Chris Rickert:

There are a lot of good things about public-sector unions, but solidarity for solidarity’s sake isn’t always one of them.
Wisconsin’s public-sector unions wasted no time showing solidarity with Chicago’s union teachers on Monday, when the latter hit the picket lines for the first time in 25 years.
“Their fight is really our fight,” John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., told this newspaper. “Whether we’re talking about Scott Walker or (Chicago Mayor) Rahm Emanuel, it’s the same thing.”
Except it’s not, and already embattled public-sector unions risk credibility by insisting otherwise.
In Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Walker used his party’s takeover of state government last year to essentially push through the death penalty for most public-sector unions.
Unions that choose to take on the newly arduous task of recertifying can expect little more for their efforts than the right to bargain for raises limited to the rate of inflation.

Todd Finkelmeyer:

he Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reviewed budget documents from 48 states that “publish education data in a way that allows historic comparisons,” with Indiana and Hawaii being excluded from the review because they don’t do so. Overall, 35 states still are funding K-12 education below pre-recession levels, according to the paper.
“There is no doubt Wisconsin has deprioritized K-12 spending,” says Sen. John Lehman, D-Racine, who chairs the state Senate’s Committee on Education and Corrections. “Education took the biggest cuts in the history of the state” over the 2011-13 biennium.
“The cuts counteract and sometimes undermine education reform and more generally hinder the ability of school districts to deliver high-quality education, with long-term negative consequences for the nation’s economic competitiveness,” the report states.
Some, however, say there are significant problems with the review by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Todd Berry, the president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, notes that while the report purports to show changes in per-pupil spending in each state, what it’s really showing is the amount of state aid appropriated per student. He says such numbers are “particularly useless in Wisconsin given the significant role that local property taxes” play in per-pupil funding here.

The Economist:

HAVE you heard the “amazeballs” news about Collins Online English Dictionary? It’s become the “frenemy” of tradition-lovers after its recent additions of words crowdsourced from the public, which some might consider the equivalent of “mummy porn” slipping in to Shakespeare. Indeed, don’t be surprised if you spot a “bashtag” about this latest development, or someone demanding a “tweetup” to resolve the issue.
As dubious as this may sound to some, the above paragraph was legitimate English. Indeed, its veracity has passed the test of those sternest of eyes, the lexicographers at CollinsDictionary.com. These sticklers for spelling and high standards this week approved 86 new words that came in the form of online public submissions.
Of course every new dictionary has new words that upset traditionalists, and crowdsourcing is nothing new. John Simpson, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, says that in 1859 the OED appealed to readers in America “to supply material for us” and that the dictionary is an “amalgamation of editorial effort, users contribution, and academic consultants who review what we put out before we publish it”.

Brian Palmer:

The Chicago teacher strike seemed to be heading toward resolution on Thursday, although school probably won’t be back in session until next week. Among the teachers’ complaints was Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to base evaluations largely on student test scores and to expand charter schools that hire non-union teachers. Are unionized teachers better than non-unionized teachers?
It’s not clear. Despite decades of trying, no one has come up with a perfect study design to measure the effects of unionization on teacher performance. One strategy favored by economists is to ask what happens to student outcomes when the teachers in a school district unionize. These studies don’t reflect well on unions. An oft-cited 1996 study found that the high school dropout rate in a school district increases 2.3 percentage points after its teachers unionize. The study also suggested that unionization tends to soak up a district’s financial resources: When non-union districts increase salaries and reduce class size, the dropout rate decreases. In unionized districts, however, the dropout rate is virtually impervious to increased spending. Another studied, published in 2009, was slightly kinder to unions, finding that teacher unionization had no significant impact on the dropout rate.

170K PDF, via Suzanne Alexander & Dave Baskerville:

The Madison Club
5 E Wilson St., Madison, WI
Lake Dining Room
Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2012
Coffee and continental breakfast: 9:30 a.m.
Panel discussion: 10-11 a.m.
Panelists will include Democratic and Republican legislative education leaders to be determined at a later date, as well as:
Mary Bell
President
Wisconsin Education Association Council

Dr. Michael Thompson
Deputy State Superintendent
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
Dan Rossmiller
Director of Government Relations
Wisconsin Association of School Boards
Elaine Richmond
Administrator, Division of Early Care and Education
Wisconsin Department of Children and Families
The panel will be moderated by Alan Borsuk, Senior Fellow in Law and
Public Policy at the Marquette University Law School

MD Kittle:

In total, district employees racked up $44,723 worth of hotel bills and $10,036 worth of restaurant bills in last year, according to EAGnews, which reviewed district credit card statements and check registers.
On the spending list:
$15,474.22 charged at Hyatt Hotels in Chicago on July 13, 2011.
$3,133.55 at the Sheraton NY Hotel and Towers on Jan. 6, 2011.
$4,736 in charges at Hotel 71 in downtown Chicago on Dec. 19, 2011
Two transactions -each worth $288.96 – were made at the Rio Suites in Las Vegas on April 27, 2011.
$223.57 in charges at the Heidel House Resort and Spa on June 23. There was another charge of $756.64 at the same resort six days later.
The spending occurred as Madison Metro and its teachers stressed over apparent deep cuts in state aid and the implementation of Act 10, the law, led by Gov. Scott Walker, that gutted collective bargaining for most public employees.
James Howard, president of the Madison Metropolitan School Board, told Wisconsin Reporter the nearly $55,000 in credit card charges for hotels and restaurants represent a fraction of the district’s approximately $376 million budget. The board, Howard said, thought the expenditures were “reasonable.”
“The real question is for us, do we have procedures in place, checks and balances to make sure we don’t have unreasonable expenses in this area?” he said, noting the board is considering that question as the result of EAG’s investigation.
It boils down to simple economics, Howard said.

Related: 2012-2013 Madison school district $376,200,000 ($15,132 for each of its 24,861 students) budget notes and links.

Victor E. Ferrall, Jr.:

It is ceaselessly (and correctly) observed that college tuition has gone through the roof and something must be done to get the cost of higher education under control. In the 10 years between 2000 and 2009, while the median income of American families grew a modest 16 percent, the cost of attending college shot up 63 percent; more than 70 percent for in-state students at public universities. Even during the terrible year 2009, when family income actually fell more than 2 percent, average tuitions rose nearly 4 percent at all institutions; more than 4 percent at public universities. Today, the list price for a student from an average American family to attend a prestige college or university for 7 1/2 months is only slightly less than her family’s entire income in 12 months.
Free marketers champion for-profit universities as the answer. If they are, it is an odd answer: 80 to 90 percent of the for-profits’ income comes from federal tax dollars–$26.5 billion in 2009. Another odd “solution” presently in play is to radically cut state aid for state universities which, of course, forces the universities to increase tuition even faster (and to try to replace in-state students with out-of-staters, for whom tuition is typically two to three times higher).

Alexander Taub:

1) How To Get An Internship
Getting an internship can be easier than finding a full-time job, but not always. This mostly depends on in which industry you are looking to work. For example, Wall Street internships typically go to students in “core” schools targeted by that company (read: Ivy League or equivalent) or with close relationships to the management. For startups, your school is less important than your persistence, interest, and ability.
Here are some tips to get the internship you want:

Peter Slevin:

Rahm Emanuel is not big on ambiguity. He was thrilled, a few days before he took office last year, when the Illinois House voted 112 to 1 for a school improvement package that, among other things, made it harder for teachers unions to call strikes.
A “historic day of opportunity for kids in the city of Chicago,” he said after the vote. Rank-and-file teachers were less pleased, particularly when an Emanuel ally boasted, “The unions cannot strike in Chicago.”
Teachers are now on strike in Chicago– loudly and enthusiastically — and Emanuel (D) finds himself in a far more pointed and public battle than he had bargained for. Under a national spotlight, his famous dealmaking skills are being severely tested by an increasingly familiar set of schoolhouse issues seen in communities across the country as contentious and often personal.

William Harms:

Many high-achieving students experience math anxiety at a young age — a problem that can follow them throughout their lives, new research at the University of Chicago shows.
In a study of first- and second-graders, Sian Beilock, professor in psychology, found that students report worry and fear about doing math as early as first grade. Most surprisingly math anxiety harmed the highest-achieving students, who typically have the most working memory, Beilock and her colleagues found.

Joseph Epstein:

In a loose definition, the “liberal arts” denote college study anchored in preponderantly Western literature, philosophy, and history, with science, mathematics, and foreign languages playing a substantial, though less central, role; in more recent times, the social science subjects–psychology, sociology, political science–have also sometimes been included. The liberal arts have always been distinguished from more specialized, usually vocational training. For the ancient Greeks, the liberal arts were the subjects thought necessary for a free man to study. If he is to remain free, in this view, he must acquire knowledge of the best thought of the past, which will cultivate in him the intellectual depth and critical spirit required to live in an informed and reasonable way in the present.

Jeevan Vasagar:

Cambridge has lost its place as the number one ranking university in the world, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the US university that specialises in science and technology, taking over the top slot.
MIT came first, while Cambridge, which topped the list in 2011, came second and Harvard third in the QS World University Rankings, published on Tuesday.
The QS table is based on measures of research quality, graduate employability, teaching and how international the faculties and student bodies are.
University College London, Oxford, Imperial College, Yale, the University of Chicago, Princeton and Caltech, in that order, make up the top 10.

Child Mortality Estimates:

CME Info is a database containing the latest child mortality estimates based on the research of the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation.

Nick Kristof:

The most important civil rights battleground today is education, and, likewise, the most crucial struggle against poverty is the one fought in schools.
America’s education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.
That’s why school reform is so critical. This is an issue of equality, opportunity and national conscience. It’s not just about education, but about poverty and justice — and while the Chicago teachers’ union claims to be striking on behalf of students, I don’t see it.

Megan McArdle:

Why are we spending so much money on college?
And why are we so unhappy about it? We all seem to agree that a college education is wonderful, and yet strangely we worry when we see families investing so much in this supposedly essential good. Maybe it’s time to ask a question that seems almost sacrilegious: is all this investment in college education really worth it?
The answer, I fear, is that it’s not. For an increasing number of kids, the extra time and money spent pursuing a college diploma will leave them worse off than they were before they set foot on campus.

Judy Keen & Greg Toppo:

The teachers’ strike that went through its second day Tuesday highlights tensions between public schools and the federal government, unions and administrators, and teachers and their bosses.
It’s a trend that began under President George W. Bush with No Child Left Behind, which required states to test students to qualify for federal funds, and continues with President Obama’s Race to the Top, a federal grant competition that pushes schools to use standardized test scores to retain and reward teachers.
“We are at a critical moment,” says Kevin Kumashiro, a University of Illinois at Chicago education professor. At stake, he says: Whether unions can resist a nationwide shift toward the use of test scores to evaluate teachers, the spread of charter schools that hire non-union teachers and the erosion of teachers’ job security.

David Brooks:

You’re probably aware of the basic trends. The financial rewards to education have increased over the past few decades, but men failed to get the memo.
In elementary and high school, male academic performance is lagging. Boys earn three-quarters of the D’s and F’s. By college, men are clearly behind. Only 40 percent of bachelor’s degrees go to men, along with 40 percent of master’s degrees.
Thanks to their lower skills, men are dropping out of the labor force. In 1954, 96 percent of the American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today, that number is down to 80 percent. In Friday’s jobs report, male labor force participation reached an all-time low.

Richard Vedder:

More than 2 million U.S. college students this fall will be spending a good bit of their time reviewing what they were supposed to learn in high school or even earlier. They are taking “remedial” education courses.
A recent study issued by ACT Inc., a testing organization measuring “college readiness,” found that less than one-third of graduating high-school seniors met benchmark standards for science, and a majority failed to meet them for math. Even in English and reading, a large minority of students were below a level that would mostly earn a grade of C or better in college- level work.
The results are depressing. In science, most students don’t come close (within three points) of meeting the ACT benchmark standards. Yes, it is often pointed out, some population groups are less prepared than others: Only 5 percent of black students meet all four ACT criteria. But for white students, for every high-school graduate who meets the benchmarks, there are two who don’t. The student at least partially unprepared for college is the rule, not the exception.

Louise Brown and Megan Ogilvie:

So, will there be early-morning cross-country practice Thursday or not?
Students and parents are holding their breath to see which of Ontario’s 76,000 elementary teachers will decide not to run after-school activities to protest the new law that freezes their wages.
While the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario has asked members to take a “pause” in extracurricular activities, it stopped short of ordering them to do so or telling them how long the boycott should last.
So no one — not parents, not school boards, not even some local teacher unions — seems to know quite what will happen.

Erin Richards:

“There’s a general recognition that our current testing regime is not getting the job done and that we always knew we were going to have to do something different,” he said. “When people understand the importance of measuring growth over time instead of raw test scores and getting testing information back to teachers in a more timely manner, I think they will look more favorably on spending money on new tests.”
Still, Kestell said $7 million was a lot, and probably would not have been considered at all two years ago when the state made significant cuts to education spending.
For the next budget cycle, he said: “It could very well happen, but it’s way too early to predict anything positive.”
The DPI’s Johnson pointed to Milwaukee Public Schools as a model district that has begun ACT testing for all juniors, setting aside time for them to take the four-hour exam in school. Though testing all juniors has lowered the district’s average ACT composite score, the move has received praise for opening opportunities to more students who may not have known they were ready for college, and for providing a broader measure of student performance.

Matthew DeFour:

Wisconsin would pay for all public high school juniors to take the ACT college admissions test starting in two years as part of a $7 million budget initiative State Superintendent Tony Evers announced Wednesday.
The proposal also includes administering three other tests offered by ACT to measure college and career readiness in high school. The tests would replace the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination, which is currently administered to 10th-graders to comply with federal testing requirements.
“We need to give our students and their families better resources to plan for study and work after high school,” Evers said. “It makes sense to use the ACT to fulfill state and federal testing requirements at the high school level with an exam package that provides so much more than the WKCE: college and career readiness assessments and a college admissions test score.”
Under the proposal, all public school ninth-graders would take the ACT EXPLORE assessment in spring of the 2014-15 school year. All 10th-graders would take the ACT PLAN test, and all 11th-graders would take the ACT and the WorkKeys tests.
The state would pay for students to take each test once. Those who want to take an ACT a second time to improve their score would have to pay for it themselves.
Also, by training all schools to administer the ACT, the proposal would help students in rural districts who lack access to certified ACT testing sites, Evers said.

Much more on the oft-criticized WKCE, here.

Paul Moreno:

The Chicago teachers strike has put Democrats in a difficult position. Teacher unions are the most powerful constituency in the Democratic Party, but their interests are ever more clearly at odds with taxpayers and inner-city families. Chicago is reviving scenes from the last crisis of liberalism in the 1970s, when municipal unions drove many American cities to disorder and bankruptcy. Where did their power come from?
Before the 1950s, government-employee unions were almost inconceivable. When the Boston police unionized and went on strike in 1919, the ensuing chaos–rioting and looting–crippled the public-union idea. Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge became a national hero by breaking the strike, issuing the dictum: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” President Woodrow Wilson called the strike “an intolerable crime against civilization.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt also rejected government unionism. He told the head of the Federation of Federal Employees in 1937 that collective bargaining “cannot be transplanted into the public service. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer” because “the employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws.”

Andrew Vanacore:

The state’s top education official, Superintendent John White, laid out a broad framework Tuesday for revising the way Louisiana vets state-sanctioned private schools, a process under greater scrutiny now that those schools can apply to receive tax dollars through the state’s new voucher program. Without going into detail — the superintendent plans to bring a fleshed-out plan before the state board of education next month — White told members of the board’s nonpublic school council that his approach will vary from school to school based on the number of children affected and the amount of tax dollars at stake.

ACT:

Nearly every state has adopted the goal of college and career readiness for all students. At the end of 2011, 45 states had adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics,1 with the stated goal to prepare students to “graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit- bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs” (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010a).2 Other states, such as Texas and Virginia, have also focused on aligning their content and performance standards with college and career readiness requirements (Virginia Department of Education, 2010; Texas Education Agency & Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, 2009).
Not surprisingly, current research shows that many students are not on target to meet college and career readiness requirements. For example, if performance standards for the Common Core State Standards are set at a level comparable to ACT’s College Readiness Benchmarks–consistent with the goal of preparing students for college and careers–the majority of today’s students are not well prepared to meet those standards (ACT, 2010).

Tim Keown:

A couple of weeks ago, at a high school football game near where I live, a team showed up and played with just 13 players in uniform. Predictably, the game ended 53-0, and it was a struggle for the winning team to keep from scoring 100. At one point, a kid running a punt back for a touchdown intentionally fell at the 20 because enough was enough.
On the same night, at Galt High School near Sacramento, the school’s administration decided to forfeit a game rather than play with 14 healthy bodies. This was a big enough story to make the 11 o’clock news; Galt High has been playing football for 89 years, many of them with distinction, and this was the first time it had been forced to forfeit.

Matthew DiCarlo:

One claim that gets tossed around a lot in education circles is that “the most effective teachers produce a year and a half of learning per year, while the least effective produce a half of a year of learning.”
This talking point is used all the time in advocacy materials and news articles. Its implications are pretty clear: Effective teachers can make all the difference, while ineffective teachers can do permanent damage.
As with most prepackaged talking points circulated in education debates, the “year and a half of learning” argument, when used without qualification, is both somewhat valid and somewhat misleading. So, seeing as it comes up so often, let’s very quickly identify its origins and what it means.
This particular finding is traceable to a 1992 paper by economist Eric Hanushek, one which focused primarily on the relationship between achievement and family composition in Gary, Indiana (the data are from the early- to mid-1970s, and include only low-income students). After reviewing his (very interesting) main results on the relationship between student achievement and family size, birth order and the interval between births, Hanushek presents an analysis of test-based teacher effects.

Andrew Rotherham:

As the strike in Chicago enters its second day there is a lot of uncertainty but here are some early takeaways events in Chicago should probably remind us of:
Seriously, it’s not all about the kids. Saying it’s ‘all about the kids’ is education’s version of a routinized benediction. You hear it all the time – and often just preceding or just after some decision that’s actually not that good for kids. The system is more or less still set up for the benefit of adults – and that’s not just teachers unions, it’s management, vendors, and so forth, too. In this case, if the kids really mattered most then almost 400K of them wouldn’t be without places to go today because the adults charged with teaching them decided to strike.
This is a clash of values. This Ed Trust statement calls out the teachers union for low-balling expectations for kids. It’s a good illustration of how underneath the posturing and rhetoric and the substantive disagreements Chicago is really about what kind of school system they city is going to have – the old kind, which was a quasi-jobs program or the new type where performance and execution matter most. In that way the strike is an important national moment.

Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:

“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).

Athens News:

In a statement to reporters, Arvanitopoulos noted that the school year was launched with all schools fully equipped with books and staff, with books arriving even in remote Gavdos.
“Primary and kindergarten teachers and teachers of all basic subjects in secondary education were at their posts today. During the next week, when the size of each class is finalised, we will appoint every necessary reserve teacher, down to the last,” he said. Arvanitopoulos noted that even in a time of dire economic crisis, the ministry proved able to ensure that schools were open, supplied with books and that teachers were in their place.

Ezra Klein:

Luckily, we don’t have to guess, since CPS publishes median salary statistics (see page 198 in this pdf). As is often the case with stats like these, the median salary is below the mean: for the 2010-11 school year, the most recent year for which data is available, the median salary was $67,974, as opposed to the mean of $74,236 that year (as reported, pdf, by the Illinois State Board of Education). That mean is slightly different than the one reported by CPS because it relies on more recent ISBE data.
Some of that salary has to go to pension contributions. Teachers are required to contribute 9 percent of their salary to their pensions, and support personnel must contribute 8.5 percent, as opposed to 6.2 percent if they were part of the Social Security system. But the Chicago Public Schools system pays for 7 percent of the employee contribution. So the more relevant comparison is a 1.5 to 2 percent contribution for CPS employees compared to 6.2 percent for private sector workers paying Social Security tax. So the median after-pension income is $66,614, which a private sector employee on Social Security would need to earn $71,017 a year to make. So a median of $71,017 (or a mean of $77,560) is the most relevant number for comparing Chicago public school teachers to other workers.
What about the longer school day that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is implementing? The school day is increasing from five hours and forty-five minutes for elementary school and seven hours for high school, to seven and seven and a half hours, respectively. Isn’t an increase in hours of that scale effectively a wage cut, in per-hour terms?

Ezra Klein:

Chicago performs quite poorly on national assessments of educational quality. As Reuters notes, fourth-graders in Chicago performed an average of nine points worse than the big city average and sixteen points worse than the national average on the math section of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the national gold standard for measuring learning. On reading, they were eight and seventeen points worse than big city and national averages, respectively. That’s a bit better than Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. but worse than New York.
Chicago also has shorter than average school years and school days. Many students are only in class for 170 days a year as of a few years ago, below the state minimum of 176 days and the national average of 180 days; under Emanuel, the year was lengthened to 180 days. The school day in Chicago averages five hours and forty five minutes in elementary schools (as opposed to the national average of six hours and forty-two minutes) and seven hours for secondary schools, above the national average of 6.6 hours. Emanuel and teachers recently negotiated a deal to hire 500 new teachers to allow for a 90 minute school day extension without increasing hours for current teachers.

Andrew Rotherham:

Spoiler alert: when Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new feature film, Won’t Back Down, hits theaters later this month, its plot hinges on the forcing of school officials to make big decisions in front of parents rather than behind closed doors. The film is fictional, but raging against backroom power politics is not. Teachers’ unions and district officials almost always negotiate privately, so when those negotiations reach a deal or an impasse — or lead to a strike, as they did in Chicago yesterday — the public gets to hear only part of the story as families scramble to figure out what to do with their kids. Chicago, whose 400,000 students make it the U.S.’s third largest school district, today offered safe havens for kids in dozens of public libraries and churches and, for a four-hour stretch this morning, in nearly 150 public schools staffed with nonunion workers.

Jodie Tillman:

Community college enrollment has started to decline, signaling a possible end to the recession-fueled boom that sent large numbers of local job-seekers back to classrooms.
Enrollment statewide began leveling off last year, but area colleges are now seeing significant dips in their fall term head counts.
The number of students enrolled so far this fall is down 4.4 percent at Hillsborough Community College and 2.5 percent at St. Petersburg College. Pasco-Hernando Community College is seeing an even steeper decline — about 8 percent.
Those decreases follow explosive growth — double-digit percentages in some years — at all three colleges in recent years.

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

An important part of supporting choice is providing families with good information about school performance. However, families often do not have access to school performance information when deciding on schools. The Florida Department of Education implemented an A-F School Grading System that works to provide transparent, objective, and easily understood data to parents, educators, and the public to spur improvement among all schools. State and district leaders will spark a frank conversation about whether and how to use a state accountability system in districts’ school choice processes and will ask participants for feedback on how to expand the use of school performance information.
Mike Kooi, Executive Director of the Office of Independent Education and Parental Choice, Florida Department of Education
Dr. Pansy Houghton, Director of Choice and Magnet Programs, Hillsborough County Public Schools
Terrie Dodson-Caldevilla, Choice Marketing and Communications Managers, Hillsborough County Public Schools

Christian Schneider:

When 25,000 Chicago teachers walked off the job on Monday, it provided a perfect bookend to the sturm und drang Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker faced in his recent attempts to lessen teachers union power.
But while the Chicago imbroglio marks the end of the Wisconsin struggle, many have forgotten that Wisconsin played a central role in birthing the framework that emboldens teachers unions.
In 1974, tiny Hortonville, Wis., saw one of the longest and ugliest work stoppages in American education history.
Before it was over, the town would be flooded with thousands of union activists and would draw the attention of the nationwide media. In fact, the Hortonville strike would prompt many of the changes Walker only recently revoked.
In March 1974, teachers unions were still a relatively new phenomenon. Wisconsin was one of 11 states in the late 1960s and early ’70s where statewide teachers unions were formed. (The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association became the first certified teachers bargaining agent in Wisconsin in 1964.) Between 1969 and 1974, Wisconsin teachers struck 50 times.
But the state hadn’t seen anything like what happened in Hortonville on March 18, 1974, when 88 teachers walked off the job. The teachers were seeking pay increases of 16.5% in the 1974-’75 school year; the district offered 1.2%. After several days of picketing, the district fired 86 of the striking teachers and immediately brought in replacements to get the schools running again.

Ezra Klein:

Talks between the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union broke down yesterday, and now the city’s teachers are on strike, just as class was about to start for the 2012-13 school year. Labor will insist that the strikes lead to contracts that attract good teachers who promote student learning in the long-run, while Emanuel notes that the teachers are striking over his proposed evaluation system, which he argues will help achievement going forward. Leaving that debate aside, what does the strike itself mean for students?
Nothing good, the best empirical evidence suggests. Two of the best recent studies on the effects of teacher work stoppages and strikes concern labor disputes in Ontario schools in the late ’90s and early 2000s. One, by the University of Toronto’s Michael Baker, compared how standardized test scores rose between grade 3 and grade 6 for students who lost instructional time because of the Ontario strikes, and for students who were unaffected.

Madison School District:

Accountability Plan for All Achievement Gap Programs and Positions
The following motions were passed by the Board of Education on June 18, 2012, to assure that all staff responsible for the program or position/s follow the following protocol for accountability. Each staff member must submit to the Deputy Superintendent their plans for accountability in sections 1, 2 and 3 by September 1, 2012 (See attached template).

Courier Post, via Laura Waters:

Interdistrict school choice is one of the best new education programs legislators and Gov. Chris Christie have signed off on in recent years. Certainly, its scale is small — statewide there are only about 3,300 “choice” students who’ve moved to another district this year. Next year, that number is expected to jump to about 6,100. Still, that’s a drop in the bucket. Many of the schools accepting “choice” students only take a small number like 10 or 20 total.

Edsource PDF:

As concerns grow about the effects of discipline policies on schools and students, and especially their disproportionate impact on African American and Latino students, attempts to reform these policies have also gained momentum.
To better understand how discipline policies are being implemented in California schools, EdSource conducted a survey of 315 of the state’s largest school districts. Collectively these districts enroll two-thirds of California’s students. This new EdSource report describes the findings from that survey and presents the perspectives of the district administrators in charge of student discipline policies for their schools.
Key findings include:

• School officials express a need for support to more effectively manage discipline issues, including additional school counselors and community resources.
• More than 80% said the state’s budget crisis has affected their ability to deal with student behavior and discipline.
• School districts are trying a range of alternative approaches to suspension and expulsions.
• Two-thirds of officials express concern about the differential impact of discipline policies on students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Kathryn Baron

The survey found that an overwhelming 81 percent of administrators ranked student discipline and behavior management as a concern when compared to other issues facing districts, although just 22 percent said it was a major concern. They worry about the disproportionate number of expulsions and suspensions of Latino and African American students, about not having discretion when it comes to the state’s zero tolerance policies, and about the financial burden of student discipline on the schools in staff time, legal fees, and security measures.
“They are keenly aware of the challenges they face and are actively searching for solutions and support,” said Louis Freedberg, executive director of EdSource.

Andrew Martin::

At a protest last year at New York University, students called attention to their mounting debt by wearing T-shirts with the amount they owed scribbled across the front — $90,000, $75,000, $20,000.
On the sidelines was a business consultant for the debt collection industry with a different take.
“I couldn’t believe the accumulated wealth they represent — for our industry,” the consultant, Jerry Ashton, wrote in a column for a trade publication, InsideARM.com. “It was lip-smacking.”
Though Mr. Ashton says his column was meant to be ironic, it nonetheless highlighted undeniable truths: many borrowers are struggling to pay off their student loans, and the debt collection industry is cashing in.
As the number of people taking out government-backed student loans has exploded, so has the number who have fallen at least 12 months behind in making payments — about 5.9 million people nationwide, up about a third in the last five years.

Ada Lee:

15-year-old Joshua Wong Chi-fung, co-founder of the group Scholarism, has come to symbolise the anti-national education movement’s energy.
You know Joshua Wong Chi-fung is a busy young man the moment he meets you. With the government headquarters in Admiralty alive with protest action, he walks fast, talks almost too quickly to catch his words, and hardly has time to chat at all.
The driven 15-year-old can claim credit for an anti-national-education message that is now all over the city. From a YouTube video showing his eloquent engagement with reporters, to mass rallies organised by a group he co-founded, he has grown in stature beyond his years, becoming an icon in the snowballing movement against the classes.

Roger Schank:

The other day an article written by me appeared in the Washington Post saying that algebra was useless and shouldn’t be taught in high school.
The hate mail that followed (written mostly by math teachers) was unbelievable. Mostly accusing me of being irrational and incapable of thought, and stating that math teaches people to think. This is pretty funny because if math is supposed to teach one to think, as they argue, they might have looked me up and discovered that not only was I a math major in college, but I was also a professor of computer science.
Of course, it is not only high school math I am against. I believe that every single subject taught in high school is a mistake. What I write here will infuriate teachers, but teachers are not my enemy. It isn’t their fault. They are cogs in a system over which they have no control. I believe there are many great teachers, and I believe that teaching and teachers are very important.

Vivia Chen:

If you think you’re a pretty smart cookie–but not spectacularly so–this might be the year that you can squeeze into a better law school than you thought possible.
The reason is simple: There are fewer applicants, which results in more opportunities at more prestigious law schools. You’ve probably heard about that 25 percent drop in law school applications in the past three years or so, but did you know that the top 14 law schools will be forced to accept students who are below the top 2 percent of their LSATs? (Sobs, please.)
Here’s the nitty gritty from Blueprint, an LSAT tutoring company, based on statistics from the Law School Admissions Council, Inc.:
We see that in 2010/2011, there were 3,430 students in the top 2 percent on the LSAT (171+), which is at or near the median LSAT score for most elite (top 14 or T14 as determined by U.S. News & World Report rankings) law schools. That number drops to 2,600 in 2011/2012, resulting in nearly 1,000 fewer top percentile scores from which law schools can recruit.

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

Given that, we should be cautious not to overreact to recent data the school district provided at the request of Mayor Paul Soglin. Yet the data is intriguing. And the numbers highlight the academic peril that often follows a transient student.
For example, in tracking the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination scores of eighth-graders, we learn that those students who took the math portion of the test in Madison as both a fourth-grader and an eighth-grader scored significantly higher than those who took the test here only in eighth grade.
For the longer-term students who took the test last school year, 78 percent scored proficient or advanced in math while, for the shorter-term students, 65 percent were proficient or higher. The story is much the same in reading scores. Of long-term students in the district, 81 percent scored proficient or higher as an eighth-grader while, for the more recently arrived students, just 65 percent hit that mark.

I look forward to seeing a more in-depth analysis of this question.

Jay Matthews:

Sidwell Friends is a special school, an exemplar of the best education we can provide in America for $34,268 a year. It is simlar to many other selective private schools, except that the children of the president of the United States attend. You might call it the First School or High School One.
I was drawn to a page of the most recent Sidwell alumni magazine enumerating where the class of 2012 went to college. Some people have the impression that kids at schools like Sidwell all go to the Ivy League, but that’s not true. One of the most popular colleges among Sidwell’s 123 graduates this year was a state school, the University of Michigan, number 28 on the U.S. News list.. More Sidwell students (15) were admitted there than any other college sought by the senior class, and more (6) chose it than any other college.

Madison Teachers’, Inc. 46K PDF, via a kind Jeanie Bettner email:

Not only did Governor Walker’s Act 10 strip from the Madison Metropolitan School District the ability to engage in collective bargaining regarding wages, benefits and working conditions, but it gave full authority to the Board to unilaterally create a “replacement document”, the Employee Handbook.
At last week’s Board of Education meeting, MTI Executive Director John Matthews delivered a letter to the Board in which, after acknowledging the negative impact of Act 10, he told the Board that Act 10 DID NOT take away the Board’s ability to engage in conversation with representatives of MTI about the subjects to which the parties had previously agreed in bargaining, as well as any other topics. Board President James Howard called Matthews to tell him that the Board’s process is still being developed and offered to meet with Matthews after the Board next meets about the Handbook.
MTI has developed a process for Handbook development for which MTI has asked to present that to the Board of Education. MTI’s proposed process includes a recommendation that those elected by the members of MTI’s various bargaining units be appointed to the BOE’s Handbook Committee. This will assure both elected representation and input from all employee groups.
Matthews told Board of Education members about the discussions he and representatives of the AFSCME, Firefighters and Police Unions have been having with Mayor Soglin, County Executive Parisi and Supt. Nerad about the need to maintain positive employment relations, particularly relative to the development of the Handbook. Unfortunately, this effort at creating goodwill hit a bump in the road by former Supt. Nerad’s failure to inform Interim Supt. Belmore. Working together to solve issues is the Madison way.

Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Joel Hood and Kristen Mack:

“This is about as much as we can do,” Vitale said. “There is only so much money in the system.”
The district said it offered teachers a 16 percent pay raise over four years and a host of benefit proposals.
“This is not a small commitment we’re handing out at a time when our fiscal situation is really challenged,” Vitale said.
Lewis said the two sides are close on teacher compensation but the union has serious concerns about the cost of health benefits, the makeup of the teacher evaluation system and job security.

More from
Justin Katz and Daily Kos.

Chicago teachers are officially on strike.We stand with @ctulocal1 because they are fighting for what is best for our students.

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) September 10, 2012

Analysis: Striking Chicago teachers take on national education reform.

Chicago teachers walk picket lines for first time in 25 years.
Update: Madison Teachers’, Inc. [PDF] on the CTU Strike:

MTI Stands with Chicago Teachers
In August, over 90% of the members of the Chicago Teachers’ Union voted for authorization to strike. Our CTU brothers and sisters have long been fighting against the charter school initiatives supported by Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel and a Democratic city council. On August 22, several MTI members attended a “Solidarity with CTU” night at SCFL. MTI members made up almost half the room. CTU member Becca Kelly spoke passionately about the injustice, inequity and blatant racism present in Chicago Public School policies and closures. In an interview, Chicago Teachers’ Union President Karen Lewis stated, “Our students deserve smaller class sizes, a robust, well-rounded curriculum, and in-school services that address their social, emotional, intellectual and health needs. They deserve culturally-sensitive non-biased and equitable education, especially students with IEPs, emergent bilingual students and early childhood children. And all of our students deserve professional teachers who are treated as such, fully resourced school buildings and a school system that partners with parents.” This is what the CTU is fighting for.
This past year CTU fought side by side with parents to halt 17 schools closings or “turn arounds” in the city. The parents did secure a meeting with the city council, but all 17 schools were closed. Next year, Kelly shared, there are over 70 Chicago Public Schools identified for “turn around or closing.”
On August 22, the MTI Board voted unanimously to support the resolutions put forth by the CTU. The MTI Board also recommended further fundraising efforts. MTI President Kerry Motoviloff spoke in support of the CTU that evening. She called for MTI members to stand with our CTU brothers and sisters as they stood with us when we called them. Speaking of the anti-worker movement, she said, “This is not a Madison issue. This is not a Chicago issue. This is not a Wisconsin issue. This is not even limited to a union issue. This is a worker issue.” She continued, “Scott Walker, Rahm Emanuel, they cannot define us. They can make things difficult. They can give us hoops to jump thorough. They can try to throw us off our focus to play defense. But the more we control our message, our voice, the more potent our acts become. This is all one fight. We are all one movement. We will win this.” The Chicago Teachers Union has published a booklet and a page of 10 talking points, both can be downloaded in PDF on the CTU website. Members are encouraged to visit it for more details. MTI will keep members abreast of future solidarity actions.

CTU Parent Flyer (PDF) and CTU in the news (PDF).
Stephanie Banchero:

The Chicago battle has pitted Karen Lewis, one of the country’s most vocal labor leaders, against Mr. Emanuel, one of its most prominent mayors and the former White House chief of staff for President Barack Obama. The Democratic mayor has made efforts to overhaul the city’s public education a centerpiece of his administration.
The two sides have been negotiating for months over issues including wages, health-care benefits and job security. The city has offered teachers a 3% pay raise the first year and 2% annual raises for the next three years. The average teacher salary in Chicago is about $70,000.
On Sunday night, city officials and union leaders said the wage issues aren’t the sticking point. Rather, the two sides are at loggerheads over a new teacher-evaluation system and how much of it should be weighted on student test scores, and over job security for teachers laid off from low-performing schools.

Alan Borsuk:

I probably shouldn’t do this, but I keep thinking about Heidi Ramirez when I should be focusing on Darienne Driver.
Ramirez is gone now after two years as chief academic officer of Milwaukee Public Schools. Driver is freshly arrived as MPS’ chief innovation officer (a new position). The two jobs aren’t exactly the same, but there is reason to juxtapose Ramirez and Driver.
Specifically, when school opened in 2010, Ramirez was a youngish, very smart, change-minded, powerful MPS leader, fresh in from Philadelphia with degrees from Harvard and Stanford. And when school opened in 2012, Driver was a youngish, very smart, change-minded, powerful MPS leader, fresh in from Philadelphia with a lot of work done on a Harvard PhD.
More important, there are lessons from Ramirez’s time in Milwaukee that help frame the challenges Driver faces.

:

THE biggest national team at the Paralympic games in London is from the host country, Great Britain. The British team is 295-strong, larger even than that of the world’s most populous country, China. China topped the medal table at the games it hosted in Beijing four years ago, with Britain second, and these two countries were in the same position halfway through the London games. (America, which came third in Beijing, is trailing in sixth place at present.) Ranking the number of competitors on a population-weighted basis inevitably flatters tiny nations (Ireland is the biggest country in the top ten), but it does provide an interesting snapshot. Of the richer countries, Antipodean and Nordic nations appear to take their involvement in both the Olympics and the Paralympics pretty seriously. At the other end of the table, India and Indonesia, among the world’s four most populous nations, have sent tiny teams to the Paralympics and share the lowest ranking with another ten countries. Around 40 nations, however, did not even make it into the ranking as they sent athletes to the Olympics but not to the Paralympics. Five countries have sent more competitors to the Paralympics than they did to the Olympics: Iraq, Rwanda, Iran, Thailand and Bosnia (not shown).

Paul Tough;

We are living through a particularly anxious moment in the history of American parenting. In the nation’s big cities these days, the competition among affluent parents over slots in favored preschools verges on the gladiatorial. A pair of economists from the University of California recently dubbed this contest for early academic achievement the “Rug Rat Race,” and each year, the race seems to be starting earlier and growing more intense.
At the root of this parental anxiety is an idea you might call the cognitive hypothesis. It is the belief, rarely spoken aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success in the U.S. today depends more than anything else on cognitive skill–the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests–and that the best way to develop those skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.
There is something undeniably compelling about the cognitive hypothesis. The world it describes is so reassuringly linear, such a clear case of inputs here leading to outputs there. Fewer books in the home means less reading ability; fewer words spoken by your parents means a smaller vocabulary; more math work sheets for your 3-year-old means better math scores in elementary school. But in the past decade, and especially in the past few years, a disparate group of economists, educators, psychologists and neuroscientists has begun to produce evidence that calls into question many of the assumptions behind the cognitive hypothesis.
What matters most in a child’s development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years of life. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us often think of them as character.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Todd Finkelmeyer:

A technological glitch is confounding information technology experts and causing major headaches for some students and professors across the UW System as the 2012-13 academic year gets under way.
The problem lies within the university’s online learning and course management system, which is provided by the company Desire2Learn and managed by UW-Madison’s Division of Information Technology (DoIT).
According to this university update posted Friday at noon: “DoIT technologists continue to work daily with experts from Desire2Learn (D2L) and Microsoft to address the issue of slow application response. We’re keenly aware of the problem and regret the impact on the UW educational community. We remain steadfast in our commitment to resolve this situation and provide regular progress updates on the status. Please note this situation has the attention of top leadership within DoIT and Desire2Learn.”

Tammy Webber & Don Babwin:

The vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union said Saturday the city school district’s latest offer in contract negotiations was disappointing and that the wrangling would continue throughout the weekend, as tens of thousands of teachers readied to walk off the job on Monday.
Chicago teachers say they’re prepared to walk off the job for the first time in 25 years over issues that include pay raises, classroom conditions, job security and teacher evaluations. A strike would cause massive disruptions in the nation’s third-largest school district, which has 400,000 students.

Madison School District PDF Summary Document:

The 2005 to 2011 Strategic Plan was adopted by the School Board in June 2005. It outlines major objectives for the Arlington Public Schools for the six years covered by the plan. The Strategic Plan process was designed to result in clear direction for the school system that focuses on improved student learning for all students. For each goal of the plan, the School Board has defined specific objectives, indicators, and targets or benchmarks to measure progress over each of the 6 years. This summary provides selected findings from the results presented for 2009-10.

Links:

• Arlington Schools Assessment Reports
• Arlington Schools Strategic Plan
• Arlington Schools Strategic Plan indicators (PDF)
• Arlington will spend $501,433,941 during 2013, for 22,723 students or $22,073 per student during the 2012-2013 school year. Madison plans to spend $15,132/student, or 45% MORE more.
• Arlington County’s median household income of $94,880 dwarf’s Dane County’s $60,519 (Madison’s is even less: $52,550.
• 30% of Arlington’s students receive subsidized meals, substantially lower than Madison’s approximately 49%
• How do Arlington & Madison compare to the world?
  
  
  
• Dane County property taxes highest in state.

I hope the Madison School Board reviews additional Districts. Arlington’s demographics and tax base are substantially different than Madison.

http://wesupportchicagoteachers.tumblr.com/

Tom Peters:

I recently spoke at the World Strategy Forum event in Seoul, where the theme was “The new rules: reframing capitalism”. Predictably, the discussion focused on global financial infrastructure. But, as one of the few non-economist speakers, I instead argued that employment/unemployment is even more affected by the changing nature of work – and the wildly accelerating effectiveness of technology, which is encroaching on activities that employ tens of millions of people, especially in the developed world.
This is, I believe, in the mid to long term, both the number one problem and the number one opportunity for businesses and wider society. But the specifics of what follows were triggered by the debate at the event and were eventually encapsulated in what I grandly call: “A human capital development manifesto at the enterprise and national government level”.

John Pelletier:

Late summer is when parents bring their children to college. As they drive to campus they’re worried about tuition increases, the burden of student debt and whether their children will find jobs when they graduate.
Some parents and high-school students are beginning to question the value of a four-year college degree in this post-Great Recession world. And you can certainly understand why they have these concerns:
College costs keep rising. The College Board reports that from 1981 to 2011, after adjusting for inflation, the average published cost of going to college is up 180% for private, nonprofit four-year colleges and 268% for in-state, public four-year colleges.

Wow. I remember my first semester at the UW- Madison 31 years ago. In state tuition was $399/semester. That is $944 in 2010, according to this calculator. Current in state UW-Madison tuition is about 5,000/semester. Crazy.

Inside Higher Ed:

A study from the MetLife Mature Institute found that 29 percent of grandparents have given their grandchildren financial support for education, spending an average of $8,276 over five years. Of those grandparents who did fund their grandchildren’s education, 32 percent helped with tuition or loan payments, 29 percent donated to a college savings plan, and 7 percent helped pay for graduate school.

Larry Cuban:

8:00 AM in a Northern California charter school.
I am observing Mr. Lesser (pseudonym), a U.S. history teacher for the past four years at the school. Students sit in six rows of six movable desks facing the front of the room. Teacher settles the students down and begins a review from the text (Bower and Hart, History Alive!) of what happened in U.S. after World War I. In rapid fire fashion, the teacher asks a series of questions to the entire class:
“What was the ‘Red Scare?
“What were the Palmer Raids?
“Who were Sacco and Vanzetti? Why do we study them?”

Geeta Dayal:

Don’t you dare even think about your banking account password when you slap on those fancy new brainwave headsets.
Or at least that seems to be the lesson of a new study which found that sensitive personal information, such as PIN numbers and credit card data, can be gleaned from the brainwave data of users wearing popular consumer-grade EEG headsets.
A team of security researchers from Oxford, UC Berkeley, and the University of Geneva say that they were able to deduce digits of PIN numbers, birth months, areas of residence and other personal information by presenting 30 headset-wearing subjects with images of ATM machines, debit cards, maps, people, and random numbers in a series of experiments. The paper, titled “On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain Computer Interfaces,” represents the first major attempt to uncover potential security risks in the use of the headsets.

The Wall Street Journal:

The proposed amendment text would make the “rights” to organize and bargain collectively a constitutional guarantee, and any state law that would “abridge, impair or limit” collective bargaining would be repealed. Last Monday, the Michigan court of appeals ruled that the measure could appear on the ballot, and the state Supreme Court heard arguments on the case Thursday.
In a filing to challenge the ballot measure, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Attorney General Bill Schuette say the huge impact of the law can’t possibly be captured in the 100 words of a ballot measure. It is misleading, Mr. Schuette wrote, for unions to “propose an innocuous-sounding constitutional amendment that has the secret effect of wholesale changes in Michigan law.”
The problem is that the amendment language is so broad that the courts could interpret any union-related measure as a violation. It explicitly refers to all current and future laws. In 1997, for instance, Michigan moved new state employees to a defined-contribution pension from a defined-benefit plan. If the amendment passes, unions will challenge the new plan as unconstitutional and it could be invalidated at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Clusty Search: Michigan “Protect Our Jobs” Amendment.

Richard Perez-Pena:

Large-scale cheating has been uncovered over the last year at some of the nation’s most competitive schools, like Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the Air Force Academy and, most recently, Harvard.
Studies of student behavior and attitudes show that a majority of students violate standards of academic integrity to some degree, and that high achievers are just as likely to do it as others. Moreover, there is evidence that the problem has worsened over the last few decades.
Experts say the reasons are relatively simple: Cheating has become easier and more widely tolerated, and both schools and parents have failed to give students strong, repetitive messages about what is allowed and what is prohibited.

The Leader-Telegram:

The issue: It’s the first day of school.
Our view: Students should take advantage of the exciting opportunity in front of them.
Even those who cheered the loudest back in June when school let out probably admit to at least a smidgen of excitement as they head off for the first day of school this morning in Eau Claire and districts around Wisconsin.
Soon enough, though, the routine of the school year will settle in, leading some students to question the point of the lecture or lesson in front of them.
“I’ll never use this,” we can hear them say, because many of us said the same thing when we were their age.

PBS NewsHour:

Question: Science and technology don’t seem to be producing the jobs or economic improvement many would hope. What often gets forgotten is that many science and technology ideas are developed in academia where they are owned by the institutions. The schools are not businesses to turn them into products and businesses have a harder time making money on ideas they don’t own. So these intellectual property portfolios become idea graveyards. What if the rules changed so that the individuals who came up with the ideas could own a majority stake in their own ideas? Could they not then follow it out of academia and out to product? Seems like that would start more businesses, give universities more money (some of something as opposed to all of nothing), and even take some of the weight off of long term government support for science. Am I being naive to think that we could fix science and improve the economy?
Paul Solman:Yes, I think you are being naive. I know quite a few people at universities- professors and students both – and more and more of them talk about commercializing their research, or are actively engaged in doing so. Ideas do not seem to be trapped in the groves of academe. Just the opposite. If you think I’m wrong, readers, I trust you to let me know in the Comments section below.
A much more important hurdle to innovation may be the U.S. patent system, strengthened last week by the jury judgment against Samsung from infringing Apple patents. A number of economists have written about the anti-competitive constraints imposed by the patent system in the past decade, including Adam Jaffe of Brandeis and Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School (“Innovation and its Discontents”) and two economists at Washington University, St. Louis: Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine.

Matthew DiCarlo:

The accountability provisions in Virginia’s original application for “ESEA flexibility” (or “waiver”) have received a great deal of criticism (see here, here, here and here). Most of this criticism focused on the Commonwealth’s expectation levels, as described in “annual measurable objectives” (AMOs) – i.e., the statewide proficiency rates that its students are expected to achieve at the completion of each of the next five years, with separate targets established for subgroups such as those defined by race (black, Hispanic, Asian, white), income (subsidized lunch eligibility), limited English proficiency (LEP), and special education.
Last week, in response to the criticism, Virginia agreed to amend its application, and it’s not yet clear how specifically they will calculate the new rates (only that lower-performing subgroups will be expected to make faster progress).

John Spong:

Of all the remote corners of Texas considered difficult to reach–the Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande, in Big Bend National Park; the center-field wall at Minute Maid Park, in Houston; the butcher block at Franklin Barbecue, in Austin–the single most challenging can actually be found in every big city and rural burg in the state: the mind of a seventh grader. It’s a destination with no clear path, the ground around it littered with hormonal land mines, the terrain ever shifting as growth spurts are endured or, even worse, anxiously awaited. In one of God’s great dirty tricks, an awareness of peer pressure presents itself during roughly the same week as zits. Soon come a new voice, a new shape, a new smell. Nothing about it is easy, not for the seventh graders and certainly not for the teachers charged with trying to get through to them.

:

Seventeen of Wisconsin’s 72 counties reduced property tax levies. Dane County was one of five that increased them by more than 3 percent.
Median property taxes in Dane County have increased 32.8 percent in the last 10 years. Home values have grown at a similar rate — the median Dane County home is worth $230,800, an increase of 38.6 percent in the last decade.

WISTAX 2011-2012 Property Tax Report.
Madison School District 2012-2013 Budget Update; Reduced3.47% Property Tax Increase due to Increased State Tax Dollar Spending.

Caroline Porter:

Public-school students in some parts of the country this year are going back to very different classrooms than they are used to: ones with both boys and girls.
A decade long campaign to separate genders in schools–based on the theory that children learn better that way–has sparked a backlash that is chalking up victories. Critics have sued three districts to end their single-sex classes, and sent letters of concern to 15 others.
A judge in one of those lawsuits last week ordered a school district in West Virginia to halt its single-sex program, and a handful of other districts around the country have voluntarily suspended their own split-gender classes for the new school year.

Nat Hentoff:

II’m surprised that with all the warfare under way about teacher tenure and performance evaluation, together with standardized testing and schools as dropout factories, there has been hardly any mention of the leading active educator among our founders, Thomas Jefferson.
Some know of him only as the creative founder of the University of Virginia, but when he was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, Jefferson introduced what he considered his most important educational effort, “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” in 1778.
In the invaluable The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson (Cambridge University Press, 2009), there is a chapter by Darren Staloff that I strongly recommend to present-day school boards, principals, teachers, students and members of Congress of both parties.
The chapter is titled “The politics of pedagogy: Thomas Jefferson and the education of a democratic citizenry.” In the primary grades, the goal of education was to ensure a citizenry that would be made “the safe, as they are the ultimate guardians of their own liberty.”

Katie Rophie:

If, from beyond the grave, Betty Friedan were to review the Facebook habits of the over-30 set, I am afraid she would be very disappointed in us. By this I mean specifically the trend of women using photographs of their children instead of themselves as the main picture on their Facebook profiles. You click on a friend’s name and what comes into focus is not a photograph of her face, but a sleeping blond four-year-old, or a sun-hatted toddler running on the beach. Here, harmlessly embedded in one of our favourite methods of procrastination, is a potent symbol for the new century. Where have all of these women gone? What, some earnest future historian may very well ask, do all of these babies on our Facebook pages say about “the construction of women’s identity” at this particular moment in time?

Sarah Frier:

International Business Machines researchers spent four years developing Watson, the computer smart enough to beat the champions of the quiz show “Jeopardy!” Now they’re trying to figure out how to get those capabilities into the phone in your pocket.
Bernie Meyerson, IBM vice president of innovation, envisions a voice-activated Watson that answers questions, like a supercharged version of Apple’s Siri personal assistant. A farmer could stand in a field and ask his phone, “When should I plant my corn?” He would get a reply in seconds, based on location data, historical trends and scientific studies.
Finding additional uses for Watson is part of IBM’s plan to tap new markets and boost revenue from business analytics to $16 billion by 2015. After mastering history and pop culture for its “Jeopardy!” appearance, the system is crunching financial information for Citigroup Inc. and cancer data for WellPoint Inc. The next version, dubbed Watson 2.0, would be energy-efficient enough to work on smartphones and tablets.

Amy Payne:

This election year, millions of Americans will donate to the political candidates and initiatives of their choice at the local, state, and federal levels. But for unionized workers, union dues come out of their paychecks and go to political causes–and they aren’t consulted on where that money will go.
In July, The Wall Street Journal’s Tom McGinty and Brody Mullins published an eye-opening report that “Organized labor spends about four times as much on politics and lobbying as generally thought.”
They broke down the unions’ political spending from 2005 to 2011: $1.1 billion “supporting federal candidates through their political-action committees, which are funded with voluntary contributions, and lobbying Washington, which is a cost borne by the unions’ own coffers.”

Tap or click to view a larger version.

The survey can be found here, via a kind reader.

Julie Halpert:

WHEN ERIC WITHERSPOON became superintendent of Evanston Township High School (www site) near Chicago in 2006, he walked into a math class where all the students were black. “A young man leaned over to me and said, ‘This is the dummy class.'”
The kids at Evanston who took honors classes were primarily white; those in the less demanding classes were minority–a pattern repeated, still, almost 60 years after integration, across the nation. All of the Evanston kids had been tracked into their classes based on how they’d performed on a test they took in eighth grade.
Last September, for the first time, most incoming freshmen, ranging from those reading at grade level to those reading far above it, were sitting together in rigorous humanities classes. When I visited, students of all abilities and backgrounds met in small groups to discuss one of the required readings, which include A Raisin in the Sun and The Odyssey. This September, most freshmen will sit side-by-side in biology classes.
Mindy Wallis, the mother of a sophomore at Evanston Township High, agrees. She opposed the decision to detrack, and spearheaded a petition that advocated waiting for the results of a three-year evaluation before making changes that so substantively affected the freshman class. Angela Allyn, whose 14-year-old son just took a freshman humanities class, says her son was hungry to read more than two-thirds of The Odyssey, which was all the class required. He was encouraged by his teachers to read the entire book, but Allyn says the teachers didn’t help him navigate difficult portions during class, so she had to work with him into the late hours of the night. Her son was teased by classmates, she says, for “showing off and using big words,” something she believes wouldn’t have occurred if he’d been grouped with a similar cohort. Detracking, she contends, focuses “on bringing the bottom up–and there’s an assumption that our bright children will take care of themselves.” She acknowledges that because she’s seen as having “white privilege,” despite the fact that she put herself through school and even occasionally had to use soup kitchens to get by, she’s perceived as racist by merely making such a comment.

Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, also believes that race is part of the debate: “People who support tracking are more interested in productivity and less concerned about inequality, and people who are critics tend to focus on inequality and don’t spend too much time thinking about productivity.” Gamoran argues that schools that want to keep ability-grouping need to do a better job with the students in the lowest tracks, but he also believes that the most capable students may not always be sufficiently challenged in mixed-ability classes. “There’s no single solution,” he says. “The point is to try to address the limitations of whatever approach is selected.”

Links:

• English 10
• Small Learning Communities
• Evanston will spend $75,200,000 for 2,974 students, or $25,285/student (!) Madison will spend $15,132/student during the 2012-2013 budget year.
• Adam Gamoran notes and links.
• Madison parents’ Talented & Gifted complaint.

Karran Harper Royal:

And how an you tell if you’re on the wrong side of reform: Does the policy shut down open debate? Does it remove the democratic process? Do parents get to elect the charter board? Do the policymakers have to focus on a villain, in this case, teachers and unions as the bogeyman? Do they insist on closing schools rather than improving them? Do they impose on high stakes decision for children or teachers or schools? Do they talk about return on investment and are there billionaires pulling the strings? Do they focus on “school choice” over civil rights? These are signals that they are on the wrong side of education reform. And yet it’s easy to fall into the wrong side. Check out Karran’s brilliant analysis why. Thanks to Norm Scott for the video.

NBC15:

“I think we have come a long way,” said Superintendent Jane Belmore. “The district, as you may know, developed a pretty ambitious achievement plan last year and came out to the community and talked with folks in the community about it, got a lot of buy-in and there are lots of community organizations that are really behind us on that.”
Superintendent Belmore says it will take a number of years to complete the process–but says they’re fortunate to have the resources to help put it into play this year. “We have a plan that we’re now looking at, really what I’m calling kind of sorting the priorities of the priorities, because it’s very ambitious,” she said. “We’re not going to be able to do everything at the same level, at the same time, but we’re really figuring out what the things are that are going to give us the most leverage.”
The Urban League of Greater Madison has been on the forefront of the fight to address the achievement gap. President and CEO Kaleem Caire says he thought the achievement gap plan was too broad to begin with.

Links:

• Madison MAP Testing Shows They are Falling Short Too
• 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use
• Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.
• “When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before”

Marketplace:

Sarah Gardner:Thousands of teachers are notheading back to school this week. Budget cuts have hit one of this country’s largest professions especially hard. In the last three years, more than 300,000 education jobs have disappeared. And that’s left a lot of people working on their Plan B. Former technology teacher Chris Bjuland found his at the airport.
Chris Bjuland:I was working as a teacher in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, and I got called down to the principal’s office one day between classes, and he said, “Well I’m sorry to do this, but we’ve had some budget problems and so we’re going to have to let you and all the part-time teachers go.”
I did look for other teaching jobs. After about a year of really trying and seeing how frustrating it was, it was time to open up the horizons.

Laura Water:

Last week New Jersey Monthly published its biennial ranking of the state’s 328 public high schools, a closely-followed contest among N.J. districts. The top-ranked school in N.J. is New Providence High School in Union County, which boasts combined SAT scores of 1737 and a 97.7% graduation rate. The lowest-ranked traditional high school is Thomas Jefferson Arts Academy in Elizabeth, which admits to combined SAT scores of 1136 and a 53% graduation rate.
Rankings were compiled by an independent research firm in Ringwood called Leflein Associates, which used a combination of factors in its calculations, including average class size; SAT, A.P. and state assessment scores (HSPA); graduation rates; and socio-economic ranking (DFG).

Laura Waters:

Yesterday the Christie Administration released the long-awaited the Education Transformation Task Force report. As NJ Spotlight reports, the 239-page report “was a gargantuan effort, with teams of educators and lawyers poring over more than 3,000 pages of the state’s voluminous laws and administrative code over the past six months.” (Also see overview from Courier Post.) Or, as the Task Force puts it,

Through the superintendents’ survey and countless conversations with educators across New Jersey, the Department learned that the State over the course of many years saddled educators with rules on every subject imaginable. The result is an accretion of provisions in statutes and regulations that ties the hands of schools and districts and stymies innovation. This not only frustrates good people trying to help students learn, it also increases costs and, on occasion, even erects obstacles to student achievement.

Information Liberation:

‘Students and parents at two San Antonio schools are in revolt over a program that forces kids to wear RFID tracking name tags which are used to pinpoint their location on campus as well as outside school premises.
Students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School will be mandated to wear the tags from today which will be used to track them on campus as well as when they enter and leave school.

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:

State Superintendent Tony Evers announced 132 Wisconsin School of Recognition awards for the 2012-13 academic year, an honor that recognizes success in educating students from low-income families.
“Congratulations on a strong start to the 2012-13 school year,” Evers said. “These schools are being recognized for their work to break the link between poverty and low academic achievement through rigorous programming and attention to student needs. Their efforts align with our Agenda 2017 goals: to improve graduation rates, reduce dropout rates, and close college and career readiness gaps.”

Matthew DeFour has more.

Abby Andrietsch, via a kind email:

Happy start to the school year! Our team is more excited than ever about the transformational work being done across Milwaukee.
Today, our 24 STCM partner schools serve over 10,000 students. As I hear the “first day” stories from several of our partner schools, I am reminded of all of the work put in by our coaches and school leaders to prepare: I am reminded of the four days of leadership training STCM held with more than 80 leaders from across the city coming together to focus on excellence in their schools; I am reminded of the more than 135 new urban teachers that came together for a STCM training focused on high-impact instructional practices.
The power of this group is real and the momentum is visible – these are the leaders that will change Milwaukee’s education system and prepare our future leaders. The results we have seen in each of the three STCM pathways (described below) are an early indication of what is possible for our city.
While I am more aware of the challenges facing our students, families, teachers, leaders and schools in Milwaukee, I am more hopeful than ever about what I know is possible. However, we can’t do it alone. It takes engagement from city leaders, educators, non-profit partners, business leaders and foundations. Join us in the movement to support quality across Milwaukee.
Warmest regards,
Abby Andrietsch
Executive Director
Schools That Can Milwaukee

(Tap or click to view a larger version)

Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson & Ludger Woessmann

“The United States’ failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country’s ability to thrive in a global economy.” Such was the dire warning recently issued by a task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Chaired by former New York City schools chancellor Joel I. Klein and former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, the task force said that the country “will not be able to keep pace–much less lead–globally unless it moves to fix the problems it has allowed to fester for too long.”
The report’s views are well supported by the available evidence. In a 2010 report, only 6 percent of U.S. students were found to be performing at the advanced level in mathematics, a percentage lower than those attained by 30 other countries.ii Nor is the problem limited to top-performing students.
Only 32 percent of 8th- graders in the United States are proficient in mathematics, placing the United States 32nd when ranked among the participating international jurisdictions. Although these facts are discouraging, the United States has made substantial additional financial commitments to K-12 education and introduced a variety of school reforms.
Have these policies begun to help the United States close the international gap?
Progress was far from uniform across the United States, however. Indeed, the variation across states was about as large as the variation among the countries of the world. Maryland won the gold medal by having the steepest overall growth trend. Coming close behind, Florida won the silver medal and Delaware the bronze. The other seven states that rank among the top-10 improvers, all of which outpaced the United States as a whole, are Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia.
Iowa shows the slowest rate of improvement. The other four states whose gains were clearly less than those of the United States as a whole, ranked from the bottom, are Maine, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. Note, however, that because of nonparticipation in the early NAEP assessments, we cannot estimate an improvement trend for the 1992-2011 time period for nine states–Alaska, Illinois, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, and Washington.

Related:

• www.wisconsin2.org
• Education wake-up call is looming.
• Madison MAP Assessment results.
• 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery …

Claudio Sanchez:

At this year’s charter school convention in Minneapolis, the birthplace of the movement, vendors sounded almost giddy about the millions of dollars charter schools spend every year. The vendors are selling everything from graphing calculators and playground equipment to packaged curricula and risk-management services.
Charter schools today are big business. The public and private money that’s going into charter schools, though, is not the main reason for their remarkable growth, Ted Kolderie says.
Kolderie, considered by many as the “godfather” of the charter school movement, says charters have grown because of the need for real options for kids who haven’t done well in traditional public schools.
…..
Kolderie, a former journalist turned academic, designed and helped pass the nation’s first charter school laws. He began the work in Minnesota in 1991, despite formidable opposition — and not just from teachers’ unions.
“School boards’ associations, superintendents’ associations, principals’ associations — the whole array of organizations regarded in most states as the most powerful at the [state] capitol,” he says. “So the opposition wasn’t just something that the unions led.”
Ironically, Kolderie says, it was a top union leader who first endorsed and promoted the concept of charter schools in the spring of 1988. Al Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, gave a supportive speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
“We’re meeting here today because it’s time to take a major step forward in trying to improve the schools of our nation,” he said.

Adam Falk:

As classes resume on our nation’s campuses, amid anxiety about high tuition, student debt and other concerns, it’s worth examining what we value in college education. The question warrants consideration, in particular, following a recent recommendation by distinguished economists, appointed by the National Academy of Sciences, proposing to define the “output” of higher education as a combination of credit hours awarded and degrees earned.
That reduces the work of colleges to counting how many students they push through the system–a bit like defining a movie studio’s output as the number of feet of raw footage shot, with no consideration of whether the resulting movies are any good.

Christina Farr:

Hallway, a startup created by high-school students for high-school students, is launching to the public today with seed funding from Fortify.vc.
The founders view their technology as the next logical step in education, and this summer, they’ve been testing the private beta at schools across the Greater Washington region.
Hallway is a website where students submit questions about subjects, such as algebra or political science, that their peers can answer. The site uses a Reddit-style system to rate the most useful questions and answers, which then rise to the top.

Peter Berkowitz:

Some reflect the failure to manage effectively forces that have been inflating the nationwide higher education bubble. The cost of attending college, greatly outpacing the rate of inflation almost everywhere, has skyrocketed in California: Whereas nationwide tuition and fees at public universities over the last five years have risen on average by 28 percent, the average increase at UC campuses is an astounding 73.1 percent and, at Cal State campuses a still more astounding 83.8 percent. While turning away students and seeking billions for new buildings, California institutions are significantly under-using classroom and laboratory space. And, absent drastic reform, in little more than a decade the Cal State and UC systems are unlikely to be able to meet their obligations to faculty retirement programs.
More menacing to higher education in California is educators’ adoption of curricula, classroom pedagogy, and limitations on free speech that fly in the face of liberal education’s fundamental requirements. These practices also fly in the face of public opinion.

Read the complete PDF report, here.

Marketplace:

Kai Ryssdal: There was an item in the Washington Post last week that piqued our interest. The president of an elite private college in Connecticut said he’s looking for ways to make school cheaper and let students graduate in less time.
The school is Wesleyan University. The president, Michael Roth, is also an alum. Back in the day, he got through in three years to save his parents some money. And with tuition where it is now, two fewer semesters can mean even bigger savings.
Michael Roth, good to have you with us.
Michael Roth: Nice to be here.
Ryssdal: How’s this going to work? Do you just double up on courses and work in the summertime?

Frank Jacobs:

Geography was my favourite subject in school; physics the one I disliked the most. If only I’d known about this Map of Physics!
This spatial representation of the subject, dating from 1939, defines itself as Being a map of physics, containing a brief historical outline of the subject as will be of interest to physicists, students, laymen at large; Also giving a description of the land of physics as seen by the daring sould who venture there; And more particularly the location of villages (named after pioneer physicists) as found by the many rivers; Also the date of founding of each village; As well as the date of its extinction; and finally a collection of various and sundry symbols frequently met with on the trip.

Richard Wilson:

Estonian Tiger Leap Foundation in September 2012 launched a program called “ProgeTiiger”, in the framework of which Estonian students in grades 1 to 12 will be introduced computer programming and creating web and mobile applications.
“The interest of students towards using modern technologies has grown year after year. With the “ProgeTiiger” program we create prerequisites for students to develop from consumers of software to developers of software,” said Tiger Leap Foundation training sphere manager Ave Lauringson.
In the first stage, the program concerns pilot schools, in the following years all public schools can join if they want to become part of the “ProgeTiiger” program.
The first ones to start with “ProgeTiiger” program lessons will be primary school students after their teachers go through corresponding training in September. Next year, programming hobby groups for middle school and selective courses for high school will be added. Study materials for all levels are being created. Tiger Leap Foundation’s initiative is supported by technology sphere

Marcus Pohlman>:

The study released last week by the Pew Research Center confirms a trend that political economists have been observing for years — the middle class, the 50% of American households earning between $39,000 to $118,000, are now headed backward in income for the first time since the end of World War II.
The bedrock of a stable society is a large and healthy middle class. They not only do the bulk of the work and pay the lion’s share of the taxes, but their level of affluence gives them a personal stake in the survival of existing political and economic orders.

Related: Madison School District 2012-2013 Budget Update; Reduced 3.47% Property Tax Increase due to Increased State Tax Dollar Spending.

Room for Debate:

When Teach for America entered the national stage it was applauded as a fresh, innovative approach to education. Now, well into its second decade of providing teachers to struggling schools across the country, is it still a good idea for our children? Has bringing in smart, young college graduates improved the education that American children are receiving?

Peter Harmsen:

When Hsu Chung-hsin went to university three decades ago he became part of a small elite in Taiwan. Now virtually everyone can enter higher education. That, he thinks, is deplorable.
“It’s become so easy. As long as you’re willing to pay the tuition, you can go to university. That’s no good,” said Hsu, a legislator with a PhD in law from Cambridge.
“It doesn’t influence the top universities. It’s the low-end universities that are affected. Their quality is low. The teaching is not so serious and the students are not so hard-working.”
Declining birth rates and an explosion in the number of universities — there are more than 160 for a population of 23 million — mean the vast majority of high school students gain entry to higher education.

Seema Mehta:

Teachers unions have been the Democratic Party’s foot soldiers for more than half a century, providing not only generous financial backing but an army of volunteers in return for support of their entrenched power in the nation’s public schools.
But this relationship is fraying, and the deterioration was evident Monday as Democrats gathered here for their national convention.
A handful of teachers and parents, carrying large inflated pencils, picketed a screening of “Won’t Back Down,” a movie to be released this month starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis as mothers, one a teacher, who try to take over a failing inner-city school.

David Dayen has more.

Associated Press:

State lawmakers failed to revive a controversial measure that would rewrite state rules on teacher evaluations, but supporters vowed to bring it up again in the next legislative session.
The long-dormant bill, AB 5, was resurrected in recent weeks by Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes (D-Sylmar), according to the Los Angeles Times (http://lat.ms/RwfqnW). It would institute a statewide uniform teacher evaluation system featuring more performance reviews, classroom observations, training of evaluators and public input into the review process.
Education advocates slammed the bill, saying the new rules would have weakened initiatives in Los Angeles and elsewhere to improve the quality of public school instructors.

Enventra :

MoboMath lets you create formatted math expressions for your favorite applications in your own handwriting.
Using a pen and tablet, or even a trackpad or mouse, simply write an equation as you normally would, tap Enter to convert it to formatted math, and copy or drag it into your target application for calculation, graphing, or documentation.

Arthur Thomas:

For all the changes implemented in 2011, one thing hurt enrollment at schools of education more than others, said John Gaffney, recruitment and retention coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point’s School of Education.
“The message of teachers being the problem hurt us the most,” Gaffney said.
The Act 10 legislation affected teachers’ pocketbooks – with union bargaining largely eliminated, higher deductions for benefits were imposed – and the political firestorm that resulted put teachers at the center of attention.
Maggie Beeber, undergraduate advising coordinator at the UW-Stevens Point education school, recounted a story where she was meeting with incoming freshmen. She asked the students if anyone had tried to discourage them from becoming teachers. Nearly every hand went up. Then she asked if more than five people had discouraged them. Most of the hands stayed up.
“It’s easy to follow the public discourse about teaching right now and conclude that everything is doomed,” said Desiree Pointer Mace, associate dean for graduate education at Alverno College.

Related:

• When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
• Many notes and links on Julie Underwood.
• The oft-criticized WKCE will soon be replaced by Wisconsin’s Common Core implementation.
• NCTQ Sues UW Ed Schools over Access to Course Syllabi.
• An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria

Matthew DeFour

More than 40 members of Madison Teachers Inc. attended Tuesday’s board meeting, and executive director John Matthews delivered a letter reminding the board that changes in state law “did not take away the board’s ability to engage in conversation about” benefits and work rules.
Board vice president Marj Passman said she preferred a process where management and employees work out their differences.
“I don’t care what the governor wants,” Passman said. “I’d like to go back to the two equal body process.”
Board member Arlene Silveira said several districts included teachers on the committees that developed their handbooks and “having staff input right upfront prevents difficult ways of getting there.” She also suggested having a board member present at each meeting.
Prior to the meeting, School Board President James Howard said the work group is for administrators so it doesn’t need to include teachers. There will be other advisory groups that will include their input, he said.

Clusty Search: Plateau Bargaining.
Karen Vieth

“The kids are delighted to be back at school,” James Howard said as he addressed the Board and numerous spectators at tonight’s Board of Education Workshop. Everyone nodded their heads in agreement, while they anxiously awaited the real topic of conversation. This would be the Board’s first public conversation on the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Employee Handbook, a handbook that would replace more than sixty years of collective bargaining.
As Howard spoke, I surveyed the crowd that had gathered in the McDaniels Auditorium at the Doyle Administration Building. Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI) members stood out in their red, Union T-shirts. They made up more than half of the audience. The AFSCME members were dressed in green, representing custodial, maintenance and food service workers in the district. MMSD administrators, community members and a County Board member were also present.

TJ Mertz:

There was some Pollyannaish talk that the “Guiding Principles” in the process document — especially the first two “1. Improve student learning. As in everything we do, the first question and the top priority is student learning. How does what we are considering impact students? 2. Empower staff to do their best work. How does this impact teachers and staff? Does it help or hinder them in doing their jobs effectively?” — would be sufficient (a little more below on this), but there seemed to be a consensus that at very least the committee should present some options to the Board. That’s another reason to have an inclusive committee; to get better options.
A quick aside on the “Guiding Principals” and related thoughts and then back to the Board’s role. It is all well and good to say that student learning is or should be primary in just about everything, but it is also false and serves to marginalize staff. I’ve long said that the interests of teachers align with the interests of students and the district by about 95% and yes “student learning” is the prime interest. But staff are adults, with mortgages, families to support, loans to pay, relationships to cultivate and maintain, …They are not and should not be people who put student learning above the their own well being. To even contemplate that they should be is disrespectful. That’s why we hear the “All about the students” meme from the anti-teacher/anti-union reform crowd. It sound good, but it is wrong. Think about it, did the people negotiating a contract on behalf of Interim Superintendent Belmore put “student learning at the top of their list? Of course not, and they shouldn’t have.

Madison Teachers’, Inc. 65K PDF, via a kind Jeannie Bettner email:

Members of MTI’s Board of Directors and Union staff greeted the District’s newly hired teachers at New Teacher Orientation on Monday. There are 250 new members of MTI’s teacher bargaining unit.
MTI Executive Director John Matthews addressed the District’s new teachers during their Tuesday session. In doing so, Matthews provided a brief history of the Union, its reputation of negotiating outstanding Collective Bargaining Agreements which provide both employment security and economic security, and in explaining the threat to both, given Act 10, said all MTI members would need to pull together to preserve the Madison Metropolitan School District as a quality place to teach.
Matthews told the new hires that these benefits and rights, along with MTI’s action to assure due process and workplace justice, has earned MTI the reputation of being one of the best Unions in the country. To illustrate the magnitude of MTI’s accomplishments over the years, Matthews told about school board policy mandating female teachers, through the early 1970’s, having to advise their principal “immediately upon becoming pregnant”, and being obligated to resign when the pregnancy “began showing.” As a result of MTI’s accomplishments, such antiquated, degrading policies are history, he said.
Matthews also cited MTI’s precedent setting accomplishments in advancing employee rights regarding race, religion, sexual orientation, and negotiating such things as the school calendar and health insurance. Until the early 1970’s, the school calendar only accommodated Christian holidays. MTI’s litigation expanded the benefit to cover all religions.
Continue the Awareness, Continue the Protest, Wear Red for Education
Since February, 2011, MTI members have been tirelessly protesting and working to end the disastrous impact on public sector workers of Governor Scott Walker’s union busting destructive budget. The most important reasons for resistance vary from one union member to another and include: the Legislation jeopardizes children’s future and the viability of public education and other public services; its provisions are dishonest and immoral; they constitute an attack on Wisconsin’s working-class and middle-class values; they ask for no shared sacrifice from the wealthy or profitable corporations.
Payroll checks for all public employees have been substantially lessened because of Act 10, causing financial hardship for many families. Walker’s Law forces all public employees to pay 50% of retirement contributions, even though MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District have agreed as part of one’s total compensation package dating to the early 1970’s, that the District would pay 100% of the contribution and many have increased contributions for health insurance.
MTI leaders are working with other public sector union leaders across Wisconsin to reverse this disastrous legislation.
Ready, Set, Goal Conferences
As previously reported in MTI Solidarity!, the Ready, Set Goal (RSG) memorandum has been amended, as a result of grievance mediation.
The Memorandum of Understanding between MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District, which governs RSG Conferences has been amended to include the following parameters which apply, when determining the amount of compensation due a teacher for holding RSG Conferences during times other than scheduled school day(s)/ hours:

• Teachers receive up to 15 minutes per student for conference preparation.
  
• Teachers receive up to 30 minutes for each conference held.
  
• Teachers are compensated for up to two parent “no shows” per student, at 30 minutes per scheduled conference. Teachers are not obligated to schedule a RSG conference after there have been two parent “no shows”. However, a teacher will be compensated pursuant to Section 2b (second bullet above), if the teacher thereafter holds a RSG conference for the student.
• Compensation will continue to include traveling to/from homes of parents, or other mutually agreed upon meeting place(s), or traveling to/from school if the conferences are not at a time adjacent to the Contract day. Mileage shall be paid in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and reasonable expenses for refreshments shall be reimbursed.

The full RSG agreement is located on MTI’s website (www.madisonteachers.org). Questions can be directed to Assistant Director Eve Degen at MTI (257-4091 or degene@madisonteachers.org).

Welcoming today’s youth at school w/ big smiles, friendly demeanor & high expectations. It’s going to be a good year for our future leaders.

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) September 4, 2012

Matthew DeFour:

The later students enter Madison schools, the less likely they are to graduate on time and score well on state tests, according to district data Mayor Paul Soglin requested this year. The data do not take into account other variables connected to achievement such as race and income (bold added).
“Maybe we shouldn’t be as critical of the system in holding the district responsible for the failure of a 14-year-old who’s only been here a year and is reading at a seventh-grade level,” Soglin said. “If there is a difference, maybe it shows that some intense work should be done with kids upon arrival.”

I hope that the District evaluates the data in more depth…

Agence France-Presse:

As far back as 25 years ago, US investor Jim Rogers already believed China would be the next economic superpower and young people the world over should prepare for the future by learning Mandarin.
Now 69, the billionaire had a chance to practise what he preached when he moved in 2007 to Singapore with his wife Paige Parker, 43, after visiting Hong Kong and Shanghai in search of an ideal place to bring up his children.
Their daughters Happy, now nine, and Baby Bee, four, are studying in public schools in Singapore, which promotes mastery of Mandarin as part of its own ethnic Chinese heritage and, more pragmatically, to give its people economic opportunities.
“Singapore has the best education in the world, the best healthcare, the best everything. I think that the best gift that I can give two children born in 2003 and 2008 is to know Asia and to speak Mandarin,” Rogers told AFP.

Kyle Spencer:

But in interviews in recent weeks, Harlem parents described two drastically different public school experiences, expressing frustration that, among other things, there were still a limited number of high-quality choices and that many schools continued to underperform.
Those fortunate enough to get their sons or daughters into one of the high-performing schools said, for the most part, that they were thrilled with the quality of the teaching and extracurricular programs. Some of the parents who grew up in the neighborhood said that until a few years ago, they would never have imagined such options even existing.
Yet, while most of the charter schools perform relatively well on tests, a majority of Harlem’s students attend schools that do not. Among elementary schools in Harlem and East Harlem, only a few of the some 25 traditional neighborhood schools with students taking statewide tests had at least 50 percent of children reading at or above grade level.

The Economist:

THE Buddhist monk, staring intently at the smoke rising from an incense stick, said the government was destroying state-provided education because it was “easier to control uneducated fools”. Maduluwawe Sobitha is an influential figure among Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhala population. He is also a loud critic of the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa. The monk’s new National Movement Against Social Injustice is, with other groups and unions, backing a university lecturers’ strike for more state spending on education. Almost 5,000 academics stopped work on July 4th. Like them, he is angry that the government spends a mere 1.9% of GDP on schools and universities.
On August 23rd the higher education minister, S.B. Dissanayake, responded by closing down indefinitely the country’s state universities and institutes. He accused lecturers of dragging students into their campaign. Yet students, among them young Buddhist monks, still protest, demanding that the universities be reopened. On August 29th police in Colombo fired water cannon and tear gas at hundreds of students marching in support of academics. Members of the Inter University Students’ Federation (IUSF) retaliated by flinging whatever they could lay their hands on, including rocks and spent tear-gas canisters, at police.