TED:

Sugata Mitra thinks big. At last year’s TED, he unveiled his dream to transform primary education. Instead of a teacher, a chalkboard and a generic curriculum, the recipient of the 2013 TED Prize asked us to imagine an environment that empowered children to learn on their own, with the guidance of virtual mentors. Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the CloudIt involved nothing more than a few computers, an Internet connection and a bunch of curious minds. He called this utopian world School in the Cloud, a Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE), or simply put, a place where children could tap into their innate sense of wonder by connecting with information online.

A year later, Mitra returned to the TED stage to give an update. He has opened five learning labs — three in India and two in the UK — with two more slated to open in May. Mitra is also the subject of a School in the Cloud documentary being filmed by British director Jerry Rothwell, the winner of the Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award. The trailer was released during TED2014, giving viewers a taster of all the work that went into building the School in the Cloud and a candid look at Sugata Mitra himself. Because let’s face it: some people thought his head was in the clouds when he conceived of this idea … But now, kids around the world are learning in this exciting new way.

At the same time, Mitra — a professor at Newcastle University — has also pioneered a digital tool, a virtual School in the Cloud Community Platform with the help of core technology and innovation partner Microsoft and their Skype Social Good team. The web platform, launched this week, ensures that anyone, anywhere around the world can experiment with self-organized learning. Made by Many, the product design team, spent six months co-creating the platform with Mitra’s team, Microsoft and children themselves, to ensure that the experience translates across cultural and economic barriers. Essentially, it is a giant global experiment in self-organized learning, inviting everyone to help design the future of learning.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown:

Note to American tweens: Don’t be a Good Samaritan on the state’s watch. A sixth grader at a Virginia Beach public school was suspended this week for having a razor blade. She took the blade from another student who was cutting himself with it. Bad move, apparently.

The Bayside Middle School student, Adrionna Harris, said she took a razor blade away from another student because he was using it to cut himself. She threw the blade away and told school officials. Then she was suspended for 10 days, with a recommendation for expulsion, according to Virginia Beach news station WAVY.

Note that Harris didn’t even have the razor blade in her possession when she went to school administrators. The only evidence this razor blade existed is Harris’ own admission of it, when she told school officials what had happened and that she had already thrown it away.

Michael Teitelbaum:

Everyone knows that the United States has long suffered from widespread shortages in its science and engineering workforce, and that if continued these shortages will cause it to fall behind its major economic competitors. Everyone knows that these workforce shortages are due mainly to the myriad weaknesses of American K-12 education in science and mathematics, which international comparisons of student performance rank as average at best.

Such claims are now well established as conventional wisdom. There is almost no debate in the mainstream. They echo from corporate CEO to corporate CEO, from lobbyist to lobbyist, from editorial writer to editorial writer. But what if what everyone knows is wrong? What if this conventional wisdom is just the same claims ricocheting in an echo chamber?

The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce. How can the conventional wisdom be so different from the empirical evidence? There are of course many complexities involved that cannot be addressed here. The key points, though, are these:

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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter via a kind Linda Doeseckle email (PDF):

Does it matter to you when school begins in the fall? How about when and how long winter or spring break is? And, how about when the school year ends? Have you thought about how many days you work for your annual salary, or how many hours make up your school day? In members’ responses to many years of MTI bargaining surveys, all of these factors are “very important” to those in MTI’s various bargaining units.

It was MTI’s case in 1966 which gave teacher unions an equal voice in establishing all of the above. Ruling for MTI, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the school calendar is a mandatory subject of bargaining, meaning that a school district in Wisconsin must negotiate with the union to determine each of the factors described above. However, Governor Walker’s Act 10 reversed the Supreme Court’s ruling, because Act 10 removed workers’ rights to collectively bargain. And now to make it worse, there is a legislative proposal to enable school boards to unilaterally increase the number of hours in a school day.

Walker’s Act 10 enables a school board without a good conscience to abuse staff, especially teachers, because teachers are paid an annual salary not on an hourly basis. MTI’s victory before Judge Colas found Act 10, in great part, to be unconstitutional, which in turn enabled MTI to negotiate Collective Bargaining Agreements for MTI’s five bargaining units for 2014-15. Walker’s appeal of Judge Colas’ decision to the Supreme Court is pending decision. District management meantime, has refused to bargain over the calendar for the 2015-16 school year. This negativity not only impacts teachers’ planning for the 2015-16 school year, but is also causing families not to be able to plan ahead. Many families often plan vacations, weddings and other family and religious events years in advance.

Deanna Wright:

Last April, and to a remarkable amount of fanfare, Jennifer Cheatham became the superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District. From the very start, the community has opened its arms to welcome her. When I interviewed her for Madison Magazine TV last month, I was aware that the community, especially parents of color, continues to be hopeful, if not expectant, that she’ll be a superintendent who follows through on her promises to ensure that all students learn—no excuses. Here’s an excerpt of our talk.

Deana Wright: One component of the district’s new strategic framework is parental and community involvement. Research, of course, has shown that when parents get involved in their kids’ education, not only do test scores go up, but disciplinary problems go down. The report does indicate that the plan to develop family engagement strategies for each school is a little behind schedule. What is the next step?

Jennifer Cheatham: Each of our schools develop their school improvement plans, and one of the requirements for those improvement plans is to have a strategy for better engaging families. What we learned quickly is that our schools are struggling with that. They just don’t know enough about what great parent engagement looks like. So, we had to take a close look at, really, what defined parent and family engagement, first of all. I think we intentionally had to slow this work down, because we realized that it was more complicated than we originally thought and we’re trying to re-define family engagement so it isn’t about expecting families to come to us, to come to the traditional events that we hold in our schools, but to really think about family engagement differently.

DW: Does that mean going to them?

Related:

Jennifer Cheatham.

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results

Madison’s 2013-2014 budget, about $392,000,000 or $15k/student

A brief look at recent Madison Superintendents.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

This will be my final report to the community as the president & CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison. Today, former Madison Police Chief Noble Wray will take over as the interim leader of this great organization and I will spend the remainder of this month supporting his transition, ironing out my new path, drinking these wonderful green smoothies and enjoying more frequent trips to the gym and bike rides around town.

We have accomplished a great deal since I joined the organization on March 29, 2010. We increased the size, diversity and strength of our staff to meet increased community needs, invested more in their professional growth and development of our team members than ever before, and improved their compensation to be more consistent with the market rate for their positions. We also provided full-time employment to five team members who completed our job training programs.

Highlights of our other accomplishments:
Increased our industry-specific, skill-based training academies from one to five, adding Customer Service & Sales, IT, Food Service and Construction Trades Academies. We continue to operate the highly regarded Health Administration Training Program (HATP) and are exploring adding academies in facilities maintenance, coding and lab tech as well.
Added the Featured Employer Program, adding 40 new employer partners in just the last 18 months who are dedicated to hiring talent through the Urban League. Since January 2010, graduates of Urban League training programs have earned more than $17.2 million in salaries and wages, and yielded more than $3.5 million in paid taxes. We’ve also grown from serving 183 adults in 2009 to 1,731 in 2013 through our four-tiered workforce development strategy.

Launched the Urban League Scholars Academy, which is presently offering an extended day high school preparatory program to 127 sixth and seventh graders attending three Madison middle schools who have academic enrichment needs.

Tutored more than 2,500 children annually in 17 middle and high schools across four Madison area school districts, utilizing more than 900 skilled volunteers; prepared more than 300 students for success on the ACT college entrance exam; and launched a partnership with the Madison Metropolitan School District to identify young men and women who’ve dropped out of school and help them complete high school, prepare for the workforce, secure jobs and continue their post-secondary education.

Created the annual Workplace Diversity & Leadership Summit, Wisconsin’s largest training ground in workplace diversity for employers and career professionals, and the Urban League Jazz Cabaret, a new annual fundraiser. To learn more about the upcoming Summit on May 9th which we are co-hosting this year with the Madison Region Economic Partnership, click here.
Completed a comprehensive analysis of the needs and aspirations of residents of three important South Madison neighborhoods and hosted several community events that have brought together hundreds of residents to celebrate and work together, and build a strong South Madison community.

Established the Urban League of Greater Madison Young Professionals Chapter which will bring together an unprecedented number of diverse young professionals at its first ever Emerge Gala on March 29, 2014. To learn more and purchase tickets, click here.

Built one of the strongest and most diverse teams and Board of Directors among nonprofits in Greater Madison, and cultivated talented leaders who are doing great things within the Urban League and other organizations they have gone on to work for and lead.

Among our greatest achievements also was our effort to establish the Madison Preparatory Academy charter schools for young men and women. Though our vision was not realized, in pushing for the school we spearheaded an unprecedented and necessary conversation about the state of education for African American and low income children that has moved a community and a school district to become more engaged and accountable than ever.

It has been an honor and a pleasure to stand on the shoulders of the Urban League leaders and team members who’ve come before me, and serve this great organization and the Greater Madison region. Thank you for all the encouragement and support you’ve shown me and our team, and thank you for all that you do for our community as well. The Urban League is poised to accomplish great things for the community for years to come.

…and don’t forget to provide your sponsorship and buy your tickets to the YP’s Emerge Gala and Economic Development, Leadership & Diversity Summit. The League can’t succeed without your financial contribution, continued active engagement, and support.

To the Future. Onward.

Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison

Much more on Kaleem Caire and the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

Interview with MMSD School Board candidate Wayne Strong Safe schools and high academic achievement:

High academic achievement, for Strong, means that all of our MMSD students are achieving to the fullest extent of their abilities.

“Whether you are a TAG [Talented and Gifted] or a special-needs student or whether you are a middleof- the-road student, the teachers [should be] challenging our students to do the best that they can do and to be the best that they can be,” Strong says.

“We’ve got to make sure we are doing that for all of our students.”

Strong wants to improve graduation rates and he feels that the disparity in the way that kids are disciplined affects that quite a bit.

“Right now, our African American students are only graduating at a rate of 53 percent. That’s still not good,” Strong says.

Michael Flores: I’ll build bridge from community to School Board, more.

Madison school board candidates Wayne Strong and Michael Flores propose achievement gap solutions.

Credit Kaleem Caire for big impact

It’s easy to talk about Madison’s awful record of graduating barely half of its black high school students in four years, among other glaring racial disparities.

Kaleem Caire actually did something about it. And that’s what matters most. Caire’s impact on Madison during his four years as leader of the Urban League of Greater Madison has been profound.

Unfortunately, unanswered questions about his surprising departure and “less than ideal” use of the nonprofit’s credit cards won’t help the cause. It will give supporters of the status quo more leverage to argue against bold change.

The Madison School Board in late 2011 rejected the Urban League’s promising charter school proposal, siding with the teachers union over the Urban League and its many supporters. The proposal for a Madison Preparatory Academy was aimed at low-achieving minority students. It would have offered higher expectations for students, a longer school day and year, more pressure on parents to get involved, more minority teachers, uniforms, same-sex classes and internships with local employers

Libbey Meister: Flores would be wonderful School Board member.

Ed Hughes: I look forward to helping Madison schools thrive (Mr. Hughes is running uncontested for the 3rd time).

On Politics: Mary Burke would cut statewide vouchers, private school tuition deduction

Investors Business Daily:

Buried deep in a section of President Obama’s budget, released this week, is an eye-opening fact: This year, 70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high.

In effect, the government has become primarily a massive money-transfer machine, taking $2.6 trillion from some and handing it back out to others. These government transfers now account for 15% of GDP, another all-time high. In 1991, direct payments accounted for less than half the budget and 10% of GDP.
What’s more, the cost of these direct payments is exploding. Even after adjusting for inflation, they’ve shot up 29% under Obama.
ObamaCare, Medicare…

Where do these checks go? The biggest chunk, 38.6%, goes to pay health bills, either through Medicare, Medicaid or ObamaCare. A third goes out in the form of Social Security checks. Only 21% goes toward poverty programs — or “income security” as it’s labeled in the budget — and a mere 5% ends up in the hands of veterans.

Walter Russell Mead:

With enrollments down and tuition peaking, many colleges are looking everywhere for way to enhance their revenue streams. A new piece in the New York Times describes the rise of “bridge programs,” which are essentially third-party companies hired by colleges to recruit foreign students to study in American schools and prepare them for a foreign educational system.

The purpose of these programs is twofold: There is an abundance of talented foreign students eager to study in the U.S., but most have only heard of the big-name schools, but there aren’t a lot of spots open. Enter bridge programs, which steer foreign students toward lesser-known schools and offer them crash courses in the peculiarities of the American learning environment.

The second purpose of these programs—boosting applications and enrollment—is of more interest to the universities:

Erin Richards:

It was once the premier creative arts school in the Milwaukee area, drawing students from as far away as Elkhorn and Cedarburg.

Now, the staffers at Roosevelt Middle School talk about the size and number of fights they endure.

Former teacher Caryl Davis remembers a Thursday afternoon in 2012, when a fight started among students. The disruption spread, and Davis saw a group of eighth-grade boys rush around a corner.

She put her arms out to slow them down, and one boy twisted her arm painfully behind her back, Davis told police. The incident resulted in a torn rotator cuff, she said, and the trauma ultimately prompted her to resign.

Few who attended Roosevelt in its prime would recognize the place it has become. The school, at 800 W. Walnut St., has 627 students in sixth through eighth grades. Last month, Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Gregory Thornton called for an emergency reorganization next year, eliminating the sixth-grade class entirely so staff could get a handle on the seventh and eighth grades for a year.

Rob Lazebnik:

March Madness is upon us, by which I mean the tradition of taking your high school junior on a manic tour of college campuses. I’ve done it twice now, so I feel that I have some perspective on how to survive it.

As the parent, you have much to offer on this exciting and emotional journey—paying for it and doing the driving. But this limited influence does give you leeway to help design the trip, and here is where you can begin your subtle campaign of influencing where your kid goes to college. Keep your designs sub rosa, because the minute you say, “I’d love to see you at UMass Amherst,” she’ll set her heart on Sarah Lawrence. That one little sentence can cost you $40,000.

You’re only going to have a week or so on the tour, so you’ll have to pick your schools carefully. Most likely your kid will have already assembled a wish list of colleges to see. Don’t feel hurt if those places are far away from you—that is only because she wants to be really far away from you.

First off, pick schools that are only one nonstop flight away. A kid who has to take multiple planes to get home will soon be saying, “Brandon’s family is close, so I’m going to spend Thanksgiving there instead and go crossbow hunting with him and his friends.”

As you plot out a Google GOOG -0.19% map of the schools you want to visit, use the opportunity to avoid colleges you feel aren’t a good “fit”—that is college counselor-ese for, “She doesn’t have a shot in hell of getting in.”

Reihan Salam:

America’s elite higher education institutions are the envy of the world. Foreign students flock to the oldest and wealthiest U.S. research universities to take advantage of resources that are unparalleled, thanks to the deep pockets of many centuries’ worth of captains of industry.
 
 Yet when we consider the post-secondary institutions that educate the typical American high school grad, we see a very different picture. While the share of Americans who enroll in higher education has grown substantially in recent decades, graduation rates have been stagnant.
 
 Community colleges promise an affordable education to millions of students, but they often fail to offer the courses students need to complete a degree in a reasonable amount of time. Public colleges and universities churn out graduates who are forced to take jobs that don’t actually require a four-year post-secondary education. Most private non-profits do the same, and they’re also notorious for charging obscene tuition that their graduates can scarcely afford. And private for-profits, which have grown enormously by taking on some of the hardest-to-accommodate students, stand accused of loading up their students with debt without offering them marketable skills.

By Jon Marcus and Holly K. Hacker:

America’s colleges and universities are quietly shifting the burden of their big tuition increases onto low-income students, while many higher-income families are seeing their college costs rise more slowly, or even fall, an analysis of federal data shows.
 
 It’s a trend financial-aid experts and some university administrators worry will further widen the gap between the nation’s rich and poor as college degrees—especially four-year ones—drift beyond the economic reach of growing numbers of students.
 
 “We’re just exacerbating the income inequalities and educational achievement gaps,” said Deborah Santiago, co-founder and vice president of Excelencia in Education, a nonprofit group that advocates for Latino and other students.

Molly Beck:

Even though expanding eight schools is only part of the plan, “if there’s any one (school) that looks particularly challenging to explain,” Hughes said, “we know that will be what the opponents of the referendum will latch onto. … We are going to have to be able to work through that and decide whether each of these is separately defensible.”

Hughes added that attendance area boundary changes are tough, but the board might find out that could be a solution for one or two of the schools.

Board vice president Arlene Silveira and board member T.J. Mertz also said that the controversial idea needed to be thoroughly vetted.

“We have to have the discussion about boundaries — we have to show that we looked at it, and what that showed,” said Silveira, who also added that internal transfers at popular schools like Van Hise Elementary and Hamilton Middle School needed to also be examined as a way to relieve crowding.

Board member Mary Burke said making the proposed investment in the eight schools could ultimately save the district the cost of having to build schools, especially if the district sees enrollment gains in the future as schools improve.

Related: Might low income student distribution be addressed? and Effective school maintenance spending?

Melissa Korn:

College admissions officers trumpet graduates’ success in finding well-paying jobs. But the schools often have a hard time getting solid proof.

Boiling down employment outcomes to a single metric isn’t easy, many college officials say, since hurdles stand in the way of gathering meaningful figures and conveying them. Others say they are leery of tying the nuances of educational success to dollar figures.

But with student-loan debt outstanding hitting a record $1.1 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the issue of quantifying graduate success has become increasingly important as colleges come under pressure to prove the education they provide is worth the investment.

Bonnie Mann Falk was dismayed at the lack of information on student outcomes that she and her daughter, Mollie, got from admissions officers during the college hunt this past fall. Mollie, a 17-year-old high-school senior from Long Island in New York, plans to study retail management and sought assurance she could find a job in that industry.

Arsalan Bashir:

Almost everybody knows there is a problem with the education system, but very few can put a finger down on what that problem is. Parents, teachers, students, and even school administrators blame a fractured system for its shortcomings — but this quickly dissolves into a circular argument centered around funding and improved results.

US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, drew out a contrast between the mindset of parents in South Korea and the United States. In a few minuted of non-sugar-coated honesty, Arne pointed out a perspective that is ignored in most attempts to fix the education system — teachers and culture.

This instantly aligned with my analysis of the caveats with the system, and why even a meteoric startup culture was struggling to help. While most of the EdTech pioneers aimed to make teachers redundant, countries like South Korea and Finland focused on first choosing the best teachers, and then empowering them to drive their students to academic success.

South Korea stringently requires teachers to come from the top 5% of college programs and Finland takes this quest for qualified educators to a higher level by insisting on all teachers being Masters degree holders.

Related: When A Stands for Average.

Emily Jane Fox:

Anthony-James Green has spent nearly a decade, and amassed quite a fortune, figuring out how to ace the SAT.

But his finely honed — and expensive — methodology could be in flux now that the College Board plans sweeping changes for the college entrance exam.

Among the changes: Test takers will no longer need to commit scores of obscure vocabulary words to memory, and math sections will focus much more on real-world problem solving. College Board president David Coleman said the changes, beginning in the spring of 2016, aim to level the playing field for those who can’t afford pricey tutors and classes.

So what about Green, who’s built a business around that uneven playing field?

Over the past nine years, he’s cultivated a strategy in which he observes each client one on one and zeroes in on the student’s biggest weakness.

“Before you ever teach students anything, you need to know the enemy — what is it that they don’t get and what’s stopping them from getting their perfect score,” he said.

Corey Robin:

Jargon has been the bane of academic life since there’s been academic life. Just read Immanuel Kant. Or Thomas Hobbes, who complained that the academic writing of his day was “nothing else … but insignificant trains of strange and barbarous words.” But if scholarly journals still feature specialists writing for specialists, more academics are writing for the public than ever before. When they’re not, it has less to do with the perversity of their preferences than the precariousness of their profession.

Seth Jovaag:

Melissa Droessler tries not to flinch when she tells people her dream of opening a charter school in Madison.

“Even the word ‘charter’ in Madison can be emotionally charged,” she says.

But Droessler, director of Isthmus Montessori Academy, is steadfast in her belief that a century-old pedagogy created in the slums of Rome could help tackle Madison schools’ thorniest problems.

Last month, the academy submitted a proposal to open Madison’s first public Montessori school in September 2015. As Madison’s fourth charter school, it would be tuition-free and open to anyone. It would also employ unionized Madison teachers, potentially avoiding a hurdle that tripped up proponents of the Madison Preparatory Academy charter school in 2011.

Perhaps most significant, Droessler and others believe the Montessori approach could raise low-income and minority student achievement.

“The achievement gap will probably be the biggest part of our pitch,” she says “We feel it’s time for this in Madison. There’s no other motive.”

Organizers want to submit a grant application to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction by April 15 that could net $150,000 for planning costs next year. The Madison school board is expected to vote whether to green-light the application at its March 31 meeting, though any binding decision to establish the school is at least 10 months away, according to district policy governing the creation of charter schools.

Board member James Howard has toured the academy at 255 N. Sherman Ave. on the city’s near-northeast side. He says he’s interested in the proposal but needs to know more before forming an opinion. Ditto for board president Ed Hughes.

Related: Previous stillborn Madison charter initiatives include: The Studio School and the Madison Preparatory Academy IB school.

Rebecca Onion:

Published in 1941, this “Trading Game: France—Colonies” aimed to teach French children the basics of colonial management.

Players drew cards corresponding to colony names, then had to deploy cards representing assets like boats, engineers, colonists, schools, and equipment, in order to win cards representing the exports of the various colonies. “Images on the game,” Getty Research Institute curator Isotta Poggi writes in her blog post on the document, “provide a vivid picture of the vast variety of resources, including animals, plants, and minerals, that the colonies provided to France.” Cartoons on the cards depict coal (mined by a figure clearly intended to be a “native”), rubber, wood, and even wild animals.

Along the way, players needed to avoid pitfalls like sickness, “laziness,” and intemperance (illustrated by a cartoon of a red-cheeked white man in khakis and a white hat, served by a “native” in “traditional” dress). Once the cards representing a colony’s major exports had been won, the colony was considered “exploitée,” and was out of the game.

As the map at the center of the board shows, at the time France’s empire held colonies in Africa, South America, and Asia. The postwar movements for decolonization and independence changed this picture completely. By 1962, when the eight-year-long Algerian War finally led to Algerian independence, many of the colonies marked in red on this map were no longer under French control.

Madison School District (PDF):

This is the third in a four-part series of updates regarding development of the 2014-15 MMSD budget. As you may recall, the January update focused on the revenue side of the budget. In February, the update provided an introduction to the staff allocation process. The update this month will feature the non-personnel side of the budget for the schools. It will also include information about the MMSD budget adoption process and schedule.

1) School Non-personnel Budgets:
Our proposition is that school non-personnel budgets are under-funded and that funds should be shifted from central office accounts to the schools to correct this condition. Our zero-based budget goal is to shift at least $500,000 to the schools for non-personnel budgets (an 11% increase), with a stretch goal of shifting $1,000,000 to the schools (a 22% increase). In 2013-14, the schools received $4.5 million of local funds for non-personnel accounts. Our goal is to increase this amount to $5,000,000 or $5,500,000. This reallocation will provide additional resources for schools which can be used for a variety of activities aligned with SIP priorities, such as basic classroom supplies and materials, supplemental instructional materials, staff development, additional teacher planning time, and additional SBLT planning time.

It should not be surprising that school non-personnel budgets have been squeezed in recent years. Whenever personnel costs grow faster than school revenues, which is the case in almost all Wisconsin school districts, the non-personnel side of the budget is inevitably reduced. For example, MMSD used a two percent (2%) across-the-board decrease in all supply accounts (including central office) to help balance this years’ budget.

We are making school non-personnel budgets a priority in budget development because it will give principals slightly more local decision-making authority. In addition, there are related signs of budgetary stress in the schools which we should acknowledge, even if we can’t solve them all in one step. At the secondary level, for example, under-funded school non-personnel budgets lead to departmental requests for higher course fees. At the elementary level, it leads to ever-lengthier school supply lists for parents to fulfill. At the community level, it leads to PTO’s and Boosters being asked to supplement school budgets for routine operational needs. These are conditions we wish to remediate over the next several budget cycles.

George Parker & Helen Warrell:

Under the intense gaze of Lenin and Malcolm X, Michael Gove is setting out his plan to break the grip of a bourgeois elite that has taken hold of Britain, seizing key positions in public life, including those at the heart of government – his government.

“It’s ridiculous,” splutters Gove, Britain’s education secretary, as he reflects on the immaculately connected and expensively educated inner circle of David Cameron, his friend and the country’s Conservative prime minister. Four of this exclusive group went to just one private school: Eton College, Cameron’s alma mater. “It doesn’t make me feel personally uncomfortable, because I like each of the individuals concerned,” he says. “But it’s ridiculous. I don’t know where you can find a similar situation in any other developed economy.”

Gove then draws parallels between Cameron’s team and the cabinet assembled by the supposedly nepotistic Tory prime minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil. “At the beginning of the 20th century, the Conservative cabinet was called Hotel Cecil. The phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’ came about. It’s preposterous.”

But this is Britain in the 21st century. And Gove is burning with indignation that money can still buy the education that opens doors to the top jobs in Britain today, while the state school system allows talent to go to waste. “I don’t blame any of the individuals concerned, that would be equally silly,” he says, referring to Cameron and his team. “But it’s a function of the fact that, as we pointed out a couple of years ago, more boys from Eton went to Oxford and Cambridge than boys eligible for free school meals.”

Lucy Ward:

Access to the data of more than a million teenagers and students and thousands of their parents is being sold to advertisers such as mobile phone and energy drinks companies by Ucas, the university applications body.

The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service received more than £12m last year in return for targeted advertising and sales of the emails and addresses of subscribers as young as 16.

The service, which controls admissions to UK universities and attracts 700,000 new applicants each year, sells the access via its commercial arm, Ucas Media.

Vodafone, O2, Microsoft and the private university accommodation provider Pure Student Living are among those who have marketed through Ucas, which offers access to over a million student email addresses and a market worth a claimed £15bn a year.

The Red Bull energy drink firm promoted three new drink flavours by sending sample cans to 17,500 selected students deemed to be trend-setting “early adopters” in order to create a “social media buzz”.

Applicants can opt out of receiving direct marketing, but only at the cost of missing out on education and careers mailings as well.

Owen Phillips:

News stories covering the rising price of a higher education are disconcerting for anyone planning to attend college—but for low-income students, these stories are particularly discouraging. That’s because these students are the most likely to see rising tuition as a barrier to attending college. And although billions of dollars in federal programs exist to help low-income students afford college, many never receive assistance because they do not complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Submitting the FAFSA is the first step in receiving a financial aid package. Once they have that, students can begin to calculate their true costs of college, and perhaps it won’t be as expensive as news stories had led them to believe. The map below uses data released earlier this year by the Department of Education (DOE) to show the share of high school seniors in each state that completed the FAFSA*. The data show that on average, less than 55 percent of seniors complete the FAFSA in each state. That’s an especially alarming statistic given that studies demonstrate a 25 to 30 percent increase in the likelihood of low and middle-income students enrolling in college if they simply complete the FAFSA. – See more at: http://www.edcentral.org/filling-fafsas/#sthash.AzhpOihh.dpuf

Powerpoint Slides (900K PDF):

Partner: University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education Term of Agreement: April 1, 2014 – June 30, 2015 (phase one)

Purpose: To craft a comprehensive induction strategy in Madison schools resulting in a workforce which can significantly impact student achievement and narrow opportunity gaps. (phase one)

Target Audience: New educators, instructional coaches, and new principals (phase one)

Much more on the UW-Madison School of Education, here.

There are alternatives to Powerpoint style “slideware”:

Jeff Bezos likes to read. That’s a dog-bites-man revelation if ever there was one, considering that Bezos is the cerebral founder and chief executive of a $100 billion empire built on books. More revealing is that the Amazon CEO’s fondness for the written word drives one of his primary, and peculiar, tools for managing his company: Meetings of his “S-team” of senior executives begin with participants quietly absorbing the written word. Specifically, before any discussion begins, members of the team — including Bezos — consume six-page printed memos in total silence for as long as 30 minutes. (Yes, the e-ink purveyor prefers paper. Ironic, no?) They scribble notes in the margins while the authors of the memos wait for Bezos and his minions to finish reading.

Amazon (AMZN) executives call these documents “narratives,” and even Bezos realizes that for the uninitiated — and fans of the PowerPoint presentation — the process is a bit odd. “For new employees, it’s a strange initial experience,” he tells Fortune. “They’re just not accustomed to sitting silently in a room and doing study hall with a bunch of executives.” Bezos says the act of communal reading guarantees the group’s undivided attention. Writing a memo is an even more important skill to master. “Full sentences are harder to write,” he says. “They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”

Philip Nel:

As I am writing this article, I should be writing something else: an email to an editor, an email to an author, a letter of recommendation, notes for tomorrow’s classes, comments on students’ papers, comments on manuscripts, an abstract for an upcoming conference, notes for one of the books I’m working on. I cannot remember the last time I ended a day having crossed everything off my to-do list.

Why do academics work so much?

1) Part of it is habit. When we’re just starting out, we learn to say “yes” to everything. Join this panel? Yes. Send article in to special issue? Yes. Write a book review? Yes. Join committee in professional organization? Yes. Indeed, we learn to look for things to say yes to. This is how you build your C.V. Go to conferences, publish, get involved. If you don’t do it, you won’t get that elusive tenure-track job. Then, should you become one of the few who get the job, you’ll need to maintain a level of production in order to get tenure. Should you get tenure, you’ll want one day to get promoted. If that happens, and you reach full professor, well, best to keep publishing … just in case. What if your university falls on hard times? Or you need to move? Tenure is good, but portable tenure is better. So you just get on that treadmill and never get off.

Noam Chomsky:

On hiring faculty off the tenure track

That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Walmart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line.

The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities.

The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.

Robert Hiltonsmith, Tamara Draut:

As student debt continues to climb, it’s important to understand how our once debt-free system of public universities and colleges has been transformed into a system in which most students borrow, and at increasingly higher amounts. In less than a generation, our nation’s higher education system has become a debt-for-diploma system—more than seven out of 10 college seniors now borrow to pay for college and graduate with an average debt of $29,400.1 Up until about two decades ago, state funding ensured college tuition remained within reach for most middle-class families, and financial aid provided extra support to ensure lower-income students could afford the costs of college.

As Demos chronicled in its first report in the The Great Cost Shift series, this compact began to unravel as states disinvested in higher education during economic downturns but were unable, or unwilling, to restore funding levels during times of economic expansion. Today, as a result, public colleges and universities rely on tuition to fund an ever-increasing share of their operating expenses. And students and their families rely more and more on debt to meet those rising tuition costs. Nationally, revenue from tuition paid for 44 percent of all operating expenses of public colleges and universities in 2012, the highest share ever. A quarter century ago, the share was just 20 percent.2 This shift—from a collective funding of higher education to one borne increasingly by individuals—has come at the very same time that low- and middle-income households experienced stagnant or declining household income.

Marian Wang:

At the center of the admissions and financial-aid process is a massive information imbalance: Schools make their decisions with detailed data about each applicant that goes well beyond test scores and transcripts. Many universities have access to comprehensive financial profiles, sometimes down to the type of cars a family drives. Some analyze patterns and interpret even the most subtle indicators from students, such as the order in which schools are listed on the federal financial-aid application, or even how long a student stays on the phone with an admissions officer.

Students are not so lucky. Schools offer comparatively little information about exactly who they’re awarding aid to and for what. College-bound teens and their parents often resort to college forums, sharing their personal “stats” — their financial and academic profiles — with strangers online to get advice on which colleges are likely to be generous with aid. Once they get their financial-aid awards, some even go back to these forums to compare their aid packages in an attempt to reverse engineer colleges’ criteria.

Most colleges offer “vague and superficial” disclosures about how they allocate their financial-aid dollars, said Mark Kantrowitz, a financial-aid expert with Edvisors, which publishes websites about paying for college. “They don’t give details about the actual formulas they use.”

Take Newman University, a Catholic liberal-arts college based in Kansas.

Steve Strieker, via a kind Michael Walsh email:

My first teaching contract 19 years ago at a Midwest Catholic high school grossed $15,000. My retirement benefits consisted of a whopping $500 401K. Cutting into my take-home pay was a $1500 annual premium for an inadequate health insurance plan with a high deductible and 80-20 coverage on remaining family medical bills.

Money aside, I was a good Christian soldier. I taught a full load with 3 or more preps, moderated the school newspaper, ran the service program, coached baseball, drove the school bus to athletic events, and volunteered for all kinds of school activities.

Considering money, I was a naive Christian soldier. I did not think finances mattered all that much. After growing up on the lower rim of the middle class, the $15 grand I grossed in my first year of teaching felt like a million dollars. When the family budget tightened as college loans came due and the family grew, I practiced my own personal “no excuses” policy and doubled down on work by milking cows in the evening and on weekends, painting houses in the summer, and working a variety of odd jobs. While many Americans were “moving on up” during the 1990’s, my wife (also an educator) and I shuffled funds around trying to survive on less-than-professional pay.

In these conditions, my teaching suffered. My professional goal of getting my masters degree by age 30 came and went. I recycled the same lesson every year. Innovation was limited to what I could concoct late at night or each morning before school. I was a resourceful teacher, but not a developing educator.

In the midst of this mess, one of my kids became seriously ill. She did a few tours in the hospital before some highly skilled and professionally-priced specialists got a handle on her condition. The medical bills mounted. Things became desperate.

So I made a desperate move. I sold my soul and left teaching for a year. I searched for funds in other fields. In the midst of this despair came some soul-saving, professional advice from my brother teaching in Wisconsin. He coaxed my wife (also an educator) and I to move to his neck of the woods, where we could earn professional pay and benefits by teaching in Wisconsin’s public school system.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Alexandra Topping:

More than 160 academics have written to the Guardian to protest at being used as an extension of the UK border police, after universities have come under more pressure to check the immigration details of students.

The academics, from universities including Oxford, Warwick, Durham and Sheffield, accuse the Home Office immigration agency of “undermining the autonomy and academic freedom of UK universities and trust between academics and their students”.

Unrest has been growing for months as universities have come under more pressure to prove that their students are legitimate, according to the signatories, who say matters took a “pernicious new turn” in summer 2012 when London Metropolitan University briefly lost its trusted sponsor status – a requirement for all institutions wishing to recruit overseas students.

“Since then, universities have been preoccupied with managing accountability demanded by UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI – formerly the UK Border Agency), and in effect have become its proxy,” says the letter. “Academics at a number of universities in the UK and beyond have now become concerned at this state of affairs, and at the methods used to establish bona fide student status.”

Arun Gupta::

Public school teachers in Portland, Ore., and their students are doing a victory lap. Nearly a year after unveiling a contract proposal that would have put the squeeze on the 2,900-member Portland Association of Teachers (PAT), the Portland School Board on March 3 approved a contract that acceded to virtually every demand from the teachers’ union.

The board was acting as a stalking horse for corporate attacks on unions and public education nationwide. It initially wanted to saddle teachers with higher health care costs, fewer retirement benefits, more students and a greater workload in a city where 40 percent of teachers already work more than 50 hours a week (PDF). The board also demanded expansive management rights (PDF) and allegedly wished to link teacher evaluation more closely to standardized testing. The PAT opposed the board, arguing that low-income and minority students would pay the heaviest price as their classes grew larger, more time was devoted to testing and resources for curriculum preparation and teacher development got slashed.

Only after 98 percent of the PAT voted to strike starting Feb. 20 — and students vowed to join the picket line — did the board blink. Alexia Garcia, an organizer with the Portland Student Union who graduated last year, says students held walkouts and rallies at many of the city’s high schools in support of teachers’ demands because “teachers’ working conditions are our learning conditions.”

The deal is a big victory for the teachers’ union in a state where business interests, led by the Portland Business Alliance, call the shots on education policy. The school board had brought out the big guns, authorizing payments of up to $360,000 to a consultant for contract negotiations and $800,000 to a law firm, despite already having a full-time lawyer on its payroll. But, emulating Chicago teachers who prevailed in an eight-day strike in 2012, the PAT went beyond contract numbers, winning community support by focusing on student needs and rallying to stop school closures in underserved communities.

Most significant, the teachers helped expose the role of education reform in gentrifying the city, making it nearly impossible for every neighborhood to have a strong school. This is a process playing out nationwide, from Los Angeles to Atlanta, Milwaukee to Washington, D.C. But it is particularly striking in Portland, so noted for quirkiness and tolerance it has spawned a hit television show, “Portlandia,” During a public forum on the contract negotiations, one teacher observed that the show was a reflection of how “we march to our own beat in Portland.” This has held true for the teachers’ approach to education.

Karin Fischer & Jack Stripling:

t happened so slowly that no one really noticed at first. That’s the way erosion works. It is a gradual decay.

But somewhere along the line, over the past three decades or so, the deterioration of support for public higher education became hard to miss. Appropriations tanked. Tuition soared. College leaders embraced gloomy rhetoric about broken partnerships with the very people who had built these institutions from the ground up.

Now we have come to a precipice. College students and their families, who just a decade ago paid for about one-third of the cost of their education, are on track to pay for most of it. In nearly half of the states, they already do.

Behind these changes is a fundamental shift. Public colleges, once viewed as worthy of collective investment for the greater good, are increasingly treated as vehicles delivering a personal benefit to students, who ought to foot the bill themselves.

Pedro M. Silva:

A few months ago, during a class, one of our teachers proposed as discussion: given a specific situation, with several participants, and an outcome, we would rank the level of culpability of each one.

Right now, the situation itself isn’t very important. The point is: after that class, I could not stop thinking about it. I didn’t knew why, but unconsciously I knew something was not right: it was like my subconscious already knew the answer, but refused to tell me, forcing me to get there on my own.

Society today is leaning more towards an acceptance mindset, in which we try to decipher others’ actions by putting ourselves in their shoes and seeing through their eyes. And sometimes, when others do something wrong or bad, even to us, we are able to do something wonderful called forgiving, because we are able to understand that their actions were perhaps caused by circumstances out of their control. And so we don’t blame them.

Sean Coughlan:

Up to 60 Shanghai maths teachers are to be brought to England to raise standards, in an exchange arranged by the Department for Education.

They will provide masterclasses in 30 “maths hubs”, which are planned as a network of centres of excellence.

The Chinese city’s maths pupils have the highest international test results.

The announcement comes as a campaign is launched to raise adult maths skills, with warnings that poor numeracy is costing the UK economy £20bn per year.

The National Numeracy Challenge aims to improve numeracy levels for a million people.

It is providing an online self-assessment test – with help for those lacking in confidence in maths.

Financial cost
Mike Ellicock, chief executive of National Numeracy, says 78% of working-age adults have maths skills below the equivalent of a GCSE grade C – and that half only have the maths skills of a child leaving primary school.

Related Connected Math and disastrous reading results in Madison.

Alex Tabarrok:

All of this is almost entirely at variance with three facts, all of which are well known among education researchers.

First, test prep has only a modest effect on test scores, on the order of 20-40 points combined for a commercial test preparation service. More expensive services such as a private tutor are towards the high of this range, cheaper sources such as a high-school course towards the lower. Buchmann et al., for example, estimate that private tutors increase scores by 37 points while a high school course increases scores by 26 points.

The average SAT score among those with a family income of $20,000-$40,000 is 1402 while the average score among those with an income $100,000 higher, $120,000-$140,000, is 1581 for a 179 point difference. Even if every rich family had a private tutor and none of the poor families had any test prep whatsoever, test prep would explain only 20% of the difference 37/179. If rich families rely on tutors and poor families rely on high school courses, the difference in test prep would explain only 6% (11/179) of the difference in score.

The second surprising fact about test prep is that it doesn’t vary nearly as much by income as people imagine. In fact, some studies find no effect of income on test prep use while others find a positive but modest effect. The latter study finding (what I call) a modest effect finds that in their sample a 2-standard deviation increase in income above the mean increases the probability of using a private test prep course less than whether “Parent encouraged student to prep for SAT (yes or no).”

Andrew Smith Lewis:

Since their inception, there has been a flurry of debate around the legitimacy and efficacy of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Widely recognized as game-changing in education, they offer radical reach and democratize access to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen. However, the rise of anything new and exciting is typically accompanied by criticism. In the case of MOOCs, it has been heavy. Skeptics point to uncertainty in scalability, assessment, engagement — the list goes on.

The main argument being made against MOOCs attacks the perceived lack of success as measured by their low completion rates (Mass MOOC Dropouts). The interpretation of this metric varies greatly.

Critics are obsessed with the infamous five percent rate, pointing out that “If 95 percent of students who enrolled in a residential college course dropped out or failed, that course would rightly be considered a disaster.”

Some take it further (the MOOC Racket), claiming that MOOCs are a platform for evangelizing academic rock stars to the detriment of students and teachers, and arguing that educators can’t teach tens of thousands of people at once — “that MOOCs only deliver information, but that’s not education.”

John Glover:

The amount of debt globally has soared more than 40 percent to $100 trillion since the first signs of the financial crisis as governments borrowed to pull their economies out of recession and companies took advantage of record low interest rates, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

The $30 trillion increase from $70 trillion between mid-2007 and mid-2013 compares with a $3.86 trillion decline in the value of equities to $53.8 trillion in the same period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The jump in debt as measured by the Basel, Switzerland-based BIS in its quarterly review is almost twice the U.S.’s gross domestic product.

Borrowing has soared as central banks suppress benchmark interest rates to spur growth after the U.S. subprime mortgage market collapsed and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bankruptcy sent the world into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Yields on all types of bonds, from governments to corporates and mortgages, average about 2 percent, down from more than 4.8 percent in 2007, according to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Broad Market Index.

“Given the significant expansion in government spending in recent years, governments (including central, state and local governments) have been the largest debt issuers,” according to Branimir Gruic, an analyst, and Andreas Schrimpf, an economist at the BIS. The organization is owned by 60 central banks and hosts the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a group of regulators and central bankers that sets global capital standards.

Knight Arts:

A few years ago, Knight Foundation set out to bring art and culture into people’s everyday lives by presenting surprise opera and classical ballet performances at markets, parks and airports. More than 1,000 of these Random Acts of Culture® took place in eight communities across the United States. The reaction each time was amazing to watch, as people grabbed their cellphones for pics and videos, some moved to tears, reminded of the emotional connection they have to the arts.
 
 Now, as we think of new ways to bring the arts to more people, Knight Foundation has turned to libraries. As libraries continue to reinvent themselves in the digital age, they have become spaces that are more about creation than collection.They are amongst the most democratic community spaces we have, used by people from every walk of life, in every age group. Spread throughout neighborhoods, we thought they were an organic way to bring the arts to all communities. All that and more makes them the perfect stage for what we’re calling Library Acts of Culture.

The Economist:

AUTISM is a strange condition. Sometimes its symptoms of “social blindness” (an inability to read or comprehend the emotions of others) occur alone. This is dubbed high-functioning autism, or Asperger’s syndrome. Though their fellow men and women may regard them as a bit odd, high-functioning autists are often successful (sometimes very successful) members of society. On other occasions, though, autism manifests as part of a range of cognitive problems. Then, the condition is debilitating. What is common to those on all parts of the so-called autistic spectrum is that they are more often men than women—so much more often that one school of thought suggests autism is an extreme manifestation of what it means, mentally, to be male. Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls are. For high-functioning autism, the ratio is seven to one.

Moreover, what is true of autism is true, to a lesser extent, of a lot of other neurological and cognitive disorders. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is diagnosed around three times more often in boys than in girls. “Intellectual disability”, a catch-all term for congenital low IQ, is 30-50% more common in boys, as is epilepsy. In fact, these disorders frequently show up in combination. For instance, children diagnosed with an autistic-spectrum disorder often also receive a diagnosis of ADHD.

Matthew Di Carlo:

A few months ago, the U.S. Department of Education (USED) released the latest data from schools that received grants via the School Improvement (SIG) program. These data — consisting solely of changes in proficiency rates — were widely reported as an indication of “disappointing” or “mixed” results. Some even went as far as proclaiming the program a complete failure.

Once again, I have to point out that this breaks almost every rule of testing data interpretation and policy analysis. I’m not going to repeat the arguments about why changes in cross-sectional proficiency rates are not policy evidence (see our posts here, here and here, or examples from the research literature here, here and here). Suffice it to say that the changes themselves are not even particularly good indicators of whether students’ test-based performance in these schools actually improved, to say nothing of whether it was the SIG grants that were responsible for the changes. There’s more to policy analysis than subtraction.

So, in some respects, I would like to come to the defense of Secretary Arne Duncan and USED right now – not because I’m a big fan of the SIG program (I’m ambivalent at best), but rather because I believe in strong, patient policy evaluation, and these proficiency rate changes are virtually meaningless. Unfortunately, however, USED was the first to portray, albeit very cautiously, rate changes as evidence of SIG’s impact. In doing so, they provided a very effective example of why relying on bad evidence is a bad idea even if it supports your desired conclusions.

Los Angeles Times Editorial:

Amid allegations of overbilling, environmental hazards and spiraling costs at the Belmont Learning Center in downtown L.A. in the late 1990s, the state Legislature created a separate investigative office within the Los Angeles Unified School District. The new inspector general was authorized to issue subpoenas, and charged with examining operations in the district with a piercing and unimpeded eye. But the position was authorized for only 15 years, until the end of 2014.

The first inspector general reported on serious shortfalls in accountability and oversight at Belmont. Four employees left the school district after he made his findings known, and five were placed on extended administrative leave. Subsequent audits and investigations that went beyond Belmont uncovered costly waste in the purchase of textbooks, misuse of federal money intended to feed students and the misappropriation of $200,000 that led to the criminal conviction of a charter operator.
The relationship between the inspector general and L.A. Unified leaders has at times been understandably tense; later legislation unfortunately weakened the investigator’s authority. Still, it’s to L.A. Unified’s credit that the district is backing legislation to extend the office for an additional 10 years. The need is ongoing: The current inspector general is now examining the district’s troubling decision to purchase hundreds of thousands of iPads without first resolving major concerns.

Ruthie:

A potential law in Minnesota will allow former and current military members and their spouses, the opportunity to obtain temporary teacher licenses in the state while they pursue permanent certification in the state. This proposal is considered the latest in a nationwide trend to allow degreed professionals easier paths to the classroom.

“This bill is not meant to usurp licensing boards,” explained Representative Will Morgan, “We’re simply trying to help military families who have been moved not by choice.”

Similar to new legislation in Kansas allowing private-sector professionals to teach through industry certification or career expertise benchmarks, the legislation in Minnesota aims to curtail lengthy and cumbersome hoops for potentially excellent educators.

AAE’s state chapter in Colorado, the Professional Association of Colorado Educators (PACE) surveyed its members on the issue of teacher licensure in their state, asking: Would you support a policy creating a clearer pathway into the teaching profession by granting an initial license, renewable based on performance evaluation ratings, to teacher candidates that are able to pass a background check and have three things: a bachelor’s degree, a principal willing to hire them, and a passing score on a content area exam? An overwhelming 72% of members supported this new path, further indicating a national shift in teacher licensure legislation.

bury pensions:

The July 1, 2013 actuarial reports for the New Jersey pension plans are coming out and if you are of a mind to explain to your teacher friends why they will soon be seeing Detroit-type ‘adjustments’ to their pensions just point them to page 8 of the Milliman report for the Teachers Plan – TPAF – (Buck does the valuations for the other 6 plans in the system) titled ‘Risk Measures.’ Search the Buck reports and you won’t even find the word ‘risk’ mentioned but Milliman beginning with their July 1, 2009 report thought it a good idea to mention that…..
THE PLAN BARELY HAS 50% OF THE ASSETS NECESSARY TO ANNUITIZE ONLY (YES ONLY) THE RETIREES WITH THE OTHER 475,000 PARTICIPANTS HAVING LESS THAN NOTHING.

The Risk Measures exhibit on page 8 for the last five years compares the value of the liabilities* for retiree benefits to the market value of assets less the Annuity Savings Fund (accumulated member contributions). That percentage as of July 1, 2013: 50.2%.

Now compare that to July 1, 2000 (when Milliman didn’t feel the need to insert a Risk Measures exhibit). $1,159,146,402 in retiree payouts valued at $12,040,604,827 and easily covered by the $35,839,120,536 in assets even when reduced by the $5,034,537,874 in the Annuity Savings Fund. That percentage came to 255.84% and even considering the dodgy assumptions for valuing liabilities (then and now) there would have been plenty of money to annuitize retirees.

edushyster.com:

Reader: I have a confession to make. My path has not been a righteous one. In fact the last time I attended a church service was in the 5th grade, when, as a *plus one* with my best friend’s family, I would pass a confused, incense-choked hour thinking longingly of the donuts that waited downstairs. But that all changed recently when I accompanied wonder blogger Mercedes Schneider to her southern Louisiana church. Her pastor gave a sermon about David and Goliath, so powerful, so perfect for our *2 big 2 fail* times that I have been thinking about it ever since.

Meet Goliath, Inc, Inc, Inc
In Malcolm Gladwell’s provocative study of David and Goliath (note: all references to the Gladwellian oeuvre must be preceded by *provocative*), he alleges that it was double vision that ultimately felled the giant Philistine. Our #edreform equivalent of Goliath—let’s call him *G*—suffers from a different disorder: double hearing. You see, our G lives in an echo chamber such that everything he utters is repeated back to him. He and his G-unit think in the same tanks and watch their Roth’s gently swell in the same banks. In fact, rare is the day in which they encounter a single other individual who does not share their belief that it is a matter of common sense, not to mention fierce urgency, that [INSERT BELOVED REFORMY POLICY HERE] should be implemented posthaste. In fact, in fact, only yesterday G read a brand new study affirming exactly that—well, maybe not a study exactly, more like a collection of handsomely bound talking points. But still…

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

The District has informed principals of their staffing allocations for the 2014-15 school year. Surplus notices, where the District determines such are necessary, are expected to be delivered to staff by March 19 (the Contract enables one to be declared surplus through July 1). As part of the negotiations over the 2013-14 MTI Teacher Contract, the parties agreed to significant changes to the teacher surplus reassignment and vacancy posting language. The changes were driven by the District’s desire to engage in earlier hiring.

Under the new language, teachers declared surplus will first be placed in available vacancies prior to the posting of said positions, with the goal of assigning all surplus teachers by May 1. Any positions which remain vacant as of May 1 will then be posted for voluntary internal transfer (while some vacant teaching positions in high-demand areas will be posted during the months of March and April, the majority of vacancy postings will occur on May 2). Application for voluntary internal transfer will be enabled for vacancies known by June 14. Positions becoming vacant after June 14 through the first four (4) weeks of school are not subject to posting and voluntary internal transfers are not enabled.

The benefits of the above revisions are that: 1) surplus teachers should receive earlier notice of their upcoming year teaching assignment, and; 2) by moving the “no post” date from August 1 to June 15, the District is able to offer new hires specific teaching positions approximately six weeks earlier than in the past, which the District asserts will improve their candidate pool. The potential downside to the changes is that current teaching staff will have fewer vacancies to choose from, and a shorter window of time to apply for vacancies. All MTI Faculty Representatives have received a fact sheet with information on surplus and transfer changes. Members may also call MTI Headquarters with any questions.

School allocation decisions made before the District’s budget is finalized was a controversial practice some years ago. Obviously, it continues.

Peter Wood:

The new changes, like others that have been instituted since the mid 1990s, are driven by politics. David Coleman, head of the College Board, is also the chief architect of the Common Core K-12 State Standards, which are now mired in controversy across the country. Coleman’s initiative in revising the SAT should be seen first of all as a rescue mission. As the Common Core flounders, he is throwing it an SAT life preserver. I’ll explain, but first let’s get the essentials of how the SAT is about to change.

The essay is now optional, ending a decade-long experiment in awarding points for sloppy writing graded by mindless formulae.

The parts of the test that explored the range and richness of a student’s vocabulary have been etiolated. The test now will look for evidence that students are familiar with academic buzzwords and jargon. The College Board calls this “Relevant Words in Context.” Test-takers won’t have to “memorize obscure words” but instead “will be asked to interpret the meaning of words based on the context of the passage in which they appear.”

Lynn Arditi:

The classic children’s book by Dr. Seuss is the 6-year-old’s top choice for bedtime reading, his mother, Brittany Morales said.

So when Jamier came home from kindergarten in East Providence recently with a bookmark that read “Meet the cat in the hat” at the Warwick Mall Saturday, she knew they had to go.

The National Education Association of Rhode Island’s 17th annual Read Across America Day drew some 2,000 children based upon the 3,000 or so donated children’s books volunteers gave away, said Marie Glass, president of the NEARI’s Education Support Professionals’ caucus.

The national Read Across America Day is officially Sunday, which was Dr. Seuss’s birthday. (He was born Theodor Seuss Geisel in Springfield, Mass., on March 2, 1904, and died in 1991.)

Mike Antonucci:

Last week we examined how teacher unions stand in relation to the rest of the labor movement. As the number of union members overall continued its decades-long decline, teacher unions were able to add members for many years, and so became the predominant sector of organized labor.

But how have the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers fared in relation to the teaching workforce? Was teacher union growth a function of organizational effort, or simply the expansion of the teaching population? Thanks to data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and unionstats.com, we have an answer.

BLS began tracking union data in 1983. That year there were more than 2.6 million people employed as primary, secondary and special education teachers in both public and private schools. More than 1.5 million of them were union members, for a unionization rate of 57.5 percent.

Deborah Fallows:

In January, I visited the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, a public residential high school in Greenville. Artistically talented students from around the state spend two or three of their high school years in dedicated pursuit of their art—dance, drama, music, visual arts, or creative writing—along with their academic curriculum. I wrote about it here.

I asked Scott Gould, a creative writing teacher at the school, if he would ask his students to write me a short essay about their school. This was a wide-open request; I wanted to hear whatever perspective the students wanted to offer about their experience at the school. Among the essays the students submitted, here are three of my favorites, unedited and untouched. I’d like to share them with you.

Megan Williams:

A funny thing happens at McSwain Elementary School on Friday afternoons when a teacher comes over the intercom to say it’s time for “CAB,” which stands for Celebrating Appropriate Behavior and is extended recess time.

For most students, the announcement is a happy one, a reward at the end of the week. But for Christy Davis’ group of gifted third-graders it either elicits no response or assurance that what they are working on — creative enrichment projects — is way more fun than CAB.

“CAB? We haven’t done CAB in forever,” said Kayla Bullard, as she worked on a visual story involving Lego characters where she created her own text, background and props.

A fellow classmate chimed in, “Yeah, this is way funner.”

Nat Hentoff:

Former Chief Judge of New York State Judith S. Kaye always makes necessary sense, as she did when she recently wrote this in the opinion pages of The New York Times:

“As universal pre-K and the Common Core standards dominate the headlines, we cannot overlook a third subject that deserves top billing: keeping children in school and out of courts” (Letters, The New York Times, Feb. 22).

Kaye was writing in response to an op-ed that had run in the Times last month. In it, Robert K. Ross and Kenneth H. Zimmerman, the respective heads of the California Endowment and the United States programs for the Open Society Foundations, wrote: “Large numbers of students are kicked out, typically for nonviolent offenses, and suspensions have become the go-to response for even minor misbehavior, like carrying a plastic water gun to elementary school …

“The Civil Rights Project at UCLA found that the number of secondary school students suspended or expelled increased by some 40 percent between 1972-73 and 2009-10 … A study of nearly one million Texas students found that those suspended or expelled for violations at the discretion of school officials were almost three times as likely to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year” (“Real Discipline in School,” Robert K. Ross and Kenneth H. Zimmerman, The New York Times, Feb. 17).

Jeremy Kun:

A large part of my audience over at Math ∩ Programming are industry software engineers who are discovering two things about mathematics: it’s really hard and it opens the door to a world of new ideas. In that way it’s a lot like learning to read. Once you’re mildly fluent you can read books, use the ideas to solve problems, and maybe even write an original piece of your own.

Many people who are in this position, trying to learn mathematics on their own, have roughly two approaches. The first is to learn only the things that you need for the applications you’re interested in. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s akin to learning just enough vocabulary to fill out your tax forms. It’s often too specialized to give you a good understanding of how to apply the key ideas elsewhere. A common example is learning very specific linear algebra facts in order to understand a particular machine learning algorithm. It’s a commendable effort and undoubtedly useful, but in my experience this route makes you start from scratch in every new application.

Sam Frizzell

American students are well over $1 trillion in debt, and it’s starting to hurt everyone, economists say

Chris Rong did everything right. A 23-year-old dentistry student in New York, Chris excelled at one of the country’s top high schools, breezed through college, and is now studying dentistry at one of the best dental schools in the nation.

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But it may be a long time before he sees any rewards. He’s moved back home with his parents in Bayside, Queens—an hour-and-a-half commute each way to class at the New York University’s College of Dentistry—and by the time he graduates in 2016, he’ll face $400,000 in student loans. “If the money weren’t a problem I would live on my own,” says Rong. “My debt is hanging over my mind. I’m taking that all on myself.”

Alays Francis

In an unauthorised colony of labourers in Delhi, a class of six-year-olds is reciting English, a language their parents hope will get them jobs in call centres and offices.

But later this month the classes will stop.

Ramditi JRN Deepalaya is among hundreds of small private schools – which have multiplied in India selling education at 100 rupees ($1.6; 96 pence) a month – that are being forced to sound the final bell because they do not comply with a law which makes education a fundamental right for children.

Teacher Gitanjali Krishnan said the school in Panchsheel Enclave would have to triple student fees to meet the demands of the law.

“Our parents are the poorest of the poor, labourers and migrant workers, they won’t be able to afford it,” she said.

When the Right To Education (RTE) law was introduced in 2009 it was hailed as a major step to bridging the cavernous gap between the education of rich and poor in India.

Peggy Noonan:

What a small and politically vicious man New York’s new mayor is. Bill de Blasio doesn’t like charter schools. They are too successful to be tolerated. Last week he announced he will drop the ax on three planned Success Academy schools. (You know Success Academy: It was chronicled in the film “Waiting for Superman.” It’s one of the charter schools the disadvantaged kids are desperate to get into.) Mr. de Blasio has also cut and redirected the entire allotment for charter facility funding from the city’s capital budget. An official associated with a small, independent charter school in the South Bronx told me the decision will siphon money from his school’s operations. He summed up his feelings with two words: “It’s dispiriting.”

Some 70,000 of the city’s one million students, most black or Hispanic, attend charter schools, mostly in poorer neighborhoods. Charter schools are privately run but largely publicly financed. Their teachers are not unionized. Their students usually outscore their counterparts at conventional public schools on state tests. Success Academy does particularly well. Last year 82% of its students passed citywide math exams. Citywide the figure was 30%.

These are schools that work. They are something to be proud of and encourage.

Mr. de Blasio’s move has caused considerable personal anxiety and widespread public anger. The Daily News on Thursday called the nearly 200 Success Academy students who now have no place to go the mayor’s “educational orphans.” A reporter spoke to distraught families. “I wanted the best for my daughter,” said Rakim Smith, 40, a cable technician from Harlem whose daughter Dymond is a sixth-grader at Success Academy Harlem Central Middle School. “Now they’re trying to take it away.” “I don’t know where else I can send my son so that he can have the same level education,” said Fatoumata Kebe of the Bronx, whose 11-year-old son, Ousmane, goes to Harlem Central.

Larry Gordon:

As part of a major overhaul of the SAT college entrance exam, test-takers starting in 2016 will no longer be required to write an essay, the College Board announced Wednesday.

However, an essay-writing test still will be offered, and many colleges may demand that applicants take it and submit the score.

With that change, the main SAT will be condensed to two sections from the current three, and the top possible score will be 1,600, as it was for many decades.

The current 2,400-point maximum was introduced with the start of the required essay seven years ago. The new optional essay test will be graded separately on a scale that is still under consideration, said officials of the College Board, which owns the widely used exam.

Those shifts, officials said, are part of a wider effort to better align the exam with what students learn in high school and will need in college — and away from the advantages they may gain from expensive private tutoring.

For example, the revised sections in reading will drop their most obscure vocabulary words and instead “focus on words students will use over and over again,” said College Board President David Coleman. The math problems will be less theoretical and more linked to real-life questions.

“While we build on the best of the past, we commit today that the redesigned SAT will be more focused and useful, more clear and open than ever before,” Coleman said at a meeting in Austin, Texas, that was broadcast on the Internet.

Richard Adams:

She and husband Michael Gove became first Tory education secretary family to send offspring to state secondary school

You shouldn’t judge people by their clothes, or where they live, but by who they really are’ … Sarah Vine

Sarah Vine – the journalist and wife of education secretary Michael Gove – has written a rousing celebration of state education in England, calling it “a miracle” while describing private schools as polarising and built on principles of snobbery.

Vine told readers of her Daily Mail column that her decision to send her daughter to a state secondary school was motivated by a desire for her child to receive a broad education: “that you shouldn’t judge people by their clothes, or where they live, but by who they really are”.

“That, in my view, is the miracle of our state education system. Like the NHS, it welcomes all-comers,” Vine wrote. “The state doesn’t care where its pupils come from; all that matters is where they’re heading.”

Vine and Gove’s decision to send their daughter Beatrice to Grey Coat Hospital comprehensive school, a popular girls’ academy in Westminster, made headlines this week because it marked the first time a Conservative education secretary had chosen the state over the private sector for their child’s seconday schooling.

“I believe that at state school Beatrice will receive a far more comprehensive education – in every sense of the phrase – than at any private establishment,” Vine concluded.

Study Hacks:

In an innocuous office complex, three blocks south of Northwestern University, and a short walk from Lake Michigan, you can find the Yellowbrick psychiatric treatment center. Though Yellowbrick treats the expected spectrum of mental disorders, from anxiety to schizophrenia, its mission is unique: it’s the country’s only psychiatric center dedicated exclusively to emerging adults — young people in the ever-expanding gap between adolescence and the stability of family, a mortgage, and a settled career.

Unfortunately for you, my dear student reader, business at Yellowbrick is booming.

In a recent New York Times Magazine article, journalist Robin Marantz Henig provides a haunting portrait of a typical Yellowbrick patient: he’s a young man “who had done well at a top Ivy League college until the last class of the last semester of his last year, when he finished his final paper and could not bring himself to turn it in.” This brief moment of existential despair spiraled out of control.

“The demands of imminent independence can worsen mental-health problems or create new ones for people who have managed up to that point to perform all the expected roles,” explains Henig. “[They] get lost when schooling ends and expected roles disappear.”

In other words, when you go through life thinking “if I can make it through this, things will be better later,” you eventually forget what “better” means.

Austin Walters:

This is a long story, but I feel sheds light on education in general and why academia and educational institutions function so poorly that they drive the brightest into the dark.

More than once I have told by an academic advisor that I am going to fail

2nd grade was my first brush with failure, I started young and I failed English. I remember my parents telling me that I could not pass 2nd grade without learning to read. Yet, I showed them, I passed with a D! For some reason, being the independent 6 year old I felt smug knowing I had outsmarted them and by the middle of 4th grade I was in deep trouble. At this point I had to be enrolled in an after school tutoring program, since I still did not really know how to read. This was expensive for my parents and I regret it now (realizing how childish I was when… I was a child), but at the time I thought little of it.

I remember myself sitting in a chair and speaking the first time with the overweight, scraggily haired tutor across the table. She was explaining to me how this tutoring program worked and looking back it was perfect. The tutor laid out the process of how in this tutoring program for each thing we accomplish we receive a coin, we then can use our coins to purchase items. Simple things such as candy, to things such as tents, or radios, etc. The most expensive items were probably $50 – $100, but to me this was amazing! I worked very hard, saved all of my coins, and by my last day in the program I bought out all of the items they had available that day.

For me, what was important is achieving something. In this case I wanted to do what I perceived as the hardest thing to do, to buy out all of the “prizes” for doing a good job. Thankfully, (as a happy coincidence) I learned to read.

This was just the first of many challenges I faced, largely due to the fact I chose not to learn to read until late 4th – early 5th grade.