Elaine Weiss:

As many of us have long suspected, the impacts of popular market-oriented reforms are not as positive as their proponents would have us believe. Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and then-CEO and now-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who ran the school systems in New York, Washington, DC and Chicago, respectively, along with the mayors who controlled the school systems they led, all exaggerated their successes. In fact, the report I recently co-authored as National Coordinator of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, “Market-Oriented Reforms’ Rhetoric Trumps Reality,” discovers that using student test scores to make high-stakes decisions did little good and more than a little harm.
We found that across all three cities, student NAEP test scores rose less than they did in comparable high-poverty urban districts. In Chicago, reading scores, already below average, fell further. New York City students achieved the second-lowest average test score growth across fourth and eighth grade reading and math of the ten districts studied, beating only Cleveland. And Washington, DC students, who had been gaining ground in both subjects, saw that growth stop or even begin to fall. Moreover, what small gains did accrue went heavily to white and higher-income students, so many achievement gaps grew rather than narrowed. Closing schools neither helped students nor saved money, and drove teacher turnover, not teacher quality.

Barry Garelick, via a kind email

The tendency to interpret the standards along the ideological lines of the reform movement can be seen most readily in how the Standards for Mathematical Practice are interpreted. The SMP themselves are sensible and few mathematicians or teachers would disagree with their principles. Their interpretation and implementation is another matter, however.

Standards for Mathematical Practice: The Cheshire Cat’s Grin.
Standards for Mathematical Practice: Cheshire Cat’s Grin, Part Two
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Standards for Mathematical Practice: Cheshire Cat’s Grin, Part Three

Peter Sacks:

In my 1996 book Generation X Goes to College, I predicted that virtually anyone with a computer and a modem would have access to the storehouse of human knowledge. As a result, higher education as we know would become an anachronism, if not obsolete. The university’s status would diminish because it would lose its competitive advantage in disseminating information.
The recent emergence of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), however, raises obvious questions. Are these new teaching methods as effective, in terms of student performance, as real-life classrooms? Can these new technologies bring down higher education costs? Former Princeton president William G. Bowen takes on these questions and others in his new book Higher-Ed in the Digital Age. Once a skeptic, Bowen now concludes that online learning programs will reduce the cost of higher education without harming student learning outcomes.
His conversion is inspired by the findings of ITHACA, a non-profit organization that conducted “the most rigorous assessment to date” on the economics of online learning technology. That study demonstrated that student learning outcomes, as measured by standardized tests, are no worse in online courses than in traditional classes. Not better, just not worse. Though these results might sound unimpressive, Bowen asserts that they are “very important” because they disprove the common prediction that online education will harm students.

Alan Borsuk:

Think of all the different ways you can say the word interesting. Different inflections carry different messages. Different accents change what letters are sounded or the number of syllables and can hint at your background. Probe the word and it can become really interesting – and educational.
Here’s another thing that’s interesting, educational and, I would add, a special jewel in Milwaukee education: The linguistics class at the Milwaukee School of Languages taught by Suzanne Loosen.
If I had taken this class when I was in high school, I would remember it to this day, 45 years later. Which got me thinking about two questions:
What makes a high school class especially memorable and valuable? What are we doing to encourage, support and respect classes such as this one and teachers such as Loosen?
A few things are special about Loosen’s class:
First, the course itself. Linguistics – “the scientific study of language,” as Loosen teaches her students – is normally a college-level subject. Best as Loosen knows, the course, an elective for 10th through 12th-grade students, is the only high school class in the nation devoted entirely to the subject, although many teachers include linguistics as part of broader courses.
Second, the enterprising aspects of creating the course. There are pluses to the increasingly standardized, regulated and monitored world of education. But there are minuses, like not seeing very often what Loosen offers: the creativity and zest of teaching a beloved subject that is a bit off the conventional path.

Grant Wiggins:

The title of this post refers to the title of an article I wrote twenty years ago: The Immorality of Test Security. It is basically immoral to hold people accountable for improved results on tests that are so secure that teachers aren’t even allowed, in some cases, to see them. And as more states back off releasing tests and allowing teachers to score them, it seems timely to revisit the argument. (See this and this article on the changes to make the Regents exam no longer teacher scored).
As I have long written, I have no problem with the state doing a once-per-year audit of performance. But what far too many policy-makers and measurement wonks fail to understand is that if the core purpose of the test is to improve performance, not just audit it, then most test security undercuts the purpose. Look, I get the point of security: you can get at understanding far more easily and efficiently (hence, cheaply) if the student does not know the specific question that is coming; I’m ok with that. But complete test security after the fact serves only the test-makers: they get to re-use items (and do so with little oversight), and they make the entire test more of a superficial dipstick, using proxies for real work, than a genuine test of transparent and worthy performance.

Jenny Anderson:

Parenting in a pathologically competitive, information-saturated city can make anyone crazy, even those parents lucky enough to be worried about fennel burgers in school lunches. And while Avenues offers its students every imaginable educational benefit — a 9-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio, a Harvard-designed “World Course” — it has also tapped into an even deeper, more complicated parental anxiety: the anxiety of wanting their kids to have every advantage, but ensuring that all those advantages don’t turn them into privileged jerks.
As Manhattan, and particularly downtown, is transformed by a staggering infusion of wealth, there is a growing market for creating emotionally intelligent future global leaders who, as a result of their emotional intelligence, have a little humility. In fact, when the nearby Grace Church School was researching whether to start its own high school, it asked top college-admission officers what was lacking in New York City applicants. The answers coalesced around the idea of values, civic engagement, inclusiveness and diversity — in a word, humility.
And so Avenues students may run to their “Empire State of Mind: Thinking About Jay-Z in a New Way” “mini-mester” while passing a Chuck Close self portrait, but they do so with the intent of being “humble about their gifts and generous of spirit,” as the school’s mission statement puts it. “We wanted a school that was innovative and wouldn’t force our kids into any particular mold,” says Sheree Carter-Galvan, an Avenues parent and a general counsel at Yale University. Or, as Ella Kim, mother of a 4-year old, explains, Avenues took the anxiety of a New York parent — albeit of a certain type — “and designed a school around that.”
Last winter, a group of Avenues 4-year-olds ventured out to the 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in Chelsea to view the work of John A. Parks, an English painter, who fingerpainted his childhood memories. Schulman thought it segued seamlessly with a unit they were doing on abstract art, which included studies of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Schulman, who always seems to be brimming with excitement, explained how the subject matter and the field trip were perfect for the immersion classes. “You can use the vocabulary in both languages,” she said, to learn about the art.

Much more on Avenues, here.

Robin:

I frequently have my undergrad and grad students read Bill Easterly’s excellent book, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. They are often a bit depressed after reading the chapters on growth, noting how little we seem to know about growth in the real world. It is the education chapter, however, which really gets to them. In it, Easterly points out what has been known for ages but is rarely mentioned in print (see Lant Pritchett’s “Where has all the education gone?” for a refreshing exception), namely, that education is not positively and significantly related to economic growth for most samples. Sometimes you can find a weakly positive t-stat in a sample of OECD countries, but you are lucky if you merely find zero correlation (instead of a negative and significant) in the developing world.

Related www.wisconsin2.org.

The Guardian:

Education in rural areas has been in the headlines recently, with scandals over missing textbooks, overcrowded classrooms and inadequate facilities. A group of South African dignitaries visited the Eastern Cape province recently to witness conditions for themselves. This is what they saw:

Inside Higher Ed:

There are more than 120 programs in the Football Bowl Subdivision – the top level of National Collegiate Athletic Association competition – but only 23 of them turned a profit in 2012, according to a new NCAA report on athletic department finances. That is despite upward movement in generated revenues: a 4.6 percent increase at FBS programs and a 9.06 percent increase at the smaller Football Championship Subdivision ones. While the median spending at FBS programs is $56 million, for other institutions, it hovers around $14 million. FBS median expenses increased 10.8 percent above the previous year, compared to 6.8 percent at FCS programs and 8.8 percent at Division I institutions without football. The report also notes the gap in the growth of expenses between institutional and athletics spending. At FBS programs, the median athletics expenses increase was 4.4 percent higher than the institutional increase. At FCS and Division I no-football colleges, the gap was 3 percent and 3.1 percent, respectively.

Temple Grandin and Richard Panek:

The following article is adapted from The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
I was fortunate to have been born in 1947. If I had been born 10 years later, my life as a person with autism would have been a lot different. In 1947, the diagnosis of autism was only four years old. Almost nobody knew what it meant. When Mother noticed in me the symptoms that we would now label autistic–destructive behavior, inability to speak, a sensitivity to physical contact, a fixation on spinning objects, and so on–she did what made sense to her. She took me to a neurologist.
Bronson Crothers had served as the director of the neurology service at Boston Children’s Hospital since its founding, in 1920. The first thing Dr. Crothers did in my case was administer an electroencephalogram, or EEG, to make sure I didn’t have petit mal epilepsy. Then he tested my hearing to make sure I wasn’t deaf. “Well, she certainly is an odd little girl,” he told Mother. Then when I began to verbalize a little, Dr. Crothers modified his evaluation: “She’s an odd little girl, but she’ll learn how to talk.” The diagnosis: brain damage.

George Hesselberg:

Some Verona grade school boys may remember the “hard lockdown” Thursday at their elementary school as the day they got to pee in a bucket in a janitor’s closet.
Verona Area School District Superintendent Dean Gorrell emailed a frank letter of apology to parents Friday for “not having adequate (or any) communication” about the lockdown while authorities searched for a dangerous suspect nearby.
As for the boys and their temporary bathrooms, that was simply a matter of protocol, safety and expedience, as the elementary school gymnasium where staff and students were under lockdown has no immediate access to bathrooms.
Gorrell said he had received no complaints about that as of Friday afternoon. The children were not allowed to go to bathrooms outside of the gym because it would have required their presence in a hallway, and staff “made provisions for students to relieve themselves in private,” he said.
On the topic of communication to parents and others about the lockdown, Gorrell said a new notification system called SchoolReach Instant Parent Contact has already been purchased and should be online for the next school year.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Legislators should be skeptical of a proposal by Gov. Scott Walker to sharply expand the school voucher program. There isn’t much evidence that students in voucher schools are better educated; in fact, they seem to perform at about the same level as their peers in mainline public schools.
We also remain deeply skeptical of the move by the Legislature two years ago to open up the program to lower middle-income families. If there is any justification for the voucher schools, it’s to give impoverished families a “choice.” We have long supported choice for the poor and believe the program should be limited to those families. Republicans essentially are advocating a shadow school system. Why not work harder to adequately fund and hold accountable the system we have?
Walker’s plan would expand private voucher programs to at least nine other districts outside Milwaukee and Racine. Families with income of to about $70,000 a year would be eligible.
Before they act, legislators should take a close look at outcomes.
In a report released last month, the state Department of Public Instruction found that students attending voucher schools in Milwaukee and Racine scored lower than public school students in Milwaukee Public Schools and the Racine Unified School District on the state standardized achievement test.

Comparing Milwaukee Public and Voucher Schools’ Per Student Spending

I find discussions of the per-pupil funding level of different types of Milwaukee schools usually turns into a debate on how to make a true apples-to-apples comparison of per-pupil support for the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). While basic differences in MPS and MPCP schools and their cost-drivers make any comparison imperfect, the following is what you might call a green apples to red apples comparison.
DISCLAIMER: if you not interested in school funding, prepare to be bored.
Per-pupil support for MPS
Note I am not trying to calculate per-pupil education funding or suggest that this is the amount of money that actually reaches a school or classroom; it is a simple global picture of how much public revenue exists per-pupil in MPS. Below are the relevant numbers for 2012, from MPS documents:
…….
Though not perfect, I think $13,063 (MPS) and $7,126 (MPCP) are reasonably comparative per-pupil public support numbers for MPS and the MPCP.

W. Lee Hansen, via a kind reader’s email:

This paper presents estimates of the full resource costs of Minority and Disadvantaged Student Programs for UW-Madison and the UW System. It shows that for 2008-09 the total resource costs of M/D programs are almost 60 percent higher than the published expenditure figures for UW-Madison and more than 75 percent higher than the published expenditure figures for the UW System. It provides several alternative estimates of the per student resource costs of these programs. Finally, it cumulates the value of the resources committed to M/D programs during Plan 2008 and in the years subsequent to 2008. These differences occur because the UW System’s Minority and Disadvantaged Student Annual Report (M/D Report) fails, without explanation, to include the full array of M/D program costs even though it openly acknowledges these omissions.
Based on the full resource costs estimates developed here, these costs range from as little as $1,000 per student to as much as $80,000 per student, depending on which groups of students receive the most benefit from these programs.
The results presented here for 2008-09 provide at best a snapshot view of the resource costs of M/D programs. Additional perspective comes from cumulating the resource costs of M/D programs for UW-Madison and for the UW System during the decade-long Plan 2008, and from estimates of these costs for the duration of Plan 2008 plus the first five years under UW’s new diversity plan called Inclusive Excellence.
The constant-dollar estimates of the resource costs incurred by UW-Madison during Plan 2008 total $280,000,000, and they approximate $500,000,000–half a billion dollars–for the 15-year period beginning in 1998-99 and continuing through 2012-13. Comparable estimates for the UW System are substantially greater, totaling $680,000,000 during Plan 2008 and approximating $1,150,000,000–more than one billion dollars–for this same 15-year period.
By understating the resource costs of its M/D programs and failing to provide evidence on the success of its M/D programs, the UW System fails to meet its commitments to transparency and accountability, and in the process compromises its institutional integrity.

Susan Schwartz Wildstrom:

I am moved to respond to Sol Garfunkel’s “Opinion” article.1 I am a long-time high school mathematics teacher in a public school. I started teaching around the time of SMSG and have been in the trenches throughout several of the math wars. I know Dr. Garfunkel’s fine work in creating interesting modeling projects and his outspoken opinion that using technology to solve problems that apply the mathematics we are teaching will better concretize students’ understanding of the underlying mathematics. It sounds like a fine idea, but the reality is often very different.
Our problems in teaching mathematics begin in elementary school. Sadly, many teachers working with our children at the start of their mathematical journeys are not themselves comfortable with the mathematics they are trying to teach. They often only know one way to teach an idea and they may not fully understand how that method works and why it gives the right answers. Such a teacher confronted with an alternate creative method (perhaps suggested by a clever child or a seasoned colleague) may reject the alternative rather than trying to see how and why two methods produce the same result. Beyond stifling the creativity of students and discouraging them from trying to see how the mathematics works, such an approach is not fertile ground for applications and modeling projects in which creative exploration and possibly unorthodox methods are encouraged as a means of truly understanding what is happening. Teachers who lack confidence in their own understanding of the ideas may not want to include these sorts of activities in their classrooms.

Related: Math Forum audio & video.

Daniel Bice:

Rarely has the political payoff for a special interest group been as quick or blatant.
The American Federation for Children, one of the leading advocates for school choice in the country, brags in a recent brochure that it spent more than $325,000 – far more than the group has previously made public – to help elect state Sen. Rick Gudex in a closely contested Wisconsin race last fall.
Gudex won his seat by less than 600 votes.
Then, last week, the freshman lawmaker joined two other Senate Republicans in saying they were drawing a line in the sand by vowing to oppose a state budget bill if it doesn’t include an expansion of the state’s school voucher program.
“The American Federation of Children got exactly what they wanted,” said Mike McCabe, head of the left-leaning election watchdog group Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. “They want legislators who will go to the mat and make expanding the voucher program the bottom line.”
Just as interesting, McCabe said, is that the school choice organization is saying in its own material that it spent twice as much helping Gudex as it reported to state regulators. McCabe said his group is looking into filing an election complaint.
A source familiar with the American Federation’s political spending in Wisconsin called such a complaint “frivolous.” The organization, the source said, had abided by Wisconsin election laws.

Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators.

Sean Silverthorne:

Boston College’s greatest marketing campaign lasted about six seconds.
It’s called the “Flutie Effect.” In a 1984 game against the University of Miami, BC quarterback Doug Flutie threw a last-second “Hail Mary” pass 48 yards that was miraculously caught for a game-winning touchdown–a climactic capper on one of the most exciting college football games ever.
The play put BC on the map for college aspirants. In two years, applications had shot up 30 percent.
Ever since, marketing experts and school deans have acknowledged the power of the Flutie Effect’s ability to transfer a successful collegiate athletic program into a hot ticket for admission. Georgetown University applications multiplied 45 percent between 1983 and 1986 following a surge of basketball success. Northwestern University applications advanced 21 percent after winning the Big Ten Championship in football.

Felix Salmon:

This manages to be both incomprehensible and incredibly offensive at the same time. I have no idea what Friedman thinks he’s talking about when he blathers on about disappearing protective floors; I can only hope that he isn’t making a super-tasteless reference to the recent disaster in Bangladesh. But it’s simply wrong that today’s world is “tailored” for anybody who happens to be “self-motivated”. Both the self and the motivation are components of labor, not capital, and as such they’re on the losing side of the global economy, not the winning side.
Friedman is a billionaire (by marriage) who — like all billionaires these days — is convinced that he achieved his current prominent position by merit alone, rather than through luck and through the diligent application of cultural and financial capital. His paean to self-motivation recalls nothing so much as Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society” quote: “parenting, teaching or leadership that ‘inspires’ individuals to act on their own will be the most valued of all,” he writes, bizarrely choosing to wrap his scare quotes around the word “inspires” rather than around the word “leadership”, where they belong.
True leadership, in a society where the workers are failing to be paid even half the fruits of their labor, would involve attempting to turn the red line in Blodget’s chart around, and to spread the nation’s prosperity among all its citizens. Rather than telling everybody that they’re “on their own” and that if they’re not a success then hey, they’re probably just not “self-motivated” enough.

Related: Status Quo Costs More: Madison Schools’ Administration Floats a 7.38% Property Tax Increase; Dane County Incomes down 4.1%…. District Received $11.8M Redistributed State Tax Dollar Increase last year. Spending up 6.3% over the past 16 months.

The Economist:

BRITISH universities can be depressing. The dons moan about their pay and students worry they will end up frying burgers–or jobless. Perhaps they should try visiting McDonald’s University in London’s East Finchley.
Students are often “rough and ready”, with poor qualifications and low self-esteem. But ambition-igniting murals display the ladder of opportunity that leads from the grill to the corner office (McDonald’s chief executives have always started at the bottom). A map of the world shows the seven counterpart universities. Cabinets display trophies such as the Sunday Times award for being one of Britain’s best 25 employers.
McDonald’s is one of Britain’s biggest trainers. It gets about 1m applicants a year, accepting only one in 15, and spends £40m ($61m) a year on training. The Finchley campus, opened by Margaret Thatcher, then the local MP, in 1989, is one of the biggest training centres in Europe–many of the classrooms are equipped with booths for interpreters. It is part of a bigger system. An employees’ web-portal, Our Lounge, provides training as well as details about that day’s shifts, and allows employees to compete against each other in work-related video games.

Tom Foremski:

John Wihbey at Journalist’s Resource has highlighted an important problem: Young people aren’t very good at search.
Since Google’s algorithms have trouble in distinguishing between spam and good content, a search-based education isn’t much use if students don’t know how to evaluate sources of information.

Cindy Koeppel, via a kind email:

* NEW SPECIAL PROJECT * “Civility in the Golden Age, 1959-1969”
On April 16, 2013, Dirksen Center staff member delivered remarks entitled “Civility in the Golden Age, 1959-1969” to a conference, “Returning Civility to Our Public Discourse,” funded by The Center and sponsored by the Institute for Principled Leadership at Bradley University.
Mackaman used documents from Everett Dirksen’s papers to illustrate the nature of civil discourse among the political leaders in the 1960s.
Read the remarks at: http://www.dirksencenterprojects.org/Civility.pdf

Lisa Hansel, via a kind reader’s email:

So why haven’t we ensured that all children get a rigorous, supportive education?
This is a question I ask myself and others all the time. I think it’s more productive than merely asking “How can we?” Those who ask how without also asking why haven’t tend to waste significant amounts of time and resources “discovering” things that some already knew.
Okay, so I’ve partly answer the why question right there. Much better answers can be found in Diane Ravitch’s Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, and Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
But still, those answers are not complete.
Right now, Kate Walsh and her team with the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) are adding to our collective wisdom–and potentially to our collective ability to act.
NCTQ is just a couple months away from releasing its review of teacher preparation programs. The results may not be shocking, but they are terrifying. Walsh provides a preview in the current issue of Education Next. In that preview, she reminds us of a study from several years ago that offers an insiders’ look at teacher preparation:

The most revealing insight into what teacher educators believe to be wrong or right about the field is a lengthy 2006 volume published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Studying Teacher Education. It contains contributions from 15 prominent deans and education professors and was intended to provide “balanced, thorough, and unapologetically honest descriptions of the state of research on particular topics in teacher education.” It lives up to that billing. First, the volume demonstrates the paucity of credible research that would support the current practices of traditional teacher education, across all of its many functions, including foundations courses, arts and sciences courses, field experiences, and pedagogical approaches, as well as how current practice prepares candidates to teach diverse populations and special education students. More intriguing, however, is the contributors’ examination of the dramatic evolution of the mission of teacher education over the last 50 years, in ways that have certainly been poorly understood by anyone outside the profession.
Studying Teacher Education explains the disconnect between what teacher educators believe is the right way to prepare a new teacher and the unhappy K-12 schools on the receiving end of that effort. It happens that the job of teacher educators is not to train the next generation of teachers but to prepare them.

Huh? Really? How exactly does one prepare without training? Walsh goes on to explain that. But the only way to prepare yourself to comprehend the teacher educators’ reasoning is to pretend like “prepare them” actually means “brainwash them into believing that in order to be a good teacher, you have to make everything up yourself.” Back to Walsh:

Harking back perhaps to teacher education’s 19th-century ecclesiastical origins, its mission has shifted away from the medical model of training doctors to professional formation. The function of teacher education is to launch the candidate on a lifelong path of learning, distinct from knowing, as actual knowledge is perceived as too fluid to be achievable. In the course of a teacher’s preparation, prejudices and errant assumptions must be confronted and expunged, with particular emphasis on those related to race, class, language, and culture. This improbable feat, not unlike the transformation of Pinocchio from puppet to real boy, is accomplished as candidates reveal their feelings and attitudes through abundant in-class dialogue and by keeping a journal. From these activities is born each teacher’s unique philosophy of teaching and learning.
There is also a strong social-justice component to teacher education, with teachers cast as “activists committed to diminishing the inequities of American society.” That vision of a teacher is seen by a considerable fraction of teacher educators (although not all) as more important than preparing a teacher to be an effective instructor.

Kate Walsh:

Nowhere is the chasm between the two visions of teacher education–training versus formation–clearer than in the demise of the traditional methods course. The public, and policymakers who require such courses in regulations governing teacher education, may assume that when a teacher takes a methods course, it is to learn the best methods for teaching certain subject matter. That view, we are told in the AERA volume, is for the most part an anachronism. The current view, state professors Renee T. Clift and Patricia Brady, is that “A methods course is seldom defined as a class that transmits information about methods of instruction and ends with a final exam. [They] are seen as complex sites in which instructors work simultaneously with prospective teachers on beliefs, teaching practices and creation of identities–their students’ and their own.”
The statement reveals just how far afield teacher education has traveled from its training purposes. It is hard not to suspect that the ambiguity in such language as the “creation of identities” is purposeful, because if a class fails to meet such objectives, no one would be the wiser.
The shift away from training to formation has had one immediate and indisputable outcome: the onus of a teacher’s training has shifted from the teacher educators to the teacher candidates. What remains of the teacher educator’s purpose is only to build the “capacity” of the candidate to be able to make seasoned professional judgments. Figuring out what actually to do falls entirely on the candidate.
Here is the guidance provided to student teachers at a large public university in New York:
In addition to establishing the norm for your level, you must, after determining your year-end goals, break down all that you will teach into manageable lessons. While so much of this is something you learn on the job, a great measure of it must be inside you, or you must be able to find it in a resource. This means that if you do not know the content of a grade level, or if you do not know how to prepare a lesson plan, or if you do not know how to do whatever is expected of you, it is your responsibility to find out how to do these things. Your university preparation is not intended to address every conceivable aspect of teaching.
Do not be surprised if your Cooperating Teacher is helpful but suggests you find out the “how to” on your own. Your Cooperating Teacher knows the value of owning your way into your teaching style.

Related: When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?.
Wisconsin has recently taken a first baby step toward teacher content knowledge requirements (something Massachusetts and Minnesota have done for years) via the adoption of MTEL-90. Much more on teacher content knowledge requirements, here.
Content knowledge requirements for teachers past & present.

Jordan Weissmann:

When you look at the average performance of American students on international test scores, our kids come off as a pretty middling bunch. If you rank countries based on their very fine differences, we come in 14th in reading, 23rd in science, and 25th in math. Those finishes led Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to flatly declare that “we’re being out-educated.”
And on average, maybe we are. But averages also sometimes obscure more than they reveal. My colleague Derek Thompson has written before about how, once you compare students from similar income and class backgrounds, our relative performance improves dramatically, suggesting that our educational problems may be as much about our sheer number of poor families as our supposedly poor schools. This week, I stumbled on another data point that belies the stereotype of dimwitted American teens.
When it comes to raw numbers, it turns out we generally have far more top performers than any other developed nation.
That’s according to the graph below from Economic Policy Institute’s recent report on America’s supply of science and tech talent. Among OECD nations in 2006, the United States claimed a third of high-performing students in both reading and science, far more than our next closest competitor, Japan. On math, we have a bit less to be proud of — we just claimed 14 percent of the high-performers, compared to 15.2 percent for Japan and 16.2 percent of South Korea.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org

Stephanie Banchero:

Classrooms across the country roll out universal math and reading standards, a growing group of critics are pressing officials to slow their implementation or dump the learning goals entirely.
This is the first school year that most states are using voluntary academic standards known as Common Core, which lay out what students should know from kindergarten through 12th grade. Written by a group of governors, state school officials and other experts with the goal of better preparing students for college and careers, the standards have been adopted entirely by 45 states and the District of Columbia since 2010. A 46th state, Minnesota, has adopted only the language-arts portion.
Now, the Common Core effort is under attack from an unlikely coalition: conservatives who decry the implementation costs and call the standards an intrusion into local education decisions; union leaders who worry that states have tied, or plan to tie, teacher evaluations to new Common Core exams; and some parents who contend their children are ill-prepared for the Common Core tests.

George Skelton:

Now we know what Gov. Jerry Brown really cares about — what gets him riled and raring to rumble.
“The battle of their lives,” he promises opponents. “This is a cause.”
When a governor bares his soul like that, not only is he waving a nasty stick, he’s tacking up a big sign that reads, “Name your price.”
Brown’s passion: pouring more tax money into inner-city schools at the expense of the suburbs.
It’s not that simple, of course. Nothing about California school finance is.
Not all urban districts would benefit from Brown’s school funding redistribution scheme. Oakland Unified, for example. Brown’s hometown, where he was mayor, would get shortchanged.
Oakland’s schools would receive $228 less per pupil under his plan when fully implemented than under the current funding formula, according to the state education department. The governor’s own budget office also shows Oakland as a loser.
So the governor might want to tweak his proposal to eliminate at least one unintended consequence.
Brown’s plan would allot significantly more money for districts with large percentages of poor children — those eligible for subsidized lunches — and English learners. But that would mean less than otherwise for middle-class and better-off districts where the vast majority of kids speak English at home.
Among the 50 largest districts, more than half would be losers under Brown’s plan, based on education department calculations.

Ryan Lillis:

But Shirey said he would withdraw that recommendation if the Sacramento Police Officers Association, the union representing city police officers and sergeants, does not agree to have its members pick up the full employee contribution into their pensions by July 1.
Most city employees pay an employee share of pension contributions; the city picks up an employer share. The police union is the largest in the city that does not pay into its retirement plan.
Dustin Smith, the head of the police officers union, said the organization and city officials are in “active bargaining sessions” and that more talks are planned.
“We’re still hoping we can bargain some type of deal that works out for both the community and the officers who serve it,” he said.
The City Council will receive its first formal briefing on the budget at its May 7 meeting and is scheduled to adopt the budget June 11.

The Wisconsin State Journal:

School principals should know who their best teachers are, and those top performers deserve higher pay.
Jeff Charbonneau, honored last week by President Barack Obama at the White House as national teacher of the year, helps show why.
Charbonneau teaches chemistry, physics, engineering and architecture at Zillah High School in Zillah, Wash.
“I fight a stigma,” Charbonneau wrote in his award application. “Students hear the words ‘quantum mechanics’ and instantly think ‘too hard’ and ‘no way.’ It is my job to convince them that they are smart enough, that they can do anything.”
He’s succeeding. About two-thirds of juniors and seniors at the small, rural school are signing up for chemistry and physics. And nearly every student is graduating with some college credit, according to the Associated Press.
Charbonneau can award college credits to his high school students because he attained adjunct faculty status with local universities, and many of his fellow teachers at Zillah now are doing the same. Zillah offers 72 classes that can lead to college credits, and 90 percent of students go on to college, an apprenticeship or the military.

Much more, here.

Jay Bullock:

Back when I used to blog about politics, I was a constant critic of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s PolitiFact operation. Or, as I called it, Politi”Fact,” with the emphasis on the sarcasm quotes.
Why? Because PolitiFact Wisconsin, as the local franchise is known, tries to set itself up as a neutral arbiter, and so it usually plays the “both sides do it” card. It can’t be too critical of one side, even if that one side plays far more fast and loose with the facts than the other side does. (Also: there are only two sides, so the truth must lie in the middle!)
This kind of faux-neutrality is the hallmark not of fact-checkers but of a distant, entitled media, hoping to maintain an “above it all” reputation and the good graces of the folks who generously douse the state’s largest media operation with significant political ad buys every couple of years.
In Monday’s paper, the PolitiFact crew examines some claims made about school vouchers by groups both favoring the program’s expansion (including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker) and opposing it, claiming it is “sorting out the truth” about voucher schools. It should be no surprise that I oppose expansion, though I am not personally involved in the anti-voucher groups cited in this story.

David Blaska:

The Madison School Board recently voted 7-0 to encourage the state Legislature to say no to school choice. The surprise would have been had they voted otherwise.
I suspect Madison’s school board is like yours in Neenah and others throughout the state. Given their druthers, they’d just as soon have no competition. Makes management ever so much simpler.
Of course, those who can afford to do so can send their children to private schools – but first they must pay the monopoly school district, or move out of town. What a business model! Kim Jong-un would approve!
Our school board has the firm backing of the teachers union – the same one that unilaterally closed down Madison schools for a week during the Siege of the Capitol in February-March 2011. It should! The union elected them!

Greg Toppo:

Schools that want to do a better job fighting bullying ought to start with one key step, a group of researchers said Tuesday: Stop using the term “bullying.”
Because it’s “being used for everything from rolling eyes to ‘not wanting to be your friend’ to sexual assault, the word ‘bullying’ has really obscured our ability to focus on what’s happening” to children, said Dorothy Espelage of the University of Illinois.
Educators have been “spinning our wheels for decades” in a bid to treat bullying, but they’re often hampered by policies that require mistreatment to be repetitive, for example, part of the classic definition of bullying. That focus also obscures whether specific acts are happening more or less, she said.

Felix Salmon:

Peter Cooper understood this well. A wealthy man, he owned a lot of land in Manhattan — including the land underneath what is now the Chrysler Building — and he knew that land would, literally, produce healthy rents in perpetuity. A philanthropist, Cooper knew exactly what he wanted those rents to be spent on: he created the Cooper Union, a college with the defining characteristic that it would charge its students nothing. It was — and is — a noble cause. And in the early days, its trustees quite literally bought into that cause: they helped out with its endowment, and covered its deficits in years where it lost money.
Cooper understood that free education doesn’t really scale. If you’re charging, then extra students provide extra income which can pay for extra teachers and administrators and buildings. But if you’re giving education away for free, then it’s imperative that you operate strictly within your means. The only way to grow is if you persuade some new generations of wealthy benefactors to contribute their own money or land. But at Cooper Union, that hasn’t happened for many decades.
As a result, Cooper Union has always been an extremely special educational institution, the kind of place where a little went a very long way. The faculty was not well paid; the facilities were bare-bones. But the students were fantastic, because Cooper could pick the very best of the very best. And the college’s overriding social mission engendered a huge amount of loyalty and love for the institution, as well as being reflected deep in its curricula. Here’s Sangamithra Iyer, for instance:

The Washington Post:

As public schools across the country transition to the new Common Core standards, which bring wholesale change to the way math and reading are taught in 45 states and the District, criticism of the approach is emerging from groups as divergent as the tea party and the teachers union.
The standards, written by a group of states and embraced by the Obama administration, set common goals for reading, writing and math skills that students should develop from kindergarten through high school graduation. Although classroom curriculum is left to the states, the standards emphasize critical thinking and problem solving and encourage thinking deeply about fewer topics.
But as the common core shifts from theory to reality, critics are emerging. State lawmakers are concerned about the cost, which the Fordham Institute estimated could run as high as $12 billion nationally. Progressives fret over new exams, saying that the proliferation of standardized tests is damaging public education. Teachers worry that they haven’t had enough training and lack the resources to competently teach to the new standards. And conservatives say the new standards mean a loss of local control over education and amount to a national curriculum. They’ve begun calling it “Obamacore.”
On Tuesday, the head of the American Federation of Teachers and a strong supporter of the Common Core standards will warn that the new approach is being poorly implemented and requires a “mid-course correction” or the effort will fall apart.
“The Common Core is in trouble,” said Randi Weingarten, the union president who is slated to speak Tuesday in New York about the issue. “There is a serious backlash in lots of different ways, on the right and on the left.”

Jess Cotton:

Described as the “Alex Ferguson of University Challenge”, for 16 years librarian Stephen Pearson has been the driving force behind the rigorous selection and training procedures of Manchester University’s quiz team, leading them to three victories since 2005. Ahead of tonight’s final between Manchester and UCL, he gives five insights into what makes a successful team.
1. Fingers on buzzer
The ability to buzz in on starter questions is actually more important than pure knowledge. The starters are the key to a team’s success – even if a contestant has copious amounts of general knowledge, if they don’t have the instinct to buzz in straightaway, they’re simply not going to get the starter points. Contestants should buzz in even if they are not 100 per cent sure of the answer.
2. Team building
A cohesive team is essential. When picking the contestants I ensure that there’s at least one candidate who’s strong on literature, history, geography and science. The training sessions allow the contestants to understand when to leave certain questions to the expert in that field. The first practice session is for them to get to know each other as people as much as anything else. I use a similar format to business team-building exercises – there should be lots of bonding and harnessing of team spirit. I’m getting a bit old for it now, but I know that after the practice sessions current and previous contestants will go to the pub for, I’m told, informal mentoring over drinks.
3. The classics
Many of the University Challenge questions include clues which refer to the Latin and Greek derivations of words – particularly scientific terms. This means that people who know their classics can respond even if they’ve got no idea about the science involved. Kwasi Kwarteng, now an MP for the Conservative party, showed this to great effect in his performance as part of the winning Trinity College Cambridge team of 1995.

Vauhini Vara:

A battle is heating up in California over Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to boost funding for all schools, but funnel more money to districts where many students are poor and struggle with English and less to wealthier districts.
Since Mr. Brown, a Democrat, unveiled the “weighted funding” plan in January, school chiefs in poorer areas have pushed hard for the state legislature to pass it.
But superintendents in richer districts argue that the proposed redistribution is unfair and that they want a bigger slice of the pie now that the state’s finances have improved, thanks to a stronger economy and a tax increase.
Public schools in California, as in other states, are financed by a mix of federal, state and local dollars. Local funding includes property taxes and donations, which tend to bring in more money in wealthier areas.Federal funding, which includes Title I funding for low-income districts, generally brings more money to low-income districts.

Doug Erickson

As the Rev. Richard Sunderlage entered the elementary classroom at Resurrection Lutheran School one recent morning, all five students shot up out of their desks.
Students at the school are required to stand whenever an adult enters the room. They also must address their elders as “ma’am” or “sir.”
Such rules set the school apart, but so do many other things. It is tiny — just 12 students in first grade through high school — and it is not affiliated with a church. Even rarer, it charges no tuition or fees.
“We don’t want there to be any barriers,” said Sunderlage, the school’s driving force.
Now in its third year, the school appears to be the only no-tuition, no-fees, first-through-12th-grade private school in the state. Matt Kussow, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Religious & Independent Schools, said he is not aware of any others.
Good Shepherd Lutheran School in Wisconsin Rapids also is tuition-free, but it stops at eighth grade, charges a book fee and caps enrollment at 15. Resurrection Lutheran turns no one away. It has had as many as 33 students and could hold up to 100.

The Chicago Tribune:

Indiana lawmakers are proposing huge increases in state education funding this year. Ditto those in Wisconsin.
Here in Illinois, The Deadbeat State? Just the opposite. Education funding is being strangled by the same python that is strangling the rest of state government’s finances: pension obligations. Every day that the Legislature delays the enactment of pension reform, the unfunded liability of the state’s five pension funds grows by $17 million, according to Gov. Pat Quinn’s office.
In this state, we’re not arguing about how to, say, give more money to schools because great schools drive growth and innovation, attract businesses, create jobs.
No, we’re arguing instead about which school kids will get cheated more than other school kids because state lawmakers dither on a pension fix — kids from richer districts or those from poorer districts? That’s the depressing debate we’re having.
Here’s why: In Illinois, the Legislature sets a “foundation” funding level that the state says every student needs for an adequate education. That’s the starting point for a calculation that determines how much state aid each district receives. The calculation considers each district’s local taxing ability to meet that foundation level, and also looks at how many students in the district need extra support because they’re from low-income families. Districts that have relatively lower revenue and educate relatively more higher-need students receive more state aid.

Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 Madison Rotary Speech:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Pamela Cotant:

Students at Wingra School only needed to travel across the street for a day in the outdoors as part of its annual all-school unit called Outdoor Odyssey.
Last week, students ages 5 to 14 culminated the unit by working in multi-age teams to complete a variety of challenges throughout the UW Arboretum, across Monroe Street from the school.
The challenges, created by Wingra teachers and UW Arboretum naturalists, included identifying animal skin and bones, a scavenger hunt, identifying scat and measuring the weather with different instruments made by the students.
Wearing a matching raincoat and boots with a bug design, kindergartener Leo Langer, 5, used a trowel to dig up invasive plants under the supervision of teachers and Arboretum staff. He said it was his favorite activity so far that day.
“I learned a new way to dig out (dame’s rocket) instead of just pulling stuff out with your hands,” he said.

Mary Beth Faller:

Harold Begay drives around Tuba City, on the Navajo Reservation, showing a visitor boarded-up buildings and ramshackle houses abandoned by the federal government and left to rot.
Begay, who is superintendent of Tuba City Unified School District, tells his visitor about high unemployment on the reservation and the sense of alienation in many young people who feel cut off from their culture and the traditional Arizona classroom. Like most Arizona districts on American Indian reservations, Tuba City’s is struggling.
Begay is familiar with the disconnect between the traditional values of the Navajos and modern education.
A quiet man whose soft speech is inflected with the tones of his native Navajo language, Begay spent his childhood tending his family’s corn and sheep a few miles from where his Tuba City office now stands. He greeted the sunrise with prayers and ended evenings with a family meal and stories about what it means to be Navajo, or “Dine” as they call themselves.
After enduring troubles in school on the reservation, Begay joined the Marines and, after leaving the military, drove a school bus. He eventually went back to school, earned a doctorate and traveled the world before being drawn back to Tuba City, a few square miles of modest homes on the mesas of the Painted Desert, 75 miles north of Flagstaff.

The Madison School District:

The team from West High School won at the Wisconsin Science Olympiad State Tournament on Saturday April 13th at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The team competed against high school teams from across the state. West High performed at a high level, winning many individual medals (8 first place medals) and the overall team championship. West followed up last year’s win with back to back titles. They also won the honor to represent the state of Wisconsin at the national tournament where the top Math and Science high schools will compete for national honors. Hamilton Middle School will also attend the national tournament.

Congratulations.

Margot Peppers:

Mona Lisa and Kip Harding from Montgomery, Alabama, home-school all ten of their kids – six of whom started college by the age of 12.
The remaining four children are ten and under and also aim to go to college early.
A mother who home-schools her ten children in Montgomery, Alabama, has opened up about how six of them began their college degrees by the age of 12.
Those of the Harding siblings who have already graduated from college have gone on to become a doctor, an architect, a spacecraft designer and a master’s student. Another two – 12 and 14-years-old – are still finishing up their degrees.
But despite the Hardings’ incredible achievements at such young ages, their parents – Mona Lisa and Kip – insist they are a family of ‘average folks’ who simply find and cultivate their children’s passions early on.

Madison Teachers Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Bettner email (PDF):

MTI has filed notice with the Board of Education and the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) to open bargaining for 2014-15 Collective Bargaining Agreements for all five (5) MTI bargaining units. Bargaining is enabled by Judge Colas’ decision that Act 10, which sought to bar public sector bargaining, is unconstitutional. The City of Madison and the County of Dane have contracts with all City and County unions through 2015.
Last week MTI filed an additional petition with Judge Colas because of the failure of the Governor and the WERC Commissioners to implement those parts of Act 10 which Colas found to violate the Wisconsin Constitution. The WERC Commissioners contend that, because Judge Colas did not issue an injunction, they may ignore his declaratory judgment when considering cases filed at the WERC. The WERC Commissioners and the Governor apparently believe that without a specific injunction directing them to abide by the Court’s declaration of unconstitutionality, they are free to apply the law as they, not the Court, interprets it.
MTI Executive Director John Matthews said, “The above-described actions of the WERC Commissioners and the Governor, who are parties to the case, are unprecedented. They argued that the law was constitutional and they lost. They asked for a stay from the Circuit Court and the Court of Appeals and they lost. By implementing and enforcing a law determined to be unconstitutional, they are saying ‘We are above the law.’ That is intolerable. Consequently, MTI has returned to court to seek an injunction to force the WERC Commissioners, and the Governor who controls them, to respect the Courts and follow the law.”
MTI expects to exchange bargaining proposals with the District within the next few weeks. MTI represents approximately 5,000 District employees in five different bargaining units. They are teachers (MTI), educational assistants (EA-MTI), clerical/technical employees (SEE-MTI), substitute teachers (USO-MTI) and school security assistants (SSA-MTI).
In addition to the usual topics, MTI bargaining will include District proposals to amend Contract terms about parent-teacher conferences and possible extension, in some schools, of the school day and school year.

Fascinating. It appears likely that Madison’s “status quo” governance model will continue.
Commentary on Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes’ Teacher Salary Increase Colloquy.
Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.

Tamar Lewin:

Dazzled by the potential of free online college classes, educators are now turning to the gritty task of harnessing online materials to meet the toughest challenges in American higher education: giving more students access to college, and helping them graduate on time.
Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes. That early detour can be costly, leading many to drop out, often in heavy debt and with diminished prospects of finding a job.
Meanwhile, shrinking state budgets have taken a heavy toll at public institutions, reducing the number of seats available in classes students must take to graduate. In California alone, higher education cuts have left hundreds of thousands of college students without access to classes they need.

Greg Toppo:

In 2002, educator Ryan Hill opened his dream school with all of 80 students, four teachers and one office manager. “I was there till midnight every single night,” he said. “It was really hard.”
Like many startups, the Newark middle school started with a single grade level and grew by adding a grade each fall. Eleven years later, TEAM Academy belongs to what is essentially a four-campus mini-district: two elementary schools, another middle school and a 525-student high school, each of which grew the same way. The TEAM charter school network, part of the national KIPP schools movement, enrolls 1,800 students, with plans to double over the next few years to 10 schools. Its waiting list, almost 9,000 names long, covers nearly one in four Newark students.
The secret to Hill’s success: starting from scratch. “Learning how to manage four people is not easy,” he said, “but (it’s) way easier than learning how to manage 40. It allows you as a principal to grow into the role and makes it possible for more people to pull it off.”
The Obama administration has long supported charter school startups like TEAM Academy, but it now invests much more — $3 billion in all — into a very different strategy. Instead of starting from scratch, Obama wants to “turn around” the USA’s worst public schools, improving the schools we’ve got.

Danielle Curtis:

Kim Wright took a few college courses after graduating high school but never earned a degree.
Though she thought about going back to school for years, financial constraints always held her back.
So when her employer told her about a self-paced online program that would help her earn her associate degree in less than two years, she jumped at the chance.
“I always want to challenge myself, to get more knowledge and prove that I can do it,” Wright said Wednesday. “I’m just excited to see how far I can go.”
Wright, facilities manager at The Moore Center in Manchester, which provides care to individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities and brain injuries, is one of about 500 employees from companies and organizations around the country participating in an eight-month pilot program of Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America online, competency-based degree program.

Tarak Barkawi:

The New York Times, Slate and Al Jazeera have recently drawn attention to the adjunctification of the professoriate in the US. Only 24 per cent of university and college faculty are now tenured or tenure-track.
Much of the coverage has focused on the sub-poverty wages of adjunct faculty, their lack of job security and the growing legions of unemployed and under-employed PhDs. Elsewhere, the focus has been on web-based learning and the massive open online courses ( MOOCs), with some commentators celebrating and others lamenting their arrival.
The two developments are not unrelated. Harvard recently asked its alumni to volunteer their time as “online mentors” and “discussion group managers” for an online course. Fewer professors and fewer qualified – or even paid – teaching assistants will be required in higher education’s New Order.
Lost amid the fetishisation of information technology and the pathos of the struggle over proper working conditions for adjunct faculty is the deeper crisis of the academic profession occasioned by neoliberalism. This crisis is connected to the economics of higher education but it is not primarily about that.
The neoliberal sacking of the universities runs much deeper than tuition fee hikes and budget cuts.

Charlie Mas:

That represents a grievous failure to manage. That’s a simple fact. The absence of any assessment of the quality and efficacy of these programs constitutes an indisputable failure to manage the programs. How can the District make decisions based on data if there is no data?
The Board has a duty to oversee the district’s management – not to meddle or micromanage, but to confirm that the management work is getting done. Given the poor documentation, rapid turnover at the executive level, and history of non-management, this duty carries more than ordinary weight.
Towards that end, the Board conducted a work session to review the management of two of these efforts – Advanced Learning and Native Education. The Board not only noticed the absence of reports on the quality or effectiveness of these programs, but throughout the department. Director Carr decried the absence of any meaningful metrics or benchmarks for the entire C & I operation. She noted the absence of Key Performance Indicators. Others noted the mismatch between objectives, measures, and targets for the department. It wasn’t lost on them.

Jurjen van Rees:

For the Netherlands, and its capital Amsterdam in particular, 2013 is promised to be a momentous year. On April 13th the city celebrated the re-opening of its famous Rijksmuseum with the centre of attention pointed at the Rembrandt’s Nightwatch. Jubilees in the city in 2013 include the Artis zoo, the Royal Concert Gebouw, its Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and 400 years of constructing the iconic canals of Amsterdam. Adding to the festivities is the inauguration of the new king Willem Alexander who is succeeding his abdicated mother queen Beatrix on April 30th. As if these weren’t enough reasons to plan a visit to the Venice of Northern Europe, the city government is hosting a competition to start a new research university with the alluring title Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions.
The establishment of a new university in Amsterdam should first and foremost be seen in the light of supra-national policy goals set by the European Union.
It all starts in 2000 in Lisbon with the European Commission determined to transform Europe into the top-region in the world for research, innovation and educational excellence through the Lisbon Strategy. When it comes to EU policy strategies, the Dutch have a strong tendency to act accordingly to their proclaimed status of being the bravest and smartest young child in the classroom. Together with their ‘big brother’ Germany, the Netherlands holds a comparable approach when it comes to the national deficit not exceeding 3% of the gross national income on which EU member states agreed upon in 1997. The European Union pours billions of euros – 50,5 to be precise – in fundamental research through their 7th Framework Programme up till 2013, followed by another subsidy programme Horizon 2020 with an estimated 80 billion Euros being invested in the European knowledge economy between 2014 and 2020. From a European perspective the Dutch feel they have a knowledge-intensive responsibility to live up to.

Eric Smith:

It has been 30 years since the landmark report “A Nation At Risk” documented the failings of America’s public-school system, and the past three decades have seen much promising reform on the local, state and federal levels, in legislatures, on school boards and in classrooms. Yet today the trend lines again are moving in the wrong direction, with federal policy inviting states to back away from their duty to ensure that students receive the education they deserve.
Since 2011, the U.S. Department of Education has granted waivers to 34 states and the District of Columbia exempting them from some of the core accountability measures in the bipartisan 2001 No Child Left Behind law. Ten more states have waiver applications pending. Meanwhile, the Texas legislature is considering loosening public-school testing standards, and nine districts in California have independently moved to submit NCLB waiver requests.
No Child Left Behind was based on the idea that schools should establish measurable educational goals and be held accountable for meeting them. This is the only proven formula for improving education in this country–and NCLB has generated some amazing results, particularly in low-income minority communities. Unfortunately, opponents of the law have relied on disingenuous claims in pushing for waivers.

Bill Bush:

On Tuesday, the commission released a list of recommendations that would significantly change the management of Columbus City Schools. Those included:
The mayor, city council president, school board president, city auditor and county probate judge would appoint an independent auditor to monitor the school board.
A fund overseen by a panel from the private sector, schools and city government would oversee a fund of $35 million to $50 million to help replicate high-performing city schools and successful charter schools. A portion of that money would come from property taxes paid by district residents.
The mayor would re-start a department of education in his administration. The director would sit on the school board as a non-voting, advisory member.

Reimagine Columbus Education.

Katie Zhu:

My frustrations are with the rigidity of my actual degree requirements – the credits I have to take in order to graduate. The credits for which I’ve wasted hours of email back and forth, running around getting signatures, and filling out petition forms in order to get them to line up with my little degree chart so I can check off the appropriate boxes and graduate on time.
My frustrations are with the lack of an applicable concentration that reflects the state of the news industry in 2013.
How is it okay that journalism students are able to graduate without ever taking a real statistics or mathematics class, given the crazy demand for data journalists? Or without ever taking a programming class?
The field of journalism has always been interdisciplinary, though traditionally this has been with the non-technical disciplines – the humanities, economics, political science.

Great points.

Carolyn Luby:

These are serious marks against both our athletic program and our university as a whole — marks that, other than a decision made by Coach Kevin Ollie to suspend Wolf indefinitely, have gone unaddressed, unmentioned, and unacknowledged by UConn authorities. What does this timeline say when juxtaposed with your justification? It beckons the question, what does UConn do with marks like these? The answer appears to be: we turn them blue and shape them into something new.
Instead of giving these problematic aspects of male athletic peer culture at UConn a second look or a giving the real face of athletics a true makeover, it appears that the focus of your administration is prioritizing the remodeling of the fictional face of the Husky Logo. Instead of communicating a zero tolerance atmosphere for this kind of behavior, increasing or vocalizing support to violence against women prevention efforts on campus in the face of such events, or increasing support to student run programs that seek to work with athletes on issues of violence as well as academic issues, it would appear that your administration is more interested in fostering consumerism and corporatization than education and community. Another example of this shift in priorities can be seen in the current administrations selection of the new logo — a selection made with no involvement from or consultation with the normal, everyday, non-Olympian student body:
Contrary to speculation, the Husky will not appear to be mean, snarling, or capable of frightening small children! Instead he will be rendered as the sleek, beautiful animal a real Husky truly is.

Jeffrey Selingo:

May 1 is fast approaching, and with it the deadline for high-school seniors to commit to a college. At kitchen tables across the country, anxious students and their parents are asking: Does it really matter where I go to school?
When it comes to lifetime earnings, we’ve been told, a bachelor’s degree pays off six times more than a high-school diploma. The credential is all that matters, not where it’s from–a view now widely accepted. That’s one reason why college enrollment jumped by a third last decade and why for-profit schools that make getting a diploma ultraconvenient now enroll 1 in 10 college students. But is it true that all colleges sprinkle their graduates with the same magic dust?
With unemployment among college graduates at historic highs and outstanding student-loan debt at $1 trillion, the question families should be asking is whether it’s worth borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for a degree from Podunk U. if it’s just a ticket to a barista’s job at Starbucks. When it comes to calculating the return on your investment, where you go to school does matter to your bank account later in life.
Not surprisingly, research has found that a degree from a name-brand elite college, whether it’s Harvard, Stanford or Amherst, carries a premium for earnings. But the 50 wealthiest and most selective colleges and universities in the U.S. enroll less than 4% of students. For everyone else, the statistics show that choosing just any college, at any cost for a credential, may no longer be worth it.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

A legislative move to expand a planned audit of the University of Wisconsin System is entirely appropriate given the recent revelation that the system has $648 million in reserves spread across hundreds and possibly thousands of accounts.
Students and families who faced 5.5% tuition increases in recent years deserve to know why those increases were necessary when university officials were setting aside money in those accounts for various purposes. Couldn’t the university have set aside fewer funds, still have a (albeit smaller) contingency and not raised tuition?
The public also deserves to know more about the reserves, including where the money came from, how the university determined the level of reserves and how the funds are allocated across the system. Are those funds in interest-bearing accounts?
And university officials need to address issues of transparency and accountability. Legislators are rightly angry that they were unaware of the size of the reserve funds, which came to light in a report by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. That should not have been the case.
University officials have acknowledged that they should have been more forthcoming about the numbers and should have done a better job of explaining them. Absolutely: System officials have mishandled this from the moment the report came to light, and they haven’t been getting much better. It’s a public relations disaster for the UW System.

Alan Borsuk:

Let’s take a trip to the basement of Wisconsin educational success.
The spotlight on student success is almost always on the top levels – “advanced” and “proficient,” as they are labeled. I’ve done it that way for years myself, focusing on what percentage of kids were doing well.
How many were at what I would call the ground level of success (labeled “basic”) or basement level (“minimal”) got little attention.
But as I strolled through some of the scores for schools across the state that were released last week by the state Department of Public Instruction, I found my focus shifting to the “minimal” totals.
Why? The results differ so dramatically from previous years. The bar for putting a student in the higher categories for reading and math has been raised sharply, which means the number of students in those categories has fallen sharply. There are a lot more kids in the basement now – 24% of all test-takers in the state were rated “minimal” in reading, compared to 5% a year ago.
We’ve never given a school respect for keeping down the number of kids who show minimal proficiency. In the new approach, maybe it’s time to do that. That’s especially true in Milwaukee, where students at high-risk of not doing well are so plentiful.
There is a wide variation from school to school in how many students are rated “minimal,” as compared to “basic,” even in schools dealing with similarly challenging kids. There are schools with extraordinary concentrations of “minimal” kids, which I take as not a good sign about the school.

In Business:

Kids have been trying to sneak portable electronic devices into classrooms for decades. From the old Coleco handheld football game to today’s smart phones, anything that glowed, made obnoxious noises, and could fit neatly inside a knapsack was enough to satisfy kids’ appetite for distraction.
Well, here’s some bad news for students: Your ongoing rebellion will now have to take another form. For fun, try sneaking a slide rule onto campus. But bring your iPad. You’re going to need it for class.
“The way that technology has provided mass customization to many other industries, it’s starting to do the same thing for education.” – Jon Tanner, Oregon School District
The technological revolution that’s overtaking the business world, our social lives, and nearly every other nook and cranny of society is quickly reshaping education, and locally, the Oregon School District is among the leaders in the movement.
At the December School Leaders Advancing Technology in Education (SLATE) conference, participants identified preparing for advances in technology as the number one issue facing Wisconsin schools.

500K PDF, via a kind reader’s email.

The Economist

ABOVE the entrance to America’s Supreme Court four words are carved: “Equal justice under law”. The court is pondering whether affirmative action breaks that promise. The justices recently accepted a case concerning a vote in Michigan that banned it, and will soon rule on whether the University of Texas’s race-conscious admissions policies are lawful. The question in both cases is as simple as it is divisive: should government be colour-blind?
America is one of many countries where the state gives a leg-up to members of certain racial, ethnic, or other groups by holding them to different standards. The details vary. In some countries, the policy applies only to areas under direct state control, such as public-works contracts or admission to public universities. In others, private firms are also obliged to take account of the race of their employees, contractors and even owners. But the effects are strikingly similar around the world (see article).
The burden of history
Many of these policies were put in place with the best of intentions: to atone for past injustices and ameliorate their legacy. No one can deny that, for example, blacks in America or dalits in India (members of the caste once branded “untouchable”) have suffered grievous wrongs, and continue to suffer discrimination. Favouring members of these groups seems like a quick and effective way of making society fairer.
Most of these groups have made great progress. But establishing how much credit affirmative action can take is hard, when growth also brings progress and some of the good–for example the confidence-boosting effect of creating prominent role models for a benighted group–is intangible. And it is impossible to know how a targeted group would have got on without this special treatment. Malays are three times richer in Singapore, where they do not get preferences, than in next-door Malaysia, where they do. At the same time, the downside of affirmative action has become all too apparent.

The Economist:

WILLIAM POWERS is the president of the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin). Lino Graglia holds an endowed chair at its law school. Both have kindly demeanours, impressive records and that crucial perk of academic success, offices with great views: Mr Powers looks out over the heart of the university’s campus, Mr Graglia at its football stadium.
They also hold strong and opposing opinions on whether admissions to their state-run university ought to take account of race. Mr Powers believes that using “race as one factor in an overall holistic view of the candidate” helps the university build a diverse campus, an achievement which has “an educational value for all of our students”. Mr Graglia thinks “lower[ing] standards to admit members of preferred groups” is “a bad idea”.
America has a number of policies and practices designed to increase the presence of minorities in various areas of life from which they have historically been excluded. But the role of such affirmative action in university admissions has garnered the most attention. Schools and universities provided many of America’s desegregation battlegrounds. And gaining entry to America’s elite universities is difficult; the perception, right or wrong, that race can in some circumstances trump merit strikes many as unjust, not least because universities play a large role in social mobility.
The Supreme Court is about to weigh in on the matter. In March it agreed to hear a case that could determine whether a state may ban affirmative action in university admissions on the basis of a referendum. In 2006 a majority of Michigan’s voters approved such a measure, but last November a federal appellate court ruled that the measure violates the equal-protection clause of the constitution, which requires states to treat all citizens equally, by preventing affirmative-action supporters from pressing their case to individual universities. And the court will soon rule on a suit brought against UT-Austin by Abigail Fisher, a white woman who was not admitted to the university

Tom Beebe:

Many observers have called Gov.Scott Walker’s proposal to expand private school vouchers bad education policy. I agree. Today I would like to address voucher expansion from the perspective of fiscal policy.
If voucher advocates are successful in expanding private school vouchers in this budget, vouchers will eventually become one of the largest taxpayer-funded entitlements in Wisconsin.
I realize this is a strong statement. I also understand that voucher proponents argue the Governor’s proposal increases voucher eligibility to just nine new school districts in 2013-14. If you let the nose of the camel inside the tent, however, it won’t be long before the rest of the camel is inside the tent as well.
The ultimate objective of private school voucher advocates is a statewide system of private school vouchers for all Wisconsin school children. Voucher advocates, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, have repeatedly voiced their support for statewide vouchers. This objective became crystal-clear in a recent news interview when School Choice Wisconsin Vice-President Terry Brown identified the goal of voucher proponents as “a voucher in every backpack.”
So, how much could this entitlement end up costing Wisconsin taxpayers?

NPR Around the Nation:

In his cover story for the April 29 issue of The New Republic, “The Hell of American Day Care,” Jonathan Cohn writes that “trusting your child with someone else is one of the hardest things a parent has to do — and in the U.S., it’s harder still, because American day care is a mess. And about 40 percent of children under 5 spend at least part of their week in the care of somebody other than a parent.”
Cohn’s article examines how we ended up with a day care system that is barely regulated and sometimes unsafe. It’s a system that is difficult for many working parents to afford, yet offers many of its workers a barely livable income.
“One of the tragedies of the situation,” Cohn tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, “is that parents need these day cares to work, to make a living. You’re talking about single parents a lot of the time. You’re talking about families that aren’t making a lot of money. They desperately need someone to watch the kids or they’re not going to be able to make it, and there are just not a lot of options out there.”

Mike Ford:

I had my first chance to read through the new Milwaukee Public School (MPS) budget proposal yesterday, and I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. Compared to trends of the last decade or so, things are definitely looking better for the district.
Most important, MPS is increasing their staffing in key areas next year. Despite all the talk about governance structure the most important place in education is the school itself. MPS is increasing its school level staffing by 120.8 full-time-equivalent employees in FY14. A good number of those positions, 51, are teachers and educational assistants (though on the negative side the federal sequestration is responsible for the loss of 24 title 1 teachers). The district is also adding assistant principals, safety assistants, social workers, and nurse associates in schools. All of this is particularly impressive when overall enrollment is projected to decline 1%.
So how did they do this? A big part is the aggressive action the district has taken to reduce its benefit costs. MPS notes in their budget that their average teacher salary is increasing but their “school operations and categorical benefit” rate will drop to 58.4% from almost 70% just two years ago. Part of this is due to Act 10, and part of this is due to the willingness of MPS to take needed action.

Milwaukee’s $1,170,867,945 budget will spend $15,011 for each of its 78,000 students during the 2013-2014 school year. Madison spends a similar amount per student.

M. D. Kittle:

In January 2011, just as one of the most tumultuous sessions of the Wisconsin Legislature was getting underway, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett wrote an urgent letter to state Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills.
Barrett begged the lawmaker to push forward legislation that would transfer control of vacant and underutilized Milwaukee Public Schools real estate to the city of Milwaukee.
The mayor described the sad state of affairs in some Milwaukee neighborhoods, where “once thriving parts of their communities now sit barren and quiet.”
What the city needed, Barrett wrote, was a law that would allow the city to “take a more holistic approach to the management of these assets by addressing the needs and concerns of neighborhoods where buildings stand vacant as well as better meeting the educational needs of our community.”

M. D. Kittle:

The governor also touched on statewide proficiency data released by the state Department of Public Instruction earlier this week.
DPI on Tuesday released test scores comparing Milwaukee Parental Choice Program students to Milwaukee Public Schools students, failing to account for disparate income levels between the students.
“The vast majority of families in that program are low income,” Walker said. “If you compare the same income categories of students who come from families in Milwaukee Public Schools with Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, you’ll find that in almost every category the kids in the choice schools outperform those in the public schools.”
He added he wanted all schools to perform better.
DPI’s release showed that 19.4 percent of MPS students were proficient or advanced in mathematics compared to 13.2 percent MPCP students participating in the Wisconsin Student Assessment System.
It also showed 14.2 percent of MPS students were proficient or advanced in reading, compared to 11.1 percent of MPCP students.
Data released by the voucher advocacy organization School Choice Wisconsin, however, showed that MPCP students outperformed MPS students everywhere except math, including reading, language arts, science and social studies when comparing only students in low income families.
Free and reduced lunch is available for students whose parents earn less than 185 percent of the federal poverty line, about $41,000 for a family of four. Until last school year, the income eligibility for the school choice program was 175 percent of the federal poverty line.

Christian D’Andrea:

High school dropouts adversely impact the state of Wisconsin each year–financially and socially. Dropouts’ lower incomes, high unemployment rates, increased need for medical care, and higher propensity for incarceration create a virtual vortex that consumes Wisconsinites’ tax dollars at a vicious rate. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on these high school dropouts every year.
Not only does the state spend hundreds of millions of dollars on high school dropouts, the Wisconsin economy missed out on $3.7 billion in 2011 due to a lower average income for residents without a diploma.
This study examines the state’s costs across three major state funding mechanisms: state tax collections, Medicaid expenses, and the costs of incarceration. All three aspects compose substantial parts of Wisconsin’s operating budget. In 2010 alone, prison expenses cost the state more than $874 million (1).
However, these costs could be reduced if the state had a smaller population of these under-educated adults. By eliminating a group of residents that typically relies more on state-based aid and is more likely to end up in prison, Wisconsin could save hundreds of millions of dollars each year. These funds could have instead been invested in other efforts to improve the lives of Wisconsinites across the Badger State.

Chris Rickert:

“Our teachers haven’t had a raise for the last three years.” — Ed Hughes, clerk and candidate for president of the Madison School Board
There are a lot of employees who haven’t seen their pay go up in three years, but the vast majority of Madison public school teachers aren’t among them.
And yet, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re taking home more money.
Confused? Welcome to the world of public school teacher compensation, post-Act 10.
Hughes isn’t the first public school representative whose definition of “raise” doesn’t jibe with the way the rest of the world defines “raise” — i.e., an increase in salary for a job well done.
During teachers union contract negotiations, public school and union officials routinely refer to a “raise” as something that is distinct from and in addition to the automatic bumps in salary teachers are already getting for remaining on the job and accruing more college credit. Essentially, such raises are across-the-board increases in a district’s salary range, known as a salary schedule.
But if a district refuses to increase that range, teachers continue to get longevity and degree-attainment pay raises under the old salary schedule.
It’s such parsing that allows Hughes to say teachers haven’t gotten raises — and to be right, at least in one context.

Related: MTI & The Madison School Board, written by Ed Hughes in 2005:

The WSJ article also states that “This year’s salary and benefits increase, including raises for seniority or advanced degrees, was projected at 4.9 percent, or $8.48 million.” So the school board, with all the budgetary problems it confronts, is apparently willing to pay for salaries and benefits an increase that is about twice as much as state law will permit the overall budget to rise next year, and $1.9 million more than the amount necessary to avoid arbitration. (Using the same numbers, a 3.8% increase would be $6.57 million.)
What could be the justification for this? I understand that, as a practical matter, the increase has to be more than 3.8% in order for the district to obtain any sort of concessions. (Across the state for 2004-2005, the average total package increase per teacher was 4.28%.) Does anyone know if there are concessions on the table that might explain what seems to be an excessive increase in these difficult times? Or what other justification for this level of increase there might be?

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.
Status Quo Costs More: Madison Schools’ Administration Floats a 7.38% Property Tax Increase; Dane County Incomes down 4.1%…. District Received $11.8M Redistributed State Tax Dollar Increase last year. Spending up 6.3% over the past 16 months.

130K PDF:

Much more on incoming Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, here.

Paul Fain:

Earlier this year Capella University and the new College for America began enrolling hundreds of students in academic programs without courses, teaching professors, grades, deadlines or credit hour requirements, but with a path to genuine college credit.
The two institutions are among a growing number that are giving competency-based education a try, including 25 or so nonprofit institutions. Notable examples include Western Governors University and the Kentucky Community and Technical College System.
These programs are typically online, and allow students to progress at their own pace without formal course material. They can earn credit by successfully completing assessments that prove their mastery in predetermined competencies or tasks — maybe writing in a business setting or using a spreadsheet to perform calculations.
College for America and a small pilot program at Capella go a step further than the others, however, by severing any link to the credit hour standard. This approach is called “direct assessment.” Other competency-based programs track learning back to seat time under the credit hour, which assumes one hour of instruction and three hours of coursework per week. (For more details from College for America, click here.)

Ry Rivard:

Online higher education is increasingly hailed as a chance for educators in the developed world to expand access and quality across the globe.
Yet it may not be quite so easy. Not only does much of the world not have broadband or speak English, but American-made educational material may be unfit for and unwanted in developing countries, according to academics who have worked for years on online distance education and with open educational resources, or OER.
Their experience raises questions about a utopian vision. This vision foresees online courses bringing education to students of all longitudes and latitudes, while reducing the need for brick-and-mortar universities. This goal of “democratizing education” using technology is gaining popular appeal among investors, some professors, pundits, politicians and the public amid the recent craze for massive open online courses, or MOOCs. But some scholars question whether an American-based effort can do this. While MOOCs are new, scholars have wrestled with questions about cultural barriers for years in the OER community.
Some educators worry a one-way transfer of educational materials from the rich north to the poor south will amount to a wave of “intellectual neo-colonialism.”
Lani Gunawardena is the co-author of a forthcoming book on global culture and online education. She said some global distance education evangelists tend to assume everybody speaks English and has the same priorities as they do.

John Tierney:

It’s always hard to tell for sure exactly when a revolution starts. Is it when a few discontented people gather in a room to discuss how the ruling regime might be opposed? Is it when first shots are fired? When a critical mass forms and the opposition acquires sufficient weight to have a chance of prevailing? I’m not an expert on revolutions, but even I can see that a new one is taking shape in American K-12 public education.
The dominant regime for the past decade or more has been what is sometimes called accountability-based reform or, by many of its critics, “corporate education reform.” The reforms consist of various initiatives aimed at (among other things): improving schools and educational outcomes by using standardized tests to measure what students are learning; holding schools and teachers accountable (through school closures and teacher pay cuts) when their students are “lagging” on those standardized assessments; controlling classroom instruction and increasing the rigor of school curricula by pushing all states to adopt the same challenging standards via a “Common Core;” and using market-like competitive pressures (through the spread of charter schools and educational voucher programs) to provide public schools with incentives to improve.
Critics of the contemporary reform regime argue that these initiatives, though seemingly sensible in their original framing, are motivated by interests other than educational improvement and are causing genuine harm to American students and public schools. Here are some of the criticisms: the reforms have self-interest and profit motives, not educational improvement, as their basis; corporate interests are reaping huge benefits from these reform initiatives and spending millions of dollars lobbying to keep those benefits flowing; three big foundations (Gates, Broad, and Walton Family) are funding much of the backing for the corporate reforms and are spending billions to market and sell reforms that don’t work; ancillary goals of these reforms are to bust teacher unions, disempower educators, and reduce spending on public schools; standardized testing is enormously expensive in terms both of public expenditures and the diversion of instruction time to test prep; over a third of charter schools deliver “significantly worse” results for students than the traditional public schools from which they were diverted; and, finally, that these reforms have produced few benefits and have actually caused harm, especially to kids in disadvantaged areas and communities of color. (On that last overall point, see this scathing new report from the Economic Policy Institute.)

Bob Dean, via a kind Laurie Rogers email:

The belief that high-stakes testing will bring any improvement to our public schools is built on an ounce of wishful thinking, a pound of good intentions and a ton of ignorance.
Consider the recent history of high-stakes testing in the State of Washington. We spent more than a decade and a billion dollars on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) only to find that the test was deeply flawed. The WASL didn’t align with college or career readiness, and it basically tried to measure student achievement of standards that were so poorly written they were impossible to measure by any kind of assessment.
Despite these major flaws, legislators, the public, business leaders and most of the media ignorantly assumed that something meaningful was happening by requiring students to pass this bogus exam. Unfortunately, the only meaningful thing that was happening was teachers throughout our state were forced to try and teach to this test despite the fact that it didn’t align to anything that was important for students to know. The WASL was a test built around standards that de-emphasized student content knowledge and supposedly would teach students to think more deeply and become expert problem solvers. In the end, the main problem that many students now have to solve is how to go through life being mathematically illiterate.

Susan Matt and Luke Fernandez:

In 1937, as she lay ill in bed, Annie Oakes Huntington, a writer living in Maine, thought of ways to spend her time. She confided in a letter: “The radio has been a source of unfailing diversion this winter. I expect to enter all the courses at Harvard to be broadcasted.” Huntington was joining in an educational experiment sweeping the country in the 1920s and 30s: massive open on-air courses.
As educators contemplate the MOOCs of our day–massive open online courses–they would do well to consider how earlier generations dealt with technology-enhanced education.
We are not the first generation to believe that technology can transcend distance and erode ignorance. Nearly a century ago, educators were convinced that radio held that same potential. The number of radios in the United States increased from six or seven thousand to 10 million between 1921 and 1928. Many universities explored the possibility of broadcasting courses across the country and allowing anyone to enroll. Some onlookers believed those courses would transform higher education and eliminate lecture halls and seminar rooms. One observer noted, “The nation has become the new campus,” while another celebrated the “‘University of the Air,’ whose campus is the ether of the earth, whose audience waits for learning, learning, learning.”

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (PDF):

This report includes data from the Fall 2012 Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE). In this report, we focus on reading and math scores. Students in grades 4, 8, and 10 also take Science, Social Studies, and Language Arts tests, but these tests are not used for school accountability in the same manner as Reading and Math tests and are not aligned to the new rigorous standards, so they are not directly comparable.
This year, WKCE results reflect the state’s transition to the Common Core State Standards in that DPI has adjusted the cut scores for each performance level to reflect higher expectations for student proficiency. As a result, MMSD’s scores (and scores for every district in the state) look very different from prior years.
1. The new cut scores can be applied to last year’s scores to provide a more meaningful year-to-year comparison. Scores have remained roughly unchanged from last year when the same scale is used.
2. Achievement gaps between subgroups of students exist across grades and locations and show few signs of either increasing or decreasing.
3. Scores showed some changes from last year at the building level, but these changes were mostly small.
4. Schools with more students scoring “Advanced” in Fall 2011 faced smaller negative impacts from the new performance cut scores.
In addition, overall proficiency rates in MMSD are close to state averages. Asian and White students in MMSD significantly outperform the state averages for their racial groups in both Reading and Math. In addition, large achievement gaps exist statewide as well as within MMSD.

Much more on the oft-criticized WKCE, here.

Mike Ivey:

If Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature move forward with a vow to freeze tuition at the University of Wisconsin for the next two years, they have some numbers to stand on.
Wisconsin has seen the largest percentage tuition increase of Midwestern state universities over the past five years, according to The College Board, with tuition and fees up 23 percent for in-state undergraduate students. UW tuition has risen 5.5 percent each year since 2007 but had jumped even more in previous years — including an 18.7 percent hike in 2003 at some campuses.
But Wisconsin certainly isn’t the only state where the cost of college continues to rise at public colleges. The College Board data show increases of 21 percent in Minnesota and Illinois and 20 percent in Michigan over the past five years, just under Wisconsin’s 23 percent. Nationally, increases since 2007 have ranged from 78 percent in Arizona and 72 percent in California to 2 percent in Maryland and 3 percent in Ohio.
Despite the increases, tuition at the UW remains largely in the middle of the pack compared to other states, as reported by The College Board.

BBC:

Within four years, a quarter of sixth formers at a leading UK independent school will be heading for universities in the United States.
That’s the prediction of Anthony Seldon, head of Wellington College in Berkshire.
Dr Seldon, one of the UK’s most prominent head teachers, says that ambitious teenagers are looking further afield than ever before in their university choices.
The lure of well-funded US universities, with more broad-based course options, is proving increasingly attractive to youngsters in the UK, he says.
At a recent talk with pupils, he said that about 40% claimed to want to go to US universities, with the expectation that many of these will actually go on to enrol.

Rohin Dhar:

Applying to colleges in the United States is a stressful, competitive process. In 1970, the acceptance rate at Stanford University was 22.4%. Today, only 5.7% of applicants are accepted into the school. Across the country, nearly every top school like Harvard, MIT and Yale are reporting record-low acceptance rates. The number of students applying to elite colleges is exploding, and those applicants have better test scores than ever. It’s never been harder to get into a selective university.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Here in Madison, our attention is primarily focused on our troubling achievement gaps, and those gaps are achingly apparent in the new WKCE scores. Under new superintendent Jen Cheatham’s leadership, we’ll continue to pursue the most promising steps to accelerate the learning of our African-American, Latino and Hmong students who have fallen behind.
At the same time, we also need to continue to meet the needs of our students who are doing well. I am going to focus on the latter groups of students in this post.
In particular, I want to take a look at how our Madison students stack up against those attending schools in other Dane County school districts under the new WKCE scoring scale. The demographics of our Madison schools are quite a bit different from those of our surrounding school districts. This can skew comparisons. To control for this a bit, I am going to compare the performance of Dane County students who do not fall into the “economically disadvantaged” category. I’ll refer to these students as “non-low income.”

I took a quick look at property taxes in Middleton and Madison on a $230,000 home. A Middleton home paid $4,648.16 in 2012 while a Madison home paid 16% more, or $5,408.38. Local efforts to significantly increase property taxes may grow the gap with Middleton.

Ron Lipsman:

Easy question. Administrators do. Odd as it may sound today, faculties have long assumed the right and duty to set the campus agenda–to establish admission standards, control research and curriculum, run visiting speaker programs, and set the academic and professional criteria on which promotions, prizes and appointments are based.
Historically, the faculty actually did control these things, in part because it was viewed as the natural way to run a university, and partly because there were no countervailing forces to prevent it. The administrative layers that accompanied and facilitated faculty control of campuses were fairly thin. That is, the percentage of professional, full-time campus administrators was small compared to that of the faculty. Furthermore, many of them were drawn from the ranks of the faculty (to which they returned after relatively brief stints in campus administration) and so although these faculty functioned as administrators, they still thought of themselves as faculty and comported themselves accordingly.
The Army of Deans
All of this has changed dramatically over the last fifty years. The number of campus administrators has exploded. Instead of a single dean of an all-encompassing college of arts and sciences, we see a host of deans spearheading numerous units into which the large college has been split. These deans enjoy the support of a gaggle of assistant and associate deans, dragging in tow scores more chairs, heads and directors. This is accompanied by a proliferation of new academic units on campus – e.g., Urban Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies and countless other “Studies” departments representing “compelling” fields of academic study that we didn’t know existed in mid-twentieth century.

Bruce Vielmetti:

A group of veteran Neenah teachers has sued to restore early retirement benefits that could amount to $170,000 each.
The suit was expected since February, when the School Board denied a group of teachers’ demand to restore them to the original early retirement deal eliminated last year after Act 10.
The named plaintiffs are six “distinguished teachers,” but the suit, filed Monday in Winnebago County Circuit Court, seeks to represent a class including more than 250 teachers who had been eligible to participate in the former early retirement plan.
Their attorney, Charles Hertel, said Neenah Joint School District administrators used the plan for years to recruit teachers, and to induce them to accept lower-than-market salaries. Many teachers’ retirement planning was based on the expectations of the later payouts, he said.
The lawsuit asserts four claims: that the district must be held to promises on which teachers relied, that cutting the plan amounts to unjust enrichment for the district and negligent misrepresentation and strict responsibility.
The suit seeks compensatory damages, costs and enforcement of the retirement plan.

St. Marcus Superintendent Henry Tyson, via a kind reader’s email:

Dear supporters of St. Marcus School,


I need your help in setting the story straight. Perhaps you read the bold headline in the local section of the Journal Sentinel yesterday — “Wisconsin voucher students lag in latest state test.” That claim is not accurate. You need to understand that this is misinformation about the Choice program. I want you to know the truth — and be our voices in sharing this with others.
The state released the 2012 WKCE test scores this week, conveniently comparing the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) to all of Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and showing that MPS “beat” MPCP in every subject area.
Unfortunately, this is a gross misrepresentation of reality and is not an “apples to apples” comparison. The information that was released FAILED to do the appropriate comparison of MPS low-income students to MPCP, whose students are almost ENTIRELY from low-income families. When doing an accurate comparison of MPCP to MPS’s low-income population, choice schools beat MPS in all subjects except math. (Remember MPS has many students who are not in poverty and are high-achieving. By nature, almost allMPCP students are low-income.)
Beyond the program averages, our St. Marcus students are doing tremendously well, outpacing both the MPS and MPCP numbers by wide margins:



This may seem unimportant, since people are often negative about the choice program. However, it is actually very important at this time to set the record straight. Legislators are reading this misinformation, our supporters are reading this misinformation and so is the general public. At a time when there is much debate about the amount of the choice voucher funding and the expansion of the program, it is essential that we set the record straight. We need to get correct information to our supporters and legislators immediately!
At St. Marcus, it has been demonstrated that it is possible to educate the urban poor, even very poor children, in a highly effective manner. To protect the well-being of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and to enable St. Marcus to continue to grow and deliver excellent education to more students please take ACTION:
Forward this e-mail to your friends and certainly any legislators you know.
Contact your legislator directly and encourage them to support an increase in the voucher amount for MPCP schools. (Unbelievably, the current voucher amount of $6,451 is lower than the voucher amount back in 2006!)
Thanks for acting in support of your friends at St. Marcus and the awesome students achieving great things in schools like ours.
If you have any other questions or concerns, you can contact me.
Blessings,
Henry Tyson, Superintendent
414-303-2133
henry.tyson@stmarcus.org

Listen to a 2012 interview with Henry Tyson, here.
The Wisconsin State Journal:

The lower scores do not reflect falling performance. Students just need to know more to rank as high as they used to.
Most states are doing the same thing and will benchmark their exams to international standards.
Just as importantly, the computerized assessments of the near future will adjust to the ability of students. That will give parents and educators much better, more detailed and timely information about what students know and what they still need to learn.
Some critics will disparage any and all testing, pretending it will be the only measure Wisconsin will use for success. Others have lamented the increasing role of the federal government in the process.

Phil Hands cartoon.

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin:

A reporter recently asked me how often I planned to meet with Madisons’ new school Superintendent, Jennifer Cheatham.
I do not know and frankly, I am wondering why it matters.
How often we meet will be driven by a number of yet to be determined factors. And more important than how often we meet, is the matter of improved performance for Madison school children.
It is the difference between outputs and outcomes. The number of miles of street we plow is an output, the measurement of the quality of the job is an outcome. The number of teenagers who attend a class on abstinence or receive condoms is an output, the number of teenage pregnancies is an outcome.
We need to focus on outcomes. We need to measure performance and ensure that educational attainment improves.
How often Superintendent Cheatham and I meet will be determined by the agenda, the role of our respective staffs, and other factors.
It is possible that we may find regular quarterly meetings too frequent, we may find that monthly meetings are not frequent enough. We don’t know yet. But I do not plan to measure the success of the district’s students by the number of meetings.

Much more on Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, here.
Refreshing.

Christopher Levenick:

John Kirtley smiled. It was March in Tallahassee, and the morning sun was already warming the immense crowd before him. Some 5,600 people had gathered in front of the Leon County Civic Center–more than 1,000 of whom were arriving after a 14-hour overnight bus ride from Miami. Still, the energy in the air was palpable. Excited schoolchildren clutched hand-lettered signs: “Don’t Take Away My Dreams,” “Education Through Choice.” Parents chatted with teachers as clergymen greeted newcomers. It was a diverse crowd, predominantly black and Hispanic. Kirtley knew it had gathered for a single purpose: to convince the 2010 Florida legislature to strengthen the state’s school choice program.
A little after 10 a.m., the crowd began heading east along Madison Street. Kirtley walked at the head of the procession, alongside the Rev. H. K. Matthews, an 82-year-old African-American minister who had marched in Selma. Together they proceeded by the sprawling headquarters of the Florida Department of Education. They marched past the state’s tidy Supreme Court. When the crowd ultimately reached the capitol, it was the largest political rally in the state’s history.
Charlie Crist, then the Governor of Florida, welcomed the crowd. Dignitaries lined up to address them: Al Lawson, the Democratic leader of the Florida state Senate; Julio Fuentes, president of the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options; Anitere Flores, Florida state Representative. Representing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, James Bush III proclaimed the support of the civil rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. The crowd roared.
Kirtley had helped organize the march to put the legislators on notice. Since 2001, Florida had offered dollar-for-dollar tax credits to corporations that contributed to state-approved scholarship organizations. (Those organizations in turn offered partial scholarships to low-income families, giving parents the resources to pay tuition at a private school of their choice.) Funding for the program, however, had always been capped. Offering more scholarships meant passing a new cap. The school choice program was forever in jeopardy, an election away from a hostile governor or legislature.

Jen Gerson:

Mount Royal University says it simply can’t afford to teach theatre anymore. Facing a 10% cut in its spending, the program is on the chopping block, along with music performance, disability studies and certificate programs in forensics, aging studies, perinatal care and journalism.
The school, which is in Alberta premier Alison Redford’s own riding, has lamented the prospect of losing the disciplines.
“I was sick by the time I talked to people,” the school’s provost Manuel Mertin told the Calgary Herald.
“I never imagined I would have to do this.”
Mr. Mertin is likely not going to be the last provost in Canada to cut offerings in the face of fiscal reality. As government coffers are squeezed by a slow economy, demographics, and increasing healthcare costs, there are signs that bean counters and reformers across the country are ready to take the red pen to post-secondary education programs.

Apple Post-Crescent:

This chart ranks each of Wisconsin’s 424 public school districts based on four criteria: report card score, enrollment, average teacher salary and district administrator salary. The report card score is an average of the district schools’ individual scores from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction report cards issues in October. The average is not official, as DPI does not generate a district-wide score. It does not factor in schools that were not able to be scored — a group that includes many charter schools — and could downgrade some districts because schools fell short on certain criteria individually that the district would not have lost points on if scored as a whole. The district administrator salary is as reported to DPI and does not account for administrators who served partial years or hold other jobs in addition to district administrator. Districts with no data for a given field are denoted with a ranking of 999.

Jeffrey Solochek:

By now it’s evident that leaders of the national education “reform” movement like to compare outcomes and hand out grades, whether looking at teacher pay, school test results or just trying to show how Florida is doing in comparison to Illinois.
Florida education commissioner (and former basketball coach) Tony Bennett likes the concept so much he keeps an actual scoreboard in his office. As he said his first day in office, “Today, I brought out the infamous student achievement scoreboard that I kept outside my office as Indiana’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction. In my new position as Florida’s Commissioner of Education, I will keep the scoreboard up as a constant reminder to me and my colleagues of the importance of accountability in measuring teacher and student success.”

Richard Adams:

Sal Khan has a simple mission: a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Naturally, people think he’s crazy. The craziest part is not the “world-class education” part, because plenty of people want that. And it’s not even the “for anyone, anywhere” part. It’s the “free” part.
Crazy or not, it’s an idea that has attracted attention from Downing Street to Washington DC. And like a lot of crazy ideas, it started by accident.
Khan – working as a financial analyst in 2004 after earning degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard – started remotely tutoring his cousin, Nadia, in Louisiana, who was struggling with maths. “Then the rest of the family heard there was free tutoring,” he says, and more relatives started taking part. The demands got too much – until a friend suggested he could film the tutorials, post them on YouTube and let the family members view them whenever they chose.
“YouTube? YouTube was for cats playing the piano, not serious mathematics,” Khan recalls thinking. “I got over the idea that it wasn’t my idea and decided to give it a shot.”

John Fallon:

The education world spends a lot of time talking about ‘next generation learning’, but what does it really mean? I have been reading Michael Fullan’s excellent book, Stratosphere*, and I think he can help us nail both what we mean by the concept and what we need to do to ensure that it delivers for learners.
I’ve been struck by the clarity with which Fullan sets out how the ultimate goal – doubling learning at half the cost – can be achieved if we can combine pedagogy (especially how to learn and the opportunities to learn differently) with technology (and the huge, ever-expanding series of data it opens up), and engage the whole education system (in terms of how to change, and knowing what to do with all that data and information).
But what is most striking, perhaps, is Fullan’s four criteria for successfully integrating technology and pedagogy to make sure it works – it needs to be irresistibly engaging; elegantly efficient and easy to use; technologically ubiquitous 24/7; and steeped in real-life problems and problem-solving skills.
It’s a compelling vision for online learning, but also a vital one if we all want to use technology to scale and really solve some of the biggest problems in global education.

Pearson is a large education publisher.

The Economist:

FEW school subjects are so divisive. When Michael Gove, Britain’s education secretary, released draft changes to the country’s national curriculum in February it was his plan for history that created headlines. Mr Gove’s proposal called for history to be studied “as a coherent, chronological narrative”, beginning with the early Britons and ending with the cold war. Opponents said the syllabus overstressed the deeds of “posh white blokes” and underplayed those of minorities. “Unteachable, unlearnable and un-British” blasted a campaign group on April 10th. Rival camps of historians have published petitions and rowed on television. That shoot-out will last beyond the official consultation period, which closes next week.
Politicians with an axe to grind have often twisted history books, lionising characters they admire and tainting ones they do not. In March Dmitry Livanov, Russia’s education minister, promised a new textbook to replace the 80 or so in use. That looks like an effort by Vladimir Putin’s government to commandeer Russian history and partially sanitise Stalin (though Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” is also taught in schools). But the rumpus in Britain reflects a deeper and more subtle argument dividing school staff rooms around the world–one with broader consequences. As well as tussling over the content of courses, parents, teachers and politicians are now discussing the techniques by which history is taught, and debating what the discipline is for.

Schoolmattersmke:

Since new test cut scores designed to raise standards in reading and math was adopted last year, many school systems have to adjust to having less students rated “proficient” or “advanced” than in recent years.
In a statement Tuesday, MPS Superintendent Gregory Thornton noted that MPS students continued to outperform their counterparts who used publicly funded vouchers. According to the results, MPS students scored 3.4 higher than voucher students in reading and 6.5 points higher in math.
But nobody could deny the overall results of the standardized testing revealed daunting problems still remain with under-performing students in Milwaukee Public Schools.
In his remarks, Thornton praised the results but noted there was more to do.
“We have seen some promising increases in achievement among students who have historically underperformed,” Thornton said. “We are working hard to make sure that the significant reforms we have put in place … will yield stronger results in the coming years.”

Daniel Willingham:

My Facebook feed today has lots of links to this article. The upshot: a new Pew study showing that Americans think that US 15 year olds rank “near the bottom” on international science tests, whereas the truth is that they “rank in the middle among developed countries.”
I guess “the middle” covers a lot of terrain, but the way I look at the data, this assertion doesn’t hold.
The international comparison in question is the 2009 PISA. Here are the rankings. (Click for larger image)

Related: www.wisconsin2.org.

Charlie Mas:

Tomorrow evening the School Board will conduct an oversight work session to review the operation of the District’s Teaching and Learning. Finally. This will be the Board’s first review of Teaching and Learning EVER.
This is one of the final direct consequences of the mismanagement of the District under the Sundquist Board and Dr. Maria Goodloe-Johnson. It has been a long time coming.
After the State Auditor’s Office took the District leadership to task for their horrendous performance. In particular, the SAO called out the Board for their total failure to fulfill their statutory duties to oversee management and to enforce policy. The Board members had, until then, specifically denied that they had these duties.
In response, the Board stepped up their effort to revise policy and, in particular, the Board’s duties. This led to the development of Board Policy 1005 Responsibilities & Authority of the Board, and Board Policy 1010, Board Oversight of Management.
The latter of these policies calls for Board review of district operations with a review of each department at least every three years (originally every two years). This policy was originally adopted on June 1, 2011, but was amended in February of this year to change the review frequency from every two years to every three years.

Mike Antonucci:

I was in the midst of writing this for posting on Income Tax Day when last Monday’s tragedy occurred.
For many years we have expressed education expenditures as “per-pupil spending.” This is a reasonably good way to frame the numbers, though controversy sometimes arises over what is included and what isn’t. The following is a list of different angles on the same spending. All the figures cited are for 2010, courtesy of the National Center of Education Statistics, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the U.S. Census Bureau.
1) Revenues collected by governments for public education in the United States totaled $593.7 billion. About $261.4 billion came from local sources, $258.2 billion from state sources, and $74 billion from federal sources.

Matthew Di Carlo:

A big part of successful policy making is unyielding attention to detail (an argument that regular readers of this blog hear often). Choices about design and implementation that may seem unimportant can play a substantial role in determining how policies play out in practice.
A new paper, co-authored by Elizabeth Davidson, Randall Reback, Jonah Rockoff and Heather Schwartz, and presented at last month’s annual conference of The Association for Education Finance and Policy, illustrates this principle vividly, and on a grand scale: With an analysis of outcomes in all 50 states during the early years of NCLB.
After a terrific summary of the law’s rules and implementation challenges, as well as some quick descriptive statistics, the paper’s main analysis is a straightforward examination of why the proportion of schools meeting AYP varied quite a bit between states. For instance, in 2003, the first year of results, 32 percent of U.S. schools failed to make AYP, but the proportion ranged from one percent in Iowa to over 80 percent in Florida.
Surprisingly, the results suggest that the primary reasons for this variation seem to have had little to do with differences in student performance. Rather, the big factors are subtle differences in rather arcane rules that each state chose during the implementation process. These decisions received little attention, yet they had a dramatic impact on the outcomes of NCLB during this time period.

Encarnacion Pyle:

The rising cost of college has rekindled the debate about the value of a liberal-arts education, with governors in three states pooh-poohing such degrees as history, literature and philosophy.
But several central Ohio college officials say a liberal-arts education has never been more important as employers complain that graduates lack communication, critical-thinking and problem-solving skills.
“The problems of the 21st century — 9/11, the global economic meltdown, terrorism in Boston are complex and don’t come in neat little boxes,” said Victoria McGillin, the provost of Otterbein University, a private liberal-arts college in Westerville.

Mark Schieldrop:

Cranston teacher’s union officials filed a lawsuit against the Cranston School Committee in Superior Court today, alleging the committee could violate the terms of the union contract by voting in changes to the Basic Education Plan.
The changes include a measure that would put an end to the annual job fair, during which teachers pick assignments based on seniority and certification. State Education Commissioner Deborah Gist ordered the changes. Gist, in correspondence with the school district, threatened Cranston with the loss of state aid and stripping the superintendent’s certification, among other penalties, if the changes are not adopted.
In an interview, Cranston Teachers Alliance President Lizbeth Larkin said if the School Committee votes for the changes tonight, its members will have “abrogated” the contract. That’s what prompted the union to file the anticipatory breach of contract suit today.

Matthew DeFour:

The Madison School Board’s two newest members are voicing the strongest support for a potential 7.4 percent property tax increase, but others worry the amount may be too high.
The property tax increase was included in a preliminary $393 million budget proposal put together by school district administrators.
The amount reflects the maximum amount the district could raise property taxes under Gov. Scott Walker’s state budget proposal.
T.J. Mertz and Dean Loumos, who were sworn in Monday, said they don’t oppose taxing the maximum amount allowed under state revenue limits, which as proposed would add about $182 to the average $230,831 Madison home’s property tax bill.
Mertz plans to advocate for taxing the maximum amount, though he questioned some of the proposed new spending, such as whether a community partnership coordinator needed to be an administrative position costing $128,000.

Related: 2010: Madison School District 2010-2011 Budget Update: $5,100,000 Fund Balance Increase since June, 2009; Property Taxes to Increase 9+%.
Status Quo Costs More: Madison Schools’ Administration Floats a 7.38% Property Tax Increase; Dane County Incomes down 4.1%…. District Received $11.8M Redistributed State Tax Dollar Increase last year. Spending up 6.3% over the past 16 months.

The Madison Urban League, via a kind Kaleem Caire email:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 23, 2013
Media contact: Kaleem Caire
kcaire@ulgm.org
608.729.1249
Click Here for Urban League’s 2013-14 Agenda
State Test Scores Confirm Urban League’s Concerns and Call to Action
Madison, WI – Today, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released students’ results on the annual statewide achievement test, Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam (WKCE). The results confirm concerns raised by the Urban League of Greater Madison, that disadvantaged students and students of color are severely underperforming in many of Wisconsin’s public schools, particularly in the Madison Metropolitan School District.
All Wisconsin public school students completed the test in November 2012. This revised test raised the standards of performance for all students, thereby providing a more accurate picture of students who are on track to graduate from high school academically ready to succeed in college or a career. Test results show that all students, regardless of their race, socioeconomic status or disability, are struggling to achieve to high standards in Madison-area public schools.
This afternoon, the Urban League of Greater Madison joined Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, and leaders of other community organizations, at a press conference where Cheatham shared MMSD’s results. Cheatham presented data showing that an astounding 92% of African American and 85% of Latino students are reading below their grade level, and 90% of African American and 77% of Latino children are failing in mathematics. The data further showed that a large percentage of white students have fallen behind as well, with 42% are reading below grade level and 33% failing in math.
In reflecting on the scores, Darrell Bazzell, the Chair of Urban League’s Board of Directors said, “These numbers are a stark message that Madison’s public schools are at a tipping point and that our community must embrace change. The implications for our region are profound. For the sake of our community and our children, Madison can, and must, do better for all students and families.”
Bazzell further stated that, “Every citizen in our community must say that ‘we will no longer harbor these gaps; that we accept responsibility for addressing these challenges; and that we will commit to doing all that we can to ensure all of our children succeed. We must also acknowledge where we are not succeeding and commit to change in smart, innovative and effective ways that lead to real progress for our kids’.”
In response to these troubling statistics, Urban League President and CEO, Kaleem Caire, shared that, “When 90% of Black children cannot read at their grade level, we are significantly reducing the possibility of success for an entire generation. This issue negatively affects not only this generation of children, but also the vitality of our entire region. If not addressed quickly, it will affect the quality of the lives of all citizens who call Madison home.” To address these challenges, Caire said “The Urban League is working to build a pipeline of high quality cradle to career educational and employment services that positively impact the entire family, move all children towards high performance, and prepare youth and adults for career success.” He further highlighted, “We have already begun working with the Madison Schools, other area school districts, employers and community partners to ensure that we attack the persistence of underachievement and other contributing factors, such as poverty, at its core. ”
The Urban League’s 2013-14 Strategic Plan creates opportunities that will help the community overcome these challenges. Caire enthusiastically shared that, “We are a community of great people, great teachers and great families who are passionate about helping others transform their lives. But our passion now must become our reality.”
About the Urban League of Greater Madison
The Urban League of Greater Madison’s mission is to ensure that African Americans and other community members are educated, employed and empowered to live well, advance professionally and contribute to the common good in the 21st Century. We are committed to transforming Greater Madison into the Best [place] in the Midwest for everyone to live, learn, and work. We are working to make this vision a reality through a comprehensive strategic empowerment agenda that includes programs & services, advocacy, and partnerships & coalition building. www.ulgm.org
Urban League of Greater Madison | 2222 S. Park Street | Suite 200 | Madison | WI | 53713

Related: The rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school
Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.
The recently released WKCE results.

gradelevelreading.net:

By 2020, a dozen states or more will increase by at least 100 percent the number of children from low-income families reading proficiently at the end of third grade.
The Campaign is building a network of national and local civic leaders, policymakers, advocates, community organizations, and everyday people to assure:

Related: Madison’s disastrous reading results.