Tim O’Reilly:

Regulation is the bugaboo of today’s politics. We have too much of it in most areas, we have too little of it in others, but mostly, we just have the wrong kind, a mountain of paper rules, inefficient processes, and little ability to adjust the rules or the processes when we discover the inevitable unintended results.
Consider, for a moment, regulation in a broader context. Your car’s electronics regulate the fuel-air mix in the engine to find an optimal balance of fuel efficiency and minimal emissions. An airplane’s autopilot regulates the countless factors required to keep that plane aloft and heading in the right direction. Credit card companies monitor and regulate charges to detect fraud and keep you under your credit limit. Doctors regulate the dosage of the medicine they give us, sometimes loosely, sometimes with exquisite care, as with the chemotherapy required to kill cancer cells while keeping normal cells alive, or with the anesthesia that keeps us unconscious during surgery while keeping vital processes going. ISPs and corporate mail systems regulate the mail that reaches us, filtering out spam and malware to the best of their ability. Search engines regulate the results and advertisements they serve up to us, doing their best to give us more of what we want to see.
What do all these forms of regulation have in common?

Jim Franz:

When he was hired in March, 2011, as Beloit Memorial High School head football coach, Jon Dupuis knew he was accepting a major undertaking.
“I’m passionate about it,” Dupuis said at the time. “I’m home grown. I really believe in these kids and this community. I want to make going to Beloit games something you do on Friday nights again.”
After three seasons and just two victories to go with 25 losses, Dupuis wasn’t ready to throw in the towel.
The high school’s administration, however, did it for him. Dupuis said Monday he learned he was being let go.
“I went in and asked for a three-year commitment and was told they wanted to move in a different direction,” Dupuis said. “I think my staff and I deserved (the three additional years) because of the progress we were making. I was told they want a powerhouse and I told them you’re not going to turn this into a powerhouse in three years. I don’t know how you could do that.
“When I originally interviewed for this job I wanted five years to turn it around and they gave me three. I don’t know much more of what we could have done

Alex Tabarrok:

ne of the general features of information technology is that through coordination it makes better use of distributed resources, such as workers, automobiles or energy. An excellent case in point is being tested in Stockholm, Sweden. SMSlivräddare (in Swedish) has a large list of people who are trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). When an emergency call is received indicating a possible heart attack, SMSlivräddare finds the mobile phone user(s) closest to the potential victim and alerts them with a text message. The message also contains a map to the victim’s location.
Survival rates for heart attack outside a hospital in Sweden are low, only about 5-10% but every minute shaved off the time it takes to begin CPR increases the survival rate by 10%. When notified, SMS responders arrive faster than ambulances about 50% of the time so the potential for saving lives is quite large (final data on the research project are not yet in).

Stanley Kurtz

What do America’s college students want? They want to be oppressed. More precisely, a surprising number of students at America’s finest colleges and universities wish to appear as victims — to themselves, as well as to others — without the discomfort of actually experiencing victimization. Here is where global warming comes in. The secret appeal of campus climate activism lies in its ability to turn otherwise happy, healthy, and prosperous young people into an oppressed class, at least in their own imaginings. Climate activists say to the world, “I’ll save you.” Yet deep down they’re thinking, “Oppress me.”
In his important new book, The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings, French intellectual gadfly Pascal Bruckner does the most thorough job yet of explaining the climate movement as a secular religion, an odd combination of deformed Christianity and reconstructed Marxism. (You can find Bruckner’s excellent article based on the book here.) Bruckner describes a historical process wherein “the long list of emblematic victims — Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples — was replaced, little by little, with the Planet.” The planet, says Bruckner, “has become the new proletariat that must be saved from exploitation.”
But why? Bruckner finds it odd that a “mood of catastrophe” should prevail in the West, the most well-off part of the world. The reason, I think, is that the only way to turn the prosperous into victims is to threaten the very existence of a world they otherwise command.

New York Times Editorial:

Researchers have been warning for more than a decade that the United States was losing ground to its economic competitors abroad and would eventually fall behind them unless it provided more of its citizens with the high-level math, science and literacy skills necessary for the new economy.
Naysayers dismissed this as alarmist. But recent data showing American students and adults lagging behind their peers abroad in terms of important skills suggest that the long-predicted peril has arrived.
A particularly alarming report on working-age adults was published earlier this month by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a coalition of mainly developed nations. The research focused on people ages 16 to 65 in 24 countries. It dealt with three crucial areas: literacy — the ability to understand and respond to written material; numeracy — the ability to use numerical and mathematical concepts; and problem solving — the ability to interpret and analyze information using computers.
Americans were comparatively weak-to-poor in all three areas. In literacy, for example, about 12 percent of American adults scored at the highest levels, a smaller proportion than in Finland and Japan (about 22 percent). In addition, one in six Americans scored near the bottom in literacy, compared with 1 in 20 adults who scored at that level in Japan.

Peter King:

Three years ago today, I sat in the office of Massachusetts neuropathologist Ann McKee, who studies the brains of deceased former football players to discover the effects of repetitive brain trauma. She showed me slides of cross-sections of brains of former NFL players with evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). This was five days after Rutgers player Eric LeGrand was paralyzed after a big hit in a college game, and four days after frightening blows by pro players James Harrison, Brandon Meriweather and Dunta Robinson. “I wonder,” McKee said that day. “Can we make it more of an Indy 500 and less of a demolition derby?”
The race is on to see if football can change–and so far, after three years, the effort is there on all levels. With the emphasis on the head trauma issue evident all over football and society, The MMQB will spend this week publishing a series of stories taking the temperature of people across America–high school coaches and players, parents of players, medical experts and current and former pro players–about the game.
What you’ll read on our site this week:

Nat Hentoff:

My primary hero of the full existence of the Constitution is George Mason, a Virginia delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Why him? He refused to sign the Constitution because it didn’t have a “declaration of rights” — the individual liberties of American citizens.
Because of George Mason, who was followed by other non-signers, James Madison introduced the Bill of Rights. These first 10 amendments to the Constitution, when ratified by enough states in 1791, guaranteed to We The People specific limits on government power.
In this self-governing republic, the Fourth Amendment in these guarantees clearly states:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
In last week’s column, I focused on two shocking cases, unknown to most Americans because the media in its various forms ignored them. These cases dealt with public school students who had been “locked down” in mass searches by police and drug-sniffing dogs. The searches were conducted without court warrants or any indication that the students being searched for drugs or drug paraphernalia had any connection at all to these suspicions.

John Cassidy:

In recent years, a number of international surveys have raised alarms that the United States is falling behind other countries in terms of educational achievement. Now there is another one, and its findings represent a serious threat to the country’s future prosperity. In basic literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills, the new study shows, younger Americans are at or near the bottom of the standings among advanced countries.
The survey was carried out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a Paris-based forum and research group, which counts thirty-three high- and middle-income countries among its members. Some of its findings have been well covered elsewhere, particularly by the Times’ editorial board and its economics columnist Eduardo Porter.
But the data comparing young adults aged sixteen to twenty-four in different countries–the folks who will be manning the global economy for the next thirty or forty years–deserves a closer look. The figures come from three charts in the report’s statistical annex, which we have adapted here. Taken together, they vividly illustrate some of the challenges facing an economic hegemon that has for decades been plagued by wage stagnation and rising inequality, and which, as President Obama has pointed out, desperately needs to raise its game.

Douglas Belkin & Caroline Porter:

After decades of rampant growth, the rate of tuition increases at U.S. colleges and universities has slowed for the second academic year in a row, but government aid has fallen, continuing a cycle of rising costs and debt for American students.
Published tuition and fees rose 2.9% for in-state students at four-year public schools, the smallest one-year increase since 1975-76. At private schools, tuition and fees rose 3.8%, a bit lower than in recent years, according to a report from the College Board, a New York nonprofit that tracks university costs.
“The news in terms of college price increases is that it does seem the spiral is moderating, not turning around, not ending, but moderating,” said Sandy Baum an economist at the College Board.
After adjusting for aid, students attending public four-year institutions this academic year are paying an average of $12,620, up $220 from last year, for tuition, room and board. Private-school costs rose $700, to $23,290.
The continued rising costs come as student debt has topped $1 trillion and the default rate on student loans has risen for six straight years. One in 10 students now defaults within two years of starting repayment, according to Department of Education figures released earlier this month.

Stephen Ball:

The English education system is being dismembered. Gradually but purposefully first New Labour and now the coalition government have been unpicking and disarticulating the national system of state schooling. With free schools and academies of various kinds, faith schools, studio schools and university technical colleges, the school system is beginning to resemble the patchwork of uneven and unequal provision that existed prior to the 1870 Education Act.
At the same time, we are moving back to an incoherent and haphazard jigsaw of providers – charities, foundations, social enterprises and faith and community groups – monitored at arm’s length by the central state. Furthermore, private providers are waiting in the wings for the opportunity to profit from running schools.
Local democratic oversight has been almost totally displaced. Our relationship to schools is being modelled on that of the privatised utilities – we are individual customers, who can switch provider if we are unhappy, in theory, and complain to the national watchdog if we feel badly served – but with no direct, local participation or involvement, no say in our children’s education.
These changes have been pursued in the name of choice, diversity and autonomy. Some parents now have new schools to choose from for their children, but some do not. This simply depends on where you live. You may have a local academy or you may not. If you do, it might be a sponsored academy (Bexley, south-east London), a chain academy (Ark, ULT, AET), a converter academy, or a school subject to forced academisation. There are 174 free schools and you may live near one of these, but many are faith schools or have specialisms that may not suit your child. The free schools were supposed to be targeted at areas of social disadvantage but recent research by Rob Higham at the Institute of Education indicates their distribution does not reflect this aim. There is a distribution map of free schools on the DfE website.Some of these free schools already have problems – unqualified teachers, poor management – as Nick Clegg will point out in his speech on Thursday. Academies seem to display the same diversity of outcomes as the schools they replaced. If you live in a rural area you’re unlikely to have much, if any, choice of school.

Matthew Ladner:

The No Child Left Behind Act required student testing and reporting of data in return for continuing receipt of federal education dollars. The law however left granular details to the states, most of whom happily went about abusing them.
This chart is from a new study about the inclusion of special needs children in state testing regimes. As you can see from the third column, states held a glorious 35.4% of schools accountable for the academic performance of special needs children during the 2009-10 school year. This ranged from a glorious 100% in Connecticut and Utah to a sickening 7% in Arizona.
I have heard through the grapevine that addressing this national scandal has been a major point of emphasis in Arne Duncan’s waiver process. As someone who views this process skeptically overall and suspects that it is creating a mess that will be difficult to unwind, let me say bully for Duncan on this score.

Patti Waldmeir:

Cao Qing is home-schooling her 13-year-old son because, among other things, “he doesn’t like homework”.
In the land of the midnight homework project, the average teenager’s distaste for homework would not normally give Tiger Mum pause. Most Chinese children learn early to sacrifice playtime and sleeptime on the altar of schoolwork: kids who do not excel in primary school fail to get into the middle school that gets them into the high school that guarantees the right university entrance scores. School is a serious business in China, right from the beginning.
So who cares if the offspring hate homework? Is that not part of the human condition – not just in China, but around the world?
Ms Cao is one of an increasing number of Chinese parents who no longer think suffering is a necessary condition of academic success.
“The school gives too much homework,” she says, as an autumn breeze blows through the open patio door of the walk-up duplex flat she rents in a Shanghai suburb to use as a home-schooling base for her son, Zhou Yi. “Besides, he’s a boy, and boys like to play, they don’t like to sit still for a long time,” she says, adding: “They can’t just get all their knowledge from textbooks.” Our chat is obviously distracting the boy in question, who pops up from his studies at the nearby kitchen table and goes off to fondle the family’s newborn kitten and fetch his beetle collection for us to admire.

Paul Hill:

In October 2002, about nine months after Bloomberg took office, he and schools Chancellor Joel Klein unveiled “Children First: A New Agenda for Public Education.” Children First sought to increase the four-year high school graduation rates–which hovered around 50 percent–and preparedness for college. Because children from advantaged households already graduated at high rates, the only way to increase the number of graduates was to improve results for children who were at risk of never graduating. The only way to do that was to improve schools–high schools so students would be encouraged to take necessary courses and persevere to graduation, and elementary and middle schools so that students would enter high school ready to succeed. Children First also worked to rescue high school-age students who had already dropped out or fallen drastically behind. It did this by creating career and technical education schools that linked students to jobs, and “multiple pathways to graduation” that offered flexible schedules and concentrated learning opportunities so students could graduate.
Here’s an assessment of the results.
Graduation rates are up. When Bloomberg became mayor, less than half the students in New York City’s high schools graduated in four years. Today, nearly two-thirds graduate on time. Every year, 18,000 more young people graduate high school than would have been expected in 2002. The percentage of graduates who enter college without needing to take remedial courses has doubled since 2001.
From 2005 to 2012, the graduation rate for Asian students rose from 66.3 percent to 82.1 percent, for black students from 40.1 percent to 59.8 percent; for Hispanic students from 37.4 percent to 57.5 percent; and for white students from 64.0 percent to 78.1 percent.
The percentage of city students dropping out after entering high school fell from 22 percent in 2005 to 11.4 percent in 2012. The percentage receiving an Advanced Regents Diploma increased from 12.5 percent in 2005 to 16.6 percent in 2012.

Doug Tuthill:

Florida’s Duval County School District is losing students to charter schools, and the district’s entrepreneurial superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, is fighting back.
But his efforts to regain lost market share raise an important question: Should districts place maximizing student enrollment over ensuring all children have access to the learning options that best meet their needs?
Most school boards and district superintendents want to maximize district enrollment, but this is not the best way to ensure student success. K-12 students today are incredibly diverse. School districts have never been able to meet the needs of all students, which is why parents are demanding more school choice options and flocking to charter schools, private schools, virtual schools, and homeschooling.
The Duval school district is the sixth largest in Florida and 22nd largest in the nation. Its enrollment has dropped from 126,873 in 2003-04 to 119,188 today, while enrollment of charter schools within the district has increased from 609 to 7,795 over the same period. Duval’s private schools now enroll more than 24,000 students.

Mara Rose Williams:

On the same day that state officials left Kansas City Public Schools unaccredited for now, Mayor Sly James and Superintendent Steve Green asked state lawmakers to support their efforts to improve education in the city.
At a public hearing before 18 members of the 22-member Missouri House Interim Committee on Education, the conversation ranged from a push for early childhood education to support for the mayor’s city-wide reading initiative. The potential transfer of students from unaccredited Kansas City schools to surrounding suburban districts also was discussed.
The committee, which is traveling the state hearing from educators and residents, said its plan is to put together a report on what people across Missouri say is needed to improve education and present it to other legislators.

Much more on the Kansas City schools, here.

Joseph Spector:

Nearly 92 percent of teachers were rated highly effective or effective in the first year of a new evaluation system, the state Education Department said Tuesday.
The highly controversial testing of teachers produced few poor grades, the state said. Just 1 percent was deemed ineffective, and 4 percent were characterized as developing.
The results are for 126,829 teachers outside New York City; 91.5 percent were deemed effective or highly effective.
The results come after the state released new student assessment scores as part of the Common Core program last summer that showed just 31 percent of New York students in elementary and middle schools were proficient in math and reading.
“The results are striking,” state Education Commissioner John King said in a statement. “The more accurate student proficiency rates on the new Common Core assessments did not negatively affect teacher ratings. It’s clear that teachers are rising to the challenge of teaching the Common Core.”

Molly Beck:

Local teacher union officials say they are hopeful after Monday’s ruling by a Madison judge finding state labor commissioners in contempt of court for continuing to enforce collective bargaining restrictions he deemed unconstitutional last year.
Meanwhile, some area school districts are saying it’s too soon to tell if the ruling will produce new calls for negotiations.
“We are back to the point that unions and the people they represent have equal standing,” said John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., one of two plaintiffs that brought a lawsuit challenging Act 10, resulting in Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colas’ 2012 decision.
The Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission had argued that decision applied just to the plaintiff unions. Colas said Monday the ruling applied statewide and the commission was purposefully ignoring it.
In Madison, teachers and the district just extended a contract through June 2015.

Matthew DeFour:

Public schools will receive $4.26 billion in general state aid this school year, up $87.5 million or 2.1 percent from last year, the Department of Public Instruction announced Wednesday.
The aid figures are a revision from those released Oct. 15. Gov. Scott Walker signed a bill Sunday to increase aid by $100 million over two years. The bill did not include an increase in state-imposed limits on school district revenues, so school boards are expected to use the additional aid to lower property taxes.
The aid figures were marginally different than estimates released by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau last week as part of the discussion of the property tax relief bill. The Madison School District, for example, will receive $12,680 less than reported last week, a change of 0.02 percent.
Over all, Madison will get $52.2 million in state aid, a 10.7 percent decrease.

Madison received an increase of $11,800,000 in redistributed state tax dollars last year…



Madison Schools’ 2013-2014 Budget Charts, Documents, Links, Background & Missing Numbers.

Madison Teachers, Inc (PDF), via a kind Jeanie (Bettner) Kamholtz email:

Several joint committees were created in the recent negotiations over MTI’s 2014-15 Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement. The joint committees will study and potentially recommend modification of Contract terms. Each committee will report its recommendations, if any, to Superintendent Cheatham and to the MTI Board of Directors.
The Committee on Teacher Assignments will discuss potential modification of Contract Section IV-F, Teacher Assignments, Surplus, Vacancies and Transfers. MTI’s appointees are: Andy Mayhall (Thoreau), Nancy Roth (West), Karlton Porter (Cherokee) and Doug Keillor.
The Committee on Teacher Evaluation will study and make recommendations pertaining to the District’s implementation of the State-mandated teacher evaluation system, “Educator Effectiveness”. Any revisions will be incorporated into Section IV-H of the Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement and will become effective July 1, 2014. MTI’s appointees are: MTI President Peggy Coyne (Black Hawk), Andrew McCuaig (La Follette), Kerry Motoviloff (Doyle) and Sara Bringman.
The Committee on Professional Collaboration Time will discuss implementation of the MTI/MMSD Memorandum of Understanding on High School & Middle School Professional Collaboration Time. MTI’s appointees are: Art Camosy (Memorial), Karen Vieth (Sennett), Aisha Robertson (West), and Nichole Von Haden (Sherman).
The Committee on Elementary Planning Time will discuss potential modification of Section V-I-1-d, Early Monday Release and Section V-P, Planning Time. MTI’s appointees are: Nancy Curtin (Crestwood), Greg Vallee (Thoreau), Holly Hansen (Falk) and Doug Keillor.

Tap or click to view the pdf version.
Speaker: Pharen Bowman, Harvard College Admissions and Financial Aid Officer Tuesday, November 5
6:30 – 8:00 p.m.
Urban League of Greater Madison (2222 S. Park Street Madison, WI)

Eric Sheninger:

If someone would have asked me this question a few years ago I honestly would not have had a good answer. I always thought a positive school culture was one where strict rules were created and consistently enforced to keep students focused on learning. In my mind, the more I could control the environment that my students were a part of the better the results. There was not much flexibility in terms of the structure of the day and what students were “allowed” to do. The end result was either compliance or outright defiance. Those who were compliant were celebrated while those who were defiant were disciplined accordingly.

Marian Wang:

George Washington University — which got in trouble last year for misreporting admissions data to bolster its college ranking — is making yet another confession.
The university has been misrepresenting its admissions and financial-aid policy for years, touting a “need-blind” admissions policy while in fact giving preference to wealthier students in the final stages of the admissions process, according to the student newspaper, the GW Hatchet, which first reported on the practice. Meanwhile, hundreds of academically comparable but needier students were put on the waitlist for admission because they lacked the financial resources.
Many colleges and universities like to tout “need-blind” admissions processes, or the practice of judging their applicants’ academic qualifications strictly on their merits and making decisions without factoring in applicants’ wealth. In recent years, some colleges that have traditionally been need-blind have weighed whether to become more need-aware.
Until a few days ago, the undergraduate admissions page for George Washington University stated, “Requests for financial aid do not affect admissions decisions.” That language was removed over the weekend. (Here’s the archived version.)

Lacy Hunt:

The Fed’s capabilities to engineer changes in economic growth and inflation are asymmetric. It has been historically documented that central bank tools are well suited to fight excess demand and rampant inflation; the Fed showed great resolve in containing the fast price increases in the aftermath of World Wars I and II and the Korean War. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, rampant inflation was again brought under control by a determined and persistent Federal Reserve.
However, when an economy is excessively over-indebted and disinflationary factors force central banks to cut overnight interest rates to as close to zero as possible, central bank policy is powerless to further move inflation or growth metrics. The periods between 1927 and 1939 in the U.S. (and elsewhere), and from 1989 to the present in Japan, are clear examples of the impotence of central bank policy actions during periods of over-indebtedness.
Four considerations suggest the Fed will continue to be unsuccessful in engineering increasing growth and higher inflation with their continuation of the current program of Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAP)

James Bradshaw:

The pressure of the year’s first exam-and-essay crunch is driving some students at Canadian universities to look for help in study drugs. A dealer might charge $20 for a single pill of the prescription Adderall, but students under stress are willing to pay.
A few weeks ago, before midterm season, that same pill might have cost $5. Students who have used a range of medications commonly prescribed to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, say they can help casual users focus for hours, study stacks of material or write papers through the night without fatigue.
Nearly 4 per cent of students who have no medical need for the drugs take them to cope with academic demands, despite risks to their health, according to a major national study released this year. Many buy them from friends or classmates with legitimate prescriptions. Schools are aware of the problem – and the ethical questions – but have few tools to combat it.
The Globe and Mail asked student journalists across the country to probe the use of study drugs on their campus. In more than 20 interviews, students said they turned to the drugs, often before exams, because they had too many non-academic commitments or felt anxious to get good marks to be accepted to graduate school. Others confessed that they had procrastinated. Nearly every one said the drugs gave them a clear boost. The Globe contacted the students to verify the interviews. All of them declined to be identified on the record, out of concern about harming their academic or job prospects.

Stephanie Simon:

Teach for America is best known for sending bright young college graduates to teach for two years in poor communities.
But it’s much more than a service organization. It’s a political powerhouse.
With a $100 million endowment and annual revenues approaching $300 million, TFA is flush with cash and ambition. Its clout on Capitol Hill was demonstrated last week when a bipartisan group of lawmakers made time during the frenzied budget negotiations to secure the nonprofit its top legislative priority — the renewal of a controversial provision defining teachers still in training, including TFA recruits, as “highly qualified” to take charge of classrooms.
It was a huge victory that flattened a coalition of big-name opponents, including the NAACP, the National PTA and the National Education Association. But it barely hints at TFA’s growing leverage.
TFA has already produced an astounding number of alumni who have transformed the education landscape in states from Tennessee to Texas by opening public schools to competition from private entrepreneurs; rating teachers in part on their ability to raise student test scores; and pressing to eliminate tenure and seniority-based job protections. Convinced that quicker, bolder change is needed, TFA executives are mining their network of 32,000 alumni to identify promising leaders and help them advance.

Peter Gray:

We like to think of human rights in affirmative terms, so we speak most often of our rights to move toward what we want: our rights to vote, assemble freely, speak freely, and choose our own paths to happiness. My contention here, however, is that the most basic right–the right that makes all other rights possible–is the right to quit.
Quitting often has negative connotations in our minds. We grow up hearing things like, “Quitters never win, winners never quit.” We’re supposed to stick things out, no matter how tough the going. I rather like this variation, which I heard somewhere: “Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots.”
If we move our minds out of the quagmire of competition (indeed, we can’t win tennis matches by quitting) and think of life’s broader goals–the goals of surviving, avoiding injury, finding happiness, and living in accordance with our personal values among people whom we respect and who respect us–then we see that freedom to quit is essential to all of these goals. I am talking here about the freedom to walk away from people and situations that are harmful to our wellbeing.

Robert Oak:

America has a problem, a big one, the middle class has been wiped out. It is economic genocide and the target is most of America. The statistics just continue to pour in on how poorly America is doing. Even as the great manufactured crisis is over in D.C., the political agenda once again has nothing to do with helping America’s middle class. Why jobs are not job #1 by this government we do not know. To drive home just how bad it is below we show some damning maps.
The Southern Education Foundation has a new report showing the percentage of low income students in public schools from 2011. In 2010 and 2011 there was a new record set, the majority of kids in public schools in the West are poor. Below is their map showing in the South and West, the majority of students are low income. In other words, America is now raising a nation of poverty stricken kids.

Bill Keller, via a kind Peter Gascoyne email:

WHOEVER coined that caustic aphorism should have been in a Harlem classroom last week where Bill Jackson was demonstrating an exception to the rule. Jackson, a 31-year classroom veteran, was teaching the mathematics of ratios to a group of inner-city seventh graders while 15 young teachers watched attentively. Starting with a recipe for steak sauce — three parts ketchup to two parts Worcestershire sauce — Jackson patiently coaxed his kids toward little math epiphanies, never dictating answers, leaving long silences for the children to fill. “Denzel, do you agree with Katelyn’s solution?” the teacher asked. And: “Can you explain to your friend why you think Kevin is right?” He rarely called on the first hand up, because that would let the other students off the hook. Sometimes the student summoned to the whiteboard was the kid who had gotten the wrong answer: the class pitched in to help her correct it, then gave her a round of applause.
After an hour the kids filed out and the teachers circled their desks for a debriefing. Despite his status as a master teacher, Jackson seemed as eager to hone his own craft as that of his colleagues. What worked? What missed the mark? Should we break this into two lessons? Did the kids get it? And what does that mean?
“Does ‘get it’ mean getting an answer?” Jackson asked. “Or does it mean really understanding what’s going on?”
At that point Deborah Kenny, the founder of the Harlem Village Academies charter schools, leaned over to me: “That right there, that is why we’re starting a graduate school.”

Related: Teacher prep ratings.

Christopher Newfield:

AMERICANS WHO WONDER what the heck is happening to their public colleges can find answers in the British case. While American educational and political leaders deny the negative outcomes of the actions they barely admit to be taking, the United Kingdom’s Tory government has offered explicit rationales for the most fundamental restructuring of a university system in modern history. The stakes are very high. Both countries have been downgrading their mass higher education systems by shrinking enrollments, reducing funding for educational quality, increasing inequality between premier and lower-tier universities, or all three at once.
Oddly, policymakers are doing this in the full knowledge that mass access to high-quality public universities remains the cornerstone of high-income economies and complex societies. The public has a right to know what politicians and business leaders are really doing to their higher education systems, why they are doing it, and how to respond.

James Freeman:

Stan Druckenmiller makes an unlikely class warrior. He’s a member of the 1%–make that the 0.001%–one of the most successful money managers of all time, and 60 years old to boot. But lately he has been touring college campuses promoting a message of income redistribution you don’t hear out of Washington. It’s how federal entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are letting Mr. Druckenmiller’s generation rip off all those doting Barack Obama voters in Generation X, Y and Z.
“I have been shocked at the reception. I had planned to only visit Bowdoin, ” his alma mater in Maine, he says. But he has since been invited to multiple campuses, and even the kids at Stanford and Berkeley have welcomed his theme of generational theft. Harlem Children’s Zone President Geoffrey Canada and former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh have joined him at stops along the tour.
Mr. Druckenmiller describes the reaction of students: “The biggest question I got was, ‘How do we start a movement?’ And my answer was ‘I’m a 60-year-old washed-up money manager. I don’t know how to start a movement. That’s your job. But we did it in Vietnam without Twitter and without Facebook and without any social media. That’s your job.’ But the enthusiasm–they get it.”
Even at Berkeley, he says, “they got it. There is tremendous energy in the room and of course they understand it. I’d say it’s a combination of appalled but motivated. That’s the response I’ve been getting, and it’s been overwhelming.”

Christine Gross-Loh:

Picture a world where human relationships are challenging, narcissism and self-centeredness are on the rise, and there is disagreement on the best way for people to live harmoniously together.
It sounds like 21st-century America. But the society that Michael Puett, a tall, 48-year-old bespectacled professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, is describing to more than 700 rapt undergraduates is China, 2,500 years ago.
Puett’s course Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory has become the third most popular course at the university. The only classes with higher enrollment are Intro to Economics and Intro to Computer Science. The second time Puett offered it, in 2007, so many students crowded into the assigned room that they were sitting on the stairs and stage and spilling out into the hallway. Harvard moved the class to Sanders Theater, the biggest venue on campus.
Why are so many undergraduates spending a semester poring over abstruse Chinese philosophy by scholars who lived thousands of years ago? For one thing, the class fulfills one of Harvard’s more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. It’s clear, though, that students are also lured in by Puett’s bold promise: “This course will change your life.”

TeachThought:

There have always been some pretty smart–make that incredibly smart–teenagers around.
Take, for example, the French mathematician Evariste Galois (1811-1832; at left), who invented the field of abstract algebra known as group theory while still in his teens. This branch of mathematics lies at the heart of modern quantum mechanics, among other things.
Galois may have been brilliant, but he was no nerd: He died in a duel over a love affair at the tender age of 21! So, teen geniuses are nothing new. However, it does seem like there are more of them around today than ever before.
Some of them are inventors; some, like Galois, solve difficult mathematical problems; some are brilliant artists, performers, or entrepreneurs; and some have encyclopedic knowledge, speak multiple languages, or can correctly spell any word.
They are all smart. Very smart. Smart way beyond their years. So, how do we measure intelligence? The most popular measure for intelligence is the Stanford-Binet IQ test offered through Mensa International, an organization for high-IQ people. An average IQ score is 85-114; 144 or above is considered genius-level. Yet, some people have intelligence and gifts that defy or go beyond a test score.
At first glance, it’s pretty hard to recognize the smartest teenagers. Just like fruit and other gifts of nature, we can’t (and shouldn’t) judge that proverbial book by its cover. You’ll recognize the diversity among these 50 smart teenagers and find very little in common among them in terms of physical characteristics, locations, background, etc.

Oxford University:

The University of Oxford is today releasing a set of sample interview questions from tutors who conduct Oxford interviews, in an attempt to explain the reasoning behind even the most strange-sounding questions.
The questions have been released to mark the deadline day for students to apply to study at Oxford University next year. Students applying for biological sciences might be asked whether it is easier for an organism to live on sea or land, history applicants might be asked which historical figure they would like to interview and why, while aspiring philosophers might be asked to distinguish between ‘lie’, ‘deceive’ and ‘mislead’.
‘When considering an application to Oxford, we look very carefully at GCSE results, aptitude test scores, personal statement, teacher’s reference and interview performance, and we know that for many students the interview is the most daunting part of the process,’ says Mike Nicholson, Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Oxford University. ‘Academic interviews will be an entirely new experience for most students, so we want to show students what they are really like so they aren’t put off by what they might have heard.
‘Interviews are designed to give candidates a chance to show their real ability and potential, which means candidates will be pushed to use their knowledge and apply their thinking to new problems in ways that will both challenge them and allow them to shine. Interviews are an academic conversation in a subject area between tutors and candidate, similar to the undergraduate tutorials which current Oxford students attend every week. Like tutorials, interviews are designed to get students to think, not recite specific facts or answers.’

Jessica Gross:

Since the suburban boom of the post-World War II era, parents of means have moved from cities to affluent areas with better schools. Despite what facile style section pieces tell you, this has long been a trend. But a new analysis of census data featured in the Wall Street Journal shows that wealthy people with kids are now twice as likely to segregate themselves from the poor than they were in the 1970s. Conversely, poor families now cluster together as well.
According to an analysis of census data by Kendra Bischoff of Cornell University and Sean Reardon at Stanford University, the proportion of families living in affluent areas doubled from 1970 to 2009–it went from 7 to 15 percent. At the same time, the percentage of families living in poor areas also more than doubled–it went from 8-18 percent.
So what’s going on here? Why are more affluent Americans with children clustering together now than they did in the ’70s? Presumably wealthy people have always wanted their kids to live in areas that had good public schools and low crime rates–what’s changed?
I asked my former colleague Tim Noah, contributing writer for MSNBC and the author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, why he thinks more wealthy families are now living in affluent communities than they did 40 years ago. He wrote in an email:

Christy Choi:

With the faint whiff of eugenics about it, the act of choosing the sex of your baby may be anathema to many people.
But increasing numbers of Hong Kong and mainland parents are getting around laws which ban the procedure at home by hiring the services of middlemen to smooth the way – at a price.
These facilitator businesses partner with clinics and hospitals in places like Thailand and the United States, where an IVF procedure can cost anything from HK$250,000 to HK$2.3 million.
“We have people who want a boy and a girl at the first go,” says 32-year-old Tina Fong Wai-lan, who runs Eden Hospitality with her husband Alfred Siu Wing-fung. Set up in 2008, it has arranged for more than 300 couples to go overseas on IVF and sex selection packages. “If it’s the first time they’re having children, the [Chinese] government won’t penalise them,” she said. Others look to even out the sex balance in their families.
Business has spiked with their client base tripling to 300 in the past year – about 70 per cent from the mainland and the rest from Hong Kong. The increase could be partly due to an advertising strategy which offers marriage packages alongside baby sex selection services.

Rec Jahncke:

Universal pre-kindergarten schooling, every progressive’s fondest dream, is back in the news. Bill de Blasio, the overwhelming favorite in the New York mayoral race and the likely future head of the nation’s largest school system, is pushing universal pre-K as his No. 1 policy proposal. President Obama offered a national version of this idea in his February State of the Union address and has since pushed hard in other settings. Two problems: Such programs would have negligible educational value, and they would be massively expensive.
Mr. de Blasio wants to raise taxes on the city’s rich to collect $530 million annually mostly to fund full-day pre-K. The money would go for 68,000 lower-income New York City children, most of whom already attend publicly funded pre-K either full- (20,000) or part-time (38,000) at a current annual cost of about $190 million. Mr. de Blasio’s proposal means nearly tripling the annual cost for roughly the same group of children.
“Universal” is a misnomer. since Mr. de Blasio’s program would serve only lower-income kids out of a total New York population of about 120,000 four-year-olds. Perhaps, by saying “universal,” Mr. de Blasio intends to rally public support with something seemingly equally available to all. Mr. Obama takes a similar tack, offering the combination of a lofty “universal pre-K” vision with a more limited and targeted program in practice. Yet his program would also cost tens of billions of dollars.

Madison School Board President Ed Hughes:

As I hope someone might have noticed, I have not been posting much lately. Part of the reason is that I have another outlet. I have been writing a column in the school district’s bi-weekly family newsletter.
My latest column focused on a recent School Board retreat where we learned more about the Common Core State Standards. Even though the family newsletter is a district publication, I should point out that the views I express in the column (as well as in this blog) are my own and do not necessarily represent the views, positions or policies of the Madison Metropolitan School District. But however unofficial my words may be, here is what I wrote:
On Saturday, September 28, the Madison School Board held the first of our quarterly board retreats. We get together on a Saturday for an extended discussion of a few topics of particular interest. Our focus this time was on the much-misunderstood Common Core academic standards for literacy and math.

Madison School Board President Ed Hughes:

Mary Burke’s past activities are coming under increased scrutiny now that she is an active candidate for governor. Mary has generously supported different educational initiatives for many years. Her primary focus has been the AVID/TOPS partnership between the Madison School District and the Boys and Girls Club. But her pledge of support for the Madison Prep charter school proposal has drawn the most attention. Since I was more involved in the Madison Prep saga than most, I thought it might be helpful if I provided a summary of what I know about Mary’s involvement.
In December, 2010, the Urban League of Greater Madison presented an initial proposal to the Madison School Board to establish a charter school called Madison Prep. The Urban League described the school as “a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men, particularly young men of color.” The school was intended to inculcate a culture of hard-work and achievement among its students through a host of practices, including single-sex classrooms, an International Baccalaureate curriculum, longer school days and school years, intensive mentoring, and obligatory parental involvement.
Madison Prep was controversial from the start and the initial proposal was adjusted in response to various concerns. By the fall of 2011, Madison Prep was planned to be an instrumentality charter school, like our existing charter schools Nuestro Mundo and Badger Rock. As an instrumentality, all teachers and staff would have been union members.

Burke’s candidacy will bring additional statewide attention (and rhetoric) to the Madison schools, particularly its challenges. It will be interesting to see what, if anything Mary Burke says about her time on the local school board.

Joel Kotkin:

Perhaps no urban legend has played as long and loudly as the notion that “empty nesters” are abandoning their dull lives in the suburbs for the excitement of inner city living. This meme has been most recently celebrated in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
Both stories, citing research by the real estate brokerage Redfin, maintained that over the last decade a net 1 million boomers (born born between 1945 and 1964) have moved into the city core from the surrounding area. “Aging boomers,” the Post gushed, now “opt for the city life.” It’s enough to warm the cockles of a downtown real-estate speculator’s heart, and perhaps nudge some subsidies from city officials anxious to secure their downtown dreams.
But there’s a problem here: a look at Census data shows the story is based on flawed analysis, something that the Journal subsequently acknowledged. Indeed, our number-crunching shows that rather than flocking into cities, there were roughly a million fewer boomers in 2010 within a five-mile radius of the centers of the nation’s 51 largest metro areas compared to a decade earlier.
If boomers change residences, they tend to move further from the core, and particularly to less dense places outside metropolitan areas. Looking at the 51 metropolitan areas with more than a million residents, areas within five miles of the center lost 17% of their boomers over the past decade, while the balance of the metropolitan areas, predominately suburbs, only lost 2%. In contrast places outside the 51 metro areas actually gained boomers.
Only one city, Miami, recorded a net gain in the boomer population within five miles of the center, roughly 1%. Much ballyhooed back to city markets including Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco suffered double-digit percentage losses within the five-mile zone.

Audre Watters:

Here are the notes from the brief 10-minute talk I gave yesterday at the University of Mary Washington at a “conference before the conference” (Namely: OpenVA). I was part of an afternoon-long event called “Minding the Future,” that brought together a number of educators and technologists. (Namely: Kin Lane, Gardner Campbell, David Wiley, Alan Levine, and myself). We each spoke for 10 minutes about our thoughts on the future of higher education, then took 20 minutes of questions. And at the end of the evening, we sat on a panel, taking questions from Jeff McClurken and the audience. Video and slides are also embedded below.

Jeff Simpson:

Marshfield School District has been in the news lately, This time they have shown us the consequences of ACT10.
First this story from the Administrators where they praised ACT10:

Jon Swedien:

Tom Larson is one of the legislators responsible for reviewing the set of academic standards for public schools in Wisconsin, yet the rural Colfax assemblyman admitted last week that he was still trying to catch up with the arguments swirling around the “Common Core.”
In 2010, state schools Superintendent Tony Evers voluntarily agreed to adopt the Common Core State Standards, which cover math and English and promote literacy in history/social studies, science and technical subjects for students from kindergarten through high school. According to the Common Core website, the standards also define a vision of what it means to be a literate person in the 21st century.
On paper, that all sounds good, but, in the real world, the Common Core standards have sparked a firestorm of controversy in the Badger State and elsewhere.
Speaking Monday before a group of local education officials in Eau Claire, Larson said he had been selected as one of nine representatives to sit on the Assembly Select Committee on Common Core Standards.

Related: the oft criticized WKCE.

Julia Ryan:

Sarah Theule Lubienski didn’t set out to compare public schools and private schools. A professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she was studying math instructional techniques when she discovered something surprising: Private schools–long assumed to be educationally superior–were underperforming public schools.
She called her husband, Christopher A. Lubienski, also a professor at the university. “I said, ‘This is a really weird thing,’ and I checked it and double checked it,” she remembers. The couple decided to take on a project that would ultimately disprove decades of assumptions about private and public education.
Studying the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, they have found that, when controlling for demographic factors, public schools are doing a better job academically than private schools. It seems that private school students have higher scores because they come from more affluent backgrounds, not because the schools they attend are better educational institutions. They write about these conclusions–and explain how they came to them–in their book, The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools. Here’s an interview with the Lubienskis about their work, edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Andrew Hill:

For more than 200 years from its beginnings in the 1770s, the Dead Letter Office was where Americans’ letters and parcels were sent if they were unclaimed or undeliverable. Some items were redirected: the DLO had a “blind reading” department trained to decipher illegible or vague addresses (“To my Son he lives out West he drives a red ox the rale rode goes By Thar”).
The office would incinerate the others or auction their contents, which included, according to one sale list, anything from wedding rings to “False Bosoms” and quack medicines, such as “the cure-all Tennessee Swamp Shrub”. It was estimated that 6bn pieces of mail were posted in the US in 1898, of which 6.3m ended up at the DLO in Washington, DC. “What romance was to be had in an undelivered or undeliverable letter!” Simon Garfield writes in To The Letter. “And what mystery and sadness too.”
Well, the romance and mystery have certainly gone. The US Postal Service has renamed the DLO the Mail Recovery Center, consolidated four locations into one in Atlanta, Georgia, and is pushing through a “Lean Six Sigma” process improvement project to make it more efficient. Asked if they write letters, most people would echo the DLO’s famous fictional former clerk Bartleby in the Herman Melville story: “I would prefer not to.”
Plainly, instant electronic means of communication – email, of course, but increasingly social media such as Twitter and Facebook – have pushed pen, paper and postboxes to the edge of most private correspondents’ consciousness. It may be nice to think that investors’ enthusiasm for this month’s public offering of shares in Britain’s Royal Mail, the world’s oldest postal service, is based on a revival of letter writing, “the humane art, which owes its origins to the love of friends”, in Virginia’s Woolf’s words. In fact, Royal Mail’s daily postbag is at its lowest for 20 years, and it predicts the volume of letters – most of which are for business and marketing – will fall at up to 6 per cent a year. The Royal Mail’s future lies in delivery of items ordered on the internet. Even Postman Pat, the children’s cartoon character, has had to amend his theme tune to reflect the fact he now brings more “parcels through your door” than letters.

Alan Borsuk:

And if there’s a happy future in the whole MPS buildings issue, it’s unlikely to lie in vacant buildings. It lies in doing something different with current schools that chronically get poor results. What if those buildings housed something much better? Keep watch to see if there is fresh action on that front, including offering some to charter schools.
The specific factors around the Malcolm X matter are one reason for the big fight now. But the bigger reason, in my view, is the continuing failure by, oh, close to everybody to get past those sharp divisions among us and to take actions that best serve the largest number of kids by creating the largest number of quality schools.

Beth Hawkins:

A cynic would be forgiven for wondering whether the press conference Minneapolis mayoral candidate Mark Andrew held Monday afternoon, flanked by five members of the school board, was at least partly an exercise in damage control.
At the session, held in the library at Windom Dual Immersion School in southwest Minneapolis, Andrew announced a three-pronged education agenda. At its center: a promise to convene a collaborative headed by education advocates with divergent philosophies, Mike Ciresi and Louise Sundin.
“The conversation about improving educational outcomes for kids of color has gotten extremely polarized and increasingly heated in the past several years,” Andrew explained in the plan. “The reformers vs. unions dichotomy is unproductive, and doesn’t serve the best interests of our children or find Minneapolis solutions to the problems in Minneapolis’ schools.”

Minneapolis plans to spend $524,944,868 (PDF budget book) during the 2013-2014 school year for 34,148 students or 15,364 per student, about the same as Madison.
Yet, property taxes are substantially lower in Minneapolis where a home currently on the market for $279,900 has a 2013 property tax bill of $3,433. A $230,000 Madison home pays $5,408.38 while a comparable Middleton home pays $4,648.18 in property taxes. Madison plans to increase property taxes 4.5% this year, after a 9% increase two years ago, despite a substantial increase in redistributed state tax dollar receipts. Yet, such history is often ignored during local tax & spending discussions. Madison Superintendent Cheatham offers a single data point response to local tax & spending policy, failing to mention the substantial increase in state tax receipts the year before:

When we started our budget process, we received the largest possible cut in state aid, over $8 million,” Cheatham said. “I’m pleased that this funding will make up a portion of that cut and help us accomplish what has been one of our goals all along: to reduce the impact of a large cut in state aid on our taxpayers.”

A bit more background.

Emily Badger:

High-cost cities tend to have higher median incomes, which leads to the simple heuristic that, sure, it’s costlier to live in San Francisco than in Akron, but the people who pay bills there make enough money that they can afford it.
In reality, yes, the median household income in metropolitan San Francisco is higher than it is in Akron (by about $30,000). But that smaller income will buy you much, much more in Ohio. To be more specific, if you make the median income in Akron – a good proxy for a spot in the local middle class – 86 percent of the homes on the market there this month are likely within your budget.
If you’re middle-class in San Francisco, on the other hand, that figure is just 14 percent. Your money will buy you no more than 1,000 square feet on average. That property likely isn’t located where you’d like to live. And the options available to you on the market are even fewer than they were just a year ago, according to data crunched by Trulia. To frame this another way, the median income in metro San Francisco is about 60 percent higher than it is in Akron. But the median for-sale housing price per square foot today is about 700 percenthigher.

Des Moines Register:

Funding the state’s public universities based on performance will be examined by an Iowa Board of Regents task force on Friday.
The task force will study how state dollars are awarded to Iowa’s universities, and determine what metrics should be used to measure performance. The regents board governs the state’s universities.
Across the country, some state legislators have sought to hold public universities accountable for better performance. In Tennessee, 100 percent of higher education funding is based on a variety of performance measures, including graduation rates.

Dan Kahan:

Because the “asymmetry thesis” just won’t leave me alone, I decided it would be sort of interesting to see what the relationship was between a “science comprehension” scale I’ve been developing and political outlooks.
The “science comprehension” measure is a composite of 11 items from the National Science Foundation’s “Science Indicators” battery, the standard measure of “science literacy” used in public opinion studies (including comparative ones), plus 10 items from an extended version of the Cognitive Reflection Test, which is normally considered the best measure of the disposition to engage in conscious, effortful information processing (“System 2”) as opposed to intuitive, heuristic processing (“System 1”).
The items scale well together (α= 0.81) and can be understood to measure a disposition that combines substantive science knowledge with a disposition to use critical reasoning skills of the sort necessary to make valid inferences from observation. We used a version of a scale like this–one combining the NSF science literacy battery with numeracy–in our study of how science comprehension magnifies cultural polarization over climate change and nuclear power.

Pat Schneider:

745.
That’s the number of students in the Madison Metropolitan School District identified as homeless seven weeks into the 2013-14 school year. The count is on a pace to continue record-setting numbers of homeless children over the past decade, say school officials.
The number of homeless children and youth in the school district has climbed more than 2-1/2 times since the 2004-2005 school year, from 485 to 1,263 in the 2012-2013 school year, according to district statistics.
“We’re learning more and more that the trauma created by having to go through homelessness stays with them the rest of their lives,” Amy Noble, a social worker with the school district, told participants at Homelessness in Dane County, a summit hosted Tuesday by Leadership Greater Madison.
The number of students in families who are homeless rises over the course of the school year as families lose housing and students’ circumstances are recognized by school personnel. The count, under federal law, includes children whose families are doubled up for economic reasons, a common circumstance for low-income families not included in most other calculations of the homeless population.

Rachel Lu:

Students taking China’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, according to a popular saying, resemble an army of 10,000 rushing across a narrow log. So what happens to those who fall off?
Each year, more than 9 million Chinese students endure the gaokao, as the exam is known. A grueling two or three days’ experience — it varies by region — the test covers Chinese, mathematics, a foreign language, chemistry, physics, geography, and history, among other subjects. The test results, which range from the 200s to the 600s (scores of over 700 sometimes make headlines), comprise almost the entirety of a student’s college application portfolio. While some of the multiple-choice questions would be familiar to U.S. teenagers sweating over Advanced Placement exams, gaokao essay prompts are sometimes so bizarre that even Chinese state media challenged its mostly adult readers to answer some of the more notorious essay prompts, such as this one: “It flies upward, and a voice asks if it is tired. It says, ‘No.'”
Because Chinese parents often expect their children to become family breadwinners, the pressure to perform is intense. Faced with the gaokao’s high stakes and frustrating unpredictability, tens of thousands of test takers choose to sit through the ordeal again, when their scores fall short of their — or their parents’ — expectations. Having already graduated from high school, some of these re-takers hunker down at home for a year to study. Others attend cram schools like Maotanchang High School, which lies tucked away in a small town in the mountains of central China’s Anhui province and specializes in the dark art of military-style test prep. With an annual enrollment of more than 10,000 students, the school, known as Maozhong, has earned the dubious honor of being called “China’s Largest Gaokao Factory” in Chinese state media.

Wolfram Alpha:

We are proud to announce Wolfram Problem Generator, a website where students decide which topic they want to practice and we provide the questions and solutions. This is an exciting new way to help students with their classes: previously, students provided their own practice questions and Wolfram|Alpha helped them find answers with Step-by-step solutions. Students can now ask Wolfram|Alpha for help with practice and homework questions and can do practice problems with Wolfram Problem Generator.
Currently, there are six main topics that Wolfram Problem Generator covers: arithmetic, number theory, algebra, calculus, linear algebra, and statistics. The topics range from early elementary school all the way through college calculus. Moreover, for elementary and secondary education material, we are closely following the Common Core Standards initiative to provide a comprehensive list of topics.

Richard Adams:

The education secretary, Michael Gove, has urged politicians to stop “lying to children” about their life chances and allowing inflated exam grades that he compared to Soviet tractor production propaganda.
“For years, ministers in previous governments looked at the way more and more people were getting GCSEs and they congratulated themselves, like Soviet economics ministers on the growth in statistics,” Gove a US summit on education reform on Thursday night.
Slipping into a mock Russian accent and syntax, Gove said: “Look in Russia, thousands more get GCSEs. Surely now we are education powerhouse?”

Gillian Tett:

A few years ago John Donoghue, professor of neuroscience at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, met Cathy Hutchinson, a young woman who was suffering from locked-in syndrome following a stroke. Until recently, this would have condemned her to a life of helplessness and hopelessness: locked-in syndrome means that somebody cannot move their limbs, even if their brains are functioning normally (as Jean-Dominique Bauby described so movingly in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).
But Hutchinson had a dream: she longed to drink a cup of coffee on her own, in one vestige of normality. And Donoghue was convinced he could help. Over the past few years, he has run a project called Braingate that combines the latest advances in computing science, engineering and mathematics with neuroscience, to map the connections inside the brain – and replicate them on a computer.
More specifically, this project uses the impulses that our brains send whenever the body makes a movement – or even just thinks about a movement – to activate a robot, via a computer.

Josh Orr:

So my daughter’s computer class has progressed now from typing Word documents to Excel spreadsheets. What the hell does a 6th grader need with Excel? Is she realistically going to balance her piggy bank with a complicated spread sheet formula? Or is that meant to inspire her to enter the Future Excel Drones of America(c) club?
When I was in 6th grade I was learning HyperCard. We were animating stick figures and making choose your own adventure decks. You know, the kind of things that are appropriate for a 6th grader. In the process the groundwork was laid for my programming career.

David Leonhardt:

The education research of recent years has pointed overwhelmingly to the importance of teachers. Perhaps more than anything else – quality of principal, size of school, size of class – the strength or weakness of classroom teachers influences how much students learn and even how they fare later in life.
The great unknown is how to improve teacher quality, be it by attracting more good teachers, weeding out more bad teachers or helping teachers become better at their craft.
A new study released on Thursday, offers powerful if still tentative evidence that teacher-evaluation programs can play an important role. The study is especially notable because past research about evaluation programs suggested they had little effect. The new paper, however, studies an evaluation program – called Impact, in the District of Columbia school system – that is far larger, with bigger rewards and stiffer penalties, than most programs.
Impact, which began under Michelle Rhee while she was chancellor, has been a hotly debated program, and the new study is sure to attract attention from both supporters and critics of teacher evaluation. New York state’s plan to begin evaluating teachers has also been the subject of intense praise and criticism, as have such programs elsewhere.

Corey Kilgannon:

A research group that named Hunter College High School the saddest tweeting spot in Manhattan now says it was mistaken in its finding. The group’s acknowledgment of the error came to light after many questions were raised about an initial post on the study.
In August, the group, New England Complex Systems Institute, released a study assessing the moods of New Yorkers based on their Twitter posts. The lead researcher on the study, Prof. Yaneer Bar-Yam, told media outlets that Hunter High School, an elite public school on the Upper East Side, had the highest percentage of “negative sentiment” posts of any place in Manhattan.
This was determined, he said, by a computer program that sorted geo-tagged posts into negative or positive sentiment designations, based upon their language and emoticons.
Hunter High School was the source of an unusually high percentage of negative Twitter messages, even higher than hospital locations and spots with particularly frustrating rush-hour traffic, said Professor Bar-Yam, who offered possible reasons that included the high school’s lack of windows, high workload and the fact that the posts were collected just as the students had returned from spring break and were facing final exams.

Hillel Aron:

It’s unusual for a man like the influential Deasy to enjoy being sued. But these are unusual times. As Deasy had hoped, Superior Court Judge James Chalfant tentatively ruled that Los Angeles Unified School District’s leaders had ignored a key state law, the 1971 Stull Act, which requires LAUSD to grade not just its students but its teachers.
Hailed 31 years ago as a key reform, the Stull Act requires all school districts to evaluate their educators annually. Teachers were to be assessed on many criteria, including how well pupils progressed under their tutelage.That never happened.
Assessing teachers by how well their students learned was all but ignored statewide. LAUSD, which educates one in every nine children in California, never bothered.
Deasy’s courtroom loss inDoe v. Deasy “did exactly what has been my position,” Deasy says. Chalfant ordered school districts to take student progress into account in grading their teachers.

Jamie Gass, via Will Fitzhugh

He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,” Mississippi’s William Faulkner said of man upon receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, “but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.”
New Englanders can rightfully claim to have been America’s 19th-century literary hub, but no other regional landscape dominated 20th-century literature like the South and its genius for storytelling. Famously, Faulkner’s imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, Chickasaw for “split land,” provided the setting for his most inspired novels.
American high school students should read Southern writers like Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, author of the 1962 National Book Award-winning “The Moviegoer.” Percy crafted stories about “the dislocation of man in the modern age,” while contributing to a “community of discourse” around fiction writing. His Greenville, Miss., was a wellspring of outstanding writers.
Greenville’s patriarch, William Alexander Percy, was a lawyer, planter and poet from a suicide-plagued family. He authored the best-selling 1941 memoir “Lanterns on the Levee.” His second cousin, Walker Percy, and Walker’s lifelong best friend, Shelby Foote, were both young when they lost their fathers. Will Percy’s book-filled house became a sanctuary for writers, journalists and musicians, as the man himself mentored a region.

Reed Albergotti:

Facebook Inc.’s move Wednesday to let teenagers share items more widely reflects growing competition among social networks for the attention of teens–and the advertisers that want to reach them.
Facebook said it would let users between the ages of 13 and 17 make posts “public” so that they can be seen by anyone on the network. Previously, teenagers’ posts could be seen only by their friends and “friends of friends.”
With the shift, Facebook will operate more like such rivals as Twitter Inc. that let teens share publicly. Twitter, unlike Facebook, also lets users post anonymously or with pseudonyms.
Analysts said Facebook risks losing the next generation of young users if it doesn’t keep pace with competitors. But some privacy advocates are more concerned about public posts on Facebook than on other sites because of its vast reach. It has 1.2 billion users world-wide, roughly five times as many as Twitter. Facebook also allows users to post a wider range of media and to comment more broadly than Twitter does.
“This is about monetizing kids and teens,” said James Steyer, founder and chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit devoted to online privacy.
Aaron Everson, president of Shoutlet, a Madison, Wis., company that helps brands manage social-media campaigns, said Facebook wants to “compete against other networks that might have a younger demographic, and potentially help them reel in more advertisers.” Marketers will have to be creative in grabbing the Web-savvy teen’s attention without alienating parents, he added.

Nicholas Bakalar:

A regular bedtime schedule is unquestionably helpful for parents, but a new study has found it that it may be even more beneficial for their children.
British researchers interviewed mothers when their children were ages 3, 5 and 7, asking how often their children had a regular bedtime: always, usually, sometimes or never. The mothers and the children’s teachers also completed questionnaires about behavioral difficulties.
Almost 20 percent of 3-year-olds had no regular bedtime, compared with 9.1 percent of 5-year-olds and 8.2 percent of 7-year-olds. After controlling for many social, economic and parental behavioral factors, the scientists found that children with a regular bedtime, whether early or late, had fewer behavioral problems. And the longer irregular bedtimes persisted, the more severe the difficulties were.
The study, published Monday in Pediatrics, also found that children who had irregular bedtimes at ages 3 and 5 had significant improvements in behavior scores if their bedtime was regular by age 7.
Still, the lead author, Yvonne Kelly, a professor of lifecourse epidemiology at University College London, warned against exaggerating the importance of the findings.

Matthew DiCarlo:

The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) has recently released the first round of results from its new principal evaluation system. Like the system used for teachers, the principal ratings are based on a combination of test and non-test measures. And the two systems use the same final rating categories (highly effective, effective, minimally effective and ineffective).
It was perhaps inevitable that there would be comparisons of their results. In short, principal ratings were substantially lower, on average. Roughly half of them received one of the two lowest ratings (minimally effective or ineffective), compared with around 10 percent of teachers.
Some wondered whether this discrepancy by itself means that DC teachers perform better than principals. Of course not. It is difficult to compare the performance of teachers versus that of principals, but it’s unsupportable to imply that we can get a sense of this by comparing the final rating distributions from two evaluation systems.
These are different, completely untested systems measuring different jobs. Moreover, the principal evaluations (appropriately) employdifferent measures than those used for teachers, and they are combined in a different way. For instance, principals can only be rated effective if they meet their proficiency targets in either math or reading and “make gains” in the other. (Side note: Cross-sectional proficiency gains are a terrible measure that, in my view, should not be used in these systems.)

Patrick Wintour:

Education in England is no better than mediocre, and billions of pounds have been wasted on pointless university courses and Sure Start schemes for young children, Michael Gove’s special adviser has said in an outspoken private thesis written a few weeks before he is due to step down from his post.
Dominic Cummings, the most influential adviser to the education secretary in the past five years, also argues in a revealing 250-page paper that “real talent” is rare among the nation’s teachers – and, eye-catchingly, says educationists need to better understand the impact of genetics on children. The adviser, known for making fierce demands of civil servants, writes that the endgame for the Department for Education should be to reduce its role to acting as accountants and inspectors, employing hundreds and not thousands of civil servants – and creating an environment in which private and state education would be indistinguishable.
The Cummings manifesto claims that “the education of the majority even in rich countries is between awful and mediocre”, and that the quality of maths education, in particular, is poor.
“In England, few are well trained in the basics of extended writing or mathematical and scientific modelling and problem-solving,” he writes.
One of the best-known and most controversial of many special advisers working in government, Cummings is due to leave Gove at the end of the year. He worked in the department for two years, having previously advised Gove before the election, although his appointment within the department was initially blocked by David Cameron’s then director of communications, Andy Coulson, who regarded Cummings as untrustworthy.

Edward Frenkel:

What is wrong with the way most of us are introduced to math?
The way mathematics is taught is akin to an art class in which students are only taught how to paint a fence and are never shown the paintings of the great masters. When, later on in life, the subject of mathematics comes up, most people wave their hands and say, “Oh no, I don’t want to hear about this, I was so bad at math.” What they are really saying is, “I was bad at painting the fence.”
So what is it really like to be a mathematician?
You don’t discover something beautiful every day. Most of the time, you work on something for weeks or months, only to realize that it doesn’t work. But you never give up, you go back and try to analyze the data that you have, and try to see the analogies and connections to try to come up with a new hypothesis. Then you try to test that.
What is the ultimate goal of all these efforts?
Another analogy is solving a jigsaw puzzle. Imagine that somebody gives you a puzzle, but they don’t give you the box, just the pieces. You take those different pieces and try to put them together to create something of value, something beautiful and powerful. You can think of mathematics as the grand project of building this enormous jigsaw puzzle, with different groups of people working on different parts. Then, every once in a while, somebody finds a bridge between two parts, a way to assemble pieces together so that big chunks of the puzzle connect.

M G Siegler:

A simple link. That’s all it took to unleash a hailstorm of angry emails, messages, tweets, and comments. Why? I dared wonder if libraries will continue to exist in the future.
I mean, it’s not that crazy a notion, right? (If you’re a librarian, you’re not allowed to answer that.)
Last Monday, I linked to this piece by Art Brodsky for Wired from my blog. In it, he argues that beyond the recent hoopla around e-book pricing, the real problem with e-books is what they’re doing to libraries. That is, killing them.
As Brodsky notes:

Imagine walking into a library or bookstore and needing three or four pairs of different glasses to read different books manufactured to specific viewing equipment. Or buying a book and then having to arbitrarily destroy it after say, two weeks. That’s just nuts. But it’s the current situation we’re in with ebooks.

John McDermott:

“Life is better now than at almost any time in history”, Angus Deaton writes in The Great Escape. The Princeton economist’s account of health and wealth is a fundamentally positive story. Lives are longer, healthier, richer and more satisfying than ever before. To take one statistic from this compendium of progress: in every country in the world, infant and child mortality is lower than it was in 1950. On average, humankind is having a pretty good run.
Our incomplete flight from deprivation and early death is, however, more than a story of averages. Deaton’s lucid book celebrates the riches brought by growth while judiciously explaining why some people are always “left behind”. He draws a distinction between the inequalities that are opened up by advances in knowledge and those caused by flawed political systems. For it is humanity’s lot that, ultimately, “inequality is the handmaiden of progress”.

Ryan Mclaughlin:

About a week ago I began deleting all photos and videos of my children from the Internet. This is proving to be no easy task. Like many parents, I’ve excitedly shared virtually every step, misstep and milestone that myself and my children have muddled our way through.
To be honest, aside from making sure my Facebook privacy permissions were set, I hadn’t given a whole lot of thought about sharing photos of the kids online. I’ve run this blog (in various formats) for about a decade, and sharing stuff on it was just what I did. What I’ve always done. It’s sort of the point of it. And when in the last few years I’ve started blogging less and posting on Facebook more, I carried that same sense of “my life is an open book” with me to the social network.
My view on sharing photos of the kids has always been that the advantages of having an easy, centralized way of sharing photos with an extended family that are thousands of kilometres away outweighed the largely fictional threat of creepy people having access to them.

Michael Hancock and Kevin Johnson, Angel Taveras and Julian Castro:

Lagging far behind their international peers. Shamefully low reading and math competency. A staggering achievement gap. We’ve heard the alarming statistics about the trajectory of American students. After 10 years, No Child Left Behind has failed to put American children back on a competitive academic track.
But we are beginning to see real results in America’s cities, the epicenters of innovation, including the four we lead: Denver; Providence, R.I.; San Antonio; and Sacramento, Calif.
Long before we entered the political arena, each of us lived in the city we now lead. We attended public schools and sat at those desks — and through that connection, we know that public education can work.
One lesson is that education doesn’t need to be a partisan battleground. Far from Washington, smart education policy is uniting even the most strident opponents.
Take the Common Core curriculuma which was first promoted by the National Governors Association and has now been adopted by 45 states. Common Core improves on NCLB by putting more influence into the hands of those on the ground, breathing new life into an old Tip O’Neill axiom: Not only is all politics local, but effective education policy is even more local.

Kevin Werbach:

I’m participating in the #WWEOpen13 MOOC about open online teaching. For the first unit, we were asked to post our “teaching philosophy.” These kinds of questions typically tie me in knots. They seem inherently circular and unsolvable: to say how I should teach, I need to know what students need to learn, which isn’t something I can just declare. For whatever reason, this time I was able to tap out ten statements. I don’t know that I’d call them a philosophy, but they ring true as commitments I feel comfortable with.
Good teaching is good learning… for both the student and the instructor. Learning means new connections and themes and lessons that weren’t there at the beginning.
I believe in a balance between what the instructor and the students contribute. Teaching shouldn’t be a monologue, but it also shouldn’t be purely a peer conversation: students want the guidance and validation and knowledge that the instructor can orchestrate.
Every student should feel they are part of the experience and encouraged to contribute their unique perspectives. In particular, students should not be unfairly disadvantaged by factors such as gender, race, national origin, language, or disability.

Betsy Hammond:

Oregon high school students are broadly dissatisfied with their public education experience, saying school isn’t challenging enough, too many teachers are careless or incompetent and too many students are falling through the cracks.
Those are among the findings of a survey of 200 Oregon high school students representative of the geographic, grade-level and racial/ethnic make-up of the state’s high school population. The small sample means the survey has a margin of error of about 7 percentage points.
The survey, done by survey firm DHM Research and non-profit education advocacy group The Chalkboard Project, was designed to inject the student voice into the adult-dominated conversation about education reform in Oregon.

Matt McGrath:

A new study from the RSPB suggests that large numbers of children in Britain are missing out on the natural world.
The three-year projectfound that only 21% of children aged 8-12 were “connected to nature”.
Girls were much more likely than boys to be exposed to the great outdoors, while children in Wales had the lowest score across the UK.
The RSPB says that a perception among some adults that nature is dangerous or dirty could be holding children back.
There has been an increasing amount of research in recent years underlining the lack of contact and experience with nature among modern children.

Mark Robinson:

In the weeks leading up to the publication of our cover story about Sergio Juárez Correa and the students of José Urbina López Primary School, it became clear that WIRED could help. We decided to sponsor the school and Juárez Correa, providing them with supplies and equipment they need, like a projector, printer, and laser pointer.
But there also are powerful ways you can get involved with the burgeoning student-centered style of learning and teaching. Whether you want to bring this approach into an existing school, start a program of your own, donate to a program, or find a teacher who has asked for specific help, we’ve got suggestions. Here are four ways to take action:
1. Last year, the TED prize gave $1 million to Sugata Mitra, one of the movement’s leading thinkers. If you are interested in supporting Mitra and his School in the Cloud project emailTEDPrize@TED.com or make contributions payable to:

Edushyster::

What were you most surprised by?
The open bar. Just kidding! When I asked the people I talked to about how they got involved in the education reform movement nearly all could point to a transformative event in which they’d confronted some frustrating aspect of the education bureaucracy. I was struck by how similar their stories were to the ones that teachers tell me–and fascinated by how it is that we could have arrived at such different analyses of both the problem and the solution. For example, one of the reasons I’m so passionate about teachers having some kind–any kind–of job protections is because I’ve seen how often they have to get up in the grill of their principal or other administrators to advocate for their students. But that’s a topic for another day. You want to know if I spotted any celebs…

Erica Green:

The Baltimore City school board has requested that the district follow through on a plan to assess the effectiveness of teachers who are alternatively certified through programs like Teach for America that for years have funneled teachers into the city’s struggling schools.
The city school board approved last week the $880,000 contract to hire and train 125 to 150 Teach For America teachers for the 2013-2014 school year.
The board also approved a $735,000 contract to hire the same amount of teachers from the Baltimore City Teaching Residency, a program similar to Teach for America that has more rigorous certification requirements.

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

Record keeping by an employee is important. Don’t wait for trouble to start before you begin to compile your own personnel records. Having good records is also very important, should you become involved in a grievance over your Contract rights or benefits, or in a matter involving discipline or dismissal. To enable the Union to provide the best possible protection and representation, every employee should maintain his/her own “personnel” records.
One’s file should contain such documents as: college transcripts, evaluations, accumulated sick leave and days used, direct deposit (wage) records, records of student disciplinary referrals, Wisconsin Retirement System (DETF) records, personal leave, documentation of honors and awards, notes on student accidents and confrontations with parents or administrators, copies of all correspondence with supervisor(s) and administrators, and for teachers – individual teacher contracts for each year, licenses, and teaching assignments by year with subjects taught.

Mark Vandevelde:

The ancient university that has been seated at Oxford at least since Norman times has little in common with the modern one at Loughborough in the English Midlands that is descended from a council-run technical college. Yet one thing that is the same in both places is the £9,000-a-year fee. Britain’s universities are barred from charging more than that, and only a quarter of them opt to charge less.
Andrew Hamilton, Oxford’s vice-chancellor, detects that something is amiss. Noting the oddity of “a market in which every item, virtually regardless of content and quality, is the same price”, he argues that universities should have the freedom to charge more.
Yet America’s experience of allowing universities to set their fees is a cautionary tale. In real terms, tuition at US universities costs on average five times more than it did 30 years ago. Annual fees can run to $45,000 (roughly £28,000). Two-thirds of students who graduated in 2011 had gone into debt, borrowing an average of $26,000.

Daniel Willingham:

The results of this experiment probably won’t surprise you. What surprised me was the fact that we didn’t already have data like this in hand.
The researchers (Sadler et al., 2013) tested 181 7th and 8th grade science teachers for their knowledge of physical science in fall, mid-year, and years end. They also tested their students (about 9,500) with the exact same instrument.
Each was a twenty-item multiple choice test. For 12 of the items, the wrong answers tapped a common misconception that previous research showed middle-schoolers often hold. For example, one common misconception is that burning produces no invisible gases. This question tapped that idea:

Jesse Ritka:

There are six new sets of bleachers at Kletzsch Park, and a 12-year-old is responsible. It’s a project that’s helping him make history.
Standing next to the bleachers he helped build, James Hightower III recited the Scout Oath “On my honor I will do my best, to do my duty to God and my country, and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.”
His father, James Hightower II, tells TODAY’S TMJ4’s Jesse Ritka how much being in The Boy Scouts means to the Hightower family, “We believe in scouting. Where else can a young man, at the age of 10 or 11 start a oath by saying ‘on my honor’? It starts with saying ‘on my honor’ and those are very powerful words and words to live by.”
They’re words that the Glen Hills 7th grader takes seriously. James joined The Boy Scouts when he was eight years old and now he is the youngest African-American Eagle Scout in the country. An accomplishment the now twelve-year-old is proud of, “It’s awesome, it’s… I’ve impressed myself.”

Bill Korach, via Will Fitzhugh:

A new video war game “Call of Duty” integrates women as the objects of violence while time spent on homework declines to about two hours per week. This is not a formula designed to produce an educated literate society that will be competitive in the global economy. On the other hand, spending 8 ½ hours per day on media including games of shocking violence is a formula that will continue to coarsen our culture and even produce real violence. Recall that the Columbine killers were avid video game players.
The Kaiser Foundation reported in January 2010, that:
“Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in media use among young people. Five years ago, we reported that young people spent an average of nearly 61/2 hours (6:21) a day with media–and managed to pack more than 81/2 hours (8:33) worth of media content into that time by multitasking. At that point it seemed that young people’s lives were filled to the bursting point with media. Today, however, those levels of use have been shattered. Over the past five years, young people have increased the amount of time they spend consuming media by an hour and seventeen minutes daily, from 6:21 to 7:38–almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day, except that young people use media seven days a week instead of five. [53 hours a week]”

A. Barton Hinkle:

“My goal,” says the candidate, “is a healthier America. That is why I am setting an ambitious target of sending 1 million more Americans to the hospital in the next five years. To make sure they get there, I am announcing a new, low-interest loan program to help them pay for their treatment. This will ensure that hospital costs stay within reach of the typical American family.”
If you heard a speech like that, you probably would start scratching your head. Sure, people with acute medical conditions need hospital care. But most people don’t have to lie for weeks in a hospital bed to get healthy. And lavishing more money on hospital care will simply drive the price up — just as giving everyone a $2,000 vehicle subsidy would jack up prices for cars and trucks.

Tara Bahrampour:

Teachers are significantly more likely than people in other professions to be diagnosed with progressive speech and language disorders, according to a new Mayo Clinic study.
Speech and language disorders, or SLDs, affect patients’ ability to communicate through speaking or writing, rendering them unable to come up with words, produce sentences with correct grammar or articulate properly. It is different from Alzheimer’s dementia, which primarily involves loss of memory. SLDs become progressively more severe over time, with death occurring on average between seven and 10 years after onset.
The study, whose results were published this month in the American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias, came about after Mayo Clinic doctors noticed that a high percentage of their SLD patients were educators.
Using Alzheimer’s patients as a control group, the study found that the odds of being a teacher with SLD were 3.4 times higher than being a teacher with Alzheimer’s dementia. For other occupations, there was no statistical difference between the SLD group and the Alzheimer’s group. The study controlled for the percentage of teachers in the general population as counted in the U.S. Census.

Deborah Fallows:

I found Principal Brian Williams in the lunchroom of the Sustainability Academy, a pre-K – 5 magnet school in the Old North End of Burlington, Vermont. He was easy to spot, the biggest guy in the room, sitting on a very small chair, talking with an 8-year-old tousled-haired boy who was having trouble with his writing. It was noontime, and Principal Williams asked me if I would like some of today’s lunch: “Beef stew. I made it myself.”
I was about to chuckle a “Sure, sure” when I stopped and thought that actually, maybe he had made the stew himself. It seemed like such a place where the principal might also be the cook.
Just 5 years ago, the Sustainability Academy (SA) was known as the Lawrence Barnes Elementary School, one of two failing schools (the other was H.O. Wheeler) in the needy, sketchy part of Burlington, where about 95% of the kids were on free or reduced lunch (the nation’s most reliable proxy for poverty), test scores were very low and enrollment was declining. The school’s neighborhood is home to a mix of the down-and-out, the frontier-pushers, and is also the first stop for many of Burlington’s constant influx of refugees and immigrants.

The Burlington, VT school district will spend $59,615,950 to education about 3,600 students during the 2013-2014 school year, or $16,559.98 per student. Madison will spend about $15k/student this year, about twice the national average.

Alan Borsuk:

I had a depressing experience a few nights ago. (Don’t worry, I’ll end on a more optimistic note.) Someone sent me an email, asking for a copy of a story about him that ran in the Milwaukee Journal in 1986. He said I wrote it. This was totally news to me, but it turned out the guy was right. Glad to help.
My life was better organized in those days. I kept scrapbooks. In the course of trying to help this person, I found one with stories I wrote in 1986. I paged through it and came upon a story from September of that year about the gap in success between black students and white students in Milwaukee. The story was based on observations in classrooms, data and interviews.
The depressing part: With some cosmetic changes, that story could appear right here, right now. No one would think it was out of date. Twenty-seven years ago! In the big picture, so little has changed.
Here are some of the central points from the 1986 article:
“Many black children are not getting support from their homes that would help them do well in school.”
“Economic poverty is connected to academic poverty.”
“While some teachers are excellent, others can hardly control a classroom.”
“The dominant classroom characteristic of many students is indifference, not misbehavior.”
“Extremely high pupil turnover within schools impairs the progress of children.”
The story described a middle-grade class where students were engaged and doing good work under one teacher. Her period ended and the next teacher took over the same class — and disorder reigned.

Drake Bennett:

Yesterday I got back from a vacation on which I broke my noise-cancelling headphones, snapping off one of the ear cups when I crammed them into my suitcase. I had originally bought the headphones for trips, for blocking out the roars of jet engines (which, apparently, are deadly), snoring neighbors, and the klaxon wails of babies reacting (in a way I myself would sometimes like to) to the traumatizing experience of modern air travel. But as I was reminded upon my return, what I really use the headphones for, what I need them for, is getting anything done at work.
Like many people, I work in an open-plan office. There are rows of long shared desks, as on a bond trading floor. That means that at any one time, I am within earshot of approximately three dozen phone conversations–it would be more if one of my neighbors wasn’t a laser printer. In addition, from where I sit, there are six TV screens within my line of sight, which are usually tuned (soundlessly, thank God) to 24-hour news channels. There’s a Kurt Vonnegut short story set in a dystopian future in which everyone is supposed to be exactly equal, mentally and physically, so smart people have to wear little devices in their ears that blast horrible noises every 20 seconds to disrupt their thinking. That is how my office sometimes feels. And so yesterday I found myself groping repeatedly for the spot on my desk where the noise-canceling headphones used to sit–and breaking into a cold sweat when I couldn’t find them.

Madison’s Thoreau Elementary School originally featured an open plan design. No longer.

Barry Garelick, via a kind email:

An important part of the job of teaching math in K-12 is to stretch students–to teach them creative and personal engagement with the material. At some point this must involve expecting students to come up with previously unfamiliar steps on their own for new problems that do not lend themselves to known algorithms, prescribed methods, and predictable approaches. An effective way of doing this is to extend routine problems that students know how to solve into nonroutine problems.
Over the past two decades, however, disagreements between advocates of traditional or conventional math teaching and the math reform movement have resulted in a fragmented approach to teaching math. A key area of disagreement centers on the distinction between “exercises” and “problems”. Math reformers generally believe that conventional math teaching consists mainly of routine problems that are nonthinking, repetitive, tedious and do not lead to students learning to solve nonroutine problems.

Valerie Strauss:

he Guardian newspaper in England published a post in its Secret Teacher blog, written by teachers who write anonymously, with this headline: “There’s an insidious prejudice against older teachers.’ The piece refers to a program in England called “Teach First,” which, it turns out, is a founding partner with Wendy Kopp’s Teach For America in a growing network of dozens of organizations in countries around the world that try to change the teacher corps. It’s called Teach For All, which I wrote about in this post:
Teach for All is a network of like-minded school reform organizations in countries around the world that, as the website says, “all recruit outstanding university graduates and young leaders of a variety of disciplines and career interests to commit two years to teach in high-need areas, providing a critical source of additional teachers who ensure their students have the educational opportunities they deserve, despite socioeconomic factors.”
Teach First, whose patron is Prince Charles, is having the same effect on many veteran teachers in England as Teach For America is having in the United States, at least according to this Secret Teacher blog post. Here’s part of it:
Until not so long ago I was a happy classroom teacher, with happy pupils in a happy school. A teacher who had been officially and consistently recognised as teaching successfully over a long period of time, by many different professionals – leaders and colleagues, visiting headteachers and Ofsted inspectors. Now, despite years of successful practice, I am feeling vulnerable and hunted….

James Grant

“There is precedent for a government shutdown,” Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, remarked last week. “There’s no precedent for default.”
How wrong he is.
The U.S. government defaulted after the Revolutionary War, and it defaulted at intervals thereafter. Moreover, on the authority of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the government means to keep right on shirking, dodging or trimming, if not legally defaulting.
Default means to not pay as promised, and politics may interrupt the timely service of the government’s debts. The consequences of such a disruption could — as everyone knows by now — set Wall Street on its ear. But after the various branches of government resume talking and investors have collected themselves, the Treasury will have no trouble finding the necessary billions with which to pay its bills. The Federal Reserve can materialize the scrip on a computer screen.
Things were very different when America owed the kind of dollars that couldn’t just be whistled into existence. By 1790, the new republic was in arrears on $11,710,000 in foreign debt. These were obligations payable in gold and silver. Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, duly paid them. In doing so, he cured a default.

Chris Rickert:

More important than whether UW-Madison might take a chance on Madison Prep, though, is whether such a school chartered by UW-Madison would work. Caire said “higher education institutions tend to be more careful about who gets a charter and tend to charter some high-quality schools.”
There appears to be some evidence of this. Ten of 11 UW-Milwaukee-authorized charters have an average state report card score some 14 points higher than the Milwaukee Public Schools generally, with one charter school not rated.
The MPS and charter schools have comparable rates of poverty, although MPS schools have higher proportions of disabled students and English language learners. A special state test for disabled students and other accommodations can help mitigate the negative effect on a school’s overall performance but not necessarily completely, according to James Wollack, an associate professor and expert in testing and evaluation at UW-Madison.

Much more on the Madison Preparatory Academy, an IB charter school proposal rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board.
Madison’s non-diverse K-12 governance model spends about double the national average per student yet has sustained disastrous reading results for some time. The “same service” governance model has long run its course.

Kopin Tan:

You’ve got to learn a foreign language. At least one! This is not 1953. America’s relative position in the world will continue to decline, and Americans must know about and engage the rest of the world. If I can do just one thing, I would shake up the American education system and make Americans learn more about the world. We have the largest debt in the world. The days when we can get away with not caring about the world are coming to an end.

Aki Ito:

“You have this enormous pool of people that’s being missed because of the way the entire industry goes after the same kinds of people, asking, did you go to Stanford, did you work at this company?” said Erik Juhl, head of talent at Vungle Inc.
They can drive cars, win Jeopardy and find your soon-to-be favorite song. Machines are also learning to decipher the most human qualities about you — and help businesses predict your potential to be their next star employee.
A handful of technology companies from Knack.it Corp. to Evolv Inc. are doing just that, developing video games and online questionnaires that measure personality attributes in a job applicant. Based on patterns of how a company’s best performers responded in these assessments, the software estimates a candidate’s suitability to be everything from a warehouse worker to an investment bank analyst.
Welcome to hiring in the age of big data, an ambition marrying automation with analysis in the race to better allocate talent. Having people work at what they do best would make them more productive, bolstering the economy’s capacity to expand, according to Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Bruce Feiler:

Now that the school year is under way, my wife and I are busy managing our children’s after-school schedules, mixing sports practices, music lessons, homework and play dates. It can be a complicated balancing act for our elementary-age daughters, as some days end up overstuffed, some logistically impossible, some wide open. Still, compared to when we were children, the opportunities they get to sample on a weekly basis is mind-blowing.
There’s only one problem: To absorb the conventional wisdom in parenting circles these days, what we’re doing to our children is cruel, overbearing and destructive to their long-term well-being. For years now, a consensus has been emerging that a subset of hard-driving, Ivy-longing parents is burdening their children with too many soccer tournaments, violin lessons and cooking classes. A small library of books has been published with names like “The Over-Scheduled Child,” “The Pressured Child,” “Pressured Parents, Stressed-Out Kids” and so on.

Charlotte Deleste:

At a far west Madison school, the News 3 Topnotch Teacher for October 2013 is imparting on students the power that words can have on others.
In early October, Dana Munoz’ sixth-grade class at Toki Middle School was working on its class contract, an agreement about how the students are going to interact with each other for the school year.
“Those usually include things they believe about themselves or they believe about the world and that they really want to happen,” Munoz said. “It sets the tone or the foundation for the rest of the year. I refer to it all the time.”
Munoz, who’s been working at Toki for five years, teaches language arts and likes to emphasize to her students that words, whether written or spoken, can be quite powerful in good or bad ways.
“The words we say, the impact we have on others can make or break someone’s day,” Munoz says. “Not only is it important to read and write, how we relate to one another can change the world.”
Munoz chose to use her words to change the world through teaching. The University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate admits it’s not always easy.

Toki Middle School “Report Card” (PDF).

Jayachandran and Pande:

Height-for-age among children is lower in India than in Sub-Saharan Africa. This presents a puzzle since India is richer than the average African country and fares better on most other development indicators including infant mortality. Using data from African and Indian Demographic and Health Surveys, we document three facts. First, among firstborns, Indians are actually taller than Africans; the Indian height disadvantage appears with the second child and increases with birth order. Second, investments in successive pregnancies and higher birth order children decline faster in India than Africa. Third, the India-Africa birth order gradient in child height appears to vary with sibling gender. These three facts suggest that parental preferences regarding higher birth order children, driven in part by cultural norms of eldest son preference, underlie much of India’s child stunting.

Douglas Belkin:

In the past decade, college tuition has risen three times as fast as the consumer-price index and twice as fast as medical care.
To answer those questions, The Wall Street Journal invited three economists with distinctly different orientations within higher education to discuss the issue.
Rudy Fichtenbaum teaches at Wright State University, Fairborn, Ohio, and is president of the American Association of University Professors, which promotes academic freedom and shared governance on college campuses. Katharine Lyall was president of the University of Wisconsin System from 1992 to 2004. Richard Vedder is director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Washington, D.C., which researches cost and efficiency in higher education.
This conversation was conducted by email between Aug. 28 and Sept. 3. Here are edited excerpts.

Wall Street Journal:

What explains the high, and rising, cost of college in the U.S.?
JON ERICKSON: Among the obvious factors affecting the rising costs of a college education in the U.S. are declining state funding coupled with increased services. However, there are other factors that may not be so apparent.
Among these factors are the staggering costs of remedial education. Our data show that far too many high-school graduates arrive on college campuses ill-prepared to succeed in standard first-year courses. According to some studies as many as 40% of college students must take at least one remedial course. Conservative estimates just within Texas put the cost at nearly $250 million.
Since remedial courses don’t count toward degree attainment, this also places a significant strain on students, delaying graduation, costing them more money in tuition and fees, and deferring the salary they will earn after they obtain their degree. Improving the college readiness of our high school graduates could help reduce college costs for many students.

Michael Barry (PDF):

MMSD financial results for 2012-13 were favorable in comparison to budget expectations. The General Fund Balance, which was budgeted to decrease by ($5.5) million to support several one-time expenditures, actually decreased by just ($1.6) million. This puts the District’s balance sheet in a stronger opening position for 2013-14. The primary reason for the favorable result was an unbudgeted revenue influx of $3.2 million from Medicaid reimbursements.
However, the Food Service Fund struggled in 2012-13, recording a net loss of $386,000 on total revenues of $10.5 million. Labor cost overages were the primary cause of the net loss. The Business Office is working closely with the Food Service department on budgetary expectations for 2013-14. Overall participation in the program decreased slightly last year.
….
Open enrollment results show 370 students enrolling in to MMSD from elsewhere and 1,206 MMSD residents enrolling outside of the district. The net out is -836. (Enrollment background data & District statistics)
(Last year, MMSD had 379 students enrolling in and 1,118 enrolling out, for a net out of -739.)

Much more on open enrollment here.
Suburban Districts vs. Madison, 1995-2012.
Madison School District: Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Surveys (June, 2009).

Christine Campbell & Betheny Gross, via a kind Deb Britt email:

When people lament that innovation is not possible in “regular” districts–ones that are overseen by elected school boards and working with active teachers unions–we at CRPE often point to Denver Public Schools. We’re not alone in noticing Denver–cities around the country have heard about its energy, new ideas, and solid implementation. Last year alone, more than a dozen city teams visited Denver to try to bring some of its ideas back to their own communities.
But this enthusiasm is not universal. In a recent Denver Post article about the challenges facing Superintendent Tom Boasberg in the upcoming school board race, one interviewee remarked that his “national notoriety is pinned more to the change that DPS has been willing to initiate and less on the results that it has produced.”
Actually, Denver has produced results. During Boasberg’s tenure, graduation rates rose and dropout rates fell. According to a 2012 study by a local foundation, over four years, 68 percent of new charter schools and 61 percent of new innovation schools exceeded the district median in student growth. Independent researchers found that the district’s teacher compensation reform was associated with improved student achievement. And the district’s new enrollment system, which allows families to apply for any of the city’s public schools with a single application, matched 83 percent of students to one of their top three choices and, as hoped, showed that families across the city demand high-performing schools.
Concerns remain, of course–but the city is working to address them. When the foundation report revealed that only 32 percent of the city’s turnaround schools performed above the district average, the district sought to open new schools rather than rely on turnarounds. Researchers found that the high-quality schools that families prefer aren’t evenly distributed across the city; local civic leaders are keeping a close eye on the progress of the district’s landmark effort to improve schools in the historically underserved Far Northeast section of the city.

Alex Tabarrok:

Here’s a TV schedule from 1963. If you wanted to watch Hootenanny you needed to be in front of the television on Saturday night between 7:30 and 8:30 pm. Have something else to do that night? Too bad. No pause or rewind either.