing cost of legal education . . . If I may advert to my own experience at Harvard, once again: In the year I graduated, tuition at Harvard was $1,000. To describe developments since then, in the words of a recent article:

Over the past 60 years, tuition at Harvard Law School has increased ten-fold in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars. In the early 1950s, a year’s tuition at the school cost approximately $5,100 in 2011 dollars. Over the next two decades this figure more than doubled, so that by 1971 tuition was $11,664 in 2011 dollars. Tuition grew at a (relatively) modest pace over the course of the 1970s, so that by 1981 it was $14,476 in 2011 dollars. Then it climbed rapidly again, rising to $25,698 in 1991, $34,484 in 2001, and nearly $50,000 in 2011, again all in constant dollars.

What’s Your Major? 4 Decades Of College Degrees, In 1 Graph

Quictrung Bui:

In honor of college graduation season, we made a graph. It answers a few questions we had: What is the mix of bachelor’s degrees awarded today, and how has the mix changed over the past several decades?

A few notes:

The persistence of business. Business majors, which include accounting, marketing, operations and real estate, grew even more popular over the past several decades. One in 5 college grads now gets a degree in the field.

The decline of the education major. The education degree saw a dramatic decline, falling from 21 percent of all graduates in 1970 to just 6 percent in 2011. Does this mean there’s a huge shortage of teachers? Not necessarily — it just means that far fewer students who go on to be teachers actually graduate with an education degree. According to the Department of Education, as recently as 1999 roughly two-thirds of new teachers graduated with an undergraduate degree in education. By 2009, that figure fell to just half.

Student Perspectives on Race and Education in Tuscaloosa

Amanda Zamora:

“Skin color doesn’t define your intelligence.”

“I am not what society thinks.”

“Looking forward, not to the past.”

These are just a few of the six-word essays written by high school students in Tuscaloosa, Ala., when asked to describe their perspectives on race and education in America today.

The essays are all the more poignant when paired with photographs by the same students documenting everyday life at two schools on very different sides of the resegregation equation. Sixty years after the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling outlawed official segregation, nearly one in three black students in Tuscaloosa now attends a school more reminiscent of the Jim Crow South.

When my colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones set out to report the story of the dismantling of court orders, closed-room deals and school district decisions that paved the way for resegregation in Tuscaloosa, she knew some of the most important voices would be from students living the consequences of those decisions. So we hatched a plan to enlist them in telling their own stories. As the engagement editor at ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative newsroom, my job is to help build an audience for our work and get the community to participate in our journalism. We wanted the students’ stories to be a vital part of this story from the start.

Intervention with low achieving students: who gets to graduate?

Paul Tough:

For as long as she could remember, Vanessa Brewer had her mind set on going to college. The image of herself as a college student appealed to her — independent, intelligent, a young woman full of potential — but it was more than that; it was a chance to rewrite the ending to a family story that went off track 18 years earlier, when Vanessa’s mother, then a high-achieving high-school senior in a small town in Arkansas, became pregnant with Vanessa.

Vanessa’s mom did better than most teenage mothers. She married her high-school boyfriend, and when Vanessa was 9, they moved to Mesquite, a working-class suburb of Dallas, where she worked for a mortgage company. Vanessa’s parents divorced when she was 12, and money was always tight, but they raised her and her younger brother to believe they could accomplish anything. Like her mother, Vanessa shone in school, and as she grew up, her parents and her grandparents would often tell her that she would be the one to reach the prize that had slipped away from her mother: a four-year college degree.

There were plenty of decent colleges in and around Dallas that Vanessa could have chosen, but she made up her mind back in middle school that she wanted to attend the University of Texas at Austin, the most prestigious public university in the state. By the time she was in high school, she had it all planned out: She would make her way through the nursing program at U.T., then get a master’s in anesthesiology, then move back to Dallas, get a good job at a hospital, then help out her parents and start her own family. In her head, she saw it like a checklist, and in March 2013, when she received her acceptance letter from U.T., it felt as if she were checking off the first item.

Five months later, Vanessa’s parents dropped her off at her dorm in Austin. She was nervous, a little intimidated by the size of the place, but she was also confident that she was finally where she was meant to be. People had warned her that U.T. was hard. “But I thought: Oh, I got this far,” Vanessa told me. “I’m smart. I’ll be fine.”

Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds, Raising Worries

Alan Schwarz:

ATLANTA — More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outside established pediatric guidelines, according to data presented on Friday by an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report, which found that toddlers covered by Medicaid are particularly prone to be put on medication such as Ritalin and Adderall, is among the first efforts to gauge the diagnosis of A.D.H.D. in children below age 4. Doctors at the Georgia Mental Health Forum at the Carter Center in Atlanta, where the data was presented, as well as several outside experts strongly criticized the use of medication in so many children that young.

Reflections on the Future of the Legal Academy: Increased Faculty Workload & Less Pay

The Honorable Antonin Scalia: Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States:

What I want to discuss with you briefly—and I promise to be brief—is whether (to be blunt about it) you have essentially wasted one of your three years here, and could have done the job in two.

It is a current proposal for reform that law students should be permitted to sit for the bar exam and otherwise be eligible to practice law after only two years of study. To be sure, this is not a new idea. In New York, for example, between 1882 and 1911, college graduates needed to complete only two years of law school to sit for the New York bar; only non-graduates had to do the extra year.1 But then, in 1911, the New York Court of Appeals changed the rule to three years—which remains the rule today in almost all jurisdictions. But, now and again, it has been a source of controversy. In the 1970s prominent educators from President Derek C. Bok of Harvard University to President Edward H. Levi of the University of Chicago said publicly that switching to two years was at least worth a try.2 Then in 1999 Judge Richard Posner embraced the idea.3 As did the President of the United States just last year, saying that third-year students would be “better off clerking or practicing in a firm.”4 Finally, joining the chorus—and this was a surprise, at least to me—was the American Bar Association’s Task Force on the Future of Legal Education, which suggested in January of this year that “bar admitting authorities could create paths to licensure with fewer hours than the [current] Standards require by devices such as: (1) accepting applicants who . . . have fewer hours of law-school training than the Standards require; or (2) accepting applicants with two-years of law school credits plus a year of carefully-structured skills-based experience, inside a law school or elsewhere.”5

I vigorously dissent. It seems to me that the law-school-in-two-years proposal rests on the premise that law school is—or ought to be—a trade school. It is not that. It is a school preparing men and women not for a trade but for a profession—- the profession of law. One can practice various aspects of law without knowing much about the whole field. I expect that someone could be taught to be an expert real- estate conveyancer in six weeks, or a tax advisor in six months. And maybe we should train such people—but we should not call them lawyers. Just as someone might become expert in hand surgery without knowing much about the rest of the human body, so also one can become expert in various segments of the law without knowing much about the rest. We should call the former a hand surgeon rather than a doctor; and the latter a real-estate conveyancer, or H&R Block—but not a lawyer. Those of you who have walked the streets of Paris may have noticed (as I have) signs here and there—“Jurisconsult,” for example—advertising the services of people who give legal advice but are not avocats (lawyers). I am not even sure whether one must pass an exam or have any special training to work in such a capacity.

Education Automation, Freeing the Scholar to Return to His Studies

Forward by Charles Tenney:

My feeling about today’s meeting with you is first, that it is a tremendous privilege as a human being to stand with other human beings who are concerned fundamentally and deeply, as you are, with the process and further implementation of education and to be allowed to disclose to you what I think I have discovered regarding education’s trending evolutionary needs. I am quite confident that the Southern Illinois University’s new Edwardsville Campus studies are uniquely important.

Because President Morris has mentioned it in his introduction of me to this meeting, let me begin with some of my own student experiences at Harvard, for what I have to offer to you today springs from my several educational experiences. I am a New Englander, and I entered Harvard immaturely. I was too puerilely in love with a special, romantic, mythical Harvard of my own conjuring‹an Olympian world of super athletes and alluring, grown-up, worldly heroes. I was the fifth generation of a direct line of fathers and their sons attending Harvard College. I arrived there in 1913 before World War I and found myself primarily involved in phases of Harvard that were completely irrelevant to Harvard’s educational system. For instance, because I had been quarterback on a preparatory school team whose quarterbacks before me had frequently become quarterbacks of the Harvard football team, I had hoped that I too might follow that precedent, but I broke my knee, and that ambition was frustrated. Just before entering college I was painfully jilted in my first schoolboy into-love-falling. Though I had entered Harvard with honor grades I obtained only “good” to “passing” marks in my college work, which I adolescently looked upon as a chore done only to earn the right to live in the Harvard community. But above all, I was confronted with social problems of clubs and so forth. The Harvard clubs played a role in those days very different from today. The problems they generated were solved by the great House system that was inaugurated after World War I. My father died when I was quite young, and though my family was relatively poor I had come to Harvard from a preparatory school for quite well-to-do families. I soon saw that I wasn’t going to be included in the clubs as I might have been if I had been very wealthy or had a father looking out for me, for much of the clubs’ membership was prearranged by the clubs’ graduate committees. I was shockingly surprised by the looming situation. I hadn’t anticipated these social developments. I suddenly saw a class system existing in Harvard of which I had never dreamed. I was not aware up to that moment that there was a social class system and that there were different grades of citizens. My thoughts had been idealistically democratic. Some people had good luck and others bad, but not because they were not equal. I considered myself about to be ostracized or compassionately tolerated by the boys I had grown up with. I felt that my social degradation would bring disgrace to my family. If I had gone to another college where I knew no one, it would not have mattered at all to me whether or not I was taken into some society. It was being dropped by all those who had been my friends that hurt, even though I knew that they had almost nothing to do with the selecting. I became panicky about that disintegration of my idealistic Harvard world, went on a pretended “lark,” cut classes, and was “fired.”

Are affirmative action preferences “worse” than other sorts of admissions preferences?

David Bernstein:

My article on the Schuette case was written before the Supreme Court decided the case, but it will still be useful to those interested in the constitutional and policy debate over affirmative action preferences. Careful readers will note that some of my criticisms of the Sixth Circuit decision also apply to Justice Sotomayor’s dissent. Here’s the abstract:

The question presented to the Supreme Court in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is, “Whether a state violates the Equal Protection Clause by amending its constitution to prohibit race- and sex-based discrimination or preferential treatment in public-university admissions decisions.” Given that the Supreme Court barely tolerates affirmative action preferences, it is exceedingly unlikely to endorse a lower court ruling that overturns a state ban on them.Nevertheless, it is worth examining the reasoning of the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Schuette, because it exemplifies many interesting nuances regarding the debate over the constitutionality of affirmative action preferences, nuances that were mostly ignored in the dissenting opinions. Judge Cole’s opinion demonstrates (1) that despite decades of jurisprudence permitting state university affirmative action preferences only if used for “diversity” purposes, its legal advocates, including federal judges, still act under the assumption that the purpose of preferences is to benefit students who are members of underrepresented minority groups; (2) some affirmative action advocates cling to an obsolete model of American politics that posits that African Americans and members of other minority groups lack any substantial political power; (3) some affirmative action advocates tend to discuss the issue as if the only groups affected are African Americans and whites, neglecting both that Asian Americans tend to be harmed by university admissions’ preferences, and that African Americans are a shrinking minority of those eligible for preferences, with Hispanics a significantly larger and faster-growing demographic group; and (4) affirmative action advocates tend to be dismissive of the claim that race is different and more problematic than other criteria that university officials may consider in admissions, for moral, historical, and practical reasons. While not unassailable, these reasons seem to provide a significant non-arbitrary rationale for state voters to ban official reliance on race and ethnicity.

Commentary & Votes on The Madison School Board’s Collective Bargaining Plans

Pat Schnieder:

Maybe the formal deliberations on strategy don’t start until a closed session of the Madison School Board on Thursday, May 15, but engagement over a proposed extension of the teachers contract already has begun.

School board member Ed Hughes is stirring the pot with his remarks that the contract should not be extended without reconsidering hiring preferences for members of Madison Teachers, Inc., extended under the current contract.

John Matthews, executive director of MTI, replies that Hughes probably didn’t mind preference being given to internal transfers over external hires when he was in a union.

“When Ed was in the union at the Department of Justice, I doubt he would find considering outsiders to have preference over an internal transfer to be satisfactory,” Matthews said in an email.

Members of MTI are planning to offer their arguments for extending the contract when the school board meets at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at the Doyle Administration Building, 545 W. Dayton St.

Mary Burke votes for labor talks with Madison teachers. Matthew DeFour weighs in as well.

Congratulations to Class of 2014, the Most Indebted Ever

Phil Izzo:

As college graduates in the Class of 2014 prepare to shift their tassels and accept their diplomas, they leave school with one discouraging distinction: they’re the most indebted class ever.

The average Class of 2014 graduate with student-loan debt has to pay back some $33,000, according to an analysis of government data by Mark Kantrowitz, publisher at student-marketing company Edvisors. Even after adjusting for inflation that’s nearly double the amount borrowers had to pay back 20 years ago.

Public Education Battles: WORT Conversation with Timothy Slekar, Dean, Edgewood School of Education

Allen Ruff @ WORT:

Do we have a public education crisis in this country? Is standardized testing ruining our kids’ chances at a meaningful and productive education? What are the downfalls of privatizing education? Listen to this addition of AP to find out more!

44MB mp3 audio file.

Much more on Timothy Slekar, here.

UCLA prof says stats prove school’s admissions illegally favor blacks

Maxim Lott:

Public universities in California are barred from using race as a factor in admitting students, but a UCLA professor who once served on its admissions oversight team says he has proof they do it anyway.

While the first round of admissions consideration is handled fairly, African-American students are nearly three times as likely to make it out of the “maybe” pile than equally-qualified white students, and more than twice as likely as Asians, according to Tim Groseclose, a political science professor at the school and author of a new book titled, “Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA.”

“UCLA is using racial preferences in admissions,” Groseclose, who made his case using data from 2006-2009, told FoxNews.com.

After a first look results in most applications being either accepted or rejected, a handful of senior university staff sift through those marked for further consideration, according to Groseclose. That’s where the alleged bias happens. He found black applicants were accepted at a 43 percent rate in the second round, while whites were accepted at a 15 percent rate and Asians at an 18 percent rate.

Common App: Admissions Collusion?

Scott Jaschik:

Colleges may soon have a new reason — an antitrust lawsuit — to think twice about their relationship with the Common Application.

CollegeNET, which provides a variety of admissions-related services to college, some in direct competition with the Common Application, sued Common App last week in federal court, charging antitrust violations. And while the suit is only against Common App, it states that some of the 500 colleges that are members have been “co-conspirators” in some of the alleged violations.

When CollegeNET issued a news release last week about having sued Common Application, some admissions leaders were scratching their heads about how a service to process applications could violate antitrust law. The press release provided few details.

Related: Financial Aid Leveraging.

Confessions of a Grade Inflator Between the grubbing and the blubbering, grading fairly is just not worth the fight.

Rebecca Schumann:

n the classroom, I can be formidable: I’ve been known to drill-sergeant lethargic students out of their chairs and demand burpees; I am a master of the I’m Not Mad, I’m Just Disappointed scowl. And yet, when it comes to assigning an end-of-semester letter value to their results, I am a grade-A milquetoast. It’s grading time once again, and I’m a softie as usual: Of my current 33 students, 20 are getting either A’s or A-minuses.

It’s not that I just “give” students good grades. Each course I teach has a meticulous assessment breakdown, taking into account participation, homework, quizzes, and essays—and for the latter, I grade with a rubric, which both minimizes griping and allows me to be slightly fair. But even with all of these “hard-ass” measures, the ugly truth is that to get below a B+ in my class, you have to be a total screw-up. I’m still strict with my scale—it’s just that said scale now goes from “great” to “awesome.” It’s pathetic, I know. But when you see what professors today are up against, maybe you’ll understand.

If I graded truly fairly—as in, a C means actual average work—the “customers” would do their level best to ruin my life. Granted, there exist professors whose will to power out-powers grade-gripers. There are stalwarts who remain impervious to students’ tenacious complaints, which can be so single-minded that one wonders what would happen if they had applied one-fifteenth of that focus to their coursework. I admire and cherish those professors, but I am not one of them. You know why? Because otherwise, at the end of every semester, my life would become a 24-hour brigade of this:

2+2=What? Parents rail against Common Core math

Michael Rubinkam:

What could be so horrible? Grade-school math.

As schools around the U.S. implement national Common Core learning standards, parents trying to help their kids with math homework say that adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing has become as complicated as calculus.

They’re stumped by unfamiliar terms like “rectangular array” and “area model.” They wrestle with division that requires the use of squares, slashes and dots. They rage over impenetrable word problems.

Related: Math Forum audio & video.

Bonfire of the Humanities Christine Lagarde is the latest ritualistic burning of a college-commencement heretic

Daniel Henninger:

It’s been a long time coming, but America’s colleges and universities have finally descended into lunacy.

Last month, Brandeis University banned Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali as its commencement speaker, purporting that “Ms. Hirsi Ali’s record of anti-Islam statements” violates Brandeis’s “core values.”

This week higher education’s ritualistic burning of college-commencement heretics spread to Smith College and Haverford College.

On Monday, Smith announced the withdrawal of Christine Lagarde, the French head of the International Monetary Fund. And what might the problem be with Madame Lagarde, considered one of the world’s most accomplished women? An online petition signed by some 480 offended Smithies said the IMF is associated with “imperialistic and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” With unmistakable French irony, Ms. Lagarde withdrew “to preserve the celebratory spirit” of Smith’s commencement.

The students are revolting, and this time they have the gizmos to get their message across

If you are a capitalist, you should be worried right now. The children of Facebook and American Idol are rebelling in the US – and that spells trouble for many of you later on.

The uprisings have taken the form of protests against big-name guests invited to attend university graduation ceremonies. Those who have been rebuffed include such well-known people as Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund; Condoleezza Rice, the former US secretary of state; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the human rights activist.

It’s not the end of the world. There’s no reason to shed dollar-denominated assets, diversify into Bitcoin or identify escape routes to the nearest hills. Our graduates aren’t really revolutionaries.

They are hard to please. Socially networked and sure of themselves, they can turn quickly on anyone or anything – and dealing with them as consumers is going to be tricky for businesses of various kinds.

Inside UK’s Park View academy: Religion row school ‘is victim of its success’

Richard Adams:

asan Sajad is a year-11 student at Park View academy in Birmingham. He should be thinking about sitting his GCSEs shortly, but his school’s emergence at the centre of a political furore about alleged Islamist takeovers has given him something else to worry about: his future.

“There’s a chance we may be sidelined due to what’s come up in the news. People may say, oh they are from Park View, they’ve been part of the whole Trojan horse scandal, so let’s not give them a place in a sixth form or university later on. That could be a possibility,” Sajad said.

A few months ago that would not have been a concern for Sajad or his classmates. Park View was warmly praised by Ofsted’s head, Sir Michael Wilshaw, and its inspectors for achieving academic results well above the national average, all the more remarkable given its location in Alum Rock, a deprived mini-suburb of Birmingham and its high proportion – 70% – of pupils eligible for free school meals.

But that changed in February with the emergence of the now-infamous Trojan horse document alleging a citywide Islamist plot to hijack state schools in the area, catapulting it into the media glare. Claims of outside meddling, indoctrination and bullying of non-Muslim staff have engulfed it and other schools in Birmingham, and different parts of the country including Bradford and Manchester.

For Sale: Student Profiles

Stephanie Simon:

Each year, more than 2 million middle school and high school students fill out comprehensive surveys for the National Research Center for College & University Admissions detailing their academic records, their athletic skills, their religious leanings, their aspirations.
In short, it’s “their hopes and dreams,” said Ryan Munce, the group’s vice president. He compiles profiles on each child.

Playbook: Brock launches Koch unit
Poll: Clinton sweeps GOP in Ohio
Report: Sterling calls Obama ‘flippant’
For sale: Student ‘hopes and dreams’
Are student files private? It depends.
Fannie, Freddie reform to get harder
Then he sells them.

The recent flurry of interest in updating federal privacy law focuses on preventing children’s personal information from being sold without parental consent. Left unnoticed: The huge and lucrative market of peddling profiles with student consent — even when that consent may not be entirely informed.

U.S. Students from Educated Families Lag in International Tests

Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson and Ludger Woessmann:

“The big picture of U.S. performance on the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is straightforward and stark: It is a picture of educational stagnation…. Fifteen-year olds in the U.S. today are average in science and reading literacy, and below average in mathematics, compared to their counterparts in [other industrialized] countries.”

U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan spoke these grim words on the bleak December day in late 2013 when the international tests in math, science, and literacy were released. No less disconcerting was the secretary’s warning that the nation’s educational problems are not limited to certain groups or specific places. The “educational challenge in America is not just about poor kids in poor neighborhoods,” he said. “It’s about many kids in many neighborhoods. The [test] results underscore that educational shortcomings in the United States are not just the problems of other people’s children.”

In making his comments, Secretary Duncan challenged those who cling to an old belief that the nation’s educational challenges are confined to its inner cities. Most affluent Americans remain optimistic about the schools in their local community. In 2011, Education Next asked a representative sample to evaluate both the nation’s schools and those in their own community. The affluent were especially dubious about the nation’s schools—only 15 percent conceded them an A or a B. Yet 54 percent gave their local schools one of the two top ratings.

Public opinion is split on how well the nation’s schools educate students of different abilities. In 2013 Education Next asked the public whether local schools did a good job of teaching talented students. Seventy-three percent said the local schools did “somewhat” or “extremely” well at the task, as compared to only 45 percent who thought that was true of their capacity to teach the less-talented.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org.

Commentary on Madison’s K-12 Governance Scene

Hughes deserves credit for even raising this possibility. @CapTimes http://t.co/yfBEsLkDdC

— Chris Rickert (@ChrisRickertWSJ) May 15, 2014

More. Vis a vis Pat Schneider’s recent article.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: States Grapple With Unpopular Property Taxes; Madison Seeks Continue Annual Increases; Chicago to Fund Pension Deficits

Elaine S. Povich

State Sen. David Argall thinks Pennsylvania’s law to fund schools with property taxes, which dates from the 1830s, has outlived its usefulness. He is pushing a bill that would eliminate property taxes levied by school districts and replace the revenue with higher state income and sales taxes.

For the first time, his idea is gaining some traction.

Argall, a Republican, has tried before to scrap the property tax collected by school districts, but this year he got more than half the state senators to co-sponsor his bill. He said the problem with property taxes is that “the tax has very little connection to the ability to pay.”

Poll results make Emanuel’s Chicago property tax hike a tougher sell.

Judge halts Illinois pension reform law.

Additional charts & data on Madison’s tax & spending growth, here.

How Teacher Quality Became a top Tier Issue

The Joyce Foundation:

A decade ago, Joyce decided to fund research and advocacy on the importance of placing a highly effective teacher in each classroom, the best ways to identify and reward excellent teachers, and ways to support those who need additional help improving their work.

Coinciding with our ten-year focus on teacher quality, Bellwether has released Genuine Progress, Great Challenges, a report that documents how the teacher quality movement took hold and propelled policy changes in dozens of states. Along with the report, the interactive narrative above tells the story of progress to date and priorities ahead.

In the next ten years to implement and improve upon the policies we know work best for students and teachers. Children need this. Parents demand this. Teachers deserve this.

This Legislation Would Allow Companies to Offer Credentialed College Courses

Lindsey Burke:

Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., has introduced a proposal to fundamentally restructure higher education accreditation. The proposal would allow states to establish flexible accreditation models that would infuse a level of customization in higher education that is currently impossible under the existing accreditation system. The Higher Education Reform and Opportunity Act—or HERO Act—would empower states to allow any entity to credential courses and pave the way for a more flexible college experience for students and make possible a dramatic reduction in college costs.

Currently, accreditation is a de facto federal enterprise, with federally sanctioned regional and national accrediting agencies now the sole purveyors of accreditation.

The result has been a system that has created barriers to entry for innovative start-ups—insulating traditional brick-and-mortar schools from market forces that could reduce costs—yet has made it difficult for students to customize their higher education experience to fully reach their earnings and career potential. And because entire institutions are accredited instead of individual courses, accreditation is a poor measure of course quality and a poor indicator of the skills acquired by students.

Google Apps for Schools – Eric Schmidt Has an Interest. Is It a Conflict?

Steve Lohr:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York last month appointed a three-person commission to offer thoughts on the use of technology in schools.

The group, the governor’s office said in a statement, will be “charged with advising the state on how to best invest” the $2 billion the governor plans to raise in a “Smart Schools” bond issue in the fall.

Eric E. Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, is one of the three, but his appointment raised some eyebrows. Mr. Schmidt’s company has a commercial interest in seeing more Chromebook computers, which run Google’s Chrome web software, and the company’s productivity applications, Google Apps, being used in schools.

And Mr. Schmidt’s appointment struck Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit advocacy group with a history of pursuing Google, mostly on privacy issues, as a conflict of interest. Last month, it sent a letter of protest to Mr. Cuomo’s office, and got no reply.

Higher Education Spending & Tuition Growth Climate: Jobless in Two Days

Colleen Flaherty:

Like so many institutions, Quinnipiac University has struggled at times to maintain its financial footing since the recession. And like their counterparts elsewhere, Quinnipiac professors have borne the brunt of that struggle, seeing a salary freeze and stalled hiring along the way. But faculty members say that no one saw last week’s rapid-fire round of full-time faculty cuts coming, and they’re still “reeling” from the news.

Beyond the unusually quick timeline for the cuts – deans and department chairs were given just two days to decide whom to lay off – the matter has raised concerns about shared governance. Faculty members say they have no idea whether such cuts are really necessary, given their lack of involvement in the decision and the fact that Quinnipiac simultaneously announced it will hire additional faculty members next year in other “growth” programs.

“There’s shock, disbelief, confusion – we’re really just still reeling from this,” said a faculty member who did not want to be named, citing concerns about job security. “I don’t know how to express to you, in terms of information, how little we got [about the cuts].”

Madison school board’s Ed Hughes: Don’t extend Teacher Union contract without rethinking hiring process

Pat Schneider:

It’s not a good idea for the Madison School District to extend its labor contract with teachers through the 2015-2016 school year without renegotiating it, says school board member Ed Hughes.

Hughes wants Madison School District administrators — especially school principals — to have the ability to offer jobs to the best teacher candidates before they are snapped up by other districts.

One way to accomplish that would be to drop a labor contract provision giving Madison teachers the opportunity to transfer into open positions before external candidates can be offered those jobs, Hughes says.

“To take the collective bargaining agreement in its current form and just change the date without any discussion, to my mind, is creating a potential impediment to our important efforts to attract a highly qualified and diverse workforce,” Hughes said Tuesday.

Hughes said that a labor contract that includes a “last hired, first fired” provision also hampers efforts to hire teachers with experience in racially and ethnically diverse classrooms.

“Why would someone with 15 years experience in Janesville come to Madison and be the first one on the chopping block if there are layoffs?” he asked. “I’m not proposing a specific solution, but we need to address these issues in a collaborative way so we’re not handcuffing ourselves from bringing in the best teachers.”

Related: Act 10, Madison Teachers, Inc and Ed Hughes.

Emphasizing adult employment: Newark School Reform and retired Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman.

Mr Hughes wrote one of the more forthright quotes on local school matters in 2005:

This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.

Tea leaves: Mr. Hughes was just replaced as President of the Madison School Board. Interestingly, he ran unopposed in three (!) elections. The candor is appreciated, but were there similar comments during the past few years?

Lectures Aren’t Just Boring, They’re Ineffective, Too, Study Finds

Aleszu Bajak:

Are your lectures droning on? Change it up every 10 minutes with more active teaching techniques and more students will succeed, researchers say. A new study finds that undergraduate students in classes with traditional stand-and-deliver lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use more stimulating, so-called active learning methods.

“Universities were founded in Western Europe in 1050 and lecturing has been the predominant form of teaching ever since,” says biologist Scott Freeman of the University of Washington, Seattle. But many scholars have challenged the “sage on a stage” approach to teaching science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses, arguing that engaging students with questions or group activities is more effective.

To weigh the evidence, Freeman and a group of colleagues analyzed 225 studies of undergraduate STEM teaching methods. The meta-analysis, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that teaching approaches that turned students into active participants rather than passive listeners reduced failure rates and boosted scores on exams by almost one-half a standard deviation. “The change in the failure rates is whopping,” Freeman says. And the exam improvement—about 6%—could, for example, “bump [a student’s] grades from a B– to a B.”

“This is a really important article—the impression I get is that it’s almost unethical to be lecturing if you have this data,” says Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard University who has campaigned against stale lecturing techniques for 27 years and was not involved in the work. “It’s good to see such a cohesive picture emerge from their meta-analysis—an abundance of proof that lecturing is outmoded, outdated, and inefficient.”

Although there is no single definition of active learning approaches, they include asking students to answer questions by using handheld clickers, calling on individuals or groups randomly, or having students clarify concepts to each other and reach a consensus on an issue.

Brown at 60: An American Success Story

Stephan & Abigail Thernstrom:

In conventional liberal circles, there is never any good news about race. Thus, as the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation case nears, mainstream media outlets lately have been depicting American schools as resegregated.

Thus we read that in New York City “children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality,” the New York Times NYT -2.65% reports. The Los Angeles Times describes more Latino children increasingly attending segregated schools, while the segregation of black students is virtually unchanged from the early 1970s. That conclusion is drawn from the work of a research team led by UCLA professor Gary Orfield, the left’s go-to man on race and schooling. For decades Prof. Orfield has been successfully peddling a story of dashed hopes for school desegregation.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared in its unanimous Brown decision that state-imposed, single-race public schools violated the 14th Amendment. Separating children on the basis of race, the justices said, denied black pupils “equal educational opportunities” and hence deprived them of the “equal protection” of the laws, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote. The watershed decision marked the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow South, applying to more than 10 million children who were enrolled in color-coded schools in 21 states and the District of Columbia. They made up roughly 40% of the nation’s public-school students, and more than two-thirds of all African-American pupils.

The Problem for Sports Parents: Overspending

Kevin Helliker:

When sports psychologist Travis Dorsch set about studying the effect of parental spending on young athletes, he expected to find a positive correlation. After all, recent research suggests that young athletes benefit from parental support.

But his study, just completed, found that greater parental spending is associated with lower levels of young-athlete enjoyment and motivation. “When parental sports spending goes up, it increases the likelihood either that the child will feel pressure or that the parent will exert it,” says Dr. Dorsch, a Utah State University professor and former professional football player.

The study adds to a small but growing body of research suggesting that parents ought to temper their investments in youth athletics. The problem, at root, isn’t financial: It is that big expenditures tend to elevate parental expectations. “The more parents do, the more they expect a return on their investment,” possibly reducing their chances of a favorable outcome, says Daniel Gould, director of Michigan State University’s Institute for the Study of Youth Sports.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Just Released: Young Student Loan Borrowers Remained on the Sidelines of the Housing Market in 2013

Meta Brown, Sydnee Caldwell, and Sarah Sutherland:

Last year, our blog presented results from the FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel (CCP) indicating that, at a time of unprecedented growth in student debt, student borrowers were collectively retreating from housing and auto markets. In this post, we compare our 2012 findings to the news for 2013.

Between 2012 and 2013, U.S. auto and housing markets recovered substantially. The CoreLogic national house price index rose by 11 percent from December 2012 to December 2013. According to the Los Angeles Times, “It was the [auto] industry’s best year since 2007.” Last summer, this blog post discussed the sources of the ongoing auto recovery. Here we pose two questions: What part have young borrowers, with and without student debt, played in the recent housing and auto market recoveries? And, have the housing and auto purchases of young student borrowers at last accelerated past those of nonstudent borrowers, to once again reflect their skill and earnings advantages?

The share of twenty-five-year-olds with student debt continued to increase in 2013, as the group’s average student loan balance reached $20,926. For those twenty-five-year-olds with student loans, student debt now comprises 69 percent of the debt side of their balance sheets. Given the increased popularity of student loans, some have questioned how taking on extensive debt early in life has affected young workers’ post-schooling economic activity.

Continuing to grow K-12 spending on top of property taxes is not a good long term strategy.

Schooled: Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education.

Dale Russakoff:

Late one night in December, 2009, a black Chevy Tahoe in a caravan of cops and residents moved slowly through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Newark. In the back sat the Democratic mayor, Cory Booker, and the Republican governor-elect of New Jersey, Chris Christie. They had become friendly almost a decade earlier, during Christie’s years as United States Attorney in Newark, and Booker had invited him to join one of his periodic patrols of the city’s busiest drug corridors.

The ostensible purpose of the tour was to show Christie one of Booker’s methods of combatting crime. But Booker had another agenda that night. Christie, during his campaign, had made an issue of urban schools. “We’re paying caviar prices for failure,” he’d said, referring to the billion-dollar annual budget of the Newark public schools, three-quarters of which came from the state. “We have to grab this system by the roots and yank it out and start over. It’s outrageous.”

U.S. children read, but not well or often: report

Andrew Seaman:

Although American children still spend part of their days reading, they are spending less time doing it for pleasure than decades ago, with significant gaps in proficiency, according to a report released on Monday.

The San Francisco-based nonprofit Common Sense Media, which focuses on the effects of media and technology on children, published the report, which brings together information from several national studies and databases.

“It raises an alarm,” said Vicky Rideout, the lead author of the report. “We’re witnessing a really large drop in reading among teenagers and the pace of that drop is getting faster and faster.”

The report found that the percentage of nine-year-old children reading for pleasure once or more per week had dropped from 81 percent in 1984 to 76 percent in 2013, based on government studies. There were even larger decreases among older children.

High School Seniors in U.S. Fail to Show Reading, Math Progress

Janet Lorin:

U.S. high school seniors, whose school years have encompassed the sweeping education initiatives of two presidents, failed to demonstrate improvement in math or reading on a national exam.

Only 38 percent of those tested in 2013 scored as proficient readers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” released today by the Education Department. Three-quarters failed to show math proficiency. The scores were little changed from 2009, when the test was last given.

“Stagnation is unacceptable,” David Driscoll, chairman of the board that administers the test, said in a statement. “Achievement at this very critical point in a student’s life must be improved to ensure success after high school.”

The seniors were in the first grade when President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law. The program called for schools to demonstrate yearly progress and to show that all students are proficient on state standardized tests by 2014. Most states have received waivers under President Barack Obama, whose Race to the Top program has pledged $4.35 billion in state grants in four years to boost education standards.

The Nation’s Report Card shows what students know in various subject areas and compares achievement data among states and demographic groups. Tests are also given in science, history and other subjects. Just 12 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in American history, according to a 2011 report.

Related: wisconsin2.org.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Food Stamp Growth, including Wisconsin

Atif Mian & Amir Sufi:

Why exactly has there been such a sharp rise in food stamp usage? Is it general economic weakness? Failed economic policies? What do the data say?

The USDA provides state-level information on food stamp usage, so we can see exactly where food stamp program enrollment increased the most. Here is the growth in food stamp usage from 2006 to 2009, with darker red states those that had the largest increase:

Lessons From the World’s Best Public School

Grant Birmingham:

Jinjing Liu, a 15-year-old ninth-grader at Meilong Intermediate in central Shanghai—and part of the best education system in the world’s most populous country—is ticking off her normal class schedule: “Physics, chemistry, math, Chinese, English, Chinese literature, geography…the usual stuff,” she says in impeccable English.

That’s not Jinjing’s school day schedule; that’s her workload each and every Sunday. The Lord may have rested on the seventh day, but Jinjing studies, from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. She relates this over lunch on a Saturday afternoon, “the only day,” she acknowledges, that she has “any free time to relax.” And lest you think she is some whiz-bang academic geek on the fast track to Tsinghua, China’s M.I.T., think again. Ask who else in her high school has that Sunday routine and she says, “Pretty much everyone.”

Over the past several years, the Shanghai public school system has drawn global envy—and stirred controversy—by acing an international test given every few years by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that seeks to measure the quality of school systems globally. In 2009 (the first time the city participated in the test) and again in 2012, Shanghai finished first out of 66 locations surveyed in the so-called PISA exams (Program for International Student Assessment) in the three key disciplines: reading, science and mathematics. At the same time, the test showed the United States dropping lower in the global standings in all three disciplines, most precipitously in math.

Sallie Mae Spin-Off Expects $103 Million Hit From Probes

Insider Higher Ed:

Navient, the loan-servicing company formerly known as Sallie Mae, disclosed to investors Friday that it expects to pay an additional $103 million to settle two federal investigations, on top of the $70 million it already set aside last year for that purpose. The company is facing investigations from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Department of Justice, and other federal and state agencies over how it managed and processed the payments of student loan borrowers, including active-duty servicemembers.

The spin-off of Sallie Mae’s loan-servicing business into its own independent company, Navient, was officially completed at the end of April. Navient now inherits all liability stemming from the federal and state investigations of Sallie Mae’s loan-servicing business, the company said. The FDIC has cited Sallie Mae for unfair or deceptive acts involving the way it made disclosures to borrowers and assessed certain late fees.

Navient said Friday that, based on its discussions with the FDIC, the company believes it will be required to refund $30 million worth of certain late fees to borrowers of Sallie Mae loans dating back to November 2005. In addition, in an effort to “treat all customers in a similar manner,” Naveint said it also expected to “voluntarily” reimburse $42 million in late fees for borrowers whose loans were not owned by Sallie Mae but were serviced by them.

Frustrated Parents Turn to Picky-Eater Coaches

Bonnie Rochman:

Mention you’ve got a picky eater to a fellow parent, and the choruses of “me too!” come quick. Some fed-up parents—embarrassed, at their wits’ end or worried about their children’s nutrition—are hiring picky-eater coaches to expand their kids’ palates.

Leslie Springer was tired of acting like a short-order cook for her twin girls in second grade and daughter in preschool. Day-Glo orange mac and cheese was a staple. Snacks consisted of Goldfish crackers, Cheez-Its, potato chips and Oreos. Her girls devoured french fries but wouldn’t touch other kinds of potatoes. She would offer cauliflower and carrots only to get rebuffed.

Ms. Springer sought help from food coach Tara Roscioli, who had recently begun a Fit Moms group in New Jersey geared at encouraging healthier choices for mothers. Ms. Roscioli suggested some initial substitutions: steel-cut oats with a pinch of brown sugar and raisins instead of heavily presweetened oatmeal packets. Brown rice instead of white rice. Apple chips instead of potato chips.

“When Tara suggested this, I thought, ‘This is never going to happen,’ ” says Ms. Springer, a clinical social worker in Maplewood, N.J.

Elite Colleges Don’t Buy Happiness for Graduates

Douglas Belkin:

A word to high-school seniors rejected by their first choice: A degree from that shiny, elite college on the hill may not matter nearly as much as you think.

A new Gallup survey of 30,000 college graduates of all ages in all 50 states has found that highly selective schools don’t produce better workers or happier people, but inspiring professors—no matter where they teach—just might.

The poll, undertaken this spring, is part of a growing effort to measure how well colleges do their jobs. This survey adds an interesting twist, because it looked not only at graduates after college; it tried to determine what happens during college that leads to well-being and workplace engagement later in life.

The poll didn’t measure graduates’ earnings. Rather, it was rooted in 30 years of Gallup research that shows that people who feel happy and engaged in their jobs are the most productive. That relatively small group at the top didn’t disproportionately attend the prestigious schools that Americans have long believed provided a golden ticket to success. Instead, they forged meaningful connections with professors or mentors, and made significant investments in long-term academic projects and extracurricular activities.

“It matters very little where you go; it’s how you do it” that counts, said Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education. “Having a teacher who believes in a student makes a lifetime of difference.”

Charter, public schools and the chasm between

Javier Hernandez:

When Neil J. McNeill Jr., principal of the Middle School for Art and Philosophy in Brooklyn, learned that fewer than 4 percent of his students had passed state exams in math last year, he was frustrated.
It so happened that he shared a building with one of the top-performing schools in the Brownsville neighborhood, Kings Collegiate Charter School, where 37 percent of the students had passed, well above the New York City middle-school average of 27 percent.

Mr. McNeill had long been curious about the charter school’s strategies: It, too, served large numbers of low-income black students, many from the same neighborhoods. But the two schools operated in their own bubbles, with separate public-address systems and different textbooks. And as a matter of practice, they did not talk about academics.

MTI, AFSCME and Building Trades Petition for 2015-16 Contracts

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

The value of positive employer-employee relationships being highly valued in Madison and the surrounding area has moved the County of Dane and the City of Madison to continue to negotiate contracts with their employee unions. While the 2011 legislated Act 10 was designed to strip employees of their contractual rights and benefits, Judge Colas’ ruling that much of Act 10 is unconstitutional enables bargaining to continue.

Given the value placed on positive employer-employee relationships by Mayor Soglin and the County Board, MTI, AFSCME and the Building Trades Council, all of which represent bargaining units of District employees, have petitioned the Board of Education to enter Contracts for 2015-16. The Board will consider these requests at a special meeting this Thursday, May 15.

MTI – 7, State of Wisconsin – 0
MTI representation has resulted in the dismissal of charges against all MTI members who were issued citations by the State for participating in the Solidarity Sing Along, with one case still pending. MTI provided representation because of the State depriving members of their Constitutional right to freedom of speech in protesting Act 10’s impairment of collective bargaining.

The DOJ and Wisconsin’s private-school choice program: a storm is brewing

CJ Szafir:

Last week, the Wisconsin Reporter reported that the United States Department of Justice is still conducting an “ongoing investigation” into whether Wisconsin’s private-school choice program discriminates against children with disabilities and, as a result, violates federal disability law.

In 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a complaint with the Justice Department accusing the Wisconsin school-choice program—as well as two private schools in the program—of discriminating against children with disabilities. In April 2013, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department sent a letter and legal memo to the state of Wisconsin accusing the school-choice program of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). They concluded that unless Wisconsin drastically changes its choice program, the United States will take legal action.

Among its numerous demands, the Justice Department wants private choice schools to be forced to adjust their programming to accommodate all children with disabilities, so long as the accommodation does not “fundamentally alter” the school (an extremely onerous legal standard). Federal disability law, as traditionally interpreted by the U.S. Department of Education, applies a different, less exacting standard to private schools in the choice program. Private schools must only make “minor adjustments” to accommodate students with disabilities. Given that private schools do not receive the same government funding for special education as public schools and may wish to take distinctive approaches to students with behavioral problems, this is perfectly appropriate.

Via Alan Borsuk.

Much more on vouchers, here.

Advocating Additional Collective Bargaining in Madison

Madison Teachers, Inc. members fill the school board work group room, and the hallway outside. pic.twitter.com/UaIN004Pf7

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeckWSJ) May 12, 2014

Related: Collective Bargainain, Act 10 and Retired Ripon Superintendent’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club.

Illinois: Different standards for different students

Diane Rado:

Under a dramatic new approach to rating public schools, Illinois students of different backgrounds no longer will be held to the same standards — with Latinos and blacks, low-income children and other groups having lower targets than whites for passing state exams, the Tribune has found.

In reading, for example, 85 percent of white third- through eighth-grade students statewide will be expected to pass state tests by 2019, compared with about 73 percent for Latinos and 70 percent for black students, an analysis of state and federal records shows.

The concept is part of a fundamental and, according to critics, troubling shift in how public schools and students will be judged after the federal government recently allowed Illinois to abandon unpopular requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

A key NCLB measure long considered unreachable — that 100 percent of students must pass state exams — will be eliminated.

But the complex new approach of different standards for different groups is troubling to civil rights activists, who are not convinced that school districts will be held accountable for failing to educate minority students, and to some local educators, who say the lowered expectations will send a negative message to students.

“You’re potentially sending a message that it’s OK for some kids to not do as well,” said Timothy Truesdale, assistant superintendent in Cicero’s Morton High School District 201, where almost all students are Latino and low-income, and test scores have been dismal for years.

Via: Kaleem Caire.

School outside school: No English spoken here

Gayle Worland:

Monday through Friday, Maya Reinfeldt is an eighth-grader at Savanna Oaks Middle School in Fitchburg.
But on Saturdays, while her classmates are at soccer practice or gymnastics lessons, the 13-year-old is back at a desk studying literature in her mother’s native Russian.

Maya is one of more than 50 students enrolled at the Madison Russian School, a weekly immersion program where students can take classes in math, language, literature and drama, often using the same texts as their counterparts in Russian schools.

It’s not all academics. Students also do many performance events, sing together in a choir and participate in cultural gatherings with their families. And because they spend years together in the same classroom, they often develop deep friendships linked by a faraway culture.

“Sometimes I get more out of it than normal school,” said Maya, whose mother helped co-found the Russian School in 2003 so that her daughter, then 2, could master the language. “It’s a pretty good way to spend a Saturday morning. Otherwise I’d just be wasting my time.”

Advocating School District’s Review their Programs for Effectiveness

Alan Borsuk:

So what’s it going to take to move the needle around here?

The wealth of data that has come out in recent weeks on educational achievement hasn’t justified much celebration. For Wisconsin as a whole, the picture was not bad. The high school graduation rate has gone up a bit and is tied for second highest in the nation, but the percentages of kids rated as proficient in reading and math at all grades remain concerning.

As for Milwaukee, what can you say?

So much has been done and so little has changed. The percentage of kids graduating in the conventional time frame of four years actually went down. Other achievement measures have barely budged.

But we keep trying. In itself, that may be the best thing going for us. I’d like to think some of the things underway now are better thought out, more realistic, and ultimately more promising than things that haven’t borne fruit.

I’d like to use this space for the last few weeks of the school year to check in on what is happening with several improvement efforts underway here.

Are they accomplishing anything?

What has been learned about what it takes to have positive impact?

I’ll start with the GE Foundation grant of $20.4 million to Milwaukee Public Schools. It was announced with great hoopla on Jan. 19, 2011, at Morse-Marshall Junior and Senior High School. Superintendent Gregory Thornton called it an investment “that will make a huge difference in the academic lives of our children.”

Cincinnati’s achievement gap initiatives

Kim McGuire:

When educators nationwide want to look at proven ways to turn around a struggling urban school system, this is the city they visit.

Over a decade, Cincinnati Public Schools’ graduation rate has jumped from 50 to 80 percent. And in the past five years, the reading and math proficiency of its elementary students has climbed in many schools.

Those gains have been fueled by big improvements in the performance of black students, who make up more than half of the district’s 30,000 students. In 2006, 2007 and 2010, black students’ graduation rates surpassed those of whites.

Via Molly Beck.

Cincinnati spent $602,605,253 during 2013 [PDF] for 33,000 students or $18,261/student.

Madison plans to spend $402,265,253 for 25,107 full time and 2,079 pre-k students (about 14,800/student) during the 2014-2015 school year [detailed budget package 2.5mb pdf]

US college system is no model for students

Paul McGeough:

We’ve seen it over and over in Hollywood movies – American youngsters arriving at college for the first time, invariably with Mom shedding a few tears, Dad hovering awkwardly and siblings hauling cartons filled with home comforts to the freshman student’s new digs.

It’s a right of passage towards an as yet unformed career. It’s been an emotional roller coaster to get this far, committing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to study at one of the ‘best’ colleges – to attend Mom or Dad’s alma mater or to strike out for something more experimental.

But increasingly, it all defies economic good sense. And if critics of higher education in the US are to be believed, it also defies educational good sense.

Lest we be seen to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater in Australia, an analysis by The Economist declares American higher education, ‘on the face of it’, to be still in rude health. More than 50 of its colleges are in the top 100 in the world; eight of them in the top 10; they are unparalleled in scientific output – they produce most of the world’s Nobel laureates and scientific papers; and American college graduates, on average, still earn far more and receive better benefits than those who do not have a degree.

Then came a big ‘BUT’. It was in the vein of a critique last year by Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, whose key points in a reason.com forum are cause for wonder about an education system that Australia might attempt to emulate. Here are the eyes plucked from the Vedder piece:

How Bad Is the Job Market for the College Class of 2014?

Jordan Weissmann:

College graduation season is approaching fast, which means we’re also heading for the annual round of horror stories about the job market for young B.A.s. At least, I expect we are, because said market is still a mess.

You can spend a long, long time arguing about precisely how bad freshly minted grads have it these days and why. But for now, let’s stick to broad strokes. In its recent chartbook on youth joblessness, the Economic Policy Institute reported that roughly 8.5 percent of college graduates between the ages of 21 and 24 were unemployed. That figure is based on a 12-month average between April 2013 and March 2014, so it’s not a perfect snapshot of the here and now. Still, it tells us that the post-collegiate job market, just like the rest of the labor market, certainly isn’t nearly back to normal. (For comparison, the unemployment rate for all college grads over the age of 25 is 3.3 percent, which is also still higher than normal.) More worrisomely, the EPI finds that a total of 16.8 percent of new grads are “underemployed,” meaning they’re either jobless and hunting for work; working part-time because they can’t find a full-time job; or want a job, have looked within the past year, but have now given up on searching.

Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding

Matt Richtel:

The event was part of a national educational movement in computer coding instruction that is growing at Internet speeds. Since December, 20,000 teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade have introduced coding lessons, according to Code.org, a group backed by the tech industry that offers free curriculums. In addition, some 30 school districts, including New York City and Chicago, have agreed to add coding classes in the fall, mainly in high schools but in lower grades, too. And policy makers in nine states have begun awarding the same credits for computer science classes that they do for basic math and science courses, rather than treating them as electives.

There are after-school events, too, like the one in Mill Valley, where 70 parents and 90 children, from kindergartners to fifth graders, huddled over computers solving animated puzzles to learn the basics of computer logic.

College Grads Have Diplomas — and Lots of Optimism

Kathleen Madigan:

College graduates are wearing caps and gowns–and rose-colored glasses.

A new survey of college grads shows a high level of optimism about job prospects. What the Class of 2014 may not realize is that their predecessors were also upbeat about their job prospects, only to have their expectations dashed on the rocks of a weak recovery.

The Accenture 2014 College Graduate Employment Survey, released Wednesday, shows 69% of this year’s class think they will have a job within six months of graduating. Another 11% have already accepted a job.

Proposed changes to storied IB program roil Denver high school

Alan Gottlieb & Kate Schimel:

When the Saturday morning meeting about proposed changes to George Washington High School’s International Baccalaureate program got off to a raucous, even unruly start in the school library, a mixed group of IB and non-IB students decided to take matters into their own hands.

As angry parents who had expected an open forum but found themselves in a less interactive session tried to shout down Denver Public Schools administrators, a group of about 20 students calmly retreated to a computer lab and spent 90 minutes devising their own list of recommendations.
The student gathering was impassioned but calm and when two students started talking at once, one of their peers chimed in with “C’mon, guys, let’s not be like the parents.”

For their part, parents said they had legitimate reasons to be angry. They cited a letter penned last week by GW Principal Micheal Johnson that promised the meeting would “address any questions or concerns that may arise about our future direction.” Instead, DPS officials made it clear from the outset that they were not going to answer questions but rather would hold “breakout sessions” on “becoming a destination high school,” “improving communications and school culture,” and ensuring academic excellence for all students.”

Parents said they felt impending changes to one of DPS’ most academically successful programs were sprung on them with little notice and no opportunity for them to provide input. “This was all done sub rosa,” said Leslie Lilly, whose son is an IB program 10th-grader.

Related: Denver spends $1,581,688,230 for 84,000 students or $18,830 per student (Page 89 of the 469 page 2013-2014 budget document [PDF]. Interestingly, prominence is given to “general fund” spending on page 25, not total spending) Madison seems to have done this in its most recent budget documents as well. I fail to understand how ignoring total spending vis a vis “general fund” makes sense. The mission of public school districts is to educate their students. End of statement.

Madison spends about $15,000/student – see the 2014-2015 budget documents, here.

Young Minds in Critical Condition

Michael Roth:

It happens every semester. A student triumphantly points out that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is undermining himself when he claims “the man who reflects is a depraved animal,” or that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for self-reliance is in effect a call for reliance on Emerson himself. Trying not to sound too weary, I ask the student to imagine that the authors had already considered these issues.

Instead of trying to find mistakes in the texts, I suggest we take the point of view that our authors created these apparent “contradictions” in order to get readers like us to ponder more interesting questions. How do we think about inequality and learning, for example, or how can we stand on our own feet while being open to inspiration from the world around us? Yes, there’s a certain satisfaction in being critical of our authors, but isn’t it more interesting to put ourselves in a frame of mind to find inspiration in them?

Our best college students are very good at being critical. In fact being smart, for many, means being critical. Having strong critical skills shows that you will not be easily fooled. It is a sign of sophistication, especially when coupled with an acknowledgment of one’s own “privilege.”

Our Generous Uncle Sam: Lenient College Debt Rules Encourage Students To Keep Borrowing And Hunt For “Public Service” Jobs

George Leaf:

Our Generous Uncle Sam: Lenient College Debt Rules Encourage Students To Keep Borrowing And Hunt For “Public Service” Jobs

People keep talking about the high burden of college debt, which now surpasses credit card debt. And the federal government is doing something to help.

Unfortunately, what it is doing makes the problem worse.

Student loan debt has risen more than any other category, according to a February report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That’s surprising because college enrollments (and also enrollments in many graduate and professional schools) have been declining.

So why is that student debt mountain still growing?

Instead of paying their debts down, many graduates are either keeping their loan balances steady or even allowing them to increase. About 17 percent of student borrowers are currently delinquent, but many more who aren’t officially delinquent have avoided that only by taking advantage of Uncle Sam’s generosity with taxpayer money.

One of the “generous” features of federal loans permits students to defer their payments. They can simply claim that they impose “economic hardship” or they can return to school. Just by enrolling half-time, the student can qualify for more loans and can use the money not just to pay for tuition, but to help cover living expenses.

Princeton president: Graduating college with $100k debt? ‘Something’s gone wrong in your financial planning’

Nicole Mulvaney:

PLAINSBORO — If you’re an undergraduate leaving a four-year institution owing $100,000 or more in debt, “something’s gone wrong in your financial planning,” according to Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber.

“It’s highly atypical of what you see coming out of colleges,” said Eisgruber, speaking before about 150 business officials today at a Princeton Regional Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

After serving as Princeton’s provost for nine years, Eisgruber was named the university’s 20th president in July after Shirley Tilghman stepped down. In his remarks today, Eisgruber stressed the necessity of obtaining an undergraduate degree to compete in the current job market, debunking claims in news media, he said, that four-year degrees are no longer worth the increasing costs.

“If you talk to labor economists who study higher education about those kinds of topics, they are baffled by that kind of coverage in the press, because the case economically for the value of higher education is extraordinary,” Eisgruber said. “The premium from a college education today is higher than it has been at any point in our history.”

To justify this, Eisgruber referenced economists’ figures for the value of an undergraduate degree: between 7.5 percent and 15.2 percent annually in return on investment, he said.

“Think about that: How many investments can you make where the anticipated return is about 10 percent compounding?” Eisgruber asked.

The College Bottleneck in the American Opportunity Structure

Richard V. Reeves and Quentin Karpilow:

Note: Part of a two-week series devoted to exploring what we can learn about social mobility from Joseph Fishkin’s new book, Bottlenecks.

Bottlenecks control the flow of future opportunities, according to Fishkin, and they can take the form of developmental opportunities, instrumental goods (like money), or a qualifications. In the U.S. today, one qualification acts a quintessential bottleneck: the college degree.

Qualification bottlenecks

Simply put, qualification bottlenecks are:

“Educational credentials, test scores, and other requirements that one must fulfill in order to pursue some path or range of paths to valued ends.” (Fishkin, Bottlenecks, p. 156)

While developmental bottlenecks are concerned with skills-building opportunities, qualification bottlenecks relate to the requirements for pursuing a particular life path.

Of course, in many cases, developmental and qualification bottlenecks are interrelated. Scoring well on the SAT is often a pre-requisite for going to an elite college, making it a qualification bottleneck. Elite colleges, however, offer educational and skills-building opportunities that are often hard to find in other post-secondary institutions.

Competency and Affordability

Paul Fain:

The $10,000 bachelor’s degree remains elusive. But Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America has unveiled self-paced, competency-based degrees that students should be able to complete for that price, or less.

The private university’s regional accreditor, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, last week gave a green light to online bachelor’s degrees in health care management and communications from College for America, which is a nonprofit subsidiary of the university.

The college first began enrolling students last year. Until this week its sole option was an associate degree in general studies.

Tuition and fees at College for America are $1,250 per six-month term. The college uses a subscription-style model in which students can complete assessments at their own speed. The associate degree is designed for students to complete in an average of two years — at a cost of $5,000.
The new bachelor’s degrees will be stacked on top of associate degrees, college officials said. That means students must first complete the associate degree — or transfer in with one from elsewhere — with the bachelor’s being the second half of the curriculum.

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How to Fill the Skills Gap: Bring Back Apprenticeships

Robert Maxim:

Manufacturing is growing in the United States, but many companies claim that they face a “skills gap.” These companies have unfilled vacancies, but say that unemployed workers and recent high school graduates do not have the technical knowledge needed to fill them. Apprenticeships have historically taught students the necessary skills for a career in manufacturing. However, there has been a sharp decline in apprenticeships across the United States, some 40 percent over the past decade, and cash-strapped state budgets have forced schools to cut technical education in favor of four-year college preparatory curricula.

Harvard to adopt student honesty pledge

Sean Coughlin:

Harvard University is going to introduce an “honour code” in which students will promise not to cheat.

It will be the first time the prestigious US university has asked students to make a public commitment not to plagiarise or cheat in their coursework and exams.

In 2012 the university faced its biggest-ever cheating scandal.

The proposals will mean students at Harvard from 2015 agreeing to an “affirmation of integrity”.

“Honour codes” – or “honor codes” in the American spelling – are used by a number of US universities as a way of discouraging students from cheating in exams or submitting material that has been copied from the internet.

Poll: Prestigious Colleges Won’t Make You Happier In Life Or Work

Anya Kamnetz:

There’s plenty of anxiety in the U.S. over getting into a top college. But a new Gallup poll suggests that, later in life, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as we think. In fact, when you ask college graduates whether they’re “engaged” with their work or “thriving” in all aspects of their lives, their responses don’t vary one bit whether they went to a prestigious college or not.

The surprising findings come in a survey of 29,650 college graduates of all ages by Gallup pollsters working with researchers at Purdue University. The poll asked graduates a range of questions designed to measure how well they are doing in life across factors such as income and “engagement” in their jobs and careers.

The survey set a high bar. It found that 39 percent of college grads overall say they’re “engaged” at work (which is 10 points higher than the population at large). And, while almost 5 in 6 self-report doing great in at least one sphere — whether sense of purpose, financial security, physical health, close relationships or community pride — only 11 percent are “thriving” in all five areas of well-being.

And here’s the kicker.

Get a College-Level Computer Science Education with These Free Courses

Melanie Pinola:

We’re lucky to have access to so many excellent free online courses for just about anything you want to study, including computer science. Here’s a curriculum list that strings various free computing courses into the equivalent of a college bachelor’s degree.

aGupieWare, an independent app developer, surveyed the curricular requirements for computer science programs at several of the US’s top universities. It then developed a similar program using 15 free online courses from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, and other sources. Like formal college programs, the courses are broken into introductory classes, core classes, and electives.

While this won’t get you an actual college degree, you can save tens of thousands of dollars rolling your own education. (And you might also be able to get formal college credit through exams.)

UK Free schools project put in peril by soaring costs – MPs

Richard Adams:

The government has spent £240m on free schools in areas that don’t need them and the programme risks blowing out its budget due to lax financial management and rising costs, MPs report today.

In a damning evaluation the public accounts committee’s report cites poor value for money in the planning and oversight of free schools, the state-funded institutions introduced by Michael Gove as education secretary since 2010.

It has calculated that the government has spent at least £240m on building 42 schools in areas that had no shortage of school places, while receiving no applications to open primary free schools in half of the areas with a high forecast of need for extra school places.

Emancipation Day Commemoration in Eastern Mississippi School

James Fallows:

Over the months Deb Fallows has reported on a variety of impressive and innovative public schools around the country. For instance: the Sustainability Academy in Burlington, Vermont; the Grove School in Redlands California; the Shead School in Eastport, Maine; several English immersion schools in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; the Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, South Carolina; the A.J. Whittenberg Elementary School for Engineering, also in Greenville; and the Camden County High School near St. Marys, Georgia.

Recently she has spent a lot of time at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS), in Columbus, Mississippi. MSMS is a public, residential high school for students from across the state, about which Deb will be reporting in detail soon. But before the day ends, we wanted to note a moving presentation by MSMS students this evening in a historic cemetery in Columbus.

Scaling a University

Anthony Finkelstein:

Regular readers will probably appreciate that I occasionally write to exorcise my managerial angst. This may not make for enthralling reading, but needs must. So, I have been giving thought to the problem of universities and scale.

The problem here is that many of the mechanisms, both formal and informal, by which universities conventionally operate, do not scale. They are built upon institutions that are physically, more or less, in one place. These institutions are constituted of a small number of departments, perhaps loosely clustered in coherent faculties, where the departments are small enough for all the members of staff to know each other and for the Head to be able to both run the department and be a peer to the senior staff. The departments are the primary locus of student engagement and hold the main responsibilties in respect of day-to-day management. The universities are dependent upon broad participation in collective governance and on a shared understanding of a common operating model. They depend too on a straightforward and transparent allocation of financial responsibilities and schemes of delegation.

There are very few universities for which these operational conditions hold. Put simply most research intensive institutions outgrew the established mechanisms and associated organisational models perhaps ten or more years ago. Much of the recent story of university management has been a process of catch-up in which we have sought to transition from a scheme of working that could no longer be sustained to an approach that respects the realities of increased scale. This is the genesis of ‘faculties’ with executive responsibilities, coordinating ‘schools’, ‘research institutes’, ‘clusters’, ‘hubs’, ‘programmes’ and all the varied organisational forms that have emerged.

Get coding into CA schools

Carmel Deamicis:

Today some of the biggest names in tech came together to make a stand. It wasn’t a stand for immigration reform or a stand for shuttle-bus stopping rights. It was for something far less sexy: Coding classes.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Square CEO Jack Dorsey, investor Vinod Khosla, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings joined a list of 30 that reads like the who’s who of Silicon Valley. All the participants signed a letter to California’s Governor Jerry Brown to explain the need for programming courses in California’s public school system. A choice excerpt:

The radically sensible idea that’s lowering America’s massive monthly student debt payments

Matt Phillips:

As we all know, US student debt is soaring. With a relentless rise, student debt has become the second-highest form of consumer debt in the US in recent years. In the fourth quarter, the amount of student debt outstanding hit $1.1 trillion. (This chart doesn’t show mortgage debt, which is about a dozen times as big.) But at the same time , there’s a crucial transformation going on. That’s why this chart, below, is important. It shows more people have been availing of a couple of different federal programs that lower the monthly repayments on student loans. The income-based repayment program (IBR) was instituted by the US Department of Education in 2009. It caps monthly loan payments at 15% of the borrower’s discretionary income and forgives loans after 25 years. A separate repayment plan, known as pay-as-you-earn (PAYE), was introduced in December 2012. It is aimed at helping young Americans who graduated into the miserable economy of the Great Recession. (It is only available to those who took out their first loan after Oct. 1, 2007.) It caps monthly payments at 10% of discretionary income and forgives loans after 20 years.

People seem to think these programs are a good deal, as usage of them is growing fast. In a report, analysts from Moody’s noted that the balance of all federal direct loans in repayment—which includes loans that are in forbearance and deferment—under these two programs was about 20% as of the end of March. That’s up from 14% in June 2013.

Online Learning: A Bachelor’s Level Computer Science Program Curriculum

agupieware:

A few months back we took an in-depth look at MIT’s free online Introduction to Computer Science course, and laid out a self-study time table to complete the class within four months, along with a companion post providing learning benchmarks to chart your progress. In the present article, I’ll step back and take a much more broad look at com-sci course offerings available for free on the internet, in order to answer a deceptively straightforward question: is it possible to complete the equivalent of a college bachelor’s degree in computer science through college and university courses that are freely available online? And if so, how does one do so?

The former question is more difficult to answer than it may at first appear. There are, of course, tons of resources relating to computer science and engineering, computer programming, software engineering, etc. that can easily be found online with a few simple searches. However, despite this fact, it is very unlikely that you would find a free, basic computer science curriculum offered in one complete package from any given academic source. The reason for this is fairly obvious. Why pay $50,000 a year to go to Harvard, for example, if you could take all the exact same courses online for free?

Aspen to Students: Your Property Book is Not Your Property

Daniel Nazer:

EFF has been fighting for years for the principle that if you bought it, you own it. The first sale doctrine – the law that allows you to resell books and that protects libraries from claims of copyright infringement – is crucial to consumers. Unfortunately, first sale has been under threat in the digital realm, as copyright holders increasingly insist on saddling “sales” with onerous restrictions. You may think you are buying a product (like software, music and ebooks), but as far as they are concerned, you are just renting it, on their terms, whether you know it or not.

The latest attack on first sale comes from Aspen Publishers, and the target is the lucrative textbook market. Aspen is insisting that students who are assigned and purchase physical textbooks Aspen published cannot resell those books to recoup some of the expense.

In Pursuit of Knowledge, and Profit How universities aid and abet patent trolls

Daniel Engber:

A few weeks ago, administrators at Penn State University did something they believed had never been attempted in American academia: The school put about 70 engineering patents up for auction and tried to sell them to the highest bidder. They weren’t so successful—not many patents sold—but the project has disturbing implications. What if all this intellectual property, based on research done at a public institution, were to end up in the hands of someone less interested in innovation than in hauling companies to court? What if Penn State auctioned its inventions to a greedy patent troll?

It wouldn’t be the first time that an institute of higher learning had partnered up with patent trolls, or mimicked their behavior. Universities and patent trolls have some major traits in common: Both make money off of legal rights; both let other businesses implement ideas and then pinch a portion of the revenue; both purport to bring that money back to those innovators who most deserve it. Looked at from a distance, and with squinted eyes, a school might seem to be a patent troll itself—and that resemblance is growing stronger.

America’s educational failings

Fareed Zakaria:

The United States has high levels of education and a large percentage of its workers in adult learning and training programs, and it spends lots of money on all these activities. And yet, it does worse than many countries with few advantages and resources. (And no, it isn’t just because of immigrants. About half of the OECD countries now have a larger percentage of foreign-born adults than does the United States)

What we learn from this study is really just an extension of what we have discovered in the PISA results. The biggest force behind falling American rankings is not that the United States is doing things much worse but that other countries have caught up and are doing better. The U.S. system of education and training is inadequate in the new global environment.

And things show no signs of improving. The bipartisan backlash against the Common Core — a set of national standards agreed to by governors — is a tragic example. Parents raised on a culture of low standards and high self-esteem are outraged that the tests show that many American schools are not teaching their children enough. (The tests must be at fault because they know that their kids are brilliant!) Some liberals and teacher groups are upset with the emphasis on testing (though Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, has endorsed the Common Core). And Republicans now oppose it — despite having championed it only a few years ago — largely because the Obama administration also backs the project.

Children’s Dyslexia Centers

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

Kids with dyslexia are among those most affected by poor reading instruction. The Children’s Dyslexia Centers around the country (there are three in Wisconsin) train tutors in the Orton-Gillingham approach and provide free tutoring to children. It’s a game-changer for these kids who have so much to offer. Here is a glimpse inside the CDC-Milwaukee. Other centers are in Madison and Eau Claire.

As wonderful as these centers are, it would be even more wonderful if they became unnecessary because classroom and special education teachers, reading teachers, and reading specialists were trained to effectively teach all children to read.

‘What could be more interesting than how the mind works?’

Colleen Walsh:

Steven Pinker follows Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Martha Minow, and E.O. Wilson in the Experience series, interviews with Harvard faculty members covering the reasons they became teachers and scholars, and the personal journeys, missteps included, behind their professional success. Interviews with Melissa Franklin, Stephen Greenblatt, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Helen Vendler, and Walter Willett will appear in coming weeks.

The brain is Steven Pinker’s playground. A cognitive scientist and experimental psychologist, Pinker is fascinated by language, behavior, and the development of human nature. His work has ranged from a detailed analysis of how the mind works to a best-seller about the decline in violence from biblical times to today.

Raised in Montreal, Pinker was drawn early to the mysteries of thought that would drive his career, and shaped in part by coming of age in the ’60s and early ’70s, when “society was up for grabs,” it seemed, and nature vs. nurture debates were becoming more complex and more heated.

His earliest work involved research in both visual imagery and language, but eventually he devoted himself to the study of language development, particularly in children. His groundbreaking 1994 book “The Language Instinct” put him firmly in the sphere of evolutionary psychology, the study of human impulses as genetically programmed and language as an instinct “wired into our brains by evolution.” Pinker, 59, has spent most of his career in Cambridge, and much of that time at Harvard — first for his graduate studies, later as an assistant professor. He is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology.

Q: Can you tell me about your early life? Where did you grow up and what did your parents do?

Wales (UK) set to abandon school banding system for new colour-coded ratings

Gareth Evans:

Wales’ controversial school ‘banding’ system is to be replaced with a new colour-coded support mechanism designed to raise pupil performance, we can reveal.

Officials in the Welsh Department for Education are preparing to launch the “national school improvement and categorisation system” as a means of ensuring schools get the right support and intervention to improve.

Unlike banding, it will extend to primaries as well as secondaries and see schools in Wales categorised annually into one of four groups.

A judgement on standards – based on available data – will be made, and schools at the lowest end of the scale (category Four) will languish in the “red zone”.

“Check Your Privilege” is Actually Just a Lousy Argument

Brian Mayer:

Like you, I’ve read Tal Fortgang’s piece, “Why I’ll Never Apologize for my White Male Privilege.” And like you, I’ve enjoyed watching him get skewered by blog after blog in the never ending one-upmanship that is the who-had-it-worse awards. As the internet froths at the mouth, I hereby declare that, like you, I think he made a big mistake! He should have elaborated on his first sentence and stopped there.

The point he should have made, but skipped over instead, was that the “check your privilege” riposte is not relevant to almost any discussion in which it is invoked. It is a rhetorical flourish used to discredit the proposition based on the identity of the speaker, and not the merit of the proposition itself. There’s a word for this logical fallacy: ad hominem. When employed, it can pack a powerful punch, but in reality it is lazy, lousy, and liberally lobbed in lieu of any legitimate point.

Although I’ve rarely heard the literal words “check your privilege,” I have been exposed to many, many forms of this non-argument. You might recognize these examples from your own experience:

From The Bard to Russell Brand: To Study or Not To Study

Alex Quigley:

Today the newspapers were awash with stories to make our great British population wince with embarrassment and raise a fist in fury. Our hallowed tradition of literature is apparently under threat of being sullied by the dumbing down of a new A level qualifications. It is sure to send our nation spiralling into inexorable decline. Shakespeare and Austen paired with Dizzy Rascal and Russell Brand. Oh, the horror, the horror!

The Department for Education were outraged at this “rubbish“. The Daily Mail put aside their immigration-nation narrative to one side for at least a few hours to demonise their bête noire – drug fuelled raconteur Russell Brand. Bejewelled with breast-laden hyperlinks, “Brand-speak” was suitably denounced. Of course, if we can gloss over the celebrity fuelled sex-spiked Daily Mail stories for one moment, we can buys ourselves with many linked condemnations of our state education system.

Summer math class: Calculate the # of administrators vs. the # of qualified math teachers

Laurie Rogers:

Problem # 1. The number of useless administrators varied inversely with the number of qualified math teachers squared.

When there were 200 qualified math teachers, there were 5 useless administrators. As the number of qualified math teachers was cut back to 25, how many useless administrators were there?

Below is a calculation for Problem #1.
Below that is a parody of typical professional development (PD) for teachers and staff, related to Problem #1.

Answer: As the number of qualified math teachers was cut back to 25, the number of useless administrators increased to 320.

This number, of course, is fake. The number of truly qualified math teachers in most public school districts (i.e. those who know enough math to teach it to at least their grade and the grade following) has been purposefully cut back by colleges of education and administrators to “small,” “infinitesimal,” or “a speck, really.”

A new study reveals the secret to Asian academic success—hard work!

Will Fitzhugh:

Abstract The superior academic achievement of Asian Americans is a well-documented phenomenon that lacks a widely accepted explanation. Asian Americans’ advantage in this respect has been attributed to three groups of factors: (i) socio-demographic characteristics, (ii) cognitive ability, and (iii) academic effort as measured by characteristics such as attentiveness and work ethic. We combine data from two nationally representative cohort longitudinal surveys to compare Asian-American and white students in their educational trajectories from kindergarten through high school. We find that the Asian-American educational advantage is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian–white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to (i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and (ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.

Is it really fair for them to work harder?

e.g.

Writing a paper for the Review was a completely new experience for me. Suddenly, there were no word limits and no guidelines to dictate what my paper had to look like; these guidelines had previously determined every paper that I had written in past history classes. I was free to pursue whatever aspect of my topic that I wanted to whatever extent that I wanted. It was liberating, but also incredibly intimidating. At first, I admittedly felt lost and even scared about where I was supposed to take my paper.

Begin forwarded message:
From: Janet Chen
Date: March 16, 2012 11:27:57 AM EDT
To: Will Fitzhugh
Subject: Re: Concord Review Authors

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

Thank you for taking the time to consider my essay on the unauthorized disclosures of the Pentagon Papers. If you have the time to read this email, I would like to provide you with some background information on the process that I underwent while researching this paper. I am currently a Junior attending (public) high school in Boulder, Colorado. I initially wrote a much shorter version of this essay for my U.S. history teacher, Mrs. Leigh Campbell-Hale.

The process of researching and completing this [9,963-word] paper took two years. In 2010, I decided to study the Pentagon Papers because at the time when I was selecting topics, the Wikileaks incident was all over the news. I became fascinated by the leak of information, the current presidential administration’s handling of it, and the public controversy that the leak ignited. One trend that I noticed throughout many of the news articles that I followed was comparison between the current Wikileaks disclosures and the historical leak of the Pentagon Papers. Fascinated, I thought that a closer study of the historical Pentagon documents might provide me with answers to some of the current questions that I had about contemporary leaks.

I came upon President Nixon’s telephone transcripts by accident; initially, I had not intended to focus upon that aspect of the leak. However, reading the transcripts made me realize that there were a lot of discrepancies between what my secondary sources were telling me (that is, what historians previously believed about the leak) and what the transcripts actually show. I began to realize that because there was new evidence that historians previously did not have the opportunity to consider, this topic demanded a reassessment.

I’d like to thank The Concord Review for pushing me beyond my academic boundaries. After my teacher read the much shorter version of my paper, she suggested that I submit a longer one to The Concord Review. Writing a paper for the Review was a completely new experience for me. Suddenly, there were no word limits and no guidelines to dictate what my paper had to look like; these guidelines had previously determined every paper that I had written in past history classes. I was free to pursue whatever aspect of my topic that I wanted to whatever extent that I wanted. It was liberating, but also incredibly intimidating. At first, I admittedly felt lost and even scared about where I was supposed to take my paper.

In the shorter version of this essay, I relied heavily upon my secondary sources and I did not pursue the primary source telephone transcripts to the extent that I should have. I used various excuses to justify this to myself—the word limit wouldn’t have allowed me to fully analyze the transcripts; moreover, the transcripts didn’t seem to fit the guidelines that my teacher had asked for. However, the truth was, I didn’t think that I had the intellectual capability to take on such a challenging academic task. Directly analyzing primary materials and drawing original conclusions (instead of relying upon secondary material) was something that my teacher called “real history”; I was convinced that only “real historians” and graduate level students were capable of doing that kind of research. However, after reading the essay in the Review about Andrew Jackson and his Indian removal policy, I realized that I had been mistaken. Suddenly, none of my previous excuses seemed legitimate. That weekend, I made calls to the National Archives and the National Security Archives to obtain all of President Nixon’s transcripts from that time period. I also emailed and called the historians whose works I had previously referenced in my research. I interviewed these scholars to find out more about the processes that they underwent in their research; I also discussed what they thought about the new evidence that had come out and how that new evidence could be used to revise the conclusions that they had come to years ago.

In retrospect, this has undoubtedly been the most demanding academic endeavor that I have ever undertaken during my high school years. More importantly, however, it has also been the most fascinating academic work that I have ever had the opportunity to engage in. I have learned so much not only about history and the Pentagon Papers, but also about my own critical thinking process and capabilities. Thank you again for taking the time to consider my essay, and thank you (and The Concord Review) for giving me the opportunity to go beyond my previous academic boundaries.

[She is in the Class of 2017 at Columbia University]

EAVESDROPPING ON THE PRESIDENT: A RECONSIDERATION OF THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION’S DECISIONS CONCERNING THE LEAK OF THE PENTAGON PAPERS

“I want…N.C.A.A. machinery dismantled. I want faculties to take back their universities from athletic depts.”

Joe Nocera:

Mary Willingham remembers the exact moment when she realized she had to go public. It was at the memorial service in the fall of 2012 for Bill Friday, the former president of the University of North Carolina. During his long career, Friday had championed the amateur ideal — the notion that college athletes needed also to be students, and that academics mattered as much as wins.

Willingham went to the university in Chapel Hill in 2003 as an academic adviser to the school’s athletes, primarily its football and basketball players. She was a reading specialist, a refugee from corporate America who had become a teacher in midlife. “Mary is one of those people who believed in the mythology, that you can do both athletics and academics,” says Richard Southall, who runs the College Sport Research Institute at the University of South Carolina.

But right from the start, she realized that there was a problem: Many of the athletes were coming into college unequipped to do college-level work. Around 2008, she recalls, after the N.C.A.A. changed its eligibility requirements — depending on their G.P.A.’s, athletes could now get in with lower S.A.T. scores — the situation became dramatically worse.

Mixed Report for Race to the Top Education Grants

Stephanie Banchero:

Three Graphs About Trying and Failing

Bryan Caplan:

The true return to college heavily depends on the probability of successful completion. That probability in turn heavily depends on pre-college academic performance. How heavily? Check out these three graphs from Bound, Lovenheim, and Turner’s “Why Have College Completion Rates Declined?” (American Economic Journal 2010). BLT compare results for the NLS72 (high school graduation cohort of 1972) and NELS:88 (high school graduation cohort of 1992), using a standardized high school math test to measure pre-college performance.

First, check out your probability of trying college if you finish high school.

Teaching handwriting in a digital world

Rachel Pincus:

If you’ve ever watched a young child learn how to write or try to guide him or her, the process can be both comical and mildly frustrating. By the time they are formally taught how to write, some children seem to internalize some very arbitrary notions of what letters should look like, and these habits can be hard to break. Furthermore, less and less time is being spent on handwriting education at all, leaving some students to their own devices – even dyslexic children, who don’t pick up on handwriting skills as naturally.
Though most schools are unable to do anything about the visual environment of handwriting learners, the Castledown Primary School in East Sussex, England took a more proactive approach. “I’ve been frustrated with the lack of clarity of letters in fonts since my beginnings as a teacher,” headmaster Neil Small told Wired. decided to permanently change the look of school mailings and signage, commissioning a font from the Colophon Foundry that both looks fun and creates healthy habits for life.

America’s Leaky Pipeline for Teachers of Color

Farah Ahmad and Ulrich Boser:

If you spend time in almost any major school district in America today, you will notice that the students often do not look much like the teachers. In fact, in some areas, the students don’t look anything like their teachers. There is a significant demographic gap in the largely white teaching profession and an increasingly diverse student population.

To prepare American students for lives of high achievement, America’s schools need a teaching corps that is not only highly effective but also racially and ethnically diverse. Progress has been made in recent decades in attracting people of color to the teaching profession. But major barriers—including a scarcity of high-quality, teacher-training programs targeted at teachers of color; the educational debt students of color must shoulder; and the general lack of esteem in our society for teaching—stand in the way of producing an optimal pool of teachers. Without vigorous policy innovations and public investment, the demographic gap will only widen to the detriment of children’s education.

Learning to Automatically Solve Algebra Word Problems

Nate Kushman, Yoav Artzi, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Regina Barzilay:

We present an approach for automatically learning to solve algebra word problems. Our algorithm reasons across sentence boundaries to construct and solve a sys- tem of linear equations, while simultane- ously recovering an alignment of the vari- ables and numbers in these equations to the problem text. The learning algorithm uses varied supervision, including either full equations or just the final answers. We evaluate performance on a newly gathered corpus of algebra word problems, demon- strating that the system can correctly an- swer almost 70% of the questions in the dataset. This is, to our knowledge, the first learning result for this task.

Why students using laptops learn less in class even when they really are taking notes

Fred Barbash:

Are you one of those old-school types who insists that kids learn better when they leave the laptops at home and take lecture notes in longhand?

If so, you’re right. There’s new evidence to prove it, and it’s unsettling because so many students aren’t really taught longhand anymore.

According to a new study based on a series of lab-based experiments comparing how much students learned after listening to the same lectures, there’s no contest. Handwriters learn better, hands down.

The ones who took their notes in longhand demonstrated in tests that they got more out of the lectures than the typists.

It’s not for the reasons most people think either. It’s not because of “multi-tasking” or the distraction available to students using laptops, especially with WiFi. That’s a problem by itself. But for this study, in a lab setting, no extraneous activity was allowed.

Are 90% of academic papers really never cited? Reviewing the literature on academic citations.

Dahlia Remler:

“90% of papers published in academic journals are never cited.” This damning statistic from a 2007 overview of citation analysis recently darted about cyberspace. A similar statistic had made the rounds in 2010 but that time it was about 60% of social and natural science articles that were said to be uncited. Neither statistic came with a link to supporting academic research papers.

That lack of support was a problem for me. I did not doubt the basic truth that many academic papers are uncited. But to be sure 90% was not urban legend and to learn the context and caveats, I needed to find the original research paper. I was not the only one who wanted the supporting evidence. So, I dove into Google scholar, searching the disparaged academic literature for articles on academic citation rates.

What’s the truth?

Many academic articles are never cited, although I could not find any study with a result as high as 90%. Non-citation rates vary enormously by field. “Only” 12% of medicine articles are not cited, compared to about 82% (!) for the humanities. It’s 27% for natural sciences and 32% for social sciences (cite). For everything except humanities, those numbers are far from 90% but they are still high: One third of social science articles go uncited!

Ten points for academia’s critics.

College tips: Advice from a professor

Matthew Might:

Beware the first semester
When I ask my students about their biggest college regret, it is almost universally, “my first semester.”

Graduates often lament that they spent their entire college career trying to recover from the damage inflicted to their GPA in the first semester.

The change in class structure and freedom catches students off guard.

Professors don’t coddle like high school teachers.

Most won’t even force students to attend class.

For students in dorms, parents can’t act like a check on bad habits.

Students without a strong sense of discipline find themselves sleeping through 8 AM classes, failing to study for exams and unable to complete assignments.

Most of these students sober up and gain discipline when they see their grades for the first semester, and live with a sense of regret thereafter.

Those that don’t drop out at the end of freshman year.

Student Debt and a Broken Financial System

Atif Mian & Amir Sufi:

When the Class of 2009 entered college in 2005, they had good reason to be optimistic. The economy appeared to be healthy, and a college degree commanded higher wages. College, of course, is expensive. And almost 2 out of 3 students entering college took on some debt. They took on that debt believing that it would be easy to pay back given the strong market for those with a college degree.

But then the biggest recession in 80 years hit the United States, leading to a much worse job market for college graduates. Here is the unemployment rate as of October for college graduates who just graduated, by year from 2007 to 2011.

The Class of 2009 had an unemployment rate of 18% — twice as bad as the Class of 2007 had when they graduated. The employment to population ratio also shows how bad the market was:

Guess Who Cares For Young Adults When They Move Back Home

Heather Krause:

When my kids first left home, one of the things I enjoyed most was that I didn’t have to make any more school lunches. But today, in my home just as in millions of others, my 21- and 24-year-old kids are back, and I’m making lunches again. This is a big change from what I had expected my life to look like when my kids became young adults. Like many women of my generation, I invested a lot of time in parenting my children, with the unspoken assumption that they would enjoy the same independence and economic prosperity that I did as an adult. I expected that when they were in their 20s, I would be dining out, dropping off laundry at the dry cleaners and spending quiet weekends with my husband.

A record number of young adult children are living at home with their parents. In the U.S., 21.6 million young adults were living at home in 2012, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data. That’s 36 percent of all 18- to 31-year-olds, representing the highest rate since 1969, the first year that comparable data was available. This recently increasing trend began at the onset of the most recent recession in 2007. So I wondered: is this affecting how parents are spending their time, the way it has affected me? And are women affected differently than men?

It turns out it’s not just me. According to an analysis of data from the American Time Use Survey,1 which asks a nationally representative sample of people to record how they spend their time every day, parents with 18- to 31-old children living at home are spending at least eight hours per week caring for them. That’s causing real shifts in the time they spend relaxing. (Their sex lives are also being affected.) And women are spending significantly more time taking care of these young adult children than men are.

It’s not news that women do more work around the house than men, or that women have less leisure time than men. What’s new is that the period of care is getting longer, even if it’s mitigated by the increased responsibility and independence of these adult children.

How to Talk to Your Children About Mass Surveillance

Cory Doctorow:

There’s a popular forum on the Reddit online service called ‘‘Explain Like I’m Five,’’ in which redditors pose difficult and esoteric questions whose settled answers are beyond their comprehension, and ask their fellows to simplify these answers to the point where a five year old could follow them.

Parenting is a long-running game of ‘‘Explain Like I’m Five’’ (actually, it starts with ‘‘Explain like I’m a pre-verbal infant,’’ and I imagine it ends somewhere around ‘‘Explain like I’m a post-adolescent young adult’’). My daughter, Poesy, is six, and she’s turned me into a skilled player of ‘‘Explain Like I’m _______,’’ starting when she was about two and a half and found out about death and was consumed with existential terror. For about a year – a very long, very difficult year – I found myself explaining death and the circle of life, over and over again, to my kid. It’s the only time I’ve ever regretted being an atheist. I’m pretty sure that if I’d floated the idea of harps and robes and eternal paradise in a cloudy heavenscape, I could have avoided a lot of grief. But it was worth it, if only for the weird misunderstandings that my attempts engendered, like when we visited a friend’s farm and Poesy explained that the celery in the garden was made of dead people.

Since then, we’ve tackled a variety of substantial topics, from globalism, to climate change, to racism, to the Holocaust, to evolution, to the Enlightenment, to monarchism, to cosmology and quantum uncertainty. We talk about Ukrainian politics and we talk about global aviation logistics. We talk about Chinese labor migration and we talk about proportional systems of governance.

Enrollment in Student-Debt Forgiveness Programs Soars in 2014

Josh Mitchell:

Two federal programs that offer to wipe away huge accumulations of student debt have grown at a rapid clip this year, putting them among the government’s fastest-growing forms of financial assistance.

The Journal reported last week that enrollment in the plans—which allow students to rack up big debts and then forgive the unpaid balance after a set period—surged nearly 40% in the second half of 2013.

The growth of the programs hasn’t slowed. The number of borrowers in the income-based repayment programs climbed 24% between January through March to 1.63 million, the Education Department said. The amount of debt absorbed grew by 22% to $88 billion—now nearly a 10th of all outstanding federal student debt.

At that rate, the government took on more than $5.3 billion per month in potential student-debt liability in the first three months of the year.

Interest in the programs began to surge in the middle of last year as the Obama administration promoted the programs through emails to borrowers and on the Internet. In the nine months through March, enrollment is up a staggering 72%.

The programs’ popularity comes as top law schools have taken to advertising their own plans that offer to cover a graduate’s federal loan repayments until outstanding debt is forgiven—opening the way for free or greatly subsidized degrees at taxpayer expense.

Character a worthy focus for schools

Alan Borsuk:

“I made a lot of bad jokes about good people, just for a cheap laugh,” the athletic-looking junior from a suburban high school said. “Leave those jokes behind.”

That’s one step he can take to make his school better. And that was his commitment, made before more than 200 students from 14 high schools throughout southeastern Wisconsin at a “responsibility retreat” Thursday at Brookfield East High School.

At his school, another boy told the group, there’s too much sentiment “that giving up is accepted.” He wants to make next year, when he’ll be a senior, a time for demonstrating “a relentless work ethic.”

A lot of kids at her school think YOLO — you only live once — means you can do all sorts of stupid things, a girl told her peers. Recently, some students vandalized property near the school and embarrassed everyone. She wants her senior year to show “YOLO should be a positive thing, to try to make the best impact you can.”

I guessed that there would be a long, awkward silence when organizers of the morning-long event invited students voluntarily to step up to a microphone to name one positive change they would take next year. I was wrong. At the last part of the three-hour session, kids came forward in quick succession, three dozen in all. The line stopped only because time ran out.

You never did math in high school

Jeremy Kun:

As a teacher I encounter all of the typical kinds of students. There’s one kind of student I routinely encounter, usually in a freshman calculus course, that really boils my blood: the failing student who “has always been good at math.”

Oh it’s so annoying! And it’s even worse to hear because the stuff we teach in calculus isn’t really math either. The irony is so thick in the air when a student says it I’m surprised I don’t cough. Invariably, they never actually understood the “math” they were always so good at. I don’t get angry because they don’t understand the material (indeed, that’s the point of the class!). I get mad because they have absorbed a message about what constitutes mathematics that is, at best, misguided.

Of course, the problem is deeper than a handful of students who accidentally say ironically stupid things. The problem is that American high school students are taught something named “math” for four years which is not even close to math.

What the office  has done  to American life

Nikil Saval:

But this white collar book: ah, there’s a book for the people; it is everybody’s book. … It is all about the new little man in the big world of the 20th century. It is about that little man and how he lives and what he suffers and what his chances are going to be; and it is also about the world he lives in, has to live, doesn’t want to live in. It is, as I said, going to be everybody’s book. For, in truth, who is not a little man?
—C. Wright Mills,  letter to his parents (1946)

In or around the year 1956, the percentage of American workers who were “white collar” exceeded the percentage that were blue collar for the first time. Although labor statistics had long foretold this outcome, what the shift meant was unclear, and little theoretical work had prepared anyone to understand it. In the preceding years, the United States had quickly built itself up as an industrial powerhouse, emerging from World War II as the world’s leading source of manufactured goods. Much of its national identity was predicated on the idea that it made things. But thanks in part to advances in automation, job growth on the shop floor had slowed to a trickle. Meanwhile, the world of administration and clerical work, and new fields like public relations and marketing, grew inexorably—a paperwork empire annexing whole swaths of the labor force, as people exchanged assembly lines for metal desks, overalls for gray-flannel suits.

A ‘Rebel’ Without a Ph.D.

Thomas Lin:

reeman Dyson — the world-renowned mathematical physicist who helped found quantum electrodynamics with the bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and others, devised numerous mathematical techniques, led the team that designed a low-power nuclear reactor that produces medical isotopes for research hospitals, dreamed of exploring the solar system in spaceships propelled by nuclear bombs, wrote technical and popular science books, penned dozens of reviews for The New York Review of Books, and turned 90 in December — is pondering a new math problem.

“There’s a class of problem that Freeman just lights up on,” said the physicist and computational biologist William Press, a longtime colleague and friend. “It has to be unsolved and well-posed and have something in it that admits to his particular kind of genius.” That genius, he said, represents a kind of “ingenuity and a spark” that most physicists lack: “The ability to see further in the mathematical world of concepts and instantly grasp a path to the distant horizon that’s the solution.”

Report: Too Much Regulation Is Hurting Scientists

Inside Higher Ed:

Faculty members in the sciences spend too long on burdensome administrative work, at the expense of their other, more meaningful duties, argues a report out today from the National Science Board. The report, called “Reducing Investigators’ Administrative Workload for Federally Funded Research,” is based on the work of the board’s Task Force on Administrative Burdens, which asked professors to identify through roundtable discussions and requests for information which federal and internal university procedures and requirements were the biggest drains on their time. Financial management, the grant proposal process, progress reports, institutional review boards, and layers of oversight related to working with animals all were common responses.

The paper acknowledges that some oversight is necessary, but says that regulations — once set — are not easily changed or lifted, and that “[principal investigators] at many institutions suggested that a culture of overregulation has emerged around federal research, which further increases their administrative workload.” The paper argues that such problems have been cited for years — including two Federal Demonstration Partnership surveys that found principal investigators spend 42 percent of their time on administrative tasks — but that failure to address them has resulted in “wasted” federal research dollars. “Escalating compliance requirements and inconsistent audit practices directly impact scientists and the time they have to perform research and train students and staff,” said Kelvin Droegemeier, board vice chairman and a member of the Task Force.