The Department of Public Instruction (DPI)’s July 1 estimate of state aid for the 2013-14 school year shows Sun Prairie getting 10.98% MORE aid than last year.
The most current budget estimates projected we’d receive a 10% increase over last year.
The net effect is that the district is receiving $3.8M more than last year, and $382K more than projected.
Let the spending begin!
Sarah Yatsko, Elizabeth Cooley Nelson, Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:
The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has been monitoring, supporting, and analyzing the cross-sector collaborative work undertaken in 16 District-Charter Compact cities. CRPE tracks progress on agreements and reports on local political, legal, and financial barriers to collaboration, and also facilitates networking and problem-solving among participants. Using data and documents from interviews with district and charter leaders, this interim report details the first two years of Compact work and finds evidence that these cities have made mixed progress on a number of fronts, such as facilities sharing, equitable funding for charter schools, more high-performing schools, and improved access to high-quality special education. But challenges like leadership transitions, local anti-charter politics, and key leaders’ unwillingness to prioritize time and resources for implementation have thwarted efforts in some cities. The report includes key Compact agreements and measurements of progress for each city, plus a checklist for district and charter leaders considering a collaboration Compact.
Plenty of schools use iPads. But what if the entire education experience were offered via tablet computer? That is what several new schools in the Netherlands plan to do. There will be no blackboards or schedules. Is this the end of the classroom?
Think different. It was more than an advertising slogan. It was a manifesto, and with it, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs upended the computer industry, the music industry and the world of mobile phones. The digital visionary’s next plan was to bring radical change to schools and textbook publishers, but he died of cancer before he could do it.
Some of the ideas that may have occurred to Jobs are now on display in the Netherlands. Eleven “Steve Jobs schools” will open in August, with Amsterdam among the cities that will be hosting such a facility. Some 1,000 children aged four to 12 will attend the schools, without notebooks, books or backpacks. Each of them, however, will have his or her own iPad.
There will be no blackboards, chalk or classrooms, homeroom teachers, formal classes, lesson plans, seating charts, pens, teachers teaching from the front of the room, schedules, parent-teacher meetings, grades, recess bells, fixed school days and school vacations. If a child would rather play on his or her iPad instead of learning, it’ll be okay. And the children will choose what they wish to learn based on what they happen to be curious about.
Preparations are already underway in Breda, a town near Rotterdam where one of the schools is to be located. Gertjan Kleinpaste, the 53-year-old principal of the facility, is aware that his iPad school on Schorsmolenstraat could soon become a destination for envious — but also outraged — reformist educators from all over the world.
And there is still plenty of work to do on the pleasant, light-filled building, a former daycare center. The yard is littered with knee-deep piles of leaves. Walls urgently need a fresh coat of paint. Even the lease hasn’t been completely settled yet. But everything will be finished by Aug. 13, Kleinpaste says optimistically, although he looks as though the stress is getting to him.
“If the students are performing at or better than they were in the schools they came from, then that would be a compelling case to offer more choices like that to more families across the state,” Walker said. “If the majority are not performing better, you could make a pretty compelling argument not to.”
Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said work on an accountability bill is wrapping up and he hopes it will begin circulating for sponsors by the end of this month. He hopes hearings will be held in late summer and early fall with a bill sent to the governor by the end of the year.
“I hope that everyone comes away happy that this is the right thing to do,” Olsen said. “The voucher people want a bill like this because they’re only as good as their weakest school.”
Olsen said the bill will not only apply the report card system to schools participating in the voucher program, it will also make changes to the report card for public schools.
The report card released last fall didn’t measure high school student growth, because it was based on one test taken in 10th grade. The state budget the governor signed Sunday expands high school testing to grades nine and 11. The accountability bill will ensure future report cards include those tests, Olsen said.
Democrats have been skeptical that Republicans will follow through on holding private voucher schools accountable. Earlier this year Senate Minority Leader Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, compared talk of a bill to Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.
In February, Walker told the State Journal editorial board that he hoped to sign a voucher school accountability bill before the budget was approved. That didn’t happen, but Walker said there was push back from the Legislature.
Much more on vouchers, here.
An article on the plight of adjunct professors in higher education, “Labor of Love or Cheap Labor? The Plight of Adjunct Professors,” was brought to my attention by its author, Celine James. Ms. James kindly asked me for my thoughts about her article. I thought Pileus readers might be interested in what I sent her. Here it is in full:
Dear Celine,
I have had a chance to read your article. I empathize with the plight of adjunct instructors that you describe. It is, or can be, a terribly difficult life. I am afraid, however, that I cannot endorse the solution you suggest, namely unionization.
Higher education is operated like a medieval guild, with special protections for the lucky few who make it in and special benefits to them that come at the expense of all those who were not lucky enough to get in. The problem is the rigidity in the labor market that this creates: once a person is in, he or she cannot be fired, regardless of performance, for life.That is a great deal for those who get in, and it explains why so many try so desperately hard to get in, but it is a model for maintaining an unjust, and slowly dying, status quo rather than responding to changing economic realities we actually face.
The solution would be not to extend the guild system to a slightly larger cohort, but, rather, to abandon it altogether. In other words, we should abolish the tenure system. In a world with thousands of institutions of higher education, along with now an almost unlimited upper bound of educational opportunities online, there can be no justification for the economically stifling and restricting system of guild benefits for a privileged elite.
I published Part 1 about how my ideas about school reform have changed over the past half-century. Here is Part 2.
***************************************************************************
I used to think that structural reforms (e.g., creating non-graded schools; new district and school site governance structures; novel technologies; small high schools with block schedules, advisories, and student learning communities) would lead to better classroom instruction.And now I think that, at best, such structural reforms may be necessary first steps toward improving instruction but are (and have been) seldom sufficient to alter traditional teaching practices.
In teaching nearly 15 years, I had concluded that policies creating new structures (see above examples) would alter common teaching practices which, in turn, would get students to learn more, faster, and better.
I revised that conclusion, albeit in slow motion, as I looked around at how my fellow teachers taught and began to examine my own classroom practices. I reconsidered the supposed power of structures in changing teaching practices after I left the classroom and began years of researching how teachers have taught following the rainfall of progressive reforms on the nation’s classrooms in the early 20th century and similar showers of standards-based, accountability-driven reforms in the early 21st century.[i]
Going to college can seem like a choice between impossibly high payments while in school or a crushing debt load for years afterward, but one state is experimenting with a third way.
This week, the Oregon Legislature approved a plan that could allow students to attend state colleges without paying tuition or taking out traditional loans. Instead, they would commit a small percentage of their future incomes to repaying the state; those who earn very little would pay very little.
The proposal faces a series of procedural and practical hurdles and will not go into effect for at least a few years, but it could point to a new direction in the long-running debate over how to cope with the rising cost of higher education. While the approach has been used in Australia, national education groups say they do not know of any university in the United States trying it.
Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a speech to the Society of News Editors that Education Week called “The strongest defense yet of Common Core Standards.”
In it, he said that the Common Core – educational standards that are being adopted by most states – “has become a rallying cry for fringe groups,” that opposition has been “misguided” and “misinformed” and that legislation in state houses across the country aimed at stopping the standards is “based on false information.”
While it is true that some criticism of the Common Core has been over the top, it is also true that the Common Core does not have to be a malign conspiracy to be problematic.
Even if you believe that the standards are a “boon” for schools, as the Washington Post’s and USA Today’s editorial boards do, it is important to recognize that the Common Core’s ultimate success will hinge on its implementation. As such, several issues loom large.
IVF treatments that require the direct injection of sperm into the egg are associated with a small increased risk of intellectual disability in the resulting children, according to a study.
Scientists also found that standard IVF treatment posed no increased risk of children developing intellectual disabilities or autism.
IVF is considered generally safe. About 4% of IVF children have physical or mental problems at birth, compared with 3% of those conceived naturally.
In the latest study, the largest so far into links between reproductive treatments and neurodevelopment, scientists examined how IVF might affect the incidence of autism and intellectual disability.
Next, by grade: In 1978, 28 percent of NAEP-LTT test takers were in 7th grade or lower, compared with 39 percent in 2012. Although standards and curriculum are different today, it’s worth noting that the 13-year old sample has changed as far as where they are in the K-12 system.
Third, there is the difference in parental education. The proportion of the 2012 sample with parents who completed college is over twice as high (54 percent) as in 1978 (26 percent). Conversely, the percentage of 13-year olds with parents who have a high school diploma or less is half its 1978 level. Again, some of this change is recent – for example, the proportion with a high school diploma or less was 27 percent in 1999, compared with 20 percent in 2012.
In short, the student population, and thus the NAEP samples, are changing, over the short- and longer terms. Any concurrent changes in testing performance may just as easily be due to these and many other shifts in the characteristics of the test takers- including unobservable factors that cannot be gleaned from breakdowns by subgroup – as to any change in school performance. This most certainly does not mean that schooling quality is unimportant, only that raw NAEP scores by themselves do not measure it very well, and they’re not supposed to.
Not all adjuncts at CUNY are being paid at subsistence level:
David H. Petraeus will earn a $150,000 salary when he joins the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College this fall as a visiting professor of public policy, according to documents obtained by the Web site Gawker through a public-records request.
Shall we make the obvious comparison? I think we shall:
CUNY adjuncts usually earn less than $3,000 per course.
IN A small school on the South Side of Chicago, 40 children between the ages of five and six sit quietly learning in a classroom. In front of each of them is a computer running software called Reading Eggs. Some are reading a short story, others building sentences with words they are learning. The least advanced are capturing all the upper- and lower-case Bs that fly past in the sky. As they complete each task they move through a cartoon map that shows how far they have progressed in reading and writing. Along the way they collect eggs which they can use to buy objects in the game, such as items to furnish their avatar’s apartment. Now and then a child will be taken aside for scheduled reading periods with one of the two monitoring teachers.
The director of North Kenwood-Oakland school says this sort of teaching, blending software with human intervention, helps her pupils learn faster. It also allows teachers at this school–which, like other charter schools, is publicly funded but has some freedom to teach as it likes–to spend more time teaching and less time marking written work and leading pupils through dull drills of words and numbers. On top of that the school gains an accurate, continuous record of each child’s performance through the data its various programs collect and analyse.
As well as evidence from these schools, the effectiveness of particular bits of software has been studied. The Department of Education spent four years evaluating literacy programs; it concluded that Read 180, a program to help students who have fallen behind in reading, was good at combating adult illiteracy. A randomised control trial of Cognitive Tutor, which helps teachers identify weaknesses and strengths in maths, among 400 15-year-olds in Oklahoma found that children using the program reached the same level of proficiency as the control group in 12% less time.
Meanwhile, the Khan Academy, a creator of online tutorials widely used as a form of home tutoring, is beginning to provide hard evidence for why it is considered one of edtech’s rising stars. At Oakland Unity, in tough inner-city Oakland, test scores for 16-17-year-olds in algebra and geometry have risen significantly in the two years since Khan courses were introduced. These courses are now being adopted by the Los Altos school district, also in California, which is already one of the best-performing in America. Khan Academy pinpoints the way in which edtech can turn conventional education on its head: in its “flipped classroom” pupils are no longer given lectures in the classroom and set problems as homework, but watch instructional videos at home and work on problems in class, where teachers and peers can help them.
Getting teachers who make a difference
Teachers matter …
One point of broad agreement in education is that teachers matter greatly. Students of certain teachers simply do better in a way that has a marked effect on social and economic outcomes. For example, a recent study drawing on data covering about 2.5 million US children found that, after correcting for other factors, pupils assigned to teachers identified as delivering better educational results “are more likely to attend college, attend higher-ranked colleges, earn higher salaries, live in higher [socio-economic status] neighbourhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children as teenagers.”[6] Professor Schwartz believes that “the single most important input variable [in education] is the quality of teaching.” However, teacher quality, notes William Ratteree – until recently, education sector specialist at the International Labour Organisation – “is a mix of factors which are difficult to pin down.”
Much of the research in this area has focused on what education systems can do to ensure that they find teachers who add value. Even here, though, says Professor Hanushek, “the rules tend to be country-specific.” McKinsey’s 2010 report, How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better, argues that the best interventions even depend on the current state of the school system. In McKinsey’s view, systems currently marked by “fair” levels of performance should focus on teacher accountability, while “good” systems are likely to benefit more from enhancing the status of the teaching profession.
… But what matters for getting good teachers?
Neal McCluskey, Williamson Evers and Sandra Stotsky:
The Common Core — effectively national math and English curriculum standards coming soon to a school near you — is supposed to be a new, higher bar that will take the United States from the academic doldrums to international dominance.
So why is there so much unhappiness about it? There didn’t seem to be much just three years ago. Back then, state school boards and governors were sprinting to adopt the Core. In practically the blink of an eye, 45 states had signed on.
But states weren’t leaping because they couldn’t resist the Core’s academic magnetism. They were leaping because it was the Great Recession — and the Obama administration was dangling a $4.35 billion Race to the Top carrot in front of them. Big points in that federal program were awarded for adopting the Core, so, with little public debate, most did.
Major displeasure has come only recently, because only recently has implementation hit the district level. And that means moms, dads and other citizens have recently gotten a crash course in the Core.
Their opposition has been sudden and potent — with several states now considering legislation to either slow or end implementation, and Indiana, Pennsylvania and Michigan having officially paused it.
Ten U.S. states have public pension liabilities that are at least as big as their annual revenues, according to aMoody’s Investors Service report released on Thursday that found the Illinois pension bill was equal to 241 percent of its revenues.
The rating agency took a new approach to determining the health of public retirement systems by weighing each plan’s net pension liability – the difference between the projected benefit payments and the assets set aside to cover those payments – against state revenue.
The typical discussion about how much money public pensions have is incomplete, said the author of the Moody’s report, senior analyst Marcia Van Wagner. By comparing those amounts to states’ revenues, though, the rating agency can get a better sense of states’ abilities to pay for the obligations, she said.
For many of the states that ability is very limited. In nearly half, the pension liability is equal to half the state’s annual revenue.
After Illinois, Connecticut had the highest pension burden in the country, with a pension liability equal to 189.7 percent of revenues. That was followed by Kentucky, at 140.9 percent; New Jersey, 137.2 percent; Hawaii, 132.5 percent; and Louisiana, s 130.2 percent. Colorado’s net pension liability was slightly more than revenues at 117.5 percent and Maryland’s slightly less at 99.5 percent.
On 4 August 2005, the police department of Memphis, Tennessee, made so many arrests over a three-hour period that it ran out of vehicles to transport the detainees to jail. Three days later, 1,200 people had been arrested across the city – a new police department record. Operation Blue Crush was hailed a huge success.
Larry Godwin, the city’s new police director, quickly rolled out the scheme and by 2011 crime across the city had fallen by 24%. When it was revealed Blue Crush faced budget cuts earlier this year, there was public outcry. “Crush” policing is now perceived to be so successful that it has reportedly been mimicked across the globe, including in countries such as Poland and Israel. In 2010, it was reported that two police forces in the UK were using it, but their identities were not revealed.
Crush stands for “Criminal Reduction Utilising Statistical History”. Translated, it means predictive policing. Or, more accurately, police officers guided by algorithms. A team of criminologists and data scientists at the University of Memphis first developed the technique using IBM predictive analytics software. Put simply, they compiled crime statistics from across the city over time and overlaid it with other datasets – social housing maps, outside temperatures etc – then instructed algorithms to search for correlations in the data to identify crime “hot spots”. The police then flooded those areas with highly targeted patrols.
New York City socialite Michelle Heinemann and her investment banker husband, Jon, are suing the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine after they were charged $50,000 for a finger painting, the NY Post reports.
Ms Heinemann worked with her son’s kindergarten class to create a finger painting that could be sold at the school’s fundraiser charity auction in March this year.
The painting consisted of traced-and-cut-out paper hands of their son, Hudson and his 17 classmates.
After they were told paintings typically sell at fundraisers for up to $1200, the couple agreed they would place the winning bid at $3000 as they could not attend the event, their lawsuit filed in the Manhattan Supreme Court said.
However, the school’s director of advancement had a first-grade teacher, Ms Bryant, drove up the bid to “the outrageous sum of $50,000”, the suit alleges.
I. Reading (Sources)
Score: (1-6) Reader One 6 Reader Two 5
Reader One:
Yours is a mature and demanding subject. Your work is both convincing and authoritative, and your research is first class. From Jean Bethke Elshtain onward you cover all the bases in the field of ethics. Your use of primary source material is outstanding. There are flashes of genuine distinction in all you do. Congratulations.
Reader Two:
This paper is based on the author’s reading of an impressive number and quality of sources, 63 (!) of them altogether. ey include writings by Augustine, Aquinas, Grotius, and Kant, articles in scholarly journals, and monographs on the subject, such as Michael Doyle’s examination of Kant’s “democratic peace thesis” and, especially, Jean Bethke Elshtain’s scholarship. e bibliography is not in alphabetical order, as it should be.
Emma, first of all tell us about what you are currently, doing, studying, and the like.
I am graduating from high school this week and heading to New York University in the fall. Having gone through the grueling college admissions process and four years of high school, I am dedicating my summer to surfing, reading, and hanging out on the beaches of Santa Cruz…
2) Now, I understand that you were published a while ago in The Concord Review. What was your topic and when did this occur?
My paper on the Broderick-Terry Duel was published in the Spring 2013 Issue of The Concord Review. The Broderick-Terry Duel was a pistol duel in 1859 between U.S. Senator David Broderick and California Supreme Court Justice David Terry. The duel was the culmination of a decade of dramatic and divisive politics in California between the pro and anti-slavery democrats. Broderick’s legacy has been imprinted in history, for his death in the duel reversed the pro-slavery Democrats’ victory in the 1859 statewide elections and ensured that California would remain firmly in the Union.
3) What prompted you to write a major research paper on the topic of your choice?
I was inspired by Colonel Edward Baker’s eulogy for his friend, U.S. Senator David Broderick. One of the finest orators of his time, Baker wrote eloquently about how Broderick stood up to a pro-slavery president as well as the California and national legislatures, and repeatedly, won against all odds. He spoke of Broderick’s conviction and courage, his fight against the pro-slavery movement in California, and of how his unwillingness to cave to injustice ultimately cost him his life. Over one hundred years later, Baker’s words still had the power to move me to tears and compel me to research Broderick’s story and the context of his time.
4) Who helped you? Parents, teachers, principals?
My father is a constant source of information and support. My earliest childhood memories are playing with my doll while watching Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary with my father. As I have grown older, we continue to share a love of history.
5) I understand you have some concerns about the current emphasis on Science, Technology, Electronics and Math. Tell us about your concern?
As was recently stated in The Concord Review’s blog, “The Emerson Prizes lost their funding last year…Intel still has $680,000 in prizes for High School work…” I can attest to the contrast in reception of academic achievement in STEM fields versus the Humanities, even at the small, academically-focused, independent school (The College Preparatory School in Oakland, California) that I attend. This year, one of my classmates received an Intel Award and teachers continually publicly recognize and celebrate her achievement in school assemblies and newsletters, which is entirely appropriate because she did extraordinary work.
However, I told several of my teachers about my paper being published in The Concord Review, an internationally recognized academic journal, and while they congratulated me, neither my published paper, nor my Emerson Prize, was acknowledged in a public forum until the last day of school, as a brief afterthought.
I understand that STEM is currently receiving a lot of attention in the national news because it is closely tied to our economic expansion and workforce. I recall a statistic from the U.S. Department of Labor stated that 5% of the American workforce is employed in a STEM related field while 50% of our economic expansion relies on STEM related professions. Clearly, there is a great demand for talent in STEM fields and we are looking to the next generation of brilliant young minds to fill the gap. However, it is essential that students with an aptitude for the humanities be encouraged as well, for man does not live by science alone.
How bland would life be without literature, history, poetry, and music? How will society advance, if we do not understand who we are and where we have been? We need young people who are gifted in English, History, or Language for our economy, too. Our nation needs teachers, writers, law makers, orators, translators, researchers, etc. We need brilliant minds–period, and academic excellence and achievement should be celebrated and nurtured across all fields.
6) Some people talk about “life changing events.” Do you see getting your paper published as a life changing event?
Being published in The Concord Review was one of the happiest moments of my life. The research that I put into the paper will stay with me forever, for through the course of my writing, Senator Broderick became my personal hero. His character and the life that he led have inspired me to live my life with principle and integrity. Serendipitously, by having my paper published, I met another hero, Mr. Fitzhugh, the founder and editor of The Concord Review.
Although I am only acquainted with him through email correspondence, I greatly admire that he has dedicated his life to advocating for youths and youth education. I follow his blog and posts on The Concord Review’s Facebook page, and although his posts are usually serious, they can also be really funny and sassy.
7) What kind of writing are you doing now?
Poems, love letters, creepy Facebook statuses…In all seriousness, I am hoping to write for NYU’s student newspaper in the fall.
8) What have I neglected to ask?
How is learning to write a history research paper relevant and useful to high school students?
In my opinion, writing a history research paper encompasses all of the skills of the humanities discipline–reading, writing, critical thinking, researching, and understanding a subject within its historical context. These abilities teach and reinforce essential skills for any student’s academic and professional career. Being able to think critically about an event or issue within its context is vital to understanding and solving any kind of problem, and in the modern age of the internet, it is crucial that everyone know how to research and identify credible sources. Furthermore, knowing how to methodically organize and support one’s ideas is key to being able to communicate or argue a point and understanding someone else’s argument.
Outside of the classroom, these skills have enabled me to give back to my community. Currently, I am on the Board of the Oakland Fund for Children and Youth, which guides the allocation of $12-20 million towards programs that serve impoverished and at-risk children and their families. Although I am the youngest on the commission, my vote has equal power, so I take my responsibility seriously. I prepare for each meeting by reading and analyzing briefs, data, and long government documents in order to understand the issues at hand as well as the greater community context.
It is not easy reading, and I have learned that many local and national policy and funding issues are complex and interconnected; but, by treating each meeting’s agenda as a subject to be researched, I am able to contribute to the Board’s discussions at public hearings and make funding recommendations.
It’s treacherous to predict future trends based on the recent past in education labor policy, but the uproar over school closings and layoffs in Chicago may soon be replicated in other areas of the state as staffing levels are reduced to match student enrollment.
In the early 2000s Chicago was like most large urban districts in the U.S. in that it hired K-12 teachers faster than the school population grew. But when enrollment fell – and it did by 3.6 percent between 2006 and 2011 – and money got tight, the staffing couldn’t be sustained. So Chicago teacher levels were reduced by 14.4 percent in that same time frame. That trend is continuing today.
A look at the rest of the state’s largest districts suggest others may follow suit. Rockford, Schaumburg and Palatine all had enrollment declines but grew their teacher workforce by 8 percent or more. In fact, 17 of the 25 largest districts increased staffing beyond enrollment, or didn’t reduce staffing to match enrollment losses.
Madison’s aid amount is about the same as it was in 2010-11. The district received a $15 million boost in aid last year mostly because 4-year-old kindergarten enrollment added about 2,000 students.
The Madison School Board taxed the maximum amount allowed last year, resulting in a 1.75 percent property tax increase. That amount was low compared to previous years because of the state aid increase. The additional funds allowed the district to spend more on building maintenance and a plan to raise low-income and minority student achievement.
Property tax increase coming
Cheatham said she hopes to propose a lower property tax increase than 6.8 percent when she introduces her budget on July 15. A group of local and national experts recently advised the district that it should reallocate more funding from the administration into classrooms. Cheatham expects to do a deeper review of district finances for the 2014-15 budget.
“I would not be reluctant to ask the taxpayers of Madison to support us with additional funding moving forward if I knew that we were spending every dollar in the best possible way to support the students in our school district,” Cheatham said. “I’ll know that next budget cycle.”
To reduce the budget, Cheatham said she doesn’t expect any major changes that will affect classroom learning.
Instead she could cut a 1.5 percent proposed increase in the employee salary schedule, reduce maintenance spending or make some previously recommended reductions in administrative positions.
Much more in the 2013-2014 budget, here.
Related: Up, Down & Transparency: Madison Schools Received $11.8M more in State Tax Dollars last year, Local District Forecasts a Possible Reduction of $8.7M this Year.
Madison spends significantly more per student than most districts. Property taxes were increased 9% just a few years ago.
Finally the ongoing tax increases may play a role in Madison School Board member Mary Burke’s rumored race for Governor.
Wages fall at record pace.
Madison’s long term disastrous reading scores.
Can we make ourselves happier? According to studies from all over the globe collated by the World Happiness Database in Rotterdam, we can. But the path to happiness may not be where we are looking for it.
Prof Ruut Veenhoven, Director of the Database and Emeritus professor of social conditions for human happiness at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, says his own study found a slight negative correlation between the number of times people in a study spontaneously mentioned “goals” and their happiness.
“Though it is generally assumed that you need goals to lead a happy life, evidence is mixed. The reason seems to be that unhappy people are more aware of their goals, because they seek to change their life for the better.”
Although there is some positive correlation between seeing meaning in life and being happy, studies suggest this is not a necessary condition for happiness. In fact, studies suggest leading an active life has the strongest correlation with happiness.
A popular article by Verlyn Klinkenborg last week in The New York Times Sunday Review lamented the decline of English majors at top colleges and universities. Mr. Klinkenborg is worried about the “technical narrowness” of some college programs and the “rush to make education pay off”- which, he writes, “presupposes that only the most immediately applicable skills are worth acquiring.”
I am sympathetic to certain parts of Mr. Klinkenborg’s hypothesis: for instance, the potential value of writing skills even for students who major in scientific or technical fields, and the risks that specialization can pose to young minds that are still in their formative stages.
But Mr. Klinkenborg also neglects an important fact: more American students are attending college than ever before. He is correct to say that the distribution of majors has become more career-focused, but these degrees may be going to students who would not have gone to college at all in prior generations.
If ever you start to fret about being replaced by a robot in some Terminator-style apocalypse, look up a YouTube video entitled “PR2 Autonomously Pairing Socks”. The two-minute clip from a University of California, Berkeley research project in 2011 shows a robot identifying the two matching pairs from five socks. After carefully flattening the socks to inspect their shape and pattern, it checks they’re not inside out, then couples them.
It’s an impressive feat of robot engineering, of course. But for some it will be quite comforting that this task, dispatched in seconds by us humans, takes the $280,000 Willow Garage PR2 robot fully half an hour. On a cost-benefit basis alone, robot armies are unlikely to be marshalled against us in the near future.
Yet robots are about to invade our homes – and they’re coming not for our laundry but for our children. Rather than androids with arms, clunky thumbs and screens for eyes, they’re arriving as toy cars, balls and babysitters – and costing not $200,000 but $200. You might call them robots in disguise.
‘The Heart of the Matter,” the just-released report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, deserves praise for affirming the importance of the humanities and social sciences to the prosperity and security of liberal democracy in America. Regrettably, however, the report’s failure to address the true nature of the crisis facing liberal education may cause more harm than good.
In 2010, leading congressional Democrats and Republicans sent letters to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences asking that it identify actions that could be taken by “federal, state and local governments, universities, foundations, educators, individual benefactors and others” to “maintain national excellence in humanities and social scientific scholarship and education.”
In response, the American Academy formed the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, with Duke University President Richard Brodhead and retired Exelon CEO John Rowe as co-chairmen. Among the commission’s 51 members are top-tier-university presidents, scholars, lawyers, judges, and business executives, as well as prominent figures from diplomacy, filmmaking, music and journalism.
“IT IS possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture,” observed Thomas Edison in 1913, predicting that books would soon be obsolete in the classroom. In fact the motion picture has had little effect on education. The same, until recently, was true of computers. Ever since the 1970s Silicon Valley’s visionaries have been claiming that their industry would change the schoolroom as radically as the office–and they have sold a lot of technology to schools on the back of that. Children use computers to do research, type essays and cheat. But the core of the system has changed little since the Middle Ages: a “sage on a stage” teacher spouting “lessons” to rows of students. Tom Brown and Huckleberry Finn would recognise it in an instant–and shudder.
Now at last a revolution is under way (see article). At its heart is the idea of moving from “one-size-fits-all” education to a more personalised approach, with technology allowing each child to be taught at a different speed, in some cases by adaptive computer programs, in others by “superstar” lecturers of one sort or another, while the job of classroom teachers moves from orator to coach: giving individual attention to children identified by the gizmos as needing targeted help. In theory the classroom will be “flipped”, so that more basic information is supplied at home via screens, while class time is spent embedding, refining and testing that knowledge (in the same way that homework does now, but more effectively). The promise is of better teaching for millions of children at lower cost–but only if politicians and teachers embrace it.
Michael B. Horn And Meg Evans:
The past several decades have seen technology transform industry after industry. Nearly every sector in America has used new technologies to innovate in ways nearly unimaginable a generation before the change.
One sector, however, has remained nearly the same as it was a century ago.
The education system in place in urban school districts around the country was created in the early 1900s to serve a different time with different needs. In 1900, only 17% of all jobs required so-called knowledge workers, whereas over 60% do today.
Back then, the factory-model system that educators adopted created schools that in essence monolithically processed students in batches. By instituting grades and having a teacher focus on just one set of students of the same academic proficiency, the theory went, teachers could teach the same subjects, in the same way and at the same pace to all children in the classroom.
When most students would grow up to work in a factory or an industrial job of some sort, this standardization worked just fine. But now that we ask increasingly more students to master higher order knowledge and skills, this arrangement falls short.
Milwaukee and Wisconsin as a whole have felt this pressure acutely. Between 2011 and 2012, Wisconsin had the biggest six-month decline in manufacturing jobs in the nation after California. According to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel special report, the city’s pool of college-educated adults ranks among the lowest of the country’s 50 biggest cities. To become an average city among the top 50, Milwaukee would need another 36,000 adults with college degrees. Since 1990, it has added fewer than 1,000 a year.
Spot on. Much more on our “Frederick Taylor” style K-12 system and its’ focus on adult employment, here.
There are sometimes days doing this watchdog work that are defeating, sad and frustrating. Today is one those. I’ll get to the issue at hand but a few thoughts first.
I’ve said this before – I do truly believe we have some good and decent people working in SPS. There are several up the food chain who are almost great but, like many a bureaucracy, have those whose work either drags them down or mires them in place.
I’ve also said this before – anyone who works in leadership at SPS who does not read and heed the words in the Moss-Adams report of 2002 is doomed to failure. Or, at least doomed to frustration.
The echo in my head from that brilliant report (and I paraphrase here) –
It does not matter what structural or systemic change you bring to an institution, if the culture of bureaucracy at an institution does not change, nothing changes.
Teaching was once dubbed “the profession that eats its young” and many educators liken their first few years in the classroom to a hazing ritual. The result is an industry that hemorrhages new teachers nearly as fast as it can license them.
One factor feeding the high turnover rate is lack of preparation, according to Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a national union representing 1.5 million educators.
“Newly minted teachers are tossed the keys to their classrooms … and left to see if they (and their students) sink or swim,” she wrote in a December 2012 report for the AFT. The report called for higher standards and accountability in teacher training programs.
The 2013 NCTQ Teacher Prep Ratings, released today by U.S. News, are a step in that direction.
[Read U.S. News Editor Brian Kelly’s opinion on the NCTQ ratings.]
Part of a broader effort by the National Council on Teacher Quality, the ratings are a subset of the NCTQ Teacher Prep Review, published today by the nonprofit educational research and advocacy group. The review is a 2.5-year effort to gauge the quality of the bachelor’s and master’s degree tracks required to enter the teaching profession.
10 percent of the schools produce nearly half the college-ready graduates Last week the city announced that 22.2% of students from the high school Class of 2012 met the state’s college-ready standard, up from 21.1% for the Class of 2011. What the announcement didn’t say was that this already weak college-readiness rate was inflated by a small group of schools that contribute a disproportionate number of students to the city’s college-ready percentage. The differences between schools were so great that the city’s overall college-readiness rate of 22.2% did not represent the reality for even most city schools. In fact, only a quarter of the city’s high schools had a college-ready rate that was 22% or better. Here’s one way to look at the numbers: –
Autism, or the fear of it, chased one Korean mother from her Queens church. “I very carefully told the mom: ‘I think your child is a little different. Why don’t you take the test for autism?’ ” said the Rev. Joy Lee of the Korean Presbyterian Church in Flushing. “She told me, ‘Oh no, my child will be O.K.’ So then she quit. After that, she did not pick up the phone.”
It crushed another Korean mother — twice. First, she said, when her son received the diagnosis, and again when friends saw it as a sign that she herself was sick. To cure him, they said, she needed psychotherapy.
Sun Young Ko, of Forest Hills, whose 8-year-old son, Jaewoo Kwak, was given a diagnosis of autism 18 months ago, said her own mother refused to discuss her grandson with relatives or friends. “She’s kind of hiding,” Ms. Ko said.
There’s a revolution in education taking place, many people have told me about the excellent education people can get through online courses, many of them free, some of them from top schools.
It’s a disruptive trend. No, it’s not.
The top schools won’t be disrupted, even most other schools won’t be affected by free online education.
Even if you could sit in on any lecture at any top school, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc, it wouldn’t help you much at all. Students will still be competing to get into those top schools, happy to mortgage their, and their parents’ futures, to pay to get into those top schools.
Because it’s not about the education you get it’s about the contacts you make. It’s about joining a privileged group that takes care of its own throughout the rest of your life. The alumni associations and the other relationships you make are worth far more than the cost or even the quality of the education. It’s not about knowing your subject, it’s about who you know.
Marketplace:. A brief documentary about school lunches.
A friend of mine has two signs in her office. One says, “Stay calm and carry on.” The other says, “Freak out and throw things.”
Both offer paths to grasping the realities of Milwaukee Public Schools as the system reaches a milestone. Sunday is the last day of the contract between MPS and its teachers union, the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association. It is, at least for the foreseeable future, the end of the teacher contract era in MPS.
The teachers’ contract was a huge shaping force in MPS for roughly the last half century, setting not only pay and benefits, but lots of the operating rules for daily life. Especially in the last 15 years, as the price of health insurance and commitments to current and future retirees escalated, the contract drove the financial realities of MPS — and the direction was rather startling.
Now, the contract is gone. What impact will that have on MPS? A few observations:
Stay calm and carry on: In many ways, not much will be different. As is true in general in Wisconsin school districts, the contract is being succeeded by a “handbook,” a statement by management of what the rules of the school road will be. A lot of the provisions are in line with the past. A lot of school systems around the state have realized it’s good to have some stability and to keep teachers generally feeling they are being treated with some dignity and in ways that have some rationale.
Much more on “Act 10”, here.
Molly Conley’s mom, Susan, received a packet from Bishop Blanchet High School in Seattle today.
Along with her report card, it included a letter molly wrote to her class as an end of the year assignment.
The 15-year-old girl was killed while walking with friends along a Lake Stevens road. A 26-year-old Marysville man has been arrested in connection with the drive-by shooting death.
The City of Lake Stevens first confirmed that an arrest had been made in the case Friday evening. The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office said the suspect was arrested at his home and would be booked into jail for first-degree murder, but provided no further details.
Last week, dispatchers made reverse-911 calls to nearly 4,000 phones, seeking information that could help catch the shooter. Detectives asked people to respond if they had video of vehicles driving in the area during the hours before and after the shooting.
A reward for information in the case had reached $34,000.
Here is Molly’s letter:
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently announced that states will be given the option to postpone using the results of their new teacher evaluations for high-stakes decisions during the phase-in of the new Common Core-aligned assessments. The reaction from some advocates was swift condemnation – calling the decision little more than a “delay” and a “victory for the status quo.”
We hear these kinds of arguments frequently in education. The idea is that change must be as rapid as possible, because “kids can’t wait.” I can understand and appreciate the urgency underlying these sentiments. Policy change in education (as in other arenas) can sometimes be painfully slow, and what seem likes small roadblocks can turn out to be massive, permanent obstacles.
I will not repeat my views regarding the substance of Secretary Duncan’s decision – see this op-ed by Morgan Polikoff and myself. I would, however, like to make one very quick point about these “we need change right now because students can’t wait” arguments: Sometimes, what is called “delay” is actually better described as good policy making, and kids can wait for good policy making.
Unless Congress acts, interest rates for government subsidized student loans will double to 6.8% from 3.4% on July 1. In May, House Republicans passed a bill that would index rates on new loans to the rate on 10-year Treasurys (currently about 2.6%), plus 2.5 percentage points, with an 8.5% cap. But with little Democratic support in the Senate, that bill is dead in the water.
Most Democrats want to lock the current 3.4% rate in place for two more years while Congress debates a “fairer” solution. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has even proposed letting students borrow directly from the government at the same ultra-low rate that banks currently get on short-term loans from the Federal Reserve–0.75%. She calls the Republican proposal “immoral.”
In the student-loan world, there’s immorality to spare–not in the still historically low interest rates, but in the principal of the thing. Student debt, which recently surpassed the trillion-dollar level in the U.S., is now a major burden on graduates, a burden that is often not offset by increased earnings from a college degree in say, race and gender issues, rather than engineering.
According to an extensive 2012 analysis by the Associated Press of college graduates 25 and younger, 50% are either unemployed or in jobs that don’t require a college degree. Then there are the large numbers who don’t graduate at all. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, more than 40% of full-time students at four-year institutions fail to graduate within six years. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that almost 75% of community-college students fail to graduate within three years. Those students don’t have degrees, but they often still have debt.
A national study that gave UW-Whitewater teacher education a low score was incomplete and shallow, the dean of education at the school said.
“They never talked to our students, and they never interviewed student teachers or principals to find out how our students were doing,” said Katy Heyning, dean of the UW-Whitewater College of Education and Professional Studies.
“It’s a very incomplete picture in terms of what they were looking at, so I don’t know how they can possibly understand our program,” she said.
Kate Walsh, president of National Council on Teacher Quality, said the Teacher Prep Review gives a “pretty good indication” of teachers UW-Whitewater and other schools are turning out.
The study released Tuesday judged the quality of teacher training programs across the nation, analyzing course documents, state laws and requirements and school districts’ needs for teachers.
Much more here and here.
Jeremy Singer-Vine & Anton Troianovski:
While 7-year-old Eros ViDemantay played with a kid’s app on his father’s phone, tracing an elephant, behind the scenes a startup company backed by Google Inc. GOOG +0.38% was collecting information from the device–including its email address and a list of other apps installed on his phone.
“My jaw dropped,” says Lee ViDemantay, Eros’s father and a fifth-grade teacher at the Los Angeles Unified School District. “Why do they need to know all that?” The app, called “How to Draw–Easy Lessons,” also sent two of the phone’s main ID numbers.
A Wall Street Journal examination of 40 popular and free child-friendly apps on Google’s Android and Apple Inc.’s AAPL +0.70% iOS systems found that nearly half transmitted to other companies a device ID number, a primary tool for tracking users from app to app. Some 70% passed along information about how the app was used, in some cases including the buttons clicked and in what order.
Some three years after the Journal first tested data collection and sharing in smartphone apps–and discovered the majority of apps tested sending details to third parties without users’ awareness–the makers of widely used software continue to gather and profit from people’s personal information.
Cameron McWhirter & Meredith Rutland:
A conspiracy case stemming from one of the largest school-cheating scandals in U.S. history could be scuttled or drastically diminished if a judge rules that investigators coerced some educators into talking.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry W. Baxter is considering a defense motion that he strike down many, if not all, of the charges–most notably conspiracy–against the former superintendent of Atlanta’s public schools and 34 other former educators. Defense lawyers say the charges are based on interviews by state investigators who told some defendants they would be fired if they didn’t talk, which they argue violated defendants’ constitutional right against self-incrimination.
Judge Baxter is expected to make a ruling soon, though the precise timing is unclear.
A 2011 report by the state investigators found that cheating on state standardized tests was rife in Atlanta schools, including allegations that teachers erased incorrect answers because they would get bonuses if their students got higher scores. The report found the educators were responding to pressure from the administration of Beverly Hall, the superintendent from 1999 to 2011, to show marked improvement in their students’ scores or face discipline or less pay.
Tighter standards in a federal loan program have dealt a significant blow to Howard University and other historically black colleges and universities over the past year, curtailing funds for thousands of students and contributing in some places to a sudden decline in enrollment.
The change in federal lending to parents of college students had an acute impact at Howard, where finances are also under pressure from the federal budget sequester and expenses at its hospital. Howard President Sidney A. Ribeau announced budget cuts in January in response to shortages in revenue from tuition and other sources.
Federal data show that parent loans for Howard students fell by at least $7 million in the 2012-13 academic year compared with the previous year, a 17 percent decline.
Howard’s 5 percent enrollment drop and loss of revenue fueled a debate over fiscal issues that has roiled the university community. The vice chairwoman of the board of trustees, Renee Higginbotham-Brooks, warned in a letter to trustees disclosed June 7 that the school “is in genuine trouble.” Days later the board chairman, Addison Barry Rand, countered that it remains “financially and operationally strong.”
The Folsom Cordova Unified School District has violated special education rules 63 times in the past four years, according to state records.
The violations ranged from placing a child in a restraint chair without informing the child’s parents to failing to provide families with progress reports in a timely fashion.
According to state files obtained by The Bee covering the last four school years, families filed 25 separate complaints alleging that Folsom Cordova violated state laws or federal regulations a combined 92 times.
Investigators subsequently concluded the district had failed to comply with special education rules 63 times, or in nearly two-thirds of the allegations.
The California Department of Education launched a formal review of the district after complaints spiked in 2010-11, when parents alleged the district committed 50 violations.
District officials say they have since addressed and resolved the problems identified that year.
Folsol-Cordova spent $135,777,901 for 19,198 students, or $7,072.50/student.
If you have school-age children, you already know how hard it can be to get them to quit playing their video games and settle down to their school work. And with the summer upon us, it’s frightening to imagine how little time most children will invest to advance their knowledge and intellect in the next 80 days.
However, imagine education that is as entertaining and addictive as video games. Sound far-fetched? I believe that this is exactly the idea — driven by dynamic innovation and entrepreneurism — that will help bring our education system out of the stone ages.
Indeed, our education system is obsolete. For starters, we are educating students under a system based on industrial-age thinking, where they advance to the next level based on their age, not ability. Some children are naturally good at one subject and can master it quickly but may take a little longer to comprehend a different subject. It’s astounding that we are advancing children on a fixed-time basis, leaving our exceptional students to languish for a full year and our challenged students to struggle and yet advance.
For a glimpse into Newark’s educational politics, Newark Teacher Union President Joseph Del Grosso barely squeaked out a victory in this week’s contentious battle for the top spot in the association: he won by a scant nine votes. However, his opposition – represented under a new faction called “NEW Vision” or “Newark Education Workers Caucus” – won 18 of 31 seats on NTU’s Executive Board. NJ Spotlight, in recounting the story, says that this will be the “first time since his first term that Del Grosso’s slate will not control the board.”
Del Grosso has been widely criticized by by some NTU members for agreeing to a merit pay structure in NTU’s new contract and associating with Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson. Consorting with the enemy, if you will.
So what does NEW Vision want?
Handily, Intercepts has posted NEW Vision’s “manifesto,” a thoughtful and well-written strategic plan that defines this union’s activism as “a movement of social justice, a “supreme act of devotion” to schoolchildren in Newark and the city’s future. Part of that devotion is declaring enmity to “the privatization of public schools, the corporatization of public life, and the commodification of human life in general.”
Can the lure of gambling be used to help people save?
A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research explores the possibility of using lotteries to induce savings behavior. The concept is called a prize-linked savings (PLS) account, in which holders have the chance of winning cash or other kinds of prizes for contributing money.
The authors of the paper — Emel Filiz-Ozbay, Jonathan Guryan, Kyle Hyndman, Melissa Schettini Kearney and Erkut Y. Ozbay — conducted a controlled experiment with 96 University of Marylandstudents to compare the success of a PLS account to that of a standard interest-bearing account. They found that participants were more likely to save when offered the possibility of winning a prize. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first evidence showing that PLS products are more effective at inducing savings as compared to a standard interest bearing account offering the same expected return,” write the authors.
Channel3000, via a kind reader email
An 83-year-old music professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has played bass with Bruce Springsteen and classical conductor Igor Stravinsky has been awarded the nation’s highest honor in jazz.
The Wisconsin State Journal reported that Richard Davis won a 2014 Jazz Masters Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Davis says, “It feels good to be honored amongst your peers.”
Sallie Mae, the largest private lender of student loans, recently announced that it will split into two entities. The first company will manage nearly all of Sallie Mae’s assets–$118.1 billion worth of federal loans and $31.6 billion worth of private loans–and the second will continue to lend to students.[1] This development underscores a disquieting truth: Americans have a healthy attitude toward higher education but an unhealthy relationship with student debt. While household debt comes in many forms, only student debt grew during the Great Recession. Federal policy has encouraged this habit. In the two years following the financial crisis, spending on student loans grew 19 percent and 18 percent, respectively.
Though students and families are borrowing more to cope with the ever-growing cost of college, the loans that they are taking out may actually be a cause, as well as a result, of the problem. Many studies suggest that colleges are capturing part of this increase in federal loan funds and using it to pay for high-cost expenditures–such as research labs, student amenities, and administrators–that are then passed on to students in the form of higher tuition and fees. Since colleges are guaranteed funding for students who demonstrate need, they are insulated from the consequences of raising prices.
Therefore, student loan reform needs to introduce competitive pressure into the student loan system. De-linking the cost of specific colleges from decisions on loan awards is one way of achieving this goal. Instead, colleges could offer every eligible student four possible loan awards based on financial need and the median cost of college. This reform would force colleges to compete for students’ loan money by demonstrating the actual value that their education provides. And since colleges would no longer be shielded from market pressures, they would be forced to become more cost-conscious.
Jim Bender, of the pro-voucher group School Choice Wisconsin, said there are a range of legitimate reasons parents choose voucher-funded private schools, but that the rising number of voucher students proves parents want that choice.
That’s probably what you’d expect to hear from a leader in what voucher critics see as a national effort to privatize — and profit from — education.
Of course, what you hear from Democratic lawmakers and a DPI run by a Democratically leaning state superintendent — who rely for political support on teachers unions — is about what you’d expect to hear from those with a vested interest in public schools’ hegemony.
Vouchers might be one of those childhood-related policy debates that has less to do with what children need than with what lawmakers and their special interests want.
And if what children need is to be ignored, the next best thing might be to pay a little more attention to what parents say their children need.
Much more on vouchers, here.
Students seeking online degrees might soon resemble traditional on-campus students, according to a new survey sponsored by two companies involved in online education consulting.
The survey, in its second year, continues to show the typical student seeking a degree or certification online is a married middle-aged white woman, but the new results suggest the overall population of online learners is beginning to include more students who are of traditional college age, but not going to a college campus. The survey is only of students who have taken, are taking or plan to take courses from an online program.
“It’s obvious that more and more people from traditional college-age populations are electing to do their college online — they are just skipping the campus,” said David Clinefelter, a co-author of the study and the chief academic officer at the Learning House, Inc., which advises colleges on online education ventures.
As a schoolboy, Akihiro Matsumura spent hundreds of hours learning the intricate Chinese characters that make up a part of written Japanese. Now, the graduate student can rely on his smartphone, tablet and laptop to remember them for him.
“Sometimes I don’t even bother to take notes in seminars. I just take out my tablet to shoot pictures of what instructors write on blackboards,” he said.
Like millions of people across East Asia, 23-year-old Matsumura is forgetting the pictographs and ideographs that have been used in Japan and greater China for centuries.
While some bemoan what they see as the loss of history and culture, others say the shift frees up brainpower for more useful things, like foreign languages, and even improves writing as a whole.
Newly released data from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction show that staffing levels at state public schools held steady last year, despite fears that changes initiated by Gov. Scott Walker would prompt additional losses.
The number of employees did drop in some program areas and in some districts, according to the DPI’s summary report. And overall staffing remains significantly lower than five years ago.
“District job losses as the result of budget cuts have stabilized, and in some cases become one-year positive readjusts,” DPI spokesman John Johnson said. Despite this rebound, he said, many districts are still hurting for staff, “and student services programs have been cut dramatically.”
The data, released this week, tally staff levels for the 2012-13 school year as they existed on the third Friday in September.
They show that the state’s 424 school districts had 99,265 full-time equivalent positions in 2012-13. That’s up 25 positions from 2011-12, but down a total of 5,200 FTE positions since 2008-09.
The achievement gap between white and minority children has narrowed considerably in recent decades, as black and Hispanic students have posted strong gains on math and reading tests, according to a new report out Thursday.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “the nation’s report card,” found that minority students at all ages tested – 9, 13 and 17 years old – have made substantial progress on standardized tests since the early 1970s.
Black and Hispanic students made up a third to half of the gulf that had separated their average reading scores from the average scores of white students, the report found. The progress was nearly as good in math.
Proficiency at specific skills also grew over the decades. In math, for instance, 13-year-olds of all races tested in 2012 were far more likely than their counterparts from the 1970s to be proficient at interpreting data from a table and factoring numbers. In reading, 9-year-olds were more adept at making inferences from nonfiction texts and grasping figures of speech.
considers that possibility in his recent column. About one in four bartenders has some kind of degree. Orszag draws heavily on this paper by Beaudry and Green and Sand, which postulates falling returns to skill. It’s one of the more interesting pieces written in the last year, but note their model relies heavily on a stock/flow distinction. They consider a world where most of the IT infrastructure already has been built, and so skilled labor has not so much more to do at the margin. This stands in noted contrast to the common belief — which I share — that “IT-souped up smart machines” still have a long way to go and are not a mature technology. You can’t hold that view and also buy into the Beaudry and Green and Sand story, unless you think we have suddenly jumped to a new margin where machines build machines, with little help from humans.
Rather than accepting “falling returns to skill,” I would sooner say that education doesn’t measure true skill as well as it used to.
We present a real-time system including a 3D character that can converse, capture, analyze and interpret subtle and multidimensional human nonverbal behaviors for possible applications such as job interviews, public speaking, or even automated speech therapy. The system works in a personal computer and senses nonverbal data from video (i.e., facial expressions) and audio (i.e., speech recognition and prosody analysis) using a standard webcam. We contextualized the development and evaluation of our system as a training scenario for job interviews. Using user-centered design and iterations, we determine how the nonverbal data could be presented to the user in an intuitive and educational manner. We tested efficacy of the system in the context of job interviews with 90 MIT undergraduate students. Our results suggest that the participants who used our system to improve their interview skills were perceived to be better candidates by human judges. Participants reported that the most useful feature was being given feedback on their speaking rate, and overall they reported strong agreement that they would consider using this system again for self-reflection.
On test day for my Behavioral Ecology class at UCLA, I walked into the classroom bearing an impossibly difficult exam. Rather than being neatly arranged in alternate rows with pen or pencil in hand, my students sat in one tight group, with notes and books and laptops open and available. They were poised to share each other’s thoughts and to copy the best answers. As I distributed the tests, the students began to talk and write. All of this would normally be called cheating. But it was completely okay by me.
Who in their right mind would condone and encourage cheating among UCLA juniors and seniors? Perhaps someone with the idea that concepts in animal behavior can be taught by making their students live those concepts.
Animals and their behavior have been my passions since my Kentucky boyhood, and I strive to nurture this love for nature in my students. Who isn’t amazed and entertained by videos of crafty animals, like Betty the tool-making crow, bending wires into hooks to retrieve baskets containing delicious mealworms? (And then hiding her rewards from a lummox of a mate who never works, but is all too good at purloining hard-won rewards of others?)
Much more on Visakan Veerasamy, here.
The end-run of the logic of the “free market model” of education–and its application to schools–is simple: the repudiation of schools as we have come to know them; the abandonment of democratic principles on which they are based; and the service of a technocratic vision of education as matrix of individual relationships with private providers. In recent years, this vision takes the form of crude assertions that online learning platforms might not only extend or enrich the learning that takes place in schools, but might obviate the need for the “school” as we know it.
This claim is supported by politicians, pundits, and policy wonks–the vast majority of whom would make vitally different decisions for their own children’s education, than they might for yours or mine. It’s obvious to educators that we should embrace the opportunities provided by digital tools, services, and platforms to supplement and to inform the learning that takes place in a school, but we should beware the growing and disturbing focus on the replacement of the school by those technologies.
We have known for many decades in schools that differentiation, individuation, and responsiveness to student voice and choice are hallmarks of effective schools’ support of each learner in a school community. Now, however, the discussion of vaguely related imperatives is dressed in the language of “personalization” of products, content, and services, as though this represents a new-found metaphor for redefining education as we know it. We lay faith–lazily, or purposefully, and even in the most sophisticated and insightful writing about mutations in 21st century capitalism–in the promises of private corporations that mimic this language, extolling selfless commitments to service our individual needs.
Ithaca, N.Y. is a relatively small college town, but one thing that might make up for its size is its brain power. That’s because Ithaca tops a new list from Lumosity that ranks U.S. cities by their raw cognitive performance.
San Francisco-based Lumosity creates brain-training exercises and has raisedmore than $70 million in funding to date from Discovery Communications, Menlo Ventures, and others. Since it launched back in 2007, Lumosity claims to have amassed the world’s largest dataset of human cognitive performance, with data and insights collected from more than 40 million people.
Ruth Spencer, Nadja Popovich and Greg Chen:
It’s been a month since graduation season has come and gone, and while many college grads have entered the working world, financial challenges have left many back where they started: with Mom and Dad. We asked recent grads (so-called boomerang kids) and later, parents about life inside their respective nests. Here are their dispatches from home
Conventional wisdom suggests that English is becoming “the world’s second language,” a lingua franca that many forward–looking organizations are adopting it as a working language. Optimists about the spread of English as a global second language suggest it will enable collaboration and ease problem solving without threatening the survival of mother tongues. Pointing to hundreds of thousands of Chinese children who learn English by shouting phrases back at teachers, the American entrepreneur Jay Walker offers the idea that English will be a language of economic opportunity for most speakers: they’ll work and think in their mother tongue, but English will allow them to communicate, share, and transact.
Cultural-preservation organizations like UNESCO aren’t as confident of this vision. They warn that English may crowd out less widely spoken languages as it spreads around the world through television, music, and film. But something more subtle and complicated appears to be going on. While English may be emerging as a bridge language, a wave of media is being produced in other languages, in newspapers, on television, and on the Internet. As technologies make it easier for people to communicate to broad and narrow audiences in their native languages, we’re discovering that linguistic difference is surprisingly persistent.
The humanities and social sciences “enable us to participate in a global economy that requires understanding of diverse cultures and sensitivity to different perspectives.”
In each of these sentences, and many others that might be instanced, the key words — “framework,” “context,” “complex,” “meaningfully,” “understanding,” “diverse,” “sensitivity,” “perspectives” — are spectacularly empty; just where specificity is needed, sonorous abstraction blunts the edge of what is being asserted, rendering it unexceptionable (no one’s against understanding, complexity and meaningfulness) and without bite.
Then there are the recommendations.
“Increase NEH funding.” Fine idea, but only political efforts of a kind not mentioned here will do that trick. College teachers should “reach out” to their colleagues in K-12. Sure, let’s have a joint bake sale or a dance. “Embrace the chance to connect with the larger community.” What exactly does “connect with” mean and where does the “chance” reside? “Deepen knowledge of other cultures.” Add “deepen” to the list of words that say nothing. Develop “intercultural skills.” First tell me what they are and how they differ from mono-cultural skills. “Expand the pool of qualified teachers.” Wait a moment while I wave my magic wand. “Promote Language Learning.” Yes, that’s something we could and should do, but it will take money, and money has systematically been withdrawn from public higher education for decades.
The report alludes to this unhappy fact, but doesn’t take it up. Nor does it take up the converging factors that accelerate the rush to vocationalism and short-term payoffs — the mania for online education, unsupportable student debt, rising costs in every area of a college’s operation, the Internet’s preference for chunked-up bits of information, the elimination or radical downsizing of French, Russian, German, religious studies, theater and other programs because they cannot be justified under zero-based budgeting assumptions.
Breaking news alert! Wages fell at the fastest rate ever recorded during the first quarter of this year, the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.
Hourly wages fell 3.8 percent in the first quarter, the biggest drop since the BLS began tracking compensation in 1947. Productivity rose half a percentage point. The result was that what economists call “labor unit costs” fell 4.3 percent.
In plain English, that means paychecks overall shrank, but work output grew. If you are a business owner, that is news worthy of a toast with a bottle of the finest Cristal champagne, which at $595 is more than the $518 that a median-wage worker earns in a week.
If you have not heard this news about plummeting wages, it is not surprising. Except for right-wing websites, and an item at the liberal Huffington Post, the June 5 announcement went unreported.
The networks and the major newspapers all have staffs of business reporters, yet they missed the third paragraph of the official government announcement that contained this important news.
The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdős is a beautifully written, beautifully illustrated kids’ biography of Paul Erdős, the fantastically prolific itinerant mathematician who published more papers than any other mathematician in history.
Boy is written by Deborah Heiligman, with illustrations by Leu Pham, and the pair really worked to weave numbers and mathematics through the text, with lively, fun illustrations of a young Erdős learning about negative numbers, becoming obsessed with prime numbers and leading his high-school chums on a mathematical tour of Budapest. They also go to great lengths to capture the upside and downside of Erdős’s legendary eccentricity — his inability to fend for himself and his helplessness when it came to everyday tasks like cooking and doing laundry; his amazing generosity and brilliance and empathy in his working and personal life.
Ultimately, this is a book that celebrates the idea of following your weird, wooing the muse of the odd, and playing to your strengths rather than agonizing over your weaknesses. It’s an inspiring and sweet tale of one of humanity’s greatest mathematicians, and a parable about the magic of passion and obsession.
Much more on Paul Erdős, here.
The Madison School District has the money to improve low-income and minority student achievement but needs to reorganize its central administration to put more resources in the classroom, according to a group of local and national education experts who conducted a district review.
“We’re recommending the system turn on its head,” said Robert Peterkin, the former director of Harvard University’s Urban Superintendents Program who led the review team.
New Madison schools superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, a graduate of the Harvard program, organized the team of experts as part of her transition. She plans to consult their recommendations before releasing next month a set of specific strategies and 2013-14 budget proposal.
According to the team’s analysis, students need to be at the top of the “power pyramid” rather than district administration, with the focused goal of turning out graduates ready to attend college or start a career.
Central office administrators need to spend more time in the classroom and cut down on new programs that contribute to what teachers call “initiative fatigue.”
Principals should have more input into hiring a more diverse staff. Teachers need more focused professional development. And all district employees need specific goals that can be measured and used to hold them accountable.
Students also need “demand parents” who take an active role, not only in school bake sales and sports, but in understanding the curriculum and educational goals for their students.
“Resources even in this environment can be brought to bear from existing dollars to your more focused set of goals and activities, rather than supporting proliferation of those activities,” Peterkin told the Madison School Board on Monday night.
Cheatham said the review team had not taken a deep enough look at district finances to conclude that funding is available, but based on her assessment of the budget so far, she said the conclusion was “fairly accurate.”
“The recommendations from the transition team warrant a deep look at the central office organization and our allocation of resources,” she said.
The “Transition Team” Report (3MB PDF) and Superintendent Cheathem’s “Entry Plan” summary.
Related:
Madison’s disastrous long-term reading results.
Deja Vu: A Focus on “Adult Employment” or the Impossibility of Governance Change in the Madison Schools.
Madison has long spent more per student than most districts. The most recent 2012-2013 budget, via a kind Donna Williams and Matthew DeFour email is $392,789,303 or $14,496.74 per student (27,095 students, including pre-k).
The United States is one of the world’s biggest spenders when it comes to education, but with much of the money flowing to the wealthiest students, the country is losing ground to other nations from pre-school through college, according to a report released on Tuesday on educational progress around the world.
The United States spends 7.3 percent of its gross domestic product on education from pre-kindergarten through the university level, according to the report, by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The rate, which encompasses both public and private spending, is the fifth highest in the world. But the results don’t match the spending.
America used to have one of the highest college completion rates for young adults in the world. It has now dropped to 14th place, behind countries including Korea, Russia, Ireland and Canada, according to the OECD report .
The United States also falls behind in early childhood education. Just half of 3-year-olds were enrolled in preschool in 2011 compared with more than 90 percent in nations such as France, Italy and Norway, according to the report.
Watch out Ivy League, there’s a new generation of elite universities on the rise around the globe, according to a new “100 Under 50” report from Times Higher Education magazine.
The report, published on Wednesday, ranks the best young universities – defined as those founded no more than 50 years ago – in categories including research prowess, student-to-faculty ratio and international reputation.
South Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology came out on top. Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale of Lausanne ranked second, followed by another rising Asian star, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
Britain had 18 institutions in the top 100, more than any other nation. Other countries with strong showings included France, Spain and Taiwan.
Eight American institutions made the list – all of them public universities. Two University of California campuses, Irvine and Santa Cruz, cracked the top 15, as did the University of Texas at Dallas. Rounding out the list of U.S. upstarts: The University of Illinois at Chicago, George Mason University, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the University of Texas at San Antonio.
To become a citizen of the United States, naturalizing immigrants must take a test. Many native-born Americans would fail this test. Indeed, most of us have never really thought about what it means to be a citizen. One radical idea from the immigration debate is the repeal of birthright citizenship–guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment–to prevent so-called anchor babies. Odious and constitutionally dubious as this proposal may be, it does prompt a thought experiment: What if citizenship were not, in fact, guaranteed by birth? What if everyone had to earn it upon turning 18, and renew it every 10 years, by taking an exam? What might that exam look like?
The U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is a sprawling network of roughly 210,000 civilian and military employees across seventeen agencies as well as approximately 30,000 private contractors. With a budget of $75 billion between the national and military intelligence programs, the IC is authorized to carry out a range of activities and programs, including monitoring suspected nuclear weapons programs, killing suspected terrorists, and analyzing ongoing events for everyone from President Obama to soldiers deployed in Afghanistan.
In an effort to counter some myths and misperceptions, create positive associations, and recruit future employees, eleven of the seventeen agencies of the IC have web pages dedicated to “kids,” which are equal parts informative, entertaining, creepy, and borderline inappropriate. (Beware that some of these pages have broken links, depriving American children fascinated by the National-Geospatial Intelligence Agency.)
Most U.S. government agencies also have websites for children, which are intended to provide useful information in an entertaining format. For example, the Consumer Products Safety Commission features a self-described “goatboy!” named Kidd Safety: “I’m eleven years old and live in Goatlahoma. Don’t try to find it on a map. It is in the middle of nowheresville.” Kidd Safety emphasizes wearing safety gear during playtime, and gives tips on ways to make your home less dangerous. A related “Hey Kids!” page includes this daunting challenge for young children: “Find out how to help save lives and protect yourself and your family.”
A Democratic poll testing gubernatorial candidates asks respondents their opinions about Madison School Board member Mary Burke, a complaint with state regulators says.
In one of the strongest signs yet that Madison School Board member Mary Burke is considering a run against Gov. Scott Walker in November 2014, a polling firm is apparently testing her favorability rating among potential voters.
The poll came to light Tuesday after the Republican Party of Wisconsin filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Board regarding a telephone poll that included questions about the former Trek Bicycle executive and Commerce Secretary under Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle.
The Associated Press also reported Tuesday that online records show that on June 12, the day before the poll was conducted, six Internet domain names that point toward a Burke candidacy were registered anonymously, including: Burkeforwisconsin.org, Burkeforwisconsin.com, Maryburke.org, Burkeforgovernor.com, and Burkeforgovernor.org.
Burke did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
The GOP complaint, filed against Burke and the state Democratic Party, alleges a telephone pollster asked questions about Burke and whether certain statements would influence the respondent’s vote.
The PDF complaint (1.2MB).
Not much, if anything has changed within our public schools over the past year that Mary has been on the Board. There is plenty to do, starting with the District’s long-term, disastrous reading scores.
Beijing: What should have been a hushed scene of 800 Chinese students sitting their university entrance exams erupted into siege warfare after invigilators tried to stop them cheating.
The relatively small city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province has always performed suspiciously well in China’s tough ”gaokao” exams, winning a disproportionate number of places at the country’s elite universities.
We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.
Last year, the city was cautioned by the province’s education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject.
This year, a pilot scheme was introduced to enforce the rules.
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When students at the No.3 high school in Zhongxiang arrived to sit their exams this month, they were dismayed to find that they would be supervised by 54 randomly selected external invigilators.
The invigilators used metal detectors to relieve students of mobile phones and secret transmitters, some of them designed to look like pencil erasers.
A team of female invigilators was on hand to intimately search female examinees, the Southern Weekend newspaper reported.
Students attending publicly funded, privately run charter schools posted slightly higher learning gains overall in reading than their peers in traditional public schools and about the same gains in math, but the results varied drastically by state, according to one of the most comprehensive studies of U.S. charter schools.
The study [PDF], published Tuesday by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, found that charter students in Rhode Island, for example, gained the equivalent of an additional 86 days of reading comprehension and 108 days of math comprehension annually compared with peers in traditional public schools. In Nevada, however, charter students had 115 fewer days of learning in reading and 137 fewer in math annually, the study found.
Overall, the new study found that charter students gained an additional eight days of reading, while the math gains were identical. Low-income Hispanic and African-American students did much better in charters than their peers in the traditional school option, while white children did worse in charters.
The researchers and some charter proponents said the results suggest some states need to be more particular about which groups they award charters, and more aggressive about shutting low-performers.
Center for Research on Education Outcomes Press Release:
According to the 26-state study:
- Students in poverty, black students, and those who are English language learners (ELL) gain significantly more days of learning each year in both reading and math compared to their traditional public school peers. Performance differences between charter school students and their traditional public school peers were especially strong among black and Hispanic students in poverty and Hispanic students who are ELL in both reading and math.
- Charter school enrollment has grown among students who are in poverty, black students, and Hispanic students.
- The 11 new states added marginally to the mathematics gains seen since the 2009 study, but more so to gains in reading.
More from Stephanie Simon.
Related:One year in, Oconomowoc High School staff, students adjusting to change and May, 2012: Budget Cuts: We Won’t Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That’s Okay.
A majority of Madison school board members rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School in 2012.
Madison’s long term, disastrous reading scores.
University of Michigan has adopted its lowest in-state tuition increase in three decades — and it’s doing so in part by putting an additional cost burden on out-of-state students.
During a public meeting Thursday afternoon, the school’s eight-member governing board in a 6-2 vote approved a 1.1 percent increase for underclassmen residents, bringing the in-state rate to $13,142, and a 3.2 percent increase for out-of-staters, bringing the non-resident rate to $40,392 for freshmen and sophomores.
“The people of Michigan have made an investment in the university over a long period of time and I think that creates an equity that makes it fairer to do what we can to make in-state tuition go up at a slower rate than out-of-state,” U-M regent Larry Dietch said in an interview. “And the data would indicate, at least at this point, that there is elasticity in terms of the demand from out-of-state and the ability of people to pay.”
In his revealing book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” Charles Murray spends hundreds of pages using statistics to illustrate the rising inequality that is increasingly putting the white working class on the path toward generational poverty.
Murray concludes by suggesting that the “new upper class” — which increasingly is cloistered in pockets of rich, highly educated super-neighborhoods — move into the communities of “regular” people.
“Age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well lived requires engagement with those around us,” writes Murray, who himself lives in what he describes as an increasingly troubled “blue-collar and agricultural region of Maryland.”
He closes: “A civic Great Awakening among the new upper class can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more rewarding — and more fun — to lead a textured life, and be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives.”
Murray’s invocation sprung to mind a few weeks ago as I was reading stay-at-home dad Andy Hinds’ “Why I Want to Choose the ‘Disadvantaged’ Local School (and Why I Might Not)” on The New York Times’ “Motherlode” blog.
Hinds describes the gut-wrenching choice he has to make about whether to put his “mixed-race, socioeconomically advantaged, English-proficient twin girls” into the good school where his neighbors’ kids go or into the troubled school only a five-minute walk from his home. His idealism makes him wonder if he and a group of caring, motivated parents could change a school with 100% poverty and a predominantly Hispanic student body. Ultimately, such participation could make a difference for the whole community.
It’s been an excellent state budget season for lousy voucher schools.
Of course, it’s been an excellent budget season for all private schools that want public financial support — statewide expansion of vouchers, tax deductions for those who pay tuition to elementary and high schools, big jumps in state payments for each voucher student a year from now, some last-minute helpful surprises.
But the lousy operators must be feeling especially good. Why? Because nothing was done to drive them to improve or stop taking state money. Come this fall, a cluster of low performing, poorly run voucher schools will still enroll thousands of kids and take millions of dollars in state money.
Even the most adamant voucher supporters agree that there are schools in Milwaukee that don’t merit public support. There is a large range of quality among the 110+ schools that take voucher students. Some are excellent, many are of average quality. And some really stand out when it comes to being bad.
Somehow, a solution that promotes quality and responsible use of public money seems off the table in Wisconsin.
I regard myself as one of the few people on Earth who has no pro or con position on vouchers. A professional obligation — I’m neutral. But I’ve followed the program closely for 15 years and visited something around 100 voucher schools. I’m not neutral when it comes to quality.
Do we apply the same governance standards to all publicly funded schools?
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has just issued the Heart of the Matter, a 61-page report (plus appendices) aimed at persuading Congress to spend more money on the humanities. This is one of the report’s immediate goals, phrased of course in the financial imperative, “Increase investment in research and discovery.” The report as a whole is presented as a response to a “bipartisan request from members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives” in 2010. The American Academy took up this request and appointed a 54-member commission to figure out what “actions” are needed to “maintain national excellence in humanities and social scientific scholarship.”
Let’s see. That works out to 1.1296 pages of report per commissioner. Many of the commissioners also appear in a 7-minute accompanying video, which begins with the actor (and commissioner) John Lithgow explaining that the humanities are the “beautiful flower” at the end of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math.) With a piano softly playing Christian Sinding’s Rustles of Spring in the background and a camera exploring the petals of a yellow gerbera, Lithgow continues, “Without the blossom, the stem is completely useless.” Cut to George Lucas, Rustling Spring pianissimo: “The sciences are the how and the humanities are thewhy.” Cut to the Milky Way with Lucas’s voiceover, segueing to architect Billie Tsien, “The measurable is what we know and the immeasurable is what the heart searches for.”
Roughly three-quarters of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little to no emergency savings, according to a survey released by Bankrate.com Monday.
Fewer than one in four Americans have enough money in their savings account to cover at least six months of expenses, enough to help cushion the blow of a job loss, medical emergency or some other unexpected event, according to the survey of 1,000 adults. Meanwhile, 50% of those surveyed have less than a three-month cushion and 27% had no savings at all.
America’s K-12 schools are being hollowed out, dismantled and converted to private management. It’s the ultimate outsourcing of our children’s futures.
In Philadelphia, one of America’s largest school districts, layoff notices were recently delivered to 3,859 teachers, aides, administrators and other staff. In Chicago, 850 teachers and staff are being let go. Nationwide, a staggering 335,100 teachers and other local public school jobs have been lost from June 2009 to May 2013, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
It’s easy to blame those layoffs on the sour economy, but that’s only part of the story. The education “reform” movement, a code for privatizing schools, has been using the economic crisis to push its agenda. After the public schools have their budgets and staff cut, private management companies offer to come in and save the day.
The Supreme Court remanded the case to the Fifth Circuit, which had earlier ruled in the University’s favor, with instructions to give “strict scrutiny” to the admissions policy–that is, to investigate whether the (legitimate) educational goal of racial diversity could not be achieved by a race-neutral admissions process. The vote was 7-1. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the only one to uphold the Fifth Circuit’s decision. Justices Scalia and Thomas said that they would have gone further and voted to overturn the precedent on which U.T. relied, a case called Grutter v. Bollinger, decided in 2003. (Justice Kagan recused herself.)
Grutter concerned the admissions policy at the University of Michigan Law School. In an opinion by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the Court affirmed Justice Lewis Powell’s opinion for the Court in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in 1978.
Powell said that setting racial quotas (as done by the U.C. Davis School of Medicine, to which Allan Bakke, who was white, had applied) is unconstitutional, but that race may be counted as a “plus” factor in college and university admissions. Powell cited the “Harvard plan,” a statement of holistic application evaluation adopted by the admissions office at Harvard University, where I teach, as a constitutional model.
National Council On Teacher Quality: Teacher Prep Report, June, 2013 (PDF) and National Council On Teacher Quality: Teacher Prep Details, June, 2013 (PDF):
via a kind Wisconsin Reading Coalition email:
Earlier this week we provided a link to the teacher preparation report released by the National Council on Teacher Quality. We have pulled out the ratings for UW system schools in the areas of preparing teachers to teach early reading and struggling readers.
On the summary attachment, you can see which five schools scored zero stars for early reading, which 2 schools scored 1 star, which two schools scored 3 stars, and which school received the maximum 4 stars. You can also see which two schools scored 4 stars in the area of struggling readers, and which 10 schools received zero stars.
On the detail attachment, you can read the NCTQ comments on why each school received certain scores.
Much more on the recently released NCTQ teacher quality study, here.
Related: Teacher Training’s Low Grade.
A report released this week bears out what many educators have been predicting: Amid rising college tuition, increased global economic competition and a job market that disproportionately rewards graduates in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields, students are seeking degrees in what they and, indeed, many in our nation view as lucrative business and hard-science disciplines. The study is from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, on which I serve.
Some institutions have responded by cutting budgets in the arts and humanities and directing those funds elsewhere. That’s the wrong thing to do. The humanities — the study of languages, literature, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, comparative religion, ethics, social sciences — and the arts are vital to our future. We should be investing more funds, more time and more expertise, not less, into these endeavors.
What detractors of the “soft” subjects miss is that the arts and humanities provide an essential framework and context for understanding the wider world. Studying the humanities strengthens the ability to communicate and work with others. It allows students to develop broad intellectual and cultural understanding; it nurtures creativity and deepens participation in public discourse and modern democracy.
Each year, the Board of Directors performs a formal evaluation of the Superintendent’s performance. The evaluation is based upon goals adopted by the School Board in November 2012.
These evaluation criteria focus on five areas:
Hire, Develop and Strengthen Leaders: Teacher/Principal and Central Staff evaluations; Hire quality leadership to fill vacant positions; professional development
Raising expectations and improving academic performance and opportunities of all students: narrow achievement gaps, growth for English Language Learners; implementation of Common Core State Standards;
Building relationships with selected stakeholders to connect them to our schools: Family engagement, Labor Partners and community based organizations.
Governance Team Priorities and Areas of Continuing Emphasis: Develop a plan for BEX IV and EP&O levies; a framework and process for collective bargaining; bring professional growth and Evaluation system to scale; develop community outreach for the strategic plan; develop the Equitable Access Framework; develop student support strategies; expand the transparency of district decision-making
Core Competencies: Collaboration; Getting Results, Decision Quality and Problem Solving, Integrity, Accountability, and Fiscal Responsibility
The Superintendent was evaluated based upon the agreed on evaluation criteria. The Superintendent issued a report to the Board, which is attached, detailing performance during the last year.
The District retained Robin Boehler, of Mercer Island Group, to facilitate the evaluation process. Ms. Boehler interviewed each Director, as well as the key senior staff.
The evaluation ratings of Mr. Banda were evaluated using a numeric rating system. These are the same ratings used for classified employees in the District. The ratings were made using a five point rating system with a numeric rating of five as “Outstanding”; four is described as “Exceeds Expectations”, three is described as “Meets Expectations”, two is “Below Expectations” and one is “Unsatisfactory”.
I spent the past 7 weeks teaching middle school girls to build websites as part of an after school program, CodeEd.
We didn’t teach anything too fancy, just basic HTML. Our goal was to introduce girls to the wonderful world of programming and technology and dispell some common myths: programming isn’t scary or impossibly hard, and programming can be creative and expressive.
We took a project-based approach: the girls spent their time building a site on any topic their heart desired, which this semester, turned out to be music, fashion, cats and Sims FreePlay.
Here’s what surprised me:
1. helloworld.html BLOWS THEIR MIND (creating an html file with a silly sentence and then seeing it in their browser). I think the realization is twofold: “whoa the internet is actually just made by people writing text in files”, and “whoa, this is something that I can do”. One girl immediately exclaimed,”Oh I’m going to show my mom that. She won’t believe it.”
“If you have 10 students on vouchers in your school, are the test scores for those 10 going to be used for a report card when you’ve got 200 or 300 in your school?” Lancaster said.
The Legislature has yet to introduce a bill that would bring private voucher schools into the state’s public school accountability system, though the budget requires those schools to receive report cards a year after linking to the state’s student information system.
Walker said earlier this year he hoped to sign a bill with the details before the budget passed, which won’t happen. His office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said he expects legislators to make progress on a proposal this summer and pass a bill during the next fall or spring session.
Lancaster said many schools were concerned about paying $900 to sign up for the program, only to not make the top 25. Last week the Assembly addressed that concern with a budget amendment that ensures the registration fee would be reimbursed to schools that don’t make the cut.
Some schools in the rural and suburban parts of the diocese don’t expect to have large enough low-income student populations to make it into the top 25, Lancaster said.
Much more on vouchers, here.
A TOKYO schoolyard is an unlikely venue to find North Korea’s red star fluttering in the wind. Children inside the Tokyo Korean Middle and High School study textbooks in Korean beneath portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. When classes end, the girls shed their traditionaljeogori dresses for anonymous teenage clothes and blend back into the city.
This school and around 70 more like it in Japan are an unusual legacy of Japan’s difficult relationship with Korea. Large numbers of Koreans came or were brought to Japan during the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula between 1905 and 1945. At the end of the second world war, about 700,000 of them stayed on rather than return to their homeland, which was by then sliding into the Korean war that would split the country into two bitterly opposed states. They were stateless for 20 years until 1965 when Japan recognised South Korea, at which point Koreans in Japan could become South Korean. Those who didn’t became North Korean by default and went to North Korean schools. The schools are an accident of history, often more about continuing a connection to the homeland than about ideological indoctrination.
In the past few years, I’ve taught nonfiction writing to undergraduates and graduate students at Harvard, Yale, Bard, Pomona, Sarah Lawrence and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Each semester I hope, and fear, that I will have nothing to teach my students because they already know how to write. And each semester I discover, again, that they don’t.
They can assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax. They can meta-metastasize any thematic or ideological notion they happen upon. And they get good grades for doing just that. But as for writing clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions and the world around them — no.
That kind of writing — clear, direct, humane — and the reading on which it is based are the very root of the humanities, a set of disciplines that is ultimately an attempt to examine and comprehend the cultural, social and historical activity of our species through the medium of language.
The teaching of the humanities has fallen on hard times. So says a new report on the state of the humanities by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and so says the experience of nearly everyone who teaches at a college or university. Undergraduates will tell you that they’re under pressure — from their parents, from the burden of debt they incur, from society at large — to choose majors they believe will lead as directly as possible to good jobs. Too often, that means skipping the humanities.
The senior year of high school, a time when students sometimes seem more focused on social pursuits than academics, may soon be a thing of the past for some Texas students.
Dallas Independent School District, the state’s second largest, is developing a voluntary three-year high school diploma plan that is likely to start in the 2014-15 school year and would funnel cost savings to finance prekindergarten.
A bill passed in the recently concluded legislative session, sponsored by two Dallas Democrats, Representative Eric Johnson and Senator Royce West, will allow the district to use savings that occur when students in the new plan graduate early. Under current Texas law, districts get state funding on a per-pupil basis, and the Dallas I.S.D. would have lost state aid for a senior year for students who graduated early.
“It’s a way to start thinking about the system differently,” said Mike Morath, the Dallas district trustee who promoted the three-year concept. “Do we view education as schools and buildings and first grade and second grade and third grade? Or do we view education as a way to enrich the lives of young people, and do we start taking these institutional blinders off and thinking about it more creatively?”
In my contribution to the AEI-coordinated book A Roadmap for Education Reform, I outlined how Recovery School Districts can accelerate the three primary strategies of Relinquishment: (1) letting educators operate schools (2) giving families choice amongst these schools and (3) promoting sound government regulation over performance and equity.
Writing this chapter got me thinking: What if we were to create a roadmap not for immediate implementation but to guide us over the next couple of decades? This train of thought was further spurred on by a conversation I had with Seth Andrew, founder of Democracy Prep – where Seth told me that he’s sold on Relinquishment but that we need more arrows in our quiver if we want to significantly increase student achievement. I, of course, agreed.
So, to answer Seth’s question, what are the other arrows? Or, to put it another way, if in thirty years the United States develops an improved educational system, how will this have occurred?
My best guess: It will because of the following Four Arrows.
The perk was designed to make government jobs more appealing to those who might earn more in the private sector. But a debate is brewing about whether it’s due for the chopping block.
Congress may let student loan interest rates double July 1, but some federal workers and congressional staff likely are protected from the impact by a taxpayer-funded benefit that provided more than $20 million last year for them to pay down their college debts.
Congress created the benefit more than 10 years ago to make government jobs more appealing to job candidates who could get higher-paying jobs in the private sector. Meanwhile, a 2007 law that cut student loan interest rates in half will expire July 1, and Congress has been unable to reach a deal to extend it.
A review of congressional spending records by USA TODAY and the non-profit Sunlight Foundation, a watchdog group, showed that the House of Representatives spent almost $15 million last year to pay down staffers’ student loans, while the Senate spent almost $6 million. Members of Congress are not eligible for the program.
Federal agencies — which provide more detailed information — spent about $72 million in 2011, the last year for which data are available, to pay down student loans for 10,134 federal workers.
It’s time to retire the blackboards and go back to the town squares.
Over the last 30 years, the United States has increased education funding dramatically: from around $11 billion to $77 billion (source: Dept. of Education) but it seems like we’re no closer to figuring out a solution to bettering the quality of educational.
Nothing about education is straight-forward, even its origins. Education “began either millions of years ago or at the end of 1770” says Dieter Lenzen (source: Wikipedia) and yet we’re still asking some fundamental questions about how to best approach it: how do you measure it? How do you scale it? Is it a right? Is it a privilege? How do people learn best?
The education field hasn’t changed much since its supposed origins in 1770, but technology has finally begun to shine its spotlight on those who seek a learning experience. The result has been a bloom of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), online learning tools, and so forth. But, I’m not sure if those hold the answer.
The list of administrators who are receiving a non-extension of contract is extensive due to the decision to move from rolling two-year contracts to straight two-year contracts and the desire to have approximately half of the administrators on odd-year contracts and half on even-year contracts. Other than the normal one-year contracted administrators, volunteers were solicited from the group of administrators who would have normally received a one-year contract extension to accept a non- extension this year and then accept a two-year contract for 2014-16. After the volunteers were accounted for, a lottery was held.
There is a group of 33 administrators in their first two years of employment with the district who are on one-year contracts. These contracts were approved in January 2013 and are not reflected on the attached lists (REVISED Appendix 000-12-5).
Housewife Ahn Jee Eun began looking for a job to supplement her husband’s income after the cost of sending their twin 3-year-old daughters to preschool pushed the family’s bank account into the red. “My husband and I are spending about half of our income on education,” says Ahn, who pays more than 1.7 million won ($1,500) a month on tuition. Ahn says she’d rather spend less on groceries than pull her girls out of their exclusive kindergarten, where the other kids are from wealthy families and the mothers know which schools and tutors are the best.
In the latest quarter, private consumption in South Korea fell the most since the 2009 global recession. Heavy spending on schools and tutors had an impact. “The cost of education is the biggest contributor to the decline in household spending after household debt,” says Lee Ji Sun, an economist at the LG Economic Research Institute. “Worse, some are taking out new loans to pay for schooling.”
In mid-June, President Park Geun Hye set up a task force to scale back a common practice in Korean high schools: teaching material not required by national curriculum standards and thus forcing one high school student in five to seek help from private tutors. The Ministry of Education said on June 14 that out of 17,158 private schools or tutors investigated by regulators over the past three months, almost 1,900 had broken some or all of the rules regulating the fees parents pay for extra schooling, as well as the 10 p.m. curfew after which private schools and tutors cannot teach students.
Los Angeles’ school system, the second largest in the United States, is ordering iPads for all its students, handing Apple a major success in its quest to make the tablet computer a replacement for textbooks.
The Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday approved the purchase of $30 million worth of iPads as the first part of a multi-year commitment. It found that the iPad was the least expensive option that met its specifications.
The initial order is for more than 31,000 iPads, Apple said. The Los Angeles Unified School District has more than 640,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
The textbooks will be delivered through an application from Pearson, a major publisher, rather than through Apple’s own iBooks. Apple and its publisher partners launched a suite of textbooks for iBooks in early 2012.
According to biographer Walter Isaacson, changing the textbook market was a pet project of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, even in the last year of his life. At a dinner in early 2011, Jobs told News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch that paper textbooks could be made obsolete by the iPad. Jobs wanted to circumvent the state certification process for textbook sales by having Apple release textbooks for free on the tablet computer.
American Enterprise Institute & Wisconsin Policy Research Institute:
For Milwaukee schools to experience widespread improvement, fundamental changes must be made from top to bottom, Hess and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj write in “Roadmap for Education Reform in Wisconsin,” one of the project’s essays.
The eight other essays focus on:
- New schools and innovative delivery
- Rigorous quality control measures
- Opportunities for creating a recovery school district
- A comprehensive approach to talent management
- Human capital strategy
- Efficient management of financial capital
- Robust research and development efforts
- Effective governance and central management
Among the findings: Schools must be laboratories of innovation, not implementers of rigid rules and regulations; and they must do a better job of empowering their teachers to maximize their impact on students.
One reason decades of MPS “reform” have fallen short is that underlying systems, regulations, policies and practices have been difficult to eliminate or change – until now. At the end of June, for the first time in almost 50 years, the Milwaukee Public Schools will no longer be subject to collectively bargained union contracts. New powers given to the MPS school board, the approved statewide No Child Left Behind Waiver, and the significant market-share of non-traditional options puts Milwaukee in a unique position to enact positive change.
“Education leaders in city schools – traditional as well as choice and charter schools – have an opportunity here,” said Lightbourn. “But the ultimate power shaping the condition of Milwaukee schools is in the hands of the public that needs to hear a more persuasive case for both systemic and very specific change. This volume of research can help accomplish that.”
Read individual Pathway chapters here:
More, from Erin Richards: MPS needs more non-union charter schools, other reforms, report says
Research universities create mountains of data, and more and more, that data is tethered to a place in the world. The world is, after all, spatial–and information is not an island.
The technology and field behind that spatial data are called Geographical Information Sciences (GIS). The University of Minnesota has embarked on a visionary endeavor, called U-Spatial, to develop a network to support spatial research across the University, in fields ranging from nursing to watershed restoration. By using expert consultants and providing training and support in spatial research, U-Spatial is making research more meaningful and usable to researchers and society. It’s also reducing redundancy in support for spatial science research.
A leader in GIS
For more than 50 years, the University of Minnesota has been a national and international leader in spatial research. The U helped create one of the first geographic information systems in the 1960s, and offered the first professional degree program in GIS in the United States. As the world makes the “spatial turn,” as some have called the GIS revolution, the U is the place to be.
More than Google Maps
GIS is growing, and it will play an ever-increasing role in the future. If you’ve used Google Maps, you’ve used an element of GIS, but it is much more than this. Society uses spatial data, for example, in responding to disease outbreaks or climate change, and in resource management, transportation, and more. The U.S. Department of Labor identifies spatial technology alongside nanotechnology and biotechnology as high growth industries in the 21st century.
The Mental Health Task Force completed its work in May 2013, culminating in the development of a comprehensive vision and strategic roadmap entitled, The Plan for a School and Community Integrated Model for Children’s Mental Health in Madison. This plan embodies the collective vision and tireless work of hundred of individuals representing families, children and youth, policymakers, advocates and key systems including mental health, education, health, child welfare, violence prevention and juvenile justice. These groups recognize and support the need to prioritize the social emotional well-being of our children and ensure that all students have access to the mental health services they need to support the achievement of their full potential as healthy and contributing community members. This Plan is presented to the Board with the resounding support of the Task Force and offered as a springboard for moving forward the recommendations that have been created with a high level of collective energy, engagement and commitment.
These three expert pedagogical experimenters,
Maria Montessori, Italian school teacher and founder of the teaching method by the same name,
Sugata Mitra, creator of the esteemed “Hole in the Wall” experiment and winner of the 2013 Ted Prize, and
Paul Anderson, a high school biology teacher, 2011 Montana Teacher of the Year, and creator of over 300 biology videos on Youtube, all speak of a similar insight about learning:
The need for exploratory learning environments, where students can tinker, investigate and discover central concepts for themselves.
Maria Montessori, spoke of the “Prepared Environment” that allows a child to discover concepts like reading, writing, colors and numbers. Her Sandpaper Letters are a wonderful example: each letter is cut from sandpaper and pasted on a smooth card. The tactile difference between the letter and the surrounding card acts as a natural writing guide for a kid. Kids are able to ‘discover’ the motion of writing on their own just by tracing the sandpapered letter with their finger.
Sugata Mitra’s Hole-in-the-wall is another example. Mitra setup computers in public places in impoverished neighborhoods in India and South Africa. Within weeks, children who had never touched a computer before were able to learn basic computer skills just by exploring the machine amongst themselves. No formal lessons required. Further, discovery and exploration is fun, so kids were self-motivated and dedicated to learning.
The federal government has begun investigating a complaint that Durham Public Schools suspends black and disabled students at disproportionately high rates, a group that filed the complaint said Thursday.
Advocates for Children’s Services, a project of Legal Aid of North Carolina, and the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the Civil Rights Project of UCLA filed the complaint against DPS in April with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.
In the 2009-2010 school year, 14.1 percent of black students were suspended while 3.3 percent of white students were; 17 percent of disabled students were suspended while 8.4 percent of non-disabled students were, according to the complaint.
It describes the experiences of two students identified only as “N.B.” and “T.H.” Both are black and both spent years in DPS; both were suspended from school repeatedly.
“N.B.,” a 17-year-old student diagnosed with several mental health issues, wasn’t evaluated for her eligibility for special education and related services by DPS until she was well into high school. “T.H.” has been diagnosed with behavioral disabilities; instead of addressing those issues which the complaint says contributed to his falling behind in school, “(his school) responded punitively with out-of-school suspension.”
One of the downsides of raising questions about the classroom effectiveness of new technologies is when a school district buys tablets and laptops, journalists call to ask for my view of the purchases.
That happened yesterday when the Board of Education for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)-the second largest school system in the nation-approved a $30 million contract with Apple Inc. to buy iPads for every student in 47 schools in the first phase of a district-wide plan to have 655,000 students equipped with tablets. Funds for these iPads come from two bond referenda aimed at construction and maintenance of facilities in LAUSD.
Called The Common Core Technology Project, each iPad costs the district $678, higher than the price of an iPad bought in an Apple store, but it comes with a case (no keyboard, however) and an array of pre-loaded software aimed at preparing students for the impending Common Core standards and the state online testing system. The Board of Education and Superintendent John Deasy want each student to have access to an iPad. With mostly Latino and poor students in LAUSD, the eventual cost of this contract with Apple Inc. could run over $400 million.
Djibouti is one of the poorest countries in the world, where roughly 74 percent live below the poverty line and 42.2 percent suffer from extreme poverty. The country also has some of the lowest enrollment (39 percent) and illiteracy rates (70 percent) in the world, with women comprising 85 percent of the illiterate population. Although some encouraging progress had been achieved under Projet d’Amélioration d’Accès aux Écoles (PAAE I), Djibouti’s education system continued to face serious challenges that called into question the country’s ability to achieve the education-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. Despite the government’s effort to expand access, demand still outpaced supply, and the quality of education continued to face persistent issues, such as a shortage of qualified teachers, outdated pedagogic modules, insufficient numbers of textbooks, high repetition and dropout rates, and overcrowded classrooms. Finally, in spite of the substantial government budget allocation to the education sector (6.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2004), there was little financial margin to improve education quality.
Solution
The objectives of the Second School Access and Improvement Projectawere increasing access to basic education equitably, improving the quality of education and increasing the efficiency of the education system, which were integral parts of the Government of Djibouti’s master plan. The project was divided into three main components with the following objectives: 1) increase student enrollment and retention with a special focus on girls and children with special needs, and provide adequate facilities for them to complete primary education; 2) improve the quality of education service provision so that it would be conducive to quality learning and teaching, and help reduce repetition and dropout rates; and 3) improve the management of the education system for a more efficient utilization of sector resources.
President Barack Obama set a goal early in his first term for the U.S. to turn out more college graduates than any other nation, but there hasn’t been much progress as most states have stumbled in their attempts to improve.
Montana, however, stands apart.
By investing in junior colleges, the Treasure State boasts a 6 percent rise in adult graduation rates over a span where the rest of the country showed an increase of less than 1 percent, according to census data.
Montana, and the nation, still has a long way to go to accomplish the president’s objective by his 2020 deadline. It would take roughly a 50 percent increase in graduation rates to hit Obama’s target. Meanwhile, the percentage of degree-holders has decreased in 15 states since the president’s 2009 announcement, and other states have seen only marginal bumps.
What’s the point of the humanities? Of studying philosophy, history, literature and “soft” sciences like psychology and poly sci? The Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, consisting of academic, corporate, political and entertainment big shots, tries to answer this question in a big new report to Congress. The report is intended to counter plunging enrollment in and support for the humanities, which are increasingly viewed as “luxuries that employment-minded students can ill afford,” as The New York Times put it.
Titled “The Heart of the Matter,” the report states: “As we strive to create a more civil public discourse, a more adaptable and creative workforce, and a more secure nation, the humanities and social sciences are the heart of the matter, the keeper of the republic–a source of national memory and civic vigor, cultural understanding and communication, individual fulfillment and the ideals we hold in common. They are critical to a democratic society and they require our support.”
I find this a bit grandiose, and obscure. I have my own humble defense of the humanities, which I came up with a couple of years ago, when I started teaching a new course required for all freshmen at Stevens Institute of Technology. The syllabus includes Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Shakespeare, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, William James, Freud, Keynes, Eliot–you know, Greatest Hits of Western Civilization.
