James Gallagher:

Mathematicians were shown “ugly” and “beautiful” equations while in a brain scanner at University College London.

The same emotional brain centres used to appreciate art were being activated by “beautiful” maths.

The researchers suggest there may be a neurobiological basis to beauty.

The likes of Euler’s identity or the Pythagorean identity are rarely mentioned in the same breath as the best of Mozart, Shakespeare and Van Gogh.

The study in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience gave 15 mathematicians 60 formula to rate.

One of the researchers, Prof Semir Zeki, told the BBC: “A large number of areas of the brain are involved when viewing equations, but when one looks at a formula rated as beautiful it activates the emotional brain – the medial orbito-frontal cortex – like looking at a great painting or listening to a piece of music.”

The more beautiful they rated the formula, the greater the surge in activity detected during the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans.

“Neuroscience can’t tell you what beauty is, but if you find it beautiful the medial orbito-frontal cortex is likely to be involved, you can find beauty in anything,” he said.

Matt Bruenig:

I see it often claimed that the high rate of child poverty in the US is a function of family composition. According to this view, the reason childhood poverty is so high is that there are too many unmarried parents and single mothers, and those kinds of families face higher rates of poverty. The usual upshot of this claim is that we can’t really do much about high rates of childhood poverty, at least insofar as we can’t force people to marry and cohabitate and such.

One big problem with this claim is that family composition in the US is not that much different from family compositions in the famed low-poverty social democracies of Northern Europe, but they don’t have anywhere near the rates of child poverty we have.

Michael McDonald

At a Dowling College campus on Long Island’s south shore, a fleet of unused shuttle buses sits in an otherwise empty parking lot. A dormitory is shuttered, as are a cafeteria, bookstore and some classrooms in the main academic building.

“There’s a lot of fear here,” said Steven Fournier, a senior who lived in the now-closed dorm for his first three years. “It’s not the same college I arrived at.”

Dowling, which got a failing grade for its financial resources from accreditors last month, epitomizes the growing plight of many small private colleges that depend almost entirely on tuition for revenue. It’s been five years since the recession ended and yet their finances are worsening. Soaring student debt, competition from online programs and poor job prospects for graduates are shrinking their applicant pools.

Richard Vedder:

Here’s a scary statistic about American higher-ed: more than 40 percent of college students don’t graduate. But that number hides enormous variations in drop-out behavior. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has issued a “state supplement” report filled with interesting statistics; Here are some:

Completion rates are vastly lower for part-time students relative to full-time ones;

Students attending private schools are more likely to graduate than those at public institutions;

Far more two-year public college students fail to complete their degree than successfully do so;

Interstate variations in completion rates are large;

Roughly 20 percent of those completing schools graduate from an institution different than the one they originally attended, although that proportion is lower at four-year schools;

Those entering colleges right out of high school are much more likely to get a degree in six years than those who wait to attend college;
Women are more likely to complete school then men.

Nikole Hannah-Jones:

Though James Dent could watch Central High School’s homecoming parade from the porch of his faded white bungalow, it had been years since he’d bothered. But last fall, Dent’s oldest granddaughter, D’Leisha, was vying for homecoming queen, and he knew she’d be poking up through the sunroof of her mother’s car, hand cupped in a beauty-pageant wave, looking for him.

So, at about 4:30 in the afternoon on October 18, Dent, age 64, made his way off the porch and to the curb along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in the West End of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Soon he could hear the first rumblings of the band.

There was a time, little more than a decade ago, when the Central High School homecoming parade brought out the city. The parade started in the former state capital’s lively downtown and seemed to go on for miles. The horns of one of the state’s largest marching bands, some 150 members strong, would bounce off the antebellum mansions along the streets. Revelers—young and old, black and white, old money and no money—crowded the sidewalks to watch the elaborate floats and cheer a football team feared across the region.

Central was not just a renowned local high school. It was one of the South’s signature integration success stories. In 1979, a federal judge had ordered the merger of the city’s two largely segregated high schools into one. The move was clumsy and unpopular, but its consequences were profound. Within a few years, Central emerged as a powerhouse that snatched up National Merit Scholarships and math-competition victories just as readily as it won trophies in football, track, golf. James Dent’s daughter Melissa graduated from Central in 1988, during its heyday, and went on to become the first in her family to graduate from college.

But on that sunlit day last October, as Dent searched for Melissa’s daughter in the procession coming into view, he saw little to remind him of that era. More caravan than parade, Central’s homecoming pageant consisted of a wobbly group of about 30 band members, some marching children from the nearby black elementary schools, and a dozen or so cars with handwritten signs attached to their sides. The route began in the predominantly black West End and ended a few blocks later, just short of the railroad tracks that divide that community from the rest of the city.

More: Share Six Words on Race & Education.

Related: Madison has long supported a wide variation in school demographics. The chart above, created from 2013-2014 Madison School District middle school demographic data, illustrates the present reality, with the largest middle school – near west side Hamilton – also featuring the smallest percentage (18.3%) low income population. Nearby Cherokee Middle School’s low income population exceeds 60%!

The Madison School District (600K PDF):

This is the fourth and final installment of the series of updates designed to keep the board informed during the 2014-15 MMSD budget development process. The first update reviewed the budget process, priorities, and expected revenues. The second update explained our goals for a school-based staffing process that was more responsive to the needs of each school and its students. The third and most recent update explained our vision for reallocating at least $500,000 from central office accounts to schools’ non-personnel budgets. This update is a follow-up on that vision.

Zero-Based Budget Development: Central Office Departments
Throughout the 2014-15 budget process, we have remained focused on MMSD’s Strategic Framework, which emphasizes the importance of the work being done at each school, particularly as it relates to the School Improvement Plans (SIPs). We recognize that schools must have the support and resources needed to successfully implement their SIPs. At the same time, however, we are also faced with the limitations of the current school funding situation, which creates a finite pool of resources available to the district.

A key benefit of a zero-based approach to budget development is that it enables us to examine current resource distribution, identify district priorities, and then realign resources to support those priorities and student learning. Because the work of the central office is designed around the schools, our goal was to identify opportunities for redistributing resources from the central office departments to the schools with a targeted amount of $500,000 – $1,000,000.

Taking a collaborative approach to the process, we met with the leaders of each central office department to thoroughly review their existing budgets and find areas to create better efficiencies. Through this process, we were also able to improve their resulting budgets by aligning their resources with their actual budgetary needs and creating a cleaner set of accounts for them to use during the 2014-15 fiscal year.

After several rounds of meetings, we successfully identified $1,000,000 in the central office budgets that was available to be repurposed. We reallocated from accounts for supplies, travel, substitutes and temporary staffing, equipment and consulting services. Of the $1,000,000 amount, half will be used to fund locally staff that were previously funded, partially or wholly, by Title I[M1]

Related: Madison Schools 2013-2014 budget charts, background & missing data.

Matthew DeFour on Madison School Board Member and Gubernatorial Candidate Mary Burke:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke said Tuesday that if elected, she would eliminate the new statewide voucher program and private school tax deduction in the next budget.

Burke, a Madison School Board member, previously said she didn’t support the statewide voucher program.

In response to a question at a Wispolitics.com luncheon at the Madison Club about what she would cut in the next state budget, Burke went further, calling statewide vouchers “a new entitlement program we frankly don’t need.” She also identified the private school tax deduction as something she would cut.

“I respect people’s choice in making that, but I don’t think we should be subsidizing that choice,” Burke said, referring to sending children to private schools.

Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign issued a statement in response to Burke’s comment.

“Gov. Walker believes every child, regardless of ZIP code, deserves access to a great education, and parents should have the right to choose the best educational environment for their children, whether it’s a public, private, charter or home school,” spokeswoman Alleigh Marre wrote in an email.

Both the tax deduction and the statewide voucher program were introduced in the 2013-15 budget signed by Walker.

Uppity Wisconsin on Mary Burke (October 2013):

o, yesterday, when Mary Burke finally made a promise and told the Wisconsin State Journal that, although she opposed Walker’s statewide expansion of vouchers, she nonetheless would do nothing to remove the statewide voucher program, jaws dropped throughout Wisconsin’s progressive community:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke said Monday she wouldn’t have expanded private school vouchers statewide, which Gov. Scott Walker did in this year’s state budget.

However, Burke said if elected she would keep the statewide program in place with a cap of 1,000 students and seek accountability for private schools receiving public funds in Milwaukee.

Vouchers a conservative entitlement program — John Skille

Elizabeth Warren’s Quiet Support for Public School Vouchers by Carrie Lucas:

If all goes right for Massachusetts Democrats in November, they will fill the seat once held by liberal lion Sen. Ted Kennedy with a school voucher supporter who has proposed radically reforming public education in America.

You won’t find a call for school vouchers on Elizabeth Warren’s campaign website. Education is listed first among the candidate’s top priorities, but the website sticks to safe, poll tested platitudes calling for “good public schools, good public universities, and good technical training” as the key to a having a competitive workforce.

Yet in her 2003 book, The Two Income Trap, Warren and co-author Amelia Warren Tyagi cite the traditional public schools system, in which children are assigned to a school based on their residence, as a key source of economic pressure for families with children. Warren and Tyagi call for system-wide reforms to break the link between where a child lives and where they go to school, and specifically make the case for a fully-funded voucher program that would enable children to attend any public school.

Sweden’s School Choice: Vouchers for All and “The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”.

Carl Straumsheim:

he Maryland Higher Education Commission is cracking down on institutions that provide distance education to students in the state. But the commission has a problem: It doesn’t know who those distance education providers are.

The commission last month fired off letters addressed to presidents and provosts of institutions that offer fully online programs (seen at the bottom of this article), asking them to self-report if they enroll students in Maryland.

“As of July 1, 2012, higher education institutions offering fully online education to Maryland residents must submit an application to register with the Maryland Higher Education Commission,” the letter reads. “A review of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System has revealed that in 2012 your institution offered fully online programs and enrolled Maryland residents. If any of your current students are Maryland residents and are enrolled in fully online programs, the aforementioned regulation applies to your institution.”

After explaining how Maryland regulates out-of-state providers, the letter presents them with three options: Confirm that the institution enrolls students in Maryland, then pay an annual registration fee of $1,000 and a bond valued at five times the average cost of tuition; confirm that the institution is interested in enrolling students in Maryland, and pay the same fee; or decline any interest in enrolling students in Maryland, thereby barring those students from enrolling altogether.

D.D. Guttenplan:

Besides his name and email address Richard C. Levin’s new black-and-white business cards contain just two short lines of type: “Coursera” and “CEO.” Mr. Levin, the former president of Yale University, was named head of the online education company late last month.

With seven million registered users and 25 million course enrollments to date Coursera is the largest provider of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. A for-profit company, its main rivals include Udacity, another commercial firm, and edX, a nonprofit backed by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But with its sole revenue stream coming from a small minority of students who enroll in its “Signature Track” — which charges a fee of around $50 to verify a student’s identity, and issues a certificate upon successful completion of the course — questions have been raised about how long its backers will have to wait to see a return on their investment.

In a recent interview, Mr. Levin predicted that the company would be “financially viable” within five years. He began by disagreeing with Andrew Ng, Coursera’s co-founder, who described Coursera as “a technology company.”

Orin Kerr:

I don’t find these suggestions very useful. First, don’t most schools already have these “new” courses? I’m most familiar with the curriculum where I teach, but we already have one or several courses in each of those named fields.

Second, I don’t see how the listed “problem-based” seminars are supposed to help. What legal issues do students study in their Word Peace class, and how does expertise in World Peace help students get jobs? Presumably students aren’t expected to practice World Peace law. And I assume no one expects that two-credit seminars will actually create world peace.

Third, if the problem with law schools is that students need these courses but don’t take them now, then the answer is to mandate these courses rather than simply offer them. At most schools, almost everything after the first year is an elective. Merely adding new electives that most students won’t take is at best a symbolic answer to the alleged problem.

Wisconsin State Journal:

First the good news: Reading scores in Wisconsin are improving.

The latest statewide test suggests 36.6 percent of students are proficient or advanced in reading, and 48.6 percent are proficient or advanced in math.

That’s up slightly from the previous year, with slow yet steady improvement over several years.

Let’s keep those scores going up.

Wisconsin also should stay committed to the higher state standards known as Common Core. Educators across Wisconsin have been preparing for Common Core for years. The Legislature wisely adjourned this spring without altering these important academic standards.

Common Core will make it much easier to compare the performance of Wisconsin students to their peers in other states and around the world. The state’s previous standards were vague and inadequately prepared students for college or career.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org.

John Ziker:

The days of the ivory tower are a distant memory. We may hear about them from our ancestors — our teachers’ teachers’ predecessors who lived in the days when social philosophers wrote voluminous comparative works and most teaching was done in small groups in the Socratic tradition. But my mentors also taught me to be wary of idealizing the past. Discrimination, sexism and exclusivity characterized those times. And the theories of human nature that social philosophers and historians expounded back then were biased as a result. No, the ivory tower is not some golden era to which academics are striving to return.

But one concept from those days of yore — the principle of academic freedom — remains hallowed in the minds of most scholars. Without academic freedom, it is likely that the spirit of inquiry and intellectual development would wither away under the ever-looming “bottom line.” Academic freedom is what keeps Homo academicans stomachs full and mental juices hot. Without academic freedom, higher education faculty would have all the drudgery without the satisfaction of discovery. We love what we do, and if we don’t, we get out.

Chris Stone

On 9 May 2013 I was stabbed in front of the US Embassy in Cairo. My attacker was a young college-educated Egyptian man who had come from his village that day to kill an American in “revenge over U.S. policies in the Middle East.” At the time, I was living in Egypt and conducting research as part of my sabbatical from Hunter College of the City University of New York where I teach Arabic. The day I was stabbed, I had come to the Embassy looking to have a translation of my marriage certificate authenticated so that my wife’s Egyptian residency permit might be renewed.

After the attack, a few Egyptian journalist friends wrote about the event, partly to rectify some of the early misreporting in the Egyptian press. The main shared goal of their articles, though, was to declare that my attacker could not have picked a less appropriate target, given my love of Arabic and Arab culture. These overly generous portrayals did not prevent me from asking myself very early on: was I really such an unsuitable target? Not that my attacker knew what I do for a living, but the thought crossed my mind that perhaps, someone out for revenge on US policy in the Arab and Islamic World after 11 September 2001 could do worse than inadvertently target a teacher of Arabic.

Gillian Tett:

A couple of decades ago Orin Starn, an American-based cultural anthropologist, went to Peru to conduct a study of a poor Andean community. It was a classic of the genre.

But since then Starn has made another important discovery: sometimes it is even more interesting to flip the lens and look at tribes in modern American life instead. He recently published a fascinating book on Tiger Woods, looking at golf as a cultural symbol. And as a self-styled “sport anthropologist”, who now works as professor at Duke University, North Carolina, he has also pondered the thorny question of lacrosse.

It is easy to see why. This week Bill Cohan, a banker turned journalist who has previously written exposés on Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns, published an account of a 2006 scandal about rape allegations against Duke University’s male lacrosse team. And after reading his exhaustive, fascinating tale, The Price of Silence, the only thing that surprises me is that there are not more academics working in this nascent discipline of sports anthropology, given how much material there is to explore.

Richard Perez-Pena:

Marilyn Ferreira has solved her share of financial puzzles — running a business, buying a home and arranging a mortgage, raising six children as a single mother. But none of that compared to the challenge of understanding the cost of sending her brood to college.

She and her daughter Kelsey are in the thick of it now, weighing Kelsey’s admissions and financial aid offers from various colleges before the May 1 deadline, trying to make meaningful comparisons and just hoping they aren’t blindsided by something they missed. She has an important advantage in making sense of the terminology and the numbers: a lot of experience, with two sons now in college and a daughter already graduated.

“But it’s still confusing to me, probably the most confusing thing I’ve had to deal with,” said Ms. Ferreira, 48, a dance instructor who lives midway between Boston and Providence, R.I. “I couldn’t have figured it out on my own the first time, and I’m still not sure I could.”

It becomes clear over a long conversation that she does not understand how colleges define basic, crucial terms like “need,” “aid” or “need-blind admission,” and she does not know that those definitions vary from place to place. Her confusion is distressingly common, as demonstrated in studies, surveys and interviews with students and parents.

An array of policy analysts from think tanks to the White House say things should change. “It’s a ridiculously complicated system, if you can even call it a system, and a lot of people don’t get it,” said Sandy Baum, a research professor at George Washington University’s graduate education school, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a leading expert on college pricing. “If you put five aid offers from different colleges together, they’re all different, and it’s very, very difficult to compare. That problem could be solved.”

Related: Questions About Financial Aid?

Shaila Dewan:

For rent and utilities to be considered affordable, they are supposed to take up no more than 30 percent of a household’s income. But that goal is increasingly unattainable for middle-income families as a tightening market pushes up rents ever faster, outrunning modest rises in pay.

The strain is not limited to the usual high-cost cities like New York and San Francisco. An analysis for The New York Times by Zillow, the real estate website, found 90 cities where the median rent — not including utilities — was more than 30 percent of the median gross income.

In Chicago, rent as a percentage of income has risen to 31 percent, from a historical average of 21 percent. In New Orleans, it has more than doubled, to 35 percent from 14 percent. Zillow calculated the historical average using data from 1985 to 2000.

Nationally, half of all renters are now spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, according to a comprehensive Harvard study, up from 38 percent of renters in 2000. In December, Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan declared “the worst rental affordability crisis that this country has ever known.”

Howard Blume:

A popular Los Angeles high school science teacher has been suspended after students turned in projects that appeared dangerous to administrators, spurring a campaign calling for his return to the classroom.

Students and parents have rallied around Greg Schiller after his suspension in February from the downtown Cortines School of Visual & Performing Arts. Supporters have organized a rally on his behalf at the campus for Thursday, gathered hundreds of signatures on a petition calling for his reinstatement and set up a social media page.

Schiller was ordered to report daily to a district administrative office pending an investigation after two students turned in science-fair projects that were designed to shoot small projectiles.

One project used compressed air to propel a small object but it was not connected to a source of air pressure, so it could not have been fired. (In 2012, President Obama tried out a more powerful air-pressure device at a White House Science Fair that could launch a marshmallow 175 feet.)

Another project used the power from an AA battery to charge a tube surrounded by a coil. When the ninth-grader proposed it, Schiller told him to be more scientific, to construct and test different coils and to draw graphs and conduct additional analysis, said his parents, who also are Los Angeles teachers.

Jonathan Keats:

IN THE early 1990s, 14 computer scientists at the University of Maryland were sharing an 80-megabyte hard drive. The drive was often overloaded, with expendable files taking up space in neglected sub-directories. Finding anything was like blindly reaching along all the branches of an overgrown tree.

There had to be a better way, thought departmental professor Ben Shneiderman. So he wrote a six-line algorithm that visualised the drive as a rectangle. Vertical divisions split the rectangle into smaller ones, representing directories, which then subdivided horizontally to show subdirectories. Each of the smallest rectangles corresponded to a megabyte of storage space, so free space was visible at a glance.

He called his invention a “treemap”, and it was adopted by computer labs around the world. It soon found other uses, such as in an interactive chart of stocks and shares, still popular today.

These hierarchical treemaps “epitomize the recent growth of information visualization”, writes Manuel Lima in The Book of Trees: Visualizing branches of knowledge. And as big data engulfs labs and lives, the need for such powerful visualisations will only increase.

Tara Bahrampour:

When Paul Vaughn, an economics major, was in his third year at George Mason University, he decided to save money by moving off campus. He figured that skipping the basic campus meal plan, which costs $1,575 for 10 meals a week each semester, and buying his own food would make life easier.

But he had trouble affording the $50 a week he had budgeted for food and ended up having to get two jobs to pay for it. “Almost as bad as the hunger itself is the stress that you’re going to be hungry,” said Vaughn, 22, now in his fifth year at GMU. “I spend more time thinking ‘How am I going to make some money so I can go eat?’ and I focus on that when I should be doing homework or studying for a test.”

A problem known as “food insecurity” — a lack of nutritional food — is not typically associated with U.S. college students. But it is increasingly on the radar of administrators, who report seeing more hungry students, especially at schools that enroll a high percentage of youths who are from low-income families or are the first generation to attend college.

Student Union of Michigan:

On April 1, 2014, the University of Michigan announced on The University Record that its Chief Financial Officer Tim Slottow would become the new president of the for-profit University of Phoenix. It sounded so ridiculous that even Michael Proppe, the president of the Central Student Government (CSG) and someone who we don’t usually see eye to eye with, was convinced it was an April fools joke. What could the CFO of a public university like the University of Michigan possibly know about running a for-profit private university like the University of Phoenix? Wouldn’t it be hard for him to adjust to the logic of a for-profit (recently probed by the Senate) after spending 12 years working at an ostensibly public institution? If Slottow’s tenure at the University of Michigan is any indication, the answer is a resounding “No.”

The institution whose finances Tim Slottow was charged with managing is no longer public in any meaningful sense of the word. During Slottow’s tenure as CFO at the University of Michigan from 2002 to 2014, one year of lower division undergraduate in-state tuition more than doubled, increasing from $6,395 to $12,948. If tuition had kept pace with inflation it would be about $8,346. Furthermore, the University has radically reshaped the student body, privileging wealthier students whose families can afford exorbitant out-of-state tuition while pricing out students from lower class backgrounds and Black, Latin@, and Native American students. There’s now more students at U-M whose parents make over $200,000 that there are students whose parents make less than $75,000.* Rich students want fancy facilities, so the university has dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to expensive, unnecessary construction projects. The University now brings in over $1 billion in revenue each year from students’ tuition (just under half of which are paid for with loans).

Slottow’s management of the University’s finances, however, must have been even more attractive to the University of Phoenix’s board of trustees. His accomplishments are duly noted in the University’s press release:

Alan Borsuk

Jean Maier says she now realizes two of the important qualities needed to make progress in dealing with Milwaukee’s reading crisis:

Humility and tenacity.

One piece of good news is that she has seen them in action in places such as Gwen T. Jackson School, 2121 W. Hadley St., a Milwaukee public school where improvement in reading achievement is an urgent need. (How urgent? Scores improved this year so only 84.7% of students were rated below proficient in reading in state test results released last week.)

Another — and I hope broader — piece of good news is that the carefully constructed (which can be read as “slow aborning”) efforts of Milwaukee Succeeds are entering the action stage. In recent weeks, I visited three pilot programs associated with the everyone-at-the-table campaign by civic leaders to improve the lot of children in the city.

I liked what I saw, in terms of the projects. I was sobered by the depth of the problem, both when I watched kids struggle with reading basics and when I looked at the new wave of test results. But I did feel like a lot of care, commitment and intelligence is going into finding more effective ways of helping kids with reading. That is one of several major focal points for the Milwaukee Succeeds effort.

Two of the Milwaukee Succeeds pilots I visited focused on tutoring. There are a lot of people who want to help kids improve their reading, including volunteers ranging from college students to retirees. But, frankly, there have been two big problems with tutoring efforts citywide.

One is that they focus too much on kids who are actually doing OK and too little on those who really need help. The Milwaukee Succeeds folks have put together compelling data to show this.

Ann Larson:

WWhen I enrolled in the PhD Program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center to study Composition and Rhetoric, I was idealistic about the future of the discipline and my own place in it. I believed that Comp and Rhet (as I came to call it) was asking crucial questions that were central to the mission of higher education in America. I still believe that. But, after working in the field in a number of full-time and part-time positions over several years, my idealism has turned to despair at what I now regard as Composition’s great shame. It has left me to doubt that there is a place in the field for me and for many others like me.

As anyone who teaches college writing is probably aware, the majority of such courses are taught by contingent faculty, including adjuncts and graduate students. These workers usually receive low wages and few benefits. (Some long-term CUNY adjuncts receive health care, but even this small benefit has recently come under attack.) This is not just a local problem. Recent data shows that adjuncts now earn a national average salary of just $2,758 per course, which means teaching eight to ten courses per year results in a salary of $22,064 and $27,500. These are poverty and near-poverty wages. More recently, Josh Boldt, who compiles information on the pay rates and overall treatment of adjunct faculty on his Adjunct Project blog, has confirmed in chilling fashion what we already know: many adjuncts have no access to benefits, no role in university governance, and are rarely told if they will have classes to teach from one semester to the next.

Playbook
 International Student Assessment (PISA) 1MB PDF.

The Wall Street Journal

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System has a well-deserved rap as a taxpayer drain. So to rehabilitate its image, the pension fund has produced a “study” purporting that public-worker pensions are California’s biggest jobs generator. As if Californians needed more reason to doubt the pension behemoth’s math.

According to the 14-page analysis, “CalPERS benefit payments and investments in California are essential to the state’s economy” (Calpers’s bolded emphasis). For instance, Calpers “supports” 1.5 million jobs in the state. That figure includes every job at a California business in which Calpers invests including the 664 companies in its public equity portfolio like Google, GOOGL -1.63% Apple AAPL -0.74% and Walt Disney. DIS -0.65% Who knew that the public pension fund was essential to the survival of so many successful California public companies?

Calpers also notes that “the economic impact of CalPERS benefits far exceed initial taxpayer contributions.” Lo, the fund claims to return $10.85 in “economic activity” for every dollar taxpayers contribute, which would make public pensions the best government stimulus of all time.

Lindsay Gellman:

Not long after Molly Patterson tossed her cap in the air with her fellow Yale College Class of 2013 graduates, she found herself in a new and unfamiliar city far from the East Coast where she grew up.

Instead of returning home to Reston, Va., the 22-year-old had relocated to Houston for a chemical-engineering position at a large oil-and-gas company.

Though she worked with a real-estate agent through her employer’s staff-relocation service, Ms. Patterson also spoke with Houston natives and scoured real-estate sites like Zillow.com Z -6.97% and Trulia.com to get the lay of the land.

To meet people and begin to put down roots, she quickly joined a local weekly trivia-night group and signed up to audit a Chinese-language course at nearby Rice University.

Carolyn Geer:

Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, 54 years old, didn’t have a lot of money growing up. What she did have was a role model in her father, Charles Schwab, who founded the brokerage firm that bears his name in a two-room office in 1971. “My dad was a struggling businessman until I was in my 20s,” she says.

As a teenager she worked (baby sitting, a paper route, secretary) and she saved—opening a savings account, moving back home after college to scrape together her first and last month’s rent and to buy herself a bed and a dresser.

And she is still working, now to impart the good money habits she learned first hand to those not fortunate enough to have role models like “Chuck.”

It’s no secret that financial illiteracy is rampant in the U.S., where less than one-third of the population can correctly answer three simple questions on interest rates, inflation and diversification, according to a study by Annamaria Lusardi of the George Washington University School of Business. But the jury is still out on what, if anything, to do about it.

Michael Bernick:

It just matters that you go.
 
 This month, high school seniors across America are receiving college decision letters of acceptance and rejection. Many of these students, and their parents, will think that where they go to college will significantly affect their employment future.
 
 They think wrong. Today, whether you go to college retains some importance in your employment options. But where you go to college is of almost no importance. Whether your degree, for example, is from UCLA or from less prestigious Sonoma State matters far less than your academic performance and the skills you can show employers.

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

Among the many excellent benefits available to MTI members, guaranteed by MTI’s various Collective Bargaining Agreements, is the additional worker’s compensation benefit, i.e., benefits greater than those provided by Wisconsin Statutes.

Wisconsin Statutes provide a worker’s compensation benefit for absence caused by a work-related injury or illness, but the benefit does not begin until the 4th day of absence, and has a maximum weekly financial benefit.
MTI’s Collective Bargaining Agreements provide that one absent from work because of a work- related injury or illness will receive his/her full wage, and that it begins on day one of the absence. Further, MTI’s negotiated benefits for worker’s compensation are not limited by Wisconsin Statutes, i.e., there is no maximum. MTI’s Contracts also provide that one’s earned sick leave is not consumed by absence caused by a work-related illness or injury.

Although MTI is working to preserve this benefit, it is at risk due to Governor Walker’s Act 10.

Ian Johnson:

In December, China stunned the world when the most widely used international education assessment revealed that Shanghai’s schools now outperform those of any other country—not only in math and science but also in reading. Some education experts have attributed these results to recent reforms undertaken by the Chinese government. Jiang Xueqin has been active in Chinese education since 1998, when as a Yale undergraduate he taught for six months at one of the top high schools in China, Beida Fuzhong, or the Affiliated High School of Peking University.

A Canadian citizen whose parents emigrated from China, Jiang, who is thirty-seven, helped establish an experimental high-school program in Shenzhen in 2008 and now works for Tsinghua Fuzhong, Tsinghua University’s Affiliated High School. He just published a book in China called Creative China about his experiences in Chinese public schools. I spoke to him in Beijing in late March about the future of education in China.

Susan Headden (PDF):

PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHING is a profession in transition.
Already the largest occupation in the United States, it is expanding faster than the nation’s student population. Teachers of color are entering the profession at twice the rate of white teachers, reversing an exodus after civil rights victories opened many other doors to African Americans. And women are again entering the profession in greater numbers after years of bypassing the field for other opportunities.1

But what may be most significant—to students, schools, and the nation—is that teachers today are younger and markedly less experienced than a generation ago.2 Experts consider teachers with five or fewer years of experience to be still learning their craft.3 By the end of the last decade, more than a quarter of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers were in that category, compared to only about 17 percent in the late 1980s. Back then, the most common teacher in America was a 15-year veteran; two decades later, she was a first-year neophyte. 4 “The flow of new teachers,” says Richard Ingersoll, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education who studies teacher trends, “has become a flood.”

Although the recent recession pushed back the tide somewhat, and has likely raised the level of experience, the sheer number of novices in public school teaching has serious financial, structural, and educational consequences for public education—straining budgets, disrupting school cultures and, most significantly, depressing student achievement.

Yet there has been scant discussion of the phenomenon by education policymakers. “I don’t know why everybody isn’t talking about this,” says Gail McGee, manager of new teacher induction for the Houston Independent School District. “It overwhelms me. Everybody, everywhere, is single-mindedly focused on the achievement gap, and nobody is spending any time talking about what potentially could be one of the biggest underlies of why we have one.”6

David Gurliacci:

Known as a P-TECH model school, the six-year academy is a collaboration with IBM, Norwalk Public Schools and Norwalk Community College.

Norwalk Early College Academy (NECA) will serve grades 9 to 14 and enable students to graduate with both a high school diploma and a no-cost Associate in Applied Science degree that will put graduates on the path to a good job.

Created by IBM and partners, P-TECH schools are innovative public schools that bring together the best elements of high school, college, and career. There are no tests or screening required for admission.

The new school in Norwalk will be located at the Norwalk High School, and graduates will be first in line for jobs at IBM.

“As Connecticut industry and government realign for the 21st Century, it has become clear that there is a skills gap in our national and state economies,” Governor Malloy said.

“However, Connecticut is home to many industries that will be growth and innovation sectors over the next 10 to 20 years, and we must prepare our students with the skills they need to succeed in that workforce.

Bryan Alexander

American higher education now seems to be recovering at last from the 2008 financial crisis. Some states are increasing their support for public universities and colleges. Backlash against the impact of budget cuts seems to have the idea of austerity down a peg, if not discredited it entirely, which might free up more budgetary room for governmental support of education. On the private side, institutional endowments are finally rising after years of stagnation and decline. Domestically, American college graduates still enjoy higher lifetime earnings than those with only high school experience. Internationally, the number of students traveling to study in the United States continues to grow.

But what if these cheerful data paint an inaccurate picture? What if a battery of other data points, driven by powerful forces, exerts pressure in the opposite direction, pushing American colleges and universities into contraction? Much like “peak car,” the demand for higher education may have reached an upper point, and started to decline. Like peak oil or peak water, it’s becoming more expensive and problematic to meet demand. As a thought experiment, let us examine these forces and consider this possible scenario under the header: Peak Higher Education.

Enrico Gnaulti:

Rates of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are not creeping up so much as leaping up. New numbers just released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that one in 68 children now has a diagnosis of ASD—a 30 percent increase in just two years. In 2002, about one in 150 children was considered autistic and in 1991 the figure was one in 500.

The staggering increase in cases of ASD should raise more suspicion in the medical community about its misdiagnosis and overdiagnosis than it does. Promoting early screening for autism is imperative. But, is it possible that the younger in age a child is when professionals screen for ASD—especially its milder cases—the greater the risk that a slow-to-mature child will be misperceived as autistic, thus driving the numbers up?

The science stacks up in favor of catching and treating ASD earlier because it leads to better outcomes. Dr. Laura Schreibman, who directs the Autism Intervention Research Program at the University of California, San Diego embodies the perspective of most experts when she says, “Psychologists need to advise parents that the ‘wait-and-see’ approach is not appropriate when ASD is expected. Delaying a diagnosis can mean giving up significant gains of intervention that have been demonstrated before age six.”

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez:

Southern California researchers are finding that foundations, set up to raise money for public schools, are reintroducing funding inequality that was supposed to be eliminated back in the 1970s, when the California Supreme Court ruled on the Serrano vs. Priest case.

“The court said spending needs to be equitable between school districts, you can’t have Beverly Hills spending twice as much as the other guys, per pupil, because a child’s education should not be dependent on the wealth of the area in which they happen to live,” said Cal State Fullerton professor Sarah Hill.

She and two colleagues have compiled information from about 1,500 education foundations and other fundraising groups such as booster clubs and PTAs, along with Internal Revenue Service data, to create a database Hill said is the first of its kind.

“We’re doing more of a sophisticated analysis looking at how wealth matters for which school districts are able to raise money. How demographics matter,” she said.

Some Northern California public school foundations are raising additional funds of about $2,000 per student. Researchers say that figure is a significant addition to the roughly $8,000 per student the state gives public schools each year. California’s current level of per pupil spending is the second lowest in the country.

Adam Liptak:

It was the last Monday in June, and the Supreme Court had just issued its latest decision on affirmative action. The debate was starting about how much the court had restricted the use of race in college admissions.

But Edward Blum, the legal entrepreneur who had orchestrated the case, wasted no time. He made a prediction that sounded a little like a threat.

“Those universities that continue using race-based affirmative action,” he said, “will likely find themselves embroiled in costly and polarizing litigation.”

It is now almost a year later. Admissions letters have just gone out, and there is no particular reason to think the court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas affected how students were selected. And the lawsuits Mr. Blum predicted have not materialized.

Abigail Fisher, who was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin, said her race was held against her.Justices Step Up Scrutiny of Race in College EntryJUNE 24, 2013
There are reasons for that, Mr. Blum told me last week. One is that it is hard to find plaintiffs willing to call attention to having been rejected by a prestigious institution, to blame that rejection on race discrimination and to persevere through years of litigation.

Alyssa Abkowitz:

Chinese businessman Li Sheng is looking for a $900,000, four-bedroom home in Australia, where he hopes his two children will someday attend college. At this point, neither child has finished grade school—one is still in diapers—but Mr. Li hopes to buy a family home in Melbourne in the next year.

Mr. Li, who lives in Harbin, an industrial city in northern China, sees the purchase as a good investment in both his real-estate portfolio and his children’s future. While China has plenty of universities, he and other affluent parents say they want their children to experience life abroad, where the educational system is less rigid. “In Chinese families, the parents make the choice for their kids,” Mr. Li, 40, says. When his children get older, “I don’t want to make choices for them. I want them to do it themselves.”

In an effort to increase the likelihood of their children studying abroad, a growing group of Chinese buyers is snapping up high-end real estate in college towns around the world. Some Chinese buyers are using the properties to meet the universities’ residency requirements. Luxury homes also offer their children an upscale alternative to dorm life. Most important, many hope that real-estate purchases will help pay the costly university tuition.

Center on Reinventing Public Education, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Tennessee’s state-run Achievement School District (ASD) has again received high marks on its implementation of the portfolio strategy for managing and improving schools. New York City, Denver, and the Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans also continue to lead among districts implementing these reforms.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington has released the new rankings as part of its work supporting a national network of over 40 portfolio school systems.

CRPE’s Portfolio Implementation Snapshot Tool rates each school system’s progress on portfolio reforms. The twice-yearly assessments are based on interviews with district or other system leaders and measure implementation progress on the strategy’s seven key components: good options and choices for all families, school autonomy, pupil-based funding, a talent-seeking strategy, new sources of support for schools, performance-based accountability, and extensive public engagement.

Districts can use the online tool to track progress (or lack of it) and see how they line up with best-in-class portfolio practices and other districts in the Portfolio School District Network. “These ratings show cities where they are and where they want to be,” says Christine Campbell, CRPE’s policy director. “The cities that invest the time in these interviews and bravely open themselves up for review are making a big step forward, whether they are currently at the top or the bottom of this list. In six months’ time, some of those just getting started will see big gains because they are becoming strategic about their work and actively making use of the network’s resources.”

Marni Bromberg & Christi Theokas (PDF):

Nationally, there are 61,250 students of color and 60,300 students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds who perform among the top 25 percent of all students in reading and math at the beginning of high school.

Many high-achieving students of color and students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, however, leave high school with lower AP exam rates, lower SAT/ACT scores, and lower GPAs than their high-achieving white and more advantaged peers — a reality that influences their choices beyond high school.

Schools can take action to better serve these students. Interviews with the principal of one successful school and with high-achieving students from around the country provide insight on what practitioners can do.

Related: “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!

Two of the most popular — and most insidious — myths about academically gifted kids is that “they’re all rich, white kids” and that, no matter what they experience in school, “they’ll do just fine.” Even in our own district, however, the hard data do not support those assertions.

When the District analyzed dropout data for the five-year period between 1995 and 1999, they identified four student profiles. Of interest for the present purpose is the group identified as high achieving. Here are the data from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Report from May, 2000:

Charles Kenny:

It is college acceptance season, and letters with financial aid offers attached are dropping on doormats nationwide. Many students and an even greater number of parents are facing the sticker shock associated with tertiary education. As college prices rise—the average annual cost hit $18,497 in 2010-11, according to the National Center for Education Statistics—the question inevitably arises: Is it worth it? For the average student in the U.S. and worldwide, the answer is affirmative: Education remains a fantastic investment for individuals. The tougher question is whether education at all levels is such a great investment for societies as a whole.

In the U.S., education leads to higher wages. Median weekly earnings in 2013 were $472 for someone with less than a high school diploma, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number rises to $1,108 for those with a bachelor’s degree and $1,714 for those with a professional degree such as an MBA or J.D. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper suggested that the educational payoff for “marginal” college students—the ones who might not attend if it weren’t for government support, for example—may be a lot lower. Still, for most students, the high cost of college is well worth it.

That’s true worldwide as well. Recent estimates (PDF) for Ghana, for example, suggest that each additional year a child stays in school translates into an average annual income 7 percent higher. In China, that figure is 12 percent.

Q&A with Christopher Chatham:

It’s happens to all of us: times when we simply cannot stop ourselves mid-action, whether running a yellow (or red) light, making an inappropriate comment, or reaching for our buzzing phone during dinner. Most of the time, adults can overcome these impulses. Children, however, are notoriously different – most of the time seemingly incapable of curbing impulsive responses. New research suggests the problem is not an inability to stop but rather that they lack awareness of their environment.

Our ability to proactively monitor our surroundings is what allows us to stop mid-action, says Yuko Munakata of the University of Colorado Boulder, who will presenting new work at the CNS conference on Tuesday. She, along with Nicolas Chevalier of the University of Edinburgh and Christopher Chatham of Brown University, tested this idea in 7- to 9-year-olds, seeing if monitoring their environments improved their ability to subsequently stop behaviors compared to simply telling them to stop.

Chatham, who will be co-chairing the session at the CNS meeting about response inhibition, talked with CNS about this new research and how it fits into the big picture of differences between children’s and adults’ capabilities.

Harold Wilde:

College presidents—and I was one for 22 years—have few more thankless jobs than procuring (and that’s the right word) commencement speakers.

The expectation of graduates and their families is that a big-time speaker will be there to put the cherry on top of the sundae that was their college experience (and all those tuition dollars). So expectations are high. The ideal commencement speaker is a household name, has landed on the moon, won a Nobel Prize and a few NBA championships, was on the cover of last week’s People magazine … and will bring front-page publicity to the school (like George Marshall’s announcement of the Marshall Plan at Harvard’s 1947 commencement), forever glorifying their graduation day.

This is a fantasy, and the commencement speaker may be a tradition that long ago outlived its usefulness. But the college president, sharing the platform with the speaker, has no choice but to be personally involved. Few mistakes on his or her watch will be more visible, or more challenging to avoid, than the wrong commencement speaker.

Start with the constituents. At many schools, the students are polled every year on their preferred list of speakers. The ones you’ve heard of (probably less than half, e.g., the rap artists) either carry a speakers bureau charge of $25,000 to $100,000— or will cost you even more in the support you lose from your biggest donors. And, anyway, you have no money to pay for a commencement speaker. “The honor of the occasion, receiving an honorary degree, it should be enough.” Right! That may work in the Ivy League and at flagship state universities, but not at 3,400 other institutions across the country.

The Hechinger Report:

Here’s a modest test result to bolster the argument of those who say the American educational system isn’t so terrible. On a new creative problem-solving test taken by students in 44 countries and regions, U.S. 15-year-olds scored above the international average and rank at number 18 in the world. That’s much better than the below-average performance of U.S. students on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) reading and math tests conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“We think teaching through problem solving is already more developed in the US than in other countries,” said the OECD’s Pablo Zoido, in explaining why US students have higher problem-solving scores than expected.

Still, Asian countries and regions dominate the top 10 spots in creative problem solving, with Singapore, Korea and Japan taking first, second and third place. Canada, Australia and Finland were the only non-Asian nations to make it into the top 10. Shanghai, which topped the PISA charts in math and reading, was relatively weaker in problem solving at number 6.

Pew Research:

More moms are staying home: The share of mothers who do not work outside the home has risen over the past decade, reversing a long-term decline in stay-at-home mothers. (In the U.S. today, 71% of all mothers work outside the home.) Two-thirds are “traditional” married stay-at-home mothers with working husbands, but a growing share is unmarried.

2 Americans say a parent at home is best: Despite the fact that most mothers in the U.S. work at least part time, 60% of Americans say children are better off when a parent stays home to focus on the family, while 35% say they are just as well off when both parents work outside the home.

Can someone please tell me why this isn't more informative than the unemployment rate? pic.twitter.com/SaZoaDIQmG

— Amir Sufi (@profsufi) April 9, 2014

Related: Madison’s planned $39,500,000 fall property tax increase referendum.

Minding The Campus:

s students and their families rethink the value of the liberal arts, defenders of traditional education are understandably ambivalent. On the one hand, the diminished stature of the liberal arts seems long overdue, and this critical reevaluation might lead to thoughtful reform. On the other, this reevaluation might doom the liberal arts to irrelevance. To that end, Minding the Campus asked a list of distinguished thinkers a straightforward question: should we be unhappy that the liberal arts are going down? Here are responses from Heather Mac Donald, Thomas Lindsay, and Samuel Goldman.

Heather Mac Donald, Manhattan Institute

We shouldn’t only be unhappy if the liberal arts are “going down.” We should be ashamed. Our highest duty as a civilization is to keep alive those works from the past that gave birth to our present freedoms and that constitute the most profound expressions of what it means to be human.

I see no evidence that a “critical evaluation” of the liberal arts is underway, beyond an ignorant flight on the part of some college students towards more allegedly marketable majors. This idea of a job-ready major is a fallacy; outside of vocational training and some select STEM fields, few majors, whether economics or philosophy, have a direct connection to most jobs.

But while the marketable major is an illusion, there is no question that the conceit is driving many students away from humanistic study. The irony is that colleges are themselves wholly responsible for endangering those fields that were once their very raison d’être. For it is their sky-high tuitions that are fueling this migration into purportedly more bankable fields and their adolescent politicization of the humanities that is failing to give students a reason to look back.

Tuition levels are the result of universities’ own decision-making–above all, their insatiable drive to expand their student services bureaucracy. No branch of that endlessly growing bureaucracy is more senseless and self-indulgent than the diversity superstructure, founded as it is on a demonstrable lie: that colleges are bastions of discrimination against minorities and females.

Sue Shellenbarger:

Those early childhood memories, which are so quick to fade, are important in influencing decisions in later life. WSJ’s Sue Shellenbarger reports on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.

What you can remember from age 3 may help improve aspects of your life far into adulthood.

Children who have the ability to recall and make sense of memories from daily life—the first day of preschool, the time the cat died—can use them to better develop a sense of identity, form relationships and make sound choices in adolescence and adulthood, new research shows.

While the lives of many youngsters today are heavily documented in photos and video on social media and stored in families’ digital archives, studies suggest photos and videos have little impact. Parents play a bigger role in helping determine not just how many early memories children can recall, but how children interpret and learn from the events of their earliest experiences.

“Our personal memories define who we are. They bond us together,” says Robyn Fivush, a psychology professor at Emory University in Atlanta and an author of dozens of studies on the topic. Children whose parents encourage reminiscing and storytelling about daily events show better coping and problem-solving skills by their preteens, and fewer symptoms of depression, research shows.

Douglas Belkin & Caroline Porter:

More companies are entering partnerships with colleges to help design curricula, as state universities seek new revenue and industry tries to close a yawning skills gap. Doug Belkin reports on Lunch Break. Photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick for The Wall Street Journal.

The University of Maryland has had to tighten its belt, cutting seven varsity sports teams and forcing faculty and staff to take furlough days. But in a corner of the campus, construction workers are building a dormitory specifically designed for a new academic program.

Many of the students who live there will be enrolled in a cybersecurity concentration funded in part by Northrop Grumman Corp. NOC -0.35% The defense contractor is helping to design the curriculum, providing the computers and paying part of the cost of the new dorm.

Such partnerships are springing up from the dust of the recession, as state universities seek new revenue and companies try to close a yawning skills gap in fast-changing industries.

Kingsley R. Browne:

Implicit in the materials for this conference is the assumption that any gap that exists between men and women in the workplace (at least if the gap seems to disfavor women) should be eliminated. The question is asked, “how can this gap be explained and rectified?,” implying that “rectification” should follow irrespective of how the gap is explained.

There are many statistical disparities between the sexes in our world, but only some become the subject of widespread concern. Ones that are perceived as favoring men are labeled “gaps,” while those that favor women are simply facts. Outside the workplace, men are arguably disadvantaged in a variety of arenas, whether in terms of health and longevity, crime and violence, domestic relations, or education. In the workplace, men are far more likely than women to be killed and to work long hours. None of these disparities is generally viewed as a “gap” deserving of intervention, however. Men earn a disproportionate number of Ph.Ds in some fields, while women earn a disproportionate number in others. Only the former set of disparities, however, is typically viewed as a “gap.”

Neil Munshi:

The Illinois legislature has passed a plan to overhaul two of the funds in the Chicago pension system, by far the most underfunded of any large US city.

The move is an important first step toward shoring up the combined $27bn unfunded liability the city and its school district have racked up after years of the government failing to pay its share. The massive liability has caused the city to suffer multiple credit rating downgrades in recent years.

The bill now moves to the desk of Governor Pat Quinn, who has not indicated whether he will sign it into law.

The reform addresses the pension funds for municipal employees and labourers, which are 37.6 per cent and 56.3 per cent funded, respectively. The bill would increase the funding levels to 90 per cent by 2055 through benefit cuts and increases in employee contributions.

Erin Richards & Kevin Crowe:

Reading and math proficiency for students attending private, mostly religious schools in Milwaukee with the help of taxpayer-funded vouchers ticked up in 2013 from 2012, according to the latest state standardized test score results.

On average, students in Milwaukee’s private-school voucher program still performed lower than students in the city’s traditional public school system.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released fall test score data for the taxpayer-funded private voucher schools on Tuesday, one day after allowing media to review the fall 2013 state test score results for public schools.

In all, reading and math achievement on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination for both the public and private voucher schools, especially in Milwaukee, continued to be low. That’s due in part to the state raising the bar for what’s considered a proficient score on the state test.

The WKCE will be replaced next year by a new, computer-based assessment in reading and math that is aligned to national standards and will allow for better comparisons of achievement between states.

Another issue that has cropped up is an increasing number of voucher-school families opting their children out of taking the state exams altogether — a legal option, but one seemingly at odds with the statewide push toward more transparency for schools.

Gov. Scott Walker signed two bills into law Tuesday that will bring more accountability to the private schools receiving taxpayer money.

Meanwhile, the latest state test results showed:

About 16% of Milwaukee voucher students who took the state test met or exceeded the bar for proficiency in math, and about 12% did the same in reading.

Much more on the oft criticized WKCE, here.

Sophia Grene:

Financial education falls into the motherhood and apple-pie category – almost everyone is in favour of it. So the news that a number of asset managers have taken part in an initiative by Redstart to provide financial education to English schoolchildren appears positive.

The move has raised concerns, however, chiefly the potential conflicts of interest. Should the vendors of financial products also be allowed to provide education about them?

The founders of Redstart hail from Redington, the investment consultancy. The company has little to gain from getting its name in front of schoolchildren. Redington does not deal with the retail market, so has neither products to push nor brands to promote.

But asset managers, who have proved happy to become involved, are likely to count on schoolchildren being their future customers.

“If financial institutions want to fund financial education, that is all well and good, as long as they have no part in designing it or delivering it,” says Mick McAteer, founder and director of The Financial Inclusion Centre, a think-tank. “If they are serious about doing it for public policy reasons, not just as a Trojan horse marketing stunt, let them fund financial education charities.”

Princeton Press (PDF):

The mathematics of ancient Iraq, attested from the last three millennia BCE, was written on clay tablets in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages using the cuneiform script, often with numbers in the sexagesimal place value system (§1.2). There have been many styles of interpretation since the discovery and decipherment of that mathematics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries CE (§1.1), but this book advocates a combination of close attention to textual and linguistic detail, as well as material and archaeological evidence, to situate ancient mathematics within the socio-intellectual worlds of the individuals and communities who produced and consumed it (§1.3)

Iraq—Sumer—Babylonia—Mesopotamia: under any or all of these names almost every general textbook on the history of mathematics assigns the origins of ‘pure’ mathematics to the distant past of the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Here, over five thousand years ago, the fi rst systematic accounting techniques were developed, using clay counters to represent fixed quantities of traded and stored goods in the world’s earliest cities (§2.2). Here too, in the early second millennium bce, the world’s first positional system of numerical notation—the famous sexagesimal place value system—was widely used (§4.2). The earliest widespread evidence for ‘pure’ mathematics comes from the same place and time, including a very accurate approximation to the square root of 2, an early form of abstract algebra, and the knowledge, if not proof, of ‘Pythagoras’ theorem’ defining the relationship between the sides of a right-angled triangle (§4.3). The best-known mathematical artefact from this time, the cuneiform tablet
Plimpton 322, has been widely discussed and admired, and claims have been made for its function that range from number theory to trigonometry to astronomy. Most of the evidence for mathematical astronomy, however, comes from the later fi rst millennium bce (§8.2), from which it is clear that Babylonian astronomical observations, calculational models, and the sexagesimal place value system all had a deep impact on the later development of Old World astronomy, in particular through the person and works of Ptolemy. It is hardly surprising, then, that ever since its discovery a century ago the mathematics of ancient Iraq has claimed an important role in
the history of early mathematics.

Cultural progressives often talk about something called “hegemonic masculinity.” By this progressives and feminists mean the standards we use to determine what an ideal man is in a particular culture. Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson, in The Gendered Society Reader, describe American hegemonic masculinity this way:

In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports . . . Any male who fails to qualify in any one of these ways is likely to view himself–during moments at least–as unworthy, incomplete and inferior.

With this definition, progressives and feminists are on what seems to be a campaign to “dismantle” any sense of “American” masculinity. Additionally, part of the mission is to redefine all of America’s problems in terms of what males, especially white males, have done to ruin society. As many have argued before, the first step in solving social ills is to pathologize boyhood and numb it into oblivion.

Esquire Magazine recently ran a story titled “The Drugging Of The American Boy” which highlights the seemingly settled disposition that developing masculinity is something to be diagnosed as ADHD and, therefore, a problem to be solved. The article cites this data:

Thomas Lin:

Freeman 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.”

Priyamvada Gopal:

The once highly-regarded British public university is not quite dead but it is in terminal care. After half a century of global success on public funding that amounted to less than 1.5% of Britain’s GDP, in the space of two years we’ve seen the partial withdrawal of the state from the sector, and it is expected that this is a precursor to full withdrawal followed by extensive privatisation.

With the overnight tripling of tuition fees in 2010 (in the face of widespread protests) and with further rises in the offing, the student has been reframed as a consumer buying private goods in the form of a degree. Combine this with a mortgage and you have a large number of citizens who are unlikely to be debt-free at any point in their life.

Formerly known as a university, the service provider of higher education is now to sink or swim in response to the pressures of competition, as degree-awarding corporations rather than sites of inquiry and learning. Ironically, however, it turns out that the new fees regime which David Willetts, the Universities Minister, keeps bizarrely insisting is fairer than the previous one, is actually costing the exchequer more, through the rising costs of subsidising student loans.

Eva Dou:

In a concession to student protesters, Taiwan Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng said Sunday a review of a contentious services trade pact with China will be delayed until an oversight mechanism for cross-strait agreements is enacted.

The announcement is the largest gesture of conciliation from Mr. Wang since students stormed the legislature three weeks ago and barricaded themselves inside to protest the services trade agreement, which was signed last year.

The protesters have said negotiations between Taipei and Beijing weren’t transparent and demanded that the government set up a legally binding mechanism to oversee all cross-Strait deals, including the services trade pact, to ensure proper oversight and public input.

Pressure is mounting on the government to resolve an impasse over the trade pact that has moved thousands of students to camp inside and outside the legislature since March 18. More than 100,000 protesters gathered outside Taiwan’s Presidential Office Building in downtown Taipei last Sunday.

Alan Borsuk:

“It’s all about teacher quality,” Eric Hanushek said.

“What improves student achievement is improved instruction,” said Michael Casserly.

What’s needed, said Paul Hill, is “a mechanism to drive (the search for improvement) beyond the comfort zone of the school providers.”

If you were looking for one answer for improving American education outcomes, you didn’t find it in Milwaukee last week. But if you were looking for food for thought, the week brought rich offerings.

An unusual number of the nation’s — and in some cases, the world’s — leading thinkers and voices on education were involved in two separate events, one public, one invitation-only.

The public event, at Marquette University Law School, focused on what Milwaukee can learn from urban school systems where there are signs of improvement. (I was involved in organizing the session and moderated part of it.)

The private event was hosted by the low-profile but influential Kern Family Foundation, based in Waukesha County with more than a half billion dollars in assets and a strong interest in education.

Kern brought together 15 to 20 researchers and advocates at a downtown Milwaukee hotel to work on strategies for increasing U.S. success in international educational competitiveness. I sat in on several presentations (and will say more on what I learned later).